Thomas Erickson
May 2020; June 2024
I am up to my armpits in a field of witch hazel. A thousand fingers pluck at my clothes as I push forward. The hazel obscures the ground and makes forward movement slow and halting. I can’t make out where I’m headed. I lurch through a furrow. Cold soaks my right shoe as I step into a water-filled depression. I slip on a charred bit of log. It is a hot, sweaty, claustrophobic experience. This is not what I expected from a course in Forest Ecology.
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How does one design a new life?
Once upon a time, more through fortune than forethought, I stumbled into what was to become a career that spanned forty years. At the time, in the early 1980’s, it was referred to as “software design.” “Software” had not yet entered common usage; years later I discovered that my mother had believed that I was designing sportswear apparel.
Four decades unspooled, with greater and greater rapidity. Computers that filled rooms shrank until they sat on desktops, and again until they were handheld, and again until they could be worn. Shrinking into invisibility, their computational powers have infiltrated all manner of things: watches, thermostats, TVs, cars, signs, buildings. Invented to perform calculations, they have become at least as important as a medium for communication and collaboration. Beginning with email, chat rooms, and what were called electronic bulletin boards, new forms of computer-based communications proliferated: virtual communities; blogs and microblogs; social networks; video conferencing; wikis; avatars and virtual environments; telerobots and remote work; crowdsourcing. Together with colleagues, many of whom became friends, we studied how these systems were used, and where they succeeded or failed. Sequestered in the research divisions of large organizations, we designed and implemented systems of our own, studied their use, and tried to turn them into products. It was grand!
But time flows onward. Commercialization and consolidation set in. Systems became adept – under the rubric of ‘gamification’ – at shaping their users’ behavior. They became more than a medium, harvesting information on their users to support the targeted marketing that was increasingly lucrative. The proliferation of new forms of digital media slowed. The values and priorities of the organizations that supported my work shifted. I became restless. It became clear that it was time to go. I thought about retirement.
How do I design a new life?
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I was anxious about retiring. While I was confident it was time to move on, I was less clear on what lay ahead. Being a researcher and designer had been fun. For years my team had a custom of composing group limericks, one line at a time, on our shared chat system. We would toss around wild ideas, and sometimes one would turn into a project. There were road trips, and joint trips to conferences where we’d meet up with like-minded colleagues from other institutions. There was, of course, much that was mundane: every job has aspects that are dull or annoying, but I was fortunate in that the tedium was punctuated with laughter, excitement and even joy.
What would replace all this? The organizations I’d inhabited had created an ecosystem of ideas and activity within which I’d flourished. My friends and colleagues were already falling away; the pace of innovation and the flow of ideas I found exciting were already slackening. What would it be like when I actually retired? Would I be bored? Lonely? Would the days blur into one another? Who would I be if I were not a research scientist? What would I do when the scaffolding of work – my role, incentives, goals, colleagues – softly and suddenly vanished away?
My anxiety was exacerbated by two concerns. Unlike my academic colleagues, who become emeritus and retain a connection to their institutional homes when they retire, corporate folks are unceremoniously ejected. One day you have a title, a role, a department, an email address, and so on; the next day they vanish as if they never were. Email sent to your corporate address doesn’t bounce: it disappears into a void. It is telling that the human resources system does not refer to “retirement;” it is called “termination.”
The second concern is that for the last twenty-five years of my career, I’d worked remotely, a thousand miles away from my colleagues. But while I say I worked remotely, I did a lot of travel: face-to-face contact was essential to developing the trust and friendship that underlies effective work, and so I made regular pilgrimages to the lab, as well as meeting up at conferences and business events.. After my “termination” there would be no meetups at business events; no grabbing someone for a beer after work; no dining on sushi and saki at Ichi Riki; no connection to the rumor and gossip that flows through the veins of corporations just as it does through other institutions.
Retirement, it seemed to me, would be entering a strange new territory. I would walk away from much that I knew. While the solid ground of home – my wife, our friends and family, the patterns of daily life that connect us – would remain, many familiar points of reference would be left behind. To be sure, there was an element of attraction to this. I’d spend decades honing my knowledge and skill, and I enjoyed being seen as an expert. But I felt that I should turn away from that allure. I wanted to shed the identity that was bound up in my work. I wanted to try new things, which, necessarily, would mean becoming a novice, and undergoing the discomfort of mistakes and ignorance and stupid questions. I was both attracted and wary. It can be fun to be a little lost, but scary to be completely lost. I was walking away from a lot. What would I be walking towards? How would I even figure out what direction to go? I needed a plan.
I like plans and maps and models. I find comfort in their simplicity and clarity. If I am uncertain or overwhelmed, I make a list. Break the big balky ball of chaos into simple elements, and arrange them into an order. If there are missing bits, add them. If there are irrelevant bits, delete them. Move this to the top, that to the bottom. Now things are under control! Of course, plans never actually work. Plans are a beginning, not an end. It is like what I learned about software design: if you do a good job of designing something, it will be flexible and robust and will be used in ways you never imagined.
My plan had three parts. First was learning. Being over 62 I was able to audit courses at the University for free: I began with forest ecology and meteorology, though in the longer term I intended to focus on geology. Part two was to maintain connections with people with whom I could have stimulating conversations. I wanted to remain immersed in a flow of ideas that had made my work so rewarding. Curiosity is a core part of who I am. Part three was to stay physically fit. I had taken up running in my fifties, and wanted to expand on that. In particular, I enjoyed hiking, and wanted to be able to do challenging hikes.
With my plan in place, I set out.
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Part one of the plan worked well, if not quite as I had anticipated. University life has changed in some ways. There are still darkened lecture halls filled with students, the steady march of slides punctuating the dimness as the lecture moves from start to end, and the slower rhythm of classes and units and tests that pace out the progress of the term. I find comfort in being embedded in these familiar rhythms. They act as a sort of architecture – I imagine a colonnade where light and shadow alternate as I move forward, giving me a sense of progress through an orderly structure. I appreciate that the class stretches out before me for twelve weeks. The work projects that used to structure my life are gone; classes are now the longest projects in which I participate.
Although the rhythms are familiar, the people are different. Actually, it is I that am different. I am acutely conscious of the youth of the students. They are in an earlier phase of life, following paths into a world that differs from what I knew. They move rapidly, eager to get through this and on to the next thing, heedless of the possibility of stumbling. I move more slowly, curious about the here and now, and all too aware of what a stumble may mean for an older person. For me, time is already moving fast; there’s no need to hurry.
I’d known that forest ecology, the first course I took, included a lab, but I didn’t know what that meant. The sciences I studied long ago – chemistry, biochemistry, neuroscience – examined entities that were smaller than the eye can see. We perched on solitary stools at long laboratory benches with impervious surfaces where we prepared solutions and samples in test tubes and Petri dishes. But forests are big! They don’t fit in test tubes. Instead, you are immersed in the thing you’re studying. Perhaps, I’d thought, the labs would involve hiking through forests, listening to the wind and birdsong as my feet sank into the forest duff, with an ecologist providing a narrative that revealed the order within the tangle. That would be lovely!
The actual lab is more mundane. It is about collecting samples from the forest in a regular and repeatable way. The instructions are straightforward: Lay out a straight transect – a line along which you will walk – of one hundred meters. Every twenty meters inscribe a circle with a radius of eight meters. Within each circle lay out two one-meter squares, each one meter out from the transect.
This plan has a pleasing geometry. A straight line, like a road or a spine, with geometric figures at regular intervals. It is reminiscent of prehistoric pictographs and henges and faerie circles. Pent within the carefully laid out figures, we are to perform our spells. As scientists, that means we count things. By counting the numbers of saplings, shrubs and grasses within each square, we assess the health of the forest. I have a fleeting image of sleep-walking ecologists trampling their sampling regimes into the fields, leaving mysterious geometries – crop circles! – to be puzzled over by the uninitiated.
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The simplicity of the instructions is deceptive. Out in the field, it is not easy to lay a straight transect. The forest does not submit gently to being measured.
I strain to keep my measuring tape above the grasping fingers of the witch hazel and push forward. Every ten meters I plant a flag to mark the line of the transect. It is a challenge to keep it straight. I shout to my partner at the other end of the tape; he shouts back; the wind hissing through the hazel makes it difficult to hear. In the gentle landscape of my imagination this would have been easy, and a series of red flags waving in the breeze would show the transect slicing through the forest. But in the real world the flags, each only a foot high, are well below the level of the hazel and are obscured along with everything else. Those who had planned the lab were not familiar with the actual terrain. The map is not the territory. An old story.
Or more likely, they are familiar with the territory. This is part of our training. The plans we formulate, the elegant models and maps that capture the patterns of the natural world, these are abstractions. They do not survive contact with the real world unscathed. As budding ecologists we need to learn how to move back and forth between the abstract and the real. Adapt. Adjust. Improvise.
As I become more familiar with the challenges of the real terrain, I adapt. I trample a path through the hazel so that it will be easier to keep the previous flag in view. So much for the sensitive ecologist moving lightly through the delicate ecosystem. Next time I will wear boots!
The final stretch of the transect is not quite straight: it angles off at about 20 degrees, diverted by a fallen tree and a bit of bog. There is a nice lesson here: while transect is not as straight as intended, it does at least keep me going in one direction.
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The other parts of the plan, likewise, have worked out, though sometimes angling off in unexpected directions. Part two was to maintain a network of social connections to ensure a flow of ideas and conversations. This was a big challenge. I am a lifelong introvert. I don’t willingly seek out new people. My wife is the only person I will call without having a reason. But during my career, connecting and conversing was part of the job, so I did it, and I found that I enjoyed it – once I had done it. It nourished me.
I had hoped that my activities at the University would foster new connections, but that did not work out. Connections with students felt awkward, and did not survive the end of the course; professors needed to maintain a degree of distance from students, even older ones. I had also joined the Minnesota Geological Society, which met at the University; this was more successful, but field trips were few and far between, and significant connections did not develop.
Despite these disappointments, part two of the plan worked out because of a third effort. Before retiring, I had begun scheduling meetings with people I wanted to stay in touch with. It was the scheduling that was important: that meant that the meetings lived on the calendar, and I set them up so that they repeated at regular intervals, most commonly weekly or bi-weekly. If the calendar says I am supposed to call someone, I do so. No other reason is needed. And because the meeting automatically repeats, the calls will continue, a series of meetings stretching off into the future like the dashed lines on a long straight highway. The topic? There’s no particular topic. But the calendar requires a topic! For reasons I no longer recall I called the first one “Pleasant Chat.” The name stuck, and proved curiously engaging.
I no longer recall how the first pleasant chat came about, or how the concept began to spread. The first chat took place while I was still at work, and likely was with Christine or Wendy. I believe that what happened next was that I mentioned the chat to someone else – perhaps saying I had to end a call to attend a pleasant chat, or perhaps to attribute the origin of a bit of gossip, a joke, or an idle speculation to a pleasant chat – and the unusual term intrigued people. It caught on. Other colleagues suggested that they too might enjoy pleasant chats, and so the practice spread, even before I retired, and continued spreading afterwards.
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Part three, staying active, worked as I’d hoped. I continued my running, and used annual hiking trips to the Sierra Nevada as a motivation to increase my fitness. But even the simple act of staying active changed over time. Here, the transect did not so much angle off in different direction as begin to braid and meld with other parts of the plan.
The forest ecology course played a role by changing the way I experienced the forest. I remember a moment:
Drawn by a glimpse of a small clearing filled with light, I’ve made my way off the trail. The snaps of twigs and rustle of dried leaves mark my progress. The clearing is long and narrow, created, I can now see, by the fall of a massive tree, which in crashing down took out a number of its neighbors.
This is topography in the small. I used to think of topography as big stuff. Hills. Valleys. Mountains. Plains. Canyons. Everything was large scale, relative to humans who would be small insignificant figures situated within it. But forest ecology sharpened my conception of topography by showing how it functioned at smaller scales. When a tree falls in the forest it often opens up a hole in the earth where the roots used to be. And so it is here. There’s a hole, big enough that I can clamber into. It is cool and moist. My feet sink into the earth. There is a small pool in its lowest part, with a some immature ferns. A few midges hover in the air; I hear the hum of a mosquito; strands of web catch a bit of sunlight. It’s a likely place for a salamander. I see that this small bit of topography is itself a tiny ecosystem, remarkably different from the dried duffy forest floor that stretches off into the distance.
I can see that the tree’s fall has had other impacts as well. Falling east to west, in line with the sun’s arc, it has opened the forest floor to sunlight. It’s clearly been down for several years, as small aspens and pine saplings are beginning to shade out the meadow-loving wild flowers. The trunk, most of its branches gone, is beginning to decompose. It is a process that takes decades. It begins with Ambrosia beetles excavating a lattice of tunnels beneath the bark, which in turn provide access for water and fungi and other organisms. That is where it is at now: the bark has come off in sheets, beetle burrows inscribe the surface with alien hieroglyphics, and fungal mycelia are growing into the heartwood. A few saplings are sprouting alongside the trunk, taking advantage of the moisture that a decomposing log soaks up and then gradually relinquishes, and of the nutrients released by the fungi into the surrounding soil. In the longer term, as it hosts an increasingly diverse community of life, the log will disintegrate into the soil, leaving only a streak of color, a soft earthy shadow.
This is but a moment in a small niche in the forest. But the time stretches out, and the intricacy of the patterns of life make the small large. New ideas and perspectives come to me from the world, not just from chats with friends.
It feels like the plan is working, and having effects beyond what I’d envisioned.
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Two years after my retirement, Covid arrived. It was a shock. It reminded me of something else I’d learned in forest ecology. On the day that I laid the transect, the topic of the lab was the effect of disturbances on ecosystems. We were looking at the effect of fire frequency on the health of an oak savanna, and doing so in a Scientific Natural Area, where different areas had been subject to different frequencies of controlled burns over the last several decades. In general, disturbances are a good thing. Ecosystems have evolved to expect them. In most forests, drought and wind and lightening intersect often enough to make small fires an unremarkable event, creating a patchy forested landscape in which an older patch of the forest will burn, and then the fire will smolder to a halt as it enters a more recently burned patch of forest that is younger and greener and has little fuel. A consistent ‘fire regime, as ecologists call it, reduces the amount of dry wood on the ground, meaning that fires are smaller and less intense: they can clear out the deadwood without injuring the mature trees. The fires also create sunny open spaces, release nutrients, and trigger seeds to generate, thus increasing the diversity of the forest.
It seems paradoxical, but periodic disturbances create healthy resilient ecosystems.
But not all disturbances are equal. In the realm of forests and fires, a particularly negative kind of disturbance is the complete absence of fires. In the natural world, such an absence is an anomaly. But in the presence of humans, who prefer their air clear and their forests green, decades of land management policy and public relations have been designed to eliminate fires. It may have seemed like a noble goal to planners looking down at their maps, but, on the ground, fire suppression is a synonym for fuel expansion. After a few decades of suppression, the diverse patchy landscape of forests will grow into a vast swath of fuel-rich forest, an ecological transformation especially attractive to wildfires. Wildfires, in their scale and intensity, can devastate an ecosystem, even creating low pressure centers that suck in air until every scrap of fuel is consumed. They become self-reinforcing disturbances that end in devastation.
What kind of disturbance was Covid? For the world, it was devastating. It will be a long time until we fully understand its effects and the transformations it has wrought. While I was fortunate that my friends and family avoided its most tragic impacts, nevertheless it disrupted my plan. Transects, already skewed by contact with the real world, were further altered.
My university courses continued, online but vitiated. When courses resumed on campus I didn’t feel comfortable returning, and so they ceased entirely. The structure provided by the semester and syncopated by lectures and tests was lost.
Travel ceased, including the hiking trips in the Sierra that inspired me. My outdoor activities contracted to solo runs at regional parks. Covid also eliminated most face-to-face social interaction, especially during the winter. My life had become simpler and more solitary and more homogeneous. Time flattened out and the days blurred into one another, a retirement scenario I had imagined with dismay. What day is it?
Only the pleasant chats ticked steadily along. They provide a topography to the week. Christine is Monday and Friday, although we often punt on one of the days. Heather is Wednesday, once a month. Catalina is first thing every other Friday morning. Rachel and Wendy are every other week, on alternating Monday afternoons. Steve is usually Thursday morning, once every few months; he prefers not to schedule recurring meetings, but is so reliable about sending invitations that it works well enough. Each chat, over time, has developed a distinctive character and ethos; they are niches within which I shelter. Although Covid has narrowed and constrained my activities, there is still intricacy and richness to be found on a smaller scale.
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Two years have passed. Covid, its danger lessened by vaccines and its impact normalized by repetition, is less acute. The plan – learning, staying connected, being active – has evolved and grown into something more intricate than I’d imagined. I have made a masked return to classes. I have half a dozen geology courses under my belt, and am dabbling in chemistry. Learning has expanded as well. Most mornings, espresso in hand, I haunt the online geology forums on Reddit, looking for questions that, with my limited knowledge, I can answer. Often, as I compose an answer, I discover gaps in my knowledge, and pause to fill those. Good answers get upvotes, a small but real pleasure.
Pleasant chats have evolved. Originally envisioned as a way to keep in touch with former colleagues, they now include my local friends. Carolyn is Tuesday afternoon at Jones Coffee. Kathy is Wednesday morning at Alma Provisions. Charles is Thursday afternoon at his place. Charles and I began a project reading essays, which gave our chats a nice focus. Soon the reading spread to other chats. Carolyn and I read science, mostly geology. Kathy and I read essays, especially those slanted towards natural history. Rachel and I read biology and neuroscience. The reading and ensuing discussion is not only fun, but it requires preparation. Now the week has a more defined topography – I look ahead at the week, not just in anticipation of seeing people, but because I need to get my reading done and my notes in order. The pleasant chats are landmarks that I eye as I approach: each is a niche in my personal ecosystem, with its own (eco)logic, its own emotional timbre. The week is a journey through a diverse landscape of thought.
Hiking, too, has changed. After the Covid-induced hiatus I returned to doing hikes that were farther afield. The geology courses I’d taken – particularly where they touched on geomorphology, the macroscopic structures of landscape visible everywhere – changed how I saw the landscape through which I hiked. It is now common for me to get distracted on a hike: on my last trip I spent two hours poking around an acre of glacially polished granite, looking at aplite veins, erratic boulders, and mats of tabular orthoclase crystals embedded in the granite. I did not make it to my destination… but I really did.
Though I prefer solitary hiking, that too has changed. Kathy, of the Wednesday pleasant chat, joined me on a hike into the Grand Canyon, where we spent two nights at the bottom. Carolyn, of the Wednesday pleasant chat, is a companion on geology field trips. Most recently, after a solo hiking trip in the Sierra, I met up with Dan, a former colleague, and we did a tour of the local geology. Perhaps he will morph into a new pleasant chat partner.
So the elements of the plan have grown together. They are no longer items on a list, to be ticked off one by one. Nor transects, to be tramped, as straight as possible into the terrain. They have entwined, each enriching the other, and each instance assuming its own distinct character. My life has achieved a new post-career equilibrium, though it has proved to be what ecologists call a punctuated equilibrium, periods of stability disrupted by disturbances that are in turn followed by adaptation.
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I am hiking in a forest, in a small valley I love. All around the columns of trees create a vast space of light and shadow through which I move. The filtered sunlight gives the stream a dark emerald color. Cool moist air flows down the valley, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes in a sustained shushing through the canopy, like the long slow breaths of a sleeping being. I have returned here, often every year, for much of my adult life. But this, too, was interrupted by Covid. Since I’ve last traveled here, there’s been a fire. I’m told that quite a lot of the valley burned. I’m curious to see how it has fared.
Rain-polished blackened trunks refract the afternoon sunlight. The green of young leaves stands in contrast to the ebony. I hadn’t imagined that a burnt forest could be beautiful. But it is. It is spring, and the forest floor is carpeted with wildflowers: Lupine, Penstemon, Wild Iris, others. Paradoxically, the forest floor is sunny now, more a meadow than a forest. It is bright amidst the charred trunks. Below the trees, the insulating layer of old needles and other detritus is gone. The nutrients that used to be locked up in the trees and duff are now in the soil.
The recovery is still in its early stages. The forest floor is a patchwork of largely segregated species. As I walk along the trail, I pass from an area where lupines predominate, to one dominated by ferns, to a barren area yet to be colonized. What is most striking is that the patches are large – each around an acre of one plant or another. The small-scale diversity, the finely interwoven tapestry of life that is a familiar aspect of forests, and of any kind of mature ecosystem, is not there yet. But it is coming. The boundaries are growing less distinct. Apparently it takes time for different elements of an ecosystem to entwine, to negotiate the ways in which their impulses for cooperation and competition will come into balance.
The life of the forest is not restricted to plants. Pollinators of all sorts buzz and bumble along. Butterflies, especially Painted Ladies, abound. Although they seem to zig and zag at random, there is a trend to their movement. Over time, they are moving upwards. It is uncanny to sit amidst the blackened trunks and snags and wildflowers and watch thousands of butterflies slowly drift up the side of the valley. Woodpeckers are also in evidence, at least audibly, in staccato bursts of rapping. What are they after? Surely there are not insects beneath the char. But looking closely I see that almost every trunk has shelves of fungus protruding. Breaking off bits, I see that every piece of fungus has worm holes within it.
The fire has turned the forest biome inside out. That which was most alive – the canopy and cambium of the trees – is dead. The areas where life used to be sparse – the forest floor, the interior of the now-charred trunks – is now fecund. The dead tree comes to contain more living biomass than it did when it was alive. Disruptions, after a period of chaos, allow new and different equilibria to emerge.
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So here I am. No longer a research scientist. No longer a designer. No more travel to conferences. No more talks or papers. No more meetings or projects or proposals. No more pronouncements about the future of technology. All this has been cleared away. In its wake there is new life. I hike in the forest. I run by the river. I read books with friends. I write. I learn. Every week has its complement of pleasant chats, cozy niches in which I linger.
I am in a new territory. It was, at the beginning, strange, but now I can feel its patterns and rhythms. At every moment there is more than eye can see, more than the ear can hear. Onward.
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