The Middle Distance

This MacBook is rocking my world. Aside from the internet connectivity, I had completely not even thought about the joy of having a battery that works for more than 10 minutes, not to mention the ability to watch videos that are longer than a YouTube kitteh clip.

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Unrelated, I suppose, is that I just finished reading American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, by Susan Freinkel.

Once upon a time, there was a tree called the American Chestnut. One in 4 trees in Appalachia was one. It grew tall and huge, produced vast quantities of nuts that wildlife, livestock, and humans relied on, and it produced great wood. Most of the century-old cabins and barns and fences you see in that region are made of chestnut, because it just.doesn't.rot.

Then the blight came, imported accidentally on Chinese chestnuts (which had evolved immunity). It was first spotted in New York in 1904. The American Chestnut was almost completely vanished and on the edge of extinction by the 1940s; it's estimated that between 3 and 4 billion trees died. But chestnut roots aren't affected by the blight, and they have a lot of energy in them--the woods were still full of young sprouts and saplings rising from the roots of long-dead trees when I was a kid in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the 70s and 80s. There were still plenty of chestnut leaves to be found and pressed into albums along with the oak and tulip poplar and maple and locust and other common trees. They will always get infected with the blight and die before maturity, but they still keep popping up. There are fewer of these sprouts now, but they're still around in the tree's historic range.

There is also a scientific effort to bring the tree back using backcross breeding to get blight-resistance genes from the Chinese chestnut while still keeping majority American characteristics; there's also a controversial one involving transgenic trees. The American Chestnut Foundation is kind of the mothership for recovery efforts, research, and volunteer pollination and planting work.

I can't explain yet why I'm so fascinated and moved by this, but I am. Childhood memories, I suppose. Comes of being a park ranger's daughter; I'm pretty sure I knew about the chestnuts and the blight before I started kindergarten. I just hadn't thought about it for a long time. Probably Tolkien too, perhaps that's why the Ents have always been so vivid and touching to me. Maybe there's a story of my own percolating in there somewhere. Regardless, I just wanted to share it.

Chances are, you've never seen a mature American Chestnut. (There are a few, very isolated) But if you'd lived east of the Mississippi just 80 years ago, they would have been everywhere and you almost certainly would have tasted their fruit.

I got to meet the lovely ithilwen and her parents. We had lunch at the Signature Room, on the 95th floor of the John Hancock building. Can you believe I've lived in Chicago 18 years and never been there? It's really the kind of place you go with out-of-town friends.

We saw peregrine falcons flying by!

Then we spent the afternoon at the Field Museum, which always makes time fly by like nothing else. Ancient Egypt. Mammoths and mastodons! Sue the T-Rex on 3D! Creepy old taxidermy! (That and the T-Rex film made me feel really carnivorous, I think. Must tear meat with teeth! Does passenger pigeon and California condor taste like chicken? Mmmm, bison.)

So when we went to Heartland Cafe for dinner, I had a bison burger. And there I got to meet the lovely deborah_judge, who is a brand-new Chicagoan.

Thank you, all of you, for the fantastic day!