Nature

Reader Comment: More Thoughts on the Foxes

~ jackewilson ~ 3 Comments

My favorite part of running this blog, by miles and miles, is reading the comments. Sometimes they make me laugh, sometimes they make me think, and sometimes they are very moving. Often it’s all of the above.

And then there are those that make me proud. Because they say flattering things about the writing (thank you, everyone!). Or because I’m proud to see the beautiful expressions of thought that my story has inspired.

Wonderful Reader quarteracremile responds to Object #26 – The Offering:

This is a lovely article. It always stuns me when people think of animals as wild and incapable of complex thought… Since I live and breathe animals every day and only WISH that much of humanity could compare. I’m glad you learned a bit more about that from your experiences. I wonder if you realize that the fox likely felt much the same way about your housing situation that you did… That they would have loved to live the safe, happy “grown up” fox life that they dream of… With no bb guns, no butterscotch colored dogs, no landlords ruling over their lives, without even being able to come and go freely in their own space, without being able to use their whole space as their own because of their landlords lingering presence… Of course the landlords in this case being your own family. And perhaps even that offering you a payment of “rent”, to help you feed your family, could smooth relations.

Of course, animals are not as complex. But we have a hubris of thinking we’re a lot more complex than we are. Thinking that complex emotions are anything more than glorified instincts and adaptability… And, truly, you were never in any danger (foxes, especially a healthy successful breeding pair, are unlikely to try to come close to a human unless you threatened the kits) and neither were the foxes… But neither of you knew that.

I hope you’re happier where you are in your life now… And I hope nature continues to grow on you. Animals are so insightful, loving, and thoughtful… Just because they do not dwell needlessly doesn’t make them dumb. Indeed, I wish I could dwell less and live more. So I also hope you end up living more as well as you find your inner fox.

Congrats on being freshly pressed!

Thank you! And thank you for the comment, which makes me want to be a better person. Onward and upward, everyone!

The Offering (A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #26)

~ jackewilson ~ 103 Comments

staring-fox

And then something happened that changed everything.

I wish I could start the story that way, because that’s how it felt when it happened: startling, vivid, breathtakingly transformative. Even now it makes my heart race, the moment when I looked down and saw what I saw on our front porch, and the follow-up moment when I pulled the car out of the garage and saw what was there. But you can’t be jolted out of a world without there being a world to be jolted out of. That’s an awkward way of saying it, but I’m a storyteller, not an expert in metaphysics. Bear with me.

And then something happened that changed everything.

We’ll get to the something. But first, you have to know what the everything was.

#

We were renting a house on a cul-de-sac in northern Virginia. The purplest part of a purple state, in the section of territory that, viewed on a map, looks like it was carved out of D.C. Someone probably fought a war over this patch of land, once upon a time. Historic battlefields were everywhere, replaced now by highway interchanges and big-box stores. Progress marched along. Even decent old brick houses like ours were being torn down in favor of ersatz palaces with fake-stone facades, their walls rising up from the very edges of the small-sized lots.

One nice thing about living in a purple state was that my vote mattered. What was less nice was that my next-door neighbors put up an Obama sign and the kids who lived across the street shot it up with their BB guns.

We had left New York City so that our toddlers could play in a backyard. And now this? Young political activists? With guns?

I had not moved to the suburbs so my kids could be caught in the crossfire.

But we had signed a twelve-month lease, so what could we do? We settled in and kept the blinds pulled. Our kids could play in the backyard. Away from stray bullets.

Since we were renting, there were a few things we had to do to convert the house to something suitable for our family. We took down a hammock after it caused too many problems. (Hammocks are lovely for grownups. They can propel small children halfway across a backyard.) We drained the hot tub on the back deck out of similar safety concerns.

Inside, there was a pull-down ladder to the attic. I loved the attic: it was huge and roomy, and we could stash plenty of clutter up there. The one downside was that the owners had left a few things of their own: a metal rack holding some coats, a letter jacket, and a wedding dress in plastic, and four or five boxes of trophies and other knickknacks. I knew I should have been grateful that they had not left those things in the house itself. Instead I was irritated and tempted to throw it all out.

What were we paying for? Dammit, we were renting a house. We were not renting a storage unit.

It was an unreasonable position, but there it was. Those items were a reminder that we did not own this house, and I did not like how that made me feel.

It was frustrating, for example, that the owners had not trusted us with the remote control to the automatic garage door opener. Every time we entered or exited the garage, we had to park the car, get out, punch buttons on a key pad, and get back in the car. In rain. In snow. In wind. With the kids asleep. With the kids screaming. Every single time it was a pain, and every single time I thought about how temporary and transient our lives were.

Twenty addresses in twelve years. It’s one thing to live like that when you’re poor and living in dirty old apartments. The life of the struggling writer. Paycheck to paycheck, meal to meal, crummy surroundings, cold nights spent under the covers on a hand-me-down futon. It’s living! It’s living free! Hello, Bohemia! But this? Rent at this place was a sizable expenditure, and it was for a house, with a finished basement and a backyard. This was a place for grownups to live in.

And we were grownups, whether we liked it or not, because parents have to be. Granted, I was a baffled, confused parent, a father with no idea what fatherhood meant or how to handle it, with zero strategy other than the single tactic that as a 35-year-old man, I could present what seemed to small children like wisdom and authority. Eventually they would figure me out. For now, I faked being an adult. And it worked: faced with a three-year-old and a one-year-old who believed in me just as they believed in Santa, their optimism and expectations overcoming what was in front of their very eyes, I pulled off a great con, day after day after day. I bluffed them.

So then: a grownup I was, or appeared to be, most of the time. But this house did not make me feel like a grownup. It felt as if the real grownups – the ones with the stuff in the attic, and the ones in possession of the automatic garage door opener – had gone somewhere and left us in charge.

#

On a morning that spring I went to retrieve the kids, who were playing next door at the neighbors—the Obama-sign neighbors, not the camouflage-wearing junior soldiers of fortune. I left via our back door, walked across the deck, and headed for the gate that separated our two yards. Even from here I could admire their house, built to appear in Architectural Digest, which was literally the wife’s dream, or perhaps I should say vision. She had acquired two dogs, not because she wanted dogs particularly, but because their butterscotch coats matched the house and would look fantastic in the photo spread.

Her husband had told me this one day with a heavy sigh. I nodded as if I understood, but I felt like I was from another planet. Our house had two rooms that had no furniture at all, and a third that only had two beanbag chairs. Maybe Architectural Digest would have a Minimalist issue we could get in on.

I hopped down the steps and walked around the waterfall that no longer worked, hopefully through nothing my kids had done. And then, as I passed the back of the hot tub, I heard something strange. It sounded like growling.

I stopped in place, afraid to move until I heard what it was.

More growling. Like someone’s loud stomach, except more feral. It was an animal sound, there under our deck, behind the lattice woodwork.

Continue reading →

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Black Hole

~ jackewilson ~ 1 Comment
image credit: nature.com

I’ve always had a love-hate thing with deep space. On the one hand, I’m fascinated (note to terrible poets: I’m happy to consider a poem about space for our terrible poem breakdown series). On the other hand, I find myself overwhelmed by the feeling of insignificance when thinking about anything farther away than the moon.

Good news for me! It turns out that if a) I become an astronaut, and b) I fall into a black hole, I might not actually suffer what has always sounded to me like an extreme sort of mental torture:

[P]hysicists had long assumed [that] the astronaut would happily pass through the event horizon [of a black hole], unaware of his or her impending doom, before gradually being pulled inwards — stretched out along the way, like spaghetti — and eventually crushed at the ‘singularity’, the black hole’s hypothetical infinitely dense core.

“Happily”? Nothing can escape the event horizon! What would happen to the atoms in your body? What would happen to your soul? For years I’ve lain awake in bed, staring at the too-dark ceiling, shivering at the prospect.

Some more recent views of quantum mechanics predict a somewhat more routine demise:

But on analysing the situation in detail, Polchinski’s team came to the startling realization that the laws of quantum mechanics, which govern particles on small scales, change the situation completely. Quantum theory, they said, dictates that the event horizon must actually be transformed into a highly energetic region, or ‘firewall’, that would burn the astronaut to a crisp.

A little better. But here’s the problem: once you’re burned to a crisp, you still disappear into the event horizon. That’s it! You’re done! You don’t even get worms. You don’t even get to be space dust.

Luckily, Stephen Hawking has come up with a new theory!

In place of the event horizon, Hawking invokes an “apparent horizon”, a surface along which light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be suspended. In general relativity, for an unchanging black hole, these two horizons are identical, because light trying to escape from inside a black hole can reach only as far as the event horizon and will be held there, as though stuck on a treadmill.

However, the two horizons can, in principle, be distinguished. If more matter gets swallowed by the black hole, its event horizon will swell and grow larger than the apparent horizon.

Why is this good for me? Because I would avoid the singularity.

If Hawking is correct, there could even be no singularity at the core of the black hole. Instead, matter would be only temporarily held behind the apparent horizon, which would gradually move inward owing to the pull of the black hole, but would never quite crunch down to the centre. Information about this matter would not destroyed, but would be highly scrambled so that, as it is released through Hawking radiation, it would be in a vastly different form, making it almost impossible to work out what the swallowed objects once were.

Almost impossible – but that’s not the same as impossible! My information can escape! All it takes is a little descrambling on the other end.

Given the choice between total oblivion and a small hope for survival in some form, who would choose the former? And why aren’t we all out celebrating this development!? I for one will be sleeping better tonight. Within my tangible body. Under the tangible covers. In my tangible bed.

Dreaming of permanence.