Rants from the Hill Read online

  “OK, I’ll do what I can,” she said, “but you got to understand some of these carriers don’t much like that stuff from back East.”

  I thought for a long moment about how best to reply. Then, like the true Silver Hillbilly I have become, I said, “Yeah, that makes sense.” After all, I didn’t want to be cranky. Femailman still won’t deliver the magazine, but I keep up the subscription, because I like to imagine that somewhere out in these sere, brown hills, a red-nailed, hairy arm is lining the cat pan with a fresh cover of The New Yorker every Friday afternoon.

  A FEW YEARS AGO, at just this lovely, springtime season of the year, I had to go back East for a few months of work. When I returned home to Ranting Hill, which I missed mightily while I was away, I noticed plenty of changes. Great horned owls had taken up hunting perches on the peaks of our roof and had knocked back the local population of packrats. My native shrubs had survived, though they had been cropped by black-tailed jackrabbits. It was clear from scat and hoof prints that both mule deer and pronghorn antelope had grazed our property regularly. But the most obvious difference was that a thousand honeybees were buzzing around the eaves at the southwestern corner of the house.

  Honeybees are unusual here in the high desert. Although we do have some forage plants—including snowberry, rabbitbrush, balsamroot, and a few wild mustards—we simply do not have enough year-round forage to make this severe desert environment very appealing to your average honeybee. I had not seen a thousand bees total in a decade up here on Ranting Hill, so it was clear that something was out of the ordinary.

  Upon closer inspection, the bees were going in and out of a small hole in the eaves, where they adjoined the exterior stucco wall. When I called the local extension agent, she immediately asked, “Did you spray them yet?” When I replied that I had not, she sounded relieved. She then asked, “Are they still swarming? I mean, are they in a big clump? A swarm can be nabbed and moved pretty easily.” I explained that the bees were, instead, flying in and out of the house. “Well, you’re talking structural removal, then. Hopefully you can do a cut out, but you might have to do a trap out. Pest-control guys are clueless on this stuff, and most beekeepers don’t want the hassle unless they can get an easy score on a swarm. Big Dan’s your man on this.”

  Next, I called Big Dan—apparently a legend among local bee freaks—who also asked, “Spray yet?” and “Still swarming?” before patiently posing a number of other astute questions and, finally, agreeing to come out that afternoon to see if he could help. Let me admit straightaway that, as a desert rat, I know diddly squat about bees or beekeeping. I pictured Big Dan as a dude who would step down from a shiny, white F-350 looking like an astronaut in his fancy bee-fighting gear. Instead, a tiny, ancient, sun-faded, powder-blue hatchback Honda Civic rolled up, and out of it rose a man who was not only tall and large, but also graced with an immense, bushy red beard and a long braid of red hair trailing down between his shoulder blades. He was costumed not in studly bee-wrangling gear but in Birkenstocks, baggy brown cargo shorts, and a T-shirt brightly tie-dyed with a swirl pattern. He wore small, black-rimmed glasses that were so nerdy as to be completely incongruous with his hippiefied appearance. Big Dan looked like a red-haired version of the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, but only if Garcia had also been your kindergarten teacher. When little Caroline asked innocently if she could call him “Dan, Dan, the Big Bee Man,” Dan responded gently and sincerely, “I’d be honored.” My own thought in that moment was that this guy was a high-desert original—just the kind of character I had missed so much during the time I had been away from Silver Hills.

  Big Dan was a soft-spoken man, a mild giant who clearly had a deep feeling for the miracle that is the honeybee. He had the sensibility of a teacher, and he taught me a hundred things about bees while going calmly about his work. Wearing no bee-battling gear whatsoever, Dan first climbed my ladder right up into the cloud of bees, where he used a stethoscope to listen to various spots on the eaves and walls of the house. From this he diagnosed that the bees were not hived up in the eaves, where he could have done a “cut out” by sawing open the soffit and physically removing the nest. Instead, they were somewhere deep inside the interior walls of the house and thus would require a full-blown “trap out.” When I asked for an explanation, Big Dan agreed to trade one for a good beer.

  So first we drank and talked beer, and it turned out that Dan was not only a skilled microbrewer but also a beer competition judge of repute. Then, he turned to describing a trap out.

  “A trap out takes eight weeks, sometimes more,” he began. I think he noticed my grimace. “Or, you can poison the bees, risk spreading disease to other hives, and leave fifty thousand dead bees in your wall. The rotting smell won’t last more than a month, but the comb and honey left behind will attract ants, wax moths, and mice. When July rolls around, you may notice honey seeping through your walls.”

  I handed Dan a second porter and asked him to continue. “In a trap out, we first seal all the entrances to the hive except one. Then, we cover that one door with a long, funnel-shaped screen, with the tapered end pointing away from the house. Bees will come out of the cone to go forage, but when they come home, they won’t be able to find their way back into the tube. Near the small end of the cone we put a nuc box, which is a secondary hive with about five frames of brood comb, cells with eggs and larvae, and, of course, a queen and a bunch of bees. When the foragers can’t find their way back into the hive inside your house, they’ll give up and join the secondary colony in the nuc box. It takes a long time, because you have to wait for the colony’s full cycle. First, the foragers and drones will end up in the nuc box, but then the brood that’s already in your wall has to hatch and develop to the foraging stage before they’ll be ready to fly out and end up joining the secondary colony. You have to be patient.”

  “Yeah, but what about all that pest-attracting honey that’ll still be inside the house?” I asked.

  “Here is the true beauty of the trap out,” Dan continued, with genuine enthusiasm. “Once the colony inside your wall has failed, the bees adopted into the secondary colony will have no loyalty to it. At that point we remove the one-way cone and let the bees go back inside your house!”

  I told him I would need another beer to grasp why I’d want to allow what would now be sixty or even eighty thousand bees free access to the interior walls of our home. But Dan was evangelical about the elegance of the trap out. “Bees in the nuc box will fly into your walls and rob out every last bit of wax and honey, transferring it to the new colony. They’re thorough! Because there’s no telling where inside your house the hive is, this is the only way to leave your place clean. So, what’ll it be?”

  “Trap out, for sure,” I answered. “When can we start?”

  Without saying a word, Dan set his porter down on our stone wall, cracked a gentle grin, and walked over to his little Honda. He opened the hatchback and lifted out a bright-white hive box, carried it back with his pointer and middle fingers curled through the eye bolt in its top, and set it down next to my beer. The humming and buzzing emerging from that box was so loud that it seemed to be vibrating. Dan then strapped on a tool belt and ascended the ladder, climbing fifteen feet up into a cloud of bees. Again, he wore no veil or protective gear, and I could see bees crawling on his shoulders and head and even gathering in his bushy, red beard.

  Dan stayed aloft for a half hour, caulking holes and patiently constructing and attaching the cone-shaped screen that would guide the bees out of the house and then prevent them from reentering it. He also screwed a large hook into the wooden eaves and attached to it a heavy-duty carabiner. He then descended the ladder, lifted the white hive box, climbed back up again, and hung the hive by snapping the carabiner through the eye bolt on the box. Next, he stapled the narrow end of the cone to the face of this dangling hive, so that bees exiting our house could not miss the alternative colony. Finally, he removed the long, rectangular block that had kept the bees bo
ttled up in the nuc box. When he came down the ladder for the last time, Dan was wearing a wide smile beneath which flowed his flame red beard, now with at least half a dozen bees crawling through it.

  Eryn, the girls, and I soon came to love having the bees around, and we watched their patterns every day for weeks. We would observe the foragers emerge from the cone early in the day, return with their legs laden with pollen in the afternoon, and circle the funnel in an attempt to find a way back in. That failing, they would “beard” on the outside of the cone for an hour or two before giving up and joining the growing secondary colony in the suspended hive box. After some weeks, the traffic subsided, and we knew the brood in the wall colony was maturing and preparing to forage. Eventually, a torrent of exiting bees resumed, and for several more weeks we had the pleasure of observing their daily missions before bees once again ceased emerging from the cone.

  After a week of this inactivity, Big Dan came back up to Ranting Hill. We drank some stout before Dan removed the trap cone, and he watched with satisfaction as bees from the dangling hive reentered the house in masses. I confess that I did not find this reversal of the bee stream consoling, though I tried to imagine the alternative of having honey exuding from the interior walls of our house. After a few more weeks, the bee activity again ceased, and Dan reckoned that the house hive had been robbed clean of honey and that the new colony was established. He came out to the house a third time, savored an IPA, and then ascended the ladder. Dan sealed the bees’ sole entry hole to the house, blocked the entrance to the hive box, and climbed down carefully with what was now a very heavy load. Opening the hatchback of his Honda, he lifted the colony in. There were still quite a few bees clinging to Dan’s box, and as he drove away, waving to the girls, I could see him smiling and appearing not to notice—or at least not to mind—the single honeybee that was still attached to his forehead.

  The trap out was a wonderful reminder that often the best solution to a confrontation with nature is to work with, rather than against, the problem. Bees in our house was the problem, but it turned out that bees in our house was also the elegant solution to it. Instead of a sagging wall full of pesticide-soaked, rotting bees and rancid honeycomb, I had clean walls and a story to tell. But it was even better than that, because I learned so much about bees and was able to give Hannah and Caroline the wonderful experience of living with their own “pet” colony—even if it was suspended fifteen feet in the air. I also had the pleasure of meeting a fine high-desert character in Dan, Dan, the Big Bee Man, who later gifted us a jar of the sweet honey produced within the walls of our own home.

  AFTER ERYN’S DIFFICULT and dangerous twenty-two-hour labor, Hannah Virginia, our first daughter, made her reluctant entrance and began a still-unbroken run of being a sweet, smart, thoughtful, and interesting kid. In the early years of Hannah’s life, Eryn and I were in the habit of congratulating each other on what amazing parents we were. What could be wrong with all these other people, whose kids ran around screaming and climbing things, when our daughter’s sole idiosyncrasy was her preference for quiet and order? We pitied those exhausted parents, whose lives more closely resembled Lord of the Flies than Lord of the Rings, and who had consequently to face so many failed attempts to tame their ungovernable urchins. For us, parenting was a gratifying affirmation that, even in a world of chaos and noise, a rational, gentle, intelligent approach can produce a child who is delightfully well-adjusted and mercifully low-maintenance. It was this unchecked hubris that prompted us to have a second kid. After all, we were so good at parenting that doubling down seemed a sure bet.

  That was before we met Caroline Emerson. Four years younger than Hannah, Caroline was born after a fast and hard labor, and has been running us ragged ever since. I suppose the middle name we chose for her may have started the trouble. Ralph Waldo Emerson is America’s oldest and, to many, its most eloquent exponent of self-reliance—the belief that fierce independence, individuality, and nonconformity are the qualities we should develop in ourselves and value in others. This wild independence is precisely what we got in Caroline, though in her it is braided with an intense physicality—a remarkable strength, coordination, and spontaneous desire for adventure—that makes her appear equal parts cute little girl, Hollywood stunt double, and simian beast.

  At two weeks old, Caroline launched herself out of her grandma’s lap; at ten months, she stood up and walked away from us; at four years, she insisted that monkey bars should be built in place of sidewalks, because she can cover ground faster when “it’s just swinging.” It is a major accomplishment to persuade her to operate, even occasionally, on the horizontal surfaces of the world, and her innate ability to climb is both terrifying and inspiring. Caroline can scramble up anything: trees, fences, walls, and—in one of our best father-daughter party tricks—even me. I stand perfectly still as Caroline leaps onto my chest, momentarily hugging me like a sloth, after which she wedges her orangutan toes into my hipbones and then, reaching for my neck, buries her chimpanzee fingers under my collarbone and swings herself up onto my shoulders in a single, graceful motion, like an organ grinder’s monkey hopping onto a pony’s back. Having summited “Daddy Mountain,” Caroline pumps her fists in the air and shouts, “BOOOYAAAH!”

  Ranting Hill and its surrounding wilderness provide the ideal habitat for a little girl who is so thoroughly animal—though I often wonder whether it is Caroline’s wildness that makes her the perfect inhabitant of Silver Hills or whether this remote, high-desert landscape has instead produced the wildness that is so unmistakable in her. To her, this arid wilderness is home, and town is a place you go only when you have no choice. Caroline does not mind the extreme cold out here, or the blistering heat, or the incessant wind. She hates proper clothes and coming in for supper. She loves chasing jackrabbits and searching for scorpions, and she relishes the night sounds of shrill coyote yelps and raspy owl hoots. In early spring, she wants to spot sagebrush buttercup, sand lily, and death camas—signs of the changing season here—and her main goal is to find an antler shed by a mule deer. Her favorite summer activity is scrambling up into scratchy Utah junipers, where she builds stick nests that she hopes ravens will occupy. In fall, she is the only one in our family who welcomes the return of the big wind, because she insists it is alive, and her main worry is that she may not glimpse the mountain lion that hunted our valley last autumn. In winter, she watches constantly for pronghorn, and she sleds madly down Ranting Hill, even though it is impossible to do so without crashing into thickets of ephedra and gooseberry. Her favorite winter activity is taking off her clothes, running outside, and making naked angels in the snow.

  Caroline is like any normal kid, except that she wears no clothes and refuses to come indoors to pee. Though the very idea now seems hilarious, a few years ago we tried a last-ditch effort to civilize her by taking her to ballet lessons in town. When she was asked by her dance teacher to play the role of a butterfly in the class recital, she refused, explaining coolly that she would not be anything that can be eaten by a western kingbird. Instead, she set the terms for her participation: she would be happy to join the recital, but only if she could be a northern harrier.

  The humbling experience of living with Caroline Emerson has cured us of our delusional belief that we are, in any way, gifted as parents. An endearing term like feisty does not do justice to Caroline, who is so fiercely independent, energetic, and stubborn that she is, for all practical purposes, unparentable. Her signature reply when asked to do anything she prefers not to do is to adopt the stance of a boxer—turned sideways, with one foot in front of the other, fists circling slowly—and growl, “You want some of this, huh?” The other day when she struck her pugilist pose, I said, “Give it your best shot!” She instantly launched a roundhouse left, but I deftly caught her little fist in my right palm; she followed with a savage right uppercut, which I managed to grasp in my left hand. In this moment, I believed foolishly that I had neutralized her attack. Caroline just smiled an
d then, before I could respond, launched herself forward and rammed the crown of her head into my groin, doubling me over and leaving me gasping for air. “BABAAAM!” she hollered, holding up her puny arms in a would-be biceps flex.

  Unlike Hannah, her professorial big sister, for whom all actions are preceded by thorough analysis of contingencies and consequences, Caroline takes a “ready, fire, aim” approach to being in the world. Her instinct is always to try something to see if it will work, rather than to think—or, even worse, to talk—about whether it might work, and she views the basic risk analyses inherent to parenting as just so much cowardly stalling, hedging, and jawflappery. While this attitude has a substantial downside—one made clear when she once leapt into the Pacific Ocean several years in advance of learning how to swim—it is impossible not to admire her unrelenting, visceral drive to experience the world. In the time it takes me and Eryn to discuss whether it is safe to allow Caroline to climb a particular tree, she has already reached its top. While we think, she acts; while we calculate, she executes; while we wonder what she might be capable of, she sets out immediately to find out. Caroline is more her own person than any adult I know, and her spontaneous confidence provides a salutary challenge to the deadening logic of a grown-up world in which things are as they are only because that is how they have always been—because some adult who was afraid to try something in their own way could not dream up a better reply than “because I said so.”

  The word wild derives from the Old English wilde, which means “in the natural state, uncultivated, untamed, undomesticated, uncontrolled.” But the word’s older root is in the Latin ferus, which gives rise to the English word fierce, which is itself a cousin to the delightful word feral. It is this quality of being feral that fascinates me most, for while a wild animal has no experience of enclosure or constraint, a feral animal will “run wild, having escaped from domestication.” Caroline Emerson began her escape from domestication—began going feral—the moment she was born. We can give Caroline a home, but she will be in the blast of the desert wind most of the time. We can dress her in warm clothes, but she is going to peel them off and sprint outside to leave angels in the snow. As our family’s half-wild emissary to the more-than-human realm, Caroline seems to have entered this high-desert landscape through a snowstorm or a lenticular cloud or a secret green door beneath the sage. She is the girl for whom the walls the world has built around her exist merely to hold up the wild doors that only she can see.