The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Poundbury may not have a “pedestrian zone,” but in a real sense the entire town is a pedestrian zone. It’s up to the drivers to adjust to the built realm, not vice versa, for Poundbury calms traffic with a vengeance. In fact, there have yet to be any accidents, Conibear told me. “The street layout is deliberately chaotic,” he said. “There are blind bends, no signage, not even stop signs. We also use the ‘seventy-meter event’ rule—that is, every seventy meters something happens to slow the cars down.”

  • • •

  Poundbury is less than half-finished, with a current population of about 2,000 residents. Forty percent are retirees, typical for this area since southwest England is Britain’s Arizona. Flats and small houses sell for £100,000 to £200,000 ($160,000 to $320,000), while large freestanding houses command in excess of £500,000 ($800,000). These are high prices in a region where the median gross annual pay is £25,000 ($40,000).

  Yet Poundbury is not a middle-class ghetto: more than a third of the dwellings qualify as affordable housing. The majority is social housing, owned by charitable trusts and rented to low-income tenants, but there is also shared-equity housing, which allows qualifying buyers to purchase a share in a home, even if they cannot afford a mortgage on the full market value. What is unusual in Poundbury is that the affordable housing is “pepper potted”—that is, scattered, and it is similar in appearance to its neighbors. It’s hard to get a complete picture of how well this works during a brief visit, although by all accounts, there is little social mixing between the two groups.

  Another innovation at Poundbury is the embrace of mixed use, which is more extensive here than in most planned communities I’ve visited. Not only are the ground floors of many residential and office buildings devoted to commercial uses such as shops and cafés, there are medical clinics, professional offices for lawyers and accountants, garden centers, veterinarians, travel agents, and even a funeral home. There is also light industry: a large shed-like building at the bottom of a village green is a chocolate factory; a breakfast cereal manufacturing plant stands across the street from elegant townhouses; a low brick building with arched windows was until recently occupied by an electronics factory. The key to introducing industrial buildings on residential streets, says Conibear, is to make sure that they are built before the housing; residents accept a fait accompli, but they strongly resist the introduction of nonresidential uses after the fact. In all, Poundbury currently has an impressive 136 businesses generating 1,600 jobs—nearly one per resident.

  • • •

  I asked my landlady what her neighbors thought about Poundbury. “Not everyone likes it,” she said. “Some people think it looks like a movie set.” Although Poundbury is a commercial project—the duchy is emphatically not a charity—the execution is of high quality: tight graphic control over signage, crunchy pea gravel instead of expanses of bare asphalt, granite blocks not paint stripes to denote parking stalls. Walking about town, I am also struck by what is missing: intrusive commercial signs, gimcrack construction, and the plastic vulgarity that pervades even the historic center of Dorchester. I suppose to some that makes it a movie set. But the allusion is surely also prompted by the revivalist styles of the architecture, the very thing that sets off the critics.

  In an article in Building Design in which he excoriated the traditional appearance of the architecture, Crispin Kelly asked: “If Poundbury’s 1759 date stamp is not to our taste, do we have better pattern books of our own to promote to the punters … ?” I think the date stamp is more like 1940, but it’s a good question. What would be a modernist pattern book?

  The stylistic free-for-all that has produced Dubai and Doha is surely not the answer. On the strength of 1920s-era neighborhoods I’ve seen in Oslo and Tel Aviv, I can almost imagine an International Style–revival Poundbury, although, as Los Angeles’s Getty Center decisively shows, white walls and pipe railings only get you so far. Individual modernist buildings have always looked good in the natural landscape—Fallingwater, the Glass House, the Sydney Opera House—or when surrounded by traditional buildings—think of Paris’s Pompidou Centre, Lloyd’s of London, the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. But modernism has been notably deficient in creating an urban fabric. The modernist palette is simply too restricted—or perhaps not restricted enough. There is either too much repetition or too much variety, too much standardization or too little.

  It seems to me that Poundbury could quite happily absorb a wider stylistic range, although neither Krier nor any of the architects I spoke to mentioned this possibility. But for the moment the imposition of an architectural code that favors tradition is understandable. The reason for “leaning on the past” is not nostalgia or lack of imagination but rather the recognition that the established vernacular offers the best chance for creating the nuanced variety and shadings of difference that produce a coherent urban environment and a recognizable sense of place.

  Harper’s Magazine

  FINALIST—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  “Brave, powerful, painfully honest,” said the National Magazine Award judges about “Sliver of Sky,” Barry Lopez’s account of the sexual abuse he suffered as a boy. “Eschewing self-pity or sentimentality,” the judges continued, “Lopez describes how these experiences marked his life and how he finally made an uneasy peace with his past.” Well known to readers for his essays, short stories, and books, Lopez has been described as “arguably the nation’s premier nature writer” by the San Francisco Chronicle. His book Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape won the National Book Award in 1986. Founded in 1850, Harper’s is the oldest general-interest magazine in the country. It has won twenty-one National Magazine Awards, including awards in recent years for fiction, photography, and reporting.

  Barry Lopez

  Sliver of Sky

  One day in the fall of 1938, a man named Harry Shier entered the operating room of a Toronto hospital and began an appendectomy procedure on a prepubescent boy. He was not a trained surgeon; he nearly botched the operation, and the boy’s parents reacted angrily. Suspicions about Shier’s medical credentials had already surfaced among operating-room nurses, and the hospital, aware of other complaints related to Shier’s groin-area operations on young boys, opened a formal investigation. By the time the hospital board determined that both his medical degree, from a European university, and his European letters of reference were fraudulent, Harry Shier had departed for the United States.

  A few years later, a police officer in Denver caught Shier raping a boy in the front seat of his automobile. Shier spent a year in prison and then slipped out of Colorado. In the late 1940s, he surfaced in North Hollywood, California, as the director of a sanitarium where he supervised the treatment of people with addictions, primarily alcoholics. In the summer of 1952, at the age of seven, I was introduced to him when I visited the sanitarium with my mother.

  At the time, I lived with her and my younger brother in nearby Reseda, a town in the San Fernando Valley. My parents had recently divorced, and my father had moved across the country to Florida. To support the three of us, my mother had taken a day job teaching home economics at a junior high school in the city of San Fernando and also a job teaching dressmaking two evenings a week at Pierce Junior College in Woodland Hills, on the far western edge of the Valley.

  Early that summer, my mother had somewhat reluctantly agreed to take in a houseguest, her first cousin Evelyn Carrothers. Evelyn, who was my mother’s age, lived an hour away in Long Beach and was struggling with a drinking problem. Her marriage was also in trouble. Mother couldn’t accommodate Evelyn for long in our one-bedroom house, so she began inquiring among her friends about other arrangements. People advised her to call Alcoholics Anonymous. Someone in the organization’s Los Angeles office suggested that she contact the North Hollywood Lodge and Sanitarium.

  One morning, Mother drove us all to the facility at 12003 Riverside Drive, known then around the Valley, I would later learn, as “Shier’s dryer.” In
those years, Shier was renowned as someone who could “cure” alcoholism. He was also able to relate sympathetically to the families of alcoholics. When we arrived at the clinic, Mother introduced my four-year-old brother and me to “Dr.” Shier. We shook hands with him, and he escorted the two of us to the sanitarium’s kitchen, where we each selected a fresh doughnut from an array laid out on trays for the patients—frosted, sugared, glazed, covered with sprinkles. A nice man. I remember the building’s corridors reeked that morning of something other than disinfectant. Paraldehyde, I was later informed, which Shier used liberally to sedate his patients.

  Shortly after Evelyn had, in Shier’s estimation, recovered enough to return to Long Beach—she would begin drinking again and, a year later, would return to his facility—he started dropping by our home in Reseda. He had gotten to know something of Mother’s marital and financial situation from Evelyn, and during one of his early visits he told Mother that he was concerned: her income was not, in his view, commensurate with her capabilities. He said he might be able to do something about that. (Mother’s divorce settlement required my father to send her ten dollars a month in child support—an obligation he rarely met, according to correspondence I would later find.) Shier said that one of his former patients was in a position to speak with the school board about Mother’s value to the school system. This appeal was apparently made, and a short while later she received a small increase in salary.

  She was grateful. Harry was pleased to help. Shier conducted himself around Mother like someone considering serious courtship. She was a handsome woman of thirty-nine, he a short, abrasively self-confident, balding man of fifty-six. He complimented her on the way she was single-handedly raising her two polite, neatly dressed sons. He complimented her on her figure. Occasionally he’d take her hand or caress her lightly on the shoulder. After a while, Shier began dropping by the house in the evening, just as my brother and I were getting into our pajamas. He’d bring a tub of ice cream along, and the four of us would have dessert together. One evening he arrived without the ice cream. He’d forgotten. He suggested I accompany him to the grocery store, where I could pick out a different dessert for each of us.

  A few minutes after we left the house, he pulled his car up alongside a tall hedge on an unlit residential street off Lindley Avenue. He turned me to the side, put me facedown on the seat, pulled down my pajama bottoms, and pushed his erect penis into my anus. As he built toward his climax he told me, calmly but emphatically, that he was a doctor, that I needed treatment, and that we were not going to be adding to Mother’s worries by telling her about my problem.

  • • •

  Shier followed this pattern of sexual assault with me for almost four years. He came by the house several times a month and continued to successfully direct Mother’s attention away from what he was doing. It is hard to imagine, now, that no one suspected what was going on. It is equally difficult, even for therapists, to explain how this type of sexual violence can be perpetuated between two human beings for years without the victim successfully objecting. Why, people wonder, does the evidence for a child’s resistance in these circumstances usually seem so meager? I believe it’s because the child is too innocent to plan effectively and because, from the very start, the child faces a labyrinth of confused allegiances. I asked myself questions I couldn’t answer: Do I actually need protection in this situation? From what, precisely? I was bewildered by what was happening. How could I explain to my mother what I was doing? Physical resistance, of course, is virtually impossible for most children. The child’s alternatives, as I understand them, never get much beyond endurance and avoidance—and speculation about how to encourage intervention.

  An additional source of confusion for me was the belief that I had been chosen as a special patient by Harry Shier, an esteemed doctor and the director of a prestigious institution. A weird sense of privilege was attached to Shier’s interest in me, and to the existence of an unspecified medical condition too serious or exotic to share with Mother. Also, being the elder son in a lower-middle-class and fatherless family, I came to feel—or he encouraged me to feel—that I was shouldering an important responsibility for my family.

  I understood that I was helping my family, and he complimented me on my maturity.

  • • •

  When Shier came to our house he would inform Mother that we were just going out to get some ice cream together or, on a Saturday afternoon, that he was going to take me to an early movie, and then maybe out to dinner at the Sportsmen’s Lodge on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. We would say goodbye and he would walk me to his car and we would drive off. If it was dark, he’d pull over soon in a secluded spot and rape me in the front seat; or we’d go to the movie and he’d force my head into his lap for a while, pushing at me through his trousers; or it would be dinner at the restaurant, where we’d hook our trout in a small pool for the chef to cook, and then he’d drive on to the sanitarium, where he’d park behind the single-story building. He’d direct me up an outside staircase to a series of rotting duckboards that led across the clinic’s flat roof to a locked door, the outside entrance to a rooftop apartment, where I was to wait. He’d enter the front of the building, check on his patients, say good night to the nurses, and ascend an inside staircase to reach the interior door of his studio-size quarters. I’d see the lights go on inside. A moment later he’d open the door to the roof and pull me in.

  One night in these chambers, after he was through with me, he took a medical text from a bookshelf. He sat me down beside him on the edge of the bed and showed me black-and-white photographs of men’s genitals ravaged by syphilis. This, he said, was what came from physical intimacy with women.

  In bed with him, I would try to maneuver myself so I could focus on the horizontal sliver of sky visible between the lower edge of the drawn blinds and the white sill of the partially open window. Passing clouds, a bird, the stars.

  From time to time, often on the drive back to my home, Shier would remind me that if I were ever to tell anyone, if the treatments were to stop, he would have no choice but to have me committed to an institution. And then, if I were no longer around for my family … I’d seen how he occasionally slipped Mother a few folded bills in my presence. It would be best, I thought, if I just continued to be the brave boy he said I was.

  I know the questions I initially asked myself afterward about these events were not very sophisticated. For example: Why hadn’t Shier also molested my younger brother? My brother, I conjectured, had been too young in 1952, only four years old; later, with one brother firmly in hand, Shier had probably considered pursuing the other too much of a risk. (When we were older, my brother told me that Shier had molested him, several times, in the mid-1950s. I went numb with grief. After the four years of sexual violence with Shier were over, what sense of self-worth I still retained rested mainly with a conviction that, however I might have debased myself with Shier, I had at least protected my brother—and also probably saved my family from significant financial hardship. Further shame would come after I discovered that our family had never been in serious financial danger, that Mother’s earnings had covered our every necessity, and more.)

  • • •

  My mother remarried in 1956. We moved to New York City, where my stepfather lived, and I never again saw the malachite-green-and-cream-colored Pontiac Chieftain pulling up in front of our house on Calvert Street. After we moved into my stepfather’s apartment, I felt a great sense of freedom. I was so very far away now from Harry Shier. A new school, a new neighborhood, new friends. I had surfaced in another ocean. This discovery of fresh opportunity, however, which sometimes gave way to palpable euphoria, I nevertheless experienced as unreliable. I couldn’t keep a hold on it. And then, two years after we moved east, when I was thirteen, Harry Shier flew into New York and my sense of safety collapsed. He arrived with my stepfather at our vacation home on the Jersey Shore one summer evening in 1958. He was my parents’ guest for the weeken
d. A surprise for the boys.

  Weren’t we pleased?

  The next morning, a Saturday, while my parents were preparing breakfast in the kitchen, Shier eased open the door of my attic bedroom and closed it quietly behind him. He walked wordlessly to the edge of my bed, his lips twitching in a characteristic pucker, his eyes fixed on mine. When he reached under the sheet I kicked at him and sprang from the bed, grabbing a baseball bat that was leaning against the headboard. Naked, cursing, swinging at him with the bat, I drove him from the room and slammed the door.

  While I dressed, he began a conversation downstairs with my parents.

  Eavesdropping on them from the hallway next to the kitchen door, I heard Shier explain that I needed to be committed. He described—in grave tones, which gave his voice a kind of Delphic weight—how I was prone to delusions, a dangerous, potentially violent boy. Trouble ahead. Through the hinge gap in the doorway, I studied my mother and stepfather seated with him at the breakfast table. Their hands were folded squarely on the oilcloth. They took in Shier’s measured, professional characterization with consternation and grief. In that moment, I couldn’t bring myself to describe for them what he had done. The thought of the change it would bring to our lives was overwhelming, and, regardless, my own situation felt far too precarious. Having abruptly gained the security of a family with a devoted father, I could now abruptly lose it.

  I left the house without delay, to play pickup baseball with my friends. In the afternoon I rode off alone on my bicycle to the next town inland. When I returned that evening, I learned that Shier had asked my stepfather to drive him straight back to New York that morning so that he could catch a plane west from Idlewild. I had insulted the doctor, my mother told me, and embarrassed the family. She presented his analysis of my behavior. When I tried to object, her response was, “But he’s a doctor!”