Molybdomancers of the New Moon
No. 171
“What sound does the Chupacabra make?” So asked my neighbor the morning after we heard it, on an otherwise quiet night, the Saturday between Christmas and New Year’s.
My wife and daughter and I had just returned home from an early dinner with friends. After they went inside, I stepped back out to pull the truck in and lock the gate for the night. It was as quiet as it gets around here, at the edge of an industrial corridor half a block from where a major east-west artery merges onto the tollway. Then I heard the scream, coming from the darkness, less than a hundred feet down the street. A vocalization like none I had heard before, but which sounded very much, as it repeated, like a human child or young woman screaming, over and over again, “STOOOOOOOOP!”
On our weird little street, it is not implausible that one would hear just that. It is also the sort of urban interzone where Mulder and Scully would encounter a cryptid. Three blocks of dimly lit blacktop, the faded double-yellow stripes marking the division between a long row of sun-blasted old metal warehouses on one side and oddball houses and urban woods on the other, much of it behind tall chain link fences. Our end of the block has thick patches of thorned foliage in the right of way and rusting bits of barbed wire above it. One of the lots across from us harbors a weedy sculpture garden of salvaged lightbox signs from forgotten businesses, broken old electric cabs, and busy crews who alternate between late-night “business” activities and preparations for political uprising. A little further down is the fairy tale hand-built wooden trailer attached to an old semi behind the wind chime factory, whose occupant, we learned through an email notice from the sex offender registry, served in prison for felony contact with a 3-year-old.
I walked down the street to investigate. I even called out in response to one of the cries. Moments later, the screamer revealed itself. A fox stepped out into the street from the darkness behind the neon plant, no more than a shadow, but clearly identifiable by its distinctive silhouette. It trotted right into our neighbors’ driveway, then continued its mating call, arousing their dachshunds, and then all of the other dogs on the block.
I texted my neighbor Tom, an entomologist, a heads up what it was the dogs were excited about. In the morning he told me how he had heard it carrying on for some time after, that night and again in the predawn, and how it helped him appreciate how earlier human peoples could imagine all sorts of night creatures from the sounds they heard in the dark.
“Maybe it was la Llorona calling for her lost child.”
I’d been hearing the strange night calls of the foxes for the past couple of weeks, back in the woods behind the door factory and the construction supply depot, and struck by how different they sound every time. And how the field guides, in their scientifically neutered prose, never capture the weirdness and wonder of the variations one encounters—especially in the urban field, where the animal adaptations to anthropogenic habitat seem mostly unobserved by science. Allowing the casual observer to experience what’s it’s like to hear the screams in the dark without knowing what they are.
Like all foxes, the gray fox, Urocyon cinereoargentus, seems to thrive in zones of abrupt ecological transition. Present across most of the U.S. south and east of the Rockies down through the Central American isthmus and beyond, mammalian biologists deem it the carnivore most closely associated with the deciduous forest of eastern North America. The guidebooks say it can be found in greatest abundance at the edges where woodlands abut old farms and fields. And like the coyote, it has adapted exceptionally well as that habitat type has been devoured by our sprawl, making home in the weirder edgelands where pockets of urban woods can be found down the street from dumpsters full of food trash and the rodents that feed on them.
The entry in Mammalian Species describes a hard life for our vulpine neighbors. Only half of the juveniles survive their first seven months of life, and almost half of the adults die in any given year. They mostly shelter in the abandoned dens of other animals, apparently because they don’t really like to dig. And their main predator is us. The few studies one can find of urban foxes confirm that they show no population impact from increased density of development, as long as there are woodland buffers nearby. I wonder if, like raccoons, the urban Urocyons may be rapidly evolving to be more intelligent than their country cousins, as they solve the challenges our domain presents, and learn new ways to sing to each other in their alien vocalizations, against the sonic background of police sirens and machine noise.
On New Year’s Eve we gathered the extended family clan for what has become our annual year-end ritual: to burn the Christmas trees, and the cares embodied in piles of old bills and tax documents, in the fireplace of our edgeland grotto, which we built from the concrete rubble and other trash that had been dumped on this site before we built our house here. With my own 84-year-old mother permanently relocated here this year, we added a forward-looking element, reviving the New Year’s Eve tradition of pagan fortune-telling Oma’s family brought with them when they immigrated from Germany in the late 1940s: casting the Bleigießen.
Molybdomancy is the practice of melting a heavy metal over an open fire, casting it into cold water, and reading the resulting shapes as auspices of what is to come in the life of the one doing the casting. It’s best done at night, when you can shine the light from a candle onto the lead form hung from a string, and interpret the shadows. There are plenty of interpretive guides out there in German, so I translated one, and was reminded from my experience as a boy how many of the standard associations are negative. And even the putatively positive ones are usually a little weird.
Antlers: bad luck in love
Apple: Trust is broken
Axe: Disappointment in love
Butterfly: Unstable luck
Broom: A conflict is brewing
Beetle: Nice love experience
Bra: Exciting love
Bucket: You have envious people.
Cup: Happiness and health; Sports success
Elephant: You are the greatest.
Falcon: Someone is jealous of you.
Fishing rod: You are being cheated.
Fist: You feel burned out.
Feather: Change is coming.
Gun: You are cheating on your partner.
Island: You are lonely
Mouse: Secret love
Mushroom: Take care of your health.
Rock: Lots of work awaits
Paintbrush: Trouble with tradesmen
Pants: You will be humiliated
Pipe: Beware of danger
Plow: Don't be lazy
Spear: Someone wants to fight you
Weapon: Don't overdo it.
Worm: Little success
Zeppelin: Happy future
We got several with the atomized character often interpreted as money, two that looked like big waves, and two with shapes that invited easy Freudian interpretations.
As a ritual to end a holiday fortnight that was also a political interregnum charged with dark anticipation, the sympathetic magic of gathering the family around our Anthropocene hearth at the edge of the woods to cremate our worldly cares, free-associate agency in our own futures and share a lot of laughs in the process proved a more powerful spell to keep the worries away than I expected.
And so when I took our daughter out the next few mornings to enjoy her confidence on the bike that Santa brought, cruising through the graffiti-covered ruins of the twentieth century as I jogged alongside and the urban hawks and vultures patrolled above, I couldn’t help but bask in the brightness. Even as the image that inaugurated the new year in earnest, of an exploding Cybertruck outside the entrance of the President-elect’s Las Vegas hotel, felt like a better distillation of the immanent Zeitgeist.
The Roundup
My op-ed on “Habitat for all — how housing and biodiversity can coexist in a crowded future” appeared in last Sunday’s L.A. Times and is available online (on this side of the paywall for now).
I was delighted to have the opportunity to contribute once again to feminist SF publisher Aqueduct Press’ yearly roundup of reading, viewing, and listening.
Thanks to all the folks who included A Natural History of Empty Lots on their own year-end reading roundups, from Transfer Orbit to the North American Rock Garden Society, booksellers like Ruth at Book Moon in Northampton who put this quote from the opening on the sign outside the shop, and all the social media shares from readers like the novelist Arjun Basu:
The book will be officially released in the United Kingdom this week, on January 9, so if you’re in the UK, please be encouraged to spread the word.
If you’re in Austin, I’ll be joining the Austin Science Reading Book Club at BookPeople this afternoon, January 5. And on Friday, January 17, I’ll be at the amazing new Livra Books in conversation with Moctezuma Seth González.
The red-shouldered hawks have been especially active this season, not just in the woods along the urban river, but also coming out more often over the quiet of the holidays to hunt along the roadways. I was especially impressed by the confidence of this one I encountered the morning of New Year’s Eve, waiting for second breakfast to show itself in the freshly empty lot where the week before they demolished the last little old house and abandoned service station on the road out of town.
Moments later its mate flew up, alighted in a nearby tree, then moved on to the streetlamp across the road.
The avatars are out there, if you know where to look.
Best wishes for the new year, and happy hunting.
Love the strangeness of your neighborhood that you set up here: the door factory, the wind chime factory, the neon lot. Dream-like and surreal!
I'm about to recommend the book, once again, on a podcast about books being recorded on Tuesday. I have no idea when it will air. But I know the question is coming (it's the only thing I know about this podcast) and I am prepared for it.