Search Results for: Nature

No Journalist Should Have to Know How to Survive in Prison

Courtesy the author

Alice Driver | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,616 words)

 

“Welcome to the Democratic Dictatorship of Myanmar,” said a slight, young woman on the street in Yangon, Myanmar. She was referencing the number of journalists in the country who had been threatened or jailed by the theoretically democratic government. Yangon is tangled roots and the shade of 100-year-old trees; it is the sound of hundreds of wings flapping as young men feed pigeons, their feathers flashing golden in the early-morning light; it is journalists imprisoned for speaking truth to power.

***

When I arrived in Yangon in January 2018, Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been in prison for a little over a month. Much had changed since I had lived in the city in 2006, volunteering at an international high school with my best friend Tien, both of us living at a government-run hotel and eating Hershey’s chocolate bars out of her suitcase.

In 2015, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, swept elections, and both citizens and the international community had high hopes that she would support press freedom. At a press conference a few days before the election, Suu Kyi referenced a “communications revolution” as millions of citizens watched her via Facebook, which at that time also promised to be a beacon for democracy. Facebook arrived in Myanmar in 2011, and since that time has racked up at least 14 million users, 93% of whom accessed it on their mobile phones.

In a country where burgeoning press freedom and the appearance of Facebook coincided, media literacy has proved a challenge. During my time there in 2006, I helped students apply to colleges in the United States and Australia — basically anywhere outside of Myanmar, which at that time had a dysfunctional university system. One of the students I worked with ended up attending Berea College, my alma mater in Kentucky, which I had encouraged her to apply to since they provide funding to low-income students. Yangon University, which was once Myanmar’s most famous university, reopened for the first time in two decades in 2013. Between the lack of independent media and the lack of access to higher education during the years before the democratic opening, it didn’t surprise me that media literacy was low.

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Born Again

Illustrations by Karen Barbour

Michelle Dean Topic | April 2017 | 13 minutes (3,100 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

Candace Newmaker was 10 years old when she died in 2000. There are only a few pictures of her, and even fewer biographical details. Here is what we do know: she had dark brown hair and eyes, she liked dogs and horses, and she enjoyed arts and crafts. Candace had been a ward of the state of North Carolina since she was about 5 the daughter of a very young mother who hadn’t been able to hold her own life together, and who had lost her very young children to the Department of Children and Family Services. Jeane Newmaker, a kindly nurse-practitioner who was single and in her early 40s, found Candace in the system when she was 6 and adopted her in 1996. It’s not clear exactly when things got difficult between Newmaker and her adopted daughter. Maybe things were difficult from the start. (Newmaker declined to comment for this article; this account is based on contemporaneous press reports in the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.) Candace, one of the girl’s therapists later said, could be sweet, but she could also be “mean.” One therapist said it just seemed like Candace had a “defense mechanism for being through so many places” — that “it was like having the average 18-year-old adolescent in your house,” one who was trapped in a 10-year-old’s body. Read more…

The Forever Nomad

Margarita Gokun Silver | Longreads | April 2018 | 18 minutes (4,386 words)

 

On an afternoon in August 2017, I walk out of the library and turn right. At the intersection, the pedestrian light comes on and I cross knowing that once I reach the end of Madrid’s Plaza de Colón, I’d wait less than a minute before I could cross again. I’ve done this walk every day for the past several years, my pace synchronized with the rhythm of traffic lights; my mind concentrated on counting the stairs — 14 of them: seven for my right foot to ascend and seven for my left — and my hand clutching a euro to give to the old man selling tissues on the corner. Everything is the same — skateboards banging against the concrete under the quick feet of their teen devotees, dogs running around the middle of the square let loose by their owners, and, up above, a giant red-and-yellow Spanish flag flying in the wind. Everything but one thing.

I’m on my way to a home that’s no longer there.

A week ago the movers came and methodically went through our three-bedroom apartment. They wrapped our glasses, plates, vases, and the ceramic Don Quixote in bubble wrap. They encased our furniture in cardboard, bending the thick corrugated boxes patiently so that when they were done our couch looked like a mummy-copy of its former self. They sealed our artwork — most of it painted by me — in wooden crates that resembled well-insulated tombs. I wanted to ask if the art could breathe through the layers of paper, plastic, and wood, nailed shut so tightly that not a ray of sunlight could get through. But they were busy, and I didn’t bother them. Instead I went into what used to be our bedroom, lay down on the bed that wasn’t coming with us, and concentrated on my own breathing.

By my count, this was the 18th time I moved homes. Some of those moves were miniscule — just several miles away from where I’d lived, my belongings riding in the back seat of a car in milk crates and an old laundry basket. Others were more substantial — intercontinental relocations that involved wrapped furniture, sea freight, and customs bills. What all of them had in common — and what set them apart from this last one — was that they didn’t evoke grief. Sure, many had been tinged with goodbyes and sadness, but none before had stopped my heart, gelled the blood inside of my veins, and perforated my body with holes that seemed to allow life to seep right out of it.

None of those moves had felt like loss.

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Publishing the Best of the Desert: An Interview With Ken Layne

AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File

Ken Layne is the writer, editor, and publisher of the Desert Oracle, a bright-yellow “field guide to the desert that covers the “strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros” of the Joshua Tree region in California. We spoke with him after the publication of a recent profile in Pacific Standard, in which he explained how he designs and delivers each issue himself to desert outposts with as little as 30 people. 

Aaron Gilbreath: You grew up in the desert. Where exactly did you grow up in Phoenix?

Ken Layne: I was born and mostly raised in New Orleans, far from any desert, but I lived in Phoenix during the formative middle-school years. First on the poor side around Buckeye and Seventh Avenue ─ old Phoenix, a shack behind my uncle’s house. Vacant lots, railroad yards. We had motorcycles and Chihuahuas. My classmates were mostly Latino and Native American. I made one friend, this very poetic character, and he lectured me all the time on Aztlán, the Chicano cause. It was all new to me. He kept the tougher kids off my back, which was nice. My grandpa had been a coal miner, along with his father, and they all moved out to the south side of Phoenix on the Black Lung train. At least that was the story I heard now and then.

The other place was a nice little stucco house with a swimming pool,  a suburban elementary school a few blocks away. Most everybody was a white kid from Illinois or Michigan. My dad and his twin brother started an air-conditioning service business, so eventually, we could afford our own house. There was this big urban cowboy sort of honky-tonk nearby, huge place on a nearby big intersection on the northwest edge of town. My parents used to go there now and then. Just north of Greenway Road was wild desert, dirt roads through foothills, crazy saguaros with owl nests hanging out.

AG: I grew up in Phoenix, too. The city itself felt like any other, but one unique thing was how you could drive in any direction and be in the middle of undeveloped Sonoran Desert in thirty minutes. When did Arizona desert start to work its magic on you as a kid?

KL: I never much saw the natural world before we moved to Arizona. I never saw mountains all around, or mountains at all. But it was purgatory for my dad, something he had to endure again to finally earn enough money to move to San Diego. That’s the usual dream of kids who grew up in Phoenix of the 1940s and ’50s, especially the poor ones: Take the highway out to the beach and never come back. There are three generations of Laynes buried in Phoenix.

I liked it up in the foothills, in that mostly wild desert that began just across Greenway. I got to go to a science camp at this since-submerged place up at Lake Pleasant. We held gopher snakes and tarantulas, walked out under the stars, listening for owls and coyotes. It was fantastic.

AG: After your family moved to California, you started exploring the desert on your own. What did you do on those trips? Why were these experiences formative?

KL: Had a group of friends, oddballs mostly, from different parts of town. Four of us went out to Death Valley one freezing winter, Christmas break from high school. Everybody had part-time jobs so we had this narrow window, maybe 48 hours. We drove up in the middle of the night — after one of the guys finished work at a pizza parlor — in this other guy’s grey-primer VW bug with holes in the floor and springs coming out of the seats. A very cold night. Didn’t do much more than drive around, watch the sun come up over the wild desert, hiked a little, explored old buildings. I took a bunch of black-and-white pictures. Drove back in the middle of the night, listening to weird AM radio stations. It was romantic. Still is. That is my favorite thing in the world, just driving a desert two-lane at night, could be West Texas or the Four Corners, but especially Nevada and East California. A weekday night, alone with the radio, a motel and more driving ahead. A vague destination or purpose, with time to take sketchy dirt roads, to walk around outside, stop in used bookshops and little roadside taverns with E Clampus Vitus neon signs.

AG: Those desert drives are deeply romantic. They’re a good place to make a life. It’s interesting because many residents of big desert cities loath the desert. They like the sun, the pools, the mild winters. Are you trying to reach those people with Desert Oracle and convert them to the landscape’s wonders? Or are you trying to reach the converted?

That is my favorite thing in the world, just driving a desert two-lane at night, could be West Texas or the Four Corners, but especially Nevada and East California.

KL: The only propaganda angle is desert conservation, encouraging people to love these places for their wildness, for their desolation and spooky beauty. I try to make something that looks good in a desert home, that you’ll leave out when you’ve got people coming over. And maybe you learn about the animals, learn about the plants and the seasons, the folklore and history, both recent and ancient. And maybe you already have a backyard full of native plants and ground squirrels and roadrunners, and you want to encourage more of that, defend the wild desert where that’s still the norm.

People who love a place will fight for it, whether or not they live around there full-time, whether they’re in Palm Desert or Scottsdale, surrounded by strip malls and golf courses. You can still see the mountains! The best of the desert isn’t where most people live, anyway, all crowded together. The best of the desert is walking alone on a sandy trail, or being lost in a wilderness area and figuring out how to get back, or sitting alone in the rocks while creatures go about their business, or driving some mysterious road in the middle of the night, watching for cattle on the road and military drones and UFOs.

AG: The desert West is many things: its poisonous critters, prickly plants, spaciousness and deadly heat. It carries the burden of a distinctive mythology and politically charged climate. But it also evokes a feeling, a kind of mystic awe and reverie. Desert Oracle somehow manages to capture that elusive experience in its pages. Can you talk about trying to bottle that desert feeling?

KL: I like having minimal information when I’m exploring: rumors, oddly-worded signs, a sense of menace around a truck stop or a rest area, weird motels, out-of-date interpretive displays, Civilian Conservation Corps’ bunkhouses and trail stairways, the cheery and somewhat suspicious oddballs you meet in a campground outside Trona or Tonopah. With the Oracle, I try to keep it sparse. Easy on the eyes. I don’t want to give anybody eye strain. In telling stories of UFOs and Yucca Man and past civilizations and failed real-estate schemes, I want to dryly transcribe the weird stuff. I don’t want to oversell it. Like somebody calling you in the middle of the night and reading the police reports out of the paper in Barstow or Pahrump, like a radio announcer in a long war. I trust that the people who enjoy the Oracle are the people who read this kind of thing at night and get a sense of dread and romance that makes them feel alive to all kinds of possibilities. Alive and alert.

Like any old southwestern newspaper or quarterly, Desert Oracle is presented without fanfare. I don’t explain things too much. You can look up the rest if you get obsessed. And you will probably get obsessed with some of this material, and then you’re diving down internet rabbit holes and raiding used bookstores in the High Desert, seeking evidence. I despise those “Explainer” things that are so popular in the online media. “Here’s a complex subject that could provide years of intellectual pleasure should you pursue it, but we’re going to post some glib, error-ridden thing that nobody even bothered to proofread, and then you’ll be all set!”

AG: Preserve the mystery while sharing bits of it. Desert writer Edward Abbey was a big influence on you. How’d you first discover him? What did his writing and life teach you?

KL: After that first Death Valley trip, I was raiding the high-school library for regional books, anything about the wild desert. Desert Solitaire was there, with all the nature books. And like everybody who falls in love with the desert and that book at the same time, the deal was done. Abbey wrote beautifully, of course, but he also had that swaggering thing that appealed to me at that age. The brave poetic writer, etcetera, a lifetime of screw-ups, moments of beauty and transcendence.

You’ll find when you start hiking and learning about the wildflowers and the animals, some scold will often appear and start lecturing you, telling you all the things you’ve got wrong, everything you don’t yet know — the people who suck the joy right out of a place in their constant campaign to be validated as some sort of self-appointed expert. Abbey never did that, and that’s one reason why it’s so easy for people to fall for him. He’d often explain that he wasn’t a naturalist, wasn’t a biologist or geologist. He was a philosopher. In one of his books, Abbey claims his favorite desert birds are the turkey vulture and the “rosy-bottomed skinny dipper.” It’s very welcoming. A good teacher makes it enjoyable, makes it a pleasure to accumulate those little bits of knowledge we have about the desert, about the natural world in general.

AG: Abbey influenced me, too. I spent my undergrad years bushwhacking southern Arizona’s deserts and mountains alone. When I found Abbey’s books, I realized I wasn’t some crazy loner, just an enchanted youth fascinated by this place’s magic, and that I could try to write about it, too. He was my first role model desert rat. Do you identify as a “desert rat”?

KL: I like any dramatic, moody landscape. But I guess I’m most at home in the American desert, and mostly the parts of the Great Basin and Mojave with a minimum of other people. Harry Oliver mastered the “desert rat” thing with his Desert Rat Scrap Book that he self-published for 20 years starting in 1946. (Oliver was a self-taught architect and set designer who worked with director Cecil B. DeMille and built the Tam O’Shanter and Brown Derby in Los Angeles, before retiring to Thousand Palms to become a full-time desert rat.)

That’s a particular thing, that sort of cornball comedy, relocating the ornery hillbilly or farmer to another environment that is baffling to the city people. It’s a very American archetype, and I guess I picked up a little of that for the radio show, for my campfire stories. For myself, I seem to be moving toward something more like the early desert hermits of early Christian Egypt. Probably a one-room stone cabin that’s a daylong walk from the nearest person. I don’t want to farm or collect junker cars or have domestic animals or shipping containers everywhere, and I don’t want to see any human works: no power lines, no satellite dishes, no other houses, no visible homes. Come into the little town every week or three for a dinner out and a martini, check the PO box, then “See you next month.” Boy, that would be nice.

The people who enjoy the Desert Oracle are the people who read this kind of thing at night and get a sense of dread and romance that makes them feel alive to all kinds of possibilities.

AG: In his posthumous Abbey biography, The Red Caddy, desert rat Charles Bowden wrote: “Desert worship is a suspicious matter to desert rats. It is as if talking about what is out there will diminish what is out there. Also, as a group, we feel damn foolish admitting what we feel out there.” What do you make of that?

KL: Well I don’t feel foolish about it. And I don’t mind talking about it, now and then. But when you’re visiting with other desert people, you don’t need to convince each other of anything. It’s usually the new convert who needs to wax poetic and all that, and that’s a normal part of infatuation.

It’s a good feeling, building this link to a place, a bioregion, the part of the Earth where you’re going to settle in. People can go overboard at this stage but that is all right. Enthusiasm is necessary and generally in short supply. Most of us who choose to live in low-population desert places are looking for a minimum of human interaction anyway. A little goes a long way.

AG: In the recent Pacific Standard article about Desert Oracle, you describe how a black triangular object hovered beside your car before shooting off through the clouds ─ a UFO. What about that experience influenced your magazine’s vision or aesthetic?

KL: It is entirely possible that my preference for black geometric icons and dingbats influenced how I saw that particular UFO — and by “UFO” I mean an unidentified thing you could loosely describe as “aircraft” but more as “pulsating 100-foot-wide manta ray hovering silently next to your car, before it vanished in a point of light over the distant clouds.” It’s also a very popular UFO shape, seen for hundreds of years: the black arrow or triangle. They are still seen, often on country roads or desert highways. It’s a really particular kind of experience, from the many eyewitness reports I’ve read over the years. Usually goes from a brilliant light on the horizon to this enormous thing hovering nearby to a light streaking away in the opposite direction, at the speed of a shooting star. Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas billionaire who had the Pentagon’s UFO study contract that the New York Times recently revealed, ran a black-triangle study for many years. After my own sighting in late 2001, I contacted them and was interviewed by one of their people. They eventually put out a report that said people see these things fairly often, and whatever they are remains unknown.

Desert Oracle #4, the UFO cover from 2015, has a UFO typographic symbol as the only cover art. It’s an “Adamski disk,” something George Adamski saw (or faked) around Desert Center, near the southeastern corner of Joshua Tree National Park. Just this black symbol on yellow cover stock. I love everything about that. It’s my favorite cover so far, and it’s echoed by the radio show’s art, the podcast logo you see on your phone when you listen to the show. My signs at the office in Joshua Tree look like that, too. It puts you in the right frame of mind.

But it initially felt kind of cheap to make a cover out of what is basically a printer’s dingbat, a wingding. I had been commissioning artists to do illustrations for the covers before that one, and the first couple issues have good covers. But the really stark covers are my favorite.

Since the 1990s, I was designing websites that mimicked tabloid newspapers, black and white with some primary spot color. And whenever a “real designer” came in, everything got crowded, too much of everything. Too much color, too many elements. The ultimate nightmare is the modern Internet page, with fifty different things blinking and yelling at you, a sewage mix of every color, every bad style of graphic, crowded and miserable. So I do it all myself now. I just learn as I go.

I’ve always liked one-color printing. Cheap offset printing, no two pieces exactly alike, blocky type, colored stock. I love that kind of poster art, like Eastern European political posters, or Southern California punk-rock flyers. The desert component was the regional press, these small shops in the Southwest that printed up their own field guides, rockhound books, trail & wildlife guides. You could buy them at gemstone shops in the desert, or gift shops at the state park. They had single-color printing for the usual reason—it’s cheap—but generally with desert-colored cover stock, so you’d have the utilitarian and modern 1950s and ’60s typesetting and graphics in black on a yellow or orange or sand-colored cover. Keep it sparse. All of that goes into the design for Desert Oracle. I used to run the photo-typesetting machine at this little backcountry weekly, at night when the regular typesetter was gone and the editor had his column ready after going through a few coffee mugs full of Bushmill’s, and I loved the limited choices for headlines, captions, and body text. The sans serif choices were News Gothic and maybe the Avenir or Futura families, and you could do so much with variations of shape and font size. Then you had easy-to-read serif fonts for text columns, Times New Roman, Schoolbook and such things. Add a little black-and-white illustration from the “Old West Clip Art” books. That combination is nice to read, just nice to look at.

Anyway, I suspect the really dramatic close-up UFOs are at least partly filled in by the brain of the observer, the witness. There’s a whole episode of my radio show, #25, on this subject. Jacques Vallee and John Keel often wrote about it. And it’s entirely possible that my own convincing UFO encounter on a desert highway triggered the part of the brain that produces or processes spiritual experiences — Saul on the road to Damascus and all that, the children at Fatima, people who “see” a spaceship from Star Trek or elves from a fairy tale — and that our aesthetics and culture fill in the details, the “message” if you get a message in the process. Or maybe not. UFO theories aren’t terribly interesting to me, all these 20th-century science-fiction tropes. In the return of Twin Peaks last year, there’s something like a mass UFO sighting in a small-town New Mexico. A girl and a boy are walking at night and she picks up a Lincoln penny. And then this Abe Lincoln robot-hobo is terrorizing the town, staggering through traffic, etc. That made a lot of sense to me.

AG: “Crowded and miserable” — that describes both the modern Internet pages and certain popular urban desert trails I’ve hiked. Part of each Desert Oracle issue contains reprints of naturalists and explorers writings, alongside original pieces. How do you find older material?

KL: Mostly it’s chosen as intentional propaganda. Mary Hunter Austin was really the first Edward Abbey. She wrote The Land of Little Rain, about the California desert, and she was this bohemian character, a socialist, an artist, an important early feminist in the literary and theater scenes. And she wrote beautifully about the desert, in a way that reads very well today. People should read Mary Austin. And it’s public domain, so I can afford it. Same with John Wesley Powell, who most desert people know as this great explorer, the guy who recommended that the United States leave the desert Southwest alone, as it could not support huge populations with its scant water. But he also wrote with style and wit, and you feel like you’re there with him, around the campfire after a day of adventure. I feel a kinship with Powell. His family, like my paternal family, originates in the West Midlands and wound up around the Ohio River, and we both had many early Methodist preachers in our line. His life was a series of adventures, his morals were good and progressive for his time, and he looked at the Southwest with the right eyes. We should’ve listened to him more, but much of the federal desert land we have today is the result of the land-conservation philosophy he helped create, and the recommendations to the U.S. government after his great explorations of the Colorado River and the interior West in general. It was in the last years of his life that the General Land Office ─ what became the Bureau of Land Management in 1949 ─ finally transformed from a land-giveaway agency controlled by the railroad monopolies to a bit more of a conservation mission. He’d be heartbroken to see “Lake Powell,” which is a monument to everything he was against. And of course we’re all still fighting about public lands and water rights, and there are a handful of welfare ranchers and deadbeats like those Bundy people who are paid instigators of an anti-American effort to strip us of everything that’s in the public domain, everything that is part of the Commons. One day we’ll stuff all those nutbags in a rocket and drop ’em on an asteroid somewhere. “It’s all yers, Clive!”

Then there’s Zane Grey, who is always kind of dismissed as this cowboy-book hack. When I finally got around to reading his stuff, I found it interesting and sort of poetic. He was living in a desert cabin and crossing the Southwest on horseback at a time when it was really a commitment to be out on the desert. I like reading something and realizing what I assumed about it was wrong, that there’s real value to the stuff, and then I like to spread it around if I have the opportunity. The old pieces also give you a sense of time as part of the space of the desert. All these times layered over the desert: the U.S. Calvary camels crossing the Mojave, Charles Manson hiding out in the Panamints, Minerva Hoyt sleeping under the stars in a desert canyon, Shoshone and Paiute stories of great ships in the sky, red-eyed monsters in the night.

AG: You must have a large home library.

KL: It’s spread out between home and the Oracle office and a storage unit. I’ve got most of the desert-related books close at hand, but one day soon, I hope, it will all be assembled together, at my secret ranch house that is many happy hours away from busy little Joshua Tree.

AG: What is your ideal Desert Oracle piece? What elements do you gravitate to in material?

KL: It’s not completely clear. It is mood more than subject. I’ll start off with a bunch of ideas for each book and sort of see which ones I still like when it’s time to fill the text columns.

AG: Lots of people who love magazines think it’s nuts to try to start a magazine. Charles Bowden often worked eighty hours a week running his magazine from a cluttered Tucson office. In his words, “The magazine is an obsession and I am at my happiest when I am obsessed.” You’re a one-person operation: You have to fill it, design it, distribute it, sell and promote it. You go store-to-store. How much time does Desert Oracle take? What sacrifices does independent publishing require of you?

KL: It’s one of those times right now when I haven’t had a day off in three months. It’s not always like that. Summer is slower. I can bum around a little more. Each book takes a good 60 days to put together, I’ve slowly figured out — two months full-time. And then I do all these other jobs that are part of Desert Oracle: a weekly radio show that needs to be written and produced and edited, these live performances at museums, hotels and campfires, talking to the reporters, running the goddamned social media accounts, invoicing and delivery, shipping out orders, tax returns, bookkeeping, postal permits. Somewhere in there you try to write and edit and design and proofread this little magazine. It’s every day all the time, and it’s depressing to always be so far behind on everything, but it’s ultimately a satisfying thing to invent and halfway manage to pull off. I had a whole thing in mind: Not just a print book with this certain look, but a radio show, live events and the sparse office with books and maps and yellow file cabinets — this specific desert thing layered over the existing reality, to make the existing reality better, cleaner and more romantic.

But it’s not a sacrifice at all. A sacrifice is working for some media corporation where everybody’s always in fear for their jobs, for their lives. It would be nice to have more money,  to be able to afford to hire a couple of people who see the vision, who would enjoy contributing to the thing. One day. Or not. I’m aware that it’s a singular pursuit and might always be that way.

AG: People either imagine magazines being these lucrative enterprises with fancy editorial parties and celebrity photo shoots, like Vanity Fair, or they imagine them as money pits that devour all your savings before leading to nicotine addiction and divorce. What are the financial aspects of running an independent magazine?

You cannot run your own business and be a good parent to your intellectual property unless you understand how the business works, at least how it works for you.

KL: Desert Oracle has been barely profitable since the first issue. It doesn’t make much, I rarely pay myself, and I run a tight ship. But I’m deeply against going into debt for things. You have to play whatever angles you’ve got, whatever strengths you’ve got, and see if that works, try something else if one thing falls flat. Stick to the vision but always be ready to go with it, wherever it goes. Having a small-but-loyal readership, a cult following, etcetera, can work out if you run a tight ship. You have to do pretty much everything, and you have to get some satisfaction from it.

There’s this idea that artists — designers and writers and musicians, that whole crowd — are supposed to be dupes when it comes to money, when it comes to contracts. You cannot run your own business and be a good parent to your intellectual property unless you understand how the business works, at least how it works for you. As a one-person publication, you can rarely afford consultants or “professional services.” I will not skimp on attorneys but I do my own accounting, I do my taxes. I am my own subscriptions-and-circulation consultant, I figure out the postal permits and the databases and the wholesale and retail mix. I design the envelopes and postcards, the invoices and the business cards, my work uniform, all that. I clean the bathroom and change the printer ink, and take packages and issues to the post office, proofread the issues and process the photos. There is always something to do.

You’re going to have do most everything, so you might as well make it the way you want. You have to create the whole world you will operate within, from your physical office to your daily schedule.

AG: Every generation includes ambitious people with literary aspirations who have something to say, and they start magazines and independent presses. Many universities have graduate publishing programs. What insights can you share with these folks about running your own magazine?

KL: If you’re doing something small, something that’s mostly your labor and vision, then stick to what makes you satisfied. Don’t let people bully you into putting a lot of stuff in the book that doesn’t please you. Don’t feel obligated to run anything. Don’t give out excess free copies if you depend on selling those books. Treat your readers and your retailers well. Answer their emails, at least the nice ones. Listen to them, because your loyal readers can point you to a lot of potential material, and because they’re people with interests very close to your own. You will meet good people and new friends through such work. They will generally forgive your mistakes and tardiness if they believe your work is done in good faith.

If the publication begins to get some attention, and you can make a living from it, then you are part of a proud American tradition of the small-town publisher, the country newspaper, the regional quarterly: Poor Richard’s Almanack, Leaves of Grass, the Territorial Enterprise, the Los Angeles Free Press. It’s a great life, especially if you pick a cheap area to live.

AG: One of Abbey’s problems, particularly with Desert Solitaire, is that his books’ popularity drew more people into his beloved quiet spaces than he was comfortable with? As his friend Charles Bowden put it in The Red Caddy, Abbey “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground and pulverized one of his favorite backwards of the Colorado Plateau.” As a publisher, does that concern you?

KL: Of all the human uses of the desert, people visiting national parks and monuments to sight-see and hike and camp is the best. And you want to convert these people from “Oh this looks great on Instagram” to “I will donate time and money for the rest of my life to non-profits that defend and protect wild desert.” We’re fighting this mafia federal government right now, these Russian mobsters trying to upend our beloved new desert national monuments, trying to upend California’s Desert Renewable Energy Plan, which was put together over a decade of hard negotiation between the Bureau of Land Management, the state government, the environmental groups and the renewable energy companies, years of public meetings and reports and science. These attacks on the environment and our parklands are completely out of step with California, with the modern West, where people place tremendous value on these weird wild landscapes that are near enough to all the big cities for people to escape for a weekend. The California parks and monuments are a steam valve for the densely packed California cities. It’s important.

I’ll complain like any local crank about the tourist traffic and how you can’t eat out most of the time, because we have very few restaurants and they’ve got lines out the doors in tourist season, which is now a solid nine months a year. But these are people here to appreciate the desert landscape, the flora and fauna, the run-down cabins, the wind and the sand. That’s good. We need these people on our side. Too many of these people is a good problem to have.

I’ve spent half my life out here chasing illegal hunters, trash dumpers and off-road motorcyclists tearing up the desert. It’s a lot easier to run off some illegal campers from Oakland or wherever. I always tell them where they can legally camp or point it out on their map.

AG: Endurance and armor are important survival strategies for desert creatures: come out at night, hunker down by day, grow slowly and develop a thick skin. Where do you see the magazine in five years?

KL: Hopefully it’s still here — hopefully we’re all still here! — hopefully publishing on a tighter schedule, maybe with a couple of employees, an editorial person and a production or layout person, maybe another several thousand subscriptions, some income from the radio show, some other things in the works, and mostly I hope I can do more driving around and walking around the desert. I had planned on a “couple days a week” made-up job as publisher and editor of the Oracle and that part of the scheme has not yet worked out. But it’s all right. Better than the usual alternative: Go bust and go back to working for somebody.

Finding the Soundtrack to My Desert Life

Photo courtesy the author, notes via Shutterstock

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2018 | 30 minutes (7,571 words)

After I transferred from the university in Phoenix in late 1995, I kept myself in motion so compulsively that I barely got to know my new town. I biked to class. I hiked after class. I ditched class to hike during the week and drove all over Arizona’s rugged southeastern corner to hike the whole weekend. Half a year passed during which I spent as little time in my sad, lonely apartment as possible. I didn’t know anybody in Tucson, and I didn’t want to — not yet. My previous friendships had only helped me turn myself into a pothead. And yet I couldn’t stand to be alone and sit still either. Struggling with my isolation and anxiety about life, I tried to work through my twitchy misdirection in the border region’s dry mountain forests and lowland deserts, taking advantage of the long highways that gave me time for silent contemplation at 75 miles per hour.

Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains, Sycamore Canyon in the Pajarito Mountains — in those first Tucson months, I saw more of this rugged landscape than many University of Arizona students did in four years of college, yet I never really saw my new city for what it was, because I didn’t take the time. I only saw the land around it.

***

I was restless at age 20, lost, searching for something beyond my reach and always beyond my understanding, some cosmic insight and career path that Mother Nature’s vast deserts seemed capable of offering in a way cities could not. I’d smoked too much weed during the previous three years, and I was trying to quit in order to find my calling. Sitting still meant dealing with temptation; hiking kept me on track. I read a lot of ecology and nature books back then, and what compounded my avoidance was my belief that the wilderness held the answers to all of humanity’s questions — from the meaning of life to cures for cancer to an objective sense of right and wrong. I still believe in wild nature, but in my young, confused Thoreauvian worldview, urban areas were cancerous “man-made” places to escape, not savor, so I fled Tucson every chance I got, just as I had fled Phoenix the year before.

Phoenix was bland. It had a Taco Bell personality. Tucson had a singular, authentically Sonoran Desert character that evolved from its origin as a military outpost in Spain’s old northern territory, then developed in the isolation resulting from Phoenicians’ dismissal of the city as a backwater. People nicknamed it the Old Pueblo. Even before I moved there, I could see the Old Pueblo’s superiority. Prickly pear cactus grew as tall as trees. Roadrunners climbed ornamental palo verdes in the middle of town, and the lonely howl of passing trains rang throughout the night. Many streets had no sidewalks, just as many houses had no lawns. The plaster on old buildings peeled to reveal straw in the adobe bricks underneath. It was as if the city was letting you see who it really was.

Phoenix looked as engineered as Las Vegas, or worse, like bad cosmetic surgery. Central Tucson looked like an extension of the desert, natural and spacious and endearingly shaggy. I could see this when I arrived, but my philosophical views let me rationalize my unwillingness to really appreciate it; it was a city, natural-looking or not. Only when I discovered The Shadow of Your Smile, an album by a band called Friends of Dean Martinez did I finally quit running long enough to find something to value about urban Arizona, besides Mexican food and live music. I’d learned to use cities as basecamps for outdoor excursions. This instrumental steel guitar band helped me stay put, because its cinematic cowboy lounge music matched the personality of this Spanish colonial city. When I started looking at its beauty as equal to that of wildlands, I not only started feeling at home in my city, but also in my own body, and I found my sense of direction.
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The Red Caddy

Photo by Kirk McKoy/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Charles Bowden | The Red Caddy | University of Texas Press | April 2018 | 19 minutes (5,099 words)

I don’t bring a lot to the table. I knew him, we were friends and we had a lot of good talk. But there were no big moments, dra­matic events, or secret missions. There is no cache of letters. I’d pretty much pitch those as they came in. I was trained up as a historian but apparently the training never took. I am by nature a person who takes things as they come and that is how I took him. The only thing special about him to me was our friendship, since I don’t make friends with everyone I meet.

Now I run into people who are struck that I knew him and I always tell them it was not a very hard thing to do. He was rea­sonably polite, didn’t shit on the floor, and was well read. This last point mattered to me since I devour books, and like most such wretches love to talk about what I have read and even better argue about it. He had a similar pathology. I admired what he wrote and by and large agreed with it — not just philo­sophically, but viscerally. I suspect I was born already knowing a lot of what is in his books, it seems to come with a certain ornery cracker territory as part of the blood. So, naturally, we never wasted time on such commonplaces but talked about other things. Read more…

Trump’s Wall Would Devastate Big Bend National Park

AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

The lower Rio Grande forms the border between Texas and Mexico. Although it’s the fourth-longest river in the U.S. and feeds wildly diverse ecosystems along its 2000-mile course, the Rio Grande is treated like an irrigation ditch and what writer Nick Paumgarten calls a “moat” dividing the two nations. Trump’s proposed border wall would follow a large portion of it, devastating its fragile ecology without slowing the trafficking of hard drugs.

For The New Yorker, Paumgarten floated the rugged river canyons through Big Bend National Park. Camping on both sides of the border, his flotilla included such esteemed companions as Democratic Senator Tom Udall, from an influential conservation-minded family, and Teddy Roosevelt’s great-grandson.You have to see certain places to understand why they must be protected. Paumgarten’s story lets readers experience this landscape themselves, to appreciate what Trump’s wall would destroy: not only the landscape, but the opportunity to experience tranquility around campfires, for wildlife encounters, starlit nights and spiritual experiences, and the chance for future generations to connect with nature.

Having been determined by the 1848 peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War, the border traces the river’s deepest channel—the thalweg—which, because the riverbed frequently shifts according to the water’s whims, is in some respects notional. Of course, no one is proposing that a wall be built in the middle of the river, or for that matter on Mexican soil, even if Mexico is going to pay for it. So the wall would go on the American side, some distance from its banks—miles into U.S. territory, at times. It would cut people off from their own property and wildlife from the main (and sometimes the only) water source in a vast upland desert. The Center for Biological Diversity has determined that ninety-three listed or proposed endangered species would be adversely affected. The wall could disrupt the flow of what meagre water there is, upon which an ecosystem precariously depends. And it would essentially seal the United States off from the river and cede it to Mexico: lopping off our nose to spite their face. It would shrink the size of Texas.

There is also the matter of efficacy. The wall would probably delay a hypothetical crossing by a few minutes, depending on its design and the manner of the breach. There are videos of Mexicans deploying ladders, ramps, ropes, welding torches, and tunnels to get over, through, or under border fences. (There are about seven hundred miles of fence already, most of it in California and Arizona.) For a great deal of its length, the river is insulated on both sides by hundreds of miles of desert—inhospitable terrain that does more to discourage smugglers and migrants than a wall ever could. (The vast majority of hard drugs intercepted on the southern border is coming through so-called points of entry—the more than forty official crossings—hidden in vehicles and cargo.) And, while the banks of the river, for much of it, are free of impediments, except for thick stands of invasive cane and salt cedar, which can make life miserable for the Border Patrol, about a hundred miles of it cut through deep canyons far more imposing and prohibitive to a traveller on foot than a slab of concrete or steel. The canyons don’t require funding from Congress.

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Life on the Oil Frontier

Maya Rao |The Great American Outpost| Public Affairs | April 2018 | 9 minutes (2,428 words)

The house is squat and tan, near a 24-hour Walmart and a small truck stop along a busy road where diesel pickups groan and belch black exhaust. My new landlord leads me to the sparsely furnished basement, where a room costs $600 a month; the window by the bed is level with the gravel parking lot. About a half-dozen other women are renting rooms in this oasis of one of America’s most patriarchal societies: the North Dakota oilfield.

“It’s not like you’re in prison,” says the landlord, explaining that we are not to have any guests over. “But we don’t let it be the Wild West and let people get crazy.” Somebody’s oil worker boyfriend might trash the place; indeed, the last round of roughnecks already have. Men in other camps and housing developments are also forbidden from having women over, in an effort to keep out prostitutes. Gender segregation is de rigueur in a region where the oil industry is about 80 percent male. There are plenty of women around, but they’ve often followed a boyfriend or husband to the oilfield and taken jobs cashiering, tending bar or working as office administrators.

The landlord owns a cleaning company, and the house was originally purchased to lodge some of the cleaning staff, though it has open rooms for tenants like me. Some clients hire him after other cleaning firms send out women who lean over their mops to reveal undergarments, signaling they are available for extra services. But the landlord assures me that his operation is nothing of the sort. A billboard at the corner features a rotation of advertisements:

West Prairie Estates – new home auction
Holiday season special Golden China super buffet (lunch $6; dinner $8)
Dewatering containers filter sock solutions SPILL-CLEAN-UP
Little Caesars $5 classic TURN LEFT NOW

It’s spring 2015 and I’ve spent the last few years traveling back and forth from Minneapolis to the North Dakota oilfield in order to write a narrative nonfiction book about the largest oil rush in modern U.S. history, and the implosion that follows. Like most people out here, I’ve found myself living in a myriad of makeshift circumstances: crashing in spare rooms and on couches in a farmhouse, a camper, a few apartments and a trailer park called Dakotaland where a roughneck from Tuscaloosa gets stoned every night with our Houston neighbor and educates me about the intricacies of workover rigs. My housemates have been all men — more out of necessity than preference — until I decide to go on Craigslist and sign a proper lease. By the time I show up to the basement room near Walmart, several people have dismissed my inquiries upon learning that I’m a woman. “We don’t want to discriminate, but we can’t put anyone in a compromising situation,” says one landlord. So the basement room by Walmart in Williston, the largest town in the oilfield, is my only choice. It is too expensive to live alone — even as OPEC’s oil price war against the American shale industry makes overleveraged apartment owners desperate for tenants.
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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”

Who Needs Jurassic Park When We Have Liaoning, China

Visitors pose with their hands in a dinosaur's mouth at an exhibition in Shenyang, China.

In The Middle of Nowhere, China, 250 miles northeast of Beijing, a massive new museum is rising up from the dusty earth. It will house a portion of the findings from Liaoning, a region whose abundance of fossils is helping paleontologists understand dinosaurs’ relationship to birds in more detail — and making China the new paleontology hot spot. Richard Conniff has the full story for Smithsonian.

Nonetheless, there’s genuine fossil wealth being revealed in Liaoning. Many of the slabs have been transferred to Beijing, where preparators are getting them ready for display. One morning in the basement of the IVPP, I watched a young man stare through the dual lenses of a microscope as he worked an air-pressure tool along the length of a wing bone. The needle-pointed tip whined and flecks of stone flew out to the sides, gradually freeing bone from matrix. Nearby a woman used an old credit card to apply a tiny drop of 502 Super Glue to a break in a fossil, then went back to work with a needlelike pick in one hand and an air pump in the other. Eight preparators were working at that moment at different fossils. It was an assembly line, dedicated to opening old tombs and bringing whole empires of unimaginably strange and beautiful creatures almost back to life.

Read the story