A Certain Slant of Light

Exciting news from the Hummingbird Cottage: a Canada goose is nesting by the lake, right across from my patio! There are two geese, actually, and sometimes one is on the nest and the other patrolling, but sometimes both on the lake, dipping their heads underwater so their white back ends stick up in the air.

So far no sign of goslings, but I’m keeping an eye out. The pond might be christened Gosling Pond.

However, I also believe that there’s a kingfisher (!!) in the area, and if I can get a positive ID on the bird, the pond will likely be Kingfisher Pond instead. I am not very confident in my bird identification skills and even less so than usual in this case because I would LOVE to have a kingfisher, and therefore fear deluding myself. But I’ve seen it more than once and feel cautiously hopeful that I have not after all led myself astray.

Other birds in the area: lots of robins. Cardinals. Blue jays. A lot of little brown birds that I vaguely classify as “sparrows,” although I’m sure some of them are chickadees. A lovely little red bird, smaller than a cardinal and without the distinctive crest, very red at the front and fading to brown at the back. I saw that one in the tree outside my office window, which is on the second story so I am of a height with the birds in the trees.

The office is a fancy name for a table pushed up under the window, where I do my Sunday Writing Mornings. Mostly I’m working on short stories, and I’m building up a little stash: seven so far! This is also the room where I practice my dulcimer (most recently working on “Scotland the Brave”), and think about practicing my tin whistle, but I haven’t managed to take the plunge on that one yet.

It’s getting warm enough to plant, so I need to get started in the garden. There’s a rosemary plant that appears to have overwintered, as there’s green coming into the tips of its gray leaves, and some very happy mint on the shady side of the house. Not sure what kind. I brought a little inside and Bramble was very interested, starting whizzing around the house, and then either jumped or fell off the upstairs balcony into the living room. (He was fine. He has been courting this experience for weeks, as he considers the balcony rail a fun enrichment opportunity for cats.)

My composting efforts were met with great enthusiasm by the wildlife community, by which I mean that something dug them up repeatedly until it ate every last bit that it found appetizing. Strongly suspect the agency of a possum that I saw waddling across the patio one morning. This is probably a heartening sign of biodiversity, but as I don’t wish to open a buffet for possums, the composting is on hold as I consider next steps.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Winter Cottage, a wonderful book! Near the beginning of the Great Depression, Minty and Eggs are on the road with their sweet but feckless father when their car breaks down… right next to someone’s charming isolated lakeshore summer cottage. As their current destination is the back bedroom of an aunt who emphatically does not want to put them up, they make only some half-hearted attempts to fix the car before settling into the cottage for the winter. (Conveniently, they arrive with a winter’s worth of provisions, left over from their father’s latest failed business venture: a grocery store.) Exactly as cozy as a book with such a premise should be.

I also read Gerald Durrell’s Catch Me a Colobus, because I realized that the local library has a few of his books I hadn’t read and instantly could not survive another moment with a fresh Gerald Durrell book in my life. This one is a bit of a hodgepodge, I suspect because Durrell wrote it swiftly to get funds to shore up his zoo, which is mostly what the first third of the book is about, as he returned from a collecting trip to find the zoo hovering on the edge of bankruptcy. We continue on a trip to Sierra Leone for his first BBC series (this is the bit that the title comes from, as colobus monkeys are high on his list for the collecting trip), and end with a trip to Mexico to collect the rare Teporingo, a volcano-dwelling rabbit in danger of extinction.

Although hopping from continent to continent like this makes the book a bit formless, Durrell’s prose is a delight as always. I love his metaphors, perfectly apt and entirely unexpected: the “slight squeak” of a Teporingo, “like somebody rubbing a damp thumb over a balloon,” or the experience of walking through a forest of massive bamboo stalks, which “creak and groan musically” in the slightest wind; “It must have sounded like that rounding the Horn in an old sailing ship in high wind.”

What I’m Reading Now

Traipsing along in Women’s Weird. In any anthology, the quality is inevitably a bit uneven, but overall it’s quite high. The scariest story so far is May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” (a pair of lovers stuck together in Hell for all eternity, even though in life they deeply bored each other); Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol” is a classic spooky ghost story, while my favorite for sheer strength of voice is Edith Nesbit’s “The Shadow.” Oh, props to Margery Lawrence for making a saucepan deeply ominous in “The Haunted Saucepan.” The way it just sits there, boiling, on a cold stove…

I should be hitting D. K. Broster’s story (“Couching at the Door”) next week. Excited to report back!

What I Plan to Read Next

An account of getting distracted by Winter Cottage and Catch Me a Colobus, I have made almost no progress on the books I earnestly desired to make progress on last week. Well, such is the reading life. Sometimes a book comes along that you want to read more than anything else, and it’s best to strike while the iron is hot.

J. B. MacKinnon’s The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be is about the human relationship with the natural world, a vastly complicated subject which I will attempt to tackle in list form. (As usual, I will probably manage to miss some key point that is absolutely in the book but slipped my mind in the gap between reading and writing.) MacKinnon’s points include, but are not limited to:

1. Humans are a part of the natural world.

2. Humans, like a number of other species (elephants, whales, beavers), tend to play a large role in shaping their natural environment. (Elephants’ voracious eating habits tend to create the kind of open savannah country that humans find particularly pleasing, for instance.)

3. Unlike elephants, whales, and beavers, humans tend to shape the environment in ways that decrease rather than increase biodiversity.

4. Humans have been doing this for a long time, starting back at the end of the Ice Age when we spread out across the globe to the exciting new continents of Europe, Australia, and the Americas, and proceeded to drive the megafauna to extinction. (Megafauna = mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, etc.) MacKinnon notes that scientists often hedge by asserting that both climate and people drove the megafauna to extinction, but when we say this, “we really mean we did it.” (Compare the habit of saying that certain animals are endangered because of “habitat loss,” when really we mean “human destruction of habitat.”)

5. In recent years, each human generation tends to hand on a world with less biodiversity - fewer types of animals and also fewer animals of most types. (Obviously there are individual exceptions. We’ve been great for rats!) Generation by generation, we adjust to this new normal so thoroughly that we often refuse to believe that there truly were more animals in the past. A micro-example: Grandpa talks about the big fish he used to catch on the Gulf, and we roll our eyes and say “Sure, Grandpa” - but if you compare fishing photographs from the Gulf of Mexico between now and Hemingway’s day, people were catching more and bigger fish.

6. This is my thought, not the book’s, but I think this is part of a more general pattern where we dismiss the inconvenient observations of elders with “Oh, old people always think it was better in the past,” often even when we have ample proof that what they are saying is true. Winters really did used to be colder!

7. To tie this back in with the book, MacKinnon notes that many more species than we previously realized rely on the guidance of their elders. Cod migration, for instance, apparently depends not on mysterious cod instinct, but on elders who know the way acting as guides. We know this in part by observing the behavior of schools of migrating cod, and in part because after the cod fisheries collapsed, leaving basically no cod elders (because humans like to catch the biggest fish), the migration stopped.

8. In general, the human preference to catch the oldest, largest, most impressively-antlered (wisest and best suited to lead the herd) animals has probably had catastrophic effects on animal populations, particularly in social species like elephants.

9. (This one is once again my extrapolation.) Everything we think we know about elephant social dynamics probably needs to be filtered through the knowledge that elephants as we know them are the refugee population of a human war against elephants that is still ongoing. Elephant societies almost certainly used to be much richer and more complicated, because, well, societies just are when they haven’t been shot to pieces. Ditto whales and other intelligent and social species that humans have hunted near the brink of extinction.

10. It appears that fully stocked ecosystems just plain work differently than ecosystems as we know them, which are generally depleted by our handiwork. MacKinnon describes an isolated coral reef in the middle of the Pacific, as close to untouched by humans as you’re going to find on this earth, where the biomass was 85% sharks and other predators. This flies in the face of everything biologists thought they knew about how ecosystems work. The biologists who first described the reef couldn’t get their paper published until they included photographic evidence that, no, really, there are that many sharks.

11. Does this mean that undoing our handiwork would mean coming to terms with a world that is 85% sharks? All evidence suggests that human beings don’t want to live in a world that is 85% sharks (or bears, or wolves, or insert your favorite large predator here.) Many people like the idea of bears existing… somewhere… far enough away that we don’t have to take bear spray on every walk to the supermarket.

(The specific 85% thing is probably a moot point, but “Do we actually want predators around?” is, in fact, an issue with reestablishing predator populations at basically any level. If there is a bear population there will, occasionally, be people mauled to death by bears. Not many! Certainly not as many people as die in car accidents! But for some people any risk of death by bear feels too high.)

Here’s the premise of Carl Safina’s Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace: although many human beings believe that wild animals are driven largely by instinct, in fact many animals, particularly social animals, have to learn almost everything they will need to know to survive, just as humans do. Moreover, what an animal learns is dependent not only on its species, but the culture of its particular family or clan: some chimpanzee groups crack nuts with rocks and some don’t, some orcas hunt only mammals and others hunt only fish, and so forth and so on.

Safina also notes that among social animals, a sense of “us” and “them” is basically universal. What isn’t universal is conflict based on this categorization: “us” and “them” doesn’t have to lead to “us versus them.” Although humans, wolves, and chimpanzees spend a lot of time fighting other creatures of their own kind over things like territorial rights, elephants and orcas and bonobos just avoid the groups that they dislike. Those Orcas who eat That Thing We Don’t Eat are weirdos and we don’t talk to them, but when we meet by accident, we don’t fight about it; we just go in opposite directions.

I feel like a lot of human visions of conflict resolution involve widening the frame of who we see as “us,” ideally until it includes all of humanity and maybe some of the more intelligent animals too (easier to see an orca as “us” than Donald Trump, tbh)... but given that every social animal on earth has a concept of us vs. them, maybe this is simply too big an ask. Like, literally, maybe most people are not capable of sustaining this conception outside of moments of ecstatic spiritual experience.

And also, maybe most of us don’t want to, deep down inside. I haven’t seen this framing often recently, but in my early LJ days I remember a good deal of discussion about how the only people you were “allowed to hate” are Nazis and pedophiles. Okay, first of all, it’s amazing how wide those words can stretch when there’s someone you just really really really want to be allowed to hate, like Those Shippers who ship the Wrong Ship - but also, what a telling framing. Hate as a treat that you’re allowed under special circumstances.

In any case, the human and orca situations aren’t truly analogous. All the orcas have apparently agreed to Orca Truce, no matter how repulsive the salmon-eating orcas may find those weirdo orcas who peel seals with their teeth. (Seals! Those Other Orcas eat cute little seals, who are mammals like us! Don’t talk to those seal-eating orcas, children. Some of these orca groups who never fight each other have also refused to interbreed for literally tens of thousands of years.) Humans have not achieved Human Truce. And maybe “They are Them and THAT’S FINE, we don’t need to fight about it” is even harder for the average human to cope with than “all humans are Us, really”?

***

On a lighter note, one of my ongoing projects has been a matriarchal fantasy world. It was Carl Safina’s earlier book Beyond Words, actually, that suggested to me that rather than remake the wheel, I could just model this society off one of the female-dominated animals societies, orcas or elephants or bonobos… Okay, maybe not bonobos. That would be so many sex scenes.

All of these species, as noted in the above paragraphs, don’t have wars. And I’ve been contemplating, one, is this even a human society if they don’t have wars - are you at some point simply elephantomorphizing your human-shaped characters, if you will?

Which is not perhaps a bad thing! But, two, am I interested in writing it if no one is marching off to war? At Beth & Becca’s wedding, I was chatting with someone about my books, and she teased me that Briarley is a fairytale retelling set in World War II, and A Garter as a Lesser Gift is an Arthurian retelling set in World War II, hmmm, suspicious, and I insisted that no, I write lots of things that aren’t World War II!

At which point blotthis piped up cheerfully, “Yeah, Aster has books about other wars too!”

BUSTED. I mean, I do write non-war books! I have multiple books in which there are no wars at all! (It occurs to me that the no-war books all have female main characters.) But yes. I do go back and back and back to war.

Yesterday I met my dad for a hike and a picnic in McCormick's Creek State Park. "Let's hike to Wolf Cave," Dad suggested. "When I was a young man, I went right through it."

"You can go THROUGH?" I boggled, having always assumed that the cave left off about where the daylight ended.

My dad keeps a headlamp in his car, because that's just the kind of person he is - a square flashlight on a headband, not a whole miner's hat ensemble - so we took that along, and lo! the cave DOES go back. We got a few turns in, and the ceiling lowered till we would have had to crawl, at which point Dad decided he is too old for this now; so I saw him back out to the entrance, and plunged back in myself.

The signs on the cave do not make it obvious that it goes through the hill like a tunnel, possibly because they don't want you to: it's very twisty and narrow, like a creek underground, which indeed is what it is: it's been worn out of the rock because the water rushes through every time the water gets high. There are branches on the smooth floor, left there by the last flood, waiting quietly in the darkness, and the rocks glitter in the light.

Just past where Dad had turned back, I found water standing on the floor. At first glance it looked fathoms deep, and I stopped short; but upon turning the light on it again, I realized that was an effect of the angle at which the light hit it, so I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my trousers and waded in. It was not so cold as I feared, but it did get slowly deeper, halfway up my shins; and just when I was beginning to think how deep I should wade before it would be the better part of wisdom to turn back, I turned the corner and saw light ahead.

It was a very low light, by which I mean low to the ground. The cave wall came down to a foot or two above the earth, and a puddle spread across the opening, so the only way out was to crawl - assuming there was enough space to crawl; I might have to creep on my stomach.

I put my shoes out onto the rocks, so they at least would stay dry, and got down on my hands and knees, and got through with one soaked thigh and a little water splashed on my stomach, which is pretty good all things considering.

...Then, having gotten safely through the cave, I made a mistake about the best way out to the trail. I followed what I thought was a path over a hillside, slipped on the mud, and gave the meaty part of my left thumb a jolly good whack on an outcropping rock. The bruise is unfairly unimpressive, but that part of my hand remains very stiff and sore.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Jessie Graham Flower’s Grace Harlowe’s Junior Year at High School, which evelyn_b sent me lo these many moons ago. As you can probably guess from the title, it’s the third book in the series, so I might have had more luck keeping track of the characters if I’d read the first two - although on the other hand I might not; Flower isn’t that good at differentiating characters, even on the very basic level of giving each one a single distinguishing trait a la Enid Blyton’s school stories.

However, I did enjoy it in the sense that it’s super interesting from a historical perspective: there’s a scene where the boys of Grace’s acquaintance put on a skit mocking the suffragettes, to the merriment of Grace and her friends. (The book was published in 1911.) This is probably the most overt political content I’ve read in a children’s book from that era, and it’s striking that it’s on the anti-suffrage side: clearly the publishers weren’t concerned that supporting the status quo would hurt their bottom line.

What I’m Reading Now

Here’s your weekly quote from Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. “What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?”

Or this one, related, also about the consciousness of trees: “The trees especially seem to bespeak a generosity of spirit. I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.”

Upon reflection, I’m not sure that makes any sense, but it’s striking, isn’t it?

In Gay Life, Denis is sabotaging all his chances of future happiness by trying incessantly to present himself in the best possible light to Chrissie Challoner while actually just making himself look affected and fake. For instance, he attempts to pass himself off as the hero of a motorboat sinking, when in fact he panicked so hard that his rescuer had to knock him out so as not to be drowned by Denis’s flailing.

It’s clear that Chrissie would have been more impressed by a frank admission of that panic, but Denis just can’t bring himself to believe that (and to be fair, how many people really mean it when they say “I just want honesty!” Who hasn’t beta-read a story for someone who claims they want unvarnished criticism, but in reality can barely even handle notes on SPAG?) and their relationship is sinking almost as fast as the motorboat. Oh Denis. If only you didn’t have that streak of dishonesty on top of all your other problems!

I’m also barreling through Sam Eastland’s Berlin Red, which I am pretty sure is going to end with Pekkala reunited with his lady love! ...whose existence I’m afraid I had forgotten, but that’s okay, it turns out that in the years since the Revolution she has become a BRITISH SPY who is DEEP UNDERCOVER AS A SECRETARY WITH GERMAN HIGH COMMAND. Most recently seen: staring at her boss’s arm thinking about all the different arteries she could stab to kill him. In short she’s just as extra as Pekkala so clearly they’re perfectly suited.

I am a liiiiittle afraid that the book will end with the two of them getting shot, as it’s the last book in the series, but mostly I’m confident that Eastland loves them both too much and will probably smuggle them away to England somehow and they live quietly on a bee farm for their happy ending.

What I Plan to Read Next

More Ben Macintyre! Agent Zigzag is on the way.

I'm back from Canada! I come bearing two boxes of those little maple sugar candies... and that's pretty much it really, I didn't even take many photographs because I didn't like to take my phone on the boat (it occurs to me that this is a drawback with having your phone as your camera). But of course there are beautiful memories.

STUFF I SAW IN CANADA

- a black bear, which loped across the road as we were driving into the resort

- three bald eagles, one of them perched on a high tree limb like it was waiting to have its picture taken ("I think the eagles have moved to Canada for the duration," I suggested)

- AN ENTIRE HILLSIDE FULL OF WILD BLUEBERRIES. I half-filled a water bottle with blueberries, which filled an entire bowl, which I ate in less than a day. I really love blueberries.

- a beaver! This was in an inlet near a resort, where Dad got involved in a struggle with a northern pike, so the wind tugged our boat in an arc around the inlet, and meanwhile in the middle there was this beaver, calmly munching on lily pads which it held in its itty bitty paws. (I'm pretty sure it was lily pads. At any rate it was munching something in the midst of a cluster of lily pads, and once I saw a flash of green.) It would dive down to gather more and then there were be a boiling of bubbles right before it came up, and then it would munch away some more.

We got within ten feet of it and it remained totally chill (being so near the resort, it's become totally blase about humans) and I could have gotten a great and adorable picture and I didn't have my phone with me :( :( :( :( :( :(

- lots of dragonflies, blue and green and gray. When they get close enough you can hear their wings clicking.

- a few orange butterflies, as well, down on the river below the dam where we took the canoe. I like canoes more than motorboats. They're more work but you're closer to the water.

Also I caught a v. nice bass while we were in the canoe, which always endears a boat to you.

- and, on the last morning, mist rising from the lake.

Spring has sprung! I went for a walk this afternoon to see what destruction the snow earlier this week might have wrought, but the green daffodil spears seem uninjured, and indeed have begun to swell with flower buds: if you bend close, you can see the yellow still hidden away within the leaves.

And the crocuses have begun to bloom! I found a lonely white crocus not quite opened - and then, a few blocks later, a whole stand of crocuses, deep golden yellow.

It would be nice to have a first crocus festival - or at least some private ritual to mark it; but I don't know what that would be. I shall have to give this some thought.

***

My quest for a St. Patrick's Day dish is going well, though! I don't like corned beef or cabbage and was therefore pleased to find an Irish cookbook that helpfully explains that those are a regional dish within Ireland anyway, so I've dispensed with them with a clean heart and have been trying other recipes.

I'm leaning toward potato pancakes. Nothing is more festive than crispy golden potato pancakes (served with sour cream & chives, although I haven't managed to arrange the chives part, whoops). However, my friend Caitlin has also suggested Guinness cookies, and I've heard tell of Guinness chocolate cake, so... Well, in the name of science I ought to give those a try too, don't you think?

“Enjoy” is not quite the right word for what I felt about Nate Blakeslee’s American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West. Or, rather, I did straightforwardly enjoy the chapters that were about the wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone, and the epic exciting pack dramas, and all the good ecological effects of that reintroduction: less coyotes, which meant more rodents, which meant more birds of prey; less elk, which meant more trees, which meant less erosion.

But I did not enjoy the chapters about the political ramifications of that reintroduction. It’s not that they were out of place or detracted from the book - they’re an important part of the story Blakeslee is telling - but reading about it just made me so angry. Blakeslee is doing his darndest to be fair, but nonetheless the basic blinkered selfishness of the opponents of wolf reintroduction comes through.

They are so concerned about the life stock losses the wolves will cause. Never mind that the winter causes many times that number of losses; they can’t legislate against the winter. Although they definitely would if they could, and damn the ecological effects. And they can’t bear the fact that they’re going to have competition for the elk now.

One little girl (little enough that she’s clearly been put up to it by her parents) pickets with a sign that reads “Will there be elk when I grow up?”, and, uh, yes, Virginia, there will be elk when you grow up. Unless of course humans kill them off, because we are the only species with a proven track record at that sort of thing, which is why the wolves needed to be reintroduced into their own natural habitat in the first place. The wolves and the elk coexisted for thousands of goddamn years before we slaughtered the wolves.

The hypocrisy of humans complaining about the destructiveness of any animal ever is completely breathtaking, given that we are the most destructive species on earth by several orders of magnitude. At least if we do stumble into an apocalypse and kill ourselves off, all the other animals will finally have a fighting chance - assuming of course that we don’t take them all down with us.

We've reached another Caldecott book that I'm familiar with from childhood! (And in fact we'll run into quite a few of them for the next twenty years of Caldecott books or so.) My parents actually owned Peter Spier's Noah's Ark, so I was quite familiar with it, although I must say it never was a favorite: the ark gets awfully dirty from having so many animals in it, which is only reasonable, but I thought all the piles of dung were gross.

I also found the Noah's ark story itself a bit upsetting - particularly the bit at the beginning where alllll the animals are gathering around the ark, but Noah's only letting them on two by two so you've got, say, a bunch of elephants standing around, dolefully waiting to drown. Why do the elephants deserve to drown because humans were horrible? It seems so unfair.

It occurs to me, rather gloomily, that at this point we might see the Noah's ark story as something like a prophecy: the elephants etc. still don't deserve to suffer, but human activity is slowly killing them off anyway - not with a literal flood, but from poachers servicing the rising tide of human greed. It is often the innocents who suffer most.

This is rather gloomy, especially considering the book itself is about as cheery as a retelling of Noah's ark can be. There are all sorts of fun animal vignettes (the elephant who doesn't fit out of the ark; the flood of rabbits coming out, because the two beginning rabbits have bred a four score and seven baby bunnies), all of which is very cute.