A version of this poem appeared in Doubleback Review.
The Death of the LobsterI.
The death of the lobster will commence quietly.
One night, she will awake and find her shell slightly too snug:
The lobster’s shell has stopped growing. The lobster has not.
Tomorrow, her shell will be tighter;
the next day, tighter still.
Her shell is everything that holds her, outside and in.
It is the little legs that click her across her cave,
the gears in her stomach for grinding fish into food.
The constriction will continue.
The lobster will lose her appetite.
Now she will waste away, a diminishing prisoner
inside a self-shaped cell.
II.
One morning, it will be time. She will pump her shell with sea water,
more, more, more, until it cracks.
She will wrench the lining from her guts
and pull it from her mouth, a conjurer's string of scarves.
She will withdraw withered arms from rigid sleeves.
She is too weary to be doing this. Still, it needs to be done.
She will thrash her soft body through the rupture in her armor.
The world will go black.
It will feel like dying, and it is.
But it is not the end.
III.
Beneath her old split shell
she has grown another, flimsy and mica-thin.
When she wakes, she will flood this young covering
with water, filling the new shape until it inflates,
solidifying by the moment.
Before long, she will have claws that will hold. Legs to stand on.
Teeth to feed her.
She will rise on new feet. She will raise the broken shell
to her mouth and start eating.
The old house will never be home again. Yet from the rubble
she will pick good bricks and rebuild.
*
Image by Mostafa Ashraf Mostafa via Unsplash. Inspiration by Trevor Corson.
I’ve spent a lot more time in a car than I used to, since the pandemic started. Because of not wanting to be in spaces where other people are exhaling. On Sunday, I spent a few half-hour stretches in a car. And I noticed a number of things, and I’m here to tell you about them now.
I took the picture above on Sunday, but I was standing on my two feet, nowhere near a car, and isn’t it pretty?
Black vulture
As the car went up a wide suburban road, two vultures were flying low. So low that I could tell, for once, that they were not both the same kind of vulture. I know that there are both turkey vultures and black vultures around here, in the air and on the ground, eating dead things. But most of the vultures are turkey vultures, so mostly I assume that’s what I’m seeing.
Most of the time, they’re too high up to see the color of their heads – they’re just a black V shape in the sky. This time I could see that the undersides of their wings had different light-and-dark patterns, and then one turned in a way that I could see its black head.
The delight of seeing something I sort of knew, for real, in the field! And by field” I mean in the sky, over the six-lane road.
Black walnuts
A few hours later I was driving along the Beltway that encircles Washington, D.C., and spotted a cluster of green balls on the shoulder.
Just outside the window of my apartment is a catalpa tree, and several feet to the left of that is a black walnut. It’s a wonderful, tall, sturdy tree, with pretty leaves that catch the light. My tree book tells me “all parts [of the tree] have distinctive odor” but I’ve never gone out there to sniff the tree. I’d be trespassing in the backyard of the abandoned apartment building next door.
I just recently realized that the bonk! rolllllll sound I’ve been hearing in the fall for years now was black walnuts falling on the roof. This time next year the tree and the empty apartment building will be gone, replaced by something new. When I saw those walnuts by the side of the interstate, I remembered that there are other walnut trees out there, living their little lives and throwing their round, green fruits down on the ground, even if nobody appreciates them.
Dead mammal
As I left one interstate for another, on another ramp, I saw a furry ball by the side of the road, up against the concrete barrier, huddled, soft.
Roadkill is one of the many ways that cars are the worst. That animal was just going about its business, maybe trying to get to some fresh walnuts. Then someone who was afraid to take Metro drove by, and the animal dragged itself to the side of the road, met a concrete barrier, curled up, and died. I’ve driven by roadkill countless times before – cars: the worst – but this one actually made me feel sad. It looked like a raccoon to me, although all I saw was its beautiful fur and its curled-up back.
Maybe since then a vulture has stopped by, and ensured that it did not die in vain.
That was my Sunday: In a car, noticing the bits of the natural world that hang on, surrounding us, overhead and at the margins of our concrete, growing and dying while we drive by.
Last week I asked a friend, new to town, to meet me on the corner by Mockingbird Lane. I have been noticing mockingbirds more since the start of the pandemic—the bright flash of white tail feathers, the snippets of stolen songs. And I’d been to this corner many times—it’s the start of one of my favorite places to walk—but until I had to give someone directions, I’d never really noticed that particular name, on that particular sign.
Streets, particularly ones I know well, have a way of doing that to me. The words don’t mean the same thing as they do out in the real world, they’re connected instead with a particular stretch of tarmac, or the series of turns needed to get to a destination. As I started writing this, I started thinking about the streets I’ve lived on or near. Until about five minutes ago, I’d never associated a road called Grizzly Peak, a main thoroughfare in my childhood, with any living, breathing bear.
I ran through other familiar streets in my mind. Crow Canyon, Quail Hollow. Some of them I write on envelopes every December: Sun Eagle, Wren. The words seem beautiful, interesting, but they have never been birds to me. Some say the names of things show us what we’ve lost, others say they could be a way of marking what species are important to us. At their best, making an effort to name streets after local fauna (and flora) could generate pride–and perhaps, even spark an interest in protection, according to a 2018 study in PLOS.
I starting thinking about the birds we find on our street signs while reading Jennifer Moxley’s new book, For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds. In one of her essays, she describes growing up in San Diego among birds as cross-streets, from Albatross to Lark. Moxley, too, had an early disconnect between the street and what it described: “[T]o my young self, ‘Curlew’ conjured not the image of a sleek shorebird with a curved beak, but a perilously steep, snake-like road . . It was a hazardous gauntlet down, and an arduous, almost impossible climb back.”
She describes navigating girlhood by bird streets. And in her other essays, these birds come to life off reflective signs, and form another way to navigate the world. It may be arduous, but that’s where I’d like to climb to, too, to a place where roads direct me back to the world around me. Maybe we can meet there, on Mockingbird Lane, and these birds and their patchworks of song can start showing us the way.
*
Mockingbird photo by Flickr user Anne Davis 773 under Creative Commons license
The other day, my friend Max — a brilliant aquatic scientist whose work lies at the center of the herpetology/gender studies Venn diagram — tweeted a comment he’d received from an anonymous peer reviewer. Evidently this reviewer had doubtedMax’s claim that frogs have political economic histories. Max’s reply: “lolz yes. All critters on Earth have socio-cultural & political economic histories.” (If the reviewer found this tweet convincing, Max didn’t say so.)
I agree with Max’s assertion — heck, even a creature as obscure and humble as the achoque salamander is deeply embedded in socio-cultural webs of religion, science, and regulatory bureaucracy.That said, I’m skeptical that every species has an equally compelling socio-political history.While one couldtheoretically write an exhaustive work of political economy about, I don’t know, the red-backed vole, I’m not sure I’d want to read it. (Apologies to all the mammalogists I just mortally offended.)
I’m biased, but I’d argue that the political economy with the most explanatory power in the non-human animal kingdom is that of Castor canadensis, the mighty beaver.How many other species were the subject of a transcontinental trade that spanned centuries and fundamentally restructured European and Indigenous North American cultures?How many species spurred the colonization of a continent, started wars, inspired a real estate transaction as grandiose as the Louisiana Purchase?How many species were so economically important that regional currencies were pegged to the value of its fur? I could go on. Somebody should really write a book about this.
Anyway, Max’s tweet got me wondering: Which other species are crying out for a popular political economic history?Most of the obvious ones, I think, have been written.Mark Kurlansky covered cod (and, in so doing, made the single-species biography a genre). David Montgomery did salmon.Whales have been comprehensively documented, most recently by Rebecca Giggs and Bathsheba Demuth.There’s no shortage of books about influential disease vectors (mosquitos, rats, ticks) and species at the center of management controversies (wolves, bears, spotted owls)and commercially valuable sea creatures (save some fish for the rest of us, Paul Greenberg).
In short, it’s a crowded market.(Although I dothink the world badly needs a prairie dog opus.)
(As a brief aside, I’m aware that I’m defining political economy vis-a-vis species’ interactions with humans, a narrow frame that reveals my anthropocentrism and limited imagination.No doubt many animal societies have endlessly rich political economies of their own, entirely unrelated to their relationship to humans. Imagine the palace intrigue within, say, a naked mole rat colony.)
All of the above notwithstanding, there’s one deserving critter whose political economy has never, to my knowledge, been thoroughly explicated: the Colorado potato beetle.
I’ve been interviewing women scientists again, younger ones this time. I ask them if they have some kind of semi-official, almost casual way of staying connected with other women scientists. Because, you know, staying connected helps you survive the bullshit. Every time I ask them this question — and the answer is almost always “YES!” — I think of Senator Barbara Mikulski’s lunches which were surely a bullshit-survival mechanism. But they were something more: they were also watched. What happens when a network of women is watched? This first ran January 9, 2017.
I wish I could remember – but I can’t – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda. Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer? Just don’t remember. The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not that the women met for lunch, it was that the men they worked with noticed that they met. The men didn’t get snippy, didn’t make comments, just noticed: something like, “saw that you were at one of your lunches.”
Now there’s a thought. I’ve spent a certain amount of my career writing about women in science and the gender-related issues they deal with, including how to get attention paid to their research, how to get taken seriously, and how to get enough power. Why even be in a profession unless your voice gets heard and you can do things that you’re good at, things worth doing, the things worth your time on earth? Even the paleolithics wanted to have the things they made (I stole this idea from Jacob Bronowski, around minute 14:45), show the shapes of their hands.
And of course women have always and still have trouble being noticed. One work-around was hilarious: a woman in a meeting says something (“Let’s check the immigrant statistics”), another woman in the meeting repeats it and cites the first woman (“I think we should do what Sarah suggested, check the immigrant statistics”). They called it “amplification,” as in, boosting the signal, making it louder, spreading it farther, just like a cell phone tower. Parts of these last two paragraphs are digressions.
The solution of the woman-I-can’t-remember was different from amplification, less in-your-face: it was just, have lunch. When I was in academia, I was part of something like this. A friend in another department, agreeing with everybody that the university’s percentage of women faculty (upper-body strength not a requisite) was pathetic, began reserving a lunch table at the faculty club every few weeks. She thought that since we were so few, we might like to know each other. There we sat, at an obviously-reserved table, in the middle of the faculty club dining room, talking not about university politics or the plight of women or the subversion of the patriarchy, just talking to the person across the table about what her research was finding these days or had she travelled somewhere interesting over the summer or how were her classes going. I loved these lunches; they made me feel more a part of the university’s intellectual candy store. But that was the view from the inside. I never thought about the old boys at the next table over, what they might be seeing. Though I do remember the same comment, something like, “saw you at one of your lunches.”
Turns out Senator Barbara Mikulski had the same idea. After she announced her retirement, the news media talked all about how she was head of the enormously powerful Appropriations Committee, and how she was 4’ 11” and stood on a stool so she could be seen over a podium, and how she’d been in the Senate for 30 years and was the longest-serving woman senator and when she first got there, she was only the second senator to be a woman and the Senate didn’t have women’s bathrooms and she was supposed to wear skirts.
And in almost all of those news reports was this same piece of information: that every month or so for two decades, Mikulski had held – often at her house – famously private dinners to which only women senators were invited, no men. Because women senators come in all political persuasions, the discussions were not business meetings, they were just people getting to know each other, listening, talking – you know, the basis on which the human, social world of politics begins its arguments, negotiations, and compromises.
Some news reports said that the dinners were the reason that women senators got an unrepresentative amount of stuff done.
But again, that’s the view from the inside. Here’s my point: the dinners were private –the rule was no staff, no memos, no leaks — and even then, they were a standard part of the public news reports. The dinners existed and so the guys watched, they noticed. Maybe humans can’t help ourselves, when some people sit around in a special group, we pay attention, we wonder what they’re up to. And even if they seem to be up to nothing special, just sitting around eating, we notice. We keep an eye on them, see if they do it again. They do. They do it for the next twenty years. They’re a presence now.
All the gender-related inequities still have to be talked about, written about, legislated, enacted, enforced. But meanwhile, damn, sisters: to be seen, start with lunch.
__________
Roundhouse Wipers, 1943 – United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division, via Wikimedia Commons
Senator Barbara Mikulski (guess which one she is) and NASA (part of her professional purview) staff, via Flickr
Mikulski and fellow senators at the 2008 Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Women’s Law Center, and the National Partnership for Women and Families: Clarissa Peterson, LCCR, via Flickr
My in-laws are visiting from the East Coast and we’ve had some days to explore. The local bar in our five-hundred-person town is a must-see, its sleek wood and mirrors more than a century old, and the old mountain-mining town of Telluride is forty-five minutes away for window shopping and looking for famous people. The bulk of our days, however, we’ve spent with much older points of interest. If you’re coming all the way from the other side of the continent, I wouldn’t want to be frivolous.
My wife planned most of the tour, a whirlwind of sun-filled valleys and cliffs. The desert of southwest Colorado in October is at its peak, green from summer rains, warm but not searing. We mince our way up canyons, over boulders the size of bedrooms, and follow dry washes and backroads, our truck loaded to take us to the next stop and the next.
A man unlocks a gate near a permanently closed trading post and lets us through. A mile or so down the road, we park under cottonwood shade. Near the outbuildings of a desert ranch, the in-laws spot a boulder across the road pecked with a fifteen-hundred-year old anthropomorph. They’re getting good at spotting images, recognizing the style, Basketmaker Culture.
The boulder is the size of a cottage and it has rock art on every side, bighorn sheep, lightning-like snakes, and human figures with plumes and lines coming out of their heads. We have the usual conversation, surmising headdresses or hunts, a dialogue that has to happen at rock art panels.
I came to this family saunter fresh off of a teaching gig for Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, CO. This had been a field program in the Utah backcountry, in the contested and soon to be restored lands of Bears Ears National Monument, just over the horizon from where we live. I taught with an Anglo museum curator, a Hopi archaeologist and tribal member, and a scholar from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. A dozen participants followed along as we walked to rock art and ruins, which the Hopi archaeologist said were not ruins, not abandoned. They were still on the Hopi map, places very much alive.
The Hopi archaeologist I taught with would say these petroglyphs were spirit people, ancestors, the ones who carried prayers. I’ve also heard them called personifications of clouds, where instead of seeing a rockface of people, you are seeing thunderheads marching toward you, rain bringers.
If you study the breeding habits of a stout gray seabird called the rhinoceros auklet on a couple of islands in Washington, a field season typically lasts from May until August. Come fall, then, you have a choice: you can either dive into the data and analysis and statistical whatnot, or you can spend some quality time with the photos you took during the field season, and so try to make it last a little longer.
I usually opt for the photos. I say this even though I’m not a very good photographer. My portfolio consists mostly of run-of-the-mill landscapes and seascapes. Often those -scapes are filled with dots. (“Are those supposed to be birds?” my daughter asks.) No matter. I just like to look at the auklet’s islands. One, Protection Island, is about two miles off the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Here are a few of the several hundred shots I have snapped of it over the years.
