Thanksgiving Cranberry Report
Knee-Deep in the Icy Bogs
During the greatest October sports season in Wisconsin’s history, the Wine-Dark Land of UTIs
Will there be enough cranberry sauce this year?
I’m a woman. At times, I must call upon the cranberries. I have puckered my way through many quarts of sugarless juice, and popped plenty of encapsulated concentrations to flush infection from my urinary tract. But this time, curled over in agony on the floor of a hotel room next to SeaTac, I couldn’t dally around with folkways. I rushed to urgent care for a prescription to nuke my UTI.
The timing was uncanny. I was about to fly to the world’s cranberry Mecca, to investigate where cranberries come from and hunt them in their bogs, standing knee-deep in cold water in order to provide my best estimate of whether America would be properly sated come Thanksgiving, the holiday in which the majority of the country’s cranberry product is consumed. But I was on the verge of canceling my reporting trip, foiled by the very scourge that the tart red berry has historically cured. Shivering and shaking, …
Oral History
Ora Cogan stands in the clearing like a summer goddess draped in black satin
She lives in an old mining town in British Columbia after working as a silversmith and doing other cool shit
“It’s not just about dressing up in muumuus and playing a mandolin.”
I was living in rural Northern California the summer that Ora Cogan’s “Cowgirl” came out, and when I first heard it in my friend’s truck on our way to the river we were dead silent as we let it wash over us, absorbed in delicious loneliness. Now I am following the sound of her fiddle through Laurelhurst Park on a sunny spring afternoon in Portland. Amid the picnickers and the dog-walkers, she sits in the clearing like a goddess draped in black satin. Her dark eyes, framed by long, chocolate-brown hair, gaze at the instrument tucked under her chin, her cowboy boots kicked off to the side, a snake tattoo creeping up her leg. She pauses her reverie to greet me with affable warmth. I kick off my own boots to join her in the grass.
Raised among the rugged shores of Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Cogan possesses the soulful disposition of someone who has spent her whole life humbled by the …
The Insanely Long Half-Life of Insignificance
I can’t remember much about seeing Jimi Hendrix play live, though I saw him twice. But I recall every detail about the night I ventured forth to a bar in New Jersey to see Root Boy Slim.
Who Can Forget Novac, the Phantom of the Organ? I Can’t.
Without these low-rent memories, who am I?
One night back in the eighties, I found myself in the men’s room of a bar in darkest New Jersey, inhaling lines of coke off the top of a urinal with the Reverend Charles M. Young. We had ventured out from Manhattan to this remote roadhouse to see Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band. But the men’s room called to us, as it so often did in those days.
Now, I know that boomers can bore you rigid with their tales of vintage dissolution in any decade other than the one in which you, a tragically unhip person, have found yourself trapped. And I know that one such boomer — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., lately a big wheel in the Trump administration — has been retailing a story similar to the one I’m retailing here. His, however, offers no connection to Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band, and is thus inferior to my own.
Root Boy and his group are long gone now, as is the Reverend Young (a great guy …
