A letter to myself, to be read in spring of 2017, when it starts getting hot again.
Dear Helen:
I know. The weather report is scary. It’s going to be in the 80s this week. Could be 85 by Friday. It means the worst: Summer. Is. Coming.
Yeah, I know. Summer is the worst. Washington, D.C. does not do summer gracefully. Washington, D.C. does summer sweatily, grumpily, heat-island-ly. Your apartment in particular does summer like a solar oven, and yeah, the air conditioning pretty much has to run from March to October without a break. Once you even had to run it on Christmas Day, but that was because you insisted on making a pot roast even though it was sunny and over 40℉.
Death weighed heavy on LWON this week — the death of a cardinal, the death of a Laotian activist, the death of yellow cedars, the probable death of a fox, and the looming death of a space probe.
Two years ago, Michelle told us the story of the English teacher who helped Laotian organizer Sombath Somphone transform himself from subsistence farmer into environmental leader. This week Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit the country, so a redux seemed particularly fitting.
On Thursday, Ann answered that age-old question: What does the fox say? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow! Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!
And on Friday, Jessa introduced us to the animated series that helped her family and many others bond with a hopeful little European spacecraft, a spacecraft that now has to say a final goodbye.
On September 30, the Rosetta orbiter will make a controlled collision with Comet 67P/C-G. It is not designed for landing, so this is the last we will hear from it. This date also marks an end to a happy period for my family that started in 2013 when my son was just four years old and the European Space Agency released the first of its “Once upon a time…” cartoons about the mission.
In the animation series, Rosetta is depicted as a calm pilot, older sister to the lander Philae. In the voice of an American grandfather, the narrator takes us through all of the latest developments in the mission as if we are sitting on his knee and he is reading a bedtime story. Historical context appears in the reading material the pair packed for the long journey, and other space probes are retroactively anthropomorphized, given relationships — grandfather, cousin — to Rosetta and Philae. Continue reading →
Across the street are two houses with two small yards, connected so they look like one, shaded by trees, one of which has a rope looped in it. The little kids come out of both houses, run through the shade into the dapple-spots of sunlight, disappear back into the shade, grab the rope and swing, climb up into the tree and perch like little panthers. Sometimes they sing. And one twilight, running into and out of the light, what they sang was “What does the fox say?”
The song was popular a few years ago but I’d never listened to it. I went inside and googled it. It’s an unsettlingly weird song by a Norwegian — what is it with those far northerners and their pale skins and light eyes and strange stories? The song is about a guy who knows that dogs say woof and elephants say toot but doesn’t know what the fox says; so a bunch of people dressed in animal costumes dancing in a woods tell him what the fox says, which is, among other things, Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow! Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff! You get the idea, they’re making it up, they don’t know what the fox says either. These sounds, coming out of the dark from kids in trees across the street, Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!, were also unsettlingly weird. Continue reading →
The Alexander Archipelago, a 300-mile-long sweep of islands off the southeastern coast of Alaska, is known for its isolation, its heavy rain, and its thick, ancient forests of hemlock, pine, spruce and yellow-cedar. Yellow-cedar, which John Muir called a “truly noble tree,” has long been prized for its fine-grained, butter-colored wood. But over the past century, as average temperatures have risen, shrinking spring snow cover has exposed more and more of the species’ shallow roots to freezing temperatures, and yellow-cedars have been dying off. Because the tree was and is used for so many human purposes—canoe paddles, ceremonial carvings, even bridges—the disruption is both ecological and cultural.
Ecologist Lauren Oakes wanted to know how the rest of the forest was responding to this long upheaval, so in the summers of 2011 and 2012, she and her field crew sampled forest stands in the archipelago, comparing tree size and species composition at different stages of yellow-cedar decline. In the south, where the decline is most advanced, she found that while some very old yellow-cedars are hanging on, there are few young trees—and those are usually outcompeted by other species such as western hemlock and Sitka spruce.
Oakes had glimpsed the future of the forest, and she wanted to communicate what she’d seen—especially to the people whose lives are still shaped by yellow-cedar. So after she summarized her results in the language of science—bar graphs, charts, and scatter plots—she decided to use the language of music, too.
Sombath Somphone, a respected civil-society leader in Laos, was abducted in Vientiane in December 2012 and has not been seen since. As President Obama becomes the first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos, we revisit this post about Somphone, his disappearance, and a long-ago turning point in his life.
Two years ago this week, a well-known environmental organizer named Sombath Somphone was detained at a traffic stop in downtown Vientiane, Laos, and driven away in a white pickup. He has not been seen or heard from since. You can read a lot more about Somphone, his work in Laos, and his wife’s remarkable efforts to call his abductors to account in my story for National Geographic.
Right now, though, I’d like to tell you a story about his high-school English teacher.
A male northern cardinal. Via Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0
Two weeks ago, while sitting on the floor building a puzzle with my toddler, I heard a window-rattling thud. I figured it was the neighbor’s soccer ball hitting the glass door again, so I got up feeling somewhat ticked. When I looked out the window, the first thing I saw was an absolutely apoplectic male cardinal, chittering madly and darting around the boxwoods off my deck. The next thing I saw was the bird’s offspring, a fledgling we’d been watching learn how to fly. He was writhing on the top stair, his left wing flapping and twisting while his right one lay unmoving. He was breathing heavily. He had flown straight into the glass, obviously at high speed. (My blinds were up on that sunny day and I’ve already ordered bird-deflecting decals, so please don’t @ me over this.)
I took my daughter upstairs, figuring that if we left, the male bird might feel safe enough to approach the house and try to flip the baby bird over, or maybe move him. When we came back, the young bird was still. The breath had gone from his breast and his eyes, half-open, gazed blankly to one side. The older male bird was gone. My daughter is too young to understand why I was now crying, so I brought her back to her puzzle without a word.
Then the male bird reappeared, still agitated but now less concerned about my presence in the window. He had food in his beak. I watched, incredulous, as he landed on my deck, hopped over to the baby bird, and dropped the morsel into his baby’s mouth. Then he flew to our patio table, still chittering, then flew back. He flitted around the dead bird another few times, checking out its face. Finally I had to look away. Continue reading →
Journeys bookend this week, while the middle was filled with grief and change, which are journeys of their own.
On Monday, Sarah takes us to the rivers of British Columbia and the mysteries that bubble around and through them. It was as if the country itself murmured just beyond the edge of hearing, moved just beyond the edge of vision, watched us even as we watched it slip past along cobbly banks.
Next, Rose breaks down the four stages of Twitter grief, from praise to criticism to finger-wagging to the inevitable wave of think pieces about the nature ofremembrance…Then, because it’s Twitter, all hell officially breaks loose, and the fights truly begin. And then in a few days we just start the whole thing over again.
Michelle documents the slow process of designating a new geological time interval, and what this means for those of us living in it. When and if the International Commission on Stratigraphy decides to add the starting point of the Anthropocene to the planetary time scale, it may start to look less like a metaphor for tragedy or triumph and more like the beginning of every other geological interval: a time of remarkable change.
Craig and his kids drift through New York City after midnight, and find an enigma in a toy airplane. It was, in a sense, the purpose of our trip. We were looking for mysteries, for wrinkles in the city, needles in haystacks.
And I wrap up the week with a post about how to optimize a road trip. What I’ve learned so far: lower my expectations, pull over when body parts get stuck together.
