The Real Life Adventures of Girl vs. Nature

I recently turned 44, and to celebrate my fabulous husband gave me a watch.

Actually, he bought more than one, starting with the kind he thought I ought to wear and eventually ending with the one I actually would.

This was no ordinary watch. It was traditional, with a wide leather band reminiscent of a bomber jacket. It was substantial. It was totally butch. And it was Swiss.

Thankfully, it also came with a warranty, because less than two weeks into life on my wrist, it stopped keeping time (although the second hand is still dutifully making its rounds).

And while this turn of events saddens me deeply, it is in no way surprising: I have been frying watches since 1978, when I was hit by lightning while venturing up the Mount of the Holy Cross with a gaggle of Girl Scouts.

This was no ordinary accident; it was Girl vs. Nature.

I am still standing, but no watch has ever survived being strapped to me, and that's saying something because in the year leading up to the Mountain Top Incident, I survived another Girl vs. Nature smack down and my watch was the winner.

In 1977, I was attacked by a killer horse. Or maybe it was just Horse Gone Wild. It's hard to say. But either way, I started out riding the horse and ended up flat on my back, unconscious, with the horse thrashing wildly beside me in an effort to get right-side-up and back on her feet. Stunningly, my skull was not broken, but I had multiple concussions and a broken jaw. And, although my arm was both compound fractured and splintered into 11 pieces, my Timex was in tact.

My mother said this was to be expected; back then, Timex commercials featured real life disaster stories with people like me, who would hold up their surviving watches and declare: "It takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'." She thought I should be in an ad.

It was not meant to be, however. My trusty timepiece met a dramatic end just a few months later, sometime between the blue haze of the lightning bolt and the hail storm and the rainbow that followed.

My next Timex never worked. Nor did any of the watches that followed.

It would be ten years before I would learn that this is not an uncommon consequence of being hit by lightning. I've since heard that no one who's had a near-death experience can wear a watch.

After about 4 dozen watches and 20 years, I declared Nature the winner and threw in the towel. Until recently.

Then I decided I needed a watch. A very specific watch. It had to be a women's design, but substantial and bold. With a leather strap. And big enough to read with my aging eyes.

This was a rather surprising impulse. Irrational. Doomed to fail. And yet, inspired by something completely endearing--an email from the most brilliant of colleagues addressing me as "Wonder Woman."

I realize in retrospect that I do indeed want to be Wonder Woman, and I want a watch wide enough and tough enough to deflect all of life's bullets. But you can't, as they say, fool Mother Nature.

Soon, my wonderful birthday watch will be in its magnificent orange box headed home to Switzerland, where the master watchmakers will undoubtedly open it up and declare: "C'est increable! C'est impossible!" By then, my $29.99 on-clearance-at-the-discount-store replacement will be finished as well.

Maybe I am part Wonder Woman; I do seem to have my very own super power: Electro Magnetic Girl Fries Electronics and Brings Down Computer Systems in a Single Stroke! But apparently, I'll have to embrace traditional cuff braclets; I'll never be able to dress the part wearing a watch no matter how perfect it might look.

Maybe it's not the look. Maybe Girl vs. Nature is really about iterative transformation and the ways that we stay connected, like Spiderman, to the mysterious power of Nature that threaten to overwhelm us.

I am, after all, still standing. And late. Again.

Sun Worship and Other Paradoxes

Happy Solstice! I hope the summer sun is brightening your world!

I was blessed to be born on the longest day of the year and I do have a very special affinity for the sun!

And yet...I always wear sunglasses, and not just because the risk of ocular melanoma is rising exponentially with the loss of the ozone. My pale blue peeps are remarkably light sensitive and I am easily blinded by any form of daylight.

And I own stock in the makers of SPF. My fair skin (a kind euphemism for my particular shade of pallor) is prone to horrific burning, though I do make a better run of it than my sister, who has on more than one occasion found herself hospitalized for sun stroke, sun poisoning and high altitude burns. The up-side, from what I understand is that we melanin-challenged individuals are far less prone to frostbite than others.

And frankly, I hate to be hot. I live the Pablo Neruda line: "In the full light of day I walk in the shade."

As I have been watching the recent flooding in the mid-west and the onset of the fire season in the far west, it's occurred to me that we all suffer from this kind of weather-related paradox. In farm country, run-off is a blessing, an anticipated ritual, a marker of time, and a signal that the new season for growing crops has begun. Run off brings a torrent of plenty and the promise irrigation throughout the summer. And yet too much rushing water brings dread, anxiety and destruction.

The ancients believed they might gain an upper hand with Nature by praying and sacrificing to the gods. Bringing pleasure and satisfaction to the spirit world was meant to appease those forces that would otherwise bring flood, famine, lightning and forces of destruction. Sometimes it appeared to work...

Today, we build levees and dikes, dams and reservoirs. And at times, it appears to work.

I think it is inevitable that we humans will keep trying our hand at this. Just as the sun will bring the solstice again and again, we will make our efforts again and again. What's most interesting to me, though, is our relentless optimism, our apparent belief that we will some day find the way to prevail.

All Hail the King!

This morning at breakfast my middle child, a 19-year-old soon-to-be-sophomore biology major, surprised me by announcing: "I searched your blog and found that you have not mentioned me. You haven't even mentioned that you have a son."

Actually, I haven't mentioned that I have two sons.

The older one will graduate from college in May of 09. If you happen to be the one who scores the Foreign Service Exam, I hope you take notice of him! He's named Josh, has an incomprehensible love of comparative politics, mad gaming skills, a certain aversion to dirt, and --by graduation day--experience working for the Canadian consulate. Not that Canada is all that foreign, but we in the Pacific Northwest love our neighbors to the north. Plus, they speak English and French. Like Josh.

Hopefully, if the ice age comes along in the next year, Josh's Canadian friends and colleagues will lend him a dog sled and teach him the finer points of trapping. It's not as exotic as Micronesian friends and colleagues or Canary Islander friends and colleagues or even Australian friends and colleagues. But it's practical. Like Josh.

Now, my other son is not known for his aversion to dirt. Or being practical. In fact, he's rather lofty and is known far and wide as King.

This is not his given name, of course. But his given name is one of those adrogonous names gone all girly. He hates it (or perhaps he hates his parents for saddling him with it), and has always gone by his middle name. But in a modern world, your first initial leaks out, and by second or third grade everyone wanted to know what his mysterious first initial, K, stood for.

"Simple," he would say, "It's King." Then he would humbly explain that he was sparing their dignity by not using his haughty moniker, and by middle school absolutely everyone--friends, neighbors, teachers, the mailman--everyone believed that we had named our first child Josh and our second child King. "My name is King Cole," he would declare, and no one would laugh or giggle or ask any questions.

Just for the record, he is not named King Cole, nor is he named King Kong, which might be more appropriate given his flair for the dramatic.

The King is extaordinarily gifted. He has an IQ of about 8,000 and a Midas touch that won't quit. And he's quite certain that global warming isn't real, or at least not worrisome, which is the real reason I haven't worked him into the blog until now (in case you're reading, my wunderkind).

He's making me read The Beak of the Finch so that I might learn just how we living organisms will adapt to a crisis such as climate change. But I'll confess: I don't really understand it.

Still, I find myself nearly persuaded each time I hear The King argue that polar bears will survive; after all, they have already begun to adapt. I'm not sure if he learned this in his evolutionary cellular biology class or because he attends the only university in the country to have a polar bear as a mascot.

And yet, for all his blustery objection to global warming propaganda, here he is, reading--searching, even--InnerNeanderthal. What else could a mother ask for? What else could a blogger ask for? My goal here is to stretch the limits of imagination, and clearly, I've captured some tiny corner of his.

As an adult educator, I am well aware that human beings can neither discuss nor act on anything that is beyond the boundary of our imagination. And we cannot imagine global warming.

Or more strictly, we cannot imagine how six, or at the most eight, degrees of warming will change our world. And since we cannot imagine, we cannot talk about what's coming or what we could realistically do to stop it.

We can, however, imagine how difficult it would be be to whittle all our possessions down to a short list we could pack and carry in a hurry. And that is the point of the exercise.

The King may be right. Maybe global warming is a natural phenomenon that has not been accelerated by humankind. I find this a bit unlikely. But also a bit irrelevant.

We should all radically change our behaviors right this minute, just to be sure. And certainly, The King and his brother Josh have been most cooperative in our family efforts to live a one-car life and to slash our electrical use.

But even if we cease to produce any more greenhouse gases tomorrow, global warming would continue...the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere need time to dissipate; they will continue to influence the weather until they're gone.

And so, it is most likely that we will see climatic catastrophes for decades to come.

It seems to me that it is time for all of us--skeptics and saints--to shine a little light on the corner of our imagination and talk about what we're going to do about the impending reality, regardless of its ultimate cause.

Perhaps, in the end, The King knows that his mother is right. Perhaps that's the real reason he's searching for his Inner Neanderthal!

Top Ten List of Entreprenuerial Possibilities for the Ice Age

Ever since I discovered that homo sapiens and neanderthals are separate species I've been holding out hope that the future ice age will be a little more civilized than past ones. We have so much wisdom and so many conveniences to help us along this time around.

And yet, too many of our best tools still rely on electricity or a network of some kind. With hundreds of feet of ice on the ground, our electronic umbilical cords will be severed.

Once a critical mass of fresh water melts off the polar ice caps, slowing the Gulf Stream and triggering massive cooling, life is going to get a lot less complicated. We'll forget all our passwords and PINs and head south, focused on staying warm, finding food, and protecting our own.

Sure, we'll have Gortex and wool socks and protein bars. But what's still missing? What will we need that's not yet been invented or isn't properly powered for the ice age?

Here's my Top Ten List of Entreprenuerial Possibilities for the Ice Age:

10. Ice batteries. Putting batteries in the refrigerator is supposed to be good for them, so there must be a way to generate power in the cold! Since many of our most essential conveniences need some juice, ice batteries should be at the top of the R&D agenda!

9. No melt candles. Light bulbs are complicated and electricity will be in short supply. Candles are the obvious solution, if only they didn't insist on melting away! If we can make them dripless, we can make them no-melt!

8. Ice floe toilet. Floe, flush, whatever works. Need I say more?

7. Battery operated coffee grinder. I'm not a big coffee girl myself, but I know what happens when the dancing goats go without for too long. A wise ice traveller will make friends and build alliances along the way by carrying a closely guarded supply of beans, a grinder, and the means for whipping up a steamy mug wherever (s)he goes.

6. Ice cows. I don't really like to admit it, but it is possible that a sudden ice age might elminate a quite a number of species and limit our ability to hunt down food. What's more, most of us are quite domesticated--which is to say, we don't really know how to hunt. We need a herd of ice cows to travel with us, produce milk, and serve as an occasion gustatory sacrifice. I'm sure they can be engineered and domesticated in a freezer laboratory until we need them....

5. Solar powered blow dryers. Really, why don't we have these already? I'm not a huge fan of the curling iron, and the flat iron is ridiculous, but as long as there is vanity, these items ought to run off the sun as well!

4. Blow dryer co-generation capacity. Manufacturers have been co-generating products and energy for quite some time. Blow dryers put out inordinate amounts of heat, which we ought to harness for important endeavors, like grinding coffee or lighting the cave.

3. Toothbrush making kit. It's an unfortunate fact of life that toothbrushes wear out. We need to be prepared. We could schlep a thousand toothbrushes along (is that enough for an average lifetime?), but as the old saying goes: give a man a toothbrush and he is minty fresh for a day; teach a man to make a toothbrush and he is cavity free for a lifetime.

2. Water deriver. Every Inner Neanderthal will want and need one of these easy-to-tote contraptions. Just break off a piece of relatively clean ice and lock it in the chamber to melt it down and sanitize it for drinking. Just think of it as the next generation of bottled water!

1. Solar Powered iPod. I have been talking with people for years now about the most essential items to pack in the event of climatic catastrophe, and they have provided me with a long list of sensible items: fire, tampons, all the ammo I can carry. The iPod never comes up though; it's just not sensible. It's not essential. And yet, it appeals so deeply to our sensibilities, reflects our individual identity, captures history and art. Even if I could never upload another tune, I'd sure like to have a Nano on hand, ready and able to play Like a Virgin till all eternity.

Survival of the Richest

Although my physical body shows up at the gym several times a week, my mind often wanders. And so today, I found myself contemplating a funny sign that hangs over the towel rack on the way in: "Shower Towels 25 Cents."

I noticed it on the way in, as I grabbed a little towel--the non-shower towels, I suppose--that you use to mop up sweat and wipe down machines. They're itchy and graying. I paused as I picked it up, wondering for a moment if the shower towels are more luxurious and white. They must get a lot less use.

Just as I worked up a sweat, I began to wonder: Who would pay a quarter for a towel?

My husband and I were debating the Top Ten People Most Likely to Survive the Ice Age as we passed by the shower towel sign. He was making a darned good case that rich people would fare best in the Ice Age--at least for awhile. Would rich people pay a quarter for a shower towel?

"It depends on the rich person," I thought as turned out another mile.

There are plenty of rich people out there like me: "Why would I give you a quarter for a towel when I can bring one from home for free?" Even if the mysterious shower towels are gorgeous and absorbent, why waste cash? "I come to the gym 4 times a week, that's a dollar a week, that's 52 dollars a year..." You've met this guy. He knows exactly how you can turn your $52 into a million bucks before you retire.

I'd like to know how to turn a quarter a day into a retirement fund! But, I'm not really sure the math adds up. There is a different kind of rich guy, who makes this case: "Time is money. And by the time you find a towel and pack it and put it in the laundry and pay for the soap and the water and the electricity to get it clean, you've spent far more than a quarter." I start to wonder how you do this kind of cost-benefit math. Somebody must know how.

I'm through the cardio and the stretches and the weights and the shower before I realize that money isn't everything. There is another kind rich guy (my kindred spirit, perhaps) who says: "Are you kidding me? There are some things you just don't share with anyone!"

I don't know where he comes from, but my mind wanders off to another kind of rich person, the one who would undoubtedly scoff at my reasoning: he wouldn't belong to a club where you pay for towels, much less where you put up a tacky sign announcing the cost. "I belong at a place where staff places clean towels in my locker whilst I play squash. Alfred knows that I prefer white, Egyptian cotton with a slight scent of lavendar."

I have no trouble imagining real people who think in these different ways, not just about towels and other trivialities, but about meaningful life decisions. But would it make a difference in the event of climatic disaster? I ask my husband what he thinks, as we head for home, "Which kind of rich person did you mean when you said rich people would be the most likely to survive?" I make a case for each:

The guy who saves his quarters and invests them to greatest advantage is incredibly resourceful. He's good at the long term and knows how to get where he wants to go. And he's willing to sacrifice in the short term to get there.

The guy who weighs the quarter against the hidden costs knows how to see the big picture. He doesn't always take the obvious path, he takes the smart path. He understands trade-offs and measures his carefully. He'll be able to plan ahead, account for all kinds of variables and make smart decisions.

The guy who doesn't share will have a loyal clan around him, an extended network of family and friends who take care of each other and protect each other from outsiders.

And the guy who plays squash...well, he might sound like he's a little soft around the middle, but he knows how to be the king of the jungle. He knows how to get others to do his bidding, how to be on top. He'll probably make a whole new country and get himself elected king for life. And whatever the new economic system looks like, he'll be the richest one.

So whose going to make it? Who is the fittest for survival? Is it possible to train your mind to be as fit as your body? And if so, whose footsteps do you want to be following in?

Thank Heavens for Vic's Pizza

It's Friday night and my daughter wants pizza. Vic's Pizza to be exact.

Vic is apparently the pizzeria's resident shepherd dog. I don't know how a dog learned to make pizza, but the thin, crispy crust and zingy sauce set it apart from all other local options. Only Hot Lips--down the road a hundred miles in Portland--could even begin to compare.

Vic's and Hot Lips are small shops in college towns; both sell by the slice or by the pie. Both make it possible for carnivores, omnivores, vegetarians and vegans to embibe in the world's Most Essential Food. Perhaps that's what makes them great. But the convenience doesn't hurt either.

Call ahead and voila...pizza! There goes my daughter now...

As the tail lights fade into the distance, I begin to wonder what makes pizza so indescribably close to perfection? Do I want to preserve this treasure for eternity? What, exactly would it take to bring pizza making along for the Ice Age?

If we were living the Neanderthal life, we would definitely need one of those solar foil ovens we learned to make in Girl Scouts a zillion years ago.

Admittedly, sitting around the foil oven doesn't have the same ring as sitting around the campfire. But nevertheless, I can imagine my InnerNeanderthal baking up a Friday night storm, bending low over the foil oven, evoking oooo's and aaaaah's from those who never could cook.

Perhaps you can smell the yeasty dough...I can. And yet, this is where my vision begins to get cloudy. Pizza is remarkably simple: cheese, sauce, dough (and maybe a topping or two, if something interesting is hanging around).

But the cheese...Exactly where do you get cheese when there's no deli drawer in the refrigerator?

I know it involves a cow, or a goat, or possibly some other mammal. Perhaps Vic will be bringing along a herd for us to milk.

And perhaps Vic knows what happens next, because I sure don't. It's something involving cultures and cheese cloth and the intestines of a calf.

Okay, maybe I imagined that last part. But wild berries and barbequed snake on a stick are beginning to sound a little more practical.

Lucky for me, my daughter is back and she has one ginormous pizza box in hand!

Ice Ages Not Dark Ages

World history students across the nation love the Middle Ages. They won't call that time between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance the "Dark Ages." To them, the knights and the castles are far too romantic to warrant such a dismal moniker.

For 15-year olds enamored with swashbuckling and jousting, even The Plague can be reframed as a worthy adversary to be tracked and slain like the mythical dragon. Each boy imagines himself as the virtuous knight most capable of such a task. And the girls look dreamily on, oblivious to the real implications of chastity belts, and hoping that lessons in chivalry will lead to an invitation to the Prom.

Even Monty Python can't disuade them. But Search for the Holy Grail is probably the truest portrayal of the times ever conceived. "Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!" ("I'm not dead yet." Whack to the head. "Now you are.").

Perhaps you know that historically London streets are the width of two arms and two bed pans. Each morning, housekeepers and women of the house would carry chamber pots to the edge of the street, reach as far as they were able, and empty the contents into the road so that the waste could be flattened by a cart like the one collecting the dead in The Holy Grail.

Truly, it was a dark time. And filthy. Brits didn't believe in washing; water seemed to be a source of ill-health, and likely was, at least in the cities. Instead, women wore flea bags, animal pelts hung from the waist and tucked into the pleats of a lady's skirt. Flea bags were meant to attract fleas and other pests away from the human.

It is continually amazing to me that Europe plunged from the glory of the ancient empires to darkness, hopelessness, illiteracy, filth, hunger, poverty and disease of the Dark Ages within generations. Ancient knowledge and wisdom was lost to memory and had to be rekindled centuries later.

We know it can happen. And we even know some of the reasons why. Humans are notorious forgetters. And stress actually speeds up our forgetting. So what's going to happen in the event of cataclysmic climate changes? What will we forget?

What is it that keeps us out of the darkness of the Dark Ages? What do we know, what are we able to do, what do we value that brings light to our world?

And how might we intentionally save our collective wisdom and skills? How do we keep ourselves out of the mud, out of the ignorance, and taking baths instead of hanging flea bags?

As long as we're connected to the internet and able to spend an odd Friday night at Barnes and Noble, we're good. But what happens when the lights go dark and the ice gobbles up our infrastructure.

Will we be prepared to remember at that time? Click Here to weigh in! Take a 9-question InnerNeanderthal survey and let us know what's needed to keep the Dark Ages romantic and interesting, and well in the past!