Out Of My Depth

If you'd told me ten or fifteen years ago that I'd one day become an acclaimed creator of estuarine media, I think my first question would have been "what does estuarine mean?" (Relating to, or formed in, an estuary.) But even after you'd cleared that part up, I'd still be surprised. 

First of all, I've never cared much for the water. I'm not a strong swimmer -- even standing at chest-depth makes me very anxious. Second of all, I'm no scientist. I'm interested--passionate about the environment, even--but inept. I don't have the analytical discipline necessary for the scientific method; I can't even follow a recipe. But it turns out there are ways in which having a limited understanding of something can actually assist in the service of a given cause -- that's kind of the seat from which I pilot my entire career. I like to tell people that I'm good at asking stupid questions. But I'm also good at learning backwards. 

Earlier this year, I was interviewing the comedian Max Silvestri about a cooking competition show he once hosted. It was a light parody of shows like Top Chef and Chopped, but at the time I'd never seen any of those shows. I liked Max's show anyway, and it eventually led me backwards to the cooking shows it was taking inspiration from, which I now watch constantly (I binged 11 seasons of Top Chef this year). Max was not particularly surprised to hear this -- we'd both grown up watching shows like The Simpsons make references to movies and historical events we'd only see or learn about later. I also grew up admiring my Gen X uncles, imitating their pop cultural tastes and affectations before I really had the context for any of it. In a lot of ways, I feel like I am still gathering context for things I saw as a kid, adding layers of understanding. 

I'll also credit my higher education and early corporate years for sharpening my teeth on this -- at Boston University I studied Political Science, which ultimately granted me less wisdom about politics than about academic frameworks. The thing about Poli Sci is that it's not really a science -- check my "Bachelor of the Arts" degree for confirmation. It adopts a scientific patois to garner legitimacy, and it's an awkward fit, but that awkward fit allows you to see under the hood of academic frameworks more easily than you'd be able to if you had to also focus on, you know, actual science. So you end up learning more about how things are thought of and organized than you learn about any one real thing.

Later, I got my professional start as a temp at a federal contractor. When a member of my team with a full-time role abruptly left, I took over his assignment and skipped past the training phase of the job, building slowly on the limited understanding I'd built as a temp. I was good at that. I was doing everything right based mostly on a sense of what I probably should be doing. There were fairly essentially pieces of my job that I didn't fully grasp or understand the reasoning behind for almost a year -- sometimes I'd speak out loud a revelation that was so basic it would startle my bosses-- "Zac, you're only just getting this NOW?!" But over time, my understanding got much, much deeper and broader than it might have become any other way. Somewhat ironically, I then became a full-time trainer, taking new hires through the 8-week curriculum I'd never technically gone through myself.

It's a great skill to have--this learning backwards thing. Drop me in the middle of a process and I can muddle my way through until I gradually understand how it all works, pretty much every time. And that hard-won understanding really sticks. It's exciting, and very freeing, to start from a place of little-to-no understanding. Socrates has that whole riff about not being wise except in that he's aware of his own lack of wisdom -- and that knowing what you don't know is in fact the height of wisdom -- and that always resonated with me (in philosophy class Freshman year, where, you know, I didn't understand much else).

I put this "learning backwards" skill to the particular test in 2019, when I joined my town's Stormwater Committee. I volunteered to help out with the town out of a general sense of civic pride and obligation, and happily accepted an assignment to Stormwater despite having literally no idea what "Stormwater" was supposed to mean. When I attended my first meeting, I filled several notebook pages with words I wanted to look up later, ("Culvert?" "Outflow?" "MS4-- maybe some kind of gang?") and didn't say much of anything.

Eventually, I figured a lot of it out, enlisting the help of some actual scientists from the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership along the way. And to both document and solidify my own understanding, I made a podcast episode out of it. It's called "A Balanced System" and it might be my favorite of the 70-something episodes I've produced. 

 

The episode explains concepts like runoff and municipal stormwater systems in as basic a language as I could manage, frequently doubling back to explain it again and again from different angles. I was extremely gratified when my town chose to highlight the episode in their annual newsletter and on their website, and to include it in Stormwater compliance documentation submitted to the EPA. 

I left the Stormwater Committee in 2021, mostly because when the state's emergency order expired, we were required to resume meeting in person and as a parent of young children it didn't seem worth the risk. But I'm excited to have a lingering legacy there -- a flier I wrote about, of all things, the ecological importance of cleaning up after your dog, is sent out to all of the down's dog owners every spring. You can read it here. It has a lot of Frasier references, because I am nothing if not a man of the people.

Having a passing understanding of estuarine systems and ecology has oddly served me well in my professional career. Now employed by a bank that does a lot of charitable work in the region, I get along well with environmental groups who are, by nature of our particular geography, almost always concerned with the coast. I love to highlight the bank's environmental projects because I love spending time around, and learning from, people who work in this space. 

One of my favorite places in Maine is the Wells Reserve at Laudholm, a former farm near the beach that is now an solar-powered estuarine research lab, as well as a stellar wedding venue. I first visited in 2021, creating a "nonprofit spotlight" video that allowed me to hang out in their lab and learn about much more than I could actually fit in the video (in fact I'm still hanging on to a clip about tracking devices on green crabs that I'm trying to work in somewhere in a future project).

I returned with my kids to hike around on my birthday this spring, but I've also been lucky enough to spend several work and volunteer days there since. This summer, when my employer funded the purchase of an all-terrain electric golf cart to help with accessibility at the Reserve, I not only insisted on documenting the project, but also respectfully demanded we finally purchase a GoPro to do so. My request was happily approved.

 

Fun video, right? It went over well on social media, and that was that. Until a few weeks ago, when Nik, the president at Laudholm, casually let me know he wanted to submit our video to an estuarine film festival. An estuarine film festival? Naturally, I was surprised. 

It turns out that NERRA, the National Estuarine Research Reserve Association, holds a film festival every year at their annual conference. I think that is so cool. I'm a person who strongly believes in the power of storytelling and video to educate people, but it's always exciting to see that belief reflected in all sorts of unexpected places. And anyway, it turns out that this video took home an award at this year's NERRA conference. Specifically, and delightfully, the "Grackle Award" for Entertaining Educational Content. 

I will be honest: I am absurdly proud of this win -- again because of my belief in how important telling these kinds of stories, in precisely this kind of wacky way, really is. It is the single thing that I think I am best at. And as surprised as I am to find myself having success in this particular issue area, when I think about learning backwards, and how I've always done well in places where I clearly understood that my own understanding was very limited, I suppose there's nothing surprising about it at all.

catching the rain

A couple days ago I finally watched BOYS STATE, a documentary on Apple TV+. I'd heard good things and I'd resolved to watch it eventually but what really pushed me over the finish line was the realization that my free trial of Apple TV+ was finally going to run out in December. It's nice when certain financial imperatives* help you clear the deck and make a decision.

(*I mean, it's like five bucks a month. And I will certainly sign up again as soon as Mythic Quest and Ted Lasso return in the summer. But until then there's no real reason to maintain yet another monthly subscription, especially one where you can so easily get out clean -- like I can't leave Hulu because it's tied to my Spotify account, and I can't leave Netflix because it just feels spiritually wrong. I almost never watch Netflix and it's the most expensive service! And yet, they're the O.G. and you have to respect your elders.)

BOYS STATE is great. Some documentaries are the kind where you are absolutely shocked that the filmmakers lucked into the story they got to tell. CATFISH was, for me, the prime example of such a doc. (I get the sense that ICARUS is another recent example--though I haven't seen it yet! I know, I know!) BOYS STATE is sort of the opposite of that -- it tells a story that you can be reasonably certain unfolds everywhere, all the time. It's not catching lightning in a bottle -- it's catching the rain. But it does a tremendous job catching that rain, in such a way that makes us appreciate both the rain itself and the process of catching it so patiently and deliberately.

It follows several teenage boys at the Texas chapter of Boys State 2018, which is sort of a government camp run by the American Legion. Over the course of a week, these 16 and 17-year-olds simulate the process of government and party politics. They campaign for office, establish a platform, debate and pass legislation, and elect a governor. They also have a talent show. By focusing primarily on four different boys and tracing their path across the week, the filmmakers demonstrate the many ways in which people move through politics and politics moves through them. It ends up being about, in a grand sense, our entire political system and a look at the potential origins of the adults currently running the real show, but it's also about moral fiber and the lack thereof, and the ways we can be tested without even knowing its happening; though the film builds to a climactic race for Governor, the real contest happens along the way.

I actually attended Boys State NH when I was 17, which I was only hazily recalled when I started watching -- the modern, Texan version of the camp is much more sophisticated than the version I experienced, but sequences of deliberation in the mock House of Representatives brought at least a few memories back to me. I went with my friend Josh, who remembered more than I did -- we were suggested for the program by our High School Civics teacher, who in Josh's words deployed us there as "the tip of the spear for the libs." 

In high school I was fiery and colorful when it came to politics -- I remember being frustrated by having to register for the draft in order to receive financial aid for college, and so in response I wrote my Selective Service number on my arm in black sharpie. Very subtle, yes? I listened to Desaparecidos a lot and gravitated toward radical poetry and literature. (Growing up in a tourist town in the Lakes Region, I had very little personal experience with the struggles they spoke of, but I was an eager and early ally.) For class projects I'd use two patched-together VCRs to edit together montages of clips from cable news TV -- Saddam Hussein's capture juxtaposed with cereal commercials. Probably not my best work, but I can see why my high school teachers thought it was pretty cool.

Josh reminded me that the hot issue at the time of our Boys State session was flag burning. How quaint, right? At the time, the American Legion was pushing for an anti-flag burning amendment, and encouraged us to debate its merits. I happily took up the "pro" side of the debates and immediately gathered that many of my more diplomatic peers might have agreed with me, but were firmly on the fence for the benefit of our patrons. It was a lesson that I remember very consciously choosing to ignore! And to their credit, the Legionnaires encouraged contrary views. I certainly absorbed that part, too. Hazy though my specific memories of Boys State were, my confidence that ignoring certain conventions and best practices would better serve me in my life turned out to be -- and continues even now to be -- very true. 

there is no beginning to this story

(If you're reading this on a phone, the above embedded player probably won't show up -- so here's the download link to the episode, and here's the link to my show on Apple Podcasts.)

I introduced myself to Brian Murphy, of Placework Studios, via email shortly after his presentation at this year's New Hampshire Businesses for Social Responsibility virtual conference, "Silver Linings: Resilience and Regeneration." In fact, he might not have even finished presenting by the time I sent my email.

Murphy's talk reached me at the perfect time. For a couple years now I've been talking on my podcast more and more about "systemic thinking" -- a way of understanding the world's (and one's own) problems by considering the actors and factors and cycles involved. I'm a person who was trained to think narratively, where everything has a beginning, and a middle, and an end. This is, I am finding, usually a flawed way of thinking about people and organizations and progress and the way they are intertwined. 

I don't know about you, but I was never really persuaded by history class in the early years of school, with the focus on founding fathers and other individual figures. Later, once we got to the progressive movement and the suffragettes and other groups of people making little changes all over, I sat up a little straighter in my chair. 

(Similarly, my favorite book in A Song Of Ice and Fire is the fourth book, in which the main characters in Westeros are swallowed up the the larger, decentralized social movements they unknowingly activated.)

Murphy's talk at the conference was about "Regenerative Communities" -- how his firm's architectural projects were aiming beyond sustainability and toward work that gave back more than they'd taken from the environment and the people in and around it. This work toward regeneration was all tied up in his concept of "Systems Thinking" (that phrase is what initially got my attention -- having myself only a passing understanding of architecture from my friend Rob Harbeson, various Netflix shows, and David Byrne songs). In the podcast interview we talk about both concepts, and what a regenerative community looks like in practice, and we connected his idea of "Systems Thinking" with our shared optimism about the future. 

I'm a person who is pretty openly troubled by the way many discuss climate change in apocalyptic terms, and I honestly believe that our tendency toward narrative thinking is partly to blame. We see ourselves and our lives as a story, and we fear the end of that story, so we're always looking out for it! Which is understandable. But we don't have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All of us are individually and collectively a part of many connected cycles -- we play a role in processes that continue beyond us. And I don't just mean after we die -- I mean even after we leave a room. We are always impacting each other, and our environments, in ways that reach beyond our experience. When you start to see yourself as a part of a larger, collective cycle, or even a set of systems and cycles, you not only have, surprisingly, a stronger sense of your own impact, but a fiercer belief in our ability to enact change together.

So that's sort of what I wanted this episode to be about.

i want a good life, with a nose for things: 20 years of yankee hotel foxtrot

In my early teens I was a dedicated reader of a now-defunct website called absolutepunk.net. It was run by a guy named Jason Tate, and he was the first writer whose musical taste overlapped with mine in a significant way. Before absolutepunk, I'd learned where to find the writers who were at least closer to my taste in the major music magazines -- they were always writing for the beginnings and ends of issues. In all those "in brief" blurbs up front and the record reviews in back, I sensed kinship. Not in the long, fawning profiles of pop stars -- not that there's anything wrong with long, fawning profiles of pop stars, mind you -- it's just that when I stared into those I saw nothing of my own reflected back. 

AbsolutePunk was pure mirror. He liked the same bands I liked and many more, and when I looked up those acts I didn't know I always found new music to love. Before long, I trusted Jason Tate implicitly and entirely and I read his website every day. 

(Do you remember reading blogs every day? It was a habit I would carry with me from hero to hero. Jason Tate, David Rees, Josh Marshall, Gabe Delahaye. That habit has been broken for me now by the coagulation of the internet, and I'm worse off for it.)

One afternoon, Jason Tate posted about a documentary called I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART. He said that anybody who cared about being in a band or how music was made needed to see this film. Naturally, I sought it out immediately, despite never having heard of the band it featured: Wilco. 

(Looking back, I have no idea how I found the documentary. Could it have possibly been at my local video rental store? I would have been in very early high school, and I don't think that even the mailed version of Netflix was yet a going concern. I might have ordered it, though I don't know that I ever owned a real copy. I can't summon the image of the object in my mind. There is a bootleg DVD in a sleeve somewhere that a friend later burned for me after we borrowed it from the Boston Public Library. I've been meaning to track it down.)

I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART documents the process of recording Wilco's 2001 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The photographer Sam Jones shot it in grainy black and white, capturing the band's studio experimentation and intramember turmoil. Watching it was a transformative experience. It is not an exaggeration to say that it taught me to be creative. This is how I learned everything. 

Experimentation as an end and not a means -- that's what Wilco (and Sam Jones) showed me, at a pivotal age. It became, in many ways, my creative guiding light for two decades now. When I create anything -- videos for my YouTube channel, music with my brother, even when writing for work -- I'm always drawing on the same flame. It was maybe always within me, but I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART poured gasoline on it, and showed it where else to spread. 

I went out and bought the album right away, and played it for all of my friends, trying to articulate what I felt its sonic landscapes promised. I was in my first band at the time -- I remember showing it to our singer, George, while I was working at an ice cream stand. We sat on the coolers on a slow day and I pointed out the overlapping piano textures in the title track. At the time, the musicianship on display in YHF was so far beyond my reach that I couldn't imagine trying to imitate it directly. Instead, I found myself applying its spirit to video editing--somewhere that I'd already developed some skill. I wanted to visually represent those bursts of percussion and static and abrupt beauty I heard on YHF -- and got better and better at doing so over time.  

I could now list the virtues of each track, the unexpected twists and turns, the lyrics that have played on loop in my head since I first heard them ("Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable...") but in the event that you're not familiar with this album, I'd rather you have an unguided experience. Go listen. It's 20 years old, and still sounds like it was recorded in the future.

Sam Jones's documentary is itself urgently worth seeking out and watching -- it's a lighting-in-a-bottle capture of the process of capturing lighting in a bottle. I wish I could know precisely what Jason Tate said to inspire me to seek it out in the first place, but the archives of AbsolutePunk.net seem to be inaccessible now. I can still almost picture the blog post -- the same way I can remember certain passages of books and lines from magazines that struck me so hard in the moment that they never left me. 

I'm still so grateful to Jason Tate for pointing me in this direction -- putting me on the path I'm still on now, and will never leave.

I Do This, I Do That: UNH Paul Scholars

 

Frank O'Hara once described his own poems as follows: "I do this, I do that." I remember years ago using that line as a way to give myself permission to just start posting YouTube videos where I just showed some things I was doing, no real jokes or anything. It became sort of a joke with my wife -- if we were on a mountain and I got my camera out, she would know I was about to say, "Hey what's up, I'm on a mountain." End of recording. I do this, I do that. It was very freeing.  

Last week I went to UNH to talk to a group of students called "Paul Scholars." They're incoming freshmen to the business school and there are just so many reasons I can scarcely imagine what that must be like now.

I was there as part of a group of recent graduating alumni (despite the fact that I am neither an alum nor a very recent grad!) for a "Reverse Career Fair." The idea was to talk about how we found jobs that aligned our career with a sense of purpose -- and given that this event was put on by the school's Sustainability Institute, obviously all of us were there representing fairly virtuous organizations. Nobody was there to talk about realizing their postgraduate dream of manufacturing and distributing assault weapons, in other words. 

I was very excited to do this -- I feel as though after graduating college I spent about a decade in the wilderness, really just surviving, career-wise, while pursuing other interests. And it really felt like the right move until it didn't anymore. Now, I work for a company that I believe in, doing work that I feel is contributing to the greater good, and even, weirdly, drawing on all of the talents I developed over that decade in the wind more than I ever thought I would be allowed to at work. 

I know I'm a weird case, but as happy as I am with my path and the pace with which I got there, there's a part of me that wishes I'd just been able to imagine it was even possible a little earlier. One thing I told these kids was that I really had no sense about what most jobs even were when I was their age. My parents and most of my friends' parents were teachers. So, I knew that was one. Beyond that, I mean, doctor? Cop? There were no large employers in my home town -- no corporations or factories or software companies. Just gift shops and houses and property taxes.  

The truth is there are so many jobs out there, so many positions where you can really determine, yourself, a lot of what you actually DO day to day. In every job I have had as an adult, I have seized many readily, increasingly available opportunities to define my own position, shaping it more and more in my own image. I wanted them to know you could do that. 

There were seven of us speaking at this thing; we introduced ourselves, one by one, with a two minute talk. One guy actually timed himself out on his phone, which I thought was a very cool, organized move. After that we circled the room, sitting at tables with 5 or 6 students for 8 minute Q & A sessions. They all asked very different questions -- at one table I talked about how my roommates and I used to pay our bills winning video contests on Revver and even briefly tried to explain how the dot com bubble bursting in the 2000s was how all that money ended up on weird websites like Revver anyway. At another table I talked about opioid overdose death statistics in 2020. I stopped myself from swearing for emphasis a few times, but also let myself do it a few times, just for fun. 

I spent a lot of time and a lot of 8-minute sessions trying to articulate my career path. It's helpful to have to slot yourself into a brief narrative every once in a while-- you're never telling the whole story, but it's a way of getting closer to your fundamental truths somehow anyway. I told them that I graduated with a degree in Poli Sci, and while I never really used my degree specifically, Poli Sci did give me a very strong sense of how to translate academic speak into normal human English. I also learned how easy it was to dazzle people by doing that. And when I look at my own career and my successes honestly, that's the main thing I do. I translate some form of technical speech into every day conversation and I'm pretty good at it.

And I spent too long undervaluing that ability! In my conversations with these students I found myself frequently paraphrasing something I'd heard recently on the podcast How to Save a Planet -- it's important to think about what you like to do, and what you're good at, and find the places where they overlap. It's hard to learn what you're good at -- took me like fifteen years! -- but again, I don't think I was really looking. I wasn't wondering what I was good at, and I wasn't wondering how I could apply whatever I was good at to anything other than a project I created myself. And I wasn't very confident. I'm learning now how important it is to ask yourself those questions, and how to move confidently once you have the answers. 

Most likely, I didn't really leave those kids with a lasting sense of any of that. Most likely, they will just briefly remember me as the energetic guy from the bank. And that's fine! But if a few of them come away with at least the beginnings of a wider sense of what's possible for a career, that's enough for me. That's huge for me.