Bloom Where You’re Planted

By: | May 1, 2024

On May Day, my brother and I used to sneak around our neighborhood with our mom, secretly delivering flowers to unsuspecting neighbors. Here are some May Day flowers for you.

In spring 2020, I wasn’t sure how to use Instagram. I mean, I technically knew how to use it. When I logged on, it was honestly keeping me going each day, watching everyone try to figure out what to do at home and seeing that they were just as uncertain as I was. People made sourdough bread, they knitted, they drew rainbows and put them on their windows, they banged pots and pans. But when it came to responding in kind, I wasn’t sure what to do.

Then one of my plants started to grow.

The best way to describe the way I garden is salutary neglect. This phrase, it seems, came from the British loosening their enforcement of trade relations with the colonies in the early 1700s. I have no enforcement whatsoever. I love to buy seed packets and new, hopeful plant starts, and plant them in the garden. I tend them in the first few days, but then something always comes up. (Perhaps not unlike the British—according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, some historians think it would have been impossible for the British to enforce trade across spread-out colonies, others say “a greater cause of salutary neglect was not deliberate but was instead the incompetence, weakness, and self-interest of poorly qualified colonial officials.” Gardening incompetence, weakness and self-interest, that’s me!)

So seeing a thriving plant is always a pleasant surprise. This one started as a low-growing spiky thing, and had stayed that way for a year.  In March 2020, it started shooting up toward the sun.

The plant was an echium, a biennial plant which shoots out a flower spike during its second year. These species—there are six of them—are native to the Canary Islands and parts of the west coast of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. This one, called Echium wildpretti is known for its size—its flower tower can grow up to seven feet.

So I started taking photos of it. And there was much more drama than I thought. In a rainstorm, the spike fell over. A few days later, the tip started to lift skyward again. (Personal drama: I wrote and deleted several penis-themed captions while giggling to myself.) Huge buds grew in a spiral around the spike. Pink flowers appeared, and then an underlayer of purple. The echium toppled over again, and again, it reoriented toward the sun.

This is the kind of drama I would not have noticed otherwise. But in taking photos of E. wildpretti each day, I could see the small changes. I started looking forward to what would happen next, even when there wasn’t much else to look forward to.

Finally, the tower faded. By then we’d fallen into something of a rhythm at home, or at least something that felt less desperate. Elsewhere in the garden, a few small apricots appeared, and then a surfeit of figs. Sunflowers and pumpkins, then the dump of seed pods from the elm that signals the start of fall.

And now it’s spring again. Because of my incompetence and weakness, I could not remember what year I planted the next set of echium starts. Would I have to wait another year to see a bloom? Then about a week ago, an unassuming plant in the shade started growing upward instead of out. Now it is up above my knees, reaching toward the light.

Another Chapter in the Roadkill Chronicles

By: | April 29, 2024

This past weekend, during a tracking course in California (spoiler: I did not ace the final exam), we students were tasked with identifying the above gorgeous creature, found dead by our instructors on — where else? — the highway. This gorgeous little beast is a long-tailed weasel, Neogale frenata, a lithe, furtive carnivore that I’d never before seen in the wild (though I’ve encountered their short-tailed cousins). Beholding this lovely and doomed mustelid, I was reminded, for the billionth time, of how roads both obliterate and reveal wildlife. The long-tailed weasel is an animal seldom glimpsed by humans, and then only as a brief brown flash streaking across the landscape. Cars halt weasels in their tracks, giving us an opportunity to inspect their exquisite bodies — before they decompose and melt into the soil, forever lost.  

Guest Post: A Killer Whale by Any Other Name

By: | April 26, 2024

Last month, scientists described two new species of killer whales, and the community of cetacean researchers and advocates online immediately erupted in the Internet equivalent of excited squeaks, squeals, and whistles.

But I felt a little bereft, my sense of killer whales as cultural beings diminished.

Killer whales – or orcas if you prefer, or blackfish, even though they are not fish at all but, yes, the world’s largest species of dolphin – are a widespread and multifarious bunch, inhabiting all the world’s oceans and staging a grand pageant of different ways of life. 

Around the Pacific Northwest, where I live, there are orcas who eat nothing but fish, and Chinook salmon preferentially; orcas who hunt marine mammals like seals, sea lions, and porpoises; and orcas who hunt sharks in deeper offshore waters. Elsewhere in the world, other orcas gather by the hundreds to feast on schools of herring that they herd into tight balls, and still others work in twos or threes to topple seals from Antarctic ice floes.

As a rule, different orca groups scarcely interact and never interbreed, even when they inhabit the same waters. Each group has its own unique dialect of calls and whistles, and many have distinct traditions and even fads: one group of killer whales has recently taken to messing around with yachts; another has long enjoyed rubbing their bodies against the smooth stones of particular beaches; a third, for one memorable summer, wore salmon as hats.

Until now, all these killer whales the world over have been gathered under a single species name: Orcinus orca. So the two new species haven’t been discovered, exactly, in the usual sense of being seen for the first time, or seen for the first time by scientists. Instead they were cogitated – conjured from our increasing knowledge of the whales.

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I wrote a eulogy

By: | April 22, 2024

My father, Jim Fields, died unexpectedly in November at age 81, of a stroke. Last week I wrote a eulogy for his memorial service on Saturday. It was hard. I’m a writer, and goldarn it I wanted it to be the best eulogy ever written. (I’m confident that I did not achieve that, but it’s certainly the best eulogy I’ve ever written.) Here‘s a lightly edited version, if you’d like to learn a little about my father.

My dad loved being outside. Hiking was one of his favorite things and it’s actually how my parents met. It was the beginning of the summer of 1961, and it was going to be my mom’s second summer at the YMCA camp in Estes Park, Colorado. She was standing in the Boulder bus station talking to some of the other college kids about hiking—all the hiking she’d done the summer before, all the hiking she was going to do this summer. And there was this guy standing nearby, and listening, and getting closer and closer…

That was my dad. They hiked a lot that summer and then the next summer, and now here we are.

The last time he and I hiked in Rocky Mountain National Park together was in the summer of 2019. He and I walked up Flattop, one of the mountains that they climbed several times in those summers, and kept on going up the next mountain over, Hallett. The picture above is from the top of Hallett.

When we got to the top, he said, and I quote: “Ha-haaa!! Oh, man. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. This is where we get to eat our lunch.” I know that because I took a video. In the video, you can hear me breathing hard from the climb. He was 77 at the time and still in better shape than me. Obviously. My dad was always in better shape than me, until the day he died.

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The Dream Camera

By: | April 19, 2024

If you could record your dreams, would you ever be able to stop watching? 

That’s a central plot point in Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders’ three- to five-hour arthouse flop/work of staggering genius (depending on which cut you watch) from 1991. He threw cyberpunk, detective noir, and road movie into a blender with a civilisational apocalypse. It cost him $20 million to make and did not earn it back. Love it or hate it, this movie is canon, in part because it was prescient about the technological future to the point of being oracular.

In the near future as he imagined it, a scientist has invented a machine that lets you re-watch your dreams – including all the dreams you never knew you had (most of them become irretrievable within minutes of waking up). People become instantly bewitched by the technology, some sliding into “a disease of images” in a way that is immediately legible from 2020s discourse on phone and social media addiction. They’re simply unable to tear themselves away from the beautiful, narcissistic universe this technology has opened for them, and are no longer able to engage with reality. “How many times must I have dreamed this?” one character mumbles reverently, lost in the grainy footage of her childhood memories.

Wenders got a startling number of things right about the technological future. Ubiquitous wireless devices, search engines, voice-to-text, an early version of Google maps and retinal prostheses; the characters in the film are saturated in tech.

And now Will Heaven has written in MIT Technology Review about a company that has been able to reconstruct lost childhood memories using generative AI. The dream camera is nigh.

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A New Age of Brightness

By: | April 17, 2024


Last night I took a crowded elevator to the hundredth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Not rattled or shaken, we were propelled to the top in 52 seconds, like being beamed up.

Doors opened and we all poured into a high-windowed space looking onto the electric-white boroughs of New York City. A revolving door turned us onto an outdoor viewing platform where hundreds gushed and posed at angled glass barriers tipped away from the building where one can lean over the edge more than a thousand feet above the ground. The Empire State Building with its colored spindle was not diminutive, but it didn’t reach our height, emerging like the tip of an awl from a crystalline sea. You can see it in the picture above, the spire in red.

The last time I was this high up in a piece of architecture was the late 90s in a bar on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. I came with a friend on a winter night and I recall the elevator taking minutes, rocking as it went, opening partway where we had to get out and switch to another elevator to continue the ride. That was the technology of the time, the only way to be taken up this kind of swaying height. We handed coats to the woman at the coatroom and walked into the bar, which was aptly called Windows on the World.

The nocturnal city at the end of the 20th century raged around us, more light coming from outside than from the soft bar fixtures. We got our drinks and walked together out of the dark pit, climbing up a few short steps to the main floor and its museum of windows. You could tell tourists from the bar crawlers. Tourists, like us, bought drinks because we had to, and walked to the windows with glasses in hand, not taking a sip, staring 106 floors straight down. The view went down to the tips of our shoes, no visual buffer where windows met the tight-weave carpet, and it felt like you were stepping off the edge. This was a peculiar sensation considering what happened a few years later when Windows on the World, fully staffed, crashed to the ground and all were lost. Our mouths opened slightly as if not believing what we were seeing, as if the bar crawlers had gone blind talking and laughing as if they weren’t suspended in the sky. Their voices drained away as we looked down on this transparent glass fish of a city, every tiny bone wired and glowing. 

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The obstetric dilemma

By: | April 15, 2024

We attended our first childbirth preparation course last week, Pete and I. It was 2.5 hours long, on Zoom, and would have made an excellent drinking game (drink every time you hear the word blood! Or mucus!) had I been drinking. Instead, we just watched it in bed on my laptop, passing a block of cheddar cheese back and forth while Pete drank enough whiskey for both of us.

The instructor (Linda? Laurie?) flipped through slides on the various Signs of Labor and Stages of Pregnancy at a brisk clip. All the titles were capitalized, like biblical plagues or Liam Neeson films: The Breaking of the Bag of Waters, Bloody Show, Effacement. In an irritating grammatical quirk that I’ve noticed in a lot of health practitioners lately, she never referred to an infant as “the infant,” or “the baby,” but just Baby. (It doesn’t take much to irritate me, lately.)  

I couldn’t help thinking of last week’s eclipse as they showed the “vivid animation” of a dilating cervix. As it vividly reached 10 centimeters, I turned to Pete and yelled, “Totality!” Other than that, there were only two other parts of the class I cared to reflect on afterwards: First, when the instructor pushed a doll through a knitted uterus to simulate contractions, and second, when she brought out a (real?) human pelvis and demonstrated how the doll might try to fit through it. 

Bouncing gently on her birthing ball, Linda/Laurie manipulated the pelvic bones so they flexed apart and came back together around the doll head — like the Jaws of Life, I thought, or just Jaws. Watching the absurdly large-looking doll corkscrew its way through the birth canal made me think of scientists, past and present, who have observed the same thing and tried to figure out in what universe this makes any sense. In particular, I thought of the obstetric dilemma hypothesis  — a long-accepted explanation for why human mothers have evolved to push their infants through such a narrow gap. 

The hypothesis was first articulated in a 1960 issue of Scientific American, by a physical anthropologist named Sherwood Washburn. He argued that humans evolved narrower pelvises in the process of becoming bipedal, but that this poses a “dilemma” for women because it conflicts with the other evolutionarily advantageous adaptation of larger infant brains. Washburn concluded that females had been stuck with a painful compromise between walking upright efficiently, which a narrower pelvis enabled, and their babies’ growing heads. 

Few challenged this hypothesis until the 2000s, when a handful of anthropologists, mostly women, started to ask whether having a narrow pelvis was really as important to efficient bipedal locomotion as Washburn had made it out to be. Through biomechanical studies, they found that having a broader pelvis and wider hips actually reduces the amount of energy a person spends walking or running, especially when someone is carrying a burden like a pregnant belly or a nursing infant. In addition, they found so much variation in the size and shape of the pelvis in women around the world that the notion that female locomotion is somehow inherently at odds with reproduction has started to unravel.

Although the obstetric dilemma is still widely accepted, it’s now just one of several competing hypotheses for why childbirth is difficult for humans, compared to other species. Other explanations have to do with the invention of agriculture, which may have led to women with smaller pelvises and bigger babies, as well as more recent increases in obesity and malnutrition.

For my own part, aside from trying to master pelvic floor exercises (that’s when my unborn child does a double back layout with a half twist on my bladder, yes?) I hadn’t really thought much about pelvises before, my own or others. But after watching our instructor heft one around, making the ilium, ischium, and pubis subtly expand and contract like wings, I finally understand why Georgia O’Keefe spent so much time painting them. Looked at one way, the pelvis is a cage, a maze, a trap. But from another angle — look, a window.