I do government-adjacent work, so Friday afternoon I went out the front door to walk off my feelings and decided to turn right.
As I neared the U.S. Capitol building, I started seeing people with going-home-from-a-protest energy (small groups, cheerful, heading away from major government buildings) and gangs of Architect of the Capitol staff cleaning up trash from the wide sidewalks.
As I walked down one of those sidewalks, another woman, also alone, coming the other way, started to trend toward me in a way that people do when they’re not going to follow social conventions about strangers. She looked cold and tired. I put my head down and studiously ignored. “Are you pro-life?” she called. As I passed: “Oh, you don’t like women having control over their own bodies? How pathetic!”
Ah, right. It was that day in January, every year, when a bunch of people show up to be mad about Roe v. Wade. They won, but I guess they’re still showing up. And I guess that lady is still showing up to yell at them about it.
I do like having control over my own body, while it lasts, and I walked that body on toward the sunset and then back on home.
With California once again burning, I keep wondering, if those fires were coming our way, what would I save?
I remember my cousin who, years ago, lost her house during a summer of flames; she’d been away from home when it burned, so there was no frantic effort to stuff the car with keepsakes. After everything had cooled she was allowed to return to the property; in a Hazmat suit she sat in the ashes, sifting through in search of jewelry and anything else that might have survived (an image that has stayed with me ever since). Nothing had, except the beautiful view of the mountains that she had once enjoyed every day. The vast art collection, many of them family pieces, was gone. Jewels, both real and fake, gone. The music, so much music, was gone. (She was a radio personality and had a studio at home with a roomful of curated CDs, many of them given to her and signed by the artists.) There was no sign of our grandmother’s blue Wedgewood china, nor a no-doubt impressive collection of family photos, many of them captured and developed the old-fashioned way and, therefore, gone for good. Her chickens squawking in their coop…I can’t let myself think about them. They, and those other things, I’m sure, are some of the things she would have pulled out if she could have.
At the time I sent her a care package of random stuff—some clothes of my mom’s that might fit her height, a teapot, a few odds and ends, something to help her get through. It felt like nothing, but she had nothing. I’ve thought about that a lot, both the nothing and the something.
We’re fortunate not to have a fire problem here, at least not yet. But I look around and wonder, what’s worth the effort? What could I let burn?
Not to be flip about the horrendous experience a house fire must be, but it’s an exercise worth doing. We are a culture of stuff, and I’ve heard people say after losing everything they realized how little of it was meaningful. But the things that are? Those mean a lot.
So, I started working on a list, just in case. Never mind that transporting large paintings out of harm’s way would be a logistical nightmare. As I work on the list I wonder if it might help me pare down, help me make choices now. Clutter is exhausting with real effects on our mental health: it can make it hard to think clearly, it can steal our attention away from other things. It can cause strife and self-loathing. More on the physiological side, there’s a phenomenon called “visual crowding” that happens when clutter muddles how we take in and process information at the edges of our vision.
I had tickets to fly to LA at the end of the week for mountain lion research where I’d meet with wildlife biologists, follow cats in the Santa Monica mountains by radio collar telemetry, and take a tour of the nearly complete Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101. That plan went out the window with these horrific fires. Contacts dropped out to deal with on the ground emergencies and I quickly found that couches I’d been hoping to sleep on were already taken. None of the collared cats were caught in the fires, but their already fragmented urban-edge habitats are further fractured and reduced.
For a manuscript I’m writing on mountain lions, this is a week I can’t afford to lose. I changed flights to Miami where another marginal population lives in southern Florida. In the Southeast they are called panthers, same species as the ones in LA, as the ones that still exist anywhere in the Americas. Unlike the cats of LA who get infusions of genes from surrounding mountain ranges in Mexico and the US, panthers in Florida are completely isolated. Fifty years ago they were down to between ten and thirty individuals living in the swamplands and savanna grasses of the southern part of the state. They are now up to a couple hundred, still located in the bottom of the sock of Florida, still dangerously endangered, and still more isolated than any other Puma concolor population in the world.
Meanwhile in LA, mountain lions are taking it hard, pushed out by fires, killed frequently while crossing interstates. Those with collars respond to fires by being out more during the day with nocturnal habits upended. Their patterns change as territories are reorganized and new ground is explored, which includes unfamiliar streets and backyards. Cats that got out of the way of fires have to keep going.
I could never hack it as a farmer, and the thought of living as a hunter-gatherer evokes for me the feeling of being locked out of your house. But in the ancient and abandoned indigenous villages on the coast of British Columbia, there was a mode of food cultivation that really strikes a chord with me: the forest garden.
Next to archeological village sites that, until 150 years ago, were continuously occupied for at least 2,000 years, paleobotanist Chelsey Geralda Armstrong and others have found patches of forest where the plants were transplanted from distant sites and selectively managed.
I wrote this post in 2019, when I was feeling prickly and uncertain–not too different than how I’m feeling these days. We do have a few more orchids now, although I still am not quite sure how to care for them.
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I wake up this morning on the prickly side—or at least, I’m prickly once I look at my phone. There are a series of misunderstood texts, frail disjointed things that have good intentions but poor phrasing, or lack the perfect emoji.
My phone is sitting right next to an orchid. It’s a new type of orchid for me—a miltonia, with narrow leaves that point upward and a sweet, pansy-like flower. But now the orchid’s flowers have withered and some of its leaves are yellowing. It may be getting too much light. It may be getting too much water, or not enough.
I thought I was doing so well with my orchids. We had received several plants as gifts; a few months ago, I decided I needed to start taking better care of the plants if I ever wanted them to flower again. I bought pots with holes to let their roots breathe. I researched the right potting mix, I unwound roots that had grown soggy. There is now a special spray bottle that I take around the house to give them a tropical misting.
The ones I’ve re-potted have been growing new leaves. But this morning, the straw-colored tips of the miltonia leaves reminded me that I must keep taking care of things, keep learning how to take care in new ways.
Sometimes taking care of things makes me exhausted. That’s was the problem with all of those texts. And then my middle son wakes up prickly because we are going to church. We don’t even go to church unless we’re visiting a grandmother or, some years, on Christmas Eve. We’ve been talking about Martin Luther King Jr. Day and we don’t really have a tradition to celebrate it, I tell him. Maybe going to church will be a way to do that.
Lately I’ve been a bit lax about my camera trapping — dead batteries, neglected cameras, etcetera — but, last month, I did manage to check the rig I’d had set up for a while at our county’s friendly neighborhood carcass pile, where highway crews and hunters dump the sorry detritus of elk and deer, and scavengers come to feast. I’d been hoping for an elusive mountain lion or late-season bear, but no sooner did the videos upload than I realized it was going to be a rodent-dominated set. I’d unwittingly placed the camera right in the middle of a squirrel’s territory, whose frantic scurrying had triggered its electronic eye every few minutes and drained the battery in about ten days.
In between the rodent captures, I did manage a few nocturnal glimpses of our region’s standard canids: coyote, red fox, gray fox. I love seeing this trio; I have boundless admiration for these carnivores’ stealth, pluck, and adaptability. Apparently a wolf has also recently wandered into our corner of Colorado; with luck, she’ll be next to appear at the elephant graveyard.
And with that, I’m sorry to report that my tenure at LWON comes, for now, to an end; for a variety of reasons, I’ll be stepping away to focus on professional and personal duties. I’ve so enjoyed writing for and engaging with this community over these last years, and offer my deepest gratitude to all you readers and my fellow LWONians (LWONites? I could never get it straight) for making this such a vibrant hub of thoughtful, quirky science writing. See you in the comments!
Last Friday, Sarah used “touchstone” as a metaphor. I think she uses the metaphor — you touch a stone and see its landscape in time — in a way that’s poetically off-center from touchstone’s usual meaning. Which is a thing that’s solid, grounded, and reliable and which is the way I’ve used “touchstone,” because I have a long-standing issues around grounding and reliability. A touchstone is what you refer back to when you’ve become uncertain; it’s reliable certainty, isn’t it, a truth in which you can believe and by which everything can be judged.
But touchstones didn’t start out as metaphors, they’re real things, originally dark and fine-grained rocks, like slate. They’re used as a test for the type and purity of a metal. Specifically, gold — like, you’re paying for gold here, is it really gold? is it pure or has it been cut with baser metals? You draw a line, called a streak, on the touchstone with a piece of the metal, then look at the line’s color. If the streak is gold, the metal is gold and the gold is pure. If the streak is black, it’s pyrite, fool’s gold. If the streak is white, it’s silver; copper-colored, it’s copper. The more copper that’s alloyed with the gold, the redder the streak. Alloys of silver and copper, of silver, copper, and gold; and of tin and lead, all have their own streaks.
