Monday, October 29, 2018
10.29
I stoop and turn the grass with a trowel. My detector is screaming on the grass nearby, my heart beat ringing in my ears, the dirt soft and wet. My favorite hammer is calling back to me. All the old boards, frames, forms still standing—and their father mouldering in the dirt. Come back, sweet creator of my home. Come back.
Sunday, October 28, 2018
10.28
I'm hunched over in the dark, pulling grass up from between my toes. The air feels wet on my back, in my lungs, on the grass. The distant sound of crickets rasps a quiet tick tock, driving the night forward and back, a pendulum on a grandfather clock. My muscles slowly freeze into place all hunched and shivering. I can't feel my hands. By the time I fall asleep with my head on my knees and my pants dew-soaked, the morning is maybe only a moment away.
Saturday, October 27, 2018
10.27
What year is it?
1987, probably. By the looks of it around here, I'd say so. These buildings are falling into the ground, but they still hold that intensely practical feel of a single fat red brick. The colors are exactly that hyper-saturated faded primary color combination that I'm so unfamiliar and so familiar with. The people look like they turned off their TVs and radios and never bought a connection to the web. Things are stuck around here.
1987, probably. By the looks of it around here, I'd say so. These buildings are falling into the ground, but they still hold that intensely practical feel of a single fat red brick. The colors are exactly that hyper-saturated faded primary color combination that I'm so unfamiliar and so familiar with. The people look like they turned off their TVs and radios and never bought a connection to the web. Things are stuck around here.
Thursday, October 25, 2018
10.16
Her hands were crossed and folded, which pulled her otherwise-broad shoulders in. She held her shoes. A curl or two fell, unruly, across her forehead. A loose bun wasn't tenacious enough to hold her hair. The stained concrete floor of the massive tool house was cool beneath her feet. She could see a tall man walking in from across the field, passing other workers in the narrow rows. The air danced and shimmered around his shoulders, but even squinting, she couldn't make out his eyes.
Was he kind? He had to be.
He took off his hat and waved it at her, not cutting his stride. She broke out of the pavilion's shade and walked, near-stiff, to meet him. The air hit her again like a physical object.
"Ho there," he called, from earshot.
"Hello!" She was forced to yell. "I said, hello!"
She could now make out his feet's soft crunch in the old leaf litter between the rows. His toes were splayed out wide, raw, and red. His shoulders and chest were nut-brown. He looked up at her. "Sorry about that. I was on the other field. Mike said you wanted a job?"
"That's right."
"But I'm not hiring."
"You haven't seen me work."
"Fair. But am I supposed to replace one of my guys for you? They're hungry too. We all are."
She paused and said with maybe a touch more dirt in it, "You haven't seen me work." Her nostrils flared once, twice, and she struggled with a self-righteous anger that flashed across her face and evaporated in the sun.
He swept a beet-red hand across his beet-red face and flicked the sweat down into the dirt. He narrowed his eyes at her with that look. She had already shifted her weight to turn and go when he said "Alright. Let's see this." She rocked back on her heels, near-tipping over. Her mouth was suddenly very dry.
He led her down a long row through the terrible bake of the sun to where a man waited in a screaming-white truck. From the back, he plucked a fat linen bag the size of her palm and tossed it to her. "There's your gold. Where's your painter?"
She held up a broad brown hand.
"I'll believe it when I see it," he said, hopping down from the truck. "Come on. There's a fresh row just down here." He fell silent while they walked, and she could feel the thin vibration of her pulse in her neck, hear the crisp sound of the dirt beneath their toes. He turned to her without speaking and cleared his throat.
"Here?"
"Yeah."
She unclipped the top of the cloth bag and held its neck pinched in the fingers of her left hand, rolling the cloth down over them to hang the bag just so in her palm, opened between her two longest digits. Softly tapping her right fingers into the dusty-gold powder in the bag, she picked up a paltry amount with her hand. Her left hand snapped closed again on the small bag and she straightened, reaching up to the top of the plant with her right hand where a stem abruptly truncated in a small confusion of spidery tips. She flicked the pad of one finger across, finding another right behind, flick, another, flick, flick, flick. Tap the dust again–pollen, was it? They called it something she had never bothered to learn about–and again into the plant to find a feather. Flick, flick, flick, flick, and paint the plant. Quickly, efficiently. She was buried into the depth of the vine each time she stepped forward, her skin complaining at the tiny bristles on the top of each leaf. Flick flick flick. She worked the whole plant and stepped back.
He nodded. "Where'd you learn that? 's a new style."
"Up somewhere near Edmonton. I don't remember the name of the town."
"Growing?"
"Grapes."
He nodded and rocked forward and back in the softened dirt of the row. He seemed to settle. "I don't normally hire women, you know. Not often tall enough to reach the tops of the plants." There passed the space of one breath between them, during which he flicked his eyes up to hers. "Not your problem, though. If you want a job, I think I have an idea for you, if you're up to it. Grapes, you said?"
"In Alberta."
"You get snow up there?"
"Once."
He shivered. She opened the bag on her fingers and flicked the last of the powdery gold from her right hand, loosed the bag again, and clipped it shut. She looked calm, but the movements of her hands were too deliberate, too careful. He was lost in a reverie and she watched him carefully, dark eyes unmoving, breath slow. As she breathed, her shirt pulled in small ripples at the dark, wet patches down her back and sides.
He jumped a little as though realizing, wiped his brow again. "Alright, then. I liked what I saw. You wanna follow me, then?" He turned on his heel and strode off, light and fast. She reached out one last touch to the plant she had worked. Without turning, he started talking fast. "I don't think your talent is useful out here in the tomatoes." Her head turned to the plants as she walked, brows furrowed. "They're expensive, but they don't require much skill, much care. They're sturdy, you know. I mean, we've got 'em out here in the sun. Obviously. Nothing to it: Most of the guys use old horse hair brushes and we get good results. But that finger trick, now that's something else."
The two closed in on a massive building with closed up walls. An enormous hum vibrated through the soles of her feet and the building's edges seemed to vibrate with the sun. The whole surface was painted a sun-sharp white and her eyes watered as she looked ahead.
"You're something else and we have something else. Come on inside." A key in a lock. And the door, three feet thick of steel. She stooped as she stepped over the mantle into the dark beyond and then: she jumped back out. A roiling cloud of fog was hissing over the steel around her, the face of which dripped heavily on the floor. He saw her face and said "We have a state license for the cold house. Don't worry. We're all legal here. You said you had worked in Edmonton, so I thought . . ."
She looked at him through a hot face.
"Alright. Let's go."
She stepped through, and he swung the door closed behind her. Its clang made a tumbledown echo that rolled through the long corridor. His light, slapping footfalls proceeded them to the lockers lining the last ten feet before a nearly opaque glass door. The light beyond was golden-green.
He tossed her a neat bundle of grey cloth. "Can't take anything in there," he said. He sounded embarrassed. She only nodded.
The pair scrubbed their feet and hands. He stood facing away from her while she rinsed off the rest of her. He put on his own silly-looking smock over his sunburnt shoulders, and flicked one eyebrow up when she hesitated. "Yeah?"
"I'm ready. You can open the door."
The door swung into the next room, and a wall, three layers thick of thin cotton strips hung down beyond. He pushed through and disappeared. She pushed through the wall and nearly lost her direction, nearly tripped, nearly floated away, but came through the far side blinking at the sudden return of light. Her skin prickled up. The last of the shower water felt like it was freezing. Her chest hurt. She looked up.
The refrigerated room stretched out half a kilometer or more across, an enormous distance for such a low ceiling. Golden light tore through the thick plants from a hundred skylights, bouncing around the small space left for it until all light was swallowed up at the floor and ceiling by vines, stalks, and bushes, each one a dense green body with firework bursts of colors. The dust of a multitude of colored plant-explosions settled soft on the black earth between her dark toes and fought with the plants to cloud away the cutting sunlight. Tearing all throughout were the small sounds of a living place, a cutting buzz, a whining, two million small toes tapping a blind path through the verdant maze. A continuous thunderstorm of rain left the bass clef with no space for the sound of a heartbeat.
She didn't move herself, but she moved, eyes too full, breath caught up. She fell back into the dead passageway. Cotton cloth cut off the overwhelming life from view.
He ducked his head between strips and coughed a laugh. "You ain't never seen no cold house, have you? Well, I'm glad to know you can still be surprised. The way you told yourself is like you've seen everything ever to see."
"What is it?"
"What, the cold house?"
"Am I a joke to you? I'm just a duster, a drifter, a nobody. You can kick me out as soon as show me this. Why torture me?"
He didn't respond to that but stepped away, and the cloth door fell down in soft flaps. A wet smear of air crawled along the floor in his wake. She heard him sigh beyond.
She stood up, but didn't pass through. "Hey," she said. "Why'd you bring me here?'
But there was only green noise from beyond.
She sighed.
Pushing again through the cotton blindness, she emerged again to the vast noise beyond. He was gone. She stood in his footprints, and could just make more out in the black earth, leading in. Leaves rippled everywhere her eye landed. The noise trembled, and she shook at how it vibrated the chill in her bones. Her answers were in.
There were plants that she had never seen now pulling at her smock and scraping down her limbs. All the leaves were impossibly broad and troublingly wet. She felt their indescribable fragility as stems broke and twitched at her passing. She pulled one flat, smooth leaf up and grimaced at it with an alien unfamiliarity on her face. She stooped and touched the baby-thin roots in the softest ground. And then he was beside her again, sudden. He was a ripple of leaves and then a man. The hint of shock ran through her spine, twisting her up a twitch, and then she slowly rose to her height.
"Well?" He looked back at where she had been.
"Why am I here?'
"I think everyone should see it once, what we had. Now, God stands at the gates of the old world with a flaming sword to cut the sky in two, and the sea licks at the toes of the mountains. The world doesn't have much left of what it once was. I think everyone should see this once, if only to feel their old bones—"
"My bones?"
"The ones your grandmother gave you. Do you feel the strength come back to your limbs? Do you see with new eyes? Can you look beyond your size? What do you see?" He was practically whispering, now.
Something moved behind him, and her eyes flickered to it. He laughed at the shape her face twisted into."
Her tongue was hard pressed to the roof of her mouth and every inch of her long legs was trembling from the both the cold and the exertion of holding her to the earth. She stared deep into the leaf litter she saw beyond his grinning and saw there a thing. It moved impossibly and didn't seem to see the two of them. It nosed around through the dirt, chasing the detritus of dreams too small to see.
"What—"
"I don't know what it's called. Don't ask me that. It's from the old world, before. They all are."
"All . . ."
And like that, her eyes tripped on a countless constellation of frustrated motes of life. The undersides of leaves, the point of each colored confusion on a plant stalk, the dirt between and around the roots, the air, the air, the vibrant and tintinnambulous air—all were full and moving. Not just the dusting of plants nor the waving of leaves, but life too small to be conceived was on the move.
His voice was warmer than she remembered. The room was warmer than she remembered. His words creaked with long-forgotten pain reborn, croaked with the ages she had stood unblinking. He held his hand up for her to see a monstrous spiky little shame crawling swift between his fingers, black as the inside of an eyelid on a moonless night. "They're the last gift to be taken from us. My grandfather's grandfather saved what he could and brought them here."
"Here where?"
"Eden."
Loss.
[I'll miss the bees when they're gone.]
Was he kind? He had to be.
He took off his hat and waved it at her, not cutting his stride. She broke out of the pavilion's shade and walked, near-stiff, to meet him. The air hit her again like a physical object.
"Ho there," he called, from earshot.
"Hello!" She was forced to yell. "I said, hello!"
She could now make out his feet's soft crunch in the old leaf litter between the rows. His toes were splayed out wide, raw, and red. His shoulders and chest were nut-brown. He looked up at her. "Sorry about that. I was on the other field. Mike said you wanted a job?"
"That's right."
"But I'm not hiring."
"You haven't seen me work."
"Fair. But am I supposed to replace one of my guys for you? They're hungry too. We all are."
She paused and said with maybe a touch more dirt in it, "You haven't seen me work." Her nostrils flared once, twice, and she struggled with a self-righteous anger that flashed across her face and evaporated in the sun.
He swept a beet-red hand across his beet-red face and flicked the sweat down into the dirt. He narrowed his eyes at her with that look. She had already shifted her weight to turn and go when he said "Alright. Let's see this." She rocked back on her heels, near-tipping over. Her mouth was suddenly very dry.
He led her down a long row through the terrible bake of the sun to where a man waited in a screaming-white truck. From the back, he plucked a fat linen bag the size of her palm and tossed it to her. "There's your gold. Where's your painter?"
She held up a broad brown hand.
"I'll believe it when I see it," he said, hopping down from the truck. "Come on. There's a fresh row just down here." He fell silent while they walked, and she could feel the thin vibration of her pulse in her neck, hear the crisp sound of the dirt beneath their toes. He turned to her without speaking and cleared his throat.
"Here?"
"Yeah."
She unclipped the top of the cloth bag and held its neck pinched in the fingers of her left hand, rolling the cloth down over them to hang the bag just so in her palm, opened between her two longest digits. Softly tapping her right fingers into the dusty-gold powder in the bag, she picked up a paltry amount with her hand. Her left hand snapped closed again on the small bag and she straightened, reaching up to the top of the plant with her right hand where a stem abruptly truncated in a small confusion of spidery tips. She flicked the pad of one finger across, finding another right behind, flick, another, flick, flick, flick. Tap the dust again–pollen, was it? They called it something she had never bothered to learn about–and again into the plant to find a feather. Flick, flick, flick, flick, and paint the plant. Quickly, efficiently. She was buried into the depth of the vine each time she stepped forward, her skin complaining at the tiny bristles on the top of each leaf. Flick flick flick. She worked the whole plant and stepped back.
He nodded. "Where'd you learn that? 's a new style."
"Up somewhere near Edmonton. I don't remember the name of the town."
"Growing?"
"Grapes."
He nodded and rocked forward and back in the softened dirt of the row. He seemed to settle. "I don't normally hire women, you know. Not often tall enough to reach the tops of the plants." There passed the space of one breath between them, during which he flicked his eyes up to hers. "Not your problem, though. If you want a job, I think I have an idea for you, if you're up to it. Grapes, you said?"
"In Alberta."
"You get snow up there?"
"Once."
He shivered. She opened the bag on her fingers and flicked the last of the powdery gold from her right hand, loosed the bag again, and clipped it shut. She looked calm, but the movements of her hands were too deliberate, too careful. He was lost in a reverie and she watched him carefully, dark eyes unmoving, breath slow. As she breathed, her shirt pulled in small ripples at the dark, wet patches down her back and sides.
He jumped a little as though realizing, wiped his brow again. "Alright, then. I liked what I saw. You wanna follow me, then?" He turned on his heel and strode off, light and fast. She reached out one last touch to the plant she had worked. Without turning, he started talking fast. "I don't think your talent is useful out here in the tomatoes." Her head turned to the plants as she walked, brows furrowed. "They're expensive, but they don't require much skill, much care. They're sturdy, you know. I mean, we've got 'em out here in the sun. Obviously. Nothing to it: Most of the guys use old horse hair brushes and we get good results. But that finger trick, now that's something else."
The two closed in on a massive building with closed up walls. An enormous hum vibrated through the soles of her feet and the building's edges seemed to vibrate with the sun. The whole surface was painted a sun-sharp white and her eyes watered as she looked ahead.
"You're something else and we have something else. Come on inside." A key in a lock. And the door, three feet thick of steel. She stooped as she stepped over the mantle into the dark beyond and then: she jumped back out. A roiling cloud of fog was hissing over the steel around her, the face of which dripped heavily on the floor. He saw her face and said "We have a state license for the cold house. Don't worry. We're all legal here. You said you had worked in Edmonton, so I thought . . ."
She looked at him through a hot face.
"Alright. Let's go."
She stepped through, and he swung the door closed behind her. Its clang made a tumbledown echo that rolled through the long corridor. His light, slapping footfalls proceeded them to the lockers lining the last ten feet before a nearly opaque glass door. The light beyond was golden-green.
He tossed her a neat bundle of grey cloth. "Can't take anything in there," he said. He sounded embarrassed. She only nodded.
The pair scrubbed their feet and hands. He stood facing away from her while she rinsed off the rest of her. He put on his own silly-looking smock over his sunburnt shoulders, and flicked one eyebrow up when she hesitated. "Yeah?"
"I'm ready. You can open the door."
The door swung into the next room, and a wall, three layers thick of thin cotton strips hung down beyond. He pushed through and disappeared. She pushed through the wall and nearly lost her direction, nearly tripped, nearly floated away, but came through the far side blinking at the sudden return of light. Her skin prickled up. The last of the shower water felt like it was freezing. Her chest hurt. She looked up.
The refrigerated room stretched out half a kilometer or more across, an enormous distance for such a low ceiling. Golden light tore through the thick plants from a hundred skylights, bouncing around the small space left for it until all light was swallowed up at the floor and ceiling by vines, stalks, and bushes, each one a dense green body with firework bursts of colors. The dust of a multitude of colored plant-explosions settled soft on the black earth between her dark toes and fought with the plants to cloud away the cutting sunlight. Tearing all throughout were the small sounds of a living place, a cutting buzz, a whining, two million small toes tapping a blind path through the verdant maze. A continuous thunderstorm of rain left the bass clef with no space for the sound of a heartbeat.
She didn't move herself, but she moved, eyes too full, breath caught up. She fell back into the dead passageway. Cotton cloth cut off the overwhelming life from view.
He ducked his head between strips and coughed a laugh. "You ain't never seen no cold house, have you? Well, I'm glad to know you can still be surprised. The way you told yourself is like you've seen everything ever to see."
"What is it?"
"What, the cold house?"
"Am I a joke to you? I'm just a duster, a drifter, a nobody. You can kick me out as soon as show me this. Why torture me?"
He didn't respond to that but stepped away, and the cloth door fell down in soft flaps. A wet smear of air crawled along the floor in his wake. She heard him sigh beyond.
She stood up, but didn't pass through. "Hey," she said. "Why'd you bring me here?'
But there was only green noise from beyond.
She sighed.
Pushing again through the cotton blindness, she emerged again to the vast noise beyond. He was gone. She stood in his footprints, and could just make more out in the black earth, leading in. Leaves rippled everywhere her eye landed. The noise trembled, and she shook at how it vibrated the chill in her bones. Her answers were in.
There were plants that she had never seen now pulling at her smock and scraping down her limbs. All the leaves were impossibly broad and troublingly wet. She felt their indescribable fragility as stems broke and twitched at her passing. She pulled one flat, smooth leaf up and grimaced at it with an alien unfamiliarity on her face. She stooped and touched the baby-thin roots in the softest ground. And then he was beside her again, sudden. He was a ripple of leaves and then a man. The hint of shock ran through her spine, twisting her up a twitch, and then she slowly rose to her height.
"Well?" He looked back at where she had been.
"Why am I here?'
"I think everyone should see it once, what we had. Now, God stands at the gates of the old world with a flaming sword to cut the sky in two, and the sea licks at the toes of the mountains. The world doesn't have much left of what it once was. I think everyone should see this once, if only to feel their old bones—"
"My bones?"
"The ones your grandmother gave you. Do you feel the strength come back to your limbs? Do you see with new eyes? Can you look beyond your size? What do you see?" He was practically whispering, now.
Something moved behind him, and her eyes flickered to it. He laughed at the shape her face twisted into."
Her tongue was hard pressed to the roof of her mouth and every inch of her long legs was trembling from the both the cold and the exertion of holding her to the earth. She stared deep into the leaf litter she saw beyond his grinning and saw there a thing. It moved impossibly and didn't seem to see the two of them. It nosed around through the dirt, chasing the detritus of dreams too small to see.
"What—"
"I don't know what it's called. Don't ask me that. It's from the old world, before. They all are."
"All . . ."
And like that, her eyes tripped on a countless constellation of frustrated motes of life. The undersides of leaves, the point of each colored confusion on a plant stalk, the dirt between and around the roots, the air, the air, the vibrant and tintinnambulous air—all were full and moving. Not just the dusting of plants nor the waving of leaves, but life too small to be conceived was on the move.
His voice was warmer than she remembered. The room was warmer than she remembered. His words creaked with long-forgotten pain reborn, croaked with the ages she had stood unblinking. He held his hand up for her to see a monstrous spiky little shame crawling swift between his fingers, black as the inside of an eyelid on a moonless night. "They're the last gift to be taken from us. My grandfather's grandfather saved what he could and brought them here."
"Here where?"
"Eden."
Loss.
[I'll miss the bees when they're gone.]
Sunday, October 14, 2018
10.14b
I've seen an eclipse so badly that I couldn't do it as well again if I tried. Not solar. None of that daylight-waking-no-fooling-where'd-the-sun-go trash. A lunar eclipse, in which not only is light an object of mystery, but so also the memory of it, an eight-and-a-half minute desperate streak frustrated from its destination by both direct and oblique means. And aren't I the same? A desperado discouraged by both direct and oblique means?
I was once close to the sun while I watched an eclipse, body to body, and she chose to eclipse herself. Right there, where the earth meets its end and the clouds pull clothes on the panicking cosmos, the sun was too much for itself and died away.
I was once close to the sun while I watched an eclipse, body to body, and she chose to eclipse herself. Right there, where the earth meets its end and the clouds pull clothes on the panicking cosmos, the sun was too much for itself and died away.
10.14
I lost an October, once.
July 20th. I remember because it was the anniversary of when man first stepped onto the moon. That's how I felt, too, sharing in the reflected glory of a first step. You know, that's how I felt, too. A first step, tumbling forward into a dark unknown, expecting nothing sharp (abrasive? caustic? no). The first of it was well descending into true nothingness, too. Have you ever closed your eyes while you fell asleep and drifted away from your body? Have you ever closed your eyes while falling in love and lost hold of the hand you so tightly once held?
October won't come back.
May 17th. I remember because it was the last day I wore my sleeve on my sleeve, that outward expression of discretion and chastity now stripped away and thrown, more regurgitated from revulsion, really, into the passenger's seat as I drove away. What was it about the face looking back at me. Was it really a mirror, or perhaps a painting? And what would a painting look like if it weren't also a mirror? Either way, I drove away from that place and knew I had lost a breakfast joint forever. I'll never go there again as long as I live, nor never wear the chain forged for me (by me).
October has left me. Oh, it's written down someplace or other. I could go look it up, search through texts, hunt down journals, find traces of old faint lines now erased by sun-fading into thought-shadows litter. October exists. But I have left it, and I haven't lived an October since. You know, two years ago I was on a bicycle nearly every day of the month and even so couldn't reconcile that I rode past a place where I once saw god in October. I couldn't make sense of the cyclical nature of the month. Found in October, lost in October, remembered in October, alive in October. The whole month has the resonant frequency of play-acting fear, but its bell tolls brash brass, for me. I'm done with it.
I renounce October. Flee me.
Monday, October 8, 2018
10.8
Aral Sea
Once the fourth-largest lake in the world by surface area, the Aral Sea was destroyed by irrigation efforts in the USSR and continuing irrigation by Russia and Kazakhstan. It and Lake Chad, among others, are visibly-disappearing lakes.
Ogallala Aquifer
A vast aquifer spanning the high plains, once treated as inexhaustible. In most places, rainfall replenishes the water reservoir an inch or so a year, and many farmers pump out a foot or more a year to water their crops. Because the aquifer is an underground resource, there's no easy way to know if it's dried up until your pump gulps air and your crops die.
Elephant Butte Reservoir
The largest reservoir in New Mexico, fed by the Rio Grande, and built in a spate of optimism in the 1910s, the reservoir is, as of September 2018, empty. I mean, three percent full. Part of the cause is low rainfall and snowpack from upstream (the Rio Grande is drying out entirely in northern New Mexico), and part of the cause is increased use. It doesn't matter generally, the effect is the same. The lake is empty. The article from the Las Cruces Times points out that of course it emptied: that's what reservoirs are supposed to do. They disburse in lean years what was saved in the wet. The lake is, regardless, empty, and it feels like such a fragile thing. Maybe reservoirs like this and Lake Meredith are like heartbeats of Nowhere, America. I think Elephant Butte is less important globally than the Aral sea or the Ogallala, but I know I intend on keeping up with it.
Once the fourth-largest lake in the world by surface area, the Aral Sea was destroyed by irrigation efforts in the USSR and continuing irrigation by Russia and Kazakhstan. It and Lake Chad, among others, are visibly-disappearing lakes.
Ogallala Aquifer
A vast aquifer spanning the high plains, once treated as inexhaustible. In most places, rainfall replenishes the water reservoir an inch or so a year, and many farmers pump out a foot or more a year to water their crops. Because the aquifer is an underground resource, there's no easy way to know if it's dried up until your pump gulps air and your crops die.
Elephant Butte Reservoir
The largest reservoir in New Mexico, fed by the Rio Grande, and built in a spate of optimism in the 1910s, the reservoir is, as of September 2018, empty. I mean, three percent full. Part of the cause is low rainfall and snowpack from upstream (the Rio Grande is drying out entirely in northern New Mexico), and part of the cause is increased use. It doesn't matter generally, the effect is the same. The lake is empty. The article from the Las Cruces Times points out that of course it emptied: that's what reservoirs are supposed to do. They disburse in lean years what was saved in the wet. The lake is, regardless, empty, and it feels like such a fragile thing. Maybe reservoirs like this and Lake Meredith are like heartbeats of Nowhere, America. I think Elephant Butte is less important globally than the Aral sea or the Ogallala, but I know I intend on keeping up with it.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Lakes, reprise
In view of my constant fascination with lakes, I have a new and more idiotic question than ever before. This is not an article or an essay, just a meandering exploration of things I found interesting. It's not as well-written or as ground-breaking as my previous flights of fancy, and that's alright. I'm not writing these for you; this writing is just a reason for me to research, a way to spend my time well, and a documentation of my findings.
If you find it interesting, helpful, or enlightening, God bless you. And so we begin.
What percentage of the United States is surface water? And of course, this comes with a flood of other inane questions that are easily answered by a single Google search. Come with me on an adventure of pure, untethered silliness as I dissolve into increasingly difficult-to-answer questions, aided only by the greatest collection of knowledge the world has ever produced and my own feeble research abilities. One by one, we shall knock down the doors to the temples of knowledge and ask the confused monks whether the state with the largest percentage of water is likely to be a very small state due to its overall small area of land, or if it's just Michigan because it's probably Michigan, isn't it? Take my hand, and we shall see realms undreamed of. And incidentally, the United States is 3.96% surface water (not counting ocean).
Considering that the United States is the fourth-largest country on earth by land area, how does it rank by water area? The same wikipedia page can answer this question. If we take only the top ten countries by land area, the US is fourth again, passing China and falling behind India, Canada, and Russia, in that order. Considering that India is 9.55% water, according to Wikipedia, and that I cannot name a single lake in that country, I think perhaps India is reporting vast swathes of the Indian ocean as its territory (which is the sort of thing the US also likes to do, but is kind enough to part out as a separate number). Canada, on the other hand, is as honest as you would expect and has 8.93% surface water without counting any ocean. Canada has a larger freshwater area than the smallest 163 smallest countries on the planet. This is despite its above-board approach on an overabundance of lakes, cutting the Hudson Bay and all territorial waters from the count. If we re-include the 1,600,000 square km of Hudson Bay and 200,000 square km of coastal waters, the total water area of Canada is larger than all but the seven largest countries' land area. Canada has more water than Kazakhstan has land, and that should make Kazakhstan a little uncomfortable.
The United States is third in total water area after Canada and Russia.
The Marshall Islands is first in water area percentage, with 98.47% of its territory being Pacific Ocean, obviously.
Lesotho is 0.0032% surface water and yet makes most of its money selling water to South Africa.
And if you're being non-idiotic, the country with the largest area of fresh surface water and percentage of fresh surface water is Denmark, because Greenland (a self-governing Danish territory) is covered with an ice sheet roughly 1,600,000 kilometers square.*
How do each of the states rank against each other? Now we come to a stop-and-pause moment. I know the USGS calculates water area for even ludicrously small communities (Shady Cove is 0.26 square kilometers water), and I can confidently state that the USGS is the best.
Sidebar: what other country on Earth gives away free maps of the entire country that are accurate down to the foot? And we give away NOAA data, Smithsonian visits, library books, and twelve years of education? I like where our head is at.
I would like to guess. I have already found and opened in another tab the actual list of states by water area, but I want to just open a map, pontificate, and be proven utterly wrong. I will choose the top five and bottom five states by water, and I invite you to play along. Come with me on this embarrassing humility exercise.
The truth exists on the USGS website for the world to see. You didn't cheat, did you? I didn't, but I am gratified to see that ocean counts (the total water coverage is the much higher 7% if coastal waters are included. Oh, wait. Florida. Oh, crap, Hawaii! Too late now. Heartbeats. What's the highest? Lowest? I copied the information from USGS to this handy chart to add rankings**. I'll give myself a point if I even named the state in the wrong order.
You will notice that I named all five constituent members of the percentage dryboys, but thought they were area dryboys instead. Vermont!? What about Lake Champlain!? What about Robby Complain? Regardless, some interesting things to notice include Illinois' rank and percent water. It's 25 of 50 and 4.1% water, the closest percentage to the total country's true (not ocean) 3.96%. That's some nice symmetry. (I learn later that my numbers are poorly-informed by USGS rounding. More at the bottom of the page.)
And speaking of symmetry, I decided to calculate each state's true wetness (percentage of surface water) by how many wets it is (total area of surface water). Essentially, what rank would you expect, given how much water (ignoring how much land). This post is already monster long, and I'm just getting into the gritty details that I find the most interesting.
I have ungoogleable questions, as well. What is the largest lake in the state with the smallest area of water? . . . with the lowest percentage of water? Well, the largest area of water in the smallest-area-wet state (outside the Potomac in DC) is Summersville Lake in West Virginia. It has an 11 square km area. Apparently, somebody sunk a boat in the lake to give divers something interesting to see. And, though it's not interesting, someone thought it was worth explaining that the lake's name is unusual because the Corps of Engineers didn't name the lake for the closest town or for a person, but a slightly-further-away town. We all have them to thank for not having to read about Gad Lake.
As for low percentages, it doesn't get much lower than the mega-dry New Mexico. Well, let me tell you about Elephant Butte Reservoir, 147.7 square km of dull glory. That's slightly larger than Disney World's area. It holds the dubious distinction of being the 84th-largest man-made lake in the United States (my guess: Salton Sea the largest? Upon looking it up, I am embarrassed that I just didn't think very hard about the unbelievably vast Missouri-river lakes in the Dakotas. But! Salton is fourth by area and an accident, which is more fun than Oahe). Elephant Butte is named for a volcanic core sticking up from the water, not the stegomastodon skull discovered by a bachelor party in 2014. Also, I seriously doubt the size estimates of this lake, given that it rains less than in the past and we waste more.***
Is there a state that uses more surface water than ground water for drinking/farming/showering/carwashes? Well (haha get it), I can find this USGS website counting surface water use and ground water use, but I don't understand what I'm looking at. Looks like I'm gonna have to read the underlying data in this paper. Crud. It's very old information. Crud! 1995!??! Well, regardless. What's water use like?
Oh, no. My question is garbage; the reverse would have been more interesting. Something more than half the states use more surface water resources than ground water resources. Now the question becomes "why do Nebraska, Kansas, and Arkansas use so much well water, I mean holy crap?"
Let's start with total off-stream consumptive water use so we can get a sense of the scope of the problem. Let's pull the top three and bottom three examples just to see the interesting outliers.
That's how we come back to Nebraska. I read further in this 1995 water use report. In Texas, about 1/3 of fresh water use was consumptive. In Vermont, it was about 1/20. In our great American heartland of waving grain and not much else, consumptive (non-replacing) water use represented about 2/3 (66.9%). In Nebraska, the place where boredom goes for vacation, 7/10 (70.2%) of the state's water was pumped up from ground water resources. In Nebraska, America's breadbasket, 92% of total land is farmland. In Nebraska, our nation's collective memory lapse, 71% of total water use was for crop irrigation. In Nebraska, aka the Devil's ironing board, 2.2 trillion gallons of water was pumped from the ground there in 1995. Nebraska, accounts for nearly a tenth of all United States ground water use. Is there a state that uses more ground water than surface water? Oh, yeah.
The Ogallala Aquifer is an enormous groundwater basin underneath nearly all of the high plains region, including essentially all of Nebraska. When I visited Union College as a senior in high school, the college showed all of us a tourism video that boasted of Nebraska's most alluring qualities. It was a short video and even so they managed to run out of things to say. "Home to the nation's largest underground lake," the narrator crowed. I turned to my friend and said, "Did they just insinuate that the Ogallala is a tourist attraction? It's not a lake. It's saturated dirt." A third of the United States' irrigated land lies over the aquifer. We pull something like ten trillion gallons of water from it every year. The aquifer has lost an estimated 9% volume since 1950, and to replenish the aquifer from empty would take six thousand years of natural rainfall. Is there a state that uses more ground water than surface water? You bet.
I'm not looking into Arkansas because I assume it will sadden me.
Is there a city I can name that is over 25% water area? Over 50%? I will guess five and see what kind of results I get. I doubt there's a list of "Cities with highest water area" but who knows? I might get lucky. To give myself some context, I'll look up a few large cities that I know will be sub-ten percent water. Chicago (3%) New York (35.40% oops why) Saint Louis (6%) and Minneapolis (6%) Saint Paul (7.5%). I guess New York wanted to control their harbors? That was anti-climactic, but I'm not writing to be interesting or compelling. You're along on this journey, discovering as I discover. From my guesses, there are several factors I think will increase a city's total water area. Enclosed lakes are obvious, but few. Enclosed rivers are more likely, but the city has to be small and on both sides of the river, and the river would have to be large. Bays and harbors are even better. So I think that Seattle, San Francisco, Mobile, Boston, and (cough cough) New York are some of my**** best bets for big cities with loads of water area. I'll list and rank them for you.
Correction:
Wow, a pre-publication correction? Yes. I am not editing this document in any way. So, why did I do all that work when Wikipedia lists everything in easily-parseable tables? Because errors are my friends. Come to find out, Nebraska and Nevada are both drier than Iowa in %, which frustrates me, but what are you going to do?
*Antarctica isn't a country. At 98% coverage, that's 13,720,000 square km of ice. So.
**I made a useless table because Wikipedia made it first.
***I wonder--in drought years--how the rankings of the water surface area of various reservoir-dependent states changes. Elephant Butte loses something like 80 to 90% of its surface area in a drought like the one pictured above. I might have to call the Corps of Engineers and do some legitimate research to find that one out.
****Bron came over and guessed New Orleans, which is over 50% water.
If you find it interesting, helpful, or enlightening, God bless you. And so we begin.
What percentage of the United States is surface water? And of course, this comes with a flood of other inane questions that are easily answered by a single Google search. Come with me on an adventure of pure, untethered silliness as I dissolve into increasingly difficult-to-answer questions, aided only by the greatest collection of knowledge the world has ever produced and my own feeble research abilities. One by one, we shall knock down the doors to the temples of knowledge and ask the confused monks whether the state with the largest percentage of water is likely to be a very small state due to its overall small area of land, or if it's just Michigan because it's probably Michigan, isn't it? Take my hand, and we shall see realms undreamed of. And incidentally, the United States is 3.96% surface water (not counting ocean).
Considering that the United States is the fourth-largest country on earth by land area, how does it rank by water area? The same wikipedia page can answer this question. If we take only the top ten countries by land area, the US is fourth again, passing China and falling behind India, Canada, and Russia, in that order. Considering that India is 9.55% water, according to Wikipedia, and that I cannot name a single lake in that country, I think perhaps India is reporting vast swathes of the Indian ocean as its territory (which is the sort of thing the US also likes to do, but is kind enough to part out as a separate number). Canada, on the other hand, is as honest as you would expect and has 8.93% surface water without counting any ocean. Canada has a larger freshwater area than the smallest 163 smallest countries on the planet. This is despite its above-board approach on an overabundance of lakes, cutting the Hudson Bay and all territorial waters from the count. If we re-include the 1,600,000 square km of Hudson Bay and 200,000 square km of coastal waters, the total water area of Canada is larger than all but the seven largest countries' land area. Canada has more water than Kazakhstan has land, and that should make Kazakhstan a little uncomfortable.
The United States is third in total water area after Canada and Russia.
The Marshall Islands is first in water area percentage, with 98.47% of its territory being Pacific Ocean, obviously.
Lesotho is 0.0032% surface water and yet makes most of its money selling water to South Africa.
And if you're being non-idiotic, the country with the largest area of fresh surface water and percentage of fresh surface water is Denmark, because Greenland (a self-governing Danish territory) is covered with an ice sheet roughly 1,600,000 kilometers square.*
How do each of the states rank against each other? Now we come to a stop-and-pause moment. I know the USGS calculates water area for even ludicrously small communities (Shady Cove is 0.26 square kilometers water), and I can confidently state that the USGS is the best.
Sidebar: what other country on Earth gives away free maps of the entire country that are accurate down to the foot? And we give away NOAA data, Smithsonian visits, library books, and twelve years of education? I like where our head is at.
I would like to guess. I have already found and opened in another tab the actual list of states by water area, but I want to just open a map, pontificate, and be proven utterly wrong. I will choose the top five and bottom five states by water, and I invite you to play along. Come with me on this embarrassing humility exercise.
Top 5 guesses by area:
1 Michigan (doi)
2 Wisconsin
3 Ohio
4 New York
5 Minnesota
(Alaska don't make the cut, but that seems risky)
Bottom 5 guesses by area: uhhhhh
46 Iowa?
47 Arizona . . .
48 Colorado
49 Kansas
50 New Mexico with least.
I am unconfident on every possible metric.
Before I start looking at stats, do you want to play another dumb game? Top by percent?Bottom 5 guesses by percentage is probably so overlapped with bottom by total that it's not worth me embarrassing myself.
Top 5 guesses by percentage:
1 Michigan still (doi), and if ocean is counted,
2 Maryland
3 Deleware
4 Rhode Island
5 Wisconsin.
These are no better than a poor gut instinct.
The truth exists on the USGS website for the world to see. You didn't cheat, did you? I didn't, but I am gratified to see that ocean counts (the total water coverage is the much higher 7% if coastal waters are included. Oh, wait. Florida. Oh, crap, Hawaii! Too late now. Heartbeats. What's the highest? Lowest? I copied the information from USGS to this handy chart to add rankings**. I'll give myself a point if I even named the state in the wrong order.
True top 5 by area: 2/5
1 Alaska 245,383km square (risky and stupid--ocean counts)
2 Michigan 104,052km square
3 Florida 31,424km square
4 Wisconsin 29,367km square
5 Louisiana 23,761km square
True bottom 5 by area: 2/5 or 3/7
(not counting DC with its 19km square)
44 Colorado 1,170, a second honorable mention45 Iowa 1,077, an honorable mention46 Vermont 1,035km square47 New Hampshire 1,027km square48 Arizona 1,026km square49 New Mexico 757km square50 West Virginia 497km square (oop)
True top 5 by percentage: 3/5 or 4/6
1 Michigan 41.5% (e a t m y s h o r t s , h a w a i i)
2 Hawaii 41.2%
3 Rhode Island 33.1%
4 Massachussetts 26.1% oh, right, Chesapeake Bay
5 Maryland 21.8%
6 Delaware 21.7%, an honorable mention
True bottom 5 by percentage:
46 Iowa 0.7%47 Kansas 0.6%48 Colorado 0.4%49 Arizona 0.3%50 New Mexico 0.2% water
And speaking of symmetry, I decided to calculate each state's true wetness (percentage of surface water) by how many wets it is (total area of surface water). Essentially, what rank would you expect, given how much water (ignoring how much land). This post is already monster long, and I'm just getting into the gritty details that I find the most interesting.
Four states were ranked exactly as you'd expect.Texas was 23 ranks drier than you'd expect given its rank-eight 19,075 square km of water. California, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, and Alaska were all unexpectedly dry for their large water areas, but only 16 (CA) to 10 (AK) ranks too dry. On the other hand, all our tiniest states are so small that street-corner puddles add a percentage of surface water. Rhode Island is 43 ranks wetter than its paltry 1,324 square km of water would suggest. Other big performers include New Hampshire and Vermont, 24 and 22 ranks wetter than expected despite being 46 and 47 for least amount of water overall. Frustrating idiots. Am I writing too much? I like statistics and outliers.
South Carolina rank 21
Kentucky rank 34
Tennessee rank 35 (it's nice that they're next to each other)
Indiana rank 39
As for low percentages, it doesn't get much lower than the mega-dry New Mexico. Well, let me tell you about Elephant Butte Reservoir, 147.7 square km of dull glory. That's slightly larger than Disney World's area. It holds the dubious distinction of being the 84th-largest man-made lake in the United States (my guess: Salton Sea the largest? Upon looking it up, I am embarrassed that I just didn't think very hard about the unbelievably vast Missouri-river lakes in the Dakotas. But! Salton is fourth by area and an accident, which is more fun than Oahe). Elephant Butte is named for a volcanic core sticking up from the water, not the stegomastodon skull discovered by a bachelor party in 2014. Also, I seriously doubt the size estimates of this lake, given that it rains less than in the past and we waste more.***
Is there a state that uses more surface water than ground water for drinking/farming/showering/carwashes? Well (haha get it), I can find this USGS website counting surface water use and ground water use, but I don't understand what I'm looking at. Looks like I'm gonna have to read the underlying data in this paper. Crud. It's very old information. Crud! 1995!??! Well, regardless. What's water use like?
Let's start with total off-stream consumptive water use so we can get a sense of the scope of the problem. Let's pull the top three and bottom three examples just to see the interesting outliers.
Total off-stream consumptive fresh water use per stateThis almost makes sense. California and Texas have a lot of people and agriculture, but Nebraska? Ignore it for now. I'll come back to it. California used 365000 times more water PER DAY than Rhode Island did in 1995. At the time, the population ratio was 32:1. The farm acre ratio (in 2007) was 374:1. Now, say what you will about growing food, but using ~1000 times more water per farm acre than Rhode Island might explain why California is having a water crisis. Now let me tell you the worst news of all. Consumptive fresh water use is a use that is not returned to the water table. It's water that has been respirated by plants, evaporated from a canal, turned into a product, and so on. It's actually non-renewable water use, and California so outstrips the rest of the country on this metric that it's almost panic-laugh-worthy.
1 California 2.55 x 10^11 gal/day
2 Texas 1.05 x 10^10 gal/day3 Nebraska 7.02 x 10^9 gal/day----
48 Alaska 2.5 x 10^7 gal/day49 Vermont 2.4 x 10^7 gal/day50 Rhode Island 1.9 x 10^7 gal/day
That's how we come back to Nebraska. I read further in this 1995 water use report. In Texas, about 1/3 of fresh water use was consumptive. In Vermont, it was about 1/20. In our great American heartland of waving grain and not much else, consumptive (non-replacing) water use represented about 2/3 (66.9%). In Nebraska, the place where boredom goes for vacation, 7/10 (70.2%) of the state's water was pumped up from ground water resources. In Nebraska, America's breadbasket, 92% of total land is farmland. In Nebraska, our nation's collective memory lapse, 71% of total water use was for crop irrigation. In Nebraska, aka the Devil's ironing board, 2.2 trillion gallons of water was pumped from the ground there in 1995. Nebraska, accounts for nearly a tenth of all United States ground water use. Is there a state that uses more ground water than surface water? Oh, yeah.
The Ogallala Aquifer is an enormous groundwater basin underneath nearly all of the high plains region, including essentially all of Nebraska. When I visited Union College as a senior in high school, the college showed all of us a tourism video that boasted of Nebraska's most alluring qualities. It was a short video and even so they managed to run out of things to say. "Home to the nation's largest underground lake," the narrator crowed. I turned to my friend and said, "Did they just insinuate that the Ogallala is a tourist attraction? It's not a lake. It's saturated dirt." A third of the United States' irrigated land lies over the aquifer. We pull something like ten trillion gallons of water from it every year. The aquifer has lost an estimated 9% volume since 1950, and to replenish the aquifer from empty would take six thousand years of natural rainfall. Is there a state that uses more ground water than surface water? You bet.
I'm not looking into Arkansas because I assume it will sadden me.
Is there a city I can name that is over 25% water area? Over 50%? I will guess five and see what kind of results I get. I doubt there's a list of "Cities with highest water area" but who knows? I might get lucky. To give myself some context, I'll look up a few large cities that I know will be sub-ten percent water. Chicago (3%) New York (35.40% oops why) Saint Louis (6%) and Minneapolis (6%) Saint Paul (7.5%). I guess New York wanted to control their harbors? That was anti-climactic, but I'm not writing to be interesting or compelling. You're along on this journey, discovering as I discover. From my guesses, there are several factors I think will increase a city's total water area. Enclosed lakes are obvious, but few. Enclosed rivers are more likely, but the city has to be small and on both sides of the river, and the river would have to be large. Bays and harbors are even better. So I think that Seattle, San Francisco, Mobile, Boston, and (cough cough) New York are some of my**** best bets for big cities with loads of water area. I'll list and rank them for you.
San Francisco 79.78% (479.14km2 water/600.59km2 total)Boston 45.98% (106.73km2 water/232.14km2 total)Seattle 41.17% (152.0km2 water/369.2km2 total)New York City 35.40% (429.53km2 water/1,213.37km2 total)Mobile 22.58% (105.31km2 water/466.34km2 total)Mobile doesn't encircle the bay like I hoped. On the other hand, San Francisco has been as greedy as I assumed it would be. Congratulations, SF, for artificially lowering your per-kilometer population density. I thought breaking the 25% mark would be difficult. Nope.
Correction:
Wow, a pre-publication correction? Yes. I am not editing this document in any way. So, why did I do all that work when Wikipedia lists everything in easily-parseable tables? Because errors are my friends. Come to find out, Nebraska and Nevada are both drier than Iowa in %, which frustrates me, but what are you going to do?
*Antarctica isn't a country. At 98% coverage, that's 13,720,000 square km of ice. So.
**I made a useless table because Wikipedia made it first.
***I wonder--in drought years--how the rankings of the water surface area of various reservoir-dependent states changes. Elephant Butte loses something like 80 to 90% of its surface area in a drought like the one pictured above. I might have to call the Corps of Engineers and do some legitimate research to find that one out.
****Bron came over and guessed New Orleans, which is over 50% water.
Monday, October 1, 2018
10.1b
I wore camouflage. I was running through the big back yard, through and into the woods beyond the creek. I slinked low, trying to stay near to the cover that broke up my silhouette against the grass. Binoculars hung around my neck. My shoes filled with grass seed. I started to sweat through my camo hat. But I could hear him just over the ridge, so all my precautions were necessary.
I finally got to the treehouse: the last refuge point, the primary fortification. Its ladder was on the same side of the tree as he was, so I, white-knuckled, gripped the ladder's side and slid up it, my body obscured by the wood. I was lucky that dad had nailed the ladder at the top, or I would have pulled it over on top of me since I was hanging off the side like a ripe bunch of bananas wearing a stupid-looking hat. I slithered up to the second level of the treehouse, nerves tense, sweat dripping, patience shot. I could hear him still, but the slight ridge wasn't going to protect me now. I was above it, perched at a vantage good enough to see him, now.
And there he was: my brother.
He's only twenty months younger than me, and we're intense rivals. I'm a little taller. I'm a little faster. I'm a little further ahead in school. I own all the cool toys. And now I've got one up on him again: I'm spying on him and he has no way of knowing. I'm clever enough to wear camouflage, to bring binoculars, to slither my way through the bramble without drawing his attention. I win again.
I bring the binoculars to my eyes, and through them, he becomes clear. There he is with the dog. What are they doing? I try to imagine his dumb, dumb activities. He's got a big stick, and he's walking around swinging it like a weapon. Ha! What a dumbo. Obviously I'm much cooler in my camo, spying on my nine-year-old brother. He's just cutting the tops off of weeds out in the field. What a waste of time. And what's the dog even doing? Just sort of . . . running around? Ugh. If the dog were with me, we'd be having a much better time. I'm obviously much better than my brother in all ways. I'm smarter, faster, stronger, and much more creative. Ugh.
He's so boring. I watch him for twenty minutes. And when things get rapidly unboring, I start wishing for the old boring again.
I'm just watching Philip through the binoculars when I see him walk slowly toward the dog, curiously. The dog is digging in the long grass. Just when Philip gets close to the dog, I see him tense, jump, swat at my very good boy. The wind brings me a strange noise: Philip's yelling. But it's not his voice, quite. He's masked it to make it sound as low as he can. It's not very low; he's nine. But he's tried to add all the gravitas he can, all the basso, all the pomp. He's scraping the bottom of a shallow barrel, but I recognize that voice. It's his "Hey, I'm important too, don't mess with me" voice. Sometimes he uses it on me when he's mad and trying to get his way. It never works, because I am better than him in all ways. And now, he's using this "power voice" on my dog, yelling at my dog and swinging a stick at my dog. How dare he!?
Philip runs the dog off three times, yelling and swinging. A cold feeling falls into the pit of my stomach. Has he gotten tired of whipping the tops off weeds, and now he wants something more exciting to bludgeon? I'm mentally gauging the size of the stick. Is he likely to catch the dog? Is he likely to maim it? And is he likely to do this again? Because: camouflage. He has no idea he's not alone. I'm seeing the inner soul of a vicious nine-year-old killer-on-the-loose. I'm seeing his darkest secrets. Maybe he'll grow up into a criminal. Maybe he'll be a serial killer. I don't know. My mind is reeling. I'm calculating the worth of my life. If I interrupt him now, will he turn from the dog to me? How will he handle my presence? Is he dangerous? Should I tell mom and dad? Maybe they can move him to a home somewhere. I have heard about military academies and juvenile detention and other places they send bad kids. That's where Philip should go. I'm sweating puddles in my jacket. I take my hat off and wring it between my tensed-up fingers.
The dog finally runs away. I'm breathing silent prayers. Philip follows, cool as you like, a salad cucumber on a hot August day. I'm feeling a chill, but mine is worry. What exactly was he doing over there? Why would he attack the dog? And for digging a hole? It's a dog!
I wait. I wait maybe two minutes, though it feels like an eternity. Philip breaks back into the tree line, headed back for the house, and I slip and slide down the ladders, hardly hitting the rungs. I scramble up the slight rise and run pell-mell to the spot in the grass where I saw my dingus brother try to hit my precious dog. I'm looking for evidence, forming an argument in my mind. ("Mom, I saw Philip trying to hit the dog with a stick, and the dog was just digging in the ground! He wasn't even digging up a tree or anything, just grass!") And it is just grass, you see, all grass around here. Oh, my gosh. My brother is unhinged. I live in the same room as a serial killer.
That's when I hear it, and the sound turned my mind around 180 degrees. "Peep peep peep peep." Down in the grass. "Peep peep." What is that? "Peep peep peep." I part the grass a little with my hands, inches away from where the dog has been digging, and I see a small nest—a tiny cup in the grass filled with birds. How did Philip know they were here? Wait. Philip knew they were here, and he saved them. He risked scaring his own dog, and maybe the very good boy wouldn't love Philip any more if he got hit by a stick. Maybe he would only love me and mom and dad and Katy anymore, and he wouldn't love Philip just because Philip hit him with a stick. And for what? For six tiny birds?
For six tiny birds.
My camouflage feels heavy and stupid. The binoculars are just dumb tubes of plastic, anyway. They don't really magnify anything. My sneaking around has brought me a sum total of nothing: no glory, no intelligence, no quality, no cleverness. I am no better for my afternoon of glorious plans. I'm left with a heavy feeling in the cavernous pit where my heart should be. I'm not the better brother. Would I have saved those birds? Would I have risked my dog? Would I have been so kind? No. Philip saves birds. I sneak around. Philip risks and loves. I judge and spit. Well, crap.
He's only twenty months younger than me, and we're intense rivals. I'm a little taller. I'm a little faster. I'm a little further ahead in school. I own all the cool toys. And now he's got one up on me: he's not just the better brother, but the better man. He wins again.
10.1
What kind of writing teacher do I want to be?
Superlative.
Am I done? I assume that's the answer that's lurking deep down under the layered obfuscations of "Ohahohoho but whatever do you mean?" I have taught writing classes—taught reading classes, even—and even now I don't actually identify myself as a writing teacher. Sure, I'm a writer (bad, of late, having produced nothing noteworthy or even likeable for the last year or more [or am I forgetting something? Have I put anything in the sidebar in that time?]). Sure, I'm a teacher (I show up in classrooms [which is a low bar to cross]). But I don't feel like a writing teacher. The grammarian in me screams at how I started the last sentence with a conjunction, and the optimist in me shrugs and whistles a merry tune and the dreamer in me allows that maybe I am a writing teacher after all, but none of these things make truth of the claim.
Competent.
Because what does it even mean to teach someone to write? Language is a function of such innumerable hours of difficult work (an aching, paining difficulty that no one quite notices because the rewards are often immediate and overwhelming. I think we have become inured to the difficulty of language and our expectations are so far benumbed that we forget that each (limp? querulous? gravid? disappointing?) tumble-down phrase we construct is the product of a thousand thousand tiny choices all piled up and leading to the one moment in which we speak, hear, read, think. I don't know what it takes to build proficiency in this activity other than to look deep into someone's helpless eyes and say more of the same.
Satisfied.
And deeply satisfied, I think, is a state of mind. I've been there, and I will be there again. I'm quite happy with who I am and how I teach, but satisfaction is a tacit remonstrance against the critical eye. One cannot coexist peacefully with the other. But if I am to be satisfied, and I hope to God I will be, where is the space for self-doubt? For questioning? For improvement? Perhaps, I fear, there is no space. I'll never improve. I'll never be competent. I'll never be superlative. But on the off chance, if I am very lucky and charmed beyond belief, I may well yet be satisfied.
Superlative.
Am I done? I assume that's the answer that's lurking deep down under the layered obfuscations of "Ohahohoho but whatever do you mean?" I have taught writing classes—taught reading classes, even—and even now I don't actually identify myself as a writing teacher. Sure, I'm a writer (bad, of late, having produced nothing noteworthy or even likeable for the last year or more [or am I forgetting something? Have I put anything in the sidebar in that time?]). Sure, I'm a teacher (I show up in classrooms [which is a low bar to cross]). But I don't feel like a writing teacher. The grammarian in me screams at how I started the last sentence with a conjunction, and the optimist in me shrugs and whistles a merry tune and the dreamer in me allows that maybe I am a writing teacher after all, but none of these things make truth of the claim.
Competent.
Because what does it even mean to teach someone to write? Language is a function of such innumerable hours of difficult work (an aching, paining difficulty that no one quite notices because the rewards are often immediate and overwhelming. I think we have become inured to the difficulty of language and our expectations are so far benumbed that we forget that each (limp? querulous? gravid? disappointing?) tumble-down phrase we construct is the product of a thousand thousand tiny choices all piled up and leading to the one moment in which we speak, hear, read, think. I don't know what it takes to build proficiency in this activity other than to look deep into someone's helpless eyes and say more of the same.
Satisfied.
And deeply satisfied, I think, is a state of mind. I've been there, and I will be there again. I'm quite happy with who I am and how I teach, but satisfaction is a tacit remonstrance against the critical eye. One cannot coexist peacefully with the other. But if I am to be satisfied, and I hope to God I will be, where is the space for self-doubt? For questioning? For improvement? Perhaps, I fear, there is no space. I'll never improve. I'll never be competent. I'll never be superlative. But on the off chance, if I am very lucky and charmed beyond belief, I may well yet be satisfied.
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