I went cross-country skiing on Saturday. It was my fifth ski day of the new season, which is a welcome change after last year’s abysmal snowfall. We have another storm underway and with any luck, we should have some packed trails this week. Saturday also happened to be Halloween. I think of Halloween skiing as a Grand Mesa tradition, and since I’m a data nerd I have numbers to prove it.
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This spring I went on a pilgrimage to 88 temples around the island of Shikoku. There’s a tradition of giving gifts to pilgrims, called “osettai” – an important part of the pilgrimage.
I experienced osettai in many forms. A volunteer on our second day of walking who stopped and offered a ride to the next temple, number 10. (We accepted, gladly.) An inn near temple 44 where the host threw in dinner for free, two nights in a row – she asked us not to mention it in any online reviews, because she might not always be able to do it, and it was delicious. An older man who tapped me on the shoulder as I ate a snack at a convenience store counter and handed me the sports drink he’d just bought me.
The osettai in the picture above came from a woman who was waiting at a wooden shelter along a river in the eastern part of Kochi. A couple of other pilgrims happened to be walking a few hundred feet in front of me, and I saw her go up to them and give them something out of her tote bag. I got to her and it was my turn. She handed me this bag of snacks. I dug in my pocket and pulled out an “osamefuda” – a piece of paper with my name, location, the date, and a prayer that you leave in an offering box at each temple and give to people when they do something nice for you. We thanked each other profusely and I walked on.
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Welcome to one of Helen and Cameron’s periodic conversations on wool! If you haven’t been following along, this all started when Helen wore a wool dress for 100 days, and Cameron wondered how that was possible. Along the way, the two of us found we had the same sheep-themed place settings. Now, Helen is back from a pilgrimage to Japan where she had deep thoughts on wool, among other things. And there is lots of other news, too, including Helen’s new job as the production manager of the Washington Revels.
Hang on to your knitted hats, here we go!
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The other day I couldn’t come up with the name Jane Goodall.
Of all the names, that’s not one I thought I’d ever struggle to recall. Jane Goodall!! I sat for a while, picturing Jane. Thinking about the amazing work she did with chimps. Remembering the criticism lobbed at her by scientists for giving her study animals names. Envisioning the famous photos of her as a young woman crouched alongside a chimp family, or with her hand reaching out graceful as a dancer’s to a curious baby. Recalling how she gently befriended animals few had ever seen in the wild, much less observed up close.
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My wife and I were hiking up a pain in the ass desert canyon the other day, hand over hand between bus-sized boulders, no trail to follow, when she said she was done and sat in the shade. She said feel free to poke ahead and when I did, within eyesight of her I found a panel of ancient fossilized ripple marks on a boulder half the size of our house. The way the boulder landed when it fell from surrounding cliffs, what was once flat was like a painting on a wall, 90 degrees to what is currently flat. Set along the face of this late Triassic boulder at the base of Wingate Sandstone, western Colorado, was a trackway of a four-legged dinosaur the size of a hippo.
I started calling back to her, and I’ve got to say it sounded like mansplaining because for good reason she didn’t want to climb the boulder choke that was required to get here and I needed to convey a scene that was unfolding: a four-legged animal had walked across a mudflat leaving four or five impressions around 210 million years ago, maybe a smaller, long-necked predecessor of the sauropods. Looking at each print, you might think it was a bulged concretion or some other geologic oddity (they were convex to the rock, reverse impressions, also known as negative tracks), but when put together the walking pattern was clear to the eye.
Looking up through the crack I had climbed, she could see what I was talking about from fifty feet away, and maybe had a better view of the canvas from a distance, pointing out features I couldn’t see, branch-like impressions as if from vegetation.
After half an hour of back-and-forthing, I said I was going to keep on and see where our route went and I’d be back in half an hour. Where it went was nowhere, the canyon steep and so full of giant geologic debris I understood why there was no trail. Nobody comes up here. My wife and I specialize in places like this, poking into nowhere lands, and we’ve found dinosaur environs before, mostly plant fossils, sometimes the porous patterns of bone sticking out of a rock, and footprints now an then. There’s so much dinosaur-aged rock lying around—cliff walls and ten thousand boulders at a time—that you can’t help recognizing the existence of other ages.
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Recently, while working through Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy with my mom, I encountered a new-to-me poetic form: the sestina.
Jaouad’s book is a collection of creative enticements from writers and artists, musicians and teachers, and we’d come across Ann Patchett’s prompt, “The Mouse Sestina,” in the midst of a particularly hectic time. It was still winter, the radiant heating in my upstairs loft had sprung a leak and flooded the carpet, and I found myself replacing our flooring while my partner was on the other side of the planet. I responded to Patchett’s prompt, “Pick out a poetic form and give it a try,” by writing a haiku and calling it a day. I did not have the bandwidth to engage with a poetic form that she calls “ridiculously complicated.”
A sestina is, indeed, a complicated form—six stanzas of six lines each, where each line ends in one of six words that appear in a bewilderingly specified arrangement. Assign each ending word a number, and the arrangement looks like this:
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The other week I was trudging through laps around the court I live on, and a neighbor yelled across the court, first “HI” and I yelled “HI” right back and then he yelled, “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR!”
So I asked why it was the best day of the year, and trudged a little closer to hear him better even though he was still yelling, “BECAUSE IT’S THE DAY THE CHEMISTRY NOBEL IS ANNOUNCED.” I’ve known this neighbor since he first moved here, buying his first house, he and his wife having their first baby, starting his first real job, which — relevant to our discussion — was as a young professor of chemistry. Chemistry has always seemed to combine the idiosyncratic rats’-nest of biology and the rigorous theology of physics, and I stay away from it. But I’m a science writer and professionally obliged to be curious, so I trudged a bit closer and asked who won the chemistry Nobel. My neighbor was still yelling. “KAGAN AND SOAI,” pronounced so-aye, “FOR HOMOCHIRALITY,” he yelled, which, I haven’t a clue. And because he’s a scientist to his bones, every atom of him is scientist, he was pleased to tell me, unasked, what homochirality is and how it happens and I went over to where he was standing by his car and listened hard.
He started by telling me all the molecules of life — all the molecules of life? so, everything that life is and does? I didn’t ask — had a handedness, which chemists call chirality. Pretty word, ancient Greek, means “hand,” I sort of knew what chirality meant: the way the molecule twists itself, spirals toward the left or right, I pictured a snail shell, a DNA molecule, a helix. He was getting ahead of me already. Turns out that all the molecules of life — whatever they are — have the same chirality, homochirality, “homo,” also ancient Greek, means “same.” Every amino acid in every protein in every cell twists toward the left, they are all left-handed. But chemical reactions — which are what? I didn’t ask — in the lab, create both left- and right-handed molecules. I wasn’t following his argument 100%, more like 50%, and I know from these links I’m inserting that it’s not this simple. But I did get the bottom line: if both chiralities are created equal, how come we’re all molecularly left-handed?
The Nobel Prize winners figured that out and did the experiment(s). In experiments, it turns out — and this is thoroughly above my pay grade — they could do some magic that life must also have done: they could prejudice the outcome just the least little tiny bit toward the left-handed. And then they could take that outcome with the tiny prejudice and repeat — something or other that’s repeated — and by the time it all comes out in the wash, those tiny prejudices toward the left have added up and accumulated and pretty soon life is only left-handed. The word I’m thinking of is “propagated,” used the way physicists use it: one thing leads to another. A tiny difference in a reaction that gets repeated and repeated just gets bigger and bigger. The prejudice propagates and accumulates.
At least, I think that’s what my neighbor was saying. I didn’t ask because 1) I wouldn’t have understood him without a lot more brain work and I hadn’t had breakfast; and 2) I was interrupted by a blinding epiphany. Which was this ⬇️:
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