Susan Orlean's Blog, page 13

Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in the area that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand. This is especially true in the case of liberal Democrats—they may be a dime a dozen in New York City, but up here they are so rare that children can bring one in for show-and-tell at school.

Another big difference is the lawn signs. I grew up in a town in Ohio that didn't permit lawn signs, so I had never seen them until I moved out West after college, and then lost track of them again when I moved to New York City. I had sort of forgotten they even existed until moving upstate. Now, as far as I can tell, the biggest fall crop in Columbia County is political lawn signage, flourishing on road shoulders and medians and right-of-ways as well as front lawns. They drive me crazy, mostly because they look so trashy. They also stick around like ragweed burrs for months after the polls have closed.

More differences: Upstate, many people show up to vote in hunting clothes. They are not being ironic; it's just that they are either on their way home from or on their way to go hunting. Also, in my town at least, voters are usually offered candy when they sign in (correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember getting candy when I voted in Manhattan). Conversation in line is clearly location-specific. This morning, as we lined up to vote at our tiny town hall, my next-door neighbor was kibitzing with the election supervisor about farming. I caught bits of their conversation while the other supervisor was trying to explain the new, slightly baffling voting machines.

"You've got the pasture, don't you?" my neighbor was saying to the supervisor.

"I've got the pasture," the supervisor answered.

"Well, then, you've got the pasture, so that's that," my neighbor summed up. Then he stood up, put his hunting cap back on, and took his turn to vote.

See more of The New Yorker's coverage of the midterm elections.

When did Halloween become, to use the marketing phrase of the moment, spooktacular? The inflatable black cats, the four-hundred-dollar Rocking Crotchety Grandpa lawn displays, the illuminated foam tombstones, the bats with L.E.D. eyes, the Pumpkin Jack fog machines, the plastic Rotted Flesh body parts—when did these all happen? The haunted houses with fifteen-dollar admission fees? The parades? The festivals? The "Have a Horrid Halloween" cards?

I am unusually Halloween-attentive, because, as it happens, I was born on Halloween, so for me it has always been an occasion of great moment. I would have certainly noticed Zombie Arm Lawn Stakes and nine-foot-high animated Grim Reapers if anybody had them. When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop; there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes. I do remember the first time I saw bright orange lawn trash bags decorated with smiley pumpkin faces, which was about ten years ago; I thought they were kind of clever and festive, if a bit commercial. Now they seem quaint, compared to, say, yard decorations like Demonica Zombie Baby ("a latex skin foam filled child with sound and motion activated flashing eye lights," in stock and ready to ship for $39.99) or a life-sized Hellraiser Pinhead Animatronic (a big investment at $279.99).

Another change: when I was young, Halloween was a holiday celebrated only by children. I can't imagine how terrified I would have been if I had seen my parents in costume on Halloween; even an encounter with the Hellraiser Pinhead would have been less frightening. These days, adults are full partners in the festivities, save for the trick-or-treating. I've been invited to costume-required, adult-only Halloween parties for probably the last ten years, making Halloween now the hardest night in the entire year to find a babysitter, since now people of babysitting age—who used to stop celebrating it as proof that they were no longer little kids—are in love with Halloween, and have their own "Dress as Your Favorite Character from Saw 2" party to go to. Babysitters on Halloween are even scarcer than on New Year's Eve.

My guess is that the Halloweening of America has many causes. One is probably the popularity of horror films, and, accordingly, the enthusiasm for things like Bloody Dagger Doorknockers and the whole severed-body-part segment of Halloween decor. Another is certainly the genius of insistent merchandising by card and costume and decoration companies, which have managed to make the average citizen feel like a heel if he or she doesn't send out St. Patrick's Day cards or style the house for Valentine's Day (see Maud Lavin's excellent book "The Business of Holidays" for particulars). And maybe it's an upwelling of nostalgia by baby boomers for their childhood, and their gauzy memories of more innocent Halloweens, now amplified and inflated and running on two (not included) AA batteries.

I'm trying to cultivate a few more quirks, especially in my professional life—you know, the kind of color-commentary material like the stuff that they love featuring between commercials during the Olympics. At present, my range is very limited. I am maddeningly ordinary. I don't fetishize particular writing tools (I am pleased by Pilot G-2 pens, but I don't run screaming from a Bic or a Foray or even, to be quaint about it, a pencil). I have worked on PCs and on Macs and, while I have my preferences, I don't find it crippling to work on one rather than the other. I like those long, skinny reporter's notebooks and stockpile them when I can, but I've managed without. By mistake, I once showed up at an interview without my bag, which meant I had to borrow supplies. I was offered a pen (fair enough) and a tiny Hello Kitty notepad (embarrassing), but I did make it through. I really like my desk (a big boomerang sort of thing, made by Herman Miller and no longer in production, unfortunately) but I've written on hotel credenzas, fold-down trays in trains, café tables, and in bed. I once had a boyfriend who couldn't write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-up reënacter or something. A friend of mine used to claim she couldn't write unless she was wearing a large, and, for what it's worth, rather hideous necklace that had belonged to her mother; another said she couldn't write unless she was wearing her grandfather's hunting shirt. Whatever. I have no such fixations. I do, however, have standards. I work at home, in the country, and days will go by when, except for my husband and son and the occasional UPS man, the only sentient creatures that see me are my chickens and turkeys. I really could stay in the same ratty pajamas day and night and roll from bed to desk and back again until the pajamas fell apart. But I am somehow hung up, in my own bourgeois way, on showering and brushing my teeth and applying light makeup and dressing in reasonably attractive clothing before I sit down to write. I wouldn't quite categorize this as a quirk, but it sometimes does give me pause; do the chickens appreciate that I'm mixing textures and color in an interesting way?

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn't know. For instance, I would like to forget the excellent story the New York Times ran last year about the work conditions on commuter airlines. If you didn't read the story, here's the gist: commuter airline pilots work non-stop and sleep almost never; if and when they do get to sleep, they are lucky if they can snuggle up inside a recycling bin behind the terminal, since they can't afford hotels. Speaking of money, they earn less than a moderately successful manicurist and often work twenty or thirty side jobs, usually at cocktail bars, just to stay off welfare.

The story was especially disturbing to me because I am a recovering fly-a-phobe. About a decade ago, I was struck, out of the blue, with a total fear of flying, and I spent several years so miserable and unhappy every time I had to fly that I would bend over backward to avoid it. I drove places anytime it was feasible, and I often cancelled or declined invitations if they required flying. I finally overcame my phobia, and now I approach flying with a sort of studied boredom—a learned habit, thanks to my learn-to-fly-calmly training—but like all former flying phobics, I retain a weird and feverish fascination with aviation news, especially bad news. I of course gobbled up the Times piece, and immediately wished I hadn't.

These days I fly a lot, and I frequently start somewhere no one wants to be and end up somewhere no one wants to go. In other words, I am almost always on small aircraft, size-wise just one notch up from laboratory pipettes, built by off-brand, offshore manufacturers, operated by some outfit I've never heard of that disturbingly enough prefers its name in small print. When I board one of these planes, I try to catch a glimpse of the pilot through the open cockpit door. It's great if I'm accompanied by my son, because if I offer him ten extra minutes playing Angry Birds on my iPhone, I can usually induce him to request a kiddies' cockpit tour, to afford me a better look at things. Otherwise, I use a stalling technique—asking about the weather with the flight attendant stationed at the front of the aircraft—and while he or she is giving me details of the winds aloft and so forth, I swivel my head toward the pilots, looking for telltale signs. Dark circles under the pilots' eyes, for instance, or cocktail napkins stuck to the bottom of their shoes, or Red Bull empties littering the floor. I feel it's my job, just the way, when I was still scared to fly, I used to grip the armrests throughout the flight, convinced it was my job to keep the plane in the air and on course. I just completed several trips that were courtesy of Air Wisconsin and ExpressJet and Air Whatchamacallit and What-Happened-to-the-Big-Airlines Airlines; I'm happy to report that so far, so good.

Let us now discuss shapewear.

I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle—a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own—and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip. I remember thinking that a girdle was barbaric, and that never in a million years would I treat myself like a sleeping bag being shoved into a stuff sack. Never! Instead, I would run marathons and work out and be in perfect shape and reject the tyranny of the girdle forever.

Yeah, right. I did, in fact, run marathons and work out and for a long time that was that. I don't remember exactly when that wasn't that anymore, but there came a point when I thought, Now I get it. This happened to be the moment when waistbands on pants had dropped down somewhere around one's knees, exposing an unexplored region of blubber between waist and hip. It turns out that my new deficiencies in contour were not unique; millions of people in my age cohort were having the same unpleasant surprise. Like magic, shapewear departments began to appear in stores, offering an updated version of my mother's brutal girdle—Lycra had changed everything. Now it was harder to figure out if someone was doing overtime in the gym or had Spanx or Yummy Tummy or Controlit! or Assets to thank for their bulgeless form.

By the way, whoever came up with the name "shapewear" deserves a MacArthur. It's so subtle and so modern, and so brilliantly implies that the person wearing it is actually already in shape, and that the shapewear is just tidying up—a little pencil edit, nothing drastic. I suppose I'm still true to my vow to never wear a girdle; none of them are called girdles. They're Hide-and-Sleek Mid-thigh Smoothers and Power Panties and Slim Cognito Shape Suits. I've been saved by a name.

Deer-hunting season approaches. My husband and I are not hunters, not at all, but we have a lot of land that a deer hunter would find bountiful, so every year we've had to figure out what to do. We could easily forbid anyone to hunt on our property, or we could give someone permission. My first impulse had been to tack up the "No Trespassing" signs and leave it at that, but then my mind was changed, and for the last few years we've allowed a neighbor to hunt on our property. One thing that changed was realizing that we have a ton of deer on our land, more than are probably well-accommodated, and if the winter is harsh and the pickings are slim, there are definitely too many. It seemed more humane to reduce the herd by hunting—that is, by a good hunter who can hit his or her mark, rather than a Dick Cheney sort of hunter—instead of leaving them to struggle through the winter miserable and mad with hunger.

What made up our minds, though, was more an issue of community. Hunting or not hunting is one of those indelible dividing lines between locals and those of us who meandered up here from Manhattan, and letting our land be used for hunting, even if we don't do it ourselves, seemed a rare opportunity to straddle that line. The guy who hunts on our property shoots only one or two deer a season, and butchers them for meat; it has a purpose and point that I try to appreciate, even if the appeal of hunting is entirely foreign to me. (The closest I've ever gotten to imagining the thrill of hunting was finding a shed antler in the snow a few years ago; I was so excited that I shrieked for five minutes straight.) I still think big-game hunting is terrible, and I used to think those faux-game-preserve hunting set-ups, where animals are raked into view for lazy thrill-seekers to shoot for bragging rights only, were the true sign of end times, until I heard about hunting set-ups where the hunter, who could be sitting on a sofa with a martini miles or even countries away from the animal, fires the gun via remote control, acting out a sort of beastly snuff film, with a mounted trophy as the takeaway. I think what I've learned by living up here is that there's hunting, and then there's hunting, and that it's worth trying to appreciate the variations in the game.

The rooster problem isn't going to go away anytime soon. I'm no zoologist, but I'm guessing that the hen to rooster ratio is probably one to one, but the desirability ratio is about twenty million to one. The world is filled with redundant roosters. Most people who keep chickens want hens so they can get eggs. You don't need a rooster to achieve that (for some reason, even people who did fairly well in high school biology ask me whether you need a rooster to have eggs, which is like asking whether a woman needs a boyfriend in order to ovulate). You do need a rooster if you want baby chickens, but you knew that. If you do have a rooster in your flock, he will serve as the chairman of the board, and he will romance the hens indefatigably, and he will perhaps do a little work as protector and savior, if so called upon. He will also crow, which some people (me) find charming and others not so charming. The people who find it not so charming have made roosters illegal in many municipalities that have otherwise permitted chicken-keeping (New York City, for instance). He will also go mental if he thinks something other than a hen has invaded his personal space—another rooster, for instance, or, problematically, a human being.

Unfortunately, you often end up with roosters unexpectedly, because it's very hard to tell the gender of a chicken until it's fairly old. I never wanted a rooster, and the first chickens I bought came from a big hatchery with the guarantee that they were girls. But then I started buying chickens here and there, from people who were not certified chicken sexers. I got a batch of young hens from a guy I met online, in one of my chicken groups, and last year, one of them, the demure and delicate Laura, put on a crazy growth spurt and then sprouted wattles, spurs, and a bad attitude, and made himself known as a rooster. He was spectacularly beautiful, with blue and black feathers and the face of a killer. We renamed him Lawrence, but couldn't help but persist in calling him Laura—it just stuck, the way names do. I'm sure it would have entertained anyone watching to see me quaking in the corner of the coop, yelling, "No, Laura! No, Laura!" as he spurred me angrily. He got more and more aggressive, and we couldn't figure out what to do with him. I thought about putting him up for adoption to my online chicken group, but there were always surplus roosters being offered almost every single day, so my hope of finding a home for him was dim. A few friends suggested we eat Laura, but I just couldn't do it. Anyway, he was so nasty that I assumed he'd be tough.

Laura's beauty was his redeeming feature. One day, a neighbor of mine who has chickens was at our house, and when he complimented Laura's luxuriant feathering and rosy wattle, I seized my chance. I said that Laura would be happy to come home with him and be beautiful at his house. I didn't really expect to close the deal, but my neighbor considered Laura for a moment and then proposed we do a rooster swap—a convention of country life I had not yet been introduced to, in which roosters are traded, usually because someone wants a different breed or size and has one to give away. I was hoping that by offloading Laura I would be out of the rooster game altogether, but my neighbor promised that his rooster was unusually calm and retiring. He just wasn't as studly and gorgeous as Laura, and my neighbor was willing to take on the challenge of a bad bird for the sake of beauty. That is how I ended up with my Rhode Island Red rooster Statue of Liberty, who has turned out to be just as low-key as my neighbor claimed. Laura is living large down the street with his new harem, and my neighbor, who seems to enjoy the challenge of Laura's belligerence, thinks he got the better end of the trade.

I wonder what book signings will be like when most of the books we read are electronic. Will authors sign something else? A flyer, perhaps? A special kind of card devised for the purpose? Or will people have to carry big, blank-paged autograph books to readings (autograph books, by definition, being one kind of book that will never be digitized)? I've signed T-shirts and magazine pages and once even signed a cast (fun, but sloppy) but most of the signing I do is in books. There are other unanticipated repercussions in moving words from paper to microchip. I have previously discussed here what a shame it would be if we could no longer snoop around people's bookshelves (snooping on people's hard drives seems an entirely different order of snooping). I would not miss having stacks of newspapers to recycle, but I would miss tearing little stories out of the paper. For years, my office was festooned with strange headlines and weird news items that I had come across, and I would glance at them for inspiration throughout the day. Looking at what you've uploaded to Evernote or Instapaper doesn't have quite the same visceral impact. And there's more. My neighbor called me the other day, sounding frantic, and asked me if I got the daily paper. I assumed she wanted to discuss some story with me, so I said yes, and waited to find out what news had gotten her so riled up. "We have a new puppy!" she gasped. "We're trying to housebreak her but we stopped getting the newspaper! Can I have your old copies to put down on the floor?"

My impulses as a gardener are totally perverse. This is the time of year when most gardeners are in mourning, watching the zinnias nod into eternal slumber, the tomato vines shrivel, the beds turn to dust—and yet I am happy. I love tearing things out of the ground. I love digging and discarding. I love pruning. In fact, I love pruning so much that I once gave myself carpal-tunnel syndrome because I attacked a trumpet vine with so much dedication. I love lopping. I want a chainsaw very badly, because I think cutting down a tree would be unbelievably satisfying. I have asked for a chainsaw for my birthday, but I think I'll probably get jewelry instead.

I might have missed my calling as an editor. In the spring, the sight of my empty garden beds gives me the horticultural equivalent of writers' block: So much space! So many plants to choose among, and yet none of them seem quite right! After a summer of mad growth and ungovernable expansion, vines that trail on like bad sentences, small dry bulbs that erupt into sprawling, overripe flower mounds, I can't wait for the fall editing session when I can get to work yanking out all the dead things, the ugly things, the mistakes and misjudgments. Planting is existential, boundless, aspirational. Closing the garden for the winter is like doing a math equation and getting it right, ending with something finite and absolute.

The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I'm tired. I have been tired for decades. I am tired in the morning and I am tired while becalmed in the slough of the afternoon, and I am tired in the evening, except right when I try to go to sleep. I am tired when I'm working hard, and I am extremely tired when I'm not working and the weightiness of being awake presses down on me like a sack of stones.

I was tired the entire time I was in college, because I never ...