This was first published October 4, 2021. It’s still the case.
In regard to the wildness of birds towards man, there is no other way of accounting for it… many individuals… have been pursued and injured by man, but yet have not learned a salutary dread of him. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Darwin's Finches
All right, fine, the first few birds
Could not have seen this coming.
They saw only dark shapes—large, lumbering, branch-winged birds
Tipped with tufts of down.
Of course the little birds were curious.
Of course they believed the branch-wings
Were benevolent.
And you’re right:
Once those first birds had been grabbed,
Necks twisted,
No, they couldn’t have gone back
To warn the others.
But the finches just kept coming,
Bird by trusting bird,
And the men kept killing them,
And the flock kept thinning.
You might think at some point
One bird might say to another,
You know, there’s something strange
About that beach—
The birds who go there
Never come back
And maybe
One bird did say this,
And maybe
The warned bird went anyway.
I guess I understand.
*
Image by Flickr user Brian Gratwicke under Creative Commons license
Snow has been heavy this winter and spring where I live in the Southwest, and sunny days are coming, meaning the white is about to turn to water and desert rivers will soon be raging. Whenever water starts to move I get excited. How could I not? It’s like an animal come to life, nosing its way through terrain. Even a car being washed up the street catches my attention as I follow the first finger finding its way down a curb. Even better if it comes out of the sky and roars across the land foaming. With that in mind, this post originally came out in October of 2015 and I hope it makes you want to chase the water, or at least admire it when it suddenly appears.
The picture above I took may look like nothing but chaos and you may be right. It is a flash flood in southern Utah and I was safely standing on a ledge above it. I was absorbed by the galling roar and the smell of the desert funneled by intense rainwater to a single point. Watching this with the naked eye is dizzying, though I could stay for hours and stare at physics folding on itself, fluid dynamics torn up by its roots. But it would not last for hours. Later that day, the flood would have dropped ten feet. The show would be all but over.
In the desert, however, the show never ends.
I was on NPR’s Morning Edition talking about the nature of flash floods after 16 people were killed in two different southern Utah flood events in one day. It’s hard to talk about something you love when it just ended lives. Many of the 16 were children.
Still, I can’t avert my gaze. I can’t help but inch my way closer. During this last wave of floods, I was out with a group of 7th and 8th graders from my children’s school backpacking in the wild, tangled canyons of southern Utah. Hearing of weather alerts and flash flood warnings, some parents were hesitant, to say the least, that we were going ahead. But we were on the other end of the spectrum from those who died. We were looking for floods, not trying to get away from them. We reveled in water, the girls in the group singing songs one morning about it, like prayers, like hymns, not like those who must have been lost in terror wondering what hit them. Continue reading →
When I’m feeling patronized, which happens a fair amount in a few subject areas, I sit in silence. It’s clear the down-talker is not looking for my contribution on the subject, and if I did pipe up with my perspective, some part of me would know I was trying to impress. My pride can’t take the idea of doing that—of managing someone else’s perception of my expertise level—so I rely on the hope that a third party will eventually set the person straight about me.
Velella velella, or by-the-wind-sailor. Credit: Notafly, Wikimedia Commons
Walking south along the beach towards Los Angeles this weekend, my friend and I were talking about all the arbitrary things that can alter a life’s trajectory, like where you’re born or if your parents went to college.
As we walked, we noticed hundreds of tiny sea creatures scattered like dark blue flower petals along the water’s edge. Some were as small as a baby’s fingernail. Others were as big as silver dollars. When we looked at them up close, we saw that each animal had a flat, blue oval disc for a body, joined to a transparent sail.
We prodded the stranded animals gently to see if they were alive or had any stinging venom, since they looked a lot like jellyfish. When nothing happened, we started arranging them in a line on the damp sand, from small to large. All the sails curved in a shallow S–shape, and were angled slightly to the left. They looked like a fleet of ships waiting for a general’s command to launch. Later, we learned that the strange blue discs were called Velella velella, or by-the-wind-sailors.
Last week I read a delightful story about seed catalogsthat made me remember this 2012 post. And my seed catalogs! Somewhere along the way, I must have gotten off the catalog lists because not a single one has arrived this winter to help me dream of spring. (Where did I go wrong?!) For now, I will enjoy the volunteer tomatoes that still appear years after my original tomatoobsession.
*
I can’t remember why the seed catalogs started showing up, but once they did, I was a goner. If you haven’t ever gotten one, imagine full color photo spreads of produce, like the striped Tigger Melon and and the orange-red lusciousness of the French pumpkin Rouge Vif d’Etampes. I suppose the names don’t have quite the ring of “Miss September,” but compared to some centerfold beauty, these fruits and vegetables are much more alluring — maybe because some September, a new variety might appear in my own garden, one that I could give any name I wanted.
This is how I ended up with at least six different varieties of tomato seeds last year. I’m not quite sure what it is about tomatoes. Even before I had a real garden, I’d buy the plants every year. They always seemed so hopeful, appearing in the nursery in winter, when you can’t even imagine that by fall you’ll be saying ridiculous things like, “Caprese salad, again? I don’t think I can do it.”
Somewhere along the lines, I realized there were more options out there then the plants we could find at our local nursery. I knew I had to grow from seed once I learned that there was a variety named after the writer Michael Pollan. I could even figure out how to crossbreed my own tomatoes (and wondered what I’d call a Black & Brown Boar crossed with a Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye–oh, the possibilities!).
So there I found myself, one morning last winter, in front of a tray of dirt with seeds and Sharpies and labels in hand.
As I planted, I got to thinking about Gregor Mendel and his pea experiments. I’d first learned about them in high school, when the charts showing tall and dwarf pea plants, yellow and green peas, made it all seem so easy. But with seeds in hand, I started to buckle under the logistics. To do anything, first these seeds would have to grow.
Even if they did, I’d then have to do some tricky tweezer work (I read a bit about crossing tomatoes here). Then the tomatoes would have to grow, produce seeds. I’d have to save the seeds, grow the first generation the next winter, and do it all over again. If I was lucky, I’d start seeing crazy new phenotypes two summers from now.
That’s what Brad Gates does. At Wild Boar Farms (the California farm where I bought many of my seeds), he grows and tends thousands of plants each year, always keeping an eye out for novel tomatoes. (Brad’s Black Heart was a result of a random mutation that he spotted).
Gates used to ship some of his seeds off to the Southern Hemisphere, so he could grow two generations of tomatoes and try to speed through the breeding process. But he was never sure what was happening with his tomatoes, if someone was choosing exactly what he would.
Even though I’ll never know exactly what Mendel was thinking every day, when he went out to tend his peas (although Robin Marantz Henig’s A Monk and Two Peas gave me a good idea), but I did ask Gates. When it comes to growing tomatoes, he said, “the fun part is all the Christmas presents I get to open every year,” he said, Whether it’s new flavors, textures, shapes, and sizes—“there are hundreds of surprises.”
And as my tomatoes began to grow, I started to get it. Every day, I watched my little plants unfold. Maybe it’s crazy that I had to set up hundreds of seeds to finally take the time to watch something grow. My curiosity about my future tomatoes grew each day—but at the same time, so did my patience.
What happened next shouldn’t really have surprised someone who once required a hazmat team to descend on her freshman chemistry lab (mercury spill from carelessly placed thermometer). When I set the starts out for hardening, a spring windstorm set all the labels flying. Then friends started to pick up some of my extra seedlings (I couldn’t fit all 144 in our raised beds). By the time I planted, I had a vague idea of which one was which, but then old tomatillos grew up among them and everything became a tangled mass of vine. Even the seeds I tried to save once the season was done got thrown out by accident.
Winter is here again, and so are my seed catalogs. I don’t think I will discover anything that hasn’t already been grown, and it’s unlikely that I will create a variety that will someday lure gardeners from between the pages of a seed catalog. But I do have a new respect for genetics, and for farmers. And I’ve certainly learned one thing already: Michael Pollan is delicious.
In 2005, the Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word that, in four mellifluous syllables, perfectly encapsulated the Anthropocene’s discontents: solastalgia, the emotion you experience when an environment you’ve long loved is catastrophically altered. Solastalgia, as Albrecht put it, is “a form of homesickness one experiences without leaving home” — it’s what you feel when your ancestral lands are ravaged by coal mining, your homestead torched by megafire, or the only planet you’ll ever inhabit warped by climate change. In testament to its resonance, solastalgia — whose etymological roots twine with solace, nostalgia, desolation, and pain — has since become the subject of countless academic articles, the thematic backdrop for video games, and the inspiration for Estonian concertos. “Solastalgia,” Albrecht wrote in 2019, “has now well and truly entered popular culture.”
Albrecht’s all-too-apt neologism is also muse for a new essay collection, Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World, published last month by University of Virginia Press.The anthology — conceived, curated, and edited by the author Paul Bogard — features meditations by thirty-four writers, among them luminaries such as Kathleen Dean Moore, Scott Russell Sanders, and Meera Subramanian; Albrecht himself penned the foreword. (Although very far from a luminary, I have a piece in there, too, about a certain architecturally inclined rodent that I just can’t seem to quit.)“All of (these essays), in their own ways, engage the pain, grief, and sorrow inherent in the concept of solastalgia,” Bogard writes in the book’s introduction. “And all of them also have at least a hint — and often much more — of the possibility in this emotion.”
For the Last Word on Nothing, I chatted with Bogard about the power of Albrecht’s coinage, the perils of parenthood in the Anthropocene, and his forays into solastalgic rock-and-roll.
Profiling someone who is widely and wildly admired is harder than it ought to be. The word, hagiography, is not a compliment. What’s wrong with an objective profile of someone who’s practically a saint? I still don’t know.
These two people here have since died and the world is less shiny for their not being in it. This first ran March 1, 2017.
Writing about people who are a normal mixture of good and bad is already hard. Writing about good people is close to impossible.
I wrote a profile once about a doctor who was just plain good. He wasn’t a do-gooder – “I’m not a missionary,” he’d say; he was just a man who needed to make sick people well so he needed to get to the bottom of what made them sick and what would make them well. He listened, he watched, his manners were exquisite, he said what was on his mind, he was kind, he was absolutely relentless, he didn’t attract or like attention.
By “good,” I don’t mean faultless. He’d have said his biggest fault was his competitiveness, but I spent a lot of time watching him deal with people and the only thing he was hell-bent on competing with and beating the daylights out of was disease. We were collaborators – he was the doctor, I was the writer – and I’d have said his biggest fault was not getting his chapters to me within four years of the deadline. Other people got mad at him for similar reasons but nobody stayed mad. He’s a good man, period. He is good and he does good. And when I wrote the perfectly truthful and representative profile of him, the editor sent it back saying it was a valentine, I needed to make him more human.
Why is that? This doctor I was profiling is famous not only for his work but also for his goodness; everybody says so. Why couldn’t I report that?
I don’t know the answer to that. I understand thoroughly that people who are better than us (me) making us (me) feel inadequate and generally worthless. And I understand the universal reaction to feeling worthless is not, “By golly, I better start being worthwhile!” And I do know that I read the lives of saints only to see what idiots they were. St. Francis was born rich and rebelled against his father’s life; and when he was an adolescent, he went into a public square in front of his father and his father’s friends and took off all his clothes. I’m pretty sure I’m meant to read that gesture as a saintly rejection of greed and the self-aggrandizement that often accompanies riches. I’m pretty sure if I were in that square, I’d have thought he was a little jerk sanctimoniously embarrassing his father in front of his father’s friends. My point is, I understand my editor not believing my report of a good man.
This weekend I ran into a woman — she told me something she’d done on her 95th birthday but didn’t mention it had been a while back — whom I run into now and then at restaurants, parties, funerals. She wears bright colors and outspoken jewelry; she piles her hair on top of her head and holds it in place with a barrette. When someone talks, she pays attention; she asks questions; she’s curious about other people.
I know only a few things about her. She came from serious money, married more of it, raised her kids, and loved staying at home; but she worried that her kids were getting too dependent on her so she did something that no married woman in her family or social circle had done: she went to work. She began by screening families who wanted to adopt babies, not all of whom were orphans, and she did that for ten years. Then she saw an ad from a local research hospital offering to train housewives to become psychotherapists. She applied, was trained, and spent the next 40-plus years working with people who wanted help with their sexuality – including homosexuality, transexuality, and men whose sexuality was affected by the onset of feminism. She was part of the 1970s civil rights movement, marched on Washington, helped integrate a local public park. She got certified and married two gay men. She set up nonprofits that offer free legal service for LGBT people, that help adoptive families, that mentor new teachers. She talks in her gravelly old-lady voice about these causes with passion but she never says what she does for them. Like the doctor, she’s just plain good, everybody says so.
The world is full of the normally-good; good doctors and good therapists and good philanthropists aren’t news. I hope I am myself normally-good. But these two particular people are different somehow. They’re completely unself-conscious. They deflect attention. They seem to do good because that’s what they have to do; they need to do good things so they do. They’re more like artists who have to paint or compose or write because they don’t know any other way of getting through life. Their lives seem not so much admirable as beautiful. They’re luminous. If I believed in holiness, I’d wonder if they were holy.
I still haven’t answered the question about why such good people are so hard to write about and that’s because I still don’t know the answer. I just want to record their presence.
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UPDATE: the splendid Friend of LWON, Nell Greenfieldboyce, found a profile of a good person, Mr Rogers. It’s by a writer named Tom Junod and for my money, over-eggs the pudding a bit but jeez, the pudding is good. It does the close-to-impossible.
