Not by themselves, but the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive is out to show how they can help.

For a tree too big to wrap your arms around, the California coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, is surprisingly elusive. Their bases might be elephantine, but the upper reaches, they’re lofty, inscrutable. It's this zone that I'm preparing to enter, a fog-shrouded crown on the northern California coast. A guide cinches me into a harness, and before I know it, I'm 140 feet up, then 150, 160. I stare at the tree's dark, gnarled bark to quell the vertigo rising in my temples.

By the time I'm about 20 stories off the ground, the dot-sized people staring up at me are gone, replaced by intertwined branches and needles that close around me like a net. Clumps of sage-colored moss dangle and an inexplicable calm descends. Somewhere, my mind is scrambling like a squirrel, aware that I’m dangling 200 feet off the ground, but the tree's unrelenting solidity—it's been here since before the Magna Carta, after all—is having an effect. There’s a stillness up here that passes understanding.

I should have seen this coming. It’s just the way David Milarch described it. Milarch's singular goal in life is to bring these primeval forests back from the brink, and he knows just how to win people to his cause. The best baptism is the experience. I see it in the faces of others after they return from a crown visit: blooming cheeks, starry eyes, deep sighs. They've gotten big tree religion.

Milarch is counting on this kind of conversion, and he approaches his life’s work with a religious zeal. He is the founder of a nonprofit called the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, and he’s out to spread the gospel of California's coast redwoods. Years of droughts and shifting temperatures have already driven these evergreen giants out of some coastal zones they once inhabited. The trees can live for as long as 2,000 to 3,000 years, but some scientists think, the way things are going, that they could disappear from California in a fraction of that time.

Milarch spends his days tracking down the heartiest coast redwood specimens he can find, cloning them in his own lab, and then planting them in carefully chosen plots where they can thrive, hopefully for millennia. One site is a new experimental bed in San Francisco's Presidio, part of the U.S. National Park system. Milarch’s goal is both to strengthen the coast redwood gene pool with clones of the strongest individuals, and to store loads of climate-change-causing carbon—more than 1,000 tons per acre of redwoods, more than any other kind of forest in the world. It’s a complicated mission with a simple philosophy: Save the big trees, and they'll save us. Reckoning with climate change will take much more than that, but Milarch’s singular devotion is at least a reflection of the kind of zeal we’ll need.

For millennia, California coast redwoods seemed like the last tree species that would need to be saved. They are endurance champions that survive through thousands of years of natural floods, droughts, tsunamis, fires, and wild temperature swings. They can thrive and recover from damage so long as they can count on rainwater and coastal fog banks that roll in every morning. And it is those critical water sources that are dissipating as temperatures rise. The damp conditions the trees like—mostly in pea-soupy pockets of California and Oregon—are rarer than they used to be. Coast redwoods now occupy less than 10 percent of their original range. Their loss will have ripples—economic, ecological, emotional—particularly in the vast amount of carbon they can store.

In places where coast redwoods remain, their silent grandeur is simply overwhelming. So it's at least a little ironic that one of their greatest advocates is such a talker. If you strike up a conversation with Milarch, you’ll get his life story inside of 10 minutes—from his motorcycle gang days in Detroit to the revelation that set him on his current path, involving a near-death experience, angels, and a disembodied voice that dictated a plan he wrote down in the wee hours of the morning. When he woke up fully the next day, he says, “There was an eight-page outline on that legal pad. It was the outline for this project.”

The angel who tapped Milarch for this mission seems to have picked the right person—not only is he an able tree-vangelist, but he is a third-generation shade-tree grower. His sons Jake and Jared, both of whom work for Archangel, make up the fourth. So he knows all the secrets of getting balky arborial species to reach their potential by locating the healthiest specimens, clipping and propagating them, and then nurturing delicate new trees.

In the primeval forests of California's northern coast, Milarch knows what he is looking for: redwoods that have proven their mettle by surviving for a millennium or more. Some of these aren’t the fully grown behemoths, but just stumps or “fairy rings,” the term for a circle of sprouts that are exact clones of a fallen parent tree, thriving on its decaying remnants. “Redwoods, just before they die, they know they're dying,” Milarch says. “They self-clone. There are a dozen trees [sprouting] from the root system, so that when she passes, she lives on.”

Once Milarch and his team find the right tree—if it’s not a stump already—they zip up to the canopy in harnesses and harvest hundreds of pale green branch tips, each about the size of a fingertip. These are spirited carefully back to Archangel's lab facility in Copemish, Michigan. Taking these cuttings at just the right time is critical, it turns out. “We stay away from collecting material when the tree is stressed out,” Jake Milarch explains. “It has to be at a certain point of hardening off.” Too green and it will wilt, too mature and it won't root properly.

The next step is getting the cuttings to take root. Some thrive in rich soil with a dose of rooting medium, while others, Jake says, need more help—a process called micropropagation. “We're taking tiny tips and basically multiplying them in vitro. Not down to the cell, but down to a stem the size of this—” he points to a dot on a spread-out map. These bits get nursed along in sterile vessels to prevent bacteria from interfering with a critical stage in development. But there's still a lot of trial and error involved. Typically, only 3 to 4 percent of the tiniest coast redwood cuttings survive long enough to make it into the ground.

Deep in San Francisco’s Presidio, which sprawls under the southern approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, behind a chain-link fence, there is a sun-dappled clearing where dozens of wooden stakes are lined up in neat rows. Tethered to each is a spindly little Charlie Brown tree about a foot tall. When Presidio foresters wanted to plant an open area with coast redwoods and heard about Milarch’s cloning project, they reached out to him for healthy tree starts.

When Presidio staff planted these 75 cloned redwoods in late 2018, the National Parks Conservancy issued a press release—but it’s not a tourist draw, not yet. “It's kind of tucked away,” says Presidio head forester Blake Troxel. “No one comes up here except us and the coyotes.”

The grove features a backdrop of gnarled old shade trees, including a few coast redwoods the park's one-time military management planted back in the 1800s, each now more than a hundred feet tall. The smaller trees, all reared in Milarch's Michigan lab, came from coast redwood stumps that predate the Roman Empire. The silver-gray fog bank that rolls over the site in the wee hours just about every night makes this ideal coast redwood territory, despite being more or less in the middle of a city. Even so, Troxel says, the new trees’ success in the grove isn’t guaranteed. The Presidio team tends the site aggressively to make sure the redwood starts aren't eclipsed by faster-growing competitors. “The grasses are what make it difficult,” Troxel says. “We come through and brush-cut.” The baby redwoods also get drip irrigation a couple hours a week when it's not raining, as well as infusions of compost from elsewhere in the park. To help the clones feel more at home, eventually, Troxel and his team will plant understory species that appear in natural redwood forests, such as coast live oak, California buckeye, and elderberry.

Milarch is hoping that the Presidio site will demonstrate how redwood clones can be planted on a larger scale, and Troxel's feedback will be an invaluable source of information. If a certain sub-species of redwood does particularly well there, California planters will know that variety might do well at similar planting sites around the state.

Of course, not all 75 of these trees will one day dominate here. As redwoods mature, they need progressively more space around their top branches so they can get the sunlight they need. “In five years,” he says, “their crowns will be touching.” After the trees get their park legs under them, Troxel plans to thin them selectively to give the strongest ones the best chance to make it.

When Milarch launched the Archangel project, he imagined groves of saplings like this, but as scientists and activists raised the alarm about greenhouse gas emissions, his vision began to broaden. These days, he talks more and more about pressing coast redwoods into service to capture atmospheric carbon. “We need a viable, measurable solution to reverse excess carbon, which is causing highs and lows and storms and droughts,” he says. “It's about our children and grandchildren having a shot at life.” The signature line on his e-mail reads, “Champion Trees Are the Answer.”

Some science supports Milarch's outsized faith in these trees. In a Science article published in July 2019, Swiss researchers estimate that 900 million new hectares of forest—a swath about the size of the continental United States—could capture enough carbon to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by about 25 percent. New redwood groves could be a start, as they store a lot of carbon per acre, but they don’t thrive just anywhere and take a long time to grow.

Troxel hesitates to put too much stock in the carbon capacity of tree-planting. “As a cure-all, I'm not so sure,” he says. He stresses the importance of restoring entire natural ecosystems that include the big trees. As University College London earth scientists Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis point out in The Conversation, reforestation is hardly a magic bullet against climate change. It can take centuries, even millennia, to have its effect, and that’s time the climate problem does not have. Some of the land areas earmarked for reforestation in the Science study may end up too hot for forests by the time people get around to planting them. “Reforestation,” Maslin and Lewis write, “should be thought of as one solution to climate change among many.”

Even if champion trees aren't an answer by themselves, Milarch is determined to see them at least become part of the answer. If there’s anything worth being downright messianic about, he figures, it’s creating eternal groves of thousand-year-old, self-replicating giants that could benefit all humankind. “We have a list of the 100 most important trees to clone. We have our marching orders. We know where we need to go,” Milarch says. “I raise my hand every morning and I say, 'Use me.'”

Every summer and fall, giant vacuums gobble up insects for 13 hours a day.

Tall, white towers rise like smokestacks in Crookston, Minnesota; Manhattan, Kansas; and Monroe, Michigan. Around 19 feet high and secured to the ground with cables and wooden posts, they’re essentially giant vacuums, sucking up some of the creatures passing through the nearby sky. Come May, around 35 of these strange structures will be active, jutting up near woods, cornfields, and squat, leafy rows of soybeans, mainly around university-backed agricultural research stations.

The vacuums capture all sorts of small critters—they’re capped with screens, to prevent birds and bats from toppling in, but wind up snaring mosquitoes and other insects, as well as the occasional spider. But the reason for their existence is a pesky pest known as the soybean aphid, Aphis glycines. Together, the gulping towers make up the soybean aphid Suction Trap Network.

As long as they fly under the radar, soybean aphids have a pretty good life. In their winged form, they soar above a buffet of farmland. “They basically suck the juices out of the soybean plant,” says Glen Hartman, a research plant pathologist at the Urbana, Illinois, office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service. Hungry and as small as a pinhead, the aphids cause plants to dry out, mature faster, or die young, and they’re also known to transmit viruses to plants. Soybean aphids can cluster by the thousands on a single plant—think of a bagel heaped with yellowish-green sesame seeds. That’s frustrating for farmers, who can see declines in their yields.

Soybean aphids probably arrived in the U.S. from East Asia around the turn of the 21st century, possibly as stowaways on ornamental plants or edamame pods. At first, scientists and farmers in America “didn’t really have a lot of information about how serious they were,” Hartman says. “They really kind of blew up in our face.”

First observed on a farm near Whitewater, Wisconsin, in July 2000, soybean aphids quickly spread throughout the Midwest and into Ontario, Canada. In August 2001, so many of them descended on a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game that the umpire demanded that the stadium roof be closed against the onslaught. Across the soy-speckled region, the insects flourished. They also encountered ample buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), bushes where they can hunker down for the winter. Within four years, they had been observed in 22 states and three Canadian provinces.

When the species first arrived, it spread so quickly that predator populations took time to catch up, Hartman says—“they hadn’t realized there was that much food.” But in June 2019, entomologists at the University of Manitoba reported that aphid populations are constrained by hover flies and a few other species that move between neighboring soybeans and alfalfa plants. To thwart them, farmers have applied insecticides (which can also inadvertently kill other, beneficial insects), and researchers have bred resistant populations of soybeans.

Given the damage these aphids can do, scientists were keen to track their locations and migrations over time. In a paper forthcoming in the journal American Entomologist, a team of 15 collaborators, including Hartman, describes the network of vacuums that inhale the insects and save them for scientists to study.

The soybean aphid Suction Trap Network, founded in 2001, took a cue from a similar project in the U.K., which has been tracking aphid migrations since 1964. (There are currently 16 operational traps in the U.K. network, according to the American Entomologist paper). There was a predecessor in the U.S., too: From 1983 to 2003, a network of traps tracked the Russian wheat aphid across California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.

The soybean aphid traps suck the sky daily from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., from the third week in May to the third week in October. (They’re set on a timer, so no one has to run out and turn them on or off.) They’re powered by fans and breathe in 60 cubic meters of air per minute, which is enough to fill more than 15,000 one-gallon jugs. “If you think of sucking on a straw and bringing up liquid, it’s kind of the same thing if you suck on the air,” Hartman says.

An aphid unfortunate enough to cross a trap’s path is sucked down into it and through a funnel. At the bottom, it lands in a solution that’s part water, part antifreeze. This liquid preserves the insects without creating a shipping hazard, and each week, collaborators collect and replace it, sending the aphid-studded batch to the USDA Soybean Diseases and Pests Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Back in the lab, researchers sort and store the aphids in ethanol at -4 degrees Fahrenheit, so they’re available for future study.

Each batch is a snapshot of the life passing by. “We call it a DNA soup,” says Hartman. “People do these soil biome studies where they study the soil DNA. This is just a sample that’s in the air.”

By studying the life languishing in the liquid, the researchers found that aphid populations tend to peak in late July and mid-August, when they’re flitting between soybean plants, and then again in the last two weeks of September, when they’re decamping for the buckthorn. Of the states the researchers studied, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin were especially infested; Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and South Dakota much less so. Between 2005 and 2018, the researchers counted 176 species of aphids—more than 904,000 individual insects in all.

The ideal location for a vacuum trap is a spot that’s fairly out in the open, but still close enough to a building that the fan has a power source. “We also can’t have them in the middle of a field, because it would be an obstruction to the farmer,” Hartman says. Enclosed in the bottom of the tube, the whirring motor isn’t loud enough to bother people, says Doris Lagos-Kutz, a research associate in the soybean/maize germplasm, pathology, and genetics research program at the USDA Agricultural Research Service lab in Urbana, and lead author of the American Entomologist paper—but stand close by, and you might hear the whooshing.

Other than the weekly liquid exchange, the traps are pretty low-maintenance. The motors give out every few years, and sometimes the bird-deterring spikes blow over, but the towers are generally sturdy, unless they’re toppled by a storm or shaken by a distracted farmer. (Someone once snagged a tractor on the wires, Lagos-Kutz says.)

The network expanded in 2005, and has been sucking away for years. It only has two more years of planned funding, Hartman says. They operate with grant money, and when that runs out, “we’re not sure where the funding will come from,” he says. The collaborators hope they can keep vacuuming up aphids for years to come. “It’s really important to have these long-term studies,” Hartman says. “If we just took a window of a year or two, that wouldn’t tell us much about how populations change.”

The aphid samples come in handy when researchers want to test new targeted insecticides, says Lagos-Kutz. Future work could also reveal, for instance, how aphids affect emerging Midwestern crops, such as hemp, Hartman says, and open a window into how insect viruses ripple through populations. There’s also the big question about how aphids will fare in a changing climate. A few years isn’t long enough to track those thorny issues. “We need to measure in decades,” Hartman says.

A hit single is benefiting an endangered species.

Few instruments of social change can match the power of pop music with a message. With a catchy enough earworm, hitmakers can provoke the masses to “Fight The Power,” “Give Peace A Chance,” or even “Impeach the President.” São Toméan pop legend João Seria has an even more pointed message for his listeners: “If you see sea turtle meat for sale, don’t buy it.”

Seria’s breezy, bouncy, turtle-friendly 2017 song “Mem di Omali,” or “Mother of the Sea,” was actually part of a calculated conservationist endeavor, the outlines of which are covered in a newly released paper by scientists from the University of Oxford and Programa Tatô, a São Toméan NGO. To raise awareness of sea turtles’ endangered status and curb the local market for their meat, the international team launched a mass-marketing campaign in São Tomé of music, theater, and food festivals. It is having a marked effect, and not a day too soon.

Lead researcher and Oxford zoologist Dr. Diogo Verissimo is blunt. “If things don’t change, in a few decades we won’t have any sea turtles left in São Tomé,” he tells me over the phone. The five species of sea turtle that thrive around the islands of São Tomé and Principe not only play a crucial role in maintaining marine biodiversity, but also attract tourism on which the local economy depends, according to co-author Dr. Ana Nuno.

“It’s an animal that’s been heavily exploited for centuries,” says Verissimo. São Toméans are not to blame for the sea turtles’ endangered status, he emphasizes. The industrial-scale harvesting of yesteryear by the Portuguese is what laid turtle populations low. But the animal’s vestigial role in modern São Toméan cuisine keeps them endangered.

While it’s no daily bread, sea turtle meat and eggs do feature in the São Tomé and Principe's food. São Toméans mark special occasions such as birthdays, Easter, and anniversaries with a stew called calulu that often includes sea-turtle meat. According to a 30-year-old São Toméan who wishes to remain anonymous, they traditionally blanche cleaned turtle meat with sape-sape leaf before stewing it with aromatics, chili, lime, and tomato paste. At other times, they beat the eggs with corn flour to make omelets. Turtles are typically harvested during their nesting period, he writes in an email, from September to March. “But there are also out-of-season catches, from underwater fishermen.” Seria himself, who is 73 years old, admitted to researchers from Programa Tatô that, for decades, he partook in the regional specialty.

Until 2015, São Toméans bought and sold turtle meat in the island’s central market. While a law that year banned the possession, trade, or sale of turtle meat, clandestine consumption persisted, though Verissimo is reluctant to even call it a black market. "It was pretty open,” he says. “If you asked for it, you could still get it.” When conservationists saw the ban was ineffective, the only solution became what Verissimo calls “voluntary compliance”; people had to decide not to eat sea-turtle meat of their own volition.

To make a persuasive case, the team of mostly Portuguese scientists conducted more than 1,000 interviews probing islanders’ thoughts on sea-turtle products, marine biology, and media. To ensure accuracy, the team employed proxy interviewers. “The reality is that me, a Caucasian man, going into these communities and asking these questions would cause a distraction,” says Verissimo. The interviews revealed that both rural and urban communities believed sea turtles would never go extinct. Further, while politicians ranked as the least likely to alter social behavior, figures from television and radio ranked as the most likely. Enter the pop charts.

Programa Tatô approached Seria, an ambassador of São Toméan culture, with their research. To say he was receptive would be an understatement. “We just had a conversation about sea turtles’ role in the ecosystem,” says director Betânia Ferreira Airaud. “Then he wrote and recorded the song in one day.”

In the video, a bare-chested Seria signals a thumbs up while casting an earnest glance toward the crystal-clear waters off the pristine beach, singing: “My people, let the sea turtle live / She was born in São Tomé, traveled throughout the world and returned to lay her eggs in this country.” He trades verses with another São Toméan pop star, Sebastiana, and weaves in and out of three local dialects, which, according to Verissimo, was by design. “We wanted the song to be as close to the people as possible,” he says. The song was broadcast across the island’s state-run TV and radio and amassed more than 30,000 hits on Youtube.

Still, the blithe, beach-ready single was just one of the conservationists’ weapons in the war on the turtle market.

They collaborated with a local amateur theater group to write and perform radio soap operas after the nightly primetime news, stocked with key messages and slogans. They organized youth soccer tournaments under the campaign’s name, “Mem di Omali.” They distributed bumper stickers, which read, “I don’t transport sea turtles,” amongst the fleet of taxis that often bring shoppers to and from the central market. They even held a day-long festival centered around a cooking contest and well-known local chefs presenting turtle-free versions of São Toméan dishes that typically employ sea-turtle meat.

Detailed counts of sea-turtle populations will be revealed later this year, but already a change is in the air. Preliminary results show not only an uptick in sea-turtle numbers, but a shift in social behavior, according to Verissimo. The turtles are now more visible features of local beaches, and São Toméans rally around the nesting mothers. Programa Tatô fields calls from breathless beach-goers who see them onshore and promise to watch over them. Coordinator Sara Vieira says youth programs have been particularly effective. “We have kids calling the police to denounce even their own families,” she says. “They’ll tell on their uncle for having a sea turtle in the house.”

Seria’s song is a lighthearted solution to a dire problem, but it’s proving no less effective. “All fishermen who live in coastal communities, do not catch turtles,” he sings. It’s simple pop you can feel both onshore, and underwater.

Salah Abu Ali often sleeps beneath his ancient charge.

Salah Abu Ali has three children. But he has another son here, he says, pointing towards the gnarled trunk of the Al Badawi tree. Weathered and ancient, it looks more like an oak than an olive tree, with muscular stalks and a cavernous trunk. Sensing confusion, Ali walks to the tree. He kneels below the branches and gently caresses a small sapling that’s sprouted near the base. He says he found it on the day his last son was born.

In the sleepy Palestinian village of Al Walaja, on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Ali wakes every morning to tend to his family’s orchard. Entering through a neighbor’s yard, he trots down the grove’s narrow paths in a way that belies his age, occasionally reaching down to quickly toss aside trespassing stones; briskly descending verdant terraces, one after another until he comes to the edge of the orchard. It is at this edge where Ali spends most of his day, pumping water from the spring above or tending to the soil. It is where he sometimes sleeps at night, and where he hosts people that have made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But many come for the tree, an olive that some believe to be the oldest in the world.

The Al Badawi tree is one of a handful of olive trees in the eastern Mediterranean that are more than 2,000 years old. In 2010, two teams, one from Italy and another from Japan, carbon-dated Al Badawi. They came up with an age range of 3,000 to 5,500 years old. The top end of that spectrum would make the Al Badawi tree the oldest olive tree in the world, but it’s impossible to know for certain.

Regardless, the tree holds religious, historical, and cultural significance for the people of the village and those that come from abroad to visit. “Those that know it, come,” Ali says, adding that the tree was once a pilgrimage site for Sufis. It is said that the tree got its name from Sheik Ahmad al-Badawi, an Egyptian Sufi holy man who spent much of his time beneath its branches. Olive trees are also repeatedly mentioned in the Bible, and their branches have become a universal symbol of peace.

But the olive tree of Al Walaja has become something else to its residents. Now, it’s a symbol of resistance. The village is a shadow of its former self. Most of the village’s residents were forced to flee their homes amidst heavy fighting during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. “In 1948, we came here and slept under the trees,” Ali says, as Israeli military personnel chant during drills in the valley below. After the dust settled and the demarcation lines were drawn, Al Walaja had lost around 70 percent of its land.

The town was further eroded after Israel captured the West Bank during the six-day war in 1967. Israel then expanded the Jerusalem Municipality, annexing around half of what was left of the village.

More recently, Israel’s separation wall threatened to once again cut the village in two, isolating the Al Badawi tree. But residents won a court battle which saw the chain-link wall diverted around the village. The wall now stands just below Ali’s family orchard, separating the new village from the site of the old, just across a narrow valley.

Despite the court victory, dozens of homes have been bulldozed to make way for the Jerusalem Municipality. Al Walaja still sits isolated, hemmed in on nearly all sides by Israel’s separation wall and no longer able to access uncultivated farmland or many of the village’s once-famed springs.

It’s hard to imagine what might have become of Ali if he had been torn from the tree. He now considers it his life’s work to protect it. His sons help, and often sleep under the tree, he says, as he sometimes does and like his father did before him. The Palestinian Authority now pays Ali a small monthly sum to guard it, no doubt worried about reports of settlers and soldiers burning and cutting down ancient olive trees in other parts of the West Bank. According to the United Nations, approximately 45 percent of agricultural land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip contain olive trees, providing income for some 100,000 families. “The Palestinians are attached to the olive tree,” Ali says. “The olive tree is a part of our resistance and a part of our religion. With the olive tree we live, and without it we don’t live.”

Olive trees have an ability to survive where other trees cannot, clinging to the craggy, arid landscapes of the Levant, asking for nothing more than a little water and care. And for centuries, people have depended on the olive tree for food and oil in this region, possibly as far back as 8,000 years. However, a tree as large as Al Badawi requires special attention and more water. It’s only just recovering from a recent drought.

The past five years have been especially hard, Ali says, as he gets up to check a hose he uses to pump water from a shallow spring above. One year, the tree was bare and did not produce anything. Last year, with the help of a healthy rainy season, Ali was able to harvest 400 kilograms, or nearly 900 pounds of olives. “20 years ago, there was more rain and it made 600 kilograms regularly,” he says.

Despite this, Ali believes the tree will live on. “It’s better than people,” he says. But even though the land it stands on has been contested since time immemorial, people have nurtured the tree for just as long, all the way through the founding of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. If Al Badawi is not cared for by his family, Ali says, the task will surely be taken up by another.

The genre is moving beyond its machismo-fueled roots.

It's a drizzly Sunday afternoon in Tlaquepaque, a Mexican city known as much for its ceramics and pottery as it is for its mariachi culture. In a traditional Mexican restaurant and bar called El Patio, the atmosphere is buzzing. Families dine on large plates of pescado and pollo in mole sauce and share stories, while steps away in the eatery's central al fresco courtyard, two dancers donning colorful baile folklorico dresses stand at the ready on a raised wooden stage. Suddenly, a melody of voices fills the air, followed by the sounds of trumpets and violins. It's the iconic mariachi song Guadalajara, which the band members sing as they work their way around the restaurant, the dancers twirling and stomping their feet in unison. It's all very normal for Mexico's Jalisco state—the birthplace of Mariachi music—save for one major aspect: the band is entirely female.

Mexico's Mariachi heritage dates back at least to the 18th century. The genre of music and related culture began in the countryside of the west and later made its way into Guadalajara, Jalisco's largest city. Along with using a range of various string instruments and, in more modern bands, trumpets, Mariachi music tells the stories of the Mexican people, from their love for their homeland to unrequited love for another, in styles that range from ballads and waltzes to polkas and pasodobles. Mariachi performers are also known for their distinctive attire: Charro-style suits that typically consist of short jackets embroidered with embellishments on either side and pants to match, a piteado (a type of decorative leather) belt and matching buckle, tie, boots, and a sombrero.

You can always find mariachi bands playing in Guadalajara's Plaza de los Mariachis, or main square, and musicians strolling along the streets of Jalisco towns such as Tapalpa and San Sebastián del Oeste. In 2011 UNESCO designated Mariachi a symbol of Mexico's “Intangible Cultural Heritage,” joining previous designated treasures such as Dia de Muertos and traditional Mexican cuisine. But while all-female mariachi bands are well-known outside of the country in cities such as Los Angeles and New York, they're still fighting to find their place at home.

“For every 100 mariachi bands, only about five of them are female,” says Verónica Oviedo, leader of Mujer Latina, the same band playing at El Patio and one of the few all-female bands in the area, despite performers like Lola Beltrán breaking the gender role nearly 75 years ago. Often referred to as “Lola la Grande” and later, “Queen of Mariachi,” Beltrán was a Mexican actress and singer who became a prominent part of the Mariachi scene for more than 40 years, beginning in 1947, and is largely responsible for spreading Mariachi music globally. Yet, it remains more common to see female mariachi performers in a mostly-male band than within an all-female group. “People have the notion that women can't play Mariachi music,” Oviedo says. “But in reality, it's good musicians and bad musicians that is the real distinction.”

Oviedo began Mujer Latina in December 2004 with only eight members, but the group has since grown to 10, including five violinists, two trumpeters, a guitarrón (or large bass guitar), vihuela (guitar-like string instrument), and harp. Dressed in matching outfits of deep purple or black that substitute long skirts for pants, but otherwise adhere to the standard Mariachi attire, they've played across Mexico, performed as part of August's annual International Mariachi Festival of Guadalajara, and have even taken their show of mostly traditional songs to international festivals, such as Vancouver's Mariachi Festival Canada and Festival del Tamal in southern California.

“Part of the reason I started Mujer Latina,” says Oviedo, “was to open another door for Mexican women. In a culture where 'mariachi' exudes machismo, it's been a difficult thing.” Oviedo tells me that choosing a different musical genre, such as pop or bolero, would have been acceptable in Mexico, but not mariachi. “For most women who do perform Mariachi, it's more of a hobby,” she says. “We're still expected to combine it with household obligations and childcare, but for men it's a viable business.”

Unlike most Mariachi performers, Oviedo didn't come from a family of musicians. Instead, she decided to learn guitar on her own and then violin, taking lessons for three straight years before forming Mujer Latina. “Mariachi music is very much its own entity,” she says. “For example, you play a mean salsa trumpet, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to make the switch to a Mariachi band. It's another reason you won't see many female Mariachi musicians—it takes a commitment of time that's just not there.”

Mujer Latina's members average around 36 years of age, and many of them (especially those who are single) have other means of employment. Several are full-time teachers, dedicating their nights and weekends to music. Despite the uphill battle, the women agree that it's both a sense of pride and the ability to partake in a beloved Mexican tradition that prompted most of them to join Mujer Latina. For example, Margarita Rojo Chávez has been a violinist with Mujer Latina for 12 years. “I studied music at the University of Guadalajara as a professional career,” she says. “Although my family thought that my foray into music would be in a symphony orchestra or philharmonic, I loved the idea of being in a mariachi band. Here I can also sing, and am already one of the main voices.”

Elva Aranza Zavala Souza, also a violinist for Mujer Latina, says it's her love of Mexican music, along with an opportunity to represent Mexico in other countries, that inspired her to give Mariachi music a go. “It can be difficult, since it's not economically profitable for women and the environment remains predominantly male,” she says. “However, my parents could see how hard I've been working and decided to assist me with my dream.”

According to Oviedo, it’s a common misconception that all mariachi bands are male—one that occurs because male musicians are the traditional model. "We have [mariachi bands] at everything: playing in restaurants, as part of parades, even performing at funerals," she says, “but the majority of people still envision them to be made up of men." In fact, today there are Mariachi bands made up entirely of children; fathers and sons playing together, and even LGBTI groups. Amid the differences in age, gender, and/or sexuality, the music sounds the same.

“Most of the responses to Mujer Latina have been positive,” says Oviedo, “both from male mariachi performers and our audiences. Mariachi may have a long tradition of being male, but Mariachi is also Mexico. [The genre] has opened doors for our country. Now, it is also opening doors for our women.”

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Do you really want to spend your vacation at the "very, very large hole" that is the Grand Canyon?

Sequoia National Park, in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, has a 4.5-star rating on Yelp. Hundreds of visitors rated it five stars, and only a handful left one-star reviews. But those reviews are one-of-a-kind. “They don't even offer a helicopter tour,” one visitor declares. “Do they not want to make money?”

Artist Amber Share trawls disgruntled reviews on such platforms as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, and Facebook to mine for complaints about the parks. She’s looking for quippy put-downs or one-liners that she can juxtapose with lush, loving illustrations of park landscapes for a project she calls Subpar Parks.

Sure, Sequoia is full of giant, ancient trees—but before you get too excited, keep in mind that “there are bugs and they will bite you on your face.” If you’re planning to venture to the Grand Canyon, remember that it’s nothing but “a very, very large hole.” And why go all the way to Yellowstone to see some geysers, one person asks, when you could “save yourself some money—boil water at home”? ("No cell service and terrible wi-fi" might have been meant as a dig at Isle Royale, but it doesn't sound so bad at all.) Atlas Obscura chatted with the Raleigh-based illustrator about wonder, wanderlust, and crankiness.

Have you been to the parks yourself?

Oh God, yeah. When I was a kid, my dad was in the Navy and we moved around a lot. When I was around 10, we were stationed in Italy after being stationed in Hawai‘i. We had to get from Hawai‘i to New York to fly out, and my grandparents lived in New Jersey, so we planned this family road trip. We had our car shipped to California from Hawai‘i, and then we just road-tripped across the U.S. to stay with my grandparents until it was time to head to our new location. We went to Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone and the Badlands—so many different national parks, and some monuments and recreation areas. It's just such a strong memory of my childhood.

At the Grand Canyon, I didn’t understand what I was looking at, but I immediately wanted to know what was down there—and I wanted to go. The Grand Canyon is a pretty important place for me personally.

What inspired the style of these prints? Were you looking at the Works Progress Administration-era posters that celebrated the parks?

I get that a lot. It makes me a little sad, because I deliberately tried not to imitate them. For some parks, I purposefully picked a different viewpoint—but at the end of the day, I think the parks have just been illustrated so many times that it's kind of impossible not to be a little bit similar. Truth be told, some of the parks really have one major vista that's the thing they're known for, so to make it recognizable you kind of have to do that. I think those original posters are obviously amazing, and I definitely looked at them when I was starting the project, as well as the Fifty-Nine Parks series.

I go through Google Images and Pinterest and find cool angles to get inspiration from. I collect a lot of different images to get ideas for the color palette, and I try to make it semi-realistic, but I definitely take some artistic liberties to capture more of the personality. At Glacier National Park, for example, the water of Saint Mary Lake is not that blue. It’s this teal-y blue in my illustration, but I just felt like that really captured the feel of Glacier in my mind.

If you were writing a one- or a five-star review of your favorite park, what would you say?

Because of this project, funny little negative, fake things come into my head a lot now when I'm out hiking. But it's so hard for me to even pretend to be mean about the Grand Canyon. I mean, I think the biggest thing is, it's too hard to look at. Like, “There's too much to see.” That would be my fake bad review.

What do you hope that viewers take away from this?

If a national park—which is beautiful and incredible and inarguably amazing—is going to have one-star reviews, you also have no chance of pleasing everyone. It's like—learning to laugh and have a lighthearted mindset about our critics, including the ones in our own heads, who are often the meanest.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

For brothers Pierre and Granville Pullis, photographing the sprawling system was intrepid, precise work—not unlike the construction itself.

Pierre Pullis had a photography studio on Fulton Street, in New York City, but he spent a lot of time working outside its walls. For about four decades in the first half of the 20th century, he lugged his camera to some rather inconvenient places around the city—including beneath its boulevards.

His photos “are as interesting as they are difficult to obtain,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported in 1901, soon after Pullis undertook his work. “In many cases, Mr. Pullis and his assistants are obliged to place their cameras in perilous positions in order to photograph the face of a rock or the effect of a blast, and taking flashlight pictures knee deep in a twenty-five foot sewer.”

Pullis was an early photographer of subway construction, tapped by the agencies responsible for building the first underground rapid transit line in NYC. Along with his slightly younger brother, Granville, Pierre took tens of thousands of photographs of stations, equipment, construction sites, and the people who built the stations, as well as the pedestrians who would eventually wedge themselves onto the trains.

Portions of the brothers’ vast archive are on display at the New York Transit Museum through January 21, 2021. But the survey captures only a sliver of the museum’s holdings of the Pullises’ prints, glass negatives, and film negatives.

“[W]e could do a show of an equivalent size three times a year for the next 10 years and still not show all of them,” says associate curator Jodi Shapiro, who organized the exhibition. “It’s the collection that keeps on giving.”

The Pullises worked methodically, often revisiting a site several times to keep tabs on its progress, and to inventory how the world was changing, both above ground and below it. They kept careful records in a log book, where they noted the day, location, land use, and other pertinent details. Sometimes they’d walk down a block and stop to take a photograph every 10 or 15 feet. "Especially when construction was in full swing, they'd go back several times within a couple of months," Shapiro says. Other times they’d return to a building to document it in different states, before and after excavations carved out the ground below.

The project stretched on for years, as Pierre worked through the 1930s (he died in 1942), and Granville photographed until at least 1939. (As the system continued to expand, so did the ranks of photographers, Shapiro says. Because there was so much construction going on, the agency couldn’t reasonably expect one person—or even two—to cover it all.) Along the way, the Pullises and amassed a deep and rich record of what Shapiro calls the “nuts and bolts of subway construction”—an extensive overview of “how the sausage gets made, as it were.”

The brothers’ images are technically proficient, but also artistic and tenderly humane. Many of the photographs were bound into books—some in the museum’s collection still have holes punched through one end—as reference documents, or as evidence that could be called forth in the event of a lawsuit (it was, after all, an era when construction was staggeringly dangerous and injuries were commonplace).

They were also impeccably timed snapshots of urban life and work. Pierre and Granville captured signs and businesses and moments of striking symmetry, such as people frozen in mid-stride as they wandered between buildings. “What makes these full of personality [in a way] that other photographs of this type usually [aren’t] is that you can tell both of [the photographers] waited for just the right moment to click the shutter,” says Shapiro.

Pierre and Granville frequently framed workers in the foreground, showing compassion for the people sweating and straining to build the city’s sunken arteries. The workmen, in turn, appear comfortable in front of the camera, as if they’ve just cracked a joke with the person behind the lens.

“A lot of the people in these photographs, we’ll never know their names,” says Shapiro. “But we know their faces. That’s our privilege—to let people know, these are the people that built this. Somebody photographed them and cared enough about them to make them look dignified in their work.”

Pierre and Granville are slightly less anonymous than the unnamed workers in the photographs, but Shapiro says she and her collaborators at the museum are keen to learn more about the duo. “One of the underlying sinister reasons we’re having this show is that we’re hoping … someone who’s related to them will come out of the woodwork,” she says, laughing.

The team scoured old newspapers and other documents, but didn’t find much about the brothers’ lives. With the exception of some court records from when they were called as witnesses, there are very few accounts of Pierre or Granville speaking in their own voices. “I just hope that someone out there knows about them,” Shapiro says. “The archivists and I were like, ‘Somebody—there’s got to be somebody.’”

Shapiro can’t go back in time and talk to the Pullises, of course, or to the men they depicted working below the streets. But if you visit the exhibit, study the subjects’ faces. Then, the next time you’re in the subway, try to remember their work—and the men who photographed it.

“If you can’t gather shellfish then you’re going to starve.”

Phyllis Clough was driving to the post office in the tiny Alaskan village of Old Harbor one summer afternoon when her lips went numb. Within minutes, her mouth was swollen and the numbness had spread to the rest of her face.

She learned how close she had come to catastrophe at the local clinic the next day. She had eaten a single clam containing a naturally occurring poison a thousand times more toxic than sarin gas. The clam had been harvested by her parents, both subsistence fishers, from a beach in Old Harbor, home to 300 people on the southwestern Alaskan island called Kodiak. “You could die from one clam,” Clough recalls her doctor telling her.

Clough’s family is Alaskan Alutiiq, a tribe that has long depended on the state’s wealth of cockles, clams, limpets, urchins, mussels, geoducks, and periwinkles. “When the tide is out, the dinner table is set,” Alutiiq elders say. But increasingly, those shellfish harbor the toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning, the illness that made Clough sick. Her reaction subsided within a couple of days, but the traditional foods from the ocean that have fed her tribe for thousands of years no longer pass her lips. “I’ll never eat a clam again because I’m scared of what it did to me that time,” she says. “I just never want to go through that again.”

She is 57 years old. She hasn’t touched shellfish since she was in her mid-20s.

Her mother, an 80-year-old Alutiiq elder named Mary Haakanson, has no such qualms. She still regularly eats food harvested from the sea. Clough doesn’t understand it. “We’ve actually had people die of this here,” she says. “I feel very strongly against it, but people grew up here so they want to continue eating it. It’s a traditional food, so they don’t care.”

The toxin in the clam Clough ate is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. It is also unpredictable, potentially loading up one clam with a lethal dose and skipping the one just down the beach.

For that reason, coastal states in the lower 48 have developed statewide systems to keep their recreational and subsistence harvesters safe from paralytic shellfish poisoning, or PSP. Shellfish from their beaches are regularly tested for toxins and, when necessary, authorities close the beaches to fishing. Alaska, which has more coastline than the rest of the United States combined, has no such system. State environmental health officials say the sheer length of its coast makes monitoring shellfish for the toxin that causes PSP impossible. Thus, it’s the only place in the nation where people still die from eating wild shellfish.

It’s also a state where close to 100 percent of the rural population depends on foraging and hunting, pulling in an average of 375 pounds of wild food a year per person. Nearly half of those rural harvesters are Alaska Native—a population that surveys show is more likely to lack access to nutritious food than the state’s non-Native residents. In the winter, when birds, seals, and fish are scarce, indigenous Alaskans—a quarter of whom live below the poverty line—turn to the ocean, where fat butter clams and mussels are ripe for the plucking year-round.

“Every kid in the village will know where to go get clams and when and where to harvest them,” says Clough’s brother, Sven Haakanson, an anthropologist and former executive director of the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak. “If you can’t gather shellfish then you’re going to starve.” Besides, for Alaska Natives, cockles and clams are more than a dietary supplement. Tens of thousands of indigenous Alaskans regard subsistence living as a form of identity and culture.

In a typical Alaska Native community, 30 percent of the households harvest 70 percent or more of that enclave’s wild food. The bounty is shared among family members and given to single mothers, the elderly, and the disabled. It’s impossible to separate the communal aspect of subsistence living from the sustenance it provides. “It’s the Native way to share,” Delores Stokes, a Qagan Tayagungin Alaskan who grew up in Sand Point, a town on an island southwest of Kodiak, says. “If I got some clams I would offer, ‘Would you like some or do you want to come over?’”

She, too, has reason to be wary of shellfish. When she was a little kid fishing with her parents in Sand Point one summer, a man in a boat next to theirs ate some butter clams and died before he could even get to the beach. Years later, as a teenager, Stokes saw toxic shellfish poisoning up close again, when a man was medevaced to a clinic she was working in with a severe case of PSP. “His tongue was starting to swell up and he had red blotches on his face,” she says. “His fear, you could feel it.”

The last time she ate shellfish was in late April, when her neighbor harvested a batch of butter clams and called her with the good news. “I’ll be right there,” she said, and headed to the harbor. She ate the clams roasted on the half shell. “It was wonderful,” she recalls, relishing the memory. Stokes follows a simple tradition like many others—including Mary Haakanson: only harvest shellfish in months with an “R” in the name: September, October, November, December, January, February, March, and April. Following this rule didn’t eliminate the risk of PSP, but it reduced it.

At least, that was true in the past. Now, times are changing.

This summer, independent shellfish-testing sites all over the state reported spikes in toxin levels, possibly related to the historic high temperatures in the water surrounding Alaska. And those warming waters are creating the ideal conditions for the algae that produce the toxin to propagate year-round, some researchers say.

Already, the incidence of PSP is creeping up in cooler months: September, October, March, and April. When Bruce Wright, senior scientist with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, visits Native communities in Southeast Alaska, elders tell him that they’ve seen more PSP incidents, more months of the year when the PSP toxin is active, and higher toxicity levels than in the past. The “R” rule could soon become unreliable, if it hasn’t already.

The data coming out of the few areas of the state with regular testing hint that PSP’s toxin could one day become omnipresent in Alaskan waters, intensifying in places where it’s already found, and also creeping toward the North Pole, where it could spread into the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans. The consequences for harvesters who are unfamiliar with PSP or have long believed that its toxin disappears when the seasons change has the potential to be catastrophic.

A small cadre of environmental researchers, tribal community members, and concerned citizens are trying to keep tabs on the chemical agent in shellfish in Southeast Alaska in order to protect subsistence fishers from this hidden threat. But challenges abound, ranging from lack of government funding to a simple lack of manpower to the fact that many Alaska Natives will likely never stop eating shellfish, no matter the risks.

Shellfish, says Coral Chernoff, a Cheyenne artist living in Kodiak, are part of the fabric of Native life, so ubiquitous they’re nearly unnoticeable—until they’re gone. Her ancestors used shells for beads and earrings, a tradition she continues in her studio. She and her family used to harvest butter clams and eat them roasted or steamed on the beach. Her Alutiiq father could eat dozens of clams, she says, as many as she could cook. But she harvests alone now. The rest of her family, scared off by the threat of PSP, may never hunt shellfish again.

A journal kept by the Russian navy officer Gavriil Davydov documents one of the first written accounts of PSP. A hunting party returning to Kodiak from Sitka, in southeastern Alaska, in 1799, stopped to spend the night in a cove where clams and mussels grew in abundance. Minutes after finishing their dinner, six Native Americans died. “All those who had eaten the shellfish grew very frightened—but no one knew what to do to help,” Davydov wrote. “Some ate sulphur, others rotting iukola [strips of dried or smoked fish], others tobacco or powders to induce vomiting.” Over the course of the next few hours, nearly 100 men died—an invisible massacre. The officer’s account noted that “the same shellfish can be harmful at one time of the year and at other times harmless.”

The unpredictable nature of PSP is one of the most terrifying things about it. Mary Haakanson ate dozens of clams from the same catch that made her daughter, Phyllis Clough, sick all those years ago, and walked away without any reaction.

The truth is that without lab equipment, it’s impossible to know when shellfish “go hot.” Saxitoxin, the poison that causes PSP, has no detectable effect on shellfish flesh. You can’t neutralize it by frying, boiling, or freezing like you would with bacteria. Alaskan subsistence fishers call harvesting your own shellfish “Alaskan roulette”—a nod to the fact that shellfish toxicity can vary beach to beach, harvest to harvest, clam to clam.

The poison itself is produced by a tenacious type of algae called alexandrium catenella, which hibernates in hard cysts on the ocean floor when water temperatures drop, biding its time until the sun comes back. When it reemerges, shellfish, one of the ocean’s most efficient filtration systems, rapidly accumulate the algae and the toxin it produces.

Once saxitoxin enters the human bloodstream, it prevents neurons from firing normally. Signs of PSP tend to develop within a half hour: First, a tingling or burning sensation in the fingertips and lips. Then nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and finally full paralysis of the respiratory system and death. Just one milligram can be fatal, and there is no antidote.

People who have experienced a run-in with PSP and lived to tell the tale aren’t quick to forget it. Dan Clarion, another Old Harbor resident, remembers eating dozens of butter clams one summer when he was a young commercial fisherman with a couple of days to kill in between jobs. Within minutes, he was laid flat on his back, struggling to fill his half-paralyzed lungs with air. Like the majority of people who have survived PSP, he emerged from the incident with a terrifying anecdote and a healthy dose of fear. Now he helps researchers test shellfish for toxins in his village.

According to data collected by the state, four people have died from PSP since 1993, and 120 have fallen ill total. But that number is almost certainly an underestimate, considering tests of butter clams and blue mussels throughout Alaska in the past 30 years have consistently turned up some of the highest levels of saxitoxin in the world.

The size of the state and the far-flung nature of its communities makes keeping track of PSP incidents nearly as difficult as establishing a shellfish-monitoring network. Part of the problem is that folks who have experienced a run-in with the toxin are charged with self-reporting it to the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, the agency that logs illnesses and, depending on the circumstance, issues public service announcements warning Alaskans of heightened danger. But residents might not know who to call to report the incident, or even know that they’re supposed to report it in the first place, says Louisa Castrodale, an epidemiologist with the department. Those who have experienced a mild case might take it for food poisoning or the flu. Doctors might even confuse symptoms of severe shellfish poisoning with a heart attack. The official records of a problem the department has classified as a public-health emergency could be just a tiny fraction of what’s actually playing out on the ground.

According to the statistics on hand, toxic shellfish poisoning hits Kodiak particularly hard. Roughly a third of all reported PSP incidents in Alaska between 1993 and 2014 came from Kodiak and the smaller islands that surround it. Scientists don’t know why area shellfish frequently turn up such high levels of saxitoxin, but data collected by researchers in the Gulf of Alaska over the past several decades show levels many thousands of times greater than the federal limit of 80 micrograms per 100 grams of shellfish flesh (that’s a little less than one part per million). In the late 1980s—around the time Clough got sick—saxitoxin levels in Kodiak topped 20,000 micrograms. For context, butter clams with just 1,000 micrograms of the chemical have caused near-instant death.

Tribes have been aware of PSP since long before researchers first extracted its toxin from the flesh of an Alaskan butter clam in 1957. A series of tips and tricks ranging from dubious to mildly effective were all that stood between Alaska Native populations and PSP. Alexandrium thrives in warm water and sunlight, which is a big reason why the “R” rule has served many communities relatively well in the past. Some harvesters also scrape out the gut of the clam and snip off its siphon—the two areas that testing has shown hold the highest concentrations of saxitoxin.

Neither method is reliable. While amounts of the chemical found in shellfish typically dip below 80 micrograms in cold months, dangerous levels have turned up even in the dead of Alaskan winter. A researcher who tested indigenous cleaning methods found that while gutting and snipping the catch did make some types of shellfish less toxic, it did not eliminate the toxin entirely. PSP also affects people differently depending on their body weight, what they ate that day, and how much shellfish they consumed.

Other methods some Natives swear by include first feeding a bit of your catch to the neighborhood cat to see what happens, boiling clams with a silver dollar, or avoiding red tides, which are related to algae but not necessarily to alexandrium. These shaky methods have been used for so long they’re thought of as fail-safes. Every few years, another death proves that they are not. But without a consistent, reliable network to detect outbreaks and warn the population, people along the Alaska coast have few options.

At 6 a.m., the tide was nearly out at Mission Beach, a rocky length of shoreline minutes from Kodiak’s main road. As the sun began to lighten the sky, pinks—a type of salmon that takes Alaskan waterways by storm in autumn—glinted in the waves, and an eagle made slow circles overhead. Across the water, a cluster of dark islands formed a loose line between Kodiak and the Gulf of Alaska. Many of those islands and the islands beyond them are majority Native and only accessible by seaplane, helicopter, or boat.

Andie Wall, an environmental technician, pulled into the parking lot and jumped out of her car. She popped the trunk and began pulling on a pair of waders for her morning’s work. The organization she works for, a health and social services nonprofit called the Kodiak Area Native Association, or KANA, started an initiative in 2019 to test blue mussels, butter clams, and seawater at three traditional harvesting sites in Kodiak for saxitoxin and two other shellfish-borne poisons.

“Part of the reason I took this job is because my family used to eat clams all the time, especially in the summer,” Wall says. After someone got PSP in her town, located on the opposite end of Kodiak Island, word of the danger started to spread through her community. KANA serves indigenous communities in Koniag—one of Alaska’s 13 Native regions—even the villages you can only get to by boat.

Wall and a couple of volunteers spread out over the beach, tailed by Wall’s energetic white labrador, Izzy. First, they plucked 70 blue mussels from the beds exposed by the receding tide. Using shovels and rakes, they dug holes three feet deep in the sand, looking for elusive butter clams. Every once in a while a little spout of water shot up out of the hole in the sand inches from where the volunteers were scraping around in the muck—proof the clams were down there. Half an hour later, the volunteers had about a dozen clams, which is enough to send off for testing.

During the previous several months, Wall had recorded three potent marine toxins at each location where she had conducted tests. One of them, of course, causes PSP; the other two respectively cause diuretic shellfish poisoning, which can induce prolonged bouts of diarrhea, and amnesic shellfish poisoning, which can cause short- and long-term memory loss. That data goes on the KANA website and various community Facebook pages. When toxins spike into the thousands of micrograms, Wall and other researchers in Kodiak will reach out to local media outlets, who can disseminate the information to a wider audience. “We’re not going to go red alert every time it’s above the regulatory limit because chances are, in Kodiak, it’s above the regulatory limit,” she says.

Back at the lab, Wall stood over the sink and cracked open the butter clams and mussels dug up at Mission Beach and Trident Basin, another testing site a few miles away. She packaged up the soft flesh and sent it by plane to Sitka, where the state’s only lab dedicated to testing non-commercially harvested shellfish is located. It’s run by Chris Whitehead, a shellfish biologist who spent years working on a statewide warning system for toxic shellfish poisoning in Washington state.

Now in its third year of operation, Whitehead’s lab works with 16 tribes in the southeastern portion of Alaska—the region that consistently experiences the highest levels of PSP toxin—analyzing shellfish from beaches that those tribes frequently fish. The initiative, called Southeast Alaska Tribal Ocean Research (SEATOR), has blossomed into Alaska’s first coordinated effort to date to help launch and streamline testing efforts. The program keeps track of shellfish data from 42 beaches across Southeast Alaska, including the ones in Kodiak. As of February, however, many of those sites had no recent data to report.

Whitehead’s lab is also a resource for any Alaskan in the state who wants their shellfish tested. Individual fishers and public health workers such as Wall can send their shellfish to Whitehead for $50 per sample. Through Walls’ program, subsistence fishers from Kodiak who can’t afford the $50 fee can send their samples to the Sitka lab for free, though funding for that particular aspect of Wall’s project is running out. For harvesters who are willing to wait a few days to get their test results back, the system has been an effective, if inconvenient and expensive, solution. “Since my team was up and running in 2015, nobody at any of our sites has gotten sick,” Whitehead says.

Wall sent her samples off to Sitka, but because the lab was running low on a key component of its tests, she didn’t get her results back until nearly a month later. The report showed wildly different results for the shellfish harvested that day at Mission Beach. Blue mussels at the west end of the beach turned up 153 micrograms of saxitoxin per 100 grams—above the regulatory limit, but not extreme. On the east end, fewer than 50 yards away, mussels came back with 756 micrograms of toxin, almost 10 times the regulatory limit. “Same beach, same day, large variation between locations,” Wall says. If she’d known about those results in time, she would have alerted the media—but by the time she received the report, it was too late. Shellfish can amass and filter out saxitoxin so quickly that data becomes unreliable after about a week. “There was nothing anyone could do,” she says.

Wall’s efforts, and SEATOR’s program in general, still only cover a fraction of the active fishing grounds in Alaska; most beaches have no saxitoxin surveillance at all. But state officials point out that setting up a statewide monitoring network that could do what Wall does would be a huge undertaking for a massive and sparsely populated state. “It’s almost impossible for us to wrap our arms around a coastline that’s this large,” said Kimberly Stryker, program manager for the state’s Food Safety and Sanitation Program, which is housed within the Department of Environmental Conservation. The state doesn’t require permits to harvest shellfish in most cases, she explains, which is another reason why it lacks the resources to establish a monitoring network.

One way to better manage such an unpredictable and potentially deadly foe would be with a rapid field test, so fishers could get information about their specific catch right away, before dinnertime. Since 2016, Julie Matweyou, a marine advisory agent with the university research program Sea Grant, has been working to develop a tool that could tell people exactly how toxic their shellfish is right there on the beach, down to the precise microgram. She was planning to get a field test into people’s hands last summer, but the company Matweyou was working with ran into problems getting the kit’s biochemistry to function reliably. “We’re not there yet,” she says.

But Matweyou is still working to protect Alaskan communities from PSP. By conducting tests at beaches that serve as traditional harvesting sites, developing relationships with community residents, and sharing limited grant money, she has shared resources and know-how with Wall, as well as with the Sun’aq tribe and various Native and non-Native volunteers to patch together their own ad hoc shellfish-monitoring system covering a few clamming spots on Kodiak. The alliance is teaching the community how to “harvest and hold,” or collect clams and mussels, send a sample to Chris Whitehead’s lab to get tested, and wait until the results come back before digging in. It’s round-the-clock work, but the team knows a lapse in its efforts could have lethal consequences. They’re striving to protect a way of life that is fundamentally Alaskan and intrinsically Native.

Even just a few weeks of missing data could undermine long-term efforts to identify trends in shellfish toxicity in the area, they say, because it takes decades of consistent testing to establish those patterns. But more importantly, they know that subsistence fishers are going to harvest no matter what. Arming the populace with the facts—by visiting local radio stations for interviews or getting the word out in villages, if shellfish test really hot—will at the very least help people make informed decisions about which beaches to visit and when.

This homemade safety net shows promise. Awareness of the dangers posed by shellfish is high in Kodiak. In turn, the researchers have been careful not to raise the alarm about high toxicity levels unless absolutely necessary, in order to maintain trust with people who can’t afford to stop harvesting.

It’s a delicate balance, one that’s complicated by the fact that rising temperatures have made other sources of food harder to find. Record-breaking heat this summer in most parts of Alaska wilted wild plants and herbs. Blueberries ripened a month early, catching harvesters off guard, and blight blackened swaths of salmonberry bushes. Drought hit the state as pinks were headed upriver to spawn, stranding them at the mouths of streams where they died in mottled piles, roe decaying in their bellies. Birds and seals died in unprecedented numbers in the Bering Sea, starved to death due to a lack of krill and copepods, and, some researchers speculate, from ingesting the PSP toxin. Meanwhile, under the sand, snugly ensconced in their pure white shells, butter clams remained as plump and abundant as ever.

Sven and Mary Haakanson parked in front of Harborside Coffee, a cafe across from the fishing docks in Kodiak, the city, where commercial fishermen, tourists, and service members from the nearby Coast Guard base mingle in the mornings. Sven helped his mother, a wizened woman no taller than five feet, out of the car and into the shop. When they sat down, Sven started asking the questions, carefully pulling at threads he knew would help Mary recall memories from decades past. So much of the Alutiiq way is kept alive in the memories of elders. When they’re gone, he says, so are the stories.

There are ways to keep traditions alive. Several years ago, the Haakansons traveled to Sitka to attend the memorial of the mass shellfish poisoning documented in the journal of Gavriil Davydov, the Russian naval officer. The Alutiiq remember this incident well, in part because the Tlingit—a tribe native to Sitka—made sure they never forgot it. “They kept songs alive from our region for over a century,” he says. “When we went down for that celebration, they gifted the songs back.”

Speaking softly in her ear so she could hear him over the hum of the cafe, Sven asks Mary, one of approximately 200 native Alutiiq speakers left in the world, to say the Alutiiq word for clam. “Mamaayaq,” she says in a hoarse voice no louder than a whisper. What about mussels, he asks. Mary shrugs. She has forgotten. But she still remembers something her mother used to tell her about harvesting clams. “Mom used to say when the water gets warm be careful,” she says. “They knew. I don’t know how, but they knew.”

The clink of cups and hiss of steamers nearly drowns out the sound of Mary whispering her own warning: “They say someday it’ll get warm,” she says, looking out at the harbor. “But it’s here today.”

A 19th-century ceramic work by London's quirky Martin Brothers, it's now smirking at museum-goers in NYC.

Walk past the perfectly preserved 17th-century staircase, the multitude of delightful English teapots, and the 700 other works of decorative art. Then turn to your right. That's where you'll see it, leering at you near the door: one very strange bird.

The foot-tall specimen on a glass-encased perch is a "Jar in the Form of a Bird," a straightforwardly named but startlingly curious ceramic piece on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's newly revamped British Galleries.

Dating to 1888, it traces its provenance to London’s Southall neighborhood. There, in the later part of the 19th century, an idiosyncratic potter named Robert Wallace Martin ran a ceramics shop with his brothers, Walter, Edwin, and Charles. Known, aptly, as the Martin Brothers, the quartet—who had grown up extremely poor—became successful and prolific for many years, turning out a wide variety of vases, sculptures, jugs, and more.

But the Martin Brothers were known especially for their birds. Nicknamed “Wally Birds” after Robert Wallace, who conceived them, the beaked creations are so expressive, it’s hard to ignore—or forget—them.

“The Wally Bird fixes its viewer with a gimlet-eyed stare, curling the corner of its enormous beak either in amusement or disdain,” writes Yale University art historian Tim Barringer in an email. “The viewer wants to laugh at this peculiar creation, but leaves the encounter with an uncanny sense of being watched.”

After training at the Doulton & Co. ceramics studio in Lambeth, the four Martin brothers banded together—with Robert Wallace as lead potter—in the early 1870s and opened their own shop in a former soap factory. The shop was “dusty and Dickensian,” says Met assistant curator Iris Moon, who oversees ceramics in the museum’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. It was full of “odds and ends,” but became well known as the Martin Brothers’ reputation grew. By the end of the 19th century their pottery—made mainly with a porous, salt-glaze stoneware—had become popular with collectors, and even some wealthy patrons.

Perhaps this is because their work stood out in a time of mass manufacturing. The Martin Brothers, says Moon, “represent the fault line between industrially produced ceramics and the move toward studio pottery.”

The material they worked with was also special. “It was an old material used in England as early as the 15th century,” says Moon—very different from the bone china typically used in the era's industrial ceramics.

“The ceramics produced by Walter and Edwin Martin are in many ways archetypal Victorian objects, matching sound technique and canny commercial acumen—learned from Doulton & Co—with a wild, whimsical visual and spatial imagination,” writes Barringer, whose current exhibition at Yale’s Center for British Art features a Martin Brothers pitcher.

The bird—technically a tobacco jar—on display at the British Galleries is certainly no exception. Deliberately showcased at the end of the exhibit, the grotesque anthropomorphic bird is seemingly waiting for visitors to notice it. When they do, says Moon, they’re usually surprised. “When you leave the galleries and turn to your right, you unexpectedly see this little guy winking at you—this smirking weird bird that you wouldn’t want to run into in an alleyway.”

Despite that vaguely sinister quality—and the decidedly muted color palette that typifies most of their pieces—the Martin Brothers’ pottery has only grown in value. In December of 2018, a particularly ghoulish, grinning crustacean made by the Martin Brothers in 1880 made headlines when it was sold at the Phillips auction house in New York City for $275,000—the highest price a Martin Brothers piece has ever fetched at auction.

“The human face that [Robert Wallace] has locked within the body of a crab wears an expression of faux jollity mingled with embarrassment and even terror,” states the catalog essay accompanying the piece on the Phillips website. “That [he] has managed to convey such a subtle mix of human emotions, in the context of a grotesque composition, is a tribute not only to his awareness of the philosophical angst besetting contemporary intellects, but to his technical ability to translate this angst into common stoneware.”

The Wally Bird at the Met’s British Galleries, which was acquired from the Robert A. Ellison collection of European pottery, does not have a sale price listed—but you can bet it went for more than a song.

Instead it has animal skins, cowbells, bullwhips, and frightened children.

In a back alley of the bleached stone village of Mamoiada on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, a three-year-old girl is crying. Her mother kneels to comfort her. “There’s no such thing as mamuthones, ” she says. “There’s no such thing as monsters.”

The girl’s older brother shouts, unhelpfully, “That’s not true! I’ve seen them.”

The mother sucks her teeth dismissively. “They’re scary. But they’re only masks.”

The little girl uses her forearm to wipe her tears. “I don’t think you’re right,” she retorts. “I have seen them, too. There are men inside.”

In the region of Barbagia, deep in the island’s core, gray massifs erupt out of the earth on every side. The sun emerges late here and sets early, with pockets of light creeping and sweeping down craggy glens filled with prickly pear and wild fennel. The sweet-smelling valleys are studded with little medieval villages, largely unmolested by modern distractions, stuffed with men in caps and widows in mourning, and children playing accordions unironically in front of churches pockmarked by 10 centuries of wind and fingers.

Barbagia—first named that by the ancient Romans, who considered the locals to be “barbarians”—remains out of step with modern Italy’s bustle. Church attendance there is low for the otherwise hyper-Catholic country, even in the period approaching Lent, when the churches sit largely empty.

Carnevale—the last chance to eat too much, drink too much, dance too much, live too much—before the austerity of Lent is marked the world over by revelry and ribaldry: Think Brazil’s thumping parades, Venice’s masked pomp (though it was canceled this year), New Orleans’s gaudy spectacle. In Barbagia, beads and glitter are nowhere to be found. There are far too many cows to chop up and strangers to whip.

In this out-of-the-way part of an out-of-the-way island, for carnevale, thousands take to the streets, more in the spirit of the old gods, wearing grotesque masks and performing street dances while dressed in animal skins or covered head to toe in soot from bonfires. They scare children. They scream. They hit each other, and strangers, with whips. They draw crowds. They actually draw blood.

Sardinia has a long history of freedom from outside influence, and every village has evolved its own pre-Lenten code, each valley pocket of its own traditional dress, rituals, and masks. The two themes for the celebration shared across the region are cattle and bedlam. In Mamoiada, the little girl was frightened by the mamuthones, who wear pear-wood masks, animal pelts, and 60 pounds of cowbells, and create a racket in the streets as they’re led through by white-masked issohadores like cattle to slaughter. In Ottana, the locals dress in bull head masks, and are accompanied by handlers called merdules who wear frowning black masks and animal skins that might be passed down from one generation to the next. In Lula, roving bands of men wear black cloaks, carry whips, and designate one person to be the official victim, or battileddu. This individual takes on the role of a freshly slaughtered cow and wears the dispatched bovine’s horns as his own, its stomach lining for a hat, and its steaming heart as a belt buckle. The rest of the band then drive the victim through the town with real bullwhips—while also taking swipes at both gawking locals and what few tourists show up, for good measure.

The festivities generally begin with a bonfire on the Feast of Saint Anthony, on the night of January 16. The macabre festivities then recur for a month of Sundays, culminating on the weekend before Shrove Tuesday, and then another bonfire and more revelry on the day itself. And when it’s all done, everyone goes home to take off their masks, wipe off the blood, remove the heavy weights, and wash the soot from their faces. The next morning, of course, is Ash Wednesday, when the rest of the Catholic world dons its ashes.

Additional reporting provided by B.A. Van Sise.

A tale of unlikely neighbors.

The length of Tel Aviv coastline stretching from Nordau Beach to Hilton Beach is an area rife with contradictions: it is tense and peaceful, hostile yet curious, conflicting but viable. Nordau Beach, which is surrounded by a wooden partition, is intended for the conservative-to-very-conservative Orthodox Jewish crowd and has separate days for men and women. To the other side of it stretches Hilton Beach, one of the world’s best gay beaches. The two are separated by a dog beach, which functions like a U.N. demilitarized zone.

This unique melting pot, formed by chance, has maintained its status quo for decades. But sometimes the sea does what it does best. “As soon as you go 50 meters into the water, the borderlines disappear,” says Zuri Shasho, manager of a lifeguard station in Tel Aviv. “Sometimes it causes chaos. Sometimes chaos leads to a small change.”

Hilton Beach, one of the world’s 10 hottest beaches according to the American website GayCities, developed spontaneously. It is located under the Hilton Hotel and Independence Park. Since its establishment in 1953, the park has become a meeting and cruising spot for gay men. In recent years, cruising has almost disappeared due to the rise of online dating platforms. At the same time, the Tel Aviv LGBTQ community has become one of the strongest in the world. In 1998, when the city’s Pride celebrations were declared official, so was the beach.

Nordau Beach, which is visited mostly by the Haredi Orthodox community, was segregated by gender a few decades ago. Women and girls use it on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Men and boys bathe on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday mornings. A few hours before Sabbath, on Fridays at noon, the Haredi leave the separated beach, and mixed bathing is allowed for the non-religious. A massive partition was erected during the late 1990s to separate Haredi Jews from the neighboring beach. Shasho says that lifeguards and the municipality treat the Haredi bathers with extreme sensitivity.

“The municipality arranges a place to pray at the entrance to the separate beach, and during the Sukkot holiday it builds a sukkah. Due to the bathers having a lot of suits and garments, thousands of hangers were added to the pavilions.” Many resources are also invested on the other side of the partition. Tel Aviv “invests millions in the beach during Pride Week. Tens of thousands come to it from all over the world, so they bring lifeguard reinforcements from other beaches and keep us here overtime,” says Shasho.

The dogs in the middle are unaware of all this. “There are a lot of dogs in the city, and the municipality set aside for them an undeclared strip of the beach,” Shasho explains. Without meaning to, the dog beach has become a barrier between the gay beach crowd and the Haredi community. “Although sometimes the dogs go into the separate beach and create a commotion, because the ultra-Orthodox usually don’t raise dogs.”

An Israeli-American documentary, Kosher Beach, hit the screens a few months ago. The film follows the “Brave Bunch”: Haredi Jewish women from Bnei Brak who find refuge in the gender-segregated beach, and are forced to fight for their right to visit it in the face of rabbinical objections.

The director, Karin Kainer, says her original plan was to document the entire bay, “but then I discovered the ‘Brave Bunch’ in the ultra-Orthodox beach and the movie quickly became a story of women’s empowerment.” Kainer says that during the three years in which she followed her heroines, the beach began reflecting a massive shift in Israeli Haredi society. “There, on the beach, it all burst out. More and more religious women arrive in bikinis and thongs; there are more conversations between mothers and daughters about wanting to make money, to buy clothes, to enjoy their autonomy and realize themselves.”

The “Brave Bunch” includes women of all ages and is led by Rebbetzin Idela Ravitz, whose family members hold key positions in the Israeli Haredi society. Her struggle revolves around what the Haredi bathers call “the descent from Mount Sinai,” the mountain where the Ten Commandments were given while, on its slopes, the People of Israel turned to worship the golden calf. “Ultra-Orthodox men and women arrive at the beach in packed buses, mainly during the summer,” Kainer says. “The buses park at the edges of Independence Park and the passengers have to cross the park on foot, which involves encountering scantily clad people, kissing couples, LGBT people. These are challenging moments, and my protagonists try and be as indifferent to them as possible. When encountering male bathers, some of them were embarrassed, giggled, lowered their eyes. Some wouldn’t allow their daughters to come along.”

“’The descent from Mount Sinai’ is why every year the rabbis issue bans on going to the beach,” Kainer says. “And these are always male rabbis.” For instance, the Edah HaChareidis rabbinical court has issued a statement that “we have been scandalized to discover the grave breaches taking place in the Tel Aviv separate beach, both in the access paths and the beach itself. Therefore, Da'as Torah strictly prohibits going to and staying on this beach, perilous for both women and men…”

“Fortunately,” Kainer says, “the group I document is not a bunch of outsiders, but very powerful women. Ravitz is a well-connected woman who knows how to repeal the prohibitions. Sometimes the efforts take time. During the filming, the beach was closed for four months [by the rabbinical court] and my heroines were really depressed. They eventually won, and they come to the beach regularly, in heat, rain or storm.”

While the film shows the challenges the gay beach presents to the Haredi community, Robert Ross says it also provides a solution for some of them. Ross, a French-born hairdresser residing in Tel Aviv with his partner and their two children, points out that the religious beach assigns separate bathing days for men and women. “Ultra-Orthodox men who don’t want to go to the beach without their families come to the gay beach and co-exist in peace.”

“The beach has become one of my regular spots since I came to Israel during the ‘80s, when I wasn’t even 18 yet,” Ross says. “It was relatively empty back then: except gays, it was for people who wanted to be left alone, such as women who wanted to sunbathe topless.” Ross was the first man in the global LGBTQ community to have children via an Indian surrogate mother, 12 years ago. “Until then, gay couples who wanted to start a family would team up with a woman and receive joint custody. We are the first gay couple in Israel whose children are home every day of the week.” According to him, families are one of the significant changes in the community and in Hilton Beach. “Gay men changed. They became couples and families. Today I come to the beach with my kids, as part of a family.”

When lifeguard Zuri Shasho hears Ross’ claims that he has “never heard a bad word between the two ‘tribes’,” he smiles bitterly. “Unlike civilians, lifeguards get all the shit. A Haredi man can accidentally swim into the gay beach and his friends will freak out. They will demand that I rescue him as though he was trapped in Hell.”

Shasho identifies himself as a second-generation lifeguard. “My father also worked on this beach. I grew up in the lifeguard tower, by the sea, and was officially certified in 1996. When I’m working on the separate beach, I need infinite patience. Women will argue with me if I’m allowed to walk around next to them. Sometimes we had to rescue women from the water in a less than optimal way, the body in the water and only the hands on the boat. Men will disobey me because God outranks me. ‘You won’t tell me that swimming to the pier is dangerous. The sea belongs to the Creator, not to you.’ Sometimes arguments become violent. They gang up on us, throwing sand in our eyes.”

Meanwhile, on the dog beach, everyone is throwing sand around. “And you can’t do anything about it,” a local blog warns, “because it’s a dog.” Tel Aviv is Israel’s canine capital, home to more than 30,000 dogs. The Hilton dog beach, a short, narrow strip of around 500 meters, is one of a number of such beaches. Unlike its neighbors, it’s a truly diverse beach. It has small dogs, large dogs, males, females, mongrels, and purebreds. But disharmonious co-existence, alas, haunts us all. The Clinic, a Tel Aviv veterinary center, made sure to issue the following recommendation: “dog beaches have many dogs running free. If your dog does not get along with other dogs, this pastime is best avoided.”

Atlas Obscura had a page for something called Moose Boulder, until fan Roger Dickey called us on it.

It was 3 a.m. on a nearly deserted island, and two hikers were badly lost. Roger Dickey and his mother, Ellie Talburtt, had been exploring Michigan’s Isle Royale—the least-visited national park in the United States—and were trying to recover the trail in the island’s murky and bewildering woods. This was not what they had had in mind for a mother-son getaway, no matter how good a story it would make if things turned out okay.

What had brought them there, and into this rather dicey situation, was something called Moose Boulder, a kind of geological matryoshka. Here’s what makes Moose Boulder special, from the outside in: Lake Superior is the world’s largest freshwater lake, and its largest island is Isle Royale, whose largest lake is called Siskiwit, whose largest island is called Ryan. According to Wikipedia, at least, Ryan Island is home to a seasonal pond called Moose Flats that, when flooded, contains its own island—Moose Boulder. This makes it “the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the world.” Pity it’s not in Greenland, it could have gone all the way.

Spoiler: Mother and son made it out alive, but it wasn’t because they stumbled on a geological/hydrological anomaly that they could use to get their bearings. They couldn’t have, because, despite what the internet has to say, Moose Boulder almost surely doesn’t exist.

Let’s give Roger Dickey some credit, though. He actually knew that Moose Boulder was some kind of hoax before trekking across Isle Royale. But when he first heard about it, the San Francisco–based entrepreneur knew where he was taking his next trip. “I just like finding extreme features on maps,” he says, and he’s prepared to travel far and wide to see them for himself.

Over the course of his travels, Dickey has crossed the Arctic Circle. When he visits more populous tourist destinations, he goes hunting for the unbeaten path, like the time he trekked to the westernmost point in Portugal—also the westernmost point in continental Europe—just to watch the sun set. Next, he says, he’s planning a trip to Newfoundland because the Flat Earth Society has deemed it one of the four corners of the Earth.

In short, Dickey is the Atlas Obscura reader par excellence, the kind of person who looks at a map, notices a “funny-shaped peninsula,” and feels that his trip won’t be complete without seeing it—come hell or high water. So when his mother sent him an article about Moose Boulder, which linked to this very website, Dickey had no choice. He was already planning the trip.

A diligent hiker and thoughtful son, Dickey wanted to make sure he had solid GPS coordinates for Moose Boulder before trying to visit. Its very existence, he recalls, depended on a pond that isn’t even always there. Google Maps didn’t have a mark for Moose Boulder, nor did the alternative specialty mapping services that Dickey downloaded just for this search. It’s not hard to find Ryan Island, but “a little spot of blue” inside it? That had proved impossible.

Dickey’s next move was to turn to fellow hikers and topography enthusiasts, so he consulted several online forums that had hosted discussions about Moose Boulder over the years. Between all of these sites, fewer than a dozen people had actually discussed this place—and none had actually seen it, not even those who had been to Ryan Island and looked around. Some wondered if they had simply visited during the wrong season.

It’s doubtful that any of these other hikers, however, had consulted Atlas Obscura. Had they done so, Dickey soon realized, they would have found the precise coordinates: 48.0088°, -88.7720°. They would have seen that some people had marked visiting it on their Atlas Obscura profiles. Dickey had to get creative to actually contact these people. “I did Google reverse image search for their profile photos,” he says, which led him to two people with social media presences, neither of whom responded to his messages. Dickey wasn’t exactly discouraged: On the contrary, he was starting to have some fun. “It became kind of a pet project for me,” he says. This might be an understatement.

The Atlas Obscura entry for Moose Boulder led Dickey to the Wikipedia page for Siskiwit Lake, and he got in touch with the Wikipedia user who had edited the page in 2012 to include information about Moose Boulder. That user, whose identity Dickey wants to keep secret—like a good investigative reporter might—pointed Dickey to a book, Superior Wilderness: Isle Royale National Park, by Napier Shelton, also cited on Wikipedia. So Dickey ordered a copy and read it, only to discover that it contained absolutely no information regarding Moose Boulder. (I know what you’re thinking: Yes, he did try to contact Shelton, but he couldn’t find any contact information. A research society to which Shelton once belonged didn’t get back to Dickey, either.) The case had by now become highly suspicious, but did not yet seem unsolvable. After all, says Dickey, “Atlas Obscura is a trusted source to me.” Thanks—it is to us too.

And then it hit him like a bolt of lightning: Dickey realized that he had overlooked a major piece of evidence. Pictures, those internet-age angels of truth. “Pictures or it didn’t happen,” right? Naturally, as they all do, the Atlas Obscura entry for the site had an image—albeit a grainy one—of a lonely little rock, cautiously jutting out of the water, feebly sprouting some weeds. (For good measure, there’s a yellow arrow drawn onto the photo, in case you weren’t sure what you should be looking at.) A photographer, of all people, had scaled the Everest of seasonal ponds and come back with this piece of evidence.

Many photos that users upload to Atlas Obscura link to their original sources, but this one was a dead end. Using the Wayback Machine, Dickey found that it had come from a defunct website that appeared to document a geological research expedition to Ryan Island. So Dickey got in touch with one of the members of that research crew, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who—you guessed it!—had never heard of Moose Boulder. The team, in fact, hadn’t even made it to Ryan Island. The supposed photographic evidence had indeed come from that expedition, but it was merely a photo of an ordinary rock, off the coast of Isle Royale itself and not of the Inception of islands deep inside it.

By now, the odds seemed overwhelming to Dickey that Moose Boulder was a myth, a spasm of the internet’s imagination that had managed to proliferate and live on. But still, something didn’t quite add up. There was a missing piece to the puzzle that stopped Dickey short of declaring it all a hoax. He had found another article about Moose Boulder, published in 2009, that cited Wikipedia as its source of information. But the information about Moose Boulder had been added to Siskiwit Lake’s Wikipedia page in 2012. It was like a scene in a bad horror movie in which someone gets a phone call from a dead person. Dickey joked with his girlfriend that perhaps Moose Boulder does exist, but only in some kind of “temporal anomaly.”

Here’s the rub: Wikipedia is a nesting doll, too. Before a page for Siskiwit Lake had been added to the site, the page for Isle Royale had pointed readers to Moose Boulder, and had been doing so since 2009. It was put there by a different user than the one who added it to the Siskiwit page in 2012. Either way, that’s where the trail goes cold, and there’s no other evidence that the place exists. The identity of that first Wikipedia user to write about it—with those completely unrelated sources—remains a mystery, but all available evidence suggests that it was a person having a laugh, nothing more. Dickey had now grown certain of that himself, but with the end of summer approaching and the plans booked, he packed up and left for the wilderness of Isle Royale.

Ellie Talburtt, Dickey’s mother and traveling companion, did not yet know the truth. Dickey had kept her apprised of the early stages of his investigation, but he decided to keep the final Moose Boulder revelation a surprise until after they met up in Michigan. “Hey mom,” Dickey said at the airport, “I’m excited about this trip. By the way, Moose Boulder isn’t real.” Talburtt took the news well, perhaps suspecting this to some degree all along. As lovers of geographical obscura, the duo were still excited to be heading to the least-visited national park in the United States. They didn’t know it, but there was more excitement to come.

There is little that’s easy about getting to and around Isle Royale. The pair got there by seaplane, and stayed overnight at a lodge on Rock Harbor. They caught a water taxi to Malone Bay, the embarkation point closest to Siskiwit Lake. Dickey brought along a canoe, which they hefted to the lake and then paddled 2.5 miles to Ryan Island, which is barely a mile long. Moose Boulder may have been off the table, but that wasn’t going to stop them from visiting the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the world—even if it ended up being a brief stop. (Dickey and Talburtt did, however, consider “creating” Moose Boulder by pouring some water around a rock.)

All told, Dickey doesn’t recommend heading to Ryan Island should you find yourself on Isle Royale. It requires a tremendous amount of effort and, frankly, is not without risk. Very few people visit the Isle Royale complex at all. Dickey estimates seeing between 20 and 30 people while on the outermost part of the island, near the lodge, and almost none of them would venture much farther inland. They saw none of the island’s wolves and just one moose (the dueling subjects of a long-term predator-prey study on the island)—to which lodge staff replied, “Oh yeah, you saw Bruce.”

After canoeing back from Ryan Island, mother and son got well and truly lost. At some point during their 18 miles of hiking, they lost the trail. In their genuine terror—it was, by then, the middle of the night—they realized that their best shot was to find the coastline, since following that was guaranteed, eventually, to get them back to the lodge. Finally, they found the park ranger’s house, and had no choice but to knock on his door until he woke up. They didn’t know it, but they were still 10 miles from the lodge, and would have missed their flight off of the island had they not been driven back.

“I don’t think anyone in the world has researched [Moose Boulder] as much as me,” says Dickey. He’s almost definitely right. So when he contacted Atlas Obscura to share his findings, we took the page down, lest anyone else get lost chasing this phantom anomaly.

Dickey is pretty sure that the second Wikipedia editor—who perpetuated the earlier misinformation on Moose Boulder—had been “genuinely duped” rather than a conspirator. He was hardly the only one. It’s probably the same for the Atlas Obscura user who created the Moose Boulder page. It’s also true for the U.S. Coast Guard. In 2017, the Coast Guard’s Great Lakes division posted about Moose Boulder on Facebook, playing up the novelty and its comical complexity. When the (satirical) Twitter account of East Africa’s Lake Kivu boasted of its nearby volcano and challenged Lake Superior to best that, Superior’s Coast Guard–run Twitter replied: “I have Moose Boulder. Which is the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the world. #GLOAT.” (Read: “Greatest Lake of All Time.”)

Let’s be honest about the stakes here: They’re not high. Nonetheless, the case of Moose Boulder attests to the ease with which a hoax or a prank or harmless goofing off can penetrate our official discourse, and become a kind of “real.” This is all part of why Dickey felt so fiercely determined to visit Moose Boulder, or at least solve its mystery. There’s something exciting, he says, about being a “modern-day explorer”—about arriving at one of the world’s few remaining unknown destinations. In a world where you can sit in New York City and watch a live street view of Tambov, Russia, a rock in a tiny seasonal pond grows in stature for being genuinely elusive.

And so, perhaps, after developing a safer contingency plan for getting lost, Dickey will return to Ryan Island—and keep searching. He may not be able to help it. After all, he says, he “can’t be 100 percent sure that it doesn’t exist, without exploring every square foot of the island, which is very densely forested.” He’s just the explorer for the job.

Meet Giovanni Vale, your travel guide to countries that no longer exist.

Travel writing is almost always about documenting a place as it is, now, with all of its obvious contours and, if you're lucky, its hidden gems to be discovered. But sometimes the genre goes beyond, and before, the present manifestation of a place. Sometimes it elucidates how, and when, that place became what it is today.

From Rick Steves to Lavinia Spalding, a handful of travel writers remind us that few things in life are forever—even those that can seem the most impervious to change.

Now, the Extinguished Countries project is seeking to reverse engineer that enterprise: Journalist Giovanni Vale and his team have mapped the modern remnants of the ancient Republic of Venice, which stretches across seven European nations. Their final product is a guidebook to the Venetian republic—the first in a series that will examine the modern world through the lens of its extinct predecessors.

Some kingdoms and empires took centuries to decline into oblivion; others were snuffed out in a day. No matter the cause of their disappearance, the Extinguished Countries project serves to highlight the dead-and-gone nations that were instrumental in the creation of the modern world.

Atlas Obscura recently spoke with Vale about the new guidebook, now available for pre-order.

Why launch a series of guidebooks on countries and states that no longer exist?

I've been a journalist and travel writer for the past six years, working in this guidebook universe, and I've noticed how it’s changing. Guidebooks [today] have more and more experiences, or interviews with locals, and [fewer] lists of hotels or restaurants.

One day I was having a conversation with my girlfriend—now wife—on the Croatian coast. She's Croatian and I'm Italian. We were discussing local history ... meaning the Balkans ... There were many extinguished countries [here]—former empires, which had left a visible heritage. We ... said “Wouldn't it be nice to have guidebooks of countries that no longer exist?

[But we weren’t sure what form one would take.] Would it be something you could travel with? Or would it just be a history book?”

To give you a concrete example why in this region, especially, this is relevant, imagine that in Croatia, a small country of four million people, you have three different ways of saying “towel.” On the coast, you can use a word that comes from the Republic of Venice, a Venetian-Italian word; a Slavic word in the center [of the country]; and a Turkish word in the areas that were under the Ottoman Empire for centuries.

So far, this has been seen as a problem in the Balkans: too much history. I think Churchill [said] the Balkans produced more history than they can consume. Well, sure—there's a lot of diversity in the region. But it's a cultural richness.

This is how it all started.

What other “extinguished” countries are you documenting?

We decided to start with the Republic of Venice, which is not well known far from the Mediterranean. The modern Republic of Venice would be seven countries: parts of Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, and Cyprus.

We've many others in mind, but haven't decided. We've fantasized about Andalusia, which was an Arabic state until Spanish people reconquered the south of Spain. And a lot of mosques are still there. Bigger countries could be the Russian Empire, going into all of Russia and parts of Eastern Europe. [In] the 21st century, the U.S.S.R., and in the Balkans, Yugoslavia—both left a heritage even if they were shorter-lived.

You have the Ottoman Empire … [as well as] the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many [of these places] are European. But many are in South America, for example—all the kingdoms that existed before Europeans.

What’s it like to do research for a guidebook on an empire that disappeared centuries ago?

From the beginning, when I was discussing with my wife, we thought, "Maybe this is too geeky. This is like a history book, it might be boring."

But we found so many fun facts, anecdotes, and stories ... Take the capital of Cyprus, Nicosia. It’s considered the last divided city in Europe: Part is Turkish, and part is Greek Cypriot. [But both halves are] surrounded by these Venetian walls in the shape of a star, if you look from above. Both municipalities use the star as a symbol in their logo. And everybody's attached to those walls, even if they forget their story. They were built in a rush by the Venetians in what they hoped would stop the Ottomans from conquering the city five centuries ago. (It didn't work.)

Or in Venice, you have this area called Ghetto. And that's where the word “ghetto” comes from. Ghetto comes from the Venetian word gettare, which means “to throw.” In that area in the 16th century there was a foundry—people would throw things in the fire.

I've been [a political reporter] for the last six years. It's really refreshing to [instead ask questions like], “What's our identity? What do we have in common with our neighbors?”

We have this local dish with fish, very typical for the Croatian coast. But we found it's also in Greece. Why? Well, those two places were both part of Venice for 600 years.

You mention that a lot of the reporting was with locals around what was once the Republic of Venice. How did you find your sources?

I started [by] finding the local cultural institutions in each city, and then one person leads to the next. Eventually I'd find a historian, or a cook who knows about local gastronomy. For example, I found this engineer who lives in a little town on the Croatian coast [that in the past was] famous for pirates. He's very proud of that past, and today, the city is not really [publicizing] that heritage—they don't have a museum. So [the engineer] decided to rebuild a pirate ship in his free time. The boat should sail again this summer, after like 800 years. And he's done all that by himself.

Normally, every city, every region is very proud of [its] local history. And the local history is what I'm diving into. I'm not there for what people might expect. There might be a city where there's an important industry—what the news [there] is about. But I'm coming in with questions about piracy. That's what triggers people, and in a few minutes, everyone says, "You should speak with that guy."

As the guidebook took shape, did it become clear whether it would be a travel utility, or a way for people to read about a place from their armchair?

You can keep a balance between the two things. In normal guidebooks you have a lot of descriptions in small print. In this guidebook there's a few pages—a story—for each city, the history, the identity of the city, and then some text on the side that gives you some travel advice. For example, a restaurant where they still cook some traditional dish.

But I avoided lists of hotels and restaurants that don't really have a story. People book accommodations through Airbnb, or whatever, and they don't really need a list telling them about a four-star hotel.

Can you tell me a couple of your favorite stories of foods and places in the book?

When it comes to dishes, there are a couple I could mention. The first one is something called brudet. It's brodetto in Italy, brudet in Croatia and Montenegro, and it becomes bourdeto in Greece. It's a fish stew. It changes a bit. In Greece, in Corfu, it's very spicy; they put paprika and chili peppers in it. In Croatia, it's mild and more of a soup, and the same goes in Italy. And then there's this small village in Croatia by the coast, where the same fish stew is done there with eel and frogs. Just eel and frogs. I don't know why.

The second dish is pastitsada. It's a meat dish. In Italy it's pastissada, and it’s only in Verona, and done with horse meat and polenta, while in Croatia it's beef and gnocchi. In Greece it's again beef, but with spaghetti. When I was speaking with people in Corfu, they didn't know it also existed in Croatia. And when I mentioned to people in Croatia that it existed in Corfu, they were surprised. They were like, "This is our traditional dish!" And I said "Yes, it is!"

In this sense, I believe the project can bring people closer. It's not like "these guys stole our traditional dish." No! You have your own traditional dish and recipe, but you share a past with your neighbor. For us today it may be hard to imagine. ... Countries like Italy and the United States—they've been around for just a couple of centuries. The Republic of Venice existed for over 1,000 years. Of course they left these common traces.

What about places? I saw mention of some abandoned towns.

There's this region in Croatia called Istria; it’s [near] Venice, basically across the sea. [Most of it] was under the Republic of Venice until the end of the republic. I was speaking over the phone with someone from the region, and ... I had this map of Istria from the Republic of Venice. I was checking which towns were under Venice and which were under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

And I asked him about this town, and that town, and then I asked about Dvigrad, another town. And he said, “No, there's nobody in Dvigrad. It's a ghost town.” … Turns out the town was abandoned due to the plague and some other reasons 400 years ago. And today, if you go there, you can see the ruins of more than 200 houses, the square, and the church. It's not advertised because the local municipality didn't receive permission from the ministry of culture to do something with it. You can do it on your own, but there are no tours.

It was funny to me because I was just doing research on towns, and had no idea there was a ghost town. Turns out my map was old.

What was the hardest part of building this project out?

There was an organizational challenge, because at some moments I had so many emails coming back, from Greece, from Cyprus, from Albania. I had to slow down the rhythm and start organizing everything.

At the beginning too, just reading and understanding the history. I'm a political journalist, and I write for travel, but I'm not a historian. I studied diplomacy at university, but not anything Middle-Aged. So I went through this 600-something-page book on the Republic of Venice. It was painful. But if I didn't, I wouldn't understand any story in the bigger picture of the republic.

You’re taking a bike trip from Venice to Dubrovnik as part of the project. What do you hope to get out of it?

Well, part of the project is a podcast ... with a French colleague. We enjoyed the podcast so much that we thought, "OK, we're doing the book [too]." He said many people like to cycle and listen to a story instead of reading it. As we'd [already] done the podcast, why wouldn't we do something longer while traveling?

That's where the idea started. To go from Venice, through the republic, and test out the guidebook. … We'll interview people and make a [roughly 30-minute] podcast about the journey. And we can spread the word about the book to locals.

We're doing a crowdfunding campaign now, and the book will be printed in autumn, in November. So we still have time to collect stories. The idea is to go through the extinguished country and see how the book works in the field.

What do you hope the public takes away from the project?

That the travelers with this book travel a bit differently. That they go slower, that they question what they're going through, that they take time to go through [these places] with a different eye. And to experience the travel on two [levels]—being there in the present, but also understanding, through the book, how the city was in the past.

Europe at this moment is facing a rise in nationalism, and I'd like to show with this book that we're all connected. [Y]ou cannot consider your own identity as something completely separate from other people. You definitely have something in common. And I'd like it if through ... traveling, people can learn something about their neighbors and find out that we have things in common.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

A Caribbean island has a culinary solution to its lizard dilemma.

Along a long, straight stretch of the Queen’s Highway on Grand Cayman, regular signs warn of “Iguana Crossing.” Indeed, green iguanas cling to the tree limbs throughout the island. But a sharper eye might spot, in a rustle of leaves on the ground, the elusive, lethargic blue iguana.

The Caribbean has long been beset by invasive species, most notoriously the spiky, venomous lionfish. Much like lionfish, conservationists and chefs have started hunting and cooking the local green iguanas. It’s part of an effort to save their native blue brethren, which are only found in the wild on Grand Cayman.

First introduced to the island as pets, green iguanas are originally from Central America. The creatures can grow up to five feet long, weigh as much as 17 pounds, and can live for more than a decade. What might be one of their worst traits, however, is that they can lay up to six dozen eggs at one time. It was estimated in 2018 that there were as many as 1.6 million green iguanas on the island: more than 30 times the human population of Grand Cayman. But in 2002, there were only about a dozen wild blue iguanas left.

Grand Cayman blue iguanas are even larger than green iguanas, weighing up to 25 pounds. But green iguanas are far more active. "They are a threat to the indigenous blue iguana population, competing for habitat and food and bringing with them pathogens which are harmful to the blue iguana population," says Luke Harding, the operations manager of Blue Iguana Conservation. The Cayman Islands' largest native land animal, blue iguanas cannot climb or swim well, and do not move very quickly along the ground. Yet green iguanas are good swimmers, adept climbers, and avid diggers, destroying the blue iguana's habitat as well as land and property belonging to the two-legged inhabitants among the islands.

Apart from churning up earth to burrow and build nests for their eggs, green iguanas can also dig tunnels up to 80 feet long under highways, houses, and even under sea walls. Not to mention the tree fruit and other vegetation they damage by snacking on flowering buds. "These animals are now deemed pests, and cause damage to crops and gardens, eat wild bird eggs, and pose a threat which could cause massive ecosystem change," says Harding.

To calm the perpetual motion of the treetops, the Cayman government put a bounty out on green iguanas in November of 2018, in hopes of killing up to one million. By July 2019, nearly 800,000 had been killed, at a payout of $5 per iguana. "For the foreseeable future, controlling green iguanas on Grand Cayman will need to be part of life here until some hope of eradication—getting them off the island completely—comes on the horizon," says Sophie O'Hehir, a research officer at the Cayman Islands Department of Environment. As the bodies stacked up, however, the question of how to dispose of so many iguanas was soon answered by chef Thomas Tennant, owner of Tomfoodery Kitchen in George Town, Grand Cayman.

When Tennant was first approached by the Department of the Environment about serving lionfish, he immediately took it up in the restaurant where he worked at the time. It wasn’t long before he became interested in the iguana windfall as a way to “inform the population of the threats the green iguana poses to the Cayman Islands," says Tennant. Serving iguana to customers, however, was a tougher sell to his boss. For the freedom to cook them, Tennant quit and opened his own catering company.

To make iguana meat more appealing to patrons, Tennant first tried to fry it like chicken, though the irregular sizes of the animals made it a false start. He then tried making a confit, before landing on iguana rillettes: shredded lizard meat slow-cooked in rich fat. He also endorses cooking iguana in a rundown, a classic Jamaican stew made with a sauce of reduced coconut milk.

Green iguana might be a delicious alternative meat that tastes a lot like roast duck, but it's much more than an interesting local dish. "Putting them on the menu is another tool in the arsenal of protecting the environment," says O'Hehir. "I find it very interesting that most meat consumed by us has an environmental cost, such as beef that has been raised where there used to be part of the Amazon rainforest. With green iguanas from Cayman, however, it is the reverse. You are helping the environment by removing these animals."

Though his original processor has recently closed shop and his iguana rillettes are currently not available, Tennant is again working with the Department of the Environment to find another source for green iguanas. "That doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to get it. It just means those who want to serve green iguana, including myself, must stress with the culler the utmost importance of handling the green iguana when it's being culled," says Tennant. "Whether it is being euthanized humanely in a facility or being shot with a rifle, proper handling must happen.”

Now, all the effort to balance the iguana population is paying off. Though green iguanas still rule the island, the number of blue iguanas has increased dramatically. There's both a recovery program and protected nature reserve dedicated to the reptile on Grand Cayman, and the 1,000th blue iguana was released into the wild in 2018, according to Harding. But even off-preserve, it’s now easier than ever to spot the rare, slow-moving lizards lazing about, the sun gleaming off their turquoise skin.

NASA's Earth Observatory wants your help finding hidden gems in its vast archives.

For more than 20 years, NASA’s Earth Observatory has collected and shared images of our planet, as it appears from far above the Earth’s surface. Some capture the entire marbled globe, while others are zoomed-in and abstract. A smattering of holes that could be the work of termites are actually towering sand dunes and desert lakes. Swirls of beige, mauve, and olive green may look at first like brushstrokes in an Impressionist painting, but they turn out to be mud and water mingling in Lake Frome, a saltpan in central Australia.

Over the decades, the Earth Observatory has published more than 15,500 images. They vary in detail, scale, and origin—some were captured by astronauts, others by satellites—but they collectively “tell a story of a 4.5-billion-year-old planet where there is always something new to see,” writes Michael Carlowicz, managing editor at the NASA Earth Observatory, in the foreword to the 2019 book Earth. “They tell a story of land, wind, water, ice, and air as they can only be viewed from above. They show us that no matter what the human mind can imagine, no matter what the artist can conceive, there are few things more fantastic and inspiring than the world as it already is.”

Now, the Earth Observatory is asking readers to nominate the image that left them especially rapt and riveted. You can submit ideas until March 17. (So far, the many suggestions include a 2015 composite of Earth rising above the lunar surface—a nod to a famous 1968 image—and a recent image of melt ponds in Antarctica, captured after the highest temperatures ever recorded there.) Atlas Obscura exchanged emails with Carlowicz about satellites, telling stories with data, and the wonder of a fresh view of our home planet.

How are the images captured?

The vast majority of our natural-color imagery comes from the MODIS instruments on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites, from the Landsat satellites (Landsat 5, 7, and 8), and from the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi-NPP satellite. Every weekend, we publish a photo shot by the astronauts. Occasionally we get aerial photos from scientists and engineers on field/airborne campaigns.

For a long time, we used imagery from the Earth Observing-1 satellite (until it reached the end of its life). But we also regularly make maps, plots, and data visualizations based on data from dozens of other instruments, models, and scientist-provided analyses. My guess is that 200 different instruments/sensors are represented in our archives/catalog.

How do you find a story in the reams of data? Do you start with a question and look for an image to illustrate it, or begin with data and then build the story around it?

We do both. Images on Earth Observatory are always accompanied by a story; stories always have to have a strong image (or several). Our site is based on the interplay of images and words—both are needed, and both should reinforce each other.

We approach storytelling like journalists because everyone on the staff comes from a journalism or data journalism background. We read the news and social media to track natural events and hazards, and then we look for imagery or data that can help people understand what the planet is doing. (Sometimes this means we do not tell a story because we cannot see it—the scale is too small for our satellites, or clouds are in the way, or timing is off, etc.)

We scan and read scientific journals for interesting papers, and then work with scientists to convey those concepts in ways that non-scientists can understand. We attend lectures or seek out scientists and engineers in the halls of NASA and other science institutions. We pay attention to the human and natural calendar and look for images and stories that fit the seasons and moments.

Sometimes we find—or scientists share with us—compelling imagery and we ask: What is that? And then we follow our curiosity in reporting. We consider an image and think: What can we say that isn’t obvious from the image? Is it scientifically interesting? Does it convey a timeless or timely scientific idea? Is it just beautiful or wild?

We look for a NASA hook or contribution because we are here to help tell the story of Earth as NASA sees it. Is it imagery or data acquired by NASA? Is it data from a close scientific partner that is shared with NASA-funded scientists? What does NASA bring to this story? Why should we tell it?

Do you have a favorite of the Earth Observatory’s images of Earth?

I honestly do not have one favorite image or story. (I edit all stories and visuals.) I am the current front man for the band, but it wouldn’t be the site that it is without the help of a lot of creative and diligent colleagues—writers, data visualizers, scientists, web developers—who are constantly pushing each other to be better.

I have written a lot about the Earth at night, and I remain fascinated by what we can see. I do have a fondness for places that I have visited—favorite childhood or vacation spots. I have lived most of my life near the coast, so those places are a bit over-represented in my portfolio.

What visual qualities do you look for in an image to share with a broad public? Do they seem to have something specific in common?

We ask a few things for every story: What story are we trying to tell, and what is the best way to show that? If we start from the image, we ask: can we reliably explain what we see there? How do we know—how can we verify—what that is? Is the image visually compelling? What draws your eye when you look at the image? Will this visual be understandable to our grandparents, our children, our non-scientist friends? (For this reason, we try not to use a lot of false-color because research and experience shows that most people don’t understand it.) Can you actually see the action, the details, the concepts that we want to convey? We are not just here to share pretty pictures.

There is repetition to the cycles and seasons and events on Earth. But we are constantly thinking about whether there is a fresh and novel way to present things. Publishing 365 days a year—and for 21 years—that can be a challenge. We try to stay vigilant and creative. We are always hunting for new angles and ideas.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Scientific evidence suggests that her bones had been hidden behind a church wall for a millennium.

If the walls in the Church of St. Mary and St. Eanswythe could talk, it would probably be in Old English.

Researchers recently announced that bones found in those walls likely belonged to Eanswythe, an Anglo-Saxon princess from the seventh century and patron saint of Folkestone, the southeastern English town in Kent County where the church is located. While the bones themselves were discovered in 1885—launching much speculation that they were the princess's remains, missing for centuries—this latest research provides the first empirical evidence that they did indeed belong to the namesake of the church.

Back in January, researchers from the Canterbury Archaeological Trust and the Finding Eanswythe project closed the Folkestone church for four days to convert it into a temporary makeshift laboratory. “We set up in the nave just in front of the altar, and also in the adjoining vestry,” writes Andrew Richardson, of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, in an email. “This meant that apart from a few teeth and small bones sent for lab testing, none of the relics needed to leave the church.” Richardson estimates that approximately 50 percent of the skeleton is accounted for.

During that first round of analysis in the church, the researchers saw some intriguing clues as to the identity of the remains. First, the lead box in which the bones were contained was dated to the eighth or ninth century, closer to Eanswythe's death than the church itself, which was constructed in the 12th century. Second, the enamel on the teeth showed no signs of malnutrition, suggesting that this person was well-nourished and of high social status. Third, and most important, the bones came from one person rather than several (as is often the case with relics and such old burials), and the pelvis and skull revealed that that person was most likely a woman.

But the most important findings came back from the lab at Queen’s University in Belfast, where a tooth and a foot bone underwent radiocarbon dating. Those test results were consistent with the common view that Eanswythe died in the 650s or 660s. “It is very hard to imagine why these remains would be anyone other than Eanswythe,” writes Richardson, “given the multiple historical references between the 10th-16th centuries that place her in Folkestone and, from 1138, in this church.” Indeed, “the earliest Anglo-Saxon documents that mention her,” he writes, “say she ‘rests in Folkestone.’”

According to the Finding Eanswythe project, Eanswythe was probably born around 630, likely the youngest child of the Kentish King Eadbald. It’s hard to put a precise date on it, but sometime during the seventh century a “minster”—or church built as part of a monastery—was founded at Folkestone. It’s possible that the minster was built within Eanswythe’s lifetime, and that she was indeed its founding abbess, as tradition holds; it’s also possible that it was established after her death. Either way, she could be one of the founders of female monasticism in England. It’s one of the reasons she occupies a position of such prominence within Folkestone’s cultural memory. In fact, a 799 charter refers to the priory grounds as “terra sancta Eanswithe [sic]."

The current Church of St. Mary and St. Eanswythe was built in 1138, after the original minster was destroyed. Documents and basic deduction suggested that Eanswythe was buried in the original church, and then moved to the new one before being "lost." In 1885, workers renovating the church found the bones within the walls, where they have stayed ever since, in a specially constructed alcove. Many assumed that the bones were proof of Eanswythe’s burial there, but Richardson was careful not to jump to that conclusion, wary of false relics that date to the founding of the church but are purported to be much older.

Removing the bones once more for research purposes was not merely an academic affair, but an emotional one as well, as some of the researchers slept in the church to guard the remains. Lesley Hardy—Finding Eanswythe’s project leader and a historian at Canterbury Christ Church University—is an ordained deacon in the Church of England, and began every morning of research by reciting prayers over the remains.

The next steps in the project should provide even more detail. A tooth is currently undergoing stable isotope analysis at Oxford University, and will then undergo further study with the British Geological Survey. These analyses could provide insights into Eanswythe’s diet, and by extension her environs; they may reveal, for example, that she did not always live in Kent. If the Francis Crick Institute can extract genetic material from the tooth, it may have clues to Eanswythe’s hair and eye colors, and perhaps something about her lineage.

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

A mishap turned water into Lambrusco.

On the morning of March 4, a neighborhood in the Italian town of Castelvetro di Modena awoke to a startling surprise. When residents turned on faucets and showers, a rush of fizzy, crimson liquid splashed into sinks and tubs.

In the 20 affected homes, they initially recoiled in alarm, reports the Modena newspaper, Gazzetta di Modena. But a familiar fruity odor—violets, strawberries, fresh plums, and cherries—lured them closer. The liquid proved a mix of water and sparkling red wine.

Specifically, it was Lambrusco Grasparossa from the nearby winery Cantina Settecani. The blend bears Italy’s second-highest geographical distinction and is made from at least 85 percent eponymous grapes. A celebrated regional specialty, its lineage dates to the Etruscans. Abroad, however, backlash from an early-1980s boom of cheap, mass-produced Lambrusco led to a mistakenly poor reputation.

Locals reportedly responded to the development by filling all available empty containers. Some went on to phone town officials. Others, the winery. Some of the clients who called to warn Cantina Settecani about the situation, commercial manager Fabrizio Amorrotti told CNN, gleefully confessed to capitalizing on the mishap.

The intoxicating dilemma lasted about three hours. The winery lost around 1,000 liters of wine.

The culprit behind the bizarre, boozy leakage? Castelvetro water officials and winery staff traced it, essentially, to failed circuitry in the winery’s bottling plant. According to Amorrotti, malfunctioning valves partnered with pressure differentials to cause the wine, which was stored in a large silo, to shoot through water lines and be diverted into surrounding homes.

Thankfully, the situation was determined to have posed no health risks. According to the Gazzeta di Modena, the town has released statements saying measures are being taken to protect against similar failures in the future.

Not all residents were appeased.

We should not be laughing at this, said Enrico Magnus, a resident of Modena, in translation, in Facebook posts and the comment threads of a related story in the Gazetta di Modena. He described the event as disturbing and called on officials to conduct investigations that would ensure the problem wasn’t systemic. “What’s to stop a madman from [exploiting such weaknesses and] making a massacre?”

Still, considering the town’s location in northern Italy amid the epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus crisis, Mezzacqui chose to see a silver lining in the disruption. The town is typically a magnet for gastronomic enthusiasts, and residents rely heavily on tourism for their livelihood. But the recent COVID-19 outbreak has led would-be visitors to cancel more than 80 percent of bookings. Nationwide travel bans have worsened the situation. Owners and employees at local restaurants, wineries, shops, and countless other businesses are suffering.

“At a time when we have very little to smile about, I’m glad we could bring some levity to others,” Mezzacqui told CNN. Hopefully, at some point in the future, she added, people will remember this incident with a smile and decide to visit the beautiful town of Castelvetro.

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

Whether a cookie or a fruit bun, the "offending object" has been discarded.

Don’t judge a book by its cover—you might miss out on free, albeit fossilized, food.

Emily Dourish, deputy keeper of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts at the Cambridge University Library, was recently making rounds through the collection when she made a most unusual discovery. Wedged inside a Renaissance-era volume of Saint Augustine’s complete works sat a flat, decaying, dry, partially eaten snack—likely a cookie, or “some kind of fruit bun,” though Dourish admits that the treat was well past easy identification.

Dourish had pulled the book off the shelf as part of an ongoing effort to add volume-specific details to listings in the library’s online catalog. The rare books collection, she writes in an email, contains about 1 million items, “so adding this information is something of a labour of love.” One perk is the opportunity to “make new discoveries” about the priceless and historic editions, though those findings generally aren’t edible.

It’s impossible to know for sure how the snack ended up in the book, though it’s safe to assume it didn’t happen during its publication in Switzerland, between 1528 and 1529. Dourish’s working theory is more modest. Cambridge, she writes, acquired the book from a local boy's school that was founded more than 450 years ago. In 1970, the school donated some 800 historic titles to Cambridge, where “environmentally controlled book storage” can keep older materials in better shape. “We are confident,” she writes, “that our reading room staff would not have allowed someone to drop food into the book while consulting it in this library!” She believes it’s likelier that the snack got lodged in the book during its days at the school, where “it’s quite possible that a schoolboy could have had a snack.” Ultimately, the treat's origins will have to remain a mystery.

It’s not the first time that Dourish or her colleagues have found foreign objects inside their rare books. Over the years, they’ve encountered flower petals, unexpected annotations, bits of medieval manuscripts within actual book bindings, and even an unknown poem by the Dutch scholar Erasmus. One particularly notable example was a key found by Dourish’s colleague in a medieval manuscript, which left a rusty impression even after its removal. Fortunately, in the case of the cookie or bun, all that remains is “[a] slightly greasy mark” that doesn’t affect the text. “My colleague in our in-house conservation team,” writes Dourish, “took the volume away, gave it a thorough clean, and disposed of the offending object.”

And so the book is back on the shelf, snack-less, waiting to be picked up again—hopefully by someone with a little more respect for the written word.

A new exhibition pays homage to some of the Buckeye State's beloved—and infamous—legends.

One evening in August 2016, Sam Jacobs and his girlfriend were playing Pokemon Go near the inky shore of Lake Isabella, in Loveland, Ohio. The lake is regularly stocked with catfish, bluegill, trout, and perch (to the delight of local fishers). But the couple saw something that struck them as more than a little odd—and it wasn’t a creature roaming their phone screens.

“We saw a huge frog near the water,” Jacobs told Cincinnati’s WCPO television station. “Not in the game,” he added. “This was an actual giant frog.”

Jacobs paused his play and snapped some grainy photos. They’re tricky to decipher, but appear to show a dark figure standing in the gently rippling water, light bouncing off its enormous, saucer-shaped eyes. Jacobs was convinced he was seeing a frog rearing up on its hind legs.

“I realize this sounds crazy,” he told WCPO. “But I swear on my grandmother’s grave this is the truth: The frog stood about four feet tall.”

Jacobs wasn’t the first person to claim to see a monstrous amphibian roving Loveland. In 1972, a local police officer named Ray Shockey said he crossed paths with an enormous frog near the Little Miami River. Shockey kept it pretty quiet, Dayton’s Journal Herald newspaper reported that year; he didn’t want to spook anyone.

Soon after, however, his partner, Mark Matthews, was scouting the same spot when he encountered a creature that fit Shockey’s puzzling description. It hopped toward him, he told the Journal Herald—and while it wasn’t aggressive, exactly, it was unusually, almost unbelievably, large. Keen to get a closer look and preserve the evidence, he landed four shots with his .357 magnum. He told the Journal Herald that he suspected the thing was a hefty iguana that had lost its tail—but that it was hard to say for sure, the paper noted, because “the animal gave one last hop, fell into the river and was washed away.”

There’s no reason to suspect that Rutherford B. Hayes, America’s bookish and extravagantly bearded 19th president, ever laid eyes on the giant, bipedal Loveland Frog (or Frogman), as it’s come to be known. Or that he was scared by an unsettlingly oversized iguana. He probably never made the acquaintance of the Mothman either. Or the Grassman (Ohio’s answer to Bigfoot). Or South Bay Bessie, the Loch Ness–style monster said to patrol the waters of Lake Erie.

But Hayes’s presidential library and museum, in Fremont, Ohio, has recently mounted a show called “Ohio: An Unnatural History,” about the legendary creatures that go bump in the Midwestern night.

The museum, which normally traffics in tangible objects and measurable facts, doesn’t view its dalliance with the paranormal as anything unusual. “Not only do we cover presidential history, but also local history,” says Kevin Moore, associate curator of artifacts. “And we view local folklore as part of Ohio’s local history.”

Hayes had a personal library of thousands of books, Moore says, and was a history buff to boot, with an interest in the legends of local Native American cultures. “We want to appreciate the folklore just being part of Ohio culture—not get into any effort to validate or disprove it,” Moore says.

Tall tales, however dubious, don’t spring from nothing—and that makes folklore a useful window into local history, says Esther Clinton, a folklorist at Bowling Green State University, in a video accompanying the exhibition.

“The stories that become folklore are the stories that are repeated often, and not just by the same person,” Clinton says in the video. “What that means is that these are stories that make emotional and intellectual sense to people. If we look at folklore, that tells us a lot about what are people thinking about, what are they worried about?”

To bring the creatures in the exhibit to life, the library tapped Dan Chudzinski, a historian, special-effects artist, and animal-anatomy aficionado who doubles as the curator of the Mazza Museum at the University of Findlay.

The child of an anatomist-cum-biology-professor, Chudzinski has always been drawn to both known anatomy and the creatures that wander the foggy, gray margins of our imagination. He cut his teeth on taxidermy as a teen, and volunteered at the Toledo Zoo. At the Mazza Museum, which is rich in children’s book illustrations, he strung a 40-foot-long sculpture of Bessie, made from urethane foam and custom hardware, from the ceiling. It has a massive skull, studded with 200 teeth, and is roughly the size of a bus—a fact that Chudzinski uses to playfully taunt schoolkids, saying, “If you all fit into one bus, theoretically you could all fit into one really hungry lake monster.”

Though he often creates sculptures so uncannily lifelike that you expect to see the eyes blink or the chest rise and fall, Chudzinski’s work for the cryptid show mainly consists of 2D images. He wanted them to feel as informed and convincing as paranormal portraits can possibly be—thoughtful and unique, yet recognizable, sporting the iconic characteristics.

To research one of his subjects—the Headless Motorcyclist, said to roam the roads after a gruesome accident—Chudzinski visited local libraries to look for reports of a vehicular decapitation. He also interviewed people who claimed to have encountered the various creatures he portrayed—and did a little fieldwork of his own.

For Grassman inspiration, he visited creatures including Kwisha, a silverback western lowland gorilla who lives at the Toledo Zoo; artist and ape have known each other for about 18 years. To compile characteristics for the Loveland Frog, Chudzinski tromped to the pond near his house, where he observed the pickerel frog’s speckled skin and the tree frog’s ability to conceal itself up in the canopy. (He figured it would be superlatively creepy if the Loveland Frog could scale trees and conceal itself while spying on the humans below.)

To capture the moods he wanted to convey in the background, Chudzinski says he went “to locations that people wouldn’t wander around at times when people definitely wouldn’t go out.” There, he asked himself: “What sounds do I hear? How am I feeling?” To up the eeriness even further, he depicted most of the creatures at dawn or dusk, surrounded by wisps of fog.

Some of the legends, like the Loveland Frog, have local or regional roots. Stories of the Mothman have flitted around West Virginia as well as Ohio. (The two states were linked by the Silver Bridge until 1967, when it collapsed, resulting in dozens of deaths.) The Pukwudgies—little troll-like creatures spiked with quills—are hallmarks of Wampanoag and Algonquian stories, Chudzinski says. Others are Midwestern twists on other, established creatures. The Grassman, Moore says, is clearly a relative of Bigfoot or Sasquatch (though the Ohio version is said to be surlier than its Pacific Northwest counterpart).

Many have spawned local traditions or swag. The Loveland Frog earned its own musical (Hot Damn! It’s the Loveland Frog), and the Great Lakes Brewing Company sells a beer called the Lake Erie Monster, a seasonal Imperial IPA it markets with a logo of a menacing, wave-riding serpent.

These creatives are elusive, and the stories about them have an element of shapeshifting too. The legend of the Loveland Frog may actually be a mangling of the telling of an extraterrestrial encounter, said to have occurred in the 1950s, according to the exhibit.

The Mothman story has changed too. In November 1966, the Associated Press reported alleged sightings of the Mothman in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, just across the bridge from Gallipolis, Ohio, and described the creature as a “gray and white ‘thing’” that looked like a “man with a 10-foot wingspan who flies after cars at 100 miles per hour.” The AP noted that the creature was winged, but didn’t mention anything about the searingly red eyes that would figure into later accounts.

Even as cryptids evolve in the popular imagination, the people who helped stoke their stories sometimes wind up recanting. After Sam Jacobs claimed to see the Loveland Frog in August 2016, Mark Matthews—the gun-slinging patrolman from 1972—got in touch with WCPO to call bull on the whole thing. He hadn’t seen a creature standing on its hind legs, he clarified—it had scuttled under a guardrail. And the body wasn’t lost to the river—he had put it in his trunk, certain that it was just a very large iguana. "It's a big hoax," he said.

The new exhibition doesn’t adjudicate the tales it tells. But it does make a curiously compelling case that murky accounts belong in the annals of history, shoulder to shoulder with real-world artifacts. They all help us understand the stories a place shares about itself.

Indians who were pushed out of Burma have made this market a multicultural haven.

On a bright morning in August, 1965, a young man named Gurumurthy ushered his parents and sisters out of their home in the Burmese capital of Rangoon. They shut the wooden gate behind them, glanced at the stark-white façade of their house for a final time, and began to carry their modest belongings to the nearby port.

As ethnic Indians, Gurumurthy and his family were fleeing a military dictatorship that had stoked the flames of xenophobia in Burma. That morning, they joined thousands on the SS Mohammadia. Several families were fleeing after living in Burma for four or five generations. Together, they sailed past the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and into the Bay of Bengal.

Three days later, the ship dropped anchor in Madras, a major port city in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The site of the first major English settlement in India, Madras was renamed Chennai in 1996.

Gurumurthy is one of many thousands of Burmese Indians who settled in Chennai. “When we arrived, we were met with a rousing reception and a feast,” he recalls. “And then we were promptly sent to transit camps on the outskirts of the city.”

Today, about a half-hour drive from Gurumurthy’s office in MKB Nagar, tiny shops crowd a vast market known as Burma Bazaar, on the northern coast of Chennai. They stretch along the busy Beach Road in the historic George Town neighborhood, selling everything from electronics and imported perfumes to chocolates and toys, at bargain prices. There are stacks of pirated DVDs of films in various languages, hastily moved out of sight in the event of a police raid.

“We started right here, on the platform of Chennai Beach railway station,” Chandran, one of the vendors at Burma Bazaar, tells me. “When we arrived in the sixties, we began disposing of whatever goods—clothes, perfumes—we had brought with us from Burma to earn some money, and discovered that we sold out quickly.”

Once they had exhausted their goods, the hawkers at Chennai Beach station bought more from other, recently arrived Burmese Tamils. What began with a few people spreading towels on the ground to sell items eventually expanded into a full-scale market, comprising nearly 200 shops and gaining notoriety for trading in smuggled goods.

It was very difficult to make Burma Bazaar a permanent feature of the city, says Gurmurthy, who now runs a business distributing liquefied petroleum gas cylinders. He has become a familiar name at the market, largely due to an organization he established in 1979 to protect the interests of fellow Burmese Indians. “It took a lot of persuading,” Gurumurthy says of Burma Bazaar. “But the ruling DMK government at the time was sympathetic to the cause of Burmese Tamils.”

In 1969, the Tamil Nadu government officially recognized Burma Bazaar. Here, in a seemingly random corner of Chennai, the community has managed to build one of the few tangible, lasting links between past and present lives.

The modern Indian-Burmese community has its roots in the middle of the 18th century, after the British Empire waged a series of wars to seize control of Burma (now known as Myanmar). The British treated the Burmese with condescension. One British visitor, D. Clouston, accused them of laziness and claimed that locals were “not as willing as Indians to do hard work for small pay.” British Burma was governed as a province of British India despite large cultural dissimilarities, and scores of Indians migrated there.

Indians in Burma—primarily Tamils hailing from Tamil Nadu, but also Bengalis, Telugus, and other groups—worked as farmers, civil servants, traders, moneylenders, day laborers, dock workers, and security personnel. Many chose to settle down and raise families there. By 1931, the population of Indians in Burma had risen to over a million. In the capital of Rangoon, now known as Yangon, they outnumbered the Burmese.

“Burma has a long-term, love-hate relationship with India,” says Michael Charney, a professor of Asian and military history at SOAS University of London. “Its religion and mythology come from the subcontinent; the hate part comes from the colonial period.” He points out that some Indian immigrants lived in Burma before colonial rule. “But under colonialism, being Indian per se became associated with foreign rule and exploitation, because the British favored many more Indians and Chinese coming in.”

By the 1930s, during the economic devastation of the Great Depression, anti-Indian sentiment continued to grow, and violent riots left hundreds dead—most of them ethnic Indians. Rising Burmese nationalism, and the administrative separation of British Burma from British India in 1937, worsened the insecurities of the Indian population. During World War II, Japanese forces invaded and occupied Burma. “When the British fled in 1942, the Burmese took their anger out on Indians,” Charney says.

Between January and June 1942, nearly half a million Burmese Indians fled Burma. The British reserved ships and airplanes for the exclusive use of Europeans, Anglo-Indians, and occasionally wealthy Indians, leaving at least 400,000 Burmese Indian refugees to make the arduous, months-long journey on foot. Although official statistics are vague, 10,000 to 50,000 people—by some accounts, even 100,000—are said to have lost their lives while walking hundreds of miles to the northeastern Indian border. The trek has become known as the “forgotten long march.”

Burma gained independence from Britain in 1948, and in 1962, the military dictator Ne Win seized power. “Burmese nationalist discourse became increasingly racist,” Charney says, citing a series of discriminatory laws and measures that stripped ethnic minorities of their businesses, lands, and claims to citizenship. The 1962 coup led to yet another wave of large-scale reverse migration, with hundreds of thousands fleeing to India within just a few years. (To this day, the Myanmar government denies full citizenship rights to several longstanding communities in the country, including the Rohingya, Chinese, and Indians.)

Upon arriving in India, Burmese Indians—officially referred to as “repatriates”—were sent to transit camps in the places where their families had come from. Many still spoke the languages of their ancestors. According to state government records, in Tamil Nadu alone, 144,445 Burmese repatriates have been resettled since 1964.

Gurumurthy, who is 75, still remembers that time. “I was working as a traffic sub-inspector in Rangoon before I left,” he says, alternating between fluent English and Tamil. His family had once lived in a thatched-roof house across Burma’s Irrawaddy River, in a region populated by rice mills, but the house they left behind was on Rangoon’s bustling Mogul Street, present-day Shwe Bon Thar Road. He remembers many reasons why Burmese Indians left: “lack of employment, stringent dictatorship, ethnic discrimination, demonetization, and a desire to return to our motherland.”

In addition to finding jobs and housing, Burmese Indians had to learn to integrate into a society that their forefathers hailed from, where they understood the local language yet did not truly belong. Often, they found that they were not accepted by the locals.

The Tamil Nadu government took steps to rehabilitate Burmese repatriates by allocating housing, disbursing loans, and introducing job quotas, but it was a tedious process frequently stifled by bureaucracy and corruption. Some, like Gurumurthy, worked their way up through sheer resourcefulness, creating a comfortable life for their families.

“It was a disorganized life,” Gurumurthy recalls. “Many of our families had lived in Burma for four or five generations. It was like uprooting your life and replanting it in India.”

Gurumurthy got his first job thanks to a bond he had made in Burma, with an Anglo-Indian man named Edwards whom he had once helped. The man’s brother, who lived in Chennai, aided Gurumurthy in finding work at the warehouse of a kitchen wholesaler. For a time, he left the city for another job, but soon decided to return. “Chennai offered more opportunities and room for growth,” he says, smiling and taking a sip of tea. “And so I returned and got a clerical job at the Heavy Vehicles Factory.”

With the help of his connections at the warehouse, he applied to become a cooking gas dealer. “I told myself, if I worked for the government, I could only survive on bribes. I didn’t want to do that. I had to go into business instead,” he says, with a hint of pride.

At Burma Bazaar, a handful of shopkeepers gather around and answer questions about their work here. Chandran, the local vendor, offers to be my guide. It is the middle of the afternoon, and the infamous Chennai heat has caused a lull in activity. A few shoppers walk around, but mostly the vendors linger outside their shops or lean against parked motorbikes.

Chandran informs me that every day after sundown, nearby food stalls—also run by Burmese Indians—will begin selling a variety of Indo-Burmese dishes. Cars whizz past us on Beach Road.

As we make our way to one of the shops selling children’s toys, we pass an elderly man. He is seated at a lone table on one side of the narrow lane, opposite the myriad numbered shops, peddling watches and knickknacks. “He is the original Burmese Tamil,” the shopkeepers say, insisting that I speak with him. “He is the oldest among us, and has a lot of stories to tell.”

The man notices us, and dismisses their statements with a slight wave of his hand. “What is the use of digging up stories that are buried in the past?” he asks. Then he turns back to his table and begins gingerly rearranging the watches on display.