Author: Jim Dowd

[Today’s guest post is brought to us by Adam Kuhlmann Cormac McCarthy]

On the eve of Winter Storm Juno, The Clam invited acclaimed author Cormac McCarthy to Gloucester to document the carnage.  One might think that Clam-tributing would constitute a step down for a man with a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, and an inside track on the 2015 Nobel.  But lately McCarthy has been experimenting with modern forms, such as the Yelp review.  Plus, he’s always been a sucker for apocalyptic landscapes.  So, to our delight, he accepted—and because the aging master was totally reliant on the MBTA to get around, he ended up staying for the next six weeks.  What follows are excerpts from his eyewitness account.

January 26, 5:18 PM:

Naked and chapped the country awaits its first snowfall.  By evening clouds mass and people scuttle through the ruins of grocery store aisles like insects fleeing a timber doused in spirits and set aflame.  One stops and studies an empty shelf and raises a hand to her mouth in a gesture both gnomic and portentous.  Nearby a reedy and stoop-shouldered clerk bends and turns and erects a tower of canned soup that quivers in the fevered air.  The Lime Shrimp Ramen, he says.

Yes, she says.

Gone.  He pivots and enlists the cold linoleum as his spittoon.  And no damned good besides.

January 28, 6:32 AM:         

The storm decamps and dawn breaks to snow totals beyond the reckoning of yardsticks and meteorologists.  In the gathering light the powder manifests in queer shapes: paraboloids huddled in the lees of houses and huge white cowls shrouding the bald crowns of Buicks and Oldsmobiles and appliances a mendicant neighbor has abandoned to the ceaseless abrasion of the elements.  An early shoveler wades into the trackless depths and reels like a drunkard in a stiff wind.  Depleted he stalls and squints into the blowing snow and brandishes his middle finger as if to say this morning is the worst among mornings.  As if to say fuck you.

February 3, 8:05 AM:

We wake and pull the shade and find that the world has vanished again beneath a cold white veil not lovely but remorseless and we hold our heads in our hands for a long time.  A paralysis creeps in on us like a plague or a phantom or the pale shadow of a snowman steeped in crimson light and it is all we can do to lie down once more on still-warm sheets.  Spent and slick with panic sweat we mouth prayers and maledictions in tandem and look skyward for mercy or the method of the universe but there is none.  What there is is whisky and we drink it and it goes down with relish and dispatch.

February 10, 10:21 AM:

After three days the storm holsters itself and moves on with the poise of an assassin altogether indifferent to virtue or to the bloodspray stippling its cheek.  In its wake blooms a peculiar madness occasioned by endless games of Clue and Parcheesi and by diapers stacked like the middens of some squalid and fiber-loving race.  A woman who can no longer abide the stink and folly of her kinfolk howls and scurries to a window which she jerks but finds jammed by plow-spume and hoarfrost.  Crazed and dervish-like she wheels and tries another and it gapes and exhales its reek as though it were the maw of a demon.  In defiance of sense and a ruddy Irish mayor she leaps and falls and sinks to her neck in the massed ejecta of a snowblower.  Her arms are pinned in an attitude of crucifixion but at last she knows deliverance.

February 14, 7:25 PM:

Shadows cohere in the corners of a restaurant where tables are untenanted save for candle flames dancing like bright djinns in the drafty gloom.  A woman registers the desolation within and without.  A phone rings and she lifts the receiver from its cradle.  Good evening, she says.  Pinol—I mean, Alchemy Café.

Buenas noches, senorita.  The voice contains gravity and menace beneath its evocations of sage and creosote and good mezcal.

Can I help you?

Si.

Ruminative she twists the kerchief at her throat.  Why are you speaking in Spanish?

The questions are for me to ask and for you to answer.

Okay.

Why senorita does the winter endure?

She thinks.  Well it’s only mid-February.

No senorita.  Look around you.  On this the day that Saint Valentine martyred himself do you not see only figments where there should be lovers?  Winter endures and the snow persists in falling for one reason alone and that is to remind us that inherent in this universe is one notion only and it has no commerce or affinity with love.

She waits.  Falters.  Begins to tremble.  What is the one notion?  What is it?  But she can discern only a snort.  A faint click.  And the swelling gale outside.

March 2, 12:37 AM:

They come at night.  A forbidding and alien assemblage of front-loaders and backhoes emitting diesel smoke and the throaty purr of some ancient and nameless beast.  Insensate they gut the drifts and lay the entrails in the beds of dump trucks like acolytes with burnt offerings to a gelid God.  Piss-keen and frisky a dog marks a hydrant newly released from its snowy sepulcher.  A man stands and watches and smokes thoughtfully and tenders a muffled hosanna.  What or whom he addresses, the machines or the frozen waste or the escorts of springtime yet remote, is unclear.

At the Museum of Science in Boston there is a device that demonstrates the most important function in our universe: probability. It’s in “The Hall of Math” and is way less sexy than the tyrannosaurus or the IMAX theater, but without it neither would exist.

It’s a simple device called a “Galton Box” or a “Bean Machine.” With a  piece of wood, some nails an a jar of marbles you could make one in less than an hour.

One simply releasees the jar of marbles at the top of the pattern of nails and the marbles ping their way down as they fall. Some ping themselves out to the sides, most ping their way down to the middle and make a neat pattern of distribution we all know as “The Bell Curve” It’s actually a demonstration of a wave of probability.

It’s so familiar to us we don’t even think about it but we know it intuitively: most of the marbles will land in the same general place, some do not. You can’t predict where any one will go, but you can safely predict where most of them will go. Every time.

Boring, right? Wrong.

When you look at something that happens consistently in the universe in a specific way you have to ask “why?” Why does it happen like that over and over? Why does probability allow us to predict how large numbers of things will interact, but never individuals? While we may never get to the exact “why” what physicists discovered in the early 20th century was even more disturbing:

Though they didn’t want to admit it, everything turned out to be a product probability waves. Everything as in you, or at least the stuff that makes up you. Nothing exists in a hard and fast way, it only tends to exist based on the chances of it being in a certain location at a particular time. Atoms are not, as most of us were taught in sixth grade,  little solar systems acting like tiny Legos, building everything up from the smallest components. The reality is at the deepest level its more like the swirling clouds of the Earth from space. It’s dynamic and fluid, with defined patterns emerging but with plenty of chaos as well.

You only exist in one place consistently because you’re made up of so much stuff (trillions of atoms) that the tendency for you to remain constant is amazingly strong. You’re the expression of an impossible-to-comprehend number of probabilities coming together at once. You’re a big pile of poker hands, doors on “The Price is Right” and scratch tickets.

Pictured: You

I’m not being poetic here or weirdly metaphysical, this is hard science. Taking advantage of these principles is how computers and cell phones work. You can actually see it happening every time you go outside because a strange quirk of probability distribution powers the Sun.

The Sun, or any medium-range star, in reality does not have enough fuel to operate the way it does. As you probably know stars work because huge amounts of hydrogen clump together and when it gets all clumpy it ignites and burns. But our Sun really isn’t hot enough to sustain fusion reactions, which is the “burning” part. Fusion is basically the process of mushing stuff together to release energy. It’s so hard here on Earth to make happen we actually have to heat things to thousands of times the actual temperature of the Sun, which is a pain in the ass. Our Sun makes up for this lack of temperature by having an incredible amount of stuff, but all this matter creates a tremendous barrier of electromagnetic forces created by all those atoms upon atoms smooshing together, acting like a big repulsor, a shield to more stuff coming in.

The thing shouldn’t work. It should have burned out after only a few million years. It confused scientists for a long time.

However, here is the trick: As we said, the Sun has an incredible amount of stuff in it. You could fit a million Earths in the Sun. It’s 98% of the mass of our solar system. So if we take our example above of the falling marbles, you can imagine that even though most of them go to the middle of the curve, there is still a substantial number who wing out to the side and do their own thing. For some of them (and this is where it gets even weirder) even the barriers of forces don’t seem to matter, they just bounce into the electromagnetic field and shoot a little puff of energy over to the other side. It’s not unlike ramming a dock with your boat, most of the energy is taken up by the boat and dock collision, but a little goes to make waves on the other side. Some of the energy passes right on through, dock notwithstanding (but in our case, there is nothing touching anything else- it’s as if the dock wasn’t even there. It’s weird, but true)

The Sun is powered by improbability.

The same sun Sun that serves as the singular reason why you and I and anything alive in this solar system exists.

It gets even weirder still, but I’ll leave it here, suffice to say that those probability waves only turn into real, hard stuff when you measure them and the ability to measure them requires a conscious observer and conscious observers only exist because there are stars like our Sun to beget them.

Let that roll around in your brain for a while.

“I LOVE THIS CARROT SO MUCH” – Lara Lepionka, Backyard Growers.

Two things I love are Japan and winter. Neither is easy.

My first trip was in the mid 90’s, to Toyama, a small industrial city on the opposite side of the main island of Honshu from Tokyo. I was there three weeks. My brain almost exploded.

I remember looking out the window as we touched down thinking “Oh look, they have  streets and Hondas and KFCs. It all looks the same as home. How hard can this be?” Answer: very hard. Because everything in Japan, especially outside the major cities, is all Japanese. Japan is, like, everywhere in that country. It’s sort of inescapable, all the Japan in Japan. Go figure.

All that Japan everywhere made getting anything done reliant on bending to unique structures and expectations. The equipment we were using was similar, but not the same. The cultural structure of teams and the communication in and between them was impossible to easily navigate for a novice. Even getting materials (this was a building project) was a challenge, but also hilarious as their main supply outlet (sort of like Home Depot but more industrial-focused) was called “Happy Beaver.” My point is whatever it was I had to do in a given day needed to be adjusted to account for the “Japan Factor.” Even those Hondas drove on the opposite side of the road and those KFCs were considered (at the time) to be nice sit-down restaurants, the kind of place you would take your spouse on a night out.

This is how I feel right now, how a lot of us feel, I think at the tail end of this epic winter. We’re doing all the same stuff we normally do; commuting to work, getting kids to school, walking the dog,  trying to get our jobs done and the shopping and the laundry and the rest of it all taken care of, but the conditions are taking a piece of the action wherever we go. It’s hard to adjust to the idea we now live in what is, essentially, a giant strip mine for snow with huge pieces of excavation equipment rolling around everywhere all the time. It’s difficult to get into your head that traveling from downtown to East Gloucester and back can take as long as getting to Boston. It’s tiring. It wears on you.

We’re at the point where it’s not an emergency anymore, this is just day-to-day life. It’s just normal to see people and cars sharing the lanes of the narrow, busy streets, inching out because you can’t see around corners, knowing that public transportation is no longer reliable or how parking is an epic challenge and walking  anywhere is a death-defying process. And we’re just going on with the full knowledge it’s going to snow again, probably a couple more times. That’s just life in the new reality.

It’s the same feeling I remember having after another long day of failing to get across to the the crane operator what we were trying to do for about four hours. I was lying in my micro-scale hotel room drinking my next in the series of large cans of Asahi beer from the vending machine in the hall outside (there were benefits) and listening to the BBC World Service on my small Grundig shortwave (this was pre-Internet). I was thinking, “I just want shit to be normal again. I just want to order what I think is a pizza and not get a flat rice pancake with a pile of what looks like moldy beans on top with two french toast sticks jutting out of it. I just want to get on a train and know that it’s going to wind up somewhere I’m trying to go, not take me to an otherworldly seaside park with these weird exposed tree-roots everywhere and that strange aquarium with tanks of  little fish that swam through hoops.”

people were crowded around this fish like it was Cher

In retrospect, that first experience was incredible. I still dream about it, especially that particular day where I got lost and gave up on what I thought I was going to get done and just wandered around. However, at the time it was profoundly stressful and exhausting.

But man, those little fish. Those thing were cool.