Bloom Where You’re Planted

By: | April 14, 2021

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.

How Baby Snoots Became the World’s Most Famous Manatee

By: | April 12, 2021

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 Herald reported, 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.

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Snapshot: #Vanlife

By: | April 9, 2021

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.

(#vanlife!!)

Guest Post: A Donation from the Heart, and the Bladder

By: | April 7, 2021
Wald carrying some of her donated urine.

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.

In Praise of Minor Bulbs

By: | April 5, 2021

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.

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An Invisible Wrong

By: | April 2, 2021

There’s something wrong with men. I am one, I feel it. Something is broken. The last two mass shootings — two massage spas and a grocery store — might be old news by the time you read this, but it feels like an open wound.

How are you doing? 

We say we’re becoming numb and I don’t believe it. I have never hurt so much in my life. No matter how loud you turn up the radio or how many devices you bury your head in, it still hurts. 

Does it need to be said that the shooters were male? They almost always are. If we’ve got one thing going for us, it’s consistency. I don’t want to determine here on this page why men indiscriminately kill, but I want to recognize that this is a thing being done by men. Women have their own brand of rage I’ve found, but that is not my business to solve. It does not leave so many bodies on the ground. Women are murderers, there’s no doubt. I taught a writing workshop several years ago in a women’s prison in Anchorage, Alaska, and sat in a circle of women, some of whom had killed. Good writers, I have to say, enthusiastic about the craft. They had their demons, and maybe they weren’t so different from any of ours, but I’m not talking about theirs. I imagine they had reason to kill. I didn’t ask. 

I didn’t grow up fighting, but I grew up male. My dad was a brawler. We were playing pool and a guy stacked quarters on our table. My dad didn’t like his look and swiped his coins to the floor, saying, “Go play with yourself.” As in, don’t interrupt me and my son, but in a less polite way. I talked the guy down. I’m better at that than fighting, maybe it’s growing up with a single mother.

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Voice Mails from the Great Beyond

By: | March 29, 2021

On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow but would call me again before that. She really wanted to connect.

I am notoriously terrible about clearing out my voice mails. I can’t bear to erase them. I have a habit of keeping at least one at all times from the people I love most. The content of the message isn’t important. It’s that I can hear their voice, catch them in the midst of ordinary life, before they are dead. I’ve learned that you never know when someone will be dead.

I once heard a story about a phone booth in Japan where people who lost friends and family in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake go to talk to their lost loved ones. I would use a phone booth like that.

I still occasionally listen to the voice mail I saved from my friend Mona before she died several years ago. I have heard her say that she’s just returned from Tai Chi class dozens of times. In the months after she died, I also texted her more than once. Sometimes I would forget, if only for a split second, that she was dead and feel compelled to follow through on my impulse to tell her something on my mind. Other times, I just needed to pretend for a moment that she wasn’t really gone. 

When I got the news that Kristina had died, I had just placed a letter to her in my mailbox. A few days earlier, a loved one had sent a message out saying that Kristina was turning inward and it was now best to send wishes and love by mail rather than text or phone. This was my second note to her in the previous two weeks, and I’m not sure if she ever read the first. After I received the news that she had passed, I stood on the front porch and stared at the little red flag raised on my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I could not make myself go retrieve the letter. 

Photo: Pxhere