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Bully for You

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |  14 minutes (3,476 words)

A few years ago I wrote an essay about my best friend having a baby and my inability to handle it. I wrote about the almost familial closeness of our friendship, about my difficulty parsing what we actually were (friends? more than friends?), and ultimately about the impossibility of accepting someone else getting in the way. I’m not going to relitigate the piece, that’s not what this is about, but I continue to stand by any writer who is sorting themself out in their work and who is self-aware enough to acknowledge their part in their mess. No one else did; I got about 600 comments, pretty much all of them negative: “Want to feel creeped out? Read this. So many issues in one person.” What I remember most, though, were the writers, more famous than me — one of them very famous — dismissing me — not my work, me. What the fuck was I even talking about? Who does that? Fuck no, they don’t want to read that. (Like I was some ancient untouchable, like I was contagious.) Almost all of them were women; all of them known for writing, among other things, about the intricacies of their lives; all of them claiming to make daily work out of forging a space for marginalized voices. But this, a woman wrestling with her feelings about another woman, seemed to be where they drew the line. I wasn’t a murderer, I wasn’t a psychopath, I wasn’t a white nationalist, I wasn’t a criminal, I wasn’t even a cheater, for God’s sake, and yet one of them was offended enough to actually block me on Twitter: “Wow, this is such selfish bullshit.”

Women may be encouraged to bleed out onto the page — there’s a reason the personal essay boom was predominantly populated by them — but it also opens them up to deeper cuts. Not only are they dissected in a way men are not, but the response to this writing, by people of all genders, skews more emotional as well. The motif is so well established by now that it’s almost a rule; at the very least it should be anticipated. And yet, the recent unprecedented pile-on of women writers hectoring a former university student who dared to critique a popular young adult novelist had one of these women telling me, “It never crossed my mind that people would look her up or harass her. That is … bizarre and wildly inappropriate.” 

In 2015, I didn’t expect most people to engage with the mechanics and anatomy of my writing, but I did expect the writers to. I was surprised when they didn’t. I was surprised that it all came down to a headline: This woman abandoned another woman. That I had spent months dissecting 14 years of emotions — that I had distilled them into 2,323 words — was beside the point. The point was that those writers were Good People, and Good People don’t abandon friends, much less friends who are mothers. I was not a Good Person, so there was nothing to consider beyond that. This is where being a writer, any artist really, can be at odds with being a human. Ideally, you meet the artist, the work, the ideas with no judgment. In reality, you meet them with yourself and all the limits of you. In this instance, that also entailed the particulars of being a female writer, which are very different from those of a male writer. Women not only have to withstand all the obstacles faced by every artist in a world that does not value art, but, within that, in a world that also devalues them as women, and therefore their — our — stories. They can’t just write, they have to fight to do it. And as subjugated populations have throughout history, they group together for strength, in order not only to defend themselves, but also other women who can’t — other women they choose, with whom they have a moral affinity, who are deemed worthy of representing their gender. 

This is the powerful woman’s fundamental hypocrisy. Not every powerful woman, but a healthy number. As aggressively as she clears a space for women she approves of is as aggressively as she rejects women she doesn’t. This isn’t so much about who she dislikes, though there’s that. It’s more about women she believes are espousing views that conflict with The Cause of Women™, which is what she and her circle are determined to protect. It’s understandable, yes, but it’s not excusable. A slew of apologies followed the YA mess, with all of the writers making the right sounds, but that was unsurprising. They think, they analyze, they write a good game, the best game, but their actions don’t track with their words. They say they are defending young women’s interests as they attack a young woman. They say they want women to be unlikable, but spurn them for that very same thing. “I am not a politician or a priest or a rabbi,” Roxane Gay, one of the YA supporters, wrote to me. “I’m allowed to make mistakes.” Sure, everyone makes mistakes, but who gets punished? Read more…

Thou Shalt Not Mess With a Mom in a “Mamacita Needs a Margarita” Sweater

Waltraud Grubitzsch/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Proud, bold, feminine yet threatening, and frequently touting alcohol use and caffeine dependency, the slogans American mothers plaster on their shirts, mugs, and sweaters broadcast their identities as exhausted super-women, as well as their need for recognition and connection. For The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino explores what she calls “sassy mom merch,” which has proliferated in our era of Etsy, Amazon, and social media, but whose spirit Tolentino recognizes from her years eating at Cracker Barrel as a Texas youth. Where does the desire to wear the slogan “This mom runs on caffeine, wine, and Amazon Prime” come from? What does this #momlife phenomenon say about being a woman in America? As one successful t-shirt maker told Tolentino, “When you put out a little signal on a shirt, like, ‘I’m struggling too,’ it starts a conversation. Anytime I wear something like that, I always have people comment, or I get those random smiles. It’s sort of like when you’re nursing in public: someone gives you a smile and a thumbs-up, and you know you’re O.K.”

Social media exacerbates two competing impulses in the performance of one’s everyday self: aspiration and honesty. Women, in particular, find these impulses rewarded on the Internet, where the ever-present cultural interest in female desirability and failure—in encouraging women to balance atop pedestals in part because it is satisfying to watch them fall off—is codified in the form of public comments and likes. My colleague Carrie Battan recently wrote about the rise of the “getting real” moment for Instagram influencers, in which women who have built their public identities on meeting an ideal version of womanhood offer a moment of catharsis to their audience: all of this is constructed, they say, and it’s anxiety-inducing, and there’s so much that you don’t see. But this form of expression doesn’t seem to cut back on aspiration so much as complicate it—women are now encouraged to be both very perfect and very honest at once.

The mom-centric Internet has been working out this tension for almost two decades: so-called mommy bloggers turned aspirational honesty into a profitable genre long before Instagram existed. (Quite a few of the best-known mommy bloggers have since upended the lives that looked so perfectly-imperfect-but-mostly-really-perfect, getting divorced, or leaving their religion, or both.) Social media and smartphones have brought motherhood real talk to minimally hierarchical online spaces, such as Facebook groups and messaging apps like Marco Polo. “People ask for support, people talk about things that might be embarrassing elsewhere,” Heather Plouff, an Etsy seller in New Hampshire and a mother of three, told me. “The hashtag #momlife is this big community, where we’re all a little sassy, and we love our children, but we also know that children can be a real pain in the ass.”

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A Beautiful, Rugged Place: Erosion of the Body

Photo by Jerry Zhang, Book Cover from Sarah Crichton Books

Terry Tempest Williams | Erosion | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2019 | 39 minutes (7,820 words)

 

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

We had just celebrated my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Louis Gakumba and I were driving back up to Jackson Hole. My husband Brooke texted me, “I love you. Pull over to the side of the road. Call me.” I knew it was Dan. I had been thinking of him as I was mesmerized by the immense cumulus clouds building in the west.

“Is Dan dead?”

“Yes.”

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The Backcountry Prescription Experiment

Illustration by Natalie Nelson

Mathina Calliope | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,134 words)

In 2014 my doctor took me off the antidepressant I had credited with making life okay for the previous 16 years; at 41 I was trying to have a baby with my boyfriend, Inti. I didn’t get pregnant, but this story isn’t about my failure to become a mother. Instead it’s about how a break from my meds led, ultimately and circuitously, to another kind of birth; to a different life for myself.

My doctor’s orders seemed rash. Going off antidepressants is fraught, especially since so many people who want to stop taking them have been on them for so long. New guidelines are emerging that acknowledge this danger; a 2019 study in The Lancet Psychiatry recommended patients taper “over a period of months and down to amounts much lower than minimum therapeutic doses.” But my doctor was nonchalant. “You have something to be happy about now,” he quipped. “You’re trying to have a baby.” Skeptical, but with a tendency to assent to authority figures, I followed his command to stop cold turkey.

Wellbutrin (bupropion) had helped me leave a stifling marriage (though this story is also not about that). It let me dance salsa two to four nights a week through all my 30s. It gave me the energy to earn an MFA. It fueled ten-mile races, half marathons, and a marathon. It supported me throwing myself a 40th birthday party, my favorite night of my life. And the drug helped me have the clarity to see sweet, steady, easy-going Inti — my dear friend of 11 years — as more.

If the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent?

In addition to trying for parenthood, I had recently changed almost everything else about my life. In 2013 I had asked Inti to be my boyfriend and move in. To save money toward a house, in summer 2014, shortly after I quit meds, we put my place on Airbnb and went to live with his mother and brother. That fall I achieved a promotion at work, but the role presented unexpected challenges — not least the fact that the job itself, the career even, was not fulfilling. For the first time in more than a decade, anxiety appeared. The usual infelicities of intergenerational living — different standards of kitchen cleanliness, for example — set me on an edge that felt unwarranted. Fortunately my usual yoga, running, and dancing did a lot of the heavy lifting Wellbutrin used to do. Things were rocky, but they weren’t bleak.

A year after going off the drug, I was not quite depressed, but also not quite the same person I had been on the meds. It had become clear pregnancy wouldn’t happen without heroic measures we were disinclined to take. I grew restless and cast about for something meaningful, something, perhaps, to fill the hole I expected a baby would have filled.

Inti and I moved that January 2015 into a posher-than-necessary apartment of our own, and, with no fetus to protect, I started drinking wine socially and coffee daily again. Circumstances evened out and anxiety dissolved. Depression remained at bay, too, so there seemed no need to restart Wellbutrin. Still, something was off.

Although millions of people take antidepressants and are helped — saved, even — by them, psychoactive substances were not, in fact, first used to treat mental illness but to alter one’s state of mind, going at least as far back prehistory (e.g., chewing coca leaves). It was only later and “serendipitously,” as author and MD Marcia Angell writes in a 2011 New York Review of Books article, that scientists realized such drugs altered brain chemistry. They then hypothesized that since, for example, Thorazine, which helped patients who had schizophrenia, lowered dopamine levels, maybe a surplus of dopamine caused the condition. Similarly, since antidepressants increased serotonin and helped patients with depression, perhaps a serotonin shortage caused depression. “Thus, instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality,” she writes, “an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.”

Psychologist Irving Kirsch writes in his 2011 book The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth that double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of antidepressants show the drugs to be infinitesimally more effective than placebos. In other words, although many people attest to the medicines’ good, they may in fact be responding only to the placebo effect. Jerome Groopman, an M.D., notes more recently in the New Yorker that clinical trials have “stirred up intense controversy about whether antidepressants greatly outperform the placebo effect. And, while SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] do boost serotonin, it doesn’t appear that people with depression have low serotonin levels.” (Bupropion is not an SSRI; rather, it inhibits the reuptake of norepinephrine and dopamine.)

And if so, I wondered, who cares? The placebo effect is real. But if the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent? What if my problem was never my brain chemistry to begin with? What if it was my life?

One day shortly after moving into the nice apartment, I ditched work for a day hike on the Appalachian Trail, where I met a couple of backpackers who were walking the whole thing, 2,189 miles from Georgia to Maine. I admired their audacity, and the man told me, “It’s never too late.” I had never backpacked, so I almost laughed out loud. But the idea took hold.

Day hiking had always induced unequaled tranquility, in short supply in the prior year. Surely full-time forest living would do more of the same. I had read and enjoyed Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Theoretically I was a fan of nature. All reasonableness to the contrary, I decided to try it: A thru-hike. I would quit my job, put my furniture in my parents’ basement, break the lease on our apartment (Inti would wait for me in the house he owned with his mother), and spend from mid-April 2016 until whenever I finished, sometime in October, living in and walking through the woods. It was preposterous.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 15: Protestors left Amazon boxes on the ground in front of an Amazon store on 34th St. on July 15, 2019 in New York City. The protest, raising awareness of Amazon facilitating ICE surveillance efforts, coincides with Amazon's Prime Day, when Amazon offers discounts to Prime members. (Photo by Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Will Evans, Tomi Obaro, Rachel Morris, Maya Kosoff, and Michelle Delgado.

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Behind the Smiles

Longreads Pick
Author: Will Evans
Source: Reveal News
Published: Nov 25, 2019
Length: 24 minutes (6,000 words)

Borrowed Babies

Archival photographs courtesy of the New York State College of Home Economics records, #23-2-749. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY.

Jill Christman | Iron Horse Literary Review | Spring 2013 | 41 minutes (8,219 words)

 

Cooking, the science of foods, budget-making, house beautifying, dressmaking and a knowledge of textiles, all of these subjects have been considered essential to the teaching of home economics but the art of babies has until this late date been left to theory, and Providence. Now, however, schools of home economics are adding a new branch of study to their curriculum—practical mothercraft. —“Apprenticing for Motherhood,” Today’s Housewife (July 1924)

 

Just weeks after the level-two ultrasound, almost five months pregnant, I booked a ticket to Syracuse, New York, where I was to pick up a rental at the airport and drive up to Ithaca. I had a grant to do research in the human ecology archives of the Cornell library, and I was scheduled to be there for three weeks. Alone. Ithaca is lovely in the summer, I told myself, and archives are like treasure hunts for nerdy people.

I should have been giddy with anticipation, but I was not. I was miserable and terrified and lonely. I didn’t want to go. Now, I recognize this as one of the most unstable times of my life, hormonally speaking, and with all of the chemical changes happening inside my body, I couldn’t cope with change on the outside. I wanted to hunker down. I wanted a box of Wheat Thins, some lemonade with fizzy water, my couch, my dogs, my husband Mark, and another episode of The Baby Story. 

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It Was Putin, on British Soil, Using his Poison Factory

Boris Berezovsky (Photo by Warrick Page/Getty Images)

Over at BuzzFeed in this adaptation from her new book, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West, Heidi Blake reports on Scotland Yard’s attempts to maintain the safety of Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch living in Britain. From a poison factory, to a multitude of hired assassins, it seems Vladimir Putin will stop at nothing to silence his most vocal critics.

Hadn’t Berezovsky himself been warned, years before, of a radioactive plot to kill him on British soil? Wasn’t he Putin’s true nemesis? The oligarch was busy telling everyone that the assassins had really been sent to eliminate him but must have failed and seized the chance to poison Litvinenko instead. So when the protection officer showed up in his office with the news that he was at the top of the Kremlin’s UK hit list, he was thrilled. Finally the state was endorsing what he had been saying all along: Vladimir Putin was trying to kill him.

On more than one occasion, he called the protection officer to announce that he had just met someone he had been warned might be part of a plot to kill him. And he flatly refused to stop antagonizing the Kremlin. He kept traveling to Belarus and Georgia to stoke unrest right on Putin’s doorstep—even after being told that Scotland Yard could do nothing to protect him when he was overseas. And every time he gave another interview in which he took a potshot at Putin, fresh intelligence would flood in from Britain’s listening posts in Moscow indicating that new plans were being laid to silence him. It was almost, the protection officer thought, as if you could feel the chill wind blowing in from the east.

But the oligarch seemed to thrive on it. “I am what I am,” he would say. “I am Boris Berezovsky, and I crave conflict.” It was as if he had a strange sort of destructive energy, the officer thought, that made him want to run right into danger.

Berezovsky wasn’t ordinarily one to follow instructions, but he was relishing his leading role at the center of this live operation against an enemy agent, so he did as he was told when Atlangeriev called. Then he phoned Down Street and told his secretaries to be on high alert for the assassin’s arrival and to tell anyone who called that he was busy. After that, all that remained was to wait. He passed an enjoyable few days on board Thunder B, sunning himself on deck, scuba diving, and zooming around on his Jet Ski while the British authorities tracked his assassin around London.

Scotland Yard’s surveillance operatives found themselves on an unexpected sightseeing tour. They had hoped Atlangeriev might lead them to the heart of FSB activity in the capital, or possibly to a warehouse crammed with radiological weapons, but ever since his call to Berezovsky, the hit man had acted for all the world like a tourist showing a kid around the city. As he and his young companion traipsed through Trafalgar Square and past Buckingham Palace, the hazardous materials officers crept behind them swabbing and scanning for traces of toxins or radiation—but everything came up clean.

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‘By Choice, and Not By Choice…Time Is Going To Change You.’

Apollo and Daphne by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, c. 1470-80. Oil on panel. (VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)

Zan Romanoff  | Longreads | November 2019 | 13 minutes (3,494 words)

 

I first encountered Nina MacLaughlin on Tumblr: at some point around 2010, I stumbled onto her blog, Carpentrix, in which she was chronicling the transition from working as a full-time journalist to doing carpentry in and around her native Massachusetts.

I fell in love with the physicality of her writing, the force and attention with which she inhabited the world, and for years, I watched from across the internet (and the country) as she renovated countless kitchens and bathrooms for strangers, hand-built tables for her brothers, and, more recently, got into making spoons.

MacLaughlin published a memoir, Hammer Head, about her career transition in 2015; as it happens, we met in real life that same year — when my best friend married one of those brothers on a bright, cold Boston afternoon.

Wake, Siren is MacLaughlin’s first work of book-length fiction; it re-tells the stories of the female characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reimagining a cast of mostly silent women as a chorus of voices who have plenty to say about the ways that they’ve been (mis)treated and (mis)represented throughout history. Read more…

Burning Out

Illustration by Brian Britigan

Sarah Trent | Longreads | November 2019 | 22 minutes (4,920 words)

Jack Thomas was home in time for dinner, but he wasn’t really home. His head was still in the fire, gnawing on the details of what his strike team had accomplished, hazards they’d found, a care facility they’d partially saved from the flames. For 19 hours of their nine-day deployment, his team had fought to save those 25 senior apartments, which had somehow been spared when the wildfire tore through town. Thomas knew that if they could stop the fire at the building’s central atrium, these homes would stay standing. And they did.

Walking through his front door, in a suburban Santa Rosa, California, neighborhood the weekend before Thanksgiving, Thomas still smelled of smoke.

He had dinner with his wife, shared photos from the fire, and talked through their holiday plans. Afterward, he unfurled parcel maps across the table while his bags waited, packed, on the couch. After more than a week fighting the most destructive wildfire in California history, the Santa Rosa fire captain had just a few hours to study the maps and get some rest: His deployment on a fire crew was over, but hundreds of people were missing, and FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue Task Force #4 needed someone to help manage the search.

Thomas set his alarm for 3 a.m. He was going back to Paradise.

That night, the next morning, and for many days after, trained search and rescue professionals and volunteers from across California and beyond drove into the smoldering heart of catastrophe. The Camp fire, which started the morning of November 8, 2018, and within hours had overtaken the town of Paradise, was unprecedented: in size, pattern, intensity, damage, and number of people missing, which climbed as high as 1,300. It required the largest search in state history — in conditions few of the searchers were trained for. But to leaders like Thomas, it seemed a portent of things to come: Wildfires are becoming more common and worse. And other disasters are, too.

Rachel Allen got to Paradise two days before Thomas, after dark on Friday, November 16, joining the first wave of volunteer searchers responding to the call for mutual aid. It was the earliest she could arrive, leaving her postdoc research behind for the weekend. A member of the Bay Area Mountain Rescue (BAMRU) team since 2012, she has deployed to dozens of searches across the state, usually for one person missing in the wilderness: a snowshoer lost in a storm, a hiker injured and stuck off-trail, or a person with Alzheimer’s who wandered away from home.

She and her team spend hundreds of unpaid hours each year practicing specialized search and rescue skills. But in Paradise, little of their training in snow conditions, rope systems, or tracking was relevant. Allen wore a white Tyvek suit over her hiking boots and learned how to identify what was typically the only trace of people who hadn’t escaped the blaze: small fragments of bone.

When Thomas arrived Sunday morning, just in time for the morning briefing, searchers in a rainbow of red, orange, and hi-viz agency-branded jackets filled the Tall Pines Entertainment Center parking lot: county search teams, mountain rescue teams, law enforcement, the National Guard, all ready for the day’s assignments.

Thomas joined the fray with USAR Task Force #4 — one of 28 teams in the nation equipped for large-scale disaster relief. Most USAR members, like Thomas, are professional firefighters. On top of a grueling season fighting record-setting wildfires, this was his team’s third urban search deployment in as many months. They’d been to the sites where Hurricane Florence made landfall that September. Where Michael had hit in October. And now this. 

New kinds of disasters require new response plans and training, and bigger ones need more people who know what to do.

All weekend, the air was thick with smoke and a pervasive otherworldliness. “If you had told me I was on Mars, I’d be like, ‘OK, right,’” Allen told me. She searched for two days, mostly in silence, wearing a mask she had to remove to speak. Her hiking boots sank with every step into ash up to eight inches deep. The sky was a murky orange. Trees were still green. Everything else was gray. It was a town like any other. But everything had changed.

In 2018, wildfires swept not only California, Australia, and Greece, but also the colder, wetter landscapes of England, Ireland, and Sweden. Kerala, India, was hit by one of the worst floods ever recorded, killing more than 500 people; a heat wave hospitalized 22,000 in Japan; and a series of tropical storms and typhoons affected more than 10 million across the Philippines. A bomb cyclone slammed the U.S. Northeast. Avalanches crushed Colorado. Mudslides buried Montecito, California. Record-breaking hurricanes battered the Southeast. As of this writing, what has come to be known as “fire season” is well underway in California, and fires blaze in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia. 

To climate scientists, the pattern of increasing extremes comes as no surprise — it’s in line with projections for life on a warming planet. And at 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit above average, according to NASA, 2018 was one of the hottest years on record. 2019 is on track to be hotter.

When disaster strikes, rescuers like Thomas and Allen drive toward the danger the rest of us are desperate to escape. They’re trained to find us when we’re stuck somewhere — lost, injured, or worse. But a changing planet has raised the stakes: Avalanches, tornadoes, fires, and floods fill news cycles with counts of the missing and cell phone footage of neighborhoods turned to wilderness. The U.N. warns that climate catastrophes are now happening once a week across the globe. And unpredictable shoulder seasons — the busiest months for search and rescue calls — are getting longer. New kinds of disasters require new response plans and training, and bigger ones need more people who know what to do.

Search and rescue teams train for the worst conditions. But the worst conditions are getting worse. Search teams are stretched. Rescuers are burning out. We are all less safe.

***

On a May 2013 day in Naujaat, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut — an Inuit hamlet known at the time as Repulse Bay — the local search and rescue team was called after a nearby traveler activated an emergency GPS beacon. It was a day with almost 18 hours of sunlight, but blizzard conditions postponed the search.

The call itself was unremarkable — Nunavut search and rescue records are full of similar reports: emergency signals turned on in harsh weather, hunters who’ve run out of gas, a group trapped by moving ice. Nearly everyone is brought home safe. But one trend is nonetheless alarming: In 2016, researchers showed that search and rescue calls in the province had doubled over a decade.

The reasons were complex. More powerful boats and snowmobiles carried hunters, fishers, and travelers farther from safety; people’s preparedness for harsh conditions had not kept pace with their ability to travel so far; high costs to maintain equipment led to makeshift repairs and more frequent breakdowns. But one factor stood out: As the Arctic warms — and it’s warming faster than anywhere else on earth — weather and ice conditions have become less and less predictable. 

“It’s the perfect storm” for accidents and the ensuing calls for rescue, researcher Dylan Clark told a Canadian Senate committee in 2018. And this storm is anything but localized.

In Iceland, where tourism is booming and glacier driving tours are popular, the ice is melting, opening crevasses that threaten vehicles and people. A woman died in 2010 after falling into one with her 7-year-old son just a short distance from a tour jeep. 

In the Alps, retreating glaciers have changed popular climbing routes, increasing exposure and difficulty on nearly all alpine climbs. Where there once was snow, there’s now ice. Where there once was permafrost, there’s now unstable rock. One catastrophic rockfall in Bondo, Switzerland, killed eight hikers in 2017. Their bodies were never found.

Search and rescue teams train for the worst conditions. But the worst conditions are getting worse.

Eddy Cartaya, a Portland Mountain Rescue volunteer and expert on glacier cave exploration and rescue, says that across the Pacific Northwest, more and more people are exploring the backcountry. Outdoor equipment is better and less expensive than ever, cultural interest in the outdoors is surging, and longer summers mean more access to beautiful, wild places. 

Normally, “deep snow-pack insulates some of these locations from inexperienced people,” Cartaya said. But that’s changing. Hiking into areas with now-melting glaciers — in which ice caves are prone to sudden collapse, volcanic gas-filled fumaroles are becoming exposed, and flash floods of glacial melt can occur on the bluest of bluebird days — even an expert outdoorsperson is more likely to run into trouble.

Many of these hazards are new to rescuers, too, making operations riskier for everyone. Now, Cartaya said, his team trains in glacier caves — areas most mountaineers spend their entire careers trying to avoid. After two rescues in noxious fumaroles, the team has purchased new equipment to measure crevasses for hydrogen sulfide. And with a higher volume of calls than ever before — to a group of volunteers in an industry where burnout is already high (few last more than a couple of years) — they’ve increased their recruitment efforts, tripling their most recent cohort of trainees.

But you don’t need to be a backpacker, hunter, or mountaineer heading deep into the wilderness to require rescue from a disaster compounded by climate change. Increasingly, that disaster is coming to us.

In Switzerland, rockslides have buried villages and stranded residents. In Alabama, devastating tornadoes have cut swaths through towns and neighborhoods. Across the Midwest, floods have done the same. In Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean, residents have evacuated from record hurricane after record hurricane. And all of this, according to climate scientists, is at least partially attributable to a warming planet, in which ice is melting at record speed and rising levels of atmospheric water are strengthening storms and producing unprecedented rainfall. 

While the Eastern U.S. is inundated with water, the Western states suffer without it: As temperatures rise, the snowpack melts faster and forests dry out. By late summer, much of California is a tinderbox. Any spark — lightning, a barbecue, a faulting power line — can set the whole thing off.

***

Ten of the 20 most destructive wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2015. They include the two most destructive (2018 Camp and 2017 Tubbs fires), the two largest (2018 Mendocino Complex and 2017 Thomas fires), and the deadliest by far: In Paradise, searchers found 85 people dead. Two remain missing. This is more than the previous three deadliest fires combined.

For Thomas and his team, the Camp fire set another kind of record and, leaders believe, a precedent: It was the first time FEMA USAR teams had ever been called to a fire. Thomas and others doubt it will be the last. The federal program, which launched in 1991, was designed primarily to respond to catastrophic earthquakes. But as the nature of disasters has evolved, USAR task forces have too. In 1994, teams deployed to the Northridge quake in Los Angeles. A year later, to the Oklahoma City bombing, and in 2001, to downtown Manhattan after the World Trade Center attack. 

In 2005, all 28 teams went to Hurricane Katrina, and as the size and severity of hurricanes have increased since, so have the calls to USAR: Sandy in 2012. Matthew in 2015. Harvey, Irma, and Maria in 2017; Florence and Michael a year later; Dorian this fall.

Thomas went to most of them. “We’re in the water business now,” he said. And the fires? “I totally think that’s going to be in our scope now.”

As a firefighter of more than 30 years who fought the 2017 Tubbs Fire in his own city and countless more around the state, Thomas knows firsthand the ways wildland fires have changed. “It never used to be like this,” he said. When he first started, he’d go to one, maybe two “mutual aid” calls (that is, requests to help other agencies) per season, fighting wildland fires to the scale of around 10,000 acres. “Since 2015 it’s just been non-stop with these major fires,” he said. 


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In 2018, between USAR calls and wildland fire response, Thomas spent 75 days working outside Santa Rosa County, including 21 days in a row at the Mendocino Complex fire. When he came home from that blaze — which burned nearly 460,000 acres before it was finally contained — he had just enough time to move his daughter to college before he was deployed again.

“It pulls on your heartstrings to go help,” he said. But every time he arrives at base camp for another wildland fire, he sees the same guys, grim with fatigue.

“You can see it in guy’s eyes,” he told me. “It seems like it’s more and more and more and more.” Between fighting fires around the state, flying east for hurricane missions, and expecting that USAR’s scope will grow, the effort is not sustainable, he said. “But you know the thing is, who are you going to call? With the amount of missing residents, the amount of destroyed homes — who’s going to do that work?”

Headquarters for Thomas’s team — one of eight in California — is tucked between I-880 and the train tracks in East Oakland, behind a city vehicle maintenance facility. On a cold March morning, a dozen men and women in dark shirts and caps emblazoned with their agency logos — Pittsburg Fire, Sonoma Fire, Contra Costa Fire — ambled from room to room, catching up and collecting signatures for their annual reorientation exercise. 

Each member checked the fit of their issued full-face air mask, re-upped their baseline EKG test, and verified, essentially, that they knew the drill: Every checkpoint is a step they’ll repeat in the hours before an actual deployment. In the garage, Thomas signed off on helmet fits and asked each member if their go-bag was ready. 

“97 you said?” He searched for Tracey Chin’s duffel among the hundreds of numbered red bags on the shelves surrounding the garage. He found it and pulled it down, and she unzipped the pockets to inspect what was inside. She checked the size of the clothing, in case it had changed, and the toothpaste’s expiration date. The team has just four hours to deploy when a call for mutual aid comes in, and they must be prepared for 72 hours of self-sufficiency. The “creature comforts,” as Chin calls these basic necessities, are nearly as important as a tightly sealed air mask.

She zipped the bag closed over carefully folded T-shirts, and Thomas snapped a red plastic lock seal through the zipper pull. Her mask fit. Her photo had been taken. Her sign-off sheet was full. Chin was ready to deploy.

And this team fully expects to — though until recently, that was far from their norm.

“We went eight years without deploying,” said Oakland Battalion Chief Robert Lipp, who leads the task force. But since 2017, they’ve fielded six calls. Now, come autumn, when hurricane and wildland fire seasons are both in full swing, he said he’s “more surprised if we don’t go somewhere than if we do.” 

To climate scientists, the pattern of increasing extremes comes as no surprise — it’s in line with projections for life on a warming planet.

As the need for rescuers goes up, the whole response system is stretched thin. Two Southern California USAR teams, which largely pull on members from one fire department each, were undeployable for USAR calls last fall while wildfires raged in Riverside and Orange counties. The Oakland team is more insulated from that pressure: Its 230 members — enough for three full rescue units — come from 15 different departments. The team has never had to turn down a call for mutual aid, Lipp said. “But we’ve been awful close.”

“When there’s a disaster, we all want to go.” But, he added, “anyone who says it’s not worsening is not paying attention.”

***

On the first day of SAR-Basic — required for anyone who hopes to join Bay Area Mountain Rescue — 15 recruits listened and took notes as veteran members explained the weekend training. Wearing an array of technical fleeces and down coats, it was obvious that they were the newbies: Every sworn-in member wore a red jacket — BAMRU patch on one shoulder and the San Mateo County Sheriff star on the chest — to insulate against the early morning chill.

The first lesson in every emergency response training — from first aid through wilderness paramedicine — is the same, though every teacher has their own way to phrase it: The most important person at the scene is you; don’t let someone else’s emergency become your own; your safety comes first. Adrenaline and the powerful urge to help someone in need can be difficult to overcome — and dangerous to everyone. 

Under the county park picnic shelter, Nathan Fischer sat atop a long wooden table, his gray waffle fleece and close-cropped beard blending into this year’s cohort of mostly twentysomething men. With one leg casually folded, he absorbed the morning lectures. He, like everyone seated around him, was there in part to fulfill that urge to help. “Other people adopt kittens or mentor kids,” he told me. “I’m awful with kids, but maybe I can stop the bleeding.”

An instructor addressed the group. “The first rule of search and rescue,” he said, “is don’t create more subjects.”

This year’s safety talk was unusually personal for the team. Just months earlier, a Ventura County mountain rescuer was killed and two teammates were injured in a storm while trying to help the victims of a rollover crash. The team was en route to a training exercise. The roads were slick. Another vehicle lost control.

At every training station at SAR-Basic, the safety talk was reinforced. Fischer and the other recruits learned to perform a fine grid search, crawling shoulder to shoulder looking for shell casings in the dirt and leaves — while also scanning for poison oak. They learned how to load and carry a person in a titanium-frame litter — along with effective communication to spread the load, and to lift and move as one. Navigation skills, radio skills, tracking skills. And then, finally, a mock search.

Fischer, leading a team of three, talked his group through the details of the briefing. Two trail runners were missing. Their team had been assigned a trail to search. They grabbed a radio and a map and set out for the trail, flanked by mentors.

’It’s the perfect storm’ for accidents and the ensuing calls for rescue.

The mock search is an audition of sorts, at which members and the soon-to-be can feel out their future colleagues. Trust, teamwork, and leadership are as important as technical skill and search savvy. Those who are accepted to train with BAMRU will start deploying on calls as soon as they wish: Trainees join searches while they work through a long list of skill sign-offs and training exercises that typically take a year to complete. The best lessons — and the hardest — will come in the field.

After a morning of searching for the “missing” runners, Fischer’s team broke for lunch. Mentor Eric Chow — just a year into his own tenure on the team — knew that the action would soon pick up. He pulled Fischer aside. “What do you have for PPE?” Chow asked, using shorthand for personal protective equipment — namely, in this case, nitrile gloves. Fischer had none. Chow found a pair in his radio chest harness and handed them over. 

Then the radio blared, cutting into the quiet on the trail. Another team had found the last missing subject. Fischer looked at the map. They were close. When they arrived on scene, his wilderness medical training kicked in. He went straight toward the subject — a woman who had fallen off-trail and injured her leg — and joined another rescuer assessing her injuries. He removed her shoe and checked the circulation in her foot.

Uphill, proctors were watching. One of them whispered: “Where are his gloves?”

Blood is a hazard. Smoke is a hazard. Needles, nails, cornices, rocks, hypoxic subjects, moving vehicles. The powerful urge to help someone can come at profound personal cost. Forgetting safety precautions in an exercise merely means failure. Being without them in the field can mean creating more subjects. 

Physical safety is paramount, but psychological preparation is important as well: The emotional costs can be just as high.

This team typically deploys to difficult, far-away searches — ones that have already gone on for days without success. Stopping the bleeding (or rescue at all) is not usually involved: Often, they recover bodies.

Veteran team member Alice Ng is haunted by the search for a young mountaineer crushed by an avalanche. The recovery of a body brings closure to everyone, but this one hit her hard. The traumatic stop of this boy’s life, while doing something she might have done too; his family, walking in circles around the airfield, with nothing to do but wait. The day after finding him, while chopping vegetables for dinner, she suddenly broke down in tears. The task was so normal, she told me: “That can be taken away from you so quickly.”

For Eric Chow, one of the mentors who took part in the mock rescue, one search near Lake Tahoe was especially memorable. “We were in our element there,” he remembered. It was high angle, high altitude, in avalanche conditions, a search for one missing person. It was everything this team trains for. The Paradise fire, on the other hand, felt like the opposite. There were scores of bodies reduced to bone fragments, cesspits hidden under the ash, and “widowmakers” — the precarious branches of burned trees — that could fall at any moment. “We don’t know any of those hazards,” he said.

***

It’s difficult to plan or train for what’s never been experienced before, and in climate-influenced disasters, nothing is as it was. The Camp fire was apocalyptic. Michael St. John, long-time leader of Marin Search and Rescue and newly retired from the Mill Valley Fire Department, deployed to Paradise on day five of the blaze to help Butte County search coordinators and state search and rescue leaders wrap their collective heads around organizing such a massive search.

“What’s your PPE plan?” he recalled asking the leaders at search command. He knew they’d need air masks. Tyvek. Steel-shanked boots if they could find them fast enough. And decontamination facilities. When a forest burns, the smoke is dangerous. When a city burns — with all its plastics, paints, chemicals, and more — it’s deadly. If not today, then perhaps years from now when the cancers start growing, St. John said. And while many teams like BAMRU and Marin SAR have limited county insurance for in-field accidents, volunteers don’t get workers’ compensation. They just get sick.

You don’t need to be a backpacker, hunter, or mountaineer heading deep into the wilderness to require rescue from a disaster compounded by climate change. Increasingly, that disaster is coming to us.

From search headquarters at the Tall Pines bowling alley, where cots were set up in the bar and a rec room was converted to mission command, St. John searched Amazon for boots. A dozen deputies raided every Home Depot in the Central Valley for supplies. The National Guard was called to set up mass decontamination tents. 

On the first day of the search, central command ran out of P-100 masks, which offer more protection than the N-95 masks the public was encouraged to wear. Some rescuers who couldn’t get masks in the first days of the search, before donations poured in, turned around and went home. The air was so thick with smoke and particulate matter that it choked out even the sun. Just a few hours in Paradise was too much for some: The personal risk was just too great.

Over the week, St. John and search leaders troubleshot challenges. They had state, county, and federal resources at their disposal, and while every one of them was trained in the same incident command structure — a logistics and hierarchy system built to scale to any emergency — each group had its own culture, communications, and even GIS mapping systems. 

Leaders struggled to manage the growing list of missing people — and to commit enough resources to sort all 1,300 reports, winnow out redundancies, and narrow the search. As best they could under pressure, they integrated lessons from failures along the way, improving the system a little bit more every day.

And every day, the massive search continued across 240 square miles, where homes, stores, schools, and retirement homes — more than 18,000 structures in all — were now gone. Just the grid of streets remained, along with stone, metal, and randomly spared objects. Chimneys stood like sentries. So did radiators. Mailboxes. The intricate metalwork of a headboard. Cars had melted by the roadside, their metal shells resolidified as river-flows on pavement.  Read more…