I witnessed a minor Drama in Real Life the other day while biking along the Western Maryland Rail Trail. Several deer were foraging by the side of the trail as I passed them, then I heard a bang and a scream (deer) and another scream (human). A full-grown deer had leapt into the trail and rammed another biker, throwing her off her bike. The biker had scrapes all over her arms and knees, and she was pretty shaken up. She’d just been attacked by a wild animal! Fortunately, she didn’t hit her head (no helmet) or get kicked by the deer, but she was a mess.
My biking companion and I had some ancient first-aid kits and helped her get cleaned up with alcohol prep pads and some antibiotic cream. Our band-aids were too small and not very sticky anymore, so that didn’t help much. We gave her some water, made sure she hadn’t broken her wrist, and talked with her for a while until she was steady enough to get back on the bike. Again, a very minor Drama in Real Life, but I took away a few lessons that I’ll share in case they’re useful for you.
(For anyone who hasn’t read Reader’s Digest, Drama in Real Life was a regular column recounting just what the title says, and the dramas were typically life-or-death. I remember reading one when I was a kid about a Boy Scout who saw someone in a horrible accident that caused an abdominal wound, and their intestines were spilling out. The scout helped push their guts back in (in my distant memory of the story), and it was the most disturbing thing I’d ever read in all my 9 or so years.)
Anyway, take-aways. Always wear a bike helmet! This trail is wide and smooth and level, with only a few back-road crossings and no car traffic. If it’s okay to skip the helmet anywhere, you’d think it’s there. Even if you don’t get rammed by a deer, there are so many ways to fall off a bike. Skulls are so thick but so fragile.
Refresh your first-aid kit. I’m getting a bunch of new and bigger bandages to stick in my bike bag and backpacks, and more antibiotic and antiseptic stuff. Skin is so thin and so fragile.
Deer are big and strong and fast and stupid, and that is a dangerous combination in a non-human (or human) animal. And they are deadly. Depending on how you do the estimates, 150 to 440 people in the United States die from interactions with deer each year, most involving car crashes. The most dangerous time is in the fall, during rutting season (stupid things are stupider when they’re looking to breed). Deer typically run in groups, so if you see one deer crossing a road, assume there are others behind it and watch out. They’re most active at dawn and dusk, so keep an eye on the side of the road and be prepared to stop. If you can’t stop in time, it may be safer to hit the deer than to swerve and potentially hit a tree or another car.
The deer population in the East is probably higher than it’s ever been. In addition to causing dangerous accidents, deer sustain and distribute disease-vector ticks, and they destroy habitat for ground-nesting birds. I’d love to see a wolf- or cougar-reintroduction project that would bring back their predators, but for now the only thing that kills them is hunters and cars. Be careful out there? And please share your own nemesis-deer stories in the comments.
If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend making a tiny friend.
How tiny, you ask? I think it helps if your friend is big enough to be visible to you (though this isn’t strictly necessary) but small enough to be outside of the category of beings you would normally consider friend material.
The act of befriending someone small and unlikely can change the way you think, about friendship and about who is worth knowing and caring for. It may change your perspective on who matters. And it could offer a respite from the complications of being a human.
If you’d like to give it a try, here are some potential tiny friends to consider: spiders, snails, and bees.
Spiders
Those who know me will probably not be surprised that I recently befriended a jumping spider.* She appeared in my house one day in March, tucked into the upper corner of a window frame near the front door. Soon she was exploring the seam where the wall meets the ceiling (if you want to find a jumping spider, or any spider, in your house, this is a good place to look).
Some jumping spiders do fine indoors, assuming there are flies to prey on, but they are often thirsty. So I stood on our entryway bench on tiptoes to offer this spider a drink from a wet Q-tip. She backed away, but then inched toward the offering, pedipalps waving madly. Once she realized there was water, she latched on and drank for a good 10 seconds.
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In 2018, I wrote the post below about bedtime procrastination. The term was new to me, the concept was not. I was a bedtime procrastinator. And, spoiler alert, I still am a bedtime procrastinator. Zero improvement.
There’s a new term now, an even more delicious one: Revenge bedtime procrastination. Here’s how a Web MD article defines it: “It means you get ‘revenge’ for your busy daytime schedule by fitting in leisure time at the expense of shut-eye.”
Who am I retaliating against? In this case, I am both the subject and object. Who will win? Me, by reclaiming the time work, children, and chores have stolen from me! Who will lose? Me, by getting so little sleep I am irritable and exhausted the next day (or, because this is habitual, every day). Whee!
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Yesterday at 8:23am, my husband texted me a link. No note, just a string of random letters and slashes and dots. I clicked and landed on a research article titled “Why don’t you go to bed on time?”
The manuscript begins like this: “Most people do not get enough sleep on work days despite sleep’s importance for well-being, performance, and health. A phenomenon held responsible for promoting insufficient sleep on work days is bedtime procrastination. Bedtime procrastination is defined as ‘going to bed later than intended, without having external reasons for doing so’, that is, ‘people just fail to [go to bed].’”
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A couple of weeks ago, I climbed Mount Adams with my good friend Carson. Our plan had been to climb Mount Hood, but schedules being what they were we could only get away from Friday to Saturday. Weekends on Hood can be pretty crowded, so Mount Adams was something of a fallback. A consolation prize.
Mount Adams is one of the five major volcanoes in Washington, but is somewhat anonymous as those peaks go. I’ve seen it referred to as “The Forgotten Giant of Washington” or “The Forgotten Volcano.” A curious fate, given the mountain’s immense size. At 12,280 feet in elevation (give or take), with over 8,000 feet of prominence, it is the second-tallest mountain in Washington, after Mount Rainier. With a volume of some seventy cubic miles, it is the second-most massive of the Cascade volcanoes, after Mount Shasta in California. More than a mere bump on the landscape, in other words.
Second in this, second in that. Maybe that has something to do with Mount Adams’ air of understatedness. Even its present-day name in English nods at a penchant to obscurity. George Vancouver may have named Baker, Rainier, St. Helens, and Hood after British gentry during his 1792 expeditions, but somehow he and his survey parties overlooked the tall peak just beyond Rainier and St. Helens, which was eventually named after John Adams. (The second president!) That said, the mountain would have its moments. In 1805, while canoeing down the Columbia River, Lewis and Clark wrote of seeing “a high mountain of emence hight covered with snow.” They supposed it to be “perhaps the highest pinnacle in America.” Good on Adams! Save for the fact that Lewis and Clark thought they were looking at Mount St. Helens.
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Ben no longer writes for us but he left us this post to remember him by.
This time last year Elise and I were bellied up to a bar (remember those?) in Montana, talking about what childless dog-owning couples generally talk about: our pet. We’d owned Kit — or had she owned us? — for a year and change at that point, and we’d taught her the basics: to sit, to stay, to shake, to tweet angrily at Lindsey Graham. As the bartender, a flannel-clad woman who looked like she could kill an elk with a glance, refilled our Cold Smokes, we roped her into the conversation. “What should we teach our dog next?” I asked.
She poured off some foam and considered. Then she said: “To hunt.”
Alas, we said, Kit wasn’t exactly the hunting type. A squat thirty-pound amalgam of terrier, pug, and gerbil, she loves nothing more than couches and cuddles, ideally savored at the same time. Although she’s an exuberant chaser of squirrels, the only time she succeeded in capturing a rodent — a hapless mole — she merely gummed the poor thing like a sucking candy and spat it out unharmed. She’s more of an ornamental dog, we explained, as frivolously entertaining as a Christmas tree.
No more, however, can we dismiss Kit as a maladroit vanity pet. We recently discovered, to our astonishment, that she has a single and singular Talent. Forthwith, the saga of Eggdog.
One evening last month, we gathered around a firepit in our neighbors’ backyard, our primary source of social interaction these last nine months. Our neighbors, Nick and Alicia, run a sort of peri-urban permaculture operation, which includes a flock of chickens that are free range bordering on feral. The hens spend their days wandering willy-nilly around the neighborhood, mostly into our yard, pecking at the grass and kicking through the mulch. Often we come home to find them milling around our stoop, like Jehovah’s Witnesses waiting for someone to answer the door.
The flock’s peripatetic habits, unfortunately, make egg collection difficult. Lately, Nick told us, they had ceased laying in the coop. Where exactly they were laying, though, was an open question, since their habitat encompasses a full city block. Absent eggs, he complained, the chickens were just a bunch of freeloaders, demanding feed and shelter and expensive antibiotic ointments which have to be squirted down their gullets like chocolate syrup. No longer were the chickens purposeful working animals; instead, they had migrated into the squishier category of creature to which our dog belongs: They had become the lovable parasites known as pets.
As we discussed chickens and eggs, Kit, our own lovable parasite, wandered in and out of the firelight, weaving between our legs like a slalomer. Every few minutes we heard her rustling in the unlit recesses of their yard, getting up to whatever hidden mischief dogs get up to in the privacy of darkness. The conversation moved on; time passed; beers were opened and gulped. And then, after a while, Elise looked down at her boots, to find a slick, unbroken, perfect egg.
Mystified, we debated its provenance. Had it been sitting there all along, unnoticed? Or had something, or someone, slyly delivered it —
And then Kit sidled again into the glow of the fire, her wide grinning maw wrapped around a cream-colored ovoid. She knelt in a graceful play-bow, lowered her head, and lovingly deposited another egg at our feet.
We all gaped. Kit turned, her tail arched over her back like a scorpion’s, and trotted off into the blackness beyond the fire ring. We watched her dim silhouette army-crawl beneath a snarl of brambles that no human could penetrate. We heard her rooting around, nosing her snout through the leaf litter like a wild boar. We waited — a minute, maybe two. And then out she popped, another egg clasped in her jaws, which she delivered to us, as proud as a child who’s made her first pinch-pot in a summer-camp art class.
We showered her with praise, scratched around her ears, and then sent her back to the secret nest to do it again. Which she did. And did, and did, and did.
Reader, by night’s end, Kit had excavated eleven eggs from that bush. We hoped she’d find an even dozen, but she’d evidently tapped the chickens out. Over subsequent visits, though, she’s unearthed five more, bringing her total to 16. She’s become as reliable as a truffle-pig.
It seems, then, that I owe her an apology. For the thirty-odd months that she’s been in our lives, I’ve disparaged Kit’s senses: how many times has a squirrel skittered mere feet from her snoot during our walks, only for her to remain fixed (doggedly, you might say) on the sidewalk beneath her paws? Despite the fact that she’d lived on the mean streets at some point in her past — a feat of survivalism I could never pull off — I admit that I deemed her adorable but fundamentally incompetent.
Her adventures in egg-hunting, however, have given me a new appreciation for her capacities. “Explosives-detection dogs smell as little as a picogram — a trillionth of a gram — of TNT or other explosive,” the dog cognition researcher Alexandra Horowitz has written. Once, it seemed unfathomable that Kit shared DNA with such keen canines; now, I suspect she has reserves of latent potential waiting to be tapped.
And yet it wasn’t the acuity of Kit’s sniffer that most impressed me. Rather, it was the tenderness with which she presented us each egg — this tiny, fragile object, clasped so gingerly in her strong terrier jaws, as though she intuited its precious delicacy, as though she guessed that we would be touched by her gift. She knew, somehow, that she held a thing of value. And we were, we were touched: by the eggs, yes, but also by this unexpected display of aptitude, by the dawning realization that our oh-so-familiar animal was still capable of amazing us with her gentle skill.
This winter and late spring, when we all had mono and a variety of flus and colds and for a while thought Pete might have cancer, we spent a lot of time on the couch watching Pete’s favorite comfort shows. I was scared and trying not to be dramatic about it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that the life we’d built and were enjoying so much wasn’t going to last forever. It was one of those times when the reality I can usually ignore was sitting right next to me in the theater, loudly snapping its gum and looking at its phone.
While we waited for biopsies to come back, I drew. I told myself I was going to keep drawing — one sketch a day! forever! — but once we knew Pete didn’t have cancer and recovered from mono life suddenly accelerated to full speed again. For one thing, Will started moving — not just crawling but hurtling along the ground the way a komodo dragon does, his short, muscular limbs propelling his wiggling torso forward in a motion that, when lizards do it, scientists apparently call terrestrial swimming.
I stopped drawing — or sitting for more than a few minutes at a time — and started chasing. Then we decided to move our entire household (see Helen’s post about her recent move, asking if life is, after all, just hard.)
Moving was a necessary but somewhat sudden decision and it felt like the rest I’d been looking forward to for months had been snatched away. Pete and I had lived in our old house for seven years, the longest either of us have stayed anywhere in our adult lives.
We moved in when we were still dating. We moved out with several household’s worth of hand-me-down baby clothes and supplies and an eleven-month-old baby.
It took us two months to get the move done, because we had to take turns watching Will or do it in sprints when we had childcare. Since Will puts everything he can find in his mouth, moving into the new house entailed triple-cleaning every surface — at one point, I was crawling on my hands and knees, using my fingertips to comb through the carpet pile. It was worth the effort: In addition to dozens of tiny orthodontic rubber bands, I found a barbed salmon fish hook.
Last Friday, I went over to do a final sweep of the old house and, as my final domestic act, wipe down the fridge. It was a bit emotional, as these things are. I thought about the years Pete and I spent there together — getting to know each other, getting engaged, followed immediately by the Covid lockdowns, getting a cat, me getting pregnant, having Will.
It was a great house for us, even if the floors were so warped that none of the furniture sat quite level. I’ve met the new tenant — he seems to get this funky little house’s potential. But it was strange to give the keys away, and with them, all the layers of life we laid down there. How long before all the traces of Calliope’s fur are finally gone, I wonder? I’d wager years, even though we cleaned thoroughly.
Now we’re trying to “babyproof” the new house — a joke, first of all, and a challenge with stairs — and begin the next round of shaping the space we live in to fit our lives. We have a bathtub, finally, and a dishwasher. Now we just have to keep Will from climbing inside the dishwasher — the last time I looked away for a half a second, he’d managed to steal a steak knife.
I think one of the reasons it was hard to leave the last house is that we survived there — through the Covid-19 lockdowns, wildfires, job changes, all the ups and downs of building a life together. Even though we were sick and exhausted a lot of the time, that house was where we rested and healed. Now I have to trust another house to take care of us the way that one did. Or maybe just trust that no matter where we go, we’ll be able to take care of ourselves.
Don’t read too much into this, but I have become an obsessive bird spy. I blame LaWONian Ben Goldfarb. He wrote a post about his birdcam (and the board game Wingspan, which I still intend to try), and it made me think that a birdcam would be a great Mother’s Day gift. I consulted with Ben and selected one for Mom.
Mom liked the gift well enough (she would never tell me otherwise), but it has attracted mostly rodents and she can’t keep it up all of the year lest she attract the bears in her neighborhood among the foothills of Sandia Peak. Still, it got me so excited about the device that Mom gifted me one in return.
I’ve always loved birds, but now I can watch them close up. It’s like hanging out on the branch with them. For the first months after I installed the camera (it’s a bird feeder with a camera that connects to the internet so I can watch the live feed on my phone), I had only juncos and scrub jays. Both are lovely birds, but they’re very common and they hang around our front porch and other places where I frequently get a good look at them, so it didn’t feel that special.
At the same time, I found myself watching these familiar birds and getting to know them better in the process — the cute sounds they make, the way they interact with their friends and other birds. Before long, I had fallen in love with their endearing little gestures, the way they hold the various seeds in their beaks and hop around on the feeder.
I loved my juncos and scrub jays, but I was a little baffled at why they seemed to be the only birds coming to the feeder. I have always loved mountain bluebirds, and when they arrived this spring I saw them everywhere but the birdcam. I also noticed that the Stellar’s Jays also didn’t frequent the birdcam feeder.
I started to think that I was running a restaurant that only admitted scrub jays and juncos, and then the black-headed grosbeaks arrived. They are colorful and cute and look sort of funny stuffing their beaks with food.
Other pretty birds are coming too. My favorite is the pair of Lazuli Buntings that have been frequenting the birdcam. The male is a gorgeous blue, while the female is more like a middle-aged woman, beautiful if you truly look at her, but invisible if you’re not paying attention.
I guess the moral of this story is that the closer attention you pay to your surroundings, the more delights you might discover.
Like Helen, I consider the The Merlin Bird ID app the best feature on my phone, and I’ve been learning to better identify birds by their songs. Spying on my neighborhood birds on the birdcam is not just about looking at them, but also learning the noises they make and their patterns of behavior. They’ve taught me to slow down a little bit and do more observing. It’s really just a way of practicing paying attention.
