The Last Word On Nothing

In recent months, I’ve spent most of my time in Bremen, a coastal fishing village just down the peninsula from Damariscotta, Maine.  Often my husband joins me. Bremen is Maine the way you think of it–our neighbors haul lobsters, dredge clams, pull kelp, and farm oysters.  There’s an emergency doc who doubles as a vet up one road, and a fiber artist married to a blacksmith down another.  And of course, there is nature.

Our back yard rolls down to a little lake that’s busy with small mouth bass and perch.  The beavers build dens the size of igloos, and on summer evenings the loons kick up a fuss like a pack wet diapered toddlers.   In winter the lake freezes mirror solid, and ice fishers huddle for hours pulling up pickerel to leave like an offering for birds of prey.  

It’s as good a place as any to wait out the plague years.  That’s no secret to aspiring builders who circle like vultures, swooping down with their checkbooks to bid up the price of land.  Still, it’s mostly quiet and just far enough “away” that it’s easy to overlook what’s going on outside our brackish bubble, the closed schools and shuttered businesses, the crowded, frantic hospitals, the airline passengers gone mad with impotent rage. 

Still, we got our shots and boosters, wear masks and worry, especially about the children getting lost in the viral stampede.  What will become of them, we wonder, growing up in a world where grownups bicker over inconvenience and distort medical reality to suit their “truth”? 

Last week we drove to Boston, to see our grandchildren, Avery, a yellow haired girl just turned 4 and Aiden, a brown-haired boy whose second birthday comes in April.  Avery met us at the door dressed in snow pants, mittens and a miniature N95, fully armed for our sledding date.  Aiden was a few steps behind, no mask yet, and his mom still struggling with his boots.   The struggle proved futile, and it was decided Aiden would remain warm and dry at home with his mom. 

Avery selected a few choice snacks from the pantry as I extracted two flying saucers from a tangled heap in the garage.  When all was finally ready, we trudged the half mile or so through the snow to the sliding hill, already thick with tots and pre-teens. Nearly every one of these eager thrill seekers—even the pre-teens—came protected by a guardian who hovered by his or her side at the top of the hill, then scuttled to the bottom to assure a safe landing.  I found this odd: the hill’s vertical drop was no more than 50 feet, and so gradual that some sledders had to push themselves through the last few yards.  That was fine by me:  my granddaughter was on the younger side, and no daredevil. I helped her get settled on the saucer, pointed her in a roughly downhill direction and wished her luck. 

But just before launch time, a guardian leapt into her path, frantically waving and booming “stop.”  We froze.  

The guardian strode purposely up the hill, her eyes peering furious just above her mask. Had I seen her sons huddled together on the toboggan at the bottom of the hill?  If not, was I blind?  If so, did I think that they were targets?  

I squinted hard and spotted the endangered sons, staring sheepishly uphill at their mom. They were fairly far to the left of us, and appeared to be roughly 10 and 12 years of age. I estimated their combined weight at 150 pounds, not counting their sturdy wooden toboggan.   My granddaughter weighs in on the light side of 30 pounds and her ride was a flimsy plastic disc.  Common sense—and basic physics– tells us that the consequences of a direct strike were there to be one:  the light object rebounds with the opposite velocity to its initial velocity, while the heavier object remains at rest.  If by some odd trick of fate my granddaughter had somehow veered several yards to the left and into that toboggan, any damage would have been all hers.

I pictured my own daughter Alison—Avery’s mother—at age 4, speeding down a far more precipitous hill on her Flexible Flyer, its steel runners flaming red as she whizzed past the cheering onlookers.   (When I was a child, we called these “razor sleds,” coating the blades with ski wax to give new meaning to the term “flyer.”)  Naturally I worried that Alison might do herself harm, I mean—steel runners? But I kept those fears to myself.  That sled was her magic carpet, her freedom ride—I’d had mine, now it was her turn.  The cost of instilling that fear in a 4 year old seemed much higher to me then did the cost of a split lip or gashed knee.

But of course, that was before the plague years. 

After I assured the mother that Avery would postpone her launch until her sons were safely at the top of the hill, she teared up, not with gratitude, but with embarrassment.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell,” she told me. “We’ve had so many health scares, so many warnings, there’s just so much fear flying around, I think I projected it onto you.” 

I nodded, bent down, and pushed Avery hard.  And she just flew. 

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Ellen Ruppel Shell, Professor Emeritus of Science Journalism at Boston University, tormented hundreds of students in the (recently defunct) Graduate Program in Science Journalism. She hopes most of them have forgiven her. The author of four books and too many articles, essays and reviews, she writes about things other science writers wouldn’t—like the nature of work, and the real cost of low price; but also about things they would—like salmon farms and human cognition and the obesity pandemic. In delusional moments, she imagines that narrative non-fiction can be practiced in service to social justice and related lofty goals. In more lucid moments, she acknowledges that readers yearn to be delighted, not merely—or even necessarily– illuminated. Her current book project, tentatively titled “Slippery Beast: A Tale of High Crime, Fierce Obsession, and One Woman’s Fight to Save the State of Maine.” It’s about eels.

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Photo by Babewyn, via Wikimedia Commons