Back in January of 2014, I wrote a guest post for LWON about a morning with a dog and here it is again, only slightly fixed up.
A neighbor dog and I walk up a snow-crusted hill together. Glossy black lab mad for sticks and balls, he hasn’t forgotten how to travel with a human in the woods. He ranges forward and back, and side to side, sniffing and sussing the hilly thickets.
Not every day is it a mountain lion, or a bear pawing the ground. Most days I see only piñons and juniper trees, maybe a jay flying by, or a deer staring back at me. High mesas in Western Colorado each have their own daily surprises. Today is the dog.
I am not used to traveling with a domestic animal, unless you count my kids who also clobber the ground and run from side to side. I’d just moved with my family into a house tucked into a geographic platform extending above the North fork of the Gunnison River. The morning’s walk is unfamiliar, these hills new to me. Having a dog tickles an old sensation in my head, going somewhere new with an animal at your side.
I’ve been working lately to get a handle on where awe fits into our lives, especially the intersection of awe and science. In my journeys, I met someone who sheds light on the awe appeal of science fiction and how it has changed over the history of filmmaking.
Michael Backes worked in Hollywood for decades. He’s done everything from co-writing screenplays with Michael Crichton to consulting on the science in the Spider Man franchise, to advising on the logic of Iron Man’s suit. He has worked with Steven Spielberg, Tom Clancy, and James Cameron, and he co-founded the American Film Institute’s Digital Media Studies program. Over time, he has seen the progression of audience expectations.
Eight years ago, I wrote a post about my struggle to decide whether to have a child. Now I have two. The latest addition, who is almost eight months old, is a determined, wiggly, often screaming bundle of chub. He is wonderful. He is awful. He defies description. This is a letter I wrote in 2015 to that previous version of myself, the one who had no babies. I wanted to help her understand what she’s in for. I should have read this again before arrival of number two, because it turns out you forget.
Motherhood doesn’t begin like you think it will. There isn’t any rhythmic breathing or sweating or straining. No pain or pushing. No labor at all. Instead it begins with a scalpel. A doctor obscured by a blue surgical drape mutters, “baby out,” and another says “well, hello there!” And then comes the wail, both terrifying and awesome. Suddenly you are responsible for the survival of seven pounds of fragile flesh and bone. You marvel at her helplessness. She has all the parts, but none of them work well. Except her vocal cords. At first, the nurses (bless them!) are always there. They show you how to feed her. They change the baby and bathe her. They swaddle her just so. They give you pain pills, the strong ones.
The slow stretch of river where I like to swim gleamed copper yesterday morning, reflecting sunlight tinted red by wildfire smoke. I sat and drank my coffee as the sun rose, watching the silhouette of a hummingbird zip across the dun-colored sky.
Four mergansers cruised across the pond then dove underwater, leaving barely a ripple behind them. “Must be nice to be a boat, a plane, and a submarine,” a friend who’d stopped to watch the ducks said. We chatted for a minute about loss and transition, about the hundreds of too-close-to-home wildfires in California and the triple digit heatwave fueling them. “I came here to swim,” I told him. “That’s how I’m dealing with this.”
The water in the river stays cold all summer, stored in an upstream reservoir. When the weather gets hot, dam operators release more water to generate power for air conditioners. This week, as you’ve probably heard, temperatures vaulted past historic records, and the demand for power threatened to overwhelm the state’s electricity system, prompting rolling blackouts. To keep our energy bill down and preserve my sanity I’ve been attempting to remain in a state of near-hypothermia, starting each day with a cold morning swim.
This morning I stood at the water’s edge for several minutes, debating whether to go all the way in. The water was cold enough to make my foot bones ache, and I dreaded the brain-freeze that would come when I submerged my head.
Then a hot, hair dryer-like wind blew up the canyon. I caught the scent of late-August blackberries, so ripe now they’ll fall apart in your fingers as you pick them, and of evening primroses, a fragrant, pale yellow flower that opens at sunset and closes at dawn. The chorus of birds got louder; I set my stopwatch and dove in.
The most striking thing about Konrad Steffen is not his accolades as one of the world’s leading cryosphere researchers, but how he could light a cigarette in a 60-mile-per-hour gale screaming across the ice. He’d duck into his shoulder with a lighter and in a second or two reappear with a glowing cherry. He held the cigarette with his teeth so it wouldn’t blow away.
Koni, as he was known, was as much a vivid, epic character as he was a steadfast climate scientist ringing the alarm that Greenland ice is departing much quicker than expected or modeled. He ran a small research camp built in 1990 on the Greenland Ice Sheet where his monitoring stations have directly tied warming episodes to ice movement as it spills toward the sea.
This was where he died a little over a week ago. He was last seen at his camp walking off to perform a task on the ice, and he never returned. It appears that he fell into a crevasse and drown in the meltwater below. He was 68.
It’s the last day of summer for us, so I’m taking my summer feet to the beach. This post ran in August 2019. This year, school will look a little different, because we’ll all be barefoot.
At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There is a particular stretch of asphalt between the university parking lot and the beach that is especially pitted, and the sharp dark bits of broken ground make me cringe even before I step onto the road.
I often choose a different route to the beach, down the steep steps that are soft wood, worn by salt air and waves. But one of my friends likes to walk the bumpy path. While I dodge back and forth, taking a few steps on a curb, another on a small island of sidewalk, she charges straight down the bumpy asphalt. “I’m working on my summer feet,” she told me once. How good would that be, I thought, to have soles so thick that I didn’t feel anything?
But so far, I don’t have them. Even though the climate is mild here, I often wear shoes, even boots, in the winter. Even right now, in the dog days of summer, I’m typing this and I still have on the running shoes that I’ve been wearing since biking to school this morning. Hang on—okay, now they’re off. Socks, too. There’s the parquet floor now, smooth and just slightly cool, under my soles.
When I remember, I do try to go barefoot. It does feel relaxing. I do like feeling things like this, the texture of the ground, its temperature. There’s a sidewalk parking strip down the street with smooth, round stones that feels like a free acupressure session. And there’s such relief, on that pathway down to the beach, once my feet finally reach the sand.
But my feet never seem to get tougher. The gravel that runs along the side of the house always presses into my skin like tiny tacks, and I hop and skitter and hiss nasty things at it when I go to put the bikes away. And my feet accumulate all sorts of ugly things—black spots of tar, bee stings, moon-like calluses on the balls and heels.
Once school started, I found my shoes again. It’s too far to walk barefoot to school, and while I love seeing barefoot people riding beach cruisers, the idea of putting skin on metal pedals seems sketchy and uncomfortable. I have to bring out other protective layers, too–sunscreen and full lunchboxes, fresh school supplies and new socks. An encouraging yet increasingly insistent voice that gets homework in backpacks and bodies out the door. The promises that it will really be more fun at school than at home, where I’ll just be boringly typing things on the computer.
Humans have spent most of their existence without shoes. Now a lot of people wear them most of the time. But this means most people don’t have a chance to develop thickened soles; their feet are already cushioned from the earth’s rougher spots. So a group of researchers on several continents decided to look at whether calluses act differently than shoes when it comes to how well feet can sense the ground while walking.
The researchers compared shod participants to those who spend most of their time barefoot. They thought the calluses might reduce how well a foot could sense the ground beneath it, but it turned out that although calluses can provide a layer of protection against thorny patches, calloused feet were just as sensitive as those that spent most of their time in shoes.
I thought it was just more barefoot time that would help me get my summer feet, to feel nothing as I charged across the parking lot to the beach, to whistle as I walked on the gravel. I thought after six years of back-to-school picnics and pencils and pictures that this would feel like more of the same, that they would all run toward the classrooms at the sound of the bell, that I would run away. There would be nothing sharp that could penetrate us, that would make us stop and curl up and cry.
The calluses are there, trying to do their job of protecting me. Still, I’m tender about the end of summer, even with my thicker soles. Maybe they were never meant to stop me from feeling, but instead are making sure that I keep walking, feeling it all.
*
Image by Flicker user ɘsinɘd under Creative Commons license, 8/27/19
Last weekend Elise and I spent three days backpacking in the vicinity of Pyramid Pass, a high notch in the stony spine of the Idaho Selkirks. With a couple of friends in tow (don’t worry: absolutely no hugging!), we crested the pass and descended to a teacup lake nested in a bowl of granite and stunted firs. Like many tiny alpine lakes, this one looked low-nutrient and barren, a sapphire more beautiful than alive. Around sunset, though, fish began to dimple the surface, sending out concentric rings as they rose to emerging midges. I strung my rod and tossed out a fly.
The fish that hit my ant was small — palm-length, tops — and came to hand with a few gentle tugs. It was no trout. Its scales, notably large for its diminutive body, gleamed chrome, and a fine smattering of black spots freckled its gill plates. In the fading light, I mistook it for a mountain whitefish, a common bottom-feeder. I slid it back into the lake, felt its tail kick against my hand like a heartbeat, and cast again.
Not until the third fish did I recognize my misdiagnosis.As I disengaged the hook from the neat O of its mouth, its dorsal fin,which had been tucked snug against its back,rose and billowed, like a mainsail unfurling in a stiff breeze.With a ginger forefinger, I extended the dorsal to full, spectacular mast. A sunburst of spots — lilac, burgundy, cinnamon — decorated the proud appendage. This was no whitefish, I realized with sudden wonder.This was an Arctic grayling.
I doubt I need to elaborate to make you love these itty bitty frogs that, on a dark and steamy night some weeks ago, emerged from our pond and pipped away (my term; they just weren’t big enough to properly “hop”) into the unknown. They didn’t even mind me with my flashlight, sitting on the slate encouraging them to land on my hand, which some of them did without complaint. Yes, I petted them. I PETTED THEM. (With very gentle taps on the head. There wasn’t much to them.)
Knucklefroglet. I’ve named her Penelope.
Gray tree frogs, which, as you can see, appear quite green early on, are happily suburban where I live. Last year and the year before, there was a single male–maybe even the one in the picture below–who found himself a divot in the pond’s biggest boulder that amplified his calls stunningly. From his little stone stage he croaked and croaked, and I felt sorry for him because, loud as he was, I never saw a female and didn’t notice any tadpoles as the summer went on.
It all changed this year. There were suddenly two males, and then three, four, maybe five. At night they’d take up the same positions, one here, one across the way, one in the tree above, one inside the rock, to play their favorite game: “Who can split the eardrum?” It was adorable at first. Now, I’m just so tired. Everyone on our street knows the frogs for their raspy (and somehow piercing) vibrato, and one night the man next door, who is a bit of an ass, if I may say so, placed a ladder against our shared fence and leaned way over onto our side, hanging above the pond wielding a broom like a sword–which he proceeded to slash at the water. When my husband lit him up with a flashlight, expecting to see a raccoon or some other wildlife splashing around, he explained himself thusly: “TOO! MUCH! NOISE!”
Daddy “The Screamer” Gray Tree Frog, and Lurker.*
As a result of all the males showing off, we had tadpoles. Lots of ’em. (Females of this species may deposit 1,000-2,000 eggs in the water. We didn’t have THAT many ‘poles, but there were quite a few.) I checked on them daily, observing their dramatic change from sperm-like swimmers to proper miniature frogs. (That in-between stage, when newly sprouted legs dangle like mittens clipped to a kid’s sleeve, is my favorite.)
And then, once they all seemed more frog than fish (which takes around 50 days in this species), the whole show came to a close. Over a couple of nights, the tiny frogs, some still sporting half tails, fled their aquatic phase one by one.
For the parent frogs, it was mission accomplished.
The most precious froglet ever. I call her Halftail.
And yet, even with their DNA scattered widely (the froglets have appeared in various other yards since emergence, according to neighborhood communications), the adult males are still at it, battling it out behind our house, keeping us on the edge of sleep until they finally shut up after midnight. (It’s usually about a four-hour chorus.) One of them barks like a seal, and I thought maybe it was another species joining the conversation. But I’ve decided it’s a gray tree frog’s special aggressive war cry. And that one mad warrior’s voice certainly stands out, especially when I have a migraine.
I suspect the pond will go quiet soon enough, when these uber competitors finally realize there’s no sex left to be had. The girls are done with you for now, you boneheads.
But dang, those froglets were adorable. I could hardly stand how cute they were! It was totally worth the late nights to witness their development and emergence. I do wonder, though, if next year even more males will find their way to our yard to take up a post around the pond, and whether the volume will finally reach unbearable.
I guess there’s always the broom.
Totally unrelated toad, for your ‘phib viewing pleasure. She’s very friendly, happy to come out and snatch a worm if you dangle one. We called her Sebastian because why not.
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*It’s not a great photo of Daddy, but I took it blindly, hanging upside-down at the end of the rock shining a flashlight into the “cave” with one hand and trying not to drop my cell phone from the other. That second frog back there? Total surprise. A competitor, I’d guess. Perhaps they wrestled. Sorry I missed that.
