Mapping an island and a family

Jessica J. Lee’s “Two Trees Make a Forest”, incarcerated firefighters, sharks and seals, and flower of the week

Jessica J. Lee: “In Taiwan, though so much had changed, my mother became a person with a topographic history, a person set in the scene in which she believed she belonged. In my childhood, I never saw that in her: In forty years of life in Canada, she had never rooted to the place and got lost easily. … But on the beach I realized that she’d carried something of the island in her the entire time, molecularly, absorbed the way water swells beneath the skin.”

Lee’s new book Two Trees Make a Forest maps her pursuit of her family’s past in Taiwan and explores her own relationship to the island. Lee grew up in Canada and spent time “chasing a paternal past” of her British father before the loss of her Po (grandmother) and Gong (grandfather), her mother’s parents, led her to devote time to tracing her roots in Taiwan. After experiencing the horrors of the Japanese invasion of Nanjing, Po moved to Taiwan as the battlefront of the Chinese Civil War advanced toward her home town. Gong, a pilot for the Kuomintang—the Nationalist forces who fought against the Communists in the civil war—relocated to the island as the Kuomintang retreated from mainland China.

Two Trees Make a Forest reexamines how Lee’s family’s stories reemerge in the present. She traces her path to reckoning with loss, forging a relationship with Taiwan’s people and its dramatic topography. The island transitions rapidly from grassland to rainforest to pine forest, and is cut through by tectonic fault lines. “Disruption is written in the island’s stone: forged in movement, scattered with dormant volcanic hills and slopes that rise from sea to sky to swiftly they cannot be captured in a single glance,” she writes. Learning the Mandarin names of native plants, “I turned their names over in my mouth, stretching their shapes in my mind, and found in them a longing to remember the things I had not known.” As in the quote at the top, her personal revelations are deftly phrased and hauntingly beautiful.

Lee’s writing is vivid and exacting. When she and her mother find a stack of papers where Po had written autobiographical reflections, she uses a simile from ecological field work to describe how she read them: “I took the pages paragraph by paragraph, as if setting the limits of a survey plot, words and names the samples of my search.” Her reading of Taiwan’s dramatic landscape acts as an island-sized metaphor for her family’s emerging narrative: fault lines, dramatic transitions, and surprising moments of consolation on coastal flats and far up in the mountains. And as she charts her family’s history, she also exposes the scars of the multiple colonizations of Taiwan—by empires from China, Europe, and Japan, as well as the harms wrought by the Nationalist government in the 20th century.

As a nature writer, I would seek such a book out for its penchant insights into Taiwan’s environment alone, but the story of Lee and her family is gripping, filled with surprise, tragedy, and unexpected sources of joy. You could imagine a version of the book that focuses solely on the high drama. Lee instead approaches her family’s past with great empathy and wisdom, effectively using understatement and suggestion to balance scenes of intense epiphanies and reunions. I’d recommend the book to anyone with broad interest in creative nonfiction or memoir. The book offers more insights into the mechanisms of colonialism than many books in the nature writing genre. As a memoir, its revelations are carefully plotted and paced out.

I read books in the personal narrative/nature genre for surprises and perspectives I don’t expect. Two Trees Make a Forest is one of the most surprising and beautiful that I’ve read in quite a while.

Incarcerated firefighters, climate change, and COVID-19

Yessenia Funes at Gizmodo has been providing essential coverage of California’s wildfires, their connection to climate change, and the state’s incarcerated wildland firefighters. The state pays them $5.12 a day ($1/hour “raise” for those on active fire lines) but depends on them to fight its massive wildfires. California’s reliance on prison labor has run up against the increased risk of COVID-19 infection among incarcerated people, leading to quarantines of many of its fire crews. It’s one of the most important climate stories right now, and it also reveals one of the many ways the U.S. depends on incarcerated people’s labor.

How Cape Cod seals dodge their shark foes

There’s an interesting recent paper from Cape Cod shark researchers tracking daily gray seal movements alongside detections of tagged white sharks. Gray seals have a varied diet, so you might expect that their daily and seasonal movements to reflect that variety as they switch between different food sources month to month. Instead, the researchers found that the 412 daily trips from eight tagged seals showed consistent patterns in the summer, when white sharks are most abundant, and in winter, when they’re at the lowest risk of shark attack. In the summer, seals only foraged at night, probably taking advantage of the low light levels for safety. The summer trips were much shorter (15-18 km) and closer to shore than the winter trips, when the seals would travel nearly 200 km for food. That indicates it’s the seals’ predators, not their prey, that’s directing their movements.

One of the most dangerous maneuvers seals have to make is leaving and returning to their “haul-out” spots on beaches, where they rest during the day. Here, the seals are concentrated and become easy marks for predators. They seemed to use different strategies for leaving and returning. At dusk, the seals left for foraging trips when shark activity was at its peak, right around sunset. The scientists believe that by swimming in a large group at sunset, the seals are opting for a safety in numbers approach. But when seals return at the end of the night, it’s much harder to assemble a large group, because seals return at different times from their trips depending on stamina and their level of hunger. In this case, the seals swam onto the beach before predawn light, dodging a peak in shark activity around sunrise.

This new seal information helps fill in a critical gap in shark researchers’ knowledge. Scientists have now tagged a number of white sharks, but to really understand their behavior, we also have to know what their prey, the seals, are doing.

The consistency in seal behavior and its ties to defending themselves from sharks stands in contrast to how gray seals act in colonies with less pressure from predators, which depends more on what the seals are eating rather than what’s eating them. It’s a sign of how strong an influence white shark predation is on Cape seal behavior. The researchers note that both seals and sharks are reestablishing their ecology in and around Cape Cod after nearly being absent following overhunting through much of the 20th century. Seals began to rebound in earnest just in the last decade or so, and higher numbers of white sharks appeared to hunt their favorite prey. Given that, it’s fascinating to see clear patterns arise relatively quickly in the recovery of the two species.

And the more data we have on the linked movements of seals and sharks, the better we can plan our own behavior and actions around these animals to avoid dangerous interactions and keep us and the ocean life safe.

A note about sexism in shark science

It’s worth noting here, though, that all the authors of the above study are men. This summer, women shark biologists have spoken out about sexism in their field and how shark researchers are portrayed in popular media such as Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. I’m not saying the authors of the study are necessarily sexist as individuals; instead, that the field itself is sexist in its structure. Most leadership positions in shark science are occupied by men, who then are more likely to appear as experts publicly and receive the lion’s share of credit for research. I’m writing about this study because it’s important local data that fills a gap in our knowledge, but I also want to zoom out and think about this field as a whole and how it can improve.

Some groups doing work to change the field include Minorities in Shark Sciences, a group of Black women shark biologists supporting each other and advocating for change. The Gills Club, a project of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, connects girls with women scientists to work on projects focused on public perceptions of sharks and shark biologists.

Flower of the week: Common soapwort

I’ve been trying to get out to the beach before starting work. Though the beach is right along a big road, you can get pretty far away from the road noise while the tide is out and the shore is temporarily broad. I walked over with my camera the other day and found that the roadside patch full of wildflowers I had came for had been weed-whacked, as if it was just a bunch of crabgrass. Well, it’ll grow back. In the meantime, I found a patch of soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) on a remnant dune. This is the first summer I’ve noticed these puffy pink flowers. It turns out the name refers to compounds called saponins in the leaves, which allows one to make a soapy lather when mixed with water. It’s not native here (brought over from Europe for gardens) but there are saponin-producing species endemic to North America like soaproot, which is traditionally used in some Native American cultures to stun and catch fish.

The times, folks. They’re not good! I don’t have a prescription for what to do about it. Just telling you that I go to the beach and take pictures of flowers and then come home and try to help someone else out.

Questions or comments? Send it to the mailbag: possum.notes.substack@gmail.com

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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.