Resurveying the West
Every year the New York-based photographer Victoria Sambunaris takes extended road trips across America with a large-format 5×7 view camera. Although by now she has photographed nearly every part of the country, she devotes special attention to the West, focusing not only on the easy natural splendors but also on resource extraction and the vast infrastructure and transit networks that have enabled restless national expansion. In the portfolios that result, an image of an enormous strip mine might be followed by a spectacular view of a light-filled canyon and then a panorama of a truck yard filled with multi-colored shipping containers. The photographs evoke a sense of wonder at the scale of the landscape and an ambivalent awe at the scope of our presence in it.
Victoria Sambunaris is one of the few photographers that seems to share my love of the American West.
Not the capital-B Beautiful parts of it — the Yosemites, the Yellowstones, the Redwoods — but the "flyover" West. Interstitial Wyoming, middling Montana, eastern Oregon. The scale and scope of the American West is unlike anything else, if only for our species' ability to imprint itself onto land at sheer scale. Strip mines, earthen dams, river diversions, nuclear testing facilities, irrigation canals.
Leave behind the cities and you begin to see another side of human nature laid bare. It's deeply unsettling, but it's honest.
An Idyll on the Shores of a Toxic Lake
…people who live in Bombay Beach stay because the town offers a tight-knit community in the midst of catastrophe. Though its residents contend with environmental adversity on a daily basis, they’re also demonstrating how to navigate the uncertain future we all face — neglect, the fight for scarce resources, destruction of home, the feeling of having no place to go. They are an example of how people can survive wild climate frontiers together.
Bombay Beach. Butte. The San Luis Valley. Rock Springs. Where they go, so go we all.
When I'm free of the constraints of every day life, when I no longer work in regular intervals (or when traveling, work at all), the emotions come in fast and loose.
I find myself in a small mountain resort town, one I last visited when I was six or seven on a family vacation. Walking my dog downtown, I'm struck by how bland, how uninteresting, how similar this place is to other resort towns: Steamboat, Hood River, Jackson, Bend. Boutiques that cater to rich white women, "local artist" co-ops selling overpriced art, seven dollar lattes. Wealthy, attractive people walking around town, browsing the shops in their Patagonia and North Face, talking of the latest run on the mountain or their investment accounts. There's a palpable insulation here — news of the larger world rarely makes waves in towns like this, unless said news affects the stock markets.
At the end of a long day, I'm in a dirty motel room, bathed in sickening white LED light from the nightstand lamp, reading a book about a remote Colorado valley, where people live on five-acre tracts of barren land in trailers and shacks and sheds, just thankful to be left alone. On the balcony above my room, a woman hangs over the edge, ashing her cigarette onto the hood of my car. She must live here. A few nights ago, at a motel in a middling city in the center of the country, I rented a $35 room for the night and was put in the middle of several families, all living out of their rooms. Late at night, the noise of an argument down the mezzanine woke me up. A few hours later, the muffled pops of gunshots in the distance, several blocks from where I slept. I woke up to the sound of a kid learning to ride his bike in the hallway.
When I'm out America-ing, I often think back to my hometown, to the people I knew as a child. I wonder what they'd think of this place. I wonder how I'd describe it to them, to someone that hasn't left Indiana. There American West doesn't translate well to someone from the heartland, and I think I prefer it that way. Some days, I feel as though I accomplished something just by making a life out here, as if it imbued me with some sort of unique understanding of human nature. I think of people back in the corn and soy fields of the Midwest, no mountains or public land in sight, and wonder about their lives.
And I look around at mine. What, exactly, am I trying to find out here?
An answer? To what question?
Family Dollar to close almost 1,000 stores
The parent company of Family Dollar said it would close approximately 1,000 stores, citing market conditions, store performance and other factors.
Dollar Tree, which has owned Family Dollar since 2015, said Wednesday that 600 Family Dollar stores would close in the first half of 2024, with another 370 locations closing over the next several years.
The husks of these stores will become a new hallmark of rural America.
Train Robbery for Amazon Packages? More Common Than You Think.
The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots. Cases of reported cargo theft in the United States have nearly doubled since 2019, according to CargoNet, a theft-focused subsidiary of Verisk, a multinational company that analyzes business risks, primarily for the insurance sector. On CargoNet’s map of cargo-theft hot spots, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta and Memphis show up as distinct, high-incident red blobs. But the biggest blob, a red oblong smear, stretches out over the Los Angeles valley like molten lava.
That photo is really quite something…
Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas
Such is the power of the Sphere; at the exact moment you ask yourself What exactly are we all doing here?, the building morphs into a Dali-esque rendering of Elvis, your brain floods with dopamine, and you lose your critical faculties.
And what an excellent title.
The Most Detailed Map of the Tetons Ever Made
With a source image over 100,000 pixels wide and using hundreds of gigabytes of data, we’ve created the most detailed relief map of the Teton Range ever made.
Anatomy of a Random, Unhinged Assault in Portland, City of Professed Benevolence
The question of what constitutes humanity is at the heart of Constantino’s attack and the tensions in Portland, a city buckling under the weight of its ostensible benevolence. Few U.S. cities have offered as fertile an environment for drug addiction and homelessness to take root, via hands-off policies and the idea that a moral society is a tolerant society – all of which might have stood a fighting chance, had the riots and violence of 2020 not kneecapped a city already struggling under COVID.
I voted, in 2020, for Measure 110, the ballot measure decriminalizing the possession of many controlled substances, i.e. drugs, below a certain amount. When I did, I was thinking of my experience with drugs like mushrooms, molly, marijuana, all of which I’ve used and enjoyed. (And not just recreationally — having suffered in the past from severe, debilitating, and suicidal Depression, these drugs have helped me immeasurably. It’s not an understatement to say I owe them my life.)
But slowly, over the last few years, I’ve come to regret my vote. I did not understand the potency of these new synthetic drugs like fentanyl, sent in from China via Mexico.
I voted as I did in hopes that people with mental illness would not be jailed. I still feel this way. But I recognize it’s not compassionate to leave people on the streets either, left in the grip their addiction.
To leave someone to their addictions is not compassion. It is at times necessary, but it is not love.
6.6 DOE Test Area North, INEEL, Idaho – Remediation Management of Complex Sites
From 1950 to 1972, all liquid waste streams generated at TAN were introduced directly into the basalt aquifer (Snake River Plain Aquifer), approximately 200–300 feet below ground surface, through injection wells. Waste streams included low-level radioactive wastewater, industrial wastewater (including organic liquids), and sanitary sewage. Historical records provide little information on the types and volumes of organic wastes injected into the groundwater; estimates of total TCE injection range from 350 to 35,000 gallons. The direct result of these injection activities was a two-mile trichloroethene (TCE, C2HCl3) plume at concentrations >20,000 µg/L.
Whoa.
America Is Draining Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow
Oklahoma is working to determine how much water remains in its aquifers, information that state lawmakers could use to set limits on pumping. But Christopher Neel, the head of water rights for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, said people might not necessarily welcome the government telling them that their land is running out of groundwater.
“If we start showing that kind of data, that kind of goes into your property values,” Mr. Neel said. “If we show an area may be depleted in, let’s say, two years, well, if someone tries to sell that property, they’re not going to be able to.”
Rare to find human nature this blatantly on display.
Isn’t this the problem with humans? We are so concerned with our immediate present that we lose all sight of a not-so-long-term future. We feel entitled to what we have right now and we will do anything to justify keeping it, even when reality shows it to be impossible.
Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89
With an eye for the darker side of human nature, his novels remain some of my favorite.
What Happens After the Worst Happens?
Stories in nature are once-upon-a-time stories, with slow, winding plots and surprise twists that evolve in the telling and are never finished. Once upon a time, Mount St. Helens came as close as a mountain can get to earthly perfection. And then the worst happened. But the land never stopped telling its stories. Fortunately, there were people on the ground who knew how to listen, who could make sense of what they heard, who pondered its implications and understood that they were entrusted with knowledge of the most miraculous kind. They’ve been writing the sequel to the eruption for nearly four decades now and counting — trying to answer that crucial question, What happens after the worst happens?
Will a Dollar General Ruin a Rural Crossroads?
Some say they recognize that the county needs tax revenue. “But are we going to sell our soul for anything that comes along?” said Bobby Conner, who grew up in Ebony and now works on tourism initiatives for Brunswick County.
Welcome to America, where everything is for sale.
