Smithsonian - 05.2021

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James Turrell’s mind-boggling artwork

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Vol. 52 | No. 02 May 2021
features
C OV E R : A RT WO R K ©JA M ES T U R R E L L , P H OTO G R A P H BY M I C H E L L E G R OS KO P F; T H I S PAG E : D O M I N I C B R AC C O I I ; G R A N T C O R N E T T / N M A A H C, G I F T O F G I N A R. M CV E Y, G R A N D DAU G H T E R ( D E TA I L)
32
The Light Fantastic
58
The End of the Trail
An exclusive look into Our correspondent
Roden Crater, a momen- heads to Oregon and
tous artwork by James encounters misty for-
Turrell that captures ests, glacial meadows,
celestial energy in an underground ghost
tunnels and chambers town—and amazing
carved into a volcano in new food. Turnip leaf
the Arizona desert and wild nettle pistou,
Photographs by anyone?
Michelle Groskopf by Tony Perrottet
Text by Wil S. Hylton
44 72
Silence Speaks
Where the A motorcycle show in
Monarchs Go Russia. Protesters on
Their wondrous migra- the street in the USA.
tion is at risk, but mil- A barnacle-studded
lions of butterflies still whale’s fluke near
reach their winter home Antarctica. The winners
south of the border of Smithsonian’s 18th
Photographs by Annual Photo Contest
Dominic Bracco II document the strangest
Using a navigational system that scientists are just
Text by Joshua beginning to decode, monarchs alight on conifers in a year in memory
Hammer protected mountain biosphere reserve in Mexico. by Meilan Solly
50
The Making
30 Crossword: Our monthly
puzzle
28
of a Mom prologue
A new coterie of re-
searchers is discovering 06 Discussion
13 American Icon: The Peace 08 Institutional Knowledge
how fetal DNA and
Corps at 60 by Lonnie G. Bunch III
newborn babies affect
mothers in startling • Charity begins at home 88 Ask Smithsonian
ways, sometimes even 16 Art: The Rosenwald Schools You’ve got questions.
by saving their lives 18 Travel: Roget, word collector We’ve got experts
by Abigail Tucker • Early synonym finders
TO OUR READERS
26 Origins: Stop the presses! In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, our offices have been closed for a year, and
Cover: The Oculus, in The AP is turning 175 each member of the editorial, production and business staffs has been working
Turrell’s Roden Crater, has from home. So have the journalists, artists and experts we collaborate with
a stairway to the heavens. 28 National Treasure: around the world. Trying times, as you know. Yet it’s such a privilege to produce
By Michelle Groskopf. Harlem Hellfighter’s medal Smithsonian, now in its 52nd year. Thank you for your support. —The Editors
May 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 3

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4 SMITHSONIAN | May 2021

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discussion
MAGAZINE
TWITTER: @SmithsonianMag
INSTAGRAM: @smithsonianmagazine
FACEBOOK: smithsonianmagazine
perpetuated by white supremacy culture. We need to

better understand how we got to where we are today
in order to become a society that values and treats
each person with equity and justice.
— Suzanne Munro | Portland, Oregon
Many of us Oklahomans have wondered how we

could have lived here so long and never heard about
the Tulsa Massacre. Your riveting cover article
solved the mystery for me. This was calculated, sys-
tematic state-sponsored terrorism that succeeded in
silencing a whole community of people, who feared
for their lives. Thank you for bringing this history to
“This was calculated, our awareness. I pray that as many of the survivors
and their families as possible will tell their stories,
systemic state-sponsored that we will listen with respect and compassion and
that they will experience healing.
terrorism.” — Terry Fife | Oklahoma City
A Comeback for Wolves

Richard Grant and Morgan Heim (“The Wolf That
Discovered the Golden State”) brought understand-
Remembering Tulsa ing and hope to the plight of these intelligent crea-
Reading the article about the 1921 Tulsa Race Mas- tures, which struggle to find mates, raise their young
sacre (“American Terror”), I felt an incredibly deep and survive. We must help them.
sadness, rage of epic proportions, and, quite honest- — Johanna Dordick | Moorpark, California
ly, bewilderment. In 100 years, much has changed,
but so much has remained the same. Black people, Sounds of the Sea
my people, are still fighting to catch their breath, to What a fascinating, little-known world (“Listening to
live in peace without fear of being murdered at the the Fishes”). Kudos to the Navy for hiring a female
hands of those who simply refuse to see their human- scientist. They certainly made the right pick.
ity. Thank you for such a thorough documentation of — John R. Selser | Clinton, Tennessee
this often overlooked piece of American history. It
is my hope that it sparks a conversation that culmi- Birds of a Feather
nates in empathy. America needs a heavy dose. Rosalie Edge took her love for birds (“How Mrs. Edge
— Melissa Alexander | Atlanta Saved the Birds”) to the level we should all be at
when it comes to protecting our environment.
I was mesmerized, saddened and enraged by the his- — Lydia Krohmer | Thompson, Ohio
torical realities described in “The Promise of Okla-
homa.” Thank you for bringing this chapter of Amer- Corrections: A photo caption in “Game On” (April 2021)
misstated Spike Lee’s birthplace. He was born in Atlanta.
ican history to your readers. It is vital to our un-
derstanding of ourselves as a nation to learn of our In “Cuba Confidential” (March 2021), a photo caption on
Page 65 misidentified a large computer at the National
past and acknowledge the deeply harmful injustices Security Agency. It was an IBM system from the 1970s.
Send letters to [email protected] or to Letters, Smithsonian, MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013.
C O N TA C T Include a telephone number and address. Letters may be edited for clarity or space. Because of the high volume of
US mail we receive, we cannot respond to all letters. Send queries about the Smithsonian Institution to [email protected] or to
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institutional knowledge
LONNIE G. BUNCH III, SECRETARY
the depth, breadth and vigor of Smithsonian re-

search. Even before the pandemic, the Smithsonian
Conservation Biology Institute’s Global Health Pro-
gram was working to identify zoonotic pathogens
with pandemic potential before they could spill over
into the human population. Researchers have iden-
tified more than 1,000 novel mammalian viruses,
including more than 150 coronaviruses. Smithso-
nian data is being used to understand and charac-
terize the Covid-19 virus.
The Global Health Program is one of many efforts
to expand our knowledge of Covid-19. Just as vital is
the Smithsonian’s responsibility to transmit this in-
formation, providing clarity and helpful guidance to
our audiences. That’s why I am deeply proud of the
The Power of Research way Smithsonian units are collaborating to help ed-
ucate and inform. For instance, in partnership with
WE CAN ACCOMPLISH MORE WHEN WE UNITE the World Health Organization, the Smithsonian Sci-
OUR ROBUST SCIENTIFIC CAPABILITIES
WITH OUR EDUCATIONAL REACH ence Education Center last year launched “Covid-19!
How Can I Protect Myself and Others?” Intended for
audiences ages 8 to 17, this guide helps young people
understand the virus and take steps to protect them-
R OS H A N PAT E L / N AT I O N A L ZO O ; I L LU ST R AT I O N S O U R C E : M I C H A E L BA R N ES / S M I T H S O N I A N I N ST I T U T I O N A R C H I V ES
selves, their families and their communities.
ARLIER THIS YEAR, when leading Making research actionable and disseminating
E infectious disease doctor Anthony information to those who can use it—these tradi-
Fauci entrusted his personal coro- tional Smithsonian strengths were never more evi-
navirus model to the Smithsonian, I dent than during the past year. To put it simply, we
was doubly thrilled. To me, this gift accomplish more when we unite our robust scien-
was more than an acknowledgment tific capabilities with our educational reach and the
of our role as the keeper of national history. It was trust we have earned as guardians of the nation’s
also a reminder of vital but often underappreciated cultural and historical identity. As we begin build-
aspects of our work: scientific research, application ing a post-pandemic future for the Institution, our
and education. communities and our nation, Smithsonian research
Though it tends to draw less public attention than should be foundational to those efforts.
our museum exhibitions, re-
search is the engine that pro-
pels the Smithsonian forward.
It drives our exhibitions and
guides our educational ef-
forts. Whether we’re studying
the long-term effects of cli-
mate change, measuring the
impacts of Covid-19 or gaz-
In Myanmar, ing up into the solar system,
a scientist with
Smithsonian’s Smithsonian research chang-
Global Health es the way we understand our
Program exam-
ines the world’s place in the world.
smallest mam- Again and again, the past
mal, a bumble-
bee bat. year has impressed upon me
8 SMITHSONIAN | May 2021 Portrait illustration by Jurell Cayetano

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unforgettable
HOSPITALITY
In Charleston history and hospitality are our cultural
heritage. They’re as much a part of who we are as the
American Revolution and our revered restaurants. It’s time
to immerse yourself in our rich history, breathe in the salt
air, and discover a place where you are always welcome.
POWDER MAGAZINE
South Carolina’s oldest government building, it was used as
an arsenal from 1713 - 1748 and again during the American
Revolution to store gunpowder for the defense of the city.
MILES BREWTON HOUSE

Constructed from 1765 to 1769, the house is a perfect
example of a Georgian-style Charleston double house.
During the Revolutionary War, it served as the headquarters
for British General Sir Henry Clinton.
MARION SQUARE
Site of American fortifications during the Siege of
Charleston (March 29 - May 12, 1780), a major victory
for the British Army during the Southern Campaign of the
Revolutionary War. Despite this defeat militia commanders
including Francis Marion, the legendary Swamp Fox,
continued to harass the British utilizing guerrilla tactics.
CHARLES PINCKNEY NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

Often regarded as a forgotten founder of the United States,
Charles Pinckney (1757-1824) was a signer of the United
States Constitution and served four terms as Governor of
South Carolina. He was captured when Charleston fell to
the British in 1780 and was held as a prisoner until 1781.
E X P LO R E C H A R L E S TO N . C O M
Encounter history at every turn.
EXPLORECHARLESTON.COM
EDISON
LABORATORY
PORT BOCA
GRANDE
LIGHTHOUSE
I t’s the feeling of warm sand beneath your toes, and the visual feast that is
the turquoise green of the ocean meeting the blue of the sky. It’s the taste of
fresh seafood, locally caught and prepared, and the sound of birds in every
strips safely home, and the museum
established there explores stories of
the sea and stories of Gasparilla Island
color of the rainbow calling to each other as you explore their natural habitats. itself, including a collection of fossils and
shells dating back thousands of years.
The gentle rocking of the boat that ferries you across calm waters to enjoy
an afternoon at a historic estate where your only job is to enjoy the sunset. The Beaches of Fort Myers & Sanibel
is also home to rich histories on
Some call it an a-ha moment, but for visitors to The Beaches of Fort Myers display at local museums and in the
Τ¡àŎĮûĉń̀Įƍ ƄŌŗżĉńĮŁĉàńĮĢĩƍûƕńûƍĩàƍĢŗĉƄŗǌƍĩĉŌĮŎƕƍĉƳŗƕżƬàüàƍĮŗŎ local landscape—a set of historical
starts, letting you know that this is exactly where you’re supposed to be. ǏƄĩĮŎĢüàûĮŎƄƬĮƄĮûńĉûƳûŗàƍĉƬŗŁĉƍĩĉ
idyll of the early 1900s, while Mound
House, an active archaeological site,
NŎ̀«ĩŗŌàƄ*ăĮƄŗŎ̀ƭĩŗƄĉƄüĮĉŎƍĮǏü Myers. In 1906, advertising titan Barron
invites visitors to learn about the Calusa
research and experimentation paved Collier bought the 100-acre Useppa
people who called this area home nearly
the way for the gadgets and electric Island, which came with an 1890s inn
2,000 years ago.
cars of our modern era, was in search established for vacationers who wanted
of a break from Northeastern winters. to soak up the Florida sunshine during
Finding himself in Fort Myers, he quickly the winter months. The Collier Inn, as it’s The beauty of the Fort Myers area is
realized the special magic of the area, come to be known, has been restored that wherever you turn, there’s some-
and purchased 13 acres of land, upon to full turn-of-the-century splendor. thing that invites you to come a little
which he built a Queen Anne-style Reachable only by boat, the inn is home closer. It’s the quiet joy of leaving
estate that would become his winter to a restaurant serving fresh grouper behind the built world to pluck shells
residence for years to come. Today, sandwiches and classic cocktails. from the sand and catch the sun dipping
visitors to Fort Myers can meander And because no island is complete brilliantly beyond the Gulf of Mexico’s
through Edison’s botanical gardens, without a historic lighthouse, there’s waters. The Beaches of Fort Myers &
tracing the path he walked—often side Port Boca Grande Lighthouse on Sanibel is waiting for you to make your
by side with neighbor and friend Henry Gasparilla Island. Originally known discovery of a lifetime.
Ford—as he contemplated the endless as the Gasparilla Island Light
possibilities of science. Station, the structure is the oldest on
Of course, Edison wasn’t the only one the island. Since 1890, the lighthouse
who appreciated the charms of Fort has been guiding seafarers of all
PAT R I C K KO E L L E R / W EST M I C H I GA N G R A P H I C D ES I G N A R C H I V ES
By
A 1972 poster celebrating the Peace Corps’ tenth anniversary, designed by Patrick Koeller.
Miranda Moore
T H E PAST I S
volunteers
A moment of
Corps
Values
reckoning for the
nation’s globe-trotting
A M E R I CA N I C O N
prologue
May 2021 | SMITHSONIAN

13
prologue
A M E R I CA N I C O N
N MARCH 2020, AT THE START OF COVID-19 lock-

downs, as flights were grounded and people around
the world sheltered in place, 7,000-odd Peace Corps
volunteers serving in 61 nations came home to an
uncertain future. Many worried that the Peace Corps Budget cuts in the 1980s slashed the number of vol-
Peace Corps
might even have to shut down permanently. That volunteer Marya unteers to around 5,000, and the number has hov-
hasn’t happened, but the nation’s foremost global Cota-Wilson ered between 7,000 and 8,000 for the past ten years.
gives a garden-
volunteer organization has no volunteers in the field ing lesson in Volunteers go to every continent except Antarctica,
for the first time since its founding 60 years ago. Costa Rica in with nearly half today serving in sub-Saharan Africa.
the 1980s.
Practicing a uniquely American blend of idealism I joined the Peace Corps in 2009, and for 32
and realpolitik, the agency was conceived in Octo- months I worked with farmers, entrepreneurs and
ber 1960, when Senator John F. Kennedy made a 2 nonprofit leaders in Masindi, in western Uganda,
a.m. campaign speech at the University of Michi- teaching skills such as grant writing and business
gan at Ann Arbor. Kennedy, then running for presi- planning. But a Peace Corps volunteer’s activities ex-
dent, challenged 10,000 students assembled outside tend beyond the office or classroom. Sharing a meal
the Student Union to use their skills to help people of beans and ebitooke (steamed, mashed plantains),
around the globe—and spread Ameri- helping my 14-year-old host sister with
can goodwill along the way. One thou- her English homework and learning the
sand students responded by signing a correct way to chop fresh sugar cane
petition volunteering to serve abroad. OUR INCREASINGLY were considered vital to my Peace Corps
The emphasis on peace was earnest, INTERCONNECTED experience. So was showing my neigh-
but the backdrop for the new agency was WORLD DEMANDS bor how to make guacamole, watching
the Cold War. The Soviet Union, Kennedy GLOBAL SOLIDARITY, bootleg DVDs of Nigerian soap operas
noted, “had hundreds of men and wom- NOT CHARITY. with my host family and learning dance
en, scientists, physicists, teachers, engi- moves to the latest Ugandan pop music.
neers, doctors, and nurses . . . prepared My neighbor still sends me the occa-
to spend their lives abroad in the service sional WhatsApp message with links to
of world communism.” Kennedy established the music videos of our favorite songs, a joking reminder
Peace Corps on March 1, 1961, less than two months of how bad I was at the “Bread and Butter” dance.
into his presidency, and the first volunteers headed I found the work rewarding, not least when I
out in August—to Ghana. helped a farmers’ cooperative start producing seeds
Whether or not the Peace Corps managed to coun- for weather-resistant maize they could sell for high-
teract Soviet influence, it has sent nearly 250,000 er profit. But I also understand why there’s so much
Americans to serve in 142 countries around the talk among Peace Corps alumni questioning wheth-
world. The number of active volunteers peaked in er the agency’s paternalistic approach—rooted in
1966, when more than 15,000 served in 52 countries. Cold War animosities and developed long before the

internet and cellphones linked remote villages to of diversity among volunteers, who in recent years
cutting-edge knowledge systems—still makes sense. have been overwhelmingly white, female, young
“Our increasingly interconnected world demands and well educated. A more inclusive volunteer
global solidarity, not charity, to solve global prob- corps—with more volunteers from working-class
lems that transcend national borders,” Kul Chandra backgrounds and more volunteers of color—would
Gautam, former deputy director of Unicef, said last benefit host communities, who would gain access
summer in a speech to the National Peace Corps As- to a greater variety of knowledge and skills; it might
sociation. Gautam, who was taught by Peace Corps also improve America’s reputation overseas, as more
volunteers in his native Nepal starting when he was people in other nations would encounter the diversi-
in seventh grade, says it can be “a great organiza- ty that is such a source of U.S. strength.
tion,” but, like many others, he advocates a more Not that there’s a shortage of goodwill. Through
equal relationship between volunteers and their my work with the farmers’ cooperative, I met a
host communities—for instance, giving local com- seed salesman based in Kenya. After the salesman
munities a greater say in the work volunteers per- learned I was a Peace Corps volunteer, he didn’t
form, or maybe sending community members to the charge the farmers for the seeds he’d provided them,
States for education and training. Glenn Blumhorst, enough to plant several acres. I later asked him why,
president and chief executive officer of the Nation- and he said it was because, decades before, his high
al Peace Corps Association, agrees, saying the host school math teacher was a Peace Corps volunteer.
communities “must drive the work volunteers do.”
Another tradition the Peace Corps says it will up- WATCH a Smithsonian Folklife panel about the Peace
date before returning to the field next year is a lack Corps at 60 at Smithsonianmag.com/peace
Lending a Hand at Home

OVER A CENTURY AGO A FEW VISIONARIES LAUNCHED CHARITIES
THAT NOW COLLECT BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
By Ted Scheinman
UNLIKE THE PEACE CORPS, with its Cold War focus on foreign lands, these leading charities were launched to
solve problems at home, such as growing poverty and urban crowding, and were founded in the 19th century,
amid the moral and spiritual revival sometimes known as the Third Great Awakening. They remain potent
symbols of Americans’ generosity, collecting some $7.5 billion in donations in 2019.
1851 1880 1881 1887

AMERICAN YMCA SALVATION ARMY AMERICAN RED CROSS THE UNITED WAY
The sea captain Thomas Emigrating from England to After the Civil War, Clara Barton The United Way was conceived
Valentine Sullivan made waves Philadelphia in 1879 with her went to treat casualties in the in Colorado by a rabbi, a priest,
for surviving a shipwreck in Ant- parents at the age of 16, the Franco-Prussian War under two ministers and Frances
arctica and a pirate attack off precocious Eliza Shirley—fol- the International Committee Wisebart Jacobs, the daughter
the coast of Brazil. But his most lowing in the footsteps of the of the Red Cross. She then of Bavarian-Jewish immigrants,
lasting legacy came while doing idealistic preacher William founded the American Red who led the group for five
missionary work among the Booth, who had founded the Cross while lobbying the U.S. years. The Charity Organization
seamen of Boston. Inspired by a first Salvation Army in England government to ratify Geneva Society—it wasn’t called the
London-based group called the in 1865—used an abandoned Convention protections for United Way until 1970—raised
Young Men’s Christian Associa- factory to start the group that wounded soldiers, which it did more than $21,000 in its second
tion, founded in 1844, Sullivan would become the American the following year. The group year, over $581,000 in today’s
launched the first U.S. YMCA Salvation Army. Today, the provides 4.8 million meals and money. It remains the nation’s
in 1851. Today, there are 2,700 organization serves nearly collects four million blood largest charity, with $3.6 billion
YMCAs nationwide. 60 million meals a year. donations annually. in donations in 2020.
G E T T Y I M AG ES (5 )

prologue
A RT
Photographs by By
Andrew Feiler Amy Crawford
LESSONS LEARNED
A photographic
homage to a
momentous
education
experiment
Schoolbooks
used at Warfield
School, Mont-
gomery County,
Tennessee,
which operated
between 1922
and 1968.
A
CROSS THE SOUTH, some 500 modest build 4,978 new schoolhouses. “They fundamentally
Built in 1920,
structures still stand as monuments to an ex- this Rosen- changed the educational experience of African Amer-
traordinary partnership formed more than wald School in icans,” says photographer Andrew Feiler, whose new
Hertford County,
a century ago between Booker T. Washing- North Caroli- book, A Better Life for Their Children, documents 105
ton, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, and na, was later of the remaining buildings. Most closed soon after
acquired by the
philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the chief Pleasant Plains the Supreme Court ruled segregated schools uncon-
executive of Sears. Under Jim Crow, most schools Baptist Church stitutional, in 1954, but by that time they had already
and has served
available to African Americans were inadequate and as a communi- helped to educate the civil rights generation—among
underfunded. But between 1912 and 1937, the Ros- ty center and hundreds of thousands of alumni were Medgar Evers,
fellowship hall.
enwald Schools program helped black communities Maya Angelou and U.S. Representative John Lewis.

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prologue
T R AV E L
By Illustration by
Claudia Kalb Lucille Clerc
Roget
Gets the
Last Word
Long before compiling his
famed thesaurus, he had to
escape Napoleon’s dragnet
I N JANUARY 1802, Peter Mark Roget was an am-
bivalent young medical school graduate with
no clear path. He lacked the professional con-
nections that were crucial to a fledgling English
physician and was eager for a reprieve from a
life largely orchestrated by his widowed moth-
er, Catherine, and his uncle and surrogate fa-
ther, Samuel Romilly, who together had steered
him to study medicine.
Roget had spent the previous four years since his gradua-
tion taking additional courses and working odd jobs, even
volunteering in the spring of 1799 as a test subject at the Pneu-
matic Institution in Clifton, England, for a trial of the sedative
nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas. With no immedi-
ate professional path, he felt unsettled and despondent.

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prologue
T R AV E L
Romilly suggested a change of scen- Louvre and Notre-Dame Cathedral,

ery. Accordingly, he introduced his enjoyed afternoon strolls along the
nephew to John Philips, a wealthy Bois de Boulogne and attended the
cotton mill owner in Manchester, theater regularly. The actors, Na-
with the plan that Roget would chap- thaniel noted, were “superior to any
erone Philips’ teenage sons, Burton we have in London.”
and Nathaniel, who were about to Not all their verdicts were posi-
embark on a year-long trip to the con- tive. “I begin to like the cooking bet-
tinent to study French and prepare ter; yet I shall never take to the ‘Fri-
for a career in business. Roget had candeau,’ which is a terrible dish—
caught a big break—or so he thought. composed of beef, spinach oil and
The timing, it turns out, could not bacon,” Nathaniel wrote to his par-
have been worse, and so began a ents. Roget, for his part, bemoaned
telling adventure in the early life of the country’s apparent lack of hy-
a man now known worldwide for his giene. The pavement stones were
lexicography in his Thesaurus of En- “greasy and slippery,” he wrote, and
glish Words and Phrases, one of the the “men in general wear cocked
most influential reference books in hats, and are very dirty in their per-
the English language. sons; they wear large ear-rings, and
The French Revolutionary Wars, often allow the beard to descend
during which France declared war on from the ears under the chin.”
Great Britain in 1793, had been halt- For centuries, travel to France
ed by an armistice in the fall of 1801, had provided wealthy Brits with the
under the rise of Napoleon Bonapar- chance to pronounce judgments on
te. With a peace treaty set to be rati- their geopolitical rivals, escape from
fied in the northern French town of the damp fog of England and rev-
Amiens the following March, British el in the magnetic charms of Paris.
travelers were jamming the boats that plied the En- France in 1802 offered something new—the prospect
The painter Bar-
glish Channel, eager to set foot in Paris for the first on Antoine-Jean of seeing Napoleon, of whom “everybody wanted to
time in almost a decade. Gros captures catch a glimpse,” notes Jeremy Popkin, a historian at
Napoleon in
Roget and his two charges left London in February 1802—the year the University of Kentucky.
1802, a few weeks after Roget’s 23rd birthday. Their Roget and the Just weeks into their stay, Roget and the boys had
boys began their
journey followed many aspects of the traditional tour. their first chance to see the great man, at the Tuil-
Grand Tour, a rite of passage for young British aristo- eries Palace in early March. “He is thin and of low
crats. Armed with letters of introduction, along with stature; his countenance, though meager and sallow,
a salary of £400 for Roget, plus money for expens- is extremely animated, his eyes black and piercing,
es, the travelers boarded a packet boat—a midsized his hair black and cropped, his dress remarkably
vessel carrying mail, freight and passengers—and plain,” Burton wrote. They saw him again on Easter
crossed from Dover to Calais. There, Roget hired Sunday, in a regal procession celebrating his resusci-
tation of the Catholic Church, which had been a tar-
get of antireligious policies during the Revolution.
“Bonaparte bowed in response to the applause of the
BONAPARTE BOWED TO POPULACE, populace. His carriage was drawn by eight superbly
HIS CARRIAGE DRAWN BY EIGHT decorated horses,” Nathaniel reported in April. “The
SUPERBLY DECORATED HORSES. great bell of Notre-Dame, which had been silent 10
years, was rung,” along with a 60-gun salute.
The toll of the Revolution became most evident
when the trio departed Paris for Geneva in May. En
a three-horse carriage, which transported them route, they surveyed the dilapidated 12th-century
B R I D G E M A N I M AG ES
through the northern French countryside to Paris. Palace of Fontainebleau. “It might formerly have been
The trio’s first three months in Paris were relative- well worth seeing, but it has suffered greatly from
ly uneventful. Roget enlisted a French tutor for the the fury of the mob; and now, stripped of its ancient
boys and took them on daily outings to the Museum honours, it stands a monument of the devastation
of Natural History to study science. They visited the wrought by the revolutionary storms,” Roget wrote.

prologue
T R AV E L
Geneva, by contrast, greeted Roget and the boys

with glorious vistas of the Alps and their first taste of
frog pâté. But here, almost a year into their blissful
tour, they found themselves trapped, amid a flare-up
of hostilities between Britain and France. An increas-
ingly imperious Bonaparte expanded his territorial
reach into northern Italy, northwest Germany, Hol-
land and Switzerland, thereby impinging on Britain’s
foreign trade. King George III lamented the French
ruler’s “restless disposition,” and on May 18—a little
more than one year after the armistice—Britain de-
clared war on France.
In retribution, Bonaparte issued a decree that all
British citizens in French territory over the age of 18
be held as prisoners of war—including those living
in Geneva, an independent city-state that Napoleon
had annexed. Roget was stunned. “The measure
was so unprecedented and so atrocious as to appear
destitute of all foundation,” he wrote. But Geneva’s
commandant, a man named Dupuch, made it clear
that English adults were under strict orders to sur-
render and be transported to Verdun, a small city in
northeast France, where they would be required to
find lodgings of their own, or else be put up in bar-
racks. Although British captives were not in literal
prisons—they even attended the theater and horse
races—they were denied many basic freedoms.
The Philips boys were too young to be subject to
Napoleon’s edict, but Roget was leery of sending icate as well as a regional official who could authen-
An 1803 satire of
them off alone. His first instinct was for the three of the brief peace ticate the father-son relationship. The official was
them to flee. But after taking a carriage to the out- between France playing boules at a club when Roget found him and
(the officer)
skirts of the city, they discovered that gendarmes and Britain (the did not want to be disturbed, but a financial incentive
woman). George
had been placed at every exit route to stop escapees. III and Napoleon changed his mind. “At length, by tickling the palm of
Retreating to their lodgings, Roget petitioned offi- face off in the his hand, he promised to be ready for me by 6 the next
background.
cials in Paris for exemptions as a medical doctor and morning,” Roget wrote.
a tutor of two teenage boys. These entreaties failed. On the 26th of July, with Genevese citizenship
Now deeply panicked about the safety of his charges, documents in hand, Roget hastened to Neuchâtel
Roget sent the boys over the border to the Swiss Con- and reunited with the boys. But their ordeal was
federacy—first to one of John Philips’ business as- hardly over. The passport Roget had obtained in
sociates in Lausanne, and then farther Geneva was invalid for further travel,
north to Neuchâtel—to await his arrival. and he needed new paperwork to jour-
In mid-July, Roget resorted to a final, ney north. Unable to obtain this paper-
desperate course of action: changing his IT IS IMPOSSIBLE work quickly, he and the boys simply
N I DAY P I CT U R E L I B R A RY / A L A M Y STO C K P H OTO
citizenship. His father, Jean, was a Ge- TO DESCRIBE THE made a run for it. Dressed in shabby
nevese citizen who had grown up in the RAPTURE WE FELT clothing, so as not to look like the tour-
city before moving to London as a young IN TREADING ON ists they were, they traveled through
adult, and had died of tuberculosis in FRIENDLY GROUND. obscure villages, avoided speaking En-
1783. On July 21, Dupuch, the comman- glish and, after bribing a French guard
dant, growing impatient with Roget’s in the border town of Brugg with a bot-
efforts to elude captivity, demanded that tle of wine, crossed the Rhine River by
Roget present Genevese papers by 7 a.m. the next day; ferry to unoccupied German soil. “It is impossible
otherwise, Roget would join his fellow countrymen to describe the rapture we felt in treading on friend-
who were being readied for Verdun. Somehow, Roget ly ground,” Roget wrote. “It was like awaking from
managed to track down Jean Roget’s baptismal certif- a horrid dream, or recovering from a nightmare.”

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prologue
T R AV E L
Back in England, Roget launched his career as a

physician and inventor in 1804 at the age of 25, going
on to lecture and publish extensively. In 1814, the year There’s a Word for That
Bonaparte abdicated as emperor, Roget published a LEXICOGRAPHERS COMPILED PRACTICAL—
paper about a logarithmic slide rule he had invented, AND WHIMSICAL—GUIDES TO SYNONYMS
CENTURIES BEFORE ROGET
earning him election as a fellow to the Royal Society
By Teddy Brokaw
of London at the age of 36. His most momentous work
was an exhaustive surveillance of physiology in the
vegetable and animal kingdoms, which composed
one of the celebrated eight Bridgewater Treatises, a
series of books published in the 1830s that considered
science in the context of theology.
In 1849, after retiring from medicine and science,
the 70-year-old turned to words, a passion that
harked back to his childhood, when he had filled a
notebook with English translations of Latin vocabu-
lary and then classified them into subject areas. Ro-
get’s early passion never dissipated: In his mid-20s,
during off hours, the young doctor compiled a list
of some 15,000 words—a “little collection,” he later
called it, that, although “scanty and imperfect,” had
helped him in his writing over the years.
Now a man of leisure, Roget unearthed his earli-
er compilation. One of Roget’s greatest gifts, his bi-
ographer D.L. Emblen writes, was a determination
“to bring about order in that which lacked it.” Over
the next three years in his Bloomsbury home, just
steps from leafy Russell Square, Roget assembled ISIDORE OF SEVILLE ETYMOLOGIAE, SIVE ORIGINES,
his words into six overarching categories, including C. 600-625
Synonymy—the concept of distinct words signifying the same thing—
“matter,” “intellect” and “volition.” Roget’s work was understood as far back as Ancient Greece, but the Archbishop of
Seville authored the earliest work modern readers might recognize as
echoed the organizational principles of Carl Linnae- a thesaurus. Writing in Latin, Isidore sought to help readers distinguish
us, the pioneering 18th-century taxonomist. Neither between easily confused words: “Drinking is nature, boozing is luxury.”
a dictionary nor simply a collection of similar words,
JOHN OF GARLAND SYNONYMA, C. 1225-1250
Roget had sorted and classified “all human knowl- This English grammarian’s work was one of the first attempts to teach
edge,” Emblen notes emphatically. budding orators to punch up their speech by using different words to
express the same idea. Organized alphabetically, like a modern the-
Although prior books of synonyms existed, none saurus, it was written entirely in Latin verse and meant to be committed
offered the depth or scope of the thesaurus that Rog- to memory. Garland encouraged orators to be attentive to context: A
barking canis might be man’s best friend, but a swimming canis would
et published in 1853, and for which he would become be a “sea-dog”—a shark.
a household word—a synonym for the source of all
ERASMUS COPIA, 1512
synonyms. Over the next 16 years, Roget oversaw The Dutch humanist’s book of Latin rhetoric went through nearly 100
more than two dozen additional editions and print- print runs. It would influence many future writers, including Shakespeare.
Erasmus delighted in showing how a sentence could be rephrased almost
ings—so many that the stereotype plates created for limitlessly. He demonstrated 150 ways to express “Your letter pleased me
the third volume in 1855 eventually wore out. mightily,” for example: “Your epistle afforded me no small joy.”
Genius is rooted in an incessant quest for knowl-
GABRIEL GIRARD LA JUSTESSE DE LA LANGUE FRANÇOISE,
edge and an imagination that transcends boundar- OU LES DIFFÉRENTES SIGNIFICATIONS DES MOTS QUI
ies. Roget’s early travels exposed him to foreign cul- PASSENT POUR SYNONYMES, 1718
The French abbot emphasized the distinctions between similar words
tures and new terrain; science gave him structure. in his synonymary: A man is “stupid” because he cannot learn, but
After his death on September 12, 1869, at the age of “ignorant” because he does not learn. His book was a runaway success,
inspired a wave of imitators and influenced Voltaire and Diderot.
90, Roget’s son John took up editorship of the the-
saurus. In an introduction to the 1879 edition, John HESTER PIOZZI BRITISH SYNONYMY, 1794
reported that his father had been working on an ex- The English writer produced the first original English work of synonymy
after seeing her Italian husband struggle with conversational English.
panded edition in the last years of his life, scribbling Despite her lexicographical prowess, Piozzi limited her book to the realm
words and phrases in the margins of an earlier ver- of “familiar talk.” Her Synonymy was reprinted several times, including
a heavily censored French edition published as Napoleon came to pow-
sion. His mind never stopped. er—and which was conspicuously missing its entry for “tyranny.”
Illustration by Margaret Kimball

prologue
ORIGINS
By
Amy Crawford
E Y E W I T N ES S TO H I S TO RY
A newsworthy birthday for a venerable
source of trusted reporting
I
N MAY 1846 , eager to get news
of the Mexican-American War
to his readers in the Northeast,
Moses Yale Beach, publisher of
the New York Sun, convinced
the leaders of four other New
York newspapers to invest in a network
of couriers on horseback who would
carry reporting from the front lines of
the war to Montgomery, Alabama. From
there, the correspondence would travel
via stagecoach to the southernmost U.S.
telegraph office, in Richmond, Virginia,
for transmission to New York. The com-
plicated scheme ensured that the five
newspapers were first to break war news.
Speedier transmission of information
was not the only innovation of the ser-
vice, which eventually became known as
the Associated Press. Unlike most Ameri-
A P P H OTO ; CA R PA C U BA N A , H E RT Z B E R G C I R C U S C O L L ECT I O N , W I T T E M U S E U M , SA N A N TO N I O, T E X AS
can news outlets at the time, the AP took
a firmly nonpartisan stance, providing
reports to Democratic- and Republican- One of the
AP’s legendary
aligned publications alike. “My dispatch- photographers
captured con-
es are merely dry matters of fact and de- struction workers
tail,” the first Washington bureau chief, lunching on a
steel beam atop
Lawrence Gobright, said in 1856. the 66-story
By then, the AP was a quasi-official RCA Building in
New York in Sep-
recorder of election results nationwide. tember 1932.
During the Civil War, its impressive net-
work of agents—with access to 50,000
miles of telegraph lines—regularly con-
The 1940 press
veyed battle results within a day. pass for an AP
The journalistic neutrality that the AP reporter named
Joe Abreu.
pioneered, and which became a model for
many other news organizations, strikes some com- every day. In an era of shrinking journalism budgets
mentators these days as quaint. They question wheth- and shuttered newsrooms, the organization still op-
er unbiased reporting is possible—or even desirable. erates 248 bureaus in 99 countries. Even in the Unit-
“Neutral objectivity trips over itself to find ways to ed States, an AP reporter is often the only journalist
avoid telling the truth,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning recovering a regional news event. Its best-selling Style-
porter Wesley Lowery declared in an op-ed last year. book, now in its 55th edition, still sits on the desks of
But the AP’s “dry dispatches” remain as vital as writers around the world, and the AP’s studied neu-
ever, 175 years after its founding. More than half the trality, even if an unreachable ideal, helps indicate
world’s population has access to news from the AP to readers where “the truth” might actually be.

prologue
N AT I O N A L T R E AS U R E
Profiles in
Courage
A salute to the bravery of
the Harlem Hellfighters
By Photograph by
Joe Williams Grant Cornett
THEY WERE THE LONGEST-SERVING

AMERICAN FRONT-LINE COMBAT
UNIT IN THE WAR.
N SEPTEMBER 29, 1918, Cpl. Lawrence Leslie McVey was

hunkered down in Séchault, a farming hamlet in north-
east France, engulfed in the Meuse-Argonne offensive—
one of the last and deadliest encounters in World War I.
Not far away, a crew of German soldiers unleashed
bursts of machine-gun fire, aiming at the trench oc-
cupied by McVey and other soldiers in the U.S. Army’s
369th Infantry Regiment, an African American unit
drawn mostly from New York City. Hot shrapnel from ex-
ploding shells fell like rain. Enemy biplanes roared overhead. The ground shud-
dered with the impact of incoming artillery.
McVey—a genial farm boy who’d found his way to Harlem from Flatonia, Tex-
as, at age 18 and was known as Mac—had orders to lead an attack on the German
machine-gun nest the following day and to neutralize it by any means, including
hand-to-hand combat. The odds were high he wouldn’t make it back.
The squadron had been formed as the 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York
National Guard in June 1916, after Harlem civic leaders lobbied New York Gov.
Charles Whitman to let black men prove themselves as soldiers. The unit was
commanded by Col. William Hayward, a white former officer in the Nebraska Na-
tional Guard. During training in South Carolina, the soldiers weathered Jim Crow
laws and racial slurs. When the United States entered the war, in 1917, Hayward
deployed with the unit to France, and the 15th was soon recommissioned as the Ar-
my’s 369th Infantry Regiment. The men were forbidden to associate or train with
white troops. Their initial duties included cooking and digging latrines.
In the spring of 1918, French and British armies, their front-line troops de-
G I F T O F G I N A R. M CV E Y, G R A N D DAU G H T E R
pleted, were desperate for American reinforcements. At Hayward’s urging, Gen.

John J. Pershing sent the 369th, but Pershing also tainted his directive to the
Allies with the racist observation that these soldiers were “inferior” to whites and
lacked “civic and professional conscience.” He also wrote that French civilians
should not fraternize with the African American troops, to avoid “spoiling” them.
Hayward, for his part, scorned the cynicism of Pershing’s decision. “Our great
CREDIT TK HERE
FROM THE
American general,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, ”simply put the black orphan
SMITHSONIAN
N AT I O N A L M U S E U M in a basket, set it on the doorstep of the French, pulled the bell, and went away.”
OF AFRICAN
A M E R I C A N H I S TO RY
After three weeks’ training, and outfitted with French rifles, the 369th was sent
A N D C U LT U R E into battle in April 1918, a month before any other American unit reached any

prologue
front in the war. Pvt. Henry Johnson and

Pvt. Neadham Roberts soon distinguished
Don’t Be Puzzled
themselves: As night sentries at a camp YOU CAN FIND SEVEN ANSWERS IN THESE PAGES
near the Argonne Forest, they repelled a By Sam Ezersky
German raid, though lightly armed and
badly outnumbered. Johnson single-hand- 1 2 3 4 5 4 5 6 7 8 9
edly rescued Roberts from capture.

But the regiment’s most significant con- 10 11 10 12
tribution came at Séchault, during the last
major Allied offensive. Just before sunrise 13 14
on September 30, McVey and his squad
took out the enemy machine gunners, and 12 15 16 17
the American Expeditionary Force parried
the German thrust—prelude to a series of
18 19 20
attacks that would effectively end the war.
McVey, who was seriously wounded,
21 22 23 24
was awarded the Croix de Guerre, France’s
highest military honor, as well as a Purple
Heart. France eventually gave the entire 25 26 27 28
unit the Croix de Guerre for bravery; the

369th is believed to be the first U.S. regi- 29 26 30 27 28 29
ment to be so honored.
They were the longest-serving front-line 31 32 33 34 35 36
American combat unit in the war, with 191
days in the French theater. Created in part 38
37
to refute racial stereotypes, the 369th never
surrendered a trench and fought so fero-
39 35 40
ciously they earned the nickname “Hell-
fighters”; whether the Germans or the U.S.
media coined the moniker is unknown.
Yet the Harlem Hellfighters, as they will
forever be known, returned home only Across Down
1 Image file format 1 Prez who established the
to face bigotry and prejudice, despite the 5 ___ to the teeth Peace Corps
victory parade down Fifth Avenue in New 10 With 16-Down, presences in a 2 Something you might click
mother’s body, long after birth to open
York that paid them tribute. McVey, aside 12 “In your face!” 3 Ride-share app info
from helping in his brother’s barbershop, 13 Another name for a jack 4 It goes “Bang!” in a courtroom
14 Patron saint of girls 5 Grp. for attorneys
worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, 15 Abbr. meaning “you get 6 Noted lexicographer who once
which typically employed black men as the idea” escaped capture in Geneva
17 Apiece under Napoleonic rule
porters or baggage handlers. He was beat- 7 Kind of butterfly in Mexico’s
18 Appraiser’s determination
en to death in a New York City park on Sep- 20 “T” on a test mountain reserve
21 Opposite of against 8 Pieces next to lenses on
tember 13, 1968. microscopes
22 Polite shorthand in a texted 9 One of Santa’s reindeer
McVey’s time in uniform is captured request
24 Breathing exercises? 11 Relent
in a black-and-white photo postcard of 16 See 10-Across
25 Donations to the needy
him, which he sent home while serving in 27 Bodies of water in Scotland 18 Locale for a decades-long
art project by James Turrell
France. The baby-faced corporal looks into 29 March Madness org. 19 Fleet groups
30 Place to get pampered
the camera, standing ramrod-straight in 21 Devoted followers, collectively
31 Pops 23 Absorb like a sponge
his dress uniform, his peaked service hat 33 Sinclair who wrote The
Jungle 26 Name that’s an anagram of
cocked over one eye, a large bolo knife fas- IDEAS
37 Sign of caution outside a studio 28 Pickled topping for a bagel
tened to his belt. On the photo, someone, 38 See 36-Down 32 150 are commemorated in
probably his wife, has written a single word 39 ___ Yale Beach, founder of a sesquicentennial: Abbr.
what became the Associated 34 Swimming/biking/running
in pencil: “Hero.” Press race, for short
40 Big name in crackers 35 First full mo. of fall
36 With 38-Across, people with
READ MORE about these brave warriors at ancestral homelands in the
Smithsonianmag.com/hellfighters See the solution on Page 84. Wallowa Mountains

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Light
The
Fantastic
IN THE ARIZONA DESERT, JAMES TURRELL IS CREATING ONE OF THE MOST
AMBITIOUS ARTWORKS IN AMERICAN HISTORY. HERE’S AN EXCLUSIVE LOOK
Turrell began
working on
Roden Crater
in 1974. Left,
the Alpha (East)
Tunnel leading
toward the Ocu-
lus—an opening
cut into the
crater’s floor.
Photographs by Text by
MICHELLE GROSKOPF W IL S. H Y LTON

I T WAS A CLOUDLESS day in north-
ern Arizona and James Turrell
wanted to show me an illusion.
We climbed into his pickup truck
and drove into the desert. After a
few miles, he turned off the pave-
ment to follow a dusty road; then
he turned off the road and barreled
across the desiccated landscape. When we reached the base of
a red volcano, he shifted into four-wheel-drive. “This is why I
got this vehicle,” he said, starting up the side.
The engine groaned and Turrell gripped the wheel with
two hands as we climbed. Here and there we lost traction and
slipped backward a few feet, but eventually we reached the
top. The desert stretched for miles around, a patchwork of
green and gold and brown, with the snowcapped peaks of the
San Francisco mountains on the horizon.
Turrell pointed down. “You see how the area right below us
seems to be the lowest point?” he asked. I followed his gaze,
and it was true: The desert appeared to slope toward us from
every direction, as if the volcano were sitting at the bottom
of an immense bowl. “But it can’t be,” Turrell said, “or we’d
be surrounded by water. This is an illusion that Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry talked about. You have to be between 500 and crew, black out the exterior windows, and build a new structure
600 feet above the terrain for it to happen.” inside—creating a labyrinth of halls and chambers, which he
Turrell paused to let the illusion sink in, then he restart- blasts with light in such a way that glowing shapes material-
ed the engine and continued across the summit. As we ap- ize. In some pieces, a ghostly cube will appear to hover in the
proached the far side, he said, “I’m going to drop over the middle distance. In others, a 14-foot wedge of green shimmers
edge,” and twisted the wheel sharply. The right side of the before your eyes. One series that Turrell calls “Ganzfelds” fills
truck slid off the summit while the left side remained on top. the room with a neon haze. To step inside is to feel as if you are
With the vehicle canted 30 degrees, I stared down the vertig- falling through a radioactive cloud. In another series, “Skyspac-
inous slope. Halfway to the bottom, a dozen cars and trucks es,” Turrell makes a hole in the roof of a building, then winnows
were parked on a narrow terrace, where a yellow backhoe was the edges around the opening to a sharp point. The sky above
piling soil around the mouth of a tunnel. Contractors in hard appears to flatten on the same plane as the rest of the ceiling,
hats and reflective vests streamed in and out of the opening. while supersaturated tones of light infuse the room below.
“Looking pretty good, isn’t it?” Turrell said. “And now, I want Turrell’s work can be found in 30 countries around the
to show you the Fumarole.” He tapped the gas and continued world. He has produced nearly 100 Skyspaces alone. Visitors
around the rim, with half the truck still dangling off the side.
TURRELL, WHO TURNS 78 THIS YEAR, has spent half a

century challenging the conventions of art. While most of his At home near Flagstaff, Turrell views plans
contemporaries work with paint, clay or stone, Turrell is a for the access road to the crater. Tight
contour lines near the center represent the
sculptor of light. He will arrive at a museum with a construction steep slope to the summit.

Moonrise and
Earth’s shadow
looking east
from the cra-
ter’s rim. The
red-and-black
volcanic cinder
cone, located in
Arizona’s Paint-
ed Desert, last
erupted around
900 years ago.
A L L A RT WO R K ©JA M ES T U R R E L L , P H OTO G R A P H S BY M I C H E L L E G R OS KO P F
can view them in Tasmania, Israel, China, Japan, all
across Europe, and in more than a dozen cities in
the United States. In 2010, Turrell built a pyramid
surrounded by pools of moving water in Canberra,
Australia. The next year, he completed another on
the Yucatán Peninsula. There is an 18,000-square-
foot museum devoted exclusively to his work in the
mountains of Argentina.
The volcano is different. It is Turrell’s most am-
bitious project, but also his most personal. He has
spent 45 years designing a series of tunnels and
chambers inside to capture celestial light. Yet Tur-
rell has rarely allowed anyone to visit the work in
progress. Known as Roden Crater, it stands 580 feet
tall and nearly two miles wide. One of the tunnels
that Turrell has completed is 854 feet long. When the
moon passes overhead, its light streams down the
tunnel, refracting through a six-foot-diameter lens
and projecting an image of the moon onto an eight-
foot-high disk of white marble below. The work is
built to align most perfectly during the Major Lunar
Standstill every 18.61 years. The next occurrence will
be in April 2025. To calculate the alignment, Turrell
worked closely with astronomers and astrophysi-
cists. Because the universe is expanding, he must
account for imperceptible changes in the geometry
of the galaxy. He has designed the tunnel, like oth-
er features of the crater, to be most precise in about
2,000 years. Turrell’s friends sometimes joke that’s
also when he’ll finish the project.
Born in California in 1943, Turrell was raised in the
Wilburite Quaker tradition, which rejects modernity
in a manner comparable to the Amish. Growing up,
he was frustrated by the prohibition on convenienc-
es such as the toaster and the zipper. He gravitated
toward his mother’s sister, Frances Hodges, who
worked for a fashion magazine in Manhattan. While
visiting Hodges as a teenager, Turrell discovered the
work of an artist named Thomas Wilfred at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art. He was enthralled by Wilfred’s
use of light as an artistic medium. As a student at
Pomona College, Turrell began making work of his
own. After graduation, he enrolled in art school at
the University of California, Irvine, but his studies
came to a stop in 1966, when he was arrested by the
FBI for teaching young men how to avoid the draft.
Turrell spent about a year in prison, where he
sought refuge by provoking guards to place him in
solitary confinement. Alone in the darkness, he
fixated on traces of light. By the time he returned
to California, he was more committed to his art than ever. In the late it. He hiked to the top, unrolled a sleeping bag and
1960s, he built his first installations while living in a derelict hotel in spent the night. Over the next three years, he leased
Santa Monica. In 1974, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and used the property, conducting surveys by day and sleep-
the money to fly around the West in a small plane, looking for a suitable ing in an octagonal house he built on-site. Then he
place to embark on a new project. He was heading east across Arizo- persuaded the Dia Art Foundation to buy the crater
na when he spotted a volcanic cinder cone in the distance. It was red and pay him a monthly stipend to develop it. In the
on top, with a charcoal-colored base, and he landed the plane beside years to come, he would buy the property through

a foundation of his own, scheduling exhibitions
around the country to generate funds each fall and The Painted Desert Bridge is designed to
appear as a natural extension of the land-
winter, then using the money to work on the crater scape. It will extend from the South Space,
an astronomical observatory, over a gulley
through spring and summer. In 1984, he received a to a helipad and a cluster of lodges.
MacArthur Fellowship—a “genius” grant—becom-
ing, along with Robert Irwin that same year, one of
the first two visual artists given the award. Thirty

Construction
near the South
Space. The
partially subter-
ranean structure
incorporates a
naked-eye tele-
scope modeled
in part on an
18th-century
instrument in
Jaipur, India.
The Fumarole
Space, built
inside the extinct
volcano’s sec-
ondary vent (the
primary vent is
in the sunken
crater on top),
will act as both a
radio telescope
and a camera
obscura.
The hemispher-
ical instrument
called the
Yantra contains
an Eyepiece,
which enables
observers inside
the South Space
to track celestial
bodies as they
rotate across the
night sky.

years later, President Barack Obama presented Turrell with the National Medal of
Arts in a ceremony at the White House.
I had gotten to know Turrell not long before, while writing about his work for the
New York Times Magazine. He was in the process of opening three simultaneous
exhibitions: at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Altogether, they occupied
more than 90,000 square feet, a breathtaking feat of creative productivity. A few
weeks after the article appeared, Turrell called my cellphone. I had been wondering
what he thought of the story, but he did not mention it. Instead, he asked if I wanted
to join him for a sail on the Chesapeake Bay. He was staying with his wife, the artist
Kyung-Lim Lee Turrell, in their house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, so I drove
from my home in Baltimore, and we spent a day on the water. A couple of weeks
later, Turrell called to invite me on a longer sail; then he invited me to help crew his
schooner in a race; soon we were spending days together at sea—charging south to
Norfolk, Virginia, or north to Marblehead, Massachusetts.
One thing I came to understand about Turrell was that, deep in his marrow, the
crater was not just a vision but a kind of duty. The decades of struggle to gather
funds, perfect the design and continue work on the project were culminating in the
twilight of his life with a painful recognition that time was running out. Turrell had
completed the first major phase of construction in the early 2000s, but a decade lat-
er, his progress was slowing, and the remaining work seemed like more than a man
in his 70s could expect to complete. He had, reluctantly, shifted his focus to draft-
ing meticulous blueprints for the crater, so that if he did not complete it, someone
else could. But there was little peace in that. He seemed to be torn between the
forces of obsession and mortality.
That began to change a few years ago, when Turrell got a call from Kanye West.
Like countless others, West wanted to visit the crater. But for reasons even Turrell
cannot explain, he agreed to give West a private tour. Late one night, they wandered
for hours through the underground chambers, staring at the stars and basking in
ethereal light. Afterward, West offered to donate $10 million to the project, which
Visitors will
follow a path,
left, to a seat
beneath the
Eyepiece,
aligned to focus
on the North
Star. At right,
the exit leads
to an exterior
vantage above
the Yantra.
Turrell, who has received many more of-
fers than actual donations over the years,
regarded as a compliment, but little more.
Then the money appeared. West has con-
tinued to support Turrell’s work in the time
since—kicking the project into a higher
gear than ever before.
At about the same time, the president
of Arizona State University, Michael Crow,
presented Turrell with another proposal.
ASU was willing to raise money to help
finish the project and could serve as a long-
term operating partner. By spring 2019,
Turrell was in discussions with the uni-
versity on a framework of terms, and the
crater was buzzing with heavy machinery,
contractors and hope.
I FLEW OUT TO VISIT TURRELL at his stu-

dio in Flagstaff, and we flipped through
the pages of a thick notebook filled with
architectural designs. The broad strokes
had not changed dramatically since he
first envisioned the project. Turrell has al-
ways been determined to leave the exterior
of the volcano as close to its natural state
as possible, so only a small fraction of the
work will be visible on the surface. But the
spaces inside are far more elaborate than
Turrell has ever revealed in public, and
his vision for how the crater will be experi-
enced by visitors has evolved. Where once
he imagined an earthworks installation in
the desert to enchant artistic pilgrims, he
now has plans to open a hub for artists, as-
tronomers and tourists.
Turrell said the site will accommodate as
many as 100 day-trippers, who will arrive
by shuttle to an amphitheater at the base of the west- brought to you, or you can have a cook come to your
The access road
ern side. But he is also preparing a whole ecosystem place and prepare it for you.” leading to the
of services to accommodate longer visits. Guests will be encouraged to wake before dawn South Space
and a group
He flipped to a page labeled “North Space Main and walk to an underground spa that is nestled into of lodges that
Level.” “This is where the overnighters will come,” an area known as the East Space. Inside, they will Turrell hopes will
become part of
he said. He pointed to a reception area, where vis- change into bathing suits, step into a small pool, a hub for artists
itors will check in before proceeding to one of 32 and swim through an underwater passage to a larger and astrono-
mers as well as
lodges perched along the edges of the crater. pool. The eastern end of the larger pool is designed tourists.
“They will have the same quality of service and with an infinity edge that extends through the side
amenities as the $2,000-a-night Amangiri,” Turrell of the volcano, allowing swimmers to watch the des-
said, citing the luxury resort complex in the Utah ert sun rise over a watery horizon.
desert. He is in talks with Northern Arizona Uni- Afterward, they can climb an outdoor staircase to
Inside the Sun
versity’s School of Hotel and Restaurant Manage- an area known as the Fumarole Space. It is the most and Moon
ment to manage the facilities and provide meal op- complex installation at the crater, with three levels Chamber, a
six-foot-diame-
tions. “You can make your own meals, or have them of rooms and corridors. “It’s a Faraday cage,” Turrell ter lens projects
said, referring to a space that cannot be penetrat- an image of the
Los Angeles-based photographer Michelle moon onto the
Groskopf is represented by Paris Texas LA Gallery. ed by electromagnetic radiation. “The only energy eight-foot-high
BYLINES white marble
Wil S. Hylton, a contributing writer for the New coming in comes from the sky.” A Skyspace admits
York Times Magazine, lives in Baltimore. disk behind
light to a chamber with a C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 8 6 Turrell.

photographs by
Dominic Bracco II
...
text by
Joshua Hammer
Their relentless
migration covers
thousands
of miles. But
new threats are
jeopardizing this
ancient wonder
of nature research by
Alfonso Alonso
...

where
the
monarchs
go

PREVIOUS SPREAD
Butterflies in
Mexico’s mon-
arch reserve.
Their wings can
function as solar
panels, convert-
ing sunlight into
energy for flight.
A tattered male
.......
monarch. Its left

..
forward wing is
missing and its
.
..
..
orange scales
...
are damaged—
..
signs of possible
....
.
..
bird predation.
.
.
.
..
.
.. ......
...
.
.
..
..
..
.
..
.
.
..
..
. .
.. . .
O
.
NE OF NATURE’S MOST EXTRAORDINARY SPECTACLES unfolds in the 10,000-

foot-high conifer forests of Michoacán, Mexico. In mid-November, swirling
orange-and-black clouds appear in the skies above the Monarch Butterfly Bio-
sphere Reserve, a 139,019-acre sanctuary carved out of the Transvolcanic Belt by
the Mexican government in 2008. Millions of butterflies alight on oyamel firs, pines and junipers. As
the late-year temperatures dip toward freezing, the beautifully patterned insects fall into a sort of hi-
bernation, after their several-thousand-mile migration. “The area has the microclimate the monarchs
need to slowly consume their stored fat and stay alive,” says Alfonso Alonso, a conservation biologist
and butterfly expert at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute.
Only in the last couple of decades have scientists begun probing the central mystery of this aston-
ishing odyssey: How do monarchs find their way to a tiny patch of forest in Mexico? A breakthrough
came when researchers discovered that the butterflies possess a finely calibrated navigational sys-
tem. It consists of a light-sensitive “sun compass” embedded in their antennae that directs them due
south from their summer habitat in the eastern
and central United States and southern Canada,
and an internal clock that prevents straying off
course as the sun moves across the horizon. “We
still don’t understand how they find their pre-
cise way to the overwintering sites,” says Steven
Reppert, a retired neurobiologist at the Universi-
ty of Massachusetts.
One theory is the butterflies use natural bar-
riers—the Appalachian Mountains, the Rockies,
the Atlantic Ocean—to channel themselves from
north to south toward Michoacán, says Ryan
Norris, an ecologist at the University of Guelph,
in Ontario. He posits that monarchs—capable of
flying 85 miles in a day—may rely on olfactory
cues to reach the Mexico reserve.
Research by Norris suggests it may take three

Once sunbathing mon-
to four successive generations for monarchs to fly
north out of Mexico, as far as southern Canada, before
In Mexico,
archs reach a daytime
temperature of 53.6 de-
grees Fahrenheit, they
returning to the overwintering site the following year. the protected
His team captured monarchs from 17 states and two
head from their forest
perches to a stream in Canadian provinces, then tested their wings for atom- overwintering
search of water.
...
ic variations, or isotopes, of carbon and hydrogen, ac- sites were
quired from milkweed. Monarchs lay eggs on the flow-
ering plant and feed on its nectar, which also furnishes under siege
A male, right, toxins that make the insect unpalatable to predators.
attempts to
mate with a The researchers compared each butterfly’s carbon and
from illegal
female. The
monarch popula-
hydrogen isotope signature with isotope signatures of loggers.
tion in Mexico milkweed varieties in different parts of North America.
varies year to Thus they drew a map that traced the insects’ origins
year. An uptick
in numbers is and movements.
encouraging. “Monarchs don’t fly at night when they migrate; they
need to be warm, and need the sun to orient themselves,”

Arriving in
November,
monarchs form
colonies at high
elevations. They
move en masse
down to more
humid locations
as the dry sea-
son progresses.
...
Monarchs over-
winter in the dry
season, when
nectar-bear-
ing plants are
few. They are
adapted to rely
on fats stored
during migration
feeding.
Alonso says. Some fall victim to strong winds, ending up off course. “There have been reports of Monarchs cluster in sturdy
oyamel firs, which are
butterflies that get pushed into the Gulf of Mexico and try to land on oil rigs.” native to the mountains
The epic migration faces increasing threats, from pesticides to climate change. Warming tempera- of central Mexico and can
hold great quantities of
tures could be affecting cues that trigger the butterflies’ autumn and spring journeys. Also, farmers butterflies.
across the United States have been ripping up milkweed, which the butterflies depend on. In Mexico,
the protected overwintering sites were under siege from
illegal loggers, and a few avocado plantations have been
established in the buffer zone. Last January, Homero
Gómez González, manager of part of the biosphere re-
serve, who waged a vocal campaign to protect the land,
was found strangled to death and dumped in a well. A
tour guide was fatally stabbed days later; neither crime
has been solved or a motive definitively established.
Tensions are also rising on the border, near Mission,
Texas, where We Build the Wall, a privately funded anti-
immigration group, constructed a three-mile-long barri-
er along the river, destroying habitat containing plants
that migrating monarchs feed on. Marianna Wright,
executive director of the National Butterfly Center, in
Mission, which opposed the wall, had noticed a decline
in migratory populations even before construction. “We
could see the end of migration in my lifetime,” she says.
Monarch populations in Mexico have fluctuated
in the past decade, reaching the lowest level ever re-
corded in the states of Mexico and Michoacán in 2013
to 2014, when the butterflies occupied only about 1.66
acres. During the 2020-21 overwintering season, though,
monarchs covered 5.19 acres—an observation that some
experts and advocates see as cause for optimism. Re-
searchers estimate that 6.5 million to 8.1 million butter-
flies may occupy an acre of the reserve.
Few natural phenomena, Steven Reppert says, are
more “mesmerizing” than millions of monarchs in the
skies on their purposeful journey: “It’s a remarkable piece
of biology that we need to understand and preserve.”
Dominic Bracco II is a photographer based in Mexico

City who specializes in documenting life at the border.
BYLINES
Joshua Hammer, a frequent contributor, last wrote
for Smithsonian about Florence Nightingale.

THE
MAKING
OF A by Abigail Tucker
illustration by
Melinda Beck
photographs by
Dina Litovsky
MOMScientists are revealing how

a child can shape a mother’s
heart and mind—literally
“It feels like I grew a new heart.”

That’s what my best friend told me the day her About 50 percent spontaneously get better, the highest
daughter was born. Back then, I rolled my eyes at her rate of recovery from heart failure for any group. Some
new-mom corniness. But ten years and three kids of maternal hearts are practically as good as new in as lit-
my own later, Emily’s words drift back to me as I ride tle as two weeks. Adult heart tissue doesn’t rally easi-
a crammed elevator up to a laboratory in New York ly, but new mothers may somehow be able to regrow
City’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where cardiologists are heart cells the way salamanders sprout new tails.
probing the secrets of maternal hearts. At this Mount Sinai Hospital lab, a cardiologist
Every year, thousands of pregnant women and named Hina Chaudhry thinks she has figured out
just-delivered mothers land in emergency rooms with why. In tests involving lab mice, which were surgically
a life-threatening type of heart failure. Symptoms operated on to simulate a heart attack, she and her re-
include swollen neck veins and shortness of breath. search team discovered something astonishing: heart
Their hearts have a harder time pumping. The under- cells with DNA that doesn’t match the mother’s own.
lying cause of this “peripartum cardiomyopathy” is un- The mystery cells belong to unborn mice. During
clear, but it’s the kind of health disaster that, for other pregnancy the fetal mouse cells cross the placenta
people, can end in a heart transplant, or oblivion. into the mother’s body, joyriding through her blood
Yet fate has a different design for fledgling mothers. vessels until cardiac damage happens, at which point

they sense inflammation and make a beeline for her wounded
heart. The lab has even found that these cells, harvested from
mouse placentas, will travel to the damaged hearts of male
mice after being artificially implanted in their tails.
“They just zoom in,” says Chaudhry. “These cells home to
the heart like heat-seeking missiles.”
Multiplying in maternal chests, the fetal stem cells trans-
form into blood vessel-like tubes and, more significant, cells
that resemble full-fledged heart muscle cells, which cardiolo-
gists have struggled for decades to recreate in a lab. The moth-
er’s crippled organ likely uses this fresh tissue to heal.
It feels like I grew a new heart.
On a nearby computer screen, Chaudhry pulls up highly
magnified video footage of these fugitive fetal mouse cells in a
petri dish. Tagged with a green fluorescent protein, they look
like fresh peas in a dish of gray gravy.
She hits play, and the peas begin to pulse, to twitch. I squint.
Why on earth, I ask, are the fetal cells bopping around like that?
Chaudhry grins. “They’re beating.”
It’s not just hearts. A mother’s body is like her living room,
strewn with kid castoffs and debris. Scientists discover fetal
cells in the darnedest places. Our children colonize our lungs,
spleens, kidneys, thyroids, skin. Their cells embed in our bone
marrow and breasts.
Often they stay forever. Scientists find rogue fetal cells while
autopsying the cadavers of old women, whose babies are now
middle-aged. Long after giving birth, the bodies of surrogate
mothers are scattered with the genes of strangers’ progeny.
The phenomenon is called “fetal microchimerism”—“mi-
cro,” because these are typically teeny numbers of cells, only a
handful per millimeter of blood in pregnant women, and fewer
in moms later in life. A “chimera” is a type of awkward mytho-
logical Greek monster remixed from various familiar creatures.
On my computer screen I stare at statues of these ancient and cells” in research studies and mandated the inclusion of
freaks cast in bronze: goat legs, lion heart, dragon wings and female animal models, mothers occasionally included.
fire breath billowing out of one of three heads. That’s no mon- But more scholars, many of them young women, are taking the
ster, I think. That’s me most mornings. That’s a mom. time to actually investigate, and they’re discovering that mothers
are not so ordinary. In fact, we may be more intriguing and com-
plex than anybody imagined. And that’s what makes Chaudhry’s
A mother’s body is heart work so eye-catching. If you peer closely enough, mothers
often look very different from the rest of humankind.
like her living room,
strewn with kid T H E F I R S T T I M E I ever considered the hard science behind
the tender maternal instinct was during a visit for this maga-
castoffs and debris. zine to a famous vole laboratory at Atlanta’s Emory Universi-
ty. Larry Young, the lead researcher, told me how prairie voles’
unusual brain chemistry may enable them to form lifelong
Until pretty recently, few scientists, especially in cut- pair-bonds with their mates by recycling a much more basic
ting-edge fields like neuroscience, were curious about the and ancient mammalian system: the maternal circuitry that
inner happenings of the two billion or so human moms pa- mobilizes when a female becomes a mother.
trolling the planet today. Blame the historically macho scien- Though already expecting my second child at the time, I
tific establishment, if you must: Some thinkers trace this ne- had always thought—or maybe willed myself to believe—that
glect all the way back to Charles Darwin, who lost his mother motherhood was an elective lifestyle rather than a biological
when he was 8 and maybe couldn’t bear to think about us too predicament, one hat among many that I sometimes chose
much, poor guy. It wasn’t until 2014 that the National Insti- to wear, as opposed to my entire head and all its expensively
tutes of Health confessed its “over-reliance on male animals educated contents. But Young was describing motherhood

as an unseen and poorly understood cellular-level the first month of motherhood a woman is 23 times
Turning the lens
revolution that rebuilds the female brain. on women at more likely to have her first hospitalization for bipo-
In pregnancy, of course, our entire physical selves Mount Sinai. lar disorder than she is at any other time in her life.
From left, phy-
are in flux. Our moles may darken, our voices deepen sician-scientists These are all heavy hints that what’s transpiring
(as Kristen Bell’s did while recording Frozen, requir- Bingyan Wang, within our brains is just as extreme as our external
Hina Chaudhry,
ing her to go back after pregnancy and rerecord parts Sangeetha Va- makeover. Over the course of a few short months,
of the soundtrack in her normal girlish tones). Our dakke-Madathil our brains are abruptly renovated, causing us to re-
and Cherrie
noses swell, our arches flatten, and our toenails fall Sherman. Their interpret familiar stimuli—a stranger’s face, or the
off. Our hair can change color or gain curl. We may research began color red, or the smell of a tiny T-shirt—in freaky
with Chaudhry’s
burp as if we’ve swallowed a bomb cyclone. The bile close observa- new ways. Suddenly a child’s smile is our alpha and
in our livers can stop flowing, causing us to itch like tions of female omega. Our old systems of desire have been rewired.
patients, but the
the dickens. And we become demonstrably more de- cells her lab is The most striking change in motherhood isn’t about
studying have
licious to mosquitoes because of our increased body the potential to how we look on the outside. It’s about how we see.
temperature and carbon dioxide output. heal others, too.
And yet all of this turmoil pales in comparison to
what’s happening inside the maternal mind. Some T H I S B E C A M E C L E A R to me intuitively, as for
of the changes might be good news: One recent many mothers, the instant I laid eyes on my first
study of more than 14,000 women suggested that Equipment in child, and found myself bowled over by perfection—
women with three or more kids have a 12 percent Chaudhry’s lab her plentiful eyelashes, her barely there fingernails.
allows research-
lower risk of dementia. But many dangerous and ers to isolate But how can researchers recreate this primal epiph-
opaque mental problems hound mothers, espe- stem and cardiac any in a laboratory?
cells from heart
cially as they transition into the maternal mode. In tissue without Curiously, on the exalted subject of motherly love,
Adapted from Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal destroying studies of lowly lab rats often supply the best answers.
Instinct by Abigail Tucker. Copyright © 2021 by Abigail Tucker. Reprinted by the cells in the
permission of Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. process. Before having her first litter, a virginal rat doesn’t enjoy

the presence of pesky rat babies in the slightest. Like
my former self, a childless urbanite perhaps overly
fond of a bottomless mimosa brunch, the pre-mater-
nal rat will always choose eating snacks over hanging
out with rat pups. And gluttonous rat maidens may
happily nosh on the pups themselves.
This preference persists almost until the end of
pregnancy. But as she gets ready to give birth, some-
thing momentous happens inside the rat mom-to-
be. A rat mom will choose quality time with an in-
fant over a straight-up hit of cocaine. She will brave
an electric grid to reach pups, which a virgin rat
wouldn’t risk even for the most lavish cornucopia.
You can blind her, deafen her, muzzle her, disable
her nose, even burn off certain bits of her brain—
and scientists have done all of these things to rat
moms. They don’t waver in their devotion.
Researchers suspect
that oxytocin
readies our brains
for infant worship.
Clearly we can’t study the habits of human moms
by zapping them or ejecting babies from laboratory
chutes, the way scientists have done with rodents.
But there are other clever ways of testing just how
powerfully babies trigger mothers.
For instance, they’ve figured out how to peek into
our skulls to see what’s up when we inhale the fumes
of our babies’ little heads. In a 2013 smell-based ex-
periment, 30 women sniffed at a mystery item—a
newborn’s cotton undershirt—as scientists watched
their brains react via an fMRI scanner. The new moth-
ers showed significantly greater activity in an area called the thal- bies, who were being eyeballed by a strange male. The moms
amus, which regulates consciousness, sleep and alertness. showed activation in an area on the right side of the prefrontal
Baby faces, too, are extra-stimulating to moms. One 2014 ex- cortex while the women without children did not.
periment, entitled “Here’s Looking at You, Kid,” pitted the atten- All this suggests something already clear to veteran moms. Be-
tional processing of 29 first-time moms against 37 non-mothers as ing a mom isn’t as simple as riding high on baby fumes and vib-
they viewed pictures of disembodied heads of babies and adults ing off their button noses. As usual, pain accompanies pleasure.
floating against a black background. While both groups of wom- “Sensitization” is science’s word for our experience. It’s al-
en seemed to find the baby mug shots more engaging than the most as though our nerves extend out of our bodies. I think this
adults’ faces, the moms ogled the babies for measurably longer. is why mothers have a hard time watching movies or even TV
Perhaps most important, infant emotions move mothers pro- commercials involving suffering children. We feel it too deeply.
foundly. Our pupils dilate more when viewing distressed babies, It’s a little depressing to think of oneself as uniquely attuned
and we are slower to look away. Our scalps register different elec- to tears, but this perhaps explains why bawling babies on planes
trical readings at the sound of baby screams. make me feel like I’m being boiled alive, a peeled tomato rolling
Using a technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, Japa- across rough pavement. That’s maternal sensitivity for you.
nese scientists tracked how the oxygen levels of moms’ brains
changed as they viewed emotional baby pictures—of happy
babies, who had been playing with attractive toys, of enraged M A N Y S C I E N T I S T S B E L I E V E this sensitization involves
babies, from whom said toys were taken, and of fearful ba- oxytocin, a hormone made in the hypothalamus. “Oxytocin”

brain cells that produce light-sensitive reac-
tions. In this case, a blue light from a laser
shining into the mouse’s skull would stimu-
late a natural oxytocin rush. Marlin whisked
these genetically engineered mice off to the
lab’s studio-grade sound booth and implant-
ed brain probes to take readings from individ-
ual neurons. She broadcast pup distress calls,
but the virgins remained unmoved. Their
brains responded in a typically disinterested
manner, with a jaded spike here or there.
Then she blasted the blue light.
Oxytocin flooded the auditory cortex, as
it might in childbirth. Now when she played
the pup distress calls, the virgin brains began
to perk up, with more reactive spikes. With-
in three hours, the virgin readings matched
those of the mothers. Exposure to oxytocin
had somehow sensitized their neurons to
the cries. “That was a pretty amazing thing
to see over three hours,” says Marlin who, in
the midst of her oxytocin studies, became a
mother herself. “We replicated the birthing
process in a single neuron.”
It seems female mice brains are built to sop
up this oxytocin gush. Froemke’s researchers
have detected a unique surge in the number
of receptors in the auditory cortex of female
mice that are ready for mating (that is, about
2 months old). While this lab group is focused
on sound-related regions, the oxytocin re-
ceptor burst apparently occurs elsewhere,
too, perhaps in areas related to other sens-
es. It seems that some of the special neural
equipment to handle the chemical rush of
childbirth comes prefabricated.
Much less is known about the natural dis-
tribution of oxytocin receptors in human
brains. But the data we have suggests that
means “swift birth” because it gushes into the blood- oxytocin also modulates human maternal behavior,
Bianca Jones
stream during labor and delivery and facilitates Marlin, a neuro- whether we’re howling our way through labor and de-
uterine contractions and milk letdown. Scientists scientist at Co- livery—or getting paid to inhale the stuff in the lab. In
lumbia, studies
have recently become captivated by its impact on the positive side several experiments, when women with no children
the brain as well. Sometimes called the “love hor- of parenting snorted puffs of oxytocin, they, too, had enhanced
as well as how
mone” or the “trust hormone,” it is associated with trauma can responses to baby faces and infant cues such as cry-
social and romantic bonding. be genetically ing and laughing, compared with women who’d only
passed down the
Researchers like Robert Froemke at NYU Grossman generations. sniffed placebos.
School of Medicine suspect that oxytocin doesn’t just But before anybody gets too excited about this
prepare women’s bodies for birth; doubling as a neuro- smoking gun, this “mother molecule,” as one scien-
transmitter, it also readies our brains for infant worship. tist described oxytocin to me—you should know that
Froemke’s lab members wanted to see if they could use At NYU’s Lan- there is another well-regarded laboratory, also part of
oxytocin to watch a rodent brain transitioning to moth- gone Lab, a NYU, that studies the transformative maternal effects
research station
erhood in real time. They set up a series of experiments, is outfitted of an entirely different neurotransmitter: the pleasure
published in 2015 and now considered classics. with cameras chemical dopamine, which, like oxytocin, is produced
for studying
The lead researcher, Bianca Jones Marlin of Colum- adult mice from by the mother’s own body. Still other labs remain keen
bia University, picked female mouse virgins whose different angles on the lingering behavioral impact of progesterone,
as they interact
DNA had been manipulated to include extra code for with pups. estrogen and other byproducts of the placenta, which

seem to combine in precise ratios throughout pregnancy to helpless newborns seem to be a stim-
prime the mother’s mind for the climactic hormonal tsunami ulus powerful enough to create the
of birth. And of course there’s prolactin, the breastfeeding hor- maternal mindset without hormonal
mone, and stress hormones to boot. prompting. You simply stick a virgin
“No behavior is controlled by a single brain region,” warns mouse in a cage with a mother and
Danielle Stolzenberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Cal- her pups. During the first three to
ifornia, Davis. But to the extent that they’ve found a maternal five days, nothing happens. You have
locus of control, or a “central site” of mom behaviors, scientists to be very, very careful that the new-
often refer to a part of the hypothalamus, way down toward the comer doesn’t eat anybody. But after
brain’s core. The hypothalamus is “really important for the four about a week in close quarters with
F’s,” Stolzenberg says. “Feeding, fleeing, fighting, and . . . uh, the babies, the deep-down systems
mating.” And at the very front of the hypothalamus sits the “me- start to awaken, and the former can-
dial preoptic area,” or mPOA. nibal begins to act like a softy around
The mPOA can be stimulated to produce maternal behav- the pups.
iors. Surgically dismantling or anesthetizing it, on the other While I’m at Froemke’s lab, Naomi
hand, makes maternal behaviors disappear in rats, to the ex- López Caraballo, another one of his
tent that mothers no longer collect their screaming pups with graduate students, shows me a virgin
their mouths. (The animals’ mouths still work fine in these mouse whose maternal instinct has
experiments, since the moms remain proficient at gathering been “unmasked” this way. With la-
up Charleston Chew cubes and other treats. Babies simply no tex-gloved fingers, she expertly drops
longer seem sweeter than candy to them.) a couple of peanut-size 8-day-old
The mPOA tosses long nerve fibers, called axons, like lassos mouse pups into the cage with a tell-
hither and yon to network with other important brain clumps. ingly svelte female who is not a biolog-
The most important axons tether it to a reward center related ical mother, but who has been exposed
to motivation. In fact, together these two synced-up areas are to pups for a week. “Let’s see if she’s up
to retrieving,” López Caraballo says.
The deposited pups immediately
People who adopt or open their mouths and shudder with
the force of their inaudible-to-hu-
foster may become man-ears distress cries. Instead of fleeing, the valiant virgin
inches closer. (Watching her adorable diligence, I feel a pang
sensitized by of regret about certain snap traps laid in certain kitchen pan-
tries.) She runs her paws gently over the pups’ tiny, shaking
experience, changing bodies, then hustles to fluff up the cotton fibers of her nest.
These are maternal behaviors, and although the virgin
on a chemical level. doesn’t retrieve the pups in my presence, she did in previ-
ous trials. “We don’t know what experiences throughout
co-housing train the virgins to retrieve,” López Caraballo
sometimes called the “maternal circuit.” This packages baby says. But the virgins are increasingly willing, their reluc-
cues together with reward. tance diminishing with time. I inquire about an odd-looking
But the whole maternal shebang ropes in many systems relat- L-shaped metal plate attached to the virgin’s head, which I
ed to pleasure, stress, memory and practically everything else— somewhat unscientifically refer to as “her hat.” “Oh, that’s
and the more these connections fire up, the stronger they grow. for the virtual reality trials,” López Caraballo says. “It holds
The jumble gets even more complicated when you make the her head still.” The researchers are trying to determine if
jump from rodent brains to people brains, with our supersized they can spark the maternal metamorphosis in virgins sim-
cortexes that can override primitive impulses. What’s more, the ply by popping in some mouse parenting videos.
mPOA is too small to see on MRIs, and way too deep down for In fact, maternal sensitization is possible even if the vir-
EEGs to detect. We won’t be able to probe it in humans until our gin’s pituitary gland—her hormonal manufacturing center—
tools improve. At the moment, scientists have no way of deter- is surgically removed. It’s undeniable that the hormones of
mining the causes and effects of human maternal metamorpho- pregnancy, birth and nursing kindle a sudden and startling
sis, even though they know where it transpires. They are adamant change in female rodents. But experience with pups, acting
only that change occurs—that mothers are molten creatures. on the same built-in brain systems inside all female mam-
mals, is also a strong catalyst for maternal care.
And some version of the maternal instinct is potentially uni-
B U T M O T H E R S C A N A L S O be made without the chem- versal. With enough cajoling, maternal care can even be experi-
ically laced processes of pregnancy and birth: Just ask any mentally induced in male rats, who, like many male mammals,
adoptive parent. Under the right experimental circumstances, have no contact with their offspring in nature. “You can force

line affinity for each other’s offspring.
One study suggests that men and women
who have children may even find the cries of
an unrelated baby strangely rewarding. Re-
searchers looked at fMRI readings and found
that crying babies caused a cascade in a part
of the brain related to attention and emotion.
(People without kids also responded to unre-
lated babies, but it was laughter that caused
a more powerful cascade in their brains.)
A study of foster mothers suggests that a
strong, specific bond starts to form after a
woman has been caring for a child for about
two months. At first, the women in the study
had similar spikes in oxytocin whether they
were cuddling with their own charges or with
other babies. But after a couple of months,
those spikes became more clearly linked to
the babies they’d been fostering. This shift
corresponded with more outward displays of
affection toward their foster children.
While we can’t be sure how devotion
develops in adoptive parents, such exper-
iments suggest that people who adopt or
males to respond positively to pups,” says Joe Lonstein, foster may become sensitized by experience, chang-
who studies maternal neurobiology at Michigan State ing on a chemical level. The longer a person has been
University, “but it is much, much harder compared to caring for a child, the more a parent metamorphoses.
female rats.” If administered via injection, far larger
doses of hormones must be doled out over lengthier
periods of time. Likewise, male caregiving in rats can T H E R E A R E P L E N T Y O F practical, even Machia-
A laboratory
freezer at Mount be stimulated by exposure, but it takes longer room- vellian reasons to investigate moms’ transformations.
Sinai. Because ing-in periods with pups than the week or so that virgin Tens of thousands of women worldwide become first-
placentas are
usually discard- females require. time mothers each day. We’re a force not just of na-
ed after birth, In the world outside the laboratory, this buried ma- ture, but also of economics. We make up a staggering
Chaudhry calls
them “almost a ternal seed inside all mammals mostly doesn’t germi- portion of the American labor market, with around
limitless source” nate: As far as scientists know, baby rodents are rarely 70 percent of us working, the majority full-time, and
of potentially
life-saving cells. if ever nurtured by unrelated virgin females, and only we’re the sole breadwinners for 40 percent of families.
seldom by males of any kind. In the uncommon cases We are apparently pretty good at our jobs, since Gold-
when adoption occurs in wild mammals, there has of- man Sachs is attempting to retain new-mom employ-
This digital ten been an accident—mother-pup seal pairs getting ees by internationally airlifting their breast milk home
microscope at
NYU can mea- mixed up on a crowded beach after a big storm, for in- to their babies when they’re traveling for work. Even
sure the activity stance—or the female in question is already a biologi- MI6 actively tries to recruit mom spies—not for our
of a single brain
cell, helping cal mother who has perhaps lost her own young but is honeypot appeal, but for our “emotional intelligence.”
researchers zero nonetheless hormonally primed to mother. Group-liv- But I’m more interested in the potential benefits to
in on the effects
of different ing mammals like lions may routinely pitch in with a moms themselves. Scientists deep in this research look
hormones. sister’s or cousin’s cub, but the helping most often stops forward to new and better mom-specific medications
with the bloodline. and to the day when brain scanners are as much a part
Adoption is, however, part of the super-social hu- of ob-gyn visits as blood pressure cuffs. And because it’s
man repertoire. The strong human desire to adopt by now clear that mothers are physically impacted by
unrelated young—going back to the stories of Moses stresses ranging from financial hardship to social iso-
and Krishna, and likely long before—may be unique lation, policymakers might draw on emerging research
in the animal kingdom. Human women and men are to craft better support for vulnerable women right now.
innately alloparental, which means we have a base- The maternal instinct is both fixed and highly
flexible, powerful and fragile, ancient and modern,
Abigail Tucker, a former Smithsonian staff writer,
is the author of the book Mom Genes. universal and unique. In the course of becoming
BYLINES
Photographer Dina Litovsky is based in New York mothers, we do not “change our minds” about the
City and describes her work as visual sociology.
world. Our minds are simply changed.

The End
If you hike to
the Minam River
Lodge, thinking
about the amaz-
ing food, includ-
ing smokehouse
bacon and
foraged morels,
may help keep
you going.
of the
Trail by Tony Perrottet
photographs by Brian Smale
A VINTAGE GUIDEBOOK INSPIRES A QUIRK Y TRIP

THROUGH OREGON, FROM A WILDERNESS LODGE TO A GILDED AGE
SALOON TO A TOWN HIDDEN UNDERGROUND
ven by the wild standards of the
Pacific Northwest, Minam River Lodge
is remote. After driving 280 miles east
from Portland, I followed a series of
ever-narrowing back roads to the lonely
farming hamlet of Cove, where cellphone
and GPS reception disappeared. The
lodge staff had warned me to print out the directions
beforehand, so I located “Forest Lane 6220,” a steep,
washboard gravel road broken by cattle guards that
climbs eight miles up to the trailhead, 5,510 feet above
sea level in the Wallowa Mountains. This was where
the real adventure began. At a weathered wooden
sign—“Horse Ranch Trail 1908”—I laced up my hiking
boots, hoisted my pack and set off into the shadowy
forest, fighting the vague sense that I might disappear
forever. But the unease vanished when the trees parted to
reveal an alpine meadow framed by verdant mountains
and distant snowcapped peaks, all beneath polished
blue skies—the lavish beauty of Oregon distilled.
In the course of the afternoon, I descended 2,000 feet into print of a dude ranch that opened in 1951, and at first it seemed
the Eagle Cap Wilderness, one of the largest natural refuges that not much had changed since those days. Three dogs loped
in the lower 48 states. Its 360,000 acres contain 31 peaks over past, while a wrangler in a broad Spanish hat and chaps saddled a
8,000 feet, 60 alpine lakes and vast expanses of fir, larch and horse. Putting down my pack, I was greeted by a bearded figure in
limber pine. From high ridges, the Minam, one of the most a red flannel shirt who looked like a lumberjack from a Jack Lon-
pristine rivers in Oregon, could be heard burbling far below. don story. He turned out to be the chef, Sean Temple, who glee-
At other times, the forest fell into silence until a wind rustled fully declared: “You’re in luck! Tonight we have quail!” He added
through the branches. A sign with tiny scratched text offered that he had an organic sauvignon blanc that would pair well.
hikers encouragement: “½ Way There!” The Minam River Lodge epitomizes Oregon’s quirky cre-
At last, I spotted the lodge, a collection of wood cabins and ativity. It offers all the classic outdoor activities that have
canvas tents nestled on the valley floor. It was built on the foot- been popular in the West for generations, such as hiking,

A first edition of
the WPA guide to
Oregon (1940).
A pull-out map,
featuring 30-odd
tours, introduced
Americans to
obscure locales
like Little Nash
Crater Junction.
THE TOME INCLUDES RECIPES FOR HUCKLEBERRY

CAKES AND VENISON, AND AN EXPLANATION OF
WHY OREGONIANS CALL THEMSELVES “WEB-FOOTS.”
swimming and horseback riding. But it has also It was only in the 1910s that automobile touring
become famous for its fine food. That night at and the wilderness movement began to put Oregon
dinner, Temple quieted the 20 or so seated guests on the travel map for the same reason it had been
and stood for a speech. “Day 95 of the season!” he avoided before: raw, untrammeled wilderness. The
announced—and rattled off a menu that I almost language that had once been used by economic
needed a gastronomic dictionary to follow: wood- boosters to praise the state’s natural resources now
fired, herb marinated quail, house-made sour- attracted sightseers. Still, tourism got off to a slow
dough and chicken liver mousse, garden greens start: In 1913, the state had only 25 miles of paved
in a nectarine and rosé vinaigrette, braised chard roads. In the Great Depression, though, the Works
with anchovy, garlic, lemongrass and oregano, and Progress Administration (WPA) funded an ambitious
roasted acorn squash garnished with spruce tips and pine string of projects, including scenic roadways, hiking trails and
pollen. It was a dizzying end to a day on the trails, comple- mountain refuges, with the aim of giving Americans access to
menting the otherworldly setting. After the meal, I retired to healthful recreation. Many Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
the campfire for a more traditional Western pursuit, nursing a works remain the basis of travel in the most popular corners of
glass of whiskey and counting shooting stars. Oregon today.
Those engineering feats in the Pacific Northwest had their
counterpart in the WPA guidebook series. It was a national
project of massive ambition: From the mid-1930s, an army of
C O U RT EST Y O R EG O N H I STO R I CA L S O C I E T Y
ACK IN THE GILDED AGE, the lush and misty Pacific
B
6,500 writers, including John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Ralph
Northwest was untouched by the first great currents Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, fanned out across the coun-
of U.S. travel, when Arizona was dubbed “the Italy try to pen a volume for every state. Historians have observed
of America” and Colorado “the Switzerland of America,” that the guidebooks were part of a larger quest to define a
and the New England coast was lined with European-style shared American culture and “way of life,” making travel
resorts that employed chefs shipped in from Paris. Long af- nothing less than “an adventure in national rediscovery.”
ter the railway reached Portland in 1883, the region kept its Steinbeck called the WPA guides “the most comprehensive
pioneer flavor, and the rugged hinterland was left to loggers, account of the United States ever got together” and dreamed
gold miners and ranchers. Nature was bountiful in Oregon, (in vain) of packing all 48 in his baggage for the American
but it was there as an expendable resource. road trip described in his 1962 book, Travels With Charley.

The WPA series gave Oregon its due as a destination for the
The Minam River
first time. The 550-page volume, subtitled “The End of the Lodge grows
Trail,” was among the last WPA guidebooks to be published, in most of its own
greens, vegeta-
1940, but it covered the state’s attractions in encyclopedic de- bles and herbs,
tail, with ten classic road trips broken down into 35 mini-tours. and gathers wild
mushrooms like
The prose is not quite Steinbeck’s standards, but it is filled chanterelles.
with wry humor. The editor T.J. Edmonds wrote that when
the subtitle “The Beaver State” was suggested, local wits com-
plained: “Why not call it the Rodent State so as not to discrim-
inate against our rabbits and prairie dogs?” The tome includes
A trekker on the
recipes for huckleberry cakes and venison, and an explanation trail to Backbone
of why Oregonians call themselves “web-foots” (for the noto- Ridge in the
Eagle Cap Wil-
rious rainy winters). Although Americans had only around 18 derness, which
months to use it before Pearl Harbor, the guidebook enjoyed a boasts some
535 miles of
new spell of utility after the war, when returning G.I.s sought trails for hiking
and horseback
out Oregon’s wild places as a balm to civilization’s ills. riding.
Seventy-five years later, I could sympathize. I had spent
six months in lockdown in Manhattan
during the pandemic, and as U.S. travel
slowly reopened, nature was high on my
mind. I had heard about the Minam Riv-
er Lodge from an outdoors-loving friend,
and planned a two-week road-trip around
a state that seemed a self-contained
world filled with alluring secrets. In Sep-
tember of last year, it would be an under-
statement to say that it was a unique
historical moment for travel. The flight
from New York was a fraught exercise in
juggling face masks and hand sanitizer. I
landed in Portland, whose downtown was
still boarded up in the wake of Black Lives
Matter protests and police clashes that
had seized international headlines since
late May. And a string of wildfires had be-
gun in western Oregon that would soon
become the worst in U.S. history, cut-
ting off many highways, closing national
parks and engulfing the state in smoke.
But such calamities were hard to imag-
ine when I first arrived in Portland, a
famously livable city of quiet riverside
parks, outdoor cafés and extensive bike
lanes. In 1940, the WPA guidebook au-
thors noted, slightly tongue-in-cheek,
that the compact outpost was dubbed
“The Athens of the West” for its cultural
vibrancy, at least compared with the rest
of Oregon. Following the WPA guide, I
tracked down Erickson’s Saloon, a leg-
endary complex that once served 300 log-
gers at a time along its 674-foot mahogany
bar, and whose upstairs rooms earned it
the nickname Temple of 10,000 Delights.
(It had recently been turned into condos.)
A few other saloons too seedy to make it
into the WPA guide remain, including

The lodge’s new
owners added
a hot tub and
other luxuries,
including an
on-site massage
therapist.
Horses belong-
ing to Patrick
Currin, a volun-
teer caretaker at
Red’s Ranch. The
onetime lodge
and dude ranch
is now owned by
the U.S. Forest
Service.
OREGONIANS HAVE FINE-TUNED THE OLD OUTDOOR

PLEASURES. THERE IS A WOOD -FIRED HOT TUB NESTLED ON
A RIDGE—“THE SWEETEST BATH WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI.”
the Oregon Oyster Company and the White Eagle Sa- River Highway, staying one day ahead of the smoke
loon from 1905, where sailors were shanghaied. as it rolled in behind me.
With news about the wildfires along the coast The skies were still flawless when I hiked the
growing dire—the noonday sun had become an or- next afternoon to the Minam River Lodge, which
ange ball, and the scent of ashes hung in the air—I is in many ways a barometer of 21st-century Amer-
rented a car and headed east along the Columbia ican travel. The setting is as spectacular as it was in

photographs from the 1950s, when a nearby valley rock floors had settled, and chinks in the walls let in
was so dense with elk, deer and other game that it rain and snow. Stone chimneys were leaking; one cabin A grass airstrip
near the Minam
was called Mert’s Meat Locker after one of its hunt- had nearly been crushed by a falling tree. River Lodge
ing guides. From the porch, I watched the last golden It was a melancholy sight, and we contemplated the serves guests
who choose to
rays of sun creep across a meadow where horses still probability that much of the ranch will soon vanish, arrive by plane.
Here, a Cessna
gamboled. Oregonians have fine-tuned the old out- even though volunteers have offered to do repairs. “It’s en route to En-
door pleasures. There is a wood-fired hot tub nestled just too bad,” Spath sighed. “These cabins would be terprise, Oregon.
on a ridge—“the sweetest bath west of the Mississip- beautiful if there was a little upkeep. Instead, they’ve
pi,” one guest declared—and a wood-fired sauna that been left to their own demise.” Its eccentric Oregonian
can be used for leaping in and out of the near-freezing past only made the loss seem more poignant. Mike
water of the Little Minam River. (“You get used to it Rahn, whose uncle had been one of Red’s carpenters,
on the fourth time!” another guest advised me.) In the showed me the ranch’s most offbeat attraction: a con-
wood-floored barn, a survival from the 1950s, a yoga crete step where guests would engrave their signa-
instructor from Texas held classes every morning. tures in a backwoods version of the Hollywood Walk
That golden dusk was my last glimpse of the moun- of Fame. One was “Goldwyn,” possibly Samuel, the
tains. When I woke up the next morning, wildfire illustrious MGM producer, or his son.
smoke had shrouded the valley. Poring over my WPA “Burt Lancaster’s signature used to be there,”
guide, I realized that it listed another “dude outfit” Rahn sighed, “but someone broke it off and stole it.”
in the Minam River Valley in 1940. “Oh, that must be
Red’s,” said the manager, Anna Kraft. “There are a
couple of volunteer caretakers taking care of it now.”
HAT OTHER AMERICAN SAGAS lay hid-
W
Dating to 1918, Red’s heyday came after the Sec-
ond World War, when it was run by a bearded, flame- den in the Wallowa Mountains? Once I
haired former firefighter from Portland named Ralph had ascended the 2,000 feet of trail back
“Red” Higgins. A larger-than-life raconteur and bon to my car—riding in the packhorse train with the
vivant, Red lured outdoors-loving celebrities to hunt wrangler to avoid choking on wildfire smoke—I con-
and fish, including, according to unshakable local sulted the WPA guidebook again. The volume pro-
lore, John Wayne, Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster as vides a window onto a period when Oregon was still
well as, a local author proudly noted, “the entire Los regarded by most as a half-fantastical frontier. Indeed,
Angeles Rams football team.” Red’s Falstaffian tenure the editor Edmonds had anticipated its historical val-
ended with his death in 1970; in the mid-1990s, the ue, with a self-awareness rare among travel authors: In
ranch was sold to the Forest Service, which planned the future, he wrote loftily, it “will serve as a reference
to level the site until it was saved by a public outcry. source well-thumbed by school children and cher-
I was greeted by one of the volunteers, Cynder Spath, ished by scholars, as a treasure trove of history, a pic-
who had just arrived on horseback with her husband, ture of a period, and as a fadeless film of a civilization.”
Jeff; the two previous caretakers, Mike and Mona What he did not anticipate was that our view of the
Rahn, were also still in residence, waiting for the smoke America it describes would not be purely nostalgic.
to lift. The unpaid position on a one- to two-week rota- In fact, Oregon is grappling with an unusually bleak
tion was so desirable among Oregonian nature-lovers, racial history. The state has a liberal reputation today,
“FROM THEIR SLOPES FLOW A NUMBER OF STREAMS

THAT HAVE CUT DEEP, ROCK-WALLED CANYONS,
AND PLUNGE OVER LEDGES IN LONG RIBBONS.”
mostly retirees, that there was a years-long waiting list, but in the 19th century its white settlers attempted to
they said, even though the ranch had no electricity or extirpate almost any nonwhite population and create
phone, and only propane gas for cooking. The setting a Jim Crow system that lasted well into the 20th cen-
was magical, with cabins handcrafted from knotty tury. Written by progressive authors, the WPA guide
pine nestled by a shady pebble “beach” on the Little was ahead of its time by at least attempting to include
Minam. Shooing away wild turkeys, Jeff Spath showed alternative views. But it was penned before the civ-
me around the 30-plus structures. The main building, il rights era, and today its value as a document is as
erected in 1946, was still intact, it’s interior decorated much what it leaves out as what it includes.
with a bear skin, elk antlers and a wagon wheel chan- My new mission in the Oregon heartland was to fill
delier. But the cabins were in serious decay. Their river in the gaps. And it seemed that everywhere I went,

once-forgotten stories are emerging back into the light. dow and order a double soy latte. At the Jennings
The logical base for exploration was the town of Hotel, the foot-worn wooden entrance stairway
Joseph, a former logging outpost near the shores of felt like something from the The Shining or Dead-
Wallowa Lake, a dazzling ribbon of crystalline wa- wood, but a handwritten poem was posted on one
ter surrounded by glacial moraines. Like the Minam banister. (Titled “Things to Remember,” it includes:
River Lodge, the town is today an easygoing mix of “prairies, forest, thunder. . .wild rose, alpenglow. . .
Old and New West. Sitting outside an elegant café rocks tumbling in the surf...the Alamo...”) The 1910
called the Blythe Cricket, I watched a cowboy in a landmark hotel was restored in 2015 with a Kickstart-
ten-gallon hat ride up, tether his horse by the win- er campaign, and its rooms individually designed by

in the Wallowa Mountains. The town’s name
commemorates Chief Joseph, the tribe’s
brilliant leader (called “the Red Napoleon”),
who refused to accept the so-called “thieves
treaty” of 1863, imposed by the U.S. govern-
ment to take away the tribe’s land and devas-
tate its nomadic lifestyle and religion. When
the Army arrived to enforce the treaty in the
summer of 1877, Joseph led some 700 Nez
Perce men, women and children on a gruel-
ing 1,170-mile flight across Idaho and Mon-
tana and portions of Wyoming, including a
detour through the newly declared Yellow-
stone National Park. Outwitting his cavalry
pursuers over and again, Joseph (whose real
name was Hinmató·wyalahtq’it) and 418 sur-
viving followers were forced to surrender only
40 miles from safety at the Canadian border.
Chief Joseph’s heroic resistance and dignified
pronouncements earned him the admiration
of both the military and the American pub-
lic. Though the settlers named the town after
him, as well as a nearby mountain, a creek and
a canyon, the gestures were empty. When Jo-
seph returned—twice—to ask for a parcel of
land so he and his closest relatives could grow
old in his beloved home, 200 citizens signed
a petition against it. He died in 1904 on the
Colville Reservation in Washington State, the
most famous Native American in the United
States, and one of the most tragic.
By the time of the WPA guide, the Wallowa
Valley and its surrounds had become re-
nowned as a scenic wonder. “From their slopes
flow a number of streams that have cut deep,
rock-walled canyons, and plunge over ledges in
long ribbons. Glacial meadows are tapestried
with brightly colored wild flowers,” the guide
says. The Nez Perce, banished to reservations
in Idaho and Washington State, were by then
rarely seen. Few in 1940 could have imagined
that they would return to their valley; at the
time, many believed that Native Americans
would slowly die out. Which is why one of the
region’s most interesting new attractions is
the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland project, a
unique blend of nature park and cultural site
that is fulfilling Chief Joseph’s dream of a base
Portland artists. The building also now includes a for the tribe in their traditional lands.
The shores of the
boutique with a BLM sign in the window and a gour- 3.5-mile-long The town of Wallowa was hit hard by closures
met pizza restaurant. “Eastern Oregon is very conser- Wallowa Lake, and workforce reductions at sawmills in the 1980s
near the town
vative, but also libertarian. It’s live and let live. The of Joseph, were and ’90s; located a half-hour’s drive from Joseph,
old-timers were just happy I was fixing the place up. inhabited by the it feels as though tumbleweeds should be blowing
Wallowa band
It was falling to bits,” says the owner Greg Hennes. of the Nez Perce down its sleepy main street. But the Homeland, on
Pioneers moved in the 1850s to this fertile lake- tribe until 1877. its outskirts, has a hopeful air. I wandered its park-
side, which for centuries had been the crown jew- like grounds, which lie between a spectacular basalt
el of the Nez Perce Indians’ ancestral homelands ridge called Tick Hill and a lush river, and visited te-

pees, a longhouse, a stables and a dance arbor; bronze plaques paid
tribute to Indian culture. In a field, a dugout canoe was being carved
by a Nez Perce craftsman. A canoe completed here in 2019 was the
first Indian canoe to ply the sacred waters of Lake Wallowa since Jo-
seph was expelled 142 years before.
“The Homeland project was born of necessity,” said Joseph Otto
McCormack, one of only three members of the Nez Perce tribe who
today live year-round in the valley. A former Marine and Vietnam
veteran who sported a long silver handlebar mustache and goatee
and a baseball cap, he arrived in a pick-
up truck with five friendly dogs.
When the collapse of the logging in-
dustry gutted the region’s economy in
the 1980s, McCormack said, the time
also felt ripe for racial reconciliation.
Wallowa held an annual rodeo, Chief
Joseph Days, but it had devolved into a
week of evening bar brawls and tensions
between white residents and Nez Perce
members, who arrived from distant res-
ervations. So in 1989, a coalition of indi-
viduals created a potluck and powwow
to be held the following year at a local
high school. There were displays of In-
dian dancing and drumming and mem-
bers prepared traditional meals of elk,
salmon and buffalo for the whole com-
munity. Attendees brought side dishes to
share, and it was such a success that it ex-
panded outdoors within two years. In 1998
it became known as the Tamkaliks Cele-
bration, which added horse processions
and was soon attracting 1,500 people.
Overnight, Chief Joseph’s vision of
a permanent home in their summer
hunting grounds was within grasp. To
secure funding, the local U.S. Park Ser-
vice agent Paul Henderson attended a
1993 meeting of the Oregon Trail Coor-
dinating Council, which was promoting
the 150th anniversary of the pioneer
route. “I pointed out that the Oregon
Trail came into Oregon, but there was
also one that left: the Nez Perce Trail,”
Henderson said. The foundation gave
$250,000 from the sale of souvenir li-
cense plates to the Homeland project, enough for the Nez Perce to buy
A sculpture on Main Frontier and modern life
160 acres. Soon after, a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant helped Street in Joseph entitled mix in Joseph, where a
double the acreage. A grant from the Myer Memorial Trust funded the etweyé·wise, a Nez Perce horse is hitched to a post
word meaning “I return outside the Blythe Crick-
building of their first structure, the dance arbor. from a hard journey,” by et Cafe while his owner
It wasn’t all a Hollywood-worthy tale of racial healing, McCormack Native artist Doug Hyde. grabs a latte.
“IT’S A HUGE SHIFT IN ONE GENERATION. IT’S NOT

COWBOYS VERSUS INDIANS ANYMORE. WE REALLY
NEED TO UNITE. THE ISSUES ARE BIGGER NOW.”

said. “The first person we tried to buy land from
The boutique pulled it off the market because he thought it was an
Jennings Hotel
on Main Street in Indian group.” (The Homeland’s board is 50 percent
Joseph occupies Nez Perce and 50 percent “non-tribal.”) But relations
a 1910 building
that has been a with “the old Indian fighters” improved in the mid-
boardinghouse, 1990s when tribal members offered to help restore
a tattoo parlor—
and, legend has steelhead and salmon to local rivers. At first, McCor-
it, a brothel. mack had been worried about gaining access to the
rivers. “We didn’t want to have an altercation. The
police attended to protect the Indians. But we were
greeted by a potluck dinner and a lot of warm hearts.
They said they’d love to have Indians fishing in the
river, and when could they fish it themselves?” The
program was a success. “It brought hope to a lot of
people.” Today, tribal members work with the Fisher-
ies Department all over their old lands; in 2019, they
Gwendolyn
Trice, executive were given land at the head of Wallowa Lake on the
director of the river to promote the sockeye salmon there.
Maxville Heritage
Interpretive Cen- “It’s a huge shift in one generation,” said Angela
ter in Joseph, Bombaci, the executive director of the Nez Perce
is hopeful that
race relations Wallowa Homeland project, who grew up in Wal-
in Oregon are
improving. lowa town. “It’s not cowboys versus Indians any-
more. We really need to unite. The issues are bigger

now.” The 2020 wildfires have added to the urgency. black people from moving there. For years Oregon’s
As the scale of the conflagration grew, Indian activ- Jim Crow laws were the most severe outside the Joseph Otto
McCormack, a
ists argued that they should be allowed to steward South, with the few black residents denied the right member of the
Western forests again with the controlled burning to vote, own real estate or enter legal contracts. Nez Perce tribe,
sits with his two
that for centuries before white settlement had pre- Chinese gold miners were also harassed merci- Irish wolfhounds
vented “mega-fires.” Bombaci and others are opti- lessly in the late 19th century, and occasionally mas- Simone and
Rowan near the
mistic about the future. “The whole Indian story is a sacred. Life grew so bad in the town of Pendleton, longhouse at the
miracle of survival,” noted a Homeland board mem- for example, the Asian community moved into un- Nez Perce Wal-
lowa Homeland.
ber, Rich Wandschneider. “And the Nez Perce story derground chambers and tunnels, leaving a unique
is now the American odyssey.” ghost town that can be visited to this day. But by the
1920s, African Americans were the main targets. The
Ku Klux Klan was resurgent around Oregon, and
some “sundown towns” set up billboards warning:
OMETHING ABOUT this remote corner of Or-
S
“Do Not Let the Sun Catch You.” In Portland, many
egon keeps hopeful memories alive. This is businesses hung signs even in the Eisenhower era:
quite an achievement given the state’s grim “We Cater to White Trade Only.”
racial history, starting with its very inception. The But today, attention is being given to an extraor-
first white settlers declared they were building a non- dinary exception to the grim narrative: The logging
slave state, but Exclusion Laws also banned African camp of Maxville, a lonely settlement 39 miles from
Americans from living there. One law, passed in 1844, Joseph in the Wallowa Mountains, resisted Ore-
threatened any freed slave with a lashing every six gon’s racist current, and from 1923 until the late
months until he or she left. Although this savage legal 1930s flourished by becoming more integrated.
provision was never enforced, when Oregon joined The story is now being retold by one of the black
the Union in 1859, the state constitution prohibited loggers’ daughters, Gwendolyn Trice, who formed

a nonprofit in 2008 and set up a small museum in white children sitting together with their teacher in
The dance arbor Joseph called the Maxville Heritage Interpretive a field of cabins. Both were scenes that would have
at the Nez Perce
Wallowa Home- Center in 2012, and succeeded in 2020 to reclaim seemed like science fiction elsewhere in the state.
land is the site of the original campsite to set up her own version of The logging camp, Trice explained, sprang up
the annual Tam-
kaliks Celebra- the Nez Perce homeland. seemingly overnight in 1923, when a railroad was
tion, a weekend
of singing and I discovered the unlikely story when I found the carved into the wilderness and houses were shipped
dancing open to small museum one afternoon. Wearing a weathered in on boxcars. Defying the Exclusion Laws, which
the public.
straw cowboy hat and bright floral vintage skirt, were on Oregon’s books until 1927, the Bowman-Hicks
Trice welcomed me at the door, saying “Come on Lumber Company hired some 60 skilled black loggers
in!” Hanging in pride of place on the wall inside was from the South, including her father, 19-year-old La-
a grainy sepia photograph from the 1920s, which fayette “Lucky” Trice of Arkansas.
showed a team of African American loggers dressed Maxville was officially a segregated township, with
in overalls with enormous saws over their shoulders, two housing districts, two baseball teams and two
posing alongside white workers in a mountain for- schools. But the racial division quickly eroded. “It was
est. Another picture showed a half-dozen black and a big fail!” Trice said with a C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 8 0
“THEY WORKED ALONGSIDE ONE ANOTHER. THEY HAD TO RELY

ON ONE ANOTHER. THE FAMILIES SAW EACH OTHER EVERY DAY.
PEOPLE BECAME FRIENDS. I’M A DESCENDANT OF THAT FAILURE!”

SILENCE
P
FROM AN
ASTONI SH ING
GLIMPSE
OF YOUNG
WOM EN
E
ENGAGED IN
PROTEST TO
A SUR RE AL
P ORTR AI T
OF TH E
A
UNCONS CIOUS
M I N D, THESE
P ICTURE S
C APT URE
T H E PAS S I O N,
K
S O LITUDE AND
SURP RI SE O F A
YEA R UNL IKE
A N Y OT H E R
S by M E I L A N
S O L LY
T H E T W O Y O U N G W O M E N PA S S E D Skyler Wilson at be killed or assaulted. “This was eye-opening for me,” says Wilson.
the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. just long enough He created his startling picture—the Grand Prize winner of
for him to make eye contact and snap a photograph. “I was our 18th annual photo contest—in January 2020, shortly before
immediately curious,” says Wilson, a second lieutenant in the pandemic did away with large unmasked public gatherings.
the Indiana National Guard. After the march, Wilson con- But even during a long year of lockdowns and quarantines,
nected with his subjects through social media and learned the curiosity that inspires photographers remained active, as
they were sisters from the Oglala Lakota Nation in South many of our other winning entries show: A distant neighbor
Dakota, protesting on behalf of missing and on a Mumbai terrace. A lone drinker at a down-
murdered indigenous women and girls. TO SEE ALL 60 FINALISTS sized motorcycle festival in Russia. “If you can get
and enter your own images
Throughout the United States and Canada, someone to stop, do a double take and ask ‘What’s
in the next competition at
indigenous women and girls are far more like- Smithsonianmag.com/ this about?’” says Wilson, “that’s when the con-
ly than women in the general population to photocontest versation can really begin.”

▲
WINNER: GRAND PRIZE
Skyler Wilson, 24
Washington, D.C.
PHOTOGRAPHED: JANUARY 2020
After years of taking photos in tightly controlled military environ-

ments, the National Guard officer was riveted by the scope of the
Women’s March. “There were so many stories, all the different
reasons each person was there,” he says. The red handprint is
a symbol worn at rallies across North America. It represents the
silence around the issue: In a comprehensive review in 2017, the
Urban Indian Health Institute reported that 5,712 indigenous women
and girls from 71 U.S. cities, ranging in age from 1 to 83, had gone
missing in the previous year. Only 116 of those cases had been
logged in the Justice Department’s missing persons database.

▲
WINNER: MOBILE
Mayank Soni, 37
Mumbai, India
PHOTOGRAPHED: APRIL 2020
Toward the beginning of the lockdown, while playing outside with his
niece, Soni spotted a stranger on a distant terrace, obscured by reflec-
tions and fading light. As a longtime resident of the loud, bustling city
of 20 million, Soni was struck by the symbolism. He knew the moment
and the light would be fleeting, so instead of going to get his camera,
Soni reached for his phone and turned to his niece. “I said, ‘I need to
take a picture first and then we’ll continue playing.’ ”
▲
WINNER: AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
Lynsey Schroeder, 28
Near San Manuel, Arizona
PHOTOGRAPHED: MAY 2020
▲
Schroeder, who has a degree in WINNER: PEOPLE

aerospace engineering, has long Matt Stasi, 46
been fascinated by the night sky. West Hollywood, California
After moving from Minnesota to PHOTOGRAPHED: JUNE 2020
Tucson six years ago, she also fell
in love with the saguaros native The mask worn by a Hollywood resident named Guy Peel brings
to the American Southwest. The together two of the topics that dominated 2020: Covid-19,
flash of a passing car helped a disease that attacks its victims’ lungs, and the Black Lives
Schroeder capture the cacti Matter movement, whose supporters adopted the slogan “I
against their cosmic backdrop. “I can’t breathe.” Stasi took this portrait at a June protest sparked
bring my own lighting,” she says. by the killing of George Floyd, who uttered the phrase more
“But sometimes the unexpected than 20 times as a police officer kneeled on his neck. Stasi says
ends up working even better.” Peel “was so stoic, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him.”

▲ WINNER: ALTERED IMAGES
Erika Zolli, 34
Varese, Italy
PHOTOGRAPHED: MAY 2020
Isolated during the pandemic, Zolli developed a renewed appreciation for her own inner life.
In this self-portrait, the Milan-based fine art photographer examines the tension between
her conscious actions and unconscious desires. Says Zolli, “This shot is a sort of reminder
that I wanted to give to myself to always go on, even when doubts arise.”
▲
WINNER: NATURAL WORLD
John Comisky, 72
Antarctica
PHOTOGRAPHED: JANUARY 2020
The California-based wildlife

photographer journeyed to
Antarctica just before the
pandemic derailed most of
his travel plans for the year.
He sailed with an expedition
team into a small bay,
expecting to find a dozen
or so humpback whales.
Instead, he found 250 of
them in the midst of a feeding
frenzy—the largest of its kind
observed by the expedition’s
crew. “It was like being in
another world,” Comisky
says, “seeing something that
almost no one’s ever seen.”
Witnessing such a gathering
just 60 years after the species
was pushed to the brink of
extinction was enough to
bring another expedition
member to tears.
▲
WINNER: TRAVEL
Olesia Kim, 39
Irbit, Russia
PHOTOGRAPHED: SEPTEMBER 2020
Most years, this manufac-

turing town east of the Ural
Mountains draws thou-
sands of visitors to its July
motorcycle show. Because of
the pandemic, the outdoor
event was slimmed down and
postponed to September. Kim
arrived just in time to snap
this assortment of food and
drinks on the hood of a car.
Although the picture shows a
lone woman, the spread itself
captures the human need for
community and is full of Rus-
sian symbols: the Soviet-era
GAZ-24 “Volga” automobile,
the sardines, the pickles fer-
mented at a country dacha,
the slices of bread topped
with butter and caviar.

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Oregon typical of rural Oregon of that time, she says, listening
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 71 to Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell, riding horses and
fishing with her father. In 1977, she moved to Seattle
laugh. “People were connected in many different ways. where she worked for Boeing and as an actor, screen-
They worked alongside one another. They had to rely writer and video producer. Her father died in 1985
on one another. The families saw each other every without ever talking about his early life in Maxville.
day. People became friends. I’m a descendant of that Trice began learning about her father being a logger in
failure!” The anomaly drew the attention of the local 2003 and started the process of moving back in 2005,
chapter of the Klan: “A posse came to Maxville to try to where she began piecing it together by interviewing
get rid of the black loggers, but the white superinten- the camp’s elderly white residents, many of whom
dent de-hooded the leader. He said: ‘Get out, you are had been children in Maxville and still lived nearby.
A butcher shop
not welcome here. We know who you are.’” Barriers in Pendleton She brought her research to Oregon Public Broad-
were also broken down by Maxville’s extreme isolation, Underground, a casting, which featured her efforts in a documentary
secret subterra-
especially during the bitter winters. “You live close to nean city built and allowed her to reach a wider audience. In 2015,
nature here. It’s not man pitted against man. It’s like in and occupied by the nonprofit foundation was given the camp’s lone
Chinese workers
war, you have to work together.” in the 1880s to surviving structure, the company headquarters, by
avoid the town’s
The Great Depression ended this unique social sunset laws. the new landowners. A November 2020 grant from
experiment, and in 1933 most of Maxville’s houses the Meyer Memorial Trust’s Justice Oregon for Black
were put back on boxcars and shipped out. Soon the Lives, an initiative to invest in long-term strategic
camp had all but vanished. But Lucky Trice stayed change in the state, along with the Maxville Heritage
on in the nearby town of La Grande, where Gwendo- Interpretive Center’s ongoing fundraising efforts,
lyn grew up as the second youngest of his six chil- should allow for the purchase of the 240 acres of
dren. She was almost always the only black student Maxville and surrounds by the end of the year.
in her school year, but otherwise had a childhood “Let’s take a gander!” Trice suggested. Soon we
were driving north of Joseph onto an unpaved service
Smithsonian correspondent Tony Perrottet last
wrote about hiking Japan’s ancient highways. road, while logging trucks roared past and a startled
BYLINES
Seattle-based photographer Brian Smale is well elk looked on. The site itself is now overgrown and re-
known for his environmental portraiture.
forested, but she conjured its heyday in the 1920s as a

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Nearly Invisible
KQ70
thriving camp of 400 people, and walked
its long-vanished streets using a map
“reconstructed from the memory of the
elders.” While much was left to the imag-
ination, not everything had disappeared.
We stepped over an old water pump, the
remains of the machinery workshop, and
the four-acre town dump. A few miles
away on private land stands the last of
Maxville’s wooden railroad trestle bridg-
es, still spanning a gully.
The sun was setting as we stood by a
pond that is part of the property, watch-
ing blue herons pick their way across
a carpet of white lilies. If all goes well,
the log lodge that served as the origi-
nal Maxville company HQ, which was
documented, then taken apart and put
in storage, will begin to be reconstruct-
ed on site by the 100th anniversary of
Maxville in 2023 with funds from Ore-
gon’s Cultural Advocacy Coalition. The
grounds will also serve as a field school
for archaeology and education hub and
tour site. The regeneration of the lake-
side and river areas will proceed in part-
nership with Nez Perce tribes.
As we drove back to Joseph, Trice of-
fered a personal perspective on the WPA
guidebook to Oregon. She said it should
be read today alongside the famous Negro
Motorist Green-Book, the guide written
for African Americans. The reality is that
in 1940, black travelers in Oregon would
not even have been served at most gas
stations or restaurants, and usually had
to sleep in their cars. Even in the early
1960s, black travelers stopped at her fa-
ther’s home in La Grande. “I remember
as a little girl there would be a knock on
the door in the middle of the night,” Trice
said. Her father would go talk to black
people who were driving through and tell
them where they could stay with a family
or a friendly place to buy food and gas.
By then, the racial balance in Oregon
had already started to shift, with the tiny
African American population swelled by
shipbuilders who went to Portland during
World War II and remained. The 1964 Civ-
il Rights Act changed the legal landscape,
Trice said, and the BLM movement pro-
vides the latest nudge. “When I arrived
here 20 years ago, nobody was interested
in the Maxville story. People acted afraid
of the color of my skin. But now we’ve got
a museum in the middle of Joseph and

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SMITHSONIAN JAZZ
M A S T E RWO R K S O RC H E S T R A
we’re loved! In summer, we get hundreds
BERNSTEIN of visitors every month.” She laughed:
“America is changing, doggonit!”
REIMAGINED
OR THE WEEK I had been trav-
“Bernstein
Reimagined will
F eling around Wallowa Lake, wild-
fire smoke ensured that its fabled
mountain scenery was barely visible. But
back in Portland, the winds changed and
spark listeners’
blue skies opened. For a reminder of the
imaginations state’s grandeur, Lisa Lipton, the director
and help extend of Opera Theater Oregon, offered to take
the maestro’s me to one of the city’s most theatrical
remarkable legacy.” natural settings, near downtown along
the Columbia River Highway. The Vista
DOWNBEAT
House, an Art Nouveau structure perched
on a promontory once known as Thor’s
Heights, was built in 1915 as a pit stop for the
“These are world-
first American road-trippers to enjoy views
class musicians of the river framed by cliffs and peaks. “It’s
giving a stellar, like an opera set, only outdoors,” Lipton
once in alifetime said, summing up much of Oregon’s spec-
performance. tacular landscape. “I’m thinking Wagner,
Don’t miss it.” maybe Tristan and Isolde.”
The highway engineer Samuel Lan-
METRONOME MUSIC caster declared in 1915 that he had de-
signed Vista House as an “observatory”
where mortals could pause “in silent
communion with the infinite”—in short,
a temple to Nature. He had also dedicated
it to the pioneers of the Oregon Trail and
the hardships they had endured. Today
it’s clear that other cultures also under-
took painful journeys. The future looks
promising: As more historical stories
come to light, 21st-century travelers will
find it only natural to explore the rich and
complex human past that is entwined
with Oregon’s lavish scenic beauty.
Answers from Page 30.

1 2 3 4 5 4 5 6 7 8 9
J P E G A R M E D
The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra explores the vast, diverse 10 11 10 12
F E T A L B O O Y A
repertoire of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein on the stunning, 13 14
K N A V E A G N E S
revelatory new album, Bernstein Reimagined. Bernstein once called 12 15
E
16
T C
17
E A C H
jazz “the ultimate common denominator of the American musical style.” 18 19
V A L U E
20
T R U E
This album explores lesser-known Bernstein pieces, such as “Meditations #1” 21
F O R
22
P L
23
S
24
C P R
and “On The Waterfront”, through the transformative lens of innovative 25
A L M S
26 27
L
28
O C H S
new arrangements. 29
N C A A
26 30
S P A
27 28 29
31 32 33 34 35 36
D A D D Y U P T O N
37 38
O N A I R P E R C E
The Bernstein Reimagined 39 35 40
M O S E S R I T Z
recording was made possible
by David C. Frederick
Smithsonianjazz.org
and Sophia Lynn 84 SMITHSONIAN | May 2021
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C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 42
large glass bowl at the center. The bowl

is filled with water and serves as a bath
where visitors may sit or lie down. Be-
$ cause the bowl is connected to a trans-
ducer that converts energy into sound,
anyone who submerges their head in
the bath will hear the radio frequen-
cies of space. Depending on the season
and time of day, the water may buzz
1
with solar energy, or the differing tones
of Neptune, Jupiter or Uranus, or the
white noise of the Milky Way. When no
one is in the bath, light passes through
it to an expansive sphere below, and the
curvature of the glass bowl acts as a lens
that projects an image of the sky onto a
bed of white sand. Visitors who descend
into the sphere can gaze at the sand to
observe clouds, glimmering stars or the
shifting hues of twilight. “So it’s a radio
Ross-Simons Item #920590 telescope,” Turrell said, “but it’s also a
camera obscura.”
To receive this special offer, use offer code: DEEPBLUE15
Turrell flipped through page after
1.800.556.7376 or visit ross-simons.com/deepblue page of meticulous plans. The Twi-
light Tea Room is a 24-foot-diameter
sphere designed to “look like a ball
SMITHSONIAN; May 2021;
Make Yard Cleanup EASY with Volume 52, Number 02. that’s rolling down a hill,” Turrell said.
® Smithsonian (ISSN 0037-7333) is published A telescope and mirror direct light from
monthly (except for January/February issue and a the sunset to a golden bowl inside. “It
July/August issue) by Smithsonian Enterprises, 600
Maryland Ave., S.W., Suite 6001, Washington, D.C. makes this astonishing color as you’re
and additional mailing offices.
preparing the tea,” he said. There was
Postmaster: send address changes to Smithsonian a site called the Stupa Space, modeled
Customer Service, PO Box 37936 Boone, IA 50037-
0936. Printed in the USA. Canadian Publication on a shrine Turrell saw in Afghanistan,
Agreement No. 40043911. Canadian return address:
Asendia USA, PO Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A6C7.
another called the Arcturus Seat, and a
third known as the Saddle Space—each
We may occasionally publish extra issues.
©Smithsonian Institution 2021. All rights reserved. suffused with its own combination of
Reproduction in whole or in part without permis- sound, reverberations and light. Look-
sion is prohibited. Editorial offices are at MRC 513,
P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013 Advertising ing at the blueprints, I had a new appre-
and circulation offices are at 420 Lexington Ave.,
New York, NY 10170 (212-916-1300). ciation for the audacity of the project,
but also the crushing weight of such a
Memberships: All subscribers to Smithsonian
are members of the Smithsonian Institution. monumental task. “I need another four
Ninety-nine percent of the dues is designated for
magazine subscriptions. years,” he said. “Then I can relax.”
We closed the book and drove 30-
Back Issue: To purchase a back issue, please
call or email James Babcock at 212-916-1323 or odd miles to the crater, wandering into
[email protected]. Back issue price is $7.00 (U.S. Funds).
• CHIP big branches up to 5" thick the tunnel we had seen from above. In-
Mailing Lists: From time to time we make our side, the light was low, and dust filled
• SHRED lighter yard & garden waste subscriber list available to companies that sell goods
and services we believe would interest our readers. the air. Masons sculpted elliptical walls
• REDUCE it all to a fraction of its If you would rather not receive this information,
and tile-setters finished a low bench
please send your current mailing label, or an exact
original volume copy, to: Smithsonian Customer Service, PO Box around the perimeter. Turrell wandered
37936 Boone, IA 50037-0936.
to the center of the room and looked up
DRchipper.com Subscription Service: Should you wish to change through a narrow opening to the sky. “We
your address, or order new subscriptions, you can
do so by writing Smithsonian Customer Service, have to make everything in here perfect,
FREE Catalog! PO Box 37936 Boone, IA 50037-0936, or by calling
1-800-766-2149 (outside of the U.S., call 1-386-246- so that no one can see it,” he said quietly.
Call Toll-Free
0470). “All you should see is the light.”
888-201-5557

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YOU’VE GOT QUESTIONS. WE’VE GOT EXPERTS
Q: How do zoos keep infectious diseases
from spreading among animals? Are there
special vaccines for lions or bears?
— Christopher Hu | Shaker Heights, Ohio
MANY ZOO ANIMALS can thank pets for their vac-

cines, says Kailey Anderson, a veterinary resident
at the National Zoo. Most vaccine research has been
done on domesticated animals. So when vets want to
inoculate a giant rat, for instance, they’ll use a vac-
cine developed for pet rodents. Sometimes a species
isn’t related to a common pet or farm animal, so vets
will look at factors like diet, metabolism and behav-
ior. That’s why elephants get vaccines designed for
horses, and bears get vaccines designed for dogs.
Q: Does paved-over soil have any microbial

life? If not, can the microbes ever return?
— Dorothy West | Reston, Virginia
BEFORE WORKERS pour cement or roll asphalt, they

strip away the top level of the soil where many tiny
life-forms thrive. Microbes need plants to thrive and
vice versa, says Pat Megonigal, biogeochemist at the
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. The
tiny organisms decompose dead plant parts, turning
them into nutrient-rich soil. Even after pavement has
been removed, it can take hundreds of years for the
soil’s ecosystem to recover. But scientists speed up
the process by introducing nutrient-rich compounds
that help both microbes and plants flourish.
Q: I’ve seen fashion designers
promoting clothing based on kente Q: My son-in-law and I differ on why the
cloth from Ghana. Is it insensitive for moon is always larger when it’s close to
the horizon. He says it’s an illusion caused
non-Ghanaians to wear it? by distance. I think it’s the moisture in the
— Lilia Morris | New York City atmosphere acting as a magnifying prism.
Is either of these ideas correct?
— Paul Ziebarth | Buffalo, New York
OLORFUL KENTE CLOTH —made of
C handwoven silk and cotton—has been THE ATMOSPHERE can play a role, especially in
part of Ghanaian tradition for hun- changing the moon’s color. But the “moon illusion,”
dreds of years. The colors and patterns which has fascinated humans since ancient times,
in any given piece tell a story. Within has a more widely accepted explanation, says David
Ghana, kente designs are used for specific occasions DeVorkin, curator of space history at the National
and are even protected by law. Diana Baird N’Diaye, Air and Space Museum. When the moon is on the
a cultural specialist at the Center for Folklife and Cul- horizon, it’s often positioned near objects like trees
ture Heritage, thinks it’s fine for Americans, especial- and houses, causing it to seem larger than it does
ly those of African ancestry, to wear appropriate kente when it’s isolated high up in an empty sky. Still, this
patterns to events such as graduations and funerals, isn’t the whole story. Astronauts in space also see the
as long as the cloth itself was handwoven in Africa. moon appearing to change size, even when there’s
When designers make abstract patterns based on the nothing in the foreground. The reasons for the il-
look of kente, she thinks they should make it clear to lusion are still a bit mysterious—a reliable topic of
the public where they’re getting their inspiration. But Submit your conversation while standing under the night sky.
they shouldn’t copy actual kente patterns. “It’s not queries at
Smithsonian-
just a decorative print,” she says. mag.com/ask Text by Natalie Hamilton
88 SMITHSONIAN | May 2021 Illustration by Adriana Bellet

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I ES

James Turrell’s mind-boggling artwork

T he Regata Storica started in 1489, when the beautiful

A co ll ec t io n of i m p ec ca ble de si gn & c r a f tsm an s h i p f r o m I t a l y .

May 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 3

EXECUTIVE EDITOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR

COPY CHIEF Karen Larkins

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