To Make a Renaissance

By: | September 17, 2021

I‘d been thinking about this forever and wrote it up a while back, on January 17, 2012, back before 2020, before an endless pandemic; an ex-president who can’t give up power and a political reality that amounts to a second Civil War; and the natural disasters of hurricanes, floods, fires, and storms that are the worst in living memory. It’s pretty dark around here and it’s not over yet. This post wasn’t about the present darkness but you get the point.

To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one above: In 4 November, 1966, the waters of the Arno came to this height.

Florence is full of these signs. Most of them are from 1966, which was the most recent and worst of centuries of regular floods. They happen every 15 years or so, 56 of them since the first historic bad one in 1177. The Arno floods because the local weather swings wildly between dry and rainy and when it rains, it doesn’t stop. I was there in 2010, when it rained for 10 days straight, and while the Arno didn’t flood, for days it was ugly: it was a thick brown and fast, full of waves and whorls, making a frightening low roar. When the Arno does flood, it takes out the bridges, people lose their homes and businesses, ancient art and books are destroyed, people die. The flood in 1333 wasn’t the worst, but its timing was bad and for the next 15 years, Florence was visited by one disaster after another.  And after disaster came the Renaissance.

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Homeward bound

By: | September 15, 2021


A couple of days ago, I wrote “homeward bound” with my index finger across the caked dust on the back window of my truck topper. I packed it with two weeks’ worth of clothes, with backpacking gear, with work supplies and dog food and human food. Then, I whistled my dog into the cab and drove east from my apartment in Washington towards Colorado, to see my family in the town where I grew up, and to see friends like family on the state’s Western Slope, where I chose to live as I made my way through my first decade of adulthood. I looked forward to the time alone en route. I had just put in my first-ever offer on a house after several years of feeling unmoored and placeless in the Northwest, and was preoccupied with the idea of home: My destination—where mine had been for the first 30 years of my life; and the community behind me, where I had set the still-scary intention to build one now.

The drive was beautiful—the dry sage hills along the Columbia River, the cobalt water of Lake Coeur D’Alene, the rolling Bitterroot Mountains on the Idaho-Montana border. It was also long, and several miles into Montana, my stomach growled and my eyes drooped. Billboards claiming “Best. Milkshake. Ever.” beckoned me onto the exit for St. Regis. I thought the most dangerous thing I faced there was coronavirus—Montana’s rates are surging like everyone else’s—so I snugged an n95 mask tightly over my nose and mouth, and retrieved a huckleberry shake and fries and caffeine hit as quickly as possible. Then, I drove slowly towards a nearby dog park.

I was halfway across the parking lot when the front right end of the truck dropped violently. At first, I thought I had hit a pothole and destroyed the tire. When I got out to look, I saw only flat gravel, but the entire wheel jagged crazily out of alignment, almost completely broken off. The lower ball joint had suddenly and catastrophically failed, gleaming beneath like a hipbone ripped from the socket. I stared dumbly for several minutes, imagining the wheel and the truck parting ways on Lookout Pass, 35 minutes behind me, at 60 miles an hour. Or back in Spokane, Washington, where I’d had to swerve suddenly a couple hours earlier, also at 60 miles an hour, to avoid getting sideswiped by a sedan speeding across three lanes of traffic.

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Portrait of a Marriage

By: | September 10, 2021

Before you read on, we are pleased and thrilled and absolutely overjoyed to introduce New Person of LWON, Eric Wagner! Eric is a fabulous writer and chaser of birds based in Seattle, Washington, who has written for the likes of The Atlantic, High Country News, Audubon, and Orion. He has penned magazine articles about techy fire lookouts who obsess over beet-influenced pee and watercolorists who dip their brushes in vodka. He once wrote an amazing book about the penguins of Argentina, and once more recently wrote an amazing book about Mount St. Helens, a truly obsession-worthy place if ever there was one. We love him and we’re glad he’s here. We hope you are, too!

One evening a week or so ago, I hiked out to camp on the eastern flanks of Mount St. Helens, in a place called the Plains of Abraham. The breeze was brisk when I arrived, the sky pink with a few tufts of cloud. I boiled some water for dinner and watched the mountain’s great shadow reach out for Mount Adams across thirty miles of unbroken forest. By the time I had licked the pot clean the sun was gone, so I got into my sleeping bag, zipping it tight until just my eyes and nose were exposed. A dazzling mass of stars dotted the cold, clear sky. Beneath them the mountain loomed, blacker than night. The conditions were perfect, I thought, for what I had come to do: end things, once and for all, with Mount St. Helens.

I first met the mountain, from a professional standpoint at least, a little more than six years ago. Tasked with writing a book about it, I was at an event called The Pulse. This was a regular gathering of scientists who worked at Mount St. Helens, some since the 1980 eruption. For a week I listened to a parade of -ologists—ecologists, geologists, hydrologists, others—all the while trying frantically to scribble their every word. When my cramped hand needed a break, I stepped away and looked with a growing sense of despair at the mountain. There it sat, massive and austere. Would I be able to learn even a small fraction of all there was to know about it? I had my doubts.  

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on resilience

By: | September 8, 2021
a cascading bonsai tree atop a military artillery case

Back when plants were just background noise to me, I assumed bonsai were just like that — tiny trees by nature, just a miniature version of the world’s bigger trees. There are miniature horses and pygmy goats, so why not little trees? Eventually, I learned I was totally wrong, as I am about many things, and that the process of cultivating bonsai is high art, achievable only through careful maintenance and patience. What looked effortless to me, a clueless onlooker, was often the result of decades of vigilance and care.

In the spring, a friend suggested we visit the Pacific Bonsai Museum. I’d grown closer to these friends over the previous couple of months; after the murder of six Asian women in Atlanta, we found comfort in one another through hard conversations about what it means to be Asian in America, and how to find peace when it felt like there was so little around us. I expected our bonsai field trip to be breezy distraction from all that, an outing where Asian identity was peripheral to natural beauty. But again, I was wrong. The museum offered the history of each bonsai, often with biographies of the people who cultivated them. Here in the U.S., the stories of bonsai are inextricably linked with Japanese American history, and, in particular, this country’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Alongside each beautiful tree were heart-wrenching details about the Japanese Americans who kept the tradition of bonsai alive in this country. As Japanese families were forced into internment camps, bonsai practitioners had to sell their nursery stock and leave their livelihoods — and their life’s work — behind. While incarcerated, bonsai practitioners still managed to keep their art going, creating new bonsai and caring for them, while teaching others the art. One practitioner, Juzaburo Furuzawa, cultivated a Japanese Black Pine from a seed he planted in a can while imprisoned in Utah; it’s on display now. You may have heard of it when it and another bonsai were stolen in February 2020 and then mysteriously returned just days later.

Bonsai became a practice of cultivating hope, a preservation of tradition, a symbol of perseverance. The act of caring for these decades-old — or in some cases, centuries-old — trees is a way to honor the struggle of practitioners, a reminder that we cannot forget the injustice of Japanese incarceration. The last image displayed in the exhibit is a large sign near the exit, which reads: “What kind of ancestors do we want to be?”

In a culture that rewards speed and growth, bonsai and their history remind me that there’s also value in slowness and maintenance, the thousands of tiny steps needed to care for the good things we have. I was recently gifted a juniper bonsai, and its care instructions were strangely poignant: “Without pruning back the branches, the tree would grow too large to be supported by the confined root structure.” As our world is reshaped by the pandemic, how do we thoughtfully prune? What do we want our root structure to support?

(If you live anywhere close to Puget Sound or find yourself in the area before November, I highly recommend visiting the museum and seeing the exhibit for yourself, or getting a group of friends together for a virtual tour through Zoom.)

Shitty robots and their shitty blog posts

By: | September 6, 2021

I recently took an ultra-fun workshop run by the Queen of Shitty Robots, Simone Giertz. It’s the second of hers I’ve done, the first being a lightening round of Lego Mindstorm building to create robots that would then be raced against each other over the distance of one meter. This time, we were creating robot artists whose little servomotors would brush a canvas with markers and paintbrushes and highlighters to express their little robot souls.

My team went for iconography and a predictable result, on the right.

When it comes to artificial intelligence and creative tasks, results are not predictable, per se, but they do rely on what you feed the AI. I did some poking around to see whether I could create a blog post ‘in the style of Last Word on Nothing’, because I wondered whether the dozens of writers who have contributed to this site, past and present, had a collective style.

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The Caldor Fire Donation Center

By: | September 3, 2021

(A poem for the evacuees. Pete and I are safe.)

At the rummage sale at the end of the world, you don’t have to pay for anything.

Strangers disgorge their closets for you: Dirty tennis shoes, used underwear, new dresses from Ann Taylor with the tags still attached. You rifle through the clothes, trying to ignore the greasy residue they leave on your fingers.

There’s a baseball cap brought back as a souvenir from Dubrovnik. A soft, chevron-patterned airplane blanket that someone wore draped over their knees on a first class flight with United Airlines. Miniature Lucky Brand jeans that could fit a three-year-old, rows of baby shoes, a polo shirt from a PGA tournament.

You did not choose well in the final minutes. You are like the man who fled his house carrying only tennis balls, the woman who filled her purse with oatmeal. 

Now people expect you to make better choices, and to be grateful: Yes! to the ugly shoes with comfortable insoles. No! to the floor-length, faux fur coat and this pair of four-inch heels studded with green rhinestones.

And yet. That coat! It’s 100 degrees out during the day, but the nights are getting chilly. Its glossy dark fur reminds you of the black bear on the highway with scorched paws, crawling on its forearms. Who knows what you will need in this new life you’re going to build. 

You take the coat. You leave the heels.

Doom and the dogmometer

By: | September 1, 2021

As we head into wave after wave of 100+ degrees Farhenheit temperatures in my home valley in Washington, this post from 2017 seemed worth re-upping:

One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall health of the planet. The Arctic, for example, is regarded as a bellwether for the catastrophes of climate change that will soon afflict us all, thanks to its temperatures that are rising faster than those in any other region on Earth. There’s also the escalating loss of glacier ice around the world. Or this week’s “heat attack,” which will basically force residents of the American Southwest to go hide deep underground in caves or risk perishing in temperatures predicted to climb past 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

But since long before the famous hockey stick graph, scientists have also secretly relied on another, much more ancient analog to skry the hot ’n’ doomy future: The dogmometer.

The dogmometer is an accurate indicator of ambient air temperature, gradating from “so cold I have reduced my body to the size of a fist and buried my face in my own butt” to “all the other dog owners buy kiddie pools when it’s this hot, you asshat” and “OK I’m basically dead of hotness I will never move again not even for treats.” But its readings are more precise than a regular thermometer’s, because they also incorporate a dog’s uncanny ability to pick up on ambient vibes to put those temperatures in local, regional, and even global ecological and geopolitical context.

Even better, you don’t need some fancy degree to read a dogmometer. And you’d better learn, because with Trump in the Whitehouse, U.S. government funding for climate change research is bound to plunge. Here, let’s go through some examples.

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