Hey it’s newsletter number I forget and I’m already slacking

Anyway, here’s what you’re signing up for:

I’ve not been here in this memo for very long and already I’m falling a bit short of what I promised. Hopefully this provides some explanation.

I do have some submissions to review and some fun things on the way still but this is going to be another lean issue. Thank you for being here.

I don’t talk about my dreams much because I try to talk about things I myself would be interested in hearing about and I never, ever care about whatever random information dump the hose of your brain leaked into the basement den of your subconscious. But last night my dreams were just too on the nose to ignore. In my slumber I found myself in college again and taking my juggling final. I was struggling to juggle outside of my normal comfort zone, which is three balls or pins for a little bit. In the final I was expected to keep many objects of different sizes and shapes aloft and was failing. I was failing in front of an audience.

This week was not bad, exactly, but it was not easy. It started last Monday with a bike crash. I slipped on some wet leaves, a victim of autumnal physics. It seemed minor at first with only a moderate lingering shoulder pain, and by the time I was riding home I had forgotten all about it until my back bike tire went flat about halfway to the train station. It was unfixable in the field so I walked my bike the remaining three miles and got home an hour later than usual. I refused to let this be an auspicious beginning to the week or any kind of omen but it feels like it decided to be that anyway.

On Wednesday I gave a presentation at Utah State University’s Quinney College of Natural Resources, which is where I graduated from. This may not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed me on social media for more than–like–two days, but I overthought it. In retrospect it seems almost absurdly obvious that they wanted me to talk about wildlife crossings. That’s what the latter half of my career has been focused on, and it’s something that has been increasingly visible in the natural resources world. Every video my agency posts about wildlife crossings goes mega-viral on social media, and it has brought us worldwide attention. I imagine if you googled me it would be the first three results at least.

This is a presentation that I have given so many times that I could have done it with little preparation and with slides I already have prepared. The hour of time that I was so intimidated to fill would have flown by. It’s one of the few subjects on earth that I can talk about without notes for, roughly, the rest of time until the heat death of the universe.

Instead I prepared a retrospective of my career and a metaphor about how we all have very different pathways to work. Useful, I hope, but why me? Why did I instead spend about ten hours preparing a talk that nobody asked me to? Why did I think that I was being invited as, like, a notable alumnus and not just another seminar guest presenting research and expertise? I honestly don’t know. I don’t know why my brain works this way.

The day of the presentation was quite fun and pleasant. I got to visit Utah State’s beaver bunkhouse, which I’ve wanted to see since I found out about it maybe 5 years ago. And luck would have it there were actually beavers there, which is unlikely given how late in the season we are. After hanging out with three beaver kits I had the free time to drive up Logan Canyon and look at some famous beaver dams up there. It was a really stunning morning.

Then I had lunch with some students and answered questions and gave advice about careers, and was feeling pretty all-around good about everything. I thought I’d have some free time in between lunch and my presentation, but instead my schedule was filled with talking with some professors. This is when I realized I had made a tactical error. All anyone wanted to talk with me about was wildlife crossings. Which, again, of course they did. That’s the thing I’m known for and the most novel thing I could possibly talk about. I am at least one of the experts on this in the state. At this point if I did have some free time, I would have scrapped and pivoted the whole thing. But I didn’t, so I couldn’t.

I know that I’m overthinking this, too. My presentation went fine. And I think there were valuable things I talked about. I wanted to reflect on some things I wish I knew when I was a student. People laughed at my jokes. I hope it was worthwhile for the people who attended. I did adapt somewhat and spent the last 10 minutes or so speed-running the most frequently asked questions about wildlife crossings. When I asked for questions, of course all anyone wanted to talk about was that. Because that’s why they invited me.

It’s fine. Nobody was hurt and everyone was nice. This kind of thing makes me spiral, though. I’ve done this my whole life: misunderstood a request or instruction and then spent way too much time going down a path that nobody wanted me to go down. Speaking of careers, this has been damaging to my own more times than I care to think about. I can think of so many times that I’ve done almost this exact thing and I still haven’t found a strategy to mitigate it.

So anyway, it was hard to dwell on too much because the next morning I had a root canal. Here at Howie’s Everything Club on top of everything else it’s been 2:30 for two weeks now (tooth-hurty). I foolishly thought I would be able to work afterwards and instead I just laid in bed counting the minutes until I could take tylenol again. And the next day after that I put on a resume workshop at a different local university. Even though it was the evening, this also occurred at 2:30 (tooth-hurty). Still it was was fun and satisfying and reminds me that one of the many issues I have with the way American society has evolved is that we have so few opportunities to interact with people from different generations.

Given the current news cycle regarding horrifying predators in every level of power and government, I understand why we need to be cautious when introducing young people to the worlds of middle-aged men and vice-versa. I understand why, when I’m volunteering at the domestic violence shelter and watching children, I am watched closely. I wouldn’t have it any other way. That all being said, I think it’s the result of a consistent and systematic failure to hold anyone accountable for blatant abuse. In the absence of institutional justice, we find ourselves in a place of distrust and public opinion court. That all makes sense. But because people (mostly men) who are in power tend to abuse that power, we are robbing our young people of access to wisdom and experience and robbing us middle-aged folks from finding out about good new music.

In my two structured but casual conversations with groups of young students this week, it was deeply fulfilling to be able to just hang out with people full of hope and enthusiasm. We still had a lot in common; they liked my Avatar the Last Airbender hat and I am playing some of the same video games they are. I also enjoyed my time speaking with professors from a generation older than me and picking their brains a little about things we can work together on in the future. A few weeks ago I gave a presentation about wildlife crossings to a group of middle-schoolers, and let me tell you their questions were good. They held my feet to the fire and their follow-ups were insightful.

Aside from very real issues with power dynamics that rightly require extra safety measures, I think generational differences are completely exaggerated. I can make my 95 year old grandma laugh and I can have very serious conversations about Marvel lore with a 15-year-old while volunteering as a sexual assault victim advocate. I can spend a perfectly pleasant hour drawing sonic the hedgehog alongside a 6-year-old while they chatter about Five Nights at Freddy’s. This may be the conspiracy theorist in me, but I think the generational difference obsession is rooted in the same place as all the rest of the ways we’re prevented from relating to each other: the more we are separated, the less we can see how similar we are and cooperate. That’s how a tiny handful of people can maintain power and hoard resources to the detriment of all the rest of us.

You have more in common with your neighbor than you do someone you interact with online. Even if you disagree about some things. And you’re more powerful when united with someone in your community than you are agreeing with strangers in a comment section. My challenge this week for you is to find safe ways to interact in real life with people older and younger than you. Join a knitting group, volunteer at an assisted living. Find non-profits with healthy professional boundaries (and background checks) in place and see if you can help out. If nothing else, it will help you forget for a minute how many pins you have in the air.

I’m reminded that I didn’t do a media round-up last week (or any of the log cabin sundays reporting) because of the absolute self-imposed crushing stress of overpreparing for a presentation I didn’t need to overprepare for. Luckily I wrote things down so here’s two weeks worth of info.

We hit a stash of great condition classical records at the thrift store that all have handwritten notes on them, including what we guess are all the dates they were listened to and the listener’s favorite tracks. We’re fascinated with this person. Were they a music teacher? Just an enthusiast? We couldn’t buy all of them because there are dozens, but we did end up with maybe 12 between two trips. It was clearly treasured by someone and I’m glad at least a bit of it will stay together. Anyway, we’ve been listening to a lot of it while reading T. Kingfisher books by the artificial fire.

Last week we listened to

Ashkenazy in Concert, Chopin

The Faint, Danse Macabre

Orville Peck, Bronco

Marty Robbins, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

Soccer Mommy, Sometimes, Forever

We watched: Tombstone. It still rips

I read most of The Angel of Indian Lake, by Stephen Graham Jones

This week it was a bunch of classical albums and I don’t remember which

Finished The Angel of Indian Lake

And started and finished What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher

I did watch a little football again and got bored

This week’s videos:

At the beaver bunkhouse I met three little kits who were born this spring. This late in the year they’re in a tough spot. Their future has been a bit uncertain, but I hope that soon I have some good news for you. People are working hard for these little engineers.

You can watch it here.

Today’s submission is about larches, which I HAVE NOT YET SEEN AND IT MAKES ME MAD. From this essay I have learned that there is one here which is extremely valuable intel.

Olivia Box is a writer, artist, and ecologist living in Utah. To preorder watercolor cards and prints, send a direct message to me on Instagram at @acquarellibyolivia or email oliviafaybox (at) gmail (dot) com.

I first saw larch out of a bus window in the Adirondack mountains of New York, spindly, tall trees aglow in yellow amongst already senesced trees.  From the bus window, I couldn’t really tell what the tree was. Was it just a birch that I had mistaken for a conifer? Was it a white pine whose needles were yellowed from drought or disease? When we got out of the bus, I eavesdropped on the conversations around me until I heard it: Larix, tamarack, sometimes called larch. A deciduous conifer that drops its needles in the fall, is found in cooler places, being especially prevalent in boreal forests.  I was on a forestry field tour for grad school. I often felt immersed in confusion on these tours. I was new to formal forestry, and while I loved the terminology – shelterwood, patch cut, release thinning – I was lost in it.   I would spend these tours scribbling notes in my field notebook, a cascade of questions. While others around me were focused on the cuts that the foresters had made, I often felt swamped in other things. Looking at the plants growing underfoot, wondering what the forest looked like before and what it would look like in the years to come. How the forester felt – did they feel any regret, or just certainty? I rarely asked questions out loud. I don’t remember much from the tour, except the larches dotting the roads as we wove through the Adirondacks. Their yellow needles, like summer corn, glimmered in the late October sun. I was newly obsessed with this needle-dropping, golden evergreen.   That was then, six years ago. I now have my master’s from grad school, though I often hardly feel like a master in anything.  I’m driving up the canyon with my coworkers to look at a potential project. Big Cottonwood Canyon abuts Salt Lake City, making it popular year-round. I hear a coworker complain lightly about how busy it is, and I smile to myself. I’m not bothered by others in the canyon, seeking out color on a cloudy day. If anything, I like to think people are sneaking away from their 9-5 to see the aspens at peak.  It's my first time in this canyon. I’m new to this team, less than three weeks into a job that I uprooted my life for. Again, I find myself lost; lost on the trail, lost in the species that dot it, lost in an ecosystem I don’t yet know.   We are near the end of the trail and it begins to rain. I clearly see my raincoat, askew on my kitchen table, an hour away. I note that everyone else was better prepared than me, and I zip up my vest and move a bit quicker. I don’t yet know how fickle the weather is here or how to best prepare.  The crest of the trail is an entirely new color palette: an undertone of ochre and gray, and some determined greens still holding on from the summer. I miss the reds and oranges I’m used to back home, but a flood of yellow is so unique to me. I snap a few pictures to send to my family back east.

Despite the rain that’s falling heavier now, folks passing by have eyes only for the aspen grove. We wind through the trail, my coworker pointing out project sites, concerns, suggestions, hopeful ideas. The rain begins to slow as we sign off on the proposal and begin to curve down the trail. Another coworker, a botanist, mentions a tree she’s dying to see here: a larch. I spin around at the mention of the tree, and she tells me about it. The larch was planted in the canyon, entirely outside of its native range. She’s never seen how it turns color, drops it needles, and then sprouts in spring. We don’t have time today to trek out to see it, but that matters less to me: I can easily picture the glowing needles, the heavy shape of the branches.

Today I feel like the larch. When I lived in Maine, outsiders were called “from away”, a phrase I detested due to its otherness. We’re all from away. But I do really feel that way here. I don’t yet know the species here or their patterns. I love the colors of the west, saturated and unfamiliar, and the scale: large and assuming. Even the hikes illicit my senses in a new way. I love it when the air smells of cedar, and the way I end a hike with chapped lips and dry skin, instead of feeling coated in humidity.  Later, I learned that the larch was planted in 1907 by Wasatch nurseries as a restoration effort. The team planted a mixture of Larix decidua and Larix sibirica, European and Siberian larch respectively, and didn’t track which took root. I love to think of it, intertwined and intermixed, outsiders uniting in a new spot. The larch has been here for over 100 years, ever an intruder here but well adapted outside its range; even welcomed, in a way.  I wonder how long I’ll live in Utah, and when or if I’ll ever look at my surroundings and feel like I belong.  As the rain turns to hail, my colleagues began to get giddy and cold as we walk down the trail. It’s always like this, the exact opposite of what the weather app says, someone behind me says. I smile at myself. I feel like the opposite here too, like this hail on a sunny day, like the welcomed intruder larch in the canyon.

Folks liked this thread I posted on Meta’s crappy twitter knockoff:

“Ugly sweaters were first ironic thrift store finds, then that market was apparently tapped and a new intentionally ugly sweater market exploded. Now I’m pleased to report that thrift stores are again fully stocked with the things”

I had a post go pretty viral on there about stormtroopers in Star Wars but it’s too long to get into and made people mad to the point that I turned off notifications about it so that post is no longer any of my business. I forget that you can’t make jokes about Star Wars online.

I am taking any and all submissions. Poems, art, essays. The only request is that the fit into the general vibe of what I do online, these include: ecology, domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy, books, recipes

Also, if you make stuff that you sell online, I would love to feature your products in anticipation of stocking season.

Feedback, chats, questions? Email [email protected]