hot and cold

By: | July 7, 2021
Jess on polar bear watch.

I was already half awake when I heard Audrey’s voice at the door of the tent. “Hi ladies,” she said quietly, trying not to wake the others sleeping nearby. “It’s your turn.” My tentmate Jess stirred; it seemed like she had managed to actually get some rest, but I just couldn’t stay asleep with a balaclava over my face. We wordlessly pulled on the thick down pants, jacket, and boots we’d been issued a couple days earlier by our trip organizers, and stumbled out of the relative warmth of our tent.

Outside, the sun continued its endless loop around the sky, painting the mountains blush and bruise purple. It was early April in Svalbard, an archipelago about halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and we’d just crossed the line into nightless days. Audrey, a physiologist, had come to study an expedition of women skiing to the North Pole; Jess was a physician helping her collect data, and I was writing about it for WIRED. While the expeditioners made their way north, Audrey suggested we go on our own (albeit much less rugged) adventure. She booked a trip through a French tour company, who handled all the logistics for five days of snowshoeing and dog sledding. This was only day 2 of the trip, but about a third of the group had already bailed back to hotels in Longyearbyen. They were wealthy French women who were visibly panicked when the snowcat that brought us to the wilderness began to pull away, and complained loudly about the tents’ lack of heat, lights, and running water. They forced our guide to call them another snowcat, which cost them at least a thousand dollars. Initially, I’d scoffed at their pricey decision: why book a trip to the Arctic if you weren’t prepared to be cold?

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No Privacy for the Dead

By: | July 5, 2021

The other day I was going through someone’s collapsed house on the tip of a mesa in western Colorado. It looked like a small homestead where no one had been in a handful of decades. The front wall with its peaked roof and door still latched shut lay flat where it had fallen. I poked through nails and peeled off wallpaper, lifted a toppled wood-frame with the tip of my boot. Handle of a ceramic mug. Pull tab from a can. Shirt button.

Whose life was this?

A small plastic coat hanger turned milky in the sun: kids or kid, a family, maybe a nice dress, or a Sunday shirt.

I’ve been doing this since I was little, playing archaeologist wherever people left their detritus. My grandpa and I used to drive around the plains of Chaves County, New Mexico, where he grew up, looking for barns and houses abandoned in one of the many lesser dust bowls to hit last century. We creaked in through doors half off their hinges and checked kitchen drawers and cupboards to see what had been left. I remember a corner of a photograph, a single wooden crutch.

I’ve never shaken the feeling I’m invading someone’s privacy. Even if they’ve been gone since long before I was born, it feels as if a shade of them is here, a memory lurking around. I learned to move slowly, quietly, a way of asking permission, or at least forgiveness. Continue reading →

See that bird?

By: | July 2, 2021
a shoreline with trees
See the raptor?

This week, at a lake house in Michigan, I kept hearing a sound that made me think of a gull, but wasn’t. At least, I heard it when I didn’t see any gulls. I’d heard that the Merlin bird identification app can now identify birds by sound. So I held my phone up and it told me right away: merlin.

That’s right, the first bird I ever identified with the Merlin app was a merlin. It turns out that the picture I took above actually captured the bird making the sound. See that dead tree poking up above the treeline, in the center of the picture? See that bird on it? That’s the merlin–a small falcon. Now that I know it’s out there, I hear it multiple times a day. I played it for my friends who own the house and they recognized the sound right away, but had no idea that there were merlins here, or even what a merlin is.

There’s quite a world out there, if you have the right tools to discover it. Once upon a time, the tools for learning to recognize the call of a wee raptor were a lot of patience, a knowledgeable friend, maybe some LPs of bird songs. Now that computer in my pocket is going to teach me a lot of new bird songs, very fast.

Photo: me

Guest Post: In Praise of Phases

By: | June 30, 2021

When I was sixteen, my voice teacher predicted I would become a Jack of all trades. It wasn’t a compliment: We were in the midst of a fight, squaring off across the shiny black battlefield of her baby grand piano. She wanted me to concentrate only on singing. But I couldn’t imagine abandoning subjects like math, from which I derived a kind of type-2 satisfaction, or quitting ski racing—the locus of my teenage social life.

That latitude—that lack of focus—would be my downfall, she warned. And her prophecy seemed to come true as I grew up and flitted from hobby to hobby, career to career.

In college, I fell in love with philosophy, then geology. After graduation, I moved to a mountain town where I spent winters in ski boots and summers sweating under a backpack or dangling from a climbing rope. In graduate school, I dedicated much of my free time to trail running and even completed an ultra-marathon. For a while, I became obsessed with trying to bake perfectly round baguettes with perfectly scored “ears.” I grew and canned food like the apocalypse was nigh. And for several years, I fronted a raucous country band.

On the outside, it looked like I had a long list of skills and accomplishments. But to me, this all felt like mounting evidence of my promiscuous mind and weak willpower. I was hardly exceptional at any of these pursuits, and I hopscotched between them like a distracted child. I wasn’t serious; I was just “going through a phase.”

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Our Herd

By: | June 28, 2021

We first saw the elk in September. Our route to the Wilder forest passed the Yaquina Bay, and there, between the road and mudflats, was an antler rack we initially mistook for a willow tree. 

Our neighbor said it was likely that hunters chased them out of the hills. That they were a smart herd. 

We saw them again in October, this time eating pickleweed behind the Hatfield Marine Science Center. They lifted their heads and eyed us briefly. A couple nights later, on the same path, we nearly walked into the bull before he raised his head. For no tactical reason other than that it felt vaguely respectful, we pulled our headlamps off and waved them on the ground as we backed away.

Shortly after, Hatfield security hazed them off the grounds, and the herd reemerged in the field outside our place.

***

The herd quickly became a sort of glue for the neighborhood, binding us in our disparate connections to them. One boy watched the elk through his window with a handheld spotting scope for hours at a time. My own connection deepened a couple weeks after they’d arrived. Grabbing a sip of water at 1 am, I looked out the window at what I thought was Scots broom shifting in the wind. Then the bull turned and I saw his side glow in the lamplight before he moved off into the field. 

That night the bull crossed from a spectacle to a presence, and I began to watch and listen to the herd more intently. On the mornings between storms I sat on the edge of the field, a hundred square yards of sandy soil that abuts mossy dunes of shore pine. A soundscape would materialize—the munching, mewing, clacking of antler on antler. Grunts and huffs, the squeak of a car slowing to look. It was not just me who needed their company. Others wanted to get in touch, to view natural beauty at a time when “nature,” in the form of a deadly virus, was showing us our fragility.

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Guest post: Becoming People on the Playground: Observations of Young Humans in their Native Habitats

By: | June 25, 2021
The author’s son (yellow shirt) leaving the playground with a friend, previously a blue guy.

ABSTRACT

What is it about watching kids be kids that is so fascinating? That makes us snap too many photos and text other adults or Tweet at the world in the middle of the day about some random or mundane thing they just did? It might have something to do with the infinite enigma of whatever is happening in their “weird little minds”1. Forget the Sunday crossword.

Put in the words of another dear friend, “All of a sudden they’re just like… doing their own thing, being their own person. You get to see who they are. It’s cool to watch them become.”2

There’s that, too.

METHODS

Sit on a bench halfway out of sight from the child for whom you are responsible*, ideally with a book or another manipulative, to give at least the semblance of preoccupation. You don’t want to be inadvertently influencing behaviors, including giving off signals that you sit at a child’s beck and call. You might not want to engage in small talk with other adults, either. You might, in fact, truly be trying to read the book. Good luck with that.

Observe the children.

*The author does not recommend watching children at a playground without having one or more of them affiliated with you in some manner.

DATA

Instances that struck the author as profound for some reason:

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Make Prayers to the Sky

By: | June 23, 2021

Over the last week I traveled from town to town in southwest Colorado giving stage performances at night, telling stories about being here at the height of summer, tales of drought and wildfires and raging thunderstorms. The moon and stars passed over our open-air venues. I gave the show some science and some mysticism, in my mind two sides of the same coin. I had a poet come out to read her version of a rain prayer, and she wore a flowing dress, her palms held to the sky. A crown of flowers in her hair was illuminated with tiny wire lights to get the attention of the clouds.

I won’t claim we had anything to do with it, but after several dry and rainless weeks, we started to see light showers on the days or nights of the shows. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled across audiences.

I don’t know if prayer works, but it’s worth covering bases when it’s this dry. Getting clouds to come to us and drop their loads is no small or even possible task. Scientifically, there’s no way it could be true, based on something only in your head. Why would a cloud come toward you at your calling, then be convinced to disgorge its rain? In dry country, everything hangs by the taut string of precipitation. You imagine all sorts of things are possible.

One of our performance spaces was on a mesa top where we built a stage out of wooden pallets and brought in festoons of stage lights, a sound system, and images projected against a screen. As rain stories came up that night, drops began falling. I could see them through the stage lighting, silver streaks diving into a field of chairs and faces. I called to the rain as it fell, holding up my hands and feeling the cold sting, like diamonds poured from a freezer.

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Guest Post: The Whimbrel

By: | June 21, 2021

They were dark forms scattered up and down the beach. One here, three there, a pair just beyond them. Their larger size distinguished them from the other shorebirds, drawing our attention.

“What are they?” my dad asked.

“Whimbrels,” I said.

We were at Fort Stevens, a few miles outside of Astoria, Oregon, my hometown. My two younger sisters walked ahead of us, bundled against the cold of the mid-May evening. The wind was strong and unrelenting, and a heavy mantle of cloud compressed the sky against the rolling breakers of the Pacific. We were the only people on the beach so far as I could tell.

My mother had died two days ago, taken by a sudden and unexpected illness. I had last seen her a couple of days before that, on Mother’s Day. When I told her I would see her next week—now, as it turned out—she smiled wanly. In retrospect I wondered if I should have taken that as a sign. She had been old, but not that old, or so I thought; in the same way I am old, but not that old, at least when it comes to losing a parent.

“What makes a whimbrel a whimbrel?” my dad asked.

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