Dispatches | Page 36

Unconventional Indicators

July 25, 2012 Dispatches

How can you tell a modern, Western country is in the midst of an existential economic crisis? Bread lines? People begging in suits? Garbage and vermin? Tumbleweed? Packs of feral youth and stray dogs?

I’m in gorgeous, light-drenched Lisbon for a two-week literary conference, staying at a residence in a drab suburb near the huge, green-and-yellow-tiled Campo Grande stadium. I ride the subways, walk up and down the hilly, chipped-stone streets, poke my nose in stores, people-watch in cafés. I try to see people’s expressions in their cars. Portugal’s economy is at its worst since 1945, its central bank says, and one of the worst-off countries in the euro zone. Yet people here go about business purposefully. They look calm, dignified, not conspicuously depressed. They dress nicely though not as expensively as Parisians or Romans.

Sahara Syndrome

July 18, 2012 Dispatches

By TODD PITOCK

Entering the Sahara, the rock and hard-packed sand is so flat and immense you can see the Earth’s curve. It’s an optical illusion, really, the mind providing an explanation in the face of such an expanse, the way it interprets the glassy reflections in the near distance as water. On very hot days, the sun bleaches the sky and sand, whiting out all points of reference. It can be literally mind-blowing, inducing Sahara Syndrome, a temporary anxiety disorder that can push you to the fringes of insanity.

Blue Haven

July 11, 2012 Dispatches

By JAMES A. GILL

We left the upper reaches of the Mississippi River, our last connection with what we knew, and ventured onto the plains of Minnesota and into North Dakota, 80 miles an hour through fields of sunflowers. Outside Minot, the two-lane highway was under construction, but there were no rows of orange barrels striped with reflective tape; instead, both lanes of pavement were ripped up, and I drove the dirt roadbed between earthmovers, graders, and dump trucks while my wife slept in the passenger’s seat and my seven-month-old son made faces at me in the rearview mirror from his car seat. Finally the roadwork ended, and we drove on through a valley where each hill held white rocks stacked to form the year of a high school’s graduating class. Almost twenty years were covered in as many miles, and I wondered what would happen when they ran out of hills. We crossed into Canada at a small town called Portal, then made our way across the plains, trying to remember to read our speed in kilometers. The city of Regina appeared on the horizon like a skyline drawn in elementary school art class: the sky and ground meeting on a ruler-straight line, while boxes and rectangles extended upward from it. Past that, the highway skirted the Arm River Valley, the only variation in the tabletop prairie, where each town was marked with a wooden grain elevator rising in the distance.

Jim’s Way

July 4, 2012 Dispatches

By MELINDA MISENER

We — my uncles Jim and Larry, my cousin Lindsay, and I — went to Scotland on the sort of family business that is not business at all but is, rather, an excuse for a vacation. We are Scottish by an unremarkable fraction, but because that branch of family history is well documented, because we have things like a plaid and a crest, our unremarkable fraction can feel an awful lot like half.

Painting Chairs

June 27, 2012 Dispatches

By REBECCA CHACE

I have been painting chairs this summer. It is my second summer visiting my boyfriend at his country house in the Catskills, though it’s not only my boyfriend’s house. The house belongs to him and his wife. I am here because his wife is dead. She passed away two and a half years ago, and her death sometimes feels as blunt and brutal as the undeniable fact that the phrase “passed away” is trying to soften. I didn’t know her, but she was a powerful woman who died too young and left behind an adolescent son and a husband of twenty years.

Between Two Places

June 20, 2012 Dispatches

By CRALAN KELDER

Driving with LLL Louise Landes Levi from Amsterdam up to Riva San Vitale in the Alps to visit Franco’s place at the Franco Beltrametti foundation:

Moonstone

June 13, 2012 Dispatches

By ROLF ALBERT YNGVE

Three days of dirty weather and everyone saw it on their way home from work. It was dumped onto the Silver Strand State Beach parking lot— the keel naked and scabbed with barnacles, the mast canted. Someone said the park maintenance people must have hauled it up out of the surf. It looked like a forklift had punched two holes in the hull.

Inside Passage

June 6, 2012 Dispatches

By RACHEL MORGENSTERN-CLARREN

Like the forearms
of the fishermen,

Port Arthur Girl

May 30, 2012 Dispatches

By CAROL ALEXANDER

Down around Port Arthur the tumbleweed, that mobile diaspore,
flings its seeds in a race with time, dying in a pool of rain or oil.
And what they have is a lot of sky and oil tanks coddling crude
and girls in much more underwear than they wear way up North.
Mining land is deeply scarred and raw, the gravel pits alien,
like lunar landscapes or the bank where Charon plies his trade.
The young ones necking in their cars, the ugly bars, showed you
the rocking road away from that stripped coastal town.

Reunion

May 23, 2012 Dispatches

By MAURA CANDELA

The dogs were the first to greet us. Two came trotting into the parking lot of the Masseria. A farm manor on a mountaintop, the Masseria was built into the cliff of tufa, the sandstone of the mountains that ring the Valley of the Jato. Like one of Michelangelo’s Captives struggling to be free of marble encasement, the house—with all its many additions—seemed caught in the act of struggling to free itself of the mountain.