Twenty-one years ago, Domino’s Pizza ran a fairly mundane promotion: customers who purchased a large one-topping pizza would also receive an order of cheesy bread, on the house. This event would not have even registered for me, or anyone I knew, had Domino’s not advertised it like this:
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Brown
Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. They pair up, lay a clutch of two eggs, incubate those eggs, have a brood of two chicks, feed those chicks, and, finally, watch those chicks strike off on their own. The luckiest penguins go through all those steps over the course of several months. The vast majority of penguins are not that lucky, however. Some never find a mate, or a kelp gull eats their eggs, or their chicks starve, and so on. Sometimes I am astonished at all the ways they can be unlucky. Even so, no matter the outcome of the breeding season, once March and April arrive, every single penguin molts.
The molt seems to me a harsh way to close the year. Some birds only molt a few feathers at a time so they can keep living their lives more or less unaffected by the need for new plumage. Not so Magellanic penguins. Magellanic penguins undergo what is called a catastrophic molt, which means they replace all their feathers at the same time. To prepare for this involved procedure, they first leave the colony for two or three weeks to stuff themselves with food. When they return, they settle in a nest, or sometimes just a patch of open ground, and stop preening and oiling their feathers. Deprived of care and oil, the feathers soon lose their lustrous blackness, fading to brown. The colony fills with brown penguins.
This is the first stage of the molt. Because we are creative, we call it Brown. Think of it as the beginning of the end.
The invasion is now in full swing. I am not sure if I’ll make it beyond tonight. You have no idea what I’ve seen out there.
It began a few nights ago, though it was chilly then. The earth gleamed with moisture. There were fewer of them; the cold and the rain held them off, I think.
We knew they were coming, because it’s that time of year, but we did not know, yet, that there would be so many. How could we know?
That first night, I saw one or two. Oh. Oh no. They’re back, I thought. A couple days later came the first sign that this invasion would be epic. We could not know, for real, because the state entomologist whose forecasts I read with alacrity has apparently retired. So I have no idea what the miller moth season will be like this year; I can only pray that it will not be as bad as the summer of 2020, or heavens forbid, the summer of 1989.
But then one morning last week, I opened the door for the dog. Several of them had glommed onto my storm door, seeking warmth, and I’d just dislodged them. Some half-dozen moths fell stupidly onto my head, while many (so many) others fluttered directly into my face and hair. My screams traveled the neighborhood and brought my children to tears. My screams heralded the miller moths’ annual arrival. My screams trumpeted the beginning of the end.
The end is nigh. The end of my love of the summer night is upon us. I cannot be out there when they are there. I cannot go to the door in peace, or anything resembling normalcy, when they are out there. I cringe. I shiver. I falter. I flail, Elaine-like, entranced by fear. I dance and I zigzag, not unlike—well, one might say, not unlike one of them. I shriek into the ear of my literary agent while on a phone call, I hurt my arm in the door in my attempt to slam it on them. Unfortunately, I have never been conscious of a strange sort of pity for them.
I went outside tonight to hear the great horned owls, which are in the early stages of their mating season. The hoo-hu-hooo, hoo-hu-hooo, hoo-hu-hooo flying from treetops is one of my favorite experiences in the woods I now inhabit. Dusk is such a wonderful time in the early-summer mountains. The hummingbirds were buzzing to my feeder, the turkeys were gobbling about something, the magpies were screeching, what I think was a pine siskin was screech-squealing in the woods, and the owls were getting an early start. I went out just to stand there, to hear the birdsong and to watch the night come by. I thought I saw a few small blurs flit across my vision, so I blinked a few times. I need a new eyeglass prescription. Wait—no. My eyes were not adjusting. I was seeing real movement in front of the trees, above the trees, all around and within and through the trees. I was seeing them.
I saw dozens of them, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them were flying past my porch, probably at least 1.5 million of them per square foot. It was horrible to think that one billion miller moths were out there with me, flying above my 3/4 of an acre. A trillion moths is too many moths for anyone, but especially for me.
Thump. Thump. Thump. I went inside and could no longer hear the great horned owls, but instead the stupid muffled sound of Colorado’s most obnoxious creatures fluttering haplessly against the windows. They were trying to reach the light. I hate them so much. I do not see the pure bead of life in them; I am so sorry. They are my greatest phobia. They are dusty, hence their “miller” nickname, and their poop is maroon and weirdly large and it stains the walls, and why? They are oddly proportioned, with huge fat bodies and long legs and stubby little delta wings. I cannot describe them further, I am sorry. The end is nigh. I hope my neighbor bears eat them all.
If you’re reading this, I have survived to write another day. Working in the dark, after my children were safely sleeping, I survived logging into WordPress amid the sound of them beating their wings against my windows. Thump. Thump. Thump. My friend down the street texted me a photo: What the hell? They are in my fireplace!
If you’re reading this, I actually may or may not still be alive. We will see what tonight brings.
May the ghost of Virginia Woolf forgive me.
Image: Adapted from Flickr user Louis – CC BY-SA 2.0
There are things I have not revisited since spring 2020 because they remind me too much of the darkest days of the pandemic. Puzzles, for instance. I have not done a puzzle in three years, nor have I eaten frozen Costco salmon (my parents panic-bought us roughly a million fillets in mid-March, and it took us months to get through them). There are pairs of pants I refuse to wear because they remind me of being extremely depressed. My one solace, in those days, was playing Animal Crossing on my Nintendo Switch. There, I “saw” friends by visiting their islands while chatting with them on Zoom, and I built a virtual house and a virtual garden and nobody there had COVID. I even wrote about its questionable ethics here in July 2020.
Recently, I logged back on after months away from my island. Weeds surrounded my virtual orchard; my villager friends said passive aggressive things like, “We were worried about you!” I had a few dozen messages in the mailbox outside my house: the local airlines sending me a note of thanks (spam); Fuscia, the pink deer who is my best friend in the game, inexplicably sent me a refrigerator (?); and there were multiple gifts and notes from “Mom.”
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Back in 2017, I wrote a post debating whether I should have a second child. I almost didn’t. We tried and tried. We even went to a fertility clinic. And then we decided it probably wasn’t meant to be. I was already 40. “Let’s give it two more months and then call it quits,” I told my husband.
And then there it was, the plus sign. I looked at it with mistrust. This had happened before. A plus and then, nothing. I went about my life. But the plus didn’t fade. The baby was real and (fuck!) a boy.
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Jennifer Lunden is the author of the astounding new book American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. She’s also a good friend. This is Part 1 of our conversation about work, exhaustion, and writing while ill.
Kate: I know American Breakdown has been a very long time in the making. When did you start writing this book?
Lunden: In some ways, it started when I found a biography of Alice James in a used bookstore in 1994. Alice was the sister of the writer Henry James and the psychologist William James, and she was, most of her life, bedridden with an illness that felt very similar to the one that I was dealing with. Hers was called neurasthenia; I had been diagnosed with what we now call myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Reading that book was the seed, because I felt like I’d found my soulmate or kindred spirit, this person who completely understood in an embodied way what it was like to be as sick as I was.
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Under a spring sky in the high desert of Western Colorado, we had a little gathering at our house. My wife’s childhood friend, awarded author and translator of Lithuanian poetry Laima Vince, stood on our wooden deck discussing a Jewish poet who was executed along with her family at the age of 19 in 1941 outside of the small Lithuanian town where they lived. Laima translated the young woman’s work into a beautiful book, including reproductions of journal pages revealing a swooning love life complete with teenage heartbreak, ink on two of the pages dotted with three drops of tears.
Matilda Olkinaitė’s journals and poems were hidden in a church and hardly seen by anyone until they were unpacked from a dresser and shown to Laima in 2017. Otherwise, they would have easily disappeared, and the young poet’s name would be lost. As war rose around her, the poems became dark with premonitions as, Laima wrote, “she wished she could bring the world back to its senses.” Less than a year before she was murdered and buried in an unmarked weedy peat bog, Matilda wrote:
It is so difficult for me. I wish I could utter that one word.
Just one word for the crowds and for the nations.
The processions would pause. Time would come to a halt.
All the generations would stop and listen.
Several months ago, my wife Daiva and I traveled to her family’s homeland in Lithuania, where she’s been returning since she was a teenager when the country was still under Soviet occupation. As we drove the countryside we came on sign after sign indicating a tragedy had happened in one place or another, mass graves where a village burned to the ground, murders unspeakable, concrete bunkers old enough to have become part of the landscape. The numbers of the dead at each site range far and wide; 105, 49, 50,000.
Daiva took me down a gravel road puddled with rain to a place she’d visited before, a haunting and beautiful scene for her. We parked and walked up a hill in birch trees and damp grass where 40-some residents of the massacred village of Ablinga are memorialized. They were killed by Nazis in World War II, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, sisters, brothers. What was left of them and their village was burned. Trees have been carved into remembrances, and walking through their renderings I felt crushed. In one wooden trunk, a father held his arms around a mother who held onto their two daughters, the youngest turned to face inward as if hiding from something. She had two braids tied with ribbons down her back, now cracked where the wood had split from age. The father’s hands, oversized, as if they could hold off anything, were placed so they made contact with everyone in the family. It was impossible not to cry.
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Freshly back from my annual pilgrimage to TED, I’m taking stock of the brain-fizzing input that came my way all week in Vancouver. Each year has its own balance of technology, entertainment and design, and this year all three had a distinctly artificial intelligence flavor. The conference is built on ‘ideas worth spreading’, but the one that seems to be sticking with me now is not one of the talks, per se, but an idea for a future TED talk: one delivered by an animal.
You see, TED used to have an annual prize of a million dollars given to one person – Bill Clinton, say, for his health infrastructure project in Rwanda. This year, they gave away one billion dollars to ten people, each a leader of what it dubs an Audacious Project. It’s money donated by the usual suspects, the Gates Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, and others. And one of those Audacious Projects is, I kid you not, honest-to-goodness translating whales.
I talked to the leader of Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), a marine biologist who described to me his sperm whale subjects. They spend a few minutes at the surface before they dive down to the depths of the ocean and break all of his listening equipment for hours. Through natural language processing (yes, more AI) his team has been able to decipher the phonetic alphabet of these whales’ combinatorial language – something only humans had been thought to possess. A few minutes into their time at the surface, he says, these whale pods start chatting amongst themselves about diving. That’s the first concept his analysis was able to identify in the language. And then, after a distinctive series of clicks, they all dive together.
It would be great to hear a whale’s ideas on the TED stage one day soon, even if there are ethical questions around whether we should be acting like Amy Adams in Arrival, communicating back to animals in their own languages and disrupting them in yet another way. But a TED friend pointed out that it would actually be a lot easier to train an AI model to converse with those animals directly, in the same way GPT-4 interacts with us. Except that we would then understand neither the AI nor the whales. And that, to me, would feel like a more fitting gift.