Albany Training Academy

This week Vinny retired from the department, after 31 years of service that began when he was 18. And last night I attended his retirement party in Napanoch, New York.

Over 200 people were there – a fitting tribute to a man who was immensely popular among his fellow correction officers (CO’s). Vinny’s humor was in full flower: “I’m 300 pounds but tonight I feel like I’m floating,” I heard him say as I walked in. I was a bit on edge—not everybody in New York corrections loves me. The second person Vinny introduced me to, as it happened, was the guy at Eastern Correctional Facility who tears the seven pages out of Newjack when a prisoner receives a copy in the mail … my censor! But the man seemed perfectly nice and after all, it’s not his idea.

Vinny and his wife, Val, sat me next to Dave Miller, a respected former superintendent of Eastern who, it turns out, had a dog-eared copy of Newjack in his pocket. He teaches it in his course at the local community college, he explained. That made me feel better when the current superintendent, digressing from his roast of Vinny, mentioned that my book had upset a lot of people—a lot of people, he repeated, making me suspect that he was possibly one of them. Soon after came the first of several friendly, joking offers by various people to escort me to my car at evening’s end.

The Legend (left) Has Retired

Fortunately, my presence was gradually forgotten as the night progressed—as it should have been, because it was Vinny’s moment in the sun. Friends remembered hijinks and capers galore, one of my favorites being the wager he placed with a newjack working South Hall at Eastern. “I bet you lunch that I can make all the inmates flush their toilets at the same time,” Vinny was heard to tell the rookie. “You’re on,” said the man. Vinny then stepped out on the flats where all the prisoners could hear him:

Could I please have everyone’s attention? I need everybody to help me by not flushing their toilets for the next couple minutes. We’ve got a sewage problem and it’s all backing up into the CO’s office.

They said the roar of flushing toilets was deafening.

Every time I do, I think of Tess. Tess was a turkey that our neighbors in New Hampshire found walking down the road. She was a domestic turkey, not a wild one, and she had evidently been hit by a car, which messed up a bunch of her feathers. The neighbors nursed her to health and she lived several more months.

You could see Tess in their yard from the road, and one day we stopped for a better look. She stood near Sandy, who was gardening; Sandy explained that Tess followed her everywhere. She encouraged our kids to stroke her feathers and big soft blue-red wattle, which evidently changed colors with the turkey’s mood. We noticed that Tess had a long, coarse beard–turkeys have so many interesting parts. Finally she suggested reaching down to touch the bald spot on Tess’s breast. It was a round patch, about four inches wide, where the feathers had not grown back, and what I’ll never forget was how warm Tess’s skin felt. It was pale and stippled with feather follicles like the skin of a Thanksgiving turkey, but otherwise it was completely different: it felt good to touch.

I suppose the story could end here, with a reflection on how Tess makes me feel bad to eat turkey. That’s true to some extent. But I love eating turkey, and it would be truer to say that Tess makes me appreciate my meal: behind the cold carcass that I cook was a creature that was warm already. I try to honor it by cooking it right.

*   *   *

The feel of Tess makes me think of something else that is both edible and unexpectedly warm.

In New York we often shop at the Fairway market’s Harlem location, at West 132th Street and the West Side Highway. This is a great place, chaotic and usually crowded, but eccentric and full of thousands of good things to eat. It has a famous produce section, a large “cold room” containing meat, fish, dairy, beer, etc. (and a wall of jackets on hooks you can borrow to wear in the cold room, if you didn’t bring one), a heavenly coffee section, a cheese counter, etc. Between the fresh bagels and the barrels of olives is a station where, all day long, one or two employees make fresh mozzarella cheese. It is sold in balls, salted or unsalted. As soon as a ball is ready, it is wrapped in plastic, slapped with a label, and placed on a tray in front of them, where customers can take it.

It’s so warm that the plastic wrap around it blows up slightly with air, balloon-style. Until my wife brought home the first ball of fresh mozzarella, I had no idea that cheese, like turkey skin, was ever warm. She unwrapped it, put it on the cutting board, and sliced a piece for me. As she did, a bit of milk seeped out. One slice was not nearly enough. I ate another piece, and another, and another. Refrigerating what’s left takes out a good deal of the glory of the cheese.

So here’s what to do next time you’re in that part of New York. Bring a small knife. Go to Fairway, buy the cheese and, say, a fresh baguette. Then take them outside—there’s a newish park next to the Hudson River. If it’s cold the cheese will warm you up; in any event it will cheer you. My son saw a big splash out there in the river one day when he was little and swore it was a whale. This is unlikely but it reminds us of an amazing fact: that the ocean is traversed by mammals, warmth where you least expect it.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the president of Dartmouth College, told me that Ophelia is “one of the great human beings walking the earth right now.” I thought she deserved her own piece of writing, and today I published it, as a Kindle Single. (That’s the amazon store, new this year, for pieces of writing that are longer than a typical article but shorter than a book.) It’s my first piece ever to have a digital debut. Please check it out–only 99¢!–and submit a review if you’re moved, as I was, by Ophelia’s story.

(You don’t need a Kindle to read this piece. Amazon also lets you read it on the web or on your computer, iPad, or other device.)

Last month the magazine did an update on Carmen, as well as on eight other people who were the subjects of iconic photos from the magazine’s past. Scott Thode, the photographer I worked with on the project, took a current photo of Carmen Mirach, now 28, in her Brooklyn apartment. An accompanying narrative, in Carmen’s words, brings readers up to date on her life. (See the slideshow and read about her here.)

I never expected Carmen to grow up pretty. She has had so much to contend with in life. But in Scott’s photo—again set at home, this one evidently comfortable, peaceful-looking— I think you’ll agree, she’s beautiful.

I know about the miles because he took a picture of the zeroes turning with his BlackBerry and sent it to me. I imagine he did that because the car used to be mine. It’s a 1995 Honda Accord EX wagon; my wife and I got it new. Rick took possession at 90,000-some miles, and drove it home to North Carolina. And has driven it and driven it and driven it since.

He told me that a bit of leaking oil is the car’s only real problem.

I admire him for this, in part the way I admire people like cab drivers on the West Bank who keep their old Mercedes wagons going and going and going–far beyond 200,000 miles, I would guess. I imagine that driving a car this long is a more “green” thing to do than driving a hybrid car, which I do. If I’d kept the Honda, the earth would have been spared the manufacture of my current car.

the wheels in motion

As people who drive a lot, we measure our lives in miles to some extent. Rick has had a lot of old cars. In fact, at his rehearsal dinner, I toasted him by remembering several, chief among them the AMC Gremlin. The Gremlin would not shift into reverse, and so Rick tried hard to avoid any situation that might require it, such as driveways and parallel parking–in fact, most parking–because to move the car backwards, he’d have to put it in neutral, climb out of the driver’s seat, and push it backwards while trying to steer.

But Rick’s ownership of the Accord is, to me, a measure of his constancy. We go back to college; he took the author photo of me for my book Coyotes. He keeps things a long time.

Am I the only one to have noticed the similarities between the Night Fury dragon and the CIA’s Predator drone aircraft? Drones, which have been deployed by the United States in northern Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya (and by Israel in Gaza), are the main weaponry we deploy against the Taliban and al Qaeda. A fascinating piece in today’s New York Times describes the spread of portable Raven drones—which soldiers launch by hand—and the ongoing efforts to make drones that are the size of small birds, or even insects.

Despite their technical sophistication, drones kill a lot of people unintentionally. According to a 2009 report from the Brookings Institute, in Pakistan about ten civilians die for every targeted militant; a recent study lists the total number of casualties there since 2004 as somewhere between 1,459 and 2,319.

Using cameras that beam detailed images to their operators, the drones hang in the sky far above a target, sometimes for hours. Apparently they are sometimes audible on the ground, if not visible; always, they are beyond the reach of low-tech weaponry. According to an article by Jane Mayer last year in the New Yorker, the drones’ operators are usually not in the Middle East at all but in cubicles back in Langley, Virginia. The technician who pushes the button that launches the missile is on the other side of the globe.

There is outrage and fear in the tribal areas that see the most drone attacks; the missile strikes have become a major point of contention between the United States and Pakistan. I’d been reading about this around the time I finally watched “How to Train Your Dragon.” And at the end, when the Vikings and their boy hero triumphantly demolish the Great Lair, my mind turned to this: somebody in South Asia or the Middle East is thinking very hard about that cubicle in Langley.

The journal’s title and mission come from blending the idea that literature is rightly about “finding the extraordinary in the common” with the notion of the town common as a place to gather and exchange ideas. Editor Jennifer Acker writes that they seek “a modern sense of place.”

That idea is close to my heart and I am delighted to have my meditation on an abandoned route in New Hampshire, Brown Road, appear as the first piece of the new issue. I’ll be reading from “Brown Road” at a launch event for The Common in Brooklyn on May 7 – drop by if you’re in the area.

It’s a huge loss, to journalism and to all of us. I thought “Restrepo” was deeply impressive but you don’t need to watch it to get a sense of the artistry of Tim Hetherington.

As I write this, his web site is still up. If you have just a little time, go there and look at some of his still photos. I think my favorites are the ones of sleeping soldiers. We’re all used to images of soldiers in action. To see them asleep, in these photos, is to see them disarmed, as people. (To view these, click on any of the row of dots that is second from the bottom.)

Here are two posts from New York Magazine about Hetherington’s death, and the wake held at Junger’s bar.

The separation of Ralston from his arm is a grisly, existential nightmare that I might not have chosen to see had the movie not gotten good reviews — and had I not written about outdoor adventure and death in my book, Whiteout: Lost in Aspen. My chapter, “The Chances You Take,” opens with my friend, Seth, returning home one lovely summer day to inform me that his hiking partner, the physicist Heinz Pagels, has fallen near the summit of 14,018-foot Pyramid Peak. The rescue team is assembling and he is to return in two hours; I drive him.

Heinz, tragically, died in the accident. So do six-to-eight other people pursuing outdoor recreation every year around Aspen, mostly young men. These are not the sort of guys who wait all week to watch a weekend ball game or tennis match on TV—they are after non-vicarious experience. The county coroner told me that Aspen’s was “a weird population—the percentage of death from fatal injury to illness is skewed.” In other words, more die while pursuing risky outdoor sports than would in a more ordinary kind of town.

oops

One of them was nearly Aron Ralston, who worked not in a city, as the movie suggests, but at an Aspen sporting goods shop called The Ute Mountaineer. I read his memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, when it came out in 2004—another reason I thought I should see the movie.

I wish I hadn’t. Boyle’s “Trainspotting” had horrific scenes of heroin addicts going cold turkey, and I’m one of the few people I know who didn’t make it through “Slumdog Millionaire”—the scene of the orphan being blinded by his handler was the last one I could watch. I had to look away once James Franco began to self-mutilate in earnest, but it was kind of interesting to see how many of my fellow theater-goers did the same, while others stayed glued to the screen (including the two elementary school-aged boys near the front with their dad).

I wasn’t the worst, though. Right after Franco had said goodbye to ulna and radius, just when I thought it was safe to turn back toward the screen, we heard strange gurgling sounds and the young man seated directly in front of us stood up and said, “Help! Help me!” We looked: the woman next to him was arched backward over the armrest, having convulsions. I stood up and called out, “Is there a doctor here?” Nobody replied. The movie played on. I called 911. A few minutes later, the projectionist finally stopped the movie.

While a couple of people tended to the victim and everyone waited for the paramedics, a patron a few seats away Googled “127 hours seizures fainting” on her iPhone. “Hey,” she said. “This has happened to a lot of other people!”

So what do we call a film about self-injury that itself causes injury?