About one-third into her new book, Barbara Ehrenreich recalls when she first lost hope in positive thinking while attending the National Speakers Association convention — the mecca of motivation. Leaving one panel, Ehrenreich asks one attendee if she is troubled by the use of quantum physics to explain how positive thoughts can manipulate matter. The woman, a “life coach” from California, smiles indulgently and asks, “You mean it doesn’t work for you?”
Aghast, Ehrenreich wonders, “If it ‘worked for me’ to say that the sun rises in the west, would she be willing to go along with that?” What empirical reality can we agree upon “if science is something you can accept or reject on the basis of personal tastes?”
What kind, indeed. But then, positive thinking isn’t known for its cozy relationship with science — or reality. So argues Barbara Ehrenreich, renowned muckraker launched to fame by her savage exposé Nickel and Dimed, in her latest work, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In a punchy 200-page critique, Ehrenreich cracks open the sugarcoating of “Think Positive!” and shows us the poison pill underneath. At a time when more and more Americans are choosing their own reality, whether deciding which news to hear, which science to believe, or how much debt they can afford, Ehrenreich’s book is a much-needed call for us to, in all possible terms, get a grip.
What could be so bad about thinking things are good? It’s a question we rarely ask ourselves amid constant exhortations to find a silver lining, be a team player, and always look on the bright side. From Oprah’s inspiring guests to the syrupy tales of Chicken Soup for the Soul, we are told that we too will soar to new heights if we just keep thinking happy thoughts.
Sadly, this just isn’t true. Not that Ehrenreich would rather we celebrate hopelessness and despair. But positive thinking demands we focus on ideal outcomes at the expense of recognizing real problems. “A chief of state does not want to hear a general in the field say that he ‘hopes’ to win tomorrow’s battle,’” Ehrenreich observes. “He or she wants one whose plans include the possibility that things may go very badly, and fall-back positions in case they do.”
Yet in recent decades our fanatical devotion to optimism has led us pretty deep down the rabbit hole, into a world where Newtonian laws can be warped by our whims. Self-help guides like the 2006 bestseller The Secret promise that the “law of attraction” allows you to “visualize what you want and it will be ‘attracted’ to you.” Literally: Picture what you need, and the universe shall provide.
Ehrenreich traces the seeds of positive thinking to a group of 19th-century philosophers struggling to shake off the existential dread of Calvinism. Their New Thought movement held that “illness was a disturbance in an otherwise perfect Mind and could be cured through the Mind alone.” Ehrenreich attributes today’s industry of positive thinking — complete with books, posters, and 10-step programs — to social and economic change in the 20th century. As “more and more middle-class people were … employees of larger corporations, where the objects of their labor were likely to be not physical objects … but other people,” she theorizes, “interpersonal relations came to count for more than knowledge and experience.”
Being positive was a veritable survival skill during the 1980s era of downsizing. CEOs employed motivational speakers, self-help books, and company retreats en masse to placate survivors of these brutal rounds of firing. Three decades later, pep has become the norm, even as our actual happiness has declined. We’re the 23rd happiest country in the world according to a recent analysis, surpassed by “even the supposedly dour Finns.” (We also account for two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants.)
Unbridled cheer has spread far beyond office culture, greeting Americans in church and even through academia. Bright-Sided’s chapters on megachurch “pastorprenuers” like Joel Osteen and “positivity psychology” are Ehrenreich at her best, bubbling with undisguised contempt. At Osteen’s church, we hear Joel and his wife Victoria celebrating the victory God gave them over a flight attendant who sued her for assault. (Victoria had demanded the attendant remove a stain on her first-class seat, then tried to enter the cockpit to complain when it was not blotted immediately.) It’s hard not to share Ehrenreich’s disbelief: “I look around cautiously to see how everyone else is reacting to this celebration of a millionaire’s court victory over a working woman … The crowd, which … appears to contain few people who have ever landed a lucrative book contract or flown first-class, applauds Victoria enthusiastically.”
Much of Ehrenreich’s wrath, unfortunately, seems spent by the book’s final chapter, where she unveils the pièce de la resistance: how positive thinking created the recession. She makes a strong case for how deluded CEOs refused to heed clear warnings about the toxic assets we now know as subprime mortgages. And she shows clearly how we dug ourselves deeper by believing the gurus who encouraged us to dream of “larger homes, quick promotions, and sudden acquisitions of great wealth” even as wages declined.
But then she seems to give up. After eking out 17 pages on her theory of the recession, the seemingly exhausted Ehrenreich cobbles together an even briefer postscript and drops the pen. More effective is the introduction to the book, in which she rants about how positive thinking pastes over our deepest social problems: “[It] takes the effort of positive thinking to imagine that America is the ‘best’ … Our children routinely turn out to be more ignorant of basic subjects like math and geography than their counterparts in other industrialized nations … We have … the greatest level of inequality in wealth and income.” In other words, positive thinking encourages neglect of our deepest social ills.
Such big-picture conclusions, unfortunately, are rare. We’re left feeling as though Ehrenreich has held back in all the wrong places, pouring vitriol into her anecdotes but failing to tie them into the all-encompassing “screw this” indictment that she alludes to in her introduction.
Yet fear not, those looking for the activist who wrote Nickel and Dimed. While the book is more diagnostic than prescriptive, Ehrenreich does urge us to disengage from the self-absorption positive thinking requires and invest ourselves in creating a genuinely happier world. “Surely it is better to … search one’s inner self for strengths rather than sins,” she writes. “The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all … Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?”
We indeed have real work to do. And we need to start by facing reality.
Chelsea Rudman Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.
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Either I’m a masochist, or I enjoy sleeping sitting up on twelve-hour trans-Pacific flights. On a visit to Tortola to ring in 2010, I realize that I have been running away from bitter, northeastern American winters to beaches on the other side of the world while warm paradise was just a short four and a half hours away.
Despite this proximity, Tortola seems like a world away. One of the small British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea, it has one traffic light, chickens running around freely, and the slow island vibe I desperately crave after hustling through New York City’s rat race. Even language is spoken slower in Tortola. Who can be bothered with verbs or tenses? As I settled into the sun-and-sea lifestyle, I quickly realize I can’t.
I come to visit my cousin Branson, who is actually a belonger. “Belonger” is the word used to describe citizens of Tortola. Branson’s mom is American and his dad is British, but they happened to be living there when he was born. He is blond and blue-eyed and has spent many years living in other parts of the world, so he’s not your typical Tolan (as the locals are called).
I saw it from the other side of the street, the corner of Chacabuco and Carlos Calvo, two blocks away from my apartment. I stopped. People continued to walk by — a man, a woman and child, a group of teenagers blasting Cumbia music. No one else noticed. I looked both ways and crossed the street to get a closer look, a confirmation that this was reality. The black spray-paint looked fresh, and I touched it, immediately checking around me to see if the painter was nearby, still stenciling. Two cop cars drove by. I took out my camera to photograph it. My first swastika.
My bewilderment slowly turned to curiosity and then quickly into fear. I had seen swastikas before, but only in dark movie theaters and on glossy textbook pages. I had always been a passive observer. I could be eating popcorn or highlighting dates. I thought the swastika was meant for Jews with German accents, waiting in long breadlines, not for me. Whatever vestige that remained of its original meaning had been reinvented for contemporary use. Who was its maker? How many of them were there in the city? Is my new home away from home not safe? What does it mean? Eventually I would read the image to be a comment on Israel’s current military actions, but at the time all I felt was the urgency and adrenaline of alarm.
With the rise in anti-Semitic attacks across Europe and the number of Latin American protests of the war in Gaza, I had begun to wonder about my safety and the general safety of other Jews in the world. Given Buenos Aires’ history of being both a sanctuary for Jews as well as Nazis, this one piece of graffiti should have the ability to shock and incite people into action or at least contemplation.
I took my thoughts with me to dinner, where I and a few other journalists convened after a brief milonga (tango dance). Rather than discuss the situation or the sentiments that were expressed, I was met with opposition. My colleagues were more concerned that I had never seen a swastika before than they were alarmed by what I had seen on my block, as if it should have been a part of my regular life, a rite of passage that every minority surely endures. They assured me that the graffiti I had witnessed was not part of a larger phenomenon, but the result of the actions of a hateful, ignorant few.
Yet in the coming days, news reports of similar swastikas being found all over the city — most shockingly nearby a children’s hospital — continued to pour in. I saw them on my way to work, on the walls across my sips of coffee, and the seeming indifference of the streets persisted. It wasn’t until the comments of an Argentine bishop were heard around the world that my peers understood my alarm. Something new was going on in Argentina.
I decided to sit down with Ana Weinstein, one of the directors of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA), a Jewish organization in Buenos Aires, to get a better understanding of the precedence and response to anti-Semitism in Argentina. She warned me to bring my passport, as security in the building was on high alert. On July 18, 1994, a car bomb exploded outside the original building, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds. This attack came after the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy, in which 22 people were killed. All this was common knowledge, as was the fact that authorities have been unable to locate those responsible for either bombing. Reports trickle in on occasion, telling of torture and violence for those who choose to investigate the tragedies. All Jewish affiliate buildings in the city maintain strict security.
When I arrived, a man in camouflage slacks spoke loudly on his cell phone. He screened my passport and led me inside, past a metal detector and two steel doors. I was excited to find all the contents of a Jewish Community Center in America — message boards with Jewish film screenings, lectures, and a cafeteria with knishes.
Up the elevator and to the left, I found Mrs. Weinstein, who greeted me with a hug and a kiss. A man brought us mate cocido, and we sat down to chat.
My prepared questions were met with complications. As an accomplished sociologist and leader of the Jewish community, Mrs. Weinstein deconstructed what my college professors had taught me to call “hate crimes,” “discrimination,” and “anti-Semitism.” It was all a bit trickier than that.
She described to me the history of the Jewish people in Argentina as well as the history of Nazi sympathies by the last dictatorship. In the middle of the century, Mrs. Weinstein explained, “There were ties between the military of Argentina and Nazi organizations. The regime was friendly to another fascist state.”
These political policies bled into the populace through their appeal: “Every family had a member in the armed forces, a lawyer or a politician, and a member of the church — let’s say a nun or a priest. Then there were these outsiders, Jewish people.” With such strong ties to organizations sympathetic to Nazi beliefs, sentiments were transmitted into the nuclear family. “For them the Nazi ideology was music to their ears. Nazis could enter Argentina easier than the survivors of the Shoa.”
With the return of democracy in 1983 and the rise of Alfonsin, the Jewish community welcomed the pluralism promised by a new democratic society. She described how 10 years later, after the 1994 bombings of AMIA, a different Argentina could be seen.
“Society felt hurt by the bombing and was ashamed. It is now better understood what it is to be Jewish; we are also Argentineans.” The economic crisis of 2001 provided similar solidarity between the Jewish community and the rest of nation. As thousands of people lost their jobs, savings, and direction, AMIA and other Jewish organizations opened up their resources to include all sects of people. Reaching out to everyone, they offered food, health, and job assistance. “AMIA recovered despite the severe attack to help others, and cared not only for Jews. We proved we are a positive presence within society, and anti-Semitism diminished.”
Anti-discrimination laws were passed, and the Delegation of Israeli and Argentine Relations was founded to monitor activities considered to be discriminatory. However, Mrs. Weinstein was careful to explain, “This does not mean anti-Semitism disappeared. More extreme parties who are anti-Israel, Yanqui, and Zionist have appeared. Groups like Quebracha and Partido Obrero attack Israel to support Palestine, or attack America to support Iran, but it is more complicated than that. There is a belief that Israel should have a right to exist and preserve itself. And separately, there are the actions of that state. The dialogue between Israel and the Diaspora is seen as unconditional support. They do not dare to see the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian authority, and so an unconditional support of Israel is met with an unconditional support of Palestine.”
So who was the maker of the swastika? Partido Obrero? Quebracho? Or was it simply the psyche of the Argentine public scrawled on the walls? Should I be afraid?
Mrs. Weinstein mused over the question and responded, “It is a very strange moment. I’m worried; I’m not scared. There was a leader of one of the groups that announced, ‘You don’t have to look for the Jews in Gaza. You can find them here in their synagogues.’ It’s a change.”
I asked her what contact she had with these groups that might be responsible for perpetuating the swastika within the Jewish star, and her body language closed, and she grew very serious. “You cannot talk to those people. They do not understand what they do.” She warned me not to contact them, that they would tell by my accent I was Jewish, American, and everything they despised. I would be endangered should I make myself known to them. With my questions somewhat answered, I said good-bye and found my exit out of the fortress.
She did not dissuade my fears but only allowed me to grow more aware of certain paranoia always present in the back of my mind. Whether or not I agreed with the actions of Israel, I had been collapsing a pro-Palestinian argument with an anti-Semitic one. My head full of discomforting realizations, I walked past a congregation of young protestors waving newspapers. The front page bore an image of Palestinian victims from attacks in Gaza, with the words “La Solucion Final” (The Final Solution). It was members of the group Partido Obrero.
They looked like I did: mid-20s, jeans, funky sunglasses. I stopped and asked for a paper. “Would you like to get involved in the fight?” the girl asked me. I was about to make my father cringe and attempt to face generations of paranoia and fear. “Yes, I would like to know more.” I put my cell phone number down and wrote “Emilia,” my best attempt at masking my identity. I opened my purse, foolishly stuffed with Hebrew pamphlets I had picked up at AMIA, and paid the two pesos for the paper. She promised to call me for the next meeting. I exhaled. Marianela seemed pretty harmless.
The anonymous writer of the main article wrote, “The massacre in Gaza is a final solution to the Palestinian question… They act, without regard, from a barbaric and reactionary fantasy that no doubt will be like the final solution that Hitlerism intended against the Jewish community.”
The sentence “the final solution” caught my attention. Words like these and swastikas were once specific — to refer to Hitler and World War II. I always thought these ideas were instrumental in the creation of Israel, as they were the harbingers of Jewish suffering and the ideology behind the need for Israel to exist. When these words are used against Israel in this way, it destroys the reasoning behind Israel’s existence. If the Holocaust was the reason for Israel, and Israel causes a holocaust, then Israel loses its identity as a victim state. Those who were once oppressed have become the oppressors. This re-appropriation Holocaust terminology was not pro-Palestinian, but anti-Israel. Equating a Jewish star with a Nazi symbol achieves the same effect, only it’s not just anti-Israel — it’s anti-Semitic.
I met Marianela and her boyfriend Emiliano at a café in the center of the city. They brought along Marianela’s younger brother, who sipped on chocolate milk as we discussed the mission of Partido Obrero. The Trotskyist political party is the largest section of the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International, with its primary support amongst youths. Having formed in the middle of the 20th century, Partido Obrero was the host of the 2004 Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International, and the party has offices in Greece, China, and Venezuela.
I didn’t tell them I was a journalist and a Jew until we were an hour into our discussion of capitalism, class, and the seeming plethora of evils in the world perpetuated by the Jews, imperialists, and fascists. Emiliano used all these terms interchangeably until I stopped him and asked to record the remainder of the interview. I unmasked myself as a Jew and kindly asked him if he understood the difference between a Jew and an Israeli, to which he replied “of course.”
From then on, we talked in specifics about the mission statement of the organization. Emiliano is the leader of the Partido Obrero at the University of Buenos Aires’ School of Engineering, where he “organizes different activities around politics and sets up discussion meetings to come up with ways to solve the problems of the working class.”
With regard to Gaza, he eloquently described the situation and had a very clear argument: “I believe, firstly, that it is a mistake to call it a war. A war is a conflict between two governments or two states with opposing ideas or interests. There is no Palestinian government, so there can be no war. It is just a massacre. They are a community who oppose the Israeli rule. It’s a war crime. They are fighting for basic human rights: education, clean water, electricity, and we identify with their cause. We want to help them fight.” Marianela agreed, nodding her head.
He went on: “The Jews believe they have an excuse to maintain and perpetuate this wrong, but they do not… We aim to recognize that this isn’t a question of race; it’s not Jews or Israelis against Palestinians, but a state expanding with pro-imperialistic policies in line with the other imperialistic powers of the world. We’re talking about Sarkozi in France, Zapatero in Spain, Putin in Russia, Bush and his successor Obama — all of the leaders of nations employing new colonialism.”
I felt as if his answers were rehearsed, and unfortunately he had forgotten to make the distinction between Jews and the Israeli government. I felt like I was one of the first Jewish people he had ever met, and he too was shocked to see how similar I was to him in size and age.
And what would be the goal of this organization? What was it calling for?
“We want for all of the working class to unite against this injustice, to demand the troops be removed from Gaza. We want the proletariat of the world to go to the Israeli embassies and defend the Palestinian people during this massacre.” He was discussing peaceful protest; he did not advocate violence, but somewhere along the line I could see how this message could be misinterpreted. Mrs. Weinstein’s comments were echoing in my ears.
Finally I asked him about the front cover of the newspaper. I asked him about the swastika. Neither referred to the Holocaust, he told me. “The photo on the front of the paper is supposed to ask, ‘What is the truth of this action? What is Israel really doing to the people of Palestine? Why are they using this force?’ The only solution for capitalism is violence, to solve the financial crisis of the world. I did not know it had anything to do with Hitler.”
He then went on to explain to me the true identity of Hitler and how my alarm was misplaced.
“Hitler was born of a political and militant movement to fight the socialism of Russia. He became a fascist to organize the German people to fight insurgents and motivated the masses not only against Jewish people, but against Gypsies and homosexuals to maintain a regime of oppression. We don’t know who makes the stars, but they are misguided. We don’t have the same intention of whoever makes them. These drawings, this graffiti, I believe is wrong. We don’t believe that the state of Israel is a fascist state; it is not the same as Hitler.” I felt that to deny Hitler’s position and role as an ethnic cleanser and leader of genocide equally demeaned the message of the party.
The café’s tango music played on, and I stared blankly across the table. It was true that he didn’t understand the history of the Jewish state, but it was not malice that kept these two fighting for Palestine. In fact, Emiliano proudly commented, “Many Jews have written for Partido Obrero against the massacre in Gaza. I don’t know them, but they are members just like me.”
After following him in his circles, I posed one last question: “What is and where does anti-Semitism come from?”
Succinctly he responded, “The fact that the Jewish community has organized a state means that they have organized a society under a system of exploitation. A part of the society has taken power of the production to keep the rest of the population oppressed. The Jewish state has not been created based on the Jewish community needs but only on the needs of just part of the community. To support this system, they need to support anti-Semitism to keep the people afraid.”
After four hours of interviewing Emiliano, he invited me to a party on Friday that was being held by Partido Obrero. I told him I would think about it. I checked the address of the party; it was at its headquarters, a block away from my apartment. It was close, convenient, and maybe it would be a good idea to improve relations. I was ashamed at the courage it took to talk to them in the first place. My concern stemmed from an uncertain place and from fear, and perhaps because of the solitude of a year of expatriate life, I decided it would be a worthwhile endeavor to confront my fear head-on. I could go and represent Judaism; I could show them what I wasn’t. On my walk over I realized it probably wasn’t a good idea. A few meters away from Partido Obrero’s door, I passed the first swastika, black and bold, still unraveling my sense of self and the political party’s definitions of truth.
Until a few short weeks ago, Haiti was a country rarely mentioned in the international press, except in annual rankings of the world’s economies, where it ineluctably squirmed at the bottom. Now it’s a story that writes itself; a bonanza to foreign correspondents and non-governmental organizations everywhere.
In the face of the disaster there, the typical departure points for a personal essay seem oddly trivial. The scale of the destruction, the pull of the human tragedy, and the naked fact that the world’s attention is a Johnny-come-lately to the morbid party in Port-au-Prince halt conventional approaches to journalism. Of course, the unique position of Haiti is that nature’s wrath has made an already dire humanitarian situation even worse, thus practically writing the script for the stream of news coverage. But it has also made Haiti, a place many reporters were visiting for the first time after the earthquake, a perfect storm of high-pitched clichés about people living on $1 a day and the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Since my first experience of Haiti, I’ve wanted to avoid writing about the clichés.
I visited this ramshackle one-third of an island for the first time in the summer of 2005. I was a graduate student at New York University, and when I first moved to New York, my first hosts in the city were Haitian. I decided to return the favor by writing about the lives Haitian immigrants face when they immigrate to America. As I began talking to journalists, preachers, nurses, and street vendors who shared stories about their previous lives on the island, I wondered why, in the face of such Third World-realities that existed in Haiti—a mere 700 miles from the United States—the country was contractually spurned by cable networks and newspapers. I flew into Port-au-Prince with the vague ambition to find an explanation.
Bougainvillea drape over countless fences, walls, and gardens in Haiti.
Mischievous, Twisting Beauty
Even before the earthquake pulverized the already crumbling city and crushed the living breath out of its people, and long before the cameras swooped in on the scene, the sporadic news out of Haiti was reliably grim. Reflecting the well-worn, though true, dictum that Haiti is a failed state, the stories again seemed to write themselves: dysfunctional government, urban blight, environmental degradation, unrivaled rates of illiteracy, hunger, violence, disease. The tender but more shielded beauty of the place seemed to escape notice—and even when it did impress itself, the news rarely got out.
The immediate, most vivid image of Haiti’s beauty to me is the clusters of bougainvillea wrapping the facades and fences of houses like some kind of jubilant pink ivy. From their perches on stone walls, their outrageously bright flowers seem to wink at visitors and whisper that looks are deceiving. That beneath all the misery and sadness, there’s actually a tradition of pride, humor, and a lust for life that puzzles and enchants.
It is not easy to put a finger on what exactly makes Haiti a country that anyone would want to visit, return to, or let alone live in. But if you ask the people who do live there, it is a very special place. Haitians often refer to their homeland as Ayiti cherie—dear Haiti—as if it were an abandoned child left in their care by abusive parents. The dictators, demagogues, and military despots that have governed it in bad faith for decades invite the easy allegory. Still, that a people should speak so fondly of a place that, to an outsider’s eye, gives back so little lends new meaning to the phrase “love of the land.”
A boy looks at passersby near his makeshift home in Port-au-Prince, before the earthquake.
In the Haiti I saw, cynicism is rare, but a mischievous sense of self-deprecating irony is plentiful. It is born out of a tradition of hardship that has taught people to pat misery on the back and shake its hand for being a trustworthy companion. Ask a Haitian person how they’re doing, and you’re likely to hear a double entendre: “N’ap boule”—everything’s good—which literally means “we’re burning,” presumably because of the tropical climate there, but also due to an existence seared by an unceasing struggle for survival.
What I discovered during that summer in Haiti and when I went back a few months later—beyond the disheartening realities of life and the people’s openhearted acceptance of them—was something I was completely unprepared for. In spite of the vast differences between the geopolitical, ethnic, temporal, and spiritual coordinates of this tiny Caribbean country and those of my only slightly larger European homeland, incredibly—almost illicitly—I felt that I’d come home.
Parallel Lives
In the uncomfortable period of Bulgaria’s transition from socialism to democracy in the ’90s, many of us inhabited the same survivalist reality Haitians have faced for years: young men half-worked, half-loitered, selling contraband car radios and cell phone chargers out of makeshift stores; grandmothers bought inexpensive Maggi chicken bouillon cubes to season a pot of soup; jitney drivers fastened the rickety doors of their vehicles with bits of linen rope while standing passengers doubled over to avoid bumping heads into the low ceiling. I am just old enough to remember the darker era of breadlines and coupons, which was also the time of two hours on, two hours off for electricity, home-brewed alcohol, and special shipments of bananas and oranges (only for New Year’s).
These experiences were not only humbling but also laughable, and thus the inconveniences, insufficiencies, and improvisations of our daily lives gave us a whole new language: the vernacular of making do and doing without, a treasure trove of practical jokes that the whole country would share. Bulgaria’s first post-socialist late-night talk show host, Slavi Trifonov, built his early career partly on making people find humor in scrimping, at once lampooning and lauding their learned instincts to reuse the aluminum lids from jars of homemade preserve season after season or spend a day “at the beach” under the laundry lines on a sunny balcony.
Street art of startling high-precision brush strokes—as if poised to deliver a view of life unmuddled by the grind of getting by—adorns many a roadside painter’s corner.
In Haiti, as in Bulgaria, people alter, adjust, and adapt. In Cap Haitien, on the northern coast, the upkeep of horses is costly, so tour guides use petite donkeys to lead tourists up a winding dirt road to the top of the Citadelle Laferrière, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and a symbol of the country’s erstwhile independence. In Port-au-Prince, people without running water but who can afford to get it delivered store it in cisterns in their yards, where the sun warms it just enough for a nightly shower. And on the half-hour stifling flight between these two cities, the pilots of the low-flying charter planes compensate for the lack of air conditioning by opening the cockpit windows and cracking jokes with their passengers.
The long traditions of self-reliance in the former French colony and that of stern, necessary resourcefulness in the former socialist republic are both legacies of debased, nepotistic, tyrannical, and sometimes barbaric governance. But the nations forced to make resilience and inventiveness part of their collective characters could not be any more different, culturally as well as organizationally. Clearly Bulgaria’s economic and political transition cannot compare with Haiti’s unbroken agony. And yet, the two countries seem to travel on strangely parallel paths.
Courage, the thread that holds together the fabric of life in Haiti.
To embark on the path to political and economic liberation after decades of Cold War psycho-tyranny, Bulgaria needed an event no less cataclysmic than the fall of the Berlin Wall. More than 20 years later, it is still bumping along, unsteadily but determinedly, on the road to honest and progressive governance. Like a faint transcultural echo, the shattering of the ground in Haiti too may have begun extricating it from the morass of economic calamity and international obscurity. And so, to begin clearing its past of the wounds of brutish dictatorial regimes that robbed its coffers and set in motion a wheel of unending misery, Haiti just may have needed the clean slate afforded by the earthquake—however perverse that may sound—to start rebuilding its own ailing organism, brick by brick, dream by dream. Ironically, this extravagantly insensitive proposal is one of the oft-repeated clichés about Haiti after the earthquake, but when spoken in earnest and not with the glib ease of punditry, it is a cliché I hope will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I admit my instinct was to say no when two friends urged me to take a free trip to Israel my senior year of college. I had known for years that even as a half-Jew I qualified for Birthright, a program that uses a combination of funds from wealthy donors and the Israeli government to send young American Jews on a free trip to Israel. But I never thought I would actually go. Raised as a Unitarian Universalist by a Jewish father and lapsed-Catholic mother, I wasn’t sure that my self-prescribed brand of Judaism (Passover in spring, Yom Kippur in fall, little prayer in between) made me qualified to claim a trip to Israel as my “birthright.” And I was squeamish, to say the least, about Israel’s less-than-savory policies regarding the Palestinians. As I explained to my father, “I don’t really know if I agree with all of Israel’s … foreign relations.”
“I think you’ll find a lot of Israelis agree with you,” he said. “Look, not every American agrees with what the government is doing here, right?”
I tried again. “But I’m not … very observant.”
He shrugged. “Neither are they, for the most part.” I confirmed this with Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem, a guidebook to the 1980s Middle East that became my pre-trip primer on Israel. Friedman reported that Israelis tend to be more secular than American Jews, conceiving Judaism as a nationality besides a religion. “[The sense] in Israel,” Friedman writes, “[is that] the sky is Jewish, basketball is Jewish, the state is Jewish, and the airport is Jewish, so who needs to go to synagogue?”
Somewhat convinced, I signed up for Birthright. I pretended I would play reporter rather than pilgrim, picturing myself as a young, female Thomas Friedman who would jot dispassionate notes on the natives. Friedman, though objective in his coverage of Israel and its neighbors, is also Jewish, and, as it becomes clear in his book, viewed Israel as a possible prism through which to understand his own background. I wanted this too.
The much-feared test of my Jewishness came right at the beginning of my trip, when an Arkia flight attendant asked me for my Hebrew name at check-in. “I … I don’t have one,” I stammered.
She raised an eyebrow and asked softly, “And why is that?”
“Because … I didn’t make bat mitzvah,” I bumbled, unwittingly compounding my sin, as Hebrew names are given at birth. She scribbled something in Hebrew on a sticker and slapped it on my passport, then gestured me toward security. I stalked off, flushed and wondering if my passport now bore the Hebrew for “stupid goy.”
I was even more determined to “catch up” with the “real” Jews. During a stretch of insomnia somewhere over the Atlantic, I spent a few hours learning the alefbet from my friend Jordan. By the time we landed in Israel, I was sounding out written Hebrew left and right, decrypting words letter by letter to anyone who would listen. “Yi-teuh-zu-ah!” I read off a sign as we stumbled sleepily off our red-eye into the Israeli morning.
“Almost. Yetzi’ah,” said Jordan, smiling.
“Exit.”
“Good!”
Our big orange tour bus was waiting for us at Ben Gurion Airport. We met our guide, Saar, a towering, camel-faced man who sported a full beard and a gnarled ponytail of dreadlocks. The Birthright itinerary wastes no time — our bus whisked us from the airport straight to Jerusalem for a day of touring. On the bus ride, I asked my friend Joelle to teach me the Hebrew numbers from one to ten. We didn’t have a pen or paper, so she taught me aloud, repeating the numbers again and again. Outside the windows, a brown land of pomelo and date trees faded into sparse desert and then finally gathered into a low ridge of hills concealing Jerusalem.
“Echad, shtayim, shalosh …” One, two, three … I frowned, not knowing how to say four in Hebrew. .
“Arba,” said Joelle, dozing against a window pane.
Just outside the city center, we stopped at an outlook to take pictures. Blocky white buildings crowded the misty hills. The black and gray shapes of squat domes and pointed arches dotted panorama of stone. In the distance, we could see the golden crown of the Temple Mount. It looked exactly like the pictures I had seen painted on plates at my father’s cousin’s house: biblical. It was the place to which all Jews vowed to return every Passover: “Next year in Jerusalem!”
Then we headed straight for the most sacred part of Jerusalem, the Old City. Its tiny quarters — 0.35 square miles — house five ethnic neighborhoods, a few shopping arcades peddling trinkets, countless archeological digs, and some of the holiest sites in monotheism. Inside its massive, 500-year-old walls, sand-colored arches frame the maze of alleys and stairwells that spill down Jerusalem’s steep face, funneling visitors from the modern to the ancient. Feral cats stalk courtyards. Arab merchants hawk T-shirts and pomegranates from tiny shops and stalls.
Saar led us between museums and falafel stands, stopping every 10 minutes to point out this historic tower or that holy monument, punctuating his words with wild gestures from his plate-size hands. “Yeh-ruh-sheh-lai-uhm,” I slowly whispered aloud, squinting at the inscription on a Roman-era frieze and realizing, with a tingle of pleasure, that I was reading the Hebrew word for Jerusalem.
Then we arrived at the Kotel, the Western Wall. The Kotel is all that remains of the Second Temple, the last Holy House where Jews worshipped together as a nation in the days of David. At 62 feet high, it towers above visiting pilgrims, but its 187-foot length is a mere fraction of its original span. The temple was built in 515 B.C. and stood for six centuries until the Romans destroyed it, save its western wall, in 70 A.D. This is why the Kotel is also known as the Wailing Wall: Jews are meant to bemoan the ruin of Judaism’s holiest place of worship. Ancient Jewish law decrees, in fact, that Jews should rend their clothing upon sight of the Wall.
Today, only the ultra-orthodox haredim wail and moan at the Kotel, but their long black skirts, hats, and suits go unrent. But ritual still dictates the movement of everyone who visits. The face of the wall is divided in two by a long fence — men go one way, women, the other. I stood at the entrance to the women’s side for a long time, staring at the scrap of paper on which I was supposed to write a prayer. Watching the tide of black-robed, plain-clothed, and long-skirted pilgrims ebb and swell around the foot of the wall, I couldn’t help but picture the millions of Jews who had bowed, sobbed, and prayed here, whispering prayers in the language still inscribed on the rocks at my feet. Some of those pilgrims, I realized, must have carried the very genes that had gone on to battle their way through pogroms and purges, escaping eastern Europe onto a boat carrying people to America, including my 14-year-old great-grandmother, who never saw her parents again, whose lineage was passed down to my grandmother, who passed it to my father, who passed it to me. They were once here. And now I had returned.
I wrote a prayer on my paper and folded it into a tiny square. I squeezed through the masses and reached the wall itself. The stones were huge, massive, each block as tall as I could reach. I slipped the prayer into a crack, a white speck joining thousands, then touched my fingers to the wall and kissed it, as one kisses a prayer book after touching it to the Torah. I stood for a long time. Then I walked away backward, as one must, keeping my eyes on the Kotel for as long as I could.
I am an atheist. But here, I prayed.
Chelsea Rudman Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.
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Undulating, moss-covered lava fields and grey skies surrounded me on the drive from Keflavik Airport to downtown Reykjavík, dubbed “101” or “the 101” by local hipsters. Speeding eastward along Route 41, I could see Faxaflói Bay spread out on my left and on my right; off in the far distance, sat the remnants of the former United States Air Force base. The surrounding landscape has been favorably compared to the surface of the moon, although I could not imagine the lunar surface looking so inviting. Navigating through the narrow streets of Reykjavík proved easier than I had anticipated, and after locating my small hotel on the western edge of the city, I checked in, refreshed myself, then left on foot for Laugavegur, Reykjavík’s commercial nerve center. It was barely eight in the morning.
Until its economy imploded in the early weeks of October 2008, Iceland had been for me, as it was for many of my contemporaries, best known as the home of a famous chess match, a U.S.-USSR summit that didn’t go so well in the 1980s, and a few quirky musicians. So it was a shock to discover that not only had the global financial tsunami lapped at the shores of remote, mysterious Iceland, but that the whole thing had nearly gone down in the span of a weekend. Who knew Iceland had such weapons of financial mass destruction? And who knew that it would end up turning these on itself?
Nearly a year after Iceland had almost fallen apart, I decided to visit Reykjavík to see for myself how Icelanders were faring. For the natives, rebuilding meant painful economic restructuring conducted under the glare of the international spotlight — and the attention was not always welcome nor, for that matter, kind. To me, Iceland’s collapse evoked pity and fear, as in it I saw reflected the fearful outcomes that might have struck my own fortunes had the U.S. economy not been so robustly buttressed.
A journey to Iceland, therefore, would be a touristic form of catharsis, an attempt to purge the unease of living in an economically unsafe world with a reassurance that if the Icelanders could keep themselves afloat, then there was hope for the rest of us. Call it a “recession vacation” or “vulture tourism”; either way, I wanted a front-row seat to one of the preeminent stories of the young millennium: a Western European democracy attempting to recover from total financial apocalypse and save itself from becoming the go-to punch line for the Great Global Financial Crisis of 2008.
The lay of the land
That first morning, I strolled through Austurvöllur, the public square facing the parliament building and the site of frequent protests, though on this morning the only signs of discontent were a row of placards planted along the edge of the sidewalk. No one else was around at the time, suggesting that whichever protest these signs had garnished had either taken a recess or was in preparation mode for later in the day. Though they were written in Icelandic, the boldface type, exclamation points, and earnest handwriting implied a manifest objection to the current state of affairs — though it seemed the height of Icelandic politeness that these signs, clearly left overnight, had stood at the edge of the square unmolested. Although it was only a few weeks past midsummer day, I felt the need to bundle up under fleece and winter coat, and thought perhaps I was being overcautious by allowing the “ice” in Iceland to convince me I had walked into a nation-size refrigerator.
In good time I navigated my way to Bankastraeti, and, as I had anticipated, the banks of Bankastraeti had been emptied — both literally and figuratively. The ghosts of decimated balanced sheets and lost savings accounts of nationals and foreigners were eerily called to mind by the residue of signage that had been haphazardly removed yet still lingered in faint sun-bleached traces on walls and windows. If trauma can be said to leave traces of heightened emotion in the places where such tragedies occurred, then Bankastraeti oozed the psychic residue of intense suffering and made me shudder. It felt unclean and unsafe.
After a short distance, Bankastraeti morphed into Laugavegur. The cityscape, such as it was, rose gently up a hill, but upon reaching the main drag, I found Laugavegur and its side streets littered with broken bottles, garbage, and puddles of multicolored liquid drying in the cool morning, as if a cyclone had ripped through the world’s largest liquor and vomit store and dumped the refuse across central Reykjavík. More ominous, however, were the shop windows. Although it was clear that the stores and boutiques were in business, filled with merchandise and accepting all major credit cards, almost every one of them had displayed somewhere on the glass the word útsala. Sale. Clothes, souvenirs, sunglasses, books, bicycles, even Dolce & Gabbana were discounted at 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent off. Deserted art galleries were another common feature, most of them depressingly emptied and abandoned, while others, barely operational, had unpurchased wares clearly visible through somber windows.
In the mercantile mise-en-scène of Lagevular, I could perceive a palimpsest of Iceland’s mercurial rise and fall. The functional if not entirely imaginative architecture of the row of shops betrayed a recent past life as a thriving yet quaint high street. Then, when the good times and good money rolled in, these storefronts were swiftly appropriated for high fashion, big-ticket luxury consumer goods, piled Gucci-high and Prada-deep. Yet with all these trappings, it was still easy to determine that these establishments had not been originally fashioned for fashion; the interiors were too plain, too dull. What I observed that morning was the third and saddest phase: the fire-sale panic of desperation, útsala signs superscripted over these august labels like diacritical marks of economic depression.
To get a better look at the city, I made my way up to the majestic Hallgrimskirkja, the Lutheran church that commanded an impressive view over all of Reykjavík. Its massive front, built to resemble pillars of columnar basalt, was unfortunately obscured by scaffolding, providing an unflattering backdrop for the majestic statue of Leif Erikson perched out front. Seen from the top of Hallgrimskirkja, Reykjavík in the Saturday morning sun lacked the gravitas one would naturally expect from a world capital. Suspended, as it were, both geologically and symbolically betwixt America and Europe, it lacked both the Old World weltanschauung of London or Paris and the New World, nouveau riche glitz of New York City. It was clear, however, that from its most recent financial gambit, Iceland was struggling to become a significant something — if not a mirror of its peers, then a distinctive North Atlantic equivalent — and this desire for that distinctive something-ness could be seen in the manic architectural eruptions on its fringes, mainly in the suburbs and along the waterfront in the form of glass and steel monoliths and Scandinavian-inspired high-rises.
Yet a collateral benefit of Iceland’s quest for something-ness has been Reykjavík’s transformation into a multicultural metropolis. With a population of nearly 120,000 (over 200,000 with suburbs included), greater Reykjavík accounts for nearly two-thirds of Iceland’s population of 320,000, 7.4 percent of which are foreign citizens. The majority of these are Central and Eastern Europeans. However, a substantial portion of this figure is made up of Africans and Asians. Up until the crisis hit, Iceland’s surging economy had necessitated the rapid importation of mass labor, mostly for the construction and service sectors. In 2000, the foreign population of Iceland numbered only 7,271, mostly in Reykjavík. By 2007, however, the boom was heating up, and 18,563 foreigners were living and working in Iceland. By the end of 2008, the year the banks crashed and the economy soured, the immigrant population stood at 23,421.
In absolute terms, 23,421 might not seem so significant. For Reykjavík, however, the sudden introduction of outsiders was not so much culture shock as culture electrocution. This sudden, rapid influx of foreigners propelled suburban expansion in Reykjavík (“do not shoplift” signs around the city are written in six languages, including Polish and Vietnamese). It also led to a serendipitous collateral industry: foreign restaurants. Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, and even Nepalese restaurants dot the city and draw brisk business.
Saturday night runtur
Upon leaving Hallgrimskirkja, I heard a low rumbling accompanied by a loud hiss and the sound of breaking glass coming from below. I scrambled around a corner only to be nearly run over by a convoy of massive street-sweeping trucks. These large, cubical creatures slowly grazed on the filth lining the roads, scrubbing away the glass, trash, and puke with gigantic rotating brushes and sprays of pressurized water. In mere minutes, all traces of the mess were gone, and the beasts lumbered on to filthier pastures. Standing in the midst of what had only moments before been a trash heap, I was astounded that such chaos could be so smoothly transformed into order.
The disarray I had witnessed was not in fact the result of Iceland’s transformation into a dystopian trash heap, but rather the leftovers from the previous night’s runtur, the world’s most amicable kegger. On Friday and Saturday nights, a drinking ritual is reenacted, where Icelanders shed their northerly reticence, drive in circles, and — especially in the case of Reykjavíkians — drink themselves into a state of friendliness. Whether on the streets or in the bars, when Icelanders get excessively drunk, they don’t get mean; they get nice.
Eager to join in the festivities, I spent the rest of the day in low-energy pursuits, mainly museums and people-watching. Austurvöllur was crowded with locals and tourists, and the only indicator of disquiet was a lone protester standing in front of the parliament building. Surrounded by his poster and banging a gong, the white-haired man spent the afternoon howling invectives into a megaphone. Meanwhile, nearby throngs of Icelanders relaxed, sunbathed, and took advantage of the free Wi-Fi in the square, hardly noticing the man with the gong.
Later that night, I engaged Icelandic culture on its own alcohol-fueled terms. Returning to Laugavegur, I found the streets transformed into a spontaneous celebration and packed with revelers. Well-dressed adolescents with Hoxton fins and popped collars comingled with larger, older, more tastefully clad folk walking, driving, staggering, and occasionally singing their way across the city. I found myself greeted and smiled at by random strangers, tipsy teens apologized sincerely for accidentally bumping into me, and scores of 20-somethings honked and waved at me from their cars. The streets, especially Laugavegur, were choked with cars which were in turn choked with smiling occupants. Revelry, merriment, and politeness were in fluid abundance under the fuchsia glow of a sun that refused to dip too far below the horizon. If there were any harsh financial difficulties being suffered by those present, I could sense none of it amongst the runtur revelers that night, at least as long as the beer and brennavin (the local caraway-flavored schnapps) flowed, nor did it seem appropriate that night to spoil everyone’s pleasure by asking about unpleasant topics.
Instead, I literally went with the flow, in this case the flow of people, cars, and drink, which swept me down Laugavegur, up Hverfisgötu, and all through the backstreets and alleys, from bar to bar and club to club. I philosophized with strangers (in English, of course) and at one point observed two rowdy drunks being counseled to calm down by the police — and their complying without complaint. As I sat in the back of a gay bar at 4:00 a.m., umpteenth drink in hand, rockabilly band playing American hits, and women in scarves and poodle skirts dancing the night away, I was overwhelmed with an inexplicable sense of optimism.
As the hours passed and the midnight sun gave the sky a rose-tinted hue (although this could have easily been the effect of my bloodshot eyes), the litter accumulated, glass bottles were broken on sidewalks and in gutters, and puddles of puke blossomed anew on the pavement like wildflowers after an 80-proof rainstorm. This time, however, I wasn’t so worried as I was earlier that day. Perhaps it was too much of a leap to see in the runtur a metaphor of Iceland’s attitude about weathering its own grim economic forecast. That is, despite the hardships of the present, maybe all the driving in circles, drinking, and wild abandon would eventually get fixed somehow and by someone else, preferably whilst everyone was asleep. Then again, maybe this time the hangover of financial runtur might not be so easily sprayed clean by the even-handed application of state resources as Reykjavík’s streets were every weekend morning. Still, it was a comforting thought, as I made my way in the general direction of my hotel, that someone else was going to clean up this mess.
When financial hardship is not enough, add humiliation
The facts of Iceland’s economic collapse, like Sunday morning in Reykjavík, are startlingly bright, hard to ignore, and well known to everyone. The triumvirate — some would say the bankocracy — of Landsbanki, Glitnir, and Kauphthing banks had gambled big and lost bigger, the ratio of debt to the gross domestic product (GDP) being the neighborhood of around €50 billion to €8.5 billion. The nationalization of these institutions set off a chain of events resulting in austerity measures, political unrest, gallows humor, and the mass spontaneous combustions of Land Rovers by owners who preferred to destroy their vehicles and collect the insurance rather than be forced to pay them off. Unemployment, which had been 1 percent in 2007, had risen to 9.1 percent by February 2009 before settling to 7.2 percent the following October. The GDP sank 3.3 percent in the first three quarters of 2009.
And then there were the humiliations. As a price for breaching global financial decorum and actually falling apart, Iceland would suffer the shame of the public stockade. U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling famously invoked an antiterrorism law in order to protect the funds of British citizens who had deposited money in Iceland banks. At the news that the International Money Fund (IMF) had agreed to provide funds to stabilize the Icelandic economy, a mob of angry protesters assembled in front of the Althing, Iceland’s parliament building, demanding Prime Minister Geir Haarde’s resignation. President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson created a mild diplomatic stir when, in an attempt at self-effacing obsequiousness, he offered the Russians use of the abandoned U.S. airbase at Keflavik, apparently in exchange for a helper loan. (The offer was politely declined.) Michael Lewis, writing for Vanity Fair, added to the feast-of-fools atmosphere by describing in comic-horror vignettes the testosterone-juiced ineptitude underpinning the risky financial machinations of Iceland’s banks, while Icelanders were portrayed as chauvinist, sexist, and entirely inept xenophobes.
Iceland as financial terrorist. Iceland as fourth-world country. Iceland as Russia’s toady. Iceland as a financial idiot playing with nuclear weapons and getting radiation burns. To these one might add one more characterization that surfaced in the press just as Iceland was well under water: the ever-so-embarrassing detail that a majority of Icelanders reportedly “[did not] deny the existence of elves”and that consequently major construction projects had to wait for certification that no elves would be harmed. Iceland as elf-believers. It seemed that — in the case of Iceland’s recent historical catastrophe, anyway — the first time for Iceland was both tragedy and farce.
These were not appealing narratives, particularly for a country that had been, until recently, the poster child for the transformative power of bold financial risk-taking. A nation of speculator-spenders, buoyed by yen swaps and ebullient optimism, had seen its worldwide profile rise so precipitously that when the end came as spectacularly as it did, there was nowhere to hide from the shame of it all — the end came on too fast. The Reykjavík daily newspaper, Morgunblađiđ, reported that 50 percent of Icelanders aged 18 to 24 were considering leaving for good, no doubt to avoid the shame of living in a state with such clumsy bankers and politicians.
The “Library of Water”: the cure for tourist guilt
There was one other form of humiliation laid over the bad figures and the bad press afflicting Iceland: a spike in tourism, the ironic upside of having one’s currency devalued so viciously. Tourist shilling is a special form of humiliation, one that compresses economic necessity and local hospitality customs with the need to “perform” one’s self and one’s identity for the entertainment and edification of eager outsiders. Tourism certainly brings in the foreign capital, but at times the cost to one’s self-esteem can be as devastating as the financial meltdown itself, and in Iceland’s case, the 2009 tourism numbers sped upward almost as soon as news of the country’s collapse in October 2008, whereas Europe’s tourism industry declined across the board. It seemed that many like me had targeted Iceland for a recession vacation of their own.
Thus, over the next few days, I gingerly set forth to look for signs of economic recovery in ways I hoped would inflict the least embarrassment both for them and for me — call it tourist guilt. Unfortunately for my guilty conscience, my first stop turned out to be the most well-trodden of tourist haunts — the Golden Circle. Hovering over Reykjavík like a halo of geological wonders, the Golden Circle comprises an impressive array of natural and historical sites: the _ingvellir, the site of Iceland’s ancient parliament, founded in 930 A.D.; Gullfoss, a spectacular waterfall; and the Haukadalur Valley, home of Geysir, from which all geysers are named. The route took us past volcano craters both dormant and extinct, mirror-smooth lakes bursting with char, and a vast geological rupture that ran like a long, thin valley for miles. It was the Mid-Atlantic Ridge exposed to plain air, the meeting point of the American and European plates.
Over the next few days I spread out and covered more ground, the pangs of tourist guilt gently subsiding under the spell of Iceland’s brooding panoramas. I hitched a ride to Nesjavellir to see a geothermal plant, and later that day I caught a bus to Skógar and hiked up a segment of Sólheimajökull, an easily accessible arm of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier. Decked out with crampons and an ice ax, and avoiding crevasses and sinkholes, I made my way up several kilometers of aquamarine ice bespeckled with the ash and pebbles of a century-old eruption. Underneath the ice cap lurked Katla, a volcano that had last exploded in 1918 and whose threatened reawakening was a constant source of gossip and fearful speculation for the locals.
Along the way and at every stop, contrary to what I had heard about Icelanders’ legendary reticence, the locals I met and interacted with seemed willing enough to opine on the landscape, geology, local mythology, and crisis facing their country. The common refrains I heard were variations of familiar bromides about waiting things out and hoping for the best. Their responses brought to mind a house I saw near a mountainside on the trip back from the Golden Circle, a small, bright green summer cottage that happened to be completely surrounded by boulders the size of baby brontosauruses. Having been built so near a mountain ridge on an island prone to earthquakes, the builder was just asking for trouble; and yet when the big one hit, the house was miraculous spared. There was bold fatalism in that house, similar to the shrug that I saw Icelanders interject as they reflected on their economic travails.
On my last extended day trip, I met the chattiest Icelander, Magnús. I was set on visiting the seaside town of Stykkishólmer, resting on the southern edge of the Breiðafjörður fjord on Iceland’s west coast and apparently home to the best runtur in Iceland. My intention was to pay a visit to a particular art installation titled “Vatnasafn” (“Library of Water”) by the American artist Roni Horn, which consisted of water samples taken from various natural sources — mostly glaciers — from across Iceland and placed into tall, clear, pillar-like cylinders.
Magnús, my driver, spoke without ceasing, digressing with authority on biology, geology, architecture, and Icelandic history and mythology. He expounded on the sagas and showed me a path allegedly worn into the solid lava of Berserkjahraun by two feuding Vikings. At another point he stopped the car and asked me to listen to the landscape with him. Though it was an odd request, especially coming from someone who spoke so much, I indulged him, and for a few choice minutes together we stood at the side of the road, the sound of wind rushing down steep hillsides.
Back in the car he asked, “Would you like to try hákarl?”
For the uninitiated, hákarl is the preserved flesh of Greenland shark, famous for its nauseating smell and taste which reportedly once made Gordon Ramsay throw up. Catching Greenland shark the traditional way involves hooking it, wrestling it into your sailing vessel, then severing its spine below the skull while avoiding having your own spine snapped by its hideous jaws. Since the flesh is saturated with uric acid (the better to survive cold North Atlantic waters), Greenland shark meat is sliced into large sections, buried for several weeks, then hung to dry — or, if you prefer, rot — for many months afterward. The resulting product is a spongy meat the color of alabaster, usually cut in cubes, reeking of violent death. I was game.
After reaching Bjarnahöfn, an out-of-the-way farm at the end of a long, unpaved driveway, I found ways to delay the inevitable tasting that would surely cause me intestinal distress: I admired the horses, breathed the fresh air, and speculated on the unusual tools I saw hanging on the wall outside one of the buildings. A few meters away I saw a trailer with a blue tarp, its edges held down by ropes. I observed a child approach the tarp and lift one of its corners, revealing the sliced corpse of a recently caught shark. The proprietor of the farm was a longtime hákarl maker from a long line of hákarl makers, although on that day he was away, so Magnús introduced me to the hákarl maker’s grandson, who proudly showed off a collection of hooks and curio memorabilia arranged in a makeshift museum. Weird stuffed animals stood sentinel over ancient fishhooks and yellowed photographs of unsmiling fishermen. A well-preserved fishing boat was propped up on one side of the museum-shed, surrounded by desiccated shark faces and other seafaring accoutrements.
Set out on a table, unassuming yet foreboding, was a container of hákarl, with no alcohol chaser within easy reach. Even from a distance the smell was overpowering, and I hesitated before impulsively taking the plunge, spearing a piece with a toothpick and popping it in my mouth. My strategy was to chew and swallow quickly, then run for the door to projectile vomit — it would be over in seconds. Surprisingly, I was not overcome, neither by fumes nor flavor. As I chewed warily, the aroma, texture, and mouthfeel reminded me of the kinds of dried fish I used to eat in Hawaii where I grew up, minus the queasy formaldehyde-like after burn, though when offered I gently refused a second taste. That I had bested Gordon Ramsay just once was enough of a victory for me.
Shortly thereafter we headed on to Stykkishólmer, Magnús’s hometown. I was dropped off near the harbor with instructions on when I’d be retrieved. Breiðafjörður, the bay upon which Stykkishólmer sits, contains thousands of islands of varying size and a diverse array of birds and sea life, and I would have been remiss not to go out for at least a few hours and explore. I caught a tour boat that took me around some of Breiðafjörður’s major islands, remote and forbidding, crammed with puffins, guillemots, gulls, and even an eagle. The islands were unruly masses of columnar basalt rising vertically (and sometimes horizontally) out of the depths of the sea so steeply that the boat could sidle within arm’s reach of a cliff without threat of running aground. The stone looked like so much rebar gathered, twisted and misshapen with scant tufts of greenery tossed in to enhance the island effect. I could understand the impulse to design Hallgrimskirkja after these formations, as the islands themselves exuded a cathedral-like solemnity (minus Hallgrimskirkja’s fascistic undertones). The empty homes of especially brave farmers were planted on select islets scattered in the bay, and I noted the sheep grazing away, oblivious to us and their precarious isolation.
Back at Stykkishólmer, I hiked up the tallest hill to get a view of the harbor and environs and to visit the former town library, which had been altered to be the home of Roni Horn’s “Vatnasafn.” As I walked in, I was invited to put surgical booties over my shoes so as not to disturb the rubber flooring laid down as part of the installation. I found the columns of water scattered throughout the open rooms, and on the floor were words, mostly in English, expressing different moods: happy, sad, indifferent. As the light shifted during the course of the day, different moods would be emphasized by the refracted light of the water. From one of the large bay windows I could see a fancifully designed white church made out of stylish, modernist gestures (I later learned that Magnús had taken part in its construction, although he was not a churchgoing man himself). In another I saw a two chairs and a table with a half-played chess game. It was quiet, sunny, and warm inside the artwork, a welcome respite from the cool summer air outside, and yet I wondered, as I left, what had happened to the real library that “Vatnasafn” had replaced.
On the drive back to Reykjavík, I drew up the courage to ask Magnús about his views of the economic distress. He knew things were bad, but living in Stykkishólmer, so far from the center of things, was both insulating and isolating, and he seemed content to let things work themselves out. As we drove through landscape dotted with volcano cones and craters, he mentioned the 1973 Eldfell eruption on the island of Heimaey. Faced with the loss of the harbor so crucial to the island’s economic survival, Iceland engineered a heroic rescue operation that involved pumping millions of gallons of seawater onto the advancing lava, cooling and diverting it. Despite the substantial destruction of property and a mass evacuation, the herculean effort succeeded in holding back the lava, and Heimaey was saved. And as if to add triumph upon triumph, the islanders managed to generate electricity and hot water from the residual volcanic heat and resurface the tiny local airport with the volcanic fallout.
Perhaps this is how Icelanders saw themselves and their relationship to the crisis looming before them. Hovering in the nether realms of the national sub-conscience, the Eldfell response showed how Icelanders could save property, prevent mass emigration, and turn destructive heat into productive energy through persistence, engineering, and a bit of luck. It was a tempting thesis, and I tried it out on Magnús. He shrugged the summer-cottage-in-the-boulder-field shrug.
The whales of July
On my final afternoon in Iceland I went whale-watching in Faxaflói Bay. As we chugged out of the harbor, I could see stark reminders of the building boom gone bust: half-built or empty buildings lining the shore. A sliver of an office tower, clad in floor-to-ceiling glass windows, stood imposing but hollow.
Although the puffins were unaccommodating that afternoon, the whales were abundant, and an especially frisky humpback emerged from the deep and whipped the tourists into a photo-taking frenzy. It spouted, flipped its tail several times, and approached so close to the boat that I could smell its fishy breath whenever it exhaled. Several minke whales later joined in.
On the return trip I befriended two women, an Icelander named Johanna and her co-worker, a Chinese exchange student. Both attended university and were taking the day off from their part-time hotel jobs. We spoke generally about the whales and the lack of puffins, then later compared digital pictures of the sea life.
I delicately brought up the subject of the economic crisis.
“It was crazy,” she began. “Too much money and not enough workers. Every high school student had a full-time job. Every day they would come home from classes and then start working.”
She said that even before the crisis it was the Icelandic way to graduate: incur debt buying homes and other luxuries, then spend a lifetime paying it all off. Generous government housing subsidies had set the stage for the madness that followed, and more easily available credit accelerated home-building and housing speculation ad absurdum. I asked her if she had felt the same compulsion to borrow and spend as her peers had, but she claimed she hadn’t.
“We’re probably going to join the EU,” she said with a sigh as we clung to the observation deck bars. “Things will probably get worse before they get better. But I’m not worried.”
“So you’re optimistic,” I suggested.
“Oh God, no,” she replied. “I’m moving to Vienna to live with my boyfriend. There aren’t any jobs here.”
I prepared as I would for any other overnight at a cemetery in the middle of January—by pulling on three layers of clothing and making sure I had all the essentials. The essentials for this stakeout were a camera, a notepad, pencil, a hot cup of tea, and Edgar Allan Poe.
With his complete works secure as an application in my iPhone, I pulled on my black knit hat and heard a tapping. I spun around to find my husband giving me the pressing nod that all husbands give to their wives as a nonverbal cue to hurry up. I looked at the time and panicked. It was 11:36 p.m., and time to go.
The hotel clerk called us a taxi, but after waiting twelve minutes we took off sprinting through the streets of downtown Baltimore. We had flown in from Chicago just for this night and wanted to make it to our destination before midnight.
Cynthia Pelayo writes a note to Edgar Allan Poe before leaving her own tribute at his grave.
As we turned down Fayette Street, it was no surprise that a crowd of about 50 people had formed outside the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in front of both sets of tall, black gates. We caught our breaths and checked the time. We had made it. In a few minutes, this crowd of strangers, who had traveled from all over the United States, would mark Poe’s 201st birthday.
Some people greeted us with smiles or nods, others with the question on all our minds: “Do you think we’ll see him?”
“Him” being the Poe Toaster, the mysterious black-clad figure who has appeared at Poe’s grave every year for the past sixty-one years. First documented in 1949, the Poe Toaster raises a toast of cognac and leaves behind three long-stemmed red roses at the author’s grave. One rose is presumably for Poe, the second for his wife, Virginia Poe, and the third for his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. To date, the Poe Toaster’s identity has remained secret, making him—or her—one of America’s true mysteries.
Poe himself loved a good mystery. He is credited with writing the first detective story, starring his curious investigator C. Auguste Dupin. Yet even a master detective like Dupin couldn’t unravel the circumstances surrounding the cause of Poe’s death, which remain unsolved to this day. Speculations have come and gone as to how he wound up delirious in a Baltimore gutter, only to later die. He was then buried to no fanfare in an unmarked grave in a family plot at the rear of the cemetery. Eventually he was moved to the other side of the cemetery to rest beside his wife and mother-in-law beneath a white monument engraved with his image.
A headstone engraved with a raven and an epitaph that reads “Quoth the Raven. ‘Nevermore’” marks his original burial spot. And it is here that the Toaster prefers to leave a tribute, and near which I stationed myself for the night.
With my gloved hands gripping the black bars and my face pressed close to the cold metal, I refrained from participating in any graveyard chatter. I didn’t want to risk missing the Toaster.
Poe had reached out to me with “Annabel Lee” when I was an angst-ridden preteen convinced that no one understood my sorrow. Later, “The Raven,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” would inspire me to become a mystery writer.
I came here this evening to thank him, my guide and my mentor.
At 12:20 a.m. a girl screamed, “I see someone!” She pointed out over the cemetery, her face tinged with awe and fear. I looked in the direction of her finger and saw a silhouette. The shadow of a man crept across the tombstones and vaults and then disappeared. Then suddenly, shouts erupted as we saw the flip of a man’s cape. I screamed for my husband, who had gone off to take pictures. He rushed to my side and shook my arm in congratulations. “You saw him, honey!”
I was completely thrilled. We waited for Jeff Jerome, the curator of the Poe House and Museum, to appear at the gate to ceremoniously present the three roses and bottle of cognac as proof. When he did walk out at 12:43 a.m., he only waved before returning to the church where he kept watch on the burial grounds. My heart sank. Whatever we saw, it wasn’t the Poe Toaster.
The celebrations resumed, because it was, after all, a birthday party, with a group reading of “The Raven.”
After a few hours the group dwindled to around 30 diehards. Paranoia set in as our eyes played tricks on us. At one point a gentlemen shouted, “I believe the Poe Toaster is one among us!”
He even pointed at me, perhaps because I had been mostly quiet.
There has never been any definitive evidence left by the Toaster to reveal his or her identity. All we know is that the original Poe Toaster left a note in 1993 stating that the “torch” had been passed. Later, another note indicated that the role was passed on to a son after the older Toaster died.
As the group grew impatient, we decided to sing “Happy Birthday” to Poe to help lure the Toaster out. Our chorus rang through the moss-covered graves, and the final note brought a charge of electricity. A young man cracked open the Poe book and announced he was going to read his favorite Poe poem, “A Dream Within a Dream,” written in 1849, the year of Poe’s death. The poem was fitting for such a moment; right then we all could easily have said, “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
As it neared 5 a.m., I felt a growing pang of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. The latest that the Poe Toaster had ever left the tribute was at 5:30 a.m. in 1990. Was he—or she—running late? Was it even possible that the Poe Toaster would run late for such an important event? The idea of a no-show had never seemed possible to me.
Cynthia Pelayo’s tribute of three red roses and a bottle of cognac is left at Poe’s grave.
At 5:35 a.m., Jerome and his fellow watchers approached the gate slowly, their faces solemn.
“He didn’t show,” Jerome announced.
“What happened?” I asked.
As Jerome padlocked the gates, he shrugged and smiled again, his grey mustache moving with his words. “I don’t know. The guy could have the flu.”
They left, and before long, we decided to call it a night. At Poe’s grave I decided to read my favorite poem, “The Bells,” which was published posthumously. Reading as loudly and clearly as I could, I hoped that wherever the Toaster was, he would hear and finally pay his tribute.
“Oh the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells.”
In one final show of desperation, I pressed my face to the gate and shouted, “Please Poe Toaster! I promise I will not reveal your identity if you come out now.”
There was silence.
Shakily, I said, “You have to come. It’s his birthday.”
Tears flowed down my cheeks, and I couldn’t believe that for the first time in his history the Toaster failed to arrive. I thought of Poe’s death and how he was not initially praised for his writing but was mocked as an alcoholic and buried without any salute. I did not want Poe to think we, like the Toaster, had forgotten.
Later that morning, after feeling as if I’d been stood up for the prom, I realized I needed to stop at a liquor store and a flower shop.
With three red roses in hand and a bottle of cognac, my husband and I returned to Poe’s grave, anticipating it’d be already covered by people from all over the world. But there was nothing.
I wrote a note, opened the cognac, and took a long swig before pouring some over the moist dirt. Then I set the roses and note on the tombstone. I had come here to witness the Poe Toaster, and in a Poe-like plot twist, became one.
The massacres of 386 Palestinians in two Gaza Strip towns—Rafah and Khan Younis—by Israeli soldiers in 1956 have not left much of an imprint on history. At the time, the media was preoccupied with the Suez Crisis, and as a character in Joe Sacco’s new graphic novel Footnotes in Gaza laments, Gaza is a place “where the ink never dries” before the next calamity happens. Footnotes is Sacco’s impassioned attempt to set the historical record straight, to make the massacres more than a footnote.
“History can do without its footnotes,” he says. “Footnotes are inessential at best; at worst they trip up the greater narrative.”
Sacco himself only learned of the massacres from a brief mention in The Fateful Triangle, Noam Chomsky’s indictment of America’s pro-Israeli policies that was published in 1983. In 2003, he returned to Gaza—where he had previously traveled on assignment for Harper’s during the second intifada—to investigate the killings. Footnotes draws from his interviews with witnesses and survivors, examinations of Israeli archives, news stories, and United Nations photos.
Like Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Ed Piskor (Macedonia), Sacco is a master of what could best be described as “graphic journalism,” his two previous books—the award-winning Palestine and Safe Area Goražde—also using the form. In Footnotes, he alternates images of Gaza in the 1950s with images from present-day Gaza. One drawing, for example, shows neat rows of houses that made up a refugee camp in 1956; that is contrasted with an image of the same camp today, rocks holding down shabbily built roofs, a sea of satellite dishes on top of them. Similarly, when Sacco’s Gaza subjects tell their stories, images of them in the 1950s are juxtaposed with images of them now, their faces showing the toll of a hard life.
Sacco’s method has a tremendously compelling quality, in that his juxtaposing technique evokes a sense of what might have been, as readers grapple with the subjectivity of each storyteller’s memory. In one scene, Gazans debate over when exactly a family member died and was buried. Their memories are eroded from the passage of time—and from pain. The technique also evokes a sense of continuity, weaving together the past and present, and demonstrating the inexhaustible nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As if to demonstrate just how intertwined the past and present are in Palestine, Sacco touches on the death of Rachel Corrie, an American activist who was run over by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer while she protested the demolition of a house in Rafah in 2003. On the same day that Corrie was killed, Ahmed El-Najjar, a Rafah resident, was shot by Israeli forces in the head, chest, and leg, reportedly while standing in his own doorway. As Corrie’s body lies in the morgue, surrounded by the flashes of photojournalists’ cameras, El-Najjar is left alone by the media, tended to by only his family. “The killing of a Palestinian in Gaza is a routine occurrence,” Sacco observes. “His loss will cause not a ripple outside of his immediate circle of family, friends, and neighbors.” In one chilling image on one page, Sacco expresses the book’s message: death and destruction are so commonplace in Gaza that the details become simply footnotes, existing only in the memories of Gaza’s residents.
If one aspect of Sacco’s work must be criticized, it might be his apparent inability to leave anything out. Footnotes in Gaza is 432 pages thick (compared to Palestine, which comes in at only 288 much narrower pages) and, at times, feels cluttered. Fortunately, it’s split into sections and can easily be read piecemeal once the reader passes the introduction.
Footnotes does not provide a broad history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor does it answer any of its big questions. And though it is not a sequel to Palestine, those without much knowledge of the intricacies of Israel’s and Palestine’s histories would do well to go back and read Palestine first. But Footnotes provides an intimate look into the lives of ordinary Palestinians whose memories of 50 years of conflict are permanently ingrained into their outlook on life. It is one man’s take on the reality of Gaza, brought to vivid life by his unique brand of comic art.
As I get ready for work, I finger a row of books on the shelf, tickling the spines of favorite titles, like John Updike’s Brazil and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, until I reach a tiny volume. My fingers rest upon the broken and bent spine of Allan Hibbard’s Paul Bowles, Magic, and Morocco, and I’m transported to the day when I stumbled upon it in a bookstore, lead to it by kismet, in search of some biography, some nonfiction work I never found. Then I remember the days I spent reading it, shaded by an orange tree in the hot Meknassi sun four Augusts ago. I remember those first days more clearly than any that succeeded them: sitting coyly at one of the two outdoor tables at Coin de Feu, attempting to flirt with the waiter, watching Japanese tourists — who always seemed to find this tucked-away treasure of a café — from behind my sunglasses, and sipping on mint teas and cappuccinos. The café was surrounded by flourishing orange trees, and occasionally, an orange would fall to the ground with a thud, only to be picked up or kicked like a soccer ball by a passing child. I would watch the child as curiously as he watched me, my sunglasses the only thing preventing a full-on staring contest.
Though that time four years ago wasn’t my first time in Meknes, Morocco, it was my first time there alone, having just moved my life across the ocean in one giant suitcase and a hiking pack. I remember the smells of that first summer and fall, my solo trip to Chefchaouen, where I was harassed — not because of my gender, but because of a presumption that I wanted to buy some hash — and got food poisoning on the eve of Ramadan. I remember the scent of the crisp air and how I didn’t want to leave the small town, in all its isolated beauty. I remember shopping for a night table on a very hot October afternoon, the smell of its Atlas cedar mixing with diesel and sewage as we rode the truck back to my apartment. I was so proud to have navigated the furniture souk by myself and bargained the price of that handmade cedar table down to the equivalent of $25.
But no memories of my two years in Meknes are as clear as that first August four years ago. On my first day, I bought some potatoes, some fruit, two Casablanca beers, milk, butter, cereal, and a pack of Marlboro Lights. I attempted to make mashed potatoes for dinner, failed miserably, and cried a little while I smoked a cigarette in my kitchen. Then, realizing the sheer madness of crying over potatoes, I hoisted myself up onto the kitchen counter, looked out the window toward the sky, and all of a sudden it hit me — where I was, what I was doing, and the fact that I’d be doing it for at least another year. I smiled, suddenly feeling freer than I ever had before. I took photos that first night, of the sunset, of myself sitting on the floor against my futon, walls bare, suitcase not yet unpacked.
I was barely twenty-three and still amazed by everything around me. I hadn’t yet experienced the frustration of Morocco. I hadn’t yet been pinned up against a truck on my way home from work at night, saved only by my trusty neighborhood car guardian, the eyes and ears of my block. I hadn’t yet had gut-wrenching food poisoning, or the giardiasis that hit two months later, wrecking my insides and knocking 30 pounds off my already lithe frame. I hadn’t begun to feel cheated or ripped off for my foreignness, despite earning a local salary. I didn’t, at that point, feel the pain of leaving things behind.
The week before I left Meknes is a blur. Packing, 100-degree summer heat, and tears — everything happened so quickly, and I was ready to just get the hell out that I don’t think I took the time to savor everything I loved. I was tied down by obligatory good-bye lunches and teas during those last few days, so I didn’t have time to walk the 1,000 or so paces down my favorite street and back. I didn’t get to walk up Rue des FAR, down Ave. Mohammed VI, past the conservatory, where I’d strain my ears for sounds of the violin, then up Rue de Paris, where I’d buy a marrakshia and an espresso and sit amongst lecherous men watching football, hiding behind my sunglasses as I’d learned to do in that first week. I’d sit for hours in the same café, watching teenagers strut up and down the tiny, almost provincial, pedestrian lane, the girls dressed up for each other and the boys doused in cologne, and wonder what I would have been like had I come of age there.
And yet certain vistas in my mind remain distinct; everyday places were now poignant memories to record vigilantly in case I never saw them again. Or perhaps in case things had changed so much that by the time I ever made it back, they’d be unrecognizable.
I remember my beloved Rue de Paris. When I first walked it in 2004, it seemed almost decrepit, but when I left three years later, the storefronts were filling with chic new local additions: Marwa, the clothing store where I bought my favorite fingerless gloves; Novelty, a piano bar, which was only novel to me because it was the only bar I could sit alone unharassed and where one could find draught beer. I miss the uneven sidewalks, the wilted potted plants, the ubiquitous cats. I miss the shouts of teenagers, the smell of apple shisha wafting past my nose, the homeless men on the corner, always grateful for even a penny.
I always knew I’d miss Marrakesh, and on some nights, I swear I can hear the adhan of Fez. But Meknes, ya Meknes, most of all, I miss you.
Glossary: Souk: The marketplace in a traditional Arab city. Car guardian: A man whose job it is to watch over the cars on a portion of street, help people park, and generally watch out for the neighborhood. Marrakshia: A sticky sweet Moroccan pastry common to the city of Meknes. Adhan: The Muslim call to prayer.
The protagonists of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel Up in the Air and Jonathan Miles’ 2008 book Dear American Airlines represent opposite ends of the air-travel spectrum. Consultant Ryan Bingham, the narrator of Kirn’s book, spends virtually his entire life in transit, professing to prefer the rhythms of travel to a more stationary existence, while translator Benjamin R. Ford of Dear American Airlines finds a once-in-a-lifetime family obligation a good reason to leave his Manhattan townhouse for the first time in decades. Still, both these characters reflect that, however ambivalent Americans may be toward air travel, it’s a privilege they take for granted and are loath to give up.
Up in the Air’s Bingham has just resigned from his job as a “career transition counselor,” called in to talk to employees who have just lost their jobs — an occupation he fell into because he “wasn’t strong,” though it’s not hard to imagine him returning to it in this current economic downturn. (A movie adaptation starring George Clooney as a noticeably older Bingham, this time tailed by a bright-eyed trainee who openly challenges his lifestyle, is scheduled for release later this month.)
Bingham’s primary means of entertainment during the near-constant traveling (so intense, he has even given up his apartment) comes from racking up miles on the fictional Great West Airlines in pursuit of the elusive one-million-mile mark. He’s idealized the moment down to where it ought to happen (over the Great Plains) and how he’ll celebrate (with a disposable camera and a copy of a story he wrote in college about his happy childhood).
Bingham sees himself as a citizen of “Airworld,” a largely anonymous, sanitized life in which recognizable chain restaurants represent open arms and every city is a series of ring roads, while simultaneously aware that his ardor for it is perhaps the most unique thing about him. As he faces the end of his traveling days, Kirn suggests he won’t be able to give up his highly mobile lifestyle by writing in a love interest (who, in a twist, was laid off by him on a previous trip) and dangling in front of him the prospect of working for a mysterious international conglomerate called MythTech, which Bingham believes is spying on him at various stops. While Kirn begins his book with the itinerary of Bingham’s last week, his destinations are unimportant; for Bingham, the cities are meaningless without the miles that will allow him to achieve his goal.
Bingham would never want to get in line for security behind Benjamin R. Ford, the narrator of Dear American Airlines, whose lengthy complaint forms the text of Miles’ debut novels. (Both narrators are writers, though Ford is largely a translator; Bingham’s book The Garage, which he discovers he unwittingly plagiarized from one of his counselees, is a vacuous management parable.) Unlike Bingham, Ford is not a frequent traveler, nor is he on the road on business. After receiving an invitation to his estranged daughter’s wedding in California, he decides to book a ticket based on a long-ago gibe he made to the girl’s mother about walking her down the aisle. (Both women are named Stella; since Ford formerly lived in New Orleans, inevitably he finds himself locked out of their shared house before his wife leaves him, yelling out her name before feeling properly foolish.)
Ford catalogs the indignities of his position — stranded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport — as if experiencing the well-known inconveniences of air travel for the first time: Each type of seating is uniquely uncomfortable; the best offer of a diversion is Sudoku; and the stores in the terminal don’t carry his brand of cigarette. As Ford periodically leaves the terminal for a smoke break, he believes that one particular guard has been singling him out for extra searches. For a middle-aged white man, such scrutiny is merely an irritant, but his predicament hints at the very real debate over racial profiling at security checkpoints.
As one of thousands stranded at O’Hare due to an undefined error, Ford is on the verge of not being able to fulfill his promise — “Dear American Airlines,” he writes, “since when did you start canceling flights in midair?” — but his request for a ticket refund blossoms under author Miles’ careful cultivation into an homage to a life well lived as well as a laundry list of regrets. In the final pages, he confesses that he was thinking of committing suicide at his destination, making his unexpected layover a Beckettian pause, not just a disturbing interruption. Like Bingham, Ford is on a quest, and he is never so insistent on his right to travel as when he believes that it is about to be taken away by the titular airline.
In believing himself alone in “Airworld,” Ryan Bingham errs; more Americans than ever took to the skies in the past 10 years thanks to discounted rates and the rise of new carriers to challenge the legacy airlines. But if the doomsayers are correct, Bingham’s way of life may become the stuff of fiction in a generation or two. Even though oil prices have fallen from last year’s highs, experts continue to predict the demise of affordable mass air travel.
In “Airworld,” it’s the Binghams, not the Fords, who fill most of its seats. Take away the road warriors — or make their journeys unnecessary with videoconference equipment and “greener” office policies — and the legacy carriers will be courting bankruptcy within a year. But the Fords, who choose to travel, will suffer the most as commercial flights become more expensive. In the closing pages of Dear American Airlines, Ford is finally headed to his destination, planning to make it if not to his daughter’s wedding, then to the reception. The obstacles to his journey have, if not exactly melted away, only served to convince him of its necessity.
By Buffy Charlet Photos by Buffy Charlet and Jenn Pflaumer
We knew only one thing: We needed to pack sleeping bags and rubber gloves. Jenn, my friend and farm coworker, and I were gearing up for our trip to Humboldt County.
It was the old “friend of a friend who knows a guy” scenario. Yes, that’s how we committed to working on a medical marijuana farm. We didn’t know specifically where we were going, what the work entailed, who we were going to be working for, where we would stay, or even how long we would be there. But somehow, from our comfortable couches in Los Angeles, the complete omission of specifics only heightened our anticipation of the adventure. All Jenn and I needed to hear was “$20 per hour cash” and “marijuana farm.” We were in.
Fresh-cut and de-leafed marijuana branches ready to go up to the trim tent. Jenn Pflaumer
We had been instructed by the Bossman to wait in a small town about 40 minutes away from our destination. He would meet us nearby and then escort us to the farm because there was “no way” we’d find it on our own. He was right.
During our hour or so of waiting for him, we were entertained by the sight of packs of dirty hippies. I say the term “dirty hippies” lovingly, as I spent the first seven years of my life in a hippie commune. But apparently in order to qualify as a dirty hippie in Humboldt, you must A) have a dog with a hemp rope tied around its neck, B) be barefoot, C) smell like BO, turmeric, and flightiness, D) ask for money, and E) style your hair with nail clippers and mud. A tension exists in Humboldt County’s new social strata, as the locals are repulsed by this ganja-reeking crowd but attracted by the money they spend.
Finally, we got the call from the Bossman. It was time to go to the farm.
We were instructed to meet him by the side of the highway, which seemed rather gangsta. We were excited and nervous, but mostly excited.
And then we saw him waiting for us, our Bossman — an energetic, bandana-wearing Southern boy with a slight Eau de Hippie.
How it all began
I’ve long had a fascination with marijuana. When I’m numb from hearing about health care, unemployment, foreclosures, and H1N1, I turn to the debate over legalizing medicinal marijuana for stimulation. The agri-counter-culture that is budding in California is at the very least interesting.
For those in an ethical struggle over the value of legalizing pot for medicinal purposes, try a more pragmatic angle: the United States would experience staggering economic benefits from its legalization. According to a National Public Radio report, each Southern California pharmacy contributes hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in state tax revenue. Then there’s the geopolitical bonus: Stateside-grown marijuana directly threatens the dominance of Mexican drug cartels.
In fact, according to CBS, “The shifting economics of the marijuana trade have broad implications for Mexico’s war against the drug cartels, suggesting that market forces, as much as law enforcement, can extract a heavy price from criminal organizations that have used the spectacular profits generated by pot sales to fuel the violence and corruption that plague the Mexican state.” Yeah, duh. Of course “market forces” can take a bite outta crime. Think Al Capone and the repeal of Prohibition.
And then there’s the social justice angle. Users — perhaps you and I — will no longer have to risk buying weed from the sketchy kid down the block. Instead, we can take our cash and our self-respect and purchase our sack from the local, taxed, state-regulated pharmacy. I’m thinking you’d rather go to a pharmacy instead of waiting for “Tyler” to text you back to let you know the “Red Head” has arrived. Do we really think that by keeping marijuana illegal it’s going to go away and that bunnies and unicorns will run free?
Grape ape. Buffy Charlet
I was once in a grow house up in Sonoma County, but it was literally that — a regular suburban house with its bedrooms converted into marijuana grow rooms. Each room had 30 6-foot-tall plants and an exceptional amount of lighting and fans. It was very impressive, very well contained, and definitely NOT “green” (as in carbon-neutral).
Because medicinal marijuana in California is an emerging industry, the laws are murky. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s website, “In California there is no state regulation or standard of the cultivation and/or distribution of medical marijuana. California leaves the establishment of any guidelines to local jurisdictions, which can widely vary.”
The laws are different in every county and every city. In Los Angeles County, each card-holding patient or “caregiver” (someone who grows marijuana for patients) can grow fewer than 10 plants. In Sonoma County, the maximum jumps to 30 plants. And in Humboldt County, a caregiver can grow up to 99 plants! Seems like encouragement to move from houseplants to farming. How much bud a caregiver or patient can carry at any one time also greatly varies per county. So as long as you’re following the specifications of your city and county for growing, you have nothing to worry about as far as the state’s law is concerned.
The thing you do have to worry about is getting robbed. It’s not the law that is the danger, but rather gun-slinging criminals. People associate growing marijuana with mountains of cash, which is a fairly accurate assumption. Grow houses are risky, as the smell alone, wafting from the house, is enough to give someone a clue. The blacked-out windows and the air-conditioning turned on full blast in January are additional clues. So if you’re considering starting your own grow house, do yourself a solid and get an off-site safe.
Anypuffpuff, speaking on the phone about the details of our trip wasn’t smart. Marijuana, medicinal or not, is still illegal federally, so Jenn and I could only assume the situation in Humboldt would be similar to the one I witnessed in Sonoma.
We had heard through the grapevine — from the friend of a friend who knew the guy, our soon-to-be Bossman — that our job description on the farm was to be “trimmers.” We were unsure of what being a trimmer entailed, but it sounded like something you might learn in home ec class.
In addition to our sleeping bags and rubber gloves, we also packed running shoes for daily jogs by the river; yoga mats for morning asanas; DVDs for movie nights in the cabin; bikinis for the possible Jacuzzi on premises; multiple purses, because really, you just never know; tweezers, just ’cause I’m in Humboldt doesn’t mean my brows have to go to hell; our computers for intermittent Internet distractions; and a plethora of different outfits. We were starting to think of this as our “Humboldt Vacation.” The marijuana gods were laughing.
But that’s the lifestyle we were expecting to live for two weeks while communing with nature and trimming some ganja. This is what actually happened …
Inside the trim tent. Jenn Pflaumer
The road to nowhere
After following our Bossman for 30 minutes up a winding, deserted mountain road, I not only started seeing our town outings evaporate, but I also began to see our faces on milk cartons.
We pulled up to the bottom of a very steep dirt road, and Bossman jumped out of his car.
“Okay ladies, some cars can make this road, and some cars can’t.” ’Nuff said. I’d like to be in a car that can, por favor.
It should be noted here that I have a Prius, which I now know is perhaps the world’s all-time worst off-roading car. It barely clears speed bumps, and Priuses are to steep hills what I am to corporate ladders — you’ll never see it climbing one.
Bossman continued. “So you should start way down there, at the bottom of the paved road [about 50 yards], and gun it. Then once you hit the dirt road, just keep pushing on that gas, and hopefully you’ll make it to the top.”
“Um, can I just park it down here?”
“No, ’cause during trimming season there’s lots of weirdos up here who will strip your car.” Flashing red light in brain…
I was in over my head. Why did I feel the need to add “marijuana trimmer” to my already ridiculous resume? But at this point, I was in too deep. We had just driven 11 hours from Los Angeles, and I was now depending on this money. The market showed its ugly face again. No turning back.
I told myself, “Okay, I’m cool. I’m cool. No worries. I can do this,” as I tried to ignore the image of my mom’s face when I’d tell her that I totaled my car by driving it up a dirt road to trim weed. I drove to the bottom of the hill, and at the last minute I yelled out the window, “Oh, what do I do when I get to the top? Go straight?”
“Oh no! You’ll go off the side of the mountain if you go straight! You gotta cut hard right.”
Good to know.
Jenn turned to me and, in the calmest manner possible, said, “How you feelin’?”
“Like I might barf and have diarrhea at the same time.”
You know those friends who are really good influences on you? The ones who really put your issues in check? That’s what Jenn is for me. I have a tendency to be neurotic and high-strung, but Jenn is calm … really calm. But at this moment, I needed Valium.
Port-o-potty and Prius. Jenn Pflaumer
So I gunned it. We barreled up the hill and I cut hard right, and then the Prius coughed and pooped her pants and stopped. I floored the gas pedal, but the wheels just spun and whined, and we went no further. Bossman ran up and told me to back down the hill (oh, piece of cake!) and that he would go get his truck and they would tow us up.
My level of anxiety shot through the roof, and my shirt was now covered in sweat. But I was trying so hard to be cool. At this point, I began to feel sentenced.
A few minutes later, he sped down the hill in a beat-up truck with Bossman No. 2. They jumped out and started tying a rope (which I could only imagine was made of hemp) to my bumper.
Jenn crouched down with them, coolly inspecting the situation and knot-tying, while I stood a few feet away with pee trickling down my leg. Then Bossman dropped this load: “So, we had a little land dispute and lost the cabin. But there’s space for you ladies to sleep outside.”
My brain immediately jumped to the weather forecast (watching the weather is part of my genetics) and the fact that it was going to drop to the 30s at night while we’d be there. A) I might’ve grown up in a commune, but I do NOT enjoy sleeping outside. And B) I live in L.A. and I get cold if it’s below 70 degrees. I was speechless.
Jenn, Queen of Calm, said, “Huh. Well, we didn’t bring a tent.”
Bossman No. 1 replied, “Oh, that’s okay. You can share with the guys.”
Suddenly, we were not going to have movie nights, town outings, and Jacuzzi Sauvignon Blanc-sipping; we were going to be sleeping outside in 30-degree temperatures with “the guys.” I imagined these guys were like the dirty, barefoot, grime-caked, BO-stinking hippies we’d seen in town. In my head, Mom’s face was replaced by my boyfriend’s, shoving my belongings into a box and dumping them on the sidewalk.
“Well, that about does it,” said Bossman No. 2 as he secured the rope. “I just hope it doesn’t rip off your bumper.”
Well, gosh, me too. I didn’t think Toyota Financial would recognize “bumper ripped off on marijuana trim adventure” under my warranty.
But I stuffed down all my good sense, and with paranoia burbling to the surface of my brain, I said, “Okay, let’s do this.”
And so we did it — we towed my citified car up a dirt roller coaster using a hemp rope. Miraculously, my bumper remained secure and I kept my lunch down.
The resin on our gloves after only two hours of work. Buffy Charlet
Down on the farm
The farm really was something beautiful to behold. Nestled amongst the redwoods, the land was pristine. The only man-made items on the property were a small trailer where Bossman No. 1 and his girlfriend slept (and cooked most of our food), a large tent for trimming the marijuana, two small sheds where the marijuana dries, and THE GARDEN! This Eden boasted 45 marijuana plants ranging in size from 2-foot-tall babies to bushes well over 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide. These were some impressive plants.
We were then introduced to our workspace — the tent — and there was no getting prepared for the sight. Not scary or grotesque or hilarious, just reeeaally strange. Seated around a long table were 10 latex-gloved, heavy-metal-listening dudes — “the guys.” The air was thick with pot smoke, pot pollen, and dust from the dirt floor. The table was piled high with marijuana branches to be trimmed, and there were several large chafing dishes filled with the completed product — trimmed buds. Beautiful, perfect, and pounds and pounds of them. But the most peculiar thing about the tent was the flat-screen TV at the end of the table.
Here was a place where no one got cell reception, where we only had a Port-O-Potty, where there was no refrigeration or even ice, and where we had to sleep outside, yet we had DirecTV and a flat screen.
Metallica blared on the speakers and a baseball game filled the screen. Jenn and I were suddenly very aware that we were two women from Los Angeles in a male environment that chose TV over refrigerating meat. When we were given the option to go work in the garden by ourselves or stay in the tent to trim, in one voice we opted to work in the garden.
That first day in the garden, we couldn’t stop laughing. It wasn’t the pot — it was either laugh or cry. We kept asking ourselves what had possessed us to put our lives on hold and drive 11 hours to do manual labor with a bunch of dudes and then sleep on the ground? What were we thinking? So we just kept laughing. And pulling leaves off marijuana plants.
That was our job in the garden — pulling the leaves off the mature plants that were ready to be harvested. Doesn’t that just sound like a sweet little painless chore? That’s what we initially thought too. We had grand visions of finishing the entire garden in two days. And then we began our first plant.
First of all, we had to wear latex gloves because the resin from the plants is so thick and so sticky, in a matter of minutes you are covered in the gummy tar, which is impossible to get off. Later we learned an interesting fact: The resin can be removed from the gloves and smoked as hashish. At that moment, though, this information was not a bonus.
Anyhigh, we had to wear latex gloves, long-sleeved shirts, and long pants to avoid becoming resin babies. What we thought might take a few minutes of leaf-pulling per plant actually took over an hour per plant. There were zillions of leaves, and we had to pull delicately so as not to rip off the bud. We were immediately daunted, and as the sun bore down, we had a notion of what it must be like to be a migrant field worker.
Once the sun dropped, we joined the guys to work in the trim tent. The dust from the floor mixed with the pot smoke (yes, the trimmers smoke pot the entire time they trim — but as anyone who’s worked in a coffee shop knows, the last thing you want is a cup of joe) mixed with the airborne debris from 12 people trimming plant matter causes a sinus horror show. I blew my nose, and actual pieces of bud flew out. Listen, potheads, this is not okay. The tent was a constant cacophony of sneezing, wheezing, nose-blowing, hacking, and spitting. It was there we learned the term “the Humboldt hack.”
Trimming the buds into perfect little sellable nuggets was more mind-numbing than the garden plants’ deleafing, thus the flat screen. It also caused our hands and back muscles to cramp.
My multitasking, iPhone app-fiddling, Twittering, emailing, blogging, texting brain started to short circuit. I began to have a panic attack reserved expressly for middle class white people. How in the world was I going to do this for over a week, 12 hours a day? All the while sharing a Port-O-Potty with 10 dudes? I was not only dirty and disgusting (already!) I was bored. Picking and trimming leaves all day and night? Really? The social injustice was primarily body odor, and it seemed hardly worth the financial reward.
This was the temper tantrum my brain threw for the next two days. Bossman must have sensed my panic, because he got everyone a hotel room to share. And by hotel room, I mean a $25-a-night cell with a goat in the yard, 45 minutes away, in which we crammed as many bodies as possible. But hey, it had hot water and a roof, so I was grateful. I felt as though I were on Survivor, only without a million-dollar grand prize for surviving.
Meditations on pot
I’m not sure what got me through those first couple of days. It was probably Jenn’s constant calmness. And the fact that I needed to make this money or else I wasn’t going to be able to pay rent. It was also the knowledge somewhere deep, deep down in my gut that I needed this experience. I needed to be ripped away from my electronics, my comforts, my routine, and my false sense of control.
On the evening of day two, I had this epiphany: The universe sentenced my ass to a marijuana farm, and I had to do my time. I had to chill out, relax, and let go. If I counted the seconds, they would only get longer. I had to commit and be in the moment here more than in any of my previous meditations.
On day three, I embraced my epiphany and the work and living conditions. It started to feel less like prison and more like a spiritual retreat. I was becoming unplugged from my own expectations. That’s when I began to be fully aware of the unique experience I was having.
I started to ask the guys questions. I was amazed to find that what I once thought to be a motley crew of potheads and metalheads was in fact a group of interesting human beings. One had been a monk for 17 years in Laos. There was a chef, a firefighter, an actor, a screenwriter, a musician, a sports TV project manager, and a dad. We all had a desire to fall off the grid, if even for a brief period, and to experience some of the last days of the Wild West. And to make some fast money…
This truly was the Wild West. Our bossmen were in the throes of a major land dispute over another piece of property on which they had 350 mature marijuana plants. A mature plant can yield anywhere from half a pound to 2.5 pounds of dried bud. A pound of dried bud can sell anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000. So we’re talking about a lot of money.
The daily news told stories of local robberies and even violence. We would hear gunshots in the distance. Target practice on squirrels? Possibly. More land disputes and more robberies? Very likely. Small planes would fly over our heads as we worked in the garden. Private joyriding? Perhaps. Scoping outdoor gardens? Maybe. This is big business, and it is largely unregulated.
We often mused about how once marijuana is legal on a federal level, it will be so regulated that working on a pot farm will no longer be a retreat of sorts for those of us who are wandering and could use $20-per-hour cash. We could eat, drink, and pretty much work when we wanted. We just kept track of our hours, on scraps of paper, through a perma-haze. But once it’s universally legal and regulated, there will be masses of real migrant workers who, being paid $8 an hour, will be required to produce a certain amount of pounds per hour. There will be no DirecTV, no free Coors Light, no joint being passed around the trim table, no constant chatter, no getting to know a monk from Laos, a chef, or a musician.
But this is how it’s done now. This moment of time presents a brief opportunity for an opportunistic few to make a considerable amount of money. Cash. And let’s be clear: This Wild West scene has been created by the law.
The ambiguity of the law is tough to navigate. Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, under which California voters approved the use of medicinal marijuana, is completely silent about transportation, distribution, and sales of marijuana. In 2004, SB 420 was passed, but it only focused on cultivation and possession.
Contradicting the very keystone of this debate is that while pharmaceutical prescription drugs are not taxed in California, medicinal marijuana is taxed. So medicinal marijuana is being treated more like alcohol and cigarettes under state law. This is just more evidence of the hazy laws and California’s own indecision of how it wants to treat marijuana. Like the citizens of Humboldt, the state likes the money it brings in but is having trouble with the stink.
The debate over pharmacies is likewise thick and convoluted. The laws themselves conflict and clarify little. In similar murky waters, the pharmacies and the patients who buy the bud are taxed, but the growers — the caregivers — are not taxed. Typically, a caregiver will sell his bud to a pharmacy (also called a “dispensary” or “collective” under state law) that will then sell it to the patients.
According to the California Attorney General’s elusive guidelines —
Well, isn’t that a fluffy mouthful? Let’s be real: Medicinal marijuana is a multibillion dollar business that could potentially help rescue us from a pulverized economy. The state of California stating that a pharmacy “might have to organize as some form of business to carry out its activities” is like refusing to admit your daughter is going to have sex at her senior prom.
Come on, give the girl a condom. Let’s look with eyes wide open at medicinal marijuana as the emerging, booming industry that it is. We need clear, concise laws to be mandated so that the grower, the transporter, the pharmacy, and the patient are at no risk for infringing on the law. And once we can do that, then maybe California — and the nation — can welcome another taxable business into the mainstream.
Who says size doesn’t matter? Jenn Pflaumer
The give and take
Jenn and I went to the farm with our own agenda. From Los Angeles to Humboldt, we carried with us plans and schedules — an itinerary of what we wanted to accomplish. Humboldt took our plans and bitch slapped them. On the marijuana farm, we weren’t so much seduced by the high of weed, but rather by the buzz of letting go and being in the moment.
On the eighth day of our stay, it became overcast and cold. The forecast called for rain — lots of rain. Jenn and I took this cue and realized it was time to return to L.A. After hugs and promises to stay in touch with our new “trim” family, we packed up our sleeping bags and resin rubber gloves. Then, reeking of ganja, we headed down that winding road. In the redwoods, on a farm up in Humboldt County, we left our agendas, our naïveté, and our phone numbers for next season.
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The creative process is fleeting and difficult to quantify. Where does inspiration come from, and when will it strike? It is a mystery as old as art. Watch Portrait of a Drowned Man, an instrumental band from Duluth, Minnesota, wrestle with these questions in the video below.
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