The Woodpile

Everyone loves genealogy. We all want to scour the musty annals of our dead for clues to our nature. There's no subject that interests us more than ourselves. Each of us pokes through our personal attics to find out: who collaborated to produce the wonder that is me? Or--depending--who can I pin the blame on for this pisshole of an existence?

If we weren't so irretrievably interested in ourselves, we wouldn't click on so many odd internet quizzes ("I got Pol Pot. What murderous totalitarian dictator are you?") We're hoping for Attila the Hun, but we'll take anything as long as someone asks us what our favorite flower is, or our favorite rock star. Ask us anything about ourselves, market research gnomes! We'll tell you!

Remarkably, four out of five students of genealogy who dig deep enough discover they are descended from Charlemagne. This is a familiar enough phenomenon. No fortune-teller peering into anyone's previous lives has ever turned up a horse thief or a sewer worker. We are all reincarnated royalty.

Sure, we know plenty about our own parents, but they seem to fall short in important ways and can't quite account for all the intricacies of our character. We study them and come up with a collage of qualities. We get our nose from our father, say, and our impatience from our mother--although, in our case, it's not impatience so much as a desire to see things done properly.

I've never delved into my own family history, because the fanciest parts had already been logged on a scroll and handed to me as a youngster. We had the family tree going back ten generations to the Mayflower, when my fore-Brewster led a doughty band of religious folk to the new world and promptly lost most of them the first winter. It's hard for me to relate to the dude. I'm peeved at the Supreme Court for thinking it's okay to invoke the name of Our Lord And Savior Jesus Christ at a town hall meeting (the opinion of the majority being that Jesus Christ is everyone's Lord And Savior whether they know it or not), but I wouldn't pile into a wobbly bathtub of a ship over it. Still, I have to admit it: I've got clergymen tromping all over my DNA.

Supposedly the information on the scroll accounts for my makeup, with a little leavening from my sturdy and cheerful Norwegian side. There are a number of writers in the woodpile. My grandmother got poems published in Scribner's. Here's one she wrote about my father:

To My Son.

All that thou art to me? Oh love, my inmost heart,
If I could say
The half of what thou art to me each day,
It were but mockery, and my love were dead.

Holy shit! Douse me in lilac and slap me with an antimacassar! Four lines, with the subjunctive tense jammed in twice. My grandmother spent her adulthood in bed with the consumption, writing poetry and waiting for the laudanum to kick in. Am I in there anywhere? Her father was a popular author who toured with Mark Twain. He annoyed the bejesus out of Mark Twain, in fact. "I like him," MT said. "But in him and his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it."

I'd sure like to believe a stray sperm of Mark Twain's had found its way into my great-grandmother. But maybe my essential germ is somewhere else. There are a hell of a lot of womenfolk who dissolved, along with their maiden names, into my family tree. Maybe I should start snooping around those parts a little. Find me a decent horse thief. Somebody.

The Electronic Leash

It has recently come to my attention that you can have your own daughter chipped like a wayward terrier, and thus avoid all worry in life. The chipping can be done without surgery, since your daughter is never separated from her cell phone. It's called a Family Locator App and it's so accurate you can call in a missile strike on the little darling. How cool is that? I learned this through a TV ad in which a mother watches her teenage daughter recede into the distance down an escalator--now ten, now twenty feet away--in a shopping mall while a map floats over her head. The mother has the look of fondness and bitten-lip concern appropriate to a woman watching her only child board the Mayflower on the way to the New World. How much calmer would our old-world matron have been if, at any time, she could have ascertained her daughter's whereabouts within inches! "Forsooth, she's leaving the Macy's perfume counter," our bereft mother would report, "and heading over to Cinnabon."

It's hard to imagine our modern mother getting much of anything done with this much technology at her disposal. Already she can't go fifteen minutes without checking Facebook to find out if Lulu is still grumpy and needs coffee, or if Ryan has decided to get his tires rotated after all. Tracking one's own progeny as well would seem to be a full-time occupation. When we took our cat Larry in for radiation treatments and could go online to watch the Cat-Cam focused on her kennel, that's all we did. "Still asleep," we'd report to each other, several times an hour. It's not healthy.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these new abilities actually increase worry. I'm certain it would have taken years off my own mother's life if she had been able to know where I was all the time. Secrecy and deception, done right, can be loving gestures.

Dave and I are still phoneless and quite comfortable being lost. Even in the grocery store, I can't call him in Dairy to tell him I'm in the meat aisle. We have no idea where the other is unless we run into each other. People don't know how we can stand it, but we're used to it. Believe it or not, that's the way it was for everybody not all that long ago. There are some benefits to getting lost. We'd have never seen the entire north half of Vancouver Island if it were not for Dave and his remarkably inventive sense of direction.

No one else really knows where we are at any given time either. It's like we're invisible. I do recognize that this is an illusion. In reality, we're living in a world where scientists are able to track penguin populations by seeing their rust-colored poop on the snow from space. So finding me should be a snap.

I'm always leaving my shit all over the place.

Love Is In The Water

It's the middle of February, which can only mean one thing around here: it's time to jump into a cold swamp up to our nipples and look for evidence of amphibian romance. Yes, Team Brewster is once again gearing up to monitor egg masses of frogs and salamanders for the regional government entity in charge of wetlands. They won't know how good a job they're doing until we come back with some hard data. It's not always comfortable out there, but one neat thing about being immersed in a cold swamp is you barely notice the stiff winter winds.

Sadly, Team Brewster has lost half its members. Elizabeth, who keeps an overcoat on when she visits us, even if we have the heat jacked up to ninety for her, bailed out this year. Even after I offered helpful suggestions. "Quit falling in," I told her, but she was unmoved. I'll miss her, but there's a lot to be said for diversifying the gene pool a little bit. Brewsters have their good qualities, but none of them are all that useful. We're great at showing up, and tipping over, but don't look to us for direction. There have been Brewsters in this country a long time; the starter set barreled over on the Mayflower full of righteous fire and not much else, watched everybody drop dead the first winter, and had barely enough gas left over to procreate. Now, nine or ten generations later, we're still a sparse population of, shall we say, unusual intellects.

Fortunately, Dave has stepped up. Among his other fine traits, Dave does not confine his activities to the sensible. Plus, he has much higher nipples. He proved to be a natural right off the bat. I told him to look for egg masses that look like oranges (Northwestern salamander) or grapefruit-sized tapioca (red-legged frog), and, attuned to all things edible, he homed in on some right away. Everything stops at this point while we write down our data and flag the eggs. Elizabeth and I had trouble with this, juggling a clipboard, several markers, a spoon (don't ask), tape, a stopwatch, and a large bundle of bamboo sticks. It was always an ordeal. Dave starts right out by laying the bundle of bamboo sticks on the water.

"Bamboo sticks float?" I said. Well, don't that beat all.

Minutes later, he was working his problem-solving skills again, when he tried to determine if his waders leaked by farting in them and looking for bubbles. The man complains that his cognitive powers are slipping, but he has a long way to slide before he gets to the Brewster mental terrain.

Last year, our assigned patch of wetland was barely manageable for two monitors. It was a lot of territory. This year, same location, Walden Pond had been replaced by Lake Michigan. We're going to be at this a while, I thought. Meanwhile, Dave was hard at work.

"Whoa," he said, bending over.

"You got eggs?"

Dave nearly had his nose in the water. "Pretty soon," he said.

Whereupon he reached in and scooped out a pair of rough-skinned newts, locked in embrace. "Dude," you could almost hear them saying, but nobody was letting go of anything. The female was smaller and had the standard grainy skin texture, and the male was so engorged--all over,

mind you--he'd gone smooth. They can remain clasped together for hours or days, and sometimes a whole group of them are tangled together. It's called a mating ball--which isn't what we used to call it back in college, but we might as well have. We started to see them everywhere. We haven't logged too many egg masses yet, but there's romance in the air. It doesn't look like these guys are giving anything up for Lent.

It's still Muddy Gras in the old town tonight.