Nymphs of the Chumbox Moon

No. 168

The Sunday before the elections, I noticed an insect had laid a clutch of eggs on the window next to our front door. A few hundred of them, tiny and spherical, colored the yellow of custard with just a bit of pearlescent shine. Pretty enough, I suppose, that you might be tempted to eat them, like some kind of edgeland sushi. Or you might find them gross, tangible evidence of mysterious invertebrates copulating near your kitchen, but we are way past that point in our house.

The eggs were very hard to photograph with a phone, because the software couldn’t figure out which lens it should use or what to focus on among all the reflections in the glass, and the device wouldn’t let me override. But I got a couple of legible shots, shared them, did a little “research,” and concluded they were most likely laid by a moth—a guess my entomologist neighbor Dr. Atkinson confirmed as a "pretty safe bet.”

By Friday, the luscious color had mostly changed to a more carbon-colored hue, with a few spots of yellow still there. Signs, Tom would later explain, of “yolks eaten by larger embryos.” It was then that I noticed how the pattern of the eggs resembled the map of the United States—especially the color-coded electoral maps that had filled our feeds all week.

For all of my youth, from the 70s through the 90s, the TV networks Chyron-coded the states that went Republican as blue and the states that voted for the Democrat as red—a chromatic binary that seemed designed to reflect essential characteristics of the parties. It was that way every four years, until it suddenly changed in 2000. That election was the first one I experienced where, the day after, we still didn’t know who had won—a statistical tie that would be settled by lawyers and judges. In the weeks-long interregnum that followed, the “Red States and Blue States” vernacular really took hold. And it made me wonder at the time whether that change was something the political operatives that got the red had engineered, knowing the natural power of that color.

The signals red codes are consistent across species:

Although other colours are also present in animal displays, it is specifically the presence and intensity of red coloration that correlates with male dominance and testosterone levels. In humans, anger is associated with a reddening of the skin due to increased blood flow, whereas fear is associated with increased pallor in similarly threatening situations. Hence, increased redness during aggressive interactions may reflect relative dominance.

— Russell A. Hill and Robert A. Barton, “Red enhances human performance in contests,” Nature, 18 May 2005.

Just ask the little coral snake I almost fed my finger while collecting stray pool toys from the leaf litter last Sunday afternoon:

Not long after the election, checking out the coverage in one of the clickbait news feeds I sometimes visit to see how others are viewing the world, I noticed how weird and creepy the ads were getting. In addition to the usual chumbox lures of horror movie superfoods, forgotten celebrities, miracle cures and eating-based diets, there was a row of images across the top advertising a line of field jackets that looked like things you’d find in a Western wear shop crossed with the traditional leather clothing worn by Bavarian and Austrian men of a certain cultural orientation. American Trachten designed for this weird turn, the aesthetic definitely more Man in the High Castle than Sound of Music.

Next to that was an even creepier cluster of T-shirts with images of Santa Claus in mirrored aviator glasses, spouting misogynistic sexual gags. One of those little windows into the Zeitgeist, and maybe into one’s own demographic, that leaves you ill at ease. Even before you turn on the news and see the presidential transition playing out like one of those comic book futures where the supervillains take over, followed by a livestreaming gladiatorial contest pitting 58-year-old Mike Tyson against a blonde-bearded young post-Jackass “influencer.” The suspicion that the whole dark spectacle was being scripted by some divine parodist helped only a little.

My perspective may have been skewed, as I had also been reading the astonishing ProPublica investigation by Abrahm Lustgarten into the eco-fascist roots of the anti-immigration movement—people who as early as the 1980s foresaw the way climate change would generate cross-border population movements, coupled it with their own racist conceptions of the ideal community, and even infiltrated the Sierra Club in an effort to link ecological health with a species of population control focused on the perpetuation of the white majority. A reminder of some of the divergent visions of the future whose seeds, planted long ago, are now trying to germinate before our eyes.

As an escape for the whole family, we ended the week taking our daughter to a new kids’ movie, expecting a diversion into innocent wonder. But even there, our collective anxiety about what’s coming seeped through, if a little more hopefully.

From The Wild Robot

The Wild Robot animates the tale of a robotic personal servant that’s lost in shipping and washes up on a verdant and biodiverse coast. There, she befriends the animals, learns all their languages LLM style, and raises the gosling whose family she has accidentally killed. In time, the young goose must migrate with its kind, and that’s when, late in the movie, we learn the wider setting of the story as the flock flies over a half-submerged Golden Gate Bridge, a landscape of underwater skyscrapers, and a blooming desert of abandoned and decaying radio antennas.

Grounded by a winter storm, the geese take shelter in one of the domed cities where all humans apparently now live, managing armies of robots that tend expansive fields of agricultural production and treat any intrusion from the natural world outside the dome as a contamination to be immediately exterminated.

We are the robots, as the Krautrockers sang. The robot is a stand-in for the human viewer, finding her way free from her capitalist machine programming and back into authentic and reciprocal connection to wild nature. I wondered if she might even help the movie’s young viewers someday find their own way out of the domes, and into real life.

Scene from Logan’s Run (1976)

One of the older children’s stories on our shelf is the collection Walk When the Moon is Full by Frances Hamerstrom, who escaped patrician Boston for the Depression-era Midwest and became a protege of the naturalist Aldo Leopold. I’m a bigger fan of Hamerstrom’s memoir, Strictly for the Chickens, and her insane Wild Food Cookbook, which is how I first encountered her work (thanks to my mom), as profiled here back in the early days of lockdown. But her advice and admonition to get out there under the full Moon resonates with me, and so Friday morning, on the second night when I was awakened at 4 a.m. by the bright blue orb shining on my face, I decided to do just that.

I set out right at 5. I carried a flashlight with me, but didn’t need it other than to enter the combination to open our back gate. That left me momentarily night blind, as I stood there on the trail into the floodplain woods, wondering if the coyotes were watching, and whether they might find the prospect tempting. I closed my eyes for a long minute, adjusted, and followed the narrow trail, which I have walked enough to navigate without really seeing.

The forest was still pretty dark, as the leaves haven’t really fallen from the trees yet here. I heard a barred owl in the distance—I’ve been hearing them every morning and evening this week, which always feels like a good sign of the health of the woods—and made my way toward the river. When I stepped through onto the bank, I got a dose of the everyday sublime. The channel sweating a thin fog under clear skies, totally lit up by the light of the Moon, with the lights of downtown visible above the treeline to the west.

As I took this shot, I heard a splash nearby—some big fish already getting its breakfast on. I looked that direction, away from the Moon, where there was only one tiny porch light behind the inky treeline. Especially with the balm of that eerie blue glow, it was one of those moments where the city lets you really feel the long now, and you wonder what kind of world the Moon will be shining on in a century or two.

The eggs did hatch, by the way, a week after they appeared. I saw the fuzzy little fledglings drying out their wings before they took off. They reminded me I have some native prairie seeds to plant before it gets cold. The spiderwort is already coming up in the trash-filled dirt at the back of our lot, a reminder that winter is the incubator of spring.

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Recent and Upcoming Appearances

If you’re in Austin, I’ll be appearing at the Texas Book Festival today (Sunday 11/17), talking “Earth, Memory and the Art of Connection” with photographer and Dig author Sarah Wilson and moderator Ray Brimble from 1:30-2:15 at the Jones Center, signing to follow. The festival is on all weekend, free and open to the public, and highly recommended—full schedule here.

This coming Thursday, November 21, I’ll be in Seattle at Elliott Bay in conversation with my dear friend Eileen Gunn, and on Friday, November 22, I’ll be in Portland at Powell’s with the amazing Michelle Nijhuis. Thanks again to Michelle for this lovely coverage of A Natural History of Empty Lots in the Nov. 21 issue of The New York Review of Books.

And huge thanks to Michael Barnes and photographer Jay Janner at the Austin American-Statesman for this incredibly generous profile in the print edition of last Sunday’s paper, which ran online Monday accompanied by this wonderful photo gallery from my walk with Jay.

Thanks also to Cybele Raver of Vanderbilt for this piece on Empty Lots at The Masters Review.

It was great to join futurists Scott Smith, Malka Older and Jake Dunagan for this live “breaking futures” confab the morning after the elections—a sober but affirming conversation:

For new subscribers interested in more information about Empty Lots, you can start here.

And if you’re joining the crowd rushing to Bluesky in search of a healthier social media community, I’ve been there for a while— come say hi.

Other Reading

For a deep dive into the chumbox, check out John Mahoney’s masterful 2015 piece for The Awl, “A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum.”

For more on the semiotic and political history of red states and blue states, this Wiki seems pretty authoritative.

Field Notes friend M. John Harrison has a lovely, creepy cozy short story about a train ride into the country up at Granta, which I really dug—“Doe Lea.”

RIP Murray McCory, founder of JanSport, who helped this 70s kid get outside.

And congratulations to The Onion for successfully, in partnership with the Sandy Hook families, winning the auction to buy Infowars from the bankruptcy estate.

Have a great week.