Summer Feet

By: | August 9, 2021

Right now, my summer feet are having fun in the beautiful red dirt in the Southwest. This post first ran in August 2019.

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.

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Image by Flicker user ɘsinɘd under Creative Commons license

Rivers of Noise

By: | August 6, 2021

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Manhattan rattles my ears. Subway lines shake the fine bones inside my head. Cars honking on the street change the way my brain physically functions. When I stayed in the city a week ago I noticed the same as I always do: noise.

I live in a quiet place off the grid in Western Colorado and when I plunge into urban melee it is a primarily aural experience. Much of the city runs at about 85 decibels, a level that takes just eight continuous hours to permanently kink the hairs transmitting sound through the inner ear. The average subway ride comes to around 112 dB, somewhere between a shouted conversation and a power saw going off near your head.

An audiology researcher in Berkeley, California, informally tested the sound of his local transit system and found sustained peaks at the level of a rock concert (around 120 dB). On top of that, he noted, many passengers were wearing ear buds, listening to music loud enough to mask the external noise, far exceeding limits on volume and time-exposure that lead to permanent damage and hearing loss.

I’ve made a habit of seeking out the quieter places in the city, this time taking shelter in a poetry reading room. At other times I’ve gone to Wall Street at dawn on a Sunday morning for its towering quiet or, once, the Ramble in Central Park at night, also quiet but disturbingly dangerous. Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): Resonance

By: | August 4, 2021

Our mother died on August 7, 2010, quite a while ago now. Our father had already died way back in 1978. Last Monday, I noticed the date, thought it was probably their wedding anniversary, and then thought, “Oh, Mom will be sad today.” Then I thought, “No, she’s dead too.” Everybody does this, deaths never quite go away, do they. This first ran on August 17, 2011.

My mother was an old lady, she’d lived a good and useful life, and she died a year and ten days ago.  I hadn’t been keeping track of her death’s anniversary but I didn’t need to; I only had to figure out why I was walking around feeling, for no good reason, sad.  One of my cousins wrote to me, “I’m sorry you are sad, Annie. Thursday my new couch was delivered. I cried as my old one left – apparently I had an undiscovered attachment to it.”  My cousin recently moved to a new house with a new love; the old couch was from her old life, years ago, when her husband had died.  Sad in early August?  Crying over couches? Really? Science, as it often does, has a nice metaphor: resonance.

When I was a kid, I’d open the piano lid and tap a string and it would hum; and then like magic, all on its own, another string hummed too.  I thought the strings were malfunctioning and quit thinking about it.  Obviously I was a young English major; a young physicist would have tapped some more strings and then looked it all up and found the strings hummed because they were vibrating, oscillating; and that each string had its own native note, its natural frequency of oscillation, its resonant frequency. And if one string hums at that particular frequency, then as if in sympathy the other hums too.

In fact, everything – atoms, molecules, crystals, desks, skyscrapers — has its own resonant frequency at which, depending on its mass and stiffness, it most wants to oscillate.  So resonance is a response; it’s when two things are linked in some way or somehow touching, and then one taps or vibrates or oscillates and the other responds at that same frequency.   

If you’re an army crossing a suspension bridge, for instance, you shouldn’t march in cadence in case your cadence happens to match the bridge’s resonant frequency and the bridge jumps in step with you.  If you rock a rocking chair too fast or slow, the rocker will just sit there; rock at the resonant frequency and the baby falls asleep.  If you pump a swing too fast or slow, nothing much happens; pump at the resonant frequency, it’s almost like flight.  If you’re in a building and the earth quakes at the building’s resonant frequency, get out fast.

Resonance is actually more complicated than this.  Resonances can be forced or driven, all the way to disaster.  Pump the swing harder and harder at that right frequency and you risk breaking your neck.  Sing loudly at a wineglass at the right frequency and it’ll shatter.  Google a video of the resonating Tacoma Narrows bridge, nicknamed Galloping Gertie, before it fell into the river.  The genius inventor, Nicola Tesla, supposedly said that if he could figure out the resonant frequency of the earth, he could split it to pieces.  An aside: don’t google Tesla, who attracts enthusiasts, unless your bullshit detectors are robust, hair-trigger, and highly-informed (though you should read this novel; it’s charming).

But disaster isn’t part of this metaphor.  The metaphor is simple resonance — like the sympathetic piano strings, like the resonance you notice when you first meet someone and know you’re going to get along.  We use the metaphor all the time:  we’re in tune, we’re on the same wavelength, we’re in synch.   Death set up a resonance with early August, with a couch; another early August, a different couch, and there like magic is death.

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Photo credits:  couch – bartek.langer; swing – John Garghan

Snapshot: Butterfly

By: | August 2, 2021

A butterfly in my kitchen—that’s a surprise. It would have had to flutter up a lot of stairs and down a lot of hallways to get here from outside. I suspect it actually came in with some kale. I think it’s a cabbage white butterfly, a sweet little agricultural pest that arrived on this side of the Atlantic in the 19th century and has been eating its way through cabbages and their relatives ever since. I captured it in a plastic container and walked it down the stairs to freedom.

Photo: Helen Fields

Mushroom Misadventures

By: | July 30, 2021

Mushrooming is more than a passion. It’s an obsession, and after two poor seasons in a row, we are finally experiencing some fungus among us in Colorado. Which means that it has become very difficult for me to go hiking or running or biking, because as soon as my mushroom eyes catch glimpse of a nice shroom, I stop, drop and pick. The pursuit is the fun of it. And once I find one nice bolete (the king of mushrooms), I know there must be more and I can’t be satisfied until I find the next.

Yesterday I tried to go for a mountain bike ride, but a few miles in, I spotted the cap of a king bolete and had to stop. Immediately, I realized I had a problem. I had no basket and the beautiful mushroom was too big to fit in my jersey pocket. In desperation, I wrapped the shroom in my rain jacket, tied it to my handlebars and headed back to the trailhead. All was fine until I hit a rock and the jacket went flying. Luckily it had a soft landing, so although a piece of the cap was destroyed, most of the mushroom remained intact. Still, I didn’t want to give it time to disintegrate, so I rushed home to sauté it in butter before it became bruised. The mushroom made a meal, and I didn’t even care that my ride was cut short.

blackberry season

By: | July 28, 2021

The first thing I learned about Seattle is that there are entire hillsides held up by blackberries. On my first visit here, weeks before we were set to move, we signed a lease on an apartment and celebrated with a walk in Discovery Park, where we stumbled upon a cornucopia of blackberries growing along a trail. That was the first moment I felt sure I would like this city after all, even if I had reservations about its reputation for cold rain and cold people.

In the fall and spring, we curse blackberry thorns as we work to pull them out of our garden beds, our yards. It’s a battle we won’t win. In the winter, I pay $6 for a clamshell of sad, bitter blackberries shipped in from thousands of miles away. But for a few weeks in the summer, the city is full of free blackberries and I feel like the richest woman in the world. Right now, there’s an absolute embarrassment of riches right around the corner from our place, and we make a detour there every time we leave the house. Walking the dog? Stop at the blackberry patch. Catching the bus? Take some berries for the road. Tipsy on the way home from dinner? Have some dessert.

Yesterday, I stopped there on the way home from a lovely lunch with friends. (Is there anything more decadent than lunch dessert?) In the last few days, more berries have turned from green to red to black, and some have shriveled on the vine. I thought about grabbing a container from home, and maybe even a step ladder to get at the higher vines, so that I could pick enough berries for a pie. But something about it felt wrong; who am I to hoard these riches? I’ve delighted in seeing other neighbors pause here, marveling at the unexpected gift of fresh, sun-warmed berries. I think about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass — “Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others.” The magic of street berries lies in the joy of stumbling upon such abundance, and the acknowledgment that good things are ephemeral. Take your handful and move on.

Hugs, Interrupted

By: | July 26, 2021

Early on in the pandemic, a few days before Switzerland’s first lockdown, participants in an international colloquium arrived in Basel and immediately started to flounder as they tried to navigate new norms for social interaction: 

“Hey,” said one conference-goer to another, waving. 

“Are you doing the elbow thing? Or are you doing the other thing?” her fellow asked. 

The first person extended her right toe, and the other reciprocated, completing a right foot-bump. Person One then presented her left foot, but Person Two got flustered, responding late and using the right foot twice. To researchers observing a video of the exchange, the second woman’s delay indicated that she was a “novice” foot-bumper.

I stumbled on these tales of footsie faux pas in a study published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics. The paper is part of an ongoing project at the University of Basel, in which researchers are trying to understand how greetings like handshakes and hugs have changed over the course of the pandemic, using videos of interactions in the university, parks, shops, and markets. Early in the pandemic, greetings like hugs and handshakes went from routine to “hesitated, suspended, and yet still completed,” the team found. But as the pandemic progressed, the same gestures were “resisted, refused,” and ultimately abandoned. (Example: Someone named Eva tries to hug someone named Rick. Rick waggles his index finger at her and clicks his tongue in disapproval. Eva laughs, lowers her arms, and shrugs.)

Eventually, some social groups adopted novel rituals, like air hugs and toe taps, to replace the riskier options. But wasn’t easy for people to learn these new modes of greeting, and the interactions often read like experimental theatrical productions with avante garde staging — the characters could be speaking from the insides of dustbins or buried in the ground, like in Samuel Beckett’s plays. In another transcript, poor Person Two (Ariane below) attempts once again to greet people properly after watching people named Denise and Chuck elbow-bump, and finds only existential confusion:

Ariane: Is this the new, uh. This is the new style?
Chuck: Heh heh.
Ariane: It happens very fast. We all need to progress.
Denise: Yeah.
Ariane: So I was talking with Joan earlier. We were this…(extends right arm)… Do we hug or do we not hug?
Denise: Heh hah.
Chuck: I don’t know.
(Ariane makes a ‘hugging’ gesture, both arms.)
Ariane: Yeah, you have to ask.
Chuck: I don’t know.
Denise: Hah hah. (Moves both elbows.)

There’s nothing surprising about the study’s findings, or even new, it was published more than a year ago. But I read the disjointed transcripts over and over because they feel to me like how I and many of the friends and colleagues I’ve talked to lately are feeling: no longer able to rely on the new norms and habits we established during the pandemic, but not yet able to go back to the old ones, either. Emerging from our pandemic chrysalises, we less like glittering social butterflies than hesitant, vulnerable larvae, uncertain what’s acceptable or safe to do. We need time to develop new boundaries, routines, and rituals — all of which, we know, will be subject to rapid change.

When a concept like an “air hug” acquires new layers of meaning, I recently learned, linguists describe it as “sedimentation,” as if gestures and symbols and the meanings and feelings that accrue to them are like the particles of silt that cumulatively change a river’s course and tell its story. Who knows if we’ll come out of this pandemic as foot-bumpers or elbow-tappers or air huggers, or if all these coping strategies will wash out over time. But I find the idea of sedimentation kind of appealing: If nothing else, it suggests that disorienting array of social options we’re exploring together will settle down and add up to something someday.

Notes from a constituent

By: | July 23, 2021
Catherine McKenna swooshes out of a building

Canada’s politics are stable enough that I can afford to be, more or less, a single-issue voter. Six years ago, I wrote to the incoming member of parliament for my riding – a candidate for whom I did not vote.

“Dear Ms. McKenna:

Congratulations on your new position as our Member of Parliament.

My parents live across the street from you, and I grew up there when Celia Franca lived in the little house next door to you. [various other personal details]. I’m a science journalist and author.

I went to your website during the campaign, and the issues your video talked about were more local than my own focus, so I ultimately voted for the Green Party. However, you will have my full support and campaign engagement in the next election if you do one thing during your current term: Agitate consistently for immediate action on the climate crisis.

Continue reading →