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Mowing the Lawn to Map the Ocean Floor, One Long, Slow Pass at a Time

A scuba diver explores an old, wooden shipwreck in Lake Michigan. The waters of the Great Lakes are so cold that they preserve the many wrecks on bottom.

Related underwater reading: Gene and Sandy Ralston use specialized sonar on their boat to locate bodies under water.

As Matthew Braga reports at The Verge, we’re flithy rich with land maps, ones that show us “how the planet has changed, and how we’ve changed the planet,” over time, but that’s not the case where land is covered by water. The treasure trove of information to be gleaned from mapping the world’s oceans could help scientists understand climate change. Enter BEN, an automated map-making boat Braga met while it plotted Lake Huron. According to Braga, “we’ve mapped just 9 percent of the world’s oceans to modern standards,” which is “why BEN and vehicles like it hold so much promise.” (Note, the fantastic illustrations in this piece were done by the incomparable Zoë van Dijk. Check out some of her illustrations for Longreads.)

It was just past midnight when the Ironton punched a 200-square-foot hole in the side of the Ohio. It was dark, the waters were rough, and the Ohio, a wooden bulk freighter loaded with flour and feed, was no match for the Ironton, a schooner heavy with coal. The Ohio sank within half an hour, and the Ironton soon followed, taking five of its crew down too.

Their ghostly hulls have sat largely undisturbed at the bottom of Lake Huron since colliding in late September 1894 — just two of the many wrecks that lie in a treacherous stretch of water called Thunder Bay off Michigan’s northeastern coast. Some are so well preserved by the lake’s frigid freshwater that their unbroken masts point definitely towards the surface, rigging still intact. Others have dishes in the cupboards, a century late for dinner. A few years ago, local media reported that divers found a 1927 Chevrolet Coupe amid the wreckage of a steamship, covered with algae and barnacles, but nonetheless pristine. You can thank the rocky shoals, frequent fog, and sudden gales of Thunder Bay for turning what was once the bustling marine interstate of America’s early industrial age into a modern-day museum of Great Lakes maritime history. Locals called it “Shipwreck Alley.”

Divers flock from all over the world to see the wrecks for themselves each year — and last spring, they were joined by an unusual interloper: an autonomous boat named BEN. BEN is a self-driving boat that’s been tasked with making maps, and it was brought to Thunder Bay to help lay bare the long-lost secrets of the lakebed.

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The Man Who Lived in a Hole in Hampstead Heath

A man walks across snow-covered Hampstead Heath, London, United Kingdom (Photo by Tim Graham/Getty Images)

He was a local handyman with a bone disease which ended his work as a stage hand. He was a regular at The Garden Gate pub who enjoyed an ale in the evenings. At the end of those pub evenings Dominic Van Allen went home — to a bunker he’d dug and fortified, well hidden in the brambly section of Hampstead Heath. It was warm, safe place to sleep and enjoy a bowl of soup re-heated on his stove.

As Tom Lamont reports in this fascinating piece at The Guardian, Van Allen wasn’t destitute. He earned a little money doing odd jobs, but there was no way he could earn enough to pay notoriously high rents in London. He wasn’t an addict or mentally ill, and because so many Londoners are far worse off, Van Allen ‘”never quite reached the top of anybody’s list, and was eventually told: “It’s unlikely you’ll get housed.”'”

Still: it came as a surprise, one ranger told me, when they came across a patch where steam was rising out of what ought to have been solid ground.

He would never plausibly make London rent. Social housing was just out of reach. A mortgage purest fantasy. Van Allen had taught himself, instead, how to borrow a piece of this expensive city, night by night, on unarranged loan.

Halfway along the footpath, he turned off again, this time stepping directly into dense bramble. He found a narrow gulley that had been cut between the thorns and followed it through a zigzag turn to a small clearing, where he bent in the dark and patted the earthy floor. There – a concealed hatch. Van Allen tugged it open with his fingers and descended into the ground, closing the hatch behind. Below, he flicked on lights at a switch. He hung up his coat.

There was space in the bunker for two camp beds, pushed against opposite walls. In the 4ft gulley between the beds, Van Allen could stand, comfortably enough, without his head scraping the trussed timber roof. The floor underneath him was poured concrete. He’d put up hooks for his coat, his bag and his cooking utensils, and there were shelves by the bed for odds and ends. Push-button LED lights were stuck to the walls using tape. There was a portable gas stove down here, and now that Van Allen was in for the night, he lit it and emptied a can of soup into a pan. After eating, he washed up with wet wipes. Litter was tied inside plastic bags, to be spirited away to a distant bin, early tomorrow, before the heath’s park rangers came on duty.

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“Follow Along,” or How to Learn Flamenco Guitar with a Tocaora

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For more from Lavinia Spalding, read her Longreads essay, The Cabin.

I’ve been studying guitar for three years now and electric bass for nine months. There’s something special about the happy hours of focus I spend to earn any proficiency, whether it’s to learn a new concept or chord voicing, improvise a jazz phrase, or glean a bass line from an old blues tune.

As a child guitar prodigy, Lavinia Spalding knows this love, devotion, and satisfaction well. She studied with her father — one of the few students of the greatest flamenco guitarist of all time, Paco de Lucía — until she became a teen and the need for friendship overshadowed her love of guitar. Spalding’s father had infused her not only with musical acumen but also possibility; he had wanted her to become the rarest of flamenco musicians, a tocaora — a female flamenco guitarist.

In this beautiful essay at AFAR about family, relationships, commitment, and above all, the love of studying and playing music, Spalding recounts how she travelled to Spain to study flamenco in person with three of the country’s most celebrated tocaoras.

Tell people in the United States that your dad studied with Paco de Lucía, and they’ll smile. Here in Andalusia, they’ll gasp. Their eyes will bug out. They’ll want to hug you. Pilar is no exception. When I show her my dad’s transcription, I might as well have unveiled a sacred relic. “It’s glorious,” she says, poring over it. “Magnífico.”

Leafing through my folder of sheet music, however, she acts like I’ve thrust rotten chicken under her nose. She’ll happily instruct me in the ways of soleares, but this?! No. When she demonstrates a compás, the rhythm she intends to teach me, her hands become birds—darting and fluttering, dipping and swooping, graceful, furious.

“OK,” she says. “Now follow along.”

To be clear, there is no chance I can do this.

And as I struggle, regret creeps in. How could I have quit—twice—such an important part of my life?

But during our second lesson, something happens. While showing me how to connect a compás to a falseta, Pilar suddenly begins playing a melody my father taught me 15 years ago. A delicate, lively string of single notes, it’s as familiar as a lullaby. “That!” I shout. Tears blur my eyes, and then my fingers are plucking along as fast as hers. It’s as if a spirit has been summoned to return me to guitar. It’s as if a missing piece of me is back.

But I do remember, finally, what it means to be musical. To concentrate deeply, practicing until something beautiful emerges. To live for the moment when it all connects and you are elevated. And mostly, to share that magic with someone else.

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In Hot Pursuit of STS-50, High Seas Scofflaw

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The high seas begin 370 km from a nation’s shore and because it’s difficult for governments and organizations to patrol and police these waters, it’s the perfect place for pilfering the best the ocean has to offer while damaging fish stocks and marine ecosystems. At Hakai Magazine, Sarah Tory reports on the hunt for STS-50 — alias Andrey Dolgov, alias Sea Breeze, alias Ayda — a notorious longliner whose captain and crew had evaded and escaped capture to loot the seas of $50 million in fish over a ten year period.

The STS-50 was a 452-tonne, 1980s-era former longliner originally from Japan. It was well known in maritime circles…for poaching Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish (also called Chilean sea bass), two lucrative cod species from the Southern Ocean. Authorities believe the STS-50 operated illegally for 10 years or so and looted up to $50-million worth of the fish, which can grow to 120 kilograms and live for 60 years. Interpol had issued a purple notice for the vessel—an international request for information about the STS-50’s criminal activity. But the vessel’s owners and captain had been evading authorities for years with a typical bag of tricks: registering the boat to nations with lax rules; using shell companies to obscure ownership; forging documents; and spoofing the most advanced satellite surveillance.

Vessels that fish illegally are often involved in human trafficking and drug smuggling while contributing to plummeting fish stocks and degraded marine ecosystems. Experts estimate that up to 20 percent of the world’s total catch (fish and other marine fauna) falls under illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. That’s more than 23 million tonnes of seafood stolen from the seas annually—or one out of every five wild-caught fish sold on the market—worth $23.5-billion.

Selling the illegally caught fish is relatively easy to get away with if port inspectors do a poor job of investigating the vessel, explains Peter Horn, the project director for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ ending illegal fishing program. All the captain has to do is misreport the catch, claiming for instance that the crew caught one type of fish when in fact it caught another; lie about the quantity of fish caught; or pretend to have fished in a different area. The end result is a market with so many illegally caught fish that “there’s a reasonable chance that you have inadvertently bought some,” Horn says.

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How a Mom Penetrated the Pen to Hack the Warden’s Computer

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John Strand didn’t think it was a great idea to allow his mom to attempt to break in to a South Dakota prison as part of a “penetration” or “pen” test of their security systems. But as Lily Hay Newman reports at Wired, Rita Strand, age 58, insisted. Armed only with a fake badge and some confidence, she posed as a health inspector doing a surprise inspection and managed to gain access — unaccompanied! — throughout the facility where she planted “rubber duckies” (USB sticks with code used to compromise computer security systems) on several computers, including the one belonging to the warden.

“She takes off, and I’m thinking in the back of my head that this is a really bad idea,” Strand says. “She has no pen testing experience. No IT hacking experience. I had said, ‘Mom, if this gets bad you need to pick up the phone and call me immediately.'”

Pen testers usually try to get in and out of a facility as quickly as possible to avoid arousing suspicion. But after 45 minutes of waiting, there was no sign of Rita.

“It gets to be about an hour, and I’m panicking,” he says. “And I’m thinking I should have thought it through, because we all went in the same car so I’m out in the middle of nowhere at a pie shop with no way to get to her.”

Suddenly, the Black Hills laptops began blinking with activity. Rita had done it. The USB drives she had planted were creating so-called web shells, which gave the team at the café access to various computers and servers inside the prison. Strand remembers one colleague yelling out: “Your mom’s OK!”

In fact, Rita had encountered no resistance at all inside the prison. She told the guards at the entrance that she was conducting a surprise health inspection and they not only allowed her in, but let her keep her cell phone, with which she recorded the entire operation. In the facility’s kitchen, she checked the temperatures in refrigerators and freezers, pretended to swab for bacteria on the floors and counters, looked for expired food, and took photos.

But Rita also asked to see employee work areas and break areas, the prison’s network operations center, and even the server room—all allegedly to check for insect infestations, humidity levels, and mold. No one said no. She was even allowed to roam the prison alone, giving her ample time to take photos and plant her Rubber Duckies.

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Margery Kempe: Patron Saint of Writing Moms

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Sara Fredman observes that becoming a mother helped her perspective as a writer, much like Margery Kempe, a medieval mom with 14 kids who managed to write The Book of Margery Kempe — a treatise on her own spiritual reinvention that may very well have been the first memoir. Despite the sore boobs and the sleep deprivation, Fredman says being a mom sharpened her focus and motivated her to write within the small windows that having three small children allows. Read her essay at Electric Literature.

New motherhood blindsided me like a semi truck. There was the fact that breastfeeding physically tethered me to my child like one of those yo-yo balls from the ‘90s, able to extend only so far before I had to rocket right back.

There are some who would use motherhood as a cudgel or a cautionary tale in an attempt to convince us that becoming a mother—or too much of a mother—means locking ourselves out of the writing life. But the truth is that, like Margery, I found that motherhood unlocked something in me. Maybe it was surviving four days of labor or fourth months of no sleep, but when I emerged from the fog, I had more to say and an increasingly fiery need to say it,

Having children has simultaneously fried my brain and made it sharper and more focused. I don’t know how this is possible, but it is my truth. I see things differently now because growing and birthing a baby changes you. It can change your palate and your shoe size and it most certainly changes your brain. For Margery, this meant a series of divine visions that altered the course of her life. For most of us, the changes are far less spiritual, but they can be similarly revelatory.

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How a Hurricane’s Trailing Winds Retold Willie Earle’s 1947 Mass Lynching

A lynch mob, with police, following the mob's unsuccessful attempt to lynch CY Winstead, who was in the county jail, Roxboro, North Carolina, August 19, 1941. (Photo by Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)

In this haunting essay at The Bitter Southerner, Josina Guess confronts South Carolina’s violent racist past.

When an Autumn hurricane’s trailing winds disturb old newspapers stored in her shed — blowing them around to lodge and rest in various places across her yard — the old sodden papers revealed themselves over time to tell her the story of Willie Earle’s 1947 lynching and the subsequent acquittal of all 31 accused, a pivotal event that marked a change in public opinion in South Carolina and the South against unchecked mob violence.

When my family and I started to settle into our northeast Georgia farmhouse two years ago, we found a box of Athens Banner-Heralds and Atlanta Journals and Atlanta Constitutions from the mid 1940s through the early 50s. I pored over the brittle yellow papers, a time capsule of this region’s attitudes on race, gender, economics, politics, and agriculture. I wondered at the treasures hidden in those stacks, and what coverage, if any, I might find of some of the racialized terror and lynchings of those waning days of overt American apartheid.

During a blustery autumn storm, the tailwinds of a hurricane, the wind whipped through the woodshed and stirred up some of the papers, littering them around the property. Each day we would pluck a few – a strange harvest of stories. Opinion columns about communists clinging to the blueberry bushes; by the smokehouse, a story of a man dying because a segregated hospital refused him treatment; in the kale I found the price of cotton: 36 cents per 1-inch middling. I would nibble on these stories, roll them over in my mind, then bury their empty husks beneath a pile of oak leaves.

Then a keeper appeared to Michael in the grass between the old well and the pecan tree. The front page of the Athens Banner-Herald from May 16, 1947 read, “State Seeks Death Sentence For All 31 Lynchers.” He lifted the dampened page and laid it to dry on the dining room table. The article gave graphic details and ample evidence, including confessions and incriminating accusations from the taxicab drivers who killed Willie Earle to avenge the fatal stabbing of a cab driver named Thomas Brown. Arrested, then almost immediately kidnapped from jail, Earle had no opportunity to stand trial – his guilt or innocence never proven.

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Apocalypse Now? Now? How About Now?

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For Harper’s Magazine, Lauren Groff attends Prepper Camp hoping to learn useful, climate-friendly survival tactics to help herself and others to weather the aftermath of hurricane season in Florida. While she encounters the expected — gun enthusiasts, fear of the “other,” and a fair bit of snake oil — she also realizes that she has a lot more in common with her “prepper brethren” than she first thought.

Perhaps I should have expected to feel wildly out of place at Prepper Camp. I am a vegetarian agnostic feminist in a creative field who sits to the left of most American socialists: I want immediate and radical action to halt climate change; Medicare and free public higher education for all; abortion pills offered for pennies in pharmacies and gas stations; the eradication of billionaires; the destruction of capitalism; and the rocketing of all the planet’s firearms into the sun.

And yet I am also, in the darkest corners of my heart, a doomsday prepper myself.

It should not have been a surprise to me—though it was—how rarely actual facts were invoked at Prepper Camp: instead I had heard a great deal of fear mitigated by practical-seeming ideas, lots of baseless venom spat in the direction of imagined liberals, but almost no science to give weight to any assertions, no analysis of the larger state of the world, no evidence of statistical knowledge. Survivalists had revealed themselves to be romantics. Prepper Camp was a castle built on emotion: fear of the inchoate other was so great that the survivalists felt justified in being prepared to kill other humans to protect their material goods.

But then I saw, to my horror, an uglier truth: that I was no better than my prepper brethren. And that because of my hypocrisy, I was probably even worse.

Perhaps doomsday libertarians do secretly long for a chance to rid the earth of people who threaten their supremacy; but there is something equally anarchic in me that longs for society to break so that we can rebuild it to be kinder, more generous, more equitable. Deep down, perhaps I am a prepper because I believe that the only way we are going to pry the world’s wealth out of the greedy, grasping hands of the billionaires who are willfully killing the environment is through a total collapse of the status quo. Perhaps I am a prepper because I have had enough: I am goddamn ready for the guillotines.

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Can Mickey Mouse Coexist with Bears, Panthers, and Alligators?

Further reading: How pet reptiles are flourishing in Florida by preying on bird populations.

In Florida, 12 acres are developed each hour. In the land of snow birds, theme parks, golf courses, and ever-expanding terra cotta tract housing, is there a way for wetlands and wild animals to not just survive, but thrive alongside man’s ravenous appetite for development?

At The Bitter Southerner, Will Wellman follows a small team and their documentary crew through forests and swamps as they study the potential to create a wildlife corridor connecting the last remaining wild places in the Sunshine State.

Even in my own Floridian imagination, my home state has shifted from wild green to lifeless gray. Florida is no longer “dotted” with development, but with wilderness. Come to Florida, the advertisements say, there are gators, tropical flowers, wide open oceans. BUT DON’T WORRY, they can’t reach you from your air-conditioned hotel room, restaurant, Disney vacation. Come and look! You definitely don’t have to touch.

Joe continued his research on a small bear population in Glades and Highlands counties, attempting to understand how these bears managed to live in an area so heavily affected by human development. One of the bears Joe was tracking, a male given the colorful name M34, went on a journey of nearly 500 miles — wandering from Lake Placid through the Everglades Headwaters, then toward Celebration, a planned community outside of Disney World. M34 bumped up against I-4 many times but was never able to cross; he eventually made his way back south to the ranches and natural land of the Lake Wales Ridge area.

M34’s problem is a common issue for animals throughout the state of Florida. Growing development and infrastructure across the state means isolated habitats, and there are scant pathways connecting these wild areas.

The swamp along Reedy Creek is relatively dry. The trunks of trees throughout the swamp bear the marks of both seasonal flooding and drought. In a month, when the summer rains begin, the waters will quickly rise to the higher water lines. For now, though, the ground is a mucky labyrinth of dead vegetation, fallen trees, and downed branches. The humidity here is palpable; it presses against you, as does the heat.

This is no place for claustrophobics. But of all the landscapes I’ve had the good fortune to explore, none makes me feel as alive as a swamp does. I don’t mean exuberance or joy. It is a sense of life fed by ever-present danger. Swamps are marked by death — all the rotting organic matter that mars its floor and gives it life — and by risk — every nook and cranny could hide snakes, gators, and more. A swamp jars you from default, autopilot amble and into an alertness of a dark, living world around you. Rilke’s words reverberate as a mantra for this wooden morass: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”

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Finding Answers about Life and Love in the Mountain Death Zone

Sunset over Nuptse and Lhotse summits. Solu Khumbu. Nepal. (Photo by: Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

He lost his wife and children in a plane crash. Her marriage had crumbled. James Morrison and Hilaree Nelson were brought together by death and loss but united in love — for each other, for self challenge, and for the mountains — in their attempt to become the first adventurers to summit Lhotse and ski down. As Chris Ballard reports at Sports Illustrated, little did the pair know they’d be plagued by equipment delays, as well as adverse weather and avalanches as they made their historic attempt in the death zone.

Above them loomed the jagged outline of Lhotse, rising 27,940 feet, and, to the north, the shadow of Everest. Below stretched a vast expanse of white—ravines and gullies, frozen rivers of ice—and beyond that Nepal. Somewhere over the horizon lay everything the pair often tried to escape: the cities and highways, the clatter, the dark memories.

They communicated without words, conserving energy, James Morrison in front and Hilaree Nelson a few steps behind. Alpine ski blades framed their packs. They’d need to move fast at the summit; according to Morrison’s calculations, they had 12 hours before weather arrived. If they made it, though—if the chute was passable, if they maintained an elevated pace, if the winds held—they’d have a shot at doing something no human had: summiting and then skiing the Dream Line, a track of snow down the western side of the peak. Among mountaineers, it had become a Holy Grail.

Morrison and Nelson wanted to be the first to descend it, of course, but that was only one of the reasons they had traveled to the other side of the world, assuming risks some peers felt too great.

Their other motives were more elemental. And more complicated.

Though the fourth-highest peak in the world, Lhotse bears little of the cachet of its neighbor, Everest. Movies are not made about Lhotse. Thrill seekers do not crowd it. Swiss climbers first summited it in 1956, but its middle peak remained the highest unclimbed spot on the planet until 2001. Lhotse holds particular appeal for skiers due to its unusual architecture. Under the right conditions, a thin ribbon of snow traces a jagged line off the peak, curving through a narrow rock chute for 1,500 vertical feet before emptying out onto the 5,000-foot Lhotse Face.

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