Canoe Stashing with Craig

By: | July 31, 2023
Photo courtesy of Craig Childs

So I finally read Craig’s book Stone Desert, and I’m glad I did. It’s a republication of an earlier essay collection alongside his original journals – sketches, scribbles and notes he made in his twenties while hiking and paddling through desert canyons in Utah, along the Green and Colorado rivers.

For me, the book was a reminder of how zesty life can be when I remember to shut down my computer and leave the damn house without my phone, and with a notebook and pen. Sometimes (especially in summer) I forget what it’s like to be hungry for knowlege — to gnaw on a question before I Google it, letting my own thoughts develop and whetting my appetite before lunging for the answer.

Craig says he finds his 20-something self embarrassing, but his voracious curiosity was a perfect antidote to the summer ennui I’ve been flirting with lately. For one thing, he reminds me that it is in fact possible to write when it’s hot out, and for that I (grudgingly) thank him.

The book also reminds me what human writers can do that AI can’t — move our uniquely gifted, limited, vulnerable bodies through the world, use language to make sense of what we find out there and share it with each other. It’s hard to imagine an AI stashing canoes in the desert and writing about it (though I’d definitely read a sci-fi novel about that). But even if it could, it wouldn’t walk, paddle, or wonder like Craig.

Here’s our conversation:

Craig, Stone Desert is full of references to canoes you’ve stashed in remote river canyons. When and why did you start stashing canoes? Was this something you did as a kid? 

I was doing that as a kid with my mom, she and I would do these things. The plans were not quite as elaborate, but there was always some kind of adventure where she’d come up with a crazy plan and we’d go do it, you know, something in the backcountry. I enjoyed that so much that I stepped it up to a new level. 

Two of the people that I traveled with quite a bit were running a river outfit out of Moab. So they would jet boat down the Colorado River to the confluence with the Green River and pick people up. We knew these routes and we said, why don’t we just start dropping canoes at the bottom of the route – go hide them up in the boulders and then pick them up again, in the spring. We’ll hike down through a crack in a cliff and when we get to the river, there will be a canoe waiting for us. And in that way, we can kind of sew the whole landscape together. 

Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, Google Earth

So wait – you drive out into the desert, and then hike down the canyon and then get in the canoe?

That’s one way to go. We’d get dropped off somewhere and just start these walks. Within a couple of years we were doing 30-day trips out there. We’d have food stashed at the canoes. For the next month, we’d be gone and we wouldn’t see anybody, wouldn’t cross a trail, wouldn’t see another human footprint for 30 days. 

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Guest Post: Berlin Boar Pheromones

By: | July 28, 2023

The wild boars of Berlin get a bad rap. Last week one of these beasts was mistaken for a lioness, triggering emergency alerts and a two-day armed search. During the pandemic, another boar stole the laptop bag of a nude sunbather, forcing an absurdly ridiculous birthday suit chase. When I lived in Berlin, I was once stuck in traffic because an entire boar family had decided to relax in the middle of a busy intersection. Some boars steal groceries left unattended in open car trunks or birthday cake at garden parties.

I’d argue Berlin’s abundant boars are actually an untapped resource: A few years ago, I used them as part of a gonzo science project. My friends called it a midlife crisis, but I called it the Boar Witch Project.

I probably need to start from the beginning. For a time, my obsession was the world of online human pheromone peddlers. These are typically men on the straight bro-incel spectrum who promise in creepy videos that a spritz or two of their wares will instantly attract any woman, and lead to a “homerun.”

Like much related to romance, the question of whether human sex pheromones exist is… complicated. Researchers have found enticing clues that human body odors may play a role in seduction, but a scientifically-validated product remains elusive. This hasn’t stopped online entrepreneurs from jumping the gun: There’s a bounty of pheromone colognes for purchase online with perilously evocative names like Sacred Cherry, Raw Chemistry, and Dragon’s Blood.

Some cologne entrepreneurs deploy pseudoscientific claims about their wares, namely that the ingredients androstenone and androstenol are human pheromones. This is nonsense (and for a full explanation of why, read this). But amusingly these molecules do help catalyze sex for wild boars and pigs. 

Male swine produce androstenone and androstenol in their saliva. When a horny male pig or boar breathes heavily on a female in heat, she will smell the molecules, spin around, and then lift her rump in an ostentatious demonstration that she is ready to start a family. The chemicals are so successful for getting female pigs in the mood – or at least in the right position – that pig farmers use them to ease artificial insemination. The spray is aptly named Boar Mate.

The human dating scene is already dystopian. It’s just as well that scientists haven’t identified a human sex pheromone with instantaneous results on par with boars.

But what would happen, I wondered, if some Berlin dude had gotten duped into wearing pheromone cologne? Would one of the abundant, local female wild boars heed his siren call? This called for An Experiment.

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Beach

By: | July 26, 2023

My neighbor and I went to see Barbie this past weekend. I loved it. Without saying too much, I loved the colors and the cleverness and the way that the characters said things that I have thought but haven’t said, and things that I’ve felt but that have never risen up and assembled into consciousness.

I did feel a little bad for Ken, though.

Ken. In the movie, his job is “beach.” Not anything specific at the beach. Just beach. In the real world, he isn’t qualified to be a lifeguard. He can’t go out into the water, he can’t even help people on land. In Barbie Land, he collides with an immovable wave when he tries to surf.

He does get a resolution of sorts in the movie, but I had trouble seeing where he was headed, how he was going to take all he learned and move forward. (Sometimes I have a little trouble returning to reality after watching or reading something.) It bothered me like a tiny stone in my shoe, moving around but never disappearing.

I was still thinking about Ken the next morning, when one of my kids agreed to go on a walk with me. We walked down to the beach, which was covered in kelp and patches of small rocks.

This is a kid who is crow-like, a collector of anything shiny. We stopped to pick up sea glass, we found rocks to skip. We saw sand dollars and ropy clumps of kelp. We wondered how a country could really become a country. How many people would have to agree? How big would it have to be?

We watched two dogs wrestling each other, identical except for the color of their eyes. We walked past a man yelling at harbor patrol, stomping his feet, shouting at the sky. We talked about what preys on the spiny lobster.

A beach find. Possible new Ken song?

I stopped thinking about much for a long time as I kept my eyes on the sand. Green sea glass was the same color as torn kelp blades, white sea glass looked like shells. Clear plastic that I wanted to pick up looked like dried-out Velella, which I didn’t.

And then after we’d turned back—we covered a mile in about an hour—it came to me. Isn’t this beach? It’s doing nothing, but also doing everything. Looking, seeing, seeking, finding, wondering. I wasn’t so worried about Ken anymore.

*

First photo by Flickr user NoIdentity under Creative Commons license 

Cohabitation

By: | July 24, 2023

A well-known fact about beaver lodges, one that any close observer has surely noticed, is that they’re often home to muskrats. I’ve seen this many times, never more than last week up Clear Creek here in central Colorado, where three or four busy muskrats seemed to constantly be motoring to and from a lodge, gathering their bundles of grass with the utmost purpose and industry, their little tails churning the surface like propellors. (By the way, note to everyone who emails me to report alleged beaver kit sightings: If you can see tail movement, you’re watching a muskrat. Beavers swim with their hind feet.)

This frequent cohabitation leaves me with two questions. First, why do the beavers tolerate these semiaquatic freeloaders? Maybe the relationship is simply one of commensalism, whereby the muskrats benefit (in the form of a home, obviously) and the beavers are unaffected. (It’s not like a muskrat takes up much space.) Or perhaps there’s some mutualism at play. A couple days of camera-trapping and direct observation at Clear Creek revealed that the muskrats emerged fairly early each evening, well before dark, whereas the beavers didn’t become truly active until night had nearly fallen. Are the muskrats somehow acting as sentries or scouts, confirming the coast is clear for their more cautious rodent roommates?

Second question: where do they all sleep? Do the muskrats excavate their own miniature chambers? I’d prefer to imagine the two colonies, beavers and muskrats both, nuzzled together in a single capacious cavity, a big furry pile of hot soft bodies snuggling and snoring through the chill Rocky Mountain winters. You’re welcome for that adorable image.

Anyway, lest you think I only detected muskrats, here’s a spot of late-night maintenance performed by one of the lodge’s true architects, benevolently building for the benefit of other species, as per usual.

Johnny and Oppie

By: | July 19, 2023

Some smart cookie timed the release of the movie about Robert Oppenheimer to the week of the anniversary of Trinity, the first test of the first nuclear weapon. (Another smart cookie threw in the release of a Barbie movie and a notable Barbenheimer genre was born, but that’s not what this post is about right now.) Anyway. Oppenheimer’s leadership of the Manhattan Project that led to Trinity is so famous that most of us (me) forget that he also did brilliant — at least for a while — physics. This first ran August 21, 2013, Oppenheimer and Wheeler had both died already, and Dyson has died since. The comments on the original post are probably better than the post.

Physicists, like the ancient Greeks, like to gossip about their gods.  Three physicists* happened to be talking on Twitter** about a review by a fourth physicist, Freeman Dyson, of a biography of one of these gods, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and about his war with another one, John Archibald Wheeler.

Physicist #1: Oppenheimer did the breakthrough work on black holes.

Physicist #2:  Isn’t it ironic that Wheeler gets credit for inventing black holes?

Physicist #3: Dyson’s review doesn’t talk about Wheeler’s bitter rejection of Oppenheimer’s black holes and Oppenheimer’s antipathy toward Wheeler.

Physicist #2:  So interesting. Maybe Oppenheimer wasn’t accustomed to challenges?  And then Wheeler invents the phrase, “black hole”, and Oppenheimer never uses it.

Physicist #1: “. . .[the star] like the Cheshire cat, fades from view. One leaves behind only its grin, the other . . .”

Physicist #1:  “. . . only its gravitational attraction.” – John Wheeler 1967

Physicist #3:  I heard Oppenheimer sat outside the auditorium when Wheeler was giving the talk that conceded that black holes form.

Physicist #2:  I remember now, that story is in Kip Thorne’s book***.

Me: Oh my what a story!

Physicist #1:  I’d just like to 100% endorse @AnnFinkbeiner’s tracking it all down.

And off I go to find Kip Thorne’s book. And Wheeler’s autobiography.  And Dyson’s review.  And the Web of Stories online interviews.  And to fall thoroughly down the rabbit hole, where it’s dark and lonely but, you know.  Interesting.

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In the Doorway

By: | July 17, 2023

The end started a long time ago. I guess that’s always true in a sense. But this was years, really, even before the pandemic–for both of them, though mostly for her. As the dementia worsened and her care became more difficult, her daughters made that decision no one wants to make; the facility was nearby and they’d be able to see her and help calm and reassure her that things were as they should be. He went with her because that’s how it goes; they’d been together a long while. His presence was her lifeline for a time. We called their room “the apartment” so it seemed less awful. Even though the window looked over a grassy park, she didn’t fall for it.

She didn’t last long, anyway. Unexpectedly, he did. Has, I should say. In the physical sense, that is, despite COVID, which ravaged him then gave him (mostly) back. In the mental sense, he comes and goes: There’s a heavy door in his mind that creaks open now and then and he takes a step through, then turns back, unsure which way to go. It’s scary on both sides, familiar but also not. He’s caught in between, grabbing at this from one room and that from the other and trying to piece them together. Nothing quite fits.

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The Melody of the Mountain

By: | July 14, 2023

This past weekend, I climbed Glacier Peak with a friend of mine. Glacier Peak is Washington’s fourth-highest mountain, and also one of the state’s five stratovolcanoes. (Perhaps you’ve heard of one of the others; I know I have.) What distinguishes Glacier Peak among its volcanic kin is its remoteness. It is at the eastern edge of Snohomish County, and you can’t see it from any of the major highways and byways unless you really know where to look. Also, the approach to the start of the standard climbing route is at least twelve miles long, depending on where you set up your high camp. Some of this hike is through lovely cool evergreen forest, and some of it is through lovely open alpine meadows, but a lot of it is just up up up a series of unrelenting switchbacks. Then, of course, there is the climb itself: five miles and four thousand feet of glacier and mountain until you reach the summit.

All of which is to say that, for me, there is a fair amount of slow trudging. I wish I could claim this gave me a chance to savor the sights, sounds, and smells of the various habitats I trudged through. Instead, when I trudge, my mind inevitably finds a musical figure to play over and over and over, so that my steps can serve as a metronome, since they are, after all, already ploddingly metronomic.

I trained as a classical pianist when I was younger, and for the longest time the piece I turned to for extended trudges was Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor. The theme, just eight measures long, is a haughty melody over stern chords that descend a chromatic scale, but the first three variations are comparatively light and quick, as those chords are arpeggiated with repeated notes and then exchanged between the hands. These variations could accommodate a range of walking speeds, my steps falling on various beats as the needs of my heart and lungs dictated.  

Beethoven served me well on hikes and climbs and treks for years. But I’m older now, and slower, so for Glacier Peak my mind added a new piece to its repertoire: J.S. Bach’s Prelude in F minor from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier. I was primed, having just started learning the piece a couple of weeks before after hearing it on a commercial or podcast or something. But it suited the trip well: it is slow, smooth, and somewhat plaintive, while also, in its way, relentless, an exercise in quiet perpetual motion. Playing it, you never really get a chance to stop and collect yourself; Bach is always asking one hand or the other to keep the steady pace of sixteenth notes. Oh, you might pause slightly, bring some thought to its conclusion, but by then the next phrase has already begun. One writer described the piece as having an “awe-inspiring sense of inevitability.” Maybe there’s a metaphor in that, or maybe it’s the elevation getting to me, but the notes keep moving, and moving, the tension building, breathless almost, until, before you know it, there you are, at that loveliest of closes: the Picardy third. And the view isn’t bad, either.

Photos by the author