Delray Beach, America’s Rehab Capital
It is impossible to grow up in America without repeated exposure to cripplingly addictive drugs
The Florida Shuffle ain’t what it used to be
Do you have a lighter?
Florida looked as you imagine.
A seagull jerked its reptilian eyes around an axis of scrawny neck: noon, ten o’clock, three o’clock, noon. It squeaked and whined to the air, which was 75 degrees Fahrenheit; and to the water, which was a charming turquoise; and to the sky, which of course was azure; and to the trees, which, naturally, were palms with trembling fronds; and to the girls, who lay on their stomachs in, indeed, bikinis, reading thin paperbacks; and to the man, whose hair was the white of retirement age.
The man sat in a blue polyester folding chair, a few yards from the girls. He faced not the ocean but down the endless beach to the south, where the sun lay. The sun made the man’s fat silver wristwatch and gold baptism chain glitter, and it made knives dance on his sunglasses, and it deepened the caramel of his skin.
“Ladies,” he called over, his voice tight and gritty with …
Big Cheese
In the limestone caves beneath Springfield, Missouri, lies the Fort Knox of American cheese.
The conspiracy theorists are right: America’s cheese reserves include over a billion pounds of dairy products.
I gaze upon the wealth of cheese with my own eyes, though it is no longer owned by the US government.
Many of America’s stainless-steel tanks, like those that bring raw milk from farms to processors, and pasteurized milk from processors to production plants, are manufactured in Springfield, Missouri. Across town from Stainless Fabrication Inc, I discovered the Fort Knox of American Cheese, located deep beneath the ground at the armpit of two industrial roads east of downtown. From my rental car, I watch tractor trailers through binoculars as they ease into an archway and down a ramp blasted into the limestone bedrock on one side of the intersection; on the other, a freight train loaded with six refrigerated cars from the Kraft Heinz cheese plant across town makes its way into another entrance. In one of the rail’s subterranean unloading bays, carved into gray-green rock and built back up with concrete, I observe forklift operators as they shimmy enormous barrels of cheese through the warehouse doorway. …
Jade Divers of Big Sur
Smelly beats, hippies, artists, and bums are drawn to the sacred energy of California’s most coveted coastal region
There, they discovered a magical stone
You want to see what the jade says
Big Sur inspires reverence. When the explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo became the first to sail along the Alta California coastline during the fall of 1542, he was transfixed as oak-laden hills turned mountainous and studded with plentiful conifers, which rose abruptly from the turquoise water like enormous terrestrial swells. “There are mountains which seem to reach the heavens, and the sea beats on them… It appears as though they would fall on the ships,” he wrote aboard his flagship, the San Salvador. Entranced as he was, Cabrillo dared not seek harbor beneath these newfound peaks and instead continued to ride the wind northward.
Later generations of seafaring explorers also tried and failed to penetrate this stretch of coastline — home to a range so rugged, isolated, and unnavigable that the native Esselen people who inhabited these mountains spoke a language uninfluenced by any other …
