Sunday morning. Early for a Sunday morning, which is to say not that early. Maybe 8 a.m. A crowd of gulls and terns stood along this sandy Delaware beach. When my friend and I walked past they took off, as expected, and returned to what seemed to be the main activity of the morning: fishing. We watched them hover and splash.
A raptor that I think was a bald eagle flew off over the land, pursued by a smaller bird. An osprey crossed over. A tern careened in circles with a prize in its mouth as another chased after it, screeching.
On our return walk, we found the above picture: what they were fishing, I assume. A perfect silvery iridescent specimen, half-eaten, although I assume someone took care of the other half before long. Predation at work, the species living out their drama within sight of the crystal-palace vacation homes that line the Delaware shore, the birds continuing to make a living; the fish meeting their ends.
The round things in this picture of clear water aren’t rocks. They are little balls of algae tumbling around the bottom of the Adriatic sea off the Croatian coast. Occasionally they float to the surface of the water.
Looking at these little balls is likely having a very different effect on you than it had on me. When I saw them I ran around the beach barking for my camera, because I think they might be marimos, and marimos have no business being here. My problem is that I have the marimo brain virus. You may have it too by the end of this post, so if you don’t want to get obsessed with strange algal life forms and start embarrassing yourself at beaches, consider switching to a different tab.
My dad died last year at age 94, his death a blessing for him and, while immensely sad, a relief for me. My grief felt over too soon, but I realized it was because I’d been grieving him for years. I looked back thinking about those so-called stages of grief we learned about in Psych 101: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These five were originally proposed by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, and while they were derived unscientifically and are clearly massively oversimplified, I have found truth in them. As my father was declining, I’d first denied his trajectory by posing unrealistic plans that required him to have a future (e.g., turning my husband’s workshop into a little apartment for dad, never mind all the nursing care he required). I experienced deep anger at people who didn’t see worth in healing his various ailments, and I begged any higher power who was listening to keep him whole until I could find solutions to unsolvable problems. Eventually, I sat in darkness knowing there was nothing I could do to adjust his heading. I slid in and out of each of these feelings, in various orders, numerous times as he lay dying. By the end, acceptance was all that was left.
Last week, I crabbed over papers at a late-night kitchen table while my very pregnant step daughter stood near me with her hands clasped atop the globe of her belly. She’d been pacing for most of an hour, not wanting to sleep or sit down. She wanted her pelvis as open as she could make it.
Her body posture said, tell me something interesting.
“Have you heard of galactic archaeology?” I asked.
She pondered without moving her hands, as if leaning on the table of herself. “Galactic archaeology,” she repeated.
She had talked to everyone else in the house, teetering on her mother’s shoulder saying how afraid she was, this being her first time, and she’d chatted up her love on the couch about plans, schedules, go-bag ready by the door. I was working on cosmology, the logical next step for her evening.
I read to her the first line of the paper before me, entitled: “Chemical Inhomogeneities in the Pleiades: Signatures of Rocky-forming Material in Stellar Atmospheres” by Lorenzo et. al., 2018, in The Astrophysical Journal. The line was, “The aim of Galactic archaeology is to recover the history of our Galaxy through the information encoded in stars.”
This caused the mother-to-be to stand with greater stillness as she thought about what this meant. “This is an actual science?” she asked.
In
1925, teacher Wilfred Eitzman found a cobble—a rock slightly bigger than a
pebble, the weight of a small rat—in a cave in Northern Province, South Africa.
It was reddish brown with an unmistakable, prominent face etched into it.
Two
deep and perfectly round eyes, a shallow divet for a nose, and grimacing,
toothy mouth. An outline above the face turns the rounded stone into a head
with hair. It looks for all the world like a little carving, but it wasn’t made
by any human—it was found with the bones of an australopithecine who lived between
2.5 and 2.9 million years ago.
Last week I went sailing for the first time since I was a kid. It was a beautiful day, and I was out with my son and some friends, and they were learning to sail and I was watching them learn to sail and watching the harbor become a beautiful expanse of coastline as we moved away.
A few miles off shore, we turned east and the waves began to slap gently against the starboard side. We’d been talking with the captain about his adventures around the world, what it was like to live in the harbor, how he’d learned to sail with his dad along the south coast of England and suddenly I had to stop asking questions and think about my stomach.This time, my response wasn’t as dramatic as what happened in this post a few years ago. This time, I watched the horizon, I took deep breaths, and I told myself I was not going to get sick in front of my son. I didn’t! So things are looking up. And on the way back, we saw dolphins.
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It’s embarrassing enough that it took me 12 years to go to Channel Islands National Park, especially since I see the islands almost every day. Last month, I got on board the dive boat that would take us to the place they call the Galapagos of North America. At last! The captain said something about Dramamine, but I didn’t really pay attention.
The trip takes about two and a half hours. After the first 30 minutes, I stood white-knuckled at the railing until the islands appeared. There were dolphins. I love dolphins! I hardly looked at these ones, even though there might have been three dozen of them. Instead I stared at the horizon as if it was an oncoming lifeboat.
When we finally anchored in a cove. I went downstairs to change into a wetsuit. Another passenger asked how I was doing. “Fine,” I said. Then I started losing my breakfast, and possibly the previous dinner as well. Later, once it was funny, my husband told me he was impressed with the force and the volume that I managed to vomit. At the time, he kindly got me a trashcan and brushed my hair away from my mouth.
OMG this saw whet owl. But it belongs in the forest, so I will leave it there.
Years have passed since I collected these cuties. I still want all of them.
If you’ve trolled the Internet any time in the last decade, you know that animals and their silly antics are very happening. And no wonder. For the most part the creatures we interact with are adorable and waggish, even if they can be annoying, childish, and smelly. Hell, they sound like husbands. What’s not to love?
Those precious looks and that infantile behavior get to us for good reason: Our brains are programmed to respond to “cuteness”—traits including big eyes (especially when close together), clumsiness, softness and roundness, tinyness, general helplessness—so we’ll keep taking care of our own babies even when they’re screaming and pooping and projectile vomiting simultaneously.
Puzzlingly, studies show that sometimes our response to “cute” is almost violent. We can hardly stand how cute something is, we want to hug and squeeze it to death! It might make us cuddle a little harder, pinch a bit tighter, scratch bellies with extra verve. I’m not sure how that near-aggression is good for survival of a species, but it means newborn kittens should beware the pleasantly plump lady in the purple cat sweatshirt. She means well, but she’s stronger than she looks.
I continue to have nothing good to say about Baltimore in August. In fact, if anything it’s getting worse though it’s incrementally-worse from already-bad. Like, the recent run of feels-like temps from 105 to 110 and I don’t even look at the numbers after that. And then once the temps get that high, afternoon storms kick in along with high winds and blown fuses on transformers. I’m sorry to be so grumpy right when we probably all need cool rationality and calm. This first ran August 17, 2022.
I have nothing good to say about Baltimore in August. Ok, the farmers’ market is moving into high season, peaches & tomatoes, also okra — that’s good. Digression: I spent childhood on a small farm in the midwest making internal proclamations and declarations about freezing corn and canning applesauce in a hot kitchen, like, if I ever get outa here I’m never doing this again, not me. Until decades later, I ran into the irrevocable fact that peaches and tomatoes have a few-weeks’ season and the rest of the year aren’t worth eating, so now I’m freezing peach crisp and tomato sauce and apologizing to the sweaty irritated young Ann. Anyway, I think that’s it for anything good about Baltimore in August.
The sun is out, temperatures are in the 90s and dew points are in the 70s, dew points being the temperature at which water condenses out of the air so that was 20 degrees ago — meaning that gills would have been the better evolutionary option here because the air is 52.76% water. At these dew points, the air is holding all the water it can so you can’t cool by sweating; these dew points, says our beloved Capital Weather Gang, are not just oppressive but offensive and “very gross.” Digression: I asked a neighbor who was a public health scientist just back from equatorial Africa what it was like there and she said, “About like here.”
Nights might get down to the upper 70s, same dew points; another neighbor had a friend visiting from California ask when the evening would cool off, and the neighbor just snorted. Digression: once I asked my gyn when I was going to stop having hot flashes and she too just snorted. So anyhow, that’s the Baltimore days and nights.
The afternoons, however, are terrifying, due to a hair-raising alliance between physics and chemistry. More heat means more action in the air and less density, meaning as we all know, that hot air rises. More water — for chemistry reasons having to do with molecular weight that I don’t understand — also means less density, also rising.
So whooop, up she goes, wet hot air, rising rising, juicing up the atmosphere, and the more juice, the more convective instability — digression: I read that phrase first as “collective instability” which, yes, we are, aren’t we — which is measured as CAPE, Convective Available Potential Energy, the operative words being “potential energy.” Because that wet hot air rises up into the high atmosphere where it’s cooler, then condenses and carries all that juicy potential energy into thunderheads which grow crazy big, bigger every minute, blooming over the city like an alien invasion.
And inside those thunderheads, all the molecules and things get charged and the electric fields get more intense and the energy that’s been potential now just lets loose, the fields discharge and become lightning, also in a way I don’t understand but neither do scientists. Lightning heats the air to 55,000 degrees until the air explodes into thunder, and the closer in time the lightning is to the thunder, the more it seems personal. Digression: a neighbor and I were on his porch, the neighbor holding his cat, and a simultaneous lightning/thunder hit, CRACK BAM, and the cat exploded like thunder out of my neighbor’s hands, and the rest of my life I’ll remember that cat, feet outstretched, hanging like a bat in the air above us.
Anyway, afternoons in Baltimore: watchful anxiety, the thunderheads get bigger, the chances of storms go up and up until finally and with some probability all hell breaks loose, physics and chemistry unconstrained by human convenience.
Windows rattle, transformers blow up, trees crash down, the power goes out — recently for days — and so does the AC, and you sit there in the dark in a puddle of your own sweat if you can even sweat. Streets flood, and the Capital Weather Gang repeatedly tweets TURN AROUND DON’T DROWN; flights are delayed, then cancelled, then you can’t get home until the afternoon of next Thursday when thunderstorms will again be likely — these weather patterns are stable — and flights will be cancelled again.
The best you can say about Baltimore is that it’s not in the midwest where cells of convection become supercells and your house gets blown into the next county. So I guess that’s a second good thing about August in Baltimore — catastrophes here, as with so much else, are not sensational; here we have only unassuming Armageddons.
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Chuck Patch via Flickr Creative Commons: Baltimore’s Artscape, when it’s so routinely hot and/or rainy, it’s called Artscape weather. Yianni Mathioudakis, also Flickr Creative Commons: also Baltimore
