The gossamer strands are beautiful, but potentially dangerous.
Hawaii's Big Island recently got a little bit hairier. Golden filaments resembling human hair measuring up to two feet in length are draped across parts of the island—an unusual effect of the ongoing eruption from Kīlauea volcano. These strands may look like biological matter, but they're actually made of glass. Known as Pele's hair, or goddess hair, the fibers are produced when gas bubbles within lava burst at its surface, reports Live Science.
"The skin of the bursting bubbles flies out, and some of the skin becomes stretched into these very long threads," Don Swanson, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, told the publication. Some of them are so thin they're virtually invisible. Others are roughly the same width as human hair, making their name especially apt. Because they're almost weightless, they're easily picked up by the wind and distributed around the island.
In Hawaiian mythology, Pele is the goddess of fire, lightning, and volcanoes. She is at once eater and originator of the islands, and portrayed in folklore as a woman—either bent with age or young, tall, and beautiful. Playing with her hair, however, is almost as dangerous as playing with the fire she is said to control. The strands usually have a small sphere at the end, but it's prone to snapping off, leaving a sharp end. If the hairs snap, and make it into drinking water, they can be extremely harmful to humans or animals who may accidentally ingest it. "Imagine inhaling tiny slivers of glass. That's what the Pele's hair is," Swanson told Live Science. "It can inflame and irritate anything that comes in contact with it."
But for all their potential danger, they're a surprisingly beautiful geological oddity, with curious Rumplestiltskin-like qualities. In the shadows, they look like straw; in the sunlight, they shimmer like gold. Either way, they're interesting to look at it, but usually better not touched.
"Chili queens" spread the dish from San Antonio's plazas.
At sunset, the plazas of 19th-century San Antonio, Texas, would come alive with firelight and the songs of Tejano troubadours. There, industrious cooks supported their families by serving hot meals to the diverse crowds that congregated in the squares. These innovators, known as the "Chili Queens of San Antonio," were forgotten for decades by the outside world. Yet they played a tremendous role in popularizing a standard of Tex-Mex cooking: carne con chile.
By the start of the Civil War, the descendants of pre-Hispanic Texans, Spanish settlers, and a host of other people had descended upon the city. According to the U.S. Census, San Antonio became home to more than 12,000 people by the 1870s. In his book A Journey Through Texas, Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmstead noted that a diverse crowd congregated in the shops and squares.
But for nearly a century, these enterprising chefs—who made chile and other delicacies—were central to both shaping and sustaining San Antonio nightlife. Graciela Sánchez, the director at San Antonio’s Esperanza Center for Peace and Justice, is a great-granddaughter of one of the plazas’ entrepreneurial women, Teresa Cantu. “She was a businesswoman,” she says. “They all were.” As with cities in Mexico and Spain, the plazas of San Antonio served as the centers for commerce and entertainment. “They were always alive,” says Sánchez. “That was where business was done during the day, with carts and shops. After that, people would read the news out loud, and others would sing. It was a place to socialize.”
Starting in the mid-1800s, local families would bring supplies from home and set up food stands, serving tamales, beans, coffee, and other home-cooked fare in the plaza. “They lived nearby in a community called Laredito,” says Sánchez. “They would walk over around four or five in the evening and work late into the night.”
The slow-simmered chile, with its careful combination of spices and distinct flavor, was one of their most well-known offerings, and was a mainstay in the plazas for over 100 years. For a dime, a patron could walk away with a full plate of chile, with beans and a tortilla on the side. “The food was comida casera, home cooking,” says food writer Adán Medrano. “It developed in that place for over 10,000 years. Each cook had their own recipes, and it was very much tied to family, culture, and region.”
Things took a turn in 1877, when the railroad service reached San Antonio. Upon arriving in the city, travelers from all around the United States would hear talk of the food stands, and the incredible fare locals served up there. Many came to test their palates with the cooks’ offerings, and the stands quickly became a crucial stop for anyone stepping off the train. In a 1927 issue of Frontier Times, Frank H. Bushick describes the surrounding plazas as melting pots. “Every class of people in every station of life...would line up along-side and eat side by side, unconscious or oblivious of the other.”
Individual offerings varied from table to table, and competing chefs served tamales, mole, or one of a hundred other specialties. In turn, the culinary trail blazers preparing these dishes were critical to fueling the late-night activity in San Antonio’s plazas for decades. They fed hungry crowds while merchants sold their wares and troubadours performed in the plazas. Tejano musicians, such as Lydia Mendoza, began their careers playing to the plaza’s patrons, too.
Women cooking these meals often drew from their own family recipes, and sold the dishes as an additional source of income. For many, it also became a way for them to defy the norm. “They were working to make a living,” says Sánchez. “During the day, some washed clothes or worked as midwives or healers. Some women, like my grandmother, were able to hire others to help them at the stands. Back then, women were not really allowed access to the streets, so this was a unique opportunity.”
But as word spread of these sensational dishes, tourists and writers alike objectified these culinary innovators, too. “Eroticizing them was the writers’ impression,” says Medrano. “The papers never referred to them as chefs or discussed any variation in their cooking.” By the 1920s, they were referred to as “chili queens,” which relegated their identity to a dish they made. “They didn’t call themselves ‘chili queens,’” says Sánchez. “That’s a name someone else gave them and it stuck.” It's likely that the name of this dish, "carne con chile," became Anglicized around this time, too. As Medrano writes, "they served a wide array of indigenous food: enchiladas, tamales, tortillas and carne con chile. All these dishes used chiles as the predominant flavoring but it seems that “chili” was easier for the newly-arrived to pronounce, so it stuck as the popular term."
By the turn of the century, carne con chile had reached cities across the country. Tourists returned home craving more of the dish, and chile parlors sprang up with their own takes on it. “Depending on where you went, you would get something completely different that the ways it was made it Texas,” says Medrano. “In Cincinnati, it was more like spaghetti.” The chile served under the open skies of San Antonio was also markedly different than many modern recipes, too. Tomato was absent from the concoction, and beans were served alongside it instead of being cooked into the stew.
Although they fueled commerce in the city squares, authorities increasingly displaced these businesswomen. “The place became more bureaucratic, and the city looked at the open-air stands as an eyesore,” says Medrano. In the 1880s, construction of a new city hall and other development pushed these chefs out of the bustling plazas, and they temporarily shifted operations to the west side of town.
Authorities took it a step further in the 1930s, when the city health department ordered that the chefs enclose their operations in tents and mesh fencing. Some cooks continued under these confining conditions and close scrutiny of the health department, but in early 1940s, the last of the stands shut down. When the food stands disappeared, the women who made Tex-Mex staples, and helped popularize them, gradually faded from mainstream culinary history as well. “The agency and creativity of these chefs was erased,” says Medrano.
For generations, the legacy of the San Antonio entrepreneurs lived on in the kitchens of their descendants. “We never stopped cooking our food at home,” says Sánchez. But in recent years, chefs have introduced their family recipes to the public through restaurants, cookbooks, and food writing. “Now we have Texas chefs like Sylvia Casares, Johnny Hernandez, and others who emphasize family traditions and keep the food connected to the culture,” says Medrano. “They’re part of a resurgence of casera cooking in their own cities.” Medrano’s own cookbook, Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary History in Recipes, records indigenous Texas dishes while exploring the centuries of tradition and techniques behind them.
For these chefs—and the many others who treasure these recipes—the tradition, aroma, and flavor of this food alike represents much more than daily nourishment. “The practice of cooking has served as resistance and memory,” says Medrano. “Every time we cook this food that was uniquely ours, we sustain our cohesion and identity.”
The diverse young people of the town of Liberal are coming up with their own way to talk.
Say you're a young person living in Liberal, Kansas—a small town in the southwestern part of the state, home to about 20,000 people—and someone you know does something fun without you. "I told my friends from Liberal that I had gone to Vancouver to present some research," says Trevin Garcia, who just graduated from Kansas State University. "As soon as I said that, they were like, 'Oh yeah, TFTI.'"
"TFTI"—pronounced "tifty"—stands for "Thanks for the invite," Garcia explains. It's used in a sarcastic way: "Someone does something that the other person would have liked to get in on, but didn't find out until afterwards." Ironically, he adds, it's a bit of an exclusive phrase itself: "It's very rarely that I find someone from outside of Liberal using TFTI."
The kids from Liberal are doing something else unique, too. According to new research from KSU, they're beginning to develop a distinctive new accent. Garcia and his advisor, linguist Mary Kohn, studied the speech of people from Liberal, and compared it with the speech of Kansans from other parts of the state. They found that, likely because of the increasing number of Hispanic residents, people in Liberal are now speaking English with certain Spanish inflections. This is true even of residents who don’t speak Spanish.
Garcia, who graduated from Kansas State University this past May, spent most of his young life in Liberal. "It's a really interesting community, just because of how fast it went from being majority white to majority Hispanic," he says. Kansas overall is quickly becoming more diverse, and meatpacking plants in the Southwest continue to draw many immigrants from Mexico. In 1980, 20 percent of Liberal's residents were Hispanic; today, that number is 60 percent."It's a huge demographic shift in a really short amount of time," says Garcia.
Garcia identifies as mixed-race himself—his mom is white and his dad is Hispanic. "Being that, and being in a community like that, helped me to notice something going on," he says. "I'm always aware of the language I'm using with different groups of people." So when he got to Kansas State University and started working with Kohn, he recommended they do some studies back in Liberal. "I knew we were interesting," he says.
In other mixed communities around the United States, Kohn says, how people speak often has to do with their particular social affiliations—who you're friends with, or what hobbies you have. Garcia and Kohn figured they'd find something similar in Liberal. For this reason, Garcia started by interviewing members of a few different high school sports teams with varying demographic makeups. "We were thinking that these teams—based on the ethnic groups that were participating in them—would sound different," says Garcia.
Instead, "what we found was that they're all really talking the same," he continues. "It wasn't what we were expecting at all." Kohn agrees: "We would find these variants that we could associate with Spanish contact or language-learning processes in Liberal," she says. "But we would find them not only among the Latinx youth but also among many of the white youth as well. It seems like these variants—because Liberal is now a Latinx-majority community—are just becoming the way this community sounds."
So what does it sound like? Kohn and Garcia point to a couple of distinguishing features. The first has to do with vowel sounds. When they examined the speech of speakers from Liberal—Anglo and Latinx—"We found that there were aspects of the vowel system that looked like [those of] Latinx communities in other parts of the country," says Kohn.
For example, in much of Kansas, a word like "hand" would be pronounced in the European-American way, with the tongue high up in the mouth. In Liberal, it might instead be pronounced with the tongue lower down, so that it rhymes with "hat." (Kohn speaks more about this difference in this audio clip, and a speaker also demonstrates it in this one.)
The second has to do with rhythms of speech. Generally, English is what linguists call a "stress-timed language," meaning that speakers tend to emphasize particular syllables within words. "If I say a word like 'father,' the first syllable is stressed—it's louder and longer," explains Kohn. Spanish, on the other hand, is more likely to have more evenly-timed syllables. Researchers have found that Latinx English-speakers often split the difference: "You can get sort of an intermediate rhythm," says Kohn. This, too, is now prevalent in Liberal, with both Latinx and Anglo speakers. (You can hear one of their interviewees demonstrating it here.)
While certain of their findings are surprising, Kohn says, the existence of the accent isn't. "From a linguist's perspective, everyone has an accent," explains Kohn. Neither is the fact that it's changing: "Every generation uses language to construct their identities," she says, adding that the only languages that don't shift are dead ones.
"It was really fun to see that the way we talk is really not based on our ethnic backgrounds," Garcia says. "All the young kids and kids my age—people who have grown up with a huge Hispanic presence—everyone's talking the same, basically."
Sometimes, he says, he hears himself using that lower-tongued A. "And I'll be like, 'Oh man,'" he says. "I really am from Liberal, aren't I?'"
It is expected to fetch as much as $45,000 at auction.
Napoléon Bonaparte was a hat person. Over the course of his career, the emperor wore some 120 hats, in broadly the same style: two characteristic corners, worn side-on for maximum battlefield visibility. He would alternate between 12 hats at any given time, each with a lifespan of three years. (Before they made it to the imperial head, he had them broken in by valets.) Only 19 still exist. This week, one such hat goes under the hammer in Lyon, France.
According to the BBC, the headgear is said to have come from the Waterloo battlefield, where Napoleon was famously defeated in 1815. It was reportedly swiped by a Dutch captain in the fray and taken home as a war trophy. (The red cloak he was wearing at the same time has been the property of the British royal family since 1837.)
Certain clues help experts determine whether hats of this ilk truly belonged to Napoléon, reports the BBC. The emperor had very particular millinery preferences, and would usually have the trimming removed and extra reinforcements added. Made of felted beaver fur and leather, the vast majority came from the French hatmakers, Poupard. They were his signature style, but somewhat inconvenient: "When it had been exposed a long time to the rain," writes the historian Frédéric Masson, "the beaver got soaked, and the flaps before and behind fell onto his shoulders."
In recent years, a fervor among collectors for Napoleonic paraphernalia has seen prices for items such as these skyrocket. Just a few years ago, a similar hat sold for $2.2 million, AFP reports. But this one, despite its curious provenance, is less well-preserved and so expected to be less appealing to potential purchasers. Cracks in the leather aside, it's a hat with a story—though, with a forecast sale price of $45,000, probably not ideal for future Halloween costumes.
For decades, they stayed on either side of Interstate 40, but those days appear to be over.
At this point, everyone knows the ups and downs of chicken transit. Other creatures, though, prove a bit more mysterious. Take the bighorn sheep who wander California's Mojave Desert. For decades, these creatures hauled their curly horns up and down the desert's rocky peaks, generally living in small herds of two or three dozen. They didn't mess with Interstate 40, the four-lane road that has cut through their territory since the 1960s.
But according to a recent study, the sheep have changed their ways—all of a sudden, they're crossing the road.
The study's lead author, Clinton Epps, has been studying these populations since the early 2000s, when he was a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. At that point, he says, the small herds of sheep that lived on the north side of I-40 didn't mingle with those on the south side. "Since the construction of the highway in the mid- to late-1960s, these little tiny populations on either side had kind of been cut off from each other," he says.
Then, in 2013, sheep started getting sick. Members of a herd living near Old Dad Mountain, north of the highway, contracted pneumonia. A couple of months later, sheep south of the highway, in the Marble Mountains, got it, too. Tests revealed that it was the same strain. "We saw the pathogen jump to the other side," says Epps. "There was a clear suggestion… that something had changed."
So Epps took another close look, collecting more sheep DNA from individuals and fecal samples and using it to figure out which sheep went where. One in particular has been caught red-hoofed: In August 2014, Epps and his colleagues collected pellets from a ram in the Granite Mountains, on the north side of the freeway. That same November, they captured, collared, and genotyped that same ram on the south side. But he's probably not the only one: "The genetic data suggests that multiple animals have moved," says Epps.
What was it that changed? Maybe the sheep got bolder. "The population to the south there has been pretty large for a while now," says Epps. "Perhaps there's more pressure for individuals to go and explore and look for other places." Or maybe the road got easier to cross. Fences have degraded in certain areas, although the more potent barrier—the noise and flash of cars—has not diminished.
For conservationists, the fact that sheep have learned to cross is encouraging: "These populations are so small, the interchange among them is really important," Epps says. Further study might help wildlife officials figure out how and where to encourage safe traversals, as they've done with grizzly bears in Canada and squirrels in Washington State.
But as Epps is careful to point out, we can really only speculate as to what motivated them. "We go out, and we study what animals are doing in a time and a place," he says. "We have to remember that they may do something different now and again."
It's check-in time for your memories of unforgettable travel lodgings.
It was no doubt not long after the very first family road trip took place that hotels and motels began looking for creative ways to lure in motorists. They may not be as ubiquitous as they once were, but for many decades, especially in North America, unusual or quirky roadside hotels dotted every highway, locked in a fierce competition for drivers' attention.
Across hundreds of responses, readers told us about roadside hotels shaped like old train cars and motels housed in former sardine factories. There were ramshackle sheds only good for waiting out a storm and lodgings where you can catch a drive-thru movie from the comfort of your room. And of course, the ever-iconic, ever-problematic Wigwam Villages came up more than once. Each one an amazing or unique place to stay.
We've collected some of our favorite reader responses below. Continental breakfast not included.
"The most surprising roadside motel that I've ever stayed at was in 2017, when I spent six months driving across the USA. I stayed in hundreds of roadside motels, but one of them was such a surprise: the Best Western East Zion Thunderbird Lodge. From the road, I didn't notice anything particularly unusual besides the amusing sign for the restaurant that said ‘Home of the Ho-Made pies.’ But once I checked into my room, the architecture looked strangely familiar, and definitely far more well-designed than any other motel I'd stayed in. I inquired with the staff and found out that the original owner wanted Frank Lloyd Wright to design the hotel but he was either too expensive or too busy, so she hired one of Frank’s students to design the hotel, and Frank Lloyd Wright's influence can easily still be felt in the rooms today." — Stavros Mitchelides, United States
The guest rooms are actual train cabooses. Think tiny houses on rails. There are several cabooses arranged around the property. Each one is different, in color and design. They are all super cute. I stayed in one with my husband and three school-age kids. The cabooses have their own bathrooms, mini-fridges, and microwaves. Ours had a deck, too. There's a little cafe and gift shop on site. They also have a petting zoo and horses to see. — Jeanne VanHassel, Westtown, New York
"It wasn’t incredible because of how it looked but more so because of where it was. Rachel, Nevada, is a very tiny town right on the outskirts of Area 51. There’s about 10 houses and not much else, with the Little A’le’inn being the only place for people to congregate. They have a UFO out front, and an alien standing in the window of the restaurant area. You stay in tiny trailers that have the most basic of amenities but being so secluded in the desert is what makes this place special. Standing outside at night and looking at the clear sky with all its stars, it’s almost no wonder people talk about aliens out there. One of the most unique and amazing places I’ve ever been." — Janey, New Jersey
"It was a late night and I needed a place to stay for the night when the retro-neon lights of the El Rancho grabbed my eye and I knew I had to stay. The El Rancho is a classic Route 66 motel frequented by seemingly every actor/actress from the golden age of Hollywood, including John Wayne, Jane Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, and Lucille Ball. Each room has a plaque above the door of a movie star who once stayed in the room, and the whole place is seeping with quirky history." — Nick, Colorado
"There was a petting zoo/real zoo outside. With lions and everything. The lions were very loud at night. The goat enclosure was INSANELY LARGE, and all the goats knew they were the stars of the zoo. Also the lodge itself had this Big Buck Hunter-esque deer bedspread and a totally available DVD player on the TV. I watched Rushmore there with my parents. Amazing place." — Rory Gallagher, DeKalb, Illinois
"It's a roadside hostel, located in a very beautiful mountain location. What makes it unforgettable for me is the staff and the fried fish they make." — Ilya, Tel Aviv
"It used to be a sardine factory, so it’s right on the water in the most beautiful location. The view out the windows is stunning. Small islands float over the water, the mist is salty, and the hum of the little harbor is enchanting." — Richard Honer, Northfield, New Hampshire
"We were among the only guests for New Year's Eve 2012, after a day in the Smokies and before a day in Mammoth Cave. We arrived after the sun went down and collected our key from a box near the owner's house. Why they didn't stay in a teepee is beyond me. We ordered some pizza, ate it, and fell asleep, the same as we would in any other hotel, but it sure was teepee shaped." — Fred Kerner, Morrisville, Pennsylvania
"Besides the caverns, which is worth a trip in itself, there’s a totally random collection of antiques, the dinosaur golf course, and typical 1950s roadside motel. Like many places in Arizona, even though it has Grand Canyon in the name, it really has nothing to do with the Grand Canyon." — Dale, Concord, California
"A 1964 renovated motel that kept to the retro style with some modern additions. Staying there brought me back to my family’s road trips when I was little. Not having a plan and staying wherever the road took us. Plus it's in Savannah, which is an amazing place on its own, the Thunderbird added to my adventure." — Danielle Philibert, Lynnwood, Washington
"This had been the Nelson County, Kentucky, jail, and the site of numerous executions since its construction in 1810. It was considered a prominent haunted place, but me and my wife didn't know this until we had already checked in." — Ed Fleming, Chicago, Illinois
"Driving up 101 late one night just before Christmas, stopped because of the name and wandered in. A huge fire burning, an older couple asleep on the sofa, toys and lights everywhere. It was like we happened upon Santa's workshop after the elves went to bed. They held the dining room open. We had the best service and food in years. They had a vacancy! We took it! The room was small but amazing. We left in the morning, but 15 years later we still remember the magic." — Carol Rall, Kirkland, Washington
"Each room of the hotel was hand painted with a mural and theme by Marta Becket, as was the Opera House. The Opera House is painted with murals of a full audience to enjoy Marta's dancing and stories. Marta was a dancer and performed in Radio City Music Hall in New York City. She found the opera house while on vacation in the area and stayed to live her life there, telling her life story." — S. Berkun, Denver, Colorado
"The motel is a nondescript place in a small, rough-and-tumble Montana town. Walk through the wood-paneled lobby and up the stairs, and a tired tiki lounge, the Sip 'n Dip, straight out of the '70s awaits. [...] And once an hour, a merman and a mermaid would jump into the hotel pool, visible from a window behind the bar, and put on a show. When I was there, the mermaid let little plastic seahorses and whatnot float out of her coconut bra, waving to the six of us paying attention. They collected tips once they dried off. When the mermaids weren't in the pool, you could just watch hotel visitors swim, which was equal parts disturbing and entertaining. I think the incongruous nature of a very-expected basic motel (which does leave a logo'd rubber duck in each room) with a pool and this weird bar makes it one of the more memorable places I've stayed." — Andrea, Chicago, Illinois
"It's an unexpected sight in the sleepy, dusty little town of Gila Bend, Arizona. The flying saucer on top of the lobby & restaurant is certainly eye-catching!" — Kathy L. Smith, Goodyear, Arizona
"The Wigwam Motel's tagline on the sign says, 'Have You Slept in a Wigwam Lately?' Well, our answer was never, so it was definitely a bucket list item. The wigwam itself was surprisingly spacious, comfortable, well air conditioned, and definitely one-of-a-kind." — Amy Hamilton, Chanhassen, Minnesota
"Well, first off there's the Model T and the llamas. Oh, and the props from the movie Roots. That's what you first notice when you drive up. Then you walk down the hall to your room and every square inch of the hallway walls is covered with antique photographs from that part of the world. The most interesting thing, though, is when you bump into the owner and he gives you the handout and the audio CD relating how his father was shot dead for bootlegging when he was a little boy. And there is his father's leather jacket hanging on the wall with the bullet hole right through it. Despite/because all of that, it was one of the nicest hotel stays I've ever had—lovely rooms, gorgeous view, and incredibly nice people all around." — Kate, Gainesville, Florida
"The rooms are themed, there is a giant airplane parked out front, and inside a tunnel that goes underground to a bar next door. Oh and barber chairs in the lobby." — Rachael, Chicago, Illinois
"On a family vacation in the mid-1960s, the hotel restaurant was recommended to us—the motel was in the final stages of construction, but some rooms were open for booking. Given their relative luxury, we discovered that the rates were less than where we were staying, at a nearby Travelodge. The exterior looked like a Swiss chalet. Each room had a separate theme—the Harvard Room, the NASA room, etc. We were given a tour of the rooms. The restaurant itself featured a skilled Swiss wood carver who had been brought in specifically to do elaborate carvings of the beams, stairways, etc. Women were lining up to go into the men's restroom to see the Mother of Pearl sinks and a waterfall inspired and designed urinal that used an electric eye to initiate flushing. Mr. Madonna was a road building contractor who had grown wealthy through projects in the region. His wife baked all the many decadent desserts. The last time I passed through this way in 2012, the place was still there and open, as it is to this day." — Michael Griggs, Portland, Oregon
"Flintstone's Bedrock City is a campground and RV park near the Grand Canyon, and it's not just the theme that makes it seem like the land that time forgot. From the towering Fred Flintstone who welcomes you, to the volcano that looks like a giant version of your 4th grade science experiment, everything here is just the right balance of decrepit and totally charming." — Danielle Stockley, Rhode Island
"Stayed in a Best Western in Hyderabad, India, that was styled like a medieval European castle. Big stone walls and stone floors and huge wooden doors and all sorts of medieval European ornaments. The pièce de résistance is the framed letter from then-president G. W. Bush in the lobby. He visited there for a short time (about an hour, according to the front desk staff)." — Mark Strouthes, Arnold, Maryland
"A group of cottages originally built in 1934, by the set designer for the old Robin Hood movie with Tyrone Power. Each of the cottages is different, with personalized appointments like a surprise window of stained glass in the bath, and custom handmade pine cabinetry. The interiors and exteriors are charming, unique, enchanting, and romantic. It was a total surprise. We found it with our GPS late one night at the beginning stages of a month-long road trip from Vancouver to Santa Barbara. We had waited far too late after leaving Seattle to reserve a room for the night, and when we saw the name on our GPS, we said, ‘Why not?’ So glad we did; it's one of the great highlights of that trip and a lifetime memory. The Robin Hood has a cool pub-like bar and restaurant filled with local, colorful characters and a village aesthetic that blinks frequently between a 12th and 21st-century atmosphere." — Jeannine Seymour, Santa Fe, New Mexico
[Editor's Note: Not every hotel and motel readers sent us is still around, but some memories were just too good not to share. The following submissions are no longer helpful suggestions, but they do get at the amazing experience of finding an unforgettable place to stay on the long, lonely road.]
BJ's Motel 6
Robbers Roost, Utah
"While on a camping trip in the remote Robber's Roost canyon area of Southern Utah this past May, we came across BJ's Motel 6. We had been camping out for several days when terrible weather rolled in. We miraculously came across this cowboy-built shack and holed up in it for two days until the storms cleared. Graffiti carved into the wood indicates that it was built prior to the 1970s. It was a godsend." — Houston Hardin, Jackson, Mississippi
Unknown Motel
Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso
"Incredible because incongruous: a motel in Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso, with a miniature golf course. Who'd ever expect a miniature golf course in the Sahel?" — Steve, Cedar Grove, New Jersey
Unknown Hotel
Somewhere Outside Bakersfield, California
"On the night before my 16th birthday, my family was driving north on I-5 and pulled over at a hotel outside Bakersfield. We checked into our room and turned on the television to find the iconic '90s Bollywood music video for 'Chaiyya Chaiyya,' starring Shah Rukh Khan. We kept the television on until we fell asleep, comforted by the cultural icons. Sometimes the most surprising place is one that disarms you not with its otherworldly kitsch, but with its unexpected familiarity. People of color and immigrants are so often excluded from the narratives of road trips, from representations of the landscapes of rural America—but we very much exist there, thrive there, and occasionally find remarkable cultural touchstones in places we were not expecting to even be." — Surabhi Balachander, Mountain View, California
Bobbie’s Texaco
New Mexico?
"In 1967 I was in college. One day my roommate said 'let's drive to California.' We were students at the University of Wisconsin. It was the 'Summer of Love' in San Francisco. I had a junker 1936 Packard. The next day we left. It was done on the cheap as we were broke. We stopped at a gas station about sundown and asked where there was a place to sleep. The owner pointed behind the station. There were about 40 single iron beds spread out around the desert away from the station. It was free. We threw our sleeping bags on the springs and I can attest I have never slept better since that night. Cool desert breeze, total quiet. We were on a piece of Route 66 in New Mexico or Arizona. It was a Texaco station but as it was 50 years ago, it's probably gone. The rates were quite agreeable, no room service, no room. No check out time. Excellent breakfast tacos." — Craig Campbell, Praha, Texas
Unknown Hotel
Dax, France
"In a little village in France called Dax, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Sound of Music have had a baby. The hotel has vinyl grass on the bathroom floor. It rests next to the faux wood carpet. A tiny log, covered in fur, sits beneath the table, which is covered in a pine tree photograph. On the table, two lollies wrapped in pine cone paper await you. You will sleep under a mural of the forest. As I slept, I dreamt of Julie Andrews singing—or maybe that was just the quiet madness of my mind incorporating my surroundings. If this is a competition where you can win a visit of your choice. We. Do. Not. Want. To. Go. Back. To. Dax... Give the prize to someone else." — Gail May, Australia
A host of environmental and internal forces can cause an all-you-can-eat restaurant to go bankrupt, including waning popularity and rent hikes. But ceasing operations because people ate too much food is a more unusual cause for closure.
That's what happened to Jiamener, an all-you-can-eat hot pot restaurant in Chengdu, located in China's Sichuan province. The trouble started earlier this month, the South China Morning Post reports, when the restaurant launched a promotion that allowed guests to pay 120 yuan ($19) to eat as much hot pot as they could stomach for a whole month.
Jiamener underestimated how, well, hot that deal for bottomless hot pot would be. According to the paper, over 500 diners visited daily, and hungry patrons lined up outside from 8 a.m. and stayed until late at night. The unexpected price of that deal? Excruciatingly long hours for staff, and not enough money to sustain operations. After incurring a debt of 500,000 yuan, or $78,000, the restaurant shut down. They were less than two weeks into the promotion.
The restaurant's owners told reporters that they expected to lose money because of the promotion, but it was in the service of drawing a more loyal customer base. They also thought it might help them decrease costs with their suppliers over time (since they could negotiate lower prices by buying more food). Su Jie, an owner, chalked the closure up to "poor management."
All-you-can-eat buffets and restaurants typically assume that diners will eat roughly one pound of food. From there, they count the average number of visitors, then divide that by the cost of making and sustaining the food. But when the average number of visitors to Jiamener skyrocketed, and they ate at a bargain price for a month, that threw the equation off. (Most all-you-can-eat establishments instead usually employ cost-saving tricks, such as placing bread at the front of the buffet and serving more expensive foods on tiny plates.)
The concern with all-you-can-eat deals is that they sound to good to be true. In the case of a month of unlimited hot pot at bargain prices, the deal turned out to be too good to actually work.
To survive the arena, they ate a mash of barley and beans.
What epitomizes the ideal Western male physique more than the Roman gladiator? Rippling with lean muscle, gladiators’ bodies represent corporeal perfection—or so films and television shows such as Gladiator and Spartacus would have us believe.
In reality, what we know about gladiators’ diet and physiques suggests a very different physical appearance than the one depicted in classical art and contemporary popular culture. According to archaeological research, their abdominals and pectorals were likely covered in a quivering layer of subcutaneous fat. Why? The evidence suggests gladiators carbo-loaded. They ate a diet high in carbohydrates, such as barley and beans, and low in animal proteins. Their meals looked nothing like the paleo or meat-and-fish centric diets now associated with elite warriors and athletes.
Current knowledge of gladiators’ physiques comes from a group of medical anthropologists at the Medical University of Vienna and a nearly 2,000-year-old gladiator grave located in what is now Ephesus, Turkey. (When its inhabitants were interred, the area was part of the Roman Empire.) The mass grave houses the bones of 67 gladiators and one female slave, thought to be the spouse of one of the men buried there.
Researchers were able to identify the buried bodies as gladiators through reference to a set of reliefs carved into the marble slabs that marked the grave. These reliefs depict gladiatorial battle scenes and were dedicated to fallen gladiators.
Although none of the 68 skeletons was complete, enough arm and leg bones, as well as skulls and teeth, were preserved for researchers to be able to study and understand the nutritional and medical realities of the men to whom they once belonged. Using a technique called “isotopic analysis,” the team was able to test the skeletal remains for elements including calcium and zinc. This enabled them to partially reconstruct their diets. Based on the elemental mixtures they recovered using the analysis, the team concluded that the bodies in the grave ate few animal proteins and plenty of carb-rich legumes, as well as a healthy dose of calcium. This relatively meat-free diet is described in texts from the time, too: Pliny’s Natural History refers to gladiators by the nickname hordearii, which translates to “barley eaters.”
Interestingly, according to the researchers, gladiators’ primarily vegetarian diet was not a consequence of their poverty or slave status. While it is popularly believed that the ranks of men and women who fought as gladiators were comprised entirely of slaves, that’s only partly true. Though the majority of gladiators were prisoners of war and convicts, some rejoined voluntarily to earn wages after their initial term of conscription had ended. Nonetheless, given this lowly status, one might assume that a carb-heavy, mostly meat-free diet was a cost-cutting measure. After all, why feed prisoners extravagant fare?
Well, you might do it to improve their battlefield performance. The Vienna team posits that the fighters ate weight-gaining foods because extra fat created a layer of bodily protection. Nerve endings would have been less exposed, and bleeding cuts would have been less perilous. As an added benefit, the extra, protective layer of fat would have created a more satisfying spectacle: The gladiators could sustain wounds and gush blood, but, because the wounds were shallow, they could keep on fighting.
Harvard Classics Professor Kathleen Coleman, who is unaffiliated with the University of Vienna team, agrees with the notion that the gladiator diet was carefully considered. Since everyone wanted the best possible fight, she says, “I assume that they knew about the link between diet and performance [and] they certainly wanted to fatten gladiators up.” Even if the fare wasn’t a cost-cutting measure, though, “the ancient sources sneered at the gladiator’s ‘mash,’ as they called it.”
If this research is correct, though, why has a seemingly inaccurate picture of gladiators persisted for so long? The short answer: because the ancients were a lot like us! They idealized forms in a manner akin to an ancient sort of Photoshop. In ancient Greece, for example, ideas of the beautiful, perfect body were derived from men competing in athletic competitions, and to make up for a lack of true perfection in the real world, artists depicted everyone—gladiators, gods, and philosophers—as closer to perfect specimens.
Across the Roman Empire, training gladiators was a popular source of revenue. More than 100 gladiator schools stretched from modern-day Vienna, Austria, to Ephesus, Turkey, and beyond. The most famous schools were clustered around the Coliseum, and visitors to Rome can still see the remnants of Ludus Magnus, the largest school that was connected to the Coliseum by tunnels.
Based on the archaeological evidence that still exists, experts describe the training centers as “fortress prisons.” They usually had one exit door, which faced the public arena. Inside the school, a rotating body of experts trained the men and women in different fighting techniques and weaponry. Gladiators could not leave, and they presumably ate their bean-heavy mash without complaint in the spartan surroundings.
Notably, the gladiators’ extra fat doesn’t mean they were unhealthy, and their treatment wasn’t all harsh. In fact, both the archaeological evidence from the Ephesus site and writing from the period suggest the opposite. Gladiators were a significant investment, and archaeological sites evidence the fortresses as “also [including] heated floors for winter training, baths, infirmaries, plumbing, and a nearby graveyard.” Though prisoners, they likely received superior medical care. For example, the historical record shows that at least some gladiators were treated by elite doctors, such as Galen of Pergamum, the Greek physician and writer whose theories and research deeply influenced the medical field for centuries. The quality of gladiators’ medical care is also evidenced by a comparison of injuries on the bones of average citizens to those of the gladiators, which evince superior care with clean, smooth healing lines along old breaks.
Gladiators’ good-health was not just a consequence of quality medical treatment. They also regularly drank calcium supplements made of either charred plant or bone ash. Like modern athletes, they took their calcium—scholarly analyses describe the calcium levels in gladiators’ bones as “exorbitant” compared to average citizens. And the Elder Pliny records the same in Natural History XXXVI.203: “‘For abdominal cramp or bruises,’ states Marcus Varro, and I quote his very words, ‘your hearth should be your medicine chest. Drink lye made from its ashes, and you will be cured. One can see how gladiators after a combat are helped by drinking this.’”
Gladiators did have the occasional chance to nosh on more decadent foodstuffs. To kick off gladiator games, elite Romans held large banquets, which the fighters might be invited to. The first-century B.C. historian Livy described these feasts as shows complete with sacrificial animals, athletes, and famous horses, while “banquets too were prepared for the delegations with equal sumptuousness and attention to detail.”
But while some gladiators had the chance to feast, if they chose, before their upcoming fights, others faced death as part of the entertainment. During banquets, when guests “were all sated with dining and drink, [the hosts] called in the gladiators,” wrote the Greek philosopher and historian Nicolaus of Damascus in his Athletica. “No sooner did one have his throat cut than the masters applauded with delight.”
At the 1908 Marathon in London, athletes hit the bottle mid-race.
On July 24, 1908, the London Olympic Marathon went down in history as one hell of a race. Summer heat had plagued the city, and a newly resurfaced track stretched hard as rock under the runners’ feet. At the last minute, the course was extended nearly two miles, forever setting the official marathon length to an arbitrary 26 miles and 385 yards.
So much drama unraveled under these harsh conditions that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame) was inspired to write a recap for The Daily Mail. “I caught a glimpse of the haggard, yellow face, the glazed, expressionless eyes, the long, black hair streaked across the brow,” he wrote of the eventual winner. Fifty-five runners started off from Windsor Castle, but only 27 made it to the finish line. The majority of runners quit before the halfway mark.
For a badly needed boost, a number of competitors turned to unlikely, but common-at-the-time sources: brandy, glasses of bubbly, and strychnine (best known now as rat poison).
Wild as it may seem today, people once believed alcohol and strychnine cocktails were performance enhancers. The drinks were doled out like Gatorade or energy gels to endurance athletes. According to Dr. Matthew Barnes, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of the School of Sport, Exercise, and Nutrition at New Zealand’s Massey University, plying athletes with alcohol started in Ancient Greece and Imperial China.
Modern use of alcohol in sports can be traced back to the competitive foot races of the 19th century. Essentially very long walks of dozens or hundreds of miles, these events captivated Great Britain. Contending “pedestrians” were advised to down lots of champagne during competition. Years later, marathoners were often given boozy boosts by trainers or assistants who followed their runners in cars or on bicycles.
Common substances included various alcohols and dangerous drugs—from strychnine to heroin or cocaine—which were meant to mask pain, increase aggressiveness, or gain a quick energy boost. Trainers often had their own secret cocktails, and people didn’t stop using heroin and cocaine as performance-enhancing additives until the 1920s, when the drugs became prescription-only substances. And athletes boozed during competition all the way into the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Alcohol as a whole was celebrated for its stimulative effects and high sugar (energy) content. Champagne was a favorite thanks to its supposedly rejuvenating effervescence. And, since strychnine’s use as a pesticide had not yet been discovered, low doses were believed to reinvigorate tired sportsmen.
At the time, it seemed to work. In 1896, at the inaugural modern Olympic Games, Greek marathon runner Spiridon Louis famously knocked back a glass of cognac with six miles left to go in the race. Refreshed, he went on to win the gold. The 1904 St. Louis Olympic Marathon runners battled sweltering 95-degree heat and borderline inhumane track conditions. Throughout his victorious run, Thomas Hicks regularly sipped near-deadly cocktails of strychnine, brandy, and sulfate in egg whites. In 1908, the winner of the Chicago Marathon, janitor-turned-runner Albert Corey, credited his win a steady supply of champagne.
At the 1908 Olympic Marathon, at least a handful of runners imbibed alcohol or strychnine cocktails during the race—including the first four to cross the finish line.
Thanks to his recent record-breaking win at the Boston Marathon, Canadian runner Tom Longboat was the favorite at the London Games. Unfortunately, he never finished. After plodding his way into second place, the 20-year-old runner fell victim to the brutal heat. At mile 17, likely dehydrated and exhausted, Longboat slowed to a walk. Searching for energy, he turned to champagne. Two miles later, he collapsed and was out of the race.
South Africa’s Charles Hefferon also imbibed. Unlike most of the runners, he seemed to cope well with the inhospitable conditions. By mile 15, Hefferon had a two-minute lead. Nine miles later, he had doubled his lead time, leaving the gold medal within a few minutes’ reach. Or so it seemed. But two miles from the finish line, Hefferon “accepted a draught of champagne,” an act he later admitted cost him the race. The drink caused intense stomach pains, and Hefferon was forced to slow and watched two runners pass. Once a shoe-in for the gold, Hefferon finished third.
At the finish line, Arthur Conan Doyle and 80,000 spectators waited for an “exultant victor.” Instead they spied Italian pastry chef Dorando Pietri, a “little man, with red running-drawers” (in Conan Doyle’s words) who “reeled as he entered and faced the roar of the applause.” In the last quarter mile alone, an exhausted and dazed Pietri had collapsed five times, had run in the wrong direction, and even had the area over his heart massaged by concerned medics.
In a now-famous photograph of Pietri crossing the finish line, a hollowed cork wedge can be seen in his hand. Clenching cork wedges helped endurance runners relieve strain on their hands and fingers, but when hollowed-out, they acted as vessels for wine, brandy, and other questionable energy drinks. In the end, concern for Pietri’s life resulted in the runner being supported across the finish line by a doctor, causing his eventual disqualification and a redistribution of the race’s medals. Some attribute Pietri’s physical downfall to being drunk, while others believe both he and Longboat were subjected to strychnine poisoning.
Not all of the boozed runners fared poorly. De facto gold medalist Johnny Hayes admitted to an energizing gargle of brandy during the race, and bronze medalist Joseph Forshaw also turned to brandy in order to treat a stubborn side stitch. He claimed he “felt fine” after, and was able to carry on in the final leg. Around that same time, it was believed that dehydration was better treated with wine than water. In fact, the 1924 Paris Games infamously stocked its rehydration stations with glasses of wine.
Thanks to later studies on the effects of alcohol on muscle groups and hydration, trainers no longer offer athletes strychnine cocktails or glasses of bubbly. However, alcohol is still an option for runners looking to enhance a race along other dimensions. At the Marathon de Médoc in French wine country, 23 different glasses of wine (and other gastronomic goodies) await runners along the 26.2-mile route. But thankfully, no one believes it will actually help them win.
The story behind red snacks and beverages at Black American June 19 celebrations dates back to well before slavery.
On June 19, Black Americans gather across the United States to feast, as they have done every year since the nation’s slaves were freed. These celebrations at public parks have historically included parades, the reading of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the main event—the food. Prior to the celebrations in 1933, the Dallas Morning News reported that “watermelon, barbecue and red lemonade will be consumed in quantity.” Indeed, laid across their plates were charcoal-grilled meats, greens, black-eyed peas, and teacakes, but also an assortment of foods and drinks with red hues.
Red velvet cake, red strawberry soda, and red punch always made appearances. For a long time, relatives told young ones that the red symbolized the blood of the millions of slaves, who had suffered and died. But the red foods and drinks may have had a longer history that began on the continent these slaves were taken from.
Juneteenth celebrations originated in Texas. On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger issued an order declaring: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free…” This was two-and-a-half years after President Lincoln decreed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slaves in rebel states were free, but was only practical to slaves close to Union territory.
For a long time, slaves in Texas did not know they were free, and even after they knew, they faced lynchings, rape, and other continued acts of slavery. But that didn’t stop freed people from celebrating the June 19 announcement, in opposition to the systems of white oppression. This holiday became known initially as Manumission Day, named after the act of an owner freeing their slaves, but later the month June and the number 19 became mixed into what’s known now as Juneteenth.
Red foods and drinks were a major way of commemorating that legacy of slavery and the holiday. But “the practice of eating red foods—red cake, barbecue, punch and fruit–may owe its existence to the enslaved Yoruba and Kongo brought to Texas in the 19th century,” from present-day Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, writes culinary historian and food writer Michael Twitty in his blog Afroculinaria.
Twitty goes on to write, “enslavement narratives from Texas recall an African ancestor being lured using red flannel cloth, and many of the charms and power objects used to manipulate invisible forces required a red handkerchief.”
Professor of history and foodways at Babson College, Fred Opie, writes that some historians believe the red color could be connected to “the Asante and Yoruba's special occasions which included offering up the blood of animals (especially the red blood of white birds and white goats) to their ancestors and gods.”
Red, in many West African cultures, is a symbol of strength, spirituality, and life and death. It’s possible this cultural legacy along with these groups’ distinct food knowledge of okra, beans, melons, and many other food groupings—some red, some not—was brought across the Atlantic.
The story is clearer when it comes to drinks. According to culinary historian Adrian Miller, red drinks at Juneteenth celebrations have links to the fruits of two native West African plants: the kola nut and hibiscus. The kola nut, typically white or red, was and still is served to guests as a snack to chew, used as a water purifier, or steeped for tea. The flowers of the hibiscus, too, were often stewed to make a reddish-purple tea called bissap and provided to guests. Both were extracted to the Caribbean and the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade. From watching the slaves, plantation owners noticed that the kola nut could be used as an energy booster, digestive or cold remedy, and made for a stimulating additive to bitter water.
When crushed into a powder, then added into water, the kola nut creates a reddish-brown refreshing drink. Miller also notes that slaves used red corn, after a long day of corn shucking, to make their own whiskey. This practice of adding reddish substances to make sweet, palatable drinks was common, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see such drinks associated with Juneteenth.
Even after slavery, the usages started to evolve in different ways in black households, especially in the South. It was common to see homemade teas and lemonades infused with red fruits such as cherries or strawberries. Some drinks were made by taking a red-colored fruit and adding vinegar to preserve it, and then families would add the syrup to water and sweeten it.
“During the Southern Cooking era, molasses and water and red lemonade were inexpensive, refreshing drinks that could be made easily and quickly; their popularity reflected the poor economic condition of African-Americans in the rural South,” wrote Miller in his book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time.
Food coloring came to preeminence in the late 1800s, and by the 1920s, red-colored carbonated drinks like the Texas-made soda Big Red became part of Juneteenth culinary tradition.
Whatever the origin of each item on the Juneteenth table, collectively, they hold a lot of symbolic meaning. “I love eating red-colored foods, especially red drinks, because it connects me to previous generations of African Americans,” says Miller. “I think about all of those Emancipation celebrations, church suppers, family reunions and other occasions when people got together to celebrate, renew family ties and friendships, and affirm their humanity.”
In August 1959, the earth beneath Hawaii shook, and three months later Kīlaeua Iki, a smaller crater next to the expansive dent in the top of Hawaii most active volcano, exploded, sending fountains of lava 1,900 feet high. For a month, lava spurted out of the volcano and dripped down the mountain in red-hot rivers. Finally, in December, the eruptions stopped.
In January, as soon as they could, two botanists climbed into the devastated area and marked off small plots of ground, about 30 feet by 30 feet. Over the next four years, and again in 1966 and 1968, they returned to identify and count the plants that were growing there.
When wildfires burn hot through trees and grass, they still leave behind parts of plants and seeds hidden beneath the ground. But when lava flows through, the devastation can be complete. The botanists wanted to know what kind of plants would colonize the lava first and which type of lava they’d find most easy to settle on. But their main question was one with a long horizon: After a volcanic eruption, how long does it take a forest to develop?
Today, on Kīlaeua, lava is still actively streaming down the mountain, with little sign of stopping. So far, more than nine square miles of the island have been buried in volcanic material, and many people have lost their homes. But eventually Kīlaeua will quiet again, and the process of recovery will began for both people and plants.
It will be a long and slow process, and there’s no one answer as to how long it will take. “The main thing we’ve learned in recent times—in the last 50 years or more—is that it all depends,” says Bruce Clarkson, a plant ecologist at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. The nature of the lava or the ash, the climate, and the amount of water available all determine the future of a place volcanic activity has made barren. In Hawaii, lava flows are linear features, Clarkson points out: They begin at the summit of a high mountain and drip straight down to the sea. The climate at the top of the flow can be entirely distinct from the climate halfway down or at the edge of the island.
If a volcanic eruption spews mineral-rich ash in the area around it, plants can grow back relatively quickly. In 1980, the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington left behind a wasteland of ash, where today there are fields of lupines. But on lava flows, where plant life has to start again from scratch, the process is much slower.
Nooks, crannies, and crevices can collect dirt, water, and seeds. Eventually, ferns and other plants can start to grow. But for soil to form on the top of the lava flow, the rock has to weather down. In Hawaii, the soil quality of the individual islands depends on how long ago they were formed and how quiet their volcanoes have been. “On the oldest island, you have really deep, red soil,” says Darlene Zabowski, a professor at the University of Washington and co-author of Celebrating Soil. “You can go from one island to the next and see huge changes in the ecosystems as they get older and older.” It’s possible, though tricky, to reverse engineer the age of a lava flow from the vegetation growing on top of it.
The botanists who were observing the plants on Kīlaeua in the 1960s, Garrett Smathers and Dieter Mueller-Dombois, had some idea what they might find, since previous work had established that usually algae are the first colonizers of lava and lichen are the second. In the lava lake area, where devastation had been complete, they found that, indeed, algae were always the first colonizers and lichen usually came second. The picture was more complicated than that, though. Mosses and ferns might show up at the same time as algae or along with the lichens. Native flowering plants would come later.
Still, it was a slow process. “The vegetation cover was as yet so small in year 9 (1968) that on a superficial view, the surface looked practically barren,” they wrote. But it had been progressing in a distinct pattern: As the lava cooled, the plants advanced in concentric circles towards the center of the crater, the last place to cool down.
Studying plant succession in devastated areas like this one can give scientists an idea how, fundamentally, ecosystems work and how plants might have colonized land millions of years in the past. It takes hundreds, even hundreds of thousands of years, for forests to fully take over the places where lava stripped down a mountain. But it always will.
“One of the biggest misconceptions is that things won’t recover,” says Clarkson. “It’s astounding how nature can repair itself given half a chance.”
We still don't know how or why they made these elaborate textiles.
There are almost as many myths about 19th-century military quilts as there are mysteries.
These intricate patchwork textiles were once believed to be the work of recovering soldiers, painstakingly stitched in some far-off corner of the British Empire. The fabric came from the uniforms of fallen comrades—a way to remember those who had given their lives for queen and for country—and the skills from occupational therapy in a clean, well-maintained hospital. They were known as "convalescence quilts," and they offered reassuring proof to the folks at home that Queen Victoria’s army were being well looked after.
Or, at least, so the story went. But many things about this tale are worthy of further investigation, says Annette Gero, an international quilt historian, author, and collector. We don’t know who precisely made these quilts, beyond that they were soldiers; why they made them; what they were used for; or how they picked up the ability to do so. The more scholars like Gero look into these quilts, the more unconvincing the accepted explanations seem.
Here’s what we do know: During the second half of the 19th century, British soldiers made extraordinary quilts out of thousands of tiny triangles and squares. They’re made of the thick woolen felt of military uniforms, in rich primary colors—here and there, old hemlines, the outlines of jacket pockets, and even buttonholes are worked into the blankets. It’s not clear whether these were scraps from discarded uniforms or the offcuts from military tailors’ workshops.
The quilts are geometric, rather than pictorial, and stitched together by hand with a traditional patchwork overstitching, also known as “whip stitch.” They’re often known simply as Crimean War quilts, despite having been made in a variety of places, each with their own particular aesthetic. (Crimean War quilts, for instance, are more conservative and less vibrant than those made in India a few years later.) It seems likely that hundreds were made, but no two have been found with the same pattern, making it even less likely that they were the product of structured occupational therapy.
Some quilts are a little crude; others are staggeringly complicated. We know that some of these quilts were undoubtedly made by military tailors, as they’re the work of a seasoned professional, and use particular offcuts that only these men would have had access to. On some Indian quilts, for instance, tiny circles are used as decoration. According to Gero, these would have been salvaged from a kind of special metal hole-punch used by tailors to make openings for the shanks of brass buttons.
When it comes to the quilts made by ordinary soldiers, however, there’s little option but to speculate. Most of the quilts in Gero’s own collection have lost their provenance. In the vast majority of the cases, the maker is unknown. When we do know who made individual quilts, Gero writes in her book Wartime Quilts: Appliqués and Geometric Masterpieces from Military Fabric, “even these may have been slightly romanticised in their history as they were passed down through the family.”
Yet for decades, rumors abounded that these quilts had been made by soldiers as they convalesced in bed. But the only evidence that any soldiers stitched in bed, Gero says, is a single 1856 painting of Private Thomas Walker. Walker is sat up between the sheets with a bandaged head, painstakingly stitching together vivid triangles of felt into a relatively simple quilt design. In a newspaper article around the same time, the painting’s young subject was described as having had the “entire top of his skull [...] removed by skilfull operation at different periods,” after a shell burst directly over his head.
There’s more to that painting than meets the eye, Gero says. It’s not simply an image, but “a political painting specially made to show Queen Victoria’s subjects that her soldiers were being well treated in hospitals. Clean sheets, clean bandages, and some occupational therapy.” Throughout the second half of the 19th century, when many of these quilts were made, British troops were fighting in Crimea, south of Ukraine; in South Africa and India; and in other troubled reaches of the British Empire. In most of these places, however, there was little resembling Western hospitals—with no hygienic practices to speak of, men often died of their infections. Paintings such as these gave people the impression that even far away, members of the British army would be as well looked after as they would have been at home.
What’s more, Gero says, “it is infeasible that somebody with most of their brain blown out would be able to sit and design a quilt as complex.” Even the story about the cloth coming from uniforms of dead soldiers doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Joseph Rawdon, a British soldier, wrote a letter home describing how they had made a quilt that took “all of six years on and off to make ... from different uniforms, more than a few pieces from poor fellows that fought hard for their country and fell in the struggle.” But a 2010 paper published in the journal Textile History, the historian Sue Pritchard revealed that, of all the known military quilts, none show signs of having seen the gore of the battlefield. These places were “dirty, bloody and chaotic,” she writes. “Sparks and powder from musket fire would have left residue on uniforms.” But there’s no blood, oil, or gunpowder on these fabrics.
If the quilts really had been made by soldiers in bed, Gero says, she believes the level of skill required would have necessitated supervision by military tailors. Someone would also have been tasked with making sure the hospital was stocked up with felt. Instead, Gero proposes, it’s quite possible they were the result of soldiers sitting around on the battlefield with nothing much to do. In India, for instance, the regiments were said to spend five percent of their time in battle and the remainder in boredom. With so little to do, men often resorted to drink or hobbies to fill the time. Pritchard quotes a letter from Private John Pearman, written in India: “Our time was spent very idly as all drill was in the morning and dismounted drill in the evening. As it was very hot in the day, we sat on our charpoys or bedsteads and played at cards, backgammon or chess or anything that took our taste. At other times I would read books or set at the needle.”
But simple tedium doesn’t explain how bored soldiers picked up the skills to execute these fascinating textiles. Most soldiers and sailors could sew a little: They were supplied with a “housewife” sewing pouch, which might contain needles, thread, and a few spare buttons. But they needed active training to learn how to put together quilts of this magnitude. It’s not clear exactly how, or why, they received it—though the British army’s antipathy to boredom, which they believed encouraged idleness and disobedience, may have inspired them to make sewing lessons a priority.
All we have by way of explanation, in fact, are the propaganda stories designed to put the British public at ease, and rebut accusations of military ineptitude. The men were so well cared for, the stories went, that they were sitting up in bed and learning to quilt. “The promotion of the soldier-quiltmaker was part of a calculated campaign throughout the United Kingdom to rehabilitate public opinion about the careless administration of the war,” Gero writes, in an accompanying essay to a 2017 exhibition of the quilts at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, “and also to endorse quiltmaking as a masculine and healthful alternative to less savory activities among enlisted men, such as drinking and gambling.” The real story, it seems, may be lost for good.
Victory is within reach for the residents of Crow Wing County, who are tired of the four-acre behemoth.
The wild beast of North Long Lake has been tamed. Or, more accurately, dismembered.
The plucky residents of Crow Wing County have removed one section of a massive floating bog that has plagued them since last fall. The four-acre behemoth had broken free of the shore in October 2017 and bounced around the lake just north of Brainerd, Minnesota, crushing docks and boat lifts. Weeks later, it came to rest on the shores of Legionville, an American Legion summer camp, right in front of the swimming beach.
The bog was not welcome there. But how to make it go away? The clock was ticking: Campers were scheduled to arrive in mid-June. When we challenged Atlas Obscura readers to devise solutions, advice poured in. One reader suggested making “Rogue Bog” whiskey out of peat harvested from the bog. Another recommended deploying goats equipped with water wings to devour it.
In the end, more practical minds prevailed.
Three men spearheaded the battle of the bog: Kevin Martini of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Bill Schmidt of the North Long Lake Association, and Randy Tesdahl of the American Legion of Minnesota. “It’s been a three-legged stool from the beginning,” Tesdahl says. (Over the phone, I hear ice sloshing in a cooler. Tesdahl is gutting rock bass as we talk. The bog, for all its faults, is great fish cover.)
The trio decided to wait for the spring thaw and then move the bog back to where it came from, just 400 yards up the shoreline. They planned to pull it with a fleet of boats while tractors pushed from the shore. Then they hoped to pivot the bog to where it was initially anchored and secure it there with stakes and chains.
Dozens of volunteers gathered on a warm Wednesday in May. News helicopters and drones buzzed overhead. Periodically, Randy Tesdahl checked the local coverage on his phone. The aerial footage made the boats look laughably small next to the giant bog. The pressure was on.
The DNR, the sheriff’s office, the American Legion, the Lake Association, and the outboard motor company Evinrude all delivered safety briefings. The organizers distributed walkie-talkies. Volunteers tethered their boats to a ring of logs encircling the bog, meant to give them purchase on the slippery island.
Finally, the blow horn sounded. Engines revved, boats strained. And the bog… didn’t budge. Once more the motors revved, and, once more, defeat. After three attempts, the bog-wranglers gave up.
The only way forward, the team decided, was to cut the bog into pieces. They planned to lasso it, pull the noose tight, and cut the bog in two. To do so, they’d have to snake a tube all the way under the bog and then feed a cable through the tube. (A cable alone, they feared, would snag on tree roots.) “Imagine pushing 30 sections of 10-foot PVC pipe all glued together under a bog,” Tesdahl says. “It’s a lot like trying to push a string up a hill.” Miraculously, it worked. The cable sliced through the bog as if it were butter.
Once more the boats and heavy equipment lined up. Again the blow horn sounded. But even this new, smaller chunk of bog was too massive to move. The volunteers attempted a second cut to make the bog a more manageable size, but this time the PVC tube fell apart underwater. It was time to go home.
“It’s kicked our butt,” Martini told a local TV news crew. “Let’s just be honest here. We never thought we’d have this much trouble.”
Yet the next day, they MacGyvered a second cut. This time the men slung a big steel cable over the top and sunk one end in the lake with steel I-beams, ripping through the bog. By day’s end, everyone was covered in mud. “We took home at least a cubic foot of the bog every one of us, in our pants,” Tesdahl says.
The operation entered a lull. It was windy for a time, and volunteers had become harder to recruit. In early June, the board of Legionville announced they were cancelling camp for the summer—for the first time since World War II.
But the three-legged stool of Martini, Schmidt, and Tesdahl was undeterred.
“All along, each time we would fail, we would learn,” Schmidt says.
“Everyone was always so positive,” Martini says. At the next rendezvous, the crew cut the center third of the bog itself into thirds. (This time they used a 24-inch chainsaw, muck flying every which way.) In mid-June, the boats lined up to tow these baby bogs, each about the size of a hockey rink. Schmidt was in the lead boat. “I told everybody, ‘Don’t overpower it. Just hold steady.’ And all of a sudden I saw it move about an inch. And then another inch. And then there was continuous movement, real slow.”
Spectators cheered from the shoreline. Methodically, the crew moved all three sections of the center third of the bog off the swimming beach and staked them down. At last, there is a clear view to the lake, if only a partial one.
The operation has cost countless hours and around $10,000 so far, Tesdahl estimates. Two formidable bog sections remain. But victory feels within reach, and the community has united around this unusual challenge. Tesdahl held a celebratory dinner after volunteers conquered the center section. The Northern Cowboy Flame N’ Brew in Brainerd concocted a drink for the occasion.
The ingredients included Blue Curacao, green Jello made with vodka, and a leafy green sprig for garnish. I’ll bet you can guess what it was called.
Sometimes, rocks are more than crumbled pieces of the earth. Sometimes, they unveil clues about our planet’s ancient past or future. For archaeologists from the Antiquity of Southeastern Europe Research Centre at the University of Warsaw, the rocks in Shkodër, Albania, turned out to be the ruins of the 2,000-year-old lost city of Bassania.
Back then, Bassania was an economic and military stronghold, part of the Illyrian kingdom, which existed from 400 to 100 B.C. The ancient city contained numerous settlements and fortresses, one of which the archaeologists unearthed.
What they found were ancient stones of a fortress guarded with large bastions and roughly 10-foot-wide stonewalls and gates. These defensive buildings, according to University of Warsaw professor Piotr Dyczek, are common in Hellenistic architecture. The team confirmed the age of the ruins by analyzing nearby coins and ceramic vessel fragments, which dated back to the time of the Illyrian kingdom.
Following the stones led to more clues about the city. Large stone walls encompassed an area of about 200,000 square meters, meaning Bassania was three times larger than ancient Shkodër, which was 70,000 square meters.
But this city, and the Illyrian kingdom, ultimately fell to a Roman invasion in the beginning of the first century. This may be why it took so long for archaeologists to find Bassania.
"The reason could be that the city had ceased to exist so long ago that its name was forgotten," wrote Dyczek.
They Polish and Albanian archaeologists also speculate that the location's geological infrastructure has something to do with it. The ruins are found on a “hill locally called ‘lips of viper’ in [the village of] Bushat, a few miles from Shkodër,” wrote Dyczek. After years of erosion, the stone remnants look like a part of the sandstones and conglomerates that make up the hill. So to a passerby, it might look like a bunch of stones, not a structure made by humans.
Now that the unearthed city is visible, the ruins will be open for sightseeing.
The Chinese Exclusion Act likely exiled the man who first cultivated it.
"Cherry red" is a bright, fire-engine color. But for most Americans, their cherries are dark. Deep red, nearly purple, the cherries in the supermarket are sweet, glistening, and big. This kind of cherry—the Bing cherry—is America's most produced variety. But the man who helped propagate it, a Chinese foreman named Ah Bing, is largely forgotten. An accomplished representative of the Chinese workers and immigrants who labored to establish orchards in the American West, he also faced all-too-typical persecution: His time in the United States was cut short by racism.
Not much is known about Ah Bing. What is known of him comes from Florence Olson Ledding, a lawyer and the step-daughter of Ah Bing's employer, Seth Lewelling. The Lewellings were a Quaker farming family with strong abolitionist sentiments. Before the Civil War, Lewelling's brother Henderson built a home in Iowa known as "the main ticket office for the underground railroad": trapdoors and tunnels still dot the house. But in the mid 1800s, the Lewellings headed west with 700 fruit trees. Their journey echoes a grueling game of Oregon Trail, yet no one died. When Henderson arrived in Milwaukie, Oregon, he established the West Coast's first nursery, where Seth soon joined him.
At the time, Oregon's population was booming. Some settlers were looking for post-Gold Rush opportunities, while others had their eyes on the Pacific Northwest's rich farmland and resources. With their hundreds of trees, the Lewellings established a thriving nursery business. Henderson Lewelling soon peeled off to Honduras (to start an ill-fated utopian colony), but Seth stayed, putting down deep roots. The Lewelling orchards of prunes, apples, and cherries kickstarted Oregon's fruit-growing industry.
Oregon was flourishing, but needed labor. All across the West, Chinese workers were building train tracks and working mines, orchards, and farms. But they were always paid less, and their industriousness was denigrated as hurting American wages and stealing jobs. It was in the American West, writes immigration historian Erika Lee, that "arguments in support of Chinese exclusion arose."
In 1882, the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the immigration of Chinese laborers for decades to come. Meanwhile, violence against Chinese immigrants flourished in the Pacific Northwest. In 1885, city leaders in Tacoma, Washington, became local heroes for driving the Chinese population out of town and burning their homes. Two years later in Oregon, 34 Chinese miners were murdered in the Hells Canyon Massacre, and the culprits were never punished.
At the time, Ah Bing worked on Seth Lewelling's farm. Sarah Ledding described him in detail to a Federal Writer's Project interviewer in 1939: He was more than six feet tall and of Manchu descent, hailing from the north of China. Both his height and background, added Ledding, made him "very unlike" the majority of Chinese immigrants, who mainly came from the more southern Guangdong province. Ah Bing worked for Lewelling for more than 30 years, sending money back to his wife and several children in China. Ledding remembered him often singing a popular song of the day, but in a mournful minor key.
As the foreman of Lewelling's orchard crew, Ah Bing supervised more than 30 men. He worked closely with Lewelling on grafting, propagating, and caring for trees. The Bing cherry, Ledding recalled, surfaced one day when Lewelling and Ah Bing walked through the rows of cherry trees, where each man maintained separate rows. In Ah Bing's row, there was a marvelous new type of cherry. Someone suggested that Lewelling name the cherry after himself. But Lewelling protested. He had already named a cherry for himself. “No, I'll name this for Bing," Ledding recalled him saying. "It's a big cherry and Bing's big, and anyway it's in his row, so that shall be its name."
But other stories portray Ah Bing as even more central to the development of the cherry. In 1922, the agricultural journal The Oregon Grower related that Lewelling had assigned a collection of "Black Republican" cherry seedlings to Ah Bing to care for in 1875. Ah Bing's cultivation resulted in the Bing cherry, which, the author commented, would "pass his name down in horticultural history."
The cherry went on to win prizes and sell for the princely sum of a dollar a pound. But Ah Bing's contribution couldn't save him from American racism. During the years of violent anti-Chinese riots, Lewelling sheltered Ah Bing and his other Chinese workers in his home. Perhaps it was the fevered environment that spurred Ah Bing to visit his family. But he also longed for home. "Bing was always talking about his family," Ledding said. In 1889, he returned to China for a visit. While the Chinese Exclusion Act had already passed, legislators actively plugged loopholes and made it even more restrictive. Ah Bing never returned to the U.S., and Ledding, years later, blamed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The rest of Ah Bing's story is lost to history. After working for decades in the United States, perhaps he wanted to stay in his homeland, where he wouldn't be threatened due to his race. It's equally likely, though, that he tried to return, and was rejected. But Americans encounter his legacy every day, just by seeing the name "Bing" on their bags of cherries.
Last week, the Wisconsin-based business Penzey's Spices sent out emails emblazoned with a frown emoji. The occasion was a several dollars per ounce hike in the price of vanilla. Founder Bill Penzey wrote a brief explanation: Madagascar, where 80% of the world's vanilla comes from, has been going through a rough patch. A perfect storm of drought and a pair of cyclones hit vanilla farmers hard. The rippling effects have disrupted everything from the supply chains of massive multinational companies to the flavoring in fudge.
But how did one island come to dominate the vanilla industry? And why is one kilogram of "plain vanilla" now more valuable than one kilogram of silver?
After all, vanilla isn't even native to Madagascar. The main source of vanilla is the Vanilla planiflolia orchid. Long cultivated in Mexico, the flavoring from its long pods was used in rituals and in the traditional Aztec drink of ground, spiced chocolate. As Spain's conquistadors dismantled the Aztec empire in the 16th century, they sent Mexican silver, chocolate, and vanilla back to Europe. Vanilla, with its floral, subtle taste, quickly became a favorite, especially as an accompaniment to chocolate and cream. But when Europeans tried to grow it in their botanical gardens and their colonies, the long pods didn't develop. Vanilla's main pollinator was back in Mexico: the Melipona bee.
Without pollination, vanilla production was mostly limited to Mexico. But other regions were desperate to grow valuable vanilla, and plants were shipped to likely climates around the world. In 1841, one young innovator figured out an unlikely solution. Edmond Albius was a 12-year-old slave on the French-controlled island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean. Using a stick and his thumb, Albius pushed together the male anthers and female stigma of the vanilla flower, pollinating it efficiently. Mass vanilla production suddenly became possible, especially in hot, humid climates. Tiny Réunion fits the bill, but so does another, much larger island a few hundred miles to the east: Madagascar.
The reason that Madagascar is still on top of the vanilla game is grim: According to The Financial Times, it's one of the few regions with the right climate that is also poor enough to make laborious hand-pollination affordable. While other countries, such as India, have dabbled in heavy vanilla production, huge swings in the international price make it a dangerous crop to grow widely. Many farmers choose to stick to other crops. This concentration of vanilla production makes the industry and prices even more precarious—currently, events in Madagascar have led to some ice cream parlors losing money on each scoop of vanilla.
Vanilla has long been one of the world's priciest seasonings. Artificial vanillas have abounded for centuries, made with everything from beaver pelvis glands to petroleum products. But with demand for natural flavors booming, high prices are inspiring vanilla heists everywhere from farms in Madagascar to spice companies in Michigan. Though a little vanilla goes a long way, there's no sign that our craving for vanilla is going anywhere soon.
For centuries, txokos have been crucial to shaping culinary traditions.
In every crevice of Basque Country, Spain, friends gather behind closed doors to drink a glass of wine, perform music, play cards, and eat. Txokos, a Basque word meaning “corner” or “secret place,” evolved from late-night sociedades populares (popular societies). In the mid-19th century, these societies formed in San Sebastián as middle-class workers began spending their increased wages at sidrerías (cider houses) and staying out later, often after existing cafes, restaurants, and bars had shuttered. Soon, these groups—known as “sociedades” in San Sebastián and in the Guipuzcoa region, and “txokos” in Bilbao and the Bizkaia region—became established entities where groups gathered to eat and revel.
Today, membership is granted based on an application, annual fees, a personal recommendation, or is passed down through families. But all txokos share the same general structure, in terms of the setup and communal aspects of the societies. Some txokos, usually ranging from 80 to 100 members, are dedicated solely to food and dining, while others revolve around certain religious, political, or sports groups. They’re more than just a pastime, though. Txokos persisted through the authoritarian regime led by Francisco Franco during part of the 20th century. During that trying era, these clubs existed as safe spaces where the Basque could preserve their language, dishes, and culture in the face of persecution.
Traditionally, it works like this: Either the best chef in the group—or who ever volunteered on a given evening—will prepare dishes central to Basque cuisine such as bacalao (salted cod), angulas (baby eel), or marmitako, a fish stew with potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes. Although txokos are equipped with basic supplies, including olive oil, spices, and wine, several members will typically make a trip to the market to buy fresh fish, bread, and produce, returning to the space and pooling a sum of money at the night’s end to fund the groceries. While some members cook, others will set the table, tend to the fire, or simply pour themselves a cerveza (beer) and relax with friends.
Some txokos are located in the city center on the ground floor of businesses, while others are hosted by farmers in ancient stone buildings in rural areas. While members typically gather for special events such as birthdays, sporting events, or even funerals, they have daily access to the space and are welcome to drop by on weekdays after work, or on weekends. Today, it's estimated that over 80 percent of Basque men are members of one of the approximate 1500 private dining clubs existing in northern Spain. Although the clubs are historically male-only, that’s been changing over the past few decades. Many txokos now allow women and families to become members.
Marcela Garcés, who wrote the screenplay for the 2017 film The Txoko Experience: The Secret Culinary Space of the Basques, describes the interior of most txokos as open, industrial-size kitchens with long tables for dining. Yuri Morejon, the film’s director and a Basque immigrant, notes that after the meal, families and friends spend hours talking, singing, joking, and having drinks sobremesa, or around the table.
“Almost every memory I have from my childhood is related to food because we had a txoko in my parents’ apartment building in Bilbao,” Morejon says. “A txoko is a cozy place for celebrations with friends. For me, [the film] was a great opportunity to show people how Basque enjoy and live around food.”
After the meal, members often sing Basque songs or play games such as La Rana, in which players try to toss metal disks inside a wooden chest.
Xabier De La Maza, a Basque native and restaurant owner, is a member of Cofradía Vasca de Gastronomía, one of the oldest and most well-known sociedades. While these gatherings have inspired many of the recipes in the region's Michelin-starred restaurants, to De La Maza, the societies serve as a place to do something fundamental to Basque culture: share. “We use food and drink in every stage of life, every good or bad moment,” De La Maza said. “There may be more modern societies, more traditional societies, with people from different neighborhoods or ones from the same neighborhood, but they always serve as a point of union.”
These points of union have made bigger waves outside of Basque Country in recent years. Chefs Alex Raij and Eder Montero frequently visit the region to spend time with Montero’s family in Bilbao and explore different Spanish cuisines for their restaurant Txikito, in New York City. Montero says it’s something beyond the dishes, dining experience, and quality of food that has caused Basque cuisine to become a bigger presence worldwide. He cites the example of a friend, who may travel three hours to forage mushrooms for a dish he would prepare for his txoko that afternoon, as an illustration of Basque people’s devotion and connectedness to the land. “You find something and you want to share it with people in these small places that you gather in,” Montero says. “It’s a way of therapy. You’re probably cooking the same dishes over and over again, the way your grandmother did it.”
Although rooted in tradition, txokos continue to evolve in the face of tourism, a global gastronomic spotlight, and the inclusion of women and families. While mosts tourists walking the cobblestones streets of San Sebastián and Bilbao don't know about the discreet social gatherings being held, some larger and more commercially-minded txokos have opened their doors for cooking demonstrations or to share a meal with visitors. Occasionally, smaller txokos may invite non-members as guests or charge tourists a fee to visit their establishment, too.
Goiuri Azkarateaskasua, a recent graduate from Antzuola, Spain, says her father’s sociedad, Eperra, was originally created to unite hunters in the area in 1975. Over the past two decades, the sociedad has since opened membership up to women and families. “I feel like we should embrace these new identities we now have in the region and welcome them into our culture,” Azkarateaskasua says, “Since it’s all about having a good time surrounded by great food and company.”
For decades, two island nations came to blows over fish.
In Icelandic, they were known as Þorskastríðin, "the cod strife," or Landhelgisstríðin, "the wars for the territorial waters.” In English, they were simply “the Cod Wars.” Between the late 1940s and 1976, the two island nations of Iceland and the United Kingdom all but declared war—despite the fact that there were almost no casualties, and the former had no army.
In the frigid waters between these two nations, four confrontations took place between Great Britain, a world superpower, and Iceland, a microstate of just a few hundred thousand people. Each time, Iceland won. And it all happened because of cod—and the right to fish it. These were the Cod Wars.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a nation surrounded by hundreds of square miles of ocean on all sides relies heavily on fish. It has long been Iceland’s main food supply and primary export product. But of all fish, cod is the most important: a raison d’etre, a source of national pride to rival their soccer team, and a favorite thing to eat. Sometimes, it’s dried into a kind of fish jerky and smeared with butter. Sometimes, it’s salted (one of Iceland’s biggest exports). Sometimes, it’s simply the fish’s gellur (the fleshy triangular muscle behind and under the tongue) boiled or served in a gratin. It is Iceland’s very own watery white gold, and the country carefully guards its bounty.
But in the lead-up to the Second World War, Icelandic fishermen grew concerned about a preponderance of British ships in their waters, which affected how much cod they could catch themselves. Anxiety mounted until, in 1952, they announced new rules, limiting the Icelandic waters where British fishermen could trawl, and expanding Icelandic fishery zones from three to four nautical miles from the shore.
The United Kingdom, incensed by this swat from its tiny neighbor, retaliated by imposing a landing ban on Icelandic fish in British ports. It was a costly sanction—the U.K. was Iceland's largest export market for fish. It backfired, however, when the USSR found homes for Iceland’s unsold fish. In the midst of its own Cold War, the U.S. followed suit, perhaps fearing greater Soviet influence, and encouraged its European allies to do the same. The sanctions thus minimized, Iceland could maintain their new limits. Eventually, in 1956, Great Britain capitulated the first Cod War, in the wake of a decision from the Organisation of European Economic Co-operation that sided with Iceland.
That might have been that, but in September 1958, Iceland expanded its national waters still further, from four nautical miles to 12, deep into waters that had previously belonged to no one. NATO, the Western military alliance, was up in arms, and Britain refused to cooperate. With the backing of virtually every western European country, Britain insisted they would continue to fish where they had before, under the protection of Royal Navy warships.
During the first Cod War, sometimes described as the prequel to the later three, Iceland had done little to enforce its ban: Its Coast Guard arrested only one British trawler. This time, however, skirmishes were frequent and shots were fired.
In one such altercation, in November 1958, the Icelandic gunboat V/s Þór fired warning shots at the British trawler Hackness. Eventually, the British navy ship HMS Russell intervened, and pointed out that the British ship was well outside the four-mile limit (that the British recognized as legitimate). Þór’s captain would not retreat, and ordered his men to man their guns and approach the wayward trawler. Russell, a comparable titan, made it clear that they would sink the boat if it shot the trawler. A brief stalemate followed, until the arrival of more British ships forced the Þór to back down.
By early 1961, clashes such as these made the situation more and more untenable. Diplomatic relations were worsening—Icelandic people protested the British and taunted the British ambassador when he visited the country—and Britain’s Royal Navy chaperones were proving expensive. With Iceland threatening to leave NATO, a compromise was drawn up: The United Kingdom would recognize Iceland’s 12-mile limit, with certain concessions in the first three years. The rest of the world, recognizing the risk of further conflict, imposed a new rule. Any further fights over cod between the two countries were to be sent directly to the International Court of Justice.
It was a prudent decision, but one that had little effect: Barely a decade later, in September 1972, the Icelandic government extended its fishing limits again, now to 50 miles. In the past, they’d been reluctant to assert themselves with military force. Now, however, they had a secret weapon, which they happily deployed. All seven of Iceland’s Coast Guard ships were armed with trawl wire cutters. “In reality,” writes Mark Kurlansky in Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, “the new weapon applied the old technology of minesweeping to fishing. One of the device’s four prongs would ensnare a trawl cable and cut it, letting loose a net worth $5,000 and whatever catch might be in it. A trawler without a trawl had nothing to do but go home.”
Once again, Western Europe opposed Iceland’s decision; once again, Iceland held firm, declaring that they were battling against imperialism and for their economic independence. “After the effectiveness of the trawl wire cutter was demonstrated,” Kurlansky writes, “the second Cod War denigrated into dodgem cars on the high seas.” Trawlers and Coast Guard vessels were ramming into each other, in attempts to prevent or incur trawl cable cutting. Britain’s NATO commitments made them unable, legally, to call on the Navy for support. Vessels were damaged, but, incredibly, no one was hurt.
It seems amazing from the outside, Kurlansky writes, that Iceland could be so hostile to its close neighbor and ally. But cod was worth major diplomatic tussling. “Unlike Britain, Iceland depended on fishing for its entire economy.” Cod alone had lifted the country into affluence and modernity. “Despite a history of warm feelings between the two nations and a close alliance, Iceland was not going to yield on its only resource.” Under pressure from NATO, Britain capitulated in late 1973. Iceland’s determination had carried it to victory yet again.
That might have been that, but global legal changes in 1975 provoked Iceland to act a final time. Despite the 50-mile limit, Icelandic fish stocks were under threat from overfishing more generally. A 200-mile limit was considered, and then adopted. British trawlers and fishermen within that limit began clashing with Icelandic gunboats, and the Royal Navy was brought in again. It was short, but messy, with 35 ramming incidents in six months. Iceland refused to negotiate, eventually severing diplomatic ties with Britain altogether despite repeated meetings between foreign and prime ministers.
Once again, NATO stepped in. Iceland was threatening to leave for good, and these “friendly” naval battles risked getting out of hand. For the fourth and final time, Iceland asserted itself, and the United Kingdom caved. The Cod Wars were over. There had been just two casualties: a British fisherman, from Grimsby, who had been hit by a hawser (towing cable), and an Icelandic engineer, who was accidentally electrocuted while repairing his hull.
The British economy may not have relied on cod as much as Iceland’s, but the effects were certainly felt. As Britain’s fisheries effectively closed, a depression settled over the country’s large northern fishing ports, such as Grimsby, Hull, and Fleetwood. Thousands of skilled fishermen, and those in related trades, including fish merchants and chip shop owners, lost their jobs. Meanwhile, Iceland’s 200-mile zone became the standard, curtailing foreign fishing all over the world.
All of this barely slowed the overfishing of cod, though. In 1998, the World Wildlife Foundation placed cod on the endangered species list, enacting limits on how much cod people could catch—no matter where in the world they were located. Iceland might have prevented foreign powers from fishing in its waters, but even a tiny country with a fighting spirit was no match for the natural and international limits now placed on its most delicious national treasure.
In 1898, George A. Grierson, an Irish civil servant and philologist, undertook the first ever Linguistic Survey of India. It took Grierson 30 years to gather data on 179 languages and 544 dialects. The survey was published in 19 volumes, spanning 8,000 pages, between 1903 and 1928.
For a very long time, Grierson’s achievement remained unsurpassed. After India became independent, the government initiated but never completed a second language survey. In 1961, the Census of India published The Language Tables, which identified 1,652 “mother tongues.” But the data for the Language Tables was obtained while collecting other census information and is not considered an authoritative language survey. In the absence of an extensive modern-day audit, the government cites 122 languages as the official number based on available data. The state does not individually recognize those languages spoken by less than 10,000 people.
Ganesh Devy was frustrated by this lack of contemporary data, especially the discrepancies he saw in the existing numbers. Since the government wasn’t likely to start on a new survey in the near future, Devy, a former professor of English from the western state of Gujarat, launched the People’s Linguistic Survey of India in 2010. The name refers to the fact that it was the people of the country, and not the government, that embarked on this project.
With single-minded ambition, he put together a team of 3,000 volunteers from all parts of the country. Since 2013, the PLSI has published 37 volumes, featuring detailed profiles of each of India’s languages. The project is expected to be completed by 2020 with 50 volumes. In the linguistic landscape of India, the work done by PLSI is not just pathbreaking, it is crucial in recording and thus preserving the languages of the country for future generations.
India is one of the four most linguistically diverse countries in the world, along with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Nigeria. The country has been identified as a “language hotspot” by K. David Harrison, a linguist at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College. According to Harrison, a language hotspot is a region with a high level of language diversity and endangerment, and a low level of documentation. In such a rapidly shifting country, Devy’s documentation is thus invaluable.
The challenge of putting a disparate team together with a minuscule budget of 8 million rupees ($1,17,000)—provided by a private trust—to map the languages spoken by 1.3 billion people was enormous. “My team was not made of linguists, but people who could speak their own language,” Devy says. “We had writers, school teachers, philosophers, social scientists, some linguists. We also had farmers, daily wagers, car drivers, people who had been in and out of jail. They had an intimacy with their language. Even if it was less scientific, it was authentic.” These volunteers were asked to record data about the languages they spoke, including the history of the language, its grammatical features, and samples of songs and stories. It was chaotic, Devy admits, but he traveled to every corner of the country to train the team and the final product was vetted with academic rigor.
So far, the PLSI has recorded 780 languages in India and 68 scripts. When Devy embarked on the mammoth project, even he did not expect to unearth that many. He says that the PLSI could not report on nearly 80 languages for various reasons, including accessibility of a given region due to remoteness or conflict, which brings the estimated total number of languages closer to 850.
Based on data from the survey, Devy estimates that in the last 50 years, India has lost 220 languages, including some within the last decade. In 2010, Bo, one of the oldest languages in the world, dating to pre-Neolithic times, died along with the last fluent speaker, a woman named Boa Senior who had been living in the Andaman Islands. In 2017, Majhi, a language spoken in Sikkim in northeast India, perished with the death of its last speaker, Thak Bahadur Majhi.
Languages such as these, spoken by communities that have lived in relative isolation, including the tribes of northeast India and those communities on the islands of Andaman and Nicobar in the south, are identified as the most vulnerable by linguists. A decline has also been seen along the coast of India as people migrate to cities for work.
But the story of India’s languages is not all grim. There are plenty of other instances of linguists discovering “hidden” languages in the country. For example, in 2010, Harrison identified Koro, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by a remote tribe in Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India. In April 2018, the linguist Panchanan Mohanty from Hyderabad University discovered two languages, Walmiki and Malhar, in remote parts of Odisha state in eastern India.
“India has some of the oldest surviving languages,” says Devy. “A language like Tamil has been around for 2,500 years. Some of the tribal languages would be even older. These languages have survived because they have a philosophical context to them and that philosophy is part of the lived lives of the speakers.”
Jad is one of the 780 languages documented by the PLSI. In many ways, the story of Jad, which is spoken in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, is illustrative of what is happening with many of India’s minority languages, which are disappearing at an alarming rate. The language is classified by UNESCO as “definitely endangered” (when children can no longer learn the language as a “mother tongue” in the home), with about 2,000 remaining speakers. It is under pressure from the dominant languages of the region: Garhwali, Hindi, and English.
In Dunda, a remote village perched on top of tall Himalayan peaks, members of the Jad community ponder the fate of their language. Dunda is the winter abode of the Jad people, a nomadic tribe that raises sheep and migrates between two villages with the change of seasons. In the evenings, women sit together in small groups in their compounds working on huge stacks of wool and talking companionably among themselves in their language, while their children go for coaching classes to learn English.
Sundarwati Rawat is part of this community. Every day when she puts her one-year-old grandson to sleep, she yearns to sing to him in her native language. The songs that were sung to her in Jad when she was young have slowly faded from her memory. She deliberately did not sing them to her daughters; she wanted them to learn Hindi and English, to find jobs in big cities. As she’s become older, she’s started to worry. “How will my grandson know who he is and where he comes from if he doesn’t know his own language?” she frets, speaking in Hindi.
Rawat thinks of herself as the memory keeper of her people. She is one of the few from her community to have preserved traditional objects related to Jad culture. In her collection, there’s an angni (a short woolen shirt), a pagra (broad woolen belt), a gold necklace with beads, and a large nose ring, all of which she brings out proudly to exhibit. “Our mother and their mothers have worn this,” she says. Her sense of loss of language is entwined with the loss she associates with these relics.
Her daughter Sheela is 24 and teaches in a school nearby. Sheela says that though she prefers to speak her language among her people, she never speaks it in front of outsiders. “I don’t want people to see me as different,” she says in Hindi.
Every family in the village faces the same dilemma, their identities threatened by erasure. The Jad are a proud people with a riven history. They were associated with the ancient Silk Road trade between India and Tibet, bartering grains, jaggery, and sugar for salt, borax, and wool from Tibet. The Jad language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman group of languages and Jad people are influenced by both Indian and Tibetan cultures. In 1962, at the time of war between India and China, the Jad people, whose villages were originally located close to India’s border with Tibet, were displaced and then resettled. The trade routes were closed and they had to find new means of living.
Narain Singh Negi, the elderly chief of Dunda village, carries the wounds of that displacement. “Our land was taken away and we were given these houses in compensation,” he says in Hindi, as he points at his surroundings. The houses in the village are draped with bright Buddhist prayer flags that flutter in the wind. Negi is disillusioned by the curiosity of anthropologists and linguists who record their culture and language and represent them to the world. He was even reluctant to go on record for this article. He fears the “othering” of his community. “They come here and try to separate us from the mainstream and that is not good for us,” he says.
Jad is an oral language, with little or no documentation. If there were any folk literature, storytelling, or history in the language, it is lost. To preserve it, a trilingual Jad-English-Hindi dictionary is being prepared, along with a grammar and ethno-linguistic report, by the Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages, an initiative by the Indian government.
“Jad can certainly be revitalized as there are enough speakers,” says Kavita Rastogi, a linguist from Lucknow University who is the principal investigator for the SPPEL. “The bigger battle is to convince the community to not abandon its mother tongue, and the people will not lose their social status if they speak a minority language.”
However, not all scholars agree that Jad can be saved. Suresh Mamgain is a professor of Hindi who has researched and published books on the Jad community and contributed the section on Jad in the PLSI. “They are not as isolated now as they were before,” he says in Hindi. “There is migration and globalization. I have observed that the community feels the need to assimilate in the mainstream and... that is the reason for the decline of language.”
After mapping India’s languages, Devy, whose spirit is unflagging at 67, has turned his attention to the world at large. His next project is the Global Language Status Report. The UNESCO states that nearly half of the over 6,000 languages spoken in the world may disappear by the end of this century. The GLSR proposes to cover the languages of Africa and South America, two regions where languages are fast disappearing without any trace, and where linguistic diversity has not been mapped. (Europe, Australia, and the United States are excluded, since their languages are well-charted.)
“I have been traveling to Africa for a year now and I am not deterred by the scope of mapping 54 countries,” Devy says. “The experience with PLSI was great fun, and I believe if people decide to do something, they actually can.”
For someone who has dedicated his life to searching for languages, it comes as a surprise to learn that Devy is not a trained linguist. Before he started the PLSI, he had worked closely with the tribal communities of India, documenting their languages and culture. Given his background, he perceives himself as a language activist and has a contrarian view on how to save endangered languages. Unlike some of his colleagues, Devy thinks that compiling dictionaries or teaching languages cannot stop them from dying. “Every language represents a unique worldview,” he says. “It takes great human labor for a language to evolve and when a language disappears, we will not be able to look at the world in the same way again.”
“I think creating livelihood for people in their language zones is the only solution,” he adds.
Devy’s perspective on saving languages by connecting them with people’s livelihood has strong resonance in Bagori village, a place that feels like the end of the earth. It is the last of the villages along the sharply ascending road that leads to Gangotri, the glacier which is the source of the river Ganga, the most holy of all rivers in Hinduism. This is where the Jad community migrates in May to spend the summer in ancient-looking houses, with intricate carvings in deodar, a Himalayan cedar tree. It is so high and cut off from nearby cities that only the elders of the village have migrated this year.
In Bagori, there is an acceptance among the senior members of the community that their way of life is disappearing. Given the remote nature of the village, and its lack of employment options, the elders have watched as younger generations shift away from Jad traditions, including the language itself.
Jeet Singh is nearly 90, one of the oldest people of the Jad tribe. His family is in the city, busy with jobs and education. He smokes a cigarette as he looks at the freshly fallen snow on the distant mountains. “We have lost so much as a community, our land and our homes,” he says in Hindi, with resignation. “Our survival has depended on learning other languages. If our language dies, we will not mourn, but adapt.”
It's thought the animal may have been kept as a pet.
Some 2,300 years ago, a gibbon unlike any on Earth today was buried in a chamber in Shaanxi Province, in central China, alongside lynx, leopards, and a black bear. The tomb is believed to have belonged to Lady Xia, who was the grandmother of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor. For years, the gibbon escaped much scientific scrutiny, until a visiting conservationist and gibbon expert, Samuel Turvey, came across its skull in a local museum. It's since been found to be an entirely new genus and species, the BBC reports, likely brought to extinction hundreds of years ago.
Using digital scans, Turvey and his team compared the gibbon's skull to the bones of hundreds of other animals in collections around the world. The scans confirmed that the animal was unlike any other. Compared to other gibbons, the now-extinct specimen had a "comparatively flat, small face," the New York Times reported, with protruding canines. In Chinese culture at the time, people believed that gibbons had noble characteristics. They were even sometimes kept as high-end pets. The researchers have since named the genus and species Junzi imperialis—junzi means "scholarly gentlemen" in Chinese—and published their findings in the journal Science.
Speaking to the New York Times, the researcher Susan Cheyne, who was not involved in the study, described how the gibbon might have been captured as a juvenile, at its peak cuteness. Practices such as these, she said, often involved the killing of gibbon mothers, who bear one infant at a time, “potentially impacting the social structure of entire group, which may not survive the loss of an adult,” she said. “So each live individual being kept as a pet certainly represents a bigger loss of individuals from the wild.” It's possible that practices such as these, therefore, brought the species to extinction.
These days, there are about 20 species of gibbon remaining, many of which are under threat from illegal trade, hunting, and deforestation. The most endangered of all, the Hainan gibbon, comes from a small island south of the Chinese mainland. There are fewer than 30 of these animals left. Junzi imperialis may have been the first gibbon species to disappear as a result of human intervention, but it seems certain not to be the last.
