Friday is not a masterwork. On the list of Heinlein’s greatest stories, Friday would be in the bottom third.2 It’s flawed in about a dozen different ways, as Jo Walton expertly explains.3 But this isn’t about great books; this is about the books you turn to when you need to fall into a world that you know by heart, that makes you believe for a minute or two that everything will be OK.

Life has been a lot, lately. There’s the ongoing chaos of the second Trump administration4 5 and the impact that has on local services, which hasn’t been to make us great.6 Add to that perimenopause.7 And aging parents. And kids transitioning into their adult lives. And being an empty nester, whatever that means. And, ya know, the fascism.

I only occasionally fall into a reasonable amount of despair. Mostly treading water and not drowning. Hope you can achieve the same.

I’ve discovered, tho, that I really don’t have a lot of energy to read anything that requires work or has a plot with surprises. What I really want is to fall into Friday again but can’t because I just did. Even I have limits on how often I can read the same dang book.

Enter John Varley, whose books mean enough to me that I’ve moved them from Austin8 to Tennessee to New York, which is an honor few writers receive. Books are heavy, y’all, and I only want to lug so many of them around and/or pay to have someone else do the same.

Varley hit the SF scene a generation or two after Heinlein. His first novel hit the stands in 1977; his last in 2018.9 When he died at the end of 2025, I picked up my old mass market copy of Titan, fully intending to re-read the trilogy. Instead, I discovered that the wee tiny type in my yellowing copy was just too hard on my middle-aged10 eyes.

Enter Steel Beach, which I pulled off of the shelf last month because a) I remembered enjoying it and b) I have a hardback so the type is a reasonable size.

I was fresh out of college when Steel Beach came out, technically an adult but seriously adrift. I’d just moved from Pennsylvania to Texas with some guy.11 I had a degree in a subject I wasn’t sure I cared about anymore. I was working days at a housewares shop in the mall; nights in local live theater. I was very much in my early 20s and scared that everything I was doing was the wrong thing, which meant it was exactly the right time to fall into this created world where humans were forced to settle the inner solar system after being wiped off of the earth by invaders.

There are two perfect first sentences.12 Varley wrote one of them: “In five years, the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman. If that doesn’t make you want to read more, then this is very much not the book for you.

Which isn’t to say Steel Beach is about penises. They do come up13 but only in the context of gender and sex—and how fluid both can be when you can change them easily.14 It’s also about learning what’s important in a life that can last a couple hundred years, if you want it to, which you might not. It’s easy to change your body in this world but it remains impossible to change who you are, even if you want to more than anything.

What I didn’t pick up when I first read it is how Steel Beach is a response to Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and RAH’s firm belief that computers-with-sentience would be a good thing. They would plot just revolutions, throw off the yoke of the oppressor, and keep the air breathable! Without cease! Or reward! Oh, brave new world!

Steel Beach—remember this was written in the early 1990s when we still had monochrome monitors and dial-up—predicts where we are in 2026 with AI: it is full of very human flaws because it is using human language and logic as its model for “thought.” The real world consequences of relying on it without question keep smacking us in the head, from minor “hallucinations” to blowing up schoolchildren (allegedly).

Varley ups the ante. AI (or something very like it) is in charge of keeping people alive on the moon. Now what happens when it starts to fail in very human ways?15

And while those are the ideas bubbling beneath the text, which I picked up on this time around as a more experienced reader with a few more decades of life behind me,16 I boggled at how much of this book makes up the furniture of my subconscious, despite not having looked at it since the late 90s.

There’s Varley’s voice, for one, that I clearly have been trying to ape for 30 years. I currently work in a version of his Texas Disneyland. On my best days, my inner voice might just be Hildy Johnson’s, to say nothing of her take on the experience of working in a newsroom. I seem to have imprinted on this book like a baby duck on a passing Ford Fiesta—and had no idea.

Brains are wild, y’all. Wild.

I’m going to keep re-reading my Varley, if only to see what else I’ve retained without my active knowledge. Are there any books you’ve had a similar experience with?

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And now, some links:

• Sometimes, I want revenge more than equality.

• Ridicule is an important tool against fascism.

• “The tradwife, like the 1950s housewife, is not a real person.”

• I had to read this obit a coupe of times to make sure I don’t actually know the deceased, even though my uncommon name turns up at the end. John Martini sounds like he was a solid guy. May his memory be a blessing.

• I will never not love restoration content.

• This is in New Jersey?

• “Running is a radical act. The person you are at the end of a run is different from the person that took that first step.”

• We’ve come a long way, baby.

When you are a little bit obsessed with a Relatively Obscure Person of History, your friends—those same souls who have heard you go on (and on) about said ROPoH—point out spiritually (if not actually) related ROPoHs, if only to give you something else to talk about already.

Which is how I learned about Ethel Brillana Tweedie, a later Victorian-era lady globetrotter. 2

Tweedie and Bird were very different people. Ethel married at a socially appropriate age3 and had two sons. She was born into a decent amount of money and her husband was in the marine insurance business, just like his father before him. Unfortunately, all of that wealth was lost in some kind of marine insurance calamity, which was followed by his death, which was followed by Ethel being broke with young children. She had, however, a nascent writing career, which was just getting started when Bird’s was winding down.

Tweedie’s first trip was to Iceland in 1886, when she was about 24 and unmarried (but her later husband was part of the traveling party, which I find absolutely fascinating. He was friends with Ethel’s brother, who was also with them. Quelle intrigue!).

Prompted by her father,4 Ethel kept a journal, which would later be published as A Girl’s Ride in Iceland in 1895. Her father wrote a very thorough appendix about geysers, in a style that makes you wonder if he was really into dinosaurs or trains as well because it is that level of granular.5

But this isn’t about him.

Even after the birth of her kids, Ethel kept traveling, first because she just enjoyed it; then because it’s how she made a living. At first, she stuck mostly to Scandinavia. But by the end of her life, she’d been to a fair chunk of the world. Maybe not as traveled in terms of variety as Bird—but still had a respectable and diverse tally.

Unlike Bird, Tweedie had interests beyond getting out of the U.K. for a bit. She was passionate advocate for women’s suffrage. She hosted dinners and salons. She painted. Hers was a life full of experiences, it seems. Where Bird felt stifled when at home; Tweedie made the most of the opportunity to pursue other interests.

But that is a much longer story for another time. Or not. We’ll see which way the wind blows.

However, some tidbits about Tweedie’s Iceland trip.

Ethel and the other four travelers departed by ship from Leith, just outside of Edinburgh. The trip was supposed to take about 3 and a half days but wound up taking ten. Seas were rough.

“On entering the Moray Firth the evening calm of the untroubled sea was exchanged for rough billows, and hour by hour we became more and more miserable, each alike in turn paying our tribute to Neptune, and truly realising the difference between a voyage in prospect and one in stern reality.”

They visited various ports of call—Akureyri, Reykjavik—and hopped on horses to visit the interior, including Geyser and Thingvellir, as well as local farms. She ate a lot of skyr and lamented the continual odor of decaying/drying fish. Mostly, however, she leaned into the adventure.

“Of course we were often placed in the queerest positions, over which we laughed heartily; for on starting we agreed that we would each and all make the best of whatever obstacles we encounter, and it is certainly no use going to Iceland, or any other out-of-the-way place, if one cannot cheerfully endure the absence of accustomed luxuries. Travellers not prepared to do this had better remain at home.”

The version of Tweedie’s Iceland book that’s online is the 2nd edition, which came out five years after its debut. Ethel wrote a forward to the new edition full of updates and critical responses. Of most interest to me, maybe, is this:

“When this little volume (my maiden effort) was published five years ago, it unwittingly originated an angry controversy by raising the question ‘Should women ride astride?’6

“…Miss Bird, in her famous book of travels, tells us how terribly her back suffered from hard riding on a side-saddle, and how easily she accomplished the same distances when, disregarding conventionalities, she adopted a man’s seat.”

And, thus, this particular circle is closed.

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The links:

• Jane August made herself the job I now very much want.7

• Speaking of the above: I literally went to the Merchant’s House Museum a week before this story was released. There was zero hint that such a cool piece of history was in the house, which brings me back to my belief that this could be such an amazing museum if someone sunk some money into its communications and installations.

• More on the Willard Suitcases: on privacy and empathy and points in between.8

• All you need is your Bradshaw’s guide.9

• The font is the clue.

• Just when I thought I couldn’t love Betty Gilpin more.

• My next cross-stitch project.

• When Harry Styles met Haruki Murakami.

• If you have loved a dog; if you are finding it hard to close a chapter to move into the next...

• What do you lose when you censor history?10

For the last four-five weeks, my mother, who lives in Florida,2 has been unwell. In a variety of ways. And last week, it all boiled over.

But that’s another story for another time. Maybe. I’m not really sure it is my story to tell. Or that I have some unique take on it. Families are complicated. Aging is rough. You should live your life while you can.

The details are unique but the overarching themes are universal.

I’m typing this in a hotel room near the Orlando airport. I can see the tops of palm trees. I must be near an outgoing runway because every now and again a plane pops out of the green. After a week in Central Florida, I’ll head out tomorrow morning. And I cannot wait to get back to the cold and the routine.3

I promise this will make sense in a minute:

In 1869, the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane, opened in near Seneca, NY. It’s mission was pretty much what you assume it was. It was also as inhumane as you’d assume. The 19th century wasn’t known for it’s gentle treatment of mental illness.4 It closed in 1995.

The building itself is still there. The Seneca Seven relay, which I ran three times, takes you through the property. It looks pretty much like what you’d think an abandoned 19th century asylum would look like: creepy and mouldering and very brick.

Archivists rescued what they could. And years and years and years ago, I got to see the Willard Suitcases, which are all of the suitcases that residents had brought with them when they were admitted and then never managed to reclaim.5

When I turned up to the New York State Archive warehouse in Rotterdam, I was asked if I wanted to watch them open for the first time a few of the suitcases? There is only one answer to that. My guide led me through the labyrinth of stuff and pointed out highlights while we moved. Those are the bats from the Attica riot. Here’s a half-melted subway turnstyle that was under the World Trade Centers. We have the counterweight from the last hanging of a woman in the state.

Most of the suitcases contain the expected stuff of life at the time. The archivists wrote down each hairbrush, each razor, each pipe. Then wrapped what could be wrapped in acid-free tissue and moved on to the next case. All very orderly. All fascinating.6

One of the last suitcases—in my memory it is a brown leather one—broke that meditative routine. When opened, it was full of walnuts.

No one spoke. I remember that feeling of quiet surprise and re-orientation of what an unquiet mind might find important enough to carry.7

A couple of days ago, when I visited my mother, she decided it was time to clean out her purse. I swear to you, as she dumped its contents on her hospital bed, my first thought was that nothing but walnuts would spill out.

You just never know what will stick with you, you know?8

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Some diversions:

• In another life, one where I could plot every last detail, I would be a writer on either The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight. This conversation between John Oliver, Trevor Noah, and Eugene (whose last name I can’t seem to locate) is one of the reasons why. If you want to know more about the structure of jokes and writing, give it a listen. And if you just want to laugh about FIFA, that’s in there too.

• The work of art can give you a place to live.

• True fact: I’ve long thought I’d be a great rally driver,9 which is why I ordered this book.

• Thirty-three Pomeranians.

• I’m so sad this resource (seems to be) gone.

• The version of my mother that could have been.10

• “But no one is ever exactly what you expect them to be—not in this story, and not anywhere else.” Sara Gran’s story about Helen Schucman and A Course in Miracles is full of her brand of clarity and truth and human-ness but, you know, brisk and modern. Look. Her work is hard to describe.

In the early ‘90s, Austin wasn’t the Austin it had been, the one where you could rent a cheap apartment, catch cheap live music, and eat cheap breakfast tacos. But it hadn’t yet become the tech industry nightmare it has become. My Austin was growing ever-more expensive but still manageable,3 especially when you were in grad school (my partner) or working in theater and in the middle of an existential crisis (me).

Austin theater was a force in those days. Venues were cheap;4 talent was plentiful, thanks to UT. Any given week, you could see a different show every day. Some stretched the boundaries of what theater can be; some were more successful at that than others.

For my first few years there, I worked as a stage manager. “Worked” implies I was paid, which I sorta was (but not much). I had a day job at a university bookstore on The Drag—we all had day jobs—but theater was my vocation.

I was young enough that I thought every theater scene was a constantly churning, always creative, let’s-do-it-on-a-shoestring force in every single city in the U.S. I didn’t realize how precious it was until I left. It was what I needed as a human when I needed it5—and I suspect I’m not alone.

The best part about the scene was that there was a sense that you could try just about anything without risking your entire career on it. Plus, the barrier to entry was low. You want to perform a musical about the I-35 corridor and a grain silo?6 Sure. Let’s go.

It’s only in hindsight that those involved have been able to put words to the ethos that made it all work, which someone captured a few years ago at a Memory Jam:

And it’s only in hindsight that I realized how much of this I’d internalized in the intervening years, especially the Radical Hospitality and Lifelong Learning bits. You could do worse arranging your way of being in the world around this.7

Robert Faires, the Austin Chronicle editor who saw something in my writing and gave me the advice/confidence/kick in the ass I needed to keep going, is writing a book about that time and that place. There’s a Kickstarter8. Give if you feel drawn to it.

The most recent update featured this image, which was taken by Bret Brookshire, whose photos from that time are what I’ve judged all future promo shots against.

This was (I think) the first show I ever stage managed on my own. I made every mistake you can make, including almost burning the theater down.

I know it was the first show that forced me to confront a couple of unpleasant truths about myself, not limited to my whiteness, especially on the night just after the afternoon O.J. Simpson Bronco chase. It was also the first show where I had to run out to buy underpants for one of the actors because she forgot9 hers and didn’t want to accidentally give the audience more of a show than they paid for.

What a time it was, to quote the great bard Paul Simon. Hopefully, we can capture some of what happened, if only to provide a blueprint for the future.10

And now:

• Lyle W. Fass captures the magic of Iceland (and why I’ll return as many times as I can.)

• Building a movement, one stitch at a time.

• My favorite Uncle on math and education and Einstein.

• “Is this what it means to ossify?”11

• One of the reasons I’ve never felt bad about eating pork.

• This piece on congruence resonated.

• Once we shovel out, I’ll need to see this, if only because of my work at the Fenimore Farm.

• I needed this. You might, too: How to Hold it Together.

During 2024’s season, I focused on bulking up my weaving skills2 and made some wool yardage that will (eventually (once I weave the second half) be made into shawls.

During this past season, I turned my focus to spinning, which was likely the part of making cloth that most women (and girls and boys) would be doing nearly every minute their hands were unoccupied by another necessary task.3

Spinning and I have a tenuous relationship. I own a used wheel,4 which I picked up, gosh, like ten years ago because I pitched a book project about going from sheep to sweater. While I waited to see if it would get picked up—spoiler: it did not5—I figured I’d get a jump on the learning to spin part of the journey.

I absolutely hated it.

Coaxing a usable ply from some sheep fluff and rotation is hard. Not intellectually hard, mind, because the microscopic little barbs on each hair really want to interlock but physically hard. Coordinating my feet and hands and the wheel was work.

Eventually, I could produce something not terrible and vaguely yarn-like. I resented how simultaneously sticky and slippery wool could be, as well as how my own limbs couldn’t master a job that was done by literal children.

I spun one skein of yarn. I knitted one hat from it.

Technically, I went into this museum season knowing how to spin. The club I did not have in my bag was spinning itself.

My museum mentor Garry is not unlike a herding dog, in that he continuously nudges you in the direction he feels you ought to go. This would be irritating if he weren’t absolutely correct most of the time.

In March 2025, at Nash Yarn Fest, the Greater Cumberland Fibershed had a big ol’ trash bag full of 31 ounces of Babydoll+Merino wool already processed into sliver.6 The price was right for fleece I was certain I’d screw up. So I brought it to New York to see how much ugly yarn I could spin this summer.

It took a hot minute to remember how wheels work, especially given that my home wheel is modern and my work wheels are not. All of the same parts are there, mind, but they are in a different configuration. And the older wheels can be cantankerous7 at times.

But I kept going, urged on by Garry’s nudges8 and a garbage bag full of fiber.

And so I spun. I made some lumpy, bumpy yarn. I kept spinning.

After four months of spinning, making yarn became kinda fun, so much so that I picked up other bits-and-bobs of prepared fleece from local sources just to see what would happen. By the end of the museum season, spinning yarn was second nature.9

There’s a lesson in here about perseverance and practice and confidence—but you already know it. Sometimes, you need a reminder, tho.

As for what this will become? Well. I know next to nothing about natural dyeing. Plus, we harvested our humble-but-sincere flax crop in October…

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Some links:

• Be John Beam.

• I want to go there.

• I mean…opening the parking lot to homeless students is great but…

• How much society has changed and hasn’t changed at all: “A woman who’s still in a marriage is presumably consenting to sex,” adding, “Maybe this is the risk of being married, you know?”

• The idea of a four-hour play fills me with dread but this one sounds interesting enough to overcome my resistance because it’s about building community, theater, and dragons.

• We need more fiction set on (or around) Saturn.

• My favorite holiday song.

One of my all-time favorite writers is Michael Lewis.1 Take it as read that I’m in the tank for his work.

While Lewis is best known for books about finance and sports (like The Big Short, The Blind Side, and Liar’s Poker), his newest beat is government systems. The Fifth Risk and The Premonition should be required reading for anyone who lives in the U.S. and wasn’t paying enough attention in civics class.2

No matter the topics, his biggest skill as a writer/reporter is telling stories about people who care deeply about niche topics—rare diseases, baseball stats, tornados— that wind-up having broad implications. Lewis’ skill makes it both personal and universal.

Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service is only sort-of a Michael Lewis book. It’s not a deep dive by Lewis into something that seems complicated but isn’t once you start taking it apart like, say, credit default swaps. Instead, Who is Government is a compilation of columns Lewis commissioned from other writers for the Washington Post. Each column finds an under-appreciated bureaucrat3 and explains what it is they do and why what they do is important.

While the book itself is a primer on why you need a government to implement large projects whose benefits don’t necessarily generate profit, it is also a primer on writing voice and reporting style. Geraldine Brooks, for example, doesn’t sound like John Lanchester who is completely different in tone than Casey Cep. But all of them are telling compelling stories about regular Americans who just happen to care about what they can do to make this a better place, even if it’s something as seeming insignificant as shoring up coal mines or mowing the lawns at Arlington.

All of it has value. Most of it isn’t front-of-mind. All of it would be missed if it disappeared, as we discovered when the government shut down.

Well worth a read, is what I’m saying.

Also: check out The Partnership for Public Service. Not only have they tracked what the actual cost of the shutdown was, they continue to track all of the projects that are being destroyed by the current administration. If you go to the Impact Map, you can see what’s happening in your neck of the woods.

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I promise that more historical craft/Isabella Bird/random nonsense is coming.

But first, some links:

• I want all of these Dorothy Waugh posters.

• “How are you making out with your problem?” “We are holding our own.”

• I kinda wish I didn’t know this existed.

• “If you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal.”

• Big fan of Heather Cox Richardson but this diary entry from late October is particularly resonant. History always rhymes.

• This story about Revolutionary War re-enactors in The Atlantic4 by Caity Weaver stirred up big feelings in the re-enacting community.5 It’s a great read, however.

  Some quotes:

  

  

  And that might be the thing to keep in mind during these times: It could end up anywhere. We just don’t know yet.

The rage I am experiencing right now is beyond description.

Our tax dollars are being used for this. Rather than actually feed people who need food, our money is in the hands of cowards who control all three branches of the Federal government and have the stones to blame their failure to negotiate, which is what governing actually requires, on everything but their own fear and incompetence.

I JUST CANNOT.

And, yet. I must. We all must. The only way out of this is through.

If nothing else, our current shitshow is teaching me to appreciate the gentle, quiet moments. The glimmers.

For the past three years, I’ve given ghost tours2 at the Farmers’ Museum/Fenimore Farm. I’m largely indifferent about giving the tours. I don’t eagerly anticipate them, nor do I actively loathe them. Once I figured out that the dark and the buildings do most of the work, I leaned into the tours.

For me, the magic is in my drive home after.

That first year, I happened to be listening to Terry Pratchett’s Masquerade when I pulled out of the parking lot after my shift. No companion could have been more ideal.

The following year, I made a point of saving the last chapters of Monstrous Regiment3 for October.

This year was Jingo.4 It could not have been more appropriate. Me, alone in the dark, hurtling down roads I know well, able to fully fall into the story and forget about all of *waves hands around.* Thirty-five minutes of escape and amusement and wonder at how good Terry P was, and how funny and how smart.

It’s these moments—whatever they look like for you—that will get us through. We just have to notice them.

(Before the promised links: Now would be a great time to donate to Feeding America. We are all much closer to food insecurity than we are to being billionaires. Remember that and act like it.)

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LINKS:

• When teaching history, it’s also important to go small.5

• The meaning of Carhartt and how our clothes are more than just objects.

• Cyndi Lee and equanimity.

• I would like to go here.

• We’ve been divided before. We will be again. But there are blueprints for thinking through what comes next.

• We have always found ways to disappoint our parents, just ask Zizizi of Assyria.

• “Oh, well. We don’t mean you.”

• The economic collapse of 2009 taught us absolutely nothing.

• I should set my death list up.

Garry, the Yoda to my Skywalker (in the ways of fiber and dye and weaving), suggested a new approach: copper and ammonia can make a mighty fine dye and requires minimal effort.

He had me, of course, at “minimal effort.”

Step one: text your husband to see if we have any copper in the house that can be spared.

Step two: put spare copper, ammonia, and water into a non-reactive container.

Step three: wait.

Step four: when the liquid is blue-green-ish, add yarn. This was handspun that came from the Fenimore Farm’s sheep, who may or may not be mostly a Cheviot-Merino cross.2

Step five: wait.

Step six: feel very sad and gray. Rinse everything.

Step seven: acceptance. I mean…it’s not awful? But not what I’d hoped.

Will there be more lazy dying this season? Stay tuned!

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Some links, as a treat:

• Chuck Wendig eats a bunch of apples every fall. His reviews are perfection.

• It’s a question to ask right now: Who goes Nazi?

• This is why I’m not writing a book right now (or ever again, most likely).

• You may not know this part of the story of the Erie Canal.3

• I had the opportunity to write about a great place for Modern Daily Knitting.

Because I’ve been making so much yarn this season,2 I’ve been reading about natural dyes. While yarn is great, colorful yarn is even better.

However. I don’t want the dyeing to require much effort on my part. We do a whole natural dyeing weekend every three years and it’s A LOT of work. Caldrons are involved, as is constantly tending fires. As is schlepping water buckets and measuring beetles and muttering numbers.

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I’ve been lead to believe there are some easier ways. I stumbled across a version of this indigo dye that uses yeast, ammonia, and indigo, which are three things I can easily get my hands on.

Yeast I pulled out of my freezer at home. Ammonia was trickier because our grocery stores were out of it3 but Walmart wasn’t. I spelunked into one of the museum’s basements for the indigo.

Thus armed, I mixed up the dye as directed.

According to the instructions, you know the dye is ready when the solution is yellow-green.

After a month, mine looked like this:

Those of you who aren’t color blind will note that this is NOT a yellow green. It is blue-gray, maybe with some green if you squint super hard.

We4 were pretty sure this batch was a failure and have a guess as to why.5 Still, we decided to see what happened if we tried to dye with it.

I tossed in some fabric no one cared about:

Let it sit for a bit. Pulled it out to dry.6

While these looked blue immediately after being removed from the jar, I guessed it was only a surface color and would wash right out.

I was, sadly, correct.

Still, I press on. I currently have another pot of lazy dye going, this time with copper pipe. Will update as warranted.

And, no. This isn’t now a natural dyeing blog/newsletter where I wax rhapsodic about madder and alum.7 But I did want to capture this information somewhere and here seems as good as anywhere else.

Use it as you will.

I will get back to Isabella Bird, mind. Just need to get through the museum season first. Know that she’s still out there, exploring.

2

So far this year:

Over the course of the summer, as part of my regular duties at the Fenimore Farm, I dusted off my performance skills (and my fetching straw bonnet) to deliver an oration by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.1 It’s her keynote address from 1848’s first convention on women’s suffrage, which took place just a couple of hours from me in Seneca Falls.2

For the past couple of years, during the Fenimore Farms’ July 4th Celebration, I’ve delivered the “Declaration of Sentiments,” which is the document attendees signed in 1848. I take the stage right after the Declaration of Independence is read from the Tavern balcony and cheered by those below.3 Seems like a fitting time to remind the assembled that America has always been a work in progress and that some have always been more equal that others.4

This summer seemed like a good time to reinforce that fact—and to remind people that the work of equality is never, ever done. Never.5

In 1848, three hundred people gathered in the Finger Lakes to hear about and unite around the fight for women’s suffrage. More than 70 years later, women across the country would finally be allowed to vote.6 Most of the women (and men) who attended the Seneca Falls convention didn’t live long enough7 to see how it all played out. Yet they gathered and marched and organized regardless. Some were tossed in jail and force fed; some were beaten by cops. And yet, they kept at it.

Now, of course, we’re fighting to keep the vote, which some would happily strip away from us. And for those who argue that women voting is settled law, let me tap my “Roe v. Wade” sign.8

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The forces that want to go back to the “Good Old Days,” the ones where every non-white-straight-man knew his or her place in the order of things,9 will never, ever rest. Never. Which became a topic of conversation with audience members after performances this summer.

Most of the folks who stopped to talk afterwards expressed the same emotion: resignation with a side of weariness. Same, I said. SAME.

One woman came up after to tell her story of fighting with Bell Labs in the early 1980s to become a lineman, which was the job she was most suited for and that paid about twice what the “women’s jobs” paid. She wore them down, eventually, but always reminded her daughters and grand-daughters that you have to stand up for yourself.

One woman was surprised that a woman could make such a sophisticated argument in the mid-19th century.10 To which I said that we’ve likely been making a sophisticated argument since the dawn of time—or, at least, the dawn of democracy—and that no one paid attention before.

None of Stanton called out was new, not now, not in the 19th century, not in the 16th century. But Stanton linked it in her speech to our country’s foundational documents. She talks about the consent of the governed, about taxation without representation, about unjust laws.

Stanton declared:

“…we are assembled to protest against a form of government existing without the consent of the governed—to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such is graceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love; laws which make her the mere dependent on his bounty.

“The right is ours. Have it, we must. Use it, we will.

“The pens, the tongues, the fortunes, the indomitable wills of many women are already pledged to secure this right. The great truth that no just government can be formed without the consent of the governed we shall echo and re-echo in the ears of the unjust judge, until by continual coming we shall weary him.”

I keep coming back to that line: until by continual coming we shall weary him. It’s great fun to say out loud. But it’s also a reminder that real change is multi-generational. For every successful new hope, the empire will strike back.11 That’s just how humans work. As much as we want change, we also resist it.

Stanton winds her speech up with a reminder that the fight will be hard and that the opposition has organized the rules so that they can’t lose.

“We do not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers of popular applause, but over the thorns of bigotry and prejudice will be our way, and on our banners will beat the dark storm clouds of opposition from those who have entrenched themselves behind the stormy bulwarks of custom and authority, and who have fortified their position by every means, holy and unholy.”

Yes, of course the game is rigged, she reminds the crowd. However.

“…we will steadfastly abide the result. Unmoved we will bear it aloft. Undauntedly we will unfurl it to the gale, for we know that the storm cannot rend from it a shred, that the electric flash will but more clearly show to us the glorious words inscribed upon it: Equality of Rights.”

Repeating her words a few dozen times this summer was a spine-stiffener. We’ve been here before; we’ll be here again. But what are we going to do about it right now, even if we’ll never see the end of it?

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La links:

• Some of you know that the differences in coroners and medical examiner systems12 might be the topic I can yammer on about endlessly. Here’s another collection of data to add to my mental file folders. (h/t to Jen A. Miller.)

• Toile that tells the story of its making.

• I suspect this one story about the Med Spa industry is only a harbinger of many, many more to come.

• If you only listen to one episode of Maintenance Phase, make it this one on seed oils.

1

The short shows at the Fenimore Farm are part of the Glimmer Globe Theatre Company’s July and August programming. Also in the rotation was Andre Lake, who took on a speech by Henry Highland Garnet, a leading figure in the abolition movement, and first person of color to address the U.S. House of Representatives.

I didn’t get a chance to see Andre’s performance—but can attest that his reading of Frederick Douglass’ “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July” is pretty darn good.

Both Bird and I saw Japan, nearly 150 years apart. Letter by letter, I followed Bird. She started in Tokyo, then traveled mostly on horseback through the countryside north of that city and up to Aomori, where she hitched a ride on a boat up to Hokkaido, the most northerly island in the chain. In Bird’s time, most of the population were Ainu, the indigenous people who were in the process of being subjugated to Japanese rule. Even now, most non-Japanese people don’t travel up to Hokkaido. In the 19th century, it was almost unheard of. She was the first European and the first woman to experience this part of this only recently opened country.

Bird didn’t travel alone, mind. At the start of her journey, she worked with an acquaintance at the British Consulate to hire an interpreter/fixer to smooth her path through the unbeaten (by a white person) terrain. Through that process, she found Ito, a 19-year old Japanese would-be dandy with a questionable past. The mis-matched pair would be fantastic fodder for a buddy comedy, if only Hollywood producers found the idea of a buddy comedy about a middle-aged matron marketable.

I finished reading Unbeaten Tracks in February 2020. The story was enjoyable enough. The pictures she painted about her Japan both tracked with what my experience had been and showed me a wildly strange place. After turning the last page — on it, Isabella broke down how much she spent at each city, just in case someone wanted to recreate her trip — I put the book on my desk with the intention of looking up some of the places she’d been to see what they looked like now. It promptly was buried by about 3,000 other pieces of paper. In the whirlwind of daily life with kids and a job and a spouse, Bird’s adventures would occasionally pop back into my head but would quickly be replaced by a grocery list or a trip to the post office.

Then March 2020 happened.

Try to remember what those early covid-days were like. There were only a couple of cases in the Pacific Northwest—and those were in assisted living facilities. The federal government insisted that they had it contained. We believed them enough to make plans.

In my part of the state, rumors about New York City hospitals starting to see cases were whispered. Then there was a gigantic outbreak in Westchester. Then there were portable morgues in place in Queens, makeshift quarantine beds in the Javits Center, and a staging area in Central Park. I was working on a college campus upstate, where we are close enough to feel connected to the city but have more cows than people. The college sent everyone home for an extra spring break week and fully expected to be back to normal by early April.

As we now all know, anything approaching normal was (and is) a long way from there.

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During the first few weeks of lock-down, I escaped into Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. When I finished that, I picked up A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, the book that Demers and Edith enjoyed. In it, Isabella travels the American West 1873. She started in San Francisco, took the train to Truckee, then rode a borrowed horse to Estes Park, past Colorado Springs, and around again. During that time, she also climbed Long’s Peak, worked as a cook/housekeeper when a global economic collapse froze her banks accounts, and met the love of her life (maybe), who would later be killed in a bar fight.

While I recognize most of the names of the places she saw, it feels like a foreign county. I’ve not traveled in the American West (again, other than the Denver airport) and don’t have a good sense of what the land outside of the cities is like. Given the separation between Bird’s time and mine, what she describes feels even more alien. For example, this reminder that public health crises are nothing new: those in the last stages of consumption1 would travel to Colorado to take in the thin air. Many, of course, would die before they got there. Which Isabella observed during a few day’s stay in a boarding house. The proprietess dealt with one or two dead strangers a month, laying them out on chairs in the front parlor before the authorities (such as they were) buried them outside of town.

Yes, the past is another country.2 Her Japan is not my Japan. Her Albany is not mine. I’d assume that her Estes Park would follow that pattern. That might be what makes Never in Hand work: the juxtaposition of then and now. So much has changed — we don’t take boats and trains anymore really, for starters — but so much about being human is exactly the same, even if ladies no longer wear corsets for anything but cosplay. This story is about those similarities and differences as well as all of the surprises waiting in the archives, like Mr Roessle, the Celery King. I’ve been exploring all of that in telling the story of a Victorian-era badass adventurer who would be absolutely appalled to be called one.

So where shall we go from here, dear reader? More about the rocky mountains? Japan? Where else she went? Her short-lived marriage? Do you want to choose the next part of her adventure you read? Or is it dealer’s choice?3

I have folders and tabs and more folders ready to go.

Some related (and not) links:

• Because in my brain everything circles back to Isabella Bird, this piece about Mathelinda Nabugodi’s new book in the New York Times reminds me that a) Bird and her family were part of the anti-slavery movement and made a big deal out of forgoing sugar in their tee and b) everything connects.

• If this is your thing,4 it’s time for 'Bama Rush.

• I pushed to publish this installment of Bird’s story today mostly so that I can link to the brilliant Heather Cox Richardson’s celebration of Frances Perkins, who was another woman who could always find a way when there was no way. You could do worse than taking her attitude as inspiration.

What might be more surprising than Bird’s unusual vocation for a woman of her time3 would be how terrible her health was when she wasn’t traveling. She wound up taking her first trip to North America because her doctors ran out of better ideas. Bird was a sickly child, who failed to thrive despite her economic advantages. When she wasn’t in bed, she was laid out in the sun, which was seen as a potential wonder cure. Various concoctions were poured down her throat throughout her young life. A lot of those miracle elixirs only made her problems worse.

The most identifiable physical problem she had was a series of growths along her spine, which were operated on when she was in her early teens. But she also suffered from insomnia and what would likely be diagnosed as clinical depression now. As a young woman, her view of the world came from her bed, from books and the stories her mother told her and her sister. In her late teens, her doctors suggested a change of scenery might do her good. Her father handed her 100 pounds and told her to come back when the money ran out.

It’s hard to say what both her parents and her physicians imagined would happen. Did they expect her to thrive in the sea air? Or did they expect the coaches and trains to break her for good? And does it matter what they thought, given that we know how it turned out? She became known as the Samson abroad and the invalid at home. Travel saved her life—and allowed others to live vicariously through her, even now.

Cheryl Demers, who lives4 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, discovered Bird’s Rocky Mountain stories in the early 1990s. She was newly divorced and was renting a basement apartment from “a deeply Christian gal who loved to read.” Demers asked for a book recommendation and her landlord suggested Bird’s book about the Colorado territory.

“I was in love with it. I was like, ‘This is the best book I've ever read, ever’ because Isabella Bird took me on her journey with her. I bought several copies for friends for birthdays and gave one to my mom. I wanted to share something I thought was gold,” Demers said.

Years later, Demers was a nursing home social worker. She became friends with Edith, who as in her late 80s and blind. Over dinner each night, Demers would read Bird’s book to Edith.

“The more we read, the more Edith was like, ‘I feel like I know this lady. I feel like I'm on her adventures,’” Demers said.

Edith was also an elder in the Chippewa Sioux Tribe. She loved reading about the history of the pioneers, because she always felt the native land had been taken from them.5 But Bird’s descriptions and attitude toward the native people in Colorado, which reflected the ideas of the late-Victorians and were less than kind, captured some essence of Edith’s experience.

“She shared with me how she had to go to Indian school,” Demers said. “She was taken away from her own family, her mom and her dad. She said her dad was not around much, and he drank. She had to stay in Indian school until she was married off."

Bird’s travelog unlocked Edith’s memories enough that she was willing to give Demers a glimpse into what life was like back then, which was its own reward. Mostly, though, Edith and Demers simply embraced Bird’s book.

“With Isabella, we fell in love with the part where the skunk goes under her home. Then when we got to the part about Mountain Jim,6 and she was like, "Can you read that over to me?’ And I did. And she said, ‘This is an adventure. This is romance.’"

The pair got through the story before Edith’s passing in 2010. But before her end came, Edith helped Demers plan her second wedding, which took place earlier that year.

“All of it was just a wonderful, wonderful experience and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I also think when I share this, Edith is with me in a different way,” Demers said. “Every time on my wedding anniversary, I think of Edith, because she had to help in my dress selection. When I think of her, and then I think of us reading the book together. When you're in a nursing home, reading carries you away. You get to go somewhere.”

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That urge to go somewhere led me to Isabella Bird shortly after the pandemic lockdowns in early 2020. For me, however, the draw wasn’t her Rocky Mountain adventure, mostly because I haven’t spent much time in Colorado proper.7 Instead, it was Bird’s Japan journey that first pulled me in.

A few months before we all started to go more or less nowhere, I’d gotten to take the trip of a lifetime to Japan. I went with my Dad, who has long been a Japanophile. In short, it was a trip I’ll never forget. Yes, Japan is wonderful and stunning; but I spent ten days in a tiny ship’s cabin with my Dad, with whom I’ve not lived in more than 30 years. In Japan, it fully sunk in that my Dad still had the will to drink in every last shrine and garden and that his body would not let him because aging cannot be stopped.

For me, the trip was an opportunity to lean into how time passes so quickly while simultaneously being knocked on my ass by how odd and also familiar Japan is.

Shortly after we got back, I wandered over a mention of Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, which was her travelog of a journey from Tokyo to Hokkaido in 1878. I’d never heard of her before that moment. But when I started reading (and once I got used to the rhythms of her writing), she felt like an old friend, if one who is more no-nonsense than anyone I know.

Bird first sees Japan from the water, as her ship pulls into Yokohama, the port town that feeds into Tokyo.8

“The day was soft and grey,” she begins, “with a little faint blue sky, and though the coast of Japan is much more prepossessing than most coasts, there were no startling surprises either of colour or form. Broken wooded ridges, deeply cleft, rise from the water’s edge, grey, deep-roofed villages cluster about the mouths of the ravines, and terraces of rice cultivation, bright with the greenness of English lawns, run up to a great height among dark masses of upland forest.”

And in that instant, I was back on that luxury cruise ship on the Inland sea, feeling the cool, damp air as the deck rocked under me. Our first morning was overcast. The blue-gray water met the blue-gray sky, except where is was broken by the pine-laden coast. The boat’s path was dotted with rocky islands, which seemed to be arranged by the volcanoes that birthed them in just the right places to provide a gasp-inducing composition. The view looked like it had been retouched to evoke wonder and awe. Instead, it was right out my window on a Tuesday.

A couple of links:

• This remains one of my favorite museum-going experiences ever, which means that I’m going to have to get myself to Oakland, CA.

• Trans people have always existed. Example #4002: 18th Century France.

• I think this woman and Bird were of similar vibe.

• Cherie Priest nails the current state of the publishing industry. (And buy her books!)

• I dream of taking a ride with Bernd Maylander.

8

I’m going to put this here, because it’s one of the stories from her Japan book that proves that people will always behave like people, no matter when or where.

So it was custom at the time in rural Japan to commemorate the death of a loved one by suspending a piece of cloth over a pond or stream. You would come each day and pour a dipper-ful of water through the cloth. When the cloth had weakened enough that the dipper fell through, your time of mourning had ended.

Very sweet, yes.

However.

You could speed the whole process up by buying cloth that was already thinned in the middle. You could also pay someone to come each day and make the offering for you. While Bird doesn’t mention it outright, I strongly suspect you could also buy a heavier dipper.

Because of course you could.

In the U.S., Bird might be best known for her 1873 memoir A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. Her story of riding on horseback through the Colorado Territory is told through a series of letters written to her sister in their native England. Bird was 42, had just finished a trip through Australian, New Zealand, and what would be Hawaii. But this trip tested her in new ways—not the least of which was falling for a handsome trapper—and describes a gorgeous, pitiless place that no longer exists. In her native England, her books about backcountry trips in China, Japan, Malaysia, and Korea might be better known.

At its most basic, Bird’s purpose was to take readers with her to places they could not go because of financial, social, or physical reasons. She travels because it makes her feel less terrible (more on that in a minute) and to share the adventure with her sister Hennie, whose poor health keeps her in England. Even when Bird is nearly killed fording a flooded river on horseback, for example, she shakes it off with a middle-aged sturdiness and a stiff-upper lip, which are qualities often admired but rarely ever celebrated. It’s that quiet competence might have led to the wider world of books to forget her. If she were more inclined to drama, she might still be a household name.

Regardless, it’s likely she’d remain unknown in my personal world had there not been a pandemic. And, no, I’m not saying that a pandemic happened simply to introduce me to a travel writer I hadn’t before known. In this time when there are so many tragedies of all shapes and sizes, it’s become important to pay attention to any available silver linings. For me, falling into Bird’s world has been one of the silvery-est.

Because of the pandemic, I’ve met a woman who didn’t confirm to what I’d been taught women of that period were, which is the Angel of the House who struggled under the patriarchy while having a dozen children and dying young. Bird married in middle age, was widowed a few years later, and never had children. Her first successful book wasn’t published until she was in her mid-40s. After her husband’s death, she trained as a nurse, then founded a medical mission in her husband’s honor in India. Because of an ill-timed invasion, she found herself a war reporter during the Japanese invasion of Korea, after she’d been on a mapping mission to Kurdistan and Persia.

She did this more than 175 years ago. I have all of the advantages of a modern woman and can’t leave my house.1

Physically, I cannot go anywhere I haven’t already been a million times. But because of my ever-growing obsession with discovering as much as I can about Bird, I’ve traveled in time and space. Even now, assuming that we are able to travel again in the near future, I want to know more and plan to visit her archives in Edinburgh and Denver.2 I intend to revisit as many of the places she saw in order to know how the world she experienced has changed—and how it hasn’t.

Some of the places she went are already familiar to me. In 1852, during her first trip to the United State when she was in her early 20s, she traveled all over the Eastern U.S. and into Canada’s Maritimes. One of her stops was Albany, New York, which happens to be a city I know well, if only because it’s the largest city near Oneonta, N.Y., where I’ve lived for 20+ years.

“Albany is one of the prettiest towns in the Union,” she wrote from her hotel room near what is now the state capital complex. From there, she could see the traffic on the Hudson River, which is where the Erie and Champlain canals met. The river is full of sloops and steamers, “painted white, and the sails are perfectly dazzling in their purity, and twenty, thirty, and forty of these flotillas may be seen in the course of a morning.”

One hundred and fifty years into the future, it’s hard to imagine anyone associating the words “pretty” or “pure” to Albany. It is lovely enough, mind, but hardly something to write home about, mostly because all of its more charming districts have been carved up by interstates. The canals and the river no longer dictate how the city operates. Now it’s more about political currents more than actual ones.

Because I am the right kind of nerd, I found out what happened to the Delavan (which she misspells “Delaval”), the hotel Bird stayed in. She described it as “peculiar” and “comfortable,” which is bland enough. What stuck out to her was that the waiters were Irish girls who worked under a “coloured” manager, “and their civility and alacrity made me wonder that the highly-paid services of male waiters were more more frequently dispensed with.”

Theophilus Roessle, the self-described “Celery King,” owned the Delavan Hotel at that time, having recently purchased it from Edward Delavan, a wealthy abolitionist.3 The hotel itself employed Stephan Myers, who was one of the leaders of the Underground Railroad in the area. Many of the Black men who worked at the hotel were also workers in the area’s anti-slavery movement. An anti-slavery activist herself, Bird may have known this before she checked in.

Roessle, said Celery King, was a German immigrant made his fortune growing exactly what you’d expect. He invested his celery money in real estate, which was a wise choice since the Victorian celery bubble (and, yes, there was a Victorian celery bubble) would burst a few years later. He sold the hotel in 1890. You can’t visit it because it burned down in 1892. The Egg, which is one of the more iconic buildings on the Albany skyline, stands there now, if the old maps are to be trusted.

Bird’s room looked directly onto the train tracks. “All night long,” she writes, “[I] was serenaded with screams, ringing of bells, and cries of ‘All aboard!’ and ‘go ahead!’” After her brief stay, she’d take that train to New York City. I’ve taken that same train — well, I imagine the physical train is different after all these years — to New York City myself.

Her description of that ride remains true. “A very undignified scramble takes place for the seats on the right side of the cars, as the scenery for 130 miles is perfectly magnificent. [The tracks] run along the very verge of the river, below a steep cliff, but often are supported just above the surface of the water upon a wooden platform,” she writes. A couple of sentences later she mentions how magnificent the view is, with the November sun beaming “upon swelling hills, green savannahs, and waving woods.”

The only difference between how I’d write about the same trip compared to her writing might be word choice. Rest assured, the scramble for seats on the river side of the train (as well as the hills, plains, and woods) remains the same.

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Some links (not Bird related):

• It is very possible to have too much money: the Enhanced Games

• Reader: I cried a little.

• I’m a member of the We Do Not Care Club4.

• We talk about this a lot when we talk about weaving at the Fenimore Farm.

• It’s almost like this country wants us to be exhausted and broke just because we care about other people.

• NEW LIFE QUEST.

• The Declaration of Sentiments hits harder this year.

• Why feeling good feels like a full-time job.5

• Perhaps the most amusing story I’ve written about lately. Humans can be great.

On March 8, 2025, I was on an eight mile training1 run and at mile seven, the arch of my right foot started to hurt in a new way. Weird, I thought, and ran the last mile figuring it would sort itself out.

By that afternoon, my ankle was the size of a softball. Weird, I thought, but I’m sure it will sort itself out.

I worked Nash Yarn Fest and was on my feet for hours and hours, which meant as much ibuprofen as it was medically appropriate to take because I was in a not-small amount of pain. By the time I got home, my ankle was even more swollen. My walk was more like a hop-and-drag.

So I took myself to the urgent clinic, where the PA admired how large my ankle was. There were x-rays, which confirmed no broken bones, which seemed ideal.2 She wasn’t sure what was happening but clearly something was so I was referred to a sports medicine3 orthopedist in Delhi, a tiny town about a 30 minute drive away. His soonist appointment was a week out.

Which…fine. What’s one more week? Then we’ll get this all figured out and I’ll be back to running. No need to defer my half marathon entry. Or, if I can’t run that far, I can just drop down to the 5K.

The sports medicine doc diagnosed posterior tibial tendon tendonitis with a possible stress fracture. The prescription was classic RICE plus PT. While he was relatively certain it should clear up in a few weeks, we scheduled an appointment for four weeks out.

Reader: it did not clear up.

Finally, my insurance company was willing to pay for an MRI. The closest appointment was two weeks out in Cobleskill, which is 40 minutes from my house in the opposite direction from the route I’d take to Delhi.

A brief pause here: All of this driving is one of the things few people talk about when they talk about rural healthcare. Yes, our system has most of the medical professionals you might want; however, NONE OF THEM ARE IN THE SAME PLACE. Oh, and also, there aren’t enough of them to get appointments quickly. Unlike a large city where there might be a dozen cardiologists in the same hospital, we might have one who spreads her time between four different offices that are scattered across hundreds of miles.4

I have so many advantages, mind. My insurance is pretty good. My work schedule is fairly flexible. I have a car and can drive. I know how to make the phone calls needed to get the system to work. But maybe half of the people who live here do not have all of those advantages.

Back to the story…

The MRI revealed that the tendonitis is actually a torn muscle and a really torn tendon. Sports medicine guy called me5 to talk over the results.

“I’m going to refer you to the podiatrist who knows ankles,” he said.

“Great,” I said. “I’m going to go ahead and run the 5K, tho. That’ll be fine?”

*silence*

“But are you still in pain?” he asked.

“I mean…yes.6 But it’s just a 5K.”

*judgmental silence*

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I said.7

This conversation was mid-April. The earliest the ankle person8 could see me was August 11.9

So this is where I am. I haven’t really run since early March and am doing a poor job of managing normal life stresses without that outlet.10 I can kinda walk without pain if I wear my new pair of Brooks Glycerins, which were recommended by the PT. I’ll find out soon (maybe) if surgery and/or a boot is in my future. And then I’ll discover how long it will take to schedule surgery and how far I’ll need to travel for that to happen. Will my injury be a year old before I can get back to something approximating normal?

I mention all of this not (just) to complain but to highlight some fundamental flaws in our health care system. And it’s only going to get worse. The current administration’s choice to cancel a bunch of visas will lead to even fewer doctors in our rural hospitals. The current U.S. House budget would de-stabilize Medicare and Medicaid so much that rural systems would face bankruptcy quickly.

To say nothing, of course, in the general increase in needless suffering.

Are we great again yet?

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Anyway: some links—

• This story makes me suddenly realize the backstory behind a bunch of conversations about solar with constituents I’ve had lately.

• How much will you pay for Made in the USA?

• The step between “Dr. Oz” and “Nazi” is not a big one.

• Your emergency Feel Better kit.

• Ultrarunner John Kelly is writing/has written a great couple of posts on applying the lessons he’s learned at Barkley (and other long races) to any large project, including a) his tech business that uses AI for something-something medical and b) his current attempt at a Fastest Known Time for the Appalachian Trail. He’s a pretty smart guy and worth a read, even if you don’t run or code.

  Sample quote:

  

• Here’s what we forget when we start cutting government services: No one knows when they don’t die.

• It’s PUFFIN-FLINGING TIME.

• Blair Braverman went out into the frozen wilderness with a commercially available bug-out bag. It got philosophical.

• Stormwater management and Tom Holland.11

• This Fallen World would be more tolerable with more mascots.

  

• Re: the above quote—If you haven’t read Terry Pratchett, you’re only hurting yourself. Here’s why you should and where to start.

• SHOW ME THE LIES.

• I cannot even: Elon’s town.

• A retired journalist is on a cruise around the world. It is not going well, which is to our benefit.1213

Bird’s second trip1 across the Atlantic was scheduled to last six months but took a year. The end goal was to add her boots-on-the-ground observations to a manuscript her father had mostly completed about religion in the U.S.

Instead, her observations were turned into a second book about America, one where she focused on explaining how these former colonies had changed since the revolution. Bird dug into our systems so that she could explain them to her British readers. What she diagnosed in 1853 — pre-Civil War, remember — are illnesses we are still attempting to cure more than 150 years later.

Kentucky was the first slave state Bird visited. Her first encounter with a slave stuck with her. On the street, she saw “a being created in the image of God, yet the bona fide property of his fellow-man. The first I saw was an African female, the slave of a lady from Florida, with a complexion as black as the law which held her in captivity.”

Bird and her family were strong abolitionists and opposed the trade in the British West Indies (so strongly, in fact, that her aunts refused to use sugar in their tea in protest.) Anti-slavery advocate William Wilberforce was both a relative and a friend of the family. Her anti-slavery stance grew out of her fully felt and deeply studied faith. According to a contemporary biographer, who was a friend-of-a-friend of Isabella, she “went to all the religious meetings, of whatever creed professed, and listened to no fewer than 130 sermons, some of them preached to Indians, to trappers, to negroes, and by negroes.”

Perhaps the service which moved her most was one in the African Baptist Church in Richmond. An “aged negro, called upon to pray, did so in such a manner, reverent, apt, and eloquent, with such perfect diction and accent and with such a fullness of thoughtful petition, that she burst into tears and declared afterwards that her religious life was quickened and strengthened forever by this beautiful prayer uttered by a slave.”

Bird’s objections are grounded in more than the sheer evilness of one person owning another person (which ought to be enough, of course), she also objects because creating an oppressed class of people is just a bad structure to build a country on. At that time, 3 million people were enslaved and 430,000 “colored persons, nominally free, but who occupy a social position of the lowest grade.”

That number will only increase to 6 million in 25 years and that will create “a population dangerous from numbers merely, but doubly, trebly so in their consciousness of oppression, and in the passions which may incite them to such a terrible revenge.”

This alone should be enough for America to do the right thing, both out of naked self-interest and in the eyes of God.

“America boasts of freedom, and of such a progress as the world has never seen before,” Bird wrote, “but while the tide of the Anglo-Saxon race rolls across her continent, and while we contemplate with pleasure a vast nation governed by by free institutions, and professing a pure faith, a hand, faintly seen at present, but destined ‘ere long to force itself upon the attention of all, points to the empires of a by-gone civilization, and shows that they had their periods in which to rise, flourish, and decay, and that slavery was the main cause of that decay.”

In another chapter she concludes, “The struggle between the advocates of freedom and slavery is now convulsing America…and appearances seem to indicate a prolonged and disastrous conflict between the North and the South.”

From a 2020 vantage point, we know how that turned out. Rather than devote our collective energy into reconstruction after the Civil War until the job was done, we chose instead to prop up our racist past over and over again with predictable results. In 2021, after a summer of protest and after an armed insurrection marched into the U.S. Capital in support of a white supremacist (among other things),2 Bird’s observation seems especially prescient. She could see what would happen long before we got here.

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Bird’s travels through America and parts of Canada weren’t all devoted to pointing out injustice. Among other adventures, she spent a week in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she communed with the poet and other great thinkers of the day like James Russel Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau3.

(As you might have already figured out, Bird had no problem making her opinions known. Of Longfellow’s work she said, “Although it is very unequal and occasionally fantastic, and though in one of his greatest poems the English language appears to dance in chains in the hexameter, many of his shorter pieces well upwards from the heart, in a manner which is likely to ensure durable fame for their author.” Which is a great 19th century burn.)

Bird returned to England from her second trip to America at the end of April 1858. That very day, her father caught influenza and was dead by mid-May. Dora, Hennie, and Isabella grieved.

The work went on, however. She added to her father’s draft and Some account of the Great Religious Awakening now going on in the United States was published. Additionally, she wrote a ten episode travelogue for a magazine and a couple of pamphlets about abolition, a cause she would continue to fight for. With that, her own work became increasingly known. She was 25.

The remaining Birds moved to Edinburgh after their patriarch’s death. There, Isabella’s health declined. She threw her energy in to a charity working to relocate those who lived in the Outer Hebrides, where poverty and famine were increasing both human misery and mortality. She made a short trip to Canada in 1866 to see those islanders resettled. Then, that August, her mother died. Isabella was 34.

Years pass, as they do. Isabella and Henrietta stayed in Scotland and did their best to save those living in urban squalor. (Just a note: their idea of how to “save” people wouldn’t square well with what we’d do now. That is a conversation for later.) She helps get the Harris Tweed industry on its feet to provide jobs for crofters. She campaigns for clean, freely available water for Edinburgh’s poor so that they have more options than whisky. But it’s not enough.

“I feel as if my life were spent in the very ignoble occupation of taking care of myself, and that unless some disturbing influences arise I am in great danger of becoming perfectly encrusted with selfishness, and, like the hero of Romola, of living to make life agreeable and its path smooth to myself alone. Indeed, this summer I have made very painful discoveries on this subject and long for a cheerful intellect and self-denying spirit, which seeks not its own and pleaseth not itself,” Isabella wrote in her diary.

By 1872 and back in Britain, Isabella’s health has declined so much that she really doesn’t sleep but spends whole days in bed. Sources hint that she has a mental breakdown of some sort. And, as her doctors did before, they suggest she get on a boat and go somewhere.

By the time of Isabella’s death in 1904, she’ll have traveled to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, the American West, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Saigon, the Malay Peninsula, Kashmir, Tibet, Persia, Kurdistan, Seoul, and Morocco. Along the way, she’ll become a bestselling author, a nurse, and a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. She’ll marry at 50 — and technically become “Isabella Bird Bishop,” although most who know her fail to use her married name. Some even call her husband John Bishop “Mr. Bird.”

A few years later, Mr. Bird will die despite traveling all over England and France to find a cure for his anemia. After going to college for nursing, Isabella will take up travel again. She’ll set-up and support hospitals in rural India. It won’t be easy, especially for a woman who doesn’t really get started until middle age. All of these things will be worth it, for her, for those who read her work, and for the communities who receive medical care.

More4 next time …

1

This aside is actually about the image above these words. Apparently, I can’t footnote a photo caption. Mentally move this there.

When I found this map on the googles, my brain knew I’d seen it before. Eventually it dawned on me: I’ve seen it at work at few million times.

The Fenimore Farm has Samuel Nelson’s office on its property. He hailed from Cooperstown and was a Supreme Court Justice from 1845-1872. What he’s most know for is his role in the Dred Scott decision, which essentially ruled that enslaved people weren’t actually people and couldn’t have rights. Scott, who’d been born in enslavement, had been living in free states for years but remained the property of his owner.

It’s one of the worst decisions in history, according the above informative signage and to this video.

(FWIW: I suspect there are worse decisions but Dred Scott is certainly in the top ten.)

Anyhoo, there’s a whole informative display in the building about Nelson. It doesn’t pull punches. And it also contains this map.

Fun fact—the headstone for Pamelia, one of Nelson’s daughters, is about 20 feet from the building.

The very much legal way that the museum acquired the headstones is its own story and this footnote is long enough.

TL;DR: Everything connects to everything else eventually and we’re all going to wind up with measles.

Isabella Bird was like a wild vine

stuck in a too-small pot.

She needed more room.

She had to get out.

She had to explore.

But petite Isabella,

pale Isabella,

proper Isabella

Was an unlikely candidate for adventure.

— Away with Words: the Daring Story of Isabella Bird (a book for kids) by Lori Mortensen and Kristy Caldwell

#

Isabella was born in Yorkshire to Edward Bird, a vicar in the Church of England in 1831. She was his first child with his second wife Dora. His first wife and child died in one of the many epidemics that swept through India while he was posted there. Remember: this was during the years when the sun never set upon the British Empire, especially in places they could colonize and exploit for cheap labor and material goods. It was what it was — and we will be reckoning with that for at least another century or two.

Three years later, Dora and Edward would welcome Henrietta — Hennie, as she’d become known — to their family. Hennie would thrive through all of the moves the family made from Yorkshire to Maidenhead to Cheshire to Birmingham. Isabella did not. She was a sickly kid, one prone to illness, pain, and insomnia. As an older teen, she had a tumor removed from her spine, which sounds like even more of a nightmare when you think about 1850s anesthesia. When she was in her early 20s, her doctor suggested she wear a steel mesh contraption to hold the weight of her head.

Rather than focus on what Isabella couldn’t do, her parents focused on what she could do. Both girls were given expansive educations — not just “expansive for the lesser sex,” mind. They were taught as if they were boys, with a full curriculum of Latin and logic and botany. Isabella shone in the academic sphere and had a pamphlet contrasting free trade and protectionism published when she was 16.

Isabella’s other strength was horseback riding. She was plunked on a horse as a toddler and grew into an accomplished horsewoman. Her world grew once she could see it from five feet up. And once she found a socially acceptable way to ride astride — women only rode sidesaddle at the time — she was able to see parts of the world where even men failed to tread.

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The family moved frequently — and not because Edward Bird was an in-demand, beloved minister. He kept alienating his congregations because he was strict about the Sabbath. No commerce was to be done on the Lord’s holy day, he firmly believed, but his increasingly middle class parishioners disagreed. They kept the wheels of capitalism moving, especially in a large city like Birmingham, and had no time for Bird’s counsel otherwise.

It’s not like Father Bird had to work. Some of Isabella’s success is due to inherited wealth. It wasn’t castle-in-the-country money, mind, but it wasn’t one-step-from-the-workhouse either. They were comfortable enough to keep the sisters in tutors and saddles. Their parents were their most consistent teachers, with their father telling them about his time in India and instilling them a Jesuit-like method for asking questions about their world.

Their best educator, however, may have been their mother Dora, who was herself highly educated and the daughter of a well-known prebendary in the Church of England. “No one can teach now as my mother taught,” Isabella later said. “It was all so wonderfully interesting that we sat spellbound.”

All of their money and status couldn’t improve Isabella’s health. The spinal surgery wasn’t completely successful — and given that germ theory hadn’t yet been realized, it is a wonder the procedure didn’t kill her outright. Most of her days were spent lying in bed and, when the pain relented enough that she could focus, reading and dreaming about the world outside her bedroom.

At 22, she wasn’t sleeping, still in pain, and suffering from “lassitude.” Her doctors tried bloodletting and leeches, which (surprise) only made her weaker. Bird was prescribed laudanum, potassium bromide, and chlorodyne, which is a mix of opium and cannabis. Bird said drugs made her “more nervous than I have ever been and I cannot remember anything or read a book. These last few days I have felt shaking all over and oppressed with undefined terror.”

Despite all of the promises made by mid-19th century doctors and medicine (and just maybe because of all of them), Bird’s health remained terrible. Her doctors might have decided that there was little left to lose by suggesting that this headstrong and intelligent woman challenge herself with an adventure. Maybe a sea voyage would do you good, they suggested. Many upper middle class young women were taking the Grand Tour, where they would spend a year seeing the sites of the continent before settling down to domestic life. Perhaps that would help?

Isabella and her father decided that would be a great idea. But rather than go where everyone else was going, he gave her 100 pounds and sent her to North America’s East Coast, where she was to visit a cousin. She could see whatever sites tickled her fancy. When the money ran out, she was to come home. With that, everything moved from sepia-toned to technicolor.

Her first stop was Halifax, then on to Rock Island, Illinois, and Cincinnati. After a couple of delays because of a cholera epidemic in New York City, she finished the trip up with stops in Quebec and Prince Edward Island. Remember that this was the early days of a new nation — and that what would now take a couple of days by car was a seven month long ordeal on boats, trains, and horses. It was not a journey you’d expect an ill person to do well with.

She loved it. The insomnia stuck around but all of her other symptoms vanished.

While it was unusual for a young woman to travel alone at the time — most of the ladies on the Grand Tour2 went as a pack rather than solo — Isabella’s way was smoothed by letters of introduction her family provided, her status as an outsider in this country, and her relative wealth. Her life at home was constrained by what English society expected her to be; here, however, she was given the freedom to be whomever she chose, within reason. “She had no concerns about personal safety when unaccompanied by friends or relatives,” Clarence Strowbridge writes in a new introduction to her first book. Isabella backs that up in her own words: “a lady, no matter what her youth or attractions might be, could travel alone through every state in the Union, and never meet with anything but attention and respect.”

Which might not have been true for an American woman of her age at the time, or for one who had less money, but status worked in Isabella’s favor. In all of her books, she tends to brush over any moments where she is overcome by other people’s expectations of her. Her daily life on the trail might have been full of all of the biases against her sex a modern set of eyes would see but was the water she swam in.

That’s not to say she never had a moment’s discomfort or confusion. On the sail over, her cabin-mate was a drunk English atheist who threatened to throw Isabella’s Bible overboard. Her luggage tickets were stolen out of her pocket on a train to Chicago. On a sail up the St. Lawrence river, she met a man who claimed to have murdered his wife and also was, incidentally, the King of Montreal.

Once back home, she compiled her notes into what became her first book, The Englishwoman in America. It was published by John Murray, whose publishing house would go on to print all of her books. As exciting as that was, Bird’s health began to decline again in Britain. Her father suggested she travel back to America to learn about our religious practices. So she did.

… to be continued.

C’est la vie.

But this isn’t really about what has happened. It’s about what never came to be.

I’ve pitched a bunch of shorter pieces that never found a home in print, either because the idea wasn’t ready or because the publication it was perfect for didn’t exist. Those loose ideas live in one folder on my desktop. Every now and again I sift through them to see if circumstances have changed. It’s all good.

But there are a couple of folders dedicated to full-length book proposals that never took off. And one of those proposals is about Isabella Bird.

I know some of the reasons why this book has never found a publisher: I don’t have a gazilion followers; there’s no audience5 for stories about Victorian women who dared; I couldn’t find a good hook; traditional publishing is imploding as a business model; etc.

Which is all true enough, I guess.

But I still think it’s a compelling story. So I’m going to start telling it here.

It won’t be the same as a book, mind. Unless I can stick the dismount6, there won’t be a cogent through-line other than “I think Bird’s life was super interesting and believe you will find it interesting, too.”

One never knows, tho. I’m holding space for a happy accident.

This is Isabella Bird.

In the 1990s Colorado writer Evelyn Kaye wrote Amazing Traveler Isabella Bird, which was a broad overview of Bird’s travels. Kaye recreated Bird’s Japan trip in 2000 in Adventures in Japan: A Literary Journey in the Footsteps of a Victorian Lady. Like me, Kaye was fascinated by Bird and collected everything she could find about her.

I’ll dive into that later. For now, know this: Kaye’s observation sums up the appeal of Bird’s story. Bird was not “breathtakingly beautiful, brilliantly clever, irresistibly sexy, fabulously talented, extremely rich, or adorably young…she was a short, plump, solid, plain woman. She worried about her health, her looks, her abilities….her one passion was adventurous travel, and her skill was to write about her travels passionately. For women everywhere, her books are a breath of intoxicating and entertaining fresh air.”

“A lady an explorer? A traveler in skirts?

The notion’s just a trifle too seraphic;

Let them stay and mind the babies,

or hem our ragged shirts;

But they mustn’t, can’t and shan’t be geographic.”

— Punch magazine (1893).7

Isabella Bird’s first sight of the Moroccan village of Mazagan was from a swaying coal basket, in which she was being transferred from a rocking boat to the sturdy shore. The seas were so rough that cargo could not be unloaded but a short, round 69-year old woman could, if only just. It was January 1900. The 20th century had just begun.

Her trip started on New Year’s Day in Tangier, a destination she’d chosen because she couldn’t fathom spending another cold, damp winter in London. For most of her life, she couldn’t fathom spending more time in either her native England or Scotland than absolutely required so this choice wasn’t unusual. Bird led a peripatetic life, one where she’s sailed to Canada’s maritime provinces as a young, single woman in 1854.

Once in North America, she traveled south to report on the abolitionist movement, of which she was a vocal supporter. After long rest and some family upheaval in England, her wanderlust took her to Australia and Hawaii; to a post-Civil War stay the American West; to a middle-age horseback ride through the heart of Japan. After a brief marriage, she lit out for China and Tibet and India and Persia. And, now, Morocco.

After landing in Tangier, Bird spent days in a rented room laid low by a fever and pain. She was so ill that she missed the announcement of Queen Victoria’s death. She’d met the Queen, who knew of Bird’s books about her travels around the globe, not long before this trip. By 1890, Bird was a household name and her books and magazine articles were eagerly awaited.

During her audience with Her Royal Highness, Bird may have been lobbying for the women lived in poverty in all corners of the Commonwealth, which had become Bird’s biggest cause. She’d organized for the poor in Edinburgh, raised money for starving crofters in the Shetlands in order to emigrate to Canada, and pointed out the inequalities in places like the Malay peninsula in her books and angered the powers-that-be in China when she decried the practice of foot binding. In India, she’d recently opened two hospitals for the lower castes. Travel was its own reward when she’d started writing. Now it was the means to an end.

After learning of the Queen’s death, Bird had to decide if she’d recovered enough to continue on or to return to London, where she could attempt to heal enough to try the trip again later. But, she wrote, “I realized that I must either make up my mind once and for all to ‘give in’ or resort to what proved a panacea before, and quit civilization for the wild.”

Isabella Bird always chose the wild.

Shortly after her decision, she found herself in the coal basket, being whipped by the wind above the Mediterranean Sea. She’d told her doctors that she would only spend her time in Morocco on embroidery, photography, and water-colors. Once on the ground, she was lashed by rain during her ride out to their camp-site. During the night, the heavy and wet end of her tent broke loose and flapped against her head until dawn. By then, the rain had stopped and her mood improved. She and her traveling companions packed up a camel, mule, donkey, and horse and rode 126 miles to Marakesh.

It was, she wrote, “awful.” This city of 80,000 was the “most crowded, nosiest, vilest, filthiest, and busiest city I have seen in the world. It terrifies me.” A few years before this, Bird had escaped from a mob in China, who chased her through the streets calling her a “baby killer” for speaking against selling of young girls into domestic work or prostitution.

A little before that, she’d escaped from the Japanese invasion of Korea with nothing but the clothes on her body. No money. No passport. No documents of any sort. Only good luck and the implied might of the British Empire got her to the Consulate in China.

“I experienced something of the anxiety and timidity which are the everyday lot of thousands,” she wrote, “and I have felt a far tenderer sympathy with the penniless, especially the educated penniless, ever since.”

Even when compared to that harrowing adventure, Morocco was a new level of unpleasant. While she was swept away by majestic vistas and moorish architecture, she was appalled by the people themselves. “The oppression and cruelty are hellish—no one is safe. The country is rotten to the core, eaten up by abominable vices, no one is to be trusted. Every day deepens my hours of its deplorable and unspeakable vileness. Truly Satan’s seat is here.”

Given the decade and her stalwart Christian faith, there’s likely more than a touch of racism and anti-Islamic sentiment at play here. But Bird also spent years crusading against slavery—indeed, one of the reasons she visited the U.S. when she did was to network with abolitionists—and was appalled by the poverty in Marrakesh. Both of those positions can be true, which is an observation we struggle with in this modern age as well.

But that is an argument for later.

Now Isabella is scrambling through the Atlas range on a black horse lent to her by the Sultan. The horse’s saddle is crimson and sits 18” above his back, which means that the barely 5-foot tall Isabella carries a small ladder with her. The travel is rough. Two of the party’s horses are lamed and a mule tumbles off of a bridle track, rolling down and down into the valley without stopping.

“I never expected to do such traveling again,” she writes in a letter home. “You would fail to recognize your infirm friend astride8 on a superb horse in full blue trousers and a short skirt, with great brass spurs belonging to the generalissimo of the Moorish army, and riding down places awful to even think of, where a rolling stone or a slip would mean destruction.”

She closed the letter: “It is evidently air and riding which do me good.”9

Isabella finished her trip with an audience with the Sultan. He is young, dressed all in white, and seated on a raised throne. She is near the end of her life, dressed in black silk, and standing at the base of the steps to his dais. After their brief meeting, Bird wished him long life and happiness. He told her that when his hair was as white as hers, his hope was to have as much energy as she does.

“So I am not quite shelved yet,” she wrote.

Once back in Britain, she started packing for another trip to China, one where she might visit the hospitals she founded in the names of her late husband and sister. That trip never happened, however. Shortly after her return, a fibrous tumor was found in her chest. Her health waxed and waned for a year or two but she never fully recovered. Isabella Bird died in 1904 at the age of 72. Any person who knew her as a child would have been amazed she lived to be 18, much less into her 70s. Simply surviving was a miracle. Thriving should have been impossible.

To be continued…

Frequently, it was a roasted chicken with the best roasted potatoes I have ever eaten ever.3

Sometimes, it was pasta and meats and sauce.

Always it was far more food than we could sensibly eat and yet we ate it all anyway, mostly because it was so delicious and partly because of the guilt ladled out by her if we didn’t.

Two things you should know:4

1. My grandmother did the absolute best she could, given the constraints on women and on immigrants when she was a girl. She lost her first husband shortly after WWII ended and raised two boys in a rough section of Pittsburgh that only grew rougher as years passed. It made her tough—and inflexible.

2. She also liked to remind us that “vendetta is an Italian word.”

When I was in the kitchen watching her cook,5 she’d frequently talk about the extended family, both in the present and in the past. Every now and again, she’d talk about someone who’d wronged her and rage would nearly explode from her, only to be shoved down as quickly as it flared up. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone that incandescently angry, before or since. Her ability to flip it off like a light switch remains astonishing.

But that’s what she had to do. My grandmother was raised to be compliant above all else. Her actual feelings were of no concern. And if she had any strong negative emotions, they were to be suppressed. Circumstances didn’t allow for the luxury of rage.

Clearly those moments stuck with me. I’m no longer a teenager—heck, I’ll soon no longer be a parent to teenagers—and, still, adult me couldn’t understand that level of anger. I grew up in a different time in a different way and have a wider range of acceptable emotions to choose from. My irritations and disappointments can work themselves out before they fester.6

Over the last four months, I’ve been thinking about my grandmother a lot.

I get it now.

There are moments when I hear about El Salvadorian prisons or Signal chats or vaccines causing autism where I snap into the same kind of rage I witnessed, only to stuff it down again because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it right that moment.

It’s not a response to how dumb and avoidable7 all the last four months have been but a reaction to feeling completely and utterly powerless. I cannot control these circumstances, nor can I predict them.

And that’s the point, right? The idea is to cause so much rage (and its cousin despair) that we are unable to act. Or, if we do act, we direct all of our suppressed and unacknowledged anger at ourselves.

If this were fiction, my grandmother would have leaned into thing #2 and had her revenge on anyone who ever wronged her, like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

Real life isn’t like that.

Ultimately, her vendetta energy was inwardly directed. But that is another story. People are complicated.

What’s hard right now for me8 is finding the most useful point between Uma and my grandmother. Vengeance isn’t helpful, nor is despair.

I don’t have a tidy little lesson to close with. I wish I did.

Near as I can get is a reminder that if we didn’t have more power than we thought they wouldn’t be working so hard to convince us otherwise. There are moments when I believe that but they are few and far between.

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Meanwhile, we muddle through. And we remember that all bleeding stops eventually. And we marvel at the rich pageant of human experience:

• Honestly? I can totally get behind human kibble.9

• The podcast Noble is fascinating (but be warned that it contains graphic language about what happens to human bodies when they decay.) It’s about the 2002 discovery of 300 bodies on the grounds of a crematory in rural Georgia.10 It’s about so much more than just that case and explores everything from racism to capitalism to justice-ism while also asking the living what they owe the dead. There are no easy answers. Journalist Shaun Raviv has done a thorough job of telling this story and how it intersects with broader aspects of life (and death).

• Again: Francis (Fucking) Perkins. I remain amazed that she was able to do so much during a time when women didn’t yet even have the right to vote. She is one of my heroes.

• Speaking of F(F)P: The Cost of a $5 Dress.

• I had the honor of knowing/working with11 Lisa D’Amour.12 She’s up to some interesting stuff.

• “As a doctor, how could I fail to provide life-saving treatment for those seeking my care?”13

• Chuck Wendig really nails What It Feels Like Right Now.

• The Perfect Marathon Pacing Strategy is to Rip It.14

We can all3 agree that a person who may have broken the law has the right to a fair trial, which includes access to a lawyer who can walk the accused through the process and mount some kind of defense, if that is the best course of action, which is something a lawyer would know.4

Sometimes, folks who are accused of breaking the law aren’t capable of understanding that they’ve broken it, either because the law is really complicated and/or because their mental state is not reality based.

New York State5 has a whole section of its Mental Health and Hygiene law devoted to these cases. It’s referred to as section 730 and was adopted in 1970, which makes it barely older than me. Parts have been declared unconstitutional, yet 730 as a whole still controls what happens in many cases where the defendant is not capable of understanding a trial.

Hang onto that idea for a minute. I’ll come back.

The language in these laws does not match what we’d use today, which shouldn’t be a surprise because a lot of what we said in 1970 is not okay now. Every time I read about hygiene law I think about the filmstrips we saw in 4th grade.

The folks who are covered under section 730 are deemed incompetent because of “mental disease or defect [who] lack capacity to understand the proceedings against him or to assist in his own defense.” We really wouldn’t describe mental illness or a developmental disability as a “disease” or “defect” anymore but these are the words used when the law was drafted and in current conversations about the law.6

Which might give you one huge clue that it’s time to rewrite and/or nullify and come up with something better. However. We press on.

The goal of 730 is to get the accused to a place where he/she/they can understand what is happening in their case and the charges against them. In court speak, this is called “restoration to competency.”

Sometimes, it’s pretty easy to restore a person to competency. They need some meds, maybe, and some courtroom training. Most defendants can be restored in a couple of months.

Of course, there are outliers. And that’s where it gets messy.

A judge can order a defendant into a state-run competency restoration service at a state-operated Forensic Psychiatric Center, which costs (on average) $1,300 per day. Judges do this with the best of intentions. They want the accused to get the help they need to understand what’s happening in their case. Cost is not the primary concern.

Nor should it be. One of the functions of government (despite what the current regime would have you believe) is to care for the most marginalized members of our society. If this is what that care costs, then that is what is costs.

The problem in New York State is that we are not sure that is actually what it costs. These centers are informational black holes from which no data can emerge. The county the client resided in is liable for the entire expense of treatment.7

Which would be okay, I guess, if counties had some kind of control over or visibility into the process. Instead, we are just sent invoices with a patient’s name on it and a very large number at the bottom. What we know is that we have to pay it.

What we don’t know is what kind of treatment is being given, how long a stay might be, or if the client is on-board with the treatment plan. Additionally, we don’t know when one of our residents might be ordered into restoration. There also seems to be no time limit on when we can be billed for services. We’ve had invoices show up years after the client has been released from care—and our payment is due in 30 days.8

For example: last year9 our small county was sent a $100,000+ bill for a resident who’d been assigned to a state center. We had no idea it was coming, nor how many of them we’d be getting, or what sort of treatment plan existed. What we knew is that we had to find the money to pay it, which we had because we always leave a cushion in the budget for a 730.

I mean hooray for us, I guess, but that’s not how you want to handle taxpayer dollars.10 We’re putting aside funds that could be spent on any number of other things in the mental health and hygiene realm just in case this relatively rare event happens. One year, we had two of them, which was a different sort of crisis.

To be clear: a 730 is not intensive psychiatric treatment, even if judges might believe that it is. The only goal is to get the accused to a place where they can understand the legal process. It is not to improve their quality of life or mental health.

Again, tho: restoring a defendant to competency is the right thing to do. No one in the courtroom should be unsure of what’s going on.

But how do we pay for it? And how do we know we’re getting what we’re paying for?

The oversight into the 730 process is enough of a problem that the New York State Association of Counties has drafted a resolution setting some avenues for sharing information in the future. I sit on the subcommittee that drafted it, btw. It’s hard to say if our state assembly and senate members will care enough about the problem to, you know, do something.

At least one smaller county11 has decided to just stop paying the bills the state sends until they get more information about what is happening inside these centers. I wonder how long it will take before other counties do the same. This isn’t the preferred method of getting someone to pay attention—but is becoming the only avenue we have.

And is an avenue worth thinking about as the federal government strips services out of its budget. Why bother paying for something we don’t have or is forced on us without our consent?

Some links:

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• This story made my blood boil.12

• If you don’t already know her story, you really should read about Madame C.J. Walker. And even if you do know who she is, you should refresh your memory.

• You should also know about Alice Ramsey.13

• My economist friend Karl14 is writing again. And he hit the nail on the head with this post about rural economies.

• Related to the above: you likely don’t know who really uses Medicaid.15

• You are meant to feel powerless. You aren’t.

To back up: Sara Gran is one of my must-buy-on-sight writers. Her Claire Dewitt books are exactly what I want from a detective novel: weird, occasionally bleak but full of heart, and snappy. Even when when one of her books doesn’t quite hit me—I’m still not sure I figured out the point of The Book of The Most Precious Substance—I always deeply dig the act of reading her work.

Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight does everything it says on the label. While Claire Dewitt does turn up, it’s not really her book. There are, in fact, miniature puzzles that confuse, enthrall, and delight. But these short stories also pick at what it means to be an aging

human during a time when the rules that have been ingrained in you no longer hold value.

“No one will blame you if you give up now. Go get an apartment somewhere, maybe a condo with a pool. Fuck Rapid Falls and its abnormally high crime rate. Fuck mysteries and fuck this world and most of all fuck other people. Some people say Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Those people don’t know what loss is, and you wonder if they’ve ever really ventured anything at all.

“You have a choice: Can you believe that the universe has some adventure left for you? That life—and other people—might still be worth risking another crack in your heart for?

“If you say NO, then hey, listen, I don’t blame you. People are awful, and so is this fucking world we’ve made. But going home is not without it’s own risks: you might wake up in the middle of the night and not know who you are anymore. YOu might realize with a painful and ugly feeling that you no longer remember what you were so angry about, or why you devoted your life to it. You might realize that instead of letting someone else break your heart, you’ve broken it yourself.”

I mean … ooof. Just ooof.

And if you have a copy already you are in for a treat. I highly recommend reading page 268 over and over again whenever this world feels like too, too much.

Anywho, I love Sara Gran’s work. You might as well.

Now, some links:

• From the above photo: a bit of history you probably didn’t know about.2

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• Just because you personally just started to notice it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been happening all along.

• All of these are true.

• News you can use re: PA Coroners.

• “Anyway, now it’s March.”3

• American politics right now really is this simple.

• And while life in my county isn’t this bleak, if the systems of care we have keep getting cut back, it will be.

• I would totally hike this.4