Too Like the Lightning: Initial Thoughts

Writers I respect have given Ada Palmer's 2016 Too Like the Lightning rave reviews, and I enjoy & admire her blog; but I delayed reading the book for over a year because I knew it would be a deep, dark rabbit hole —

but now I've started it —

and it's made me so mad.

Utopia?!

Four hundred years from now the boundaries of the world have been erased by cheap, autonomous, super-speed flying cars, and people work only 20 hours a week and anti-aging drugs keep them biologically 20 until they're 65, and there hasn't been a war for three centuries.

And yet this world is awful.

Everyone there wears a "tracker," always. It's a Google Glass, basically, with a single carrier and infinite range and it appears to be attuned to thoughts, or something, so people never have to dial or type or scroll: you can only tell they're no longer present by the far-off look in their eyes. The data the tracker collects is instantly shareable; a person can log into another another's tracker and, despite being miles apart, they can experience the sunset together. A wife can whisper in her husband's ear. But the wife's enemies can whisper in his ear, too. So can — and does — the ever-present news. So can the police. So can 9-1-1, which gets alerted when a person's heart rate elevates. And if one's tracker is off for five days, by law search & rescue begins.

And the cars! The cars combined with a governmental system that separates citizenship from geography has created unimaginable mobility. Live in Seattle, work in Valparaiso, take an evening class in Shaolin; hey friend let's meet for lunch at this new place I found in Jakarta! but —

In the book this has either made every place exactly the same as everywhere else or it's ruined people's ability to see differences. Nobody seems to notice where they are, except as a statement of allegiance — the French love Paris because they're French and the French love Paris — but they don't care if they're surrounded by ponderosas or olive trees; they don't care if that's a robin's call or a nightingale's; they don't even notice humidity nor rain nor heat nor wind nor the difference between summer sunlight and winter sunlight.

In the same way that the trackers would disrupt your ability to think consecutive thoughts — to daydream or meditate — this world-hopping would destroy your ability to form a relationship with a landscape because you'd never see it move through time: not only winter-spring-summer-fall but also dawn-noon-twilight-dusk.

That's awful.

I got mad because in all the reviews I've read, in all the Reddit discussions over whether this society is a utopia or not, no one has commented on this.

Are people even today indifferent to ponderosas?

*

The only book I would classify as utopia is Ursula LeGuin's Always Coming Home, which begins like this:

"Stone Telling is my name. It has come to me of my own choosing, because I have a story to tell of where I went when I was young; but now I go nowhere, sitting like a stone in this place, in this ground, in this Valley. I have come where I was going.

"My House is the Blue Clay, my household the High Porch of Sinshan.

..."In Sinshan babies' names often come from birds, since they are messengers. In the month before my mother bore me, an owl came every night to the oak trees called Gairga outside the windows of High Porch House, on the north side, and sang the owl's song there; so my first name was North Owl."

Sigh. Now I feel better.

"Science is right next to me," Blake said, apropos of nothing. We were driving back home from a loop around town (errands); Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire sat in his lap. He and his sister had paused an argument to share bits of beef jerky, and he spoke between bites.

"Not science," I said. "Sasha."

But he was being serious.

"No, no, I know what you mean. Science explains how the world works, so in that sense you're surrounded by science."

"No, that's not right," Sasha piped up. "Science asks questions."

"Right," Blake said. "And religion gives answers."

(Found in my drafts folder.)

Quote

"Is this Earth?" he cried, for things had changed abruptly.

"Yes, this is Earth," said the one beside him, "nor are you out of it. In Zambia men are rolling down hills inside barrels as training for space flight. Israel and Egypt have defoliated each other's deserts. The Reader's Digest has bought a controlling interest in the United States of America/General Mills combine. The population of the Earth is increasing by 30 billion every Thursday. Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis will marry Mao Tse-Tung on Saturday, in search of security; and Russia has contaminated Mars with bread mold."

"Why then," said he, "nothing has changed."

Excerpt from Ursula K. LeGuin's short story "A Trip to the Head" as reprinted in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, 1975.

She cracks me up.

ISFDB says this story was originally published in 1970, the year before I was born. So she also makes me feel quite, quite young.

**

Ms. LeGuin has a list of links to good background information on the so-called Oregon Standoff on her site. Go here and scroll to the section "New on the Website".

She also wrote a blog post in October with what is, I believe, the text of a speech she gave to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the Steens Mountain Wilderness. In it she says, "It’s only too easy to antagonize 'the locals' by appearing to dismiss their hard-earned local knowledge or giving the impression that the aesthetic emotions or escapist yearnings of hikers, campers, birders, tourists are more valuable than the ranchers’ relationship to the land and the living they and their animals earn from it. Such antagonisms can be modified by patient listening on both sides, genuine conversation, working towards a mutual good. Sounds easy. It’s complicated."

**

I do love Ursula LeGuin. Even if she always puts her most misguided societies in volcano country.

Escapee

My daughter's gecko has escaped his cage. A gecko is not as destructive as our other escaped pets (a gerbil once spent a week holed up in our speakers) but he's more difficult to find. He's the same beige as our walls and carpet, and he's silent and still and nocturnal.

To catch the gerbils we put out food. To catch Tokay we're setting up humidifiers. Poor little guy. I hope he doesn't end up like Ötzi.

*

Blake berated his sister over this. I told him to stop. All caged creatures, I said, will find an opportunity to escape, even misleadingly immobile geckos.

And my son leapt from his chair and disappeared out the front door.

But then he came back in. "It's cold out there!"

**

You guys. I cannot stop reading about events at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. I'm so curious about the journalists that I'm tempted to drive over there.

What does the press think of it out there? It's really, really remote. From Bend heading east there is not a noticeable town for two hours, and even then you've only reached Hines (population 1500) and Burns (population 2500). Are they flying into Bend or Boise and renting vans? Where are they staying? Where are they eating? Where are they charging their phones?

Anachronism

My sister and I wrote a newsletter one summer. It was the truly, truly wonderful summer before my junior year of college & her sophomore year; we lived in a rented house in Ithaca; we worked a little, but mostly we were free to do exactly as we pleased --- and writing a newsletter was one thing that pleased us.

I know. We were wild.

I had a Mac Classic, the laptop of those days*, and a printer** and I loved to write and I'd interned at a place that taught me to use PageMaker*** and I was bored in that really luxurious youthful summer way: so my sister and I typed up a newsletter. We mailed**** it to our parents and little sister back home.

It was totally hilarious. No, really! It started all serious, you know, "The sisters announced today..." with a headline and byline and placeline, and then it would go on to say we'd eaten cereal for breakfast. Cheerios, of course, not Lucky Charms, because our parents raised us so well.

Yes: it was just like a blog. Not like Facebook or Twitter, those bastions of the one-liner: it was just like a blog.

I miss blogging.


* god, does anything date a person like technology? Before cell phones: after email but before the World Wide Web: therefore, 1991

** dot-matrix. Yep, there is an e-learning piece about a technology from my college years

*** in high school the yearbook staff learned PageMaker but I was on the newspaper staff, and we literally pasted the paper together

**** no, that's not a typo. We mailed it. I told you, it was nineteen ninety one

Dive bomb

A robin built a nest in the crook of our silver maple tree. I didn't know it until I heard her screeching and saw her dive-bomb a western scrub jay that had landed in the nest. I dashed over there and stomped my feet and screeched at him, too, and he flew off.

Afterward the robin flew to a nearby fence, where she perched, still squawking. I thought she was yelling at me, so I went away – to watch her surreptitiously. After awhile she stopped shouting. She stayed there on the fence post.

So I climbed the tree to check on her eggs.

Of which there were none.

The robin stayed on the fence for quite awhile. She looked a little lost -- at loose ends -- as if she wasn't sure what to do next or where to go. The gerbils are like that after one of their fellows dies: lonely and not sure why.

Tools dictate behavior

My husband has been sick for awhile so I'm making him a restorative beef soup. I started it this morning on the theory that if it simmered all day, the meat would become soft and digestible and delicious and the broth full of vitamins. (I firmly believe in food as medicine.) But in the last little while the wind has kicked up. It creates just enough of a breeze within the house that on simmer, my gas burner sputters and sputters. I could hear it sputtering even upstairs, at my desk. So I ran downstairs and turned the heat up higher and let the soup boil while I went back up to work; then, worried it had all evaporated, I ran downstairs and turned it off and let it cool awhile as I went back to working; and then, worried it might go bad, I ran downstairs again to turn the heat on again and let it boil again; and so on: every half hour running up and down the stairs to attend to my now imperious restorative soup.

*
For Alejna -- a list:

If you google "tools dictate behavior," you get pages with the following titles:

• Orangutans' culture dictates their behavior
• Do neurons dictate behavior?
• Do genes dictate behavior?
• Do you let your type dictate your behavior?
• Does your birth date dictate your behavior?
• How sporting rules dictate behavior

And the grand prize winner:

• Actually, rudeness is dictating people's behavior

Wait

After my 2nd child was born, I lost a lot of weight. I'm not exactly sure why. I think partly my daughter was premature; partly I was nursing exclusively*; and partly I had a toddler + infant and refused to accept help**, so I was always running around and never eating... I had a 4-month-old and wore a size 0. Anyway, that year that I was so crazy thin, women were always giving me breathtakingly rude, backhanded compliments. One woman said to me, "Your friends must hate you." I could've slapped her. But also, I've always wondered about the subtext to that comment. Did she believe that my thinness made other women look bad? Made them look -- what? Lazy? Did she believe that I had an obligation to look a certain way post-childbirth?

As soon as I went back to my standard weight (when Sasha finally weaned) all the criticism stopped. It was a very weird experience.


* For the longest time she refused to drink from a bottle. Re-fu-sed.  If she was hungry and her dad tried to feed her, she'd scream bloody murder. No joke. We used to call her Decibella.

** The following summer I was sick for a month -- I had a stomach virus for a month -- and that cured me forever of my independent streak!

Prompted by jo(e).

Take 4

A synonym of "repair" is resort.

Sled

After exiting the chairlift, snowboarders skate to an out-of-the-way space to sit in the snow and clip their back foot into its binding. Skiers have to wait for them.

Skiers whose wives find it amusing to develop a portfolio of shots of the NWX snowmobile against a gray sky – those skiers must wait a little longer.

Make your mark

They call it boot-packing. It means that one slings one's skis over one's shoulder – or holds a snowboard across one's back – and climbs the hill in boots, stomping firmly into the snow to create a foothold.

The first person up the hill is blazing trail. Everyone following tries to step in the tracks he's made: to use his foothold. Sometimes a follower will slip and have to stomp a new hold, and in this way (if it's not storming) a path will form, set a foot or two feet or even three feet lower than the surface of the rest of the snow, and snaking all the way up the hill.

Lines

After a long dry spell we finally had several inches of new snow, so the entire town of Bend went into the mountains to play -- or near enough to the entire town as matters: at 8:15 yesterday morning, traffic was backed up to the Safeway on 14th Street. I've never seen it like that before. It took us over an hour to get to Mt. Bachelor, where the lift lines were all long, especially because one of the best chairs was not operational.

So. My husband and I joined this throng of people hiking up the cinder cone. The snow was waist-deep and light and wheee-hooo!

I'm not a powder hound (as evidenced by the fact I'm not there today, with the Summit chair newly-opened) but I really do like a good storm. It knocks the thoughts out of my head.

Déjà vu all over again

The snow on the mountain is compacted and crusty and skiing is, people quietly confess, not very much fun. We refer to it as exercise. On the chairlift locals remind each other that this happens every year; we have just such a long dry spell every year – but the March Miracle happens every year, too! The skiing is always amazing in spring! Just hold on.

If you need to write a letter to a dragon

Sparkles

After ten consecutive weekends, snowboarding was feeling more like a job than a gift. I was dead tired of the whole thing: the early, busy mornings and the recalcitrant children and the cold and the pain and the – the have to on a weekend.

So Sasha and I took a wee break this weekend. We played hooky. All day Saturday we did whatever the heck we wanted, so long as it didn't involve snow; and then on Sunday she and I snowshoed while the boys skied.

It was so cool. It was surprising. We saw critter tracks everywhere. We stood in the forest, in view of the chairlift, with the buzz of snowmobiles around us, and we saw critter tracks everywhere. We followed them all 'round – between trees and over hillocks and down – trying to find the critters themselves, but we never did. It was very mysterious. I'm not sure what they were. Pine martens, do you think?

Sparkly snow with possible pine marten tracks near the trees.

Title borrowed from jo(e)

Once upon a time

My daughter slept on the floor of her brother's room the whole year that she was seven. She said that when she'd turned seven, she became afraid of shadows and darkness and needed her brother's presence; but when her eighth birthday arrived, she assured us, she wouldn't be afraid anymore. She could go back to her own room. And she did.

Sometimes she slept in a sleeping bag and sometimes between blankets but most often she made herself a nest: a round pile of every stray pillow, blanket and stuffed animal in the house. She liked to build two nests, actually, to entice Blake to sleep on the floor with her – and me, too.*

So: many nights during the year that Sasha was seven, she and Blake and I snuggled together in the nests Sasha had made, and I would tell them stories about their alter egos. The stories always began like this: "Once upon a time, a long time ago, there were two children named Slake and Basha. They lived in Bend, Oregon, with their mother and father and two guinea pigs.** One night the children were woken by the sound of..."

My written stories always start with place and character, and I like the places and the characters so much that I never can get them into trouble, which means it's not really a story – nothing happens; the story never goes anywhere. The tales I told my children, though, were set right here with people who are known (like a coyote story) and so they had to be all action. And improvised. And modified on-the-fly when the children lost attention – or got too involved: the stories were, after all, intended to settle them to sleep.

One night the children were woken by the sound of footsteps on the roof. They ran out the back door, into the yard, and looked up. It was a female dragon building a nest!

One night the children were woken by a terrible rushing grinding sound. They ran to the front window to see what it could be. It was a rocketship landing in the street!

It was a baby dragon and they were worried that all the grown-ups would be afraid of it so they hid it in their closet and Slake used his slingshot to kill squirrels for its dinner.

It was a pterodactyl that took them for a ride; it was a rocket full of aliens who took them to other planets; it was a baby snow leopard and they taught it to hunt and then took it up to Broken Top, where it lives even now, eating deer just like the cougars do...

Sasha's nearly nine now. She sleeps in her own bed. She can read novels herself, and more often than not she wants to read herself to sleep. She seems still to have affection for Slake and Basha, though. Maybe she'll continue their adventures in stories she tells her own children. Maybe I will!

And then the children came back home. They settled into the nest that Sasha had made. Their mother began to tell them a story, and they continued the story in their dreams.


* Once her teacher told me that she had asked the students if they liked to build forts and Sasha said oh no, I build nests; my brother would wreck a fort. Retelling this, the teacher could barely contain her laughter – but Sasha's response seemed to me perfectly reasonable. Isn't it?

** At that time we had two guinea pigs. Now we have only one. She's five. I think she must be the longest-lived guinea pig in Bend.

Red

My son read this post and declared me a great writer and authorized me to write more about him, if I liked. My daughter asked for more, too, although she requested that I write about Slake and Basha, my kids' alter-egos. (Basha has a pet dragon and Slake flies to other planets.) So I'm hoping to dredge up the time to write more often on this here blog. We shall see, eh?

More photos from Mt. B

This is from last weekend, I think. From the top of Mt. Bachelor, clouds made an ocean and the mountains were islands.

In a ski hut in the moonlight

The evening before Christmas Eve some friends hosted an almost-annual party at the Swampy Lakes ski hut. The hut is a small, three-sided log cabin with a dirt floor and, this year, four feet of snow on its roof. Snow fell so deep so early this year that our friends had to cut snow-steps down to the floor of the cabin, and people took turns standing by the entrance, chiding, "Watch your head!" as the rest of us ducked in and out -- drawn by the roaring fire in the barrel stove and three camp tables laden with food.

I first attended this party in 2005, when my son was barely four. At that time I was the connection to all those people. We women worked part-time then, and on our days off we'd haul the kids to this or that playground, or each other's houses, to drink coffee and complain of sleeplessness and laugh and worry over our sweet, silly babies. Now I work full-time. The children are tall, lean tent-poles and they're all in school -- nearly middle school, some of them. The husbands keep us connected now, ensuring that during the long, long ski season we meet on the mountain whenever we can.

Back in 2005, I was unnerved by this party. At the winter solstice the sun sets around 4:30; the party was held almost entirely in darkness, in the forest 16 miles from town, in bitter cold and deep snow. This year, however, the moon was nearly full on the solstice, and you know what? Moonlight on snow is very bright. It's so bright the trees cast shadows. In the cold, voices carry. Also the children are so much older now, I worry about them less -- even though now they're old enough to climb onto the roof of the little cabin and leap, squealing, to land poof! in that deep snow.

At one point I walked out alone, admiring that forest turned to shades of blue in the moonlight; I walked along the trail people had made, and then further, cutting my own path through waist-deep snow. I didn't go far; it was too exhausting; so I turned: looking back at the dark forms of my friends talking around the bonfire and the children romping in the snow, clearly visible in that moonlight, and loud, very loud, the way that free people will be.

Leaping from the roof of the shelter. Near sunset.

I'll shimmer and I'll shimmer and I'll blow your house up

I have to work today but because I work from home and my children are now 11 and 8 1/2, I don't have to make provisions for them. They do their own thing. Every little while I assemble a snack for them and remind them to eat, eat like a good mother -- then run back upstairs to sit at my desk and think and type like a good employee.

My son is singing. He's playing Minecraft and watching YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft and he also must be watching the Minecraft parody for the song DJ Got Us Falling in Love Again, or else he's watched it often enough that he can belt out the song without a prompt: Baby tonight the creeper's going to steal our stuff again...

The YouTube parodies are funny. My son didn't know they were parodies until he asked me to watch the videos with him and I noticed the flag in the title and then we went around listening to the originals, both of us declaring the parodies much better. The other night he (with assistance from his little sister) invented his own parody, not of a song but of a certain well-known fairy tale, which begins, "Once upon a time there were three little Steves. The first little Steve made a house of mud. The second little Steve made a house of wood. The third little Steve made a house of bedrock. One day the creeper came along and said, 'I'll shimmer and I'll shimmer and I'll...'"

My daughter is making bracelets. She made one for her best friend and one for me and now she's down by the TV, listening to the Kratt Brothers with half an ear as she makes another. The bracelet kit was a gift from my mother, and it includes enough parts that Sasha believes she can make a bracelet for every female she knows. She's generous that way: always making things for other people. Two days after Christmas we had some friends over for dinner, and while Blake played with their three boys, Sasha -- who found the boys too rowdy for her taste, I think -- made their mother a little purse from felt and yarn. 

Well, well. I am supposed to be working, not blogging. I need to validate a fix that one of the programmers made this morning. So, ok! Off I go!