This was Katherine May’s pandemic book, a book haunted by lockdowns and mass death. Needing to feel grounded, May dug into the earth beneath her feet. Not in an ickily sentimental way – she makes it clear that Whitstable’s stone circle is modern, and that the sacred spaces of Dungeness are its WW2-era sound mirrors and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. She admits that her garden is a mass of weeds and that staying up late to watch meteor showers is tiring and chilly.
May’s pragmatism makes awe accessible. She learns the names of wildflowers (viper’s bugloss! Known to Australians as Salvation Jane or Paterson’s curse) and attends a class on bees. I listened to this book between drives to Rancho Viejo and bike rides to Heron’s Head, my own sacred landscapes. Big storms are coming. There’s no way out but through, and enchantment is one of the ways through.
(I usually end up short-changing good books toward the end of my list so this year I’m going to split things up into separate reviews instead.) Ed Yong’s An Immense World turned up on everyone’s lists of favorites the year it came out, and deservedly so. Late to the party, I listened to the audiobook which Ed Yong himself read brilliantly. Not to be a shallow bitch but the narrator of an audiobook makes a huge difference. A bad narrator leaves you struggling to parse whatever sense the author was trying to make, whereas the author reading his own work competently draws you by gentle degrees all the way into his own sphere of perception.
Check out that segue! Because this book is about animals’ spheres of perception – their umwelt – and how their various sensory capabilities, so different from ours, mean that they live in overlapping but fundamentally nonidentical universes from us and from one another. This is, in fact, a book about empathy. However well the narrator reads, we can’t experience life from the point of view of another being, but in spite of the impossibility of doing so, it’s incredibly important to try.
I did think about my political opponents, listening to this book before the election. I tried to imagine the world from their point of view, and how their choices – ruinous from where I’m standing – might make sense to them. It was hard and probably futile but it was one small thing that helped me to clamber out of the impact crater in the awful days immediately after.
I tested positive for Covid on Sunday, my first time. The last of my family to get it, nearly five years into this global panny-D in which we find ourselves, I thought I was doing the tests wrong.
I’d been run-down since Thursday. Cortland Street was closed to traffic for the first time but I missed Halloween. On Saturday afternoon I could only ride my bike as far as Potrero del Sol, to look at the Day of the Dead altars and the squares of the AIDS quilt in the crisp autumn sun. Marigolds and grief. I cried for the lost boys who should have been my queer elders.
By Saturday night my temperature was 100.6 and it took some effort to breathe. When I finally called my doctors on Sunday, wheezing, they sent me to the emergency room. In the friendly robot taxi I wept for the people who went to the ER with Covid in 2020, and who said goodbye to their families through iPads, and who died. Me, I had x-rays which ruled out pneumonia, was given paxlovid and all the steroids and came home to quarantine in the attic.
Election day is a more reliable trauma trigger even than the week in which both my parents died. I spent the morning text banking in Michigan, then I howled all through therapy, deep, racking sobs for all that we have lost. Afterwards the cats insisted on taking me out into the garden, where the linnets and phoebes and hummingbirds and crows had various constructive things to say.
I took portraits of the sticky monkeyflower and hummingbird sage and Douglas iris. I chatted to my sister in outback NSW. I scrubbed out the bird-feeder with hot water and soap. That’s about all I had in me, and now I’m back in my college kid’s bed, looking over Excelsior and San Bruno Mountain as the sun sets into the Pacific. May all beings know peace.
Last night the Saturn V looked very graceful, suspended by a cross fire of searchlights which made it sparkle like a delicate opal and silver necklace against the black sky. Today it is a machine again
He could watch long, solitary waves rise up in the middle of a relative nowhere, deep in the South Atlantic or far off the Alaskan coast, giant walls of water that were built up until they broke over themselves, having come and gone, gorgeous, and having been invisible to everybody but him.
We might discover life in other solar systems someday, but for now there’s nothing but chaos and blackness and desolation for billions of light-years in every direction. Yet here in the middle of all that is this magnificent place, this brilliant blue planet, teeming with life. It really is a paradise.
It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived here how much we start to miss nature. In the future there will be a word for the specific kind of nostalgia we feel for living things.
The city is strange and gorgeous at the dark end of the year. Summer lingers into September, and then on October first, as if someone had flipped a switch, it’s suddenly and irrevocably fall. You crave soup and pie. By November you are riding your bike to yoga in a dry sunlit cold that makes your bones ache.
Last week Lenny and I had a private lesson with the boss trainer to work on our canter depart. I’ve been riding for forty years but this program demands absolute correctness, and it’s fiendishly difficult. To canter, you sort of pick the entire horse up with your thighs and put him back down on his outside hind leg. Oh, and you sit perfectly still while you are doing it. Sound impossible? It is.
And then Lenny and I came around a corner and I saw where our canter depart should be, and I showed Lenny, and he stepped into it, soft and round and through. For a blinding instant I felt superpowered. We have yet to reproduce our feat.
On the drive home the marine layer rolled in with the early sunset. 280 was a freeway through giant trees – not mere redwoods, but dense black trees so huge they blotted out half the sky. 21st century cars zooming through a primeval forest, the landscape of the reptile brain.
Riding – not even bothering to compete, just riding for its own sake – is the most ephemeral of arts, there and gone almost before you can acknowledge its presence. Like the city circling the sun as the planet spins on its axis, that scrubbed-clean sky, those ghosts of monstrous dawn sequoias; I write them down because memory is the only trace they leave. As John Darnielle sings, “All of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” To live is to bear witness.
We’ve been going to Benjamin Dean lectures on and off since the kids were tiny. It’s pretty cool that our youngest, nigh-adult child now enjoys coming with us. Last month we looked at the Galilean moons, including Ganymede with its own magnetosphere and our beloved Europa. This month Stanford professor Susan Clark walked us through the magnetic fields in the interstellar medium (ISM), the dust and gas between the stars.
She was charmingly annoyed about this name. “I’m pretty sure oceanographers don’t study ‘the stuff between the whales.’ I don’t think atmospheric scientists study ‘the stuff between the birds.'” To be fair, she acknowledged, the parts of ISM that are dust show up as black blobs in visible light, like Barnard 68. But if your eyes could see into the infrared spectrum, you would see the stars beyond.
One cool thing about the dust is that its particles are amorphous; another cool thing is that they spin. As they spin, they align with magnetic fields. Because they’re aligned, they polarize the light from the stars behind them, and the heat radiation they emit. So that by examining the polarization of that distant light and heat – by seeing with different eyes – amazing observatories like Planck and Arecibo and SOFIA can map the magnetic fields between the stars. (That main image got projected onto the dome of the Morrison Planetarium. It was astounding. Collective intake of breath.)
Of course the Planck and SOFIA missions have ended, and Arecibo suffered catastrophic mechanical failure. “Everything I love…” said Professor Clark sorrowfully. All eyes turn to the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Space Telescope. There is so much more to learn! Very good science lectures are like being at a party listening to someone absolutely fascinating hold forth on their field of special interest; they’re like touching grass, except the grass is interstellar space. They’re delightful.
It’s golden hour and the last sunlight is drenching the trees around our little treehouse. I just ran to the shops and on the way, had an overwhelming urge to listen to what is maybe the Alan Parsons Project’s weirdest song, certainly one that has stayed with me these forty years: Ammonia Avenue. Eric Woolfson wrote it after visiting the ICI petrochemical plant in Billingham, in the UK. It’s a hymn to science and progress, of sorts: “And who are we to criticize or scorn the things they do?” It might have been reading Lydia Kiesling’s excellent Mobility that brought it to mind, or driving past enormous industrial facilities dropping C back at college. But it was probably gazing into the heart of a nuclear reactor.
It’s a small General Atomics training reactor, the only one in the world operated by undergraduates. In the chemistry lobby where we met for a tour there is a small museum exhibit. This includes one of the hunting decoy ducks removed from the cooling pond in 2012 because the NRC found them unprofessional (“I tend to agree,” said our guide) and a chipped piece of orange Fiestaware beside the clicking Geiger counter it was setting off.
The reactor itself is in a small brick building behind the chemistry building. It looks like a garage. You enter via a hallway with a glass window looking into the reactor room, which looks like a weirdly industrial small indoor swimming pool. In the control room we met the operators on duty. There are the deadly serious panels from the 60s and 90s and 2020s tracking the reactor behavior, and there are the Homer Simpson mousepads and the joke tchotchkes like a switch labeled “Fission” and “Fusion.” Our tour guides and the operators all had jewel colored hair and facial piercings and badges with their pronouns beside the dosimeters above their hearts.
In the reactor hall we leaned on the railings and gazed thirty feet into the aluminium-lined pool. Long control rods descend into a squat dark cylinder with dozens of narrower cylinders running through it like wires through a cable: the graphite containment, the uranium fuel rods. The core. It’s cooled by a closed loop of water that runs into a heat exchanger where city water takes away the excess heat. If the system lost electricity, the control rods of boron silicate, a neutron poison, would drop into the core via gravity and stop the reaction. That’s the theory, anyway. The operators can also drop the control rods by hitting the big red SCRAM button.
Our tour guide turned off the lights and we saw a miracle, Cherenkov radiation, generated by neutrons moving faster than the speed of light in water and creating a visual equivalent to a sonic boom. It is the most beautiful blue you can possibly imagine, like Yves Klein blue but made of light. It’s like gazing into the unknowable quantum essence of the universe. And then the operators hit the scram button and the core lost criticality and the blue faded away.
That night I read Serhii Plokhy’s Atoms and Ashes, a followup to his excellent Chernobyl that looks at all six of the major nuclear accidents and their causes. I’m a Gen Xer still astonished to have outlived the Soviet Union. I grew up almost equally terrified of atoms for war and for peace. But the idea of powering our cities with magical hot rocks is arguably no worse than doing so with necromantically resurrected dead dinosaurs. How do you weigh six major atomic catastrophes against the ongoing invisible disaster of climate change? How do you reconcile all of that with the knowledge that nearly everyone who got us into this predicament was acting in good faith? I honestly have no idea.
Everything went impossibly right. We spent months trying and failing to sort big kid’s passport and didn’t have it in hand until the very hour of our original flight, which we had to rebook at vast expense. Despite this I managed to overlap with dear friends in Paris and spend our first afternoon together at a cafe in the square. There was a fricken accordion player, it was ridiculous.
The fast trains to Narbonne were sold out so we rented a car in Paris instead, picked a village halfway there at random and ended up having one of the best meals of the trip in an absolutely gorgeous covered market in Souillac. We revisited the lovely abbeys at Fontfroide and Lagrasse and finally made it to Niaux Cave, which instantly joined Newgrange as one of my favorite places in the entire world.
Back in Paris we got Bastille Day free entry to the Louvre and I went to a concert in Sainte-Chapelle – Vivaldi and Pachelbel. Shivers up my spine. Then Jeremy and I rented bikes and accidentally crashed the victory rides around Paris with Team Rynkeby. Everything planned half-assedly and coming together at the last minute into delight. Amazing grace.
We knew coming in here that the tall green stand of top-heavy, shallow-rooted blackwood acacia trees would have to come down, and that we would be lucky if they didn’t come down on the house. We lost them to this winter’s unending chain of atmospheric rivers. Even expected, their loss is incalculable. They were invasive, but the hummingbirds and woodpeckers and grey squirrels loved them, and so did I.
Without their shade and shelter, my little garden feels much more exposed. The patterns of daily sunlight have changed and the fog wind whips across the deck. I got two lovely Japanese maples from Flowercraft and put one on the deck and one in the shady alley above the stairs. I worried for the one in the shade, but the deck tree blew over half a dozen times and is dry and shocky. I have put it with its friend in what is now the maple courtyard, the shaded tree still green and thriving.
After considering buckeye – toxic to cats – and bay laurel – a carrier of sudden oak death – I noticed a tree at the barn, on the bank of the creek, with maple leaves and a weeping habit. Box elder. Paul at Bay Natives had two of them in fifteen gallon pots, over six feet tall. He’s had them for years and was delighted they finally found a home. They barely fit in the Prius, which is still full of their leaves. Aisea planted them yesterday and this morning I drank my bowl of latte in their dappled shade. No single thing abides, but all things flow.
From Barcelona through Chris’s community in Vidalia and over the Pyrenees to Villerouge-la-Cremade, and back again. Cathar castles and Montserrat and the Med.
Even more beautiful: from San Francisco to Redding and up and over the Cascade Range and along the Rogue River Valley to Reed College in Portland. The State of Jefferson, the high desert where my wild horse Lenny was born.
Driving home from a fantastic riding lesson with Carrie (Lenny swinging his back and reaching forward into the bridle), I stopped the car by the side of the road to watch a great blue heron standing on the green hill of the horsepasture.
The heron considered me gravely before returning its attention to a gopher hole at its feet. Faster than thought, it struck and lifted out a soft, blind gopher baby.
To my surprise the heron dropped the baby at once. It fluffed out the creamy feathers on its S of a neck, opened its beak, reared back its head and raised its crest, all dinosaur threat. Before I had a second to marvel, a bright shadow flew in the heron’s face. The heron spread its wings and climbed into the air like a pterodactyl.
A golden eagle landed on the gopher, mantled over it to glare at me, then flew away with the prey in its talons.
A twenty-minute meeting cancelled at the last moment. I snuck outside into the garden; a guilty pleasure of working from home. We’re having a heat wave and the air is flower-fragrant and full of bees, like it is in the south of France.
I took the cats with me. There are rules. Thimble has to wear a collar with a locator tag, because she loves to vault the fence into the neighbors’ gardens. Since last Memorial Day, when she terrified us by staying away a night and a day, her jaunts seldom last more than an hour. But I fret – there are coyotes on our street. The tag lets us play a cheery mechanical tune. Fugitive cat sonar.
Hazel has to wear a harness with a tag on it. She occasionally tries to jump the fence but isn’t as fast or determined as Thimble. It’s easier to pluck her down. The harness is to acclimate her, so that she can be a good college companion animal for kid the elder.
Alice is not required to wear any equipment. She has jumped the fence twice but is mostly an amiable plush bowling ball.
I did some more weeding. There is always weeding. Thimble rolled luxuriantly on the concrete. Hazel sphinxed narrow-eyed on the lawn. I overshot my mini-break by three minutes and had to race back inside. I scooped Hazel and herded Thimble, but Alice was hidden in the Melica imperfecta and I couldn’t locate her in a hurry. I sent Jeremy out for retrieval. He couldn’t find her easily either. When he brought her back in, her fur was brown and hot from the sun, and dusted with pollen.
