The Rake Magazine

Month: February 2003

  • The Postmodern Itinerant

    Mark Backman is an infuriatingly calm 25-year-old whose life has direction, financial stability, and purpose. Yet he has no home, nor does he have any idea where he’s going to be next February. His line of work can be dangerous and frequently takes him to distant states and lands. He embarks on fascinating adventures and then maddeningly downplays them, even dismissing construction work in Antarctica as merely a job. When his interviewer detects enthusiasm toward any particular topic, a follow-up question quickly kills any potential lead. You can take the northern Minnesota boy out of northern Minnesota, but you’ll never get him to stop punctuating every sentence with “I guess” or the even vaguer “I s’pose.”

    Backman, as he’ll tell you, is just a blue-collar guy. He dropped out of the University of Minnesota after a year, when the fix-it genes inherited on the paternal side insisted he was better suited to heavy work than head work. He enrolled in the College of Oceaneering in California and graduated at the top of his class with a degree in commercial diving, completed his apprenticeship in New Orleans, and dove everywhere else. He was almost killed when a mudslide buried him during a routine dredging of a riverboat casino in Missouri. He was nearly sucked down a drain in New Mexico, when the plug came out of a 3.5 million gallon underground reservoir he was helping repair. When his life flashes before his eyes, Backman does all he can to survive and then, misfortune averted, simply returns to work.

    Mishaps aside, Backman likes underwater welding. Yet he despises politics of any kind, and underwater welders, who have a closely-knit association of just 5,000 members nationwide, can be as catty as an old ladies’ social club. So he retired. He moved into construction, and what better place to avoid the rat race and the bickering old crew than Antarctica?

    What is it like building a science station on the polar cap during the southern hemisphere’s brutal winter? When the average daily temp is around 40 below, but can dip as low as 140 degrees below zero? Not so bad, Backman insists. A few extra layers is all anyone needs, and if the chill gets to be too much, the thought of the $2 drinks at the camp’s one-and-only local will keep a person moving. Until, that is, you find yourself falling into the ultimately unavoidable lethargy that encroaches when a person never sees the sun. When that happens, Backman says, all plans are abandoned. The predicted 15 pounds creep on. You dream of leaving and never returning. The mind erases the memories of the despised rat race and its incessant politics.

    Until you return to them. Which is why Backman is seriously considering heading south to Antarctica for a second year. After that, it might be hard for him to ever go north again. “Veteran South Pole construction workers say you do the first year for the experience and the second year for the money,” he says, his green eyes showing a hint of the slow smile spreading across his face. “After that it’s because you don’t fit in anywhere else.” —Katie Quirk

  • from Baghdad: A Minnesotan in Iraq

    We were in the Al-Amariya bomb shelter, listening to the guide’s report that 400 women and children were incinerated here when U.S. “smart bombs” found their way into the structure. The men and boys had stayed home to prevent looting of their houses. I was standing next to Ahmed, the friendly, ever cheerful professor of veterinary science at Baghdad University, who led us from one site and meeting to the next. And I asked him whether it was only a bomb shelter (because it looked to some in our group like a communications center, and perhaps at one time had been one). He became agitated and his face took on a grim expression. He told me that relatives of his had died in the shelter. As sympathetically as I could, I said that our government had admitted it was a mistake. I had difficulty believing they would deliberately bomb an installation they knew to be a bomb shelter. “Why not?” he said. “Your government deliberately bombed and destroyed the bridge over the Tigris River at a time they knew people and vehicles would be crossing it.”

    As our visit to the shelter was ending, a congenial young reporter from Austrian Radio wanted to interview me. He asked me to comment on the fear of many Austrians—that if Saddam Hussein were not deposed he could become another Hitler. Saddam has the psychological capability to emulate Hitler, I said. But he lacks not only the geopolitical capability, given the fractious Middle East, but also the economic and military capability, which was lost in the Gulf War and the resulting sanctions and controls.

    During the first day of the conference, I had lunch beside the Tigris, with several professors of veterinary medicine. Two splendid Arabian horses were being saddled up in a nearby pasture, and behind them in the distance were the twin stacks of the city’s electric power plant. I asked what would happen if the plant were destroyed—as it surely would be—when the bombs started falling again. They said it would be like 1991: For weeks if not months, residents would have to use candles, do without refrigeration and flush toilets, and get their water from the polluted river.

    During a trip to ancient Babylon the next day, a professor of architecture said that all Arabs share the dream of an Arab nation that includes all the Arab states, and that Saddam Hussein is the only leader still alive who genuinely represents that dream. I said it seemed to me an unrealistic goal—how could those independent states ever agree on a leader or a central government? He replied that it need not be a nation, but perhaps something like the European Union. If the Europeans can have such a union, why not the Arabs?

    On our last day in Iraq, six of us visited the Um-Al-Maarak (“Mother of All Battles”) mosque in the outskirts of Baghdad. It is a gleaming gem in blue and white, surrounded by inviting pools and walkways. It was built by Saddam Hussein, and is the model for an enormous mosque under construction, to be called the Saddam Mosque. It is intended to be the largest in the world. We were told that its grounds form a map of all the Arab countries from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, visible from above.

    I thought that finally I understood the “problem of Iraq.” History is repeating itself, but on a much larger scale. At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Turks were driven out of the Middle East by tribes of the Arabian peninsula assisted by British soldiers, one of whom was Colonel T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), who supported a “pan-Arabic” union of the tribes. When Lawrence asked his superiors to supply the Arabs with cannons for use against the Turks, his request was rejected for fear that with such armaments the Arabs could become too powerful to manipulate. Today, the United States and various other western countries wish to unseat Saddam Hussein because they fear that he or some leader inspired by his example will one day establish a union of Arab states that will control all the resources of member states, especially the oil, and thus become a powerful economic competitor to the western nations and their various unions and alliances.

    A more recent history seems to be repeating itself, too. To justify the Vietnam war, our government demonized Ho Chi Minh, leader of the movement to unify Vietnam. The U.S. argued that the result of inaction would be the domino-like collapse of the countries of Southeast Asia, and maybe even a Chinese invasion of our country (by sea, in their navy of what were then mostly junks?). Today, our government demonizes Saddam Hussein, and insists that he must be removed to protect us from anthrax and nerve gas (to be delivered in his 300 km-range rockets?).

    It was shocking to learn that Eisenhower, perhaps our most honest president, had said that the Vietnam war was really about the “tin, tungsten, and rubber” of Southeast Asia. Today we are more cynical. We’re not surprised when our commentators generally agree that a principal aim is to insure that the vast oil reserves of Iraq remain available at acceptable prices. That doesn’t mean we have to assent. A common theme of the anti-Vietnam-war movement was that a Pax Americana—the U.S. as policeman of the world—was neither acceptable nor possible, and most Americans agreed. Today, our government maintains that a Pax Americana is both viable and right—whether the United Nations concurs or not. An alarming number of our fellow citizens seem to agree.—Wade Savage

    Wade Savage

  • Out of Space?

    Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper is grounded, indefinitely. The St. Paul native and 1980 Derham Hall grad was scheduled to take her first trip into space on May 23, as a crew member aboard the shuttle Endeavour. But following the February 1 Columbia disaster, NASA put all its shuttle missions on hold.

    Stefanyshyn-Piper was slated for STS-115, a 10-day mission to carry power-generating solar arrays to the International Space Station. The mission specialist had been assigned two space walks to help separate pieces of the payload. “Things are bolted together so that they don’t jiggle apart or fall off or get damaged in the launch,” she explained. “The only way to remove all the launch locks is to have the astronauts go out there and actually physically remove them.”

    To prepare for this zero-gravity activity, Stefanyshyn-Piper flew in the infamous “vomit comet” — a high-altitude jet that climbs to 35,000 feet before dropping into a nose dive and generating 20 seconds of weightlessness inside the aircraft. However, “For a six-hour space walk, it’s really impossible to train in 20-second chunks,” she explained. That’s why NASA also uses a neutral buoyancy lab, a 40-foot-deep pool that holds two submerged scale mockups of the space station exterior.

    That facility felt pretty familiar to Stefanyshyn-Piper. A member of the U.S. Navy since 1985, she spent the mid-90s as an Underwater Ship Husbandry Operations Officer. In civilian terms, that means she repaired waterborne ships and conducted underwater salvage efforts. The experience led her to wonder if she should point her career in a new direction.

    “I’d see astronauts doing space walks,” she said. “To me, that looked more like diving than flying. I figured, if I could fix ships underwater, I could build a space station in space.”

    If Stefanyshyn-Piper gets to test that theory in 2003, she’ll be doing it 20 years after Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. It’s no longer unusual for a shuttle crew to include female astronauts, but women are still very much in the minority. “Before you can get more women into the astronaut office, you have to get more women into science fields like engineering and physics and chemistry,” she said. A “Women of NASA” web site is designed to encourage girls in these subjects—although one wonders if the rose and pink color scheme might generate a counterproductive “Barbie goes to space” vibe.

    Stefanyshyn-Piper’s route to celestial exploration began with two mechanical engineering degrees from M.I.T. (she rowed for the crew team there too), and her Navy career. “I never did any of that because I was looking to blaze some new trail,” she said. “It was just something I was interested in, and I found I was good at it.”

    Whether she’ll find out if she’s a good astronaut is still up in the air. Before the Columbia disaster, when all systems were go, Stefanyshyn-Piper considered future cosmic travel inevitable. “Right now, we’re really in the infancy of space exploration,” she said. “If you look at human nature and you look back at history, first it was, ‘What’s over the next hill? What’s down the road? What’s across the ocean?’ We’ve pretty much looked at all that. The only natural progression from here is to go out there.”

    Stefanyshyn-Piper didn’t feel particularly nervous about undertaking that prospect herself—after all, the Challenger tragedy was 16 years in the past. “We’ve launched more than 100 shuttle flights,” she said. “There is the danger of strapping yourself into a rocket and going up into space, but being here at NASA, and seeing the controls that NASA has, and how meticulous they are about every detail, you know that safety is a major concern. That’s very evident in the way things work around here. That helps to alleviate some of the fears.” —Scott A. Briggs

  • Banging On

    One of the gratifying—and maddening—things about publishing this magazine is that we get to start over each month. Roughly every four weeks, we wipe the slate clean and get another chance to shine (and yes, of course, to suck), to correct ourselves when we are wrong, to refine the rough spots, find new ways to frame the same old punch lines, and try to sneak dirty words in (or, failing that, maybe some Latin).

    Our publishing calendar is both a promise and a threat. We’re not nearly as important or permanent as a hardcover book, say, but we hang around a bit longer than the typical daily headline or the weekly political harangue. With this issue, we celebrate the self-appointed privilege of repeating ourselves for one full year, which is about six months longer than some of us expected to be repeating ourselves.

    Redundancy is the new black. We’re back in the hot-box with Iraq, 12 years after we should have finished the job right the first time. Indeed, many people feel like one Bush should have been enough, but there you are—history repeating itself, and not exactly a surfeit of wisdom won from hard experience.

    On the other hand, we welcome other kinds of eternal return. Many Minnesotans are secretly pleased that winter finally arrived a few weeks ago, a little behind schedule to be sure, but with all the windchill and accumulation of a less apocalyptic time. The return of our most beloved season is reassuring. We wanted to write about global warming this month, but besides the fact that there wasn’t room for us to park our lips on Paul Douglas’, uh, barometer, we decided to do the American thing, and let our world views be dictated by nothing more than what we can see out our window.

    Let’s hope the view keeps improving. Interesting, isn’t it, that someone had the temerity to send back the architectural plans of Jean Nouvel and Michael Graves, some uppity Minnesotan had the balls to ask for another draft? Interesting, too, that the masters seem to have been strong-armed by stoic rubes who might otherwise have been convinced that the tossed-off, million-dollar, second-stringer designs were manna from heaven. Nouvel was made to realize, apparently, that there was considerable cognitive dissonance between his “context-sensitive” design of the Guthrie as riverfront factory, and its function as a space fundamentally about transcendence. Graves had the opposite problem: His overly literal remake of the Children’s Theater smacked not so much of laziness as a genuine fear of children, expressed in cloying babytalk—the architectural equivalent of “goo-goo-ga-ga.” For the record, both architects were able to salvage the most important element of each project: the ego of the architect. Nouvel claimed last year’s design was only “50 percent” finished, and Graves said, “the first iteration is never the one you go with.” In other words, folks, don’t fool yourself: Your worries fell on the deaf ears of genius.

    We’re beginning to think that learning from history is still no hedge against repetition. After all, the poet wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Then he changed his mind and scribbled, “Vanity. All is vanity.”

  • The Seagull by Anton Chekhov

    This is why we go to the theater—a skilled cast in a marvelous production of a great play. Chekhov’s tale of love, jealousy, the nature of art and theater deserves the title masterpiece, and the Jeune Lune company does its usual imaginative job of interpreting the classic. As the characters weave among the birch trees of Dominique Serrand’s striking set, they knit and then unravel the relationships among them. Barbra Berlovitz, as the aging actress Irina, is the center of the work both philosophically and physically. Her magnificently nuanced performance—particularly as she demonstrates the art of acting by her reading of the same line over and over—is both the comic and artistic highlight. Add the luminous Sarah Agnew as the young actress Nina and Natalie Moore’s boisterous Masha, both of whose hopes of love are dashed by Irina’s machinations, and you have an evening far more full of genuine humanity than you’ll ever find on reality TV.

    Thursdays-Sundays through April 27. www.jeunelune.com. 612.332.3968