On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow but would call me again before that. She really wanted to connect.
I am notoriously terrible about clearing out my voice mails. I can’t bear to erase them. I have a habit of keeping at least one at all times from the people I love most. The content of the message isn’t important. It’s that I can hear their voice, catch them in the midst of ordinary life, before they are dead. I’ve learned that you never know when someone will be dead.
I once heard a story about a phone booth in Japan where people who lost friends and family in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake go to talk to their lost loved ones. I would use a phone booth like that.
I still occasionally listen to the voice mail I saved from my friend Mona before she died several years ago. I have heard her say that she’s just returned from Tai Chi class dozens of times. In the months after she died, I also texted her more than once. Sometimes I would forget, if only for a split second, that she was dead and feel compelled to follow through on my impulse to tell her something on my mind. Other times, I just needed to pretend for a moment that she wasn’t really gone.
When I got the news that Kristina had died, I had just placed a letter to her in my mailbox. A few days earlier, a loved one had sent a message out saying that Kristina was turning inward and it was now best to send wishes and love by mail rather than text or phone. This was my second note to her in the previous two weeks, and I’m not sure if she ever read the first. After I received the news that she had passed, I stood on the front porch and stared at the little red flag raised on my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I could not make myself go retrieve the letter.
You want travel to change you. Right? But then you come back home, and it’s back to your regular life, and the smells and sounds and memories and surprises drift away, and there you are, back the way you were.
This spring, I spent nearly two months on a pilgrimage, visiting 88 temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku. I know, I keep going on about it. It was, I hope, life-changing.
But how do you change a life? And why? I have good friends and interesting hobbies. I sing regularly. I live with a beloved man and dog. And yet I felt mild dread about going back home and having life be exactly like it was. What did I do this whole thing for, this two-month odyssey of tired feet and hard mattresses, if I was just going to end up back on the couch, scrolling on my phone?
Here’s a list I started halfway through the trip and added to as I went along, trying to capture some of what made the experience so rich and good – a mix of suggestions for home and descriptions of pilgrim life:
Walk a lot until I get a job
Walk in rain
Carry things
Stay off Instagram and Facebook
Knowing what I’m doing – a plan/goals
Being outside
New experiences
Learning
See people in person
So how am I doing on this list, a month after my return?
I took one six-mile wander in the first week or two, but other than that it’s mostly dog walks and then the walking you do when you get around mostly by public transit. Which is a fair amount of walking, but it’s not going to add up to 150 miles a month. I do lean a little more toward choosing to walk even if it’s raining. Carrying? I haven’t been carrying any more than is necessary – certainly not the 15-20 pounds I sometimes had while hiking.
Facebook and Instagram are my preferred social media apps, and it was important to me to actually be on my pilgrimage, not immersing myself in the news and outrages from home. Or, just as bad, living for my audience and their reactions. I did eventually go back to Facebook to get advice from the group devoted to the pilgrimage, and re-installed Instagram to keep up with people I met along the way. After a break, it was easy to see that opening social media is like settling into a warm bath of my friends’ and acquaintances’ opinions and anxieties. I have plenty of my own opinions and anxieties!
That perspective was easy to hang onto when I was engaged with the trip. But here I am, back at home, letting the old obsession creep back in.
The pilgrimage had a goal, and it took my whole dang body and mind every day. It wasn’t easy; planning my hybrid of walking, bus, and train meant bopping back and forth between a paper map covered in post-it notes, a guide book, Google Maps, the amazing Henro Helper app, and a Japanese navigation app – that last one because I now know there are bus routes that Google Maps isn’t aware of. I needed all of these to figure out how far to go each day, where to eat, whether I needed to carry lunch, and where I could stay.
I was also exercising my brain by speaking Japanese every day and constantly learning new words and characters. And I was remembering how great it is to interact with people face to face. (I’ve been talking to more strangers in my neighborhood, and if you’re in the D.C. area with free time on weekdays and I haven’t already gotten in touch about coffee, I’m sorry about that.)
Here at home, what is my goal? What is my project? To teach my dog a new trick? To live well until death? Finding a job is a project, but it’s not as fun as working out how to visit all of temples 60-65, keeping in mind the weather, the huge climb to temple 60, the opening hours of the temple offices, the limited transportation options, and the availability of lodgings. Solution: 63, 60, 61, 64, 62; three days, two buses, one inn; and a smidge of hitchhiking. It was awesome.
There are ways that I’ve brought the pilgrimage home with me physically. Not just my stamp book, filled with red stamps and black calligraphy, or the heaps of souvenirs. My actual body changed. Partway through the trip I took in the waistbands of my two pairs of hiking pants with safety pins, and now I’m wearing jeans I had long ago given up on. Last week the eye doctor confirmed that my eyesight had drastically improved since my last visit, just four months before. Now I’m waiting on new lenses for my glasses, but I’ll hang onto the old ones – I assume the return to a life where I rarely look farther than the end of a leash will bring back my old eyesight again.
A few weeks ago I was setting out to walk to a doctor’s appointment. It was more than a mile from the nearest metro station, and I was feeling vaguely irritated about it. And I thought: Wait, you love walking. What made it so good in Japan? And I thought of the perfect tiny assemblages of plants that grow up on roadsides, like in the photo at the top of this post – violets along a rural road near the town of Susaki. And I thought: You can find that here.
Moments later, an abandoned gas station came through.
Did it fill me with as much joy as the plants I saw in Shikoku? Not really. But it was still a perfect little glimpse of the world that grows around us, and it made my day better.
Photos: Helen Fields, obviously
If you want to read more about my trip – like, a lot more – I wrote on Substack along the way. Click here to read all about it!
I wrote this on May 7, 2018 and I have no idea why it feels like I wrote it this morning, looking out my window and wondering what I was looking for. I’ve always done this, looked out my window and wondered why I was doing that, what was out there, what was I looking for?
I grew up near stands of what passes in northeast Illinois for old-growth forest. The definition of “old-growth” is apparently a work in progress. I take it to mean a forest that was there before a particular part of the country was cleared and settled, and in northeast Illinois that was pretty late, around the 1830’s.* So these forests were named for local farm families that my family knew: Egermann Woods, Goodrich Woods, Greene Valley Woods. One forest that wasn’t named was behind our little farm — bottom of the hayfield, across the creek, and up a rise to the woods.
The woods was shaded by the treetops, not much on the ground except leaves, big rocks, moss, some grasses I think, and for sure wildflowers: shooting stars, dutchman’s breeches, may apples, jack-in-the-pulpits, spring beauties,** and in one place, yellow violets.
The woods had no suggestions for what to do except to look at things, sit down and lean against a big tree for a while, then get up and see what was beyond the next tree. Back by the creek was a willow, easy to climb, that I sat in a lot, not thinking. We weren’t supposed to go down to the woods — partly because it was someone else’s property and mostly because our mother couldn’t see us — so that was part of the draw. The real reason we snuck down there over and over, time after time, for years was – I don’t know quite how to say it. It was deeply comfortable, you could breathe slowly, you felt lighter, it felt like you’d come home.
So decades later, in the city on the east coast, when my neighborhood got its shorts in an uproar over a local private school’s plans to clean out a tiny woods, I went to look at the woods. The trees were scrawny, the ground was covered with ivy and brambles, and I thought, “What a wretched little woods.” The school could have cut that woods to the ground and the only ones suffering would be the displaced rats.
Years after that, I read Emma – “Coming of Age in a Trash Forest” — on the subject of urban nature and the silliness of trying to return it to its original and pure ecology, the “Big Pristine,” she calls it. She’s talking about the environmentalists’ swerve toward the realistic.
Every day, almost every day, most days, I walk along the streets of one of the most densely-populated neighborhoods in the city, and admire and criticize my neighbors’ gardens, though I keep any unfriendly opinions to myself. At the bottom of the hill is a little creek, a “stream” or a “run,” they call it here. Along the far side of the creek is a dirt path that on a map runs through a green space. The woods around the path are, I admit, green.
The trees are spindly, their habits misshapen; they’re covered with honeysuckle, English ivy, and poison ivy which will crown and kill them. The vines are all over the ground too, and stands of weeds are head-high, no way you can walk off the path to the creek, you can’t get through and you’d fall over anyway. Some of the stands are jewelweed, gold and crimson flowers. Some places have been carpeted by the lethally-invasive lesser celandine, such a beautiful name; they’re the glorious yellow of buttercups and the small shiny leaves look soft and bouncy. Daffodils, lilies, and Japanese cherry trees have escaped from nearby lawns. I saw a blue heron in the creek; a mallard couple lives there. Kids sort of live there too: invasive bamboo has been cut to make lean-to hide-outs; dead branches and vines are laid out carefully over swampy patches. Good and bad taken together, though, the woods are still unlovely; they’re full of aggressive plants and weak trees; they have their beauties and uses but they’re not home.
But who still thinks “home” is a place you can get to any more? Who thinks it’s a place you’re even remembering rightly? If you went back there, would it even feel like home? Isn’t “home” the place you are right now and where you’re likely to stay awhile? Isn’t it a place you find the best in, and that best is good enough for anyone? I miss my old woods and the relief of their comfort. But this “green space” I have now, it’s going about its life with verve — stupid and inept maybe, but full of beans. And maybe the bed of lesser celandine, maybe it would be nice to sleep on.
_______
*The French and Indians were there much earlier — see the old place/river names – but they weren’t clearing and farming acreage. I apologize for going on about this but I’m always surprised by the lack of history in northeastern Illinois.
**These are local names, maybe local even to my family, and not necessarily the flowers you’d see if you google-imaged them.
Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous.
Keywords: Seabirds, oceans, uncertainty
Introduction
A good introduction is a funnel. A funnel takes an otherwise unruly amount of material and feeds it through a small opening. It is a tool not so much of order as of constraint. Here, the unruly amount of material is the ecological state of the world. But we constrained ourselves to the changing nature of the ocean, and how that change affects some of the things that depend on it. That is a topic we can reasonably wrap our heads around, given the areas of our expertise.
We focused on birds. (We happen to like birds.) One species in particular, in one particular place. We have been watching this bird in this place for a while. During that time the ocean went through an especially severe change that lasted a few years. Thousands and thousands of animals died—not just birds, and not just here. (We are still determining the extent of the loss.) Then conditions returned more or less to “normal.” Whatever that means anymore.
We wanted to know how the birds we watched fared. More broadly, we want to know how they will survive in this world we’re making for them. But we can’t phrase our research question quite that way, so we will say something like: Given such-and-such marine states that we believe we can measure with some degree of accuracy, what did the birds do? How many laid an egg in a burrow, how many chicks hatched from those eggs, how many of those chicks survived to set off on their own?
To refine our thinking we reviewed the literature. It was often contradictory. We are left with our simple questions. Some of the answers were easier to come by than others. Here we report a few of the former.
In April, the sun started rising early enough so that I started walking or running near dawn. Each time I returned, there were people gathered underneath the same cluster of eucalyptus trees in the park and I didn’t ask why. I mean, I wondered why, but people do strange things sometimes.
Then, a few weeks ago, my friend Annie asked if I’d seen the owlets.
The next time I walked by the small knot of people beneath the trees, I stopped and looked up. Where are they? Someone pointed. And there they were: three fluffy white owlets lined up on a branch like bowling pins, and overlooking them, a stern-faced great horned owl.
The owls, I later learned, had been nesting there for months. Great horned owls usually move into another species’ nest over the winter. They need to start early, because once hatched, their owlets need more time under the watchful, night-seeing eyes of their parents compared to many other birds. A local naturalist told me that the owlets, even once they’re flying — one already is — will still return to their parents throughout the summer, maybe even into fall. The parents will continue to feed them, even though the young owls can hunt on their own. “Like college students,” the naturalist told me.
I like to run this post on Memorial Day (the first version ran May 28, 2012) because when I think about soldiers and wars and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy. He was awfully opinionated and excessively direct but I admired him greatly and listened when he talked. Not he ever talked about the war, he didn’t. But in this case, what he was talking about is an ancient link between war, technology, and humans — a link began when someone first improved a stone into both the first hammer and the first spear. I’ve heard it about this link from many technologically-inclined people; I heard it again just the other day. Uncle Bundy has since died — at a nice old age with his family around him — and I miss him.
It’s Memorial Day in the U.S. but this is not a war story. It does have a little war in it, but the real reason I’m writing it is because of this ball bearing my uncle had. My uncle’s name was Leverne, some of his buddies called him Vernie, all his relatives called him Bundy – no reason for that – and he’d always been a mechanic. One summer day a long time ago, he was out in his garage working on a car and I was watching him. “Look at this,” he said, “it’s a ball bearing.” It was a grooved ring, and running in the groove were little metal balls. “I just greased it,” he said, “and look how pretty it goes.” He ran his finger over the little balls and, one after another, they turned smoothly and easily in their groove. “Isn’t it pretty?” he asked. No, it isn’t, I thought, but I didn’t answer. I was in high school and an English major. It’s greasy and dirty, I thought. Poetry was pretty, not ball bearings.
Bundy was a farm boy who went to high school, then in November, 1942, joined the army. He was sent first to the University of Utah, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the Fort Sill Motor School, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the 668th Field Artillery School, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the Schofield Barracks Motor School in Hawaii, and he learned to be a mechanic. He never got a college degree.
In 1944, he got on a Liberty troop ship, a little hollow tub short enough and the Pacific waves big enough that the ship went up one side of a wave and down the other while the seasick troops lined up along the deck and threw up over the side. The ship was headed for the Philippines, to the battle of Leyte in which 3,000 Allied troups and 10,500 Japanese troops were being killed. By this time Bundy wasn’t really mad at anyone any more and didn’t want to fight; and anyway Leyte turned out to need materiel, not troops; and besides the war was ending, so Bundy was just as glad when the Liberty ship turned around and went to Oahu, where he spent the rest of the war.
He came home to Illinois in November, 1945. He and Mitzi, his new wife, lived in an unheated upstairs room in his sister’s house. He got a job fixing cars and tried to figure out a place to live. He found a little octagonal house that had been built for either hired hands or pigs, and bought it for $2,300 which he borrowed from his mother. The house was too far from work so he bought a lot nearer by, and then he measured up the house and measured up the lot. Next he dug two rows of post holes and in the holes he stuck stove pipes which he filled with concrete, and this would be a foundation. Then he asked his two brothers and his brother-in-law if they’d be willing to help move the house; and next he asked a customer at work if he could rent the customer’s flatbed truck for a Saturday at the going rate of $3 an hour. His plan was to raise the house enough to back the flatbed under it.
He remembered seeing some 30-foot timbers somebody had left out along Route 66, and he and his brothers went out and picked them up. They brought the timbers back to the house and with two hydraulic jacks, jacked up first one corner of the house and wedged a timber under it; then jacked up another corner of the house and wedged a timber under it, then went back to the first corner and jacked up the timber and wedged another timber under that one; and pretty soon the house was perched on the timbers up higher than the truck. Then they backed the truck under the house, timbers and all, and headed out — Bundy stood on the roof to lift up any telephone or electric wires. When they got to the lot, they backed up to the foundation, unloaded the house, trimmed it up, and reversed the jacking-up process, removed the timbers, and rested the house on its foundations. It worked exactly as planned. Bundy paid the customer $9 for three hours rental, plus $1 tip.
Bundy and Mitzi lived in the house for five years, then sold it to his mother and moved to a house that could fit the six kids they eventually had, and where they lived the rest of their lives. Bundy kept being an auto mechanic and by the time he retired, he owned his own garage. Once my brother had questions about his college physics problems, and Bundy figured out the vectors and derivatives intuitively and got the answers. Bundy told me in the 1970’s to hold on to the Dodge slant-six but for my next car, give up and buy Japanese because otherwise Detroit wasn’t ever going to learn. At age 91, he was fairly creaky but as bossy, opinionated, righteous, and as impressively, precisely competent, smart, and ingenious as he ever was.
Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up a sinuous dry canyon, guarded by two guys with broadswords. The hopping university town of Fort Collins, then just a smallish scatter of purple squares along a tidy grid of streets. And there’s Boulder in 1957, my hometown, where I’m visiting my family.
We press the map folds flat with our fingers and lean closer. The city then was a tiny yolk at the core of its current footprint, pressed hard against the mountains. The mesa where my parents live formed its eastward boundary, a new neighborhood then, not yet swallowed and sprawled miles beyond with malls and business parks and subdivisions and natural gas wells, the fingers of the city and its neighbors creeping outward over the plains, grasping each other to form an amoeba of light and noise that pulses with traffic along a vasculature of roads. A place forever swallowing itself. Becoming new and new again, without becoming better.
Every time I come back, I grumble about how much things have changed since I was a kid. For all my sharp words, though, there’s something unchanging here. It rises in me when I see the rolling, ponderosa-covered waves of the foothills breaking on the treeless slopes of the high Rockies to the west, when I see the plains reaching boundlessly east, haloed pink at the days’ two turns, from and towards darkness.
A Norse comb from the Middle Ages unearthed in southern Greenland.
The comb was found in a trash pile, what the archeologists call a midden, not far above the sea and just outside the remains of a longhouse. From the sit of the house and the site of the midden we know it was an easy toss: you could practically step outside and hurl food scraps, bits of wood, leather or whatever onto the pile. And so the ancient homesteaders did: Ashes from the hearth, bones from meals of seal, a tiny wooden horse with braids carved into its mane. And this curved comb, held together with rivets that still shine in the right light.
The people who lived beside the midden more than 500 years ago, along the edge of fjord in southern Greenland, are generally called Norse, though they are often called Vikings, too. What we know is that they arrived in Greenland around the first millennium and survived up into the 15th century. Then they vanished, somewhat abruptly, and more or less without a trace. This is to say we don’t know how or why they disappeared. We don’t know where they went, or if they went, or how they died. Theirs is among the mutest of all endings I can think of, for no one in the Middle Ages seems to have noticed, or recorded, or even wondered what happened to them. By the time Europeans returned to Greenland, in the early 1700s, this comb had lain buried for at least 300 years.
One afternoon last September I sat in the attic of the Greenland National Museum and Archives considering the comb. Arranged on a table before me were a dozen or so other artifacts—bits of wood decorated with interwoven, almost Celtic designs; sticks carved with enigmatic Old Norse runes, a pair of rust-caked shears still sharp enough to be dangerous. But the comb held my attention.
It was in good shape, seemed ready for use. I gently lifted it from a tissue-lined tray and tried to imagine who had last pulled it through their beard or hair, or tugged it across the head of a reluctant child. Nearby on the table was a lock of braided hair that had somehow survived from Viking times. The two relics were not related—they came from different sites—and yet here in the attic they formed an unsettling pair. While I handled the comb (with a curator’s permission), something kept me from touching the hair. It seemed too intimate, even though its owner was many centuries gone. I’d discovered, to my surprise, a line I would not cross.
Norse shears.
What I’m learning now about the comb is that it tell us more about the Vikings than I’d ever imagined. Similar examples have been found across an astonishing sweep of territory: western Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, the Scandinavian homelands, and deep into eastern Europe. More than almost any other object, the combs reveal how far Norse travelers moved. Map the places where they turn up and a vast network emerges—routes of trade, migration, raiding, and settlement stretching across much of the medieval world.
The combs reveal something else, as well. In them we glimpse what mattered to the people who carried them. Grooming. Craftsmanship. Daily ritual. These are not the kinds of details that tend to survive in the popular imagination of the Viking Age. We think swords, spears, armor. We think boats, burial mounds, hoards of silver. We think of their terrible raids into Britain, or the way they once or twice attacked Constantinople. Or we remember stories of sacrifices made to old gods who loved a good battle.
The comb told about none of that. When I mentioned this to a curator he laughed and said personal grooming kit didn’t make for good TV. But perhaps it’s the nature of the comb itself: simple, practical, intimate. What is a comb but an undramatic tool for a small personal act that after a moment on a wind-swept shore leaves no trace. And yet this object may yet undermine generations of violent storytelling. How do you gauge the real reach of Viking culture? Look for their combs.
I thought of the comb I’d carried in my suitcase—black plastic, cheap and forgettable—and I handed the Norse one to the curator. He held it up to catch afternoon sunlight glancing through the attic window. The relic was warm in that light and surprisingly heavy in the hand. It felt good to hold. Later I would pick it up again, and pull it through the air, mimicking the way its last owner might have moved. I would think of my middle child, the one whose long hair I have learned, after much screaming, to untangle from the ends first, not the roots. After a moment the curator turned to me and said, You know,no one’s ever found a sword or a shield or a spear in Greenland. But we have plenty of combs.
