Disturbance Regimes
An Ecologist’s Guide to Female Friendship
Two years ago, a doctor inserted a small, T-shaped bit of plastic into my uterus. The polyethylene frame looks like a stick insect with its legs cut off, and has strings that hang like airplane contrails. There’s a reservoir (in the body of the dismembered stick insect) with levonorgestrel, which is a progestin, which is a hormone that regulates the menstrual cycle and pregnancy. That reservoir holds 52 mg of the stuff, enough to last five years.
Within those five years, before they have to pry me open and tug that plastic carcass out of me, I am immune from pregnancy. There were initial side effects, of course: my uterus contracted around that small foreign object, sending me horizontal. I bled for over a month, a lot at first and then a slow dribble, one that I stopped cleaning up. Now I don’t bleed at all. Sometimes a ghost of periods past will visit: a whisper of a cramp, the prickle of a pimple in waiting.
I was 14 years old when I met Alice. It was the first semester of boarding school in Massachusetts, where I grew up. It was fall, and the air was light and full and the sun had started to shine orange. As the days lost their warmth, leaves covered our cobbled paths in bursts of sunset. We wrapped in jackets, then scarves and gloves and hats. We waited for the first snow.
Alice was from Houston, Texas, so this was new to her. Houston spends much of its year steeping in wet heat, the air sticking to you, perfumed by the haze of cars. I went to Houston only once, in springtime, and I sweated through my whole visit. I remember Alice’s unbelieving face when I told her, walking to the chapel in that muddy space where New England fall slushes into winter, what we called this light, not-quite-rain. “Misting?” Her face collapsed forward onto her open mouth. “What the fuck is misting?” The refrain: we don’t have this in Texas.
Alice’s dad worked in oil, which would’ve been a bigger sticking point if I had, at that point, sorted out my morals into such convenient little boxes. Her dad was from Ecuador and gave her her dark, spilling curls, the gold beneath her skin, and far-away relatives to visit. Her mom was Southern (United States speaking) and gave her that drawl, that full laugh, and a love of dress up.
In a school where neither of us felt quite comfortable or understood, Alice was my best friend. She was the first person to take my mind and my writing seriously, the first person to pay attention to what I thought past what I said. She was — is — one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. We built a quiet love out of blizzard sleepovers, shared secrets, and book recommendations.
Phenology is the scientific study of timing. The world runs on a million different clocks, all set to signal different processes. Caribou migrations and first rainfalls and starfish spawning are all governed by these invisible internal signals. Species evolved around each other’s cycles, and ecosystems emerged from that chaos. It all functions a bit like our endocrine system, the complex array of hormones that signal chain reactions and make us sleep, eat, and reproduce.
Climate change has really fucked with timing. As a warming planet invites insects out sooner, migratory birds arrive with nothing to eat. When salmon run later, fisherman have nothing to catch. Here in California, an earlier spring extends fire season.
Before coming to California, I had never heard the term “fire season.” My impression of California was one of no seasons at all. Even in Northern California, which separates itself from the sunny monotony of the Southern half, we live with an illusion of stasis. The sun will always rise, the air will always hover in the temperate sixties or seventies. This was the promise of California: a blank climatic slate for my wildest dreams.
This exported image ignores the disturbance regime central to California’s ecosystem. On particularly hot, dry, and windy days, much of the state is at risk of a massive wildfire. This fire is central to California’s ecosystem: it signals certain seeds to germinate, clears room for new plants to take root.
Calling fire a season feels strange, when the seasons I grew up on are much more obvious, gentle, and predictable. But that’s what it is: for a period of time, the world behaves differently.
Two years ago, springtime. My feet are kicked up on stirrups, my body wrapped in a paper gown. A small sheet hangs next to me at hip-level, splitting my body in two. A doctor on one side, my best friend Joanna on the other. The sensations are all sharp: a thick coldness, a rush of pain. But it’s okay because after this, there’s nothing. No daily pill, no monthly cramps. No need to keep those twisted packages of cotton, rayon, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyester tucked in my bag. There will be no blood to stanch. I can do anything, always, free from the limitations of my body.
I go first but Joanna asks all the questions. I am silent, my eyes closing, my hand squeezing hers. She asks what it’s made of, how it works, what exactly she is doing with those heavy metal instruments. The doctor answers through a mask, focused on the precise placement of plastic inside my uterus.
Later that day, we switch positions. I hold Joanna’s hand and she tightens her fingers so that I can feel as she does. We’re both quiet, this time: we know the drill, and I’m not as good of a coach. But she knows I’m there. She’s holding on.
Four years ago, fall. The reddening landscape faded into a backdrop for the college process. I didn’t know about disturbance regimes yet, didn’t know the way that our ecosystems could hold chaos and not break. Our seasons moved slow and we peeled our eyes for signs of change: the first frost, a peeking crocus, the end of the rain. You build up a tolerance for these endings, a patience for their second comings.
It was during that fall that Alice began to lose her voice. We would walk to dinner after cross-country practice and the silence would wrap us like trauma blanket. The things we were built on — the spine-splitting laughter, the splay of watching old movies, the conjoined way we read separate novels — slipped out so quietly that they did not demand acknowledgement. Or maybe: so quietly that I ignored their demands. That I let adventure and the flush of a new relationship take their place.
The wet cold of winter began to seep in. Our partnership was contractually bound: we co-edited the newspaper, co-captained the cross country team. We stopped talking anyway. After one long run, I stood apart from our team, trying to stretch the ache from my bones. There was the chatter of disbanding, and then arms around me. I returned Alice’s wordless hug, smelled the soapiness of her scalp, felt her hold tighten. She pulled away with tears in her eyes, told me she was sorry.
I don’t remember what I said, if I said anything at all. I must’ve stood there open-mouthed, suspended in inhale. The words I needed — I miss you, I love you, I don’t understand what’s happening — crowded on my tongue, sitting thick and heavy.
We let this go on, her pulling away and me letting her. There was no reason, no blow-up, no breaking. I don’t even think I cried, not until much later.
In the spring, on one of our many walks of attempted resolution, she told me how hard that autumn had been for her, even outside of everything between us. She used clinical language I’d never heard anyone claim, gave her sadness a name. You never told me. She gave a small shrug, her hands buried in the pockets of her Barbour jacket. “I thought everyone knew.” I shook my head. As if I were everyone.
We spent the spring in these faltering restarts, never getting back to what we knew we had. I thought this was the end of our friendship.
After graduation, I didn’t see Alice for over three years. When I made new, close friends, we cried together over the people we’d lost. We mourned the fact that there was no lexicon for what it meant to lose a friend. We created that language for ourselves, promised each other we would never let the other drift away.
In Massachusetts, where I grew up, all the roofs are slanted. That way the snow slides off. We have basements so we can set our foundations below the frost line. That way, when the frozen soil expands and presses against the house, it doesn’t push it up. We build in the summer knowing that winter will come. When it does come, the arms of adaptation lift quickly. Before we’ve even seen the snow, the plows have banked it on sidewalks. That way, we can drive to work or school on smooth, clear roads.
Most of California doesn’t have basements, or slanted roofs, or armies of plows. We built it later, faster, on grid lines. We build in summer thinking that summer will stay. We have been right, mostly. Winter likely won’t come.
But the rains may, and they will send our desert sliding. Or they may stop coming, and our network of aqueducts will dry, and our lawns will wither, and Los Angeles will thirst for something that the north can no longer provide. And as we dig and beg for water, the sea will slink closer, and our cities will drown in salt. And as we drown the same towns will keep burning, and people will keep running only to land in the smoke of their old homes. And that smoke will send up carbon to feed a widening gash, an open mouth that says: you did this.
But maybe not. Maybe we will pull our communities onto solar microgrids, clear the old, twitching power lines from our forests. Maybe we will start building our cities up and not out, so that people do not run for the hills. Maybe we stay away from the coastline. Maybe we retrofit our buildings to be seismically safe and we prepare for floods and for fire. Or maybe not, and the lucky ones will move inland, closer to the food and farther from the ragged edge we’ve been chasing.
This year, summer. Alice and I shared the same city. We exchanged nervous planning texts, agreed to see each other, three years later. We were set to meet at 7 pm. I arrived slightly late. The place was called “Short Fiction” and was awash in pink. She sat at the bar in a long blue and white wrap dress, her thin fingers wrapped around a gin and tonic.
I had picked my outfit carefully. A yellow faux-silk tank top, one that showed my tattoos—proof that others had scribbled and scarred after her. White straight-leg pants. Sparkly mesh socks piled above the dark leather of my vintage Portuguese oxfords, my favorite shoes. My face was one I wore most of that summer: a bit of highlight on my cheeks and the ridge of my nose, coffee-colored lipstick. I wanted her to see that I was different. I wanted her to see that I was still me.
Alice ranted about the scam economy and told me all the best books she was reading for her job. We ran into a podcaster that she loved in a KGB-themed bar and Alice bought the three of us vodka shots. We cried over lost time. We ended up on a park bench in Union Square on the other side of 3 a.m., trading lessons from our time apart.
When our reunion slowed to our old hum, she exhaled slow, kicked her legs into a straight line as she leaned back. She talked about the future in a clean, even way, as if it were already settled. She’s dating a guy who works in consulting. She’s applying to law school, getting ready to take the LSAT. They may move in together in some beautiful Southern house someday, she said. He’d be a good husband, she said.
Finally, we made our way to the subway station, into those blinding lights. “Where are we going?” I asked her, rubbing my eyes. She laughed, pointed to a sign. “You’re going that way,” she told me, before gesturing to the track going Uptown. “And I’m going this way.”
I nodded and got on the L train, which ran limited service on weekends. I waited 20 minutes for my train and got off at Lorimer, walking the half-mile home laughing. I woke up to a text from Alice.
In her work Radical Ecology, philosopher Carolyn Merchant lays out her definition of ecofeminism. She explains how order, hierarchy, progress, and productivity are all masculine concepts, ones used to define goodness and to dominate both women and the earth. Nature is cyclical, a reproductive force unconcerned with these impositions. If left to its change, it will maintain equilibrium. It is through demanding order that we incite chaos.
When Europeans moved west, they began counting species, marking the timing of events, taking stock of what was there. Some of this has been crucial to science: we have a clear map of the way that climate change has shifted ranges, altered phenological processes, distorted ecosystems. But it also gave us the false sense of control, and an arbitrary baseline that we spent decades maintaining. Armed with this feeling of universal understanding, we set about building our houses at the forest edge and swinging electric wires across swaths of parched grass.
Like me, Europeans pushed East to West, with no understanding of the life-giving nature of fire. They built an image of California as a never-changing paradise, an image that, at 18 years old, pulled me 3,000 miles away from home. Unlike natives, who built their homes from the unscorchable redwood trees and set regular fires to clear the undergrowth, these newcomers put out every flame they came across. They let the forest floor grow heavy with undergrowth, until a sparking wire or a cigarette butt could set the whole state aflame. They drained the rivers to keep their gardens green and built sprawling metropolises in the middle of the desert. They imposed order, and we are left with chaos.
Merchant describes how men’s history of domination has brought us to ecological crisis, and provides ecofeminism as a solution. If we honor the reproductive nature of our planet, we can help it survive. This is hard work, and means accepting that we cannot eat passion fruit from Vietnam and blueberries from Chile all year round. It means that we will have to build according to an ever-shifting risk, away from flooding coastlines and charred hills. It means we have to accept ourselves as part of our ecosystems, and change as a part of those systems too.
This is hard work. I think of the plastic stick pumping hormones into my uterus, stopping my periods and my mood swings, helping me stay in medicated stasis. I think of the way I expect my power to stay on always, despite high winds and fire warnings. I think of the way I want my friendships to stay always the same, no matter how we change or hurt or move.
This summer, as Alice and I fell back into friendship, I was living with Joanna, my college best friend, in a railroad apartment in Brooklyn. There, Joanna and I drank a lot of gin and tonics after returning home from our full-time internships. We’d sit on our tiny balcony in the stick of a New York summer and talk about our families or the future or boys we were seeing or had seen or wanted to see again. We curled up and watched Big Little Lies every Sunday, went out to a movie every Wednesday. In our daytime hours apart, we’d text each other about our moods and our plans, swapping Spotify links and Facebook events.
Our summer felt like a test-run of post-collegiate life, and we both came back to school wanting. Berkeley slid our new selves us back into old routines. We worked late and too hard, played less, pulled further into our own minds. September felt like a sigh after the overheated Brooklyn rush. I wanted to think slow and work slow, to do something other than produce. Joanna returned still running, wanting to figure things out and build a secure future.
It is the fall of my senior year again, and there is a hierarchy of fears: getting a job, the end of organized education, entering the Real World, the fracturing of a friend group, a rapidly warming planet.
In October, after the Bay had cleared the last traces of Sonoma’s ashes from the air, I sat on my back porch with Joanna. This is our second Berkeley house together, our third year living together, our fourth year of friendship. We smoke cigarettes until they sear our fingertips and she looks at me with those huge green eyes. “Can I say something?”
I nod, pulling my sweater down over my hands. I shift my weight against the slats of the stairs as she tells me that she doesn’t feel like I’m with her right now. She’s right: she’s been buzzing in and out of her room, waking up at 6 a.m. to go to a Lagree workout class and hovering on LinkedIn and doing informational interviews and case prepwork and talking to recruiters and trying to network. I haven’t applied to a single job and have only lazily perused internship spreadsheets. I am not putting my personhood on trial; I’m trying to build a personhood worth testing.
After a summer of crawling into her bed to relive the night before over a pot of French press, an emptiness had swelled between us. She only knew how to talk about the future and I didn’t know how to—not when I was worried it would take us to different cities and different income brackets and towards different endings. I told her I was scared, told her I was sorry I hadn’t been paying attention. She told me I needed to tell her the truth earlier, that we could make sure we didn’t get pushed apart.
We have found a place to meet in our separate aimlessnesses, one where we skip the party to eat M&M’s in her downy white bed and talk through how we can work in a world that feels like it’s burning. I let her toy with the idea of working in investing and she lets me run around with my louder, joking friends who make me laugh more than they make me think. This is our adaptation, how we plow our roads.
Alice asks me if I’m safe from the smoke and I say yes, I’m staying inside. She tells me she went on a long run today, in that nippy New England weather. It always makes her nostalgic, she says, for me, for high school, and for the first falls when the seasons changed in her life.
On the right street, in the right light, Berkeley can give you that too. A breeze will shift through, kicking up the smell of decomposing leaves. It feels like the play of seasons as I learned them: a world in motion, a promise to return.
