Ode to materialism

By: | April 3, 2018

When I lived in a small town in Colorado, I knew a woman who most people would describe as a hoarder. She made her home in a log cabin not far from a winding river, under ragged cottonwood trees that shed downy tufts in early summer, and showers of gold each autumn. You could see all the this-and-thats stacked high against the windows where the curtains didn’t cover, all the way up to a shipstyle porthole on the second floor. The overall impression was that the cabin sloshed nearly to its brims with things.

Her airstream out front was full of dressers and armoires. Her backyard was like a sculpture garden for the partially broken mundane. A trampoline. Odds and ends of lumber. Stacks of salvaged tile. She told me once that she was storing six clawfoot bathtubs. Sometimes, she’d find a dress or a pair of pants she thought would strike my fancy, load it into a salvaged plastic grocery bag, and hang it from my gate latch for me to find when I came home from work.

The objects she kept were beautiful, not junk, except insofar as there were far, far more of them than she’d ever be able to use. But given the stigma attached to hoarding, she was always self-conscious about her collection. Rarely did she allow anyone else inside her house, including the tenants who rented the small studio apartment she had built in a shed out back.

Her impulse to gather stuff was something I understood. My parents are the sort of people who keep things until they are completely worn out. There is still a beige, orange and brown carpet in their house from 1968. They drive the same Ford Explorer they bought used in 1990. Some of my childhood friends’ parents took this frugality to even greater heights, introducing us to Dumpster diving in middle school. It was both amazing and shocking the things we would find, that others had tossed out. Working stereos. Leather jackets. Perfectly good sneakers. Piles and piles and piles of compact disks, and all their flimsy “jewel” cases. Artifacts now as exotic maybe as arrowheads, but lacking the beauty of something made by hand and cared for as if it carried the same worth as the labor from which it was made, for a purpose with real stakes: Food, and by extension, staying alive. Continue reading →

We Did Not Go Back to the Moon, Because It Is Hard

By: | April 2, 2018

Saturday, March 31, was kind of a big day for the moon. It was full for the second time this month, making it a blue moon — the second of 2018. It was also the first full moon after the spring equinox, what’s known as the Paschal moon. The first Sunday after such a moon is designated as Easter, but only very rarely does Easter Sunday fall the day after that moon, making this one unique.

And there was another special reason. March 31 marked the passing of a milestone that means the moon will be bereft of humans for a little while longer.*

It was the deadline to capture the Google Lunar X Prize, a once-storied competition that pitted more than two dozen private companies against each other in a race to return to Earth’s satellite. Nobody went, and nobody won.  Continue reading →

Last Word

By: | March 31, 2018

March 26-30

Helen and her co-conspirators created a peep show like none other to start the week. In a menagerie of fossiliferous marshmallowness, they followed the original ichthyosaurus discovery in 1810-11 by Mary Anning on the coast of Southwest England, brilliantly replacing Mary with a marshmallow peep. This will make perfect sense if you see it, and the wonderful dioramas they invented, which you must.

We were introduced to feral daffodils by Emma, who says they “thrive on neglect and abandonment.” Emma offers a notion of wilderness where there is room for species that can live without our intervention, including these spring flowers living somewhere between wild and cultivated.

The internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II is far from forgotten in Hood River, Oregon, and Michelle helps keep stories in the light. Some brave residents resisted the racism in their community, welcoming back those who were sent away, showing how it should and can be done.

Erik went back through his genealogy, from Yorkshire, England, aristocracy to dirty Norwegians, people who in their poverty had to supplement their porridge with sawdust. Seeing families pouring in and landing on different sides of the tracks, Erik concludes that immigration is the best thing to have happened to this country.

Finally, Cassandra ponders a good question, did she catch the flu because she’s been sucking snot out of her baby’s nostrils? She’s been using a device, a ‘snotsucker’. She asks, “Could I be huffing pathogens from my daughter’s nasal secretions into my lungs?” Science has an answer!

The Hidden Risks of Snot Sucking

By: | March 30, 2018

Three weeks ago I came down with the flu. I was sicker than I have been in years. For a full five days, I could only manage to quiver on the couch and binge watch old seasons of Scandal. One episode would end and the next would automatically begin until Netflix asked incredulously, “Are you still watching Scandal?” I was.

Finally, still feverish, I hauled myself off the couch and into the clinic. The flu has been especially terrible this year, and I was convinced I might be one of the unlucky few destined to drop dead of the illness. The doctor, however, sent me home. “You should feel better in a few days,” she said. And I did.

As I slowly recovered, I pondered how I had contracted the virus. My daughter had been ill, but not nearly as sick as I was. Still, it seemed likely that I had picked up her illness. And then I remembered something that made it seem even likelier. For more than a week I had been sucking snot out of her nose . . . with my mouth. That may sound crazy, but it has become common practice among parents thanks to the Snotsucker — a device as beloved as it is disgusting.  Continue reading →

Redux: Dirty Norwegians

By: | March 29, 2018

I wrote this story last year about my ancestors and their reluctance to accept foreigners. I have begun preparations to move from Mexico to Maryland, home to the Hardcastles during the Revolutionary War. I thought it was fitting to return to them one more time. 
Having a child changes a man. Perhaps not as much as it changes a woman but a fair bit. A friend of mine recently had his first kid and decided to take up hunting. He’s a successful nurse in a big-time hospital but somewhere deep inside him, he wanted to know he could provide meat for his wife and child.

Me, I got into genealogy. In my mind, I wanted to be able to tell my son who he is and who came before – to reach back through time and find our places in the unending line of history. I guess having a child has made me want to understand where he comes from.

What I found amazed me. The family I thought were Irish were actually Scottish colonizers – hated by the Irish. An ancestor’s half-brother married Henry VIII’s sister. A branch of my family even fought in the famous Appalachian feuds between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

But in this new era of immigrant distrust and isolationism, my favorite branch has become my “dirty Norwegians.” Continue reading →

Redux: Resistance Begins at Home

By: | March 28, 2018

Not long ago I read The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, an excellent and, sadly, extremely relevant history by Linda Gordon. Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the KKK of the 1920s targeted not only African-Americans but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants of all nationalities, and it operated in daylight, electing hundreds of its members to public office. It was stronger in the North than in the South, and it was particularly strong in Oregon, where it helped elect a Klan-sympathizing governor and pass a ballot initiative that would have eliminated Catholic schools. The following events surely helped fuel that statewide wave of hate—and were fueled by it in turn. 

On the evening of November 29, 1944, in the small town of Hood River, Oregon, the members of American Legion Post 22 performed what they later described as a patriotic act: They went to the county courthouse and blacked out sixteen names on the plaques honoring local soldiers. All sixteen men were still overseas, fighting on behalf of the United States. All sixteen were of Japanese descent.

The United States government, in the midst of the racist paranoia that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, had already “removed” some 120,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes on the Pacific Coast to internment camps in the Interior West. In Hood River, hundreds of families had been forced to abruptly sell or lease their land and board a train bound for the camps, not knowing when or if they would return.

By the fall of 1944, with the end of the war in sight, the hysterical hatred directed at Japanese-Americans had begun to subside. In Hood River, however, it was about to reach new heights. Continue reading →

Feral daffodils

By: | March 27, 2018

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud 

by William Wordsworth

 

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

 

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

 

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

 

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

 

It is late March and my daffodils have not yet bloomed. But they are so close that the yellow color is radiating through the thin flesh of the buds. (Here in the mountains, my daffodils have resisted becoming antevernals, Michelle’s word for flowers that eerily appear well before their time thanks to a changing climate.)

Around the world, daffodils are a sign of spring. As Noel Kingsbury recounts in his highly recommended treasure-trove of information about common garden plants, Garden Flora, the genus Narcissus spirals out from a center of diversity in Iberia and the Maghreb in Northern Africa and is found in the wild as far away as western Europe and Iran (and now in the Americas, the UK, and Japan). It comprises 70 species and some 27,000 cultivars—all of them suitable for filling one’s heart with pleasure in person or later on when lounging on one’s couch in a vacant or pensive mood. (And if you aren’t doing any phone-less couch lounging these days, check out these tips for returning some salubrious vacancy to your life.)

Daffodils are springlike not only because of the timing of their bloom and their extravagantly cheerful yellows and oranges, but because of their reliability and tenacity. Although the darkest days of winter can breed a superstitious doubt, spring always comes back, and so do the daffodils. As Kingsbury writes, “daffodils reappear faithfully every year, not just in gardens but wherever they may have been dumped decades ago—for these are true clonal perennials.”

Continue reading →

Mary Anning, Paleontolopeep

By: | March 26, 2018

Once upon a time there was a fossil seller and paleontologist named Mary Anning. In the early 19th century, she and her brother found the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton. 

In the early 21st century, we immortalized her in marshmallow form.

Presenting Mary Anning, Paleontolopeep: A diorama by Joanna Church, Helen Fields and Kate Ramsayer.

a black cliff with marshmallow skeletons embedded in it and a lady paleontolopeep standing on the beach with her marshmallow dogMary lived in Lyme Regis, a coastal town in Southwest England along what is now known as the Jurassic Coast. The shale that makes up the nearby Black Ven cliff is rich with fossils including ammonites, belemnites, and ancient fish that once swam in the shallow seas. Mary and her dog, Tray, went out fossil-hunting at low tides and after storms – she became a well-respected paleontologist (paleontolopeep?) at a time when women weren’t admitted to the geology boys clubs. We won’t mention what happened to poor Tray.

comparison of Mary Anning's portrait and our marshmallow Mary

Look how much she looks like herself!

You may have heard the story that the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore” was written about Mary Anning. One of the delightful nerds at the Library of Congress, folklorist Stephen Winick [I can call him a delightful nerd because (1) he is one and (2) I know him – Helen] has written a 6,000-word blog post about this assertion, and how there’s no evidence for it, and also what evidence is and how historians think, and will generally give you a sense of why folklorists are great. I recommend it. 

closeup of warning sign on top of the cliff that says "unstable cliff, keep away from edge"

In modern days, the cliff tops along the Jurassic Coast have a lot of very alarming warning signs. We suspect this was not true in the early 19th century, but look how cute it is.

We happen to have knowledge about the warning signs on the Jurassic Coast because we went there ourselves in the spring of 2015. We hired a fossil guide, Chris Pamplin, for the morning, and he showed us around a beach a bit east of Lyme Regis, where we found ammonites, belemnites, and other fossils that Mary would have been very familiar with.

three women walking along a beachLook, it’s Helen, Joanna, and Liza Lester, the fourth member of our Jurassic Coast adventure team.

a small fossil ammonite on a hand

Kate holds an ammonite, which she likely found with a lot of help from Chris (he drew arrows in the sand). Once this was the shell of a nautilus-like creature that swam around Jurassic seas.

an ammonite-shaped keychain pressed into a mini-marshmallow

It turns out that this key chain, from a museum in another part of England that also has ammonites, is perfect for making impressions. Squish it onto a mini-marshmallow for a minute or so with your finger…

ammonite keychain with finger

…and you get marshmallomnites. We were shocked at how well this worked. This method is also good for putting ammonite impressions into fingertips, which fortunately do not last as long as the marshmallow impressions.

many marshmallomnites on a table

Did you know you can paint marshmallows? This is also handy for the Peeps themselves: Peeps are stuck together in the package, so when you pull them apart, there’s white marshmallow visible under their colorful sugar coating. Whip out the acrylic paints and cover up those scars.

basket of marshallowmnites; peep head sticking out of cliff

The Washington Post stopped holding their Peeps diorama contest last year ago. We still haven’t forgiven them. Last year we entered our Moby Peep diorama in a couple of other contests and won the St. Paul Pioneer Press’s contest. The Washington City Paper jumped in at the last minute last year to host the local competition and now seems to be making it an annual event, so we entered – but alas, did not make it into the finals. See the delightful winners on their website. 

It’s possible the City Paper editors aren’t as into overlooked lady scientists of the 1800s as we are (their loss!). And, on that note, we were wondering… if we hosted a science-themed peep contest next year — and we’re not saying we’re going to, because it sounds like a lot of work — would you participate?

Photos: Kate Ramsayer; Portrait: Either an unknown artist or B.J.M. Donne, Natural History Museum in London, via Wikimedia commons.