Catherine Price (6 page)

L
et’s start with the carpet. Why would Bay Area Rapid Transit, one of the country’s busiest commuter rail systems, decide it was a good idea to upholster the floor?

The result is Eau de BART, the stomach-turning scent that hits you in the face every time you board a train to San Francisco. It’s a blend of spilled coffee, greasy hair, body odor left by vagrants who take naps on its blue cloth seats, and the aroma that arises from substances trapped on thousands of commuters’ shoes. Thankfully, there’s a movement afoot to rip up the rug from some of the cars, but this still leaves the question of the fabric seats unresolved. Perhaps my allegiance to the New York subway system makes me biased, but I believe that all public transportation systems should be built with materials that can be hosed down with bleach.

BART was honored as one of the Top Ten Public Works Projects of the Century by the American Public Works Association. But despite this accolade, its problems don’t end with its odor—or with the questionable decision to refer to a major public transportation system with an acronym that rhymes with “fart.” BART is the main transit link between the East Bay and San Francisco, and yet its trains don’t run between 12 and 4
A.M.
Berkeley residents looking for a night on the town therefore find themselves in a public transportation version of Cinderella—except when the clock strikes midnight, BART doesn’t turn into a pumpkin; it disappears entirely.

If you do manage to get on a train, be prepared to ponder several engineering questions such as: why did no one predict that thanks to some unfortunate confluence of acoustics and friction, BART cars would emit an ear-piercing shriek for their entire 3.6-mile passage underneath the water through the Transbay Tube? Or, alternatively, what would happen in an earthquake? The BART Earthquake Safety Program has identified areas that are particularly vulnerable if the ground starts to shake: the Transbay Tube, the stations, and the aerial guideways that prop up the tracks when the train emerges above ground. In other words, pretty much all of it. One can only hope that if and when the big one comes, it does so between the hours of midnight and 4
A.M.

B
orn in 1846, Carry Nation didn’t come from the stablest of backgrounds. Her maternal grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousin all had dementia, and her mother suffered from delusions that she was Queen Victoria. Not to be outdone, Nation directed her own mental energy toward religion; she claimed to have frequent chats with Jesus.

Apparently, Jesus had a lot to say about alcohol. After her first husband drank himself to death, Nation remarried and joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which closed all liquor-selling establishments in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, except for one stubborn drugstore. The other women considered this a success, but it wasn’t enough for Nation, who grabbed a sledgehammer, stormed into the shop, and smashed a keg of whiskey. The druggist, terrified, left soon thereafter, and Nation had found herself a cause.

After following a voice in her head that told her to destroy saloons in nearby Kiowa, Nation returned to Medicine Lodge and bought a hatchet. She then began what she called a “hatchetation” tour across the eastern half of the United States, bursting into saloons and destroying bottles with an enthusiastic chant of “Smash! Smash! For Jesus’ sake, smash!” Nation soon developed such a formidable reputation that when she arrived in New York City, bartenders locked their doors. Who could blame them? The woman was nearly six feet tall, a muscular 175 pounds, armed, and crazy.

Luckily, Nation kept her rampages focused on inanimate objects like bottles, kegs, and cash registers; her reign of terror ended when she ran out of money and was reduced to supporting herself by selling souvenir hatchets and reenacting saloon smashes at local carnivals. But her legacy lived on—and across the United States, bartenders posted signs in her honor.
ALL NATIONS SERVED
, they said.
EXCEPT CARRY
.

Carry Nation with bible, hatchet

Wikipedia Commons

A
dvertised by tourist brochures as the “most fortified border on Earth that only Korea can offer,” the demilitarized zone is anthropologically fascinating, not to mention one of the world’s only active battle lines to have its own gift shop. (Sample souvenirs: DMZ key chains, child-size camouflage suits, duty-free alcohol.) There is a welcome center; there is a movie theater. Concerned about providing fodder for North Korean propaganda photos, the DMZ even has its own dress code; visitors are forbidden from wearing flip-flops, tank tops, or shorts that “expose the buttocks.” It is not entirely clear what the people who wrote the dress code have against leather riding chaps, but they’re not kidding: wear the wrong thing, and you’re not going on the tour.

Providing that your pants meet protocol, you’ll sign a release acknowledging that you could get shot, watch a slideshow presentation and briefing, and eventually be led to the Joint Security Area, which is the only area in the DMZ where North and South Korean troops stand face-to-face.

The border in this section is less Berlin Wall than it is sidewalk curb: a half foot tall and straddled by a group of squat, powder-blue UN buildings. These were originally designed as neutral spots for negotiations. But since visitors are allowed to go inside, most of the negotiations going on these days are among members of large tour groups figuring out where in the building they need to stand to get a picture of themselves in what is technically North Korea. Like most of the DMZ tour, this comes highly recommended. But do not bother with the Third Infiltration Tunnel.

That’s not because it is uninteresting. The Third Infiltration Tunnel—or the Third Tunnel of Aggression, as it’s more poetically known—is the third discovered underground passageway (of an estimated dozen or so) that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il ordered to be blasted from North to South Korea in preparation for a potential invasion. When South Korea found this particular tunnel in 1978, North Korea claimed that it was merely a coal mine—even going so far as to have part of the granite walls painted black. Unconvinced, the South blocked the tunnel with three barricades and then, as a capitalist “screw you,” opened it as a tourist site.

The resulting experience is not for claustrophobics, people prone to panic attacks, or anyone with an aversion to being buried alive. First, you’re led to a train platform and told to put all your belongings into a small cubby. Next, you’re given a hard hat and herded onto a small trolley. That’s probably the part where you should start asking questions, like: why are you on a train? Or, more important, where are you going? But most tourists, lulled into complacence by the
trolley’s similarity to those in Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World,” don’t think to be inquisitive.

Instead, the claustrophobic visitor will experience an unexpected rush of terror as the train begins a 240-foot descent underground through a narrow tunnel blasted out of solid rock. As your little train chugs lower and lower, you wonder how the giggling tourists around you can seem so oblivious to the lack of emergency exits and escape hatches built into the suffocating walls pushing in on you from all sides. Several horrible minutes later, the trolley finally reaches the bottom and you’re given several minutes to walk to the tunnel’s main attraction—the barricade between North and South Korea. (Spoiler alert: it looks like a wall.) The good part about the tunnel is that, at 6½ by 6½ feet, it’s slightly less oppressive than the train ride, but the extra headroom isn’t worth the panic attack it took to get
there.

Y
our opinion toward bus travel in Samoa is likely to depend on one important variable: whether or not you mind being close with strangers. And when I say close, I’m not talking about having your face smushed into people’s armpits during rush hour. I’m talking about sitting on their laps.

In Samoa, buses are small, seating is limited, and nobody’s supposed to stand. So drivers are left with two options: leave people in the road, or assume the passengers will find a place for them to sit. Etiquette dictates the latter, and so whenever a bus picks up
someone—which could be anywhere, since Samoa has few predetermined bus stops—the passengers engage in a round of quiet shuffling to make space on someone’s lap for the new arrival. Whose lap you sit on depends on your status in the social hierarchy—elderly people get the front, then come women with children, then women with no children, and finally a throng of men at the back.

If you have a loose definition of personal boundaries, this lap sitting can actually be a fun cultural experience, not to mention provide a welcome layer of padding on rough roads. But be careful: according to the World Health Organization, in Samoan urban areas, over 75 percent of adults are obese. Ending up on the wrong side of a lap could mean a very painful ride.

Also worth noting: After years of driving on the right, Samoans recently were forced to start driving on the left, a transition that not only increases the risk of head-on collisions, but means that many bus doors now open directly into oncoming traffic.

MARY ROACH

The Tupperware Museum

A
merica has an enduring passion for highly specific and unnecessary food storage receptacles. It was created, almost single handedly, by Earl Tupper, the man whose Orlando empire has given us, over the years, the Garlic Keeper and the specially designed pickle storage container, never minding that the Vlasic jar has a screwable lid. I once wrote a magazine article about Tupperware, partly because I was fascinated by Mr. Tupper and his wares, but also because I had long harbored a desire, unfathomable even to me, to visit the Tupperware Museum of Historical Food Containers. Could anything be duller? (Possibly. There’s a Needle Museum somewhere in England.)

As the afternoon at Tupperware HQ wound down and my host from the public relations office began moving us toward the door, I asked to be directed to the museum. She replied that it had closed some years back and that the contents were—are you ready?—
in storage
.

Years later, I found a photograph of the museum. Its dullness surpassed even my imagination: brown carpeting and case after case of drab, unimaginatively displayed crockery, amphoras, vats. It appeared that the whole point of the museum had been to make pre-Tupperware food storage seem sad and boring, to foster a yearning for festively colored Wonderlier bowls and stackable sandwich-fixings holders. Nonetheless, my disappointment lingers, as though for all these years it had been stored in a virtually airtight, just-right Disappointment Keeper.

MARY ROACH
is the author of
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

F
irst, let’s clear something up: cicadas are not locusts. Locusts, which are related to grasshoppers, enjoy swarming, eating everything in their paths, and bragging about the good old days of their biblical plague. Cicadas, on the other hand, feed only on tree sap, can’t fly well, and are too dumb to organize. If locusts are ravenous sociopaths, cicadas are more like frat boys—clumsy, loud, and obsessed with sex.

There are cicadas around every year, but the number of annual cicadas is nothing compared to their periodical counterparts, which are the longest-living insects in North America and only exist in the eastern United States. These periodical cicadas spend most of their lives underground, but every thirteen or seventeen years, depending on the species, entire broods of cicadas push their way out of the dirt and climb into trees to mate. Scientists don’t know how cicadas synchronize their appearance—it might be related to soil temperature—
but the result is striking: millions of cicadas can come out of the ground in a single night.

Once above ground, cicadas devote themselves to one thing: finding another cicada. Newly emerged cicadas, still nymphs, climb up on whatever woody structures they can find and quickly molt into adults, leaving behind amber-colored, creepy-looking sheaths that are great for practical jokes. Then the males start singing, joining together in chirping choruses that can reach up to 100 dB. Females respond by coyly flicking their wings, and about ten days of nonstop noise later, they mate. Females cut slits in twigs, lay eggs, and then die, their carcasses dropping from trees to form a thick, crunchy carpet. Six or seven weeks later, tiny white ant-like nymphs hatch, fall to the ground, burrow into the dirt, and the cycle begins again.

So let’s get to the wedding: the Great Eastern Brood, also known as Brood X, is the farthest-reaching cicada brood in the northeastern United States—and it’s set for a reemergence in 2021. Sometime early that summer—probably in the heat of wedding season—millions of cicadas will tunnel their way toward open air and, if you plan things poorly, your wedding site. Imagine it: your vows being drowned out by the singing of thousands of horny cicadas, insects falling onto your guests’ heads, the crunch underfoot of countless abandoned shells.

Dave Allen Photography/daveallenphotography.com

The upside is that cicadas are harmless—they don’t bite or sting, and they’re not even attracted to human food. But at 1½ inches long with large wings and bright red eyes, they’re definitely noticeable, especially given their tendency to fly into things. If your wedding site has seen cicadas in the past, consider renting a tent.