Search Results for: Mars

Bundyville Chapter Four: The Gospel of Bundy

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 46 minutes (11,600 words)

Part 4 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

The best way to get to Bundyville is to drive straight into the desert and prepare to never come back.

The ghost town that used to be home to the Bundy family is reachable only by deeply rutted roads covered with red quicksand so thick that it can suck in even the burliest 4×4 if you hit it wrong.

On the map, Bundyville is actually called Mount Trumbull. But back in the early 1900s, people started referring to it as Bundyville, because, according to one Arizona Republic article from 1951, “every single soul in the tiny village except one person answer to the name Bundy!” There was never electricity, no phones.

Abraham Bundy, Cliven’s great-grandfather established the town with his wife, Ella, in 1916. Their son, Roy, homesteaded there with his own family. And Cliven’s dad, David, was born in Bundyville — a place “perched atop a cold and forbidding plateau at an elevation of 5,200 feet,” according to the Arizona Republic article.

Before World War II, as many as 200 people — mostly Bundys — made their home in Bundyville, despite its remote location. Newspapers took six days to arrive. Four postmasters doled out mail twice a week. There was a school, a general store.

It was a Bundy utopia. A place that was all theirs, a place no one else wanted. And yet, still, it slipped right through their fingers. There wasn’t enough water to sustain them. By the 1950s, the place was mostly abandoned. Little had changed between the time the Bundys arrived and the time they left. “We heard the coyotes howl at night,” one Bundy resident once said, “but did not see a living soul.”

I want to stand in that place — where the family’s curse of loss began and where their anger at the government may have originated. I want to go to the middle of nowhere to see how far this family has been willing to go to live by their own code.

Bundyville still holds meaning for the family. Each year, hundreds of Bundys make a pilgrimage back for a giant Bundy family reunion. It’s like it’s not just a place in the desert, but a state of mind, too.

When Abraham Bundy and his wife arrived there, it must have seemed like it was the only place where they could fathom solace, calm. Far from civilization, far from the reaches of the federal government, the family tried to tame the landscape, farm, and raise livestock for themselves with little forage or water. To live by their own rules. To make an intractable place bend to their will.

I explain all this to a representative at the BLM’s Arizona Strip field office — that I’d like to go to the place the Bundy story started. And she clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me and my producer, Ryan Haas, to go there this time of year. It’s been raining recently, she tells me. I think, so what? I’m from Oregon. But rain is unusual in that part of the Southwest, and it turns the clay-like dirt on the roads into a silty paste known to suck up tires, stranding unprepared people in potentially deadly temperatures until someone can come with help.

I read about an old lady who got lost on the road to Mount Trumbull and almost died before anyone found her. Another article talks about some hikers who’d come across skeletons in the desert there.

The outdoorsy dude-bros at a Jeep rental place in Hurricane, Utah, were skeptical, too: Just before we pull out of the lot in the burliest Jeep they’ve got, one of them throws a shovel into the back for us. “Better than nothing,” he says with a shrug.

The next morning, we wake up at 3 a.m. The way we’re figuring, if we’re going to make it, we’d better go while the ground is frozen. Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Three: A Clan Not to Cross

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 29 minutes (7,300 words)

Part 3 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

Since Cliven Bundy took in his first desert breath as a free man this past January, the old cowboy has found himself more in ballrooms and meeting rooms and on stages across the West than back in the saddles he fought so hard to sit in again.

Just two days after his release, he stood in front of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department in Las Vegas, bullhorn in hand, goading the sheriff to come outside: “Is this man going to stand up and protect our life, liberty, and property?” he asked the small crowd gathered around him, smartphones livestreaming his words. The sheriff never emerged.

“My defense is a fifteen-second defense: I graze my cattle only on Clark County, Nevada, land, and I have no contract with the federal government,” Bundy told his flock.

Later that month, on a rural Montana stage flanked by ruffled red curtains, there he stood in jeans and boots and an ash-gray sport coat as a crowd of a couple hundred welcomed him with whoops and whistles fit for rural royalty. “I have a fifteen-second defense,” he said. The crowd listened, rapt.

And there he was again, in February, on an amateur YouTube talk show, in a blue plaid shirt and bolo tie, expounding for well beyond 15 seconds on his ideas about government.

If Cliven Bundy was a star among constitutional literalists after the standoff in 2014, two years in jail transformed the old man and his family into the full-fledged glitterati of the far, far right.

His trademark 15-second defense line is mostly true: Cliven has no contract with the federal government and, yet, continues to graze his cows illegally on public land. Read more…

Will Big Pharma Help Save Some of the Oldest Marine Life on Earth?

Dale Gerhard/The Press of Atlantic City via AP

Ecology is the study of the relationships between organisms and their environment. Birds known as Red Knots migrate to the Arctic to breed. To gather the necessary caloric reserves, each bird needs to feed on approximately 400,000 horseshoe crabs’ eggs along the eastern seaboard. Unfortunately, the crabs’ numbers have declined precipitously, and the birds haven’t been breeding as much as before. The problem is that biomedical companies bleed the live crabs to use their blue blood in endotoxin tests — and as their numbers drop, so do the numbers of birds.

At Audubon magazine, Deborah Cramer examines how Eli Lilly biologist Jay Bolden tackled this ecological problem by convincing his employer to switch from crab blood to an effective synthetic. Bolden’s next challenge is to get the rest of the pharmaceutical industry to follow suit.

But Bolden had a compelling reason: “I’m a birder,” he says, “so this hit close to home.” He’d seen Red Knots, one in Delaware’s Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge, and then another in Ireland’s Ballycotton Marsh. And a few years ago, at an endotoxin summit in Delaware hosted by Lonza, Bolden witnessed the arrival of horseshoe crabs. “We were walking along Pickering Beach, in Delaware,” he recalls, “and the beach, seemingly empty, suddenly filled with horseshoe crabs coming in from the sea. It was a religious experience for me.”

The longtime birder didn’t need to be told how badly shorebirds along the Atlantic Flyway need horseshoe crab eggs. Further, he had learned about the plight of horseshoe crabs worldwide in 2013, during a Lonza webinar with Glenn Gauvry, president of Ecological Research and Development Group, an organization dedicated to the conservation of horseshoe crabs across the globe. While population data on the animals in Asia isn’t fully known, “horseshoe crab populations in Japan, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, once vibrant, are now endangered,” Gauvry has written. It is questionable, he writes, whether current takes of horseshoe crabs for endotoxin testing “can be sustained, much less meet the projected future demands of this rapidly growing market.”

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The Dying Days of the New West

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Tori Telfer | Longreads | May 2018 | 15 minutes (3,912 words)

The American West brings out a hunger in people. I’ve felt it myself — an urge to disconnect from society, buy a horse, live next to a giant saguaro. My husband and I have talked for hours about moving to the town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, where we were invited to live by an elderly gay couple we met beside a Tucson, Arizona pool. They told us that houses were cheap and everyone was friends and they’d be our uncles; we took their business card home and spent nights looking at houses on Zillow, cooing over cacti. The destiny was almost made manifest, then real life intruded. Guess where we’re moving instead? New York City.

The urbane, European-inflected East Coast has looked at the West with a strange blend of envy and hope for most of United States history. While the United States was built partially on the idea that the West was our manifest destiny, an East/West rivalry has also been baked into our identity from the beginning; even the famous “Go west, young man!” dictum contained within it some eastward scorn. That cry came from an 1865 New York Times editorial, in which Horace Greeley, the newspaper’s editor, exclaimed that “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

In 1836, the writer Francis Grund speculated that westward expansion would only stop when some “physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress”; by the late 1800s, the ocean proved to be no such barrier, as America’s westward colonization encroached on the islands of the Pacific, reaching as far as the Philippines; in 2018, there is so little West left to discover that when we want to dream about the idea of the “frontier,” we look to Mars. Today’s West is a place of deep irony: lands that look wide-open to the naked eye but are actually choked by bureaucratic red tape. In fact, “the West” is more of a mirage than a reality, these days. But the hunger is still there. Read more…

A Kendrick Lamar Syllabus

Kendrick Lamar performs at the Grammys on January 28, 2018. (Christopher Polk/Getty Images for NARAS)

Last month, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth won the Pulitzer Prize in music for his 2017 album DAMN. It’s the first work of hip-hop to be commended since the award for musical composition was created in 1943. Most winners have been classical musicians, and a few, like Wynton Marsalis and Ornette Coleman, composers of jazz.

The Pulitzer board noted that DAMN. “offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” The album’s selection updates and redefines conceptions of music and high culture — it is canon expanding and its reverberations and aftershocks should be significant.

DAMN. is Lamar’s third album, and while it is spectacular, I don’t think it’s his most thrilling. good kid m.A.A.d. city, from 2012, succeeds more on the plane of hip-hop aesthetics, with its structurally sound story arc. To Pimp a Butterfly, from 2015, was more melodically lush, and it magnetized a rising tide of political fervor: The single “Alright” became a protest anthem, and every major release by a popular black musician afterward seemed to form a politically-charged chorus.

Lamar has made a career of delivering prescient, complex work that is sometimes fiery and discordant, and other times deeply meditative or grief-stricken. But his work always feels honest. With the significance of his Pulitzer in sight, I offer a small selection of the insightful writing on Lamar that has published in the years since his debut.
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Is Your Job Lynchian, or Is It More Kafkaesque?

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Rachel Paige King | Longreads | April 2018 | 14 minutes (3,753 words)

 

When Richard Bolles, Episcopal minister and author of What Color Is Your Parachute?, died last year at age 90, the New York Times explained his best-selling career guide’s success this way: “‘Parachute’ had come along at the beginning of a historic shift, when corporate strategies like outsourcing, subcontracting, downsizing and mergers were starting to erode traditional notions of job security. The idea that you could stay in one job for a lifetime began coming undone in the early 1970s, and ‘Parachute’s’ perennial sales reflected, at least in part, this new reality.”

Given the tumultuous climate for job seekers over the last half-century — Bolles’s book originally came out in 1970 — the various editions of Parachute have, unsurprisingly, sold a lot of copies (roughly 10 million). In the 2005 edition, for example, Bolles demonstrates why generations of job seekers found his work helpful, with its combination of straight talk and spiritual uplift. For example, he writes, “The typical job in the new millennium is best viewed as a temp job …You must always be mentally prepared to go job-hunting again, at the drop of a hat.” Although the various editions were constantly being updated and revised, we see Bolles (in the mid-aughts at least) spinning the parlous state of job-hunting as not just an inevitable part of modern business but an opportunity for personal transformation. He asks workers to stop expecting not only security, but also stability or even any kind of appreciation for their efforts. At the same time, he presents the world of work as a thrilling adventure (or at the very least a fun challenge) involving short-term gigs with steep learning curves and workplaces characterized by interpersonal drama and managerial indifference to personal struggles. Still, he appears to believe that finding a “dream job” is possible if you stop hoping for any kind of external reward. For Bolles, the job seeker should not be looking not for a single position or even for a traditional career, but for a vocation. Secular people sometimes forget that that word was originally synonymous with the concept of a religious calling, but Bolles, with his seminary training, most likely never did.
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‘I Try Not to Have a Schedule’: Talking Writing with William Vollmann

Philippe Merle/AFP/GettyImages

William T. Vollmann is as renowned for the size of his books as the magnitude of his subjects: poverty, the morality of violence, the collision of Indigenous and European cultures. His book Rising Up and Rising Down spans seven-volumes and 3,300-pages. Imperial runs 1,306 pages. But his beautiful sentences, challenging structures, and documentary photography deserve equal attention, and his ten published novels and four story collections often require as much research as his nonfiction.

His newest project is a two-volume series called the “Climate Ideologies” that addresses how the wonders and waste of energy consumption are irrevocably heating our planet. The first volume, No Immediate Danger, covers the effects of manufacturing, farming and nuclear energy, and it took him into the restricted zone one mile from Japan’s ruined Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Volume two, No Good Alternative, covers coal, oil, and natural gas.

Prolific, original and determined, on paper Vollmann cuts an intimidating figure. He famously wrote his first novel You Bright and Risen Angels at the San Francisco office where he worked as a computer programmer, often sleeping there a week at a time and living off of vending machine candy bars. In person, his warmth and humor make for easy conversation. Years ago, when I gave up on a big book project that was tormenting me, I did something crazy and wrote him a letter through his agent, telling him about my idea and struggles. Four months later, a handwritten letter arrived in my mailbox, encouraging me with wisdom that distilled his own approach to writing: read as much as you can about the subject, take the trip as many times as necessary to get it right, then the story will be yours. His words were just what I needed. I booked a flight soon after and wrote a whole book based on that reporting trip. Writers need mentors, and hungry readers need writers like Vollmann.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: You start No Immediate Danger by stating that it’s too late to stop climate change, so now we can only understand what led our species here so future generations know the details. Did your 2014 book Last Stories, about death, help prepare you for this grave work?

William Vollmann: Yeah. I had been preparing for the worst for a long time, but in Carbon Ideologies I do believe that it’s probably too late, but I’m hoping I’m wrong. Any book is really about its own present, even a science fiction book or a book like this, so it’s always possible that maybe some sort of a plant-based carbon sequestration system could come to our rescue. I’m not counting on it.

AG: I like that it’s dedicated to your daughter since that does add a small sense of hope that maybe salvation is possible.

WV: It would be nice, and if it isn’t then I’m just hoping that her life won’t be too much worse than mine and that there might be a few more generations yet before it peters out. You never know.

AG: One interesting thing about Carbon Ideologies is that it functions as an apology to future generations for the earth that we destroyed. The fact that you’re even hopeful enough to envision future readers makes me want to uses this interview to talk about writing in the same way, as a time capsule message to other writers both alive and unborn.

WV: Why not?

AG: You are one of the most productive writers on earth. A lot of my fellow writers know how hard it is to research, report and write a single-story, so we always wonder how you sustain your pace, publishing so many books at this size nearly every year. People like me picture you sort of living at your computer from morning until night. They wonder if you sleep. What are your writing days like?

WV: Well, I try not to have a schedule. So, I’m pretty much writing every day at some point, but I do other things also. When I get bogged down, there is something that I don’t understand, I set that aside and do something else, whether it’s another writing project or doing a little maintenance at my studio or painting or going on some river adventure to see my outlaw friends in the Delta. I just try to mix it up. So I very rarely feel any boredom, unless of course, I’m on my stationary exercise bike. After about 10 or 11 hours of misery, I get off and realize it’s been about 30 seconds.

AG: That sounds like my gym experience. Is that bike in your studio where you can toggle between it and your computer?

WV: It’s at the home, yeah and maybe I should get one at the studio too, I don’t know. But it’s also so hateful that it might be better just to swell up and die of diabetes or something. We will see.

AG: Did somebody convince you to get a bike, or was that your own decision to start that?

WV: It was my own decision. I have had that bike for 20 years, and once in a great while I will force myself to use it.

AG: The older I get, the more I wonder how exercise fits into the daily routine of somebody with a sedentary profession that involves so much reading and writing. Do you take preventative measures? Are there measures you wish you had taken now that you’re 58?

WV: There was an old guy one time who said, “Bill, in your 50s you start having problems. In your 60s you realize that you have to do something about those problems, and in your 70s you realize that those solutions don’t work.” So, you might as well just have a sense of humor about it and know that it has to end badly one way or another so, why worry?

AG: Smoke a cigar and have a drink.

WV: Exactly.

AG: It surprises me that you don’t have a schedule. Is part of your productivity related to successful multitasking and time management?

WV: I guess so, and also the fact that I don’t want to feel forced to do this or forced to do that. Sometimes I have to for a while, but mostly, if I really don’t want to be working on one particular thing at that particular time I don’t have to do it. That keeps me feeling fresh and gives me the sense of novelty, because once that’s gone you are thinking, Well, why on earth am I doing this? How can you write something interesting if it’s just drudgery?

When I’m researching a book, there is some necessary drudgery, so if I’m working on one of the Seven Dreams books, I try to get up to speed on the anthropology or archeology of those people whom I’m writing about. With Carbon Ideologies, there were a lot of tables I had to put together. At first, that was a rather dreary experience. Then I began getting quite interested. Whether or not the reader will ever be interested, I can’t say. But, once I had those tables, I felt that I was able to start saying things about what the tables implied. So that’s just how I do it.

AG: Making sure that it retains enough freshness to drive your interest?

WV: Yeah, I would say. How about you when you are writing, what do you do?

AG: Sort of the same thing. Since most of the time nobody is paying me ─ I write so many essays on spec ─ that I only write because it’s interesting and not drudgery. I operate almost entirely out of curiosity. I want to know or process my own experience or learn about the world, so I write because those subjects are fresh.

WV: That makes sense to me. If I try not to put limits on the curiosity, then I’m more likely to actually learn something. In Riding Toward Everywhere I talked a little bit about this one thing Thoreau said that I have always found inspirational. It runs something like, “We must not let our knowledge get in the way of what’s far more important, which is our ignorance.” So as long as I keep saying, “Alright, I’m ignorant. I’m ignorant about everything, and I want to learn more,” then I’m more likely to actually learn more, as opposed to saying, “Okay, now I know the answers about climate change.” People knew the answers about climate change a long time ago, and they were wrong.

AG: I saw that you mentioned that in the book that people had suspicions in, was it 1945 or the ’50s?

WV: By the ’70s people really started wondering. At Oak Ridge they were saying, “Well, things probably won’t be too bad until we get up to 400 parts per million of C02, but why worry, because that won’t happen until the 21st century.” So it’s an odd thing thinking about our obligation to the future. We never really had to do that. We probably should have done that, but we never actually considered the possibility that we might be making the future unlivable. Then suddenly here we are forced to decide, “Well, is that our responsibility? Do we want to do something about it?” I hope the answer is yes.

AG: In No Immediate Danger you distilled that sort of frivolity with the phrase “Keeping the lights on.” That seems to summarize the sense of convenience and thoughtlessness. Flicking the lights on and leaving them on, we don’t even think about energy’s effects or waste.

WV: There is something very beautiful in the idea that we have all this electric power at our disposal to make our lives better, and of course, in many ways, it has improved our lives, and will probably continue to do so. One of the real troubling things is that what we’re doing is not entirely frivolous. The fact that someone can do all the cooking and cleaning in the kitchen in less time than they used to. That’s really great. But what about all the so-called vampire power? All the lights on, computers and surge protectors just to keep telling you, “Yes, everything’s good, I’m still drawing current.” There are so many things that we don’t need, and one very dangerous aspect of our economic system is that there’s this notion that one has to keep creating demand. That means we will need more and more power, and no matter how efficiently we use it, if our absolute demand is increasing, most likely so will our greenhouse emissions. That is not very promising at all.

AG: Is that related to the sort of capitalist ideology of constant expansion? Edward Abbey said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

WV: That’s right. It is a capitalist pattern, and it was also a socialist pattern. I talk at one point about the Russian’s idea that there have to be more consumer goods. They were doing it differently at a different scale, but what it really comes down to in my opinion is natural biology. A tree is going to try to grow taller and maybe crowd out the competition. A rabbit is gonna have lots of bunnies if it can, and we humans are going to want to have more and more. We want to reproduce and make our lives more comfortable and interesting, and in a sense that’s the natural thing that every organism does. Of course, the problem is that there are not unbounded limits. There are bounded limits, so unless organisms are checked by some means, organisms that obey their natural proclivities will get into trouble. I can’t even really blame capitalism as much as I would like to.

AG: In a sense, it’s a very judicious way of viewing our perilous climate situation. You do an impressive job in No Immediate Danger of not being judgmental of the culprits and instead simply look at why we do what we do, and assess what we have done. Are you are saying we are the victims of our own biology, even if we don’t recognize it or not?

WV: We’ve been very successful. I love being able to plug my laptop into the wall; I’m able to write more books. I love being able to get on a plane and fly to other countries. Probably the single best thing that you or I could do would be to give up air travel. I mean, there are lots of other things we could do. I’m still flying. I want to advance my career. I want to write a book. I want to see this or that, so I’m part of the problem. How can I blame capitalism for that?

AG: You implicate yourself right before the table of contents. You admit that you’ve consumed all these forms of energy and say, “Better an honest muddler than a carbon-powered hypocrite.”

WV: That is right.

AG: I grew up as an environmentalist, so I always felt very conflicted about procreation because of the amount of waste generated with plastic diapers and trash bags and all sorts of things. Once I met the right person, I wanted to have a kid. Then I met my daughter and just thought, To hell with it, this is the right thing to do.

WV: In a way that’s the so-called tragedy of the commons. Are you familiar with that paradigm?

AG: Yes.

WV: So, we all want to do what’s best for us, and we each take a tiny share of the net detriment to everyone that our choice has caused, so we’re still ahead by getting most of the net benefit.

AG: There’s obviously a moral imperative, but in our very individualistic society, is it possible for us to accept that moral imperative that comes with being a part of the commons in order to make any lasting changes?

WV: I am guessing that you and I as individuals can’t really do very much. We can reach out to other individuals and maybe, if I were lucky and many people read my book, and they all decided, for instance, not to fly anymore. That would make some difference, but my suspicion is that it wouldn’t make enough difference. What we really need are top-down regulatory changes. Why is it that in Japan it takes a lot less coke to make coal than it does in the US? Why shouldn’t we say, “Alright, if we’re going to make steel from coke then we have to at least use the Japanese technology?” And maybe somebody has to decide when we really need to use aluminum and cement and these other so-called big five materials that use 80% of all the energy for manufacturing. Of course, the more of this regulatory or bureaucratic burden you impose, the more we become something like East Germany. It will get less and less pleasant. But it may well be that we are approaching a state of emergency and won’t have any choice. It’s certainly true that the sooner we start figuring out how to reduce demand, the easier it’s gonna be.

AG: The regulatory experiment that Mayor Bloomberg did with the size of sodas in New York was an interesting way of changing people’s perception of what’s required to quench their thirst and what actually qualifies as a “large size.” It seems you’re right: the only way to make these large-scale, long-term societal changes will be top-down regulatory in that same generational way.

WV: I think that’s right, and I think that we are going to have people making cost-benefit analyses of various things. For instance, it takes almost a hundred times more energy to manufacture a pound of aluminum than a pound of cement, which is the lowest energy user of the big five materials. But aluminum, by being so strong, light and recyclable, makes a lot of sense in skyscrapers and bridges, and it may actually be more energy efficient to use that aluminum than to use the vastly heavier, greater quantity of steel that you would need to use. So who is going to figure that out? You want someone who is intelligent, practical and doesn’t have some kind of a bias, someone who is not a show for the aluminum industry or the steel industry. Where are we going to find people like that? I don’t know where to look. Those are the kinds of things that really make me very disheartened about the dilemma we’re in.

AG: It might be easier to create a colony on Mars than to find an unbiased politician who isn’t influenced by industry lobbyists.

WV: Yeah, a colony on Mars would probably be a fantastic boondoggle, and a lot of people could probably get rich supplying and exploiting it.

AG: If we are going to keep creating demand, why not do it on another planet?

WV: That’s right. First, we need to create some Martians that we can sell to.

AG: I did enjoy your comments in previous interviews about the potentially positive effects of swine flu.

WV: It’s all rather bleak. And that would certainly be an effective way to reduce demand, but I would rather we reduce demand in some voluntary and kinder way.

AG: A question for you about the origins of this book. A lot of us nonfiction writers fret about how to come up with ideas: have we run out of ideas? Can we generate more? I remember you saying you came up with the idea for the Seven Dreams Series while researching Rainbow Stories, asking yourself what the continent looked like before all these parking lots. How do you generate ideas, and how did you come up with Carbon Ideologies?

WV: Well, I guess it was my visit to Fukushima in 2011. First, I saw the devastation created by the tsunami. Then I went into the areas that were already abandoned as a result of the nuclear disaster. The tsunami left very palpable effects, but when I first went into the town of Kawauchi, for instance, it seemed as if people might almost still be there. It was very eerie. There were blinds pulled down, a couple of places maybe an umbrella would have fallen down at the front doorway, some potted plants starting to die. Over the next few years, as I kept returning to those parts of Fukushima that hadn’t been reclaimed, they were looking worse and worse and more creepy. But still, the local people kept saying, “Well, I don’t even know what radiation is. I mean, I don’t itch from it, I can’t really see it. It’s invisible.” And I started thinking about how great a metaphor that is for the effects of all these fuels. After a while, you can see indirectly the effects of the radiation contamination by looking at these hideous abandoned places, but you can’t see the contamination directly. Then when you go to nonnuclear fuels, you start seeing certain affects ─ the mountaintop removal and various ugly sites of oil and coal in Bangladesh ─ but you can’t see the emissions. So it’s a more slowly unfolding version of the tsunami or of the radiation contamination. You kind of have to work yourself into understanding it or to feeling it. That’s how I started thinking about Carbon Ideologies.

AG: So you started with invisibility as a metaphor, then in No Immediate Danger‘s Japan sections, you use your dosimeter and scintillation counter to bring this invisible drama to life, both to measure it and to prove that it exists at all. And people in the no-go zones still don’t believe you!

WV: I really wish that I had a lot more money to throw at this problem. I would have liked very much to have had a FLIR camera ─ forward-looking infrared ─ so that in my book I could have pictures of carbon dioxide coming out of smokestacks or people’s mouths, or of methane rising from manure heaps. But I wasn’t able to make those emissions visible in that way. Those cameras cost something like $60,000.

AG: Well, if you were online you would have been able to do some sort of Kickstarter campaign.

WV: That’s right. If I were online I’m sure I could do all kinds of great things.

AG: And be monitored. What about doing that retroactively; has it ever been done before?

WV: Well, maybe you can do it.

AG: I would love to. I’d have to get some money together. But the fact that you work in multiple mediums for different projects and have a photo book to accompany Imperial, you’re obviously the ideal person.

WV: Well, it would really be fun to be able to do it, and it would be nice if they had cameras to show the radioisotope blooms. Maybe they do. Anyway, all we can do is do our best with our limited senses. One of the things that I liked about the pancake frisker, which was the real-time analog to the decimeter, was as one of my friends put it, it’s like an extra sense. It was really fascinating to frisk my daughter’s cat. I was frisking everything for a while, and then I would be a little bit unnerved if something was four or five times more radioactive than something else. Eventually, I realized that that’s all so trivial. You fly to the East Coast or you go out to the granitic rock of the Sierras, and things are 10 times higher or whatever. Then you go to Fukushima and you might find things up to 700 times higher.

AG: What about your health: In one great scene in Japan’s radioactive city of Ōkuma, the protective shoe covers and painter’s suits “manufactured with pride in the United States of America” ripped. Have you been tested for the effects of radiation lately?

WV: I doubt that you could really tell. If I got some kind of cancer maybe there would be a way to track it back to the cesium, or maybe not. We probably all have micro-particles of various isotopes from atmospheric testing and concentration in seafood or whatever, so if I get cancer, maybe I can just console myself that it was as a result of drinking a lot of whisky or playing around in the dark room.

AG: You have made your peace.

WV: I have, yes.

AG: If the idea for this book started with your first visit to Fukushima, how do your other books evolve?

WV: It sort of depends on the book, Aaron. With one of the Seven Dreams books, I know what the story is, or at least what I think the story is. It turned out that what I thought I knew about Pocahontas and Captain John Smith wasn’t exactly true, but still I knew the basic historical events were fixed and my job was not to write a new story but to interpret those events. With something like Carbon Ideologies, the events and their effects are still unfolding and, to some extent, in dispute. My job there would be to take a lot of notes, visit the people and places available to me, read a lot of books and just let my ignorance guide me and hopefully save me from too much prejudice as I started building up judgments about these things.

AG: In your fiction, how do you inhabit other people’s lives in those historical eras?

WV: Well, for the Seven Dreams it’s possible to go to a very particular place. In The Ice Shirt I was able to go to the ruins of Erik the Red’s farm in Iceland and I could stand there and think, Okay, this is not too dissimilar to the view that Erik himself had. So I’m looking out at the water, at the clouds and the birds and grass and flowers and the stones and thinking, How does this make me feel? Is there any way brings me closer to Erik? For him, these things would all have been more quotidian and yet still there must be some kind of a common human response to wet grass and gray sky. That’s one of the ways you can just kind of work yourself back into seeing and trying to feel what those people would have. Then you try to perform some of the acts that you know the historical characters would have. For The Dying Grass, I had a chance to fire a Springfield single-shot rifle of the kind that the US cavalry would probably had fired. So I could say, Okay, this is what it feels to hold something of this weight. This is how you load it and how quickly could a person do this? Not nearly as quickly if one had an AR-15. How steady can you hold it? How difficult is it? What’s it like and here comes this topple white smoke from the black powder out the barrel, and then I have to clean it afterwards; the barrel is quite fouled with this stuff. So I’m doing all of these things relative to one particular action that if I describe accurately, I’m describing something intrinsically true about those US Calvary men. That’s another way of getting into what they might have felt and seen, and that is so much of who you are or who you become I think and what you do.

AG: So research and travel are the essential elements that unite both genres for you. The structures of all your books vary widely, so do you just adjust your approach and the structure of a book according to each project?

WV: That’s right. I think it would be a drag for me and the reader if I were just following some formula for my books. As I get older my options narrow, and I imagine that my books will become a little bit more of a piece, and that’s probably already happening. But the extent that I can resist that and make every book new, I think that’s a win-win for the reader and for me.

AG: So far, mission accomplished. One of the things that I also love about your nonfiction is its dry sense of humor. One of countless examples in No Immediate Danger was, “Let us now celebrate the miraculous smog of Calabar!” What else can humor do besides add levity to certain dark subjects?

WV: Sometimes you can make a frightening or bitter point more effectively through humor. You can actually make it sting a little bit more, and you can also try to sparkle up the page a little bit. If there are a lot of things about agriculture, fertilizers and so forth, it’s really incumbent on me to try to give the reader some little reward every now and then for reading that.

AG: You embrace the exclamation point, which I also like. Is that contentious punctuation also a way to get people’s attention?

WV: Yeah, and often in Carbon Ideologies the exclamation point adds to the ironic pseudo-ingenuous nature of some absurd claim about how wonderfully healthy radiation is or whatever.

AG: No Immediate Danger isn’t a joke, but in the way you point out the flaws of our thinking and denial about nuclear energy and climate change, this 600-page book all seems sort of punctuated by a giant exclamation point.

WV: That’s right. In a way it is, of course, a joke, right? It’s just the joke is on us and we’re not gonna like it, but maybe the beetles that replace us will somehow be able to laugh with their antenna.

AG: That sounds like your first novel brought to life. The fact that you wanted a FLIR camera to document the carbon dioxide and methane and expand the range of your climate change inquiry to a second medium makes me think how you like room to explore your subjects sufficiently. From what I gather, though, there’s been a long-standing attempt by your publishers to get you to cut your books, including page limits in your contracts and lowering royalties for longer books. Can you tell me about your legendary resistance to heavy editing?

WV: What if someone were to tell you, “We think your daughter was born a little bit too tall, so would you mind chopping off her legs?” You might not have the most compliant reaction to that, right?

AG: No.

WV: My books are my children. They’re just like my daughter. She’s turning out the way she’s turning out and that’s just how it is, so people can like her or not, but I love my daughter and I’m not going to chop off her legs. [laughs]

AG: So editing is forced surgery. You try to let the story be what it is, and the people who publish the book have their financial and other concerns? What dictates this chopping of the legs?

WV: Well, wouldn’t it be perfect for editors and publishers and maybe reviewers if all books had to be the same length? They all had to be, let’s say, exactly 124 pages, and the extra 24 pages all have to be ads. I mean, wouldn’t that just be lovely? One of the many reasons that I love the internet is, of course, because that’s how things are there. You can watch something and there’s going to be some wiggly, giggly little ad in the corner the whole time, and also, let’s track your eye movements. How wonderful it all is. As soon as there is any attempt to control creativity for noncreative purposes, we start going down that miserable road. But as I always say, Aaron, the world doesn’t owe me a living, and a publisher could legitimately say, “Well, Bill, we just don’t think you are going to pencil out, so we don’t want to publish your book.” That’s like saying, “Well, your daughter really is too tall, so we don’t want her to date our son.” That’s okay, but how awful it would be if they said, “Your daughter is too tall, so we want to chop off her legs,” and I said, “Okay, I’ll do that.” What kind of a father would I be? What kind of an author would I be to go along with that bologna?

AG: So protecting your vision of your book seems to be first and foremost?

WV: That’s right. My strength and my weakness is that I don’t really care about the financial implications. I don’t care too much about whether a book is going to make its advance back, which means I’m not a good team player. I have to be very thrilled and grateful that Viking once again saw things my way and let me publish Carbon Ideologies at the length that I thought it needed to be. It certainly can’t be too good for Viking’s bottom-line, but I think that, like me, they’re worried about climate change. They worked so hard, it was a real thrill to have such dedicated colleagues. I worked really hard too, and we all did our best without cutting off anybody’s legs.

AG: You struck a few of those chords in the “Note to the Reader” at the beginning of No Immediate Danger. You meant for the two volumes to appear as one volume. Your endnotes and citations got cut. I interpreted the “Note” as an apology to readers that the book they hold isn’t the book you intended. There and in the acknowledgements in the back of the book, you weren’t shaming Viking, but you were like letting the reader in on this push and pull between both parties. What was your intent including those?

WV: The main reason is that I’m very grateful. This is to some extent a math/science book, and I’m not a mathematician or a scientist, so I’m doing my best. Even so, it’s a risk for me and a risk for the publisher. So I’m really, really thrilled that they tried to help me and everyone by publishing this. That’s the main thing. As far as the push and pull part is concerned, I think that’s kind of interesting, and it’s probably a good thing that readers who care can learn that I didn’t want to cut the source notes. I wish they could have been in the hard copy. This is the first time that that’s happened, and it was a compromise that I was willing to make because Viking had already done so much for me and this book. Thank God I don’t have to understand their financial imperative, and I guess that’s all I would say.

AG: You do your job and they do theirs, and it seems you are able to meet in the middle.

WV: That’s right.

AG: I just love that there is a couple of places at the beginning of the book where you say, you know, it will be okay to skip the primer section and start over 200 pages in. I just pictured your publisher shaking their head, like, “Bill, please, try harder to entice the reader!”

WV: [Laughs] Unfortunately, it is to some extent a dreary book about a dreary subject. Of all my books, it’s probably not the book that people are going to put a pick up and re-read for fun. It can’t be. Just having to decide Let’s see, do we want to talk about lignite’s emissions per pound or its emissions per energy produced when it’s burned? ─ all this kind of stuff. It’s important and needs to be discussed, but it’s not particularly fun.

AG: But you clearly tried to have fun. You titled one section “The Parable of Adipic Acid” and had some fun there despite the dreariness of the subject.

WV: I do my best. [Laughs]

AG: As informative as it is, there are some funny lines in there like, “What a treat to watch adipic acid combining with the hexamethylene diamine so that we could see a pallid syrup forming, settling out into something resembling melted cheddar cheese!”

WV: Aw, how delicious.

AG: I guess it’s a good example that there are different types of books for different kinds of experiences, and your oeuvre contains so many different sorts, including the kind that we probably aren’t going to read on the beach.

WV: No, maybe not. Unless, of course, rising sea levels turn your backyard into a beach.

AG: That’s what so many residents of Phoenix, Arizona where I grew up were banking on with California earthquakes. They didn’t understand geology. Speaking of which, I was just reading about California governor Jerry Brown retiring, who said he doesn’t believe in legacies. I was wondering if you as a writer believe in legacies.

WV: Well, I want my daughter to live as long and as happily as she can, and I feel the same about my books. If people find some value in them after I’m gone so that their lives are extended, that’s a concept that makes me happy. But it’s hard for me to believe that I’m going to know it, and therefore what’s the point of a legacy in the way. You find that you give someone a very nice tomb and what happens? The tomb gets robbed. That’s life and that’s death.

AG: It seems interesting to think that since you don’t know if there will be a legacy, you shouldn’t burden yourself with trying to create one. Is that liberating?

WV: That’s right, but that doesn’t let me off the hook. I want to make sure that I do the best job I can and try to make things ─ to the extent that that’s possible ─ somewhat timeless. I try not to get too bogged down in what is current in 2018, for instance. I’m hoping that in the future someone could pick up Carbon Ideologies and say, “Alright, here and there, this part seems a little bit antiquated now, a little bit superseded, but still I understand what Bill’s trying to do, and how he’s trying to compare the different fuels, and this was how many perks per million of C02 there were in his lifetime.” What I would like is for the book to still be useful or of interest or still something in its dated way.

AG: When it’s a paper copy or in your achieves at the Ohio State University, readers will be able to see your intent and data unchanged, unlike on the evolving internet.

WV: Unlike the internet, exactly.

AG: Can I ask you about your daughter? I’m curious what it was like raising a child as a writer who travels for work as much as you do.

WV: Well, I love her very much and it’s been a thrill to be in her life.

AG: Your father was a very encouraging, cool father, a business professor who frequently told you, “Bill, if it’s not easy, lucrative, or fun, don’t do it.”

WV: Yeah, he was great. That’s a good business plan. I recommend that to everybody, especially to people like you and me Aaron who are self-employed. There is certainly no reason to do something for nothing unless it’s going to be fun.

AG: Amen. My dad, who is Mr. Practical, had good advice in that same vein. He said, “When you find what you like, do the hell out of it and make sure you enjoy it.”

WV: I agree with that.

AG: Do you see some of your intellectual appetites and hunger for knowledge and experience in your daughter?

WV: I think so, yes.

AG: As a new father myself, I just wonder how working writers balance everything, that and I want to help encourage curiosity in my own daughter.

WV: The good news is that as parents we will inevitably fail, and therefore all we can do is fail with grace and let our children see that we are not perfect and they are not going to be perfect either. If we can help each other through the hard times and forgive the rest then we are probably doing our best.

Read an excerpt from William Vollman’s “No Immediate Danger”

Bang and Vanish

Great white heron / Getty Images

Janice Gary | Longreads | April 2018 | 20 minutes (5,587 words)

 

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap …

— Ted Hughes, “Wind”

 
We had been in Key West only five hours when the shit hit the fan. Six fans. One in the kitchen, two in the living room, one in the bedroom, and the two in the dining room where my dog lay on a red oriental rug panting incessantly, his sleek black-and-white body trembling from head to tail.

I squatted next to Winston and pressed my hand against his chest. His heart beat erratically. “What happened?” I asked my husband.

He ignored the question. “Where the hell were you? I called. I texted.”

“I turned off the phone,” I said. “I’m sick. I didn’t want you to wake me.”

“Well you’re awake now.”

I was awake alright. Awake and alarmed. Winston stared out into space, his eyes glassy and unfocused. It seemed like he didn’t even know I was there. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“I don’t know,” Curt said. “One minute he was walking down Duval Street with me and the next thing I know he could hardly move. I had to carry him home the last two blocks.”

Instinctively, my hand moved to Winston’s belly. The first thought was bloat — a twisted gut, always a possibility for large-chested breeds like his boxer–pit bull mix. But his stomach wasn’t distended. I pulled back his lips. Pale gums. Not a good sign. I considered taking him to an emergency clinic but simply walking through the door of one of those places could cost hundreds of dollars.

“Take him now,” my sister screamed over the speakerphone. She said it could be anything — bloat, internal bleeding, a brain hemorrhage. After hanging up, Curt and I looked at each other suspended in a trance of uncertainty. My sister was known for histrionics when it came to health, canine or otherwise. I asked Winston what he wanted to do. Like Jesus rising from the dead, he got up on shaky legs and walked to the front door. “I guess we’re going,” my husband said.

***

We hadn’t even been in town long enough to unpack. This was not a vacation. It was something bigger, a trial run for living and working on the edge — the southernmost edge of the country — a jumping-off point for artists and eccentrics who had one foot on the ground and the other on something much less solid. But the endeavor felt jinxed from the start. Leaving three days before New Year’s Eve, we ran smack into holiday traffic and an accident that had us crawling through the state of South Carolina for hours. In Georgia, we passed a burnt-out carcass of a car frame — a stark reminder that one wrong lane change could end everything. Even worse, for most of the trip my husband was sick with a terrible cold, which, despite my best germ-avoidance techniques, left his body and began to assault mine by the time we reached the Florida state line.

***

Winston’s crisis gave us our first lesson in what it was like to live in the Florida Keys. Outside the ubiquitous convenience/liquor store, all-night resources were far-flung and limited. The only emergency veterinary clinic in the entire island chain was 50 miles away in Marathon. And there was only one way to get there — U.S. 1, the Overseas Highway — heading back in the direction we had come.

Usually, driving on the Overseas Highway thrilled me in a way nothing else could. It was all sea and sky, the waters a liquid kaleidoscope changing from aqua to olive to cerulean to a million shades of turquoise with the slightest shift of light or shading of cloud. I loved that water so much that my last will and testament included a map indicating the exact spot on Bahia Honda where I wanted my ashes scattered. But at 1 in the morning with no moon, an invisible sea, and the threat of rain in the sky, the only thing out there was a black void, and in that void I saw another road, the one we had traveled earlier that day, traversing a sea of grass into a time and place where the confluence of the ordinary and the mythical appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly.

***

Coming down we had driven from Naples to Homestead on the Tamiami Trail, an old two-lane highway connecting the west coast of Florida to the east at the southernmost tip of the state. The trail, named for its Tampa-to-Miami route, bored straight through the heart of the Everglades as part of the Army Corps of Engineers’ earliest attempts in the 1920s to drain the Big Cypress Swamp.

The asphalt unspooled across a vast expanse of grass, extraordinary in an ordinary way, full of nothing but sun, sky, sedge, and glittering water concentrated in concrete canals, which constricted the rivers that once flowed freely. The only visible wildlife were birds — predators mostly: falcons, egrets, herons, and cranes arcing in wide circles high above the marshes, searching for their next meal.

Somewhere mid-route, a large white heron flew out of a tree and soared across the road in the direction of a drainage ditch on the other side. As the bird made its descent, I turned my attention to my iPhone and some god-knows-what internet headline. Suddenly, my husband yelled out, “Shit! What the hell?” His voice was so startling I immediately looked up from the phone, and there, on the tarmac in front of us, saw what he was screaming about — a mangled white bird body, its twisted white plumage flapping in the breeze.

Then it — and we — were gone.

“It was that van,” my husband said, motioning toward the windshield. Two cars ahead, an old tan minivan slowed and wobbled toward the shoulder.

“The bird was flying across the road, when bang, just like that! It went straight down into the path of the van.”

I turned to the passenger window and studied the landscape of the Glades. Sun glinted silver on a patch of water. Two hawks soared against a blue-white sky. I felt my heart drop into my stomach. “This is not good,” I said.

“What do you mean?” my husband asked.

“A white heron dying like that. It’s a bad sign.” As the words left my lips, I felt a weight pressing on both of us.

***

I come from superstitious people, Eastern European Jews who created elaborate rituals and mythic narratives as a way to elude the dangers of poverty, death, and religious persecution. Safe was never safe. Brides could be raped and killed while traveling to meet their grooms in the next village. Boys sent out for milk might end up with their heads lopped off by drunken Cossacks sweeping through town. The only way to control the uncontrollable was through tricks of the mind, making deals and appeals to the demons, the dybbuks lurking just out of sight.

Growing up, my mother wouldn’t let us pass over open safety pins. Bad luck, she’d say. So was walking back into a house once the door had been locked. But all the closed safety pins and doors in the world didn’t stop me from walking out the door one morning to find my father dead in our driveway, a suicide finally carried out after years of threats. It didn’t protect me from being taken down and raped on a dark street far from home. Still, or maybe because I know bad shit can happen anytime, anywhere, I look for signs.

‘A white heron dying like that. It’s a bad sign.’ As the words left my lips, I felt a weight pressing on both of us.

It’s complicated, this way of seeing the world. My default setting is not logic, but supposition, born of an overactive mind constantly searching for metaphor and meaning. As a student of Zen Buddhism, I’m fully aware that in order to see the true nature of things I must free myself from this web of delusion. “Life as it is,” my sensei says, which means a dead bird on the highway is just a dead bird on the highway. But I struggle with this. Magic and myth are part of my epigenetic inheritance. There is a crazy witch living inside me who constantly fights the clear-seeing samurai warrior on the Noble Eightfold Path. And although I’m embarrassed to admit it, more often than not, it’s the witch who wins.

***

After hitting the bird, the driver of the van pulled over and turned on their emergency blinkers. At first, I thought he had stopped to check on the bird, but no doubt he wanted to see if his car had been damaged. I pulled up Google and entered Great White Heron symbolism. There was some new age bullshit about taking a stand and finding stability. Another site said it represented following intuition. When I found a brief mention that the bird could represent death, I followed my intuition and stopped my search.

“It means death,” I told Curt at the time.

He gave me a puzzled look. “Whose?”

“My Mom. Maybe yours. That’s my guess.” Both of our mothers were in their 90s.

We continued on in silence. A large wooden totem loomed ahead, marking the Miccosukee Visitor’s Center, which advertised gator shows and airboat rides. I must have still been in shock from seeing the shattered bird; I remember how I longed to jump out of the car, hop on an airboat, and glide down that silver water, stopping time and movement to make sense out of what had just happened. But we continued on the Tamiami Trail to its terminus at Homestead where we picked up the Overseas Highway and made our way down the Keys while the cold germs settled into my body and the memory of the white bird fluttered in my head.

***

The emergency clinic was easy to find; it was one of the few places on Marathon that actually looked open for business at 2 a.m. We rung the bell and were buzzed in by a pleasant blonde woman who took us directly to an examining room. Within minutes, a young vet dressed in blue surgery scrubs entered. He bent down, listened to Winston’s heart with his stethoscope, and then stood up and studied him. Winston moved slowly across the tiled floor, wagging his tail half-heartedly when the vet called his name.

“I think your dog is stoned,” he said.

My husband and I looked at each other and shook our heads. “Stoned?” my husband asked. “How could he be stoned?”

Apparently there were many ways a dog could be stoned in Key West. A roach dropped on the sidewalk on top of an errant French fry. A piece of pot brownie discarded on the curb. A bud embedded in a splotch of ice cream, slurped up by a quick tongue. It seemed crazy. But possible.

Our mood lightened for a moment. If it was true, we’d have a great story to tell; our dog would forever be known as the Little Stoner. But even though he looked stoned and acted like it, I couldn’t shake the dread that followed me all the way down the highway to the clinic.

“What about internal bleeding?” Before leaving the house, I had done some quick research on Winston’s symptoms on the internet. It seemed like a possibility.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I’ve never seen a dog with internal bleeding wag their tail.”

That barely moving tail was a faint shadow of Winston’s usual boisterous greeting. The vet suggested my husband drive to the 24-hour Walgreens to buy a drug-testing kit. Who knew you get those things in a drug store? I hoped the test would prove he was stoned. But as I sat on the stool under the harsh fluorescence of the examining room, the white bird sat next to me, his mangled feathers fluttering like the panic in my gut.

“I could do an ultrasound if you want me to,” the vet said.

I wanted him to. He took Winston to the back. When he returned without him, his face told me what I had feared. “He’s bleeding.”

The foggy image on the ultrasound showed a swirl above his spleen. The X-ray that followed was clearer: a huge mass had ruptured and was spreading through his system. He needed to be stabilized immediately, the vet said. Then, the spleen would have to be removed. After that, a biopsy.

“Fifty percent of these masses are benign, fifty percent cancerous,” he explained. Our options were to operate and hope for the best. Or do nothing and have him die that night. There was no hesitation on our part. He was a young 11, puppy-like at an age some would say is old in a boxer. We were not ready to say goodbye.

Is anyone, ever?

***

We left Winston with the vet and drove back into the darkness. On the way home, bridge after bridge, key after key, I mentally dissected the incident of the white heron on the Tamiami Trail and compared it to what just happened. My husband saw the bird hit by the car but I only saw the aftermath. Curt witnessed the moment Winston went into shock; I only saw what happened after. Both events came out of nowhere, the bird doing what a bird does, the dog doing what he does, both taken down suddenly and in mid-movement. The similarities were startling.

My default setting is not logic, but supposition, born of an overactive mind constantly searching for metaphor and meaning.

One small detail gave me solace: We didn’t hit the bird, the van two cars ahead of us did. I clung to that distance of a few hundred feet as it were a lifeline. Maybe this meant Winston would be okay. Maybe this would be a close call and nothing else. Maybe, maybe, derived from the Old English may it be. Later that night, I repeated may it be in the form of a Buddhist metta chant recited over and over: May he dwell in the heart. May he be free from suffering. May he be healed. May he be at peace.

Some people push beads down a string as means of supplication. I pile words on top of words. Beads, prayer, paper, it’s all the same, an attempt to create order out of eternal chaos.

***

The surgery to remove Winston’s ruptured spleen was successful. (Dogs, like people, do not need spleens to survive.) He was sent home after three days at the vet with a cone over his head, a slew of medications, and a biopsy shipped off to a lab to determine whether the mass was cancerous. We picked him up just hours before my first memoir workshop began in Key West, one of three I would be teaching over the month. By the time we got back, I barely had enough time to run to the studio. After introductions, I gave the students a writing exercise and walked the art-filled hallways while they wrote, studying the work of local artists. The walls were covered with paintings of blue seas and tropical flowers. But my favorite piece was a 3-D installation of a baby doll with an eight ball around her neck entitled “Born to Lose.”

I wanted to buy that one.

***

The Friday after we brought Winston home, I sat on the oriental rug in the rental house, painting my toenails with polish while he lay beside me, his blocky black-and-white head ensconced in the plastic cone. Curt was out, making the rounds of the music clubs and I was still nursing the bad cold, sipping tea and watching the news. At one point, I got up to get something, and while looking at my dog or the television or anything but the floor, slammed my third toe against the hard plastic sole of the shoes I had thrown on the rug.

The pain was intense and familiar. I had broken my toes twice before — once right here in the Keys — and it felt a lot like those earlier injuries. Hoping it was just a bad sprain I iced it down and went to bed, leaving Winston to his deep sleep in the living room.

Sometime after midnight, I woke to the sound of Curt’s voice, alarmed and incredulous. Afraid that something was wrong with Winston, I jumped out of bed and stumbled into the living room. The dog was still sleeping on the rug where I left him. Curt was at the dining room table on his cell phone. When he saw me, he held the phone away from his mouth and whispered, “It’s Rob. He’s had a heart attack.”

Rob was Curt’s younger brother. He ate too much meat and worked ridiculous hours, but had no real health problems that we knew of. Now his wife Carmela was on the phone, speaking rapidly in her mixture of Tagalog and English, saying something about him losing oxygen on the way to the hospital. “He had a leg cramp,” she said. “We go to bed. I wake up, and he isn’t moving.”

The fan whirled above my head, still on high from when it was set for the afternoon heat. I stood there, shivering in my camisole and panties. In the dark of the dining room, the cell phone cast a ghoulish reflection on Curt’s face. “How is he?” I asked.

He stared into the phone and shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

***

The next day, I drove to an urgent care facility — a human one — and limped my way into the lobby. They showed me to a small examining room where I sat on a paper-covered table waiting for an X-ray machine to be rolled in. On the wall next to the table was a large print of a white heron standing in a mangrove hammock, its plumage as delicate as dandelion puffs in the wind.

“You again,” I said.

The X-rays came back, showing a break on the third toe of my right foot. The doctor taped it, gave me a couple Advil, and told me to rest and ice the toe. Putting my socks and shoes back on, I thought about how bad things supposedly came in threes. First Winston, then Rob. This toe would make three, wouldn’t it? I stared at the bird, as if it had the answer, but the beady eyes refused to meet mine. Before leaving, I snapped a picture of the heron with my phone camera, knowing I might need to prove — even to myself — that I had actually seen it.

Someone once told me that an aunt of hers was driving down the highway when a vulture flew into her windshield. “Can you imagine?” she asked.

Actually, yes, I can.


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By the time I returned from the clinic with my taped toe, Curt had found out that Rob had already gone into cardiac arrest before he arrived at the hospital. The doctors had induced therapeutic hypothermia, hoping to stem any further damage to his brain by reducing his core temperature. Within 24 hours, they would begin raising his temperature again and monitor his progress. All we could do was wait, which we were already doing for Winston’s prognosis. Both of them — and both of us — were in that limbo borderland between life and death, knowing and not knowing.

That night, I lay in bed half-awake and half-asleep. In this hypnagogic state, part of me was in the bed in the rental house, and part of me was in my closet at home, going through the shelf where I kept the box holding the ashes of Barney, my dog before Winston. In the dream, Winston entered the closet and jumped up, first on me, then as high as the shelf where Barney’s box was. Then he fell from the shelf. When he hit the floor, he was no longer Winston but rather a box — his own cremation box. At that point, I awoke with the dreaded certainty of what the pathology report would reveal.

The following week, the veterinary clinic called. Several times. I kept ignoring it, wanting to wait until our visit later that week to hear the news. Finally I took the call. Just as my half-dream predicted, the tests came back showing the mass was malignant. It was hemangiosarcoma, the aggressive and always fatal canine cancer they had warned me about when we first brought him in. “I’m sorry,” the woman on the other end of the phone said.

Both of them — and both of us — were in that limbo borderland between life and death, knowing and not knowing.

I hung up, refusing to feel anything. Winston lay at my feet, looking the perfect image of a healthy and vibrant dog. “You’re going to have a good couple of months,” I said to him. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Over the next few days, as Rob remained in a coma, both Curt and I began hearing stories about people who had come back from hypothermia-induced comas with varying degrees of success. A lot of them were okay, if not exactly 100% perfect. In a reversal from my usual pessimism, I began to see Rob recovered and back at his farm again. He’d have to retire from work, of course, but he’d come out of this. Finally, he’d be able to take it easy, enjoy his family, slow down some.

It felt good to envision good things. I wanted to imagine a happy ending was possible somewhere in all this mess. But the Gods were in a winter mood, even in Florida.

Unbeknownst to us, when we crossed the Tamiami Trail on our way to the Keys, strong upper-level disturbances were already headed in our direction. Fifty miles to the north, Palm Beach County would be hit a few hours later by a 90-mph tornado; to the east, gale-force winds would end up pounding the coast, ripping up whole sections of shoreline. Nothing appeared on the horizon as we drove, not the toxic blood pouring into the spleen of our sleeping dog, not the time bomb ticking in my brother-in-law’s chest, not the rogue wave of air building enough strength and momentum to slam a bird into the path of a tan minivan and onto the pavement.

The wind is always blowing something our way. We just never notice until it knocks us off our feet. This may be the Buddhist in me talking, but it’s also my experience.

***

Rob did not recover from the coma when his temperature was raised. The doctors told us that if the machines strapped to his chest, nostrils, and veins were removed, he would not be able to function. There was an intense and delicate conference call between Rob’s wife, Curt’s mother, a hospital chaplain, and us in Key West about unplugging life support. The decision was made to let him go. He would have to be moved to hospice where we would wait for nature to take its course. It felt unreal.

Almost immediately after hanging up the phone with Rob’s doctors, we jumped into the car and drove back down the Overseas Highway for Winston’s follow-up visit. While he bounced around the room, covering the vet and her assistant in kisses that were thinly disguised entreaties for the beef-flavored biscuits in the jar on the counter, the vet again explained the aggressiveness of this cancer. Our options were limited. Chemo would only give him a few weeks more — at best. She suggested herbs and supplements. Not to heal the cancer, she emphasized, but to help him live better. We left with the herbs and some hope, a little anyway.

The wind is always blowing something our way. We just never notice until it knocks us off our feet.

Not long after we rescued Winston from a kill shelter in West Virginia, when he was still less than a year old, Curt and I sat in our den and watched a blur of a dog zooming around in circles with a deflated chew toy in his mouth. He was so full of joy and energy, it filled the whole room. Out of nowhere, Curt said, “This one’s a shooting star.”

I remember the dread that flooded my body in that moment. The pronouncement felt like a prophecy, not just an offhand remark. I looked at this pup racing around the house and feared he was indeed a shooting star. And now the star was falling.

***

Rob took his last breath less than 24 hours after being taken off life support. His wife told us that the night before the heart attack, Rob stood in the kitchen and told her he loved her. A few weeks earlier, she said, he had paid off the house. She wondered if he knew. Was it even possible?

***

On New Year’s Eve, the day before Winston’s first bleeding incident, we had stopped in Naples to visit old college friends. Dave and Sally were hippies with brains, an engineer-turned-herbalist and an arts advocate who was using her expertise in fundraising and political networking to save the west coast of Florida from falling into the sea. They were delightful hosts, offering good food and drink and heady conversation. Even Winston had a blast, running around their five-acre property with their dog Bandit, at one point breaking into a giant box of Milk-Bones and grinning wildly when caught in the act, as if this were the greatest party ever.

Twenty-four hours after the great Milk-Bone caper, we’d found ourselves in an emergency veterinary clinic examining X-rays of a burst tumor. Could all that partying with our friend’s dog on New Year’s Eve have caused the rupture?

“It’s possible,” the vet had said when I asked about it. “But it doesn’t matter. It would have happened eventually.”

By this time, I understood the rupture was inevitable. But what about the cancer? Was there something I could have done to stop it from happening?

Now I did what I could do: mixed vitamins into Winston’s food, stuffed Chinese-herb capsules into duck-and-pea-flavored pill pockets, measured out 60 drops of mushroom extract twice a day. I had no idea whether I was really prolonging his life or rubbing a good luck charm in the form of an exotic-medicine bottle.

***

Our remaining time in Key West was spent in a kind of shell shock. We drank lovely cocktails — maybe too many of them — smoked pot, and haunted the streets, taking Winston with us as we walked in the valley of the shadow of death among tourists in Tommy Bahama shirts and drag queens in high heels and homeless men who slept curled up like dogs in their blankets under the covered porticos of closed churches and shops.

One month later, we walked down a hill behind my husband’s family’s church with friends and loved ones to spread Rob’s ashes. After the service, we all went back to Curt’s mother’s house and sat in the living room talking about the things families talk about when they have lost one of their own. We had brought Winston, who waited at home during the funeral and acted as a therapy dog while we talked, offering up kisses and comfort until, bored by the lack of food and action, he wandered over to the fireplace and sat down next to an immense basket of memorial flowers.

It was a striking scene, the black-and-white dog, the red-and-black fireplace, the towering display of white roses and pink-flecked lilies. I took a picture with my phone’s camera. It was so perfect it looked staged. Like in a magazine.

Not long after Winston’s pose, my husband walked him to the car and noticed that he seemed unusually unstable. In the car, Winston was restless, unable to sit down or stay still. By the time we arrived home, we knew for sure something was wrong. We drove to the after-hours vet clinic near our home, where an X-ray confirmed another bleed. “Could a tumor grow that fast in six weeks?” I asked.

“Yes,” the vet said. “That’s what this cancer does.”

She suggested putting him down. Curt and I sat in the bare room with our spacey dog debating whether to end his life. First we said yes. And then no. Then we asked Winston what he wanted to do. The door to the hall was open. Just like in Key West, he got up, walked into the lobby, and proceeded to the exit on the far end of the room, where he waited patiently to be let out.

For two days Winston was fine. Then, one evening, while napping in Curt’s office, he jumped off the couch and stood there glassy-eyed and immobile. This time, there was no discussion about taking him to the emergency clinic because we knew what was happening. As his symptoms worsened, he crept off to my office and curled up under my desk, obviously wanting to be alone.

In the morning, when I walked into the office, I didn’t expect he would still be with us. But he was. Kind of. He was obviously weak and unstable.

With each passing hour, he showed signs of being more alert, but my illusions about his prognosis were stripped away. I knew tumors were lining up inside him, each one with a fuse that varied between short and shorter. I called the animal hospital and scheduled a time later that afternoon for the euthanasia. By the time we arrived at the vet’s office, Winston had recovered enough to jump up on the assistant and give her kisses. It killed me to see it. This time, I didn’t ask him what he wanted to do. I didn’t give him a chance to walk to the door. I let it close, knowing it was shutting on both of us.

If there is anything more painful than this, I don’t know what it is.

***

According to a Mexican proverb, whatever you do on New Year’s Day is what you’ll be doing all year.

What I was doing: traveling, witnessing sudden turns in fortune, facing deaths, fighting a cold. Also: witnessing wonder, beauty, wide blue seas, and infinite night. And this: sitting in a veterinarian’s fluorescent-lit examining room made of tile and metal, looking past the nothingness in the air and seeing molecules filling empty space, watching the dance of the hidden and ever-present — the there, here, the here, there — all of it, revealed.

***

Aside from the pain of losing a loved one, Rob’s death set off a chain of repercussions that forced my husband and me to revisit our wills. As the younger brother of a man with no children, Rob was the next in line to receive most of what we had. Now, the legal mumbo jumbo of “what if” became alarmingly real: What if A is deceased before B, what if B is deceased before A, what if neither Beneficiary E nor F is alive …

In the lawyer’s office with its cherrywood bookcases and soaring windows, I could see my old-world grandmother huddled in the corner, saying Men tracht und Gott lacht. Yiddish for Men plan and God laughs.

Following the charts with their lines of succession, all I could think was, You’re right, grandma.

***

I have three advanced degrees and a healthy aversion to anything that smells like a cult. My religious life is focused on the here and now, or is at least a Buddhist’s attempt at it. Even so, I wear evil eye bracelets to ward off danger. Rings with precious stones that supposedly contain mystical powers. One of my bracelets is a mala made of skulls carved out of wood, a reminder that life is short and death ever-present. I stare at those skulls each morning as I slide them onto my bony wrist. You’d think I’d have gotten the message by now.

But nothing says death like death itself.

A few days before leaving Key West, things seemed to be settling down. Curt and I took a kayaking trip into the dense mangrove islands east of town. In the midst of the hammocks, the water was calm and easy, and I had no trouble paddling through the narrow root-lined passages. But by the time we headed back, a freshening breeze threaded the air and rain clouds hovered on the horizon. As we entered Cow Channel, the water was already churning with small whitecaps. I quickly fell behind. It was a struggle to not be blown off course.

Halfway across the channel, I saw a white heron fishing in the shallows. I called out to Curt, but he was too far ahead and the wind carried my voice away. Was the bird a sign? Did it mean we had finally come full circle?

In the middle of unruly waters with a wind that seemed bent on turning me around, there was no time to dwell on it. Maybe it was a sign, or maybe I was just a woman in a small boat with a big need to believe. Keeping an eye on the sky, I grabbed the double-bladed paddle and pushed against the current, determined to outrun the dark clouds.

The rain began just as I pulled into the dock.

***

One year later, I stood on that same dock. Now, planks of fresh pine outnumbered the weathered wood. Except for those boards and a couple of blue-tarp roofs jutting out above the tree line, it seemed hard to believe that only three months before a monster hurricane named Irma roared into this channel carrying the sea on its back. Boats, buildings, and lives were destroyed. Bang! Just like that.

There is an old Zen saying: Everything changes.

And for now, I’m still here.
 

***

Janice Gary is the author of Short Leash: a Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance, winner of the Eric Hoffer Prize, Nautilus Book Award, and a finalist for the Sarton Award for Memoir. She is on the faculty of the Master of Liberal Studies Program at Arizona State University and conducts memoir workshops throughout the country. Her work has been published in River Teeth, Brevity, The Spring Journal, The Potomac Review, and other publications.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

The 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winners

From left, writers Alice Crites, Stephanie McCrummen, Amy Gardner, and Beth Reinhard embrace in the newsroom after The Washington Post wins two Pulitzer Prizes. The Post shared a Pulitzer with the New York Times for their coverage of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and contacts between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian officials and won a second Pulitzer for uncovering the decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct against Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

As expected, the New York Times and The New Yorker dominated much of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize fanfare, and while it is necessary to honor the award-winning reporting undertaken by Jodie Kantor, Meghan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow, some of the most-talked about features from this past year were also celebrated. Including, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, whose in-depth reporting on Dylann Roof for GQ won for feature writing (Ghansah also won a National Magazine Award for this story). And the staff of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which provided a brutal examination of the effects of heroin during a week-long period.

The entire list of the other Pulitzer recipients can be found here, but below is a list of some of the honored works. Read more…

Chasing the Man Who Caught the Storm: An Interview With Brantley Hargrove

AP

 

Jonny Auping | Longreads | April 2018| 15 minutes (4,096 words)

 

In his recently released book, The Man Who Caught the Storm, Brantley Hargrove tells the story of an unlikely legend named Tim Samaras, who lived his life grappling with and addicted to one of nature’s most dangerous marvels.

Samaras was a tornado chaser with a simple but absurdly treacherous goal: to get close enough to a twister to glean data from within its core. Hargrove, who spent months on the road chasing tornadoes for the reporting of the book, retraces and recreates Samaras’ most dramatic missions, culminating on May 31, 2014 in El Reno, Oklahoma, where he would face off with the largest tornado ever recorded. That same tornado would take Samaras’ life along with those of his son, Paul, and fellow chaser Carl Young.

“We now live in an era when the Mars Pathfinder rover has touched down on the Red Planet,” Hargrove writes. “The human genome has been mapped. But twisters still have the power to confound even the most advanced civilization the planet has ever known.”

Samaras legacy and life’s work represented a crucial foundation for how to better understand and predict historically unpredictable tornadoes.

But The Man the Who Caught the Storm is hardly a meteorological textbook. Rather Hargrove weaves a uniquely American tale of adventure — “nowhere else on the planet do tornadoes happen like they do in this country,” as he explained to me — diving into the circumstances and makeup that leads a man to chase what he should be running from.

Lacking even a college degree, Samaras was an outsider in the meteorological community, who not only developed one of the most sophisticated information-gathering probes the field had ever seen, but also had the courage (or perhaps unrelenting urge) to personally drop that probe in front of a twister.

Hargrove sat down with Longreads to discuss tornadoes, his own storm chasing, and the addicting thrill of being in the presence of something that can cause unfathomable chaos and destruction.
Read more…