The Teenage Whaler’s Tale

Before his story made the Anchorage paper, before the first death threat arrived from across the world, before his elders began to worry and his mother cried over the things she read on Facebook, Chris Apassingok, age 16, caught a whale.

It happened at the end of April, which for generations has been whaling season in the Siberian Yupik village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island on the northwest edge of Alaska. More than 30 crews from the community of 700 were trawling the sea for bowhead whales, cetaceans that can grow over 50 feet long, weigh over 50 tons and live more than 100 years. A few animals taken each year bring thousands of pounds of meat to the village, offsetting the impossibly high cost of imported store-bought food.

A hundred years ago — even 20 years ago, when Gambell was an isolated point on the map, protected part of the year by a wall of sea ice — catching the whale would have been a dream accomplishment for a teenage hunter, a sign of Chris’ passage into adulthood and a story that people would tell until he was old. But today, in a world shrunk by social media, where fragments of stories travel like light and there is no protection from anonymous outrage, his achievement has been eclipsed by an endless wave of online harassment. Six weeks after his epic hunt, his mood was dark. He’d quit going to school. His parents, his siblings, everybody worried about him.

In mid-June, as his family crowded into their small kitchen at dinnertime, Chris stood by the stove, eyes on the plate in his hands. Behind him, childhood photographs collaged the wall, basketball games and hunting trip selfies, certificates from school. Lots of village boys are quiet, but Chris is one of the quietest. He usually speaks to elders and other hunters in Yupik. His English sentences come out short and deliberate. His siblings are used to speaking for him.

“I can’t get anything out of him,” his mother said.

His sister, Danielle, 17, heads to University of Alaska Fairbanks in the fall, where she hopes to play basketball. She pulled a square of meat from a pot and set it on a cutting board on the table, slicing it thin with a moon-shaped ulu. Chris drug a piece through a pile of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and dunked it in soy sauce. Mangtak. Whale. Soul food of the Arctic.

Soon conversation turned, once again, to what happened. It’s hard to escape the story in Chris’ village, or in any village in the region that relies on whaling. People are disturbed by it. It stirs old pain and anxieties about the pressures on rural Alaska. Always, the name Paul Watson is at the center of it.

“We struggle to buy gas, food, they risk their lives out there to feed us, while this Paul Watson will never have to suffer a day in his life,” Susan Apassingok, Chris’ mother, said, voice full of tears. “Why is he going after a child such as my son?” (...)

Alaska Natives have been hunting bowhead in the Western Arctic for at least 2,000 years. The animals were hunted commercially by Yankee whalers from the mid-19th century until the beginning of the 20th century, decimating the population. Since then, whale numbers have recovered, and their population is growing. In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated there were 16,000 animals, three times the population in 1985.

Alaska Native communities in the region each take a few whales a year, following a quota system managed by the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC). The total annual take is roughly 50 animals, yielding between 600 and 1,000 tons of food, according to the commission.

Subsistence hunting of marine mammals is essential for villages where cash economies are weak. The average household income in Gambell, for example, is $5,000 to $10,000 below the federal poverty level. Kids rely on free breakfast and lunch at school. Families sell walrus ivory carvings and suffer when there isn’t enough walrus.

Store-bought food can be two to three times as expensive as it is in Anchorage, depending on weight. In the village grocery, where shelves are often empty, a bag of Doritos is $11, a large laundry detergent is more than $20, water is more expensive per ounce than soda. No one puts a price on whale, but without it, without walrus, without bearded seal, no one could afford to live here. (...)

Soon Chris had congratulations in his ears and fresh belly meat in his mouth, a sacrament shared by successful hunters on the water as they prayed in thanks to the whale for giving itself. He had been the first to strike the whale, so the hunters decided it belonged to his father’s crew. They would take the head back to the village and let the great cradle of the jawbone cure in the wind outside their house.

They towed the whale in and hauled it ashore using a block and tackle. Women and elders came to the beach to get their share. Every crew got meat. Whale is densely caloric, full of protein, omega-3s and vitamins. People eat it boiled, baked, raw and frozen. Its flavor is mild, marine and herbal like seaweed.

People packed it away in their freezers for special occasions. They carried it with them when they flew out of the village, to Nome and Anchorage and places down south to share with relatives. Everyone told and retold the story of the teenage striker. Then the radio station in Nome picked it up: “Gambell Teenager Leads Successful Whale Hunt, Brings Home 57-Foot Bowhead.” The Alaska Dispatch News, the state’s largest paper, republished that story.

It used to be that rural Alaska communicated mainly by VHF and by listening to messages passed over daily FM radio broadcasts, but now Facebook has become a central platform for communication, plugging many remote communities into the world of comment flame wars, cat memes and reality television celebrity pages.

That is how Paul Watson, an activist and founder of Sea Shepherd, an environmental organization based in Washington, encountered Chris’ story. Watson, an early member of Greenpeace, is famous for taking a hard line against whaling. On the reality television show, Whale Wars on Animal Planet, he confronted Japanese whalers at sea. His social media connections span the globe.

Watson posted the story about Chris on his personal Facebook page, accompanied by a long rant. Chris’ mother may have been the first in the family to see it, she said.

“WTF, You 16-Year Old Murdering Little Bastard!,” Watson’s post read. “… some 16-year old kid is a frigging ‘hero’ for snuffing out the life of this unique self aware, intelligent, social, sentient being, but hey, it’s okay because murdering whales is a part of his culture, part of his tradition. … I don’t give a damn for the bullshit politically correct attitude that certain groups of people have a ‘right’ to murder a whale.” (...)

“This has been my position of 50 years and it will always be my position until the day I die,” he wrote.

Watson and Sea Shepherd declined to be interviewed for this story but sent a statement.

“Paul Watson did not encourage nor request anyone to threaten anyone. Paul Watson also received numerous death threats and hate messages,” it read. “It is our position that the killing of any intelligent, self-aware, sentient cetacean is the equivalent of murder.”

Villagers have been familiar with Watson’s opinions for many years. They have seen him on cable, and many remember 2005, when Sea Shepherd sent out a press release blaming villagers for the deaths of two children in a boating accident during whaling season.

Many environmentalists who object to subsistence whaling have a worldview that sees hunting as optional and recreational, said Jessica Lefevre, an attorney for the whaling commission based in Washington, D.C.

“The NGOs we deal with are ideologically driven; this is what they do, they save stuff. The collateral damage to communities doesn’t factor into their thinking,” she said. “To get them to understand there are people on this planet who remain embedded in the natural world, culturally and by physical and economic necessity, is extremely difficult.”

The organizations are interested in conservation, but fail to take into account that Alaska Natives have a large stake in the whale population being healthy and have never overharvested it, she said. Some NGOs also benefit financially from sensation and outrage, she said, especially in the age of social media.

by Julia O'Malley, High Country News |  Read more:

Image: Chris Apassingok by Ash Adams

[ed. Anti-Social media, continuing its 'service' of providing hateful uninformed assholes a worldwide platform and megaphone. This story recently received the James Beard Media Award, along with those of another Alaskan writer, Laureli Ivanoff of Unalakleet (2 Alaska journalists win James Beard Media Awards) (ADN). Here's one by Laureli: Where the first spring harvest relies on a still-frozen ocean (HCN):]

***

"We both fired at the ugruk sleeping on the ice 100 yards ahead, but the bullets missed their mark. We watched the long gray mammal, heavier than the three of us put together, quickly slip into the hole it had scratched through the ice.

“How’d we miss?” I said as I pulled the gun’s lever to eject the bullet casing, the metal against metal smooth. Arctic did the same without answering my question, knowing I wasn’t looking for an answer.

Arctic is the kind of person you want to have next to you, whatever you’re doing. When he was in high school, he was captain of the Wolfpack — the Unalakleet basketball team — and he led with quiet, assured dignity. Whether the task is to build a chicken coop, butcher a moose or cut salmon for drying, Arctic works from start to finish, cracking subtle jokes along the way. Your stomach relaxes and you breathe deeper when he’s around.

As we put the guns on safety, the ocean water lapped against the sides of the boat, and the cool spring breeze brushed the backs of our bare necks. Dad slowly backed the boat away from the ice pan in case the ugruk popped up close by to breathe after diving. The scent of rotten fish and shrimp filled the air, and Arctic and I looked at one another, smiling. Accusatorily.

“Did you fart?” I asked Arctic.

“Nope,” he said as we got a stronger whiff.

I started laughing, hard. “That ugruk farted on us.”

Sometimes our spring bearded seal hunt happens in April. Usually in May. One year, the ocean ice broke up early and we were boating around ice pans in late March. Each year we wonder if the warming northern oceans will allow us adequate time to hunt for the largest of the seal species that live in the Norton Sound. Ugruk are 7 to 8 feet long and weigh several hundred pounds, and only good thick ice will support them. Some years, the ice melts too quickly, or the currents and winds do not bring thick pans that formed in the outer Bering Sea into the sound, and we have just days to hunt. Each spring, our family works to harvest at least three adult ugruk; the meat we dry and the oil we render feeds us all year long.

Later that day on the boat last spring, Arctic pointed to the big dark head of an ugruk as the animal swam in blue water, each ripple reflecting sunlight, crisp and cheery. Unlike the smaller, curious ringed seals that duck back beneath the surface with hardly a splash, ugruk will dive in, showing their backs and rear flippers. The large seal dove, its curved spine seeming to go on for miles.

“That’s a big ugruk,” Dad said, in awe.

He piloted the boat slowly to where we’d seen the ugruk and pulled the throttle back. The motor idled; the glass-calm water reflected the clouds and bright blue sky, as if to let the earth adore itself after the dark winter. We waited. The rippling ocean waves sparkled and the water lapped against the ice pans. Our rifles in hand, we scanned the water all around us, calm and ready.

Arctic and I looked at one another, this time with wide eyes. We heard it.

The ugruk, beneath us.

Singing.

Hearing an ugruk sing is like hearing the ghost of a beautiful woman wailing, undulating between loud and soft. The song captures the attention of every cell in your body. It sounds haunting, but is nothing like a haunting. Instead of sadness or fear, the song evokes wonder and awe. And thankfulness, for getting a glimpse of the everyday for some beings, something that’s unimaginable, momentous and rare for us, the visitors.

The ocean fell silent. We heard Dad’s motor idling, again the lapping of water against ice and our own slow breathing as we waited. Seconds later, the melody from below, from the water, began again.

Tears in my eyes, trying not to move or make a sound that would startle the seal, I looked at Arctic and smiled. He didn’t smile back, but I knew he was also delighted. Anyone with a pulse would be."

Jean-Luc Godard, self-portrait, 2020
via:

Wieners

[ed. Glen Powell seems to be having a moment these days (deservedly so) with his new movie Hitman on Netflix. This clip from an earlier time is hilarious and reminds me of a few scenes from Top Gun (with Powell of course reprising Val Kilmer's bad guy role in the sequel Maverick.]

There’s No Such Thing as “Just a Song”

During the early, quiet, and lonely months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many strange things occurred, among them a renewed interest in a near-dead genre of music: sea shanties. It started with one viral video on TikTok and it morphed, as trends do, to include other types of ballads and chants, leaving historians scratching their heads.

“They’re not shanties!” explains maritime music expert Stephen Sanfilippo in exasperation. “Those songs aren’t even work songs”—the type of folk music to which shanties belong.

Sanfilippo discovered the genre in the mid-1970s when, fresh out of the Navy, he started a folk music club at the Long Island high school where he taught. He went looking for old songs from the area; one led to another, and he has dedicated the half-century since then to collecting, performing, analyzing, and teaching songs from the sea.

To him, the songs that briefly went mainstream are more than just fun ditties or old-fashioned novelties. They’re important historic artifacts that give us a glimpse into how people in the past lived, worked, and thought of themselves. “Sometimes my students will say, ‘It’s just a song,’” says Sanfilippo. “But there’s so such thing as ‘just a.’”

The flash-in-the-pan glow of #ShantyTok has faded, but Sanfilippo remains committed to keeping maritime music alive. And though he doesn’t have high hopes for its future, his work can help illuminate the murky waters of contemporary life.

You told me that you’re particularly interested in the “music of the common people.” Work songs fall into this category, but what makes maritime music the music of the people? Why is it worth remembering this music and performing it?

The sort of songs I sing are chanteys: the work songs of seamen. These are maritime songs, work songs, that are used to set the tempo and rhythm of body motion of particular tasks. They are akin to calling cadence when marching, which isn’t done by officers but by privates. It’s done by prison chain gang workers. And it’s not the guards who are singing it; it’s the guys who are swinging the sledgehammer. The songs are coming from the workers.

The ballads about shipwrecks and storms, often you’ll hear poetry critics call them doggerel. They’ll say they are formulaic. Of course they are formulaic! “We had a ship, and a storm at sea, and it was capsized. Thirty-five of us were killed and two survived.” That’s the formula. But when it’s lived experience, you can hear something in it that is eternal.

As a graduate student, your scholarship focused on Marxism and maritime music. What was the connection?

I wanted to do something with folk music and the “plain” people. I was also called to the idea that everything in nature is beautiful, and working in nature creates a body of music. The songs of dock workers, the songs of cowboys, even the songs of coal miners—they’re working in nature, too. They’re underground in the Earth. Doing this kind of labor creates a particular kind of music.

But that connection with Marxism didn’t quite pan out, did it?

The 1840s were a decade of labor radicalism; Europe had 17 revolutions in 1848. They were revolutions of the left against the established power of foreign occupiers, dukes, kings. My great-great-grandfather fought in the 1847 revolution in Germany and when he failed, he fled to New York. This is when Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. It was the time of Seneca Falls and the women’s movement. Things were happening.

I wanted to see if that kind of class consciousness existed among nautical workers or whalers. So I went to read 80 journals that were written by whaling hands, cabin boys, and ship’s carpenters. These were the guys writing, not the captain. I wanted to show that the seamen in the whale fishery—at least those from eastern Long Island— had a radical sense of class consciousness developing in the 1840s. I thought I would show this through songs.

What I discovered is that none of these songs have a clear sense of class consciousness. There is conflict, but it’s not phrased in terms of class. Even in songs in which they had a poor person, it was describing one poor man in opposition to a single rich man. The stories in the songs weren’t phrased in terms of unified class consciousness. What I found instead is that they presented sailors in terms of their manhood.

In my thesis, I argued that there were several different types of masculinity represented in song. Seamen—by which I mean the hands, not the officers—were very different one from another. I wrote of them as “bourgeois aspirants,” who sought to earn money toward personal financial and status advancement; “secular libertines,” the stereotypical drunken, brawling, whoring sailor; and Evangelical Christians who, in the mid-1800s, were very much involved with social reform movements. They were the “liberals” of the day.

Why do you think sailors were not more radical or concerned with labor issues, given that they were working in a dangerous industry and likely being exploited by wealthier men?

Among other things, because human actions are often irrational. The simple answer is that people don’t really act in their own interest individually—and it’s hard to put thousands of mobile workers together. The geographical mobility of seamen, the going from ship to ship, and the overall impermanence of the work, be it in whaling, fishing, or commercial sailing, worked against the sort of organizing that could go on in mines and factories.

Keep in mind, I am not arguing that seamen were not conscious of being abused, and that they didn’t resist. Many—if not most—were always conscious of physical abuse, bad conditions, bad food, and bad pay, and found ways to resist. What I argue is that they did so through a view of abuse being an affront to their manhood, rather than through class consciousness.

What else do the songs tell us about the singers?

That they are not the stereotype we assign to them. Those who went to sea were diverse in outlooks and sensibilities. The same could be said for those ashore, especially as many of the ballads heard at sea were originally from farms or small towns.

Several times in our conversations you have said, “Everything in nature is beautiful.” How does this belief inform your work as a musician and historian?

“Beauty” doesn’t necessarily mean “pleasant to look at,” although most of “scenic” nature is. Remember, nature has no morality—so when a wolf kills and eats a lamb, or a tsunami kills thousands in a coastal town, or a shark eats the floating survivor of a shipwreck, that’s nature.

My father hated and ridiculed the word “picturesque.” “The picturesque farmers at work in their fields” means the impoverished peasants or serfs or slaves toiling endlessly for the landlords—or lords, or plantation owners. Those landlords don’t live in nature, but live off the toil of those forced to labor in a transformed nature for profit for the owners. But nature, in and of itself, is beautiful. It is God. What isn’t beautiful is the horrors of labor.

I hold that nothing made by man is more beautiful than a full-rigged ship sailing before the wind, the perfect coordination of nature and human mind and skill—but I must also remember that the seamen work in great physical danger, under severely harsh conditions of labor exploitation.

Do you think there’s a place for work songs in contemporary culture?

The roofers were here yesterday. The roofer was in his mid 40s and he had two guys working with him who were 18 or 19. They had two radios. They were listening to what Susan and I would call laundromat music—but they were not singing.

My grandfather and my father and my uncles, they bought abandoned farmland that was redlined for Italian immigrants. They built their houses on it, and while they were doing that, they would sing. They sang while they worked. What I see now with workmen is that they don’t sing. (...)

What do you think is the future of work songs? Do they have a place in the 21st century that’s not just TikTok memes and watered-down, pirate-themed performances?

Let’s say that I’m not optimistic.

If by “work songs” you mean the historic call-and-response form of singing to coordinate body movement and muscle power by setting rhythm and tempo, I honestly see no future other than as something of a fabricated oddity among people who are somewhat “counterculture.” I can’t speak for other societies, but the United States has become a country of listeners who will listen to whatever the commercial music industry tells them to listen to at any given time.

When was the last time you passed a worksite and heard the workmen singing? When was the last time you passed a worksite and heard their radio playing music that had something to do with their work, or with the rhythm and tempo of their work? Music has become detached—or, to use a Marxist term, alienated—from work and from the worker. It’s relegated to background noise. Similarly, when was the last time you were in a store that played music over a PA system and shoppers sang along? Or in a doctor’s waiting room?

by Katy Kelleher, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Susan Sanfilippo; George Cruikshank/Wikipedia

Rockin' 1000

[ed. Everybody wants to be a rock star. Unfortunately abbreviated, but more (full tunes) on YouTube here:]

Pain and Suffering

Demonizing opioids has unintended consequences

The first time I saw a dying patient suffer through extreme pain came shortly after I joined a hospice volunteer program in Manhattan. I was assigned to visit Marshall, a former welder, who occupied a double room in an all-HIV facility on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. Our first visit was quiet. Marshall seemed too demoralized by his condition to entertain a guest, so we watched TV. But when I arrived for our second visit, I found him literally doubled over. He clutched his knees and slightly rocked his body. Marshall’s roommate, Timothy, told me that he had been reprimanded by staff for getting Marshall some Advil when he asked for it. But the medication Marshall was being given for pain by medical staff didn’t last long enough. I hurried down the hall to summon the nurse, who seemed hesitant to respond. She had been instructed to administer pain medication every four hours. Within two hours of dosage, Marshall was experiencing what’s called “breakthrough pain,” and then he was left to withstand that pain for another two hours. What could she do? I protested loudly. Finally, a doctor and a primary nurse came to Marshall’s bedside. One of them suggested giving Marshall a drug they had not yet tried, one with demonstrated efficacy: methadone. The nurse shifted from one foot to the other. “It’s highly addictive,” she said, as if the conversation were over. What possible difference could that make? “He’s dying,” I told them.

This was 2014. Methadone was considered a “junkie drug,” what addicts took to get off heroin—and by this time, heroin use had been rising rapidly. In fact, the United States was in a “third wave” of opioid abuse, which started with widely prescribed painkillers in the late 1990s, then a rise in heroin deaths beginning around 2010, followed by a rise in deaths from illicit opioids such as fentanyl beginning around 2013. By 2014, there were twenty-eight thousand annual drug-overdose deaths in the United States. The widespread awareness of what is often called an “opioid epidemic” explains the nurse’s warning that day about the addictive risks of methadone. There were several obstacles to treating Marshall’s pain, but the greatest was the stigma of opioids.

The stigma is not hard to understand: magazine features, books, and movies for two decades now have chronicled America’s drug problems, including the rapacious role of drug manufacturers like Purdue Pharma, which made OxyContin a household name and enriched the Sackler family in the process. The publicity of their misdeeds led lawmakers on a campaign against opioid prescribing. Yet the crackdown had an unintended consequence, one little examined today: it has increased the suffering of patients who experience chronic pain, as medications that were once heavily promoted have since been restricted. And it has added to the needless agony of those like Marshall at the end of life. I told the story of Marshall and others like him in my 2016 book, The Good Death. Since that time, the double-sided problem has only seemed to worsen. Even morphine, which has long been used to ease the final days and hours of patients in hospice care, is only available to the fortunate ones, as supply chain problems have combined with fears of overuse, leading to vast inequities as to who dies in terrible pain.

This unequal access to pain medications is part of a worldwide problem, stretching far beyond the privileged precincts where hospitals are well-stocked with the latest in medications. Last summer, the World Health Organization released “Left behind in pain,” a report that zeroes in specifically on lack of access to morphine, which it notes is “the most basic requirement for the provision of palliative care.” Worldwide, about half of all deaths each year occur while patients are experiencing “serious health-related suffering,” due to poverty, racial bias, limited access to health care—including palliative care—and laws that restrict opioid distribution.

International respondents to the WHO survey pointed to policies or laws that “overly focused on preventing illicit use and unduly restrictive administrative requirements for prescribing or dispensing morphine.” One survey respondent noted, “The regulatory controls are so many that the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t find [morphine] worth manufacturing as the profit is low and regulation is high. The regulators are more concerned about misuse than easing the pain of patients.” (...)

Inaccurate understanding of morphine’s properties is common around the world. Sixty-two percent of the respondents from the Americas believed that morphine was only “suitable for use in people near the end of life.” Such “negative attitudes and perceptions” regarding morphine and other opioids suggest a misunderstanding of how addiction works and how the medical profession should balance the benefits of opioid use for pain with the dangers of powerful drugs. These negative attitudes include “associating opioid use with imminent death” and believing “that opioids can immediately and definitely cause dependence and that opioids are always harmful or even lethal.”

Today there are more than five hundred drugs that are derived directly or synthetically from opium, a product of the poppy plant. They are used to treat a vast range of ailments including congestion or cough, post-surgery pain, chronic pain, addiction, and end-of-life pain. “Opium and its derivatives are all things to all men and have been so for centuries,” Martin Booth wrote in his 1999 book, Opium: A History. Today, not just in the United States but around the world, opium and its derivatives are part of two huge markets, delivered either by the pharmaceutical industry or the illicit drug trade. And perhaps more than ever before, the extraordinary power of opium products to alleviate pain is complicated by the language of addiction.

The Power of Myth 

Some addiction experts offer a counternarrative about today’s much-discussed opioid crisis. In the late 1990s, there was a movement in the medical community to better address the pain that patients were experiencing, especially in the final weeks of life. With roots in the palliative care movement, which began with the establishment of hospice programs in the UK in the 1960s and the United States in the 1970s, this focus on pain relief emphasized better training for medical professionals: fear of addiction and biases within medicine were preventing doctors from prescribing adequate pain medication, even to those who were dying. But soon, at intake, patients were being asked what level of pain they were experiencing on a scale of one to ten, or to identify themselves on simple diagrams of faces ranging from a frown to a smile. And savvy pharmaceutical manufacturers rushed to develop medications that could supposedly treat pain without the addictive aspects.

OxyContin was patented in 1996 and aggressively marketed to doctors and the public, along with other new opioid drugs. This resulted in a surge of prescriptions, sometimes in large quantities. About two-thirds of those prescriptions were never fully used, so the country’s medicine cabinets were suddenly awash in prescription pills. These pills were often found by curious teenagers or family members, those experimenting with drug use, or those with prior drug experience. “Prescribing increased massively, and a lot of that increase did not go to people with pain,” Maia Szalavitz, author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, told me. “If they were so horribly addictive,” Szalavitz said of those unused prescriptions, “how could this even be true?” In other words, the majority of those with legitimate prescriptions were not getting hooked. And as many as 80 percent of those using prescription opioids for a high were not getting them from a doctor.

Demand created a market: pill mills. Those dependent on opioids sought out their own prescriptions, while others began to sell their unused pills for extra income. Instead of addressing drug use with treatment—methadone, buprenorphine, abstinence programs—states and the federal government began to respond by limiting the quantity of opioids that doctors could prescribe, hurting legitimate pain patients, who were now unable to get the medication that allowed them to function, and leaving those dependent on or addicted to illicit prescription medication in deep withdrawal.

“Do you really think that’s not going to generate a local street market?” Szalavitz asked. So, in “towns where there was deindustrialization, a lot of despair, long family histories of addiction to things like alcohol,” she said, people were forced to find a new drug source. Heroin and street fentanyl filled the void. Those addicted to or dependent on prescription opioids were now using drugs that were not commercially made, their dosages variable, unpredictable, and often deadly. Between 2011 and 2020, there was roughly a 60 percent decline in opioid prescriptions in the United States. Yet, the overall overdose death rate per capita, across all drug categories, tripled.

This way of looking at the opioid crisis is worlds away from the prevailing narrative that Big Pharma alone was driving up the overdose death rate. Pharmaceutical companies were indeed pocketing billions of dollars. Yet, taking down Purdue Pharma didn’t solve the opioid problem. No laws were passed to change marketing practices, and little effort was made to support those with addiction through treatment and training, or through economic policies and health care access. And hardly any attention was devoted to the people with pain who now had to struggle to find medications that had previously allowed them to live their lives.

When I asked Szalavitz how she made sense of this misleading popular narrative about addiction and overdose, she told me, “You couldn’t say that the people who got addicted to prescription opioids were starting by recreational use because then white people wouldn’t be innocent—and journalists like innocent victims. We had to get it wrong in order to convict the drug companies.” From this vantage point, every story of, say, a high school athlete getting hooked on Oxy after knee surgery is misleading as an average portrait, defying both the data and what experts know about addiction. Most people with addiction begin drug use in their teens or twenties, which means it’s likely that those proverbial student athletes getting hooked on Oxy were already experimenting with drugs. “If you don’t start any addiction during that time in your life, your odds of becoming addicted are really low,” Szalavitz told me. “So, what are we doing? We’re cutting off middle-aged women with no history of addiction, who are not likely to ever develop it, and have severe chronic pain, to prevent eighteen-year-old boys from doing drugs that they’re going to get on the street instead.”

Understanding—and addressing—addiction is what’s missing from current drug policy. Instead, some types of drug dependence are demonized, dependence is conflated with addiction, and the best, most cost-effective treatment for pain to exist at this time is stigmatized and kept from those who rely on it to function. As Szalavitz explains it, dependence is needing an increasing dose of a drug to function normally. Many on antidepressants or other stabilizing drugs are not shamed for their dependency. Addiction, Szalavitz says, is using a drug for emotional not physical pain; it is “compulsive drug use despite negative consequences, so increasing negative consequences does not help, by definition.”

Truly facing and addressing addiction requires a new vocabulary—and accepting that “say no to drugs” is an inadequate response. It also requires an examination of far-reaching economic and social challenges in our culture: lives of despair, racial prejudice, economic insecurity, isolation, inaccessible health care, expanding police forces and prisons, and, of course, politics. For politicians, “drugs are a great way to get elected,” Szalavitz said. They can campaign on tough drug laws, claiming that their policies will decrease overdose deaths. “It’s really infuriating,” she told me, “because our prejudice against pain and our stereotypes about addiction push us toward solutions to the problem of opioids that simply do not work.” (...)

Today we call the extensive family of opium-derived drugs opioids, but the term obscures the difference between opiates, the alkaloids extracted from the poppy plant or derived from it—morphine, codeine, heroin—and opioids, the more than five hundred drugs fully or partially synthesized from chemical components of opium. The partially synthesized include hydrocodone (Vicodin), hydromorphone (Dilaudid), and oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet). The fully synthesized include dextromethorphan (NyQuil, Robitussin, Theraflu, Vicks), dextropropoxyphene (Darvocet-N, Darvon), methadone (Dolophine), meperidine (Demerol), and the infamous fentanyl (Sublimaze, Duragesic). The catchall term, then, is a linguistic manifestation of the way that addiction has colored our understanding of an entire class of drugs, some of which remain medically indispensable.

by Ann Neumann, Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Valeria Biasin

[ed. Exactly. I've been banging on this issue for ages saying exactly the same thing (just type the term opioid into the 'Search' button). When a few pill mills and unscrupulous doctors were initially exposed you could see the hysteria coming from a mile away.]

Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25?

Back in groovy 1968, visionaries dreamed of a utopia of peace and love. But only one person actually created it.

I’m referring to John B. Calhoun, a scientist who built a perfect society in a small town in Maryland. He created an actual Garden of Eden in modern America.

But only for mice.

Even today, Dr. Calhoun’s bold experiment—known as Universe 25—demands our attention. In fact, we need to study Universe 25 far more carefully today, because zealous tech accelerationists—that’s now a word, by the way—aim to create something comparable for human beings.

What would you do if AI took care of all your needs?

Would you be happier? Would you be kinder and gentler? Would you love your neighbor more? Would you spend more time with family? Would you have a richer, more fulfilled life?

Calhoun tried to answer that question by creating a utopia for mice, and watching how their society evolved when all their needs and desires were met.

It didn’t turn out like he planned.

Calhoun started with eight mice—and he gave them a perfect environment. His specially designed mouse utopia offered unlimited food and drink, cozy apartments for nesting, ample supplies of nesting material, and constant temperature control to maximize comfort.

There were no predators. There was no disease. There was no competition. There were no threats.

Mice were free to be the best they could be. The only thing missing was 24/7 Netflix.

There was just one rule: Nobody could leave.

The galvanized metal walls of Universe 25 had no exit doors. But why would a mouse want to move out of the Garden of Eden?

Calhoun expected that his mice would flourish and propagate. He had room for 3,000 mice in his pen. He anticipated that the population would soon reach that limit.

It never happened.

At first, the population doubled every 55 days. But things started to deteriorate after the mouse population reached 620—although that was only around 20% of Universe 25’s capacity.

The problem started in the northeast corner of the pen, where the birth rate dropped enormously. But the decline soon spread elsewhere.

Dominant males adopted a narcissistic lifestyle—cleaning and preening themselves, and gorging on food. But they lost interest in routine mating behavior, although rape of both males and females was now on the rise.

Many other males became listless. Calhoun shared some details:

They became very inactive and aggregated in large pools near the centre of the floor of the universe. From this point on they no longer initiated interaction with their established associates, nor did their behaviour elicit attack by territorial males. Even so, they became characterized by many wounds and much scar tissue as a result of attacks by other withdrawn males.

Females now became very aggressive—attacking each other, and even their own children. Males no longer acted as protectors, losing interest in defending the nests. Yet they would increasingly attack other mice for no purpose. Although ample food was available, mouse-on-mouse cannibalism was now commonplace.

The mouse population stopped growing on day 560. A few baby mice survived weaning for several more weeks—but after day 600 not a single newborn mouse lived to adulthood. (...)

The last living mice in Universe 25 were totally anti-social. They had been raised without maternal affection and nurturing, and grew up in a society of extreme narcissism, random violence, and disengagement.

Eventually the entire mouse population in Universe 25 died out. They couldn’t survive utopia. (...)

***

AI is ramping up to displace doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, software developers, engineers, scientists, therapists, writers, musicians, artists…all the way down to customer service reps, fast food workers, and the lowest entry-level employees.

Nobody is immune. Well, almost nobody.

Except for a few overlords, everybody else with a social purpose or meaningful vocation will be disrupted. And not because consumers want this—surveys show the exact opposite.

Consumers hate AI replacement theory by an overwhelming majority. But the ruling technocrats want it madly. And will force it upon us—as quickly and as irrevocably as possible.

But what happens to a society where people are deprived of purposes and vocations?

Humans are so much more complicated than mice. So if mice need challenges and obstacles in order to flourish, we need them all the more. People are not built for passive lives—and the tech billionaires who are chasing this (out of greed, not benevolence) are courting disaster on the largest scale imaginable.

More than 100 years ago, sociologist Emile Durkheim studied the problem of anomie. That’s not a word you hear very often nowadays. But we need to bring it back.

Anomie is a sense that life has no purpose or meaning. The people who suffer from it are listless, disconnected, and prone to mental illnesses of various sorts. Durkheim believed, for example, that suicide was frequently caused by anomie.

But the most shocking part of Durkheim’s analysis was his view that anomie increased when social norms were lessened. You might think that people rejoice when rules and regulations get eliminated. But Durkheim believed the exact opposite.

When the old structures go away, people encounter a crisis of meaning in their lives. In extreme cases, they kill themselves.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: John Calhoun and Universe 25; Twitter/X

Is Microsoft Trying To Commit Suicide?

The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of "AI" (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It's the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in town, and the media (who these days are mostly stenographers recycling press releases) are screaming at every business in tech to add AI to their product.

Well, Apple and Intel and Microsoft were already in there, but evidently they weren't in there enough, so now we're into the silly season with Microsoft's announcement of CoPilot plus Recall, the product nobody wanted.

CoPilot+ is Microsoft's LLM-based add-on for Windows, sort of like 2000's Clippy the Talking Paperclip only with added hallucinations. Clippy was rule-based: a huge bundle of IF ... THEN statements hooked together like a 1980s Expert System to help users accomplish what Microsoft believed to be common tasks, but which turned out to be irritatingly unlike anything actual humans wanted to accomplish. Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on "help the users get stuff done". Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they're asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it's a truthful answer or not.

Anyway, CoPilot+ is also a play by Microsoft to sell Windows on ARM. Microsoft don't want to be entirely dependent on Intel, especially as Intel's share of the global microprocessor market is rapidly shrinking, so they've been trying to boost Windows on ARM to orbital velocity for a decade now. The new CoPilot+ branded PCs going on sale later this month are marketed as being suitable for AI (spot the sucker-bait there?) and have powerful new ARM processors from Qualcomm, which are pitched as "Macbook Air killers", largely because they're playing catch-up with Apple's M-series ARM-based processors in terms of processing power per watt and having an on-device coprocessor optimized for training neural networks.

Having built the hardware and the operating system Microsoft faces the inevitable question, why would a customer want this stuff? And being Microsoft, they took the first answer that bubbled up from their in-company echo chamber and pitched it at the market as a forced update to Windows 11. And the internet promptly exploded.

First, a word about Apple. Apple have been quietly adding AI features to macOS and iOS for the past several years. In fact, they got serious about AI in 2015, and every Apple Silicon processor they've released since 2016 has had a neural engine (an AI coprocessor) on board. Now that the older phones and laptops are hitting end of life, the most recent operating system releases are rolling out AI-based features. For example, there's on-device OCR for text embedded in any image. There's a language translation service for the OCR output, too. I can point my phone at a brochure or menu in a language I can't read, activate the camera, and immediately read a surprisingly good translation: this is an actually useful feature of AI. (The ability to tag all the photos in my Photos library with the names of people present in them, and to search for people, is likewise moderately useful: the jury is still out on the pet recognition, though.) So the Apple roll-out of AI has so far been uneventful and unobjectionable, with a focus on identifying things people want to do and making them easier.

Microsoft Recall is not that. (...)

And there are tools already out there to slurp through the database and see what's in it, such as TotalRecall.

Surprise! It turns out that the unencrypted database and the stored images may contain your user credentials and passwords. And other stuff. Got a porn habit? Congratulations, anyone with access to your user account can see what you've been seeing. Use a password manager like 1Password? Sorry, your 1Password passwords are probably visible via Recall, now.

Now, "unencrypted" is relative; the database is stored on a filesystem which should be encrypted using Microsoft's BitLocker. But anyone with credentials for your Microsoft account can decrypt it and poke around. Indeed, anyone with access to your PC, unlocked, has your entire world at their fingertips.

But this is an utter privacy shit-show. Victims of domestic abuse are at risk of their abuser trawling their PC for any signs that they're looking for help. Anyone who's fallen for a scam that gave criminals access to their PC is also completely at risk.

Worse: even if you don't use Recall, if you send an email or instant message to someone else who does then it will be OCRd and indexed via Recall: and preserved for posterity.
Now imagine the shit-show when this goes corporate.

And it turns out that Microsoft is pushing this feature into the latest update of Windows 11 for all compatible hardware and making it impossible to remove or disable, because that tactic has worked so well for them in the past at driving the uptake of new technologies that Microsoft wanted its ~~customers~~ victims to start using. Like, oh, Microsoft Internet Explorer back in 2001, and remember how well that worked out for them.

Suddenly every PC becomes a target for Discovery during legal proceedings. Lawyers can subpoena your Recall database and search it, no longer being limited to email but being able to search for terms that came up in Teams or Slack or Signal messages, and potentially verbally via Zoom or Skype if speech-to-text is included in Recall data.

It's a shit-show for any organization that handles medical records or has a duty of legal confidentiality; indeed, for any business that has to comply with GDPR (how does Recall handle the Right to be Forgotten? In a word: badly), or HIPAA in the US. This misfeature contravenes privacy law throughout the EU (and in the UK), and in healthcare organizations everywhere which has a medical right to privacy. About the only people whose privacy it doesn't infringe are the Hollywood studios and Netflix, which tells you something about the state of things.

by Charles Stross, Charlie's Diary |  Read more:

Image: Android Authority via:

[ed. This feature can apparently be turned off after installation but how many will do that, especially if it's not obvious what the implications are, or how to do it? Privacy creep is another concern as MS could, over time, try to access a treasure trove of data for AI training purposes. One of my favorite Charlie Stross quotes (actually a quote of a quote) is: "... if we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization." See also this previous post: How Microsoft Plans to Squeeze Cash Out of AI (DS). UPDATE: Oops. Sounds like MS is already backpedalling on Recall. (Ars Technica):]

"On Friday, Microsoft announced major changes to its upcoming Recall feature after overwhelming criticism from security researchers, the press, and its users. Microsoft is turning Recall off by default when users set up PCs that are compatible with the feature, and it's adding additional authentication and encryption that will make it harder to access another user's Recall data on the same PC."

Crying Wolf in an Age of Alarms

In rural Washington, on a dry July morning in 2020, Collienne Becker stood at the edge of her driveway and prepared to face a wall of water.

Minutes earlier, she’d stepped onto the porch of her farmhouse to smoke a cigarette when she heard a familiar, jolting sound. Every Wednesday at noon for as long as anyone in the town of Carnation could remember, a high-pitched siren had blared in the small city, followed by a weekly dose of reassurance over a loudspeaker: “This is a test of the Tolt Dam Warning System.”

For decades, the City of Seattle has owned and operated, from afar, the Tolt Reservoir and Dams, which supplies about a third of greater Seattle’s drinking water. Carnation—a small farming community of just over 2,000 people in the Snoqualmie Valley, about 30 miles east of the city—receives none of that water, but bears all of the risk of the operation. In the improbable event that the 200-foot-high dam fails, a 30-foot wave of water could surge down the South Fork Tolt River and inundate this small town.

Since the time they’re children, locals learn that an alarm on Wednesday at noon is nothing to worry about: It’s just routine testing—everything is fine. But if the siren sounds at any other time during the week, it’s reason to head for higher ground immediately.

This time, it was a Tuesday. A message over the alarm’s accompanying speaker confirmed everyone’s fears: “The Tolt Dam has failed. Evacuate the area immediately.”

Becker, who had recently retired from Amazon, and her husband, Michael, scrambled to grab food and water and leashes for their howling golden retrievers. Yet, by the time they corralled the animals into their Toyota 4Runner, the typically vacant road abutting their property was already bumper-to-bumper. Roaring fire trucks had alerted families to scoop up their kids. They had an hour, tops, to leave town or climb to a higher elevation.

With most of the traffic heading west, away from the reported deluge, Becker decided, somewhat counterintuitively, to drive east toward the dam. The couple had friends who lived in the thickly forested highlands nearby. They could hole up there, potentially. But she only made it a mile. A woman driving a horse trailer had jackknifed across the narrow country road and gotten stuck, blocking it for everyone, after a passerby said a bridge nearby had breached and she needed to turn around.

So Becker doubled back, illegally driving westbound in the empty eastbound lane, incredulous that people were still waiting for the traffic light in the other lane when they could potentially drown at any moment. When she reached home, she walked down her driveway, and, with traffic westbound out of town at a standstill, decided to await her fate. She imagined their farmhouse, one of the oldest structures in the area, getting swept away. She imagined worse. I’m going to die, she thought.

“That’s when a guy said, ‘Oh, it’s all false. Don’t worry about it,’” says Becker. As she stood immobilized in her driveway, he leaned from his car and told her he’d seen a Facebook post that suggested the siren was a false alarm. Becker wasn’t sure whether to trust him, but a sheriff soon came by and confirmed the rumor. A crew working on the warning system had accidentally set it off. Everyone could go home.

The siren, which blared for more than 40 minutes, was the first and most harrowing of eight false alarms that sounded over a four-year span in Carnation. These repeated false alarms left residents with lingering stress, anxiety, and jangled nerves. 

In August 2023, after the sixth failure of the alarm, the city declared a state of emergency, imploring Seattle officials to fix the problem. “Seattle’s dam puts all of our lives and property at risk,” Jim Ribail, Carnation’s mayor, told Seattle City Council that September. But even as Seattle Public Utilities has worked to improve the faulty warning system with new technology and equipment, they can’t alleviate the psychological toll it has already taken. “There are many people that live here today that still suffer from the PTSD [of] this first event,” Ribail said during a community forum later that month.

In the aftermath, some locals have taken measures to protect their mental health. One resident on the autism spectrum sets a timer for two minutes before the test siren on Wednesdays to mitigate his agitation. Becker, meanwhile, leaves town entirely on Wednesdays—every Wednesday. Once a standard, if still jarring, interjection in the quiet rhythm of the town, the siren is now “a trigger,” she says—an anxiety-inducing reminder of that awful day.

Beyond the haunting psychological effects, however, a more insidious and potentially damaging response to the spate of false alarms has also set in across Carnation: There have been so many false alarms, Becker says, that she and others are experiencing “the ‘cry wolf’ thing.” She says, “If it had went off today, I would have probably had that rush of panic, but I would have waited to try to figure out whether it was real or not. Waiting is probably not the right decision, but I just don’t trust it anymore.”

She’s not the only one. Each time the alarm sounded in Carnation, Ribail hopped in his truck and drove up to a 20-acre evacuation site in the Tolt Highlands. Each time, the mayor has waited for his constituents to join him there, only to discover “nobody’s coming up,” he says. (...)

Natural disaster alerting systems are generally more accurate than they once were but remain fallible, so those designing new systems have to ask themselves: What are the consequences of too many alarms versus too few? How frequently and under what circumstances should an alarm go off? And how can we protect these systems from embarrassing hacks, such as the one that occurred in Texas in 2021, in which subscribers received three alerts that killer doll Chucky was on the loose?

In our era of climate change, “having warnings that actually make people evacuate becomes more and more important,” says Katharina Hembach-Stunden, a researcher who worked on a recent study of the cry wolf effect while at Osnabrück University in Germany. “If you have too many false alarms, there’s a lot of research that hints toward people becoming more reluctant to actually respond to it. So you’ve run this risk of them not evacuating and then having higher losses—deaths.” Changing behavior is difficult, she says. (...)

Surveys of more than 4,000 southeastern United States residents discovered that people are very bad at estimating how often an alarm is false and that, even in areas with high numbers of false alarms, residents still sought shelter at among the highest rates.

“There’s mixed findings in that research, which is what makes it so interesting,” says Sarah DeYoung, a professor in the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center who was not part of the NOAA study. “In some communities, it’s led to hyper vigilance. In some communities or instances in some studies, it’s led to reduced vigilance.” (...)

Since 2012, various U.S. government authorities have sent tens of thousands of text message-like Wireless Emergency Alerts to inform different areas of crises such as missing children and severe weather. But at 8:08 a.m. on Jan. 13, 2018, residents of Hawaii received one unlike any before or since: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

It would be another 38 minutes before the government sent another alert with the professional equivalent of “just kidding.” Like in Carnation, a local agency was responsible for accidentally activating a false alarm.

Before the follow-up message, confusion reigned on the state’s constellation of islands. Locals wondered whether they were about to endure another Pearl Harbor. Some assumed it had been sent in error. Others called loved ones, thinking they were about to die, and desperately sought more information. A few were more fatalistic, wandering to the beach to drink wine.

These responses, and the aftermath show the wide variety of ways humans may react to the same incident. In a follow-up study in International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, for example, at least one survey respondent reported he could never trust the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency again, while others said they’d be more prepared to take precautions for the next missile alert. (...)

Sharing information with others nearby to better understand a threat and its potential implications—also known as “milling”—was a common reaction in Hawaii, too, the survey found. Neighbors there conferred in driveways and messaged online, suggesting that before people decide to react to an alarm, they may consult others in the community rather than just rely on independent judgment. “I’ve noticed, across all my research and in my personal life, people do that social milling thing, where they’re going to look to see what other people are doing,” says DeYoung, who was one of the authors of the Hawaii paper.

Those who went online usually found reassurance sooner. Some saw posts by Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard that dispelled the missile myth. But others bemoaned the lack of physical cues around them. “A lot of people talked about listening for or noticing a lack of air raid sirens,” says Jennifer Trivedi, an assistant professor in the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center who conducted interviews on the ground after the false missile alert.

A similar complaint would resurface five years later, after the Maui wildfires. The island has 80 siren towers—when natural disaster is imminent, they’re designed to blast long tones to let the public know to seek more information on radio or television and to evacuate to higher ground, head inland, or if they are inside a concrete building, to climb to the fourth floor or higher. The sirens are tested routinely, each month. But during the blazes, officials decided not to activate them at all—in part, for fear that residents would head into the hills, putting them at greater risk. Instead, they sent out only phone notifications. But many people never received these digital alerts, inviting a different but nagging question: How can we manage—and measure the efficacy of—alarms in an era of increased natural disasters if some people never hear the cry?

The roots of that question date back to the 1960s. At the time, scholars David Green and John Swets had just formulated what is known as signal detection theory, which proposed a framework for how people respond to stimuli, or signals—such as disasters—in situations of uncertainty. If they perceive a signal—say, a flood—but don’t get an alarm, it’s a “miss.” If they get an alarm, but no flood occurs, it’s a false alarm. Neither is a desired outcome, but which is worse over the long run?

by Benjamin Cassidy, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Ian Dewar Photography/Shutterstock; markk

[ed. I was there (during the incoming missle threat in Hawaii) and most people just seemed sort of nonplussed and confused. Like, how could this be true? And, if it was, what could anyone do? There were no emergency sirens. Later we heard stories about a few people crawling into culverts and such, but mostly everybody just kind of hung around outside - 'milling' as it were - talking to neighbors and just going..."did you get this weird notice thing too?"]

Tom Penaguin

Typewriter in D minor

Lori Hersberger (Swiss, 1964), Today / Tomorrow, 2007
via:

via:

[ed. See also: Deco Japan, Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945 (SAM). Highly recommended.]

A Portrait of Japanese America, in the Shadow of the Camps

In the nineteen-twenties, United States officials began preparing for the possibility of war in the Pacific, and the consequences this would have for the territory of Hawaii. About a third of Hawaii’s population were people of Japanese descent, a community that had first arrived in the late eighteen-hundreds to work in the sugarcane and pineapple plantations. But the group remained largely mysterious to American leaders. If the United States went to war with Japan, a military study from 1929 concluded, “all Japanese, alien and Hawaiian-born . . . should be considered as enemy aliens.” The report echoed long-standing nativist fears that Asians were incapable of assimilation. Colonel John DeWitt, one of the architects of Japanese incarceration, foresaw the need for “complete military control over the Hawaiian islands,” including the suspension of civil liberties and the selective imprisonment of anyone considered threatening to local interests. As the so-called Japanese menace grew in the thirties and forties, so, too, did anxieties about what role this community might play in future conflicts. George S. Patton, who would later become a famed general, drew up a list of a hundred-and-twenty-eight influential community figures in Hawaii, including teachers, doctors, and a priest, who might be taken as “hostages” in the event of war with Japan. Franklin Roosevelt proposed a similar, secret list of suspected agitators who might be “the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.”

There was little evidence that these communities were hotbeds of sedition. The late historian Gary Y. Okihiro argued that these suspicions were purely speculative, drawing from caricature rather than firsthand knowledge. In September, 1940, an F.B.I. report on the inner workings of the Japanese community bore this out, suggesting that “local alien Japanese” were “not organized for purposes of sabotage or subversive activity.” In fact, the younger, American-born Japanese seemed “predominantly loyal” to the United States. Whatever grievances these communities held, the report continued, owed to the discrimination they had experienced at the hands of white employers and landlords. “As a result, their resentment is directed more toward the Caucasian Race than the American government as such.”

Nonetheless, the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, fuelled racist paranoia. Shortly after the bombing, the columnist Walter Lippmann warned of a potential “fifth column”—subversives secretly living within the United States, plotting a “combined attack from within and from without.” He proposed a temporary, wholesale incarceration of the Japanese in America, even if it meant compromising on civil liberties. Some outspoken government officials agreed. “We want to keep this a white man’s country,” Bert Miller, the attorney general of Idaho, said. “All Japanese [should] be put in concentration camps for the remainder of the war.” On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the War Department the authority to forcibly remove and relocate all persons of Japanese descent in the Western states. With little time to evacuate their homes, many lost their property and businesses; decades later, estimates placed the total monetary loss between four hundred million and three billion dollars. The Wartime Civil Control Administration commandeered fairgrounds, racetracks, and cattle halls for temporary shelter in the Western states, where Japanese communities were concentrated, while barracks were built. Yet some hard-liners, like Chase Clark, the governor of Idaho, felt these measures didn’t go far enough. Clark compared the Japanese to rats; his proposal was to send them all back to Japan, and then to “sink the island.”

About a hundred and twenty thousand people of Japanese descent—two-thirds of whom were American citizens—were incarcerated in ten camps throughout California, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. Tellingly, there was no wholesale roundup of the Japanese in Hawaii, despite the long-standing fears over the islands’ proximity to Asia, a fact that suggests that what happened on the mainland was a deeply arbitrary interpretation of military necessity.

While Executive Order 9066 was largely met with doubt, despair, and anger among Japanese Americans, it also became a source of collective shame that was seldom discussed in the years that followed. Few stories of camp life were published until decades later. This spring, the writer Frank Abe and the literary historian Floyd Cheung published “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration,” an essential volume that collects more than fifty accounts of Japanese life before, during, and after the war. The title alone is a bold assertion of identity: for decades, the wartime incarceration of the Japanese was described in euphemistic terms such as “relocation” or “internment.” And Abe and Cheung’s definition of “literature” is admirably broad, encompassing letters, editorials, poetry, short stories, manga, and government documents. Although there have been many books written on the history of incarceration, few have captured the kind of emotional detail that comes through in the largely first-person accounts collected by Abe and Cheung. Their selections paint a complicated picture, convening hopeful, patriotic idealists, righteous firebrands, and downtrodden cynics.

Before the Second World War, one of the more pressing existential issues facing the Japanese American community seemed to be the generation gap between foreign-born immigrants—the issei, or first generation—and their American-born children, the nisei. In 1929, the Japanese American Citizens League was founded to help this latter group navigate what it meant to be American. (Until 1952, foreign-born Japanese people could not become American citizens through naturalization.) Organizations like the J.A.C.L. retained a modest faith in the powers of assimilation. Toshio Mori, whose short story collection, “Yokohama, California,” was completed before the Second World War, but not published until 1949, writes of a “perfect day” at the park as two Japanese American baseball teams squared off. “The outcome of the game and the outcome of the day do not matter,” he writes, of this carefree, quintessentially American afternoon. “That is left for moralists to work on years later.” 

The bombing at Pearl Harbor put immediate pressure on many young Japanese Americans to figure out where they fit in. Many had grown up with only a tenuous link to Japan, yet they also lived in the shadow of racist policies, like laws prohibiting “alien” ownership of land. Abe and Cheung focus on this moment of fear, offering the perspective of people reckoning with the inflexibility of wartime politics. (...)

In February, 1943, the War Relocation Authority and the War Department administered a questionnaire designed to affirm the loyalty of those incarcerated in camps. It also offered draft-age men the opportunity to enlist in the military, if they answered affirmatively to two questions. The first asked their willingness to serve in the armed forces, wherever ordered; the second required their “unqualified allegiance to the United States,” as well as their renunciation of Japan. Approximately twelve thousand young men volunteered for service. The well-documented heroism of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, which consisted almost entirely of American soldiers of Japanese ancestry, was a boon for wartime morale.

Yet the loyalty questionnaire was divisive within the camps. One in five nisei—the American-born, second-generation Japanese Americans—refused to answer, answered no, or qualified their answers to one of these two questions. Draft resisters organized sizable protests, particularly at the camps in Poston, Arizona, and Heart Mountain, Wyoming. At the Tule Lake Segregation Center, in California, they were met with violence.

These men would later be seen as heroes. But what’s striking about Abe and Cheung’s collection, particularly in these moments of rebellion, are the modest hopes held by those incarcerated. “I just wanted to be who I was—a Japanese American, an American of Japanese descent, an American citizen,” the poet and playwright Hiroshi Kashiwagi writes. He was in his twenties during his incarceration. Kashiwagi refused to enlist, and he grew dismayed by the harsh treatment of his fellow draft resisters. “I renounced my American citizenship at Tule Lake,” he writes, but he came to feel like it “was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life.” Yet this was a no-win situation. How else to reckon with the paradox of your government seeking patriotic obedience while stripping you of your rights? “Living under such pressure, it’s inevitable that there should be doubts and questions about your actions, as well as feelings of guilt. Were my actions wrong or bad? What kind of man did this make me?”

Okihiro, the historian, whose book “Cane Fires,” from 1991, tracked the roots of anti-Japanese sentiment in Hawaii in the eighty years leading up to the Second World War, passed away late last month, at the age of seventy-eight. I’d been rereading his book alongside Abe and Cheung’s collection when I learned of his death. Okihiro grew up on a sugar plantation on Oahu, in Hawaii. “Cane Fires” grew out of his firsthand perspective of how wartime jingoism bore down on individuals, like his parents and grandparents, who “burned and buried” all traces of Japanese culture, like flags, letters, and records. An influential scholar and inspiring teacher known for his generous, mellow vibe, Okihiro later reflected on the deep psychological wounds that remained. “It was not so much the loss of property that bothered Japanese Americans,” he explained in an interview that he did in 2010. “It was the loss of their humanity, their dignity as people. Because they were treated as subhuman, treated like cattle: rounded up, given tags with numbers instead of names, put into cattle trucks to be assembled in horse stalls, or race tracks and fairgrounds, then to be dumped in horse stalls that still reeked of manure.”

In December, 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not indefinitely detain a citizen who was “concededly loyal” to the United States, leading the way for the Roosevelt Administration to rescind Executive Order 9066 and allow for Japanese Americans to leave the camps. Each person was given twenty-five dollars and a train ticket to go wherever they wanted to go. Settling nearby was rarely an option. The Wyoming legislature, fearful that Japanese Americans from neighboring states who’d been incarcerated at the Heart Mountain camp would eventually want to settle in the region, passed a law that would “prevent Asiatic aliens from buying or owning property” in the state. Returning to the West Coast, Japanese Americans faced discrimination in the job and housing markets.

Few of the writers in “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration” expected to be read decades later, if at all. Some were merely keeping records for themselves. After the war, there was little hurry to revisit this moment of victimhood; the few who wanted to share their experiences with a broader readership found there was no real market for books about such a dark chapter of American history. Instead of dwelling on their plight, many Japanese Americans sought to reintegrate themselves into the mainstream. Once seen as an alien threat, they were now embraced as exemplary Americans. In 1966, the sociologist William Petersen wrote in the New York Times of the unusual “success story” of this community. “Barely more than twenty years after the end of the wartime camps, this is a minority that has risen above even prejudiced criticism. By any criterion of good citizenship that we choose, the Japanese Americans are better than any other group in our society, including native-born whites.”

by Hua Hsu, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: A line crew at work in the Manzanar camp. Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
[ed. I'm Japanese/American and during the mid-50s to -60s grew up on a sugar cane plantation on Oahu (my grandparents worked on a pineapple plantation on Lanai, where I spent much time as well). I'm actually grateful for the unique experience. The cane fields were my playground. I heard scattered war-time stories growing up from older generations - in not much detail - and generally have the impression that most preferred not to relive that experience. It was such an inconceivable reaction, especially in Hawaii, where everyone of all races lived in general acceptance of each other.]

A Surf Legend’s Long Ride

Jock Sutherland’s childhood home, on Oahu’s North Shore, was a picturesque ruin when he brought me there. It was built after the attack on Pearl Harbor: a wooden barracks at the water’s edge, part of the military’s frantic preparations for a second attack. The building had a soft V shape, as if embracing the ocean, with a line of louvred windows opening onto a basic deck. Waves pounded the rocky point below. Sutherland’s mother, Audrey, bought the house in 1961, for fifteen thousand dollars, and lived there for nearly sixty years.

I thought the place looked salvageable, but Sutherland said no. “Dry rot. Rust. The walls are racked. It’s a teardown.”

He sounded so unsentimental.

“Anyway, look at the neighborhood.”

He gave me an eyebrow signal that I had to interpret. We couldn’t actually see the neighbors. We were in the yard, surrounded by coconut palms, lush vegetation, an ancient unpainted stake fence. I decided I knew what he meant: mansions were slowly filling every lot along this part of the coast. In fact, Jock and his siblings had already sold this place to wealthy mainlanders. But the new owners seemed to be in no hurry to build, so Jock was still taking care of the yard, and using it to park his van while he surfed nearby.

“Looks fun out there,” he said, peering at waves breaking on a reef off the point. It did look fun. We paddled out through a gantlet of blue-gray lava rocks. I tried to mimic Sutherland’s every move—he had been navigating this tiny, swirling channel since the nineteen-fifties—but still managed to slice my foot. Out in the channel, he took my foot in his hands, studying the cut from various angles. “That’s not from a rock. You kicked an ‘opihi”—a limpet. “We can clean it later. I’ve got some good stuff.”

There were a dozen people out, and every one of them greeted Jock as he paddled past: little shakas and fist bumps with old regulars. This spot, where the waves range greatly in quality and intensity, is known as Jocko’s. The eponymous local had arrived. (...)

Sutherland surfs unusually well for a man of seventy-five. Surfing well at his age is unusual, full stop. But he has spent his whole life, nearly, in this wave-rich corner of Oahu. He’s wiry, long-armed, spry, disturbingly lean—five-ten, one-thirty-five—and he still carries, across his upper back, a serious rack of paddling muscles. He works as a roofer, running a small company, and gets in the water whenever possible. His hair is short and gray, his skin sun-punished and deeply lined. But his glance is sharp, and his default expression is a level, knowing, impish gaze. You need to watch the eyebrows. (...)

Although Jock didn’t know it, he and I went way back. I’m a few years younger, and also started surfing as a kid. But my family lived in Los Angeles, where the surf craze of the early sixties—call it the “Gidget” boom—was being manufactured. Jock was out here, on the North Shore of Oahu. Surfing has a cultish aspect, and many of its pilgrimage sites are in this small corner of Hawaii. When I took my vows, surfing had a sacred text, too—a magazine called Surfer, which outsiders inevitably called “the Bible of the sport.”

The magazine was created by John Severson, a California surfer and filmmaker who wanted to counter the “Gidget” version with something closer to the real thing. One of his inspired gimmicks was the Reader Poll, which débuted in 1963 and produced an annual list of the world’s best surfers. For my friends and me, the Surfer poll established a righteous pantheon. I can still name the top twenty from that first year, possibly in order.

In the mid-sixties, a flashy young haole (Hawaiian for “white person”) named Jock Sutherland made his move on surfing’s main stage—known simply as the North Shore—riding enormous waves with rare, almost playful aplomb. He was, unlike most surfers, a switch-foot, able to ride equally well leading with his left foot or his right. As a goofy-foot (right foot forward), he rode the Banzai Pipeline, the world’s most famous, most photogenic, and, at that time, most dangerous wave. Images of Jock in stylish high gear at huge Pipeline, one hand delicately grazing the water’s surface, hung in the bedrooms of surf rats everywhere. He rose swiftly through the Surfer poll, and in 1969 was No. 1—the consensus best surfer in the world.

When I mentioned this achievement, faux casually, Jock gave me the fish eye. “That whole thing was rigged,” he said. “Severson decided who would win. I had a part in a film he was releasing.” (...)

We were eating home-cooked Asian-style mixed vegetables at his place, a modest upstairs apartment in the hills above the North Shore. I should not have been shocked, but I was. Hadn’t I faithfully voted, after long deliberations, in each Reader Poll? Hadn’t I worshipped the surfing of young Jock? Of course, I didn’t know anything about him beyond a few great film clips and some classic stills.

A surfer as famous as he was could have made enough money for an easy retirement, I thought, but Sutherland hadn’t cashed in. Surfing was never, to his mind, a job. Even when he was at the apex of the surfing world, he was unimpressed, stubborn. There was no pro tour in those days. “You could work for a board manufacturer, maybe have your own signature-model board,” he told me. “But that meant sell, sell, sell. That was . . . crass. I mean, the banality. It was antithetical to being able to enjoy being out in the water.”

Jock built a different sort of life on his home coast. He’s seemingly everybody’s favorite roofer, a part-time farmer, a revered elder with garrulous tendencies. I’ve heard him called “the mayor of the North Shore.” My old starstruck view of him was pure projection. In truth, he was, from an early age, leading a strange, half-wild, quite complicated existence.

His place was jammed with books, magazines, cookware, and tools, but there was no shelf of trophies or mementos—just a faded poster in a hallway from the 1967 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, a major surf contest that Jock won. He had recently been elected to something called the Hawaii Waterman Hall of Fame, which throws a big banquet in Honolulu. Evidence of the award was nowhere to be seen. (...)

When Jock was twelve, his mother sent him to stay with a man known as the Hermit of Kalalau, on the island of Kauai. The hermit lived in a cave on the Nāpali Coast—a roadless wilderness where sea cliffs rise as high as four thousand feet. “That was actually his summer cave, down by the beach,” Jock told me. “He had a winter cave up the valley.”

The hermit’s name was Dr. Bernard Wheatley. “I was the object of his displeasure,” Jock recalled. “Being a kid, I was unaware of the imperatives of his existence. There was a good little bodysurfing wave out front, but he didn’t want me to swim out there. He was responsible for me. I started whining, and I ended up bodysurfing it.”

Jock enjoyed himself in Kalalau. “It was like a summer camp, but for more serious stuff than laying around playing cards,” he said. “We did a lot of foraging.” They also did some hunting—Jock had brought along the family .22. Dr. Wheatley warmed to him, slightly: “He tolerated me. I was curious. I had potential.”

Jock suspected that his mother wanted him to spend time with a father figure. His father, John Lauren Sutherland, was a Coast Guard officer who had left the family when Jock was ten. How did his mother know Dr. Wheatley? Well, he was her type of person. She had a job with the Army, doing education counselling, and was raising four kids alone, but she frequented the wilder coasts of Hawaii and had an exceptionally wide circle of friends.

Audrey Sutherland was a one-off. She grew up in California, went to U.C.L.A. at sixteen for international relations, worked as a riveter in the Second World War. She became a long-distance swimmer, married a sailor, worked in commercial fishing, and moved to Oahu in 1952. There she did substitute teaching, taught swimming, got her Army job. Her kids, growing up in the decommissioned barracks at the ocean’s edge, were all water babies. After their father left, they scrounged. “When you’re poor,” Jock told me, “you learn how to find food on the reefs, hunt, pick wild fruit, trade with your neighbors. We set out lobster traps. Spearfishing, night diving. Got a lot of fruit from the hills.”

Audrey drew up a list of things that every child should be able to do by age sixteen and stuck it on the wall. It read, in part:

—Clean a fish and dress a chicken

—Write a business letter

—Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord

—Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes

—Handle a boat safely and competently

—Save someone drowning using available equipment

—Read at a tenth grade level

—Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy

—Dance with any age

This list changed with the times, adding computers and contraception, and nobody really kept score, but everybody got the idea.

Audrey had what she called a “wildcat need” to take wilderness trips alone. She used her short vacations from her Army job to explore backcountry Hawaii—climbing volcanoes, swimming remote coasts, living off the land. She swam the northeast shore of Molokai, perhaps the wildest coast in the islands, from east to west, pulling her supplies behind her on a line. That took a week. She hiked into narrow, once inhabited valleys, got into terrible scrapes on cliffs and landings, nearly lost her life on more than one occasion. In 1978, she published a book about her Molokai expeditions called, after Louisa May Alcott, “Paddling My Own Canoe.”

Audrey had a theory about relations with her kids: “They decided letting me be crazy gave them more freedom.” But sometimes she took one of them along for what Jock called “our mountain education.” The Sutherlands didn’t have a TV when Jock was young, and Audrey was proud to raise readers. The kids went to high school in Waialua, an old sugar-mill town a few miles down the coast. A retired county lifeguard who worked with Jock’s younger brother told me, “All those Sutherlands were really fucking smarty-pants. They read way more books than anybody else.” (...)

Jock’s father introduced him to surfing—on an old balsa board, as he recalls. He began to surf at spots he could paddle to, or walk to with a board on his head—and surfboards then weighed nearly as much as he did. Just to the west was Laniakea, just to the east Chun’s Reef. Both are well-known breaks, and yet, surfing them with Jock, you learn that every peak and chunk of reef has a hyperlocalized name: “That’s Piddlies, and that thing over there is Chuckleheads.”

The North Shore has a concentration of spots that, in the wintertime, break bigger and better than any other known coast, and in the fifties a trickle of doughty Californians began making the pilgrimage, testing their skill and nerve alongside a small crew of locals. A few big-wave surfers became household names—at least in the households where I hung out. Board-makers started shaping specialized boards, known as “guns,” for riding huge waves.

But the first time Jock surfed Waimea Bay, which was then considered the largest ridable wave in the world, he did so on the same battered board he rode at Piddlies. He was fifteen. “It was pretty consequential, riding a board that wasn’t all that fast,” he recalled, quietly. His talent drew attention, and older guys started giving him lifts to more distant spots, like Sunset Beach, a complex big-wave reef break farther east. A local board shaper, Dick Brewer, befriended Jock. “He was kind of a proxy father,” Jock said. The relationship had its transactional side. Brewer gave Jock boards that let him surf faster, harder, more freely, and people saw the Brewer sticker under his feet.

Although there was no pro tour yet, there were contests. Jock won the Hawaiian State Championships three years in a row, and in 1966 placed second in the World Championships, in San Diego. These events were all held in small waves—not his specialty—but he was wicked fast, technically solid, and unpredictable. He switched stance, which is something you rarely see in contests. In unchallenging waves, he did silly but difficult things like taking off fin first. He seemed to be out there having fun, and yet he usually won. When he won the 1967 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, it was the biggest deal in competitive surfing, at least in Hawaii, and it was held at Sunset, in serious waves. Jock, who was still in his teens, got no prize money.

But it was not in contests that he made his name. It was at Pipeline, which sits roughly halfway between Waimea and Sunset Beach. A few surfers rode Pipeline well, notably Butch Van Artsdalen, a hellion from La Jolla. But most people were afraid of it. When Pipe is working, it breaks with stupendous force in shallow water, producing one of the world’s most beautiful, deadly tubes. Jock and his buddies started riding it on small days. “I made one or two out of ten,” he said.

He kept at it, refining his approach. He started making the takeoffs, and seeing how to avoid the heavy lip, by quickly finding a ridable line and “pulling in”—crouching close to the face and letting the barrel envelop him. Then, with perfect positioning and a bit of luck, he would be thrown into the clear by the explosive force of the lip’s impact. Jock seemed to have more time as he rode than anybody else did. Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin. (...)

Jock knows everybody on the North Shore, but he seems to keep special track of good photographers, like the old cover-shot surfer he is. A set comes through, and we need to scramble out. Jock, as always, gets a head start, and catches the first wave. Afterward, he paddles back out and asks me, shyly, if he looked dorky jumping up regular-foot (that’s left foot forward, not his more natural stance), and I assure him that he looked smooth. He nods happily—never too late for vanity.

Later, he insists that I take off in front of him. It’s a small wave, not much wall, and I’m not sure what we’re doing riding it together. He yells, “Come back!” He’s gesturing at me to ride toward him, which I do, though it makes no sense. He keeps gesturing. Now we’re on a collision course. “More!” He cuts back to give me more room. I keep heading toward him, against my better judgment. Our boards are now inches apart. The wave is a dribbler. “O.K.!” he yells, steering away and pointing at the wave beyond me. I turn and see that this small, weak wave has hit a shallow shelf of coral, far closer to shore than people normally surf at Chun’s. The wave stands up, chest high, turns smooth as pearl, and I find myself flying through a lovely section, the sun infusing the lip with a gray-green glow. Jock, now far behind, is giving me a thumbs-up. (...)

A solid north swell hits the North Shore. It’s way out of season, nearly May. Jock and I check Pipe. The crowd is so thick that the surfers look, from down the beach, like ants stuck on a glue trap, an undulant mass. It’s dead glassy, no wind, and very ominous-looking. The water is gray, almost brown, and the swell seems bunched up for its size. Ten-foot waves come through, and nobody in the crowd even tries to take off. The waves detonate on the reef, most with no corner, no shoulder, confirming the wisdom of the crowd’s prudence. The bunched-up swell makes a two-wave hold-down look all too possible. “Not user-friendly,” Jock says.

We drive to Sunset. The wave there breaks on a long set of reefs far from shore, and it is handling this swell beautifully. Two-story peaks stand against the sky, and then a long clean wall roars toward the channel. Dozens of people are watching from the highway, but there are only a few surfers out. My heart hammers. This is obviously the spot. I start changing. Jock does not.

“You’re not going out?”

Jock looks miserable. “No, I’m going to run some errands. I feel emotionally wounded.” He had a difficult conversation that morning, apparently, with Pia Stern, his longtime girlfriend. Pia, who lives in San Diego, is a painter and an art teacher. She and Jock met in the nineties, when she was teaching at the University of Hawaii. They have never lived together. They fly back and forth when they can. “We’re very attached, very close, but I don’t have a name for it,” Pia told me. (...)

Jock quotes Pia often, and seems in awe of her. But, Pia told me, “I’m uncomfortable when he puts me on a pedestal.” This is a theme with Jock. He speaks of his mother with reverential affection. He keeps a collection of her handwritten journals. But his view of his father has developed an edge. “He treated Mom more like a girlfriend than a wife,” he told me. “He had girlfriends everywhere. Really, he was just another selfish surfer.” (...)

I heard Dave Rastovich, a superb pro surfer, contrast Jock with the “grumpy old dude who wishes it was yesteryear”—the inevitable guy who grumbles about the days when it wasn’t so crowded and, hell, even the waves were better. Jock was the antithesis, “always vibrant and always buzzing,” he said. I couldn’t argue with that. He still wanted to surf well, and wanted to look good as he surfed, but I have never heard him fret, even in a sidelong way, about his lost relevance in high-performance surfing. He still likes to compete—in the “old guys’ division,” in local North Shore contests. Last year, he took second at Haleiwa. (...)

Jock, after many false starts, is off to see Pia. To prepare, he goes to see a barber who works out of her house near Sunset. He’s given her a ton of avocados, so it’s a discount haircut. He comes out looking like a boy. Jock, for a world-class athlete, has always had a delicate head and neck, and this haircut makes me want to protect him from the world.

Before he goes, we surf Chun’s one more time, and he gives me a wave-judgment tip that I could not have imagined previously. It’s a rising swell, and the sets are starting to produce a lovely peak right next to the channel. The crowd has moved over there, but Jock instead points toward the horizon: “Let’s go, Bill.” I see nothing, but I follow. He’s paddling fast, moving way out, away from the crowd. Eventually, a wave appears—easily the biggest of the day, standing up far outside. It’s physically impossible, I believe, that Jock could have known that wave was coming. But he gets there in plenty of time, right to the heart of the peak, and spins. Everybody else in the water is caught inside by at least forty yards. People are shouting in dismay and disbelief. It’s a demonstration of basically incomprehensible mastery.

Then Jock does something truly weird. He jumps up and goes left. Chun’s is a right-hander—the channel is on the west side of the reef. But Jock sets out east, from the main peak across a very long wall. I punch through the lip near the takeoff and turn to watch. The wave runs off for fifty, sixty yards, no sign of Jock, until he finally comes sailing over the shoulder, way down by Piddlies someplace. It is one of the most counterintuitive things I’ve seen in a lifetime of surfing.

by William Finnegan, New Yorker |  Read more:  

Image: Katy Grannan for The New Yorker
[ed. I can't praise Bill Finnegan's Pulitizer Prize-winning book Barbarian Days highly enough. Even if you think you have zero interest in surfing, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, even enthralled.]