Untitled Story, Chapter 2 (excerpt)

The ship rose out of the water taller than anything Solomon could have imagined, taller even than the highest trees he had climbed on his father's land. The scope of everything in the port dazzled him, from the dock jutting into the waves like a piece of road transplanted in the ocean, to the mooring lines as wide around as his waist, to the ocean itself, impossibly vast, rolling and frothing just as he had envisioned in his daydreams. The one element he had never considered was the smell of it all. He was hypnotized by the tang of salt on the air, something he had only ever tasted on rare occasions in town when the butcher had slipped him pieces of cured meat as his father conducted business across the street. But this...this was salt as he had never imagined it. It filled his nostrils, his lungs, and his mind as he stood on the bustling path that led from the seaport market down to the docks. Dizzy with the sights and smells, he sat himself on top of a barrel out of the way and took it all in as best he could. 

For a boy who had spent the better part of his life wandering the woods alone, such a place was a shock to the senses. He saw all manner of men either rushing or lazing about, clad in strange clothes and speaking to each other in tongues he did not understand. Strange as it may seem to those who are well-read, and knowledgeable of the world, and who have spent their lives meeting all kinds of people, Solomon Hyrax had never before considered that there might be whole groups of others that didn't speak in the same language as he. This revelation and the observations that led to it were enough to keep him fixated in his seat for well over an hour. 

He gazed at the crowded tumble of stores and homes that vied for space in the town that stretched out behind him. They were ramshackle, mostly, painted in pale pinks and blues and yellows. Where the paint had chipped away old boards showed through, eroded in strange patterns by the salt wind and turned an odd green by the moisture. Solomon's eyes took all of this in, so new and different from the dry and comfortable Naweego that he had grown up in, eventually alighting on a building nothing like the others. 

It was shaped like an odd sort of cone, black and white stripes spiraling up its sides, with what appeared to be a tiny glass house at its top. This building stood far apart from the rest, perched at the end of the ancient stone seawall that led across the mouth of the town and out into the rocky shoals. Solomon never left the barrel, but his mind was working overtime processing all the rough-hewn majesty of the oceanside town. He was chewing without thought, barely cognizant of the matronly woman who had come out of a nearby shop and pushed a steaming, meat-filled pastry into his hands.

During this time, the older Hyrax was dashing about attempting to haggle for last-minute supplies and making sure all preparations had been made in advance of their arrival. In truth he was in a state of anxious panic, setting the wheels in motion for an undertaking full of possibilities both hopeful and terrible. Jacques was and always had been an exceptionally brave man, and the anxiety clawing at his chest and suffocating his breath was a new sensation to him. He was not a man readily given over to hoping for things, practical as he was, but that emotion was fighting for space within him as well. Though he never could have vocalized it, part of him hoped he was doing right for Solomon's sake as much as for his own.

He need not have worried, at least on Solomon's account. One of the things that marks children as children (and which marks them as nearing adulthood when they begin to lose it) is the unwavering belief that their parents know what to do in any situation, particularly the tough ones. Solomon was no different, and had always believed his father to be a man whose decisions were correct. This too might seem curious, given the utter lack of socialization or emotional connection developed in the Hyrax home, but Solomon's lifelong isolation must again be taken into consideration. 

After a great deal of time Jacques emerged from the cobbled street's dry goods store with another man. Two others followed them, one pushing a roughly hewn wooden cart piled high with sacks of flour and potatoes and the other rolling a veritable flotilla of barrels with skill. Though Solomon knew nothing of such matters, there was no mistaking that the man striding beside his father was a person of importance. This newcomer exuded an air of power and authority, and though he was at least a head shorter than either of the Hyraxes, it was apparent to Solomon that he ought to stay out of this man's way. 

Jacques summoned Solomon with a twitch of his head as he kept pace with this authoritative newcomer. Solomon lifted himself down from his perch, working a kink out of his saddlesore backside as he hurried to his father's side. The new man was talking away, in a manner as rough as the boards of the shop they had just left.

"...can't promise that. But my best guess is eight days out before we reach the Chasm. Can't take ya no further. My crew and I'll be banking straight north once we reach it to finish our supply run and start fishin'. If your people are where you say they'll be, we should be able to pass ya across to 'em without too much trouble."

"Thank you, Captain. Solomon..." His father paused. "We're off to sea. Can you understand?"

There seemed to be more to the question than that, but whatever it was went unasked. Solomon retrieved his trunk from where it lay behind the carriage as their walk wheeled them down towards the dock, the great ship looming larger and larger as they approached. Solomon scarcely dared believe it. After his long years of sleeping and dreaming and imagining the sea, he was about to sever the invisible ties that bound his feet to the land and set sail for the first time. The destination hardly seemed to matter; indeed, the thought of where they might be headed barely crossed his eager mind as he made his way up the gangplank onto the sturdy timbers of the vessel that lay waiting for him. 

                                      .                    .                   .                      .                .

They were at sea for three nights before Solomon was able to lie down for bed without feeling as though his insides were down below the deck, rolling around the cargo hold among the barrels of wine and smoked meat and gunpowder. Those first few days were among the most unpleasant of Solomon Hyrax's young life. All of his romantic notions of life at sea, all of his yearning to know the most intimate details of a ship's handling and operation, had seeped out of him through the planks of the Windjammer's deck as he lay curled up and immobile behind an enormous spool of rope. 

He had never felt so acutely aware of being sick; consequently, he had never felt so little care about the things going on around him. Men came and went, his father among them (though for much longer periods of time than anyone else who came to sit with him), carrying out duties and affairs that Solomon could not muster an ounce of interest in. He had spent those three days inwardly cursing himself, his stomach, and the sea. Here was the clear beginning of an adventure that he had spent a short lifetime pining for, and he was too violently ill to take any more part in his oceanic journey than a piece of driftwood takes in its own. 

Now, as all seagoing folk know, these kinds of ailments are usually temporary. Before he knew it, though long after he began silently begged for it, Solomon was feeling almost himself again. He found that he was absurdly hungry, and it dawned on him that he had not eaten a bite since the pastry he had savored from on top of the barrel at the docks of Merriport. The tingling excitement that had electrified him the moment he stepped on board had been deadened by the rolling of his stomach. Now, as his seasickness started to subside, Solomon's feelings of flighty happiness began to well up in him again. He rose from his makeshift quarters, steadying his weakened knees by propping himself up on the massive coil of rope. 

"Well, well. Finally decided to join us, lad?"

Solomon pushed a limp coil of salt-bleached orange hair out of his face and saw standing before him the same dubious-looking man that had come to his house (could it only have been four nights ago?). His weatherbeaten face was wreathed in the acrid smoke of his black pipe. Solomon nodded slowly, careful not to make any sudden movements in case his innards decided to betray him again. 

"Good to see yeh on your feet. Yer father'll be lookin' for yeh. Give your corner there a moppin', when yer feelin' up to it."

The man was gone. He had still given no explanation of who he was, or why his coming had created such a momentous frenzy in the Hyrax home, or where they were going. 

                                                  .            .              .              .           .            .            .

Despite what the strange man had said, Solomon did not hear a word from his father for another two days. He would see the older man every few hours, usually deeply engaged in the work of the ship. Jacques' sinews bulged visibly even beneath his salt-stained cloth jacket as he went about his work. Solomon had always assumed his father to be a man of prodigious strength, but to see him in action tying off the sails or carrying up whole crates of dried food from below deck was something else entirely. At fifteen years old Solomon was quite strong himself, though he did not help with any of the work taking place on board save for the mopping requested by the strange man. No one spoke to him except to bring him food, and somehow it didn't seem to be his place to ask for a job to do. 

What Solomon did do was what he had always done: climb. The rigging of the massive ship provided ample opportunity for a boy as skilled as he to pull himself up, hand over hand, into the highest places. A quick test of any line's tension told him whether or not it was already secured in place, and if it was he could make use of it. He found the climbing of ropes and  masts to be a welcome challenge, as the whole apparatus was fundamentally more unsteady than anything he had climbed all of those lifetimes ago--or was it only weeks?-- in the colorful woods of his father's land.

From his vantage point high in the rigging of the Windjammer, Solomon could see the sailors going about their business far below. As he had done on trips into town with his father, as he had done his entire life, he imagined what the people far below were like. It troubled him only a little that he was not actually getting to know them, only creating lives for them in his own head, because he had no reason to believe that they had any inclination to get to know him in return. If they even knew he existed.

He finally spoke with his father on a hot bright morning, quite by accident. Solomon had taken it upon himself to sweep out the deck in front of the captain's quarters. Having finished early, he decided to sweep the inside as well. He had yet to find a locked door on board the ship, and guessed that this would be no different. He eased his way through the well-worn door, moving quietly in his fashion, and was startled to see his father sitting at the captain's desk poring over a large and fraying map. The older man's shirt was completely unbuttoned, and in the dusty half-light filtering through the porthole he saw what looked like ink stains covering his father's sizable chest. Jacques Hyrax was sweating considerably in the stuffy cabin, but his perspiration was not making the ink run, and Solomon stood transfixed as his eyes began to focus on the strange shapes and patterns swimming across the torso of a man who had never been anything but primly dressed in front of his son. 

If the elder Hyrax was startled by his son's presence, he didn't show it. His ice-blue eyes locked on Solomon's as he buttoned his shirt all the way back up and buried the pictures on his skin once more. He reached for a cloth that lay to the side of the desk, and slowly mopped his glistening forehead. Solomon detached his eyes from his father's chest, now covered by Jacques' rough blue shirt and utterly unremarkable. 

He rarely ever spoke to his father, especially without being spoken to first, and never asked him a question without good reason. But Jacques was just sitting there, calmly and with jaw set, as though expecting one to come. Hundreds of them danced across the front of his son's mind, begging to be asked, and Solomon blurted out the one he thought might bring him the least trouble.

"Father…who is that man? The one who came to the house, I mean. I…" 

For a few more moments, agonizing to the ever-placating young man, Jacques remained quiet with his  eyes fixed directly on his son's. When he finally broke his rigid pose, his magnificent red beard was matted by the force of his sigh. 

"I'm afraid I don't know his real name. I have always known him simply as Rip Rap. He is an old sailor and now serves as the keeper of the lighthouse that you may have seen when we were in Merriport. As such he's perhaps the best-informed man on the entire coast. He brought me some news on the day that he came to the house, and Rip Rap's news is always worth something…for good or ill."

Sweat was beading on Solomon's forehead and he could see the dust motes filtering down in the strong beam of sunlight that came through the closed porthole behind his father's head. The air in the room was becoming stifling. He dared not ask what the news had been. 

"I'm glad to see that you're up and about. Ships take some getting used to. Give it another few days and you'll be moving around like you've spent your whole life on board. I'll sweep this office from now on, so you can leave it out of your list of duties. I'm sure there's plenty of dirt in the galley for you to clean up, while you're in the mood. And please tell Rip Rap I would like a word, if you come across him."

Solomon took the hint that his interview was over, and left the room with his broom in hand. As he made his exit he saw his father begin to unbutton his shirt once more. 

Marshall Islands Chronicles, Post-Script: Pissing on the Dead

The Marshallese, being a family-oriented society with little in the way of available land space, almost always bury their dead at home. Just about every house you see there has two or three dusty white headstones in the yard, high rectangular graves with rectangular markers rising from one end. My host family's home was no different--there were three gravestones on their property, the closest being maybe six feet from my bedroom window. Nothing says, "Welcome to your home for the year" quite like three dead people to share your personal space with.

Their presence at first presented me with one of my more serious ethical dilemmas--others included "Should I eat this endangered sea turtle that's been served to me?" (guilty) and "Is it morally defensible to tape two seven-year-olds together who won't stop brawling, in the spirit of teaching them a lesson about cooperation?" (doubly guilty). Anyway, the dilemma presented by the three deceased housemates was, namely, whether or not it was okay to just piss out my bedroom window at night despite my proximity to their final resting places. The alternative, mind you, was to try to make my way through the pitch dark in an unfamiliar house with a full bladder, undo a series of knots that functioned as a lock, and take care of business before negotiating the same process in reverse. While also trying not to step on the sleeping forms of my three host siblings, who used the floor as a shared bed. Mind you, Marshallese dark was not like American dark. There was no light pollution there, no headlights going by, nothing. Once it was dark you better have known where you were.

As so often (unfortunately) happens, convenience trumped my moral platitudes in this case. I decided a few weeks into my stay on Aur that I would just let fly out the window, so to speak, should a middle-of-the-night situation arise.

This system worked out just fine for me from August to February, with a few notable exceptions. These usually involved me grossly misjudging the time of night (having gone to bed at 8:45 for lack of light or social options) and thinking it was a lot later than it really was. I would assume I was in the clear and proceed with my nightly micturating, only to have someone in my host family come around the side of the house and witness a thin stream emerging from the dark conspicuous frame of my window--it being, say, 10 pm and not 2 am as I had imagined. To their credit, they never once mentioned it to me. This I took as early evidence that we were going to get on just fine.

(PSA: this longwinded story is about to go from lighthearted to soul-crushingly bleak.)

As I said, my system worked well into February--a full six months of urinary freedom. But on the morning of February 16th, a Saturday, I woke up to the sound of men shouting and shoveling right outside my window. I was pissed off at the chaos for about three minutes before getting up to see what the commotion was. I didn't pull back my window curtain; rather, I got dressed and went out the door and around the house. What I saw felt like a sucker punch to the gut, a complete reflex that occurred before I had even finished processing what I was looking at.

A group of the men had dug a shallow trench, maybe six feet long, in the earth directly under my bedroom window. Lying in the trench was a woman, and it was immediately clear that she was no longer alive. I went out of my head for about ten seconds, just not processing or hearing anything clearly. When this wave passed I sprinted over to my school's principal, standing among the men, to ask what in God's name had happened. He explained that she had been sleeping in one of the small tin outbuildings on the next door neighbors' property, and an enormous breadfruit tree had collapsed and crushed it. Breadfruit trees generally run pretty big, with sturdy and visible roots, but there had been a colossal windstorm the night before and it had come loose. Help had come to her too late, and she never woke up. She died in the little trench as the men attempted to minister to her with medicines both modern and traditional. I should selfishly mention that my cot rested against the 1/2"-thick piece of particle board which served as a wall of the house, meaning that their ministrations and her death had happened less than a foot away from where I was sleeping. I probably don't need to explain how that made and still makes me feel.

The woman in question, Kathleen (pronounced Cat-a-lane by the Marshallese) was the mother of two of my students and the aunt of about nine others. The gut-punch I got was clearly nothing compared to the one received by the entire community, who had known her for her entire life. Everyone is family on an islands like that, in both a communal and biological sense, so when someone dies everyone loses a neighbor, a friend, a grandmother, a child. It is a strange, strange feeling to be a relative outsider in the midst of such deep-seated grief. From the events that transpired following Kathleen's passing, however, I learned two very important aspects of Marshallese culture. These simultaneously made me feel like part of their communal family (because they let me into something intensely personal and emotional), and like even more of an outsider (because I could not in the least relate to how they were handling things). Allow me to explain.

The first thing I learned is that the Marshallese, despite their passionate Christian beliefs (thanks to generations of missionary influence), are afraid of nothing except ghosts.  They swim with and kill sharks, climb limbless 50-foot coconut trees, and sail vast expanses of ocean in canoes that look like they barely float, all without batting an eye. But the possibility of a ghost--a timon (bastardized from demon)--puts them right over the edge. They cannot cope. This particularly applies to the children. After Kathleen passed away in my backyard, the kids of Aur basically foreswore the whole property for weeks. It became taboo. It took more than two months for any of my host siblings to even sleep in the house again, and only then with a solar flashlight running all night. I was regarded by my students as some mixture of crazy and heroic for continuing to sleep in my room and using that side of the house at all. For my part, I mostly just felt terrible for Tammy and Darrel (Kathleen's kids, my students) that their friends had turned their mother into the village bogey-woman. Despite all their charms, kids are occasionally just as capable of being shitty to each other as adults are.

The other thing I learned was the process by which the Marshallese grieve. Funerals are just about the only time you will ever see an outer-islander exhibit any kind of sadness. Marshallese adults simply do not cry, ever, with this one exception. It's a cultural sticking point that I really can't identify with in the least. The kids, like kids anywhere, cry all the time over hurts real and imagined, but by the time they reach age fifteen or so the ability to act on that impulse is almost entirely gone. The Marshallese are also not an outwardly affectionate people in the physical sense, ever, so it was beyond bizarre for me to be at the house that day and see upwards of forty people milling around in the presence of a dead body without a single hug being issued or tear being shed. We often forget how thick the American lens through which we view the world is, and this was one of the times that my cultural bias was readily apparent. It was truly surreal. My clumsy attempts at comforting Tammy and Darrel made me feel even more out of place, like I had just stumbled into a meeting that I wasn't supposed to know was taking place. They all just sat there, looking kind of dazed.

Like I said, there was zero crying before the funeral. What we would call "calling hours", the Marshallese call the ilomeji.  That word literally breaks down to "I see dead person/people." Eat your heart out, Bruce Willis. The ilomej went on all afternoon the following day and a vigil was kept over the body all night, until the next morning's funeral service and burial. Just before the coffin was lowered into the ground I saw my first adult Marshallese tears. It was chilling. To see such reserved women absolutely lose it, all at once, was hard to watch. It wasn't so much weeping as it was screaming. Kathleen's family pounded the lid of the coffin as they mourned, clinging to it until the last possible second.

What sprang to mind as this was all happening, as I was handed a shovel to help with the burial, was a crystal-clear memory of twelfth-grade AP Latin. The year's task had been translating Virgil's Aeneid, and the entire class had struggled with the parsing of a passage describing the sacking and burning of Troy. Our teacher, the brilliant Dr. James Hunt, told us that in English the words we couldn't grasp referred to something called ululating. Dr. Hunt said that he could explain what it meant, but we probably wouldn't truly understand because we had no cultural frame of reference for it. American women display grief in all manner of ways, but generally not with the ululations, rending of clothes, or pounding of the breasts in sorrow, as these Asiatic women had done in antiquity and the Marshallese women were still doing today. It is a gesture suited to the most unspeakable sadnesses possible. Speaking of Latin, Seneca had a saying for this: "Light griefs are loquacious, the great are dumb."

It's worth noting that the whole process, from death to burial, was over in about twenty-six hours. Being on island time (as they will proudly tell you), the Marshallese typically don't put on a shirt without three days of hemming and hawing, delays, and schedule changes, so the fact that something as momentous and important as a funeral could be pulled off so quickly was a borderline miracle. Perhaps this speaks to the hard life of the Marshallese throughout history, a catalogue full of short lives and unpleasant deaths in an impossibly unforgiving setting. I was and am humbled and grateful that they deigned to give me so much of themselves throughout the year. This particularly comes to mind when reflecting on how they were all so accommodating and thoughtful in the midst of their mourning--at a time when they had every reason to be resentful of the intruder on their grief, they still insisted on feeding me before themselves, giving me a seat of honor at the funeral, and allowing me to help shovel the earth that put Kathleen in her final resting place.

From that day forward I figured it was only right that I should never again piss in the presence of their honored dead.

Untitled Story, Chapter 1

(This is the first draft of the first chapter of an as-yet untitled story I've been working on. Any and all feedback is welcome! Later chapters draw on my experiences in the Marshall Islands, in a re-imagined sort of way.)

When Jacques Hyrax was a boy, he would often wake in the night feeling as though his bed had moved. It was not uncommon for him to feel the motion of waves rolling beneath his mattress as a whiff of salt air filled his nostrils, or for the frosty blasts of a snowstorm to howl by just outside what might have been a cave tucked away in a mountain. Of course, the bed never really went anywhere, but such is the kind of imagination that, if it is cultivated and allowed to grow tall, produces the kind of people who go on grand adventures and have many tales to tell. Jacques Hyrax was of just such a mind. He would eventually go on to have adventures of the sort that he had imagined as a boy (some of which will be related here), or else there would be no tale to tell, but life is long and can be dull in the early going when one is unable to get out and see the world.   For now, what we should note first is that Jacques eventually had a son. The son was named Solomon, and he too happened to be the sort of boy who woke in the night feeling as though his bed had transported him somewhere both strange and wonderful. 

On the occasions that Solomon Hyrax would wake with this feeling, he would lay awake for awhile with his head and torso out of the covers until the sounds of pounding surf or howling wind or driving snow faded back into the recesses of his imagination. This did not always come quickly or easily, and if sleep refused to come he would slip out of bed and pad softly down his hall to the top of the stairs. Because he was quick and slender he made no noise in doing so, which allowed him to scan, unnoticed, the familiar sight of the ground floor below him. 

More often than not, he would peer down and see his father sitting in his favorite armchair in front of the wavering embers of a dying fire in the fireplace. On the infrequent times that he deigned to speak to the son, his father was kind, though rarely cheerful, and on those fire-lit nights the older Hyrax wore the thousand-yard stare of a man who had seen and done strange and regretful things. Of course young boys rarely have much to really regret, and as such Solomon was only vaguely aware of what might be stirring behind his father's glassy distant eyes. But it didn't take a lifetime out in the world to recognize that all was not settled in the mind of the private, solitary man who had raised him. 

He had noticed that when the two of them would walk into town together, down the dirt road flanked by towering ancient trees and across two winding hills before coming to the cobbled street of smiths and bakers and chemists, that people on the street always gave his father a wide berth. The older Hyrax had a distant stare for these occasions too, though it was not the stare of a man lost in thought so much as one of shutting out the world before it could do the same turn to him. Solomon could not remember his father wearing anything other than sleeves that buttoned all the way to the wrists and shirts with high stiff collars, even on the warmest of these days in the town, and he always supposed the townspeople's stares might have had something to do with the odd fashion in which his father chose to dress. 

The two of them would run these errands perhaps once a week, the fiercely bearded towering man and the tall slight youth. Anyone watching them would have known them as family only by their matching shocks of red hair. Otherwise they could not have been more dissimilar--the man hawk-nosed and muscular, the boy elfin-featured and lean, with a deep tan to his skin even in the winter months. Jacques' eyes smoldered turquoise blue, while his son's were the grey of a stormcloud out across some distant sea. The assumption of the townspeople had always been that the boy's looks favored his mother's, though none of them could ever recall seeing or knowing her. For that matter, neither could the boy.

They said little as a rule on these excursions, for although his father had never forbade his asking questions, young Solomon seemed to sense intuitively that intrusions into the pensive mind of the older man were unwelcome. The man went about his business quickly and firmly, often stopping in a number of stores and buildings marked by words that the boy was unable to understand. He had never been taught to read, and his education had consisted entirely of learning the paths of the forest behind his house, the calls and cries of any number of wild animals, and the climbing of trees. 

They had no neighbors near their house, a two-story structure of pink-tinged stone, as their property was bounded by forest on two sides and rolling fields of grass and clover on two others. As such Solomon had no friends, but he also did not know the want of them. He passed his hours at home going about the chores his father set for him, or learning every inch of the forest, or building model ships in his room. He had never been on a ship, or even seen one in person, but they often appeared in his dreams. If it could be said that the boy felt he was missing anything in his life, it would be the absence of ships and the sea in his landlocked existence. 

                                                                   .   .   .   .   .

Very little changed in the life of Solomon Hyrax until he was fifteen years old. The passage of time marked itself, of course, with the changing of the leaves on the tapestry of trees that blanketed his father's land, from green to a palette of reds and golds until all fell off for the winter. Such has time always passed in that part of the world, with the townspeople harvesting the dead and dying trees to heat their cottages through the oft-blustery winters. The boy relished snowy afternoons when his chores were finished, for he welcomed the challenge of climbing trees whose branches had iced over in the night and were prone to dumping their snowy burdens at the touch of a hand. Still he loved these adventures most, because something was moved deep inside of him at the touch of his ungloved hands on the frozen steely arms of oak and ash. He could sense, intuitively, the dormant life and warmth of these wooden sentinels that lay beneath their icy exteriors. These treks were often followed at night by bed-moving dreams, sometimes to far-flung tropical islands under the blistering sun or sand-swept desert vistas that seemed to stretch on forever. His dream sensations, he found, rarely matched the season. 

The winter months of Solomon's fifteenth year gradually passed into spring (too quickly, in his opinion) and green gradually returned to the countryside. The boy found that the only good thing about the melting of the snow was that his walks to town became considerably more pleasant when he wasn't tramping through a knee-high blanket of snow crusted over with frost. Upon returning home he would kick his dew-covered boots off into the grass and tramp barefooted up the stone stairs to his room, pushing the slatted window open and feeling the breeze drifting through the window, still clinging to winter's last icy suggestion. Solomon pictured ships in some distant harbor setting out again, sails unfurled by hard-living men who spoke roughly but knew their vessels like parts of themselves, venturing fearlessly into waters still mapped by the broken ice floes that drifted and bobbed in the unforgiving green waters. 

It was on one of these days in the early spring, as the far-off sea rolled and crackled under its frigid covering, that just such a man came to the boy's house. In later years he would remember it as the day that marked the real and true start of his strange adventurous life. 

                                                                      .   .   .   .   .

The small hard man sat with Solomon's father all night, as far as the boy could tell. It had been early afternoon when he had arrived, the youth having only just finished his small neat lunch when the raps on the heavy wooden door began echoing off the stone walls and flagstones throughout the house. It seems prudent to note that, though anyone else would have known what ceaseless banging at the outside of a door on a pleasant afternoon might mean, Solomon was hopelessly confused by the noise. As far as he could remember, no such thing had ever occurred at his home before. His memory did in fact serve him correctly (those boys who dream vividly also having excellent memories, as a rule). The Hyrax household had not received a visitor once in his fifteen years, and he had been quite unsure of what was happening. 

Dumbstruck as he was, he had remained quite stationary in his father's favorite easy chair, a seat upon which his legs had only recently started reaching the floor, and had stared across the ground floor at the front door. He had gazed past the myriad maps and charts that adorned the sitting room's walls, past the large strange bones and fangs that ornamented his father's dusty soaring bookshelves, to the door which had creaked slowly open. His father had approached the door with measured pace as the afternoon sunlight illuminated the visitor from behind, casting his entire visage in shadow as he had stepped unasked into the house. Solomon had found his legs then, and had bolted up the stairs to his room as quickly as they would carry him. 

Toward midnight, as the moon poured silver light through the boy's window, he rose from his bed and crept, like so many other nights, to the top of the well-worn staircase. His father and the stranger sat facing one another, chairs barely a foot apart, speaking rapidly in low voices. Though he could not say for sure, Solomon believed that this new man was telling his father something urgently, something that his father was unwilling to believe as true. Smoke poured from their mouths and pipes as the conversation continued, but there was little for Solomon to make out. He was immediately inclined to distrust this visitor to their quiet home. Something seemed unsettling in the man's eyes, which darted constantly from side to side in their thick hooded lids. The boy had never seen anyone dress in such a strange rough manner, his pants in tatters and his blue coat low-collared and dirty. Nor had he ever encountered a man whose beard was plaited as this man's was. Though thick and grey, it bore intricate braids from the jawbone to its tip, and the smoke of the stranger's pipe seemed to meld with the beard, to change its shape into a shimmering and substanceless cloud of silver. 

Solomon eventually returned to his room, sleep finally coming despite the moon's brightness through his open window. He felt as though he had only dozed a moment when he awoke to the rough hand of his father on his shoulder. The older man was firmly shaking him awake, whispering his name with urgency.

"Solomon Hyrax! Wake up, child!"

Solomon sat bolt upright upon hearing the strained quality of his father's voice, rippling with an almost fearful tone. The sun had not yet started to rise above the horizon, and the dewy air pouring forth through the open window lent a chill to his body deep down as he came awake from a sleep in which his bed had gone nowhere. 

"Father! What time is it?"

"Never you mind that just now. Up, child! Up!"

Solomon clambered out of bed to find clothes laid out for him on his desk's chair, a sturdy wooden contraption with a seat well-worn from his years sitting, thinking, playing at it. He was astonished to see that his small trunk was by the door, already packed full, and his small heart sank at the thought that his father might be sending him away. What could have happened? Had their visitor demanded he be taken away?

Groggily, he lifted the trunk (in only one hand; though he had never taken a trip before, he had often hefted it in quiet restless moments as he daydreamed of what might lay out in the world, and until this past year this exercise had always required a two-handed effort) and hurried clumsily to the stairs and down them. A little ways down the path, he could just make out the shape of a horse and carriage in the predawn gloom. It was this that his father hurried him towards with breathless haste. The previous afternoon's visitor was seated at the reins, and barely glanced at Solomon as he hoisted his trunk into the carriage and jumped in behind it. A terrifyingly uncertain moment passed in the boy's mind as the thought of his forced flight began to settle in his mind, but it was partially dispelled seconds later as his father dashed around the carriage and jumped in on the other side with a trunk of his own. He banged twice on the inside roof of the carriage, and it leapt to life in an instant as the horse sped off recklessly down the path. Having only ever walked the path to the village, and everywhere else to boot, Solomon was at once thrilled and frightened by the speed and novelty of the vehicle. His father said nothing, and as always Solomon thought it better not to ask, though the older man's eyes were lit with a strange frenzied glow that didn't seem to match his tight, grim expression. 

The town was called Naweego and on that morning Solomon Hyrax knowingly set foot outside it for the first time in his fifteen years. Although perhaps 'set foot' is the wrong way to describe it, as the boy and his father were pulled the entire way--through fresh morning hills, dirt roads, and dewy meadows-- in the roughly hewn carriage driven by the strange little man who had arrived the previous afternoon. 

Big Ten Heist Team Power Rankings

A few weeks ago, I came across the following tweet while reading Grantland's weekly college football roundup:


@DangerGuerrero: Michigan has players named Fitzgerald Toussaint and Blake Countess. They're one DB named Rene Le Serge away from having a crew for a heist.

This witty observation, coupled with my hatred for all things Michigan, got me thinking: Are all college football teams as chock full o' heist-worthy player names as UM is? What about just the Big Ten? I started doing some research, and found a glorious treasure chest of dudes who, based purely on name value, I would follow into an Ocean's 11-style heist without a moment's hesitation. Without further ado, I present your 2013 Big Ten conference All-Heist power rankings.

1. ILLINOIS FIGHTIN' ILLINI

Heist Crew: Man Berg (QB), Fritz Rock (WR), Devin Church (RB), Zane Petty (DB), Nick North (DB)
Honorable Mentions: DeJazz Woods (DL), Houston Bates (DL)
Left at Home: Pat Flavin (OL), Wes Lunt (QB)

Top to bottom, Illinois' roster screams "Heist-worthy". I would pay good money to see a movie about suave criminals starring Jason Statham as "Devin Church" and Dolph Lundgren as "Man Berg". Very few weak spots here. If only their football team could pull off the smooth moves I mentally attribute to their handsome hypothetical counterparts.

2. IOWA HAWKEYES

Heist Crew: Solomon Warfield (DB), Nico Law (DB), Andrew Stone (WR), Boone Myers (OL), Jordan Cotton (WR).
Honorable Mention: Brett van Sloten (OL)
Left at Home: Greg Mabin (DB), Peter Pekar (TE), George Kittle (WR)

If "Solomon Warfield" isn't the name of Terry Crews' next action movie character, I might quit on movies altogether. "Boone Myers" evokes visions of Burt Reynolds, hamming it up as a wily old southern ex-con. "Nico Law" was the role that late-80's Jean-Claude van Damme was destined to play. Another roster full of middling football players blessed with fantastic names. On the other side of the coin, from here on out everyone named Greg is getting left behind. Can't be bringing a Greg with you when you're stealing millions of dollars/jewels/hearts.

3. NORTHWESTERN WILDCATS

Heist Crew: Kain Colter (QB), Dwight White (CB), Christian Salem (QB), Pierre Youngblood (WR), Chance Carter (DL)
Honorable Mentions: Joe Cannon (CB), Brad North (OL), Xavier Menifield ()
Left at Home: Pat Hickey (LS), Chi Chi Ariguzo (LB), Mike Trumpy (RB)

Idris Elba, Robert Downey Jr., and Matthew McConaughey star as "Dwight White", "Kain Colter", and "Chance Carter" in 2013's "WILDCATS: THE MOVIE". The cast would need to be rounded out by a team of suave, preferably foreign-born individuals (Omar Sy as "Pierre Youngblood"?). I once heard Kain Colter referred to as a "Swiss Army Knife" on the field, as he can pass, run, and catch, so his character would have to be a consummate jack-of-all-trades. Chi Chi Ariguzo gets left home for obvious reasons (namely, that name brings to mind Tracy Morgan's character in the 2005 remake of 'The Longest Yard').

4. NEBRASKA CORNHUSKERS

Heist Crew: Vincent Valentine (DT), Chongo Kondolo (OL), King Frazier (RB), Logan Rath (DL), Boaz Joseph (CB)
Honorable Mentions: DJ Singleton (DB), Givens Price (OL), Zaire Anderson (LB)
Left at Home: Thad Randle (DT), Jay Guy (DT), Ron Kellogg III (QB)

Quentin Tarantino would need to direct Nebraska's heist film, as "Vincent Valentine" sounds like the kind of steely, remorseless criminal that QT would create to drive his next sociopathically awesome splatter-fest. Samuel L. Jackson would be the obvious choice to play "King Frazier", the no-nonsense shit-talking wild card hired gun. Djimon Hounsou as "Chongo Kondolo" is a perfect fit. This heist wouldn't be the stealthy quiet kind. With this crew, smash-and-grab shoot-em-up tactics are the only way to go.

5. MICHIGAN STATE SPARTANS

Heist Crew: Taiwan Jones (LB), Blake Treadwell (G), Dan France (OL), Leland Ewing (LS), Damon Knox (DL)
Honorable Mentions: Kodi Kieler (C)
Left at Home: Denzel Drone (DE), Mike Sadler (P)

Hugh Jackman IS "Leland Ewing" in Bryan Singer's 2013 film "SPARTANS", a chromed-out fast-paced hacker movie (that includes at least 3 heavy-handed metaphors about gay acceptance). Matt Damon helps carry the team as "Dan France", a career criminal who struggles with the ethics of his profession in light of the recent birth of his daughter. Breaking from cliched heist movie norms, "Taiwan Jones" is black rather than Asian.

6. OHIO STATE BUCKEYES

Heist Crew: Ezekiel Elliot (RB), Kato Mitchell (WR), Ben St. John (OL), Cardale Jones (QB), Vonn Bell (DB)
Honorable Mentions: Warren Ball (RB), Philly Brown (WR)
Left at Home: Eli Apple (CB), Chris Rock (DL), Kenny Guiton (QB)

Spike Lee directs this ultimately heartwarming tale of five friends who rise from the mean streets of Cleveland to become rich, successful criminals. These modern-day Robin Hoods take down soulless corporate interests in order to give back to the struggling community that birthed them, dishing out street justice to pimps and drug dealers along the way. Will Smith and Wesley Snipes star. This movie, nay, film, wins several Academy Awards.

7. MICHIGAN WOLVERINES

Heist crew: Blake Countess (CB), Fitzgerald Toussaint (RB), Justice Hayes (WR), Taco Charlton (DE), Jack Doyle (LB)
Honorable Mention: Richard Ash (DT)
Left at Home: Jake Butt (TE) (LOL), Jack Wangler (WR) (ROFL), Henry Poggi (DT) (LMAO)

Let's be honest, those top three names are awesome, and Michigan's team was the inspiration for this post. But I'm a huge homer and there's no way I'm putting UM ahead of tOSU in any ranking except "sucking". Plus the squad gets dragged down by potentially the most awful bottom three names in the league. This movie would be a middling, semi-entertaining crime story with an entirely European cast. A doing-this-for-the-paycheck Colin Farrell stars as team leader "Jack Doyle".

8. PURDUE BOILERMAKERS

Heist Crew: DeAngelo Yancey (WR), Jack De Boef (OT), Andy Garcia (LB), Danny Ezechukwu (LB), Armstead Williams (LB)
Honorable Mentions: Ruben Ibarra (LB), Cameron Posey (WR), Sterling Carter (WR)
Left at Home: Greg Latta (DE), Shane Mikesky (WR), Austin Appleby (QB)

Andy Garcia, himself an "Ocean's" movie alum, takes on the role of a lifetime as "Andy Garcia", the leader of an international heist crew boasting smooth criminals from Mexico (himself), the Netherlands (Jack De Boef), Ghana (Danny Ezechukwu), America (Armstead Williams), and England (DeAngelo Yancey). They call themselves "The Boilermakers", a reference to their first clandestine operation as a team. It involved a train heist, and it was awesome. Savvy readers will note that the "Greg Rule" has again been applied here.

9. WISCONSIN BADGERS

Heist Crew: Jazz Peavy (WR), Reggie Love (WR), Jack Russell (K), Darius Hillary (CB), Walker Williams (OL)
Honorable Mentions: Dezmen Southward (S), Jesse Hayes (LB), Robert Wheelwright (WR)
Left at Home: Jeff Duckworth (WR)

An ancient treasure. A fearsome mountain. A hostile tribe protecting their birthright. A man struggling to live up to his family's legacy. Christoper Nolan's "THE BADGERS" tells the story of Darius Hillary, great-grandson of legendary Everest climber Edmund Hillary, and his crew. So named for their striped, furry attire, The Badgers are an experienced team of mountaineers and thieves trying to find their place in the world. Each man is haunted by his own demons, none more so than Hillary, who must make his way to the unknown faces of Everest and find the "treasure hidden within", or die trying. But does his checkered past put the rest of the team at risk? Leo DiCaprio stars.

10. MINNESOTA GOLDEN GOPHERS

Heist Crew: Maxx Williams (TE), Brock Vereen (DB), De'Niro Laster (LB), Martez Shabazz (DB), Gabe Mezzenga (TE)
Honorable Mention: n/a
Left at Home: David Cobb (RB), Tommy Olson (OL)

Affectionately known in the criminal underworld as "Team Scrabble" (based on how many points they would each get for their names, on average), the squad calling themselves The Golden Gophers have big shoes to fill. Each is the son or younger brother of a rich, respected, career criminal; each has serious shortcomings in his criminal toolkit. Can this ultimately lovable, scrappy band of misfits pull together to earn some serious cash, and find themselves along the way? Watch 2013's "GOLDEN GOPHERS" and find out. The Rock stars as "Maxx Williams".

11. INDIANA HOOSIERS

Heist Crew: Nate Boudreau (QB), Danny Friend (TE), Nick Stoner (WR)
Honorable Mention: n/a
Left at Home: Chase Hoobler (LB), Steven Funderburk (LB), Dan Feeney (OL)

Spolier alert: This low-budget Cajun-weed-chic movie will not do well at the box office (or on the football field). Gary Busey 'stars' as "Danny Friend", a Hawaiian shirt-wearing loose cannon trying to make one last big score on the streets of New Orleans. Because Taylor Kitsch has never been in a good movie ever, he plays the role of "Nate Boudreau".

12. PENN STATE NITTANY LIONS

Heist Crew: DJ Crook (QB), Jesse James (TE), Jack Seymour (QB), Christian Hackenberg (QB)
Honorable Mention: Chip Chiapalle (RB)
Left at Home: Gregg Garrity (WR), Garry Gilliam (OT), Gary Wooten (LB), Wendy Laurent (C), Alex Butterworth (P)

Sanctions against the production company prevent this movie from ever being made. The Greg(g) Rule applies to this Nittany Lions squad, which also somehow fields two guys named Gar(r)y on the same 53-man roster. Pretty mind-boggling stuff. They also have a guy named Wendy, and the man who would be their heist crew's leader has a name that sounds like a moniker that a 13-year-old might self-apply. Last place is the obvious spot for PSU here.

An Open Letter to ESPN

To whom it may concern,

As a lifelong sports fan, ESPN has been a staple of my daily routine for as long as I can remember. For many, many years, your network provided excellent and unparalleled sports coverage, particularly during episodes of "SportsCenter". This "flagship" program was an hour packed with highlights, insights, witticisms, and analysis. If a viewer craved exposes, emotional stories, or discussion of the personal lives of athletes, "Outside the Lines" (often following "SportsCenter") provided a perfect medium to explore this side of the sporting world. This sort of investigative reporting provided a perfect complement to the action-packed, diverse hour that was "SportsCenter". Except in the smallest of markets, a viewer was practically guaranteed at least a few highlights of his favorite team taking the field/ice/court if they had played that night. It's what made the show so great: a broad appeal, brimming with highlights that were enriched by the commentary behind them. 

I wish I could still talk about "SportsCenter" like this in the present tense. For several years now, however, the quality of this program has been steadily deteriorating to the point that I no longer recognize it as the bastion of sports videojournalism that it once was. I think I can pinpoint the first time I noticed the show beginning to fall off. It was the summer of 2008, and a swimmer named Michael Phelps was taking the Beijing Olympics by storm. It was undoubtedly a feel-good story, one that we could all get behind as Americans. His chase for eight gold medals was a series of inspiring televised moments that many of us will likely never forget. The only dark side to his success was the fact that sports programming began to feel oversaturated with coverage of the man. My friends and I jokingly started referring to ESPN as "PhelpsCenter", due to the unyielding focus on this Olympic hero. Interviews with people only tangentially related to the situation, and to the man, began to permeate your programming. The reporting on Phelps started to take on the breathless, hero-worshipping air of freshman girls who have been smiled at by the varsity football captain in the hallway. ("He's so funny!" "OMG his workouts are in-sane!" "He eats 12,000 calories a day and is still so ripped?? Ughhhh I must be dreaming!")

The Olympics ended, and eventually the Phelps talk began to recede into the distance, but we the viewers soon found out that "SportsCenter" had developed a taste for this kind of thing. You had gained viewership by capitalizing on this type of rabid, singular focus that deconstructs every possible angle of an athlete's personal life, body language, relationships, and possible flaws.  It wasn't long after Phelps' moment in the spotlight that the specter of Brett Favre's will he-or-won't he retirement reared its ugly head. For weeks (in consecutive summers!), every morning's edition of "SportsCenter" seemed solely dedicated to scrutinizing the minutiae of Favre's life and decision-making process. Were Favre less hungry for the spotlight, he would have been justified in filing a restraining order against ESPN's own Ed Werder--the man practically camped out outside the quarterback's Mississippi home, reporting on the movements inside as well as wildly speculating about the end result of Favre's decision. We were even 'treated' to police chase-style aerial footage of Favre's black SUV taking him to and from airports as the situation played out. The man was a good quarterback, not OJ Simpson on the lam, and this coverage seemed to be ESPN's "crossing the Rubicon" moment: the die had been cast, the shark had been jumped. There was no turning back. 

Since then, "SportsCenter" has devolved into a steady rotation of flavor-of-the-month stories that are beaten into the ground by day three, and yet are not given up on until weeks or months later. Tiger Woods' imploding personal life followed Favre's indecision; LeBron James' "Decision" special came less than a year later. (Yes, yes, that hour-long debacle raised $100,000 for the Boys' and Girls' Clubs of America. It also turned the sporting press into a group of fawning yes-men waiting for a handout from a benefactor elevated to divine status.) I need not remind anyone of the biggest story to follow LeBron's "Decision" and the ensuing season, in which his first title bid in Miami fell short. An oft-criticized, poorly-mechanized quarterback was given a chance to start for my beloved Denver Broncos, and his unconventional way of winning in the face of adversity (even when the adversity was his own poor decision-making) set your network newly aflame with endless material for the talking heads. Your media circus has barely let up in the nearly two years since Timothy Richard Tebow first started a game in the NFL, through his trade to the Jets and subsequent release, and it continues to this day as he dons the practice jersey of your favorite team to hate, the New England Patriots.

(Not-so-quick sidebar: What does your network have, exactly, against the New England Patriots? As a devoted supporter of a different AFC team, I could hardly be called a Patriots fan. But I feel compelled to defend them in light of recent events--namely, the Aaron Hernandez murder trial. Your coverage has repeatedly made it seem as though members of the Patriots organization, from owner Robert Kraft to coach Bill Belichick to quarterbacks Brady and Tebow, are somehow morally culpable for Odin Lloyd's death. Hernandez's choices were his own, and by all accounts most members of the team chose to have little to do with him outside of the team facilities. Had he made threats in the locker room, or suggested in the least that he intended or was capable of such a crime, then perhaps an intervention might have been necessary, or at least possible. But to condemn an entire organization for the actions of one troubled member is not only shoddy analysis, it's blatantly unfair. I haven't heard an iota of blame being levied against the Kansas City Chiefs for linebacker Jovan Belcher's murder-suicide, and your network's collective memory seems conveniently short in the case of ESPN golden boy Ray Lewis, who escaped a murder conviction by the skin of his teeth a decade ago. I suspect that your network's chosen Belichick-as-Machiavelli storyline stems more from the fact that he refuses to play your game, to embrace the era of TMZ-style guerilla journalism, than it does from any indiscretion he has actually committed.)

As far as Aaron Hernandez is concerned, the coverage carried out by 'SportsCenter' to date has bordered on the level of absurd reached during the Brett Favre years. At one point early last week, we were treated to three consecutive days of coverage of the police searching the lake near Hernandez's home. The lack of information being stretched into four-minute "news" bits became laughably apparent when the biggest piece of information delivered was that police had found a cell phone that was entirely unrelated to the case. I don't mean to be the bearer of bad news, especially since I have no background in sports journalism, but this is hardly the kind of "news" your viewers are clamoring for. 

The most recent examples of this overexposure not named Hernandez are those of Johny Manziel and Alex Rodriguez. In the case of the former, I can only say that I am unsurprised. Not because I believe Manziel to be an out-of-control, irresponsible party boy (although recent leaks about his autograph troubles speak to some level of character issue), but because when someone is elevated to such an iconic, borderline mythical status at such a young age, they are almost guaranteed to disappoint. And regardless of how Manziel fares, ESPN will benefit. Either he salvages his reputation and repeats his record-breaking season, thereby proving the hype perpetuated by ESPN correct, or he is suspended, disgraced, and less than what he was last year, in which case your network will have months' worth of fodder with which to continue playing out the Johnny Manziel saga. Triumph or tragedy, you will capitalize, because you have established a perfectly closed feedback loop that one or two athletes a year are chosen to occupy. Oh, and in the case of A-Rod, I think most sports fans are tired of him in general. A few more concrete examples of what a self-serving, rule-bending prima donna he is will not change the emotional landscape for many. Enough. 

Perhaps I should not allow the decline of one television program to negatively impact my life so severely. In the long run, maybe it isn't so important. After all, I am only twenty-two years old--nostalgia isn't something I should be cultivating too strongly when I plan on living for quite a while longer. And yet...I feel compelled to give in to that inner tug to complain about the fact that you were once great and are no longer. I will not call it sadness; I have experienced the shattering of too many of my illusions to get sad about them anymore. But in the mold of the cliched movie dad, I will say that I am disappointed in you. Disappointed that you used to stand for things, that you caved in and sacrificed your best qualities to try to be who you thought we wanted you to be. You were wrong. Those of us out there who truly do care about sports have no time and no attention for an hour of sports news that feels like an open comedy audition mated with the worst of HLN programming. But like Nancy Grace has done on HLN, so have you allowed circus clowns like Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith to dominate your airtime and rhetoric. They seize their time on camera to bring out the worst aspects of discussions on race, religion, and human nature, exploiting controversial viewpoints that no rational human being could support. They employ, as was once said of President Warren G. Harding, "an army of phrases moving across the landscape in search of a meaning". And we, your customers and viewers, are tired of the whole charade.

You have gotten lazy, ESPN, as all who achieve near-monopoly status are wont to do. Why should you change? You are, after all, the "Worldwide Leader in Sports". But I contend that you still hold this title only for a lack of competition, of better options. I, for one, hope that the new Fox Sports Network lights enough of a fire under your ass to force you to uphold basic principles of journalistic integrity, and revert back to giving the people what they want: fair, broad coverage of American sports leagues that provides insightful analysis and tough reporting, instead of inflammatory baseless analysis and spineless reporting. Scandal is easy, it is cheap. It is also the mark of hacks and those with little of import to say. As a lifelong lover of sports, I can only hope and petition that you find it in the collective conscience of your network to stop coddling reporters who do not report and analysts who do not analyze, and get back to what made you once great. 

Sincerely,

Charles McKeever

K-Rockathon Is Not Decadent But It Is Certainly Depraved

The following is a harrowing, possibly exaggerated account of the writer's day as a beer server at Syracuse's "K-Rockathon".

I pulled into the State Fairgrounds at 9:40 am, the air ripe with the smell of decaying human intelligence. It took me several tries to find the VIP/Vendor parking lot, and I was briefly delayed by a gibbering drunk behind the wheel of a Toyota Tundra, screaming at his mother over the phone. His vascular neck and overall complexion made me grateful for the numerous medical tents set up inside the Fairgrounds, as his day seemed destined to end in either a vein-bursting fit of apoplectic rage or a vomit-spewing episode induced by crippling amounts of bottom-of-the-barrel $5 lager. It was eighty minutes before the gates were set to open, and already the chain link fences were groaning under the mass of jiggling black-clad flesh pressing against them in anticipation. Cries rang out left and right, an ad-libbed discordant chorus accompanied by the honking of truck horns--"Hail Satan!" "Three Days Grace Rules!" "Ooooaaa-a-a-a-ahhhhh!"

I hustled from my car (a recycled-plastic Saturn Ion adrift in a sea of pickup trucks old and new) and through the gates, exchanging a nod with the uniformed officer guarding the crosswalk as to say what we were both thinking--"Yes, these people exist." I felt like a Christian being led into the Coliseum early in the day, before the raving spectators and lions arrived. My nerves jangled all the way to Beer Booth #1, where I faced the prospect of trying to slake the unquenchable thirst of this teeming horde of flesh. As I approached the Booth, I was hailed by a passing roadie pushing two speakers on a dolly. His black shit-kicking boots, green cargo shorts, and stained brown tour T-shirt showed plainly enough that he would have been here an hour early even if he wasn't being paid to.

"K-Rockathon twenty fuckin' thirteen, am I right buddy?!"

I gave a curt nod and half a smile as I made to move past him, but this non-reply was clearly unsuitable.

"Lineup's gonna be sick, brother!"

Feeling the weight and ugliness of the day already setting in, I decided on a different tactic.

"Sure will be. Not sure the crowd's going to be to my liking, though."

"Hell, my man, you scared of a little moshing? I lost two teeth in that pit last year and I'll be right back innit again, you bet your ass."

He peeled back his upper lip to show me that he wasn't joking.

"Oh, I'm not scared of it," I said, "Just not sure I'm gonna like the shade of it. Paper said they're expecting a record turnout of blacks this year. Mexicans, too."

"Aww, you're shittin' me, brother."

"Can't say I am. I guess it's been a terrible growing summer in the south...too much rain when they only need a bit, no rain at all when they could use downpours. Never know what it's going to do from week to week. So they're all hanging in CNY for the summer hoping to get work. Berry farms, Finger Lakes wineries, that kind of thing."

"Naww! Well shit, this ain't their scene! Whoever heard'a a crowd like that comin' out to bang around to Sevendust? Or mother-friggin' Chevelle??"

"The internet is a powerful force. Bands are spreading their tour info and music videos like never before...Just last week my buddy Jose told me that Flyleaf is the best thing he's heard in years. Times are changing, amigo. No one says you have to like it though, God knows you've still got the right to dislike it."

"Bastards! That shit-eatin' Cuomo is probably eatin' all that right up too! Let me tell you somethin' about our precious gov-nor, you got a minute?"

"Actually I don't. The crowds will be in any minute, gotta get a table of cold foamers ready for 'em. Wouldn't want anyone here having to stay sober, would we? But hey, keep your head up in that crowd..."

I gave a last nod and ducked under the Beer Booth's restraining rope. I watched my weather-beaten roadie friend shuffle off pushing his speakers, spitting through the hole in his front teeth more pensively now, and occasionally giving a shake of his head as he pushed. I thought I could hear a faint muttering..."Mexican bastards..."

Still on edge, I knocked over three sleeves of cups immediately upon entering the booth. I hastily began rearranging boxes on the floor to make it seem as though I knew what I was doing and that I was supposed to be there. The booth manager called for the taps to be turned on and the first wave of cups to be filled. It wasn't a moment too soon. The gates opened at exactly 11 am with a whoosh, the same sound Pandora must have heard upon opening her fateful box. The crowd descended like a cloud of bats, and the losing battle to keep the supply in line with the demand began. 

A quick word about how the average Thon-goer was supposed to go about getting his half-hourly allotment of alcohol: First, he had to stop at the ticket stand and pre-purchase beverage tickets to be redeemed at the booths. This 'drastic' measure was enacted in the aftermath of K-Rockathon 2009, when a wild stampede of metal enthusiasts crashed through the tables at the beer tent--foaming at the mouth, frenzied with drunken greed, they made a run on the cash boxes and made off with an undisclosed sum. Several off them made off anyway; the rest went down under the force of the meaty fists and pepper spray of event security. I'm told the brown cloud hung over the Fairgrounds for days afterward, and all beverages served for the remainder of the concerts smacked of Habanero chilis. 

For the remainder of the day, I learned what it felt like to be the proverbial sailor dying of thirst while adrift at sea. Company policy forbade us from drinking on the clock, and I needed the $100 too badly to risk being sent home. By 6 PM the smell of Shock Top had so thoroughly permeated my nostrils that they felt caked in orange peels and coriander, with a dusting of wheat, and still I resisted the temptation to throw one back. I give myself extra credit for this feat because no one subjected to 12 hours of the kinds of ranting, screaming gibberish spouted by K-Rockathon's so-called 'bands' should ever have to do it sober. I passed the time instead by imagining what the studio practice sessions for the members of these otherwise-unemployable groups must sound like. It's difficult to picture the Beatles, while recording the White Album, turning to each other..."That take was pretty good, mate, but it could use more noise. And your vocals were far too comprehensible."

As morning wore on into evening and evening became night, the stream of faces at our counter steadily seemed to roll themselves into one fuzzily-outlined Face. The Face had red-rimmed eyeballs and multiple neck tattoos...beneath the Adam's apple the body seemed to be breaking down like a mud hut in the rain. The rivers of humanity had overflowed and left this mass, this Face, awash on the fair shores of Onondaga lake. In the fleeting moments that my eyes were able to focus themselves on individuals rather than their collective mass, I saw pairings so strange that Noah himself might have abandoned the Ark and left mankind to be swallowed by the flood. Aseptic, sexless women with the arms of twelve-year olds and shirts taken from the Hot Topic bargain bin being pawed, groped, and led around by men so large and fleshy that their skins appeared to be attempting an escape from their frames. Spray-tanned girls with fake breasts and irredeemable facial flaws holding hands with diminutive men in trucker hats with barbed wire tattoos. Shirtless yokels, more redbodies than rednecks, whose chins seemed to vanish into their chicken-thin upper bodies, tongue kissing girthy women in halter tops that contained 1/3 of the fabric necessary to render their appearance socially acceptable. At no point could I single out a heterosexual couple from the crowd and say, "Now, there's a smart match."

Despite the rain that came off and on throughout the evening, I had the sweats. It was sensory overload...an assault on the eyes and the ears. The clock struck ten and I dizzily signed out from the hours sheet, a doctor's scrawl brought on by fumes and fearful haste. I dashed from the Booth, trying to beat the insane traffic...in the distance, the sounds of car horns and curses rang out. Ah! A perfect coda to an exhausting day for the ears. Faster now, almost to the gates...I collided with a heavyset bald man wearing a t-shirt that read, "Save a Fuse, Blow an Electrician!" I couldn't bring myself to consider why he might be wearing red-lensed Oakley sunglasses at this time of night. Finally, to the car, out onto the proud highway, as the heavenly I-690 chorus of squealing tires and police sirens sung me home...

Marshall Islands Chronicles, Vol. IV: What I've Learned This Year

   Rather than write another long-winded anecdote about my time in the Marshall Islands, I've decided to wrap things up with a comprehensive and long-winded list of things I've learned this year. These cover a range of topics, from the personal to the cultural to the philosophical. So, without further ado: This year, I have learned...

-That it is possible to be soul-crushingly lonely in a room full of people singing to and celebrating you

-That sarcasm doesn't translate well into other languages

-That the only acceptable reaction to waking up in the night with a cockroach on your face is to
scream "motherFUCKER!!" and spike that cockroach off the wall

-That complete strangers can treat you like royalty while treating their own children terribly, and find no contradiction inherent in that

-That having a say in what you eat on a day-to-day basis is a majorly underrated component of happiness, one I will never again take for granted

-That nothing switches on a primal brain-freeze quite like the torpedo silhouette of a shark cutting through the water under the moon

-That children, especially in groups, are just as capable of being shitty to each other as adults are

-That I'm terrified to try teaching in the U.S., where there are real expectations for teachers and helicopter parents earn their title

-That it is very possible to get sick of eating pancakes

-That a select few Marshallese people are more generous, decent human beings than 97% of the Americans I know

-That you can win over a room full of sixth-graders for a whole year by meeting a daily quota of one masturbation joke in their native tongue

-That anyone who voluntarily  goes celibate and sober for extended periods of time is probably a lunatic

-That our feelings, personalities, and identities are inextricably linked to our native culture, which only really becomes apparent when you experiment with "breaking free" of that culture

-That every single one of us is going to die someday, and consequently it is foolish to wish for a single second to pass more quickly than is already does

-That the previous statement is pretty much the epitome of "easier said than done"

-That writing and receiving real letters is about 1000% more enjoyable than e-mail

-That your sense of time completely goes out the window when you live in a world of perpetual summer

-That being a local celebrity is a pretty exhausting responsibility

-That it is possible to be nostalgic about Syracuse winters

-That unshakable moral principles can turn into loose guidelines pretty quickly when you have to adapt to a new life and a new culture

-That "this too shall pass". despite being one of the most worn-out clichés ever, has real teeth when you have to actually live in a situation that calls for thinking that way

-That it is possible to buy Ramen noodles for an entire bar and have no recollection of it

-That one of the greatest atrocities ever committed by the American government happened in these little islands, and hasn't ever really been atoned for (Google- "Bravo test")

-That SpongeBob SquarePants is set in one of the lagoons of Bikini atoll, and the fact that all the characters are able to talk and interact is allegedly a result of the aforementioned Bravo test

-That things that build character in the long term are never fun in the short term

-That it is in fact a small world, and it is impossible for me to go anywhere-even 9,000 miles from home- without meeting a half-dozen people who know my friends or acquaintances or old classmates

-That it doesn't feel like a small world at all when you fly across the entire Pacific Ocean

-That commonplace words-like "for", "at", and "have"- can have about a million different permutations and situational meanings, which makes teaching ESL a dicey proposition to say the least

-That living in your head because you don't have many people to talk to can be a useful exercise but gets either boring or terrifying after awhile

-That there are lots of different flavors of coconut

-That there are some kinds of fish I really enjoy

-That Americans are probably in the minority when it comes to getting riled up about public breastfeeding

-That if you stop drinking for five months, twice, you'll rediscover the jawline you forgot about in college

-That if anyone is still reading, I probably owe them big time

-That doing something worldly for a year doesn't entitle you to give advice, and you should probably stop now.