The first woman to get a Ph.D. in oceanography in the United States—and in North America, and, perhaps, in the world—was Easter Ellen Cupp. She received it from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1934. I learned this because I have been reading about one of Cupp’s supervisors, a man named Harald Sverdrup, for a book on seabirds I’m supposed to have finished. When you work on a book about a science, you tend to read a lot about some very hardworking and accomplished people. Their stories can leave you (me) feeling kind of lousy about your (my) work ethic.
Such is the case with Harald Sverdrup. He was really something. Born in 1888, in the town of Sogndal, Norway, he came from a family known more for farming, politics, and the Lutheran clergy, but he was drawn to the natural sciences. He went to the University of Oslo, where he excelled in geophysics, meteorology, oceanography. When he graduated he studied under Vilhelm Bjerknes, then the world’s preeminent meteorological theoretician. After he finished his Ph.D. he joined Roald Amundsen, who, a few years removed from his triumph at the South Pole, was planning an expedition to the North Pole. Amundsen never reached the pole, but Sverdrup collected reams of data on all manner of natural phenomena. When he returned from the expedition several years later he assumed Bjerknes’ old professorship at the University of Oslo, before being asked to become the director of Scripps in 1936.
At Scripps, Sverdrup more or less developed oceanography as a modern scientific discipline. He established a core curriculum and published the field’s first textbook, The Oceans, in 1942. The Oceans became the standard text for the next several decades; oceanographers still refer to it as “The Bible.” All the while Sverdrup was doing groundbreaking (or waterbreaking) research on the dynamics of ocean circulation, revamping also the research ethos to emphasize long pelagic cruises. He would eventually be memorialized as a unit of flow: the Sverdrup (Sv), or the volume transport of one million cubic meters of seawater per second.
In 2019, a forest caught fire in Sussex, England. This would not have made international headlines, except that the forest in question was Ashdown Forest, the real-life inspiration for Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin’s beloved Hundred Acre Wood. As the fire spread, dry-eyed forest rangers explained to reporters that the blaze and the little lives it took were no big deal, really, nothing to worry about.
From an ecological perspective, they were probably right. But I just kept thinking about all those little lives: the breathing, fleeing, terrified, heart-beating descendants of Rabbit, Piglet, and Roo. So I did what I often do when things are on my mind. I wrote a poem about it.
We are now entering the third year of a global pandemic—a worldwide conflagration that has already taken so many lives. Reading this poem now, I can’t help but hear echoes of the forest rangers’ impassive assessments in the daily spate of ableist comments from our nation’s leaders. They reassure us that everything is fine, that we don’t need to worry. That only the vulnerable will die.
Wildfire, Hundred Acre Wood
Tonight A. A. Milne’s beloved forest is burning, tall flames overtaking the very small animals, smoke choking rabbits as they flee. No one knows how it started, and no one saw the owl emerge. Either he’s still in there or he got away.
Tomorrow experts on the news will tell us this is not a tragedy. All’s not lost, says one forest ranger, indicating the destruction behind him. Within four weeks we’ll have grass growing. In six months you probably won’t know too much has gone on here.
*
Image via Unsplash. You can read more about the fire here. A version of this poem was originally published in SIREN.
There is a lake not far from where I live now. I’m not a person who has ever invested deeply in place; I am a child of immigrants and I have always been somewhere temporarily. I don’t know the place where I was born, and as much as I love my hometown, I always knew I would leave it. In college and grad school, I knew I was just passing through. But after almost eight years in Seattle, I’ve finally accepted that I live here. I am here with no plans to leave. While friends have come and gone, breweries opened and closed, politicians elected and disgraced, the lake has been here all along.
Getting to know her has been an honor. Like any other friend, I have become acquainted with her in steps. I met her through friends, and at first, I only spent time with her every once in awhile, and usually briefly, shallowly — just passing through, just saying hello. Now I am there almost every day. Sometimes I am there with others, but most of the time, I’m there just to see her. I have kayaked in her waters, walked and run her perimeter countless times, picnicked on her banks, eaten ice cream on the docks. I’ve seen her many moods: hopeful (daybreak), mysterious (a fog at dusk), moody (grey and misty), furious (driving rain and wind), festive (cross-country skiers gliding new paths into snow), murderous (icy, and bitterly cold), glowing (summer sunsets). Even when she is at her worst, I know it will pass; her emotions are literally the weather. By the same token, she has seen my moods. Some days, I’m euphoric, and the runs feel easy. Other days, I’m pounding the ground, running out my frustration. On the worst ones, I plod along slowly, and the loop I know so well feels impossible, even though I know it hasn’t changed.
She has rewarded my loyalty by introducing me to her friends. There’s the heron that everyone stops to photograph. There are the resident geese and the fearless seagulls, as well as the guy who feeds them baggies of torn-up bread, holding out his arms so they land all over him. There are the cottonwoods, right next to the alcove where hobbyists launch their remote-controlled sailboats. There’s the writer who sets up a table in the summer, asks you for three themes, and handwrites poems while you wait. There’s the round man who always shuffles along at a half-run, half-walk in a dirty white t-shirt and grey shorts. There’s the abandoned payphone by the basketball courts, and the tree that just fell a few weeks ago over by the amphitheater where the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin once played. There was, until about a year ago, a tree stump halfway between the amphitheater and bathhouse, which I still look for every time I run.
In the local library, I saw a whole book about her and the plants that grow there. This spring, once everything is lush and green again, I’m planning a heart-to-heart with her where I walk the loop with the book in hand, looking even more carefully at each thing I have passed a million times. Time and attention, I’m realizing, is the only way to show care, to build a lasting relationship with place. For the first time in my life, I am finally committed to staying.
What parent hasn’t felt this grim determination at some point during the marathon that is modern, village-less childrearing? I instantly fell in love with this statue on a visit to Moscow (en route to the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic to visit a physics lab under a mountain). I can’t seem to find any information about the sculpture or sculptor, and though it has some stylistic features of propaganda art, I choose to take my inspiration where I can find it.
This week, I encountered a tweet that claimed “The CDC just quietly lowered the standards for speech in early childhood development. Now children should know ~50 words at 30mo rather than 24mo. Instead of highlighting the harmful effects masks and lockdowns have had on children, the CDC just lowered the bar for milestones.” Tens of thousands uncritically amplified the tweet and added to the outrage, but it only took a minute or two to find the real story, if you were actually interested.
My future self runs from the mistakes of my past self
This post originally appeared April 19, 2019
My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit design element, foretold by the laws of mathematical symmetry to augment the holy trinity of electrical circuit design elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor.
Wait! Don’t go! What distinguished this fourth mythical element – today known as the “memristor” – from its workaday siblings was its behaviour, which depended more on its history than on any particular stimulus hitting it at any given moment. This tendency is called hysteresis, and the makers of memristors hope it will make the computers of the future capable of more human behaviours.
But what did that actually mean? Even after months of editing this thing with several of the world’s best electrical engineers at my disposal, I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept. They explained it to me every way they could, including comparing it to the behaviour of a synapse: the connections between neurons can become stronger or weaker depending on the number of electrical signals they’ve traded in the past. They sent me this graph of a bowtie.
Pinched hysteresis loop, courtesy of R. Stanley Williams
It was unedifying. I finished the edit without ever coming to grips with the meaning of hysteresis. But over the next decade, thoughts of that maddening bowtie would come to me unbidden. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It gnawed at me because, even though the math was far beyond anything I could handle, there was something familiar itching just under the surface of that shape.
Cameron: Yes! Let us! Although I don’t know if it will be a real fight this time, like all of our other very vicious fights. Would it be fair to say we are united in feeling slightly beaten down?
Helen: Oh goodness yes. If there is a winner in this fight, it is definitely the coronavirus. We have been doing this for omg-how-is-it-almost two years now, and I am so done. Except I’m not, because you can still get the thing and give it to other people and kill them, so I’m still wearing my mask and being cautious about what I do and whatnot. But mentally, I am DONE.
Cameron: Done, yet carrying on. Is there anything that’s helping you with the carrying-on part?
Helen: For me, the answer to surviving a pandemic seems to be: Crafts. I’m not sure I can even count all of the crafts I have taken up over the last two years. Embroidery was first. Then I got a stand mixer and started baking (a lot). Then…yeah like I said, I’m not sure I can count. The most recent hobby is whole wheat sourdough bread, so I’m about two years behind everyone else on that one.
Cameron: I did the sourdough thing early on and I had maybe one–maybe two–successful loaves, and then I did one that turned into a seriously sticky mess that dripped all over the floor.
Helen: Oh, no!! Did you try any other hobbies? How do you deal with being slightly-to-severely beaten down?
Cameron: Ahhh. . . some days better than others? I guess when I’m doing a good job dealing, it has something to do with being where I am right now and somehow going. . . deep into that? . This is also something I feel like I have to relearn every day. Like, I’ve been running, which has been great, and I got all inspired and signed up for this run up north. . . but as it got closer, I realized that . . . what did I realize, Helen? . . .
Helen: Running is the worst and nobody should ever do it?
Cameron: Oooh, is this our argument?
Helen: No, arguing about running is boring. I don’t like running. I’m glad you like running!
Cameron: I think I had this idea that either I was going to meet a friend and do the run, or my family was going to come and we would go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, or there would be something fun about it. That’s it! It initially sounded FUN. But as it got closer, various things happened (coronavirus) so that I was just going to go by myself, which meant driving by myself, and staying in a hotel by myself, and eating by myself–and usually, this does sound fun, but with all the various restrictions and uncertainties involved in this, it started to sound NOT FUN. So I thought, what would be fun? (Thank you, Catherine Price!) Instead, I planned out a long trail run near where I live. It was beautiful, and my family brought me snacks about halfway, and one of my kids ran with me for part of it. It just made me appreciate being here, and my family (and my own shower and bed), and it was FUN! Where was I going with that? Being here? Being present?
Helen: Is this about place?
Cameron: Maybe?
Helen: Part of my coping is definitely hobbies. But another part is paying attention to what’s around me. I have learned so many bird songs in the last two years, and have noticed so many more behaviors by the squirrels and birds and bugs. And of course there were the cicadas, my favorite biological event.
Cameron: I think maybe I keep imagining the end (what we keep thinking is the end) of the pandemic, and I forget something about place because other places look so shiny, and then it takes my brain a while to catch up and remember that it really helps to pay attention to things?
Helen: It took me a while this winter to realize that omicron was creating another pandemic winter, and what I needed to do was go back to my coping skills from January 2021 – teaching knitting and doing art on Zoom with friends.
Cameron: Yes. I think I have this idea that someday I will not need coping skills any more–but I guess I will always need them even if/when it’s not a pandemic.
Helen: I think sometimes about the stuff from the pandemic that I want to hold onto after the pandemic. If a post-pandemic time ever arrives. Those things include: Having a ton of unscheduled time at home. In pre-pandemic times, I was doing stuff all the time. I like stuff! There’s so much great stuff to do! I live in a city! With a thriving theater scene! And so much music of all kinds! And I know approximately one million people, many of whom I like, and I make plans to see them! And somehow, through putting all of these wonderful things on my calendar, I ended up with no time to stay home, get bored, and learn how to sew.
Cameron: I agree. Also I know we both agree that staying home and getting bored are low-level pandemic problems.
Helen: There’s so much death. Nine hundred thousand people, in this country. The ways the pandemic is kind of crummy for me are nothing compared to how a lot of people are suffering. Also, though, it’s somehow happening to me, too, and this is how I’m experiencing it: A lot of isolation and a lot of crafts.
Cameron: 900,000 people! It’s a whole huge city of people. And they’re all gone.
Helen: It’s so many people. And each of them had so many people who loved them. It’s awful.
Helen: What’s the next phase of your pandemic?
Cameron: So, I got a mandolin. I’m not even sure why, I just really thought a mandolin would make me feel better and that the mandolin would be the answer to my musical lacklusterness. I’m sure it would be if I actually practiced. I recently got a hanger, so I can hang it in my shed and, I hope, just pick it up, mess around, and put it back.
Helen: Ugh, practicing is the worst. I took piano for years and never got the hang of it. Same with voice. I love singing with people, but I don’t know how to practice.
Cameron: I have the same problem with musical instruments! I know a little bit of a few different instruments, but I have never really known how to practice. It’s actually been really inspiring to see my oldest kid learning to play the violin. He really does it for fun! (Is this a theme?) He just picks up his violin and maybe plays a song–even part of a song–and then sets it down and does something else. But he does that multiple times a day! And he is really amazing after doing that for–well, he started taking lessons in February 2020, so it’s really been a pandemic practice. There’s something about those small increments adding up. And this is reminding me of your daily drawing practice.
Helen: Yeah, that’s the thing I always tell people about drawing: Did you know, if you practice something, you get better at it?!?!? Someone should have told me this years ago! (Everyone told me this. About everything. My whole life.)
Cameron: One thing that the violin teacher says is not to use the word practice. Just use the word play. Because that’s what you’re doing. Is there some way we could tie that into pandemic living? I mean, if we could only practice pandemic living for 15 minutes a day I’m sure we’d be great at it.
Helen: That’s such good advice! What a wise teacher. Maybe this is the connection: You can live in the pandemic as if you’re waiting for your regular life to come back, or you can play. For you, playing is doing a long run near home with your family’s support, and for me, playing is picking up every baking- and fiber-related hobby that catches my attention?
Cameron: Yes!
Helen: Ok, we’ve learned the lesson of the pandemic. Now can it end?
Cameron: If we concede that coronavirus has won, will it go away?
Helen: Worth a try. Ok, pandemic. We’re conceding. Maybe by the time this goes online the whole thing will be done.
Somehow I always knew there was something about my dad’s heart. I’m not sure exactly what I knew, but I did know that he didn’t eat certain things, like eggs and bacon, and ate other things, like canned tuna and low-fat cheese and margarine. (It was the eighties.) He enrolled in a cholesterol study. Bottles of liquid meals appeared in the fridge, all autumn-colored: pale orange and green and brown.
I knew enough—or at least, worried enough—to read the sign at the waterpark where we’d climbed up to the top of the slide. I was small, and scared, but I told him he shouldn’t go down. It wasn’t good for people with heart problems. The heart seemed like a frightening thing, or at least unruly, ready to misbehave at any minute, something that constantly needed watching.
I feel less watchful now, but I do find myself drawn to any information about the heart. To the blue whale, its 400-pound heart as big as a Harley-Davidson, working to its edge. When it dives, it drops its heart rate from around 30 beats per minute to four.
I find how we talk about the heart fascinating, too. We are disheartened, we have lost heart, and it is hard to go on. The hearts of those we love are sweet. The ones we don’t, or who don’t love us, we call heartless. A different way of being without a heart. There are many creatures that never have a heart at all. The sea cucumbers, the jellies, the sea stars, the flatworms. And then there are the cephalopods, which have three. Two hearts do their work for the gills, the other sends blue blood swooshing to the organs. An octopus’s organ-focused heart even stops while it swims.
Hearts seem like small animals. They leap and flutter and sink. They can be heavy, they can be light. In Etruscan shrews, they can race along at 1,500 beats per minute. The lowest heart rate observed during a blue whale’s dive was two beats per minute.
Beat.
Count slowly to 30.
Beat.
If you think of someone who is all heart, do you imagine them as a four-chambered organ, the size of a fist? Does it surprise you that dogs’ hearts make up a bigger portion of their mass than almost all other animals?
And then there are trees. They have no wet engine, but the central column of wood that supports them is called the duramen, the heartwood. It will not falter if the surrounding layers of living tissue and the bark keep it safe. This heart is at the center of things, even though in most of us it sits slightly to the left. We can transplant hearts back into the body’s soil.
The heart of the matter, the heart of the problem. We get to the heart of it. We steal hearts and we take heart and we wear them on our sleeves. We open our hearts, we close them. Inside, the valves open and close, too, letting blood rush in and rush back out again. Although we have only one, we can lose them again and again. I sometimes imagine hearts scattered about the world like lost socks. Where do they all gather? Is there somewhere that they find each other, scattered in the gutter or clumped at the storm drain?
Wherever they go, they contain both movement and sound, a marker of time, if time is something that can be marked. The clock before there was a clock. Maybe hearts are time themselves. We don’t know how many heartbeats we have, but there is this one, and this one, and this one. Sometimes they murmur. Sometimes they pound.
It is better, though, if it is not always steady. Better to have a tripping rhythm that speeds up and slows down with every breath. A new type of pacemaker will even listen to the heart and follow its irregular lead, a willing dance partner from tango to foxtrot to TikTok mashup. The heart might march to the beat of its own drum, but when people sing together in groups, their breathing and their heartbeats start to synchronize.
It was my dad’s heart in the end. It stopped, and then it was restarted, but the rest of him never resurfaced alongside it, and then, eventually, it stopped too. It is easy to say it was his heart, because it feels like it’s all of our hearts, always up to something: aching and soaring, growing cold, starting to thaw. A zebrafish can repair its own heart, but to fix our hearts, sometimes we need each other. We need someone whose heart goes out to our lost ones and brings them skipping back home.
In recent months, I’ve spent most of my time in Bremen, a coastal fishing village just down the peninsula from Damariscotta, Maine. Often my husband joins me. Bremen is Maine the way you think of it–our neighbors haul lobsters, dredge clams, pull kelp, and farm oysters. There’s an emergency doc who doubles as a vet up one road, and a fiber artist married to a blacksmith down another. And of course, there is nature.
Our back yard rolls down to a little lake that’s busy with small mouth bass and perch. The beavers build dens the size of igloos, and on summer evenings the loons kick up a fuss like a pack wet diapered toddlers. In winter the lake freezes mirror solid, and ice fishers huddle for hours pulling up pickerel to leave like an offering for birds of prey.
It’s as good a place as any to wait out the plague years. That’s no secret to aspiring builders who circle like vultures, swooping down with their checkbooks to bid up the price of land. Still, it’s mostly quiet and just far enough “away” that it’s easy to overlook what’s going on outside our brackish bubble, the closed schools and shuttered businesses, the crowded, frantic hospitals, the airline passengers gone mad with impotent rage.
Still, we got our shots and boosters, wear masks and worry, especially about the children getting lost in the viral stampede. What will become of them, we wonder, growing up in a world where grownups bicker over inconvenience and distort medical reality to suit their “truth”?
Last week we drove to Boston, to see our grandchildren, Avery, a yellow haired girl just turned 4 and Aiden, a brown-haired boy whose second birthday comes in April. Avery met us at the door dressed in snow pants, mittens and a miniature N95, fully armed for our sledding date. Aiden was a few steps behind, no mask yet, and his mom still struggling with his boots. The struggle proved futile, and it was decided Aiden would remain warm and dry at home with his mom.
Avery selected a few choice snacks from the pantry as I extracted two flying saucers from a tangled heap in the garage. When all was finally ready, we trudged the half mile or so through the snow to the sliding hill, already thick with tots and pre-teens. Nearly every one of these eager thrill seekers—even the pre-teens—came protected by a guardian who hovered by his or her side at the top of the hill, then scuttled to the bottom to assure a safe landing. I found this odd: the hill’s vertical drop was no more than 50 feet, and so gradual that some sledders had to push themselves through the last few yards. That was fine by me: my granddaughter was on the younger side, and no daredevil. I helped her get settled on the saucer, pointed her in a roughly downhill direction and wished her luck.
But just before launch time, a guardian leapt into her path, frantically waving and booming “stop.” We froze.
