The rest of my graduate project focused on creating an outreach plan for a park in Pittsburgh. I spent a summer there working on this project, being an incredibly socially awkward undiagnosed autistic disaster bi. It was extremely hot and I was staying in a room with no air conditioning. My grandpa died while I was there. I had just started a new relationship back in Vermont and didn’t feel like being away (especially when my partner got sick)… but I was there because i was trying to expand my qualifications from just vegetation mapping to environmental outreach. I was trying to adapt to city life but there was a lot of social tension and some flaring violence happening around the city which i didn’t have the context to navigate very well. Mostly i just remember it was a super weird summer. My outreach plan was supposed to be this melding of science and art, but I think maybe the project proponents wanted more of a technical document. I don’t like technical writing and am not great at it, and prefer …whatever it is this thing you are reading now is. I was trying to do the edgewalker thing… between science and art, between a city and rural Vermont, in a place somewhere between Vermont and California, where i am from. I don’t think i really pulled it off, but i do like some of the art i put in my plan. That being said, I do think the plan was helpful to the community in getting out the word that a flood control and stream restoration project was needed to help the marginalized community downstream. Unfortunately, this still never happened, for reasons unrelated to my project. On a personal level, the project sparked my slow water movement blog, the precursor to this substack, as well as a bunch of rainwater art which was the spiritual ancestor of my bog bins and ledge rainwater waterfall (which will be the subject of a future post). So, like the braided channels of a glacial river, or the sewage-laden runoff from Junction hollow, life meanders and braids through different cycles and paths. Sometimes people talk about how life moves by fast, and certainly it bothers me that once time passes I can’t get it back, but really it seems like i have done so so many things in my 47 years of life, and really, lived multiple lives within that as well. I’m sure there is much more to come, so long as fate doesn’t have something else in mind…..

The final section of my smartphone article has a Future Directions section. It describes a ‘future’ in 2021. Of course, Covid and various other issues are not present in this attempt at future prediction. Instead it describes a hiker in the Green Mountains using smartphone apps to monitor storms and learn about her local environment, only to discover that the tracks she has discovered are that of a cougar having returned to Vermont. She uploads the data to an ‘animal tracking app’ (basically iNaturalist, which i found out about not long after writing this) and inspires a conservation-based response. The tech described absolutely exists in 2026 (it wasn’t reaching all that much) and was in 2021 too… except surely any posting of a cougar track on iNaturalist will result in insistence that the tracks are bobcat tracks, insults, attempt to reclassify the new cougar taxonomically into a cryptic microspecies, and other mishaps. Turns out smartphones and social media are both just tools, and if there’s anything that defines our species it is creative ability to create and use complex tools only to have them taken away by bad actors who seek to use them to harm other humans. It started with sticks and fire and continues to this day. There’s always hope, and we always scrape by, but social media was no savior then, and given its limited use today beyond the mess, i’d say it isn’t going to be how we scrape through the next decade as a species, either

.

I suppose this is a bit of a ‘coming out’, though i’ve already told a bunch of people this (don’t feel left out if i didn’t tell you, it’s often been opportunistic as it can be easier in person). Other people seem to have inferred something like this over the years, in the same sense that many people knew i was autistic before i knew. Perhaps it is because i absolutely sit weirdly all the time.

I don’t really like the term ‘bisexual’, because to me, this being part of two worlds goes far beyond sexual attraction. And while i hid that aspect for decades, it seems to have expressed itself in other ways. I’m often on the edge of two things, and never really truly either one. To list just a few:

1. I’m a pretty solid example of the ‘AuDHD’ concept. I’m autistic, but i also have a whole load of ADHD traits. I don’t really experience them as totally discrete things like some people do, but i definitely bounce between one and the other.

2. I’m obsessed with wetlands, which are the literal edge interface between land and water.

3. The places closest to my heart are the driest and hottest places of the country as well as some of the coldest and wettest.

4. My relationship with gender is kinda weird, but i have both male and female traits and often act more like a mom than a dad.

5. I love social and tech stuff, but also often can’t stand social or tech stuff and want to hide from it.

6. I’ve been ‘half in, half out’ of a bunch of different scenes such as music scenes, the ecology community, and more. I’m just kind of on the edge of a lot of things.

7. I’ve got two pretty discrete personalities i use to interact with others. Not in the dissociated identity sense, but in the IFS sense. They are basically autistic masks that became more than that.

   1. a very social, funny, cheerful and goofy “shape shifter” who manages most of my social interactions and i have a lot of fun with, but requires a lot of energy to ‘run’ and in the past was fueled largely by alcohol. Appears more ADHD than autistic. Many of my friends mostly know me as this part.

   2. A super scientific, logical, meticulous part that closes off most emotions and senses. Loves analyzing data, getting work done, and being serious business, ‘for science’. Not great with people, but tries to make up for it by being useful and productive and capitalizing on hyperfocus.

   3. (to be fair there are other parts, and the one that writes these blog posts is often a third part who holds childhood emotions, sensory experience, and such. But, that part doesn’t usually interact with others).

8. my fylgja is a great blue heron, walking edges, rapid and slow, gangly and awkward in some settings and graceful in others. I’ve also got a connection to coyotes who are known edge walkers.

9. Am i a scientist or an artist/writer? i don’t know. I don’t fit in academia.

10. When i am at a gathering, i am usually on the edge, both in and out I drift to the edge of rooms and crowds.

As a kid, i don’t understand much of what was going on in the world, and the world sure didn’t understand me either. I’d become accustomed to hiding the way my body moved, the information i wanted to share and the things that were hurting me, because i was told again and again in school and social settings that they weren’t real. In middle school, i got a typical middle school crush on someone, but it terrified me… because the crush was on a boy. This was the mid 90s, homophobic bullying was excessive, and people already accused me of being ‘gay’ for reasons i could not understand. I was already struggling so much, how could i deal with that as well? Since I’d suppressed so many stims and hidden away so many other things, i was well prepared to suppress that crush as well. He ended up moving away not long after that and I never talked to him again, not that i’d ever talked to him much in the first place. After a couple of bad years where i didn’t much talk to anyone at all, I got another crush with all the full-on AuDHD limerance that entails. This one was on a girl. That crush didn’t pan out either, but it made it very clear to me (and anyone around me, since i am not so good at hiding things) that i did like girls. I had never even heard of the concept of being bi at that point back in 1996, and was very aggressively avoiding anything queer-related at that time as well. I hid nearly all of myself away when I got my first big reset going to college, and stayed that way until Everything Fell Apart over 20 years later, after the COVID pandemic. This culminated in a divorce that i did not take very well. I don’t usually talk about my divorce or my ex on here for a lot of reasons but for my part, given she had basically married a mask i’d constructed that didn’t work any more, there wasn’t really any other possible outcome. That put me in another bad place, that i am only now getting free of. Last winter I handfasted my partner in Iceland, as i discussed in another recent post. My partner has truly embraced my bi-ness, which brings me great joy. This post is me embracing it myself.

Some of my constant ‘life resets’ and remaking myself over the years was masking neurodivergence, but a lot of it was also because I wasn’t able to see, or accept, is that I am bi. Bifurcated. An edge walker. Always in two worlds, never part of either. Trying to stuff myself into either side breaks me. Cottongrass grows in the most pristine bogs and the most toxic acid mine runoff but will not grow in an average forest or marsh. It is soft, and it is tough. I am not meant to be the goldenrod i wanted to be, tolerant of everything, and able to survive in any opening. I’m a cottongrass.

While writing this post, i came across the concept of Disaster Bi. This is pretty much me. Or how i was meant to be anyway. Awkward, clumsy, silly but also overly serious, sits weird, loses things, struggles with relationships at the same time that relationships and friendships were the heart of my life. My true form, the song i couldn’t write… I am a disaster bi who works to help people avoid and be resilient to disasters. It’s been a long road to self acceptance, and at age 47 I am hoping I can settle into this without any more huge self-revelations… because for perhaps the first time in my life, I actually have a good feeling for who i am.

The story of Ragnarok, from the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, tells that Ragnarök will bring ‘brothers fighting brothers’ (which seems to be the case any time anything goes wrong) plus a Fimbulwinter, an extreme winter which lasts three years. Thor, the god of thunder, fights the Serpent and both die. There are, of course, multiple versions of the story, and it is much more complex than i am making it out to be. My point here is that there is a modern interpretation of this story. This article from 2004 links Jörmungandr to the thermohaline circulation - an ocean current system which includes the Gulf Stream and pumps heat around much of the world’s oceans. Like the serpent the current crosses over itself in an ouroboros-like shape and ‘eats its own tail’. There is an increasing concern that freshwater from melting glaciers in Greenland may result in changes to the ocean that could weaken or even stop this current. Indeed it is believed this has happened before and resulted in dramatic temperature drops for areas around the North Atlantic. Should it happen again, it would indeed bring a Fimbulwinter to areas like Iceland, Norway, and the UK, while also bringing near apocalyptic heat to southern areas (represented in these stories by Surtr). Because the heat that travels from the equator towards the Arctic can no longer be transported by the sea “serpent” current, it must transport in the other way it does so which is through massive storms such as hurricanes. This of course matches the link to Thor fighting the serpent. Here in Vermont it is unclear what would happen, but it would likely involve much increased storm severity, worse flooding, eat streaming up from the Gulf of Mexico at times, and extreme cold blasts other times. Basically an intensifying of the issues we can barely cope with now - perhaps dramatically so. Ragnarok. In that story, two humans survive by climbing into the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree. But Yggdrasil is an ash tree, a species being killed in Vermont due to the emerald ash borer (which doesn’t fit into this story as far as i know).

Did the Vikings know about this ‘serpent’ current, through spiritual or conceptual means, and create this story? Others have suggested it instead refers to climate change caused by exploding volcanoes, which may be a more compelling if less timely argument. Volcanos are a whole other form of monster. All that being said, it is worth thinking about ancient wisdom because people did notice things back then. And, anything involving Loki is best given a wide berth and respect, regardless of any other factors.

I’ve been really diving into my interest in weather lately, and having obtained a membership in the WeatherFront app, i’ve been tracking the movement of different storms in Vermont and how they interact with the terrain. Last Thursday i was able to use this app to find evidence of rotation in a storm in Lincoln, Vermont that seemed likely to create a tornado - and sure enough there was one… and a rather strong one by Vermont standards. I’ve been cataloguing different forms of convective storms and am hoping to create a record of them, perhaps in a Wordpress site or a different Substack. We shall see. It’s been a wet summer before, very different from the drought last year. I’m a bit worried it could be another bad flood year in Vermont.

Some time in the afternoon of the 16th, a thunderstorm formed in western New York State. At some point it began rotating. When a thunderstorm rotates, it gains more coherency, often lasts longer, and can be much more severe. The storm pulsed, strengthened, weakened, made its way across the Adirondacks and the Champlain Valley. This storm found its way onto the high ground between two watersheds, where it could more easily suck in warm air from both sides. A rotating convective storm almost feels alive, and like a life form it creates a wall around itself to protect in from out. Thunderstorms that do this can last hours and travel hundreds of miles.
We knew storms were expected, and that there was a chance of severe ones. But stepping outside after dark, you could see more than that. You could see that there was a monster present. The sky was lit up, not by the normal flicker of nocturnal lightning, but by rapid flashes about once a second. It looked like a heartbeat. Consistent, enduring, incredibly eerie. I couldn’t see the massive hail 15 miles to my south, only the brief downpour and tiny chunks of small hail that affected my location. But in Brookfield, the flickering lightning lit up a wall cloud, something only rotating thunderstorms create. Often, but not always, a wall cloud comes before a tornado. That was the case with this storm. It was small by Midwestern standards, but plenty strong enough to destroy a barn.

Tornados are uncommon in Vermont, at least compared to other parts of the United States. We get severe weather each summer, but microbursts and flash floods are more common, perhaps due to the mountainous terrain. They do happen, though, and i have had closer encounters than this one. Close enough to hear. In Middlebury, to the southwest of me, it produced a tornado that damaged several homes. The tornado did not last long, and the storm weakened and lifted when it crossed the mountains. But then, as it moved towards Montpelier, it strengthened again. This was a storm i could feel, in a rare and terrifying way. And when it hit town, I heard a horrifying sound. It sounded like sheet metal being ripped apart. By a monster. My hair stood up as the air itself seemed to change its texture, likely due to rapid pressure drop and suction. I rushed down to the basement. Later I learned what had happened. About a mile to my south, several massive white pines were ripped apart half way up. They were not blown over, instead they were twisted apart half way up. Most likely the tornadic claw of the storm didn’t touch down in Montpelier, but it got close enough to twist the pines to bits.

There have been other monsters in my life of this sort. Twice i’ve seen the sickly green color and texture to the sky that often comes before the fiercest of monster storms - massive mesocyclones with huge hail and often tornados. The color is singular, the sort of thing you can’t actually understand until you’ve seen it. Like a total solar eclipse. I’ve been in lightning so intense the metal around me was buzzing. That nocturnal monster roared with thunder with no gaps for perhaps an hour. You could have read a newspaper by the lightning, no problem. Then there was the line of flash-bulb storms in the desert, after the hottest day of my life (120F), spent in a canyon that humans had defiled in various ways. It was easy to imagine the storm as a god of vengeance, but perhaps the truth is scarier. The desert simply does not care. We left that canyon because a desert flash flood that cuts through sandstone like butter isn’t kind to the human body.

It’s been a hard time lately. It’s not an easy time to live in the United States, but i’m not even talking about national politics here. Vermont’s political landscape has turned into its own flash flood of lies, gaslighting, astroturfing, and awful behavior. I choose not to talk about my current job on here, but suffice to say the civil servants of Vermont have been treated like trash, and in the field i am in it is doubly so. I’ve also had several disappointments with professional contacts in my personal life. Not the monsters i reference above, but the mundanity of incompetence and apathy. So i am drawn back to the monster storms, same as in my past.

As a child, part of my obsession with weather originated in the fact that it was the only natural thing in Torrance not manipulated, controlled, or smashed by human hubris. Humans do affect the weather, but all we really do is make it more fierce. Torrance has the most bland weather on this continent, but the swirls of the daily marine layer and the heaping monsoon storms that form over the mountains each summer offered the ability to project a part of myself away from the world i was in. I wanted to be a meteorologist, or perhaps some sort of storm chaser. That path was closed because my particular form of neurodivergence didn’t get along with 1990s calculus classes and at the time i was not self aware enough to come up with workarounds. So instead I ended up here. Which, overall, i usually regard as a good thing, but the way things are right now it doesn’t feel that rosy. It feels like the work i am doing is not actually making anything better. Lately i’ve been watching storm chaser streams on YouTube, and perhaps i am pondering that other life never lived.

Things won’t stay how they are now. But the monsters will keep walking the ridges. The fiercest storms will still claw the earth in a way that seems like it shouldn’t feel real. Mountains will rise and fall, and humans will get their act together, or will mostly die off or get turned into something else. Maybe a little bit of both. Monster storms will do what they do, regardless of what i want them to do. I wish they would not destroy homes and kill people, but they won’t pay that any heed, and conversely my watching them in fixated wonder does not change them at all.

caveat: i am not saying that my autistic profile is the most valid or a particularly common one, only that i sometimes come off like a weird TV character. Autism is a VERY variable thing by nature, and others may have completely different experiences from me, even in the absolute opposite direction, and that is totally valid too!

We recently watched Love on the Spectrum, a Netflix series about autistic people navigating dating and love. I was fascinated but a little concerned to watch it, since so many things like this are so problematic.

It’s a mix of good and, not without its flaws. I felt that the show focuses too much on parents and can infantilize. it also clearly emphasizes peoples awkwardness and struggles, since that is what the show is about. But the real upside is the people. From what I have seen on social media, they mostly feel that they were treated well, and had a positive experience. No one asked if the dogs with varying anal maladies consented to having these outed on television, but i will give the show a pass for that.

In particular I saw myself in Dani, a young woman portrayed with very monotropic views about her special interest and being very prone to limerance, plus displaying sexual desire but not knowing how to express it within social norms. This pertains a lot to me in my 20s. Outwardly i think i present a lot like James, who is a bit older and is prone to long, overly analytical, dialogues about what is going on, plus can lean into being a big goofy. I present this with a HUGE caveat that i do NOT know these people and they are certainly portrayed differently in the show to how they act on a day to day basis. That being said, i definitely identified a lot with them and if i did meet them in real life we’d probably either become good friends or annoy the heck out of each other. Or both.

When the characters in Love on the Spectrum are being awkward around a date, it plays a sort of goofy music in the background. I feel like that would have been the soundtrack to a lot of my 20s. In my teens and 20s i was very prone to unrequited crushes and limerences on friends, sometimes not even acted on. My first relationship started in a similar way except it was requitted without my expecting it. (I had assumed i was unattractive and no one wanted to date me, but in reality i have NO ability to read social cues when someone was attracted to me). This was when I was 21 and I had nowhere near the emotional or social maturity to be in a relationship, but of course i tried anyway. It was a fest of pathological demand avoidance and drama, but was also a lot of fun when it was good. I was heartbroken when my ex left the relationship and did not understand why, but now i clearly do. We were a mess, but i was fun too, and she was dealing with really bad things that i had absolutely no experience or social capacity to understand.

Before this was a limerence over my best friend, who was dating my other friend. I never acted on that. After this breakup and a long period of autistic burnout social withdrawal was a limerence over a colleague who had little interest in dating me, while i was oblivious and unable to process another person who id want to date me who would have been a much better fit. I wrote some sad songs about it and made some sad art, kind of like James and Dani seemed like they might do. Cue the wonky music and a little infodump from me about how writing a song about someone and making a painting must make them want to date me, because i failed to understand social cues, even from other neurodivergent people, and was neither connected with my own body nor able to understand that intimacy and attraction are not driven by MS Paint art no matter how pleasant.

This attempt at pebbling was flawed in more ways than one as i am awful at gift giving a lot of the time. It’s what I thought of when I saw this super cute animation by Dani which was about as successful as my MS Paint Art in achieving romantic intimacy.

My limerence didn’t end until my friend moved away, after which time my second relationship started. This next one was highly informed by my past limerence where i was trying to reform myself into someone who would have more success in dating. I ended up establishing a relationship and moving in with someone based on autistic masking, who ended up revealing i ‘talked about plants and weather too much’ and ‘was weird around her family’ and couldn’t fit into her new social group. I was frustrated by this breakup and angry that she didn’t like a realer me, but could i really blame her when i’d mostly hidden the real me from her? Unfortunately i didn’t actually learn that lesson. And as with my first breakup, i was teleported to a new place in the disruption. This was how I ended up in Vermont, where i tried the same sort of thing again with a different person. This time we married and had two wonderful kids… but it did not end well after that. I won’t talk about my ex in here, but for my part, refusing to be self aware or even address my core self (including autism and some LGBT stuff that is due for another post) got me in a very bad place. The divorce, the upheaval, and being uprooted from a place i loved sent me into the worst autistic burnout of my life, and i was just lucky i had people to support me during that time.

And here’s one thing Love on the Spectrum doesn’t really touch on, perhaps because it doesn’t make for good TV. Autistic people are very, very vulnerable to certain types of toxic or abusive relationships. We’re taught to throw away who we are at a young age, that our feelings and perceptions and instincts are wrong. We are taught by the school system and society we are lucky to be accepted by anyone at all. Many of us also struggle to process and understand lies and manipulation directed at us. Thus we can end up in very bad situations.

There’s another equally dark side of this coin as well. Autistic people can themselves be very toxic or abusive in relationships, especially if not self aware. Lack of understanding of self and others, vulnerability to autistic meltdowns, difficulties with emotional regulation, and inability to read social cues all play in here. We tend to find each other and date each other, so sometimes two autistic people get trapped in a very toxic relationship with each other. Autistic suicide and addiction rates are very high, and something that might be a sad story for some people, can be the end of the story for an autistic person.

This is somewhere where me being a trope can help me out a bit. There are quite a few characters in media, probably written by neurodivergent people with similar struggles, who fit my story well. Luz Noceda of The Owl House is perhaps my favorite, plus Entrapta of the new Shera and Rumi from K Pop Demon Hunters. Each of these characters has strong abilities or power, but end up hurting those around them because they are not aware of and do not accept themselves. Also relevant is Nimona, who is a bit different because well, they are Nimona, and not like anyone else at all. But Luz, Rumi, and Entrapta each nearly allow completely evil forces to destroy the world they love - and not because they themselves are malicious at all. In fact it’s the other way around - they are trying to help! That all just makes it worse. It requires an intense collapse for them to go on to be the leader and hero they are meant to be. But in real life, people sometimes go to the grave having caused a great deal of harm and may understand they hurt others, but don’t understand why.

It’s also interesting all of these characters are female, except Nimona who is well… Nimona. But Nimona does often take a female form. I do sometimes trope break by following stereotypical woman rather than man patterns, which can cause me to be problematic if i don’t remember i am still not experiencing sexism how a woman would since i look very male. Also, you could make a decent case for me being a bit like Hiccup of How to Kill Your Dragon as well.

So where does my story lead then? Do i eventually find my path like Luz? I hope so. I am at least aware i need to try. This winter i went to Iceland to do a handfasting ritual with my partner. She is also autistic and very similar to me with a very similar background, but she lives across the ocean. We chose a handfasting and Asatru ritual rather than a traditional marriage, and we did our ceremony on the literal crack between our two continents, in a beautiful place that is meaningful to us both. While we were doing the ceremony an intense blizzard started which swept over the lava fields in its own sort of marriage of fire and ice. Our union, and our life together and sometimes also apart, will not be what most people experience, but trying to live that way led us both dark places. And anyway, we’re not a people. (note that link has mild Nimona spoilers and someone having been stabbed by an arrow).

This story diverges a bit from the main topic of this substack, but i could not do much to help the world before i went through my own character arc, which has been the most painful and probably the most important thing i’ve ever done - not just for me, but for my kids and other loved ones as well. I thank all those who have shared their characters like Luz and Entrapta, and I also thank Dani, James, and the other Love on the Spectrum participants for sharing their stories. I hope me sharing my small story is meaningful and helpful as well. I think Love on the Spectrum has some work to do with things like centering the parents too much for a dating show, but I do look forward to seeing the next season, and wish the best to Dani and James who appear to be in happy relationships now based on their Instagram pages. So next time I am awkward, i will just play that goofy music in my head, and let it be as it is.

This is Charlie. He likes cottongrass, and water flowing through sand. He doesn’t like office buildings, or potlucks. Bring on the silly music and video clips.

I have made similar posts about Dwarf Fortress, and long ago about Minecraft (though it could use an updated post, it’s changed a lot since then!).

Timberborn

Timberborn is a city builder and resource management game, with the twist that you are sentient technology-using beavers rebuilding after a human apocalypse. The ‘hoomans’ are gone but they left a trashed world where water is in short supply and often polluted. It isn’t a perfect fit as a ‘cozy’ game since the beavers can easily starve or die of thirst, especially in hard mode, but it still seems to fit that genre based on the play style. I of course had to get this game the second i heard about it, which was several years ago, but it was still in development mode for that whole time. A few days ago the official ‘final’ game was released. This coincided closely with the release of the Pixar movie Hoppers which is also beaver-themed. Add in all the real world stuff i am avoiding in this post and it’s very timely!

There is a lot I love about this game, including the beaver theme and the post-apocolyptic setting, but perhaps my favorite thing is the water. Unlike most other games, the water is modeled rather realistically. In the post i linked earlier, i complained about the Minecraft water flow simulation, which is limited and unrealistic. In Dwarf Fortress, the water is a little bit more realistic but even touching the water seems to usually kill all your dwarves and flood your mine, and in other games, like the older Sim City games or story-based games like Zelda, the water is mostly a static prop. In Timberborn the water flows in a quite realistic manner, until it stops flowing (droughts are a big part of the game). Polluted water called badwater can also mix in or replace the clean water, which can make beavers sick and kill crops and trees. Much of the game centers around storing water behind dams and spreading it out on the landscape, just like real beavers do. It’s also necessary to shunt away polluted water. The water and badwater come from set source blocks, rather than precipitation and runoff, and flow downhill until they meet a drain or the edge of the map. There’s no erosion or deposition (which would be tricky to model in a game). You can’t clean the polluted water, just shunt it away to plague some other beaver elsewhere off-screen. There are no floods, no ice and snow, no glaciers, etc. But that would be expecting a lot from a game of this sort.

In terms of ecology, there’s a fair bit of depth but it isn’t the main focus of the game. When you return water to the landscape, the ground turns green but you can’t interact with whatever is growing there. The game allows you to plant and harvest crops. You can also plant several species of tree (but the beavers don’t eat the bark); blueberries (which the beavers hate and only eat when starving), and dandelions (unknown which microspecies but they help cure the beavers that touch polluted water). Unless they are marked for replanting, these plants will slowly spread over time. They don’t spread fast enough to really be useful for gathering resources, do not spread up or down slopes, and only spread one block at a time, but it can add a fun dynamic and makes the game a bit more immersive. I like to try to ‘restore’ areas with ‘native’ vegetation beyond the official game goals, and it does work to a limited extent. The trees never die of old age and dead trees never fall over, so there’s no forest succession or real change unless you cause it manually. Still, it’s fun to watch things spread as i did here (sorry for the ugly screen photos)

I’d totally love to see more complex ecology and more of a goal to actually restore ecosystems beyond where the beavers are living (if they just develop everything as a beaver city, won’t they end up like the hoomans?) I’d also love ways to clean rather than shunt away the badwater. For instance, you can grow cattails as food, but why not also make it so that water gets cleaned flowing through cattails? In real life, cattails clean nutrients from polluted water. The badwater perhaps has more the vibe of acid mine runoff, but if so, why not cottongrass! What about the ability to restore peat bogs to help restore the climate which presumably is altered in this world? What about invasive species- briars exist as landscape features, what if they spread near polluted water? Imagine knotweed, giant reed, buckthorn, etc… but maybe that would make the game too realistic and unpleasant. I am probably imagining a game only I would play or one that would break my computer. I tried twice to make an invasive species themed simulation game, but time or lack of experience or other factors (like being busy pulling up goutweed in my real life yard) meant they didn’t get finished. If i had more time and more coding ability i’d try making a mod, as the game seems rather mod friendly. Perhaps a new faction specifically setting out to restore ecosystems (the Folktails are ecosystem-friendly in their lore, but the game isn’t a habitat restoration game, I haven’t played the Iron Teeth much since they are more industrial and doomed to end up like the hoomans for sure).

Broadly, I’d give Timberborn 8 out of 10 Ecosphere Points. It’s about as good a gamified ecosphere simulator as one could expect, because most people who are really into ecology and water flow aren’t also game devs. Overall it’s a fun game and I definitely recommend it if you are into this sort of thing, though i do kinda lose steam after mid game when i get the water sorted out, since there aren’t ecology or hydrology related issues to manage at that point.

Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley has been around as a completed game since 2016, though several updates with additional features have been added since that time with another one planned in the future as well. Stardew is definitely a ‘cozy’ game. Your character leaves a miserable office (that looks much like the office Vermont state employees are often forced to use) to start farming on a farm they inherit from their grandfather. So just like in real life, you only have a chance of success via generational wealth. The farm is in a small town in a place that seems a mix of Oregon and Vermont (perhaps Adamant, Vermont or something, but on the ocean. Perhaps downeast Maine.). You expand your farm, forage in the woods, go in a little Terraria-esque mine to fight monsters and get ore, and choose whether to support the local community store (with an owner who is still kinda a jerk) or a chain store. You get to befriend the villagers, romance some of them, and can get married (or get an aromantic monster roommate friend if you’d rather). I ended up liking this part of the game a lot more than i expected to. In my first playthrough I married Abagail who has purple hair and canonistically eats minerals (based on an old coding bug but that just makes it funnier). There’s a bunch of lore around Abagail, her irritating dad Pierre, and a wizard that may be her secret father.

In terms of ecology, Stardew does have a bit going on, but mostly just in the farming part of the map. As with Timberborn, most species of trees do spread on their own, at least on the farm. The spread is actually a bit more detailed than Timberborn as the trees can spread three blocks and go through several growth forms. This is a mixed blessing because you start out having to clear trees to farm, and you don’t want them overtaking everything. You can also indefinitely deforest Cindersap Forest and other parts of the game, without any real consequence. You can plant additional trees, but any trees you cut will eventually regrow. There are two types of grass that also spread, as do weeds. You can get moss, seeds, and sap from trees, and can also find or grow mushrooms. Rocks and sticks also appear on the farm over tine. The weeds can create a nuisance, damage paths, or displace your crops just like in real life. You can have livestock that eat the grass. Fishing is a surprisingly difficult minigame and there are a lot of different fish types you can catch. At certain points in the game you can accept a quest to get rid of certain types of fish because they are supposedly becoming invasive. However there’s no real change in their abundance, and ignoring the quest doesn’t lead to ecosystem collapse. With the crops you are able to save seed for the next year, but you can not breed better crops over time, or anything like that. The water is very static and there’s no real aspects of geology, other than a generic volcano and a woman who eats quartz. Seasonality does affect crop growth, except on a tropical island you eventually get access to, and your greenhouse.

I give Stardew Valley 6.5 out of 10 ecosphere points. The ecosphere is not as important a part of the game as Timberborn and the landscape can not be customized as much, but there are some aspects of ecology and seasonality integrated into the game. Overall as a game it’s really more like a 9 out of 10, it’s a wonderful, cute, sweet, and surprisingly deep game despite its boring water. Perhaps best of all, it has multiplayer farms and is really fun to play with kids and family. But it isn’t an ecology simulator, alas. I’m just glad the trees and grass spread, as to me the somewhat unpredictable change over time makes the game more appealing. And the rocks that sporadically reappear give my in-game wife something to snack on.

I’ve always been fascinated with how ecology is represented in games, ever since playing games like SimEarth and SimLife back in the day. Those games did try to model ecology, and that was basically the whole point of SimLife, but unfortunately it was extremely buggy and slow. It’s very difficult to simulate any portion of the complexity of ecology, though it does help that computers are more advanced now than they used to be. Still i am holding out hope for some multiplayer capable game like Minecraft but with more dynamic ecology and geology. Maybe one day… Meanwhile, i am glad to have ecology-themed content on the days with murder sleet or the evenings when i need to rest, because I am so monotropic i can’t stop thinking of it even while playing games.

50 years ago it might not have been particularly notable, but after a string of warm winters, it has hit like a bag of bricks, except substantially more beautiful, especially the frigid night the Northern Lights lit up the snow.

The cold is not a retreat of the warming that is affecting the Earth’s climate overall. Instead, it is a manifestation of increasing extremes, and the recent propensity for weather patterns to get stuck in one place. The West Coast has been very warm, and the Rocky Mountains have a truly feeble snowpack right now. The jet stream has set up in a way that pumps north air into the western part of the United States and dumps cold air directly towards Vermont and points south.

The harshness sharpens the beauty, and the beauty sharpens the harshness. For several days we had nothing but fine diamond dust slowly settling to the ground, the perfect glitter (because it will melt later, not make a mess). There has been less snow than many years, but one storm moving up the coast dropped 16 inches on us so there is plenty on the ground. It hasn’t melted and won’t be doing so any time soon. Other than the Grinch Thaw and one week of sporadic January thaw-ing, it’s been below freezing nearly the whole time since around Thanksgiving. It will likely stay that way for the first week or two of February as well. While we may get above freezing in a bit over a week… maybe… before that time we have another Arctic blast likely next weekend in what may be the coldest days of the winter. Lake Champlain is almost frozen over and will likely freeze completely across by this weekend. This used to be common, but has not happened since 2019.

The cold leads to hibernation and contemplation, especially during a weekend alone when i’ve got the illness that’s been circulating around my kids’ school. I’ve spent some time thinking about ‘where i came from’ and ‘who i am’, something i have long pondered because i have always been different from most other people. Some of this involves thinking about my ancestors, who come almost entirely from areas near the North and Baltic seas and adjacent waterways. This is another cold place, and dark. Like other species, humans adapt to their environment rather quickly. Humans have access to technology, but are also affected by slower forces. One of the interesting quirks of evolution of humans is that we are able to quickly (by the standpoint of evolution which still takes many generations) adapt physically to cold, dark areas by losing melanin from our skin so we can absorb sunlight and Vitamin D. This leads to pale pink or peach colored skin. Conversely, in very warm, sunny areas, we end up with more melanin and dark brown skin. There are many other shades in between, plus differences in hair and eye color. This is a trait that evolution can change quickly, much like leaf shape or flower color in plants which can vary quite a bit within a species. Having pale ‘white’ skin or dark ‘black’ skin isn’t even a monophylletic trait. It mattered more before we had vitamin D supplements and sun lamps, sunscreen and wide-brimmed sun hats. My ancestors are from a cold place like Vermont (though more oceanic) but in the modern day i am no more suited to be here than someone with very dark skin. Somehow people have taken this interesting variation in our speices and turned it horribly toxic, as if white-skinned humans are some kind of shiny pokemon.

Some people will seriously find a way to make anything toxic. We know why people use differences to divide each other and seek power for themselves, but it’s still disappointing every time. Our species has covered this planet, and all of our actions affect one another. In the past, populations of humans were isolated for generations, but today we live in a much more united world in both positive and negative ways. We are all the same hot mess species, flaws and all.

And there’s been a lot of flaws around. The empire i live in is falling apart. I don’t know if it will be permanently broken, or if it will rebound, but things are not good right now. We have a crisis of leadership, and i do mean that at nearly every level. We can’t blame all our problems on just one person, and need to recognize failure is widespread amongst those meant to lead and guide us. I don’t know how to fix it. I usually avoid politics here because i am not very good at talking about it, and am maybe doing a bad job now as well. I am blunt and very impatient when people act illogically, even though i often do so myself as well. I tend to piss people off and would make an awful politician. I don’t go to protests and rallies because my form of autism makes me prone to freaking out if i am in a big crowd of emotionally charged people, which would help no one i want to help. So i just go on trying to grow cottongrass, restoring a tiny hillside to native plants, working to get better at mapping wetlands and understanding post-glacial soil and hydrology… learning more plant species and what they mean to a wetland’s story. But how can that be enough in all that is going on? When so many people are unsafe and it is getting worse? I have a place in a world trying to get better, and would probably be valued in a post collapse world too, but during this phase of necrosis i don’t seem to have a place. I had a whole blog about Stardew Valley and ecology that I was going to write, and will do at some point, but it didn’t feel right to do that right now when everything is such a mess. There are some wonderful things in my personal life and that of loved ones that have happened or are happening, but when i enlarge my circle much beyond that, there are just so many things gone wrong, which i seem ill prepared to make better.

I guess just like me personally, my whole country is asking the same questions. Who are we? Is this really who we are? Many are just waking up to the long list of awful things our predecessors have done. We must also wake up to the long list of heroes and normal people throughout our country’s history, especially the marginalized and ignored ones, who stood up against the bad things and demanded better. Who continue to do so. My Senator, Becca Balint, says we are all on a hero’s journey now. Not just one or two of us, a special important hero snowflake. All of us, together. We are our past, the horrible and wonderful and brave. We are our present, the chaos and shame and the surprising emerging unity. We are millions of people holed up in our homes as the air gets cold enough outside to crack the inside of tree trunks… where a storm coated places that rarely freeze in ice and broke the roads, while across the continent farmers worry as beleaguered watersheds will see little snow to recharge their streams and aquifers… fighting through flu season, the horrors awash in our technology and culture, and all the beauty and bravery as well. And who we are in the future, who we choose to be? That is yet to be written. I do have hope that out of this darkness something better is coming. But the thing that sometimes is forgotten in these stories is how many people good fall along the way to the many things that afflict struggling or dispossessed humans. we can’t write this story without recognizing that not everyone is going to make it, and it’s not fair, and a cold, cold thing.

It’s been a cold winter. Who knows what spring will bring.

There was a common, repeatable topography that I often reverted to. A shoreline in the south and a river that cuts north through steep mountains, draining a wide valley near the north end of the paper. Smaller rivers drained mostly north-south to the east and west of the main river. It had similarities to both the Winooski River cutting through the Green Mountains, and Malibu Creek cutting through the Santa Monica Mountains. Perhaps it was inspired by the latter, as even at a young age i had strong familiarity with it. Perhaps it just fit on the page well.

The process starts at the ocean with sequential mapping of each elevation heading upstream. I rarely draw maps from ‘up’ down, though i have dabbled in it. After the topographic lines are drawn i draw in the rivers and streams, which is perhaps my favorite part. The streams must match the topography i set up for them, which has canyons, basins, valleys, and slopes. When i draw roads those too meander and curve and switchback across the landscape. Once i add such features the topography is already drawn in pen so i can’t undo it.

What does this all have to do with the K Pop Demon Hunters? (Spoiler alert, if you’re even slower to see it than me). Rumi, the main character, is a musical demon hunter. But she’s got a secret. She’s also part demon. In this story demons have patterns on their skin. Hers show when she is upset, and she tries to hide them, because it shows she is the very thing she hates most. And… while they aren’t topographic looking.. the patterns do look a bit like a map to me.

Now, i want to be careful here. I do not want to link my experience with autism, or any of my other differences, too closely with ‘demons’. These things aren’t objectively bad, they just are. But that being said… there were times they absolutely felt that way to me. As a child I was very uncomfortable in the school environment and when i was uncomfortable, i developed very intrusive stims and other repetitive behaviors. This of course was not particularly appreciated in a classroom (or office) setting. Over time, i got a bit better at hiding them. The maps are also a stim, and a bit more discrete, though in time i learned to hide the maps as well. Of course, i didn’t know what a stim was. No one really knew why I was acting how I did, but i became very aware that people didn’t like it. So i hid it. Like Rumi’s patterns. And as with Rumi, such things aren’t possible to hide forever. It’s poison for the soul, and after a point you face a choice to let it out, no matter how it makes you look, or to be destroyed trying not to.

I watched K Pop Demon Hunters with my kids because they asked me to watch it. I felt confident i’d enjoy it since it’s kind of in the vague owl house/encanto sort of realm (really I am more of a Luz Noceda than a Rumi but that’s for another post). I did not expect to be brought to tears by it (though i don’t know why based on my experience with owl house and encanto… when i did start letting things loose, i regained the long lost ability to cry). But this song just got me. I’d probably get sued by someone if i quoted the lyrics that seem directly relevant, because it’s almost all of the song. Why did i cover up the colors stuck inside my head? And i’m not some sort of magic demon hunter. But, the song has the answer to that too: “so we’re not heroes'. we’re still survivors”. And after all the real demons in my story aren’t an external, malicious spiritual force. There’s no job for them here, because they couldn’t have said or done worse to me than the words i spoke to myself in the darkest times. I had to defeat my own torment. And while i wish i’d been able to do it sooner, the truth is, I really did find my power when i stopped hiding the maps, the stims, my strengths which were hidden in the broken glass. Making maps is an increasing part of my job and legacy in the ‘real’ world, and if the maps can fight through the politics and chaos we are facing, they may just let me do my part in the end to fulfil my potential.

And perhaps the best part? at the end of the song, the magic released by the main characters looks a little bit like a topographic map.

So, on theme, i am not going to apologize for my maps, or for how much i liked this movie.

My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like.
My maps without the lies this is what it sounds like.

Really cold.

Last week we had our first venture into single digits below zero Fahrenheit, according to our local airport. It was a record low for the date.

Last night it was double digits. We had another record low.

The North Branch of the Winooski River has more ice on it already this year than it did any part of the winter of 2023-2024. That winter was warm and the river stayed swollen from the floods the whole time, making it very hard for ice to form. The dark shiny parts in the middle are not open water, but clear mirror-like ice. I am very reluctant to step onto river ice as it can be sketchy, but it looked to be several inches thick.

December is usually a rather fickle month. We almost always have snow at the end of November, but often Christmas is a slushy icy mess. Some years the snow doesn’t really amount to much at all. In distant past years, when human-caused climate change was less of a factor, there were colder Decembers, including near Lake Champlain. Since I moved to Vermont in 2009, however, nearly all Decembers have had periods of rain and relative warm. Most of them also seem to have featured an event I have named the Grinch Storm. The Grinch Storm is… kind of a thing, but it’s hard to parse genuine patterns from observer bias.

To explain the grinch storm, I need to explain a bit about winter storms in Vermont. There are three main types of winter storm here. Of course, not every storm meets these parameters, they intergrade into each other and other less common weather patterns also exist, but like the concept of biological species, the concept of storm types has a lot of value (Really i’m a lot more likely to be a splitter for storm types than for plant species). The best-known type of New England winter storm is the nor’easter. (just don’t tell this guy.) These storms rage up the coast, feeding on the contrast between the warm Gulf Stream and cold inland air. Often they seem to materialize or suddenly strengthen right over New England or the associated waters, and sometimes they are comprised of two storms merging. There are of course multiple subclasses of nor’easter, some of which don’t affect Vermont in any significant way . Some of the biggest snowstorms along the coast stay too far southeast and miss us, whereas the nor’easters that dump snow on Montpelier often track further inland with their warm air and bring rain to coastal New England. These storms become less a factor as you go west, and sometimes they back up against the Green Mountains dumping snow on the east side of Vermont and mostly avoiding the west side. Nor’easters sometimes bring rain to Vermont, especially in the fall, and on occasion also bring sleet and ice.

The second common Vermont winter storm type is the Alberta clipper. Where the nor’easters back up from the ocean to the east, clippers barrel straight out of the west-northwest. Nor’easters sometimes bring rain or wintry mix, but clippers are almost always snow. One nor’easter can bring a foot of snow whereas a clipper usually only brings a few inches, but you can have a clipper every two or three days for a couple of weeks and end up with well over a foot of snow anyway. The cold storms coming through this early December - the one last weekend and the one coming tomorrow - are clippers. I remember a few years back there were several years with few to none, and then last year had quite a few, and this year they have returned as well.

There is a third type of winter storm, less well known and often disdained - the Great Lakes Cutter. This term is apparently not used as much as there is no Wikipedia page, but I did find a mention here in this weather blog and in this article. And why don’t I like them? They bring winter rain. I love summer rain, spring rain, and fall rain, as long as they aren’t excessive. I loved winter rain in coastal Southern California, where it was an incredibly vibrant life bringing force upon the dry land. In Vermont? Winter rain is (relatively) hot garbage. Often when it starts, there’s freezing rain and dangerous roads. When it really kicks in, it will either melt whatever snow is on the ground or turn it to ice. All the drains are clogged with snow, so the roads fill with water. If they are heavy enough the cutters can cause flooding, including ice jam floods that can be devastating to towns along rivers. Once they end, the temperatures usually go back below freezing, everything gets covered in a sheet of ice, and any snow that remains is not in good condition for skiing or sledding.

Storms seem to follow patterns. There always seems to be an early nor’easter near Halloween and severe thunderstorms are common near the Fourth of July. There’s usually a thaw in late January called the January Thaw, though in these times of extremes and climate change it isn’t as predictable as it used to be. Several recent years have featured heavy snow in mid March. And then there’s the Grinch Storm.

Most years seem to have them. Beautiful snow covers the ground by mid December, and then some time in the week before Christmas, it appears. A big wet Great Lakes Cutter. More Christmases than not, it seems, feature bare ground, ice, and slush, even during otherwise cold, snowy winters. Some people have taken to calling it the Grinch Storm. I am also partial to “Hot Garbage Express”. It is a pain in the butt, and gets bonus garbage points if it brings freezing rain that also halts travel.

Does the Grinch Storm hold up statistically? I’m not sure. I thought i remembered seeing somewhere that the pattern is reflected in slightly higher average temperatures during that period, but i am not sure if that is actually true. It may instead be a case of bias - most of us are familiar with “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” but no one speaks of the “Turkey Drippings Frigate From the South” that brings rain on Thanksgiving, or a “Fourth of July, Small Hail in my Eye” storm that ruins fireworks displays. Nor do people tend to remember the “Entirely Predictable Early February Nor’Easter With Unsurprising Snowfall”. People simply notice rain before Christmas more often than they notice other storms. That being said, the third week of December does tend to favor Great Lakes cutter storms, and the Grinch references are hard to pass up, even if no one is rejoicing over their rain gage needing to grow three sizes this year. I do think in the last decade or two, at least, we have usually had one of these storms.

There are other repeatable (or non repeatable) weather patterns that draw notice. There’s a parade in Pasadena, California called the Rose Parade that happens each year on the 1st or 2nd of January. January is the wet season in Pasadena, and that month averages around 4 inches of rain, but somehow the parade itself tends to avoid the rain. Except when it doesn’t. I lived in Pasadena for one year, and was walking distance from that parade when it happened in 2006. The weather that year? An absolute downpour. That winter wasn’t even all that rainy (the one before was record wet), but during the rose parade, it was a deluge. So when i think of that parade, i think of rain. Others think of lack thereof. Pattern recognition is an important skill, but it can also easily go awry.

Of course the real question I and others in Vermont now have is… is there going to be a Grinch Storm? Do we all have tickets for a ride on the Hot Garbage Express this year? The answer is maybe. Right now it looks like there is likely to be some warmer air moving through around December 19-20. But given it’s been so cold, relative warming might not be enough to cause much of a thaw. (Ideally it warms enough to get the snow to slide off my solar panels, which is more of a win than a loss for me. The “Renewable Energy SemiThaw of 2025”?). Or, there could be a sunny thaw, which hardly can be called a Grinch Storm (Grinch Sunshine? Drippy Roof Friday?). Earlier today the GFS, one of two commonly used long range weather models, was showing a grinch thaw. But I just checked again and as of right now, it isn’t showing much of a thaw at all. Both the GFS and the European weather model are currently showing a couple of forays that week into the mid 30s, possibly hitting 40, with a chance of some light rain, but also light snow afterwards that would make up for whatever would melt. That would hardly be a grinch storm, and might be a welcome chance to chip ice off of the driveway. (The Chippy Cutter? That doesn’t sound too bad.) That being said the forecast is likely to change quite a bit before then anyway. It’s not for nothing that some people claim “GFS” stands for “Good for s**t”, as that model has had some issues over the last few years, but i actually think last year it did well.

It will be interesting to see how the winter unfolds. As the Matt’s Weather Rapport post i linked earlier describes, cold Decembers sometimes do lead into cold winters overall, but not always. Some of the coldest Decembers on record were followed by very cold January and February conditions, but others switched over to much warmer conditions those months, relative to average. My guess is it will continue to be colder than the last several winters, but a big thaw or two is hard to avoid these days. Human-caused climate change does not stop extreme cold from affecting Vermont, but it does turn the odds against it a bit, and also just increases extremes in general. Hopefully this winter brings more snow for fun winter activities, and gentle or sporadic thaws in the spring that don’t lead to more floods. We really don’t need any more of those for a while.

There are many plants with fluffy seeds, usually meant to be distributed in the wind. Dandelions, thistles, willows, cottonwoods, or for that matter the cotton plant. Many of these are within the sunflower family or the willow family. With the sunflower family plants - dandelions, thistles, and such, the seeds are soft but sometimes scratchy and the plant is often spiky. This is also true for cotton which is related to mallows. With the willows and cottonwoods, the fluffs quickly detach rather than remain on the plant. The same is true of the unrelated milkweeds which release their floof after the first frost in Vermont.
Cottongrass is different. Its leaves look grass-like, but it is in the sedge family. Its floofs are unique, and in many cases remain on the plant for a long time. They are so soft, and remain nodding softly in the wind. I like to imagine they just choose to be soft, since other wind dispersed seeds aren’t soft in the same way. But no doubt the plant has its own evolutionary ‘reasons’ i do not understand. Interestingly, despite resembling cotton, it can’t be weaved in the same way, and indeed places like Iceland and Scotland instead rely on wool from sheep that graze amidst the cottongrass.

Cottongrasses grow all around cold areas of the Northern Hemisphere, usually in peaty soils. In some cases they also extend into warmer areas where there is peat, but most places they are found are cold. I often find them in bogs and fens in and near Vermont. In Iceland, they are prolific, and the two species are known as “Klófífa” (which my brain incorrectly but cutely reads as “cloofy”) and “Hrafnafífa”. In Scotland we heard them called “bog cotton”, or in Scots, “canach”.

iNaturalist lists 12 species of cottongrass, plus a hybrid. It seems the taxonomic hypersplitting fad hasn’t yet been applied this genus, or perhaps it just speciates less than some. I’ve seen seven of these species. By far the one i see the most is Virgina cottongrass (Eriophorum virginicum). This species prefers acidic bogs and poor fens, though as we will see later it sometimes pops up elsewhere. I have some in my bog bins and am currently trying out stratifying some seed to propagate more. This species produces its floofs in late summer and they remain bobbing about in bogs through the fall - little exclamation points announcing that you’ve found a special place. Each floof is made up of several secondary poofs (i am avoiding botanical terms here in favor of cute ones) but unlike some cottongrass species, it just looks like one megafloof. It also is browner than most cottongrasses thus the name ‘tawny’. It can get quite dense and sometimes looks like snow from afar.

The cottongrass i’ve observed second most often on iNaturalist is “common” cottongrass (Eriophorum angustifolium). This is one I have never seen in Vermont and it’s unclear if it was ever found here at all, but it is very common in Iceland and Scotland. This is the “cloofy” cottongrass (referring to it being “cleft” because it has more than one poof) and it appears to grow in most wet places in Iceland though in Great Britain it is more limited to boggy areas. It has a wide range in cold places of North America and Eurasia, despite avoiding also-cold Vermont. The ones in the photo below were bobbing in the wind next to a large Icelandic glacier.

Also notable, in the dubh lochan area mentioned in my last post, this species is common, but given it was October during my visit to that area, only one lonely floof remained visible, the rest of the seeds having been dispersed by the strong winds of the Flow Country.

Tussock cottongrass has the surprising name Eriophorum vaginatum, with the species name referring to a membrane or sheath, not anything to do with humans or this fictional character (though she does look floofy). This cottongrass is abundant in acidic bogs in Europe and North America, but unlike some cottongrasses doesn’t seem to be able to survive outside of bogs at all. It is notable in the strong clump forming habit of its leaves. It doesn’t seem to hold its floofs very long.

Next is green-keeled cottongrass (Eriophorum viridicarinatum), a multipoof species of cottongrass that differs from the ones above because it loves calcium rich fens rather than bogs. This species is limited to North America. While it does need calcium-rich groundwater, it can grow in some odd places as long as that requirement is met. This year i was amused to find it along Interstate 89 near the Randolph exit. This area was surveyed in connection with VTRANS, i am not roaming around on the interstate edge just to look at cottongrass, but you can catch a glimpse of it if you are driving north near Randolph in June, even at highway speeds.

Rough cottongrass (Eriophorum tenellum) is rarely seen in Vermont, but i was lucky to see it several times this year. It has a very specific habitat preference - floating peatlands extending over open, still water. This is perhaps why it is rare, but by luck or fate, one of our random stratified wetland sampling points landed in a sea of this species this year. This looks a lot like green-keeled cottongrass but blooms later in the summer in different habitat. I don’t know if it was having a good year this year or if I just got better at finding it than past years. It has a more limited range globally, in a narrow line from the Great Lakes to Newfoundland in both Canada and the USA.

Scheuchzer’s cottongrass is very habitat limited - it seems to require alpine habitats either at high latitudes like Iceland or high elevations like the Alps or Rocky Mountains. This one has a single poof and may be the cutest of them all. It isn’t in Vermont, and even in Iceland seems less abundant than “cloofy”.

My last species is slender cottongrass (Eriophorum gracile). I don’t know this species very well but it is rare in Vermont and seems to like rich fens like green-keeled cottongrass does. Its global range spans much of the Northern Hemisphere in cold but often not alpine areas. Also, i would be remiss not to mention alpine deergrass which is a related species that is sometimes considered a cottongrass and sometimes isn’t. It’s tinier than the others, also very cute, and occurs in areas of calcareous seepage, often on shallow soils including along roads.

The species i have not yet seen include broad-leaved cottongrass - E. latifolium, which occurs only in Europe and not Iceland. It looks like this one is another multifloof species. Then there’s russet cottongrass (Eriophorum chamissonis) which combines the colors of tawny cottongrass (or more so!) with the cute big single floofs of Scheuchzer’s cottongrass. It looks like i can find russet cottongrass if I take a trip to the Canadian Maritimes in early or mid summer - which is something i’d love to do for other reasons as well. Short-anther cottongrass (Eriophorum brachyantherum) is apparently also in the Maritimes but very rare and a bit more common in Norway. This one has a limited range. Arctic cottongrass (Eriophorum callitrix) seems even more limited to a few Arctic areas, but possibly also occurs on some high mountains near Yellowstone. Finally there is Eriophorum humile which looks to be limited to southeastern Russia and part of Mongolia and doesn’t even have an English common name. iNat lists the Russian name as Пушица низкая. I guess I am unlikely to ever get to see this one. I’d absolutely love to visit that ecoregion but both the political situation and the massive transportation difficulties make it seems unlikely. If any of you have seen it I’d love to hear about it. Lastly, apparently chamissonis and scheuchzeri seem to sometimes hybridize to form the rarely seen Eriophorum × medium.

A few things unite all the cottongrasses - they all have cute soft floofs and all tend towards colder areas (Virginia cottongrass does get into the hot Southeastern USA in some boggy areas). They also are fairly picky about their habitats. You won’t find them in forests, dry fields, deserts, and many other habitats. But… within that, some of them area also incredibly resilient. First of all, bogs are not particularly easy habitats to live in. Nutrients are few and far between, there is no solid ground, the saturated soil freezes and thaws dramatically, and usually conditions are quite acidic. The rich fens some species prefer have more calcium but are very wet and very localized habitats. The scattered nature of these habitats may be part of why the floofy seeds are so successful. Some species such as Virginia cottongrass form extensive runners in Sphagnum moss, knitting bogs together and forming large, perhaps genetically identical populations. This form of reproduction allows them to proliferate in their needed habitat, but by also producing fluffy seeds it has a chance to land in a different bog somewhere else facilitating genetic exchange and colonizing new habitats. Bogs are slow to form, but the habitat suitability for cottongrass still varies from year to year. If factors such as beaver activity or natural succession add or remove bog habitat, the cottongrass fluffs find their way to where they need to be. (This also brings up the question of how tiny, non-floof-producing plants such as pitcher plant and sundew somehow also find all the bogs, but that’s a whole other post).

So why is cottongrass a survivor? it seems delicate, small, and ‘picky’. And yet it proliferates in harsh places, sometimes surprisingly so. Recently i was at an acidic mine site where extremely toxic runoff from an old copper mine was poisoning a stream. The immediate mine discharge was orange, with the stream denuded of nearly any plant life (and all animal life). But what i did find, to my surprise, was a great expanse of Virginia cottongrass. Its soft floofs found this ruined place and set out rooting into the acidic sands. In fact it shows promise for rehabilitating such places and even can help clean up oil spills and removes otherwise ‘forever’ chemicals like PFAS from wetlands. It is soft, but it is not weak, or useless. Cottongrass is valuable and reminds us of strength in softness.

Next time you are in a bog, keep an eye out for this unique plant, and if you do find one, feel it’s fluff and appreciate the strength in softness.

In Great Britain, i only encountered one type of hawthorne. In New England there is a mysterious cloud of dozens to hundreds of species, depending on how fine you want to split them out - really every individual seems like its own species. Prunus - cherries and plums - are much more diverse in the UK. Mountain ash grows in about the same cold rocky habitats, but in Vermont it grows amidst or under other trees. In England i found the local mountain ash species growing in the open, and imagined maybe the little trees missed the primeval forests that used to surround them.

Of course… you can say very little about a landscape from a one week whirlwind tour. My only other time in the UK was two Februaries ago where I explored southern England and Wales. Two decades ago, I did visit Ireland, which is decidedly NOT the UK but does have similar ecology. And of course, in summer 2024 I visited Iceland which sits atop the mid Atlantic ridge between continents. You can stand on a bridge that spans between North America and Europe. Between the volcanoes and the glaciers and the blasting wind and the cold, Iceland has little in the way of trees. It always was low on trees and most that were there were removed by humans over time. Most of the plants there consist of ground-hugging alpine plants and soft cheerful cottongrasses. But still, all of this tells me little about the cold North Atlantic. For that matter, what has 15 years taught me about Vermont? A human lifespan is too short to learn the language of trees that live hundreds of years and their associated fungal connections which probably live much longer still.

A human lifespan is too short to learn the language of one forest, but can paradoxically help me do so by traveling to other, different forests to see the context. Despite the also-present downsides of the modern world, this is a bit of a wonder.

And then there are the things that are utterly unfamiliar. On the far northern end of Scotland, the mountains get lower and draped across the saddles and rolling lowlands there are blanket bogs… great open bog mats. The Flow Country is draped in a soggy carbon and water based sponge - the largest blanket bogs in Europe. They have been mined extensively for peat in the past, because there was nothing else there to burn to cook or keep warm. Now many of the peatlands are being restored. And on teh higher ground of the peatlands, there are scatterings of mysterious dark pools. Dubh lochans. These are terraced, oddly deep pools in the peat somewhat reminiscent of travertine springs. The water is the color of black tea, and the wind rages so strong the tiny pools develop their own little waves. Apparently they change size over time. They look a bit like the deadmarshes from Lord of the Rings. If one were to venture here after dark, i imagine it would be a good place to see a will-’o-the-wisp, or something else of the sort. It’s got a very spiritual feel to the place, a sort of reverse desert where instead of lack of water leaving to stunted plant life, too much water and organic matter excludes most larger plants. Similar pools do exist in vast bogs of Maine and Quebec, but nothing like it exists in Vermont. It was a truly mystical thing to see.

As i googled the spelling of will-o’-the-wisp, i learned that these features have become increasingly rare. Some attribute them to various spiritual causes, others interesting chemistry from gases that emit from blogs. Perhaps it can be both at the same time. But either way, draining of bogs and swamps as all but eliminated them in many areas. I still have never seen one, but i am not in bogs in the dark very much. Probably the replacement of horse and foot travel with cars also amounts to some of why the swamp lights aren’t seen as much any more.

Much is made of the importance of forest and wetlands to humans, but perhaps too little is made of the sense of awe and wonder that is found in these places. No doubt the dubh lochans hold water during floods and release it during droughts. No doubt they also somehow emit mysterious lights and inspire treasured stories. I was happy to see some of the plugged ditches in the old peat mining areas seemed to be turning into linear dubh lochans which over time will warp into their own mysterious shapes. The awe and wonder seems fleeting, but in reality it is us who are fleeting, and long after we are gone the land will still be telling its story.

When I had to leave, i wanted to take a bit of the Mystery Spring with me. So i brought an old cattle drinking trough from the old house, took it to my new home, and put it under the roof drip line so water would drip in. I filled it with yard clippings and sand, and then I put plants from mystery spring in this bin.

I named it a ‘bog bin’, though in this case the plants were more indicative of the spring than a bog.

The bog bin thrived at first, but it sprung a leak (it was a very old cattle trough from a farm that hasn’t existed for decades). Worse, i had to move it to install heat pumps, and it wouldn’t budge! I ended up having to remove the plants and dig it up yet again, which made me very upset since it reminded me of losing the spring the last time. I ended up creating a few new bins in smaller containers that could be moved if need be, and didn’t leak, and i tried again.

The vegetation in the smaller bins thrived. Several years later, the bins are doing great. At this point not many of the plants in them are still from Mystery Spring. Multiple other plant species are now present which i got from a very disturbed spillway with mysterious bog plants that was undergoing maintenance; plants given to me by others with wetland on their land; little handfuls of soil from other seeps; bits of plant material from samples I took for identification during wetland surveys; and even plants that came in on their own from nearby wildland areas. (Note: please do not grab plants out of bogs to create your own bog bins, you can damage the bog and usually the plants will die. I wasn’t getting these plants from bogs, but rather from disturbed sites on my own land and that of friends).

I’ve got some wonderful plants in my bog bins including my favorite plant, cottongrass.

Cottongrass is a grass-like plant that produces extremely soft and beautiful fluffs to spread its seeds in the wind. There are several types, but most grow in peatlands. In arctic areas like Iceland they will grow pretty much any wet place, but in Vermont, they are limited to bogs, fens, and peaty beaver wetlands, with several different types having different habitat preferences. This one is Virginia cottongrass, perhaps the state’s most common type, and it grows in bogs, poor fens, and around some beaver wetlands. Cottongrass deserves its own post so i will leave it at that for now. I don’t know how the cottongrass got in here, i like to think a fluff found the bog bin from another bog on its own, but it’s more likely it came from a handful of seeds in a sample bag or something. Either way, it is thriving and is in two bog bins and i am of course spreading the seeds to the other bog bins too. It doesn’t seem to like to grow on its own, and instead seems to need other plants of different sorts growing with it, but maybe i can get a cottongrass-only bin to work, especially if i add other species of cottongrass.

I started tracking the species in the bog bin here. This isn’t all of them, but is still at over 40 species. In addition to the cottongrass the bog-affinity plants i have include small cranberry, bog bean, swamp calla, a small patch of sphagnum ( i am having trouble getting sphagnum to grow!), and Magellan’s sedge. I’ve also got fen affinity plants in some of the bins such as grass of Parnassus (not:e: not anything like a grass), woolly fruited sedge, alpine deergrass, variegated horsetail and Kalm’s lobelia. Plants that prefer seeps and seepage swamps are also present in the bog bins including water avens, water pennywort, marsh marigold, and swamp dewberry. Marsh bedstraw, bugleweed, and jointed rush in the bins seems to be some of the holdouts from mystery spring, and a few willow-herbs and mosses seem to have come in on their own. The ecology is a bit jumbled and i don’t know how it will all play out but i suspect over time as the plants exhaust the nutrients in the soil and only receive water from rain and snow from the roof and ‘distilled’ dehumidfier and heat pump water, they may become more acidic over time and the cottongrass and sphagnum may become more dominant.

Here’s a few more bog bin photos:

I have about 10 bog bins including one for each kid, one that is extra wet (and i have to put mosquito dunks in or drain it out so no mosquitos breed), one that is made out of an old broken wheelbarrel, the sink one, and one i made in an old cookie pan to try to emulate a rivershore seep with shallow soils (with limited success).

I was sad not to have a wetland where i live now but I am lucky to be able to have these bog bins that collect water from the roof, and hope to some day create a bigger one intercepting all the water from the garage roof, which might be more of an intermittent stream than a bog. We will see! The old leaky bog bin is buried in the ground where i was trying to create another wetland, but it still leaks despite me trying to seal it, and doesn’t serve much purpose any more.

Over time i keep creating new bog bins. Below is my latest one which is also full of cottongrass seed from the other bins:

I am hoping maybe one day in the more distant future i can give away or sell bog bins, but even the small ones are pretty hard to move around. Maybe i can create starters or just sell the plants. I’ll probably never do it, though, because the logistics of running a business like that kind of break my brain.

The other day i got to see something while kayaking that seemed like the inverse of a bog bin. My friend Elijah found it, and i went and located it as well. In Number 10 pond, Fish and Wildlife created a floating platform for loons to nest on, which consists of some logs held together by metal mesh. Apparently the loons didn’t show much interest in it, at least recently, but other life did. The platform, which is about a meter on each side, supports at least 20 species including plants, spiders, dragonflies, and fish. Here are some of the things i found. What stuck with me is it is about the size of a bog bin, and has similar levels of diversity in a tiny space. Perhaps the loon or other birds did use it in the past and their poop raised the fertility and encouraged plant growth, or perhaps these plants really just like growing on wood. I’ve found other floating logs in ponds that had similar numbers of plants. Number 10 pond is largely surrounded by summer home type buildings with a steep shore, so there’s not much wetland along the shore to provide habitat and clean the water. I can’t help but wonder if we could create a bunch more of these in ponds without much wetland, and how that might help support life and clean water in the ponds. It’s so easy to yank invasive plants out of the platform as they come, and a fun job from a kayak or canoe. In some settings, such as constructed backyard ponds, such islands could amount to most of the diversity of the whole pond!

The world is a mess and feels hopeless at times, but it’s comforting to know even at my house, i can have tiny worlds full of life. Even a tiny floating platform can support life. In tiny places, there is hope.

My heron part hatched in a tiny marsh surrounded by humans and soon flew away to find more suitable habitat.

When I first graduated from college, i was working for a small company that did habitat restoration. Some of the Spanish-speaking people doing the hardest manual labor in the hottest sun, jokingly named me “La Garza”… partly because i am long and gangly and wade about in marshes, and partly because la garza means female heron and they thought i wasn’t very masculine. Turns out that isn’t entirely wrong, but herons don’t express gender the way humans do anyway. My heron part is definitely a Great Blue Heron, and in that species unless you see an egg being laid, it can be hard to tell what biological sex the heron is. Both take an equal role in rearing young.

When I returned to southern California about a year later, I spent several years working in chaparral-cloaked mountains with little to no wetland. There my coyote part rose to the surface, and heron faded to the background. Years later i found myself in Vermont, and for a time a beaver part rose was prominent, while i tried to make a home on a plot of land and restore a tiny wetland. When that was taken away, beaver slowly submerged into the swamps of my brain, not completely gone, but relegated to angrily tugging up goutweed, constructing a small rain garden, and maintaining bog bins at my next home.

There are other parts too - a peregrine falcon that zips amongst the hills when I drive rural roads, a rattlesnake that hides and wants to be left alone and rattles at anyone who comes by, even a pigeon who makes themselves known in ridiculous situations such as certain internet forums. I don’t apply the concept of “spirit animals” to myself, because that concept comes from certain indigenous groups, and I don’t want to appropriate it. For sure my Norse and Celtic and Germanic ancestors likely connected to animals in similar ways, as do all humans who are close to the land. I do not know if my shape-shifting animal parts are typical or not, either. I just know heron was waiting within me, and that waiting is something they are very good at doing. As my career pivoted to wading about in muddy and mucky places, heron began to assert themselves more. Eventually I came to realize heron wanted more from me. I needed to be on the water, stalking the shallow, muddy edges of ponds and the drawdown banks of slow, meandering sunny rivers. I can’t fly, but I can glide. I needed a kayak.

Herons don’t tie knots, deal with ropes, or fasten things to cars. Herons don’t belong in stores. My heron part doesn’t talk at all, in fact. Some of my other animal parts do, but heron decidedly does not. Instead my partner came with me, and i got set up with a one person kayak and equipment to easily move it on my car. The kayak i ended up with has a very appropriate name.

I should note that a lot of my thinking about my ‘parts’ is also linked to the concept of Integrated Family Systems. This includes the idea of multiple parts that people are made up of, sometimes ones are are not conscious of that may form or be strongly affected by trauma or other issues. It would derail this story too much to get into detail, and i’m not an expert on IFS either, but in a sense it is a bit like the Inside Out movies where there can be different ‘drivers’ or influences in our brain. However the parts aren’t really associated with just one emotion the way the Inside Out parts are. And of course, it’s also a modern spin on some very old ideas. The short version is, i’ve got more parts in me too, and they may feature in future stories.

Sometimes Heron also acts a bit like the Owl Beast in the show Owl House. When I am overwhelmed Heron may take over, whether I like it or not. Heron doesn’t fight like the owl beast though, it usually tries to fly away, and if it does try to hurt someone in defense, it’s going to be very pointed, sudden, and pre-emptive. (to be clear, this is all verbal, i am not stabbing anyone and don’t actually have a sharp beak. But there are times i can be hurtful and wish later i hadn’t). Herons are gangly and can be fragile, but are also surprisingly fierce. They sometimes get in fights with bald eagles, and i’ve heard it said if the heron gets the first strike, it often wins. A group of herons defending a rookery can even be dangerous to humans. They are predators, and eat only other animals, though unlike eagles they cannot tear flesh, so they only eat what they can fit down their throat (which involves surprisingly large fish and rodents, but not a human or eagle. Whereas if an eagle kills a heron, i’m sure it is happy to eat the heron).

Heron is no more interested in the center of a pond than in California’s chaparral coated mountains. Instead of paddling down the center of the waterway, i stalk the shallow pond edges. I’ve always been on the edge of most spaces I am part of anyway. Where land and water meet are the wetlands, and the blending of spaces brings a flowering of diversity. I lack an actual heron digestive system or beak, so i don’t eat the wildlife i see, and settle for hunting down plant species and birds to document on inaturalist (you can see the observations here). There are dozens if not hundreds of kayakable waterways within an hour’s drive of Montpelier and I hope to get to as many as I can over the next few warm seasons. This happens on the weekends I don’t have the kids with me, as when I am with my kids, heron is content to watch over them protectively as they do their own things. Perhaps in the future they will boat with me, but my little kayak can’t fit them right now.

I’ve had some difficult stretches of life over the last decade, but i also feel so lucky to be able to let heron take me along the edge of a pond. The sense of peace doing this is something i didn’t have access to in the city as a child, nor in most other parts of my life for that matter. The water is often so clear that it feels like flying, and a kayak feels surprisingly speedy when you are right by shore and in shallow water. It’s much easier to observe wildlife in the boat, and i’ve seen bald eagles, loons, multiple (other) great blue herons, ducks, geese (surprisingly large-looking when on the water, i left them alone), beavers, mergansers, and more. Today I saw a green heron, a smaller cousin of the great blue heron. Once on the North Branch of the Winooski River, right in Montpelier, i saw a rare vagrant glossy ibis. And, of course, I see tons of plants. As of now I’ve documented over 160 species from the kayak, and undoubtedly there will be more tomorrow when I plan to be out again.

In The Owl House, the Owl Beast started out as a curse placed on the character Eda. She’d turn into the Owl Beast when she was tired or upset, and had little or no control over what happened when she did. She was ashamed and hid her curse, but eventually she had to face the Beast and learned that it wasn’t just that she was cursed with it, it was also cursed with her. She finally realized that by accepting and working with it, she could take on a more powerful form where she’d have more control over what happened to her. In return the owl beast needed space to well, be an owl. So Eda ends up eating some voles (in owl form, probably quite enjoying them). It’s a wonderful metaphor for various things such as neurodivergence, trauma, chronic disability, and suppressed LGBT traits. In any event Heron is a bit like this, and sometimes i like to eat some seafood after my paddles. Today i had some pasta salad with clam in it and i’m not sure a heron could open a clam shell but i’m sure they’d be happy to eat the clam if they could. If i get a chance, like a heron, i may even eat a handful of rodents myself. We shall see. I’m not actually very good at fishing, but human fishing isn’t much like heron fishing.

I don’t know why it took me so long to get a kayak, but it’s been a long recovery from my life collapsing several years ago, and before that happened i didn’t get many chances to be out on my own much. The weekends without the kids over the last few years could be very difficult for some of my parts. Heron, however, can leave their young in a rookery and hunt for food. When they return they are fiercely protective. I do think my heron part wishes i had more of a rookery environment for my family as i want to be part of a parenting community, but am pretty different from others around make which can make that challenging. There’s more to that story too, which may appear in another post as well. I’d tried to adapt to be like everyone else, but for many reasons, including being autistic and being part heron, trying to be like everyone else doesn’t actually work. And rebuilding who I really am, or in some cases acknowledging it for the first time ever? That can only be done stick by stick.

One of the eeriest places we ended up was the Bangor Mall. I was surprised to find a Hot Topic, which I reminds me of buying blue hair dye in 2001. I had bright blue hair and my college girlfriend had bright green hair. That was probably around the time this mall was in its prime. Not any more. The world has definitely Moved On from the Bangor Mall. One dead store seemed to have been some sort of amalgamated appropriation from Native American cultures from the Southwestern USA. The odd turquoise color scheme remained on the empty mall as well as an abandoned ‘dream catcher’ or Kokopelli sticker or some other appropriated then abandoned merchandise.

Near the mall was a stream and wetland restoration project with a sign indicating the many millions of dollars it costed, which was odd because that sum would have funded all of Vermont’s wetland monitoring for probably decades. No one really wants to pay for monitoring. I’m still glad the wetland was restored, though it was full of invasive species and the sidewalk was caving in. There were chain restaurants nearby that seemed to be doing a bit better than the sidewalk. The Comfort Inn had a sign warning visitors not to attempt to touch or move the snapping turtles that come into the parking lot. I looked for one, but failed to find any. Nearby are several ancient bogs of deep peat, one of which has a really impressive boardwalk. Lots of people were enjoying the bog boardwalk, which I was happy to see, especially given the absence of people in other areas.
After the bog we went to a pine barren. It all was amazing for my iNaturalist life list. The pine barren was very hot, but that just kind of fit the landscape. We were able to identify a bunch of birds using the Merlin app, one of the few apps that doesn’t appear to have enshittified… er, “Moved On” yet. Thunderheads piled upon themselves nearby, and in the distance one we had recently drove under unleased what was likely a flash flood.

The White Mountains are beautiful, and Conway was probably the most thriving town of the trip, thanks to lots of tourists still streaming in. Maybe the world hasn’t quite moved on from Conway, New Hampshire yet. The Kancamagus Highway was as pretty as I remember it being when I first drove over it about 20 years ago. The USFS in this area still pushes their ‘Adventure Pass’. I remember when they put forward this concept in the Southern California with the promise that the fees they collected would fund new services and facilities. The fees did not fund new services and facilities. I think they took the money and used it to help bomb someone in some far away country. They retained a little bit of money to pay a forlorn looking ranger to walk around sticking fake tickets on the cars that didn’t pay the fee. He looked like he’d rather be doing a guided walk, or really, anything else. The granite boulders and ledges in the river were beautiful, and there were some interesting sedges here. It was too hot. The air has had this buzzing, shimmering feel since June. It’s exhausting, both physically and emotionally.

Lately my life has brought some pretty interesting self revelation, and it’s pretty amazing what trauma, neurodivergence, and toxic societal influences can bury in someone so deeply that it’s hard to wedge out even in their mid 40s. But i find that i have less motivation to talk about it, because there’s less place to do so. I left Facebook during my divorce, but stayed off after the company amped up its awful behavior. Twitter too. Twitter was massively important to me when I realized I was autistic and found community there. When I left many months ago it had lost pretty much all its value as a community space, and i think it’s gotten worse since then. I don’t have nearly as much motivation to post on instagram as I used to, either. Substack supposedly supports nazis, and i obviously haven’t quit it, but it dampens my enthusiasm about it. I’m tired of starting over again and again. I’ve reinvented myself maybe a dozen times and refreshed my online presence about that many times as well. I don’t see much point right now. The World has Moved On. My circle has shrank to my kids, partner, immediate family, and a few friends and colleagues. Most everyone else I just don’t have a real mechanism to talk to. I miss a lot of people, but social media, which i had so much faith in once, has become a massive disappointment. In real life, the town I live in ends up being transitional such that most people who move here end up leaving in a few years, so many of the friends I made in the past have just moved away. Moved on.
The other day I got a kayak. I have now unlocked the ability to float around on ponds and slow-moving rivers. I saw a weird rare ibis on the North Branch of the Winooski River, where there’s two miles round trip paddle behind an old mill dam when the water levels aren’t too high. I wonder if it felt out of place there with the herons. I have a part of me that is a heron, and the heron wants to stay on the water until it becomes too cold when autumn starts spilling into winter, but i can’t really digest raw frogs and i don’t think my kids or colleagues would appreciate the heron style of employment or parenting. Still, the river is there and i’ve been making time for it. The river is unspeakably ancient, to the point the mill dam is but a hiccup. The river doesn’t care if i make time for it, but it does have an energy I can link into. The World may have Moved On, but the river has been moving on since before the dinosaurs died, and is in no mood to stop now, so neither will I.

I am working on updated wetland mapping of Vermont, and sometimes we do ground truthing of the maps which brings me all over the state. Recently i was driving back from a mapping trip to far northern Vermont and drove back along a road i haven’t been on before, along the Wild Branch of the Lamoille.

The Wild Branch looks like an open wound. I didn’t get any pictures, as it was late and I didn’t want to gawk at something that had no doubt destroyed lives. But the river had thrashed and ripped through the landscape to the point where dangling bits of trees, smashed up rocks, and various other debris were scattered all along the river. Unfortunately it wasn’t limited to natural features - in at least one case a house had been left dangling over the river and condemned - it is even visible on Google Street View. There were still children’s toys on the porch when i drove by, but if the house isn’t removed by people, the next flood will clearly remove it.

The first thing i thought driving by was, “i wonder which flood this was”. The second thing I thought was “wow, it’s really upsetting that i don’t know which flood this was, that says a lot”. It probably was the July 2023 flood which caused widespread damage across the state, but various flash floods have happened in various places since then, and before. I have no doubt both climate change and watershed damage made this flood more destructive. I can report that as someone who has looked at thousands of wetlands, in the rare case where wetlands do not have damage to the watershed, nor abundant invasive plants, they often respond well to climate change, surviving and sometimes even thriving. This isn’t to say that climate change isn’t damaging other ecosystems, nor that it won’t be a threat to humans. Both are absolutely the case. But what I am observing here is that climate change is ripping open old scars, leading to the ecosphere equivalent of extensive, sometimes septic infections, originating from forests that at a glance, don’t even appear damaged .

The point of the mapping I am working on is to precisely and accurately locate wetlands so that we can find ways to avoid damaging them when building new homes or other similar things. It will help reduce formation of new scars. It won’t get rid of the old scars. It’s not even clear how we can get rid of the old scars. Most of them were not readily visible on a statewide level until high resolution LiDAR elevation data became available, which has only been true for about a decade. Continued damage is only just becoming visible as consecutive LiDAR and air photo data are collected after the floods. Unlike some scars, these ones barely left a mark on the surface at all. And even finding them doesn’t mean we have the resources or the knowledge to fix them.

I can’t help but feel a sort of kinship with the land. I don’t have very many physical scars, but i’ve got plenty of things under the surface that i never fully healed and just smoothed over. Human life is finite, and it seemed like the scar tissue was thick enough that it would survive a human lifetime. In reality, the intensifications of multiple crises in the world, as well as on a personal level, make that calculation no longer valid. It isn’t that i’m struggling, as really i’m probably as mentally healthy as I have ever been. It’s that I am able to see how precarious it’s always been, and how most of what i thought had grown over, will not actually stay put for a full human lifespan - for me or for others around me. My ripping open started a few years ago, really. It started during covid when i finally started facing up to the past and saw that in fact, i’d always felt different and weird because I am different and weird. Not in a bad way, but… in a way that sometimes does make life harder. I came out of that experience learning not only that i am autistic, but that being autistic is why i am able to do those things which i can do better than most other people, including mapping wetlands, trying to prevent scars on the land. It also led to a shift in my life river, which rapidly began eroding a glacial deposit of past experiences, dumping the debris elsewhere on my life path. Which, i suppose, is a necessary part of the human experience, even though it is regrettable in the case of fragile watersheds. In any event… it’s just a lot.

I don’t think one person can heal all the scars of the land, though i do intend to try. I may have a shot of finally processing and healing my personal ones though, and the way everything connects together, that is important as well. That way after I am gone, at least no one will name a brook “Mad Charlie Brook” after me.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

Please note that this is an incredibly complex game i am still learning about, so if i make errors in this post, let me know and I will fix them!

What is Dwarf Fortress?

The basic premise is you are a small group of dwarves in a fantasy environment. Think Moria from Lord of the Rings. Over time you dig for resources, build things, fight increasingly large forces that come to attack your increasingly large fortress, and adapt to a variously challenging environment ranging from a gentle countryside to a barren desert or icefield, or an evil biome packed with murder-minded monsters and rain that kills you. You need food, alcohol (dwarves will flat out riot if not provided alcohol), and of course to delve too deeply for gems and such. On its face it sounds pretty generic, but the real notable thing is it’s complexity. Dwarf Fortress is a ridiculously complex game. One of the ways they made up for the computing limits of a deep simulation was by rejecting all forms of fancy graphics and user interface. In its original form, it only uses ASCII characters and didn’t even use a mouse.

I will admit i found this version of the game VERY HARD, but i did play it for a while. There are two reasons it was very hard and one was the formatting and lack of interface. Because of that i stopped playing for a while, but with a new version available that has a choice of using graphical icons and a fairly normal city builder type set of controls, i decided to start up with it again.

Losing is Fun

Oh yeah, the other reason this game is hard? Dwarf Fortress isn’t like most games where there’s a set endpoint and a guaranteed path to winning. Random or cumulative factors can and do lead to the collapse of your fortress. This is called Fun by the Dwarf Fortress community, along with the statement ‘Losing is Fun’. if you want a fair, easy game, this isn’t for you. if you don’t mind watching your dwarves suffer and die (it is cartoony and not graphic, but your dwarves WILL suffer and die, and pools of blood will fill your fortress at some point), and love a good story, it IS for you. Because that’s what it is at its root. A story creator. And, you can grow and lose multiple fortresses in a world, and the failed fortresses remain part of the story for your new dwarves (or a source of destructive werepanthers, apparently).

Here are a few stories of how my dwarves have died:

• Back when i had the ASCII version… i did not realize a dwarf got stuck on top of a wall and couldn’t get down. He died and started decomposing up there and the other dwarves were very understandably Not Happy. They started what is called a tantrum spiral which is basically when each dwarf that throws a tantrum causes several other dwarves to do so until they all riot and then the fortress collapses. All of the dwarves died or left, and the fortress was abandoned to ruin.

• In another ASCII game, i somehow accidentally accused a deceased baby of having been a vampire. This false accusation understandably angered the family, causing a tantrum spiral.

• More recently, i had an entire world fall to werepanthers. Pretty much any type of animal has a were-form. I didn’t realize that when dwarves were bitten, they themselves would turn into were panthers on the next full moon. They did so, inside the fortress. Soon all the dwarves were infected or dead, and many of the infected ones left the fortress and dispersed across the continent. This would prove problematic later.

  • Several additional games had werepanthers show up in or near my fortress. I came to find out that the entire continent became infested with them and so new dwarves coming to my colony were often werepanthers. Unfortunately you can’t maintain a fortress of werepanthers, at least not at my skill level, because for every dwarf they turn into werebeasts, they rip to shreds probably a dozen, and werepanthers also don’t like other werepanthers and fight each other in the fortress destroying everything around them. In one case a trade caravan and new migrants arrived during mid-attack and themselves got bitten and ran away. This led to the problem getting still worse.

• In one case i didn’t have time to get killed by werepanthers because i accidentally burrowed into a river from beneath while expanding my mine. Most of my dwarves drowned, and yep, the fortress was abandoned to ruin.

• I tried out ‘adventure mode’ where you are just one character and roam the world. I created a character who was part peregrine falcon and part human. Not a were-beast, just a animal-human type hybrid, like in Bluey, Zootopia, or Kevin and Kell. I set off in the world to find adventure. Very … slowly. Very, very slowly. I couldn’t figure out why other characters in the game moved at light speed and i did not. My character died alone in a snowy forest and only then did i discover the truth. He couldn’t really fly because i’d loaded him up with massive armor and supplies, so he was basically dragging himself through the snow until he starved/died of thirst/froze to death. Oops! Dwarf Fortress is a bit more realistic than most other games where you can put unlimited stuff in your inventory and somehow it comes along with you.

• Back to fortress mode, i created a fortress on an island far from anyone else, and hopefully, werepanthers. Visitors were rare, but one visitor in particular found his way deep into my fortress. Yep… a werepanther. At that point i gave up on that world and regenerated a whole new world. (I kept the old werepanther world, ironically called ‘the eternal world’ by the random name generator, and maybe will try it again later… but it may just be a ruined hellscape of gore and werepanthers).

• In my new world, i dug into a cavern system beneath a desert. I was still figuring out how to use my dwarven militia squad, and they successfully fended off a were-monitor-lizard without infections but eventually I got murdered by serpent people after delving too deeply into the caves.

• On a cold forested shore in the northwestern corners of my world, giant dingos got me cornered in my new fortress and that was that.

• Currently i’ve got a rather advanced fortress that has fought off were-monitor-lizards and goblins and breached the caves. No doubt Fun is coming for this fortress, probably by the time I finish writing this post (update: not dead yet! But i haven’t played since yesterday afternoon. Doom is coming… and Fun).

But what about the ecology?

Biomes

The biomes of Dwarf Fortress are relatively complex, with a large range of species available in each. The species lists are complex and fairly solid, though it does not match Earth in terms of differences between spread apart biomes of the same type. For instance, i was impressed to see both Saguaro Cactus and Baby Toes around the desert fortress, which is pretty neat. But they would not occur together naturally on Earth as Saguaro occurs in western North America and Baby Toes in southwestern Africa. It’s really asking a lot to simulate this in a game that is based around mining and fantasy adventure, so i can’t hold this against Dwarf Fortress. Conversely, i was excited to find my favorite plant cottongrass near one of my wetland fortresses! The wetlands have some interesting features, but i haven’t explored them in detail because they aren’t very hospitable to dwarves that make their livelihood from mining deep underground. It will be an interesting future challenge.

Also I noticed that for all the monsters that roam the dwarf worlds, the menance of taxonomic splitting is absent. Perhaps the elves engage in taxonomic splitting, but the dwarves are very much lumpers. Only one species of Oak?

Trees

The trees of Dwarf Fortress are fairly complex, much more so than the trees in say, Minecraft. Not surprisingly, the main interest the dwarves have in the trees is cutting them down for wood, or turning the fruit from the trees into alcoholic beverages. Conversely, there are elves who will get mad at you if you cut down too many trees, which means the dwarves and elves don’t always get along. (The elves are portrayed as silly and unreasonable, but i wonder what an Elf Stronghold game would be like, within the same universe, with more advanced ecology. Hmm…).
Given the complexity of Dwarf Fortress I’d hoped that the fruits or seeds would be necessary for a new tree to germinate, but in fact, new saplings just pop up randomly where there is space and it’s the appropriate biome. Given how complex the game already is, simulating seed dispersal would probably be asking too much… but it sure would be neat! In any event you still can create a form of “fruit forest” over time, by retaining the fruit trees which produce food and cutting down the trees which do not. The non fruiting trees will continue to seed in, but won’t grow large where there is already a fruit tree, and anyhow you will still need some lumber (sorry, elves…). Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like you can irrigate desert or grassland to grow additional trees, which would be an interesting dynamic for sure, but perhaps more in the realm of Timberborn.
A few species of fungal ‘trees’ also grow in the caverns. These more or less follow the same rules as the aboveground trees. They don’t need light and being fungi are probably feeding on all the dead dwarves of past fortresses, as the caves are a constant source of death for dwarves.

Shrubs

Shrubs are like small trees in the Dwarf Fortress world, just like real life (though the definition of shrub is surprisingly complex in real life ecology). As with trees, dwarves consider some large fungi to be shrubs… again, the dwarves aren’t taxonomists... Shrubs regrow like trees, though sometimes you can get seeds from them for crops. Admittedly i can’t really get the farms in DF to work yet. I guess dwarves aren’t really farmers either most of the time. The game doesn’t seem to model dry shrubland like chaparral very well, as most of the dry shrubland instead has shrubs that grow in wet areas. Alas the game creators didn’t create a detailed model of a rather obscure biome.

Grass

Grass in Dwarf Fortress really includes all of what ecologists consider herbaceous (non-woody) vegetation. Thus it includes those baby toes succulents, every microspecies of dandelion, etc. The dwarves also include some plants i would consider shrubs, such as meadowsweet. We will forgive them as they are rather monotropic (or bitropic?) and fixated on geology and alcohol. The grass is actually modeled in a somewhat detailed way, in that it can be eaten by livestock in your pasture or worn down by being stepped on. If an area of soil in an appropriate setting is left alone, the grass will eventually grow back. In theory this could set up some interesting opportunities to try rotating pasture use, but in practice, it doesn’t really matter much in my experience so far.

Animals

There are a huge number of animals in Dwarf Fortress, including a bunch of real-life species as well as fantasy species. As with the plants, they kind of just appear or roam in and out of the maps, but unlike the plants they can be captured and sometimes bred or tamed. When wild, they do seem to breed on their own some, and predators seem to sometimes eat prey, but this isn’t modeled in detail as it would be pretty impossible at this scale to model predator-prey dynamics, alas. Most animals have a ‘giant’ form, and also the aforementioned furry-like Animal Person form which is often playable in Adventure Mode. Some of these are rather horrifying/ridiculous.

Fire and Lava

Fire-dependent ecosystems aren’t really modeled in Dwarf Fortress. Trying this would probably get you dead quickly. There is magma deep in the earth and lava in volcanos, which can be used to power a forge and also often results in dead dwarves.

Water

Flowing water in Dwarf Fortress is modeled pretty realistically, but is barely safer than fire - dwarves tend to be unable to swim and tend to end up drowning, and creating waterworks like dams and canals often gets your dwarves dead when it unexpectedly floods your fortress. Unfortunately you can’t get the Beaver People from Timberborn to come engineer water for you. There are fish and such but don’t appear to be underwater biomes other than vague things like ‘ocean’. Erosion isn’t simulated in Dwarf Fortress (or any other game I am aware of). The rivers are sometimes somewhat realistic, but other times not. I have one that splits into three deep gorges downstream from a waterfall, which is not something that would be likely to form naturally. Maybe a Giant Beaver Man dug out the gorges, or a Wombat Woman.

My Ecological Verdict on Dwarf Fortress

(with the disclaimer that i have by no means explored the entirety of this game, and doing so would probably take me decades given the amount of time I have available to play computer games)

In terms of immersion, ‘making your own story’, and global inclusiveness, Dwarf Fortress is really a 10 out of 10. There isn’t any other game I am aware of that even includes cottongrass as part of the landscape, much less also baby toes succulent, a wide range of animals, and climate. The ecology isn’t modeled directly, but one can kind of tweak their play to imagine it is, by choosing which trees survive, taming certain animals, etc. I do this with Minecraft, by manually causing erosion, volcanos, and spread of trees. Dwarf Fortress seems even more versatile than Minecraft in this regard. The procedural generation also truly seems to create unique settings every time, without the repetitiveness of games like No Mans Sky which has a billion planets that somehow all act the same ecologically.

In terms of actual simulation of events that you are able to participate in, compared to other games, i give it a 6 out of 10. There isn’t much ecological simulation that I have been able to find, but there isn’t in other games either. I think the highly simplified but a bit more emergent ecology of Timberborn does do somewhat more - trees and shrubs spread and die and can be planted - but it happens very slowly and I wish Timberborn did more than it does as well. I’ve found most games that claim to simulate things like ecosystems or evolution fall flat on their face due to the complexity. The old game SimLife would just crash if you had a big enough plant and herbivore population to support carnivores without supplemental feeding. Spore was a total dud in this realm, and No Man’s Sky generates neat looking procedurally generated animals and plants, but they don’t change over time. It may be that short of future tech such as quantum computers or actual sentient AI, it’s not possible to really model an ecosystem on a computer, which just underscores the importance of properly monitoring, caring for, and being stabilizing keystone species in real ecosystems. But during mud season, or late at night after an exhausting day, that isn’t really possible, and many people just plain don’t have access to safe natural areas, so Dwarf Fortress is a pretty fun (and Fun) option that helps stimulate thought on real world events.

Until you realize the world’s largest empire is currently in the nuclear-armed equivalent of a Dwarven Tantrum Spiral. Sigh.

Turns out the web of life is incredibly complicated. “Oak” for example is a type of tree, but in fact it’s considered a “genus”, which is a level above species. In fact, according to Google, there are over 400 different’ species’ of oaks that have been described. And each species is totally discrete, right?

Wait, what exactly even defines a species?

Well, if you go to Wikipedia, it says this: “A species (pl. species) is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.”

That’s what i learned when I started out too. The problem is, that doesn’t work well with a lot of taxa (that’s the word for any defined group of similar organisms). Take the oaks… for instance bur oak and swamp white oak. Both grow in the Champlain Valley of Vermont. When you find a classic bur oak, you know it. Its leaves have a unique ‘waistband’, like this:

Then there’s swamp white oak, which is similar, but doesn’t have those deep lobes in the leaves, and the leaves are more pale underneath. Its acorn caps are also less fuzzy.

This all sounds great in this blog post, but then you get out to the Champlain Valley on a hot June day. The mosquitos are awful, there’s a thunderstorm coming, and you’ve got a few oaks in your vegetation plot that you are trying to identify. The problem is, they look somewhere in between the two. And in fact they are somewhere between the two. You’ve found hybrids of bur and swamp white oak. Haines says this hybrid is rare, but i’ve seen it multiple times. Or at least I think I have. Maybe I haven’t, because bur oak also hybridizes with white oak and chestnut oak, and swamp white oak also hybridizes with white oak. And of course, white oak hybridizes with chestnut oak as well. Basically, any of the ‘white oak group’ in Vermont (oaks with rounded leaf lobes) can hybridize, and in some cases, without genetic testing you can’t afford, you won’t know what it is! The red oak group hybridizes too, as red oak can hybridize with black oak, scarlet oak, and others. Many of these (maybe all) produce fertile offspring, which means the hybrids themselves hybridize with other nearby oaks sometimes. And lest you get the impression it’s some Quercus quirk, willows, ash, spruce, and maple do this as well. In fact, in the swamps and floodplains of northwestern Vermont, red and silver oak intergrade into a hybrid swarm of backcrosses spanning the whole range between each species.

So that makes it simple, right? There’s just two species of oak in Vermont, right? Red and silver maple are the same species, right? Except that isn’t very useful. Bur and swamp white can be a headache to tell apart, but white oak is truly different from these, with very different habitat needs. Chestnut oak looks similar to swamp white oak, but it grows on Vermont’s driest hottest ridges whereas true to its name swamp white oak indeed grows in swamps. Outside of the hybrid swarm, red and silver maple truly are very distinct. So, this ‘extreme lumper’ approach doesn’t work well.

Unfortunately, there’s been a recent push to go far in the other direction instead. Instead of using the hybridization criteria, the new trend is to declare literally any discernable, repeatable difference as its own species. This includes genetic differences. Take ponderosa pine, the enigmatic pine that covers mid-elevation mountains across much of the western United States. Granted it’s very similar to Jeffrey Pine and hybridizes with that species, but it’s got a much larger range and is very distinctive. It’s a good species, right? Not according to some taxonomists. In fact many taxonomic authorities have split it into multiple species. Supposedly they differ in factors like number of needles per bundle, except you have to count hundreds of bundles per tree. This might be a soothing task on a warm summer day as the pines smell wonderful and make the most soothing sound imaginable in a breeze. But… even before the United States said "hold my beer” to the UK and embarked on a binge of national self destruction an order of magnitude beyond Brexit, field ecology was always horribly understaffed and underfunded. Simply put, no one has got time for this pleasant but inane nonsense. It’s not just ponderosa pine either. The new splitter hegemony has stricken again and again, splitting up Joshua trees, foamflowers, Jack-In-The-Pulpit, stinging nettle, already-cryptic Sphagnum moss species, pitch pine, blue cohosh, black mustard, and many more. And dandelions. You don’t even what to know what they did with dandelions. Go look at all of these 'so called ‘microspecies’ here. There’s dozens - hundreds maybe. They may or may not be genetically distinct but you won’t be picking these apart in your releve plot.

Whew! Well, if that isn’t enough, they are splitting genuses up too. And it pretty much always results in your taxa getting a new ridiculously unspellable name that can not be written on a field form. Yucca? Now it’s Hesperoyucca. Many common Scirpus became Schoenoplectus. Some taxonomic authorities have removed bunchberry from Cornus. I don’t find this change too much of a frustration per se because it really is very different from other dogwoods. But the name they use? Chamaepericlymenum. No, that’s not a joke. Someone actually thought that was a good idea, undoubtedly someone who’s never had to follow a protocol that required writing full scientific names on a piece of ‘rite in the rain’ paper that is quickly losing its waterproof qualities while your fingers go numb in a 40 degree downpour. Nor have they ever had to type that into a database 50 times. Sometimes these names are used because some very dead wealthy European man came up with it over a century ago and other times the names were created very recently. Some of them are quite poetic really, but you won’t see me writing Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese 20 times in a sodden notebook in a spring downpour either. The soft body of my animal says f***k no to that one too.

What is there to be done? For most people, the answer is to ignore the new names. This of course causes lots of problems as some names are adopted and others are not. Any use of this approach makes field work nearly impossible and mangles database back-compatibility. It’s even worse on iNaturalist. iNaturalist has firmly adopted the approach of adding any possible proposed taxon split any graduate student has ever written in an unpublished, unreviewed paper based on supposed stolons you can see only on Tuesdays during a lunar eclipse. If you try to add a ponderosa pine, as your kindergarten teacher and all field guides describe it, you’ll get scolded. I was a curator for a time and advocated for less ridiculous taxonomic change, but just gave up under a stream of attacks on my integrity, credentials, and even an anonymous hate mail. Seriously, i’m a veteran of AOL chat rooms back when the internet was truly anonymous, and some of these ‘curators’ would give CreepyDude69’s random “ASL” IM chains a run for their money. Oh, and they all have moderation privileges as well, which CreepyDude69 didn’t. And you probably don’t either. Some of them are quite happy to abuse their power. Unfortunately, humans gotta human and iNaturalist’s onetime title of ‘nicest place on the internet’ was sadly fleeting. Taxonomic inflation (among other things) has taken its toll.

There’s another factor at work here too. There’s the idea that if you declare these minute variations as their own species, more things are tracked as rare, and more species will get protected. There are two problems with this. One is that it’ll be nearly impossible to monitor things that are nearly impossible to tell apart. The other is that those of us in the USA are dealing with people who would literally declare a leaking oil drum the head of the EPA if they could get the Supreme Court to grant it personhood. They are not going to suddenly conserve cryptic species just because someone’s genetic analysis proves it is technically distinct. No, just stop with this. Locally appropriate ecotypes and disjunct or edge-of-range populations need protection, but declaring everything its own species isn’t going to go the way you think it will. It leads to impressive species lists, and a lot of ‘rare’ species and probably used to be a decent way to get grant funding. But it isn’t doing ecology any favors.

Ok… wait a minute. Don’t send me that hate email yet. Hear me out. I absolutely believe that the field of genetics is a gamechanger for ecology, that it’s worth tracking the evolution and genetic ancestry of populations, and it’s a worthwhile endeavor and an act of love to describe every little variation of a species as it’s own entity. Look, i’m autistic af, i completely get the urge and support it. Just… maybe consider making Eclipse-Stoloned False-Foamflower a subspecies or variety instead of a species next time? No one gets grant money any more anyway. Let’s actually create a naming system that will still work in this proto-apocalyptic wasteland, okay? And don’t let CreepyDude69 describe any new species of dog stinkhorn mushroom, that just isn’t going to go well.

The world is incredibly complex, and that’s awesome! Just.. some things don’t need to be complex for no good reason. Consider limiting the length of your new genus name, please. The Rite-In-The-Rain paper doesn’t work that well anymore, and seriously, some protocols really do make you write the whole name on a field sheet. And seriously… what is the deal with Chamaepericlymenum? I don’t care if Linnaeus and Charles Darwin penned the name together on the Beagle. They are dead now and won’t care… just stop.

“I’ll just use a weather app”

Some people seem to think weather apps can replace NOAA forecasts. Unfortunately, that idea is in the same realm as people who think we don’t need farms because ‘food comes from the store’.

National Weather Service forecasts are created by professional meteorologists, who consult multiple weather models, soundings of the atmosphere, a huge set of data from hundreds of weather stations, the weather radar network, and satellites imagery. There are also private meteorologists who do this sort of interpretation, like news networks and The Weather Channel. But here’s the thing. The radar, satellites, and soundings across the United States and nearby areas? They come from NOAA. The Weather Channel does now own Wunderground which has a bunch of private weather stations networked together, but that isn’t going to accomplish much on its own. Then there’s [in]accu-weather. They seem to just sell a feed of a weather model, which is often wrong. They should also be avoided for other reasons I will mention below. And many of the other weather apps just feed directly from weather models as well. Basically, if you break NOAA, all the weather apps in this country will ‘break’ as well.

Why do weather models need NOAA?

Weather models are a bit like AI - some are actually AI, but most are older technology. These weather models are fed data about current weather, including soundings (basically sending weather balloons up to sample the upper atmosphere), weather stations, satellite data, soil moisture and snow cover data, and more. It’s complicated and i don’t know all the details but I do know this: the GFS linked there, and other models such as the NAM, are run directly by NOAA and ALL weather models that apply to the USA are fed NOAA data. There’s also a European weather model, ECMWF. It’s also fed by European resources of course, but European data is in Europe and not very helpful in forcasting weather in the United States. What i can tell you from my frequent use of these weather models is that the European model used to often be the best one, but lately it’s been awful for Vermont - regularly 10-20F too warm. If it lost access to NOAA data it would be even worse. The GFS, which we used to call the Good for Shit due to its poor performance, has been really good this year. The NAM is a shorter range high resolution model which doesn’t always model mountain weather effects correctly in my area but is nevertheless very useful. There is also a Canadian weather model that can be useful, but needs NOAA data to run properly as well. The short version? without NOAA many of the weather models would go away and those that did remain would become much less accurate in the United States. Some people near the Canadian border might be able to get some benefit from Canadian weather forecasts, but even in Canada they would decline in accuracy without NOAA data, and they do not forecast for the USA. A total loss of NOAA would result in a devastating loss of forecast accuracy, break most of the weather apps, and even worse, lead to the loss of hurricane forecasts and tornado warnings. So yeah, we’d be screwed.

What is really happening to NOAA?

I don’t really know what is going to happen, of course. The best scenario is just that the people in power now are removed immediately, because they are clearly not suited to be there, but that seems unlikely right now. The worst case scenarios, involving collapses of the USA, civil wars, world war III, sudden massive ecosphere collapse, etc, mean we probably will have bigger problems than NOAA disappearing, or will just be dead. I suppose the dystopian option is that the weather data collection still occurs, but the forecasts are just all hidden behind paywalls. Granted we all PAID for NOAA resources- the satellites, radar network, etc, but clearly the people in charge are fine with taking taxpayer funded resources and allowing only the rich to use them. I suspect they don’t really have the capability to actually run the data collection system at all, or even retain staffing, so might just break it on accident if not on purpose. But a ‘project 2025’ future would mean the taxpayer funded weather network would be given to a private company (probably Accu-Weather) to profit from at our expense. Most of us would lose access to weather information unless we subscribed, and a lot of us would probably die in weather disasters, especially since the same people doing this seem to also want to make climate change as awful as possible as well.

is inAccu-Weather really in on this?

They say they aren’t. Of course they do. But as far back as 2005 they have been sending money to awful politicians such as Santorum to push to gut the National Weather Service for their own benefit. They also used to employ this weirdo who liked to run around telling preposterous lies about climate, and who would often issue ‘climate forecasts’ that were dramatically wrong on the side of being too cold. It may be true that this company has backed away from its garbage stances after public pressure, but they are explicitly listed in project 2025 along with the claim that their forecasts are ‘better than NOAA’ (remember they get their weather data from NOAA, so the statement makes no sense). Broadly? They certainly haven’t earned my trust back. But even aside from Project 2025, my experience is their forecasts are awful, the least accurate of any options I’ve seen (except for maybe caterpillar butts), in Vermont and also in California (where that caterpillar species isn’t even found). There’s simply no reason to use accu-weather even if they aren’t jerks. And certainly also avoid that ‘weatherbell’ company this Bastardi character runs, as his forecasts were always pretty bad too. In his case actually worse than caterpillar butts which seem right at least 50% of the time.

How about The Weather Channel?

I have to give credit where it is due: as a kid in the 80s and 90s I was absolutely obsessed with the weather channel. It was my autistic special interest. I’d watch the muzak local forecasts, now-primitive radar screens, the colorful cold and warm fronts on their maps, and more. I just found this page and went down the rabbit hole watching videos of the old-time forecasters such as John Hope. I mostly lost interest in TWC after they started having poorly-acted reenactments of weather events, but probably they were just struggling to survive as weather forecasts became more available on the internet. In any event they are probably better known now for their website(s) including www.weather.com . They have had an annoying history of buying other websites and dismantling them, for instance, with Wunderground which used to be a neat project run by a weather expert named Jeff Masters and is now mostly useless with a buggy app and cloned Weather.com forecasts. They also dismantled most of Intellicast which used to have some great stuff like a good radar algorithm but did also have the misinformation spewing “Dr Dewpoint” aka Joseph D'Aleo. (i still use what is left of their radar functionality somewhat as it does a good job with rain vs snow in Vermont). Note that pretty much all of the USA weather data the Weather Channel gets, other than what is left of the Wunderground citizen science network, also comes from NOAA.

What’s the Deal with Weather Apps, Really?

Weather apps and websites seem oddly susceptible to being ruined or abandoned. In addition to the ones mentioned above, another popular one, DarkSky, got purchased and dissolved by Apple. The Apple weather app, which is pretty ‘meh’, seems to get most USA data from NOAA and The Weather Channel (which in turn gets it from NOAA). WeatherSpark was another really useful website that would display forecasts compared to averages, and one day it was just gutted. I guess they couldn’t adapt to some technology change, or maybe TWS secretly bought them too. I tried MyRadar because it works with Apple CarPlay, but the composite radar layer they use doesn’t work for my area because it uses beams that the mountains block, and also it’s got pretty intense levels of ads. I do occasionally use the Wunderground app still because i like their rain/snow algorithm on their radar, but it seems really buggy - for instance it doesn’t update itself properly when i look at the app multiple times.

Ok, so what do you use then?

There are a couple of weather apps and websites I really like now, though some of them require a bit of knowledge to use. The Windy app and website is great, i do pay for a yearly membership, but you still get some features without it. Notably, it offers graphs with several models including the Euro, GFS, and NAM. The downside is none of these are great used on their own. The best bet is to use the compare feature or page through each one, to see the range of possibilities for your region. Also note that in some cases the point forecast isn’t very good, so you’re better off also looking at the map. And… for weather model mapping rather than point forecast graphs, i definitely recommend the oddly named site Tropical Tidbits. Currently, weather models can’t usually predict where individual thunderstorms will form, so if you look on the map and see scattered thunderstorms in your region, even if the model doesn’t show one right over your head, you might have a thunderstorm at that time. It is also helpful for other issues, for instance the NAM 3km creates a dramatic ‘rain shadow’ over Montpelier that in reality is much less of a factor than the model (and thus the point forecast for Montpelier) suggests. For weather radar, the Radarscope app is in my opinion the best. It allows you to use different products including different radar beam angles which can allow you to see areas like mine that have some of the beam levels blocked by mountains. However, it only shows one radar station at a time and doesn’t work for things such as apple carplay. If you subscribe to it you can get a few extra features like lightning tracking (really useful for field work safety) and a longer radar loop. You can also see a product that lets you see the wind direction in a storm, which can allow you to see if the storm is rotating, which can indicate risk of tornados or other severe weather. This might prove useful if the administration decides to stop issuing tornado warnings, but really if they do that they will probably also take the radar away (guess where RadarScope gets its USA weather radar data from?).

Really though there’s one source for USA weather that’s far far better than any of these, though it does not come with an app. It’s the National Weather Service webpage. Here’s the page for my area. You can search an address or click on the map, and then save a bookmark of the forecast for your area. There are lots of features here in addition to forecasts, such as a view of all weather watches or warnings and the technical forecast discussions, which take some getting used to but offer a real glimpse behind the forecast. The forecast itself is partially compiled by AI/weather modeling, but the forecast discussion is written by a meteorologist and often full of interesting notes on what is going on.

So what should I do about this all?

Firstly, i suggest you get familiar with how the weather in your local area works. Even setting aside the awful Trump chaos, a little understanding could help you a lot or even save your life. Weather can be dangerous in this country (i noticed once that the the UK travel to the USA page (pre Trump) listed two major US risks: Gun violence and extreme weather.). The United States probably has the most violent weather in the world with the most tornados (by a significant margin), frequent hurricanes, some of the heaviest rains and snows, strongest winds including ones that cause severe wildfires, worst floods, and generally wild levels of extremes. Plus flooding and fires are made worse here by bad land management and policy. And, of course, climate change is making them worse as well. You can start by just watching the clouds and wind, as there are often patterns that can be helpful. The weather varies a lot from place to place, but it really is possible to make some inferences based on cloud motion, wind direction, and changes in temperature and barometric pressure. Animal instincts can be surprisingly helpful as well. Birds get much more active before a big storm, for instance, and often hole up right before it hits. Humans even have access to these instincts, or some of us do at least. I often get a specific feeling when a big storm is coming, and sometimes it can even awaken me from deep sleep before i can hear the storm. And use common sense. Take thunderstorms seriously and avoid lightning. Don’t drive your car through floodwaters, ever, for a bunch of reasons. Don’t drive during freezing rain either. Keep drains and culverts free of debris. Multiple drain or culvert clogs can cause significant flooding nearby and downstream. And expect the weather to do things you’ve never seen before, because it will.

Secondly, yeah, i don’t know what to do about doge ruining most of the country. Everyone seems to have different ideas, but we all will have to do what works for us. Protests work for some, calling politicians to complain, talking to your neighbors, sharing information. Build community. Just be aware of a lot of what you hear is garbage. Trust your instincts and your senses. As we’ve seen in this post and elsewhere there’s a long history of people lying about climate change, and i’ve been able to make enough of my own observations of weather to understand firsthand that they are lying. And by all means do not fall victim to what George Orwell warned us in 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”.

note: any pro doge or climate change denialist comments will be deleted

I was never a reptoid but i guess that’s what a reptoid would say.

I was never a reptoid, but i do feel like i’ve shed my skin many times, and in one of my previous lives, i was an employee of the federal government, both the Park Service and the Forest Service.

That isn’t an official Park Service uniform. I did have a Park Service uniform, but i didn’t wear it very much because i was often in remote areas doing ecological inventory, rather than doing outreach or law enforcement like the stereotypical rangers. One might think i was engaging in government waste in this photo here, but you can see i wasn’t exactly wearing fancy clothes, just an old Less Than Jake shirt and weird jeans (are those JNCO jeans what even are they). We were true field dirtbags and me and my colleagues did this work because we loved it and cared about it (and sometimes because we were neurodivergent in ways that made indoor work painful). This fine silty soil, if i recall correctly, is correlated with the purple sage and sagebrush in the background. The rockier, more well-drained soils instead had larger chaparral shrubs. This mattered not just in terms of ecosystem health but in terms of fire, because fire acts differently in different vegetation types. The work we were doing involved making a big map of a large mountain range that just happened to be the site of a very severe fire. Hopefully the work we did helped with the fire and associated planning and rebuilding. But, it seems like it may be being ignored amidst all the chaos.

Oh, and the vegetation is also linked to this fog, which is linked to water supply. But we don’t need water, right?

We were goofy out in the field sometimes, but we worked long, hard days. It was often incredibly hot, we thrashed through extremely dense shrubs, climbed slopes that were too steep, waded through grass with lots of rattlesnakes in it (though they weren’t very aggressive, thankfully), and dealt with fire and flash flood risk. Of course the biggest risk was always humans, sketchy humans you wouldn’t want to encounter in some remote canyon, or worse, Los Angeles drivers. Field ecology is actually a fairly dangerous job, and in fact one of my colleagues did later die of a field related incident. This isn’t something lazy people do to grift off of taxpayers.

Probation? Were all these federal employees recently released from prison?

Trump recently fired a bunch of federal employees on ‘probation’, which sounds like they just got out of prison, but that isn’t what probation means in this context. It just means they were fairly new hires. Kind of the equivalent of not having tenure at a university. Sometimes it just means they switched federal jobs recently. That being said, field dirtbags aren’t even usually at the level of ‘probation’. We were temp employees, meaning we would just be hired for a project and laid off after. Back then medical insurance was a lot cheaper, and now this is even harder to do. But in any event those jobs didn’t last long, so people moved around a lot. Sometimes there was good money to be made because you’d either have housing provided at a park or just be nomadic for a summer, but overall pay wasn’t very high especially given you had to have a college degree. Back then student loans were smaller too. I know people still do temp ecology jobs, but it seems even harder now… In any event, this is the sort of person losing their jobs, not an upper manager sitting at their desk pushing papers around, nor HR employees shuffling thousands of forms.

Where’s the real waste then?

I’m sure some people will tell you that ecological monitoring is a waste. They must love fires and floods, mass extinctions, and climate change. Or they just don’t understand how the planet works, which is not surprising, because it’s a very confusing planet. If you’ve got a brain that can understand that stuff, you’re probably like me and there’s no space in your brain left to have any concept of why humans do what they do. Or maybe that’s just being autistic. I wonder if there are autistic reptoids.

but wait… there IS government waste! elon just can’t find it because he doesn’t actually want to. The Republicans have a thing they love to do that i call nuking potholes. If a road has a pothole in it, that’s bad. You should have someone come fix the pothole. But don’t hire a republican. They will nuke the road, and then go to the steaming crater and say ‘wow, roads are useless, and dangerous too. roads are bad. you should never have built that road’. So now you’ve got no road, just a giant crater where the pothole was. Republicans want to break the federal government, not fix it.

The whiplash is wasteful

So republicans nuke potholes, but democrats aren’t blameless either. The democrats love unfunded mandates. The democrats will pass a law saying all potholes must be fixed, but won’t actually hire staff to fix the potholes (either because they don’t want to or because the republicans won’t let them). The unfunded mandates do make the government less effective, because there are too many tasks and not enough staff. More on that in a minute. The point i am making here is federal agencies struggle to get things done because most things the federal government does are long term and require more than four years to really do effectively. Unfortunately every 4 to 8 years there’s a new president, and every 2 years there’s at least some change in Congress. This means projects, policies, and priorities come and go quickly. Things don’t tend to get done that way.

Understaffing actually wastes money

The federal government always has too few staff for what they are doing. Maybe not high up in the hierarchy, but there are always too few field dirtbags. I have no doubt the other agencies, such as the CDC (field germbags?) and FAA (flying dirtbags? airbags?) must have similar issues. The people who have boots on the ground often aren’t able to stay in one place long. Expertise is built up only to have it leave. Often interns are relied on but not given enough training and mentoring so they aren’t able to do as good of a job. A lot of this centers around….

The health care crisis causes bad staffing policy

One main reason no one can hire full time field dirtbags is because health insurance is so expensive. ‘Temp’ or part time workers don’t need to be given health insurance. Of course this is an awful deal so they don’t tend to stick around. It would be easier to hire longer term employees if there was some progress on this issue. Why doesn’t the government just put all its employees on medicare? (and literally everyone else too but… yeah). Back when we still pretended we were ‘the best country in the world’, we should have sorted out how to actually let our field ecologists and other federal employees go to the doctor. The current system is a huge waste of money and staff time, but of course, someone is benefitting from it, so we keep doing it that way. Sometimes i think corruption is just a trait of our species. Certainly it’s inherent in the US system but not coming from the field dirtbags. I wonder if reptoids have corruption too.

The federal government is ‘penny wise but pound foolish’

It makes sense that federal employees don’t get posh handouts, drive a Mercedes or Rolls Royce to our field site, get free helicopter rides, or get to ride around in circles on the taxpayer’s dime. That’s wasteful and pointless. However, field dirtbags always end up with insufficient gear, barely functional computers, old vehicles that break down, etc. This ends up getting in the way of getting work done, and is wasteful. If it’s so hard to hire new employees, it seems like it would make sense to equip the employees with time-saving gear so they are more efficient. But that doesn’t seem to happen.

The paperwork really does get absurd sometimes. Why can’t Big Balls fix the paperwork?

I know it’s a trope, but the feds really could do a better job with pointless paperwork. I remember having to painstakingly copy my resume into a form for each job i wanted to apply to (Is USAJobs still this bad?) You basically had to do this separately for each job application. Once you are an employee, buying anything is a pain - oversight is needed of course, but even routine supplies could take hours to purchase. This was a burden to people trying to get work done, but somehow wasn’t a burden to scammers within the system, who DO exist. They are happy to fill out the forms because they are benefitting from it. If this so called ‘doge’ could have hired Big Balls to come up with a more efficient purchasing and hiring system, maybe he would have actually saved some money. But somehow i doubt that is what Big Balls was after. (and seriously, he’d have to change his name to ‘big bawls’ after just one moderately difficult field day, he’d be crying in the brassica because it was too hot out. What a joke. When i was his age i …… bla bla bla).

Too much contracting

There’s always an emphasis on ‘making the federal government smaller’ and someone figured out at some point they could just not count contractors as federal employees, contract everything out, and then say there are less employees. There’s a time and a place for contracting things out, but that time and place does not include ‘the regular job duties that a regular employee could do better thanks to experience, relationship building, and local expertise’. This turbo contracting actually effectively expanded the federal government a lot as now a bunch of private corporations exist entirely to work for the federal government, but with much less oversight. It also just costs a lot more. And you end up with government freeloaders like the original elongated muskrat who continue to ‘shrink’ government and conveniently funnel taxpayer money right into their pockets. The contracting process is prone to corruption, and the controls in effect don’t work as intended at all.

Let’s do transparency correctly

In theory most non-classified things the federal government does is available to any citizen through the Freedom of Information Act, but in reality this process is tedious and usually only accessed if someone wants to sue the state or has other issues like that. We should have hired the Doge people to make some nice software for sharing the easy to share and useful information about federal employee work. Except not really, because i saw the DOGE website and it’s even worse than the hated USAJobs website. No Thanks. But as an example… i spent a long time obsessed with the website iNaturalist, where you can share observations of living (or previously living) things you find in nature. I’m currently mad at inaturalist and feel like it got a bit enshittified, but broadly, something like this for appropriately sharing neat field dirtbag findings with the public would be awesome. Usually there’s too much effort trying to control the narrative, where they didn’t want field dirtbags accidentally saying something wrong (see the elitism section below), but in a time and place where trump can literally say the worst thing possible with no consequence, maybe a little unfiltered field talk would be a good thing. (I’m talking off color comments about yucca flower shape, not sexual harassment or racism anything like that). I bet other agencies would have interesting things to share too. Too bad social media is completely ruined now. But what if there was a facebook-like page for federal employee information, only without the predatory algorithm, spying, or that creepy zuckerberg guy?

the federal agencies are often slow to adopt technology

Usually federal websites look like Geocities pages from 2001, and this is probably because their IT staff are paid way less than in the private market, again, because there isn’t enough investment in resources. I don’t mean my IT colleagues do a bad job on purpose, but there’s no time and support to innovate.

Elitism

obviously i don’t like trump or elon and am very critical of them here, but it’s absolutely true that elitism runs deep in a lot of places including aspects of the federal government. It doesnt justify giving big balls my social security number, but seriously, more connecting with people on the ground is a good idea. Plain language and transparency in rules and policies is a good thing. Simplicity when applicable is a good thing. When it’s not, the experts or their proxies should have good summaries of why not. People need to know why the rules are there and that they are for fairness and protection and greater good, not for hoarding power. And anyone using them for the latter should stop.

imagine if doge didn’t suck

ok, that’s probably impossible. but imagine instead of a superbillionaire’s weird meme crypto scam fest, there actually was a place where early career people could share ideas about improving government efficiency. Imagine if there really was a way to streamline new tech, if the public knew about what the federal government was doing and understood why it was important, and the park service and other agencies like the EPA weren’t a political football that was barely able to do anything at all.
Well, actually that place probably already exists… in Europe. but they hate us now because of our new naughty government. I’m sorry!

Where do we even go from here

Right now it feels impossible to even get back to the semi-dysfunction of a few years ago, much less actually create a better new federal employment system. But, it still feels worth describing what that would be like, even if it’s just aspirational. If AI ever gets worth using, we should use it to replace the politicians, or at least to fill out our forms. Not doing air traffic control or making art. Seriously. At this point i’d probably vote for an AI. We are basically at the point in the show Three Body Solution where people ask the aliens to come and destroy us because at least then we are rid of our awful human overlords. But hopefully instead of being called ‘bugs’ we can build a better nation from our mistakes instead. Or something. But anyway, maybe people can try this stuff in Europe or Canada or wherever else is the least crap country these days, because that clearly isn’t the united states right now.