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| Midnight sun, Toolik Lake, Alaska. Photo by Diane Walsh |
...see the sights
The endless summer nights
And go play the game that you learnt
The endless summer nights
And go play the game that you learnt
From the morning
Monday, July 30, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
Why I couldn't sleep
On Sunday afternoon around 4 PM I was upstairs looking for something when I heard a loud bang, and realized that a bird had hit the window. Gingerly I opened the
balcony door a crack, in case I was met with a disoriented bird trying to dart
inside. Instead I saw a young robin on its back, its feet
up in the classic pose of death. As I opened the door it turned its
head towards me and opened its beak wide, once, then again, but no
sound came out, and after flexing its body it lay still. I closed the
door softly, hoping it would right itself and recover, as I've seen
many birds do, and after a few moments I opened the
door again. This time it didn't move, but I put on leather gloves and got a clean plastic waste
paper basket, figuring that an unconscious bird waking up inside a container it would remain calmer during the short trip down the stairs and out the front door to freedom. I
stood over it, talking to it, half expecting a sudden burst of
movement, but it moved not a muscle. Gently I picked it up by the
feet and slid my other gloved hand under its body.
I have disposed of dead birds before,
but always much after the fact, quickly flinging the dried up little things
into the bushes. This bird was surprisingly heavy, and limp like a rag doll, its little head slumping to the side as I placed it in
the container. After bringing it out the front door I
took it in both hands and went down the path that leads to a little duck pond. It was still warm and showed no outward sign of injury, its yam colored
breast marked with juvenile speckles. Not a dried up little thing at all but a creature that had been throbbing with life just a few short minutes ago. I chose a spot under some bushes and laid it in a little depression on the ground.
Its body draped limply in the depression, as if the little birdie was fast asleep, except that sleeping birds don't lie comatose on the ground.
I said goodbye and walked back to the house.
It bothered me for the rest of the day. The heave of its body I now realize was the moment of death.
I have never watched a person or an
animal die, but I will never forget the way it opened its beak, as if
to say: it hurts! It hurts!
Later on the balcony I examined the window and found the tiniest smudge of gray down stuck to the glass. The
window was caked with dust, and around the smudge I took my finger
and drew an outline of a hawk, not because I thought it would help
but because I felt it was my fault that the poor bird flew into the
window. If I had put a hawk sticker on the window this would never have
happened, and I would not be remembering so vividly a bird experiencing its final moments in unmistakeable pain and surprise and terror.
This morning, rather
than stew over how many more bodies would be waiting for me this evening, I got out the windex and paints and brushes, and did three windows before leaving for work.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Midsummer
Climate
change is on a lot of people's minds these days. It's one of the
hottest summers on record--upper 90's in the midwest and atlantic
states, and dry as a bone from the west coast to the heartland. In
Fairbanks this July it has been relatively dry and warm compared with
a rainy May and June, with temps in the mid to upper 70's. Two weeks
ago during the longest days of summer we had a week in the mid to
upper 80's, the week of Matt and Stephanie's visit. And not just hot
but humid too. The previous two summers were warm early and cool and
wet by midsummer. Hot and humid is not what I've come to expect up here.
Joe and I have only been here three summers. The climate change skeptics (as
opposed to the deniers, who don't look at the science at all but
simply deny the existence of anything that would mean no more drive-through Starbucks) cite 'inter-annual variation' as a
reasonable contradiction to the idea that the planet is warming,
because inter-annual variation--patterns of hot or cold, wet or dry, stormy or calm weather that may characterize a season as 'unseasonal'--throws a certain amount of noise into the records, and thus the predictions.
Climate
skepticism is fine, but it doesn't explain drastic things, like
disappearing glaciers, shrinking sea ice, and gullies and cracks
opening up in ground riddled with permafrost—it's a bit like
those rich people aboard the Titanic who felt nothing more than a
bump that sloshed the brandy in their snifters, so they went back to
their card game. This is why animal lovers are freaking out about
polar bears, people who live in the North are getting nervous, and
the entities who brought you Exxon Valdez, Prudhoe Bay, and
Halliburton are casting their evil eyes upon the Arctic coast and
tenting their fingers like Mr. Burns. The sea ice is melting faster
and forming later, the oil companies and their political cronies
stand to make billions out of it, and polar bears, fisherman, and
coastal Native communities are being forced to get to the back of the
economic bus.
As I consider what to study up here and how
to study it, and to understand its relative importance against the larger
ecological and sociopolitical background, I wonder how long before the world as we know it--the world with its budding springs, lazy summers, and cold, stable winters--becomes a very different, and very harsh
place to live? Many ecosystems have been wrecked at our hands, over
and over. It starts with the wild things that are tasty to humans and
progresses to things most sensitive to disruption, things that live
in water or are rare and dependent upon specialized habitat--orchids,
amphibians, birds, insects. We don't perceive these changes until the
link directly impacting human survival is affected, and by then the
damage has magnified like a huge wave looming into view. How long
before the standard of living we so heedlessly enjoy is swept
away? Two generations? One? Half a generation? When will people stop
driving gasoline-powered engines? Until the oil runs out, or before
then? How long is that?
I really
want to know. Because it's not just about orchids and frogs now, or even weather.
At 52,
I've had a pretty good run, but it will be a very different world
twenty years from now, if I live to see it. If I die of old age
before that, that's perhaps luckiest of all. There is no sense in
pretending we will ever be able to engineer our way out of this
predicament. Humanity has gone global for better or worse. There
is a last-ditch plan being worked on as we speak by “climate
engineers,” a way of spewing enough aerosol particles into the
atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from earth and cool it down a bit
(cool it down?! How god-awful and Doctor Strangelovian!). And where
did such a 1950's sci-fi horror flick of an idea come from? I think
scientists have been tinkering with this idea for the past couple of
centuries, but current research was inspired by Mt. Pinatubo. Its
eruption in 1991 was just cataclysmic enough to reduce sunlight
hitting the earth by ten percent—but not to extinguish life. Thus
inspired, these geniuses still need to: A) find a suitable type of
material in an amount that won't poison us too much or wreck the
biosphere (sulfur dioxide is a serious candidate); and B) figure out
how to get it up there. I'd be curious to know if the first
powerpoint lecture on this was shown at TED.
Unlike
the rest of the country, our summer in the Alaskan interior has been
lovely, and I am trying to soak up every minute.
The hills are clad in bright green birch and poplar, the fields and
meadows are glowing fuschia with fireweed, the air is fragrant with
flowers and alive with winged creatures great and small. Will we ever
remember a summer like this again?
Solstice tree
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