Portrait of a Marriage

By: | September 10, 2021

Before you read on, we are pleased and thrilled and absolutely overjoyed to introduce New Person of LWON, Eric Wagner! Eric is a fabulous writer and chaser of birds based in Seattle, Washington, who has written for the likes of The Atlantic, High Country News, Audubon, and Orion. He has penned magazine articles about techy fire lookouts who obsess over beet-influenced pee and watercolorists who dip their brushes in vodka. He once wrote an amazing book about the penguins of Argentina, and once more recently wrote an amazing book about Mount St. Helens, a truly obsession-worthy place if ever there was one. We love him and we’re glad he’s here. We hope you are, too!

One evening a week or so ago, I hiked out to camp on the eastern flanks of Mount St. Helens, in a place called the Plains of Abraham. The breeze was brisk when I arrived, the sky pink with a few tufts of cloud. I boiled some water for dinner and watched the mountain’s great shadow reach out for Mount Adams across thirty miles of unbroken forest. By the time I had licked the pot clean the sun was gone, so I got into my sleeping bag, zipping it tight until just my eyes and nose were exposed. A dazzling mass of stars dotted the cold, clear sky. Beneath them the mountain loomed, blacker than night. The conditions were perfect, I thought, for what I had come to do: end things, once and for all, with Mount St. Helens.

I first met the mountain, from a professional standpoint at least, a little more than six years ago. Tasked with writing a book about it, I was at an event called The Pulse. This was a regular gathering of scientists who worked at Mount St. Helens, some since the 1980 eruption. For a week I listened to a parade of -ologists—ecologists, geologists, hydrologists, others—all the while trying frantically to scribble their every word. When my cramped hand needed a break, I stepped away and looked with a growing sense of despair at the mountain. There it sat, massive and austere. Would I be able to learn even a small fraction of all there was to know about it? I had my doubts.  

Continue reading →

on resilience

By: | September 8, 2021
a cascading bonsai tree atop a military artillery case

Back when plants were just background noise to me, I assumed bonsai were just like that — tiny trees by nature, just a miniature version of the world’s bigger trees. There are miniature horses and pygmy goats, so why not little trees? Eventually, I learned I was totally wrong, as I am about many things, and that the process of cultivating bonsai is high art, achievable only through careful maintenance and patience. What looked effortless to me, a clueless onlooker, was often the result of decades of vigilance and care.

In the spring, a friend suggested we visit the Pacific Bonsai Museum. I’d grown closer to these friends over the previous couple of months; after the murder of six Asian women in Atlanta, we found comfort in one another through hard conversations about what it means to be Asian in America, and how to find peace when it felt like there was so little around us. I expected our bonsai field trip to be breezy distraction from all that, an outing where Asian identity was peripheral to natural beauty. But again, I was wrong. The museum offered the history of each bonsai, often with biographies of the people who cultivated them. Here in the U.S., the stories of bonsai are inextricably linked with Japanese American history, and, in particular, this country’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Alongside each beautiful tree were heart-wrenching details about the Japanese Americans who kept the tradition of bonsai alive in this country. As Japanese families were forced into internment camps, bonsai practitioners had to sell their nursery stock and leave their livelihoods — and their life’s work — behind. While incarcerated, bonsai practitioners still managed to keep their art going, creating new bonsai and caring for them, while teaching others the art. One practitioner, Juzaburo Furuzawa, cultivated a Japanese Black Pine from a seed he planted in a can while imprisoned in Utah; it’s on display now. You may have heard of it when it and another bonsai were stolen in February 2020 and then mysteriously returned just days later.

Bonsai became a practice of cultivating hope, a preservation of tradition, a symbol of perseverance. The act of caring for these decades-old — or in some cases, centuries-old — trees is a way to honor the struggle of practitioners, a reminder that we cannot forget the injustice of Japanese incarceration. The last image displayed in the exhibit is a large sign near the exit, which reads: “What kind of ancestors do we want to be?”

In a culture that rewards speed and growth, bonsai and their history remind me that there’s also value in slowness and maintenance, the thousands of tiny steps needed to care for the good things we have. I was recently gifted a juniper bonsai, and its care instructions were strangely poignant: “Without pruning back the branches, the tree would grow too large to be supported by the confined root structure.” As our world is reshaped by the pandemic, how do we thoughtfully prune? What do we want our root structure to support?

(If you live anywhere close to Puget Sound or find yourself in the area before November, I highly recommend visiting the museum and seeing the exhibit for yourself, or getting a group of friends together for a virtual tour through Zoom.)

Shitty robots and their shitty blog posts

By: | September 6, 2021

I recently took an ultra-fun workshop run by the Queen of Shitty Robots, Simone Giertz. It’s the second of hers I’ve done, the first being a lightening round of Lego Mindstorm building to create robots that would then be raced against each other over the distance of one meter. This time, we were creating robot artists whose little servomotors would brush a canvas with markers and paintbrushes and highlighters to express their little robot souls.

My team went for iconography and a predictable result, on the right.

When it comes to artificial intelligence and creative tasks, results are not predictable, per se, but they do rely on what you feed the AI. I did some poking around to see whether I could create a blog post ‘in the style of Last Word on Nothing’, because I wondered whether the dozens of writers who have contributed to this site, past and present, had a collective style.

Continue reading →

The Caldor Fire Donation Center

By: | September 3, 2021

(A poem for the evacuees. Pete and I are safe.)

At the rummage sale at the end of the world, you don’t have to pay for anything.

Strangers disgorge their closets for you: Dirty tennis shoes, used underwear, new dresses from Ann Taylor with the tags still attached. You rifle through the clothes, trying to ignore the greasy residue they leave on your fingers.

There’s a baseball cap brought back as a souvenir from Dubrovnik. A soft, chevron-patterned airplane blanket that someone wore draped over their knees on a first class flight with United Airlines. Miniature Lucky Brand jeans that could fit a three-year-old, rows of baby shoes, a polo shirt from a PGA tournament.

You did not choose well in the final minutes. You are like the man who fled his house carrying only tennis balls, the woman who filled her purse with oatmeal. 

Now people expect you to make better choices, and to be grateful: Yes! to the ugly shoes with comfortable insoles. No! to the floor-length, faux fur coat and this pair of four-inch heels studded with green rhinestones.

And yet. That coat! It’s 100 degrees out during the day, but the nights are getting chilly. Its glossy dark fur reminds you of the black bear on the highway with scorched paws, crawling on its forearms. Who knows what you will need in this new life you’re going to build. 

You take the coat. You leave the heels.

Doom and the dogmometer

By: | September 1, 2021

As we head into wave after wave of 100+ degrees Farhenheit temperatures in my home valley in Washington, this post from 2017 seemed worth re-upping:

One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall health of the planet. The Arctic, for example, is regarded as a bellwether for the catastrophes of climate change that will soon afflict us all, thanks to its temperatures that are rising faster than those in any other region on Earth. There’s also the escalating loss of glacier ice around the world. Or this week’s “heat attack,” which will basically force residents of the American Southwest to go hide deep underground in caves or risk perishing in temperatures predicted to climb past 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

But since long before the famous hockey stick graph, scientists have also secretly relied on another, much more ancient analog to skry the hot ’n’ doomy future: The dogmometer.

The dogmometer is an accurate indicator of ambient air temperature, gradating from “so cold I have reduced my body to the size of a fist and buried my face in my own butt” to “all the other dog owners buy kiddie pools when it’s this hot, you asshat” and “OK I’m basically dead of hotness I will never move again not even for treats.” But its readings are more precise than a regular thermometer’s, because they also incorporate a dog’s uncanny ability to pick up on ambient vibes to put those temperatures in local, regional, and even global ecological and geopolitical context.

Even better, you don’t need some fancy degree to read a dogmometer. And you’d better learn, because with Trump in the Whitehouse, U.S. government funding for climate change research is bound to plunge. Here, let’s go through some examples.

Continue reading →

Fig of My Imagination

By: | August 30, 2021

It’s fig season again! This post first ran in October 2019. Now we have a squirrel who I’m competing with to get the ripe ones off our bigger tree. And our little tree? It’s still little, with about six figs and two leafy branches. Maybe I’m imagining it, but the branches seem a little stronger and the leaves a little greener than they were two years ago. I do know that the fig I just picked from the tree was wonderfully ripe–and now, it’s gone.

*

When we first moved into this house, we planted a fig tree in the backyard. It looked sad and scraggly for a long time—years, in fact. I would go over to the houses of friends who had fig trees in August, and these trees would be dripping with figs. I would ask how old the trees were, and they’d say things like, “Oh, we planted that last year!” I would come home and make puppy dog eyes at my little fig tree.

And then—BOOM! Five years ago, August came, and the figs were there. I’d battle it out with the birds to get the fruit first. We got a net to protect the figs. The birds figured out how to get into the net, although sometimes they needed help getting out. I would curse the birds as I peeled the net away—they’d fly off and I’d feel happy, but slightly miffed that they’d gotten something I wanted. Then a year came when we had to have friends help pick it because there were too many. There were even figs left after the birds got in and out of the net.

This year, there were so many figs that the birds couldn’t keep up either. We never put the net up. Every day, there are more figs, sitting on their stems like purple jewels. The ground below is littered with ones we haven’t gotten in time. In the morning the air around the tree smells sweet; in the height of the day when the sun beats down, it smells like the morning after a fig wine bender.

People have been reveling in the fig for thousands of years—it may be the earliest cultivated fruit. Researchers excavating in a village in the Jordan Valley found nine carbonized figs dating back more than 11,000 years, even before crops like wheat, corn and barley emerged. These were parthenocarpic figs, which means they don’t need insects for pollination—to produce more trees, people would have planted stems. These planted stems grow roots and leaves and their very own figs. The researchers explained that people at the time must have recognized that these fig fruits did not turn into new plants on their own, and started to cultivate these edible—yet non-reproductive—figs, following meandering mutations of these natural clones to develop the taste of the fruit. And the fruit isn’t even really a fruit—it’s a part of the stem that has grown into a teardrop-shaped container for the plant’s flowers.

In the middle of October, the fig leaves are starting to turn yellow; soon, there will be no more fruit. But there is another fig tree on the shadier side of the yard. These ones are Genoa figs, pale green with hot pink inside. We planted this tree about eight years ago, when my son was born. It has been slow to grow, mostly looking like a dowsing stick. This year, it has two short leaf-covered branches and has produced a half-dozen figs.

Elsewhere in the world, researchers are using fig trees like Ficus elastisca and Ficus thonningii to build resilience in the face of climate change. These superpower figs can shore up hillsides and provide drought-resistant food for livestock.

Our little Ficus carica trees can’t do much but feed us and the birds between August and October. But having one fig tree already has given me a little more patience with the second. Someday, we may have to fight the birds over our little green-figged tree. Someday, there may be more than enough to share.

*

Image by Flickr user Jack Fussell under Creative Commons license

Mystery Treats

By: | August 27, 2021

This week Elise and I completed one of our lives’ great adventures, the John Muir Trail, the legendary footpath that wends along the granitic spine of California’s Sierra Nevadas. In point of fact it’s more accurate to say that she completed it, walking virtually the entire 200-mile course from Yosemite National Park to Mount Whitney’s talus-strewn flanks, while I was merely privileged to serve as her sidekick for the last 140 miles. It was a spectacular, transformative trip, graced by pikas and golden trout and black bears and so much granite — vast, towering, monolithic blocks and wedges and spires of granite. Even the pall of wildfire smoke felt oddly appropriate, a reminder that our journey took place within climate change’s all-devouring context.

Having never before attempted a through-hike, I didn’t realize what a collaborative endeavor it would turn out to be. The writings of Cheryl Strayed have perhaps conveyed the impression that long hikes are solitary endeavors that test individual mettle. Not so. Perhaps we’re less self-reliant than most, but our hike was abetted by a pit crew of trail angels: Nick and Alicia kept our plants alive; Carl and Emily minded our dog; Michael and (a different) Emily doled out advice; Terence and Cecelia offered us a Bay Area basecamp; Jeremy and Owen put hundreds of miles on their Volvo in support of our elaborate logistics. Apparently it takes a village to convey two people through the mountains, or at least these two people.

And then there was Charles.

A few words here about the mechanics of hiking the John Muir Trail: Unless you’re traveling exceedingly light and fast, the JMT is too long to finish on a single load of food. Instead, you need to resupply — at least once, usually twice, or even three times. One popular resupply point is at an area called Onion Valley, which JMTers must depart the trail to access, in the process hiking eight miles over a fearsome 12,000 foot saddle of rock called Kearsarge Pass. It’s an arduous, exhausting headache that costs hikers a day or two, not to mention a few gallons of sweat. 

We, however, had an ace in the hole: Charles, a lifelong friend who also happens to be an experienced outdoorsman (as well as a programmer, medical entrepreneur, Chinese scholar, and general polymath). Charles and his partner, Alexis, live in Santa Monica, which puts them a fairly easy drive from Onion Valley. Months before the trip, Elise emailed Charles and asked if he might be willing to restock us, a proposition to which he cheerfully agreed. Thanks to his generosity, we wouldn’t have to drag our asses over Kearsarge and back; instead, Charles would meet us on the trail with a bundle of precious foodstuffs. The mountain would come to Mohammed. 

The mountain would also come bearing gifts. In an email, Charles confirmed that, in addition to the dried and prepackaged schlock we’d sent him — oatmeal, dried chili, energy bars — he and Alexis would bring us something considerably more appealing: Mystery Treats. The Mystery Treats would remain, by definition, unspecified. But Charles and Alexis are epicures, and we were sure that any goodies from their cupboard would be worth the wait.

***

Continue reading →