Home/Not-Home

By: | May 7, 2018

I grew up near stands of what passes in northeast Illinois for old-growth forest.  The definition of “old-growth” is apparently a work in progress.  I take it to mean a forest that was there before a particular part of the country was cleared and settled, and in northeast Illinois that was pretty late, around the 1830’s.*  So these forests were named for local farm families that my family knew:  Egermann Woods, Goodrich Woods, Greene Valley Woods.  One forest that wasn’t named was behind our little farm — bottom of the hayfield, across the creek, and up a rise to the woods.

The woods was shaded by the treetops, not much on the ground except leaves, big rocks, moss, some grasses I think, and for sure wildflowers: shooting stars, dutchman’s breeches, may apples, jack-in-the-pulpits, spring beauties,** and in one place, yellow violets.

The woods had no suggestions for what to do except to look at things, sit down and lean against a big tree for a while, then get up and see what was beyond the next tree.  Back by the creek was a willow, easy to climb, that I sat in a lot, not thinking.  We weren’t supposed to go down to the woods — partly because it was someone else’s property and mostly because our mother couldn’t see us — so that was part of the draw.  The real reason we snuck down there over and over, time after time, for years was – I don’t know quite how to say it. It was deeply comfortable, you could breathe slowly, you felt lighter, it felt like you’d come home.

So decades later, in the city on the east coast, when my neighborhood got its shorts in an uproar over a local private school’s plans to clean out a tiny woods, I went to look at the woods.  The trees were scrawny, the ground was covered with ivy and brambles, and I thought, “What a wretched little woods.” The school could have cut that woods to the ground and the only ones suffering would be the displaced rats. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 5, 2018

April 30 – May 4, 2018

Sorry, this is late today. But I finished a hard story, the lilacs are going for world domination, the robins think they own the place, and I was unable to stay inside and type.

Why is it that writing about people who are normally-good is so much easier than writing about people who are just-plain good? And who are those good people anyway? I don’t have answers but I sure do love and admire those guys.

Cassie goes amongst the anti-vaxxers, hoping to find rationales. hopes, fears, something with which she can find common ground.  Instead she runs into rock-hard adamance and some really dicey genetics.

Maybe feeling a little down and house-bound, Becky heads out of the city and into this country’s heartland, and figures out as she goes why it’s called that, the heartland.

The Atacama Desert, says Sarah, makes the Sonoran Desert look like a rain forest, it’s so dry and lifeless.  Except for the underground creatures and the birds, the poor birds who drowned in the desert.

Craig is rummaging around in the outback again, this time with a sculptor who’s interested in geology and a large, unlikely rock.

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Photo: Brian Wolfe

 

 

 

 

The Way the Earth Shapes Us

By: | May 4, 2018

I lay under a boulder not long ago with a sculptor. The rock must have been 20 tons or more, balanced on a sandstone pedestal hardly bigger than the crook of my elbow. The actual points of contact between the boulder and its support had been winnowed by the wind down to almost nothing. The rock above protected to rock below, which supported the rock above; a geologic symbiosis. We marveled at the notion the boulder might fall, and which way it would go, tipping over and missing us by inches as we scrambled backwards, or a straight down on us like a pancake.

The sculptor was John Grade, a Seattle artist I’d been corresponding with for the last decade and a half. (His name is pronounced grah-dee.)We sent each other letters and curious objects we’d found, a curled rusted piece of metal, an abandoned, pear-shaped wasp nest. He’s a sculptor of natural forms, somewhere between Andy Goldworthy and Lee Bontecou. Lately he’s been rendering pingos, spending time on foot in remote Arctic landscapes, armed for bear, studying these giant, blistered ice forms pushed up through the tundra, some 60 feet tall. This summer, he’ll build his version of a pingo in the Anchorage Museum. He told me people will be able to enter the massive object. They’ll walk through its icy interior, able to see the invisible construction, while he mills with them, plainclothes, unnoticed, listening to their reactions. Continue reading →

The ocean mummies

By: | May 3, 2018

The Atacama Desert is country that wears quiet like a skin. Stretching through the top 600 miles of Chile, it is so spare of all save earth and rock that it calls to mind bone stripped of flesh by sun, wind, teeth. It is a place that makes you understand why the painter Georgia O’Keeffe saw in pelvises and skulls the curves of desert hills. But the Atacama is more naked still than the Southwestern deserts she loved. “When you think of desert, probably you think of Sonora or Chihuahua,” a Chilean biologist recently told me—the vast, brutal deserts of northern Mexico. “They are forests compared to Atacama.”

Pause and listen for a moment: Where does the sound you hear arise? In most places, it comes from life and water. Voices and the growl of cars. The burble of rain and rivers. The rustle of leaves. In the Atacama, what sound there is comes from wind. What life there is goes underground: Spiders lizards birds, finding homes in the cool dark of holes. When Rudulfo Amando Philippi, a German naturalist, made a famous expedition across this desert in the mid-19th century, he improvised by sheltering in the shadow of his mule.

But at night, the Atacama does have a song, and it comes from the sea to the west, on the other side of the mountains. Continue reading →

Heartland Driving is Good for the Soul

By: | May 2, 2018

If you are feeling down, or housebound or just uninspired, there are few better salves than a drive. First, put on comfortable pants. Then get in the car and drive to the nearest highway. Choose any direction; it usually doesn’t matter. Set your cruise control to 65.

After a few minutes, the right angles of your rust belt city will give way to the curves of nature, of rivers and farms. The sky will seem wider, the air fresher. Looking at the rolling fields, I can’t believe that we are free, you will sing to yourself. Continue reading →

Redux:Vaccines, Viruses, and the Anti-Vax Movement

By: | May 1, 2018

In 2013, I attended a lecture by Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a physician who believes vaccination is the cause of many, many evils. Four years later, Palevsky is still railing against vaccines. His latest newsletter, which arrived in my inbox a couple of days ago, highlights a story that celebrates the defeat of several vaccine bills in Florida—two which would have made the HPV vaccine mandatory, and two that would have mandated healthcare providers to enter vaccination information into a centralized database. The newsletter also links to a story claiming that research shows unvaccinated homeschooled children are healthier than their vaccinated peers. This post originally ran April 5, 2013. 

On a chilly February evening, I found myself stepping across the threshold of one of Midtown Manhattan’s many brick high rises. I took the elevator to the sixteenth floor, home of the Meta Center, which describes itself as Manhattan’s “number one destination for Consciousness Raising, Cutting Edge Spiritual & Metaphysical Education, Healing and the Creative Arts.” A sign at the entrance to the conference room asked me to remove my shoes before entering sacred space. So I shucked my boots, tried to hide the hole in my left sock, and picked my way to the back of the room in search of an empty folding chair.

I had come to hear a lecture on vaccines. As a science writer and public health advocate, I’m a big proponent of vaccination. Study after study has shown that the benefits far outweigh the risks. The proof is incontrovertible. But I wanted to hear the alternative argument. Continue reading →

Redux: The Problem with Good People

By: | April 30, 2018

This first ran March 1, 2017. I recently had dinner with the woman in this post.  I wish I could have dinner with her every week — I can’t, she has too many other friends who also want to have dinner with her — because I want to study her, I want to see how she does it, and besides she’s having a great time here so her dinner partners do too. Writing about people who are a normal mixture of good and bad is already hard.  Writing about good people is close to impossible.

I wrote a profile once about a doctor who was just plain good.  He wasn’t a do-gooder – “I’m not a missionary,” he’d say; he was just a man who needed to make sick people well so he needed to get to the bottom of what made them sick and what would make them well.  He listened, he watched, his manners were exquisite, he said what was on his mind, he was kind, he was absolutely relentless, he didn’t attract or like attention.

By “good,” I don’t mean faultless.  He’d have said his biggest fault was his competitiveness, but I spent a lot of time watching him deal with people and the only thing he was hell-bent on competing with and beating the daylights out of was disease.  We were collaborators – he was the doctor, I was the writer – and I’d have said his biggest fault was not getting his chapters to me within four years of the deadline.  Other people got mad at him for similar reasons but nobody stayed mad.  He’s a good man, period.  He is good and he does good.  And when I wrote the perfectly truthful and representative profile of him, the editor sent it back saying it was a valentine, I needed to make him more human.

Why is that?  This doctor I was profiling is famous not only for his work but also for his goodness; everybody says so.  Why couldn’t I report that?

I don’t know the answer to that.  I understand thoroughly that people who are better than us (me) making us (me) feel inadequate and generally worthless.  And I understand the universal reaction to feeling worthless is not, “By golly, I better start being worthwhile!”   And I do know that I read the lives of saints only to see what idiots they were.  St. Francis was born rich and rebelled against his father’s life; and when he was an adolescent, he went into a public square in front of his father and his father’s friends and took off all his clothes.  I’m pretty sure I’m meant to read that gesture as a saintly rejection of greed and the self-aggrandizement that often accompanies riches.  I’m pretty sure if I were in that square, I’d have thought he was a little jerk sanctimoniously embarrassing his father in front of his father’s friends.  My point is, I understand my editor not believing my report of a good man.

This weekend I ran into a woman — she told me something she’d done on her 95th birthday but didn’t mention it had been a while back — whom I run into now and then at restaurants, parties, funerals.  She wears bright colors and outspoken jewelry; she piles her hair on top of her head and holds it in place with a barrette.  When someone talks, she pays attention; she asks questions; she’s curious about other people.

I know only a few things about her.  She came from serious money, married more of it, raised her kids, and loved staying at home; but she worried that her kids were getting too dependent on her so she did something that no married woman in her family or social circle had done: she went to work.  She began by screening families who wanted to adopt babies, not all of whom were orphans, and she did that for ten years.  Then she saw an ad from a local research hospital offering to train housewives to become psychotherapists.  She applied, was trained, and spent the next 40-plus years working with people who wanted help with their sexuality – including homosexuality, transexuality, and men whose sexuality was affected by the onset of feminism.  She was part of the 1970s civil rights movement, marched on Washington, helped integrate a local public park.  She got certified and married two gay men.  She set up nonprofits that offer free legal service for LGBT people, that help adoptive families, that mentor new teachers.  She talks in her gravelly old-lady voice about these causes with passion but she never says what she does for them. Like the doctor, she’s just plain good, everybody says so.

The world is full of the normally-good; good doctors and good therapists and good philanthropists aren’t news.  I hope I am myself normally-good.  But these two particular people are different somehow. They’re completely unself-conscious.  They deflect attention.  They seem to do good because that’s what they have to do. They’re more like artists who have to paint or compose or write because they don’t know any other way of getting through life.  Their lives seem not so much admirable as beautiful. They’re luminous. If I believed in holiness, I’d wonder if they were holy.

I still haven’t answered the question about why such good people are so hard to write about and that’s because I still don’t know the answer. I just want to record their presence.

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UPDATE:  the splendid Friend of LWON, Nell Greenfieldboyce, found a profile of a good person, Mr Rogers.  It’s by a writer named Tom Junod and for my money, over-eggs the pudding a bit but jeez, the pudding is good.  It does the close-to-impossible.

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Photo by Andrea Mann, via Flickr

The Last Word

By: | April 28, 2018

April 23-27, 2018

Rose starts the week gathering some ideas on creativity, like so many eels. How does one catch eels? Bare handed? Do I design myself some gloves? Or some kind of hunting stick, or camera trap? Maybe I should sing to the eels, to make them feel safe. I need to become an eel expert, to be able to tell which are healthy and which are sick and need attention, and which should be let go. Some eels are not meant for my barrel.

Do you know what Roko’s Basilisk is? If you don’t, you luckily have Sally’s Tuesday post. If you’re like most of the people who have heard of Roko’s Basilisk, there’s a good chance you started to look into it, encountered the phrase “timeless decision theory”, and were immediately struck by the overwhelming need to do literally anything else.

Christie gets snared in a massive “reply-all” fiasco, and analyzes the responses. Once something’s on the internet, it takes on a life of its own. As the NC5760131 emails continued, they became more and more light-hearted. “I just wanted to inform the group that a hot dog is 100% a sandwich,” wrote one guy.

Michelle visits the long-lost Famous Women Dinner Service, where Cleopatra, Virginia Woolf and 48 other women could grace the same table. By including these and other taboo-breaking women in the Clarks’ dinner service, Bell and Grant didn’t so much rescue them from obscurity as seat them alongside the uppermost upper crust of British society. It was a bit of mischief that Kenneth Clark, despite his initial misgivings, seems to have enjoyed: in later years, he is said to have selected particular plates for particular lunch guests at his Piccadilly apartments—perhaps to honor their interests, or to prick their sensitivities.

On Friday, Jenny reduxes a 2016 post on the charms of the kookaburra. A not-a-morning-person Aussie may beg to differ on the charm thing. The dawn racket is probably just damn annoying. But as a tourist, I woke up extra early and sat by the window in the dark, waiting for the cackling to begin.

We’ll see you bright and early Monday morning.

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Image: German: Zwei Flussaale by Aloys Zötl.