The Best Laid Plans

By: | September 4, 2023

On July 30th, 2014, the sky turned black in the middle of the day and a thunderstorm rained tar on our car. That was the final straw of the Yellowknife wildfire season for me; I brought my then-4-year-old son down to Calgary to attend a day camp until the air cleared up North. Back then, Beijing’s air quality was so nightmarish that I was shocked we had the same particulates index reading. Now a decade later, Beijing’s skies are blue and healthy but Yellowknife is still a 20,000-person outpost in the middle of a semi-arid (very flammable) taiga that sprawls over an area twice the size of France.

At the end of that fire season in 2014 I attended a meeting where officials laid out emergency plans for future fire seasons that could get worse. Yellowknife has only one highway out of town. If fire crosses the highway and heads toward the town, we’re in trouble, they said. It would not be feasible to fly everyone out, they said, and the most extreme plan at their disposal was to order everyone to shelter in place as the fire passed over. Privately-owned construction equipment on the edge of town could be commandeered by the city, they added. I tried to imagine ‘sheltering in place’ in my beloved stick-built house with its solid diagonal beams supporting wooden decks.

Just as COVID quickly surpassed the most extreme public health plans that governments had dared dream of, this summer’s wildfire season in the North taught us that yes, sometimes you really do need to just get everyone out of town, even if it is infeasible. Multiple fires were approaching, and they looked determined to pass right through town until they reached Great Slave Lake. Yellowknife has never before had to evacuate out of the Northwest Territories, but the time had come for a group road trip.

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Guest Post: A Glimmer of Good in a Time of War

By: | September 1, 2023

On the night of January 8, 1970, I was an A-37 attack jet pilot returning to my home base of Bien Hoa after a mission over the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. It was 1:30am as I reduced the power to separate from my leader and then zoomed the aircraft to 20,000 feet so I could see further down the horizon. Looking over the canopy rail to my right, I saw the constellation Crux for the first time in my life. Also known as the Southern Cross, it was just poking up over the southern horizon. It appeared as an X cross with a bright star at each end, just like I’d expected it would be. At my 11 o’clock, I spotted a white smudge, which I took to be the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). I had always wanted to see the Southern Cross and to see it under those circumstances was special — it was something good happening in the midst of war. 

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Lookit This Tree

By: | August 30, 2023

About seven months ago, I acquired a boyfriend. I mention this for two reasons: (1) to brag that an exceptionally good-looking, kind, and intelligent man wants to hang out with me and (2) because I just recently noticed something about this tree in his front yard.

I’ve been going out of the front door there a lot, through three seasons, and walking past this tree every time. It is not a new tree. His landlord, who bought the house in 2003 and used to live in it, stopped by recently and reminisced about how tiny the tree used to be. Now it is big. Its roots are pushing up the bricks that pave the tiny yard.

A few weeks ago, on a Wednesday morning, I was waiting for him to come outside and looked at the tree, and saw something I’d never noticed before: Two horizontal lines of holes. The tell-tale sign of the yellow-bellied sapsucker.

The yellow-bellied sapsucker is a cute little woodpecker with a distinctive way of eating. It drills a line of holes across a tree, then drinks the sap that collects, along with any bugs that get stuck in it. If you see a neat little row of holes like this in a tree, at least in my area of the mid-Atlantic, you can bet: that woodpecker has been around. (Other sapsuckers do something similar in other places.) The line of holes is one of those secret signs of nature that you see if you keep your eyes on the trees. Which, apparently, I had not been doing.

The tree grows in the middle of Washington, D.C., close enough to the U.S. Capitol that my boyfriend could hear the din of the January 6 riot. And, if he’d listened very closely, maybe at some point in the last few years he could have heard a sapsucker that stopped by for a meal.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

Zee Lady

By: | August 28, 2023

So, you might have read this post before. But have you ever read it while listening to Jack Black sing “Peaches“? Bonus points if you are eating a peach at the same time!

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Confession time: I used to be a peach hater. What was wrong with me? It’s a question I often find myself asking, too.

Part of it was the pit. When I first saw a peach cut open, I was a kid. It was summer, and I was at a swimming pool. The pit looked like a tiny withered brain. A brain that left bloody marks on the peach flesh all around it, a brain that came out smeared with yellow slime.

A friend told me that the pit was poisonous. In my mind, the poison infused the whole peach, becoming a deadly pink-yellow time bomb, my own forbidden fruit. (It’s true that a peach pit contains amygdalin, which turns into hydrogen cyanide once you eat the pit—so don’t eat peach pits!—but you’d likely have to eat a lot of them to have real problems. This woman ate as many as 40 apricot pits and survived.)

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Redux: The Lookout Cookbook

By: | August 25, 2023

I’m on a backpacking trip this week, which makes it as good a time as any to revisit one of my favorite posts (or, more accurately, to make you revisit it). Although Colorado, our home since early 2022, doesn’t have quite the same abundance and diversity of rentable Forest Service fire towers as did the Inland Northwest, we still hope to rest our bones in a couple of these aeries next summer. Hopefully they’ve updated the menu since I whipped up a batch of Shipwreck in 2020.

When, years from now, I reflect on the debacle that was 2020, I will remember it for COVID, of course, and for its possibly planet-saving election; but I will also recall it as the Year of the Fire Tower. Decommissioned fire lookout towers stipple ridgelines across the West, many of which can be rented for a $40 nightly fee — a sensational bargain, as long as you don’t mind carrying your water up fifty feet of rickety stairs and sleeping on a mattress strewn with mouseshit. Elise and I spent this summer bouncing up derelict dirt roads to towers with names like Cougar Peak and Gird Point and Yaak Mountain, seeking solace in sunsets and the stoic profile of the Northern Rockies. As I wrote recently for CNN: “Being surrounded by millions of years of rugged geology doesn’t diminish our present crisis, but it does offer a bit of deep context.”

I’ve come to love fire towers not only for their scenery, but for their history. Luminaries like Gary Snyder and Ed Abbey once scanned horizons for smoke; Jack Kerouac suffered an emotional meltdown during his summer at Desolation Peak. Traces of antiquity still survive at some towers: initials carved into cement foundations; lichen-encrusted cairns; the wondrous Osborne Firefinders that dominate the tiny cabins like supermassive stars. In one tower we unearthed a copy of the Fire Man’s Handbook, a 1966 manual whose wisdom included this pearl: “When lightning storm is near or overhead, observe the following safety rules: Stand on insulated glass-legged stool.”

If lightning didn’t kill twentieth-century lookouts, the food might do the job. Lookout cuisine was, by all accounts, abominable. Fire-watchers depended on the canned, the powdered, the non-perishable: anything that could be hauled in on a mule and preserved without refrigeration. One early cookbook advised lookouts to “purchase a half or a whole mutton from sheepherders in the vicinity of your station. To keep, hang up in a tree or some other high point at night, wrapped in canvas, or put in a burlap sack during the day and put between blankets and mattress of bed.” No wonder towers were often ransacked by bears.

Fire tower food was so notoriously terrible that it inspired a Colville National Forest lookout to pen the following bit of doggerel, in which FS stands for Forest Service: 

 I like FS biscuits;

think they’re mighty fine.

One rolled off the table

and killed a pal of mine.

I like FS coffee;

think it’s mighty fine.

Good for cuts and bruises

just like iodine.

I like FS corned beef;

it really is okay.

I fed it to the squirrels;

funerals are today.

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The Boundary Conditions Being What They Are

By: | August 23, 2023

I’ve written books and didn’t find the experience pleasant: I’d go underground for 2 or 3 or 4 years, maybe 5, and when I’d stick my head up into the light of the world again, the world was changed. Like, during one of my underground sessions, the internet took hold and when I surfaced, the print magazines for which I’d written were saying their last goodbyes. Or during another session, my job whisked out from under me and ok, I was sick of academia anyway and worse yet, now that I was free to only write, I found I was also sick of my writing. All of this is to say, coming out of the pandemic is a lot like coming out of a book: new world, what the hell?

And of course even when it’s over, it’s not over. Just like page proofs have to be corrected and publicity has to be arranged and endured, the pandemic has its upticks and new variants and friends suddenly cancelling afternoon teas.

Meaning, I don’t know how to live in what remains of the past and simultaneously figure out how the present is different. I think this is a liminal state, neither land nor water but some kind of uncertain swamp in between. I do hate uncertainty which, too bad because at this point in time, the swamp is the rule, it’s non-negotiable, it’s the boundary condition.

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 “Boundary condition” means different things to different scientists but in general it’s the immovable thing that can’t be changed, only worked within. A river running along a granite wall has to run parallel to the wall: the wall sets the boundary condition.

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One thing for sure: given current boundary conditions, I need therapy. Every week, I meet with a psychotherapist and a physical therapist; and every day I practice both. Shoulders back and down. Speak kindly to myself. Run my fingers up to door frame to the top. Separate the anxiety from the situation that’s provoking it. Hold a stretchy band in both hands with elbows at the side and pull my hands apart. Figure out what’s so frightening about wanting comfort. Lie down and slowly punch my arms into the air. Think of life’s little epiphanies.

The tiny black hummingbird is at the feeder and the sun hits it just so and it turns iridescent green, and it drinks and drinks and then its head pops up and it winks out of space and time, gone.

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Once I was in the woods, writing, in a cabin with a grand piano in it and a piano player needed to practice so I said sure, while you play I can write. I couldn’t. She worked her way through two volumes of Beethoven sonatas, and while Beethoven seems to write in sentences, his sentences were more complicated than mine and much more interesting so I got distracted and meanwhile she filled up the cabin with the Waldstein, up to the peaked roof, every atom of air in that cabin moved by Beethoven. I was breathing Beethoven.

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How many years ago was that? Twenty? Thirty? I’m at the age where you don’t suddenly lose days or months or years, you lose decades. Getting old: another liminal state. I’m sticking my head out of the ground from the pandemic just in time to face old-age planning. Also someday, not as far away as it used to be, is death, another boundary condition. I have no particular reason to think about death but I am aware of the time. How can all this life just go away? I will miss it all so much. I look at the hummingbird, the little kids in my tree, the lottery card the neighbor leaves on my porch, other neighbors having a kids-in-bed girl-party on their porch, the extraordinary mix of people at the farmers’ market united in their focus on peaches and sweet corn, and I get blinded by loss; I don’t want to ever leave this. My therapist gets a little snippy: then don’t, she says, it’s all out there, you don’t need to miss it now.

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Sticking a head up in the middle of a patch of dense, tall, intense green, ferny amsonias is a pale magenta phlox. I had deleted all the phlox years ago because it wasn’t flowering much and got terrible fungus, and I dug it all out. And yet years later, there it is. New world: what the hell? The phlox had been white and this pale magenta guy had to go back into its ancestry for its color and its will to live. “I’m here,” it says, “I am what I am and I’m here.”

Make of that what you will. But don’t you think, given these trying boundary conditions, that pale magenta phlox is also saying, “just go forth, sweetie, and do the best you know how?”

__________

Photo by me and it looks like it.

Puddleglyphs

By: | August 21, 2023

It was over 100 degrees several days this past week, where I live in Washington, and now we’re drowning in smoke. Needless to say, I’m craving something clean and cold. Maybe you are too? In which case, I pulled this from the archives for both of us:

Sometimes
in the spring
out walking
I get the feel
that the earth itself is speaking,
that it has its own language,
written in ice

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The Wolverine That Wasn’t

By: | August 18, 2023

Sorting through photos from our motion-triggered game camera reminds me a lot of field work. For every target animal you’re seeking, you end up looking at a lot of deer. So when I recently discovered a creature that I couldn’t immediately identify in our roll of game cam photos, I was thrilled.

It looked wide and strong, and for a split second I wondered if it could be a bear. But the size easily ruled that out — it was too small and squat.

Immediately, my mind went to the most exotic, exciting possibility — wolverine!

According to my National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Rocky Mountain States, the wolverine, or Gulo gulo, is “robust,” “bear-like” and “very strong and fearless for its size; drives bears from kill.”Its range includes western Colorado and its habitat is listed as forests, scrub and meadows, which pretty much describes the back acres of our farm where our game cam spotted the mystery creature. The wolverine’s  lateral stripes “can range from extremely prominent to almost indiscernible,” according to the Wolverine Foundation.

By the time I downloaded the photo, there were no tracks left, so all I had to go on was the photo. Checking the photo with the species accounts, everything seemed to check out. Of course, it was just one datum, so I called in some backup.

I sent the photo to some wildlife savvy friends, and they were split. A lot of them agreed it could be a wolverine. A few others wondered if it were a badger.

The American badger, Taxidea taxus, also fit the description pretty well. The range, habitat and body shape — “wide, flattish,” according to the Audubon guide — all fit. While it’s not clear that there are any wolverines left in Colorado, badgers are pretty common in the state, which tilted the scales in its favor.

I’ll be honest, I wanted it to be wolverine. Well, sort of. They’re vicious killers so maybe I didn’t want them hanging around my chickens, cats and other animals. I didn’t really want a badger around either. Still, there’s something thrilling about the thought of a dangerous wild animal inhabiting a shared space.

After looking at a bunch of photos in my field guides and online, I decided it was probably a badger.

And then I downloaded the latest photos, the first of which were taken the day (night, really) after the mystery photo was shot. And here’s what I found.

Skunk! It was a skunk. As soon as I saw this photo (and a video of what was probably the same skunk the following night) I was convinced.

Why? Because until I had seen the second photo and video, I had very little hard evidence to go on. The notion that the animal was a wolverine or badger was based almost entirely on what could be seen on the photo. And really, that wasn’t much. In the age of the internet, we all know how deceptive photos can be.

Wild animals can be hard to identify on the fly (or run or in a single snapshot of a camera) and so it’s important to consider a principle called “base rate neglect” or the “base rate fallacy.” It’s the tendency to favor the most recent or individual information while ignoring the prior probability of a particular outcome. In this case, it was taking the bodily characteristics of an animal in a night photo as the most compelling evidence, without giving as much consideration to the probability that a wolverine would be lurking in my forest. It wasn’t impossible that it was a wolverine, but chances were much greater that it was not. Badgers are more common around here than wolverines, and skunks are even more widespread still. I also had lots of prior evidence that there were skunks around — I’d chased one out of my garden shed multiple times.

The base rate principle is useful for birding too. Hawks are notoriously difficult to identify when they’re high in the air. We have lots of them around here, and I usually look up and say, “Look, a red-tailed hawk!” Because chances are, I’ll be correct.

Wolverine image: Max Pixel. Badger by Jonathunder

This post first ran on June 19, 2018.