A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta as a beet.
Natural inks have been enjoying something of a contemporary resurgence, at least in my Instagram feed. There, I had recently noticed that the Toronto Ink Company had teamed with New York Times illustrator Wendy MacNaughton to show kids how to make inks out of common kitchen items like black beans and blueberries. So why not pollen cones? I thought, loading my pockets with the sticky orbs.
Naturally, I didn’t do anything so practical as follow an ink recipe. I just got witchy, figuring I could cover them with water and boil them until the solution was sufficiently concentrated to produce a vivid stain. Having only one saucepan to my name, and feeling uncertain about the relative wisdom of boiling resinous cones of unknown toxicity in a container I use to make food, I piled the cones into a mason jar instead, filled it halfway with water, stuck it in the microwave, and watched.
For instance, if you’re “ready to put down roots,” the story’s handy flowchart offers you two choices — Issaquah, Washington (if “the burbs are calling”) or Sugar House, Salt Lake City, Utah, if they’re not.
Now Sunset is a fine magazine and they’re hardly alone in propagating these “best places” inventories. I understand the impulse to quantify a place’s attributes and size them up against other localities. But I worry that the proliferation of these lists have transformed place into a commodity rather than a commitment.
What I’ve learned from living in three countries and more than 20 locations is that there is no perfect place. Believing otherwise prevents the letting go of elsewhere necessary to create a home place where you are— a journey that takes effort and devotion.
If you grew up in the U.S. South or Midwest, there’s a good chance you are familiar with the “live laugh love” home decor aesthetic. For the uninitiated, it’s hard to describe, as it takes many forms, but, like US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once defined obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s farmhouse-chic, all reclaimed wood and burlap, with positive messages written in swirly calligraphy or what looks like someone’s down-to-earth handwriting. It’s the wall art in the type of suburban home that has no fewer than five throw pillows on the couch and monogrammed towels in the bathroom (the confusing type, where the last initial is the biggest letter in the middle, so a towel for the initials JCH would read j H c).
The words live, laugh, and love need not be present, but the essence of the aesthetic can be taken in many directions. They’re popular decor at weddings of hetero couples, or as commemoration of their love. They often display Bible verses or one’s Christian bonafides (“raised on sweet tea & Jesus“). Its “zaniest” form is the wine lady, who’s all about “wine o’clock” or, simply, just living, laughing, loving, and drinking wine. And its liberal version is the “in this house, we believe” sign, which includes phrases like “love is love,” “Black lives matter,” “feminism is for everyone,” and “kindness is everything.”
No disrespect to anyone who’s partial to that style of decor — it’s just not my cup of tea. But earlier this year, I came across a live laugh love-style sign that I’ve been obsessed with for months. It appears to have originated on Tumblr, and says:
In this house
we ♥ believe
this is not a place of honor
no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here
nothing is valued here
what is here is DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE
the danger is in a particular location
the danger is still present in your time
this place is best left Shunned & Uninhabited
“The year is 1994. We are all living underground.” So begins a 1960s movie my friends and I howled about in the year 1996, watching a large cast of extras in metallic bell-bottoms surging purposefully through tunnels. I am re-posting this post from seven years ago because I can’t remember writing it. I absorbed not one of the facts therein, and I’m surprised I never mentioned that B-film, which provided months of hilarity in my teens.
At Lisgar Collegiate, my old public high school in Ottawa, whenever I had gym class, band or strings, law or – as I vaguely recall – accounting class, I had two choices. I could either pack my books away, pin my sleeves over my hands and charge out the door, through 15 seconds of -20C blizzard to the adjacent South Building or I could take the civilized — if slightly less refreshing — route underground. Subterranean building is a common solution in extreme climates, and the future of weather means that cities elsewhere would do well to put a bit of ground between themselves and the elements. Urbanist Jane Jacobs may urge us to build up, not out, but there is another option: down.
The cobblestones of sleepy Corsham, Wiltshire, hide a well-kept secret of improbable scale. Embedded in the limestone cave network underlying the town, a 35 acre city was built to allow 4,000 government staff to ride out a nuclear war. Burlington Nuclear Bunker had its own TV studio where survivors could make announcements from the apocalypse. Offices, a hospital, a sprawling phone exchange, pub and landromats — all sat empty for half a century under a bizarre selection of Olga Lehmann murals. Powered by a heavy-duty generator, the underground city was to use a subterranean lake as a drinking water reservoir. Its existence remained classified until it was decommissioned and put up for sale in 2004.
A while ago I found this post-it note on my desk. Here’s the list of items I had written down:
Skyrim
pie
Star Wars
Firefly
Star Trek
Nancy Pelosi
tax brackets
Elsevier sucks
Marvel
Gene Kelly
tap dance
Drama Book Shop
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
What…on Earth. That is my question for you. What is this list? It’s not things I like. While I love Gene Kelly (obviously), Firefly, and pie, I am kind of lukewarm on Star Wars and have no particular opinion on Drama Book Shop. I guess I’m in favor of tax brackets. But how is “Elsevier sucks” on this list? That’s not even a thing! It’s a sentence!
So. What on Earth? Put your guesses in the comments, please.
High above the place where you’re reading this, maybe many miles away or, if you’re lucky, just outside your door, there is a strange and dangerous realm. Few dare to venture there, and many who do are unprepared for what they’ll encounter. Even fewer live in this harsh realm, especially all the time. It is cold, even when it’s sunny, and it can be as dry as desert even when there’s consistent snow cover. It’s hard to breathe up there, because there is little oxygen, and because the wind will take the breath right out of you.
To reach the Realm, you have to climb, and usually for a long time. You can take a car part of the way but then at some point you just have to walk. There is no way forward except moving your own body through your own will through the forest and up, up.
Eventually, the trees grow shorter and scrubbier. This is the Krummholz zone. The trees change shape, turning from proud straight trunks to cowering, curved bushes. Some are so twisted they almost look wretched, like they have avoided something unspeakable. Nevertheless, they persist.
If you keep walking, there comes a point where even the Krummholz forest does not grow. Nothing remains but some soft cushion plants, which look like lumps of moss; some tiny flowering plants; a few hardy succulents; and rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.
In the Harsh Realm above treeline, which starts roughly between 11,000 and 11,500 feet in Colorado, you can feel—without trying too hard—that you are not on Earth. You are obviously above most of Earth, but it’s more than that; in the rocky surroundings of many mountains, you can feel detached from Earth entirely. I happen to love this feeling of mentally departing my rocky silicate planet and reaching a couple miles closer to space. I love having little evidence of any sentient life at all. But it can be jarring. It is also very lonely.
Nothing but tundra plants grow up there, and even then, their growth can be scraggly and sparse. Usually all you notice, all you have time and mental bandwidth to notice, are the rocks. They are often splotched with lichen, meaning there’s something living, but lichen is no forest. Plants are few and far between in the broken rocks, called talus, and they don’t really grow in the scree, which is looser, gravel-like stuff.
But if you’re fortunate and it’s been a sunny morning, you might catch a glimpse of an animal. The likeliest one you’ll encounter is a tiny tailless furball called a pika. Suddenly, you’re back on Earth. Their liquid eyes, koala ears, and hamster-like countenance bring you right back to the realm of the living, feet firmly planted on the planet of warm-bodied mammals.
Pikas collect grass and leaves all spring and summer, building caches that will keep them fed through the harsh alpine winter. Those winters are getting warmer and drier, as a changing global climate tweaks the typical seasonal cycles of the high mountains. Many ecologists worry that pikas, marmots, and other alpine species will suffer and be displaced as the climate warms. But one researcher, who has studied American pikas for 50 years—yes, a half century—believes the pikas will be all right. At least when it comes to climate change.
Like many tundra species, pikas have evolved some cold-weather survival tricks. They are feverishly warm-blooded, with an average body temperature of 104 F, and they have a thick layer of insulating fat topped with fur, which means they could overheat easily in warm environments. On a balmy summer day in the alpine tundra, they hide in the cool shaded rocks of the talus. Researcher Andrew Smith, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, says he used to believe these traits would hurt them in a warming world.
But in 2017, he went looking for evidence of pika problems and came back with good news. Among 3,250 pika habitat sites, he and federal researchers found pikas on 2,378. They were missing from 774 sites that contained only old evidence of pika habitation, and they had vanished from 89 sites where they were previously spotted in 2005. To Smith, this was largely good news.
The empty and old sites had the same temperature and moisture ranges as the areas where the pikas still lived, he says. This suggests something other than the Harsh Realm was driving them out. Something like human activity.
Based on a review of dozens of pika studies, Smith concludes that pika populations appear to be just fine in their typical range—at least as far as the climate is concerned.
“Most species exhibit losses near the edges of their geographical ranges, simply because individual animals in those zones are living in conditions that are less than ideal for them,” he writes in a recent article. “This does not mean that they are going extinct.”
Like so many other problems, the pikas’ future predicament will be human-caused. But it may be for reasons that are more direct than climate change. Colorado’s high mountains, including its 54 peaks towering above 14,000 feet, are more highly trafficked than at any point in human history. People leave beer cans and poo and countless other types of trash, and they venture off Forest Service trails to get better Insta shots, damaging tundra communities and pika food in the process.
Trail management and conservation groups are trying to stem the tidal wave of damage, but hordes of young smiling hikers are hard to hold back. Pity the pikas not for climate change, then, but for all of the people clamoring to visit the Harsh Realm.
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Photo credit: Top: US National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons/CC-2.0 Middle: Flickr user Marshal Hedin via Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY-SA-2.0
Back in 2019 I interviewed two prominent skunk researchers, the wonderfully-named Dr. Ted Stankowich and Dr. Jerry Dragoo. After talking to them I decided that if I were going to devise a Marvel-style comic book avatar for myself, it would be “Skunk Woman.” Rather than mostly in-the-way, non-aerodynamic objects of unwanted attention, my breasts would be repurposed as weapons that shoot noxious, tacky gel out of maneuverable nipples. Bold stripes in my fur would clearly signal what a bad idea it was to harass me. Don’t mess with me, they’d signal. I might be rabid.
It’s unseasonably warm right now, 70 degrees out, and the skunks seem to think it’s spring too, since an unusual number seem to be scampering out of their dens and ending up as roadkill. In tribute (and because the Sunday sunshine’s beckoning) here’s an old post about the most misunderstood of animals.
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Late at night, after the campers at Puddingstone Lake RV park in Los Angeles County have gone to bed, Ted Stankowich and his graduate students set up infrared cameras and speakers around an open field. They open cans of cat food and fling chunks of it all over the grass. Then they wait.
The skunks come in droves. Some wear metal ear cuffs and RFID tags. Others are streaked with pink and purple dye, tagged in a previous run-in with the researchers. As the skunks nibble on cat food, Stankowich and his team cue up the sound of a coyote howling, or a great horned owl hooting. Then they watch to see if the skunks stand their ground, or scatter.
A friend gave me the cyclamen for my birthday, in early December. I’d had a potted cyclamen once before, in high school or so, and it didn’t last long. In the rush of the holidays, I mentally categorized the new arrival as a temporary plant, and I didn’t do very well at watering it.
One day in January, I happened to notice its stems were drooping, its beautiful pink flowers pointing toward the table. So I watered it and got back to work. But I had a feeling its recovery was going to be dramatic, so I left my phone watching.
The video above is a time-lapse of the next two hours in the life of that plant. It’s only about a minute and a half long. I recommend it.
It feels like a metaphor, doesn’t it? Give this plant some water and it stands back up, its cells returning their customary turgidity, the flowers atop the stalks again instead of dangling at the bottom. When we douse ourselves with vaccines, masks, and a functional White House, maybe we will stand up, too, and present ourselves for live theater, in-person meetings, and hugs.
About a third of the flowers have died since then, so I hope it’s not a super precise metaphor. But, oh, am I ready to stand up again.
