Light, far away

By: | July 22, 2020

It was an unusual scene, last Tuesday night in a suburb of Washington, D.C. My mom and I were in lawn chairs on the edge of a closed road. My dad was wandering around with his camera on a tripod. A friend sat 10 feet farther down the road in her lawn chair. Strangers came and went, a little farther away. We all gazed off to the west, over the rare suburban open space.

We were looking for the comet. We arrived soon after sunset and, cheered by the nearly-cloudless western horizon, settled down to wait, with cookies. Wood thrushes sang from the woods. As the sunlight faded, the fireflies came out, puttering around above the road’s grassy shoulder. The lights came on in front of us. A few bats flew over. Eventually it got dark enough to start looking seriously.

This was only the second night Comet NEOWISE was visible in the evening, and one of the nights when it was brightest, but it was still very dim. My friend spotted it first; I eventually caught on to the faintest slash in the evening sky, the kind of dim light that disappears if you look directly at it. It got brighter as the sky got darker. Even after full dark, about 10:30 p.m., it was still a very dim slash. But unmistakable: the comet and its tail, receding after its swing around the sun.

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Hoot

By: | July 20, 2020

We have been going out to see the comet—to try to see the comet, that is—almost every night for the past week. I read articles to figure out where to find it, beneath the Big Dipper after sunset.  Most of the articles call it a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and it’s true. Comet NEOWISE won’t be back again for another 6,800 years.

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Distractions II: This Stunning Dragonfly

By: | July 17, 2020

My latest happy distraction is the candy-stick of a male dragonfly that has taken over my backyard pond. A gorgeous blue dasher, he zips (dashes!) in circles around me, hovers remarkably close to my face like some tiny drone, then finally alights on a twig nearby, watching me—truly watching–with his cartoonishly large compound eyes. His funny little face twitches periodically, as though the whole thing is blinking. When perched, he’ll curl his abdomen up toward the sky, an “obelisk” posture that I thought surely was a gesture akin to the middle finger (these guys are super territorial), but which instead helps regulate body temperature by reducing the surface area exposed to the sun.

The dasher’s Latin name, Pachydiplax longipennis, means “long winged.” (Why, what were you thinking?) Its wings are actually pretty standard sized for dragonflies.

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A Carless Biergarten

By: | July 15, 2020

The kitschiest town in Washington nestles in the Cascades, two hours east of Seattle and three west of Spokane, where the Wenatchee River elbows its way through a cleft in snow-veined mountains. This is the picturesque home of Leavenworth, a faux-Bavarian town that has gone all-in on a year-round Oktoberfest vibe. The ersatz chalets boast angled roofs and baroque moldings, the beer gardens — sorry, biergartens — serve bratwurst, and lederhosen is de rigueur. Two thousand people allegedly live in Leavenworth, but it seems always to crawl with tourists, which, of course, is the point: The Bavarian theme was the brainchild of two Seattle-based diner owners who, in the 1960s, whipped up the ploy in hopes of transforming a decaying timber town into a recreational hub. In that endeavor, they succeeded, and then some. If a Christmas card were a physical location, it would be Leavenworth.

This all makes it sound like I’m disdainful, when in fact I think Leavenworth is good, clean, campy fun — who doesn’t love “The Sound of Music,” and besides, better an artificial culture than none at all. Mostly I admire how wholeheartedly it’s committed to the gimmick: Even, like, the local NAPA Auto Parts franchise writes its name in an ornate Ye Olde font. 

So, when Elise and I found ourselves camped in the Cascades earlier this summer, I made a point of dragging us into town, motivated by morbid curiosity as well as nostalgia. Surely, I thought, Leavenworth would be lifeless — how could the consummate tourist town possibly thrive during modernity’s worst travel season? As it turns out, you can’t keep good American tourists down. From a distance, the streets seemed to be packed as ever with milling Seattleites, licking droopy ice cream cones and gulping Hefeweizens with unmasked mouths. As we walked toward the main drag, my wife and I exchanged dubious glances: Were we heading into an incipient hot zone? 

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Why Potsherds Matter

By: | July 13, 2020

I broke a pot the other day, not just any pot but a ceramic Acoma vessel I inherited after my father died decades ago. I snatched something from the shelf, barely tapping the little seed jar, its mouth big enough for a finger, maybe two. It barely rocked one way and then the other, energy transferring, going off balance. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something midair, wondered for half a second what I’d set free. Then, a singular pop on the floor. I knew. 

The term is ‘potsherd’. Not shard. It is its own category of broken thing.

I’ve been looking at potsherds for a long time, parts of the desert strewn and sprinkled with pieces of broken jars, bowls, and cups from the early millennia AD, Pueblo ancestry. A well of generations passed vessels back and forth, water carried, food served. Trade routes moved ceramics through passes and along rivers, northern Mexican wares found in Utah, Colorado wares found in southern Arizona. Some places are carpeted in broken pieces. Walking onto a ruined pueblo at the edge of the Hopi reservation, there’s hardly a spot of soil. The ground is made of them.

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What the Kids Are Doing

By: | July 10, 2020

I walk out my front door after dinner to check on the night, and before breakfast to check on the day.  And every now and then, on the porch table, or the porch floor, or the front sidewalk is an arrangement — rocks, berries, plants of some sort. They’re not put there at random, they’re definitely arranged, each rock or plant or berry chosen according to some criterion (pretty color, shiny, whatever was handy) and put down next to another rock or plant according to another criterion (circles, lines, rows, whatever looked nice).  I started taking pictures of them.

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The many languages of Dog

By: | July 8, 2020

This post originally appeared in February, 2020. I resurrected it because I figure we could all use a dog hug, in this pandemic time of not hugging folks outside our households.

When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine equivalent of pyrotechnics: Leaping, writhing, twirling, lip curling, a quiver full of hyena sounds. Once, after a 13-day visit to Alaska, she reached my face in a single bound from the floor, her nose making high-speed contact with my mouth. Proof once again that love can draw blood—mostly metaphorical, sometimes literal.

Each time her affections explode into uncontrolled demonstration, I imagine what it would be like if humans greeted each other this way. The teenager who bags groceries jumping and singing at the sight of a familiar customer. The host of a dinner party flinging a saucy spoon into the air at the arrival of his guests, spattering the ceiling with a Jackson Pollack arc of pureed tomatoes and olive oil. Friends, upon unexpected sight of each other from opposite sides of the street, sprinting into an intersection to embrace.

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How to Live with Uncertainty: Find Joy in Elephant Heads

By: | July 6, 2020

This is my first pandemic, and I had no idea what to expect. Which is sort of on theme, because the the overarching feeling I’ve experienced inside the COVID-19 pandemic is uncertainty. Will I get sick? Will my loved ones die? How long will this ordeal last? Will we ever have a vaccine or a cure? If so, how soon? None of these questions have certain answers. 

By late March, it was clear to me that a lot of people were going to die. I’d been reading the scientific reports, and I have journalist friends on the infectious disease beat who were freaking the fuck out. I was scared. A lot of people were going to die (more than 112,000 in the U.S. alone, as of July 2, per the CDC) and I wondered which of my loved ones would be among them. What if it was me?

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