An unedited voice memo as our group of 150 people hype ourselves up before Baranco Wall. Feel free to play this in the background as you read…

The Scene

At midnight, a near-continuous highway of lights blinks up the dark side of Mt. Kilimanjaro. When I squint, the highway is more like a river, flowing to the sky, releasing into a delta of stars. This is summit night, quickly transitioning into summit morning. And our community of 33 students, seven educators, six guides, and six porters join the stream of lights. Feet churn up dust clouds as we slowly-slowly shuffle-shuffle up the tallest lone-standing mountain on earth, which is also the highest point in Africa, and one of the seven summits.

“Now, THAT’s a scene,” Noah says, turning to me.

My heart jumps. Noah is a 15-year-old student from Denmark, and he’s attended my afternoon storytelling classes for the past seven days. In these classes, we sit cross-legged on the ground, unintentionally coating ourselves with a moon dust consisting of pulverized toilet paper, food wrappers, and glacier scrapings. At times, camps have close to a thousand temporary residents, so we settle on the uninhabited flat spots, cracked helipads overlooking cloud oceans.

While summiting a mountain is a perk, it’s not why I came to Tanzania.

I’m here to teach students like Noah character-centered, science-driven expedition storytelling. My participation was the brainchild of Paula Kahumbu, a National Geographic Explorer and board member, a conservation biologist, an elephant fanatic, and a regional ambassador for a network of service-oriented schools called Round Square. Paula is an extraordinary person, the kind that is easiest to summarize with a phrase like, “just Google her.” Personally, I don’t know if I will ever be able to look at an elephant again without also seeing Paula.

Paula aims to place National Geographic Explorers and Storytellers (like me) on student trips to teach and share curiosity and wonder. This is our first experiment with the program. My classes take place informally while we amble up the eight-day Lemosho route, and formally in the afternoons after arriving at our camps.

We start our workshops cross-legged, eyes shut, hands soft, focused on our breathing. Around us, shouts slingshot between tents. Kids yell over card games. White-Necked Ravens, black birds with white patches of feathers that look like the kerchiefs of goth Boy Scouts, squawk and steal unattended food. I tell the students to bring their attention to the air in front of their noses. I ask them to trace their breathing into their stomachs, their lungs, their hearts. I guide them to follow the way it circulates in and out of their body; observe their senses, the temperature of their cheeks, the weight of their lids, the chorus of sounds.

“What a marvel,” I remark, “how we continue to breathe night and day above 14,000, without even thinking about it. Thank your breath with each exhale.”

After long pauses, I encourage students to follow their thoughts. If there are especially hard ones, hug them close to our chests, and then release them to float up into the sky.

I list the thoughts, so the students know that we all have them: I am not enough, I am too much, what if I can’t make it up the mountain, where do I belong, what’s happening at home, should I have said that thing, what will this next school year be like, what if I don’t fit in, what if I am left out, what if I can’t make something good, what if I don’t succeed, what if they reject me, did anyone notice I was gone, am I remembered, am I forgotten, am I loved?

“We all have these kinds of thoughts,” I say. “Don’t feel bad when they visit you. You’re right where you need to be, doing exactly what you need to be doing. Embrace each thought, and then release it.”

I mostly tell the students things I need to hear. This past spring, I was diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD. I’m on medication, and I’ve spent a great deal of time sitting with inner voices that periodically tell me, in short, that I suck. Learning how to write again, to overcome all the setbacks and “no’s” that have become ever more inherent in the journalism landscape, has become my work. Now, I pretty much can’t do anything without 15 minutes of meditation first, so the breathwork is more to help me prepare to teach than for anyone else. But the students say the meditations are some of their favorite parts. I am in good company.

After 15 minutes, we open our eyes, debrief the sit, and transition into more conventional lessons about story structures, character development, and the ladder of abstraction. I challenge the students to select scenes from the past seven days and describe them to the group.

One student details how meaningful her meals are, knowing that 109 porters have hauled every chair, table, tent, stove, and grain of rice up the mountain for her, an entire village transported, arranged, and dissolved daily. She recounts her struggles with privilege and guilt and inequity, sitting by while Chaga people from the local villages carry our belongings and luxuries on their heads and necks. Another student describes the exact line on the mountainside where the dense trees and brush fell away, exposing the Shira plateau, one of the largest on earth.

As we climb into darkness attempting a summit, I can see Noah’s thoughts as his face flickers into view under his headlamp. He’s thinking in scenes, both living within a moment while also watching it unfold. I am proud, and it’s tired and almost meaningless at this point, but I’m also grateful. I love working with students, and to do it like this, in a living classroom, where the “distractions” are simply being extremely present, is quite special. They turned in their cellphones at the beginning of the trip, so our days are spent recounting memories, observations, and riddles, singing songs, playing cards, and asking questions. I wonder who else has experienced these phone-less young people like this; have their parents been this lucky?

The Time

In the night’s cold, I shake my hands and feet. For students and teachers, we have two speeds: slow and slower. Our route is the most gradual; with every step up, our pace slows down. This is my challenge. I feel an achy restlessness. “Slowly” in Swahili is pole pole (sounds like poleh poleh). These words are passed up and down our line of students like a baton in a meditative relay.

I think about time as a currency, how we take it, make it, and give it. We take time to go slowly in a society that has favored speed, quick fixes, fast food, overnight shipping, and instant gratification. We make time for breaks, for breathing, acclimation, and waiting for our village of approximately 150 people to move from camp to camp. And we give time to one another; we share moments and listen all the way through. I chew my food slowly, I wake up slowly, I walk slowly, I reply slowly, and climbing a mountain becomes less about physical fitness and more about patience. And pauses.

The porters and guides live an opposite reality to ours. They speed up and down the mountain, rushing to snag sites, set up tents, make camp, cook food, clean, and prep for the next day. They work tirelessly, and we all ask questions about their rights. Yes, they have unions. No, their working conditions usually aren’t fair. Some operators deduct the price of their food and accommodations from their payments, and the only money they make is from tips. Yes, many of them are well-educated, some having studied in the U.S. on scholarship. Yes, many of them also didn’t finish high school and became porters in their early teens to support their families. No, it is not easy to be promoted from porter to guide. There are thousands of porter positions and only 50 spots in the guide certification course held by the Tanzanian government, which takes place every two years. Yes, money flows from the operations to the nearby towns, making their villages some of the wealthiest in Tanzania. No, we don’t become accustomed to the hierarchies, and the students in my classes share their discomfort daily, worried that the porters do not have enough rights. The guiding company we are with, Adventure Alternative, I am told, is one of the best. And I want to believe it.

Most stories are about relationships and power, I tell students. So we map relationships and power. And of course, scenes.

Every day we see another angle of the dying glaciers. Our lead guide, Gavin, tells us that when he started climbing this mountain in the 1990’s, 61 successful Kilimanjaro summits ago, our camps were surrounded by snow, and we would have needed crampons and ice axes to climb. Now, the glaciers are predicted to totally disappear by 2040. Gavin tells us that ice core samples show Mt. Kilimanjaro hasn’t always had glaciers; that there’s a several-hundred-year cycle of the mountain with and without them. But humans have expedited the speed at which they are melting. The rate of disappearance is unlike any in their 12 millennia of existence.

Toni, one of the students from Germany, remarks at the shiny, drippy ice. She says that the mountain looks like it’s crying. All of our water comes from glacial melt; we drink its tears. Gavin tells us that in the not-too-far-off future, climbers will have to carry all of their water. Even now, porters walk an hour at times with a bucket to haul drinking water to and from the camps.

I ask the students, what is nature and what is natural? Are humans part of nature? Is the quickened ice-melting natural? They roll their eyes, and then they debate the questions for days. In return, they ask me what I think happens to us when we die. I teach them about epigenetics, Margaret Mead and Samoa, nurture versus nature, Alexander Humboldt, storehouse consciousness in Buddhism (called ālaya-vijñāna), Braiding Sweetgrass, Ishmael, and Octavia Butler. I tell them there is more than the Odyssey: Gilgamesh, 1,001 Arabian Nights, and the Bhagavad Gita. We dwell on philosophy daily. I teach them about Plato’s cave, Aristotle, Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, and Marxist Feminist theory. They teach me that the kids who think they’re cool are generally not (this also glaringly applies to adults I reflect), that cliqueness is lame no matter how old you are, that curiosity and original thinking rule, and that my role models are the 18-year-olds who speak three languages fluently and read Susan Sontag at the dinner table, just for fun. They remind me how much I love to learn. And that being a liberal arts-trained generalist still means something.

They find me fascinating, the way you would a dog who suddenly started to talk. They like that I let my grays go wild, they’re agast that I only watch the first and last episodes of popular TV series (and that I try to make up what happens the middles), that I drive so little I frequently forget to fill my car with gas and end up stranded on road trips (three times in the past year), that I wear toe stretchers at night, that I prefer to write letters over texts to my love interests, that I regularly write letters to myself, that I am not worried about being single and childless, that I have started to believe in letting my life show me what wants to happen, that I usually say yes to things that have the potential to teach me something new (which is basically everything), and that I like to train in grossness tolerence which means one pair of socks for the whole trip. That if I were going to hypothetically die in the next 24 hours, I would do nothing differently (they love to ask hypothetical questions).

Time is also warped as you move up and down the mountain, between each ecosystem and landscape. There is arctic-like tundra, desert forests, cloud forests, ice waterfalls, glassy streams, subalpine forests, barren rockfields…And you can toggle between them within hours. It’s glorious and trippy. The mountain starts at 3,300 ft. above sea level and tops out at nearly 20,000 ft. In between, the landscapes are like slices of a layered cake modeling above-earth biomes.

There is also, unfortunately, a great deal of trash. People tell me it’s much better than it used to be; that they bank on time to decompose the streamers of toilet paper. Little mice run around holding scraps in their tiny hands. It feels like there is human poop a few feet from every switchback. In a number of our camps, the guest registers are too full to sign our names, because there are that many tourists.

It’s easy to judge the environmental toll of the economic engine of these moving tourist civilizations. But after we all pack up camp, I turn around and see a moderately small scar of dirt where hundreds of us crammed into a camp. The toilets are beyond capacity, and the infrastructure needs upgrades. But how much more environmental damage do the towns and cities I live in make? What would it look like if we tried to pick up our day-to-day lives in the morning? What would be left behind? The mountain is a microcosm of our relationship with each other and the environment, and I spend a great deal of time with the students wondering what is ethical, ideal, and right?

The End

Every student who sets out on summit evening/morning to peak Mt. Kilimanjaro does. The guides are in awe. The two students who were struggling with stomach sickness earlier in the trek made the right choice to turn back with guides. The students tell me that the last climb was the most difficult thing many of them had ever done. At each break, some sit down, others slouch over on a rock, and others sink to the ground. We give them long hugs when they cry. We remind them to thank their breathing. We cheer them on with little hoots, promising that the sun WILL rise. Porters sing lullabies and pass around sweet tea.

The neuropathy that still lingers in my fingertips from cancer treatment feels like it somehow got worse. As I write this, I rub my thumb across my hands, checking for feeling. It was all worth it. I loved being part of something like this. I miss the young people. I loved their unrelenting curiosity, their brilliant questions, and how they treated me as someone who has something to teach. The summit was beautiful, and, to my shock, I cried. I don’t care about getting to the top; I am lesson-oriented, here to learn, and to pass anything on to those who find it helpful. Also, to mosey along like I’m a member of the March of the Penguins cast. That’s pretty much it.

To that end, I hope you enjoyed this rambly debrief. I look forward to taking 15 minutes to follow my breath and carve out the space to tell you a story more often.

First, an enormous thank you for subscribing and supporting this latest experiment in creativity. It’s invigorating and exciting to have a place to meet you again.

In full disclosure, I’ve felt pretty down on myself. But seeing over a hundred people sign up within 24 hours, with almost 20% of you opting for a paid subscription… it gave me a burst of love, appreciation, and inspiration. Thank you for believing in me.

This past year, I landed in many strange rooms. And I wanted to tell you about them: the things I learned, the people I met, the sounds I heard, the ways I wondered. It feels good to now have a way for you join me in my latest quest to find a meaningful career, to become even more of a writer, to go back to school, to hold a hundred and one little competing truths, and to create and recreate when breaking news has often felt like a never-ending dumpster fire.

Over these next few posts, I’m going to share my vision for this place we’re creating.

Let’s start with figuring out these support tiers. Free subscribers will receive most of my writing and updates on some of my new projects.

Paid subscribers will:

• Receive audio postcards like this one from the road

• Get behind-the-scenes details about my excursions and experiments

• Learn about exclusive projects I’m developing and what my process looks like

• Weigh in on what I’m making, sort of like a board of advisors

If you’re interested in signing up for those perks but can’t afford it right now, write me a note, and I’ll comp you. Otherwise, you can upgrade your subscription anytime.

Your support will help me produce and publish my own independent reporting, to say yes to the stories that matter, not just the ones that pay immediately. Examples include going to places like Priest Lake, Idaho, to get on-the-ground interviews about a Supreme Court decision; attending my first-ever writer’s conference to pitch and sell my work; or heading to Nigeria with one of my best friends, Lola, to start recording a story about how to protect one of the world’s most polluted rivers. This is cool stuff, and you are helping make it happen. I can’t say it enough: thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Now, onto the postcard.

I kicked off a series of upcoming adventures this past weekend with an 85-mile bikepacking trip from south of Prescott to north of Phoenix in Arizona. Days were unseasonably hot. Nights were so bright under the near-full moon that I had to remind myself multiple times that a sunburn was not possible. Despite the heat and wind and dryness, the Sonoran desert was green, and noisy, and alive.

Many of my postcards will come from bike trips, because I bike:

• To move at the speed my brain can actually process information (between three and eight miles per hour)

• To test the limits of my food (I just learned that a stick of butter can retain its shape for 2-3 days in desert heat if stored next to a soft water bladder in my bike bag)

• To write the projects that have been perched in my head, sometimes for years, waiting for my attention (this weekend I drafted an article about how important vacations are for embodying climate transformation—sounds self-serving, promise the piece is better than the tagline)

• To be less sad, to listen more, to study infrastructure, to observe ecosystems, to appreciate my body, to stumble into worlds I didn’t realize were there (like the bingo tournament I found myself in this past Friday night, held by older women bedazzled in bright pink sweatshirts and Wrangler jeans preparing to compete in a surprisingly difficult obstacle course with their horses. Yes, that sentence could have been much, much longer).

• To train for the occasional ultra bike race that allows me to do all of the above at scale

Enjoy the voice note and let me know what else you’d like to hear from the road. I’m thinking about keeping these at 2-5 minutes, unedited, raw, and hopefully interesting. I look forward to hearing more from you about the kinds of things you want to see and what else I can make for you.

Signing off,

Cat

Following 35 scientists racing to identify and name new species in Eastern Angola is a 24-hour race – on repeat.

At dusk, I sink waist-deep in mud while chasing a chiropterologist as she retrieves squeaky bats from her nets. Around midnight, bobbing headlamps beckon me back to camp. The herpetologists have returned with buckets of deflated frogs. After a two-hour interview, I crawl into my sleeping bag, my alarm set to 3:15 am. Long before sunrise, I join a circle of ornithologists leaning over maps, their bird whistles and binoculars dangling from their necks over the paper, as if dowsing for answers. On a 40-day National Geographic expedition at the headwaters of the Okavango River – where a ring of landmines left over from a 50-year civil war has blocked out scientific surveys for half a century – every person and item here intends to better understand the landscape and what it contains.

Except for me.

I’m a science journalist producing a podcast about how people will protect this place. And instead of trying to map the landscape for species and quantify its value through its ecosystems, I aim to understand the systemic interplay between conservation and colonialism, between environmental policy and human communities, between ancestral knowledge and scientific discovery. Over the eight episodes that encompass Guardians of the River—including two translated versions into Portuguese and Setswana—I record, write, and weave stories modeled on the oral histories of Delta peoples, a narrative arc that meanders and regroups, without a conventional beginning, middle, and end. And working with tribal members and local biologists to narrate the series, we ask questions like: What do we protect environmental spaces from? How does taxonomy shape our understandings of and value for living things? How do termites, soil composition, mycorrhizal networks, and the largest stretch of Miombo forest connect to the flood patterns of the Okavango Delta? And what human activities might disturb or protect the flow of an intricate ecosystem that has been both preserved and destroyed by legacies of conflict?

For the past decade, I have produced long-form audio series that employ philosophy, systems thinking, environmental history, collaborations with Indigenous peoples, and policy analysis to interrogate big questions about humans and science. My work has taken me from coal mining communities in rural Colorado facing economic collapse to communities along the Rio Grande fighting for their water.

Building on a project I developed during my Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, I’m now producing a story that weaves together seemingly disparate threads: the alarming uptick of cancer and chronic diseases in young populations over the past four decades, and how Clean Water Act revisions are affecting communities along one of the most endangered river systems in the United States. I’m intentionally keeping more details on this story under wraps as I’m still pitching it and working to sell it. But I have about 55 interviews, one extraordinary character, many hours of tape, and a year’s worth of work on it under my belt on it.

I call this new home for my work, When Canaries Sing Back, because whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, I write about resilience. Health and environment aren’t separate beats—they’re the same story. I believe human bodies are the canaries in the coal mine; our collective well-being suffers in the face of climate change and environmental degradation. We are inextricably tied to our ecosystems, and there are plenty of incredible stories about how we rise and change, and evolve much like the natural world we are part of.

When Canaries Sing Back will be a collection of essays—funny, sad, uplifting, honest. A place to grow, workshop, and share my writing and experiences as I pursue journalism, academia, and a love of sound in this one dynamic life.

My writings will be mostly free. I am going to start a series of behind-the-scenes audio dispatches for anyone who wants to come on as an annual supporter as I kick things off, and I would love to hear any of your comments or feedback as I grow this thing.

My main goal is to write for myself rather than trying to create a product, brand, or business, which is what’s driven a lot of my past work. So expect things to be exploratory, authentic, rough around the edges, me.

Thank you for your early support. Let’s see what I can make.