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.
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:
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.
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.
About a month after I was born, billions of Brood X cicadas came out of the ground, mated, then died. Over the next few years, I learned to walk, to read, to count. I began and quit dance lessons, piano lessons, youth orchestra, soccer, basketball, tennis. I made friends and grew apart from them. I discovered the X-Files, make-up, boys, pop punk, Jagermeister. All the while, those cicadas’ progeny were underground, sucking on xylem from tree roots, waiting to get large enough to come out again as adults.
There’s probably a chair or couch in your home where you read, but I’m talking about when you go somewhere to read. Out of personal preference or because homes can be chaotic or lonely, is there somewhere you go?
I’ve keenly felt the loss of a place to read during the pandemic. We lost not only our workplaces, but also that “third space”—not work, not home—so critical for civil society. But on the eve of opening up businesses in Ontario, it has struck me: Of the places I used to go to read, none of them were actually quite right for reading.
I might set out for a café and perch at a table, but the moment my ear picked up a train of conversation around me, those words would continue to cycle through my phonologic loop as a source of low-level stress until, exasperated, I would leave. Park benches relied on temperature (see: Canadian winters), shade, wind conditions and no precipitation.
Drawing of the vagus nerve by Andreas Vesalius. Wellcome Trust collection
“
“What even is consciousness, though?” my friend B wondered yesterday, squinting into the sun. The air was full of cottonwood dander. Floating on the breeze, the tufted white seeds looked like they were suspended in deep water.
She was nervous about the anesthesia. Four masses in her abdomen, one the size of a football. Likely not cancer, but they won’t know for certain until they “dig around,” the surgeon said. B traced the line of the scar-to-be down her belly with her finger, imagined gloved fingers pulling out her guts. If all goes well, she’ll get to keep an ovary.
To entertain or maybe distract her, I told B about my latest obsession: a wandering web of nerves that carries sensations from our organs to our brains and back again. Most visceral sensations never reach our conscious perception. That’s good. It would be awful to know what your liver and spleen are up to from moment to moment. But it also means we’re largely strangers to our innermost selves. It’s incredible, really, how little we know.
At first B thought she was allergic to gluten. Then she tried to lose weight, and although the pounds dropped off, the bulge in her stomach didn’t go. A year went by, faster than you’d think in a pandemic. She put off going to the doctor until she got a vaccine, then went for a scan, and that’s when they found the tumors.
I’ve known B and her wife for years now, watched them suffer greatly and recover. Neither has aged much on the surface. If anything they’re both more beautiful now than they were before, the way linen gets finer and softer while retaining its strength. No tumors can destroy these women, I thought when they told us. No, no, no.
Signals from the gut to the brain can influence our memory, emotions, and decisions, often without us realizing it. Maybe when the masses in B’s gut are gone, some of the dread and exhaustion of this year will go, too. She loves space and plans to go there someday. Her face lights up when she talks about going to the moon: Beam me up, Elon! She already has a degree in space studies; after she recovers from the surgery, she says she’ll overcome her fear of deep water and learn to scuba dive, so she can train in a weightless environment.
This whole year has been a form of training, B jokes. The isolation of a pandemic, and now, four alien babies. The anesthesia will feel like flying; maybe hospital food will be like spaceship food. “What do you think, am I ready to go to space?” she asked me yesterday. “Absolutely.” When they take her into the operating room, she said, “I’ll imagine I’m a rocket, preparing to launch into orbit.” This morning, she texted: “Ad astra!”
I don’t actually remember that much about the cicadas’ last visit, in 2004. I remember turning onto my parents’ street and noticing how loud the trees were, filled with chorusing insects. But not much about the bugs themselves.
Mostly what I remember is trying to convince bug skeptics that a cool thing was happening. My argument: It’s a fantastic biological event–our version of the wildebeest migration on the Serengeti. It’s epic, and it’s all around us, and it’s worthy of appreciation even if you don’t like bugs. I trotted out this argument a lot this spring, as articles circulated on the internet foretelling doom! Terror! The skies filling with insects!
A few weeks ago I went over to a nearby house to sing with a bunch of friends in the backyard. It was the first weekend that the cicadas had started chorusing from the trees, and we joked about doing every song in E flat along with them. Red-eyed adult cicadas were crawling on the picnic table, on the stairs to the back door, through the grass. I picked one up and it walked around tickling my hand with its grippy velcro feet, then flew away.
I picked up another and it stayed. I admired its wide-set red eyes, its delicate legs, its perfect, leaded-glass wings. I felt protective toward this little bug that couldn’t even be bothered to clean the pollen grains off its face. It had spent almost its entire life to this point underground, and here it was, out in the air, with wings–can you imagine?
It seemed happy to rest on my finger. When I was ready to leave, I put it on a branch of a small tree. It seemed happy there, too.
It’s hard to explain why you love something so much. I probably shouldn’t even try. I love their little faces, with those bright red eyes. Their ungainly, stubby bodies. I love how bad they are at flying, loudly buzzing through the air in hopes of landing legs-out on a hospitable surface. And they’re utterly harmless.
The other day I was walking back from exercise class, and there was a cicada in the middle of the sidewalk. Squished cicadas are all over, so if I see a live one on a walkway, I’ll often pick it up and put it somewhere safe. The move came back to me from 1987, when I played with this bug’s grandparents: a quick pinch to pin the wings near the top, so they can’t struggle.
If you pick up a male, it will often make a distress call. This amuses me. I’m saving this guy’s life, and he’s yelling at me. Ok, buddy. Yes, you’re cranky. How about I rescue you, and you can go do your mating call, and we never have to talk again.
So I put him on a leaf of a nearby tree, leg side down. He immediately let go of the leaf and crash-landed into the sidewalk, right back where it started. I picked him up again, walked him over to the trunk, and set him on top of a horizontal branch, close to a friend. When I let go, he let go, knocking the other cicada off the branch, and they both fell onto the grass. Fine. At least it wasn’t the sidewalk. I left them there.
The cicadas are only here for a short time. I hear they’ll be gone by the end of the June. Some people say they’re already on the decline, already getting quieter. My heart can’t take it. I want this moment to go on and on. And I also want it to pass, so I can look forward to the next generation.
In April, the crabapple across the street from my apartment building had the most glorious blooms and buzzed with bees. Now its branches are covered with cicadas, chorusing together, springing into flight, landing again. I’ve gone out there the last few evenings to watch and listen. I can see where the females have dug fresh notches into the skinny branches to lay their eggs. Over the last month, bits of memories have come back; a little later in the summer, I realized, the tips of that tree’s branches are going to be hanging down, dead, after their once-every-17-years pruning.
I’ll be 62 the next time the bugs come along, an unimaginable age. I suppose 45 was unimaginable in 2004, and 28 was unimaginable in 1987. It’s the obvious essay topic, in this time, to stop and think about where I was in 2004 and where I am now. Only a few miles away, but 17 years wiser, I guess.
Sometimes I wonder just what my life is for. What is anyone’s life for? And this must be part of it: To love these sweet, bumbling bugs, and to tell you about it.
