Fatherhood: The men, the mountains, and the lessons of life

By: | June 12, 2012

A picture: I’m just a little guy. Can’t be more than 4 years old. I’m sitting in a bathtub full of water the color of gas station coffee. With me in the tub (and the source of the grime) is a friend of my dad’s, a grad school buddy who had just abandoned a career as a experimental physicist and set off into the desert in search of something — god knows, whatever it is that we go looking for out there. He’d dropped by our house in the foothills above Salt Lake City for a bath and a home-cooked meal. I, apparently, thought he was a barrel of fun.

Such were the characters in my father’s circle of friends. They were academics, computer programmers, and electrical engineers. They were organic farmers, photographers, and avalanche forecasters. And almost without exception, they spent a good deal of time out in the Western wilds, mountaineering, cross-country and back-country skiing, running obscene distances on rock-strewn trails. Continue reading →

Fatherhood: The Outline of a Man

By: | June 11, 2012

A framed photo of a man hung in my grandmother’s bedroom until the day she died. He had a receding hairline over a long forehead over a strong, sweet face. His name was Hans Rudolf Weiss and he was Charlotte’s husband and the father of her three children. His picture went with her through six moves, two countries and three zip codes–and that was only while I was alive, a small sliver of her 93 years. During the last 10 years its location was purely symbolic because she could no longer actually see it, owing to the macular degeneration that had taken her vision.

We don’t know when he died, but we’re pretty sure we know where: Lubyanka prison in Moscow. It may have been sometime in the 1950s or 60s. The last person to see him alive contacted Charlotte when she finally had him declared legally dead; he was a member of an association for victims of the Stalin regime. He told her he had seen Hans there, weak and sick, just before he was supposed to be sent to Siberia. Continue reading →

Fatherhood: Father’s Day Week

By: | June 10, 2012

This coming June 17 marks the 103rd arrival of Father’s Day. I suppose I’ve celebrated it in some form every year of my life, but I still had to look up the date to figure out when it is.

Father’s day isn’t really a thing. Not the way Mother’s Day is a thing; not even the way Valentine’s Day is a thing. It’s barely even a gift day anymore, now that pipes are over with and ties have largely dwindled into obsolescence outside of a few enclaves in the east.

But fathers? Well, that’s a different story. Fathers are certainly a thing — you can tell that from the indelible impressions they make on their children, sometimes by their presence and often enough, by their absence.

Just what sort of thing a father is though, that’s not so easy to say. This week, the men of LWON take a stab at saying — and since there are just two of them, busy fathers both, they’ve called in reinforcements. Sally launches LWON’s Fathers’ Week today, and we’ll be joined by guest posters tomorrow and Thursday.

Fatherhood is no walk in the park, I don’t mind telling you. But neither is it fraught the way motherhood can be. I suppose there are Tiger Fathers, but they seem not to make people flinch. And if there are daddy wars, no one has bothered to tell me. At least, not yet — we’ll see how things look by the end of the week.

The Last Word

By: | June 9, 2012

June 4- June 8

This week, Cameron explains about the long history of complaining about the gloomy weather in Southern California.

Guest poster and Cassie’s man Soren Wheeler took on the phrase “dumbing down” as it is routinely dispensed by scientists tired of science journalism: “The implication is that if you need those things to get it, you don’t really deserve to get it. And it’s a few short steps from there to a very dangerous thought: Some people can understand science and others simply can’t.”

Having seen how our ravenous appetite has driven entire species to extinction, Michelle showed how some people are now trying to use that force for good, to wipe out invasive species.

Jessa told us about the anthropological history of sh*t-talking.

And Heather explained how field notes can save even an otherwise unmitigated archaeological disaster.

June Gloom

By: | June 8, 2012

I used to think the weather was something adults talked about because they were boring. And now that’s me, commiserating with neighbors about the state of our sky, which gave us a glorious, bluebird May and then rolled out a thick cloud carpet on the first day of June.

June Gloom isn’t just a Southern California phenomenon, and it doesn’t only happen in June. But perhaps we give it a name (and May Gray, and, in dire situations, No-sky July and Fogust) because we complain about it the most. The response from an Oregonian friend who visited this week: “Talk to the hand.”

Continue reading →

Portrait of the Archaeologist as Young Artist

By: | June 7, 2012

On the taxi ride there, I felt a little ill. The long, sleepless flight to Lima, a dodgy lunch that was coming back to haunt me, and the abrupt swerving and lurching of the taxi through the congested streets of the Peruvian capital—all seemed to be taking their toll.  By the time I and my companions clambered out at the Puruchuco Museum and filed into a small backroom to meet the director, I was certain I was in for a long, queasy afternoon. Then I spotted two old notebooks lying on the table.

Pulled from storage for our visit, the notebooks contained handwritten field notes that a young Peruvian archaeologist and artist, Jorge Zegarra Galdos, had written nearly 60 years ago during the excavation and reconstruction of Huallamarca, an ancient pyramid and ceremonial site in one of Lima’s toniest neighborhoods, San Isidro. But it wasn’t the notes themselves that caught my attention. It was Zegarra’s pen-and-ink drawings of dozens of tombs that he and his colleagues discovered along the top of the pyramid—tombs that encased fragile fardos, human mummies wrapped in a thick cocoons of textiles. Continue reading →

Stare Down

By: | June 6, 2012

In all my obsessive reading about combat sport – the ghost-written memoirs and swaggering comment threads – one concept has always stumped me. Time and again a story of a fight takes as its pivotal moment the breaking of a fighter’s will. Or take this account: “I was beating him up, but I don’t think his will broke too much at all”. As a person of reason, this smacked of soul-leaving-the-body talk. Break a fighter’s arm and I can accept you may have won. His will? What is that.

I have to accept, though, after hundreds of these narratives, that this is indeed their experience, and that the victor, in particular, can see a clear change, if only for a moment, that tips him off to his advantage.

I started looking into the non-contact elements of combat sport and the dominance communication in other forms of sport. The notion of intimidation displays immediately evokes talk of Alpha males and pecking orders, so I went into the primate anthropology literature too, just for a look-see. I’ve also been brushing up on linguistics, which has boiled power struggles down to a formula, a struggle to hold and keep the floor or determine the topics discussed.

It’s an ongoing project that I hope to share in a longer form at a later date, but since I’m so immersed in the thing, I wanted to give the LWONians a preview. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Make Me Feel Something, Please

By: | June 5, 2012

A couple of days ago I was sitting at work when my wife emailed me an article by Adam Ruben. He’s a scientist who writes a humor column for Science. This one was about science journalism. I thought: Hey, I’m a science journalist, I like funny things, should be good. But a few paragraphs in, after a snicker or two, something odd happened: a slow creeping bile of righteous indignation worked its way out of my stomach and into my chest. By the end of the piece, I was in a huff. I was still fuming four hours later on the train ride home, I ranted about it over dinner, over dishes, and that night I fell asleep imagining myself delivering scathing, witty, and well-worded responses to Adam (whom I’ve never met) in a crowded room of his scientist friends.

I’m prone to the occasional self-aggrandizing fantasy, but not usually to anger. So maybe I should back up and try to explain. Continue reading →