Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11437 articles
Browse latest View live

The World’s Largest Bottle of Wine Just Spilled in Austria

0
0

We're gonna need a bigger napkin.

If spilling wine is bad luck, the residents of Lustenau had better brace themselves. Recently, a Chinese restaurant in the Austrian town became the scene of an unprecedented spill from a world-record-breaking bottle of vino. Only through the efforts of local firefighters, dairy farmers, and cidery workers were the townspeople spared from chaos.

In 2017, the world’s largest wine bottle was presented at the grand re-opening of the Chinese restaurant, Engel Wang Fu. Fashioned over three years by a German manufacturing company, it measured 9.8 feet tall with a 40-inch diameter, and weighed more than 815 pounds. A custom-made, climate-controlled glass chamber in the center of the dining room housed the bottle.

article-image

The event culminated with 1,590 liters of Keringer Wineries’ award-winning “100 Days Zweigelt” being pumped into the empty bottle before it was sealed with a one-foot-thick cork and a layer of wax. “100 days means at least 100 days of exposure to the mash, i.e. with peels and seeds,” explains winery owner Robert Keringer in an email. The wine was meant to further mature, while on display, for several years before being auctioned off for charity.

Fate had other plans. At some point, Lustenau firefighter Jürgen Hämmerle told Wine Spectator, the power to the bottle’s glass chamber was tripped. As the internal temperature rose to room temperature, the charity wine expanded and gushed through the giant cork. All told, 230 liters, or the equivalent of 306 bottles of wine, leaked onto the floor of the restaurant.

article-image

Concerned about the integrity of the nearly half-ton glass masterpiece, the firefighters first buttressed the base of the bottle with sandbags. “It was not clear whether the bottle could burst due to a suspected crack,” Hämmerle told Wine Spectator.

The rescue took a village. Once secure, the firemen mounted the bottle and drilled through the cork from atop a ladder. “An unusual application for the fire department!” writes Kerringer. A local dairy farm supplied them with food-safe hoses to siphon the wine, and a cidery provided a tank large enough to hold it.

All told, firemen safely extracted 1,360 liters of the remaining Zweigelt which passed taste examination back at the winery. Keringer writes that they’ll be individually bottled and auctioned at a later date. What’s certain is that “dry January” is officially over for the residents of Lustenau.


Life Along the Border That Cuts Cyprus in Two

0
0

In Nicosia, physical barriers separate the Greek and Turkish communities—but many residents don't seem to mind.

A sharp line cuts across the island of Cyprus. It runs through the middle of Nicosia, the capital, marked by stacked barrels, makeshift walls, and barbed wire. Soldiers in camouflage stand guard behind the barricades, and the letters “UN” loom in thick black letters on various buildings. To an outsider, this border within a country may feel like the markings of a battleground, but the city is not at war. The line through Nicosia exists to separate the city’s Turkish and Greek ethnic communities.

Just south of the stacked barrels and blocked roads, on the Greek side of town, a store called Phaneromenis 70 sells local artworks and serves as a kind of creative nucleus for Nicosia. Monika Ioakim, a DJ and associate of the Phaneromenis 70 collective, has seen this corner of Nicosia transform during her 48 years. “When I was growing up, we were told not to go too close to the border for fear of being shot or stepping on a landmine,” she says. “There was a lot of fear.”

Today, the border is little more than a formality. A civilian can cross to the other side by flashing a passport at Nicosia’s Ledra Street checkpoint. But the history of the border that divides Cyprus is long and troubling, and it haunts the city to this day.

article-image

Cyprus experienced almost eight centuries of foreign control, first under King Richard I of England and then the Knights Templar, the French family of Lusignan, the Venetians, and the Ottomans, whose descendants are Turkish Cypriots. The British returned in 1878 as the last in this chain of invaders, and they ruled the island for approximately 80 years. During that time, Cypriots grew resentful. Roughly 80 percent of the population identified as Greek Cypriots and believed that Cyprus belonged to Greece.

Between 1955 and 1959, a Greek Cypriot guerilla group called E.O.K.A. fought for enosis, or political union with Greece. In 1960, Britain withdrew from Cyprus—but rather than unification with Greece, Cyprus was given independence. “After such a long time of foreign rule, they had no idea how to react to independence,” says Andreas Karyos, a historian at the National Struggle Museum in Nicosia.

After the British left, the island’s Turkish and Greek communities struggled to trust one another as they grappled with the strange, new concept of freedom. “Once the constitution was created, it was difficult to implement because the law was interpreted differently by the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots,” explains Karyos. The national constitution stated that Turkish and Greek authorities could only rule over their respective ethnic populations. Yet the constitution did not specify how to determine the boundaries between Turkish and Greek Cypriot populations.

article-image

These disagreements only grew. Turkish Cypriots were granted 30 percent representation in all civil service posts, which was larger than their 18 percent share of the island’s population. The constitution called for a joint army, but the disparate groups couldn’t agree on how to form one. The Turkish and Greek Cypriots were supposed to form a mutual system of tax legislation, but they could not agree on this either. “Only one spark was necessary to destroy everything,” Karyos states. “And this is exactly what happened.”

In late 1963, Cyprus descended into sporadic, intercommunal violence that would culminate in the partition of the island. On July 15, 1974, the Greek government backed a military coup to support a new, pro-Greece leader of Cyprus. Turkey reacted five days later by invading. Approximately 9,000 people died in the fighting. Eventually, the United Nations intervened and established the Green Line, a buffer zone that separates the island into two ethnic halves.

article-image

Locals still live with the effects of the city’s partition. Nicosia is both the capital of Cyprus and its only divided city. In the southern half of the historic center, which is predominantly Greek, a Greek Cypriot businesswoman named Eleni Michaelides runs a textile shop. Her father, Andreas, founded it in the 1960s, when he was only 29. “It was very difficult at the time, because most of the textile shops then were not here,” she says. “They were on Ermou Street.” (Ermou Street weaves between the UN Buffer Zone and the Turkish half of Nicosia.)

When Andreas built his shop in a different area of Nicosia, on Onasagorou Street, his peers had their doubts. But the store thrived, and other textile merchants followed. “It was a good thing for all of us, because if we would have stayed on Ermou Street, we would have lost our businesses,” explains Michaelides.

Many Cypriots can relate. In 1974, people of Greek descent with homes or businesses in northern Cyprus were forced to relocate to the south. Conversely, Turkish Cypriots who lived in the south were forced to move north. Civilians were barred from visiting the opposite side of the island until 2003, when public checkpoints were established.

article-image

Ioakim’s family experienced the division first-hand. Her parents were originally from the eastern town of Famagusta, but Turkey’s invasion forced them to relocate to the Greek half of Nicosia when she was four. Ioakim spent many years abroad as a DJ, and when she returned in 2016, she had mixed feelings about the border.

“It was harder for me to accept and let go, because both of my parents are refugees,” Ioakim says. “The border opened when I was living abroad. When I came back, it was an everyday thing. It took me a while before I realized it was fine.”

Ioakim says that crossing the border can be painful for older generations, because the other side of the island contains relics of what they lost. Her mother has only been to the Turkish side twice since the border opened, to visit the home she inhabited before 1974. “For us and the younger generation, it’s different,” Ioakim says. “If you don’t have the emotional attachment, it’s fine. Just people getting on with their lives on both sides.”

article-image

Cagla Elektrikci, a friend of Ioakim who is in her early thirties, grew up on the other side of the border, in northern Nicosia. She is the granddaughter of Turkish Cypriots who were uprooted from the southern cities of Larnaca and Paphos. Today, her life bridges the divide; she works and studies on the Greek side of Nicosia. “I cross the border almost every day to work, to study, to travel, to shop, and to connect with my friends and colleagues in both communities,” Elektrikci says.

Elektrikci is proud to live in a place with such diversity and history, but she hopes that the border will not last forever. “I don’t see concrete divisions,” she says. “To me, humanity is a universal trait.”

Early Chinese Trick Photography Sent Chubby Babies Into Space

0
0

Inside a historian’s collection of endearing, goofy early 20th-century portraits.

At first glance, the image seems set in space, or at least the set of a low-budget science fiction movie. A stubby Sputnik hovers in the background, next to a flat moon. A sleek metal rocket, labeled YI FENG 02, hangs in the foreground, but instead of an astronaut, it holds a serious-looking baby who gazes off in the distance, unperturbed by the lack of oxygen, zero air pressure, and freezing temperatures of space.

Fortunately for the baby, the image was taken in a professional photo studio. It’s a prime example of early staged and trick studio photography, which gained popularity in China in the mid-20th century. YI FENG 02’s rocket baby is one of more than 8,000 photos in the personal collection of Chris Steiner, an art historian at Connecticut College. Six years ago, Steiner started collecting examples of this kind of studio photography, on eBay and at special photo shows, to show his undergraduate students. But as his collection ballooned in size, he discovered some intriguing recurring themes. “Airplanes, balloons, people posing as fake cowboys, men posing with fake women,” he says.

Trick photography has been around almost as long as photography itself, long before Photoshop, as early as the 1840s, according to an overview from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on the practice, Faking It. Early methods of manipulation included painting photographic prints and negatives, making double-exposures, and bleaching parts of the photos. But Steiner felt drawn to a less technical kind of illusion that required no manipulation of the negative—only manipulation of the subjects and studio settings. “The photos you’re dealing with are not using double exposure, but instead props and painted backdrops, with some forced perspective and trompe l'oeil to create the ‘trick’ effect,” Christopher Rea, a cultural historian at the University of British Columbia, writes in an email.

article-image

These commercial, quasi-trick photos first emerged in the United States in Europe around the 1890s, Steiner says. The most famous backdrop of these studio photographs is the paper moon (Steiner’s instagram is devoted to the subject). The earliest examples in Steiner’s collection depict people posing in fake boats. “Then in 1907, you start to see people posing in fake airplanes, fake balloons, fake trains,” he says. The theme is so prevalent that it makes up one of the largest subsections in Steiner’s collection, which he has accurately labeled: “People posing in fake modes of transport.”

These photos proliferated in the first half of the 20th century, as the tools of photography became less cumbersome and expensive, and more widely available. Photography suddenly expanded from high-class portraiture to offer opportunities for regular people to play around: pretending to steer a boat, or putting an infant in a rocketship. “None of this is considered to be high art,” Steiner says. “A lot of people who collect high-end photography would never touch this stuff.”

article-image

The technology also moved overseas, resulting in an international phenomenon of people simply chuffed to pose in fake modes of transport—often ones they’d never have access to otherwise. Two years ago, Steiner found two eBay sellers based in Beijing who began posting eight or nine photos a week from Chinese studios, regional variations of the age-old theme. He’d stay online until an auction closed—every Saturday at 11 p.m.—to buy the ones he wanted, each around an inch-and-a-half long. (Steiner attributes the tiny size to the relatively high cost of the paper.)

For the most part, the images look like riffs on the American images he’d seen before, featuring men and women posing in fake airplanes or automobiles, but he also noticed dozens of images like nothing he’d seen before. “Babies holding flowers ... on rockets?” he says. “I had no clue why.” He tried emailing the sellers to see if they had any information, but they could only offer a range of dates in which the images might have been taken. Some photos contain the label of the studio in which they’d been taken, such 3888 or Great Wall Studio. There were also babies—mostly boys—in planes and helicopters, smiling or frowning.

“Professional photo studios in China have made use of props like these fake [or] cardboard cars, boats, and planes since [the] early 20th century,” Tiffany Lee, an art historian at Swarthmore University who studies early Chinese photography, writes in an email. One 1912 price list from a Shanghai photo studio offered patrons both Western and traditional Chinese costumes, various photo manipulations, and the option to take a photo in a “flying vessel with two seats.” The photos were often taken to mark a special event, such as a birthday, according to Claire Roberts, an art historian at the University of Melbourne. “They are playful photos,” she writes in an email. “In the case of flying, perhaps to suggest the hope of lofty achievement.”

article-image

The chubby rocket babies also recall traditional Chinese nianhua, auspicious folk illustrations for the Lunar New Year, according to Rea. “These were works of art, printed in the millions, that families would stick on their walls,” he says. People would display their nianhua on their front gates, doors, and elsewhere throughout the house, meant to bring in prosperity in the New Year. Nianhua were soon appropriated in the 1970s by the Communist Party of China, which produced propaganda posters covered with images of children, often in planes and rockets, Lee says.

These images referred “specifically to (nascent) Chinese space programs in the age of Sputnik,” Rea writes. China was still allied with the Soviet Union at the time and saw the Soviet venture into space as proof of socialism's technological superiority over capitalism, Nicolai Volland, a cultural historian at Pennsylvania State, writes in an email. It was like the old tradition of nianhua, just in a new medium.

article-image

Though trick photography was an international favorite, Steiner says he notices regional tropes such as the rocket babies. Some have clear histories, such as the Chinese qiuji tu, or “self-beseeching photograph.” These photos were double-exposed to show the subject twice—as a peasant and again as a rich person, so they appeared to be begging from themselves, Rea writes in The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China. Another popular set of images, this time from the United States, depicted people picking oranges, often accompanied by some variant of the message, “I’ll eat oranges for you and you throw snowballs for me,” and were sent either from California or Florida. “It was to gloat that you could get oranges in the winter,” Steiner says. “I had to stop collecting them because there are just too many.”

Other local themes leave Steiner guessing. For example, he has amassed a collection of postcards from towns in coastal Croatia in which people pose with their heads in the maws of ghoulish cartoon sharks. Steiner’s best guess? “Apparently great whites were present in the Adriatic, especially during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries,” he writes in an email.

Steiner hopes that the boxes and boxes of photos on his living room bookshelf will help move this chapter of photographic history out of the margins. “That’s one of the things that’s frustrating about all these photographs, [they] come to you with no explanation or no history,” he says. But even if the photos’ origins can't be recovered, their humor is timeless. Meaning, it’s never not funny to see a chubby kid sitting on a rocketship, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

For Sale: Royally Minted Coins, Decorated With Dinosaurs

0
0

It’s change 165 million years in the making.

England is famous for its rich archaeology, a result of the island nation's long-standing habitation and record-keeping. But deep below the Victorian, Georgian, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman strata of Albion, the paleontological record speaks to a time long before any simian stepped foot in the region.

Now, the legacy of the country’s extinct proto lizards will be commemorated by the Royal Mint, on coins depicting three dinosaurs.

“There’s a lot of pressure involved, because this is a big deal,” says Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an adviser to the mint on its new coins. “[T]hey’re producing coins, and these are things that can’t just be changed. They’re real things, made of metal. You can’t just put an eraser to them if something’s wrong.”

article-image

Millions of years before there was such a thing as “England,” the site was an archipelago surrounded by a shallow tropical sea—a haven for dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes (mainly large). In the early 19th century, a bit of paleontological mania consumed the Brits, from Mary Anning on the Dorset coast to Gideon Mantell in Oxfordshire and Sussex. Mantell’s crowning achievements are two of the dinos included in the mint’s project, over 150 years after the paleontologist-cum-physician-cum-geologist’s death.

The first dinosaurs coined in the U.K. are the first that were found in the British soil: the meat-eating megalosaurus, which thrived in the middle Jurassic period, and a pair of extinct animals that lived 10 million later—the spiky-thumbed iguanodon and the armor-plated hylaeosaurus.

Each coin features paleoart of the dinosaurs—created through extensive conversations among paleontologists, paleoartists, and the mint—plus the names of the people who named each species and images of the original fossils they found.

article-image

Iguanodon is well-documented in the fossil record, and hylaeosaurus doesn’t offer much room for controversy. But recent work on megalosaurus suggests that the dinosaur may have actually had feathers. Barnett and the paleoartist Bob Nicholls decided to give the giant therapod a hint of feathers—enough to split the difference between two schools of thought.

“We brought it up to date by giving it some feathers,” says Barrett. “But by the same token, we didn’t want to go too far and make it look like some kind of diabolical turkey.”

The paleoart on the coins is a marked improvement over what was achievable in the past, Barrett says. The niche field, which dates back only to the 1980s, has grown apace in the past few decades because “the science moves all the time. If we did this 30 years ago, the dinosaurs would look very different than how they look now."

article-image

But—obviously—it can only be as up to date as paleontology itself. It’s a far cry from what early British excavators could think up, especially with a limited understanding of dinosaur anatomy. Back then, in the 1820s, even the vocabulary to call the creatures “dinosaurs” was lacking.

“Instead of looking like giant lizards or giant crocodiles, [early paleoart] looked like the nightmarish outcome of a one-night stand between an elephant and a lizard,” says Barrett.

The coins, now available on the Royal Mint’s website, are 50 pence pieces, with prices ranging from 10 pounds to nearly 1,000. If the metal-minted mega-lizards are a bit out of your price range, well, shovels cost about the same as the cheaper coins—which might help you find a fossil for yourself.

For One Photographer, Reptiles Rule the Galápagos

0
0

Lucas Bustamante wants you to fall in love.

It took a lot of effort for Ecuadorian photographer Lucas Bustamante to reach one of his models. First he had to get to Wolf Island, a remote and tiny rock in the Galápagos archipelago where tourists aren’t allowed. Then he had to climb a lava-rock cliff to reach the summit of the island, where his subject—the small, delicately speckled, and vunerable wolf leaf-toed gecko—lives. They can only be found on Wolf Island and the even more distant Darwin Island. “I just had a few hours to reach the target,” Bustamante says. “It was a lot of pressure and the climbing was tough but I got it.”

The result of this encounter and many others are featured in Reptiles of the Galápagos, a book co-authored by Bustamante, who has been focused on photographing reptiles for years. The book is the first fully comprehensive field guide of reptiles of the islands. The unique setting there—extremely isolated, at the confluence of three ocean currents, impacted by seismic and volcanic activity—has created an unusual menagerie of plant and animal life, and the reptiles are no exception. Though the islands have been studied for centuries—including Darwin’s famed work there—they still hold secrets. In the last 10 years, five new species of reptiles have been described there, and there are many more just waiting to be named.

Though the beloved giant tortoises are well known, Bustamante believes that the islands’ scaly and slithery creatures deserve even more attention. As cofounder, with Alejandro Areteaga, of Tropical Herping, a research and tourism institution based in Ecuador, Bustamante has traveled around the world with his camera to promote the conservation of hundreds of species of reptiles and amphibians in danger of extinction (even braving countless snakebites in the process). One of his greatest challenges in photographing reptiles, he says, is finding ways to get people to "fall in love with them and raise their willingness to protect them.”

Atlas Obscura spoke with Bustamante about his reptilian obsession, the challenges of the Galápagos, and the joy of sharing his photos.

article-image

Why reptiles?

My inspiration started in paying attention to reptiles, even before photographing them. I remember that since I was a kid, when I fell in love with dinosaurs, there was something in snakes that called to me. When I started traveling and encountering more and more iguanas, caimans, snakes, etc., these became my real-life dinosaurs. Also, this group of vertebrates is not as well studied as others, so you can always find something new, such as any unreported behaviors.

Mixing this with my passion for photography makes it possible for me to be around my favorite creatures and show to the world how cool and important they are, and that we need to protect them.

Which reptiles in this book stand out for you?

First for sure is the Galápagos pink iguana. When I first saw it, it was a dream come true for me. I felt like I was in a fairy tale. How often do you see a big pink reptile? And if you remember that they only live on top of an active volcano in one of the most remote places on Earth, and were just discovered 10 years ago, it was just a lifetime opportunity and assignment. Photographing them was challenging as well. In contrast with the Galápagos land iguanas, they are very aggressive and very fearless. They are like mini-crocs.

On the same expedition and location, but in the foothills, I saw and photographed Andy Sabin's leaf-toed gecko. We thought that maybe we had found a new species when we encountered it, and after the genetic results came back to us, we knew it for sure! It's pretty exciting, as a biologist, to photograph a species new to science, and even better when you are in an exclusive and remote location.

article-image

What is your favorite part of the photographic process?

There are two clear things: the creative part and the communication and sharing process.

When I'm in front of a subject that I want to photograph, I love to study it first. I try to understand how it moves, what it does, how it behaves. Only after that do I try to translate that in my images.

And once I get the images, I love to find the best way to share the moment, the message, and the story. That is the most important and challenging part for me. I think that photography is the best tool to translate science and nature to the general public, to make them fall in love with an animal, feel inspired by a landscape, and also worry about the problems these animals face. I think that this is the core of using photography, to raise global awareness for environmental conservation.That's the process that I most enjoy!

How have scientists and researchers been able to use your super-detailed photos?

The most important and general way is to have them in a free online database with all the documentation, accurate morphological and genetic data, maps, and a lot of literature on each reptile.

We get emails daily from people—from volunteers to PhDs—who want to get involved with us. I think that without our graphic material, all this interest would never be there. We, humans, are very emotional and visual beings, so that is the starting point to wake up interest and start a change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image

The Archaeobotanist Searching Art for Lost Fruit

0
0

Renaissance paintings can hide botanical secrets.

Like many natives of Italy’s Umbria region, Isabella Dalla Ragione grew up learning about the great Renaissance painters active there during the 15th and 16th centuries. Piero della Francesca, Pinturicchio, and Rafael all left their mark in the churches and feudal palaces that dot the rolling hills of the Upper Tiber Valley. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that Dalla Ragione, an agronomist and Perugia native, realized that local works of art contained precious clues into Italy’s lost biodiversity. By combining clues from artwork, ancient manuscripts, and oral histories, she was able to identify hundreds of Renaissance-era fruits. She now grows many of them in a 20-acre farmstead as an outdoor museum of Italy’s past.

Dalla Ragione was born in 1957 in San Sepolcro, the hometown of the early Renaissance master della Francesca. Like much of rural Italy, San Sepolcro and its surroundings were farmed for centuries according to the metayage system. Landowners would grant farmers the right to work the land in exchange for 50 percent of the harvest.

article-image

When Italy transitioned to an industrial economy during the 1950s, farmers fled to cities to look for jobs. Many of their centuries-old practices were set to be lost. That’s when Livio Dalla Ragione stepped in. A farmer himself, Dalla Ragione’s father spent much of his life trying to preserve local folk culture. “We would spend hours looking for equipment and plants in abandoned fields,” Dalla Ragione explains. “To me, it was like going on a hunt for lost treasures.”

Inspired by her childhood adventures, she went on to study agronomy at the University of Perugia, where she specialized in the genetic and cultural history of fruit. Her joint interest in science and culture is also at the core of Archeologia Arborea, an organization that she co-founded in 1972 with her father to protect local farming knowledge.

By combining traditional research methods, such as archival consultation, with explorations of abandoned fields and monastic orchards, the Dalla Regions were able to identify hundreds of plants that they planted in their 12th-century farmstead in San Lorenzo di Lerchi. But two decades ago, she realized that precious clues into past varieties were hiding in plain sight, depicted in Renaissance frescoes and paintings preserved in the palazzos and museums of central Italy.

In the mid-2000s, Dalla Ragione began to visit the archives of Palazzo Bufalini, a 16th-century palace erected by a landowning family in the nearby town of Città di Castello. The Bufalini palace hosts a rich collection of ancient documents, including kitchen invoices and recipes filled with references to historic plants. It was during a study session at the Bufalini’s library that Della Ragione had a life-changing revelation. “I would sometimes look up to the ceiling to rest my eyes from reading,” she explains. “And I started to wonder if those frescoes could tell me something about ancient varieties.”

article-image

Like many Renaissance buildings, the interior rooms of Palazzo Bufalini are decorated with colorful frescoes of pagan and Christian subjects, surrounded by festoons of fruit and vegetables. Dalla Ragione soon discovered that the artist was Cristofano Gherardi, a student of 16th-century artist and historian Giorgio Vasari. Vasari was known to encourage his pupils to choose “real fruits” as subjects. “Gherardi painted cucumbers, melons, or pumpkins after studying them in real life,” Dalla Ragione says. “So they must have grown in nearby farmsteads or in the palace’s own orchard.”

Most of these varieties, such as white cucumbers or millet, are now rare in this part of Umbria. According to Fabio Parasecoli, a professor of food studies at New York University, the onset of large scale industrial farming from the 1950s onwards led to the abandonment of varieties that did not grow fast enough, had low yields, or could not be harvested mechanically.

article-image

But Dalla Ragione was able to recognize and catalogue most of the biological subjects painted by Gherardi, checking them against information from the Bufalini’s archives and the oral histories gathered during research trips with her father. Inspired by her discoveries, she set to study more Renaissance era paintings across central Italy. But she soon realized that botanical details were often overlooked or misunderstood.

Take "Madonna and Child with the Pear," an oil-on-wood painting completed in 1526 by German master Albrecht Dürer, currently preserved at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. “You can find so many texts detailing the symbolic meaning of pears in this painting,” Dalla Ragione says. However, the distinctive shape of the top of the fruit in Durer’s painting made Dalla Ragione realize that it was actually a “mouth of the ox" apple, an ancient variety that Dalla Ragione had found years ago in an abandoned field near Perugia and now grows on her farmstead.

article-image

Sometimes, looking at works of art can lead to new discoveries. That happened with an apple-like pear that she rediscovered, thanks to a painting by Renaissance artist Francesco Squarcione. In "The Virgin and the Child," a 1460 painting held at the Berlin State Museum in Germany, the artist painted a fruit to the right of Jesus’s feet. “Most art historians refer to this fruit as an apple,” Dalla Ragione says. “But I wasn’t convinced.”

She searched for references to a “flat apple” in old manuscripts, but soon realized that what Squarcione depicted was in fact a pera verdacchia,” a variety of pear once commonly used in Umbria to make baked pears and crostatas. After a hunt across abandoned the farmsteads and monastic gardens of the Upper Tiber valley, Dalla Ragione eventually found a pera verdacchia in a field near Arezzo, Tuscany.

article-image

Once she finds a long-lost tree, Dalla Ragione plants three samples in her farmstead and puts them up for adoption via Archeologia Arborea’s website. “If you adopt a tree, it means your contribution will be used for its preservation,” she says. “Some adoptive parents come from as far as the U.S. or Australia.”

She personally takes care of her 600 plants year-round. Between September and October, she picks up most of her pears and apples and preserves them inside an abandoned chapel next to her farmstead. Standing against the chapel’s frescoes, these baskets of fruit symbolize of Archeologia Arborea’s mission statement: that plants are an essential element of cultural heritage.

article-image

“Our communities used to revolve around plants,” Dalla Regione says, noting how locals carefully took seeds with them as they migrated across the Atlantic in search of a better life. “People considered plants as the core to their identity.” That’s why she thinks that botanical accuracy is essential, especially when looking at depictions of plants in art. Some art historians are interested in her search, but most are reluctant to update their long-held analyses to include her insights. “I’m a rural agronomist,” she says. “Some experts just ignore me.’

Despite skepticism, she has never stopped looking at art or clues into lost fruit varieties. Together with a team of historians and archivists, she produced a volume in 2009 entitled “Beholding Natural Fruits” detailing the botanical insights gathered from Gherardi’s art. And she is now working on a new book, to be published next year, detailing more discoveries about the fruits depicted by Renaissance artists. “There is so much knowledge hidden in works of art,” she says. “But it’s essential to write it down before it’s too late.”

The Devilishly Difficult Locks of Dindigul

0
0

These unique handcrafted mechanisms are designed to protect homes, confound cashiers, and outthink thieves.

A.N.S Pradeep Kumar picks up a shiny silver key the size of his forearm. He inserts it into a huge lock placed on the counter of his store. Every time he twists the massive key, a ring reverberates throughout the shop.

“This is the bell lock,” he says. “A skilled locksmith in these parts would take two weeks to craft this by hand.”

Surrounded by a sea of shimmering silver and brass, this 42-year-old lock manufacturer and retailer has spent his life and career in Dindigul, a city of two million people in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. For the past 75 years his family has been part of, and privy to, the secrets of an ancient lock-making industry.

article-image

Last August, Dindigul locks received a GI (Geographical Indication) tag, given to unique and authentic indigenous Indian products that can be traced to a specific geographical area and are famed for their quality.

In Dindigul’s case, that geography has always been key. “People turned to making locks [here] because there was an abundance of iron in this region, but water for agriculture was scarce,” says Pradeep Kumar.

Yet times are changing. Until the 1980s, perhaps 1,800 locksmiths lived and worked in Dindigul. Today, only about 200 practitioners know how to craft a typical Dindigul door lock, also called a bullet lock. It’s a complicated metal contraption, with nine inner levers that operate five cylindrical steel rods simultaneously; the rods latch into place with every twist of the key.

Though demand for these locks still exists—temples, homes, and government offices in Tamil Nadu still use them, for instance—production hasn’t been able to keep up, due in large part to a dearth of skilled labor. Ingenuity has suffered too. At one time the city produced over a hundred varieties of locks. Today perhaps 50 variants exist, only 10 of which are in active production. In just three generations, says Kumar, the intricate knowledge that sustained a city has faded.

article-image

Ragu runs a small hardware store called Ragu Hardwares, tucked into a narrow lane on Dindigul’s vibrant market street. There was a time, he says, when he stocked only Dindigul locks. But in an era of electronic surveillance and high-tech security systems, competition from cheaper, machine-made locks—manufactured in China and the northern Indian city of Aligarh—has changed the equation.

One variety of lock, however, has maintained its popularity here: the maanga poottu, or mango lock. Resembling an ordinary padlock designed in the shape of the mango—a beloved fruit in these parts—its popularity hinges on its durability. Made in all sizes, it can be used to secure homes, drawers, safes, cupboards, and bicycles.

Every mango lock is designed to be opened with what’s known locally as a “female key.” When the key, which has a circular hollow opening at its tip, is inserted into the padlock, the hole latches onto a rod in the lock’s internal mechanism.

Pradeep Kumar describes a customer from Chennai who recently ordered a “nithra” lock—a mango padlock that has two keyholes placed side by side, specifically designed to confuse a thief. If the key is inserted into the wrong hole, the lock jams. The customer wanted his nithra lock to be obscured by two iron plates that slid over the keyholes.

article-image

Some mango locks have an iron rod that extends from the keyhole. The lock can be opened only if the rod is positioned at a certain angle; the nature of the tilt is a secret known only to the locksmith and the person who commissions it. “It’s a version of a number combination,” says Pradeep Kumar.

Then there’s the mango button lock, which opens only when you twist the key after pressing a hidden button. There are also padlocks that require two keys of different sizes to open. The second key is bigger, and works only when the smaller one remains inserted in the lock.

“Vichitra” mango locks are among the most fascinating in Dindigul’s history. These locks were built with the natural hierarchy of a family business in mind, at a time when such enterprises were the norm, and flourished in an age when cash registers were never mechanized.

Each Vichitra lock has three keys—one for the cashier, one for the supervisor, and the third for the owner of the company. If the supervisor suspected that the cashier was stealing from the store, he could put his key into the lock, twist it once to the right, then lock the cash register by twisting left. After that, the cashier’s key would no longer work. If the owner wanted to shut out both the cashier and the supervisor, he could do the same thing with his key.

article-image

The first Dindigul lock is said to have been commissioned by Tipu Sultan, the 18th-century ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in southern India, to guard a fort on the summit of a steep hill in the heart of the city. But according to British records, says N. Rajendran, head of the history department at Bharathidasan University in Tiruchirappalli, the Dindigul lock industry didn’t truly spring to life until the 1900s.

“It [is] ... likely that Dindigul lockmakers were an indigenous artisan community,” he says. “It’s remarkable how they managed to trademark their craft—establishing their unique brand appeal by word of mouth. It led to a thriving market for these goods across south India.”

Five villages around Dindigul were once a haven for locksmiths, but like the retailers, their numbers have dwindled. Pradeep Kumar speaks fondly of a skilled artisan he worked with for many years: Kothambari Pitchai, who passed away three months ago at the age of 85, after a lifetime of locksmithing. “There was no lock that was too complex that he couldn’t devise,” Kumar says. “To me, his passing marked the end of an era.”

On a blazing hot January afternoon, at the government-run Dindigul Lock, Hardware and Steel Furniture Workers' Industrial Cooperative Society (DICO), four elderly locksmiths are hard at work in a shop filled with rustic tables and tools, quaint machinery, and heaps of iron, brass, and steel. Each of these master craftsmen makes three to five locks a day, for which they earn about 350 rupees (or $5).

article-image

For K. Venkatachalam—the 58-year-old head of the local locksmiths’ union who has 36 years of lock-making experience—the GI recognition brought both joy and validation. “I learned this ancient art at the age of seven, from my father and grandfather,” he says. “It makes me glad to think that people have a better understanding and more respect for what we do.”

C. Murugesan, a 30-year veteran of the industry who also works at the DICO, says it takes mathematical precision to make a proper Dindigul lock. While older locksmiths used mental calculations to drill accurate holes in the outer casing of a padlock—ascertaining the size and spacing of each hole, and how the parts of the inner mechanism should fit together—newer ones require polytechnic graduates to fill that role. Such graduates, they hope, will drive this traditional industry into the future, mechanizing the process of design and manufacturing.

M. Karuppanah, another 58-year-old locksmith at the DICO, demonstrates how the shop’s lock-making process works. First the outer iron casing of a lock is cut with a mold. One-millimeter holes are drilled into it with a precision gear drill. The inner mechanism—the lock’s heart and soul—is assembled by hand, a process that can take days, or even weeks. That’s because the locksmiths design each lock differently, fitting the inner metal grooves and spring pieces together, and lining them up with the keyhole.

The last step is the filing and polishing. Sparks fly from the bed-grinding machine, a contraption with two rapidly rotating wheels that chip away at the metal lock for a smooth finish. (Despite the sparks, no one here wears any protective gear.)

article-image

“The [Dindigul] industry thrived because lock-makers were willing to take bold risks when crafting new designs,” Karuppanah says.

Yet some designs, he admits, were perhaps too adventurous. The famed kolaikaran pootu, for instance—aka the murderer's lock. Legend has it that it was designed to murder a potential murderer. If a would-be killer used the wrong key or tried to pick the lock, a slim knife would pop out from a hidden slit and gouge out his eyes. These locks are now illegal, and haven’t been seen since the 1970s.

Today, other industries—tanneries, textiles, tobacco cultivation—are thriving in Dindigul. Unless a new generation of locksmithing artisans steps up, the secrets of the city’s ancient industry may be locked away in the past.

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

The History of Race, Performance, and Drag Intersect in a Rare Photo of Thomas Dilward

0
0

Dilward performed with all-white minstrel troupes that otherwise excluded black people.

Today in Brooklyn, New York, the southwest corner of Court Street and Remsen Street is home to a vitamin store, a law office, and a pizzeria. But in September 1862, during the second year of the Civil War, the corner was home to Christy’s Opera House, a theater that put on minstrel shows in which white men blackened their faces with burnt cork in a racist caricature of African Americans. Christy’s troupe of 16 had one notable exception: a black performer named Thomas Dilward, who used the stage name “Japanese Tommy.”

Dilward was one of the first African-American performers to tour with white minstrels, who typically excluded African-American performers from their shows, John G. Russell, a cultural anthropologist at Gifu University in Japan, writes in an email. Dilward often performed in drag, according to Errol Hill and James V. Hatch’s A History of African American Theatre. He made history as a member of these all-white troupes, even as he inherited the troubling history of a genre built on racist caricatures and exclusion. A rare carte de visite of Dilward wearing a ruffled dress, white gloves, and a bonnet was sold to a private collector by Cowan’s Auctions on February 20. “I have seen this carte de visite a long time ago at the Harvard Theatre Collection,” Krystyn Moon, a historian at the University of Mary Washington, writes in an email.

Dilward (who sometimes appears as Dilverd or Dilworth, among other permutations) was born in Brooklyn, New York, in the late 1830s. He was a little person, standing approximately three feet six inches tall, and first began performing with Christy’s Minstrels in 1853, according to Moon’s book Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s. The all-white troupe was formed in Buffalo but performed throughout New York City, once running for a seven-year engagement at Mechanics’ Hall on 472 Broadway in Manhattan, which is now a six-story condo.

article-image

“How and when Dilward got the name ‘Japanese Tommy’ is unclear,” Russell says. “Some suggest he adopted [it] when delegates of the first Japanese Embassy visited the U.S. in 1860, but it appears he was already performing under that name with Christy’s Minstrels as early as 1853.” Commodore Matthew Perry opened Japan to American trade in 1853, leading some scholars to suggest that occasion might be the origin of Dilward’s stage name, Moon says.

In 1884, Dilward performed in a skit, “Fun in a Chinese Laundry,” that invited white audiences to laugh at both African-American and Chinese people at once, writes Josephine Lee, a scholar at the University of Minnesota, in The Japan of Pure Invention. Troubling portrayals of people of Asian descent were widespread at the time; the anti-Chinese sentiment that bubbled up in California in the 1860s had spread nationally by the 1870s, and in 1882, President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

After initially being cast for his stature, Dilward established himself as an acclaimed and versatile performer who sang, danced, and played the violin, Lee writes. Drag performances were a staple of minstrel shows, and Dilward often impersonated operatic prima donnas, Hill and Hatch write.

article-image

Though Dilward spent much of his early career in all-white minstrel troupes, he later joined several of the African-American minstrel troupes that emerged after the Civil War. In 1870, Dilward joined the troupe of the formerly enslaved entrepreneur Charles B. Hicks. “Black-on-black minstrelsy was more attractive to black entertainers, because they saw it as a way of gaining a foothold in the more remunerative and mainstream white theaters,” Monod writes. Black troupes still performed white stereotypes of black people, but their performances allowed black people to gain some control over how they were portrayed on stage, and there were few other ways to make a living as a black performer, Moon says.

Dilward’s last recorded show was with the Criterion Minstrels on March 5, 1887, according to a white minstrel producer named Edward Le Roy Rice. Dilward died two months later, of asthma, and was buried in Evergreens Cemetery along the border between Brooklyn and Queens, according to his obituary in The New York Times.

Dilward’s remarkable, complicated life appears only in the margins of the historical record; he appears mostly as “Japanese Tommy” in the credits of various playbills of minstrel shows, and in the reviews of local newspapers. In 2016, the theater historian Caitlin Marshall unearthed more concrete traces of Dilward for her graduate thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. She found that Dilward registered for the Civil War draft, and that he sued a Manhattan restaurant for refusing to serve him because of his race. Once, he headlined a show called Don’t Fail to See the Little Man.


The Effort to Save Colombia's Underground Mountaintop Tombs

0
0

Scientists and conservators are finally able to return to what was once an Andean war zone.

Deep in Colombia’s Cauca Department, once a war zone, Clemencia Vernaza is cloaked in darkness in an underground chamber. The art conservator is squinting through her glasses at some of the details etched and painted into the ancient volcanic rock in front of her. She pivots her flashlight up, like a child telling a scary story around a campfire, and the beam falls on a giant, monolithic face.

“Look at these black marks just around the eyes,” she murmurs, her fingers hovering over the deep black streaks painted along the brow of the sculpted face. They’re shrouded in darkness, but the walls all around her are painted with vivid red, black, gray, and white geometric patterns.

The chamber is a tomb, one of many that speckle the southwestern Colombian mountain ranges and make up the Parque Arqueológico Nacional de Tierradentro. Until very recently, the mountains and the intricate ruins they conceal were sealed from the world by the bloody war that raged around them.

article-image

Tierradentro is a cluster of 162 burial chambers—called hypogea—hewn from the peaks of four cordilleras near the Andean town of Inza. They span a few miles of mountainous terrain, with the tomb entrances at the peaks. Small sets of stairs carved into volcanic stone descend into the tombs, some no larger than a closet and others with multiple rooms. They were created between 600 and 900, before Spanish colonization, as “homes for the dead” of the ancient society’s elite class, researchers say. Each site was adorned with vivid paintings, unique to the person buried there. Some bear monolithic carvings etched into floor-to-ceiling pillars, some are speckled with pieces of pottery. Small, rectangular holes had been carved into the volcanic stone as final resting places, though the remains appear to have been removed long ago. It’s almost as if the Valley of the Kings had been dropped into in among Andean peaks. There’s nothing like them in the Western Hemisphere.

The ruins that make up Tierradentro, meaning “inside earth,” are the largest and most elaborate concentration of pre-Columbian underground tombs in the Americas and were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. Between Tierradentro and the more than 500 megalithic statues with human and animal features in neighboring San Agustín, the zone is the continent’s largest collection of prehistoric sculpture—and that includes Chile’s Easter Island. While a set of the ruins at Tierrodentro is open to visitors, many of the chambers are in dire condition.

article-image

The local Nasa indigenous people, also known as the Páez, have known of the tombs for ages, and the invading Spaniards also took note of them, but there was little study of them until in 1936, with a set of archaeological excursions that included Colombian archaeologist Gregorio Hernández de Alba. Over the decades some minimal research has been conducted, and in 1945, Colombia named Tierradentro a national archaeological park (and a national monument in 1993).

The ancient civilization is believed to be connected to the Nasa, but the mystery of the hypogeum and the society that made them continues to perplex researchers. “Tierradentro, it’s unique,” Vernaza says as she sits at the mouth of one tomb, looking out at the ranges in the distance, “But Tierradentro, we don't know much about it. We have to do a lot of research and try to give it the attention it deserves because we don't know exactly what there is, who created it, how they made it.”

article-image

Other historic UNESCO sites in Colombia, such as San Agustín or the Ciudad Perdida, or Lost City in the northern jungles, are well-known both within and outside of Colombia. Tierradentro, on the other hand, is more or less an unknown.

That’s because the tombs are in the heart of what was once Colombia’s red zone.

During the country’s more than half-century armed conflict, the region of Cauca was the site of a prolonged, bloody battle between fighters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the Colombian military and right-wing paramilitary gangs. The windy, cliff-riddled road from the western city of Popayán to Tierradentro became famous for kidnappings and ambushes. The ruins themselves were practically off-limits to the outside world.

article-image

Oscar Parra grew up in the now-quaint riverside village of Inza, nestled among the cordilleras that hold the tombs, and has worked at the park for 40 years. As a child, he played near the hypogea, and after school helped a small cluster of scientists working in the park carry their materials down from the peaks for a few coins. But he describes his childhood as defined by a deep psychological terror, the stifling fear of becoming a target of either side of the conflict.

“If the guerrillas are here and you're nearby, the army is going to attack you and think you're a guerrilla,” Parra recalls, as he sits atop a peak where he once played, “so you wouldn't know in what moment you could be killed.”

A 2016 pact between the government and FARC has created a tentative peace. Today there are only a few traces of the peril the area once represented—the total lack of development and a faded black “FARC” spray-painted on the back of a road sign.

This easing of tensions has opened the region to the world for the first time, allowing adventurous travelers to explore and researchers such as Vernaza and anthropologist Fernando Montejo to begin to unearth Tierradentro’s secrets—and work to save them.

It has long been believed that there are more undiscovered hypogea waiting to be found. The decorations and carvings in already-excavated sites indicate that the cultures that created Tierradentro and San Agustín were closely related. Research, Montejo says, could begin to put the ancient puzzle back together.

“It's possible that there are more hypogea,” says Montejo, coordinator of the Anthropological Heritage Group of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH). “But what's certain is that there are archaeological sites in almost all of the regions. That's why it's important to research them: Because where there are hypogea, there are also important contexts to understanding the past of these populations.”

Montejo, Vernaza, and four other researchers, from institutions in Colombia, Mexico, and Switzerland trek into the mountains of Cauca, toward a set of ruins tucked in the far reaches of one of the peaks. The town below, nestled next to a winding river looks like a toy village from here. They swing open a door marking the entrance of one chamber, and climb down a large set of stone stairs into a network of dimly lit chambers, the largest of which is around 20 feet deep and 40 feet wide.

article-image

Vernaza and two others turn their flashlights to the walls of the tomb, setting the elaborate line paintings, carved surfaces, pillars and dusty pots on the ground aglow. Other researchers take pictures and carefully collect samples from the paintings and surrounding soil that might provide more information. The geometric zig-zags and thickly painted lines running the length of the chamber. Though abstract, the patterns are distinctive to each person in each tomb. The methods were revolutionary for that age, says researcher Manuel Espinosa, who examines the pigments, made with local clay and plant material, with a quarter-sized eyepiece. “Their knowledge was very deep and they were highly specialized,” he says. “This type of mural painting is not repeated in any other part of the world.”

In addition to study and documentation, the researchers have another concern: the ultimate fate of Tierradentro.

The ruins face rapid deterioration due to environmental factors such as erosion, the growth of vegetation, insects, and earthquakes. Human disturbances such as vandalism and the search for artifacts to loot have already irreparably damaged many of the sites. “They've been deteriorated,” Montejo says. “In some cases, they've been lost.” Chronic underfunding by the Colombian government, Montejo adds, makes matters worse.

A small handful of the hypogea closest to the village below are more or less intact, while other, ruins are in dire condition, with cracks winding across the walls like spider webs, chunks of carved rock in piles of rubble on the ground, and painted surfaces hanging precariously off the ceilings. Vernaza and others have focused on four of the tombs—within a 30-minute trek of the village—to save whatever they can.

article-image

Bottles, syringes, jars, and stools rest in an organized mess in a corner of the chamber. Using the soil around them, Vernaza has tried to develop a natural glue to reattach some of the more deteriorated parts of the painting. She leans in and injects this clay-glue with a measured hand, as she explains that she’s had to mix a variety of different solutions to get it just right.

“This here has fallen, there has fallen, here has fallen, too,” she says, gingerly touching the ravaged volcanic rock section she was working on.

The highest of Tierradentro’s four peaks, El Alto de Aguacate, lies in Nasa indigenous land and is home to 62 of the tombs. There, much farther from Inza, land conflicts between the government and the Nasa have left many of the hypogea “practically abandoned,” says Elias Sevilla, an anthropologist at Universidad del Valle in Cali.

article-image

Ten years ago, Sevilla scaled that mountain, up a steep incline through banana and lemon trees for more than an hour. The scenery was breathtaking, he says, but the state of decay of the tombs was horrifying: ravaged by the elements, moss growth, and graffiti. Only faint traces of the once vibrant paintings remain there, Sevilla says. “These tombs that are open are endangered,” he says. “And if you don't protect them, they're going to deteriorate.” And with them, the chance to learn more about Colombia’s origins.

Archaeologists and conservators believe the newfound peace—and a small but growing number of visitors—will be key to studying and saving the park. But for now triage is the best they can do.

Vernaza peers up at her work. The cracks she’s filled with clay-glue criss-cross with the black and red strokes of the original artists.

“It's marvelous,” she says, “But it honestly needs urgent attention.”

The 30-Hour Ferry Rides That Keep Indonesia Connected

0
0

With more than 6,000 inhabited islands, the country can’t rely on air travel alone.

The deep horn aboard the Binaiya rumbles as a nearby ship worker shouts, “Hurry on, we leave in 30 minutes.”

Amid the intense heat and humidity, what appears to be a sea of people squeezes through narrow gates. Above their heads, cardboard boxes of uncommon shapes crowd surf their way up to the front as the many uniformed guards stamp available arms, ensuring a steady flow. The mass moves towards the ship like a well-oiled machine of chaos. Where exactly is everyone going?

Indonesia is the world’s largest island nation, an archipelago consisting of more than 17,000 officially registered islands. While the vast majority of the 264 million people that call this country home are spread across just two of these, Java and Sumatra, many live scattered among over 6,000 other islands.

article-image

After over three centuries of Dutch colonization, and a few years of Japanese occupation, Indonesia proclaimed its independence in 1945. President Suharto’s new regime, centralized in Java, had to unify thousands of islands that had long differed in cultural customs, religions, and political structures.

In an effort to consolidate power across the archipelago, the newly formed government attempted to nationalize KPM, a Dutch-owned shipping company that dominated inter-island travel. Following a Dutch refusal to cooperate, the Indonesian government set up the Pelayaran Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Shipping), or PELNI for short, to regain control over their seas. With a combination of ships looted from Japan in WWII and ships rented from elsewhere, PELNI quickly emerged as the winner in this short skirmish for logistical dominion. By the end of 1957, KPM discontinued its operations in Indonesia entirely.

In an era predating affordable and convenient air-transport, PELNI became the lifeblood of local travel in Indonesia, connecting passengers and cargo to each corner of the newly united archipelago. In recent years, the company's importance in the larger, more populated islands has dwindled. But, to many of the smaller and less developed islands, primarily further east, the 26 ships still functioning are absolutely vital. They stop at places where air travel has remained an impracticality and crops are less easily grown.

article-image

Binaiya is a fairly standard model in the fleet. It officially sleeps 960 passengers, though a number closer to 1,500 is not uncommon. On the upper decks, there are a few private cabins that sleep two or four. However, the vast majority of passengers sleep in rooms of up to 200 in the massive dormitory decks.

Though routes of these boats are infamously prone to change, Binaiya regularly travels between five major islands: Bali, Sumbawa, Flores, Sulawesi, and Borneo. Dormitory tickets for the 30-hour Bali-to-Flores leg cost $15 and include six meals.

Soon after leaving the port, Binaiya takes on a life of its own. Many of the kids on board rush to the upper deck, where strong winds drown out their excited chatter. In the shaded regions, large groups circle around decks of cards. Cigarettes are passed around and, in between the small meals, copious amounts of Indomie (Indonesia’s most popular Instant Noodle) are devoured.

article-image

Every leg of a PELNI journey has its own clientele. On boats leaving from Bali, migrant workers looking to capitalize off of the tourism craze might be the most common. For young Indonesians from islands such as Flores, Sulawesi, and Sumbawa, the booming tourism industry in Bali offers stable job opportunities in hospitality and transport.

William, a local passenger, is from the Manggarai province in Flores. The population of his home town, Golocala, is roughly 1,000. Many of the people here, his family included, spend their days farming the region's main crops: coffee and rice. Curious about the opportunities offered on some of the other islands, William boarded his first PELNI six years ago. A little less than two days later, he landed in his new home, Bali. After some time wandering around the island, William found work as a manager for a pair of small villas in Uluwatu, a popular surf town for tourists.

article-image

Generally, William returns home via PELNI once or twice a year. "Almost all of the people I know are using it because it is very cheap," he says. On this particular trip, he is off to see his newborn baby for the first time. His wife, who also moved to Bali to find work in the tourism industry, had moved home just a month earlier to prepare for the birth of their child. “In Bali, having our baby in a hospital will be maybe seven or eight times more expensive than in my province,” William says.

Eventually, William and his wife plan to move back home to set up a small shop with the money they have saved in Bali. Growing up with nine siblings in a village of fewer than 1,000 people, there is a sense of community ingrained in him. “When I first left,” William says, “all I wanted was to experience different kinds of life. Now, I mostly just want to be with my family again, to feel at home.” His mind momentarily drifts before rejoining the conversation once again. “In my family, only me and one of my sisters left Golocala. But, on this boat, there are many people from Manggarai, just like us, who can’t wait to be living at home again.” Until then, the cheap price of PELNI allows William, and many others, to travel home a few times a year, for a fraction of the cost of an airline ticket.

article-image

After nearly 24 hours floating across the calm of the Bali Sea, we dock in Bima, the largest city in Sumbawa. The docking process is always a spectacle.

From the moment the gates open, food vendors rush aboard, racing to their chosen spot on the deck. All too aware of the less-than-ideal meals served on the boat, locals come laden with local delights like nasi campur and ayam goreng, as well as popular sweets such as dadar and wajik.

On the ground level, hundreds of family members line the docks eagerly awaiting the return of their loved ones as other families begin their goodbyes. Beside the boat, trucks full of corn, onion, and garlic, the main exports of Bima, load tons of products abroad. These shipments will be gratefully received by various islands less able to grow their own.

article-image

At this particular port, far more passengers get on than those who leave. An already over-capacity ship sees its hallways nearly overflow. After a couple of hours, the deep horn of Binaiya rumbles once again and the many vendors scatter back ashore. Before long, Binaiya is on the move, with Flores a mere six hours away.

Once commanding a fleet of over 50 vessels, PELNI is no longer as popular as it once was. As the nation experiences a continuous rise in affordable air travel, shipping routes available to the public will decrease. Unfortunately, for an archipelago so large, modernization occurs at very different speeds. So, while some larger islands are losing the need for these boats, many smaller islands have come to rely on them more than ever.

article-image

On the Eastern end of the archipelago, where lands are often less fertile, mass shipments of rice, onions, corn, and other basic foods are critical. Each time a route closes, these islands face less-regular shipments and added obstacles for leaving and returning home. Thankfully, a restructuring of the ticketing system and improvements to customer experience has led to an increase in low-budget local passengers, like William, over the last five years. After nearly two decades of declining popularity, PELNI seems to be turning a corner.

For millions of Indonesians, this means that dreams of better job opportunities and new homes are still on the horizon. For William, his goal is to ultimately return home. He will once again take a rather long boat ride.

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

What Were 29 Exotic Snakes Doing In a U.K. Trash Bin?

0
0

Wriggling in pillowcases, trying to stay warm after being illegally abandoned.

Desperate people have long used fire and police stations as safe places to leave infants they can’t care for. Unwanted animals more often are either dropped at animal-rescue facilities or, unfortunately, set free outdoors.

But last week, 29 snakes were left at a fire station in the northeast of England—in the trash.

In the wee hours of February 14, a passerby walking behind the Farringdon Community Fire Station, in a quiet suburb of Sunderland, noticed a pair of tied-off pillowcases (one of them with a colorful Toy Story theme), partly full, slumped against the fire station’s trash bin. And the sacks were moving.

Because they were full of snakes.

Thirteen royal pythons (aka ball pythons)—in a variety of colors, each about three feet long—were split between the two bags.

article-image

The next day, firehouse staff discovered two more wriggling pillowcases—pink ones—left inside the bin. One was stuffed with 15 corn snakes, the other with a male carpet python (the latter can reach nine feet in length, though this particular one was much smaller).

An inspector from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) secured the snakes and took them for a veterinary check-up. Twenty-eight of them are now warm and safe, though the 29th has died. But if they hadn’t been found, all 29 snakes would have ended up dumped at the nearest landfill.

Meanwhile, the mystery of who bagged them up and abandoned them in the cold remains unsolved. And authorities are scratching their heads.

Despite firehouses’ reputation as safe havens, the location may have been incidental. “If someone had wanted the snakes to be found, we would expect them to have used the front steps of the station,” says Trevor Walker, an RSPCA inspector involved in the case. “Whoever did this discarded them without any concern for the animals, and they went around back to avoid being found out.”

None of the found snakes is venomous. And all are exotic: Royal pythons come from West and Central Africa, carpet pythons are from Australia and nearby islands, and corn snakes are North American. The rescued animals appear to have come from a collector or breeder.

article-image

Abandoning snakes in this way isn’t just cruel, says Evangeline Button, the RSPCA’s wildlife and exotics expert. It’s also against the law.

“It is illegal under the (amended) Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 to release, or to allow to escape, any species that are not native to the U.K.,” she says. If caught, an offender could face a 20,000-pound (about $15,400) fine and up to six months in jail. “Non-native species could pose a serious threat to our native wildlife.”

Case in point: Consider the devastation in the Florida Everglades caused by escaped Burmese pythons—aggressive, sometimes 20-foot-long snakes that are eating their way through the native wildlife and outcompeting native species for food and other resources.

The United Kingdom has just four native snakes: two species of grass snake, the smooth snake, and a venomous adder. Already, invasive species—perhaps liberated pets—have introduced a deadly snake fungal disease that now threatens these native animals, which are already declining due to habitat loss and other factors.

Even if they'd managed to escape their sacks, “none of the snakes dropped off in those two incidents would be able to survive long in the U.K. winter,” says Terry Phillip, a herpetologist at Reptile Gardens in South Dakota. Native snakes only get through Britain’s coldest months—when temperatures can hover around 35 degrees Fahrenheit—by hibernating, and these exotic species are built for warmer conditions. Still, even if the invaders were short lived, “disease from captive animals can easily be spread to wild populations this way.”

Phillip notes that the pythons, while not rare, would be worth as much as 1,500 pounds (about $2,000) on the collectors’ market. Indeed, reptile ownership has grown significantly here in the past decade; conservatively, U.K. citizens today own more than two million pet snakes, with royal pythons and corn snakes two of the most popular species. (Some ownership estimates are much higher.)

article-image

The rescued animals, minus the one “emaciated” python that died, were deemed healthy by the veterinarian. Walker then volunteered to transport them “in the warm boot of my car—please don’t tell my wife”—100 miles to a reptile specialist in Yorkshire, where they’re now getting the care they need. “Hopefully, some of them can be re-homed,” he says.

He says that it’s unusual for the RSPCA to deal with such a high volume of reptiles. “We’ll occasionally pick up, say, a lizard walking up the high street of the village,” he says. "But that’s a one off—an animal that escaped its tank and walked out the door.”

“Then again,” he adds, “tomorrow we might find 29 bearded dragons abandoned."

Since the snake rescue, there have been no more scaly surprises behind the Farringdon station, and the case is still under investigation.

“If we learn who committed the crime, we’d certainly want them disqualified from having animals in the future,” says Walker. And to anyone else wanting to rid themselves of a reptile collection? “Contact the RSPCA, or a reptile center or pet shop that has snakes,” he says. “Please don’t just dump them in the bin.”

On the Hunt for the Wild Relatives of America's Favorite Produce

0
0

Popular crops’ untamed cousins are genetic gold mines, but they're at risk of disappearing.

When Colin Khoury was six years old, he committed an act of civil disobedience. It was Southern California in the 1980s, and real estate companies were hungry to turn the remaining farms and wilderness bordering Los Angeles into shiny new developments.

Barely out of kindergarten, Khoury was firmly against the developers. His love for landscape was tactile, childlike; he’d comb the sun-drenched earth around his home for wild plants, popping their juicy leaves into his mouth. His mother regularly found herself calling poison control. So when six-year-old Khoury saw a developer's banner planted on a plot of land overlooking a craggy depression, he chucked the sign right into the canyon. “I was doing my own activism,” he says with a laugh.

Several decades and degrees later, Khoury no longer stages impromptu acts of eco-vandalism. He still, however, loves wild plants. As a crop-diversity specialist affiliated with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and the USDA, Khoury works with a network of scientists, land managers, and crop-diversity advocates to map, research, conserve, and cultivate the wild relatives our our favorite supermarket produce. The search for these species has taken Khoury around the world—from Syria to Jamaica and back to the Sonoran Desert—and back in time, to the dawn of human agriculture.

article-image

Around 10,000 years ago, humans at several sites across the world began domesticating plants. They selected seeds from plants they had previously foraged, which had large, sweet fruits or convenient growing cycles. Over millennia of breeding, our ancestors turned wispy seeds, bitter fruits, and tiny tubers into the wheat, beans, and potatoes we eat today.

Domestication made wild plants more friendly to human consumption. But in the process, these plants lost something precious: resilience. Domesticated crops are notoriously coddled, reliant on regular watering, precise temperatures, and human care. At the same time, monoculture—the dominant agricultural practice of intensively breeding and mass-producing a select few cultivars for food production—has created crops with high yields but little diversity, making them less resilient to disease and climate change.

The modern banana exemplifies this vulnerability. While there are more than 1,000 types of banana, 47 percent of all cultivated bananas are of the Cavendish variety. This lack of genetic diversity means that when a threat comes along, like the feared Fusarium fungus, scientists fear the possibility of a “banana apocalypse" and chaos on par with the demise of the Gros Michel, the once-ubiquitous banana that preceded the Cavendish.

In contrast, domesticated crops’ wild relatives have evolved in diverse and often challenging conditions, from the wild-potato cousins that thrive on rocky Andean outcroppings to the hardy tepary beans of the parched Sonoran desert. This resilience makes wild plants genetic gold mines of potentially useful traits, such as drought and heat resistance. When crossed with conventional domesticates, they can yield more resilient and sustainable—not to mention potentially tastier—cultivars. To preserve these traits, scientists have spent decades collecting seeds and depositing them in gene banks.

article-image

But staple crops' wild relatives are under threat. “They’re wild plants that have all the issues that wild plants have: being encroached upon by human beings, climate change,” says Khoury.

Human activity, such as deforestation and development, has led to the extinction of hundreds of the worlds' plants in the past hundred years, a rate 500 times faster than would be the case without human interference. The wild relatives of our most important crops haven’t been spared. Daniel Debouck, a now-retired gene-bank manager at the Center for Tropical Agriculture, who spent most of his career hunting wild plants in Latin America, says that many of the plants he first identified in the 1970s and '80s have now been encroached upon by humans. “My most urgent priority was extinction, and continues to be extinction,” he says.

With even more climate-change-induced habitat destruction on the horizon, Khoury and his colleagues are taking action to prevent this wealth of agricultural information from being forever lost. In a series of recent studies, they’ve dug through hundred-year-old museum specimens, scoured published surveys, and drawn on their own experience tracking far-flung species in the wild to map the remaining populations of domesticated crops' wild relatives in the Americas. They’ve charted populations of wild chile peppers, lettuce, and squash, designating 600 wild species for further study in the United States alone. Dozens of those species are under threat of extinction; others have yet to be studied at all. Researchers estimate that more than 65 percent of wild pumpkin varieties and 95 percent of wild pepper varieties have never been included in any gene bank.

By mapping where these populations occur, scientists can focus on collecting plants from threatened areas, and advocate for greater protections for these plants’ wild habitats. Their results would resonate with six-year-old Khoury, who already suspected that threats to wild plants are threats to human wellbeing.

article-image

Daniel Debouck has witnessed the disappearance of wild-crop habitats firsthand. In 1977, Debouck had just started his first job as a plant researcher in Belgium. He was working with colleagues to develop more resilient agricultural crops, but he found the specimens he already had access to just wouldn’t cut it. By the mid-1900s, interest in crop research, and scientific advances in genetics, had sprouted a wave of gene-bank openings around the world. These facilities allowed scientists to store genetic material from plants, like seeds, and use them for further research. But there were gaps in the collections of the wild relatives of many of the Latin American-origin crops that feed most of the worlds' inhabitants, including potatoes and beans.

So Debouck took to the field. Over the next four decades, he traveled the Western Hemisphere, from dense Central American rainforests to cool, scruffy Andean ledges, with his eyes glued to the ground. Debouck specializes in bean plants' wild relatives, so searched areas around beans' initial domestication sites, in current-day Mexico and parts of South America, for their telltale spindly pods. He's discovered 14 new species, and collected over 3,900 new varieties of plants. But he's also witnessed many of these species come under attack. “I’ve been collecting in places where today you’ll find houses, roads, and supermarkets,” he says. “Coming back in something like 10 or 15 years, the area will be completely different.”

article-image

That makes Debouck's intimate field experience even more vital to wild-plant preservation. To find a relative of a popular food crop, Debouck first searches through herbaria specimens, which are dried plant and seed samples glued to paper and kept in vast libraries at museums and botanical gardens. Plants in these collections can be centuries old; they’re sometimes unnamed, labelled with just a place of origin. Once Debouck has identified a specimen as a potential wild relative, he takes to the field.

He begins by asking local farmers what they know about the mystery plant, comparing their knowledge with his research. Then, he starts searching. Debouck combs the countryside, reading seeds and leaves like a doctor reads symptoms. His memory for landscape is uncanny. On a recent trip to Peru’s Sacred Valley, he used signs such as soil type, ground coverage, and proximity to water to locate the descendants of wild beans he had first spotted 30 years before. Once he finds the plants, Debouck documents their location and condition, and, if he's obtained host-country permission, take samples to store at gene banks for posterity.

That last step, of asking permission, wasn't always on the botanist checklist. “The politics of all of this stuff has changed hugely since 100 years ago, where basically it was Indiana Jones time,” says Khoury. During the 1800s and early 1900s, explorers, on behalf of colonial powers, often took specimens from colonized areas without the input of local people, and used these samples to prop up the agricultural exploitation of African, Asian, and Latin American lands for European and, later, American benefit.

Today, thanks to international agreements such as the 1993 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, scientists must request permission from host countries and honor ethical commitments to local communities. Rather than using the resulting data to plunder distant lands, they’re helping to restore the very ecosystems that extractive agriculture, characteristic of settler colonialism in the Americas, initially disrupted.

At the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, researchers are taking inspiration directly from the prairie, including wild grains native to this area, to reimagine the way we farm. An untrained eye may look at the ground around the Land Institute and see nothing but wind-ruffled grass. But Tim Crews, Director of Research at the Institute, sees the future. “The whole goal is to make an agricultur[al system] that is like the natural system that was there to begin with,” Crews says.

When Europeans first stumbled across the vast grasslands that sweep the central United States, they saw a landscape of diverse perennial grasses, managed by Native peoples through controlled burns. Colonists replaced the varied vegetation with intensive monoculture. Over hundreds of years, this has devastated soil quality. “Read the reports on the state of the world’s soil and man, that’s one depressing document,” says Crews.

Climate change has further increased the stakes: Annual crops, like wheat, quickly deplete soil nitrogen. To restore this soil, farmers turn to fertilizers, whose emissions substantially contribute to climate change. The resulting increase in temperatures and extreme weather events has already had worrying effects on agriculture worldwide, including in the Midwest.

article-image

To address this, Crews is researching wild perennial plants, whose enduring root systems allow the soil to naturally build up organic matter. Crews and his colleagues are attempting to breed crops from wild relatives of sunflowers, native to North America.

Allison Miller, a professor at St. Louis University and researcher at the Danforth Plant Science Center, is also using wild plants to create more sustainable agricultural cycles, in this case through the development of cover crops. When farmers plant common crops like corn and soybeans, she says, “They’re harvested in the fall and in many cases the fields just kind of lay bare over the fall and winter.” Cover crops, on the other hand—especially ones that are native to the local ecosystem—can be planted through the winter to help the soil regenerate, limiting the erosion and nutrient runoff and decreasing fertilizer reliance.

When Debouck first started searching for domesticated crops' wild relatives, he didn’t know that his discoveries would help farmers survive on a dramatically warming planet. But that’s precisely what he finds most exciting about this work. “There are many cases where we don’t know yet what we will need and what we will invent,” he says. The key is to keep looking.

article-image

Khoury, for his part, never stopped looking. Last year, he and his collaborators published maps detailing populations of the wild relatives of squash and chile peppers. In 2020, he published a study, co-authored with Miller and others, that outlines a roadmap to conserve these wild relatives. Besides finding new plants and protecting their habitats, the researchers emphasize another vital step: inviting farmers to incorporate wild-plant research.

Decades after Khoury spent his childhood grazing on potentially poisonous wild plants, he still believes humans stand to benefit from moving beyond conventional agriculture. Unlike those early days of lone activism, however, Khoury is now part of a movement of scientists, farmers, and plant breeders, who all agree that business as usual can no longer sustainably feed the planet. “There’s something new happening in food and agriculture," he says. "Openness that things need to change in big ways."

How a British Guild Rebuilt a Vandalized Royal Cake Replica

0
0

It took an international team (and Buckingham Palace).

One day in 2015, Steve Cornish was tipped off that squatters had broken into the Rotherhithe Pumphouse in southeast London.

The Pumphouse had once been open to the public, as a museum of the Bermondsey district's history. But it closed in 2011, when the local council slashed its budget under austerity measures.

The council had installed security guards outside, but Cornish, who’s the chairman of the nearby Russia Docks woodlands, is a local boy. “When you're born and bred here, you know how to get in places,” he says. He gained access to the Pumphouse by claiming to have been sent by the health and safety executive. “As soon as I went in there, there was graffiti and damage. It was in a terrible state,” he says.

Worse was to come on the mezzanine. “I just had to stop. I was in shock,” he remembers. Queen Elizabeth’s wedding cake had been turned upside down and doused in red paint, “as if blood was running down it.”

article-image

Admittedly, it wasn’t actually the cake eaten by the future Queen Elizabeth II and Duke of Edinburgh. Their wedding cake was made by the cooks of the Royal Navy. But the bakers of the Peek Freans biscuit factory had sent a fruit cake to the wedding in 1947 as a gift nevertheless. Topped with a solid silver statue of Saint George, it weighed 630 pounds and was driven at walking pace in a specially modified car from the factory in Bermondsey to Buckingham Palace, where it joined numerous other cakes sent from around the United Kingdom. The same Peek Freans employees who decorated the cake also decided to make a sugar-paste replica to commemorate their achievement.

The original, edible cake was most likely distributed around hospitals, says Andrew Hill of the British Sugarcraft Guild. But until 1989, when the factory ceased operations, the replica held pride of place in the Peek Freans lobby. Chris Carr, the great-great-grandson one of the original Peek Freans owners, recalls running to look at it every time he visited. Each of the lofty cake’s six frosted tiers told a story of the then-Princess Elizabeth and her spouse. The top tier’s panels showed the official badges of the Sea Rangers (the young princess was enrolled at 16). The level below depicted the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth where Prince Philip trained, and where the royal couple reportedly met for the second time and fell in love. Halfway down, the third tier depicted St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where many royals would later tie the knot.

article-image

After the factory closed down, the replica was moved down the road to the Rotherhithe Pumphouse. After that too closed, most of its collection was distributed around local schools or sold. This worried Gary Magold, another Bermondsey son who works as a clerk in the City of London business district. As a major employer in the area, Peek Freans is still remembered with affection. “It kept people’s heads above water,” says Magold. He arranged for the Peek Freans displays to be moved back to the old factory, this time to a suite of rooms temporarily donated by the current owners. It's now known as the Biscuit Museum. (The site will soon make way for a mixed development of new apartments, “affordable” housing, and commercial units.) But to his dismay, the replica cake had to be left behind in the shuttered Pumphouse. “It was just too fragile to move,” he says.

That had consequences. Back at the Biscuit Museum, Magold shows me some of the remaining shards of the replica cake on a tray. “Smashed to smithereens,” he says.

article-image

After Cornish discovered the destroyed cake, Magold, who volunteers as keeper of the museum alongside Frank Turner, the factory’s former head of fire and security, called the British Sugarcraft Guild, a group dedicated to the traditional crafts of cake decoration and sugar ornamentation.“I said, ‘You don’t know me but I’ve got the Queen’s wedding cake that’s been vandalized. Do you think there’s anybody that could get it restored?’”

It couldn’t be done, was the response. Despite Magold’s initial dismay, another of the Guild’s members suggested that the replica be completely remade. Out of the wreckage came “a very happy project,” says Magold. The British Sugarcraft Guild pledged to remake the replica, bringing together the Biscuit Museum, Guild members, academics at Warwick University, and Buckingham Palace itself.

At the University of Warwick, engineering professor Mark Williams and project engineer Mike Donnelly scanned the cake remains to produce silicone molds for the detailed side panels. Meanwhile, award-winning cake decorator Jan Thorpe drew up technical diagrams for each tier, which were sent out to seven Sugarcraft Guild groups across the country. “It was the first time the committee members of the Guild had actually all worked together on a project,” says Magold.

article-image

Across the country, workshops of sugarcrafters—mostly women—labored together at long tables. Some rolled out paste flowers, others piped delicate sugar lattice-work. Volunteers working on the project ranged in age from 25 to nearly 90, and included professional and amateur sugarcrafters alike. The project even tapped the expertise of ex-royal baker Eddie Spence, who made cakes for the royal family prior to his retirement.

There were surprises. A package of sugar paste flowers came in from Ghana, sent by an international member. A BBC producer who knew one of the Queen’s historians wrangled an invite to the Billiards Room at Buckingham Palace. On a long table draped in red, Donnelly laser-scanned the now-tarnished silver statuette of Saint George that Peek Freans had sent as a cake topper in 1947, while Magold looked on. These scans were used to exactly reproduce the topper with a 3-D printer.

article-image

The delicate sugar lattice decorations proved troublesome. Each took 45 minutes to make and more often than not, they shattered. For every 48 made, Turner says, roughly eight survived. While infuriating, the Guild volunteers enjoyed working on such a prestigious project, especially one which showcased their aptitude and craft. Turner and Magold contributed too. Turner added a panel depicting Glamis Castle, while Magold’s self-described “horrible big fat flower” was reserved as the final piece of decoration, the cake’s crowning glory.

With its cornucopias, pilasters, molded plaques, and flying trellises made of sugar-paste, the decorations alone took over 130 Guild volunteers roughly six months to complete. In all, the entire project took around two years. Once volunteers finished the individual pieces, they sent them to Bermondsey, where they were painstakingly assembled at the Biscuit Museum over the course of a week.

article-image

The completed replica was unveiled in time for the Queen and Prince Philip’s platinum wedding anniversary in 2017, and the museum threw a party for its debut. Encased in a glass box, the replica cake now dominates the Biscuit Museum. Surrounded by vitrines holding biscuit molds, tin tea caddies, and cake decorating tools from the Peek Freans factory, it’s a tribute to Bermondsey’s past. “Everybody was really proud to take part,” Hill says.

In fact, Guild members enjoyed working together so much that they organized follow-up projects. In the museum office, another sugar-paste cake waits to be enclosed in its own cabinet, having just travelled back from a show in Birmingham. “Whoever the vandal was, they didn’t win,” says Magold. “Because out of it came this project.”

A First Nation, a Fight for Ancestral Lands, And an Unlikely Alliance

0
0

The Tseshaht people are working with archaeologists to write a new chapter in a fraught history.

When Ken Watts was a teenager, he spent summers on the ancestral land of his people: a remote island in the Broken Group, off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Getting there was cumbersome—the route included a car, ferry, and boat—but it brought him to the best job he could imagine. Each day, Watts and a few dozen others excavated sites around C̓išaa, a historic village of the Tseshaht people on what is today called Benson Island. By carefully digging and screening every bucketful of earth, they uncovered thousands of pieces of the past.

Watts and his fellow excavators found animal remains, such as clam shells and fish bones and a whale skull with a point embedded in it. They also found human-made artifacts, including a carved comb and an obsidian point. Denis St. Claire, one of the directors of the Tseshaht Archaeological Project, held the dark stone up to the sun. The edge was so thin that the light went right through it. “It was like something in a book or a movie,” Watts says of the experience, which took place in 2000 and 2001. “I was blown away by all those things.”

Everything Watts helped unearth—the shell middens and artifacts and animal bones—had been touched by the hands of his ancestors. Long before the land was seized by Canadian settlers and deemed a part of British Columbia, the village of C̓išaa was the birthplace of the Tseshaht. This field work proved they had lived on the island as long as 5,000 years ago. “There’s very few people in the world who can pinpoint their exact location where the first man and woman were created,” Watts says. “There’s not a lot of other cultures or people that can say, ‘This is where we come from exactly, this island.’” For the first time in his life, Watts could say that about his own ancestors, and could stand on that same ground.

article-image

Yet for centuries, the island hadn’t been treated as the motherland of a people. As with so many Indigenous groups around North America, the Tseshaht were subjected to foreign diseases, rapacious Western traders and settlers, and, with the entrance of British Columbia into the Canadian Confederation in 1871, federal policies aimed at the destruction of First Nations peoples.

The Tseshaht never signed a treaty to cede their traditional land, but starting in 1903, the island where the Tseshaht were born was claimed by settlers. It passed from the hands of one Canadian landowner to another. In the 1970s, it came into the possession of the Canadian government, joining the rest of the Broken Group as part of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. “Benson Island” became a campground for kayakers.

“Since the creation of the park, the emphasis has been on the natural environment and an attempt to provide a ‘wilderness’ experience for the park visitors,” write Alan McMillan and Denis St. Claire in their 2005 report on the Tseshaht Archaeology Project. “To the Tseshaht, however, these islands are not a wilderness but a homeland.”

article-image

The Tseshaht homeland once encompassed numerous villages on many islands, and it supported a population that numbered in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. The Tseshaht were essentially evicted by European diseases and Canadian policies, and their land now serves as a recreational site for the descendants of settlers.

For Watts, returning to the island of his ancestors was almost like escaping the rest of the world. At the time, most people didn’t have cell phones, and social media was in its infancy. Every morning, Watts crawled out of his tent and onto the land. Almost every evening, he sat on the beach with other crew members, including some of the older Tseshaht who knew more about the nation’s history. “I was like a sponge for two summers,” Watts says. “Here I am, fresh out of high school, becoming so connected to where I come from.”

But that sense of earth-deep connection only lasted as long as the archaeological project. At the end of those summers, Watts went home. The island was too logistically complicated to visit after that.

In Canada, a national park with “reserve” status, like Pacific Rim, connotes ongoing negotiations between the federal government and Indigenous groups over the status of the land. Though First Nations retain some rights to hunt and harvest resources in what would otherwise be protected territory, management is a contested issue. In the case of Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, the Tseshaht and eight other groups, all from the 14-member Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council, have traditional territory inside the park.

In 2000, many felt that these limited rights were no substitute for the autonomy that First Nations peoples once enjoyed. The three-year archaeology project on C̓išaa aimed to right some of those wrongs. With support from anthropologists and the Parks Department, the Tseshaht set out to prove just how deeply entwined they were with the islands—and why they deserved to manage the islands’ future.


It wasn’t so long ago that anthropologists routinely exploited Indigenous communities in the U.S. and Canada. In 1897, archaeologist Harlan Smith wrote, “Indians here object to my taking bones away. They are friendly and will allow me to dig graves and take all but the bones. We hope they will change their minds and allow bones to go to NY for study.” As a member of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, he and others were tasked with documenting the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, and ultimately did take ancestral remains away from the region.

Across the Americas, scientists robbed graves, pillaged cultural items, and at times trafficked in baseless theories about the inferiority of Indigenous people. There were exceptions, of course. Anthropologists like Edward Sapir did invaluable work among the Nuu-Chah-Nulth, creating linguistic documents and records of important oral histories. But all too often, and for much of the 20th century, archaeology inflicted harm in the name of scientific knowledge.

article-image

This history made archaeologists unlikely allies in the fight to reclaim First Nations lands in British Columbia. But the Tseshaht Archaeology Project had a track record: Its leaders, Denis St. Claire and Alan McMillan, both white, had been working in the region for decades, talking to elders and asking for the approval of Nuu-Chah-Nulth leaders. Their work came at a time of tidal change in the field, when a growing number of researchers began working collaboratively with First Nations, rather than exploiting their history and territory. St. Claire was even adopted into the Tseshaht, and given the rare opportunity to speak on behalf of the tribe. “They’ve always been so respectful,” Watts says of the men. They wanted to do archaeology in service of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth.

The 1999-2001 archaeology project was meant to create a gateway for future collaboration, and to provide evidence that the Tseshaht could use in an Aboriginal Title and Rights case—arguing, in short, that they had never ceded any territory, and have managed this land for thousands of years. But at the time of the project, the question of how the finds might change the park itself was anyone’s guess.

Karen Haugen, a member of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation and current superintendent of Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, began working for the park in 2003, shortly after the Tseshaht Archaeology Project was completed. The park had already moved toward more cooperative management, Haugen says; in 2009, it closed Benson Island to overnight campers. During her tenure, parks staff began meeting quarterly with all the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council nations, including her own. The hope was that by making time to talk, they could address problems early. “We are tight on time, but our First Nations partners are just as tight,” Haugen says.

article-image

Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and the Tseshaht have now been holding cooperative management meetings for seven years. Considering that the Nuu-chah-nulth nations had absolutely no say in what happened to their traditional lands in the park up to 1990, this may seem to be enormous progress, and at least a partial success of the 1999-2001 Tseshaht Archaeology Project. The park now includes a Nuu-Chah-Nulth trail and other opportunities for learning about the First Nations whose territory falls within the park.

Watts agrees that the relationship between the nations and the park has deepened and become more fruitful. “I’m pretty proud of some of the things we’ve done with Parks,” he says. But there is plenty of work left, from small issues like financial support for year-round monitoring of the islands, to the large issue of reconciliation with the federal government. On this point, Watts has strong opinions: “You want to talk about reconciliation, how about you give us our land back?”

This complicated problem is largely out of the hands of the National Parks. The Canadian federal government has been reviewing sovereignty claims for decades, and in certain cases, centuries. As the Métis writer and lawyer Chelsea Vowel explains in Indigenous Writes, “The claims landscape out there is vast, difficult to understand, and not very effective.” The three-year Tseshaht Archaeological Project was a way to gather information, but so far it has not forced Canada to return land that it stole.

Still, there are steps the National Park staff could take to help lift up the Tseshaht and their history. As anthropologist Kelda Jane Helweg-Larsen writes in a 2017 paper on the subject, “Co-management is an ideal to strive for, but by and large it has not yet been realized in Canada.” Finances, staffing decisions, and key aspects of management still reside in the hands of the Parks department. Watts offers one example, saying that the park could update their current signage. The park’s maps continue to use names bestowed by Western explorers: Benson, Effingham, Keith, Clarke. But all of these islands, including some of the “unnamed” ones, had already been named and described by the Tseshaht hundreds of years earlier. The restoration of original names would change the way that visitors understand the history of the islands.

article-image

In the 20 years that have passed since the excavations of C̓išaa, archaeology has become a cornerstone of how the Tseshaht assert their history and modern presence in the park. Archaeologists have repeatedly come back to Tseshaht territory, doing research from 2008 to 2011 at village sites on the Hiikwis reserve, which was threatened by logging, and from 2015 to 2016 on Jaques Island.

In the summer of 2019, archaeologists gather with Tseshaht visitors on Kakmakimiłh, also known as Keith Island, which hosts an annual field school through the University of Victoria. For several weeks, Kakmakimiłh hums with human voices and the sound of a generator. The island includes a dock, a gazebo, several outhouses, and a cabin for the Beachkeepers, seasonal Tseshaht employees who patrol the surrounding islands to protect heritage sites and provide park visitors with information. Tseshaht community members have started visiting more regularly, but there’s still no running water or electricity. It takes a certain amount of logistical organization to transport people down the Barkley Sound from their homes in Port Alberni.

“Not everybody has the chance to get down here on a regular basis. So welcome home,” says St. Claire, at a sunny, mid-July gathering of Tseshaht community members who have come out for the day. Tan-skinned, white-haired, and wearing a gray zip-up sweatshirt printed with the Tseshaht crest, St. Claire, 72, walks with a cane now; he’s been putting off knee surgery because he worries the recovery will force him to miss a field season. (This current project, which brings students from across North America and is coordinated through Tseshaht First Nation, is slated to last till 2022.)

After St. Claire and his co-director, Iain McKechnie, finish their welcome, tribal member Aaron Watts, a cousin of Ken Watts, sings a song accompanied by a drum, and a small group heads to the forested interior of the island. Students working on four pits have unearthed artifacts from as long as 4,000 years ago, and from as recently as the 1900s. Each year since the project started in 2017, the results have been presented to members of the Tseshaht. They serve as proof of continuous habitation, to help the nation bolster their ongoing legal case for sovereignty.

“I think of archaeology as a crucial step towards orienting ourselves in the present,” said McKechnie, who works at the University of Victoria and has been coming out to this region every summer for nearly a decade. “Even though they’re square holes in the ground, and we’re picking stuff out of a screen, all of it is the beginning of a bigger story.”

article-image

For now, even if the archaeology projects can’t completely remake the relationship between Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and the First Nations within its boundary, the work is still providing tangible benefits to the Tseshaht community. Over the years, research has documented the scale of Indigenous clam fishing and its long-term sustainability; it’s proven that the Tseshaht and Nuu-Chah-Nulth spun wool from domesticated dogs to make blankets; and it has painted an increasingly detailed portrait of the intricate resource management these nations oversaw for millennia, even as changing sea levels reshaped the landscape.

This summer, the students and professors on Kakmakimiłh uncovered a geoduck shell, the first ever found in a shell midden, or mound of discarded shellfish. According to Canadian courts, this type of clam could only be harvested using modern equipment, so the Tseshaht have not had the legal right to commercially harvest it. But if the Tseshaht prove that geoducks were a source of food during an earlier time, they could gain that right.

“We had a name for geoduck and we obviously obtained it somehow,” Watts says. “When I sit here and think about all the flora and fauna we accumulated, it makes me think about the abundance of seafood we used to have. Now you hear these things about climate change and mismanagement, and we always managed it and were sustainable. We should be in the driver seat of our own land.”

article-image

On a misty morning at the old village of C̓išaa, Denis St. Claire stands at the top of a grassy midden, just beyond a carved statue of Naasiya’atu that greets occasional visitors. For field school students who have been working on Kakmakimiłh, this is the one day they don’t have to do any excavations. It’s a day for storytelling—beginning with the Tseshaht origin story.

“Kwatyaat was the creator of the world we can see around us. He had a son called Kapkimyis, and in this story Kapkimyis is here with a shaman. Standing here, they cut with a mussel shell knife the thigh of Kapkimyis. The blood was scooped up and blown into. One version says the first woman emerges, the other says the first man. Whichever was created first, on the other thigh the same was done and out came the other gender. And the man was Naasiya’atu and the woman was Naasayilhim.

“As time goes on, their relationship is not always above reproach. They bickered, they argued. And Kapkimyis was getting a little pissed off and so he cautioned them. But that had become the definition of their relationship, so the behavior continued despite his admonishments.

“Kapkimyis had created them a river, and in a little bit of temper he destroyed the river as punishment. The banks all crumbled up and clumps of bedrock and trees and sand floated around in the water until they became fixed in position. And those clumps of river banks are the Broken Group Islands.”

article-image

When St. Claire comes to the end of the tale, he opens a discussion. “Stories have many purposes,” he says. “So why have such a story and pass it on generation after generation?”

Students offer a few answers, and St. Claire directs them to others. This particular story teaches a lesson about consequences, and helps the Tseshaht reflect on their roots. But it also has to do with resource management. “To be successful you need cooperation, not bickering and divisiveness,” St. Claire says. Out here on the edge of the continent, communities had to develop rules and norms about hunting and foraging and mussel collecting; they had to rely on each other for survival.

Ken Watts rarely comes out to the islands anymore. Fuel is expensive, and there are so many community members who have never had the opportunity to make the trip. He counts himself lucky for the two summers he spent at C̓išaa, and is enthusiastic about how the field work has continued to benefit the Tseshaht First Nation. “I hope we can always do this every year, for as long as I’m alive," he says. "To show our history—the things we ate, the things we made, the things we did." He wants his people's history to be remembered so that his kids and grandkids know who they are, and where they came from. And archaeology, he says, is a big part of that.

Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

Lake Michigan's 'Ice Volcanoes' Are Extremely Cool, Definitely Not Volcanoes

0
0

“It sounds like if you got a big Slurpee, and then dumped it on the ground.”

Recently, on a stretch of Lake Michigan’s coastline about 35 miles from Grand Rapids, so-called “ice volcanoes” seemed to erupt again and again. The vaguely conical mounds of snow and ice, soaring at least 10 or 15 feet tall, and stretching tens of feet wide, flanked the shore of a place called Oval Beach. But because they have nothing to do with molten rock or subterranean gas, they sound nothing like volcanoes, says Ernie Ostuno, a meteorologist with the Grand Rapids office of the National Weather Service, who has observed them for years. “It sounds like if you got a big Slurpee, and then dumped it on the ground,” he says.

“Ice volcanoes” are common sights along the coast of the lake. “They happen every winter,” Ostuno says, though the timing varies. This year, they formed near the middle of February, about a month later than they typically do, because January lacked a severe cold snap. The key ingredients are bitter temperatures (typically several degrees below freezing, and often lower than 20 degrees Fahrenheit), heavy snow, and significant wave action, Ostuno says.

article-image

When snow crystals fall into the cold lake, ice accretes around them and forms slush. With enough cold and gusts of chilly wind, those hefty chunks of floating ice can beach themselves on sandbars. Eventually, like rotund snowballs destined to become snowmen, they get so big that they stay put. As waves splash them, more and more ice builds up in irregular formations, making the mounds. The so-called volcanoes, which Ostuno estimates probably weigh hundreds of tons, essentially sit on the ridges of sand. Geologists at Michigan Technological University who have studied the phenomenon around Lake Superior suggest that there, too, ice volcanoes are especially likely to hug features such as sandbars, shorelines, or rock reefs.

Near Oval Beach, at least, ice volcanoes often aren’t perfect cones: On the side that is struck by the waves, they’re slightly open, and look like cracked fortune cookies. The slit faces a front of open water. When the waves bump that part of the mound, Ostuno says, “You can hear it hit, boom, and then see the water shoot up.” The slushy water spouts pretty regularly, Ostuno adds, sometimes every few seconds, though he’s not sure exactly what governs the intervals. He suspects it has to do with the amplitude or periodicity of the waves.

article-image

When conditions cooperate, mounds can form over the course of a single day, Ostuno says. And while they often stick around for awhile, they can also disappear just as fast. “Wind and waves can make ice really quickly if it’s really cold,” he says, and slightly warmer blustery days can dismantle the mounds in a flash. A 50-degree day with strong winds, for instance, would spell doom for an ice volcano, he adds.

Oval Beach is far from the Arctic Circle, but there are moments in the depths of winter when it's easy to forget that, Ostuno says. On the outer sandbar, where it’s unsafe to roam, you can hear this “otherworldly sound—scraping, groaning, really crazy,” Ostuno says. “It’s the combined sound of hundreds of freight-car-sized chunks of ice grinding together.” When the waves really kick up, the ice out there begins “calving sections, like a glacier,” Ostuno says. In the Arctic, people “see this stuff all the time,” he adds. “In Michigan, you only see it for one or two months in the winter.” It’s part of the charm of ice volcano season.


How Reading Lava Flows Reveals a Lost Paradise

0
0

Human harm is burned into Réunion’s ecological record.

There’s no such thing as heaven on Earth, but Réunion in the 16th century came pretty darn close. A lush island off the eastern coast of Madagascar, part of the remote Mascarene archipelago, Réunion was devoid of human presence for millennia. As other parts of the globe were being colonized, the island’s dense population of furry, scaly, and fruit-loving fauna—tortoises, flying foxes, and birds like bulbuls and hoopoes—was largely undisturbed, thriving in spite of the island’s numerous volcanoes (one of which, Piton de la Fournaise, is among the most active in the world).

But as a recent study of the cooled lava flows on the island have revealed, humans eventually arrived—along with a plethora of problems. French colonists showed up in 1655, and businesses like the French East India Company swiftly began changing the native ecosystem.

article-image

“The giant Bourbon turtles were, for example, loaded onboard ships to avoid scurvy among sailors,” says Sébastien Albert, an ecologist at the Université de la Réunion and lead author of the new study, published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Ecology. “This fauna unfortunately became extinct soon after the beginning of permanent colonization.”

Humans and the introduced species they brought with them—including cats and rats—quickly caused plant and animal populations to decline, according to analysis of the lava that’s spewed from Piton de la Fournaise for centuries. Using carbon dating and historical records to date the lava flows, Albert’s team timestamped snapshots of Réunion’s ecology at different points—the time before humans arrived, the period when the island’s ecosystem began to fray, and the first half of the 20th century, when the damage dealt to the island’s animal inhabitants became wholly apparent.

With each eruption, swaths of forests around Piton de la Fournaise were razed. Yet the island continued to flourish, as the frugivorous, or fruit-eating, species on Réunion would plod, slither, and flap around, distributing seeds via their poop. The island would grow lush again, until another eruption would occur, and the process would repeat.

Until humans arrived, that is. According to Albert, “98.5 percent of the lowland forests on Réunion Island have been destroyed by humans [since 1655].” In culling the animals that delivered the replenishing seeds, humans also condemned the flora that was getting distributed.

article-image

Evolution and extinction are two sides of the same coin. One adds new branches to the tree of life, testing new traits to see if they can help a species survive, while the other culls populations. Both can happen slowly, but they can also happen extremely fast. For all the biodiversity on Réunion, the changes that began in 1655 caused drastic losses for the plants and animals of the island, extinguishing the giant tortoises, flying foxes, parrots, hoopoes, fruit pigeons, and skinks in less than 200 years.

“This phenomenon is unfortunately the same everywhere on Earth,” Albert says. “The largest vertebrates disappear first.”

Today, the largest native frugivores remaining on Réunion are the bulbuls, songbirds smaller than pigeons. Though still lush and secluded, the island is quieter now (if you can tune out the volcanic eruptions). As with Eden, heavy-handed human activity left the bestial denizens of Réunion with no recourse, and their paradise quickly slipped away.

The California Photographer Who Has Shot More Than 100 Wildfires

0
0

Noah Berger is in his element amid smoke and flames.

Photographer Noah Berger was running on adrenaline, loads of iced coffee, and very little sleep when he made a mistake. He was covering the Lilac Fire in San Diego in late 2017, and the firefighting crew was preparing to spray water on a burning house. Berger ran around to the opposite side of the building, “and they turned on the hose, and it went through the house and blew out the back door or window that went into my face and cameras,” he says, “ ... blew my glasses off my face, and I can’t really see without the glasses.” His first camera was dead, his second functional but crippled. “My glasses I couldn’t find so I had to get back to the car and I put on my sunglasses.” But after that, he more or less called it a night. Getting hosed is just one of the challenges of photographing wildfires, but facing them paid off for Berger and his Associated Press colleagues, who were named 2019 Pulitzer Prize Finalists for breaking news photography. Some of Berger’s images are also part of the group show Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West, featuring 16 artists, at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside.

“It has escaped no one's notice that wildfires are growing in scale and severity. In California, 16 of the largest wildfires ever recorded have occurred in the last 20 years,” senior curator and photographer Douglas McCulloh writes in an email. “Berger and the others have multiple motivations in doing this arduous, dangerous wildfire photography. One motivation is to shine a brighter light on the issue of wildfires, man's role, and in climate change. In this they are successful. These images are seen literally around the world.”

article-image

Berger’s inspiration to get close to smoke and flames is also very personal, zen-like, in the way that the mundane disappears during long, exhausting days immersed in the scorching worlds of the Camp, Kincade, or Carr fires, all of which he covered. “It was just you, the firefighters, and fire, and I just like that stripped-down existence,” he says. “That really spoke to me.”

Berger spoke with Atlas Obscura about some of the fire phenomena he’s witnessed, how vital teamwork is, and what’s really important when shooting wildfires. The exhibit Facing Fire is on view until August 2020.

How and when did you first start photographing wildfires?

I’ve been a news photographer for 25 years, so I’ve done a couple of them over the years. But it was after the Rim Fire in 2013, out by Yosemite—I did that one for three or four days, and I was like, “Oh yeah, this is what I’d like to do with my summers and falls. This is awesome, covering this.” Since then I ramped up my knowledge, my kit, my ability, my desire for it, so it’s really grown since 2013.

I was out there with [photographer] Justin Sullivan, who is also part of the show, and we had the same thing, the sense of witnessing this awesome fury of nature that people don’t really get to witness. For the Rim Fire, there was a lot of tree crowning, which is where the fire jumps from treetop to treetop. You witness these 50-, 60-, maybe 80-, 90-foot flames. The other aspect of it is that we were out there and not dealing with the normal part of life—you’re not returning emails, you’re not going to the post office, walking the dog. It’s really trying to get the best photos you can, without dealing with a lot of layers of life that are tedious.

article-image

What’s the closest you’ve been to a wildfire? How do you stay relatively safe?

A couple of feet. California has a statute that allows press access to emergency zones. So if you have a press credential, legally you’re supposed to be able to go wherever you want in the fire, with a couple of exclusions, like if you’re impeding operations. So we’re often right in the advance of the front flames, there’s no distance limitation. That’s why you don’t see these photos from other areas, such as Colorado or Idaho, that have big fires. It’s not because there aren’t good photographers, but because they don’t have the access.

I feel you learn about fire behavior both from the classroom and the experience. When we’re driving, we keep a safety zone in mind like the firefighters do. We keep our exit routes open, we’re always thinking about what the fire’s going to do. There was this situation two years ago, in Redding at the Carr Fire, where the fire tornado kicked up, and that really did get me thinking because I was about three-quarters of a mile from where it touched down and you can’t prepare for that. Having a safety zone doesn’t mean anything when you have 140-mile-an-hour winds of fire. But for the most part, in normal fire behavior, I feel like I’m able to stay safe easily.

What was the toughest experience you've had while shooting a wildfire?

The fire tornado was just so dark and so apocalyptic that you couldn’t see a half-mile away that it was happening, it was just so black-black-red. Intellectually that was probably the most scary. The other one that really stands out is the Camp Fire last year in Paradise. Usually what happens is that when someone dies, they close off the streets for blocks around it, consider it a crime scene, you can't get in. But in Paradise, they let us tag along with the coroner’s crews that were doing the body recoveries, for days. At first, me and the other photographers were looking at each other like, “How are we doing this, we’re not getting kicked out.” That was pretty intense and definitely sad. A lot of the time you don’t really quite feel the deaths like you do when you’re watching them recover bodies.

article-image

It sounds like you’re often working with other photographers. How do you all work together?

We’re very much a team, which is awesome, and it’s really rare. I think in other cities a lot of photographers are more territorial and protective. But we’ve developed this thing because we’ve known each other for a long time. It’s me, Justin Sullivan and Josh Edelson who are in the show, and Marcus Yam, who’s Los Angeles Times, and Stephen Lam, who’s Reuters. Our preferred thing is to have two cars with two photographers in each car. It helps to have one person navigate and look out for power lines and obstacles and the other person drive. And the other thought is if one of the cars has a problem, you have another that you can jump into.

One of the things we worry about is we often come up with the same pictures a lot of the time. Still, there are so many benefits to doing it this way. We have a good time together. And it really helps to have a crew to bounce those ideas off of for where to go. Do we want to drive up this road, are we going to block a firefighter if we do that, is it going to lead to where we want or are we going to spend an hour up this dirt road for nothing?

How do you keep your gear working under such extreme conditions? And how do you manage to get good photos with such crazy lighting conditions?

I don’t worry too much. You have to clean the cameras from dust at the end of the year, but in general it’s not that hard on the gear. Our stuff is made for abuse.

In general, there’s less of a range of camera settings that I use on fire than on other work. There’s also less of a range of lenses. I tend to just go out with two lenses, and I bring less photo gear with me for fire than for corporate or other shoots. You want to travel light, you want to pare down what you need to grab as you get out of the car each time. But I have a really big fire kit. The main thing that you have safety-wise is full Nomex top and bottoms, the yellow fire-resistant clothing, and hard hat, and I have fire boots, multiple flashlights, and a lot more.

Any advice for aspiring photographers interested in this kind of work?

The biggest thing is not to get in the way of the firefighters. This isn’t about you, this is about the firefighters doing what they’re doing, about the residents and what they’re doing, and then we’re a distant third.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image
article-image

Once a Year, This Alaskan Town Is Home to More Pies Than People

0
0

For mushers in the Iditarod dog-sled race, stopping in Takotna is a treat.

Each March, Iditarod mushers call their 14 dogs to a halt in Takotna, Alaska. They know that stopping there means two things. First, they’re just 623 miles from the Burled Arch in Nome, Alaska, which is the finish line of the highly competitive sled-dog race. Second: There will be pie. Lots of pie.

If it wasn’t a checkpoint in The Last Great Race, as the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is sometimes known, the bulk of Alaskans probably wouldn’t know Takotna, a village of just 52 people that’s inaccessible by road. To get there, Alaskans either book a spot on the four-seater mail plane from Anchorage, or take a commercial plane to McGrath and then travel another three hours or more via snowmobile or ATV.

Or, once a year, when there's enough snow for a 975-mile race, the best sled-dog teams in the world race through adverse weather conditions, over barren lands and frozen rivers, and through challenging mountain ranges and sparsely populated towns, all in an effort to be named Iditarod Champion.

article-image

Despite its remote location and diminutive size, Takotna is known by mushers for its outsized generosity. Since the race started in 1973, locals have dished out turkey dinners, made-to-order breakfasts, and other free meals to the mushers. But Takotna is best known for the staggering number of pies available. This year, the village plans to make more than 100 pies (roughly two for each of the 57 racers). For the mushers, who mainly consume bland, lightweight trail meals, while traversing a landscape of muted white and brown, stepping into the community center in Takotna is akin to Dorothy appearing in Oz: The colors come on. But instead of plucky munchkins with oversize lollipops, it’s gregarious locals with tables of riotously colorful pies spanning the fruit and cream spectrum.

The pie tradition started when Jan Newton and her husband, Dick, moved from Idaho to Takotna 50 years ago. The duo had previously run a café and hotel near an Idaho mining camp, but it wasn’t until Jan moved to Alaska that she earned the moniker “The Pie Lady.”

During their initial years, there wasn’t pie, but only because Takotna wasn’t a checkpoint on the trail yet. The course has 25 or 26 checkpoints where mushers must sign in with race officials and get a vet check. Some stops are lightning fast, like a Nascar pit crew at work; at others, mushers linger to replace their dogs’ booties (they’ll often go through hundreds), dole out meals (the pups eat about 10,000 calories a day), or sneak in a nap. Administrators also mandate that mushers take several rest breaks: one 24-hour rest and two eight-hour breaks.

article-image

Those pre-checkpoint years, Newton and a friend dished out moose stew and chili to any musher who stopped long enough for them to ladle it up. Word of Takotna’s hospitality got out, and their efforts grew from there. In 1981, Takotna became a full-fledged stop. During the 2019 race, 22 of the 51 racers declared their 24-hours rest there.

Until her passing in 2012, the Iditarod Patron Saint of Pies made sure every musher felt at home in Takotna and that every local had a task, whether working in the kitchen or helping with dog care. Local kids even have the week off school so they can help.

“Jan made sure everyone in this village knew how they could help,” says Nell Huffman, a Takotna resident. “She made this a community effort. She was a leader.” Newton had each musher’s favorite pie ready when they slid in, greeted them by asking how they liked their steak prepared, and handed out bags of to-go burgers as trail snacks.

Scott Janssen, famously known to Alaskans as “The Mushing Mortician” (he owns several funeral homes), first visited Takotna during his rookie Iditarod in 2011. After feeding his dogs and getting them comfortable, he trudged to the library to sleep. When he awoke a few hours later, he realized it was his 50th birthday.

“I was hit with loneliness at that moment,” Janssen says.

article-image

Soon after, he wandered into the community center, with a goal of getting a quick bite and warming up before putting his dogs’ booties on.

“Jan comes up and says, ‘Hey Scott, we have something for you,’” Janssen says.

Newton brought out a carrot cake (a race official had called Janssen’s wife to ask about his favorite flavor) and started singing. Few of the candles matched—someone had run door-to-door to scrounge up all 50.

“Talk about feeling the love,” Janssen says. “The way we mushers are taken care of there is amazing.”

article-image

Newton’s warmth and generosity was so revered that she and her husband were inducted into the Iditarod Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2013, the year following her passing, she was named the Iditarod’s Honorary Musher. Her sled, driven by that year’s Junior Iditarod champion, was the first to leave the Anchorage Ceremonial Start. In a press release that year, the Iditarod staff said of Newton: “Her contributions to the race are remarkable and have elevated her to a position of legendary prominence.”

Huffman, one of Newton’s longtime friends, has since picked up the pie mantle. Making future generations of mushers feel welcome in their village, residents felt, was how they’d honor Newton.

article-image

Because of Takotna’s popularity as a rest stop amongst mushers, the village is clotted with visitors from Tuesday afternoon until early Friday. Making more than 100 pies and myriad meals in a remote Alaskan village is a huge logistical challenge. In January, Huffman and her team were already writing and rewriting shopping lists. The baking blitz starts a month before the race, with Takotna volunteers traveling to Anchorage to buy supplies they can’t get at the local store. Huffman says she’ll fly in several times a year to go store to store and buy all the pie crusts and fillings in each. Bakers make and freeze some pies in advance, but on race day, you can pick out the kitchen help by the berry juice staining their hands.

Huffman wants the meals to be free for mushers. But with a gallon of milk running $9.50 in rural Alaska, they do leave an empty coffee tin out for donations from race officials, itinerant journalists, pilots, and ardent spectators. Still, it doesn't come close to breaking even.

“That’s fine, though. We do it because we love to do it,” Huffman said. “This is the most fun week of the year for us.”

article-image

Janssen enjoys the company so much that he has stayed in Takotna longer than 24 hours, despite being mid race. On his 50th birthday, a group of Norwegian students volunteering in town helped him get his team ready when the cake was gone. As he followed a mining road up and out of town, he looked back and saw them on the road singing “Happy Birthday” in Norwegian, which echoed around the valley.

“I’m a tough bugger, but I cried the rest of the way up the mountain,” he says.

The Mushing Mortician won’t race this year, but he intends to return, and hopes to spend his 60th birthday in Takotna.

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

How an Abandoned Modernist Cinema Became a Revolutionary Symbol in Lebanon

0
0

The Beirut Egg is riddled with bullet holes and covered in graffiti. Protesters recently reclaimed it.

A few months ago, a trickle of protesters converged on downtown Beirut, spurred by a proposed tax on the text-messaging platform WhatsApp. Within a few days, the crowd had swelled, and so had its aims: Demonstrators spoke out against sectarian rule, unemployment, and development that had transformed the area where they were standing into a playground for the rich. Their efforts helped oust the prime minister, but the protests have continued, and they have faced violent crackdowns by security forces.

In recent months, once or twice a week, a guide named Sari Haddad has walked visitors through this evolving story. Leading one group through Martyrs’ Square, which is now partially occupied by tents and art installations, his eyes widen as he recounts the initial protest growing into a movement of millions of people, eventually taking over this once-sterile strip of downtown.

Behind him stands one of the protesters’ greatest prizes: the Egg. The abandoned cinema—a brutalist concrete dome, missing swaths of wall and riddled with bullet holes—looks like it’s from a different universe, next to the enormous Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque and sleek high-rise apartments. On the first day of the protests, the wooden boards surrounding the Egg were torn down, restoring access to one of the city’s strangest sites.

article-image

During Haddad’s story, a protester approaches the group. He’s one of the many war veterans who have taken to the streets and are now selling trinkets to pedestrians. He offers to sell a single lira coin—a bitter souvenir in a country going through a financial crisis. You would need more than 1,500 of them to make a single U.S. dollar at the official exchange rate, and over 2,000 on the black market. He motions to the Egg and says that this coin was once enough to see a movie there.

For many Beiruti, the Egg—officially part of an unfinished project called Beirut City Center complex—symbolizes both the bygone days of Beirut and the years of war that followed. The structure survived the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and '80s, despite being located on the front line between East and West Beirut. Perhaps more impressively, it also survived the reconstruction and post-war boom that totally transformed the downtown area. It remained closed to the public for years as developers argued its fate—until recently.

article-image

For the younger generation in Lebanon, the Egg was a mystery. “No one knew anything about it,” says Haddad, who is 26. It was just a curious remnant of a forgotten Beirut, he says. He and his friends weren’t interested in the downtown area, with its luxury stores and apartments built after the war. "For us, we don’t know anything about what downtown was,” he says. “We have no connection to it.”

But older residents have never forgotten the building’s significance. Philippine Eid, who is 84, says that some of her best memories come from this stretch of downtown Beirut. “At night it was a place to breathe,” she says.

When the dome of the Egg was completed in the 1960s, she was a young woman, still finishing school. A number of theaters and cinemas were already in this section of downtown where Eid lived, near the old souk and a short walk to the rocky coast of the Mediterranean. She would often visit the strangely shaped cinema with her girlfriends, to watch films from Hollywood and Egypt. She liked walking on the soft red carpet and watching the lighting reflect off the walls and ceiling.

At that time, the patrons included those from every sect and neighborhood of the city. “No one was excluded,” Eid says. “Everyone was welcome.”

article-image

Once, Eid sat in the front row of the Egg to watch a live bodybuilding show, and was amazed by the oiled men posing on stage. As it turned out, one of them was also impressed with her, and later found her at the exit—muscles respectfully covered—to ask her out. She refused, but still thinks about it decades later with a smile.

The last time she visited was at age 20, already married and with a newborn son. She had to leave early after he began crying. Still, she looks back fondly on the building. “It was very elegant,” she said.

The ’60s were a golden age not only for cinema in the country but also for architecture, says Rony Hobeika of the Lebanese American University’s School of Architecture and Design. A generation of modernist architects, many educated in the West, picked up commissions from the government and private developers.

Joseph Philippe Karam, an architect who experimented with concrete and modern designs, built the Egg along with many other buildings in the city. His cohort of Lebanese architects were optimistic about what was possible. “That was the spirit of the time,” Hobeika says. “They thought they could build utopia with concrete.”

article-image

Unfortunately, that period of optimism came to a dramatic end with the start of the civil war, in 1975. The city’s concrete buildings became makeshift bunkers, and the Egg sat on the Green Line—a no-man’s land between Christian and Muslim communities in Beirut, so named because it sprouted lush foliage in the absence of foot traffic. After the war, a reconstruction effort led by the development firm Solidere destroyed more buildings than the fighting had.

As old Beirut was bulldozed, the Egg—constantly threatened by developers—somehow remained standing. In 2009, after the building was nearly demolished, local activists began a “Save the Egg” campaign. Its entrance was closed to the public (although a rave or two was permitted).

It was during this time, decades after the war, that a young generation of illustrators, painters, photographers, and musicians turned the building into a pop icon, says Melissa Khoury, a researcher at the Lebanese American University. “When a building represents what people experienced in the city, it becomes more than just a hunk of cement and metal wires,” Khoury says. “It becomes somehow part of the people.”

That’s also why it can be so painful when it's threatened with destruction, she says, or inspire such joy when saved.

A couple of weeks after his revolution-themed walking tour, Haddad ducks under a rusted railing to enter the Egg. The dome of the building is raised above a space designed for a shopping center. Large and colorful murals—a rat representing a devious politician, the face of Joaquin Phoenix in Joker—splash color across the concrete walls. Stairs lead up and into the shell.

Haddad, who entered the Egg on the second day of the protests, says he was careful climbing these stairs at first, unsure whether they would hold his weight.

article-image

The inside of the Egg looks like a post-apocalyptic planetarium. The curved wall is tagged and painted wherever reachable. Bare steps, built for theater seating, provide a natural spot where visitors sit and smoke cigarettes and take photos, and where protesters hold meetings. “The revolution gave us back our public property,” Haddad says. “So we raved inside the Egg. We watched movies inside the Egg.”

The back wall of the structure is missing, allowing afternoon sunlight to flood the space and revealing a view of the Ring Bridge—often the site of road blocks by protesters. The skyline of Beirut pits new buildings against old, war-scarred tenements. “It was a view that was new for us,” says Haddad, looking in that direction.

For those brave enough, there’s one more level of the Egg that’s reachable. Outside of the shell, across a wooden plank that bridges a steep drop, is a narrow section of metal stairs leading to the roof. After a shaky climb, one can look down on Martyrs’ Square and the cluster of tents and vendors that occupy former parking lots. Someone who reached this point earlier has dripped a rainbow of paint down the side of the building.

article-image

As a group of teenagers film a parkour video nearby, Haddad dreams aloud of what else might be done here. The space could house daily screenings or serve as a gallery for local artists, or host 1,000 ravers like Berlin’s best industrial clubs.

But after more than 100 days, the revolution has taken a dark turn. Protesters regularly clash with riot police, throwing rocks and fireworks, facing tear gas and rubber bullets in return. A new prime minister has finally formed a government, but doesn’t have the support of those camped in front of the Egg.

Some barriers were torn down in October, but now others are appearing. Concrete walls block the alleys leading to the Parliament of Lebanon, in an effort to stop protesters from rushing the building.

Yet the Egg remains open. Many nights, visitors can stand inside, shielded from tear gas and riot police, listening to the chants of protesters who want a new Lebanon.

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

Meet the Iowa Architect Documenting Every Slave House Still Standing

0
0

Jobie Hill has visited 700 former residences. Many have been abandoned. Some have become storage space. Others are B&Bs.

The current residents of the historic Mount Zion home in Warren County, Virginia, were rifling through the attic of their garage when they found a yellowed fragment of paper. It was the corner of a larger document, soiled by mold, water, and time. But the snaking cursive writing on it was still legible. It was the bill of sale for an enslaved girl named Chalotte (more likely Charlotte, with the letter “r” long faded away).

The discovery of the bill in the garage was both extraordinary and unsurprising. Because long before the building was a garage, it was the home of enslaved African Americans.

In 2017, the residents shared Charlotte’s bill of sale and one other—denoting an unnamed man who was sold for $650—with Jobie Hill, a preservation architect from Iowa City. Hill had come to Mount Zion to do fieldwork for her project Saving Slave Houses, hoping to document the condition of the Mount Zion garage to see how much of the building’s history has been preserved.

Since 2012, Hill has surveyed hundreds of structures that she believes once served as a home to enslaved African Americans. More often than not, the buildings bear no visible trace of their past; many have been converted into garages, offices, or sometimes—unnervingly—bed-and-breakfasts. In some cases the structures have fallen into ruin or vanished entirely, leaving behind a depression in the ground.

Hill is determined to build a first-of-its-kind database that honors and preserves these spaces in more than memory, and to unite the houses with the stories of people who once inhabited them. As she sees it, such a repository is long overdue. “There has never been a national survey of slave houses, except for the one I’m trying to do,” Hill says.

article-image

Scholars who study the horrors of American slavery agree. “Slavery is largely invisible in the [current] Southern landscape, and therefore easy to ignore or forget,” Damian Pargas, a historian from Leiden University who specializes in slavery, writes in an email.

“What Jobie is doing is great, and certainly necessary,” says Joe McGill, the founder of The Slave Dwelling Project, which hosts overnight stays in former slave cabins. “These are buildings history has long overlooked, because they do not make the white male a hero.”


Hill came up with the idea for Saving Slave Houses in 2012, while researching her master’s thesis in preservation architecture. She was a summer intern at the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), a federal program established in 1933 to employ architects and draftsmen who had been laid off during the Great Depression.

The survey’s stated purpose was to document the architectural features of historically significant buildings in the United States. But it also recorded 485 slave houses that remained standing across the Antebellum South in the 1930s and ’40s. “It’s the closest thing to a national survey of slave houses that we have,” Hill says.

The HABS survey required that each site be documented with a combination of interior and exterior photographs, precise floor plans and blueprints, and any relevant history of how the building was used in the past.

article-image

Hill soon realized that this high level of documentation was a prerequisite only for the main houses on plantations, but was rarely present for slave houses. Those structures were often included in the survey unintentionally. “I would see [a slave house] in the background of the picture [of the main house,] because they couldn’t crop it out,” Hill says.

Slave houses were rarely labeled as such, but Hill has found it easy to pick them out from the surveys by observing their small size and location. “And if the building has a fireplace or a chimney, that meant it was used as a living space,” she says, adding that enslaved people often lived in the kitchens where they worked.

The architecture of these buildings varies, from one-room cabins to dormitory-style housing. But the majority of the slave houses documented by HABS were built as notched log cabins, with gaps patched with mud or left open to the air.

To match the slave houses identified in HABS with the people who once lived in them, Hill cross-references the HABS survey with the largest, best-known collection of interviews from formerly enslaved people: the 1936-1938 WPA Slave Narrative Collection—a project that gathered 3,500 narratives from people, 1,010 of whom described their homes.

The interviews paint a grim picture of the cruel and cramped quarters enslaved people were forced to live in. The inside of a slave house was as structurally bleak as the outside, with crude beds made of hay and cord. Conditions were often dangerous: Chimneys, for instance, built of sticks and mud, would fill the unventilated room with smoke, and sometimes catch fire. And the owners of certain plantations, such as Beatrice Manor in the border state of Kentucky, would lock enslaved people inside their houses at night.

article-image

But Hill recognizes these sites as sacred spaces. “It was in domestic life—away from the eyes and whip of the overseer—that captive Africans could attempt to assert the modicum of freedom they still retained,” writes the archaeologist Whitney Battle-Baptiste, referencing an article by the activist, scholar, and writer Angela Davis, in a chapter of Archaeology and Preservation of Gendered Landscapes.

Hill often finds herself fixating on the few deeply human details present in the narratives, such as how enslaved people personalized their homes. Cordelia Thomas, who was enslaved on Andrew Jackson’s plantation in Oconee County, Georgia, described how thin sliding blocks of wood disguised bored-out peepholes, to allow the people inside the house to see visitors without opening the door. Nelson Cameron, who was enslaved on Sam Brice’s plantation in Alabama, remembered how morning glory vines would climb the porch outside his log house and bloom, surrounded by buzzing bees.

Despite the historical gaps of these two chief sources—one an accidental architectural documentation, the other an inconsistent collection of oral histories—Hill says she feels confident that she’s matched five narratives to former slave houses. “It was more than I thought I would find,” she says. “I was hoping to find at least one.”

Hill’s arduous research process—identifying slave houses in archives that often mention them only in passing—is what ultimately inspired her to create the Slave House Database.

“Hill’s project is important,” Vargas says, adding that he believes that extant slave houses should be declared protected heritage sites or national monuments. “Preserving slave cabins … will help make the history of slavery visible to the general public.


Hill’s new mission is to visit every HABs-identified slave house to see if it’s still standing, and if so, how it’s been preserved. Most of the sites recorded in HABS are located on private property, so Hill always writes to the current property owner to explain why she wants to visit. People living in the homes that once belonged to slave-owners often have an idea of what the smaller structures on their property were used for, but seldom know that some enslaved people lived where they worked.

“Oftentimes they’ll write back and say, ‘Oh, we don’t have any slave houses on our site, they’ve all been demolished, but we do have a kitchen,’” Hill says. “And I’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m also interested in the kitchen.’”

article-image

Once on site, Hill shares all the information she has about the slave house with the property’s current owner, and asks for any artifacts they might have from the building. Then she’ll walk around the site, taking photographs and measurements, noting GPS coordinates, and sketching what she sees.

The first thing you notice when you walk inside a slave house, she says, is the size. “The ceilings are low, there are [very few] windows, and it’s stuffy, without much sunlight,” Hill says.

Many slave houses that have been converted into storage rooms or offices have modern upgrades—like plumbing or a window air-conditioning unit—that make them more bearable inside. In the ones that don’t, the air feels thick, stagnant, and trapped.

After visiting hundreds of sites, Hill has been surprised by the quality of construction she’s found: It’s better than she anticipated. “We’ve been taught and conditioned to think that these structures were poorly built,” she says.

article-image

Hill often sees slave houses referred to as shacks or huts—pejoratives contradicted by the fact that many are still standing centuries after they were built. (She does note, however, that scores of slave houses have not survived.) According to Hill, many enslaved people were skilled carpenters, responsible for building not just their own homes but also the grand mansions that housed the people who enslaved them. Though given limited tools and resources for their own dwellings, they built their houses as sturdily as possible. “It was one of the ways they were resisting slavery.”

Several former slave dwellings that Hill has visited are now bed-and-breakfasts, which Vargas says are most prevalent along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Some of these B&Bs are up front about the history of their rooms, though often euphemistic in their presentation. In Louisa, Virginia, for instance, the owners of the Prospect Hill Plantation Inn named the rooms after former enslaved occupants. The description for “Uncle Guy’s Loft,” which goes for $165 to $215 a night, reads: “Originally the sleeping quarters for fifteen field-hands, this private upstairs room … is both cozy and quaint, while still feeling roomy and relaxed.”

Other B&Bs are less forthcoming. In New Orleans, B&W Courtyards offers a Barbados-style beach house in a slave house, which the B&B describes as “old servants quarters.”

“I have mixed feelings about how the buildings are used,” Hill says. But she’s quick to point out that when a building is being used—however it’s being used—it’s also being preserved. Vacant or abandoned buildings deteriorate over time—a surefire route to eventual demolition.

article-image

Many of the 485 slave houses that HABS documented in 1936 have disappeared in the years since, and Hill knows there may be many more undocumented dwellings out there. So many of the homes were replaced long ago with something unrecognizable—like the plot in Macon, Georgia, that’s now the Bibb County Tax Commissioner Service Center.

Other times, the buildings disappear soon after she sees them. Hill visited the ruins of the Greenhill Plantation in Campbell County, Virginia, several times between 2014 and 2017. “Each time we went out there, one more building had disappeared, eaten up by the trees."


Though its scope is expansive, Saving Slave Houses isn’t Hill’s full-time job. She still works in preservation architecture, and has served as the architect for the reconstruction of several slave houses that were demolished long ago at James Madison’s Montpelier and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

At Monticello, Hill reconstructed a 12-foot by 14-foot cabin with walls a foot thick, where the enslaved John and Priscilla Hemmings once lived. The house was furnished according to a description given by Thomas Jefferson’s great-great granddaughter, who remembered a bed, a table, and a shelf. “One comment we got [from visitors] was, ‘This wasn’t so bad,’” Hill says.

article-image

That sentiment is part of the problem. As Hill sees it, the task of reconstructing enslaved spaces often puts interpreters in a bind. Though furniture or decorations inside the houses accurately represent the small comforts enslaved people created for themselves, visitors often conflate that with a rosier experience of slavery than actually existed. “The credit should go to the enslaved community making life better for themselves,” Hill says. “Not to the institution of slavery.”

Since 2012, Hill has documented approximately 700 buildings at more than 140 sites in six states. In 2017, a new trove of slave narratives was digitized at Southern University and A&M College in Louisiana, representing 229 stories from 17 states. Hill has been poring through these narratives to identify building descriptions that will help her match slave houses with the people who might have lived in them. She’s also scheduling new site visits, with a special focus on Alabama, which has more than 100 HABS-documented houses.

Despite the painful histories behind slave houses, Hill says that visiting them is not a painful experience for her. “The slave-owners didn’t want these buildings to survive, and the fact that they do is credit to the enslaved people,” she says.

McGill agrees. “It’s important to acknowledge and save these buildings that can help tell the stories of enslaved ancestors,” he says. “It’s a story that’s been neglected for so long.”

Sometimes, standing in houses that haven’t been remodeled or repurposed, Hill can detect traces of the people who once lived there. At Roseville Plantation near Aylett, Virginia, she visited a kitchen that had a loft upstairs, where enslaved people would have lived. She saw that a hole had burned into the floorboards of the loft, perhaps from a hot ash that escaped a fire unnoticed while a family was sleeping. She marveled at the mark—at how the small, flammable structure could easily have been burned down. And the sheer luck that it was not.

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

Viewing all 11437 articles
Browse latest View live


Latest Images