This post first ran in the early days of the pandemic. There are some parts of the silence that I miss. But today, I am working in the back room of an elementary school as the “adult on site” during a camp run by high school students. There is singing and shrieking and laughter and the sound of small feet running down a concrete hallway. I brought my noise-cancelling headphones, but I’ve hardly used them: I don’t want to miss this.
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People who have come to visit say that it is quiet here. Now it is even quieter. Fewer car drive by, fewer planes fly overhead. In the hour before dawn I no longer hear the train whistle. My neighbor used to leave early each morning for dental school, 50 miles away. Now there is no hum-and-rumble that is a Subaru engine starting up.
At first, I didn’t even notice these sounds were gone. What I noticed were the birds. So many birds. They started up around 5, around the same time, I understand now, as flights and train whistles and people heading off to early-morning destinations.
This new quiet has opened up soundscapes that we haven’t heard before. Andreas von Bubnoff, a journalist and professor based in Germany and New York, is listening in. (I know Andreas through SciLance, a group of science writers that has been meeting up online for 15 years.) He is the co-founder of the Pandemic Silence Project, which is collecting sound recordings from around the world to capture the soundscapes of the pandemic.
Andreas grew up in Germany next to a forest and spent time hiking with his family. He still remembers the sounds: the soothing rustle of wind through the leaves, the buzz of insects in Alpine meadows, the calls of birds like the Eurasian skylark. His first big soundscape project was a multimedia project on soundscape ecology, for the German publication Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2015. The project captured the sounds of nature on land and in the water, as well as human sounds that have drowned them out. “We often aren’t even aware that many sounds disappeared because we don’t remember the sounds having been there in the first place,” he says. “Perhaps the current pandemic silence is a big chance for many of us to learn how to listen again.”
For years I’ve been mildly obsessed with this idea, that “history” and “story” are related, they’re siblings if not actually the same creature. And that the relation lies in human cultures that didn’t read, didn’t write, communicated only by talking. I’m not sure why that seems so absurd and fascinating, history and story being the same thing because they began with people who didn’t read. I wrote this May 29, 2015; a couple years later I had further thoughts and went so far as to ask some experts. I’m still thinking about it.
One time, a long time ago, friends were over, everybody talking, and one of the little kids got antsy so I picked up a book and started reading, very quietly so as not to disturb conversation. But pretty soon nobody was talking any more, everybody was quiet and listening to Winnie the Pooh and Piglet track the Heffalump. I’ll bet you can sit in any small coffee shop, open a book, start reading aloud “Once upon a time,” and by the third paragraph, the whole coffee shop will be dead silent.
Stories. I’ve always thought of them as addictive entertainment for which – for some reason – we happen to be hardwired. I’m not alone in thinking this, a certain amount of creative thinking has gone into the idea of humans being wired for stories.
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Another time I was trying to learn Italian and found out that “storia” was the word for “history.” Then I found out that “storia” also meant “story;” it meant both “history” and “story,” and I was desperately confused. History and story are distinctly not the same thing, not at all. Write a history of something, the reader should more or less believe it. Write a story about the same thing, the reader rightly thinks “it’s Katy-bar-the-door.” I thought about this some more and became indignant. History is done by scholars trained in finding and assessing evidence and arranging it in the order in which it happened. Stories are the authors’ constructions, arrangements in whatever order the author likes. This is pretty much the standard view of anyone who speaks English.
Too bad for the English speakers. I read in Wikipedia that all European languages, including the rest of the Germanic ones, also use the same word for history and story. Then I ran “history” through Google Translate and tried picking the non-European languages and they were pretty much split on whether history and story should share the same word. I’m not claiming scientific rigor for this but it seems true enough and what the ever-loving hell is going on here? I’ve been fretting about this for years. In what sense are history and story the same thing?
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Meanwhile I was working on a story on how Native Americans handled their 10,000-year co-existence with Cascadia’s massive earthquakes and tsunamis. The tribes didn’t traditionally write their history down, they told it to each other and about a century ago, what they said got transcribed. Some of what they’d tell was clearly myth, story – Thunderbird and Whale were fighting. And some of it was clearly history – the giant wave caught people without their canoes and they all drowned.
I read all these stories and histories and then interviewed the people whose grandparents had heard them. And then I had one of those lightning-bolt perspective-switches. I remembered my grandmother and her sister in their rag-top Jeep driving the dusty country roads — me in the back seat hanging on and listening with all my might — talking about every farmhouse we passed: who lived there, who they were related to, who their wives and husbands and kids were, what they did in high school, what they were doing now, on and on. My grandmother and her sister were doing what the Native Americans did: they were telling stories, they were talking history, both at once, same thing.
So I derailed those interviews right away from geologic catastrophe and asked the people who’d been told the stories about the telling itself. It turns out you have to be trained.
Member of the Huu-ay-aht tribe: “I have to start in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I visited my brother who lived with my great-grandfather, and had to listen to a lot of stories at dinner table and in the evening. You have to sit down and listen just like you have to go to school, and it happened around mealtime, evening when there’s no electricity and your evenings are idle. We just had a gaslight, candles and a woodstove. We had to be there, we had to sit and listen, it was education, things we needed to know. People are designated to remember, my brother and I were chosen to hear the stories and given the responsibility to pass them on, I passed it on to my son and he knows as much as I do.
Member of the Grande Ronde tribe: “The storytellers are identified early on and are trained. The historian was a very responsible position. You couldn’t alter the stories and you had to retell them exactly as they were told. I read anthropology research in Africa that found the stories were more accurate than the written word.”
Member of the Coquille tribe: “[My uncle] said, ‘We have to go on a five hour drive to this place [where a tsunami had happened] so I can tell you this story and that’s the best way to tell a story, at the place.’ So we went to Gold Beach and did then a mile and a half hike up the hill. He [showed me the fog coming up the river] just like the tsunami and told me the waves came up that river and all the trees were covered and that’s what made the story real. I’ve been fortunate because every time someone has something important to say and wants it remembered, they talk to me. And they want me to be accurate. If someone gives you something like that, accept the gift the way they gave it to you.”
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Now I suspect that the history/story merger has its origins in pre-literate cultures. History told as stories, told in ways and places that make you remember them, by people who accept responsibility for remembering them, who are trained to do it and constrained by accuracy? Sounds like a good plan for carrying on a culture, for building a civilization.
And just like that, I’ve figured out the very good reason that stories and histories are so related and why they’re hardwired.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. My training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method, and I continue to hold science in the highest regard. Science can teach us much about the world and ourselves, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it can allow us to see beyond our biases — if we can keep open minds.
Yet I’ve grown to understand that not all knowledge worth possessing can come from a book, an experiment or a Google search. Science is very good at answering questions that involve quantifiable elements — how far away is that planet? Which drug produces the best response? But it’s less helpful at answering some of life’s most vexing questions like, what should I do with my life? Where should I focus my attention?
Two years ago this month I discovered an answer to a question I hadn’t thought to ask — how should I spend a summer afternoon? I present my found answer here, in the form of a letter — a tribute to a friend I hardly knew, but will never forget.
As If: A letter to Chris Dourley August, 2009
I arrived at your house with a book tucked under my arm, a little something to express my support–As if words could cure what doctors couldn’t. I did not yet understand that it was you, my dying friend, with the gift to bestow and me its fortunate recipient that early August afternoon.
We sat on your porch and watched the rain clouds roll in over the West Elk Mountains, and I said that I had not yet climbed Mount Lamborn. You reminisced about your many journeys up and down the mountain’s steep slopes and offered me an introduction to your old friend. You pointed to the gully I should ascend, and told me which ridge to choose for the climb to the summit.
Looking further east, I remarked how striking the Ragged Mountains appeared from this vantage point and you told me how the sun, as it followed its daily arc across the sky, would cast shadows on the cliff faces in patterns that only someone who had spent many early mornings, afternoons, and lazy evenings observing could fully appreciate. You told me about discovering this patch for the first time more than 20 years ago and your surprise that no one else wanted this mesa top at the end of a bumpy dirt road where you had found your life place.
With a twinge of envy, I told you how I longed to be one of those people who belonged to a place like that, who’d made it my own through devotion and the passing of time.
You nodded knowingly and then we quietly sat back and watched the storm clouds wash over the mountains. And as we listened to raindrops drum a gentle rhythm on the tin roof above the porch, I felt consumed with gratitude that you’d shared this moment of grace with me, thankful for having borne witness to this ephemeral pause when we could forget that you were dying and lose ourselves in the comfort of an ordinary afternoon.
As if these unremarkable events from which we piece our lives together could go on forever.
As if the beauty of the here and now could suspend us.
As if this moment could protect us from what’s to come.
In May, Doug Burgum, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, traveled to the tiny town of Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, to announce a new policy: caribou hunters will soon be allowed to use all-terrain vehicles inside the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Under most circumstances this would piss me off—another misguided plan from an administration that seems hell-bent on wrecking environmental protections and green energy initiatives, often for no reason beyond a desire to own the libs or, worse, line the pockets of Trump allies.
This sort of anti-life energy is unfolding before us in several parts of the Alaskan Arctic. One example is the so-called Ambler Road project, a 200-mile long mining track that will cut through another roadless wildland near the Kobuk River. I’ve written about the road before and the bullshit reasons given in support of it, while others have detailed how the mining companies behind the road are foreign-owned and Trump-friendly. Another example is the Trump administration’s recent reopening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. That effort, at least, seems to have fizzled, though there’s no guarantee Trump officials won’t make some other lame move. Their approach was broadcasted clearly during Trump’s first administration, when former Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo said “The Arctic is open for business.”
It’s been easy for me to oppose Ambler Road and the reopening of ANWR. I’ve worked in or near both places, studying the profoundly disturbing decline of Arctic caribou and the effects of climate change on the lives of people who depend on the animals. I’ve talked to many experts, the science kind and the hunting kind, who agree that roads, oil pads, helicopters, construction traffic, dynamite, chemicals and everything else that comes with Arctic development, are very clearly disruptive and harmful, not only for caribou, but also for the entangled ecosystems in which they are but one thread. And I’ve been able to feel certain, and probably a little too righteous, in my opinion because the science behind it is sound and, more important, because both Ambler Road and ANWR drilling are opposed by many Alaskan Natives—the people who live in and have long relationships with the land we’re talking about.
With this latest news, though, about hunters on ATVs chasing caribou inside America’s second-largest national park, I find myself suddenly on the other side. That is to say, I support this Trump policy.
How can I make such an abrupt turn? The simple answer is landback.
If you’ve never heard this term before, it has to do with returning sovereignty, often over land, to Indigenous people. Sometimes it’s as simple as the word itself implies—giving jurisdiction back to the original stewards of a particular place, or landscape. But it can mean much more than this. It’s also an approach to decolonization, to reparations, to better relationships with land, ecosystems, animals, and each other, for everyone. For a much more thorough discussion of what landback can mean, I encourage you to check out what the NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led grassroots organization, says about the term, and the many ideas it contains.
In the case of ATVs in the national park, and speaking only for myself, I support the new policy because the hunters who’ll benefit are people I know, and they are Alaska Natives, and this is what they’ve wanted this for years. The policy may be coming down from Trump administration officials, but it reflects the will of the people whose land it is. This is landback.
Here’s a bit more background. Anaktuvuk Pass is the only town of the Nunamiut, the people of the land. It sits in the middle of Alaska’s Brooks Range, about 150 miles from the nearest community, and no roads connect it to any other part of the state. It’s also completely surrounded by the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.
When the Nunamiut chose to settle here in the early 1950s, they did so because caribou—tuttu—in their language, passed through the area twice each year during their long migrations. At the time, the national park did not exist, and neither did the state of Alaska. Both later folded in around the Nunamiut, swallowing their town, their rivers and mountains, and the plains and passes over which they had traveled and hunted for generations. While state and the federal governments still allowed Nunamiut to hunt caribou within the park and beyond it, both have over many years placed restrictions on when and how they can do this. One of those restrictions, in place since the mid-1980s, has prevented Nunamiut hunters from entering the park on ATVs during the summer. This is the rule that was recently overturned.
Yesterday I reached out to a young hunter I know in Anaktuvuk and he told me he was thrilled with the change in federal policy. For him and his family, his neighbors, it had nothing to do with Trump, or with any other administration. It was simply about access, about animals, about a right returned and a wounded relationship made a little better.
“Our local leaders have fought [hard] for our right to access our hunting grounds in the park over the last two years,” he said. “Finally we can go anywhere in our lands.”
He went on to tell me the new policy would be helpful to his community after a hard winter in which there had been little snow, but many days of temperatures hovering around 50 degrees below zero. The extreme cold had led to a fuel shortage, he told me, which made it that much harder for people to go hunting.
Now, the new rule would allow younger Nunamiut to resume traditional practices in ways and in places their fathers and grandfathers had used. It wasn’t a complete return of jurisdiction, it wasn’t a transfer of land to the Nunamiut tribe. But in Anaktuvuk it was still taken as a victory.
During our conversation my friend never said landback. He didn’t have to.
We first published this conversation 14 years ago. At least half of my peers from high school and university have chosen not to have kids at all. In the end, I stuck with just the one, and so did Michelle.
Michelle and Jessa converse about the reasons we chose to stop at one child.
Jessa: So let me check I have it right: you’re an only child yourself and have an only child as well?
Michelle: That’s right, and I always thought that if I became a parent I would have an only kid. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. What about you? Do you have siblings?
Jessa: Yes, I have an older brother. I know a lot of people seem to recreate their own family structure when it comes to forming their own, but somehow that didn’t really figure in for me, for whatever reason.
Michelle: You have a boy, right? How did you decide to have only one child?
Jessa: Yes, I have a three-year-old son. It’s really a combination of factors. I think I got away with murder in terms of the personal freedom I still have, even as a mother of a young child. Mostly as a result of him having a very involved father. And I don’t want to push my luck. What was your transition to parenthood like?
Michelle: Funny, it sounds like there are some similarities — my husband is self-employed, like I am, and he was willing to share care of our daughter. So while our transition to parenthood was exhausting and confusing in all the typical ways, I really had a lot of freedom to continue my career — and I don’t think I would have the same kind of flexibility with a larger family. In some ways, I think of my job as a second child! My daughter would win in a pinch, of course, but my job is something I love and want to nurture — and it’s something that would and could take all my time if I let it. How did you and your partner arrange care?
HPV gets everywhere. But so does a vaccine! (Photo courtesy of Flickr user Courtney Emery.)
We have a VACCINE against CANCER. For 20 years now! The first Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, was approved in June, 2006. Since then, the rate of cervical cancer has dropped by 62 percent in the United States. HPV also causes vulvar, vaginal, anal, and penile, tongue, and throat cancers, and the several HPV vaccines now available protect against them as well.
Most people don’t know! They don’t know HPV is a huge public health risk for so many kinds of cancer, or that a vaccine can protect them and their kids. Anyway, happy anniversary to one of the biggest public health victories of the 21st century.
Just imagine how many more lives could be saved if people weren’t so squeamish about sex. Ess-ee-ecks. HPV is still the most common sexually transmitted disease in the U.S. That’s how you get it, through sex. It causes genital warts as well as cancer. It’s extremely contagious, and it infects many kinds of human tissue. One of my favorite descriptions, from a story I edited in Slate a while ago about why gay men should be screened: “HPV is like glitter. It goes everywhere.”
The vaccine was initially recommended for girls, now also boys, age 11-12. The idea is to protect them before they’re “exposed to the virus,” which is a euphemism for before their mouths or genitals come into contact with the mouths or genitals of other people who have HPV.
You can imagine what a challenge these basic facts are for public health messaging. From a parent’s perspective, their 6th-grader was just a toddler, like, five minutes ago. Too many parents refuse to believe their kids will ever have a rich and varied sex life someday and they do not want to think about it.
Purity culture is deadly. Theocrats and anti-vaxxers claimed the HPV vaccine would encourage girls and women to be more promiscuous. It does not. Just like how people taught abstinence-only sex miseducation and raised to believe they’ll never-ever-ooh-gross-how-shameful have sex before marriage aren’t less likely to have sex before marriage. They’re more likely to have unprotected and risky sex.
The anti-vaccine movement loves purity culture. It’s core to their creepy gender-essentialism and their eugenicist message of clean, all-natural living. They want natural? The most natural thing in the history of humankind is to die of infectious disease.
The messaging for boys is tricky because gay men are more susceptible to HPV-caused anal cancer than straight men, so there’s homophobia to deal with. And the vaccine still has a reputation for being a girl’s vaccine, and there’s nothing worse (to some parents) than a boy doing girl stuff.
The rate of HPV-related oropharyngeal (head and neck) cancer in men has been rising for a few decades. HPV has historically been a genital infection, but due to “changing sexual behaviors” (that is, performing oral sex), the HPV glitter bomb is infecting more men’s throat, tongue, and tonsil tissue. (Liz Szabo has a nice series on HPV tied to the 20th anniversary that goes into this more deeply, which I highly recommend.)
Even adult messaging is a little … vague. People whose parents don’t love them didn’t get them vaccinated are advised to get vaccinated as adults, up to age 26. The recommendations advise people older than 26 to consider vaccination “based on discussion with their clinician.” That discussion is, basically: “Do you intend to have more sexual partners? If so, great, go get vaccinated.”
The HPV vaccination rate is still too low, especially in rural areas. Anti-vaxxer grifters and conspiracy theorists keep spreading lies and fear about all vaccines, and especially HPV. And as with any public health success, it’s hard for people to comprehend all the agony that has been prevented. We don’t talk enough about things that worked. Vaccines work, and the HPV vaccine works. It prevents cancer! For 20 years! We should celebrate this, with glitter.
Nobody wants to go with me to the shitty behind-the-mall carnival, for some reason. It’s one of those ride-packed parking-lot joints, set up and pulled down stunningly fast with less than a week in between. You, too, went to one like it as a kid, didn’t you? Between rides you filled your belly with overpriced fried something and admired the high school kids smoking behind the Ferris wheel?
If one thinks about it too hard, one might wonder if getting on any of the higher-speed rides at one of these seasonal events is a tad risky. Visions of rusty bits and loose screws and sputtering engines and parts misaligned dance in your head as you make the questionable choice to hang, swing, spin, or zoom from a high place to a low one with a CVS and a check-cashing store in view. This equipment, after all, is stacked in storage for most of the year, then trucked from place to place, taken out and put back; you know from your own experience that taking things out and putting them back multiple times ensures pieces go missing. Plus, there are those disinterested, distracted sunburned folks sucking on vape pens running the rides because they couldn’t get a summer job inside the mall. The chances of a mishap seem uncomfortably high.
And yet, I’ll go, by myself, if necessary, because I still, at this late date in my existence, love to spin, swoop, and tumble down from the sky. I like the sounds and smells of amusement parks, the shrieks and squeals of happy fear, the hot plastic seats that have hosted a multitude of butts, the Coke-sticky ground near the ticket booth. Waiting in line, sweating, it’s just part of the carnival experience. Rushing forward to pick the best car or the prettiest-colored swing. Downcast smiling at those around you, because now we’re in for it. There’s a togetherness to it, a comfort in being around other thrill seekers as the motor whirrs to a start. You’re all about to have superpowers for about 90 seconds, and you’re happy to have them in tandem.
So, that’s what’s happening on the outside. Inside, a chemical soup sloshes about. As a speedy ride ca-chunks to life and gets up to speed it kicks off a brain rush starting in the amygdala, the pack of neurons at the base of the brain that asses the unknown. In noting risk (whether real or not), it fires off a combo of protective chemicals—the usual suspects: dopamine, adrenaline, and endorphins. At the peak of the thrill, your body, brain, and senses are hyper focused on the experience; nothing else really matters—nobody on a roller coaster thinks about their late mortgage bill or mean boss during an extreme pretzel loop, demonic knot, or Stengel dive. Even a small-town Tilt-a-Whirl clears the mind.
Whatever the thrill, the thrill-ee gets a testosterone boost, narrowed vision, a river of adrenaline through the body, and of course, heartbeats clamoring to leave their chest. We scream to set nervous energy free. With a rapidly pounding heart comes more oxygen to the brain (I guess we’re supposed to be thinking of a way out of this mess). Then, immediately afterwards comes a second flood of mood-boosting chemicals. No wonder some of us immediately get back in line for another go.
As with any “high” we can become tolerant; our brains and bodies realize we’re going to get off this thing in one piece, because we did before, and demand we take even bigger risks next time to achieve the same euphoric relief of having survived the scary thing. Scientists have noted connections between tolerance level and how much white and gray matter is in your brain, plus there might be some genetic mutations involved, and variations in dopamine receptors. We’re none of us the same.
I’ll leave you with these carnival-related facts: Thrill seeking has a biological basis and high heritability, suggesting it’s coded in our genes and nervous system. And thrill-seeking behavior appears to be unique to humans—other animals may play and enjoy themselves, but they don’t put themselves in seeming danger just for the dumb rush. So, I guess when I head over to the strip mall this weekend to climb aboard something twisty and fast, I’ll leave my smart dog at home.
Photos by the author, who went to the carnival, peered through the fence, saw the $35 entrance fee and got the full-on heart palpitations she was looking for without setting foot inside the gate.
This post originally ran in 2018. Nothing has changed. I still won’t go to bed. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!
Yesterday at 8:23am, my husband texted me a link. No note, just a string of random letters and slashes and dots. I clicked and landed on a research article titled “Why don’t you go to bed on time?”
The manuscript begins like this: “Most people do not get enough sleep on work days despite sleep’s importance for well-being, performance, and health. A phenomenon held responsible for promoting insufficient sleep on work days is bedtime procrastination. Bedtime procrastination is defined as ‘going to bed later than intended, without having external reasons for doing so’, that is, ‘people just fail to [go to bed].’”
Ah, bedtime procrastination. I had never heard the term before, but I am intimately familiar with the concept of failing to go to bed. If bedtime procrastination had a poster, I would be that poster’s child. My husband, on the other hand, does not procrastinate. He is a bedtime anticipator. A bedtime enthusiast. A bedtime yearner. He would go to bed right now if you let him.
The texted link was clearly the latest passive aggressive salvo in our years-long battle to define an appropriate bedtime. Me: 12-1am. Him: 9:30pm or, better yet, immediately.
According to the prevailing scientific theory, procrastination—of any task—can be explained as a failure to self regulate. That is, I want to go to bed at 10pm. I know I should go to bed at 10pm. I know staying up will cause next-day exhaustion and general grumpiness. But I still cannot manage to get my head on the pillow. Instead I stay up watching TV and eating ice cream. I give into delicious temptation.
