Animals in their Seasons

By: | September 1, 2015

Skull Night

Bowhunting season in Western Colorado opened yesterday, which means the rut is underway, the next season coming into view. By the time you see this, I will be sitting in the quiet of the woods with my 12 year old boy listening for bugling elk, their haunting, whale-like calls rising through dusk aspens and sea-green conifers.

Sex is happening out there, animals congregating and interacting at the beginning of their autumn mating ritual. It is the time of year that ungulates begin prancing, snorting and bugling. Soon males with their tongues hanging out will be boxing females into the trees. Antlers will be clattering (among deer it sounds like a fencing match between pool cues, while elk sound more like a battle with oaken staffs). As the rut winds up later in the fall, animals will begin their migration to lower country, impregnated and readying for winter.

One thing I should mention, my son and I will not be hunting while we’re out. Not with weapons at least. We are different kinds of hunters, paying attention to storms, sniffing the fresh animal tracks, and focusing beyond prey. I’d gladly take the meat, but we will be working with journals instead. Carrying backpacks off trail and moving our camp day by day, we won’t be under any auspices, no empirical research performed or recorded as we slip into draws and across mountain shoulders. We will be there out of personal curiosity, the way people flock to horseshoe crab spawnings or eclipses. We want to see a significant act of nature.

After a long and indolent summer, the forest will feel restless. This is when ungulate communication tightens up. Males whistle into the woods to hear if another male whistles back. The air will smell like rut, summer rains and late growth sending out raspberries and service berries while the first high mountain leaves begin to yellow. You can smell this first color. The party is just beginning. Continue reading →

Guest Post: When The Ants Win

By: | August 31, 2015

 

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It wasn’t just the initial intensity of the pain — a hot, vibrant shard plunging into my metatarsus and radiating up my shinbone — but its duration. From approximately 10 o’clock in the morning, when I stepped barefoot onto a reddish-brown ant in my San Fernando Valley backyard, until well after sunset, the agony defeated Benadryl (oral and topical), ibuprofen, even the one-half of an expired Vicodin I downed with a shot of vodka. Baking soda didn’t draw it out, nor vinegar, nor did calamine lotion calm it down. Ice was my only friend; a series of three Arctic Ice Tundra series packs that I kept in constant rotation from freezer to foot, wrapped in a thin towel and secured with a scarf, numbed the bite. A few seconds without one and I’d curl my toes and twist my face into a muffled scream.

The consensus on my Facebook page, where I’d cast a bid for sympathy, was that I’d been nailed by a red fire ant. A red imported fire ant to be more specific, or RIFA, an invasive destroyer that showed up in California nearly 20 years ago, having traveled up from South America through the southern states in potted plants. RIFAs are bad news; they crowd out native ants, bees and lizards; they kill songbirds, bunnies and toads; they’ve even been known to take down a pig. I would have been entirely justified in my early plan to bomb the colony with vinegar and baking soda once I was mobile again, even if that particular extermination method proved to be less effective than morbidly fun.

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The Last Word

By: | August 29, 2015

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August 24 – 28, 2015

This week, words mattered – whether they be spoken between doctors, written on a page or scratched out by a centuries-old fraud. Also worms. Worms mattered too. 

Guest writer Robin Mejia takes us with her to El Salvador and an agricultural education project. Despite continuing violence there, plenty of people still focus their energy on pruning strategies or finding the right type of worm.

Two esteemed historians talk with Ann about why some languages don’t differentiate the words “story” and “history.” It turns out that there is a difference between fact and narrative. We think.

Thanks to an impossibly complex system and a horrible lack of doctor communication, Jennifer’s father’s life is put at risk. It seemed he was taking three separate blood thinners and no one bothered to check.

Christie finally lets go of her hangup with people not using the proper singular form of the word “data.” Which I’m pretty sure is “date.”

Jessa tests out her investigative journalism chops on 75 “quintals” of 17th Century codfish. Her search leads to someone called Sir Peter Pounce Bart and General Quodlibet Hookem. Which all turns out to be hokum in the end.

 

 

A Baffling Curio

By: | August 28, 2015

quodlibet1 croppedInvestigative journalists seem awfully glamorous – delving into mysteries and catching those liars at their game. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the aptitudes involved, so I steer clear of it. But recently I’ve had the thrill of that hunt in miniature.

It all began when an editor sent me a link to the check above, to illustrate an assignment about in-kind payment. Newfoundland was the last colony to join Canadian confederation (in 1949) and before it did, there was a currency shortage, so people kept credit accounts in the form of their primary export: cod.

The text of this check, if you can’t make it out, reads as follows:

Cashier of the Bank of Newfound land please pay to bearer seventy five quintals fourteen pounds of uncured codfish 75—14

Quodlibet Hookem (Hoskem? Hoskim?)

March 14 1689

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A Singular Data Point Is A Datum, You Idiots!

By: | August 27, 2015

data_JustGrimesThere’s a moment when you realize that you’ve become the person you hate. For me, it happened at the dinner table.

I was telling (ok, ranting to) my husband about how my employer, FiveThirtyEight, has chosen to adopt as its house style the usage of the word data as a singular noun.

“So you’ve become a pedantic asshole?” he said.

He was right, of course. It was time to let it go. My snobbery over the usage of the word data dates back to my senior year of college. In my honors thesis, I described the results of my summer research project by using the word as a singular noun (“the data is,” as I recall) and one of my committee members had crucified me for it. His was the only negative comment I received, and it stung. I was never going to make that mistake again. Continue reading →

Prescription for Tragedy

By: | August 26, 2015

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Not long ago my father, who is 84, had a great fall. Great meaning bad.

He doesn’t remember tripping on anything, just that suddenly he was on the floor of his bathroom. He’d hit his head on the corner of the sink. There was a lot of blood. A long hospital stay followed after surgery to drain the blood that had pooled on his brain. He recovered, with a hole in his head as a constant and ugly reminder of his unexplained collapse.

The surgeon came to see us in the recovery room. He said “Martin, no more falling. If you hit your head again it will probably kill you.”

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Story, History, Story

By: | August 25, 2015

4932044252_5fc01f798a_bAnn:   Some time ago, I got interested in why European languages so often use the same word for “story” and “history.”  Every English speaker knows that having one word for two such different things — fiction and truth, respectively — is anathema.  But my thinking didn’t go much farther than that, it rarely does.  So  I found a couple of actual, practicing PhD historians, Audra Wolfe and Alex Wellerstein (bio’s below), and asked them: what’s story, what’s history, are they the same, and if not what’s the relation between them?   

Audra: Of course histories are stories. History is the study of change over time, which means that it’s an inherently narrative enterprise, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. To be sure, it’s possible to write a history of a given moment in time, a more static account that tries to capture a particular Zeitgeist. But even then, the author has made certain decisions about how that moment of time is defined. Something happened beforehand, to start the era under question, and something happened at the end, to close it.

Ann:  Boy, does that sound exactly how I see my own stories: I’m taking the real world and assigning beginnings, middles, and ends.  It’s also why I get so worried about using the techniques of fiction in nonfiction.

Audra:  But “story” doesn’t necessarily mean fiction! At least colloquially, we describe all sorts of things as “stories”: New Yorker articles, documentaries, and even prizewinning nonfiction books. Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, for instance, about the oh-so-thin veneer of nuclear safety, is nothing if not a great story. It’s also true. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Postcard from El Salvador

By: | August 24, 2015

20150729_144035Agricultural engineer Irene Varela is a compelling presence. Six farmers are gathered on the patio of a church library in Santiago Texacuangos in El Salvador, about an hour outside the country’s capital for a workshop she’s leading.

“What’s the soil like when you have worms?” Varela asks in Spanish.

“Moist,” says one famer.

“Rich,” says another.

It’s the last Wednesday in July, and my second week in El Salvador. I’m here on a fellowship to work with the Asociación Pro-Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desparecidos (Pro-Búsqueda), an NGO that helps parents search for children who were abducted during the country’s civil war. (The official dates of the war are 1979 to 1992—so today, those children are young adults.) Until I met Varela, that was all I knew of Pro-Búsqueda’s work. Intrigued to learn that the group offered an agricultural education program as well, I’d asked her if I could tag along the next time she went into in the field.

The training is titled Lombricultura, a play on the Spanish words for worms (lombriz) and agriculture. The farmers are mostly middle-aged men from the community who clearly know their local land. And worms. Broadly speaking, the presence of worms is a marker of healthy soils. Their burrowing aerates the soil, and their digestive systems turn organic scraps into natural fertilizer. Continue reading →