Wikipedia Commons
Chapter 38
Amateur Night at a Shooting Range
If I’m going to spend an evening shooting guns, I want there to be plenty of adult supervision—especially if half the clientele has never fired one before.
This was not the case at Jackson Arms Shooting Range in southern San Francisco where I attended a handgun-themed bachelor party with a bunch of other firearm neophytes. Housed in what looked like an industrial warehouse, the parking lot was full of pickup trucks with bumper stickers not typically associated with the San Francisco Bay Area, and the walls of the lobby and gift shop were lined with rifles. When my husband jokingly asked whether the shop had ever been held up, our teacher didn’t smile. “No,” he said. “We’re all holstered.”
Holstered he was—when he led our group into a back classroom, I noticed the butts of twin handguns protruding from under his T-shirt. I’d hoped that the fact that he was carrying at least two firearms would mean that he would have a very hands-on approach to teaching us how to use them. But instead, he treated our gun education with the gravitas one might find at an employee training session for a fast-food restaurant.
“What’s this?” the teacher asked, pointing at the back of the room.
“A wall,” someone responded.
“No. The men’s bathroom. Bullets go through walls.” He appeared pleased at this punchline. “Never point your gun at anything other than the target.”
This was good advice, but I wanted more. I wanted to know how the safety worked, and how to tell if it was on. I wanted to know what to do if the bullets jammed, and where the location of the emergency exits were, just in case the person next to me freaked out.
Instead, the teacher gave a quick demonstration of how to load the bullets, and explained how to aim (“Point it toward your target”). Then he handed us plastic caddies filled with handguns and boxes of bullets and let us loose in the firing range, a large concrete room divided into lanes. It looked like a cross between a parking lot and a bowling alley, with one important difference: everyone in it was armed.
Much to my distress, these guns were not tethered to anything, which meant that there was no way to prevent a fellow guest from turning toward you and shooting you in the face. This would not have been such an issue if we had been the only people in the room, but we weren’t. A group of twenty-something men gathered in a lane near us, all jockeying for a chance to shoot. Several loners lurked nearby, making me question whether a violent criminal really would have bothered to tick the box next to PRIOR FELONIES when filling out his liability form. But most frightening of all was a woman standing in the next lane, forty-something years old with dyed blond hair. Wearing a pink T-shirt and glasses that had a line of masking tape across the lenses to help steady her sight, she was taking slow, methodical shots with a .45-caliber handgun—not at a bull’s eye, but at the outline of a man’s torso.
Chapter 39
Ciudad Juárez
What is it about borders? Why are they inherently exhilarating?” asked the New York Times in December 2006 in an article about El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, two adjacent cities on opposite sides of the Rio Grande. Its focus was food, but in recent years Juárez has become best known for crime: between January 2008 and early 2009, more than eighteen hundred people were murdered.
The majority of these killings are attributed to drug cartels, but there’s a more systemic problem. The Mexican army is in the midst of an aggressive military effort against the cartels, but its soldiers have also been accused of abusing local police offers. In turn, the police force itself tortures detainees and indulges in other horrific abuse: one woman, a former beauty queen, was allegedly held for three days and repeatedly raped by eight policemen. And then there are the drug cartels themselves. Responsible for public assassinations, gruesome decapitations, and the murders of innocent citizens, they’re waging a bloody fight against one another and anyone who stands in their way.
What’s particularly terrifying about this battle is that many of
Juárez’s victims have little or no connection to the battles raging around them. Innocent people have been shot in broad daylight; in the city of 1.6 million people, there were 17,000 car thefts and 1,650 carjackings in 2008 alone. The U.S. State Department warns that “recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades” and says that Juárez has become subject to “public shootouts during daylight hours in shopping centers and other public venues.” It recommends staying close to tourist sites, traveling only during the day, using toll roads wherever possible, avoiding ATMs, and, for women in particular, not traveling alone.
The border is indeed exhilarating—but unfortunately for anyone trying to live or visit Ciudad Juárez, not in a good way.
Chapter 40
The World’s Skinniest Buildings
Some fights are hard to get worked up about—like the spat between the Sam Kee Building in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the so-called Skinny Building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over which structure is the thinnest.
At four feet eleven inches at its base (and six feet on its second story, thanks to bay windows), the Sam Kee Building has been named the skinniest commercial building in the world by both the Guinness Book of World Records and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Like many other slender buildings, it was built partially out of spite: its lot, originally a normal size, got reduced by twenty-four feet when Vancouver expropriated the space to widen Pender Street in 1912. Designed in 1913, the building’s basement actually extends underneath the sidewalk and used to house the only public baths in Vancouver’s Chinatown (not to mention an escape tunnel for nearby opium dens); the upper two stories were devoted to shops and very narrow apartments.
But watch out, Mr. Kee—Pittsburgh’s Skinny Building wants to challenge its claim to be the thinnest commercial space in the world. At five feet two inches wide from top to bottom, the Skinny Building is indeed more consistently emaciated than the top-heavy Sam Kee. What’s more, at three stories tall, it’s a floor higher. Back in the early 2000s, Pat Clark and Al Kovacik—a consultant and architect who were leasing the top two floors of the Skinny Building as an arts venue, sent photographs to Vancouver’s visitors’ center as proof that their building was narrower.
Clark and Kovacik may have had a point, but unfortunately, their argument may now be moot—in 2007, their landlord refused to renew their lease, and the arts venue was forced to close. With that attraction gone, the building’s main draw is purely its diminutive size, which, as anyone who knows someone obsessed with their weight can attest, is really not that interesting.
Chapter 41
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge, swirling mass of plastic in the middle of the ocean that’s been estimated to be twice the size of Texas.
The garbage patch—if one hundred million tons of debris can be called a patch—was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, oceanographer, and furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who decided to take a shortcut on his way back from a sailing competition in Hawaii. He and his crew sailed their fifty-foot catamaran through the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre—an area usually avoided by sailors because of its lack of wind—and were shocked to find themselves navigating through what appeared to be an endless sea of plastic.
Bottle caps, Legos, flip-flops, toothbrushes, Styrofoam cups, footballs, even entire kayaks—Moore had accidentally guided his boat into the final resting place for an incomprehensible amount of plastic trash, pieces of which were close to half a century old. Intrigued and horrified, Moore returned on a research trip two years later and discovered that the patch extended some thirty feet underwater, with increasingly tiny pieces of plastic swirling in the ocean like multicolored fish food. (Since no microbes exist that can digest plastic
, it doesn’t biodegrade; instead, exposure to sunlight and currents breaks its polymer chains into smaller and smaller pieces.) In parts, the water of the patch contained six times more plastic than it did plankton—a ratio that has since dramatically increased.
Moore brought himself out of retirement to found the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which is devoted to studying the composition and effects of this giant mass of plastic. This isn’t the cheeriest research assignment; Algalita’s research assignments include examining the stomach contents of dead albatrosses (the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that plastic debris kills more than a million seabirds a year) and investigating how, exactly, the toxicants in plastic dissolve into ocean water. Among the disturbing facts they’ve discovered: a lot of the plastic trash is from nurdles—
lentil-size pellets of raw plastic that are used in manufacturing and frequently escape into the water. Also, plastic has an unfortunate tendency to act as a chemical sponge for other toxicants, like hydrocarbons and DDT, which nurdle-nibbling fish can pass up the food chain to our dinner plates.
So why not just clean it up? According to the folks at Algalita, that would be completely impossible: not only is the patch miles wide and at least 30 feet deep, but it’s less a plastic island than a plastic soup, full of tiny particles that can’t be recovered without scooping up plankton and other marine life at the same time. Even worse, since much of the plastic is so tiny and/or transparent that it doesn’t show up in satellite images, no one yet knows how much of the world’s oceans have been contaminated.
REBECCA SOLNIT
The Customs Office at the Buenos Aires Airport
It would not be quite true to say that the package containing my all-weather jacket for Tierra del Fuego arrived safely in Buenos Aires. Rather, in this country that suggests all was not lost when the Soviet Union dissolved, I—with visions of packages dancing in my head—got to my mailing address only to find a sheaf of stapled papers with, on top, a long letter addressed to estimado cliente. “Esteemed client,” it said, “call these number between 10 and 3 or these numbers from 9 to 1 and 2 to 5, and then…”
So I called my excellent cousin Bernardo, a native of Buenos Aires, who later told me that when his wife heard I had to deal with customs, she said something akin to “oh my God,” or “the Lord preserve us,” or some such locution. We drove across town from Bernardo’s business at about 2 P.M. via the lawless, jammed-up surface streets—there are very few stop signs and not so many lanes or traffic lights in the Darwinist traffic here—and then the long straightaway with the innumerable tolls of about 17 cents apiece to the international airport. Bernardo asked a few dozen people to initiate us into the secret of the location, and we stashed the car in a nonsecured parking lot and asked some more people for directions, some of whom also needed to look at my passport, and so we arrived at the secret customs hell.
Bernardo talked en route about the endless corruption of this country’s government, from the airline that was supposed to be de-privatized and turned out to be run by part of the president’s family, which was shipping suitcases of cocaine on passenger-less passenger planes to Spain, to the congressional aide who suggested that, for a sum of money, the law affecting his business could be rearranged. So, to customs: a corridor in a warehouse looking into three air-conditioned cubicle-like offices. We went into the first cubicle and got some papers stamped so we could stand in the line of anxious, frustrated people for an hour or so in the extraordinary heat, not knowing if our turn would ever come before the office shut in a mere two and a half hours.
Waiting, waiting, waiting, and then finally the appointment in office two, with the young woman with badly dyed hair and forms that must be filled out, but whose government copies would only be tossed in a loose pile, suggesting no one would ever look at them again or even be able to find anything in them (in this country that still uses carbon paper). And then to office three, where we got some more papers and rubber stamps, showed my passport some more, and then, as though it were all an elaborate dance, a few more rotations: the melancholic official walked us to the actual parcel site where we jointly viewed my parcel’s contents to prove they were not new or valuable, and it was then sealed up again against theft by the officials with tape that was the equivalent of official seals so we could go back to office two to get another round of stamps and then back to office one to pay a toll of 43.5 pesos, about $14, and then, with the man from office three, we walked back to office four and actually received the damn thing. I thought of the funky technology and endless bureaucracy in the movie Brazil, the labyrinths people get stuck in, the rumpled piles of documents, and the guerrilla repairman who cuts through bureaucratic red tape to make things actually work. It was clear that though the normative purpose of data collection is data retrieval or the ability to track, these three offices with their loose piles of documents have nothing to do with any such thing. And that without a skilled local, I would’ve never seen my Tierra del Fuego gear again.
REBECCA SOLNIT is the author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.
Chapter 42
Any Hotel That Used to Be a Prison
There are many contenders for the world’s least pleasant hotels—dasparkhotel in Austria puts guests up in drainpipes, for example, and the Null Stern Hotel (German for “zero star”) offers rooms in a Swiss nuclear bomb shelter. But Karostas Cietums in Latvia tops the list. A Soviet-era military prison, it was in active use till 1997, and boasts that ever since the first years of its existence, “it has been a place to break people’s lives and suppress their free will.” Sign me up for the honeymoon suite.
The prison’s original clientele was a diverse group of convicts, ranging from members of the tsarist army and deserters of the German Wehrmacht to men judged by Stalin’s government to be enemies of the people. These days, it caters to guests who are attracted to the idea of spending the night in a place where, according to the hotel’s promotional material, more than 150 people have been shot.
Unsurprisingly, accommodations are sparse; rates include iron beds and authentic prison meals, and lucky children can spend a night in prison bunks. But threadbare mattresses are far from the only attractions: in the museum, you’ll have an opportunity to try on a gas mask or buy vintage souvenirs, like former inmates’ aluminum spoons. Other options include participating in an ominous-sounding “surprise tour” and an evening activity that gives guests the chance to “live the part of a prisoner on a dismal night.” Most activities require participants to apply in advance and sign what’s referred to as “the Agreement,” which states, among other things, that “Participants may receive insulting instructions and orders which must be carried out without objection” and that “In case of disobedience prisoners may be punished.”
Chapter 43
The Top of Mount Washington in a Snowstorm
The warnings on the trails up Mount Washington don’t mince words. STOP they say. THE AREA AHEAD HAS THE WORST WEATHER IN AMERICA. MANY HAVE DIED THERE FROM EXPOSURE, EVEN IN THE SUMMER. TURN BACK NOW IF THE WEATHER IS BAD.
It’s hard to objectively define worst weather, but by most people’s standards, the top of Mount Washington would qualify. At 6,288 feet, the New Hampshire mountain is small in comparison to the United States’ western peaks, but its location at the convergence of several storm tracks, not to mention its height and north-south orientation, means that it gets hit with hurricane-force winds and snowstorms all year round. Not only does Mount Washington’s summit hold the record for the world’s strongest recorded wind speed—231 miles per hour—but its average yearly temperature is only 27.2 degrees.
Despite its weather conditions, Mount Washington draws a steady stream of tourists—most of whom define conquering the summit as buying a bumper sticker that says THIS CAR CLIMBED MT. WASHINGTON. But hard-core hikers also tackle the mountain by foot, and occasionally they never make it down—more than one hundred people have p
erished on its slopes.
If you’re unfortunate enough to find yourself on Mount Washington during a winter storm and can’t find shelter, you’re probably going to die. But at least you’ll have something pretty to look at: rime ice, a feathery frosting that’s beloved by nature photographers. When a storm hits, these delicate ice structures will begin to build up on rocks, trees, and, if you wait long enough, your body. Your hands may be too numb to reach for your camera, but at least you can take comfort in knowing that your last vision will be one of which Ansel Adams would have approved.
Greg Neault/Wikipedia Commons
Chapter 44
The Bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole
Everyone knows about the U.S.-Soviet Space Race of the 1960s. But few people are aware that at the same time the two countries were vying to hurl manned spacecraft into orbit, they were also sprinting in the opposite direction: toward the earth’s core.
Or, to be more specific, toward something called the Mohorovicˇi´c Discontinuity, thought to be the boundary between the earth’s crust and its magma-filled mantle. America was the first to try—in 1957 it launched Project Mohole, a later-abandoned plan to reach the so-called Moho by drilling through the ocean floor. Distracted by a different, equally important project—launching the first dog into orbit—the Soviets didn’t get started on their own Project Moho till 1962, and started drilling in 1970. But while they may have lost that first battle, the Soviets won the war: at more than seven miles deep, the Kola Superdeep Borehole is the deepest hole in the world.
Catherine Price Page 7