Weeding Lessons

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Weeding can be a spiritual exercise.  This summer has been particularly challenging for my communing with the earth because of heat spells, soupy, rainy days for a week at a time, and generally just being busy with other things.  Yesterday I went out to the front garden and received a shock.  A couple of caveats, in my defense: like many people we tend to use the back door instead of the front.  With our parking space behind the house, this is understandable.  Another excuse is that I’m too exhausted after work to do weeding.  At that time of day the unadulterated sun is having its way with the front garden, and, hey, three’s a crowd.  We planted our garden in the hopes of reducing the mowing by a little bit.  It did that, but we soon learned that the expensive plants you buy tend to be shy.

And “ground cover?”  There’s three year mantra: first it sleeps, then it creeps, then it leaps.  Ours slept a couple summers and seems to be in its second summer of creeping.  In the midst of all this: weeds.  Weeds may be the ultimate symbol of hope.  Life is extremely tenacious.  It doesn’t take “no” for an answer.  My amateur adventures in gardening have taught me that weeds grow next to those paving stones you put down.  Then they start growing over said stones.  If you let them go long enough (as I say, the weather has been awkward), they create their own soil over the stones.  Meanwhile, cars line up at the hardware store to buy bag after bag of soil.  Weeds can make their own.

I’m actually an admirer of weeds.  I enjoy the aroma of raw earth when they force me to my hands and knees in front of the house.  I do envy that their 9-2-5 is just being.  Growing.  Soaking up the sunshine, rain, and carbon dioxide.  If there’s a hint of soil, or something that can help them create their own soil, they’re not shy at all.  I don’t mind that they make me go outdoors on a pleasant weekend morning.  There’s peace in the air and I don’t mind the exercise.  I am surprised at just how many plants can grow in such a small amount of space.  I do wonder how our neighbors put up with us, but yesterday it was rejuvenating for my soul to be out there.  Everyone is sleeping in on a Saturday morning, and I’m learning some free life lessons from the amazing plants we call weeds.

Stuffed

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Although a satire, The Stuff has a serious message.  This horror comedy from the eighties bears some similarities to The Substance, but in a more comic and environmentally conscious way.  The eponymous stuff is edible and discovered at a mining site in Georgia.  Its good taste soon challenges ice cream and millions become addicted to it.  The problem is, it takes over people’s minds.  Soon they will eat nothing else.  Some industrialists in the ice cream industry reluctantly hire a specialist in industrial espionage to learn what The Stuff is.  They engage Mo Rutherford, who, although crooked, is quite likable.  The film follows him as he investigates.  He eventually finds Jason, a young boy whose family has been taken over by The Stuff.  Jason saw it moving and knows it’s alive.  Mo rescues Jason and teams up with Nicole, an advertising executive who’s been marketing The Stuff.  Together, and with “Chocolate Chip Charlie” Hobbs, they decide to expose that The Stuff is animated by an alien life form and is dangerous.

There’s a lot of madcap stuff here.  The horror element comes from what happens to “Stuffies”—those addicted to The Stuff.  It hollows them out, eating them from the inside.  They’re left as hollow shells.  When shot they leak the white Stuff.  This leads an Army colonel who is also trying to stop it to his classic line, “I kinda like the sight of blood… but this is disgusting!”  There are so many corny lines that it’s no wonder that the movie has a cult following.  It’s also a parody of how industrialists will stop at nothing to get money, even when they know what they sell is dangerous.

Watching the movie, which wasn’t half bad, I wondered at how I’d never heard of it before.  There are so many movies out there and now with the internet so many websites.  Classic TMI.  I only found it by scrolling through a streaming service after a night of very little sleep when something kind of silly sounded appealing.  Comedy horror is a genre that can produce some good results.  This movie also made me think of The Blob, another shapeless monster that critics tend to dislike.  The film had a decent budget for the time and the production values are generally good.  The Stuff isn’t a great movie, but it’s a pretty good one.  The social commentary that it packs is just as relevant now as it was forty years ago.  It’s a satire worth seeing.

Humanity Wrought

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“What hath God wrought?”  So the first telegraph message read.  There was a wonderment and fear of technology in 1844.  Although at today’s rate of change, to us tech seemed to crawl back then, but it was changing rapidly.  What strikes me as I think about AI is that we’ve lost our humility.  “What hath humans wrought?” is the new motto, and one that presumes it can only be good.  How easily we forget Thoreau, even as we valorize him.  He feared that machines would end humanity, and in a way they have.  Fearing that trains would mean that schedules would be determined by clocks rather than human lives, he understood something that we’re still missing.  He feared trains would make humans in their own image.  And so they did.  We live by a 9-2-5 schedule, no matter how dehumanizing.

“What hath God wrought?”  With confident, angry atheists telling us there is no god, and that there is nothing more amazing than human intellect, we now see what we’ve wrought.  Many people object to AI.  They don’t want their power centers in their neighborhoods.  They don’t want the cost of electricity to rise just so Silicon Valley technocrats can get richer.  They know that as wildfires burn American cities, huge amounts of water are required for running data centers.  Even Three Mile Island is being restarted to help supply the electrical power they require.  Protest as loudly as you can, it will not stop them.  God is no longer in the equation.  God has left the building.  This is the age of humanity.  No, a very small segment of humanity.  A segment that thinks it’s god.

Technology is good if it serves to make our situation better.  AI is now starting, according to the New York Times, to both lie and cheat.  It is made in the image of humans, so of course it does.  Look at the White House and try to protest.  No longer does the imago dei hold any meaning.   We no longer aspire to that image of God in which we once could see reflected in our better natures.  No; we can so we do.  Even as Frankenstein keeps lumbering back to the screen, and new versions roll off the presses, we simply don’t get the message.  We have no time to stop and glance—no, stare—out over Walden Pond for hours at a time.  We must work so that our fellow humans can be put out of work.  What hath humanity wrought?

Geeology

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Some of my fondest memories of the Midwest, apart from living my teaching dream, involve rockhounding.  The other day I was out in the garage trying to locate my rock tumbler when I came across many carefully labeled boxes from our rockhounding trips.  Not all of these trips were local, nor were all of them solely rock-based.  For example, my family took a driving trip around Lake Superior.  This was back before a passport was required to cross the border.  Part of the trip involved driving up to Copper Harbor in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to look for agates and, well, copper.  Then there was the time when we drove to Hannibal, Missouri to hunt for geodes.  The mine was closed because of excessive rain so a couple months later we drove down with some friends we knew from Michigan and tried again.  This time with success.

The great, unfortunately departed, bookstore manager at Nashotah House was a great conversation partner.  Once I was talking to her about rocks and I stopped and apologized, “I don’t know why I’m so interested in rocks.”  She said, “You’ve got curiosity.  If it wasn’t rocks it would be something else.”  I took that to be the compliment it was intended to be.  Not everyone at the seminary was curious and many were only interested in matters ecclesiastical.  One night a huge windstorm blew over a very large cedar tree that barely missed our house.  Before the week was out, I was outside standing in the hole left by its roots, poking around the glacial till for interesting rocks.  I continued doing this until the tree was removed and the hole filled in.  I’ve had other interests, bordering on obsessions, in my life, but the geological interest started early.

When I was a child my brothers and I would go down to French Creek in Franklin, under the 13th Street bridge and look for fossils.  I wondered how this could fit together with the story of the world being only 6,000 years old.  We knew from school that fossils were millions of years in the making.  One time my mother bought us, at a rummage sale, a small cardboard “rock collection.”  It had a few little pieces of non-gem quality gemstones glued to the bottom.  A couple of them had been previously pilfered.  I was fascinated that such colorful things just came out of the ground.  Planning on being a minister, I never studied geology in school.  To be fair, I don’t think Grove City even offered a geology major.  Years later, teaching in a seminary in the Midwest, my old fascination caught up with me again.  And it left many fond memories.

More Rocks

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Another thing about rocks—I warned you!—is the matter of scale.  When I go out jogging, it’s on pea gravel.  Some of these tiny stones are interesting.  Or, if you’re the romantic type and gave or received an engagement ring, that diamond is likely not to be massive.  I’m always reminded of this when I go to a mall, say, which has a floor full of fossiliferous limestone.  I think of the hours I’ve spent poking around creek beds and cliff faces for fossils, and here, laid out for thousands of square feet, is polished flooring floating with fossils.  Or when I walk into a bank, say, and see a counter made of labradorite.  I carry a small labradorite piece in my pocket that my brother once gave me.  I love the way it catches the light and reflects a beautiful blue color back to me.  Here it is in massive form where I’m trying to make a modest withdrawal.

Once in Wisconsin we went to Devil’s Lake for the purple quartzite of the region.  If you look among the tumbles you can sometimes find clear quartz crystals.  I’ve noticed that on rockhound YouTube channels that collectors are chuffed to find nice, if small quartz crystals.  They’re collectable.  But they’re also small.  Size is one of the reasons for not letting rock collections grow too much.  I’ve tried my hand at making small sculptures out of significant rocks.  I can see some of them on the landing window ledge from where I’m sitting at the moment.  They’re small, but heavy, and if we ever move, will require careful wrapping.  I’m not even sure what kind of rock they’re made of.

Wisconsin quartzite with quartz crystals

Rock identification is hard work.  I have a Moh’s scale set.  A streak plate.  A hand loupe.  It’s hard to use the acid test (vinegar will do) because the pieces are so small.  Identification is often destructive.  This might not be an issue if I had a ton of similar rocks to dispose of.  No, but when you have just a handful, and these had to fit in your luggage along with your clothes, making TSA agents scratch their heads, you’re reluctant to damage them just to figure out what they are.  So identifying the small rocks I have is difficult.  Online forums tend to be unhelpful in this regard.  Not even the color can give you certain answers.  Once I collected some jasper in a creek.  I could identify it because a large boulder clearly had jasper intrusions and I could compare.  The piece I took home, of course, was quite small.  Small, however, does not mean insignificant.

Naming Birds

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I’m no Jane Goodall, but I grew up loving animals.  I still do.  I’d spend many hours poring over animal identification books.  When I was young I could tell a crab from a lobster from a crayfish.  I knew moths from butterflies.  Megafauna?  I had it covered.  One thing, however, eluded me.  Bird identification.  Now, I can tell the obvious ones apart, but ornithology seems to delight in making the trade difficult.  For example, I was on a walk with a couple friends in May.  We spotted a small bird—smaller than finch size but larger than a hummingbird.  Short tail.  Its coloration was an unusual shade of brown.  We got a good look at it.  Back home I pulled out my bird identification books.  Nothing like it.  I tried online, even Cornell’s famed ornithology lab website.  According to all the specs what we saw doesn’t exist.

The problem with birds is that they come in different colorations.  Most bird identification books and sites focus on the males.  They tend to be more colorful and their identification is easier.  Not only that, but young birds’ plumage often changes as they mature.  This is such an issue that some bird books warn the would-be watcher not to try to identify by the color.  You should look for things like eye-rings, beak shapes, and that tiny spot on the tip of the tail, when seen in flight.  Right.  After a couple of days of searching in my spare time, I gave up.  Given how small it was, this was likely a juvenile.  Which sex I have no idea.  It bothers me when I can’t identify what I see.  The world is full of such wonderful things!

Many years ago in Scotland, some friends willingly crawled to a cliff’s edge with us on a rainy day in the Orkney Islands.  We’d come here to see the puffins.  Puffins nest on cliffs overlooking the sea.  They have colorful bills and are similar in looks (but not physiognomy) to penguins.  We were rewarded with a view of a cliff-full of sea-birds, including puffins.  I often ponder, living inland now, why the bright, colorful birds tend to hide.  I know, I know—predators.  But still, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen an adult male oriel with their bright orange plumage, despite living in an area where they’re listed as common.  Birds can be so coy.  Maybe that’s why dedicated bird watchers have such passion.  I love animals.  The problem with birds is, despite hours with books and websites, some of them I just can’t identify.

Rocky Ground

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When I begin to lose my sense of wonder, the natural world grounds me.  I’ve been an amateur rockhound for many years and I sometimes wonder if it’s because I grew up poor.  The idea that you can just pick up something valuable on the ground has a treasure-hunting aspect to it.  Movers, I’ve discovered, dislike rock collectors.  My collection is quite small, and most of it not on display.  The danger is that I’ll be wanting to pick up more interesting rocks.  Like much of nature, rocks are amazing if you look closely at them.  And when the mania hits, it takes all my attention.  We all know that gemstones tend to be small, but perhaps it’s the fact that they look very little like their finished state in the wild makes them intriguing.

This interest was recently rekindled by a visit to the Lehigh Valley’s local cave, The Lost River Canyon.  As with most local attractions, it takes some time to get around to them.  We decided to go during the recent heat wave since caves maintain a constant temperature, generally in the fifties, and during the height of the wave the outside air temperature was double that of the cave thermometer.  Caves often have rock shops associated with them because being in a cave will trigger the rock-hounding gene.  And I suspect I’m not the only one to whom this happens.  Like many preserved caves, Lost River Canyon was an accidental discovery and was later purchased by a family that has been running it as a tourist attraction ever since.  I left inspired to find my rock tumbler and get it rolling again.

It’s difficult to say when or how such obsessions originate.  When my daughter was really into dinosaurs I started looking into geology.  The next thing I knew I was a member of the Wisconsin Geological Society and was going on field trips to collect.  When I lost my job at Nashotah House I seriously considered enrolling in a geology degree program, put off by the fact that calculus and chemistry were pre-requisites.  I was a hopeless humanities major and advanced math just doesn’t psit well in my psyche.  Part of me wonders if the fascination doesn’t go back to Genesis.  Geology was the science that tolled the death knell for any kind of literal six-day creation.  When this rock madness hits other interests can, if I’m not careful, be shunted aside.  It’s important to feel grounded.

Hopeful Weeds

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Our approach to our front garden has been to buy the perennials we can afford and hope the beauty of nature does the rest.  Nature, we quickly learned, loves weeds.  Tough, tenacious, even if not always pleasing to the eye, weeds may be the ultimate symbol of hope.  A friend of mine, now departed, used to say that a weed was just a plant where we didn’t want it to be.  To put a more lexical sounding spin on it, a weed is “a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation” (according to Wikipedia).  Opportunistic plants, but those with a strong desire to survive.  I have noticed, in our eight years in this house, that each year different weeds predominate.  We have a front lawn that is difficult to finagle a mower onto, so we put down ground cover and mulch and planted several store-purchased non-weeds.

Some of these survived, and others haven’t.  Some hung on for a few years and then died.  It’s difficult to say if we just don’t have green thumbs or if the brutal, full summer sun did them in.  Weeds, however, thrive no matter what.  And they find any location with the smallest bit of promise.  Tired of wrestling the lawn mower down the front steps, a couple years back I put weed-blocking ground cover on the verge.  I went to the hardware store and bought many bags of sand and gravel and some paving stones.  First the sand on top of the ground cover.  Then the heavy paving blocks.  The gravel covered the sand, and I pushed it off the paving blocks to make a somewhat pleasing, if simple hop-scotch track.  (I’m delighted whenever I see kids using it that way.)  I hadn’t realized that weeds don’t mind sand.

That first year was good.  The second summer, however, weeds had begun to sprout and grow, tenaciously.  Instead of mowing, I was now kneeling on paving blocks and pulling weeds.  Mowing took less time.  Still, the weeding can be done every few weeks rather than the weekly ritual with the mower.  I decided for our front garden that any non-spiky plant that was shorter than what we’d planted would be left alone.  There aren’t enough hours in a weekend—even a three-day one—to weed properly, not with books to write and a 9-2-5 breathing down my neck all the other days.  Not to mention the mowing and grocery shopping and other errands that eat up weekends like popcorn.  Still, fresh in from pulling the latest batch of weeks I have to confess that they give me hope.  All it takes is a place to settle down, no matter how marginal, and the will to survive.

Rumblings

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Despite the many books on Tambora, it surprisingly gets little press.  Of the volumes on the volcano I’ve read, Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora has been the best.  He, like many others, makes a case for the world-changing impact of that eruption that led to “the year without a summer” in 1816.  Knock-on effects remain with us to this day.  Wood also throws in a good bit of concern about our current climate crisis.  As he points out, the volcanic aerosols of Tambora remained in the stratosphere for three years (leading to three chilly summers), but our current carbon emissions, on-going, have no end in sight.  We all already know that weather has become more extreme.  As I write this, family members in Europe are experiencing 100-degree temperatures that used to be unheard of on that continent.  We’ve seen hurricanes increase in intensity, and have had our own erratic weather for a few years now.  The atmosphere’s too large for us to predict just who might receive the God-like wrath of the weather.

Wood uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein both as an illustration of the year without a summer and as the atmospheric monster we’ve created.  He also narrates other historical events brought on by the temporary change in climate in the eighteen-teens.  One of them was the breaking up of Arctic ice that led to the ill-fated Franklin expedition many years later.  (I was unintentionally also reading Dan Simmon’s The Terror even as I read Wood’s chapter about the expedition.)  More than that, this book describes the typhoid outbreak and pandemic that followed on from erratic weather in South Asia.  And deadly changes in parts of China.  The disaster of the breaking of the Giétro glacial ice dam, and an earlier famine in Ireland fueled by British hostility toward the Irish, as well as Tambora’s weather.

The developments that grew out of the human response to the changed climate caused by Tambora led to many institutions still with us.  Governments, slowly, of course, realized that disaster preparedness and care for the working class were necessary for any nation to remain strong.  The privileged lose said privilege when there’s nobody else left to compare it with.  (Capitalism has blood all over its hands.)  Overall, this is a provocative book making the case that the world we recognize today evolved this way largely in response to an environmental crisis that occurred before steam engines had been invented, when sails drove shipping and horses drew vehicles.  When a single volcano changed everything.  And although we should learn from such things, being what we are, we tend to overlook that largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history.

Check for

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If after Sleepaway Camp you’re still willing to go into the woods, beware of Ticks.  Actually, for a direct to video movie, Ticks isn’t bad.  It has some production values and a story that, although very far fetched, keeps you watching.  It all begins with a group of inner-city kids going on a wilderness enrichment project.  They don’t know that some cash croppers growing marijuana have been using steroids to enhance the growth of the plants nearby the cabin.  The steroids leak onto some ticks who grow supersized and are out for blood.  The kids and their chaperones know none of this as they try to get into nature and away from their unhealthy urban lives with its crime and entitled situations.  The local sleazy drug lord, however, doesn’t like them too near his operation, and keeps an eye on them.  One of the drug growers is the first to be attacked.

The mutated ticks start out about the size of a hand.  They first attack the dog of  one of the kids, draining it of blood and killing it.  Then they go for people.  Although there’s nothing really new here, other than using ticks as the monsters, it’s a somewhat fast-paced film that satisfies the monster itch.  Only one of the kids actually dies, although several are bitten.  In keeping with the tropes of many American films, though, the one Black kid is the sole victim.  This could’ve been thought through a bit more carefully.  The only other deaths are, however, three white men—all of them associated with the drug growing operation.  A bit of humor keeps things from getting too heavy, but the fact is that ticks can be scary and it turns out that making them bigger, as tenacious as they are, can work to make them scarier.

If you’ve ever been bitten by a tick (only once, that I know of, in my case) you know they can be frightening in that they carry diseases.  In the movie, instead of Lyme their bite is, or can be, hallucinogenic.  This isn’t applied evenly, however, sometimes the bites do this, and that is used to build some tension and to resolve some issues.  In the end, though, it turns out like many of the young-people-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods movies.  I won’t tell you how it ends since you may decide to see it, if you’ve cheap like me, and have been hankering for another excuse not to spend a week in the woods.  You’re generally fine if you do rent a cabin, but it is always best to check for ticks.

Cool Summer

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Daily readers may recognize the cover of this book.  Some time back I posted on a misprinted book I’d received from Amazon.  It was the first time I had to return something to the retail giant in exchange for the book I’d actually ordered.  Although the volume itself  doesn’t say, I suspect William K. and Nicholas P. Klingaman, the authors, are kin.  (Some publishers make a big deal of such things.)  Regardless, I was reading for content.  It was strange reading this during a May when temperatures have generally been running about 1816-average levels below normal (mean temperatures can be deceiving).  It was also a good reminder how erratic weather can be and how dependent we are upon it.  So, basically, the volcano known as Tambora had a massive eruption—the largest during human recorded history—in 1815.  The ash in the atmosphere contributed to a year (1816) with cold temperatures that in many places devastated agriculture and led to widespread starvation.

The Year Without Summer is an interesting book, even if overwritten (which could be a function of having two authors, each with a lot to say.  One is a meteorologist and the other an historian.  And historians, especially, tend to write long.  That’s partially because so many interesting connections can be made.  Certain things happened because precipitating events owed their existence to a volcano.  There were several points, however, where I said to myself, wait, now, what does this have to do with the weather?  All authors (including yours truly) are selective and tend to focus on what they find interesting.  Detours are permitted.

The combination of meteorology and history was very interesting in its own right.  The weather is something we talk and perhaps think a lot about, but to which we tend not to ascribe too much ultimate importance.  The many, many pages of loss, despair, and death that make up this book should belie that understanding.  The weather is vitally important for our entire way of life.  We often take food for granted, but it’s anything but.  Many of those who starved to death in 1816 did so because they couldn’t afford food.  It was sometimes available, but at princely prices.  Many otherwise law-abiding citizens opted for riots and many governments didn’t see it as their responsibility to care for the people they governed (that still happens in capitalism).  This book, a bit overwritten, is nevertheless full of interesting information and creates some weighty thoughts.  If a Tambora-level eruption were to take place today, we’d see capitalism on display with all of its very ugly teeth.

Thorough

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It was a warm summer’s day, sometime in the mid-eighties.  I was living in Boston and some friends asked if I’d like to go to Walden Pond, outside Concord.  I’d read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, so yes, please.  I knew Thoreau was an early Massachusetts Transcendentalist, mystic, and nature lover.  That particular day we were the only ones at the site where his cabin in the woods once stood.  I suspect that, being there with friends, it wasn’t as contemplative a trip as it would’ve been had I made it alone.  Still, here we were, nearing a century-and-a-half after his death, remembering him.  My wife and I recently watched the PBS three-part documentary on Thoreau, and I learned a lot about him.  He was admirable in a way that few public figures are today.  What’s more, it’s clear that he’s widely appreciated as a visionary and believer in freedom.

Image credit: Benjamin D. Maxham, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)

Writing in the nineteenth century, it seems, got you noticed much more than it does now.  Thoreau had profound things to say.  He had strong convictions about abolition and being shuffled into an existence of work, forced from being free.  He was able to live the way he did largely because he didn’t need many things.  He also had famous friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one, who gave him a place to stay when he had none of his own.  The documentary makes the point that, despite being a hero to many, we’ve gone ahead and built the world Thoreau most feared.  Few, or at least a few of us, find that work doesn’t define us.  Writing, it seems, still helps with that.  Those of us born to write do so, and long days “in the office” must be endured to come to life when writing is again possible.

If you think deeply about it you start to realize that we’ve allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by economics.  If you have a mortgage you know this to be true.  Or if you have a medical condition—you can’t afford not to have a job without insurance.  Thoreau, it seems, lived with the tuberculosis that ultimately killed him pretty much all of his life.  And he died too young, we feel, because he had so much to say.  So much to say that was worth listening to.  Such writers are rare today because, like everything else, writing has become a business and some readers even prefer things “written” by AI.  And yet I remember that warm summer’s day and think of a placid time still earlier when one might’ve met Henry David Thoreau in the woods.

A Day for Earth

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Sometimes things come just when they’re needed.  Although it was earlier this month, the Artemis II mission was a celebration of Earth Day.  It was also a much needed shot in the arm during difficult times for the environment.  Human arrogance is quite often checked by nature.  The series of very hot April days followed by extraordinarily cold April days reminded us around here that nature is firmly in charge.  Our comfort, or expectations, are secondary to the vast world around us.  And we love our world for it.  We are guests here and we couldn’t survive without it.  We may set up a base on the moon or Mars, but such places will still rely on our home.  It helps that those who’ve ventured further away than humans have ever gone sent back photos to remind us of how small we are on a fairly small planet.  Pictures of home.

Photo credit: NASA, public domain, FD06_high priority pao

From our daily perspective it’s difficult to believe that outer space surrounds us.  We’re so caught up with our own little problems, generally of our own making.  I write this after a day of shivering in a chilly house as electricians replaced the breaker box and the conduit, from service head to basement mounting.  It was a sunny day but temperatures hadn’t really recovered after a nighttime low in the twenties.  I reflected on how much we’ve come to rely on being able to shut nature out.  How difficult it would be to survive without shelter, and a little heat.  With the electricity off the furnace didn’t know to kick on, and windows had to be open to snake wires through.  For all the wonders of a household electrical system, the Earth itself is so complex we are still only beginning to understand how it works.  We love it.  We fear it.

Our dependence on things we’ve constructed makes me feel fragile sometimes.  When we first noticed our electrical issues I walked to a local shop run by an Earth-loving owner to see if their power was out too.  “Water and electricity,” she said, “are the two things we can’t do without at home.”  She was correct.  We rely on the grid.  Nature could take us with both hands behind its back.  As the replacement process stretched beyond the scheduled finish time, I had visions of a cold night without power.  No way to cook dinner, no way to keep food safe in the fridge.  I thought of astronauts a quarter-million miles from home, protected by a shell made here on Earth.  And looking back to lovingly snap a photo for Earth Day.

Tambora Crisis

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The name Wolfgang Behringer was familiar to me from his book Witches and Witch-Hunts, which I read several years back.  I’ve been interested in volcanoes lately, and Tambora in particular.  So when I saw his Tambora and the Year without a Summer I decided to indulge.  What Behringer attempts here, as indicated by his subtitle, How a Volcano Plunged the World into Crisis, is a massive undertaking.  The result is a rather rambling history that covers many of the troubles of the early nineteenth century, which, ultimately, were influenced by the crisis triggered by Tambora.  For context, the eruption of Tambora in 1815, in what is now Indonesia, was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history.  It famously led to “the year without a summer” in many parts of the world, but, as the book points out, the effects were uneven.  Western Europe was cold and wet.  North America was cold and dry.  Both of these situations led to famines and many people died.

Nature doesn’t play favorites, though. Weather is variable, and local.  Eastern Europe, and Russia, experienced nearly ideal conditions for agriculture.  There was enough food to go around, but what was lacking was the infrastructure.  Western Europe was still putting itself together after the disruption of Napoleon and his wars.  The Americans were still recovering from fighting off the British.  And, being German, Behringer spends a lot of time explaining what was happening in Germany.  Reading this kind of spurred me onto a little genealogy kick, since much of what he describes took place in the regions where my mother’s ancestors were from.  That’s why I try to read widely—it has a Gumpian outcome, sometimes.  

The inherent problem with a global history is that the world is simply too big, and human history too long and voluminous, to fit it all into one place.  There were no doubt many crises caused by the atmospheric changes to which Tambora contributed.  There were also many innovations.  Behringer makes a good case that the Tambora crisis led to the development of meteorology as we know it.  The regular and meticulous keeping of weather records began around then.  Savings banks also emerged.  As always, those who suffered the most from the famine were those who couldn’t afford food.  In response, governments encouraged people to save up for a rainy day (or year).  And the early development of life insurance, again to help people weather financial difficulties with the death of a wage earner, began.  More about the crisis than the volcano itself, this is nevertheless, a chilling examination of how one crisis can change history.

Easter Flowers

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Easter is our springtime holiday of hope.  Flowers are starting to bloom and the cold spells, when they come, don’t last too terribly long.  Of course, as a moveable feast Easter can come earlier than this, but here we are, in April with brave flowers making themselves vulnerable.  The weather’s fickle, as is typical of spring, with the lovely warm days often coinciding with when you have to be at work, reserving rain and chill for weekends.  Around here, anyway, it felt like winter lasted quite a long time.  It got cold early and was gray and gloomy for much of the time.  And for around here, we had a lot of snow.  Spring was reluctant to show up.  The timing of Easter was good this year.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the flowers.

As a kid, I appreciated the bright colors, but flowers were too delicate to play with and you could surprise a pollinator with a stinger, which seldom ended well.  As an adult I see that each flower is its own world.  For perennials, a resurrection.  Last year I somewhat clumsily dug up the daffodils that some previous owners had planted where nobody could see, and transplanted them in our attempts at a front garden.  Having already sprouted, they did not like that, and they withered and disappeared.  I hoped I hadn’t killed them.  This spring they showed up, reminding me that life is persistent.  It keeps trying.  That resurrection is possible.

We could spend a lifetime studying a flower and still not comprehend it all.  We see it for what it offers to us without thinking it exists for its own purposes.  All of nature interacts and we are connected, that flower and I.  We share the planet with insects for whom it is a source of life.  And other flowers with which it communicates in ways we can’t even understand.  We have to humble ourselves if we would let them be our teachers.  Our constant narrative of being on top of nature is misguided, you can almost hear them say.  There are riches here that money cannot buy and flowers would exist even without us being here to see them.  Nature carries on.  It urges us to acknowledge that we are part of it.  Easter is a holiday enfolded within hope, inseparable from its flowers.  They may be delicate but they are also wise.  We can learn from them.