The Last Word

By: | August 22, 2015

8206069_da9ea32cd3_oAugust 17 – 21, 2015

It was a week of people changing their minds.  Except for Cameron’s kids, they didn’t budge.

Magical thinking works, says guest Heather Abel.  For decades, she was able to stop tsunamis before they hit her. Now, though, the grand and calming ocean stops them for her.

Even out in the back of beyond, Craig wouldn’t use satellite phones.  Now he does, he says, because this is what we do: “we find the sharpest stones, we make fires, we reach to space and call home.”

No, Helen’s not going to get a U2 tatoo.  She does love that band, it makes her happy; but she’s not one of those people who get tatoos, isn’t seduced by the U2 Tatoo Project.  Now she wonders what U2 tatoo to get.

Cameron is fascinated by Cat’s Cradle.  So is her mother; so in fact is the whole world past and present.  Her kids aren’t fascinated.  Then she learned to do Jacob’s Ladder, but they’re still not.

Michelle’s neighbors are Mt. St. Helen’s and Ursula LeGuin.  LeGuin loved the mountain but once is started smoking, was scared to camp on it.  The mountain didn’t mind, though, so Leguin didn’t either.

 

 

The Lady and Le Guin

By: | August 21, 2015

1024px-MtStHelens_Mushroom_Cloud

Late last month, I got to camp with a group of ecologists at the base of Mt. St. Helens, in southwestern Washington state. Some of the scientists had been studying the mountain since shortly after it erupted on May 18, 1980, and they were full of stories about the changes they’d seen over the past thirty-five years. They told me that someone else had been watching the mountain just as long as they had, and that she still watched it every morning. Her name was Ursula Le Guin.

Ursula Le Guin? I said. The Ursula Le Guin?

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Gathering String

By: | August 20, 2015

8206069_da9ea32cd3_oI often buy presents for my kids that are really for me. This time, it was a special string for doing Cat’s Cradle. (Of course, it’s funny that I even bought a string, instead of tying a piece of yarn into a loop like I once did.)

When they unwrapped it, they saw a rainbow piece of silk, one solid knotless loop. This is a loose rendering of the conversation that followed:

Oldest son: “What is this?”

Me: “It’s a game.”

OS [disappointed]: “Oh.”

Middle son is about to throw a tantrum. Enter Grandma.

Grandma: “Oh! Cat’s Cradle! How fun!” Continue reading →

U2 Gets Onto People’s Skin

By: | August 19, 2015

Pat from Rogers, Arkansas

Once upon a time, I was a fan of bands that gave me some kind of alternative cred. I have been to a ton of They Might Be Giants concerts, which places me solidly in the ranks of the nerds. I spent many years in love with R.E.M. and have listened to all of their albums back to back in day-long binges, at least three times. That indicates a mild level of ’90s alternativeness—if somewhat less alternativeness than my cooler friends, who wrote FUGAZI on their notebooks or formed their own riot grrrl bands.

But about 10 years ago I got it in my head to go to a U2 concert. My friend Kate seemed to think they were worth seeing a bunch of times, and she’s got pretty good taste, plus I liked most of the U2 songs I knew, so I arranged to make a trip to visit friends in Brazil at a time when the band was touring there. After my first show, at São Paulo’s massive Morumbi soccer stadium, I was hooked.

I’ve seen the band nine times now. While I have always enjoyed the heck out of an R.E.M. or TMBG show, U2 concerts make me shriek and jump up and down and often cry, which, as anyone who knows me will attest, is not my everyday way of interacting with the world.

So what does U2 fandom say about me? What does it mean that the band that I will cross oceans to see live is also one of the world’s biggest rock bands?

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Talking Across Time

By: | August 18, 2015

shutterstock_116233960On a journey into the Kenai Mountains of South Central Alaska between snow-swollen peaks and cornices curling above glaciers, we carried a satellite phone. I usually don’t take any form of outside communication into the wilderness, so this device was nagging on me.

For whatever reason I was fine with headlamps and ropes, various pieces of technology, but the phone felt like an intrusion. Ostensibly, it was for emergencies. John, one of the trip members, had a mother who’d been in a deteriorating state of dementia and was on the edge of death when he left for this trip. John said that her dementia had been in place for years and that he’d lost his mother long ago, but he needed to stay in touch.

I wondered what the analog of a satellite phone could possibly have been before we ever had technology like this, the last hollers though a mountain pass, a stack of rocks left for someone else to find hundreds or thousands of years later. What has the satellite phone done but lengthen our goodbyes? Continue reading →

Guest Post: How to Stop a Tsunami in Three Easy Steps

By: | August 17, 2015

Heather beachRight now, parents newly versed in the vocabulary of doom are discussing the Cascadia subduction in Seattle backyards, in Portland parks. They’ve read the recent New Yorker article about the devastating earthquake overdue in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe they’ve also read the stories in Outside and Discover. They know that three thousand schools around the region could collapse in the quake and that kids on the coast will be trapped in their elementary schools by the tsunami that follows.

Right now, their kids, playing among the rhododendron, are overhearing this conversation. Some will ignore it; by silent consensus, they’ll move their wild games farther away. But some kids will creep closer, hoping to remain unnoticed so the grown-ups will keep talking. These are the ones prone to catastrophizing, who are always attuned to a hint of apocalypse, who have been freaking out about climate change perhaps too much. These are the magical thinkers, the worriers. I know these kids; I once was one of them. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 15, 2015

943795894_77f8336d2c_zAugust 10–14, 2015

It was redux week here at LWON, in which some People of LWON chose posts that Other People of LWON and our guests wrote.

Ann on Michelle’s post about using bourbon as mouthwash: “This post is one of LWON’s public services unto humankind. . . By re-running it here and now, we can assure that you won’t have to do this dangerous, costly, and intellectually draining experiment yourself.”  

Jessa is reading “a memoir of the amazing discovery of split-brain phenomena in patients whose left and right brains have been separated.” So inspired, she picked a post on left-right preferences in art by guest Sam Kean, which might be one of her favorite guest posts so far.

Helen says, “It’s hot and it’s always a good time to think about dogs,” so she chose a post I wrote about my dog and his troubles. (Thanks, Helen!)

Craig picked a post by Christie: “It regards the nature of bending and straightening the truth in journalism. The question of what to write in, what to leave out, and when to apply gentle literary pressure is crucial.”

With all the attention on the recent death of Cecil the lion, Jennifer says, “I thought it was appropriate to revisit a piece on a related topic: Killing animals for conservation (in this case, because they’re invasive).” She reduxed former LWONer Virginia Hughes’s post about goat extermination in the Galápagos.

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Maybe you are reading this post from a hammock like the one in this photo (by slack12 via Flickr/Creative Commons license)

 

 

Redux: Galápagos Monday: When Conservation Means Killing

By: | August 14, 2015

Well, folks, it’s the last day of REDUX WEEK here at LWON, and with all the hubbub of late over the death of Cecil the Lion, I thought it was appropriate to revisit a piece on a related topic: Killing animals for conservation (in this case, because they’re invasive). I’ve chosen an essay by Virginia Hughes about goat extermination in the Galápagos that ran July 16, 2012. Be sure also to see the follow-up conversation between LWON’s Michelle Nijhuis and Scientific American writer Jason G. Goldman. We hope you’ve enjoyed our peek at some favorites from the past. We’ll drag ourselves back to the present next week, we promise.  –Jennifer

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 Judas knew what he was doing when he double-crossed his friend Jesus. “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” he asked the conspiring priests in the famous Bible story.

The story of the Judas Goat is more tragic. She had no idea that she was leading her friends to their deaths.

Her captors sterilized her first, then coated her with hormones so she reeked of fertility. Then they collared her with a radio-tracking device and cut her loose. Nearby male goats smelled her and sought her out. As soon as they found her, people swooped in and shot them. The hunters saved Judas, though, so they could repeat the set-up again and again.

It was all part of a six-year, $6 million project in which conservationists killed nearly 80,000 feral goats on Santiago Island in the Galápagos. Similar goat genocides had happened on 128 other islands, including nearby Pinta, but never on any as large as Santiago, which spans 144,470 acres. The goats, introduced by sailers hundreds of years earlier, were decimating all flavors of vegetation there, putting ground birds, giant tortoises and other endemic species in danger. So officials — conservationists from the Galápagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation — decided the goats had to go.
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