I’m thinking about fresh scents again, which brings me back to this essay from a few years ago. For the record, I’m still wearing those perfumes!
God damn it, advertising can be powerful. I mean, not that I would ever buy some stupid crap because I saw it advertised on TikTok, of all platforms…that place is rife with over-hyped junk and over-painted hawkers (the term “influencer” makes my toes curl, no joke) and I’m not pathetic enough to fall for their BS.
Until I was. What got me: It was the yummy sounding scents that mean spring and sunshine and a breeze up your skirt. It was the arty images of grasses waving and glitter on the water and dandelion seeds in her hair. Damn it if a company that makes earthy perfumes didn’t grab me and hold me down and whisper sweet nothings against my forehead while I typed my credit card number into their website.
God damn it if in a frenzy of spring fever, I didn’t buy a sampler of 10 wee bottles so I can “find my signature scent” –the one that will make heads turn and noses flare and passers-by wonder who I am (clearly someone special) and wish they’d been to whatever sun-kissed spot on the map I’d just visited. (I’m not a winter person, as you may have guessed.)
Was this just me jumping on a popular thing on a popular platform, to feel a part of the youth culture of today? In economics there’s a phenomenon known as FOMO, or “fear of missing out”—it’s an emotional response that often drives people to buy a stock that’s skyrocketing; as the price reaches all-time highs, people take the leap regardless of what math and investing sense and even past experience might say about its future trajectory.
That’s what happens on these social media marketplaces. There are many trends, but some of them zoom to the moon and innocent scrollers see them rising and want to grab a seat, not be left behind watching vapor trails dissipate in the sky. Even knowing a trend’s star will be short lived, one wants to nab it and, to continue abusing metaphors, bask in its twinkle.
Me, I thumbed by the wide-legged jumpsuits, the crochet kits, the eyelash serums, the hand-knit Sherpa hoods, even the dog products—nope, nope, nope, nope. I flew through the stupid giant sippy cup for grownups (WTF people?) and every makeup product promising to shave off 10+ years. I saw beyond the crisscross shapewear and European hair clips and that spinning toilet brush.
But the idea of the smells of nature in a bottle, that stopped me. I remember well classics like Chanel No. 5 or, more vivid, whatever affordable perfume I bought from JCPenny in the mid-80s that’s still in my closet, 1/3 used. (I DID get beyond Love’s Baby Soft, finally.) I’ve evolved since, now taken in by nature’s notes. Today’s advertisers crept into my soul with words like sage and bergamot and cedar, grapefruit zest and fresh pine and whatever vetiver root is. Desert wind, sandalwood, aquatic notes, lily rain, black amber. Who wouldn’t want to wrap themselves in the blankets of these words, especially in miserable February, and as a bonus emit deliciousness with every step?
Scent is such a provocateur. It tells stories, it conjures memories. It worms its way deep. An exciting scent can send you traveling. A familiar scent can carry you home.
Speaking of home, an aside that I probably shouldn’t admit here: As a kid I found a floral-smelling spray in my mom’s closet that I’d spritz on my wrists and behind my ears before school, feeling very sweet and sophisticated. I didn’t know what “feminine deodorant spray” meant, apparently.
Actual scents aside, the words, the ones you can smell or taste, seem to have the most power over me. They, like the scents themselves, conjure an image that’s hard to resist. Youth, ease, fresh faces, no worries, endless possibility. You’d think I’d be immune, as I know the strength of language and employ it myself to influence others. You’d think. And yet, deep in the winter blues, shivering at my desk, the mirror telling me things I’d rather not know, those words are a breeze slipping among meadow flowers or that first deep breath one takes by the sea, and I’m powerless. I don’t think its FOMO that got me. It’s the ahhhhhhh of magical thinking and of seasons to come.
Caribou of Alaska’s Western Arctic Herd travel the shore of the Kobuk River. Author video. —
Most of the time, caribou are conservative. They tend not to try new things unless they really have to. They don’t like to wander far from their preferred migration routes, except in preiods of unusual weather, or extreme duress. While they often take serious risks—crossing just-frozen lakes, swimming rough rivers, wandering through the territories of hungry bears, wolves, and people—these hazards have been baked into their existence in such a way, and for so long, that you could say they’re grandfathered in. They’re part of the game. And caribou don’t like it when the game changes. I don’t mean to say they’re totally incurious or inflexible. They just spook easily.
This was why I worried for them.
But, as you might expect from a certain kind of conservative, caribou also tend to be very steady. Reliable. Punctual. For a very long time indeed, many thousands of years, you could set a seasonal clock by their migrations. This is uniquely true of the subspecies known as—you guessed it—migratory caribou, which spend their lives in motion and each year travel hundreds of miles between their winter grounds in the boreal forest and their spring and summer range on the Arctic tundra.
Even in our era, with upheavals caused by climate change, you can still expect nearly all of them, hundreds of thousands of animals spread from western Alaska to eastern Canada, to begin their spring peregrinations at almost exactly the same time. This phenomenon is as bewildering as it is inspiring. And yet their synchrony seems so finely-tuned that you cannot help but consider its fragility. As with any finely-tuned thing built of many moving parts—watches, automobile engines, acrobatic teams—caribou migrations are at once impressive and tense, for in their precision you sense that a slight deviation, a misstep, a series of unfortunate events, could fuck the whole thing up.
This, too, was why I worried for them.
——
In the deep past Indigenous hunters learned to take advantage of these caribou qualities in ingenious ways. Because they are punctual, Arctic hunters knew where and when to meet them on the landscape. Because they spook easily and don’t like surprises, hunters developed various kinds of herding structures to influence their movement. Often these were built of stone: rock piles arranged at regular intervals along the landscape, sometimes made to look vaguely like a person with their arms stretched out. In Canada, the Inuit call these figures inuksuit, which means, roughly, things that act in the capacity of a person.
In the caribou’s eyes, the stones were people, and upon spotting them the animals would recoil and veer away. This, of course, was just what the hunters wanted. They used inuksuit to steer caribou toward hunting blinds, or lakes, or other places where they could be more easily killed with lances and arrows. While I’ve encountered ancient inuksuk (the singular form of inuksuit) in my travels through the Arctic, I’ve never met more than one or two at a time. I have seen drawings, though, made by hunters in Alaska, of how they were used long ago. In those renderings, the stone figures, shown in great numbers, look like literal fences—lines drawn across the map. At some point I also realized the lines of inuksuit also looked like a lot like roads.
And I worried about roads, for a while.
Inuksuit at Foxe Peninsula, Baffin Island, Canada. Source: Wikipedia. —
On October 6, the Trump Administration resurrected the so-called Ambler Road project. This is a proposed 211-mile long industrial road that will shoot through a currently roadless, uninhabited portion of Arctic Alaskan wilderness, including the southern hem of the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Ambler Road will service a mine, or mines, that like the road haven’t been built yet, but Trump seems dead set on getting it done, and he convened a press conference in the Oval Office to talk about it.
In that meeting Trump did what you might expect from a man who views that natural world variously as an ATM or an enemy. He talked about how “America” needs the minerals the mine will provide. He talked about how mining and road building will create jobs and wealth. He did not mention that it will be a private road, meaning the general public will not be able to use it, and that the wealth created will go almost entirely to foreign-owned companies.
He did not mention any of the things that road building usually brings, including pollution of both the physical variety—trash, chemical spills, runoff, and traffic—and less visible (but no less harmful) kinds, such as dust, noise, greenhouse gases, and illegal hunting. He also did not talk about how the road will impact caribou.
Map of the proposed Ambler Road Project, including potential mine sites. The purple shaded area to the north is the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Source: BLM —
If Ambler Road is built, it’ll cut through the home range of the Western Arctic Herd, which is one of the state’s most storied and important herds. The Western, as they’re often called, were formerly Alaska’s largest herd, and at their peak in the early 2000s numbered some half a million animals. But the Western has been in decline for many years, and by 2023, their population had dropped to about 150,000.
This vanishing trend is not limited to the Western. All across the top of the continent migratory caribou populations are falling, some precipitously. And while no one knows why this is happening, two culprits are almost certainly to blame. First is human-caused climate change, which is unraveling the old, relatively reliable world the caribou once knew. The second is human industrial activity, including mining and especially road building.
You probably see by now where my worry was headed.
——
In the late spring of 2022, a biologist in Alaska showed me a digital animation that combined roads and caribou. The caribou, which were wearing satellite tracking collars, appeared as black dots moving across a map. The road—a mining road in the northern part of the state—appeared as a line on the screen. When the black dots hit the line, many, if not most of them, rebounded. Because I am a child of the 80s, I instantly thought of the video game Pong. It was like that: balls bouncing off a paddle.
The biologist had been touring the state, appearing at meetings about the potential effects of the Ambler Road project. At the time, the Biden Administration was mulling the whole thing over, reviewing its permits and purpose. Eventually Biden would kill it, but that hadn’t happened yet and many Alaskas, particularly Indigenous ones who rely on caribou for spiritual well-being as well as physical sustenance, were profoundly concerned about what the road and its attached mine or mines might do to caribou.
The biologist told me he’d show his animation and people in the meetings would sometimes gasp. For the most part, caribou lives unfold far out of our sight. Their challenges, their sufferings and triumphs, lives and deaths, are largely invisible to us, even if we live in caribou country. For many in the audiences, the Pong animation revealed an aspect of caribou-human relations that they had never seen before but recognized right away from their familiarity with the animals, and with old stories about hunting fences.
For a long time mining and oil companies have insisted that their roads, along with their helipads and pipelines and other infrastructure, have hardly any effect on caribou at all. But the satellites were telling a different story. They were showing how human lines scored into earth—not for hunting, but for extraction, for “wealth-generation”—could disrupt caribou movements, possibly throw off their migrations, frighten them into new, unsteady and unreliable behaviors.
“The mine folks didn’t like it much when I showed that animation,” the biologist said.
——
Later, in 2024, he sighed in relief when the Biden Administration scuttled the Ambler Road project. But then Trump resurrected it. Earlier this week I wrote to the biologist to ask how he feels and though I haven’t yet heard back I’m sure I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to tell me he’s worried.
He’ll say what most of us can probably guess: a 211-mile long industrial road, surfaced with gravel and busy with trucks that are feeding the wealth of foreigners will be no friend to the conservative, dwindling caribou of the Western Arctic Herd.
There is still hope that a court might stop the road, or that some other hurdle will block Trump’s plan. No death-cult lasts forever, after all. And if there is a silver lining here for me it may be that I’m not worried anymore. Now I’m angry, and this is good. You can’t do much, I’ve learned, with worry. But anger is, they say, is fuel.
I haven’t heard the foxes for a good year now. The woods are still there but the owners sold it to a buyer who promised to cut down only the middle of it, you know how buyers promise things. No trees have been cut down yet but a lot of people have been tramping through the woods, measuring and discussing. Maybe the foxes got tired of the people, maybe they know what’s coming; but in any case, they probably got up and left. Not everything ends well.
I wrote that paragraph on August 7, 2019, and since then (YES!) things ended well. Only the middle of the woods was indeed cut, and the foxes are back. They sashay across lawns and up the sidewalks. They look neither right nor left, they own the whole neighborhood, but I swear they know every movement everywhere. The 2019 post was a re-run from September 8, 2016. It strikes me that I’ve been doing this for a long time.
*
Across the street are two houses with two small yards, connected so they look like one, shaded by trees, one of which has a rope looped in it. The little kids come out of both houses, run through the shade into the dapple-spots of sunlight, disappear back into the shade, grab the rope and swing, climb up into the tree and perch like little panthers. Sometimes they sing. And one twilight, running into and out of the light, what they sang was “What does the fox say?”
The song was popular a few years ago but I’d never listened to it. I went inside and googled it. It’s an unsettlingly weird song by a Norwegian — what is it with those far northerners and their pale skins and light eyes and strange stories? The song is about a guy who knows that dogs say woof and elephants say toot but doesn’t know what the fox says; so a bunch of people dressed in animal costumes dancing in a woods tell him what the fox says, which is, among other things, Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow! Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff! You get the idea, they’re making it up, they don’t know what the fox says either. These sounds, coming out of the dark from kids in trees across the street, Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!, were also unsettlingly weird.
I didn’t used to know what the fox said either. And that’s odd because I grew up on a small farm set in fields, backing on to woods. That’s prime fox territory. We kept chickens, and foxes would get into the chicken house and kill them. I knew it was foxes because my mother said so. But I never heard a fox.
So decades later, hundreds of miles away, in a city, I woke up one night hearing an unholy scream. It didn’t sound human, it didn’t even sound animal. I looked out the window and saw a large fox, long tail held out behind, walking slowly down the street, stopping every now and then to lift its head and scream. You have to hear that sound to believe it. It sounded like it came from a time before animals.
That was years ago; the fox lived in a woods behind the houses across the street. I now recognize the sound — it’s been called a vixen scream and every Brit TV show featuring stately country mansions in the night has vixen screams in the background. Foxes live maybe five years, says Google, so that any foxes I hear now are probably its children. The neighbors keep track of them; on summer mornings they say, “Did you hear the fox last night?” For weeks they talked about one large one that limped; I never saw it. After a while no one saw a limping fox again so either the fox died or it stopped limping.
One night this summer, a neighbor and I were sitting on the porch as it got dark, talking about this and that. I was in the middle of saying something when she froze and nodded toward the street. There, walking down the middle, through the pools of street lights, was a fox and two cubs, maybe adolescents, all three sticking together. They might be heading toward the creek at the bottom of the street. They walked out of the dark and into the street lights, appearing, disappearing, reappearing, the way the little kids across the street moved in and out of the light. They slipped under cars, walked back into the street. Then they walked off into the dark, not saying a word, not saying any of the things that foxes say.
Every rock you pick up at the Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds has a trilobite on it.
Science vacations are the best vacations. I’ve been ridiculously fortunate to visit some great science-related destinations, and I’m trying to figure out which ones to visit next. I’ll share some of my recommendations here, in no particular order. I hope you’ll share your favorites with me and the rest of the Last Word on Nothing community.
A science vacation, for me, means anywhere with interesting wildlife, plants, fossils, rock formations, caves, mountains, museums, reefs, astronomical observatories, engineering marvels, science history sites, etc. Any destination can be a science destination if you look at it right.
Going to the Galápagos is like a pilgrimage for non-believers. (Believers are welcome, too.) I had studied plenty of evolutionary biology—you probably have, too—but when you go there and see the finches and the tortoises and tree-like cacti and the fearless mockingbirds and how they interact and co-evolve on different islands, it just makes all of Earth’s living history make sense. You can swim with marine iguanas, see penguins and flamingos on the same coast, visit HMS Beagle landing sites, and laugh at boobies dancing and frigatebirds puffing out their throat pouches.
Mount St. Helens erupted 45 years ago (I know, I know, I had to double-check the math) and you can still see the devastation it caused—and the ecosystem’s recovery. Any volcanic park makes for a great science trip, as long as it’s inactive or you’re at a safe distance. Lassen Volcanic National Park in California, Haleakalā in Hawaii, and Mount Rainier in Washington are all relatively young, accessible, ridiculously dramatic volcanoes. Devil’s Tower in Wyoming (the one in Close Encounters) is the core of an ancient volcano. You can walk through lava tubes at Craters of the Moon in Idaho (bring a headlamp).
Ben has since left The Last Word on Nothing but he left this memento of himself, for which we are grateful.
Earlier this month I visited Portugal for the first time, where I found much to love: the vertiginous cliffs overlooking the Nazaré beach, the ubiquitous custard tarts and dessert wines, the labyrinth of secret passages that veins Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood. Uncultured nature-loving heathen that I am, however, I found myself most drawn to the country’s wildlife — namely, to its swifts.
The common swifts, Apus apus, gathered each evening above Lisbon’s streets and squares, sharp black chevrons silhouetted against purpling sky, the very picture of grace and velocity. They rocketed down alleys and wheeled past balconies, accelerating into turns so steep and sudden they would have made Maverick pass out. All the while they shrieked at each other, shrill and raucous — a nightly production of avian cacophony called, perfectly, a “screaming party.” And then, though I never quite saw them do it, they disappeared into the heavens, an ascension known, for its synchronicity with evening prayers, as a “vesper flight.” (The first rule of swifts is that their every behavior must have an odd and charming name.)
“Vesper Flights” is, not coincidentally,the title of an essay collection by the estimable British nature writer Helen Macdonald; the book bears a swift, outstretched and eye glittering, on its cover. In the titular piece, Macdonald explicates the mind-blowing biology of swifts, virtuosic flyers who, after fledging, can go two years without touching earth. Each night, swifts fly as high as six thousand feet to sleep on the wing — a fact discovered by a World War I-era French aviator who blundered into a flock deep in slumber, “miniature black stars illuminated by the reflected light of the moon.” But they don’t just climb to such great heights to snooze: They also feel the rush of high-altitude air flows and so forecast incoming weather systems, and calibrate their internal magnetic compasses against stars and polarized light. “They’re quietly, perfectly, orienting themselves,” Macdonald writes.
Although I certainly consider myself a Macdonald fan— like everyone who read it, I’ve fantasized about living with a goshawk since devouring H Is for Hawk — I confess that I didn’t initially adore Vesper Flights. Its short essays felt fragmentary and fleeting; many ended abruptly just as they began to build momentum. And its swift meditation, however remarkable its facts, left me a little cold. Swifts, Macdonald wrote, had become her “fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions” in the face of COVID and other tumult. This seemed like a lot of metaphorical weight to pile on her avian subject: Wasn’t the astonishing natural history enough? Couldn’t swifts just be, you know, birds?
When I was in Portugal, I pulled up Macdonald’s essay again, nearly three years after I’d first read it in the New York Times Magazine, to refresh myself on the basics of swifthood. My experience of the piece was transformed; indeed, it struck me as one of the loveliest works of nature writing I’d ever encountered. Having never experienced flesh-and-blood swifts before, I’d failed to appreciate how perfectly Macdonald had evoked them. (The observation that “their surfing and tacking against the pressures of oncoming air make visible the movings of the atmosphere” struck me as especially apt, in how it captured their oneness with the sky, these creatures who never land.)
And, too, swifts were so charismatic that of course they made sense as parables and spiritual guides; you could hardly observe such bewitching birds withoutfeeling connected to them (not least because they operate in cities, fundamentally humanspaces; they both belong to our world and exist apart from it). Reading about swifts in Portugal was like, I don’t know, reading Joyce in Dublin: The work helps you appreciate the place, sure, but the place also helps you appreciate the work, that magical transubstantiation of setting and literature.
I returned from Portugal with a ceramic swift — the kind of tchotchke that I virtually never get on vacation, but that seemed the perfect remembrance of our trip. My swift is inert, incapable of screaming parties or vesper flights or any of the other behaviors that make these animals extraordinary. Yet in the graceful sweep of its molded wings, it nonetheless captures something of its species’ dynamism and speed; it does in porcelain the work that “Vesper Flights” performs in prose.
Hillary Rosner is a science journalist and editor who teaches journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also a friend and fellow member of Scilance, a network of 30+ science writers that has been meeting up online for 20 years. Over the years, I’ve loved following Hillary’s thoughtful, adventurous reporting on wildlife conservation, whether she’s writing about orangutans in Borneo or the Devils Hole pupfish in the Mojave Desert. Now, she’s written a wonderful book, which was published yesterday by Patagonia. It’s called Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World.
In Roam, Hillary writes about conversation projects around the world that are studying how wild creatures move across landscapes and working to support species by reconnecting fragmented habitat. I was lucky enough to talk with Hillary last week. Here’s our (lightly edited) conversation about Roam.
Our neighbors of ten years moved away about a month ago. They were an older couple; L., the husband, was the one we interacted with the most. He was a commercial contractor and drove a big black pickup, but he also made sure to let my wife and me know he had never once voted for Trump. This is Seattle, after all.
As neighbors we were friendly but not overly so. (Again, Seattle.) L. was jocular in a Hail-Fellow-Well-Met kind of way, and we enjoyed occasional chitchat over our shared fence. Once when that fence needed to be replaced, L. was able to leverage his contacts and get us all a discount. For that I was grateful.
This placid cordialness would have been the defining feature of our relationship but for an incident a couple of years ago. One spring afternoon I was doing some yard work when L. came outside and leaned over the fence. “Hey, Eric, got a question for ya,” he said. “What do you think of your tree here?” He gestured to the tree I was at that moment standing under.
I looked up and considered the tree. It was about forty feet tall. Thin. Small green leaves and white blossoms bedecked its branches.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s nice enough.”
L. nodded. “Have you ever thought about cutting it down?”
I smile-grimaced in a way I do when I’m not sure how to respond. “Have I thought about cutting it down?” I said. “No. Why?”
L. explained his thinking. After the tree was done blossoming, its petals fluttered down into his backyard. They were a pain to sweep up. They also had a powerful fragrance, and his wife did not like the way they smelled. So if I didn’t have strong feelings about the tree, it wouldn’t be a huge deal just to, you know, get rid of it.
The Moon is closer during a supermoon and you will be able to tell, because it looks so much bigger and brighter, but your photos of it will still suck. You can still send me the photos you took, and I will appreciate them, as well as appreciate that you thought of me when you saw the Moon. No, I am not tired of talking about it.
It is a long road that has no turning.
If you hit glue three Lego bricks along the side of your desk, and then attach three Lego mini figures on them, they can hold your charging cords and you can have Darth Vader or whoever holding your iPhone charger. This will be so much more work than just letting the chargers fall to the floor, and you will need to make a video about it to put on Instagram so you can tell people about it and hope to justify the time and effort you expended. It will not be worth it.
You don’t need a bread basket. You can just put your bread in the pantry, with the peanut butter and other ingredients. It will be ok.
If you buy a seasonal bath mat your kids picked out, the citrus fruits motif with the phrase “welcome summer” will feel weird by the end of September.
Enough is as good as a feast.
If you add a bunch of unnecessary stuff to your Amazon cart, you can check the prices each morning instead of reading the headlines, and feel a little better but somehow also a little worse about the course of your day.
The sun is important to your wellbeing. You should do whatever you can to see it as often as possible, and ideally to feel it on your skin at least once a day. This is hard to achieve when you are sad, but it is even more important then.
Health is better than wealth.
If you go for a walk, you will feel better, but you will not feel the truth of this until after the walk has begun. The improved mood that results from a walk can happen or not happen depending on whether you are wearing your shoes. This superposition of emotional states is a fact of quantum physics.
The road to hell is paved with slick grease sold by absolutely idiotic ill-intentioned liars, and many things are sliding down it, even now, but we have ways to stop this slide, which not enough of us are using. We must stop the paving and slickening of the road to hell by using every tool and skill at our disposal.
Vaccines prevent communicable diseases.
No matter how long the day, the evening comes.
–
Image: Supermoon over the Sangre de Cristo Range, Wikimedia Commons
