Felicia, the Fermilab Ferret: Micropoems

By: | March 10, 2023
A colored pencil drawing of a tiny ferret seemingly viewed along the telescope-like length of a vast turquoise-green tunnel.

For years, now, I’ve had a scrap of digital paper on my computer desktop with four words on it: Felicia, the Fermilab Ferret. A memorial to an extraordinary life. A reminder to channel the legendary little animal’s spirit into something strange and new. Little poems, perhaps. And, now, finally, I have.

But first: her story.

A long, long time ago (1971), in a magical place (rural Illinois), a team of scientists built a very, very large and very, very important machine (a particle accelerator). Geese migrating over the National Accelerator Laboratory could see the colossal ring of tunnels through which protons and antiprotons would soon zoom, zip, and collide. History-making was imminent.

But the machine didn’t work. Something was messing with the magnets. Eventually engineers identified the problem: tiny steel slivers left in the tubes during construction. All they had to do to fix the machine was clean out the tubes. But the tubes were miles long, and sealed, except for a narrow opening at each end.

Enter Felicia.

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Thanks for All the Snow

By: | March 8, 2023

I took a train with my high school kid to Salt Lake City for a little urban immersion on Winter Break. We disembarked at 2:30 in the morning in a city experiencing what some said was the biggest blizzard they’d seen in a decade. That early morning, with packs on our backs, we walked into the swirling night time glow of a swallowed city, nothing moving but us as drifts piled up. Within half an hour, we found the place I had rented and we both passed out in fresh beds.

In the morning, with snow coming down hard, we walked into a sculpture gallery, block after block of cars and buildings softened and rounded. Anyone who was on foot looked like they’d stepped out for a space walk, lone figures appearing and disappearing behind falling shrouds.

You don’t complain about snowfall in the dry West, and this year my gratitude is through the roof. Outlying parts of Phoenix got a rare accumulation in the low desert and Flagstaff, in northern Arizona, has been pummeled, cars unable to get out of certain neighborhoods for weeks. I live in the Colorado Rockies where storm after storm has immobilized us, wood stove crackling inside, roof bursting into a low harumph as it lets off another avalanche. Across the way in the California Sierra I’m hearing the same, 200 percent above average, pictures showing highways plowed through white canyons, snow standing nine to fifteen feet high. Yosemite National Park is closed indefinitely and more is on the way.

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Postcard from a great height

By: | March 3, 2023
Photo by Matt Forkin (thanks Matt!)

Dear LWON readers,

This is California’s only major free-flowing river, 400 miles north of San Francisco in the Klamath Mountains near the northern border with Oregon. That outrageous aquamarine color comes from a rock called serpentinite, which contains a vivid, yellow-green mineral with the equally delightful name of lizardite. Could I see the bottom of the river from hundreds of feet high? I could. Are those my loved ones paddling into the afternoon sun? They are.

Happy Friday,

Emily

The Corvids in Your Neighborhood

By: | March 1, 2023
Screenshot of an app, identifying the sound of a common raven

Ravens do not generally hang around in my neighborhood, here in northwest Washington, D.C.

The common raven lives in a lot of places – much of Europe and Asia; most of Canada, the western U.S. and Mexico; south into Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. According to the map on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Common Raven web page, a finger of the bird’s range reaches down into Appalachia. Indeed, the last one I saw was a couple of years ago, a few hours to the west, in West Virginia, being chased by crows above the treetops.

The most obvious difference between a raven and a crow is size. Ravens are big. Really big. A good two feet long, the guide book tells me. Compare that to just 17.5 inches for the American crow, which is common around here.

So the other day I was standing on a metro platform, and I spotted a big bird flying in the distance. But then it got close enough so I could see that it was black, and I thought raven, but then I thought, “ugh, Helen, it’s just a crow, crows are big.” It was flying in an odd way, though – swooping and soaring – and, I realized, it was calling, an odd pair of croaks. Part of me was saying “you’ve just forgotten what crows sounds like,” but the other part of me whipped out my phone and started the Merlin app. It confirmed: raven.

A raven! Flying over my neighborhood!

A few years ago I learned how to detect a fish crow. It looks almost exactly the same as an American crow, but its voice sounds different. Now that I know their call, I’ve realized that fish crows are pretty common around here. And, on Monday, there I was, using sound to recognize another corvid in my neighborhood.

As I learn to recognize their voices, that whole amorphous blob of big black birds is differentiating into individual species.

I think I had actually seen the raven a few days before. I looked out of my window and saw a huge black bird winging its way over the construction site, but I dismissed my instinct – it’s just a crow, Helen. I got my guidebook off the shelf in the bedroom. Ravens have a 53-inch wingspan – that’s more than four feet. It wasn’t that big. Ravens don’t live here.

Except, apparently, they do.

Photo: Screenshot of the recording I made and Merlin’s ID

On the occasion of a century

By: | February 27, 2023

My dad’s 100th birthday would have been this weekend. 100! It seems incredible—so many years since 1923, so many things that happened in them. How different it must have been, how many things might have been not so different at all.  

These are the things I think I remember that he told me: behind his house there was a pond that had goldfish, and then there was a cat, and there weren’t so many goldfish anymore. The Great Depression happened; they ate canned things. Creamed beef, soggy corn. We had a wooden sewing stand that was filled with buttons that maybe his mother, or maybe her mother, had saved.

At school, his favorite class was Latin and they sometimes went skiing over a golf course after it snowed. He went to college somewhere his parents wanted him to go but he didn’t. He worked at the newspaper. He worked as a hasher at a sorority house. After a while, he dropped out. No one knew where he went.

Months later, he resurfaced in Chicago. He considered being a minister. He started studying to be a lawyer. Then the war started. He considered being a conscientious objector. Something changed. He went to boot camp, he studied languages. He went to England. Once the war was over, he went to Austria and maybe Germany.

He didn’t talk much about the war. He said that it’s the reason why he never drank coffee (it was terrible!) and rarely drank beer. He didn’t lose his love of languages. There was a period where instead of reading a bedtime story, he read from a Finnish exercise book. I remember words with a long “oo” sound.

One New Year’s Eve I was in Munich, and I called home because the truth was, New Year’s Eve in Munich was not as fun as it might sound. He seemed talkative: He told me that he’d been there, that he’d liked that city, and then he told a story that I’d never heard before about crossing a bridge in a jeep somewhere in Austria. The bridge collapsed right after. I am not sure if I imagined that. He still had nightmares, imagining that he’d killed someone.

A few years ago, some of the Army records got declassified and my mom sent away for them. There weren’t stories about jeeps and bridges, or codes he’d cracked, or locations that he had been that we’d never known, or the mystery of those missing months. But some of his personnel files had notes that revealed a person neither of us had known: my father as a young man.

Slender, health good. Fairly nice looking kid. Extremely alert; eye for detail . . . A clean cut chap; sense of humor, but amusingly serious. Says he’d like to try cryptography.

. . . quiet but with a wry and amusing personality. Extremely conscientious, takes the world serious but with a grin. Can be fully depended on in any situation . . . Is young and often shows it in his actions, but should not be dismissed as irresponsible.

There’s something sweet to me about these notes. Maybe that it’s these Army men—I’m assuming they were men, writing in a cursive scrawl and thick typeset—saw something about my dad that would remain true half a century later.

A hundred years after he was born, I still like to imagine what he’d be doing today. Well into retirement, he was still taking on odd jobs: dog walking, taxes, testing voice recognition software. The rest of this thought the whole thing was ridiculous—the program could hardly understand anything, and it was so slow! Who would ever use it?

He would cut out newspaper articles and send them to me: financial advice, Peanuts cartoons, career ideas. One of them about this program where you could learn to write about science—after all, I liked biology and I liked writing. I thought it was dumb. I was going to be an engineer! A doctor! An anything else! Another time when I was wrong.

Now I can imagine forwarding me links, taking blurry photos, using Siri to send his grandchildren messages.

He would love emojis. Love emojis. I even try to think of messages he would send: unicorn, computer, potty mouth. Plant sprout, upside down face, crying laughing, dollar sign, smiling devil. Pumpkin, rockstar, mermaid, frozen yogurt in a cone. He would have the patience to endlessly debate the kid who leads with their mind. Cat face, tsunami, mind blown. He would sit and listen to the one who leads with their heart. Palette, fencer, croissant, sparkle stars. He would marvel at the one who is in constant motion. Disco dancer, firework, poop face, starry eyes.

And I know what I would send back: 100. 100. Heart heart heart.

Two Tapirs

By: | February 24, 2023

Earlier this month, Elise and I traveled to the Osa Peninsula, the appendage of tropical forest that juts off southwest Costa Rica into the Pacific Ocean. We chose that part of the country primarily to visit Corcovado National Park, a 164-square-mile protected area that the National Geographic Society once described, curiously, as the “most biologically intense place in the world.” (What does it mean for a place to be “biologically intense”? Do the spider monkeys all sound like Daniel Day Lewis?)

No roads lead to Corcovado’s heart, forcing tourists to approach by boat. We disembarked from our little landing craft onto a remote beach, cut through the jungle — led by our guide, Manuel, a serious steel-haired man with an encyclopedic knowledge of rainforest ecology — and emerged onto another beach. A small crowd of fellow hikers had gathered at the ecotone where the forest met the sand, and Manuel turned to us, unsmiling. “It is the tapir,” he said somberly. 

A Baird’s tapir — the largest terrestrial creature in Central America, and the animal I’d hoped most desperately to see! We scurried over, though the tapir was in no rush to evade the growing knot of onlookers. He wandered along the edge of the rainforest, at once hulking and graceful in the way of all megafauna, his robust body perched atop improbably thin legs. He paused and craned his neck, reaching up with his proboscis to grasp and strip a cluster of leaves and fruit. The proboscis — which, Manuel informed us, furnished a built-in snorkel during river crossings — was shockingly flexible and dexterous, and the tapir used the organ to pluck food nearly as nimbly as I would’ve used my hands. Another few million years of evolution and it would be an elephant’s trunk.

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The Uses of “Hand”

By: | February 22, 2023

I grew up sewing most of my own clothes and developed an abiding and expensive fixation on beautiful fabric. Once I was in Florence at a store buying fabric, textiles (tessuti), as a gift for my mother. I stipulated in toddler-Italian a light wool (leggera lana) in blue (blu) for a dress for my mother (vestito per la mia madre). The sellers of tessuti in Florence are interested in gifts for mothers and full of information, opinions, and intensity. He hauled down from his shelves a bolt of wool, soft grey-blue, and unrolled it on the counter, thump thump, and ran the fabric out so I could see it was like no wool I had seen before. It was smooth, both light and firm; it caught the light; it was silky. He grabbed a handful of it, shook it a little, and said something in adult-Italian that I didn’t recognize but could still understand and answer. “It has a good hand,” I said. And he said “Si, assolutamente,” So I bought, at a price that was staggering but worthy of the hand, four yards of it.

We speakers of English use “hand,” taken direct from the Germanic, enthusiastically and variably: hand over, out of hand, hand to hand, first hand, handy. Physics experimentalists are sometimes said to have good hands. And since English is half Latin and “hand” is “manus,” we use manus similarly: manual, manufacture, manuscript.

The use I’m currently interested in was in a book in which one character asked another if he could read “secretary hand.” I’d heard the phrase, assumed in meant some kind of handwriting but looked it up anyway and such riches, not just one kind of handwriting but choices of handwriting depending on what was written, hand over hand, one hand after another!

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