The Lookout Cookbook

By: | November 11, 2020

When, years from now, I reflect on the debacle that was 2020, I will remember it for COVID, of course, and for its possibly planet-saving election; but I will also recall it as the Year of the Fire Tower. Decommissioned fire lookout towers stipple ridgelines across the West, many of which can be rented for a $40 nightly fee — a sensational bargain, as long as you don’t mind carrying your water up fifty feet of rickety stairs and sleeping on a mattress strewn with mouseshit. Elise and I spent this summer bouncing up derelict dirt roads to towers with names like Cougar Peak and Gird Point and Yaak Mountain, seeking solace in sunsets and the stoic profile of the Northern Rockies. As I wrote recently for CNN: “Being surrounded by millions of years of rugged geology doesn’t diminish our present crisis, but it does offer a bit of deep context.”

I’ve come to love fire towers not only for their scenery, but for their history. Luminaries like Gary Snyder and Ed Abbey once scanned horizons for smoke; Jack Kerouac suffered an emotional meltdown during his summer at Desolation Peak. Traces of antiquity still survive at some towers: initials carved into cement foundations; lichen-encrusted cairns; the wondrous Osborne Firefinders that dominate the tiny cabins like supermassive stars. In one tower we unearthed a copy of the Fire Man’s Handbook, a 1966 manual whose wisdom included this pearl: “When lightning storm is near or overhead, observe the following safety rules: Stand on insulated glass-legged stool.”

If lightning didn’t kill twentieth-century lookouts, the food might do the job. Lookout cuisine was, by all accounts, abominable. Fire-watchers depended on the canned, the powdered, the non-perishable: anything that could be hauled in on a mule and preserved without refrigeration. One early cookbook advised lookouts to “purchase a half or a whole mutton from sheepherders in the vicinity of your station. To keep, hang up in a tree or some other high point at night, wrapped in canvas, or put in a burlap sack during the day and put between blankets and mattress of bed.” No wonder towers were often ransacked by bears.

Fire tower food was so notoriously terrible that it inspired a Colville National Forest lookout to pen the following bit of doggerel, in which FS stands for Forest Service: 

 I like FS biscuits;

think they’re mighty fine.

One rolled off the table

and killed a pal of mine.

I like FS coffee;

think it’s mighty fine.

Good for cuts and bruises

just like iodine.

I like FS corned beef;

it really is okay.

I fed it to the squirrels;

funerals are today.

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The Great British Baking Show Versus the Election

By: | November 9, 2020

It’s still Thursday, as I write this, and they’re still counting. Meanwhile, everything about the show I’m watching makes me feel better, even when someone chooses to make a steamed treacle pudding.

Because of this show I can now tell a fiddly from a stodgy sponge. I know – by sight, at least — proper royal icing and perfect ruff puff pastry. I know a biscuit isn’t a dog treat and jelly isn’t for toast. I might even be able to measure in millimeters, grams, and degrees C in a pinch.

I love that the bakers on this show are lorry drivers and stay-at-home mums (stet) and amoured (stet) guards and “pantomime producers.” I enjoy, in particular, the seasons with Sandi and Noel doing interstitial silliness. (No Hollywood Handshake? Go for the Fielding Fondle.) I love the side looks over the phallic fondant sculptures and the innocent talk of soggy bottoms, leaky cracks, and unpleasant textures in the mouth. I love the sounds – mixers spinning, fruit compote simmering, birds chirping, rain pattering — and the gentle tiptoeing competitiveness of the whole thing.

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Science Plus/Versus Religion

By: | November 6, 2020

Uncertainty is and always has been, for everyone, one of life’s non-negotiable facts. These days, what with politics and pandemics, uncertainty is also the whole country’s mood, a fog bank of unhappiness and anxiety that’s settled in everywhere and isn’t leaving any time soon. Everybody’s irritable and pissed-off and scared, and they’re taking it out on each other. This post is about two brothers whose personal antidotes to uncertainty seem wildly different. It first ran October 3, 2012, eight very long years ago.

I’m generally anxious though I doubt that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or at least when I went to trustable-looking websites and read their lists of symptoms and took their little tests, I didn’t quite fit or pass.  But sometimes I get scared and jumpy and fretful and hyper-alert and shaky; I stop thinking clearly; I’m preoccupied by whatever it is that will  happen or might happen or could conceivably happen.  I really, really don’t like the feeling that I care, I’m invested, I’m involved, and then things go wrong and I’m not remotely in control. Actually I think I just have a heightened case of the human condition.

One day, with an anxiety like a low-lying fog, I was listening to a young man talk about his work, his interests, and his brother.  His work is to write software, to write code, which as I understand it, is a matter of breaking a problem into its smallest possible units and ordering them, line by line, so a computer can makes sense of the commands; it sounds like an analytical, orderly kind of job.  His interests are in science, all kinds.  “Did you hear about the Encode project?” he said.  “It was so interesting.” I wondered if what he liked was the genome ordering, line by line, the workings of the body and the evolution of the species.  I thought, not for the first time, what a comfort to an anxious mind is the world of science.

Then the young man told me about his brother.  They’d been brought up hyper-religious, creationist, home-schooled, And when the young man was a teenager, he began slowly to break away from his family’s beliefs and in the process, he said, his interest in the world outside grew.  And now he and his brother argue.  “God created the world in seven days.”  “Then how can the layers in ice cores show ages of hundreds of thousands of years?”  “God created layers in ice cores old.”  Same for the chicken and egg problem:  the chicken came first, God had created it full grown.  The young man is distressed about his brother and doesn’t like to let the disagreement lie.

But back when the young man was first breaking away from his family’s ways, he had noticed his brother was also following his own interests in worldly things — art, music, coding — and he wondered whether his brother might follow him further into the world. By this time, the young man was no longer living with his family.

Then one day, through a miscommunication, the young man thought his brother had died.  He believed it had happened, that he now lived in a world without his brother.  And when he found that his brother was still alive and then saw him in person, he became, he said, “very intense.”  His brother became very intense too, he said, and they were emotional with each other.  I picture awkward young men who maybe didn’t normally touch each other hugging and hugging and crying for a while.

But after that the differences between the brothers grew, the young man said, and his brother gave up worldly interests.  They have to avoid talking about religion; in fact, they have to stop talking about anything of substance at all: “when the answer is always God,” the young man said, “the conversation stops cold.”  “To be still talking at all, you must love each other very much,” I said.  “Oh yes, we do,” he said.  “Why do you think he became so religious?” I said.  “Because of that time I thought he was dead,” he said.

After that, both brothers felt for the first time the fact of death. Apparently the young man’s brother started thinking about how he should spend the life he now knew was limited.  The young man told me his brother concluded that he should invest only in lasting things and that bringing other people to God saves them from hell and does permanent good.  Religion orders life line by line too, I thought.  

Meanwhile, the young man continued, he too had started thinking about how to spend a limited life, only he concluded that he didn’t know enough about the world.  So he started reading, he said, reading everything, reading through the night, reading to the point where his work suffered, reading because he’d wasted his young life not devouring information. The brothers, though they love each other, are no longer close.

So, we’re all gonna die and we’re not in control.  Anxiety sounds like a reasonable reaction.  But order and meaning help, so we choose faith in God, we choose human understanding and science, we balance God and science.  I’m not going to say that science and God both come down to relief from anxiety and uncertainty, reduce to the need for order.  But yes, maybe, to some extent, I’m saying that.  

Anyway, I’m personally not cut out for faith in God, and when life gets explicit about its non-negotiable facts, I prefer human understanding and science.  I can’t say that I blame the brother though. I hope the brothers start talking again; at the least, I hope they remember they love each other.

_________

Photo credits:  Yaisog Bonegnasher; mhobl

Penspective: what bird is this?

By: | November 4, 2020

On some days, one thing looks like another. It’s easy to be fooled. That’s where a pen helps.

Over the last couple years I’ve been taking pictures of objects that require scale to grasp. What I’ve used as reference is my pen, so I’m starting an ongoing LWON series of photographed objects using one for scale, calling it penspective. My hope is that fellow writers from LWON will add in with their own from time to time.

Starting this series, I give you what looks at first like a small, dead bird on the ground. Closer inspection reveals a piece of old, splintered juniper in the desert where rings in the wood have dried and split apart, forming what looks like wings, body, head, and tail.

The pen helps. I recommend carrying one around to use as a baseline, something that lets you know where an object stands. If nothing else, it helps for seeing, a reminder to look for what might be out of scale.

Yoga & the Bullshit Prevention Protocol

By: | November 1, 2020

This was first published December 8, 2016 and since then I have stopped doing yoga — not stopped needing to, just stopped doing it, the result of the pandemic and massive personal character flaws. The need for bullshit detection, however, will never stop, never.

I did not want to join yoga class.  I hated those soft-spoken, beatific instructors. I worried that the people in the class could fold up like origami and I’d fold up a bread stick. I understood the need for stretchy clothes but not for total anatomical disclosure.  But my hip joints hurt and so did my shoulders, and my upper back hurt even more than my lower back and my brain would. not. shut. up.  I asked my doctor about medication and he said he didn’t like the side effects and was pretty sure I wouldn’t either.

So I signed up for Gentle Mind and Body Yoga, the pre-K of yoga classes. I think the principle is that you get into some pose that has cosmic implications and then hold the pose until you are enlightened or bored silly.  I like the bridge pose where you lie flat on your back and put a rubber block under your butt.  I don’t much like the warrior pose where you stand with one leg bent, foot pointing forward, and the other leg straight, foot pointing sideways, arms out straight at your sides, hands turned up or down or both, I can’t get that part straight, and when I do all that I don’t have the mental reserves to keep breathing.  The less said about the pose called downward dog, the better.  I purely hate the eagle pose where you wind your arms around each other and then wrap your legs around each other and stand on one foot; I drop like a sprayed mosquito.  The teacher is forgiving:  “yogi’s choice,” she says, meaning that I’m now a yogi and I can do what I want.  She says we’re not trying to get anywhere, and I deeply appreciate not trying to get anywhere.

I enjoy a stretchy pose where you sit with a knee crossed over a leg and the opposite arm wrapped around the knee but the point is, says the teacher, to wring the toxins out of your internal organs.  I’m not going to wring out my internal organs.  Sometimes she wants us to lower our shoulders and raise our chests to open up our hearts – a phrase that gives me cardiac-surgical creeps.   The best is the sponge or corpse pose which is what it sounds like.  I’m fully competent at being a sponge, except you’re supposed to breathe in all the way up your left side and breathe out on your right because this activates your left and right brains.  I just breathe on both sides.  Then we sit on some folded-up locally-sourced blankets that smell like unwashed humanity, with legs crossed and the teacher says this is called sukhasana which means easy seat, but it’s no such thing so I stretch my legs out in front of me, yogi’s choice. We end in sukhasana with our hands in prayer and say to each other Namaste, which is apparently Sanskrit for the godhead in me salutes the godhead in you, but which my brain hears as Basta, which is Italian for stop it, enough.  I’m a polite student but noncompliant.

I’m ok with all this, even the pretend science which I’m free to ignore or better yet, to subject to Person of LWON Michelle’s stellar Bullshit Prevention Protocol (BPP) which in these days of blatant disinformation if you haven’t read, clipped out, and taped to your computer screen, you may as well join an ant colony.

Some bullshit you don’t need a protocol to detect, so I didn’t even try to find out whether twisting my body wrings the toxins out of my internal organs or whether breathing through my left nostril stimulates my right brain.  But it’s true that after yoga, climbing steps doesn’t hurt, waiting for Greek carryout promised 15 minutes ago isn’t irritating, and on the drive home my brain doesn’t do anything except drive.  Am I an N of 1? Does yoga work? I’d answer this but working through the full BPP takes time.

So I took two shortcuts.  One, I searched for yoga and efficacy in PubMed and skimmed the titles of review articles.  No answer, or rather, too many answers: yoga for cancer, chronic low back pain, diabetes, cystitis, sleep disorders, hypertension, schizophrenia, depression, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and that was just on the first page.

The other shortcut was no better.  I searched the website of the National Academies Press, the publications of the National Academies, the independent scientists who undertake studies for the government.  Again, yoga showed up in studies on, among others, pain management, alternative medicine, improving bus operators’ health and teens’ sleep habits, obesity, fitness, Gulf War syndrome, astronaut care, and PTSD.

My personal rule for any one thing that affects so many different diseases and functions is that it affects none of them and completely fails the BPP.  Or else it affects something huge and general like mood or immune function or both, that in turn affects everything else.

In general, what with lots of kinds of yogas, lots of different diseases, lots of different kinds of studies, and difficult-to-quantify entities like mood or immune function, I’m giving up. I haven’t a clue whether yoga helps at all, let alone how.  You’re on your own here.  For myself, I’ll keep going, not because it’s not bullshit but because I like occasionally painless stairs and quiet brains.  Besides, I’m finally getting competent at the infant version of the Sun Salute and I’ve learned never to look at the other people in the class.  But I have no plans to advance to Beginning Yoga.

_________

photo: via Wellcome Images, Creative Commons license

The poetry of the morning walk. Murmuration.

By: | October 30, 2020

This morning I awoke to the kind of day that offers an easy excuse to skip the walk. The temperature gauge read -3F (-19C) when I crawled out of bed, and by the time I’d finished the tea and hot porridge my husband had prepared, it was still only -1F. But the dogs were eager, the sun was shining, and my day never feels quite right without our morning ritual.

And so we pulled on our snow boots, bundled up and headed out the door. The snow was squeaky cold, and the air had a briskness that put a hustle in our strides. Halfway up the hill to the lookout, a loud ruckus. Dave turned to me. “Stop. Shhhh…” We looked at each other. “Hear that?” A lush symphony of bird song. Starlings, from the sound of it. But where?

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How are you?

By: | October 28, 2020

Lately, I’ve had some form of this conversation several times a week:

Hello!
Hello!
How are you?
Good! How are you?
Pretty good. Or, you know, good considering…everything.
[chuckle] Oh yes, me too — fine considering it all.

Usually, this is the preamble to whatever the meat of our conversation will be. But a few days ago, the person I was talking with joked that we needed a new way to respond to this question in 2020 — something way to indicate a little verbal asterisk on “fine” — and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Why does it feel so fraught to answer this question? Personally, my discomfort lies in the clashing of norms. The philosopher Paul Grice established what came to be known as Gricean maxims of language, the implicit rules we’re all following in the course of conversation. One of those norms is the maxim of quality: you’re expected to tell the truth. Saying I’m fine or good feels like a lie these days! But also, there’s the maxim of relation, which compels you to say only what’s relevant to the conversation, as well as the maxim of quantity, which requires you to succinctly reply without giving too much information, so it feels wrong to tell a near-stranger about how deflating it is to read the news or the filling replacement I had to get from grinding my teeth too much in my sleep. Lose-lose!

Plus, the very question we’re being asked doesn’t actually mean what we think. Usually, in conversation, it’s safe to assume that words just mean what they mean, but “how are you” is a slightly different type of speech — linguists call it a “phatic expression.” Here’s one delightful characterization of phatic communication, from a 1992 paper:

talk that is aimless, prefatory, obvious, uninteresting,
sometimes suspect, and even irrelevant, but part of the
process of fulfilling our intrinsically human needs for
social cohesiveness and mutual recognition.

In other words, it’s conversational filler — a scripted interaction. In the same way we mindlessly reply “you’re welcome” when someone thanks us, we reflexively say “good” or “fine” when we’re asked how we are. (In fact, the other day, after I asked someone how he was and he replied and asked me in return and I replied, I then accidentally asked him again, just out of habit.) It’s weird to break out of that reflex.

This has always been an issue, of course. Anyone who’s gone through any kind of personal crisis — an illness, a family death, a breakup — knows the discomfort of cringing at the question, then lying through our teeth to keep the social peace. And when we don’t, we make it weird for everyone. The authors of that 1992 paper highlight an old linguist joke (the best kind of joke):

A: How are you?
B: I have bursitis; my nose is itching; I worry about my
 future; and my uncle is wearing a dress these days.

(While we're on the subject of linguistics jokes, a brief
 diversion: My husband, a former linguist, tells me that
 another common joke among linguists is to reply to one
 phatic expression with a mismatched reply from a different
 phatic expression, like: "How are you?" "Not much, you?")

Beyond the joke, this type of reply represents a real phenomenon: when things aren’t fine, we’re more likely to reply to how are you as if it’s an actual question, and not just phatic speech. A couple papers — that delightful 1992 one I keep referencing, and a 2003 paper geared towards nurses working in mental health — report that patients at care facilities being asked how are you sometimes assume the question is phatic, but also use it as a launching off point to talk about how they actually are. A patient might say, “Not so bad,” but then tack on a mention of their arthritis flaring up last Sunday, or how they’ve recently really been missing their late husband. The asker can do things to prime an honest response, too: the 2003 paper suggests caregivers ask follow-up questions like “what do you mean by ‘fine’?”

In the before times, we breezed through our little language rituals without much thought. But now, we’re wondering about the weight of those words: how are we? We’re living through a pandemic, we’re grappling with anti-Blackness and white supremacy, we’re on the cusp of an incredibly important election. None of us are fine and we all know it. So many other norms have been reset recently; why not this one? I, for one, would be delighted to know how you really are, warts and depression and anxiety and all, especially if it means we all feel a bit more sane for it.

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons; street art in Austin, TX by Daniel Johnston.)

Mounting evidence to the contrary

By: | October 26, 2020

If you asked me in the abstract, and I wasn’t thinking about it too hard, I might tell you that most people are a bit stupid. A bit provincial, a bit ignorant, a bit wrapped up in consumer culture. I might think, if not say, that your average Joe is a bit of a philistine, a little bit trite, that the sales figures for tabloids and Hallmark cards don’t lie.

But then there are the people I meet.

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