Less than a week after my eight-month-old started daycare, he spiked a fever. No big deal, I told myself. Maybe he was teething. Maybe he had picked up a cold. I tried not to spin out thinking about the third possibility. Babies get fevers all the time. COVID seemed like the least likely explanation.
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I have some new neighbors who many people would consider a nuisance. They show up at random times. They occasionally kick the rocks that line my driveway, and once they knocked off my downspout. They also eat garbage and leave a real mess.
These neighbors are mostly loners. They watch me, unblinking, and do not approach or say hello. Sometimes they run away at the sight of me, but usually they just look in my direction, make eye contact, sniff the air and then move along. I don’t view this as unfriendly, because I don’t want to meet them face to face, either.
You can tell from the photo that these neighbors are bears. But I still feel compelled to write about them as if you don’t know this, because I myself am still shocked by the fact of their existence. I have neighbor bears, at least seven of them, plus five cubs. They were here first. This is their home. I am the intruder here, and yet they watch me and tolerate me so patiently. They are teaching me so many things.
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When I was in college my department offered a course in comparative anatomy. The idea was that you could learn a lot by comparing and contrasting different species. I was reminded of that course while reading Emily Willingham’s new book, Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis, which is published tomorrow. The book offers a hilarious, enlightening and thought-provoking tour through the world of animal penises, but in the end, I can’t help thinking that the species we learn the most about is humans.
Emily is a friend of mine, and I’ve long admired her excellent work, so I was thrilled to receive an advance copy of her book. I invited her to LWON to talk about Phallacy and how she pulled it off.
Christie: What was the genesis of this book? How did you end up writing a book about animal penises?
Emily: I was working with my agent on an idea about the brain (which is now a book in progress) when I realized, somehow not having done so before, that I know a lot about penises. Not just from being around them, but as someone who did a postdoc in urology. So I sent her a quick email to that effect, and we were on the phone within the hour. It was amazing how fast it unfolded after that.
Christie: In the book’s introduction, you write about a childhood experience where a gardener at your grandmother’s house laid in wait for you, then got your attention and pulled down his pants and started masturbating. “He gestured to me, leering and threatening, trying to get me to come over to him,” you write. You were 12 and his behavior scared you, but you write that “He terrorized me, not his penis.” This seems like a running theme in the book: the consequence of our culture’s fixation on penises. Can you say a few words about the conflation of penises and masculinity?
Emily: Masculinity is a fluid concept, constrained and defined by sociocultural context. What is considered masculine is not the same across cultures, and what one culture might emphasize a lot can get little attention in another. That’s because people are so behaviorally and temperamentally variable from one person to the next, and culture changes over time and under different environmental influences. The human penis, on the other hand, is an anatomical structure that does not show this variability and complexity even in its function and is not a unique qualifier of masculinity. It is reductive to focus only on the penis as something that defines, categorizes, or damages a human being when our brains are the responsible parties.
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I went up to a rock art panel in southeast Utah the other day, one known as the Desecration Panel. The sandstone wall is long and repeatedly marked by petroglyphs of animals and human-like characters about 1,500 years old, what is called Basketmaker tradition. Several are terribly defaced, the damage relatively recent. One figure, which once looked like those to either side, has been transformed into a monster of its former self, rising from the rock as if the past were not over, no sharp line saying when it wraps up and the present begins.
Stories vary, but this panel was altered by a hatchet in the 1950s or 60s. You could call it vandalism, but that is too simple a term. The act was highly intentional, perhaps desperate. The most reputable sources tell of an illness that struck Navajo families around the middle of the last century. They went to a medicine man who said the solution was defacing this rock art, taking out certain figures. They must have been connected to the illness, having some bearing on it, an echo or a power from long ago.
A friend was with me at the panel, John Tveten, an ER doctor who works the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. His region is ramping down from being one of the more severe coronavirus hotspots in the country. Tveten said he hadn’t had to intubate anyone from the virus for the past week, a big change. He showed up straight off his shift, a plunge into the desert.
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There are a lot of things that are terrible about 2020, and if I try to think about all of them at once, or even to pick an important one to write about, my head will explode. So today I am picking the least important one: Mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes have always loved me. I’m just one of those people. If the mosquitoes realize that I am around, they go for me.
Did you know that mosquitoes are flies? They are. They’re in the order Diptera, along with house flies, fruit flies, hoverflies, and [shudder] botflies. Somewhere along the evolutionary timeline, mosquitoes elongated their mouthparts for the purpose of being jerks.
You know how mosquitoes make you itch? They slobber into you. That’s also how they give you diseases. They’re the worst.
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I wrote this October 1, 2018. I was thinking about getting older and how that meant getting stronger or more concentrated or something; and of course life imitating art as it does, this particular coffee shop morning conversation happened at the same time. I was also thinking about the Kavanaugh hearings and the extraordinary anger they provoked, especially in women.
And now, almost two years later, I’m still getting older and still impressed by the depth of women’s anger. But mostly I am more than ever aware of the need for strength and concentrated will, not only to help myself to keep going but also to help everybody around me who needs help and one way or another, everybody does. The big difference between two years ago and now is that the atmosphere is in every way already on fire.
One morning in my usual small coffee shop with the usual people, a young woman walks in, long straight hair of varying colors, flannel shirt, ill-advised leggings, you know the look. An old guy at the table of regulars – the regulars tend to have been living in the neighborhood for generations – says to the young woman, “How ya doin’, hon. You look tired.” Hon flips back her hair and says, “I am. I don’t want to go to work.” The old regular looks up at her and says, “But ya gotta. Ya gotta go to work.” “I don’t want to,” says Hon. A woman, back-combed maroon/pink hair and heavy on the eye liner, sitting next to the old regular and coeval with him, says “I know, hon. But it don’t get easier.” The old regular agrees, “No, it don’t.” “It gets harder,” says the older woman. Hon looks disbelieving. I, not sitting with the regulars but coeval with them, can’t keep my mouth shut: “You’ve gotta be strong,” I yell across the room, “you’ve gotta build your strength up.” The older woman nods her head at Hon, says, “You’re gonna need your strength.”
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The quietest place in America is fern-swaddled, lichen-draped, moss-blanketed. It is past the splintered tree, through the tilted spruce, beyond a damp pocket of bog, its precise location marked by a tiny cairn of polished riverstone. Its floor is a dappled jumble of deadfall and blowdown, nurse logs melting back into the earth even as they nourish salal and the orange half-moons of shelf fungi. Its walls are fir and spruce, their arms heavy, pulled earthward by sleeves of needles that strain the sunlight like a colander. Its roof is blue sky interrupted only by the parabolic swoop of a gray jay; absent other sound, you can hear the starched crisp flap of its wings.
The quietest place in America is quiet — conspicuously quiet, palpably quiet, soft and heavy as a sweater. When, last month, Elise and I made our pilgrimage to the spot — dubbed One Square Inch of Silence by its designator, the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton — we found nature itself holding its breath. No birds sung; no squirrels chattered their staccato alarm call (though when one descended from her tree, we could detect the rasp of her claws on bark). We heard the gentle susurrus of wind, the dopplered drone of a passing bee. Synthetic noises — the buzz of a zipper, the snap of a backpack buckle — were discordant and ear-achingly loud. The overhead passage of an airplane, after twenty minutes of blessed hush, felt like an unspeakable violation, the distant roar of its engines as bombastic and menacing as “Flight of the Valkyries” blaring from the helicopters in Apocalypse Now.
The quietest place in America is in Olympic National Park, 3.2 miles up the Hoh River Valley and another quarter-mile or so off the trail. Here is what Hempton, a guy who really knows how to listen, wrote about the place in his memoir:
Silence is a sound, many, many sounds. I’ve heard more than I can count. Silence is the moonlit song of the coyote signing the air, and the answer of its mate. It is the falling whisper of snow that will later melt with an astonishing reggae rhythm so crisp that you will want to dance to it. It is the sound of pollinating winged insects vibrating soft tunes as they defensively dart in and out of the pine boughs to escape the breeze, a mix of insect hum and pine sigh that will stick with you all day. Silence is the passing flock of chestnut-backed chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches, chirping and fluttering, reminding you of your own curiosity.
During the pandemic, the commodity of quiet grew briefly less scarce. “We heard birds,” marveled the mayor of a less raucous Paris; happy humpback whales may have produced fewer stress hormones in Glacier Bay. Now the din of the world is largely returned, and quiet has been relegated again to its One Square Inch. Visit it, if you can.
If 2020 has been good for anything except Purell sales, it’s been good for backyard observations. I’m fortunate to have two backyards–one in the woods, one in the ‘burbs–which gives me double the opportunity to get to know interesting critters. I’m populating this post with an array of creatures I’ve met (chased? trapped?) while hiding out from the world. (For more, see my previous Distractions posts!) My cellphone photography is not top notch, but it will have to suffice. Nature, thank you for giving me a delightful hands-on education this summer.
I’ll leave it there.
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