The worms under the English Riviera might save your life

By: | September 5, 2022

“The English Riviera”. A phrase that sounds like a classic example of British acerbic humour, and I had already emotionally prepared myself to laugh despondently at the sight of some especially bleak industrial waterfront. But when I drove down to the South Coast of England, through hours of the most glorious “sunlit uplands” countryside you ever saw, and the low hills parted to reveal a glimpse of the jewel tone shoreline and palm trees? (Palm trees! in England!) The whole scene has been surprising and delighting Americans since at least 1986 if you go by this article in the Los Angeles Times:

“Exotic plants and palms unexpectedly thrive in this mild southwesterly climate. The palm-lined waterfront walk leads along a green park with fountains, flowers and a pavilion built in the wonderful British Raj architecture of Queen Victoria’s time.”

A closer inspection of the beach, however, revealed some blemishes on this ritzy scene. As we made our way across the wet sand toward the water at low tide, we found the whole expanse pocked with a regular pattern of little wet gasping holes. Each hole was accompanied by a small pyramid of what looked like thin, brown, squiggly sausage. You cannot look at this and think anything but ‘poop’. 

Gingerly and with great distaste, I picked my way through this minefield, taking great care to miss them and wincing elaborately when my children exhibited no such self-preserving instincts. Splat splat splat went their little bare feet smashing through the poop pyramids.

Despite the ick factor, however, I had to grudgingly admit that the regular spacing did look cool so I took a picture. Then the friend I was visiting there explained that the little piles were not poops at all but sand sculptures; the stuff that had been displaced to excavate the little holes. Construction rubble, basically.

New question. What was responsible for all this excavation? 

I lay down in the sand and peered down into one of the holes, getting my eyeball as close to the edge as I could. 

Had I remembered my LWON colleague Jennifer Holland’s 2018 post about the animals that live in those holes, I’m not sure I would have assumed this position.

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wikipedia wormhole: the donner party

By: | September 2, 2022
A placard along the Hastings Cutoff in Nevada (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A couple weeks ago, we were driving through Wyoming when I saw a sign for the Oregon Trail Cutoff. At this point we’d been in the car for something like four hours, and blessedly we were on some stretch of highway with reception, so I googled it. The cutoff, I learned, was the Lander Trail, a wagon road built with funds from the U.S. government in the late 1850s. My search brought up other deviations from the Oregon Trail: the Mormon Trail, the Bozeman Trail, the Sublette-Greenwood Cutoff, Hudspeth’s Cutoff. The one that caught my eye was called the Hastings Cutoff, “used by the ill-fated Donner Party,” according to Wikipedia.

If you already happen to know anything beyond the basics of either historical topic, you might skip this post. But as someone woefully ignorant about both — my knowledge of the Oregon Trail is limited to the landmarks and demands of the computer game, and I knew only that the Donner Party became cannibals — I was surprised about how much of the story I’d never heard before.

You can, of course, read the wikipedia entries yourselves, but here’s a cliff’s notes from memory: the Donner Party was made up of several families traveling to California. The two major families traveling were the the Reeds and the Donners; James Reed, the patriarch of the Reed family, was an Irish immigrant, and he was not popular with the group. George Donner, on the other hand, was “American-born,” and generally liked. (Wikipedia says nothing about the political context here, but one can’t help but wonder whether these men’s backgrounds might have played a role in shaping what others thought of them.)

The path to California began on the Oregon Trail; in Idaho, the California Trail veered south while the Oregon Trail continued north. The Donner Party began their journey west from Independence, Kansas on May 12. Exactly two months later, they received a letter from a man named Lansford Hastings. He claimed he’d found a more direct path to California; whereas the Oregon trail doglegged between what’s now Wyoming and Idaho, Hastings’ Cutoff (which he of course named after himself) cut through the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake. The letter was one of many Hastings had sent to travelers along the Oregon trail; he’d hired riders to travel on horseback to intercept emigrants and encourage them to take the Hastings route. The letter Reed and Donner received said that Hastings would be waiting for them at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, where he’d lead them along his great new trail.

But when they arrived at Fort Bridger, Hastings had already left. A man named Jim Bridger encouraged them to take the cutoff anyway, saying it’d be a “smooth trip” with plenty of water. At least two other people tried to warn the group NOT to take the shortcut: Reed ran into a friend who told him not to take the cutoff, and a journalist, who was a few weeks ahead of the Donner party on cutoff, sent a letter to them telling them to avoid the path, but the group never received his warning.

Reed was all for taking the “shortcut,” so the group went. It turned out to be a longcut, miles longer than the more established trail to California, and required traveling through the steep eastern edge of the Wasatch range as well as a long slog through the Great Salt Lake. The group moved extremely slowly through the punishing terrain, some of their cattle and oxen escaped or died, and James Reed even killed a guy and was banished from the group. Eventually, the group got stranded at Donner Pass over the winter. You’ve probably know the basic outline of the result: as their food stores dwindled and people died, some of the survivors began to eat the corpses. What I didn’t know was that there were multiple rescue missions, and one survivor, after returning to civilization, died by breaking into food stores and eating himself to death. Absolutely brutal.

I’ve always known their story was tragic, but what I didn’t realize was how much of their plight was the result of being swindled by self-interested con-men. Hastings hadn’t actually traveled his own cutoff before he started hyping it up; he was just eager to make a name for himself. Bridgers, the guy who encouraged the group to take the Hastings cutoff, had a trading post along that route and wanted more people to take the cutoff so he could get more business. Dozens of people died in large part because of the cutoff, and yet this part of the story is rarely talked about! While I’ve heard plenty of Donner party-related cannibalism quips, never once had I learned about the greed for money and fame underlying their fate.

I’ll leave you with another wormhole to fall into: Lansford Hastings went on to join the Confederate Army, and he was promoted to Major when he pitched Jefferson Davis a half-baked plan to make California leave the union and join the confederacy. Obviously, that didn’t happen, so Hastings moved to Brazil; he and fellow confederate expats, now known as the Confederados, moved there to colonize Brazil and set up a cotton industry to rival the U.S.’s.

Here I Am

By: | August 31, 2022

This piece is from a few years ago, and I’ll have you know I’m working steadily on a new book and continuing to shape my identity and dreaming of bottle-feeding goats in my next life. I continue to fret over the tribalism and the flies. I’m not sure what any of it means, but it’s true.

I’m standing in my underwear and socks, gripping a rolled-up magazine that is shredded at the end from my violent battle with the flies. I’ve killed a dozen or more of them this Wednesday morning, but they just keep alighting as if there is some source—a pile of dog shit, a rotting corpse—hidden just there, under the newspaper stack slouched in the corner, or here, behind the overstuffed laundry basket on the sofa. It occurs to me in passing that if such a source is that close by, I have a bigger problem than flies. Still, I continue wielding the torn New Yorker—three weeks old, 1/3 read (mostly the cartoons)—beating it, mostly fruitlessly, against the sunny countertops as the flies lift off with an irritating buzz. (Fuck you, too, flies.)

I’m in my underwear because of the hot flashes. There are certain ramifications to reaching the middle ages, one of them being the handing off of one’s hormones to a cruel sorcerer who gleefully pinches off the estrogen drip at his whim.

I’m in my socks because hot flashes are usually quick things, and after one ends I’m suddenly freezing. Whatever was sweating will be, next, chilled. I have little control over the internal thermostat, but keeping the feet wrapped gives me an ounce of control over this phase of misery. Small victories.

Yes, this is who I am right now.

Ping! An email has arrived. I abandon my murderous work and click. The note is from a high school student out West somewhere. She informs me that over the last few weeks she’s been reading all my pieces—part of an assignment to follow a favorite journalist. To her I am a hero, a skilled woman writer tapping into adventure and living her passion, a shiny thing in darkness. She wants to know more about me, how I got to do what I do, how I’ve managed to become this person she so admires and how she might follow in my successful footsteps.

And I have to laugh at her timing, the scene before her if, horror of horrors, she could see me: The me in the underwear with the flies and the hot flashes, the me who can’t get organized or inspired, the me with the puffy eyes after another night of stress-waking. The me she’s envisioning is the confident one from the back of a book—a woman I haven’t seen in months–the brushed and smiling Author with a long list of ideas and a clear road of success starting way back when and rushing into the future. That’s what most people expect who don’t know me in person, and even some who do.

But, you see, I’ve been away from LWON for some months and not because I was hunched over a book manuscript or jetting around the world chasing elephants or iguanas. The truth is less glamorous: This writer, as happens to most in this field, has hit a wall.

There are plenty of possible reasons, but one is simply that the field is packed tighter with freelancers than ever; staying ahead of the rest takes a certain grit and an even flow, not a slow drip, of original ideas. Meanwhile, some of us tire of having to sell ourselves over and over. Some of us are weary of slim paychecks and forgotten invoices. Some of us are tired of editors who forget to tell you what you did right before launching into all the wrongs. (Many do remember to compliment. But some don’t.) We scrabble for scraps. Our souls are sucked dry.

I wouldn’t call this writers’ block. A block is something that can be shattered with the swing of a sledgehammer, or slid out of the way in three heaves by a handful of friends on a Saturday afternoon (with the promise of pizza and beer).

Remember Han Solo frozen, grimacing, in the wall of carbonite?

Actually, let’s go bigger. Game of Thrones. That ice monument looming over the end of civilization—that’s the wall in this scenario. It’s massive and bone-chilling, shored up with horrendous news headlines like rebar in concrete. And the fact is, when one is defined by what one does as many of us writers tend to be, a hard stop to creativity is especially devastating.

I’ve been thinking a lot about identity as a result of this hit to mine, why some of us can’t see ourselves outside of our careers. It may be especially hard if we have a public face, some kind of success that has defined us for others. The successful writer is what when not being successful and not writing?

We are encouraged to find an identity. And that should be a good thing. Yet think of how identity has divided us. One People, yes, but so, so many ways to pull away from fellow humans these days. Isn’t it from labels that prejudice is born? While many of us speak of unity and acceptance, we continue to splinter into ever smaller groups and to stand up and scream that we, of that group, deserve special attention. Ultimately walls go up between our camps. So many walls. So much anger on either side of those walls. Disgust, even.

Evolutionarily, feeling disgust toward “other” may have once served us, keeping foreign pathogens from reaching new hosts. But morally, disgust at “other” serves no one. And yet.

And yet we wave our own flags facing off with those waving different flags. Faith, color, sex, blue versus red, meat or no meat (“cruelty or cruelty free?”), sexual preference, nationality, financial status…which Star Wars character are you, what decade are you, which European castle or dog breed are you. Even in entertainment we look for a club to join. We’ve become so “identified with,” so black and white even as we profess the desire for gray, for equality and blindness toward our differences.

Perhaps it’s a stretch, but in a way, I’ve decided, this writer who sees herself as defined by her writing—the successes and, mostly, the failures—has separated herself from all the other things she is as a human, and is, in a sense, fighting against herself. If I’m not writing, I’m scared that I’ve lost all that is important about me. What am I if not a writer? Something “not good enough.” Something to be ashamed of. Something to sneer at–a woman lost and unhinged who dreams of slinging hay for farm animals. I denounce my other selves for being less than. I forget to see the whole.

I’ve been waving my writer flag so high that I’ve lost sight of the beauty of the other flags I carry. Especially that of the simple human being just trying to make her way in the world, focused on family and health and doing right by others, and on searching for whatever beauty can still be coaxed from this world. That’s a flag we can all carry together.

I’ll admit to being comforted by this truth about writers: We tend to circle back to writing over and over. It won’t let us go, and we wouldn’t know what else to do if it did. I fantasize about different kind of job, maybe watering plants or making donuts or tending goats (really, I want to tend goats), but mostly because I know a different kind of job would give me new experiences and, as a result, something new to write about. So that part of me will, ultimately, rise to the top on its own. That has to be good enough.

So, here I am, still in my socks (one has a hole, I’ve noticed), making some slow headway toward the top of the wall, wielding my fly swatter in defense. I’m searching for a cool breeze. I’m wandering in the woods (not pitching stories, not writing a book proposal), looking for meaning in a world that’s become stunningly divided and divisive. I’m trying hard to embrace the parts of me that aren’t the writer and let them breathe un-panicked breaths until the writer returns.

My promise to the young woman who wrote to me is that the confident, competent writer in me isn’t gone forever. It’s a promise to myself as well. But I’m seeking ways to broaden my identity rather than celebrating one part and chastising all others. And I’m looking out from in here at the splintered world and applying the same lesson. No one of us is just one thing. The mosaic is especially beautiful when woven together. The mosaic, woven together, is what matters.

—–
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Montreal wants my stuff

By: | August 29, 2022

In shipping my grandfather’s 200-pound desk from my cousin in San Francisco to me in Ottawa, we found, too late, that Ottawa is devoid of bonded warehouses. This matters because customs can only be cleared for large objects like this through a warehouse bonded for such a purpose, and the nearest of these facilities is in another province altogether.

The delivery company started sending me threatening emails and calling every day, warning that storage fees were racking up, and if someone didn’t physically show up at the Montreal airport, they would return the heirloom from whence it came. I, or someone I authorized, would have to schlepp out to the customs desk (Douanes Canada) to get a blue stamp on a form and then drive that stamped piece of paper over to the delivery company, also at the airport, and hand it over.

I had extended, harrowing phone calls across a stubborn language barrier, but eventually it was driven into me that I could not authorize the delivery company to do this themselves. The Montreal-based friend I convinced to do the job shared the photo above of his dispiriting experience in a Dorval hallway, and the desk finally arrived at my house:

Ignoring the strong hints from the powers that be, I headed over to Montreal myself the following week, on holiday, of all things. My AirBnB turned out to be one of those rare remaining apartments that is really someone clearing out of their own place for the weekend to earn some extra cash. The walls were festooned with Che Guevara posters and Soviet propaganda and brochures in support of the Quebec separatist guerrilla group Front de liberation du Québec. There was an unsettling taxidermy piece, of an animal I can’t even identify.

The host boasted to me that they hadn’t locked their back door in ten years.

I guess that only works for communists, because one day later, Montreal stole my car, bought not three months ago. The police were not surprised in the least. Car theft has tracked up with the auto price surge in the city, and they warned it would already be sitting in the Port of Montreal in a shipping container, bound for Nigeria, where it would be sold to wealthy customers for even more than the Canadian market could offer. They would not be retrieving it.

It was a stormy night, and Rammstein was playing a concert on the hill. Their famous pyrotechnics lit up the storm clouds while their roaring German heavy metal thundered along. I gave up on my trip.

Reader, the Quebec police found my car the next day. The thieves had driven it to a small French town down the St. Lawrence River to look around for more cars to steal. Residents called the police about these people “driving suspiciously” – I will let you come to your own conclusions on that—and the vehicle was retrieved.

All that Montreal has taken from me, it has eventually given back, with some bizarre memories into the bargain. I can’t stay mad for long. But I’m staying on my side of the border for now, casting a suspicious eye eastward now and then, on guard for bandits and customs officials in the night.

9-8-8

By: | August 26, 2022
Les Roses by the “Raphael of Flowers”– Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759–1840) 

Note: This post is about suicide, so please skip it if you’re not up for that right now. 

Last month we lost a friend of ours, a seventeen year-old girl. My first impulse when I got the call was to clean our house. I didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing to do, except make some room for the grief that would be moving in and staying for a while. 

Natalie is the third teenager in our small community to die by suicide in as many years. To my husband Pete, her kayaking coach, she was like a goofy little sister. She was gutsy and competitive, the fastest runner on her track team. Her absence has settled over our lives like wildfire smoke, changing the light and air. The grief counselor said we shouldn’t blame ourselves, or anyone. It’s no one’s fault. But it is hard – impossible, really – not to wonder if there was anything we could have done differently, or better.

As a neuroscience reporter, I have interviewed dozens of researchers who study suicide. Since Natalie died I have been rereading some of those transcripts to see if they can help me understand what happened. They don’t tell me much. The number of researchers studying suicide in teenagers has exploded in recent years, probably in response to a steep rise in suicide deaths since the mid-2000s, but it’s still a young field. 

One well-established fact is that suicide increases sharply all over the world when puberty hits. It is relatively rare in children, but at around age 11 it increases “precipitously, not just in the United States, but in literally every country in the world,” clinical psychologist Adam Miller, of the University of North Carolina, told me. There’s no comparable pattern for adult suicide, which varies quite a bit between countries and cultural contexts and can strike at any age, he said. 

The spike in suicidal thoughts, attempts, and deaths may have to do with changes in brain regions that regulate our hormonal responses to stress, and social stress in particular. During puberty teenagers develop an exquisite sensitivity to social rewards and punishments, like being praised or shunned. All of that happens before the neural circuits that help us temper those feelings and keep them in some kind of reasonable perspective are fully developed. Maybe you know the feelings I’m talking about. Those excruciating, crawl-out-of-your-skin, things will never be ok feelings.

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Snapshot: My Neighbor’s Figs

By: | August 24, 2022

Last summer I wrote in this space about discovering figs. This summer I was ready for them. My neighbor with the fig tree started texting with progress reports in mid July. In August, they hit: Figs. Figs, figs, figs, figs. I’ve been on many fig-retrieval expeditions in the last two weeks. I arrive, bowl in hand, when possible with a taller friend, and I pick and I pick, racing the squirrels and the birds for the ripe, reddish fruits.

Figs caramelized in honey and butter on ice cream? Yes. Figs in a cake with almond and black pepper? Yes and yes. Figs cut up in my morning granola? Yes, please. Figs straight from the tree? Absolutely, as long as they don’t have any bird poop.

The birds are pulling ahead in the race now, but that’s fair; I have access to a supermarket but they have to find their own food. Fall is coming; the peaches will run out and so will the figs. I appreciate that even in my city apartment, surrounded by concrete, the fig tree is there to tell me what season it is.

Photo: Helen Fields

Fig of my Imagination

By: | August 22, 2022

It’s fig season again! But this year, it’s a little lackluster. It’s not the birds getting to the figs. It’s not the squirrels. There are only a few figs, and the ones that have appeared seem tired. Some of them are falling to the ground before they start to ripen, others are sitting small and hard on the tree. Maybe it’s just been a long dry summer. But the light is changing, the days are shortening a handful of minutes at a time. Maybe there are a few more sweet things to come before autumn sets in.

*

When we first moved into this house, we planted a fig tree in the backyard. It looked sad and scraggly for a long time—years, in fact. I would go over to the houses of friends who had fig trees in August, and these trees would be dripping with figs. I would ask how old the trees were, and they’d say things like, “Oh, we planted that last year!” I would come home and make puppy dog eyes at my little fig tree.

And then—BOOM! Five years ago, August came, and the figs were there. I’d battle it out with the birds to get the fruit first. We got a net to protect the figs. The birds figured out how to get into the net, although sometimes they needed help getting out. I would curse the birds as I peeled the net away—they’d fly off and I’d feel happy, but slightly miffed that they’d gotten something I wanted. Then a year came when we had to have friends help pick it because there were too many. There were even figs left after the birds got in and out of the net.

This year, there were so many figs that the birds couldn’t keep up either. We never put the net up. Every day, there are more figs, sitting on their stems like purple jewels. The ground below is littered with ones we haven’t gotten in time. In the morning the air around the tree smells sweet; in the height of the day when the sun beats down, it smells like the morning after a fig wine bender.

People have been reveling in the fig for thousands of years—it may be the earliest cultivated fruit. Researchers excavating in a village in the Jordan Valley found nine carbonized figs dating back more than 11,000 years, even before crops like wheat, corn and barley emerged. These were parthenocarpic figs, which means they don’t need insects for pollination—to produce more trees, people would have planted stems. These planted stems grow roots and leaves and their very own figs. The researchers explained that people at the time must have recognized that these fig fruits did not turn into new plants on their own, and started to cultivate these edible—yet non-reproductive—figs, following meandering mutations of these natural clones to develop the taste of the fruit. And the fruit isn’t even really a fruit—it’s a part of the stem that has grown into a teardrop-shaped container for the plant’s flowers.

In the middle of October, the fig leaves are starting to turn yellow; soon, there will be no more fruit. But there is another fig tree on the shadier side of the yard. These ones are Genoa figs, pale green with hot pink inside. We planted this tree about eight years ago, when my son was born. It has been slow to grow, mostly looking like a dowsing stick. This year, it has two short leaf-covered branches and has produced a half-dozen figs.

Elsewhere in the world, researchers are using fig trees like Ficus elastisca and Ficus thonningii to build resilience in the face of climate change. These superpower figs can shore up hillsides and provide drought-resistant food for livestock.

Our little Ficus carica trees can’t do much but feed us and the birds between August and October. But having one fig tree already has given me a little more patience with the second. Someday, we may have to fight the birds over our little green-figged tree. Someday, there may be more than enough to share.

*

Image by Flickr user Jack Fussell under Creative Commons license

Redux: Floater

By: | August 19, 2022

This post originally ran on October 11, 2011. Back then, I didn’t really understand why people would use these sensory deprivation pods. In the wake of the past 5 years, I can only hope one day we can all have our own sensory deprivation pods.

image credit: lo.re.n.zo

The second I close the hatch behind me, it occurs to me that I have watched far too many horror movies for this to end well. I’m in the basement of a building in South London where people shell out £45 to spend an hour in a sensory deprivation tank. The shiny white pod is about the size of a SmartCar, and its rounded edges remind me a bit of the futuristic, streamlined vehicles in Minority Report. Inside, the total-immersion bathtub is flooded with an unearthly blue light and a quietly swishing mass of water that’s been doped with enough magnesium salts to let me float handily on top, just a bit more than what’s in the Dead Sea.

There’s also a light switch, an intercom and a spray bottle of freshwater. I find out soon enough why that spray bottle is there. It takes me only about five seconds to get the super-saline water in my eyes, and the stinging is as horrible as it was predictable. I spend the first few minutes alternating between accidentally rubbing my eyes and frantic spritzing. So much for sensory deprivation.

But even after I figure out how to stop injuring myself, I can’t surrender to feeling nothing. Each time I turn off the light and succumb to the pitch black, a tentacled monster emerges from a far corner of my Hollywood-sullied imagination and I immediately need to flip the switch to convince myself that I’m not about to die an ignominious death worthy of another Final Destination sequel. I don’t know what all this says about my psyche, but I do know, as I reach for the light for the 15th time, that I have a very long hour ahead of me.

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