Guest Post: Don’t kill the miller moths

By: | October 10, 2022

The moths arrived without warning. Thousands covered the walls and ceilings of the farmhouse where we lived one pandemic summer in northeastern Colorado. So many moths blanketed the spindly elm trees that they were indistinguishable from leaves until wind rattled them into flight. The trees appeared to slightly explode.

They were harmless miller moths, metamorphosed adults of the army cutworm, and native to the place. They were just passing through, really. After hatching underground on the high plains, the moths emerge and fly west each spring to drink the nectar of wildflowers in alpine meadows across the Rockies. Those that evade grizzly bears, which can eat tens of thousands of moths in a day, return to lay eggs on the plains in the fall. If only we’d been patient, the moths would have moved on of their own accord. We were impatient.

Hundreds of moths met the roaring maw of our vacuum. They came off the ceilings and the cabinets and the tables with satisfying little zips. Others we blasted with an air gun that shoots puffs of salt, which my girlfriend’s mom kept around for horseflies. Their soft brown bodies left oozing streaks on the walls. We placed pans of water and dish soap beneath reading lamps. The pans were filled with drowned moths by morning.

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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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