Hannah Holmes: Brilliant, Gorgeous, and Talented

[photograph by Jim Daniels]

This is Hannah Holmes. You can see for yourself that she's gorgeous, so now you should be able to trust the veracity of the rest of the description in the title. I met Hannah a year or so after I arrived in Maine, and she's one of my most fascinating friends. When we first met, I remember her saying, "I'm an editor at Garbage Magazine." The magazine didn't last very long, and Hannah began a successful career as a freelance writer, which led her on a long series of globe-trotting adventures.

Before beginning these world travels, Hannah wrote an article about me for the Maine Times. At the time, I was making most of my livelihood by creating sea glass jewelry from glass I gathered while beachcombing. Hannah and I headed for my favorite glass-littered beach in South Portland, and she interviewed me while I was oohing and aahing about each little treasure I found. We had lots of fun on that outing. When the article came out, she had described my hair as "purple," (What? It was auburn, last time I'd checked the mirror that day. Now it's a natural silver color.) and mentioned that my car "lurched" when I backed up (Horrors! It did not.). It was a lovely article, and also quite humorous.

Tundra Escapade

I was thrilled when Hannah gave me this memento from one of her trips. She'd brought the little cautionary sign back from Churchill, Canada, where she'd gone to cover a story about polar bears heading out to the ice floes for their winter hunting expeditions. The link to Don Getty's wonderful photos gives an idea of what it's like in Churchill. I have the side of my kitchen cabinets pasted with various pictures of polar bears, so this was quite an exotic addition to that collection.

A group involved in ecotourism was trying to convert seal "bonking" (Hannah's graphic description), into seal watching, and invited selected journalists to participate in their noble experiment, which didn't materialize. A travel magazine assigned Hannah to cover the excursion. During this trip to Russia, Hannah traveled among the Nenets. After this experience, Hannah expressed an interest in possibly spending a year traveling with the nomadic Nenet reindeer people, and writing a book about the experience. I was aghast at the concept of a year without Hannah!

Another travel magazine sent Hannah to Norway, where she traveled with the Sami reindeer people. After a visit to Iceland, which was also part of a magazine assignment, Hannah exclaimed upon her return, "Everybody looks like me!" It's obviously a country filled with extremely good-looking people.

Nenet Child [Oyvind Ravna (Wikipedia)]

A visit to Madagascar was made in the early nineties. On this trip Hannah was accompanying a herpetologist who was conducting a census of reptiles and amphibians by charting the areas of the island were they were living. Many of the animals of Madagascar aren't found anywhere else on this planet.

The Discovery Channel Online hired Hannah to do online reporting for them, and she was sent to some great sites to do this work. Hannah went to the Montserrat Volcano Observatory about a year after the eruption of the Soufrière Hills Volcano. The volcano had entered a dormant phase when she was there, making it difficult to write exciting pieces about explosive activity. At the time of her visit to Montserrat, most of the island had been evacuated and Britain was paying the rest of the people to leave, since the idea of rebuilding an entire island was overwhelming.

Down, Down, Down

She also was on the research vessel Atlantis, in the mid-Pacific Ocean, with scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. There she went down to the bottom of the ocean in the submersible, the Alvin. It was wonderful hearing firsthand reports of the strange, eyeless creatures inhabiting the area around the hydrothermal vents.

T Rex, Where Are You?

Another assignment for the Discovery Channel was a trip to the Gobi Desert with a bunch of paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. They were on an expedition in search of dinosaur bones. I didn't have a computer at this point, but my brother would check the online reporting that Hannah was doing. I clearly remember him telling me one evening, "Guess what? Hannah peed on her ankle today."

It was during that trip, with the many dust storms that were encountered in the desert, and numerous conversations with the scientists, that Hannah became fascinated with dust; the concept of dust containing cosmic dust, along with all of the other particles from around the earth floating around in the atmosphere since the inception of our universe. Hannah's first book, The Secret Life of Dust, was the result of this adventure.

I have to mention that I had the privilege of compiling the index for this book, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. When Hannah first saw the index, she was quickly scanning through it, and found her favorite entry, which was under dust. As you might imagine, there were numerous subheads under that topic. The one that caught Hannah's eye and made her laugh was "dust, -eating children." There were two pages about babies and children crawling around the floors of people's homes, happily nibbling and stuffing dust into their mouths.

The book was published in August 2001, which actually was very poor timing. The first week of Hannah's tour around the country to promote the book was canceled, due to the unfortunate events of September 11. The book was a finalist for the prestigious Aventis Prize for Science Books in the United Kingdom, and Hannah was flown to London for a glorious week. She was in excellent company as a finalist. Stephen Hawking took the prize. Dust has been published in China, Korea, and Japan. The Japanese version has the cover on the back and the book has a built-in silk bookmark.

Hannah enjoyed the sights of Mongolia, and returned after the Gobi Desert trip with three small paintings that are exquisite. I always look for them when I visit her home.

I love the intensity of the sky's color in the larger painting, and Hannah's favorite is the smaller one; she likes the upside-down critters going around in a circle.

Cheeky

This is the cover from Hannah's last book, Suburban Safari. The squirrel on the cover is an interloper, as far as I'm concerned. He has no right to be there. Cheeky the chipmunk should have been the cover boy for this book. Hannah and Cheeky had quite a love affair that lasted for several months until Cheeky's disappearance in the fall.

The little guy in the cup is Cheeky. I'm actually holding the cup, but I wasn't pleased with the way I looked, so I just cropped the picture and left the important part of the photo—the adorable little creature.

Hannah and Cheeky became good friends while she was working on Suburban Safari. She'd be out on her deck studying the animals in her yard, and became aware of this particular chipmunk. She started bringing seeds outside and scattered them closer and closer to where she was sitting, with Cheeky becoming a most willing participant by moving closer and closer to Hannah. Eventually he climbed onto her lap to get his daily treats. After they'd become really good buddies, she lured him into her house.

One morning she was in her office working when she heard sounds leading her to believe that a chipmunk was climbing the steps, coming up to the second floor in search of his human friend. He came up there very often, scattering seeds in her keyboard, which had to be cleaned constantly if she wanted to continue typing.

I was very pleased to have the opportunity of meeting Cheeky, and even have him climb onto my lap, to reach the wonderful cup of seeds I was holding.

The Safari Site

Hannah also grew to recognize the crows in her backyard and gave several of them names. This is one of the fascinating things about Suburban Safari, becoming aware that the animals and plants in your backyard are all individuals, and not merely generic squirrels or birds.

This is the site of the wonderful year-long safari, Hannah's backyard. These photos were shot on a lovely spring day in April—in Maine—where spring is always on a delayed schedule. The remnants of last week's spring snowstorm that dropped a foot of snow in the area are still around. The birds sounded as though they were going wild, chirping about the grass, buds, and flowers soon to be evident.                                    

                                      Looking Ahead

Hannah's next book will arrive at her publisher's desk (Random House) this August. The working title is A Field Guide to the Human Animal. That doesn't need any explanation from me. I'm eagerly awaiting its appearance in the bookstores. I know it will be another terrific reading adventure by this sassy writer, who has the ability to take what we may consider to be mundane, everyday topics, and turn them into fascinating journeys we never would have experienced.