Preston’s piece is a “Talk of the Town” story about the largest musical instrument in the world, a pipe organ called the Midmer-Losh, located at Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall. Preston describes the work of Brant Duddy, “a ninety-three-year-old master organ technician who comes in twice a week to voice the pipes”:
Duddy, who has a head of white hair and the slow, smooth baritone of a radio broadcaster, was tapping away at the Stentor Sesquialtera rank, then blowing air through the pipes to see how they sang. “Toot-toot-tfffoot,” the G pipe went. “A little foggy,” Duddy said.
The pieces contains several marvelous descriptive passages, including this:
An organ pipe has a mouth, a foot, a toe, an upper and a lower lip, and a tongue, called the languid. Duddy sounds them one by one, listens, and makes adjustments. The son of a Pennsylvania church organist, he has been servicing organs since he was seventeen. “Organ repair is not really an occupation,” he said. “It’s more of a disease.” He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear.
And this:
“The soft lead pipes have a dark, woodsy flavor,” he said. Zinc pipes pierce the air like a flute. “Listen to that yodel,” he said. “Screaming its little heart out.” The Midmer-Losh’s pipes are arranged in twelve hundred and thirty-five stop tabs, named for the sounds they imitate, among them Viola da Gamba, Tuba d’Amour, Krummhorn, Grave Mixture, and Musette Mirabilis. The sixty-four-foot Diaphone-Dulzian rank is made from enough sugar pine to build a house, and it produces a quintuple low C, a subharmonic tone that sounds like a chopper circling the building.
Twilley’s “The Cold Rush” is a reporting piece on the promise – and the challenges – of establishing “cold chains” in the developing world. A cold chain is “a series of thermally controlled spaces through which your food moves from farm to table.” She calls the cold chain, “the invisible backbone of our food system, a perpetual mechanical winter that we have built for our food to live in.” Her piece is set in Rwanda, where the cold chain doesn’t exist. She accompanies a fish dealer, François Habiyambere, on a five-and-a-half-hour drive to the country’s only flake-ice machine. As they travel, she reports what she sees:
Sometime after 3 a.m., cyclists start to appear. All over rural Rwanda, sinewy young men set out from their homes on heavy steel single-speed bikes that are almost invisible beneath comically oversized loads: bunches of green bananas strapped together onto cargo racks; sacks of tomatoes piled two or three high; dozens of live chickens stacked in pyramids of beaks and feathers; bundles of cassava leaves so massive that, in the predawn light, it looks as though shrubbery is rolling along the side of the road. Over the next four or five hours, as the heat of the day sets in, gradually wilting the cassava leaves and softening the tomatoes, these men will cover hundreds of miles, carrying food from the countryside to sell in markets in the capital, Kigali.
She accompanies a milk collector named Pierre Bizimana:
He pushed a bike, over which were slung two battered steel cans, each capable of carrying a little more than thirteen gallons of milk. For the next two hours, in the gathering humidity, Bizimana, his assistant, and I trudged uphill from one station to another, picking up a gallon here and a half gallon there from a few dozen farmers. Then we headed to the nearby town of Gicumbi, where there is a milk-collection center with an industrial chiller.
She describes a collaboration between the Rawandan and U.K. governments and the U.N. called Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain, or ACES. She accompanies the ACES team on a tour of Rwanda’s existing refrigeration infrastructure:
Our first stop was a pair of cold-storage rooms built with European Union funding, in 2019, thirty miles south of Kigali, on the road to Tanzania. A member of a local farming coöperative walked us over to a low-slung brick structure; inside, the first things that caught my eye were cobwebs lining the walls. One of the rooms was not functioning, our guide said; the other contained two lonely crates of chili peppers, and the cooling seemed to have been switched on purely in honor of our visit. The spotlessly clean floor certainly did not suggest frequent use. It was also made of wood, a poor choice of material because it is hard to sanitize, so any squashed produce lingers, providing a perfect substrate for fungi and bacteria to grow.
Twilley reports two shocking facts:
1. Between thirty and fifty per cent of all food produced in developing countries is lost—discarded, unsold and uneaten, thanks to weak or nonexistent cold chains. For farmers surviving on less than a couple of dollars a day, the effect of these losses is substantial; for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, they are estimated to add up to hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
2. Cold chains present a double bind; both their absence and their presence have huge ecological costs. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if global food waste were a country its greenhouse-gas emissions would be the third largest in the world, right behind China and the U.S. On the other hand, the chemical refrigerants and the fossil-fuel energy used to produce cooling already account for more than seven per cent of global emissions—just one per cent less than food loss. As countries like Rwanda refrigerate, those emissions are increasing rapidly.
Hua Hsu’s “My Dad and Kurt Cobain” is a gracefully written “personal history” piece. Its opening sentence is terrific: “When my father moved back to Taiwan, my family bought a pair of fax machines.” The four nouns – “father,” “Taiwan,” “family,” “fax machines” – turn out to be four of the piece’s five key ingredients. The other ingredient is Kurt Cobain. It all coheres around the fax machines. In the early nineties, Hsu’s father and mother decided that his father should return to Taiwan to become an executive in the semiconductor industry. At this time, Hsu was in in his mid-teens. Father and son communicated with each other across the Pacific Ocean via fax. Hsu writes,
Faxing was cheaper than long-distance calling, and involved far less pressure. The time difference between Cupertino and Taiwan was such that I could fax my father a question in the evening and expect an answer by the time I woke up. My homework requests were always marked “Urgent.”
The piece contains several moving quotations from Hsu’s father’s faxes. Here’s one he sent to Hsu, replying to Hsu’s fax, discussing Kurt Cobain’s suicide that had happened earlier that day:
I agree that it’s a society tragedy, too much pressure. If he felt that it’s beyond his control or creativity or else, it sometimes led to the conclusion of suicide, especially for talented artists. They felt that the sense of living disappeared. So sometimes, the “normal” people is more easy to adapt to the reality which fills with not ideal situation and needs compromise. That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to every one of us. What do you think?
I find that “What do you think?” very moving. Hsu’s father seems like a great guy – not domineering, not condescending. He just wants to communicate with his son, keep the channels open, get him thinking.
I enjoyed this piece immensely. I see that Hsu has a memoir coming out next month. It’s called Stay True. I pre-ordered it today.
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