Into Thin Ice
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC | Earth cools when sunlight reflects off Arctic sea ice—which is melting away. Where does that leave us?
To track changes in sea ice, the Norwegian research vessel Lance drifted along with it for five months in 2015, on a rare voyage from Arctic winter into spring. Photo: Andy Isaacson
FIRST PUBLISHED IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JANUARY 2016
THE SEA ICE THAT BLANKETS THE ARCTIC OCEAN isn’t the unbroken white mantle depicted in maps. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of restless floes that are constantly colliding, deforming, and fracturing from the force of wind and ocean currents. Last February I stood shivering on the deck of the Lance, an old Norwegian research vessel, as it picked a path through a labyrinth of navigable fractures. A barren white plain of ice and snow extended to the horizon in every direction. The ship’s steel hull shuddered and screeched as it plowed through floating chunks of jagged ice. The Lance was seeking a solid patch of ice to attach to—the last one had shattered—so that it could resume its erratic drift across the frozen sea, charting the fate of Arctic sea ice by going with the floe.
The Norwegians have done this before, more than a century ago, when polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen and the Fram were locked in pack ice for nearly three years during a vain attempt to drift across the North Pole. But the Arctic is a different ocean now. The air above it has warmed on average about 5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century, more than twice the global average. Much less of the ocean is covered by ice, and much more of that ice is thinner, seasonal ice rather than thick, old floes. A feedback loop with far-reaching consequences has taken effect: As white ice is replaced in summer by dark ocean water, which absorbs more sunlight, the water and air heat further—amplifying the ongoing thaw.
“The Arctic warms first, most, and fastest,” explains Kim Holmén, the long-bearded international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI), which operates theLance. Climate models predict that by as early as 2040 it will be possible in summer to sail across open water to the North Pole.
Arctic sea ice helps cool the whole planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. So its loss inevitably will affect the climate and weather beyond the Arctic, but precisely how remains unclear. Better forecasts require better data on sea ice and its shifting, uneven distribution. “Most scientific cruises to the Arctic are conducted in summer, and this is where we have the most field data,” says Gunnar Spreen, an NPI sea-ice physicist I met on board the Lance. “The continuous changes that occur from winter into spring are a huge gap in our understanding.”
On the Lance’s five-month mission its rotating crew of international scientists would investigate the causes and effects of ice loss by monitoring the ice across its entire seasonal life cycle—from the time when it formed in winter until it melted in summer.
A few days after photographer Nick Cobbing and I joined the ship by icebreaker and helicopter from Longyearbyen, on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago—the base for NPI’s Arctic operations—the Lance steamed to 83 degrees north, just west of Russian territory. The scientists singled out a half-mile-wide floe of predominantly seasonal ice that they hoped to study. The crew tethered the vessel to the floe with nylon ropes attached to thick metal poles driven into the ice. They shut off the main engine. Isolated and in near darkness, we began our wayward drift and our month-long shift in the ice desert.
Like homesteaders, the scientists established camps on the floe, pitching tents and laying electric cables. Physicists like Spreen mapped the ice topography with lasers and recorded the thickness and temperature of the snow on top. Oceanographers bored a hole through the ice to gather data about the water and the currents. Meteorologists erected masts carrying instruments to collect weather data and measure greenhouse gases. Biologists searched for ice algae, which look like dirt and live on the underside of the ice and in the channels of trapped brine left after newly formed sea ice expels salt. In a few weeks, after the returning sun cast aside the cloak of polar night and began filtering through the melting floe, the scientists would watch the ecosystem awaken.
Temperatures regularly plunged to 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Scientists had to contend with numb fingers, snapped cables, and crippled electronic instruments, along with the danger of roving polar bears. “This is really extreme science,” one researcher said.
Photo: Andy Isaacson
IN 2007 THE UN INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) warned that the impacts of climate change in the Arctic over the next century “will exceed the impacts forecast for many other regions and will produce feedbacks that will have globally significant consequences.” Nearly a decade later this grim forecast is already being borne out. Probably no region has been more affected by climate change than the Arctic. Permafrost is thawing, and the land is greening, as tree lines creep north and shrubs and grasses invade the tundra. Certain populations of polar bears, walruses, and caribou have suffered significant declines. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) oceanographer James Overland says, “The Arctic really is the canary showing that climate change is real.”
Since 1979, when satellite records began, the Arctic has lost more than half its volume of ice, which has diminished in both overall area and thickness. The frozen area shrinks to its annual minimum in September, at summer’s end. In September 2012 its extent was just half the average during the 1980s and ’90s. The maximum ice extent in winter, usually reached in March, also is declining, though at a slower rate; its average thickness has decreased by half. What was once mostly a layer of 10- to 13-foot-thick ice floes that lingered for years—perennial ice—has given way to large tracts of thinner, less reflective ice that forms and melts during a single year. Sea-ice coverage has always fluctuated naturally, but there’s little doubt among scientists that man-made greenhouse gases are now accelerating its decline. “Old, thick sea ice was a global reservoir for cold, but that is now changing,” Overland says.
An entire ecosystem is melting away. The loss of sea ice may take a toll on some of the photosynthesizing organisms that fuel the marine food chain—single-celled algae that live under the ice and bloom in the spring when the light returns. Changes in the magnitude and timing of these blooms, as winter ice retreats faster and earlier, may throw off the life cycle of tiny, fatty zooplankton called copepods, which eat the algae and are in turn eaten by arctic cod, seabirds, and bowhead whales. For marine mammals such as the polar bear, Pacific walrus, and ringed seal, the loss of hundreds of thousands of square miles of sea ice has already been devastating. “It’s like someone took the floor out from under you,” says Kristin Laidre, a polar scientist at the University of Washington.
The assumption is that later this century, without a home field, these animals will simply lose all competitive advantage. Killer whales, for example, are likely to replace polar bears as the top marine predators, as bears retreat to the dwindling remnants of summer sea ice. Though polar bears sometimes spend time on land, where lately a few have been hybridizing with grizzlies, Ian Stirling of the University of Alberta, a leading polar bear expert, dismisses any notion that they could survive long-term on land as “wishful thinking.” Ice-free conditions are likely to draw in other competitors—zooplankton (maybe less fatty and nutritious ones), fish, seals—from more temperate waters.
Ice loss is also making the Arctic even more vulnerable to ocean acidification, another effect of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. Cold water absorbs more CO₂ than warm water does, and more cold water is now open to the air. As the water acidifies, it loses carbonate. Within the next 15 years it may no longer contain enough for animals such as sea snails and Alaska king crabs to construct and maintain their calcium-carbonate shells.
The upshot of all this, as Stirling bluntly puts it: “The Arctic marine ecosystem as we know it now will no longer exist.”
Photo: Andy Isaacson
WARMER AIR ABOVE THE OCEAN BASIN IS PROJECTED TO SPILL DOWN over the surrounding coasts of Russia, Alaska, and Canada, causing feedback effects as far as 900 miles inland, including accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and large emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from thawing tundra. IPCC models forecast that the total loss of summer sea ice may in itself cause one-third of the warming of the Northern Hemisphere and 14 percent of total global warming by the end of the century.
How a rapidly warming Arctic will influence weather across the hemisphere is a bit hazier. Atmospheric scientists Jennifer Francis at Rutgers University and Steve Vavrus at the University of Wisconsin have suggested that people in the continental United States already may be feeling the effects of melting Arctic sea ice—especially in the past two winters in the east, which made “polar vortex” household words.
The polar vortex is the mass of cold air that’s normally confined over the Pole by the polar jet stream—the high-altitude, fast-moving torrent of air that snakes around the Pole from west to east. The jet stream draws most of its energy from the contrast in temperature and pressure between the frigid air to its north and the warmer air to the south. As sea-ice loss amplifies the warming in the Arctic, the Francis theory goes, that contrast is reduced, weakening the jet stream’s westerly winds. It becomes a lazier, more sinuous river, with large meanders that extend far to the south and north. Because the meanders advance slowly across the map, whatever weather they enfold persists for a long time. During the past two winters the wavier pattern allowed Arctic air and extreme snow to beset New England and drought to linger over California. The melting Arctic may be affecting weather elsewhere too. Korean researchers have linked extreme winters in East Asia to air-circulation changes caused specifically by ice loss in the Barents-Kara Sea.
It’s a neat theory, but parts of it remain “fuzzy,” Francis admits. Also, many researchers who study atmospheric dynamics aren’t buying it. A more plausible explanation for the wavier jet stream and the southward excursions of the polar vortex, some of them argue, is the influence of the tropical Pacific, which is a far more powerful source of heat than the Arctic. It will take years of data gathering and modeling to settle the debate.
In any case, as the warming of the planet continues, cold spells of any kind will become less common. Even if sharp limits on greenhouse gas emissions are adopted over the next 20 years, the decline of sea ice will continue for decades. “We’re on a one-way trip and not going back,” says Overland. A further rise of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic is all but assured by mid-century, he says, enough to keep the ocean ice free for at least two months of the year, enough to change the seasons there—“enough to affect everything.”
Photo: Andy Isaacson
IN LATE JUNE, DURING THE FINAL PHASE OF THEIR EXPEDITION, the scientists aboard theLance awoke to discover that the latest ice floe they’d attached to was disintegrating too. They scrambled to salvage their gear before it became flotsam. It was time to pack up anyway. The vessel by that point had spent 111 days in the ice, tethered to different floes for several weeks at a time—logging altogether some 4,000 nautical miles across the Arctic. Polar bears had crossed its path, sometimes pausing to play with the scientists’ strange-looking electronic instruments. Storms had bulldozed huge blocks of ice high against the ship, elevating it above the surface. The Lance’s crew had bested the researchers in a soccer match on the floe. Over the next couple of years the 68 scientists involved will be hunkered in their warm labs, making sense of all the data they gathered.
One morning in March, under a dusky blue sky, I had joined Gunnar Spreen and another NPI researcher, Anja Rösel, on one of their periodic forays to measure changes in the ice floe’s thickness. We each wore insulated armor—jumpsuit, balaclava, goggles, gloves, mittens over the gloves. The scientists brought along a snow-depth probe, a GPS device, and an orange plastic sled carrying the ice-thickness instrument, which works by inducing an electric current in the seawater below. I carried a flare gun and a .30-06-caliber rifle: bear protection. Following a mile-long path staked by bamboo poles, we trudged over dunelike snowdrifts and pressure ridges—slabs of sea ice pushed up by colliding floes—that looked like crumbling stone walls. Every few feet Spreen stopped and plunged the depth gauge into the snowpack until it beeped to indicate that the measurement was complete.
Arctic warming seemed an abstract concept that day—I couldn’t really feel my toes—but across the icescape, Spreen saw evidence of change. “This is an unusual amount of snow,” he noted. Two feet of it lay beneath our moon boots, twice the amount in a typical year. One data point doesn’t make a trend, but this one was consistent with model forecasts: As sea ice shrinks, the extra heat and water vapor released from the open water into the lower atmosphere should generate more precipitation.
More snow falling on a glacier on land would be a good thing, because that’s how glaciers grow—by accumulating layers of snow so thick that the stuff at the bottom gets compressed into ice. But sea ice forms when cold air freezes seawater, and snow falling on top of it acts as an insulating blanket that slows the growth of the ice. As it happened, two weeks after my walk with Spreen, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado announced that Arctic sea ice had already reached its maximum extent for the winter in late February—much earlier than usual. It was the lowest maximum the satellites had ever recorded.
Photo: Andy Isaacson
By Foot into Peru’s Lost World
BIOGRAPHIC | A team of herpetologists treks into one of South America’s most pristine and poorly understood mountain ranges and discovers animals found nowhere else on Earth.
Photos by: Andy Isaacson
FIRST PUBLISHED IN BIOGRAPHIC, JUNE 2016
“The way we’re exploring this is not much different from how Humboldt or Wallace or Darwin got to these places 200 years ago,” José Padial explained one morning last February, as gauzy light slanted into a forest clearing deep in Peru’s remote Vilcabamba Range. His team had just slashed through a mile of steep jungle with machetes, collecting dozens of specimens—from iridescent lizards to unremarkable brown frogs—many of which appeared to be new to science. Padial had almost trampled on a bushmaster, one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous snakes, and now heard rumors that some members of the local Asháninka community were plotting to block him from leaving their territory with specimens he had government permission to collect. Camped just below 2,000 meters (6,500 feet) in a damp patch of cloud forest, the herpetologist was two weeks into his expedition but still several days from his goal—the isolated grasslands atop one of South America’s least explored mountain ranges. His most reliable source of navigating the team’s route there were some low-resolution images he’d printed from Google Earth.
Not that any trail map—or trail—existed. Few humans had ever set foot on the upper reaches of the Vilcabamba Range, a northeastern spur of the Andes that juts like an archipelago into the sea of Amazon jungle. And fewer still in the half-century since two wealthy New Yorkers, Brooks Baekeland and Peter Gimbel, became the first to do so, dropping by parachute onto a 10,500-foot-high grassy plateau in 1963. Lured by stories of Incan gold, ruins, “Indian taboos” and “sacrificial lakes in the sky,” the explorers instead encountered a primeval landscape of soggy Sphagnum bog, hilly prairie, and stands of pygmy bamboo. With two companions, they spent more than two months bushwhacking down to the Amazon basin, surviving blinding wasp stings and spooked natives with bows drawn. National Geographic’s title of the account suggested a fairytale: “By Parachute into Peru’s Lost World.” Baekeland, the grandson of the inventor of Bakelite plastic, would later recall the pioneering trek “as though in a nightmare.”
“Part of me wonders if we should have parachuted into the upper part of Vilcabamba,” Padial wrote on the expedition’s Tumblr blog before leaving Pittsburgh, where the 39-year-old Spaniard serves as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s assistant curator of amphibians and reptiles. He knew that reaching the highlands by foot—during the height of the rainy season—would be a slog. He’d tried before, in 2008, but never made it above 1,800 meters (6,000 feet). Improvising a route through steep, tangled jungle and schlepping tents, tarps, cooking pots, camera gear, solar panels, and food for at least a dozen people between successive base camps required ample trailblazers and porters. Padial expected to have little trouble finding local Asháninka willing to work, and offered more than twice the going wage. Still, he struggled to recruit just six of them. The cold, lofty terrain, the time away from families—most able-bodied workers simply didn’t care for the job description. One porter bruised his knee after a week and went home. Another, a 14-year-old named “John Clever,” shot a kinkajou, a raccoon-like creature one night, and after gutting and smoking the animal until morning, descended with it and never returned.
Scientific exploration in the remotest parts of the world is impossible to script. Every one of Padial’s expeditions has involved some unanticipated mishap, some checked ambition. The previous year, while exploring a rugged swath of Amazonian jungle along Peru’s border with Brazil, his team showed up at an Asháninka community with 20 days’ worth of gear and provisions, and permits from local officials granting access through the territory. The community welcomed them, offered shelter for one night, and then, refused to let them pass. Complications like this come with the territory, however, and for Padial and the other biologists are the cost of achieving the ultimate goal: finding something no human has ever seen. “We all have this draw of early explorers,” he told me. “We want to go to those places where no one has been before, and be the first to find these animals.”
There is scientific importance to such a quest, of course. Each discovery brings new perspective about the planet’s biological diversity, and helps us understand how much we are losing every time we decide to bulldoze or clear-cut an area. “At the least, we leave a record behind of what there was there at a time,” Padial says. Simply knowing what lives where also helps to fill gaps in the tree of life, the genealogical relationships among species. Every undiscovered organism out there, Padial explains, is a missing link in our understanding of evolution as a whole, as species are the entities that actually evolve.
“If you don’t discover these species and give them a name, they pass unnoticed. They don’t exist.”
The Vilcabamba is filled with unnamed species, Padial believes. Biologists have long suspected that its range of elevations and wide variety of habitat types harbor a tremendous diversity of animals and plants. The few scientific expeditions ever to have penetrated its vast, untrammeled wilderness encountered several new species in “unexpected habitats or in surprising abundance,” according to one account. Logging, natural gas and oil exploration, and agriculture now threaten to fracture this pristine picture, and Padial hopes that by shedding light on the region’s richness, this expedition—officially titled the Carnegie Discoverers Expedition to Vilcabamba—might begin to make the case for its protection.
In camp, Padial poured himself a cup of rainwater-brewed coffee, and then gathered his team around an improvised table made of sticks to devise a way forward. Smoke billowed from the cooking fire, nestled against the base of a tree trunk, over which moss-covered logs had been stacked to dry. Padial laid out his Google Earth printouts and a topographic map. The satellite images showed a birds-eye view of the densely forested ridgeline they’d been tracing, the same ridgeline that continued to rise sharply above them to 2,500 meters (8,000 feet), zigzagging for a couple miles, and then sloping gradually toward a hilly prairie at around 3,200 meters (10,500 feet).
It was impossible to tell how long it might take to get there, but they had ten days to try. The team—six biologists (Spanish and Peruvian), a cook (also a Peruvian biologist), and Padial’s girlfriend, a Mexican dancer and filmmaker—was used to the uncertainties and deprivations of expedition life, anyway. Most had joined Padial on previous amphibian and reptile surveys. They hadn’t showered for days, and wore damp underwear and socks. By past standards of luxury, the French-press coffee maker that Padial had secured this time represented something five-star. More importantly, they’d heard the Vilcabamba highlands concealed a herpetological Lost City of the Incas, an irresistible quarry: frogs, toads, lizards, and snakes found nowhere else on Earth.
Padial had been looking for lost places ten years earlier, when he first spotted the 110-mile long mountain range while flying around South America on Google Earth. A rocky massif fringed with green, the Vilcabamba called to mind the tabletop mountains, called tepuis—the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World”—that loom above the Venezuelan jungle like islands in the sky and host species found nowhere else on Earth. “It looked high and isolated,” Padial recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, it would be amazing to go there.’”
The Vilcabamba Range emerges out of the steamy Amazonian lowlands, at an elevation of around 450 meters (1,500 feet), and climbs to a jagged, central crest above 4,200 meters (14,000 feet). The local native groups—the Asháninka, Matsiguenga, Nomatsiguenga, and Yine—never settled the lofty interior, finding it too cold, wet, and lacking good soil and game. It remains largely virgin, free of roads, and enjoying token protection within the boundaries of Otishi National Park and two indigenous reserves. Cut off from the eastern slope of the Andes by the Apurimac and Ene rivers, a main source of the Amazon, and moated by deep valleys and gorges on all sides, its isolation has set the stage for a wide range of endemic flora and fauna to evolve. A frog living at 2,000 meters (6,500 feet) in the Vilcabamba cloud forest would have a long way to hop across several thousand vertical feet, through several foreign habitats, to reach familiar turf across the Apurimac. No chance. “The species that live in the upper area have probably been isolated from the rest of their relatives for a very long time,” Padial explained. Exactly how long these organisms have been isolated is one of the things he and the others aim to figure out.
The mountains are in a rich neighborhood already, ecologically speaking. The tropical Andes is considered one of the world’s 35 biodiversity “hotspots,” boasting the highest percentage of endemic plant and vertebrate species—creatures like the yellow-eared parrot (Ognorhynchus icterotis) and spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus). A recent survey of Manu National Park and its buffer zone, along the eastern slope of the Andes in southeastern Peru, counted 287 reptile and amphibian species (as well as more than 1,000 species of birds—around 10 percent of the world’s total) living there alone: the most diversity found in any protected area on the planet.
The few research efforts undertaken in the Vilcabamba Range over the years have managed to paint a picture of exceptional biodiversity. In the late 1960s, American ornithologists John Terborgh and John Weske mounted a series of landmark expeditions to study bird community structure along an altitudinal gradient from 600 to 3,520 meters (2,000 to 11,500 feet)—basically what Padial hoped to mimic for amphibians and reptiles. They recorded 405 species on the mountains’ western slopes alone. (It’s estimated that the Vilcabamba Range may contain more than half of all bird species known from Peru.) Then, in 1997, Conservation International and Smithsonian Institution surveys found many new species, including a pale grey tree rat the size of a domestic cat. Their report declared the area “a special place in relation to biodiversity.”
Padial’s first expedition there was sort of a misadventure. In 2008, he and his former PhD advisor, Ignacio de la Riva, a biologist from Spain’s National Museum of Natural Sciences, led a team that attempted to reach the highlands by following a river upstream from Kimbiri, a tropical town along the Apurimac. Mapping a distance of five miles, Padial figured they could get there in two days of solid hiking. The terrain, however, proved far steeper, muddier and harder to penetrate than one could glean from a satellite image. After two weeks, exhausted and hungry, they turned back.
Padial knew better this time. He spent two years planning the expedition, securing funds from Carnegie Museum donors and permits from Peruvian government agencies. He’d negotiated delicately with the residents of Marontuari, the Asháninka community at the base of the ridge, gamely sipping their alcoholic homebrew of fermented yucca root from a hollowed gourd as they spoke about the threats to their territory from encroaching coca plantations and a planned hydroelectric dam, as well as their reservations about Padial himself. “They are very suspicious about what we do with the samples,” he says. “To them, it's just weird, the whole idea of conservation—that someone goes and collects these animals that no one pays attention to. If you put money into something, [they figure] you're going to get something.”
Rather than clamber upriver, his plan this time was to drive an hour into the Vilcabamba up a dirt road from Pichari, a sleepy town along the Apurimac, until it dead-ended in Marontuari. Bushwhacking from there to the highlands, his team would pitch successive base camps—where flat ground permitted—as the environment transitioned from lowland montane forest to cloud forest, elfin forest, and finally, the Puna grasslands, a treeless region found across the central Andes between 3,200 and 4,000 meters (10,500 and 13,000 feet).
When Baekeland’s team parachuted there in the 1960s, they glimpsed an Andean spectacled bear and a Peruvian puma, but little else. Three decades later, the biologists working with Conservation International—landing by helicopter—spotted guinea pigs, numerous grass mice, and a large arboreal rodent (family Abrocomidae) that resembled one known only from bones excavated from pre-Columbian burial sites at Machu Picchu, farther south. They collected just four species of reptiles and amphibians—three frogs and one lizard—but all appeared new to science.
For Padial, the promise of scientific discovery is what had lured him to herpetology. As an undergraduate in Spain, studying biology, he volunteered on a couple of field expeditions in the Bolivian jungle and kept finding it a struggle to identify the amphibians and reptiles he observed. Even today, no general field guide yet exists for reptiles and amphibians of the Amazon. While some 7,500 species of amphibians have been identified worldwide, untold thousands remain at large. Since 1985, the total number of recognized species has increased by more than 60 percent—a new species of amphibian is described in the scientific literature every 2.5 days. Yet knowledge of their diversity and distribution pales in comparison to what scientists understand about birds and mammals. “It’s just amazing how much there is to do,” Padial says.
In the past decade, he’s launched several successful, globe-spanning expeditions, including three trips to Mauritania that resulted in the first species accounts of amphibians and reptiles for that country, as well as a pioneering excursion into Peru’s Alto Purús National Park, a wild, poorly known patch of Amazonian rainforest home to several uncontacted nomadic tribes, that yielded several new species.
Putting animals on the map of science can serve a conservation goal, too. The Vilcabamba Range stands as one of the last intact tropical montane forests left in South America, a species-rich belt that once ran the length of the eastern Andes, from northern Venezuela south to Bolivia. Yet along its lower flanks, the elevation holding the most biodiversity, the forest is being destroyed at an alarming rate to make way for coca and coffee plantations. Illegal logging also chips away. Much of the interior is within the bounds of two indigenous reserves and Otishi National Park, but the park’s staff, which includes eight rangers charged with policing 1,100 square miles (an area the size of United States’ Yosemite National Park), have few resources to combat encroachment, not to mention drug traffickers traipsing around with weapons. Perhaps by shedding a light on the unique and extraordinary life in the Vilcabamba, scientific efforts like Padial’s could help Otishi acquire the resources needed for more robust protection, like those afforded to Manu National Park. And maybe somewhere high in “Peru’s Lost World” there lives a charismatic, endemic species of frog yet to be discovered that could become an emblem for conservation.
Throughout the expedition, the scientists often encountered animals by happenstance—a lizard found skittering between campfire logs, a frog startled during a walk to pee. But since many amphibians are nocturnal, the best chance of finding them is to go probing after dark. One evening at Camp 2, as with most nights, Padial and the others strapped on headlamps and set out to collect. He wore rubber boots, square-rimmed glasses, and a collared shirt with pens tucked into the breast pocket. The group fanned out along with trail, walking slowly. They scanned leaves and tree trunks and poked at the wet leaf litter with sticks. Soon, Padial’s light reflected off the eyes of a small brown frog perched haplessly atop a leaf. He snatched the animal up, and holding it under the beam of his headlamp by its legs, gave it a quick taxonomic spot check.
Padial specializes in New World “direct developers” (Terrarana), a sprawling group of frog families ranging from Texas to northern Argentina. Instead of laying eggs in water that hatch into tadpoles, Terrarana frogs deposit their eggs in moist dirt, or moss, out of which emerge fully formed juveniles. Most of the frogs and toads in the Vilcabamba were of this type, as the steep slopes allow for few ponds or standing water.
Padial could tell immediately that the frog belonged to the genusPristimantis, a large group of mostly terrestrial direct developers. But he was looking for traits that might help place the frog more precisely on the family tree. Did it have an exposed tympanum (ear drum)? Sticky toe pads? Was its belly transparent or pigmented, glandular or smooth? What kind of dot pattern colored the inner thigh for signaling the opposite sex? A few days earlier, Padial had collected a frog that at first glance resembled one he’d collected on a previous trip to the Amazon. But on closer inspection, he noticed its sharper snout and transparent peritoneum, the spider web like membrane covering the organs that on some frogs is pigmented. “Those are like the differences between a chimp and a human, like being fully covered by hair or not,” Padial explained. “I think it was a new species.”
He plopped the Pristimantis into a clear plastic bag along with some leaves to keep the frog moist. Searching for and catching animals was the fun part—Padial had been doing that since he was a kid, hunting snakes near his grandfather’s house on the outskirts of Granada, Spain. Later came the humdrum tasks: measuring frogs, counting scales, and analyzing anatomy, bone structure, mating calls, genes, distribution patterns and climate data. “You need music for that,” Padial confessed. The team’s forest lab amounted to a stick table covered by a rain poncho, surrounded by bags containing frogs, toads and lizards. Each specimen was first euthanized with a dose of Lidocaine, the numbing drug used by dentists, and tagged with a number. With tweezers, the researchers would then extract a tiny sample of thigh tissue for later genetic analysis, and finally inject formalin to fix the animal’s shape.
With data from his two Vilcabamba expeditions, combined with findings from the CI-Smithsonian surveys in the 90s—the herpetological specimens collected then had yet to be fully analyzed—Padial hoped to assemble the best existing catalog of amphibians and reptiles in the Vilcabamba Range.
Although Padial and his team made important discoveries on the way up, in a sense this was all a means to an end. The ultimate goal was to survey the Vilcabamba’s upper reaches, a haven for endemic species. On the third week, an advance team that included Padial, a Asháninka father and son from Marontuari, and Angel Castellano, an Otishi park ranger, managed to hack a way through to 2,760 meters (9,055 feet). Their track wound past twisted branches carpeted with epiphytic mosses, and sprawling tree root systems that required vertical rock-climbing maneuvers. Passing over gaps in the vegetation where losing one’s footing could mean falling off a precipice, it made the well-maintained Pacific Crest Trail look like the Champs-Élysées by comparison.
Along the exposed ridge top, the cloud forest became a bushy elfin forest of tree ferns, bamboo, and reedy grasses. During breaks in the fog, creeping up from the valley, you could make out the jagged crest of the Vilcabamba Range, still some distance above. The change in scenery came with a host of new creatures; species like the cartoonishly bloated cane toad and electric blue poison-dart frog the team collected around Camp 1 were nowhere to be found. “It’s like going from Florida to Oregon—two different worlds,” Padial said of the transition. The biologists stumbled across what is likely an undocumented species of snake with vertical pupils and a black belly, and a tan-colored frog with orange eyes that is completely different from anything they’d found before. “We knew that if we could reach high altitude in this area we would find lots of new stuff,” he says.
Finding new frogs wasn’t like reaching a lost Incan city, admittedly. For the most part, the herpetologists reacted to each of their discoveries with the kind of enthusiasm a beachcomber might greet a curious shell or weird bit of flotsam.
But if there was any trophy Padial wanted from the Vilcabamba—a feather in his cap—it was a species of marsupial frog from the genus Gastrotheca, which carry their brood in dorsal pouches like eggs in a backpack. He knew that no Gastrotheca species from the area had yet been named, but he felt certain one must exist. “I would bet that the one here is probably cool,” he said. Camping in a humid dell a thousand feet below the grasslands, Padial and the others began hearing the unique tak-ta-tak call of a marsupial frog over the drizzle. The call would start and stop at random times, like a taunt.
One night after a meal of quinoa soup and dried meat, Padial went out looking with Giuseppe Gagliardi, a biologist at the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute (IIAP). Gagliardi, who has lived all his life in Iquitos on the banks of the Amazon River, has a special knack for spotting frogs, and would have taken home first prize on the expedition had there been such a count.
At this higher, colder elevation, frogs and especially lizard populations were a fraction of what they were in the Amazon lowlands, but as the two walked through foliage dripping wet from fog and daily downpours, Padial sensed even lower frog activity than expected, probably due to the moonlight that filtered through the canopy. “We are always concerned about how many times the moon is going to be glowing when we plan the expedition,” he explained.
Gagliardi let out a forceful whistle, which sometimes stimulates frogs to vocalize. Not long after, they homed in on a Gastrothecacalling from high in a tree. Gagliardi took off his backpack and began to shimmy up the tree, breaking off decaying branches and bromeliads as he climbed. Suddenly, the calls stopped. Gagliardi paused and dangled there for a few minutes, but the frog never called again.
A month earlier, when Padial first arrived in Pichari at the start of the expedition, the director of Otishi National Park had introduced him to local military officials, who, in a gesture of goodwill and good public relations, offered to airlift the scientists by helicopter into the remote, central grasslands of the Vilcabamba Range. It was hard to refuse such a gift. But over the course of the expedition, nailing down that ride proved to be a relentless distraction. The general who’d extended the offer was reassigned, the military had other priorities, and the only means of receiving news from Pichari was a cell signal at 8,600 feet in the wilderness. Now, with possibly just two days of bushwhacking ahead of them before reaching the Puna—it was impossible to say for sure just how long it would take—word came that the helicopter was on.
Padial was torn. His team had spent three weeks gradually advancing up the mountain by then, erecting camps and hauling provisions. They’d already made a comprehensive inventory of the reptiles and amphibians living between 900 and 2,900 meters (3,000 and 9,500 feet), which had never been done before. With another thousand feet of thick forest to go, they were poised to break tree line, beyond which they’d face a much clearer path towards the Vilcabamba’s highest elevations. Flying there by helicopter would depend on both the fickle generosity of a local military commander and even more capricious weather. Padial had misgivings about packing everything up and hiking down. It was a gamble.
Still, time was running out, and the path ahead by foot was anything but certain. In a few days, he would lose three members of his team to prior commitments, and after Angel, the park ranger, sliced his leg with a machete, he was down to only two trailblazers. With hot showers and a rotisserie chicken meal beckoning below, Padial decided to wager on the airlift.
A few afternoons later, with clean clothes and high spirits, the team arrived at a walled-off military compound on the outskirts of Pichari. The airspace above the Apurímac valley was sunny and clear, although high in the Vilcabamba the skies appeared ominous.
“Buenissima,” Padial said, taking it all in. “I can't believe it.” Then he corrected himself. “Well, I'll believe it once we put our feet on that marshy grassland.” After posing for a group photo with the smiling regional general, the scientists boarded the Mil Mi-17 helicopter parked on the airfield.
The helicopter rose above Pichari, and banked around the Apurímac, ascending toward the Vilcabamba crest. The Asháninka, Efrain and his son Wilbur, snapped pictures with their cell phones as the helicopter flew over Marontuari and traced the Pichari River, following the ridgeline the team had spent weeks hiking. Beyond that, the virgin interior of the Vilcabamba unfurled below like a green shag rug, creased with steep-walled canyons and punctuated by waterfalls.
As the helicopter climbed to nearly 4,000 meters (12,500 feet), it encountered a thick, chalky cloud ceiling that blanketed the upper mountains. The pilot maneuvered to find a visible path through into the highland plateau, where Padial had provided GPS coordinates for a couple of sites that, at least from satellite pictures, appeared suitable for setting up a camp. But the clouds were impenetrable. The helicopter flew in a wide circle to gain altitude: still more clouds. Stymied, the co-pilot signaled to Padial that they would have to abort the flight.
Courtesy of BioGraphic
The next morning, and for the rest of that day, it poured in Pichari. With each dreary hour, Padial began to lose hope that the weather would allow another attempt in the helicopter. The military also let it be known that the ride offer had an expiration—24 hours. At daybreak the following morning, with clouds choking the upper slopes of the mountains—a familiar sight nearly every day of the four-week expedition—the team began packing for home.
Padial was crestfallen—they’d come so frustratingly close. He was annoyed at having put all his chips on the military’s shaky promise of a ride. “We lost a week in which we could've ascended,” he said.
Seated over ginger noodle soup that night from a street vendor in Pichari, he tried to cast the whole experience in a happier light. “The good part is that scientifically we found a lot of stuff, some beautiful new samples,” he said. Padial estimated that the expedition had yielded 14 species that are new to science, including an iguanid lizard with a sharp spiny crest, a beautiful green arboreal snake with a large bold black spot on each side of its head, and two species of Terrarana frogs belonging to a poorly known group that lives in leaf litter on the forest floor.
“It could've been a lot worse,” he conceded. “There could have been an accident. Someone could’ve fallen into the river.” Padial admitted to feeling relief after the team passed back through Marontuari without an incident, as he’d heard some unhappy residents were plotting to block his exit in protest.
The 30-minute helicopter flyover—offering a view of Vilcabamba’s rugged interior that few have ever witnessed—only whet Padial’s appetite even further. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is even more astonishing than I thought!’” he said over dinner. “The landscape is so much more impressive than you can see on the maps.”
Padial felt that despite falling short of his goal—a comprehensive inventory of reptiles and amphibians of the Vilcabamba from top to bottom—the expedition had demonstrated, or perhaps confirmed, something important: the Vilcabamba Range is home to many new species and many more awaiting discovery. This knowledge, he hoped, might motivate other researchers to search the area for different kinds of organisms, and over time, raise the profile of Otishi National Park as a place of unique and extraordinary biodiversity—a place worthy of future protection.
Padial’s team managed to walk out of the jungle with a bunch of specimens and tissue samples, as well as audio and video recordings, of very rare species that had never been recorded, photographed, or analyzed genetically before. All of that novel material would eventually be deposited in public collections and made available to anyone. With it, he and other researchers could begin building phylogenetic trees of species from the Vilcabamba Range, inferring when these animals split from relatives, how environmental changes have affected them, and how they got there in the first place.
Padial also believed that his efforts made a case for the value of going out and traipsing through nature in search of novel organisms—for the merit of old-fashioned fieldwork—at a time when our collective attention, and funding for science, has pivoted toward endeavors deemed relevant for technological progress: robotics, gene sequencing, and the like.
“We can tell the scientific community to leave their comfy chairs and do more fieldwork—and provide more funding for it—because we’re far from knowing what’s living out there,” he told me. “If you can still go to a place so close to a paved road and find 10 to 14 new species of frogs and reptiles in a couple of weeks, imagine how much there is still to do.”
And of course Padial continues to heed the call himself. Shortly after returning to Pittsburgh from Peru, in early March, he emailed to say that he’d already managed to secure funding to go back to the Vilcabamba in 2017.
“This time during the dry season,” he added.
Amazon Awakening
NEW YORK TIMES | Ayahuasca visions and cultural tourism in Ecuador's rain forest.
Photos by: Andy Isaacson
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, OCT. 13, 2010
ILLUMINATED by a single candle, the shaman’s weathered face appeared kindly, like that of a sympathetic doctor, with painted red marks also suggesting a calm, fierce authority — both qualities that I would rely on during the dark and uncertain hours ahead. He sat on a wooden stool carved into a tortoise, and wore turquoise beads around his neck and a crown of crimson feathers. A table beside him displayed the modest tools of the ceremony: a fan of leaves, jungle tobacco, a gourd bowl and a clear plastic soda bottle containing an opaque, brown liquid.
“You will start to feel a reaction in about half an hour,” the shaman, Tsumpa, said, as my guide translated. “When the effects come, you must concentrate on what the medicine is trying to communicate.”
The open air of the hut, animated with night sounds, grew still with expectation. Tsumpa grimaced as he drank the brew. After pouring a bowl for me, he cupped the gourd in his hands and for several minutes whistled a sweet melody into it — the high key of a tin whistle or courting bird, seducing the plant spirits to aid me. The potion tasted acrid and bitter. I rinsed my mouth with water before rolling tobacco into a plantain leaf cigarette.
And then I waited.
It was the final night of my weeklong trip to explore the Ecuadorean rain forest and an indigenous people, the Achuar, who, for more than a decade, have been using limited tourism as a means to preserve and protect their land and way of life. I had traveled by car, plane, boat and foot — more than 100 miles from conventional civilization — to reach a place where the old ways have not been forgotten, where local people interpret the world through their dreams and the forest spirit known as arutam is said to inhabit the mighty kapok tree, and where healing and insight is sought from a hallucinogenic plant brew the Achuar call natem, known elsewhere as ayahuasca, or “vine of the soul.”
The trip was to be a departure from the typical Amazon tourism, which tends to package wildlife viewing with a certain cultural voyeurism. I wanted something more immersive and participatory: an experience with Ecuador’s indigenous people that would expose me to a different orientation altogether. Casting myself into a world that was utterly foreign, I hoped to return with new insight into the familiar.
Earlier in the week — an evening in late spring — I had landed in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, which sprawls at 9,350 feet along the base of an active volcano in a distinctive atmosphere of thin air and diesel fumes that aroused dormant memories of the semester I had spent there during college. With me was David Tucker of the Pachamama Alliance, a San Francisco-based nongovernmental organization that supports the cultural and territorial rights of Ecuador’s indigenous people and operates specialized tours into their homeland.
David had arranged for us to drive early the next morning to the Amazon basin, fly to a remote community that had recently built a small tourist camp in the forest, and then travel by foot and river to a more established lodge. Only despite a long layover, our bags were delayed from Miami — an inauspicious start that would waylay us a day. David thought I might want to experience a “cleansing” from an indigenous Quichua shaman he knew living in the highlands two hours north of Quito, and the next morning hired a car to take us there.
The shaman’s two-floor yellow cement home was modest but the stateliest around. A square altar to Jesus, crammed with crosses and tiny portraits, stood in the waiting room. The shaman, named Don Esteban, emerged wearing a knit V-neck sweater and slacks, beaded necklaces and a yellow-feathered headdress. He beckoned us into the adjacent treatment room, which was sparse and dim and smelled of burnt sugar cane alcohol. I was directed to sit in the corner beside a desk cluttered with melted wax, glass balls, brown eggs and various other mystical paraphernalia.
Don Esteban sat opposite me, next to his wife, a smiling woman with an array of gold teeth. “Here, rub this over your body,” he said, handing me an unlighted candle.
After I did so, he sparked the flame and gazed into it intently. “Andres espiritu, Andres espiritu,” the shaman incanted. “Your spirit is not tranquil. It is sad, and longs for a new energy and path. It is struggling to balance your health, work and body.”
I told him that my father had died two months earlier. “That is why there is sadness and disequilibrium,” he said. “This ceremony, and spending time in the mountains with Pachamama” — Mother Earth — “will help make your spirit whole.”
Don Esteban had me stand naked in the center of the room. Beating a drum and chanting around me, he summoned the ancestral spirits before instructing me to face the four directions of nearby volcanoes in turn, with arms raised, as he blew tobacco smoke on my skin and slapped me with nettle leaves. Then, with his cheeks engorged with alcohol, he held a candle flame to his lips and unleashed spectacular balls of fire that dissipated across my chest.
I looked on these ministrations with skepticism but was left feeling serene, and believing that my visit there had been serendipitous. Whether by intuition or sheer speculation Don Esteban had recognized my grief, and made it a central theme for the journey forward.
Riding back to Quito, I reflected on what the shaman had gone on to say. Three times, he had placed rose petals sprinkled with floral water into my palms, and told me to rub them all over from head to toe. “Andres,” he said all the while, “open your heart.” When we arrived at the hotel that night, our bags from Miami were awaiting.
The five-hour drive east from Quito into the Amazon basin passes through a highland corridor known as the Avenue of the Volcanoes. Pichincha, Cotopaxi, Antisana, Illiniza — their snow-white peaks rise above Ecuador’s fertile central valley like giants, and Andean indigenous people humanize them as such, relating to them as elder family members who hold great influence. This can sometimes be very handy: I was told of a pregnant young girl who dealt with her father’s disapproval by blaming the cause on the Imbabura volcano. Who was he to argue?
Our flight into the jungle was to leave from Shell, a one-street frontier town on the edge of the Amazon basin that was established by the Shell oil company in the 1930s as a base for prospecting. After 20 years, Shell left and evangelical Christians moved in — embarking on their own kind of prospecting from the town’s small airport. (They’re still there.) But when we arrived, flights were grounded because of rain. We were told to return the next day; David suggested we drive to nearby Puyo, the provincial capital, and meet some Achuar leaders.
Numbering around 6,000 on an ancestral territory of nearly two million acres in southeastern Ecuador, the Achuar people were among the last of the country’s rain forest tribes to be contacted by outsiders, when some Salesian Catholic missionaries arrived in the 1960s. Elders say that in the early ‘90s they began having dreams about an imminent threat coming from the external world. Soon after, they learned that the western edge of their homeland had been given over to Arco as an oil concession.
Most of Ecuador’s estimated 4.7 billion barrels in crude oil reserves — the third largest in South America — lie under the northeast Amazon region, where foreign corporations have left a legacy of pollution and displacement that has been widely decried.
But the Achuar had watched watching northern tribes struggle against oil companies, and beginning in 1991 were able to organize their scattered — and historically warring — communities into a political entity that has so far saved them from a similar fate.
Recognizing a need for outside allies, they met with a group of Americans to form the Pachamama Alliance, which for the last 15 years has helped the Achuar and other Amazonian indigenous groups from its Quito office with land titling, skills training, economic development and policy advocacy.
With proponents of oil development — including Ecuador’s president — continuing to press for exploration on their land, the Achuar now find themselves embroiled in a classic struggle for power and resources that native people have almost always lost.
We found Chumpi Tsamarin (also known as Luis Vargas) who had been the Achuar’s first president, seated inside the restaurant he opened on a side street in Puyo. Mr. Tsamarin, who has also led the political organization representing all nine of Ecuador’s Amazonian indigenous groups, described the current territorial struggle in terms of psychological warfare (he saw “Avatar” as an affirmation of their cause, but thought the violent tactics depicted in the film were not inevitable); the Achuar, he said, feel staunchly resolute about their right to defend what is theirs. As they see it, our collective survival is imperiled by the modern “dream,” as he put it, that sees nature as an endless fount of resources.
So far, Mr. Tsamarin said, tourism has presented the most viable, nonpolluting source of economic security. In 1996, the Achuar opened Kapawi Lodge & Reserve, which receives an average of 1,000 visitors a year. Last month the United Nations named it one of the top five outstanding environmental conservation and community development projects in the world. Though the lodge was initially set up in joint partnership with an Ecuadorean tour company, the Achuar have assumed full ownership. Most of its 30 staff members are natives, and some received hotel management training in Quito.
But the benefits of tourism have a corollary, and Mr. Tsamarin lamented them: the loss of communal values and a new market mentality, alcohol abuse, litter, men cutting off their traditional ponytails. The Achuar now want to expand a controlled form of tourism farther into their territory, and have built a camp in the forest near the remote community of Tiinkias to offer visitors a more rustic experience than Kapawi. I would be the first tourist there.
After spending a night at the luxuriant El Jardín Hotel in Puyo, we were cleared for takeoff the next afternoon in a small Cessna operated by Aerotsentsak, the Achuar’s aviation service. From on high the metaphor of the Amazon as earth’s lung came to life: below us, wispy clouds lingered over the virgin forest as vaporous exhalations while mocha-colored rivers coursed through it like capillaries.
After an hour, we landed at a dirt airstrip beside Chichirat, a forested settlement of 10 families north of Tiinkias.
I immediately felt transported by the absence of mechanical ambience, as though the soothing sounds of nature were reaching me through noise-canceling headphones. David and I stepped off the plane as dozens of villagers stared at us quizzically, and a man with a round face and thin mustache walked forward, introducing himself warmly as Shakai. He would be our guide. As children carried off our bags, Shakai led us into the elliptical communal house built over the dirt with a high palm-thatched roof and open walls, and divided along gender lines. Males sat on benches around the perimeter; women clustered in the back.
In short order, I was handed a red clay bowl painted with blackand-white shapes, filled with the staple brew of sweet fermented manioc called nijiamanch. A performance began: a woman walked up to me and sang shyly in Achuar about a sunny day alone in the forest, when she missed her husband, but was comforted knowing that he was somewhere witnessing the same sun. In a fragile falsetto, a young man with a long ponytail voiced words meant to ward off a bad omen he received. I was handed a drum and told to meander around beating it, to the amusement of all, while a girl hopped erratically beside me in a kind of courtship dance.
Their unpolished performance was touching, and being the first ever for a tourist gave it the feeling of historical significance. But this also troubled me, as I considered how my arrival marked the ushering of changes that Mr. Tsamarin had described. And yet there’s this unexpected upside. Such quaint cultural displays meant to satisfy tourists expecting something “authentic” and exotic can also resuscitate and revive aspects of traditional culture. “It makes us see how we’re admired and validates the importance of our traditions,” Mr. Tsamarin had told me, adding that the Achuar now consider the value of their cultural heritage as a useful leverage against oil development.
It became too late to travel on to Tiinkias, so we ate dinner — a crispy heliconia leaf stuffed with steaming wild turkey, palm hearts and green onion — in the thatched house of the local shaman, and pitched tents on the wooden floor of the schoolhouse.
That night I dreamed of my mother and father defending the rain forest, and later, of Ben Stiller announcing a televised ski race in an Afro wig. When I awoke at 4 a.m., roosters were already declaring it daytime through the pitch darkness. The Achuar typically rise at this transitional hour to drink guayusa, a caffeinated tea grown in the forest. It is a time when fathers pass on values to their children, mothers teach skills to their daughters and dreams are interpreted.
The local shaman, Jippeikit, told me that my first dream was about my father wanting to reunite with my mother — “Even when we die, our souls still exist,” he said. The skiing dream, he sensed, was a story of competition, which boded well. “When you visit another area,” he said, “you will not have any problems.”
We reached Tiinkias after a short trek through the muggy forest and a motorized canoe ride downriver. Its two dozen inhabitants were awaiting us in the communal house, beside a dirt clearing with a volleyball net woven from plant fibers. Laundry hung to dry between thatched-roof dwellings. An uneven footbridge spanned part of a small lagoon where a caiman rested on a log.
Over two idyllic days I found myself content simply in the Achuar’s mellow presence. We spent hours in the communal house drinking nijiamanch, tended by women constantly squeezing the pulp by hand. Often, some story I couldn’t understand provoked fits of laughter. I sang a bluegrass gospel number for the Achuar; David played guitar. Each morning, I had my dreams read by an elder.
We slept in the new tourist camp, built on a forested knoll just outside the settlement, with a simple layout of elevated wooden platforms covered by thatched roofs that extend into eating and sleeping areas meant to accommodate the groups of up to 16 visitors they anticipate.
Shakai became not just my guide to the forest but also its interpreter. In a nondescript leafy plant he saw a remedy for gastritis; in an electric blue morpho butterfly that fluttered erratically past, he saw the ears of a deceased ancestor. “What does a stick bug represent?” I wondered aloud. Shakai said it was just a stick bug.
One afternoon we passed a kapok tree, 150 feet tall with splayed buttresses and thick, weeping vines, which Shakai explained as a home of arutam: the spirit of the forest, and ancestors.
When Shakai was 13, he said, like all Achuar boys, he ventured into the forest alone to find arutam. For three days prior he fasted. He then laid a seat of palm leaves beneath a kapok tree and prepared the sacred forest medicines: datura and natem, hallucinogens that produce potent visions. Arutam first arrived, the Achuar believe, in a form of strength: a jaguar, or sometimes an anaconda, or lightning. If one becomes afraid, it is said, arutam disappears. But move toward it courageously, and the vision is supposed to transform into an elder ancestor, who reveals one’s life calling.
During this rite of passage, Shakai saw himself working with outsiders he’d never seen before. When Kapawi Lodge was built many years later, Shakai would become one of its first guides.
We reached Kapawi by motoring down the Bobonaza River, up the wide Pastaza, to the Capahuari — a four-hour journey that dipped us briefly into Peruvian territory. The lodge is set on a sheltered lagoon; 18 palm-thatched bungalows, built on stilts above the shallow water in traditional Achuar style — without nails, but with modern comforts like solar-heated showers and eco-friendly flush toilets — are connected with airy dining and lounging areas by an elevated boardwalk. The lagoon behaves as a town plaza for bird life, and screened back walls and shaded balconies ensure that guests are always well positioned, from bed or hammock, to observe its lively happenings.
It was the low season, and we and a German couple were Kapawi’s only guests. Visitors typically fly in from Shell on four-, five- or eight day packages of standard jungle lodge fare: dugout canoe rides, guided forest walks, and spotting animals (Kapawi’s remote location within a protected reserve offers a particularly excellent chance of that). Riding back the next morning from a clay lick enjoyed by chestnut-fronted macaws, we came across pink river dolphins. Later we paddled a canoe looking for anaconda but returned satisfied by yellow-rumped caciques nesting beside hoatzins, a prehistoric-looking, pheasant-sized bird with a spiky mohawk. Alone on Kapawi’s self-guided trail one afternoon, I startled (I should say the reaction was mutual) 30 ring-tailed coatis, which leaped onto tree limbs and then fixed me with beady stares.
But Kapawi places an emphasis on cultural activities, and guests can learn how women make nijiamanch or spend a night in a local Achuar community. Lodge staff members can also arrange participation in a dream-sharing ceremony with guayusa tea. But through a local shaman who knew and trusted David and Shakai, I received a special invitation to drink natem, which is how I landed, on that final evening, in Tsumpa’s house.
Tsumpa and his wife, along with a dozen children and grandchildren, live by themselves high above the Pastaza River on a tidy clearing ringed by coconut palms, manioc plants, fruit trees and a garden of various plant medicines. It was dusk when we arrived; in the distance, isolated cumulonimbus thunderclouds were set aflame by the pink-orange sun. Tsumpa was seated within a bucolic tableau: his sturdy wife prepared bowls of nijiamanch and tended to chores, while one daughter sat on a bamboo platform breast-feeding and another wove a headband. Dogs napped on cold ashes; an orphaned, saddlebacked tamarind monkey hopped onto a bunch of plantains; a toucan perched on a nearby log.
Tsumpa served me the natem in an adjacent hut. All appeared normal, until after what seemed like 20 minutes it no longer did. A montage of images emerged from the darkness — neon crystals, a lion. Soon my body dissolved into the surroundings, swallowed by a sea of energy. Unmoored and disoriented, I was adrift in a more expansive reality.
This brought a greater awareness, and I began to perceive things that had been imperceptible, like a low-frequency vibration permeating the environment. The hum of the universe? My thoughts drifted between visions. I imagined myself basking in the sun on the flanks of the volcano Chimborazo. I saw images from childhood and of random friends back home, all presented like scenes from the narrative of my life. Then my father appeared, seated in a chair before me, like a ghost. For several minutes we exchanged the sentiments that I had regretted not expressing before he died: What a life we shared, we both seemed to say. I looked down and noticed I was sobbing, and when I looked back up, he was gone.
Tsumpa was whistling and shaking leaves around a sick baby that had been brought to him for a cleansing, and Shakai asked if I’d like the same. I sat before Tsumpa and felt his hands on the crown of my head. His whistling seemed to conjure a protective field; in the leaves fanning my shoulders, I sensed a dusting of energy.
“Look at the stars,” Shakai said. The night was alive and glorious. Stepping outside felt like entering a larger room, the constellations stretching overhead as a low-hanging ceiling. David noticed my lingering sniffles and offered a bowl of tobacco-infused water, a traditional remedy, to clear my nose. Snorting it triggered a surge of intense sensation and then violent waves of vomiting unlike any I had ever experienced. More bizarre were the accompanying sounds: primeval bellows so loud and resonant they seemed to echo for miles. After, I could hear Tsumpa’s daughters giggling, and soon we were all laughing.
I laid myself down on a palm leaf, spent and contented. David and I chatted into the night. The Achuar conversed in their huts. Babies cried and were hushed. A gunshot went off in the forest, the sound of a lone man hunting. Within this dynamic nightscape, the boundaries between waking and sleeping, between inside and outside — indeed between humans and nature — blurred to nothing.
I awoke refreshed after a few hours of sleep, no longer feeling the queasiness that had been bothering me for two days. Sipping a coconut from Tsumpa’s tree, I asked the shaman what he had noticed in me.
“Andres,” he said simply, “You came here to learn about the culture, the rain forest and reality of the Achuar people. Now you’ve seen that.”
David and I returned to Quito later that morning and parted ways. I had given myself a few more days in Ecuador without a plan, but now I knew where to go. I traveled south through the highlands to Riobamba, and then ascended to Estrellas de Chimborazo, a cozy mountain lodge set beneath Ecuador’s highest peak, “Father” Chimborazo — some say that elevated by the equatorial bulge, it reaches closer to the stars than any spot on Earth.
I took walks alone through the surrounding páramo, the bushy, blond grassland carpeting the volcano’s flanks, past grazing alpacas, and lay for hours on my back.
It was precisely the time with Pachamama that Don Esteban had prescribed for me. And as I had envisioned myself.
Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex?
THE ATLANTIC | Sex toys have transformed into sophisticated and well-designed gadgets that take their inspiration from Apple not Hustler. But one company has a bigger hope: that a better machine could mean better sex for a repressed nation.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE ATLANTIC, MAY 14, 2012 (Republished in “Best Sex Writing 2013”)
THE OFFICES OF JIMMYJANE are above a boarded-up dive bar in San Francisco's Mission district. There used to be a sign on a now-unmarked side door, until employees grew weary of men showing up in a panic on Valentine's Day thinking they could buy last-minute gifts there. (They can't.) The only legacy that remains of the space's original occupant, an underground lesbian club, is a large fireplace set into the back wall. Porcelain massage candles and ceramic stones, neatly displayed on sleek white shelves alongside the brightly colored vibrators that the company designs, give the space the serene air of a day spa.
Ethan Imboden, the company's founder, is 40 and holds an electrical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins and a master's in industrial design from Pratt Institute. He has a thin face and blue eyes, and wears a pair of small hoop earrings beneath brown hair that is often tousled in some fashion. The first time I visited, one April morning, Imboden had on a V-neck sweater, designer jeans and Converse sneakers with the tongues splayed out -- an aesthetic leaning that masks a highly programmatic interior. "I think if you asked my mother she'd probably say I lined up my teddy bears at right angles," he told me.
Imboden was seated next to a white conference table, reviewing a marketing graphic that Jimmyjane was preparing to email customers before the summer season. Projected onto a wall was an image that promoted three of Jimmyjane's vibrators, superimposed over postcards of iconic destinations -- Paris, the Taj Mahal, a Mexican surf beach -- with the title: "Meet Jimmyjane's Mile High Club: The perfect traveling companions for your summer adventures." The postcard for the Form 2, a vibrator Imboden created with the industrial designer Yves Behar, was pictured alongside the Eiffel Tower with the note: " Bonjour! Thanks to my handy button lock I breezed through my flight without making noise or causing an international incident. See you soon, FORM 2."
Jimmyjane's conceit is to presuppose a world in which there is no hesitation around sex toys. Placing its products on familiar cultural ground has a normalizing effect, Imboden believes, and comparing a vibrator to a lifestyle accessory someone might pack into their carry-on luggage next to an iPad shifts people's perceptions about where these objects fit into their lives. Jimmyjane products have been sold in places like C.O. Bigelow, the New York apothecary, Sephora, W Hotels, and even Drugstore.com. Insinuating beautifully designed and thoughtfully engineered sex toys into the mainstream consumer landscape could push Americans into more comfortable territory around sex in general. Jimmyjane hopes to achieve this without treading too firmly on mainstream sensibilities. "Not everyone sits in a conference room and talks about vibrators, dildos, anal sex, clitorises -- and we do," Imboden explained. "It's important for us to remain a part of the mainstream culture and sensitive to how normal people discuss or don't discuss these subjects."
Ten years ago, walking into the annual sex toy industry show for the first time, Imboden was startled by the objects he encountered. He had developed DNA sequencers for government scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and more recently he had left a job designing consumer products -- cell phones and electric toothbrushes -- for companies like Motorola and Colgate, work he found dispiriting. "It was imminently clear to me that I was creating a huge amount of landfill," Imboden told me. "I wanted no part of it." He struck out on his own, and found himself approached by a potential client about designing a sex product.
The floor of the Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo, held that year on the windowless ground level of the Sheraton in Universal City, California, flaunted fated landfill of a different sort: a gaudy display of "severed anatomy, goofy animals, and penis-pump flashing-lights kind of stuff," Imboden recalled. These tawdry novelties dominate the $1.3 billion-a-year American sex toy market. They are the output of a small but cliquish old boys' network of companies you've probably never heard of, even if you have given business to them. One of these, Doc Johnson, was named as a mocking tribute to President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose justice department in the 1960s tried in vain to prosecute the late pornographer Reuben Sturman, the industry's notorious founding father. Sturman invented the peep show booth, and built a formidable empire of adult bookstores that for decades constituted the shadowy domain where such products were sold, usually to men.
The traditional Sturmanite sex shop (Reuters)
Imboden was inspired. "As soon as I saw past the fact that in front of me happened to be two penises fused together at the base, I realized that I was looking at the only category of consumer product that had yet to be touched by design," Imboden said. "It's as if the only food that had been available was in the candy aisle, like Dum Dums and Twizzlers, where it's really just about a marketing concept and a quick rush and very little emphasis on nourishment and real enjoyment. The category had been isolated by the taboo that surrounded it. I figured, I can transcend that."
At dinner parties in San Francisco, where he lives, Imboden found that mentioning sex toys unleashed conversations that appeared to have been only awaiting permission. "Suddenly I was at the nexus of everybody's thoughts and aspirations of sexuality," he said. "Suddenly it was OK for anyone to talk to me about it." It occurred to Imboden that the people who buy sex toys are not some other group of people. They are among the half of all Americans who, according to a recent Indiana University study, report having used a vibrator. They are people, like those waiting outside Apple stores for the newest iPhone model, who typically surround themselves with brands that reinforce a self-concept. They spend money on quality products, and care about the safety of those products. Yet, for the very products they use most intimately--arguably the ones whose quality and safety people should care most about--they were buying gimmicky items of questionable integrity. It's just that people had never come to expect or demand anything different--silenced by society's "shame tax on sexuality," as one sex toy retailer put it to me. And few alternatives existed.
Jean-Michel Valette, the chairman of Peet's Coffee, who would later join Jimmyjane's Board of Directors, told me: "I had thought the opportunities for really transforming significant consumer categories had all been done. Starbucks had done it in coffee. Select Comfort had done it in beds. Boston Beers" -- the makers of Samuel Adams -- "had done it in beer. And here was one that was right under everyone's nose."
Jimmyjane's success has inspired a growing class of design-conscious companies--including Minna, Nomi Tang and Je Joue--that are beginning to clean up an unscrupulous industry long cloaked by American discomfort around sex. LELO, a Swedish brand founded by industrial designers, creates up-market products with names--Gigi, Ina, Nea-- that sound like feminized IKEA furniture. (Try Gigi on the SVELVIK bed!) OhMiBod, a line of vibrators created by a woman who once worked in Apple's product marketing department, synchronize rhythmically with iPods, iPads, iPhones and other smartphones.
I asked Imboden what qualified him to design a vibrator, a device primarily intended for female pleasure. Imboden said he considers himself "decidedly heterosexual," but also "universally perceptive," and he suspects that the formative childhood years he spent living with his mother and older sister, after his father died of cancer when he was two, may have nurtured within him a certain empathy for the opposite sex. (His father had also been an engineer, also worked at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and ended up starting a dressmaking company called Foxy Lady.) "Ethan has an intellectual curiosity and an emotional maturity that doesn't stop him from exploring something that a man 'shouldn't,'" said Lisa Berman, Jimmyjane's C.E.O., who came from The Limited and Guess and is among the company's all- female executive team. "He is a real purist in the way he thinks, not just about engineering and design but the emotional connection that these products might assist in a relationship. He can do that better than anyone that I've met."
Imboden enlisted his mother and sister to help him start the company. These made for some strange moments, as in the time when his mom complimented him on a well-written description of how a vibrator could be inserted safely for anal use, calling out from across the room, "Ethan, you handled the anus beautifully." His friend Brian and other close friends invested initial seed money. Professional investors were intrigued but hesitant; here was a first-time entrepreneur, making a consumer product that was not, strictly speaking, technology (being the Bay Area this mattered)--and it was about sex. "They were scared of it," Imboden said. (Banks still refuse their business, citing vague "morality clauses.") Tim Draper, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist known for backing ventures like Skype and Hotmail, thought differently. "He had a unique way of looking at the world, and a great sense for product design," Draper wrote to me in an e-mail. "He understood branding."
Little Gold, Jimmyjane's first vibrator, is a slender thing that could be mistaken for a cigar case. Imboden developed and patented a replaceable motor that slides inside the 24-carat gold-plated shell, which he engineered to vibrate in near silence. It is a portable, durable, and waterproof sex toy designed never to become landfill. For Imboden, it was merely a proof of concept. "It's an immediate of disruption of the associations that we have with sexual products," he said.
The trendy London-based apothecary, Space.NK, bought the concept, and displayed Jimmyjane right next to Marc Jacobs' new fragrances. Soon after, Selfridges, the high-end British department store, carried the company's products. For Imboden, debuting in European retailers was a deliberate end-run around American social taboos, and also made a sidestep of the sex toy industry entirely. It was a statement that products like vibrators did not have to be relegated to their own store or a discreet Web site. Premiering in lofty precincts before trickling down to the mainstream borrowed from a fashion playbook: Little Gold could be thought of as Jimmyjane's couture offering, its runway showpiece. A more accessible aluminum version, Little Chroma, now sells for $125 at Drugstore.com.
Early on, Imboden would also hang around celebrity gatherings, putting vibrators in the hands of influencers. After the Grammy Awards one year, he found himself walking across an intersection in front of a white low rider. Inside, two heads bobbed to music; "Snoop de Ville" ran across the side of the car. As Imboden jogged over to the front window, he reached inside his shoulder bag for a vibrator, and "it dawns on me that this is a perfect recipe for getting shot," he recalls. Snoop Dogg was behind the wheel, talking on a cell phone; a chandelier swayed gently above him. Imboden handed him a Little Something. "This dude just gave me a 24k gold vibrator," Snoop relayed into the phone. Then he turned to Imboden. "Thank you, my nigga. I'm gonna put this to work right now."
In January 2005, the Little Gold made it into the Golden Globe Awards gift suite, the freebie swag lounge that, in those days, A-list celebrities actually visited. "To have a non-fashion item like that at one of these showcases was really unusual and groundbreaking," Rose Apodaca, the West Coast bureau chief of Women's Wear Daily at the time, told me. "It was the hot item everyone was trying to get their hands on." Teri Hatcher and Jennifer Garner, by picking one up, became among the brand's first celebrity endorsers. Apodaca wrote about it in WWD's awards season special. "Suddenly there's this tool for sex being featured in the bible of the fashion industry." After Kate Moss was spotted purchasing a Little Gold from a Greenwich Village lingerie boutique -- a "buzz-worthy bauble," Page Six wrote -- Jimmyjane appeared in Vogue.
After the introduction of electric lights in 1876, home appliances were plugged in, one by one, beginning with the sewing machine and followed by the fan, the teakettle, the toaster and then, the vibrator. (The vacuum cleaner would come ten years later.) Ads for them appeared in Hearst's, Popular Mechanics, Modern Women and Women's Home Companion, among many others. A National Home Journal ad in 1908 for a $5 hand-powered vibrator, declared: "Gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing. Invented by a woman who knows a women's needs. All nature pulsates and vibrates with life." Another in American Magazine claimed that the vibrator "will chase away the years like magic...All the keen relish, the pleasures of youth, will throb within you...Your self-respect, even, will be increased a hundredfold." A Sears, Roebuck catalog in 1918 advertised a portable vibrator on a page (with fans and household mixers) of "Aids That Every Woman Appreciates."
Was this language camouflage for an orgasm? Were these vibrators also intended, with a wink, for masturbation? This has become the popular history of the device as written by Rachel Maines, a Cornell researcher, who argued in her 1999 book "The Technology of Orgasm" that electric vibrators replaced the hands of doctors who, from the time of Hippocrates to the 1920s, had been massaging women to orgasm as a treatment for hysteria.
Hysteria: The 17th century French physician Lazare Rivière's described it as "a sort of madness, arising from a vehement and unbridled desire of carnal embracement which desire disthrones the Rational Faculties so far, that the Patient utters wanton and lascivious Speeches." Today, this sounds a lot like normal functioning of female sexuality. But men long viewed it as a disorder. During antiquity physicians believed that hysteria was caused by the womb meandering around the body, wrecking havoc, yet by the 19th century the term had become "the wastepaper basket of medicine where one throws otherwise unemployed symptoms," as the French physiatrist Charles Lasègue put it. (The American Psychiatric Association finally dropped hysteria altogether from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1952, the same year it added homosexuality.)
Virgins, nuns, widows and women with impotent husbands were thought especially prone. Victorian physicians, especially in England and the United States, were wary of female arousal. They viewed it as a dangerous slope towards uncontrollable desires and ill health, and advised women against tea, coffee, masturbation, feather beds, wearing tight corsets, and reading French novels.
Maines argues that relieving women of this pent-up desire was a standard medical practice. She takes us back to the Greek physician Soranus, who in the first century A.D. discussed his treatment: "We...moisten these parts freely with sweet oil, keeping it up for some time," he wrote. Helen King, a historian and leading authority of Classical medicine at England's Open University, told me that a correct translation of this passage has him massaging the abdomen, the typical treatment for yet another female disorder--chronic flowing of female "seed"--for which rose oil was prescribed, along with cold baths and avoiding sexy pictures. Rather, King says, it is with the influential Roman physician Galen where we see the first explicit mention of genital massage to orgasm as a medical treatment. Galen discusses a woman rubbing "the customary remedies" on her genitals--sachets of Artemisia, marjoram and iris oil--and feeling the "pain and at the same time the pleasure" associated with intercourse.
But did doctors do the deed? Probably not in antiquity, King said--there was a taboo against such things even back then, and the task was likely assigned to midwives. References in the annals of medicine to genital massage are oblique, leaving a trove of circumstantial evidence, with some exceptions, like the British physician Nathaniel Highmore complaining in the 17th century that massaging the vulva was "not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other." Maines believes that doctors considered this a tedious task, and not a sexual act, since sexual relations, especially in those pre-Clinton centuries, meant proper intercourse. However, if intercourse failed to relieve the symptoms of desire--only recently have we known that up to seventy percent of women cannot reach orgasm from intercourse alone--doctors prescribed hydrotherapy (the douche sprays in Saratoga Springs, NY were a popular destination for women whose husbands were at the racetrack) or an office visit.
In 1869 an American physician, George Taylor, patented a steam- powered contraption called the "Manipulator," in which a patient lay stomach-down on a padded table and received a pelvis massage from a vibrating sphere. The Chattanooga, a 125-pound apparatus that sold in 1904 for $200, was used on both sexes for various treatments including, the company's catalog described, "female troubles." All manner of inventions were marketed to doctors: musical vibrators, vibratory forks, vibrating wire coils called vibratiles, floor-standing models on rollers and portable devices shaped like hair dryers. They were powered by air pressure, water turbines, gas engines, and batteries. We don't really know how common the practice of massaging women with these devices actually was--Maines's book touched off a debate among sex historians, with some arguing that it was probably rare and considered quack medicine--but in any case, after the first electromechanical vibrator was patented in 1880, vibrators marketed for home use flourished. General Electric and Hamilton Beach both made handheld devices that looked like hair dryers, boxed with various attachments. (I recently found a 1902 Hamilton Beach vibrator listed on eBay for $25.99.) Women could now regain the "pleasures of youth" through their own devices.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, vibrator ads gradually disappeared from up-market magazines after the 1920s, and went underground. Fifty years later they would resurface -- Hitachi's Magic Wand Massager first appeared in the 1970s and remains one of the top- selling vibrators, even though the company will tell you it doesn't make vibrators -- and feminists in New York City began teaching women self-pleasure. By the 1990s, Bob Dole was talking about erectile dysfunction as the pitchman for Viagra, and the Starr Report described fellatio and a semen-stained dress, pushing the boundaries of acceptable mainstream media conversation.
And then, Miranda presented Charlotte with the Rabbit Pearl, a pink, phallus-shaped vibrator with rotating beads and animated bunny ears, on prime-time cable television.
Everyone in the sex toy business whom I spoke with credits "Sex and the City" with profoundly changing the way Americans now talk about sex toys. The Rabbit Pearl became an overnight sensation -- "Talk about product placement," the vibrator's manufacturer, Dan Martin of Vibratex, told me. With clean, well-lit stores like Good Vibrations and Babeland; the Tupperware-inspired, sex-toy house gatherings for women known as Pleasure Parties ("Where Every Day is Valentine's Day"); and the Internet -- which opened all kinds of new avenues for sexual adventure -- women now had safe and discreet places to buy it. The Rabbit Pearl is still the top-selling sex toy, although the original from Vibratex has been knocked off so many times that "the rabbit" has become generic.
In an episode during the fifth season of "Sex and the City," Samantha walks into a Sharper Image to return her vibrator.
"We don't sell vibrators," the clerk tells her.
"Yes you do, I bought this here six months ago," Samantha replies, holding up the device."That's not a vibrator," he says, "that's a neck massager."
Within Sharper Image, that neck massager became known jokingly as "the Sex and the City vibrator," but in 2007, Imboden approached the company with the Form 6. Literally the sixth in a series of vibrator sketches -- Imboden believes in minimalist names -- the Form 6 has a curved, organic shape that is suggestive without being representational. It is wrapped completely in soft, platinum silicone, making it completely water-resistant, and charges on a wall-powered base station through a narrow stainless steel band, a novel cordless recharging system that Imboden patented. For these features, the Form 6 earned an International Design Excellence Award, the first time a sex toy had earned such a distinction. It comes in hot pink, deep plum or slate-- non-primary, poppy colors that he believes convey sophistication. It is packaged in a hard plastic case inside a bright white box -- "literally and figuratively bringing these products out of the shadows," Imboden said. And it has a 3-year warranty (this may not seem remarkable, but is for a sex toy).
"It was certainly controversial internally," recalled Adam Ertel, Sharper Image's buyer at the time. Sharper Image decided to try the Form 6 in a few stores -- "a waterproof personal massager" is how they described it -- and, to everyone's surprise, the Form 6 soon became one of the retailer's best selling massage items. They quickly rolled it out nationwide. "It was clear to all of us that we were treading on new ground," said Ertel. "We realized that the people that bought the Form 6 for its intimate nature may be a large group of consumers that people aren't strategically selling to."
One afternoon in May, I joined Imboden at a meeting with Yves Behar to talk through ideas for the Form 4, their next vibrator. They met at Behar's downtown San Francisco design studio, fuseproject, around a conference table topped with some rudimentary prototypes that they would pick up and flex in different directions while discussing "torque" and "harmonics" and "programming sequences." On a counter along the back wall stood a desk lamp that Behar designed for Herman Miller. Behar is perhaps best known for creating the One Laptop Per Child computer and perhaps least known for designing both New York City's branded bike helmet and its official condom dispenser. The two had been friends for a while -- Behar was an early advisor to Jimmyjane -- before deciding, a couple years ago, to collaborate. "Isn't this that old fashioned Playboy mansion cliché, two guys coming up with products used for women?" Behar asked. "I don't know if it is because I have twenty-plus years experience of design or thirty years of sexual experiences. You put the two together and you can get to some really interesting places."
During the initial brainstorms, which included the women on their respective teams, some awkward workplace conversations, and plenty of giggling, Imboden and Behar identified three different functions that a vibrator should deliver. They decided to roll them out in a trio of devices -- a collection they've named "Pleasure to the People" -- all built upon a modular base structure that houses a common digital interface, wireless rechargeable battery and motor. They designed the Form 2, their first product, to be a "new interpretation" of the Rabbit Pearl. Its form is compact, resting ergonomically in the palm of the hand, with a novel shape that resembles a padded tuning fork or a portly, marshmallow Peep Easter bunny -- suggestive enough of the iconic Rabbit to appear familiar to people, but amorphous enough that they don't dwell too much on what it looks like. "It's not just a lumpy random shape," Imboden pointed out. "I think there's a real sense of purpose in the forms which communicate that this is not an arbitrary act or a whimsical random thing we've created."
Through their design, Imboden wants to convey the sense that these are carefully considered objects--that someone is looking out for our sexual well-being, even if we have been conditioned to have low expectations. "I jokingly say this is an area where you really don't want to disappoint your customers," Behar told me. "And I think this is an industry that has treated its customers really badly." The Form 2 takes a symmetrical, organic form but they avoid emulating anatomy, because while "the penis is very well designed to accomplish what it needs to accomplish, a vibrator doesn't actually need to do those same things," Imboden said. One function it was not designed to accomplish was to stimulate a woman's G spot, but even if it did, mimicking male genitalia treads on psychological territory that Imboden would rather avoid. "While on the one hand that has its own excitement, there becomes a third person," he said, noting that some men feel threatened by an object they perceive to be a substitution for themselves. "People aren't necessarily seeking to have a threesome. Our goal has really been for the focus to be on you and your sensations and the interaction with your partner and not really to pull attention to the product itself. That's an element of why we make the products as quiet as they are. It's also why we make them visually quiet." Representational objects, like taxidermy hanging in a lodge, take up psychic space; figurative forms leave fantasy open to one's own interpretation. "Staying away from body shapes," Imboden explained, "is a way of keeping open provocative possibility, as opposed to narrowing it down to a provocative prescription."
The Form 3, the second vibrator designed with Behar, has a vibrating, ultra-thin soft silicone skin that flexes into the curve of the palm. The Form 4, the two men discussed that afternoon, should "deliver an oomph." Imboden believed they could achieve this by setting two motors to vibrate at different frequencies. Behar pondered an internal structure that would allow the vibrator to bend in various directions, similar to the neck of his Hermann Miller lamp. "Plus it makes it looks exactly like Barbapapa, my childhood hero," he said, referring to the popular French cartoon creature that looks like a pear-shaped blob and can change shape. "For each of these projects we came up with some funny metaphors," he told me. "It keeps you true to the original concept."
From a study released in 2009 by Indiana University, the first academic, peer-reviewed study to look at vibrator use, we now know that 53 percent of women and nearly half of all men in the United States have used a vibrator. This makes it nearly as common an appliance in American households as the drip coffee maker or toaster oven, The New York Times reported, and about twice as prevalent among American adults as condoms, according to Church & Dwight, maker of Trojan condoms, which funded the Indiana University study. Jimmyjane's own sales reveal that as many men as women, as many 25-
year-olds as 50-year olds, and as many Virginians as Californians, per capita, are buying vibrators. At each phase of life, a sex toy might take on new meaning; perhaps, initially, as a way to explore one's own body, but later, within a long-term relationship, as a way to sustain excitement. Today sex therapists are hearing more discussion of what they call "desire discrepancies" -- one partner wanting sex more, or less, or in a different manner, than the other. "Our bread and butter used to be orgasm and erection problems," said Sandor Gardos, a sex therapist, adding that self-help sources and Viagra have arisen to address those issues. "There's more discussion now around the subtle and complex issues of relationship and sexuality."
Imboden sees Jimmyjane as playing into that discussion around sex and well-being, not only as a peddler of "marital aids" -- terminology still used by the handful of online sex-toy retailers catering to religious Christians -- but as a trusted provocateur. Guests looking for condoms at W Hotels will find Jimmyjane's Pocket Pleasure Set in their room's mini bar, a slim package containing condoms, a mini vibrator, a feather tickler, and the "love decoder"--a piece of paper folded like an Origami fortune teller that engages players in titillating acts through a game of chance. "Everybody wants to try these new boundaries but they need a catalyst to make this happen," Imboden told me. "We are granting them permission by transferring the responsibility to us."
One day, I flew to Los Angeles with Imboden for a routine trip he was taking to different retailers that carry Jimmyjane. We started at Hustler Hollywood, an up-market sex emporium on a corner of the Sunset Strip, with a glass façade, bright lights and polished floors. Hard-core pornography was displayed just feet from an in-store coffee bar, arguably two things that should occupy different spaces, but the suggestion is to get over it. Presenting erotica stigma-free in the manner of a Barnes & Noble triggers the disorienting feel of a dark nightclub suddenly flooded with fluorescent ceiling lights, where everyone can see what you've been doing in the corner. But a fishbowl is precisely the metaphor of transparency Larry Flynt had in mind, and amidst this forthright statement of normalized sexuality (store motto: "Relax...it's just sex"), Jimmyjane is at home.
"With most other consumer products, like a pair of jeans, you have to convince people why they need it," Cory Silverberg, a certified sex educator and author who writes the Sexuality Guide for About.com, had told me. "With sex toys people come in already interested, and what you are doing is removing the obstacles. A lot of it is permission giving--saying that sex toys don't make you kinky, or that your boyfriend or girlfriend isn't good enough."
Imboden told me that Jimmyjane was the first to present sex toys in white packaging, and that retailers, accustomed to the candy-colored aesthetic, told him customers would never go for it. Several packages made by the company's competitors now have a cleaner, white look. Imboden picked one of them off a rack, and pointed out the words bullet-pointed on the package: body-safe materials, phthalate-free, waterproof. "You never used to see that," he said. European laws have driven much of the industry's attention to materials safety, but whether it is to be believed is something different. Sander Gardos, who founded MyPleasure.com, an online retailer of sex toys, had told me, "You cannot trust what's on the box--it has nothing to do with what's actually in there," recalling a manufacturer at a trade show in Shanghai who stood before a display of two boxes that contained the same product-- one was labeled "100% TPR" (thermoplastic rubber), the other "100% silicone"--and then admitted both were made with PVC. "We have visited the Chinese factories that make all the toys that say 'Made in Japan,'" Gardos said. "There are tremendous quality control issues in this industry because it is completely unregulated."
A stand-alone glass case carried what the salesman distinguished as the "sex devices"--superior quality, more nicely designed, and higher priced products "that don't crap out," as he put it. Jimmyjane's products occupied two shelves. The case also displayed products by LELO and Minna. On another shelf was OhMiBod's Freestyle vibrator, which pulsates to music from an mp3 player. It bore a striking resemblance to the Form 6, down to its solid plum color and narrow metallic band.
Nearby, in West Hollywood, we stopped in at Coco de Mer, a luxury erotic boutique with outlets in London and Manhattan. With Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, who is an investor in the store, Imboden designed a custom version of the Little Chroma in black, with Stewart's lyrics etched into the aluminum and a leather cord threaded through the cap, along with a custom guitar pick. We then met Robin Coe- Hutshing at Studio BeautyMix, her store inside Fred Segal, in Santa Monica (which has since changed ownership). A wall behind the custom fragrance counter displayed Jimmyjane's vibrators, white porcelain massage stones (for which it won an International Design Excellence Award); and scented massage oil candles, which were the first candles of any kind to be formulated with a melting point matching body temperature, an innovation that makes them an effective emollient when poured onto the skin. In an environment of soaps, perfumes, and skin cream, Jimmyjane's bright color palette and white boxes fit as seamlessly as they had in a room of maid outfits and butt plugs. If Hustler Hollywood and Studio BeautyMix might represent almost dichotomous approaches to sex -- the excitement of sexual fantasy versus the everyday made sexy -- Jimmyjane works in both worlds by remaining agnostic.
We finished our tour in Venice, at A+R, the design store that Rose Apodaca, the former Women's Wear Daily editor, opened with her husband Andy Griffith. The store displays a compendium of home accessories from designers around the world. The Form 2 sits on a shelf behind glass wall display next to the Braun travel alarm clock by Dieter Rams, and is sometimes mistaken by customers, according to Apodaca, for a Japanese anime toy. In the adjacent case, beside colored glass vases in the shape of honey bears, are the Form 6 and Little Chroma. "We wanted to include these products in our mix because we wanted it to seem like a perfectly normal part of one's lifestyle," Apodaca told me. "Just like they'd have a great wine carafe or a filtered water bottle." When Sasha Baron Cohen walked into the store the week before I visited and learned what that Little Chroma was, he proceeded to browse the store picking up random objects and asking, "Does this vibrate?"
The Jimmyjane display inside Fred Segal.
Victoria's Secret, a $5 billion retailer ubiquitous today in American shopping malls, was founded in San Francisco in the 1970s by a Stanford Business School graduate who felt embarrassed buying lingerie for his wife in a department store, and set out to create a more inviting atmosphere for men. Soon, picking up a vibrator in a shopping mall, or a store that sells home accessories, cosmetics or lattes may seem rather conventional. It nearly is already. One of the faster growing categories in terms of sales at Walgreen's, the nation's biggest drugstore chain, is sexual wellness. Walgreens has been selling a vibrating ring--a gateway sex toy--made by Trojan since 2006, except in the seven U.S. states where it is illegal to do so; Target and Wal-Mart sell them as well. Amazon.com currently carries just under 80,000 sexual wellness products. Sales of "sexual enhancement devices" in mass food and drug retailers (excluding Wal-Mart) increased by 20 percent for the year that ended April 15, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a Chicago-based market research firm. Yearly sales of sexual products through home-party direct sales, like Pleasure Parties, are more than $400 million. "Vibrators are already mainstream," said Jim Daniels, Trojan's former vice president for marketing, who estimates the market for vibrators in the US to be $1 billion--more than twice that of condoms.
Trojan, along with Durex and Lifestyle, are among the large companies now developing vibrators that a place like Walgreen's might start to feel O.K. about selling under florescent lights. Trojan has introduced the $60 Vibrating Twister--the condom maker's third vibrator model. For a trial, Philips Electronics launched a line of "intimate massagers" under their Relationship Care category. "These big multinational companies are realizing there is a ton money to be made," says Cory Silverberg. "They will change things more significantly than the political feminist sex stores and some of the more interesting manufacturers like Jimmyjane." Mainstream manufacturers and retailers are couching these products as being good for sexual health--that it's not just about getting turned on, or being kinky, but about being healthy, like exercising and eating well. "That's not exactly a change in our comfort with sex", says Silverberg--it still will be some time before sex toy ads become as acceptable as Viagra commercials--"it's a marketing ploy, but it will give people permission to try something they want to try anyway."
Johnson & Johnson's KY re-launched its own brand with what it's calling "intimacy enhancing products for couples," including a topical female arousal gel "scientifically proven to enhance a woman's intimate satisfaction." "I look at it as the final frontier of the women's movement," says Dr. Laura Berman, a prominent TV sex and relationships therapist who incited a vibrator buying frenzy after appearing on "Oprah" with various devices. "Women now feel more entitled and free to explore their own sexual responses."
As sex toys become just another personal electronic device, our expectations of them and how they are used are bound to change. Imboden has been considering this scenario for years already, quietly developing technologies that he says will "fundamentally alter the way that we interact with these products." Imagine wearable sensors-- embedded in clothing, or a bracelet--that operate according to heart rate, blood pressure and skin response. Imagine devices that communicate via a personal area network, connecting sexual partners in ways they don't even realize.
One afternoon at Jimmyjane's offices, Imboden told me that he believed the companies that will succeed in making sex toys are those that are forthright, trusted and accountable, like an intimate partner. He paused, then added -- "and give great orgasms" -- just before it became an afterthought.
Return of the Fungi
MOTHER JONES | Paul Stamets is on a quest to find an endangered mushroom that could cure smallpox, TB, and even bird flu. Can he unlock its secrets before deforestation and climate change wipe it out?
Paul Stamets with agarikon. Photo by: Andy Isaacson
FIRST PUBLISHED IN MOTHER JONES, NOV-DEC, 2009
In the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest grows a bulbous, prehistoric-looking mushroom called agarikon. It prefers to colonize century-old Douglas fir trees, growing out of their trunks like an ugly mole on a finger. When I first met Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has spent more than three decades hunting, studying, and tripping on mushrooms, he had found only two of these unusual fungi, each time by accident—or, as he might put it, divine intervention.
Stamets believes that unlocking agarikon’s secrets may be as important to the future of human health as Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillium mold’s antibiotic properties more than 80 years ago. And so on a sunny July day, Stamets is setting off on a voyage along the coastal islands of southern British Columbia in hopes of bagging more of the endangered fungus before deforestation or climate change irreparably alters the ecosystems where it makes its home. Agarikon may be ready to save us— but we may have to save it first.
Joining Stamets on the 43-foot schooner Misty Isles are his wife, Dusty, a few close friends, and four research assistants from Fungi Perfecti, his Olympia, Washington- based company, which sells medicinal mushroom extracts, edible mushroom kits, mushroom doggie treats, and Stamets’ most recent treatise, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. “What we’re doing here could save millions of lives,” he tells me on the first morn- ing of the three-day, 120-mile voyage. “It’s fun, it’s bizarre, and very much borders on something spiritual.”
A few months earlier, the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Institute for Tuberculo- sis Research sent Stamets its analysis of a dozen agarikon strains that he’d cultured in his own lab. The institute found the fungus to be extraordinarily active against XDR-TB, a rare type of tuberculosis that is resistant to even the most effective drug treatments. Project BioShield, the Depart- ment of Health and Human Services’ bio- defense program, has found that agarikon is highly resistant to many flu viruses in- cluding, when combined with other mush- rooms, bird flu. And a week before the trip, the National Center for Natural Products Research, a federally funded lab at the University of Mississippi, concluded that it showed resistance to orthopox viruses including smallpox—without any apparent toxicity. The potential implications are ob-vious: Most Americans under 35 have notbeen vaccinated for smallpox, and expertsfear the current supply of the vaccine maybe insufficient in case of a bioterror attack.A bird flu pandemic within the decade iseven likelier. Currently, agarikon is beingtested to see if it can also fight off the H1N1swine flu virus.
“When you mention mushrooms people either think magic mushrooms or portabellas. Their eyes glaze over,” Stamets laments. That a homely, humble fungus could fight off virulent diseases like smallpox and TB might seem odd, until one realizes that even though the animal kingdom branched off from the fungi kingdom around 650 million years ago, humans and a fungi still have nearly half of their DNA in common and are susceptible to many of the same infections. (Referring to fungi as “our ancestors” is one of the many zingers that Stamets likes to feed audiences.)
On the first morning of our journey, agarikon remains elusive. From the deck of the Misty Isles, the white heads of bald eagles pop out of the dense green slopes of Mink Island, generating false sightings of H the chalky mushroom in the treetops. “People say, ‘Everywhere you mycologists look, you see mushrooms,’” Stamets says, focusing his binoculars. He laughs. “It’s true. The thing about mushroom hunters is, they tend to burn an image of a mushroom on their retina. Then you end up overlaying that image on the landscape. The mushrooms seem to jump out at you.”
STAMETS is of medium height and stocky build. His graying beard, round face, and glasses recall Jerry Garcia. As he tells it, mushrooms came into his life because of a humiliating stuttering habit. “I always stared at the ground and couldn’t look people in the eye,” he recounts. “That’s how I found fungi.” He remembers pelting his seven-year-old twin brother with puffball mushrooms, watching the spores explode in his face. But Stamets didn’t get serious about mushrooms until he was 18, when he ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. Hallucinating alone in the Ohio countryside, he got caught in a summer thunderstorm and climbed a tree for shelter. Waiting out the storm, Stamets examined his life. “I asked myself, ‘Well Paul, why do you stutter so much?’ So I repeated, ‘Stop stuttering now,’ over and over again, hundreds of times. The next morning, someone asked, ‘Hi Paul, how are you?’ I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ I didn’t even stutter. That was when I realized mushrooms were really important to me.”
Not long after his first trip, Stamets enrolled in college but dropped out to work as a logger. He eventually graduated from Olympia’s Evergreen State College, whose unofficial motto, Omnia Extares, roughly translates as “Let it all hang out.” While studying biology and electron microscopy, he pioneered research on psilocybin, dis- covering four new species and writing a definitive field guide. Unable to afford grad school, Stamets started Fungi Perfecti and published The Mushroom Cultivator, which remains a classic within the subculture of mushroom enthusiasts. (He once spotted a copy on the bookshelf of one of the directors of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.)
Stamets began distancing himself from the magic mushroom crowd about nine ears ago. “The problem with the psychedelic scene,” he told me while driving near his vacation home on Cortes Island, the Grateful Dead playing on the stereo, “is that people contemplate their belly but- tons and don’t get anything done. I wanted to save lives and the ecosystem.” Yet he still credits psilocybin with giving him a sense of purpose. Stamets, who has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, used to spend hours executing complex martial arts routines in the mountains as he tripped. “I had these visions of myself as a mycological warrior in defense of the planet.”
While studying the medicinal uses of fungi, Stamets built an extensive library of wild mushroom cultures harvested from the virgin forests of the Pacific Northwest. “It’s my most valuable asset,” he says. In the event of a fire, “everything can burn. I’m grabbing my test tubes and running.”
His tinkering has yielded many surprising discoveries about mushrooms and mycelium, the cobweblike, often hidden network of cells that spawns them. He’s demonstrated that oyster mushroom mycelium can more effectively restore soils polluted by oil and gasoline than conventional treatments can; in one eight-week experiment, the fungus broke down 95 percent of the hydrocarbons in a diesel- soaked patch of dirt. He’s used sacks of woodchips inoculated with oyster mycelium as filters to protect river habitats from pollutants such as farm runoff contaminated with coliform bacteria. Recently, he proved that cellulosic ethanol could be produced with sugars extracted from decomposing fungi.
Insisting that he’s merely a “voice for the mycelium,” Stamets says he can’t re- ally take credit for his discoveries about an extraordinarily diverse and evolutionarily successful kingdom that modern science has scarcely explored. Still, over the past four years, he has filed for twenty-two patents and received four. “I’m up against big bad pharma, and they will try to steal from us. I have no illusions about this,” he says. “Truly, it’s a David versus Goliath situation.” He asserts that after one of his public talks, in which he spoke about his discovery of a fungus that kills carpenter ants and termites by tricking them into eating it, he was approached by two retired pesticide industry executives. Convinced that their former employers would feel threatened by this relatively cheap, nontoxic pesticide, Stamets claims, they advised him to watch his back.
Stamets’ mother, a charismatic Christian, believes the only explanation for his unexpected discoveries is that he is chosen. “I’m not that smart,” he says. “I was the dumbest one in my family. But I’m just exceptionally lucky. Other mycologists know more about mycopesticidal fungi than I do. They missed it. In the 2,000-year history of Fomitopsis officinalis”—agarikon’s scientific name—“I’m the first one to discover it has antiviral properties? I don’t get it, either.”
“Paul Stamets is a modern example of the amateur scientist from the 17th and 18th century who made wonderful contributions with only their native curiosityand keen sense of observation,” explains Eric Rasmussen, a former Navy physicianand researcher for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, who now heads Instedd (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), a Google-funded nonprofit that develops technology to control disease outbreaks. “He’s listened to in a lot of unexpected corners.” In 1997, Battelle, a nonprofit R&D lab and a major Defense Department contractor, asked to screen more than two dozen strains of Stamets’ fungi. A few years later, it sent him back a classified report revealing the mushrooms to be highly effective in breaking down the neurotoxin VX, the illegal chemical weapon. Soon afterward, DARPA invited Stamets to one of its brainstorming sessions.
In his role as an ambassador for an en-tire taxonomic kingdom, Stamets has bee nelevated to something of a cult figure. “Ido have some crazies once in a while who believe that I’m the messiah or that we’re destined to be together,” he said, by way of explaining the tight security around his Olympia compound. “That’s sort of unnerving.” While we explored Cortes Island the day before setting sail, he occasionally texted with Leonardo DiCaprio, who had featured Stamets in his documentary The 11th Hour. Anthony Kiedis, the singer of d the Red Hot Chili Peppers, had planned to join the agarikon expedition until he broke his foot. Stamets has “hero status in t my mind,” Kiedis emailed me. “He opens himself up to information about fungi the same way I open myself to a new song that is out there waiting to be found.”
Yet for all the acclaim, Stamets is still an outsider without a PhD or an academic or institutional sponsor. That has made it hard for his work to be taken seriously in some circles—“We are just weird enough that I t think we frighten people,” he says—but it’s an identity that he ultimately relishes. His inherently positive message—that we can tap a renewable natural resource to solve an array of environmental and medical challenges—has inspired a broad set of followers. Stamets leads workshops on “liberation mycology” and delivered the plenary a address at last year’s national botany conference. In February 2008, he held forth at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, the annual conclave of deep thinkers and tech gurus in California. Afterward, Google’s founders “ambushed” him with an invitation to their exclusive summer think tank, and Al Gore complimented him on an obscure chemical reference, saying, “You taught me something I didn’t know about global warming.”
"NOT A SINGLE PROSPECT...was pleasing to the eye,” sneered Captain George Vancouver when he named this glacier-carved e labyrinth of channels and fjords Desolation Sound after spending a cloudy week here in the summer of 1792. But under n the clear July sky, it’s sublime: the water a deep, glassy blue, the islands dark green. Afternoon of the first day arrives without an agarikon sighting, so we head ashore to explore a patch of old growth. Stamets’s friends joke about his notorious “death is marches,” but the jaunt proceeds at the leisurely pace of a chanterelle foray. Fungi were among the first organisms al to colonize land 1 billion years ago, long before plants. A visitor to the planet 420 million years ago would have encountered y a landscape dominated by fungi such as prototaxites, a bizarre-looking, 30-foot-tall mushroom. Contemporary fungi may be more discreet, but they’re just as ubiquitous—and mysterious. Fewer than 7 percent of the estimated 1.5 million species have been cataloged. Mycologists have recently identified 1,200 species of mushrooms in just a few thousand square feet of Guyanese rainforest, half of them previously unknown to science.
As we walk, Stamets points out that the spongy feeling under our feet is a vast subterranean network of mycelium. Stamets refers to mycelium as “nature’s Internet,” a superhighway of information-sharing membranes that govern the flow of essential nutrients around an ecosystem. A honey mushroom mycelium that covers 2,200 acres in eastern Oregon is thought to be the world’s largest organism. When Stamets saw mycelium for the first time, growing like a spiderweb across a log, he brought it home and tacked it onto his bedroom wall. Mycelium’s labyrinthine tendrils pre- vent erosion, retain water, and break down dead plants into ingredients other organ- isms can use to make soil. Stamets likes to call fungi “soil magicians.”
Yet it can be difficult to champion an organism that grows out of poop or decaying wood, can be deceptively toxic, and appears extraterrestrial. Stamets says American society is pervaded by “mycophobia”—an irrational fear of fungi that he traces back to
England, whose medical tradition equates mushrooms with decay and decomposition. Stamets has little patience with those who disrespect mushrooms. “I hate the word ‘shrooms,’” he says. “Pet peeves: Don’t kick mushrooms in my presence and don’t use the word ‘shrooms.’”
The summer dry season has subdued the mushroom population, but as we walk and my mind becomes more focused they soon pop into view: bracket fungi growing like ledges across a fallen log, a fragile cup-capped mushroom camouflaged in leaf litter. Logging has razed the Pacific North- west’s old growth; less than 20 percent of the original forest is still standing. A handful of mushroom species, including agarikon, depends on this diverse habitat, whose dis- appearance Stamets views as not just a lost opportunity but a national security concern. The cancer drug Taxol was derived from the bark of Pacific yew trees, a conifer native to the Northwest. And tests of 18 of the 28 strains of agarikon Stamets has cultured have found varying levels of antiviral potency, indicating the great diversity even within a single fungus species, adding to the urgency of protecting its dwindling habitat. It’s conceivable that the most powerful strain is growing on a tree in a logging concession somewhere.
Foresters long assumed agarikon caused trees to rot, and preemptively logged them. Stamets, however, believes it actually protects trees from parasitic fungi. “The tree says, ‘I will accept you, Mr. Agarikon, but I want you to protect me. Give me life, and I will give you my body.’”
In the weeks before our cruise, the National Center for Natural Products Research identified the structures of the molecules responsible for agarikon’s antiviral properties. It found the molecules to be more active in the laboratory than the smallpox antiviral Cidofovir. Reverse engineering mushrooms’ complex chemical creations to synthesize a new drug is a slow and costly process; Stamets estimates that he’s sunk more than $400,000 of his own money into the effort. The next step toward developing a pharmaceutical is mammal studies, a gamble that the venture capitalists he has met with are so far unwilling to fund.
“I’ve seen the lab results. I know it has potential,” says Rasmussen of Instedd. “What I don’t know is how it performs in clinical trials. And that’s a deeply frustrating situation to be in—to see this level of activity against nasty bacteria and viruses and not have the ability to begin clinical trials and work up the scale to human trials and see what the most effective delivery meth- od is, what the dosing needs to be, what the side effects will be—and I think there will be very few. I mean, it’s a mushroom, for God’s sake.” Thus far, the active ingredients in agarikon show no or very little toxicity.
Stamets has long had a hunch that agarikon could be a pharmaceutical powerhouse. He knew from historic texts that other cultures had tapped into its medicinal properties. In the year 65, the Greek physician Dioscorides described it as a treatment for “consumption”—an early name for tuberculosis. A 19th century British text noted that it was still prescribed “to diminish bronchial secretion.” Agarikon was also highly valued by the Coast Salish First Nations peoples of British Columbia. The Haida of British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands are said to have carved the tough, leathery fungus into spirit figures and placed them on the graves of shamans to protect them from evil spirits. Mushrooms also figure prominently in Haida mythology: Women, it is said, came into existence after a “Fungus Man” found shells that resembled vaginas. The Haida knew that boiling agarikon, which they called “ghost bread,” into a tea helped with lung problems.
Tragically, they never discovered what Stamets is now finding: that the mycelium running through the tree bark is resistant to smallpox, which decimated the Haida when the British brought the virus to the region in the late 1700s. A few years ago, Stamets visited the Haida Nation’s president. Oral traditions had kept the mush- room’s reputation alive, but its secrets had been forgotten. “I know my grandmother knew about this fungus,” the Haida leader told Stamets, “but after the smallpox epidemic we lost all of our elders, and we lost all of this knowledge.”
AS THE MISTY ISLES sails alongside East Redonda Island, all binoculars on deck look for snags—craggy treetops that indicate an old, decaying Douglas fir, agarikon’s ideal habitat. The captain, a Canadian named Mike, thinks we’d be interested in seeing some Haida pictographs on the northeast shore. The paintings come into view—crude red shapes on a granite face, sheltered by an overhang. Suddenly, from behind binoculars, a researcher yells, “There’s one!” Our attention pivots toward a dense cluster of trees about 100 feet to the left of the pictographs, where I can barely make out a white blob growing on a Douglas fir.
“Oh my, it’s huge!” Stamets cries. “It’s like the Moby Dick of agarikon...the big- gest one I’ve ever seen in my life! How cosmic, right where the pictographs are! God, you’re a beautiful column. It’s got to be 70, 100 years old.”
Mike anchors Misty and I ride to shore with Stamets in an inflatable boat. We walk to the base of the tree and gaze up at the agarikon, 20 feet off the ground. The fungus is two feet long and resembles a bloated, mutant caterpillar, tubular and segmented. It is growing around a stubby branch poking out from the tree. Stamets believes that it probably fell from higher up, accidentally landed on the branch, and then calcified the wood to provide itself with a sturdy perch—an unusual occurrence he’s never seen before.
From the pictograph site, someone calls out that one of the paintings appears to be of Fungus Man. “No way, no way!” Stamets exclaims. “Fungus Man is there? Oh boy, oh boy, I’m getting shivers up and down my spine now.” He takes three deep breaths. “We may have discovered a mystery that no one ever knew—that the pictographs exist here because of agarikon. I feel like this is a fulfillment of a dream. We’re so lucky. Unbelievable. See, this is the thing about mushrooms: It’s not luck. There’s something else going on here. We’ve been guided. But this is what happens. All of our big finds, we have been led.” It also happens to be Stamets’ 53rd birthday.
Stamets grabs a long stick and reaches up to poke the fungus. It won’t budge. He pokes again. “We really shouldn’t take it,” he concludes. “We should be honored that we found it. This is now super sacred.” He lets the agarikon be and walks over to check out the pictographs. Fading from time and the elements, the rock paintings depict a dolphin, a turtle, and a two-foot-high figure with stick arms, big round eyes, and what seems to be a mushroom cap growing out of its round head. Is it Fungus Man?
The afternoon sun is falling behind the island, so we leave the question unresolved and set Misty back on course. Just before dusk we reach the mouth of the Toba Inlet, a fjord carved into Canada’s mainland, flanked by high slopes of Douglas fir, red cedar, and al- der. We dock at a lone fishing lodge, and from an outdoor hot tub, we enjoy the tranquility that the salty George Vancouver once described as “an awful silence” pervading “the gloomy forest.” Captain Mike grills salmon and Stamets considers the day’s events. “I’m glad we didn’t take it,” he says. “When I had the stick in my hand, I felt, ‘Something doesn’t feel right about this.’ I thought, ‘If this is gonna come down just with a touch, I’ll take it. But if it gives me resistance, I’m stopping.’” (He returned the following month with a team of researchers to retrieve samples.)
Toward the end of our last day at sea, Misty turns down the east side of Cortes Island. Stamets spots another agarikon growing 35 feet above the water under the bottom branch of a Douglas fir, sweating beads of amber. He goes ashore for a closer look; while the fungus appears to be dead, he believes the mycelium running up the tree is still alive. Climbing onto an over- hanging rock, he finds another one growing in a tree, a sign of an old colony.
Back on deck, Stamets looks across the open water. “How is history going to re- member you?” he wonders. “How is Fleming remembered? How are people who have saved millions of lives remembered? I want to die with a smile on my face.” He then strips off his clothes and dives into Desolation Sound.
The Perfect Moment Goes Perfectly Viral
THE NEW YORKER | Two weeks ago, the planet’s most unlikely film star turned from a Ugandan warlord to a nine-year-old kid who runs a homemade cardboard arcade out of his dad’s used-auto-parts store, Smart Parts, in East Los Angeles.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN NEWYORKER.COM, APRIL 24, 2012
Two weeks ago, the planet’s most unlikely film star turned from a Ugandan warlord to a nine-year-old kid who runs a homemade cardboard arcade out of his dad’s used-auto-parts store, Smart Parts, in East Los Angeles. Invisible children to a child’s imagination: the world could smile again. “Caine’s Arcade,” an eleven-minute film about Caine Monroy and his first customer, a struggling filmmaker named Nirvan Mullick, quickly acquired all the metrics of a viral sensation: millions of YouTube views, a top trending topic on Twitter worldwide, the Reddit front page, a call from Letterman’s people. The adulations flooded Mullick’s inbox, including one from the hacker collective Anonymous: “I commend you for your great work. You should be proud,” the e-mail read.
“It felt as though I had been knighted by the Internet,” Mullick told me. (When he tried to reply to Anonymous, the message bounced back with a scrambled auto-response.) Next, people began posting videos of themselves crying while watching the film. A seventeen-year veteran of “The Simpsons,” one among legions of recent pilgrims to Caine’s Arcade, broke down weeping at the sight of the real thing. He told Mullick that the moment recalled for him the scene in “Ratatouille” when the cynical food critic eats a bowl of soup, evoking visceral memories of his own mother’s cooking. “That’s what happened to me when Caine crawled into the box for the first time to push tickets out of a hole,” said Mullick. “It brought me back to when I was a kid, and reminded me of why I used to make things, why I wanted to make films, for the pure joy of creativity.”
When Mullick first posted “Caine’s Arcade” to YouTube, on April 9th, he added a way for people to donate to for Caine’s tuition—“imagine what this kid could build with an engineering degree”—and set a goal of twenty-five thousand dollars. He shared the link with an editor of Boing Boing, and then went to the climbing gym. While there, his phone began pinging with e-mail alerts—donations were already streaming in. Two dollars. Five dollars. Thirty dollars. Three hundred dollars. By the time Mullick went to sleep that first night, the film had raised six thousand dollars for Caine’s scholarship fund; when he woke up, it had reached sixteen thousand, and, later that day, surpassed a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. (Invitations to a summer program at M.I.T. and an offer from U.C.L.A. to customize an academic track for Caine would come later.)
And this is just how the grownups reacted. The film sparked an unexpected wave of young D.I.Y. activity around the world. Kids posted videos and photos of their own cardboard creations—pinball machines, bubble-gum machines, a photocopier inside of which a small person sits and draws whatever is laid on top of it. Teachers started showing the video in school. It’s not a stretch to say that “Caine’s Arcade” makes a convincing case for “connected learning,” a model that embraces social media as a way for kids to link up with peers and mentors—a kind of crowdsourced education. Riding the viral wave, Mullick has also launched Caine’s Arcade Foundation, with seed money from the Goldhirsh Foundation and a mission to “find, foster, and fund creativity and entrepreneurship in kids.” Naturally, there’s a TV series in the works, which will document young kids who make things, and match them with storytellers and entrepreneurs. “Caine’s Arcade” was released online, so it’s not eligible for an Academy Award. Even so, Hollywood studios have started circling for the film rights. A major studio has proposed that Mullick, whose longest film has a running time of eleven minutes, make a hundred-million-dollar, live-action feature based on the story of three characters in the film who were destined to meet.
That story unfolds like so: Caine, a shy boy with an active imagination who loves to make things. His father, George Monroy, owns an auto-parts business that has struggled in the Internet economy. (Caine’s parents are separated but live together; his mother doesn’t speak English.) And Mullick, who had been around Los Angeles for twelve years, making conceptual projects like the The 1 Second Film and flirting with the idea of doing more commercial work. Turning thirty-seven, Mullick was forced to consider how long he could keep driving a crappy car, live without health insurance, and chase an elusive dream of artistic prosperity. He had ventured into East L.A. that September afternoon because he needed spare parts to sell his ’96 Toyota Corolla. After passing all the stores that had men aggressively waving flags out front to attract business, Mullick settled on a quiet store that had a cute-looking swing hanging off a tree on the sidewalk.
Last weekend, the three stars of “Caine’s Arcade” visited the San Francisco Bay Area for their first road show of sorts, since the film hit the Web. The Exploratorium, an interactive science museum, sent a seventy-foot semitrailer to Smart Parts to retrieve Caine’s cardboard arcade for a one-day exhibition, called “Open MAKE: Trash.” The night before the event, after closing time, Caine set up the arcade with the help of volunteers, and ran around the place as though he was the museum’s V.I.P., which he was. “This is the coolest museum I have ever seen!” he noted from the back of a cart in which he was chauffeured.
That morning, the group had stopped in for an interview with Channel 7, the local ABC affiliate. The director Richard Linklater was there to promote his new film “Bernie,” and told Caine that he was a big fan of the arcade. The nine-year-old shrugged. (Word that another unknown, Oprah, had posted about the arcade on her Facebook page had prompted a similar reaction from the boy, although Justin Timberlake’s tweeting that Caine was his “new favorite entrepreneur” generated more of a response—at least Caine had heard of the guy.) Linklater was bumped to a later slot, and America’s most famous arcade proprietor was squeezed in, awkwardly, after a segment about April 20th as “weed day.” “Not ideal,” Mullick remarked.
Hundreds were queued at the Exploratorium for the exhibition—whether for the arcade or its maker was not clear. Three girls were gushing about Caine to a KCBS radio reporter. “We saw his video in school, and we thought he was the most adorable little kid in the world, so we decided to come here to see him,” one said. Another added, “Caine is like Justin Bieber,” but was corrected by the third: “He’s cooler than Justin Bieber. Justin Bieber doesn’t have a cardboard arcade.”
As a philosophy student at New College, Mullick had been intrigued by the notion of the “perfect moment,” which Sartre explores in his novel “Nausea.” What are perfect moments? Do they exist? Can you create them? “I distinctly remember putting the book down and thinking about ‘perfect moments’ and how I’d lose myself when I do a drawing, and all track of time.” Mullick said the other day. “What if you could look into a stranger and know what it was that they wanted more than anything else in the world, and figure out a way to choreograph, and make that perfect moment happen for them in their life,” he continued. “When I ran into Caine, I knew how to create a perfect moment for this boy. I knew what he wanted more than anything: customers.” Sitting at breakfast on their final day in San Francisco, Caine had found a perfect moment of his own devising. Reaching for a sugar shaker, he filled a metal spoon resting on the table with granules. “Imagination sugar!” he beamed. The arcade-maker bowed his head over the spoon and licked it clean.
Tristan da Cunha: Island at the End of the World
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER | Everything is off the beaten track on the world’s most remote inhabited island.
Photos by: Andy Isaacson
FIRST PUBLISHED IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2014
IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT on arguably the most far-flung inhabited island on Earth, and I’m nursing a South African beer at the Albatross, a pub that wouldn’t seem out of place in England or even, say, America’s Gulf Coast. A portly man croons to a country-and-western ballad playing on the jukebox. Local fishermen carouse. A football game—the British kind—is flickering on a TV set in the corner. The irony couldn’t be more obvious: I’ve journeyed to one of the planet’s remotest places and find myself in a scene resembling one from home. But there is, I’m learning, a distinction.
“You can get piss drunk here, fall down on your way home, and somebody will pick you up,” an Albatross patron tells me between quaffs from his drink. “You don’t have to worry about being mugged.”
I’m on Tristan da Cunha, a British outpost in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, roughly halfway between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Cape Town, South Africa. There is no airport. There is no deep harbor. I reached the island aboard a South African polar research vessel, the S.A. Agulhas II, on one of only nine passages scheduled annually from Cape Town. The same ship will pick me up a month from now. Time at sea is seven days, each way.
Why travel to Tristan? Simple: to escape to a place that has eluded even like-minded escapists.
Certainly, no one could have prepared me for the arrival at the island. Though part of a small volcanic archipelago, Tristan da Cunha, upon our approach, looked solitary and lost, like an iceberg adrift. The island, essentially a 6,760-foot-high volcanic cone, is given shape by the vast negative space around it.
Today, stories and photos reach us from all corners of the globe, diminishing opportunities for true discovery. Even if we’ve never been to Timbuktu, most of us have acquired a vague notion of the place. Not Tristan. The name conjured nothing for me, except questions. Did tribal natives populate the island? What did they eat for dinner? What kind of trees grew there? A handful of other passengers on the S.A. Agulhas II were seized by the same curiosity. Some had business on the island—a Scottish dentist, a British priest, an American scientist planning to install a magnetometer to measure shifts in Earth’s magnetic field. But there were a few tourists too. Two German men hoped to summit the volcano, Queen Mary’s Peak. A Brit wanted to scuba dive where no one he knew ever had.
Standing on deck, I watched as our vessel approached the northwest side of the island. Soon, beneath the volcano’s towering flanks, a cluster of low-slung structures with red and blue tin roofs appeared above a narrow grass plateau overlooking the ocean. This human settlement with 262 full-time residents seemed most improbable, a community afloat in emptiness.
“People imagine us with grass skirts on,” dark-haired Iris Green, Tristan’s postmistress, tells me in a lilting English accent. I’m at the window of the post office, which shares a building with the tourism office at the center of the settlement. A lobby displays hand-knit wool sweaters, postcards of seabirds, and commemorative postage stamps depicting such island traditions as potato planting, sheep shearing, and “giving out the mail.” Tristan’s cheerful tourism coordinator, Dawn Repetto, greets me. (Repetto is one of the island’s seven surnames.) She had left a flyer at the private home where I’m staying—Tristan has no hotels or inns—promising to help fulfill my “Tristan ambitions.” I’d wondered how I would fill four weeks on an island with no real tourist activities.
“I’d like to hike the peak,” I say after introductions.
“It takes at least six hours,” Repetto replies, “and we require you to go with two guides. I’m happy to arrange that. But there are other excursions you might like too.” Among them: a fishing trip and a bird-watching outing to the nearby isle of Nightingale, home to rockhopper penguins and the endemic Tristan albatross. I ask about the island’s nine-hole golf course, where hazards include chicken coops and gale-force winds that have been known to destroy large ships.
Repetto smiles. “Tristan people don’t really play golf,” she says, explaining the course was built for a homesick British administrator. She ends with a caveat I’ll hear many islanders echo: “Everything here depends on the weather.”
I decide to begin with an exploratory walk and head to the island’s only road, a two-mile-long ribbon of gravel and broken pavement. The pastoral tableau of mountain and ocean before me evokes a blend of Scotland and Big Sur. I pass the golf course and, just beyond it, come upon Hottentot Gulch, named after African soldiers who pitched their tents here in 1816, part of a British garrison that was dispatched to ward off American privateers and any Frenchmen bent on using Tristan as a staging post to rescue France’s exiled emperor, Napoleon, who was imprisoned 1,343 miles north, on St. Helena Island.
I pass cows grazing beside Jenny’s Watron (Jenny’s stream), where a widow once dwelled, then stroll by Knockfolly Ridge, Bugsby Hole, and an eroded sea cliff called Hillpiece. I pledge to see Ridge-Where-the-Goat-Jump-Off and Pig Bite—landmarks commemorating notable local events—before I leave.
The road peters out at a mosaic of stonewalled plots overlooking the ocean, an area known as the Patches. Scattered about the farming plots are small cabins; during Christmas, Tristanians pack up and travel all of two miles from the settlement to enjoy a weeklong holiday here.
“Need a hand?” I call out to an older gentlemen standing with a pitchfork in the moist dirt of his potato patch.
“Suuuure,” Anthony Green replies. “Just waitin’ for the missus to get back.”
When the British military left Tristan in 1817—the attempt to rescue Napoleon never materialized—a Scottish corporal, William Glass, and two English stonemasons stayed behind. They built homes and boats from salvaged driftwood, then drafted a constitution decreeing a new community based on equality and cooperation. The collective spirit that sustained the island during years of almost complete isolation still exists.
I clamber over the volcanic rock wall that lines Green’s plot, and he hands me a spare pitchfork. We dig shallow rows, then lay in spuds from a plastic bucket, along with fertilizer pellets. At surrounding plots, I see other families hard at work, laying crushed lobster shells and sheep’s wool over their potatoes (everyone has a proven method). Some smile over at me with an approving nod.
“Tristanians consider potatoes as insurance,” says Conrad Glass, a descendant of William Glass and the island’s chief constable, a few days later. “If suddenly the world went crazy and money had no value, we’d still have our staple vegetable.”
I’d eaten potatoes every night, boiled, baked, mashed, stuffed into a lamb shoulder and roasted, or made into “snislens,” fried dough served with jams or combined with raisins to make a sweet pudding.
“Do you ever tire of potatoes?” I ask Green.
“No,” he replies. “Thing about Tristan is, you always have enough potatoes.”
THAT NIGHT AT THE ALBATROSS I discover that word has traveled about the tourist who helped Anthony Green plant potatoes. This earns me points, and at least one South African lager. I strain to pick up the Tristanian-English patois—an amalgam of languages that includes Afrikaans, Italian, and Americanisms such as “hey, buddy.” One young man is “heyen on” in a singsong cadence with his “fardi” (godfather) about collecting “jadda boys” (penguin eggs), his accent thickening as he becomes “half touch up” (wasted) after a few rounds.
“Come an’ dance!” Desiree Repetto urges me, adding with a sly grin, “Someone’s been askin’ about you.” The Saturday night dance is in full swing at one-story Prince Philip Hall, next to the Albatross. An 18-year-old deejay is serving up pop hits from the 1990s, but the dance floor is awkwardly empty, like at a junior high prom. Young men cluster around a gin bottle they smuggled out of the Albatross; the women are seated on a bench. The deejay begins spinning a pop song, then abruptly changes to a country-and-western tune. I watch the guys put down their drinks, swoop across the floor, and extend their hands to the ladies. Looking at me, Desiree nods toward a shy young woman, and I walk over to invite her to dance. She smiles, and soon we’re shuffling along with the other couples. When the song ends, the floor clears once more. Later, as I head home under a starry sky, the music slowly fades to just the lonely rhythm of breaking surf—a reminder that Tristan exists all by itself.
“ENTER, ENTER,” Gladys Lavarello urges as she waves to me from her front door. She lives down a curvy paved road with no signs, traffic lights, mailboxes, or even house numbers.
White-haired and squinting from behind thick glasses, she smiles warmly as she leads me into her living room, furnished with lace-draped armchairs and family photos. Like nearly every Tristanian, Lavarello descends from a settler who washed ashore, in her case Gaetano Lavarello, her Italian grandfather, who shipwrecked on Tristan in 1892 with crewmate Andrea Repetto and stayed, coming to love the island’s remoteness.
I’d been told that Lavarello knew all about the old times, and I wanted to hear how life on Tristan was before World War II, when islanders would row out into the ocean to wave down passing ships and barter for supplies.
“There wasn’t any money,” she says. “We didn’t really know what it was! We depended on cattle and sheep and fishing.”
Lavarello proceeds to speak warmly of island traditions that still exist—Old Year’s Night, a year-end celebration when men dress in masks and scare the women; Ratting Day, a pest-control competition—and wistfully about ones that no longer take place, such as Happling Day, an annual outing to fetch apples at a now defunct orchard. She then tells me about the day in 1961 when boulders suddenly began tumbling down Queen Mary’s Peak—and the ground split just beyond her house. For the first time, islanders learned that their mountain was an active volcano. Its eruption on October 8 caused the British government to evacuate all Tristanians to Southampton, England, for two years, where they quickly became media sensations and were subjected to all manner of medical tests.
“How was that for you?” I ask.
“We all—well, nearly everybody—wanted to return to our own hisland,” she exclaims, adding the Tristanian h.
Every day I find myself gazing up at Queen Mary’s Peak, hoping for good weather; every day thick, ominous clouds glower back at me. Then it happens: One morning I awake to a calm sea, partly cloudy skies, and light winds.
“Looks like a great day,” I say to Peter Repetto, Desiree’s father and my homestay host, a retiree who right now is padding about the front flower garden in his slippers.
“It’s the lee that you’re seeing,” he says, nodding toward the flat water. Opposing winds have produced calm conditions, but they are temporary. Like most islanders, Repetto is a keen forecaster by necessity. Locals make their living from farming and fishing. Before he retired, Repetto ran the general store and trapped lobsters, the island’s main export. He doesn’t count on the good weather staying put.
For Tristanians, a great day means a fishing day. So when indicators look good one morning in the faint light before dawn, a man begins hammering on an empty propane canister next to Prince Philip Hall—the alert that, after two weeks of dangerous seas, it’s fishing time. Lights flick on inside houses as the settlement stirs. Soon men stream down to the harbor with rain slickers slung over shoulders and lunch pails in hand. In pairs, they board fishing boats loaded with lobster traps. It’s business as usual, but watching them, I get a sense that this is what these men live for. The women, including my hostess, Patricia Repetto, will process the bounty in a new factory beside the harbor—whole lobsters for Japan, tails for the U.S. Of course, they keep some: I’ll enjoy a delicious lobster curry for dinner that night.
Next door to the Repettos lives retired fisherman Ches Lavarello, for many years the island’s top lobsterman. I ask him to take me fishing; he doesn’t require much arm-twisting.
“Even if I don’t catch a single fish, I stay out on the water for hours,” he tells me as we reach an empty beach below Hottentot Gulch. “See these rocks?” he asks, gesturing offshore. “We’d come at night and catch sacks of spiny lobster here with a hand line and a scoop.”
Lavarello is large framed, with a silver chain around his neck and tattoos on his arms. He hooks a bit of squid onto his line as bait and, with a well-practiced twist of his body, lobs the line into the water. He doesn’t catch anything for a good while. Finally he feels a small tug—and ends up accumulating a respectable bucket of fish known as five fingers.
TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS after it transported me to Tristan, the S.A. Agulhas IIreturns. Not all of my Tristan ambitions have been fulfilled. I never bagged Queen Mary’s Peak, though I did spend a day hiking a lush landscape of mosses, ferns, and nesting yellow-nosed albatrosses halfway up the mountain. I also attended two baptisms, a wedding reception, two birthday potlucks, a lamb-marking, and a distribution of the mail. But holding to a tourist checklist on Tristan was never the point.
On my last afternoon on the island, I visit the Café, next to Prince Philip Hall, which opens briefly in the afternoon. A handful of Tristanians sit around tables drinking white wine and soda. The talk focuses on the weather, fishing, the potato crop, and local gossip. Life here may not be free from care—the island now is more connected to the world—but it is simpler. Yes, I’ve had Internet chats with friends back home. And Tristan’s lobsters are appearing on dinner plates in Las Vegas and Tokyo. Yet my time here has transpired in some kind of bubble. On Tristan, your camera won’t be stolen. You won’t hear a cellphone ring. And if you fall down drunk or, say, get hurt crashing your bike, someone will help you get home; everyone will know where you live.
Desiree Repetto walks me down to a grassy patch by the schoolhouse. Much of Tristan has gathered here to see off friends and visitors. A 21-year-old is departing the island for the first time, to take a scuba course in Cape Town (his mother has never set foot off Tristan); Conrad Glass, the constable, is headed to England for training.
“I’ve left Tristan five times in my life,” he says, “and it’s just as emotional now as the first time. You suddenly realize what you’re leaving behind.”
I think I know what he means. Tristan may no longer be isolated—cruise ships have discovered it—but it’s still insulated. To travel to a place like this today, even with nary a palm tree in sight, is to experience a vanishing kind of paradise.
Farming Insects to Save Lemurs
BIOGRAPHIC | An innovative approach to Madagascar's malnutrition crisis may be one of the best hopes for protecting the island nation's imperiled primates and the forests they call home.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN BIOGRAPHIC, MARCH 2020
AS A YOUNG BOY, Julien Jean Donehil would often go out searching for insects. For kids his age living on the dry west coast of Madagascar, the pastime doubles as both a game and a snack. Crickets and cicadas can be found amid the leaf litter, their high-pitched songs a dead giveaway. During the summer rainy season, locusts appear in abundance on the stems of corn and cassava plants. Always the tastiest, Donehil told me, are rhinoceros beetles (Oryctes nasicornis), which clamber around the corrals of zebu cattle. To a young boy, the beetle’s thick exoskeleton and curled, weaponlike horns are like those of an action figure. Donehil and his friends would often stage mock battles, and then bring their quarry back home. There, after first removing the insects’ wings, they would roast the protein-packed treats in their mothers’ cooking fires.
Back then, in the early 2000s, Donehil and the other children in his village, Beroboka, never went hungry. There was always arable land to grow peanuts and maize, and grass for zebu to graze. A vast succulent woodland forest, unique in Madagascar and the world, surrounded the village, stretching for miles. Towered over by giant baobab trees (Adansonia grandidieri), it was home to creatures found nowhere else, like the Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur (Microcebus berthae), the world’s smallest primate, and a giant rat (Hypogeomys antimena) that hops around like a kangaroo. Panther-like fossas (Cryptoprocta ferox) and hedgehog tenrecs (Echinops telfairi) and flying foxes (Pteropus rufus) frequently wandered past or flew over his home. “It was beautiful,” he recalls.
Donehil is now 18 and no longer forages for insects as younger boys still do. Beroboka is no longer the village it once was, either. Around eight years ago, Donehil says, the neighboring forest started to disappear. The destruction accelerated, through slash-and-burn practices, whereby land is cleared to make way for crops, the soil becomes degraded, and then more forest has to be destroyed. Around the same time, the human population was also swelling as migrants from Androy, the southernmost region of Madagascar, arrived. Fleeing a years-long drought and desperate, these pastoral people were often offered cash by powerful entities to plant corn on any piece of land they could set a match to.
Immigration and murky agrobusiness dealings have now laid waste to vast swaths of the unique, deciduous dry forest that blankets Madagascar’s west coast, driving its biodiversity toward the brink. Conservation groups have organized raids to catch illegal loggers and destroy their camps, but limited resources make the effort halting; plumes of grey smoke still mark the sky daily. The outlook is grim: It’s predicted that by 2025, the Menabe Antimena Protected Area, an 812-square-mile tract that includes villages like Beroboka, will have lost 80 percent of its forest cover.
“This region really has no hope unless something different happens,” says Brian Fisher, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences, as we climb into our S.U.V. to leave Beroboka. Out the window, the landscape has an almost post-apocalyptic quality: barren fields of charred earth stretch out to the horizon, interrupted only by sporadic fire-resistant baobab trees that stand like starved survivors. Fisher, who has been coming to Madagascar for 25 years to study ants, has witnessed the island lose a staggering amount of its unique biodiversity to the forces of population growth, deforestation, and malnutrition, as desperate locals turn to the forest for food. Recently, he launched an audacious plan to reverse the tide of destruction. Boosting a local tradition of consuming insects, he hopes, might offer a nutritious substitute for wild animals. For impoverished people, farmed insects could also provide a viable source of income.
Fisher has had some initial success in the jungles of eastern Madagascar, where a pilot project to boost the numbers of native, edible insects seems to have reduced pressure on lemurs and other hunted animals. But the destruction he now sees along the island’s west coast is on a different scale. “I feel like I’m absorbing the severity of the situation here,” he said. But if insect farming can work here, he figures, he can make it work anywhere.
In the popular imagination, Madagascar exists as a cartoon version of itself, a land of staggering biological richness. The world’s oldest and fourth largest island, it was once wedged between Africa and India, part of the supercontinent Gondwana, an ancient landmass that began to fragment some 180 million years ago. Madagascar then splintered off with India and drifted northeastward, until around 80 million years ago, it was left behind as India continued its march toward the collision with Asia that would form the Himalayas. This geological history of separation, as well as the island’s varied topography and climates—ranging from tropical mountain valleys to plateaus to coastline to arid deserts—allowed life to evolve, and diversify, in isolated pockets. Eighty-five percent of Madagascar’s plants, nearly all of its reptiles, and half of its birds exist nowhere else. When humans first arrived some 10,000 years ago, they’d have found an island containing 5 percent of the world’s biodiversity, including lemurs the size of gorillas and a flightless elephant bird that stood more than 9 feet tall.
Those megafauna have since gone extinct, but for biologists like Fisher, Madagascar remains a treasure trove. “You never know what you’re going to find until you get to a patch of forest,” he says. “And every time you get to a new patch, you always find something unique there.” Little was known about Madagascar’s ants when Fisher first began studying them in 1993 as a PhD student. His often swashbuckling fieldwork has led him to some of the island’s most remote corners, where he’s been able to describe more than 450 new species of ants. Over time, though, Fisher encountered a disturbing pattern. “You go back to an area where you were just three years earlier and discovered something dramatically new, and find the whole forest is gone,” he said. “Not just degraded. It’s leveled—there’s not a tree left on the mountain. And you’re like, Oh, there goes that species. After a while, it is kind of shocking. You wonder, how many times that’s happening to forest we haven’t even been to yet.”
It’s been happening at an astonishing pace. Since the early 1950s, deforestation has reduced Madagascar’s forest cover by nearly half. In 2018, the island lost a higher proportion of its primary rainforest than any other tropical country, a consequence of slash-and-burn agriculture, as well as pockets of sapphire and nickel mining. The familiar threats of climate change, invasive species, overharvesting, and habitat loss and fragmentation have also exacted a heavy toll: Madagascar’s endemic lemurs are now the most threatened group of primates on Earth, and nearly all of its species (94 percent) are at risk of extinction because of habitat loss and unsustainable hunting.
In 2013, Fisher caught wind of an influential report published by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which put forward a provocative approach to addressing the world’s looming environmental and humanitarian crises. By 2050, the report stated, 9 billion people will inhabit the planet. To meet this future demand, food production would need to almost double from its current rate. Farmland is scarce, and continuing to expand it is neither viable nor sustainable. Oceans are already overfished. Climate change, and related water shortages, will likely impact agriculture dramatically—and there are already nearly 1 billion chronically hungry people worldwide. To meet these challenges, the FAO report concluded, “we need to find new ways of growing food.”
Edible insects, it argued, present a sensible solution. More than 1,900 different species of insects are already consumed worldwide, mostly across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Insects are made up of as much as 65 percent protein; studies have found that grasshoppers, crickets, and mealworms contain significantly higher sources of minerals such as iron, zinc, copper, and magnesium than sirloin does. Pound for pound, insects require less land, less water, and less feed than other animals. And they also produce less waste than livestock, including fewer greenhouse gases.
It’s not hard to see Madagascar as a microcosm of the world that the FAO envisions. The country ranks in the bottom 15 percent of the UN’s Human Development Index, and is one of the least food-secure nations in the world. More than 90 percent of Madagascar’s population lives below the international poverty line, and it is one of the few countries where the rate is increasing. Madagascar, as a whole, has the world’s fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition: Almost half of all Malagasy children under five are malnourished. That constant, desperate need for food is what leads people into the forest to hunt for bushmeat, a factor widely recognized as a major contributor to global biodiversity loss.
As he crisscrossed the island documenting ants, Fisher began to wonder whether he was devoting his time wisely. “All of this work, and I have saved not a single tree in Madagascar,” he told me. “And if I continue doing this, pretty soon I’ll just be documenting what was once in Madagascar. So, I challenged myself—it’s time not to be on the sidelines. What could I possibly do to participate in conservation?”
Fisher knew that the Malagasy ate insects—he’d seen them sold at local markets across the island. As he dug deeper, he read that as early as 1617, missionaries and other visitors to Madagascar attested to the natives’ taste for Orthoptera—the classification that includes grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, and katydids. Periodic locust outbreaks might devastate a crop, but could also provide a valuable source of nutrition, especially between harvests. A preparation that involved soaking dried locusts for half an hour in saltwater and then frying them in fat “appeared on the tables of princes.” It’s said that Queen Ranavalona II, who reigned Madagascar in the 19th century, frequently dispatched female servants to the countryside to collect locusts for her.
Fisher assembled a working group, dubbed Insects and People of the Southwest Indian Ocean (IPSIO), comprised of insect researchers and regional conservation and humanitarian organizations. The group’s aim was to explore ways to leverage Madagascar’s edible-insect tradition as a way of conserving its biodiversity. Although industry groups estimate edible insects to be a 600-million-dollar business worldwide, most are used in pet food, livestock feed, and fish feed for aquaculture.
With this new objective in mind, Fisher reached out to Entomo Farms, North America’s largest producer of human-grade insects, based in Ontario. The company’s ground cricket powders supply a burgeoning market of insect-based protein bars, smoothies, chips, crackers, pasta, hot dogs, and pet treats. Entomo’s co-founder, Darren Goldin, considered Fisher’s idea a worthy “passion project,” he told me, and helped design a production facility in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital.
Crickets, it turns out, are an exemplary food to farm. They grow quickly—six weeks to full maturity—and thrive in confined spaces. They require few inputs—a bit of drinking water and grain feed is all—and as cold-blooded creatures, they don’t expend energy regulating their core temperature, as most farm animals do; half of what a chicken eats goes toward warming its body. A recent study even suggests that in addition to high protein levels, crickets contain chitin and other fibers that may improve gut health, as well as reduce systemic inflammation. There are ancillary agriculture benefits, too: Dry cricket frass (poop), a byproduct, is a useful fertilizer.
“In the end, nobody cares that it’s cricket powder,” Fisher said recently. “They eat it because it tastes good.” He was speaking one afternoon last November to a group of NGOs with food assistance programs in Madagascar, showing them his modest production facility, Valala Farms. The operation occupies part of the three-story insect research center that Fisher established 15 years ago on a hilly plot above the city’s zoo and botanical gardens. (There are plans to break ground on an expansive, 23,000-square-foot facility later this year on adjacent land donated to him by the country’s education ministry.)
On this occasion, the young Malagasy staff had prepared a spread of cricket hors d’oeuvres: skewers of honey-roasted whole insects, a yogurt dip flecked with ground powder. Fisher first led the visitors into a humid room that sounded discomfitingly like a plague—the din of 200,000 chirping crickets confined inside two rows of mesh-covered enclosures grouped by life stage.
The insects skittered across stacks of egg crates meant to provide them ample surface area and airflow, occasionally gathering at small trays of water and chicken feed. Once they reach maturity and mate, the females use a pair of barbed ovipositors to lay their eggs into moist cotton balls (meant to mimic sand). The impregnated cotton then gets transplanted to a separate incubation room, kept at 31 degrees Celsius (88 degrees Fahrenheit), and the mature adults are euthanized by carbon dioxide and collected. In an adjacent kitchen, the “harvested” crickets are washed, ground into a moist slurry using a meat grinder, dehydrated on baking sheets, and milled into a fine brown powder that smells something like roasted sunflower seeds.
With their deep pockets and wide reach across the country, Fisher views humanitarian organizations as the primary customers for cricket powder. A successful pilot project with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) demonstrated its potential to tackle malnutrition. CRS introduced cricket powder to elementary and middle school children in Antananarivo through a school lunch program, where it was sprinkled on top of traditional Malagasy meals like rice and beans. (Fisher’s team has also conducted studies in Antananarivo’s schools to gauge student perceptions of eating insects.) In the drought-stricken region of Androy, Madagascar’s impoverished south, Catholic sisters there run a tuberculosis clinic and fed the powder with meals to patients suffering from appetite and weight loss as a consequence of their infections. After just two weeks, all of the patients had gained weight, a critical factor in recovery; within the first three weeks, one had added more than five pounds. “We’re super excited about this work,” CRS’s Tanja Englberger told me. “When they don’t add it, [patients] ask, ‘Where is the cricket powder?” CRS is now extending the project to another 10 clinics across Madagascar, and may launch a series of nutritional studies.
To help reverse the loss of Madagascar’s biodiversity though, Fisher needs to bring the project closer to critical areas. A few years ago on an Air France flight from Paris to Antananarivo—the type of scene where a surprising amount of networking occurs—he struck up a conversation with Cortni Borgerson, an anthropologist at New Jersey’s Montclair State University. For 15 years, Borgerson has looked at subsistence hunting practices in Madagascar, particularly around Masoala National Park, a species-rich rainforest on the eastern coast. The largest of the country’s protected areas, Masoala is seen as a likely last stronghold of intact habitat. Among people living there, poverty is nearly universal, higher than national averages. One-quarter of the population is anemic. Borgerson’s surveys have found that as much as 75 percent of all meat eaten in some communities comes from forest animals. Child malnutrition rates are higher in households that hunt lemurs, suggesting that when they have little else to eat, families turn to bushmeat.
During the rainy season, natives of the Masoala Peninsula take delight in an endemic Fulgorid planthopper (Zanna madagascariensis, or “sakondry” in Malagasy) that feeds on the sap of wild lima beans and related plants. Locals pick them off in large clusters like berries, rinse them twice, and fry the fatty insect whole without even the need for oil. The taste is delicious, Borgerson says—like bacon. She’d long known of this food practice, and so had Fisher: He’d first photographed sakondry 20 years earlier in the island’s western dry forests. But how long did the insects live? What did they eat? When do females lay eggs? Science didn’t have answers at the time, but Borgerson and Fisher felt the sakondry held great promise for addressing regional nutritional deficiencies and the interrelated conservation issues. They’ve received a three-year grant from IUCN’s Save Our Species initiative to test sakondry farming methods.
Their pilot project is set in six of the Masoala’s most remote jungle communities, where wildlife makes up a large proportion of the diet. “Find the last village on the map, and we are like four days beyond that,” Borgerson says. The communities range from 10 to 200 households; participation is voluntary. The researchers first distributed bean plant seeds, and established a sharing program. Within the first three months, one community grew around 500 lima bean plants. “It just took off,” Borgerson told me. There are now 4,200 plants growing across all test sites—more food for the humans, and an abundance of hosts for sakondry. (The insects drink the sap-like phloem of the plant without significantly impacting bean production.) It’s a win-win, Borgerson says, “because then you get both products.” At last estimate, 52,000 individual sakondry had taken up residence, and insect consumption has increased by 400 percent of what it had been before the project began. Borgerson and Fisher’s aim had been to produce enough insect meat to replace lemur meat within three years, a goal they reached within the first eight months of the project. “It went way better than expected,” Borgerson says. “And I get at least eight Facebook messages from random communities being like, ‘Hey, when are you going to come bring sakondry here?’”
Still, crucial questions remain. Most importantly, is it actually changing any behavior? Preliminary results show that the farming has significantly positively affected child nutrition, food security, and the sustainability of hunting, according to Borgenson. There’s now simply more food, she says, available at the times when people might typically hunt. Borgerson notes that the project is having the greatest impact on women and children, who’ve been seen grabbing sakondry by the fistful. In theory, as their nutrition improves, it ought to give men of the household fewer incentives to hunt lemurs.
To reach the Menabe Antimena protected area, a patchwork of dry forest and mangrove reserves on Madagascar’s west coast, I flew with Fisher one hour from Antananarivo to the seaside town of Morondova, and then drove another two hours north by car along a rutted, red-sand road. The route passed by the Avenue of the Baobabs, a photogenic grove of trees that is among the island’s top tourist attractions. We passed boys sitting atop zebu carts loaded with sacks of rice and peanuts, and villages where women squatted in the shade, selling corn. Crammed in the back seat was Entomo’s Darren Goldin and the company’s farm manager, Aran Hinton, there to help Fisher evaluate the feasibility of establishing a small-scale farm project in a local village. Also with us was Sylvain Hugel, a specialist in crickets who would be able to determine which species might work best. All had joined Fisher field expeditions before. “He’s the most experienced field guy I’ve ever met,” Hugel told me. “The amount of stories he could tell you about problems in the field—it’s just crazy, you could write a book.”
These stories include surviving all manner of tropical diseases, from malaria (“a recurring theme in my life,” Fisher says) to leishmaniasis, which bore a hole in his leg, and loiasis, in which worms squiggled across his eyeballs. Fisher once narrowly escaped an armed group in the Central African Republic, and was forced to improvise in the Congolese jungle after local warriors his team had hired as guides disappeared with their tents and food. Vehicle breakdowns, equipment malfunctions, roadblocks, and getting lost were familiar occupational hazards. By comparison, this trip was a cakewalk. We planned to sleep in beds that night.
We turned off the road at the entrance to Kirindy Forest, a privately managed reserve with a small research center and tourist bungalows. The dry deciduous forest there is home to seven species of lemur as well as the fossa, Madagascar’s largest predator; one wandered by the reception desk not long after we arrived. Skinks and lizards rustled the dried leaves lining the footpaths between bungalows. As night fell, Hugel grabbed his headlamp and a butterfly net, and with the guys from Entomo Farms, set out to collect specimens.
Crickets reveal themselves by their songs, unique to each species. Males produce sound by rubbing the serrated edge of one forewing against the sharp-edged bottom of the other, a movement known as stridulation. These chirps are meant to attract mature females that pick up the sound through timpana membranes on their forelegs. The females seem to find the calls irresistible. Human cultures do, too. Across Asia, crickets have long been kept as pets, and in China, where the insect symbolizes luck and prosperity, imperial concubines are said to have placed crickets in small gold cages on their bedside to delight in their songs.
“There are many species here,” Hugel remarked, noting a variety of calls. He crouched down above the leaf litter in one patch, hovering the net in his hand. With one swift motion, he slammed the hoop flat against the ground, entrapping a cricket. He then placed the specimen inside a vial along with some leafy matter, which he said relaxes them. Any candidate for potential farming must be native to the area, Hugel explained—in part so as not to disturb the native ecology should any escape. But it was also important to select a species that could be reared year-round, so he looked for both juveniles and adults of a single species as evidence that their life cycle would span across rainy and dry seasons.
Fisher had arranged with a local USAID-funded NGO project, Mikajy, for the team to be shown three villages that stood just outside the protected forest. Each were identified as potential sites to introduce cricket farming. Over a breakfast of rice porridge and French bread the next morning, Fisher explained some of the challenges the team faced. “Community work is far more complicated than commercial business models,” he said. “There’s not one model that can be easily applied from one village to the next. And there’s a 100-percent resistance to change. First, we have to identify the issues of concern for that village. We also have to understand its structure. Is it an immigrant village, or a traditional village? Do they farm, and if so, where? If they don’t farm at all, that means they’re going into the forest.”
In the first village, Kirindy, the team met with a thin, shirtless man in his 30s, said to be its chief, outside a home constructed with vertical tree trunks and thatched roofing. As a couple dozen family members gathered around—men on one side, women and toddlers on the other—Fisher began asking questions through a translator, in French. What year did they arrive? What crops did they grow? The picture that emerged was bleak: The surrounding land, slashed and burned to plant crops, now barely supported cassava, corn, yam and black-eyed peas. Their zebu cattle herd had been reduced to 10 by thieves who had taken the rest.
Fisher asked whether the people of the village consumed insects, a notion the chief seemed to find laughable. Even after Fisher described the insect’s nutritional value, passing around a specimen Hugel had collected the previous night, the chief insisted that the community would have no interest in growing crickets. He mentioned taboos around certain insects. (Fisher had heard of these: Some Malagasy confuse crickets for cockroaches, which they associate with filth; and superstitions abound, such as a village in eastern Madagascar where they referred to a cricket species as “lost child” based on lore of unknown origin.) One of the women seated across the compound interjected: Perhaps, she suggested, crickets could fatten up their chickens. “Women are always thinking about the future,” Hugel whispered to me. The chief’s resistance puzzled Fisher. He’d mentioned that his family migrated to the area from the south—had they lost an edible-insect tradition along the way? Eventually, Fisher wrapped up the meeting. As we headed back to the car, a group of youth, who’d overheard the conversation, ran up to us and enthusiastically presented tin containers filled with rhinoceros beetles.
“I’ve never been presented with such a challenge,” Fisher said as he surveyed the parched and barren red earth that surrounded the chief’s cluster of houses. A mere half-mile away, safeguarded for now, the Kirindy Forest stood as a reminder of the landscape Fisher remembered from a field trip 15 years earlier. “How do you stop this? The scale of the problem is far more dire than I’d imagined. ‘Fifty percent deforested’ is hard to imagine until you come down here. And it was all happening while I was traveling across Madagascar, collecting ants.”
A 20-minute drive up the road, in Beroboka, Fisher’s team met with an older, wiry man named Gerome Radafy, the village schoolteacher. Radafy rattled off the insects that local people there consumed, a list that included grasshoppers, cicadas, and crickets. He then asked his niece, a girl of around 10, to prepare us a snack of rhinoceros beetle. After washing the insects and removing their wings, she then fried the lot in a pot of oil, adding in a pinch of salt. Radafy told Fisher that he wasn’t opposed to cultivating crickets, but thought the idea better for feeding chickens than humans. (“We’re not completely against it, but it’s not what I would prefer to do,” Fisher interpreted later.)
Fisher began to wonder whether he’d been too idealistic. “We shouldn’t kid ourselves,” he said that evening. “The problems are so severe here, we must try some radical approaches.” Insect farming could be considered a radical approach. But to stanch deforestation and bushmeat consumption there, Fisher thought, would require large-scale facilities in every village across the region, where malnutrition had become endemic. They’d have to produce enough cricket powder to feed every child, and make it available to everyone else at a reduced cost. This looked like a massive aid program. And that was just one piece of the puzzle, Fisher said. “There’s no reason to think we can have an impact on deforestation if they’re not enforcing deforestation. Enforcement has to happen.”
Lambokely, a dusty village the team visited the following afternoon, seemed to embody the problems facing Madagascar’s beleaguered western dry forests. According to news reports, in 2001 Lambokely’s population numbered 64 people; by 2018, that number had swelled to around 20,000 due to immigration from Androy.
“Do you worry about your future?” Fisher asked a group of a few dozen villagers that had congregated in the shade of a large kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra). Speaking for the chief, who sat nearby with other elders, a handsome man wearing a plaid shirt and sarong, named Elias, told a familiar story: poor soil, cattle thefts. They’d tried raising chickens and ducks, with marginal success. Yes, they ate insects— various kinds, including the sakondry, in abundance during the rainy season. Their elders who came from southern Madagascar, he said, used to boil locusts and pound them into a dry powder for use during lean times. When Fisher heard this, he perked up. “They know!” he said.
Fisher asked whether they’d be interested in rearing an insect to make into a powder, describing his facility in Antananarivo. He presented the vial containing the cricket sample. “Is it food?” someone asked. Fisher explained how crickets differ from locusts, and passed around lemon-lime flavored protein bars made by a Canadian brand, Crickstart, that uses Entomo Farms’s cricket powder.
At that point, the conversation turned—now the villagers began to pitch themselves as a potential farming site. “You can tell we have highly educated youth,” a man replied after Fisher raised the topic of staffing. Here were a people with a history of eating insects, and a genuine enthusiasm for the project. Fisher was encouraged. Before getting up to leave, he declared, “We’re ready to start working with you as soon as we can.”
The villagers clapped. Elias replied, “We’re ready, too.”
“I’m feeling positive about working here,” Fisher said as we drove away. “It would be a great collaboration. And what we learn here could be applied across the entire west. We could first start with the cricket, to make powder, but also start developing a technique for sakondry.” He looked out the window at the barren fields. “These people are screwed unless something different happens. Soon it’ll be a famine-relief effort.”
After landing back in Antananarivo, we drove up the city’s twisted, traffic-choked streets to the hilltop grounds of a new photography museum and its adjacent café, the Café Du Musee. A wraparound terrace offered a sweeping view of Madagascar’s congested capital, a riot of colorful houses and tin roofs. Part of Fisher’s strategy of revitalizing the country’s edible-insect culture involves introducing cricket product to high-end chefs for use as a novelty ingredient. The café’s chef, Johary Mahaleo, who had a reputation for inventive uses of local chocolate—the menu featured dishes like homemade foie gras with cocoa truffle and duck breast in chocolate sauce—had visited Fisher’s facility earlier in the week and taken a whiff of the cricket powder. “Has a bit of an algae scent,” he’d told me. “Plenty of room to experiment.”
Mahaleo presented us with a few appetizers to taste: croquettes topped with a dollop of lemon puree and goat cheese whipped with cricket powder; a fromage blanc speckled brown from ground crickets. They tasted delicious; it was difficult to detect any of their crickety-ness. Mahaleo seemed pleased; cricket-infused dishes, he thought, could be something he becomes known for—perhaps a bit of a marketing ploy, too. A little further up the hill, I noted, stood the former royal palace, now a museum, where the Queen is said to have once enjoyed locusts sprinkled over her food. Madagascar’s edible-insect tradition may date back centuries, but Mahaleo thought he was on to something new. Another story in the island’s unique evolution, you could say.
Steeped in Tea
UTNE | The social significance of tea in America: how tea became the beverage of inner peace and armchair travel.
Illustrations by Greg Hart
FIRST PUBLISHED IN UTNE, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007
ON A SUNNY APRIL MORNING in 1990, Mel Ziegler took a plane ride that changed his life. Ziegler, who founded and had recently sold Banana Republic, was flying back to San Francisco after attending a conference on values-driven business in Boston. Before its present incarnation as a 'casual luxury' clothing brand, Banana Republic marketed safari wear. Its retail stores were awash in ersatz Serengeti imagery-Jeeps, foliage, and fog-that used 'fantasy to lighten up the customers' idea of reality,' Ziegler would later write. Consumers indulged the story, and Banana Republic profited. On that April morning, Ziegler met a fellow passenger and young entrepreneur, Bill Rosenzweig. As they soared over the country, the men discovered their shared aspirations: personal transformation and capital gains. Tea, the two surmised, would be their salvation.
In the early 1990s, the domestic tea market was emerging from decades of mediocrity. A smattering of specialty tea companies-including Celestial Seasonings, Stash, Good Earth, Yogi, and Traditional Medicinals-had repositioned tea as a healthful and natural alternative to coffee and the lower-grade tea-leaf dust found in mass market bags of Red Rose and Lipton. Largely missing from the existing marketing, Ziegler believed, was the culture and experience of drinking tea. 'I am mad about tea,' he remarked at the time, and 'I can't think of a commodity more inappropriately marketed in the United States.'
The wine and coffee industries had recently proven that Americans with a gourmet palate would pay more for higher-quality beverages that came with a cultured air and complex aromatics. So with missionary zeal-and sensing an opportunity-Ziegler and Rosenzweig created a line of exotic blends (like Mango Ceylon), added whimsical taglines ('Metabolic Frolic Tea'), and packaged them in distinctive cylindrical tins loaded with a tantalizing aura of legend and mystery. Ziegler was appointed the Minister of Leaves; CEO Rosenzweig, the Minister of Progress. Life in the Republic of Tea, the name they gave their company, would be experienced 'sip by sip, rather than gulp by gulp.'
Today, the United States is looking more like the fanciful republic Ziegler imagined. Rooibos, chai, and yerba mate are joining kalamata olives, Sumatran coffee, and pinot noir in the mainstream American vernacular, as tea in its myriad manifestations becomes the ultimate healthy and modern beverage for millions, and a new American tea culture evolves at the speed that once characterized the country's romance with gourmet coffee.
Entrepreneurs are clamoring to capitalize on the tea renaissance. The number of tea shops has sprouted from some 200 nationwide a decade ago to more than 2,000. Taken together, annual sales of black, green, and now red and white tea have skyrocketed from $1.84 billion in 1990 to more than $6 billion in 2005 and are forecasted to reach $10 billion by 2010. Dozens of nascent companies jostle for a niche in the market's fastest-growing segment, specialty teas. Even skin creams and vitamin supplements containing EGCG, the lead antioxidant found in green tea, line supermarket aisles. And researchers, finding the mass media a conduit for their steady stream of findings on tea's health benefits, are confirming folk beliefs dating to the legendary moment when errant leaves of a nearby Camellia sinensis bush colored Chinese emperor Shen Nung's pot of boiling water in 2737 B.C. and the world's most consumed drink, after water, was accidentally discovered.
Tea may have been inappropriately marketed a decade ago, but today no other commodity is better poised to capitalize on a convergence of societal trends. In one marketing narrative, tea is touted as a multifaceted health aid and as a salve for those who wish to rebalance a life accustomed to speed. In another, it is pitched as worldly, gourmet, and, when it is organic and fair trade, even virtuous. In one moment tea acts as a social lubricant, and in the next it occupies the center of personal ritual. Taken collectively, these approaches reveal-as much as they deliberately and shrewdly exploit-the contemporary American social moment.
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Americans may still be gulping life rather than sipping it, but more are opting for the latter. The legions of 'downshifters'-those who value time over money-'are growing, and mainstreaming,' says Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College and author of The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer (Basic, 1998). When Schor first polled in 1995, 20 percent of Americans said they had made voluntary lifestyle changes, such as reducing the number of working hours and jobs, that resulted in their earning less money. In 2004, 48 percent said they had. Why? To reduce stress, most responded, as well as to have a 'more balanced life,' more meaningful or satisfying work, and a 'less materialistic lifestyle.'
'At various times throughout history,' boxes of Tazo tea read, 'Tazo has surfaced among the more advanced cultures of the day as a solution to the angst of daily life.' While Tazo marketing makes liberal use of historical license, more Americans are indeed opting out of the dominant consumer culture-the frenzied pace of life and associated angst, and inordinate concern for standard status symbols. The sociologist Paul Ray calls these people 'cultural creatives.' You might have seen them shopping at Whole Foods (rejecting the dominant consumer culture isn't tantamount to rejecting consumerism) or walking out of a yoga studio. Cultural creatives care about ecological sustainability, social justice, and self-actualization. They represent a countercultural movement that was born in the social upheaval of the 1960s and gathered a new generation of voices in the antiglobalization demonstrations of the 1990s.
If, over the course of our social history, coffee became bound up in the dominant American values of speed and productivity, then tea is now embraced as the opposing fuel, even as part of a lifestyle. 'For Americans,' argues historian James Norwood Pratt, author of The New Tea Lover's Treasury (PTA, 1999), 'tea represents a coffee recovery movement.'
On a December night in 1773, a group of Bostonians disguised as Mohawk Indians raided cargo ships docked in Boston Harbor and hurled chests of tea overboard. The Boston Tea Party marked an abrupt rejection of a beverage so integral to colonial life that John Adams, stopping at a tavern en route to sign the Declaration of Independence, asked whether it was 'lawful for a weary traveler to refresh himself with a dish of tea, provided is has been honestly smuggled and has paid no duty.' The landlord's daughter replied: 'No sir! We have renounced tea under this roof. But, if you desire it, I will make you some coffee.'
Thus the nation was born with a patriotic taste for tea's more caffeinated cousin. All across the young republic, coffeehouses opened as depots for political and philosophical discussion, becoming instrumental in the development of America's java-fueled urban work ethic. Nevertheless, tea remained entrenched in the national psyche. Some of the first American millionaires, T.H. Perkins, Stephen Gerard, and John Jacob Astor, all made fortunes trading tea with China, as clipper ships and railroads in the 1850s carried fresh tea to the New World and sold it through retailers like the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P)-the nation's first supermarket chain. At the peak of consumption, in 1897, Americans each drank 1.56 pounds of it annually. (They now drink about half a pound each.)
Two innovations in the early 1900s revolutionized how Americans consume tea. Scrambling to attract attention in the summer heat at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, exhibitors of Indian black tea poured hot brewed tea into glasses jammed with ice. The crowds came, popularizing a refreshing new beverage-iced tea-that Southerners already considered a major food group and that now accounts for around 80 percent of the way Americans drink tea. Four years later, New York tea importer Thomas Sullivan hand-sewed silk pouches to package samples of tea leaves for his customers. Enamored with the convenience of the bags, customers demanded that their product be delivered in them, too, and Sullivan replaced the silk with more economical gauze to create tea bags. Petroleum-based nylon mesh eventually became the standard, which some specialty companies are now flouting in favor of biodegradable material.
Up until World War II, Americans cherished green, oolong, and black teas. Home deliverers like the Jewel Tea Company routed tea across rural America. But Japan's invasion of China in 1937 abruptly cut off the country's lifeline to East Asian tea gardens and shifted American consumption almost exclusively to Indian black tea. (It would be 1978 before China reentered the U.S. market, and only recently have Americans appreciated green tea again.) Meanwhile, the Korean War forced producers to look to new, more stable sources of tea; Argentina emerged as one of the top suppliers to the United States. (The idyllic Argentine pampas grasslands will never find their way onto a box of specialty tea, however; most of the low-quality leaves grown there are still used for iced tea or for multiple-source, mass market black tea blends.) At three dollars for 100 bags, tea became a supermarket 'loss leader'-a product sold below cost. For consumers, it lost luster.
A 1983 New York Times editorial, 'Tea Snobs and Coffee Bigots,' summed up the degraded perception-and popular associations-of tea at the time. Responding to a letter from a Portland woman who complained about 'New York's lack of civility concerning the serving of tea,' the editors opined that 'Coffee Bigots . . . think it is somehow un-American or unmanly or troublemaking to drink tea-and scorn those who do as Tea Snobs. This bigotry, fortunately, seems to be diminishing as more and more drinkers of decaffeinated coffee also speak up for their special taste.'
A popular countermovement to caffeine had been brewing for over a decade in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where a young man named Mo Siegel was picking wild herbs near his home in Boulder, Colorado. Amid a growing wave of natural foods introduced in the 1970s, Siegel wanted to offer Americans a healthy beverage as an alternative to the wan coffee brews favored by his parents' generation and the handful of specialty black teas-mostly Lipton, Twinings, and Bigelow's Constant Comment-then on supermarket shelves. Siegel faced stiff resistance peddling his novel herbal tea blends, which he called Celestial Seasonings. The buyer for a major supermarket chain-Siegel declines to say which one-once threw a box of Red Zinger against a wall and kicked him out of his office. Lipton's head tea taster at the time belittled herbal teas as 'weeds by the swamp.' (Lipton is now one of the world's largest producers of herbal teas.)
Printed with colorful pictures and New Age quotations, Celestial Seasonings boxes eventually found their way into millions of households and reintroduced Americans to the personal and social ritual of drinking tea. Blends like Egyptian Chamomile also helped reclaim tea's exotic character, imagery that goes a long way in the marketing of specialty tea today. Roastaroma offered a crossover for curious coffee lovers, and others like Sleepytime established tea as a beverage with an occasion-and also a function-for drinking at different times of the day.
Mo Siegel, founder of Celestial Seasonings, gathers herbs in Boulder, Colo. in the early 1970s. Courtesy of Celestial Seasonings.
Celestial Seasonings helped pave the way for the tsunami of ready-to-drink teas that swept into the market next. In 1987 Snapple introduced bottled iced tea with an 'all natural' tagline on labels that, ironically, depicted the Boston Tea Party. Now accounting for one-third of domestic tea sales, and composing the single largest segment of tea, ready-to-drink teas sate Americans' desire for health, convenience, and speed of delivery. Many of us do want refreshing and calm, but we still want it on the go. While most teas on the market are still brewed with low-grade tea leaves, today's fertile crop of specialty tea brands and dedicated tea shops introducing higher-grade loose leaf blends are raising the standard once set by the lowly mass market tea bag.
The events of that December evening in Boston may have initially served as a symbolic rejection of British influence and authority, but they ultimately allowed American society to write its own circuitous social history with tea-to eventually reclaim a foreign drink with a foreign set of cultural practices as its own. Sipping a cup of tea today provokes a mix of imagery, some of it still an antiquated and imagined notion of imperial England or China, but much of it an amorphous global fusion endemic to nowhere in particular. We drink herbal teas even when we're not sick. We make lattes out of green tea. We have taken the symbols of traditional tea cultures-chai on the streets of Delhi, oolong tea in a Beijing teahouse, afternoon tea service in London, chats around the samovar in St. Petersburg-and, through a process resembling the construction of an ethnic food court in a shopping mall, put them under one proverbial roof.
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To the would-be traveler lugging a shopping basket, a supermarket shelf of tea today is as bewildering (and enticing) as the pages of an adventure travel company catalog. Navigating all the worldly choices, one might arrive at a box of Numi Tea's Rainforest Green, depicting a lush cascade that invites an armchair excursion into an Australian rainforest. Down the aisle, Republic of Tea's tin of rooibos evokes the arid South African bush. Nearby, Stash Tea's Exotica blends beckon 'adventurous sippers' to explore 'the essence of distant places . . . tropical hillsides . . . monsoon-swept plains . . . the foothills of the Himalayas.'
Starbucks seduced coffee drinkers by 'romancing the bean' and creating a lexicon of foreign words that heightened customers' sense of sophistication and transported them to an imagined continental culture. Bottled water gets by on the tap water fear factor and a certain trendy appeal, but also on consumers' attraction to distant mountain springs so pure that they couldn't possibly be chlorinated.
Going further, specialty tea companies market wanderlust, packaging a tantalizing and educational blend of exotic locales and rich cultural traditions. Just as Sri Lankans might drink Coca-Cola and eat McDonald's to taste modernity, Americans sip Ceylon tea to taste the exotic. And specialty tea companies invent blends that deliberately evoke an unlikely-and inauthentic-melding of geographies and cultures to meet consumers' desire to be transported. For example, Mighty Leaf Tea's trademark blend, Green Tea Tropical, includes 'notes that conjure up a sense of escape to a tropical island,' says Mighty Leaf's founder and CEO, Gary Shinner. One small but successful company, Zhena's Gypsy Tea, bases its marketing on the founder's Ukrainian heritage-a heritage that is not known for its tea but that contains just the right dose of exoticism. 'Specialty tea is being driven by consumers' desire to learn more of the world,' says Joe Simrany, president of the Tea Association of the USA.
If a Sumatran latte no longer evokes the mystique it once did before Starbucks saturated the American landscape, the display of Tazo tea-which the company purchased in 1999-featured on the chain's counters might serve to reclaim that aura. Tazo is one of the fastest-growing brands of specialty tea in North America. Its original marketing at Starbucks used images of Sikhs, Chinese, and Britons blissfully sipping cups of Tazo. Indeed, the Tazo brand was conceived as a 'combination of cultures drawn together,' explains Steve Smith, Tazo's founder and vice president of tea. 'Our goal was to have the brand look like it was from there and then, not here and now,' using ambiguous symbology 'to appeal to people who are into discovery.' Never mind the reality of these exotic destinations-you're more likely to sip chai in India on the sidewalk of a filthy street than in monsoon-swept serenity-but marketing isn't about reality, of course, just as an adventure travel catalog listing for 'Seven Days on the Silk Road' says nothing about poverty or, for that matter, diarrhea.
The wave of specialty tea companies founded in the early 1990s coincided with a rising tide of Americans traveling to the mystical realms found on their packages. Countries such as Bhutan opened their doors and Americans set out to explore new frontiers rather than just imagine them. An 'adventure travel' industry expanded to satisfy Americans'-especially baby boomers'-'hunger for authentic experiences . . . to leave the clinical corporate environment and touch something real,' says Kevin Callaghan, CEO of Mountain Travel Sobek, a pioneer in the industry. Over time, more tourist infrastructure and services have made farther reaches of the world more accessible and attractive. In 2005 a record number of U.S. travelers ventured abroad. No longer, tour operators say, do these American travelers want to simply get to a destination, they want an experience-and in recent years travel companies have scrambled to meet that wish for more in-depth activities. Today's vacationer wants authenticity, healthy activity, and meaningful engagement. To this increasingly mainstream American consumer, and the three-quarters of Americans who don't have passports, Steve Smith would like to offer a pot of tea.
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The administrative capital of the Republic of Tea occupies the ground floor of a standard-issue suburban office park building outside Novato, California, north of San Francisco. Inside, soft yellow walls color a few rooms of cubicles arranged by a feng shui master. An enormous display case near the front door is stocked with the company's dizzying array of tea-related products, which include Stir Fry Tea Oil, Jerry Garcia Artisan Tea, and rooibos-based blends like Get a Grip Herb Tea for PMS/Menopause No. 4. (Where is this all headed?)
One morning last August, various 'ministers' holding metal spoons congregated in the office kitchen around two small bowls of tea. The company had decided it needed a 'relaxing tea,' and these tasters were evaluating candidates for a reformulated version of an existing brand, Zen Dream Tea. Each bowl contained lemon balm, lavender, chamomile, and valerian, in different concentrations. The ministers dipped their spoons, sniffing and slurping the tea, commenting on taste and calming profiles.
Mel Ziegler sold Republic of Tea less than two years after he founded it, but his self-reflective book chronicling those years, Republic of Tea: Letters to a Young Zentrepreneur (Doubleday, 1992), commands near-biblical reverence at the company and is required reading for new employees. 'It carries the spirit of why we exist-the philosophy behind who we are,' says Minister of Commerce (national sales and education) Barbara Graves, adding, 'but we're really not a cult!'
For millennia, tea has been bound up in ritual, often occupying the center of ceremonial practices. And ritual is the essence of religion, defined as a set of practices that divide the world between the sacred and the profane (or everyday), in the process creating a community or social experience. Tea companies strongly market the ritual consumption of tea-'take the tea transformation,' Numi tells consumers. They provide instructions on how to prepare it, and when to drink it. 'They're talking about creating a type of sacred space,' notes Brown University professor of religion Mark Cladis. 'The ordinary or everyday is that hectic, fast-paced way we live our lives. Tea upsets this routine, introducing the sacred moments where we can be mindful of who and where we are, where schedules have disappeared momentarily.'
In 1994 Steve Smith introduced Tazo tea in Portland, hailing the company as 'The Reincarnation of Tea.' Inspired by brass rubbings on churches, Smith incorporated cryptic symbology in the Tazo logo. He describes the alchemical process of creating blends such as Om and Zen, initiated by unconsciously scribbling formulas down on a yellow pad, as less mad scientist than 'channeling the tea shaman.' Smith packaged the teas in text-heavy boxes loaded with jibberish and obscure signatures and equations-'our version of the Rosetta stone,' he says. The intention may have been whimsical, but Smith admits an alternate purpose in Tazo's manufactured mysticism. 'Life is about the detail,' he explains. 'You miss the detail, and where are you? We try to drop in little bits and pieces that will pay back when you dig into it and make you think. In this day and age, you find your spirituality where you can.'
Credit: Benjamin D. Esham / Wikimedia Commons
But most Americans are not finding their spirituality in a cup of tea, of course-for many, it's just a tasty beverage and a way, they hope, to live longer. However, with gimmicky, pop-spiritual marketing, Smith and his peers in the industry are attempting to attract a population that is searching. The fabric of American communities and families has frayed in recent decades, some sociologists argue, and recent studies identify a population that is ever more socially isolated. Where Americans once found purpose in community, their appetite for meaning is being played out in a search for unorganized spirituality or the rediscovery of religion in many forms, including evangelicalism. Even society's rediscovery of tea has taken on a 'born again' character, exhibited foremost in the fervor of the founders of this generation of specialty tea companies, many of whom arrived at tea later in life and now extol it as a life-transforming force. If, for most Americans, tea doesn't provide meaning and order, then at the very least, a soothing, healthful beverage 'is very comfortable at a time when the world is increasingly uncomfortable, unpredictable, and dangerous,' says sociologist Juliet Schor. 'Tea feels safe.'
All the whimsy and marketing mystique that companies craft into specialty tea brands boils down to a matter of consumer taste. (After all, they're selling a beverage.) To appeal to Americans' insatiable thirst for new varieties, and to satisfy palates unaccustomed to tea's subtle flavor nuances-which could otherwise seem plain or, if the tea is improperly brewed, bitter-specialty tea companies load on the flavor (increasingly using natural ingredients as opposed to the sprays and oils mass market brands employ). Flavored teas aren't an exclusively American twist. Jasmine and Earl Grey blends have long been favored around the world. But we prefer much sweeter and stronger flavors, notes Wei Huang, the Chinese American owner of Arogya, a tea shop in Westport, Connecticut. 'Americans put soy sauce on plain white rice and use sugar to sweeten green tea-you wouldn't see this in China,' she says. Companies usually add these flavors to inferior leaves. However, across the board, remarks tea expert Norwood Pratt, today's specialty brands 'are now providing 'premium' tea in contrast to the 'ordinary' tea bag quality.'
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Tea and coffee have long represented a great yin-and-yang duality. In The World of Caffeine (Routledge, 2001), authors Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie Bealer lay out these opposing aspects: Coffee is male; tea is female. Coffee is boisterous, hardheaded, and down-to-earth; tea is decorous, nurturing, and elevated. While coffee is associated with work and passion, tea reflects spirituality and contemplation.
In light of coffee's historic associations, it comes as no surprise that it became the symbol for the defiant American revolutionaries. More than two centuries later, a kinder, gentler revolutionary spirit continues, playing out-naturally, as goes America-in the marketplace. 'An impetus for me in designing Numi's packaging was to infuse the most mundane activity, walking through a grocery store, with the sublime and rich in self-reflection,' says Numi Tea co-founder Reem Rahim. 'What other way to subversively create a revolution-in this sense, a spiritual revolution-than through art and tea? I believe that tea, and art, are part of a feminine energy that is starting to permeate through our shift in consciousness.'
Rahim's desire to redirect society sounds markedly similar to another cultural creative's mission for his own company. 'Our secret and subversive agenda,' Mel Ziegler wrote about founding the Republic of Tea, 'was to bring Americans to an awareness of 'tea mind,' in which we would all come to appreciate the perfection, the harmony, the natural serenity, and the true aesthetic in every moment and in every natural thing.'
But as Schor, Ray, and others point out, American society is evolving to that place anyway, becoming a little more yin, a little less yang; a little more feminine, a little less masculine; a little slower, a little less fast. The course tea has taken in this country-rejected one brisk evening in Boston, regarded as 'unmanly' and 'un-American,' and now embraced, at least in part, as a backlash to the dominant social paradigm dating from that historic event-may reflect a young society maturing. 'Perhaps the exercise in moving from Banana Republic to the Republic of Tea,' Mel Ziegler pondered, 'is all only a projection of my own slow process of growing up.'
Are Tablets the Way Out of Child Illiteracy?
SMITHSONIAN | Give them technology that they may have never seen before, and students' brains will work wonders.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN SMITHSONIAN.COM, SEPTEMBER 24, 2014
MOST OF THE BUSINESSES on Main Street in Roanoke, Alabama, are shuttered. Through the windows of Phillips Brothers Hardware and Steve’s Downtown Barber Shop you can see upturned chairs and faded Crimson Tide posters. The Martin Theatre remains a brick shell from the fire that gutted it in 1980, before a run of Friday the 13th. There’s a newer commercial strip on the highway that bypasses this town of 6,000, but also a sense that Roanoke has never fully revived since the Handley textile mill closed four decades ago.
Of the 1,500 students enrolled in Roanoke’s public schools, nearly 70 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Many of their parents did not progress beyond high school. David Crouse, the technology director of Roanoke City Schools, says some of his students enter kindergarten understanding about 5,000 fewer words than typical Americans their age. “It’s staggering,” he told me not long ago. “Father, mother—we have children that have no concept of that kind of vocabulary.”
One morning, Crouse took me to a kindergarten class at Knight Enloe, Roanoke’s elementary school, where students were receiving tablet computers for the first time. Their teacher, Melissa Hill, did not explain how the devices worked. She simply placed them on miniature wooden tables in front of groups ranging from two to four.
Immediately, the children began inspecting the tablets from all sides, as if they were gift-wrapped. They poked and swiped at the darkened screens. Before long, some found the power button and voiced delight as the machines sprang to life.
“How do you turn it on?” a four-year-old asked. A classmate leaned across the table to show her.
At one table, four children seemed to be hardly getting anywhere. Eight hands played tug-of-war with their shared tablet until one girl laid down the law: “All right, everybody takes a turn. Let’s take turns.”
Ms. Hill sat quietly at her desk. When students asked questions, she deflected them, saying, “You guys figure it out.”
Even as Roanoke struggles to leave the 20th century behind, the tablet project has brought the town to the leading edge of education. It’s an experiment, conceived by researchers at MIT and Tufts and Georgia State Universities, to determine the extent to which technology, left in the hands of children, can support reading development and literacy instruction in students with limited resources.
The Roanoke project was born out of a project launched in Africa two years ago by Tufts and Georgia State in conjunction with the One Laptop per Child organization, founded in 2007 by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. One Laptop per Child, or OLPC, sought to empower students in resource-poor environments by distributing 2.4 million Internet-connected laptops in 42 developing countries. The results of the project, which ceased operations last year, are still being assessed and debated—for example, a study by the Inter-American Development Bank found no effect on test scores but some increase in cognitive skills. But in some places, it became clear that children couldn’t use some of the software because they couldn’t read, and they had no access to schools or teachers.
The research team wanted to investigate whether such children could learn to read on their own, aided only by digital devices. They delivered 40 tablets to children in two villages in Ethiopia, without instructions—a scene that must have conjured the 1980 South African comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which a Kalahari bushman has his first encounter with technology, in the form of a Coke bottle fallen from the sky.
It took four minutes for the first child to power on an Android tablet. "I got mine on! I'm the lion!" he declared. After about a month, most children had learned to recite the alphabet song in English and teach themselves to write letters. This got Robin Morris, a neuropsychology researcher at Georgia State, thinking about his own backyard. “I was saying, I know whole rural environments where 30 percent of the parents don’t have any kid books at home,” Morris recalled recently. “They want their kids to learn, but they don’t have the resources to help them. Ethiopia opened our eyes to the idea that this kind of technology, if it’s done smartly, can actually, maybe have a chance of helping some of these kids who otherwise don’t have opportunities.”
In Roanoke, meanwhile, David Crouse was seeking ways to bring technology into his school district, and his inquiries led him to Morris. In contrast to Ethiopia, Roanoke had schools, and its students were familiar with technology: What would their learning curve be with the tablets? “We want self-directed learners,” Crouse says—students who can work things out alone and together.
Last September, each of Knight Enloe’s seven kindergarten classrooms received five tablets. The students would use the devices in class for around 40 minutes each day, and every child would take a tablet home one weekday afternoon.Researchers at MIT, Tufts and Georgia State are trying to determine the extent to which technology, left in the hands of children, can support reading development and literacy instruction in students with limited resources. (Andy Isaacson)
In Ms. Hill’s class, I watched as the students, by trial and error, quickly found their way around the screen. Each tablet contained about 160 specially designed educational apps. On the home screen, they appeared simply as untitled colored squares. The students jabbed them at random, which led them down a warren of more menus of colored squares and eventually to various games, cartoons and videos. Two blond-haired boys giggled along to a piano song, snapping their fingers and swaying. A couple of students settled for a little while on an animated driving game; as they navigated a car down a road, they collected letters. The letters formed words, the words formed sentences and the sentences formed stories.
The room became a din of pings, dings and chimes as the students matched shapes, painted train cars and listened to ducks talk back to them. Perhaps more important, they did all of this socially, exploring the tablets in groups and sharing what they’d learned about the devices with others. Ms. Hill sat at her desk, organizing papers.
Credit: Andy Isaacson
Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, has become an evangelist for the concept of “minimally invasive education,” based on a series of experiments he made beginning in the late 1990s. In the first trial, he carved a hole into a wall dividing his research center in Delhi from an adjacent slum and put a computer in it for children to use; the children soon taught themselves basic computer skills and a smattering of English. The “hole in the wall” experiment, as it became known, and succeeding efforts convinced Mitra that children learn best with computers, broadband and a teacher who stands out of the way. “I found that if you left them alone, working in groups, they could learn almost anything once they’ve gotten used to the fact that you can research on the Internet,” he has said. “You ask the right kind of question, then you stand back and let the learning happen.”
This regimen is intended to help the students avoid what Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts, calls the “black hole of American education”—the fourth grade.
American students are taught how to read in kindergarten and first grade—they learn that letters refer to sounds, sounds compose words and words express concepts. From there, students decipher the nuanced laws of the English language: They discover, for instance, that ea can be pronounced as in bread or in hearth or in at least ten other ways. They learn that muscle contains a c, even though it looks weird, and that the words muscle and muscular and musculature are related. “By the end of third grade, the working assumption of every teacher until recently was that the kids are ready to move on,” Wolf told me. “But if the kids are not fluent—if they don’t have that repertoire of what the English language demands, or the vocabulary to correspond to what they read—they are going to miss the whole boat of the educational system.”
In Roanoke, the researchers see the tablet more as an educational aid. Wolf, one of the project’s designers, claims it marks the first time anyone has tried to deploy apps curated or created expressly to stimulate the young reading brain. If this approach works, thousands of disadvantaged children in the United States—and perhaps millions more around the globe—could escape illiteracy. “That would be revolutionary,” says Wolf, whose publications include the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “It’s not just about autonomous use of a tablet, but where we can, we want to emphasize how important it is to have children working on this together, playing with this together, discovering.”
Human beings are not wired to read, says Wolf. The young brain must forge a whole new circuit for the task, drawing on the neuronal networks it inherits genetically for language, hearing, cognition and vision. The apps in the tablets distributed to Roanoke’s kindergarteners were loosely designed with that process in mind: There are apps for recognizing letters and learning the sounds associated with letters, as well as apps that address many aspects of vocabulary and language development.
One of the most engaging apps is called TinkRbook. It opens with the image of an egg. The child, intuitively, taps the egg, hatching a baby duck. A playful story of the duckling’s first day unfolds—it swims in a lake, it eats bugs—as the child acts as its caregiver. Each scene engages different literacy concepts while allowing the child to tinker with the story. He or she can combine blue and red shampoo to bathe the duck and turn the duck purple, for instance; meanwhile, the child sees the colors, sees and hears the names of the colors, and then learns how to mix colors to create new ones.
“The whole premise of the TinkRbook was, in some sense, could you make learning to read more like the way children learn about physics by playing with blocks and sand?” says Cynthia Breazeal, who directs MIT’s personal robots group, which built the app. (Wolf chose the words and sentence structure for early readers and supplied the voice.) The tablet’s interactivity allows for the learning that occurs when children play socially—the “What if you tried that?” sort of dialogue. “Try something out and see what happens,” Breazeal says, “and through the contrast of trying different things and seeing different outcomes, you start to understand the key principle or key concept underneath it. That’s directly mapped to how children learn.”
One other purpose of the TinkRbook project was to create an app that would engage parents who aren’t highly literate. “It was really about, how do you foster richer parent-child dialogues?” Breazeal says. “We know that’s absolutely critical to develop early literacy: When a mother reads her child a static book, it’s not about reading the literal words on the page. It’s all in the conversation that’s prompted by that story.”
During my morning with Roanoke’s kindergarteners, I noticed that one of them, Gregory Blackman, appeared to tune out while the two boys he sat with delighted in catchy songs and dancing animals. But when I visited his family’s one-story rental house a few miles outside downtown Roanoke, Gregory was sitting on the family’s brown living-room carpet, eyes glued to the tablet. And for the next hour, he matched shapes, recited the alphabet and giggled at cartoons. His mother, Shelley, and his two older sisters hovered nearby, offering help. A darkened TV sat in the corner.
What students do when they’re left on their own with a tablet is a bit of a mystery—for now. MIT’s software records how the children in Roanoke use their tablets: which apps they open, for how long, and in what order. (Or at least it did until some students learned how to bypass the start screen midway through the year.) So far, the data show that the students use them for an average of two hours a night. Initially, they blaze through the whole tablet, exploring dozens of apps. Eventually, they settle on a handful of favorites. The Roanoke students seem to gravitate toward academic content—sounds, letters, puzzles—especially when it is framed as a game. (The piano and coloring apps are also popular.)
Of course, the increasing role of technology in children’s lives—especially young children’s lives—has triggered a series of anxieties over their physical, intellectual, emotional and social well-being, and you don’t have to be a Luddite to be unnerved by the specter of kindergarteners left, somewhat literally, to their own devices. But current research on screen-based technologies suggests that their influence on children depends on how old the children are, what they’re doing onscreen, for how long and in what context. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends limiting screen time for children over 2 to less than two hours a day. The National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning recognize the need for limits, but also say that if technology is properly deployed in early-childhood programs, “educators are positioned to improve program quality by intentionally leveraging the potential of technology and media for the benefit of every child.”
“[Students] want to be competent, and they want to learn new things—old stuff doesn’t excite them very much. And they like a challenge,” Morris says. “The good thing about the digital technology is that, based on their performance, you can increase the difficulty level and complexity of it. But it’s that child-directed learning that we’re really interested in tapping into. We want to know what attributes on which apps are going to make that happen.”
On the TinkRbook’s back end, for example, the team can track how often a student or group has “tinkered” with certain words and concepts. “A lot of the commercial [educational] apps are not at the level where we can capture that kind of data,” Morris told me. David Nunez, a MIT graduate student, has developed a “mentoring system” that keeps tabs on what a child is using across the tablet, in order to nudge him or her toward apps that address concepts that child needs exposure to—just as Amazon.com might suggest products to you based on your prior purchases. The teacher, Morris said, “will able to say, ‘Okay, Johnny’s really got his capital letters down. We need to move him into small letters, lowercase letters, and the sounds related to those letters.’ ”
Roanoke also tested the mentoring system with preschool children, having secured state money for a full-day pre-kindergarten class consisting of 18 students, a teacher and an aide. Those 18 students were a control group; they all received tablets, which they used for 20 minutes a day in class and once a week at home. Meanwhile, 16 students in a half-day class used the tablets several times a day and took them home every night. And 22 children in a third group used the tablets entirely at home.
So what did the students learn? The researchers are still analyzing the data, but preliminary results showed that among the kindergarteners, for whom data was compiled on a class-by-class basis, there was a high correlation between the time the students spent with a tablet and their speed in learning to name letters, an indicator of early-childhood literacy. What’s more, the correlation was even higher in classes whose students used the tablets more at home. Among the preschoolers, there was improvement among all three groups, but it is still unclear how much of it can be attributed to the tablet. Children who used the tablets entirely at home had fewer gains, but they didn’t spend as much time on the devices as the students in classes, and they didn’t have a teacher—or fellow students—to learn from.
“Clearly, we’d think that more engagement with a technology-supportive teacher would produce better outcomes, but how the teacher uses the tablet, and how it helps the teacher, are important questions we need to understand,” Morris said. “But how do we maximize tablet use, and how much learning can the students get who are not even coming to a traditional class? That’s the more important challenge for us, because those are frequently the more at-risk children we need to reach more effectively.”
Last year, Sugata Mitra won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, for a three-year project to explore the concept of “schools in the cloud.” In these “self-organized learning environments”—five in India and two in the United Kingdom—students of various ages will be left in a room with computers and no teachers, with volunteer tutors providing help only when asked. “It is not about making learning happen, it is about letting learning happen,” Mitra says.
Maryanne Wolf is more cautious. “By no means do we know fully whether or not [tablets] are the best medium for children’s learning at all,” she says. “But we’re in a digital age, and what is imperative is that we learn what works best for different children, in what amounts, at what ages.” Students need to develop what are called “deep reading” skills—inference, analogical and deductive thinking—and that requires time and focus. She worries that a medium that insists on rapid-fire processing and partial attention may not be ideal. At the same time, she believes that well-designed learning apps can bridge that gap. “I think our 21st-century brain is going to need both kinds of cognitive processes: a biliterate brain with faster processing, but that knows when to think and read and focus deeply,” she says.
“We are not in any way, shape or form opposed to teaching,” Wolf insists. “In fact, for children who have any kind of struggle with reading, the teacher is essential to helping ‘scaffold’ them”—to piggyback off what the technology teaches them.” Computers, she says, may be heavily involved, lightly involved or not involved: “I will be the first to say we don’t know all of that yet.”
Pamir Mountains, the Crossroads of History
NEW YORK TIMES | Retracing the Silk Road through Tajikistan.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, DEC. 17, 2009
BY 9 IN THE MORNING, the bazaar on a rocky island in the Panj River was a frenetic scene of haggling and theatrics. Afghan traders in long tunics and vests hawked teas, toiletries and rubber slippers. Turbaned fortune tellers bent over ornate Persian texts, predicting futures for the price of a dollar. Tajik women bargained over resplendent bolts of fabric. All were mingling this bright Saturday at a weekly market held throughout the year and, in one form or another, for thousands of years here in the Wakhan Valley, which divides Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
“Mousetraps, mousetraps, mousetraps, oooowww!” crooned a white-bearded Afghan in the Iranian language spoken by locals from both sides of the border.
“They don’t buy!” complained a high-heeled shoe salesman from Kabul to me, in English.
“They always start the price too high,” a Tajik woman in a blue patterned dress and headscarf whispered as she stood before bright red carpets, appearing seductive against a monochrome mountain backdrop.
As the sun rose higher, I joined the crowds — young Tajik men in sporty shirts and jeans, uniformed border guards, families — seeking shade under rainbow umbrellas to eat rice palov, served from large cauldrons. Across the market grounds, I could see three lipsticked Korean women in straw hats dispensing balloon animals to a captivated group of men and boys.
East meeting West, North meeting South: since time immemorial, the Wakhan Valley, in the Pamir Mountains, has existed at the intersection of trails trodden by nomads, peddlers, pilgrims and, at times, the soldiers and emissaries of great powers. When I’d thought about traveling to see this rugged branch of the ancient Silk Road, it had seemed like an adventure to the far-flung periphery of the world. Now, as I looked around the market, taking the long view of history, it felt more like the center.
During the last century, this long-strategic nexus of Asia, earlier crossed by Scythians, Persians, Greeks, Kushans, Hephtalites, Gokturks, Huns, Arabs and Mongol hordes, became a cul-de-sac at the command of the Russians. In 1929 Stalin’s mapmakers created the Soviet Socialist Republic of Tajikistan, a territory about the same size as New York State, 93 percent mountainous, given shape in the artificial (though politically expedient) manner in which all the Central Asian republics were drawn. A Soviet vision of a model Oriental capital was built around the market village of Dushanbe — pleasant and leafy, if dull, with a wide central avenue, pastel-colored buildings, the standard apartment blocks and some grand monuments meant to be honored from afar. (Make the innocent mistake of approaching one, as I did, and you give an underpaid policeman an excuse to seek a bribe to overlook the offense.)
The Soviets brought universal education and health care, but banned the Persian alphabet, erasing Tajiks’ literary history, and outlawed the practice of Islam. At independence in 1991, Moscow left behind an impoverished and fractured country that soon plunged into a bloody civil war. Tajikistan emerged in 1997 corrupt but safe, ailing but reasonably stable. Before long, foreign tourists began to trickle in.
After the three legs of my flight from New York, armed with a visa and special permit to visit the Pamir region, I arrived in Dushanbe during a stifling week last July. The Russians gave the city a rail link west to Uzbekistan, and they paved a road east, toward Kyrgyzstan, that is known today as the Pamir Highway and increasingly draws foreign mountain bikers and motorcyclists.
“Highway” is a generous classification for it. It took me 20 hours to travel the dusty 325-mile stretch from Dushanbe to the provincial center of Khorog in a shared taxi, flat-tire breaks included. The road climbs over craggy, treeless mountains and falls into tidy villages with apricot trees. It is interrupted by several checkpoints, including one in a valley through which heroin and opium are trafficked — and to which, news reports say, militants have begun returning — north from Afghanistan.
At this checkpoint, a burly man wearing fatigues and a Harley-Davidson hat introduced himself as Muhammad Ali, asked for my bag, and called for the dog. Out came a small, floppy-eared lapdog that agents practically had to drag over to sniff my backpack. “He must be starving,” Muhammad Ali joked. “Just open the bag.” I was sent on my way, wondering if those were my tax dollars at work. Last year the United States spent $1.7 million to counter narcotics in Tajikistan.
KHOROG, a relaxed town of 28,000 in the heart of the western Pamirs, sits across the Panj River from Afghanistan. Its isolation largely spared it from the civil war of the 1990s, but a humanitarian crisis crippled the area after Soviet handouts came to an end. A savior came in the form of a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad himself, the Aga Khan, a Swiss-born businessman who owns racehorses and a yacht club on Sardinia and is the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslim sect to which most Pamiri people have belonged for a thousand years. The community-supported charitable organization over which he presides, the Aga Khan Development Network, resuscitated Khorog, which now has two universities, new construction and a young, optimistic population.
Winters can be long and raw, but in summer the balmy air, rustling fruit trees and pedestrian bridges spanning a jade river make Khorog a nice base for exploring the Pamirs. Through an agency, I had arranged to meet a driver and translator there to guide me for a week, first south to the Wakhan Valley and then through it to Murghab, a town in the eastern Pamirs. We would sleep at a network of homestays.
The next morning we set out in a former Russian Army jeep, leaving the Pamir Highway to head south on a paved road along the Panj River, which defines much of Tajikistan’s 830-mile border with Afghanistan. Brown, gravelly slopes rise steeply from the river toward snow-capped peaks beyond view. The rustic adobe homes and donkey trails that I could see on the opposite, Afghan bank seemed suspended in a different time.
The Pamir region was renowned in antiquity for its rubies (technically, spinel) and lapis lazuli. The most famous mine, Kuh-i-Lal — though closed to the public — came into view above the road. It was the source, I later learned, of the 170-carat Black Prince’s Ruby now in the Imperial State Crown of Britain.
At a turn, the white crowns of the Hindu Kush appeared, and we entered the 85-mile-long Wakhan Valley, a fertile quilt of wheat fields along the Panj River, “situated among the snowy mountains,” as the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang described it.
I arrived at the Saturday bazaar, with its mousetraps and fortune-telling, by 9 a.m. and stayed until the island began to empty, in early afternoon. I talked with a blue-eyed Afghan policeman sporting Bushnell binoculars and a Leatherman toolkit and later passed a Tajik boy wearing a cap that read “Berkeley, Califopnia.” He reacted indifferently after I explained that I actually came from there. I realized that such sights are probably no more remarkable today than, say, a Chinese visitor here in the sixth century encountering Italians in silk shirts, or a Sogdian seen with the latest gadgets from the army of Alexander the Great, who crossed the Panj River in 329 B.C. At this ancient intersection, surreal juxtapositions of globalization date back for millenniums.
In the town of Ishkashim, adjacent to the market, we visited the crumbling remains of a sixth-century caravansary — an ancient motel for Silk Road travelers. Then we drove on eastward in the Wakhan Valley, passing roadside shelters decorated in pebbled mosaics conveying messages of Soviet propaganda, until we reached the remnants of a sprawling stone fortress occupying a prominent rock above the Panj. A plaque in Tajik and English explained that this was the King’s Castle, constructed in the third century B.C. by the Siah-Posh, a tribe of black-robed fire-worshipers (probably Zoroastrian), to defend the Wakhan from intruders.
I followed the small footpaths meandering among the ruins and thought of Samarkand, the fabled Silk Road oasis in Uzbekistan whose restoration has stripped much of its character, and Kashgar, China, overrun by modern Han society. The contrasting authenticity — and fragility — around me here was reflected on a plaque: “Your responsible treatment of the sites during your visiting them is appreciated as your contribution to the preservation of historical monuments.”
I spent two days exploring the detritus of history littered across the Wakhan Valley: rocks with Arabic inscriptions, petroglyphs, imposing fortresses, stones that were once arranged to determine the spring solstice and hot springs rumored to boost female fertility (I was the only man visiting these).
Small shrines to Ismaili holy men line the roadside. Each has its own legend, and is ornamented with special stones and curled ibex and sheep horns, symbols of purity under Aryan and Zoroastrian religious traditions, which predate Islam in the region.
Men, women and children strolled up and down the road between their villages and wheat fields. I offered lifts to old ladies in colorful embroidered skullcaps who showed gratitude by touching my chin and kissing their hands.
In a village called Yamg, we turned in where a sign announced a museum, and a teenager named Nasim opened the building with a key. The museum is in the home of his distant ancestor Muboraki Wakhani, Nasim explained, a little-known mystic poet, musician, astronomer and prolific Ismaili scholar of the late 19th century. Inside, artifacts from the ages were displayed, none behind glass: a tattered gold-and-blue imam’s robe, purportedly from the 12th century; 15th-century Chinese copper kettles; clay jugs from the storied Uzbek city of Bukhara; pipes, knives and yak horn cups; Stone Age beads; wooden stringed instruments carved into crude human figures.
Nasim invited me to his family’s house for lunch, and we followed him down a dirt pathway. Wheat, apricots, mulberries and dung lay on the flat roof to dry. The stone-and-plaster architecture was typical of traditional homes throughout the Pamirs, rich in symbolism that includes elements of ancient Aryan and Buddhist philosophy. For Ismailis living here, the home is itself a symbol of the universe and serves instead of a mosque as a place for prayer.
Nasim’s father, Aydar, mustached and wearing a track suit, led me into a main room divided, according to tradition, into three areas signifying the kingdoms of nature: animal, vegetable and mineral. Five supporting pillars represented the five members of the family of the prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali: the one for Muhammad, left of the entrance, is traditionally where a newborn’s cradle is placed and where newly married couples sleep.
Light beamed in through a skylight framed by four concentric square wood layers, representing earth, water, air and fire. Under it Aydar’s daughter laid a spread of raisins, peanuts and berries, potato and corn soup, fresh round flatbread and salty milk tea, which is passed and received with one hand to the heart. As Marco Polo noted, the language in the Wakhan Valley is different even from the Iranian dialects spoken in other Pamir valleys. But Aydar spoke some English and Russian, which was translated for me. I asked him how long his family had lived here.
Aydar told of a legend about a hotheaded emir in the 15th century who killed an entire family save one boy, who fled north, married and had three sons. One son returned to the valley years later, and eventually the two others followed with their families; these were Aydar’s ancestors. The dates were vague, but I was awed by a family story that began 600 years ago.
After lunch, we continued on to the nearby village of Vrang, where children were tending sheep below a tiered stone stupa built on a rocky perch by sixth-century Buddhists. “Buddha, Buddha,” Somon, a local boy, said, cupping his hands in a pantomime of meditation. He volunteered to guide me up to the stupa’s ancient rocks. I sat there looking at sunset over the Pamir crest, coloring the valley from on high like light slanting through clerestory windows, at moonrise above the Hindu Kush — and at Somon, who was eager to climb down. “Homestay?” he asked sweetly, pointing to a faintly lighted house in the birches below. I followed him there.
“Having left this place, and traveled three days, always among mountains,” a man “ascends to a district which is said to be the highest in the world,” Marco Polo reported 700 years ago, describing the climb north from the Wakhan Valley to the 13,000-foot-high desert plateau in the eastern Pamir from which several major ranges — the Himalaya, Karakorum, Hindu Kush, Kunlun and Tien Shan — fan out across Asia. The same journey took us three hours in our temperamental jeep, passing Stone Age petroglyphs, a lone Soviet watchtower, two Swiss mountain bikers and (across a tributary of the Panj, demarcating the border) Afghan traders leading a caravan of double-humped Bactrian camels.
“Along this high plain, which is called Pamier, he sees neither habitation nor verdure,” Polo went on, and until late in the Soviet period, the majority Kyrgyz population that endures this extreme realm known to early Persians as the Roof of the World remained mostly nomadic. The few permanent settlements today have a weathered, frontier character: tin roofs, rusty vehicle parts, satellite dishes.
We rejoined the Pamir Highway in the Alichur Valley, a 40-mile-long thin grass steppe ringed by low, rounded mountains, where Kyrgyz families come to graze their animals, setting up summer yurt camps. “Authentic” would only lamely describe the timeless, pastoral serenity of this place, or suggest the bliss I felt on my first star-filled night there reclining on hand-woven carpets by a warm iron stove inside a yurt, dipping bread into freshly churned yak butter, listening to Kyrgyz spoken in hushed tones.
Farther east, at Besh Gumbez, we visited the domed ruins of a caravansary and later passed a caravan of Chinese trucks laden with inexpensive household goods, parked beside the road. The drivers, Uighurs from Kashgar bound for Dushanbe, crouched in the shade beside the tires with a propane tank and a box of peppers, preparing lunch. In antiquity the caravans carried exotic luxuries like silk, jade, porcelain, furs, dyes, tea and spices; what a different sense the phrase “made in China” evokes today.
We split off the Pamir Highway and spent the next four days bouncing across a stark moonscape on jeep tracks that connect remote shepherd camps. One morning we saw a family out in the open air near their adobe home, rolling damp, matted wool into felt for the walls of a yurt. Curd balls lay drying on the roof. The grandfather, Mamajan, wearing a cardigan sweater and knitted skullcap, invited me for steamed meat dumplings and tea.
“Are there places like this in America?” he asked in Russian, waving around at the craggy, mineral-stained earth.
“Yes, a place called Nevada,” I replied.
“Come inside.”
Mamajan filled and refilled cups of green tea as we dabbed warm flatbread into bowls of butter and fresh yogurt. His grandparents were from present-day Kyrgyzstan. They were rich, he said, before the Soviets took their sheep. Mamajan was a bookkeeper during the Soviet period. He switched back to farming after independence and sells wool and meat, and dung for winter fuel.
By the age of 19, Mamajan claimed, he already had nine children. “You’re 32?” he asked me. “Why aren’t you married?” No explanation I could offer would suffice.
“ALL kinds of animals abound,” Marco Polo noted here, “in particular, a species of sheep with horns of three, four, and even six palms long. The horns are heaped up in large quantities along the road, for the purpose of guiding travelers during winter.” They still are, but the world’s largest sheep — named after Polo — is now endangered. I encounter only traces: their footpaths and magnificent skulls, strewn eerily across the barren landscape. Foreign hunters, mostly American, pay $25,000 to bag one. We passed a hunting camp that is temporarily closed so that sheep numbers can rebound.
My last homestay, on the far side of Tajikistan, was at an isolated yurt pitched on the edge of an expansive valley facing a spectacular panorama of the serrated Wakhan Range, in Afghanistan. Beyond lay Pakistan and just east of me, over a lofty pass, China. There, six years earlier, on a trip across that country, I had stayed in a similar yurt with Kyrgyz hosts and was left to imagine what existed across the border. I now stitched the two experiences, years apart, into a single panoramic image.
It was here in the Pamirs where Russia’s territorial expansion confronted Britain’s defense of India during the 19th-century geopolitical rivalry known as the Great Game. Both sides dispatched players — maverick officers and ambitious explorers, often in disguise — to chart Central Asia’s wild terrain and win influence. A final flashpoint occurred over the mountain in front of me, where in August 1891 a British agent crossed paths with his Russian counterpart, who claimed it as the czar’s and threatened arrest. Four years later the powers agreed to make that narrow valley between their empires — the Wakhan Corridor — a buffer belonging to neither, and it is still part of Afghanistan, a panhandlelike eastward salient of little importance.
The Great Game came and went, part of the historical tides weathered forever here, in the romantic heart of Asia. I could hear the enduring pulse of that heart around me in the whistling wind and the calls of children corralling the sheep for the evening.
“Andy, come,” my host hollered from the yurt. “Dinner is ready.”
Bartang Valley, Tajikistan. Credit: Andy Isaacson