Did you ever have to memorize the prologue to The Canterbury Tales? I did, for high school English class, spring semester of senior year. I was cranky about it—why do we have to recite this stuff?—but as with most things I didn’t want to learn, I’m glad I did. Every springtime I think of the opening lines: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote…” For anybody who hasn’t read it (or hasn’t read it in a while), the prologue explains that it’s April, sweet showers have ended the misery of winter, flowers are blooming, birds are singing, and people long to go on pilgrimages to give thanks for surviving the winter. The pilgrims meet up on their road trip to Canterbury and share their tales. (Kind of like we do on this group blog, The Last Word on Nothing.)
I was trying to remember the lines of the Prologue the other day while biking along the Potomac River (as well as the lines to Forgetfulness, a poem about forgetting poems). I stopped at a cliff face to watch a pair of peregrine falcons fighting with a pair of ravens for control of a nest. The ravens built the nest a few years ago, the peregrines stole it, and the ravens were now trying to take it back. The peregrines won. I also saw an eagle on a nest and another peregrine near the Harper’s Ferry nesting site. (If you want to see peregrines on a nest, a third site, near Point of Rocks along the C&O Canal, is a short walk upstream from the parking area. Look for all the photographers and birders.)
I’m so grateful. Grateful that we survived the winter. Grateful that peregrine falcons and bald eagles survived DDT. Those pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales were looking for adventure and fellowship, sure, but they were also expressing their gratitude. In their case, they were making a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was martyred in 1170 by King Henry II’s knights and became a saint.
It’s such a human impulse, to give thanks for things that feel miraculous. Those of us who aren’t religious don’t have the same shrines, rituals, or regularly scheduled fellowship, but we do have secular saints, people who made the world better or saved our lives. We don’t pray to them, exactly, but it’s inspiring to remember them, appreciate them. I would gladly light a candle and leave an offering at a shrine to Saint Rachel of Carson.
In his book, Eric weaves together science and stories centered on seabirds to explore the effects of climate change on the ecology of the North Pacific. Things are changing fast, and on a huge scale that is difficult to comprehend. But Eric skillfully gets at this big, dynamic picture by going deep on smaller pieces, including birds, people, fish, currents, islands, and lighthouses.
It’s a fun read, with lots of surprising and interesting elements. I was most intrigued by one of the central characters of the book, the rhinoceros auklet. The name comes from an actual horn these birds grow at the base of their beaks during the breeding season and then shed every year. They are smaller relatives of the puffin, and make the most ridiculously fun sounds.
Here’s an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length (and for the annoying number of questions I asked about auklets).
Last fall I visited the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, where I stumbled across two fishbowls brimming with gallstones. They were donated, according to the placard, by a pathologist named Dr. S. Robert Freedman.
Why, I wondered in an earlier post, would Dr. Freedman keep so very many stones? I couldn’t ask him — Freedman, a pathologist in Los Gatos, California, died in 2021 — so I did the next best thing. I called his wife and daughter.
Tomorrow, I fly down to the Magellanic penguin colony at Punta Tombo, Argentina,to apply some small tracking tags to penguins before they set off on their journeys north. I wrote this post a few years ago at the end of the same sort of trip, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the penguins make similar progress from being disheveled to sleek.
Brown
Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. They pair up, lay a clutch of two eggs, incubate those eggs, have a brood of two chicks, feed those chicks, and, finally, watch those chicks strike off on their own. The luckiest penguins go through all those steps over the course of several months. The vast majority of penguins are not that lucky, however. Some never find a mate, or a kelp gull eats their eggs, or their chicks starve, and so on. Sometimes I am astonished at all the ways they can be unlucky. Even so, no matter the outcome of the breeding season, once March and April arrive, every single penguin molts.
The molt seems to me a harsh way to close the year. Some birds only molt a few feathers at a time so they can keep living their lives more or less unaffected by the need for new plumage. Not so Magellanic penguins. Magellanic penguins undergo what is called a catastrophic molt, which means they replace all their feathers at the same time. To prepare for this involved procedure, they first leave the colony for two or three weeks to stuff themselves with food. When they return, they settle in a nest, or sometimes just a patch of open ground, and stop preening and oiling their feathers. Deprived of care and oil, the feathers soon lose their lustrous blackness, fading to brown. The colony fills with brown penguins.
This is the first stage of the molt. Because we are creative, we call it Brown. Think of it as the beginning of the end.
As I write this, the forecast calls for snow in the next day or so. It won’t be enough at my house, and certainly will be insufficient for the mountains. No matter how much snow falls at this point, it will be nowhere near enough to make up for our absolutely abysmal winter here in Colorado.
I live here, so I see it every day, and everyone I know talks about it, also pretty much every day. “I heard we’re supposed to get a couple inches.” “I need to remember to water my trees, because I think the buds are coming in a month early.” “My family was supposed to go skiing for spring break, but I saw a picture of the back bowls, and there’s like, nothing.”
It’s easy to dismiss our concern as something limited to the rich, mostly white people who ski as a hobby. Ski country is a big part of our economy, first of all. But our lack of snow in the Rockies is absolutely about more than ski conditions. There just isn’t going to be any water coming off these mountains come spring, let alone summer. And tens of millions of Americans will feel it.
Pikes Peak in the distance, seen from the crest of Monarch Mountain in early February
I wrote about this in the Atlantic last week, and I can’t even keep track of how many people here have thanked me for it, or brought it up in random situations — tennis practice, school pickup, kid activities. The rest of America needs to know what we’re dealing with, they say. I agree.
I pitched the story because I have been frustrated by the frequency of complaints on social media about the East Coast’s winter. I know it has been snowing a lot and it has been cold! We would give almost anything to have those conditions, so please spare me. I am worried about the state of Colorado burning down this summer. I am worried about Lake Powell hitting dead pool and seeing a dry riverbed at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
West side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, seen from Bighorn Sheep Canyon
I talked to a lot of people for that Atlantic piece, and as is always the case, so many of their helpful insights and comments didn’t make it into the final story. One that stands out in particular was a discussion with Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist. We talked about how people have a hard time grasping just how much snow falls throughout the Rocky Mountains all winter, from early October through the end of April and even into May or June.
It is a mind-blowing amount of snow. Hundreds and hundreds of inches of snow fall, and that packed snow sits underneath trees, in rocky valleys, on steep slopes, and in long glacial plains between ranges. Right now, there is almost nothing in some of those plains. South-facing slopes are melting fast, and it is one of the worst seasons in recent memory in terms of avalanche danger. The snowpack feeds some of the country’s mightiest rivers, which flow to the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean both. They include the Colorado River, arguably the most-managed river on Earth — supplier of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, carver of the Grand Canyon, provider of water to 40 million Americans.
“Colorado is a headwater state. We don’t have any rivers that flow into Colorado, but we have rivers that flow out in all directions,” Schumacher told me. “The snow that falls in our mountains is the water that goes into those rivers, that serves tens of millions of people for agriculture, drinking water, everything that we need water for in the West. Most of that snow originates in the mountains.”
And we do not have enough. We have about half the median amount, in fact. Snowpack is essential to the West. We have rarely seen such bad numbers since the Dust Bowl.
14,229-foot Mt. Shavano, practically bare in January
Maybe you can see why this has become somewhat of an obsession for me this winter. I am also kind of fixated on the lack of interest from practically anyone who doesn’t live here. Just wait. Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and California are going to suffer — let alone upper-basin states Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah — and you will hear about it soon enough.
The storms forecast to snow starting tomorrow, while they won’t be enough, are absolutely vital to our way of life. The flakes are about this weekend’s ski trips, but also about the alfalfa that will come in for harvest several months from now. Snow is about mountain communities’ economic security. It’s about the entire atmosphere, paving the way for the summer thunderstorms that flow from the mountains to the prairies.
Snowpack is past, present, and future, embedded in glistening walls of white covering every slope and every crevasse of every peak. In Colorado, snow is everything.
Photos: Top, snow crystal from Wikimedia Commons; inline, Colorado’s central mountains, including the Sangre de Cristo Range and the Sawatch Range, by me from January-February
Skating monster by Hieronymus Bosch, Wikimedia Commons
In which Emily undergoes a trial which will stand her in good stead (what does that phrase even mean? can you stand in steads? what’s a stead? are some steads good and some bad?) when undergoing future trials. This first ran January 3, 2019.
“This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, and the rink was packed from barrier to barrier. Pete promised peppermint bark and beer if I stuck with our plan, though, so we went ahead and rented skates.
A miniature choo-choo train chugged around the perimeter of the rink, packed with gleeful little boys. Parents lounged around the rinkside bar, day-drinking under heat lamps. No one else seemed concerned about the list of sponsors on the rink’s barrier: Marshall Medical Center, Thayer General Surgery, the West Coast Joint and Spine Center.
When Pete asked me to go ice skating with him over the Christmas holiday, I feigned excitement. Pete grew up in rural Pennsylvania and learned to ice skate as a kid. I grew up near Sacramento, California, where it hardly ever snows. Despite living an hour away from ski resorts in Tahoe, I have never mastered any sport that involves attaching blades, boards or wheels to my feet.
I wanted to be enthusiastic. But then — perhaps my fellow science journalists will relate to this — I made the mistake of entering “ice skating” into PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine’s online database.
“Did you know that hundreds of people have been poisoned by carbon monoxide emissions from Zamboni machines at indoor ice rinks?” I asked Pete one evening, as I downloaded a case study about a girl who got impaled with an inline skate in the vagina.
Temporary ice rinks like the one in El Dorado Hills, I found, can seriously strain the capacity of local emergency rooms. Going to a rink where alcohol is served increases injury risk, as does being an adolescent boy or a beginner. “The research suggests it’s my civic duty not to go ice skating,” I told Pete.
He wrapped compression bandages around my wrists and helped me hobble onto the ice. “This is going to be the longest hour and a half of my life,” I thought, clinging to the barrier. Kids were hurling themselves across the skating rink at knee-height, apparently intent on taking down as many adults as possible. From the vantage of the beer garden it must have been hilarious. (See Christie’s post on why falling is so funny.)
Remembering the boy with undiagnosed hemophilia who hemorrhaged after a freak skating accident in New Hampshire, I focused on not slicing any of the children with my skates. Pete glided up beside me, looking composed and carefree. He tried to start a conversation. “Can’t talk,” I growled. “Ice skating.”
Some of my apprehension came from chronic lower back pain, which developed in my early thirties and may have started with a hoola hooping accident. I was at a party watching a twenty-something levitate the hoop with her hips and got a little competitive. “Hold my beer,” I said to a friend, and threw my back out with the first gyration. Sometimes, when the pain flares up, it’s excruciating to reach the toilet paper.
I contemplated the children tumbling across my path. They were not focused on preserving their ability to walk or go to the bathroom. They were not thinking about their anemic health insurance plans, or mentally calculating what a 40% copay for a wrist fracture would cost. Ah, to be young, and let parents pay for emergency room visits!
So focused on not falling was I that the power ballads blaring from the rink’s loudspeakers barely penetrated my consciousness. By a third lap I had gained some balance, however, and started listening to the music. I hummed along to “Friday I’m in Love,” summoning my inner teenager. Humming helped tune out the voice in my head screaming HOW WILL YOU TYPE IF YOUR WRISTS ARE BROKEN?! , and I let go of the barrier.
By the end of “Born in the USA” I had completed a full circumnavigation of the rink, unsupported. As I completed a fifth loop, Pete zoomed up beside me and offered me his hand. We skated until the sun went down and the neon rink lights came on, turning the ice lurid purple. As “Don’t Stop Believing” exploded from the loudspeakers, I released Pete’s hand and did a final victory lap. I made my New Year’s resolution: In 2019, I’ll buy disability insurance.
Not me — Sasha Cohen. Photo credit Rich Moffit, Wikimedia Commons.
I was walking my dog yesterday when I heard them. Sandhill cranes, their distinctive trill high overhead. It’s a few weeks early for them to be migrating through already, but it’s been a scary dry, warm winter and everything is off.
So I stopped to listen and look up. It took a minute to find them, soaring in formation, so high above that they looked like little dots. The sound is unmistakable, but you have to be listening.
There’s joy to be found in deliberate listening, and I’ve been trying to cultivate this sense of presence lately. It’s so easy to get distracted by devices and all the stuff that you can pump into your mind by plugging in ear buds, but I don’t like how it all takes me out of my surroundings and into another place that’s not here. I understand the draw of elsewhere, and sometimes it’s just what I want, like when I’m doing household chores or a long road trip.
But I’ve come to crave the feeling of being present. So I walk. I listen. I look. I stop and sit and take a deep breath. This, here, now is what it feels like to be alive.
Video: I took this video last year, while I was skiing. Turn the volume up (and listen closely) and you’ll hear the cranes.
I am an American citizen, and I don’t look like someone you would stop if you were on the street trying to harass immigrants, but I wasn’t born here. (I’m not an immigrant, either – I just happen to have been born overseas.) I’ve spent about 15% of my life in other countries. And my least favorite role in those years has been “Interpreter of America.”
U.S. power is such a wide-reaching, many-faceted beast that you never quite know what tendril of it has intersected the people you’re meeting, what feelings they might have about that, and what explanations they might demand. I’ve made a lot of earnest attempts to share context on U.S. history and culture and also done a lot of throwing up my hands and saying, “I don’t know, man, I don’t get it, either.”
When this post goes online I’ll be in the middle of a 14-hour flight to a far-off land full of very polite people who, I’m guessing based on what I’ve seen of their news, will have a lot of feelings about my government’s international trade policies (I don’t know, man, I don’t get it, either). The picture above – taken this week a mile or so from my home in Washington, D.C. – is one of the ones I’ll be taking along to try to share where we are today.
