Sour Cherry Report, June 2021
by Anton Zuiker on June 19, 2021
I am happy to report that I was able to pick sour cherries again this year.
My usual cherry companions are my friends Rose Hoban (founder of North Carolina Health News) and Steve Tell. Rose was traveling, and my family opted out of this unique experience, so Steve and I drove to the Levering Orchard in Galax, Virginia early on Sat., June 12. We arrived at the gate at 8 a.m. hoping to be first to the gate —there were already 10 cars waiting! The word was out: Frank Levering had made clear in his daily answering message that this was a bad year for the orchards after a double freeze this spring. “Come early, because we’ll be done in a couple of hours.”
While we waited for the gate to open at 8:30, I chatted with the man who had pulled up behind us. He’d driven up from Cary (20 minutes farther east of where Steve and I had started), and he told me his father used to deliver milk in my area of Chapel Hill. I’m sure he would have come up the gravel driveway to deliver milk to the McCallum family in this brick house.
Once into the orchard, Steve and I found our trees and started picking. The trees had cherries, they were ripe and plump but dispersed, so the picking was slow, and the competition fierce — 20 or 30 other cars pulled into the orchard after us, some older individuals, some young families (my first time picking was with my three children). A couple of hours later, all the trees were bare, and I had a bucket three-fourths filled (about 6.5 pounds of cherries). In past, better years, I could fill a bucket in an hour.
At home a few days later, Anna and I pitted the cherries and I prepared three quarts of cherry pie filling, and one pint of sugary cocktail cherries for my old fashioned drinks in the year to come. The cherry pits are flavoring a jar of white wine vinegar and will make salad dressings that much more interesting.
Climbing the Ladder
Steve and I were not in a hurry to end the experience, and we were reluctant to leave as long as we could see any cherries high up in the leaves. We found a tree up the slope where an orchard worker was willing to move the ladder every 15 minutes. I was up high reaching for a last cherry or two when Frank pulled up in his pickup and stopped to chat. I thanked him for investing in new open top ladders, which felt much sturdier than the aged and weathered ladders we’ve climbed in the last few years.
“I drove to the Baldwin Apple Ladders Company in Brooks, Maine for those—2200 miles round trip!” said Frank.
Climbing those ladders is one of the best parts of my annual pilgrimage to Levering Orchard. I love to pause at the top, flip myself around so I’m sitting on a rung, and look down into the valley and toward North Carolina. Then I turn around and start reaching for more cherries.
Frank invited us back in August, when his outdoor Orchard Theatre will feature his play, Tales of a Waterless Sea. I told him that sounds fun. And I told him I was already praying and hoping for a bumper crop of cherries next year.
Names in the news
by Anton Zuiker on June 19, 2021
Two top journalists are in the news, and I have very minor connections to them and wanted to reflect their important work.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning journalist whose reporting on racial injustice has been an important contribution—and driver—for our nation’s continued conversation about what we need to understand about slavery and racism and injustice. She created the 1619 Project and received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Earlier this year, the journalism school at UNC hired Nikole for a Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, but the university’s board of trustees refused to award her tenure. That’s wrong, and it’s been the topic of the news for the last couple of months; for example, the latest coverage from NPR is this by David Folkenflik.
I met Nikole at UNC; we were both Roy H. Park Fellows at the j-school, and she earned her masters degree in 2003, a year ahead me. I’m in awe of what she’s accomplished, and I’m angry that UNC won’t allow its journalism students to be taught and mentored by her.
Ed Yong, a supremely talented science journalist, is the recipient of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. His articles in The Atlantic about COVID-19—and pandemic preparations even before we knew about COVID-19—have been great reads full of insights and clear explanations. Ed definitely deserves that prize.
I met Ed in 2010 when he attended ScienceOnline2010. Here’s his recap (as he headed home to England sick with whatever virus burned through our attendees that year).
I’m now seven months into my new position as clinical research communications specialist at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. It’s an engaging job, and I’m enjoying it, and yet I miss writing narrative features, so I’ve made a story pitch to a magazine for a profile of a Duke-trained marine scientist on St. Croix protecting the endangered sea turtles. (Here’s my micro.blog post and photo from Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge last month.) I’m definitely not in their league, but Nikole and Ed inspire me to strive to make a difference through reporting and writing.
Station Eleven: Look it up
by Anton Zuiker on May 11, 2021
Swinging in my hammock beneath the sea grape trees at Sprat Hall Beach on St. Croix, I devoured the novel Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. It’s a pandemic story — written before this real COVID-19 pandemic — about the few who survive and how their stories are connected and intertwined by a new future together.
In the story, most of humanity dies within days from flu, and within months all the privileges of modern society are gone or done or off: no electricity, grounded airplanes, the distribution of food and supplies abruptly stopped. Those who remain eventually band up, settled down or into a nomadic routine, and struggle to survive without medicine and industry and civil society. And the sentence that most struck me was this one that starts on page 199:
None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.
In our house, Erin and I are always grabbing our phones to look up facts and figures and historical articles. We are trying to train our children to do the same; I sometimes make them get the actual dictionary off the bookshelf to find a definition. Just last week I heard a friend explain that education today needn’t rely on making students memorize lists and equations and such. But what if? What if this amazing digital trove of knowledge in our hands suddenly stopped working? Would I survive long? Would you?
Let’s make sure we use the internet to learn to get along, to make electricity, and to survive together.
On the way to the parking deck
by Anton Zuiker on April 25, 2021
I’ve been too busy to check in on Medicine Grand Rounds each Friday at noon, but I made sure not to miss last week’s presentation by Robert Lefkowitz, MD, professor of medicine and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2012. His talk, A Tale of Two Callings, was just as funny and insightful as I expected. He even extolled the virtues of chocolate, and he broke into song — West Side Story — at the end. Watch here.
During my 10 years in the Duke Department of Medicine, at least once a week, on my way to or from the Research Drive parking deck, I would pass Dr. Lefkowitz. Sometimes he we’d exchange a greeting, but most often he seemed deep in thought. When he explained his keys to success in science, focus was at the top of the list.
In 2011 I had accompanied a photographer to the Lefkowitz Lab to get images for the department’s annual report. I used photos from that shoot to celebrate his Nobel Prize, and in my blog post Nobel connections, I recalled part of the conversation in his office from the year before:
“I tell jokes, and the [research] fellows laugh. And when they laugh, they’re making connections. And that’s what science is, making connections.”
I’ve started his memoir, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm: The Adrenaline-Fueled Adventures of an Accidental Scientist. I’m reading it slowly, trying to focus, and of course I’m eating chocolate while I read.
Planting seeds
by Anton Zuiker on April 11, 2021
A big rain last night washed away the blanket of yellow pine pollen, and then a sunny, breezy beautiful day bursting with color — the green leaves already a curtain across the woods that surround us, and the red azalea and white dogwood and bridal wreath and purple lilac attracting bees and wasps and butterflies — drew me outside. I fed the hens, turned the compost, pruned the grape vine, and prepared another bed with some of last year’s compost and packets of seeds: cosmos and sunflowers and daisies and poppies and roselle and Rocky Mountain bee plant.
I came inside for water and a snack. Malia was at the dining table, where she does most of her high school homework, and she was listening to a presentation about the Wilmington, North Carolina massacre and other injustices done to Black Americans.
I stepped out the front door to chat with Erin, who was weeding the front flower beds with Oliver, our fifth grader. He was saying to Erin, “I’m glad they created podcasts, because Malia and the rest of us can learn about racism and other important topics.” I immediately thought of Dave Winer, and wished he could have been there in that moment to hear how all the digging he’s done, and development he’s outlined, and MLK pins he’s worn have helped to make this world colorful and vibrant and on the way to justice.