How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Winter Edition)

By: | July 2, 2019

This essay originally ran on September 23, 2011. It’s reappearing here as part of LWON’s “It’s ATACAMA WEEK! (Because we can.)“

Today is the autumnal equinox, the last partial day of summer and the first partial day of autumn—at least in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern, today is the vernal equinox, the last full day of winter and the first partial day of spring. (Yes, I know, a swath of the Pacific Ocean abutting the International Date Line, including the Aleutian Islands, Hawaii, the Cook Islands, and French Polynesia, experienced the equinox very late yesterday [local time], but they’re just being difficult. Besides, the equinox, when the Sun passes precisely over the equator, happens everywhere on Earth at the same moment:  9:05 a.m. Universal Time.) For the purposes of this post the distinction between autumnal and vernal equinox—Northern and Southern Hemisphere—is one worth making, because where I spent my summer vacation this year was Chile.

When I told a friend that I would be traveling to Chile because it’s home to some of the world’s greatest observatories, she naturally asked, “Why Chile?” Because, I explained, the calm and dry air of the Atacama Desert makes Chile just about ideal for astronomy. “But,” she said, after a little reflection, “doesn’t the sand get in the gears?”

I don’t know much about geology, but I do know that deserts are defined by their aridity, not by their Lawrence-of-Arabia duneness. The South Pole, for instance, sits in the middle of a desert, which is what makes it, too, an impeccable place for astronomy. But I learned to empathize with her cluelessness, because once I got to Chile, I realized I didn’t know what kind of landscape to expect, either.

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Finding the words

By: | July 1, 2019

It’s Atacama Week at LWON. This post originally appeared March 19, 2018

Most of us probably remember the first word we spoke in our native language.

Mine was “Cat,” for I was fascinated by the ornery old Siamese that my parents kept when I was a baby. From there, I’m sure, I learned a child’s standard repertoire: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Doggie,” the colors red-yellow-green-blue, and those most basic early expressions of desire, “Love,” and “NO!”, and “I” and “Want.”

Most of us probably remember our first word in our native language, but I doubt many of us can remember a time when we knew so few words that we had to expand their definitions to cover an entire universe of necessary expression. When the word “Mom,” depending on how we said it, had to stand for everything from fear to hunger to whatever as-yet-inscrutable emotion was blowing through us.

I know I don’t remember. I work with words for a living. When I want to say, for example, that I’m cold, I have dizzying array of synonyms and phrases to call upon, each with different connotations and levels of extremity. I could be chilly or frigid, freezing or frosty, even glacial, hoary, icy, wintry, or just plain numb-lipped-club-footed-broken-fingered cold.

Then, I spent two weeks in Chile’s Atacama Desert this January. Only three of my five companions spoke English. When they talked among themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is even worse for outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds whose meanings I could only grasp at based on context and hand gesture. Or from incessantly badgering the English speakers to help me out.

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It’s ATACAMA WEEK! (Because we can.)

By: | July 1, 2019

In a celebration of a weird place few people go, except, apparently, People of LWON, we bring you Atacama Week.

The Atacama Desert is not a popular destination-wedding spot or a favorite girls’ weekend locale. I doubt anyone has thrown a bachelor party in the Atacama–although NOW I’ll bet someone will–and it’s rarely picked for family reunions (just TRY to get good catering on that blasted sand dune) or even interventions. It’s used, more often, in films as a stand-in for Mars.

The People of LWON are a quirky bunch, and it turns out at least five of us have visited this hyper-arid plateau on the Pacific coast of South America. Fortunately, being committed scribes, our intrepid travelers then put fingers to keyboard and waxed poetic. Or at least they jotted down a few notes about the place, notes they were willing to share with the rest of us.

We’ve lined up our favorite Atacama-related posts for this first sizzling week of July, only partly because none of us feels like writing something new. It’s also because, as it turns out, this dry-ass place is full of surprises. So please sit back, blast the AC, and enjoy!

A Little Less than Free

By: | June 28, 2019

The kids across the street are my special little pals. They climb all over me and believe the lies I tell them. We wrestle, take walks, get ice cream, talk about poop. I really love these two little guys—I’ve known them their whole lives–and I think they love me, too. It would be interesting to know if, while cuddling these cuties, my hormonal oxytocin—associated with maternal bonding–clicks up a few notches. Their own mom, though careworn, still gets that softness about the eyes and mouth when her boys are being especially cute. (I might call it her “oxy smile” if the term didn’t suggest something else entirely.)

Then, as the boys get tired or hungry and start to bicker and whine, I plant a last peck on each warm head and get the hell out. In my [relatively uncluttered] home, I wash the sticky from my hands and lie on the couch in just a tee-shirt, no dropped Legos pressing against the backs of my legs. I pour wine. My motherly instincts turn to the dogs. The quiet is our blanket.

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The Invention of Invention, and Vice Versa

By: | June 27, 2019

    By now you’ve probably heard about author Naomi Wolf’s fateful radio interview on the BBC. Perhaps you’ve heard the interview itself, though if not, you might want to skip it—especially if you’re a writer who traffics in facts and has ever had to cite one. It’s gruesome listening.

    Wolf was publicizing her book about the English government’s attitude toward homosexuality in the nineteenth century, Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love. The persecution, she said, included “several dozen” executions for the crime of engaging in homosexual acts.

    “I don’t think you’re right about this,” presenter Matthew Sweet said. At the time, he explained, the term “death recorded” would have referred not to an actual death but to a judge’s decision to decline to pronounce a death sentence.

    The silence that followed, you might imagine, was the sound of an author seeing her career flash before her eyes. (Her U.S. publisher has announced a delay in the Stateside publication, originally scheduled for this month.)

    I haven’t been hearing a lot of the kind of Schadenfreude that usually attends an author’s fall from grace, presumably because of the nature of the error. Wolf hadn’t committed a conscious subterfuge, such as plagiarism. She hadn’t bent statistics to her own advantage, a charge she has, in fact, repeatedly faced throughout her career.

    Instead, she’d made an understandable mistake, one that any author might make.

    I nearly made it myself, once.

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    Could We Make Conferences Less Sucky?

    By: | June 26, 2019

    This post first ran on June 16, 2011. It’s on my mind, because this week I’m at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is also at the Aspen Institute and is similar in form to the Environment Forum I discuss in the post.

    ***

    I’m not a big fan of conferences. I loathe spending vast stretches of time indoors, especially if it requires planting my butt in uncomfortable chairs and wearing clothes with buttons and shoes that aren’t flip flops. Yet I continue to attend meetings, because they offer opportunities to interact with smart people who are thinking about interesting things.

    Earlier this month, I attended two conferences in a single week, and the stark contrast between them got me thinking about why conferences so often suck and how to make them better.

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    Tale of Two Boulders

    By: | June 25, 2019

    Earlier this month, a pinpoint landslide let loose onto a highway near where I live in southwest Colorado. No homes were destroyed. No cars were crushed, though three were narrowly missed. One pickup punched into reverse, its body hammered with rocks, occupants safe.

    What is significant is the tonnage of two boulders that tumbled a thousand feet and planted themselves across Highway 145 between the mountain town of Telluride and the desert town of Cortez. Both are squarish blocks of Dakota sandstone, one estimated at 2.3 million pounds, the other at 8.5 million pounds, leaving a trough eight feet deep in the asphalt. I imagine the view from that pickup the moment it happened, two rocks the size of houses, a one-bedroom and a three-bedroom, landing out of nowhere, like Godzilla crashing into the frame.

    I like the way earth falls apart, a fan of geomorphology. I’ve pushed off a few big blocks myself, charmed by the way they were caught on a corner while falling and just needed a shove from a boot to keep their journey going. Out in the middle of nowhere, I felt like the rocks wanted to go. That’s my excuse, at least. When I skip rocks across a river, I sometimes think the rock desires its baseline, its angle of repose, every skip sending it to its lower, granular resting place.

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    The Oregon Trail Game

    By: | June 24, 2019

    This post originally appeared March 17, 2016

    The first time I played the Oregon Trail computer game – a parody of American westward expansion inflicted on countless school kids – was this winter. I was snug in bed, as befits a prospective pioneer facing one of history’s largest human migrations. Up to 500,000 settlers set out along the Oregon and California Trails in the mid-19th century. For my own treacherous 2,000-mile trip, I chose to be a banker from Boston, because I had just seen The Big Short and longed to inflict virtual revenge on the financial sector. I named this banker Beverly, since the game gave me no option to be a woman. Beverly’s sundry family members would be Pot Roast, Potato, Death, and – improbably in this bunch at least – Steven.

    Predictably, Death was first to die. She drowned along with two oxen not long after we embarked from Missouri, when I tried to ford a river instead of paying the toll for a ferry. Steven, meanwhile, was plagued by misfortunes that will be familiar to all who’ve played this game. First he was exhausted, then broken-armed, then grappling with dysentery, then lost, then down with cholera. I finally ended his misery by crashing the raft bearing our covered wagon into a rock on the Columbia River, drowning us both near the end of the line in Oregon.

    The game is a culty 1970s simplification of a complex historical event that contributed to the violent displacement of indigenous people and laid the foundations for today’s urban Northwest. But Americans have been preoccupied with valorizing and simulating the pioneer experience almost since the United States began colonizing the West Coast. More…