Free the Tree

By: | January 24, 2024

One Sunday in November, my boyfriend and I were arriving back at his house at noon or so, after a visit to the market for a baguette and bacon. As I waited for him to unlock his door, I looked at the pretty maple tree next to me. It had Christmas lights wrapped around its trunks and limbs. “Do those lights work?” I asked. It was getting dark early – daylight savings had ended two weeks before – and I thought it might be nice to have some lights outside. They did not, he said. I looked closer and realized the tree was starting to grow around the wires. In time, that can kill a tree. I suggested that it might be time to take the lights down.

At first we tried unwinding the lights, but quickly realized they were too embedded. The tree had even popped the wires in places as it grew. The lights were beyond saving. With wire cutters, we started clipping and pulling and unwinding and clipping again. Gradually we released the tree from its bonds. The hardest bits were down at the branching of the tree’s two main trunks, which had come together as they grew and widened. But my boyfriend thought of applying a bit vegetable oil as lubricant – this felt unkind somehow, pouring a plant product on a plant – and, by pulling steadily, we were able to get the last bits of the wires out.

The whole process only took about 15 minutes and it gave this pretty tree a new lease on life. Below is what the tree looked like afterward – see, you can see the twist of the wires in the lower of the two crisscrossing scars. Two months later, the scars look much milder. I hope we freed it in time.

I took pictures of the tree knowing it would make a charming post for this blog. But I’ve barely done any writing since.

This event happened at the beginning of what turned out to be the worst week of my life. My father was 81 and extremely healthy. A stroke came from nowhere, as they do. One Sunday, I had a father; the next Sunday, I didn’t. One Sunday, this tree was wrapped in wires that would kill it; the next week, it wasn’t.

Almost everybody loses their father, and almost everybody has to live in a world without their parents, eventually. (How, though?) I want to write about him, but I don’t know how, but I want to make everything about him, because it is.

Here’s what comes to mind when I look back on this little episode: My father took great joy in nature and in being active outside, as did I, climbing around that tree, pulling on wires. He and I share a passion for spotting problems and wondering if we could make things better. He’s the one who introduced me to wire cutters. And he also would have thoroughly documented his work in photos.

Photos: Helen Fields, who is her father’s daughter, obviously

Chasing the northern lights

By: | January 22, 2024

I can’t remember why I decided I needed to see the northern lights again. Maybe it was nostalgia. I remembered seeing them as a child, standing in the big yard facing Canada and watching them dance above the pasture. Sometimes I spent the night at my aunt and uncle’s in town, we’d stand in the middle of the highway and watch them. In North Dakota the sky is vast and traffic minimal.

Or maybe I just wanted a distraction from a life that become rote, a break from the relentless schedule of parenting small children.

Whatever the reason, I found a Facebook group called Upper Midwest Aurora Chasers and I joined. Suddenly every night was filled with possibility. I monitored the group’s posts, and I waited for the right conditions. Southern Wisconsin, where I live, is almost never a good place to see the aurora. Too far south. But you don’t have to drive far to get a good view.

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The internet and the overmind

By: | January 19, 2024

When the internet was young, David Bowie was asked by a skeptical journalist whether it would ever have any real impact on the world. Wasn’t it just a fad whose transformative potential artists were exaggerating in a bid to stay relevant with the youths? It was 1999, and while this stance is easy to mock today, you might spare a little sympathy for the journalist. Jeremy Paxman was a heavy-hitting British national treasure. When politicians got scared at night, it was him they feared lurking under their beds. He had seen everything. And he thought, why is everyone losing their minds over a new content delivery system?

The entire concept of internetworked connectivity was swaddled in chirpy corporate AOL yellow, in unthreatening blueberry iMac vibes. This “sky’s the limit” techno-boosterism in fact had very clear limits, and these were predicated on the internet’s benign usefulness. It would make the world like itself, only more so, and more quick, more convenient, more fun.

Bowie saw it differently. “The potential for what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable,” he told Paxman.

Paxman made a sour lemon face at him. “It’s just a tool though, isn’t it?”

Bowie grimaced. “No it’s not. No. It’s an alien life form.”

It’s worth watching the whole clip, but especially starting around the 9-minute mark, the conversation will make you wonder if Bowie was hiding a time machine among his Ziggy Stardust paraphernalia. “I don’t think we’ve seen even the tip of the iceberg. We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.”

But if you think his prediction about the alien effects of the internet from 1999 is weirdly on point, check out Arthur C. Clarke’s first-contact novel Childhood’s End, published in 1953. The only trouble is, you might have a bad time sleeping afterwards.

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Our Moon

By: | January 17, 2024

Our Becky wrote a book. It came out yesterday. It’s beautiful. And I got to talk with her about it.

*

Cameron: Could you tell the story about how this book came to be?

Becky: When I started working on this proposal, I imagined it as a sort of appreciation—here’s how cool the Moon is, here’s why you should care about it even though many astronomers find it dull, here’s what it has done for us. I wanted people to think about it in a way that transcends the modern rocket-measuring-contest obsession with going back there and mining or something. My editor, who is amazing, saw early on that this book was more like a history of human thought. 

So when I started writing it, I wanted to connect its existence to our own, and our process of thought through time. And I set out to find some interesting lunar connections. As I found these different connections—ranging from the earliest methods of timekeeping, to the roots of religion and philosophy—I grew convinced that this wasn’t going to be an appreciation, but instead an argument. Like: The Moon is responsible for every giant leap we have made as a species. We would not be here without it, and here are all of the reasons why.

Cameron: Before reading this book, I’d never thought of the Moon from the Moon’s perspective. That is, I’d only thought about it as it looks from Earth. You write so beautifully about the Moon and some of the things it experiences–its own seasons and solstices, even a water cycle–and what it might be like to be on the Moon. What was it like for you to think and write about the Moon this way?

Becky: I really wanted the Moon to be the main character of this book. At one point I mapped out the chapters according to Campbell’s traditional hero’s journey — like, the Moon is the central character experiencing a journey of supernatural wonder, encountering forces acting against its interest, triumphing over those forces, and reckoning with the transformation that ensues. I think the ultimate structure is not quite that, but there are some echoes of it in the narrative. In the middle, for instance, the Moon falls from grace; once it is divorced from our notion of time, and Galileo and his contemporaries prove that it is just one satellite of many, the Moon faces its abyss. I tried to keep those narrative ideas in mind as I was writing. If the Moon was a character, what would it feel? Without ascribing too much agency or personification to the Moon, I really wanted to keep it and its experience front and center, whether that was to consider the physical traits that separate it from Earth, or to think about how the Moon experiences the sublime. I also really just love thinking about what it would be like there. I tried to focus on the Earthly things we often take for granted, and how much we would miss them when they were gone.

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Guest Post: I Went Searching for Rattlesnakes and the Most Dangerous Thing I Found Was My Own Urine

By: | January 15, 2024

In the early days of the pandemic, I found myself faced with a test of courage even more daunting than disinfecting groceries: peeing in the woods as a woman, and a very pregnant one, at that.

As part of the research for my book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History, I had contacted wildlife biologist Brendan Clifford, who invited me (with my husband, William, in tow) to track state-endangered timber rattlesnakes in New Hampshire. By that point, I was nearly seven months pregnant with my daughter. Our drive to find the snakes would last a good hour each way, the expedition several more. We shuddered at the thought of viral clouds lingering in a gas-station restroom given the effects of the disease on gestation and gestating people—then, in May 2020, still unknown.

But pregnant women pee. They pee a lot. It’s as if your bladder has shrunk to the size of a lentil and then someone dropkicks that lentil at intervals. And so, I had to learn the art of using a pee funnel—essentially a prosthetic penis that diverts urine outward from standing position—while growing more ungainly by the day.

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Bat Facts (Kate’s Version)

By: | January 12, 2024
Colored pencil drawing of a deep burgundy bat hanging by one foot from a dark purple branch against a lavender-gray sky

Note: This is a personal essay that happens to include a lot of neat facts about bats. It should not be confused with Our Helen’s excellent 2017 post of the same name. I suggest reading both; there’s no such thing as too much information about bats. The facts and statistics in this piece are accurate as of 2022.

The world’s smallest bat is the size of a dandelion puff and weighs less than a penny. The largest bat is probably not something you want to think about.

They get pretty big.

Scientists have recorded more than 6,000 mammal species on this earth. Of those, about 1,400 species—or 1 in 5—are bats.

It is wonderful and also not fair that bats are a Halloween animal. Wonderful because bat wings are the perfect shape to carve into a pumpkin’s ribbed rind. Not fair, because they are not monsters.

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Along the Urban Ecotone

By: | January 10, 2024

The skirt of Las Vegas, Nevada, is a frictional zone scrubbed with busted tortoise shells and Joshua trees that lean toward the sun. High tension power lines intersect at substations and disperse from there into the desert. A buddy and I camped in this liminal space a couple months ago and all night long the sky over Vegas glowed like a fully lit aquarium. 

Sunrise was a nuclear blast, not a single cloud to stop it. Mountain shadows floated away and the city in its basin filled with brassy November light. The same light landed on this outer edge where my friend and I had slept at the foot of a range past the last construction port-a-potties and banners announcing grand openings of new subdivisions. I sat up in a sleeping bag next to my bicycle, gear gathered around me like an island. Biologists speak in terms of transition zones called ecotones, where dissimilar biological communities meet. This was an ecotone of the city and the wilderness beyond, the ground a matrix of bottle caps, bullet casings, and Mojave Desert scree.

In a chill morning breeze we packed camp onto our bikes a hundred yards behind a pair of green municipal water tanks. Departing the city to get away from its dominating lights, we were on a trek which would take us more than 200 miles to reach full darkness. At 150 miles, Vegas would still be casting a shadow. The next nine days would be 4×4 wilderness where we’d bum drinking water off a Jeep caravan and sleep in growing dark. This morning was our last full breath of the city. 

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The Completion Portfolio

By: | January 8, 2024

Disclaimer: If you come here for the science, you can skip this post. I feel like writing about resource allocation today.

If you ever visit a financial planner or investment advisor, they will likely ask about your job. That’s because much of your wealth, especially if you are young, is invisible. It’s in your ‘human capital’—separate from the financial capital you can see in your accounts—and it’s calculated as the present value of your future earnings.

On every payday throughout your career, you exchange a little human capital for financial capital, running out your stores until you stop working.

Let’s say you have a unionized government job and no intention of leaving. The ghostly presence of your future salary is an asset that’s more like a treasury bond than a stock. It’s low risk and steadily pays out until the bond’s maturity [your retirement].

What fascinates me is what you’re supposed to do with this information. The technique is called a ‘completion portfolio’, and I’m finding the concept extends to all the resources over which you have command, whether you are scraping by week-to-week in the gig economy or sitting like Smaug in a treasure-filled mountain. In some ways, the completion portfolio is a blueprint for life.

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