Summer Feet

By: | August 17, 2020

It’s the last day of summer for us, so I’m taking my summer feet to the beach. This post ran in August 2019. This year, school will look a little different, because we’ll all be barefoot.

At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There is a particular stretch of asphalt between the university parking lot and the beach that is especially pitted, and the sharp dark bits of broken ground make me cringe even before I step onto the road.

I often choose a different route to the beach, down the steep steps that are soft wood, worn by salt air and waves. But one of my friends likes to walk the bumpy path. While I dodge back and forth, taking a few steps on a curb, another on a small island of sidewalk, she charges straight down the bumpy asphalt. “I’m working on my summer feet,” she told me once. How good would that be, I thought, to have soles so thick that I didn’t feel anything?

But so far, I don’t have them. Even though the climate is mild here, I often wear shoes, even boots, in the winter. Even right now, in the dog days of summer, I’m typing this and I still have on the running shoes that I’ve been wearing since biking to school this morning. Hang on—okay, now they’re off. Socks, too. There’s the parquet floor now, smooth and just slightly cool, under my soles.

When I remember, I do try to go barefoot. It does feel relaxing. I do like feeling things like this, the texture of the ground, its temperature. There’s a sidewalk parking strip down the street with smooth, round stones that feels like a free acupressure session. And there’s such relief, on that pathway down to the beach, once my feet finally reach the sand.

But my feet never seem to get tougher. The gravel that runs along the side of the house always presses into my skin like tiny tacks, and I hop and skitter and hiss nasty things at it when I go to put the bikes away. And my feet accumulate all sorts of ugly things—black spots of tar, bee stings, moon-like calluses on the balls and heels.

Once school started, I found my shoes again. It’s too far to walk barefoot to school, and while I love seeing barefoot people riding beach cruisers, the idea of putting skin on metal pedals seems sketchy and uncomfortable. I have to bring out other protective layers, too–sunscreen and full lunchboxes, fresh school supplies and new socks. An encouraging yet increasingly insistent voice that gets homework in backpacks and bodies out the door. The promises that it will really be more fun at school than at home, where I’ll just be boringly typing things on the computer.

Humans have spent most of their existence without shoes. Now a lot of people wear them most of the time.  But this means most people don’t have a chance to develop thickened soles; their feet are already cushioned from the earth’s rougher spots. So a group of researchers on several continents decided to look at whether calluses act differently than shoes when it comes to how well feet can sense the ground while walking.

The researchers compared shod participants to those who spend most of their time barefoot. They thought the calluses might reduce how well a foot could sense the ground beneath it, but it turned out that although calluses can provide a layer of protection against thorny patches, calloused feet were just as sensitive as those that spent most of their time in shoes.

I thought it was just more barefoot time that would help me get my summer feet, to feel nothing as I charged across the parking lot to the beach, to whistle as I walked on the gravel. I thought after six years of back-to-school picnics and pencils and pictures that this would feel like more of the same, that they would all run toward the classrooms at the sound of the bell, that I would run away. There would be nothing sharp that could penetrate us, that would make us stop and curl up and cry.

The calluses are there, trying to do their job of protecting me. Still, I’m tender about the end of summer, even with my thicker soles. Maybe they were never meant to stop me from feeling, but instead are making sure that I keep walking, feeling it all.

*

Image by Flicker user ɘsinɘd under Creative Commons license, 8/27/19

A Grayling Visit

By: | August 14, 2020

Last weekend Elise and I spent three days backpacking in the vicinity of Pyramid Pass, a high notch in the stony spine of the Idaho Selkirks. With a couple of friends in tow (don’t worry: absolutely no hugging!), we crested the pass and descended to a teacup lake nested in a bowl of granite and stunted firs. Like many tiny alpine lakes, this one looked low-nutrient and barren, a sapphire more beautiful than alive. Around sunset, though, fish began to dimple the surface, sending out concentric rings as they rose to emerging midges. I strung my rod and tossed out a fly.

The fish that hit my ant was small — palm-length, tops — and came to hand with a few gentle tugs. It was no trout. Its scales, notably large for its diminutive body, gleamed chrome, and a fine smattering of black spots freckled its gill plates. In the fading light, I mistook it for a mountain whitefish, a common bottom-feeder. I slid it back into the lake, felt its tail kick against my hand like a heartbeat, and cast again. 

Not until the third fish did I recognize my misdiagnosis. As I disengaged the hook from the neat O of its mouth, its dorsal fin, which had been tucked snug against its back, rose and billowed, like a mainsail unfurling in a stiff breeze. With a ginger forefinger, I extended the dorsal to full, spectacular mast. A sunburst of spots — lilac, burgundy, cinnamon — decorated the proud appendage. This was no whitefish, I realized with sudden wonder. This was an Arctic grayling.

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Distractions III: These Froggies

By: | August 12, 2020

I doubt I need to elaborate to make you love these itty bitty frogs that, on a dark and steamy night some weeks ago, emerged from our pond and pipped away (my term; they just weren’t big enough to properly “hop”) into the unknown. They didn’t even mind me with my flashlight, sitting on the slate encouraging them to land on my hand, which some of them did without complaint. Yes, I petted them. I PETTED THEM. (With very gentle taps on the head. There wasn’t much to them.)

Knucklefroglet. I’ve named her Penelope.

Gray tree frogs, which, as you can see, appear quite green early on, are happily suburban where I live. Last year and the year before, there was a single male–maybe even the one in the picture below–who found himself a divot in the pond’s biggest boulder that amplified his calls stunningly. From his little stone stage he croaked and croaked, and I felt sorry for him because, loud as he was, I never saw a female and didn’t notice any tadpoles as the summer went on.

It all changed this year. There were suddenly two males, and then three, four, maybe five. At night they’d take up the same positions, one here, one across the way, one in the tree above, one inside the rock, to play their favorite game: “Who can split the eardrum?” It was adorable at first. Now, I’m just so tired. Everyone on our street knows the frogs for their raspy (and somehow piercing) vibrato, and one night the man next door, who is a bit of an ass, if I may say so, placed a ladder against our shared fence and leaned way over onto our side, hanging above the pond wielding a broom like a sword–which he proceeded to slash at the water. When my husband lit him up with a flashlight, expecting to see a raccoon or some other wildlife splashing around, he explained himself thusly: “TOO! MUCH! NOISE!”

Daddy “The Screamer” Gray Tree Frog, and Lurker.*

As a result of all the males showing off, we had tadpoles. Lots of ’em. (Females of this species may deposit 1,000-2,000 eggs in the water. We didn’t have THAT many ‘poles, but there were quite a few.) I checked on them daily, observing their dramatic change from sperm-like swimmers to proper miniature frogs. (That in-between stage, when newly sprouted legs dangle like mittens clipped to a kid’s sleeve, is my favorite.)

And then, once they all seemed more frog than fish (which takes around 50 days in this species), the whole show came to a close. Over a couple of nights, the tiny frogs, some still sporting half tails, fled their aquatic phase one by one.

For the parent frogs, it was mission accomplished.

The most precious froglet ever. I call her Halftail.

And yet, even with their DNA scattered widely (the froglets have appeared in various other yards since emergence, according to neighborhood communications), the adult males are still at it, battling it out behind our house, keeping us on the edge of sleep until they finally shut up after midnight. (It’s usually about a four-hour chorus.) One of them barks like a seal, and I thought maybe it was another species joining the conversation. But I’ve decided it’s a gray tree frog’s special aggressive war cry. And that one mad warrior’s voice certainly stands out, especially when I have a migraine.

I suspect the pond will go quiet soon enough, when these uber competitors finally realize there’s no sex left to be had. The girls are done with you for now, you boneheads.

But dang, those froglets were adorable. I could hardly stand how cute they were! It was totally worth the late nights to witness their development and emergence. I do wonder, though, if next year even more males will find their way to our yard to take up a post around the pond, and whether the volume will finally reach unbearable.

I guess there’s always the broom.

Totally unrelated toad, for your ‘phib viewing pleasure. She’s very friendly, happy to come out and snatch a worm if you dangle one. We called her Sebastian because why not.

——

*It’s not a great photo of Daddy, but I took it blindly, hanging upside-down at the end of the rock shining a flashlight into the “cave” with one hand and trying not to drop my cell phone from the other. That second frog back there? Total surprise. A competitor, I’d guess. Perhaps they wrestled. Sorry I missed that.

Stuff Chris Found

By: | August 10, 2020

This first ran May 17, 2017, and Chris still finding stuff. He’s also gone on to serious work at the local historical society. His retirement looks to be going splendidly. So do his pandemic plans, as all he needs is a stockpile of postcards, the internet, and the ability to merge the lost past into the present.

Chris T. Whitaker, a neighbor, retired with a plan.  Most retired people’s plans are to travel or to follow up on a hobby or to have no plan at all – all of which seem to make these people happy — but as one self-educating photographer said to me, “You can show your wife just so many pictures and she can say, ‘how nice, dear,’ and then it starts to get old.”  You retire, you’re finally able to do exactly what you want to do, live for yourself only, and you might run into the problem of uselessness, meaninglessness. Anyway, this was not Chris’s problem; he had a plan.

He’d go to second-hand shops – he’s near a neighborhood rich in them – and find boxes of old photos.  He’d look for photos that had names written on the back, that were dated such that the people in it were clearly long gone, and that sometimes were of pretty women in fancy hats, or cute kids.  Then he’d buy those photos and track down those people.  That spiffy little delight in the photo up there is Lee Feete, born in 1899.

Chris tracks by beginning with the name on the photo, plus the date, and then by using publically-available sources, though some he has to pay for: newspaper databases, school yearbooks, census reports, cemetery records, Ancestry.com, military records.

He scans the photos into the computer and blows them up, and then examines the screen with a magnifiying glass. This, for instance, is Madlyn Eileen Haney as a baby.

And this is Madlyn Eileen’s high school picture.

And these are people whose names Chris doesn’t know — two boys dressed up, a girl in a plaid pinafore, and an old lady with a bad knee and a crutch.  But look over the one boy’s head, at the sideboard with the flowers and the trophy on it: there’s Madlyn Eileen’s high school picture.

Who ARE these people? How do they know Madlyn Eileen? My fingers itch just looking at them.

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Give a Slug a Pen

By: | August 7, 2020

I set down my pen next to a slug the other day, not your garden variety, but a beast of a banana slug near the central California coast under misty morning redwoods. The slug wasn’t so much lumbering as gliding at a hardly perceptible speed over dried leaves, under twigs. Setting the pen down, I wanted it for scale.

That’s when our engagement began. Or maybe it wasn’t me being engaged with, but my proxy, evidence of me. The slug seized upon my pen, wrapping its face around the tip.

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What to Do During a Pandemic? Go Occupy Those Forlorn Chairs

By: | August 3, 2020

During this summer of covid, and I’ve been thinking of what poet Billy Collins called those, “forlorn chairs/though at one time it must have seemed/a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.” Even situated, as they usually are, to take in the view, it’s hard for those chairs to compete with the attention-grabbing distractions found on our glowing screens.

If you’re not careful, you can spend hours looking at moving pictures and not reading things on your magical device. You start on a favorite news site, clicking through the headlines. Maybe you even open a story or two and read a couple of paragraphs. Then you leave those open tabs to visit a social media site, which sends you on another long string of click and skim. And these on-screen attractions are merely a distraction from your work and there are also the chores of daily life, and before you know it, the day is done and the chairs have sat empty once again.

But the coronavirus pandemic has given us a new reason to slow down and occupy those lonely chairs, and here at our farm, my husband and I are doing our part. Compared to all the shiny things beckoning from our screens, and those away-from-home activities that were once possible before covid, sitting on our front porch and watching the sun move across the sky might seem a little boring. Sure, we’ve got spectacular views of jagged mountains and deep canyons. But sunsets unfold slowly, and sitting still and paying attention requires a kind of patience that’s rarely called upon in the digital age. Which is why it feels so important to practice the art of just being — savoring the moment, for its ephemeral quality.

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What Didn’t Happen

By: | July 31, 2020

The most tired joke of 2020, besides some variation of “has anyone tried turning it off and then turning it back on again,” is that time isn’t real. That’s because it’s not a joke, and also because I am very tired. I know I am extremely fortunate to work from home, yet I am also disoriented by the sameness of every day, punctuated only by moments I leave the house: bike rides, runs, or dog walks. Instead, the only measurement of time that feels real are the things that should have happened this year.

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