Guest Post: I Walked Across the Hudson River

By: | March 19, 2014

Ice yacht

Several times a week, I drive over a Hudson River bridge to pick up my daughter from her school in Troy, NY, and bring her back home to the Albany side. Back and forth I go, and every time my eye wanders to the frozen surface below. Even when it’s dark and there’s nothing to see, I look down and sense the expanse.

I’m not quite sure how the idea crept into my mind, but once there, it lodged and grew. Could I walk across the Hudson? It’s been a very cold winter. Not just cold, but consistently cold. The river’s surface has been solid since the new year. It easily held up the 20 inches of snow we got in mid-February. It sported puddles on the ice when temperatures hit 50 degrees about a week later.

I wondered and daydreamed and fantasized. At some point I realized that there must be others out there, thinking the same thing, feeling the same pull. That’s when I started to scheme. Perhaps there was a secret place where people walked on the river. Perhaps there was a wacky upstate New York event celebrating a frozen winter. Perhaps I could really do this. Continue reading →

Interview with Will Storr: Disputable Sources

By: | March 18, 2014

Star Wars ConventionAnn:  Will Storr is a phenomenon.*  His specialty is writing good stories about people in bad places.  He’s got a story in Matter about an extremely unpleasant disease called Morgellons.  People with Morgellons have terrible itches, then tiny fibers creep out of their skin and make oozy sores.  The disease sounds like a horror story out of Darwin’s parasitic wasps which lay their eggs in other insects that the hatchling wasps then eat from the inside out.  And sure enough, the usual medical diagnosis isn’t Morgellons but DOP, delusions of parasitosis. The disease, according to the doctors, belongs to the mind part of the mind-body split.  I read Will’s story after the great Ginny Hughes wrote on Twitter that somebody should interview him about how a writer works with sources who are what? bug-nuts? victims of unimaginative docs? unreliable? anyway, sources with whom a writer isn’t sure he shares a reality.  But maybe Will himself should describe these sources who after all, are fellow humans.

Will:  The Morgellons piece is an extract from my latest book, which begins with me spending some time with a creationist who’s determined to prove to me, using the methods of science, that the earth is only 6000 years old. The thing about that guy – and about many of the people I’ve written about over the years – is that he wasn’t crazy. He was living an orderly, successful life. He was happy (as happy as any of us, anyway). There was no evidence of pathology, as far as I could tell. Also – he wasn’t stupid. So if he’s not crazy and not stupid – how the hell did he come to believe what he does?   Continue reading →

Do Penguins Need Sweaters?

By: | March 17, 2014

jumperpenguinI’m a lover of science and a devoted knitter. Science-related projects that appear on the internet and have to do with yarn find their way into my inbox. That means I am aware of the project in Glasgow to knit microbes for elementary schools. I am in love with that shawl that depicts the night sky in silver beads. The knitted version of a dissected rat with its innards showing? Yep, seen it. Also the frog.

Proof that I’m doing something right in my life: When my friends see a knitted piece of science, they think of me. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 15, 2014

shutterstock mooseMarch 10 – 14

This week, Christie told us that story she doesn’t tell. Then lots of other people flocked to the comments to tell theirs.

Guest poster Daniel O’Connell asked if there’s gold in them thar evolutionary hills.

Cameron wondered if deep-sea species will be soon be forced to have their own reality show.

Moose as invasive species? Yes, Jessa said, and there is only one apex predator who can take them down.

And Roberta mourned the remipede, a strange crustacean only discovered 35 years ago, but one that might not be around much longer.

 

A tiny cave creature, eyeless and deadly

By: | March 14, 2014

Remipede

Joey Pakes was swimming in a cave in Mexico on July 4, 2008 when she spotted her first remipede. Pakes, a graduate student in biology at UC Berkeley, had seen pictures of these aquatic centipede-like creatures before. But when she encountered one in the wild, the experience was completely different. “They’re such graceful animals,” she recalls. “It stopped me and I felt a certain high… I coudn’t scream or go ‘Oh wow, look at this’ because I was underwater. So I was just really happy, and I just shared it with myself and watched it as long as I could. That was my Fourth of July.”

Remipedes are pale, leggy crustaceans, no more than a couple inches long, that dwell in caves filled with layers of saltwater and freshwater. Because these caves are completely dark, remipedes have no eyes. They often swim on their backs, paddling their many legs; their name comes from the Latin word for “oar-footed.”

Continue reading →

Attack of the Killer Moose

By: | March 13, 2014

shutterstock moose2

“Did I ever tell you about the time I got charged by a moose?”

We were at the point in our camping trip where everyone was dusting off their close-encounters-with-wildlife stories.

“Now, Davis, don’t tell that story or we’re going to get into an argument,” warned his wife.

“She was downwind of the bear spray when I let it off,” explained Davis, not particularly apologetically.

Every Newfoundlander has a story or two about the danger of moose, the dominant ungulate on the island. There is roughly one moose for every three people there – the most intense moose density in the world – and the population continues to grow despite 22,000 being harvested yearly during hunting season.

Though bulls become curious and aggressive during rutting season in September, the biggest hazard is not of the charging, snorting variety. Continue reading →

The story I won’t tell

By: | March 12, 2014

BurgersWikiMedia

I was having lunch with a vegetarian friend recently, when I caught myself wanting to tell her the story. When you’re a vegetarian, a lot of people — friends, distant relatives, complete strangers — barrage you with the story. It starts like this: “Yeah, I tried going vegetarian once.” 

During my 13 years as a vegetarian, I heard every variation of the story, and they all followed the same arc. Due to some earnest concern like animal rights, the environmental consequences of meat production or the artery clogging properties of lard, the storytellers decided to give up meat. Things are fine for a while, until we reach the story’s conflict. The protagonists notice their muscles shriveling or curly, dark hair hair growing on the backs of their hands, or new bald spots appearing on the top of their heads. They can’t sleep or they sleep all the time, they find themselves deficient in vitamin woo, or they’re plagued by strange bowel movements (which they describe in graphic detail). Now the story’s hero must decide whether to stick to good intentions or resume the meat-eating. 

It’s never even close. The slab of beef that breaks the streak is the most mind-blowing thing that any human being has ever tasted, and the storyteller’s life is returned to balance once again. In closing, the protagonist will usually indulge in a bit of self-depreciation for being so naive as to attempt a life without bacon.

I’d heard more than a decade’s worth of these stories, and I’d always dismissed them as the desperate justifications of people who felt secretly guilty about eating slaughtered animals. I’d done the research and knew that vegetarian diets are perfectly healthy, so I’d always considered these tales a pile of bull honkey. Continue reading →

Mare Incognitum

By: | March 11, 2014

Lenox_Globe_(2)_BritannicaThis week, a great white shark named Lydia may be the first white shark seen crossing into the eastern Atlantic. Scientists tagged her a year ago in Florida; since then, she’s swum 19,000 miles and as of yesterday morning, she was about 1000 miles from the Irish coast.

White shark populations, along with those of many other shark species, are dwindling because of bycatch and other threats. The more we can learn about them, the better we can help protect them. But there’s a small part of me that wants to toss a fig leaf over Lydia’s sensor, so that something about her journey is still unknown. Continue reading →