Search Results for: baseball

Bearing the Weight of My Grandfathers’ Old Clothes

Illustration by Homestead

Aram Mrjoian | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,320 words)

The first time I was mistaken for my father on the phone, I feigned annoyance. It was around 2004, I was 14 or 15 years old, and my family’s main form of communication was still the cordless phone mounted to the wall at the threshold of the kitchen, important numbers listed in thick pencil on a faded pad of yellow paper taped to the inside of the neighboring cabinet door. My mother and father also had cell phones, single-function dull silver models with green calculator screens and pixelated numbers, but these devices were strictly for work or emergencies. I was too young for my own phone, which was still an uncommon luxury among my friends, especially those still without a driver’s license. At home, the majority of calls we received were from telemarketers, and by my adolescence my parents had trained me to decline the onslaught of polite, prodding inquiries from unknown numbers, so that once or twice a day I hung up on an unfamiliar voice the moment they butchered our last name.

This time, though, it was a number I recognized, from a family member, someone who knew both my dad and me well enough to identify the distinct tones and cadences of our voices. She confused us anyway. I remember the static over the line, my momentary pause as I tried to make sense of this error. How could I be mistaken for my father? How could there be any confusion given the unsure wavering in my adolescent voice? Even as a teenager, I understood one distant moment of misidentification was neither some portentous sign of manhood nor a hint that I had matured in a more physical sense of the word. At least, I didn’t see it that way. Today, the feeling of being lost in adulthood is as constant as ever, like I am still an anachronistic version of my younger self, winging it day to day, uncertain of who I am and what the hell I’m doing. This mood was intensely magnified in my adolescence. My conceptions of masculinity and adulthood were out of whack with my perception of myself. It wasn’t simply that I wasn’t a man yet, but a larger question of how could I ever be half the man my father is, at all?
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Caught Between Borders

Illustration by Eric Chow

Malia Politzer | Annie Hylton | Longreads | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,991 words)

 
The first time his father tried to kill him, Ismail* was 15 years old. By the time he turned 19, he had escaped four attempts on his life: Once, he was outside an asylum center in South Africa, where he’d hoped to find safety; other times he was in Somalia, the country from which he fled. His father was intent on killing him to protect the family’s “honor.” No matter where he went, it seemed, his father had enlisted Somali immigrants to mete out his execution. Ismail’s crime? He is gay.

Slender and tall, Ismail dresses sharply, favoring bright colors and tight cuts. He wears a signature mixture of ladies’ perfumes, and carries a silver-chain necklace and anklet in his backpack that he longs to wear but is too afraid to put on. From a young age, Ismail displayed traits that he said were “woman things” — his walk, the way he spoke, how he moved his hands — mannerisms that were not “normal” and provoked his father’s ire. His father forbade him from school and kept him under house arrest.

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The Gymnast’s Position

Illustration by Homestead

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,257 words)

More than two decades ago, a billboard went up in Salt Lake City near the 600 South exit of the I-15. It featured a young woman in repose clad in a sleeveless black leotard, her back to the viewer and her head tilted up. The weight of her upper body rested on her right arm, which was extended behind her; her left arm lay languidly on her bent left knee. Her right leg was extended straight in front of her, its foot arch, creating the appearance of a straight line from hip to toe.

The angle of the woman’s head seemingly bathed her face in light, her long curly blonde hair falling freely down her neck. The pose was reminiscent of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only inverted.

Passersby unable to make out the words printed in small text beneath the image would be forgiven for not knowing what exactly the billboard was advertising. Was it selling a dance performance or was it an ad for workout apparel or a photography exhibit at a local gallery? Visually, there were few clues.
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Odetta Holmes’ Album One Grain of Sand

David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

Matthew Frye Jacobson | One Grain of Sand| Bloomsbury Academic | April 2019 | 19 minutes (3,117 words)

 

When twenty-year-old Odetta Felious Holmes — classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become “the next Marian Anderson” — veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and spirituals before mixed-race audiences in 1950s’ coffeehouses, she was making a portentous decision for both American music and Civil Rights culture. Released the same year as her famous rendition of “I’m on My Way” at the March on Washington, One Grain of Sand captures the social justice project that was Odetta’s voice. “There was no way I could say the things I was thinking, but I could sing them,” she later remarked. In pieces like “Midnight Special,” “Moses, Moses,” “Ain’t No Grave,” and “Ramblin’ Round Your City,” One Grain of Sand embodies Odetta’s approach to the folk repertoire as both an archive of black history and a vehicle for radical expression. For many among her audience, a song like “Cotton Fields” represented a first introduction to black history at a time when there was as yet no academic discipline going by this name, and when history books themselves still peddled convenient fictions of a fundamentally “happy” plantation past. And for many among her audience, black and white, this young woman’s pride in black artistry and resolve, and her open rage and her challenge to whites to recognize who they were and who they had been, too, modeled the very honesty and courage that the movement now called for.

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Mother/Russia

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,965 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

 
Something happens to a person trying to watch six seasons of The Americans in just four weeks. First, the math: It’s about 60 hours of television, which is a realistic goal for someone without any significant responsibilities or sleep requirements.

But suppose you’re not that kind of someone.

You might find yourself, every so often, watching with the sound off and the captions on while your toddler feeds herself noodles. You know you should be stimulating her mind and promoting the development of her language, but there is work to be done. A mission, you might call it, though only to yourself. You may also realize that you’ve been wasting perfectly good time in the car and begin to listen to the show while driving, as if it is a poorly executed narrative podcast. This gets tricky when it comes to the Russian dialogue but also lends a new layer of intrigue to the prosaic tasks of suburban living. Against a soundtrack of what closed captioning calls “suspenseful music,” a seemingly innocent Target run could be anything, especially if you happen to be wearing a baseball cap. Later, when your 7-year-old refuses to clear her dinner plate, you might find yourself muttering about how when you were her age your mother was sick with diphtheria and you wished there was a dinner to clear. In short, you begin to have a secret life, which is watching The Americans.

* * *

The spy genre relies on a precise interplay between secrecy and authenticity. We enjoy stories about spies because we get to experience the thrills of skilled artifice while being privy to the comfort of the authentic; the fun comes from watching a person pretend to be someone else while knowing who they really are. The Americans, a show about Soviet spies living in a D.C. suburb in the ’80s, offers this kind of entertainment. We relish seeing Philip and Elizabeth Jennings execute their missions while sporting a dizzying array of wigs, but that pleasure would be incomplete if we didn’t also see them return home, in their natural hair, to help the kids with their homework.

The homework-type scenes are important because we assume that, for Philip and Elizabeth, the authentic part is their family. Like David Chase recognizing the impact that the domestic could have on the mob genre, The Americans brings the spy thriller into the home. And family serves somewhat of the same function for Philip and Elizabeth as it did for Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Don Draper, humanizing them by showcasing their ability to exhibit tenderness and care toward their children. To this The Americans adds another layer. In making the Jennings’ spy HQ the home where they raise their children, the show turns a story about enemy agents raising a family into a relatable metaphor for the way parenting works, the way it has to work: the dining room versus the secret basement passport cache of it all. It becomes a story about the secrets one must keep as a parent, and also about the way feelings and beliefs and habits that have become unremarkable, or perhaps simply the way things are done, become troubling — perhaps even monstrous — when seen through the eyes of one’s children.

And so, it turns out that what we initially identify as the Jennings’ authenticity reveals itself to be just another locus of secrets. Until the end of season three, neither of their children have any idea that their parents are Russian spies; poor Henry doesn’t find out until the series finale that they have already fled the country without him. Every family moment is true and a lie at the same time, and The Americans uses the Jennings family to blur the boundary separating those concepts from each other. Family itself is multiplied on this show, with Philip and Elizabeth constantly making deep connections with other people. They’re always knocking on doors, entering lives and families, gaining trust and playing house. Philip marries Martha, who wants to have a child with him. Elizabeth cooks with Young-Hee and babysits her children. In the fifth season they both play family with Tuan, a Vietnamese agent who later reports them for jeopardizing the mission by indulging “certain petty bourgeois concerns.” When we see them slip seamlessly into these other familial tableaus, it destabilizes our own ideas about what is real and what is pretend. When they return to their children amid and in the aftermath of those missions, the domestic ministrations we once thought of as real can’t help but take on the patina of performance. Which, after all, is the real family? None of these homes is free of secrets.

Of course, we are able to tell which family truly matters to our protagonists based on how much anxiety they express over it. Philip and Elizabeth spend a lot of time worrying about the threats to their family, from the FBI and the KGB alike. This dedication to their children, the precarity of their family, humanizes them. But the show tempers that humanizing effect by presenting it alongside their role in the dissolution of other families. Together and separately, Philip and Elizabeth spend a lot of time threatening other people’s families, exploiting their particular weaknesses to destroy them. They leave those families worse than they found them, a trail of broken homes and irreparably altered futures in their wake. In the end, their own family is no exception. Their separation at the end of the series is not the work of any of their adversaries but instead the inexorable result of an authentic life built on secrets. They choose to leave Henry behind in the only life he’s ever known and, in a scene that guts me every time I watch it, Paige makes a last-minute decision to stay in the U.S. Her parents learn of this decision when it’s too late, seeing her standing on the platform as their train pulls away toward Canada. Philip and Elizabeth will finally be able to live a truly authentic, albeit slightly less comfortable, life in Russia. Henry will continue to live his American life in spite of his parents’ betrayal. Paige is the show’s true victim, most likely doomed to live off the grid. She is stranded forever between worlds, between what is real and what is pretend: a citizen of no country relegated to the purgatory of drinking vodka in a D.C. safe house.

It is this refusal to deal in binaries that facilitates the astounding accomplishment of The Americans: the refusal of the show to turn on its wife.

Read the first post in this series on Golden Age antiheroes and the nasty women who humanized them.

Blurring this line between inside and outside, between real and pretend, between work and family, is representative of The Americans’ goal of weakening our belief in the very notion of lines. The antihero genre, dedicated as it is to selling us on characters who are neither wholly good nor irredeemably evil, is the perfect vehicle for this project, and The Americans hews closely to the antihero script. Philip and Elizabeth are special because they are highly trained Soviet operatives. They are really good at what they do; they get away with things. And we want them to get away with those things because they also have interiority. We’re privy to several flashbacks and reminiscences aimed at illustrating their difficult childhoods, the sacrifices they’ve made in their lives, and the misgivings they have about their line of work. They’re humanized not only by their children but also by the remorse they feel when they kill anyone whose death does not serve their mission.

But what about the other important element of the antihero formula? Who are the easier-to-hate characters who make our murderous protagonists more likable? Here is where The Americans diverges from the genre as we know it and takes it to even grayer pastures. We would expect a show about the Cold War to present an abundance of options for antagonists and there are certainly a handful of stock villains who crop up throughout the show’s six seasons. But more often than not, The Americans surrounds Philip and Elizabeth with individuals who are, like them, neither wholly good nor irredeemably evil. Almost everyone on this show with more than a few minutes of screen time gets nuance, from Nina, who survives by making herself a helpmate to every man she meets but who ultimately risks her life for something greater than herself, to Martha, who starts off as a naïve mark but becomes one of the show’s most sympathetic and respected characters. Claudia, Philip and Elizabeth’s KGB handler, is introduced as an antagonist but by the end gains our respect and some sympathy. FBI agent Stan Beeman is the Jennings’ most proximate adversary but he is also Philip’s best friend. Characters who on any other show would have been the unsavory antagonists meant to make Philip and Elizabeth look better instead serve a more noble purpose, testifying to the ways in which people ultimately defy the categories into which we want to sort them.

It is this refusal to deal in binaries that facilitates the astounding accomplishment of The Americans: the refusal of the show to turn on its wife. When even the American-Soviet binary is called into question, it is easier to imagine a world in which an antihero husband does not need a nagging wife to win viewers’ allegiance. But this feat is still remarkable given that Elizabeth mostly refuses to traffic in what Kate Manne calls feminine-coded goods. In her monogamous American life, she bakes brownies and asks her husband if he’ll be home for dinner, but in her secret spy life she kicks serious — usually male — ass, sleeps with multiple men to gain information, and often leaves her husband and children to order takeout. That we as viewers did not turn on her is especially surprising given that she is not the kind of mother our culture respects and rewards. Flashbacks reveal that she had reservations about having kids and it’s clear that Philip is the more natural parent. The show not only gives us a wife who is smart, strategic, and quick-thinking, but it also allows that wife to be a stubborn and somewhat-absentee parent who is sometimes very, very wrong without losing her humanity and with it our empathy. The result is that we root for a wife and a marriage in a genre that has made a pastime of destroying them.

If their roles were reversed, would we have turned against Elizabeth the way we turned against Skyler? I’m not sure.

Read the second post on the wives of Ozark and House of Cards.

This is not to say that The Americans is free from the marital friction characteristic of other antihero shows. In fact, the show’s dramatic stakes depend as much on the fault line between Philip and Elizabeth as it does on whether they will be caught by the FBI. This was my second time watching the show and I had forgotten how much the pilot relied on the traditional formula for an antihero and his wife, presenting them at odds rather than as allies. Philip wants to defect and live as wealthy Americans while Elizabeth is a loyal KGB agent for whom the mission always comes first. They argue like Marty and Wendy Byrde (“So you’re just deciding for both of us?”) and Elizabeth rejects Philip’s sexual advances. The moment for defection passes by the end of the first episode but the tension between Philip and Elizabeth persists throughout the series, sometimes simmering and other times boiling over. As the one who yearns to stop spying and live a normal American life, Philip is in the position usually occupied by the antihero’s wife, standing in the way of the show’s plot and threatening to undermine its entire premise. We don’t turn on him either, though I wonder whether that’s a function of his gender. If their roles were reversed, would we have turned against Elizabeth the way we turned against Skyler? I’m not sure.


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But in crafting the Jennings’ relationship the way it did, with doubting Philip and committed Elizabeth, The Americans ends up doing something far more interesting than pitting a wife against her husband. As much as the pilot played with the elements familiar from other antihero shows, its conclusion throws the normal trajectory of such shows into reverse. First episodes of antihero shows have to work incredibly hard, establishing what its main character does wrong while making the case that we should root for him anyway. The Americans pilot does that for two different characters at once and the sum of its hard work is greater than its parts. By the closing credits the show has bound us to Philip and Elizabeth individually, and, perhaps more importantly to their relationship.

Most husband-wife pairs in antihero shows share a history of love. We imagine, or are given flashbacks to, a time when they were in a state of uncomplicated adoration and devotion. A Breaking Bad season three flashback gave us a young and upwardly mobile Walt and Skyler; Ozark’s second season offered a similar look back at the happier and non-money laundering Byrdes. Usually, by the time we get to them, most of that love is gone and only conflict remains. The Americans works in the opposite direction, both in the first episode and in the series as a whole. The pilot reveals that Philip and Elizabeth are essentially strangers sharing a home and a family, having been instructed to never divulge anything of their past lives. Their entire relationship is a lie by omission and they don’t fully trust each other. Elizabeth has even reported on Philip’s weaknesses to their KGB higher-ups in the past. But something happens over the course of the first episode. Elizabeth shares an experience from before they met and by the end of the episode has told Philip her real name; there is a moment of real affection between them. Other antihero shows begin with authenticity and devolve into secrets and lies. The Americans takes a relationship built on lies and guides it toward authenticity. It builds a marriage rather than destroying one.

We cling to this marriage like Jack Dawson to a floating doorframe in the vast and icy sea of pain and destruction that Philip and Elizabeth perpetrate throughout the six seasons of the show. We want them to keep getting away with things but we also want them to continue to love and trust each other. The final season unsettles us as the chasm between Philip’s and Elizabeth’s worldviews widens and threatens their family and their mission, if those can be said to be two different things. Philip, a devotee of EST, the personal transformation seminars popular in the ’70s and early ’80s, wants to trust his gut. A convert to the American cult of the individual, he wants to be free to live his life without destroying the lives of others. Elizabeth has put her trust in an institution and, though she is beginning to see that her loyalty may have been misplaced and abused, she still believes in the cause and the collective that she signed up for. Philip ends up spying on her, trying to figure out whether she is part of a plan to overthrow the Soviet government and derail peace talks. But just when it appears that we’ll finally get our showdown between this particular husband and wife, Philip comes out of retirement to fly to Chicago and help Elizabeth with a dangerous mission. He doesn’t want her to do what she’s doing, and he really doesn’t want to be doing what she’s doing, but when he thinks she’s in danger, he goes to help. When he said, “Sit tight, I’m on my way,” I cheered silently. The final season shows Elizabeth at her worst. Not only is she chain smoking and snapping at Philip, but she is also not getting away with things. Her missions are getting sloppier and less successful and it would be easy for us to shift our loyalty entirely toward Philip. What keeps us from turning on her?

The result is that we root for a wife and a marriage in a genre that has made a pastime of destroying them.

In the penultimate episode of the series, Philip talks about Elizabeth with fellow Soviet operative Father Andrei. This is just moments before he will realize that his cover has most likely been blown but at that moment his biggest problem is Elizabeth’s anger toward him. He admits that he has broken some of his vows — “I haven’t been as honest with her as I should have been” — but Father Andrei thinks the marriage can be saved: “There must be something between you she thinks is worth staying for.” The thing is, Philip replies, Elizabeth “thinks bigger than that … she cares about the whole world.” I think this is key to Elizabeth’s success as an antihero: her commitment to a cause outside of herself and her family, and Philip’s commitment to her. Where personal and familial ambition failed to rally us to the causes of wives like Claire Underwood and Wendy Byrde, selfless dedication to saving the world, no matter how misguided, allows us to feel empathy for Elizabeth. Perhaps more importantly, Elizabeth has what other wives do not: her husband’s love and his trust. They may not always be on the same page, but they aren’t rivals. Philip cares about her. He roots for her, so we do, too.

This is not necessarily where we need to be; wives shouldn’t have to want to save the world to gain our support, and I’m not convinced that Philip and Elizabeth could have switched roles without altering our allegiances. I suspect that a line-dancing, responsibility-shirking Elizabeth would have garnered a different audience response. Her success as an antihero is still in many ways contingent on her proximity to heteronormative marriage, and it remains to be seen whether we can root for a woman who doesn’t have a man vouching for her. But it is progress. In compelling us to root for a marriage — no small feat in an antihero show — The Americans tricks us into rooting for a wife.

Next, we’ll take a detour to the Seven Kingdoms, and consider whether Cersei Lannister could be the antihero we’ve all been waiting for.

 

Previous installments in this series:
The Blaming of the Shrew
The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards

* * *

Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

‘The Home Is a Place as Wild as Any in the World.’

Moose grazing in Cook Inlet with Anchorage Alaska in the background. Jonny No Trees / Getty

Alex Madison | Longreads | May 2019 | 13 minutes (3,462 words)

In the opening pages of Chia-Chia Lin’s gorgeous debut novel, The Unpassing, ten-year-old Gavin lays in the grass with his father, searching for meteors in an autumn sky. His father claims to see them, but Gavin is doubtful: “Either my eyes were not fast enough, or he willed those fragments of space debris into being. They flamed with the intensity of his wanting.”

We learn Gavin’s family has followed this flame of wanting from Taiwan to the U.S. and eventually all the way to Anchorage, where Gavin’s father feels “closer to the stars.” It’s 1986, and Gavin and his three siblings — Pei Pei, Natty and Ruby — eagerly anticipate the launch of the Challenger shuttle, hungrily gathering details about civilian astronaut Christa McAuliffe. Their world hums with yearning and potential. But before the first chapter ends, Gavin contracts meningitis and slips into a coma, only to awaken in a new world: a world in which the Challenger has exploded, and four-year-old Ruby has caught his illness and died. What follows is the unspooling of a new, lonelier life for each family member.

While Ruby’s death charges each of the novel’s movements, my experience of reading was filled with more wonder than sadness. Even as calamity shortens their childhoods, Gavin and his siblings remain vibrant. Their sorrow can’t erase the marvels of never-ending summer light or the joys of tromping among mysterious fauna with new friends. Grief also holds its own wretched beauty — peeling away surfaces and exposing raw feeling. The aura of grief hovers at the edges of Gavin’s experiences, but his observations are also threaded with strangeness and humor.

Chia-Chia Lin is heartbreakingly attuned to the nuance and depth of the children’s perspectives, and Gavin’s narration reflects an acute sensitivity to his family’s emotional weather. Her prose is unadorned but luminous, distilled to potent precision: “two punch holes” of Natty’s pupils in the night, “shredded clouds” announcing summer, a baseball cap that “sliced and resliced a line in the air.” Read more…

Lock Your Doors?

Edward Hopper, October on Cape Cod, 1946, oil on canvas. VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty.

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | April 2019 | 8 minutes (2,082 words)

 

I recently bought a century-old Victorian house in the Hudson Valley after a decade in Brooklyn. There are mountain views and streets lined with mature trees; it’s about as bucolic as you’d imagine. I’m now adept at lowercase ‘fixer-upper projects’ like stripping 1970s wallpaper, staining a deck, and cursing the previous owners for installing 1970s wallpaper. The cursing feels productive, and the house, a marker of adulthood.

One unexpected development: movies and books about home invasion deliver a gut-punch like never before. I’m no longer the rent-stabilized New Yorker tittering at the onscreen rubes killed one by one in their cabin in the woods — now I’m the rube. Specifically the nerd rube: I die second to last.

This isn’t limited to horror films. Even watching art-house fare like Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, I cringed less at the grand guignol filicide than at the houseguests’ breaking of that gorgeous double-basin sink. (You animals!) This new sensitivity is reassuring. I worried about becoming complacent as I entered the propertied class, in addition to the usual worries of growing cynical with age. The sensitivity is a naked flank for art to locate and slowly pierce. In the case of two books published in the past year, the piercing came with a memorable twist of the knife. Read more…

It’s Tennis, Charlie Brown

Comic strips by Charles M. Schulz

Patrick Sauer | Racquet and Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,896 words)

This story is produced in partnership with Racquet magazine and appears in issue no. 9.

In May 1951, seven months after a new comic strip called Peanuts debuted, an extremely roundheaded Charlie Brown is shown trying to return a tennis ball. He whiffs, then walks to the net to discuss a rule change with his pal Shermy, a once prominent but since forgotten character. The last panel shows both boys to be a half foot below the net as ol’ Chuck proposes, “One point if you hit the ball, two if you get it over the net!”

Throughout its 50-year run, tennis was a leitmotif in Peanuts. It wasn’t quite as prevalent as baseball or ice hockey, but forehands in the funny pages weren’t uncommon; the sport was shown or mentioned in a total of 236 Peanuts installments. The heyday of tennis in the beloved strip coincided with the tennis boom of the 1970s, which is when Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz was hitting the courts most frequently, thanks to his tennis-loving wife, Jean, as well as a close pal with 39 Grand Slam titles to her name. Read more…

Mystery Alaska

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Chris Outcalt | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,723 words)

The helicopter took off from a narrow patch of grass off the side of Route 2 about 30 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. The two-lane highway runs like an artery through the heart of the Alaskan interior, connecting the state’s third-most populous city to the outer reaches of North America. I’m riding shotgun in the lightweight, four-passenger chopper; Colorado State University (CSU) archeologist Julie Esdale is seated behind me. Esdale, who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology at Brown University, has spent more than a decade in this part of the state, exploring centuries of soil with a community of other social scientists whose aim is to weave together the tangled origins of humanity.

Fifty feet up, as the booming whop-whop of the propeller blades cuts through the air overhead, we crest a row of trees along the edge of the road, revealing a spectacular view: a massive, tree-lined valley framed to the west by the peaks of the Alaska Range, one of the highest stretches of mountains in the world. These jagged hills formed millions of years ago; shifting tectonic plates collided along the Denali and Hines Creek Faults, pushing the earth 20,000 feet into the air. Our destination lies about 10 miles into this lowland known as the Tanana Flats. Esdale and her colleagues believe the spot, a vestige of a 14,000-year-old hunter-gatherer encampment hidden deep in the earth, could hold important clues to better understanding the behavior of North America’s earliest inhabitants.

Esdale helped discover and excavate this important ground known as McDonald Creek, which turned out to be one of the oldest archeological sites in the country. Field crews found fragments of stone tools, charcoal dust left behind by ancient firepits, and remains of bison, mammoth, elk, and waterfowl. Admittedly, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about those who pioneered the landmass I’d lived on my entire life, let alone the particulars of their livelihood; but my interest piqued at the thought of these scientists dedicating their professional lives to better understanding those who came before us, like a detective unit attempting to solve one of the first mysteries of mankind.


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Esdale, who’s in her mid-40s and has straight, shoulder-length blond hair she often tucks under a ball cap out in the field, explained that Alaska is a hot spot for this research — that it was both a matter of history and geography. The last ice age took hold about 2.6 million years ago. When it began to melt around 12,000 years ago, it covered a well-documented land bridge between what is now Russia and Alaska. But before the glaciers thawed, causing water levels in the Bering Strait to rise, submerging the area known as Beringia, early humans wandered east to west across this continental divide. They were the first people to set foot in the New World, and they walked straight into what is today central Alaska.

…my interest piqued at the thought of these scientists dedicating their professional lives to better understanding those who came before us, like a detective unit attempting to solve one of the first mysteries of mankind.

“Early sites are hit and miss in the lower forty-eight,” Esdale told me. “But in the interior, we’ve got lots and lots of them.” Still, perhaps too far-flung to have slipped into the mainstream, she said Alaskan archeology was often overlooked in favor of research in the continental United States. Esdale’s husband, Jeff Rasic, also an Alaskan archeologist, told me he’d attended numerous national meetings of top researchers in the field and had often been struck by how little they tracked new findings in Alaska. “These are full-time academic archeologists,” Rasic said, “and they’re behind.” If I ever wanted to have a look up close, Esdale said she’d be happy to show me around when I first contacted her by phone last year.

By chance, I flew into Fairbanks two days ahead of the summer solstice, which brings nearly 24 hours of daylight to the region. When I landed close to midnight the sky was bright enough it could’ve easily been noon. (Later, I overheard a popular American Legion baseball game was scheduled for the following night. First pitch: 12:01 a.m.) I met Esdale early the next morning. We stopped at the local Safeway for a coffee and to pack a lunch, then headed to the helicopter launch site. After about 15 minutes in the air, Esdale pointed to our landing spot, a prominent mound that jutted above the flat, wooded landscape.

As we approached, she explained the scenery would’ve looked a lot different 14,000 years ago; the ground was still recovering from the ice age’s deep freeze and the trees hadn’t grown in yet. Nevertheless, I could see what the people who camped here back then were thinking. Atop the high point of an otherwise flat area would’ve been a good place to lookout for predators, scout prey for their next meal, or to simply rest their legs and enjoy the view after a long walk. At least that last part, I thought, we had in common.

***

In Alaska, a state known for its expansive territory, the federal government is the largest landowner, controlling about 61 percent of the terrain. Most of that is allocated for public use and managed by the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. There are other operators, however; notably, the United States Army oversees the use of about 1.5 million acres in the central part of the state.

Drawn to the open, undeveloped land and distinct climate, the military has maintained a presence in interior Alaska since the 1930s. Today, the local base is known as Fort Wainwright, “home of the Arctic Warriors.” During the frigid Alaskan winters, soldiers test gear, vehicles, and the limits of their own bodies in extreme cold. What’s more, with ample space, units can spread out and simulate wartime drills and construct practice bombing ranges. But although there are few neighbors to disturb, federal law — the National Historic Preservation Act and the Archeological Resources Protection Act — requires the military pay close attention to what might lie beneath the surface. In fact, given that the area is archaeologically rich, the Army funds a team of about half a dozen people who make sure it doesn’t trample any sensitive material — anything from stone tools or rock carvings to portions of structures or grave sites at least a century old. For the past eight years, Esdale has run the team.

Esdale first moved to Alaska in 2002 as a student, several years before getting the gig with the Army. She’d been conducting research for her Ph.D. in the far reaches of northwest Alaska when she met her husband out in the field. Not long after, Rasic got a job with the National Park Service based in Fairbanks; they made the move north together, two scientists in love headed for the Last Frontier. That first year they got a dog, a big, goofy lab who demanded a lot of time outside — even when it was 50 below and felt like your eyelids would freeze shut after a few minutes. Eventually, Esdale and Rasic had two boys and she got the contract with the Army. By then Fairbanks felt like home.

Although sharpshooting members of the armed forces and a crew of erudite scientists studying human history might seem like strange bedfellows, the partnership has identified hundreds of significant sites hidden in the Alaskan tundra. Take McDonald Creek, for example. Several years ago, the brass at Fort Wainwright proposed building a road through the Tanana Flats. A team headed by Colorado State’s Ned Gaines, which included Esdale, dug a few test pits while surveying in advance of the development. “Everywhere we put a shovel, we found artifacts,” Esdale said. The Army rerouted the planned road, and excavation of the site was turned over to Texas A&M researcher Kelly Graf.

Although sharpshooting members of the armed forces and a crew of pesky erudite scientists studying human history might seem like strange bedfellows, the partnership has identified hundreds of significant sites hidden in the Alaskan tundra.

I met Graf and her team of mostly graduate students last summer. From the clearing where our helicopter landed, Esdale and I walked a well-worn path to a sort of base camp — an area among the trees about 80 feet in diameter. The camp was surrounded by a small, pop-up electric fence designed to keep animals away, and there were dozens of water jugs and large plastic bear-proof storage containers that resembled beer kegs. About 10 people sat around in fold-out camping chairs and on tree stumps finishing their lunch. This was Graf’s fourth year digging at the remote location. One highlight, she said, was they’d recently found what appeared to be a bone from a dog. Graf said the discovery could amount to evidence of the earliest known domesticated canine in North America. While we were talking she wondered aloud whether these early people would have traversed Beringia via some sort of dogsled or used the animals to help shoulder the weight of their belongings.

After lunch, the group migrated to the nearby dig location, a large pit that looked as if someone had pressed a massive rectangular cookie cutter into the ground and discarded all the dirt in the middle. Excavating an archeological site is tedious work, a far cry from the escapades of the world’s most famous member of the trade, the fictional character Indiana Jones. Rather, it consists mainly of carefully scraping away layers of dirt with a trowel and cataloging any items for further examination and analysis. “Our goal as anthropologists — it’s not just about treasures, not just about finding stuff,” Esdale told me. “It’s to understand people.”

Scientists have learned a lot about the founding populations of Indigenous peoples who lived in this area, particularly about how they subsisted. These people were mobile, resourceful, and skilled — unquestionably successful big-game hunters who preyed on bison, elk, and maybe even mammoth. They used spears and a throwing device called an atlatl, a curved tool made from wood, bone, or ivory not unlike the plastic tennis ball throwers popular at dog parks today. Hunters used it to launch darts fashioned with a pointed stone tip. (The bow and arrow didn’t show up for another 12,000 years.) Flakes discarded during the sharpening of these points are often found in the soil at sites like McDonald Creek.

‘Our goal as anthropologists — it’s not just about treasures, not just about finding stuff,’ Esdale told me. ‘It’s to understand people.’

For her part, though, Graf hoped to find more than flakes. Carbon dating of charcoal left behind by campfires and preserved 10 feet underground suggested that people occupied this location three different times throughout history — 7,000, 13,000, and nearly 14,000 years ago — making it one of the oldest sites in Alaska. “It’s an interesting place,” Graf told me. “We’ve always been looking for the base camp of these people. There are a lot of hunting camps around, shorter-term sites, but somewhere they had to be hunkering down, where grandma and grandpa and the kids and the mom, where everyone was hanging out. That’s kind of what we’re wondering, because this is a nice, fixed spot.”

“So, this could be that type of place?” I asked.

“Could be,” she said. “Could be.”

***

On my second day in Fairbanks, Esdale introduced me to an archeologist in his mid-70s named Chuck Holmes. He had a full head of neatly parted gray hair and a trimmed white beard. Before we met, Esdale outlined Holmes’s long resume. He’d taught at multiple universities, enlightening undergrads and guiding Ph.D. candidates, and had held senior-level science jobs with both the state and federal governments. It all amounted to decades of research and discoveries in the region. Hearing Esdale, I got the impression she was describing a sort of grandfather of Alaskan archeology.

Holmes first came to Alaska via Florida, about as far away as you can get in the United States — a fact his mother made sure to note when Holmes told her he’d decided to enroll at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1970. Holmes had fallen for the state’s wide-open territory the year before. Thanks to a friend’s father who worked for one of the railroad companies, Holmes and his hometown pal landed summer jobs laying train track across the tundra. “My friend was a little less interested in doing that kind of work; I just saw it as an adventure,” Holmes said. “I got in good shape and got to see quite a bit of the state.” From that moment, aside from brief stopovers in Calgary, Canada, and Washington state, Holmes spent the rest of his life in Alaska.

Holmes told me that as a kid he’d always had a penchant for finding things, so it was perhaps no surprise that during his undergrad years in Fairbanks he found archeology. “I was hooked on Alaska at that point,” Holmes said. But it was something he discovered two decades later that Esdale wanted me to learn more about: another archeological site not too far from McDonald Creek. The spot was known as Swan Point, and it happened to be the oldest historical site with evidence of human activity not just in Alaska but in the rest of the United States as well.

Back then, in the early 1990s, Holmes worked for the Office of History and Archeology in Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources. One summer, he led a group of students digging at an already well-established site in the Tanana Valley. A couple of the kids involved in the excavation wanted to venture out to look for something new, so Holmes pulled out a couple of maps and a compass, essential tools for an archeologist in the days before Google Earth. He identified what looked like a promising topographic feature: a hill off in the woods that appeared high enough to function as a lookout point, but not so high that it would’ve deterred a group of hunter-gatherers from climbing to the top. Holmes told the students to check it out, dig a few holes, and see what they found.

On their first attempt, the kids had trouble pinpointing the right location. Holmes sent them back the next day with additional instructions, and this time they returned with wide grins. First, they handed Holmes a couple of small plastic bags containing flakes likely cleaved from a stone tool. Not bad, Holmes thought. That was enough to suggest the site was worthy of further exploration. The students, however, had one more bag to show off. This one contained a scrap of ivory. The hard, white material, typically part of a tooth or tusk, is much more difficult to find in the wild, particularly in a shallow test pit dug at a somewhat hastily selected point on a map. It was like plucking a needle you didn’t know existed from a haystack the size of Delaware.

Holmes and other researchers excavated Swan Point on and off for the next two decades. Carbon dating placed it at about 14,200 years old. Scientists uncovered all kinds of gems, including stone tools, bones from a baby mammoth, food-storage pits, and hearths that campfires were built upon. The findings from Swan Point have been documented and published in numerous scientific papers, and in 2008 the government listed the site on the National Register of Historic Places. As it turned out, Holmes explained, much of the Swan Point technology was similar to what had been commonly found by scientists on the other side of the land bridge in Siberia, suggesting these people were related in some way. “These guys, we’re not really sure who the heck they are,” Holmes said, referring to whomever camped at Swan Point so long ago.

“They’re basically Asian; they are ancient folk,” he said. “But their genes carried into the New World.”

***

Later that day, after meeting Holmes, Esdale and I bumped along an overgrown, two-lane Jeep road that ran deep into the woods. We were headed toward another archeological site on Army lands, this one dating back about 13,000 years. The road dead-ended at a clearing atop a ridge with a view of a river and an open forest below. Esdale explained this location, aptly named Delta River Overlook, marked the first time that archeologists had found a Beringian site that humans appeared to have occupied in the winter. They could tell, she said, based on the existence of a specific tooth that had belonged to a baby bison — a molar that only erupts in the cold season.

Winters were lean times for humans 13,000 years ago. In addition to tracking larger animals and storing the frozen meat under rocks, hunters in these tribes also set snares to trap small game for times when the weather made it challenging to venture too far from camp; at Delta River Overlook, for example, there’s evidence of grouse and ground squirrel. Staying warm was another challenge. Furs from big-game animals helped, but scientists are still piecing together the picture of what their shelters might’ve looked like that long ago. Best guess from ethnographic evidence, Esdale told me, is that families constructed dwellings by draping animal skins over a dome of flexible branches and packing the outside with snow for additional insulation.

The excavation of the Delta River site was led by a professor of archeology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks named Ben Potter. Potter was in China on a research trip when I visited Alaska, but I spoke with him on the phone later. Like Holmes, he’s made a number of important contributions to the Alaskan archeological canon. Potter’s body of work, however, contains one particularly unique entry: He uncovered the oldest human remains to date at an archeological site in Alaska. The first finding occurred in 2010, after years of work at an 11,500-year-old site known as Upward Sun River.

Potter and his team were contracted in 2005 to conduct a survey ahead of a proposed railway expansion through Army lands 40 miles from Fairbanks. His crew dug a few test pits and found evidence of human activity. The rail project was eventually rerouted, and in 2009 Potter received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue excavating and investigating the site. He made the startling discovery the following year. About a meter down, Potter’s crew found parts of a human skull; later analysis determined the bones had come from a 3-year-old cremated child. In 2013, they went deeper into the site, and the team found the remains of two infants. Extracting human remains from the ground in Alaska necessitates consulting with local Indigenous tribes, which maintain a notable presence in their ancestral lands in the state — about 100,000 people spread across at least four groups. With the support and cooperation of local tribal leaders, his team removed the bones and sent out a sample for genetic analysis. They published the results last year.

The goal is just knowing more — to keep understanding.

The DNA makeup revealed an entirely new population of Native peoples, a group Potter labeled “Ancient Beringians.” There were other important findings at Upward Sun River. For example, they discovered fish bones buried in a hearth, where hunters would’ve cooked their meat, which helped Potter and his team establish the earliest known human consumption of salmon in the Americas. Previously, scientists had thought this occurred near the ocean. “It wasn’t on the coast, it was in the deep interior rivers,” Potter said. “That’s pretty exciting.” But the conclusions drawn from the DNA analysis were by far the most significant: a previously unknown branch of ancient humans.

It was a substantial addition to the archeology of the time. Although the general narrative about the early migration of people from Siberia to the Americas is mostly agreed upon, the specifics are subject to ongoing debate among social scientists. When exactly did these ancient people first arrive in Alaska? Did they settle down? If so, for how long? When did they colonize the rest of America? Did they travel inland or along the coast? What the DNA from Potter’s discovery and other analysis showed was that for a period of several thousand years the genetic code of early Indigenous people evolved in isolation, no longer mixing with the DNA of those who lived in eastern Asia. It also appeared that these Ancient Beringians were eventually separated from those who went on to colonize the rest of the Americas.

Two other groups of scientists have discovered new genetic evidence that he felt buttressed his work. The findings included, in part, a human DNA sample from a 12,600-year-old cave in Montana and a single tooth preserved from a 1949 dig at a 10,000-year-old site in western Alaska, hundreds of miles from Fairbanks. The tooth had long been forgotten, stashed away on a dusty shelf at a museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was found by, of all people, Esdale’s husband Rasic. Turned out, the genetic makeup of the tooth matched the children’s from Upward Sun River.

“This actually clarifies quite a bit,” Potter told me when I followed up with him after the new papers were released. He walked me through the scenario he saw taking shape: People were likely living in Asia around 16,000 years ago. The glaciers began to melt and tribes migrated from western Beringia to Alaska around, say, 15,000 years ago. Then you have a split: ancient Beringians sticking around Alaska and another group traveling south, either inland, along the coast, or both, entering the rest of the Americas. That second group, he said, looked to be a single population that spread quickly and later split into many lineages.

Talking with Potter about the DNA results and migration theories it reminded me of a conversation Esdale and I had on our drive out to Delta River Overlook, the day before I left Alaska and flew back to the rest of the United States. We’d been talking about how, based on the antique elements of the profession, archeologists are necessarily adept at spinning complex abstractions from limited evidence, whether it’s the shape of a microblade point or a scrap of an animal bone. It seemed to me, however, that that meant there was no endgame to this work — that it could go on forever, like trying to solve a massive jigsaw puzzle in which an untold number of pieces were destroyed eons ago. When I floated this thought to Esdale, she laughed. “Yeah, no, there’s never an endgame. The goal is just knowing more — to keep understanding.”

We continued along the Jeep road into the forest.

“I never really thought about it like that,” she said.

***

Chris Outcalt is a writer and editor based in Colorado.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

They Call Her La Primera, Jai Alai’s Last Hope

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Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | April 2019 | 19 minutes (4,863 words)

On a jai alai court in North Miami, Florida, 54-year-old Becky Smith was trying out for Calder Casino’s recently announced team. It was February 2019 — winter, but Florida winter, with temperatures in the 80s — and more than 100 men had shown up to compete with Becky for approximately 30 spots.

In the large warehouse along an industrial strip of road, Becky stood alone on the court, which she thought was odd. “How can you assess my playing skills if you don’t have me playing with other people?” Becky thought. “I think that they really didn’t think I could play.” Read more…