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29 Sep 10:00

The World’s Largest Refugee Camp Is Becoming a Real City

by Victoria Milko

From the top of a viewing tower in Cox’s Bazar District in southern Bangladesh, bamboo and blue-green tarpaulin constructions sprawl in every direction, as far as the eye can see.

The Kutupalong camp is home to more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees, crowded into a temporary city spread across five square miles. They live in fragile, improvised shelters, with nothing but the possessions they fled Myanmar with. Another 300,000 Rohingya refugees live in comparable squalor in satellite settlements and camps to the south, on a peninsula adjoining the Naf River that divides Bangladesh and Myanmar. A warren of passageways dissects the vast Kutupalong camp, revealing its unplanned nature; the settlement sprang up organically around the refugees as they fled to Bangladesh in late 2017.

But in a small area of open space known as Camp 4 Extension, aid workers are busy designing and creating what could become the future for the refugees. On a rare unpopulated plot of land, several new two-level prototype bamboo and steel frame homes sit, awaiting approval from the Bangladesh government.

“We have been able to really create a settlement that is a top international standard,” says Marin Din Kajdomcaj, head of operations and sub-office for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Cox’s Bazar. “I am humbly saying it’s fantastic.”

With Rakhine State in Myanmar still locked in active sectarian conflict, the crisis shows no signs of abating. The Rohingya in Myanmar are either confined to camps or live in partially destroyed villages, denied the opportunity for work, formal education, and freedom of movement. Monsoon season is now underway, introducing the threat of cyclones to an already vulnerable population. So authorities in Cox’s Bazar are turning to a new solution to ease the suffering of refugees: infrastructure.

With the prospect of the Rohingya not being able to return to Myanmar for years to come, the prototypes in Camp 4 Extension reflect how aid and relief organizations are finding new ways to manage the long-term needs of the most populous refugee camp in the world.

A city of the displaced: The Kutupalong camp contains about 600,000 people, and efforts are now underway to create more permanent structures for them. (Victoria Milko/CityLab)

The crisis intensified on August 25, 2017, when thousands of Rohingya began crossing the Myanmar border in Bangladesh, fleeing violence that the United Nations has described as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Many of them were starving, having traveled for four or five days, and conditions were dire as vast queues of people thronged the border. “I saw an old woman slip down from a river bank, then she died as nobody could [rescue] her,” says Rohingya refugee Anamal Hassan.

When he arrived, the land was cloaked in jungle. With help from the Bangladesh government and local communities, refugees quickly set up makeshift homes around existing registered refugee settlements that had formed after waves of violence in Myanmar in the 1990s and earlier. As part of the initial response, the UNHCR also gave refugees kit material to build their own shelters. During the first year, the Bangladesh Army built a dirt and brick road to allow greater aid access, and stabilized the landslide-prone hills that refugees began to settle on.

The refugees carved away large swaths of forest—including parts of a protected nature preserve—for building materials and cooking supplies. The camps sprung up along elephant migration corridors—elephants trampled at least 10 refugees to death. Other threats loomed, too. Congested living conditions breeds a high risk of fire and disease. Monsoons brought flash flooding and mudslides to the rugged, hilly land; in 2018, the UNHCR conducted risk and hazard assessments and mapped the riskiest areas before moving at least 24,000 people to safer areas.

After 18 months and about $1 billion in international aid investments, the Kutupalong camp was deemed relatively stable, according to Kajdomcaj. Food security indicators have improved and immunization coverage has grown to over 90 percent. Some 97 percent of Rohingya refugees said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the help they are receiving from non-governmental organizations in the camps, according to a survey of about 1,300 refugees conducted in early 2019 by Xchange, an NGO that documents human migration.

“We now have a totally different response,” Kajdomcaj says.

Today, there is a semblance of order inside the camps. Along its main roads, retail districts have emerged, where Rohingya shopkeepers sell hot meals, snacks, toiletries, betel nuts, and other items traded from Cox’s Bazar. In single-room workshops, men toil to fashion wooden furniture and machetes for chopping firewood.

A pilot design for a new kind of two-story bamboo-sided shelter uses a steel frame that can be quickly disassembled and moved. (Victoria Milko/CityLab)

In November 2018, UNHCR began the large-scale distribution of liquefied petroleum gas to refugees and the host community to use as a cleaner, safer source of energy for cooking and heating. New tube wells and public toilets have significantly improved the city’s hygiene and sanitation situation, with 93 percent of refugees surveyed by Xchange saying earlier this year that the camps were satisfactorily clean. In February 2019, Oxfam opened the largest sewage plant that has ever been built in a refugee camp, which is capable of processing the waste of 150,000 people.

When the monsoon season approached in May, Rohingya volunteers armed with stabilization kits strengthened the shelters against high winds and cyclones. Lightning arresters have been installed to better protect the camps from storms, and designated safe havens mean that, unlike last year, people know where to go in an emergency.  

As the city has grown, so has vehicular traffic. Colorful tuk-tuks—three-wheeled taxis—carry women in hijab between the market and their shelters, jostling for road space with pedestrians and trucks piled with lengths of bamboo construction material. Aid distribution areas, marked with a flag system for communication, are particularly congested. Children are everywhere: carrying drinking water for their families in their arms or on their backs, standing in doorways, and running between houses. In barber shops, they sit patiently with their small heads bowed and their feet dangling high above the floor.

Still, life in the camps is precarious. The impression of growing normality and order can’t erase the lack of privacy and security. Crowded homes, lack of ventilation, and an open sewer system have contributed to outbreaks of disease. Heavy monsoon rains in July left at least 10 people dead and destroyed about 5,000 shelters, even after the storm preparation efforts.

“Although we were under pressure in Myanmar, we felt better there than here,” Hassan says. “There, we had our own home, compound, and village. Here, we only have our shelters.”

Despite recent improvements, conditions remain difficult for Rohingya families in the camps. (Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

But efforts to improve conditions in this ad-hoc city have run into a fundamental impasse: The Bangladesh government has banned the construction of permanent housing, insisting that the Rohingya will soon be returning home to Myanmar.

Since a failed attempt to repatriate some 3,500 Rohingya to Myanmar in mid-August, the Bangladesh government has shut down mobile-phone access for refugees and announced plans to set up barbed-wire fencing, watch towers, and surveillance cameras enclosing the camps. Local opinion toward the refugees is turning increasingly sour.

Humanitarian aid workers in Cox’s Bazar say privately that the idea the Rohingya will soon return to Myanmar is wishful thinking. Myanmar’s rejection of the Rohingya’s right to citizenship and a new conflict raging across the border between the Myanmar military and the ethnic Rakhine Arakan Army mean that large-scale returns are unlikely. In a sign that the Bangladesh government expects the Rohingya to stay for some time, it is planning to move some 100,000 Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char, a flood-prone island formed of sediment at the mouth of the Meghna River. The island only emerged from the river less than 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Cox’s Bazaar, there are groups that are testing the limits of the restrictions imposed by the Bangladesh government, with tacit approval from local authorities. UNHCR is starting to look further ahead, says Kajdomcaj.  

In part, the organization is looking to provide further support to the Bangladeshi host community, which is now less than one-third the size of the refugee population. For two years, this community has been sharing its resources, including health facilities, water, access roads and daily wages with refugees—a one-way street, since the Rohingya are not officially permitted to work.

Kajdomcaj says that the United Nations and Bangladesh government are now creating a district development plan that will support 13 sectors of the camp. This plan would stretch the definition of “temporary in nature” to acknowledge that refugees will continue to use public services and that the capacity of hospitals and access roads needs to be improved. “The word temporary is quite flexible in meaning,” Kajdomcaj says. “It can mean a minute, but maybe a couple of years as well.”

The government has also offered two areas of land for camp extensions, where the UN and its partners have been able to plan shelters, infrastructure, and services before families move in.  

In Camp 4 Extension, a pilot hamlet built by Bangladesh-based development organization BRAC and UNHCR has been designed to be environmentally conscious and more space-efficient. Like so many other cities, Kutupalong is suffering from excessive urban sprawl: The mass deforestation that has taken place in nature reserve surrounding the camps has been a source of tension with the host community and has increased the risk of deadly landslides.

Camp 4 shelters have steel frames that can be dismantled, which means that refugees can theoretically take their houses with them when they move home, reassembling them in about three hours. The sides are bamboo, and the structures are raised on stilts so that air can flow beneath them, a traditional means of cooling. Some boast two stories, so they can provide homes for larger numbers of refugees. If such shelters were rolled out across the camps, they could reduce the use of space by between 20 and 40 percent, depending on the terrain.

Other initiatives are aimed at improving the built environment for women and girls. Oxfam launched the Women’s Social Architecture Project last year, which recognizes the significant challenges that stem from the dominance of male architects and engineers within the humanitarian community. The project works with women and adolescent girls and women architects to add a different perspective into the design and siting of water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities in the Rohingya camps.

Designers in the U.S. are helping to facilitate these dreams for more stable refugee camps. Nadyeli Quiroz and John David Wagner at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design are embarking on a year-long collaboration with OBAT Helpers, an Indianapolis-based community nonprofit, to explore how to create varied functional spaces within the camps, such as outdoor courtyards or provisional pop-up designs.

These designers are looking at the possibility of building shaded ventilated spaces connected to community kitchens, where women can spend time preparing food during the day—an escape from the monotony and isolation of shelter life. Architects and advocates are starting small, with an aim of impacting about 200 people by the summer of next year, but they hope that projects like this can be scaled up.

Such improvements can’t entirely overcome the stark facts that underlie this ongoing refugee crisis: The Rohingya are essentially trapped in a congested prison, potentially for years. Denied fundamental rights in Myanmar, they cannot go home, and their welcome in Bangladesh is wearing thin. Still, small changes to the built environment can make daily life more bearable.

“We don’t want having good architecture to normalize a situation that should not be normalized,” Quiroz says. “But we have to be honest about what’s going to happen, and [the camps] are not going anywhere for now.”

02 Sep 20:18

The Water Tower and the Turtle

by Luke

 

The moment I stepped out of the temple gate, the thick steam wafting over from the building opposite caught in my throat. I knew the source of that steam well enough: udon. The udon works was right in front of the temple where my parents’ graves were.

Tacked up to the wooden wall on the far side of the steam was a recruiting notice. Experience not required, it read, which was all well and good, but then it said, Applicants should be sixty-seven years or younger, a stipulation whose peculiar specificity bothered me. Sensing a flash of movement, I looked down to the gutter from where the steam was emanating and saw a single udon noodle go sliding by. I was quite sure that there used to be more of them in the past. It wasn’t clear to me whether the noodles were being deliberately abandoned, or if they were the casualties of sheer carelessness, but either way the number going to waste seemed to have dwindled over the years.

This narrow street separating the temple from the udon works was on the route I had once taken to school. That was back in my primary school days, a good few decades ago now. Since the death of my mother, my last surviving relative in this town, I only came to this neck of the woods to visit the family grave, which I did once every few years. Each time I returned, I was surprised to see the udon place still going.

Yet I did sense they were cutting back a bit in terms of scale, I thought to myself, walking off in the direction my legs carried me. Now that I’d started reminiscing about my school days, it struck me that I might as well walk to my old school. I’d left the temple at midday, so I still had plenty of time before the furniture would arrive at my new flat.

Even though there was nothing in particular left for me in this place I’d grown up in, I’d decided to move back. It had all started when a former colleague asked if I knew of any nice, reputable rooms for rent here. His daughter had a thing about natural farming, and was interested in moving to this considerably more rural part of the country. I had no leads on any properties whatsoever, but I wanted to be of service if I could, and I’d taken a look online only to discover that the rent for flats in this area was less than half what I was paying at the time. In the end, my colleague’s daughter did not take up natural farming: she stopped leaving her room entirely. Yet I couldn’t get the thought of living somewhere for half what I was currently spending out of my head, and before I knew it, I’d moved. As a single man living alone who’d retired at the stipulated age, there was really nothing stopping me.

I made my way down the narrow street that led from the temple to where the primary school used to be, which was just wide enough for a single car to pass through, and I spotted several surnames on the nameplates of houses which brought vague memories of old schoolmates floating to the surface of my mind, but all of these names were common to the region, and it was likely that the houses belonged to different people entirely. Not only did I have no relatives here, but it was safe to say I didn’t really know anybody in this town at all.

The streets were so quiet. In the city, you’d often catch sight of birds, but their song would be drowned out by the noise of the passing cars. In these streets of my hometown, all I could hear were my own footsteps, and the cries of the sparrows, and some caged bird kept in one of the nearby houses.

It came to me that if I turned down a certain side street, I’d get to the sushi restaurant my parents sometimes got takeaways from on special occasions, but I figured that if I attempted a visit I’d likely only end up lost, so I stuck to the route I knew. Had that restaurant managed to weather these forty-something years? Probably, I guessed, so long as there’d been someone to take over from the sushi master who was there when I was young.

My old school was still there. Not the wooden building I’d been familiar with, of course – but from what I could see, the concrete one which had replaced it was pretty similar in layout to the original. I had no idea when the reconstruction had taken place, but even this concrete number was showing signs of wear and tear. Between the gates and the entrance was a small hut-like construction, with a sign pinned to it that read Local Residents’ Protection Squad. Could I join? I wondered. Would the squad accept members without children or grandchildren?

I didn’t really feel any deep emotion towards the school, beyond a sense of satisfaction at having seen it again, but when I glanced down the little alley diagonally across from the gates and glimpsed the sea there in the distance, I gulped. Now I remembered. This was the same alley I’d gazed down on my way back from school, and at its end, the same sea.

I stood there in the middle of the crossroads for a while, staring out at the strip of sea floating at the end of the alley. Eventually, an approaching car honked its horn ostentatiously at me and snapped me back into reality, and I set off back along the road I’d come down.

Walking towards the town’s little train station, served not by the public network but a private line, I started to worry about how few amenities there were around here. How did people get by with just one convenience store? Of course I myself had once coped, back in the day. But I wanted to know if the convenience store could be relied on, so I went inside and roamed up and down the aisles. Being in the country, I’d feared its selection might be limited, but I soon realized that it was a standard convenience store with the standard array of goods, which comforted me a bit. There was a decent selection of magazines and a range of cheap DVDs, too. I’ve recently moved to this area, I said to a cashier with a bun and oversized glasses. Where can I go to buy the kinds of books that you don’t stock here? Or household tools and that sort of thing? If you go onto the highway, she informed me politely, there’s a big chain bookstore and a home store, and a supermarket as well.

As I pictured the location of my new home in my head, it came to me that the block of flats could be accessed from the highway, and I decided to switch my route so I could investigate.

As the shop assistant had promised, beside the four-lane national road was a large bookshop shaped like of a big block of tofu, a rectangular two-storey home store painted a dull shade of blue, and, beside it, a one-storey supermarket that seemed pretty spacious. They looked rather out of place in this area, where all the other buildings were so diminutive and flat. Perhaps as the result of some kind of financial arrangement, the supermarket and the home store shared a car park, which had a fast-food chain and an all-you-can-eat Korean barbeque restaurant perched in the corner.

Otherwise, there was basically nothing there. Lining the sides of the highway with its meagre scattering of cars were fields, houses, a great big billboard advertising termite extermination, a great big billboard advertising a cash loan hotline, a great big billboard advertising flats for sale, and so on. All the billboards were noticeably enormous. That was proof of how much space there was in this part of the country. Had the house I’d grown up in had a termite problem? I wondered about this as I walked down one side of the highway, pulling out my smartphone to check my whereabouts on the map before turning down the road that led to the coast, where my new flat was. Now that I was getting further from the station there seemed to be more fields around. Not as many as when I’d been growing up, for sure, but the fact that at least half of them had survived came as a shock.

I walked along the side of an onion field facing the highway, heading for the ground floor of the two-storey block midway down the road to the sea. Going by rent alone, there was no end of flats in the area that I could have selected, and my sole reason for choosing this one over any of the others was that it was near the house I’d grown up in. And yet when I arrived, I saw that the place as it existed in my memory didn’t quite match up with the place as it actually was. Cocking my head in bemusement, I stuck the key that the estate agent had given me into the keyhole.

There’d been a water tower, it came to me suddenly. I couldn’t for the life of me remember where, but it was somewhere around here. In the middle of a field, perhaps, or standing in the grounds of somebody’s house. It had been a lovely shade of – I don’t know if you would call it cyan or pale aqua or what – but in any case it was a beautiful shade of light greenish-blue, and there was something about the grandeur of its presence, how it stood taller even than the school, which had captivated me. Whenever I played around with friends outside, I’d steal glances in its direction when they weren’t looking. The truth is, I didn’t know it was a water tower until later, once I’d grown up. It was with the vague notion that I wanted to build things like that tower that I found myself a job at a construction company with strong connections to the water industry.

I opened the door to my flat and was just about to step inside when I heard a voice at my back. Um, excuse me? said the voice. It belonged to a middle-aged woman with a surly expression who looked to be just a few years younger than me. I’m the caretaker here, she said, and, pointing towards the garage, went on: A parcel’s arrived for you, will you deal with it please? I looked in the direction she indicated, and sure enough I saw the box that she meant: not that deep, but of considerable height and width. I made out the name of the company printed on the box, and hurried towards it, my heart fluttering a little.

The cross bike I’d ordered online had arrived early. She could have sent the courier away, the caretaker told me, but he’d begged her not to make him redeliver such a big parcel, and because she knew the person who ran the company, she’d agreed to sign for it on my behalf. This really is the countryside, I thought to myself as I listened to her story. When you know the person who runs the delivery company, you know you’re in the countryside.

I’d be grateful if you opened it right away, she said, and before I could really think I was saying, Then I’d be grateful if you lent me a box-cutter. She retreated into her room, and emerged with a barber’s razor saying: This’ll do, won’t it?

The large, flat cardboard parcel was bound together with huge copper staples, and it took some doing to get it open. What is that thing, anyway? asked the caretaker, coming up behind me. It’s a bike, I answered. Why would you go and order something like that? she asked as she mounted the enormous piece of discarded cardboard and folded it in half. That didn’t make it much less bulky, though, so I scored some slits into it with the razor, and somehow managed to fold it into smaller pieces.

Someone I knew from my previous workplace took up cycling and he gave me the idea, I told her. He was always saying how much he enjoyed it. As I spoke, I recalled the conversation we’d had at my leaving party. The guy in question was younger than I was but still over forty, and after being diagnosed with hyperlipidemia, he told me, he’d taken up exercise.

You’re a strange one, you are, the caretaker said, shaking her head as she picked up the strips of bubble wrap that had been encasing the bicycle, winding them round and round into a ball. The person living in your flat before you was a strange one too. And she lived on her own, like you.

I couldn’t figure out if the caretaker was a real busybody or if she just had a lot of spare time on her hands, but either way, she stood there chatting away as I divested my bicycle of its myriad pieces of packaging.

She was an elderly woman, the caretaker went on, by the name of Noyo. See, even her name was strange! Apparently she’d been in love with some childhood friend of hers. He was a few years older than her, but he went off to war and never came back and she refused to marry anyone else. She worked selling insurance, made it as far as the head of the branch, if memory serves me right.

Noyo had moved to the area after retiring, the caretaker went on to say, and found herself a job in the clothes alterations kiosk at the local supermarket, where she’d worked right up until the day she died of heart failure. Before Noyo’s death the caretaker had been wary of her, figuring that she was exactly the type of person to die unnoticed in her flat and go undiscovered for months. In the end, the person to find her body was a young colleague of hers from the alteration kiosk.

Noyo, it turned out, had forever been telling people at work that if she ever failed to turn up to the kiosk without giving any notice, they were to go over to check on her. For that reason, she would always inform them if she couldn’t make it into work, and had taught herself how to use a mobile phone in the case of an emergency. The young woman who’d turned up at Noyo’s flat had called her, and she didn’t pick up. So I just came over, she had said with a shrug.

Noyo’s will had been easy to find, and disposing of her personal affairs was simple enough. She’d instructed that half of her money should go to distant relatives living in another part of the country, and the other half to the closest orphanage.

The caretaker spoke in such detail that I had to wonder if she should be revealing so much to me, given I’d never even met this person, but I supposed she’d decided that it was all right, since the subject in question was dead and had no relatives. As it happened, I already knew from the estate agent that the previous tenant had passed away in the flat. Would the caretaker talk about me in the same way to the next person, if something happened to me? Well, I thought, so be it.

The only thing is, the caretaker went on, she had this pet turtle which has proved a real headache. She only got it a couple of months before she died, see, so it wasn’t mentioned in the will. I’m keeping it in my room for the moment, would you like to see it? But knowing that my furniture would be arriving at any moment, and that afterwards I wanted to take my cross bike for a spin, I declined and said I’d leave the turtle-viewing for another time.

Before you go, there’s something I want to ask you, the caretaker said, folding her arms across her chest and looking straight at me. How is it that people like Noyo and you can stand to be all on your own? I looked down at the caretaker’s left hand, verifying the presence of a ring on her wedding finger, and then shrugged. I guess I’ve always been busy, I said. But there are plenty of busy people who aren’t single, the caretaker replied. I was busy and I was never very good at any of that stuff, I said, and then I walked into my room cradling large amounts of cardboard and packaging.

As I consigned the rubbish into the corner of the kitchen, my mind traced its way along the path which had led me to where I was now, the path I so rarely thought of. I realized soon enough that there was a reason that I so rarely thought of it, and stopped – though not before I’d had time to recall the woman of twenty-eight my boss had introduced me to back when I was the same age, who’d said I was ‘too vacant’. And the woman five years younger than me I’d been intending to marry at thirty-five, who had turned out to already be married, and had returned in the end to her emotionally blackmailing husband. And the woman ten years younger who I’d met at forty-five, who’d broken it off because of her concern about the perils of childbirth. At work, I’d found myself being sent all around the country in place of the married folk whose families prevented them from being posted to far-flung places, and occasionally I would get friendly with women in one of those various locations, but usually, whenever it looked like things might be going somewhere, I’d be called back to head office.

It wasn’t that I wanted to stay single and carefree. Somehow things never quite went my way, and I wasn’t ever able to plunge myself headlong into anything. I regret that, I really do. The reason that people need family and children is that without duty, life just feels long and flat. The simple repetitiveness becomes too much to bear.

But those thoughts vanished into the ether with the arrival of the moving company. The furniture they’d brought from my previous flat consisted of a fridge, a washing machine, a futon, a single chair, and two storage boxes for clothes. Everything else I planned to order online. You must have a sea view from out there, the youngest-looking of the movers said, pointing to a back-room window whose storm shutters were still down. By the time I collected myself and replied, Oh really?, the kid had already finished putting on his shoes in the entranceway.

I decided to leave the furniture and the sea for the moment, and went back down into the garage to mess around with the cross bike. A clear plastic pouch housed the instruction manual and an Allen key, which I gathered was used to turn the handlebars that had been rotated to one side in order to fit the bike in the box, as well as to adjust the height of the saddle and so on. I stood to the left of the bicycle as I adjusted the angle of the handlebars, closing each eye in turn, blinking several times, and tilting my body from side to side to check that they were really straight. According to the manual, the part between the handlebars and the frame I’d been adjusting was called the ‘stem’. I’d learned something, I thought to myself.

I went back to my room to pick up my rucksack, packed it with my wallet and the new chain lock that I’d ordered online along with the bike, and set out. Compared to the city bikes I’d ridden before, the ‘top tube’ – another new word from the manual – was much higher, and I had a hard time straddling it and perching on the saddle. After a while I realized that I needed to place my feet on the pedals before trying to sit down. Once I’d figured that out, I managed to set forth in relative comfort, pitching gently from side to side as I went.

Beer, beer, beer, sounded the voice inside my head. My body felt lighter. A bike is not like a car. On a bike you feel the speed right there on your skin.

Under a gazebo in the corner of a field was an unmanned stall selling homemade pickles. Unable to resist, I stopped my bike and bought a bag of pickled aubergines and a whole pickled daikon. The money went into a small square wooden box at the side of the stall.

Then I set off in the direction of the supermarket once again, the beer, beer, beer chant growing ever stronger. There were very few bikes in the rack. My gaze was drawn to the abnormally chunky blue mountain bike chained up to one side, and before I knew it, I found myself pulling in alongside it. My bike was also blue, as it happened, but compared to that mountain bike it looked like a little boy’s. The round, white-on-black logo didn’t help.

The chorus of beer, beer, beer was now so commanding I couldn’t think of anything else. Inside the supermarket I made a beeline for the alcohol section, picked up a well-chilled six pack of amber Yebisu, marched over to the till, and left again. I’m forgetting something I thought, cocking my head, but of late I’d given up hating myself for being unable to remember things, and so I simply told myself that whatever it was, I’d come back for it when I remembered. With that, I made my way to the bike rack, where I came across the owner of the mountain bike studiously removing the chain and the other bits of his lock. He was kitted out even more seriously than I’d envisaged: a black helmet, black sunglasses and a black lycra outfit. As I stood watching him, whistling internally in awe, the petite, wiry-looking man raised his tanned face. He was almost certainly older than me, I saw, the kind of age that made him unequivocally an old man. With his long grey-streaked hair tied at his neck and his sunglasses, there was something pretty intimidating about him.

Thinking it wouldn’t do to keep ogling him I averted my eyes, just as he said: That’s a great bike you’ve got!

Oh no, I said, taken aback. No, it’s nothing on yours, this is just a cross bike I bought for 50,000 yen online, it’s not a patch on what you’ve got there, I said, indicating his mountain bike sheepishly.

A cross bike is perfect for this area though, he said. The roads are really not in great condition.

He had a slight accent – it sounded like he was from the south, maybe Kyushu. The accent went a long way to soften the ridiculously professional look created by his cycle gear.

At first I was planning to get a road bike, I said, but I thought I’d try this out for a year and see how it goes.

I used to ride a road bike too, he said, but the roads here are surprisingly uneven and I was forever getting punctures. That’s why I switched over to this one, but now the rear hub is quite heavy, and I get tired quickly.

Right, I said, though in my head I was thinking: rear hub, you say? I resolved to look up what that was when I got home.

I’ll see you around, the man said, raising a hand and cycling away. He cut a dashing figure, that was for sure. I stood watching him until he left the car park, then zipped the six-pack into my rucksack and cycled back along the highway to my new home.

Dusk was falling. I had the faint sense that it came earlier here than in the flat I was living in before. My head was a lot clearer now that I’d bought the beer, and I recalled something else I’d meant to buy: turtle food. There was another thing as well though, which I still couldn’t remember.

I parked my bike in the rack for the block of flats, and pressed the buzzer for the caretaker. I’ll take the turtle, I told her when she emerged. Oh will you, she said, nodding blankly, and then came out carrying the small tank. I’ve got a box of food, she told me, so I’ll bring that round later. But what made you decide to take it? This woman questions everything, I thought to myself, somewhat incredulously. In a flash of inspiration, I said that I’d seen Aki Takejo talking about keeping turtles on some TV programme a while back, and had been wanting one ever since. Hah, the caretaker laughed darkly.

Back inside my room, I unzipped my rucksack and took out the Yebisu and the bagged pickles. Ah! I exclaimed, striking myself on the forehead, I should have bought kitchen stuff. Setting one can of beer and the aubergine pickles aside, I transferred the rest of the stuff to the fridge. I rinsed my hands, put the pickles and the beer on the chair, which I carried into the back room, and then opened the storm shutters. Just as the guy from the moving company had said, there was indeed a sea view from the balcony. The sea was mottled with the light of the setting sun.

I carried the turtle tank out onto the balcony, washed my hands again, and took the beer and the bag of pickled aubergine off the chair. I’d been planning to take the chair into the back room and drink the beer there, but I decided to move it out onto the balcony instead.

Outside, the sea moved a little closer. I breathed in. The smell! There were probably too many impurities mixed in to really call it ‘the smell of the sea’, but it still seemed to me like the same smell I’d breathed as a kid.

And there in the distance, to one side of the balcony, was the water tower I’d been looking for. It was curious that I hadn’t been able to see it from the highway, but I supposed this block of flats must have blocked it from view. There it stood in the middle of the field, delicately assembled of slender metal bones. There was an onion-drying shed nearby, and a wooden gazebo, which I guessed the farmers used as a resting spot.

I popped the tab on the can of beer and raised it to my lips. It tasted so good it was like all the cells in my body trembled in appreciation.

I’ve come home, I thought. Home to this scenery, to all these things I used to look at.

As I raised the beer to my lips a second time, the turtle in the tank moved, and I heard a faint scrape of gravel. The only other sound was that of the wind blowing.

I opened up the bag and took a bite of one of the pickled aubergines. Then I remembered the other thing I’d forgotten to get. Resume templates, so I could apply for the job at the udon works in front of the temple.

Tomorrow, I decided, I’d go to the supermarket and buy the templates. I’d cycle there – in the morning this time. I was pretty sure that would feel great.

 

 

Copyright © Kikuko Tsumura 2016

Photograph © Terence Mangram

The post The Water Tower and the Turtle appeared first on Granta Magazine.

25 Feb 19:15

As Racial Hoaxes Go, Jussie Smollett’s Case Is a Strange One

by ​​​​​​​Katheryn Russell-Brown

Updated at 11:46 a.m. ET on February 25, 2019.

If the purported attack on the actor Jussie Smollett indeed turns out to be staged, it will be the latest in a long line of hoaxes grounded in racial stereotypes. By design, these hoaxes reinforce different groups’ worst suspicion of one another: Whites are racists. Blacks are criminals.

Smollett, a cast member of Fox’s Empire, is African American and gay.* After telling Chicago police last month that two masked men had physically attacked him while shouting racist and homophobic slurs and a pro–Donald Trump slogan, Smollett turned himself in Thursday under suspicion of having arranged the whole thing. In some quarters, his case is now being construed as just another phony hate crime concocted to elicit sympathy and discredit conservatives.

While Smollett’s case is bizarre on its own terms, unfounded criminal accusations across racial lines have a long history in the United States. The overwhelming majority of these cases have involved white accusers implicating black people, and the consequences have often been grievous. A false claim of rape by a white woman against a black man led to the Rosewood massacre in Florida in 1923; similar allegations in Alabama in 1931 touched off the Scottsboro Boys case, which led to years of trials, retrials, appellate-court decisions, and a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. This history also includes the white Mississippi woman who told her husband in 1955 that Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old, had flirted with her. After her husband and his half brother kidnapped, beat, and shot Till and drowned him in a river, she told a still taller tale, testifying in court that he had physically assaulted her.

[John McWhorter: What the Jussie Smollett story reveals]

Over the past 25 years, I’ve analyzed more than 100 racial-hoax cases, beginning with the 1987 case of Tawana Brawley, an African American teen who falsely said that several white men had raped her. My book The Color of Crime covers 92 such cases.

Approximately two-thirds of hoax perpetrators are white. White accusers are more likely to say they were victims of a random act of violence by a make-believe black offender. Black people who create hoaxes are more likely to say they were victims of a hate crime by an imaginary white perpetrator.

These hoaxes have one thing in common: They tap into our conscious and unconscious beliefs about the nexus between race and crime. The accusers are counting on stereotypes to distract the police and the public from what actually took place.

People carry out racial hoaxes for all sorts of reasons—serious, mundane, or even silly. Here’s a short list of past accusers’ motives: to draw attention to a social issue, to get attention from a spouse, to stop making car payments, to get time off from work, to cover up a gambling loss, to cash in on an insurance policy, and to avoid punishment for violating curfew. In 2005, the “runaway bride” Jennifer Wilbanks made up a sexual assault by a Hispanic kidnapper to explain her absence from her own wedding. Or accusers fabricate crimes by others to cover up their own. In the Charles Stuart case in 1989 and the Susan Smith case in 1994, white murderers blamed nonexistent black attackers.  

In the universe of racial hoaxes, Smollett’s case is noteworthy in a few important ways. It involves a celebrity hoax perpetrator, the only such case that I’m aware of. With his high public profile, Smollett could bring an authority and a personal appeal to the narrative that other accusers could not. His allegations of anti-gay as well as antiblack slurs raised fears across more than one marginalized community.

[Adam Serwer: The lesson of the Jussie Smollett case]

Still, the twists and turns in the Smollett case follow a familiar pattern. Many hoaxes have a lurid specificity—dramatic criminal flourishes such as a carved letter on the victim’s cheek, gang rape, a peculiar body odor, or in Smollett’s case, a supposed attacker’s claim that “this is MAGA country.” Initially, supporters provide public solace to the purported victim. Sometimes members of the targeted community make calls for change and demand greater protection and stiffer laws to protect victims. But, inevitably, there are unanswered questions and facts that don’t quite add up, which ultimately lead to the unraveling of the tale.

Once the lie is exposed, everyone is angry—those who believed the hoax, those who never believed it, and the police officers who wasted taxpayer dollars investigating a crime that never happened. Any relief that the alleged crime did not take place is de minimis.   

What happens after that? Some perpetrators of past hoaxes were charged with filing false police reports, but most faced no criminal penalties. More and more, though, hoaxers are held accountable, such as being required to repay police departments for the cost of investigating their accusations.  

Only rarely do hoax perpetrators serve time behind bars. One such case involved Bonnie Sweeten, a white Pennsylvania woman who falsely claimed that she and her daughter were kidnapped by two black men. In fact, Sweeten and her daughter were at Disney World. Sweeten spent six months in prison.

[Read: Jussie Smollett’s alleged hoax will feed bigger hoaxes]

Smollett’s fate has yet to be determined. Chicago police say his accusation was a stunt to increase his salary; his lawyer has insisted the actor wants to clear his name. The impact of his case upon society is uncertain as well. Will the incident cause the broader public to harden on claims of victimization based on race or sexual orientation? If so, the hoax will cause real harm to future victims.

Amid what might now be a rush to close the book on the Smollett case, we should pay attention to what racial hoaxes tell us about our society. In the end, these hoaxes are a clarion call, reminding us of the work we still have to do to achieve racial justice.


* This article originally stated that Empire airs on HBO.

21 Feb 11:14

‘The Weaving Project’ Invites Visitors to Climb Inside a Massive Installation Formed From Nearly 10,000 Feet of Rope

by Kate Sierzputowski

For this year’s London Fashion Week, British fashion designer Anya Hindmarch collaborated with design collective Numen/For Use (previously) to create an installation that would excavate the playgrounds and play sets of visitors’ distant memories. The Tube, a bright blue structure created from nearly 10,000 feet of rope, was a part of a temporary pop-up in a Soho warehouse called The Weave Project which also included a cafe and store. The structure invited guests to revisit their childhood by climbing within the gigantic meandering structure. This is not the first time Hindmarch has used London Fashion Week as an excuse to create an installation dedicated to play— last fall the designer recalled another child-like object by producing a massive beanbag that filled the main room of London’s Banqueting House. (via Dezeen)

14 Sep 00:02

Penance

by Greg Ross

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_men_and_famous_women_-_a_series_of_pen_and_pencil_sketches_of_the_lives_of_more_than_200_of_the_most_prominent_personages_in_history_Volume_7_(1894)_(14596444080).jpg

During the last visit which [Samuel Johnson] made to Lichfield [in 1781], the friends with whom he was staying missed him one morning at the breakfast-table. On inquiring after him of the servants, they understood he had set off from Lichfield at a very early hour, without mentioning to any of the family whither he was going. The day passed without the return of the illustrious guest, and the party began to be very uneasy on his account, when, just before the supper-hour, the door opened, and the Doctor stalked into the room. A solemn silence of a few minutes ensued, nobody daring to inquire the cause of his absence, which was at length relieved by Johnson addressing the lady of the house in the following manner: ‘Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my departure from your house this morning, but I was constrained to it by my conscience. Fifty years ago, madam, on this day, I committed a breach of filial piety, which has ever since lain heavy on my mind, and has not till this day been expiated. My father, you recollect, was a bookseller, and had long been in the habit of attending market, and opening a stall for the sale of his books during that day. Confined to his bed by indisposition, he requested me, this time fifty years ago, to visit the market, and attend the stall in his place. But, madam, my pride prevented me from doing my duty, and I gave my father a refusal. To do away the sin of this disobedience, I this day went in a post-chaise to Uttoxeter, and going into the market at the time of high business, uncovered my head, and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather; a penance by which I trust I have propitiated Heaven for this only instance, I believe, of contumacy toward my father.’

— Richard Warner, A Tour Through the Northern Counties of England, 1802

The act is commemorated today in the Johnson Memorial, which stands in the Market Place, in the town center.

The post Penance appeared first on Futility Closet.

31 Jul 10:05

This Parasite Drugs Its Hosts With the Psychedelic Chemical in Shrooms

by Ed Yong

Imagine emerging into the sun after 17 long years spent lying underground, only for your butt to fall off.

That ignominious fate regularly befalls America’s cicadas. These bugs spend their youth underground, feeding on roots. After 13 or 17 years of this, they synchronously erupt from the soil in plagues of biblical proportions for a few weeks of song and sex. But on their way out, some of them encounter the spores of a fungus called Massospora.

A week after these encounters, the hard panels of the cicadas’ abdomens slough off, revealing a strange white “plug.” That’s the fungus, which has grown throughout the insect, consumed its organs, and converted the rear third of its body into a mass of spores. The de-derriered insects go about their business as if nothing unusual has happened. And as they fly around, the spores rain down from their exposed backsides, landing on other cicadas and saturating the soil. “We call them flying saltshakers of death,” says Matt Kasson, who studies fungi at West Virginia University.

Massospora and its butt-eating powers were first discovered in the 19th century, but Kasson and his colleagues have only just shown that it has another secret: It doses its victims with mind-altering drugs. Perhaps that’s why “the cicadas walk around as if nothing’s wrong even though a third of their body has fallen off,” Kasson says.

To study these fungi, “you really have to be in the right place at the right time,” Kasson says. For him, the time was May 2016, when billions of periodical cicadas emerged throughout the northeastern United States. He and his colleagues collected around 150 of the unfortunate saltshakers. And a year later, a colleague supplemented this collection with infected banger-wing cicadas—a different species that emerges annually.

Greg Boyce, a member of Kasson’s team, looked at all the chemicals found in the white fungal plugs of the various cicadas. And to his shock, he found that the banger-wings were loaded with psilocybin—the potent hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms. “At first, I thought: There’s absolutely no way,” he says. “It seemed impossible.” After all, no one has ever detected psilocybin in anything other than mushrooms, and those fungi have been evolving separately from Massospora for around 900 million years.

The surprises didn’t stop there. “I remember looking over at Greg one night and he had a strange look on his face,” Kasson recalls. “He said, ‘Have you ever heard of cathinone?’” Kasson hadn’t, but a quick search revealed that it’s an amphetamine. It had never been found in a fungus before. Indeed, it was known only from the khat plant that has long been chewed by people from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. But apparently, cathinone is also produced by Massaspora as it infects periodical cicadas.

The team took great pains to check that Massospora really does contain these unexpected drugs. They showed that the substances are found only in the infected cicadas and not in the uninfected ones. They found that the fungus has the right genes for making these chemicals, and contains the precursor substances that you’d expect.

And at some point during this work, it dawned on Kasson that he was working with illicit substances. Psilocybin, in particular, is a Schedule I drug, and researchers who study it need a permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. “I thought: Oh, crap,” he says. “Then I thought: OH CRAP. The DEA is going to come in here, tase me, and confiscate my flying saltshakers.”

He sent them an email. “This is … interesting,” read the initial response. “You have to understand that this is not something we normally get emails about.” After some discussion, the agency decided that no permit was required, since the drug is found in such small quantities within the cicadas, and since Kasson had no plans for concentrating it.

I asked Kasson if it’s possible to get high by eating Massospora-infected cicadas. Surprisingly, he didn’t say no. “Based on the ones we looked at, it would probably take a dozen or more,” he said. But it’s possible that earlier in the infections, before the conspicuous saltshaker stage, the fungus might pump out higher concentrations of these chemicals. Why? Kasson suspects that the drugs help the fungus control its hosts.

Infected cicadas behave strangely. Despite their horrific injuries, males become hyperactive and hypersexual. They frenetically try to mate with anything they can find, including with other males. They’ll even mimic the wing-flicking signals of females to lure males toward them. None of this does them any good—their genitals have either been devoured by the fungus or have fallen off with the rest of their butts. Instead, this behavior only benefits the fungus, allowing its spores to find new hosts.

Kasson suspects that cathinone and psilocybin are responsible for at least some of these behaviors. “If I had a limb amputated, I probably wouldn’t have a lot of pep in my step,” he said. “But these cicadas do. Something is giving them a bit more energy. The amphetamine could explain that.”

Psilocybin’s role is harder to explain. The drug might make humans hallucinate, but no one knows if cicadas would similarly trip. There is, however, a theory that magic mushrooms evolved psilocybin to reduce the appetites of insects that might compete with them for decaying wood. Perhaps by suppressing the appetites of cicadas, Massospora nudges them away from foraging and toward incessant mating.

There are many parasitic fungi that manipulate the behavior of insect hosts, including the famous Ophiocordyceps fungi, which can turn ants into zombies. “There’s a lot of curiosity about how these fungi might actually manipulate behavior, and this is the first time that anyone has identified chemical compounds that could play that role,” says Kathryn Bushley from the University of Minnesota. “That’s really significant.”

The discovery opens up a lot of questions, says Corrie Moreau from the University of Chicago. What exactly do these drugs do to the cicadas? And, she wonders, “do other cicada-infecting fungi share these same molecules, or has each manipulating fungus evolved a unique compound to induce the desired behavior?”

“And maybe there are other players involved,” Kasson added. He pointed to another study, which I wrote about last week, in which a different fungus seems to use a virus to control the minds of flies. “We might think that it’s just a host and a fungus, but maybe it’s more complicated than that.”

21 Jul 13:05

How Household Geothermal Energy Systems Work

Like a day at the beach, the productivity of a solar panel can be spoiled by rain. More predictable conditions exist underground; dig several hundred feet down and the earth remains at a consistent 55 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the location.

That consistency makes geothermal energy attractive. Here's how it works:

So you've got no oil required and zero emissions. The key obstacle at this point is cost. But technological advances mean that heat pumps are getting cheaper to produce and now Dandelion Energy, an offshoot of Google, has begun offering their Dandelion Air system for unbeatable prices in the New York area.

A Federal tax credit of $8,774 and a Dandelion discount of $1,500 means that one of their systems can be installed for just under 20 grand. Should customers prefer to finance, they can get the system installed for just $135 a month--with no money down. And Dandelion Air provides both heating in winter and air conditioning in summer. It seems a no-brainer.

To see if you're lucky enough to live within the qualifying area, click here.


13 Jul 10:18

Three Poems

by Eleanor Chandler

 

 

Greatness

 

I can’t have many things I like. For example, I can’t have a pinto horse.
I apologize to my country for being bad at math.
I am getting self-incinerated by boredom, so that’s fair.
In fact, I think this is the uppermost of boredom,
like a tiger chewing on a velvet sofa cushion.

 

I don’t try to seem very intelligent anymore.
I am beyond such effects.
Like a false limb full of stolen pearls.
Do you want me to write a poem?
Then hold my flask.

 

I’m not a blooming wreck, if that’s what you mean.
A thousand times I’ve almost decided to throw everything overboard.
You mustn’t get any silly ideas into your head about me.
I’ve never flopped on you yet, have I?
I’m a howling success, darling.

 

If someone’s really happy, can they be no good?
Now, don’t start trembling without me.
I demand several pittances!
Don’t worry. I’ve known myself forever.
One word of praise would cause me to act contrary to my own self-interest.

 

It’s just a poem, not a platter of brains.
So don’t give me any lucky breaks.
Is it our fault no one fawns on us?
Let’s not get forced into the mirrored casket of greatness.
It’s easier to write this than to write nothing.

 

I’m a stranger but not in my poems.
This is not an emerald mine.
It’s for somebody alive!
The only real disgrace is the refusal to believe in or listen to your fellow man!
Somebody better kiss me when I say that.

 

 

 

 

 

Drinking

 

Now look here, I feel swell.
We’ve been doing some high-class guzzling.
May I ask why the honor of this visit?
Are we sleeping or dancing?
Lunch is poured.

 

Aren’t I some kind of human being?
Or am I just a dead swan?
Baby, why aren’t we drunk?
Am I swaying?
Well, stop playing that crazy xylophone.

 

Are you a man or an iceberg?
If you’re afraid of me, then go lock yourself in a cage.
Don’t try to give me any peace and quiet.
Now it’s time for everyone to get their drink poured.
Bring me a fresh leopard!

 

You’ve completely gone out of my mind.
I think it ought to have a very healthy effect on me.
You think a kiss from a smooth operator means anything?
How about a little drink?
Now, that should have been the first thing you said.

 

Someone says they’re going to buy you a drink but they just pour you one.
Please don’t shout after I’ve had my daiquiris!
I like to curl up on the couch in high heels.
I love you, darling, but don’t you think it’s immaterial?
Dynamite couldn’t get me out of this chair.

 

I’ve tapered down to two quarts a day now.
Isn’t it wonderful?
My whole outlook on life has changed.
Licentious, profane, obscure and contrary to the good order of the community.
Who wouldn’t come to their senses?

 

 

 

 

 

Fights

 

Point of information: What do you know about anything?
I’ll give you extra time to figure it out.
No, I’m not going to cry.
I’m going to smash the geraniums.
Do you mind, darling?

 

I like it when you shake your fist at a painted portrait.
May I ask why you’re so terrible?
I love you but you want to go to blazes.
Have you ever even tasted my tears?
The empty champagne glasses were waiting beautifully.

 

Don’t look at me with that sparkle.
I don’t like it.
Everyone shouldn’t ruin everything.
I never win an argument, but there are other things in life.
Does anybody ever get that look out of their eyes?

 

I’ve had the right attitude once or twice.
I nearly went out of my mind.
What are you? A perfect rat?
I adore rats. Rats are sweet.
Now, let’s have some yelling.

 

Darling, this is a cylindrical satin sofa cushion.
I’m going to beat you with it.
Now, a lot of people don’t know what I’m talking about.
That’s what’s so wonderful.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to accept that free ticket out of town.

 

Bulletin: You’re no good.
I don’t care who catches it.
It’s a swell night for a cry.
That’s KO with me.
Let’s have ringside seats.

 

Bulletin: You’re still no good.
I think you’re the most no-good person I’ve ever known.
And that concludes tonight’s sermon.
I know what you’re thinking.
Maybe we’d get somewhere.

 

 

 

 

Image © Don…The UpNorth Memories Guy… Harrison

The post Three Poems appeared first on Granta Magazine.

03 Jul 09:41

Taming the Great American Desert

by Longreads

John F. Ross | The Promise of the Grand Canyon | Viking | July 2018 | 24 minutes (6,540 words)

In April 1877, the normally staid proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ annual meeting in Washington took a dramatic turn. For two weeks, members had listened to the nation’s most distinguished scientists speak on topics ranging from lunar theory to the structures of organic acids. Members enjoyed “Results of Deep Sea Dredging,” by the son of the recently deceased scientist Louis Agassiz. The Academy had invited G. K. Gilbert to deliver a paper, “On the Structure of the Henry Mountains,” so named in honor of the Academy’s president by Powell’s survey. On the final day, the geologists took the floor, whereupon erupted a furious discussion of the American West. The rub lay between those who studied the fossils and those who examined the rock strata, each drawing wildly different conclusions about the age of their subjects.

Such was the fervor of the discussion that the geologists soon jumped to their feet in animation and anger. “[W]hat they might do if they once went fairly on the rampage, it is impossible to say,” wrote one correspondent. Hayden rose to argue that no great degree of difference existed between the two sides, but others immediately shouted him down.

Yet while the rather scholarly debates over dating and provenance might animate the geologists, that day would be remembered not for these petty theatrics, but for an address Powell delivered. In it, the Major stepped away from the fields of geology and out of academic realms to address a topic that pressed right to the heart of American democracy. During the Townsend Hearings three years earlier, he had raised the issue of the West’s extreme aridity and the difficulty of irrigating much of it — but he had thought a lot more about it since then, and the map he now unrolled in front of America’s top scientists carried startling implications. He had bisected the map of the nation from Mexico to Canada with a vertical line rising from central Texas up through Kansas, east of Nebraska, and through Minnesota, roughly approximating the 100th meridian. At this line the arid West begins with startling consistency, the tall prairie grass cedes to short grass and less fertile soils. Trees appear rarely west of the line, except at high altitudes and in the Pacific Northwest, while forests dominate the east: The 100th meridian elegantly divides two separate lands, one composed of wide horizontal vistas, so much of the other defined by its vertical prospects.

The land west of the 100th meridian, Powell announced, could not support conventional agriculture. Surprise met this bold statement, for the line clearly indicated that much of the great plains — including all of Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, plus Arizona and New Mexico — was essentially unfarmable. Here was the professor at his best: clear, authoritative, dramatic. He had everyone’s attention.

Powell had drawn an isohyet, a line connecting areas that experience equal volumes of annual rainfall. The relatively humid lands to the east of this line experience twenty or more inches of annual rainfall, the unquestionably arid lands to the west receiving less than that, except some narrow strips on the Pacific coast. The twenty-inch isohyet offered a valuable generalization — conventional agriculture simply could not work without twenty or more inches a year, unless supplemented by irrigation. Except for some lands offering timber or pasturage, the far greater part of the land west of the line was by itself essentially not farmable. Access to the transformative powers of water, not the availability of plots of land, proved a far more valuable commodity. By now, any land through which streams passed had all been acquired, some of these owners charging those less fortunate for irrigation water. “All the good public lands fit for settlement are sold,” Powell warned. “There is not left unsold in the whole United States land which a poor man could turn into a farm enough to make one average county in Wisconsin.”

Much of what Powell reported was not exactly new, but no one had presented the data so comprehensively and convincingly — and not anyone so famous as the Major. Few, of course, doubted the region’s aridity. But in one powerful moment, Powell had claimed that the nation’s traditional system of land use and development — and thus America’s present push west — simply would not work. The debate that Powell provoked that late April day drew immediate and blistering response. The land agent for the Northern Pacific Railway, itself the beneficiary of a government grant of nearly four million acres, hammered back at Powell’s “grave errors.” “[P]ractical farmers, by actual occupancy and cultivation, have demonstrated that a very considerable part of this ‘arid’ region, declared by Major Powell as ‘entirely unfit for use as farming lands,’ is, in fact, unexcelled for agricultural purposes.” Others responded similarly. Powell clearly had touched a raw nerve. Over the next several years, he would have much more to say on the matter, igniting a veritable firestorm. While the other surveyors limited themselves to covering as much ground as possible, Powell now wrestled with the startling implications for the ongoing development of the West — and what that meant for the American democracy he had fought so hard to save.

***

For most of the first half of the 19th century, eastern America’s conception of the western portion of North America could be spelled out in three words: Great American Desert. That originated during the Long Expedition of 1819, when President James Monroe directed his secretary of war to send Stephen H. Long of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers with a small complement of soldiers and civilian scientists on a western reconnaissance. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had just negotiated a treaty with Spain that ceded Florida to the United States and drew a border between the two countries running across the Sabine River in Texas, west along the Red and Arkansas rivers, and all the way to the Pacific. Eager to know more about the border and the new western territory, Monroe had the secretary of war direct Long to follow the Platte River up to the Rocky Mountains, then trace south and back east along the new border.

The energetic New Hampshire–born West Pointer envisioned himself the successor to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark — indeed, over the course of five expeditions, he would cover 26,000 miles, and mount the first steamboat exploration up the Missouri into Louisiana Purchase territory. His name would grace the peak that Powell was first to climb. On this expedition, Long split his group into two, sending one party along the Arkansas while he with the rest headed south to chart the Red River. Long’s men, often parched and starving, battled a violent hailstorm, sometimes resorted to eating their horses, and negotiated their way past a band of Kiowa-Apaches. But the maps they carried were so atrociously inaccurate that the river they followed for weeks was not the Red at all.

***

Three years after Long’s party returned home, expedition member Edwin James published the three-volume Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains. Long’s ordeal imbued him with little affection for the “dreary plains” they had traversed. The Great Plains from Nebraska to Oklahoma he found were “wholly unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture.” He added: “The traveler who shall at any time have traversed its desolate sands, will, we think, join us in the wish that this region may forever remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison, the jackall.” The accompanying map labeled the area a “Great Desert,” terminology that soon fully flowered into the “Great American Desert,” a colorful appellation that would stick to the indefinable sections of the West for the next generation. Long believed that this desert wilderness served as a natural limitation on American western settlement, acting as an important buffer against the Mexican, British, and Russians, who claimed the western lands beyond. That compelling assertion seemed to resonate in the public imagination, locking into place the notion of a vast desert dominating the nation’s western midsection. “When I was a schoolboy,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge in 1877, “my map of the United States showed between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains a long and broad white blotch, upon which was printed in small capitals THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT — UNEXPLORED.

Even though some early trappers and mountain men had brought back word of a land often far from desertlike, the idea persisted. In 1844, when U.S. naval officer Charles Wilkes published his five-volume Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, it included a map of upper California. Inland from the well-detailed Pacific coast lay the Sierra Nevada, while the front range of the Rockies marked the map’s eastward extension. In between the ranges lay a vast, wedge-shaped blank space, without a single physical feature delineated. Unable to leave such a realm blank without remark, Wilkes had inserted a simple paragraph reading “This Plain is a waste of Sand. . . .” Like the sea monsters inhabiting the unknown sections of medieval maps, he — like Long — had condemned the entire region, the dead space not even worthy of a second look. Eleven years later, a Corps of Topographical Engineers map had sought to add additional detail, but could only insert a tenuous dotted line that indicated some cartographer’s wild guess about the Colorado River’s course.

Cracks started appearing in the notion of a Great American Desert during the early 1840s expeditions of Charles Frémont, son-in-law of that powerful advocate of Manifest Destiny, Senator Thomas Benton. With his backing, Frémont led both a four-month survey of the newly blazed Oregon Trail in 1841 and an audacious fourteen-month, 6,475-mile circuit of the West, beginning in 1843. Frémont’s subsequent reports combined a deft mix of hair-raising adventure with scientific discovery, thrilling its readers with images of guide Kit Carson and the so-called Pathfinder himself running up a flag atop a vertiginous Rocky Mountain peak. The maps accompanying the reports furnished emigrants with an accurate road map for the journeys that thousands would take west in the 1840s and 1850s. Frémont’s reports indicated that the intercontinental west certainly contained stretches of truly arid land, but that it was no unbroken Sahara. Yet even so, the pioneers and gold seekers understood that great opportunities lay not in this parched region, but beyond, at the end of the trails, in Oregon and California. Most of the West still remained no more than a place to get across.

In the late 1850s, a rather startling shift had turned the idea of the Great American Desert on its head. “These great Plains are not deserts,” wrote William Gilpin in a late 1857 edition of the National Intelligencer, “but the opposite, and are the cardinal basis of the future empire of commerce and industry now erecting itself upon the North American Continent.” Gilpin, the electric-tongued son of a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker paper merchant, would do more than any other single individual to persuade his fellow citizens that America’s great midsection was a garden only waiting to be plowed. Whereas the term Manifest Destiny had been coined as a justification for conquering great swaths of the continent at gunpoint, Gilpin transformed it into a more wholesome interpretation that pulled peoples across the nation. It also had the weight of the Enlightenment’s commandment, articulated by philosopher John Locke that God and reason commanded humans to subdue the earth and improve it. As Civil War soldiers returned home, all America could climb on board with Gilpin’s fantastical promises, any threatening idea of a great desert now disregarded. He had given America what it most wanted to hear: the promise that its growth was unlimited, its western lands a never-ending buffet of opportunity and growth, limited only by a lack of imagination and courage.

Gilpin had impressive credentials: Not only had he joined Frémont and Kit Carson on their expedition to Oregon in 1843, but as an army officer he had fought the Seminoles in Florida, served as a major in the First Missouri Volunteers during the Mexican War, and marched against the Comanche to keep the Santa Fe Trail open. A columnist for the Kansas City Star observed that “his enthusiasm over the future of the West was almost without limitation.” He became a disciple of Alexander von Humboldt, the great German geographer, who published the early volumes of his Cosmos in the late 1840s, elaborating the thesis that geography, climate, and biota incontrovertibly shaped the growth of human society. Gilpin pressed the Humboldtian idea that much of North America lay within an Isothermal Zodiac, a belt some thirty degrees wide running across the Northern Hemisphere, which contained climatic conditions ideal for human civilization to blossom. Herein lay the justification for Gilpin’s remarkable, if fanciful, theory that rationalized American exceptionalism. In three letters to the National Intelligencer in the late 1850s, later developed into an influential book, Gilpin outlined how North America’s convex shape had determined its grand destiny. The Mississippi Valley drained the bowl that was defined by the Appalachians to the east and the Sierra Nevada and Rockies to the west. By contrast, the Alps of Europe and the Himalayas of Asia rose in the center of their continents, forming insurmountable barriers to any continental unity. The geographical realities of Europe and Asia broke them up into small states and away from common centers, forcing upon them a history of unending warfare. North America, Gilpin grandly declaimed, had a national, unified personality. Thus endowed with a centripetal, unifying geography that encouraged a single language, the easy exchange of ideas, and favored the emergence of a continental power, North America stood ready to achieve world primacy.

Gilpin claimed that America would fulfill its destiny in the so-called Plateau of North America, the region between the main Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, “the most attractive, the most wonderful, and the most powerful department of their continent, of their country, and of the whole area of the globe.” Here Gilpin shone at his most incandescent, piling sheer fantasy built on pseudo-science and hope ever higher. As the war ended, most Americans had embraced the West as an untapped Eden, not as the barren edge bounding the American nation, but as the very place in which it would fulfill its national destiny.

Certainly, other forces supported such a change of heart about the West. The railroads — America’s most visible instrument of Manifest Destiny — adopted such sentiments with enthusiasm. To encourage the largely authentic, nation-building efforts of the railroad companies, the federal government bestowed vast swaths of public land abutting their tracks onto these rising great powers, many now laying track furiously across the continent. Their long-term interests hinged on the high value of the land they penetrated. The West as garden, rather than desert, suited their ambitions far better, and railroad publicists rolled out a relentless tide of promotional material. Utah was a promised land, proclaimed the Rio Grande and Western Railroad. “You can lay track through the Garden of Eden,” said Great Northern Railroad’s founder J. J. Hill, “[b]ut why bother if the only inhabitants are Adam and Eve?”

A new, supposedly scientific, idea arose to support the vision of productive dryland farming. The “rain follows the plow” theory became chaplain of the western movement. Simply cultivating the arid soil, this theory postulated, will bring about permanent changes in the local climate, turning it more humid and thus favorable to crops. The climatologist Cyrus Thomas, who had founded the Illinois Natural History Society that had given Powell his chance, became one of the theory’s strongest advocates. “Since the territory [of Colorado] has begun to be settled, towns and cities built up, farms cultivated, mines opened, and road made and travelled, there has been a gradual increase in moisture . . . ,” he wrote. “I therefore give it as my firm conviction that this increase is of a permanent nature.” Hayden, along with many other national personalities, endorsed this intoxicating, but deeply flawed theory.

In 1846, Gilpin addressed the U.S. Senate, asserting that “progress is God” and that the “destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean . . . to change darkness into light and confirm the destiny of the human race. . . . Divine task! Immortal mission!” Even at a time lit up by fiery eloquence, Gilpin stood out, his giddy pronouncements seismic in their appeal, emotionally resonate, wrapped in morality, and nationalistic in self-praise. Few could resist so powerful an appeal. And few did.

Gilpin and Powell had met at least once, in Denver City, on the Major’s first trip west in 1867. The ex-governor had probably waxed about the great promise of the West, perhaps even suggested that the Colorado River lay open to exploration. No record exists of their conversation, but Powell did not seek out his help or opinions after that. The Major found himself more comfortable with William Byers’s gritty practicality.

Indeed, Powell had no truck with the “rain follows the plow” theory. He believed that the Southwest was indeed a desert, one that could be cultivated, but only with the careful marshaling of the limited resource of water. Powell’s urging for caution solicited widespread groans and charges that he was backward-looking. That summer, he quietly ordered his senior investigators west to establish data on irrigation practices. Ostensibly traveling to northern Utah to classify land, Gilbert would examine Mormon water-delivery technology in the Great Salt Lake drainage area. Dutton would continue his geologic studies on the Colorado Plateau, but take some time off to survey irrigable lands in the Sevier River Valley and measure the river’s flow.

***

On March 8, 1878, Representative John Atkins of Tennessee, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, introduced a resolution that called for the secretary of the interior to submit a report summarizing the operations, expenses, and overlaps of the work conducted by geological and geographical surveys over the past ten years. During the consequent hearings, Wheeler, Hayden, and Powell testified about their surveys.

Powell’s young secretary would recall how Wheeler appeared dignified but aloof in his testimony. Hayden came on like a freight train, bitter and at length. He immodestly championed his work above the others and claimed that no duplication among the surveys had occurred. Once Hayden had finally finished his statement, the exhausted committee turned to Powell. In silence, the room of congressmen and a large assembled audience waited as Powell paced back and forth in the chamber, his stump clasped behind his back. All expected an impassioned speech denouncing Hayden’s claims one by one. But Powell ignored the earlier testimony. He gave a calm, even-keeled appraisal of his own work, applauded the achievements of the others, and then contended that much overlap between the surveys had occurred. Soon the entire committee was following his every word. “It was plain to see,” noted his assistant, “that the day was won.”

But even the ascendency he gained at the congressional hearings did not satisfy Powell. Never one to sit back, he prepared to make the riskiest, most brazen gamble of his career — even eclipsing the decision to run the Colorado. One of his greatest intrinsic strengths lay in realizing that opportunity so often arises out of good timing. The timing now — with the survey consolidation in full press and congressional discussion bubbling away— offered an optimal chance to take hold of the narrative and change its course. The report he would release was nothing less than explosive. He would reach far beyond his own survey work, indeed push so far beyond the bounds of a federal bureaucrat as to astound observers, seeming to shoulder the whole American experiment and bear it westward.

While Hayden and Wheeler conducted their fieldwork during the summer of 1877, Powell had stayed home, working assiduously on a document that built on the ideas he had presented to the National Academy of Sciences the year before. His Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, delivered to Interior Secretary Schurz on April 1, 1878, would be monumental and astonishing, and, in the words of a respected mid-twentieth-century historian, “[o]ne of the most remarkable books ever written by an American.” Starting with Charles A. Schott’s meteorological observations, buttressed by Gilbert’s and Dutton’s ground measurements of water requirements necessary for irrigation, Powell presented a formal, prescriptive plan for developing the West. In this report he integrated a lifetime of thought and observation, ranging from his childhood experiences in the Wisconsin grain fields to his close study of Mormon irrigation techniques, and informed by the network of ancient Pueblo canals and customs of Mexican water sharing. The thousands of miles he had walked, ridden, and climbed in the West keenly but invisibly shaped the document. At its core lay the realization battered into him on his first journey down the Colorado about humanity’s impermanence in the face of geologic time and how the Earth remained in a continual state of flux. It was more manifesto than scientific report, many of its conclusions based on incomplete evidence, much of the data hardly better than educated guesses.

Yet the conclusions have since proved ecologically sound and indeed remarkably spot-on. The report opened with a lengthy appraisal of the topography of the American West, including estimates of the amount of potentially irrigable land, timberland, and pasturage, before launching into a full-frontal assault on the current land-grant system, still rooted in the 1862 Homestead Act’s stipulation that any American adult could receive 160 acres, contingent upon demonstrating an ability to live on the land and improve it. While that system might work well in Wisconsin or Illinois, Powell argued, the arid West could not successfully support 160-acre homesteading. Those westgoers flocking into the arid lands beyond the 100th meridian would see their dreams dashed by spindly crops. Powell had directly contradicted Gilpin’s soaring promises. America could not have everything it wanted.

Powell’s recommendations focused first on classifying lands, then directing their use accordingly: Low-lying lands near water that were west of the 100th meridian should be available in 80-acre lots, while water-limited areas should be parceled into 2,560-acre units for pasturage. High mountain tracts under an abundance of timber should be made available to lumbermen.

He did not deny that drylands could be redeemed, but the limiting factor, as he noted before, was water. Irrigation could “perennially yield bountiful crops,” but the West contained few small streams that could be diverted by canal to fields, and those available were already being exploited to the limit in Utah and Arizona. Such large rivers as the Colorado ran through deep chasms and hostile ground, mostly far from any potential cropland. Only “extensive and comprehensive” actions — dams and distribution systems — could deliver the water, and only those with the means to undertake the task — not individual farmers, being poor men — could pursue it. If not carefully planned, wrote Powell, the control of agriculture would fall into the hands of water companies owned by rich men, who would eventually use their considerable power to oppress the people. He painted a truth that still rankles many today who believe in the myth of the rugged, independent westerner. He asserted that the development of the western lands depended not so much on the individual landowner as on the interdiction of the federal government, the only entity that could survey and map the land, build dams and other reclamation projects, administer vast swaths of public lands, oversee federal land grants, and tackle the displacement of the indigenous peoples. The lone cowboy taming the land with lasso and fortitude may fit the myth of the West, but the reality was quite different. Put simply, the West’s aridity required that overall public interest trump that of the individual.

The man who had previously limited himself to describing the topographic and geologic formations of the western lands had now waded directly into populist politics, driven by isohyets and tables of rainfall-per-acre statistics. Powell believed that the very republican dream of the small farmer was at risk under the crushing power of monopolistic interest. Such resistance aligned with his core childhood beliefs. He had seen the local grain operator in Wisconsin abuse powerless farmers with impunity. The stakes, as he saw them, were of the highest order, threatening the country’s very fulfillment. With the Arid Lands report, Powell had taken on not only Hayden and his congressional supporters, Wheeler and the army but also the General Land Office, the railroads, and the likes of William Gilpin — an overwhelming front of entrenched beliefs, myths, and nation-building passion, the very patrimony of Manifest Destiny. He had taken a hard shot directly at virtually unchallengeable assumptions about the unlimited wealth of American resources and the bright future of the great West — and also at who would have access to whatever wealth the West had to offer.

Powell saw that arid cultures stood or fell — and mostly fell — not on their absolute amounts of water, but on how equitably political and economic systems divided limited resources — and could evolve in the face of climatic and societal changes. To Powell, the Homestead Act, which imposed an arbitrarily eastern 160-acre parcel regardless of topography, rainfall, nearness to water, altitude, and other critical factors, appeared the height of folly, the blind, reflexive policy of a nation with outsized optimism drunk on the seemingly infinite resources available to it. Above all, he argued that the nation’s trustees needed to listen to the land itself — and respond accordingly.

Two days after Powell submitted his Arid Lands report to Schurz, the interior secretary forwarded it along to the House, which ordered 1,800 copies printed. After exhausting that print run quickly, another 5,000 copies printed afterward disappeared equally fast.

***

The Academy committee incorporated much of Powell’s report into their own, nevertheless watering it down considerably by passing over ethnology and his ideas about engineering the landscape. They recommended that the General Land Office’s surveyor generals, along with the three current federal surveys of Hayden, Wheeler, and Powell, be subsumed under two civilian-run agencies in the Interior Department. All land-measurement operation would fall under the Coast and Interior Survey, while all investigations of geology and natural resources, together with land classification, should fall under a new consolidated geological survey. It also recommended that the president appoint a blue-ribbon commission to investigate public-land laws in order to create a new land-parceling system in the arid West, where traditional homesteading was both impractical and undesirable.

On November 6, 1878, the entire Academy approved the report with only one dissenting vote, that of Marsh’s bitter rival Cope. Powell focused next on the congressional backlash that the Academy’s report would surely elicit. After all, it cut out the War Department—and diminished the power of the General Land Office’s sixteen surveyors general and their contractors. And then, of course, Hayden remained capable of hijacking all Powell’s work.

Powell launched a major lobbying effort, calling upon Newberry and Clarence King in late November to sway congressional opinion away from army management of the surveys. Ten days before the Academy presented its report to Congress on December 2, Powell decided not to seek the directorship of the new consolidated survey that Congress would most likely authorize. His deputy Clarence Dutton had written a friend ten days earlier with news that his boss “renounces all claim or desire or effort to be the head of a united survey.” A close observer much later wrote that “no one episode illustrates more strongly the character of the man—to pass voluntarily to another the cup of his own filling when it was  at his very lips.”

Noble sentiments may have in fact prompted Powell to step aside, but sheer fatigue with the political infighting could also have played a factor. But Powell had also grown shrewd in politics, anticipating full well that as architect of the survey and land-office reform approach, he would feel the wrath of the vested interests. A general awareness that he was seeking to take the directorship might put the whole endeavor at risk. He now carried great ambitions for two mighty unfolding powers—the nation and science—but not comparable ambitions for his own wealth, power, or glory. When fame came, as it had with the descent of the Colorado, he would harness it to help overcome his next challenge, not to leverage into higher speaking fees, a larger house, or political office. His distaste for self-aggrandizement embodied the Wesleyan requirement of modesty. Work done was for God’s glory, not the individual’s. While Powell worshipped at a different altar, his work, not himself, remained the center of his life. But that did not mean he had stopped fighting to get someone installed to carry on the mission of science in good form.

In his eyes, Hayden had come to stand for the culture of Grant-era corruption after the war. Hayden’s often shoddy science, Powell believed, sent the interests of the United States squarely in a damaging direction. Hayden’s ascent to the position of senior federal scientist would doom land-grant reform. With his willingness to play up to senators and his suspect optimism about the unlimited possibilities of the West, Hayden stood flatly in the way of Powell’s struggle to open minds as to what the West actually offered. In this contest, Powell felt that nothing less than democracy lay on the line.

When Congressman James Garfield asked Powell’s opinion of Hayden’s integrity as a scientist, the Major responded blisteringly that Hayden was “a charlatan who has bought his way to fame.” He was a “wretched geologist” who “rambled aimlessly over a region big enough for an empire,” shamelessly attempting to catch the attention of “the wonder-loving populace.”

Nor had Hayden stood idly by when Congress called upon the National Academy for an opinion: “I presume some great plan will be proposed that will obliterate the present order of things,” Hayden wrote a friend, “unless all our friends take hold and help.” In another letter Hayden told Joseph Hooker that “Hon. Abram Hewitt is an enemy of mine. . . . We had a hard time this last session and came near being decapitated. . . . We had to cultivate the good will of over 300 members to counteract the vicious influence of the [Appropriations] Committee.” Hayden had lobbied members of the Academy to keep John Strong Newberry off the committee. Clarence King topped Powell’s list to run a consolidated survey.

King lived in New York, comfortable with seeking his own fortune and happily above the fray as Hayden, Wheeler, and Powell battled it out. He would do little to seek the directorship, but would be only too happy to accept it if offered. On the other side, Hayden launched a forceful letter-lobbying campaign. Unbeknownst to others, he had begun to suffer the effects of syphilis, very likely contracted from his frequenting of prostitutes. The disease, which would kill him nine years later, had already begun to cloud his judgment. His letter writing, however, appeared to be working. Again Powell countered with more lobbying of his own. In early January, Marsh received a letter from Clarence King, letting him know that King felt it was time to submit his credentials for the job.

Hayden still saw Powell as his major competitor, until when—in the middle of January—a friend notified him of Powell’s withdrawal; ten days later, Hayden wrote a friend that “all looks well now.” Of all the national surveyors, Hayden had published the most, had received more appropriations, and had more friends in Congress—and indeed had the bright feather of Yellowstone in his hat. The directorship was his to lose.

In late December, Powell had finished drafting the legislation that Schurz had requested to turn the Academy’s proposals into law. Powell cleverly tied three of the four proposals to appropriations bills, clearly intending to skirt the Public Lands Committee, crowded with western congressmen who would never allow such issues a hearing. Schurz forwarded them to John Atkins, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, as well as to Abram Hewitt, the committee’s most influential member. Both strongly supported the measures. Atkins waited until February 10 to open congressional discussion, whereupon several weeks of vigorous debate ensued. Powell kept at work behind the scenes as a very public debate churned over the role of the federal government in the still largely undefined areas of science. He detailed his staff to bring Garfield books from the Library of Congress so he could cogently draft his position against proposed changes by General Humphreys and the Topographical Engineers.

The former Kansas shoe merchant, Representative Dudley C. Haskell, scoffed at federal dollars going to scientists collecting “bugs and fossils” and creating “bright and beautiful topographical maps that are to be used in the libraries of the rich.” Why would Congress reach into public coffers to pay these dubious scientists exorbitant sums to study the public lands? Other opponents of the Academy’s plan argued that the western public domain embraced much fine agricultural land. The West, the Montana newspaperman Martin Maginnis joyfully expounded, “contains in its rich valleys, in its endless rolling pastures, in its rugged mineral-seamed mountains, traversed by thousands of streams clear as crystal and cold as melting snow, all the elements of comfort, happiness, and prosperity to millions of men.” One congressman after another fumed at anyone so fainthearted as to criticize the extraordinary promise of the West. The “genius of our people,” wrote Representative John H. Baker of Indiana, was that they were “bold, independent, self-reliant, full of energy and intelligence,” who “do not need to rely on the arm of a paternal government to carve out their won fortunes or to develop the undiscovered wealth of the mountains.” Then he came to his real point: “I do not want them in their anxiety to perpetuate those or any other scientific surveys to interfere with our settlers upon the frontier.”

With Powell’s finger marks all over the Academy recommendations—much clearly pulled from his Arid Lands report—he now came under direct fire. Thomas Patterson, a former trial lawyer from Colorado, rose to decry Powell as a dangerous revolutionary, “this charlatan in science and intermeddler in affairs of which he has no proper conception.” Atkins’s proposal, he continued, was the work of one man, and threatened the West and its landed interests with disaster. Should Congress enlarge the land grants for grazing, then baronial estates would soon crowd the plains, an aristocratic few owning lands sufficient for a European principality and crowding out the small farmer upon which the nation depended. Powell must have been galled when the floor debate took this particular twist, especially when he had so consciously dedicated his efforts toward supporting the interests of the small farmer and preventing the aggregation of land and power that Patterson railed against. Patterson himself would go on to buy the Rocky Mountain News, making it a bullhorn for labor rights and the taming of corporate overreach. Indeed both men did not diverge much in their views. But at the heart of the matter lay a considerable foundational debate about who should be shaping the development of agricultural America and how much the government and scientific elite should be involved.

On February 18, 1879, Representative Horace Page of California offered a compromise that agreed to the consolidation of the scientific surveys but made no mention of reforming the land-survey system. Representative Haskell read a letter from a National Academy scientist, which submitted that the Academy debate was actually far more divisive than the one dissenting vote might indicate. The congressman would not reveal the letter’s author, most probably E. D. Cope, the missive a ploy by Hayden’s people to sow doubt about the Academy’s recommendations.

Atkins amended Page’s compromise to include the creation of a commission to investigate the land-grant system. The measure passed 98 to 79. The approved Sundry Bill went to the Senate, where no discussion took place. In the Appropriations Committee, Hayden’s supporters weighed in strongly, the committee amending the bill so that the scientific surveys were consolidated under Hayden, even taking $20,000 from Powell to finish up his work and giving it to Hayden. The bill then passed to conference committee. When it emerged on March 3, the last day of the session, the Senate’s emendations placing Hayden in charge had been cut out, but so had the House reformers’ bid to place all the competing agencies under the Interior Department. The last-minute collection of appropriation bills to keep the government functioning passed and the 45th Congress closed.

Hayden may well have considered this outcome a victory, the Senate indicating its interest in his running the consolidated survey. All he needed now was to take the directorship. But he had  not counted on Powell. The Major did not delay, writing at length to Atkins on March 4, pinning blame on Hayden for negatively influencing the tenor of the congressional discussion by raising false issues solely to advance himself personally. Powell then revealed his deepest concern: The appointment of Hayden would effectively end efforts to reform the system of land surveys. He asked Atkins to approach Schurz and President Hayes to obstruct Hayden’s bid and to sing the praises of King.

Two days later, Powell spoke with the president, Hayes questioning him in particular on Hayden’s methods of securing appropriations. Powell also wrote a lengthy letter to Garfield, furnishing him with a withering analysis of Hayden’s published work. He did not hold back, claiming that Hayden’s mind was utterly untrained and incoherent, leading him to fritter away federal money on work “intended purely for noise and show.” Powell also worked closely with O. C. Marsh, helping to coordinate the flow of letters in support of King. Marsh traveled to Washington and also met with the president.

Cope wrote Schurz in support of Hayden, claiming that “simply shameful” personal grudges had aroused the voices against his friend. As for King, Cope insinuated that his tenure in government service had been sullied by his taking fees from mining enterprises. But Cope’s letter could not stem the tide of questions raised against Hayden. King’s nomination was officially announced on March 20. “My blood was stirred,” wrote Hayden supporter and Brown University president Ezekiel G. Robinson, upon hearing the news. “There must have been some dexterous maneuvering to have brought about a change in the President’s mind.”

The Senate approved King’s nomination with the slightest opposition on April 3. Three days later Marsh wrote Powell, “Now that the battle is won we can go back to pure Science again,” then invited him and Gilbert to present papers to the upcoming National Academy annual meeting. When Powell told King he would be pleased to work for the new United States Geological Survey, King responded exuberantly. “I am more delighted than I can express. Hamlet with Hamlet left [out] is not to my taste. I am sure you will never regret your decision and for my part, it will be one of the greatest pleasures to forward your scientific work and to advance your personal interest.”

King did not last two years on the job.

Waiting in the wings would be John Wesley Powell, who would take over the directorship of the USGS, run it for 13 years, and fundamentally shape the role of science in the federal government.

***

From The Promise of the Grand Canyon by John F. Ross, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by John F. Ross.

30 Jun 11:56

Paris Through the Eyes of Willy Ronis

by Carole Naggar
In Place Vendôme, a woman’s legs, blurred by movement, scissor across a puddle, with the obelisk reflected upside down in the water. In another image, a little boy in shorts with a radiant smile runs home, a baguette under his arm. In a photo from the late 1970s, people are lost in conversation on public phones in the then-new Châtelet-Les Halles metro station, their faces hidden by the curvy cabins—a wry comment, even more so today, on the isolation and anonymity of contemporary life. “I had the vague sensation that I was witnessing the savage meal of a group of carnivorous plants disguised as phones to better deceive human beings,” Ronis commented.
24 Jun 13:17

New Glowing Dichroic Glass Installations by Chris Wood are Activated by Sunlight

by Laura Staugaitis

British artist Chris Wood (previously) continues to create sculptural dichroic glass installations. The artist forms seemingly spare geometric shapes in windows and on on white panels, which come to life with streaks of color when hit with sunlight. You can see more of Wood’s work, including large scale installations and commissions, on her website and Instagram. She’ll also be opening her studio for Cambridge Open Studios in July, 2018.

22 Jun 12:13

Sleepy in Songdo, Korea’s Smartest City

by Linda Poon

Three years ago, 35-year-old Lee Mi-Jung followed her husband from the small coastal city of Pohang, best known for its steel industry and fish market, across the South Korean peninsula to Songdo. Billed as the world’s “smartest city,” it promised her all kinds of conveniences: an efficient trash system, an abundance of parks, as well as a vibrant international community—all wrapped in a walkable, sensor-laden showpiece of 21st century urban design.

“I’d [imagined] this would be a well-designed city, that it would be new, modernized, and simple—unlike other cities,” says Lee, who used to work as an English teacher. “So my expectations were high.”

While there are no holograms or robot butlers, Lee says that as far as futuristic conveniences go, Songdo does deliver. Pneumatic tubes send trash straight from her home to an underground waste facility, where it’s sorted, recycled, or burned for energy generation; garbage—and garbage trucks—are virtually nonexistent. Everything from the lights to the temperature in her apartment can be adjusted via a central control panel or from her phone. During the winter, she can warm up the apartment before heading home.

As for that vibrant community? That’s been harder to find.

“When I first came here during the winter,” Lee says, “I felt something cold.” She wasn’t just talking about the weather, or the chilly modernism of the concrete high rises that have sprung up all over town over the last decade. She felt a lack of human warmth from neighborhood interaction. “There’s an internet cafe (online forum) where we share our complaints,” she said, “But only on the internet—not face to face.”

Lee Mi-Jung has lived in Songdo over the last three years. She enjoys the high-tech conveniences, but yearns to see more of a community. (Jiakai Lou/CityLab)

The Songdo International Business District, as it’s formally known, was built from scratch, on reclaimed land from the Yellow Sea. The 1,500-acre development sits an hour outside of Seoul and is officially part of the city of Incheon, whose proximity to the international airport and the sea makes it both a transportation hub and the gateway to Korea.

It’s the heart of the greater Songdo city, and from its conception in 2001, the IBD was envisioned as a sustainable, low-carbon, and high-tech utopia. For Koreans, the city would have all the perks of Seoul—and more—but without the capital city’s air pollution, crowded sidewalks, and choking automotive traffic. And for foreign corporations looking for access to Asian economies, Songdo as a whole would be a glitzy business capital to rival Hong Kong and Shanghai. “The city aims to do nothing less than banish the problems created by modern urban life,” as one 2009 story declared.

To accomplish that, Songdo’s buildings and streets bristle with sensors that monitor everything from energy use to traffic flow, all with an eye toward sustainability. The district has over 20 million square feet of LEED-certified space—“the highest concentration of LEED-certified projects in the world,” according to its developers, and 40 percent of all such space in South Korea. There’s a state-of-the-art water-recycling facility and generous swaths of greenery sprinkled throughout—the biggest one being the 100-acre seaside park modeled and named after New York City’s Central Park. The New York City architecture firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox designed the city’s plan, with developer Gale International serving as the majority partner in the project. The cost? Around $40 billion.

What it doesn’t have: enough people.

Originally slated for completion in 2015, Songdo remains a work in progress. Tax incentives and other perks were supposed to attract a thriving community of foreign businesses and workers, but in the last 15 years, only a handful of companies, nonprofits, and universities have opened offices in Songdo. They include the Green Climate Fund, which occupies the landmark 33-story G-Tower, IBM, George Mason University, and the State University of New York. The population of the entire city has now exceeded 100,000—with over half of the population residing in the business district. That’s only a third of the way toward the original 300,000 goal.

“I had expected this city to be like Singapore and Hong Kong, where there are many foreigners, but that has not been the case,” 45-year-old Paik Dae-Il, who’s lived in Songdo for the last 10 years and works in the hotel industry, tells CityLab through an interpreter. “Projects for big offices often get canceled. Instead, it’s been apartments, apartments, apartments.”

So what did Songdo get right? And is it too late to fix what’s going wrong?

In a rush, the Incheon government had developers build several apartment complexes—only to have many of them sit empty as Songdo struggled to attract new residents. (Mikensi Romersa/CityLab)

On a cool Thursday afternoon, I hop into a SOCAR, from Korea’s car-sharing start-up, for an evening tour of the district with urban architect and resident Alberto Gonzalez. By now, the traffic has picked up as the workday finishes. Buses are somewhat full, and a few bikers and pedestrians can be seen on either side of the roadways. We hit popular spots like Triple Street—the massive outdoor shopping mall on the southeastern end of the city—and pass by the various universities and biomedical companies that have set up shop here.

For a place that is striving to become car-free, the roads of Songdo are crazily wide, spanning as many as 10 lanes. This is partly to adhere to national building codes that mandate street width and fire access, and partly an homage to the wide, tree-lined boulevards of Paris. “It’s responding to what we call a modernist paradigm in urban design,” Gonzalez says. “So it has a lot of these really wide avenues—some of them too wide—and then you have also these massive footpaths and large parks.”

The upside, says Gonzalez, is that they’re wide enough for city planners to, say, put in a light rail or streetcar network, which may bring Songdo one step closer to fulfilling its car-free promise.

A super high-density mixed use building in Songdo. On the ground floor are bars, with at least seven hagwons, or private cram institutions, above them. (Linda Poon/CityLab)

On paper, Songdo boasts an impressive public transportation system, built in anticipation of that car-free free future. The subway here connects to both Incheon’s existing system and Seoul’s intricate rail network. Buses link hubs like Triple Street to neighborhoods and university campuses. Other bus routes ferry commuters directly from Songdo to trendy Seoul neighborhoods like Hongdae and Gangnam. To promote walkability, developers placed venues like shopping malls and convention centers within a 15-minute walk from Central Park and are building out an extensive biking infrastructure; they also promise a bus or subway stop within 12 minutes of every neighborhood.

In practice, though, cars are still a common sight in Songdo, and, for residents like 32-year-old Lindy Wenselaers, an essential tool. An expat from Belgium who’s lived in Songdo for over a year, Wenselaers ended up buying a car only five months in—she could no longer face a 20-minute walk to the nearest grocery store in the Songdo’s wintry weather.

Wenselaers lives outside the IBD, on campus housing provided by her employer, Ghent University. Her apartment is pretty basic, but she marvels at a friend’s apartment in a different neighborhood. It has elevators that talk to the garage, so when she keys in a code at the entrance, it immediately signals the system to send an elevator down. “Pretty nifty,” she gushes.

The high-tech amenities, however, haven’t helped her connect with other people. She laments the lack of direct connections from one part of town to another; on weekends, she often drives an hour to Seoul.

At one point, we find ourselves on a more narrow street, and suddenly Songdo comes alive. Here, it feels a little like we’re in Seoul, but with a more manageable crowd—perhaps the exact kind of vibe developers had in mind. Shoppers come in and out of snack shops, cafes, and make-up stores (all of which are ubiquitous in Seoul). And like Seoul, the buildings are what Gonzalez calls high-density mixed-use buildings, with a different store on each floor. Except these have seven floors, and each floor houses multiple units. One building had it all: bars, a church, and at least seven hagwons, or crammersprivate after-school academies to feed South Korea’s demanding academic achievement culture.

“Those are like an activity machine,” Gonzalez says. And while they attract a lot of foot traffic, it’s evident that many people still prefer to come by car. “This is one of the most active areas of Songdo, and it’s super ugly,” he says as we cautiously navigate around cars and school buses parked—likely illegally—along the curb.

For a high-tech city of the future, parts of Songdo feel more like a sparsely populated American 1970s suburb—just arranged in a grid form—especially as you leave the business district. The wide roads and sprawling scale means that human activities are located far apart from one another. Occasionally you see small touches, like an artificial hanok village (a traditional village where houses with old-school architecture remain intact) to remind you that, yes, you are still in Korea. It’s not exactly a “Chernobyl-like ghost town,” as some reports have claimed, but is is eerily quiet as we drive past cluster after cluster of concrete residential high-rises, all identical. Many are empty, partly the result of  Korea’s rush to build out Songdo in anticipation for the arrival of foreign workers.

Pali pali, as they say in Korean,” says Gonzales, referring to the country’s “hurry-hurry” culture. “If it keeps going this way, then this is a big missed opportunity. I think [there’s] enough of this concrete jungle.”

Yet the pace of Songdo hardly embodies that sense of hurry, in part because of how empty it feels, and its curious urban silence. “There’s a ton of people living here, but you don’t really see them,” says Wenselaers. “So the city is alive, but it’s invisible.”

Along a typically wide (and empty) Songdo street, rows of apartment buildings wait for their residents to arrive. (Linda Poon/CityLab)

Many of those who work here live in other parts of Incheon, where housing is cheaper. Some even live in Seoul, taking advantage of the intercity express buses. That means for residents like Wenselaers and Lee, it’s particularly hard to find a more permanent community.

Wenselaers did find a way to meet other Songdo residents—on Facebook. They post about events, review cafes and shops, and generally lend support to one another. There’s even a group just for expat women. Even so, she says it can be hard to fit in: Korean natives often keep to themselves, and rest of the population appear mostly to be young families with small children—Songdo has become a focus for South Korea’s efforts to boost its birthrate. “For younger people, it’s a bit more of a lonely city, actually,” she says.

Lee echoes Wenselaers’ sentiment. “I’m struggling a bit because I don’t have much things in common with my neighbors,” she says. “Usually the [community groups] are for moms, or for middle-aged or married men to go golfing or fishing.” She’s also struggling to find a job in Songdo as an English teacher, since schools tend to favor hiring foreigners. But Lee is staying positive, and trying to make Songdo work. Seoul is too busy for her, and her hometown too dated.

Construction continues as developers look to the unfinished city a biotech hub. (Linda Poon/CityLab)

The latest plan for Songdo is to build on its success in attracting biotech firms, and turn it into “the world’s best bio hub.” Already, the city is home to 25 large bio companies and 60 smaller labs. The Incheon Free Economic Zone Authority—which oversees the three regions, including Songdo, designated to be the international business hub of South Korea—will devote 990,000 square meter of lands to medical research and development in hopes of attracting more global healthcare firms.

An “American Town,” headed by the Seoul-based real estate firm KOAM, is still in the works: It’s hoped that this might to attract Koreans who immigrated overseas to places like the U.S. and are looking to return to their homeland for retirement. If all goes as planned, the new development could beef up Songdo’s population with 3,000 families.

IBD lead developer Gale International has said that the business district would be complete by 2018; currently it’s about 70 percent built out. “We hope that, in a few years’ time, the city will attract even more global thinkers who utilize Songdo as the platform it was envisioned to be,” company chairman and CEO Stan Gale says in a statement to CityLab. That is, “a testbed for new ‘smart city’ technologies and solutions; a dynamic center of global dialogue on urbanization and sustainability.”

Despite the delays in reaching the project’s earlier population benchmarks, Gale says he’s thinking long term: The company’s goal is to create a resilient city, one that can “last for decades, and, hopefully, for centuries.” And, well, that can’t be rushed. The comparatively deliberate pace of Songdo’s emergence might only look slow if you compare it to the explosive growth of, say, Chinese industrial cities like Shenzhen. “In short, a project of this scale and ambition takes time. I am very proud that we have implemented a phased development plan that has provided for thoughtful development, as opposed to the breakneck development speed that you may find in other parts of Korea and Asia.”  

Meanwhile, the master builders who are exploring the possibilities of scratch-made smart cities have also been keeping a close eye on Songdo’s progress. Some observers of these utopias-in-progress acknowledge its relative success compared to, say, Dubai’s ghostly Masdar City, whose “greenprint” is only 5 percent completed. Others are making efforts to avoid duplicating Songdo’s top-down smart-city formula. Google’s Sidewalk Labs, for example, is now planning to create Quayside, a $1 billion waterfront development in Toronto that promises to be “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up.” But in that case, the company has made much of its efforts to include community outreach early on in the planning process, and that more modestly scaled project looks to be more closely connected to its larger host city.

Gonzalez is also giving the city the benefit of the doubt; after all, the project isn’t finished yet, and he says critics are too quick to judge it as a failure, thanks in part to what he calls the “marketing hype” that accompanied the rise of what had been breathlessly billed as the “world’s smartest city.”

“I think [the people behind Songdo] deserve a little bit of that criticism for trying to be a world class paradigm [for smart cities],” he said. “Of course there are a lot of things to improve on—mobility and car use being the number-one problem. But I think it’s a comfortable place to live.”

13 Jun 17:42

lionofchaeronea: Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, Simon de Myle,...



lionofchaeronea:

Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, Simon de Myle, 1570

13 Jun 16:11

The Unbearable Awkwardness of Automation

by Carolina A. Miranda

On June 27, 1967, a Barclays bank in Enfield, London, debuted what is widely regarded as the first automatic teller machine, or ATM. The machine dispensed £10 at a time through the use of a special voucher that had to be purchased in advance. The system didn’t automatically deduct the amount from a customer’s balance. Instead, it functioned as a sort of steampunk check-cashing system, with customers’ balances updated by human tellers the following day.

The machine’s purpose, naturally, was to dispense cash outside of limited operating hours—as well as to fend off union efforts to close bank branches on Saturdays. At its grand unveiling, its first customer was actor Reg Varney, known for playing a hapless bus driver on a popular television comedy show. How exactly the ceremony proceeded has been lost to history, but a former Barclays employee did note decades later that Varney had been “a bit cheeky.”

The ATM is one of the most visible and familiar symbols of automation, its 24-hour service demanding neither coffee breaks nor health insurance. Two years after the first one appeared in England, a similar machine debuted at a branch of Chemical Bank (now Chase) on Long Island. Today there are more than 3 million globally, according to the ATM Industry Association. They have reshaped how people bank: anytime and anywhere, and mostly in locations that aren’t even banks.

It’s not just banks. Automation has also changed how people shop, park, fly, and more. In the process, it has reshaped the architecture that contains those experiences—making them more efficient, often, but also putting machines above people.


That first ATM was installed at the Barclays in Enfield, a borough on the northern fringes of London, specifically because it was the only branch with windows situated high enough on the building to accommodate the necessary machinery below. Since then, ATMs have required banks to reconsider other aspects of the building that house them.

A bank once provided a stately architectural procession: a vestibule, followed by a counter staffed by a waiting row of tellers, and perhaps a screened-off area with private offices and a safety deposit chamber. But enter a bank branch today—if you visit one at all—and chances are you’ll be greeted by a waiting row of ATMs. To find an actual human, you’d have to travel deeper into the building, often through another set of doors.

Over the course of a typical bank transaction, customers are unlikely to deal with a person at all. (Data compiled by Bank of America, for example, shows that only 30 percent of deposits there are made with the assistance of a human teller.) And at banks in more remote areas, complicated financial questions that necessitate human contact are often handled remotely. Instead of speaking with someone on-site, the customer uses an ITM—or Interactive Teller Machine, essentially a video conferencing system—to reach an employee at a centralized location. The buildings that house banks are no longer sites for person-to-person interaction. They are places where people come to transact with machines.

“I remember going to a bank and talking to a person,” says architect Greg Lynn, founder of Greg Lynn Form, a studio in Los Angeles focused on how technology facilitates architectural form. “But now everything happens with a portal on the side of a wall. It’s all about speed of transaction and efficiency.”

Banking is not the only industry where this is taking place. Arrive at a hotel and you might find yourself swiping a credit card to check yourself in. Go to a big-box store and you can check yourself out. Park your car at a lot and chances are you’ll feed your money (or more likely, your bank card) into a machine that will supply you with another card that will allow you to exit the lot.

All of this is changing the nature of the structures that people inhabit. “Architecture is losing places where you interact with people,” Lynn tells me. “There is so much desire for a rapid transaction and rapid movement and buildings are changing to accommodate that as well.”

Mariana Pestana, an architect and curator who recently helped organize the design exhibition “The Future Starts Here” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, describes this phenomenon as “post-human architecture”—one in which structures are geared more at generating machine interactions than in bringing human beings together.

Sometimes, this can result in an awkward dance between the human world and the automated one. At many supermarkets and big box stores, for example, space once allotted to a checkout station has been replaced by a row of self-checkout systems. The cashier, who previously had a designated spot behind the counter, now stands at the end of this row, ready to assist when customers get confused or if the machines fail. At stores such as Target, the staffer often has no dedicated workstation. A position once tied to a physical location has become unmoored.


At parking lots, this detachment is even starker. Parking decks and lots used to contain shelters near their entrances. They housed a parking attendant, who took a customer’s fees and raised the gate. Automation has resulted in the removal of that shelter, since a machine now purportedly does the task. Yet, in Los Angeles, where I live, you nonetheless regularly find attendants standing by the exit, helping customers navigate the machines or serving as manual override on glitchy technology.

“There always has to be someone there to fix it when it breaks,” says Rory Hyde, a London-based curator of contemporary architecture and urbanism who co-curated “The Future Starts Here” with Pestana. “There has to be someone there for the exception to the rule.”

The person may be there, but the architecture that once contained them is gone. At the parking lot of a medical building I frequent on Wilshire Boulevard, I always find the same middle-aged Latino man standing on a narrow strip of concrete feeding customer’s payment cards into the automated machine.

“Don’t they give you a little place to sit?” I ask him.

Es automático,” he responds with laugh and a roll of the eyes. It’s automatic. (He and other checkout workers I approached for this story, declined to be interviewed on the record.)

Automation is often lamented in the context of job loss—when machines can do the work that people once did, their jobs can be eliminated. A report issued by McKinsey & Company last year shows that 39 million jobs in the United States could be “displaced” by automation by 2030. Though, during that same time period, it is estimated that roughly 30 million jobs will be added to the economy—requiring many workers to shift duties or industries.

Some companies claim that automation has simply allowed them to reassign workers to other duties. Joe Perdew, vice president of store design at Target, told me that the company actually increased its headcount in 2017, despite the growing presence of self-checkout. “Approximately one-third of our guests choose self-checkout, so we’re adding self-checkout stations to give more guests a fast and autonomous alternative,” he notes. “In fact, we’re expanding self-checkout beyond the 1,500 stores that offer it today—adding to 150 more stores this year, with plans to be in all stores by end of 2019.”

Self-checkout hasn’t completely eliminated jobs, but it has transformed them. Automation design prioritizes machines over humans. That impacts customers who have to deal with the machines, but it impacts the workers even more. At Target, a cashier overseeing a row of self-checkouts has a job that is now geared less at interacting with customers than in tending to the machines the customers operate.

The same goes for parking lots. One attendant I spoke with in downtown Los Angeles noted that he now oversees two neighboring lots instead of one. Now that the gates are automated, his job primarily involves helping customers operate the ticket takers. “People have problems using them,” he tells me. “They don’t know how to insert the card or the machine doesn’t read the card or something else.” The attendant’s job has been made even more physically precarious than it already was. When he isn’t roaming the lots or assisting with the machines, he takes shelter under the eaves of a small shed stuffed full of equipment.


Having humans toil alongside machines isn’t new. Architecture has been designed for industry first, and human workers second (if at all), for a long time. Roman canals, 19th-century textile mills, and Cold-War nuclear reactors were not drafted with the human experience as a first concern. That pattern persists. A Google data center in Finland, housed in a former paper mill designed by the revered Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, regularly gets so hot that the company orders people out of the building. (“We have what we call ‘excursion hours’ or ‘excursion days,’” a Google executive told Wired in 2012.)

Over the course of the Industrial Revolution, workplace safety regulations have made some of these industrial spaces more hospitable to people. For example: The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802, informally known as the Factory Act of 1802, required that mill buildings supply adequate ventilation. (They also prohibited mill apprentices, an estimated fifth of whom were under the age of 13, from working more than 12 hours a day—so humane.)

But the current wave of automation is affecting spaces that were once specifically designed around human interaction: the front desk at the medical office or the hotel check-in counter, for example. At Yotel, an outpost of the affordable hotel chain in New York City, guests are greeted not by hotel staff, but by a row of check-in kiosks, as well as a luggage storage robot called the “Yobot.”

Yotel is easy to navigate because it’s small. But at larger hotels and office towers, automation can leave a building visitor feeling slightly adrift. “Many buildings no longer have a receptionist,” notes Hyde. “Which is fine if you work there and you know where you are going, but it’s extremely disorienting to everyone else. The legibility of the architecture breaks down.”

The Oakland-based medical consortium Kaiser Permanente, which employs self check-in for patients at some locations, has solved some of this disorientation by placing markings on the floors of its medical buildings indicating a patient’s next stop. (Aesthetically, it’s the sort of thing that would make an architect gasp: large sketches of arrows and cutesy paintings of footprints.) Other buildings are less clear. On a visit to Las Vegas last year, my husband and I checked in at the lobby kiosks at the Planet Hollywood Hotel—and then spent what felt like a small eternity looking for the poorly indicated elevator bank that would lead us to our rooms. There wasn’t an employee in the vicinity who could provide direction.

“There’s a sense that things are losing their focus,” says Hyde. “That’s what you are seeing happen now in bigger public spaces: the airport check-in or the supermarket. You lose your focus. It’s the strange flattening condition of technology or modernity.”


To a large extent, that is how people increasingly want it.

A survey conducted by the brand research firm YouGov and the Victoria and Albert, as part of the museum’s design future exhibit, shows that 69 percent of Britons prefer a human cashier to a self-checkout system. But that statistic shifts when segmented by age: 53 percent of 18 to 24 year olds prefer self-checkout compared to 13 percent of those aged 55 and over.

I’m in my forties, and I’ve acquiesced to all manner of automated systems. I use the self-checkout at Target when I have a few items because it saves time. I check into my flights online so that I can navigate LAX in a more timely manner. I am certified for Global Entry, which means that when I re-enter the United States after traveling internationally, I scan my passport and my fingerprints at a kiosk and enter the country without so much as having to acknowledge a sentient being.

American Airlines tested its first self-check-in kiosks in 1984. It deployed a prototype at Dallas Love Field 14 years later and installed the first fully functioning automated check-in system at Albuquerque International Sunport on Halloween Day of 2000. Currently, a majority of American’s 350 airport destinations feature some form of self check-in.

“Kiosk check-in will typically be shorter than a counter check-in,” says Melody Anderson, who serves as director of customer experience for the airline. “We have the business-savvy traveler that wants to do everything themselves and is very experienced in what they need to do—so whether it’s online or at the kiosk, they want that experience.”

As at retail stores and parking lots, this has changed the nature of the space. Customers entering the terminals at LAX, for example, are first greeted by rows of check-in kiosks rather than a customer service counter. And it has changed how airline agents interact with customers. Rather than being stationed behind a counter, agents are more likely to roam the floor.

Anderson describes it as a “concierge” style service: “The employees meet the customer in the process rather than queuing up … So it’s more, ‘I’m here to help you through your journey’ rather than ‘you wait in line until I’m ready.’”

The system can be more pleasant for customers like myself, since it means I don’t have to stand in line if there’s a problem. I simply flag a roving agent. But for the airlines it’s a big money saver. A 2003 study by Forrester Research showed that it cost 16 cents to check in a passenger with a self-service kiosk, compared to $3.68 with an agent.

“It’s part of a general drive for the airlines to reduce their costs so that they can, in theory, have fewer employees staffing counter or marshaling people into queues,” says Derek Moore, a director at the New York office of the global architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), which has designed airport terminals in Mumbai, Saudi Arabia, and New York’s JFK Airport. “Airlines as companies are trying to do more with fewer staff.”


Even so, Anderson tells me that the human element will likely always be a part of check-in. Leisure markets tend to demand more human assistance than business-centric ones. And emerging markets—with more inexperienced or first-time air travelers—often do so as well.

Automation will nonetheless be a greater part of the airport experience in the future. As part of ongoing automation efforts at Miami International Airport, the airport’s immigration systems are now employing biometrics, like face scanning, to match travelers to their passport pictures. The Australian airline Qantas offers its regular customers a permanent electronic bag tag (designed by the award-winning industrial designer Marc Newson) that allows them to check-in online, then drop their suitcase directly at bag drop without having to stop and print out a tag.

Moore says automated gate boarding is already in use at some airports in Asia.

“You scan your own card and the glass doors open and let you through,” he explains. “In Australia, they have incredibly fast automated international arrivals. Everybody presents themselves at a kiosk like Global Entry, but it’s even slicker. Then you walk by some people and then you’re out.” (All of it leads me to wonder if one day the airlines will just punch identifying tags in our ears and put us on an automated conveyor system all the way to our seats.)

All of this automation requires adjustments at the architectural level. The grandest part of airport terminal architecture used to be the check-in area—a shared public space where a traveler’s journey officially began. But over the years that space has increasingly shrunk. “Conceptually, it could be half the size of what it was two generations ago,” remarks Moore.

It has been eaten up by security screening checkpoints, but also services such as automated baggage handling—which occupy a large part of an airport’s footprint. Automation, he notes, “hasn’t made baggage handling systems any smaller.”

If anything, it’s had the effect of taking space in which humans once gathered and turned it over to the machines.

“Will airports of the future have that kind of processional, ceremonial feel that a lot of airport terminals have had?” asks Moore. “Have we reached the end of the terminal as a civic building? Are we going to be back to the days when they were simply processors—almost industrial-type buildings?”

As air travel has become more popular, more crowded and more strained, that certainly seems to be the case. A departure concourse once functioned as a public gathering space. In the future, that space may simply be a wall of ATMs.  


Architecture moves slowly. An ATM might get inserted into a building from the turn of the 20th century. Self-check-in systems at LAX reside in terminals that date back to the 1960s.

“There is a memory that architecture preserves—the different ways of working,” says Hyde. “You might go to a bank and it has a beautiful ornate teller [window], but it’s empty because there’s an ATM in them.” Sometimes, Pestana explains, a building’s architecture is “the last place” to reflect automation.

As new banks go up and old airports remodel, architecture is beginning to catch up. If buildings once had been awkwardly repurposed to integrate automation, now they can be designed to streamline machine interfaces from the start.

But what does it mean to design a structure that focuses human attention on technology instead of other humans? Architecture, says Lynn, should be about “trying to make things as humane and rich and meaningful as possible”—yet increasingly people are thrust into spaces where their attention is devoted to swiping and punching and scanning devices and machines.

Moore notes that it’s possible to move through a crowded airport without interacting with anybody. “Even at eateries, you now sit down at a table and there’s an iPad and you punch in your order and someone will bring it to you,” says Moore. “And that may be the only time you’ve seen a person.”

It’s a phenomenon architects might want to think about before they sit down to the drawing table. “It’s seemingly trivial encounters that are important to society and their health,” Hyde says. “We have to remember the value of those little encounters as we automate them all.”

25 May 11:04

Back to Back: Tiffany Bozic and Josh Keyes Explore Two Stories of Nature

by Editor@juxtapoz.com (EvanPricco)
Back to Back: Tiffany Bozic and Josh Keyes Explore Two Stories of Nature
Talon Gallery in Portland is currently showing a double solo show by the two former Juxtapoz cover artists: Tiffany Bozic and Josh Keyes. Basing their paintings on the depiction of the animal kingdom, often in relation to manmade objects and environment, Josh Keyes is showing Almost Paradise and Tiffany Bozic is presenting The Five Elements of Nature.
18 May 14:47

In Arkansas, the Bike’s Best Friend Is Walmart

by Erica Sweeney

Kelsey Miller likes to play a game with herself to see how many days she can go without driving her car. On most days, she bikes to work and to run errands.

This car-lite lifestyle may be unremarkable for many coastal urbanites, but Miller lives in Bentonville, Arkansas, population 47,000 and home to Walmart’s headquarters.

Northwest Arkansas might not be the kind of place one expects to find a bike renaissance, but it’s having one anyway. Municipalities across the region, which encompasses the main cities of Bentonville, Fayetteville, Rogers, and Springdale, as well as several smaller towns, have been steadily building up their biking infrastructure over the past several years. A mix of federal transportation grants and the Walton Family Foundation, the nonprofit led by the children and grandchildren of Walmart’s founders, helped fuel the bike boom: The organization has invested $74 million in the region’s trails, which now comprise a network of about 350 miles of shared-use and mountain biking trails, including more than 130 miles of shared-use paved paths.*

That’s a pretty big change for her small town, says Miller, who grew up cycling in Bentonville. Back then, there were few trails or bike lanes; she often had to ride on the sidewalk. Now, she really only gets her car out to drive to bike trails further away. “It’s been really cool to be someone who likes to ride my bike and the infrastructure be set in place for me,” she says. “The way Bentonville is set up, the bike infrastructure has been reaching further out from downtown, so it’s really conducive to ride your bike to and from places.”

A new trail usage report prepared by the Walton Foundation claims a striking statistic to back up the region’s bike bona fides: The area’s most-used bike trails have a higher daily cyclist volume than the cycling infrastructure of densely populated big cities. The study determined that the daily per capita cyclist count for the top three trails stood at 5.45 per 1,000 in population—higher than San Francisco’s at 3.2. Weekday cycling volume in Northwest Arkansas increased 32 percent from 2015 to 2017 to about 187 daily cyclists.

“The usage of those amenities and the continued investment in them is something I think that people just have come to associate with certain coastal cities, like Portland or San Francisco,” says Karen Minkel, home region program director for the Walton Family Foundation. “There's kind of that surprise when it’s a region in the heartland not necessarily known for having those types of recreational amenities. Hopefully it’s making people take a second look at what rural America really has to offer in terms of quality of life.”

Another study commissioned by the Walton Foundation showed that in 2017, cycling brought an estimated $137 million in economic benefits to the area, which is also home to corporate giants Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt Transport.

“I think, when those numbers came out, it was hard for us to believe we’ve come so far,” says Paxton Roberts, executive director of BikeNWA, a local cycling advocacy group. “At those busiest spots, when we are on par with big cities, that really validates our investment as a region in cycling.”

The bike culture of the state got a boost in the late 1990s, Roberts says, when the area’s first shared-use paved trails appeared in Fayetteville. In 2006, the Walton Foundation developed Slaughter Pen, a mountain biking trail in Bentonville. That same year, the Big Dam Bridge—the largest span in the U.S. built for bikes and pedestrians—opened in Little Rock, in the central part of the state. Then came the Razorback Regional Greenway, which opened in 2015 with close to 40 miles of off-road, shared-use trails. That $38 million project was funded through a federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant, a Walton Foundation gift, and support from the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission and the cities along the trail: Fayetteville, Johnson, Springdale, Rogers, Bentonville, and Lowell.

Use of the greenway has mostly been recreational so far, but Roberts says things are evolving: More residents are beginning to ride it for transportation, and more businesses have opened along the trail, which connects several cities and towns. Several local attractions, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, lie along the path, and development continues to appear along the trails, luring more riders.

“People want a destination to go to,” says Miller. “It’s not uncommon for us to ride our bikes about 15 miles to Springdale on the greenway just to get tacos, and then ride back. Just seeing the development and economic growth that it’s brought to the area has been huge. Bentonville is kind of a weird and awesome proof of what cycling development can do for an area.”

A rider on the Razorback Greenway in Bentonville, Arkansas, outside the  Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. (Bike NWA)

Nationwide, riding to work is growing. Commuting by bike increased 51 percent over the past 16 years, a 2016 analysis by the League of American Bicyclists found, and is growing by about 7.5 percent annually. Much of the attention in the bicycle advocacy world focuses on the big gains for bike commuters in major cities like Washington, D.C., or on the (often contentious) efforts to build dedicated lanes in urban areas. But it’s smaller towns that can see some of the biggest health and economic impacts from bike-friendly policies, says Kyle Wagenschutz, director of local innovation for PeopleForBikes. “Small communities have big potential for bicycling,” he says. “The question is whether or not they’re seizing those opportunities that exist and capitalizing on them.”

Smaller communities can be fertile territory for bike infrastructure. Not only are they less likely to suffer from the traffic congestion that can trigger “bikelash” battles with motorists over street redesigns, they’re, well, small: The dense business districts and modest scale of older towns in particular make bicycle travel a more viable mobility option—if riders feel safe. The economic benefits associated with building biking infrastructure can help the case, as a study by the League and the Alliance for Biking & Walking emphasizes. Businesses in Memphis’s Broad Avenue Arts District reported a 30 percent increase in revenues after bike lanes were added to the area revitalization. In Iowa, recreational and commuter cycling generates more than $400 million in economic activity for the state and a health savings of $87 million.

But there are special challenges in small-town bike advocacy, too. In Northwest Arkansas, building the region’s trail network required a partnership of seven municipalities, two counties, and a couple dozen small towns, all coming together to adopt the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission’s long-range plan. And there was pushback from privacy-loving rural residents who didn’t want the trails near their homes. But Roberts says the shared vision of the region eventually brought everyone together, with the local mayors signing agreements.

Northwest Arkansas now has two officially recognized Bicycle Friendly Communities, Fayetteville and the region of Benton and Washington counties. Amelia Neptune, director of the Bicycle Friendly America Program at the League of American Bicyclists, says she’s been seeing more smaller communities participate in the program, which gives communities resources to improve bicycling and national recognition. Communities can use the designation to attract new business, residents, and tourists; some have leveraged the brand to gain political support or grant funding for new cycling initiatives.

“Biking provides a lot of solutions to problems that can be common in those areas,” Neptune says. “There’s a lot of access issues, safety disparities, health disparities, and wealth disparities in rural areas compared to highly urban areas, and bicycling usually yields improvements for everyone on the road.”

BikeNWA’s Roberts, who’s native to the region, lives in Fayetteville, about 26 miles away from his Bentonville office. This area still has a ways to go in building on-street bike lanes—having a more robust network would make his commute easier. The greenway’s usefulness for many commuters is limited, since few communities have added connective bike lanes so far. Many users have to drive to the different trail heads, he says.

But overall, biking has come a long way in Arkansas. A decade ago, seeing someone walking or on a bike in downtown Bentonville was a rare sight. “Now, you can’t drive through the town without seeing both of those happen,” Roberts says. “I don’t think anyone ever thought life would be this good in terms of being a cyclist in Northwest Arkansas. We keep painting a vision that sets the bar even higher.”  

*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the network’s total mileage.

03 Apr 12:07

Rebecca Louise Law: Painting on Air

by Editor@juxtapoz.com (Eben Benson)
Rebecca Louise Law: Painting on Air
Standing amid a suspended cloud of thousands of flowers cascading from the ceiling, I realized that an installation by Rebecca Louise Law can be appreciated with eyes closed as well as open; physically looking at it is just one aspect of the experience. Recalling the wonder and innocence of a childhood spent outdoors, of lying in a field or playing in the garden, Law seeks to transform the physical senses evoked by being in nature into a work of art. “I wanted to paint in the air,” she explains, and “I needed a material to help me do this.” 
16 Mar 08:50

Breaking: The Turkish military is shelling civilians in Afrin

by Kurt T
The main city of Afrin is being bombarded by heavy artillery fire and airstrikes carried out by the Turkish Military. An official with the Rojava government, Hediye Yusuf, stated, “Turkey is bombing the center of Afrin and there are dead and wounded among the civilians.” While the count of injured and dead so far is not […]
22 Feb 13:46

lespritfrancais: Coucou c'est la démocratie Dresde, 13...



lespritfrancais:

Coucou c'est la démocratie

Dresde, 13 février 1945
22 Feb 10:25

briqou: (via Conie Vallese)

10 Feb 10:18

the-eternal-moonshine:Zaha Hadid

09 Feb 10:32

By Robert AndersIstanbul, Turkey



By Robert Anders

Istanbul, Turkey

25 Jan 11:25

Ushering My Father to a (Mostly) Good Death

by Karen Brown

Karen Brown | Longreads | November 2017 | 14 minutes (3,613 words)

 

“How about Tuesday?”

My father is propped up on three pillows in bed, talking logistics with my sister and me. We’ve just brought him his Ovaltine and insulin.

“Or would Thursday be better? That’s a couple days after the kids are done with camp.”

“Ok, let’s plan on Thursday.”

My father is scheduling his death. Sort of. He’s deciding when to stop going to dialysis. That starts the bodily clock that will lead to his falling into sleep more and more often, and then into a coma, and eventually nothingness.

He is remarkably sanguine about the prospect, which we’ve all had a long time to consider. A master of the understatement, he promises it’s not a terribly hard decision, to stop treatment and let nature takes its course, “but it is a bit irreversible.”

If I’m honest, he’s ready now to stop dialysis. It’s a brutal routine for someone in his condition, incredibly weak and fragile from living with end-stage pancreatic cancer, kidney disease, and diabetes. It’s painful for him to hold his head and neck up, which he has to do to get to the dialysis center. During the procedure, he must be closely watched so his blood pressure doesn’t plummet.

But he’s always been a generous man. He’s willing to sacrifice his own comfort in his dying days for the convenience of his family, since we all want to be present at the end. If he pushes his last day of dialysis to Tuesday, then my sister can still go on the California vacation she’d been planning with her family. If he pushes it to Thursday, I can still take the journalism fellowship I’d accepted. It will also give his grandchildren time to finish up their summer jobs and fly down.

Are we selfish for allowing him to make these choices? Possibly. But he insists, as he always has, that living for his children’s and grandchildren’s happiness is what gives his existence meaning. We hope that’s true. This is a man who spent his career as a professional decision analyst but always picked the worst-colored ties.

As it happens, though, when Thursday comes, he just can’t get out of the house. He is practically crying from discomfort as the caretaker lifts him off the bed onto his rollator, to start the journey up the stair lift and into the car. I tell him it’s okay. He can get back in bed. He looks so relieved when we rest his head back on the pillows.

I cancel my Amtrak ticket home to western Massachusetts and tell my husband not to expect me for the rest of the month.

***

A day later, my father is quietly sipping his coffee in bed, the dog at his feet. He eats and drinks almost nothing, but he can usually get down a mug of hot milky drink.

My father is scheduling his death. He’s deciding when to stop going to dialysis. That starts the bodily clock that will lead to his falling into sleep more and more often, and then into a coma, and eventually nothingness.

He looks up at his bookcase, the one he’s been ignoring for a few decades as he wrote his professional tome on decision theory.

“All these delicious books I’ve been saving for my private delectation, and I’ll never get to read.”

He gets an urgent look on his face. “I wanted to tell you — in the next room, I have a complete set of ‘great books’ — I think there are 33 volumes — all the classics. Shakespeare too. I’m particularly sorry not to read those. Maybe you can.”

I suggest we find a book to read aloud to him over the next few weeks.

We chose As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, because even if he doesn’t always follow the story, the words are nice to listen to.

And you can’t find a more appropriate title than that.

***

I’m at the kitchen table trying to figure out which insulin pen hasn’t yet reached its expiration date. I’m also making my second Nespresso of the morning. And I’m eavesdropping on my parents through the baby monitor.

We tried different methods of communication, and nothing worked very well. My father’s room is on the ground floor, and most of the house’s activity is a floor above. He would try clanking the metal bar above his hospital bed with a spoon, but it wasn’t loud enough and he’d be exhausted by the time someone noticed. He used to be able to use his cell phone to call the house landline, but his fine motor skills got too shaky to dial the right number.

We finally realized the best method was the same one we use for infants. That way, when he talks or moans or coughs, we hear it on the next floor — as long as we have the volume up and the remote monitor nearby. My mom once heard his ghostly voice calling out in pain from the upstairs bathroom, where I’d left the monitor by accident. I almost knocked over the dog running downstairs to respond. I’ve taken to keeping it tied to my belt with a string.

Of course, he loses something with this method: privacy. He forgets that any conversation he has — on the phone, or with a visitor — is also heard by whoever has the other device. We probably should turn it off, but then we might forget to turn it back on. Plus, it’s awfully tempting to listen in on deathbed conversations.

Which is how I find myself listening to my parents talk, for the first time in a long time, about life, death, and marriage. She doesn’t like going down to the bottom floor (she says it’s hard on her legs, plus it’s too musty, and a little sad), but now that he can’t come upstairs, she has no choice.

“How will you fare after I’m gone?” he asks my mother.

They are not a terribly affectionate couple, not in the last few decades. She tends to be irritable, he can get defensive. She likes cruises and entertainment news on TV, he likes to read and write and think deeply about his profession. They have separate bank accounts. But they are still quite attached to each other.

“Well, I’ve gotten used to you being gone, in a way,” she says. “For the last 20 years, you’ve been working on your book. I’ve had to find other things to do.”

“That must have been frustrating.”

“Yes, it was.”

Or:

“I feel sort of guilty, but I’ve booked a cruise,” my mom says. “For September.”

“Why would you feel guilty?”

“Because I’m assuming I won’t need to be at home anymore. It just feels like I’m counting on you being gone.”

“Well, that’s a pretty safe bet. You shouldn’t feel guilty. I’m glad you’re going.”

Then quiet. I finally turn off the monitor.

***

We have a nighttime routine. After he’s taken all his pain medication, gotten washed by the caregiver, gone through the trying routine of pricking his nearly-bloodless finger to test his blood sugar, and eaten the one — or maybe two — bites of whatever delectable pastry my mother bought in vain from what used to be his favorite bakery, it’s time for mystery hour.

The only TV stations he watches — perhaps the only numbers he knows how to punch on the remote — are the three PBS stations you can get in the D.C. suburbs. And it seems that the only shows they air after 8pm are murder mysteries from England and Australia.

My father has always been a generous man. He’s willing to sacrifice his own comfort in his dying days for the convenience of his family, since we all want to be present at the end.

I usually watch from my perch on the double mattress we set up next to his hospital bed, but occasionally, since he’s so small now, I can fit in the crook of his arm and lie next to him.

That’s how we watched the Prime Suspect origin story of DCI Jane Tennison. And the light-murder stylings of Miss Fisher’s Mysteries. The tortured adventures of priest-turned-detective Grantchester. And — our lucky break — an old airing of Inspector Morse, our favorite Oxford intellectual policeman. The actor, John Thaw, who died in 2002, looks eerily like my dad.

This episode was a good one — and remarkably, one I hadn’t seen before. An academic had been murdered, of course. (As Dad pointed out, there are more murders on this TV show version of Oxford than there probably were in the whole of England, ever.) There’s tense but affectionate banter between Morse and his sidekick Lewis. About an hour in there was a second murder, of the main suspect (who else?). And then the words: To Be Continued.

The second part would air the following Wednesday. We didn’t have to say out loud what we were thinking: that hopefully we’d both get to find out whodunnit.

***

For the past year, my teenage son has taken one or two items of his grandfather’s clothing home every time he visits. It’s weird to see my boy wearing a track suit or Hawaiian shirt that Dad spent so many years shuffling around in. My mother gets frustrated — “I bought those for Rex, and he hardly has any clothes left” — but dad doesn’t mind; he loves Sam wearing his clothes.

Dad’s tchotchkes are a bigger challenge to give away. He has awful taste in souvenirs. There’s an oversized green wine glass that says “Sexy Bitch.” I once asked why he had it in his room. “Because I couldn’t think of anyone to give it to.”

Then there’s his “treasure drawer.” In it, a quick-acting corkscrew, never opened. A prickly rubber ball that lights up when it bounces. An oak toilet paper holder. A shell necklace he bought in a cruise ship gift shop. A beeswax candle. He wants to make sure no one fights over his stuff. I assure him that will not be a problem. (But I want the corkscrew.)

He wants me to find something that my daughter might like. “We had some lovely conversations on her last visit,” he says. “I feel like I really got to know the young woman she’s going to become.” I pick up a couple of hand-sized metallic exercise balls. I’m not sure she’ll know what to do with them.

He also warns me, somewhat sheepishly, that there’s a box in the closet of, let’s say, “erotic” literature.

“What do you think Goodwill does with that sort of thing?” he said.

We will not be donating that box to Goodwill.

***

He decides to try dialysis one last time. The kidney doctor had called our home after the first appointment Dad missed and practically begged him to go back. It seems the medical specialists and the hospice team are on competing tracks. The kidney doctor’s job is to keep him alive as long as possible; hospice wants him to have a good death. Sometimes those two things are mutually exclusive.

I find myself listening to my parents talk, for the first time in a long time, about life, death, and marriage. ‘How will you fare after I’m gone?’ my father asks my mother.

The transfer — from bed, to stairs, to wheelchair, to car, to medical center, to dialysis chair — takes about an hour each way with the help of his loving caretaker Rachel. She’d agreed to work late on her last day before a beach vacation with friends, a vacation she almost turned down because she didn’t want to leave my father. (A caregiver with her level of empathy is not the norm, I have discovered.)

It is a rough four hours. First the pain in his neck and back. Then his stomach. Then my panicked phone call to the hospice nurse, who says I can give him another Oxycodone. An hour later, still squirming, another panicked call: permission to up his dose.

The technician, named Sonia, originally from Afghanistan, is kind. She shows me how to follow his blood pressure on the monitor so I won’t worry. Her effort backfires. His blood pressure crashes, and I have to call out for help. I definitely keep worrying after that. (But thank goodness for Sonia, who keeps tearing up as she realizes how close to the end my father is.)

In the last half hour, when he’s finally had enough drugs to tolerate the pain, after his blood pressure has stabilized, he asks me to come closer so I can hear his rasped questions. “Tell me about you. Are you working on anything interesting?”

Well, actually, I tell him, I’ve been working on a few personal essays. I have a new one — a relationship story I am gearing up to submit to the “Modern Love” column in the New York Times. Would he like to hear it?

I pull it up on my computer — and read aloud the 1500 words of heartfelt emotions and memories. When I am done, he is quiet.

“Dad? You okay?”

“Yes, sweetie, I’m fine.”

“Oh. The essay is done.”

“Okay.”

“Uh, what did you think?”

“Well, it was nice, but seemed a bit ‘so what.’”

Leave it to a dying man to tell you the truth.

This really will be the last time he goes to dialysis. I will not do it to him again. Even without the bad essay.

***

On the first morning he knows his head need never lift off his pillow again, he exhales slowly and asks me to hack into his email account.

I help him write farewell notes to doctors, old colleagues, admired friends, former girlfriends. He dictates as I type his words and click send. He wants to let them know he’s near the end, and how much they’ve meant to him.


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Some reply immediately with sweet messages, hoping to call. Others are returned by daughters or husbands, letting us know that the friend/colleague/ex-lover is actually doing more poorly than Dad. His best friend from childhood died just a month earlier, but before he did — as narrated by his daughter — he cracked one more one-liner to my dad: “Looks like I’ve won our race to the pearly gates.” My dad’s reply, to me at least: “But only just.”

Long-ago tennis partner Vince calls to tell him two jokes. I only hear Dad’s side, which is a surprisingly hearty laugh at the end of each one.

Then tells one back.

“A married couple go to the doctor, and the wife says, ‘Doctor, my husband won’t talk to me.’ The doctor turns to the husband and says, ‘Sir, is that true?’ And the man replies, ‘Well, I don’t like to interrupt.’”

***

After dinner with mom, I am eager to get back to Dad. I crawl into the bed next to him. The Great British Baking Show is on mute.

He puts his bone-thin arm around me and squeezes with a surprising amount of strength.

“We have just enough plumpness between the two of us for a good cuddle,” he says.

“Are you insulting me, Dad?”

“Oh, did I promise not to?”

We both chuckle. Then he adds, “I think I’m losing my inhibition in my decay.”

“Have you ever had any?” I say.

Another kind, hoarse laugh.

***

My youngest sister is sleeping in the extra bed, jetlagged. She’s just come from California to help. My dad wakes up when I enter. The sliding glass door to his room is slightly open, to let fresh air in. (We have ignored my mother’s insistence that we keep the air conditioning tightly contained)

My father can see the geese on the water. It took us three years to think of taking down the tall plants outside his room that were blocking the view of the lake. (He had my son plant them one summer, “to give him something constructive to do.”)

The morning before I leave on a four-day work trip, I bring him a milky coffee. I feel conflicted about going, as I know there’s a chance he may not be around when I return. But after a few emergency phone sessions with my therapist, emotionally panicked texts to friends, some soul-searching calls with my best friend, and assurance from my father himself (“I would hate for you to miss a professional opportunity.”), I decide to go.

Dad waited for me to return from my trip, then he waited for my children to arrive for the weekend. He waited for my husband to order new guitar strings from Amazon.

But first, our morning routine. Take blood sugar. Give pills. Try to get down some prune juice.

“Would you like me to read some more Faulkner?”

“No thank you. I’m just letting my mind free-associate.”

And then:

“I like listening to the birds.”

***

Dad waited for me to return from my trip, then he waited for my children to arrive for the weekend. He waited for my husband to order new guitar strings from Amazon. (He wanted to serenade Dad one last time.) And lastly, he waited for his old colleague Andrew to fly in from L.A.

Andrew was part of our family lore, a brilliant eccentric who was allies with my dad when they were both spearheading a new decision-analysis curriculum at Harvard. They hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade, and we were all surprised — touched — that it was so important to Andrew to see him before he died.

It was important to Dad too. In fact, the day before Andrew’s Monday visit, he asked me which day it was.

“Sunday.”

“Really? I thought it was Friday. So I only have to last one more day?”

They talked off and on for almost five hours, the last deep conversation Dad had with anyone. But the best part was Andrew’s parting gift: After they hashed out a long-ago professional feud that Dad had with his arch nemesis, a man named Ron, Andrew — who is smarter than everyone — declared that, if they were to compare Dad’s accomplishments and integrity with Ron’s, Dad would win hands down. “No contest.”

That would turn out to be Dad’s last good day. He wasn’t expecting anyone else.

***

I almost missed my father’s last breath because I was making nachos in the kitchen.

One of my sisters called out panicked from the bottom of the stairs. “Karen. Come now.”

Gathered around his bed were my mother, my brother-in-law John, my two younger sisters, and the hospice nurse — a petite sparkplug of a woman whom we had met an hour earlier. Her thick Polish accent had the comforting, confident lilt of someone who understood death.

We’d been on bedside vigil since the early hours of the morning, which came after an unusually bad night of pain. If I were to resent any part of his otherwise dignified death, it would be those hours.

When I was little, I used to get bad colic — intense stomach aches — and my dad would stay up with me in the bathroom as long as it took, his warm hand on my belly, and tell me “I wish I could take the pain for you.” So when I was sitting at his bedside some 40 years later, the roles reversed, I recounted that memory and said aloud, “I guess this is you taking my pain.” I’m not sure that gave him much of a reprieve.

The morning before I leave on my four-day work trip, I feel conflicted about going, as I know there’s a chance he may not be around when I return.

My sister and I held his hands all night. After calling in two emergency visits from the 24-hour palliative nurses, we hit upon the right dose of morphine and he was able to rest.

I had been so focused on getting him relief that I didn’t quite realize the trade-off: that he would start to leave us, for good, in a morphine haze. That I wouldn’t get a “last conversation,” at least, not one that I could schedule or choreograph.

We did get last words, though. Before the morphine, he had looked at my sister and me, full of love and trust, and said through his discomfort, “I’m in your hands.”

Over the next eight or nine hours, as he breathed quickly and loudly, his mouth open, eyes slightly open, but looking peaceful, at ease (please let that be so), we were told by the steady train of hospice nurses that his time was almost up. We told our children, our half-sister in Australia, his sister in England, and several other dear friends, that he would likely not wake up and it was time to say goodbye, even if just in our minds.

Those of us present each took a few moments at his side, whispering in his ear. (Could he hear us? They say, at some level, he probably could.) We left him with as much love and affection as words to an unconscious man could convey. He’d always had a hair-trigger crying reflex, from Hallmark commercials on up, and if he were awake, he would have been bawling.

Why I thought that was a good time for a snack, who knows.

My sister’s holler from downstairs came at about 5pm. I abandoned an open bag of tortilla chips on the kitchen table and had just enough time to join the circle around his bed.

His chest started to rise and fall at a slower and slower pace, until the movement was imperceptible, and then not at all.

The nurse took out her stethoscope, put it to his chest, and said, “I’m so sorry.”

“Are you sure?” I had to ask. That could have been the journalist in me. But it was probably just the daughter who couldn’t quite believe it was true.

“Yes, I am. I’m so sorry.”

***

It’s funny what people want to take of the dead, to keep the memories living. A few days later, after the equipment company came for the hospital bed, we took turns both throwing away trash and claiming it. One sister wanted his last uneaten Cadbury’s fruit and nut bar. My other sister wanted an old Cambridge University T-shirt with stains on it (he was always spilling.) And I wanted — of course — the green wine glass that said “Sexy Bitch.”

Rest in Peace, darling dad.

 

 

* * *

Karen Brown Karen Brown is a writer and public radio reporter based in Western Massachusetts, with a particular interest in health and psychology. She has contributed stories to NPR, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and other outlets. Her father, Rex Brown, was a decision analyst and devoted father of four.

Editor: Sari Botton

25 Jan 10:36

Photo



30 Nov 17:17

rhubarbes: All images © Lichtecht GmbH Project •• Revugia Spa...



rhubarbes:

All images © Lichtecht GmbH

Project •• Revugia Spa & Wellness Resort Hotel

Designers •• Matthias Arndt / Ronny Mähl / Krzysztof Kuczyński / Ronny Mähl

via https://www.visualatelier8.com/

14 Sep 12:58

renaissance-art: Astronomical Clock, Prague 





renaissance-art:

Astronomical Clock, Prague 

19 Aug 10:54

Bohemian Master c. 1414The Pentecost (detail)



Bohemian Master c. 1414

The Pentecost (detail)

18 Aug 09:31

CVTà Street Fest: Southeast Italian Village Is Adorned With Stunning Street Art

by Editor@juxtapoz.com (EvanPricco)
CVTà Street Fest: Southeast Italian Village Is Adorned With Stunning Street Art
For the second year, street art became the framework to change the landscape of an evocative corner of the Italian region of Molise. Civitacampomarano, a town with just 400 inhabitants, was once again filled with activity for CVTà Street Fest. Starting in April and carrying on for three months five artists from four different countries helped breath life into the depopulated village, culminating in a four-day celebration filled with events that took place June 1 to June 4, 2017.
08 Aug 14:17

sad-plath: Akira Asakura



sad-plath:

Akira Asakura

12 Jun 10:01

Please Watch This Video Showing the Unfathomable Cruelty of U.S. Immigration Policy

by Mark Armstrong

I’ve been obsessed with systems in government, and in business, that completely erase our humanity. That could mean an algorithm on Facebook that’s designed to prevent nudity but unwittingly bans one of those most powerful images from the Vietnam War. It means the lengths we’ll go to pretend that our phones are not built from slave labor. Or it could mean the layers of bureaucracy built into a company that allows its owner, now one of the President’s top advisers, to target and harass low-income tenants without sullying his own hands in the process.

We use processes, and algorithms, and complicated org charts to isolate ourselves from those who we hurt. And the system was designed so that we can point the finger at the system when it fails.

As you’ll see in the below must-watch video from Jay Caspian Kang and Vice News, the willful dismissal of our own humanity and common sense lies at the core of U.S. immigration policy.

In many cases, the main excuse for cruelty is that empathy doesn’t scale. How can one create a fair, sensible policy if every heartbreaking story had to be considered on its own merits? I don’t know the answer, but I know it’s certainly not blindly deporting a 41-year-old man who was, if not for a minor paperwork screwup, an American citizen.

It’s worth noting this is a case that started during the Obama Administration — and offers further evidence of Obama’s mixed record on immigration. That record is now being overshadowed by President Trump, who is pledging to take these inhumane policies even farther.

Watch Kang’s Vice story here: