A gripping nature thriller. The sleep diary of an insomniac. The golden years of a digital media empire. River rocks etched with history. Musings on returning to one’s hometown. Read on for our editors’ five recommended stories.
J.B. MacKinnon | Hakai Magazine | November 15, 2022 | 14,400 words
In recent years, we’ve witnessed the blossoming of a subgenre of longform writing that I’ll call the nature thriller. It’s born of necessity, by which I mean the collision of an ever-expanding human population — we hit 8 billion souls just this week — and a changing, temperamental climate. Natural disasters are on the rise, and with them come harrowing stories of jaw-dropping devastation and remarkable survival. In the right hands, these stories are propulsive without feeling glib, emotional but not exploitative. J.B. MacKinnon is a master of the nature thriller, deftly weaving plot with science. In this multi-chapter feature about the worst flood British Columbia has ever seen, MacKinnon had me on the edge of my seat reading about storm patterns, pressure systems, and infrastructure — yes, infrastructure. I learned from this story as much as I enjoyed it. (Sidenote: I had the pleasure of helping shepherd another MacKinnon feature, “True Grit,” to publication at The Atavist this month. It too qualifies as a nature thriller.) —SD
Rachel Handler | Vulture | November 6, 2022 | 7,169 words
I am not a good sleeper. My room needs to be frosty cold and my bed toasty warm, one foot tucked in and one out, to monitor conditions. A sea of devices cover my bed, distractions to stop my brain from using sleep “quiet time” to catch up on some important worrying. So I was drawn to Rachel Handler’s essay detailing her struggles with insomnia. Jam-packed with fascinating information, it starts with a new study published in the Journal of Sleep Research which, contrary to popular belief, suggests being on your devices before bed may aid sleep. She decides to put this to the test by peer-reviewing herself. For two weeks, she keeps a sleep diary, bizarre dreams and all, to measure the effects of her nightly TV. Sure, it might not be the most scientific study in the world, but her honest appraisal is nothing short of hilarious. Give it a read — on your screen in bed if you want. I support you. —CW
Mia Sato | The Verge | November 16, 2022 | 3,263 words
It’s not easy being on top. Or, rather, it’s not easy being on top when staying there is virtually impossible. Once upon a time, BuzzFeed reigned supreme among digital media upstarts, seemingly minting both page views and revenue at will; today, it’s losing millions of dollars every quarter, and readers are spending a third less time with it than just a year ago. Is this a fall from grace or a Sunset Boulevard moment (“I’m big … it’s the pictures that got small”)? The answer, as Mia Sato unpacks in this Verge feature, is a little bit of both. As hard as it was for legacy outlets to adjust to the internet, BuzzFeed knew exactly how to package it for readers — and in return, readers fed BuzzFeed not just eyeballs, but ideas. The Dress; ’90s-kid nostalgia plays; even harnessing Facebook’s then-new live video capability. Time moved on, though, and the algorithms did too. Quizzes and listicles have fallen out of fashion, and you can’t scroll Twitter without seeing a handful of other aggregation engines repurposing Reddit threads and TikTok trends. The circle of franken-content remains unbroken. That doesn’t mean that BuzzFeed employees don’t look back fondly, though, and Sato does a stellar job of tracing why the site’s heyday was so damn powerful. It wasn’t just the memes; it was the friendships they made along the way. —PR
Anna Badkhen | Emergence Magazine | September 13, 2022 | 1,828 words
In considering time trapped in a bead of amber, Anna Badkhen reflects on how our planet’s weather patterns have raged across eons. With horrific drought in Europe that saw rivers run dry this past summer, Badkhen reminds us that humans have inscribed their suffering on “hunger rocks” that appear in rivers only when the water level becomes precipitously low or disappears altogether. “In Central Europe, hunger stones—river boulders that people living through droughts petroglyphed with dates and descriptions of their woe—commemorate the years of bad harvest, scarcity, high prices, hunger: 1417, 1616, 1707, 1746, 1790, 1800, 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868, 1892, 1893. One inscription, near Bleckede, in Lower Saxony, reads: ‘When this goes under, life will become more colorful again’; another, near the Czech town of Děčín-Podmokly: ‘If you see me, then weep.’” Badkhen’s essay is a poignant reminder of the magnitude of our planet’s ongoing evolution and the split-second brevity of a human life lived on it. —KS
Anne P. Beatty | The Rumpus | October 18, 2022 | 3,165 words
Anne P. Beatty never planned to move back to her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. But at 33, she did. In these lovely musings, Beatty reflects on ambition, becoming a writer and an English teacher, and the fear of stasis when a person returns to the place they grew up. She also writes beautifully about adolescence and adulthood — what we hope for ourselves, and simply what is. “As a kid, I was constantly looking beyond myself, beyond my world. What’s out there to see? To write about?” she asks. “Now, I just want one more hour, thirty minutes even, to work from within.” I’ve been thinking deeply recently about where I am in my life — struggling as a mother, trying to be a writer — and I appreciate these refreshingly honest reflections about life and growing up. —CLR
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Meet the elites trying to make Gattaca a reality: avowed pronatalists dedicated to producing perfect heirs. Julia Black dives deep into the latest trend among wealthy, tech-minded types to bolster their legacies via science (see also: cryogenics). The subjects of this article are trying to turn their bloodlines into fire hoses and claiming it’s for the good of humankind:
Elites have used lineage to consolidate money and power for most of human history. But as couples in the developed world are increasingly putting off parenthood until later in life — or abandoning it altogether — people like the Collinses are looking for hacks to make large families feasible in a modern, secular society.
They both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. And then there’s the fact that our primary cultural reference point for a pronatalist society is the brutally misogynist world of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The Collinses, who call themselves “ruthless pragmatists,” consider the inevitable backlash a small price to pay.
“We’re frustrated that one of the inherent points of this culture is that people are super private within it,” Simone said. They not only hope that their transparency will encourage other members of the upper class to have more children; they want to build a culture and economy around the high-birth-rate lifestyle.
The payoff won’t be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will “become the new dominant leading classes in the world.”
The truth about media — and tech, and any other field that chases innovation to stave off obsolescence — is that the disrupter always becomes the disrupted. With Buzzfeed navigating uncertain financial waters, Mia Sato digs into the company’s place in the internet-aggregation industrial complex.
But outlets that depend on third-party platforms for traffic live and die according to platforms’ whims. A Facebook algorithm change aimed at reducing “clickbait” around 2014, for example, hit viral content mills the hardest. Upworthy, which at one point was called “the fastest growing media site of all time,” went from 87 million monthly visitors to 49 million in a matter of months in late 2013 — more than 40 percent of traffic wiped out. Smaller outfits that were almost entirely dependent on Facebook traffic — like Distractify or LittleThings — have since shuttered completely or disappeared from the general consciousness.
It’s six in the morning, and Robert Booth has already been on the road for three hours. Sitting alongside him in the cab of his lorry (the British term for a truck) is Louis, Robert’s small dog, a Jack Russell-chihuahua mix, and a washing-up bowl covered in bungee cords. The cords secure a slow cooker, which is happily bubbling away as Robert heads north along the A1. Dinner is still six hours away. Tonight, he’s having black bean chili.
Robert Booth is a “tramper,” a long-haul lorry driver who sleeps in the cab of his vehicle when on a job. He began driving lorries at age 48 after illness meant early retirement from the prison service. He quickly became dissatisfied with the food choices he found along his routes. “When you go to a service station, every place you go, you can get a Burger King or a KFC or a McDonald’s. The average age of a lorry driver is 55. We are well and truly in heart attack territory. And on top of that, you stick fried food …”
Robert’s solution was the slow cooker. In the small hours of the morning, when most of us are sleeping, he prepares his ingredients on a small bench in the body of the truck, puts them inside the ceramic pot, and plugs the cooker into an inverter in his cab’s cigarette lighter. The washing-up bowl stops the pot from falling off the passenger seat, and the bungee cords secure the rattling lid. At the other end of his journey, he has dinner — as long as Louis hasn’t got there first. This can be a real risk. Last week, Robert told me, the dog made off with “a wonderful piece of smoked haddock” that was defrosting on the passenger seat.
***
Humans first cooked food in a pot around 10,000 years ago. As Michael Pollan notes in Cooked, it marked a major advance in efficiency from roasting on an open fire. “Every last drop of the fat and juices from the meat, which over a fire would be lost, are conserved … Pot cooking allows you to make a tasty dish from a third-rate or over-the-hill cut of meat, and to stretch a small amount of meat so that, with the addition of vegetables and sauce, it might feed more mouths …”
Pot cooking also set the stage for the dawn of agriculture, since — as Baron Karl Friedrich von Rumohr put it in The Essence of Cookery — “innumerable natural products were rendered edible.” The very concept of ingredients and recipes didn’t really exist before we began to combine foods in a pot. Food writer Bee Wilson called it “the leap from mere heating to cuisine.”
One-pot cookery was soon harnessed by cultures across the world, often taking low-and-slow cooking to its logical extreme by using residual heat to slow-cook stews and casseroles. Orthodox Jews would make cholent, a stew, before sundown on a Friday. Left in a cooling oven overnight, they could eat cooked food without cooking on the Sabbath, which is prohibited. In fact, cholent played a key role in shaping the modern slow cooker.
***
Irving Nachumsohn was born in New Jersey in 1902. His mother Tamara grew up in Vilna, a Jewish neighborhood in Vilnius, Lithuania. On Friday nights, her mother, Nachumsohn’s grandmother, would make cholent. She would fill a crock with pastrami shtickel, vegetables, and beans, and have Tamara take it to the local bakery to cook slowly overnight in the bakery oven’s cooling heat, nestled alongside dozens of other neighborhood families’ pots.
The washing-up bowl stops the pot from falling off the passenger seat, and the bungee cords secure the rattling lid. At the other end of his journey, he has dinner — as long as Louis hasn’t got there first.
Nachumsohn was a born inventor. He invented an electric frying pan, the hula lamp (an early version of the lava lamp), and the TeleSign (an electronic news scroller). He was so prolific in fact, that he decided it was easier and cheaper to pass the patent bar himself so he could act as his own lawyer. During the long hot summer of 1936, he set out to solve the problem of cooking beans without having to stand over a hob or leave an oven pumping heat out into the house. He remembered the cholent his mother had told him about and, as with his previous inventions, applied electricity to the issue. He applied for a patent for the “Naxon Beanery” — he had shortened the family name to “Naxon” following World War II — an electric cooking pot with a fixed chamber and internal heating element. It was the world’s first electric slow cooker.
Naxon was an extraordinary inventor, but no marketer. The Naxon Beanery was not a commercial success. Twenty years later, a company called Rival bought the technology. The acquisition was a bit of a punt. “No one paid any attention to it,” Rival’s President, Isidore Miller, told the Kansas City Times in 1981 — that is, until someone in Rival’s test kitchens realized that Naxon’s device could cook more than just beans. In 1971, Rival green-lit a commercial release, rebranding the Naxon Beanery to reflect its new-found versatility. The Crockpot was born. (Crockpot, incidentally, is like Kleenex or Hoover: a brand name so well known, it’s used to cover a whole product category.)
It was the right product for the right time. Married women were beginning to seek jobs outside of the home, taking them away from the kitchen. A major oil crisis had bumped up the cost of cooking. And Rival knew what they were doing: The Crockpot was available in all the trendy colors of the day — harvest gold and avocado — and marketed as the pot that “cooks all day while the cook’s away.” In 1971, sales were $2 million. By 1975, they were $93 million. In that same year, Mable Hoffman’s Crockery Cookery, the first dedicated Crockpot cookbook, was published, featuring recipes like “Busy Woman’s Roast Chicken” — chicken stuffed with “stove top dressing,” or packet stuffing, and cooked in sauternes wine — and “Alphabet Pot Roast” (beef braised in alphabet soup). That year, it outsold The Joy of Sex and the Star Trek Starfleet Technical Manual. To date, it has sold over six million copies, making it one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time.
The Crockpot arrived amid a slew of innovations, from the microwave oven to the breadmaker, that promised to save women from the drudgery of cooking for their families. But unlike its technological contemporaries, the slow cooker didn’t speed up a working woman’s cooking, it slowed it down. The crucial part was being absent for almost the entire cooking process: A woman could actually leave the house and enter the workplace, without neglecting her wifely duties. What the modern Crockpot brought to the kitchen — or more accurately to the woman in the kitchen — was inattention. No one had to tend a fire, or make sure it didn’t dry out. No one had to watch and stir. The Crockpot was that rarest of things: a product that delivered on its tagline. It did indeed cook all day while the cook was away.
***
When I was 21, I was living in London, training to be a criminal lawyer. I was young, free, and extremely single. My sister, on the other hand, was loved up and settled in a long-term relationship. For Christmas, she received a set of fancy, cast-iron Le Creuset pans from my parents. I, on the other hand, received a slow cooker for one. I acted offended at the time, but the truth is, it was a very thoughtful gift. I had no affinity for cooking whatsoever, and was out all day, every day, but — thanks to that slow cooker — I still managed to eat a home-cooked hot meal a couple of times a week. I made an awful lot of beef stew.
Here’s the irony: When I was 25, my mum died, and I inherited her Le Creuset pans, which, among other factors, ultimately led me to abandon the law and retrain as a professional cook. I became, I’m ashamed to admit, somewhat sniffy about slow cookers. I wanted to stand over a hot stove, stirring and fiddling. Throwing a bunch of ingredients into a machine and leaving them to do their thing for eight hours simply wasn’t proper cooking. Once I’d got to grips with pan and flame, the slow cooker was relegated to the back of my cupboard.
I was being a snob. Slow cookers are useful for all sorts of people, but particularly for a specific kind of cook: the person who wants to do things from scratch, but lacks the time, culinary knowledge, or confidence to do so on the hob or in the oven. It is a sympathetic tool, unlikely either to burn your food or leave your meat undercooked. Your timings can be out by hours with little impact on the end result. It’s economical, too — first in its ability to make the most of cheap cuts of meat and tough vegetables, second in its small energy footprint (it costs about the same to run as an energy-saving lightbulb).
The Crockpot was that rarest of things: a product that delivered on its tagline. It did indeed cook all day while the cook was away.
In its heyday, the Crockpot was a popular wedding present — that’s how Mable Hoffman got hers — and it’s easy to see why. Here was a group of women juggling the expectations of the previous generation (household maintenance) and the current one (being a working mother). The Crockpot squared the circle. As Paula Johnson, curator of food history at the National Museum of American History, said in an interview with NPR last year, “I think it’s important to establish that the Crockpot had an impact on women of a certain demographic in the 1970s. We’re talking of generally white, middle-class women who could afford the device.” In the intervening years, user demographics have changed. Where once the device was explicitly (and exclusively) marketed to married women, it has since found a receptive audience in single people, with recent marketing — and my Christmas present — reflecting that. Found to be particularly popular with single men, in 2012, Jarden, the current owners of the Rival brand, even partnered with the NFL to create crockpots with logos for all 32 teams.
***
When I started writing this piece, I reached out to communities of slow cooker fans on Facebook and Twitter and asked what drew them to this form of cookery. Their responses were myriad: it’s safe; it’s easy for people with mental or physical disabilities to use; it’s great for batch cooking; it’s cheap to run; it’s healthy (because food retains moisture in a slow cooker, you can get away with less fat); you don’t need a kitchen, or even an oven to cook with it, just a plug.
For some, it’s about time. Dr. Sarah Burgess, an anesthetist and intensive care medicine registrar explained to me that they are particularly popular with junior doctors. “I come back from a night shift, sling some food in, and wake up a few hours later to the house smelling delicious and my batch cook is done.”
Vanessa Martin just wants easy food. “I don’t particularly like cooking, I find it quite helpful to just be able to throw the stuff in in the morning, leave it on. And then I know when I’m finished working, I’ve got something to eat.”
For the trucker, Robert, it’s home cooking away from home. “It’s about doing stuff in the cab: the type of food, trying to live healthier, having something to do, making life as good as you can in the cab.” In the U.K., Robert’s way of life makes him something of an outlier, but in the U.S., slow-cooking truckers are a major subgroup. There are some 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S. who have lots of time, but no kitchen, making the slow cooker ideal for their needs. Truck company websites offer slow cooking tips (“bungee cords are a must”), while industry websites have blog posts dedicated to rating the best slow cookers for truck drivers; money-saving tip sites for truckers lead with using a Crockpot to cook dinners on the road, and countless blogs, YouTube channels, and Pinterest boards list recipes for slow cooking in trucks.
The common thread within the slow cooker community is convenience. The slow cooker is inherently domestic: Chefs have no interest in leaving their pots unattended, and the prospect of having to keep a lid clamped on them and leave them untasted and unadjusted is anathema. It’s not a terribly glamorous piece of kit. “They’re not sexy!” Megan Allen, another slow cooker fan tells me, laughing. It’s not aspirational. It might be prosaic, but the slow cooker is a purely functional device: it gets the job done.
***
In 2018, the close-knit Crockpot community was shaken. After a two-season-long mystery, Jack Pearson, the patriarch in the hit drama This Is Us, was — spoiler alert — revealed to have been killed by a faulty Crockpot, which had been used to make Super Bowl chili (a Midwestern slow cooker favorite). The pot’s faulty switch sparked onto a kitchen towel, ultimately igniting the whole house. The response was huge, and Crockpot’s manufacturers were forced to join Twitter to try to claw back the PR disaster. They issued a long, detailed statement, at pains to explain why the show’s dramatic storyline was entertainment rather than a public service announcement. “The safety and design of our product renders this type of event nearly impossible […] Our hope is that the team at NBC’s This Is Us will help us spread factual information regarding our product’s safety. While we know their primary mission is to entertain — something they have continued to excel in — we also feel they have a responsibility to inform.”
You can almost feel the forced smile.
Showrunner Dan Fogelman put it slightly more succinctly on Twitter. “Taking a moment to remind everyone that it was a 20-year-old fictional crockpot with an already funky switch? Let’s not just lump all those lovely hard-working crockpots together.”
The storyline actually boosted Crockpot sales in the end, and the company shrewdly put out a new advertising campaign in which Jack makes his deadly chili and asks fans to “find the ability to forgive.” To be fair to Crockpot, the stats don’t lie: Slow cookers only caused 103 fires in the U.S. between 2012 and 2015 with two nonfatal injuries, a tiny number compared to other kitchen appliances. In the same period, ranges caused 63,784 fires, and 3,834 injuries, 199 of which resulted in death. Even coffee makers caused 256 fires.
***
I return to my slow cooker after I have a baby. In those early months, the days are long, but time is short, and my hands are constantly tied up elsewhere. I no longer want to stand over the hob, and even if I do, my baby has just learned to roll over, but not how to roll back, and has absolutely no patience for me to stir risotto before I flip him. So I pull my slow cooker from the back of the cupboard and wipe the dust from its lid.
After a two-season-long mystery, Jack Pearson, the patriarch in the hit drama This Is Us, was — spoiler alert — revealed to have been killed by a faulty Crockpot, which had been used to make Super Bowl chili
I start on safe ground, with the beef stew I made over and over in my barrister days. This is the sort of dish slow cookers were made for. I spend a few minutes prepping; eight hours later, I am rewarded with a handsome, glossy casserole.
But why stop there? Slow cooking’s many online forums are brimming with recipes that have achieved cult status. There’s “campfire stew” — pork cooked with beans and vegetables until it can be pulled apart. More surprisingly, there’s slow cooker doner kebab, which emulates the take-out favorite, and the intriguing slow cooker fudge.
First, I try sticky pork belly and honey chicken — other forum favorites. They both mimic dishes from Western Cantonese restaurants, takeout versions of the original. Everything goes in raw; no need to sweat vegetables or brown the meat. My slow cooker keeps everything hot without drying it out while I attempt to put the baby to bed — and then for a bit longer when bedtime becomes a battle. Finally, my husband and I sit down to dinner. Neither of these dishes tastes terribly authentic, but they are hot and flavorful, and they were a breeze to make.
Next up is a rice pudding. This, I confess, is a bit of a faff. If you make rice pudding in the oven, you needn’t touch it for hours. Whereas with a slow cooker, you have to stir it every twenty minutes, to avoid it catching and scorching, which rather defeats the point. However, the finished product is fantastic: smooth, rich, and creamy, just like the stuff of my childhood.
When Christmas approaches I cannot resist having a go at some of the other cult recipes. The so-called three-ingredient Christmas fruit cake (which unequivocally and irritatingly requires four ingredients) calls for flour, mixed dried fruit, Baileys Irish Cream liqueur, and lots of chocolate milk. It is not great. Burnt on the outside, insipid on the inside, it takes as long to cook as it does in my conventional oven (where it does not burn), and is only marginally simpler to throw together than an actual fruit cake.
It gets weirder, though everything more or less works. I put aside the questions that keep nagging at me: Why bother roasting potatoes in a slow cooker, when a hot oven — designed for roasting — does the job so well? (The potatoes are actually great: fluffy on the inside, crispy on the outside, though my husband declares them “a bit chewy.”) Then there’s the “dump cake,” which you make by pouring canned fruit, juice and all, into the cooker, topping with packet cake mix, then dotting with butter. The first one — tinned pears and ginger sponge — is merely OK; the second one — black cherries and chocolate sponge, Black Forest-style — is frankly glorious.
As a pastry chef, the recipes initially seemed vague and imprecise to me — I’m used to measuring things to the gram. But I soon realized that’s the point: With a slow cooker, you have a generous amount of wiggle room. The lack of precision is because precision is not required. To someone who isn’t used to cooking, or who is simply less uptight than me, it’s a feature, not a bug.
***
The Crockpot does have its culinary drawbacks: You can’t brown meat in a slow cooker, because it will never get hot enough for the Maillard reaction (the process that makes bread, or the outside of a steak, brown, bringing with it a whole whack of complex flavor). Your casserole will never reduce and thicken. For many, this is part of the deal, maybe even part of the charm. On the forums, newcomers occasionally post hybrid recipes, which have non-slow cooker steps in them. They are met with a frosty reception. It’s as if I’ve stepped into another world, where the convection oven and the hob and the microwave were never invented.
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In the beginning, the slow cooker’s limitations weren’t really that limiting. The whole idea was to use it to cook dishes that lent themselves to low heat over a long period of time, that didn’t need to be browned or really reduced. It suits cheap cuts of meat, where the cartilage and fat have time to break down and become tender and luscious, or hard, root vegetables that benefit from a low, slow cook. But for aficionados, it has since become a replacement for a whole kitchen, which means accepting various culinary compromises — or creating workarounds.
There are all sorts of hacks. You can leave the lid off to allow the liquid to reduce, or put a cloth between the lid and the pot to absorb condensation and aid browning. Many recipes call for gravy thickener or potato starch to thicken sauces. But these hacks often feel — and sometimes taste — like hacks. But some of the ideas slow cooker users have come up with are ingenious, working with the device’s attributes rather than against them. Miss South points out in her slow cooker cookbook, Slow Cooked, that they are perfect for candying fruit — a laborious process when done in the traditional way, on the stove — and for making everything from smooth, wibbly set custards, like crème caramel, to mincemeat.
The impulse to use the device to the exclusion of other kitchen gadgets can seem a bit bewildering to an outsider. “What bugs me about slow cookers,” Paula Lee wrote in Paste magazine, “is that it’s the cart before the horse. It’s the fact that recipes try to MacGyver it into doing strange tricks instead of accepting that it does one thing really well — braising tough cuts of meat — and everything else is a stunt, like using your hairdryer as a dust buster.”
Robert Booth, the truck driver, agrees. “To me, it’s just a tool. It’s not magic. Sweat your onions. Brown your meat. You’ve got to do the grunt work. At the end of the day, it’s a pot that heats up to a hot temperature. “You could do bread in it! Well, why would you?” And the food Robert produces, hack-free, is incredible. It was in a Facebook group where I first came across his “cab cuisine”: steamed pudding (strawberry and gooseberry) and boeuf bourguignon, often accompanied by a photograph of the hand-written recipe. Every evening he would post the fruits of that day’s slow cooking labors: chicken escalopes in lemon with asparagus and garlic mash, red Thai curry, and lamb tagine, all served up on his steering wheel. Other slow cooks went mad for it, awaiting his daily updates, and eager for the recipes.
Internet sharing has become a key resource for the uninitiated and aficionados of slow cookers alike. Photos, recipes, questions, and encouragement are all posted — as long as they fall within the guidelines — like most internet communities the slow cooking world is highly regulated. The groups contain a head-spinning collection of ground rules: some are unsurprising and amount to different ways of saying “don’t be rude. (“Sick” emojis will result in an instant ban.) Others remain intriguingly opaque: posts about slow cooker liners (thin plastic bags that sit in the crock and minimize washing up) are verboten. I still don’t entirely understand why, but I’m definitely too scared to post and ask.
Even the golden boy of slow cooking can fall foul of the moderator’s rules. Robert confesses to me that he has now left the Facebook group where I first discovered him, “by mutual consent,” phrasing that makes him sound like a disgraced politician, or past-it radio DJ. (It seems they wanted the recipes, but not his stories that went with them, he tells me sadly.)
***
For these rule-loving enthusiasts, part of the appeal of slow cooking is its heritage, its nostalgia: comforting, vintage dishes are the mainstay of most slow cooks. But it is more grist to the mill for their detractors. It has become a cliché that even today every Crockpot recipe begins with a can of mushroom soup and a packet of onion soup mix, but there is more than a kernel of truth in it.
Every evening he would post the fruits of that day’s slow cooking labors: chicken escalopes in lemon with asparagus and garlic mash, red Thai curry, and lamb tagine, all served up on his steering wheel.
When the Crockpot first came about, its dependence on tins and shortcuts was in direct opposition to the other culinary movements of the time: Julia Child was becoming a household name, teaching readers to debone ducks and make croissants from scratch, giving advice on batteries de cuisine and classical sauce; Alice Waters was bringing the Californian culinary philosophy of only the freshest produce into the kitchen, and fiddling with it as little as possible.
Whereas, for Crockpot evangelists, every shortcut was fair game. Even today, when we fetishize whole foods and provenance, most modern slow cooker recipes retain a penchant for jars and packet mixes. This underscores the strange niche slow cooking has consistently occupied: a desire to cook, but a willingness to get there with as little effort as possible. All of which begs the question, what is cooking from scratch? What qualifies as home cooking? Who is gatekeeping this, and why?
I’m aware of the heavy whiff of privilege in my occasional slow cooker skepticism. Using a hob or an oven is an easy and obvious alternative to me, but that isn’t true for everyone. I (often) eschew premade sauces and spice mixes because I have the time, money, and knowledge to make my own. We might all come to the slow cooker looking for convenience, but that doesn’t mean it occupies the same place in all our lives and kitchens. As Bee Wilson wrote in Consider the Fork, “Tools are not neutral objects. They change with evolving social context. A pestle and mortar was a different thing for the Roman slave, forced to pound up highly amalgamated mixtures for hours on end for his master’s enjoyment, than it is for me: pleasing apparatus with which I make pesto for fun, on a whim.”
***
Where does the slow cooker go from here?
Clearly, this device is no flash in the pan. Entering the market to solve a problem of the time, it’s become timeless. Its enduring appeal has converted new groups of consumers, and its popularity has boomed since the internet enabled us to share recipes, tips, and enthusiasm.
But these days, the Crockpot is not the only game in town. The Instant Pot is one of the hottest kitchen appliances out there. It’s a multi-function electric cooker that can act as a slow cooker, but also as a pressure cooker, rice cooker, steamer, yogurt maker, water bath, air-fryer, and bread machine — depending on which model you get. It does everything the slow cooker does, but also pretty much everything it doesn’t. Crockpot, naturally, has responded with a very similar multifunctional device.
In some ways, these devices are the natural heirs to the original Crockpot: efficient, compact, safe cookers, which can prepare your dinner with minimal fuss. But they are also radically different. The classic slow cooker is incredibly simple. Most have three settings — low, high, and auto; only after over a decade of ownership, did I realize what the auto setting actually does (a high initial temperature, to get things going, then a low simmer). There are no temperature settings, no gas marks — most don’t even have a timer. As soon as you add another feature, however compelling, you take away from what a slow cooker is designed to be.
I recently found my model of slow cooker in a shop. It was $32, the equivalent price it was when my mother bought it for me for Christmas 15 years ago, and little more than the $25 the original Crockpot retailed for when it was unveiled at Chicago’s National Housewares Show in 1971. You can pick up a basic model for $10 if you shop around. Now, as in the 1970s, we are facing a cost of living crisis, with fuel bills skyrocketing. The Crockpot, in keeping things simple, remains a radically affordable and accessible way to feed a family — we need it now more than ever.
As I turn on my slow cooker for the final recipe I decided to tackle for this piece (the chocolate and black cherry dump cake) I notice that the control panel is loose and, as it shifts, I can see the internal wiring. I might not be in This Is Us territory, but it’s still fair to say that after many years of service, my cooker is a goner. A few months ago I would probably have ditched the device entirely as a relic of my past. But now, I order a replacement immediately. You see, I’ve already bookmarked a recipe for slow cooker cheesecake, and I can’t wait to try it out.
***
Olivia Potts is a food writer and chef. After a career as a criminal barrister, she retrained in patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu. Her latest cookbook, Butter: A Celebration is published by Headline, and is out now. Her first book, A Half Baked Idea: How grief, love, and cake took me from the courtroom to Le Cordon Bleu won the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book Award and is published by Fig Tree, Penguin. She was the Guild of Food Writers’ Food Writer of the Year 2020.
Is Neal Brennan my favorite stand-up comic? Not by a long shot. But as a co-creator of Chappelle’s Show, his impact on the culture is indelible — and more than anything else, he deeply loves the art of comedy, and it’s almost never a bad idea to read conversations with people who truly love what they do.
I think artists should be able to edit their shit. You know what I mean? The same way they edit a joke that doesn’t work, doesn’t get a big enough laugh. There’s got to be some jury process, even within your own mind. I think you should be free in your first draft. You should be able to fuck around at the Cellar. But, after that, after you put it out into the world, I think people can criticize you all they want. It’s one of those dichotomies: speak your truth and live with the consequences, but, also, you’re a social animal that needs connection. I want to be able to say whatever I want to say, but also I have a glass jaw and I want total approval from everyone. And maybe that’s, like, the new human condition.
Chinese Cambodian American writer April Lim writes a beautiful and poignant essay about her family’s escape from Cambodia to Vietnam and then to Thailand; her mother and father’s journey toward a new life in America, and reconnecting to her heritage through a bracelet passed down to her.
In my parents’ Cambodia, no records exist to prove someone’s existence. “You’re alive, you’re living, that is good enough,” my father nonchalantly states, “If you die, you’re gone, back to the ground.” Paper will never prove a life to me—I know my ancestors’ existence through scriptless stories, spoken word by spoken word, like the tale of my family’s forest that no longer exists. If a tree falls in the forest, the forest will feel it. The body decays and the tree becomes part of the forest again, back to the ground. It does not turn to paper.
“I think about the many ways peers and mentors and editors have pushed me toward the stereotype of Hawaiʻi that they consume every day in popular culture,” writes Mariah Rigg. “I think about how to write away from all of this.” In this essay, Digg critiques Joan Didion’s depictions in Hawaii, namely in the essays “Letter from Paradise” and “In the Islands,” calling them reductive and prescriptive and not anything like the Hawaii she remembers — the place she calls home.
To “wrench,” to “shape,” to “render” and “remake” are largely violent verbs. They are things one often does without consent. What Didion proposes, in her literary claims to place, sounds a lot like what Trask calls deculturation, like the distortion, disfiguration, and destruction of a place and people, which are among colonialism’s main goals. What Didion is proposing resembles literary imperialism.
In this beautiful and haunting essay, Anna Badkhen remembers playing with amber necklaces as a child, suggesting that sentience could very well be trapped within each bead. As she considers the catastrophic repercussions of the flood and drought cycles that have taken place on Earth since the beginning of time, she writes of how humans have recorded the suffering from these weather events on “hunger stones” only visible in Europe in times of severe drought.
Each bead was a memento from a time when much of Europe and Central Asia were underwater and no ice capped the poles of the Earth, each necklace an abacus of planetary memories that I was still too young to compute into a warning.
Because of its soft warm feel and because of the insects it sometimes captured, I always suspected that amber was more living matter than gemstone. Even now it seems to me almost sentient, only a wandflick away from being able to speak and tell us all it knows—advents and vanishings of plants and animals, human and nonhuman, and of water, and of land, and even of the soil and rock that make up land: it could remind us that even terra firma is impermanent, that it, too, can migrate.
In an essay that manages to be hilarious as well as informative, Rachel Handler looks at how we sleep. Experimenting on herself, this may not be the most scientific look at insomnia, but it is one of the most fun.
I interview my partner, Adam, who falls asleep instantly, no matter if he is in a cozy bed or being dangled by his ankles over a cliff. I have often wondered if he is an undercover psychopath, and now seems like the right time to ask him. He denies the charge but confirms that he has always been an incredible sleeper. In fact, the main disrupter of his sleep is me.
A year ago in British Columbia, there was a massive flood — a disaster to the tune of $13 billion in damage. It was caused by an “atmospheric river,” a type of rainstorm that flows up from the tropics into Western Canada and Alaska carrying so much precipitation that it’s sometimes called a Hawaiian Fire Hose. In this case, the river in the sky caused rivers on the ground to rise to unprecedented levels, and it changed the way that some people affected by the flooding talk about nature:
The idea of nature as something that can give warning, that can be angered, that can be — as Aldous Huxley wrote — “occasionally diabolic,” stands outside the Western tradition of science. Yet people up and down the Nicola spoke of the flooding river in that older way.
They saw the river of November 15 as a different being, with a different character. “That was the demon river from Hell,” said Michael Coutts. Charleen Johnson said the river was angry; she said, “We’ve pissed off the entities or the gods somewhere.”
Kim Cardinal said flatly, “The river has taken its land back.”
Whatever the scientific merit of these kinds of thoughts, they have had their uses. In the mountains of Europe, the mysterious movement of large boulders across long distances or high into the branches of trees, or scenes of unimaginable destruction, were long assigned to giants and dragons.
Such stories served to warn residents against building their homes in geologically dangerous places, long after the deadly events had been forgotten.
An Icelandic writer, Andri Snær Magnason, recently wondered aloud whether we, as a global society, might not have done better at protecting the planet over the past few centuries if, alongside our science, we had never given up the idea that nature could be holy or sacred or — I might add — could reach out and smite us if it was mistreated.
Barry Yeoman considers what happens when two progressive imperatives — protecting the rights of people with disabilities, and ensuring that no one experiences harassment in schools or workplaces — appear to be at odds. If you’re looking for tidy narratives or easy answers, this isn’t the story for you. For moral complexity, read on:
Conflicts also arise for students with autism, who are entering higher education in greater numbers than ever, in part because of better K-12 support services. Autistic students sometimes have difficulty reading social cues and thus engage in behaviors that, to their neurotypical classmates, resemble stalking. In college, the support services that earlier might have intervened are gone.
“You take a kid who’s had a life jacket on, and that’s how they’ve been swimming for years, and then you put them into a different pool, take off the life jacket, and say ‘Good luck,’” said Lee Burdette Williams, the executive director of the nonprofit College Autism Network. “And they just plunge to the floor of the pool. And one of the ways that happens is around their social interactions.”
The object of an autistic student’s attention might file a stalking complaint under Title IX, the federal education law barring sex discrimination. “And then you have [campus officials] swooping in to say, ‘That’s not allowed here, and now I’m going to have to sanction you,’” Burdette said. “And here’s the kid, furiously trying to stay above water.”
Here’s an idea for a reality TV show: rival high school mariachi bands in South Texas compete for the coveted title at an annual extravaganza. Think Cheer, but with guitars and trumpets; Friday Night Lights, but with embroidered skirts and sombreros. This is the premise of Cecilia Ballí ‘s new feature:
The judges disappeared into a private room to determine the winners. They had been asked to score the teams in five categories: trumpets, violins, rhythm section, vocalists and presentation. They huddled together and laid their sheets next to one another to compare notes. The judges shared their scores and positive impressions of each of the groups in the order they had performed.
Rio Grande City: “Excellent change of rhythms, well managed. … ”
Grulla: “The soloists, all of them, all of them very in tune, each one. … ”
Roma: “Trumpets, it was just two of them, but they sounded very good. … ”
Las Vegas: “I liked that they would sing pizzicatos, that’s something no one else does. …”
But there were also withering critiques. They were disappointed that one musician had sung so much she hardly played her instrument. In another group, they didn’t like that one boy wore an earring, another had long hair and a third had a nonmatching belt buckle. In the end, the scores for the top three teams were exceedingly close, with differences of less than a point and one tie. So they discussed additional factors, like the difficulty of the songs and how each group had made them feel.
In 2012, I was working at a hotel in Glacier National Park when a man I’d just met invited me for a day of tubing and drinking beer on the river. Little did I know, I would nearly drown in the rapids.
But this story doesn’t begin in the water.
This story begins at Many Glacier Hotel the night before the start of the summer season. The employees, most of us new to each other, new to Glacier, gathered in a basement theater space typically reserved for a folk singer who performed songs about mountaineering. A seasoned National Park Service ranger stood before us in the usual wide-brimmed hat and stiff green trousers.
“Glacier National Park is dangerous,” she said. “And every year, there are fatalities. Climbing accidents, deadly encounters with animals. Some of you have experience in nature. Some of you are new to it. Either way, statistically, one of you will die this summer.”
Some of you have experience in nature. Some of you are new to it. Either way, statistically, one of you will die this summer.
Perhaps it was the growing darkness outside, the perfectly triangular silhouette of Grinnell Point above the mirrored surface of Swiftcurrent Lake, or the forest, thick with night, but her words sounded like a campfire story. We listened, but we did not believe. Instead, we thought of the cold beers we’d later share on the porch outside the employee dorms, tomorrow’s hike to Iceberg Lake, the beds in the hotel that needed linens, linens for guests who were on their way to this sacred corner of Montana.
I’m not going to die this summer, I thought the next day in the employee dining room, dousing a plate of rubbery scrambled eggs with hot sauce. I was young. It was my first season in the park. I’d seen the group of veteran Glacier employees headed for foreboding black cliffs with their helmets, headlamps, and worn copies of A Climber’s Guide to Glacier National Park. I wasn’t going to do anything like that. At least not yet.
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An hour later, I stood on the bank of the Swiftcurrent River, barefoot in a bikini, inflating a cheap plastic inner tube.
“It’ll be mellow,” Luke* said over the thrum of the water. Like me, he was a server at the hotel restaurant. He handed me a warm can of beer and we made our way down the berm, sat on our tubes, and pushed ourselves into the water.
The river was swollen with alpine runoff. Clear and cold enough to drink big gulps. He was right at first; it was mellow. The water tugged us along steadily, then slowed, picked up the pace, slowed again. Like the ride at a water park I’d loved as a kid, or the game I’d played in neighborhood pools where we’d move in big circles to create a current. Mellow.
Halfway through my beer, the trickle mutated into a torrent. Suddenly, the river roared as it curved through the valley. It forked. Luke went one way; I went another. It became a force bigger than me, a surge of water pouring over downed trees that sliced my arms and legs, poked holes in my pathetic yellow tube which began to deflate, deflate, deflate. The muddy riverbank was out of reach. I sank. The current tossed me from my tube. I held onto the handle of the sinking vessel, my entire body underwater except for my fingers, the bones of my shins hitting every rock on the riverbed, downed tree branches stabbing my ribs, my lungs filling with water as I gasped for air and was denied. The river was in charge now, I realized, and though I fought it as long as I could, my veins electric with fear, I kept swallowing water, choking on it, until I was breathing more water than air, until my legs were bruised and useless, until my grip began to loosen on what was left of the inner tube. And then my head went heavy, my vision went dark. The rushing river in my ears became a song guiding me toward the unknown.
Suddenly, the river roared as it curved through the valley. It forked. Luke went one way; I went another.
Let go, the river said.
A sense of peace. A flood of euphoria. A joy I’d never felt before, have never felt since.
Okay, I thought.
I smiled.
But then the tumbling stream pushed me to the surface, just for a moment. Just long enough for me to feel the sun on my skin. Just long enough for a single breath of mountain air. It jolted me, brought me back. I lunged for the earth that ran parallel to the rapids and grabbed hold of brush and branches that were still mercifully fixed to something. I pulled myself onto land and collapsed on my back, my stomach rising and falling, my bikini top torn clean off my bleeding breasts, my legs dark with bruises, my arms slick and red. In shock, I got up and ran up the hill, through the trees, and onto the side of the road, rocks slicing the soles of my feet as I wept and screamed. Cars containing tourists passed me by, despite the fact that I was waving at them. Finally, a man from the nearby Blackfeet Reservation picked me up, let me ride in the bed of his truck. “Don’t want you bleeding on the upholstery,” he said.
Luke was fine, I later learned. He’d gotten out of the water in time. “Whoops,” he said, of the incident.
“Let me get you a beer,” people kept saying to me at the employee pub. “Let me get you some wine. Whatever you want.”
I drank until I stopped shaking. Until the story was a story. Until I couldn’t hear the ranger saying statistically, one of you will die this summer. But later that night, alone in my twin-sized bed, the river returned. It washed over me, flooded my ear canals, filled my lungs. Cold and violent, it would always be with me.
***
There have been other near misses.
In Glacier, that same summer, a scramble turned into a fall. Wet shale. Loose rock. I couldn’t trust it. I lost my footing and slid down, would have slid straight off a cliff if the hotel’s piano player hadn’t been below me to catch me. The mountain sank its teeth into me on the way down, cutting three vertical slices into my side, lines of blood that would scar and then open up again and again as I lifted the tray that night during dinner service. “Uh, you’re bleeding through your shirt,” a coworker would say.
I drank until I stopped shaking. Until the story was a story. Until I couldn’t hear the ranger saying statistically, one of you will die this summer.
In Glacier, a different summer. Mama grizzly and her cubs on the side of the trail. A moose charging toward me through the misty trees.
In Death Valley, a dirt road strewn with boulders, a narrow canyon streaked with paint from vehicles that had squeezed through. No cell service. I got the rented Jeep stuck on a ledge, gave up and started chain-smoking, somehow pushed the car to safety. But I learned nothing. I did other reckless shit with my own car. Drove it 60 miles on empty one hot, desolate night. Drove it 120 miles per hour just to see what it felt like. The guy in the passenger seat said what the fuck were you thinking when I finally released the gas pedal.
That girl, someone said, is going to get herself killed.
***
In 2016, a group of Canadian social media influencers took a road trip throughout the United States. Their YouTube channel High on Life has more than 600,000 subscribers. Their Instagram account has almost a million followers. All of their videos follow a similar formula: a group of attractive friends — mostly male, mostly white, with Vegas dayclub style and a techno soundtrack to match — going on adventures around the world. Snorkeling in Indonesia, doing backflips in front of the Eiffel Tower at sunrise, kiteboarding in Spain, skiing in their underwear in British Columbia, going to raves in Croatia. Oversaturated color. Drone footage of turquoise waves, sparkling cities, and aspirational Airbnbs. Voiceovers encouraging the viewer to make the choice to enjoy life.
But they got into some trouble.
During their United States road trip, they were filmed leaving a boardwalk in Yellowstone and walking on the fragile landscape surrounding the park’s Grand Prismatic Spring. They were also caught waterskiing on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and riding bicycles at Badwater Basin in Death Valley — both illegal activities.
My friends and I in the national parks couldn’t believe this shit. Not only were these influencers laughing and smiling as they trampled pristine wilderness all over the country; they were posting about it on social media. We were outraged, seeing places we loved — places we’d lived in, worked in — desecrated. When the influencers were fined, sentenced to a week in jail, and banned from public lands in the United States for five years, we were thrilled. And then we forgot about them — at least, most of us did. But not me. I continued to hate-watch their content. Their stupid videos — girls in bikinis and guys in board shorts flexing at a rooftop pool in Barcelona, running around on sand dunes in Vietnam, acting like anyone could have a life like that if they really wanted it.
In July 2018, the crew was in the news again. They’d been goofing around on the cliffs at Shannon Falls in British Columbia, shooting content, doing their thing, when one slipped and tumbled into the water. Two of the others jumped in to save her, and they went over the edge of a 100-foot waterfall. All three died.
Reactions were swift and merciless.
Couldn’t have happened to more deserving idiots, someone commented on Facebook.
Natural selection at work again, wrote another.
And perhaps most succinctly: Karma!!!
A few friends from the national parks texted me to ask if I’d seen it, mentioned they didn’t feel sad about it at all.
The cruel responses were out in the open. It made me uneasy. Hadn’t we done stupid, selfish shit too? Driven drunk in the Tetons? Taken selfies with a moose?
After Shannon Falls, the remaining members of the High on Life crew set up a widely criticized GoFundMe, which only raised $29,646 out of a $50,000 goal. Their social media went dark, but only for two months, at which point, they posted a video on Instagram. A montage of their adventures with techno music and drone shots of beaches. “Instead of focusing on the past we wish to look toward the future,” a monotone male voice intoned. “With that said, we will now begin posting more frequently to this page.”
Two days later, they shared a video of the group bungee jumping over a river that looked a lot like the one their three friends had died in.
“They make it hard to feel sorry for them,” I told a friend. “But I do.”
“I don’t,” she said. “Karma.”
She said it simply. As if it were transactional: Disrespect nature and pay the price. I wondered if she believed it, if it was comforting to tell herself that out here, good people live and assholes die.
***
There is a series of books you’ll find in any national park gift shop. We call them the “Death in … ” books.
Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park
Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon
Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite
Death in Big Bend
Death in Zion National Park
Death in Glacier National Park
Frequently updated and incredibly exhaustive, most of the books follow a similar format: narrative accounts of deaths and near-deaths in the national parks divided into categories. Deaths by falling. Deaths by drowning. Suicide. Murder. Freak accidents.
During the summer I worked in Yellowstone, a copy of Death in Yellowstone made its way around the employee dorms. We pored over it on camping trips, shared anecdotes at the employee pub, read it aloud on long drives. Even if you hadn’t read it, you felt like you had. The book’s most well-known story is its first: the story of two Californians, David Allen Kirwan and Ronald Ratliff, who visited Yellowstone in 1981 with a big dog, Moosie. When Moosie jumped into a 202-degree hot spring, Kirwan jumped in after her, but he couldn’t save the dog from the bubbling sulphuric pool. As Ratliff helped him crawl out, Kirwan left behind handprints of skin on the rock. Lying on the ground, he whispered, “That was a stupid thing I did.” The next day, he died.
We were especially fascinated by the stories that took place at Yellowstone Lake, the largest lake in the United States above 7,000 feet, because we lived on its shore. The lake is very, very cold — about 40 degrees Farenheit during the summer — except for in places where secret underwater geysers roil, creating bursts of heat up to 252 degrees. The lake is also deep. Very, very deep. It’s 390 feet deep at its deepest point. Survival time is about 20 minutes for anyone who falls off a boat while fishing for trout. “The lake keeps its dead,” the rangers told us, which had something to do with a strong current that ran along the bottom and held things down. We repeated this phrase often — the lake keeps its dead the lake keeps its dead the lake keeps its dead — laughing as we chanted it on the days when we took acid and went swimming.
In Yosemite, I read Death in Yosemite from the bottom bunk in Housekeeping Camp, a village of canvas tents by the Merced River, which is statistically the most deadly place in the national park. A light rain fell, which turned to snow at higher elevations, closing Tioga Pass, the mountainous eastern route into the park. Mist enshrined the granite walls that ringed the valley. I read the 608-page book from cover-to-cover, safe inside my sleeping bag. I became obsessed with stories about the Ledge Trail, the third-deadliest location in the national park, an abandoned, closed-down trail that traverses from the Yosemite Valley up to Glacier Point. It is the shortest route from the valley floor to Glacier Point and covers approximately 4,000 feet in just a few short, near-vertical miles on loose rock. It is not marked, though it begins behind a popular lodge. Those that find it will know they’re in the right place when they encounter a steel sign anchored to the rock that reads: DANGEROUS DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FOLLOW THIS ABANDONED TRAIL.
At the Grand Canyon, I read Death in Grand Canyon (“newly expanded 10th-anniversary edition”) on a blistering hot day in late June. I had expected the book to be mostly about people plummeting into the abyss, and while there are chapters devoted to both falls from the rim and falls from within the canyon, a good portion of the book is about heat: thirst, fatigue, racing heart, confusion, death. In Death Valley, which was the very first national park I ever lived in, they teach you about the three stages of a heat emergency on your first day of work. First, there are heat cramps. Your muscles twinge. Sweat beads form on your forehead. There’s a tightening in your stomach. Heat cramps are easy to ignore. If you’re hiking in the desert and you experience them, you might take an aspirin and continue on. Next, there is heat exhaustion, which is less easy to disregard. You feel nauseated, dizzy, feverish. Your pulse throbs. You feel confused. You struggle to put one foot in front of the other. The last step is heatstroke, which is when your fever spikes to 104 or higher, when you begin to act like you are drunk — vomiting, slurring your words, stumbling, passing out. And then you die.
“Check the color of your urine often,” the human resources manager in Death Valley told us calmly on my first day in the park, which is probably the only time that sentence has been uttered by a human resources manager.
On the same hot day in June in which I read Death in Grand Canyon, I descended the Bright Angel Trail from the South Rim, hoping to reach Plateau Point, which is nearly eight miles one way. I was 1.5 miles away when I began to feel the effects of the heat. I had lost more than 3,200 feet in elevation since leaving the comfort of the air-conditioned hotels and restaurants and gift shops at the rim. The sky above was bright blue and far away. And it was hot. Hot and getting hotter the further down I went. The sun shifted, blanketing the exposed trail I’d come from — the same I’d have to return on — in white-hot light.
There is a reason why they call the Grand Canyon the Inverted Mountain, why there are signs at the top that read going down is optional, going up is mandatory. I had heard these things before, but now, standing in the thick heat several thousand feet below the rim of the canyon, they meant something. At Indian Garden, I laid down in the shade of a cottonwood tree, but I knew I could not stay. I quietly panicked. Sweat soaked the small of my back. The water from my backpack was warm as tea. I began the long climb back up to the top, facing the harsh sun, the part in my hair burning. At first, I was sustained by the adrenaline of my fear, but it dissipated quickly, and after that each step was agony. My feet were heavy. My brain was mush. My blue T-shirt was white with salt from my pores. I felt as if I was walking underwater. I took a long pull of water and felt it move right through me. I immediately began to urinate. A fat white bighorn sheep on the trail in front of me looked back, his pupils little black squares.
I was going to die.
A mile and a half from the top, a ranger stood in the sun. Hikers were sprawled out around him in the dirt, looking dead-eyed, breathing heavily. These were the people who I had often judged as stupid. These midwest idiots, these people who populated the pages of Death in Grand Canyon. Yet here I was, among them.
“Uh-oh,” the ranger said when he saw me. Of course I could not see myself, but his reaction to me was enough.
“Sit,” the ranger said, though there was no shade to be had. He gave me a sports drink, which I nursed until the taste made me sick. My head pounded. My eyes burned.
“I don’t understand,” I murmured. “I’ve had plenty of water.”
Later, I would read about water intoxication and wonder if I’d in fact had too much.
After leaving the national parks, I returned to Glacier with my friend, John, who had worked at the hotel with me the summer I’d nearly drowned. We spent the day stand-up paddleboarding on Lake McDonald, riding high on the glassy surface of the water over the smooth, rust-colored stones below. We stopped at a general store after for snacks and saw a copy of Death in Glacier National Park. Neither of us had read it, so we bought it, and John read it aloud to me as we drove over the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which meanders past fields of beargrass and cliffs where mountain goats stand guard as it crosses the Continental Divide before dropping down into the dreamy meadows that surround St. Mary Lake and its minuscule island.
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He arrived at a story we knew. In 2012, a 19-year-old hotel employee named Jakson Kreiser had set out to hike from Logan Pass to Avalanche Lake, an off-trail downward route that passes through blossoming wildflowers and electric blue pools of glacial runoff. He never returned. Rangers searched meticulously but began to feel less and less optimistic. After eight days, the search was downgraded to “limited mode.” Soon enough, there was no one searching at all. I remember that search. Each day, we talked about it in the employee dining room, on our own hikes, in our dorm rooms overlooking the ceaseless waters of the lake that spread out before the faux Swiss facade of the hotel. By September, the aspens were golden, the air was cool, and the season was winding down. Soon, the tourists would leave, the mountain roads would close, and we’d head to other seasonal jobs — Death Valley for me, ski resorts for my friends. It was during those final few melancholic weeks, amid the raucous midnight goodbye parties, that the news came. A pair of hikers had found his body. He’d slipped while crossing the slick wet rocks of a drainage and drowned in the freezing water.
Either way, statistically, one of you will die this summer, the ranger had said.
He had been the one.
***
Even now, after all these years, my shins are still tender to the touch. My husband will roll over in his sleep, brush his leg against mine and suddenly it’s like there’s no skin, no flesh, no fat, no muscle on the bone. It’s like I’ve just pulled myself out of the Swiftcurrent River and I’m lying in the cool grass, hot tears on my face, half-naked and covered in blood, propping myself up on my elbows to look down at my shins only to see them swollen and black. Every rock on the riverbed that day a fuck you.
But I didn’t drown. I didn’t fall. I didn’t crash.
You know what they say — play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
And I have been very, very stupid. So why am I still alive?
If you are someone who ventures into the wilderness, you don’t want the answer to that question. You want order. We all do. But the pines of the forest, the sands of the desert, the snowy couloirs of the mountains, they will not give us that.
During the winter I worked in Big Bend, I read Death in Big Bend. I read it in my trailer, which was infested with wolf spiders. They eyed me from beneath plates in cabinets. They crawled up from the drain when I showered, their crooked legs twitching as they ran from the moisture. I read it in the gravel yard outside, where packs of dark brown javelinas passed through, smelling like skunks and shrieking like ghouls. I read it by the Rio Grande, looking out into Mexico. Death in Big Bend is different from the other books. It focuses mainly on the rescue efforts of the rangers and names each chapter after a person who died, rather than relegating crowds of victims under headings like Air Crashes, River Deaths, Vehicle Deaths, Waterfall Deaths, Falls While Hiking. The tone of Death in Big Bend is kinder, the attempt to teach the reader a lesson more genuine. Reading Death in Big Bend doesn’t feel like gawking at a car accident or leaving a comment about Darwin on a news story. The book is an exploration of the sheer skill of the rangers who descended wall after wall of Cattail Canyon to rescue a stranded climber. The book is a sympathetic portrait of what it takes to recover the naked body of a suicide victim from the undulating and endless desert beneath the Chisos Mountains. It’s an anomaly for a reason. People want to separate themselves from death. They want to laugh at it or gasp in horror. Making it human brings it closer.
A sense of order pulls us back. And even though nature is chaos, we long for its code of conduct, we beg it to explain its reasoning. We make handbooks, hiking guides. We chronicle all the ways in which people have died so that we can learn from their mistakes. We make rules:
Rule #1: If you are unprepared, you will die. After Jakson’s body was found, the rangers noted that he was inexperienced. I felt the invisible sigh of relief among the folks who had been hiking and climbing in Glacier for years. They knew how to engage with these mountains. These mountains would let them live.
Rule #2: If you are disrespectful, you will die. The Canadian influencers had treated the wilderness with contempt, laughing as they filmed themselves doubting the length of its memory, its capacity for revenge. We learned this lesson from them, from others like them: Don’t hurt the animals, don’t litter, don’t trample fragile ecosystems. Be good and the landscape will be good to you.
Rule #3: If all else fails, trust the statistics. According to a 2020 study from personal injury law firm Panish Shea & Boyle LLP, most people who die in the national parks are men. The majority are between 55 and 64 years old. The leading cause of death in the national parks is drowning. You are more likely to die in Yosemite than you are in Death Valley. And you are more likely to die in North Cascades National Park than in any national park. But you can take comfort in knowing that there were less than eight deaths per 10 million visits to national park sites between 2007 and 2018.
Repeat these numbers on the trail at dawn when you hear the huffing of a bear on the cliffside below. Repeat them as you cross the river and feel it tug on your ankles. Repeat them when the lightning cracks the sky above you, strikes the rock beside you, lights the world up violet around you, reminding you for just a second that this is all just random and it is not the Oklahomans in jean shorts trekking into the Grand Canyon with cans of cola in hand who are fools, but it is you; you were a fool to believe that this is all some ordered system.
Trust the statistics. Trust the rules.
Remember, the ranger said one of you. Never mind the summers when there were two.
* Luke is a pseudonym
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Krista Diamond‘s work has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, Catapult, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Bread Loaf and Tin House. She lives in Las Vegas where she is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
