Other People's Nature Writing

LOVE IT

Ok, y’all — I’ve been cheating on y’all just a little and wrote an essay about a 2 am Waffle House waitress with ideas about painting and a Mustang with a broken driver’s side door that you had to crawl in and out of (which, at the time, for some reason seemed sexy as hell), and also driving all night to get to my job cleaning in the Olympic Village.

Anyway, it was a lot, which is why this week, I’m pointing you to other people’s writing, which I should probably be doing more of anyway because seriously, there are people out there who are tearing it up. Making some noise. Finding their voice. LOVE it.

I’ve really been enjoying Field Notes with its close look at urban nature from Christopher Brown’s Austin, Texas perch. A sample of his wry writing from one of my favorite posts, Rare beasts of the Anthropocene:

Thursday morning I saw two men trying to rescue a beached Mercedes at the edge of town. They were on a sandbar in the Colorado, below the overpass that connects north Austin with the airport. You couldn’t tell how the car had gotten there, at least not from the vantage I had up there on the old bridge that has been repurposed for pedestrian and bicycle use. The only visible tracks were of the backhoe that had driven out there shortly before I showed up, and was now poking around in the sand trying to figure out a viable extraction strategy. You also couldn’t tell if one of the guys was the owner of the car, trying to mitigate the damages of a wild Wednesday night, or if they were just an enterprising pair practicing the long Texas tradition of taking whatever bounty nature offers, by whatever means available.

The field guides to the wildlife you can find on this surprisingly beautiful stretch of urban river never include the vintage cars one sometimes encounters. For many years there was a mid-60s Impala marooned in a nearby wetland, unmistakable to a kid who grew up when such cars were in wide circulation. Thursday’s Benz was a four-door, full size sedan, painted a yellow whose mottled mustard might have been a sun-baked relic of whatever brighter gloss rolled off the factory floor. I don’t know vintage Mercedes as well as I know old Chevys and Volkswagens, but I’d guess this was early 90s, maybe a 560SEL.

On a completely different, but equally wonderful note, taking the Chris LaTrey class on “Poetry as a Spiritual Practice” has introduced me to fellow classmate’s Substack, Life in the Real World, a meditative reflection on nature through gorgeous photography and writing.

Also, I can’t let the moment pass without noting that my godmother, Carolyn, is also a godmother of sorts to a litter of raccoon babies! She and her partner live in Minnesota over the summer, and she reports that “the mom gave birth under the old cabin, and once she started weaning them, she brought them out into the back yard.”

The little dumplings with their spooky tiny hands! Adorable.

Finally, in some science news, a study has shown that, in some instances, giving gerbils testosterone made them *more* cuddly. Supposedly, they ended up looking like this:

darren i @MegaDarren

Obsessed with this study where they thought giving pair-bonded Mongolian gerbils testosterone would make them aggressive but instead it made them cuddle their mates more and also they look like THIS

C’mon guys. You know you wanna. :)

Please share your favorite nature reads and finds here, and hope you all have a wanderful week.