In Praise of the Bean Man

By: | October 7, 2022

One Saturday the bean man wasn’t at the farmers’ market, he was always there every week, and I asked the woman who works with him, “Where is he?”

“He just died,” she said. “This morning early. We were getting ready to come to the market and we found him. We called the ambulance. But the truck was already loaded so we just came here.” Other customers came up and said, “where is he?” and she had to tell the story again, over and over. “I’m so sorry, hon,” the customers said. They cried, she cried. The bean man had been there for such a long time, maybe 30 years, always there, every week.

Two things strike me — aside from sadness over that grumpy old bean man who was somehow both private and personal — about that Saturday. One was that the bean man’s co-workers found their old friend dead, did what was necessary for him, then considered the truck loaded with perishable vegetables that had to be sold fast, and did what had to be done and drove to the city from the other side of the Bay, between 2 and 3 hours, I think, in the early morning dark to sell beans, five hours on their feet and grieving, then drove back home. The bean man would have absolutely done the same.

The other thing that struck me was that the bean man had been making this Saturday crack-of-dawn drive, and usually another Sunday drive to another city market, for decades. He was one of the originals still at the market. He was an Eastern Shore truck farmer, he sold the only fresh beans around — cannellini, Navy beans, red beans, black beans, October beans, lima beans, Dixie butter beans, speckled beans, black-eyed peas — and in the spring, oh my goodness, he sold fresh peas. That is, he had something that the Baltimore of all colors and incomes loved, he could make a living at it, it was good to do, he did it, he never stopped.

And what struck me about both these things — these farmers and their hard repetitive lives and their faithfulness — was how they were in it for the long haul, they could be counted on. The bean man was 86 when he died, just beginning to talk retirement. And he wasn’t the only person like this that I know.

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The many languages of dog

By: | October 5, 2022

This post originally appeared in February, 2020

When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine equivalent of pyrotechnics: Leaping, writhing, twirling, lip curling, a quiver full of hyena sounds. Once, after a 13-day visit to Alaska, she reached my face in a single bound from the floor, her nose making high-speed contact with my mouth. Proof once again that love can draw blood—mostly metaphorical, sometimes literal.

Each time her affections explode into uncontrolled demonstration, I imagine what it would be like if humans greeted each other this way. The teenager who bags groceries jumping and singing at the sight of a familiar customer. The host of a dinner party flinging a saucy spoon into the air at the arrival of his guests, spattering the ceiling with a Jackson Pollack arc of pureed tomatoes and olive oil. Friends, upon unexpected sight of each other from opposite sides of the street, sprinting into an intersection to embrace.

Taiga is small and point-eared, with a full lexicon not of words, but of gestures that may as well be words. When she loves, she hugs with her face. When she knows you in that deep way that dogs do, once they’ve spent even a few days with someone, she may lean, with all of her weight, her forehead into your forehead, her thin forearms flung about your neck, her paws hooked over your shoulders. If you are new, and she is tentative, but approves, and you know the right places to scratch her under her collar or just beneath her ears, it may be her forehead into your knee. If you are chummy and the moment is light, and you are sitting beside each other on a couch, it will be her forehead into your shoulder.

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Look, It’s A Bear! Again!

By: | October 3, 2022

Last week, I was wiping up crumbs when brown motion out the window caught my peripheral vision. It was not random. It was deliberate, but quick, and it was dark. It was not my dog, because she was under the high chair seeking the crumbs I was wiping. It was not my neighbor’s dog, who always gets out, because it was way too big. It was not Deuce, the double-tagged black bear we see often. It was the Big One, a bear we somehow haven’t yet named—a huge, rotund specimen with a single ear tag and a surprisingly spry gait for its size.

It was gone through the trees before I had a chance to grab my phone and snap a photo, but the security camera caught it. It was going fast enough to have been spooked by something, probably a car. It passed my kitchen window at 8:33 a.m., which I deem far too late for a gigantic bear to be sauntering across the same strip of grass where my toddler likes to pretend to hike. (The above photo, from June, was taken around 9 a.m.)

I have lived among the bears for nearly three years now, and they still blow me away. I will never get used to their presence, which is nearly constant, according to the Ring cameras we installed and according to my own eyes, which catch them practically any time of day, during any mundane task. Sometimes I see a forepaw moving behind the pines; sometimes it’s a rump and a nubby tail, gone before I have truly registered what I’m seeing.

I live in a healthy forest, or more accurately a healthy wildland-urban interface. We have bobcats, at least two, which have been caught on camera in the act of killing a rabbit and using my coconut coir doormat as a scratch pad. We have skunks, rabbits, raccoons, Norway rats, shrews, eastern fence lizards, magpies, Steller’s jays, red-tailed hawks, broad-tailed hummingbirds, ravens, peregrine falcons, kestrels, great horned owls, Western tanagers, and at least one mountain lion. I try to notice them all and to know their names, but I admit many of these creatures have become part of the background noise of my daily life. (I know this is absurd and I am spoiled.) The resident mule deer snap me to attention, too, and sometimes (rarely) I’m distracted by the large rafter of turkeys that lives beside me. But the bears get me every time. They are still so incongruent, despite my having moved into their habitat. Their presence mere feet from my door is still so abnormal that it takes very little for me to notice them, and for my limbic system to raise the alarm.

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The future is a myth that is true and false

By: | September 30, 2022

Yesterday I was at a science fiction symposium on London City Island, a strange, clean little post-industrial peninsula in the Docklands. A small group of academics had gathered – the sorts of people who get PhDs in science fiction studies – to consider the question: If science fiction is about the future, what is the future of science fiction itself?

This is not just a professional development concern for a niche group of fiction writers. It’s pretty well understood that science fiction shapes society’s ideas of what’s possible. This has been true since before the space age, but the relationship between science fiction and reality has only gotten more circular as technology increasingly saturates our lives (see Elon Musk and “neural lace” for just one example among scores). And as a consequence, the science fiction genre has increasingly inflected every corner of media.

The British science fiction writer Adam Roberts (whose book The This has my most slavering recommendation) recalled that when he was growing up, sci fi was for niche nerds – until, that is, Star Wars blew the doors off pop culture. Star Wars‘ galactic success ushered in the increasing market share of sci fi narratives that seem to dominate the world around us today, from the full blanket Star Wars Cinematic Universe expansion to the Marvel universe to The Hunger Games.

Why is there suddenly so much of it? Roberts and his co-panelist, the philosopher Beth Singler, pointed out that these stories may be serving the same purpose as the Greek or Norse myths served people who lived long before us. They are reifying the stories that we are telling ourselves about the deepest realities of how the world is, and what we can expect from the future.

The word “myth” is an example of a “contronym“: it means two opposite things at the same time. These delightful creatures are everywhere: custom means common practice and also tailored or bespoke; to clip something means to fasten it and also to cut it off; to bolt means to secure and to GTFO; screen is a name for a way to keep something from view, and a way to inspect it closely. (And of course there’s my perennial British favourite, “quite”, which means both “yeah not so much” and “very much!”)

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mid

By: | September 28, 2022
At least the stereotype of a mid-life crisis is sexier than a mid-career crisis, which sounds very boring. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

The other day, a fellow writer shared a link to a residency opportunity in a science writing group. Like most residencies, the situation sounded ideal — a few weeks in an idyllic place where you’d have peace and quiet to delve into a big project and meet other writers. I looked at the logistics: the application required a letter of recommendation with a deadline a month from now. Oh, and you must be an early career writer to qualify.

Am I still in my early career? With each passing year, I am less sure, which probably means I am creeping further away from “early career” and more into “mid-career.”

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The Once Soft World

By: | September 26, 2022

I took this picture the other day, and I have to admit, it’s a trick. For half a second, I thought I’d made some impossible discovery, the track of what looks to be a giant cat in ancient sandstone.

With all the prehistoric tracks appearing lately — Ice Age humans in Utah, sloths in New Mexico, dinosaurs in Texas — I’ve had my eye to the ground. The picture I took is of Jurassic sandstone. It resembles a cat track, the size of a Pleistocene species, a 500-700 pound feline. Rounded pads, no claw marks, that’s what I’d call it. But felines are Oligocene in origin, 25 million years ago, certainly not Jurassic, which would have been of dinosaur age. So, what is it?

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Les ruines Thomas “Carbide” Willson – Chelsea, QC

By: | September 23, 2022
View from a trip with friends to the Carbide ruins.

I’m late to the party when it comes to S-Town, the hit Serial Productions podcast about Alabama polymath John McLemore, who dies half way through the series having suffered mercury poisoning from years of back-woods chemical artisanship. It made me think about all of those passionate, brilliant people society never quite manages to harness, who quietly amass virtuosic levels of scholarship and embodied knowledge that dies with them.

It also brings to mind Stephen Jay Gould’s comment that “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” But it doesn’t take grinding poverty or intense persecution to prevent potential from transforming into contribution. For some the fates just don’t align, and for others we don’t have the mechanisms to hook them into the mainframe of society. Maybe that’s okay.

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Ballooning Spiders

By: | September 21, 2022

It’s the spider time of year, the webs are everywhere and the little spiders are sneaking into the house. Sneaking is bad enough but then you learn that some spiders fly — paraglide, actually, crossed with hot-air ballooning. Just no. This post first ran on April 19, 2018.

My favorite walk. Of course the paragliders hid today.

Most spring days on my favorite walk, I watch a small group of people wearing packs trudge up a grassy hill. Once they reach the top they spread out colorful sails, put on harnesses and jog forward. The wing behind them fills with air and lifts them up, and they glide like birds above the California foothills.

Last week I saw a paraglider climb into the sky until his sail was a black dot wavering against bright-white cirrus clouds. Was he ok? Could he land safely?  I never found out. But watching him disappear reminded me of a story I recently wrote about flying spiders.

The first person to describe flying spiders was a bewigged 17th century English naturalist named Martin Lister. A bit of a curiosity himself, Lister described how more than 30 different species of spiders molt and court. He counted their eyes. To give you a taste of the level of detail he captured over years of observation, here are a few chapter titles from his 1638 book The English Spiders:

Of the two-eyed spiders

Of the eight-eyed spiders

Of the diet of spiders, and their means of hunting; and also of wasps, the spiders’ enemies

Of sheet-web spiders that are satisfied with a very small web for catching prey within which they also build their nests

Of medicaments from spiders: For earache Lister recommended spiders steeped in olive oil or rosewater; for hysteria, wax salve of spiders applied to the navel. He also believed you could catch syphillis by eating venomous iguanas. You would not have wanted Lister to be your doctor.

People made fun of Lister. His fondness for arachnids “made him a favored target for satirists of virtuosi,” writes Palmira Fontes da Costa, an historian of medicine and natural history at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal. Virtuosi was a common term for English scientists of the period, and wealthy gentlemen with too much time on their hands. One satirist even wrote a play about Lister, describing “a sot that has spent two thousand pounds in microscopes to find out the nature of eels in vinegar… who has studied these twenty years to find out the several sorts of spiders, and never cares for understanding mankind.”

Lister wasn’t discouraged by these 17th-century trolls. He urged his fellow naturalists to continue their work despite the fact that some “bespatted this kind of studie.” One fine day, he noted that some spiders will climb up to a high point on a tree branch or grass stem, and shoot out silk threads to catch the breeze.

This behavior, called ballooning, is now recognized as an important mechanism of spider dispersal.  Spiders can balloon for hundreds of miles at high altitudes. This is probably how ghost spiders colonized the remote Robinson Crusoe Island 400 miles off the coast of Chile. In The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin described a spider that, “while standing on the summit of a post, darted forth four or five threads from its spinners… then suddenly let go of its hold on the post, and was quickly borne out of sight.”

Newly hatched spiderlings balloon to escape being cannibalized by their siblings. Adult spiders seem to do it when resources are scarce, or to escape hazards. In the Rio de la Plata river basin in Argentina, for example, spiders often balloon en-masse to avoid rising floodwaters, enshrouding the trees and buildings where they land in silk.

Mysteries about ballooning still abound. It’s not clear, for example, how spiders decide when to fly and when to stay put. To find out, Moonsung Cho and colleagues from the Technical University of Berlin recently conducted an experiment with 14 large (Xysticus) crab spiders.

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