Pete has a poison oak rash in his armpit. The backs of my knees and left shoulder blade are starting to itch. It’s a sign of spring—a sign that last weekend, for the first time in a while, we did something really good.
No, not that. Last weekend we hopped fences, clambered over downed trees, scaled boulders, and hacked through thickets of poison oak in search of an incredible, majestic, injured bird.
LOOK AT THIS BIRD! Have you ever seen anything so dignified? Or so affronted? Here’s how we found ourselves unexpectedly searching a river canyon for an injured osprey: Last weekend, Pete, two friends, and I decided to float down a stretch of whitewater on the South Fork American River. A few miles downstream, we approached a house-sized boulder known to locals as Gorilla Rock because it looks exactly like a gorilla in profile. As we floated, Pete spotted something odd on the river bank: a two-foot-tall, brownish-black and white osprey sitting on a flat rock next to the water.
We’ve been slowly cutting back on meat. It’s better for us and better for the planet. Not to mention the exploited workers on the factory farms—did you see that John Oliver segment? After it came out, we said let’s take things one step further: No more buying meat for our household from the grocery store.
Of course, we’re not going to throw out all those Omaha Steaks in the freezer that our generous family sent for Christmas. And when ordering in, we’ll still allow it. Also, say we go over to a friend’s house for dinner—you know, eventually—and they’ve made a pot roast. Which is… have any of our friends ever made a pot roast? Well, you get the idea.
Point is: no need to stop cold turkey. Hah.
Speaking of which, what are we going to do about the toddler who requests a steady diet of hot dogs, pepperoni, and sliced turkey?
Well yeah, he’s only three. We are the adults.
Let’s try to trick him? Yes, we’ll trick him.
Have you seen all the brands of fake meat out there now—fake chicken nuggets could be an aisle of their own, as if nuggets were ever a real thing.
Look: This “smart sausage” is exactly like a brat. We need to get him into ketchup to really sell it though, I think.
As long as it’s covered in BBQ sauce, and not the main focus of the dish, you’d hardly know this Beyond meat wasn’t real beef.
It’s truly a golden age for meatless meats. The perfect time to be a part-time vegetarian.
Nine of the fourteen known pairs of scissors currently in my apartment. .
The other day I started counting scissors.
Why?
Because there’s a pandemic.
That should be reason enough. But if you need more, it’s because, spending all this time at home, I got started thinking about how many tools I have that do more or less the same thing. The stand mixer, the hand mixer, the blender, and the food processor. The DVD player, the CD player, and the optical drives in the laptops.
The other day, the tool I was thinking about was scissors. I could think of seven pairs right away, then nine. Most have different functions. When I dug through drawers and boxes, I got up to 14. There are probably more. That Swiss army I used to have, with a tiny folding pair of scissors – it’s lost, but it could be lost in here somewhere.
Because there’s a pandemic, and I’ve had a lot of time to think about the stuff riding out the pandemic with me, I present: All of the scissors in my apartment. In the order in which they appear in the photo above, starting at the top of the circle.
1. This reliable, yellow-handled pair lives in a can on my desk and I grab them any time I just need to cut some paper or get into a padded envelope. I think I bought them in Italy in 1998. If I’m right, and I have managed to hang onto one pair of scissors for 23 years, I am very impressed with myself.
2. The second pair with yellow handles came in a set of three from IKEA. (The other two don’t live here.) They are in a can in the kitchen, where I can grab them whenever I need to get into a food package. They go through the dishwasher often and seem to be surviving.
3. My folding scissors live in an Altoids tin with a bunch of stitch markers, big-eyed needles, and other knitting-related tools. These scissors’ only job is to cut yarn. Once some security folks in the Frankfurt airport spent several minutes digging through my bag for that weird-shaped metal thing they’d seen on the x-ray. (When they found it, they concluded that these scissors were, in fact, legal to carry on a plane, which I knew, which is why I had them.)
4. At some point in 2014 or so, I realized that I needed fabric scissors. (You don’t cut fabric with regular scissors.) So I bought this blue pair.
5. In the summer of 2015, I was on a short trip to New York and made a wee pilgrimage to Mood, the fabric store that featured in Project Runway. I didn’t really need any fabric, but I was excited to be there and wanted a souvenir. I remembered that I needed fabric scissors. I forgot that I had already dealt with that need. I bought the zebra scissors. Now I have two pairs of fabric scissors. I regret nothing.
6. I bought these very strong poultry shears to spatchcock a turkey. I used them once, to spatchcock one turkey. It was fine, but I usually do a chicken for Thanksgiving now.
7. My dad got me toucan kitchen scissors for Christmas one year as a replacement for the IKEA scissors. I always end up using the IKEA scissors, even though these are way cuter. I feel a little bad about that. I do enjoy looking at these.
8. I got these gold-handled embroidery scissors last year because I dropped the old pair too many times, and one of the tips bent. I try not to drop these as often. For embroidery, it’s handy to have very, very pointy scissors, so you can get under any errant stitches and cut through them.
9. The purple-handled embroidery scissors have one wonky point. Sorry, scissors.
10-14, not pictured: I didn’t retake the photo for the last five pairs, because one is a random, not-very-good pair that I bought in Sweden and never use, and the other four are scissors from the office that came home with me last year in a box of craft supplies for the work crafting group. Two are still in their packages.
This seems like a ludicrous number of scissors. When you have the right tool, something that seemed very annoying, finnicky, or just plain impossible – getting a clean cut in fabric or yarn, or laying a turkey out flat for roasting – becomes straightforward. I have used every one of pairs 1-9 in the last year–most of them in the last week.
What scissors do you have that aren’t on this list? Gardening shears, maybe? Some kind of nail scissors? Do you cut hair, or upholstery? Tell me about it in the comments.
Last spring, I wasn’t sure how to use Instagram. I mean, I technically knew how to use it. When I logged on, it was honestly keeping me going each day, watching everyone try to figure out what to do at home and seeing that they were just as uncertain as I was. People made sourdough bread, they knitted, they drew rainbows and put them on their windows, they banged pots and pans. But when it came to responding in kind, I wasn’t sure what to do.
Then one of my plants started to grow.
The best way to describe the way I garden is salutary neglect. This phrase, it seems, came from the British loosening their enforcement of trade relations with the colonies in the early 1700s. I have no enforcement whatsoever. I love to buy seed packets and new, hopeful plant starts, and plant them in the garden. I tend them in the first few days, but then something always comes up. (Perhaps not unlike the British—according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, some historians think it would have been impossible for the British to enforce trade across spread-out colonies, others say “a greater cause of salutary neglect was not deliberate but was instead the incompetence, weakness, and self-interest of poorly qualified colonial officials.” Gardening incompetence, weakness and self-interest, that’s me!)
So seeing a thriving plant is always a pleasant surprise. This one started as a low-growing spiky thing, and had stayed that way for a year. In March 2020, it started shooting up toward the sun.
The plant was an echium, a biennial plant which shoots out a flower spike during its second year. These species—there are six of them—are native to the Canary Islands and parts of the west coast of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. This one, called Echium wildpretti is known for its size—its flower tower can grow up to seven feet.
So I started taking photos of it. And there was much more drama than I thought. In a rainstorm, the spike fell over. A few days later, the tip started to lift skyward again. (Personal drama: I wrote and deleted several penis-themed captions while giggling to myself.) Huge buds grew in a spiral around the spike. Pink flowers appeared, and then an underlayer of purple. The echium toppled over again, and again, it reoriented toward the sun.
This is the kind of drama I would not have noticed otherwise. But in taking photos of E. wildpretti each day, I could see the small changes. I started looking forward to what would happen next, even when there wasn’t much else to look forward to.
Finally, the tower faded. By then we’d fallen into something of a rhythm at home, or at least something that felt less desperate. Elsewhere in the garden, a few small apricots appeared, and then a surfeit of figs. Sunflowers and pumpkins, then the dump of seed pods from the elm that signals the start of fall.
And now it’s spring again. Because of my incompetence and weakness, I could not remember what year I planted the next set of echium starts. Would I have to wait another year to see a bloom? Then about a week ago, an unassuming plant in the shade started growing upward instead of out. Now it is up above my knees, reaching toward the light.
For a recent edition of Smithsonian Magazine, I wrote a retrospective on the life and career of Marie Fish — ichthyologist, bioacoustician, and epitome of nominative determinism. Fish spent decades recording marine animals in her laboratory and at sea, and revealed that, far from being the “silent world” described by Jacques Cousteau, the ocean was as raucous as a dive bar on Saturday night. Sculpin hummed like generators, toadfish honked like foghorns, and even seahorses clicked like telegraphs.
Word counts being what they are, though, I didn’t have space to chronicle all of Fish’s exploits. And there was one incident in particular that I especially regretted leaving on the cutting room floor: her session with Baby Snoots.
In June 1956, Fish and her husband, Charles, went to Florida to spend a day recording Baby Snoots, a captive manatee at the South Florida Museum. At first, the hydrophone that the Fishes dangled into Baby Snoots’s tank picked up only the monotonous crunch of a manatee masticating carrots, lettuce, and celery. As the day wore on, though, Baby Snoots began to open up. When Baby Snoots was startled or surprised, the Bradenton Heraldreported, she emitted a sound “like that of old, creaking leather.” She also uttered a squeak, this one apparently voluntary, “something like that made by a mouse in full flight from a housewife’s broom.” “Throughout it all,” the paper added, “Baby Snoots maintained a curious but cautious attitude.”
As I scrolled through these clips, I was struck at Baby Snoots’s apparent celebrity. The Tampa Bay Times described her as “Bradenton’s famous Manatee.” The Herald had deemed her activities of sufficient interest to run on A1 — above the fold, no less. Evidently Baby Snoots had been renowned in her day. What I didn’t realize was just how long that day had lasted, how many it lives it touched, or how recently and tragically it ended.
We are people who love clubs. By “we” I mean all of us. As much as we pledge unity and “oneness,” people are regularly slapping on a label of some kind and then flashing that label to those who don’t have it. It’s human nature to affiliate, of course, and it’s also satisfying to belong. Belonging makes you feel good and worthy. We want others to know we’ve been accepted, especially into a group that doesn’t take just anyone.
I guess I’m no different. On that note, did you know #vanlife is a whole thing, an online collective of people who love to show off that they are nomads, that they are “living the dream” of the open road? Pack just your essentials, grab the dogs, and go. Drive anywhere, stop anywhere, stay anywhere. Life is an adventure! It’s a lovely idea that plays great in photos. Like the above: Here are doing #vanlife in the mountains of West Virginia. The weather appears perfect, the dogs are behaving…we must be having the time of our lives! For the record, our van is minimally outfitted compared to many; “comfort” is a relative thing. Still, we can look the part, and we talk about driving the whole country, stopping in all the beautiful places, waking up to steamy coffee and sunrises over every American landscape. We feel special when other #vanlife people wave to us, because we all GET IT. We are IN THE CLUB. We are DOING IT.
It’s a funny thing, this desire to be part of the tribe. I scoffed at the idea–I’m definitely not going to post too-perfect pictures or buy #vanlife merch. In fact, I expected to be the #vanlife grouch, sharing only pictures that burst the bubble of a #vanlife trip. The blooper reel, the sad truths, the “which-dog-rolled-in-deer-shit, can-we-please-get-a-hotel-room-and-take-a-goddamned-shower” moments. The world needs to know what the club is hiding.
And yet, I chose to do this quick snap…really, it just took a second…
No, that’s no good, the dogs aren’t looking and the light is wrong…we need that perfect morning glow. Honey, can you pull the van forward slightly? And either get out of the frame or get a steaming cup of something and wrap up in your Slanket and look dreamily out over the trees. No? Okay, move, please. Damn it. Get the dog’s attention? And fix that fold in the blanket…oh, never mind. We can correct it in Photoshop.
CLICK.
After this, dear readers, it’s van-life bloopers for the duration! I promise.
When I was a few weeks pregnant, I met a new friend, who is an expert in sanitation for low-resource contexts, for coffee in The Hague, where I live. I hadn’t told her about my status, but she must have gotten some whiff of a pheromone or something because she mentioned, off-handedly, that a program in the Netherlands collects pregnant people’s urine.
I hurried home to sign up. Amazingly, the program, today called Moeders voor Moeders (Mothers for Mothers), has been operating since 1931. The hormone they’re after is human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which peaks in early pregnancy. It’s most famous for making the second line on pregnancy tests, but it can also stimulate ovulation as part of a regimen of fertility drugs.
I had struggled to get and stay pregnant, a painful experience. If my urine could help another person, this seemed like something worth participating in, I thought. Plus, I had been covering sanitation as a journalist, and was thinking of writing a book, which later became Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet, just released.
What I didn’t anticipate was how hoarding my urine would transform my relationship to it.
Many ancient cultures kept and used urine. The ancient Roman Columella suggested watering pomegranate trees with the nutrient-rich liquid. In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes, “I’m told that our ancestors would put the squash seeds in a deerskin bag with a little water or urine a week before planting to try to hurry them along.”
Some cultures used urine in tanning, laundering, felting, dyeing, and even making gunpowder, mouthwash and toothpaste. One intriguing detail that many people (including me) remember from Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series is how Ice Age people could have used aged urine, which has a high pH, to make white leather. Indeed, urine was once so valuable that the Roman Emperor Vaspasian famously levied a tax on public urinals, from which comes the term pecunia non olet, “money doesn’t stink.”
Today, however, we treat urine as just another gross squirt of bodily waste–and that’s more or less how I thought of it, too. Our toilets dilute it with water, mix it with poop and toilet paper, and shoot it into our sewers, where it meets more water, cooking oils, cleaning supplies, industrial chemicals, and other substances. Not only does this make it harder to recover the useful elements of urine, but it also potentially turns them into pollution. Nitrogen and phosphorus, if not removed during sewage treatment, can contribute to environmental problems such as dead zones in coastal areas.
A few bold innovators are trying to save urine from that fate. The Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, collects it from nearly two hundred participants, pasteurizes it, and then offers it to local farmers to fertilize hay. It also publishes do-it-yourself instructions for eager gardeners. The program works with scientists to study the fertilizer’s efficacy and safety (pharmaceutical residues that people excrete in urine are a particular concern) and with regulators to develop new policies and codes. As I learned while researching my book, scientists are also developing ways to use urine to make bricks, hand sanitizer, and electricity.
Some of the Brattleboro donors use home-made urinals: Tricked-out 5-gallon jugs plugged with ping-pong balls. For Mothers for Mothers, I lovingly peed into a beige pitcher and then poured the urine into a blue jug, passing it to a driver in an unmarked van every Wednesday for several weeks. But new products will make urine collection less hands-on, such as a toilet design that uses the “teapot effect” to dribble urine down the inside of the bowl to a separate exit.
I have come to have mixed feelings about the program to which I gave my urine. Mothers for Mothers asks women to donate altruistically, as part of an “intergenerational Dutch success story, tying the previous donations of older women together with the current donations of younger, pregnant women,” as cultural analyst Charlotte Kroløkke of the University of Southern Denmark puts it in her book Global Fluids: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Waste and Value. But, as she also points out, this is in many ways just a nice bit of marketing: The urine goes to a pharmaceutical company, which makes money when women buy the drugs, for which there are synthetic alternatives. When I spoke to someone who had used the urine-derived drug, she didn’t know where it had come from, or the free work that pregnant people like me had done on her behalf.
Still, I would gladly donate my urine again, if somebody would only come for it. My hCG has long faded, but those weeks of peeing and pouring and hoarding made their mark, transforming my mental image of my urine from icky waste into something almost precious, golden.
Chelsea Wald has a bachelor’s in astronomy from Columbia University and a master’s in journalism from Indiana University, and has spent more than fifteen years writing about science and the environment. On April 6, she released a book about the future of the toilet, called Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet (Avid Reader Press/Simon and Schuster). You can find her at chelseawald.com, on Twitter @chelseawald, on Instagram @chelsea.wald, and on Facebook @chelseawaldwriter. Chelsea invites you to participate in her release celebration, called “It’s My (Online, Asynchronous, Book Launch) Potty!” on April 10-11, mostly on Instagram @chelsea.wald. She will (try to) make synthetic feces in her kitchen, host a toilet paper fashion show and a toilet show-and-tell, and answer questions about the book.
The flowers that bloom in the spring tra la. I love them faintingly, I gaze at them, hands folded reverently, such dears they are, oh my darlings, my minor bulbs!
Minor bulbs are not the same as spring ephemerals — really their name — like spring beauties, dog-tooth violets, may apples, shooting stars, and Dutchman’s breeches, their names alone are a song. They grow in woods and each one is so delicate, so oh-please-stay-awhile that they break your heart when in the next minute they’re gone. I’ve tried planting these and it never works.
Neighbors and passers-by say how beautiful are the daffodils-narcissi-hyacinths, which I also love though more prosaically. Thank you, I say, but come look at my minor bulbs. Oh nice, say the neighbors and passers-by, and continue having transports over the major bulbs. But look at this one, I say, it’s called Chionodoxa, chion meaning glory and doxa meaning glory, snow glory, glory of the snow, see how the white centers fade into the blue petals, so interesting! The fact is, minor bulbs seem to interest no one but me.
For years I ignored them in the catalogs — minor, unworthy of my attention, and dirt cheap. The catalogs say to plant them in masses and drifts so you notice them. I don’t know about that: I’m kind of a minor bulb myself but I wouldn’t be better drifting all over the landscape.
