Search Results for: Space

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo-Hoo

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Christy Lynch | Longreads | October 2019 | 17 minutes (4,584 words)

 

On my 27th birthday, I had a fever dream about Disney World. It was my third day feeling sick, and I was floating on the edge of sleep, swimming through a blur of mouse ears and castle spires. I thought I heard the clap of fireworks, and my eyes blinked against a flash of sunlight. I woke up looking around for a shower of gold sparks but saw only the crooked towers of repurposed liquor store boxes spread across my new bedroom, slicing up the morning light.

Two months earlier, my previous apartment complex went the way of New Nashville — when an investor installs energy-efficient toilets, doubles the rent, and forces out all the tenants. In the four years I’d lived in Nashville, rent across the city had exploded. Now anything comparable to my two-bedroom, no-dishwasher takeout box of an apartment cost 60 percent of my monthly take-home pay. I got a real estate agent and started looking at properties for sale on the outskirts of town.

The day before my birthday, I closed on a small condo with an HVAC unit older than I was. My real estate agent brought champagne to the title company’s office, and I signed my name to a stack of contracts until my ring finger went numb. Afterward she handed me the key to my new house, and I drove to my next appointment: the gynecologist, to find out why it burned when I peed.
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Surviving the Shattering of My Mind and My Marriage

creative commons / Pegasus Books

Andrea J. Buchanan | excerpted from The Beginning of Everything: The Year I Lost My Mind and Found Myself | Pegasus Books | October 2019 | 17 minutes (4,584 words)

 

This is what I do when I am startled, or confronted by an argument: I freeze. If I can become very still and wait it out, become invisible, then it will stop, and I will be safe.

This is not a great strategy for dealing with confrontation. And yet it is a powerful reflex, one against which I have to actively work to fight in a moment when I find myself in a combative conversation or stressful dynamic. This is why I end up staying longer than I intend to, or agreeing to things I don’t necessarily want to do, or losing an argument I should win. This is not a pattern that works in my favor in the long run.

My marriage has been a long argument, and I am perpetually freezing. It’s true that over the years I have gotten better at responding, at not holding myself so still that I can barely breathe.

And it’s true that when the argument is about something that’s not me, when it’s about the kids and what’s right for them, for instance, I am able to resist the urge to hide and instead fight on their behalf, or for what I know is the right thing. But my first instinct is always to not break, to not allow myself to shatter. And so often, against my better judgment, I agree, I soothe, I capitulate. I freeze.
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‘A World Where Mothers Are Seen’

Photo by Javier Delgado Rosas

When my beloved brother, Juan Carlos, died in 2013, I reeled into the darkest place of my life. We’re told that when someone dies, the greatest grief is the loss. We aren’t told about the griefs that loss will uncover. For me, that grief was my antagonizing relationship with my mother, whose house I left when I was 13, never to return. My mother, who still punishes me by denying me her love whenever she doesn’t approve of a decision I make about my life, which is often. My mother, who told me when I left an abusive relationship, “Tu no pensaras vivir conmigo.” The thought of moving back in with her hadn’t crossed my mind. Still, it was devastating to learn she wouldn’t take me in—I was a newly single mom of a 1-year-old. That kind of rejection leaves you unanchored in the world. It was a longing for an anchor, a foundation, that fed my obsessive research on strained mother-daughter relationships. 

In the journey, I found there is a name for women like me — unmothered — and there is a name for the pain I carry: the mother wound. 

The mother wound is defined in various ways, depending on who you talk to. The general consensus is that the mother wound:

  • is the pain of being a woman passed down through generations of women in patriarchal cultures;
  • is the series of traumas that pass down from generation to generation that have a profound impact on our lives;
  • includes the dysfunctional coping mechanisms used to process that pain and trauma.

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Stories about fraught mother-daughter relationships have been around for thousands of years. In ancient stories, figures like Persephone and La Malinche are daughters whose transition into womanhood has been thwarted by their mothers or a person representing the mother figure. In almost every fairy tale, the heroine has no biological mother, and the lack of a mother has a significant impact on the heroine: The stepmother in Cinderella and the queen in Snow White both try to destroy the protagonist.

These stories all comment on how long and hard the road is for a woman to self-actualize. Our society is still patriarchal — it forces the role of mother on women and demands it become their sole source of identity. It demands that women deplete themselves in order to mother. There is no safe space to process the rage that often results from this kind of oppression, so it is sometimes taken out on the children, especially daughters, who may remind the mother of her unlived potential.

So much of what I encountered in my research resonated. It helped me see my mother as a woman, not just a mother. I saw a woman who had encountered and endured countless obstacles and traumas, and I began to understand that while my mother did the best she could with what she had, it was also true that the little girl I was didn’t get what she needed. The woman I am today still carries that cross. 

* * *

There were questions that remained unanswered. My mother was a brown, immigrant woman who endured the kind of extreme poverty I only saw in the Save the Children commercials of my childhood. Yes, we were poor, but I never went hungry, and I didn’t watch my little sister succumb to a curable childhood illness like my mother did. How did this shape the young woman my mother was into the mother she became? Also, the research I found was focused on white people who were cisgender and in heterosexual relationships. I wondered: How have slavery, colonialism, immigration, genocide, and racism shaped and exacerbated the mother wound for people of color and indigenous folks? How do homophobia and transphobia play a role? I turned to literature and found answers in stories by writers of color: Toni Morrison’s novels such as Beloved challenge the image of black mothers as self-sacrificing and all encompassing. Jaquira Díaz’s essays examine the impact of mental illness, white supremacy, colonialism, and drug abuse on her relationships with her mother and grandmother.  

Ultimately, I was searching for stories that could help me understand my mother and why she couldn’t and still can’t nurture me. I needed to know I wasn’t alone in my suffering and that I could survive being unmothered. I found that I can make something beautiful out of my suffering: I can create spaces like the Writing the Mother Wound movement where I help writers make art about their experiences; and I can establish relationships like this one with Longreads where I can help stories like these get published. 

In March 2019, I moderated a Writing the Mother Wound Panel at AWP19 in Portland, where writers Rene Denfeld, Jaquira Díaz, Michele Filgate, Elisabet Velasquez, and I shared our stories and upbringings. Though our experiences were different, our pain was the same. We all found ways to restore ourselves, and even take back our power, through writing and community work. Seats filled up quickly and people lined up in the back, against the walls, and spilled out into the hallway of the convention center.

What I discovered was that I was not alone and that my work was giving people permission (and I dare say, courage) to write and share their stories. Many of us are shamed into silence and discouraged from writing honestly about a relationship that has shaped us like no other. We have to talk about it and write about it. This is how we can find and make healing. This is also how we discover the many ways we have and can continue to mother ourselves, and remember that it is not only mothers who are responsible for a child’s nourishment.

Complicating the idea of motherhood can help create a world where mothers are seen first and foremost as human beings, with distinct identities and needs. When a mama is seen and supported, we all benefit. 

I’ve heard the saying time and again that the healing is in the wound. This series is evidence of those possibilities.  

* * *

Listen to Longreads Contributing Editor Danielle Jackson in conversation with series creator Vanessa Mártir on the Longreads Podcast and hear author-read excerpts from the series.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:
‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
 Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Woman’s Search for Real Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang
All Mom’s Friends, by Svetlana Kitto
The Coastal Shelf, by June Amelia Rose

* * *

Vanessa Mártir is a NYC based writer and educator. She is the founder of the Writing our Lives workshop.

‘I Went Quiet…and That Allowed Me To Understand’: The Life of a Molecatcher

David Tipling/Getty

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | October 2019 | 17 minutes (4,589 words)

How does one acquire a trade? And what happens when you decide that your chosen profession is suddenly anathema to you? Those two questions hang over Marc Hamer’s book How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature. The title is not a metaphor: Hamer spent most of his working life catching moles; and this book, he explains the moment that prompted his decision to stop, and the series of events that led him to that point.

It’s a singular memoir. Hamer describes a life spent making his way around Britain, including a period of homelessness early in his life. His book abounds with reflective passages about a life lived in nature, mortality, and the ways in which humanity does and does not interact with the natural world. And, of course, there’s information on catching moles.

The resulting book is fascinating in its observations on the quotidian and in its ability to capture its author’s frame of mind. “At some point on a long walk you stop being who you thought you were,” he writes halfway through, “but you don’t question it because the questions stop too.” Read more…

End of Discussion

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  8 minutes (2,066 words)

This will be impossible to tweet. It always is. How do you siphon 2,500 words into 280 characters? More importantly, how do you turn a measured thesis into something interesting, and by interesting I mean shareable, and by shareable I mean divisive. It’s one thing to say, I don’t know, “Todd Phillips is a no-talent ass clown;” it’s another thing to imply that over more than a thousand words analyzing the bottomless lack of depth in Joker. “It was literally like ‘Let’s make a real movie with a real budget and we’ll call it fucking Joker,’” the director told The Wrap in September, his defense against accusations that his film intentionally glorified a character who many considered an incel antihero. And it wasn’t just the critics. Victims of the 2012 Aurora shooting, which took place during a The Dark Knight Rises screening, even asked for donations to survivor funds and gun violence intervention programs. Phillips was confused by the controversy. “Isn’t it good to have these discussions about these movies, about violence?” he asked. “Why is that a bad thing if the movie does lead to a discourse about it?”

It’s not a bad thing, except this isn’t a discourse. To have a discourse you need a modicum of intellectual humility on both sides, which is to say, both sides need to have some idea that what they believe might be wrong in order to actually be receptive to the opposing opinion. Neither Phillips nor the social media mob he was taking issue with were having a discourse. It’s hard to blame the latter, since the thing getting in the way was not so much them as it was the medium. It’s easier to blame Phillips, whose party line is that he broke the mold by taking a simplistic trope and turning it into a profound piece of art that explores contemporary fears, when, in actual fact, it only signals depth while remaining superficial. In a similar display of contradictions, now that his clown movie is being swept up into a complex discourse, Phillips is refusing to engage with it, instead opting for reductive dismissal that mirrors the online critiques he so openly disparages. Read more…

Bikini Kill — and My Bunkmates — Taught Me How to Unleash My Anger

Jeff Kravitz / Getty, Seal Press

Melissa Febos | Longreads | excerpted from Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger | October 2019 | 13 minutes (3,398 words)

My father and I sat in near silence for the four-hour drive to western Massachusetts. The worst possible thing had happened: my father had read my diary. Now, my parents were sending me to summer camp for three weeks. Over the previous eighteen months, I had undergone a personality transformation. They had seen the outward signs — how my grades slipped and my once gregarious and sweet disposition now alternated between despondency, sulking, and fury. The diary revealed that this new me also lied and drank and spent as much time as possible in the company of bad influences and older boys who either believed that I really was sixteen or didn’t care that I was actually thirteen. I, too, was confounded by my transformation and so my diary offered a meticulous accounting of events with little reflection. When I imagined my father reading it, my mind blanched white hot, like an exposed negative. My body was brand new but felt singed around the edges, already ruined in some principal way.
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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | October 2019 | 18 minutes (4,621 words)

In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the objects and substances we adorn ourselves with.

Previously: the grisly sides of perfumeangora, pearls, and mirrors.

* * *

Everyone thought it was gone. The woods would no longer welcome the late-spring appearance of its pendulous yellow lip, twisted maroon petals, and thick green foliage. Although lady’s slipper orchids continued to bloom throughout the wild woods of Europe and North America, this particular species (Cypripedium calceolus) had been declared extinct in England as of 1917. Collectors had destroyed the plant in the early 20th century, suffering from what was then known as “orchidelirium,” an incurable psychological illness marked by a need to pillage and possess, to strip the landscape bare and imprison one’s precious findings behind the four walls of a personal greenhouse. 

But Cypripedium calceolus wasn’t entirely lost. There were a few small plants growing wild from seed, working their thick white roots into the forest soil. It grew slowly and survived in secret. When a botanist found one growing in Yorkshire in the ’30s, it was kept secret. Botanists feared the plant would be poached again, and so for four decades, no one knew about the lady’s slipper’s return to Britain. 

Eventually, the secret got out. While botanists worked to reintroduce the flower to the wild and start a new population of yellow-lobed blossoms, collectors caught wind of the miraculous return of the lady’s slipper. For a while, the specimen — growing on the Silverdale Golf Course  — was relatively safe, thanks to its obscurity. Then, in 2004, someone got greedy. A thief stole onto the grounds in the middle of the night and attempted to steal an entire plant. It was found later, mangled, but still alive; the thief got away with a small cutting. In 2009, another poacher got away with a large piece of orchid, leaving just six flowers behind. 

The orchid is now under police protection during its flowering months, from late May to early July. As far as I can tell, they set up police tape around the growing area, assign an officer to regularly patrol the course on foot, and considered putting in CCTV cameras, though it’s unclear whether they actually ever began to film the plant. The tape and the patrolman, however, remain as a deterrent, and the plant, one of about a dozen in the U.K., continues to flower annually. 

Orchid mania didn’t begin with lady’s slippers. It began with exotic specimens, introduced to English gardeners and noblemen in the late 18th century. While many of them had seen botanical drawings of tropical orchids, the live specimens were something else entirely. Their strangely shaped flowers and bright colors sparked a fixation that came to exemplify the values of the period, for the heroic white adventurer who risks his life to harvest the knowledge and beauty of other lands, returning victorious to his home after striding across harsh landscapes, battling his way through jungles, and fighting man and beast to achieve his goals. The orchid stood for supremacy — of knowledge, of culture, of whiteness. It stood for expansion and colonialism. The way Western countries have treated orchids reflects how we’ve come to understand entire sections of the map. Instead of the old saying, “Here there be dragons,” Western explorers looked at the blank areas of their maps and thought, Here there be loot. 

If Cypripedium calceolus is afforded official privileges, it’s not because of its beauty. It’s for its symbolism: It’s a stand-in for Britain’s native wildlife. Visiting this rare flower is a way for people to show their fealty to the land itself, to participate in a romantic rewriting of history, where they always loved their green islands and white cliffs and were only ever trying to extend those same gifts to others.

* * *

It is not often that a plant inspires pilgrimages or gets police protection; for the most part, we view plants as one of the lowest forms of life. The hierarchy is usually: human, animal, insect, plant, fungi, bacteria, virus. We assumed for centuries that plants were stationary, unthinking, unfeeling, and unable to send even rudimentary messages to one another (we now have evidence that this is untrue — plants do talk, plants do listen). For centuries, we’ve valued plants primarily based on how good they are for eating, or for looking at. Until we began to understand more complex scientific ideas like ecological diversity, carbon sequestering, and rewilding, those were our primary motivations for growing plants: taste and beauty. 

Orchids have no taste, though many are edible. (Orchid petals taste, I can report, like water.) What they have by the boatload are looks. I think of orchids like little dandies, dressed in different outfits for different occasions. There are sturdy orchids that grow from swamps and would seem to enjoy long meandering walks through the countryside in tweed and green wellies. There are delicate orchids that do not like to be moved and restrict themselves to flashing their colors at passersby from their perch in the trees, like a glam wedding guest toasting the bride from a corner. There are orchids that look like ballerinas, dressed in tutus for their next performance, and orchids that look like businessmen, stiff and upright and ready to work. 

Orchids, as a plant, may date back as far as 50 to 100 million years, making both the Victorian orchid craze and the contemporary passion for orchids a blip in their overall history. While we weren’t paying attention, they were evolving complex pollination mechanisms. They were forging relationships with bees and other insects, becoming increasingly specialized. They were growing in ever more fantastic shapes and developing ever more unlikely adaptations. Members of the orchid family grow absolutely everywhere — on every inhabitable continent, which just means they haven’t figured out a way to thrive in Antarctica yet. There are about 28,000 currently accepted species of orchid (which doesn’t include 100,000 or so hybrids and cultivars introduced since the Victorian period). They live in the temperate woodlands of Sweden and in the arid rocky soil of Arizona. They hang from trees in humid tropical jungles and decorate the mountains of the Middle East. 

There are orchids that look like ballerinas, dressed in tutus for their next performance, and orchids that look like businessmen, stiff and upright and ready to work. 

Yet when most people close their eyes and imagine an orchid, they picture a tropical variety. Perhaps the moth orchid, which you can buy in almost any grocery store or gift shop. These orchids have big fuchsia or white petals and sepals surrounding a delicately proportioned “lip” and “throat” (i.e., the flower’s sex organs). Or maybe they picture the pale and eerie ghost orchid, the subject of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, a book that served as source material for the Academy Award–winning movie Adaptation. Meme lovers might know about the monkey-faced Dracula orchid, whose flowers resemble little simian faces, or the Italian orchid, which looks like a big-dicked stick figure (thus earning the nickname the “naked man orchid”). And there are plenty more orchids that you wouldn’t even know are orchids. I had a weird little plant growing in a pot in my bathroom; I’d dug it up from my backyard because I liked its broad variegated leaves. Only in researching this piece did I discover that I, a known killer of potted orchids, have been growing one for months — the downy rattlesnake plantain. But these ordinary orchids — the spiky green bog orchids and plain pale ladies’ tresses — didn’t change the history of knowledge. Not like those flashy tropical flowers did. North American and English native orchids are important to their ecosystems, but they’re not the ones that caught Charles Darwin’s eye. 

Darwin’s admiration for fauna is well documented in On the Origin of Species (1859), but people often forget about his devotion to flora. Even Darwin calls his 1862 orchid study a “little book,” but it was a little book with a long name — On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing — and a big impact. The dense book argued that “every trifling detail” of orchid structure was not necessarily the result of “the direct interposition of the Creator,” but of centuries of wooing insects into their hairy parts. Although orchids have both “male” and “female” organs (stamens and pistils) contained within one flower, they don’t pollinate their own ova. Instead, they work with insects to get the job done, ensuring intercrossing rather than inbreeding. (Darwin may have had a personal stake in his argument; he felt quite a lot of guilt over marrying his first cousin, an act that he thought may have contributed to the deaths of his “rather sickly” children. “If inbreeding was bad for Charles and Emma’s offspring,” Jim Endersby writes in in Orchid, a Cultural History, “self-fertilization (the ultimate form of inbreeding) ought to be especially bad.”) 

In efforts to attract insects and spread their pollen, orchids have developed some truly wild shapes. Oncidium henekenii is an iridescent red flower with yellow ruffled petals that looks quite a lot like a “fetching female bee,” according to David Horak of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The orchid not only looks like a bee, it smells like one. “When the male lands on the flower, it grabs the labellum and attempts to copulate with it,” writes Horak. “In the process, the flower deposits pollinia on the insect’s head, to be carried to the next flower he visits.” Other orchids lure in insects with colors and shapes that mimic those of more nutritious flowers. Orchids pollinated by flies or carrion beetles are often brown and reek of rotting flesh. Slipper orchids are some of the most devious; they use their big, bucket-shaped labellum to trap bees and bugs. The bugs fly in, thinking they’re going to get some nice sweet nectar, and find themselves stuck in an empty cavity. The only way out is through a hairy hole, just big enough for the insect to sneak through. As the still-hungry insects climb out, they brush against the pollen-covered hairs and leave decorated with the orchid version of semen. 

These adaptations have compelled Micheal Pollan to call orchids “the inflatable love dolls of the floral kingdom,” skilled practitioners of “sexual deception.” Orchids are, according to Pollan, rather fantastic liars who evolved alongside insects, luring them in time and again with the promise of “very weird sex.” Thanks to this long-term fuck-buddy relationship, there are plenty of orchid species that can only be pollinated by a specific corresponding insect species. After learning a few of their adaptations, you can spot patterns, see which lock will fit which key. Darwin’s study of orchids lead him to prophesize the existence of a long-tongued moth when an orchid grower in Madagascar sent him a sample of a star-shaped white orchid with a long, dangling nectary that could grow to almost a full foot long. Upon seeing it, he wrote a friend, “Good Heavens what insect can suck it?” before going on to suggest that, “in Madagascar there must be moths with probosces capable of extension to a length of between ten and eleven inches.” Two decades after Darwin died, scientists found a subspecies of Congo moth (commonly known as Morgan’s spinx moth) with a prolonged proboscis. 

It wouldn’t have been possible for Darwin to examine orchids so closely without access to orchids. While his other works had him trotting around the globe, he researched his little orchid book while hanging out with his family in England. At this time, growing tropical orchids in backyard greenhouses was an incredibly popular pastime for upper- and middle-class men. It supposedly started in the early 1800s, when British naturalist named William John Swainson sent a bunch of orchid tubers back from Brazil. Ironically, Swainson had used the tubers to package other specimens, but the tubers grew and blossomed, surprising everyone. The 1800s also saw the golden era of the modern greenhouse, an architectural movement spearheaded in England by Sir Joseph Paxton. A gardener who rose to knighthood, Paxton created one of the first modern English greenhouses for the Duke of Devonshire in the 1830s (Paxton later designed the famous Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851). The visibility of these elegant glass structures inspired a proliferation of greenhouse building among the upper classes. Made with iron bars and cheap, factory-made glass, these grow houses gave people a place to grow tropical plants that wouldn’t otherwise thrive in England’s temperate climate. This was also a period of rapid imperial growth and expansion that brought more orchid varieties to English shores. “Local networks of colonists, missionaries, and traders made it easier to recruit indigenous guides and porters, and to obtain information and supplies that allowed expeditions to reach and explore previously un-botanized areas,” writes Endersby. 

As more and more orchids arrived in England, the flower became further coded. Any old gardener could grow a rose bush, but to grow an orchid you needed a greenhouse — and connections. James Bateman’s 1845 book The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala speculated that “Orchido-Mania” pervaded all classes, but especially the “upper.” Bateman also suggested that orchids were nature’s green patricians. According to Endersby, Bateman wanted hobbyist gardeners to stay in their lane. Aristocratic people should grow aristocratic flowers, for “the happiness of the community at large.” This is but one reading of Bateman’s argument — he also makes it clear that all of society can benefit from seeing greater plant diversity — yet Bateman’s words still reflect a certain sense of noblesse oblige. It was inevitable, Bateman thought, that the upper classes would grow orchids and the lower classes would grow humbler flowers like tulips and carnations. It may not have been ideal, but it was the way of the world.

The high expense of orchid-rearing didn’t much deter the rise of floral madness. Those who couldn’t participate firsthand were able to live vicariously through the legendary antics of plant poachers. People were hungry for exotic flowers, and equally hungry for stories of their capture. Dozens of orchid hunters died abroad, killed by illness, accident, or foul play. “In 1901, eight orchid hunters went on an expedition to the Philippines,” writes Orlean in The Orchid Thief. “Within a month one of them had been eaten by a tiger; another had been drenched with oil and burned alive; five had vanished into thin air; and one had managed to stay alive.” The last man standing walked out of the jungle with either 47,000 or 7,000 orchids, depending on the source. In 1891, an Englishman named Albert Millican published a memoir of his time spent orchid-hunting in the Andes, Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter. As he travels through the Andes, he meets Native men and women who he disparages and lusts after, respectively. He sees his companions pierced with poison arrows and doesn’t seem particularly bothered by their passing. He also doesn’t seem to love orchids all that much: They were a means to an end. Poachers would harvest as many specimens as they could, leaving no tubers left to regrow the population. Some orchid hunters cared about scientific advancements, certainly, but most were after more money and fame. They could come back with both high-priced stock and tales of wild panthers and wild women, cannibals and conquests.  

Dozens of orchid hunters died abroad, killed by illness, accident, or foul play.

As the 19th century wore on, orchids and death became more explicitly associated. It wasn’t just that people died in their quests to procure them; orchids themselves were also seen as deadly. Stories circulated about orchids found growing in graveyards and on human remains. “In the late 1800s an Englishman in New Guinea discovered a new variety of orchid growing in a cemetery,” writes Orlean. “Without bothering to get permission he dug up the graves and collected the flowers.” (He gave the people of the nearby town a few glass beads to pay for his desecration of their ancestors.) Another orchid hunter sent home plants attached to shin bones and ribs, and still another brought a flower growing from a human skull. This last find was auctioned off at Protheroe’s of London, sparking a series of think pieces on these gothic curiosities, these bloody orchids. 

As in life so in fiction, and 19th- and 20th-century pulp literature is awash with dangerous flowers. My favorite entry into this highly specific canon is The Flowering of the Strange Orchid by H.G. Wells. First published in 1894, it tells of a short, nebbishy orchid collector named Winter Wedderburn who laments to his housekeeper that, “nothing ever happens to me.” Later that day, he goes into London and returns with several orchid roots. Most of them are identified by the sellers, but one is not. “I don’t like the look of it,” says his housekeeper, comparing it to a “a spider shamming dead” or “fingers trying to get at you,” before defensively telling her boss, “I can’t help my likes and dislikes.” But to Wedderburn, this root is an opportunity. Something, he hopes, might happen.

Of course, something does happen. After time in his overly hot greenhouse, the orchid blossoms. The “rich, intensely sweet” scent of the flowers makes him dizzy; it overpowers all other smells in the greenhouse. It also overpowers Wedderburn who passes out, to be found later by his trusty housekeeper. He is alive, but barely: Fingerlike aerial roots have swarmed over his body, “a tangle of grey ropes, stretched tight” attached by “leech-like suckers.” The housekeeper saves poor Wedderburn by breaking the windows and dragging him outside. The bloodthirsty orchid is left to die in the cold with all of Weddernburn’s other plants. 

Once he recovers, Weddernburn finds himself thrilled by his little adventure. He’s had a brush with the exotic, hypermasculine world of orchid hunting, and he came out on top. What a feat for such a quiet, milquetoast little man. 

* * * 

At the age of 7, I became an orchid mangler, like the unnamed thief of Silverdale. I suppose I could claim I was struck by orchidelirium — it wasn’t my fault, officer! — but that’s not quite true. I had flower delirium in general; I picked flowers from my neighbor’s gardens and ate the violets that dotted our yards. I stole flowerheads from grocery store bouquets. I liked the colors. I wanted to keep them all, even the dyed carnations wrapped in cellophane, even the jewelweed that grew in the swampy parts of our neighborhood. I didn’t know that orchids were rare, nor would I have cared. I wanted one of those pink, bulbous flowers — a pale ballet pink, like the inside of a seashell or my mother’s fingernails — so I picked it. (When my mother found out she sat me down and explained endangered species. I never picked another lady’s slipper.)

Looking back, it shouldn’t have been hard to resist the call of the lady’s slipper. Lady’s slippers are, in my opinion, kind of ugly. Our New England variety reminds me of human testicles, covered in spiderlike veins, more fleshy than flashy. 

This isn’t a terribly imaginative comparison; orchids have been associated with balls since ancient times. The word “orchid” comes from the Greek word for testicle, órkhis. The Greeks were inspired by the plant’s rounded tubers, which often grow in a pair, one larger and one smaller. Ancient physicians believed that these roots could both cause erections and stop them, depending on which tuber you picked. (The aphrodisiac and the boner-killer followed the same recipe: Stew in goat’s milk, drink hot root broth, wait. The big one would make the organ swell, the small one would quell lust.) In medieval Europe, orchids often went by folk names, like fox stones, hares-bollocks, sweet cullions, dogstones, and goat’s stones. (In case further clarification is required: Stones, bollocks, and cullions are all vulgar synonyms for the family jewels.) 


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It’s difficult to say precisely when orchids became more closely associated with the female body, but during the height of orchid mania, these flowers were often understood as somehow feminine. This makes some visual sense: Aside from the roots, orchids tend to look more vaginal than phallic. But it’s not really about what the flower looks like. It’s about how they were collected, harvested, conquered, bred. And (as usual) it’s about sexism. Flowers were, like women, passive players in procreation. (Darwin didn’t have this hang-up, a small point in his favor.) A 19th-century growing manual would deem orchids “marvelously docile … as with women and chameleons, their life is the reflection of what is around them.” 

When orchids were given agency, they were seen as treacherous. Their sweet scent could lure you in, their beauty might trick you into doing something foolhardy, their silent presence was enough to drive a man wild. Orchids were the femme fatales of the flower world. Popular short stories like “The Purple Terror” by Fred M. White (1898) and “The Orchid Horror” by John Blunt (1911), as well as novels like Woman of the Orchids by Marvin Hill Dana (1901) blur the line between blossom and woman. In each of these narratives, the reader is cast in the role of the male explorer who is seduced by both the promise of fabulous flowers and the hope to get closer to an alluring, exotic woman. For Endersby, these stories show not only the fear of women’s shifting societal roles, but also the fear of (and desire for) the tropics, “ripe with sickness and scheming natives, embodied in seductive exotic women.” He goes on to suggest that dangerous orchids like Wedderburns’ “seem to imbue women with qualities that were simultaneously repellant and seductive.” 

The role of the orchid collector, then, was to tame the dangerous woman. To own her, to coax forth her beauty in a safe, contained space. To take her out of her natural habitat and show her how to live; growing orchids as wish-fulfillment. It allowed these men to feel virile and manly, as though they had imposed their will on nature itself. Inside the tidy walls of a steel-reinforced greenhouse, they could be masters of their own little harem. If Hugh Hefner had been born 100 years earlier, I imagine he would have kept orchids. 

* * * 

As we slide further into the 21st century, the echoes of orchid mania still reverberate. The contemporary collector still dreams of a chance to play Columbus, to discover a new species and slap his name on it. I didn’t know this when I first visited the Montreal Botanical Garden in winter of 2019. I only knew that I wanted to get warm and to see some interesting greenery. I saw yellow orchids and pink orchids and so many white frilly orchids. I also saw the fuchsia petals of the famous Phragmipedium kovachii slipper orchid. 

The story of the kovachii flower is covered at length in Craig Pittman’s riveting book The Scent of Scandal, but in short: In 2002, an American orchid collector named Michael Kovach was traveling with his friend, “The Adventurer” Lee Moore (this nickname is printed on his business cards, so he’s that kind of guy), when the duo came across a roadside stand selling huge magenta orchids. The slipper orchids had brightly colored labellum surrounded by two massive petals and were about the size of a hand, fairly large for an orchid. Kovach was psyched to have discovered an undocumented species, bought several of the plants, and brought them back to America. He didn’t, however, get the proper permission to do so. He didn’t fill out the paperwork, he didn’t wait to get approval. He just packed them in his suitcase and brought them to America. 

Inside the tidy walls of a steel-reinforced greenhouse, they could be masters of their own little harem. If Hugh Hefner had been born 100 years earlier, I imagine he would have kept orchids. 

You can’t just take wild orchids from one country to another — there are rules about these things. Orchids are covered by an international treaty called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which specifies that you can only export orchids that were grown in a nursery or a laboratory. It’s illegal to fly out of the country with a wild orchid and bring it to your favorite botanical garden, where you hand it over to the researchers and suggest that they name the new species after you. 

That’s exactly what Kovach did, with widespread repercussions for both the botanical garden and other orchid importers. Kovach was punished, as was another importer from Texas, who also brought in illegal plants (while Kovach didn’t receive jail time — only probation and a fine — others weren’t so fortunate). It was a huge legal case, though Stéphane M. Bailleul of the Montreal Botanical Garden says it’s just “human nature that prevented everything from being done properly.” (Tell that to the scientists in Peru, who were pretty pissed that an American got to name one of their native species.) The case, Bailleul says, “highlights the difficulty of getting new species out and describing new species. The intention wasn’t to plunder the population, the intention was to describe the species, to examine it, to take the measurements,” which may be both true and the most generous reading of events.

Pittman, author of The Scent of Scandal, has a slightly different take. Orchid people, he explains, “tend to be obsessive, fairly well educated, and somewhat opinionated.” Pittman believes that orchid collectors lust after rare plants primarily because they “want to feel special. They want to feel superior to others.” Even if no one else sees your collection, you know you have something special, something exotic and singular and strange. But Pittman also seems to suggest that Kovach, Moore, and the team of scientists at Selby all believed that they were doing the right thing, at least to some extent, by describing the species. They were making the plant known. They were adding to scientific knowledge, expanding our collective understanding of the wild world of plants. 

Yet this is precisely what stuck with me after I closed Pittman’s book and picked up my next orchid-centric read, Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. It seems to make sense that scientific advancement is worth it, that it is for the good of all humanity that we dig as deeply into the natural world as possible, understanding every nook and cranny and leaf and bee. Even if it means we’re steamrolling over other countries’ rights to “discover” their own plants. Kovachii is a rare, prized species of orchid, one that you can visit at many major botanical gardens. I, personally, have benefited from this theft, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I saw something rare, something special, something new to the world of science.

And yet, what would have happened if we’d left orchids where they were? What would have happened if we’d left countries as they were, people as they were? The lust for orchids is fueled by our appreciation for beauty, our love of bright colors. But lots of flowers are pretty, so it’s safe to say this particular phenomenon isn’t just about prettiness. Orchid mania is an ongoing illness that reflects a sickness at the heart of Western culture where white scientists know best, Western countries deserve to rule over realms of knowledge and beauty and truth, and America and England get to write the stories of the world and determine what species gets which name. The story of orchid madness isn’t just a story of quirky adventurers and daring British men facing down tigers. It’s also a story of masculinity, white supremacy, and entitlement. It doesn’t matter whether the first tropical orchid sailed into England thanks to a packing mistake. It doesn’t even matter whether all the orchids we collect now are coming here by the book. Orchid madness persists and has spread to local plants and endangered species on golf courses and in backyards. When you boil it down, it’s all about the impulse to pull something up, root and stem, to possess a piece of beauty even as you know, logically, that you’re going to kill it. It’s not a story of loving something to death, as I first thought. It’s a story about the fetid swamp of desire that grows within all of us, a place where entitlement festers in deep water polluted by history, by cultural forces we don’t dare to name. 

* * *

Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris ReviewThe Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Jason Stavers
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

My Family Story of Love, the Mob, and Government Surveillance

Longreads Pick

In this excerpt from his book, In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth, John Goldsmith considers the private costs of the invasive surveillance tactics the US government uses against its own citizens. “It wasn’t just the chilling effect on Chuckie’s freedom of thought, belief, and speech—an effect that stretched back decades, to the 1950s, when he first began to suspect that he was under surveillance. It was also, more painfully, the violence against his intimate spaces and relationships, and the annihilation of the stories he told himself and the world about these spaces and relationships, and thus of his power to define and shape his life.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Oct 7, 2019
Length: 21 minutes (5,424 words)

The (Loud) Soundtrack to My Struggle with Faith

Istvan Kadar / Getty, Jean-Phillippe Tournet / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Anna Gazmarian | Longreads | October 2019 | 13 minutes (3,334 words)

 

I was raised in nondenominational churches filled with congregants who called themselves progressive for wearing denim on Sunday mornings. Even though we used electric guitars and fog machines, our congregation was made up of just under 20 families. We scoffed at televangelists, believing that our theology contained the real gospel. My life centered around Sunday morning services, memorizing scripture, and trying to understand the meaning of prayer. Before mental illness entered my life — before I became overcome with thoughts of death, and experienced what felt like God’s silence — faith equalled certainty.

***

When I was growing up, the popular boys in my high school youth group played in hardcore bands. The most dedicated musicians wore lip rings and gauges. They sat together in church and wore skinny jeans in sizes smaller than any I owned.

Davin, the most talented guitarist at my youth group, performed on Sunday mornings during worship services. He played electric guitar on the center of the stage and kept tabs on the church members who raised their hands as signs of praising God during services. He told me later on that the songs played during services were organized to elicit emotional responses for church members. Davin’s crooked teeth were covered with tobacco stains. He claimed that smoking with the baseball team was his way of ministering to his teammates about Jesus.

On Sunday mornings, he wore oversized hats over his straightened hair. The popular worship songs by Hillsong United featured lyrics about victory and following Jesus without doubt: When oceans rise, my soul will rest in Your embrace/For I am Yours and You are mine. Their level of certainty represented the type of faith that I wanted to achieve.

Read more…

It’s Time To Talk About Solar Geoengineering

Kamachai Charoenpongchai / EyeEm / Getty

Holly Jean Buck | an excerpt adapted from After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration | Verso | 2019 | 24 minutes (6,467 words)

December in California at one degree of warming: ash motes float lazily through the afternoon light as distant wildfires rage. This smoky “winter” follows a brutal autumn at one degree of warming: a wayward hurricane roared toward Ireland, while Puerto Rico’s grid, lashed by winds, remains dark. This winter, the stratospheric winds break down. The polar jet splits and warps, shoving cold air into the middle of the United States. Then, summer again: drought grips Europe, forests in Sweden are burning, the Rhine is drying up. And so on.

One degree of warming has already revealed itself to be about more than just elevated temperatures. Wild variability is the new normal. Atmospheric patterns get stuck in place, creating multiweek spells of weather that are out of place. Megafires and extreme events are also the new normal — or the new abnormal, as Jerry Brown, California’s former governor, put it. One degree is more than one unit of measurement. One degree is about the uncanny, and the unfamiliar.

If this is one degree, what will three degrees be like? Four?

At some point — maybe it will be two, or three, or four degrees of warming — people will lose hope in the capacity of current emissions-reduction measures to avert climate upheaval. On one hand, there is a personal threshold at which one loses hope: many of the climate scientists I know are there already. But there ’s also a societal threshold: a turning point, after which the collective discourse of ambition will slip into something else. A shift of narrative. Voices that say, “Let’s be realistic; we’re not going to make it.” Whatever making it means: perhaps limiting warming to 2°C, or 1.5, as the Paris Agreement urged the world to strive for. There will be a moment where “we,” in some kind of implied community, decide that something else must be tried. Where “we” say: Okay, it’s too late. We didn’t try our best, and now we are in that bad future. Then, there will be grappling for something that can be done. Read more…