Sleeping with Bears

By: | January 29, 2019

A three-year-old was lost in the woods of North Carolina for two nights last week. The weather was blustery and freezing as searchers covered ground for three days, finding no sign of the boy, doubtful he could have survived a single night, much less two with temperatures reaching the low twenties.

On Thursday evening, he was found alive, tangled in briars 40 or 50 yards into the woods from a dirt road. He was heard calling for his mother. A rescuer waded through thick brush and standing water and disentangled him, reporting that after being lost for three days, the boy was cold, but verbal, and for the the conditions, he was doing “very well.”

He was discovered not far from home near the small town of Ernul, where he’d wandered off while playing, leaving rescuers to wonder how they could have missed him.

The Craven County Sheriff said, based on the child’s story, “he had a friend in the woods that was a bear that was with him, that was with him for two [days].”

A bear in the woods saving a lost child? When I heard the news, I wondered, could such a thing happen?

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It comes upon you suddenly

By: | January 28, 2019


Fog is like water, in the valley where I live.

As dusk approaches, rivulets of cold air flow down the slopes and gullies of the surrounding mountains. They pool in the flats, the horizon line where dark brush rises from snow blurring as if smudged, the softness blending up, beginning to erase the world. Leaves and twigs vanish, then treetops. Layers like organza drift in one atop the other, settling toward the ground, light sighs of cloud. They sink the riverbed into sleep. They call other things awake.

It’s a good time to go walking up to the naked knoll behind my house, the day bending toward 3 o’clock, several hours of work completed, but still an hour and a half before sunset. So a week into the new year, I leashed my dog Taiga and headed out up the snowpacked road, through a metal gate onto an unplowed Forest Service route, then a sharp turn up a snowshoe-trampled singletrack, winding between the darkening trees.

Melt clattered through clumps of chartreuse wolf lichen spackling the ponderosas, leaving rings of yellow in the snow below. The dog nosed the powder, noting the passage of every creature. She was eager to be out after a week confined to the house, recovering from a knee sprained in deep snow on this very trail. I settled into my breath, feeling my own housebound hours trickle out of my loosening bones and muscles, more animal now, finding my pace. The trail left the trees for a stretch, crossed a pure white slope where I paused to watch the mountains wrap away into the fog’s blanket, then ducked into a dark little draw and climbed the iciest stretch, 30 minutes in, near to the top now.

The phone buzzed and I fished it from my pocket—a text from a friend I hoped could dogsit during an upcoming reporting trip, something that couldn’t wait. Thumbing in my reply, I glanced up at Taiga, dragging me forward by the other arm. Her ears – little triangles of attention—aimed to the top like an arrow, suddenly swiveled towards something to my left.

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Redux: A Vocabulary for the Almost-Lost

By: | January 25, 2019

My dog died this week. It was entirely without warning; she was fine Saturday and on Sunday she collapsed, and then she was gone. I am shattered. I am in a state of constant saudade, a Portuguese word meaning the feeling of longing for something or someone you love that has been lost forever. I thought of this post from spring 2018, and thought maybe you would like to read it again.

…

“Look, our snowman is still there,” I said Monday morning.

“Oh!” my daughter said. “It is! Mommy, will it be there for all the times?”

I picked her up. “No, it won’t,” I said. “I think it will melt. Remember how we talked about snow melting?”

“Oh,” my 3-year-old said. “Okay.” Her disappointment was audible.

I busied myself with her coat and hat, and stared extra hard at the Velcro straps on her shoes. Something must have gotten in my eyes.

“Maybe it will still be there when you get home,” I suggested. “Okay,” she said, but not that hopefully.

She has no idea, and I have no idea how to tell her, someday, who else will not be there for all the times. Some of them are too monumental to mention at all. It was enough, on this day, to consider things on a planetary scale.

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The Internet Protection Agency, Content Moderation Division

By: | January 24, 2019

A Facebook content moderator is suing the social network for psychological trauma after watching thousands of hours of toxic and disturbing content. “There is no long-term support plan when these content moderators leave. They are just expected to melt back into the fabric of society.” – “An online decency moderator’s advice: Blur your eyes“, Jane Wakefield, BBC News, 14 Oct 2018


Consider the plight of the content moderators

A spill had been reported at the border. Granger swiped at the incoming job notification to accept and shut off the ping, and hoofed it to the stack. This one came with serious hazard pay.

The front of the building looked very different from the back. The front was all Maryland Government Agency – leafy ornamental trees, spacious drive, big shiny laser-cut marble letters configured into a sculpture that spelled “Internet Protection Agency”. In the back, near a sprawling construction site, the newly transferred Content Moderation Division squatted inside its temporary housing – an intimidating stack of cargo containers piled as high as it was deep. Inside, these were much fancier than their outsides let on: the IPA had been spun out of a joint project of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Security Agency.

Freya was already at her station. She had even managed to clip her toxicity monitor to her visor. Granger, irritated, wondered how she had gotten here so fast.

“Hey,” said Freya, sounding just as unimpressed to see Granger. Behind her a woman with a face no one would ever remember (definitely OT) stood in a bland suit with her hand held out impatiently holding Granger’s monitor. Her fingers were twitching. Granger palmed it and slipped it into its clip. “Don’t burn it out this time,” the OT warned.

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Canada Goose, American Dream

By: | January 23, 2019

In the fall of 1969, somewhere in Ohio, scientists put a numbered plastic tag around the leg of a one year-old, female Canada goose, and released it into the wild. When it was eventually shot down in Ontario, in 2001, it was 33 years old — the oldest Canada goose to be recorded in the United States Geological Survey’s archive of bird longevity. 

I have to admit, when I first learned that Canada geese can live to be more than 30 years old, I thought: that is a very long time to be a goose.  

Where I live in Northern California, many Canada geese don’t migrate. Instead, like all the other locals — lots of seasonal boaters, pot farmers and telecommuters —  they just hang out on the river, being what the Fish & Wildlife Service now considers “nuisance animals.” They fly upriver, then they fly downriver. They land on one person’s lawn, then on other person’s lawn. Mostly they rip up bermuda grass, honk, poop and hiss.  

I thought Canada geese were kind of boring. But that all changed when I called a mustachioed scientist named Paul Curtis, who runs the Wildlife Damage Management Program at Cornell. Canada geese are not boring — they are winning, I learned. Once driven close to extinction, today Canada geese are living the American dream.

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Redux: The Wonderful World of Oz…and Science

By: | January 22, 2019

I was just sick for two weeks with some dumb respiratory virus, and writing a new post was low on my list of priorities. So please enjoy this old one, which originally ran December 3, 2013.

Lately I’ve been reading my way through the series of Oz books. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is only the first in a series of 14 books, and it’s not remotely the best.

It’s fascinating to reread books I loved as a child. Some are still great. Others have inexplicably morphed into poorly-written, preachy duds. Fortunately, the Oz books are the former type. They were published between 1900 to 1920 and vary in quality, but the made-up world is fun and Baum’s sense of humor holds up well.

In The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the seventh book in the series, I was surprised—and pleased—to encounter a bit of science. Even better, it’s totally outdated science.

In the book, Dorothy and her companions go on a quest to revive some people who have been turned to marble. One of the ingredients they need is water from a dark well, which they seek inside a mountain where two tribes live in a vast cave.

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Orchid Care for the Uncertain

By: | January 21, 2019

I wake up this morning on the prickly side—or at least, I’m prickly once I look at my phone. There are a series of misunderstood texts, frail disjointed things that have good intentions but poor phrasing, or lack the perfect emoji.

My phone is sitting right next to an orchid. It’s a new type of orchid for me—a miltonia, with narrow leaves that point upward and a sweet, pansy-like flower. But now the orchid’s flowers have withered and some of its leaves are yellowing. It may be getting too much light. It may be getting too much water, or not enough.

I thought I was doing so well with my orchids. We had received several plants as gifts; a few months ago, I decided I needed to start taking better care of the plants if I ever wanted them to flower again. I bought pots with holes to let their roots breathe. I researched the right potting mix, I unwound roots that had grown soggy. There is now a special spray bottle that I take around the house to give them a tropical misting.

The ones I’ve re-potted have been growing new leaves. But this morning, the straw-colored tips of the miltonia leaves reminded me that I must keep taking care of things, keep learning how to take care in new ways.

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Impossible Feats of Strength and Endurance

By: | January 18, 2019
This is me. I am ripped.

On January 9, I went to the gym and did a chin up. Here’s what should have happened next: The clouds should have parted to allow a single beam of light to cast its golden glow on my body. Winged trumpeters should have surrounded me. Confetti should have rained from the sky. A flash mob should have appeared and performed a choreographed dance to Eye of the Tiger.

Instead I turned to the guy doing bridge pose on the floor nearby and said, “I just did a chin up.” He smiled and said, “That’s great.”

There’s nothing special about doing a chin up. Many people can do them. Many people can do many of them. But to me, the act felt momentous. I had never done one before. I’ve long subscribed to the theory that my muscles simply weren’t strong enough. But lately another possibility occurred to me: What if I couldn’t do a chin up because I didn’t think I was strong enough to do a chin up? What if my problem was mental rather than physical?

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