I am lately returned from Punta Tombo, the Magellanic penguin breeding colony in Argentina where I spend several weeks each year. One of my tasks there is to open the field season in late October, which means I spend a lot of the early days stumping around our designated study areas looking for study penguins. Over the years we have marked many thousands, but they come and go. Some die at sea during the austral winter, some decide not to breed in a given year, some change nests, and so on. The start of a season therefore basically amounts to an exercise in accounting, as we peer into burrows or under bushes to see who is where and whether or not we know them.
By the time I arrive, the penguins have been at the colony for a month or so. Males start to arrive in mid-September to establish or reclaim territories. Females come a couple of weeks later and soon lay their clutch of two eggs, after which the males leave for what we call the long incubation foraging trip. This trip can last a couple of weeks or more. In most cases when we find a study bird, then, it is a female sitting on her eggs alone, her mate being off at sea. But the sex ratio at Punta Tombo is heavily skewed towards males; there might be three or four for every female. This means many males who never got a mate are still hanging around.
Bachelor males, as we think of them, react to their predicament in different ways. They might solicit copulations from every single female that toddles across their visual plane. Many get into fights with other bachelors, brawling until they are soaked with blood. A few basically force themselves into a nest with a female and in effect pretend to be her mate, while she sits on her eggs and stares at him balefully; we call these males home invaders. Others, curiously, will sit on a rock as if it were an egg.
This post first ran in April of 2019 and the 6th grader I’m referring to is now in college and I’m leaving every possibility open to journey with them again.
I pulled my 6th grader out of school for a week to hit the road. I adore the public school teachers who spend time with my kid. They work their hearts out. But an oversized shoebox of a classroom is not enough to contain the curiosity or educational needs of kids who know there’s a real world out there that you can taste, touch, and smell.
In the 2010-11 school year, 51% of school districts nationwide reported eliminating field trips, according to a survey of the American Association of School Administrators. The numbers of field trips nationwide have continued to decline. They have been replaced by increased standardized testing.
The U.S. Travel Association conducted a study of 400 American adults, half having taken an educational trip away from home and school between the ages of 12 and 18, half who hadn’t. Regardless of gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, kids who went on trips had better grades, higher graduation rates from high school and college, and greater income. You see why I had to get him out. I’m a fan of school and good grades, but a much bigger fan of being on the ground. The brain works better out here.
We picked Phoenix, Arizona, as our location, and spent some of our days walking across the city using a chain of inner city mountain ranges, something that most people in this metropolitan area could do; free and relatively easy to access. Not a lot of discipline was involved, nothing particularly rigorous about our studies in local geology or the archaeological history of the region as we crossed through rocky saddles and climbed summit after summit, the city roaring around us. Our bodies worked. We sweated. We found gravel washes where we could lie in palo verde shade and nap.
The little creek that runs along the railroad tracks through Bellefonte, Pennsylvania is beautiful at this time of year, shallow water running clear and dark, banks and bare branches covered in snow. The creek is a tributary of Bald Eagle Creek, itself a tributary of the West Branch Susquehanna. It’s the place my husband first learned to paddle a kayak — something he started doing to impress girls, he says, but which eventually turned into a passion and, for a not-insignificant period of his life, an all-consuming purpose.
That’s the first waterfall I ever rode down, Pete tells me, pointing to a low-head dam in the middle of Bellefonte’s quaint downtown. We’re in a rented minivan, heat blasting, our son fast asleep in his carseat. Low-head dams are sometimes called drowning machines, due to the dangerous recirculating currents they form, and this one looks particularly nasty, with jagged branches and other debris sticking out of the foam.
Am I impressed by Pete’s teenage antics? Not particularly.
But I do love hearing about the summers he spent working for Wizzard’s Janitorial, his family business. The night jobs lasted until dawn, at which point he’d load up his boat, go kayaking for a few hours, then get right back in the truck to go do another cleaning job. On bingo nights he worked at the Lion’s Club; later, he got a job at the Penn State cafeteria. Any time he wasn’t working, (or in school???) it seems, he was on the water.
Cleaning, then kayaking. Kayaking, then cleaning. I love that Pete was so drawn to the river as a boy and young man, I tell him as we drive along the creek. Not really, he corrects me — in addition to impressing girls, he joined the local kayaking club to keep up with his best friend. Pete is not a strong swimmer — is, in fact, still terrified of water — so it was fear, not love, that drove his rapid progression. The better you are at kayaking, the less likely you are to drown. But it worked. By seventeen or so, Pete was really good at kayaking — good enough to have a (long) shot at qualifying for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
We park the minivan next to a slouching corrugated-tin boathouse with a pile of slalom kayaks in the back, half-buried in snow. They look sleek and sharp, ready to slice and dance. This is where Pete’s coach — a guy with a van who charged basically nothing to teach local kids how to boat — ran his little kayaking club. How delighted he must have been to see his protégé become an artist — because that’s what Pete looks like in photos: Someone whose every line, from spine to forearm, was formed in relationship with moving water.
But instead of going to Greece at 17, Pete joined the military. Just this evening, Pete’s father told me what it felt like when the Marines showed up at the front door to take his son away to bootcamp. A year ago, I couldn’t have imagined it. Now, with Will on my lap, I can.
In a post 9/11 blaze of (what he now describes as self-righteous, adolescent) certainty, Pete shipped off to Iraq. Years later, after leaving the military, his childhood pastime grew into something closer to obsession. He moved to my hometown, in California, to be closer to the steep rivers that plunge off Sierra Nevada granite. He committed to an almost ascetic life of river-chasing, living out of a battered old truck with shoddy brakes, and had only just upgraded to a more functional red Tacoma when I met him — and dismissed him as just another dirtbag kayaker. Pete was cute, but too one-dimensional (cute) to hold my interest, I thought. As someone with an established weakness for complexity (in both life and men), I feared that Pete lacked layers.
Now, nearly ten years later, we are driving through the gently rolling hills of Pennsylvania — the first time I have traveled with Pete to his home town a few miles from Bellefonte. It is stunningly beautiful, even if the snow does looks like it’s been scraped over stubble. The sunset — reflected on cloud, reflected on snow-dusted cornfields — makes me catch my breath. Just like it does in my own tiny hometown, though, I can also sense how this expanse of empty space could make you claustrobic with loneliness.
Here, rivers are more than waterways — they are companions. Visiting the little creeks that shaped Pete’s adolescence is like meeting his parents; it helps me understand where he came from, and something about who he is now — someone for whom rivers supplied not just fun or adventure, but an essential connection.
Pete has almost stopped kayaking since Will was born 18 months ago, a change so drastic that those who know him have started whispering about interventions. I haven’t spent much time on the river either, but it feels like a less dramatic change for me — perhaps because I was never as serious about boating as Pete has always been, or because I have a greater variety of hobbies and interests.
One day, when I have Will to myself in Bellefonte, I take him on a little 30-minute train ride that follows the creek. We pass the kayak shack and the slalom course, and Will presses his nose and hands against the glass. “That’s where your dad learned to kayak!,” I tell him, pointing out the boats and ducks and little rapids.
As we chug along, I realize that unlike some of Pete’s friends, I am not particularly worried about his recent retreat from rivers. Maybe that’s because I have come to appreciate his knack for being fully immersed in whatever he’s doing at any given moment, something I initially mistook as a certain lack of depth.
Right now Pete is doing two big things: Teaching high school and being Will’s dad. I could worry more about that, I suppose… but no — I honestly can’t. Come to think of it, my chock-full life with Pete and Will has somewhat curbed my old appetite for complexity, or at least my tendency to make things more complicated than they need to be. It is enough — at least for now — to be fully immersed, together.
For a few years now, I’ve been going through my annual list of books read and picking my favorites. (Here’s 2024 and 2022. I guess I didn’t share my list in 2023, though I did contribute to some of LWON’s best of the year lists.)
This year, wow! I read a lot of really great books. It was really hard to choose, but I managed to pare my favorites list down to a dozen, starting with my top four.
Terrestrial Historyby Joe Mungo Reed Big thanks to Lila for recommending this; I loved it too! This book really stayed with me. The novel follows four generations of a single family —mother (Hannah), son (Andrew), his daughter (Kenzie) and her son (Roban). Hannah is a scientist in our present day who’s working to make a fusion reactor. As climate change accelerates, society starts to collapse and there’s a private effort to colonize Mars. Andrew dedicates himself to pushing for collective action to save Earth, while Kenzie joins the effort to start again on a new planet. I hadn’t heard of Reed, but I wasn’t surprised to learn that he has a master’s in philosophy and history. The book does a fine job of exploring ethical and philosophical issues raised by climate change and the prospect of human settlements on Mars. There’s also an ongoing tension between working together as a society for the collective good versus privatizing the future. The character development is outstanding and I especially loved the way Mungo Reed depicts and unfolds the mother-son and father-daughter relationships. There’s some really beautiful writing. The book left me feeling both deeply sad but also hopeful in a surprising way.
Orbitalby Samantha Harvey This was another novel that really captivated me. It takes place over the course of a single 24-hour period, and tells the story of six astronauts aboard the space station, which makes 16 orbits around the Earth during this time. That’s about the extent of the plot. Nothing much happens, and yet…the novel holds so much. We get stories from the astronauts’ lives on Earth, but at its core this book is a loving tribute to planet Earth and all its majesty. The writing is absolutely gorgeous as it describes the awe of our planet and grief for loved ones but also for the damage being done to our home in the universe.
Ship Feverby Andrea Barrett I’m slowly working my way through Barrett’s back catalogue and loving every word she writes. This collection of short stories won her the National Book Award in 1996, and rightly so. The common threads in these stories are science and love. Many of the stories take place in the nineteenth century, and Carl Linnaeus (“father of taxonomy”) appears in one of them. There’s also a story of love and betrayal and the title story follows a young doctor treating Irish immigrants to Canada during the typhoid epidemic of 1847. It’s a grim historical event, beautifully told. She captures something essential to the human condition.
Heart the Loverby Lily King I’m not ashamed to admit this book made me cry. I absolutely loved my first Lily King novel, Writers & Lovers, and I think I loved this one even more. The novel tells the story of three college friends and their sort of love triangle. In college, they all yearn for a life in literature, but only the protagonist follows through, becoming a successful novelist. The narrative begins when they are in college, then fast forwards to the characters in middle life, when the dreams of their youth have met the realities of adulthood. This is a story about friendship, love, regret and forgiveness. The characters are complex, flawed, and easy to love. It turns out (revealed in the last line, but only to those in the know) that the protagonist of this novel is also the protagonist of Writers & Lovers, so after finishing this, I went back and re-read that book and loved it just as much the second time.
My very healthy father died unexpectedly at Thanksgiving in 2023. In what turned out to be the last 3 1/2 years of his life, he and I went on a lot of hikes. My parents lived close to the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, and, in the times of pandemic lockdown, it was a good place to get outside. It was close by, quiet, and not crowded.
I went back to our favorite trailhead for the first time on a sunny, windy Sunday in March 2024. (Once or twice there was another car there and my dad would joke about whether we’d be able to find a spot.) We walked this stretch of trail over and over, and watched it change.
During one of the pandemic winters, there was a big winter storm and some trees fell, and other trees and debris got stuck in them, and the stream found a way around, cutting farther into the bank, pushing into the broad sandy flat at the bottom of the ravine. After a heavy rain the banks would crumble more and more trees would lose their grip on the sandy soil. Every time we went, it had changed.
I cried that day in March, nearly two years ago now, because my dad wasn’t there to see the changes in the log jam. It was even wider. Even more trees had fallen in.
Now it’s probably been a year since I’ve been to visit the log jam myself. Who knows what has changed since then. Somehow, the world keeps going without us.
Dreading the coming face-plant into January? I am. Cold, dark mornings followed by cold, dark evenings, chintzy decor strung up well past its prime, dirty snow (if any snow at all) heaped under dreary parking lot lighting, long gift-return lines. Nature brown and bare.
Plus, the state of the world. THE STATE OF THE WORLD. The season of long, sunny days can’t get here fast enough.
Until then, one must seek escape. Like many, I am prone to look for it where it’s most readily available. You know the place.
Which leads me to ask, why do rug-cleaning videos on TikTok make me feel a little bit better about the ugly season, the general state of things? Maybe you’ve seen them, usually posted by cleaning companies to drum up business. They go like this: A man (it’s always a man) in black rubber boots unrolls a dirty carpet onto a concrete floor in some warehouse, and the thing is not just dirty but DIRTY, embedded with filth like it’s been marinating in crude oil and sewage in an underground pit for decades. But this is a story of hope, so the man wields a carpet cleaning wand and assorted spinning brushes and bottles of blue soap and a hose and a squeegee. At 3X speed we get to watch him soap up, scrub, rinse, and squeegee the thing over and over, the water starting out mud black and gloopy and ultimately running sudsy white and then crystal clear. The colors and design of the rug slowly appear as when someone peels back old carpet to find gorgeous tile underneath. In the end, the rug looks light, fresh, and new.
Lest you think that only old books can be bothered to note the fonts in which they’re printed, the latest (Sep., 2025) Thursday Murder Club’s opening pages say it’s set in Adobe Jenson Pro, which has been designed by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller, bless her.
And in the spirit of font-noting if not the letter, J.L. Carr’s splendid books open with an ode to the printing office, “the Crossroads of Civilization, Refuge of all the Arts against the Ravages of Time. From this place Words may fly abroad not to perish as Waves of Sound but fix’d in Time, not corrupted by the Hurrying Hand but verified in Proof. Friend, you are on Safe Ground. This is a Printing Office.”
I think what they’re all getting at is, after some public person wrote this book and some less visible person edited it, some completely invisible person put together the physical book. This latter person did the book carefully and lovingly, and here presents it to you, and hopes you like it.
This first ran December 13, 2019.
You finish the book, you don’t want it to be over with, there’s still one more printed page, so you read it. “A Note on the Type,” it says, and heads off into the highest weeds: the name of the font in which the book is printed, then the font’s forebears, its continuing history, its inventor, its inventor’s history, and sometimes its virtues. This is blindingly irrelevant, unsatisfying, and irritating, and so on purpose I never read it.
Until the book I just finished, Imogen Gower’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, when I hit the “Note on the Type” page and kept on reading:
This book is set in Caslon, a typeface named after Willliam Caslon (1692-1766).
Aaaand it just goes on from there, the better part of a page. The voice was slightly prissy and assumed I wanted to know a great deal about the William Caslon and his adventures in, as it said, “typefounding.” Caslon founded a family of typefounders but before that, he was apprenticed to an engraver of gunlocks (and of course gun barrels too) in London, then opened his own shop for silver chasing. I don’t know the meanings of: typefounding, gunlock, silver chasing, and a part I left out, bookbinders’ stamps. Caslon’s skill in cutting letters – I don’t know what that is either – attracted two printers whose names I’ll furnish if you need me to and who backed him to buy typefounding equipment. The fonts Caslon cut for a folio edition of John Selden – of whom I’ve never heard – “excited great interest” and thereafter Caslon just went from strength to strength. His font has many virtues, each ennumerated, and its “general effect is clear and open but not weak or delicate.”
WHY is this interesting? WHY? And who thinks I want to know? And who in the name of the sweet baby Jesus writes these things?
The writer Tom Stoppard died on November 29. We’re re-posting this essay (which originally appeared on June 10, 2011) in his honor. The references to dates (e.g., “A few months ago”) remain as in the original post.
The 16-year-old student has an idea, but she doesn’t have the maths to support it. She does, however, have a drawing. She submits it to her tutor. He examines it, then delivers his verdict.
“This is not science,” he says. “This is story-telling.”
The scene is from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. The setting is an English country house in 1812. The student has been wondering why a steam engine can not re-energize itself forever, and she believes she has arrived at the answer: heat loss. And, yes, she understands the implications of a physics whose arrow of time goes in only one direction.
“So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold,” her tutor says. By “Newtonian universe” he means not just the cosmos but the whole clockwork kit and caboodle.
