What’s something you used to love but have lost your feeling for? For me, in a world that looks a lot like science fiction, I have trouble with the speculative novels I used to love. I’ve suspended my disbelief already, even in real life, and I shrug at the magic imagined in these stories.This post first appeared in 2013.
In this year’s SXSW closing speech, futurist Bruce Sterling enumerated disrupted technologies that have been supplanted, or are soon to be, by the latest wave of GoogleGlass-era living. He gave longform blogging five years to live, in the face of microblogging.
As future shock morphs into present shock, the cyberpunk fiction for which Sterling was first known is no longer the way to tackle envisioning the future, he says. Why write a story about future living – why not just participate in it and create it right now?
Consistent with my policy of running posts that take me, virtually anyway, out of the pandemic present to somewhere or sometime that’s interesting and wide-angle, I offer you the Chesapeake Bay: born in violence, growing up geologically and then sociologically, and now hitting the present with utter tomfoolery. And revelation. This first ran March 31, 2011.
The Chesapeake Bay was born as the Susquehanna River. Around 35 million years ago, an asteroid apparently smacked into what is now eastern Virginia and left a 50-mile-wide crater, a sink into which all the rivers – mainly the Susquehanna but also the Potomac and lesser rivers — coming east out of the Appalachians naturally flowed. Millennia came and went, ice ages came and went, and about 8,000 years ago melting glaciers raised the level of the Atlantic enough that, over the next couple of thousand years, it flooded into that old crater and on up the river valleys and created the Chesapeake Bay. I’m telling you this story mostly because I like it but please, bear with me, I do have a point.
It’s the biological event of the decade, and it’s almost here. The cicadas that have spent the last 17 years underground as nymphs, feeding on tree roots, are beginning to emerge. For the last few days, I’ve been seeing friends’ posts on Facebook, of those red-eyed 17-year cicadas, in neighborhoods only a few miles from me. So I go out after work with a friend and walk around the neighborhood, looking at the ground and the trees. At our feet: The holes the nymphs dig before they come out of the ground. Here and there, on a tree trunk: a shed exoskeleton. We spot no adults.
The parents of this batch of cicadas screamed from the trees of my parents’ suburban neighborhood in the summer of 2004. I was living in the basement, a new baby health writer at U.S.News & World Report, which was still a print magazine at the time. I wrote a story about the cicadas for Washington Post Express, a free newspaper that stopped publishing a couple of years ago.
I’ve been looking forward to the next coming of this next batch of cicadas ever since.
Wednesday evening, May 12
My plan to check my neighborhood trees every evening for the cicadas hits a snag: In other biological news, two friends are two weeks after their second dose of vaccine, so I drive up to their suburb to hug them and hold their four-month-old baby for the first time. No cicadas join us.
In 1987, I played with the grandparents of this year’s cicadas in my friend Malado’s backyard, about a mile from where I’m sitting right now. We gently squeezed the males so they’d squeal, and we built them little jungle gyms out of sticks. I don’t know if they liked jungle gyms. Probably not.
I saw these clouds in November and it has taken me six months to figure out how to upload the photo. But I’m glad, in a way, because I have a new perspective on clouds. (I am not sure that I have a new perspective on pens: the Pilot Precise V5 is still my favorite.)
Earlier this spring, I found out about The Cloud Collector’s Handbook, a guide to cloud types that also includes points for spotting various clouds and a scorecard. The book is delightful—it has approachable descriptions of the science behind how different cloud types form, and it also gives you 20 bonus points for a Brocken spectre and explains the rainbow-ringed mountaintop glory like this: “The perspective can make the legs of your shadow flare out so, what with the multicolored halo, it looks like a ghost from the 1970s.”
A couple years back, during a day cruise around the Channel Islands, we found ourselves surrounded by a sizable school of common dolphins. (Not a mega-pod, alas, but even a few dozen dolphins is a pretty awe-inspiring sight.) Common dolphins are, as their name suggests, among the most abundant marine mammals in the world; it’s probably easier to name the coastlines where they don’t occur than where they do. (Here’s a range map, for the curious.) They’re famously social, energetic, and playful, and the pair above, along with their comrades, weaved around our vessel for a good 15 minutes, flying through the Pacific in graceful synchrony.
Despite their ubiquity, common dolphins are still a bit of a mystery. In 1994, Delphinus delphis, long considered a single species, was split into two, the long-beaked common dolphin (D. capensis) and the short-beaked common dolphin. The primary difference was — guess what? — the snout, which, in the long-beakers, “can be up to 10% of the total body size.” In 2015, though, the dolphin’s taxonomic story twisted again: Researchers declared Delphins capensis “invalid” on the basis of DNA evidence. All the world’s common dolphins allegedly belonged to Delphinus delphis, though the researchers did acknowledge the existence of a few subspecies, includingD. d. bairdii, the eastern North Pacific long-beaked common dolphin, whose name is as long as its rostrum.
Got all that?
I’m reasonably certain the animals we saw in the Channel Islands were long-beakers (they tend to spend more time around coastlines rather than the open ocean, and are apparently more, well, common around the islands than the short-beakers), but I’ve been staring at dolphin photos for the last twenty minutes and feel no closer to a definitive diagnosis. If you’re a confident cetologist, get at me in the comments.
Coral head? Nope. Fungus! Hen of the Woods, perhaps, though I’m no mycologist and am happy to be corrected. (It popped up on my wooded property in central Virginia. It’s the size of a soccer ball. Impressive.) What I do know is Nature loves to repeat herself. If a shape works nicely in one environment, don’t be surprised if it crops up elsewhere. Evolution is like that, recycling good ideas, creating patterns. Fun fact: The largest living organism on earth today is a fungus in Oregon. It lives just beneath the ground and covers about 3.7 square miles. It weighs as much as thirty-five thousand tons. That’s one big shroom.
A few other fungal facts: the stuff is more genetically similar to animals than plants, apparently fungi have chemicals in their cell walls that for some reason lobsters and crabs also have, and a spoonful of soil might have thousands of different fungi within. So many are unknown/unnamed! Mycologists, get to it!
Sadly, I don’t like mushrooms (to eat). Never have. Something about that mild-dirt flavor and rubbery springy squeaky sponginess doesn’t work for me. I can manage a few button ‘shrooms in Thai soup and maybe a nibble of a Portobello burger, but that’s about it. (True story: In Amsterdam we bought the “other kind” of ‘shrooms and I couldn’t stand to chew them (see above) so I swallowed mine whole and had a bummer of a regular day. Those who chewed saw many colors and heard music that I missed. Apparently, the good stuff needs coaxing out.)
I’d like to feel differently, because mushrooms are fascinating and sometimes hilarious, and of course the ones that aren’t toxic are super healthy (or wonderfully mind bending).
I’m sorry, I wrote this article about the biology of grief and I left things out. Which yes, articles always leave things out, they have to. But this particular omission bugged the readers and also bugged me: it was the length of time grief should take. The article said that after 6 to 12 months (different organizations have different numbers), if you’re not functioning better, you might have a case of complicated grief. This could sound like, if you’re still grieving 6 to 12 months after a death, you might need help. So first, what’s complicated grief? and second, what’s normal grief?
And third and most important, WHAT THE ABSOLUTE HELL? At 6 to 12 months after someone you couldn’t afford to lose dies, you might have located the planet you live on now but that’s about it. You’re still trying to believe that this person you loved is gone, you’re in intense pain or you’re numb, you feel completely and utterly isolated, you don’t much care about any other person except maybe the people who still have spouses or parents or siblings or children and you hate and envy every single one of them, you don’t much care about life which is meaningless and you don’t necessarily want to die but you don’t care if you do, and the only thing you can imagine ever wanting again is for this person to not be dead, to come back, please, just come back. Come back.
I’ve been waking to red-spotted Scorpio on the southern horizon every morning between 5 and 6 am. I’m aware of the slow clock I’m inside of, the hands of constellations changing so I can tell week to week time hasn’t stopped. Scorpio sitting in my southern view means summer is almost here, while I’m starting to forget when I last saw Orion, winter having moved out.
Morning at the kitchen table, I have to lean far over the wooden bench to see the moon set out the window, not where it set the morning before, a second-hand ticking in the sky that lets me know the days are spinning and changing.
The passage of time over the last year has been strange. I posted about the subject at the beginning of 2020 when time seemed odd enough, and then it was all blown to tarnation. I saw my first dedicated and prolonged use of happy hour. Gigs were canceled, leading river trips, giving talks, out the window. Time became more of what I wanted it to be, a fluid experience driven by day and night rather than marks on my calendar, but less lucrative. It’s been like the Arctic in summer where the sun’s path is a tilted hula hoop making laps around your head, no telling what time it might be, 9 in the morning or 7 at night.
I swore I wouldn’t go back to the hectic ledgers of time before Covid. I’d find other ways of making a living without packing in every week, my calendar looking like it either exploded or fell apart. That didn’t happen. My calendar has again exploded.
