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
***
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.
***
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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Thomas Hale | Financial Times | November 2, 2022 | 3,902 words
After visiting a bar in Shanghai where a COVID-19 case is detected, Thomas Hale is whisked away to a close-contact quarantine facility on an island somewhere north of the city — “the kind of place that finds you, rather than the other way around.” Hale stays in a small shipping container-like cabin with an iron bed and other basics. (Interestingly, the internet connection is 24 times faster than at his hotel.) Although he never tests positive, he remains there for 10 days, and keeps to a routine that includes language study, work, exercise, online chess, and streaming TV. When he’s able to open his door or wander around, he has conversations with workers and other “residents,” which are captured in the piece as unexpected moments of human connection in an otherwise eerie place. Hale offers a chilling look into China’s zero-COVID approach, which uses constant testing, contact tracing, quarantines, and lockdowns to stop community transmission. This particular facility, “P7,” is one among many, and just a glimpse into a vast monitoring system, workforce, and way of life that most of us outside of China cannot fathom. —CLR
Sam Edwards | Guernica | October 18, 2022 | 2,646 words
In leaving Algiers, Mohammed wanted to escape compulsory military service and seek adventure. He knew there would be danger along the way. “His life at home was bearable, he said. But he wanted something more.” What Mohammed didn’t count on was spending years in a makeshift migrant camp in Spain, as his paperwork winds through the byzantine asylum process. As Sam Edwards reports at Guernica, the delays are punitive and performative; some rich countries want to make it difficult to enter. “Melilla had become a de facto holding cell for asylum applicants — and a symbol of two increasingly common trends in how rich countries handle asylum cases. Refugees are detained ‘offshore’ while their applications wind through the system; wait times drag on as applications pile up, and ‘host nations’ seem to deter future migrants by making those who are already there more miserable.” —KS
Kim Cross | Bicycling | November 3, 2022 | 6,878 words
Whether I’m on my feet or on a bike, I love climbing. Love it. (My wife hates this, especially when we’re hiking and I shift gears without realizing it.) It’s not the pain involved in the effort that attracts me; at least, not entirely. It’s more that the climb — or, rather, finishing the climb — in some way physically embodies the idea that hardship is temporary. It’s mindfulness in corporeal form. But all the lofty platitudes in the world don’t change the fact that I have no earthly idea how Braydon Bringhurst operates. Kim Cross’s profile of Bringhurst and his unfathomable quest to ride up one of mountain biking’s most brutally technical descents, known as The Whole Enchilada, makes that very clear. It’s partially his outlook, honed in part by taking the same sports-psychology class 10 times in college. It’s partially his otherworldly proprieception, which made him excellent at airborne sports from slopestyle skiing to pole vault. But there’s something else lurking in there too, and I suspect it’s the same something that fuels people like Eliud Kipchoge and Alex Honnold: the drive to do the impossible, paired with the absolutely certainty that you can. It’s never not fascinating to read about, and in this case Cross pairs it with an unerring descriptive eye that manages to turn the intricacies of the climb into something we mere mortals can understand. No matter the hill in front of you, you’re bound to take something from this. —PR
Jaq Evans | Truly*Adventurous | October 11, 2022 | 5,334 words
As it sets the opening scene, Jaq Evans’ essay reads like a thriller: As the light fades, two thieves search among the stones atop the Second Mesa on the Hopi reservation. It is a search that is fruitless until one of them sees an unnatural divot. A divot that affects the course of their lives for years to come. It marks the entrance to a cave where the pair find four figurines they later steal, planning to sell them on the black market. The figures are a family: Dawn Woman, Corn Maiden’s Husband, Corn Maiden, and Corn Maiden’s Daughter. Central to the religion of the Hopi, they are regarded as living entities. When they go missing, the Hopi priests hear them crying in the night, longing for home. After the theft, the essay gracefully morphs into a supernatural tale. The thieves see the faces of the figurines in their dreams and struggle with misfortune after misfortune. Desperate for a release from what they see as a curse, they sell the family of deities at a cut price — but still, remain haunted by them. I, too, found myself haunted, gripped by their story, hoping for an ending where they all return home together. Discovering their true fate was a gut punch. —CW
Matti Friedman | Smithsonian | November 7, 2022 | 5,377 words
I love visiting supermarkets while traveling, perusing aisles of foods both familiar and not. An Armenian grocery in the San Fernando Valley introduced me to pinecone jam. A store in Bishkek surprised me with its wide array of ketchup options. Then there was the supermarket in Abu Dhabi that boasted a bar filled with nothing but dates: big ones, small ones, stuffed ones, fresh ones — and in a rainbow of brown or orange hues. Until then, I’d had no clue there were so many varieties. Matti Friedman’s feature about the sumptuous fruit is equally surprising and instructive. It traces the date’s history from ancient times to the present and posits that the fruit tells the long, complicated story of the Middle East. Friedman takes readers on a tour of mythology, architecture, and empire; inside a Jurassic Park-style genetic experiment involving “resurrected” date palms; and into the halls of an agricultural conference about the future of the date in a fraught world and changing climate. By the end of reading this piece I felt enriched — and hungry. —SD
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Isabel Quintero writes a lovely personal essay about divorce, longing, tacos, and Mexican cuisine and culture. (Careful if you read this when you’re hungry — I really wouldn’t be surprised if you were salivating by the end of it!)
I could have ordered asada or buche, but the al pastor eclipsed everything else. It was like the first time I had good sex—I didn’t know it could be like that. I ate seven tacos. I didn’t want to stop but my body told me to keep going and I listened to my body. Nothing I’d eaten in an empty lot or at liquor store counter or food truck in California compared to the level of excellence that was served to me on a bright blue plastic plate. I watched the taquero slice with such swiftness that his knife was not a tool but an extension of his thick brown arm. These tacos had to have been made by hands that inherited this particular kind of magic making.
Is it a profile? A testament to the power of sports psychology and positive thinking? Sure. But it’s really the story of how a single human being does something that seems functionally impossible: riding a mountain bike up one of the most technically demanding descents known in the sport. (Watch the documentary embedded along with the story for the full Free Solo experience.)
Riding down it was a double-black-diamond tantrum. It zigged and zagged down a slickrock cliff that scraped the edge of a mesa. The prelude was an off-camber cascade with a steep hairpin turn to the right. After a chunky narrow chute came the moment of truth and pucker: a nearly 180-degree switchback on the precipice of a cliff. Trying to turn would jackknife the bike, so most riders would brake to a standstill, then try to hop and pivot. The final descent hugged a handlebar-scraping wall and plummeted down two slickrock slabs as steep as playground slides. The sandstone was blackened by skidding tires and polished by sliding butts.
On the eve of its series finale, Justin Charity engages with the most sneakily influential show to hit television since Tony Soprano started therapy. There’s no limit to my love for Atlanta, but don’t let the color your decision to read this; it’s no flowery paean to the program. Instead, it’s a peeling-back of the impulses and contradictions that made creator Donald Glover the perfect pugilist to step into the ring at the very peak of Peak TV.
The show thrived on the strength of its contrarian impulses. If the rest of respectable television was going to become synonymous with movie-length episodes, then Atlanta would pack its prestige into a good, old-fashioned 24 minutes. If other shows would chase middlebrow magazine raves, then Atlanta was going to primarily obsess over its standing with the average Black viewer. If other race-conscious works of the past few years would treat Blackness and whiteness as relentlessly solemn concerns, then Atlanta would tackle race with the utmost irreverence and ambivalence; the viewer would struggle, or perhaps not even care, to discern what exactly the writers’ room was “trying to say” with the chaotic scene of looters laying siege to a Target while Darius tries to return an air fryer in the opening minutes of the fourth-season premiere.
Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes)
Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, though you’d never know that, scrolling online. The back cover even features a blurb by Don DeLillo. Let’s linger on it.
I remember the bookstore, long gone now, on Forty-Second Street. I stood in the narrow aisle reading the first paragraph of The Recognitions. It was a revelation, a piece of writing with the beauty and texture of a Shakespearean monologue—or, maybe more apt, a work of Renaissance art impossibly transformed from image to words. And they were the words of a contemporary American. This, to me, was the wonder of it.
There’s a lot to like about this blurb. There’s the spectacle of one great novelist plumping for the work of another. There’s the real-time search for the right words (“or, maybe more apt”) and the wonderful ones arrived at (“a work of Renaissance art impossibly transformed from image to words”). There’s the subtext of a green writer, a budding DeLillo, stumbling on the kind of writing he hadn’t thought was native to his American soil, something he didn’t even realize he was searching for. “And they were the words of a contemporary American,” he tells us, in awe. “This, to me, was the wonder of it.” There’s a bildungsroman buried in DeLillo’s blurb.
But then there’s that opening bit, which the blurb could reasonably live without. “I remember the bookstore, long gone now, on Forty-Second Street,” writes DeLillo, eating up precious back-cover real estate.
Why recall the bookstore where he first read the opening paragraph of The Recognitions? Perhaps the paragraph was so brilliant it imprinted the moment on DeLillo’s memory as if on film. Perhaps it was a Proustian madeleine, a prod to memory. Or maybe the bookstore itself played a part in DeLillo’s first encounter with The Recognitions. Maybe something in the very plaster pulled him to Gaddis’s book. Whatever the case, the bookstore had stuck with him. Stuck to him. Paragraph and place had fused in the novelist’s mind.
I can certainly remember where I was when I first encountered a great many of my favourite books. I never meant to keep these memories; I seem to have had no say in the matter. The bookstores, my mind decided, were important: the setting for a bildungsroman.
For instance, I remember standing in Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore—“long gone now,” to lift DeLillo’s line. It was around 1996, and I was considering a paperback copy of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. The cover, you see, had cried out to my teenage self. A ninja type, sword raised, stands before an arch of ancient brickwork, bulging with duelling bulls in relief. But beyond the arch, across a plain of circuitry, a futuristic skyline awaits. Above the title, a header declares the book to be “THE #1 SCIENCE FICTION BESTSELLER,” the definite article doing some work. Below the title, a blurb from something called Los Angeles Reader (also “long gone now”) is blunt: “Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage with this novel.”
On the back cover, there’s a vote of confidence from William Gibson no less, maybe my favourite writer, plus other appealing endorsements. “A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” says one blurb. A “gigathriller” sporting a “cool, hip cybersensibility,” says the publisher’s copy. Hey, it was the 1990s.
I stood there, holding the paperback. The World’s Biggest Bookstore was low-ceilinged and harshly lit, with many rows of orange shelves. The building itself had two floors, one entrance, and a long approach, and there was usually a homeless person right by the doors, so you had time to root for change or steel yourself, especially if you were a shy, naive kid from the suburbs. It wasn’t as obviously welcoming as the tony megastores of today, like Indigo, which dedicate a lot of space to pillows, candles, and Starbucks (though I seem to recall the World’s Biggest, late in its life, grudgingly attempting a café—a counter with a few tables).
I’ve never thought about a book I own and then recalled where I was when I ordered it off a website.
Still, you could linger there for hours because of the sheer volume of books. Tongue in cheek, the store marketed itself as an admirably shabby foil to its competitors: “We occasionally have soft mood lighting. But then we replaced the burnt out fluorescent tubes.” World’s Biggest was about the books, shelves and shelves of them. When my father and I were downtown, we’d often arrange to split up for an hour or so, then meet at the bookstore. If one of us was late, the other would have more than enough to occupy himself with. This was before smartphones, when killing time took creativity.
Anyway, perhaps I looked like I was on the fence, because a passing employee paused long enough to inform me that the book I was holding was excellent. I remember a thin, middle-aged woman with jet-black hair, bearing a stack of books. I want to say she was wearing the sort of apron bookstores foist on their staff, and black shoes, maybe even Doc Martens. She gave off the vibe of a mostly reformed Goth, someone who’d dabbled in dark arts or, at least, Neil Gaiman comics. I immediately decided she was childless, a serious reader, trustworthy, and very cool. I bought the book.
As I grew older and spent more time with friends, I tried to continue the practice of arranging to meet at large bookstores, where the early worm might browse for a bit. But World’s Biggest—which was owned by Coles, a chain eventually absorbed by Indigo—was torn down in 2014. You could buy a latte at the newer, upscale stores. You could retreat to a comfy chair or even listen to live music on an actual piano. But standing around under strong lighting— basically loitering as you waited for ex-Goth angels, clad in dark raiment, to descend and offer guidance—was off brand and off the table.
I’ve never thought about a book I own and then recalled where I was when I ordered it off a website. Perhaps I was sitting at the dining room table. Perhaps I had my laptop on the sofa. Screens absorb and disperse us. When we’re online, we’re everywhere—and nowhere.
It could’ve been otherwise. When William Gibson minted the term “cyberspace” in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome,” he imagined something like an internet, but in spatial terms. You “jacked in” using an Ono-Sendai VII deck and a pair of trodes, the trodes held in place by a “white terry sweatband.” Here is one of Gibson’s characters, a hacker, describing cyberspace.
A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent. . . . Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data.
Gibson’s vision of linked computers was prescient, but quaint too. Cyberspace was still a “somewhere,” a grid populated with “bright geometries,” a terrain to navigate, to move through.
A decade later, in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson refined Gibson’s idea and proposed the “Metaverse” (no relation to Mark Zuckerberg’s). Accessible via goggles, the Metaverse is organized around the so-called Street, a “grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than the Earth.” You can customize your avatar, but be warned: “cheap public terminals” produce a “jerky, grainy black and white.” There are “vast hovering overhead light shows” and “free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.” You can “write car and motorcycle software” and take your “software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.” In the Metaverse, the code’s the limit.
We’ve grown used to this atomized, blinkered arrangement, each of us in our carousel, fed by our feed. We’ve acclimated to online shopping, to typing in the title of a book and being hustled straight away to its unique page.
We didn’t get these sci-fi internets, of course. We didn’t even get the internet as originally advertised. (The early, buzzy metaphors—“information superhighway,” “surfing”—promised dynamic motion.) Instead, we got an endlessly metastasizing stack of two-dimensional pages—and browsers to sort them. But then the language of “browser” is a feint as well. You don’t “browse” the internet. You don’t move through it. It’s a galaxy’s worth of content with none of the space. It’s infinite density. You either already know what you want to see (and duly type in the URL) or you try the search bar, which can bring up millions of possibilities. You can keep many different browsers open at once, fanned out like cards from decks of different provenance, a bespoke set specific to your needs. Miraculous, sure, but you’re never quite somewhere. There are no aisles, no vistas, no long views.
We’ve grown used to this atomized, blinkered arrangement, each of us in our carousel, fed by our feed. We’ve acclimated to online shopping, to typing in the title of a book and being hustled straight away to its unique page. We’ve given up the journey for the destination. We’ve achieved two-dimensional teleportation.
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There was something steadying, though, about standing in an actual, cavernous bookstore and taking it all in. Your fellow customers shared a room and a set of options. The scale was human, and the stock was present. Some of it disappeared from day to day as people purchased books. But you had to walk past the stuff you thought you didn’t want to reach the stuff you thought you did. Thus, you could stumble on something you hadn’t set out for. (I’d never heard of Snow Crash the day I picked it up.)
Or you could cozy up to a title slowly, over time, flirting with the idea of it. I remember visiting a copy of the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, over and over. It resided at The Book Company in Sherway Gardens. I’d won a high school English prize, and my teachers had arranged a gift certificate for the store. Thirty dollars, if I recall. A fortune for a teenager in the 1990s.
There’s plenty of information about the World’s Biggest Bookstore online, but there are only two hits on the entire internet that remember, by name, The Book Company at Sherway Gardens. The store seems to fall within what writer Tom Scocca calls
the Internet Event Horizon, the gap between those things that were around to be incorporated in real time into the eternal present of the World Wide Web, and those pre-Web things that were old enough that the World Wide Web reached back and made note of them for their nostalgia value.
The first hit, a blog post, features a digitized Polaroid snapped at a 1990 Douglas Adams book signing. The blog’s text describes the store as “a lavish, decadent shrine to literature, swathed in dark, classy forest green”—a shade purple, that, but it confirms my memories. The second hit, on Reddit, is about the exact same signing and references “a now-extinct bookstore in Sherway Gardens, The Book Company.” Worryingly, both blog and Reddit post are by the same author. Are we the only two who remember? (It turns out there were a few other Book Companies, including one in Ottawa which the Indigo Empire gobbled up and eventually shuttered.)
In any case, my teenage self had judged The Book Company in “dark, classy forest green” a serious store, and Gravity’s Rainbow a serious novel. I’d been eyeing it for some time, the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition, with mint green spine, V2 rocket blueprints for a cover, and that iconic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt quote on the back, which might’ve invented the very idea of desert islands:
Fantastic! . . . Fantastically large, complex, funny, perplexing, daring, and weird . . . If I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, this would have to be one of them.
“Weird,” indeed; the plot summary described a book whose main character’s “sexual conquests” are correlated to “V-2 rocket bombs . . . falling on London . . .” Clearly, Gravity’s Rainbow was a classic of some kind, but kooky too. Contraband hiding in plain sight. Words for a high school student to get high on.
I’d been circling the book for some time. (I’d also been circling the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics Ulysses, with the cover shot of James Joyce in Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookstore that published the novel’s first edition.) The Gravity’s Rainbow was in mint condition—except for a small white crease in the upper right-hand corner of its cover. Sign of in-store manhandling? Minor mishap at the printer? I was fussy about my books, and the crease had been bothering me, which is why I’d been reluctant to close the deal. The crease was a barrier to cross.
Nearly twenty-five years later, the book is still with me. It’s yellowed some, and the corners have lost their crisp points. The spine stayed smooth (I never crack a spine if I can help it), but I worry about the cover, which is beginning to show signs of detaching. The crease is still there, of course, a little creek I’ve learned to live alongside. Surely every Gravity’s Rainbow should have one.
A few years later, I was browsing in Pages, an independent bookstore in downtown Toronto. By this time, my passion had passed from fiction to poetry. And yet I’d struggled to admire Canadian poetry or, rather, the attenuated version my profs had been pushing in university. A species of free verse bordering on plain speech, Canadian poetry waved o the metaphor and music—too florid. Instead, it counted itself direct and unshowy. It even seemed to take perverse pride in its lack of vision. “The animals / have the faces of / animals,” says one Margaret Atwood poem, coolly, as if avoiding description were a positive; as if conjuring a blank in the reader’s mind were an act of courage. Canadian poetry was as scrubbed of formal texture as a prairie.
But there seemed to be an embargo on saying as much. Canadian poetry was a duty read. A pity read. It demanded patriotism and kid gloves. Book stores gave the frail stuff its own shelf, isolated from the other poetry. Anthologies like Gary Geddes’s 15 Canadian Poets x 2 kept Canadian poetry on life-support. Homegrown garlands, like the Governor General’s Award, were gently placed.
All of this I understood half-consciously, somewhere in my gut, where the acidic feelings churn. But a military-educational complex had arisen around the work of Atwood, Al Purdy, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson, and so many other socially approved mediocrities. A campaign of bad opinions—reinforced by journalists, prize committees, and academics—can buffet one’s confidence. You can start to second-guess yourself. It’s not the poems, it’s you.
It was in this mental climate that I lifted Carmine Starnino’s book of essays A Lover’s Quarrel off the new releases table at Pages, leafed through it, and felt a crackle of kinship. Here are the first few sentences:
I want to do this right, and the best way to begin is to fess up to reservations. Luckily, I have a few. Chief among them is whether these previously published reviews, stacked a decade deep, are interesting enough to survive the second life I’ve forced upon them. Such resurrectionist strivings have always seemed suspect to me. Past its occasion, a review’s relevance isn’t likely to run very high, and it’s a rare opinion that, appearing imperishably robust on first print, doesn’t evaporate into vapidity when invited back for a permanent stay between covers. I can only hope that’s not the case here. I’ve also been put on notice by the fanaticism with which others have fattened similar collections.
It was the style that struck me—the image of “published reviews, stacked a decade deep,” the barely concealed rhyme in “evaporate into vapidity,” the wicked alliteration of “fanaticism” and “fattened.”
Perhaps this is what browsing bookstores will be like in the future. Still, I’d give up my vision of aerodynamic pods and virtual aisles for a few more afternoons among the grubby orange shelves of the World’s Biggest Bookstore.
I hadn’t been looking for A Lover’s Quarrel that day—I hadn’t even known it existed. But Pages had armed me with an IED of a book. Here was a critic exploding pieties and expressing the very doubts I’d long kept contained in my mind. Here was a critic dragging Canada’s past for the worthy poets we’d cast off, the poets whose work hadn’t fit our narrow definition of Canadian poetry. Surely someone had erred in placing Starnino’s subversive book in plain view.
That was the joy of an indie like Pages; it stacked the Starninos on the sort of precious prominent real estate a larger chain reserves for the bestsellers that need no help finding readers’ hands. That is, Pages stacked the deck in favour of the quirky, the prickly, the heroically uncommercial. In favour of discovery. A Lover’s Quarrel never shifted that many units; it was never going to be a Heather’s Pick. But its dissident sensibilities riled and reshaped a generation of poets and critics.
Sadly, Pages vanished a few years later, in 2009, a victim of Toronto’s swelling rents. But Starnino’s book had left its blast crater.
Imagine a version of the contemporary web laid out before us, like Gibson’s cyberspace or Stephenson’s Metaverse. Picture an endless plateau, planed flat, with aloof skyscrapers: a gleaming city in draft, a Dubai dispersed. That giant #1 on the horizon is YouTube, that tower of shipping boxes, Amazon. Smaller structures suggest modest websites: businesses, blogs, and more. The buildings roll away, as regular as dominoes, around the horizon. Occasional fissures, venting steam, allude to the catacombs of the dark web.
In this vision, your browser is a pod. You punch in coordinates and zip around at light-speed, passing smoothly through other browsers, whose hulls turn transparent at your approach, as in the Metaverse. Hyperlinks are wormholes: tunnels of swirling light.
One wormhole wings your pod across a digital Atlantic and deposits you in front of a quaint green building on the banks of a pixelated river. Other quaint buildings surround it but are spaced apart to accommodate pods. (It’s as if someone clicked on the edge of a city and dragged it, distending space itself.) You are now at the online shop for Shakespeare and Company, on the banks of the Seine in Paris. It’s never closed, and the door is decoration: you float cleanly through it.
Inside, your pod hangs like a wasp, scanning spines. You move down the centre of aisles like a Steadicam shot in Kubrick. You alight on the roof of a stack of books, rising from the new releases table. The store senses that you’re squinting at something—the new Sally Rooney. The cover sharpens. Text boxes bloom in midair—blurbs, hot takes, a JPEG of the Irish author, a throbbing BUY NOW button. You look away, and the book dims, the boxes closing like tulips.
Time travel is an option here. You toggle to a 1922 version of the store, managed by the long-gone Sylvia Beach, and scrutinize a first edition of Ulysses, with blue cover, the one James Joyce’s first reviewers likened to a phonebook. In microseconds, Shakespeare and Company’s invisible AI, lurking on some server, has worked up a précis on the available copies, including prices and comps from recent auctions.
Perhaps this is what browsing bookstores will be like in the future. Still, I’d give up my vision of aerodynamic pods and virtual aisles for a few more afternoons among the grubby orange shelves of the World’s Biggest Bookstore.
I’ve bought plenty of books online, books that have come to mean something to me. But location matters to our minds. We all have personal associations—individual, inner text boxes—which float above certain objects. They can’t be swatted away. “I remember the bookstore,” begins Don DeLillo. He will never forget it.
Writing this essay, I was surprised to find myself growing emotional. Google’s supply of images of the World’s Biggest Bookstore conjured a lost civilization and its peoples, including memories of teachers I adored, my late father, and other ghosts. What had I been doing while the civilization crumbled? I’d been busy, I suppose—with grad school, a failed marriage, career, a new marriage, kids, poems, essays. By 2021, many of the bricks-and-mortar bookstores I’d browsed in my youth were gone.
But some, like Bakka-Phoenix Books (an indie specializing in sci-fi and fantasy) and Book City (an indie chain), survived. Plus, new shoots have sprung up: Ben McNally Books in 2007, Queen Books in 2017, a Type Books here and there. The stores tend to be in high-density, gentrified, and walkable neighbourhoods. (The suburb I grew up in will likely never draw a Type, with its trendy totes, to the local plaza.) And the new stores aren’t as desirably dingy as, say, Pages. I’m glad they exist, though. They’re offering sanctuary and succor to the next generation.
Consider Ben McNally Books, which started out in Toronto’s financial district, in the sort of high-ceilinged, chandeliered, and ornately columned space once reserved for banks. (It has since decamped east.) Ben McNally offers a thoroughly grownup browsing experience, with beautiful wooden shelves, excellent non-fiction and poetry sections, and book launches. (It has even launched yours truly.)
The point is the paper, the poignantly musty smell of the past. E-books and NFTs have yet to figure out how to yellow handsomely with age.
But the shop’s most valuable contribution is its calm, authoritative curation. I recall the Ben McNally shelf dedicated to the NYRB Classics imprint—the very same imprint that revived The Recognitions. (NYRB Classics is to literature what the Criterion Collection is to film: a prestige label addressed to connoisseurs.) What a delight to discover a bookstore that had corralled the imprint’s individual titles in one section. (What an innovation: curation by publisher!) Different but brilliant books that demand discovery—like Arthur Schnitzler’s Late Fame and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts—always make more sense grouped together. A well-curated indie like Ben McNally helps you make those connections. It hyperlinks its wares the old-fashioned way.
Or consider the new bookstore in the east end of my city, the Scribe. Defiantly launched during the pandemic by Justin Daniel Wood, the Scribe is a vintage concern devoted to the exquisitely old: to first editions, signed books, and antiquarian delights. What I’ve most enjoyed, though, is turning up affordable books that have gotten harder to source in bricks-and-mortar shops, like, say, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather, a 1994 sci-fi novel about tornado chasers (which I remember first spotting at World’s Biggest). The first edition I picked up at the Scribe happens to be signed, but I was happy just to have found a reading copy.
You can’t scroll through a formal catalogue, but the Scribe updates online photos of its shelves every week so that, in the words of its website, “you can browse from your living room couch.” But there’s no substitute for standing on the Scribe’s antique hardwood floor and hefting a beautifully preserved, out-of-print book in your hand. Plus, you can’t always believe your eyes when scrolling—someone might’ve already borne away the book you’re eyeballing—but you can believe them when browsing. The real world never struggles to load content. The real world never freezes.
Whether you choose to visit the Scribe in vintage flesh or shelter at home and squint at pixelated spines, Wood’s store is selling something special: a product we want precisely because it occupies space, because it came from a printing press and survived its early handlers. It’s a relief, really, to encounter something that doesn’t have a digital doppelgänger—a digital solution. The point is the paper, the poignantly musty smell of the past. E-books and NFTs have yet to figure out how to yellow handsomely with age.
Still, Toronto’s renaissance aside, it’s hard not to miss the specific stores that once offered my young self sanctuary and succor. They weren’t just stores, after all; they were hothouses that helped me grow into a reader and writer. How often the aisles, back then, steered my aimless mind. How often I simply stood around, still, as if I were potted, thumbing through a book I knew nothing about. Sometimes I was waiting for someone, sometimes I was on my own. But there was no way for anyone to reach me. How wonderfully subversive it was to feel like I was alone in a city. No alerts, no pop-ups. Just the press of books all around, the world distilled to words on a page.
There’s a postscript to the Snow Crash story. Not long after buying it, I loaned it to a high school classmate. The book came back a mess: cover scuffed, spine cracked, edges blunted. The classmate wasn’t a fetishist—just a reader. My (eternal) bad: handing the book over, I had failed to convey my fussiness.
The book stayed with me, but the state of it needled. So, a few years ago, I decided I’d try to source a new copy of the same nineties-era edition. A mint copy to supplement the mangled one. Snow Crash had since wriggled into and out of several cover designs, but I didn’t want any of them. I wanted the one commended to me by the ex-Goth angel.
I tried different websites. None was very promising. You could certainly find a copy, but I couldn’t seem to secure a mint specimen, and anyway, I didn’t trust these faceless sellers’ descriptions of the state of their stock. This was a mass-market paperback from over twenty years ago. How many decent copies had even made it into the twenty-first century?
Reader, after many months of searching, having abandoned the internet, while browsing She Said Boom! (exclamation point theirs), a used book and record store in Toronto, browsing in the flesh, alone, just before the pandemic—I found my out-of-print Snow Crash. Not only was it in pristine condition, but it also seemed to have been opened exactly once when its original owner had slipped the receipt in the inside cover. I know this because the receipt was still there; it had left a rectangle of white on the browned cardstock, indicating where it had turned back the slow creep of light and air.
The receipt was dated 1995. Printed at the top, in ink that had dried a quarter of a century ago, were the words “World’s Biggest Bookstore.”
This essay appears in Jason Guriel’s collection On Browsing, which will be published on November 15, 2022, by Biblioasis Publishing.
Jason Guriel is also the author of Forgotten Work (Biblioasis 2020) and other books. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Air Mail, Slate, ELLE, and elsewhere. He lives in Toronto.
