by John McPhee
Grunwald picked up a color transparency that showed a sheaf of wheat, a tragic mask, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, with the apple partly eaten, so that it looked like a skull, all of which had been created by Salvatore Purpura, a baker, in his bakery, on 111th Street, in Corona, Queens. Purpura had been commissioned to do a Time cover on the subject of hunger, and bread was the medium. Purpura was asked at the time what sort of bread he would use, and he said, “Italian bread that you can a-eat.” The story was dropped. NR, and a pity, too. Purpura might have become the only baker who had ever baked a cover of Time.
Russell Baker, of the Times, once came very close to being on Time’s cover—close enough to wind up in the NR bin, too, and there he was, in a creation by Herblock, who had used a photograph of Baker’s face affixed to a drawing of Baker’s body astride a flying newspaper airplane. All through the sky around him were fat-cat senators, congressmen, generals, diplomats. One man’s shirtfront was literally exploding. Each of these figures had a toy-balloon valve in his back. Grunwald sighed. “Baker is still writing,” he said. “Maybe one day … Who knows?”
Norman Laliberte, a designer who uses fabrics and textured materials, had done a handsome tapestry of the Good Samaritan for Time’s cover, a grace to the Christmas season, but the tapestry was here in the NR collection, because it had lost out to a stained-glass window, the work of another artist. Grunwald explained that in recent years he had found it expedient to commission more than one artist per cover. Two was now the standard number—two artists competing. Sometimes three. As many as seven artists had been commissioned to do finished paintings for one subject and one issue. The magazine had once depended on a handful of proved regulars, Grunwald said—people like Chaliapin and Boris Artzybasheff. And when Fuerbringer came along, his predilection had been to commission artists of international celebrity. Grunwald thought some of that had been “a little square.” He and his art directors wanted Time covers to be “more modern and postery,” and they wanted to reach out more for artists who were “unknown.” That was risky, so you commissioned several at once. Moreover, if something was not quite right in a picture and it was late getting to the printer, the cost of the delay could run into tens of thousands of dollars. Artists came cheaper. The magazine pays two thousand dollars for a cover painting (more under special circumstances). For a mere six thousand dollars, Grunwald could have three covers among which to choose, thus reducing the possibility of wasting sums much larger.
Artists don’t think well of the system. As one has put it, “half my heart isn’t in the work.” But Grunwald sees no other way in which he can afford to be as experimental as he wants to be—afford, for example, to ask a Gerald Scarfe or a Frank Gallo, or, for that matter, almost anyone else, to try a Time cover of Richard Nixon. Nixon, as a face, was by far the most difficult subject that had ever come along. Notwithstanding what might be said in its interior pages, the magazine preferred not to be cruel on the cover. Yet it was difficult not to be. The face—well, the face was just an awkward problem technically. What else could one say? And, to make matters worse, Nixon had appeared on the cover of Time more than anyone else ever.
Here, then, was Frank Gallo’s Nixon—cast in epoxy resin—looking like the Carnauba Man done in used jaundice. Gallo had sculptured Raquel Welch for Time in the same materials. His Raquel figure had been more than life-size, and he had bought an airplane seat for her on his way east to Time from his home in Illinois. For his Nixon, he might have bought space in the hold. “It is so ugly we felt we couldn’t run it,” Grunwald said. “He looks like an embalmed corpse.”
And here was the Nixon of Gerald Scarfe, the British cartoonist and papier-mâché sculptor, who had once done the Beatles for Time, and had now done what appeared to be an oversize duckbill platypus in papier-mâché. NR.
Grunwald led the way into a room that was overwhelmingly filled with leftover Nixons. During the past year, he said, there was always at least one artist at work on a new try at Nixon. Here now were dozens of them, lining the walls, standing on tables—everywhere you looked, an unused Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixon. Nixonixonixonixonixonixonixon. NR. Not running.
IN THE LONG DRY VALLEYS of eastern Nevada, where rain-hadow rain falls in desert rations and the silence is so deep it rings, water has been in storage for about ten thousand years. These are the waterlogged basins, as they are known to science—the saturated valleys—but if you were to look out upon them, that description is the last that would come to your mind. You would, in a glance, take in a million acres with nothing taller than the bunchgrass, the buffalo grass, the shad scale, the white and the black sage in tawny, desiccated boulevards between the high ranges. A daisy-wheel windmill, a cluster of cottonwoods—tens of miles apart—speak of settlement in some of the most austere and beautiful landscape between the oceans. It is a country held together by its concealed water, without which it would become exposed bedrock and dust. To the subsurface, the amount of fresh supply is essentially zero. What is down there is fossil water, resulting from a time when the climate was utterly different from the climate now, a time when alpine and continental ice to the north, east, and west caused so much rain that the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada held two freshwater lakes about the size of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. Remains of that Pleistocene rainfall rest beneath the saturated valleys, prevent them from looking like Irq al-Subay, and emerge in small, sustaining quantities as spring creeks and seeps.
Las Vegas wants the water. Las Vegas is in Clark County, in southernmost Nevada, hundreds of miles from the saturated valleys. Distance is not a deterrent when you have the money. In Nevada, you can buy groundwater and, within the law, transport it from one basin to another, provided that the transfer does not impinge upon existing rights and is in the public interest. The public is in Las Vegas—marinopolis of pools and fountains. Las Vegas has less rain than some places in the Sahara, yet its areal population is more than two million. Around Las Vegas, well casings stand in the air like contemporary sculpture, and so much water has been mined from below that the surface of the earth has subsided six feet. While new wells are no longer permissible, Las Vegas desperately needs water for its lakes. They are not glacial lakes. If you want a lake in Las Vegas, you dig a hole and pour water into it. One subdivision has eight lakes. Las Vegas has twenty-two golf courses, at sixteen hundred gallons a divot. Green lawn runs down the median of the Strip. Here is the Wet’n’Wild park, there the M-G-M water rides. Outside the Mirage, a stratovolcano is in a state of perpetual eruption. It erupts water.
Las Vegas wants to drill the saturated valleys, remove the fossil water to a central place, and then pump it on to the south, in much the way that habitants in Quebec collect maple sap in tubes. Mountain sheep, antelope, deer, coyotes, eagles, badgers, bobcats will forever disappear as permanent springs go permanently dry. Las Vegas blandly claims that the resource is renewable, that Las Vegas will not be mining Nevada’s Pleistocene water. All they want to pump up is—annually—the equivalent of a one-acre pond eight hundred and sixty thousand feet deep.
POOLS AND POOLS AND POOLS of chocolate—fifty-thousand-pound, ninety-thousand-pound, Olympic-length pools of chocolate—in the conching rooms in the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Big, aromatic rooms. Chocolate, as far as the eye can see. Viscous, undulating, lukewarm chocolate, viscidized, undulated by the slurping friction of granite rollers rolling through the chocolate over crenellated granite beds at the bottoms of the pools. The chocolate moves. It stands up in brown creamy dunes. Chocolate eddies. Chocolate currents. Gulfs of chocolate. Chocolate deeps. Mares’ tails on the deeps. The world record for the fifty-yard free-style would be two hours and ten minutes.
Slip a little spatula in there and see how it tastes. Waxy? Claggy? Gritty? Mild? Taste it soft. That is the way to get the flavor. Conching—granite on granite, deep in the chocolate—ordinarily continues for seventy-two hours, but if Bil
l Wagner thinks the flavor is not right, he will conch for hours extra, or even an extra day. Milky? Coarse? Astringent? Caramely? For forty-five years, Bill Wagner has been tasting the chocolate. His taste buds magnified a hundred times would probably look like Hershey’s kisses. He is aging now, and is bent slightly forward—a slender man, with gray hair and some white hair. His eyeglasses have metal rims and dark plastic brows. He wears thin white socks and brown shoes, black trousers, a white shirt with the company’s name on it in modest letters. Everyone wears a hat near the chocolate. Most are white paper caps. Wagner’s hat is dapper, white, visored: a chocolate-making supervisor’s linen hat.
A man in a paper hat comes up and asks Wagner, “Are we still running tests on that kiss paste?”
“Yes. You keep testing.”
Wagner began in cocoa, in 1924. The dust was too much for him. After a few weeks, he transferred to conching. He has been conching ever since, working out the taste and texture. Conching is the alchemy of the art, the transmutation of brown paste into liquid Hershey bars. Harsh? Smooth? Fine? Bland? There are viscosimeters and other scientific instruments to aid the pursuit of uniformity, but the ultimate instrument is Wagner. “You do it by feel, and by taste,” he says. “You taste for flavor and for fineness—whether it’s gritty. There’s one area of your tongue you’re more confident in than others. I use the front end of my tongue and the roof of my mouth.” He once ate some Nestlé’s; he can’t remember when. He lays some chocolate on the tip of his tongue and presses it upward. The statement that sends ninety thousand pounds on its way to be eaten is always the same. Wagner’s buds blossom, and he says, “That’s Hershey’s.”
Milton Hershey’s native town was originally called Derry Church, and it was surrounded, as it still is, by rolling milkland. Hershey could not have been born in a better place, for milk is twenty per cent of milk chocolate. Bill Wagner grew up on a farm just south of Derry Church. “It was a rented farm. We didn’t own a farm until 1915. I lived on the farm through the Second World War. I now live in town.” Wagner’s father, just after 1900, had helped Milton Hershey excavate the limestone bedrock under Derry Church to establish the foundations of the chocolate plant. Derry Church is Hershey now, and its main street, Chocolate Avenue, has streetlamps shaped like Hershey’s kisses—tinfoil, tassel, and all. The heart of town is the corner of Chocolate and Cocoa. Other streets (Lagos, Accra, Para) are named for the places the beans come from, arriving in quotidian trains full of beans that are roasted and, in studied ratios, mixed together—base beans, flavor beans, African beans, American beans—and crushed by granite millstones arranged in cascading tiers, from which flow falls of dark cordovan liquor. This thick chocolate liquor is squeezed mechanically in huge cylindrical accordion compressors. Clear cocoa butter rains down out of the compressors. When the butter has drained off, the compressors open, and out fall dry brown disks the size of manhole covers. The disks are broken into powder. The powder is put into cans and sold. It is Hershey’s Cocoa—straight out of the jungle and off to the supermarket, pure as the purest sunflower seed in a whole-earth boutique.
Concentrate fresh milk and make a paste with sugar. To two parts natural chocolate liquor add one part milk-and-sugar paste and one part pure cocoa butter. Conch for three days and three nights. That, more or less, is the recipe for a Hershey bar. (Baking chocolate consists of nothing but pure chocolate liquor allowed to stand and harden in molds. White chocolate is not really chocolate. It is made from milk, sugar, and cocoa butter, but without cocoa.) In the conching rooms, big American flags hang from beams above the chocolate. “Touch this,” Bill Wagner says. The cast-iron walls that hold in the chocolate are a hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit. “We have no heat under this. It’s only created heat—created by the friction that the granite rollers produce.”
“What if the rollers stop?”
“The chocolate will freeze.”
When that happens, the result is a brown ice cap, a chocolate-coated Nome. Sometimes fittings break or a worker forgets to shut off a valve and thousands of pounds of chocolate spill over, spread out, and solidify on the floor. Workers have to dig their way out, with adzes, crowbars, shovels, and picks.
“The trend today is people want to push buttons,” Wagner says. “They’ll try to find ways to shortcut. It’s a continual struggle to get people to do their share. There’s no shortcut to making Hershey’s. There have been times when I wished I’d stayed on the farm.” Every day, he works from six in the morning until four-thirty in the afternoon, so he can cover parts of all shifts. He walks to work in twelve minutes from his home, on Para Avenue. “Para is a bean, I think. It’s a bean or a country, I’m not sure which. We have another street called Ceylon. That’s not a bean. It’s a country.” In the conching rooms, Wagner can see subtleties of hue that escape the untrained eye; he can tell where the kiss paste is, and the semisweet, and the chocolate chips, and the bar milk chocolate. Kiss paste has to be a little more dense, so the kisses will sit up. Wagner has grandchildren in Hershey, Colebrook, and Mechanicsburg. When he goes to see them, he slips them kisses.
Within the connoisseurship, there are dearer chocolates, and, God knows, inferior ones, but undeniably there is no chocolate flavor quite like that of a Hershey bar. No one in Hershey can, or will, say exactly why. There is voodoo in the blending of beans, and even more voodoo in the making of the milk-and-sugar paste. There is magic in Bill Wagner when he decides that a batch is done. All this, however, does not seem to add up to a satisfactory explanation of the uniqueness of the product. Mystery lingers on. Notice, though, in the conching rooms, what is happening to the granite rollers rolling under the chocolate on the granite beds. Slowly, geologically, the granite is eroding. The granite beds last about thirty years. The granite rollers go somewhat sooner than that. Rolling back and forth, back and forth, they become flat on one side. Over the days, months, years, this wearing down of the granite is uniform, steady, consistent, a little at a time. There seems to be an ingredient that is not listed on the label. Infinitesimal granitic particles have nowhere to go but into the chocolate. A Hershey bar is part granite.
Ask management where the granite comes from. The official answer is “New England.”
“Where in New England?”
“New England. That is all we are saying. Nestlé’s won’t say anything about anything. Mars is the same way. So we don’t say anything, either.”
AT VASSAR COLLEGE, a few decades ago, I read to a gymful of people some passages from books I had written, and then received questions from the audience. The first person said, “Of all the educational institutions you went to when you were younger, which one had the greatest influence on the work you do now?” The question stopped me for a moment because I had previously thought about the topic only in terms of individual teachers and never in terms of institutions. Across my mind flashed the names of a public-school system K through 12, a New England private school (13), and two universities—one in the United States, one abroad—and in a split second I blurted out, “The children’s camp I went to when I was six years old.”
The response drew general laughter, but, funny or not, it was the simple truth. The camp, called Keewaydin, was at the north end of Lake Dunmore, about eight miles from Middlebury, Vermont. It was a canoeing camp, but in addition to ribs, planking, quarter-thwarts, and open gunwales you learned to identify rocks, ferns, and trees. You played tennis. You backpacked in the Green Mountains on the Long Trail. If I were to make a list of all the varied subjects that have come up in my articles and books, adding a check mark beside interests derived from Keewaydin, most of the entries would be checked. I spent all summer every summer at Keewaydin from age six through fifteen, and later was a counsellor there, leading canoe trips and teaching swimming, for three years while I was in college.
The Kicker was the name of the camp newspaper, and its editor was my first editor, a counsellor named Alfred G. Hare, whose surname translated to the Algonquian as Waboos, a
nickname that had been with him from childhood and would ultimately stay with him through his many years as Keewaydin’s director. Waboos was a great editor. He laughed in the right places, cut nothing, and let you read your pieces aloud at campfires.
When I first arrived at Keewaydin as a child (my father was the camp’s physician), the name Eisner was all over the place—on silver trophies and on the year-by-year boards in the dining hall that listed things like Best Swimmer, Best Athlete, Best Singles Canoe. Michael Eisner was not one of those Eisners. When I first arrived at Keewaydin, he was still pushing zero. He had five years to wait before he was born. His father, Lester, was among the storied Eisners, and so were assorted uncles and cousins. Over time, multiple Eisners would follow. In 1949, when Lester Eisner brought Michael to the camp to see if he would like to enroll there, I was in the first of my three years as a counsellor in the oldest of the four age groups into which the camp was divided. In the two summers that followed (the last ones for me), he was in the youngest group and I didn’t know him from Mickey Mouse. I was aware only that another Eisner had come to Keewaydin.
Summer camps have varying specialties and levels of instruction. They differ considerably in character and mission. No one description, positive or negative, can come near fitting all of them or even very many. Keewaydin was not a great experience for just anybody. My beloved publisher—Roger W. Straus Jr., founder of Farrar, Straus and Giroux—went to Keewaydin when he was thirteen years old and hated every minute of it. That amounts to about eighty thousand minutes. Over the years, he has spent at least a hundred thousand minutes making fun of me for loving Keewaydin. The probable cause is Keewaydin’s educational rigor. Gently but firmly, you were led into a range of activity that left you, at the end of the summer, with enhanced physical skills and knowledge of the natural world. You wanted to go back, and back. Mike Eisner went back in 2000 (hardly for the first or last time). He was fifty-eight. Keewaydin was celebrating the career of its eighty-five-year-old emeritus director. Three people spoke at a Saturday-night campfire. Each was introduced only by name, with no mention of any business or profession or affiliation, just, in turn, Peter Hare, Russ MacDonald, Mike Eisner. In his blue jeans and ball cap, walking around the flames with his arms waving, Eisner told three hundred pre-teen and early-teen-aged kids escalating stories of his own days at Keewaydin. They listened closely and laughed often. Few, if any, knew who else he was.