This post originally appeared in September of 2020.
Two weeks ago, wandering my central Colorado town, I stumbled upon a beaver dam. This was both typical — I’ve spent much of the last eight years finding and loitering near beaver ponds — and surprising, insofar as the dam was tucked into a little suburban stream in a little suburban neighborhood, one of those generic out-of-the-box developments that seem to be popping up all over the place here in the Arkansas Valley. It was a reminder that beavers will live just about anywhere that we let them live — that they’re as comfortable in, say, Seattle as in Yellowstone; that, given human tolerance, they can be as urban as squirrels or raccoons.
As I recently reported on LWON, I’ve become obsessed with my trail-cam. So, that evening, I pounded a metal post into the streambed, strapped my camera to it, and immediately recorded the following:
I was, of course, delighted. I’d been camera-trapping at beaver ponds for months, with little success — and now, all of a sudden, I’d found a dam with a very obliging construction worker. (The other beaver complexes had been so expansive that it was hard to know where the rodents were actively logging and building; they always seemed to work on whatever dam I wasn’t filming.) And, my own voyeuristic motives aside, it was thrilling to know that beavers were active in my neighborhood: creating wildlife habitat, filtering pollutants, storing water, sequestering carbon, and just being beavers, not ten minutes from my house.
That delight curdled to disappointment a few days later, when I returned to the dam to find it… gone. The stream now raced freely along its course, with only a few gnawed sticks still clinging to the banks to indicate that it had ever been dammed at all. What happened? We’d been getting monsoon rains for weeks, and the creek looked unusually stained and swollen; perhaps the dam had blown out. (The stream gauge on this creek doesn’t appear to be currently collecting data, so USGS is no help.) Or maybe the adjacent homeowners had felt threatened by the pond, even though it hadn’t yet risen anywhere near their property, and had torn the dam out. Given society’s aversion to these resourceful, meddlesome critters, I suspected the latter. Maybe I should distribute some pro-castor pamphlets.
I’ll continue monitoring the stream in the weeks to come, in hopes that the colony sticks around and attempts to #BuildBackBetter.
This post first appeared in 2012, when I was full of enthusiasm for seed catalogs and tomatoes. Now, my tomatoes are full of enthusiasm, too. A volunteer that sprung up in a planter with succulents in it has now been growing strong since last year, bursting with tomatoes even through the winter. What kind is it? No idea. Maybe I should call it “Happy.”
I can’t remember why the seed catalogs started showing up, but once they did, I was a goner. If you haven’t ever gotten one, imagine full color photo spreads of produce, like the striped Tigger Melon and and the orange-red lusciousness of the French pumpkin Rouge Vif d’Etampes. I suppose the names don’t have quite the ring of “Miss September,” but compared to some centerfold beauty, these fruits and vegetables are much more alluring — maybe because some September, a new variety might appear in my own garden, one that I could give any name I wanted.
This is how I ended up with at least six different varieties of tomato seeds last year. I’m not quite sure what it is about tomatoes. Even before I had a real garden, I’d buy the plants every year. They always seemed so hopeful, appearing in the nursery in winter, when you can’t even imagine that by fall you’ll be saying ridiculous things like, “Caprese salad, again? I don’t think I can do it.”
Somewhere along the lines, I realized there were more options out there then the plants we could find at our local nursery. I knew I had to grow from seed once I learned that there was a variety named after the writer Michael Pollan. I could even figure out how to crossbreed my own tomatoes (and wondered what I’d call a Black & Brown Boar crossed with a Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye–oh, the possibilities!).
So there I found myself, one morning last winter, in front of a tray of dirt with seeds and Sharpies and labels in hand.
As I planted, I got to thinking about Gregor Mendel and his pea experiments. I’d first learned about them in high school, when the charts showing tall and dwarf pea plants, yellow and green peas, made it all seem so easy. But with seeds in hand, I started to buckle under the logistics. To do anything, first these seeds would have to grow.
Even if they did, I’d then have to do some tricky tweezer work (I read a bit about crossing tomatoes here). Then the tomatoes would have to grow, produce seeds. I’d have to save the seeds, grow the first generation the next winter, and do it all over again. If I was lucky, I’d start seeing crazy new phenotypes two summers from now.
That’s what Brad Gates does. At Wild Boar Farms (the California farm where I bought many of my seeds), he grows and tends thousands of plants each year, always keeping an eye out for novel tomatoes. (Brad’s Black Heart was a result of a random mutation that he spotted).
Gates used to ship some of his seeds off to the Southern Hemisphere, so he could grow two generations of tomatoes and try to speed through the breeding process. But he was never sure what was happening with his tomatoes, if someone was choosing exactly what he would.
Even though I’ll never know exactly what Mendel was thinking every day, when he went out to tend his peas (although Robin Marantz Henig’s A Monk and Two Peas gave me a good idea), but I did ask Gates. When it comes to growing tomatoes, he said,“the fun part is all the Christmas presents I get to open every year,” he said, Whether it’s new flavors, textures, shapes, and sizes—“there are hundreds of surprises.”
And as my tomatoes began to grow, I started to get it. Every day, I watched my little plants unfold. Maybe it’s crazy that I had to set up hundreds of seeds to finally take the time to watch something grow. My curiosity about my future tomatoes grew each day—but at the same time, so did my patience.
What happened next shouldn’t really have surprised someone who once required a hazmat team to descend on her freshman chemistry lab (mercury spill from carelessly placed thermometer). When I set the starts out for hardening, a spring windstorm set all the labels flying. Then friends started to pick up some of my extra seedlings (I couldn’t fit all 144 in our raised beds). By the time I planted, I had a vague idea of which one was which, but then old tomatillos grew up among them and everything became a tangled mass of vine. Even the seeds I tried to save once the season was done got thrown out by accident.
Winter is here again, and so are my seed catalogs. I don’t think I will discover anything that hasn’t already been grown, and it’s unlikely that I will create a variety that will someday lure gardeners from between the pages of a seed catalog. But I do have a new respect for genetics, and for farmers. And I’ve certainly learned one thing already: Michael Pollan is delicious.
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Photo credits: Thamizhpparithi Maari, Goldlocki, Wikimedia Commons
These days I find it hard not to ponder the end of things…the pandemic (if ever!), menopause (I’ve heard 10 years of hot flashes?!), life. I wrote this about the third one a little ways back and I haven’t changed my mind.
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When I die, I want to be gently curled into the fetal position and put into one of those biodegradable pods from which a tree of my choice will grow. (I’m thinking weeping willow, for the drama of its wild hair, or maybe something ancient and delicious-smelling like a magnolia.)
Or dress me in a mushroom suit that feeds the soil and plant me in the woods. Really, this is a thing.
Don’t preserve me or put makeup on me or dye my skin to prompt people’s lies: They did such a nice job, she looks so natural; keep away with the creepy mouth formers and eye caps that prop up a sunken face. I don’t need a big polished coffin lined with silk, or a concrete urn to keep the worms out. I don’t need anything at all.
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The fog is thick and so you hope the auklets will come early. They do, a few minutes before sunset: ten, maybe twenty of them, although it is hard to tell since they are for the time being far enough away to be little more than dots. They circle over the waves in a tight group, not daring to stray too far from one another as they follow some vague clockwise circuit. Then they vanish back into the fog.
They reappear a few moments later, more of them now: thirty, forty, plus or minus. They swing closer to the land this time, being less leery of it, perhaps, and you can make out the details of their bodies, their heads, their feet splayed to steer, and of course their wings working madly. Then they twist away and become dots before again moving out of sight.
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My summer feet are hoping to be on vacation right now, but they’re worried about wildfires. This post first ran in August 2019.
At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There is a particular stretch of asphalt between the university parking lot and the beach that is especially pitted, and the sharp dark bits of broken ground make me cringe even before I step onto the road.
I often choose a different route to the beach, down the steep steps that are soft wood, worn by salt air and waves. But one of my friends likes to walk the bumpy path. While I dodge back and forth, taking a few steps on a curb, another on a small island of sidewalk, she charges straight down the bumpy asphalt. “I’m working on my summer feet,” she told me once. How good would that be, I thought, to have soles so thick that I didn’t feel anything?
But so far, I don’t have them. Even though the climate is mild here, I often wear shoes, even boots, in the winter. Even right now, in the dog days of summer, I’m typing this and I still have on the running shoes that I’ve been wearing since biking to school this morning. Hang on—okay, now they’re off. Socks, too. There’s the parquet floor now, smooth and just slightly cool, under my soles.
When I remember, I do try to go barefoot. It does feel relaxing. I do like feeling things like this, the texture of the ground, its temperature. There’s a sidewalk parking strip down the street with smooth, round stones that feels like a free acupressure session. And there’s such relief, on that pathway down to the beach, once my feet finally reach the sand.
But my feet never seem to get tougher. The gravel that runs along the side of the house always presses into my skin like tiny tacks, and I hop and skitter and hiss nasty things at it when I go to put the bikes away. And my feet accumulate all sorts of ugly things—black spots of tar, bee stings, moon-like calluses on the balls and heels.
Once school started, I found my shoes again. It’s too far to walk barefoot to school, and while I love seeing barefoot people riding beach cruisers, the idea of putting skin on metal pedals seems sketchy and uncomfortable. I have to bring out other protective layers, too–sunscreen and full lunchboxes, fresh school supplies and new socks. An encouraging yet increasingly insistent voice that gets homework in backpacks and bodies out the door. The promises that it will really be more fun at school than at home, where I’ll just be boringly typing things on the computer.
Humans have spent most of their existence without shoes. Now a lot of people wear them most of the time. But this means most people don’t have a chance to develop thickened soles; their feet are already cushioned from the earth’s rougher spots. So a group of researchers on several continents decided to look at whether calluses act differently than shoes when it comes to how well feet can sense the ground while walking.
The researchers compared shod participants to those who spend most of their time barefoot. They thought the calluses might reduce how well a foot could sense the ground beneath it, but it turned out that although calluses can provide a layer of protection against thorny patches, calloused feet were just as sensitive as those that spent most of their time in shoes.
I thought it was just more barefoot time that would help me get my summer feet, to feel nothing as I charged across the parking lot to the beach, to whistle as I walked on the gravel. I thought after six years of back-to-school picnics and pencils and pictures that this would feel like more of the same, that they would all run toward the classrooms at the sound of the bell, that I would run away. There would be nothing sharp that could penetrate us, that would make us stop and curl up and cry.
The calluses are there, trying to do their job of protecting me. Still, I’m tender about the end of summer, even with my thicker soles. Maybe they were never meant to stop me from feeling, but instead are making sure that I keep walking, feeling it all.
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Image by Flicker user ɘsinɘd under Creative Commons license
This first ran June 25, 2010. It’s from our beloved founder, Heather Pringle. She’s an archeology writer, meaning she has to follow archeologists wherever they go. This time, they went to the Arizona desert. I can picture them asking, “where’s the writer? did she faint again?”
Sit in air-conditioning and comfort yourself in not being Heather in 2010. She did survive.
June’s solstice has just passed and I find myself where I usually am each year at this time—37,000 feet in the air and winging off to the field. One of the great joys of my job is to set out armed to the teeth with notebooks, cameras and voice recorder, and join an archaeological crew in some remote part of the world. Over the years, I’ve winced at mummy autopsies in Egypt, wandered ankle deep in mummified rats in a greathouse in New Mexico and wormed through caves in the northern Yukon, scouting for traces of the earliest migrants to the New World.
This morning, my destination is southern Arizona, where I’ll be joining Jason De Leon, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his students on a field survey in the hilly backcountry of the Sonoran Desert. I can’t divulge any details about the story, but I will say that it has little to do with archaeology as it is usually practiced.
The weatherman predicts a scorching week, with temperatures soaring as high as 108 degrees Fahrenheit. De Leon tells me that the team heads out at 5 am each morning to take advantage of what little coolness there is and generally wraps up its field work at 1 pm. Team members fill their array of water bottles with ice each morning before setting out, but within a few hours, they are glugging down water hot enough to steep tea. And De Leon’s recommended gear includes a few things I’ve never seen before on an equipment list: a pocketknife with pliers for extricating cactus spines, instant icepacks, and something called hand coolers.
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If you grew up in the U.S. South or Midwest, there’s a good chance you are familiar with the “live laugh love” home decor aesthetic. For the uninitiated, it’s hard to describe, as it takes many forms, but, like US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once defined obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s farmhouse-chic, all reclaimed wood and burlap, with positive messages written in swirly calligraphy or what looks like someone’s down-to-earth handwriting. It’s the wall art in the type of suburban home that has no fewer than five throw pillows on the couch and monogrammed towels in the bathroom (the confusing type, where the last initial is the biggest letter in the middle, so a towel for the initials JCH would read j H c).
The words live, laugh, and love need not be present, but the essence of the aesthetic can be taken in many directions. They’re popular decor at weddings of hetero couples, or as commemoration of their love. They often display Bible verses or one’s Christian bonafides (“raised on sweet tea & Jesus“). Its “zaniest” form is the wine lady, who’s all about “wine o’clock” or, simply, just living, laughing, loving, and drinking wine. And its liberal version is the “in this house, we believe” sign, which includes phrases like “love is love,” “Black lives matter,” “feminism is for everyone,” and “kindness is everything.”
No disrespect to anyone who’s partial to that style of decor — it’s just not my cup of tea. But earlier this year, I came across a live laugh love-style sign that I’ve been obsessed with for months. It appears to have originated on Tumblr, and says:
In this house we ♥ believe this is not a place of honor no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here nothing is valued here what is here is DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE the danger is in a particular location the danger is still present in your time this place is best left Shunned & UninhabitedContinue reading