Return of Bearduck

The wife has always had a thing for cute:  she is, she's drawn to, she has an eye for cute. Years ago, when I was first courting her, I played along, as gentlemen do, primarily by engaging in extended discussion of cat names and admiring articles of clothing so identified. I won't say this activity was feigned but it was less than wholehearted. Not so my enjoyment of bearduck.

Bearduck, the bear who dressed like a duck.  The improbability of it, the jokes, the novelty, and most fun, the games we'd play in which the little figure would show up in unlikely places.  But one night, enjoying sushi boats, we took the game too far:  we placed Bearduck on an empty boat, watched him sail off towards the kitchen, and then sat and waited for his return.  He never came back.

Sometime after that one of us discovered Bearcluck, the bear who dressed like a chicken, and we've preserved him through all the travels and all the years.  He lost his rooster cap, Talia sewed him a new one.  We cared, but we never loved.  And we never forgot Bearduck, floating away.

Life goes on.  And on and on and here it is, Labor Day 2014, and we're celebrating our one year anniversary in our still-new home and BARn.  I'm on an errand, refilling supplies, and I realize that a package that's been sitting around for a few days is addressed to me so I grab it and open it and there's Bearduck, a bit bigger than I remember him, and wasn't his old outfit footed, but it's Bearduck alright, and I'm awfully pleased to see him.

Now, who sent him back home?  Not a Boston-based sushi chef, that's for sure.  No, no, it was an old friend, and a very special person with a very special mind, a mind so orderly and logical that it was able to recognize, after a hiatus closer to two decades than one, someone else's toy.  It was none other than VeronicaSpock, a lovely woman who does not dress like a Vulcan but who certainly thinks as clearly as one, and who likes for things to be where they belong.

What do you want?

Please note that containers are sold empty.  Honey is shown for illustrative purposes only.

 This one's about you, friend, not me.

What do you want?  Why don't you already know this, why don't you have an answer at hand?  Why, as you think harder about it, does the answer seem to recede into the distance?  And what's with this sense that you used to know but can't quite remember what that earlier answer was?  Lots of reasons, lots of really good reasons.

You've been taught not to want the things you do want.  I do this all the time to my kids.  What does Felix want?  More syrup on his pancakes, more soy sauce on his rice, more honey on everything.  No, Felix, you've had enough syrup...more soy sauce will ruin your rice...we are out of honey, again.  What does Gideon want?  To stay up all night, "reading," to climb out the window that leads to the apple tree, or, formerly, possibly still, to drink out of the toilet.  No, Gideon, no, no, no.  And it doesn't end there:  we are constantly telling one another not to be greedy, not to strive too obviously, not to leave the dirty dishes sit, not to have an affair.  If we exclude the leaden question of What-do-you-want-for-dinner-tonight you will find that, as an adult, you are rarely asked what it is you want, and almost never asked what you really want.

Things get taken away from you--a favorite restaurant closes, a friend dies, lovers leave you, families get broken, Utz discontinues their Mesquite BBQ Kettle Cooked potato chips, why why why why why?--and you confuse the desire to fill that hole with the want that creates something new.  Yes, you want those things back, it's a true want, but it's a useless, irrelevant want, and it drowns the weak signal of the want-for-that-which-you've-never-had.

You aren't in touch with your emotions and finding what you want depends on being able to feel it.  You will never answer this question by analysis, it isn't a puzzle to be solved.  Wants are discoveries, not inventions, but your education and your work have done almost nothing to teach you how to find things, only how to make them.  The making is what gets you the things you want, but we're not there yet.  Feeling comes first, and at your age feeling is uncomfortable at best, and if you're like me it actually hurts.

Last, there's just no space in life for questions like this.  It's open-ended, doesn't offer quick wins, and any answer you do find is probably going to cause an awful lot of trouble.  Searching necessitates sitting still, which you don't do.  Searching is helped by having conversations with people of a sort you don't normally have.  You might have to start keeping a diary or seeing a shrink, you might have to travel or take a long, long drive.  Who has time?  Who has capacity?  And who even wants to admit they don't have what they want, much less that they don't even know what that thing is?

When you really look at it, it's just a terrible question to have to ask yourself, a terrible question to have to share with others, and it's just a terrible pity that you must.  But you must, so get to it and stick to it, and good luck to you.  You can do it, you can find an answer, or a part of one.  And once you do know what you want perhaps we can blog some more together about how to go about asking for it.

How are you?

How are you, I'm asked. Here's as good an answer as any: I took this selfie yesterday, after I got stung on the tongue by a bee.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that other than the bee sting I really can't complain.

For the birds

Birds, never much cared for them. And no, this isn't me generalizing my feelings about crows, it's just that I don't happen to be one of those people who are into them; whether by innate fascination, some deep desire to fly, whatever it is that draws you people-who-are-not-like-me, I'm not like that, I'm not like you, I don't like birds, much. Until quite recently, when suddenly it got personal.

As what passes for winter around here itself passed, spring came and with it a pair of small birds that chose to nest under our eaves right near the outlet of our non-functional but completely unobstructed kitchen vent. I noticed them because of their frequent comings-and-goings and because of the occasional chirp that came through that vent. And then I noticed them a lot more because they had chicks, which chicks chirped strenuously and repeatedly throughout the daylight hours, directly into my kitchen. They chirped, I discovered (Science, take note), whenever one of their parents either entered or left the nest, or was in it, except at night. This was irritating for their human housemates, but this housemate, at least, is just barely enlightened enough to have thought to think of it from the parent birds' point of view, which I imagine is something like this:

We wake at dawn and, with our kids screaming at us, go get some food. Working in shifts we bring it back home to give to our kids and before we can even start to stuff it down their throats they scream at us some more. Each one screams at us when we are feeding their siblings, and when the food is all gone they scream even louder until we have to get the hell out of here. We get some more food and it all happens again. This goes on all day until finally we all fall asleep, completely exhausted. Then it happens the next day, and the day after, and so on.

I can really identify with this.

The chirping went on for many weeks, and as I grew accustomed to it my annoyance died and my sympathy with the parents grew and then when it ended, and extra small birds started fluttering clumsily around my yard, I found I missed the chirping and realized I'd grown fond of this little family, or the parents anyway. But they left and I did too, headed to the mountains for a few days in a tent cabin.

Now here's a nice coincidence for you: while I was in the mountains, and my family with me, friends came to stay at our house. Special friends. Ornithologist friends. And while they were here, for all of 24 hours, they made a list of all the birds they saw. This is the list:

1. California towhee
2. American crow
3. Lesser goldfinch
4. Downy woodpecker
5. Chestnut-backed chickadee
6. Oak titmouse
7. Pileated woodpecker
8. Warbling vireo
9. Band-tailed pigeon
10. Turkey vulture
11. Spotted towhee
12. Pacific slope flycatcher
13. Mourning dove
14. Oregon junco
15. Bewick's wren
16. Bushtit
17. American goldfinch
18. Western scrub-jay
19. House finch
20. Tree swallow
21. Anna's hummingbird
22. Nuttall's woodpecker
23. Brown creeper
24. White-breasted nuthatch
25. Winter wren
26. Hutton's vireo

If they had stayed up late they would likely have heard a Great horned owl, too, but they wouldn't have heard our personal bird family--House sparrows, as it happens--because, as I said, they were already gone.

That is not the coincidence. It is cool, and a surprise to me because I would not have guessed there were quite so many different birds flying around the place, and good news too because now I like birds, sort of...but it is not the coincidence. The coincidence is that our personal bird family (as best as I, the non-ornithologist can tell) had also decided to move to the mountains, there to raise a second family, only this time they did it inside our house (tent cabin) not outside it. We cohabited again, the two families, for several days, and it was a real pleasure for me at least, if not anyone else. You can view the film here, or you can come visit next spring and, I trust, see this same little family yourself.

We are all going to die

As a member of "The Day After" generation I'm used to living with existential threats to the species. Like most of my generational compatriots I've felt overshadowed by The Bomb my entire life, but aside from an abortive attempt to study nuclear weapons policy I haven't done a thing about it. Disarmament is still my litmus test for a presidential candidate, but I am happy to report that global nuclear holocaust now appears highly improbable. Less happily, it also appears to be the lesser of the two great evils of the age: cower, you, before Global Warming!

As those with a modicum of statistical sophistication, or even just a window, now understand, Global Warming is happening. No one can say what exactly this portends, but the range of intelligently projected outcomes is increasingly awful, and as the father of young children I am finding it very hard to avoid the conclusion that they will live their lives--they, my two boys, not some putative grandchildren--in a world very much poorer than the one in which I will have lived mine.

What, as a parent, do you do if your vision of your children's future world is a bleak one? We're hardly the first generation of mamas and papas dealing with this question. Back to The Bomb. If you had children in, say, the 1960s, you faced much the same: certain activities, which you perhaps did not support morally and yet probably were not doing very much to stop, were making the world a worse place for your kids. What might have led you to this conclusion? The fact that, even absent nuclear war, the US and several other countries were routinely exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in the oceans, and on land. Starting with Trinity in 1945 and carrying on into the early '80s, together these tests literally poisoned the entire globe with radioactive material, more and more of it year after year, the eventual equivalent of some tens of thousands of Hiroshimas. My dear parents, those explosions you did not stop from happening will eventually cause some millions of deaths by radiation-induced cancer, and one of them might be mine. Tense teaser: Might you not then have been afraid your child would one day say this to you?

Not if you were Thomas Neff. Dr. Neff, an expert in the economics of uranium production, is credited with almost single-handedly arranging for the purchase of gargantuan amounts of weapons grade uranium from a rapidly disintegrating nuclear state (the USSR) by another nuclear state (the USA) to be used as fuel in the latter's nuclear power plants. The reduction of the amount of bomb-grade uranium in the world is an absolute good, and Dr. Neff has to his credit an idea that led to the elimination of perhaps a third of all such material on the planet. I don't know if Dr. Neff has kids, but if he does he can say this to them: without me, children, it would have been a lot worse.

Back to the future: what answer am I going to have for my children? That I, for one, drove a high-MPG car, lived in a house without air conditioning, and sometimes tried to eat less meat? That I couldn't imagine what I could do about the situation, so did nothing? Sorry, boys, about rampant desertification, insecure food supplies, regional water resource wars, a radically impoverished biosphere, and the fact that it's really damn hot out and we still don't have air conditioning? I would rather be able to give Dr. Neff's answer: without me, children, it would have been a lot worse. And it occurs to me that the way to give Dr. Neff's answer is to take a page from Dr. Neff's playbook: #letsbuyallthefuel.

Here are two facts worth considering:

1. If we extract and burn the known fossil fuel deposits in the world we are toast.
2. These deposits are owned by companies that have been created to extract them so that others can burn them, or by countries that have based their entire economies and societies on doing likewise.

Now again, my proposal: #letsbuyallthefuel. Specifically, let's buy the rights to extract fossil fuel from all of the companies and countries that currently own those rights. Let's buy them at a price that reflects the difficulties and uncertainties involved in extraction, as well as the possibility of radically revaluing those reserves. Let's buy them under terms that powerfully encourage the sellers not to try to extract that fuel in violation of contract. Let's place those rights in an irrevocable trust and let's leave enough of the reserves out of the trust to keep us all fueled within a set carbon budget for half a generation, the budget to be set so as not to push us into the unthinkably dangerous territory towards which we are currently careening. Let's do this impossible, ridiculous, unfair, counter-intuitive thing because sometimes when you do such things they turn out quite well, and because otherwise we are all going to die.

There, the idea's out there. Tediously, it turns out Dr. Neff didn't just come up with an audacious plan but spent many, many years midwifing it into being, the better part of a career it seems. OK, the idea first, the NY Times op-ed next. I'm going as fast as I can but I have kids you know, and let's face it, they really slow you down.

Creek folk

Just because you bought a house on a creek doesn't mean you're creek folk. The transformation takes time, and drought time produces a lot less of it than rain time. Certainly we're feeling much more creeky now than we have at any time since buying the place last August, as a nearly dry bed filled with three feet of water, seemingly overnight. And, having risen, it is now a constant presence, a sound I expect to grow to depend upon.

Let's just hope we can depend on our retaining walls....