Bat Facts

By: | June 27, 2017

The Washington Monument at night, behind a bunch of trees

Last week was National Pollinator Week. Did you eat your pollinator cake and enjoy pin-the-tail-on-the-pollinator games at your neighborhood pollinator party? Yeah, me neither. But, thanks to an observant friend who’s on a lot of e-mail lists, I did get to celebrate with a bat walk.

Some bats are pollinators. None of them happen to live here in Washington, D.C. Pollinating is more of a thing for bats that live in the tropics and the desert. But our local bats are, like many bats, cute and fuzzy as heck, so I will not complain that the U.S. Department of Agriculture hosted a bat guy as part of their eighth annual Pollinator Week Festival.

We met on a street corner at 8 p.m., next to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The bat guy – Rob Mies, founder of a bat conservation organization in Michigan – had brought a big brown bat with him, in a cage. Apparently the best way to tell the difference between a lot of bat species, including the big brown bat, is to do a bunch of careful measurements and maybe check their DNA. I was glad to find out the easy way: being told by an enthusiastic man in an adorable bat t-shirt.

While he held the bat in his gloved hand and fed it mealworms, I learned bat facts: Continue reading →

The Fall Line

By: | June 26, 2017

I have a mild case of fatal familial obsessive-compulsive disorder. (At least, if that were real I’d have it.) Today’s obsession is the Fall Line.

It’s the line that runs through the big east coast cities — New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Richmond, all the way down to Columbia SC and Tuscaloosa AL.  And you thought the connecting line was I-95, didn’t you.  (I know you didn’t think that because you didn’t think about it at all, why would you.)  But I-95 only follows the Fall Line.  The Fall Line is a real physical line in the bones of the continent.  It’s the reason all those cities were born where they were.

As usual, my first obsession was with the prettiness of the name.  Fall Line.  I looked it up and found out that it was the point at which the east coast rivers all had rocky falls that couldn’t be sailed past.  So the rivers all had falls, so what? why dignify that with a name? so I just kept loving the name and not understanding what it meant.  But now I’m writing a story that requires some brain work on the Fall Line and besides, it runs straight through Baltimore.  (You could see it on a map if I-95 went through Baltimore instead of around it because Senator Barbara Mikulski made it do that.) I’m sitting next to the Fall Line right now; my office is in a converted sail cloth mill that is one of a string of mills running along the Jones Falls.  The picture at the top of this page is of the local falls and a brick mill just upstream from mine. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 24, 2017

June 19 – 23, 2017

“I imagine the zucchini plant at the end of the summer, lying back on the couch, an ice pack on its head, its eyes closed. Good work, I want to say to the zucchini. You made it.”  Now, says Cameron, will somebody please take some of it please?

Who besides Craig gets bear skulls as presents?  “What to do with a grizzly skull? I gave it to my desk, facing it toward me so when I look up I can see both sides of its life. One side is like cleanly polished marble; years of deep winter hibernation, summers of rivers and rivals. The other side, exploded, tells of a moment of flesh and blood to only be skinned and cleaned, where it now peers across books and papers at my mostly empty chair.”

Sarah invents the canine thermometer, a glorious gift unto the unhappy world.  “Heat can be gauged by the degree of extension, and whether the body is pointing up or down, and at what angle. Here, you can tell by the dogmometer’s full stretch that it’s pretty hot, but the positioning on the couch means it’s not so hot that she has to move to the much cooler wooden floor. That’d put it at 82.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the house.”

“So here is my exciting new proposition – call it the next big disruptive idea, call it old fashioned common sense. Every doctor, before he or she graduates medical school, must prescribe placebo pills to ten people and get four of them to respond. You can have as many tries as you want but you have to do it.”  Erik proposes a revolution in medical education.

“ONLY SOMETHING VERY STRONG COULD HAVE DUMPED THE BUCKETS. ONLY SOMETHING SELFISH OR MAD AT THE HUMAN RACE WOULD HAVE PULLED UP MY PLANTS AND LEFT THEM TO DIE WITHOUT EVEN TASTING THEM.”  Jennifer thinks it might be squirrels but it’s not.

 

My Garden of Evil (Plus, Planting Tips!)

By: | June 23, 2017

 

So, here’s a weird thing that happened.

It began when I bought some new plants for my “garden” in Virginia. (I put “garden” in quotes because most of what grows in this spot are weeds, which I’ve taken to calling “native plants” to make myself feel less inept.)

These were the kinds of plants you pay good money for (and by good I mean A LOT), and I’d decided prices be damned, go for three of everything because sets of three look best.

I got them at the nursery part of the gift shop at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s old digs. Most of the plants sold there are species that have been thriving on the property since Jeffersonian times, so there’s a sort of botanical history that comes with them—and, as they’re tried and true in his yard, theoretically they should survive less than 10 miles down the road in mine.

The plants, the day, both so filled with promise.

Continue reading →

The Placebo Test

By: | June 22, 2017

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken to a number of groups about the power of belief in medicine as a part of promoting my book, Suggestible You. It’s been a fascinating process and I’ve loved hearing about people’s individual experience with placebos, self-healing and alternative medicine.

But I often asked a simple question: what does all of this offer us? The mind is a powerful thing. Great, what do we do with that?

If you are not into mind/body medicine, it’s a pretty good question. Why should we care? Whenever I get this question, I find myself telling a story about an accomplished placebo expert by the name of Karin Jensen. It seems that when she first started studying placebos, she quickly ran into a rather serious problem: She could not elicit them.

Try as she might, when she gave little inert pills to unsuspecting subjects, they never reported feeling better. Which might not seem strange except studies have regularly shown that whenever you give placebos to subjects, some percentage do end up feeling better. Sometimes as many as 60 percent of them.

And to make matters worse, her assistant wasn’t having this problem. She could give out pills left and right and, Bam!, people felt better. For Jensen, who was dedicating her life to placebo research, this was kind of an existential crisis.

Continue reading →

Doom and the dogmometer

By: | June 21, 2017

One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall health of the planet. The Arctic, for example, is regarded as a bellwether for the catastrophes of climate change that will soon afflict us all, thanks to its temperatures that are rising faster than those in any other region on Earth. There’s also the escalating loss of glacier ice around the world. Or this week’s “heat attack,” which will basically force residents of the American Southwest to go hide deep underground in caves or risk perishing in temperatures predicted to climb past 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

But since long before the famous hockey stick graph, scientists have also secretly relied on another, much more ancient analog to skry the hot ’n’ doomy future: The dogmometer. Continue reading →

Redux: The Unknown Grizzly

By: | June 20, 2017

This post originally appeared March 7, 2013.

Grizzly skull bullet-side

In the mail yesterday I received a grizzly bear skull from an acquaintance and taxidermist in Soldotna, Alaska. Expertly cleaned down to chalk-white bone and glistening, thumb-sized canines, it was the size and general shape of a football, and as smooth as sanded wood. My friend had apologized ahead of time for there being a bullet hole.

Lifting the skull from its packaging, I expected to see a neat-dime-sized hole, a clean kill straight to the brain. Instead, there was a ragged gap as big as a fist through the left eye, pieces of jaw and skull exploded around it. Little flecks of bone salted out as I turned it for a closer look.

The angle of the shot looked like it could have been head-on, the bullet fired from only slightly to the side. But this wasn’t the shot that dropped the bear. This bullet had not actually penetrated the brain case. It had been stopped by exploded muscle and bone.

I wondered, had this been a charge, all slobber and paws? Or a curious 350-pound grizzly turning to study an intruder with a gun, then taking it right in the eye. I knew nothing about this bear. The only identification was a plastic tag looped through its one remaining zygomatic arch, which read, AK BGR 0202873.

Continue reading →

Friend Me

By: | June 19, 2017

At dinner for my 18th birthday, one of my friends gave me one of those long, narrow posters filled with advice and inspiration that were popular at the time. I don’t have the poster in front of me, but there were things like this: Never wash a car, mow a lawn, or buy a Christmas tree after dark. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

And then there was this gem: Plant zucchini only if you have lots of friends. Continue reading →