N is for Norman, eaten by a lionness

By: | February 7, 2024

This post originally appeared in March 2012.

“It is with the deepest sorrow that I have to inform you of the death of your son Norman. He died after an encounter with a lion near the Keito River in Portuguese West Africa 10/5/15. He made a very gallant fight and killed the lion with his knife after a severe struggle. He was serving as scout in the N. Rhodesian forces to which I also belong.”

So begins a letter from the closest friend (and executor, of which more later) of my great-great uncle Norman Sinclair. Having fought through the Boer War and stayed on in Africa as a hunter, the Scotsman was still in his twenties when he met his unusual end during WWI. A collection of his letters, along with the Dead Man’s Penny — made for all troops who died in the war, and ironically bearing the image of Brittania and a lion — were kept by Norman’s grieving mother and came into my own mother’s hands a few years ago. She was able to trace the story through official and informal accounts, all the way to his twice-exhumed and reinterred grave, now in Dar Es Salaam.
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Getting Gravid

By: | February 5, 2024
Thomas Snow Beck, ‘On the Nerves of the Uterus’, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1846: Gravid uterus at the ninth month of pregnancy.

This week we had our 22-week ultrasound, the detailed scan for all the things no one wants to think about: cysts in the brain, malformed heart chambers, exposed vertebrae. Will (we’ve started calling him Will) is moving a lot now, rotating and arching his back, kicking his legs and arms. In my mind he’s like a boulder in one of the flash floods carving up California’s hillsides right now: gaining mass as he plummets downhill, the gravitational pull between us rapidly increasing.

I’ve been hearing a lot about what’s impossible for human mothers: showers, sleep, exercise, “a single uninterrupted thought.” It stresses me out, so instead of setting up a baby registry or figuring how we’ll afford childcare, I’ve been escaping by learning about reproduction in other species. For example: pregnant bats. How do they fly?

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Stuck In the Middle With Oystercatchers and You

By: | February 2, 2024

We often celebrate the beginnings of things, and the ends of things, but what about the middles? The middle can be a gray place, either boring or too eventful in all the wrong ways. That’s what this part of the year feels like to me– I’m missing the cozy days of early winter, where candles are a welcome novelty, when the early dark gives you reason to curl up with a book for an evening. Now, the days are a little longer, but not long enough for me to really enjoy the extra hours of daylight, only enough so that I feel like I’m struggling to keep up.

There’s a little bit of what could be hope out there—a handful of pear trees have started to push out white blossoms—but looming right behind them is an atmospheric river coming to grab the flowers by the fistful and smash them into the street. We’re just hovering here between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and sometimes it feels like this is the year the balance just won’t tip toward the light. No wonder Punxsutawney Phil has trouble predicting how soon spring will come, when, like the rest of us, the groundhog is stuck in the middle of winter. (The groundhog’s forecasts, NOAA reports, have been right about 40 percent of the time during the last 10 years.)

Of course, the in-between time could also be the beginning of something else. In Ireland, St. Brigid’s Day on February 1—which started as the Celtic festival of Imbolc—marked the beginning of spring and the lambing season. I wonder how differently I’d feel if I considered this moment in the calendar to be spring—would it feel more welcome in its unsettledness?

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A Sevenmile Stream Story

By: | January 31, 2024

Years ago, Carol Evans, then a Bureau of Land Management biologist in northeastern Nevada, told me she wanted to write a book called Stream Stories — a series of vignettes about the many creeks that webbed her region and defined her career. I have no idea if she’s working on this today (Carol, if you’re reading this, I hope you are!), but it always struck me as a brilliant premise. Streams and narratives have much in common: they flow between points yet never truly end, they are subject to the forces of history yet shape it themselves. And they both have protagonists — in the streams’ case, the living beings who dwell within them and, in some cases, sculpt their physical form.

Here, then, is my stab at a brief stream story, featuring a waterway called Sevenmile Creek. And, like so many good stream stories, it co-stars beavers.

Sevenmile Creek runs down a shoulder of scraggly pinyon-juniper forest that looms above Buena Vista, Colorado, a town on the banks of the Arkansas River. For the last several years, Sevenmile’s flow has been diminishing, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear — drought, perhaps, or some subtle change in hydrology or land use. Regardless, the dwindling water has spelled trouble for its resident beavers, which, though capable of transforming even the thinnest streams into robust ponds, can’t conjure water from thin air. 

One January morning, I paid Sevenmile’s beavers a visit with Mark Beardsley, Cat Beardsley, and Jessica Doran, three beaver aficionados who restore Colorado streams under the banner of a company called EcoMetrics. We walked a couple of miles down one of the gazillion rutted dirt roads that cuts across public land in this corner of Colorado, our dogs weaving around our ankles. Distant coyotes yipped and wailed. 

When the road reached Sevenmile Creek, we found it had gone virtually dry. A stranded beaver lodge, its normally submerged entrances yawning like cave mouths, stood in a damp meadow, the crumbling ruins of an ancient kingdom. I felt a twinge of foreboding. 

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Under the Kitchen Table is One Option

By: | January 29, 2024

I have had occasion to mention January before, once with hard eyes and grit and once with faith and hope. I mean, it needs both, doesn’t it. Another option is always to become one with the cold, dark skies.

You finally get through the infinite holiday season, think you can relax for a minute, and there’s January. For instance, coinciding with the new year was a leak in the gas main running down the street outside my house. It’s all underground but the gas filtered through the ground, followed the water mains, and drifted up to the surface and then through the air, finally so obvious that not only were the neighbors reporting it but so were random people walking though the neighborhood. And with every report — eight of them — the gas company has to send out a technician who walks around with sensors and makes alarming marks on the ground and asks to inspect your basement in case you’re about to be blown to kingdom come. Luckily, I never was. And finally they sent out a team who looked like construction workers ready to become a bomb squad, dug up my sidewalk and down to China, and fixed it.

Which was just in time, a week or more later, for the yearly water main break to whose early signs I am now fully alert: water runs down the street, it’s not raining, you look for where the water is coming from, and it’s just oozing up through the asphalt. And in a mere matter of time, that water will carry away enough underground ground, and the street will cave in. Luckily this time it didn’t. And they sent out a construction team who can see in the dark, dug up the street and down to China, and fixed it.

UPDATE: A geyser has just blown up, like 10, 20 feet straight up, in the middle of a cross street around the corner. I mean, jeez.

A person could think this all was due to Baltimore’s 19th century infrastructure, which responds catastrophically to cold snaps. But the temperatures were unusually mild. The cold snap didn’t come until after the infrastructure go fixed and it came accompanied with the 5 or 6 inches of snow that now wouldn’t melt. And I’m thinking that once again, the fault is January. It’s a dreadful month. So that’s me complaining again, tired of facing life with courage and realism.

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Free the Tree

By: | January 24, 2024

One Sunday in November, my boyfriend and I were arriving back at his house at noon or so, after a visit to the market for a baguette and bacon. As I waited for him to unlock his door, I looked at the pretty maple tree next to me. It had Christmas lights wrapped around its trunks and limbs. “Do those lights work?” I asked. It was getting dark early – daylight savings had ended two weeks before – and I thought it might be nice to have some lights outside. They did not, he said. I looked closer and realized the tree was starting to grow around the wires. In time, that can kill a tree. I suggested that it might be time to take the lights down.

At first we tried unwinding the lights, but quickly realized they were too embedded. The tree had even popped the wires in places as it grew. The lights were beyond saving. With wire cutters, we started clipping and pulling and unwinding and clipping again. Gradually we released the tree from its bonds. The hardest bits were down at the branching of the tree’s two main trunks, which had come together as they grew and widened. But my boyfriend thought of applying a bit vegetable oil as lubricant – this felt unkind somehow, pouring a plant product on a plant – and, by pulling steadily, we were able to get the last bits of the wires out.

The whole process only took about 15 minutes and it gave this pretty tree a new lease on life. Below is what the tree looked like afterward – see, you can see the twist of the wires in the lower of the two crisscrossing scars. Two months later, the scars look much milder. I hope we freed it in time.

I took pictures of the tree knowing it would make a charming post for this blog. But I’ve barely done any writing since.

This event happened at the beginning of what turned out to be the worst week of my life. My father was 81 and extremely healthy. A stroke came from nowhere, as they do. One Sunday, I had a father; the next Sunday, I didn’t. One Sunday, this tree was wrapped in wires that would kill it; the next week, it wasn’t.

Almost everybody loses their father, and almost everybody has to live in a world without their parents, eventually. (How, though?) I want to write about him, but I don’t know how, but I want to make everything about him, because it is.

Here’s what comes to mind when I look back on this little episode: My father took great joy in nature and in being active outside, as did I, climbing around that tree, pulling on wires. He and I share a passion for spotting problems and wondering if we could make things better. He’s the one who introduced me to wire cutters. And he also would have thoroughly documented his work in photos.

Photos: Helen Fields, who is her father’s daughter, obviously

Chasing the northern lights

By: | January 22, 2024

I can’t remember why I decided I needed to see the northern lights again. Maybe it was nostalgia. I remembered seeing them as a child, standing in the big yard facing Canada and watching them dance above the pasture. Sometimes I spent the night at my aunt and uncle’s in town, we’d stand in the middle of the highway and watch them. In North Dakota the sky is vast and traffic minimal.

Or maybe I just wanted a distraction from a life that become rote, a break from the relentless schedule of parenting small children.

Whatever the reason, I found a Facebook group called Upper Midwest Aurora Chasers and I joined. Suddenly every night was filled with possibility. I monitored the group’s posts, and I waited for the right conditions. Southern Wisconsin, where I live, is almost never a good place to see the aurora. Too far south. But you don’t have to drive far to get a good view.

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