Writing in the Sky

By: | October 21, 2022

While visiting the Baltic seacoast of Lithuania a couple weeks ago, walking with my wife among hills of half-grassy sand dunes, I heard what I swore were sandhill cranes. I scanned an October sky pillared with distant cumulus until finding giant letters written high overhead, southward V’s and W’s a hundred yards long. 

Sandhill cranes was my quick conclusion, though I was wrong. I don’t often travel outside of the Americas, so I was already one lap behind. There are no sandhill cranes on this side of the planet. These were Grus grus, in English known as common cranes, a name that feels underwhelming considering how strongly they must figure every spring and fall. In Lithuanian, they are called gervė, one of the most mentioned birds in Baltic literature and lore. 

My sandhills, Antigone canadensis, are American species with some drifting into eastern Asia. They herald the change of seasons, standing together by the tens of thousands along lake edges and marshes on their annual migrations. To me, they are as remarkable as monarch butterflies. Last century they were edging toward extinction, but conservation efforts and changes in attitude where they were not treated as vermin invading agricultural fields has led to their brisk expansion. As they pass through Colorado or Nebraska they are known to gather in the hundreds of thousands, as loud as symphonies of wood ratchets and flutes. These cranes did the same here, coming from as far north as Siberia, flying south as far as North Africa, crowding wetlands and fields that they know like a map.

To verify what I was hearing and seeing, I turned to my wife several paces away and said do you hear that? She paused and when she heard the familiar, faraway prattle, her face changed into a bemused smile. Her mind was suddenly taken home, autumn in ditch country, Western Colorado, the last time of the year she’d be wearing a spaghetti strap outside without getting goosebumps. She’d be squatting in the garden clipping back October die-off when the calls would reach her and she’d shield her eyes from the sun with one hand, searching a prismatic blue sky until she found a great V at 10,000 feet, 3,000 feet above her. 

Continue reading →

The Iceman Cometh Not

By: | October 19, 2022

For near-term sea level rise, all eyes are on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Covering the vast majority of the island, the largest body of ice outside of Antarctica  is responsible for one-fifth of the oceans’ current elevation gain and projected to add another 10 inches globally, whether we decarbonize or not. Much of our data now comes from satellites, but the earliest ice core samples there—drilling 4550 feet into more than 100,000 years of climate history—come from an elaborate ruse that began in 1959.

“As part of man’s efforts to probe deeper and deeper into the secrets of the universe,” a small party of army engineers selected a site that year for a “city under the ice.” This according to R&D PR film number 6 produced by the US War Office in 1963. It was all about “man’s never-ceasing quest for knowledge.”

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →