The Entire Earth and Sky

Fall 2011 -- Update

2011-08-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I had a conversation with a friend who is also a bestselling author. She believes we only have a certain number of words in us each day and so we needed to be very, very careful about email, blogs, and any other word drain apparatus available today. I stopped blogging in deference to my new book, Here Is Where We Walk. The book's basically done now, save the final edits before submitting it to design. So, as Jack Nicholson said, I'm baaaaaaaaaaaack.

Coming soon: Fall 2010 syllabus and readings

2010-08-30T14:00:00.001-07:00

Fall 2010 readings and assignments -- coming soon!

in reference to: Leslie Roberts: Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts (view on Google Sidewiki)

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

2010-08-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

...I just finished reading Cesar Aira's book (check out the interview in BOMB Magazine's winter/2009 issue) An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter -- which is a trim 168 pages and boy, what a masterful book. It is the sort of book that makes writers excited to do their own work. Why? Great short books make us feel like there is a chance that we, too, can finish our books -- shorten what we have, tighten, and smarten it up. And call out, fini! As we are want to do.
...We were in Los Angeles recently (hence the blog silence) partially to tour UCLA with our son who is now 18 and a senior and a year away from sailing off to the Academy, and partially to inspect the Dennis Hopper show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The MOCA show is curated by Julain Schnabel and displayed in a former police garage, repurposed into a museum by Frank Gehry. Sounds promising, no? And indeed it is. The questions it raises, not about the practice of actors taking candid photos of other actors etc, include what will museums "be" as we plough ahead into this century. They still seem inclined towards a specific sort of spatial performance. I'd be curious to see what art looks like with a slightly lower ceiling. Or in a room that has real human presence -- stacks of papers, messy desks, tea cups from yesterday with dregs of tea in the bottom. Surely the paintings and photos came from these humble beginnings? Or do we treat paintings as pageant for reasons that make it much more celebratory and obvious and gives it the feel of "event" as opposed to "looking."
...The final big news from LA stinks of my suburban gawker core: On Saturday I had lunch at Ivy's my delish high school and college friend, Sally Kushner. Kushner texted me from while I was en route: "Check (discreetly) who is at the bar. It's a good one.) The good one turned out to be Javier Bardem. He was seated at an adjacent table. Then Penelope Cruz came in and joined him. They necked and laughed and were very tender. (Not that we were gawking between sips of Pimm's Cup.)
...A few people have been asking when the two books will be "done." Taking a page from Cedar Aira, we are shooting for no more than 200 pages per. And a deadline of December 1.

The Unique Relationship People Have With Trees

2010-08-08T15:42:00.000-07:00

(It would be great to report it is not 50 degrees and windy and silver-skied here in the Presidio, but alas, that report would be a lie. But I have made progress in describing the effect -- if you took a piece of heavy, toothed wastercolor paper in a lightish grey, then used India ink to create the outlines and complex structures of trees, then you laid a piece of vellum over the whole thing -- this is my daily view. An Antarctic glaciologist in our acquaintance used to describe being pinned down in a white-out in a tent, "imagine having the car radio stuck between stations, all static, turned up as loud as possible." Imagine this as a visual. Weather caught between stations -- neither sunny nor rainy. Wind steady. A set designers concept for an indie film where everyone looks really tired and bad things happen.)

While we spent Friday cracking into ideas for our first International Institute for Climate Change Art installation (April 2011) -- we took time out to lunch at Limon on Valencia Street (brilliant ceviche, yum Argentine rose, and charming conversation with our friend Linda, fresh back from Kenya where she documented giraffes) and wander into the coolish "pop-up workshop" -- the nearby Levis workshop. We arrived as the "48-hr" book project was about 12 hours into its life -- lead by one of our Graduate Design students at California College of the Arts -- Zach Gibson.

It's the sort of making environment that puts a spring in the step. Bits of paper and cardboard and chalkboards stuck to the milkshake-white walls featuring alphabets letters epigraphs, etc, meant to make us all want to make stuff and feel better about our oddball lives and the risks and the abandonment of status -- "all the forces in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come" -- this from Victor Hugo. The print shop features presses more than 100 years old as well as a photocopier, computers, a terrific bashing together of old methods and new.

Anyone can go in there through the month (they pack up and head Easterly for New York City where the pop-up will be photo based) and make whatever she or he wants. We're going back to make a 'zine on the photo copier.

One of the event organizers, Kevin Bosch, told us there is only one item they will not allow you to produce. Guess.

Give up?

Wedding invitations.

To read: Seth Meyer and John Wells discussing their own unique relationship with trees, "Finding New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees," (NYTimes, 08-08-10).

The International Institute for Climate Change Art

2010-08-06T17:36:00.000-07:00

The International Institute for Climate Change Art met today (Friday, August 6) for two hours at Axis Cafe in San Francisco. The purpose of the meeting was to outline guidelines for submissions for our 2011 show, Naked Antarctica, as well as to delegate tasks.
This is an exciting time for the Institute. Naked Antarctica is our first installation and we anticipate close to one dozen final pieces. Complete details and guidelines will be available on our Web site. We will be inviting artists who have worked in Antarctica as well as those who have not to submit proposals. This will be a collaborative effort, and we look forward to seeing how scientists and artists can collaborate within the context of our map.
Our Web site should be up by early September. Until then, we'll blog about the institute and its projects via theentireearthandsky.blogspot.com.

An Episode in the Life of Landscape Writer + Questions Commonly Asked of Our Life in the Presidio

2010-08-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

Remember, we need to sell at least another 500 copies of The Entire Earth and Sky in order for it to go to paperback.
The reader who gives me the best idea about how to push out a snazzy marketing campaign to achieve this wins: An autographed copy of my book. If the idea is really good, I will phone you and read to you from it. If it is a brilliant idea, I will come to your home and cook you dinner and then read aloud from the book. What are you waiting for?

My mind is occupied with the work of Cesar Aira, in particular An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions in a neat little format.

Bob Halliday, my dear friend in Bangkok and perhaps the world's foremost authority on both Thai food and coolish fiction, suggested I read it in our recent Skype call.

"I bet there's a copy right now sitting on the shelf at City Lights, waiting for you," he said. And indeed there was a copy on a bookstore shelf and now it is sitting next to me, as I gaze out at the rotting rope hammock in my backyard -- twisted, greenish-ropey gymnast, gone mad in our 52-degree, winds from the SSW at 13 miles per hour days -- (yo! check this out -- I made up those numbers up and went online to check and voila! spot on except for the wind direction -- solid W on that one. Call me a sailor who knows how to read local weather as text -- wind, cloud, humidity.)

Aira's novel documents a moment in the life of Johann Moritz Rugendas. For me, he articulates feelings so clearly about the challenges of framing, decoding, documenting landscapes.

Aira-inspired Thought: While we can work to understand the vertical dimension of The Presidio, the temporal or geologic, the serpentinite, graywacke sandstone, melange, the Monterey cypress and pines, the blue gums, the clarkia and banana slug, when it comes to the horizontal things become more obscure. No amount of study will yield an absolute set of answers. How can words begin to make a picture of the horizontal aspect of this place when what it is and what it claims to be diverge with such a spectacular lurch?

While I read Aira, stories of a landscape painter making sense of a wholly unfamiliar place, I also ploughed ahead into Here Is Where We Walk...now moving towards a finish date of 1 December.

I began making a list of the most common questions asked of us when we tell people we live here and from here we operate The Bureau of Landscape Narrative.

1) How often have you been to the statue of Yoda at the Lucas Film offices?
2) Are you a military veteran?
3) Where do you shop for groceries?

(This last one always makes me laugh. Why, after they lock the gates on this former military base at sundown, there are no trips to the shops. This is why we all have community gardens. So we have something to eat while watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey.)

By the way, the first word of this Aira book is Western and the last word is watch. A writing trick Bob Halliday taught me when we were colleagues at a Bangkok newspaper: First and last words matter. Choose wisely.

Do we each get a daily allotment of words?

2010-08-04T11:56:00.000-07:00

I sat with my friend - now a bestselling novelist who appears on national TV - but back then we were all writing obsessively, driven to tell our little stories, and hoping for the best - on a farmhouse porch in Iowa.
It was Halloween and inside the living room shook with dancers decked out in complex, tongue-in-cheek, conceptual costumes. The sort one imagines from MFA students holed up in Iowa trying to get books done -- and using any excuse not to write, such as making the most clever Halloween costume.
We were both finishing MFAs at the university. We were both deep into our first books. The horizon offered the pale orange glow of halogen lights and the fields stretching out before us were turned over, uneven, yet still marked by the neat of rows of monoculture corn estates.
She announced to me that there would be no more emails on a daily basis -- a habit I had come to adore of her -- lively, bright, witty missives, seemingly taken from the Victorians' habit of writing notes and sending them round during afternoon tea.
Her rationale was simple. She believed that each of us only has so many words in us to write each day. Email, she proclaimed, was sapping her strength for the important work, her book.
This statement has been much debated by the two of us and others over the ensuing years. Do we really have a finite number of words each day? Do we drain the supply via email, blogs, and Tweets?

Today in The Presidio the sky, I am dismayed to report, is once again a silver dome. The hawks have been busy since sunrise screeching and diving -- they seem immune to the weather -- putting on a show akin to Jurassic Park scenes, diving, air fights -- all terribly dramatic.
I thought of my friends words and decided to break my usual pattern of "checking in" via iPhone (four calls and three texts await me) and not even crack open email.
If we do have a limited number of words each day -- each year, each decade -- an idea I can argue both for and against -- at least today all the words go to this book, Here Is Where We Walk.

The Complex Relationship We Have with Trees 1

2010-08-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

Eucalyptus trees inspire a certain reverence and rage when discussed. Almost no one interviewed to date has been issue neutral on these trees. Those against note the water sucking, plant-destroying root systems, how quickly they proliferate, how they blow up like bombs when ignited in forest fires. Those who adore the trees often comment on their sound and smell...As it turns out, people have had a curiously complex relationship with these trees for some time.

From the Notebook:
Why Blue Gums Were Brought to California

Trees of the genus Eucalyptus from Australia were spread widely and numerously through California after the 1850's.
Several factors favored their spread, notably the production of timber and fuel, often with unrealistic hopes of financial gain. Planting for windbreaks and decorative purposes was also commonplace. An important and overlooked additional reason for the rapid dissemination of eucalypts in California, especially in the 1870's and 1880's, was the belief that trees of this genus, particularly Eucalyptus globulus or blue gum, could prevent or diminish the serious malaria problem that beset portions of the state.
That certain forms of vegetation, especially trees, represented sanitary influences was an ancient notion and it survived even the germ theory of disease. The supposed method whereby eucalypts achieved their healthful influence was through the trees' imagined capacity to absorb or neutralize the noxious gases that were believed to cause malaria. This erroneous and antique miasmatic etiology of malaria, together with belief in eucalypt prophylaxis, was demolished in the late nineteenth century when it was revealed that the disease was caused by blood parasites transmitted by the bites of anopheline mosquitoes.
--
35 The Pacific Rural Press, May 16, 1874, p. 20.

Meanwhile, similar comments were appearing in the authoritative British scientific journal Nature: "The subject of the introduction of the eucalyptus as a sanitary agency in fever-stricken countries has of late been so much talked about that some authoritative preliminary inquiries have been made with the view of planting Eucalyptus globulus on a large scale in Mauritius;"Nature, June 11, 1874, p. 112. "…the Italian government, following the course that it has already adopted on previous occasions, will gratuitously distribute this year 5,000 plants of the Eucalyptus globulus, for cultivation in the Agro Romano, especially in the spot infected by malaria;"Nature, April 1, 1875, p. 436.

Shorelines

2010-08-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

We've lived above the Pacific's shore in The Presidio for five years. From the perch here in the dunes, water invites the eye to extend beyond the Golden Gate, out towards the Farallon Islands, and then take an imaginative journey further west -- Hana, Papeete, Moorea -- moving effortlessly across those blue waves. The Golden Gate Strait is three-miles long and one-mile wide and gives its name to the famed orange-oxide bridge. The current runs at healthy 4.5 -7.5 knots, one of the first things we decided to learn about how the sea works in these parts.
Golden Gate as place name was not derived from the sun's color across this water -- particularly in September and October when we can see the golden light. Mais non.
The topographical engineer for the U.S. Army, John C. Fremont, named this place "Chrysopylae" because it reminded him of a harbor near Istanbul called Chrysoceras, or Golden Horn. (A human trait or folly to demand places be "like something else" -- we all seem desperate for analog when it comes to the land.)
For a mighty view of the Golden Gate unsullied by bridge, climb to the highest point in The Presidio: Rob Hill Campground.
It is also a good place to start a meditation on wild, semi-wild, not-so-very-wild places and the sh*t we do there.
Rob Hill is the only campground in San Francisco. It rests on a wind-pounded hill. It has been a source of much hand-wringing here at the head office. Why? Well, the Haas family gave The Presidio about $15 million to fix up The Presidio and the campground was thus reborn.
They took down many, many trees. While they were redoing it, the place looked like a bomb crater. The footprint spreads out like an enormous canker across newly cleared land.
Before, it was a messy, fusty place -- which for some of us is what camping is all about. (Although I have to say, camping in a city is not really my idea of camping. It's something else -- perhaps a new category under the heading 'how we spend time outside.' More on that later.)
So.
With this dim view of the whole fancy-camper operation uphill from our home, we set out each day for Baker Beach, along a road clogged these days with cars and expensive bikes ridden largely by middle-aged white men in extremely tight shorts and tops. Some of these men talk on cell phones, connected to the cell phone via Blue Tooth devices.
We walk along, trying to stay calm in the face of this onslaught of fancy stuff in our beloved park.
On a recent morning, we followed our usual path -- stairs to the beach and then the sand ladder, on this morning packed with children in the last throes of true child-ages -- maybe 10, 11? Most were either Hispanic or African American. Most were not dressed for camping in a way outfitters like REI or Patagonia would recognize. They were dressed for camping the way we all used to dress before expedition clothes became widely available at malls across the world.
Over-sized pea coats, pink shiny windbreakers, ragged sneakers. Laying down each jacket and shoe on a blanket on the sand, then shrieking when blown sand gathered on their coats and other clothes.
We came to see quite quickly it was a group that had perhaps never been to an actual beach. Talking to one of the group leaders, we found out the children came from just across town, a few miles of streets, a million miles away in the neighborhoods that don't make the coffee table books about San Francisco.
The big, fat, overpriced campsite had been their only invitation to explore a beach here, explore with borrowed clothes and all sorts of ideas of what it would be like.
We tarried there, watching the wildish play -- throwing, splashing, running -- that beaches draw out of each of us.
Then, we noted one girl standing alone at the water's edge, carefully pushing her toes into cold waters.
She turned, hands clamped to her head to keep hair from going awry -- a losing battle, we wanted to tell her, but the beach will school her soon enough, so we kept silent -- and she called out to her teacher: It's so loud! I didn't think the ocean would be so loud!
There you have it. A moment when ideas and impressions crack open.
For reasons we have yet to fully grasp, explore, and articulate, this scene made us weep. A story of one girl, wind, sea, and sky, and the day she came to hear the waves.

What Business Have We in the Woods?

2010-07-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
—Henry David Thoreau

Recently, I found myself wandering the forests of southeastern Tasmania. En route, I pulled the car over at Geeveston to inspect the Forest & Heritage Information Center. Constructed of wood, and filled with information about trees and their commercial uses, one of the myriad facts I picked up was this, "Forests managed for timber production remove more carbon out of the air over time than unmanaged forests locked up in reserves." Because this was written and distributed by people who view trees as things that need to be made into something else -- ie, wood chips, boats, two-by-fours, etc -- I read this with narrowed gaze.
On my return to America, hunched over stacks of dusty volumes, I came across the "Analytical Model of Carbon Storage in the Trees, Soils, and Wood Products of Managed Forests," by Roderick C. Dewar in the journal Tree Physiology.
The fact is, so-called managed forests do have a higher C02 intake than so-called unmanaged forests. Why? The fact is, while a forest is growing, it is a net sink for C02 while mature trees are essentially in equilibrium with the atmosphere.
What Dewar and other researchers seem to be saying, (which the Tasmanian foresters have deployed in a somewhat simplified and self-serving way) is that yes, young, growing trees will suck out more C02. However. It's a far more complex equation than young/managed vs old/unmanaged. Factors such as soil, tree species, what the trees are made into (ie, products with a short or long shelf life?) all play key parts in figuring out the C02 equation.
Facts, those pesky details, and how we twist them to our own ends.
It circles us back around to ideas of who runs the narration of life on Earth -- how proper science with all its tedious reports actually answers complex questions with complex responses. How other sorts with more commercial/exploitative interests maybe shouldn't be allowed to build "information and heritage" centres. I know that sounds incredibly bossy and Che Guevara-ish. But it's true. Leave the histories to those interested in the whole text, (from texere, to weave.)
In some places, Yosemite, for instance, it's good enough to simply be a giant tree. Your life is spared and nurtured. In some places it just isn't. Go figure that one out.
The Australian filmmaker and dancer Lisa Roberts (no relation) told me many of the trees felled in Tasmania become woodchips bound for Japan these days.
Sitting along the side of the road in Geeveston, while a huge logging truck whizzes by, shaking my car, I see the long, soft trunks stacked like -- wood. I imagine their life in these woods. I see them soon-to-be made into what -- packing materials? particle board?
I press my hand to the windshield glass as they roll northward towards the harbor in Hobart and their sea journey. Then I drive deeper into the woods.

Tree-ish Rappinghood

2010-07-27T15:25:00.000-07:00

What's a tree's worth? The other morning, slammed in traffic -- first vehicular then human -- en route to the Mariposa Grove of redwoods, I kept thinking of the Tom Tom Club's Wordy Rappinghood. It's a rat's race at a fast pace. Don't we go in search of trees to leave this stream?
What's a tree's worth? In Mariposa, French, Spanish, Japanese, here a language, there a language, heads tilted backwards, cameras held aloft, children standing next to unearthed root systems resembling a woodcut for Blake's lines. All a day's work for the redwoods.
What's a tree's worth? I walked 2.2 miles (or so they told me) shuffling dust with my children and a bunch of complete strangers. And while I usually find over-stuffed outdoorsy activities not to my liking -- give me solitude and a less scenic route any day -- I would fight the crowds again to stand among those trees.
My friend the poet Susan Gevirtz said we like big trees because they remind us of the passage of time. We can put our hands on their trunks and feel time.
Is this the reason we go to them?
Or do we like superlatives so? Largest trees on the planet -- almost. Oldest tree in this grove. Branches bigger than tree trunks in most of the world's forests.
From my notebook: Four trees called The Bachelor and Three Graces. While sneaking a closer look, a tractor trailing hauling open-air cars, wheezes by, a little bit of the Garden State Parkway right here in California. Passengers all wore headsets. Me: jealous. Hold deep, secret love of "audio tours" (don't tell) -- both because of whom they choose to read the script (always better when it's either someone who also performs Shakespeare or an inordinately sincere expert) and because it is so directional. When most things that get audio tour treatment (art, trees) are actually invitations to be wildly creative and free.
Facts on these trees -- shallow roots, only six feet beneath where I stand...down there, drinking...as I write this, drinking 1,000 gallons a day, these four trees so entwined there will be no separation for them -- if one falls, they all go down. The whole root system is said to cover half an acre.
The problem with tree facts? We get too much at one time. One or two ideas is enough. Enough. Stop reading the placards lining the route.
I like the Taoist idea of trees. How lucky they are to be content to stay in one place and grow.
After I write this, it is time to rejoin the stream, pressing, crying children in dusty strollers, crying children told sotto voce to shut up, squirrel loudly named Chubb by a teen-age boy feeding it crumbs, well-turned-out French hikers jutting lips and wiping brows saying d'accord, the whole place snapping, yapping, clapping.
What's a tree worth?

Tasmanian Pademelons

2010-07-23T07:07:00.000-07:00

We're just back from Tasmania -- where we attended and presented at the Antarctic Visions Conference at the University of Tasmania, Hobart.

How did the talk go? I believe it is always ill-advised to begin a new slide deck at 3:30 am the day of -- because one suddenly has a "great new idea."

And yet this was the predicament I sucked myself into, suddenly obsessed with capturing larger ideas of how we understand and talk about place. And the name I gave it was Lyrical Geomorphology. (Expect to see more of these notions here, as I tease them out for my book.)

The rest of the panel "killed" (modish high-praise lingo vectored into my brain via my 13-year-old daughter) that day. Bill Fox, Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent, gave a rousing discussion of his own path to Antarctica -- how understanding The Ice as Place began with conversations -- with Barry Lopez and Stephen Pyne. Gretchen Legler, author of On Ice , detailed her ever-expanding list of women's writing on The Ice.

I quoted my good friend David Campbell's brilliant Antarctic book The Crystal Desert , showed slides from my exploding collection of Antarctic images, and chatted about how "personal" stories offer us writers a sort of wild creativity and freedom.

When the conference ended we drove south towards Recherche Bay, to a solar-powered shack in the forests.

Unexpected, dominant piece of each day: In the land of nocturnal animals, road kill takes on stunning proportions.

Part of our morning ritual entailed pausing to shovel small, unfamiliar animals off the road. It felt like the right thing to do.

While doing so one day, Ed said to me, "What the hell is this one?" The grey-brown back and reddish belly, the muscular forearms, stocky, short legs.

Only yesterday as I culled photos from the trip did I sit down to add name to image. I came again to this guy and found it to be a male pademelon -- and Aboriginal name, sometimes called the rufous wallaby.

Looking at its living rellies online, I considered how islands like Tas tell a specific wild story of adaptation, how this adaptation is often portrayed as "exotic" and how site-specific plants and animals hold us in their thrall.

Thanks for that inspiration, pademelons. More about native plants and animals and how their life The Presidio in our next post.

Dream of a Butterfly Dreaming

2010-07-22T11:46:00.000-07:00

Don't tell anyone: Ed and I stole away from work to a matinee of Inception. We were the only souls in the theater. The story is built like a Chinese box and it represents all that is great about stories, the imagination, and matinees. For the two or so hours it cranked along, Inception gave me something to think about -- other than how ghastly the weather is currently in The Presidio, which seems to be Thought No. 1 these days.

Do you know what happens here in The Presidio in July and August? Well, it's not summer. Unless it's some sort of Christopher Nolan-devised anxiety-inducing dream-state. (Actually, if you wonder what the sky looks like here in summer, take note of how the sky looks in the crumbling world DiCaprio and his partner imagined in the film. Same-same.)

The sky is a silver dome. As someone who spends as much time as she can outside each day, this sky is both depressing and infuriating. On the really bad days, I am convinced someone has rigged this sky, Inception-style, to drive us all mad. Not that a few odd days of the big, glowing silver bowl -- (do we live in some hotel buffet steam-table serving vessel? Will a great spoon come and pull me out and slap me on a plate?) -- wouldn't offer some coolish variation on shades of blue and luminous clouds. But what happens in The Presidio is bright grey arrives, slaps down on us, and we live this way until September.

During these months, I walk around my writing studio, patrol the beaches and fields, and try not to scream.

I've been told there are more microclimates in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else on Earth. Can this be true? I know if I walk about a mile over the hills here, I will hit true summer -- hot sun, tanned legs, tall, sweating glasses of iced tea.

However. Do I flee my home because the weather doesn't meet my needs? Or do I stick it out, go all white and pasty, and shove my weary brain into books and matinees? This feels like the more noble path: The weather and I are meeting, eye to eye, and I am learning what it is to feel honestly blue because I cannot, will not see the blue sky.

What is the weather learning from my resilience? Am I schooling the sky?

Part of my reading-to-ignore-the-silver-sky takes this form: The skeptical philosophy of Chuang Tzu. Does Christopher Nolan read Chuang Tzu? His work suggests so. At any rate, for obvious reasons given this oppressive and relentless sky, this work resonates for me. Perhaps this is the question: Is the weather trying to tell me something via the writing of Chuang Tzu? Or am I Chuang Tzu dreaming of the weather and how I will write about it in my book? Or am I Leslie Carol Roberts dreaming of a sky that is still weeks away holding tight with the trees and the great band of nesting migratory birds that keep me company each day?

"Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things."
(The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, New York, 1968)

Paperback Writer

2010-07-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

I recently found out that if you have a great hardback edition of your book -- ie, a book people call "beautifully designed" as I do, paperback days may have to wait. Well, it's not truly the fault of the book design. The fact is,

THE ENTIRE
EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica October 2008: 323 pp.; 5.2 inches x
8.5 inches; 11 photographs.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1617-4

(800-755-1105)

while doing "great" in sales (particularly for a book with no marketing except for a few ads and a personally funded book tour) cannot go paper until we sell more hardback copies.

It's not like I'm not already trying. While the book came out over a year ago, I continue to give readings across the U.S. and abroad (try buying the book in Australia or New Zealand where I did much of my research -- ha-ha on that idea) and make cold calls to bookstores to see if they carry my book.

The main resistance to purchasing it by bookstores? Price. The book costs over $20. "We'll carry the paperback," they tell me. "Cheaper to stock. And for a traveller's book like yours. More portable."

I come home, vaguely defeated by this news. It's all so much to manage these days for us writers. Remember when making books was about assembling a bunch of pages, stapling them together, then calling it a day? Ha-ha on that idea, too.

My husband Ed, who closes large deals on fiber optic cables for a living, finds this paper-back edition log-jam appalling.

"Get me a copy of your contract! Who makes this decision?" he squawked from our orange couch, where he balanced a bowl of pistachios and a Stella Artois beer while reading the latest on hybrid Lexus sedans.

"Nebraska has the paperback rights," I sniff. "They say we have to sell more of what we have first. But they've been really good to me. It's just the book business right now. Tough."

And it's true. Nebraska is an excellent press and I love working with them. And these are weird, paradigm-shift times for all of us in publishing

So.

This leaves me with no other route than to try and sell as many copies of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica as I can. I mean, this is what we polar explorers do, isn't it? Take charge and keep going with good cheer, even in the face of adversity?

This is my first foray into direct marketing, and I can say as a writer who prefers to sit for long hours in wide-open, wild places, like Antarctica and New Zealand (read about it in THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY) -- it sort of freaks me out in a way canoeing a rough river or sliding down an icy hillock do not.

But what are the options? Sit here in silence, writing away on my new project and give up trying to get more eyeballs on THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY? Wait til I see it in five years, dust-covered on the outdoor remainder table at Green Apple Books on Clement Street in San Francisco, next to faded copies of How Not to Act Old?

Someone suggested I do a YouTube author video where we get creative and show both what the book's about and what I went through to get this book written -- how I travelled to Antarctica in 1988 for three months, then reported the news in other places around the world, then found I thought about Antarctica every day.

So I began my slow path back to The Ice, reading and researching the people who went before me, the treaty and legal conventions, and the state of the ice and wildlife. A deeply personal quest, first as a reporter then as a single mother with a Fulbright working out of Gateway Antarctica International Research Centre in Christchurch.

Fifteen years after first setting foot on Ross Island, near Robert Falcon Scott's famous hut, I wrote my book about my life in Antarctica and subsequent explorations into the "little known" stories of that continent's exploration.

Why do I think Antarctica matters so much, to stake my life on this project for more than a decade? Well, I think Antarctica offers us much to consider -- and I felt and feel we can only fully embrace all we have here on Earth via close inspection. I love how Antarctica contains more than 60 percent of the Earth's fresh water, how the ice is more than 20 million years old, how the ice covers 98 percent of the continent. I love how penguins have evolved as birds who swim rather than fly.

And I loved the chance to take a nice long chunk of time and turn all this over in my mind and into the thing call book, to slow down my thinking from the rapid-fire worlds of mothering and journalism, to allow the feel and reach of The Ice to inhabit the feel and reach of my creative work.

More on the path to making the book in the next post. In the meantime, any thoughts on ways to get the book to more people's eyeballs?

Let me know.

Field Notes: Here Is Where We Walk -- One

2010-07-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

Presidio National Park
San Francisco

An Unofficial Look at Place Known Since 1776 by Handle “Presidio” Gathered by Our Research Department

1. San Francisco Bay is relatively young: only about 8,000 years of ocean water flooding into what was once a large valley. Melting ice from the last glaciation raised ocean levels and thus the bay began to form.

2. Interesting rocky base in these parts: The Franciscan Complex. (Sometimes called the “World Famous” Franciscan Complex.)

3. Rocks Beneath Our Feet: Graywacke sandstone and argillite also lessor amounts of greenstone (altered submarine basalt), radiolarian ribbon chert, limestone, serpitinite (altered mantle material), and high-grade metamorphic rocks such as blueschist (high-pressure), amphibolite, and eclogite – these words typically fractured and mixed together to form a “melange.”

4. Range in age from 200 to 80 million years old

5. Franciscan Complex composed of semi-coherent blocks, called tectostratigraphic terranes, which were episodically scraped from the subducting oceanic plate, thrust eastward and shingled against the western margin of North America.

6. The Earth is a coolish design concept -- a dynamic place of moving pieces. Some of the best geologic detective work centers on the understanding of tectonic plates -- and how the lithosphere is broken up into seven or eight major plates and many, many minor plates.

7. A piece of the Presidio is an interesting rock called Chert. Chert epitomizes how movement and change define life on Earth.

(We spend so much time with rocks here because of recent the rocks call the shots – they determine what grows where, what the terrain is like, how much any species, even humans, can survive given their chemical composition.)

Note: This is not to suggest the rocks care, mind you. From our careful observations, we can say they are entirely absorbed with their own (losing) battle with wind and water, as well as with tectonic shifts. Thus their understandable (and forgiveable) wild indifference.

Big News on the Big Salmon

2010-07-19T15:14:00.000-07:00

Wondering what's happening in Rakaia, New Zealand, home to the world's largest public salmon sculpture? (There's a larger one in a private collection in Japan.) In addition to the Salmon Tales Restaurant, they have added a "4-D" salmon educational and entertainment center. But don't take our word for it: http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/4d-cinema-comes-rakaia/5/53329

Field Notes: Here Is Where We Walk

2010-07-19T14:46:00.000-07:00

This begins the next iteration of The Entire Earth and Sky blog.
Goals for 2G Entire Earth and Sky blog:
1. Over the next 246 days, I will complete my book, Here Is Where We Walk, posting bit and pieces as I go.
2. Figure out if it is ethically OK to print a book about trees on any sort of paper.
3. Make and document a series of interactive "maps" -- of my two current favorite topics -- trees and how they grow and behave in general and Antarctic geology and ice.
4. Learn to use the laser cutter at work with such proficiency that I can create many iterations of my maps for a "show" that will tour the world.
Well, our team here in the Presidio clearly has a lot of work to do.
This blog will be refreshed weekly for the summer, more when school begins in September.

Field Notes: The Traverse to the Pole

2008-07-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

In 2003, one of the biggest stories for Antarcticans was the construction of a 1400-km "ice traverse" from the American McMurdo Station to the South Pole. I wound up writing very little about this track in the final version of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica, and that was a difficult choice. On one hand, the discussion of this track dominated talk at Gateway Antarctica during November and December of that year. On the other hand, the project crept along, plagued by the problems posed by Antarctica to "track builders" -- ie shifting ice, deep crevasses, extreme cold, and very little was really known about the implications of the track for the larger environment.

There was also the feeling that the ascendancy of Antarctica as the key lab for monitoring global climate change meant figuring out ways to gain better access to more its formidable interior. More scientists on the ice would mean more information and maybe a better fix on how the Earth's atmosphere is changing, or has changed in the past.

I try to keep a balanced view of so-called progress in the name of science. However. It was stunning to me that whole features of the ice -- crevasses for instance -- had been modified using explosives. This "filling in" was heartbreaking to imagine. Yet when the Americans came and talked about their scheme, they argued that the track allowed them important options for better science -- and negated the reliance on planes as the sole way to the South Pole.

It was reported that airplanes pumped out more carbon dioxide and other pollutants than the track vehicles would. In 2003, the US made 293 polar flights, to the station that sits on the ice on top of the pole. They also needed the traverse to backload old gear -- and not leave it laying about in a junk heap.

As I considered this icy thruway, it struck that a little less than 100 years earlier, Roald Amundsen led the first successful expedition to the pole. In the ensuing years, the Antarctic interior remained as pristine as he found it. There are fewer than 4,000 people in the summer months, and they cling to the coast lines for the most part. Imagine this on a continent nearly twice the size of Australia or the size of the US and Mexico combined.

The term "sparse" doesn't begin to cover. It's just wide open green and blue ice ripped across by katabatic winds.

In winter, the population dwindles to about 1,000 and the ice doubles in size, making the whole place -- land with ice covering -- twice its summer size. Ninety-eight percent of the continent is covered with a permanent ice coating. Seventy percent of the Earth's fresh water is contained in this ice.

And yet, this ice track felt like some sort of essential defeat to the wilderness. Here we go, I heard one scientist say. First they blast their way across the ice to make their track, then they continue to use their bloody planes anyway. And the whole place is ripped with the sound of engines.

Rather a dire view, but something to consider.

In 2005, the first vehicles arrived at the pole on the traverse. It is described as establishing a "proof of concept" that indeed, one can make and maintain an ice road in Antarctica. The focus in 2007 seemed to be repairing and maintaining the traverse -- remember the ice flows down from the South Pole to the coast. It is in constant, slow motion, gently shifting with the cycles of the moon, they have learned.

So here we are five years after the big, loud debate about the road -- simply Google US traverse to south pole and you will find the press coverage from around the world.

Things happen slowly in general around Antarctic projects -- so much staging, so much time needed simply to stay alive down there.

As Bryan Storey, the noted Antarctic geologist and head of Gateway Antarctica once noted, Antarctica decides what you get to do once you get there.

Interesting place to stop for a moment and ponder the ice and all its mysteries.

Field Notes: They Came Home to Lyttelton

2008-06-28T15:35:00.000-07:00

In my journal for The Entire Earth and Sky, I wrote,

I drove home to Lyttelton in my green truck, made a cup of tea, and curled up in bed. From my bed, I could look out a large window to the port. Later that night, a red coastal freighter would arrive, as it did each week, and begin unloading a cargo that often seemed to be entirely clanging metal bars. At that moment, the port was still, illuminated by melon halogen lights, lights that urged gulls to forget the night. They flew in a wide arc, silent, circling. Norris had given me a copy of his Antarctic book, which was sold at the Canterbury Museum. It collected a series of newspaper columns he contributed to a local paper, detailing the specific stories of Lyttelton and Canterbury men who sailed during the Heroic Age.

As I read, I could hear his voice. Some of the ships took expeditions to the Antarctic, then turned around and came home to Lyttelton where the crew waited out the frigid, ship-crushing winter season. Thus, Scott’s second and final ship, the Terra Nova was moored at Lyttelton for long periods during 1910-1913. The ship had dropped off Scott and the exploration team at Cape Evans. They would return in the spring thaw to fetch Scott and his victorious party, home from their dash to the South Pole.
You can imagine how people in Lyttelton would have felt, looking down into the port and seeing the Terra Nova in their midst. Norris was almost equally devoted to the ships themselves, the old sailor in him coming through, I reckoned, and he recorde the Terra Nova’s fate: She had vanished during World War II off the coast of Greenland, where she was in the service of the U.S. Navy.

I put the book down and recalled a photo in the Lyttelton Museum, an image that had captured a moment of pageant and freak show, P.T. Barnum does a wilderness act: Eleven men in Burberry anoraks, hoods extended and obscuring their faces. They wore harnesses and towed sledges just as five men would do en route to the South Pole. The first holds a crumpled Union Jack hastily hoisted on a pole. Two young boys galloped in from the right, skinny legs, knee breeches and caps, white collars glistening. The street mired in mud, the hillside homes cloaked in a faint coal-smoke haze. Behind the marchers, a regimental band, wearing topcoats with brass buttons. These Antarctic sailors march deliberately, suggesting they know where they are going – and in fact, they do – back to the quayside, a left turn and then two blocks down the steep hill, back to their ship’s chores, then off to sea. Later, the photos will show these men at sea, faces masked by cold and ice, skin darkened and shining from coal and blubber smoke.

I returned to his book, in an eloquent essay, They Came Back to Lyttelton, he listed more than a dozen and their fates. There was Lance Corporal A.H. Blissett who served aboard the Discovery. By the time Norris knew him, he was Harry Blissett, a rather gruff watersider, or dockworker. He had frightened Norris as a child. Blissett was the first to find an Emperor penguin’s egg, a moment Scott had recorded on January 28, 1903, “all the news seems good. Blissett has discovered an Emperor penguin egg and his messmates expect him to be knighted.”

Hugh McGowan had served as an engineer with Shackleton’s 1904-1906 Nimrod expedition and continued that work back in Lyttelton.

W.W. Knowles had been an able-bodied seaman on the Terra Nova. He worked as a watersider for many years in Lyttelton.

The Morning, a relief ship sent out in 1903 – I considered the odd moment of language meeting purpose, mourning, the feeling of showing deep sadness following the death of somebody – sailed to find and bring home Scott and his Discovery crew when they were late returning in 1903. She had two Lyttelton men aboard: Arthur Beaumont, able-bodied seaman, who later worked in Lyttelton as a watersider and crane operator, and Jack Partridge, who sailed with the Morning and then headed south again in 1907 on Shackleton’s Nimrod. He became fireman on the Lyttelton Harbour Board’s dredge Te Whaka.

Not all the Lyttelton men were seamen. Local boy Eric Norman Webb, Norris noted, was just twenty-two when selected by the legendary Australian polar scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson to head south.

Webb served as chief magnetician with the 1911 Australasian Expedition, and was key in locating the South Magnetic Pole. The magnetic pole describes, for the Earth’s magnetic field, the equivalent of the geographic South Pole. The South Magnetic Pole is not fixed, and drifts like a cloud across water, land, ice. In 2003 it hovered off the Antarctic coast, over the Southern Ocean. Webb went on to become a world authority on hydroelectric power.

The next morning, I wandered along the town’s quiet streets. Someone had broken the windows of two shops the night before. Drunken sailors? Young hooligans? I climbed cement stairs by the museum and sat down in Baden Norris Gardens, dedicated to his work as historian and naturalist, turned and gazed out across the deep turquoise water to Diamond Harbour on the other shore. A bay cruise boat, black and white, pulled slowly away from the quay, a dolphin-watching trip. Earlier in the year a pod of Orcas had made the unusual move of swimming into the harbour and gobbling up a lot the tiny, rare Hector’s dolphins that also called Lyttelton home. Those that remained were keeping a low profile. No one had seen any in months.

Penguins Go to the Zoo...

2008-06-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

Each day as part of my iGoogle page I get a feed of jokes. Most are not my taste: I guess I prefer to laugh privately or perhaps it's that the whole joke set-up construct makes me nervous.

Who knows.

At any rate, today I got this joke from Comedy Central: Penguins go the zoo...
A man drives to a gas station and has his tank filled up. The gas pumper spots two penguins sitting in the back seat of the car.

He asks the driver, "What's up with the penguins in the back seat?"

The man in the car says "I found them. I asked myself what to do with them, but I haven't had a clue."

The clerk ponders a bit then says, "You should take them to the zoo."

"Hey, that's a good idea," says the man in the car and drives away.

The next day the man with the car is back at the same gas station. The clerk sees the penguins are still in the back seat of the car.

"Hey, they're still here! I thought you were going to take them to the zoo."

"Oh, I did," says the driver, "And we had a swell time. Today I am taking them to the beach."

The first thing that came to mind were the Magellanic penguins at the SF Zoo, a rather sad-looking bunch in their cement pond. Not so long ago, maybe five years or so, some new penguins born and bred in Ohio came aboard the island. This arrival triggered a massive "migration" of the original gang, who proceeded to swim as though making the long commute from northerly to southerly latitudes in wide open seas.

If I am in the right mood, these sorts of penguin stories can make me bawl.

This, of course, made me think of all the penguin stories I had heard from my friend, the Antarctic curator Baden Norris (he runs the Lyttelton Museum on New Zealand's South Island) -- who had also for many years run a bird hospital and nursed many penguins back to health. Penguins are endemic to New Zealand's South Island and actually considered something of a smelly mess.

One of my favorite stories was that of Percy the Penguin and I included in THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY as a field note.

Field Notes
I imagine if penguins were to study us the way we study them, they might be intrigued by how we adapt to and construct our habitats. Maybe they would investigate our habitat construction in places like New York. How we stack boxes of stone one on top of the other and then argue amongst ourselves about what colour the inside of these dens should be. How we change the den’s colour randomly. Or do we do so for other reasons? Perhaps, as scientists do in the Antarctic, they would be curious about whether or not helicopter noise disrupted our breeding habits. I don’t know about you, but I would feel disrupted by a helicopter full of penguins descending on my den, determined to shove a thermometer up my rear end and check my body temperature. Penguins may be the most carefully studied of all Antarctic wildlife and there was a lot of grumbling among Antarctic scientists about duplication and relevance. Yet penguins hold our attention in ways seals do not. Why is this so? And why do we insist on making them into comical little men in dinner suits, carrying silver trays of champagne? Baden had run a bird “hospital” for many years. As part of this, he had worked with the indigenous species called the blue or little penguin, Eudyptula minor, (the Maori name is korora, and it is the world’s smallest penguin. This penguin weighs about one kilo, or 2.2 pounds, and stands no more than 25 cm high. These penguins have suffered from gruesome predation, and introduced species like ferrets, stoats, weasels, house cats, and the family dog, make fast work of them. Among those in his care was a penguin that had arrived with a damaged bill and blind in one eye. Baden named him Percy and said he never could have survived again in the wild. While he lived with Baden, Percy got to know Baden’s cats, who came to treat the little bird with respect, and treat him as part of the household. Baden explained how other penguins were in hospital because they had become oil contaminated. To cure them, Baden gave them detergent baths, then carefully checked that all residue was removed. After about five weeks, most were ready to be reintroduced to the wild. They usually did not want to go, he added. He recalled one particular day when he had four to release, how he took them down to the beach and shooed them all toward the sea, then sat on the beach and watched them swim away. One by one, they came back to the beach and sat down next to him. Then the five watched the surf roll onto the beach at Sumner. Two penguins tired of this, and wandered back toward the waves, but the other two were quite determined to come home with Baden. So Baden brought them to the beach again the next day, and this time one turned from the waves. A few days later he, too, agreed to swim out to sea. Returning to the sea was no longer an option for Percy. He came to have a taste for cat food and enjoyed daily swims with Baden in the surf. Percy rode to the beach in the boot, or trunk, of Baden’s white car. When they finished their swim, Percy waddled back to the car park. He always knew which car was ours, he was a smart penguin, Baden recalled. I pictured the two of them rolling in the turquoise South Pacific waters. So Percy lived his half-penguin, half-human life making a comfortable nest in the cold furnace in the basement. During one of the South Island’s torrential rainstorms, he was moulting, and water surged into his moulting area and by the time Baden found him, he was ice-cold and water logged. Wrapped in shawls and held tight, Percy died. Down the coast from Baden’s home, many years later, the town of Oamaru became home to a set of wooden burrows and bleachers, a habitat restoration project with spectators, where tourists paid to watch penguins emerge from the sea as night descended. They hopped up the rocky beach. When we visited, one turned towards where I sat with my children and came to within a few feet of us, looking steadily at our family. Then the penguin turned towards the hills and began to climb towards the burrows. In the gift shop, we bought small plastic replicas of the little blue penguins. They were made in China and stood as tall as my thumb.

10 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT ANTARCTICA

2008-06-11T19:52:00.000-07:00

What a great day for Antarctic news: The last supply ship in dumped off about 16,000 condoms to make it through the winter. Good on ya, mates, as my Kiwi colleagues say. The first part of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY is a "gazetteer" of Antarctic facts. And then there are facts strewn around the book. How about this one: 46,800 cans of beer are ordered each year for Scott Base, the New Zealand base in the Ross Sea. (Wine, you ask? 2,268 bottles.) At any rate, I plan to include fact lists each week over the austral winter, in honor of our colleagues toughing it out in the 24-hour darkness of the deep south. While some might call such lists random, there is also an argument that all of these ideas were carefully selected from the tens of millions floating around out there -- do you see the link?

1) Antarctica is the only continent where people compete on an annual basis for the chance to reside and work there.
2) Antarctica was once the center of the Gondwana supercontinent, which included Africa, India, South America, and Australia.
3) 98 percent of the continent is covered by ice; with a volume of 30 million cubic kilometres.
4) The weight of the ice has depressed continental bedrock by 600 meters.
5) Antarctica contains 70 percent of the Earth's fresh water in the form of ice.
6) When winter darkness descends, the community shrinks to 1,000.
7) Ice crept across Antarctica about 40 million years ago and has remained largely intact since then.
8) On Nov. 29, 1929, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd of the U.S. Navy became first to fly over the South Pole.
9) At the South Pole, the ice is 2.8 kilometers thick.
10) People who live and work at the South Pole are called "polies."

Otherwise, you have a worthless imitation

2008-05-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

My book, The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica, is not due out until October 1 but it recently appeared on Amazon.com. Lately, when people other than my writing colleagues ask about the book -- I have taken to talking like a swaggering travelling salesman, as in, "You can pre-order a copy on Amazon.com."

This newish habit of mine makes me feel like an ass, and yet it is hard to stop. Orwell wrote so beautifully about the vanity and selfishness of the writer. He also, I believe, threw in lazy as part of his equation on what writers, in fact, are. Vain, selfish, lazy. Perhaps this is why I enjoy doing historical research, years of combing archives, in search of letters and diaries of men working in Antarctica. I am fascinated by their calm determination, their sense of purpose, and their unending appetite for the unknown. Among my favorite sailors who came to me via letters, was a Scotsman named James Paton. I included a piece of his story in The Entire Earth and Sky.

***
I recall sitting in the Canterbury Museum Archives reading Paton's diary. I was rather distracted by the diary as a physical object -- they used to sell the opening pages to advertisers and the adverts themselves seemed meaningful and illuminating, although I did not ultimately use them in my book. (Too many small portals, or portholes, open as I wandered through the pages and photos. The challenge wasn't to find, but to know what I sought while also being wholly open the new.)Here are my rough notes:

The Diary of James Paton, 1904

The book is dark brown and gold embossed on the cover, an oval “Lett’s No. 101 Diary” in ornate hand; the oval fashioned as a belt, secured with a buckle at the base.
Inside the front cover, several pages of ads, including “Eno’s ‘Fruit Salt’”
“Every household and travelling trunk ought to contain a bottle of Eno’s Fruit Salt for preventing and curing by natural means all functional derangements of the liver, temporary congestion arising from alcoholic beverages, errors in diet, biliousness, sick headache, constipation, thirst, feverish cold, influenza, throat affections, and fevers of all kinds.
“The effects of Eno’s Fruit Salt on a Disordered and Feverish condition is Simply Marvellous. It is, in fact, Nature’s Own Remedy, and an Unsurpassed One.

CAUTION: Examine the Capsule and see that it is marked ENO’S FRUIT SALT!’ Otherwise, you have a WORTHLESS IMITATION.

Lett’s Australasian Rough Diary and Almanac for 1904
Being the fourth year of the reign of his majesty king Edward VII.
Date of Birth of and Age in 1904 of The Royal Family...

Including list of New Zealand rates of postage -/1 for each 1/2 oz.

Paton writes, Saturday 5th December 1903
Cast off moorings from the Alexandria Peir (sic) exactly at noon, there were many friends down to bid us Good-bye and wish us God speed, although our send of (sic) was not quite so enthusiastic as the one from Lyttelton it was no less sincere, the short period we had been in Hobart was not lost…

A letter on the ship Terra Nova stationery: logo is Emperor penguin standing on a globe, with the Antarctic continent underfoot. In the ring band around it, the words, British Antarctic Expedition, Terra Nova RYS
The penguin is in profile, gazing steadfastly to the right.
Christmas 1910
“Knowing only too well how little time we shall have on hand when we get to our destination I think I had better begin my letters now. We left Port Chalmers at 2.30 P.M. on November 29th, and all went well until December 2nd when we ran into a heavy southerly gale our decks were heavily laden with cargo. ...we had to turn to and throw a good part of the deck cargo overboard, this was not our only danger, as it soon leeked out that the water had risen as high as the bottom of our furnaces ...all hands were employed all the time up to the waist in water, with the seas breaking over them while the aftergaurd (sic) (the officers and scientists) were kept passing it from the Engine room in buckets,
All this time we had very little to eat (nothing hot) and no rest, and for our own sakes as well as for the poor dumb animals we had on board, it was a relief the weather moderated.
During this gale we had one dog washed overboard, and two of our horses got down and died but several days passed before we could get them out of the stalls to throw them overboard."

And then Paton recounts how life was at sea -- once they arrived in Antarctica. He travelled there a remarkable 10 times and was among the most highly sought polar sailors in the world. However, you won't find him in any museums, save Lyttelton, New Zealand. Paton, like most of the simple seamen, has been all but erased from history.

The Ontology of an Oil Spill

2007-11-14T20:57:00.000-08:00

The oil spilled into San Francisco one week ago and even today, even with all our news vectors and sources and RSS feeds, we still don't seem to be able to wrap our minds around it. Baker Beach, where I walk each morning, remains closed. The sign announcing its closure has a peculiar old-timey look to it. White wood stencilled with words about the oil spill. This being a former Army base, it should come as no surprise that there are Army-letter-looking stencils lying around, waiting for the day an impromptu sign needs to be made.

So. The daily walk now leads east-north-east, towards the cemetery, a national cemetery, a place meant to ensure that these people would not have died in vain. The walk moves me away from the Pacific and closer to the site of the spill. Spill: to flow or allow something to flow from a container. Yes: Event of one week ago matches dictionary. Yes: Container ship gashed along a bumper on the Bay Bridge and then oil flowed.

And now, yes, and now the birds die. I try not to think about this and feel this, the idea that while I sit here with fingers lightly tapping keys, less than a half mile away, in the cold dark, some shag or gull feels the deep cold of oil coated feathers. Feels cold, then slowly gives into this wave of fatigue, all the while wondering, what can all this be?

What to do while we wait to hear that the beach is open or that they need more help -- there remains endless cheer herein with the news there are too many volunteers at present -- what to do? Well, the decision was reached this is no time for long, blond hair. If the birds found themselves reduced to the deep brown of bunker oil, I would join them. I wandered down to my friend Patrick Richards salon, where he ageeably chopped my hair short and then coated the blond with brown dye. I no longer look precisely like me. I am no longer me, and I am no longer me because the place where I need and desire to walk has been taken away. What I mean to say is just this: I think we each of us are defined and created by the landscape in which we live. When we stop responding to the demands of our current reality in a specific place, we cease to be fully human and alive.

As example, I think of my friend Ed, who lives in a town called Orinda. In Orinda, people place lights under their front-yard trees and illuminate their yards at night, next to their illuminated homes, gestures wherein one begins to feel the lure of the Taj Mahal after sunset. But what do these lighted trees mean for the birds who try to make sense of 24-hour light pollution? Does this cross their minds? When the sun rises, and the tree-lights fade in comparison, the homes sit and stare at the few walkers on the street. Walking in Orinda is an exercise in jumping the hell out of the way of ginormous black SUVs roaring towards the clogged freeway. Walking in Orinda is something people choose not to do, not in the sunlight, and certainly not at night. So who are the tree lights for? What do they mean in the context of placing ourselves in a landscape? How is this at all connected to the oil spill?

Spill: To come from a building or other confined space in large numbers. I invite the people of Illuminated Tree World to spill into the streets, to cut their hair, to lay down in the dusty road and see who can make the first angel.

Meanwhile, my hair remains chocolate brown and short. Meanwhile, the beach is closed. Meanwhile, as a poet once wrote, the real world goes like this: Each day we awaken to the same white light creeping into our eucaluptus stand, the banana slugs remain eager to gnaw the skin on my palm given half a chance, and our local crow family dives and alights in the silver trees. Meanwhile it is yet a beautiful day.

When you drag a comb through your hair today, think of the birds of the near-shore Pacific. Hope they fly clear when word gets out something evil this way comes.

Permaculture

2007-10-25T16:17:00.000-07:00

We gathered around an open-pit fire at Hidden Villa, in Northern California's Los Altos hills, a landscape where they teach "sustainable" practices on farms and for humans in general on Earth. Hard to believe this parcel of 1600 acres, woods, mountain, and farm, were a mere 38 or so miles from San Francisco. So far that day, we had hiked the trails and talked about how this part of the lithosphere was once deep under the sea, how banana slugs on the palm will gnaw skin, and we had worked the farm, milking, feeding, and learning how all the wiggling piglets, covered in shiny umber down and born three days earlier, were bound for the fry pan.

All this filled my brain as a shooting star zipped across the cool violet night while one of the interpreters, Will, talked about a sustainable world culture. The term he used was "permaculture, " and he explained the ideals: rather than thinking about the individual elements themselves, think about how they all weave and unify.

Most of this audience had logged a mere decade on the Earth's surface and I wondered if Will's urgings seemed too fantastic. Yet children do indeed consider all ideas -- from flying wizards to talking pigs to the possibilities of deep ecology. A hopeful moment.

Soon we broke into smaller groups and headed away from the camp fire out into the woods for a night hike. In my group , there were two other mother/chaperones along with our two wilderness guides. Both of these mothers wore lipstick, which they must have applied sometime between dinner and the walk into the dark woods. One of our exercises entailed staring at an index card displaying an outline of a Disney mouse head and then writing down its color. The guides described how in the dark, we lose our ability to see color; because three things are required to sort out color: a light source, an eye, and something at which to gaze. I thought about the lipstick. A gesture that made sense in a night world of lights and restaurants but here you had to adapt.

What came to mind as we stood listening to a Great Horned Owl,
bubo virgianus, was how out of luck we would be if we had to actually survive at night without light. Most of the children in our group lost themselves in some version of mini-terror when we were challenged to make a short "solo" hike on the trail.

Perhaps most of our current debate on how to maintain human habitats on Earth as the climate changes, a miasma of light bulbs and hybrid engines and plastic shopping bags, questions about permaculture and embracing ideas of deep ecology, then, are simply questions of fear.

After we returned to our city school later the next day, the children watched "An Inconvenient Truth." My little daughter said the film made her feel both sad and afraid, which seemed like a reasonable and thoughtful response.

For some reason, this reminded me of something an editor at The Washington Post had once told me, as way of a scolding: Fear is a great motivator.

Tonight I plan to lay in my bed and listen to the ocean's roar and consider the weave, the sea and its ecosystem, the stars overhead, those piglets down the pike. Is our sort of soft indifference to their fate, amazingly, the dominant sentiment about our fate as well?

The Ropes Course

2007-10-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

I spent Friday in the tall redwood stands of Sonoma County, thinking about "outdoor education." Among the ideas presented to me were "ropes courses," which forced people into the trees, balancing, earning each step on a thin tendril in the sky. And yet. Is nature meant to be depicted and staged thus? Is nature meant to perform a service for us? What, I wonder, happened to the simple walk in the woods, quiet with one's own thoughts, or better yet finely and keenly attentive, attuned to each small murmuring from the trees. This forest, the site of earlier redwood logging, guessed at 100 years ago, looks like this: five or six new shoots of trees from a stump the width of a tractor-trailer tire. Tree says, what a great idea, to fell one wide single tree and allow six thin descendants to avail themselves of the space.

Wide-open space and how we avail of ourselves of it: On Saturday mornings in Iowa, I walked across the alternately bright or amber fields and hills outside town with my friend Tom, his dog Lucy, and my young daughter. Tom is a retina surgeon and photographer. We met while editors at a small science magazine; Tom was the "medical editor" and I was the "lay person" who made sure the ideas and images were true and accurate on paper that was then fastened together each month and sent out in the mail.

Tom takes pictures now of Iowa, its aging barns and lavender sunsets and long cast shadows in early October, air a little hint of winter to come. He still cuts into eyeballs to help people see better.

I have never understood how anyone can cut into eyes for a living and then wander the world looking into people's eyes and not feel some peculiar disconnect. I don't know how Tom does it. He addresses this question by saying, no surgeon would think like that!

Iowa, its fact and reality vs its mythos, still occupies my mind. It is one of the most altered landscapes on the planet, vying with New Zealand, another place I have lived. In Iowa, the tall grass prairie no longer exists as a force of nature. Now it exists as pockets of "rehabilitated" land. Instead, the miles stretch in all directions with corn and some soy. Small towns slowly die in their midst, people pushed out and deconstructed by corn they themselves planted. Corn takes over Iowa: Film at 11.

Another Iowa friend, Sasha Waters, has made a documentary about a version of these ideas and sent it to me last week in the mail. My daughter and I watched it and she said, hey mom, I remember how Iowa looks different from San Francisco. Sasha's film, This American Gothic, looks at life in Eldon, Iowa, where Grant Wood painted "American Gothic." We were surprised to learn that Midwesterners thought the painting was making fun of farmers. Like they were all somehow lesser beings.

So. It is Saturday and we are in San Francisco and our day is clear and the air cool. Tom and Sasha are in Iowa on this October day getting a look at red and yellow leaves, days of singular clear skies.

In Iowa I adapted to the habitat thus: If you simply refuse to look at the corn, or if you squint, you can almost see what is described in the diaries of women who migrated westward on Conestoga wagons, called prairie schooners, tall grasses, 200 or more grass and plant species per acre, grass moving in the wind like great waves across the sea.

Blurbs.

2007-10-17T10:27:00.000-07:00

I don't know where the term "blurb" came from but I find myself saying that word now on a daily basis.

I need blurbs for my book by December 1. Like most authors, I have to get the blurbs myself. My publisher, Nebraska, even sent along the "format" for the email requesting blurbs. I don't use it, because it sounds sort of canned to me -- and isn't the idea that people blurb your book for specific reasons of love, art, and knowledge? So shouldn't the request be created in the same spirit?

Thus, I made a list of favorite nonfiction writers: Orwell, Saunders, Koestenbaum, Beard, Tempest Williams. Orwell wouldn't be blurbing any time soon, so I moved on to George Saunders.

My boyfriend, Ed, is sort of jealous of George, because I find his books exceedingly witty and clever and illuminating and thus I like to talk about George and his work like we are old friends. Ed says jealous-man things like, well, it says here George is married. I bet he's happily married too. Look at this author photo. He looks like a happily married man.

Anyway, George makes me believe the world contains more good people than bad, and seems to believe that telling a good story can change the world. I believe those things as well.

At any rate, I didn't really know who George was beyond his writing, so I did the modern thing and Googled him. This lead to me emailing him. George wrote right back. It seems George has opted out of the blurb business because it had become too time consuming. It was a nice note. He also thanked me for teaching his Dubai essay in my graduate class at the California College of the Arts.

I called Ed and breathlessly gave him the news. George blew me off, I said, but he was so polite about it. I knew he would be a good guy. Ed cheerily said he knew I would survive the blow. He sounded relieved in some small way.

What is the deal with blurbs? I know I read them, but do they influence actual book buying? If a writer whose work you despise says, I love this book, will you then despise the unread book? What if someone who has nothing to do with books at all, like a football player, or the guy with the best ERA in the NLCS blurbs my book? Would their opinions sell books? Why is it other writers we call on to judge and sell our work?

With this in mind, I am going to venture into more creative blurb territory. More soon.

Ice. Ice Is. Ice Is Nice.

2007-10-17T09:44:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year I returned to Christchurch, New Zealand, completing the last bits of research for The Entire Earth and Sky. When I am in town there, my colleagues at Gateway Antarctica let me work in one of their offices. The final chapter of the book had been reserved for information on global climate change and I wanted to hear what the scientists in New Zealand thought of the latest round of reports -- more change happening more quickly than expected appeared to be the headline. Or was it?

While I had worked at Gateway over 15 months in 2003-04, each of the scientists working alongside me had been exquisitely generous with what they understood of the continent, based on both their field research there and their wide readings in the literature. I actually found the scientists far better readers and far more curious about the ideas behind The Entire Earth and Sky -- how we place ourselves into a landscape, how we understand place through story, how the Antarctic is all about fantasy and desire -- than any of the English professors I came across at Canterbury.

If you are curious about Antarctica, a continent that is basically a cold desert, check out the excellent online guide, which the Gateway scientists have charmingly named a "visitor's introduction to Antarctica and its environment."

At any rate, I kept putting off writing about climate ideas, because each week seemed to bring something important over the transom: the IPCC, more rapid melting, penguins marooned due to too much big ice. My head spun. Thus, on an early autumn day I found myself sitting in Prof. Bryan Storey's office, listening to his ideas on global climate change, while staring at the photo on his wall of Shackleton's Endurance trapped in the ice.

With Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize, I cast my mind back to Storey's words. He spoke in his serious, resolute, calm manner, it is amazing that humans have effected the planet so, that we have altered the system with our "little fires" and cars. We have changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Now we see that the Earth-system science approach is the only approach for studying and understanding climate. Now we see that if you mess with one part, it all changes. Nothing happens in isolation.

Storey added, but because of very complicated feedback mechanisms, while we are certain we have altered the system we cannot say what effect that will have on climate.

That is, the only word that seemed entirely true: Change. The film "The Day After Tomorrow," he said, was actually not that far fetched.

Sometimes people ask me about Antarctic research, and because Antarctica for many is synonymous with melting ice these days, they also ask me about climate change. Sometimes I tell them what Prof. Storey said earlier this year.

In America, one of the most common comments after this story, unbelievably, is the pronouncement that the listener either drives a Prius or is thinking of buying one. Maybe, people tell me, when Toyota comes out with the new model in 2008 I will get one.

Yikes. Maybe we should all watch The Day After Tomorrow Again. And again. Maybe art will make the Earth seem more real in its change.

Planetary: Teaching Environmental Humanities

2007-10-16T10:57:00.000-07:00

Last night, after finishing homework with my daughter, synonyms of villain and dispute, then ripping through 11 long-division problems featuring decimals, I settled in to plan a course for the Spring semester at the California College of the Arts. There's an area of growing interest called environmental humanities, and the course I had in mind was "An Inconvenient Art," how writers, artists, and filmmakers across genres respond to environmental threat -- beginning with Thoreau and Emerson and fast-forwarding to Abbey, Carson, and then the IPCC report, among others.

My own writing -- a literary take on science and history -- is often called "inter-disciplinary." I must admit all this feels rather stiff to me. I mean, the idea that we need to name the discussion of the Earth, our place, as "environmental humanities" doesn't sit all that well with me.

At any rate, regardless of my own angst about how we marginalize place with fact and name, there is an interesting blog, Planetary, that offers both news and commentary on eco-activism specifically geared towards people who teach "environmental humanities."

A recent post found them contemplating a review of Into the Wild, which many of us who teach really struggle with as a depiction of life "outside the box" -- that is, the protagonist is either a complete genius or utter madman when you study Krakauer's account.

When I taught the book at the University of Iowa, the students were stunned by how stupid this rich white kid was about the wild. Most of those Iowa kids were from poor or struggling rural areas and had worked outside on the land. Many enjoyed hunting. Weather was something to watch and respect. Food sometimes was in short supply, even as they lived amidst corporate fields of corn and soy, a monoculture that some find beautiful but which brought to my mind recent horror films where creamed-spinach creatures come calling after dark.

How does this reside in our minds, this dissonance between what we believe the wild Earth to be, what the "countryside" is supposed to be, and what it is? On that note, may I suggest some further reading from my favorite online thought journal, The Electronic Book Review? Check out a review of McMurry's Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature, published by the University of Georgia (2003.)

As the writer notes, "everyone who is anyone after Kant agrees that the real eludes us in its concreteness..."

Synonyms: For each word below...

2007-10-15T20:18:00.000-07:00

My daughter is 10 and at this age thinking about antonyms and synonyms remains a part of each day. Tonight, as we read through the week's vocabulary, assault, strategy, villains, misleading, abandon, productive, I had to laugh. Who's behind this list of words? Karl Rove now that he has free time on his hands? My daughter had all the synonyms right, save one, I reckoned:

7. On a productive day you would
a. play outside
b. get a lot done
c. stay inside
d. get nothing done

What do you think is the correct answer? It reads like a trick question. In order to find the right response, you have to gaze into the mind of the synonym-list maker, and realize, no, it is not productive to:

d. get nothing done
c. stay inside
a. play outside

My daughter and I thought about this and decided one could argue with equal force for all of these -- and went with "play outside." This list, I might add, comes to us from a "progressive" school in San Francisco.

If words are the tools we use to build culture and our 10-year-olds learn that being productive means blandly to "get a lot done," and then we later add to this concept the idea of material gain synonymous with "get a lot done" -- as opposed to the slouch people, like writers and artists, really not getting much "done" because there is no serious "pay check," are we all doomed? Here we are on Blog Action Day, pondering "environment." What is the synonym? Landscape? Or in this case, better as, "life?"

Blog Action Day: Environment

2007-10-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

Back in 1988 I lived for four months in Antarctica. Why I went there no longer matters. The facts of my life there were simple, morning, noon, and night sunshine in the 24-hour summer blast of radiant light. This light gives you a peculiar energy. In my case, it made me want to walk around. In Antarctica, this can be dangerous but I was young then and did not worry about death in a specific way. If I fell down a crevasse, I reckoned, I would use my strength and wits to get myself out of that jam.
I write this recollection now because today we have been invited to weigh in via Blog Action Day on the environment. Because I read from my book and teach nature writing, I get asked with some frequency what people can "do" or "buy" to help make the Earth better again.
Here is my simple list of easy-make life changes.
1) Do not buy things. Use what you have. Instead of buying something, like a belt, or a new dress, or that iPod in red, stop and consider the broader implications. Will the world end if you don't buy that belt? No. Will it end if you do? Maybe. Seems like you have your answer.
2) When you need food, buy things that have not been stepped on in various manufacturing processes. That is, watch out for how many hermetically sealed bags you have around -- things like corn stamped into little shapes then baked. Things like frozen food. Think about frozen food for a minute. I mean, how does it even have any nutritional value, wrapped in plastic and then in a cardboard box decorated with a photo of the food -- and it never really looks like that when you eat it.
Ask yourself, why do I choose to eat like one of the Jetsons, heating frozen food from a box in a microwave? Do I live in some sci-fi version of the future? Make food the old-fashioned way -- find things that are grown near your home and not in some distant land. In winter, don't expect to eat strawberries. Eat less in general. We all eat too much.
3) Never buy plastic bags or wrap. Just stop. Right now.
4) Don't drive every day of the week. Stay home some days. Stay home and go for a walk. Or read. Do things that don't require burning fuel.

Think about all your life's activities in terms of burning fuel. If you read Antarctic diaries or live in Antarctica, well, you will see how in a place where the fuel is all imported, save wind energy and solar, people conserve as part of each day.

If you don't conserve your fuel in Antarctica, we have seen from the stories of early explorers, you die.

Why Write?

2007-10-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

The previous post is from the beginning of my book The Entire Earth and Sky. I think about Antarctica every day and usually try to begin my day by looking at photos of the ice and seas. For some reason, and I don't know why, I feel very much at home in Antarctica, and did from the first time I went there in 1988. I remember quite clearly when my first sighting of the continent. Words fail me when I try to lay down that feeling as type.
Later, when I read accounts of similar moments -- when James Clark Ross first spotted the Ross Ice Shelf and compared it with the White Cliffs of Dover, it occurred to me how few places on Earth offered this view: Unaltered wilderness, one that looked precisely today as it did when another was there in the mid-19th century. Lately, this idea has come to occupy my mind. The question is, how can we begin to understand the history of a place, to bridge present and past with narrative, when the facts of place shift because of human culture?
These days, I live on a dune above the Pacific Ocean and walk the beach each day. Some days, it is only me and people who are paid to walk other people's dogs -- odd as this seems to me, it is rather common in San Francisco. One of the regular dog walkers, a large, red-faced young man chasing 10 dogs around the beach, talks to his dogs like this: OK! You are not supposed to run. You have a hip problem! No more running!
I think about this young man, the dogs, the absent people who own the dogs, and the largely empty beach. Inside the huge homes overlooking the Pacific, I imagine dog owners getting pedicures, selling stocks, and never looking out the window. Except when they have guests over.
Then they need the Earth to work for them. Look, they say, look at how beautiful the ocean and beach are, as though the world exists in a snow shake.

And yet they do walk upside down...

2007-10-10T15:47:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION: THE CONTINENT AND ITS HISTORY

A bucket of icy water down the neck checks the fiercest vomiter. – Frank Arthur Worsley, Shackleton’s captain, on his cure for Antarctic seasickness.
Sometimes we are given our opportunities, and we take them and make something fine, and the story will live forever; and so we have our bodhisattva moment.
– Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica.

Antarctica is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace continent, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. The Antarctic continent is the fifth largest of the seven – Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, and North America. If you want to fix its size, imagine the U.S. and Mexico combined. Antarctica is ranked number-eight by geographic size of all the Earth’s features.
Most of us have trouble calling to mind an overall image of Antarctica. This is because Antarctica gets edited off most world maps. The familiar mapped views of the world are Mercator projections, which maximize the area of mid-latitude countries, thus making them appear larger than their geographic reality. Antarctica presents a pesky problem for mapmakers – as a circle it doesn’t lend itself to being cut into one long, wide strip. The solution has been to leave it off maps entirely. So it was that the fifth-largest continent became a lacey fringe.
Lurking mysteriously off the map, Antarctic events invite geographic context by scientists and news agencies. When an enormous iceberg broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula in 2002, its official name became B-22, a code describing location and time frame. The U.S. National Ice Center assigns these coded names, then monitors the bergs’ journey northward. The agency is located outside of Washington, DC, and most trackers have never seen an actual iceberg.
The gargantuan B-22 made news across the world – and caused editors and scientists to fish around for the words to describe its heft. The BBC described B-22 as nine times the size of Singapore, which presumably draws a picture for UK residents, all clear on their former colony’s actual size. The Associated Press noted the berg rivalled the State of Delaware. In Canada, they offered Prince Edward Island as comparison. Reuters decided not to play that game, simply referring to the berg as “large.” The game of scale is infectious for most, however. Want to imagine B-22 at its birth? Think of two Hawaiis or the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
B-22 had a short reign as a headline grabber. Within days, the British Antarctic Survey announced that satellites had captured the break up of the Larsen B Ice Shelf. The images of its demise, recorded by a passing camera miles above the Earth, made The New York Times’s front page, albeit below the fold. The Larsen B Ice Shelf weighed in at 500 billion tons, and filled Antarctica’s Weddell Sea with miles of floes. What was the biggest floe, you ask? According to the New Scientist, it was about the size of Greater London.