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

The Ghost Airline That Has Linked Cairo and Tel Aviv for Decades

0
0

Air Sinai is shrouded in mystery. But why?

In 2007, Michael Paley went to Cairo to visit his daughter, Naamah, a junior at the University of Michigan who was spending a semester in Egypt studying Arabic. He had a work trip in Israel scheduled for a few weeks later, so he asked one of the trip administrators to book him a ticket directly from Cairo to Tel Aviv. It’s a 50-minute flight on a clear day.

“I wasn’t nervous before about it,” he says, recalling the trip, “but when I got to the airport I got nervous because I couldn’t find the gate. It wasn’t posted on the screen, so I had to ask someone where to go, and then when I found the gate there was no sign that said this is Tel Aviv.”

Eventually, Paley was directed onto a bus that took him and the other passengers to a far corner of the tarmac, where a small white plane with no markings or logo was waiting. They boarded.

“The feeling you get is that you’re going somewhere illicit,” he says, adding that the oddity of the flight has stayed with him even years later. “You’re entering into an anonymous experience, and you’re clearly not in Milan, or New York.”

The unmarked plane belonged to Air Sinai, which only flies between Cairo and Tel Aviv. In 1979, Israel and Egypt signed a historic peace treaty, overseen by the United States, which inaugurated diplomatic relations between the two countries and made Egypt the first Arab nation to recognize the State of Israel. Air Sinai, founded in 1982, fulfills a term in the treaty that had to be implemented within three years of signing: the two countries must maintain active civilian aviation routes—meaning there always had to be a direct flight between Israel and Egypt.

It just didn’t have to be public.

article-image

"Virtually all of the Arab world boycotted Egypt after the treaty," explains Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, who oversaw the fulfillment of the treaty terms as the U.S. ambassador to Egypt from 1979 to 1982. He added that this reaction by neighboring countries, plus the general animosity towards Israel among Egyptian citizens, made Egypt reluctant to fly the Cairo-Tel Aviv route publicly on its national carrier, EgyptAir, which was a leading airline throughout the Arab world. “Part of Egypt’s calculation was that such a visible link poured vinegar on the situation,” he says.

That reluctance led to the creation of Air Sinai, which allowed Egypt to fulfill the terms of the treaty without directly implicating EgyptAir. Air Sinai used EgyptAir pilots, planes, and flight attendants, operating under a wet-lease agreement that effectively meant no difference between the two airlines, except on paper. Caution was still taken: The lack of any external logos on the planes afforded some privacy to the flight, and many have wondered if the Egyptian military keeps tabs on travelers between the two countries. Ambassador Kurtzer said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Egyptian military has some stake in the airline.

The reluctance also meant extreme privacy around Air Sinai’s existence. For most of its history, anybody looking online for tickets between Cairo and Tel Aviv would find a host of options for airlines offering indirect flights with stops in places like Amman, Jordan or Istanbul, Turkey. They might find a few references to a direct flight operated by an airline called Air Sinai, but any attempt to book it would end in a message to call a travel agent or contact the airline directly.

article-image

The problem with that advice was that Air Sinai had no website, no public schedule of flights, and no mechanism for online bookings. There was no number to call. Though the airline had technically been a subsidiary of EgyptAir since 2002, EgyptAir pretended there was no connection. The only way to book a ticket through Air Sinai, for those in the know, was to go through a full-service travel agency or email the company, having found their address through word of mouth. An employee would then ask for a scan of your passport and an international wire transfer to cover the cost of the ticket.

The airline only took cash, and sometimes only took U.S. dollars. For years, before Air Sinai accepted emails and wire transfers, prospective passengers would arrive at the Tel Aviv office with envelopes of cash and leave, as late as 2010, with an old-school yellow ticket that looked like a 1950s prop. More recently, passengers have been emailed their flight information. Credit cards were not an option—and still aren’t, when dealing directly with the airline. One recent passenger from the U.S., upon realizing she needed to cancel her flight, had to find a friend with an Israeli bank account who could accept the refund on her behalf. Many describe the flight booking experience as strangely intimate, reminiscent of how flying worked before the days of online transactions. A passenger flying in June 2019 recalls getting a cell phone call from the same woman he had corresponded with over email to book his flight. She called to let him know his flight would be rescheduled to the next day, as a group of South African pilgrims had booked up the entire plane on his chosen date.

article-image

Confused passengers have discovered some booking-system workarounds over the years: A couple from Atlanta, Georgia, who flew on Air Sinai in the summer of 2019, said they simply called EgyptAir from the U.S. and kept getting transferred until they found someone who was willing to take their credit card information and issue them tickets. Passengers flying as recently as 2013 have reported booking EgyptAir flights from locations in South Africa, like Cape Town or Johannesburg, and being able to select Tel Aviv as a final destination online, with a stopover in Cairo that transitions flyers to an Air Sinai flight. This was a particularly popular option while it lasted, as most flights to Israel from South Africa require long layovers. That option disappeared in 2014, when EgyptAir formally removed Israel from its flight map during the second Gaza war, and dropped all mention of the Tel Aviv location on its website. (Intriguingly, 2014 is also when Cairo International Airport and Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv began displaying the Air Sinai flight on their public check-in boards).

In February 2020, flyairsinai.com popped up. Suddenly, anybody had the option to book an Air Sinai flight. Passengers could select any of the daily flights without needing to send emails back and forth to someone in the Air Sinai office. They could even use credit cards.

While one could see this as a sign of increased warmth between Israel and Egypt, the transparency isn’t quite there. The website describes itself as a third-party travel agency only. There is no listed contact information, nor any social media presence. The site and its web developer are based in the United Kingdom. When asked directly about flyairsinai.com, an Air Sinai employee responsible for booking tickets denied having any connection to the site, though she added an emoji smiley face to the end of her email. She then stopped responding to any requests for comments.

By all accounts, the planes remain unmarked.

article-image

Over the decades, the flight route between Egypt and Israel has reflected political developments. After its inception in 1982, Air Sinai took over the Cairo-Tel Aviv route from Nefertiti Airlines. An Egyptian entrepreneur, Elhamy Elzayat, founded Nefertiti to capitalize on the new tourism opportunity by operating flights between the two countries from 1980-1982. Elzayat also ran a fleet of buses between the two countries, which remained a popular mode of travel for Israelis visiting Egypt until 2012, when security concerns forced buses to cancel their services. The majority of air travelers in the early decades were Israeli tourists eager to pour across the border and visit one of the few countries they could now travel to by land, amid a sea of neighbors still technically at war with them. The flight was also popular with international Christian pilgrims visiting holy sites in the region, and businessmen traveling in the Middle East. Israel’s national carrier El Al, which has since gone private, flew a regular flight for years, though for added discretion would only schedule flights in the dead of night, between the hours of 1 a.m. and 6 a.m.. El Al ceased its flights in 2012, after concerns over the Arab Spring basically halted Israeli tourism to Egypt entirely, leaving El Al flying virtually empty planes between the two capital cities, at great security and operational cost.

At that point, Air Sinai remained the only airline in fulfillment of the 1979 terms of normalized relations between the countries, though the impact was minimal on the Egyptian side, as Egyptian tourism to Israel has always been muted. While the Egyptian government often touts the lack of intrigue in visiting Israel as the reason, the truth is that there remains strong local resistance against visiting Israel. Travel is also much more difficult for Egyptians, who must obtain an exit visa from the Egyptian government to even visit Israel, as well as a visa from the Israeli embassy, which currently has no personnel on the ground in Egypt. Egyptian citizens under a certain age, which for men has ranged from 60 to 45, and for women generally been under 35, require additional clearance. (Younger people are considered more of an unknown, and thus more of a potential political threat.) Reportedly, applications have resulted in aggressive questioning by Egyptian forces about the reasons for such a visit, causing political tension that most Egyptians admit is not quite worth it. The Israeli embassy currently notes on its website that any Egyptian man under the age of 50, and Egyptian woman under the age of 35, is unlikely to be approved for a visa quickly.

article-image

The one significant shift has been in tourism from Coptic Christians: In 2015, Pope Tawadros II, the Pope of the Coptic Church, reversed a ban on visiting Israel which had been issued by his predecessor in the wake of the 1979 peace treaty. Since then, Coptic Christians have visited the religious sites in Israel in ever-increasing numbers. Though Israeli tourism has decreased, it still exists, with Israelis often going incognito about their identity to prevent negative reactions. One tour group of Israelis, which visited Philae Temple in Aswan, one of Egypt’s most southern cities, as part of an extended trip in 2016, said they feel comfortable speaking loudly in Hebrew, though most Egyptians assume they are Greek or Italian, and they don’t correct them.

Today, Air Sinai continues to serve businesspeople, Coptic travelers, Christian pilgrims, and tourists traveling throughout the Middle East. The new online presence suggests the airline is interested in coming out of hiding to attract more customers, and perhaps less hindered by security concerns. (Though, again, Air Sinai did not respond to requests for comment for this story). While Israeli tourism has not regained the numbers seen in the 1980s and 1990s, the continued existence of Air Sinai serves as a reminder that connections between these two countries remain both possible and active. A time may soon come when Israelis and Egyptians can visit one another a bit more publicly, or at least a bit more easily.


How America's Botanic Gardens Are Growing Without Visitors

0
0

Watering and weeding can't wait until the pandemic has passed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered countless workplaces for the foreseeable future. But a botanic garden isn’t like most offices: The flowers and trees that live there don’t pay any mind to human health or anxieties, and they need a hand from their caretakers, especially at this time of year. “Right now is the season when everything has to happen with garden collections,” says Tim Johnson, director of the botanic garden at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

At Smith, students are learning remotely, and the college grounds are closed to the public, but the plants and trees are of course staying put. The botanic garden team is navigating the thorny question of how to take care of them in an era of social distancing. “Everything is waking up, everything is demanding attention, from the indoor collections to the outdoor collections," Johnson says.

To keep up with botanic gardens from a distance, you can peruse the Morton Arboretum’s at-home educational offerings or check in on the Conservatory of Flowers’s current stunners, including the giant water lily. The Smith College Botanic Garden and Chicago Botanic Garden are both blooming on social media. In the meantime, Atlas Obscura asked four botanic garden employees (including two Tim Johnsons—no relation!) how they’re caring for their leafy green charges in the midst of a tumultuous spring.

article-image

How has COVID-19 changed your work?

Johnson, Smith College: On campus, we're spacing people out. We have an outdoor horticultural team and an indoor horticultural team, and both are temporally and spatially distancing—so they're working at different times during the day, and they're working in different parts of campus or different greenhouses. They have their own equipment—they're not sharing—and then we have space gatekeepers, so that before an employee enters indoor spaces, they need to get a hold of other staff, to make sure that they're not going to be there. As much as possible, they're using different doorways, even entering through different corridors.

Most of our teams aren't yet working on-campus full time—they’re working remotely some of the time. Half of all our gardeners' work is actually curatorial, so at home they are making sure that their records and databases are up to speed. They are always in planning mode, always looking at what material they need to be bringing in, what they can source, and how the collection might evolve over the long term. Those roles don't go away.

Kris Bachtell, vice president of collections and facilities at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois: The Morton Arboretum is working with a skeleton crew on the 1,700-acre grounds. Very small crews come in later in the day than normal. When grounds crew employees are on-site for work, they wear face masks. They keep their distance from one another, many wear gloves, and they are sanitizing everything that they touch, from doorknobs to tools.

Maryam Nabi, director of marketing and communications at the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco, California: The Conservatory only has four master horticulturists on site daily to address critical needs for the plant collection, including watering, climate control, and making sure the Conservatory remains in operation. Horticulturists are isolating themselves at work and are vigilant about disinfecting shared surfaces.

Tim D. Johnson, senior director of horticulture at the Chicago Botanic Garden: Most staff are receiving communication through email. Meetings are conducted either via Zoom or in parking lots to adhere to social distancing recommendations. Critical staff are taking the same preventive measures as in any other public space, such as washing hands or using hand sanitizer often and maintaining the recommended six feet of social distancing.

article-image

What’s a typical day like for the horticulturalists right now? What needs to be completed every day?

Johnson, Smith College: They're sort of down to what is actually essential—watering, critical weeding. We have a large arboretum on campus, and horticulturists are scanning the entire arboretum every two days, making sure that everything is safe and they're not seeing any wind damage or new tree damage.

Bachtell, Morton Arboretum: The most time-sensitive and critical tasks are the only ones being done during this time. We’re keeping plants alive by monitoring for pests and diseases, and we’re controlling invasive species and the maintenance of plants.

Taking care of the Arboretum’s greenhouse plants requires daily care. Young plants are vulnerable and they have to be monitored more carefully. Our routine checklist includes checking the cooling systems generators, because if they stop working and it gets too hot, all of the plants could die. Checking the cooling systems is a 365-days-a-year task.

Johnson, Chicago Botanic Garden: Tasks with a high priority include time-sensitive pruning, cleaning up garden beds, and planting perennials, trees, and shrubs before the warm weather comes. We have also emphasized displays in the Regenstein Fruit & Vegetable Garden because of the increased interest in growing food this year. The food produced there will be distributed through our Windy City Harvest urban agriculture program. The Chicago Botanic Garden manages the Farm on Ogden and 17 Windy City Harvest urban farms, which are also closed to the public—but we are still operating and growing produce at those locations. With aquaponics, we’re harvesting approximately 2,500 heads of lettuce a week, and also harvesting overwintered carrots, spinach, arugula, and other winter crops. As we retool our distribution model to support emergency food needs, we are adjusting to crops that are more approachable for a broader audience and can be stored for longer periods of time.

Are there other tasks you’d typically be doing that are a little more lax right now?

Johnson, Smith College: We've cut back on new plantings and new garden spaces because we don't want to commit to watering and managing those spaces this year. We typically plant dozens and dozens of new trees every year, but we've cut back to only those trees which have to be moved right now, lest they become too tall and too large to actually move.

Bachtell, Morton Arboretum: Routine grooming is not happening. For example, there are no natural area burns happening that are otherwise routinely done.

Johnson, Chicago Botanic Garden: We have eliminated tasks that require more than one person, such as moving large containers and planting large trees. We are not mulching beds as much or mowing the lawn as frequently. We want to avoid letting the grass go to seed, so we have not eliminated mowing altogether.

article-image

Are any tasks easier without other people around?

Bachtell, Morton Arboretum: Not having visitors around has been unusual—it’s so quiet. But it’s easier taking down hazardous limbs or trees, with less safety concerns.

Nabi, Conservatory of Flowers: With visitors gone, it’s easier to complete some significant pruning to ensure the collection remains healthy—mostly palms in our lowland tropics gallery— and to complete some deep cleaning.

Johnson, Chicago Botanic Garden: While we are temporarily closed, there is no need to worry about blocking paths or cleaning up debris while working—we can clean up at the end of the day instead of as we go. We have also taken this opportunity to renovate some of our turf grass areas that see a lot of foot traffic from visitors. After being seeded, they will benefit from no one walking on the lawn while they establish good growth.

Some scientists who work with living organisms have taken them home from labs, so they’re now hunkering down with dozens of cockroaches or spiders. Did anyone wind up taking plants home with them?

Johnson, Smith College: We don't have anything that's so finicky that it really has to be cared for that way, and we have horticulturalists that are taking care of the collection every single day. But when I was able to safely do so, and before the campus was closed down, I did grab some of my office plants just because I missed my space. I missed being so close to so much green. I have a Peperomia that I was neglecting, and my curators took it because I was killing it in my office. I thought, during this time, I'd bring it home, and it's doing okay—it's a little unhappy with me. Then I have an unidentified ericaceous plant, a little relative of blueberry; it lost the plant tag long ago. I macraméd a little plant hanger, and I've got it hanging in a window. I think a lot of members of our team have increased their gardening at home, or have maybe indulged in a few more houseplants than they do normally.

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

The Indian Village Where Every Person's Name is a Unique Song

0
0

Hear the tunes that Kongthong residents are given at birth.

On a gloomy January day in the Indian village of Kongthong, not far from the border with Bangladesh, Shidiap Khongsti sings a soft, melodic tune. It sounds like a lullaby a mother would sing to a crying baby. Seconds later, she hears a tune in reply, and her nephew comes running toward her. The tune is much more than an idle melody: For centuries, villagers in Kongthong have used tunes as their names. Mothers give each newborn a distinctive melody within a week of birth.

The Khasi people live in the subtropical jungles of the Khasi Hills in the state of Meghalaya, which is also known for its massive root bridges. Kongthong encompasses about 130 households in a small area. Locals never reuse the same tunes, even after a person dies. At the playground, or before bed, mothers sing a short version of the melody. In the jungle, they sing a longer version, usually 15 or 20 seconds long. For many years, such tunes served as a signal for men hunting in the wilderness. But these traditions are evolving as Kongthong starts to modernize.

Shidiap is a short, slim woman in her mid-50s. She wears a jainsen, or a long shawl wrapped around her body, which is the traditional attire for Khasi women in Meghalaya. In her small house, which is surrounded by bamboo, Shidiap pours a cup of lal sha, or red chai, and introduces her nephew Barailang Khongsti. “Barailang helps me with household chores,” she says. At 23, Barailang has been living in the village his entire life. Unlike some Khasi speakers in Kongthong, Barailang speaks fluent Hindi. “We don’t know how it began,” he says of the village’s distinctive songs. “Our forefathers used these tunes when they went hunting. They believed that spirits in the wild couldn't keep track of us if we called each other by the tune."

article-image

Opposite Shidiap’s house, Shithoh Khongsti, a 50-year-old mother of seven, runs a grocery shop. (Shithoh and Shidiap are distant cousins, and belong to the same clan.) Her teeth appear orange, caked with the areca nut she chews. She offers a bamboo stool and a small piece of areca nut wrapped in betel leaf. Then, one by one, she sings the tunes of her children. “I know most people’s tunes,” Shithoh says. When little children run past her shop, she sings their tune, lovingly. Kongthong has a population of about 700, and she believes she knows about 500 melodies.

According to Shithoh, villagers remember their tunes even when they find work in nearby cities, such as Shillong, the state capital, or Sohra, a frequent destination for tourists. “Even those who live outside the village still continue this tradition,” Shithoh says. While the melodies have little use outside Kongthong, mothers who move to other places still try to pass them on.

Shidiap has four children. Her two daughters study in Shillong, a three-hour drive from the village. Her two sons live in Kongthong. “When they were babies, I sang a tune to send them to sleep, and that became their name,” Shidiap says, during a visit to her cousin’s shop. “Only mothers can give their children these tunes. It’s out of mother’s love.”

Kongthong, like other regions in Meghalaya where Khasi people live, follows a matrilineal tradition. Children receive mothers’ last names, and property passes down to the youngest daughter of the family. “The youngest daughter never leaves home. She eventually becomes the head of the household in the Khasi society,” says C.A. Mawlong, a history professor at the School of Social Sciences at North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong. “The mother-child bond does not only determine clan membership, but also the rights to the chieftainship, since succession and inheritance are transmitted in the matrilineal line.”

In the Khasi language, the tradition of tune-giving is called jingrwai iawbei, which translates loosely to “song of the mother” or “song of the first clan lady.” The origins of the tradition are uncertain, Mawlong says, but the Khasi term for a clan’s maternal ancestor is ka iawbei. “There are many references to her in the context of newborn babies,” she says. “But it’s highly likely the tradition has practical roots. Tunes carry over distances better than names.”

article-image

Residents of Kongthong still have written names that are registered at birth, because tunes would be longer and more complex to write. But according to Mawlong, rural Khasi people avoid calling each other by name, preferring familial terms such as elder sister, middle sister, and little sister. “The idea that tunes would keep spirits away is probably a way of legitimizing this practice,” Mawlong says.

Back in her kitchen, Shidiap spoons white rice onto a small plate and hands it to her husband, with a cup of red tea. Both are staples of Khasi villages. Her husband sits next to her on a wooden bench, talking about their two daughters, of whom the youngest is 17. Though mothers often use tunes more frequently for small children, Shidiap still uses them regularly. “He loves it too,” Shidiap says, looking at her husband, and he smiles.

Later, Barailang and Shidiap walk through the village on a path lined with small houses, until they come to the local football field. Every village in Meghalaya has one.

When asked about marriage, Barailang seems shy: In many Khasi villages, marriages aren’t registered on paper. “Suppose my wife is from another village and she comes to live in Kongthong,” he says. “My mother or one of my aunts would give her a tune.” Shidiap agrees: She gave a new tune to her daughter-in-law, an outsider, who would continue the tradition. Some families in nearby hamlets—12 villages in a region named Khadarshnong—also follow Kongthong’s tradition, but the practice is not as universal there.

Mawlong believes that tourism plays a role keeping the tradition alive in Kongthong, “Although Kongthong is widely known for this practice, it was certainly not the only one,” she says. “It seems to have appropriated the leadership role, very likely because of tourism.” Media mentions and tourism bring new exposure and economic life to the village. The village now has its own community-run homestay: two traditional Khasi houses offering accommodation to visitors. Made from bamboo, they sit next to the football ground.

article-image

In late March, India announced a nationwide lockdown, restricting movement of its more than 1.3 billion residents. Since April 5, when Meghalaya closed interstate borders, Kongthong hasn’t welcomed new travelers to its homestay. With no access to the state capital Shillong, which has reported some coronavirus cases, villagers are depending on a government supply of dry rations. Neighbors share their meals. Men and women work in the vegetable fields and orange orchards, and Shithoh still runs her assorted shop with available stock.

Back in January, on the football field, Barailang and Shidiap sat while a group of men played darts. Barailang used an old Motorola mobile phone to call his cousin, Shidiap’s first son. “My aunt doesn’t have a cell phone,” he explained. There was no answer, so Shidiap sang his tune into the chilly mountain wind. “The tradition of tune-giving is well alive in Kongthong,” Barailang went on. “We are proud of it.”

7 Spectacular Libraries You Can Explore From Your Living Room

0
0

You can almost smell the old books.

Regular visitors to libraries may be missing the hush of the stacks, the smell of old books, and the welcoming atmosphere of the local branch. Many of these public, private, and academic spaces have closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But much like museums, libraries around the world have produced immersive, 360-degree tours of their interiors. These simulations can offer more than inspiring views of literary sanctuaries; often, they serve as interactive platforms that provide information about the library’s history and resources.

Last week, Harvard University’s Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library released an online, 360-degree tour to support remote access during this period of widespread social distancing. “We’ve seen an encouraging number of site visitors to our tour page in the few weeks since it has gone live, and I imagine other libraries are seeing a similar uptick,” says Matt Cook, the library’s digital scholarship program manager. The guide offers high-resolution views of the 105-year-old cultural heritage landmark, from its marble, neoclassical-style rotunda to its grand Loker Reading Room. You can also click around to read annotations on the building’s history. “This tour is the next best thing to being able to walk through the building,” Cook says. “In some ways it is better, since it provides more information than you might discover if you wandered through.”

Some of these tours even allow online visitors to browse portions of massive material collections. At Widener, Cook imagines linking the online tour to information on specific items, such as scans of rare objects and click-throughs to catalog entries, so that users can place circulating materials on hold. By moving their resources online, he adds, libraries might motivate users to visit and seek out resources they discovered remotely. Until we can safely return to these institutions, Atlas Obscura has rounded up several other virtual libraries you can visit right now.

The Klementinum library

This baroque library in Prague, Czechia, was built in 1722 as part of a Jesuit university complex, and its ornate interior has changed little over the centuries. Step into its 360-degree tour and gaze at shelves of theological literature beneath a ceiling of frescoes. In addition to housing more than 20,000 books, the library includes a collection of terrestrial and celestial globes. You can also explore nearby chambers, such as a public reading room flanked by massive oil frescoes and an observatory in the astronomical tower.

The Puratos Sourdough Library

Founded in 2013 by the Belgian bakery supply company Puratos, this collection of sourdough starters in St. Vith is the largest of its kind. Although it is not open for public visits, you can virtually venture into its refrigerators, which collectively hold more than 100 blobs of yeast- and bacteria- laden flour in jars. After hearing a brief introduction from its sole curator, Karl De Smedt—who globetrots to acquire these glorious globs—check out short videos that spotlight varieties of yeast cultivated by bakers around the world, from Altamura to San Francisco.

King’s College Library at Cambridge University

This cozy university library in Cambridge, England, was established in 1441 and is home to notable collections of rare volumes, medieval manuscripts, and incunabula, or early printed books. Its second floor also houses the Rowe Music Library, a lending library of scores that is particularly rich in 18th-century English music. Roam the all-wood labyrinth of aisles and nooks in an online tour, which features short biographies of scholars who left their mark on the college.

article-image

Admont Abbey Library

Completed in 1776 in the Austrian town of Admont, the world’s largest monastic library is a striking example of late European Baroque architecture. Among the treasures in its 230-foot-long main hall are seven ceiling frescoes, two massive reliefs, and bookcases adorned with 68 gilded busts of scholars. Due to the pandemic, a virtual-reality version of this opulent space is now available online, accompanied by a multimedia presentation on its history. Like the library’s physical tours, this digital one has an entry fee—for 0.99€ you can explore the main room and all its secret passageways, listen to audio guides, and flip through a selection of digitized books.

Jerome Hall Law Library

A beautiful, five-story academic library in Bloomington stores extensive collections of legal materials for Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. You can poke around the massive interior in a virtual tour, which offers views of its airy reading room, marble and oak atrium, and more. Keep an eye out for highlights such as hanging geometric sculptures by Morton Bradley and a special collection of signatures and historical documents from U.S. Supreme Court justices.

article-image

A.K. Smiley Public Library

This small library in the city of Redlands is a registered California Historical Landmark and architectural jewel. Built in 1898, it is designed in the Moorish Style and features red brick with hand-cut sandstone trimmings. Wander through the historic building in this 360-degree tour and explore its vaulted ceilings, reading nooks, and beautiful stained glass windows, which depict symbols associated with libraries and learning. Don’t miss the bookstore in the basement, where you can catch a glimpse of the store’s mascot, Swimmy the fish, who is a card-carrying library member.

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

In Thailand, Funeral Cookbooks Preserve Recipes and Memories

0
0

Though their origins are tragic, the books provide invaluable inspiration.

The memory of Thanaruek Laoraowirodge’s favorite Thai dish is intertwined with the memory of his grandmother, Somsri Chantra. Originally from the eastern town of Trad, Laoraowirodge vividly remembers the chicken stew that she would cook after he returned home from school.

The dish, as simple as it is, is included in his family’s upcoming cookbook, a volume that will detail the recipes created by his khun yai, or grandmother. Not surprisingly, Yai Somsri’s recipes also make up much of the menu for his family’s popular Bangkok eateries, Supanniga Eating Room and Krua Supanniga by Khunyai.

Laoraowirodge considers the upcoming tome to be the family’s first funeral cookbook. “It will include all stories of memories from our family members with khun yai, related to her life and her cooking,” he says.

article-image

Most Thais consider funeral books a way to safeguard good memories of a loved one. Distributed by family members as mourners file into the temple to say their farewells, funeral books are typically put together by grieving children or partners. Often, they document the life of the deceased, share family anecdotes and photos, and reprint important Buddhist sermons.

However, many books cannot help but include matters dear to the departed’s heart. A jewelry aficionado’s funeral book could contain a primer on spotting gem quality. For an avid foodie, it might include their favorite places for street eats, replete with histories of the vendors. Yet whether a slim pamphlet or a thick, hardcover volume, favorite family recipes have become standard funeral book content.

But legend has it that the origins of the Thai funeral book are rooted in tragedy. The first queen of King Rama V, Sunandha Kumariratana, and her daughter, Princess Karnabhorn Bejraratana, drowned in 1880 when their boat capsized on the way to the palace. Courtiers and servants who would have been able to help were rooted to the spot, for fear of breaking a law that forbade commoners from touching royals. At their funeral, King Rama V gave out 10,000 books to commemorate the lives of the queen and his daughter, but these did not include any recipes. Instead, they featured Buddhist teachings and philosophy. The nangsue anusorn ngan sop (funeral book) was born, and the custom was swiftly copied by the king’s subjects.

The motives behind this tradition, however, may not entirely stem from a desire to keep good memories of the deceased alive. “Grand families were very competitive in showing face—and still are,” says Phil Cornwel-Smith, author of Very Thai and the new book Very Bangkok. “Funeral books would have shown all the titles, awards, and ranks that the deceased had been bestowed, which would be of vital interest for the surviving relatives to publicize and justify their social position.”

article-image

While funeral books were initially considered the purview of the aristocratic elite, the bourgeois—the military, high-ranking civil servants, and wealthy merchants—were only a few steps behind. Initially, Buddhist philosophy was a popular feature, until King Rama V in 1904 proclaimed the volumes to be “not very enjoyable” and advised future books to include more interesting subject matter, such as popular Thai fables. It was only later, in the mid-20th century, when food-related matters became the norm in funeral publications.

“For grand ladies of the past, there would be far less in terms of rank to document,” says Cornwel-Smith, “so their household accomplishments would be lauded, such as recipes,” adding that one of his first jobs in Thailand was to edit a funeral booklet for a female Sino-Thai banker.

It might seem odd that Thailand would be able to nurture the unique culinary tradition of the “funeral cookbook” when cookbooks themselves were a relatively recent phenomenon. Inspired by Isabella Beeton’s The Book of Household Management, the first Thai food cookbook, Mae Khrua Hua Pa (or “Talented Women Chefs”), was published by Lady Plian Phasakorawong in 1908. Before Lady Plian’s masterwork, recipes were transmitted verbally, ideally to family or household members only. These recipes were guarded fiercely. For a family to reveal one’s culinary secrets was tantamount to ceding social cachet to another rival house. “Grand families competed in culture as much as in titles, such as quality of food and rival troupes of traditional musicians,” says Cornwel-Smith.

article-image

The publication of the first Thai cookbook finally allowed for the sharing of private culinary knowledge in the public sphere. It also reflected a general rise of literacy in the pursuit of siwalai, the Thai attempt to appear more “civilized” in the face of encroaching colonization, academics say.

The debut of Mae Khrua Hua Pa was said to have been a commercial failure because of its relatively high price. However, it has since managed to take hold of and eventually shape Thai culinary discourse—primarily through its reprinting as a souvenir for Thai funerals. In essence, it has enjoyed a second (and third, and fourth) life as a funeral cookbook for families wary of sharing their own recipes.

Other funeral cookbooks have added to the cultural conversation by keeping specific family traditions alive. The many funeral cookbooks of one of the grand houses of old Siam, the Bunnag family, detail a plethora of dishes from the homeland of Sheikh Ahmad, who arrived in the kingdom as a Persian merchant in 1600. After entering the service of King Songtham, Sheikh Ahmad eventually rose to the rank of samuha nayok (First Prime Minister), a position that many of his descendants would also hold.

article-image

Scholars such as Thai food chef David Thompson—the proud collector of at least 600 funeral cookbooks—credit the Bunnag family for bringing gang massaman (loosely translated to “Muslim curry”) to Thailand. Although hailed today as one of the most popular Thai dishes in the world, massaman curry is still classified by some Thais as “foreign” since it incorporates a mix of dried spices, while traditional Thai curries are based on fresh herbs.

Today, the family recipe for massaman curry lives on in Bunnag funeral cookbooks, and includes raisins, small potatoes, nutmeg, cumin, star anise, cardamom, mace, and the decidedly un-Thai flourish of bay leaves. In the funeral cookbook of Sheikh Ahmad’s descendent Longlaliew Bunnag, one can find Persian-inspired gems such as the aforementioned massaman, khao buree (translated loosely as “smoked rice,” the family’s own take on chicken biryani) and sai gai, a saffron-scented, syrup-soaked dessert known as jalebi in Indian cuisine.

A wealthy family into the 20th century, the Bunnag family recipes also mirror the many foreign influences that shaped the Thai upper classes. One recipe calls simply for Chinese-style egg noodles mixed with olive oil and sprinkled with “the grated cheese of your choice,” a fusion that probably would have horrified Lady Plian.

article-image

In an essay on Thailand’s culinary identity, journalist Panu Wongcha-um argues that funeral cookbooks are still shaping Thai culinary discourse. This can be amply illustrated by the menus of Michelin-starred Thai restaurants such as Nahm, Paste, and Bo.lan, whose menus are rooted in the funeral cookbooks of noble families and whose chefs are celebrities in their own right.

Chef Bo Songvisava, like her former boss David Thompson, has a sizable funeral cookbook collection of her own. Besides inspiring her cooking, the funeral cookbooks in Songvisava’s collection represent the achievements of Thai women in the only sphere once permitted to them: the home.

“Funeral books with recipes in them in the early years mostly belonged to ladies from noble families,” says Songvisava, who is in the midst of writing her own cookbook. “Printing merely a cookbook must have seemed ridiculous back then, so they used funerals as an occasion to respect the deceased and pass on her skills, knowledge, and legacy.”

Chef Jason Bailey of Paste estimates that he and his wife, fellow chef Bee Satongun, have collected several hundred funeral cookbooks. The books, while providing a snapshot of a certain time, were also helpful in showing how Thai cuisine has evolved. “We were interested in seeing how they riffed and adapted Thai recipes,” he says of past cooks.

article-image

Ultimately, the Thai funeral cookbook was born in a hothouse environment of its own, fed by royal encouragement, the threat of colonization, a dearth of spaces for female expression, and the gradual literacy of the masses. However, unlike many conventions of the past, the funeral cookbook thrives today, even popping up abroad. British food writer Alan Davidson was so charmed by the idea that he compiled a 47-page booklet of his own, to be distributed at his 2003 service. The volume included recipes for personal favorites, such as meatloaf and toad-in-the-hole.

Songvisava thinks her funeral cookbook would highlight her work at her restaurant. “The recipes that I will include in my funeral book will be the ones that are served in Bo.lan and Bo.lan only,” she says, singling out green curry with local green figs, a salad of fresh northern Thai greens adorned with grilled fish, and household essentials such as Sriracha sauce.

Her husband, co-chef Dylan Jones, says he would present a mix of Thai influences and his Australian heritage in his funeral cookbook. For him, that means two particular recipes: one for nam prik prik Thai oorn, or black pepper chili relish, and another for Vegemite on toast.

This Week in Wonder From Home

0
0

Our schedule of new offerings on Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more.

Atlas Obscura’s mission has always been to inspire wonder about the incredible world we all share. Now, more than ever, we must stay connected, not only to our sense of wonder, but to each other. Each week, in addition to our Wonder From Home stories and virtual exploration with our atlas of more than 19,000 wondrous places, we’ll now be broadcasting live—on Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, and more—and posting new videos on YouTube. We plan to bring you the unique, curious, and unusual, from our staff and the amazing people who lead our Trips and Experiences.

Here are the wonders you can enjoy from home this week:


Monday, April 27


AO Loves New York

Free | Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.


Tuesday, April 28


Video Premiere: Explore South Africa’s Forest Beneath the Waves

YouTube, 9:30 a.m. EDT

This short documentary explores the community of divers and researchers that has grown around South Africa’s kelp forests. These diverse ecosystems are under threat from rising sea temperatures, but still offer peace and inspiration below the waves.


AO Loves New York

Free | Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.


Wednesday, April 29


Video Premiere: Show & Tell: The Tenacious Tendrils of Ithaca’s Gourdlandia

YouTube, 9:30 a.m. EDT

In this episode of Show & Tell, Atlas Obscura co-founder Dylan Thuras talks with Graham Ottoson of Gourdlandia, a gourd art studio located in Ithaca, New York. Graham teaches Dylan the process behind her gourd-geous craft, from pollinating plants to carving with specialized gourd saws!


AO Loves New York

Free | Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Gastro Obscura: Happy Hour with Preeti Mistry

$25 | Zoom, 7:30 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Join Chef Preeti Mistry and learn how to make some Indian-inspired snacks and a cocktail to pair with them. You will learn to make the Desi Drop, a refreshing combo of nimbu pani (toasted cumin lemonade) and your favorite spirit, followed by Desi Jacks, Preeti's famous Indian-inflected Cracker Jack, and a spicy snack of peanuts and cheese that she grew up eating.


Thursday, April 30


AO Loves New York

Free | Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.


The Secret Arts

$10 | Zoom, 8 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Welcome to the world of The Secret Arts, a new experience from Atlas Obscura that invites some of the world’s rarest experts and artisans to share the hidden knowledge of their singular crafts. Each weekly edition features a different craftsperson, in discussion with Atlas Obscura's Eric Grundhauser, exploring some of the key lessons and discoveries they’ve made over the years, explaining how you might try your hand at their unique skills, and answering your questions live! For the inaugural The Secret Arts show, we’ll be joined by artist and master of the Japanese art of dorodango, Bruce Gardner. Dorodango is the art of creating beautiful, almost impossibly perfect spheres, using little more than mud, water, and your hands.


Friday, May 1


Holistic Herbalism & Wild Medicine with Vanessa Chakour, Day 1

$125 for all 3 days | Zoom, 12 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Deepen your relationship to the living earth through plant medicine. In this three-part intensive led by herbalist Vanessa Chakour, you’ll learn about the folklore, healing properties, and spiritual associations of plants, and how to use them for self-care and as medicine. Over the course of a weekend, we’ll cover the basics of establishing an herbal practice that fits into your daily life and individual needs.


AO Loves New York

Free | Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Atlas Obscura Trivia Night

$7 | Zoom, 7 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Welcome to the Convocation of the Atlas Obscura Guild of Trivial Knowledge and Fascinating Ephemera! A contest of interesting questions for interested people or, tl;dr, our weekly trivia night! Our online trivia experience offers members of our community from all across the globe the opportunity to get together and engage in five rounds of brain-teasing, fact-finding, and curiosity-sparking competition. Teams of up to five players can join for a two-hour contest of wits, knowledge, and guessing, with a chance to win a surprise item from one of the wondrous independent businesses featured in our store. And of course, BRAGGING RIGHTS!


Strange Sounds & Unusual Instruments

Facebook Live, 9 p.m. EDT

Join Adriana Molello, Atlas Obscura’s music curator, as she explores some of the most unusual instruments and sounds with guest musicians from all over the world. As a professional violinist, Adriana has an affinity for strange instruments. In fact, she trekked to the remote reaches of Romania to hunt down a Stroh violin—a violin without a wooden body that projects its sound through a horn.


Saturday, May 2


Holistic Herbalism & Wild Medicine with Vanessa Chakour, Day 2

$125 for all 3 days | Zoom, 12 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Deepen your relationship to the living earth through plant medicine. In this three-part intensive led by herbalist Vanessa Chakour, you’ll learn about the folklore, healing properties, and spiritual associations of plants, and how to use them for self-care and as medicine. Over the course of a weekend, we’ll cover the basics of establishing an herbal practice that fits into your daily life and individual needs.


Gastro Obscura: Queer Soup Cooking Class (and Party!) with Liz Alpern

$25 | Zoom, 5:30 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Join Liz Alpern, creator of Queer Soup Night (QSN), for a live cooking demonstration. She’ll show you how to make one of her favorite soups and fresh bread to serve along with it. QSN’s DJ JayneMarti will keep the energy going, and a special guest chef or two will share what they’ve been cooking in quarantine. Come together for a night of queer connection, interactive cooking, and, of course, fun! Everyone is welcome, no matter how you identify.


Sunday, May 3


Holistic Herbalism & Wild Medicine with Vanessa Chakour, Day 3

$125 for all 3 days | Zoom, 12 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Deepen your relationship to the living earth through plant medicine. In this three-part intensive led by herbalist Vanessa Chakour, you’ll learn about the folklore, healing properties, and spiritual associations of plants, and how to use them for self-care and as medicine. Over the course of a weekend, we’ll cover the basics of establishing an herbal practice that fits into your daily life and individual needs.


Follow #wonderfromhome for inspiring stories, incredible online experiences, and livestreams with the Atlas Obscura community.

A New Zealand Festival Turns Detritus Into Offbeat Art

0
0

Amateur sculptors are invited to grab some driftwood and make a masterpiece.

One of the easiest ways to make residents laugh in Hokitika is to comment on their excellent sunny weather. This spot that bills itself as a “cool little town” sits on New Zealand’s “Wild West Coast,” a region known for its grey, rainy weather and dramatic landscapes. It’s home to a small aquarium and kiwi center, a gorge filled with bright turquoise water, and what feels like the highest density of greenstone galleries in the country. And every January, the windswept coast is bedecked with colorful pennants marking the beginning of the Driftwood & Sand festival, which will line the beach with sculptures as charming as some of the town’s many resident artists.

The town’s beach abuts the mouth of the Hokitika River, which rolls through the mountains and forests in the center of the South Island. The fallen wood and other forest detritus it picks up wash out to sea and back onto the shore, in quantities large enough that there are jokes from the town’s history about shooting a pigeon above the beach and taking hours to find the body. These masses of driftwood have given Hokitika and its roughly 3,000 residents a year-round attraction and popular photo spot in the form of a large driftwood sign of the town’s name, and a seasonal one in the Driftwood & Sand festival.

article-image

Driftwood & Sand started in 2002, when a limestone carving symposium was taking place in Hokitika and Hoki-born artist Don Buglass decided to make a sculpture out of driftwood on the beach alongside it. The idea of a beach sculpture festival had been brewing in the back of his mind, with some inspiration from his poets’ society, and came to the forefront during a discussion about what events to host alongside the symposium.

“There’s just so much material, so much potential on the beach,” he says. “I got sick of people just going down there to walk their dogs or to bring out firewood.”

There’s no single secret to mastering a driftwood sculpture. Tips on the beach range from “balance” to “don’t use sand” to “let the driftwood speak to you.” Those who ask Sue Neale for advice receive practical instructions on how to make a “dead man,” a buried anchor for an upright sculpture. She’s a wise choice for help, since she’s been a key force behind the festival since its inception.

Buglass has since moved to the North Island, but returns each year for the festival, leaving Neale, now a festival trustee and manager, as the driving force in town. Neither of them keep official statistics, but guesses range from around 50 to 80 percent of the participants being locals; the rest are travelers who either come in specifically for the festival or just happen to be passing through.

article-image

“Quite a few people come into town and discover the festival,” says Neale. “We could be advertising it and getting more people but it’s quite neat to create that thrill of discovery. The whole ephemeral art thing is pretty cool—it’s there and then it goes.”

Participants get up to four and a half days to build their sculptures, and sculptures must be made “primarily” out of things they find on the beach. Other than a $10 registration fee, there are no entry requirements.

“They get so animated about it, it’s lovely for people to have creative outlets when they aren’t necessarily that creative in their day-to-day lives, and they just blossom on the beach,” says Phoebe Wilson, the festival’s 2020 on-site coordinator.

There’s no consistent rhyme or reason to the sculptures. There have been giant hands reaching up from the sand, human figures diving off the rock wall, and phoenixes rising from the ashes of a bonfire. Some, like a hermit crab trailing a net of garbage titled “Catch of the Day,” make an environmental statement. Others showcase the festival’s distinctly Kiwi sense of humor; 2020’s runner-up in the “Most Humorous” category was “Second Wind,” which featured the headless corpse of a seagull with wings outstretched, hanging by fishing line from a driftwood frame.

article-image

Neale describes judging as “a wee bit of a challenge. It’s not a curated kind of thing, you just get what there is,” she says.

It’s not the only challenge the festival faces. The South Island’s position doesn’t just give it masses of driftwood; it also gives the West Coast unpredictable weather patterns and freezing Antarctic gusts. Some years get lucky with a wide, sandy beach and copious driftwood, while others end up with either no beach, no driftwood, or both. Sculptures have blown over, washed out to sea, and contended with the mundane menace of teenage vandalism, which Buglass charitably described as “drunks coming out of the pub and wanting to express themselves in their own way.” One year a spring tide swept in just an hour after prize-giving and washed all the sculptures out to sea—including, fittingly, a sculpture of a Maori canoe.

Despite its setbacks, the heart of Driftwood & Sand lies in getting people onto the beach and out of their heads. “It encourages people to get past that fear factor about being on public view or not doing something good, and just realizing the act of creation itself is worth the effort,” says Buglass. “It doesn’t matter if it’s not da Vinci or Michelangelo. The important thing is to be part of it. As soon as that starts happening other people get the bug, they start looking at bits of wood and seeing something in it and thinking, ‘Ooh, I know what that could be.’”

A One-Table Restaurant Is Opening in a Swedish Meadow

0
0

There's just one chair, too.

This March, Linda Karlsson and her husband Rasmus Persson faced a dilemma: Karlsson’s parents showed up at their front door. The couple live in Ransäter, Sweden, and although Sweden has been in the news for having laxer policies than the strict lockdowns implemented by many countries to slow the spread of COVID-19, Karlsson and Persson fully intended to follow the recommendations issued by the government.

“When they decided to come to our new house and pay a visit without telling us beforehand,” Karlsson says, “we refused to let them come inside.” Her parents are both over 70, which places them among those at high risk for coronavirus. So Karlsson and Persson instead placed a table in the meadow outside their home and served them food through their window.

As the couple watched Karlsson’s parents enjoy their meal, they decided this was something others might like to try: dining in their meadow without safety concerns. For Karlsson and Persson, that meant opening a restaurant for one—just one table and one chair, completely contact-free.

That idea is now a restaurant set to open on May 10. The name, Bord för En, translates to “Table for One.” From opening day until August, the couple, who live at home with their daughter, will designate one of their two kitchens for the restaurant. (The house having two kitchens had always made it seem perfect for that purpose.) Reservations are available from 10 a.m. to 10:45 p.m., but only one person can book per day. That special guest can choose a three-course breakfast, lunch, or dinner, served in a picnic basket sent down a rope with the help of an old bicycle wheel.

article-image

The menu, which is the same regardless of time of day, is completely vegetarian, which reflects the lifestyle choices of Karlsson and Persson, who only eat meat occasionally when it is locally sourced and humanely raised. The menu also reflects the culinary background of Persson, who is stepping back into the restaurant world after 10 years in broadcast journalism. A radio show host, he is the alumnus of a culinary school in Gothenburg and a former professional chef who worked for Leif Mannerström, an acclaimed restaurateur and pioneer in Swedish cuisine.

“We can’t travel, but to me, food has always been a travel in a sense. It’s been a way for me to mentally transport myself to different places, “ Persson says. “What I wanted to do with this menu was to have my own little travel agency, and have every part of the menu be a very specific memory for me, of a place where I’ve had that flavor or that certain dish.”

As a nod to the flavors Persson experienced when he trained as a chef on the west coast of Sweden, the first course is råraka, or Swedish-style hash browns with smetana (a type of sour cream) and vegan kelp caviar. Inspired by his year working in Barcelona restaurants, the main course is a sweet corn croquette with browned hazelnut butter, yellow carrot-ginger purée, and ash made from serpent root (also known as Spanish salsify). The final course is his adult take on a childhood summer treat: blueberries soaked in gin, served in iced buttermilk and topped with crushed sugar and viola flowers. The sugar, Persson hopes, will come from beets grown in their garden.

Each course will be paired with a non-alcoholic beverage curated by Persson’s childhood friend, Joel Söderbäck, an owner of several high-end bars in Stockholm, including Tjoget, one of the World’s 50 Best Bars in 2019. Between courses, the guest can place used plates inside a bucket next to the table and ring a bell for the next dish.

article-image

At the end of the meal, guests can pay any amount they choose. “We like to adjust to the situation that people have found themselves in,” Karlsson says, alluding to lost loved ones, lost jobs, and mental-health struggles caused by COVID-19. “There shouldn’t be a price tag that is too high for anyone to enjoy this.”

Bord för En is the only restaurant in Ransäter and possibly the first, according to Persson, who grew up there. The couple has received a warm reception from the small town and garnered wide interest. They’ve received reservations from all around Sweden and even Japan.

Although it’s unclear when those Japanese diners will be able to travel to Sweden, Karlsson thinks there’s a place for one-person meals even when the threat of the virus is gone. “To really honor the company of one, I think that this restaurant is a good choice for people to just get to know themselves better,” Karlsson says. She and Persson don’t plan on adding any more tables to Bord för En in the future.


Even More Historic Dishes Born From Tough Times to Make at Home

0
0

For every crisis, a recipe.

A few weeks ago, we published a roundup of historic dishes born from bygone crises. While the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has presented us with heroic displays of humanity and ingenuity, the sad fact is that most of us are (and should be) still shuttered up in our homes, stringing together a semblance of our old lives as best we can, sustained by local food delivery services and our own culinary fortitude.

While most sheltering-in-place restrictions remain in effect and frugality is paramount, here’s a new batch of dishes from bygone tough times like these. World War rationing and Great Depression resilience gave birth to unthinkable concoctions like an apple-less apple pie and a chocolate cake without butter, milk, or eggs. The resourcefulness of enslaved Africans in the American South delivered what’s today a regional staple that’s as beloved as it is nutritious. Some names are all-too straightforward, like the Québécois “Unemployed-Person Pudding.” Others are a bit more elusive, like Nothing Soup—which we promise is actually something.

Whatever they may be, they’re our ticket out of this mess. The better we are at staying home and stretching what ingredients we have, the sooner we can all get back out there and have someone else do the cooking. After all, it’s not the first time we’ve faced down a situation like this. History has given us lessons. Now it’s our turn to eat them.

article-image

Mock Apple Pie

Craving apple pie, but don’t have any apples? Ritz has your back. Shortly after Nabisco debuted their famous crackers in 1934, they began affixing their recipe for “Mock-Apple Pie” to their boxes. The timely addition came during a severe apple shortage, but records indicate that folks have been whipping up this American classic without its main ingredient since the Civil War.

It helps that apples aren’t actually the primary flavor in any apple pie. In much the same way that “pumpkin spice” affects a flavor without actual pumpkin, the experience of eating an apple pie largely rests on its associated spices. In the mock recipe, lemon and cream of tartar stand in for apple’s signature tartness, while standard cinnamon and sugar make their appearances, and voila: “apple pie” for the apple-less. Try this simple recipe from the Seattle Times. If you can swing it, of course, it’s better a la mode.

article-image

Vinegar Cake

Sans milk, butter, and eggs, this dessert otherwise known as “Wacky Cake” or “Impossible Cake” is fully vegan, though for many families during the Great Depression, it was simply the best they could do.

The recipe hinges on a 1930s technique you more than likely performed for grade school classmates. The play between baking soda and the cake’s eponymous distilled white vinegar makes for a surprisingly airy and moist finished product that tastes nothing like vinegar. Perhaps the best part about this recipe (from Canada, where the cake became popular during World War II rationing) is that the batter can be mixed in the same pan you bake it in. Fewer dishes, more fun.

article-image

Bread and Dripping

Rather than a recipe or a dish, bread and dripping is more of a philosophy.

The fat that renders off of a roasted cut of beef presents itself as a clear, oily liquid most commonly considered something not to spill on one’s foot on the way to the trash. But in times like these, we must consider it further. A rich source of fat that retains much of the deeply comforting flavors of the meat itself, what place has it in the trash can? That question, posed to British families during World Wars I and II, was answered with bread and dripping, a humbly named trick for warding off malnourishment.

Refrigerate your beef dripping and smear it over a piece of toast with a dash of salt and pepper for a hearty afternoon snack. Otherwise, use it in place of any standard oil you’d use in frying or sautéing for a note of beefy frugality.

article-image

Nothing Soup

It helps to think of this dish as a practice in prudence and a celebration of minimalism. When you have “nothing” in the cupboard, this is something to make.

With no single point of origin, there’s no right or wrong way to make Nothing Soup. The idea is to add any fat you have on-hand to a pot of boiling water before improvising with your wares—onions, garlic, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, and so on. Stock cubes are ever welcomed. Some recipes harken back to the folktale of "Stone Soup," while others play fast and loose with the term “nothing.” This rendition from The Guardian comes from the true story of a divorce lawyer stopping by the home of a newly divorced woman around lunchtime. She claimed to have nothing; they both ate well.

article-image

Potlikker

The liquid that's leftover after boiling kale, mustard, turnip, or collard greens is called “potlikker.” It’s as rich in vitamins, minerals, and flavor as it is wrought with historical significance.

The byproduct emerged as a centerpiece in the early days of American slavery, when enslaved Africans working in kitchens throughout the South made use of the leftover broth after cooking greens for white slaveowners. On its own, it was taken as a tonic or a soup. Otherwise, it was built into a stew with the addition of whatever alliums, greens, and pork was available. For the fortunate few, it could be enjoyed with cornbread.

As with many dishes born of enslavement, potlikker became an icon of Southern cooking, even making its way into the national spotlight with the great “Potlikker and Cornpone Debate of 1931.” The phenomenon pitted a traditionalist newspaper editor from Atlanta against a U.S. senator from Louisiana in a row over whether it was more appropriate to crumble cornbread into potlikker or to dunk it. In the midst of the Great Depression, the debate gripped the country for weeks. The dispute today remains unsettled.

If you’ve got some ham hock kicking around, this recipe serves nicely. For vegetarians, mushrooms stand in well for the umami of hearty cuts of ham in this alternative recipe. If cornbread is a possibility, crumble or dunk as you see fit.

article-image

Pouding Chômeur

It’s hard to imagine that a dessert with moist, cream-laden innards sitting atop a mantle of warm maple syrup, that's topped with candied walnuts and accompanied by a side of craft vanilla ice cream, was born of destitution. Lo and behold, pouding chômeur literally translates to “unemployed-person pudding.”

The original hard-times sweet came from Canadian factory workers in the 1930s who allegedly made use of brown sugar and stale bread. They melted the former into a sauce and ripped the latter into chunks before mixing them together and baking the blend into a sweet, crispy pudding. The taste of unemployment got a little sweeter during saison des sucres, when trees were tapped for maple syrup.

As with potlikker, pouding chômeur is now woven into the very fabric of its region’s cuisine, alongside poutine and oreilles de crisse. With its ascension to such a revered status, original recipes for true unemployment pudding have been supplanted by ornate ones demanding healthy employment, but poke around a bit and you can still find ones calling for simple ingredients.

article-image

Fried Onion Burgers

Don’t let the name fool you: This Depression-era burger isn’t entirely made of onions. It’s only half-onion.

After Ross Davis, the owner of El Reno's Hamburger Inn, began stretching his patties with handfuls of grilled onions in the late 1920s, the trend went statewide across Oklahoma. The tactic not only helped the Hamburger Inn and a host of other eateries make ends meet, but the subsequent caramelization of the onions added an alluring sweetness to their burgers. From desperate measure to “national treasure,” the bold ratio of the humble fried onion burger may change the content of your patties for good.

Making this at home requires a deft hand and will most certainly call for an open window or two. If you have butter, go ahead and toast those buns.

Any other dishes we missed? You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

Teddy Bears Are Taking Over Prince Edward Island in Canada

0
0

While locals shelter in place, stuffed toys are popping up by the hundreds on porches and windowsills.

No one has seen a wild bear on Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province, since the 1930s. Now, prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of islanders are hunting bears from the safety of their cars. To be clear, the bears in question are the cuddly, fuzzy variety—Ursus teddybearus, the kind that children take to bed for comfort and security. They’re popping up by the hundreds on front porches, mailboxes, lawn chairs, and windowsills.

On March 23, Kim Baglole, a resident of Summerside who was looking for some way to respond to the pandemic, created a Facebook group that encouraged islanders to track down the fuzzy creatures. The Prince Edward Island (PEI) Bear Hunt was born. Within a week, the group grew to 7,500 members, and it’s still growing. “I just wanted to start it for something fun,” Baglole says. “People want to be socially distant, but they’re used to coming together. We’re raised from birth to be cuddled and snuggled, to hold hands, to kiss and hug, to have get-togethers. All of a sudden, we have to stop all that.”

At the beginning, Baglole simply asked members to place teddy bears in their windows. “The goal is for people to get in the car, drive around, and count,” she says. “Make a game of it. It’s giving families something to do.” Immediately, bears began appearing around her neighborhood. Those who didn’t have bears used other stuffed animals—“stuffies,” as Baglole calls them.

article-image

Baglole herself couldn’t find a stuffy in the house anywhere, so, as is her nature, she improvised. “I had a little bumblebee costume I bought for my Shih Tzu that was too small for him. I stuffed that with his winter coat and hung it in the window.” Then her sister bought her a four-foot-tall bear that now moves between her patio and her car, bearing a pair of “glitzed-out bear-noculars.”

The inspiration for the PEI Bear Hunt came from friends in Baglole’s hometown of Gander, Newfoundland, who started a similar group a few days before, inspired by the children’s book We’re Going On a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury.

On Prince Edward Island, members were soon posting about the difference the hunt was making in their lives. “One lady said her son has been depressed,” Baglole says. “His birthday happened and he’s not allowed to have friends, so they took him bear hunting. He came home and put bears up in their windows, and he’s talking and laughing again.”

Baglole also tells the story of a woman whose grandchildren came for sleepovers every weekend, their beds filled with stuffed animals. After three weeks without a visit, Baglole says, “She put the stuffies in the window. Her grandbabies came by to see them, and they all ended up crying with excitement.”

article-image

Stories like these inspired group members to get even more creative. David Farrell dressed in a bear suit and posted videos and photos of himself reading to teddy bears, playing mini golf in the living room, cooking, cleaning, and dancing in the kitchen. Toby MacDonald created a character she calls Maximus Moose. She photographed her stuffed animal teaching math using the window as his white board, helping with the cooking, and sending messages of support to front-line workers.

Last summer, Baglole had to leave her part-time waitressing job to care full-time for her husband, Kevin. “He’s immunocompromised, so we stay home a lot,” says Baglole. “His lungs are working 35 to 45 percent from complications from multiple sclerosis. I keep him pretty ensconced in the house.”

With her own experiences in mind, she has turned the PEI Bear Hunt into a vehicle for supporting others. When she learned that a single parent had lost her income and was living in isolation with her 14-year-old daughter, Baglole says, “I took my $25, all I had left in my account. I reached out to my family, and I had $80. Then I reached out through the Facebook page.” Baglole ultimately sent her friend $300 for groceries, and had enough left over to help others.

Recently, she launched a new project: the Great Canadian Bear Hunt. It hasn’t taken off as quickly as the one on Prince Edward Island. But she says that when Canadians are ready for it, “the group is there waiting for them.”

The Triumphant Return of France’s ‘Forgotten Vegetables’

0
0

Chefs are helping hardy roots overcome a World War II stigma.

At the onset of the Occupation in 1940, Nazi troops seized about 80 percent of French food production, including about a quarter of its produce and half of its meat. They focused on choice products like potatoes, leaving the French with scraps. Before World War II, vegetables such as rutabaga and Jerusalem artichoke had been relegated to animal feed, but they soon became the centerpieces of French tables.

It’s no surprise that the French, who survived off of these hardy vegetables for nine years, could no longer bear the sight of them when rationing finally ended in 1949. Eggplants, zucchini, and potatoes returned to market stalls, but many other easy-to-grow root vegetables were palpably absent, so much so that when they finally started to appear on restaurant menus decades later, they were dubbed les légumes oubliés: the forgotten vegetables.

Fred Pouillot, owner of the Parisian culinary school Le Foodist, grew up in central France. To this day, he says, his 86-year-old mother “despises rutabagas.”

“She said that topinambours (Jerusalem artichokes) were the only thing she remembers eating during the war that was good,” he says. “But she has never cooked them again.”

article-image

Culinary historian Patrick Rambourg, a professor at Université Paris Diderot, echoes this experience. “In families where grandparents had lived through that difficult period, there was absolutely no question of them appearing on their tables,” he explains. “They just contributed to the idea of everything that was so horrible about the Occupation.”

The war was just the nail in the coffin for many of these vegetables. Jerusalem artichokes, in particular, were small, difficult to peel, and caused digestive distress when eaten in excess, as did kohlrabi, which was usually only consumed by France’s poorest.

Still others had been replaced by tastier stand-ins long before the Occupation. When the potato was first introduced to France in the 17th century, it was rumored to cause leprosy and the plague. Thanks to the marketing genius of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, potatoes later began to take the place that had been occupied by parsnips on French tables since the Middle Ages. As a result, the white winter root began its long fade into oblivion.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that many of these vegetables once again took root in the hearts and on the menus of the French. Loïc Martin, owner of wine bar Martin and restaurant Robert, claims their renaissance arrived with the “bistronomy” movement. The term, coined by French journalist and food critic Sébastien Démorand in 2004, refers to a trend away from fussy cuisine towards honest bistro food made with local products. Humble, old-fashioned root vegetables turned out to be “ingredients corresponding with this philosophy," he explains.

article-image

Compounded with the influence of Japanese and Anglo-Saxon chefs, “forgotten” vegetables soon began appearing with startling regularity on French tables. Liran Tal, the Israeli chef of Baba Marais, is a “big fan of forgotten vegetables.”

“My cuisine is based on local, seasonal ingredients combined with Mediterranean influences and cooking techniques from around the world,” he explains. “When it comes to forgotten vegetables, I like charring kohlrabi or rutabaga in a charcoal oven, slicing it thinly like a carpaccio, and serving it with olive oil and date vinegar.”

But part of this trend is also about a return, not just to root vegetables, but to the historical roots of French cuisine. Kristen Beddard, the American founder of the Kale Project, which sought to reintroduce kale to French farms and tables beginning in 2012, recalls how much easier it was to sell locals on kale’s history, rather than the health benefits that so captivated its American proponents. “At the end of the day, the French don’t fall for food fads,” she says.

article-image

This attitude, explains Rambourg, is part of a greater trend: one of finding the exotic, not from far-flung lands, but from home. “We hold onto something that’s linked to our own land, to our own agriculture,” he says. “It’s reassuring to eat something like that, because the global environment, in recent history, is not reassuring.”

This culinary nostalgia is far from a uniquely French issue, according to Ken Albala, food historian and professor of history at the University of the Pacific. “My mother’s generation, who grew up in the Depression, ate just unspeakable things,” he says, citing lungs, which are now illegal to consume in the U.S. “She kind of looked at those with nostalgia but would never make them for the family,” he says. “Even though she didn’t leave the home to work, she used convenience foods. She was totally into modernity and technology and science and instant everything.” The generation that followed, he explains, “is exactly the opposite,” with their love for everything from sourdough to home-made charcuterie.

But Albala believes that the current subsistence cooking trend is approaching its end. “It’s been at least 15 years or so now that the do it yourself, craft, cook from home movement has been going,” he says. “Since the first economic downturn.” He believes that we are poised for another period of high-tech cooking, like the convenience foods of the 50s or the molecular gastronomy of the 90s. “Once this is all over and the economy is back, I think people are going to get tired of the do-it-yourself again,” he muses.

article-image

In France, the pendulum will likely swing as well, but perhaps not so violently. As is often the case in France, trends are more subtle and tend to leave their mark for longer than in the U.S. “Consumers have found their way back to the farm,” says Martin. He doesn’t think they will leave that behind so easily. And after all, despite being back on the culinary landscape for a few years, Jerusalem artichokes and rutabagas are still only eaten occasionally, Rambourg explains. “They aren’t common vegetables.”

“As far as Paris is concerned, I personally find that the offer at markets is very limited,” echoes Pouillot. “I can always find red beetroots, somewhat easily topinambours and parsnips, sometimes crosnes and salsify. Rarely original beets or cerfeuil tubéreux (turnip-rooted chervil), and never ficoide glaciale (common ice plant) or pourpier (purslane).”

But even if these vegetables remain uncommon, one thing is for certain: they have successfully been dissociated, if not in collective memory, at least in individual memory, from times of hardship.

“Maybe we needed to wait for the second or third generation,” remarks Rambourg. “We’re moving away from this history and this painful past of the Occupation. In time, you know. Not in our memories.”

A Photographer's Guide to Creating Portraits From a Distance

0
0

Visual artists are working from home—with help from FaceTime and Zoom.

Bảo Ngô’s photographs are both dreamy and forbidding. In a recent batch of images, a woman in red lounges by an empty pool, tilting her face towards a gloomy sky. There’s no one around to see her floor-length dress or her glamorous blue eyeshadow, which is as bright as the chlorinated water. This isn’t an average photoshoot: The images, which are slightly blurry, are screenshots from FaceTime, the Apple video chat app. This is photography in the time of the coronavirus.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic forced artists around the world to shelter in place, a small number of photographers have started conducting virtual photoshoots using programs such as FaceTime and Zoom. Every photographer has adapted differently. For Ngô, FaceTime photography is a way to preserve the ethos of her in-person work. “My work is very cinema-inspired, so I like to have interesting styling and interesting settings,” she says. “I like my photos to evoke a lot of emotion, and have it all feel like it’s part of a story.”

Ngô came up with the idea of a FaceTime photoshoot during a video chat with her sister, who had a color-changing lamp. “If I have decent lighting and a willing subject, there might still be a way to continue taking photographs,” she thought to herself. The story behind these poolside photos, taken in Los Angeles with assistance from her model, Matilda Sakamoto, and Sakomoto’s mother, feels symptomatic of the times. “It’s an eerie, almost apocalyptic story of a woman who is stuck in this environment she can’t leave,” Ngô says. “It’s just her trying to enjoy her time there.”

article-image

Normally, for high-budget photoshoots, Sakamoto says that a stylist, make-up artist, and photographer would prepare for the work behind closed doors, and the model would simply show up. But for this photoshoot, Ngô and Sakamoto were partners: The day before the session, Sakamoto wandered around the apartment complex where she and her mother are sheltering in place, taking photos of potential sets to send to Ngô. The building was deserted, save for a neighbor bringing in some groceries. Later, Sakamoto raided her closet and sent pictures of potential outfits and her eyeshadow palette to Ngô.

From her home in New York, Ngô looked through the pictures and picked out potential locations while styling Sakamoto’s clothes. Sakamoto served as her own makeup artist, opting for a heavy blue eyeshadow look to complement the reds and blues of the background. When it came time for the actual photo-taking, Sakamoto’s mother stepped in to help in lieu of a tripod, holding Sakamoto’s iPhone and listening to Ngô’s live, remote directing. “Shift the frame to the right, just a tiny bit,” Ngô told Sakamoto’s mother. Then, to Sakamoto herself, who was modeling without the cues of a shutter noise, “Lift your chin up. Turn your body to the side.”

“Besides the fact that you're listening to a phantom voice over the screen, it didn’t feel too crazy,” Sakamoto says. “I thought it was going to be a lot weirder than it was.”

article-image

The lighting and backdrop in a remote photoshoot relies heavily on the model’s current surroundings. After all the theaters in New York closed, Jenny Anderson, a Broadway photographer, started taking portraits from a distance. One of the first steps in her process is finding natural light in her subjects’ environments. “Look through your house and see if you can find any interesting light,” she instructs her subjects. Are there any abstract shadows around their home? Is the light pooling in from the window? Is it hitting the floor?

“Most people stand in front of the window, and I‘m like, ‘No, no, no. The light needs to be in front of you,” Anderson says. She doesn’t take her photos as digital screenshots—instead, she points her camera at her own computer screen. If you want to try this at home, Anderson goes on, make sure to turn off any lights that could interfere with the photos on the screen.

Anderson also advises taking many photographs to find the right shot. Some may show the moiré effect, which describes waves that sometimes appear on screens when a camera tries to capture an image of it. “I overshoot,” Anderson says. “If I don’t get the shot I don’t like, I just tell the subject, ‘Hold on for a second.’”

article-image

Shane Balkowitsch, a North Dakota-based wet plate photographer, also emphasizes the relationship with one’s subject. Recently, Balkowitsch shot a wet plate silhouette of a Zoom session in a long, 60-second exposure. It captured all of the movements of the model, Morgan Barbour, in a single image, from blinks to shallow breaths. “All of that is in those pictures,” Balkowitsch, who believes that even heartbeats are captured symbolically, says. “All that life is transferred from that person to that plate."

Remote photoshoots can restore some of the camaraderie of photography while softening the loneliness of quarantine. They depict people who are physically isolated but socially connected. This is why Ngô decided not to turn to self portraits while in social isolation. “That would still be me working alone,” she says.

Before Anderson takes photos of her subjects, she talks to them about how they’re processing the pandemic and the changing world. “Sometimes the conversations are longer than shooting,” Anderson says. They talk about their worries, their cities, their families, and the difficulty of sustaining creative work. These conversations bridge the distance, at least for a time. “I’m in their home. They’re walking me around their house and apartment,” Anderson says. “It’s one of the most intimate photoshoots, and we’re doing it through a computer.”

Preserve Your Quarantine Nature Walks with a DIY Herbarium

0
0

Pressed plants can be your journal of the pandemic.

Even in the era of COVID-19, Elaine Ayers is usually at the park by 7:00 a.m. When her goldendoodle, Franklin, has gotta go, he’s gotta go—“He's still a baby even though he's like a hundred pounds,” she says—and they head out for short walks several times a day in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown. She doesn’t see many people at the moment, but as they head home, she marvels at their leafy neighbors. Ayers, who teaches in the museum studies department at New York University, studies 18th- and 19th-century botanical specimens, but lately she has become especially attuned to their more contemporary counterparts—native plants thriving under an overpass, cherry blossoms painting the parks pink, weeds shoving up through the concrete. “When I go on these walks to take my dog out to pee, I'm really noticing what's around me kind of for the first time and I'm appreciating it more than I ever have,” she says.

A few weeks ago, with the realization that social distancing isn’t going away any time soon, and that she likely won’t teach her current crop of students in person again, Ayers was feeling “lonely and disconnected and sad, and in need of a little beauty.” She poked around her house for a notebook to write in. Most of them were locked in her office in New York, nearly 100 miles away, but she found a few well-loved ones, around a decade old and stuffed with pressed plants. At the time, she had been in the habit of making pressed specimens to commemorate big life events, from going to graduate school to weathering a breakup. Upon rediscovering her old specimens, she wondered if, in the midst of a pandemic, collecting and pressing plants might be a soothing exercise and a useful record of how people are interacting with nature.

article-image

Inspired by the 19th-century habit of sending pressed plants through the mail, Ayers launched the Quarantine Herbarium as a digital scrapbook of weeds, flowers, herbs, or leaves that people find, press, and photograph. So far, 20 participants from Philadelphia, California, England, and elsewhere have shared 50 specimens, and Ayers is expecting images of 30 more plants in the coming week.

Historically, botanical specimens were often collected, pressed, and mounted by women and indigenous people, who “don’t show up in the scientific record even though they were trading all of these specimens through the mail and customs houses,” Ayers says. Part of her project involves poking at the concepts of expertise and authority. Participants don’t need to have deep botanical knowledge. Anyone can press a plant.

article-image

Making an herbarium requires little more than pressure and time. Sandwich flowers or leaves between sheets of newspaper, blotting paper, or some other absorbent material, and then bury them beneath a stack of hefty books. Wait a week or so, until they’re dry to the touch, and then use tape or acid-free glue, such as Elmer’s, to affix them to acid-free paper. Jot down the species and where you found it—the park, your yard, or maybe even the corner of your living room (houseplants are fair game).

“Some plants are just easier to press than others,” Ayers says. “Things that are already dry tend to work well.” Grasses, ferns, and tree leaves qualify. Oak leaves, for instance, are hardy and hold their shape without disintegrating the way a delicate flower might. Some blooms, once squashed, don’t look like much, especially when their color fades. Ayers’s recent experiment with pressed dandelions wasn't a smash success. It “looks like a big, smushy, brown blob.” But that’s no reason not to try. “I don't think the end goal here should be to make like the most beautiful identifiable pressing,” she says. “It should be to enjoy the process and have a true account of what you're seeing. And if that ends up being a bunch of plants but don't press well, I think that's kind of fine.”

article-image

Herbaria are often snapshots of a moment in time, particularly when pressed specimens are still between old newspaper clippings. Researchers digitizing centuries-old examples can also get an idea of what lived where and how climate changes have affected plant populations. With enough entries and time, a quarantine herbarium could offer some similar insight, but in the meantime, a personal herbarium doubles as a calendar or a diary, a record of the way that millions of people’s lives have changed.

When interviewed for an Atlas Obscura story about how museums are preparing to collect ephemera that will help tell the story of COVID-19, Benjamin Filene, associate director for curatorial affairs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, suggested that people consider keeping a quarantine journal of their routines and how they’re making sense of a scary moment. Such a habit “could be a therapeutic thing of marking time in a moment when the days start to blur,” he said, and jog our memories later. Though it seems like this moment will drag on forever, it won’t. Eventually our recollections of it will start to fog up. “It’s easy, when you’re living through something, to forget how much will feel unfamiliar to you a year or two from now,” Filene said, “not to mention 10.” Some of us may want something to tether us to the feeling of this time.

Herbaria are a way of journaling with the help of nature. The first submissions might include the daffodils and bluebells of early spring. As the calendar changes, so will the species, an incidental record of how the months keep crawling along. Someday, the pressed and preserved plants will be a reminder of isolated days, and the little joys we’re all seeking.

During the Renaissance, Drinking Wine Was a Fight Against Physics

0
0

Successful sips were signs of nobility.

This isn’t a candy dish, or a cake stand. It’s a wine glass, circa 1600, from Venice, Italy.

If you attended a banquet at the house of an Italian lord, you’d be handed one of these, filled to the brim with red wine. You’d be expected to lift it by wrapping three fingers around the base, and raise it to your lips without spilling a drop. The whole process should look effortless.

Sound tough? The difficulty was the point. Courtiers were expected to embody the ideal of “sprezzatura,” a hard-to-translate word that combines the senses of elegance, sophistication, and nonchalance. In other words, you were supposed to be good at everything, without ever seeming to put any effort into it. What could be a better demonstration of sprezzatura than casually raising one of these sloshing, top-heavy goblets and taking a sip?

Even at the time, these bizarre glasses mystified visitors to Italy, such as the Englishman Richard Lassels, who wrote that “the Italians that love to drink leisurely, they have glasses that are almost as large and flat as silver plates, and almost as uneasy to drink out of.” But to those in the know, even subtle distinctions in how you held your glass could reveal your place in the social hierarchy. At least, that’s what the 17th-century artist Gerard de Lairesse implied in his best-selling manual for painters—he writes that a princess should be depicted “drawing warily and agreeably the little finger” from the glass, while her lady-in-waiting “fearful of spilling, holds the glass handily, yet less agreeably than the other.” The difference between royalty and mere gentility is the lift of a pinky.

article-image

These glasses were part of a cultural shift in dining that continues to shape how we eat. Until the 1500s, communal eating was the norm throughout Europe. Everyone, from princes to peasants, shared plates and glasses with their dining companions, and tucked in with their fingers. Etiquette manuals from the time advised readers to wipe their lips before sipping from the communal cup, and to avoid digging their hands too deep into the shared platter, lest they gross out their fellow diners.

But starting in the 1500s, Italian nobles began to lay out individual table settings for their guests. For the first time, each diner would be apportioned their own spoon, fork, knife, glass, and plate. This led to an abrupt shift in table manners. Suddenly, dining etiquette was less about common courtesy and more about demonstrating your sophistication. That’s where sprezzatura comes in.

In Renaissance Italy, dining was serious business. Nobles from different city-states cemented alliances by treating one another to lavish banquets, which required armies of specialized professionals to plan and prepare. During these feasts, courses were interspersed with live musical performances, and tables ornamented with massive, glittering sugar sculptures. The whole experience was a carefully orchestrated spectacle: the rich platters laid out on the credenza, the choreographed movement of plates in and out, the graceful lofting of each top-heavy glass.

article-image

The servers were largely nobility themselves, young aristocrats serving as “officers of the mouth.” One of most important was the trinciante, or master carver. He would lift the meat into the air on a fork and carve it up so dexterously that perfectly portioned slices landed on each eater’s plate. Trincianti carved everything, from whole roast boars to tiny game birds and individual eggs, and seasoned each bite with a mound of salt balanced on the tip of their blade.

Then there was the cupbearer, whose role was to pour the wine, mix it with water, and serve it up in the shallow glasses. He also held up a candle to the glass as the drinker took their first sip, lighting up the wine like a gleaming ruby. Indeed, the goblets were considered to be just a half-step away from precious stones themselves. They were hand-blown Venetian cristallo, the first truly transparent glass ever made. Cristallo was incredibly expensive, and sometimes sold for 100 times the price of normal glass. Part of the reason elites valued it so highly was the common superstition that it would shatter instantly on contact with poison.

Many aspects of the banquet ceremony—the ritualized tasting of the dishes, the laying out of dishes on the credenza, the illumination of the wine in the goblet—were designed to reduce the risk of poisoning. Aristocrats had good reason not to trust their dining companions, as attested by the lethal levels of arsenic discovered in the bones of such Renaissance luminaries as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano. Perfect manners, after all, are a performance, and who knows what that performance might conceal? Certainly, courtiers were not as transparent as their glasses.

One of Geology’s Great Mysteries May Actually Be Many Smaller Mysteries

0
0

The “Great Unconformity” is a big chunk of missing deep time.

Geology forms the context for many other fields, including archaeology, paleontology, climatology, and more, but that doesn’t stop this bedrock science from throwing a curveball here and there. In some outcrops around the world there’s a gap, a hint of time gone missing, a huge swath of geological data that should be there but isn’t.

It’s called the “Great Unconformity,” and it has long vexed geologists from Nevada to Scotland. Geology is often the study of layers, set one on top of each other for billions of years and compressed into sequences that provide geologists insight into how the Earth has evolved through the eons. Under the best circumstances, that sequence is more or less uninterrupted, but there can be gaps—sometimes big ones, like the Great Unconformity, which can be seen all over, from the Rockies to southern Africa to northern China. This gap spans one of the murkier periods in Earth’s history, before the Cambrian explosion, around 540 million years ago, when the diversity of life on Earth went wild.

Erosion is one natural process that wears layers away from the stack of geological deposits, but how so much was wiped out across such a wide range of places in one go has remained unknown. Even the unconformity isn't uniform, ranging in scale from over a billion years of missing time to a mere couple hundred million. In the Grand Canyon, the timeframe of the unconformity jumps multiple times along its length.

According to a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there’s evidence that this erosion didn’t all happen at once. There might have been many events involved—lots of little unconformities—the origins of which can be traced to about a billion years ago on the supercontinent Rodinia, a landmass three times as old as the supercontinent Pangea that broke up to form the world as we know it.

article-image

“This study suggests that major erosion happened long before the Cambrian explosion and was associated with either the assembly or the breakup of Rodinia,” says Rebecca Flowers, a geochronologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead author of the new study. “The Great Unconformity formed at different times and in different places and for different reasons.”

The unconformity has recently been associated with the theory of “Snowball Earth,” which posits that the planet froze over entirely around 700 million years ago, following Rodinia’s formation. The thought is that glaciation during the snowball years ground away rock all over the world, creating the gap in geological time. The Cambrian explosion followed, and can be seen clearly in the layers that eventually went down over the gap. Flowers’s recent work suggests that the unconformity her team analyzed, near Pike’s Peak in Colorado, was caused by erosion related to tectonic movement that preceded Snowball Earth.

The findings suggest that there may not have been one massive, synchronous erosion event like the Snowball Earth glaciers. Imagine you left a bunch of brownies unattended in the kitchen, and when you came back, half were gone. It would be hard to tell if there was one culprit, or a whole cast of sticky fingers.

Flowers’ team tested the rock near Pike’s Peak using thermochronology, an analysis that can show, on a radioactive level, when the stone had been very hot and when it had been very cold. The analysis suggests that the rock was pushed to the surface 717 million years ago at the latest—putting it on the surface and subject to erosion before the earliest age at which Snowball Earth may have started. And that’s when it started to wear away, before being covered again by more deposits, leaving the gap in between.

article-image

“You have the uplift of rock, and where you have the uplift of rock, you have a greater ability for forces like streams and water and ice to erode the surface, and transport rock away,” Flowers says. “When you expose the rock, you expose it to erosion.”

Though fieldwork is currently on pause due to COVID-19, the team’s next steps are to look at other North American examples of the geological discrepancy, including a famous outcrop in the bluffs of the Grand Canyon, to see if the rocks are telling different stories. In the meantime, Flowers says we should start reframing our geological vocabulary to accept some measure of uncertainty.

“The very term ‘Great Unconformity’ suggests it's a singular event,” she says. “If it's more complicated, I think it's important to develop a terminology that reflects that greater complexity.”


The Great Antarctic Escape

0
0

How Spanish scientists and soldiers made an epic journey home as the world locked down around them.

On March 11, the World Health Organization announced at a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, that the coronavirus outbreak had officially become a pandemic. A few days later, and over 8,000 miles away, the Spanish scientific research vessel Hespérides was blasting through 16-foot-high waves in the Drake Passage, the tempestuous waters between South America and Antarctica.

Its passengers, around three dozen scientists and military personnel, had been evacuated from two Spanish research bases in Antarctica—and they found themselves in a race against the imminent closure of the world. If they didn’t reach Argentina before its borders were shut and its flights were grounded, they risked being stranded in a far-flung harbor while a highly infectious virus stampeded across the planet.

While most of us had spent several weeks beginning to come to grips with the enormity of the COVID-19 crisis, those aboard the Hespérides were leaving the only continent on Earth not to be touched by it. Should they make it to shore, they were to be thrust into a world transformed, one that made their journey home to their families newly perilous. For many of them, the coronavirus itself was a greater source of fear than being inadvertently imprisoned at the icy ends of the Earth.

Their voyage would be an improvisational gauntlet, one in which every on-the-fly navigational decision could make the difference between success or failure, home or the unforgiving sea, staying healthy or risking bringing the virus home to their loved ones.


article-image

Shortly after the beginning of the new year, it was business as usual in the South Shetland Islands, a series of rocks 60 miles north of the Antarctic mainland. The archipelago’s Livingston Island was powdered in a typical sprinkling of diamond dust snow as temperatures danced just above freezing. Land-bound, spiraling sentinels of blue-tinged ice watched deeper-blue bergs drift by in the frigid waters.

Jordi Felipe Álvarez, head of Livingston’s Spanish research base, Juan Carlos I, arrived in mid-February. The base, crewed only in Antarctica’s summer months, was populated by a small crowd of scientists going about their day. “Everything was perfect. Everyone was in a good mood,” he says.

The same was true at Spain’s Gabriel de Castilla base on neighboring Deception Island. Carved with a cauldron-shaped scar, the result of a cataclysmic eruption 4,000 years ago, this isle—home to geothermally heated black sand beaches often filled with chinstrap penguins—provided a fantastic platform for all sorts of research.

article-image

Itahisa González Álvarez, a doctoral student in seismology at the University of Leeds, had arrived on Deception at the end of January. Her job was to monitor the seismic activity of the island’s active volcano. For a while, things proceeded normally.

But by late February, a worrying number of coronavirus infections had popped up in Europe. Messages of concern from people back home and a torrent of online articles about the coronavirus—not all of them reliable—made their way to the bases. “It seemed bad,” she says, “but of course we couldn't imagine how serious the situation would become.”

In early-March, flights were being grounded with increasing frequency. Europe had become a locus for the pandemic, as Italy went a nationwide lockdown and 10 other European countries began closing their borders. It was all but inevitable that Spain would join them.

A visceral sense of dread washed over both bases. As many fretted over the safety of their friends and families, and as the Spanish government began plotting its next move, the scientists and military staff began to wonder if they would be stranded in Antarctica indefinitely. Those in other state-run Antarctic research bases were toying with the idea of remaining on the white continent throughout the increasingly cold months to come, while others were hoping to be sped to safety by ad hoc repatriation efforts.

article-image

Ushuaia, a port in southern Argentina, is a common transit point for Antarctic researchers, but the country was also thinking of closing its own borders. Fearing the worst, the Spanish authorities decided to send Hespérides, a Spanish Navy–operated scientific research vessel docked in Chile, to Antarctica and get the staff from both bases to Argentina before it was too late. If they would be trapped, better there than across Drake Passage.

The date for the ship’s arrival kept being pushed up—from March 19 to March 16. Then, on March 12, the bases found out it would arrive in just two days. Normally, staff would have a week to shut everything down and shield all the scientific equipment and living quarters from the harsh Antarctic winter. This time, they had a single day. González Álvarez and her colleagues ran around Deception’s volcanic cauldron, retrieving their seismic monitoring equipment in violent wind. Others scrambled to pack up not just their own equipment, but all their food, medicine, and trash, too.

On Livingston, the base physician was asked to prime everyone for a return to a now-coronavirus-controlled world. Felipe Álvarez, a biologist by training, knew the risks of infection and understood how to safely wear and remove face masks and gloves. Others on the base were less up to speed, so they were given a crash course in biosafety and malevolent microbiology. Felipe Álvarez recalls them being told: “You cannot see it, you cannot feel it, but it can affect you in a hard way.” It was like preparing to land on another planet.

article-image

Hespérides arrived as scheduled, collected the staff from both bases, and began charging back toward Ushuaia the next day. The voyage took three days, most of it through a tempest angrily juggled the boat like a cork. “Regular meals in the cantina were even suspended on the second day, as it was essentially impossible to eat normally,” says González Álvarez.

They arrived, unharmed, in Ushuaia, only to find they were too late. The borders had closed and all outgoing flights from Argentina had been suspended. They were asked to remain on the ship. COVID-19 cases had appeared in Chile even before the boat had left for Antarctica, so the Argentinian authorities didn’t want to risk anyone potentially infected onboard entering the country. “We were treated like we were completely dangerous,” says Felipe Álvarez.

The two remaining options were grim: take Hespérides across the Atlantic—a month-long voyage—or head to Brazil. The country hadn’t yet completely shut down, and flights were still leaving São Paolo, but it would take two weeks to get there.

article-image

Unsure they would make it to Brazil before it, too, entered lockdown, those on board, like those of us stuck at home, began to think of ways to keep everyone’s spirits up. There were guided tours of the ship and yoga classes. “I taught English three times a week,” says González Álvarez. “A few people offered to cook a huge paella for everyone on a Sunday,” and they voted on which movies to watch each night.

During their sprint to Brazil, whispers began of a Hail Mary: The Spanish government was talking to Uruguay—the nation sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil—to help repatriate Spanish citizens. The rescue plan wasn’t set, but they headed to the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, on March 25, and had to wait for two days in the waters just outside its harbor.

That day, they found out the plan was official a go: On March 28, a passenger jet would fly them all to Madrid. The collective mood had noticeably lifted, and the day before they had a barbecue on the deck. But on the morning of the flight, anxieties ran high again. The last thing everyone did, says Felipe Álvarez, was shake hands. After that, they were told, the rule was six feet.

article-image

By that time the scientists had spent at least 45 days away from civilization. The military personnel had been in Antarctica for three months. And while everyone was keen to get home, they were deeply anxious that they would contract COVID-19 en route and bring it home to their loved ones. Some considered staying behind on the ship, but at the polite-but-firm insistence of the Spanish Navy, “All 37 of us left,” says Felipe Álvarez.

They were handed masks, gloves, and small bottles of hand sanitizer. Loaded on two buses, the police then sped them to the airport in a motorcade. “It was like you’d see in the movies,” says Felipe Álvarez. “We felt more like prisoners moving from one cell to another.”

Airport security was less intense than usual, with strange-looking electronic devices allowed to stay in people’s bags. The flight, run by the airline Iberia, was packed: Other European citizens stuck in Montevideo were allowed to board as well. No seats were empty. Those without proper masks did what they could. Some wore the diving masks they had brought on vacation.

article-image

Trying not to touch anything on a 12-hour flight was a thoroughly unnerving experience. “Going to the bathroom was silly,” says Felipe Álvarez. He went only twice, having decided it was safer to stay seated. Food and drinks were served. People ate. Nerves frayed. “You had this kind of freaky situation where you didn’t know how to act,” he says.

The flight landed on March 29, and everyone went their separate ways.

Felipe Álvarez drove home to Barcelona. He saw a few dozen cars on the roads at most. “There were rabbits on the highway,” he recalls. When he arrived, the city’s normally cacophonous streets were all but deserted. “It was like every single movie we watched since we were teenagers about the zombie apocalypse.”

He got to his apartment, greeted his exhilarated family from behind the door, and immediately decontaminated himself in the shower. He put his luggage out on the terrace to be sterilized by the Mediterranean sun for a week. He quickly adjusted to life back home while embracing a new challenge: helping his wife home-school their young daughters who, under Spain’s lockdown rules, weren’t allowed outside at all.

article-image

González Álvarez didn’t have much time to think when she disembarked in Madrid. She had to run to another terminal to make a connecting flight to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa, where she lives. Just four other passengers were on that flight with her. “It felt really sad and weird to not be able to properly say goodbye to everyone after all we had gone through,” she says. Upon landing, her temperature was checked by Red Cross staff before she was allowed to leave the airport.

She didn’t go to her family right away. Her parents, her partner, and his mother all have underlying conditions that put them in a high-risk category for COVID-19. Not wanting to risk infecting them, she spent the first two weeks in Tenerife alone, at a friend’s house. Even after rejoined her partner, her isolation wasn’t dissimilar from her Antarctic experience—and the experience that many of us have become strangely familiar with. “The only contact I have with other people is through screens,” she says.

But it’s more extreme in some ways than Antarctica. On Deception Island, she had the sight of penguins and sea lions lounging about outside. She is nostalgic for that, just as she is nostalgic for the time when she simply could go for a walk in her neighborhood.

“It feels a bit strange,” she says. “The world we came back to is not the same we left.”

Sold: A 19th-Century 'Chocolate Museum' in a Box

0
0

It's now part of a collection of edible books.

Just before Easter, with its bevy of chocolate bunnies, a California bookseller offered for sale a rare box of Parisian chocolate that would have outraged any kid rummaging through their basket. Not your typical package of bonbons, this was instead what antiquarian bookseller Ben Kinmont calls a “chocolate museum in a box,” distributed to schools in the late 19th century to teach children about the origins of French chocolate.

Designed by the famous French company Chocolat Menier in 1889, Kinmont points out that that the box resembles a wunderkammer, a small cabinet of natural curiosities popular in the 17th century. Made of mahogany and bearing an embossed brass plaque, the inside of the upper lid is decorated with a colorful lithograph depicting Menier’s plantation in Nicaragua and its chocolate factory in France.

article-image

Inside, there are 10 individual compartments. Seven store the remains of various cacao beans from different regions, one bears traces of sugar, and one holds three tiny glass vials which once contained cocoa butter, vanilla, and an unknown third substance. “The one item which is missing, not surprisingly,” says Kinmont, “was at the top center square area. There was originally a miniature chocolate bar. I can imagine somebody just ate that.”

As Cadbury is to England and Hershey’s to America, so was Menier to France. It was originally founded in Paris as a pharmaceutical company in 1816 by Jean-Antoine Brutus Menier, who may have used chocolate to coat bitter pills. Chocolate was known to be a stimulant, and much like coffee, people argued over its health properties, leaving distribution mainly to apothecaries.

But within the first few decades of the 19th century, large-scale manufacturing of the sweet stuff helped to popularize it. Menier built his own factory town in Noisiel, France, and began issuing bars of chocolate wrapped in golden yellow paper in 1836. By 1893, when they published a booklet to coincide with their appearance at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Menier claimed to be the largest chocolate factory in the world, with its own plantations, sugar refineries, steamships, railroads, and 2,000 employees. Though the company was acquired by Nestlé in 1988, Menier-branded cooking and drinking chocolate is still sold today.

article-image

It might seem that by sending their boîte de chocolats to schools around the country, Menier was using, if not pioneering, the marketing tactic of targeting the youngest consumers in order to peddle sugar to them—going “right to the source,” as Kinmont puts it. But, he adds, they also took care to present what the raw ingredients looked like, how they smelled, and where harvesting happened. It was this pedagogic aspect that appealed to him when he first came across it. “I’ve never seen another one of the Menier boxes,” Kinmont says, although once he began researching it, he did find two 20th-century American versions, both from the Baker Chocolate Company.

According to Kinmont, the motivation for making these objects and attempting to insert them into the public school curriculum may have had something to do with the increasing industrialization of foodstuffs. Companies such as Menier sought out consumers looking for "an authentic product, one that wasn’t adulterated in some way,” he says, adding, “I think a lot of their outreach to the public was trying to not only increase their market but also just to secure it.”

article-image

Menier had an impressive branding team in the 1890s. Apart from the boxes sent to schools, they produced an iconic advertising poster featuring a little girl writing on a wall with a chocolate bar, imagery that was then transferred to all manner of promotional merchandise. At the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889, Menier dominated with an Arc de Triomphe crafted from 250,000 of its trademark chocolate bars. On that occasion, they also published an illustrated company history, which Kinmont sold with the mini museum for a total of $5,500.

The buyer, Dr. Christopher Fletcher, keeper of special collections at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, says the Menier material caught his attention, because “we have been building up an interesting collection of ‘edible’ books.” A recent acquisition was a volume by the artist Ben Denzer, with pages made out of slices of American cheese. Both may be making an appearance at an upcoming exhibition “looking at the haptic qualities of books,” he says—that is, books with textural elements that go beyond print on a page. But while the chocolate museum in a box may be interesting to touch, nothing inside it likely tastes good any longer.

Around the Globe, Face Masks Are a Canvas for Creativity

0
0

Personal protective equipment can be a source of personal expression.

Isaías Huerta of Puebla, Mexico, loves wrestling so much that when he retired from his days as lucha libre wrestler El Gato Gris (The Gray Cat), he turned to making costumes for his fellow fighters. According to EFE, after Huerta closed his shop due to the COVID-19 health emergency, he shifted once again—to face masks with lucha libre designs for his family. Soon, fellow luchadors themselves were asking Huerta to make them masks so they could stay in character during the quarantine. Now Huerta sells his colorful gear to the public, including commissions from fans, as Mexico made it mandatory for millions to wear face masks.

Hiding one’s identity with a mask has long been the province of superheroes, bank robbers, and trick-or-treaters. But no longer, as the pandemic has driven millions to don them by law or choice. It was perhaps inevitable that people would choose to reveal a hint of themselves even as they conceal. Some reflect a connection to work, while others honor sports teams or politics. Still more go for humor, creativity, or just plain style.

Atlas Obscura has gathered some images of face masks around the world that are vibrant, inventive, and expressive. Being faceless, it turns out, doesn’t mean having to hide one's personality.

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

How to Quarantine in a Ghost Town

0
0

Cerro Gordo has been abandoned since 1957. Now its owner is social distancing there by himself.

On March 18, 2020, Brent Underwood arrived in the California ghost town of Cerro Gordo after driving 22 hours from Austin, Texas. The plan was to stay a few days, maybe a week, pinch hitting while the town’s usual caretaker left to visit his wife.

Then came the snow, as if sent from above to enforce social-distancing guidelines.

Today, some six weeks later, Underwood is still in Cerro Gordo—quarantined, snowed-in, and all by his lonesome. Without running water, he’s getting by on melted snow; without fresh food, a dwindling supply of canned goods and frozen chicken tenders; and without company, visits from a local bobcat and, perhaps, the occasional ghost.

It’s not exactly what Underwood had in mind when he purchased the town, with a friend, in 2018 for $1.4 million. “I kind of have this thing for history and hospitality,” says Underwood, who also owns an Austin hostel converted from a 19th-century mansion. For someone in that business, Cerro Gordo presented the ultimate, if not the easiest, opportunity: 22 buildings waiting to be made habitable, stark mountainous panoramas, and a literal bloodstain bearing witness to the town’s violent past as a mining community. Underwood recalls his first drive into the ghost town, along the final seven miles of winding dirt road. “My jaw dropped the entire time,” he says, as each turn revealed a new rock formation. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” he thought to himself. After some fixing up, it would make a dream vacation destination. But, as we know, quarantine is not vacation.

article-image

Founded in 1865 by Mexican prospector Pablo Flores, Cerro Gordo enjoyed a brief but fruitful run as a silver-mining powerhouse. Indeed, by the end of 1869, tons of silver bullion had been transported from Cerro Gordo to Los Angeles, about 200 miles south. “What Los Angeles is, is mainly due to” Cerro Gordo, wrote The Los Angeles News that same year. The mining town, the paper continued, is “the silver cord that binds our present existence. Should it be uncomfortably severed, we would inevitably collapse.

By its peak in the mid-1870s, the once-tiny village’s population had ballooned to nearly 5,000. But the ore bodies gradually “pinched out,” says Roger Vargo, coauthor (with his wife Cecile) of a book about the town, and the price of silver began to fall in 1877. By the 1880s, Cerro Gordo was all but abandoned, home to about 30 or 40 people. The town underwent a short-lived revival in the early 20th century, as zinc became more valuable and new technology made it more efficient to mine, but Cerro Gordo never again hosted more than a few hundred residents. The town was deserted for good in 1957, when its then-owner passed away.

article-image

Since then, it’s been visited only by caretakers, subsequent owners, and curious explorers such as the Vargos. Underwood and his friend learned of it from a Los Angeles real estate listing, and acquired the town despite being outbid. Their vision for Cerro Gordo aligned best with that of the prior owner, they were told.

And to be sure, Underwood doesn’t seem even slightly aggrieved by his current predicament. “Every day that I’m up here, I fall more in love with it,” he says. “I just get more excited about it the more time I spend up here.” Roger Vargo, who’s been in touch with Underwood throughout the quarantine, went further: “He’s having the time of his life,” says the town historian.

article-image

As of last week, Underwood estimated that he had about a week’s worth of food left on hand—frozen burgers, pasta, rice, and canned goods, some of which expired in 2015. He hasn’t seen a fruit or vegetable, he says, since March. Most of the food had been stocked by the caretaker, Robert Desmarais, and some by Underwood himself, though he was also handed a “lifeline” from an unexpected corner. “In the old saloon,” he says, “I went in the back kitchen, and there’s this huge cupboard that I never looked in.” Also in that saloon, in the card room, is a “bullet hole in the wall and a bloodstain right underneath it,” evidence of what Underwood calls “a pretty well-established card game gone awry … ” (Visitors have reported their cameras jamming up, inexplicably, in the room.) One wonders who stocked that cupboard.

article-image

Still, Underwood doesn’t sound concerned about his food situation. Though he can’t drive to buy groceries on account of the snow, he says he can walk four dry miles to meet a friendly courier from Lone Pine, the nearest town (more than 20 miles away). He’s also “raiding the pantry of each cabin one by one,” sometimes stumbling upon the odd box of pasta. “I’m not terrified of the prospect of being here for another week, as far as rations go,” he says. “I’m trying to just enjoy the time.”

To that end, he’s been passing the days by continuing his day job remotely (as a marketing and hospitality entrepreneur), applying restorative touch-ups to these buildings he hopes to one day open to tourists, taking photographs of the starry night skies, and conferring with Reddit’s animal tracks community to identify the fresh prints he finds in the snow. (So far, a bobcat, a coyote, some mice—and a potential Yeti or bear.) He’s also stumbled upon some gems that bring the desolate town’s history vividly to life. In the town’s old general store, Underwood found a briefcase that makes up a miner’s partial biography, stuffed with bank statements from the 1910s, documents from lawsuits, divorce papers, and love letters, among other personal effects.

article-image

It’s the kind of find that can only burnish the town’s already notorious reputation for another commodity: ghosts. Though Underwood was a “skeptic” upon first hearing the stories, his position has since shifted to something closer to agnostic. His most arresting experience with potential paranormal activity came before the quarantine, during a visit several months ago. While watching the sunset from a cliff, Underwood saw movement in the town’s bunkhouse: curtains opening and closing, someone looking out the window. He wasn’t too concerned because he knew that contractors had recently been working on the property, but he then learned that they’d been gone for weeks. So the next day, Underwood—who has the only key—entered the bunkhouse, turned off all the lights, closed all the blinds, and padlocked it tight. When he returned to the cliff to watch the sunset, the lights were on once again.

Ultimately, however—with the exception of the bunkhouse, which he now tries to avoid—Underwood is as comfortable with the spirits as he is with his dwindling pantry: If the ghosts do exist, he just wants to “respect their space.” He’s sure they’ll return the favor.

article-image

And besides, what’s a ghost town without a few creaks and flickers? For Underwood, they don’t signal death so much as lives lived. “Even if there was another 300 acres in the mountains,” he says, Cerro Gordo couldn’t be replicated. The site wouldn’t “have the road that 5,000 different miners walked up and down.”

There’s also a clarifying, therapeutic effect to feeling that history all around you, he adds. “Every day, I walk by a grave that—there’s people in there that literally died from the Spanish influenza,” he says. “This town was impacted by that pandemic.” It brings to his mind the phrase memento mori, Latin for “Remember your death.” Being alone in Cerro Gordo, at this point in time, is “the ultimate memento mori,” he says. “It forces you to think about what’s important and what’s not.”

It's the Perfect Time to Record Your Family's History. Here's How.

0
0

Invite your relatives to share great stories with these tips from oral historians.

Sheltering in place with your family means more opportunities to share meals, play games, and possibly drive each other a little batty. The extra hours of togetherness are also a good opportunity to collect oral histories. Whether you want to dive into family lore or record a snapshot of life in the era of COVID-19, there are several ways to set yourself up for sympathetic listening and enthusiastic sharing on all sides.

Atlas Obscura talked to four oral history project coordinators in New York City—an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in America—about how to have an engaging, respectful conversation about the past and present, and celebrate connections during a difficult time.

Gather your supplies

You’ll probably want to record the conversation, but there’s no need to spring for fancy equipment, says Natalie Milbrodt, the director of the Queens Memory Project; the microphone in your smartphone should work just fine. Even so, it’s a good idea to keep a second device, such as a simple audio recorder, recording at the same time in case your phone battery dies, or a long audio file eats up all the available storage space. You can also record directly into computer programs such as Audacity or GarageBand. Transom, a hub for public radio producers, has plenty of pointers for recording clean audio.

Grab some props to use as prompts

If you’re inviting someone to wander far back into their past, it might help to have some photos to jog their memory. A snapshot can parachute them back in time; it may make it easier for a person to recall how a given moment sounded, smelled, or felt. Photos can be helpful for the interviewer, too. “A kid looking at a childhood photo of a grandparent can see, ‘Oh, you were a kid, too,’” says Meral Agish, the community coordinator at the Queens Memory project, which is currently collecting oral histories about life in the time of COVID-19. Talking about games or time at school establishes common ground between kids and grandparents from the get-go.

article-image

Brainstorm open-ended questions

With any oral history, you want as many details as possible. “That’s where the interesting stories are, in those details, whether it’s something that happened 60 years ago or yesterday,” Milbrodt says. If you’re talking about COIVD-19, for instance, “What you want to be doing as an interviewer is getting past general statements, like, “That’s when everybody took care of each other, and things were different,’” Milbrodt says. “What you want is a specific example.” The key to arriving at one is asking questions that invite the interviewee to roam a little in their answers.

Virginia Marshall, who produces the Borrowed podcast for the Brooklyn Public Library and is coordinating the library’s COVID-19 oral history effort, often channels the types of broad, non-judgmental questions her mother—a primary care doctor—asks patients. If someone mentioned experiencing illness, for instance, an open-ended question might be something along the lines of, “What was that like?” To learn more about how communities are reacting to the pandemic, she might ask something such as, “How has your neighborhood changed?” Asking about a person’s daily routine, for example at home or work, also gives them the chance to wander around narrative cul-de-sacs full of details. When asking interviewees about their life history, Agish says, “I might start with, ‘Tell me about your earliest memory.’” The question is specific, but open, and leaves space for a variety of answers.

Help the interviewee prepare

Before you sit down and start asking questions, you’ll want to share a preview of the topics you’re interested in. “They shouldn’t be thinking about it for the first time after you hit record,” Milbrodt says. “They should be raring to go.”

Remembering doesn’t happen all at once: Interviewees often recall things in bursts, sometimes days after they start turning a memory over in their minds, Milbrodt adds. That’s why the Queens Memory Project team often sends out pre-interview questionnaires, which prompt people to start thinking about the chronology of their life, and firm up the dates of major events. “Getting all those things straight, ahead of time, will help get them to the specific memories that are more interesting to hear about,” Milbrodt says. “It’s about peeling that onion and getting back to those places in their mind.”

It’s also helpful to agree on some ground rules. For the interviewer, that might include sentiments such as, “I won’t interject, and I will create the space for you to share your thoughts,” says Taina Evans, the regional librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library who oversees the “Our Streets, Our Stories” project, the institution’s ongoing oral history effort. That kind of pledge can help the interviewee relax and feel comfortable.

article-image

Find a quiet space—in person, or digitally

When it’s time to chat, you’ll want to carve out some peaceful time, and hush whatever distractions you can. Turning off the air conditioner and corralling loud pets into another room will help both interviewer and interviewee focus on the task at hand and boost the quality of the audio recording. In a time when houses are busy and full, you’ll need to be sensitive to fatigue or interruptions, Agish adds. Either person might be tired from staring at screens, she says, or “dealing with the three-year old knocking on the door, desperate to do something with you.”

If you’re chatting in person, Agish suggests gathering around the corner of a table. The table is a good place to perch a recorder, and it doesn’t invite the same kind of slouching that a couch might, Agish says, which can make it harder for people to project their voices. Digital chats can work well, too—it’s easy enough to record via Skype, Zoom, or other face-to-face chat services, and the “mute” function help interviewers refrain from chiming in with “yeahs” and “uh-huhs,” which can interrupt the speaker’s train of thought or cause distractions for the listener. (At the same time, if the topic of conversation is difficult, an interviewer may offer some words of recognition, as a gesture of support.)

Break long interviews up into manageable chunks

“If you interview someone for less than an hour, you’re not getting great detail of information,” Milbrodt says. “If it’s more than two hours, you’re exhausting them.” An interview that spans someone’s entire life history would benefit from being broken up into chunks. Milbrodt is currently doing a life history interview with her father, and they’re on their fifth session (the first chat, for instance, only covered the history of the family before he entered the picture).

Whether the chat is a one-off or part of a series, once it winds down, you may want to help ease the interviewee back into talking about something else—particularly if the topic was emotionally raw. Marshall recently did an digital oral history with her cousin, a doctor at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn who has been treating people with COVID-19. After the cousin shared her story, Marshall asked her what she was planning to have for dinner. It wasn’t germane to the interview—Marshall had already turned the recorder off—but about supporting someone who had taken the time to talk about something stressful while her life was in flux. An oral history isn’t about extracting a story—it’s about strengthening bonds, and appreciating people who take the time to share their view of the world.

Viewing all 11437 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images