The Old Remedies
Wildcrafting in Eastern Kentucky
Yellowroot, Bloodroot, Black cohosh
‘For everything that might hurt you, there’s something close by that’ll help.’
One night in July, standing in the Eastern Kentucky bottom where my uncle keeps his garden, I tell him I’m looking for someone in the mountains who has the old remedies.
He stops working and crosses his sun-baked hands atop the handle of his garden hoe. “That’s going to take time,” he tells me, “There’s nothing about it that’s automatic.”
At my uncle’s urging, I start looking on the other side of the big mountain. There’s a man in a little coal town in Virginia who deals in roots and herbs — ginseng mostly, but also slippery elm bark, yellowroot, bloodroot, black cohosh, and so on. “If you can find him,” my uncle tells me, “and you can earn his trust, maybe he’ll introduce you to some people who can help you.”
I don’t have a name or address, so I ask around. I’m not sure why, but something about it feels illicit. Up front, no one really seems to know what I’m talking about. I get a lot of …
Logging in July
Widow-Makers
The Poplar and the Box Turtle
But Not Bob’s Wife
The climb gets steeper and more punishing, but work awaits at the top of the hill. The air is already heavy and oppressive, like a steamy wool blanket, though the day has barely broken. Sunlight slips through scattered holes in the dense canopy, casting beams of luminous vapor to the forest floor in the hills of southern Indiana.
The undisputed champions of the summer woods harass me incessantly. Gnats, mosquitoes, flies, ticks, hornets, wasps, and countless others feeding and breeding in a frenzy. The man or beast that dares to toil in this maniacal din pays a heavy toll. I have sworn many times never to return to logging, yet here I am — and in the worst month possible. Rejecting the constraints of conformity has a price. My price, my sentence, is logging in July.
When I left an acting career in New York and returned home to Indiana, I was convinced the only remedy for my inner extremes was to live …
What Happened to the Edge
The demise of Len Ragozin’s speed number
A walking brainstem like Foxy negotiates with a human supercomputer like The Sasquatch
Impulsive, deeply irrational bets drive out smart money by flattening the odds
Sporting folk know there are two principal modes of handicapping horses, the mathematical and the mystical.
When numbers fall silent, as they will with Chihuahua-bred maiden two-year-olds, for example, gamblers say that a horse with no recorded past has no form. A handicapper must have the self-discipline to sit out a formless horse race or a willingness to be seen dangling a pin suspended by thread over a racing form, or calculating the horses’ name values in Gematria. All such as may happen when the urge to bet overwhelms the imposture of rationality. Mathematician, mystic, or vigorous hybrid, every gambler needs an Edge.
Beginning in the late 1960s, a Marxist Handicapper from Greenwich Village, Len Ragozin, provided that Edge for many. Ragozin’s “speed number” boiled a horse’s performance down to a single digit. Combined with Ragozin’s acclaimed “bounce” theory, that number provided …
