Redux: The Lookout Cookbook

By: | August 25, 2023

I’m on a backpacking trip this week, which makes it as good a time as any to revisit one of my favorite posts (or, more accurately, to make you revisit it). Although Colorado, our home since early 2022, doesn’t have quite the same abundance and diversity of rentable Forest Service fire towers as did the Inland Northwest, we still hope to rest our bones in a couple of these aeries next summer. Hopefully they’ve updated the menu since I whipped up a batch of Shipwreck in 2020.

When, years from now, I reflect on the debacle that was 2020, I will remember it for COVID, of course, and for its possibly planet-saving election; but I will also recall it as the Year of the Fire Tower. Decommissioned fire lookout towers stipple ridgelines across the West, many of which can be rented for a $40 nightly fee — a sensational bargain, as long as you don’t mind carrying your water up fifty feet of rickety stairs and sleeping on a mattress strewn with mouseshit. Elise and I spent this summer bouncing up derelict dirt roads to towers with names like Cougar Peak and Gird Point and Yaak Mountain, seeking solace in sunsets and the stoic profile of the Northern Rockies. As I wrote recently for CNN: “Being surrounded by millions of years of rugged geology doesn’t diminish our present crisis, but it does offer a bit of deep context.”

I’ve come to love fire towers not only for their scenery, but for their history. Luminaries like Gary Snyder and Ed Abbey once scanned horizons for smoke; Jack Kerouac suffered an emotional meltdown during his summer at Desolation Peak. Traces of antiquity still survive at some towers: initials carved into cement foundations; lichen-encrusted cairns; the wondrous Osborne Firefinders that dominate the tiny cabins like supermassive stars. In one tower we unearthed a copy of the Fire Man’s Handbook, a 1966 manual whose wisdom included this pearl: “When lightning storm is near or overhead, observe the following safety rules: Stand on insulated glass-legged stool.”

If lightning didn’t kill twentieth-century lookouts, the food might do the job. Lookout cuisine was, by all accounts, abominable. Fire-watchers depended on the canned, the powdered, the non-perishable: anything that could be hauled in on a mule and preserved without refrigeration. One early cookbook advised lookouts to “purchase a half or a whole mutton from sheepherders in the vicinity of your station. To keep, hang up in a tree or some other high point at night, wrapped in canvas, or put in a burlap sack during the day and put between blankets and mattress of bed.” No wonder towers were often ransacked by bears.

Fire tower food was so notoriously terrible that it inspired a Colville National Forest lookout to pen the following bit of doggerel, in which FS stands for Forest Service: 

 I like FS biscuits;

think they’re mighty fine.

One rolled off the table

and killed a pal of mine.

I like FS coffee;

think it’s mighty fine.

Good for cuts and bruises

just like iodine.

I like FS corned beef;

it really is okay.

I fed it to the squirrels;

funerals are today.

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The Boundary Conditions Being What They Are

By: | August 23, 2023

I’ve written books and didn’t find the experience pleasant: I’d go underground for 2 or 3 or 4 years, maybe 5, and when I’d stick my head up into the light of the world again, the world was changed. Like, during one of my underground sessions, the internet took hold and when I surfaced, the print magazines for which I’d written were saying their last goodbyes. Or during another session, my job whisked out from under me and ok, I was sick of academia anyway and worse yet, now that I was free to only write, I found I was also sick of my writing. All of this is to say, coming out of the pandemic is a lot like coming out of a book: new world, what the hell?

And of course even when it’s over, it’s not over. Just like page proofs have to be corrected and publicity has to be arranged and endured, the pandemic has its upticks and new variants and friends suddenly cancelling afternoon teas.

Meaning, I don’t know how to live in what remains of the past and simultaneously figure out how the present is different. I think this is a liminal state, neither land nor water but some kind of uncertain swamp in between. I do hate uncertainty which, too bad because at this point in time, the swamp is the rule, it’s non-negotiable, it’s the boundary condition.

§

 “Boundary condition” means different things to different scientists but in general it’s the immovable thing that can’t be changed, only worked within. A river running along a granite wall has to run parallel to the wall: the wall sets the boundary condition.

§

One thing for sure: given current boundary conditions, I need therapy. Every week, I meet with a psychotherapist and a physical therapist; and every day I practice both. Shoulders back and down. Speak kindly to myself. Run my fingers up to door frame to the top. Separate the anxiety from the situation that’s provoking it. Hold a stretchy band in both hands with elbows at the side and pull my hands apart. Figure out what’s so frightening about wanting comfort. Lie down and slowly punch my arms into the air. Think of life’s little epiphanies.

The tiny black hummingbird is at the feeder and the sun hits it just so and it turns iridescent green, and it drinks and drinks and then its head pops up and it winks out of space and time, gone.

§

Once I was in the woods, writing, in a cabin with a grand piano in it and a piano player needed to practice so I said sure, while you play I can write. I couldn’t. She worked her way through two volumes of Beethoven sonatas, and while Beethoven seems to write in sentences, his sentences were more complicated than mine and much more interesting so I got distracted and meanwhile she filled up the cabin with the Waldstein, up to the peaked roof, every atom of air in that cabin moved by Beethoven. I was breathing Beethoven.

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How many years ago was that? Twenty? Thirty? I’m at the age where you don’t suddenly lose days or months or years, you lose decades. Getting old: another liminal state. I’m sticking my head out of the ground from the pandemic just in time to face old-age planning. Also someday, not as far away as it used to be, is death, another boundary condition. I have no particular reason to think about death but I am aware of the time. How can all this life just go away? I will miss it all so much. I look at the hummingbird, the little kids in my tree, the lottery card the neighbor leaves on my porch, other neighbors having a kids-in-bed girl-party on their porch, the extraordinary mix of people at the farmers’ market united in their focus on peaches and sweet corn, and I get blinded by loss; I don’t want to ever leave this. My therapist gets a little snippy: then don’t, she says, it’s all out there, you don’t need to miss it now.

§

Sticking a head up in the middle of a patch of dense, tall, intense green, ferny amsonias is a pale magenta phlox. I had deleted all the phlox years ago because it wasn’t flowering much and got terrible fungus, and I dug it all out. And yet years later, there it is. New world: what the hell? The phlox had been white and this pale magenta guy had to go back into its ancestry for its color and its will to live. “I’m here,” it says, “I am what I am and I’m here.”

Make of that what you will. But don’t you think, given these trying boundary conditions, that pale magenta phlox is also saying, “just go forth, sweetie, and do the best you know how?”

__________

Photo by me and it looks like it.

Puddleglyphs

By: | August 21, 2023

It was over 100 degrees several days this past week, where I live in Washington, and now we’re drowning in smoke. Needless to say, I’m craving something clean and cold. Maybe you are too? In which case, I pulled this from the archives for both of us:

Sometimes
in the spring
out walking
I get the feel
that the earth itself is speaking,
that it has its own language,
written in ice

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The Wolverine That Wasn’t

By: | August 18, 2023

Sorting through photos from our motion-triggered game camera reminds me a lot of field work. For every target animal you’re seeking, you end up looking at a lot of deer. So when I recently discovered a creature that I couldn’t immediately identify in our roll of game cam photos, I was thrilled.

It looked wide and strong, and for a split second I wondered if it could be a bear. But the size easily ruled that out — it was too small and squat.

Immediately, my mind went to the most exotic, exciting possibility — wolverine!

According to my National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Rocky Mountain States, the wolverine, or Gulo gulo, is “robust,” “bear-like” and “very strong and fearless for its size; drives bears from kill.”Its range includes western Colorado and its habitat is listed as forests, scrub and meadows, which pretty much describes the back acres of our farm where our game cam spotted the mystery creature. The wolverine’s  lateral stripes “can range from extremely prominent to almost indiscernible,” according to the Wolverine Foundation.

By the time I downloaded the photo, there were no tracks left, so all I had to go on was the photo. Checking the photo with the species accounts, everything seemed to check out. Of course, it was just one datum, so I called in some backup.

I sent the photo to some wildlife savvy friends, and they were split. A lot of them agreed it could be a wolverine. A few others wondered if it were a badger.

The American badger, Taxidea taxus, also fit the description pretty well. The range, habitat and body shape — “wide, flattish,” according to the Audubon guide — all fit. While it’s not clear that there are any wolverines left in Colorado, badgers are pretty common in the state, which tilted the scales in its favor.

I’ll be honest, I wanted it to be wolverine. Well, sort of. They’re vicious killers so maybe I didn’t want them hanging around my chickens, cats and other animals. I didn’t really want a badger around either. Still, there’s something thrilling about the thought of a dangerous wild animal inhabiting a shared space.

After looking at a bunch of photos in my field guides and online, I decided it was probably a badger.

And then I downloaded the latest photos, the first of which were taken the day (night, really) after the mystery photo was shot. And here’s what I found.

Skunk! It was a skunk. As soon as I saw this photo (and a video of what was probably the same skunk the following night) I was convinced.

Why? Because until I had seen the second photo and video, I had very little hard evidence to go on. The notion that the animal was a wolverine or badger was based almost entirely on what could be seen on the photo. And really, that wasn’t much. In the age of the internet, we all know how deceptive photos can be.

Wild animals can be hard to identify on the fly (or run or in a single snapshot of a camera) and so it’s important to consider a principle called “base rate neglect” or the “base rate fallacy.” It’s the tendency to favor the most recent or individual information while ignoring the prior probability of a particular outcome. In this case, it was taking the bodily characteristics of an animal in a night photo as the most compelling evidence, without giving as much consideration to the probability that a wolverine would be lurking in my forest. It wasn’t impossible that it was a wolverine, but chances were much greater that it was not. Badgers are more common around here than wolverines, and skunks are even more widespread still. I also had lots of prior evidence that there were skunks around — I’d chased one out of my garden shed multiple times.

The base rate principle is useful for birding too. Hawks are notoriously difficult to identify when they’re high in the air. We have lots of them around here, and I usually look up and say, “Look, a red-tailed hawk!” Because chances are, I’ll be correct.

Wolverine image: Max Pixel. Badger by Jonathunder

This post first ran on June 19, 2018.

Ma? It’s Martin.

By: | August 16, 2023

The other day my dad, who is 93 and losing his mind in dribs and drabs, asked me over the phone if we could FaceTime with his parents. I didn’t lie. I said, well, the technology is advancing quickly but it’s not quite advanced enough to reach them where they are. (True!) Maybe someday?

I mean, why not.

And I thought about what it must be like to be in his head, totally believing that his parents are out there somewhere waiting for our call. Trusting their voices would fill the room (and their faces the screen?) if we only had the right number. I suspect in his mind’s eye they are youngish people still. Maybe this: His mom in her flowered housecoat (faded from so much wash and wear) shuffling around the kitchen waiting for the brisket to cook and boiling the flavor and snap out of string beans in a big pot on the stove. His dad, a physician, coming in the back door looking dapper, as working men at that time always looked (it was the hats), loosening his tie and peeking under the pot lid at the flaccid beans and giving his wife a quick kiss for her efforts, like in some mid-century commercial for Maxwell House or Rolaids.

The phone on the wall, a black rotary Bakelite, is ringing. It’s us! There’s no video, of course, but there is a large receiver to cradle between shoulder and ear and a springy cord that stretches to the sink or stove, for multitasking. (Remember ducking under those cords? And fighting to untangle them so they’d hang right?) My dad called his mother Ma. “Ma? It’s Martin.” I’m not sure what he called his dad, now that I think about it. He was always “my father” when dad talked about him. “My father was an incredible human being. My father was a wonderful physician. My father made house calls and everyone loved him.” His father, my grandfather, died suddenly of a heart attack in his 50s, long before I was born. My dad always teared up when he talked about him. “I wish you kids had met my father,” he’d say. Not “I wish my father had met you kids.” Always the other way around. His father was that special.

Maybe my dad called him Pa, to go with Ma? I need to ask him, ASAP. I hope he remembers.

Anyway, maybe that’s what fills his mental FaceTime: His parents going about their lives, making dinner, anticipating his call, happy to hear his voice. Alive and well with many years in front of them. God, I hope so.

The Fall of a Sparrow

By: | August 14, 2023

Near where I live in Seattle there is a rail trail called the Burke-Gilman. Everyone around here knows it simply as The Burke. An asphalt conduit that bisects north Seattle from Bothell to the Ballard Locks, The Burke is over twenty miles long, and a classic multiuse recreational urban route. Bicyclists fly over it, people walk along it, there is the occasional rollerblader or rollerskier. Myself, I run.  

I enjoy my morning runs on The Burke. I think of them as Nature Trots. I’ve seen all manner of things, in all seasons, in all years. Raccoons, coyotes, moles, enormous rats, shrews, mice, bats. A couple of mountain beavers, even.

Me being me, I focus on birds. The Burke can be pretty lively, being for much of its length a greenbelt of sorts. Lots of chickadees and bushtits and nuthatches and warblers and sparrows and the odd vireo and other small flitty things. During the shoulder seasons I watch for migrants, like hermit thrushes on their way to or from the mountains. I’ve seen dunlins from time to time, a whimbrel. The list could go on and on.

Sometimes I see examples of the fraught territorial overlaps between the human and the non-human. Once I watched a nuthatch try to excavate a nesting cavity out of a metal rainspout, hammering away in vain. And one dark fall morning I was attacked from behind by a barred owl. Feeling the sharp shock of its talons on my scalp, I yelped and flailed until it let go and flew up to a tree. It then proceeded to chase me for another quarter mile, while I alternately sprinted from it or threw myself to the ground when it swept overhead.

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The New Greatest Story Ever Told

By: | August 11, 2023

Hieronymous Bosch, the Temptation of St. Anthony. Via Wikimedia Commons.

When I was a student studying literature, I kept seeing Christ allegories everywhere. I remember being assigned The Old Man and the Sea, one of many Hemingways I read that semester, and I remember my teacher asking what we thought the book was about. Answers included “death’s inevitability” and “the fallacy of humanity’s power over nature” and other tropes. But it was about Christ. It was undeniably about Christ and Santiago was his avatar. He holds the rope for three days, and it cuts his palms like the stigmata; that much I still remember.

So much of art and literature and cinema offers the same allegory, and some stories and characters are of course more obvious than others. Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is obvious; Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: the Phantom Menace maybe less so, but watch it again. Ripley in Alien 3, Neo in the Matrix trilogy, Superman in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, every single Mel Gibson character.

But in the past few years, Christ has become less obvious to me. Or, at least, the greatest story ever told is no longer the prevailing motif in the stories I read and watch. There is a different sacrificial lamb, a different tragedy, though I suppose a similar foil. All stories are climate allegories.

I started thinking about this a few years ago, but it has felt ever more present in this summer of hellish fire and heat. The first time a climate allegory became obvious to me was the sparkling 2012 novel The Age of Miracles. It is about a girl going through puberty, as she and her family experience personal crises against the backdrop of planetary calamity. The calamity is a sudden inexplicable slowing of Earth’s rotation, but the connection to climate change was evident.

A writer colleague recently asked, in a large group, for suggestions of books that are climate allegories, whether obvious or not. Her main example was Barbara Kingsolver’s lovely Flight Behavior, a beautiful climate change story that has stuck with me over the years. My colleague was hoping to avoid speculative fiction or science fiction/fantasy, but was open to any ideas. The suggestions rolled in, again some obvious and some less so: Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt; Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy; The Overstory, by Richard Powers; and Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton, were among my favorite recommendations. I said the Fifth Season trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin — yes, it is science fiction/fantasy, but some of the best writing I’ve read in recent years, and to my mind definitely climate fiction.

I started thinking about whether these books were intended as climate allegories, or whether the moment in which they were written is just so suffused with that reality, the climate connection was more organic. I don’t know. But I like thinking about it.

TV and movies are the same way. Everything is a climate story now. My favorite show lately was Silo, based on some of my absolute favorite speculative fiction books, the Wool series by Hugh Howey. I was one of the lucky people who found Wool on Kindle, back when it was new and fresh technology, and waited desperately for Howey to upload his next installments. The books read as climate or nuclear fiction, but they felt somehow fun to me then, not so suffused with dread. The TV adaptation, starring Rebecca Ferguson (never enough, never, never; also Lady Jessica), feels different. It was more darkly like a story about climate apocalypse. I won’t spoil it — you should really just read the Wool Omnibus — but suffice to say that it has the same feeling, dread mixed with longing and nostalgia and solastalgia, that is shared by movies like Children of Men, Blade Runner: 2049, and Interstellar.

I thought about the Old Man and the Sea when we watched Avatar: The Way of Water with my 8-year-old. (OK, fine, Jake Sully’s “They killed their mother” is not exactly allegorical, but Avatar is still a climate movie.) The space whales movie tries to be a lot of things, but I kept coming back to ocean acidification and the 101 degree temperatures in the south Atlantic this summer. Is that what James Cameron wanted me to think about? The deep-sea submersible diver and HMFIC hitting me over the head with mournful whale families? It’s true that some of the greatest stories getting told are, in fact, trying to talk about climate, sometimes to give the productions greater meaning, sometimes to give voice to the feeling of living and creating right now. My friend explored this in depth in a feature in The Atlantic, which you should read.

Or maybe it’s also true that I am seeing these metaphors because my mind is primed to see them. I live in narratives, so of course I look for meaning behind them, and right now the most meaningful thing I can imagine is what we have done to this planet. Books are all about climate, movies and TV shows are all about climate, because my mind is all about climate. It is the main theme I obsess over, the future I try to imagine on behalf of my kids; climate fiction is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

If, as someone once said, the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance, then I suppose it’s ok that I am seeing climate stories everywhere. It may be as the artists intended. It may be the meaning that I, the consumer of art, am bringing to the experience. The story gets told either way.

Sorry, Santiago. I still think you are a version of Christ. But I do wonder, if Hemingway were writing now, whether The Old Man and the Sea would be about rising seas instead.

Redux: Giving History a Finger

By: | August 9, 2023

Even at a thousand words, this picture would be way undervalued. But there it was, waiting to be taken (the picture, that is, not the object). So I took, during a visit to Florence, and I wrote, in 2014, and I redux, here, because some images you just can’t get out of your head.
fd3782c1-85d3-4f6c-a422-d63b25f5bacf.grid-4x2 The middle finger of Galileo’s right hand is a satisfying sight. Not because the resemblance to an obscene gesture is unmistakable (though that’s pretty amusing). And not because such a gesture might suggest that in the end a scientist who suffered persecution for the sin of being correct had gotten the last word—well, two words (though that would be amusing, too). And not even because the relic once belonged to the body of the real live Galileo Galilei (awesome). No, what pleased me most during my first personal encounter with the finger a few months ago was something more historically potent: its setting. Continue reading →