Friday, August 02, 2024

The Charming, Eccentric, Blessed Life of Lee Maxwell

Robert Sanchez brings us a rich profile of Lee Maxwell, age 94, whose love of washing machines inspired him to create Lee Maxwell’s Washing Machine Museum, home to 1,500 antique washing machines, all housed on his property in Eaton, Colorado.

He was an expert in the esoteric. Not only did he have the most comprehensive collection of washing machines on the planet, but Lee also collected antique mop wringers, irons, and vacuum stomps. He’d built the menagerie, he says, because he was intrigued by the washers’ mechanics and, over time, became interested in their histories as well. The assemblage was also, he thought, just really, really cool. A steady flow of visitors—up to 700 a year—from around the world would pass through the warehouses and marvel at his pieces, which include an 1885 Guffins Steam Washing Machine, something called a Torpedo Washer, and antique Whirlpools. CBS’ Sunday Morning program profiled Lee in 2018. The “spin doctor,” Jane Pauley had called him.



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How Lawrence Abu Hamdan Hears the World

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist. He’s also an investigator. He calls himself a “private ear.” To put it succinctly, he listens to crimes—the audio captured in phone recordings and CCTV footage, for instance—in search of the truth:

One of the earliest cases Abu Hamdan worked on involved Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Abu Daher, two Palestinian teen-agers who were shot dead by Israeli border police in the occupied West Bank during a Nakba Day protest. The Israel Defense Forces claimed that the officers had shot the boys with rubber bullets, to quell the demonstration, and that the cause of the deaths could not be determined. Abu Hamdan used sound analysis to differentiate the sonic signatures of various kinds of ammunition. In this case, the sounds were of neither rubber-coated bullets nor live ammunition “but something in between,” he said. “A kind of amalgamation of the two sounds.” Abu Hamdan ultimately found that the officers had fired live ammunition out of a rubber-bullet extension. This finding led to the indictment of Ben Deri, one of the Israeli border officers, on manslaughter charges. (In 2016, Deri accepted a plea deal for the lesser charge of negligent homicide and received a nine-month prison sentence.)

When Ben Deri was arrested, in 2014, it was the first time that a member of the Israeli forces had been charged with killing a Palestinian child. But how could Abu Hamdan feel anything like resolution? The pursuit of legal justice, however limited, had forced him into a cowed posture. “I was immediately asked to do something that, for me, was politically compromising, which was to argue that the Israeli soldiers were not firing rubber bullets but live ammunition,” he said—the implication being that rubber bullets were acceptable. “Rubber bullets, especially in the Israel-Palestine context, are constantly being shot in people’s faces at close range,” Abu Hamdan explained. They maim, as a form of deterrence.

Two years after the bullet analysis, he created an installation called “Earshot,” which reflects on the killings of Nawara and Abu Daher. The centerpiece is a video called “Rubber Coated Steel.” The film was shot in an indoor gun range, where the sounds of gunfire cannot be heard from the outside—a metaphor for violence done in a kind of aural darkness. There is no speech, but text runs along the bottom of the video: a transcript from an imaginary civil trial. And yet, even in this space of speculative justice, Nawara and Abu Daher are not given “a voice”; the boys are not made to ventriloquize a fantasy of justice from beyond the grave. Abu Hamdan challenges a maxim forced onto the marginalized: that their voices are a source of power.



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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A rustic illustrated map on parchment. on a deep brown background.

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In our Top 5:

  • A Bitcoin-fuelled health nightmare in Texas
  • The hidden history of oil in Los Angeles
  • Buying fentanyl components online
  • Preservation over profit in Alberta, Canada
  • Wayfinding with hand-drawn maps

1. ‘We’re Living in a Nightmare’: Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town

Andrew R. Chow | TIME | July 8, 2024 | 4,250 words

There are 137 bitcoin mines in the US, many of them located in remote and rural places in Texas, “home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians.” After a massive bitcoin facility started operating in town of Granbury, people of all ages began to experience a range of unexplainable medical issues, including hypertension, chest pain, heart palpitations, migraines, vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss, and panic attacks. Even the community’s nonhuman residents—from dogs to chickens to a family’s backyard oak tree—exhibited strange symptoms. At first, no one knew what was making them sick, but they knew they had one thing in common: the inescapable “dull aural hum” from the mine. The buzz, generated by 30,000 computers and thousands of fans running to cool them, is constant. And the noise, which residents have consistently recorded at over 85 decibels, is over the state’s legal limit. (On top of this, Texas’ noise law is the worst in the nation—one that seems to protect noise polluters, not its citizens.) In this eye-opening story, Andrew R. Chow shares the medical struggles and stories of more than 50 Granbury residents affected by the noise, and reports on how the community is trying to fight back against Marathon, the mine’s owner. As crypto and AI fuel the data center industry’s growth, however, this very scenario is repeating itself in other states, including Arkansas and North Dakota. “Ultimately,” Chow writes, “Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.” —CLR

2. It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil

Jonathan Blake | Noēma | July 30, 2024 | 3,826 words

Sometimes a fact jumps out of a piece of journalism and lodges itself directly into your long-term memory. In Jonathan Blake’s engrossing Noēma piece, that fact is this: unlike most cities that developed along rail and streetcar lines, Los Angeles’ (sub)urban development clustered around those many places where underground oil fields were tapped. Even if you’ve driven past the oil wells near Baldwin Hills, you may not have realized how strongly black gold influenced the city. (Or how it continues to, despite its winnowing footprint.) Blake didn’t either when he was growing up in LA; now, he visits some of the city’s most active, and camouflaged, drilling sites. Like the one in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Pico-Robertson, where, directly across the street from a restaurant opened by Steven Spielberg’s mother, ivy-covered walls conceal 40 active wells. Or the one tucked behind the Beverly Center shopping mall, the one you can only see from the top level of the parking structure or from the hospital across the street. About a third of Angelenos live within a mile of an active drill site, the negative physical and mental consequences of which Blake inventories starkly. Yet, the lingering presence of extractive industry also leads Blake to celebrate the recent launch of a satellite that continuously observes methane gas levels around the planet and makes its data available to researchers. This, he writes, is part of the necessary work to grasp what fossil fuel consumption has wrought: “Even someone living in the places most affected by climate change, like the Arctic, can’t intuit planetwide change from personal experience.” Just because you grow up in a city without realizing what’s thrumming under your feet doesn’t mean you can’t fight to make that city—and the planet it’s part of—a better place to live. —PR

3. We Bought Everything Needed to Make $3 Million Worth of Fentanyl. All It Took Was $3,600 and a Web Browser.

Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener, and Stephen Eisenhammer | Reuters | July 25, 2024 | 6,355 words

Each December, Bloomberg Businessweek publishes a Jealousy List, a compilation of “all the stories we wish we wrote this year.” If I had a 2024 list of my own, I would put this Reuters investigation on it—as I was reading the piece, I couldn’t stop thinking, “Damn, this was a great story idea.” The premise is simple: fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has become the number-one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45, can be made by combining chemicals that anyone can order online. Most of these precursors, as the chemicals are known, ship from China. To investigate this dangerous pipeline, Reuters became customers. Reporters bought chemicals with names such as 1-boc-4-AP and 1-boc-4-piperidone and had them delivered to apartments in Mexico and the United States. The shipments showed up disguised as adapters or sealed in cat-food bags. All told, the investigating team purchased enough chemicals to make 3 million tablets of fentanyl, a process that cost them only $3,600 and required only clicking buttons on a smartphone or laptop. (Perhaps you, like me, just gasped in dismay at those figures.) All told, this project shows how difficult it is to cut off the fentanyl supply at the roots—it’s basically a game of Whac-a-Mole. “While it was easy to source the goods, it proved far more difficult to identify exactly who sold them,” the story explains. “Reporters could dig up nothing more than phone numbers for two of the sellers. For the others, corporate websites and Chinese business-registry documents yielded addresses. But when Reuters visited these locations, it found no visible presence of the companies there.” One of the companies in question is still peddling its product despite being under US federal indictment. So much, I guess, for the long arm of the law. —SD

4. The Big Life—and Looming Death—of a Rocky Mountain Defender

Drew Anderson | The Narwhal and The Globe and Mail | July 18, 2024 | 4,238 words

Conservationist Karsten Heuer is only 55 years old. He knows he will die this autumn, but it’s not the first time he has faced death. In 2021 he fell nearly 30 feet to the ground from a tree stand while searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley. His lungs collapsed and he broke ribs, his sternum, and his back in several places. Since, he has been diagnosed with “a fast-acting and fatal neurological condition called multiple system atrophy” that may have been a result of the fall. After spending so much of his life traversing vast stretches of wilderness observing animal behavior, he refuses to be fettered or diminished by the symptoms of his disease and has scheduled an assisted death this fall. Drew Anderson’s piece is so much more than a profile of a lifelong nature advocate. Heuer is a tenacious fighter who has had success navigating conflicts between profit and preservation that can feel intractable in Canada’s oil-fuelled, capitalist society. In 2018, Heuer led an effort to reintroduce bison to Banff National Park, a species that had been hunted into extinction, missing from the region for 140 years. His work documenting animal migration patterns prompted the Banff, Alberta, town council to halt certain developments and move others to preserve the wildlife corridor nearby. “He was one of the early advocates of what is now known as large-landscape-scale conservation,” writes Anderson. “This model takes into account the huge scope of some animals’ terrain, a departure from caring for the land in a patchwork of small protected areas.” Even as the end of his life approaches, he’s still fighting development that would double the size of neighboring Canmore, in the name of preservation. After all that he has given to the planet in his time here, if only medical science could find a cure to preserve Karsten Heuer. —KS

5. Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps

Ben Buckland | The New York Times | July 17, 2024 | 2,793 words

Frustrated with how predictable traveling has become in the digital era, Ben Buckland decided to walk across Switzerland, relying only on hand-drawn maps from the people he met along the way, including local cheesemakers, a chef, and a farmer whose family had lived on the land since the 1600s. “I wanted to know what it would teach me about how technology and convenience have changed the way we travel,” he writes. “I wanted to be lost, and to find my way through the artwork of strangers.” At first, I found this goal as annoying as it was inspiring. Going on trips with my 6-year-old daughter has transformed the way I travel, and gone, for now, are my flâneur days, when I’d set off on foot in one direction to see where I ended up. Still, I couldn’t resist Buckland’s words and stunning photographs, his spontaneity, and his willingness to trust the people he encountered. I love his thoughts on making maps, even the simple sketches he received; reading a map is an “act of empathy,” he writes, a way to learn about a person through the details they see. By the end, Buckland walked about 250 miles over 12 days—along lakeshores, up mountains, into villages, and through the heart of Switzerland. A lovely piece on serendipity, being present in the moment, and seeing the world through others’ eyes. —CLR

Audience Award

Here’s the story our audience put their money on this week.

My Mother, the Gambler

Victor Lodato | The New Yorker | July 29, 2024 | 5,627 words

From all-night poker games, sports betting, playing the three-number “Italian lottery,” and eventually, taking bets from others in the neighborhood, Victor Lodato recalls the pervasive gambling that went on during his childhood. Until it nearly tore his family apart. —KS



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Thursday, August 01, 2024

Inside the “Broletariat Revolution”

The past few years have been tough for tech billionaires: after more than a decade of being hailed as visionaries, they’re no longer getting a free pass from an uncritical media, and it seems to have broken their brains. As Zoë Bernard details for Business Insider, many of them have responded to the loss of Unassailable Demigod status by going in house—launching a slew of podcasts and other owned media channels that let them tell their story, their way. Fascinating that “telling their story” so often involves the same hobby horses of the galaxy brains who rail against “wokeism.”

The pro-tech media’s other adversaries are a constellation of government, corporate, and entertainment figures dubbed too reflexively anti-tech, too anti-growth, or too politically correct. On Pirate Wires, jeremiads have been written against Anthony Fauci, who “oversaw one of the greatest erosions of institutional trust in American history”; Ellen Pao, “the architect of tech’s #metoo movement”; DEI activists at Google; DEI at large; Disney, for its penchant for “girlboss protagonists”; and NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, for her “near perfect record of ideological opposition to Silicon Valley.” Though Solana has since moved to Miami, his fiercest ire on Pirate Wires remains fixed on San Francisco’s liberal politicians. A sampling of recent headlines: “How San Francisco Attracts and Traps Homeless Transplants,” “How San Francisco’s DEI Industrial Complex Works,” and “Inside SF Public Schools’ Shocking Health Curriculum.” “All-In” has similarly taken aim at figures including Fauci, George Soros, Joe Biden, and a host of California politicians.



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Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Can a Church Exist Exclusively on the Internet?

Many houses of worship began streaming religious services in 2020; Christian televangelists have sermonized to a distributed “congregation” for decades. But as Vincent Owino reports, livestreaming preachers like Jeffter Wekesa have flourished in Kenya, where plentiful internet access gives them a pulpit—or at least multiple phones and webcams—from which to serve a hungry global audience.

This is how Wekesa spends most nights, preaching in front of a congregation of people spread around the country, and as far as Saudi Arabia and the United States. He prays that they’ll find jobs, spouses, business success. He tells small prophecies: This one will soon buy a car, that one will travel abroad to find greener pastures. He heals the sick by asking them to touch the ailing body part as he prays. This is the work of many modern evangelical preachers — and like TV and radio before it, social media has become a tool to expand a ministry’s reach.

The difference with Wekesa’s church is that it exists only in the virtual realm. Its physical presence sits entirely within his apartment. He rarely meets a congregant in person. On this April night in Nairobi, after three hours of preaching, Wekesa culminates his session with a request for offerings. Audience members can send him funds through the mobile money platform M-Pesa, PayPal, or TikTok’s digital gifting option. In a given month, Wekesa makes between 100,000–300,000 Kenyan shillings ($786–$2,358) from donations, well above the average income in Kenya. “As I’ve spoken, so shall it be,” he concludes. “God bless you. I will see you again tomorrow, and your life will never be the same.” Then he clicks off the livestreams and the LED lights.



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At the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference

I see a piece about attending a cryptozoology conference, I read it. Them’s the rules. Thankfully, this isn’t your average “skeptic heads to a convention center to yuck other people’s yum” takedown. Jason Katz believes in Sasquatch down to his bones, and his faith makes this pilgrimage work even beyond the character sketches.

This absence of harder proof meant that the conference was, predictably, rife with speculation. At the VIP dinner, I sat next to Monica, one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance.  She was sunburnt and wore small round gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia with her partner, Joey, who told me later that she was just there to support Monica’s varying interests. While looking down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese around her styrofoam plate, Monica asked if I’d heard about the latest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch in the Utah desert. Talking about large objects under mesas and anomalies in the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we were at a Bigfoot conference, not storming Area 51. “It’s all connected,” she said, before explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes but rather because Bigfoot travels using interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You can either close your mind,” she told me, “or open it to the very real possibility of infinite dimensions.”



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The Big Life — and Looming Death — of a Rocky Mountain Defender

Drew Anderson profiles Karsten Heuer, a conservationist who has dedicated his life to putting preservation before profit in Alberta, Canada.

In October 2021, Karsten Heuer found himself sprawled on the ground, helpless, at the bottom of an aspen tree.

He had been searching for elk in Alberta’s Bow Valley, perched in a hunting stand nearly eight metres off the ground. Then he fell. He doesn’t know how. He was unconscious, lying on the ground for more than an hour before rescuers arrived.

His back was broken in several places, ribs too; his sternum was cracked and he was struggling to breathe with collapsed lungs.

He was alone in the mountains he loves.

“I wasn’t in pain,” he remembers, sitting in his backyard in Canmore on a June afternoon, sun streaking one side of his still-youthful face. “I was actually okay with it. It was October, the sun was on my back, I could hear trumpeter swans on the lake calling, and other bird songs, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is actually a pretty nice place to die.’ ”

An immensity looms. The bulk of the mountain, the heaviness of what’s to come for Heuer, Allison, their son and their close friends and colleagues.

Bow Valley Engage continues to fight against the massive Three Sisters development. Heuer and his collaborators are awaiting a judicial ruling on an Alberta government decision to skip an updated environmental impact assessment (the original was conducted 32 years ago, long before the current iteration of the proposal). Heuer says the valley and the proposal have changed significantly over those decades.

It is just one of the foundations Heuer has laid for those he will leave behind. He says he has struggled throughout his life to pass tasks on to others, but he’s learning to let that go and make peace with the fact he won’t know how things end.



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We Bought Everything Needed to Make $3 Million Worth of Fentanyl. All It Took Was $3,600 and a Web Browser.

At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers operating through representatives with generic names like “Jenny” will air-ship fentanyl ingredients, also known as precursors, door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough of these chemicals to make 3 million pills. This stellar investigation reveals how drug traffickers are skillfully eluding government efforts to halt the deadly trade fueling the fentanyl crisis, now the top killer of Americans aged 18 to 45:

Reuters couldn’t determine whether any of the Chinese suppliers were the actual manufacturers of the chemicals received or simply middlemen. Nor could the news organization determine where the operations were located. Reporters could dig up nothing more than phone numbers for two of the sellers. For the others, corporate websites and Chinese business-registry documents yielded addresses. But when Reuters visited these locations, it found no visible presence of the companies there.

The address listed in a government database for a precursor seller known as Hubei Amarvel Biotech, for example, led to a Wuhan office tower. A visit to the listed room number showed another company occupying that space, while the building’s management told Reuters that the chemical supplier had never rented space there.

Amarvel is the operation that sales agent Jenny worked for. It is one of three Chinese suppliers that sold Reuters precursors after having been indicted last year by U.S. federal prosecutors. The Justice Department accused Amarvel of exporting “vast quantities” of chemicals used to make fentanyl and similar drugs. Two Amarvel suspects—Wang Qingzhou and Chen Yiyi—are in jail awaiting trial in New York. They have pleaded not guilty. A third, unidentified suspect remains at large.

Wang’s attorney, Leonardo Aldridge, and Chen’s attorney, Marlon Kirton, declined to comment.

A Mexico-based Reuters reporter initially contacted Amarvel via Telegram in July 2023 to inquire about fentanyl precursors, a few weeks after the grand jury indictment was unsealed in New York. Sales agent Jenny denounced U.S. drug policy and the case against the company.

“What we sell is completely legal in China, but the United States always uses this matter to criticize us, and they even pose as buyers to get our information and slander our country,” Jenny wrote in Spanish. “I hate all Americans, they use it (fentanyl) themselves and blame us.”



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Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps

Frustrated with how predictable traveling has become in the digital era, Ben Buckland decided to walk across Switzerland, relying on the hand-drawn maps of locals and strangers to find his way. The result is a lovely essay accompanied by Buckland’s own photographs on serendipity, unexpectedness, living in the moment, and seeing the world through others’ eyes.

This teaches me something unexpected about maps. I was asking people how to get somewhere. But more often than not, what they illustrate were the things to which they pay attention. For these farmers, what is important is the number of doors on the cowshed and the limits to the valley they call home.

Later that day in a cafe in Château d’Oex, I talk to Charlotte, the retired schoolteacher sitting next to me. She orders ice cream for lunch. “I have watched my weight for 60 years and now I don’t care anymore,” she says.

Her map includes the number of meters I’ll need to climb and descend to reach the next valley. She remembers them exactly because she once ran over these passes.

Our attention is a gift. Reading maps is an act of empathy. They tell us as much about the person who made them as they do about the world.



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Tuesday, July 30, 2024

It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil

“The weird thing about growing up in oil country was that I had no idea I was growing up in oil country,” writes Jonathan Blake at the outset of this fascinating piece about Los Angeles’ still-active oil industry. Many have seen the wells near Baldwin Hills—it’s tough to miss them when driving down La Cienega—but fewer are aware of how drilling fields persist a century after the original oil boom, particularly in urban residential settings.

A synagogue with the facade of a theater, a school with the facade of a Brooklyn house, an oil drilling operation with the facade of a synagogue: uncanny architecture that gives no hint of the buildings’ actual uses. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that there is active oil drilling just 125 feet from people’s homes, according to the environmental justice group STAND-L.A., a distance that seemed generous to me when I visited recently. Apartments abut the alleyway behind the tower. Some residents have windows that look onto its ivy-covered walls. Without leaving their homes, neighbors could easily read the number for the emergency hotline on the sign by the door to report a leak. 



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The War Over Safe Drug Supply in Vancouver

At one time, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver had a drug overdose rate of 25 times the national average due to the unpredictable composition of street drugs sometimes laced with lethal amounts of fentanyl and carfentanil. Activists Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicums believe that harm reduction via safe supply is the only way to save lives. So, the pair founded the Drug User Liberation Front. At first, they bought cocaine and opium on the dark web with their own money and gave the drugs away for free. Later, they started a group called the compassion club geared toward safe access to drugs.

This is how the compassion club worked: first, Nyx and Kalicum converted crowdfunded Canadian dollars to Bitcoin, then traded that for Monero, an untraceable cryptocurrency. They used private browsers to access the dark web and, for extra security, operated on private servers, which encrypted their IP addresses. To find online drug vendors, they searched discussion boards where people posted tests of substances they received. Careful to avoid international shipments, they only bought from Canadian vendors with good reviews. After selecting one, they’d order a small amount to confirm its purity. If a sample wasn’t received—or if they got a bad product—they could get a refund. Communication was limited to ordering and address details; the goods were delivered by Canada Post.



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Monday, July 29, 2024

My Mother, the Gambler

From all-night poker games, sports betting, playing the three-number “Italian lottery,” and eventually, taking bets from others in the neighborhood, Victor Lodato recalls the pervasive gambling that went on during his childhood. Until it nearly tore his family apart.

At least I had my mother’s nose, and, more important, I had inherited her belief in magic. Both of us understood that in order to survive it was necessary to arrange things in a certain way. You had to take life’s terrifying unpredictabilities and rally them, by ritual or formula, into an army that would do your bidding.

There was a period of several months when I kept suggesting my mother play the same three numbers. Seven, one, four. Something about that arrangement seemed friendly, not to mention that the numbers added up to twelve, which, when added again—one plus two—gave you three, meaning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I saw no sacrilege in this reference to the Trinity. Gambling, I sensed, was a kind of prayer—though my mother didn’t always direct these prayers toward God. Sometimes she invoked the dead, playing the birth date of a deceased relative, often her grandmother. Such bets were akin to lighting candles in church, which you had to pay for, too. Both transactions were a request to be remembered by Heaven—to be helped, or saved.



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Fear as a Game

From scary movies to roller coasters to extreme sports, there are ways we can scare ourselves—for fun. Why do some people enjoy uncertain, risky, or dangerous situations? In this Believer essay, Elisa Gabbert reflects on her fear of heights, and also explores fear as pleasure, the philosophy of games, and anxiety as a luxury.

I collect this kind of story, the kind that reveals a crack in reality. They give me that skin-tingling feeling, a flutter in the chest. We tell ourselves that roller coasters are perfectly safe and that planes don’t crash. I don’t want it not to be true; I don’t want to die on a plane. So why do I like the stories? It’s like I want my sense of reality to be destabilized. It’s like I’m playing some kind of game, a game in which the complex world falls away and I focus on a single threat. A single strange-but-very-real threat. I can stop riding roller coasters, obviously, but it’s harder to avoid planes or other forms of transportation. Trains do get derailed. Bridges do collapse. So the threats are very real—but not immediate. Not for me, when I’m reading the news, when I’m sitting at my desk.

Is there anything useful about that feeling, I wonder? That artificial fear, or fear at a distance? Might practicing fear be a good idea? It seems more useful than anxiety—if anxiety is just the brain burning energy it doesn’t really need, because you’re not currently starving, or trying to outrun a lion. These may be just concepts, words I attach to agitation, but when I call the feeling anxiety, I’m mapping it alongside paralysis and existential dread. I associate anxiety with stasis, with insomnia, lying supine in bed. Fear, on the contrary, is a vertical feeling. It’s activating. If I’m scared, I want to be moving.



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Friday, July 26, 2024

Universal Mother

For Granta, Momtaza Mehri reflects on the life and legacy of Sinéad O’Connor, on the first anniversary of the singer songwriter’s death.

I suppose that’s why I’ve always been in awe of O’Connor as a musician and a daughter. In publicly exorcising the mother-daughter relationship, she obliterates the hyphen at the cost of her sanity. There’s a reckless porousness to her work, a willingness to return again and again to that garden, locked-out and trembling. Formative nightmares can sometimes fuel you. An artist can decide to have her own baby, despite the stern advice of her record label. She can willingly choose the terror of motherhood. In photoshoots, her belly will protrude. ‘Wear a Condom’, her crop top reads. She will flash a cheeky grin. Her first child will be born three weeks before her debut album.

If you are implicated in everything you witness, and vice versa, then how do you live with yourself? The borders of your personhood become dangerously compromised. Such hyper-empathy can be a perilous position from which to think or live, one with personal and professional costs.



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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A tiny plant shoot emerges from the soil, bathed in a ray of light

In this week’s Top 5:

• A woman who survived the unimaginable
• Whether a school shooter’s parents are legally liable
• A mother’s ordeal, a son’s journey
• The reality of an autism diagnosis in your 40s
• The massive, marvelous ecosystem living in the earth’s crust

1. Emma Carey: The Skydiver Who Survived a 14,000-foot Fall

Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | June 26, 2024 | 5,538 words

Eleven years ago, Emma Carey plummeted 14,000 feet to the ground after a tandem jump with her skydiving instructor went horribly wrong. For ESPN, Ryan Hockensmith takes us through Carey’s life-altering fall. “Emma Carey is flying, and she is so happy,” he writes. “She is 14,000 feet above the earth, gripping the straps of her parachute pack like an excited kid on the way to her first day of school. Oh my god, I’m going to become a skydiver, she thinks, not knowing that just about the most terrifying thing a human being can experience is about to happen to her.” Her accident could have easily taken center stage in this piece. Hockensmith is a skilled reporter and writer who uses evocative detail to tell us so much more than the basic facts of Carey’s accident and the aftermath. He introduces us to Emma and her best friend, Jemma Mrdak. The duo is a “package deal” who did everything together, including skydiving. It’s unclear precisely what happened during Carey’s jump. All she knows is that the main and safety chutes became entangled and neither opened as expected; her instructor landed on top of her, unconscious. She does not blame him for what happened and has kept his name out of news reports in the aftermath. The premise of this story is compelling, but what I loved most is that Carey’s attitude is almost a full-fledged character in this piece. “She began toggling between moments of tremendous gratitude that she’s alive, and tremendous anger at the accident, at the world, at her body, at everything. Sometimes she had a good morning and a bad afternoon. Other times it was a bad 1:52 p.m. and a good 1:53, then a bad 1:54. She just tried to keep getting to 1:55,” Hockensmith writes. This is a gripping story of pure will and determination. While Emma may have lost feeling and partial use of her legs, she is here to tell you that as a person, she is absolutely whole. —KS

2. Guilty: Inside the High-Risk, Historic Prosecution of a School Shooter’s Parents

John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | July 8, 2024 | 8,641 words

This is the second story I’ve chosen for the Top 5 this summer that focuses on the parents of young people who committed mass shootings. The first, written by Mark Follman for Mother Jones, is about Chin Rodger, who is helping experts understand the psychology and behavior of mass shooters in an effort to prevent future crimes, based on her experience with her son, Elliot. The second, by the masterful John Woodrow Cox, is about James and Jennifer Crumbley, who were recently convicted of involuntary manslaughter because they failed to secure the gun that their son, Ethan, used to murder four people and wound seven others at his high school (a gun, it is worth noting, that his parents gave him as a gift). Together, these stories point to new fronts in the effort to combat America’s epidemic of gun violence, and the one Cox depicts is controversial. As the headline of the story notes, the case against the Crumbleys was historic—no parents had ever been held legally responsible for a mass shooting committed by a child—but it was also high-risk. Karen McDonald, the prosecutor who led the cases, faced death and rape threats, as well as doubt from some of her peers. The work consumed her life and that of her colleagues; the need for therapy is mentioned in the story more than once. Cox embedded with the prosecution over many months, which allows him to show in intimate narrative detail what it took to win in court and what was lost in the process. “Before the shooting,” Cox writes, “there was a lightness to McDonald, at least with family and friends, said her 26-year-old daughter, Maeve Stargardt, describing her as a ‘total goof’ who reveled in throwing surprise parties and giving quirky presents. She watched that part of her mom wither. But she’d accepted that’s what her mother needed to become, not just to support four grieving families, but also to overcome the persistent doubts about her decisions.” I found myself commending this sacrifice while also thinking that no one should have to make it. America’s toxic gun culture destroys lives in more ways than one. —SD

3. The Bullet in My Mother’s Head

Ryan Nourai | Esquire | July 24, 2024 | 4,757 words

It does little good to dance around the atrocity, so here goes. Four years before Ryan Nourai was born, his mother was carjacked, kidnapped, and repeatedly raped, then shot twice in the head and left for dead in an alley. She survived, albeit with fragments of a bullet lodged in her brain. Her son knew the bullet part, but little else; only after her death, decades later, did he begin to seek the full breadth of what had happened. “Why,” he writes, “now that she was gone, now that her body was in the next room, was the incident starting to feel closer than ever?” The assailants had long been captured and imprisoned for the attack, so Nourai’s ensuing investigation is more of a howdunit than a whodunit, an effort to fill the lacunae that existed between him and understanding. But as he gets closer, jumping across the years—scattering her ashes, riding with the retired homicide detective who investigated the crime, even speaking at one of the attackers’ parole hearing—you start to realize that closure isn’t the point. Something else is at play here, something shaped like grief but tinted like self-discovery. “I had been trying all along to find out whether her mettle and spark lived in me—and to do that, I thought I had to replicate her pain,” he writes. “Now I knew that wasn’t true.” In unadorned prose, Nourai sketches the boundless length and depth of a son’s love. —PR

4. What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained

Mary H.K. Choi | New York Magazine | July 3, 2024 | 5,906 words

My brother received his autism diagnosis in his late 40s—an important new framing for our family. At the time, I thought such a delayed diagnosis was unusual, but a few years later, I had the honor of editing John Paul Scotto’s Longreads piece about his own late diagnosis, “I Tried to Forget My Whole Life. I’m Glad I Failed.” After the essay was published, Scotto was overwhelmed by the number of people who contacted him to share their affinity with his story; it can be significant to shine a light. When autism was not as well understood, discovery was slower, and many grew up without the knowledge that could have helped to alleviate many difficulties. But it’s never too late to seek answers, as shown yet again by Mary H.K. Choi’s powerful piece for The Cut. Choi explains that even after being diagnosed at age 43, she still grappled with a form of imposter syndrome, writing, “And even if I was officially autistic, was I autistic enough for it to matter? And what did that mean?” She struggles to feel that her diagnosis of ASD level one, the mildest form of autism spectrum disorder, counts despite being able to see—and candidly write about—her anxiety, her awkward moments, and the pain she has caused those close to her. Gradually, Choi comes to terms with how “the disorder is not a spectrum but spectra, a solar system of sprawling constellations in 3-D that differs from one person to the next,” and that it intertwines with her cultural identity and other influences to make her who she is. After so many years of trying to fit a box, she is finally adapting the box to suit her. —CW

5. The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet

Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | June 24, 2024 | 5,966 words

Deep within the Earth’s crust, an ancient underworld teems with intraterrestrial microbes. They’re tiny but mighty, and different from their cousins above ground—breathing rock instead of oxygen, for one. They’re also extraordinary, having carved massive caverns over time, “engaged in a continuous alchemy of earth,” writes Ferris Jabr. They’ve survived the planet’s cataclysmic events over billions of years, possibly even helping to form the continents and lay the foundations for terrestrial life. I’m drawn to writing about Earth that frames its vast geological history in an accessible and beautiful way, and Jabr does exactly this, bringing inanimate rock, and these amazing microbes dwelling deep within it, to life. He explores some of the principles of Earth-system science, which studies Earth and life as a single self-regulating system, and the idea that living creatures—humans, animals, plants, microorganisms—aren’t just products of evolutionary processes, but participants in their own evolution. In other words, he writes, we are Earth. My favorite science writing informs as well as awes. Much like Jabr’s story on the social life of forests, this piece reminds me of the interconnectedness of all things, and challenges and shifts my understanding of this wondrous physical world we live in. —CLR


Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? The envelope, please.

Costco in Cancún

Simon Wu | The Paris Review | July 18, 2024 | 2,841 words

There’s little to be said about wholesale members’ club Costco that hasn’t been said already. (Including in our own pages.) Or so I thought. Simon Wu adds to that prodigious canon by organizing a family vacation to Costco Travel’s most popular and well-reviewed destination: the Mayan Riviera. The result: an essay as thoughtful and selective as a trip to Costco isn’t. —PR



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Thursday, July 25, 2024

Emma Carey: The Skydiver Who Survived a 14,000-foot Fall

Eleven years ago, Emma Carey survived falling 14,000 feet to the ground after a tandem skydive went horribly wrong. For ESPN, Ryan Hockensmith recounts the story and the aftermath, highlighting Carey’s incredible courage and sheer determination in the face of disaster.

She soars for the first half-minute, soaking in her first skydive. About 30 seconds in, she feels a tap on her shoulder, the signal from her instructor to cross her arms to brace for the jolt of her chute going off. She crosses her arms and then … nothing.

She’s not slowing down. She feels a tug on her hair, and she tries to see what the instructor is doing behind her. He’s out cold, unconscious from the ropes attached to the chutes. She can see the chutes, giant chunks of red fabric, flailing around in bunched-up bundles. They’re not supposed to be bunched-up bundles.



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‘We’re Living in a Nightmare:’ Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town

In 2022, a new Bitcoin mining facility made its home in Granbury, a small rural Texas town. The center’s computers, running 24/7, are cooled by thousands of fans, also running constantly. “As more machines were switched on,” writes Andrew R. Chow, “the noise sounded like a ceiling fan, then a leaf blower, then a jet engine.” Granbury’s residents of all ages have experienced a long list of medical issues and emergencies since, including hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, migraines, vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss, ear infections, panic attacks, and more. Even the area’s nonhuman residents—from pets to local wildlife—have shown unexplainable symptoms. Chow reports on the physical and mental health effects of the mine’s noise pollution on the town’s population, and the need for stricter regulation in the state.

At first, residents responded to the intrusion by vacating their porches, retreating inside, and turning up their fans and air conditioners to the max. But many still felt tremors in their beds—including Larry Potts, a 77-year-old retired pastor who lives up the road from the plant. Potts says he stopped sleeping and started losing hearing in both ears. In February, his heart gave out after another sleepless night; he was rushed to the hospital and kept alive by an external pacemaker. There, he was diagnosed with third degree atrioventricular block, hypertension, and depression.

“We’re living in a nightmare,” Sarah Rosenkranz says, sitting at a barbecue restaurant in downtown Granbury on an evening in May. As rock music blares from the speakers and other patrons chatter away, Rosenkranz pulls out her phone and clocks 72 decibels on a sound meter app—the same level that she records in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. In early 2023, her daughter began waking up, yelling and holding her ears. Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away. She soon refused to sleep in her own room. She then developed so many ear infections that Rosenkranz pulled her from school in March and learned how to homeschool her for the rest of the semester.



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Predator or Prey

An illustration of a fish escaping a net.

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Diana Saverin | Longreads | July 25, 2024 | (4,088 words)

1.

An old boyfriend, let’s call him K, used to tease me, saying I wouldn’t make a very good meal—“not enough fat.” He might have been talking about himself, though. He was mostly tendons and veins. 

There was something sensual about killing animals with him. We trapped and hunted together in the winter, commercial fished in the summer. During those long July days, we hammered salmon heads until their bodies stiffened into the pose that preceded death. Fish slime made its way from my cotton gloves up my plastic arm guards, onto my neck, my chin, my hair. All day, my fingers worked fast to yank fish off the net, then pull a gill to bleed them. If we didn’t pick fish fast enough, seagulls would pluck out their eyeballs, seals would tear through their flesh. Most days, we caught hundreds. Some days, we caught more than a thousand. 

I was recently reading an online essay about salmon and stumbled on a photo of myself from one of those summers. I’m wearing ripped jeans, a gray tank top, blue earrings, no shoes. A turquoise headband holds my hair and my skin is as tan as I’ve ever seen it. I look good. Blood cakes my knuckles as I work my knife along a salmon spine. In the corner of the photo, the salmon’s decapitated head sits open-mouthed and unblinking; its eyes stare back at me as I stare into the screen. 

2.

I didn’t grow up killing animals, but there was a period in my mid-20s, the period that overlapped with my relationship with K, when I killed a lot. There was the beaver I retrieved by swimming naked through a half-frozen lake. The duck wings I hung like prayer flags from the porch. The organs we liberated from the belly of the caribou. 

I had qualms. I’d stopped eating meat in high school, citing animal cruelty and climate change. In my 20s, I let my vegetarianism slip when I moved to rural Alaska. Eating caribou roast and moose tacos and salmon burgers seemed different than ordering a steak whose origins as an animal were concealed; these wild creatures led uninhibited lives in vast landscapes. Choosing to eat the calories from their flesh meant not eating something that had flown thousands of miles to reach me. It’s a painful inevitability: the calories have to come from somewhere. 

Desire sharpened my senses, made the rest of the world recede. Desire cut through other parts of my life then, too—it was a time of wanting, wanting, wanting.

Still, my enjoyment in what was a kind of murder troubled me. When I was killing hundreds and at times thousands of salmon a day, I was often having a ball. Sun on my skin, slime in my hair. I was viscerally, unabashedly alive. On land, too, I found stalking entrancing: following a grouse through the forest, slithering on my elbows to sneak up on a goose, watching a beaver lodge for hours. Desire sharpened my senses, made the rest of the world recede. Desire cut through other parts of my life then, too—it was a time of wanting, wanting, wanting. 

I was becoming a hunter.

I tried to pay homage to the lives I took. I learned how to use as much of each carcass as I could—baking trout liver, tanning beaver hides, boiling salmon roe. I made up rituals of thanksgiving, trying with words to honor the bodies I ate. I pushed myself to remember that the food I ate came from someone’s life. I wasn’t always sure it was enough, though. While I’d had a few close calls with other animals stalking me, my main associations with the word “predator” weren’t with carnivores of the tundra. Occasionally, I wondered: did every man who ever turned me into a piece of meat justify it by saying he was grateful? 

At the time, I didn’t think of my relationship with K in such terms. If he was the hunter, that would mean I wasn’t one—it would mean I was his catch. I didn’t want to see myself that way. I wanted to live up to my namesake: Diana, goddess of the moon, the hunt, the wild. 

Still, when K wrapped his arm around me, he named my body parts the way he did with a caribou: brisket, backstrap, hindquarter. Still, when we got together, I was 25. He was 51.

3. 

The killing-animals phase eventually faded. I moved from rural to urban Alaska; K and I broke up; I married my husband, David, who’s never owned a gun. David and I still catch salmon every summer to fill our freezer. We don’t hunt, but we eat meat from moose and caribou and deer that our friends kill. I’m less in touch with my animal self than I once was. The wildness I lived around in my 20s, and the wildness I found within, at some point started to scare me. I got charged by bears on a few occasions. Wolves killed my dog. I thought, for a brief moment, I might end up with K. The danger—the life and death of it all—became too much. Too much hunting, too much killing, too much wanting. 

4.

K used to comment on my body a lot: my curved lip, my crooked toes, my veiny forearms, my toothy smile—like none of a kind, he’d say. He teased when he praised my looks, saying he didn’t want to tell me I was beautiful too often, for fear I’d think he only liked me for my appearance. And yet, he kept telling me how beautiful I was, again and again and again. 

Our romance was unsteady, unmoored; as all of my friends put it, unhealthy. As a few brave friends put it, emotionally abusive. Toward the end, there was a prolonged off-and-on period, which happened to overlap with a particularly intense salmon season. There were moody hours picking fish in silence, staring into the ocean in a rage, wanting to be back on land, wanting to push him in the water. At one point, he told me I’d gained weight when things were too good between us, let myself get soft reading The New Yorker by the fire. He made clear he preferred the version of me whittled down by stress. The ugly thing? I preferred that version of me, too: the sculpted arms, the visible collarbones, the sharp awareness of what was happening around me. I was more active, attuned, alive. Few people are as alert as a hungry hunter. 

The ugly thing? I preferred that version of me, too: the sculpted arms, the visible collarbones, the sharp awareness of what was happening around me.

When things were back on between us, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Sometimes, when waiting for the fishing period to open, or the net to fill with salmon, we’d peel off our Helly Hansens and hide in the sole of the boat just below the bow. The plywood floor was coated in salmon scales and dried blood. 

5.

A big part of my attraction to K was how much he talked about being attracted to me. It scares me, how much I’ve focused over the years, on being desired. It might be why it was such a revelation to briefly identify as a hunter in my mid-20s. 

I was the one doing the desiring. I was the one in control. 

I remember the first time I noticed a truck honk—I must have been 11 or 12. There was a thrill to it, a mix of terror and lust: I was wanted, yet a threat of violence threaded those exchanges. Later, when the honks and whistles grew commonplace, I used to fantasize about pushing back, staring these men straight in the eye and saying don’t fuck with me. I never did, too meek, too scared of what might happen next. Even once I identified as a hunter, it was only in the most marginal of ways. Yes, I could sight in a rifle, identify lynx, wolf, and wolverine tracks, skin a fox, dismantle a ptarmigan. But what happened when a man came onto me and I didn’t want him to? So much of the time, I still tried to be nice. 

About a year after my first boyfriend and I broke up, he messaged me to tell me he’d changed: as he put it, he was less of a predator now. There have been so many times when I thought I’d changed, too, was over and done with scummy men, over and done with being prey, and yet when I was with K, he often joked that I was like an animal he wanted to trap, or an old nasty fish head a fox wants to bury for winter and keep for himself, or a beautiful hummingbird he wanted to cage. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as his prey. I found it exciting, all this talk of how much he wanted me. Exciting, of course, until I started feeling like an animal with a leg clenched in the jaws of a steel trap, eyes wild with rage. Exciting until I started wondering which of us had put me there. 

6. 

I eventually told my parents I was dating a man twice my age who was teaching me how to skin river otters and fry caribou liver. My dad said, “You’re a grown woman, so you can do what you want, but I want you to ask yourself, ‘Am I being used?’” 

Later, when I told K about this conversation, he replied, “Aren’t we using each other? I mean, we’re both having sex.” 

Where is the line between being exploited and fulfilling your own desires?

What I remember less often now, because of the way things ended with me and K, is how much I wanted to be with him—how much I loved being with him. Picnics in the boat, sharing pilot bread, cheddar cheese, dried caribou, smoked salmon, blueberry cake. Evenings listening to Martha Scanlan’s “Seeds of the Pine” on the muskox-skin couch. Mornings watching him build a fire in the barrel stove. We used to eat half of a lingonberry pie after each meal. 

For years, I’ve read about Indigenous traditions around hunting. I have found it comforting to learn of practices that turn predation into partnership, consumption into communion. In Southeast Alaska, the Tlingit people throw salmon bones back to their home river as a gesture of reciprocity, in the hopes that the salmon will come back. In Yupik communities, hunters give the seals they’ve killed a drink of fresh water to quench their thirst. In a Koyukon community, anthropologist Richard Nelson described an elder carrying a plate of meat to her neighbor’s house with a cloth over it. She explained, “It wouldn’t be right to leave this open in the air, like it doesn’t mean anything.” 

I’ve tried to find my own practices to treat meat like it means something. Some days, before eating, I recite the Five Contemplations, Thich Nhat Hanh’s script for mindful eating (“This food is the gift of the whole universe…”). I try to use food that’s available close by, growing a big garden in the summer, picking wild berries and greens from the tundra, putting away gallons of fermented root veggies for winter. I try to celebrate food with careful cooking and vibrant ingredients, smoking salmon bellies and collars with brown sugar and salt, collecting seaweed to sprinkle in miso soups and big pots of rice, tending moose meat as it slow-cooks with apple cider vinegar and star anise. I try to share good food with friends, sitting around a table with salmon filets broiled with sesame seeds, farro with roasted carrots and whipped ricotta, salads with quartered beets and goat cheese, black lentil stews with wilted kale and cubed sweet potatoes. But there is still the question of whether it’s all enough; each summer, I find my fingers wedged in the prickly gills of a salmon, trying to hold the fish still so I can bang a club against the animal’s head—and smiling as I do so. 

It’s not always clear, the difference between a relationship defined by love or predation—or some mix of the two. When I was inside the story with K, I didn’t see it the way my dad did. I saw myself as a hunter, too. 

7. 

K taught me how to set steel traps. We ran a small trapline, killing martens and beavers and foxes. We tried eating fox meat once when we feigned being hungry enough for it. It tasted terrible—predators don’t make very good meals. Usually, we left the carcasses outside the door for ermines to chew on.

One night, after skinning beavers by the woodstove, we heard the cry of a fox caught in a trap on the river. It was midnight and 30 below. We donned headlamps and snow pants and walked the trail down to the shore. K let me kill the animal; I steadied my .22 as he held a spotlight on the thrashing body. I squinted into the scope, inhaled, then exhaled to pull the trigger. The jerking legs released their fight. 

I carried the fox away from the trap site, then skinned him. My hands got stiff with cold as I worked, so I warmed my bare fingers against the fox’s flesh, which was still hot. I later sewed his fur into a pair of mittens, pulling fake sinew tight after each stitch. I jabbed myself repeatedly with the sharp needle, trying not to stain the orange hairs with blood. Those mittens eventually kept me warm on other 30-below nights, when I camped alone on a frozen river, my body prone under the winter sky. A couple of those nights, I had a stomach virus. Puking over the side of my sleeping bag, I feared I might freeze: the thrashing of my desire—to keep living, wanting, killing, eating—stilling into a limp pose of surrender. I knew, then, as I wiped vomit from my lips and shimmied back into my sleeping bag, how quickly my flesh would become meat. The ravens would circle, the wolverine would lumber through the spruce, the foxes and wolves would trot down the river, frosted snouts high in the air. 

8.

Soon after I first started trapping, I wrote my friend Sophie a letter and shared my qualms about killing animals. She replied with a letter about her own experience fishing in Southeast Alaska. Once, when gutting salmon on the boat, she’d decided to keep their hearts separate from the guts she threw into the sea. When she looked up from the filets, she saw a pile of salmon hearts thumping on the counter. Out in the open air, pulled from the cavernous bellies of fish, those hearts continued beating—a heap of pulsation, life holding onto life.

Remembering that letter now, I wonder: what did she eventually do with all those hearts? How do we ever properly honor what we take from other bodies? And how might we make sense of the mix of violence and tenderness, desire and cruelty that sustains us?

9.

In my first year of marriage, I cooked voraciously: red lentil stews, toasted chickpeas with paprika, elaborate lasagnas with butternut squash. I tried to make a pie a week and a friend teased that I should start a blog entitled “Fifty-Two Pies.” David and I planted seeds in a neighbor’s abandoned beds, where our green beans dangled from the vine, the arugula grew leafy and bitter, the kale proliferated so much we had to freeze numerous Ziplocs because we couldn’t keep up. 

We joked, at the time, that we’d been domesticated: we bought sheets and towels, discussed the merits of the Instant Pot, took dozens of pictures of our two sled dogs. We were housesitting that first winter together, and the cabin had a double office in the loft that looked out over a hay field. It was the coldest winter on record in Fairbanks since the 1970s, and ice stitched onto the window, obscuring our view of the snow with frozen crystals in the shapes of stars and ferns. 

I trust David more than anyone I know. He is a very good person, a very good man, so trained in not objectifying me that for years, he rarely commented on my looks. Our engagement came soon after I finally put an end to the off-on period with K. I wanted to anchor in a safe harbor. I wanted to domesticate myself. But domestication hasn’t always come easy: our first summer of marriage, also the first summer of the pandemic, my seasonal work leading backpacking trips was canceled, so I stayed home. I picked 30 gallons of wild berries—18 blueberry, 12 cranberry. Come fall, I spent hours in the kitchen pickling our carrots and beets, making veggie soups to can and freeze. I got scared, as David worked on his laptop downstairs, that my world had become too small, that it wasn’t the pandemic but the word wife that was containing me. 

It was the coldest winter on record in Fairbanks since the 1970s, and ice stitched onto the window, obscuring our view of the snow with frozen crystals in the shapes of stars and ferns.

This is what I’d wanted: to feel safe. To erect sturdier walls between me and animals that might kill me. To have a partner I could trust. I no longer wanted to find myself looking over my shoulder as I skied across the tundra or walked down the street, wondering who might be following me. And I no longer wanted to carry a gun when I ventured out, always ready to turn beings I met into meat. When I walk through the woods now, I no longer stalk or worry about being stalked—instead, I often clog my ears with headphones, pausing every once in a while to refresh email. The other day, when talking to a friend on the phone while wandering nearby trails, I almost stumbled on a cow moose munching on willows. The sight of her blond fur literally brought me back to my senses. Most of the time, I’m not as awake as I once was; danger, and hunger, no longer demand it. I’m grateful to feel safe, to have secure access to good food, and yet I also occasionally wonder: where has the hunter gone? 

10. 

When I was newly enamored of K, I focused on his eyes: green and, if you looked close enough, a splash of yellow around the pupil. 

There were his arms, too, which he knew were a surprise for his age. When we lived together, he spent a lot of time shirtless—puttering around the house half-naked in the middle of an Arctic winter. Maybe he also wanted to be looked at and objectified every now and then, to pretend that he, too, might be considered prey. 

We were living in his home at the time, which was nestled on a hill and surrounded by hundreds of miles of boreal forest and tundra. At the time, it was freeze-up, which meant the river was half-frozen, which also meant there was no way for me to leave if I wanted to. The nearest human, besides us, was 30 miles away. When I remember these details, I sometimes wonder why I considered myself “a hunter” in those years—why I said things like, “I was the one in control.” 

11.

I recently read an article that described the microwave as the most eco-friendly way to cook. When I turned 30, I rediscovered the device after David and I moved into an apartment with one. I hadn’t lived around a microwave since I was a kid. I became obsessed; you can steam a sweet potato in five minutes! You can poach an egg in 55 seconds! You can pop bulk popcorn in six minutes! 

When I was with K, I was in a phase of my life when I was trying to live as far from the nearest highway—and microwave—as possible. It wasn’t unusual for me, during that time, to haul 15 to 30 gallons of water per day. I liked to wait until the temperature dropped below zero to split wood—logs shattered at the slightest tap like candle ice. One spring, when I was alone in a remote cabin, I cried over a salad. As I stared at my plate with the first wild greens of the season, fireweed shoots and willow leaves, I improvised new prayers: Thank you for the bounty and the beauty of the land, the people I love who are both near and far, and the many joys of being alive. By the time I chewed and swallowed, my eyes were wet with tears. 

Despite my current efforts to practice mindful eating, careful cooking, and local harvesting, I still sometimes find myself pushing food into my mouth while standing up or looking at my phone or talking in such animated conversation that I forget to taste the miso-butter brine on the turnips, or the crispy skin of pan-fried salmon, or the sharp bite of ginger in a wakame salad. There are days when I am so caught up in my mind I don’t realize my body is absorbing another body. 

Often, I miss the way hunting demanded my attention, turned my gaze toward the cost of my still-beating heart. I wish I could remember that without having to kill, though. When K and I were in our prolonged off-and-on period, I was also more awake than usual, even if that meant I was more distraught than usual, too. I memorized Rilke poems, journaled furiously, went for multi-hour runs. K’s accusations at the time—mostly that I was sleeping with various other people—were maddening; I thought I was losing my mind. And yet, our reunions were ravenous. I was high and low and rarely anything in between. I felt unmistakably alive.

Often, I miss the way hunting demanded my attention, turned my gaze toward the cost of my still-beating heart.

I don’t have nostalgia for that relationship in the way I do for hunting, even though the process of falling in love and having my heart broken woke me up to the world, too. At this point, I want to feel awake to my surroundings, alive in my relationships, a part of my environment—and also to feel safe. But I don’t want comfort to mean complacency. I still want to feel each meal, each touch, each body I absorb into mine. 

12.  

A few years before I met K, I went diving with a friend in Southeast Alaska. We drove his boat into a small cove and put on wetsuits, and my friend strapped weights to his chest to help him drop down and plumb the ocean floor for sea cucumbers. I stayed near the surface, spectating—neither hunting nor being hunted. I peered through my mask at kelp undulating in the waves. Water gurgled and the whole world seemed somehow far away and too close at once. 

Meanwhile, my friend dove down, his flippers swishing as his fingers sorted through sea stars and sand dollars, looking for the slippery oval beings we hoped to later unravel, cutting thin strips from their bodies, nestling flesh against sushi rice, cucumber, and nori. When you grabbed their bodies, he later told me, they tensed up in your grip. 

The memory returns to me now as I look for an option between predator and prey—some new way to be in contact with the world, with other bodies, with my own body, with wildness and domesticity both. There was still exploitation: the sea cucumbers died; we ate them for dinner. But in the moments in between, there was something else, too: the moon’s pull on the kelp, the invertebrates, my limbs. There was my need to hold my breath and plunge into a beautiful and terrifying place. There was that zip of attention, another being in my palms, the undeniable pulse of something (briefly) alive.


Diana Saverin is a writer and outdoor educator who lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, The Guardian, and others. 


Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin



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Wednesday, July 24, 2024

The Bullet in My Mother’s Head

Thirty-seven years ago, Ryan Nourai’s mother was kidnapped, brutalized, and shot in the head. She would go on to have a son, with whom she shared some—if not all—of what she had endured. Now, after her death, Nourai writes how he came back to her ordeal, tracing her steps and even tracking down the men responsible. A tough read at times, but a tender one.

After my mother died, the incident remained, hanging over everything. Because those twenty-four hours were so horrific and so influential on her life as well as mine, which made them feel both unresolved and dynamic, I fixated on the incident more than I grieved her death. As months passed, then years, I came to believe I could learn about my mother by learning about the incident. Did she find the strength to survive in the faith that she might eventually raise a child? If I could find out the make of the gun, could I know if our relationship ever dulled her pain or chased her nightmares? If I found the names of the two men who shot her, would I feel closer to my mother or further away?



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The Lake Home

In this thoughtful essay Sara Baume recounts visits with painter Mollie Douthit in her studio. There, she gets to witness the evolution of Douthit’s lake home series over time and learn a little about the artist’s process. Along the way Baume discovers that matching vision to product is as challenging for painters as it is for writers.

I always brought the dogs with me and I would grit my teeth as they snuffled around the canvasses and wagged their tails into the partially dried paint. I would try to shoo them away, but Mollie never seemed to mind. Nothing a little linseed can’t fix, she would call out from the kitchen on the other side of the rug. The smell of scented candles, and of food, always filled the cabin – sandalwood, bergamot, fresh bread, toasted seeds, carrot soup with orange in it – and I often wondered if the paintings would look different without the attendant smells. I couldn’t believe that Mollie had no protective feelings toward her work; it seemed rather that she was open to the influence of external forces, accepting of whatever it was that luck had in store. I would be apologetic, but secretly I liked the idea that a strand of hair would adhere itself to the surface of a canvas, leaving a surreptitious signature for a conservator of the future to peel off and ask herself: who was this dog? I had a tendency to search the surfaces of artworks for flaws; I found it exhilarating to locate a drip of coffee – it seemed to me as much a piece of biography as the painting itself.

The deck was red, she said, but it’s brown, I said, and then Mollie explained grounds to me, how she builds colour in coats on the canvas as well as by mixing them on the palette. It influences the shade on top, she said, most of the paintings are yellow beneath the surface, or mossy green, and if there’s any kind of gap it stops the stark white from peeking through. The red of the deck would be richer – righter – because there was brown beneath it.

Looking at the just-begun painting I was struck by the bathos of sandboxes in suburban gardens, by the melancholy act of filling a little pit in a concrete yard with store-bought sand, clean as sugar, and handing a child a plastic spade and a castle-shaped bucket in order to simulate the experience of the tremendous, gorgeous, dangerous ocean. I asked Mollie if there was a shift between what the paintings looked like in her mind before she started work, and what they looked like in the real world, on the canvas, and she barked out a despairing laugh. Trying to align those two things is what the whole of painting boils down to, she said. It is the same trouble with sentences – I always know what I want to say but fashioning it into a string of words that I can type out with my fingers and see with my eyes – that is where the work of writing lies, the torture and the rapture.



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