Search Results for: animals

For Me, With Love and Squalor

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Lauren Markham | Longreads | June 2018 | 23 minutes (5,790 words)

One recent day, when it was raining and I was feeling particularly blue, I decided to visit my local bookstore. Though bookstores were once among my favorite places to spend time, ever since my own book was published eight months ago, trips into bookstores have mutated into sordid affairs. I’ll walk in the door, feign cool, casual, just your average browser, then drift over to the shelves in the way someone might sidle up to the bar with a good-looking mark in sight. I’m not really browsing, not just refilling my drink — I’m searching, quite shamefully, for my own book on the shelves.

When it’s there, with its beaming burnt-orange cover jammed somewhere near Norman Mailer, Stephane Mallarme, Katherine Mansfield, Javier Marías, I feel a blush of glee. But more often than not, it’s not on the shelves at all.

It turns out that just because you wrote a book doesn’t mean the bookstores will sell it. No matter what accolades my book has received, each visit to the bookstore feels a new test of my book’s worth — and my own.

That rainy day, I was sure that finding my book on the shelves would release me from my blueness. On the other hand, in the likely event that my book wasn’t there, I would have permission to sink lower, reclining into the indigo bleak. I stepped inside the store, delivering flecks of rain onto the floor. As I suspected — as I feared — my book was nowhere to be found. Read more…

Storytelling the Flood: Elizabeth Rush on Empathy and Climate Change

Allard Schager / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Bradley Babendir | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (4,357 words)

In Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Milkweed Editions), Elizabeth Rush visits people and communities made immediately vulnerable by the rising sea levels that are brought on by climate change. She interviews people who have lost their homes, their loved ones, and the world they once knew to flooding and other disasters. Some just want to be able to afford to leave, while others are willing to withstand everything to stay.

Rush pushes through the rhetoric around climate change to look closely at the consequences. Not the ones that will happen at some point down the road, but the ones that are happening now. She travels from Louisiana to Florida to California and elsewhere to see and try her best to understand what it is like to lose the ground beneath your feet.

We talked by phone about what led her to this book, what carried her through this book, and what comes next for her and her subjects. Read more…

Small-Town New Hampshire’s Battle with Bears and Liberty

AP Photo/Mark Thiessen

The more removed our daily lives get from nature, the less we understand about the wild creatures who live around us. Fear grows in darkness outside our kitchen windows, extending the ancient archetype of the Big Bad Wolf to other species. In Grafton, New Hampshire, black bears have started killing domestic animals, invading personal space, even smacking one woman, creating a psychic and territorial battle between residents and the otherwise shy Ursus americanus.

For The Atavist, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling traces the origins of this tiny town’s highly independent nature and its tense relationship with wildlife. He looks at competing theories of ursine behavior, and misperceptions about black bears versus the biological reality. What he found wasn’t a simple bear problem, but “a parable of liberty, disinformation, and fear. A parable, really, of America.” Exhibit A: the so-called cat massacre.

Andrew Timmins told me that he’d never received a bear complaint involving a cat, from Grafton or anywhere else. Plus, the idea that wild bears could acquire a taste for felines seemed dubious to him. When a Grafton resident told me about a bear that drained his biodiesel supply—a five-gallon container of two-year-old French-fry grease—I was reminded that bears will devour even the most loathsome fare, so long as it adds to their winter stores of fat. They’re after calories, not cuisine. Despite local perception, the cats of Bungtown probably weren’t the bears’ preferred target; they were just there.

Perception, though, matters a great deal when people craft stories about how they overcome obstacles and cope with conflict. Once the seed of the purported bear hazard was planted, stories nourished it. Often the light of reality was refracted such that it transformed an animal into a totemic version of itself: bandit or strongman, noble savage or mythic monster, bumbling idiot or cunning predator.

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Somewhere Under My Left Ribs: A Nurse’s Story

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Christie Watson | Excerpt from The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story | Tim Duggan Books | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,508 words)

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The landscape of theaters must be terrifying for patients, but it’s becoming normal for me. It’s amazing what you can get used to. Life wasn’t always like this.

The first operation that I watch is a heart-lung transplant. I am nineteen years old and still a student nurse. The operation takes so long: over twelve hours. It requires a team of surgeons to behave like a relay team; but instead of a baton, they pass between them a human heart and lungs. I’ve been looking after the patient waiting for the new set of lungs that day: a fourteen-year-old boy named Aaron suffering from cystic fibrosis, who is confined to bed, oxygen tubes inserted into his nose, with a tired, wet cough and sallow gray skin. I help him get ready for the operation. I rub cocoa butter onto his dry knees, take away his Game Boy and swear to guard it with my life. I wet his lips with a small salmon-pink sponge that I dip in sterile water, not wanting to risk the tiniest possibility of him being exposed to any germs.

Aaron’s room glows with lights in the shape of stars and moons surrounding his hospital bed and a journal is hidden under his pillow. There is a small corkboard next to his bed that his stepdad has Blu-tacked to the wall, covered in a mosaic of photographs of him with his friends, every single one of them smiling. It is a common thing for a child’s hospital room to be personalized. Aside from the oxygen piped through the wall and the suction canister with its thick transparent tubing, it could be a typical teenage bedroom. Read more…

‘I Was a Storm of Confetti’: Michael Pollan On Why It’s a Good Idea To Lose Your Self

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Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,468 words)

On April 19, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a quarter milligram of LSD to confirm that it had caused the oddly fantastical journey he had experienced the day before. To his surprise and delight, he was not mistaken –– the drug opened up a new window of consciousness. The discovery caught the attention of other researchers, and by the 1950s, psychedelic testing was in full bloom, yielding promising results for people suffering from neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy.

But as counter-cultural experimentation progressed and the drugs were taken out of the lab and into the wild –– think of Tim Leary, dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by Nixon, and his controversial LSD experiments –– there was a backlash. According to the writer Michael Pollan, society “turned on a dime” against psychedelics. “You’d have to go back to the Inquisition and Galileo for a time when scientific inquiry was stigmatized quite the way this was,” he tells me. “And it’s a measure of how powerful that backlash was and how threatened powerful interests felt about what psychedelics were doing to society.” Read more…

Does Outdoor Recreation Correlate With Environmental Values?

PPR/Mammut/Thomas Senf via AP Images

It’s easy to assume that people who mountain bike, rock climb, and hike also value environmental protection, but is that true? And do outdoorsy folks do anything to help protect the mountains and rivers where they play? For High Country News, Ethan Linck examines the complex, often flimsy relationship between outdoor recreation and conservation efforts. Linck speaks from experience: he’s a runner, a skier, a climber. He recognizes many failures in the outdoor recreation industry and his own community and the challenges balancing the enjoyment of nature with efforts to protect it. Fortunately, he also sees some promise.

By citing its indirect contributions to federal agencies with widely varied missions and management agendas, the Outdoor Industry Association inadvertently raises a thorny question. That is: What are we conserving in the first place? Should we fight for public lands because they provide us with recreation opportunities, or because they support biodiversity? Should we only protect those plants and animals that directly benefit us or that we find beautiful — or should we fight for the entire community of life? The field of conservation biology tells us that long-term ecological stability requires the latter. But stoke fundamentally centers on the self and the quality of human experience, and thus has no intrinsic stake in biodiversity or ecosystem stability. More than anything else about recreation culture and its relationship to conservation, this troubles me.

For even if outdoor industry groups manage to engage in some political battles, or kick some money toward environmental protection, recreationist-driven conservation has historically failed to align with the principles of conservation biology. That’s largely because of the emphasis on awe-inspiring scenery at the expense of biodiversity-rich lowlands, and wildlife management that favors prey species at the expense of ecosystems. This is especially true in the mountainous West.

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Politics and Prose

Alex Milan Tracy / Sipa via AP Images

Marie Myung-Ok Lee | Longreads | May 2018 | 15 minutes (3,630 words)

 

“Walls are built in the mind.” — Wole Soyinka

“The whole country is outraged and outspoken and you should be too

because if you’re not, then you’re not doing your part.”

— Rachel Coye, “New Year”

As a writer, a books columnist for the literary site The Millions, the co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a literary citizen with prolific and brilliant friends whose readings and performances I could probably ink every night on my calendar, let’s say I go to a lot of book signings. Some have food, some have wine. Some have people who wander in and ask irrelevant questions with disarming earnestness.

At one reading where I acted as interlocutor, the novelist I was interviewing took out a package of Swiss chocolate she’d brought with her from Geneva, and instead of putting it on the plate with the wine, handed it to me with a sly smile. I’ve been to several readings where I have been the sole member of the audience. I was asked to do a reading that would involve live exotic animals as accompaniment. I went to one on the Lower East Side, back when it was truly gritty, where the writer was accompanied — overpowered, really — by a person blowing random high notes on a flute. Each reading offers something different, delightful, educational, new.

But I’ve never been to a reading/book signing that had protesters. Especially not for a book the Cleveland Plain Dealer called a “Beautiful, eloquent, and timely” memoir authored by a young writer with a new MFA, a Fulbright, and a Whiting Award. In the era of Trump, where there is something new to protest every day (women’s rights, the EPA, the NEA, gun control, tax cuts for the rich, healthcare…), what would cause the lovely indie bookstore, Books Are Magic to send out a warning on Facebook before the event?

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Bundyville Chapter Four: The Gospel of Bundy

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

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

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

I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wild At Heart

A Bureau of Land Management park ranger tries to corner a steer that escaped from a cattle trailer outside Yuma, Arizona in 2011. (Craig Fry/The Yuma Daily Sun/AP)

Tove DanovichTopic | May 2017 | 12 minutes (2,954 words)

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

It was breaking news in New York City. News helicopters thrummed overhead, the police were called in for backup, and a crowd of rubberneckers peered through the chain-link fence at the edge of the Prospect Park soccer field. Over 3,400 viewers watched a livestream online as police exited their vehicles and walked onto the grass, nets in hand, hoping to subdue the escapee: a young chocolate-colored steer with oversize tan ears that stuck straight out from its head, like a disguise that didn’t fit right.

The Brahman steer—one of the most common cattle breeds used in meat processing—had been on the lam since the morning, when it likely escaped from one of South Brooklyn’s live slaughter markets. These aren’t the assembly-line slaughterhouses of factory farming, but rather small establishments where customers can walk up to pens of live chickens, goats, rabbits, and other animals, point to the one they want, and have it killed on the premises. Often such live markets serve immigrant communities used to eating their meat when it’s still fresh, or religious communities who want to ensure their meat was prepared kosher or halal. Apparently, the Prospect Park steer didn’t want to linger long at a place like that.

First, the steer took a breakneck tour of Flatbush and South Park Slope. As early as 8:30 a.m., Twitter lit up with people reporting sightings of the steer as it charged down the sidewalk. “I thought there was nothing new to be seen after a lifetime in NYC,” one woman wrote. Eventually, the little steer got itself into the park, and it was there that the news cameras, and the NYPD, caught up with it. The police tried to use the soccer nets to corral the animal, tipping them over and awkwardly maneuvering the enormous nets around the field. But the steer slipped out of their grasp. This went on for hours. Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Three: A Clan Not to Cross

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

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

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

I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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