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The Big Bear Reading List

Image: Carolyn Wells

Growing up in England, my knowledge of bears largely came from Yogi Bear cartoons, and on a childhood holiday to North America, it wasn’t Disneyland, but the thought of seeing a real-life Yogi that I was most excited about. However, despite my parents stoically driving a hire car down treacherous mountain roads as I lounged in the back bemoaning the lack of performing bears, it never happened.

It wasn’t until I moved to Canada many years later that I saw my first bear. I just turned a corner and there it was, a young black bear casually munching grass, completely unphased by my open-mouthed awe. Several years on, I have seen countless black bears; in fact, they rather enjoy relieving themselves on my front lawn after overindulging in next door’s apple trees. But my childhood wonder of them remains.

I am not the only one drawn to the subject; bears have inspired some wonderful articles, so I’ve compiled a reading list of six stories that not only look at bears, but the emotions and issues that they provoke.

1. Where Now Grizzly Bear? (Brian Payton, Hakai Magazine, January 2021)

In this article, Brian Payton shows grizzly bears to be intrepid explorers “destined to wander” — with male grizzlies swimming up to seven kilometers to find new territories. I found myself hypnotized by a map included in the piece, which tracks a grizzly bear as it travels an incredible 850 kilometers over five months. The positive side of grizzly bears turning up in new places is that, after decades of persecution, their numbers are finally improving and young males are looking to move away from “all these big dudes.” On the other hand, this means potential human conflict: “We know they will coexist with us. Their survival depends on our willingness to coexist with them.”

A bear emerges from dense vegetation and pauses on the shore. It’s early spring, and the young grizzly has only recently roused from hibernation, ravenous and driven. He lifts his head and gazes out across the falling tide to the opposite shore, where forested slopes are close enough to make out individual trees. The bear stands and sniffs the air.

Grizzlies can see about as well as we can, but it’s their olfactory powers—at least 2,000 times more acute than ours—that most likely set them in motion. We’ll never grasp how they perceive the world, let alone what they’re thinking. For some reason, this bear falls back on all fours, ambles away from prime habitat, and wades into the sea.

To reach the far shore, he dog-paddles west across Johnstone Strait, one of the narrowest navigable channels that make up the fabled Inside Passage. This stretch of water separates the North American mainland from the largest island on the Pacific coast, British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. It’s only three to 4.5 kilometers across but anywhere from 70 to 500 meters deep. Swift tidal currents can reach 15 kilometers per hour. Vessels of every description pass through, from kayaks to freighters, to cruise ships carrying thousands of passengers. At this time of year, the water temperature averages about 8 °C, but the bear has almost no fat left to insulate him from the cold.

2. Grizzlies at the Table (Jimmy Thomson, Beside Magazine, December 2020)

One place in which grizzly bears are more prevalent than ever is in Wuikinuxv, British Columbia. Jimmy Thomson’s beautiful piece highlights the respect that this First Nations community gives their frequent visitors. The bears are valued as an important part of the ecosystem: “In eating the salmon, the bears bridge the gap between the deep ocean and the treetops, dragging the wriggling essence of one ecosystem into another.” This article is full of such powerful imagery, and Thomson’s respect for the people who wish to defend these animals is apparent.

Adam Nelson pulls the band’s truck into the small landfill less than a kilometer from the village, as he does three times a week to keep bear attractants out of people’s homes, and honks his horn to avoid startling any nearby bears. He and Corey Hanuse toss the village’s garbage bags into the landfill and wait. Minutes later a large grizzly is tearing the bags apart.

An electrified fence around the landfill, installed at great expense, lasted three days. The bears pulled it open like a can of sardines and it hasn’t been repaired. Later, someone stole the batteries. The bears have become accustomed now to the easy food the dump has on offer, and most days it’s possible to find them snacking amongst the detritus. Better there than roaming the village.

3. Barbearians at the Gate (Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, The Atavist Magazine, May 2018)

Bear intrusions are not so welcome in other areas. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s article documents life in Grafton, New Hampshire, where residents believe “in untethering themselves from institution, foraging for food, and hunting game with guns, arrows, and knives.” Hongoltz-Hetling discovers a deep-rooted conflict in Grafton between man and bear, explaining the drama with a colorful array of local stories — about eaten cats and bear-fighting llamas, for instance — that tell us as much about the characters and colloquialisms of Grafton as about the bears themselves.

With bears reaching peak boogie man status, Hongoltz-Hetling also hears whispers of a darker side to the conflict — vigilante posses embarking on clandestine hunts of bears sleeping in their dens, even though “a person was (and still is) much more likely to suffocate in a giant vat of corn than be killed by a bear.” This article is an intriguing insight into small-town life — told through the bears.

Can bears be calculating? Babiarz and other Grafton residents I spoke to sure seemed to think so. Dave Thurber, a Vietnam War veteran who lives up the road from Jessica Soule, recounted how, one dark winter night, he had a feeling that something wasn’t right. He peeled back a corner of the curtains covering his living room windows and peered out at the front lawn, where he spotted a bear delicately licking sunflower seeds from a bird feeder. When a car approached, the bear flattened itself against a snowbank like an escaping prisoner evading a watchtower spotlight. After the car passed, the bear resumed eating.

Rumors of the bears’ cunning had planted unsettling questions in the minds of Grafton residents: How close are we to a bear right now? Could one be just beyond someone’s front door or hiding behind a nearby tree, casing a pet or, worse, someone’s child?

4. A Death in Yellowstone (Jessica Grose, Slate, April 2012)

How do you manage conflict between humans and bears when it escalates? That’s a dilemma faced by many park rangers. In the Yogi Bear cartoons, Yogi was a cheeky chap who loved to steal the odd picnic basket from guests at his home in Jellystone National Park. In this article, Jessica Grose discovers the stark reality that a fed bear is often a dead bear — for national parks are, ultimately, a human creation: “Its boundaries are built and monitored by the government, and the rangers are responsible for keeping its … visitors safe.” If a bear gets too close, the rangers have to play judge and jury on its life.

This was the case with Grose’s subject — the Wapiti sow — a bear thought to have been responsible for two deaths in Yellowstone National Park. Grose’s piece is a harrowing look at bear attacks and how rangers weigh up a bear’s guilt like a criminal case, with “ non-acidic envelopes for storing evidence, tweezers for picking up multicolored grizzly bear hairs, tape measures for measuring bear tracks.” The death penalty is based on whether a bear was acting in a naturally aggressive way or not. But what exactly is natural? The penal code for wild animals is a hard one to decipher.

Wildlife biologists like Kerry Gunther help the park’s crime-scene investigators by speculating on a bear’s emotional state. Based on the evidence at hand, he tries to determine whether a given act of bear aggression might have been a natural behavior—the result of being startled while feeding on an elk carcass, for example, or seeing someone approaching her cubs. If a bear appears to have followed a hiker down the trail instead of backing off, or if it attacked campers while they were asleep, that would be more unusual—the result, perhaps of a deranged grizzly mind.

In a mauling case like that of John Wallace, in which there are no living (human) witnesses, sorting out these categories of bear aggression can be especially vexing. But there’s one piece of circumstantial evidence that almost always leads to euthanasia: a half-eaten corpse. Under normal circumstances, the grizzly diet in Yellowstone is about 60 percent vegetarian—roots and nuts, with the remainder coming from pocket gophers, trout, elk, and bison. If the rangers have good reason to believe that a bear killed a human being and then consumed his body, that bear’s behavior will be deemed unnatural—and its crime a capital offense.

5. Lessons From a Bear Attack (Eva Holland, Cottage Life, December 2020)

Not all bears are given a guilty verdict after an attack. When Mya Helena Myllykoski and her son were charged by a grizzly bear, the bear received a reprieve for acting naturally to defend a moose carcass. In her interview with Eva Holland, Myllykoski describes her relief that the bear was spared, and how instead of paralyzing her with fear, the attack inspired her to fight to protect bears. Holland explores the fascinating psychology behind Myllykoski’s “post-traumatic growth,” as well as describing the attack itself in spine-tingling detail. Her account demonstrates great respect for the wilderness she is writing about — in a previous piece, “When a Fatal Grizzly Mauling Goes Viral,” Holland discusses her reluctance to report on bear attacks at all: They are incredibly rare, and she questions whether writing about them is anything more than voyeurism for those outside of bear country. This perspective brings sincerity, thoughtfulness, and understanding to her work on the subject.

When she shares that detail—that she has felt a grizzly bear’s hot breath on her face—I feel something unexpected creeping up inside me, a little green shoot alongside the larger growth of fear and fascination as I listen to her story: envy. Irrationally, against all logic or instinct for survival, I envy that experience, just a little. When she tells me that she regrets not having a memory of that smell, I understand what she means. I want to know what the bear smelled like too.

We crave vivid and authentic encounters with the wilderness. That, in part, is why we go out there, why we leave the city behind for an afternoon or a weekend, or more. We want to see the stars turn overhead and hear loons, owls, and coyotes; we want to watch the mist burn off a river’s surface, or a thunderstorm roll across a lake. We want to smell crushed spruce needles and wet, decomposing logs and that sweet dirt scent when the mushrooms begin to pop up.

Wilderness can feed us. It can fill our lives up with rich sensory memories. But we take risks in going there, and we bring risk with us for the animals that live there too. Sometimes we pay a price for our curiosity and our desires—but more often, they pay the price instead.

6. This Man Protected Wild Bears Every Day for 13 Years — Until He Made the Ultimate Sacrifice (Nick Jans, Reader’s Digest, June 2019)

Timothy Treadwell took the meaning of bear advocate to a whole new level. I first learned about Treadwell through watching Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, an incredible film that uses sequences extracted from more than 100 hours of video footage shot by Treadwell during the last five years of his life — years he spent living amongst grizzly bears in Alaska. Nick Jans has also written a beautiful book about Treadwell, The Grizzly Maze, depicting the journey that led Treadwell to the bears, and the stunning, eerie landscape of Alaska that is their home.

In this excerpt for Reader’s Digest, Jans explains how Treadwell was a controversial figure, a self-styled “bear whisperer” who refused to accept bears as dangerous animals, and “gave them names like Thumper, Mr. Chocolate, and Squiggle. He would walk up to a half-ton wild animal with four-inch claws and two-inch fangs, and say, ‘Czar, I’m so worried! I can’t find little Booble.'” Jans provides a moving portrait of Treadwell, culminating in a gut-wrenching description of his final demise — mauled by a bear. Accustomed to recording his life, Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, had a camera turned on during the attack: “Treadwell did not die quickly. The tape runs roughly six minutes, and his cries can be heard two-thirds of that time.”

While many believe Treadwell encroached on the life of the bears, rendering his end inevitable, he was still a remarkable, larger-than-life character, and Jans manages to capture him with his elegant prose.

Those searching for the meaning in what happened to Timothy Treadwell offer compelling theories, impossible to either prove or refute but containing flickers of insight. Bear-viewing guide Gary Porter says, “I think Timmy made a fundamental anthropomorphic error. Naming them and hanging around with them as long as he did, he probably forgot they were bears. And maybe they forgot, some of the time, he was human.” Porter points out that old, dominant males generally avoid people and are intolerant of other bears. A subordinate bear that refuses to move is attacked and, if it doesn’t retreat, is often killed and eaten. Biologist Larry Van Daele calls such an event “apparently more of a disciplinary action than predatory.”

And he, too, agrees there may be something to the theory, especially given “the strange, ambiguous signals Timothy sent to bears.”

“Maybe that big guy figured Timmy was just another bear,” Porter suggests. If so, it was a final, ironic compliment to a man who strove, among bears, to become as much like them as possible.

All that Glitters

An illegal mining site in Madre de Dios, Peru / Ernesto Benavides for The Atavist

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s 10th anniversary story, “The Gilded Age” by award-winning reporter Scott Eden. Gold mined in the jungles of Peru brought riches to three friends in Miami—but it also carried ruin.

Scott Eden | The Atavist | January 2021 | 5 minutes (1,352 words)

 

The Atavist is Longreads‘ sister publication. For 10 years, it has been a digital pioneer in longform narrative journalism, publishing one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a magazine member.

In 1511, the king of Spain gave his New World explorers an order: Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all costs get gold. Humanely was not how it happened.

When gold was discovered on Hispaniola, the native population was forced into serfdom to mine it. Within a few decades, the Taino people had been almost completely “exterminated in the gold mines, in the deadly task of sifting auriferous sands with their bodies half submerged in water,” writes Eduardo Galeano in his seminal book Open Veins of Latin America. Rather than carry on, some of the enslaved people killed their children and then themselves. Francisco Pizarro’s men entered the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, the Incan capital in modern-day Peru, and melted down breathtaking works of high-karat art because bars were easier to stack and transport back to Spain. Hernán Cortés did the same after he captured the Aztec treasure house. “They crave gold like hungry swine,” one Aztec observer said of European invaders. A conquistador named Hernán de Quesada, whose brother founded Bogotá almost incidentally while searching for El Dorado, also set off in search of the mythical golden city, taking 6,000 captured natives into the jungles and mountains of what is now Colombia. None survived.

Gold wasn’t the only metal the Spanish wanted. In Quechua, the language of the Inca, the mountain was called Sumaj Orko, “beautiful hill”—a perfectly shaped conical peak made almost entirely of silver that sits in present-day Bolivia. In 1573, colonists began conscripting indigenous people to toil in the mountain’s shafts, working under a form of forced labor known as the mita system. “It was common to bring them out dead or with broken heads and legs,” wrote a contemporary observer. The biggest boomtown in world history, Potosí, grew at the foot of Sumaj Orko; its population at one point rivaled Paris’s. Up to eight million people, many of them children, are estimated to have died working in Potosí’s mines.

Spain was merely a middleman for all the blood metal. The crown used its colonial spoils to pay off the massive debts it had accumulated in Europe’s banking houses. Gold and other precious metals financed the late Renaissance and, next, the industrial revolution.

The pillaging continued, bringing with it other forms of cruelty. In the 18th century, the miners who came to the Minas Gerais region of Brazil during a gold rush were also slave traders; they preferred buying their human beings from the West African slave port of Ouidah, because the people sold there were said to possess magical powers for divining the richest sources of gold. In 1886, after gold was discovered in Tierra del Fuego, a European engineer orchestrated a genocide there, exterminating the Selk’nam people, hunter-gatherers who had lived in the region for millennia. In the 20th century, General Augusto Pinochet abolished the rights of mine workers in Chile’s lucrative high-desert gold and copper pits. Vladimiro Montesinos, Peru’s murderous spy chief, allegedly took bribes from multinational mining corporations to help them secure control of Yanacocha, which in the 1990s was the world’s most productive gold mine.

By then a new kind of colonist had emerged in Peru. On foot, they came down from the Altiplano, from some of the poorest places on earth, migrating to low-lying rainforests where they’d heard gold was in the ground. They hoped that the tools and skills their forebears had used since time immemorial—shovels, portable sluice boxes—would help them find wealth.

They came to a remote department in the country’s southeast called Madre de Dios—Mother of God—that was covered almost entirely with dense jungle. In time, the new colonists earned enough money to rent heavy equipment. They could dig faster. There were no laws to stop them; squatter’s rights ruled. You took what you wanted. The miners began tearing down forests, clearing the way to search for the glittering flakes that could change a man’s life forever. Or end it.

Peru is the kind of place, in the words of one gold industry participant, ‘where you can do everything right and still get in trouble.’

There once was a sawyer who lived in the rainforest. His name was Alfredo Vracko Neuenschwander, but everyone called him Don Alfredo. He grew up in Madre de Dios. His father, also a logger, was an immigrant from Slovenia, but Don Alfredo treated the forest like he was a native. He took from it only what he and his family—a wife, a daughter, and two sons—needed to survive.

Don Alfredo was tall and slim, and he wore black horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like an Apollo mission engineer. His timber concession, which he obtained in 1975, was located in a part of Madre de Dios called La Pampa. To the west was the high sierra. To the east was the jungle, vaporous and immense. Don Alfredo and his family lived in a small compound—a house and a handful of outbuildings—in a one-hectare clearing he’d hacked out of the jungle. The roofs were thatch. There was no electricity. He’d built everything himself out of the wood—achihua, pashaco, copal, tornillo—found on the roughly 6,000 acres of his concession. His sawmill consisted of wooden poles propping up a metal roof over a large circular saw and an ancient planer manufactured by the American Saw Mill Machinery Co., in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Nearby was an orchard of yucca, papaya, banana, and cupuaçu, a football-shaped fruit with meat prized for its pear-like taste. Fat boas slid under the fruit trees. Flocks of oropendola birds shrieked in the canopy alongside howler monkeys.

For the better part of a decade, starting in 2007, Don Alfredo tried to save his land and the rest of La Pampa from informal gold mining. It was then, and remains today, an industry of wildcatters: people who don’t pay taxes, who don’t bother to seek government licenses or perform environmental-impact studies, who just start digging. Informal mining accounts for as much as 20 percent of the world’s newly extracted gold. In other words, up to one-fifth of the global gold business, worth more than $30 billion a year, according to some estimates, is a black market. And like all black markets, the illegal gold trade is vulnerable to the whole range of organized iniquity: bribery, human trafficking, money laundering, murder for hire, terrorism. The South American gold business is particularly fraught with these dangers, the Peruvian one perhaps most of all. It’s the kind of place, in the words of one industry participant, “where you can do everything right and still get in trouble.”

No one knew the ugly side of Madre de Dios better than Don Alfredo. On a sunny November day in 2015, he waited for the authorities to arrive. At his behest, they’d scheduled an interdiction—the Peruvian National Police would go into the jungle, find a mining site that Don Alfredo had recently reported, chase off or arrest the miners, and destroy their equipment with explosives.

Afternoon turned into evening. The police were delayed. The setting sun flared off the nearby Guacamayo, a stream that runs into the Rio Inambari, which flows into the Rio Madre de Dios (from which the region takes its name), which runs into the Beni, which joins the Mamore, which feeds into the Madeira—a tributary, at last, of the Amazon. Don Alfredo stood on the balcony of his home, listening for the sounds of arrival: the motors of police vehicles turning into his driveway off the Interoceanic Highway, which stretched from Rio de Janeiro to Peru’s Pacific coast. Completed a few years prior, the highway had transformed a series of rude dirt tracks and ancient footpaths into a modern thoroughfare navigable by trucks and heavy equipment, easing the way for miners to infiltrate ever more deeply into Madre de Dios.

Don Alfredo almost certainly would have heard the motorcycles approach, their rumble fainter than the phalanx of police vehicles he’d expected. The two bikes appeared on his property, carrying four riders. The men stopped in the driveway and dismounted. They were carrying guns and wearing black balaclavas.

Don Alfredo opened his mouth to scream.

 

Read the full story at The Atavist

Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos

Longreads Pick

“The way that Amazon does business – its pressuring of suppliers, its systematic annihilation of retail competitors, its incessant harvesting of its customers’ data, its treatment of its own workers as little better than machines – is, of course, inseparable from the personal wealth of its founder, Jeff Bezos, who earlier this week stepped down as CEO of the company.”

Source: The Guardian
Published: Feb 3, 2021
Length: 27 minutes (6,816 words)

Repetitive Stress

Getty Images

Devin Kelly | Longreads | February, 2021 | 24 minutes (6,376 words)

Read Devin Kelly’s previous Longreads essays: “Running Dysmorphic,” “What I Want to Know of Kindness,” and “Out There: On Not Finishing.”

It wasn’t the pain on the lateral side of my right knee in March. I kept running through that. It wasn’t the throbbing of my right shin in July. I kept running through that. It was one morning, waking up, when I couldn’t bend my right leg at all. If I could’ve run, I would’ve. I just couldn’t. 

I should tell you before I say anything more that I am writing this from a place of injury, not recovery. There will be no conquering here, no overcoming. Nothing will be fixed by this essay’s end. Not long ago, I was diagnosed with an osteochondral lesion in my right knee. This, after multiple office visits and an MRI. This, after a year spent running over two thousand miles. After another year spent running over two thousand miles. After another year spent running over two thousand miles. And so on. And so on. And so on, and on.

An osteochondral lesion is a break in the cartilage that spreads itself over a bone. In this case, the fracture is in the cartilage covering the base of my femur. That cartilage does so much. It is, essentially, like a bone being fractured. The diagnosis is uncertain. I can walk fine. I present well. I do push-ups in the morning instead of going out for my usual run. I pace the apartment like a jaguar. I spend a whole day wishing I was someone else. They say I can’t run for months. They say something about surgery, maybe. They say don’t think about it yet. I stay up in bed and wonder if I will ever be the same. 
Read more…

The Geography Closest In

Photo by Mats Silvan/Getty Images. Edit by Cheri Lucas Rowlands.

Miranda Ward | Adrift | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | January 2021 | 15 minutes (4,339 words)

The bald conclusiveness of a positive pregnancy test draws a clear line between yes/no, this/that, knowing/not-­knowing. For a moment at least it clarifies everything, or distils it, into a single and irrefutable piece of knowledge. This certainty, when it comes to the body, is rare (later a doctor will tell me: if everything in medicine were as reliable as a pregnancy test, my job would be a lot easier), so I hold on to that piece of knowledge, which is proof of my own productivity, for as long as I can.

But doubt, worry, have a way of threading their way through even the solidest conviction. Threat is everywhere: a light fever, an undercooked egg. Indeed the more I read the more I realise how fragile a pregnancy is, how it isn’t as simple as a positive test and a baby nine months later, which is something I suppose I always knew in the abstract but never had any real frame of reference for before. I was aware that some of my friends and acquaintances, for example, had had miscarriages, but I had not until now really understood what it meant, in both practical and emotional terms, to have to hold an awareness of this terrible possibility always alongside a hope, a longing, for it not to happen to you. Most of what I know about pregnancy, in fact, comes from fiction, from books, films, TV: the way certain signifiers – wooziness, weakness, nausea – are used to suggest a pregnancy before it is confirmed; the way, once it is confirmed, a woman must somehow both alter her behaviour drastically and hardly at all, vomiting copiously into a bin at work seconds before giving a presentation just as if nothing is amiss, but studiously avoiding, suddenly, a whole litany of food and drink; most of all the way a baby is almost always the inevitable result of a pregnancy. The plain fact of it – that at least one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, perhaps more, since sometimes a woman might miscarry before she even knows she’s pregnant – had somehow eluded me, or else I had somehow failed to think of it in tangible terms.

What does that statistic actually mean, practically speaking? It means that nothing is a given. It means that there are people – a lot of people – for whom the result of a pregnancy is not a baby. It means that even the purest elation is often shaded, especially in the early weeks, when miscarriage is most likely, with fear.

I develop a set of superstitions for protection; certain shirts for luck, certain routes home from the library or the grocery store, certain songs skipped or repeated. An aping at control. And for a while everything is normal, in the sense that nothing is normal, in the sense that I feel slightly ill, weary, a little as if I am not myself. My overriding emotion is happiness, but there is also a part of me that feels as if I have become separated somehow from my body, as if it is acting of its own accord, and the thinking part of me is just along for the ride. There are psychological adjustments to make – I have to play the phrase I’m pregnant over and over to myself to believe it; I have to think about what is good for me not in terms of my body only, but also in terms of the invisible body-­to­-be inside me. There are physical symptoms, too, though they are mild (another thing I didn’t realise: that while some pregnant women are indeed debilitated by illness or weariness, not everyone is). I am never actually sick, though I am dogged by a whisper of nausea that asserts itself at odd times and leads me to keep a pack of digest­ives on my bedside table. I can feel a largeness, a tenderness, to my breasts, and although I know it’s far too early for the pregnancy itself to show I feel fuller somehow, heavier than I was before I knew, as if the knowledge itself has some weight or substance to it.

This is not an unpleasant feeling – because it is a novelty, and because the pregnancy is so unequivocally desired – but it is hard to escape a sense of uneasiness, too. I find myself tracing familiar routes around Oxford, where I’ve lived for years, ever since I moved to the UK after university; I know the roads well, and yet I feel every encounter between feet and pavement to be different now, because I am differently bodied. What I have is a sense, visceral and unignor­able, that my body no longer belongs wholly to me – and in a way it doesn’t. As I walk I feel not exactly a ‘we’, but a blooming plurality, an ‘I and…’, perhaps, the assertion of a possibility taking physical form. Where once I occupied my mind during walks with long, elaborate daydreams, there now seems to be no room for anything other than the immediacy of experience and the planning and execution of the tasks of my own daily life. I take to listening to radio shows and podcasts, tuning out my external surroundings and internal circumstances, focusing on the minute details of, say, a true crime story, losing myself in the voice of the presenter.

* * *

Geographers write about the inseparability of the body from our experience of place: we sense places, are bodily present in them, see them, hear them, smell them, move within them. How else do we know a favourite room or city or mountain trail? The body, as Tim Edensor writes, is the means through which we experience and feel the world.

To which he adds: bodies are not only written upon but also write their own feelings upon a space in a process of continual remaking.

What I am struck by in the delicate earliest weeks of pregnancy is that I am being both made and unmade; rewritten. The pregnancy is largely unspoken of: we have told our doctor, and our parents, which perhaps lends it a weight in the world that it wouldn’t yet have had we not told anyone, but day to day I move through the hours without anyone but us knowing, because the pregnancy is still invisible. When I stand in front of the mirror I see nothing different, but nothing the same, either. When I go to the swimming pool, as I do most mornings, an almost religious habit, the place of it has shifted, though the change is microscopic, under the surface. On a quiet morning I watch the play of sunlight on the bottom of the pool and I am in a foreign country. In the changing room, pulling off my wet suit after a shower, I am self­-conscious for the first time – can they tell? But I want them to tell, even though there’s no way they possibly could, even though when I think of it I have the sense not so much of the world tilting on its axis but of the axis itself having drifted elsewhere. I smile knowingly at a visibly pregnant woman undressing and she looks away, uncomprehending or embarrassed or both. I am the foreign country, or else I have lost the map of this place. Walking home, along the same roads I have always taken, the green of the trees fading into yellow, I feel somehow both lonely and plural.

* * *

And then.

One morning, a few weeks after that first definitive, positive test, I wake up and feel my old self again – that is to say, not ill, not weary, not plural or novel – and that evening I experience some mild pain, a quick gush of blood which soon slows to an ambiguous but ominous trickle, and a sense of doom. I am not sure what the appropriate reaction is: denial? Despair? I cannot summon the energy to cook or even to eat dinner; although it is still early I retire to bed, lying on top of the duvet, curled into a question mark. Alexander lies down next to me, his body settling around mine. He tells me the things I both want and don’t want to hear: that it’s OK, that we don’t know for sure that anything’s wrong yet, that he loves me. He’s meant to be playing football in twenty minutes. Do you want me to stay? he says. I’ll stay with you. No, I say vehemently, as if this is in fact an uncharitable suggestion, you should go, you should play, what can you do at this point, what can I do? Nothing. Even after he’s pulled his socks over his shinpads, laced up his boots, he hesitates at the door: are you sure you don’t want me to stay? I don’t want you to stay, I say emphatically. If I were being honest – with him, with myself – I’d say exactly the opposite: stay, please. Instead I lie back and stare at the wall for an hour until he gets home and we go to sleep.

The next morning I call my GP, who arranges an emergency scan for me at the hospital. The soonest the scan can be done is in two days, so in the interim period I carry on as usual: I go to meetings, answer emails, run errands. It’s not as hard to do this as I would have imagined it would be, and after all, what choice do I have? But it’s also indicative of the ongoingness that will characterise much of the next two months.

I cannot summon the energy to cook or even to eat dinner; although it is still early I retire to bed, lying on top of the duvet, curled into a question mark.

I would have imagined, too, that a miscarriage was a definite thing – yes/no, this/that, knowing/not­-knowing – a neatly shaped happening with a beginning, a middle, a definitive end, each closely following the other. Women say, ‘I had a miscar­riage’, and until now I have always heard their experience as being something contained, even while brutally uncontrollable: all those stories of blood-­drenched bathroom floors, of unimag­inable agony, of horror and shock, of sadness and then resolution (often in the form of a baby arriving a year or two on, as if some consolation must always be offered): what I understand now, of course, is that these stories are told retrospectively, packaged in the way that all stories, to some extent, must be. But when I phone the doctor I’m unsure, grammatically speaking, how to phrase my concern: do I say to him that I have had a miscarriage, that I’m having one, that I’m worried I might have one in the future? The idea of the miscarriage in progress perplexes the part of me that imagined that this is a thing that can only happen privately, violently, suddenly, because it is a thing that is happening without much noise at all, and meanwhile here I am transcribing an interview, here I am meeting with a freelance client, wearing a new skirt I bought yesterday from the charity shop, here I am buying groceries and planning dinner, with nothing but a question mark inside me.

Alexander and I take a taxi to the hospital for the scan; it’s early morning and the driver is playing loud Pakistani pop, which is somehow soothing, and drowns out my own thoughts. In the waiting room Alexander scrolls restlessly through his phone. A little plastic radio on a cabinet in the corner of the room is pumping out cheerful tunes punctuated by cheerful radio host banter. I take my book from my handbag and lay it on my knees, open at my marked place. Knausgaard, A Death in the Family. In his younger-­self narrative, the author’s father has just died, while in his current­-self narrative, his partner is heavily pregnant, lumbering around, practically bursting with new life. But I cannot read on. I become fixated on a single paragraph, a description of a piece of artwork, which strikes me as incomprehensible. I read it over and over again until my name is called.

The scan reveals an embryo with no heartbeat. I lie on the bed, naked from the waist down, a blue plastic sheet draped over my legs. Alexander holds my hand while the ultrasound technician swirls a wand around inside me, talking us through the image of my uterus on the screen. It is illegible to me – darkness, light, hazy shapes – but to her the meaning is crystal clear. I’m so sorry it’s not the news you were hoping for, she says. She gives me a wad of tissue to wipe myself with before leaving the room to let me get dressed. She leads us back to the waiting room, which is fuller now, no one making eye contact, the radio still humming; a doctor will see you soon, she says, to talk to you about what happens next. ‘Soon’ is an ambiguous word, and time becomes difficult to perceive; we are there for what feels like both an eternity and an instant. I take my book out again, stare again at that same page; Alexander unlocks his phone, moves his finger across the screen in a kind of robotic motion.

What I am struck by in the delicate earliest weeks of pregnancy is that I am being both made and unmade; rewritten.

Sometimes these things resolve naturally, the doctor says when we are finally called in to see her; sometimes intervention becomes necessary, or desirable. She schedules me for another scan the following week, so we can monitor whether there’s been any change: in other words, whether the products of conception, as the embryo is now known, have been partially or even wholly expelled. After the scan, she says, we can decide how to proceed; you don’t need to make any decisions now. Good, I think, though I’m a little hazy on exactly what kind of decision I might be called upon to make; she has described the various forms of intervention but I can’t quite situate them in relation to my own body, my own products of conception.

She is very young, the doctor, soft-­spoken, apologetic. She says to call if anything changes before my next appointment, if I have any concerns. She gives me a business card, circles a phone number that’s operational 24/7. To minimise the risk of infection, she adds, seemingly as an afterthought, you shouldn’t take baths or swim.

No swimming. Of course. But I am thrown by the thought of this: the removal of the most obvious physical coping mechanism I have for dealing with what is essentially an entirely uncontrollable physical situation. I realise I’ve said this out loud without really meaning to. A silence falls, either respectful or uncomfortable.

I’m a swimmer too, the doctor says suddenly, as I’m standing to leave, abandoning, briefly, her professional distance. I’d hate not to be able to do it.

After the appointment we walk to a Starbucks near the hospital. It’s dark and anonymous inside, and smells of sweet pastries and wee. I order a latte, two shots, why not, and we sit at a counter at the window, watching buses trundle by. It’s mid­-morning and the place is full of new mothers and their prams, though occasionally someone in scrubs or a suit hurries in and then out again. Alexander texts his boss to say he won’t be coming in to work today. Not just the day but the month, the year, stretches out before us, suddenly open. What will we do with it? What can we do? The coffee is too hot, tasteless, the milk burned, but I suck it down in a rush, turning the inside of my mouth furry. Before all this, the test, the pregnancy, the ungrowing embryo, we were planning a wedding; we had set the date, hired a venue, made arrangements with the registrar. We should have cancelled everything – my due date was too close to the wedding date – but we never did; too superstitious, or preoccupied, or both. Now, of course, I say, devastated, amused, we won’t need to change the date. We can simply pick up where we left off. I feel myself begin to rewrite the map again, to slip in and out of familiarity with myself and my surroundings. There’s a simplicity to it all, underneath the ambiguity, the anguish, that makes me almost giddy: for what is this but a reversion to my natural state, a return to old routines?

A thought – terrible, comforting – hits me square in the face then, that there’s relief to be felt. The awful thing, the dreaded thing, has happened, and I need no longer fear it. I hate myself for feeling this but can’t let go of it, either, because I think it’s a way forward, a way out, a small tremble of light.

* * *

The second scan is no more or less enlightening than the first: there is still an embryo, there is still no heartbeat. No change, in other words: an unwanted stillness.

The doctor gives me a leaflet, which outlines in clinical language the three ways of managing a miscarriage when preg­nancy tissue remains in the womb: expectant, medical, surgical. The first is the wait-­and-­see approach, taken on the assumption that the tissue will pass naturally out of the womb with time. The second involves taking a course of medication to stimulate the passing of the tissue out of the womb: a potentially painful, lengthy, and often messy process, not always entirely effective, sometimes necessitating the third approach anyhow, which involves surgical removal of the tissue.

I still don’t know how to decide what to do, so I put it off: if nothing’s happened in a few weeks I’ll opt for some kind of intervention. I want above all to trust my body to do whatever needs doing, but already it’s betrayed me once, so what do I know?

Still no swimming, obviously, the doctor says sadly. Other­wise, proceed as normal.

As normal. Nothing is normal, I start to think – but then again, in a kind of terrible way, everything is normal again, isn’t it?

* * *

The present­-tenseness of the event, the miscarriage, which is not so much an event as a continual unfolding of uncharted territory, a vast grey area, makes it virtually impossible to talk about in any way that makes sense of what is actually happening. I don’t know what to tell people because the language I have is not elastic enough to encompass something which is past, present and future all at once. So I do what the doctor suggests: I proceed more or less as normal, going to meetings, going to the supermarket, scrolling mindlessly through Twitter, doing the laundry, eating, sleeping, working. I let myself lose track of time. At one point, in a notebook, next to a to-­do list, I write: The calendar is a kind of enemy, reminding me of the facts of things, the time it is actively taking to go through this process of miscarriage. I take to walking – long, slow strolls at the very edge of dusk, through parks and quiet suburban neighbourhoods that smell of woodsmoke and exhaust fumes. I feel my muscles going slack, and an irrational fear grows daily: what will my body become while I can’t swim?

My fear is really a form of vanity. I know that with each day or week that passes without a swim my body will start to look subtly different. I’ll lose, am losing, the public indicators of my fitness – the muscle, the shape of my arms and legs, the things that say to other people that I’m disciplined, that my body is under control. And I don’t want them to see what I know: that nothing is under control, that this body is not working properly, that athletically, reproductively, it is not doing at all what it’s supposed to do.

Mostly, though, if we’re honest, it’s the changes in our bodies that are in control of us, not the other way round.

Words come to me on my walks, as they used to on my swims. Some of them are obvious. Why is this happening to me? I think selfishly, inevitably, as I climb the hill to the park on a soft bed of wet leaves, fresh-­fallen after a night of howling wind. But other things, too, drifting like the smoke and the fumes. Disobedience. Betrayal. Softening, slackening, slowing. Undisciplined. Back at home, in my notebook, I write: I guess I feel disconnected from a part of myself. Not that I’m not still the same person or can’t be again, but that for a while I and some other part of me are not quite coinciding. I’m talking about the swimming, not the miscarriage, or at least ostensibly I am. I have a deep sense of geographical dissonance, like a dream of a familiar place in which the location of everything is slightly wrong, so that you round the corner and suddenly come upon a street that should be miles away, or discover that all along there has been an extra room in your house.

One Sunday afternoon, sitting in a booth at my local pub, I see a woman I used to see most weekday mornings at the pool; she always wore a bright pink cap, a navy swimsuit. She’s about my age, sitting with a friend, eating lunch. Perhaps it’s her local too, I think, for the first time realising, stupid as it sounds, that these people I’ve been brushing up against at the pool are people with lives outside that context, just like me.

Occasionally I log on to Facebook and check the page for the triathlon club I belong to. I look through the list of times from a recent 400-­metre time trial, spotting familiar names, noting the improvements, and wonder how much I, too, could have improved by now. For a moment I’m gripped by something which feels a little like jealousy but isn’t quite – desire, perhaps, something almost carnal. But then the desire, or whatever it is, fades: I’m here now, and maybe, if I can admit it to myself, I’m actually a little relieved that I’m not sweating away in a pool, that I don’t have to worry about how fast or smoothly I can cut through the water, how hungry I’ll be later, how tired.

* * *

The poles of the earth have wandered, the journalist John McPhee once wrote: even that which seems most permanent and solid is, in its own way, shifting. It’s true literally – think for example of the tectonic plates, the movement of the continents, which still, on average, drift a few centimetres a year apart, about the rate at which our fingernails grow, as the geographer Doreen Massey frames it, a reminder that the body is never in stasis either. In other words the whole world is a continual work in progress; the present is not some kind of achieved terminus, Massey writes. To underline this idea, she describes the slow movement of what she calls the ‘migrant rocks’ that came, over the course of millions of years, to form Skiddaw in the Lake District. Solid and eternal as it seems, she says, the mountain is not timeless. Like she and her sister, staying in a hotel in Keswick, it’s just passing through. It was once elsewhere. It will be elsewhere again someday.

It’s easy to lose your footing here, to feel that nothing is solid, but I’ve always found something comforting about this idea that place is essentially unfixed. The rigidity of permanence would be too much to bear, surely: who wants to be stuck in the same place forever? Who can know and love anywhere and not see that a point on a map is one thing, a living, breathing place quite another?

It’s a concept that scales well – if the world is a work in progress, then so too is a city or a street or a swimming pool. So too is the body, which is, after all, as the poet Adrienne Rich puts it, the geography closest in; it’s the first place, the place we must make peace with – subject, like all places, to the pressures of time, of external rhythms and events, changing from moment to moment, year to year, getting older, bigger, smaller, more or less capable of performing certain tasks, more or less like it was at the beginning.

There’s a simplicity to it all, underneath the ambiguity, the anguish, that makes me almost giddy: for what is this but a reversion to my natural state, a return to old routines?

Sometimes we’re in control of that change, or we think we are. Exercise in particular gives us the illusion of power over our own physical futures. Take your recommended thirty minutes of activity a day and stave off all kinds of bodily evil. Lose a bit of weight, add a bit of muscle, establish a routine, live forever, or longer, anyway. The geographer John Bale wrote of exercise as a literal form of recreation: through time, repeated action, the body is re-­created so that it works better. It incorporates knowledge, becomes stronger, fitter. Progress. Maybe next week, or the week after, I’ll be faster than I was last week. All it takes is discipline, resolve, another few thousand metres racked up. Most of all denial: of the body that wants, of the possibility of vulnerability or limitation. A few years ago, I remember, I became obsessed with watching Olympic swimming races; I trawled YouTube, read interviews with the athletes, fascinated by all their talk of sacrifice and discipline. And isn’t this why I watched in the first place? To see what happens when we write certain kinds of want out of our body, and one singular, possessive, demanding want into it: to be the best, the fastest, the one standing on the highest platform of the podium?

Mostly, though, if we’re honest, it’s the changes in our bodies that are in control of us, not the other way round. The fact of the matter is that not that long ago, my body was capable of run­ning 13.1 miles, of swimming 3,000 metres without complaint; not that long ago, my body was actually hosting another body, or the beginnings of one.

And now everything is different, and everything will be different again someday, and different again, and different again.

This excerpt has been lightly adapted for publication on Longreads.

* * *

Miranda Ward is a freelance writer, editor, and lecturer. Her memoir Adrift: Fieldnotes from Almost-Motherhood is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. She grew up on a cattle ranch in California and now lives in Oxford.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Shelved: Yoko Ono

(Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns — Getty Images)

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | January 2021 | 9 minutes (2,485 words)

Much is known about John Lennon’s self-described “Lost Weekend” — an 18-month separation from his wife Yoko Ono from the summer of 1973 to early 1975 — in which the former Beatle made records, produced records, drank, and took drugs to excess, and got kicked out of The Troubadour and various Los Angeles studios. Much less is known about how Ono spent her time back in New York.

In 1974, Ono recorded A Story at The Record Plant in New York. More than just another solo album, A Story was to be Ono’s first musical effort independent of her husband. Lennon produced or otherwise participated in all four of her previous recordings. Because of this, and the circumstances surrounding its creation, A Story is a statement of independence, a kind of personal manifesto. As a direct result of the couple’s reconciliation the following year, A Story was shelved at Ono’s direction. Most of its songs would resurface in later releases, sometimes in an entirely different emotional, as well as musical, context.

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I Will Always Love You: A Dolly Parton Reading List

Dolly Parton attends the 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards at the Staples Center on February 10, 2019, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic via Getty Images)

Central Florida doesn’t do glamour. I know because I was born and raised in Lakeland, Florida, the birthplace of Publix supermarkets and where Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, died in a nursing home. Growing up, my sister Abby and I had a never-named game where we’d see a figure skater, Vanna White, anyone, wearing a pretty dress on television, and then we’d passionately bicker over who got to have the rhinestoned, beaded, or sequined costume. We knew what glamour looked like, and we wanted it. By the time I’d graduated high school, I knew glamour in real life. I’d seen it in person three times.

My high school band competed in an annual competition up in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Each year, when the music part of the trip was over, we’d go to Dolly Parton’s dinner theater show one night, and spend a day at her theme park, Dollywood. And inside Dollywood, inside Chasing Rainbows, a museum dedicated to telling Dolly’s life story, was my pilgrimage: a collection of Dolly’s rhinestoned, beaded, and sequined costumes, more beautiful and breathtaking than anything I’d ever bickered over in the never-named game of my childhood.

Two years after high school, I moved to New York City and dug my heels into culture shock. Five years in, I got into a Dolly Parton-themed holiday party put on by a fancy New York PR firm. I glided through the night among the well-dressed and well-heeled. I sipped moonshine and peach iced tea with a party-themed name like it was mother’s milk. I danced to Kylie Minogue performing Dolly covers. And I held my head up high all night because I’d long already seen the installation in the front room, a sparkling display of Dolly’s costumes on loan from Dollywood.

I won’t say Dolly Parton changed my life. I’ve only just read her 1994 memoir “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business,” loaned it to three people, gave it as a wedding present, and have the first and only edition in paperback and hardcover. I recently got the first Christmas album Dolly recorded with Kenny Rogers, “Once Upon A Christmas.” I’m pretty proud of that. I don’t own any Dolly T-shirts or anything like that (maybe I should), I just think she’s a gift to humanity — a living, breathing embodiment of dreams. Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. Dolly would say, “It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.” Maybe she’s not for you, even though she’s for everyone. But, hey, don’t take my word for it.

1. “Outta That Holler” (Sarah Smarsh, Slate, October 2020)

In this excerpt from her 2020 book, “She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs,” journalist Sarah Smarsh describes Parton’s brand of implicit feminism. By harnessing the value of economic agency and sexual power to overcome the poverty that defined her childhood — born the fourth of 12 children, “wearing dresses made of feed sacks” and “dyeing her lips with iodine from the family medicine cabinet for lack of lipstick” — Parton has shaped the person she is today.

She reminds her audiences that, no matter where they came from, everyone can identify with being shamed one way or another, and no one deserves it. Never be ashamed of your home, your family, yourself, your religion, she says, and adoring crowds applaud. One need look no further than her immense LGBTQ following to know that Parton’s transformation from a slut-shamed, talented teenage bumpkin to entertainment superstar contains a universal struggle that has less to do with being Appalachian than with being human. If her presence and the appreciation it instills in people could be whittled to a phrase, it’s “be what you are.”

2. “The Grit and Glory of Dolly Parton” (Emily Lordi, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, November 2020)

The person and brand that is Dolly Parton did not just happen overnight. Emily Lordi provides an overview of Parton’s decades-long career, illustrating how it’s been furthered not by reinvention, but through the reintroduction of Parton and her music, all while Parton herself engages with the times. Lordi first interviewed Parton over the phone, then in person after providing a negative COVID-19 test.

People want her gifts, her glow, her time; and Parton, who, as she says, “loves everybody and wants everybody to love me,” is often happy to oblige. She can’t sit still anyway — and early on in the pandemic, she decided to keep working, as long as her team could do so safely. Last May, she released “When Life Is Good Again,” a song of reassurance that justifies the journalist Melinda Newman’s claim, in Billboard, that, during the coronavirus crisis, Parton seems to have appointed herself America’s “comforter in chief”: “When everything is on the mend, / I’ll even drink with my old friends, / Sing and play my mandolin … And it’s gonna be good again.”

3. “Dolly Parton Steers Her Empire Through the Pandemic — and Keeps It Growing” (Melinda Newman, Billboard, August 2020)

The daughter of an industrious sharecropper father and a musically inclined mother, Parton is a savvy businesswoman whose earliest and latest decisions in the music industry are only the core of her empire. As Melinda Newman writes, “Her legendary body of music is just the start of what makes her Dolly. …”

She sounds surprisingly giddy as she talks about the next chapter of her career as if it’s her first. “I’m touched and honored that I’m still around and that I’m able to still be important in the business,” she says. “I honestly feel like I’m just getting started. I know that sounds crazy but I really feel like I might have a big music career, record career. Who knows?”

4. “Dolly Parton on How to Be More Like Dolly Parton” (Anna Moeslein, Glamour, November 2019)

In an interview with Parton, Anna Moeslein and Parton review “Heartstrings,” a Netflix series in which each episode is based on a different Parton song. They also discuss emotions and Parton’s position on what people can do to bring “a little Dolly in their own lives,” as well as fashion and beauty.

Well, I think it’s always important for us to be allowed to be who we are, all that we are, and appreciate that. And I know being a woman in this world…I’ve always been proud that I was born a woman, and I’ve joked that if I wasn’t, I would have been a drag queen. That’s my favorite line, but it’s probably true. I love being able to express myself, and I want to be seen and appreciated for who I am. So I’ve always appreciated and loved people for who they are. Because we don’t need to all be the same.

5. “Is Dolly Parton the Voice of America?” (Rachel Riederer, The New Republic, December 2020)

Citing Jad Abumrad’s Radiolab podcast (“Dolly Parton’s America”), Parton’s Netflix series, shoutouts from Nicki Minaj and Drake, and even a history course at the University of Tennessee, Rachel Riederer discusses the latest Dolly Parton renaissance. And, given the political landscape of the U.S., Riederer wonders if there’s a place for Parton’s enduring position to sidestep politics — which Abumrad refers to as “Dollitics.”

You cannot talk about sharecropping without talking about politics, and to say more would not be her style. She was not shy about her desire to sell books or to present her life as a fairy tale, and you sell a fairy tale by focusing on the romance and adventures of the rising princess, not the conditions that made her a scullery maid.

6. “Springtime for the Confederacy” (Aisha Harris, Slate, August 2017)

When I mentioned Dolly’s “dinner theater show” above, I was intentionally vague. Despite my setup, I know Dolly is human. And humans are complicated. Dolly’s dinner show seems complicated, too, but really, it’s not. The show, known until 2018 as “Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede,” is performed before an arena split into the “North” versus the “South,” where the audience, feasting on a four-course dinner eaten without cutlery, cheers on white-washed narratives of colonization, then the Antebellum South, then a performance competition between the North and the South. As a high schooler attending the show, I sat and watched from the North side, not fully grasping how problematic the programming was. I suppose I could do what Parton did in the Billboard article above: plead “innocent ignorance.” As an adult, I know better.

The last time I saw the show was in 2006. Aisha Harris reviewed the show in 2017, after watching it the same week as Unite the Right, a white supremacist rally, descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. At the rally, a neo-Nazi intentionally drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing an innocent woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring others. (The president notably remarked in the aftermath that there “were very fine people, on both sides.”) Harris recorded the experience of the dinner show from start to finish, without holding back.

While the show makes zero mention of slavery, that’s not to say there were no references to the Civil War. The war was alluded to both in the overarching North-versus-South conceit and through details both subtle (the gray and blue color schemes on each side) and blatant: The racing piglets were named after Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Scarlett O’Hara. Dolly says that the show is about bringing back “those good old times,” referring to her childhood, but of course she wasn’t around during the days of Grant and Lee.

Harris wrote a follow-up to this piece after the show responded to her initial review, and again in April 2018, when the show dropped “Dixie” from its name.

7. “Living with Dolly Parton” (Jessica Wilkerson, Longreads, October 2018)

Jessica Wilkerson, who grew up in East Tennessee, where Dollywood is located, confronts the worldviews of her upbringing with those acquired as an adult after moving away from home for graduate school in New York. Weighing the socioeconomic implications of Dollywood’s hiring practices and confronting “Dolly Parton’s blinding, dazzling whiteness,” Wilkerson strikes a reluctant balance, compartmentalizing more than one version of Dolly Parton.

But the aftermath of Dollywood left me low-spirited. I was nestled into a cozy room in the log house my dad built on top of a ridge, where we lived. From the peak of that ridge, I could stand and see the Smoky Mountains, where Dolly Parton grew up and where she built a simulacrum of her mountain childhood. Hers felt more real than mine. I was sad, but jealous, too. I lived in the real world of Appalachia. A world of layaway stores and packaged foods, bleary-eyed workers and stressed-out mothers. I longed for the simulation.

Alison Fishburn is an American writer living in Paris, Ontario.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

WASHINGTON, DC, JANUARY 9: Two National Guards are seen through the fence where roses are left and which now now surrounds the US Capitol building three days after it was stormed, invaded and vandalized by Trump rioters in Washington, D.C., January 9, 2021. (Photo by Astrid Riecken For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Timothy Snyder, Austin Carr, James Murdock, Myriam Lahouari, and Brian Hiatt

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1. The American Abyss

Timothy Snyder | The New York Times Magazine | January 9, 2021 | 18 minutes (4,500 words)

“A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob, and what comes next.”

2. The Cruise Ship Suicides

Austin Carr | Bloomberg Businessweek | December 30, 2020 | 18 minutes (4,587 words)

Cruise crew members experienced a “more extreme version of the household lockdowns that have sent people tumbling into depression.”

3. Orange is the New Peach

James Murdock | The Bitter Southerner | January 5, 2021 | 15 minutes (3,947 words)

“Southern winters have been getting warmer. Ten years ago, Joe Franklin started growing citrus on his farm in Statesboro, Georgia — a place where no one expected oranges to grow. Now, Franklin’s citrus groves teem with life and might actually help, in a very small way, to combat climate change.”

4. The Catch

Myriam Lahouari | BBC | January 7, 2021 | 9 minutes (2,427 words)

“The men call up to Sofiane, telling him that he and his brother have to jump. Guelord shouts that the younger boy needs to go first. Sofiane should throw him down.”

5. The Spirit of Neil Peart

Brian Hiatt | Rolling Stone | January 7, 2021 | 26 minutes (6,674 words)

“Rush’s virtuoso drum hero lived by his own rules, to the very end. For the first time since Peart’s passing, his bandmates and widow discuss his legacy and his final years.”

The Unseen in a Pandemic without Technology

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Zoom has become a lifeline for many people during the COVID-19 pandemic. But what if you’re not allowed to use it? Michael Barajas explains in The Texas Observer that the majority of Texas state lockups still don’t have video visitation, and, with in-person visitation suspended, thousands of people have spent nine months in near-total isolation from their families. For the children of inmates, this can be particularly difficult — at a young age not seeing a parent for a long time can render them a stranger: “Justin still tries to communicate by phone with his son but months without seeing each other has made him painfully distant.” Visitation is a lifeline even for those without children, with the social ties it creates vitally important to rehabilitation, especially during frightening times —  more people incarcerated in Texas are dying “from COVID-19 than in any other prison system.” Without the comfort of family, even via video, mental health in prisons has faced an inevitable decline. 

Even before the pandemic hit, suicides and suicide attempts inside the Texas prison system were already the highest they’d been since the 1990s. By September of this year, more people incarcerated by TDCJ had taken their own lives than in all of 2019. One of them was Ricky Hernandez, 26, who struggled with mental illness throughout his life, according to his family. Treatment records show Ricky was hospitalized for a major depressive disorder and put on multiple psychiatric medications before he entered prison in 2017 on charges of harassment and violating a protective order. Henry, his older brother, says that Ricky struggled in prison because of his illness. To try and cheer him up, a big group of family members used to visit him every other week at the Coffield Unit, the East Texas prison where he lived in solitary confinement

“It was always me, my mom, some aunts, our brother and sisters, just as many as could make it because we knew he liked seeing us,” Henry says. At the start of most visits, his brother seemed on edge, eyes darting around the room, but usually seemed to relax somewhere in the middle, he says. “I think we helped settle him down.” 

Henry says his brother stopped writing as frequently after visitation stopped in March. Prison officials called the family in early May to say Ricky had tried to take his own life. Then, on May 22, Ricky was “discovered unresponsive and hanging in his cell,” according to a report the prison filed with the Texas Attorney General’s Office. After his death, someone housed near Ricky wrote to the family claiming that officers hadn’t checked on him for hours before his death. For months, Henry has called the prison system’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which investigates deaths in custody, asking whether his brother was treated for mental illness or checked on by guards the day he died. They have yet to give him any answers. OIG did not respond to the Observer’s questions about Ricky’s death.

 

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‘Everyone Benefits from a Frozen Arctic’

Photo by Wolfgang Kaehler / Getty Images

At Granta, Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier recounts her community’s ancestral way of life: one based on hunting and gathering traditions that convey a deep respect for the animals and land that offer sustenance, and one that has been all but destroyed by government paternalism and climate change. She argues that the Arctic’s health is a barometer of the planet’s health and that the earth can still heal, provided we prioritize it over economic growth.

With the signs of spring all around me, and my dreams of soon being able to get out on the land again, in season to go berry picking with fellow Inuit women, it’s perhaps not surprising that my thoughts have turned to the place of nature in Inuit life. In our language we have no word for ‘nature’, despite our deep affinity with the land, which teaches us how to live in harmony with the natural world. The division the Western world likes to make between ‘man and nature’ is both foreign and dangerous in the traditional Inuit view. In Western thinking, humans are set apart from nature; nature is something to strive against, to conquer, to tame, to exploit or, more benignly, to use for ‘recreation’. By contrast, Inuit place themselves within, not apart from, nature.

From the start, the government’s policy to move us ‘off the land’ was misguided and paternalistic. The idea was to make the ‘administration’ of Canada’s Eskimos (as we were then called) easier. We were seen as a problem needing to be fixed. This would be mended by gathering us into settlements, building houses for us and ‘educating’ our children in English with a ‘Dick and Jane’ curriculum, an education that had nothing to do with what we knew to be the real world. We would partake of the government’s assistance programmes such as family allowances (which sometimes could be withheld if we didn’t send our children to school) and, when needed, social assistance payments and subsidized housing. Along with the provision of health services, these seemingly positive enticements were difficult to resist. Nowadays we recognize these offerings as coercive, though strangely packaged in well-meaning wrappings.

With the move, things happened very quickly. At first, we expected that this new world in which we suddenly found ourselves would be as wise as our own. But it wasn’t. It turned out that our new world was deeply dependent on external political and economic concepts and forces utterly at odds with our ways of being. In particular its structures seemed to have nothing to do with the natural world. Almost immediately, we started to give away our power. For a while we thought that if we were patient – as the Inuit hunters necessarily are – that patience would pay off. But we soon lost that sense of control over our lives, especially over the upbringing of our children. They were brought into the classrooms of southern institutional schooling, a concept totally foreign to us, where they were given an ‘education’ that had nothing to do with the knowledge and skills we needed for life on the land. All our traditional character-building teachings went out the window, and our social values began to erode. When we surrender our personal autonomy, we also give away our sense of self-worth, we lose the ability to define ourselves and to navigate our own lives.

Our Arctic home is a barometer of the planet’s health: if we cannot save the Arctic, can we really hope to save the forests, the rivers and the farmlands of other regions?

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