A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta as a beet.
Natural inks have been enjoying something of a contemporary resurgence, at least in my Instagram feed. There, I had recently noticed that the Toronto Ink Company had teamed with New York Times illustrator Wendy MacNaughton to show kids how to make inks out of common kitchen items like black beans and blueberries. So why not pollen cones? I thought, loading my pockets with the sticky orbs.
Naturally, I didn’t do anything so practical as follow an ink recipe. I just got witchy, figuring I could cover them with water and boil them until the solution was sufficiently concentrated to produce a vivid stain. Having only one saucepan to my name, and feeling uncertain about the relative wisdom of boiling resinous cones of unknown toxicity in a container I use to make food, I piled the cones into a mason jar instead, filled it halfway with water, stuck it in the microwave, and watched.
Illustration from The Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus, 1539.
Hello, LWON community! I’m new to the blog, and I’m thrilled to be included in this excellent company of writers and readers. I hope you’ll enjoy my first post.
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Lauren drew her feet up slowly from the water and gave me a look somewhere between worry and wonder. It was late afternoon, and we sat together beside a swimming hole in upstate New York. Deep shade, cool breeze, a reprieve from the scorch of August. Nearby, water bugs the size of pinto beans surfed in tight formation and our kids scuttled over moss-skinned rocks.
She said, “What might be in the water that was biting me?”
This was a question I had not expected, and I felt my eyebrow rise, Spock-like. It wasn’t that I doubted her, but she was from California and this was an eastern river. In a lifetime spent wading and wandering, canoeing, swimming and skating over water like this I had never been bitten by anything that I had not first harassed with a pole or a net or my own dumb hands. Lauren hadn’t done any of that. She’d simply slipped into the current with her young daughter and sat there.
I ran quickly through a list of suspects—fish, snakes, turtles, crayfish—and quickly dismissed most of them. Sort of feebly I suggested that sunfish or minnows had done it, something small and harmless. Think of those spas, I offered, where people let fish nibble on their toes.
“I think they call it ichthyotherapy.”
Lauren’s eyes narrowed.
“It was more than a nibble,” she said.
I stood and looked back at the swimming hole. It lay below a wall of sedimentary rock, over which ribbons of white water fell into a broad emerald pool. Earlier I’d stood at the top of the wall, peering down, scanning for hazards before I leapt. I’d seen sunfish floating near the surface, and way down deep I’d glimpsed several carp. They were huge, Devonian. Some as big as my four-year-old. But even those monsters wouldn’t come for human flesh.
Suddenly I felt thrilled and also unnerved. What lived here that I did not know, that I could not name?
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I hadn’t expected much from that particular river. It ran just south of Albany, not far beyond the city’s industrial fringe. Also it was wedged between a highway and the Hudson River—twin channels of traffic and trash. But I’ve learned that with my kids, all of them Brooklyn-raised, I must take every chance to be with them in nature. So even if the swimming wasn’t great, even if the water was sludgy and looked mean, even if we didn’t go swimming at all, the trip would be worthwhile. Because it took us into the woods.
The swimming turned out to be perfect. Jumping in you felt yourself slice through gradients of light and heat, from green to gray to shivering black. That there were not only fish in the depths but also snakes along shore and many birds in the trees above settled my worry about water quality and added an extra dimension of joy. We weren’t merely swimming, we were sharing space with other beings.
But now there was a mystery, and I badly wanted to know who the biter was. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t been able to figure it out. I’d been raised in the East. I’d been a park ranger in Massachusetts, worked as an outdoor educator in Maine and New Hampshire. When I was a kid we’d even lived on a river: it was called Neponset, a word of the Massachusett people that might mean “harvest river,” or “river that flows through meadows.”
By the time of my childhood, in the 80’s and 90’s, the meadows were mostly gone and the river had been so tamed with embankments and spillways, so constrained by yards and highways, that no one considered it a wild thing anymore. It was shallow, sluggish, colonized. Not the sort of water that held many mysteries. Though for my three brothers and me it did hold treasure. Wading there we found freshwater mussel shells (though almost never a living mussel), old bowling balls, automobile brake pads, purple patent medicine bottles, once a license plate and many times a netful of leather scrap—ancient waste from the mills that had thrived upstream.
Looking back, we probably shouldn’t have been wading. There wasn’t much alive in that river but what did survive there we found, and caught, and came to know. It set the stage for later discovery, and I see now that it also made me feel too sure of myself. By the time I brought my kids to the swimming hole in New York I didn’t think little rivers could still surprise me.
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Out on the water a local kid floated face down over the deepest part of the pool. He looked dead but was just watching fish, wearing a diving mask. He’d told me earlier that I could borrow the mask and now I had a reason. I started for him, wading into the shallows, stepping slowly for I was barefoot and the rocks were shingled and sharp. Suddenly my four-year old leaped onto my back. I wobbled, caught myself, and tried to right his squirming, squealing weight. Then something bit me.
It wasn’t painful but it also was not the soft pucker of a goldfish. I felt sharply, assertively tasted, and I sort of leaped and yelped and almost toppled over, to the delight of my son who hooted like a cowboy. What the fuck! I said, too loudly, and then I was bitten again.
It was more of a pinch this time and still not painful, but I jumped anyway and when the sediment swirling around my feet washed downstream I saw something coiled in the shallows. It was pale yellow, wound up like a viper. For a moment I thought it was a snake and I fumbled backward in alarm. But then the thing flashed away so fast and fluidly that I knew it was no reptile. This was an eel.
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I went briefly manic with joy. Of all eastern riverine creatures I had never seen an eel in the wild.
I shouted to Lauren. “Eels! Eels! That’s what was biting you!”
She looked up and made a face like eew. My partner looked up blankly from where she was feeding our six-month old. My other son, still on my back, had no idea what was happening, only that this was the best piggyback ride ever. I turned to the water and laughed. Then I waded in. I stuck my big toe forward, an offering, trying to lure the eel back for a closer look.
I didn’t see him again. When I finally caught up to the kid with the diving mask he was not impressed with my story. Maybe he was 10. Already he’d seen it all, at least in swimming hole terms. Yeah, he said. They hang out with the carp.
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That night, after showers and tick-checks, I stayed up late reading about American eels. I knew they’d once been ubiquitous—thickly present in rivers up and down the East Coast—and that like many other indigenous creatures they’d suffered staggering declines under pressure from fishing, pollution, habitat destruction, you name it. But that was where my understanding fell off.
For many years I’d thought of eels as one more fading star in the constellation of native North American wildlife. So many of those stars had already blinked out, and lately I had started to notice more and more of the dark spots, the emptiness left where life had once been. Maybe it was a function of parenthood, or middle age. I had become so inured to absences that it hadn’t even occurred to me that eels might dwell in that swimming hole, living out their curious catadromous lives, waiting for some secret signal to swim back home, to the Sargasso Sea, where they would reproduce and die.
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About a week later I told my dad the story. He laughed and said, “You know there were eels in the river behind our house.” I had not known that, and right then my mind was blown. Not once in a decade of living beside the Neponset had I ever seen an eel.
“Yeah,” he said, like it wasn’t news at all. “They lived under the bridge.”
I have still not quite recovered from this revelation. And it has strange consequences. Over the last few days I have felt the cloud of memories that is my childhood rearranging itself, pushing out at the edges to accommodate eels. This sort of thing does not happen often, not for me anyway—that memories get updated, the past gets edited, grows larger. Usually our lives go the other way. They close in.
The other thing is that, before I sleep, I find myself trying to imagine the eels now swimming into my memory. I can almost see them, feel them pushing upstream. They are silver and slimy in the moonlight. They burrow into the mud and wait. The river is no longer little but vast, linked to the sea and busy bodies. I am trying to make sense of it all. How they’d been there the whole time.
My violin teacher had a special style. When I had finished fussing with my shoulder rest and rosined up my bow, I would step up to the music stand where she was waiting for me, her own resonant, professional instrument in hand. Together, we would play the assigned music.
I don’t remember ever feeling alone or judged in that carpeted basement with my father waiting in her family’s living room upstairs. Whether I had practiced at home or not, we were two friends playing music together. She would take me to concerts at the arts center and when I giggled at the funny way the pianist bounced out of his seat playing the stronger chords, she would giggle along with me.
I once took a babysitting course where the most valuable instruction was that on meeting a new child I was not to go up to the kid and start asking questions. Rather, I was to sit on the floor and engage myself with play. Soon enough the child would come over to see what was so interesting, and I would invite them to join in the construction or crafting or make-believe scenario, whatever the play was. Before long the project would be under the child’s direction, with my role to facilitate and offer the odd suggestion.
This natural way of learning works well for collaborative work, for modes of expression like music, and also for language. Vocabulary lists and ‘repeat after me’ have never given a single student fluency, because communication is a shared activity. That’s why Elizabeth Gray Vining, the American Quaker who tutored the Crown Prince of Japan after World War Two, started his English lessons by playing tennis with him. She managed to impart the idea of a world without war while gradually building his English proficiency through natural conversation from ages 12 through 16.
I don’t think this style of teaching needs to be one-on-one, but it’s hard to deliver as a system. You find the child’s zone of proximal development—a level of performance they can’t reach alone yet but can do with a bit of scaffolding—and you just explore it together. It’s a form of cognitive apprenticeship that may be what some unschooling parents are aiming for these days in their home schooling.
As AI tutors start rolling out, there is potential for this feeling of solidarity in learning at scale. OpenAI has a model spec called “Seek the truth together” that expresses it well, and I sometimes have the sense—in glimpses, at least—that I’m working alongside a curious companion.
In a time when it’s not at all obvious what we should be teaching children to prepare them for the near-future world, perhaps it’s time to let go of adversarial, evaluative instruction altogether and simply explore together. The teacher of the 21st century is, whether she likes it or not, a novice. She might as well walk alongside a child, equal but for the length of her stride and the measure of her days.
One of the great joys of gardening is learning how stuff grows. Did you know that green beans are just baby bean-beans? You harvest them when the pods have developed but before the beans inside get plump and then hard. Green peppers are just unripe red (or orange or yellow) peppers. Green olives are just young black olives. Cherry tomatoes are just … no, they’re just bite-size tomatoes. The green tomatoes in fried green tomatoes are just unripe tomatoes, but some tomato varieties are green (or black or yellow or orange) when they’re ripe. White button mushrooms grow into cremini (baby bella) mushrooms, which grow into portobello mushrooms.
Artichokes are the flower pods of a gigantic thistle plant. Seriously.
Do you know how to grow ginger? Plant ginger. It’s a root, so if you stick it in the dirt, it’ll send up grassy shoots and spread, and at the end of the season you’ll have more ginger. Same goes for potatoes and garlic. Coriander is just cilantro that has gone to seed. Hops grow on vines and smell like beer. Bay leaves come from bay trees. Asparagus shoots up out of long, ropey, horizontal roots, and if you let the stalks keep developing, they’ll grow wispy fronds out of their tips and get as tall as you are.
I was showing a (very smart) visitor my garden the other day and she was delighted to learn that blueberries grow on bushes. There’s so much about food we don’t know! Or didn’t always know. The first time I grew corn, I ordered a packet from a seed company and laughed and laughed when I tore it open and found … corn. Obviously corn grows from corn, but I hadn’t really thought about it before. You grow beans from beans, peas from peas.
I love to see people share their garden porn photos on social media this time of year. People are so proud of the produce they’re harvesting, as they should be.
I garden out of interest in how stuff grows and for flavor. Fresh-picked herbs and vegetables make it a lot easier and more delicious to get your five servings a day. (Even if you’ll get so sick of kale after a couple of weeks of kale.) It’s fun to eat produce varieties that you can’t easily find in groceries because they’re too delicate (like tart cherries, which grow on trees) or weird (like tie-dye tomatoes). But you can’t sustain yourself on a backyard plot, no matter how many potatoes you plant.
Gardening is itchy, achy, tedious, hot, endless work. The people who grow, harvest, process, and prepare food for a living are heroes and deserve safe working conditions, honest wages, and protection from being abducted, imprisoned, and separated from their children.
Anyway, this is a fuck ICE post. Fuck ICE. May the thugs in the U.S. Gestapo never be welcomed into a restaurant again or know the pleasure of a fresh vegetable.
Photo by Laura Helmuth, who planted way too many radishes this year.
My daughter’s obsession with capybaras began about six months ago. One day she was drawing mushrooms with cat ears, the next she was drawing capybaras and only capybaras. She watches videos of capybaras. She sings the capybara song. She purchased a capybara stuffie that is also, improbably, a burger. She taped a piece of notebook paper to her wall that reads:
A couple of weeks ago I spent a long weekend with my dad in Astoria, the town in Oregon where I grew up. Our visits tend to go like so: On the first day I arrive in the late afternoon and we go for a walk, either at a beach or around the neighborhood. The second day we do some project around the house and then we go for a walk, almost always at a beach. Finally, on the last day, we get brunch at a coffee shop before I hit the road.
It was the evening of the second day, and we had decided to go to Clatsop Spit at Fort Stevens State Park, a few miles from Astoria. We parked and made our way through dunes and beachgrass to the beach. There we turned west, walking along soft wet sand.
Our progress was slow. It often is. My dad snaps pictures with his phone of whatever catches his fancy, which is almost everything. (“Doesn’t that beached sea nettle look like a nebula if you crop the image?”) I watch birds. Clatsop Spit marks the mouth of the Columbia River, and the river was roiled, this being where it and the Pacific meet. In that roil were scads of pelicans, gulls of various species, Caspian terns, cormorants, all of them pursuing small fish swimming out to sea. I watched the pelicans tip over and dive from the air, watched the terns do the same, both of them plunging into the water. I watched the gulls swim over and try to snatch meals from the pelicans and terns, or, to give them their due, catch fish on their own. As different sets of pelicans or terns or gulls ate to their hearts’ content, I watched them fly over to the beach to roost together in the warm brilliance of the setting sun.
This first ran August 21, 2018 — another, earlier, fraught August — but this re-run is earlier in the month. So Mars retrograde isn’t already over. August, will you pleeeease just get it over with please?
The other day at brunch, as two of my friends and I were commiserating about things varied and universal, we agreed about the sluggish pace of our brains. What an injustice, I ventured, that our sluggishness is so out of sync with the blistering pace of this summer and of 2018.
“Someone was telling me that it’s because Mars is in retrograde. What? When is that over?” one of my friends said.
“August 27,” I replied instantly. “Mercury is retrograde right now, too, and actually so are Saturn and Uranus. I know Mercury’s ends on the 18th but I’m not sure about the giant planets.”
My friends blinked, and asked what this meant, for them and for the cosmos.
“Uh, nothing,” I said. “That’s astrology. Astrology is not based on any real science.” They nodded. They know this. They were still curious.
“Astronomically, it means Mars seems to move backward in the sky from night to night, as viewed from Earth.” I orbited my fists around a coffee cup to demonstrate the apparent motion of the planets. I have patient friends who humor me. “Astrologically, it means … nothing real. But people say it means things are slow, and kind of backward.”
They nodded. This sounded right. It even felt right to say out loud. It’s the dog days of summer; we can blame our sluggishness on the stars.
Did you know it’s called “the dog days of summer” because of the stars? It is not named for lazy dogs who nap a lot when it’s hot outside. The dog days refer to the heliacal rising of Sirius, the dog star, one of the brightest stars in our sky. “Heliacal rise” marks the morning when a star or cluster returns in the predawn sky, showing up with the sun (Helios).
If you are still reading, and you have read anything else I’ve ever written, you might be wondering why the hell I know any of this, or would write a post about astrology. The truth is that I keep tabs on pretty much everything happening in the sky. I know where Jupiter and Mars are, and when they are retrograde or “direct.” I know where the moon is in its cycle and can tell you where to find it at a given time of night, even if it’s cloudy. I know when to expect the heliacal rise of Venus, when it becomes the morning star instead of the evening star. I even know whether our star has any sunspots, because I bought nice solar binoculars for the eclipse last year and I use them occasionally, because why wouldn’t I look directly at Helios if I could? I know my sun sign and the signs of everyone in my family.
I know none of this holds any actual significance, and that I cannot use the motions of the planets or the constellations to divine any insight about my circumstances. I know astrology is a lark, as my mom might say.
And yet for some reason, I want to know all this detail. When it comes to the moon, I feel like I need to know. I’ve decided that this desire is meaningful on its own. My urge to watch the heavens, absent any oracular significance, is a form of cosmic communion that works for me. I think it’s fine to seek meaning among the stars. Actually, I’ll just come out and say it: I think it’s totally appropriate.
It’s so natural to imbue the skies with meaning. Doing so has been a primary focus of human civilization since time immemorial, since long before we imagined supernatural beings living up there. I happen to believe human civilization owes itself to the night sky. We owe timekeeping and writing and a lot more to the machinations of the moon and other objects. Did you know that the zodiac dates to Babylon? The 12 signs, which each correspond to a month of the solar year (though they don’t line up with the calendar) were invented six millenniums ago. Along with writing.
I finally decided to write about this when I saw an email in my inbox Monday: “Use code RETROGONE for 20% off sitewide!” I laughed and checked the date. Oh, I realized, it’s the 20th, so Mercury retrograde just ended! Mercury retrograde is over, let’s celebrate by buying yoga pants! I was tempted to shoot back an email asking if the sale would last through next Monday, when Mars goes direct, too. Then I laughed at myself. And then I stopped laughing, because dammit, I like knowing where the planets are, and I like that others want to know, too. I don’t care what their motivations are if it means they look up, and notice, and maybe think about something bigger. Even if it’s just over brunch.
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Photo credit: By Carol M. Highsmith – Library of Congress, Public Domain/via Wikimedia Commons
Our one-year-old strokes his hair when he’s tired, twirling his curls between his fingers. That’s how he puts himself to sleep — eyelids drooping, drooping, down.
Neuroscientists call this lazy, rhythmic caressing “slow touch” or “affective touch.” It moves across the skin at one to 10 centimeters per second — faster than a snail, slower than handwriting — and works best when it’s warm and focused on hairy skin, like the scalp or forearm. That’s where we and other mammals have the highest density of C-fibers: nerves specially tuned to respond to gentle, affectionate contact.
What fascinates me about C-fibers is their dual nature. In addition to a soft caress, these evolutionarily ancient, slow-conducting nerves are also responsible for carrying the sensation of a hot chili pepper, the itch from a poison oak rash, the hellfire of shingles.
