Flash Count Diary. Darcey Steinke
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the outer-borough vasomotor systems into the control-center hypothalamus become chaotic and imprecise.
Lessening estrogen sets the stage for hot flashes. It may also make the skin more sensitive to calibrations of heat, but estrogen is not the only trigger. Studies have found little variation between estrogen levels in women who do and do not flash. Dr. Naomi Rance, a professor of neurology at the University of Arizona, studied cells in the hypothalamus. She found that kisspeptin, neurokinin B, and dynorphin (KNDy) neurons were twice the size in menopausal women as they were in premenopausal ones. “They were large and overexcited,” she told me. Using animal models, Dr. Rance found that these discharging neurons may be what brings on a flash. As heat is off-loaded, the heart rate increases, by seven to fifteen more beats per minute. Vasodilation permits warm blood to circulate quickly into the arms, thighs, and calves. One study showed that the first part of the outer body to heat up was the fingertips.
A flash is both something going wrong and something going right. Hot flashes may ward off hardening of the arteries and plaque buildup associated with heart disease. And as the brain struggles to find equilibrium, it also grows more flexible. With each flash, the brain adjusts to a wider range of hormonal messages. Dr. Maki told me that recent studies have also shown that while it’s trying to reset, the brain learns to make its own estrogen. Could the post-reproductive flexible brain be, in part, responsible for the resilience, wisdom, and peace I see in the older women I admire? “We don’t know for sure,” Maki said, “but it’s definitely possible.”
My bus moves, buoyant as a boat, past the Jersey strip malls, the neon liquor-store signs, the traffic-worn trees, 7-Elevens, Outback Steakhouses. A red lantern floats out of a Chinese restaurant’s front window and hovers in the air over the wet street. Rain hits the big window and falls in blue streaks down the glass. We climb up into the mountains. Pass Bear Mountain. On Route 17, the lights get farther apart until it’s just mottled darkness, the rain-smeared window, and the old man snoring gently beside me.
From my bag I pull out my Flash Count Diary. Eight flashes today so far. On the subway going under the East River the heat came on so fast I pulled off my coat and sweater and sat in my undershirt. I flashed while eating a Greek salad at a diner and while perusing a book on killer whales at Book Culture. I flashed at the Citibank where I got cash and in line at the coffee shop. The worst flash occurred while I was teaching. I felt the dart of panic as my face started to bake, and heat escaped through the top of my head. I kept talking, pretending nothing was wrong. When I shifted back in my chair, I saw the two dark wet spots on the table where my arms had been.
Near Monticello, in the foothills of the Catskills, the bus pulls off the highway and I see, through the rain, a gas station, blunt under the fluorescent light. A pale blonde woman pumps gas into her Jeep; a man inside gestures angrily at the cashier. The old man beside me wakes, pulls out his cell phone, punches in a number, and starts to talk. He’s not sure. Is he going to die? The doctor was so vague. The old man is facing death. I am at the meridian, life’s disconcerting center. Unease flows into my brain. I feel the first torrid prick and my heart thumps. I panic, desperate to break free of both my body and the reality of my own mortality. I pull off my sweater and press the inside of my wrist up against the bus window. The cool glass against my skin helps a little as I’m overtaken again by the ascending heat.
2 Free Lolita
When I read that female killer whales also go through menopause, I was coming off yet another sleepless night. I’d taken a break from the novel I was working on, a book about a woman who becomes unrecognizable to herself, to read the science section of The New York Times. Inside was a story, based on a scientific paper by Darren Croft and Emma Foster, on how, like human women, Southern Resident killer whales go through menopause and then have a long post-reproductive life. The older females not only live thirty to fifty years after menopause but they also lead their pods—complex cohesive family groups—particularly in times when salmon, their main food source, is scarce. Elder females have a plethora of ecological information and all whales, even younger males, choose to follow the post-reproductive females.
I went from the Times directly to YouTube and watched clip after clip of killer whales. Killer whales, or Orcinus orca, are the largest members of the dolphin family. They are as long as twenty-five feet and weigh up to seven tons. Their dorsal fins can reach six feet. Killer whales’ brains are four times as big as our own and, like ours, have spindle cells that have been linked to empathy. Mothers raise one child at a time. They nurse for several years and teach their offspring to speak, forage, and follow the rituals of their pod.
I watched SeaWorld footage of Corky, a fifty-two-year-old post-reproductive female, on her back, waving her dorsal fins at the crowd. Katina, forty-one, slides herself onto a concrete ledge as part of a marine show. Lolita, fifty, swims tight laps around her small tank at the Miami Seaquarium. Wild whales live into old age, but in aquariums most die within five years. Lolita is the second-oldest whale in captivity and the only survivor of the Puget Sound capture of 1970, when Southern Resident whales were herded by boat, airplane, and explosives into nets. Lolita is an anomaly, moving into her forty-fifth year as a captive performer. Footage shows her swimming in her pool, the smallest orca tank in North America; its width is less than four lengths of her body, its depth less than one length. She swims frenetically from wall to wall, like an agitated soul trapped inside a concrete body.
My favorite footage shows wild whales underwater. They are harder to see as they call to one another with clicks, squeaks, buzzes, donkey brays, and an unnerving sound like a human voice on helium. I watch them dive down so deep I can barely see them on my screen—it’s as if they’ve moved down through my computer, through the top of my desk, and are hovering in the dark space below, just white patches in black water.
I listened continually for the Southern Residents near the San Juan Islands via the Lime Kiln hydrophone, an underwater microphone that streams live sound and records whale vocalizations as the orcas pass through Haro Strait. Mostly I hear boat motors, tide fetch, ebb, and flow. As I worked at my desk in Brooklyn, there was an overlay of sound from the Salish Sea, the whales’ home waters. When I was sad, I’d double down, listening while also watching footage of the Southern Residents on YouTube or flipping through pictures of whale encounters at the Center for Whale Research website. The center, on San Juan Island in Washington State, has been studying the Southern Residents since 1978.
I began to dream of whales. In the first, a small calf beaches. I know she’s young because her white patches are still orange. As I move closer to the body, the calf’s black fluke rises in what appears to be a wave. For a while the whales that move through my sleeping head are intact but appear in incongruous places. A tall dorsal fin in the Delaware River, rising beside my inner tube. A pod breaching and spy-hopping in the upstate lake where I swim. In one dream, the whales are tiny—I’m startled to find one in my bowl of soup. Other times the killer whales are colossal, as big as a city bus but liquid, flowing, like oil over the roof of my house in Brooklyn.
One night the whales lose their definition, their specific physical characteristics, and are more like shining orbs hovering over the hardwood floor. They look like I feel when I am floating in a dream. The dream might have a different story line completely—say, my reoccurring one of being sent back to college to live in a dorm room—but the whales are still there, spots of energy wading over the grassy campus quad. Sometimes their energy shuts off and they fall to the ground, a mass of fetid blubber. In a recent dream, two whales were laid out in an L shape on my bed. I was confronted with the reality of their bodies, an intimacy so excruciating it was almost obscene.
The whales accompany me, not unlike other invisible presences: a boyfriend whose physical tenderness was hard to get out from under and, more recently, my mother, a phantom whose proximity both tears and quickens. The whales’ presence is similar in sensation to—psychic pressure, sudden jerks at the edge of my eye—but different from being haunted by a person. The whales remain near but separate, unknown.
When Lolita arrived at the Miami Seaquarium in 1970, another older whale was already living there. Hugo, a Southern Resident captured a few years earlier, was a large male with a collapsed dorsal fin. All male whales in captivity have collapsed dorsal fins, a sign of ill health