#April: so we went on a field trip to ground zero and-

[cryptvokeeper]

it occurs to me that the rottmnt turtles just barely skirted around 9/11

[route22ny]

Inside DC’s Secret Covid Morgue

Written by Luke Mullins

April 21, 2020—The clerics have been sworn to secrecy. On this warm morning, they’ve come to a vast and empty parking lot, instructed not to tell anyone of its location. The pitch of asphalt is unusually secure, hidden behind a 12-foot chain-link fence that’s been swathed in sheets of black tarp to prevent anyone from peering through. At the front gate, armed soldiers stand guard.

Inside, large trailers are arranged behind tented canopies and banks of lights. Metal ramps are affixed to each trailer so that stretchers can be wheeled in. The interior walls of the trailers are lined with seven rows of metallic shelving, sturdy enough to support thousands of pounds. The temperature is 24 degrees.

The clergymen gather with a handful of city officials in front of the canopies. They form a circle, each six feet apart from the next.

Reverend Andre Towner of Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ.

Imam Talib Shareef of Nation’s Mosque.

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom–The National Synagogue.

Dr. Donell Harvin, a top official at DC’s homeland-security department.

Kimberly Lassiter, a supervisor at the medical examiner’s office.

And Dr. Roger Mitchell, the chief medical examiner himself.

Wearing masks and rubber gloves, they bow their heads. Tomorrow, the first body will be sent here. Today, a blessing.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

One by one, the clerics offer prayers, solemn exhortations for strength and humility, courage and dignity, resonating above the grinding hum of the trailers. Imam Shareef invokes the victims—“Their deaths,” he says, “are not to be in vain.” Reverend Towner prays for the workers, that their bodies will be protected from the virus, that their minds stay healthy during the difficult days ahead. Rabbi Herzfeld stresses the righteousness of the mission. “In Judaism,” he tells the group, “we believe that the greatest kindness is to care for the dead.”

***

It’s an ominous time in the nation’s capital. Several miles away, federal officials are dismissing warnings about the deadly airborne pathogen that has exploded out of Asia. Their unwillingness to act has impelled local governments across the country to launch their own scattered efforts to prevent Covid-19 from decimating their communities. In the District of Columbia, where African Americans make up 46 percent of the population, the task is especially urgent, given the virus’s disproportionately cruel impact on people of color.

Over the previous month, the city has been locked down as panicked residents watch their leaders navigate a 100-year crisis in real time. Mayor Muriel Bowser shuttered businesses. The DC Council pushed through legislation to extend unemployment benefits. Health-department officials opened testing sites and implored residents to wear masks and keep their distance. But away from public view, a weightier matter has come to preoccupy a little-known but essential corner of the bureaucracy: the caretakers of the dead.

“There’s not going to be a parade for you guys. You’re not going to get discounts or big thank-you signs. The work we do, we do in silence.”

It’s a problem of space. As Drs. Mitchell and Harvin prepared for the pandemic, they realized that the city’s morgue didn’t have the capacity to handle the surge of fatalities that the virus would leave behind. And so, over the previous few weeks, they hustled to secure the land, equipment, and manpower necessary to build an additional facility.

The clergy who led prayers on the day the field morgue opened were there to make sure the space didn’t violate the tenets of their three distinct faiths, and to consecrate the site as one. Then the work began. Over the next two and a half months, Harvin, who describes himself as the “general in charge of the death troops,” and his top deputy, Lassiter, who has recovered bodies throughout DC for more than two decades, will oversee the makeshift mortuary. By the time the spring surge is through, 404 Covid victims will have passed through the site.

Still, through it all, almost no one in the city will have any idea the Covid morgue exists. The work is carried out in strict secrecy; staffers are instructed not to disclose the site’s location or tell anyone what takes place there, not even their own family members. A mistake—such as a body being released to the wrong family—would be humiliating for the mayor and the city. News footage of workers moving the dead could upset victims’ families, opening new wounds, or lure gawkers to the site. As much as anything else, though, the silence reflects the professional ethos of those who perform this work for a living. While they’re dispatched to every hurricane and school shooting, their efforts take place entirely behind the scenes. They are the first responders you never see.

The District of Columbua invited an imam, a rabbi, and a minister to consecrate the morgue.

***

“There’s not going to be a parade for you guys,” Harvin tells each new set of workers to arrive at the Covid morgue. “You’re not going to get discounts or big [thank-you] signs. The work we do, we do in silence. Not even the family members of the victims will know what we do. There’s a pride in that. There’s a silent pride in that,” he says. “You’re taking care of someone’s grandmother, grandfather, husband, daughter, son, and that’s a higher calling.” When it’s all over, they’ll return to their previous jobs or assignments and no one will ever know what they’ve done here. “It’s a heavy burden,” Harvin says. “It’s a very heavy burden.

“[But] the world is watching,” he assures them, “whether they see us or not.”

***

Donell Harvin is 48 years old, with a sturdy build and flecks of gray in his goatee. He’s married to a physician and has four daughters. He lives in Howard County and spends most of the year looking forward to his annual scuba-diving trip.

Over the last 30 years, Harvin has been an eyewitness to some of America’s darkest moments. As an EMT, he responded to the World Trade Center when it was bombed in 1993; after joining the New York Fire Department, he was there when the towers were destroyed in 2001. As a deputy director in New York’s medical examiner’s office, he led the effort to identify victims of Hurricane Sandy. And in 2012, at the request of Connecticut officials, Harvin assisted with forensics after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.

His path from first responder to frontline bureaucrat began in the Bronx, where he spent his teenage years. After dropping out of high school, he got a GED and then a college scholarship from the Children’s Aid Society, enlisting as a paramedic. Though he loved the work, as a young father he began to worry about his safety. He was caught in shootouts while tending to accident victims and lost colleagues in ambulance crashes. On 9/11, his wife and daughters saw him on TV, racing away from the rubble, and then didn’t hear from him for 24 hours. Upon seeing their faces when he finally got home, he knew it was time for a change.

Harvin went back to school and earned a master’s in emergency management. Landing a position with New York’s chief medical examiner, he became an expert in mass-fatality management—the grim business of identifying and processing victims of large-scale tragedies. He also came to know Mitchell, and the two worked together on Sandy Hook. Two years later, when Mitchell was hired as DC’s chief medical examiner, he recruited Harvin.

Donell Harvin, who was at Ground Zero on 9/11, helped devise DC’s Covid death-handling protocols.

***

Their immediate task in the District was to turn around an office plagued by mismanagement. But an equally important project loomed. The previous year, Washington had been shaken by tragedy when a mentally disturbed government contractor gunned down 12 people at the Navy Yard. Although the medical examiner’s office had properly managed those deaths, officials realized that a larger or more complex disaster would have overwhelmed its capabilities. The city needed a mass-fatality division robust enough to absorb the kind of tragedy that Harvin and Mitchell hoped Washington would never face. They went about building it—securing federal funds, adding staff, and running mass-casualty drills.

By early 2020, Harvin had been in Washington six years. He’d since left Mitchell’s office and finished a PhD in public health. He was teaching at Georgetown and had become chief of homeland security and intelligence at DC’s homeland-security agency. But the imminent arrival of Covid meant the District was facing the catastrophe he and Mitchell had trained for, the biggest mass-fatality event in the city’s history.

On March 2, Harvin went to DC’s Emergency Operations Center for the first day of formal briefings about how the city would navigate the pandemic. Halfway through the morning, he found a quiet spot in the hallway and placed a call to his mother. “This is going to be bad,” he said.

***

The city morgue is located at 401 E Street, Southwest. In any given year, only a fraction of the fatalities that occur in DC pass through the facility. When a person dies of natural causes at a hospital, nursing home, or hospice, a physician will typically sign the death certificate and release the body to a funeral home. It’s usually only those who die alone or in unnatural or suspicious circumstances whose bodies go to the morgue, where medical examiners determine the cause and manner of their death.

Initially, Harvin and Mitchell planned to use this same approach for the pandemic, relying on hospitals—where the bulk of virus-related deaths would take place—to serve as de facto Covid morgues. But they quickly revised their thinking. For one thing, little was known about how contagious the disease might be postmortem. Would storing victims at hospitals risk infecting staff? At the same time, Harvin learned from former colleagues in New York—which was being ravaged by the virus—that hospitals were too overwhelmed to manage the bodies properly. The result was an appalling spectacle: forklifts carrying pallet-loads of bodies outside hospitals, decedents stacked on top of one another in trailers. At one point, police discovered nearly 100 rotting corpses in unrefrigerated U-Hauls parked by a Brooklyn funeral home. As the funeral home’s owner told the New York Times, “I ran out of space.”

The city handles the body of every Covid fatality, a process meant to ensure victims don’t pile up at overwhelmed hospitals, as in New York. Above, an autopsy room and viewing area at the city morgue.

***

The truth is that all mass-fatality events carry the potential for this type of disgrace. Amid the chaos of a calamity, victims get misidentified. Morgues fill up. “We saw that with Hurricane Katrina—bodies just left out there,” Harvin says. “And that’s a stain on our society.”

So Harvin and Mitchell made a decision that would set them apart from most coroners and medical examiners in the country. Instead of depending on the hospital system, the chief medical examiner’s office would assume responsibility. Every single person who dies of Covid in DC would be sent to Harvin and Mitchell’s team—a protocol that remains in place today.

By studying the mortality rate and projecting infection levels for the city, the men estimated that as many as 3,500 residents could perish in the pandemic. Or one in every 200. Putting aside the magnitude of the suffering, the math presented a serious logistical problem: The city morgue had an official capacity of only 205. The solution was apparent—they would have to build the Covid morgue.

Harvin immediately began acquiring the materials he’d need. He ordered six refrigerated trailers. He borrowed mobile light towers for nighttime work and generators for power. He acquired PPE, Porta-Potties, drinking water, 500 gallons of hand sanitizer, and heavy-duty body bags specially designed for mass tragedies, 4,000 in all. For families who couldn’t afford funerals, the District agreed to pay for cremations. And to prevent a backlog of fatalities, the city shortened the time it would hold unclaimed bodies before they could be cremated, from 30 to 15 days.

The truth is that all mass-fatality events carry the potential for disgrace. Amid the chaos of a calamity, victims get misidentified. Morgues fill up.

Meanwhile, Harvin combed the local and federal bureaucracy in search of an additional 30 workers—to volunteer. The Army agreed to detail members of its mortuary-affairs unit, which had operated similar morgues in combat zones. A trade association found out-of-state funeral directors who wanted to pitch in. DC’s Medical Reserve Corps, a group of volunteers willing to assist in health-related emergencies, provided workers. The DC Guard and the Air National Guard sent personnel.

As he rushed to get things in place, the virus was already spreading through Washington. Harvin felt the same sense of foreboding he’d experienced six years earlier when he was waiting for Hurricane Sandy to make landfall. “It’s like a slow-moving train,” he says. “You know it’s coming and you can’t stop it.”

***

While Harvin was acquiring equipment and manpower, his top lieutenant, Kim Lassiter, spent two days driving around the District, scouting possible sites for the morgue. At her last stop, she got out of her car and peered through the fence. The property had everything. It was city-owned land—a parking lot for DC employees, empty because staffers were now working from home. It was large enough for the trailers, and it could be secured with tarps and guards. Most important, the site was inconspicuous: You could drive right past it and not realize it was there. “This is perfect,” Lassiter thought.

Lassiter, a 54-year-old grandmother with a soft smile, is the second-longest-tenured medical examiner’s employee, with nearly a quarter century on the job. In the 1990s, she lifted the victims of gang wars off street corners and washed the blood from their wounds at the morgue. In 2002, she used x-rays to identify the remains of Chandra Levy, the 24-year-old intern whose murder had become the subject of national fascination when it was alleged she’d been dating a married congressman around the time of her disappearance. And in 2008, Lassiter carried the remains of four children—ages 5, 6, 11, and 17—from the house where they’d been decomposing for seven months, after their mother, Banita Jacks, became convinced they’d been possessed by demons and killed them.

Lassiter came to the work by way of her own personal tragedy. She grew up in a housing project in Prince George’s County, with five brothers and sisters. Her father wasn’t around, and her mother, who worked in healthcare, struggled to do it all on her own. She eventually fell victim to drug use. It was up to Lassiter—the eldest of the children—to run the household. She cut class three days a week to watch her siblings. At 12, she got a summer job to support the family. Even after she graduated from high school and entered the workforce, there were periods when she would drop everything to nurse her mother through the various chemical fogs and illnesses that encumber the life of an addict.

In 1987, when Lassiter was 21, her mother passed away. Lassiter was called to the hospital. A nurse escorted her to the elevator, and they rode down to the basement. There, in a frigid room, Lassiter found her mother lying motionless on a stretcher. Her eyes were still open. “I felt like,” Lassiter remembers, “she was waiting for me to show up.”

Kim Lassiter, a 25-year veteran of the medical examiner’s office, ran the Covid morgue day to day.

***

The nurse explained that her mother was being taken away for an autopsy. Lassiter didn’t know anything about the process, and the news frightened her. “If I could have gone with her through that,” she says, “I would have.”

Following the funeral, Lassiter obtained custody of her siblings, whom she supported through her job as a clerk at the US Department of Health and Human Services. A few years later, her life took an unexpected turn when she spotted an alarming story in the newspaper: The DC chief medical examiner’s office had released the wrong body to a grieving family. The incident sounded both outrageous and intriguing; more than anything, it reminded Lassiter—by then a mother herself—of when her mom had been sent to the morgue. She called the office, talked her way to a supervisor, and asked if she could help. She joined the office as a volunteer.

This was the late 1990s, and the agency was considerably smaller than it is today. Lassiter was quickly hired and eventually promoted, becoming one of seven technicians responsible for a full sweep of duties: fielding intake calls from police, snapping photographs at death scenes, transporting decedents to the morgue, and assisting with medical examinations and autopsies. She viewed the work not as some macabre responsibility but as an expression of love. While she hadn’t been able to care for her own mother after her death, she now looked after the deceased loved ones of others.

When arriving at a place of death, Lassiter is vigilant about wearing a blank facial expression, to acknowledge the gravity of the circumstances. She offers condolences, then completes her tasks—attaching the toe tag, placing the deceased into the body bag—at a diligent pace so as not to prolong the trauma of those looking on. Once an autopsy is complete, she uses tight, neat sutures to close the incisions. She then washes the stains from the body and wraps it in a crisp white sheet.

Occasionally, when working alone, Lassiter has found herself speaking out loud to the bodies. If she hits a pothole while driving someone to the morgue, she’ll apologize. I’m sorry. Upon entering the morgue’s cold-storage facility, she sometimes greets the people being kept there. Good morning. When examining a crime victim’s body—particularly when it’s a child’s—she often pledges to help get justice. I’ll do everything in my power to find the evidence needed to make whoever did this to you pay.

The hardest days are the ones when she finds herself face to face with someone she knows. One morning, as Lassiter was preparing for autopsies, she checked the manifest and saw a familiar name. It was an older woman, a friend of her mother’s who’d looked out for Lassiter as a child. She walked into the cold-storage room, slid the body out of its cabinet, and said goodbye. It was the only time she ever broke down crying at the morgue.

***

April 22, 2020—The day after the religious leaders consecrate the site, the Covid morgue begins to stir with workers in face shields, gloves, and white protective suits. It’s been six weeks since DC recorded its first case of Covid, and the death toll has exceeded the city morgue’s capacity. Now the first wave of bodies is arriving.

The process begins with a phone call. A hospital official, or sometimes a police officer, contacts the medical examiner’s office. Lassiter, who is chief of the transport unit, dispatches her team to the scene. Two workers, in full PPE, arrive in a black, unmarked van. They present paperwork for the physician’s signature. In the hospital’s morgue, they take custody of the body. Opening the body bag, they attach identification. They zip the bag closed and spray the outside with disinfectant, then place it into a second, heavy-duty body bag. They disinfect it again. The workers lift the decedent onto a stretcher and paste an identification tag onto the bag. They slide the stretcher into the back of the unmarked van.

Every body arriving at the Covid morgue is first accounted for at the intake tent, then transferred to a refrigerated trailer.

***

At the Covid morgue, the workers move the decedent onto a table in the intake tent. Here, they weigh the body, to help confirm identification, and enter the victim’s name into a computer. They wheel the decedent across the blacktop and up into one of the refrigerated trailers. Next, the transfer. If the victim is heavy, the workers—at least two, sometimes four—lift the body onto one of the lower shelves. If the person is light, they place the body on a higher shelf. The staff use internal coding—6D, 2A—to record the exact location. They exit the trailer, remove their protective suits, and put on fresh ones.

A victim typically remains at the Covid morgue a few days, rarely longer than a week. During that time, a separate team calls family members to help them through the paperwork. Once burial arrangements are made, the funeral director schedules a pickup. The workers wheel the victim out of cold storage and into a second tented canopy—the release tent. They again wipe down the outside of the body bag. They again spray it with disinfectant. The funeral director pulls up. They load the dead into the hearse.

***

Though it was difficult to find volunteers, Harvin had assembled what he called “a coalition of the willing.” The active-duty Army morticians and military reservists, the citizen volunteers, the funeral directors, along with medical-examiner staffers and UDC students. While many had backgrounds in mortuary services, others did not. “We had people,” Harvin says, “who had never touched a dead body before—never seen a dead body.”

When each new group of volunteers arrived, Harvin—“the general in charge of the death troops”—brought them together to discuss the effort. The victims had come to the Covid morgue after suffering lonely and terrifying deaths—hooked up to breathing tubes, surrounded by masked doctors and nurses. “These people often were dropped off at the hospital, and they couldn’t see their loved ones for two or three or four weeks,” he continued. “They expired around complete strangers.” The staff’s goal, Harvin told the troops, was to provide each person with a dignity in death that they didn’t experience during their last days of life.

The operation has depended on volunteers—students, funeral directors, military reservists with no prior training.

***

Then he turned it over to Lassiter, who ran the day-to-day operations. She instructed new volunteers how to implement the values Harvin had espoused. When carrying the deceased, move deliberately and with caution. Keep the body as horizontal as possible. Do not, under any circumstances, stack one on top of another. Check, double-check, and triple-check the manifest to make sure each victim is in the correct rack. And pay respect through your words. Lassiter never refers to the deceased as “corpses” or “cadavers” or “cases.” Instead, she calls them “my people.”

“That’s the only way I can get [the workers] to treat them the way they would treat someone that they love,” Lassiter says. “Because it makes them see how special these people are to me.”

***

Gerald Slater, 86, was a television executive at PBS and WETA.

Richard Paul Thornell, 83, was a Howard law-school professor who helped establish the Peace Corps’s first-ever program, in Ghana.

Jose Mardoqueo Reyes, 54, was a refugee of El Salvador’s civil war and a beloved internet-radio broadcaster.

Luevella Jackson, 87, was among the first female bus drivers in DC’s public-school system.

Samuel Shumaker III, 90, was an Army colonel who also taught English and creative writing at UDC.

Florence Gilkes, 97, was a loving wife and aunt, as well as a dedicated fan of the Washington Football Team.

Iraj Askarinam, 76, owned a restaurant in Adams Morgan, where he regularly provided free meals to the homeless. They called him “Mr. Spaghetti.”

***

By May, the pandemic’s bleakest days had arrived at the morgue. The daily influx of new decedents fluctuated—eight one day, 19 the next. As the volume swelled, the workers came face to face with the breadth of the city’s suffering. They began recognizing the last names of victims they’d been dispatched to retrieve, and it dawned on them that these were additional members of already devastated families. Payton McFadden, a UDC premed grad, describes the crushing duty of traveling to a DC hospital to collect the body of a Covid-positive baby: “We had went and gotten one of the [baby’s] family members one week prior. [Covid] was slowly but surely matriculating through the whole house.” In a searing example of the District’s racial inequality, 74 percent of the fatalities were Black. “I will never forget this as long as I live, ever,” Lassiter says. “It just took so many people at one time, so suddenly.”

A Chicago-area funeral director who asked to be identified only by her first name, Stacey, came to Washington to volunteer. She served in the medical examiner’s main office, calling families and guiding them through the process of finalizing death certificates and retrieving loved ones. On one occasion, she spoke with a man whose father was in the Covid morgue, and he dissolved into tears. The man explained that they’d been estranged for years. It was only recently that they’d finally begun speaking again. “We do help carry that burden of grief,” she says. “And it’s hard.” On another day, she had a series of conversations with a police officer whose mother was at the disaster morgue. When the officer suddenly stopped returning her calls, Stacey got hold of his wife, who told her he’d been hospitalized with Covid himself. Nearly a year later, she still wonders about him. “It is always in the back of my head,” she says. “I don’t know [if] he made it through.”

Routine tasks touched off bouts of anguish. A worker might spot a detail about a victim that resonated personally: a birthday shared with the worker’s daughter, the same last name as a best friend.

As the morgue’s lead official, Harvin was spending up to 12 hours a day at the site. “Everyone’s talking about Covid and fatalities, and it’s just numbers to them. We’re actually dealing with them,” he says. “I have a PhD and I’m in there putting on gloves and a [protective] suit and I’m helping the crews move bodies in and out of trailers. It’s visceral for us.”

The staff feared for their own safety. “The scariest thing was [potentially being] exposed ourselves,” says Denise Lyles, supervisor of the investigation unit. Lassiter grew terrified that she’d infect her family. “I have a husband that goes out and he works. I was concerned about him,” she says. “Grandchildren that are asthmatic, concerned about them.”

Routine tasks touched off bouts of anguish. While checking the manifest, a worker might spot a detail about a victim that resonated personally: a birthday shared with the worker’s daughter, the same last name as a best friend. Harvin and Lassiter did what they could to look out for their staff’s mental health. At the end of each day, Lassiter pulled people aside to see if anyone was experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression, connecting them with counselors or chaplains. Over time, even veterans of the medical examiner’s office began struggling with the weight of their mission.

After several weeks at the site, Harvin found that when he returned home from work, he would drift into a haze. He had no appetite. He stopped engaging his wife in conversation. He passed entire evenings staring blankly into the television. “I don’t even know what I’m watching,” he recalls. “I had no motivation.”

Harvin, of course, had worked mass tragedy before. After hijackers flew the first plane into the World Trade Center, he approached the South Tower on foot. From two blocks away, he saw bodies falling from the sky and his entire body froze. He couldn’t take another step forward. Minutes later, there was a deafening sound and the tower disappeared into a cloud of gray debris. Out of the rubble came a speeding ambulance. Harvin jumped into the back along with dozens of other firefighters and cops. As they neared the North Tower, Harvin turned to one of them. “Doesn’t it look like this one’s leaning?” he said.

He spent the next two days at Ground Zero searching for survivors and recovering the dead. The experience was so traumatizing that he vowed never to return to the site. But he found the work at the Covid morgue even more emotionally taxing. “I survived September 11,” he says. “I didn’t know if I was going to survive this.”

“There were so many women. So many mothers there.”

While he was able to walk away from Ground Zero after the attack,the pandemic was taking new victims each day. Every time Harvin arrived at the Covid morgue, he confronted a fresh supply of misery, and there was no end in sight. “Your mind and your soul get worn down far long before you body [does],” he says. Recognizing that he was experiencing depression, he turned to colleagues at the homeland-security department and found solace in chatting with them virtually.

For Lassiter, the pain manifested not as psychological trauma but as profound sadness. The heartache was always there, growing more intense over time. May 9—Mother’s Day—was the hardest. It had always been a tough one, the day her own mother’s death was most painful. But there was an additional heaviness now; she couldn’t stop thinking about everyone at the Covid morgue. “There were so many women,” she says. “So many mothers there.”

Though she was scheduled to be off, Lassiter didn’t feel right staying home on that particular day. She left her house in Prince George’s County and made the 25-minute drive to the site. Arriving at the morgue, she put on a protective suit and greeted the workers. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “It’s Mother’s Day,”

“I know,” she replied, “but I came down because I wanted to really thank you for what you’re doing.” She understood that some of them were mothers themselves, and she appreciated them for spending the day at the site.

Lassiter walked over to the cold-storage trailers and turned to face her people. “Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms,” she said. As she returned to the car, she noticed a lightness of spirit.

“It felt kind of like a sign of relief,” she says. “Just to speak out. To let them know that someone cares.”

***

June 2020—As summer approaches, the pace at the Covid morgue begins to slow. Fewer victims are arriving; the number of bodies in the trailers is declining. By the end of the month, the volume is thin enough that it can be handled at the city morgue. Washington’s first wave of Covid has reached its conclusion.

It’s time for Harvin to shut down the disaster morgue, at least for now. But before doing so, he organizes a final ritual. On July 7, 2020, Rabbi Herzfeld, Reverend Towner, and Imam Shareef return to the site. They were present at the beginning, and Harvin wants them here today, too.

The faith leaders gather by the intake tent as a group of three dozen workers form concentric circles around them. They offer prayers of thanksgiving that the work is coming to an end. “It is at death that the earth receives its treasures,” says Imam Shareef. “And we want to honor the facility that now has allowed for individuals to be returned back to the earth.”

After the ceremony, Lassiter assembles the men and women on her team to thank them for their two and a half months of service. When she finishes, a soldier who was assigned to the site pulls a patch off his flak jacket and approaches her. “This patch has been around the world,” he tells Lassiter, “and I want you to have it.”

Though the pandemic rages on, Harvin and Lassiter can’t help but feel a certain triumph. They haven’t misidentified any bodies. None of their team has contracted Covid. They know they may be back. But in a dark and painful year, this is a good day.

Months later, Lassiter will remember it, the special pride she felt that despite dozens of workers toiling and thousands of pounds of equipment rumbling, despite 404 fatalities passing through, word of the Covid morgue never reached the public. Her colleagues hadn’t enlisted for accolades. They’d pressed through the fear and the grief in order to care for the innocent victims of a historic pandemic.

“It felt good,” Lassiter says. “Even if no one would ever know about it.”

It’s been nearly a year since the pandemic struck Washington. In the first four months of lockdown, the city lost three times as many jobs as it did during the 2008 recession. By July, small business revenue had been cut in half. Metrorail ridership has plunged by as much as 90 percent. Over the coming four years, the District is anticipating a budget gap of roughly $800 million. All told, more than 933,514 people in DC, Maryland, and Virginia have contracted the virus, and 15,148 have died.

Today, Covid fatalities are being processed at the city morgue in Southwest DC; although the number of deaths is once again elevated, it’s well below the peaks of last spring. At the disaster morgue, the light towers have been hauled away and the generators have gone silent. The trailers are resting on a deserted blacktop. Each day, thousands of cars pass right by the site, oblivious to what happened there. If they knew where to look, though, the drivers could see something that Harvin made sure to leave in place. The DC and US flags, rising above the fence.

***

This article appears in the March 2021 issue of Washingtonian.

[ignis-scientia-estrogen-brigade]

~ISEB in Japan: A Photo Journal~

If you’ve been following me on Twitter lately, you’ll know that I’ve been traveling through parts of Japan the last couple of weeks with my Ignis Play Arts Kai figure in tow. I posted a few pictures over there during the duration of my trip, but those barely scratched the surface of everything I got to do while in Japan. So I thought I’d put together a blog post of my journey while it was still fresh in my mind, featuring everyone’s favorite strategist in what I’ve been dubbing my Great Final Fantasy XV Adventure of 2019!

[Image-heavy content + commentary under the cut]

A brief backstory: I’ve wanted to go to Japan my entire adult life. For years, I’ve watched friends make the trek while I’ve been stuck at home with a severe case of FOMO. The only thing that ever stopped me from going was money (or a lack thereof), so I made the decision last summer to buckle down and sock away every dime I made to make it happen. My only concern before hopping on the plane was that I had missed the wave of FFXV popularity by about a year, but I would quickly learn that—other than not getting to eat any of Ignis’ recipes at the Square Enix Cafe—I had little to worry about.

Literally the only reason I brought my Play Arts Kai figure was so I could take this picture of Ignis at the Citadel (a.k.a. the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building), which was the very first place I stopped at on my first full day in Tokyo. The building + the surrounding plaza, while not 100% accurate, is a fairly impressive facsimile of the one in the game. It’s located in Shinjuku, which also boasts a lot of similarities to Insomnia. Having finished Episode Ardyn mere hours before jetting off on my trip, it felt like I had stepped off the plane and right into the game!

There just so happened to be an Animate right near the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, so I popped in to get a feel for what kind of FFXV merch I’d be able to find two years after the game’s release and a year after its height of popularity. Turns out, there was quite a lot of swag to be found! Truth be told, I’ve never been one to chase down official merchandise (unfortunately my job doesn’t really afford that luxury), but I gave myself special permission while on vacation to buy anything I wanted. So I did! Including everything you see above. ^^;;

The next thing I did was take the train to Ginza to meet Lyle/@landscape-gonna  (@landscape_gonna on Twitter), and I simply cannot say enough nice things about her. If you don’t know who she is, there’s a 99.9% chance you’ve seen at least one of her Ignis costumes, and they are A. M. A. Z. I. N. G. We had chatted a bit previously on Twitter before I went full-on stan mode, asking her if she'd be willing to meet up with me (a total stranger) to have lunch and talk Ignis and Final Fantasy. Not only did she say yes, but she gifted me with copies of her incredible cosplay zines and was not the least embarrassed when I busted out my Play Kai Arts figure in the middle of a busy Japanese dessert restaurant haha.

See? Zero embarrassment here.

We even did Noct’s ultimate pose! In public!

I can’t begin to articulate how special meeting Lyle was for me—being brought together from opposite sides of the world to share in our love for Ignis/FFXV is a memory I will cherish my entire life. So Lyle, if you are reading this: どうもありがとうございます ! ٩( ᐛ )( ᐖ )۶

Lyle wasn't the only friend I had in Japan. Another friend of mine, Asuka (who happens to be well-versed in anime/video game culture), volunteered to be my guide through Ikebukuro/Otome Road the next day. Quick otaku lesson: Kbooks is a chain of stores that specializes in the resale of licensed merchandise. For example, if you missed out on some of the limited availability items from the Movic and the Square Enix Cafe collaborations, you might be able to find them at a Kbooks. Otome Road in particular has something like seven different Kbook shops in a 3-block radius, each one specializing in different products (sports anime, idols, cosplay, etc). I, of course, beelined for the video game shop...

...which is where I found this fucking thing:

I’m not gonna lie, I almost bought it. I just didn’t know what I would do with it besides scare the living daylights out of people when they least expected it lol.

Yoooo Adam I found ya boi in Ikebukuro

We popped into the cosplay Kbooks shop since it was right across the street and I found an Ignis costume for sale! Please enjoy this picture of me pretending to come up with a new recipeh (since this is likely the closest I’ll ever come to cosplaying as Ignis).

One of the things Asuka introduced me to was Hanami (picnic under the cherry blossoms, basically). I had timed my trip to coincide with the blooming of the sakura, and the experience of being in Japan during that time was indescribable. I took a bajillion pictures of the sakura while I was there and unfortunately none of my photos ever quite captured the beauty and magic of them in person, but here’s a lil’ pic of a tree in bloom at Yoyogi Park (with the Movic Ignis charm I bought at Kbooks earlier that day).

Another item on my Japan checklist was to stay at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) in Hakone, a town famous for its onsen/hot springs. Nothing in Hakone is cheap (at least, not during peak sakura season), and I had spent an absurd amount of money on a night at one particular ryokan with a private bath (shy husband haha). The private bath could only be reserved in 30-minute increments, and by the time we finally rolled into Hakone the bath we wanted only had one slot available for the rest of the night. So what did I do?

If you said, “Waste the first 15 minutes of your 30-minute, super-expensive onsen experience taking the perfect Ignis-in-a-hot-springs photo” then you would be absolutely correct lol.

I actually wasn’t planning on taking a bunch of photos of my Ignis figure on this trip, but after my husband tucked Ignis into my futon while I was in the bathroom, documenting my trip vicariously through Ignis ended up taking on a life of its own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I popped back over to Tokyo after my stay in Hakone, which is when I finally got to make the Great Nerd Pilgrimage™ to the Square Enix Cafe! Had the FFXV collab been going on while I was there, I might’ve forked over the cash to eat at the cafe, but I opted to skip out on lunch so I could spend more money in their shop. They still had a small collection of FFXV merch...

...including this acrylic Ignis stand that I wanted but thought I would never own after failing to find it at Kbooks earlier in the week. Huzzah!

Also, I just feel the need to let everyone know that this is what the outside of the Square Enix Cafe in Tokyo looks like lmao.

Our next stop was Kyoto, which we arrived in on Gladio’s birthday (April 2nd). Unfortunately I didn’t have time to draw anything for his b-day, but we did stop for a Nissin Cup Noodle in honor of Gladio!

One of the most memorable moments of my trip was when this boating incident happened, and it requires a little bit of backstory. On my first full day in Kyoto, I attempted to field two of the most popular tourist destinations in Kyoto: the bamboo forest in Arashiyama, and the Fushimi Inari Shrine. Both places have their beauty and historical significance, and I suspect during the off-season are inspiring sites to behold. In my case, both places were absolutely swarming with tourists, which really put a damper on my enjoyment of them. Defeated, I followed a local canal back toward my hotel, which is where I spotted a miniature boat enthusiast controlling a boat that looked eerily similar to the Royal Vessel. I pulled my Ignis figure out with the intention of simply taking a photo of the boat in the background; when the man saw me holding my figure and fumbling with my phone, he flagged me over and gestured for me to put Ignis in the boat. I wish I had documented how it all went down a little better, but as I was literally wheezing with laughter, the above was the best I could capture.

One of the more off-the-cuff decision I made was to dress in kimono for a day while in Gion (Kyoto). As the cherry blossoms were at their height during my stay there, you couldn’t sneeze without hitting someone who was dressed traditionally for the numerous festivals that were taking place throughout the city. As a white foreigner, I initially had reservations about wearing a kimono (for fear of cultural appropriation), but I did everything I could to be as respectful and reverent whilst wearing the garb (and the rental shop was certainly happy for the patronage). It was an amazing experience and I would definitely do it again!

Speaking of being respectful, I made it a point not to take pictures of Ignis while visiting any shrines (because nothing screams ‘douchey American’ quite like whipping out an action figure on sacred grounds), hence why I don’t have pictures of any of the major shrines we visited in this post. I did, however, spot this miniature shrine arch in an alleyway, and thought it would be okay for my equally miniature strategist to pay his respects.

Literally, a tiny shrine in an alleyway. I suppose even alleys have their deities!

Osaka is about 20 minutes away from Kyoto by train, and since I had already traveled all the way out to Kyoto, I went the extra few miles to stop by the Square Enix Cafe in Osaka. They actually had a smaller selection of FFXV merch than the one in Tokyo and I didn’t end up buying anything, but I would’ve never stopped wondering if I had missed out on something if I hadn’t gone and seen it for myself!

My last day in Kyoto was a week into my trip, and I still had five days left to go. After walking ~10 miles every day (no joke, I have the GPS screenshots to prove it!), I was really starting to feel the grind. I’m sure Ignis was also desperate for an Ebony after being lugged around in the bottom of my purse for a week lol.

Back on the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Tokyo!

Weeeeeee (ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

Said hi to Fuji-san!

Stopped for a delicious matcha parfait! (Shout-out to my husband who never once got annoyed with me whenever I busted out my figure in public spaces lol)

This was without a doubt the craziest and most unexpected find of any of my merch runs. I had gone to the video game Kbooks in Ikebukuro earlier in the week and had sifted through all their Ignis merch with a fine-toothed comb. This particular Movic charm was one I had been on the lookout for, but it was a rare pull even when they were readily available a year ago, and the only Ignis charm I came across in my first trip to Kbooks was the normal Ignis one (see my Hanami pic). I had no real reason to return to Ikebukuro after I got back from Kyoto, but on a whim I went one last time and BAM—this guy was hanging out there in his lil’ baggie, just waiting for me to get my grubby little hands on him. Jackpot!

All in all, I spent way too much money and I couldn’t be happier for it. The only thing I couldn’t find for the life of me was the Ignis cologne by Movic, but after searching through several Animates and Kbooks, I began to suspect it might be an online-exclusive item that wasn’t available in stores. (Which was probably a good thing for me cause I was already stretching my budget to the limit by this point haha.)

On my last night in Japan, I went back to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building—only this time I went at night when it was all lit up! I also went up to the observation deck on the 45th floor (something I didn’t know you could do the first time I was there) and enjoyed a fantastic view of nighttime Insomnia Tokyo. It was the perfect bookend to a perfect trip, and my heart is absolutely overflowing right now with love for both Japan and Final Fantasy XV!

[tadakixd-blog]

Kateigaho Snippets: The Natural Side of Yuzuru Hanyu

Also known as: Yuzuru Teases the Media and They Write Him a Love Letter, Part 3715309823940

A few short snippets from behind the scenes of the Kateigaho shoot for their recent March Issue. This occurred after the TCC media day, and some time in the summer during an exclusive interview in Tokyo.

Article and photos by 小松庸子 (Komatsu Youko), from her Figure Skater Love gallery.

Caption: Skater Yuzuru Hanyu at an exclusive interview in Tokyo after his Toronto interview. Sometimes smiling happily and sometimes keeping a slightly straight face, as expected, he is able to provide a multitude of different expressions in a single moment.

~~

Snippet 2: You know, my waist is insane (laughs)

This happened after his shower when he was choosing between 2 sets of clothes we had laid out for him.

"Look look~ My waist, it's insane* you know”. When we turned around, we saw Hanyu with his shirt scrunched up, showing his waist to all of the staff present.

Whaaa-- it was so...narrow!! Zero fat. So tight. But it wasn't just narrow, the muscle bulk was as expected of an athlete! A crazy waist, so envious...There's no doubt all of the staff there were thinking the same thing (laughs).

~~ Full article with a total of 4 snippets under the cut :)

A charisma that pulls in the world and a playful natural side - Yuzuru Hanyu has both. Finally he arrives at the Pyeongchang Olympics!

February 11th. Yuzuru Hanyu finally lands in Korea. It is the arrival of the main star. With this, all the players in the Mens Singles Figure Skating field have finally assembled at the great Olympic stage.

Hanyu looks a little thinner but, facing the goal of a ‘second consecutive victory‘, he has imposed on himself a severe off-ice and core training regimen and I believe that has tightened his body.

On the night of the 12th just past 7pm, at the open practice session, I was able to meet Hanyu after nearly 3 months of not seeing him on the ice.

There was concern over the condition of his right ankle but he performed a beautiful 3A. After his right foot landed on the ground, he nodded to himself - and there must have been some who unconsciously nodded along with him too. During his run through on the 13th, he landed many quad jumps easily.

And soon, the fated Mens Short Program and Free Skate will be held on the 16th and the 17th respectively.

It was at the Tokyo interview for the March issue of Kateigaho that he spoke straightforwardly about the passionate thoughts he had leading up to this Olympics. During that time I watched and listened to him relaxing and unknowingly break into laughter, and I bring to you those little snippets of the natural side of Hanyu.

//Page 2

Caption: Hanyu, both a skater and a student. The bespectacled look isn't something we see often, but since it's his own personal glasses, it fits him perfectly.

Snippet 1: Clean and fresh after a shower

Returning to Japan during the summer, he took time out of his incredibly busy schedule to give us an exclusive photoshoot and interview. He arrived at the hotel where the shoot was to be held after finishing a previous engagement, and discovered that there was a bathroom.

With shining eyes he asked “Is it alright if I just pop in and take a quick shower?”. It was a rather tight schedule but he had such a delighted face that there was no way you could say no once you laid eyes on it (laughs). But thanks to that, he was completely refreshed. Since he went along with the interview in good spirits, it was the right choice to have let him take a shower.

Snippet 2: You know, my waist is insane (laughs)

This happened after his shower when he was choosing between 2 sets of clothes we had laid out for him.

"Look look~ My waist, it's insane* you know”. When we turned around, we saw Hanyu with his shirt scrunched up, showing his waist to all of the staff present.

Whaaa-- it was so...narrow!! Zero fat. So tight. But it wasn't just narrow, the muscle bulk was as expected of an athlete! A crazy waist, so envious...There's no doubt all of the staff there were thinking the same thing (laughs).

*t/n: He uses the word えぐい, which is a slang popular amongst young adults recently to mean anything from bad/incredible/amazing/difficult/tough/insane. Almost like how you'd say "Seimei is da shit”, except less crude. Also, the way he says this is so...「見てくださいよ～僕、ウエストえぐいんですよ」"...it's almost like a whine omg, he was completely teasing them (and still polite-ish)! Show off! hahaha

Snippet 3: I like stretchable fabrics!

In Toronto, Canada, he focuses so much on his training that he rarely gets a chance to go out, and so Hanyu is almost always ok with wearing track suits everyday.

He took an interest in the not-too-formal, not-too-casual, student-like outfit (from the shoot), and especially the pants made of comfortable, stretchable fabric. “I don't have pants made of this kind of fabric, so this is refreshing. It's nice and easy to move in, isn't it?”.

After the shoot, with his suitcase rattling behind him as he pulled it towards the station whilst wearing that outfit, he remarked “It kinda feels like (I'm on) a high school field trip!” and was in good spirits.

Caption: During the shooting for the 2011 December issue of Kateigaho, we learnt that pudding was one of the things he liked, so this time we prepared a slightly more adult flavoured pudding for him. (t/n: adult flavoured usually means less sweet).

// Page 3

Caption: Photographer Sakamoto from the photography division of Sekai Bunka Publishing, who was in charge of shooting Hanyu in the traditional haori and hakama for the 2016 January issue of Kateigaho. Whilst exchanging stories with Hanyu about Toronto, the shooting progressed peacefully.

Snippet 4: Recently, the music I am interested in is...

The image of Hanyu listening to music on his earphones whilst stretching is well-known. From a previous interview, we knew that one of the ways he changed his mood was by looking for songs he liked on music websites.

So, we asked “Recently, have you found any singers or groups you're interested in?”. And he replied “Recently, what I sometimes listen to is ‘Mrs.GREEN APPLE'. It was on the YouTube recommended videos list, and when I listened to them I found I liked it. Yes, it's a Japanese group. I pretty much only listen to J-pop.”. I wonder what he will be listening too right before his Olympic competition?

Caption: The strong gaze that hides his determination as an athlete. The world has long awaited Hanyu's return to the ice. On the 13th he landed quad jumps one after the other during practice. I'm excited for his actual performance!

As a figure who reigns over the figure skating world, the overflowing charisma present in his words and actions are of course one side of Hanyu. However, the short moments in which he spends with his family and shows the natural side of his 23 year old self is too, the true him.

Hanyu shoulders many different burdens as he continues to face figure skating with sincerity, and we, Kateigaho, have been watching over him since 2011.

“If I don't lie to myself, I want to win again.”. Not being able to practice as he liked after his injury, not being able to compete, and having to swallow those feelings of irritation... with the strong feelings of wanting to repeat his victory as a support, he must have gritted his teeth and overcome it all.

And so, he has finally arrived at the stage of his 2nd Olympics. He crossed over to Canada at the end of April in 2012 and poured all of his time into figure skating. With the feelings that were borne of that, and the cheers and support of everyone that he has turned into power, I will be wishing for Hanyu to be able to skate the performance of his dreams at the rink in Gangneung Ice Arena.

[wineanddinosaur]

VinePair Podcast: West Coast Wildfires Demand Our Attention

The 2020 wildfire season has already had devastating effects up and down the West Coast, with lives lost, homes destroyed, and horrific air quality choking tens of millions of people. Beyond those immediate dangers are several other types of concerns — such as how the fires will affect American wine production. There are worries that lingering smoke might irrevocably taint wine grapes that are almost ready to be picked, or that such toxic air might make harvesting those grapes unsafe. Fear that hop fields in Washington and Oregon — which produce 98 percent of the nation’s hops — could burn. Dread that industries and companies already grievously harmed by the crippling effects of Covid-19 will not be able to survive the massive losses these fires could produce.

The question remains: Is the rest of the country (and the world) paying attention? Will images of neon orange skies and vast clouds of smoke resonate outside affected areas? What can we all do to address this crisis, both in the short and long term? That’s what Adam Teeter, Erica Duecy, and Zach Geballe discuss on this week’s VinePair podcast.

Listen online

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Or check out our conversation here

Adam: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter.

Erica: From Jersey City, I’m Erica Duecy.

Zach: And in Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

A: And this is the VinePair podcast. And Jersey City?

E: Yeah, we are back in Jersey City.

A: Wow.

E: I have to say, it is quite shocking. I traded the view out my window in Connecticut, which was of a pond and a field and a mature grove of trees, and right now I am looking down a block in Jersey City where all but one of the stores is shuttered. The only one that’s open is a liquor store at the end of the block and homeless encampments right in front of me — worse than I’ve seen since I’ve lived in Jersey City.

A: And you’ve been in Jersey for how many years?

E: For 12 years.

A: Wow. It’s crazy, right? You come back and this is what’s happening.

E: It’s a shock to the system. It really is.

A: Do you have any restaurants on your block, any bars?

E: Yes, there is one across the street — there was one I should say, but now it’s permanently closed.

A: Wow. Just crazy. But anyway, welcome back to the tri-state area.

E: Thank you.

Z: Wait, isn’t Connecticut part of the tri-state area?

E: Is it?

A: Yeah, it is.

Z: I thought it was New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

A: Yeah, it is, never mind. So welcome back to the metro area.

E: Thank you.

A: Welcome back.

Z: If you see your pond out your window, that will be just the latest natural disaster.

E: I’m just waiting for the streets to open up. So that’s next.

A: Big news in New York is that they’ve finally decided that they’re going to allow 25 percent indoor dining, as of Sept. 30, which is pretty crazy. I still don’t know. I know we’ve talked about this before, but I don’t think I’m going to go dine indoors.

E: I’m not. I’ve decided that I am not comfortable dining indoors until the pandemic is curbed. Until it’s either pretty much eradicated or there’s a vaccine, I’m just not comfortable. I just don’t think it’s worth the risk.

A: Yeah. I don’t think so either. Zach?

Z: Zero chance. As we’ve talked about a number of times on this podcast, it’s been very weird to live six months of my life without restaurants, but I can live another six months, a year, two years. I don’t want to get Covid. So no, not going to a restaurant.

A: The sidewalk cafes, at least out here in Brooklyn, are more crowded than ever. People are definitely trying to have some sort of normalcy. My wife was saying earlier this week, and I agree with her, she said she misses quarantine. And I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “I miss when we knew what the rules were.” When we were all staying inside, we were socially distancing, and maybe we saw the one random person that we felt really comfortable seeing. She said, “I crushed quarantine.” We were cooking. And now this middle ground is so weird because, what is acceptable? What isn’t acceptable? Do you go back to the office? Do you not go back to the office? You have so many offices they’re reopening. Do you go out to eat? Do you not? If you go out to eat, where do you go out to eat? Where do you sit when you go out to eat? How do you treat people? We should say either everything is shut down, or everything’s open. And I’m sure that that’s very hard for any owners, as well, of restaurants. I know it’s hard for us as a business. When do we open the VinePair office, which still isn’t open? Just thinking about do you open, or do you not? How do you open? What does that look like? It’s crazy. And there’s no guidance at all.

E: It’s totally inconsistent. My kids are doing remote school and I had to chase down a Chromebook. I went into the city yesterday and went into an electronics store where it was masks optional. I said, are you kidding me?

A: Are you serious?

E: I am serious. In Chelsea, I went into a large chain electronics store and it was masks optional. People had no masks on and I beat a path out of the store so quickly. Then I came back over to the same large chain store a little bit farther out in Jersey and it was masks required. It’s inconsistent. Completely inconsistent.

A: That’s one of the reasons that the percentage law got overturned in New York City because, for those not familiar, there’s this one area of Queens where the line is very blurred between where Queen stops and where Long Island begins. And there was this restaurant in Queens that was like, “Look, literally 200 feet from our door is one of our competitors who happens to be on Long Island and they are open with 50 percent capacity indoors. Please explain why it’s not safe 200 feet away here, but it’s safe enough there.” And then they sued the state. And I think that was one of the things Cuomo responded to, and one of the reasons he gave 25 percent, because it is, across the board, inconsistent. And that’s what just makes this so nuts. Some states are saying it’s completely fine to be at 75 percent capacity. Some states are saying it’s not fine to be eating at all, indoors or outdoors. It’s crazy, I think it’s what is making us all a little nutty.

Z: Well, that’s one of the advantages of being in a city where we are not very close to any other state line. For Erica, going from New Jersey to New York is a very, very simple trip, and you can come across different laws and different practices. Whereas in Washington State, there’s a statewide mask mandate. I’m not concerned that the store I go into is going to have a different policy or different rules because they’re in a different jurisdiction. But I totally agree that one of the major issues that we’re all dealing with is there aren’t a lot of well-articulated guidelines. And I’m not going to turn this into a huge rant. But one of the big problems is that many of us crushed lockdown, and nothing really happened. That’s the part of this that’s really hard. If we had gone three months of lockdown and then emerged, like a lot of Europe did, we would’ve been able to go back to some semblance of normal life. Not that any of us would’ve said, “Oh, man, Covid was great.” It was obviously horrible on so many levels, but at least we would have felt like that time that was, for a lot of us, very difficult and very traumatic in a lot of different ways, was put to use. Instead, we’re still in this pandemic, where things aren’t all that much better. We still don’t have any f***ing clue what’s going to happen. And we’re about to get to the time of year where going outside, for most of us, is going to be not very pleasant. We’re not going to be able to hide out outside and sort of ignore it. We’re gonna be stuck indoors, or forced into shared public spaces. And that part is the part that’s going to suck, because it’s not going to be as clear-cut as it was in March, April, and May about what we need to do. But we’re still going to have to deal with the fact that, if we’re doing things in public, they’re going to be indoors for most of us.

A: I guess we’ll get through it. We’re all trying. And drinking a lot. Anyways, let’s get into this week’s topic, which is one that we all felt is very important and worth discussing, which is the awful fires that are ravaging the West Coast of the United States. And it’s interesting, when we were all talking about the subject for today’s podcast, I was slacking with both of you and I shared with you this interesting thought that I read in The New York Times this morning, which was basically that the fires aren’t getting enough attention. And one of the biggest reasons that this writer was saying that they don’t think that they are is because, for a lot of people who probably listen to the podcast, this is one of the main things you’re thinking about if you live on that side of the country. But because the media is based on the East Coast, they’re just not covering it as much as they would if these fires were happening on the East Coast of the country. Which I think is worth considering, because these are fires that are really damaging whole swaths of land in California, Washington, and Oregon, and really affecting people’s livelihoods in a very fundamental way. And then on top of that, there’s a pandemic. It’s just really terrible. So I think we want to use this podcast to draw attention to what’s happening on the West Coast and talk a little bit about how they’re really going to impact the people who are going through it, but also truly let you know if you’re a listener and you aren’t truly aware of what’s happening, to please be aware of what’s happening and think about supporting the wineries, breweries, etc. that are going to be really suffering because of these fires. Zach, you’re over there, so let’s start with you. What’s it like to be living in Seattle? Does the reporting feel more constant for you than it does for us? What are you hearing from people that you know on the west side of the country in terms of what they’re dealing with?

Z: I think there are multiple parts to the answer. Unsurprising, I suppose. The first thing I would say is that one thing that’s challenging for people on the East Coast to understand if you haven’t spent a lot of time on the West Coast, is how big the states are out here and how big the fires are. You can look up some of the details on the fires, in particular, in California and the amount of land that’s burned and the scope of them. But it’s the size of states, obviously not the size of California, but it’s the size of other states. But at the same time, much of this land is very remote. Even in California, certainly in Oregon, and some of the cases in Washington with the fires, there are not big population centers. And I think that generally one of the reasons why these big fires over there — not just this year but in previous years, too — don’t draw media attention, is it happens far away from New York City. But also, when you have hurricanes or earthquakes, often where that footage and that coverage is coming from our cities. Big population centers that are damaged. And to this point, so far, while all these big population centers on the West Coast are being impacted with smoke and ash and things like that, the fires, themselves, have not necessarily threatened these cities. But at the same time, they are massive. And big fires are fundamentally different from earthquakes or hurricanes because we don’t really know when they’re going to end. An earthquake happens, and obviously there’s tremendous damage, and it could start fires and things like that. But the earthquake, itself, is a few minutes and then there are certainly aftershocks. And with hurricanes, we have really sophisticated modeling technology, we have a pretty good idea for where a hurricane’s going to go, when it’s going to arrive, when it’s going to pass. And there’s a ton of work and a ton of damage, but it’s mostly in the cleanup. With fires, they’re so unpredictable, they’re so dependent on winds that can shift suddenly and on conditions on the ground that are very hard to understand. And so there’s a part of this that is just very difficult to forecast and that creates a lot of uncertainty. It also creates a lot of danger. The thing I would say to this point is that what I’ve seen and heard from friends up and down the coast is that the scary thing for a lot of people is this that is earlier than fire season is supposed to happen, especially in California. And so on the one hand, land that burns and woods that burn aren’t going to burn again in a month, but there’s certainly all the still-existing potential for the typical fire season for much of California and Oregon, and to some extent Washington, which is now through October. So the fact that we already have these massive fires formed in August is scary. We’ll talk later about the impact on wine and beer, but there are real concerns about what this means even without all the added challenges that this year was going to have thanks to Covid.

A: That’s interesting. I actually didn’t realize that it was earlier, to be honest. Again, that’s because we don’t deal with it on this side of the country as often. I really had no clue. That’s crazy.

E: I think probably the best way to visualize it, and I was looking at the fire maps today, is there’s a site that’s fire.ca.gov and that is a government website that tracks fires — not just in California, but you can also see the ones in Oregon and Washington on that map. And if you look at it today, Thursday, Sept. 10, you can see that the fires are stretching all the way from the Mexico border all the way up to Canada. It’s pretty shocking and upsetting to see how many fires are happening and we’re only in the first week of September. I think just in California alone there’s 28 major wildfires and 14,000 firefighters who are currently working overtime on these things. And then I couldn’t believe the photos that came out in San Francisco and parts of Oregon where literally yesterday was the day that the sun did not rise. It was shocking to see those otherworldly orange-yellow glow images of just hundreds and thousands of acres being just totally decimated. It was pretty shocking to see the imagery.

A: It’s really nuts. I was talking to someone in Napa last week who said they came out of their house in the morning, and their car was covered in ash. Even if you’re not in the path of the fire, the fire is impacting you — and especially impacting you if you are a grower. One of the biggest things that we’re hearing a lot about now is how the fires are going to impact harvest, for hops as well as for grapes. A lot of people were saying early on that this was going to be a major year for grapes, especially in California. That there was going to be so much supply, but because of Covid maybe less demand, so we’re going to see a ton of that wine on the market across the country. People were joking, saying, “You’re probably going to find Napa Cabernet in Texas Hill Country wine,” whatever the legal limit of that was, because there was just going to be so much. And now, everyone’s talking instead about smoke taint. And so I’m not as familiar with smoke taint in terms of scientifically how it works. And I was hoping one of you was to talk us through. I understand smoke taint is that the grapes get tainted with smoke and then they taste like smoke. But I’m not sure how that works, and why it can’t be reversed.

E: Zach, you probably have a better handle on it than I do.

Z: I’m going to give my best explanation as to what exactly happens here, and try to explain what smoke taint is — and why it’s something to both be concerned about, and also not super concerned about. The one thing is there’s still not a lot of great understanding, scientifically. What conditions lead to smoke taint in a finished wine are not super-well understood. Over the last few years, there’s been more emphasis in academic and research settings to try and understand this at an academic level, and I think some of the big wine companies are probably doing some research, too. Australia is really the place where a lot of the research has been done because wildfires have been a bigger issue for them than in the U.S. in the past. One thing to note is that smoke taint is really only a risk with red wine, because the smoke taint affects the skins of the grapes. It adheres to the skins of the grapes, and so you’re only going to really extract the compounds that we think of as smoke taint when you’re doing maceration of some length, which is what you do for red wine, but not for white or rosé. White wine and rosé should largely be safe. The biggest risk with smoke taint is that it seems to be only really detectable post-fermentation, or even sometimes after aging. So one of the real issues for winemakers is that in the vineyard or at the sorting table, in the same way that you could detect rot or mildew, you can’t necessarily detect smoke taint. And it’s not like washing the grapes seems to do a lot. It’s that the skins, themselves, take up these compounds and lock them in, and then they are released through fermentation and sometimes in the aging process. And so the problem is basically that you can have wine that seems fine through fermentation and then a few months into the aging process, you go in and you smell it or you taste it and you go, “Oh s***, my wine is ruined, it’s tainted.” And that is the big risk here. You’re going to have a lot of different approaches from wineries and winemakers. Some of them may be very cautious and may decide to do very little winemaking this year, or they’re going to make nothing but white and rosé or they’re going to make really limited macerations, or they’re going to do whatever they can to try and avoid smoke tainted wines. Others might say f*** it, we’re going for it and if we detect smoke taint, then s***, we have got to do something with that wine. And maybe the answer is blended in and blended away in small quantities. There seems to be a school of thought in winemaking that a very small amount of smoke tainted juice can be non-detectable or even can add a desirable smoky note as opposed to the classic ashtray note of a truly smoke-tainted wine — which I’ve had the chance to try being on the West Coast. I’ve had winemakers sometimes with previous vintages that were smoke tainted tell me to try it and see what smoke taint is, and you’re like, “Oh s***, this is disgusting.” And the honest truth is that at this point, from what I know, we don’t have good testing for this pre-fermentation. It’s going to be a crapshoot, which is the s****y part of this, and I don’t have a better way to explain it than that.

E: I’ve seen some very varying opinions on how long the exposure period is, as well. Some people in the past have said it takes several days of prolonged heavy smoke exposure to really damage the grapes and have those phenols stick to the grape in a way that can’t come off. But then I’ve seen others saying that even a day or two of that type of heavy smoke exposure can really ruin the grapes. And, of course, as you said, it’s going to be less with white wine, or we may even see more rosé wines being made this year as a way to try to salvage some of those red wine grapes. Because you’re just not going to be able to leave the juice on the grapes to develop the red wine characteristics that you need over a long period of time with that smoke effect there. So I think what we’ll see is a change in how people are going to operate this year. Looking at all of California, you see reports of grape producers already saying that they’re not going to take their crops or that they’re not going to make wine this year in Sonoma, in Napa, in Paso Robles, in the Central Coast, all throughout the state. I’ve seen a lot of conversation happening about who is or isn’t going to make wine and which grapes were able to come in before the fires really got going. I think that’s what’s at play here, it’s really the entire harvest. If the grapes were not already picked before the smoke got heavy, it could be ruinous for some producers.

A: It’s just nuts. It really is crazy because it’s just sh****ness upon sh****ness, and there’s nothing that you can do. And that’s what I’m worried about, because there have been so many of these fires in recent years. Has there been anything that the wine industry has done? And maybe we don’t know the answer to that question. And if you’re a podcast listener and you do, let us know at podcast@vinepair.com. But has there been anything that has been done to try to mitigate that risk? Do the wineries have smoke taint insurance now? Are there other things that they can do that really will help them if they lose a huge majority of their crop?

E: I know that there is some insurance, there’s some agricultural insurance that could come into play. But it’s probably, like all insurance, there’s so many hoops to jump through to try to be able to take advantage of it. So I’m not sure if there’s kind of a hard- and-fast rule about what would and would not qualify.

A: Interesting. So you just make a lot of brandy with it or something? Does it just turn into a bunch of gin all of a sudden? Some of these wines could you just distill? Is that what you’re stuck with?

Z: Turn it into hand sanitizer?

A: Yeah, exactly. Speaking of hand sanitizer, the Champagne producers who said, “We will not release the wine on the market if it is cheaper, it will be hand sanitizer.” I wonder if that’s what you’re going to see. A lot of high-quality California wine sanitizer.

Z: Well, you also have this other problem that’s going on that we kind of touched on. In wine and in hops there were already labor issues thanks to Covid. And the other thing to think about is that vineyard work in a lot of these places is not necessarily all that safe. Fortunately, Seattle didn’t have it nearly as bad as some other parts of the West Coast, but the last couple of days here, especially Tuesday, it was not safe to be outside for prolonged periods of time. Certainly not doing something as physically demanding as harvesting grapes. And that is another piece of this. As you mentioned earlier on, Adam, we were already talking about potentially a smaller crop and questions about what would happen to grapes that were on the vine that maybe there wasn’t the labor to pick. And you’re going to potentially add to that. We’re kind of at the early stages of harvest for a lot of areas on the West Coast, but it’s getting there. Early to mid-September is certainly the beginning of the harvest season for a lot of places, and we’ll be in full swing quite soon, and many of these fires are far from contained, and there can always be new fires and things like that. One possibility is there’s a lot of unharvested grapes this year. The birds have a great year. And that may just be one of the answers. In the end, it’s not worth it from a variety of levels, economically, health-wise, etc., to pick a lot of grapes. It’s kind of sad on the one hand, think of the wine that could have been if it wasn’t smoke-tainted. On the other hand, maybe the best answer is just to basically say 2020 sucks for everyone. We’re just going to move on.

A: Except for the birds.

E: One angle that we have been reporting on is how local tourism has been a lifeline for a lot of wineries and breweries and distilleries who’ve been able to do curbside and outdoor tastings, and this is adding insult to injury. Now, not only can you not sell your wines on-premise or pick the grapes, but also you have the small, diminished lifeline that you did have of serving people at your tasting room. That. too, is gone. So, we have the plague, we have the fire, and the locusts are coming next. That’s for sure.

A: Totally.

Z: As long as there’s no smiting of the firstborn because that would be bad for me.

A: It’s just nuts. And, Zach, just really quickly before we wrap this one up for today, because last week was so long. We talked a little about the grapes but I know we mentioned hops earlier. How is the smoke impacting hops? How are the fires impacting hops?

Z: That’s a good question, and I’ll give what I know to this point. I will say right upfront, I don’t have an answer yet. I’ve been trying to find one. I don’t know that anyone knows. I don’t think there’s as much concern about smoke taint on hops. Basically what happens with grapes is the smoke compounds bind to sugars in the grapes and that’s how they’re locked into the grape itself, and then that’s why it’s released during fermentation and later on, during the maturation process. Since hops are not picked for their sugar, they’re not the fermentable substance in beer — that’s barley and other malted grains — there isn’t the same risk. There could be some flavor impacts, but the hop growers I spoke to are not concerned about the hops, themselves, being damaged. The issue is really twofold. One is, again, the same as with wine, an issue of labor and whether it’s safe to pick. Hop harvesting, like wine harvesting, is a mix of mechanization and hand labor, and obviously, if the air is unsafe to be out in, then things don’t get picked. And for those of you who don’t know, around 98 percent of the hops in this country are grown in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho in the broader Columbia Valley footprint. And this is right where many of these fires are, so there’s that risk. And then there’s also the honest risk of many of these hop fields, as opposed to vineyards, are more closely situated to some of these fires. And because of where they’re positioned — more in the valley floors than on hills — they are, I think, at more risk of burning. I haven’t heard yet about any of that, but according to a couple of growers I was talking to actually for an article that I’m working on for VinePair — which hopefully will come out, although I’m in the process of having to rewrite it because these fires are changing the story — there are definitely some concerns about an actual loss of crop due to the fire. To say nothing of people’s homes and businesses and things like that and also, of course, possibly lives. So that’s very much a TBD. But, yes, there’s also a real risk to the hop harvest in the U.S. this go-round. Again, what that means, no one knows yet, but we’ll follow up for sure. But it’s not just wine that’s potentially being impacted here.

A: If you are listening, please reach out to wineries that you love, breweries that you love. Support them, buy their products, because everyone’s going to need a lot of help to get through this. These fires are absolutely nuts, and we should be paying attention to them more if you are not already.

Z: And learn to love white and rosé, because that might be all you’re getting domestically.

A: This has been an interesting podcast. Please, if you have any thoughts, reach out to us at podcast@vinepair.com. We’d love to hear your views, other topics you’d like us to discuss in future episodes. And as always, thanks for listening. Erica, Zach, I’ll see you next week.

E: See you then.

Z: Sounds great.

A: Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair Podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week, please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now, for the credits. VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe, Erica Duecy and me, Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also like to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder Josh Malin and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again right here next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article VinePair Podcast: West Coast Wildfires Demand Our Attention appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/west-coast-wildfires-demand-our-attention/

[johnboothus]

VinePair Podcast: West Coast Wildfires Demand Our Attention

The 2020 wildfire season has already had devastating effects up and down the West Coast, with lives lost, homes destroyed, and horrific air quality choking tens of millions of people. Beyond those immediate dangers are several other types of concerns — such as how the fires will affect American wine production. There are worries that lingering smoke might irrevocably taint wine grapes that are almost ready to be picked, or that such toxic air might make harvesting those grapes unsafe. Fear that hop fields in Washington and Oregon — which produce 98 percent of the nation’s hops — could burn. Dread that industries and companies already grievously harmed by the crippling effects of Covid-19 will not be able to survive the massive losses these fires could produce.

The question remains: Is the rest of the country (and the world) paying attention? Will images of neon orange skies and vast clouds of smoke resonate outside affected areas? What can we all do to address this crisis, both in the short and long term? That’s what Adam Teeter, Erica Duecy, and Zach Geballe discuss on this week’s VinePair podcast.

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Adam: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter.

Erica: From Jersey City, I’m Erica Duecy.

Zach: And in Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

A: And this is the VinePair podcast. And Jersey City?

E: Yeah, we are back in Jersey City.

A: Wow.

E: I have to say, it is quite shocking. I traded the view out my window in Connecticut, which was of a pond and a field and a mature grove of trees, and right now I am looking down a block in Jersey City where all but one of the stores is shuttered. The only one that’s open is a liquor store at the end of the block and homeless encampments right in front of me — worse than I’ve seen since I’ve lived in Jersey City.

A: And you’ve been in Jersey for how many years?

E: For 12 years.

A: Wow. It’s crazy, right? You come back and this is what’s happening.

E: It’s a shock to the system. It really is.

A: Do you have any restaurants on your block, any bars?

E: Yes, there is one across the street — there was one I should say, but now it’s permanently closed.

A: Wow. Just crazy. But anyway, welcome back to the tri-state area.

E: Thank you.

Z: Wait, isn’t Connecticut part of the tri-state area?

E: Is it?

A: Yeah, it is.

Z: I thought it was New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

A: Yeah, it is, never mind. So welcome back to the metro area.

E: Thank you.

A: Welcome back.

Z: If you see your pond out your window, that will be just the latest natural disaster.

E: I’m just waiting for the streets to open up. So that’s next.

A: Big news in New York is that they’ve finally decided that they’re going to allow 25 percent indoor dining, as of Sept. 30, which is pretty crazy. I still don’t know. I know we’ve talked about this before, but I don’t think I’m going to go dine indoors.

E: I’m not. I’ve decided that I am not comfortable dining indoors until the pandemic is curbed. Until it’s either pretty much eradicated or there’s a vaccine, I’m just not comfortable. I just don’t think it’s worth the risk.

A: Yeah. I don’t think so either. Zach?

Z: Zero chance. As we’ve talked about a number of times on this podcast, it’s been very weird to live six months of my life without restaurants, but I can live another six months, a year, two years. I don’t want to get Covid. So no, not going to a restaurant.

A: The sidewalk cafes, at least out here in Brooklyn, are more crowded than ever. People are definitely trying to have some sort of normalcy. My wife was saying earlier this week, and I agree with her, she said she misses quarantine. And I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “I miss when we knew what the rules were.” When we were all staying inside, we were socially distancing, and maybe we saw the one random person that we felt really comfortable seeing. She said, “I crushed quarantine.” We were cooking. And now this middle ground is so weird because, what is acceptable? What isn’t acceptable? Do you go back to the office? Do you not go back to the office? You have so many offices they’re reopening. Do you go out to eat? Do you not? If you go out to eat, where do you go out to eat? Where do you sit when you go out to eat? How do you treat people? We should say either everything is shut down, or everything’s open. And I’m sure that that’s very hard for any owners, as well, of restaurants. I know it’s hard for us as a business. When do we open the VinePair office, which still isn’t open? Just thinking about do you open, or do you not? How do you open? What does that look like? It’s crazy. And there’s no guidance at all.

E: It’s totally inconsistent. My kids are doing remote school and I had to chase down a Chromebook. I went into the city yesterday and went into an electronics store where it was masks optional. I said, are you kidding me?

A: Are you serious?

E: I am serious. In Chelsea, I went into a large chain electronics store and it was masks optional. People had no masks on and I beat a path out of the store so quickly. Then I came back over to the same large chain store a little bit farther out in Jersey and it was masks required. It’s inconsistent. Completely inconsistent.

A: That’s one of the reasons that the percentage law got overturned in New York City because, for those not familiar, there’s this one area of Queens where the line is very blurred between where Queen stops and where Long Island begins. And there was this restaurant in Queens that was like, “Look, literally 200 feet from our door is one of our competitors who happens to be on Long Island and they are open with 50 percent capacity indoors. Please explain why it’s not safe 200 feet away here, but it’s safe enough there.” And then they sued the state. And I think that was one of the things Cuomo responded to, and one of the reasons he gave 25 percent, because it is, across the board, inconsistent. And that’s what just makes this so nuts. Some states are saying it’s completely fine to be at 75 percent capacity. Some states are saying it’s not fine to be eating at all, indoors or outdoors. It’s crazy, I think it’s what is making us all a little nutty.

Z: Well, that’s one of the advantages of being in a city where we are not very close to any other state line. For Erica, going from New Jersey to New York is a very, very simple trip, and you can come across different laws and different practices. Whereas in Washington State, there’s a statewide mask mandate. I’m not concerned that the store I go into is going to have a different policy or different rules because they’re in a different jurisdiction. But I totally agree that one of the major issues that we’re all dealing with is there aren’t a lot of well-articulated guidelines. And I’m not going to turn this into a huge rant. But one of the big problems is that many of us crushed lockdown, and nothing really happened. That’s the part of this that’s really hard. If we had gone three months of lockdown and then emerged, like a lot of Europe did, we would’ve been able to go back to some semblance of normal life. Not that any of us would’ve said, “Oh, man, Covid was great.” It was obviously horrible on so many levels, but at least we would have felt like that time that was, for a lot of us, very difficult and very traumatic in a lot of different ways, was put to use. Instead, we’re still in this pandemic, where things aren’t all that much better. We still don’t have any f***ing clue what’s going to happen. And we’re about to get to the time of year where going outside, for most of us, is going to be not very pleasant. We’re not going to be able to hide out outside and sort of ignore it. We’re gonna be stuck indoors, or forced into shared public spaces. And that part is the part that’s going to suck, because it’s not going to be as clear-cut as it was in March, April, and May about what we need to do. But we’re still going to have to deal with the fact that, if we’re doing things in public, they’re going to be indoors for most of us.

A: I guess we’ll get through it. We’re all trying. And drinking a lot. Anyways, let’s get into this week’s topic, which is one that we all felt is very important and worth discussing, which is the awful fires that are ravaging the West Coast of the United States. And it’s interesting, when we were all talking about the subject for today’s podcast, I was slacking with both of you and I shared with you this interesting thought that I read in The New York Times this morning, which was basically that the fires aren’t getting enough attention. And one of the biggest reasons that this writer was saying that they don’t think that they are is because, for a lot of people who probably listen to the podcast, this is one of the main things you’re thinking about if you live on that side of the country. But because the media is based on the East Coast, they’re just not covering it as much as they would if these fires were happening on the East Coast of the country. Which I think is worth considering, because these are fires that are really damaging whole swaths of land in California, Washington, and Oregon, and really affecting people’s livelihoods in a very fundamental way. And then on top of that, there’s a pandemic. It’s just really terrible. So I think we want to use this podcast to draw attention to what’s happening on the West Coast and talk a little bit about how they’re really going to impact the people who are going through it, but also truly let you know if you’re a listener and you aren’t truly aware of what’s happening, to please be aware of what’s happening and think about supporting the wineries, breweries, etc. that are going to be really suffering because of these fires. Zach, you’re over there, so let’s start with you. What’s it like to be living in Seattle? Does the reporting feel more constant for you than it does for us? What are you hearing from people that you know on the west side of the country in terms of what they’re dealing with?

Z: I think there are multiple parts to the answer. Unsurprising, I suppose. The first thing I would say is that one thing that’s challenging for people on the East Coast to understand if you haven’t spent a lot of time on the West Coast, is how big the states are out here and how big the fires are. You can look up some of the details on the fires, in particular, in California and the amount of land that’s burned and the scope of them. But it’s the size of states, obviously not the size of California, but it’s the size of other states. But at the same time, much of this land is very remote. Even in California, certainly in Oregon, and some of the cases in Washington with the fires, there are not big population centers. And I think that generally one of the reasons why these big fires over there — not just this year but in previous years, too — don’t draw media attention, is it happens far away from New York City. But also, when you have hurricanes or earthquakes, often where that footage and that coverage is coming from our cities. Big population centers that are damaged. And to this point, so far, while all these big population centers on the West Coast are being impacted with smoke and ash and things like that, the fires, themselves, have not necessarily threatened these cities. But at the same time, they are massive. And big fires are fundamentally different from earthquakes or hurricanes because we don’t really know when they’re going to end. An earthquake happens, and obviously there’s tremendous damage, and it could start fires and things like that. But the earthquake, itself, is a few minutes and then there are certainly aftershocks. And with hurricanes, we have really sophisticated modeling technology, we have a pretty good idea for where a hurricane’s going to go, when it’s going to arrive, when it’s going to pass. And there’s a ton of work and a ton of damage, but it’s mostly in the cleanup. With fires, they’re so unpredictable, they’re so dependent on winds that can shift suddenly and on conditions on the ground that are very hard to understand. And so there’s a part of this that is just very difficult to forecast and that creates a lot of uncertainty. It also creates a lot of danger. The thing I would say to this point is that what I’ve seen and heard from friends up and down the coast is that the scary thing for a lot of people is this that is earlier than fire season is supposed to happen, especially in California. And so on the one hand, land that burns and woods that burn aren’t going to burn again in a month, but there’s certainly all the still-existing potential for the typical fire season for much of California and Oregon, and to some extent Washington, which is now through October. So the fact that we already have these massive fires formed in August is scary. We’ll talk later about the impact on wine and beer, but there are real concerns about what this means even without all the added challenges that this year was going to have thanks to Covid.

A: That’s interesting. I actually didn’t realize that it was earlier, to be honest. Again, that’s because we don’t deal with it on this side of the country as often. I really had no clue. That’s crazy.

E: I think probably the best way to visualize it, and I was looking at the fire maps today, is there’s a site that’s fire.ca.gov and that is a government website that tracks fires — not just in California, but you can also see the ones in Oregon and Washington on that map. And if you look at it today, Thursday, Sept. 10, you can see that the fires are stretching all the way from the Mexico border all the way up to Canada. It’s pretty shocking and upsetting to see how many fires are happening and we’re only in the first week of September. I think just in California alone there’s 28 major wildfires and 14,000 firefighters who are currently working overtime on these things. And then I couldn’t believe the photos that came out in San Francisco and parts of Oregon where literally yesterday was the day that the sun did not rise. It was shocking to see those otherworldly orange-yellow glow images of just hundreds and thousands of acres being just totally decimated. It was pretty shocking to see the imagery.

A: It’s really nuts. I was talking to someone in Napa last week who said they came out of their house in the morning, and their car was covered in ash. Even if you’re not in the path of the fire, the fire is impacting you — and especially impacting you if you are a grower. One of the biggest things that we’re hearing a lot about now is how the fires are going to impact harvest, for hops as well as for grapes. A lot of people were saying early on that this was going to be a major year for grapes, especially in California. That there was going to be so much supply, but because of Covid maybe less demand, so we’re going to see a ton of that wine on the market across the country. People were joking, saying, “You’re probably going to find Napa Cabernet in Texas Hill Country wine,” whatever the legal limit of that was, because there was just going to be so much. And now, everyone’s talking instead about smoke taint. And so I’m not as familiar with smoke taint in terms of scientifically how it works. And I was hoping one of you was to talk us through. I understand smoke taint is that the grapes get tainted with smoke and then they taste like smoke. But I’m not sure how that works, and why it can’t be reversed.

E: Zach, you probably have a better handle on it than I do.

Z: I’m going to give my best explanation as to what exactly happens here, and try to explain what smoke taint is — and why it’s something to both be concerned about, and also not super concerned about. The one thing is there’s still not a lot of great understanding, scientifically. What conditions lead to smoke taint in a finished wine are not super-well understood. Over the last few years, there’s been more emphasis in academic and research settings to try and understand this at an academic level, and I think some of the big wine companies are probably doing some research, too. Australia is really the place where a lot of the research has been done because wildfires have been a bigger issue for them than in the U.S. in the past. One thing to note is that smoke taint is really only a risk with red wine, because the smoke taint affects the skins of the grapes. It adheres to the skins of the grapes, and so you’re only going to really extract the compounds that we think of as smoke taint when you’re doing maceration of some length, which is what you do for red wine, but not for white or rosé. White wine and rosé should largely be safe. The biggest risk with smoke taint is that it seems to be only really detectable post-fermentation, or even sometimes after aging. So one of the real issues for winemakers is that in the vineyard or at the sorting table, in the same way that you could detect rot or mildew, you can’t necessarily detect smoke taint. And it’s not like washing the grapes seems to do a lot. It’s that the skins, themselves, take up these compounds and lock them in, and then they are released through fermentation and sometimes in the aging process. And so the problem is basically that you can have wine that seems fine through fermentation and then a few months into the aging process, you go in and you smell it or you taste it and you go, “Oh s***, my wine is ruined, it’s tainted.” And that is the big risk here. You’re going to have a lot of different approaches from wineries and winemakers. Some of them may be very cautious and may decide to do very little winemaking this year, or they’re going to make nothing but white and rosé or they’re going to make really limited macerations, or they’re going to do whatever they can to try and avoid smoke tainted wines. Others might say f*** it, we’re going for it and if we detect smoke taint, then s***, we have got to do something with that wine. And maybe the answer is blended in and blended away in small quantities. There seems to be a school of thought in winemaking that a very small amount of smoke tainted juice can be non-detectable or even can add a desirable smoky note as opposed to the classic ashtray note of a truly smoke-tainted wine — which I’ve had the chance to try being on the West Coast. I’ve had winemakers sometimes with previous vintages that were smoke tainted tell me to try it and see what smoke taint is, and you’re like, “Oh s***, this is disgusting.” And the honest truth is that at this point, from what I know, we don’t have good testing for this pre-fermentation. It’s going to be a crapshoot, which is the s****y part of this, and I don’t have a better way to explain it than that.

E: I’ve seen some very varying opinions on how long the exposure period is, as well. Some people in the past have said it takes several days of prolonged heavy smoke exposure to really damage the grapes and have those phenols stick to the grape in a way that can’t come off. But then I’ve seen others saying that even a day or two of that type of heavy smoke exposure can really ruin the grapes. And, of course, as you said, it’s going to be less with white wine, or we may even see more rosé wines being made this year as a way to try to salvage some of those red wine grapes. Because you’re just not going to be able to leave the juice on the grapes to develop the red wine characteristics that you need over a long period of time with that smoke effect there. So I think what we’ll see is a change in how people are going to operate this year. Looking at all of California, you see reports of grape producers already saying that they’re not going to take their crops or that they’re not going to make wine this year in Sonoma, in Napa, in Paso Robles, in the Central Coast, all throughout the state. I’ve seen a lot of conversation happening about who is or isn’t going to make wine and which grapes were able to come in before the fires really got going. I think that’s what’s at play here, it’s really the entire harvest. If the grapes were not already picked before the smoke got heavy, it could be ruinous for some producers.

A: It’s just nuts. It really is crazy because it’s just sh****ness upon sh****ness, and there’s nothing that you can do. And that’s what I’m worried about, because there have been so many of these fires in recent years. Has there been anything that the wine industry has done? And maybe we don’t know the answer to that question. And if you’re a podcast listener and you do, let us know at podcast@vinepair.com. But has there been anything that has been done to try to mitigate that risk? Do the wineries have smoke taint insurance now? Are there other things that they can do that really will help them if they lose a huge majority of their crop?

E: I know that there is some insurance, there’s some agricultural insurance that could come into play. But it’s probably, like all insurance, there’s so many hoops to jump through to try to be able to take advantage of it. So I’m not sure if there’s kind of a hard- and-fast rule about what would and would not qualify.

A: Interesting. So you just make a lot of brandy with it or something? Does it just turn into a bunch of gin all of a sudden? Some of these wines could you just distill? Is that what you’re stuck with?

Z: Turn it into hand sanitizer?

A: Yeah, exactly. Speaking of hand sanitizer, the Champagne producers who said, “We will not release the wine on the market if it is cheaper, it will be hand sanitizer.” I wonder if that’s what you’re going to see. A lot of high-quality California wine sanitizer.

Z: Well, you also have this other problem that’s going on that we kind of touched on. In wine and in hops there were already labor issues thanks to Covid. And the other thing to think about is that vineyard work in a lot of these places is not necessarily all that safe. Fortunately, Seattle didn’t have it nearly as bad as some other parts of the West Coast, but the last couple of days here, especially Tuesday, it was not safe to be outside for prolonged periods of time. Certainly not doing something as physically demanding as harvesting grapes. And that is another piece of this. As you mentioned earlier on, Adam, we were already talking about potentially a smaller crop and questions about what would happen to grapes that were on the vine that maybe there wasn’t the labor to pick. And you’re going to potentially add to that. We’re kind of at the early stages of harvest for a lot of areas on the West Coast, but it’s getting there. Early to mid-September is certainly the beginning of the harvest season for a lot of places, and we’ll be in full swing quite soon, and many of these fires are far from contained, and there can always be new fires and things like that. One possibility is there’s a lot of unharvested grapes this year. The birds have a great year. And that may just be one of the answers. In the end, it’s not worth it from a variety of levels, economically, health-wise, etc., to pick a lot of grapes. It’s kind of sad on the one hand, think of the wine that could have been if it wasn’t smoke-tainted. On the other hand, maybe the best answer is just to basically say 2020 sucks for everyone. We’re just going to move on.

A: Except for the birds.

E: One angle that we have been reporting on is how local tourism has been a lifeline for a lot of wineries and breweries and distilleries who’ve been able to do curbside and outdoor tastings, and this is adding insult to injury. Now, not only can you not sell your wines on-premise or pick the grapes, but also you have the small, diminished lifeline that you did have of serving people at your tasting room. That. too, is gone. So, we have the plague, we have the fire, and the locusts are coming next. That’s for sure.

A: Totally.

Z: As long as there’s no smiting of the firstborn because that would be bad for me.

A: It’s just nuts. And, Zach, just really quickly before we wrap this one up for today, because last week was so long. We talked a little about the grapes but I know we mentioned hops earlier. How is the smoke impacting hops? How are the fires impacting hops?

Z: That’s a good question, and I’ll give what I know to this point. I will say right upfront, I don’t have an answer yet. I’ve been trying to find one. I don’t know that anyone knows. I don’t think there’s as much concern about smoke taint on hops. Basically what happens with grapes is the smoke compounds bind to sugars in the grapes and that’s how they’re locked into the grape itself, and then that’s why it’s released during fermentation and later on, during the maturation process. Since hops are not picked for their sugar, they’re not the fermentable substance in beer — that’s barley and other malted grains — there isn’t the same risk. There could be some flavor impacts, but the hop growers I spoke to are not concerned about the hops, themselves, being damaged. The issue is really twofold. One is, again, the same as with wine, an issue of labor and whether it’s safe to pick. Hop harvesting, like wine harvesting, is a mix of mechanization and hand labor, and obviously, if the air is unsafe to be out in, then things don’t get picked. And for those of you who don’t know, around 98 percent of the hops in this country are grown in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho in the broader Columbia Valley footprint. And this is right where many of these fires are, so there’s that risk. And then there’s also the honest risk of many of these hop fields, as opposed to vineyards, are more closely situated to some of these fires. And because of where they’re positioned — more in the valley floors than on hills — they are, I think, at more risk of burning. I haven’t heard yet about any of that, but according to a couple of growers I was talking to actually for an article that I’m working on for VinePair — which hopefully will come out, although I’m in the process of having to rewrite it because these fires are changing the story — there are definitely some concerns about an actual loss of crop due to the fire. To say nothing of people’s homes and businesses and things like that and also, of course, possibly lives. So that’s very much a TBD. But, yes, there’s also a real risk to the hop harvest in the U.S. this go-round. Again, what that means, no one knows yet, but we’ll follow up for sure. But it’s not just wine that’s potentially being impacted here.

A: If you are listening, please reach out to wineries that you love, breweries that you love. Support them, buy their products, because everyone’s going to need a lot of help to get through this. These fires are absolutely nuts, and we should be paying attention to them more if you are not already.

Z: And learn to love white and rosé, because that might be all you’re getting domestically.

A: This has been an interesting podcast. Please, if you have any thoughts, reach out to us at podcast@vinepair.com. We’d love to hear your views, other topics you’d like us to discuss in future episodes. And as always, thanks for listening. Erica, Zach, I’ll see you next week.

E: See you then.

Z: Sounds great.

A: Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair Podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week, please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now, for the credits. VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe, Erica Duecy and me, Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also like to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder Josh Malin and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again right here next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

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VinePair Podcast: West Coast Wildfires Demand Our Attention

The 2020 wildfire season has already had devastating effects up and down the West Coast, with lives lost, homes destroyed, and horrific air quality choking tens of millions of people. Beyond those immediate dangers are several other types of concerns — such as how the fires will affect American wine production. There are worries that lingering smoke might irrevocably taint wine grapes that are almost ready to be picked, or that such toxic air might make harvesting those grapes unsafe. Fear that hop fields in Washington and Oregon — which produce 98 percent of the nation’s hops — could burn. Dread that industries and companies already grievously harmed by the crippling effects of Covid-19 will not be able to survive the massive losses these fires could produce.

The question remains: Is the rest of the country (and the world) paying attention? Will images of neon orange skies and vast clouds of smoke resonate outside affected areas? What can we all do to address this crisis, both in the short and long term? That’s what Adam Teeter, Erica Duecy, and Zach Geballe discuss on this week’s VinePair podcast.

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Adam: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter.

Erica: From Jersey City, I’m Erica Duecy.

Zach: And in Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

A: And this is the VinePair podcast. And Jersey City?

E: Yeah, we are back in Jersey City.

A: Wow.

E: I have to say, it is quite shocking. I traded the view out my window in Connecticut, which was of a pond and a field and a mature grove of trees, and right now I am looking down a block in Jersey City where all but one of the stores is shuttered. The only one that’s open is a liquor store at the end of the block and homeless encampments right in front of me — worse than I’ve seen since I’ve lived in Jersey City.

A: And you’ve been in Jersey for how many years?

E: For 12 years.

A: Wow. It’s crazy, right? You come back and this is what’s happening.

E: It’s a shock to the system. It really is.

A: Do you have any restaurants on your block, any bars?

E: Yes, there is one across the street — there was one I should say, but now it’s permanently closed.

A: Wow. Just crazy. But anyway, welcome back to the tri-state area.

E: Thank you.

Z: Wait, isn’t Connecticut part of the tri-state area?

E: Is it?

A: Yeah, it is.

Z: I thought it was New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

A: Yeah, it is, never mind. So welcome back to the metro area.

E: Thank you.

A: Welcome back.

Z: If you see your pond out your window, that will be just the latest natural disaster.

E: I’m just waiting for the streets to open up. So that’s next.

A: Big news in New York is that they’ve finally decided that they’re going to allow 25 percent indoor dining, as of Sept. 30, which is pretty crazy. I still don’t know. I know we’ve talked about this before, but I don’t think I’m going to go dine indoors.

E: I’m not. I’ve decided that I am not comfortable dining indoors until the pandemic is curbed. Until it’s either pretty much eradicated or there’s a vaccine, I’m just not comfortable. I just don’t think it’s worth the risk.

A: Yeah. I don’t think so either. Zach?

Z: Zero chance. As we’ve talked about a number of times on this podcast, it’s been very weird to live six months of my life without restaurants, but I can live another six months, a year, two years. I don’t want to get Covid. So no, not going to a restaurant.

A: The sidewalk cafes, at least out here in Brooklyn, are more crowded than ever. People are definitely trying to have some sort of normalcy. My wife was saying earlier this week, and I agree with her, she said she misses quarantine. And I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “I miss when we knew what the rules were.” When we were all staying inside, we were socially distancing, and maybe we saw the one random person that we felt really comfortable seeing. She said, “I crushed quarantine.” We were cooking. And now this middle ground is so weird because, what is acceptable? What isn’t acceptable? Do you go back to the office? Do you not go back to the office? You have so many offices they’re reopening. Do you go out to eat? Do you not? If you go out to eat, where do you go out to eat? Where do you sit when you go out to eat? How do you treat people? We should say either everything is shut down, or everything’s open. And I’m sure that that’s very hard for any owners, as well, of restaurants. I know it’s hard for us as a business. When do we open the VinePair office, which still isn’t open? Just thinking about do you open, or do you not? How do you open? What does that look like? It’s crazy. And there’s no guidance at all.

E: It’s totally inconsistent. My kids are doing remote school and I had to chase down a Chromebook. I went into the city yesterday and went into an electronics store where it was masks optional. I said, are you kidding me?

A: Are you serious?

E: I am serious. In Chelsea, I went into a large chain electronics store and it was masks optional. People had no masks on and I beat a path out of the store so quickly. Then I came back over to the same large chain store a little bit farther out in Jersey and it was masks required. It’s inconsistent. Completely inconsistent.

A: That’s one of the reasons that the percentage law got overturned in New York City because, for those not familiar, there’s this one area of Queens where the line is very blurred between where Queen stops and where Long Island begins. And there was this restaurant in Queens that was like, “Look, literally 200 feet from our door is one of our competitors who happens to be on Long Island and they are open with 50 percent capacity indoors. Please explain why it’s not safe 200 feet away here, but it’s safe enough there.” And then they sued the state. And I think that was one of the things Cuomo responded to, and one of the reasons he gave 25 percent, because it is, across the board, inconsistent. And that’s what just makes this so nuts. Some states are saying it’s completely fine to be at 75 percent capacity. Some states are saying it’s not fine to be eating at all, indoors or outdoors. It’s crazy, I think it’s what is making us all a little nutty.

Z: Well, that’s one of the advantages of being in a city where we are not very close to any other state line. For Erica, going from New Jersey to New York is a very, very simple trip, and you can come across different laws and different practices. Whereas in Washington State, there’s a statewide mask mandate. I’m not concerned that the store I go into is going to have a different policy or different rules because they’re in a different jurisdiction. But I totally agree that one of the major issues that we’re all dealing with is there aren’t a lot of well-articulated guidelines. And I’m not going to turn this into a huge rant. But one of the big problems is that many of us crushed lockdown, and nothing really happened. That’s the part of this that’s really hard. If we had gone three months of lockdown and then emerged, like a lot of Europe did, we would’ve been able to go back to some semblance of normal life. Not that any of us would’ve said, “Oh, man, Covid was great.” It was obviously horrible on so many levels, but at least we would have felt like that time that was, for a lot of us, very difficult and very traumatic in a lot of different ways, was put to use. Instead, we’re still in this pandemic, where things aren’t all that much better. We still don’t have any f***ing clue what’s going to happen. And we’re about to get to the time of year where going outside, for most of us, is going to be not very pleasant. We’re not going to be able to hide out outside and sort of ignore it. We’re gonna be stuck indoors, or forced into shared public spaces. And that part is the part that’s going to suck, because it’s not going to be as clear-cut as it was in March, April, and May about what we need to do. But we’re still going to have to deal with the fact that, if we’re doing things in public, they’re going to be indoors for most of us.

A: I guess we’ll get through it. We’re all trying. And drinking a lot. Anyways, let’s get into this week’s topic, which is one that we all felt is very important and worth discussing, which is the awful fires that are ravaging the West Coast of the United States. And it’s interesting, when we were all talking about the subject for today’s podcast, I was slacking with both of you and I shared with you this interesting thought that I read in The New York Times this morning, which was basically that the fires aren’t getting enough attention. And one of the biggest reasons that this writer was saying that they don’t think that they are is because, for a lot of people who probably listen to the podcast, this is one of the main things you’re thinking about if you live on that side of the country. But because the media is based on the East Coast, they’re just not covering it as much as they would if these fires were happening on the East Coast of the country. Which I think is worth considering, because these are fires that are really damaging whole swaths of land in California, Washington, and Oregon, and really affecting people’s livelihoods in a very fundamental way. And then on top of that, there’s a pandemic. It’s just really terrible. So I think we want to use this podcast to draw attention to what’s happening on the West Coast and talk a little bit about how they’re really going to impact the people who are going through it, but also truly let you know if you’re a listener and you aren’t truly aware of what’s happening, to please be aware of what’s happening and think about supporting the wineries, breweries, etc. that are going to be really suffering because of these fires. Zach, you’re over there, so let’s start with you. What’s it like to be living in Seattle? Does the reporting feel more constant for you than it does for us? What are you hearing from people that you know on the west side of the country in terms of what they’re dealing with?

Z: I think there are multiple parts to the answer. Unsurprising, I suppose. The first thing I would say is that one thing that’s challenging for people on the East Coast to understand if you haven’t spent a lot of time on the West Coast, is how big the states are out here and how big the fires are. You can look up some of the details on the fires, in particular, in California and the amount of land that’s burned and the scope of them. But it’s the size of states, obviously not the size of California, but it’s the size of other states. But at the same time, much of this land is very remote. Even in California, certainly in Oregon, and some of the cases in Washington with the fires, there are not big population centers. And I think that generally one of the reasons why these big fires over there — not just this year but in previous years, too — don’t draw media attention, is it happens far away from New York City. But also, when you have hurricanes or earthquakes, often where that footage and that coverage is coming from our cities. Big population centers that are damaged. And to this point, so far, while all these big population centers on the West Coast are being impacted with smoke and ash and things like that, the fires, themselves, have not necessarily threatened these cities. But at the same time, they are massive. And big fires are fundamentally different from earthquakes or hurricanes because we don’t really know when they’re going to end. An earthquake happens, and obviously there’s tremendous damage, and it could start fires and things like that. But the earthquake, itself, is a few minutes and then there are certainly aftershocks. And with hurricanes, we have really sophisticated modeling technology, we have a pretty good idea for where a hurricane’s going to go, when it’s going to arrive, when it’s going to pass. And there’s a ton of work and a ton of damage, but it’s mostly in the cleanup. With fires, they’re so unpredictable, they’re so dependent on winds that can shift suddenly and on conditions on the ground that are very hard to understand. And so there’s a part of this that is just very difficult to forecast and that creates a lot of uncertainty. It also creates a lot of danger. The thing I would say to this point is that what I’ve seen and heard from friends up and down the coast is that the scary thing for a lot of people is this that is earlier than fire season is supposed to happen, especially in California. And so on the one hand, land that burns and woods that burn aren’t going to burn again in a month, but there’s certainly all the still-existing potential for the typical fire season for much of California and Oregon, and to some extent Washington, which is now through October. So the fact that we already have these massive fires formed in August is scary. We’ll talk later about the impact on wine and beer, but there are real concerns about what this means even without all the added challenges that this year was going to have thanks to Covid.

A: That’s interesting. I actually didn’t realize that it was earlier, to be honest. Again, that’s because we don’t deal with it on this side of the country as often. I really had no clue. That’s crazy.

E: I think probably the best way to visualize it, and I was looking at the fire maps today, is there’s a site that’s fire.ca.gov and that is a government website that tracks fires — not just in California, but you can also see the ones in Oregon and Washington on that map. And if you look at it today, Thursday, Sept. 10, you can see that the fires are stretching all the way from the Mexico border all the way up to Canada. It’s pretty shocking and upsetting to see how many fires are happening and we’re only in the first week of September. I think just in California alone there’s 28 major wildfires and 14,000 firefighters who are currently working overtime on these things. And then I couldn’t believe the photos that came out in San Francisco and parts of Oregon where literally yesterday was the day that the sun did not rise. It was shocking to see those otherworldly orange-yellow glow images of just hundreds and thousands of acres being just totally decimated. It was pretty shocking to see the imagery.

A: It’s really nuts. I was talking to someone in Napa last week who said they came out of their house in the morning, and their car was covered in ash. Even if you’re not in the path of the fire, the fire is impacting you — and especially impacting you if you are a grower. One of the biggest things that we’re hearing a lot about now is how the fires are going to impact harvest, for hops as well as for grapes. A lot of people were saying early on that this was going to be a major year for grapes, especially in California. That there was going to be so much supply, but because of Covid maybe less demand, so we’re going to see a ton of that wine on the market across the country. People were joking, saying, “You’re probably going to find Napa Cabernet in Texas Hill Country wine,” whatever the legal limit of that was, because there was just going to be so much. And now, everyone’s talking instead about smoke taint. And so I’m not as familiar with smoke taint in terms of scientifically how it works. And I was hoping one of you was to talk us through. I understand smoke taint is that the grapes get tainted with smoke and then they taste like smoke. But I’m not sure how that works, and why it can’t be reversed.

E: Zach, you probably have a better handle on it than I do.

Z: I’m going to give my best explanation as to what exactly happens here, and try to explain what smoke taint is — and why it’s something to both be concerned about, and also not super concerned about. The one thing is there’s still not a lot of great understanding, scientifically. What conditions lead to smoke taint in a finished wine are not super-well understood. Over the last few years, there’s been more emphasis in academic and research settings to try and understand this at an academic level, and I think some of the big wine companies are probably doing some research, too. Australia is really the place where a lot of the research has been done because wildfires have been a bigger issue for them than in the U.S. in the past. One thing to note is that smoke taint is really only a risk with red wine, because the smoke taint affects the skins of the grapes. It adheres to the skins of the grapes, and so you’re only going to really extract the compounds that we think of as smoke taint when you’re doing maceration of some length, which is what you do for red wine, but not for white or rosé. White wine and rosé should largely be safe. The biggest risk with smoke taint is that it seems to be only really detectable post-fermentation, or even sometimes after aging. So one of the real issues for winemakers is that in the vineyard or at the sorting table, in the same way that you could detect rot or mildew, you can’t necessarily detect smoke taint. And it’s not like washing the grapes seems to do a lot. It’s that the skins, themselves, take up these compounds and lock them in, and then they are released through fermentation and sometimes in the aging process. And so the problem is basically that you can have wine that seems fine through fermentation and then a few months into the aging process, you go in and you smell it or you taste it and you go, “Oh s***, my wine is ruined, it’s tainted.” And that is the big risk here. You’re going to have a lot of different approaches from wineries and winemakers. Some of them may be very cautious and may decide to do very little winemaking this year, or they’re going to make nothing but white and rosé or they’re going to make really limited macerations, or they’re going to do whatever they can to try and avoid smoke tainted wines. Others might say f*** it, we’re going for it and if we detect smoke taint, then s***, we have got to do something with that wine. And maybe the answer is blended in and blended away in small quantities. There seems to be a school of thought in winemaking that a very small amount of smoke tainted juice can be non-detectable or even can add a desirable smoky note as opposed to the classic ashtray note of a truly smoke-tainted wine — which I’ve had the chance to try being on the West Coast. I’ve had winemakers sometimes with previous vintages that were smoke tainted tell me to try it and see what smoke taint is, and you’re like, “Oh s***, this is disgusting.” And the honest truth is that at this point, from what I know, we don’t have good testing for this pre-fermentation. It’s going to be a crapshoot, which is the s****y part of this, and I don’t have a better way to explain it than that.

E: I’ve seen some very varying opinions on how long the exposure period is, as well. Some people in the past have said it takes several days of prolonged heavy smoke exposure to really damage the grapes and have those phenols stick to the grape in a way that can’t come off. But then I’ve seen others saying that even a day or two of that type of heavy smoke exposure can really ruin the grapes. And, of course, as you said, it’s going to be less with white wine, or we may even see more rosé wines being made this year as a way to try to salvage some of those red wine grapes. Because you’re just not going to be able to leave the juice on the grapes to develop the red wine characteristics that you need over a long period of time with that smoke effect there. So I think what we’ll see is a change in how people are going to operate this year. Looking at all of California, you see reports of grape producers already saying that they’re not going to take their crops or that they’re not going to make wine this year in Sonoma, in Napa, in Paso Robles, in the Central Coast, all throughout the state. I’ve seen a lot of conversation happening about who is or isn’t going to make wine and which grapes were able to come in before the fires really got going. I think that’s what’s at play here, it’s really the entire harvest. If the grapes were not already picked before the smoke got heavy, it could be ruinous for some producers.

A: It’s just nuts. It really is crazy because it’s just sh****ness upon sh****ness, and there’s nothing that you can do. And that’s what I’m worried about, because there have been so many of these fires in recent years. Has there been anything that the wine industry has done? And maybe we don’t know the answer to that question. And if you’re a podcast listener and you do, let us know at podcast@vinepair.com. But has there been anything that has been done to try to mitigate that risk? Do the wineries have smoke taint insurance now? Are there other things that they can do that really will help them if they lose a huge majority of their crop?

E: I know that there is some insurance, there’s some agricultural insurance that could come into play. But it’s probably, like all insurance, there’s so many hoops to jump through to try to be able to take advantage of it. So I’m not sure if there’s kind of a hard- and-fast rule about what would and would not qualify.

A: Interesting. So you just make a lot of brandy with it or something? Does it just turn into a bunch of gin all of a sudden? Some of these wines could you just distill? Is that what you’re stuck with?

Z: Turn it into hand sanitizer?

A: Yeah, exactly. Speaking of hand sanitizer, the Champagne producers who said, “We will not release the wine on the market if it is cheaper, it will be hand sanitizer.” I wonder if that’s what you’re going to see. A lot of high-quality California wine sanitizer.

Z: Well, you also have this other problem that’s going on that we kind of touched on. In wine and in hops there were already labor issues thanks to Covid. And the other thing to think about is that vineyard work in a lot of these places is not necessarily all that safe. Fortunately, Seattle didn’t have it nearly as bad as some other parts of the West Coast, but the last couple of days here, especially Tuesday, it was not safe to be outside for prolonged periods of time. Certainly not doing something as physically demanding as harvesting grapes. And that is another piece of this. As you mentioned earlier on, Adam, we were already talking about potentially a smaller crop and questions about what would happen to grapes that were on the vine that maybe there wasn’t the labor to pick. And you’re going to potentially add to that. We’re kind of at the early stages of harvest for a lot of areas on the West Coast, but it’s getting there. Early to mid-September is certainly the beginning of the harvest season for a lot of places, and we’ll be in full swing quite soon, and many of these fires are far from contained, and there can always be new fires and things like that. One possibility is there’s a lot of unharvested grapes this year. The birds have a great year. And that may just be one of the answers. In the end, it’s not worth it from a variety of levels, economically, health-wise, etc., to pick a lot of grapes. It’s kind of sad on the one hand, think of the wine that could have been if it wasn’t smoke-tainted. On the other hand, maybe the best answer is just to basically say 2020 sucks for everyone. We’re just going to move on.

A: Except for the birds.

E: One angle that we have been reporting on is how local tourism has been a lifeline for a lot of wineries and breweries and distilleries who’ve been able to do curbside and outdoor tastings, and this is adding insult to injury. Now, not only can you not sell your wines on-premise or pick the grapes, but also you have the small, diminished lifeline that you did have of serving people at your tasting room. That. too, is gone. So, we have the plague, we have the fire, and the locusts are coming next. That’s for sure.

A: Totally.

Z: As long as there’s no smiting of the firstborn because that would be bad for me.

A: It’s just nuts. And, Zach, just really quickly before we wrap this one up for today, because last week was so long. We talked a little about the grapes but I know we mentioned hops earlier. How is the smoke impacting hops? How are the fires impacting hops?

Z: That’s a good question, and I’ll give what I know to this point. I will say right upfront, I don’t have an answer yet. I’ve been trying to find one. I don’t know that anyone knows. I don’t think there’s as much concern about smoke taint on hops. Basically what happens with grapes is the smoke compounds bind to sugars in the grapes and that’s how they’re locked into the grape itself, and then that’s why it’s released during fermentation and later on, during the maturation process. Since hops are not picked for their sugar, they’re not the fermentable substance in beer — that’s barley and other malted grains — there isn’t the same risk. There could be some flavor impacts, but the hop growers I spoke to are not concerned about the hops, themselves, being damaged. The issue is really twofold. One is, again, the same as with wine, an issue of labor and whether it’s safe to pick. Hop harvesting, like wine harvesting, is a mix of mechanization and hand labor, and obviously, if the air is unsafe to be out in, then things don’t get picked. And for those of you who don’t know, around 98 percent of the hops in this country are grown in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho in the broader Columbia Valley footprint. And this is right where many of these fires are, so there’s that risk. And then there’s also the honest risk of many of these hop fields, as opposed to vineyards, are more closely situated to some of these fires. And because of where they’re positioned — more in the valley floors than on hills — they are, I think, at more risk of burning. I haven’t heard yet about any of that, but according to a couple of growers I was talking to actually for an article that I’m working on for VinePair — which hopefully will come out, although I’m in the process of having to rewrite it because these fires are changing the story — there are definitely some concerns about an actual loss of crop due to the fire. To say nothing of people’s homes and businesses and things like that and also, of course, possibly lives. So that’s very much a TBD. But, yes, there’s also a real risk to the hop harvest in the U.S. this go-round. Again, what that means, no one knows yet, but we’ll follow up for sure. But it’s not just wine that’s potentially being impacted here.

A: If you are listening, please reach out to wineries that you love, breweries that you love. Support them, buy their products, because everyone’s going to need a lot of help to get through this. These fires are absolutely nuts, and we should be paying attention to them more if you are not already.

Z: And learn to love white and rosé, because that might be all you’re getting domestically.

A: This has been an interesting podcast. Please, if you have any thoughts, reach out to us at podcast@vinepair.com. We’d love to hear your views, other topics you’d like us to discuss in future episodes. And as always, thanks for listening. Erica, Zach, I’ll see you next week.

E: See you then.

Z: Sounds great.

A: Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair Podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week, please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now, for the credits. VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe, Erica Duecy and me, Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also like to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder Josh Malin and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again right here next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article VinePair Podcast: West Coast Wildfires Demand Our Attention appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/west-coast-wildfires-demand-our-attention/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/629343204866736128

[junker-town]

Odell Beckham Jr’s beef with Josh Norman was a hard-hitting, media-fueled drama

It was incredible while it lasted, and those covering it made sure the beef lasted a long time

The first time Odell Beckham, Jr. and Josh Norman met, they gave us plenty of reasons to remember it. From there, the media would never let us - or them - forget it.

Beckham and Norman faced off for the first time late in the 2015 season. The Panthers were undefeated, the six-win Giants were still very much in the NFC East conversation, and yet the receiver-corner duo took top billing. Beckham was putting together a very good second season, which was really just the continuation of an incredible rookie year. Meanwhile, Norman had established himself as one of the league’s top shutdown corners - and one of the top trash talkers.

It quickly looked like everyone was right about the must-see matchup.

On just the fourth snap of the game, Odell blew past Norman. With the ball in the air, less than 90 seconds off the clock, he was steps away from proving that no one in the league could cover him...and he dropped it. Norman barked at the receiver, Beckham responded as he headed to the line, and they moved on to the next play. Odell engaged Norman, then ended up on the ground. And with that, things went zero-to-beefy in a split second.

Corbis via Getty Images

When I dip, you dip, we dip.

Beckham caught Norman with his eyes in the backfield on the Giants next possession, sending both to the turf. They’d find each other again. And again. And again.

The refs finally decided to do something, and flagged Beckham for this helmet-to-helmet hit. Norman stopped shadowing Odell for the rest of the first half, so it seemed the fireworks were over. Whether this made Beckham bored or his frustrations of being catchless through the first half were growing, he found a new friend in Cortland Finnegan - who also isn’t a stranger to beef, his just had a much shorter shelf life thanks to the hands of Andre Johnson.

Beckham got his first two catches late in the 3rd. He converted a 4th down on the second one, then picked up a personal foul. After this, even Aikman and Buck had cooled to the display. So naturally, on the very next play, Beckham sprinted from 15-yards away and left his feet to catch Norman in the facemask with the crown of his helmet. A scrum ensued, both players got personal fouls, and no one was going to be able to chalk this up as just another game.

At this point, it felt like this kind of just popped off. But knowing who each guy was before today paints a bigger picture.

This was all before any Miami yacht trips, or fighting-then-making-up with kicking nets, or anything the media would consider a tantrum. Odell Beckham was only 25 games into his career and already a poster boy for the NFL. He became a household name in just his 7th game when he made one of the greatest catches in NFL history against the Cowboys - a catch so good that it earned him a spot in Canton and earned Nike an estimated 2.1 million dollars just because he was wearing their gloves. He was the youngest player to be on the cover of Madden, and while none of that was guaranteed being drafted in the first round out of a major program to a team in New York raised the expectations just a little bit.

And to someone looking in from the outside, it could’ve felt like the success was laid out for him on a platter thanks to playing in a major market for a team not that far removed from winning a Super Bowl.

As for Josh Norman, nothing had come easy. He had to fight to stay on the Panthers roster. He had to fight to get a starting job. He even fought Cam Newton in training camp. So once he found the spotlight in 2015, he wasn’t going to give it up. He’d prove to be one of the league’s best shutdown corners, keeping top receivers in check on a routine basis, and playing so well that he nicknamed himself “Batman.”

Norman knew the work he put in to go from 4th round pick to a piece that offenses were planning around, but it would make sense he still felt some need to keep proving himself against the first round talents opposite him. His play hadn’t gone unnoticed by Beckham who even sounded eager to face him, despite not necessarily agreeing with the new monicker.

But then there was a proper beefception.

Norman reimagined “Batman” by bringing an actual baseball bat onto the field before the game. Charles Tillman said it came about from a story told by one of their coaches about needing to protect what was theirs, but another member of the Panthers took it a step further.

He approached Beckham, who reportedly offered a handshake that the unidentified batsman declined, then allegedly told Beckham, “I’ll be the reason this will be your last game.” which first off - not a cool move, and second, justified Beckham not being thrilled to face the Carolina defense, no matter who lined up across from him. I’m not saying that excuses him for spearing Norman in the head multiple times, but it helps clear up how we got to this point.

AP

They’re just both checking on their friends down there.

Norman would respond two plays later and pick up his second personal foul. Beckham scored the tying touchdown on a trailing Norman, then treated him like Tyronn Lue. Carolina won with a last second field goal. Lost in the shuffle was an incredible Giants comeback, but afterwards no one but the teams cared about the score.

Speaking to the media, Norman let everyone know that today they saw the real Odell. As for Beckham, he did his best to just dodge the topic. What he couldn’t dodge was a one-game suspension from the league. Norman received a fine, but kept on playing and made it to the Super Bowl where the Broncos defense bailed out Peyton Manning.

That March the Panthers gave Norman the franchise tag, and in April they rescinded it - so he conveniently joined New York’s division rival in Washington. And the media appreciated that so very much.

The reason that he’s become so relevant is because of me.

Not to say there wasn’t some level of animosity between them, but everyone else was far thirstier to keep this going than the actual players themselves. Beckham was asked about the Norman signing during a presser. First Take rolled into Washington’s training camp so Max Kellerman could further hound Norman. On Boomer and Carton, Odell was asked about their rivalry, but he brought up the fact they were trying to move past it and had tried to meet up that offseason to talk it out.

Even when one of them actually spoke about the other, context was cast aside. Beckham gave an interview to GQ and ended a quote saying, “The reason [Norman’s] relevant is because of me.” Norman was asked about this, and replied, “He’s relevant because of a catch, but we’re not gonna go there. I’m not into the war of words.” An attempted back-and-forth ensued, but Norman quickly tried to move on from the he-said-he-said.

He did an interview with ESPN the Magazine and cleanly laid out his feelings: “[Odell’s] skilled and talented. I won’t take that away from him. But he’s never been through any adversity in his life.”

All of that stemmed from Beckham’s full quote to GQ, which had a preface of “If I wasn’t playing him twice a year, maybe people wouldn’t bring it up so much, but now it’ll be a lot more media attention for him, attention that I don’t really look for, attention that I don’t need. The reason that he’s become so relevant is because of me.”

Yes, the end reads as egotistical, but his actual point had been largely left out.

While they let their first matchup get out of hand, neither of them had wanted this to become a thing. Norman joined the team offering 5-million per year more than Carolina. The reason they paid him so much was they needed a corner who could help cover someone of Beckham’s talent twice a year.

Really there were two beefs at play. The first was simply from things escalating once on the field between two of the best players at their positions who viewed the other as a challenge. The other was a beef that everyone else wanted to see play out and lead to more fireworks, which was fully recognized by the players, but at this point the narrative would continue no matter what they said.

Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

The players catch up on field to discuss future commercial opportunities

By the time their first rematch rolled around, both players were simply looking past all that, and towards the competition. They met after the game and shook hands, while all future battles were put under a microscope that they did their best to dodge. Norman got flagged for a couple personal fouls against Beckham in the 2016 season finale, including one that some claimed was a punch while he tried to knock the ball out, but Odell didn’t care to address it afterwards.

Beckham missed both games against Washington in 2017 which helped cool things in the media. Norman even lobbied for Beckham to stay with the Giants amid trade rumors, recognizing that the headache caused by the media was worth it to keep going against one of the best.

It may have ended before many wanted to admit, but Odell Beckham and Josh Norman’s beef was exciting, if not complex, for the short time it was real.

[broadwayandshakespeare]

Sunday in New York!

Our alarm went off around 7am, and we reluctantly dragged ourselves out of our beds. We got dressed, packed up, and went downstairs to check out. We were at a diner down the street by 8am, we ate some good food, and then we set out on our second day in NYC.

As we were headed to our first destination we passed the Penguin Random House building, and yes, I fangirled. The lobby was so cute! Books lined the walls in bookcases, illuminated by light, and a small sitting area in front of a large reception desk. Off to the side were the elevators. Oh how I wish I could work in that building (or, at least for that company). Anyways, our first real destination was the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Julliard. I wish I could’ve gone to the ballet, or to see the New York Philharmonic, or an opera, but alas, when you’re only in New York City for 36 hours, there’s only so much you can do.

After that, we walked up 8th Ave along Central Park until we reached the Museum of Natural History. We were looking for Ben Stiller, or a live T-Rex, or a miniature Owen Wilson, but unfortunately we didn’t find them. We got there around 9:45, so the museum hadn’t even opened yet. There were people waiting to get inside. We decided to continue on our journey.

We walked across Central Park and found the Great Lawn, and had an amazing view of the New York City skyline to the south. They put up fences around the lawn because it was newly seeded and they obviously want the grass to grow, but I just wanted to run across the field. I just wanted to be Amy Adams singing and running with my arms spread wide like I didn’t have a care in the world. I guess the park people had a different idea.

We walked to the Guggenheim Museum, and as much as I wanted to go in, the line to get in there was insane. As was the line to get into the MET (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). That line was basically the length of the entire block, so that was a hard pass for Peyton and I. The wind was also really brutal out on the streets, so we walked back into the park and walked south. We found the famous boathouse restaurant, the Bethesda fountain and terrace, and then the Mall and Literary Walk

down the middle of Central Park. Seeing all those places was really cool. We also found the iconic bridge with a perfect view of the famous Plaza Hotel. We didn’t go inside, but I can see why people are so obsessed with June weddings at the Plaza.

By this point, me feet feel like they’re going to fall off, but I know Peyton and I want to see so many things before we leave, so we axed the idea of walking everywhere and hopped on the subway down to the 9/11 Memorial. We saw the new World Trade Center, and then we arrived at Ground Zero. It was a chilling experience. I was disgusted with the amount of disrespectful tourists I saw. “Let’s selfie and smile and pretend like thousands of lives weren’t lost on this very site.” Assholes (oh… sorry, did I say that out loud?)

As Peyton and I wandered further south, we walked back over to Broadway and found ourselves at Trinity Church. We walked inside, and damn, it was beautiful. It smelled old and smelled of incense and I loved it. There’s also a plaque on the ground where Queen Elizabeth II stood when she visited New York and Trinity Church in 1976. We realized after we returned home that Alexander Hamilton is buried in the cemetery at Trinity Church, as are two of the Schuyler sisters (just more to tie into the show we saw the previous day).

We ran into the Charging Bull statue as we walked further down Broadway, and then we made it to Battery Park at the very tip of the island. When Peyton and I first thought about doing this trip in April, we never thought we’d be able to do all the stuff uptown, midtown, and downtown, but somehow we did it. We could see the Statue of Liberty from the park, but we decided against the ferry out to see it up close (they cost too much).

Our feet were protesting, so we hopped back on the subway and made our way over to Washington Square Park. If I tried hard enough, I could pretend I could hear August Rush playing his guitar off to the side of the park.

At this point, Peyton and I had crossed off everything on our list of things to do. We were really hungry, friggin tired, and I probably would’ve been in less pain if I sawed off my feet. But somehow we thought we could walk the 25 blocks back to 34th street. We walked a few blocks, and then called it quits. We found the nearest subway entrance and got on the train, riding it all the way back to Penn Station. After getting lost in the station (it’s so massive) we bought pizzas for lunch, and ate them super quickly. Like, I’ve never eaten a pizza that fast before. We also grabbed a dozen Krispy Kremes for the travelling we were about to do.

We bought tickets for the NJ Transit back to the airport, and once we got there we camped out in the food court before heading through security. I had a nap, then we watched a bit of National Treasure (inspired by Trinity Church, of course) and decided we should probably go through security. Belongings in the bins, shoes off, and scanned in the body scanner, they waved us through and wished us safe travels. It pays to be a friendly Canadian sometimes. Now this is where we started hitting more bumps in our trip.

I got an email saying our flight was delayed an hour (from 8:30 to 9:30). Honestly, not a big deal, but we were really tired and we just wanted to get back to Toronto and to my house to sleep. They’d delayed the flight because of high winds, so the earlier flights were running late, which then pushed our flight back. Around 7:15pm they send me another email saying the plane is now delayed to 9:45pm. Ugh, fine, whatever. Peyton and I went to sit at a restaurant and we shared some food, and then we went back to sit at the gate.

The next email I got said the flight wouldn’t be leaving until 10:05pm. At that point, someone at the gate came over the speaker system and said, “Attention those who are flying Porter this evening. We’ve been delayed several times because of the weather, but the plane should be arriving around 9:40pm. Billy Bishop airport closes at 11pm, due to the city curfew. If you don’t make it to Toronto by 11pm, you will be diverted to Hamilton Airport and will be shuttled back to Toronto by bus. So, because of this, when the plane arrives, please be ready to run onto the plane and get ready for an immediate takeoff. We really want to try to get to Toronto on time.”

So, the plane arrives at 9:40pm. The few passengers from that flight walk off the plane, and we can see flight attendants running around behind the gate doors. Flight attendants run back on the plane, and then they start rushing us all through the doors to the plane. The doors were closed at 9:46pm. That is the quickest I’ve ever seen a plane board, and every seat was occupied. They went through the safety information very quickly, and then we were moving away from the building and down to the runway. We were taxiing to the runaway at 57 km/hr (that’s the fastest I’ve ever seen a plane taxi before). We also had the quickest takeoff ever. It’s like “oh, we’re speeding up, speeding up, oh god we’re already off the ground, holy crap.”

At 10:50pm the pilot spoke to the passengers and told us that we were either landing at Billy Bishop right at 11pm, or we’d be diverting to Pearson Airport. Either way, they weren’t going to take us to Hamilton. His exact words were “We’ll make it happen.”

At exactly 11pm, our wheels touched down at Billy Bishop airport. We all clapped for the pilots. They made the typical 75 minute flight, like, 55 minutes. The flight attendants were really snotty, probably because they were stressed about making the landing on time, but at least the pilots did a good job.

Peyton and I made it back to my house around 11:45ish and fell asleep almost immediately. When I woke up the next day, my feet were swollen, one of my eyes didn’t really want to open, I had a pounding headache, and I couldn’t stop coughing. I called in sick to work, Peyton caught a bus back to London, and I went back to sleep for another six hours (and still woke up with a pounding headache).

It was such a crazy weekend, but ohmygod I would do it all over again if I could. The thing I’ve dreamed about for my entire life finally became a reality, and I still can’t believe it. Peyton and I have already talked about going back, so we can actually visit those museums that we didn’t really have time to see this time ‘round.

New York, I love you ❤

Let’s Hear It For New York (Part 2) Sunday in New York! Our alarm went off around 7am, and we reluctantly dragged ourselves out of our beds.

[k2kid]

Soldiers letters do not stand on their own. They impart small, discrete, often obscure, snippets of information that connect the writer with the people of his hometown, unit, and his social circle. They can often give clues that lead to a broader understanding of the writer and his experiences during his service. The letters also give the reader an insight into the activities of other soldiers, usually acquaintances, friends, and families This would particularly be the case for soldiers that grew up and enlisted in the rural areas of Canada, such as Bruce County.

Private Joseph Edgar McAfee, regimental number 651738[i] was from Glamis, Ontario, 15 kilometers from Paisely, Ontario. The Paisley Advocate covered the news locally and published, at least, two articles relating to the McAfee family. On October 16, 1918 it published a letter from this soldier to his mother where he relates the circumstances of his wounding.

Letters from the Soldiers

IN HOSPITAL IN WALES

Mrs. H. McAfee of Greenock, received the following letter recently from her son, Pte. Edgar McAfee:

Dear Folks–

Just a few lines to let you know of my whereabouts, and hoping you are fine and everything O.K. as it leaves me at present. This is the fourth hospital I have been in since I was wounded. Thinks this place is on the coast of the Irish Sea. What I have seen of the country appears to be very pretty.

Did you get the letter I wrote from the hospital in France? I was sorry I did not get to the hospital Bertha was in, but maybe I will get a chance again. I was sound asleep a week ago to-night about 12 o’clock when the nurse came and said, “Hi Canada, do you want to go to Blighty?” Imagine my surprise, as I thought I would be going back up the line in a day or two. So we took the train down to a seaport on the English Channel, got on the boat from there and came up through Chatham and the outskirts of London to a hospital in Cardiff city, stayed there in bed till yesterday and then came down here. I like this place fine. I am up now and able to get around well only I cannot wear my boot on my left foot yet. We get good rations here, lots of sleep and a free concert in the hospital every few nights given by the local town. And a couple of days ago a woman came around and gave me a kit from the Canadian Red Cross Society, consisting of writing material, shaving outfit and teeth cleaning powder.

The worst of is I will likely have to go back to the reserve at Witley, but its is a good rest anyway. I haven’t heard anything about the fellows around home fared out. N. McDermid got wounded in the leg.

Did I tell you how I got hit? Don’t believe I did. Well, every time we go in the line there are always so many left out of the machine gun courses, etc., and if they are going into battle these men have to act as stretcher-bearers. Well I was left out of the trip to the battle in front of Arras, but followed up and took in wounded. Everything went along O.K., was on the go practically all day and night. The second day I, along with three other chaps, was scouting over the previous day’s battle ground for any wounded, and there was a bunch of reinforcements passing us going into action, and all of an instant a German aeroplane swooped dow[n] and fired on us with a machine gun. I heard the bullets swish down and felt my toe sting, so beat it back and put my field dressing on, then went back to the ambulance and it was not time till I was miles away from the din of battle.

Our platoon sergeant was hit in the same way on the Amiens front, only he was in a trench. Let me know in your next letter if Jack Dobson is still living. I helped to carry him out of a shell hole. A dud shell had struck one of his legs. A dud is a defective shell that does not explode.

I have a few German souvenirs to send home. They are not much, but would be nice to keep.

Have you lots of wood cut for the winter? It’s one thing [for] certain, the war won’t last any more than a year, but I expect there will be a lot of hard fighting yet. It sure has been swaying our way lately. The German soldiers are getting very disheartened. If there had been lots of fight in them they sure would have got me in the Amiens battle.

Think that is all for now.

Paisley Advocate. October 16, 1918. Contributed by Jim Kelly.

Above: Paisley Advocate. October 16, 1918. Contributed by Jim Kelly.

The letter is full of details relating to the experience of McAfee’s wounding and from an examination of his service records we can correlate the events and people to which he relates with dates and locations.

Having enlisted with the 160th Bruce Battalion at Tiverton, Ontario on February 11, 1916, McAfee stayed with this battalion until it was used for reinforcing battalions in active service on the continent. Having arrived in England on October 17, 1916, it was not until March 28, 1918 that McAfee started his assignment with the 18th when he was shipped to France and passing through the Canadian Infantry Base Depot at Etaples to the Canadian Corps Reinforcement Camp he joined the 18th Battalion “in the field” on April 13, 1918.

The area of Telegraph Hill. It is due south of Tilloy-les-Mofflaines and half way distant to Neuville-Vitasse.

The activities of the Battalion had been terribly busy during the latter part of August 1918. It was operating at Telegraph Hill, south-east of Arras and the War Diary relates in some detail the activities on August 26, 1918.[ii] An attack began at 3:00 AM that day which met with mixed success, resulting in 10 men killed in action with 15 wounded.

The following day was not as active but resulted in 15 men killed with 150 wounded. The 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade (4th CIB) compresses their War Diary for the 3 days of August 26 to 28, 1918 into one brief entry, with the telling statement, “Starting at Zero hour followed a period of prolonged and most bitter fighting for three days, which continued until the Brigade was relieved…”[iii] This entry gives some idea of the tenor of the combat the units of the Brigade was experiencing. The War Diary states that from August 26 to 31, 1918, the total casualties incurred by the Brigade were 11 officers and 146 ranks killed and 50 offices and 999 other ranks wounded.[iv]

On August 27, 1918 McAfee is wounded. As he went over the rear area of the battlefield he is attacked by a German Air Force fighter. He offers specific details showing how the German Air Force was used tactically to interdict troops on the ground. It was, perhaps, attracted by the large group of reinforcements moving up into action on the line and McAfee becomes a victim of its efforts to kill and wound the troops on the ground. It succeeded in wounding Private McAfee’s left foot hitting, luckily, the flesh and not the bone. The 4th CIB War Diary expressly relates on how the use of enemy aircraft was used to interdict the ground forces at this time stating, “The enemy aircraft [was] active at times, and hindered the advance or our Supports by Machine Gun fire and the use of light bombs.”[v]

This wound begins the process of casualty evacuation beginning with McAfee putting, “…my field dressing on, then went back to the ambulance and it was not time till I was miles away from the din of battle.” His initial medical treatment occurred at the 4th Canadian Field Ambulance. From there he is transferred on August 28, 1918, to No. 18 General Hospital, Camiers, France, and by the August 31, 1918, he is being treated at the 3rd Western General Hospital at Cardiff, Wales. On September 27, 1918, he is transferred to Woodcote Park Military Convalescent Hospital at Epsom.[vi]

He relates some of the details of his treatment and care and expresses that, “The worst of is I will likely have to go back to the reserve at Witley, but its is a good rest anyway.” Witley Camp was used for reconstituting and the convalescence of soldiers in preparation of a return to fighting. This camp had an organization that assessed the medical status of a soldier and, depending on the severity or nature of the wound or illness, a soldier’s classification may result in a return to Canada for discharge. From McAfee’s tone it sounds like he wants to return to active service.

His letter relates some of the news of the soldiers he served with. Private Neil McDermid[vii] was also from Glamis, Ontario and had enlisted with the 160th Battalion and enlisted in March 1916. They were both the same age at the time of enlistment (21-years) so they probably knew each other well. He was wounded on the same day as McAfee, suffering a gunshot wound to the right leg and hand. Though McDermid would survive the war and be discharged on May 31, 1919, he died of heart failure on September 8, 1919 at the age of 25-years.

Above: Farm Record Card of death of McDermid and news clipping about his death. Source: Walkerton Telepscope. September 18, 1919. Contributed by Jim Kelly.

He also mentions John (Jack) Dobson[viii]. This soldier was also wounded August 26, 1918, in unusual circumstances. It appears he was hit by an unexploded shell, which shattered his leg. Dobson apparently effected his own amputation in the field, and it is not clear if this occurred before or after McAfee rendered aid to his comrade. Dobson, also, was a member of the 160th Battalion. He had enlisted in January 1916 at Chesley, Ontario. He was 25-years old at enlistment, but these men may have served in the same company or platoon and became familiar with each other.

Above: Photograph of Dobson, John: Service no. 651436 (Military Medal) and clipping relating to his wounding. Source: Hopkins, J. (1919). Canada at War: A Record of Heroism and Achievement 1914-1918. 1st ed. Toronto: The Canadian Annual Review Limited, p.386.

One wonders what McAfee felt when he found his comrade with his shattered leg, harmed by the passage of a large, heavy, rapidly moving projectile, and not from the effects of an explosion. This type of wounding may have been rare, but not unheard of.

McAfee ends the letter relating that he has a “few German souvenirs” and that, in his estimation, the collection does not amount to much. Given the letter is written in the fall, he is looking to winter and wonders after how the wood supply is like at his home. Finishing off with a prediction of the outcome of the war, he reflects that is the German army had higher morale he would not have survived combat, a bit of an unusual correlation to make, but perhaps a bit of reassurance and bravado to buck up the spirits of his parents to offset the news of his wounding.

This letter gives details that reinforce the idea of community and connection. All three men in the letter, the author and the men mentioned, were from the same area of Bruce County and had been further connect by their initial service and training with the 160th Battalion. Their connection extended into active service together with the 18th Battalion CEF in France. Their connection was further cemented by their wounding occurring close at had on August 26 for Dobson and August 27 for McDermid and McAfee. They were connected by three distinct characteristics and with McDermid and McAfee being from the same rural town their connection was probably closer, perhaps friends. Regrettably, McAfee’s letter does not give any intimation or details as to the nature of his relationship with McDermid.

The letter illustrates the speed and efficiency of the Imperial medical services with McAfee in England approximately 4-days after his wounding. It also illustrates the secondary support of organizations, such as the Red Cross, with it giving him items of comfort and value so he can be comfortable and communicate with his family and friends.

Even after his and his comrades wounding, McAfee is eager to go back and fight again, apparently afraid of the delay a visit to Witley Camp would cause. As he notes at the end of the letter, “It’s one thing [for] certain, the war won’t last any more than a year, but I expect there will be a lot of hard fighting yet.” He may be worried he will not make back into the line to assist his comrades when they are wounded or as a combat soldier.

The McAfee family, however, must have been highly relieved. The had already lost one son, their eldest, Private John McAfee, was killed in action at Hill 70 on August 15, 1917 while serving with the 2nd Canadian Machine Gun Company. Having lost one son to the war, they must have been thankful to hear such news from their other son. McAfee’s letter gives them the information they need to be reassured and gives us a glance at the life and experience of one man from a small town in Ontario.

[i] Library and Archives Canada. RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 6562 – 43. Item Number:143532.Accessed August 15, 2020.

[ii] August 26, 1918 18th Battalion War Diary Entry: At 3:00 a.m. following intense 5 min. barrage Bn. jumped off TILOY [sic] TRENCH in front of TELEGRAPH HILL in support of 21st Cdn. Bn. The artillery preparation was good. Owing to getting lost in the darkness, the tanks detailed to go over with the Bn. failed to turn up per schedule, so the Unit was without their assistance in the initial kick-off.MINORCA TRENCH, a difficult nut to crack, was set as the first objective, and SOUTHERN AVENUE TRENCH as the second objective. Both positions were won by 8.00 a.m. “D” Coy. holding the last named defence line in conjunction with the 21st Cdn. Bn. “A” Coy. remained in GORDON TRENCH, and “B” Coy at the first objective, MINORCA TRENCH.

Up to this time the casualties had been far smaller than anticipated, although Lieut. McHardy had gone only a short distance from the Assault trench when he sustained mortal shrapnel wounds.

The German resistance had been slight but at this point was considerably strengthened. At 1. o’clock, the Bn. was ordered to capture the village of GUIMAPPE. Personal reconnaissances in broad daylight and under sever fire by Major C.M.R. Graham and Capt. D.A.G. Parsons, M.C., O.Cs respectively for “D” and “C” Coys. were first conducted. Waiting until artillery support, inadequate as it was to meet the situation, had been obtained, “C” & “D” Coys at 4.00 p.m. advanced and captured the ruined town. Casualties in the face of both terrific machine gun and artillery barrages laid down by the enemy were fairly heavy.

Lieut. Brackin [sic], who had done brilliant work up to this moment, was instantly killed by a shell and Capt. Parsons and Lieut. Edwards sustained wounds that resulted in their immediate evacuation.

Resultant of the progress, “C” and “D” Coys occupied and consolidated STAG TRENCH, and “A” and “B” Coys moved forward to RAKE AND GORDON TRENCHES respectively. At. 11 p.m. “A” Coy under the fine leadership of Lieut. Spence, went forward, despite most stubborn opposition, and captured CALVARY TRENCH. Unfortunately, the achievement went for naught, as the Unit on their immediate left was held up and the Coy. at 3.00 a.m., 27th, after 4 hours of desperate fighting was compelled to withdraw temporarily to RAKE TRENCH. Approx. all ranks 10 killed & 15 wounded. 1 O.R. ret. from leave & 1 O.R. on leave. 2 O.Rs ret. from army rest camp.

[iii] 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade’ diary entry for August 1918 War Diary, p. 15.

[iv] 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade’ diary entry for August 1918 War Diary, p. 16.

[v] 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade’ diary entry for August 1918 Appendix 31, p. 5.

[vi] McAfee must have written the letter before his transfer to Epsom, though, but the time of its publishing, he was in Epsom, south of London, England.

[vii] Library and Archives Canada. RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 6690 – 30. Item Number: 143206.

[viii] Library and Archives Canada. RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 2553 – 36. Item Number: 357483.

Soldiers letters do not stand on their own. They impart small, discrete, often obscure, snippets of information that connect the writer with the people of his hometown, unit, and his social circle.