Two weeks ago, while we out were hiking the Long Path between Phoenicia and Palenville, my mom texted to say my dad was in the hospital. He was ok, but they needed to do some tests and keep him for a couple days for observation before letting him go home. I checked my phone for texts and updates on every climb, and reluctantly switched it to airplane mode when we dropped down into a notch. On our last night on trail, Dad texted a picture of his hospital dinner tray, and I sent back one of the concoction in our JetBoil backpacking stove.
When E and I got back to the city, I made some last-minute plans to fly home for a week to spend some time with the fam. I tried to get the newsletter written on my Friday flight, but it wasn’t enough time, and finishing it late that night (after the long drive from the airport) just didn’t feel like the best use of my limited time at home. So, if you were wondering where the newsletter was last week, now you know!
While we’re on the subject, I want to especially thank those of you who have become paid subscribers. Your support is making regular installments of this newsletter possible, with only the occasional wobble. Every time I get a “new paid subscriber email” I am filled with joy, energy, and enthusiasm. It’s such an enormous confidence boost, and it really does help monetarily as well to feel that I can dedicate some real time and resources to this project. So, thank you.
Before we move on to the reading list, maybe a few rambling words about Home?
I still think of the house in Kansas where my parents live and where I grew up as home, even though the last full year I lived there was when I was 13. I have since lived many places, and have definitely considered some of those to also be home. When I fly back to New York, I’ll be flying back home, also, again.
Sorry, my mind is a bit discombobulated. Sometimes I think my brain just doesn’t work as well when I’m home [in Kansas].
Maybe it’s the dust.
The house is on a dirt road, and there’s dust everywhere. Cars and trucks send up a wall of it when they speed by the house, which wafts into the yard, coating the grass and the trees and the vehicles, sifting through the imperfectly-sealed windows of the old farmhouse and settling into a thick, gray, gritty film on anything that isn’t used regularly. The dogs and cats have this powdery feel to their coats. The chickens probably do too but I’m too afraid of them to try petting or picking them up.
I went for a run the other day, and every time a car or truck passed, I had to choke my way through the fog that blanketed the road for minutes afterwards. Even the drivers conscientious enough to slow down a bit can’t avoid it entirely.
I may have shared this here before, but it blew my mind when I learned that the reason my parents use so much frit (crushed pieces of colored glass) in their work as glassblowers is because it can disguise stray bits of gravel dust that could blow in from the road, which might otherwise ruin an entire piece.
So maybe that’s why I feel so thick and slow here: That haze of dust that clogs the pores, the nose and throat, and somehow, it seems, my neural pathways.
That, or spending so much time in a familiar/unfamiliar place: In the bedroom that was once mine and then for many years not mine and now I’m back and it’s the same but also different, and filled with things left behind by a sibling, with only a few familiar items in the mix. The whole house is like that. It’s disorienting, almost uncanny1.
That said, I do love coming home and feeling like I’m getting in touch with my roots, and touching grass—or rather, dirt. I love running the roads I used to walk with my parents and then where I learned how to ride a bike and then where I first tried to start running almost two decades ago. The place is part of me, but also apart from me. It’s also somewhat more constant than the house itself, so maybe that familiarity is what’s comforting: the same (changing) hills, the same (changing) fields, the same (changing) sky.
Only now the horizon has windmills on it, but I don’t mind that.
Reading list
This just doesn’t seem right: In October, President Biden suspended 26 environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, in order to build a border wall with Mexico that he does not believe in, claiming his hands are tied. Aghhh!! [Nikki Main for Gizmodo2]
I’ve got mixed feelings about this March3 op-ed/book promo about seeing the country at three miles per hour. On one hand, yes. I do think people should explore more on foot and at a slower speed, and there is much to see and many people to talk to…on the other, something about the ‘rah rah America’ vibes rubs me the wrong way. I don’t think you can recount your friendly interaction with a MAGA bro (“the drywaller in New Jersey with the MAGA flags fluttering from his pickup who lavished me with snacks and jokes when he heard what I was doing; as we talked in his driveway, he gave me a cold beer”) without acknowledging your privilege as a white man. You may think he knows you’re—I’m just guessing here—on the liberal/left-of-center side of the spectrum, but he sees you as someone just like him. Your white manliness also acts as a big safety cocoon; women and especially people of color don’t have the same confidence in their freedom of movement. Just gives big, interviewing the voters at the red-state diner vibes, you know? Might still read the book though… [Neil King Jr. for the Washington Post]
This article, from September, is one of the best on the plight of the piping plover, beach access and accessibility and equity, and sharing spaces with wildlife. [Aaron Short for Hellgate]
The Endangered Species Act is arguably one of the most successful US laws ever enacted, but even so, it’s struggling to protect species from climate-driven declines. [Chad Small for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, edited by yours truly]
Finally, one of my favorite art bots on Twitter.com (rip) is old fruit pictures, but I didn’t know the story behind those beautiful watercolor illustrations until a reader sent me a link to this story about the time the US government hired mostly female artists to faithfully record every known fruit in the world. [Ayun Halliday for Open Culture, h/t Jan Davison]
This word has sparked a lively discussion with friends offline and on Instagram. Is it rude to call my home ‘uncanny’? To clarify, I don’t mean the kind of uncanny that refers to “all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror,” per Freud. I merely mean that which is not quite right, or not quite as one remembers, or just a bit off. My friend Abbie Nehring helpfully drew my attention to Freud’s essay on the subject, and in particular the discussion of the German etymology: “The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning ‘familiar,’ ‘native, ‘belonging to the home’; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.”
I told you there was a link backlog!!! Still more older links to come…