A (Mostly) Indoor Sunday

By: | January 17, 2022
As it turns out, Millie Ramsayer, who lives down the hall and is the Best Girl, got me outside for a game of fetch Sunday evening, right when the snow was turning to something worse.

In Washington, D.C., in winter, a lot of horrible things fall out of the sky. We sometimes get a good honest snowfall. But usually it’s something worse – some godforsaken blend of snow and rain and ice and sleet that coats everything and makes you not want to attempt to stand on any hard surface or really to go outdoors at all.

As I’m writing this, it’s early afternoon on Sunday and nothing has started to fall yet. I took an overdue check out to the mailbox this morning. I don’t plan to go out again.

Of course, weather isn’t the only strong excuse not to go anywhere right now. There’s also the Omicron surge.

Last weekend I realized that the feeling I was having, of being unwilling to go anywhere or doing anything, wasn’t some weird manifestation of depression or something; it was the pandemic. It was the same feeling I had last winter, when I wasn’t vaccinated yet and any encounter with the virus could have meant death. It’s less scary now – I’m vaccinated and boosted, and so are my parents and most of my friends – but I still don’t want to get COVID.

Once I’d realized that, I could pivot to my pandemic-winter coping skills – there’s a skill set we didn’t know we’d be acquiring, two years ago – and set up plans. Zoom plans. I’m doing Zoom art again. Saturday night I hosted a Zoom knitting group. We all showed off our projects and exclaimed about how we had thought we were all Zoomed out, but here we were, so happy to see each other, even on screens.

I hope the hints we’re hearing about Omicron are right, that it will settle down soon and I’ll feel comfortable breathing around other people again.

For now, here I sit, on a Sunday afternoon. My phone tells me it’s 22 degrees outside. The Capital Weather Gang tells me to expect “dangerous road conditions late this afternoon as snow changes to ice.” Don’t worry, Capital Weather Gang. I’m not going anywhere.

Photo: Kate Ramsayer

Courage and Kazoos

By: | January 14, 2022
Kazoo, Wikipedia

This post first ran in October 2019. Here’s hoping for the glorious return of school talent shows in 2021-22.

About a year ago, I attended a high school talent show. It was over two hours long. The multipurpose room smelled of old pizza and pubescent sweat. The folding metal chairs made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat, as did many of the acts.

Watching parents pull out their phones and prepare to post their kids’ performances online, I thanked God that Facebook didn’t exist when I dressed up as Baby Spice in 8th grade. (I didn’t want to be Baby Spice. I wanted to be Sporty Spice, or at least Posh Spice, and wearing Baby’s pigtails and knee socks felt like a betrayal of my values — of myself.)

So much has changed for teenagers since I was in high school: the rise of social media, the demise of the planet as we know it. At this high school, however, at least one rule of American adolescence appeared unchanged: to maintain social status, it was imperative not to be caught trying very hard.

Most of the kids who entered the talent show sought safety in groups, performing acts that required little skill or practice. One group bopped around to the relentless, infantile earworm “Baby Shark” (don’t click if you don’t want your life to be ruined.) The popular girls performed a Mean Girls-esque, unsettlingly come-hither dance. The goofball senior boys played “Eye of the Tiger” on kazoos.

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Some crowd-sourced reflections on E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy

By: | January 12, 2022

Just before the turn of the new year, E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy, two of the world’s most celebrated biologists, passed away within a day of each other. That they left the world together felt fitting, given the extraordinary interplay between their work. It was Wilson, after all, who, in a series of mad, ingenious experiments on Floridian islets, proved some of the fundamental rules of island biogeography — namely, that small islands support fewer species than large ones, and are more likely to host extinction events. And it was Lovejoy who applied those rules in a terrestrial context through his brilliant Amazon Forest Fragment Project, which showed that roads, farms, and other forms of development have effectively, and disastrously, islandified mainland habitats. It’s hard to imagine modern conservation biology, with its emphasis on corridors and connectivity, without their insights.

Much has been written about Wilson’s and Lovejoy’s legacies — heck, they jointly invented the concept of biodiversity. Still, there’s so much more to say. On Twitter, I asked folks to send me their own brief reflections on what Wilson and/or Lovejoy meant to them. Here goes.

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Guest Post: My Other Pandemic

By: | January 10, 2022

I could tell you the fentanyl statistics – that in one year 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, 28% more than the year before, and that 80% of those deaths were linked to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid – but I would rather tell you what I have learned from my teenage son. He is currently in recovery from fentanyl addiction.

Since early childhood, he has struggled with depression and anxiety, and started experimenting with marijuana to self-medicate a few years ago. Since then, he has lived through difficult times full of emergency room visits, stints at residential rehabs, calls from police, near-fatal overdoses and bouts of despair. I have searched for help in different places, with varying success. I have also learned about addiction, courage, and love from my son. I would like to share some of what I have learned in hopes that other parents might find it useful.

My husband and I didn’t discover the extent of our son’s problems in one horrific revelation the way some families do. We learned by degrees that he was using pot, then experimenting with harder drugs and eventually that he was truly addicted. The uncertainty about what was going on was agonizing. Drug addicts typically lie with great fluency and lack of scruples. So although he is often open and honest, during periods of drug dependency our son was not a reliable source of information. We originally thought over-the-counter urine-based drug testing kits would be more objective. They are quite accurate for many drugs and even have anti-cheating features, but we discovered a major flaw. They do not test for fentanyl. A fentanyl user’s urine will come back negative for opioids in general as well as for oxycontin and heroin specifically.  My husband and I spent three months arguing with each other because we didn’t know this, and our son almost died.

Once we figured out he was addicted, I started looking for treatment programs. I asked for suggestions from his therapist, talked to hospital staff and pored over glossy websites with pictures of sunsets and beautiful, acne-free teenagers. When I first spoke to the intake personnel, I felt like a drowning person being thrown a lifeline. They were so understanding and reassuring.

Over time and various rehab experiences, I learned that addiction treatment is a business. Most treatment centers are private and for-profit (lots and lots of profit).  Furthermore, few insurance plans will cover a reasonable length of stay.

On the positive side, our son generally did benefit from the different experiences, although not always. He met some wonderful staff people, often in recovery themselves, and connected with other kids who have remained friends. He also met some not so wonderful staff and some horrible kids. What he did not do was get ‘cured’.

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The Lion Sleeps Tonight

By: | January 7, 2022

I received the unusual gift this season of a stuffed mountain lion. On any other day I’d politely turn it down, but it was a thing to contend with and now it is perched in the den, a Christmas gift with its clawed catcher’s mitt of a right forepaw extended for a swipe. The pose is not serene, nose curled in offense, mouth displayed half-hissing. Putting this creature, six feet long from nose to tail, in the living room didn’t seem fair to our house cat, nor to the poor puma who I’d rather not have to watch us eat and watch movies. It went instead to the den where I write.

My stepdad, an adventurous gent, had shown me this strange creature years ago in a house in the woods abandoned by a divorce and left to rot. A realtor had told him about it and he saw the taxidermy through the window. When he took me there, it was a prank. He wanted to show me a den with a mountain lion in it. Those were the words he used, not a lie, and my mind ran with a snow drift framing a nest of tree roots where I imagined its entrance and exit strewn with sticks and dabs of mud and blood.

What I took my stepdad to mean was that he’d found an active den, not with an actual puma in it, but with fresh sign, maybe a kill dragged into a shelter. When he led me down behind the abandoned house, I thought how ingenious for a mountain lion to den among construction piles and pieces of equipment covered with half-rotted tarps behind a big log cabin. Who would bother it here? Snow three-feet-deep would have been good for tracks but I saw none, thinking the cat must have been gone from here for weeks.

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2022: Resolutions & Aspirations

By: | January 5, 2022

Cameron: In 2022 I really want to learn how to do a loud whistle. Happy to take Zoom lessons from any Person of LWON, because then I will only be spitting at my laptop and not in your face. Husband told me I should maybe choose a more pandemic-appropriate skill.

Christie: Cameron, when I was a kid I spent a long period (it felt like a year, but I was a kid so it was probably only a few weeks) trying to learn to whistle, and I totally failed. I mean, I still can only barely whistle, which is a bummer when you have dogs. If you find a good lesson, let me know. I’d love to join!

Jane: I can’t whistle at all (or snap my fingers) so this sounds like an impressive goal to me.

Ann: And I used to be able to both whistle and snap my fingers, now only rudimentarily. But I’m getting better at yawning, really yawning hard, getting all that air in and getting it all back out again.  For 2022, I’ll get even better — I’ve always been kind of a half-assed yawner.

Craig: This is a good time to learn deep breathing. I’ve been taking too many short breaths lately. That might be an aspiration for the new year, full aspirations [Ed.: I see that, smartypants Craig.]

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2021: Bragging

By: | January 3, 2022

2021 was 2021, but we found things even in 2021 life to be proud of. Being pragmatic, we aim low.

Ben: – sort of taught my thirty-pound terrier/pug mix (who is also Jane’s dog’s doppeldogger) to skijor 
– with a group of fellow Olds, destroyed a group of local teenagers in a game of pickup basketball 
– plowed my car into a snowbank while watching coyotes frolic in a field and had to be rescued by a friendly Montanan

Jane: – had my 1st aural migraine
– found a cool stick and hung it in my office
– rewatched titanic without crying
– stopped texting friends every time i felt a word was wrongly omitted from Spelling Bee
– saw Brood X cicadas
– got a hat with an image of a hat on it

Kate: Ate, drank, and bathed in enough seaweed and seaweed products to smother a sperm whale
– Built enough trust with a wild blue jay that she started eating from my hand
– Took up surfing, fell off my training board in my living room, broke both wrists, needed surgery, was out of work and completely helpless for six weeks, but listen, I took up surfing
– Discovered fleece-lined tights (they’re like cozy blankets! on your legs!), will never wear anything else in winter ever again
– Started singing, consciously and intentionally, for a few minutes every day, and have heard my weak, reedy voice grow stronger and fuller
–  These sandwiches and this pizza, and no, I will not shut up about them, you need to eat them immediately
– Saw my siblings for the first time in two years, hugged them tight, danced with them in the kitchen and bathroom and living room until we all fell down laughing

Ann: – against every instinct, crept out of my house; and even though slammed right back in by omicron, will continue mousily creeping out
– recognized when enough fleece-lined sweatpants were enough and I needn’t buy more 
– increasingly able to read to the bottom of the webpage before clicking Reply or Order

Jessa: – Watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade from the vantage of a second-storey window on Central Park West making eye contact with the characters on the floats, and free from the turkey be-hatted crowd below.
– Finally started physiotherapy for a nagging injury and found out that I enjoy it a weird amount. Now spend every Sunday morning blissed out. Is this a thing like how I’m the only one who had an ecstatic experience of being in labor?
– Stopped being a martyr and hired a cleaning lady
– The Christmas stockings I made for the cats were a huge hit, especially the animatronic fish that struggles when attacked.

Craig: -Saw a human mandible on the ground dug up by a badger at an archaeological site
– Walked a seven-mile-long bridge across San Francisco Bay with nary another pedestrian the entire time
– Looked up randomly at two different times to see satellites streaming toward space,and thought it was the end of the world both times
– Got on an airplane for the first time in a year and a half and didn’t bite anyone

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First Do No Harm

By: | December 29, 2021

One of the first things I did when my family moved to our house a few years ago was buy a decent bird feeder. I filled it with seed and hung it from an eave on the porch, and less than a minute later a couple of black-capped chickadees flitted over to investigate. Before long song sparrows joined them, and then dark-eyed juncos, house finches, spotted towhees, others. From the kitchen I watched happily as a little community assembled itself.

Not everyone in the household shared my enthusiasm. We live in Seattle and like most cities Seattle has an abundance of rats. The locals soon discovered the feeder. At first they came only at night as single spies, but when time went by and nothing killed them, they grew bold. One afternoon my wife saw a nice big fat rat casually sorting through the birds’ castoffs.

“A rat!” she yelled. She hates rats.

“But just one this time!” I protested.

She gaped. “You mean you’ve seen more than one?!”

So that was a problem. She had loftier objections, too. “You’re always going on and on about wildness!” she said. “How is feeding birds at all consistent with that?” The ones flocking to the feeder, she pointed out, had been doing just fine on their own before. Wouldn’t it be better to attend to our yard in such a way so they can forage for a steady diet of insects and plant seeds, rather than plucking stale peanuts and millet out of a silo? Worse, isn’t feeding birds and reveling in their antics simply reducing them to mere entertainments? Here I was, an ecologist who studied birds, trying to entice them to me “like you’re Snow White.”

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