Flora, Fauna, Funga

By: | October 17, 2022

This post first appeared in September of 2019 and the mushrooms never stop coming.

Paul Kroeger is a wizard. Rolling his quick little cigarettes like skinny sticks of dynamite, he halts and flows like bearded water, crossing streets of East Vancouver at angles between the cars. He slips behind houses, not the path of his fellow human beings, but grassy patches behind offices and medical facilities.

In front of a first floor apartment window, Kroeger coos, “Oh, look, look, look!” A ring of damp brown mushrooms has sprung up around a pine tree, grown from its roots. “Ectomycorrhizal,” he says. The mushroom mycelia is symbiotic with tree roots, taking to specific kinds of trees, gathering nutrients and water for the tree at the circumference of its roots, thus the circle.

Kroeger — the oe in his name more like oo — has worked at University of British Columbia studying the biochemistry of medicinal mushrooms, and is co-founder of the Vancouver Mycological Society. At the end of a day hunting in the city, he empties his collected mushrooms at home to take spore prints, gill-shaped dustings left on paper overnight. Specimens that he doesn’t dry for science, he chucks into his yard, hoping their spores will take. He has a small house in an old-tree neighborhood, his yard a crowded grove, overgrown compared to the houses around him, odd mushrooms springing up all over.

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Bug On My Window, Having a Tough Day

By: | October 14, 2022

A few weeks ago, a cicada landed on my screen of my open window.

Green and black cicada on a window screen

This was one of the regular cicadas that come out every year. They’re much more secretive than their 17-year cousins.

Well, most of the time they’re secretive. They don’t seem very secretive when they’re on your screen window, making their extremely loud sound right into your apartment.

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House Rules Rule

By: | October 12, 2022
For the last ten years, we’ve used a Monopoly game that is a family heirloom of sorts. By which I mean it’s old. The box is falling apart, and so is the board. The game pieces—the dog, the race car, the top hat, the thimble—are worn with years of fingertips. There is an orange sticky note that says it’s Indiana. No one can remember what happened to Indiana in the first place.
 
This summer, in exchange for going to swim lessons with a minimum level of enthusiasm, one of my kids asked whether we could get a new version of the game that wasn’t so battered. This did not seem unreasonable. At the end of the summer, the reluctant swimmer made his way out to a distant buoy in a mountain lake—a success! At the end of September, I picked up the most recent edition of Monopoly.
 
But was it a success? It was certainly newer. The $50 bills are purple, instead of blue. The Community Chest cards have some new descriptions: you spend time with an elderly neighbor, donate blood, go to jail for playing music too late. Some of these things take getting used to, but we’re flexible. Or, at least I was until I saw the large warning note: TO KEEP YOUR GAME SHORT AND SWEET, DON’T USE HOUSE RULES.
 
This seemed like the most unwelcome change of all. Because who goes into Monopoly thinking a game will be short? And as for sweet, house rules here and elsewhere can make for the most lovely games of all.
 
Our games use many of the techniques the top tips recommend against. No $500 bill on Free Parking? When someone’s close to bankruptcy, this beautiful golden piece of paper has bolstered many a sagging spirit. (I did also once try to bribe someone—to ask me to a high school dance? To not ask me to a high school dance?—with one of these bills. I ended up going to the dance but I can’t remember whether that was the intended outcome.)
 
And not loan money? Our most recent Monopoly game consisted of financial ups and downs that were weathered by kind gestures—paying off someone else’s mortgage, advancing them their GO money, even forgiving rent—and it was one of the most successful we’ve ever had. Others have come to a sudden, angry end.
 
We have others. In Apples to Apples, the dealer is allowed to pick whatever card they’d like to play, they’re not stuck with the one that they draw. And Uno—well, maybe I’ve never read the rules to Uno. In Solitaire, if you get stuck, you can flip through the cards in your hand two at a time, then one at a time. Why? Because that’s what my mom told me.
 
And the wonderful thing is, our house rules are not the only house rules! People come up with all sorts of terrific rules to suit their own needs. I asked some of the LWONers for theirs.
 
In Helen’s house, you can use the dictionary while playing Scrabble to check a word. “It’s considered bad form to flip through the dictionary looking for words that might exist, but making up words and looking them up is 100% fine,” she wrote. And if your word isn’t actually a word, you get a do-over. They also have a list of two- and three-letter words that people can use. Helen wrote that this “helps level the playing field a lot for kids and for people who aren’t maybe quite as good at remembering things as they used to be.”
 
Ann’s grandmother taught her grandchildren to play cards. One of her grandmother’s rules was that “if you were stuck at solitaire, you could put an extra king out, making 8 rows all together.”
 
An extra king! I never would have thought of that. Another thing that’s wonderful about house rules: their creativity. They are bespoke responses to the moment, whether that means avoiding a board-flipping tantrum or finding a way to move forward when the deck is stacked (sometimes on purpose, by a crafty sibling) against you. The game can become a puzzle to solve together, a celebration of the time that that someone put ZAXES (the plural of a tool used in roofing) on a triple word score tile.
 
There are many things to celebrate about our new Monopoly. There is a charming dinosaur token and you get money for rescuing a puppy and testing the slide at a playground you built. And there is Indiana again! We’ll keep a better hold on it—and we’ll hold onto our house rules, too.

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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