The fog is thick and so you hope the auklets will come early. They do, a few minutes before sunset: ten, maybe twenty of them, although it is hard to tell since they are for the time being far enough away to be little more than dots. They circle over the waves in a tight group, not daring to stray too far from one another as they follow some vague clockwise circuit. Then they vanish back into the fog.
They reappear a few moments later, more of them now: thirty, forty, plus or minus. They swing closer to the land this time, being less leery of it, perhaps, and you can make out the details of their bodies, their heads, their feet splayed to steer, and of course their wings working madly. Then they twist away and become dots before again moving out of sight.
My summer feet are hoping to be on vacation right now, but they’re worried about wildfires. This post first ran in August 2019.
At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There is a particular stretch of asphalt between the university parking lot and the beach that is especially pitted, and the sharp dark bits of broken ground make me cringe even before I step onto the road.
I often choose a different route to the beach, down the steep steps that are soft wood, worn by salt air and waves. But one of my friends likes to walk the bumpy path. While I dodge back and forth, taking a few steps on a curb, another on a small island of sidewalk, she charges straight down the bumpy asphalt. “I’m working on my summer feet,” she told me once. How good would that be, I thought, to have soles so thick that I didn’t feel anything?
But so far, I don’t have them. Even though the climate is mild here, I often wear shoes, even boots, in the winter. Even right now, in the dog days of summer, I’m typing this and I still have on the running shoes that I’ve been wearing since biking to school this morning. Hang on—okay, now they’re off. Socks, too. There’s the parquet floor now, smooth and just slightly cool, under my soles.
When I remember, I do try to go barefoot. It does feel relaxing. I do like feeling things like this, the texture of the ground, its temperature. There’s a sidewalk parking strip down the street with smooth, round stones that feels like a free acupressure session. And there’s such relief, on that pathway down to the beach, once my feet finally reach the sand.
But my feet never seem to get tougher. The gravel that runs along the side of the house always presses into my skin like tiny tacks, and I hop and skitter and hiss nasty things at it when I go to put the bikes away. And my feet accumulate all sorts of ugly things—black spots of tar, bee stings, moon-like calluses on the balls and heels.
Once school started, I found my shoes again. It’s too far to walk barefoot to school, and while I love seeing barefoot people riding beach cruisers, the idea of putting skin on metal pedals seems sketchy and uncomfortable. I have to bring out other protective layers, too–sunscreen and full lunchboxes, fresh school supplies and new socks. An encouraging yet increasingly insistent voice that gets homework in backpacks and bodies out the door. The promises that it will really be more fun at school than at home, where I’ll just be boringly typing things on the computer.
Humans have spent most of their existence without shoes. Now a lot of people wear them most of the time. But this means most people don’t have a chance to develop thickened soles; their feet are already cushioned from the earth’s rougher spots. So a group of researchers on several continents decided to look at whether calluses act differently than shoes when it comes to how well feet can sense the ground while walking.
The researchers compared shod participants to those who spend most of their time barefoot. They thought the calluses might reduce how well a foot could sense the ground beneath it, but it turned out that although calluses can provide a layer of protection against thorny patches, calloused feet were just as sensitive as those that spent most of their time in shoes.
I thought it was just more barefoot time that would help me get my summer feet, to feel nothing as I charged across the parking lot to the beach, to whistle as I walked on the gravel. I thought after six years of back-to-school picnics and pencils and pictures that this would feel like more of the same, that they would all run toward the classrooms at the sound of the bell, that I would run away. There would be nothing sharp that could penetrate us, that would make us stop and curl up and cry.
The calluses are there, trying to do their job of protecting me. Still, I’m tender about the end of summer, even with my thicker soles. Maybe they were never meant to stop me from feeling, but instead are making sure that I keep walking, feeling it all.
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Image by Flicker user ɘsinɘd under Creative Commons license
This first ran June 25, 2010. It’s from our beloved founder, Heather Pringle. She’s an archeology writer, meaning she has to follow archeologists wherever they go. This time, they went to the Arizona desert. I can picture them asking, “where’s the writer? did she faint again?”
Sit in air-conditioning and comfort yourself in not being Heather in 2010. She did survive.
June’s solstice has just passed and I find myself where I usually am each year at this time—37,000 feet in the air and winging off to the field. One of the great joys of my job is to set out armed to the teeth with notebooks, cameras and voice recorder, and join an archaeological crew in some remote part of the world. Over the years, I’ve winced at mummy autopsies in Egypt, wandered ankle deep in mummified rats in a greathouse in New Mexico and wormed through caves in the northern Yukon, scouting for traces of the earliest migrants to the New World.
This morning, my destination is southern Arizona, where I’ll be joining Jason De Leon, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his students on a field survey in the hilly backcountry of the Sonoran Desert. I can’t divulge any details about the story, but I will say that it has little to do with archaeology as it is usually practiced.
The weatherman predicts a scorching week, with temperatures soaring as high as 108 degrees Fahrenheit. De Leon tells me that the team heads out at 5 am each morning to take advantage of what little coolness there is and generally wraps up its field work at 1 pm. Team members fill their array of water bottles with ice each morning before setting out, but within a few hours, they are glugging down water hot enough to steep tea. And De Leon’s recommended gear includes a few things I’ve never seen before on an equipment list: a pocketknife with pliers for extricating cactus spines, instant icepacks, and something called hand coolers.
If you grew up in the U.S. South or Midwest, there’s a good chance you are familiar with the “live laugh love” home decor aesthetic. For the uninitiated, it’s hard to describe, as it takes many forms, but, like US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once defined obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s farmhouse-chic, all reclaimed wood and burlap, with positive messages written in swirly calligraphy or what looks like someone’s down-to-earth handwriting. It’s the wall art in the type of suburban home that has no fewer than five throw pillows on the couch and monogrammed towels in the bathroom (the confusing type, where the last initial is the biggest letter in the middle, so a towel for the initials JCH would read j H c).
The words live, laugh, and love need not be present, but the essence of the aesthetic can be taken in many directions. They’re popular decor at weddings of hetero couples, or as commemoration of their love. They often display Bible verses or one’s Christian bonafides (“raised on sweet tea & Jesus“). Its “zaniest” form is the wine lady, who’s all about “wine o’clock” or, simply, just living, laughing, loving, and drinking wine. And its liberal version is the “in this house, we believe” sign, which includes phrases like “love is love,” “Black lives matter,” “feminism is for everyone,” and “kindness is everything.”
No disrespect to anyone who’s partial to that style of decor — it’s just not my cup of tea. But earlier this year, I came across a live laugh love-style sign that I’ve been obsessed with for months. It appears to have originated on Tumblr, and says:
In this house
we ♥ believe
this is not a place of honor
no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here
nothing is valued here
what is here is DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE
the danger is in a particular location
the danger is still present in your time
this place is best left Shunned & Uninhabited
I’ve been playing around with the AI text-to-visual generator Midjourney, whose iterations on human words make the user feel they are working alongside a true collaborator. The results are impossible to direct but full of ideas that are a few associative leaps away from the prompts I give it. There’s no other way for me to think about it except that the network is taking artistic license with the subject.
Last week someone said a phrase that resonated with me, and I couldn’t wait to get home and see what Midjourney made of it. They were talking about the process of selling a business, and they said that if you just float with the tides generated by investment bankers and accountants, it will ‘crash you on the rocks of rich and sad’.
Above is the image Midjourney created in a few seconds to that prompt. Behold the wreckage of your business sinking beneath the waves as you wash up on a pile of gems and rubies, rich but cast away from everything you care about. I know a few people in this sort of position and I would be surprised if the image doesn’t strike a chord with them.
This sort of platform is super intuitive and could be picked up by a child at this point. That’s why my friend Briana and I have been developing free lesson plans to introduce students to AI concepts so that they can grow up to shape the technology, not just to use it. If any teachers you know might be interested in introducing AI concepts in their classroom, they’re welcome to test out our activities. I’d love to hear how it goes:
Yesterday I went down to the river with my sister – the only rational activity in this godawful heat wave – and we waded in up to our waists, squinting into the late afternoon sun. We swam until our blood cooled, then perched on a rock midstream, watching the green water spiral away in eddies and ripples and sparkle all around us.
Across the river, a family was camped out on the beach under a pop-up tent, kids in floaties, dad casting his line far out into the current and smoking a joint. Someone was grilling and it smelled amazing, a mix of barbecued meat and hot blackberries. (When it’s 103 degrees here, as it’s been for several weeks now, or close to it, the blackberries smell like cobbler, or more precisely, like the burning sugar that sizzles on the bottom of my stove and sets off the smoke alarm, every time.)
We toweled off and sat on the shore. Inspired by Cameron’s post, I had brought a peach with me, my first one of the summer. I started to eat it while Adrienne read aloud from the book we’re currently reading about Buddhism, aptly named Don’t Take Your Life Personally. I didn’t used to read many books from the spiritual or self-help sections of the bookstore, but these days I’ll take all the help that I can get. Besides, there’s at least some evidence that meditation is good for neurotic people like myself (or at least, not worse than a placebo.)
Now, Adrienne and I don’t have a spotless track record when it comes to spiritual development. Several times, when we have tried taking yoga together, I have laughed so hard that I cried, been forced to leave class, or peed my pants. But we have the best intentions.
In October 2019 I wrote about the moment when I realized that I can tell the difference between a fish crow and an American crow. Here’s the short version: A fish crow sounds like a crow, but instead of saying “caw!” it says “uh-uh.” I heard a crow say “uh-uh.” Eureka! Fish crow!
The almost three years since October 2019 have been pretty weird. I don’t love the concept of pandemic silver linings, because the pandemic has been so awful in so many ways. But for me, a lot of good things have come from this time, too. And one of them is way more awareness of bird songs.
It started in the earliest days of the pandemic, when the only thing I could do to get away from my home/office every day was to take walks around my neighborhood. With less sound from cars, the trees nearby were revealed to be filled with bird song, and I started wondering what I was hearing.
I knew some before the pandemic. I had mourning dove down, and wood thrush, and mockingbird. But that weird spring and summer of 2020, I figured out some more. Robin. Murderous blue jay. And how had I lived most of my life in cardinal territory without knowing what they sound like? I don’t know, but I did it. I learned the Eastern wood-pewee and the white-throated sparrow.
The learning really picked up in the summer of 2021, on a visit to northern Michigan. That’s the first time I tried out the app Merlin, which can identify birds by song – and right away, it told me that the weird gull-like sound I’d been hearing from the tree tops was, fittingly, a merlin. Suddenly, my bird-song-learning accelerated. I could ask my phone what I was hearing and get an immediate answer. I learned that red-eyed vireos are everywhere. I learned that blue jays make a vast array of different sounds. And, after many repetitions, I finally learned that if something is singing a loud, fast three-note song in D.C. or Maryland, it’s a Carolina wren. It’s always a Carolina wren.
This level of knowledge isn’t very impressive. I am personally acquainted with people who could stand under a tree in spring and name all of the migratory warblers overhead, while I’d be going, “hey! guys! I think I hear a robin!”
But this level of knowledge is incredibly satisfying.
On Saturday, I came out of my local grocery store and was starting the walk home when I heard a call overhead. It had that nasal scratchiness of a crow. It was a single syllable, not the characteristic “uh-uh,” but somehow, I knew it was a fish crow. I scrabbled around in my bag, under the bulk peanuts, and extracted my phone. Merlin agreed. I’d recognized a fish crow by its voice. I stood there a while by the busy intersection, marveling at this big black bird perched up there on the utility pole, making its dinosaur sounds. The crow eventually spit out an “uh-uh,” like it was supposed to.
It’s just a crow. But it’s also a sign: All that listening and learning I did over the past few years made the world around me a little more interesting, a little more detailed, a little more real. Here’s to learning lots more bird songs as I go.
Awwwww yeah, it is peach season again! I am so happy! And Iam so peach-silly that I can only think about peaches, so I am returning to this post from 2019 while I recover. One update: I have not made a peach pie since. Last week I made one from apples instead. Save the peaches!
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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.)
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.)
I’m not sure that I ever tasted that swimming pool peach. The peaches that I had tried came from cans. They were orangish, slimy, far too sweet. Much later, I also tried Boone’s Farm Fuzzy Navel, which seemed pleasant enough at the moment, less so the next morning. Swimming was involved again, this time off a houseboat into the Delta. And so, once again, queasiness and peaches were linked, this time without the pit.
My dislike of peaches even extended to imaginary ones. I loved all of Roald Dahl’s books—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Danny, the Champion of the World – except for one. How creepy it would be, I thought, to travel in a giant peach? (Our very own Rebecca Boyle wrote about a study that found that this massive fruit would actually have needed 2,425,907 seagulls to tote it across the Atlantic.)
Luckily, peaches aren’t that big. But they are fuzzy. What were you supposed to do with all that fuzz? Researchers looked closely at the fuzz, called trichomes, and found that these small hairs both keep peaches from drying out and protect against moisture from the outside. The fuzz may also keep insects from landing on the fruits and laying their eggs on the surface. It did not seem to help protect the giant peach from the assorted giant insects that James finds inside it.
PEACH PITS MAKE GAS MASKS, SAVE THEM. (National Archives and Records Administration)
Then last summer we got a few peaches in a farm box. I set them out on the table, looking suspiciously. “Oh, I love peaches!” said one little voice. “I love peaches too!” said another. “Me too!” Who were these children? I thought I’d protected them from the important things—scary movies, clowns, the scarier news–but it turned out that peaches had slipped through the cracks.
But they wanted to eat something! That I actually had! This was unusual. So, I cut into a peach.
The pit didn’t seem too scary this time, and fell right out of the fruit. I’ve since learned that peaches can be freestone or clingstone—or the in-between semi-freestone. There’s much less goop on the freestone peach pits, although I’ve heard the clingstone peaches might be smaller and sweeter.
The kids ate it up and wanted more, so I cut up another peach. And of course, whenever I’m making something for them, I always eat a little bit. I wasn’t testing it for poison, I’m usually just hungry. I didn’t die, and it wasn’t even that fuzzy.
Now, you wouldn’t recognize me. I was at the produce store on Friday, talking to the woman at the register about the difference between the organic local yellow peaches and the pesticide-free Zee Lady peaches. The Zee Ladies are more complicated, she says, and they’re her favorite. I am back again on Sunday, buying more Zee Ladies.
Last summer I even made a peach pie. It was good—after all, you can’t do too much wrong with butter, sugar, and flour. But it seemed like it was missing something. It didn’t taste much like a real peach does, which doesn’t need sugar or butter to be delicious. The pie didn’t have something essential at its center, like a peach does—the pit, the stone, the brains of the peach, doing its genius work of holding everything it needs to grow another tree.
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Image by Flickr user Sarah under Creative Commons license
