Field Notes

Anyone wanting a taste of the Lost Coast — without backpacking 25 miles from the mouth of the Mattole to Shelter Cove — can enjoy a fine day’s hike to the Punta Gorda light, a seven-mile round trip down the beach from the Mattole parking area. In its time, the Punta Gorda Coast Guard outpost […]

The fish is the last to see the water. I was recently reminded of this aphorism (from anthropologist Ruth Benedict) on receiving an e-mail from our Dutch friend Pieter in response to our question, Why do you keep vacationing in the U.S.? His reply reminded me that after 40 years living on the West Coast, […]

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. — Lewis Thomas It should be easy to be happy by the simple act of waking up in the morning, Yeah! I’m still here! […]

Read any account of how the alphabet came into being and you’ll find a reference to the sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos (modern J’beil, Lebanon) around 1000 B.C. The stone sarcophagus has been housed in the National Museum of Beirut since shortly after its discovery by French archeologists in 1923. From 1982 to 1997, […]

Take a moment to appreciate what you’re now doing: making sense of little squiggles on the page in front of you. It’s easy to take for granted our wondrous facility to read and write, but of course, it wasn’t always so. Before the invention of writing, people had no way of passing on knowledge or […]

In hindsight, it seems incredible that Humboldt Bay wasn’t discovered by European explorers until 1849. That’s when Josiah Gregg’s overland expedition from Weaverville stumbled on the bay, which was finally entered by sailing ships the following year. Many ships had sailed up and down the western seaboard previously, all of them missing one of the […]

The story goes that The Lakota holy man Black Elk took poet John Neihardt to the top of Harney Peak in the Black Hills to pray, explaining that it was the center of the world. When Neihardt asked how he knew that, Black Elk chuckled at the white man’s innocence and with patiently explained that […]

Anthropologists have yet to find a society that didn’t hold a belief in an afterlife: most of us humans think that something awaits us after death. Often the choice is binary: you’ll either end up in purgatory ("Where can I get a cold beer?") or paradise ("Enough with the harps, already!"). If not heaven or […]

The deforestation of the cedars of Lebanon happened much as these elegant trees grow: slowly but surely. Five thousand years ago, cedar forests covered huge swaths of the central mountain range of this pocket-sized country (smaller than Connecticut), a land squashed between Syria, the Mediterranean Sea and Israel/Palestine. Today, after millennia of exploitation, three reserves […]

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is a psychiatric disorder affecting between three and five percent of children worldwide, many of whom continue to have the symptoms into adulthood. An estimated eight million adults in the United States suffer from ADHD, which manifests primarily as inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. This, at least, is the official view […]

C-bill. World War I. Pope Benedict XVI. Super Bowl XLIII. Final Fantasy II. Although we normally use so-called Arabic numerals, their Roman counterparts are far from dead. In addition to the above examples, they’re used to date movies; to identify book volumes such as encyclopedias; to mark off the front matter in books from the […]

Take a deep breath. Notice anything special? Did you catch a whiff of Shakespeare, a dash of Socrates, a trace of Cleopatra? No? They were there, just the same. You just inhaled millions of molecules which each of them once exhaled. Let’s take a look at just one historic breath: Cleopatra’s last. This came, if […]