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Plus, Do You Speak Yeahlie? The Yale Accent on page 16.

Vol. xxxvii · Issue 5 · March 2011 · yaledailynews.com/mag

Hockey’sUnfinished Business. Page 31.

yale daily news magazine

it’s time

the poynter fellowshipBringing the best journalists of our generation into conversation at Yale

recent speakers include

ira glass soledad o’brien tom brokaw

Event listings at opac.yale.edu/poynter.aspx

Pho

to: R

icha

rd F

rank

Submit to the Wallace prize

fiction and nonfiction

entrieS due march 3

Winning pieces are selected by a panel of professional judges and will be published in the Yale daily news Magazine. applications are available at 202 York St.

Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag

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shorts4

Q’sDavid Lauter '79

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small talkChannel 1 x Yale Lunch

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Photo EssaYExpect the Unexpected

Madison Grinnell22

fiction Challenger Deep Marina Keegan

41

PoEtrY Naked Rain x Cazoniere 164

Prishtinë 46

PErsonal EssaYThe Back Seat

Helen Gao48

dEar dana 51

EditorsZara Kessler u Naina Saligram

Associate EditorsSijia Cai x Eliana Dockterman

Jacque Feldman x Molly Hensley-

Clancy x Nicole Levy x Lauren Oyler

Cooper Wilhelm

Design EditorsRaisa Bruner u Eli Markham

Christian Vazquez

Design AssistantsDemetra Hufnagel x Mason Kroll

Lindsay Paterson x Veronica Smith

Photography Editors Christopher Peak

Sarah Sullivan

Yale DailY News

Editor in Chief

Vivian Yee

Publisher

Kyle Miller

briaN waswaNi

by Daniel

Bethencourt

O 11 O

Yale's Most Popular DJ

street's eYe view

by Kanglei Wang

q 24 q

Crit: The Face of Homelessness

uNfiNisheD busiNess by Max de La

Bruyère

& Eliana

Dockterman

W 31 W

Inside the Rise of Yale Hockey

Do You speak

yeah-lie?by Isaac Arnsdorf

< 16 >

Is There a Yale Accent?

Magazine

Vol. XXXVIII, No. 5 March 2011

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nonfiction, fiction, poetry,

art, design

join the ydn magazine

[email protected]

Editors’ Note

Many people come to Yale trying to fashion their identities — how they will spend their time,

how they will be perceived. They learn, as we have, that identity is malleable, and who we’ll be when we graduate is not always easy to foresee.

When Brian Waswani ’12, the subject of Daniel Bethencourt’s profile, arrived at Yale, he thought of DJing as a hobby but never realized how the pastime would spiral into an all-consuming lifestyle, or even a possible career. The seniors on Yale’s hockey team arrived knowing they would devote a large portion of their next four years to the sport. But they didn’t know that with the help of Coach Keith Allain ’80, they would spend time as the No. 1 ranked team in the country and have a shot at an NCAA championship win. In anticipation of this year’s post season, Eliana Dockterman and Max de La Bruyère trace the rise of Yale hockey.

Some of us change in ways that are harder to document. Isaac Arnsdorf explores the research of Claire Bowern, who is currently studying how students’ accents change as they move from freshman to senior years. The Yale Daily News Magazine has also gone through something of an identity transformation this year — from our new design and content in the fall to our recent launch of the Magazine section of the YDN blog. But some core traditions never change.

This spring, as always, we will present the Wallace Prize in Fiction and Nonfiction. The winning submissions will be published in our final issue of the year. Entry forms can be found in the Yale Daily News Building and in the English Department office. Submissions will be accepted through March 3. We encourage all students to submit their work.

Have a wonderful vacation!

— Zara Kessler & Naina Saligram



ydnmag if you’re inter-ested in Yale hockey his-tory, this is the only book you need — because it is literally the only one ever written. mostly photos of guys with surprisingly little padding. #yalehockey

book review tweetBulldogs on ice:

by Daniel K. Fleschner

VOCab•yale•ary

DaviD scott Kastan I would take any Film Studies course taught by Francesco Casetti. He is breathtakingly smart — and, oh, that accent! If he wouldn’t let me in (and I can’t believe he would now), I would take Basic Drawing, though I fear it couldn’t be ‘basic’ enough for me.Kastan is a Professor of English.

Matthew JacobsonIt’s a good thing I got a job teaching here, because I probably still couldn’t get into Yale as an undergrad. But if I did, I would take “Galaxies and the Universe” and “Introduction to Cosmology.” I have an abiding but inarticulate fascination for astronomy, but I always shied away from it because I suck at math. Can I say that?Jacobson is a Professor of History and American Studies.

paul Fry Art History’s the subject that most interests me other than my own, maybe sometimes more than my own. Any time Alex Nemerov taught 18th and 19th century American art I’d want to take that, and if there were a seminar on Courbet, Corot, and the Barbizon painters I’d want to be there. Or possibly a survey of French art that could be called “Chardin to Courbet.”Fry is a Professor of English.

Professor RecsWhat classes have you wanted to take outside your department?

charles bailyn I actually worked out what I would take if I had a semester free and could take a full 4.5 credit schedule. Second semester Spanish, Mazzotta’s Dante course, Polak’s Game Theory, and Ron Smith’s Remote Sensing course (G&G). That would be very cool — one practical thing (better Spanish would really help communicating with the observatory staff in Chile), two long-standing interests that I don’t have any systematic education in (Dante, Game Theory), and one extension of my ‘major’ into a neighboring area I’m not an expert in. And every one of them fabulously well taught here at Yale.Charles Bailyn is a Professor of Astronomy.

“For a moment, there was total silence and then the Yale stands exploded with screams of delight and disbelief.” So wrote then-Boston Globe reporter John Powers in a February 1974 special “Yale-Harvard” hockey is-sue published by the News in association with the Yale Hockey Association. His subject? “The Night They Shot the Crimson Down,” a miraculous Eli victory against Harvard in March 1969. Did the win usher in a new era? Was it but the “first page” in a “vibrant epic of Yale hockey?” Not quite. That December, Yale lost to Harvard 6-2. Powers lamented, “The dreams of an Eli hockey Renaissance never quite recovered.”

But have they since? See p. 31.

Ydn,old school:

Jam\jam’\ v. To become wedged in a tight spacen. 1. A fruit preserve 2. An annual chance for a cappella groups to show off vocal talents under the guise of vaguely funny themes3. When preceded by “traffic,” what is caused by hoards of students run-ning across Elm street in a desperate attempt to get to WLH on time

ian ayresI would love to take Jack Hitt’s course on how to write, pitch, and publish (op-eds and magazine articles) or just about anything taught by Yale’s penetrating and eclectic ornithologist, Richard Prum.Ayres is a Professor at the Law School.

shorts



Top 10Speaking in a foreign language while intoxicated: Practice makes perfect when you’re trying to learn another language, and the confidence granted by a couple of drinks eliminates the shyness you feel in French class. Look at it as an opportunity to broaden your vocabulary beyond the lyrics to “Lady Marmalade.”

“Don’t Stop Believin’:” This pledge is really a two-for-one deal; you’ll have to cut back on your drinking as well if you ever hope to make it through 40 nights without Journey. If this just isn’t an option, there’s also “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

Giving up:You’ll sound really clever when you explain your paradoxically meta-Lent resolution to give up giving up. The philosophical discussions that will result from this one are well worth the 40 days of uncertainty you’ll face as you wonder whether you’ve already broken your pledge by creating it.

Telling other people about how terrible next week is going to be for you: Instead, try eating the chocolate that your friends all gave up for Lent; it will relieve the same amount of stress and annoy your friends just as much.

Looking at your reflection in shop windows: No, “admiring the window display” is not an acceptable excuse for breaking this one.

1

2 Harry Potter references: Trying to explain the residential college system without saying the phrase, “Well, you know how in Harry Potter, they have Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, right?” will be the ultimate exercise in creativity.

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things to give up for lent

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Hide&

SeekNeed a break from Bass? Looking for a new spot to study post-midterms? Come enjoy some peace and quiet ... if you can find it.

Passing photo 86 during a Facebook stalking session: Lent is a time when many people reevaluate their addictions to social media, questioning their dependency on technology to interact with friends. But if you can’t bear the idea of giving up Facebook, you can at least abandon some of the self-hatred you feel when you realize you’ve been refreshing social networking sites for 4 hours.

Chicken Tender Day: If enough people adopt this one, maybe there will be enough chicken tenders to feed the poor souls who have class until 12:50 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

James Franco: Enough said. A challenge for only the most devout Catholics.

Original Tart: We at the YDN Mag would never suggest going cold turkey from Froyoworld (we need to keep business booming during the harsh winter months!).But you owe it to yourself to break out of the Original Tart-strawberries-yogurt chips-dash of sprinkles rut you’ve been in ever since they stopped serving Red Velvet.

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david lauter

for David Lauter ’79David Lauter is the Assistant Managing Editor of the Los Angeles Times. He began his career at the LA Times in Washington, where he covered national politics. He moved to LA in 1995 and took on a series of editing roles. Under his guidance, the Times’ coverage of the California wildfires in 2003 received a Pulitzer Prize. As an under-graduate at Yale, Lauter majored in History. His daughter is now a sophomore in Branford College.

What is your favorite memory of Yale?Touring Europe with the Glee Club the summer after sophomore year. I had never been overseas before, and, suddenly, there I was singing in Westminster Abbey and Chartres and at the American embassy’s reception for the Paris airshow, where a pack of hungry college students was turned loose on the caviar buffet.

You can’t live without …Food? Water? Music? I think I could live without e-mail.

If you could meet one character from a novel, who would it be?The Cat in the Hat. Think about it. How cool would that be?

If you could ask President Obama a question, what would it be?I’ve interviewed a couple of presidents and have learned that one question, without follow-ups, almost never re-veals something unexpected: A good politician almost al-

ways has an answer for one question. But if I could ask just one, it would be whether he now thinks he made a mis-take by not asking for a bigger stimulus package his first year.

Writing today needs more ... Fact. The world is awash in opinion, but has fewer and fewer people dedicat-ed to uncovering new facts. Opinions without fact are like buildings built on sand.

What is your favorite word and why?Yes, “what” is my favorite word, and “why” is pretty good, too. It’s surprising how far one can get in life with those two.

Do you have a Facebook account? Why or why not?No. Because everyone has one.

If you could go back to college now what would you do differently?Take Vincent Scully’s art history class. I talked myself out of taking it because he required everyone to do a drawing as-signment, and I thought I couldn’t do it.

The most embarrassing moment of your career is ...I described a prominent official in a page-one story as “the late ...” rather than “the former ...” He lacked a sense of humor about the situation. Later, I learned he had only recently recovered from a serious illness.

What advice do you have for Yale stu-dents?Stop asking for advice so much.

Most importantly, why is Yale better than Harvard?Because at Yale, you’d ask that as a ques-tion rather than assuming it as a given.

Vol. XXXviii, No. 4 February 2011

Inside the Channel 1 showroom at 220 State Street in New Haven, Lou Cox leans back onto a black futon, spreading out his legs and stroking his black scruff with one hand while pulling absentmindedly at the threads of his camouflage print pants with the other. Around him are glass display cases filled with bottles of spray paint, skateboarder wheels, and trucker hats bearing the name of the shop. Mounted on the plain brown walls are large, spray-painted canvases depicting baseball players, their black silhouettes outlined by neon greens and yellows. The current exhibit, the Negro League Art Show, celebrates seven successful African American baseball teams from the 1920s in honor of Black History Month.

Cox classifies Channel 1 as a skate shop/art gallery, a status that is confirmed by the words “skate” and “create” that arch over the front window. The store blends the boundary between the two worlds, featuring the works of pop surrealists and underground graffiti artists, many of whom are skateboarders.

A native of New Haven, Cox first opened the showroom in 2005 after spending years trying to figure out how to channel his creative energy. After high school he attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan but dropped out halfway through his sophomore year. “I was going to a creative school and not being creative,” he explains. After a series of jobs in New York City he returned to New Haven in the early nineties and found that the city no longer offered the same opportunities for kids that he remembered from his youth.

Cox visited Coogan Pavillion in Edgerton Park, a place he had visited as a child, which was now abandoned and left with a decaying ice-skating rink. An avid skateboarder, he spent the next two years erecting what was, at the time, the second public skate park in the state.

But for someone who likes to innovate, Cox took an unexpected career turn; he spent the next three-and-a-half years driving a truck, a job he chose because of its mindlessness. It gave him the perfect opportunity to formulate his ideas. “I knew I wanted to create a shop built around the community,” he says, “one that would grow and change organically with the community. Not one that came into the community.” After he left his job driving trucks, Cox returned to New Haven. This time he didn’t pursue his own artistic skills and instead looked at those of his skater friends who sculpted or did graffiti in their spare time. The problem wasn’t a lack of talent but, rather, the nonexistent market for those abilities. “All the guys were going to New York or Boston trying to break into the art scene there,” he says. “We were losing talent, culturally speaking.” Although

Cox is quick to point out that Channel 1 has attracted some of the most celebrated underground artists from New York and Boston, he maintains that the store’s goal is to act as a launching pad for local talent.

Channel 1 provided exactly that for Silas Finch, a well-known skateboarder who came to the showroom one day and asked to put on an exhibit. Cox had never before seen any of his art. Silas brought him to his van, opened up a small side compartment, and took out a model of a motorcycle, crafted from bits and pieces that had been bolted together. “Found art! It’s like a puzzle, like Jenga!” Cox says of Finch’s work. For the first time he sits up straight and begins to gesture excitedly with his hands, “It’s like, yeah, yeah! Everything bolts together, no glue! You name somethin’, and he can make somethin’ out of it. Seriously, name somethin’!” he challenges, quickly pulling out his iPhone and opening up Finch’s webpage, complete with pieces sculpted out of everything from old piano keys to newspaper pages.

Just as Cox had hoped, the store has continued to develop a give-and-take relationship with the community, and he has established a collective that consists of graffiti artists, sculptors, spoken word artists, breakdancers, and rappers. The only requirement for joining the collective is good character and

channel 1 W yale lunch X

madeline buxton / contributing photographer

Small Talk





a willingness to give to the community in some way. “Most people look at graffiti as being vandalism,” Cox says. “We’ve kept that down to [a] minimum and given kids an opportunity to do something else.” Cox has visited high schools throughout the state and worked with art classes to construct graffiti murals. “Kids listen because we’re cooler. Well, we’re presumably cooler,” he says with a grin. “Naw, naw. We’re cooler.”

A tattooed and heavily pierced man enters the store, and Cox stands up to clap him on the back. The man’s father owns Orangeside Luncheonette, a restaurant known for its recent creation of the square doughnut. Cox is in the process of creating vinyl graphics to decorate the store. “See, it’s hip to be square!” Cox calls out laughing, in reference to the doughnuts. But he could just as easily be talking about Channel 1, his very own square peg in a round whole.

— Madeline Buxton

For a few seconds, I stare at the simple, white screen of YaleLunch.com. My name and email address are typed in. All I have to do is click “Pair me.” But what kind of loser has to use a website to avoid eating lunch alone? “Most likely … the sorts of people who eat snack boxes of raisins and compulsively smell their own hair,” wrote Eve Binder ’11, in an article on IvyGate.

Well, apparently that’s now me.YaleLunch recently piggybacked off HarvardLunch, a

program started this past November. Seth Riddley, a senior at Harvard, was the father of the impromptu idea: “I woke up in the middle of the night and thought — oh, that would be a cool website,” Riddley told me. The premise is to pair up two strangers for a meal — not a blind date, an opportunity to meet someone you haven’t yet and otherwise probably never would.

At first, Riddley did the pairings himself, but the system is now automated. More than 300 students at Yale have used it, thanks in large part to Mary Liu ’12, who emailed Riddley one day about bringing HarvardLunch to Yale and expanding it into a recruitment tool for student organizations. So far, her idea has received an overwhelmingly positive response from both students and campus groups — in the three days following her email publicity, over 100 people signed up.

One of those was me. Or was it four of them? The first time I submitted my name to the wrath of the randomizer, I received my pairing and a suggested date and time for lunch. Overcoming my almost debilitating inner feelings of inadequacy, I shot “Katie” an email.

And never got a response. Maybe she was hoping for a potential romantic interest? Maybe she looked me up and wasn’t feeling a connection? Or perhaps my email was simply lost in the bottomless depths of her inbox.

This was, needless to say, discouraging. My YaleLunch career had started off on a sour note. But I persevered, risking an ego-crushing double rejection. Cleverly anticipating a 25 to

50 percent response rate, I rabidly asked the website to pair me three successive times. I had to get a lunch date.

And within the half-hour, I did: two emails suggesting Friday, 11:30 a.m., in the Branford pit. I’m not sure why this didn’t engender more suspicion at the time, but what I initially considered mere coincidence was in fact a joke on me. The two matches had been hanging out in the same suite at the time, and … yeah.

That said, they were both still, in fact, interested in getting lunch with me. And then another ding signaled a new message — an email from my fourth match! I was suddenly in high demand, and the lunches I usually reserved for old chums were filling up fast.

I finally met (date? lunch buddy? random match?) #4 by the trays in Commons for lunch on a Friday. We loaded up plates and shared a placid, laid-back meal. He was a junior in Silliman and dating my froco’s sister, so some mutual acquaintances were established. Our meal even managed to extend through dessert, to my surprise. I don’t think we ever plan on meeting for lunch again, but we can now both wave to one more face on campus.

The thing is, Yalies don’t need a website to meet new people — we’re a socially competent bunch. My match was normal, and by most standards, I’d consider myself in that category as well. Neither of us was smelling our own hair, or worse, balding. What YaleLunch does is force you to step out of your comfort zone: “It’s like a probability experiment to test that any randomly-selected Yalie will be awesome,” said Liu. “Don’t think you’re lame, but think of it as a probability.”

“Awkward? I guess it could be,” Riddley considered. “It’s just something fun and new to try.”

Well, if you put it that way, I might just go and put my name in a few more times. You should too. Maybe we’ll end up having lunch. — TaoTao Holmes

Grey de GrIsson / contrIbutInG photoGrapher


O O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O 11

By Daniel Bethencourt

Photos by Florian Koenigsberger

Brian Waswani


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Seconds after 1 a.m., in an off-campus apartment at the top of a steep and claus-trophobically narrow flight of stairs, there’s a pitch black room whose air and walls are shaking with sound waves. I’m bracing myself against the back wall behind a 700W subwoofer, whose peak volume is barely lower than that of a small jet aircraft taking off, and I real-ize the only light sources are the faintly gleaming white grid of a Macbook keyboard, four green dots forming a constellation across a mixing board, and above them, an orange circle that’s persistently flashing, an unheed-ed warning.

Beside me is Brian Waswani Odhiambo ’12, a Po-litical Science and African Studies major from Nairobi, Kenya, hunched over his controls. He bobs slightly for-ward in a state of constant motion, his gaze so certain and stoic, his mouth so closed that it’s hard to imagine when he’d ever choose to speak.

Brian straightens up and surveys a crowd that is packed to the walls and appears to be seething, like boiling water. So many voices are yelling the words to the song that there’s a whispering above the roar. Brian holds a hand up and then points his fingers down as the first beat of the next song takes effect. He expands his arms and tilts them back and forth, as if he were flying.

A girl leans over and mumbles into Brian’s ear. “Why aren’t you dancing at your own party?”

Brian tries to brush it off. “I don’t know.”But she persists: “Why not?” “I’m DJing,” he yells over the crowd. “There’d be no

party.”

Most weekend nights when Brian was 14, he would spin records in the 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. slot at a dance club in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania that had two separate floors overlooking the DJ booth. By the time he was done, an emcee would have hyped a crowd of around 100. Brian would turn over the decks to the resident DJ — usually a radio star across East Af-rica — and he’d stand off to the side with his father, a board member of East African Television and Radio, who managed the club. Then Brian would watch and watch. Over several weekends, the resident DJs gave him their mixtapes and taught him how to spin. “In retrospect, it sounds pretty cool,” Brian says. “But I had nothing else to do.”

After four years at a competitive all-boys school in Nairobi, Brian narrowed his choices to Yale and medi-cal school at the University of Nairobi. But even before he started applying, Brian’s father was telling friends that his son was heading abroad for school. “That was my dad,” says Brian, whose father has since passed away. Of his decision, Brian says, “I guess a factor was being sentimental and fulfilling my dad’s dream. He wanted me to come abroad, and be some serious per-son, do some engineering … something big.”

Did that future include DJing? Brian’s father never bought him DJ decks. Brian remembers, “He was like, ‘I’ll take you out … but that’s not your life.’”



In 2008, Brian arrived at Yale, bought DJ decks and two black shoebox-sized speakers off eBay, and mixed songs in his dorm room, alone.

One year passed. Then he spent weekend after weekend scouting out

Yale’s parties. At each one he stood by the DJ booth, checked out the equipment, and mentally measured out the moments when the next song dropped. He’d gauge the crowd’s response. He took notes on his phone.

He spun for free at his friends’ birthday parties in a Timothy Dwight single, where a dozen-plus people would cram themselves in without removing the fur-niture. On one of those nights, someone Brian barely knew leaned in and offered him a compliment — and in that moment, Brian could suddenly see the unfold-ing potential of a future, just as uncertain as it was diz-zying.

Through the spring of his sophomore year, the par-ties graduated to a more spacious common room in Timothy Dwight. While Brian was playing, a friend of a friend asked him if he was getting paid. That took him by surprise.

By then, things were speeding up even faster. Brian DJed for another friend’s birthday party at Thali Too, his biggest venue yet. Someone talked to someone else, and a student group organizing Calhoun’s Trolley Night contacted him, offering to pay him $150 to DJ — even though Brian had been thinking he would do it for free. He ended up spinning well enough to roll the party almost half an hour past Yale’s 1 a.m. cutoff, with-out complaint.

This fall as a junior, Brian started a Facebook fan page, cautiously upped his price, and played for stu-dent group parties in the basements of restaurants like Bespoke and almost every club in the Crown Street area. He accepted an invitation from a student group at Colgate that paid for his plane flight, food, and perfor-mance at their campus pub. He realized he was the only unaffiliated Yale DJ who performs often at paid parties on campus.

When Brian was spinning at a student group party on Crown Street, the club’s resident DJ showed up and told Brian to keep playing. An hour went by, and then another — the students were gone, and the club was now filled with people Brian had never seen. But he was still playing. At midnight, the resident finally took over. He shook Brian’s hand and gave him his card.

Somewhere in between all of this, Brian’s friend Dezzy Ogakwu ’12 started to invite a large circle of friends to Brian’s apartment once a month via mass text message. And there he plays, in his words, “until the

cops come” — or until everyone goes home. But the cops tend not to come, and so the ending times have ridden out the rising of the sun, with friends waking up on his couches, only feet away from where they danced.

“I still think I could make it really big here,” Brian tells me. “DJing has become so attached to my persona … [people] think that I want to do this with my life. When people introduce me they’re like, ‘This is Brian — he’s a DJ.’”

Brian thinks that after graduating next spring, he might take a year off — before attending law school or graduate school in Political Science, as his father would probably have wanted — to DJ professionally with his cousin and a few friends in Nairobi. He says his family will be fine with the idea: “as long as I can convince them that I am not leaving school, and this is not it. It’s basically how you sell it, really.” DJing, in Brian’s mind and in his family’s opinion, isn’t a pragmatic or prom-ising career. “I’m probably one of the more successful people [in my family] in terms of coming abroad,” he says. “So me being a DJ who’s uncertain — like, I’m not certain that I could be a resident DJ at some huge club — is bad.”

Back inside the rattling walls of Brian’s apartment, a police officer in a blue beanie and parka opens the door enough to poke only his head and torso in, as if he were sorry to be taking up our precious time. When Brian cuts the music and dashes through the crowd to face him, the officer says, “Just keep it down, all right?” Total darkness returns, and the music thunders back up to the same level as before, if not louder. The roar of approval from Brian’s next bass line is so loud that the shouts sound windy, like I might be inside a long, reaching wind tunnel.

And now that the party has hit a teetering height, Brian disappears. He ducks out from the DJ space that he’s formed for himself, and he edges through the crowd while the music blares on, unattended.

For a DJ, Brian enjoys being invisible. One week ear-lier, I watched him spin at a formal birthday party for two Yale students on the second floor of The Union

League Cafe. In the first 10 minutes, not one of the couple dozen guests in suits and ties even glanced at

So many voices are yelling the words to the song that there’s a whisper-ing above the roar.


14 O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O S O O

him, hunched over in the far corner. I saw a microphone next to his turntables,

pointed at it, and asked, “Are you gonna use that?”

He shook his head and responded, “I don’t talk.” He paused as if he wasn’t going to say more, but then added: “I don’t have the perso-na. It takes a certain type of person. And voice, also.”

Later on that night, a Union League em-ployee leaned over the speakers and told Brian he’d need to instruct the crowd to sing “Happy Birthday.” Brian’s eyes nervously scanned the ceiling. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him look off-balance. He leaned toward me and shouted, “Can you find a girl named Eva? She can sing ‘Happy Birthday.’” I didn’t know who Eva was — but I wanted to know what was holding him back from picking up the microphone. He was the master of the loudest and most visible ma-chinery in the room.

In Brian’s apartment, as the party has reached its most frenetic peak, Brian has stepped away. But where could he possibly want to go? I try to squeeze through the spaces Brian leaves in his wake as partygoers thump him on the back. Across the room, I see him lean on the narrow arm of a couch beside a girl. They chat without raising their voices. I get distracted by

the light from a cell phone, which seems to twist around in the dark like a searchlight, and when I look back, Brian has reappeared at his controls across the room, the light from his keyboard faintly giving shape to his stern, focused face.

“[When] you’re tired by 1 [a.m.], you still have to keep going,” Brian later told tell me. “If you end it at one, then it’s just another Yale party that ends at one. And you’re not any different.”

It’s 2 a.m. now. An extra-large Monster can stands open by his equipment. I ask Brian how long he thinks this could last.

“I’m just gonna push it,” he says. “See how far it goes.”

More people stream in, 40 minutes drift by, and Brian’s roommate hands him a foil-wrapped bacon and egg sandwich from Gourmet Heav-en. Brian eats it slowly, looks out at the crowd, and leans toward me. “I’m out of ideas,” he says. He taps a red button over and over again and takes a swig from the Monster. “I’m gonna slow it down. So tired ... I have work at 12 tomorrow.”

But in the very next breath he wags his index fingers up and down while bobbing. He pounds his fists together softly, repeatedly. “People will

“When people introduce me they’re like, ‘This is Brian — he’s a DJ.’”



stay,” Brian’s roommate, Kevin Moore ’12, tells me. “It just depends on how Brian feels.”

At 3:15 a.m. the lights come on. The dozen or so that have stayed search through a coat pile. The last one leaving pulls the door resolutely shut.

“I’m happy,” Brian says. Though only two of his roommates and I are left,

Brian leaves the speakers rumbling almost as loudly as they have been all night. We sit silently, spread out across the common room’s void. Through the speakers, a rattling drumbeat blends into an airy bundle of voices. The song Brian is playing calls for energy that no one here pretends to have, and it all sounds just as dizzy and shell-shocked as my own brain. Brian downs the last of the Monster.

“Would you have done anything differently to-night?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Though back home, you’re never DJing four hours straight.”

“But here it happens.”“Yeah. You gotta do what you gotta do.” He paus-

es. “To keep up your reputation.” And then he adds, “Hopefully people are happy.”

When the birthday at The Union League Cafe ended the week before, Brian and I paced down the stairwell just after 1 a.m. and walked into a silent winter. I mentioned how quiet it seemed, after all that noise. He grinned and spoke looking straight ahead, as if to the air: “It could be the most amazing party ever, but then, at the end, I’m just here with my backpack. Walking home.”

Right now, as I trudge back alone from Brian’s apartment, the empty streets and dark facades seem freezer-preserved. An abandoned minivan sits glued into the side of the road, its driver’s side and back doors left wide open. A snow-plough growls by, its flashing red taillights giving off a wry, useless warning.

At close to 4 a.m., in the silence of my suite, my ears are ringing with distant sirens. Some part of my ear canal is slowly dying, as if the ringing were the sound of time, running out.

And as I crash onto my bed, I wonder, does Bri-an hear that ringing too?

O S O S O


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Do You Speak Yeah-lie?By Isaac Arnsdorf Illustrations by Kat Oshman

nyone who has called a customer service line in the past decade or so has become

well acquainted with a robot. Its voice (or rather his or her voice) is too stiff to be a human’s but too fluent to be a machine’s, thanking you for your call with all the warmth of an e-mail signature. Let him introduce himself: “I’m an automated system that can handle complete sentences. So tell me, how can I help you today?” So go right ahead and tell him just whatever seems to be the matter, and he’ll follow you because — get this — he can handle complete sentences. “OK, I’ll get you right over to our technical support department.” So then you hear a new fellow, who, judging by his slightly higher voice, is gentler and calmer, as if he knows your something is broken and you’re probably pissed. “Are you calling about technical support for an Apple product?” which, if you’ve done this right so far, you are. “Do you have a case ID?” which, if you’re calling for the first time, you don’t, but "no" is a perfectly acceptable answer in this choose-your-own-adventure novel. “Please say the name of the Apple product for which you want technical support,” which was probably the very first thing you said, back with the fellow who understood complete

sentences, but now try it again with this new guy, just the name now. “Sorry, I’m having trouble. What I’m looking for,” he continues, with the slightest and most disarmingly realistic stammer on the W, “is a product name, like Snow Leopard, iMovie, MacBook Pro or iMac.” Try again. “I think you

said iPad. Is this correct?” Glory, hallelujah, it is! Now you get to talk to a real human being.

But wait, what if you’re from Boston? Did you mean iPod?

This concern, and it is a real concern, is not unique to iPads (whose name, when it was announced in January,


instantly became a laughingstock for Bostonians and Irishmen in the press and blogosphere) nor to Apple (who declined to comment for this article). Claire Bowern, for one, knows all too well the ordeal of getting a machine to understand her Australian accent

when she wants “flight status” but says “flaiht stay-toos.” Computer, you’ve messed with the wrong Yale University linguistics professor. Bowern is currently working on the largest study of North American English dialects ever conducted. To start, she’s doing a dry run with a subset of data from Yalies.

“We were int’rested in seeing if freshmen changed thei’ accents when they came to Yale, given that, especially in the fi’st couple of weeks of claahsses, there’s a bit of a pressure-cooker environment,” Bowern says. “I’ve seen this in my claahsses teaching Intro Linguistics, and when I was a grad student at Hahvahd this was very noticeable, that freshmen would come to campus with aull sorts of local dialects and then within about six weeks they’d aull converged.”

So Bowern has set out to measure, more scientifically, how did the freshmen converge, and on what? Which regional features were abandoned and which were adopted? But since she found busy freshmen were loath to commit to repeat recordings, she decided to try sampling freshmen and seniors to see if, as groups, they speak differently.

he Yale samples will feed into the continent-wide study — Bowern and her research partners are aiming for 2,500 participants overall. They

already have more than 1,700. They hope the data collection will wrap up by the end of the year. When

it’s done, it will be the largest study of its kind by a factor of three, she says. It’s also important because Bowern is not only looking at how geography shapes dialect, as most researchers do. Few other researchers have tried studying, as Bowern will, patterns across gender, age, ethnicity, and class. Bowen explains that sociolinguists know that ethnicity, age, and gender contribute to “dialect die-versity,” but researchers tend to study those aspects separately from one another and from the larger context of regional variation. “So the question that we’re asking is: when you take a city or a given geographical area, aah the differences in geography still the most salient?”

Anyone who grew up speaking English in the United States or Canada can log onto a website (http://pantheon.yale.edu/~clb3/NorthAmericanDialects/); read the directions and frequently asked questions (Q: “But I don’t speak ‘good’ English … surely you don’t want a sample of my speech?” A: “Yes we do!”); enter his or her age, ethnicity, gender, current zip code, high

school zip code, other native language, and parents’ other native languages; and (on a computer equipped with a microphone and a sound card) record: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, broad, full, skid, prune, heel, coat, maid, duck, hill, boat, sock, clown, might, eggs, foot …

Stop. Where are your telltale paahks and caahs and knickkneeacks and beeackpeeacks? Oats and aboats? Youses and y’alls? Bowern explains: “We wanted exahmples of all of the phonemic vowels of American English between puhticular consonants,” meaning the ones where a different pronunciation carries a different meaning (bite versus bit versus beet), but holding the

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“We were int’rested in seeing if freshmen changed thei’ accents when they came to Yale, given that, especially in the fi'st couple of weeks of claahsses, there’s a bit of a pressure-cooker environment. I’ve seen this in my claahsses teaching Intro Linguistics, and when I was a grad student at Hahvahd this was very noticeable, that freshmen would come to campus with aull sorts of local dialects and then within about six weeks they’d aull converged.”

consonants constant on either end because they can affect the vowel (bat versus bad). So, in the survey, it’s pen versus pin and caught versus cot.

Hear it now? Because if you’re from the South (say, Lixingtin, Kintucky) that first pair probably sounded the same, as did the second if you’re from out West (say, Lahs Angeles). It’s called merging word classes, and about half the country is doing it these days. Homophones are appearing where they weren’t before, and with them, so are miscommunications. “I do” in holy matrimony used to sound different from the dew on the grass, or else you must have been talking about dog doo; but across this continent, most people now favor the French-sounding ieu in all cases. Which and witch used to sound different (hhhwitch and witch) for two Americans out of three, whereas now only a few sticklers bother to sound that wispy aspiration. Don’t blame mass media, for our national speech isn’t homogenizing: Small-time accents might be blending into their respective regions, but those regional distinctions are more pronounced now than ever. Starting about 50 years ago, the people in the metropolitan areas of the Midwest (Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago) started heightening their short vowels (meaning the tongue, when pronouncing them, points higher in the mouth: man becomes meean instead of maahn) in what’s known as the “Northern cities vowel shift.”

This is all well documented. But it’s not at all clear why it’s happening. Sociolinguists have postulated that a sort of social Darwinism gradually directs language change: that whenever two sounds compete, the winner shall be the one to which more people attach a social prestige. After all, ever since the Gileadites ferreted out the Ephraimites by the latter’s failure to pronounce the sh in shibboleth, people have judged one another based on their accents. The sociolinguists’ theory makes sense, except that it doesn’t explain the long history of lower-class sounds being adopted by the population at large, and it’s just as mysterious how the Midwestern eeaccent would have become, by that logic, a status symbol.

or the Yale sub-study, Bowern set out to measure the Northern cities vowel shift in microcosm — what happens when you take 18-year-olds from

all over the world, from all different backgrounds, and let them talk it out? How would Darwinism shape the dialect for this concentrated population in a concentrated period? But better yet, this is no ordinary playground peer pressure. This is Yale, one of those rare institutions that has, for centuries, refined and elevated only the most proper order of speaking by refining and elevating only the most proper order of men; the breeding ground of that voice heard round suppers with as many forks as courses, the one that Tom Wolfe in 1976 termed “the honk”; where they learned that dropping only the right r’s (fuhst for first but never fo’ud for forward) was as important as unbuttoning only the lowest button of your waistcoat, and as important as, for being so important to, surrounding yourself with the right crowd. And even after coeducation and financial aid and the attending shift (at least nominally) from an aristocratic impulse to a meritocratic one, there remains at Yale, just as do the (now nonfunctional) fireplaces in every dorm room and the windowless tombs of the senior societies, the firmest notion of upward phonetic mobility. It’s the belief that by eschewing Rhine in Spine in favor of Raeyn in Spaeyn, anyone from anywhere can pull himself up by his own diphthongs, because language says as much about where you’re from as where you’re going. Accents are as much an intrinsic part of our socially defined identities as birthplace, wealth, gender, ethnicity, and just about anything else you can think of to judge a person by. Except accents are malleable. Even contagious.

Professor Bowern notes that she now says cawffee instead of cohffee, adopting a vowel she didn’t have back in Australia but picked up in New Haven (which, by the


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way, locals always pronounce New HAY–ven, whereas the part-time population tends to favor NEW Haven).

Sociolinguists like Bowern call this the “interview effect” or “accommodation theory”: the tendency of people to adapt their accents to the person they’re talking to — provided they like them. Otherwise they may amplify the dialectic differences. The latter was the social dynamic that William Labov, the pioneering sociolinguist now at the University of Pennsylvania, found in his legendary study of Martha’s Vineyard, whose small native population, after centuries of isolation from mainland New England, suddenly faced an influx of rich vacationers; in response, a small group of fishermen began exaggerating an existing tendency in their speech as a way to distance themselves from the standard English of the summer invaders who, in their judgment, threatened their traditional home and way of life.

In the latest edition of Principles of Linguistic Change, Labov writes that the Vineyarders’ shift, while a marker of identity, happened subconsciously. When accents do rise to the level of social awareness, it usually relates to some stigma or prestige, as in New York, where Labov’s famous department store experiment found that sales associates at Saks were more likely to sound the final or preconsonantal r in “fourth floor” than their counterparts at Macy’s, who in turn spoke more r-fully than the staff at Klein’s. “Changes from above usually involve superficial and isolated features of language,” Labov writes. “They tell us little about the systematic forces that mold the history of dialect divergence.” So he, too, is still searching for possible social explanations for the Northern cities vowel shift. One of the more curious correlations he has considered is the one

between Northern dialect speakers and Democratic voters.

hese are just the kind of social and socioeconomic

dimensions, as they map onto geography, that Bowern is investigating. By the beginning of October she had

collected enough data from Yalies to begin the analysis — just 75 voice samples this time. She was all ready to go with a computer program that would automatically use sound waves to detect the spaces between the words, splice up the recordings, and graph the frequencies at which the vowels resonated. Every vowel has a natural range of frequencies on two curves, called formants (although it sounded to me like Bowern was saying foments), and the slightest change in pronunciation

registers a slightly different frequency. This is how the advanced computer program would precisely detect and quantify human speech.

And had the test subjects been computers, it would have worked out fine. But the humans counted to twelve instead of ten, or got interrupted by a roommate opening the door, or spoke too quickly and strung the words together (loud-bad-log-pen-tide-pool-lie-home-boy-gun — Bowern acknowledges that, in hindsight, home-boy was probably not the best juxtaposition; same goes for chicken-hat), or supplemented the given list of words with a string of expletives (line, dollar, cot, see, fawn, shit, fuck, damn … ). But more troublingly, the parsing program was reporting different measurements every time Bowern ran the script — a pretty bad sign for both accuracy and replicability. When she removed the uncooperative samples and ran the data again, she found a small but statistically significant difference between freshman and senior women (although not men). She wants to redo the study next year during the first week of classes, perhaps getting more participants

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alison vivinetto / contributing photographer

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by sneaking it into the barrage of mandatory freshman orientation activities. In the meantime, Bowern got a new software program and an eight-core super-processor to avoid similar hang-ups as she moves on to the continent-wide study.

In all, processing the data will take about another six months. When it’s done, Bowern hopes the study could do to accents what genetics did to race: namely, show that it lacks any scientific basis as a source of discrimination. “A lot of dialects are quite highly stigmatized in the U.S., and ultimately, when it comes down to a difference of whether F1 is at 420 hertz versus 430 hertz, it seems like a pretty trivial reason to discriminate against someone,” she says, “though it’s widespread.”

owern says she plans to make the data available for all non-commercial research purposes. Meanwhile, she acknowledges the

commercial interest of better understanding accents for speech technology companies. The largest, Nuance Communications Inc., based in Burlington, Massachusetts, projects that its 2010 sales will reach $1.2 billion. Jeff Foley, Nuance’s resident expert on accents, says the company has collected enough data to accommodate accents without compromising accuracy. “The system learns over time that if people calling in

tend to pronounce things a certain way, we can adjust the models to lean in that direction,” he says.

That means the system knows to tolerate New Yorkers who put two syllables in four and Southerners who end their sentences with “sir” or “ma’am” and people who spell using expressions like “A as in apple.” Foley says the technology for call centers is 98 to 99 percent accurate, as good as, or sometimes better than, a trained human operator. The system starts with a realm of possible responses to the given prompt — an expected script — and then tries to match the sounds it hears to the possible choices, Foley explains. It weighs the probabilities of each potential match and, if it’s not confident enough about any of them, asks the subject to try again. All the while, it listens for vocal cues that can help it narrow its parameters by figuring that the speaker talks a certain way and adjusting its expectations to suit that model.

In other words, computers have learned to make sense out of sounds in much the same way people do. Someday, they’ll be able to speak the sounds back just as well. With current technology, synthesizing a natural-sounding voice requires a tedious, finicky and expensive process of recording a real human voice talent, which is why the ones you hear tend to be nondescript and inoffensive. “You don’t want to have a Valley girl or a Deep South voice because any extreme might tick people off,” says Juergen Horst, a researcher for AT&T — just as you rarely hear such voices in, say, a Yale seminar.

But within five years, Horst says, it’s conceivable that computers will be able to synthesize voices in real time from broadcasts, user commands or even individual callers. Then they could learn to accommodate the accent of whomever they’re speaking to, just like people do subconsciously. The computer will detect hhhwhich word classes you merge and measure the height of your a’s and listen for which r’s you drop to figure out who you are, where you’re from, and how you want to be spoken to. But it’s not judging.

{–––}


ya l e c e n t e r f o r b r i t i s h a r t

lectures 5:30 pm

March 2 Portraits of a Pope in Captivity and Restoration: J. L. David, J. A. D. Ingres, and Thomas LawrenceThomas Crow, Rosalie Solow professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

March 23 Rebecca Salter: Scratching the Surface Achim-Borchardt-Hume, Chief Curator, Whitechapel Gallery

1080 Chapel Street yale.edu/ycba

Visit our website for a full schedule of free talks, tours, films and concerts.

on view“into the light of things”: Rebecca Salter, works 1981–2010

Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance

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expect the unexpected PHOTO ESSAY BY mAdiSOn grinnEll


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I’ve never known how to interact with people on the streets: how to say no, politely, to pleas for change; how to strike up a conversation after I’ve already closed off, walked away.

I’ve written before about “the homeless,” and especially about how they constitute A Big Problem. Last winter break, I had similar Big Plans: I wanted to travel around a few East Coast cities with major homeless populations before coming back to Yale to write about them. I wanted to know why the homeless lived where they lived, if the people we saw in New Haven year-round were there by choice or necessity. Was it possible that even without a roof, places may be more “home” to some people than to others?

But these were intellectual questions that got lost in the fray. I realized that before asking the homeless questions, I first needed to learn how to talk to them.

My high school friend David traveled with me because he was curious about journalism, we were both on break, my mother was worried, he’s male, and he’s impressively bearded, in approximately that order. Unlike me with my abstract musings, David was interested in the practical questions: how do we approach the people who call these streets home? What can we offer them?

Where do we begin?

They know right away we’re different. We have the college-student air about us, as if our puffy coats and hesitancy tell the world we are educated, eager and

unsure. It is the day after New Year’s, and David and I have walked unannounced into Cathedral Community Cares, a soup kitchen in the basement of St. John’s Church in uptown Manhattan. The underground room, with its tangerine stools and basketball-court floors, looks like an elementary school cafeteria that has been plopped into the same school’s gym. We stand awkwardly apart from the line of people waiting to get food until someone says the magic words: “You here to help?”

Sure, we nod, we might as well volunteer, right? And immediately, we are set to work crafting mashed potatoes. I look over to David, brow furrowed with concentration as he mixes our concoction with an egg beater, looking a little silly as one hairnet covers his longish hair, another his beard. We meet eyes; I shrug. In the back of the kitchen, we are separated from everyone except our fellow volunteers. Later that evening, we mix lemonade and iced tea and cut bread pudding at another church uptown, but we can’t bring ourselves to talk to the people we serve with more than a generic “how are you doing tonight?” All day, it has been like this: David and I rushing

about trying to find places the homeless inhabit, but even now with them all around us, we can only smile, give them helpings of salad, chat idly. How can we ever find deeper answers to our questions this way? We go back to our hostel resolved to have “real interactions” with the people in our next location: Washington, D.C., a Megabus ride away.

The McDonald’s near D.C.’s Chinatown is open 24 hours a day and is a homeless hot spot. Holding our trays of unhealthy but immensely shareable items (French

fries, nuggets, two kinds of cookies), we decide to scout out people with whom we can talk. Couple in the corner, talking animatedly. Man with daughter. Not homeless. Not homeless.

Then we spy a guy sitting sullenly by himself in the middle of the second floor. He has two backpacks and tassels of plastic bags hanging from his baggy pants. Despite the paper cup of coffee in front of him, he looks as if he were falling asleep right at the table. We go over and offer him some cookies without explanation. He eats one, silently chewing, answering our show of enthusiasm with one-word grunts. We wish he would talk to us, but instead he leaves. Some pang hits me: did we make him uncomfortable enough to go away? We wanted to be friendly, but our idle chatter only drove him from us.

Exiting McDonald’s and walking on the block back to the hostel, we pass this same man standing next to a pile of things, looking for all the world as if he were waiting for something but also, as he shuffles his feet, as if he has nowhere to go. He doesn’t seem to recognize us; we walk on. Tomorrow, we think: tomorrow we’ll find people to talk to. We’ll actually ask questions.

In the morning, we venture to the Georgetown Ministries Center, a homeless organization we had heard about from another volunteer. A couple people are waiting outside

the brick alleyway building; it is 9:50 a.m., approximately 10 minutes before they open. A man sticks his head out the door when he sees David and me approaching and asks what we want. “Oh, look, they’re real people,” one of the men waiting outside says. “Let the REAL people in. Georgetown doesn’t want to see us. Hide us!”

This is sarcasm characteristic of Larry, we learn. The people there waiting to be let in, especially Larry, certainly don’t look homeless. Larry is well-shaven with a red polo shirt stretched taut over his belly, light blue jeans, and a grey Columbia fleece;

street's eye viewBy Kanglei Wang

Illustrations by Chika Ota


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everything about him is clean. Among other services, Georgetown Ministries allows the homeless who register with them to take showers multiple times a week as well as do their laundry, things worth the wait. Larry looks behind my shoulder. “Harry!” he cries. “Harry, where’ve you been?” Harry just smiles and says, “Around.” He is wearing a tweed sweater and has twinkling eyes behind glasses with detachable sunglass frames that he has decided to flip up and away from the lens for the moment, retro-style.

As the doors to the center opens, the crowd grows. Altogether, we fit into most of the ten or so chairs, with some spaces in between. I sit next to Larry, who, I find out, used to be a car salesman and is now homeless by choice. Some winters he decides to brave it out in the cold; this year, though, he’s staying indoors with some friends at night until the spring arrives. The rest of the day, he’s on his own. With Larry’s immaculate appearance

and articulateness, no one stops him from entering D.C.’s many libraries and museums. But by being clean, he also doesn’t get soup kitchen hand-outs and most homeless shelters won’t accept him.

Harry, meanwhile, refuses to sleep in shelters and has been spending his nights in the woods surrounding D.C. Some days he’ll wake up to raccoons, but he says he’d rather trust animals than people anyway. He launches into a detailed story about fighting — naked, primal — with dogs, against the sunset in Kazakhstan or Tajikistan … one of the stan’s, he says. And I wonder if he is reliving a dream, telling stories about his multiple girlfriends

and wives in Libya, how he once had a credit card for buying plane tickets, how he got beat up in Australia and Thailand and was left to die. Bill, another man sitting next to Larry, tells me how the homeless have to watch out for themselves locally, too: he was simply sleeping outside one night and got attacked. He shows me the pink scars on his head and face by his beard.

David and I are nodding and nodding, incredulous at these scenes unfolding before us. We both think at this point: finally, this is the gold mine! This is the sort of interaction we have been looking for, with people who are so naturally open with us.

Suddenly, a towering figure with arms crossed steps out into the sitting room, and with a slight upward flick of the chin, asks us, “Can I see you two for a minute?”

“Ooh, they’re in troubleee,” says Larry, chuckling.In the back of the center in a small office space

crammed with knit items — old ladies love to donate to

Georgetown Ministries, and the center has more scarves, gloves, and hats than they can manage — we sit across from Roy Witherspoon, who is the Outreach Director of the Georgetown Ministries Center.

“Now what are you here for?” he asks us. He wants to know our exact purpose, and slowly it comes out. I’m writing an article for school on the homeless, I say. What exactly it’s about, I’m not sure. The focus keeps changing.

“That’s fine,” Roy says, “But you have to be clear when you’re talking to people. Otherwise, all kinds of things could be going on in their minds. Be honest.”

David and I had always felt awkward to say, “Hi, we’re



writing something. Can we interview you?” We wanted organic conversations, like the ones happening just moments ago, and were afraid of how people would judge us otherwise.

But we weren’t thinking that people might not want their stories told. We just expected them to tell their stories to two strangers who wouldn’t even state their agenda. Unlike the man in McDonald’s, they were willing to talk. But why weren’t we?

Often the homeless have no protector, and Roy is looking out for them. And when he says all kinds of things are going on in their minds, he doesn’t just mean the regular paranoia people face in exposing their lives to journalists. After the 1970's, an era when wide-sweeping changes shut down mental institutions across the country, and for good reason, what happened to the people inside them? Many of them are now on the streets, and the Center cares for homeless who are mentally ill. While predictions for mentally ill homeless populations vary from 15% (according to a UCSD study) to 20% (the National Coalition for Homelessness) to 40 or 50% (Psychiatric News), Gunther Stern, the director of the Center, who has been working with the homeless population for close to 30 years, says almost all the homeless he’s encountered, even those who do not seek help at the Center, have been mentally ill.

Among them are certainly the people we’ve already talked to in the sitting room — for example, Harry, we are told, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He is currently on medication but often doesn’t take it. So while we were only wishing to hide our identities to appear more friendly, they could have been sizing us up, wondering about our motives.

When we come out again, David and I explain to the group exactly what we’re up to. “So the truth comes out,” says Larry. “You’re using us.” And even as I try not to take his sarcasm personally — even as Bill and Larry continue to joke with us and Harry goes on about his world adventures, as if our newly revealed agenda hadn’t changed anything — I wonder how much truth Larry’s statement has.

Darkness falls on D.C., and David and I separate for the first time this trip. He meets up with some friends while I go on a neighborhood walk

with Gunther and Ron Koshes, the Center’s consulting psychiatrist. They take this evening walk every week to keep track of the homeless who are staying out at night.

We approach a man standing outside a convenience store with his hands in his pockets. “Do you want to go in tonight?” Ron asks.

“I’m fine,” he answers. “Do you know where the nearest shelter is?”“Where is it?” he asks, almost absently. Gunther tells

him the directions — two blocks away — and gives him a card with the hypothermia hot-line number. (This number can actually be useful since many of the homeless have and use cell phones with pre-paid minutes, to keep track of their buddies.)

The man thanks him monosyllabically; Ron and Gunther can do no more. Ron records the man and his location on a small yellow pad. Sometimes, the familiar names disappear when the homeless have shifted neighborhoods. Other times, they may find or hear news of folks dead from the cold. Ron is there because Gunther alone is legally powerless. Only a psychiatrist can file the paperwork for deeming someone enough of a hazard to himself or to others to forcibly take him to a shelter. These cases are rare: “like when someone’s out wearing a T-shirt in this weather,” Ron explains.

“Don’t you feel frustrated?” I ask them, feeling guilty that they — we — cannot do more. I think, what is even the point of taking these walks, reaching out, if it doesn’t lead to tangible change? But they tell me the whole point of Georgetown Ministries is to build a relationship with people so that when — if — they are ready, they know who to turn to, who to trust.

We stop by the West End Library — a public space the homeless use to stay warm. Libraries everywhere have their rules — being quiet

and no eating or drinking are the most common — but here, one is also not allowed to fall asleep under any circumstances (meaning the homeless cannot snooze in the daytime in a warm space), and furthermore, a crate by the checkout counter specifies the maximum bag size one can have (meaning the homeless cannot carry in more than a backpack full of their possessions, and must leave all the rest outside).

The homeless of this library are luckier than most; the head librarian is an advocate of the homeless cause in his own small way and sometimes looks the other way when some rules are broken. We meet him just outside the door: a tall, balding man who looks like the husband farmer in American Gothic, stern but with the possibility of having a bright smile. Before moving on, he tells Gunther about an event in D.C. next week addressing mental illness and homeless in particular.

“Wow, what a nice librarian,” I say. “He’s so understanding.” Ron makes a grunt of disagreement. “Well, the library’s supposed to be open to the community,” he says.

Inside, Gunther greets Shakira, a woman in pink with a big smile; next to her is a man whose desk space is littered with little trinkets. I would have had no idea that they were homeless before Gunther walked over. As we walk over, the trinket man suddenly presents me with an ornament, a bird painted with sparkly colors. “For you,”


he says.“Uh, I don’t think that’s such a good…” Gunther says,

while Ron says, “Take it!” My hand is already reaching for the gift.

I accept, and we chat. I learn his name is Damien. He’s a martial arts expert, learned judo, tae kwon do, karate, and jujitsu. He went to competitions and used to teach as well but teaching adults got too difficult for him. “They always

think they know what to do,” he says. He asks if I can do kung fu and I shake my head and tell him about my failed martial arts lessons — I can never keep at it — and he says, “You just got to be patient. Just keep doing it.” He tells me how he built a birdhouse out of popsicles at the crafts group at Miriam’s Kitchen, another D.C. organization that takes in the homeless. At the last minute, the stick house structure collapsed, but he’s still building another one, at least when he’s not reading Bruce Lee books in the library. He likes birds, which is why he gave me one. “I’ll name it Damien,” I say.

But before I can ask him anything further — about his life, his other thoughts, his and Shakira’s stories — Gunther signals to move on, and I have to say good-bye. After we’ve left, Gunther says quietly, “I didn’t know if you were really enjoying that conversation or not. I can never tell.” He was trying to free me, but I had liked Damien very much.

Outside, Gunther declares, “He keyed in on you.”“Hm?” What’s that?“The homeless have got survival skills you and I

would never need,” replies Ron. “They know how to spot someone in a crowd and know who’s more likely to give them money.” So they “key in” on those people, perform some kind of nice gesture, say hello in hopes of a tangible reciprocation.

But I don’t want to believe my Damien bird is part of this survival skill. I want to believe Damien when he tells me about his life; I want to believe his encouraging words about martial arts were genuine.

Gunther can tell I’m feeling a bit upset. “Are we jaded?” Gunther asks Ron.

“I think it’s better to know how things are,” Ron says. “You’re young and naive and guilt-ridden,” Gunther

says. “Stop it.” And he is right, pointing out that my feeling sorry does nothing. By feeling sorry for the homeless, I am only thinking less of a different way of living.

“We think it’s hardship,” Gunther says. “To them, it’s just their way of life. They’re not unhappy … they have a community.”

And for the homeless who are mentally ill especially, four walls and a roof are sometimes a curse instead of a blessing: when it’s quiet, the voices come. So the streets can be freeing, even if it means being cold or looked down upon, even if it means relying on strangers for bread in the public eye.

After leaving D.C., David and I are back in New York, mulling over our thoughts, before heading up to New Haven for the final leg of our trip.

On the subway shuttle from Times Square to Grand Central Station, we meet a familiar sight. A man comes into our subway car and starts speaking. He begins with disclaimers: “I’m not homeless,” he says. “I’m sorry to take your time….” The others on the shuttle turn away from him. People look at the ground, at their fingernails. They are annoyed. Perhaps ashamed. I look over at the man, who is now explaining that he works for an organization called We Feed the Homeless. He is asking for donations: food, money, anything.

I look over at David. I’m still hesitant: what should we do? Should we donate?

It’s David who decides. “Let’s go talk to him,” he says.We shake hands with this George Jenkins, don’t give

him any of what he is asking for from the subway patrons, but he tells us about his life anyway. This is part of his volunteer job; he comes out here twice a week for two hours apiece, usually on this particular shuttle and also on the F and A trains, where many homeless slough away their nights. He is toting a SpongeBob SquarePants cooler on wheels; it's filled with food people donate that he then redistributes. The monetary donations, too, he directly gives back to the homeless he meets on the subways so they can buy food when he has none handy, or so they can buy toiletries. He’s fed seven or eight homeless in the past one-and-a-half hours.

And if he has enough food, he feeds anyone else who is hungry, too: when the well-dressed of Manhattan talk amongst themselves of hunger, he gives them a sandwich. “It isn’t just the homeless who are hungry,” he says.

Once, he saw a woman with a little girl who said she was hungry. He gave the woman 10 dollars to buy something to eat.

The next time he was out, another lady on the train asked him, “Were you that guy last week who gave that woman 10 dollars? I watched her, and she went up and bought a nine-dollar magazine.”

“Okay,” George said.



“You’re young and naive and guilt-ridden,” Gunther says. “Stop it.” By feeling sorry for the homeless, I am only thinking less of a different way of living.


“Doesn’t that bother you?” the woman asked.“No,” he responded. It didn’t bother him, he says,

because when he gave her the money, he intended it to feed her. Whether or not she used it that way was her choice.

“Only God knows and I know if this money is going to feed the homeless,” he says. “I can only put it out there.” Twenty years ago, he went through the shelter program himself and knows the stigma that comes with asking for donations on the subway. “If people keep seeing you and know what you do, they start trusting you,” he says. Some people nowadays, he says, don’t even wait for him to start talking — they just donate as soon as he gets into the subway car.

The shuttle has gone back and forth a few times now. Before David and I get off, we leave George with a mishmash of salad, grapefruit, cookies, and two rolls of bread — our dinner. He blesses us and the lady sitting across the train smiles.

But he had given us something, too: some kind of conviction that giving is good, even if you can’t know the results. It didn’t matter to him what people thought of him or whether he was actually helping so long as his intention was to help.

He was moving instead of standing still, answering instead of questioning.

Back on campus, David and I walk down Whalley Ave. It is nearing late afternoon. We are just by Popeye’s when from our right, a man pushing a

shopping cart pops out singing, “I’m a believer, I couldn’t leave her,” hand moving to the beat, head bobbing with purple-black Aviators.

He, Antonio, and his buddy, Steve, are rolling their shopping carts, bottoms semi-covered with bottles, around the streets, scouting for more recyclable items they can later turn in for cash. They get up at 4:30 every morning to beat the recycling trucks.

“Let’s go up, cash these in, then go to Yale,” Steve says to Antonio. Antonio has an appointment at the Yale-New Haven Hospital to take out stitches from the region under his right eyebrow. He had gotten nicked in the face by a stereo as someone was moving one down the stairs.

Antonio and Steve have been buddies for six years now, looking out for each other. “We fool around, have fun,” Steve says.

While Antonio has two kids — he tears up when he starts talking about them — Steve is single, with no kids. “I need to take care of myself first,” he says. His mother, though, lives in North Haven; he calls her every night.

“EVERY NIGHT!” Antonio proclaims, laughing. “He’s not really homeless.”

“It’s true. I’m not always homeless,” Steve says. But for the past six years, he’s been living more or less on



the streets. Sometimes he stays with friends and then on the street again for a couple of days. He’d rather do that than bother anyone. A couple of years ago, he was drinking in a park, fell asleep, and woke up in the hospital on life support after having fallen into a coma. Antonio was the one who found him on the bench and called the ambulance. Steve doesn’t drink very much anymore (“the

second time,” he says, “I might be dead”), and he makes sure the person who loves him at least knows he’s safe.

While we talk, others join the group, saying hello to Steve and Antonio; quickly, we become a crowd. I am starting to feel a bit uncomfortable. The past few weeks, the homeless I’ve met have felt distant; I’d only have to give to them once, if at all. And though I wanted Gunther and Ron to convince the people on the D.C. streets to go in — to make them go, if they could — because then they would be inside and warm, yes, was it also so I wouldn’t have to face them? Here in New Haven, my home, at least for now, I can’t hide from homelessness — I can’t hide from my own discomfort.

A woman taps me on the back. “Can I talk to you about something?” she says.

“Um, sure,” I say, my defenses already up.“I’m hungry. Will you buy me something?” She

gestures towards Popeye’s.I look over at David. He shrugs. I shrug. I wonder if

she has keyed in on me. But then, I think, no: remember George on the subway. Believe her. What happens when people are hungry in the interim between shelters, when it’s 3 p.m. and the earliest shelter doesn’t open until 5 p.m. at Broadway? It’s not a matter of starvation, but a matter of hunger, and maybe that is no less legitimate, I think.

But when I agree to accompany her to Popeye’s, Antonio shakes his head.

“C’mon,” she tells Steve and Antonio and the rest of the folks. “She’s treatin’.”

“No, I won’t take their money,” Steve says. “I’ve got my food stamps.”

“When you’re hungry later,” she says, pointing her finger at Steve, “You remember this moment. You remember.” And so I treat her with the little change I have to a simple meal: some chicken, some biscuits. But in the back of my mind, I still wonder about her background, wonder, when she takes her food and leaves, if I am being

used.Later, I find out Steve has told David, “Don’t let her take

advantage of you. We can take care of ourselves. We’ve got food stamps. We can move up.”

And as I see her walk out the door, I realize I have been trying so hard to ingratiate myself with the homeless that I’ve forgotten that true generosity has to be meant, not given out of guilt. Ron and Gunther do not need to believe a person is good or “real” to help them. Sometimes, their drop-ins at the center don’t remember them the next day; most likely, something is interfering with their judgment. On the streets, they are curt with many of the people they meet, no-nonsense. Ron and Gunther try to recommend that these street-dwellers go to a shelter, but if they don’t, they know it’s not their fault.

While we are saying goodbye to Steve and Antonio, we meet Ali. At 35, Ali wants a family, starting with a wife. “Hook me up, Steve,”

he says, looping an arm around Steve. “I need one for myself,” Steve replies jovially. “What every healthy young man wants is a woman,” Ali says.

But Ali is not necessarily healthy. In jail, he drank a mixture of cleaning products — all wax and ammonia-based — to try to end his life. Now his left side — his heart and left lung — is all rotted out. He has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

In the past ten years, Ali has had fifteen jobs on the same New Haven street — Whalley Ave. — including the Popeye’s. But now he can’t work. His disability hearing is next week. He wants to show them he’s ready; if he gets it, he will receive $30,000 a year.

“I’ll get fixed up,” he says. Get a Park Avenue apartment, make a turkey dinner with seasoning, mashed potatoes with garlic, like his mother used to make. “I’ll invite you for dinner,” he says. And before we leave, he says again, “We’ll hang out. Coffee sometime? My treat.”

And I am struck that this man who is still trying to figure out his life would make these promises. Perhaps they are empty, but probably he means it. What should I believe? Does it matter? It’s not up to me how he decides to live his life.

“What can an ordinary person do for the homeless?” I ask David along our journey.

“That presumes the question that the homeless person needs help,” he replies. “Besides, what you would do for Larry is different from what you would do for someone else.” Different from what I’d do for Damien, or the woman on Whalley, or Ali.

I pause before replying. “Yea,” I say. “Yea.”

qWq


The others on the shuttle turn away from him. People look at the ground, at their fingernails. They are annoyed. Perhaps ashamed.


V W'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'W 31

Unfinished BUsiness

By Max de La Bruyère and eliana dockterman

Photos by Brianne Bowen

ale’s first goal of the North Dakota game last March could have missed the net in any number of ways. It could have bounced

off one of the three defenders between Tom Dignard ’10 and the goal. On its flight toward the net, it could have missed the outstretched stick of Denny Kearney ’11. After the puck hit Kear-ney’s stick, it could have slid away from the goal or at another player. Instead, it bounced off the ice, under the stick of one Fighting Sioux defender, over the stick of another, and past the glove of the baffled goalie. Not even six minutes into the game, Yale led, 1–0.

Hockey is a frustrating sport. It is played with a small disc of rubber that bounces strangely off skates and pads and sticks. There are none of the care-fully choreographed plays of football. Rather, there is constant motion and therefore a constant chance of witness-ing a terrible mistake, a big hit, or a bril-liant goal. But goals rarely result from

dazzling individual efforts or obvious blunders. They come after desperate scrambles in front of the net, when the puck disappears from sight among a crush of players, and then suddenly the red light behind the backboard flashes. Goals don’t come on the prettiest of plays when the prone, beaten goalie throws his stick up in desperation and somehow makes contact with the puck. They come on routine slap shots that manage to find their way past well-positioned goalies.

The Yale men’s hockey team was playing the biggest game in school his-tory when it took the ice against the vaunted North Dakota squad on March 27 in the NCAA Northeast Regionals. The Fighting Sioux were seven-time NCAA champions. Yale had never won an NCAA tournament game. If the Bulldogs won, they would be one of the last eight teams left standing. But few thought the Ivy Leaguers stood a chance against a team full of scholar-ship players. “We kind of knew that we were playing with house money,”

then-captain Ryan Donald ’10 said after the game ended. “Not too many people were expecting too much out of us.” Yale scored twice more before North Dakota could manage a response. The favorites never recovered. By the end of the night, the men in blue and white were swarming goaltender Ryan Ron-deau ’11. They had captured their first NCAA tournament win ever and upset a school with an undergraduate enroll-ment twice that of Yale’s.

The next day, Yale played Boston College (BC). The Elis lost 9-7. It was the highest scoring tournament game in fifty years and the last serious chal-lenge BC faced on its road to winning the 2010 national championship.

This year’s team has already sur-passed last year’s. In December, it be-came the first ever Yale hockey team to hold the No. 1 national ranking and re-mained in the top spot for eight consec-utive weeks. But the players and their coach, Keith Allain ’80 — the architect of the team’s rise since his arrival five years ago — insist that the only ranking that matters is the one at the end of the season. This year’s NCAA tournament begins March 25th.

In the final weeks of the regular sea-

son, the players drift into practice in groups of two or four. They remove their headphones and shoes at the door and peer through a glass wall at their teammates, who are already kicking around a soccer ball to warm up. They meander toward the locker room, nod-ding through a window at Coach Allain in his office. After muffled yells and laughter, each group emerges from the locker room, sporting grey T-shirts that read “Unfinished Business.”

The goal this year is not only re-demption on the national stage but also the restoration of Yale’s

former glory. 115 years ago, Malcolm Chace and Arthur Foote traveled to Canada to represent Yale in a tennis tournament. Chace had held the inter-collegiate singles title for the past two years, and the pair had a doubles cham-


32 W'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'WW'W V

Y


pionship under their belt. In 1896, however, they changed the face of a different sport. Fascinated by a game they saw Canadians play-ing on frozen ponds, they decided to form a club team at Yale. Col-legiate ice hockey was born. On February 1st, the Bulldogs, cap-tained by Chace — who his team-mates called the “the blond-haired wonder” — tied Johns Hopkins in the first college hockey game in American history.

The Johns Hopkins team fold-ed after only a few years. Yale kept playing. It was successful early on when there was little college hockey outside the Ivy League. Those early Elis played all their games at an outdoor rink in New York and won enough to capture intercollegiate titles in 1899, 1900, and 1902. Then came a slump. Yale’s hockey players stayed far from the national stage for the next century, save for two magi-cal years in 1952 and 1998 when they qualified for the NCAA tour-nament but were knocked out in the first round.

Charlie Pillsbury ’70, former roommate of Gary Trudeau, was a member of the Yale hockey team when it was composed of a mis-cellany of men who played other varsity sports in the offseason. George W. Bush came to all the home games and taunted oppos-ing goalies. Pillsbury explains, “We were the last year before they started recruiting. The only Canadian we had was some Jew from Quebec,” he says, referring to his longtime friend Joel Bard. “The next year, there were six Ca-nadians.”

Keith Allain ’80, was in that new wave of recruited players, playing goalie for

all four years. Before he returned to Yale in April 2006, Allain had been coaching in the NHL. To many, the Ivy League job might

have seemed like a demotion of sorts. Instead, Allain saw it as a homecoming. He told the New York Times, “I took the job first and foremost because it was Yale. I don’t think I would have looked at college if it wasn’t Yale.” The year prior to Allain’s arrival, the Bulldogs went 10-20. National rec-ognition did not seem a reality.

From his office one February afternoon, Allain looks past ev-erything that might distract him from a national title. There is a group of reporters asking him the same questions as last week, but through the window he stud-ies the movements of the play-ers roaming in the hall between the weight room and the locker room. He leans back in a large swivel desk chair and props his bare feet — which he has just re-moved from the sandals that lay under the desk and which he will soon lace into skates for practice — up on a small grey table.

His office is uncluttered and unadorned. Only two photos sit on his shelf, and the rest of the space is occupied by DVDs of game footage and books with titles such as Coaching the Mental Game, Why Teams Win, and what must be the latter’s sequel, Why We Win. Wall decorations consist of three white boards. Two are allotted for plays, bearing the outlines of hockey rinks and marked with arrows in various colors. Scribbled across the final white board are a few key phrases: “goaltending,” “team defense,” “leadership,” “disci-pline,” “desire to improve,” and fi-nally, “maintain our identity.” The office, like the coach, is focused, devoted, and unwavering. Allain stops to blow a small bubble but, changing his mind, rolls the gum he's chewing back into his mouth and turns his dour blue eyes to the sports columnists: “Winning is a process,” he says.

And Yale has been patient —

slowly working through the so-called winning process since 1896. Allain has sped that process up. Each year since his arrival, the team has tiptoed closer to the na-tional stage. In Allain’s first sea-son, the team struggled to a 11-17-3 record. In every season since, it has won more games than it has lost. Yale won the Eastern Col-lege Athletic Conference (ECAC) Championship in Allain’s third season and posted a 24-8-2 re-cord, its best in years. Last year, the team won 21 games, includ-ing that memorable game against North Dakota.

Allain’s gift is building a team, not finding indi-viduals. He recruits play-

ers who share his psychology and vision, who want that champion-ship as badly as he does. He re-cruits players who might be over-looked by more storied programs.




meet the seniorsRyan Rondeau no. 1Goaltender hometown: Carvel, Alberta major: Political Science

Rondeau played little his first three years before making a surprise start against North Dakota. The native of 19-person Carvel has been Yale's top goalie since. He was voted "Most Likely to Become a Head Hockey Coach" by his team.

jimmy maRtinno. 2Defensehometown: St. Louis, MO major: Political Science

Martin is the most seasoned Eli defenseman in history: he has skated in every game since he came to Yale. He now captains the team and has showcased his skill and leadership all year — his +23 rating leads the team.

mike matczak no. 7Defensehometown: Sewell, NJmajor: Political Science

Matczak, who plays alongside Martin on Yale's top defensive pairing, is a physical presence and a smooth passer who leads the team's defensemen in assists. The Elis recognize his blasts from the blue line as the hardest shot on the team.

ken tRentowski

no. 12Defense

hometown: Ronkonkoma, NY

major: Political Science

The gritty Trentowksi is among the team's steadiest and most dependable players.

He scores rarely but lets his opponents get by him even less. His +16 rating for the

season is fifth on the team.

BRoc LittLe

no. 14Right wing

hometown: Rindge, NH


Little led the country in goals per game last year and is known by his teammates for his constant competitiveness. He has slumped recently, but he is one of Yale's

nominees for the Hobey Baker Award, given to the best player in college hockey.

denny keaRney

no. 19Left wing

hometown: Hanover, NH


Kearney, Yale's other Hobey Baker Award nominee, was the hero of last year's North

Dakota win, with two of the team's three goals. The suits he puts on after every

game have earned him the designation of "Best Dressed" from his teammates.

BRendan mason no. 22Centerhometown: Nanaimo, BCmajor: Political Science

One of Yale's quickest skaters and hardest workers, Mason has played a crucial role on the checking line this year, shutting down opposing offenses.

chRis cahiLLno. 24Right winghometown: N. Andover, MA major: Political Science

Cahill, who spent last year in Reims, France, played on Allain's first Yale team. He has returned as a hard-shooting, physical presence on Yale's top scoring line.

jeff andeRson no. 44Left winghometown: Port Coquitlam, BC major: Economics

The forward sustained an undisclosed lower body injury that has kept him out of the lineup since early December. His return for the playoffs remains uncertain, but he was voted "Best Singer" by his teammates.


He recruits players who are not nec-essarily the biggest, burliest, or most skilled — those stars want to play for a coach with national championships under his belt. Instead, Yale’s coach-ing staff builds a team with attributes beside pure brawn. “There’s a certain type of player we’re interested in,” says Allain. “I think we look for competi-tiveness first and then speed second.” The building blocks of Yale’s recent glory years have been quick, diminu-tive attackers with a scoring touch.

Brian O’Neill ’12 is just Allain’s type. A forward who often gets less press than some of his flashier teammates, he led Yale in scoring last season and is doing so again this season. His game is a scrappy one of whacking at rebounds and staying in constant motion to get open for a pass. He is optimistically listed in press materials as 5’9”.

O’Neill grew up playing hockey with his twin brother, Brennan. “My

dad played roller hockey growing up and decided it would be a good idea for me to play ice hockey,” he says. O’Neill, whose dad never skated — “I think he always wanted to play ice hockey and just didn’t have the money” — per-ceived hockey as a path to a good edu-cation. Besides loving the sport, O’Neill says, “I thought it was my best way to move up in life.”

To recruit players like O’Neil and build a team that can compete on the national stage, Yale’s coaching staff must compete with behemoths like North Dakota, Minnesota, and Boston College for the top players in the U.S. and Canada. These bigger schools can offer players athletic scholarships, mas-sive fan bases, and home games in front of packed houses of 10,000 or more. (In-galls can fit only 3500). They can also of-fer players academic support; for exam-ple, in 2006, the University of Michigan opened the Ross Academic Center, a 12

million dollar, 38,000 square-foot facil-ity, exclusively for the use of varsity athletes. To remain competitive, Yale's coaching staff often uses the promise of a Yale degree to entice players. “Our selling point,” Allain says, “is that we’re going to allow you to compete at the very highest level of our sport and go to the best university in the world.”

Allain wasted no time revamping the team. “There was a change in coaching style right away,”

says Matt Modelski ’07, a former goalie who was a senior when Allain arrived. “Allain’s practices are shorter. They’re up-tempo.” Allain likes to practice on Sundays. “You can imagine that it changes things when you have to be at the rink at 8 a.m. on a Sunday. It makes you keep your focus. It makes you get your priorities straight,” Modelski says.

Allain prefers that the team’s on-ice sessions be competitive and lively.


The next day, Yale played Boston College.The Elis lost 9-7.

Every drill is a contest between the “blue team” and the “white team,” and the losing side is punished with extra skating. “We look for aggressive people when we recruit, and I think it becomes contagious,” says the coach. “You can sprinkle in a couple of non-aggressive people in an aggressive group, and they have to become aggressive in order to survive.” Every practice is played like a game is on the line. Still, on one defen-sive drill the hard-hitting Chad Ziegler ’12 restrains himself from slamming his teammate into the boards, as he would have with a real opponent. Instead, he merely puts his arm on the back of the player he is trying to stop.

After the last drill of the day, the Elis return to Allain, taking a knee at his feet. A few words of instruction later, he sends them out for the final seg-ment of practice: a mini-game in which the two goals are placed on the two blue lines just 50 feet apart. The atmo-sphere is charged enough that shoves and arguments can break out. Players sometimes smash their sticks on the ice

after missing an easy shot and often si-lently raise their arms in self-reverence when they score. Allain encourages the competition: “If you’re keeping score, you’ll get more intensity and more ex-citement.”

Nick Maricic ’13 is a goalie and thus usually watches these confrontations from afar. He is also a Californian who became interested in hockey when a roller hockey fad, stemming from the 1992 release of the first Mighty Ducks movie, swept through Southern Cali-fornia. He says with a laugh about the intensity of practice: “Guys will be yell-ing at each other and chirping back and forth — chirping is what we call trash talking. But at the same time it’s fun too. Everyone’s playing that hard and competing so hard because they’re hav-ing so much fun doing it.” Sometimes the intensity boils over in practice, but it always settles in the locker room, when the blue and white squads come together again.

During the intermission at a home game, Don Little and Tom Kearney,

the fathers of Broc ’11 and Denny ’11, respectively, muse about such inten-sity. For the last four years, both men have travelled from their homes in New Hampshire to watch their sons’ games and have thus seen how the team has grown with Allain. “I think the coach is a lot like them.” Little says. “They’re very competitive, but he also likes them to have fun. So not only do they like playing for him, but they have a high respect for him.”

For most of the players on the team, Allain is the latest in a long string of coaches. They have

come through youth teams and high schools and, often, full-time junior leagues in gap years before college.

Ryan Rondeau ’11 will turn 25 before he graduates. Before he came to Yale, he spent three years playing junior hockey. Rondeau’s academic hiatus translates to 180 more hockey games than Kenny Agostino ’14, a rare player who came straight from high school. Rondeau first signed with the Alberta



melissa johnson / ConTRiBUTinG phoToGRapheR


Junior Hockey League team, the Can-more Eagles, and then with the Water-loo Blackhawks in Iowa. He, like his fellow junior league players, hoped to draw interest from college coaches and sharpen his skills before matriculating at whichever school would recruit him.

Other players choose to hone their skills by attending boarding schools in the Northeast. This route usually involves spending five years in high school. Mike Matczak ’11, for example, transferred to Milton Academy in Mas-sachusetts, repeated his sophomore year, and played three years on the team there. Whether in the junior leagues or at boarding school, the play-er gets extra seasoning before he makes the jump to the more skilled and more physical college game.

This abnormal recruiting process — 18 of the 28 Elis played junior leagues and are thus older than the average undergraduate — has social implica-tions. Many of the players are either engaged or in long-distance relation-ships. Further, the hockey season lasts five months, far longer than that of most other varsity sports. During these months, the players spend upwards of twenty hours per week at the rink. The team forms an intense bond, eating lunch together most days in Commons, and watching hockey games together at their team house on Edgewood, where eleven of the players live.

Last year, the team translated its countless hours spent together into the unprecedented win

against North Dakota. The immediate effect of the victory was brief elation followed by a return to focus. “We got off the ice, did our regular cool down routine, and just got ready for Boston College the next day,” said Colin Dueck ’13. “We were definitely excited but we were already looking ahead. That’s just how our team works. You always have to look forward.” A win against Boston College would have meant moving on to the Frozen Four, the final four teams of the NCAA tournament.

When the upperclassmen were re-

cruited, a Frozen Four appearance was not on Yale’s radar. Now, says O’Neill, “We’re a legitimate national contend-er. And from my freshman year that wasn’t our goal.” O’Neill and his team-mates now have their sights set only on winning the national championship, looking beyond lesser accomplish-ments like an ECAC title. For this year’s seniors, plans for the future will wait until after the season ends. Still, most would like to continue playing hockey in some capacity and know that the

better the team fares, the better their professional prospects.

And Yale hockey's success has also begun to force Midwestern schools to take the team seriously. But not every-one is convinced. Andrew Miller ’13, who leads the team in assists and hails from Detroit, says, “I know a lot of people at home who don’t even know that Yale has a Division I hockey team.” The story is probably familiar to Yale students: many parents and friends refuse to believe that Yale is a national


melissa johnson / ConTRiBUTinG phoToGRapheR

"Winning is a process." – Coach Keith Allain '80



Between periods at a Yale hockey game, a masked figure takes the ice. Dressed in white spandex,

Captain Freedom skates from the band section to the student section, throw-ing T-shirts into the crowd. His goal: to celebrate America and, of course, to celebrate the hockey team.

A fraternity broth-er at Delta

Kap -pa Epsilon in-

vented Captain Freedom sometime in the 70’s or 80’s. Since

then, the role has been passed down from brother to brother. According to the current Captain Freedom the cri-teria for the role are pretty laidback: “Ideally, it’s someone who can at least functionally skate,” he says. “I definite-ly wouldn’t call myself a great skater.”

The current Captain Freedom grew up a Washington Capitals fan, playing more roller hockey than ice hockey be-fore assuming his role. The transition from rollerblades to ice skates has been somewhat difficult. “If you fall down, people think it’s funny," he says. "And if you stay up, people think it’s funny too, so it’s not something I stress out about.”

At games, each Captain Freedom must don a mask and form-fitting white tank and shorts adorned with red and blue sharpie designs. Much of the out-fit varies from year to year. This year’s Captain Freedom often sports a “God Bless America” vest, which fell into his lap a few months ago. His predecessors were often seen in a cape that he rarely wears but says he will perhaps revive for “special occasions.”

Getting the fans excited this year has not been a particularly tasking job.

First, he attributes much of his success to the Yale Precision Marching Band, who provide musical accompaniment to his routine. Second, since the hockey team has been drawing packed houses, Captain Freedom finds it easy to excite an already enthusiastic crowd: “My job has been easy this year with how un-believable our hockey team has been.”

The T-shirts doled out by Captain Freedom are a fairly new part of the tradition. Donated by Jeremy and Bar-ry Cobden at Campus Customs, the shirts began showing up at games a few years ago and have been a big hit since. “There’s nothing better as a kid than to get a T-shirt at a game," he says, "so I have small sizes that I always try to get to them.” At the Harvard game on February 9, the entire student section began chanting “Little Girl, Little Girl,” calling Captain Freedom’s attention to a little blonde girl perched on the rim of the rink behind the glass. Captain Free-dom teased the crowd, skating from the fan section to the band and back,

cupping his ear with his hand. Finally, he relented and hurled a shirt over the glass. He cites that moment as one of his favorite memories of his tenure: “I actually happen to know that little girl. She’s my dean’s daughter.”

His other favorite memory? Ripping off his shirt at the Yale-Harvard game to expose the words “PUCK HARVARD” scrawled across his torso. “It was kind of a funny superhero thing to do,” he says.

Captain Freedom is, after all, a bit of a superhero figure, with his mask de-signed to hide his identity. But he as-

serts that the real reason for the mask is to keep the focus on the hockey team: “The whole point is we want to get the crowd excited for the hockey team, not draw attention to anything having to do with DKE or myself individually.”

Captain Freedom’s face will only be revealed next year at the knighting cer-emony on the ice for the new Captain Freedom. Captain Freedom assures that his successor will live up to the Captain Freedom name, saying, “There will definitely be a very thorough ex-amination process.”

CAPT. FREEDoM

USA USA USA

USA USA USA

captain freedom



contender in any sport as mainstream as hockey. Around Christmas time, Al-lain coached the national junior team, which brought together players from all the top hockey schools, who were all curious about Yale. “We had players from BC and BU and North Dakota and Minnesota,” says Allain. “And they all wanted to know about the Yale hockey team. ‘How good are you guys? Are you guys that good?’”

During the season, as they walk down the hallway from their locker room to the ice, the Elis

glance down at the words stenciled in block letters on the floor: “Confidence. Teamwork. Discipline. Respect. Pas-sion,” and, finally, “Win.” Those words were added when Ingalls underwent a much-needed renovation in the sum-mer of 2009. When Brendan Mason ’11 first came to Yale in 2007, Ingalls was, as he politely put it, “A historic kind of rink.” The locker rooms were cramped; the climate control system was faulty; the ice was soft; and the team had to trek back and forth from Ingalls to Payne Whitney between skates and lifts. Mason continues, “I think be-fore it was...,” he pauses to choose his words carefully, “something you would expect from an older school. And now

it’s the best you could pretty much ask for.” After a 23 million dollar renova-tion, the rink now boasts refurbished stands, new cooling equipment, and in the basement, 14,000 square feet of gleaming new amenities under the parking lot on Mansfield Street. The new underground area has become an all-inclusive training center for both the men and women's hockey teams and includes expanded locker rooms, a sports medicine center, strength and conditioning rooms, and a study lounge.

Ingalls Rink has sold out every game since December. Yale started win-ning long before then. The Elis cap-

tured 15 of their first 16 games this sea-son, including a 10-game winning streak that spanned the winter vacation and vaulted them into the top spot in the national rankings. Four Yale forwards hovered among the top 10 scorers in the country, and Rondeau emerged as a consistent goalie, who could carry the team at the other end of the rink. The long winning streak came to an end in mid-January when some of the team’s top scorers went cold. It lost four con-secutive road games as well as the No. 1 ranking. The Elis have not recovered the top spot. But they ended their road losing streak with a characteristic of-fensive outburst at Clarkson University on February 12 and, as of press time, went on to win three straight games.

The team was eight games into its

winning streak when it played Harvard in early February. The student sec-tion was overflowing twenty minutes before the opening faceoff. Alumni, players’ relatives, and New Havenites crammed themselves into the remain-ing portion of the stadium. Senators John Kerry ’66 and Richard Blumen-thal LAW ’73 sat together in the stands. University President Richard Levin and Provost Peter Salovey joined them.

Don Little and Tom Kearney were there as usual, as were Ken and Chris-tine Trentowksi, who drive from their home on Long Island to all the home games, and most road games, of their son Ken ’11. Three weeks later, Chris-tine made the five-hour commute to Albany and sat amidst a contingent of Yale shirts. “All the families usually sit together,” she says. “It’s a real commu-nity.”

Blue and white jerseys follow the team to even its most far-flung road games. Jerry Lavish holds degrees from ECAC rivals Union and Rensselaer Poly-technic and still lives in the Albany area near the two schools, but he wore a Yale baseball cap when the Bulldogs traveled to Union in late January. Lav-ish’s son James ’93 learned to skate on the Union rink but went on to play for the Elis and win an ECAC title during his time on the team. Jerry, who attended all of his son’s games during his time at Yale, says, “They had a good team then, but it was nothing like this.” Now that the Elis are flying high, he has begun to



follow the team regularly again.Lavish only had to drive 15 minutes from his house to the

rink. Joe Denicola ’86, and his wife Debby, who live in Ham-den and have season tickets to Ingalls Rink, made a three-hour drive to Albany to watch Yale compete. They watched their son wrestle in a competition near Albany earlier in the afternoon, but the timing was a mere coincidence. Accord-ing to them, they were there primarily to see the Elis. Even more dedicated is Steve Cushner MED ’75, who flies in on alternating weeks from Arizona to see the Bulldogs play at home.

The fans crammed into the stadium for the traditional ri-valry game with Harvard, but to the hockey team this was not the team to beat (as of press time, Harvard is ranked last in the ECAC). Since the North Dakota win, the Elis’ focus is on the teams that stand in their path to the national champi-onship, Boston College chief among them. Brian O’Neill ’11 says that after the North Dakota game, “finally we were like, ‘O.K., we can do this.’”

This season — and especially this coming postseason — is a chance to prove that that win was no fluke. After Yale closes its regular season against Cornell on February 26, the team will begin its preparations for the ECAC conference tournament. After it ends, the Elis will await their seeding for the most important four games of the season: the NCAA championship.

Yale’s path through the national tournament will begin with the Northeast Regional in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The NCAAs are single elimination: it’s win or go home. So the Elis will try to extend their season first on March 26, and then

again on the next night. If they survive the weekend, they will go back to practice to prepare for the national semifinals and finals — the elusive Frozen Four — on April 7.

Eight minutes into the final period of last year’s game against BC, the Eagles led the Bulldogs 9-4, and the game was as good as lost. Broc Little, Yale’s leading

scorer of the season, had spent most of the game on the ground, pushed around by BC’s bigger men. But with one minute and 22 seconds left in the game, he was upright and swinging at a puck flying through the air. His stick connect-ed, and Little sent Yale’s seventh goal of the night soaring into the net. Yale had made a three-point comeback when they could have thrown in the towel. No other team in for the rest of the tournament would gut it out for as long as Yale had. BC won its next two games by a combined twelve to one score.

One year later, BC is again among the favorites for a na-tional title. The Elis are still considered underdogs. But the puck could bounce anywhere. Next year’s T-shirts could say anything.

V V V


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When the jellyfish came, we woke everyone up. They floated down on the ship like snow and even Lev came into the sail to press his face on the periscope. The glow was dim but we could see our arms and outlines and after a minute we stepped away from the glass to look at each other’s eyes. No one said anything, not even the Captain, and I could hear Ellen breathing hard against the glass. My eyes hurt from seeing but there was a strange hope in the blue light and the weeks of darkness drew us towards it like moths. The five of us sat on the steel for what must have been an hour before the fluorescent specks drifted out and the Submarine returned to its blackness. Eventually, I heard the Captain stand up — but it was a while before he finally cleared his throat and felt his way back to the controls.

We couldn’t see anything. Not even our fingers flexing in our faces or the steel walls we ran our hands along as we passed through chambers. We were 36,000 under when the ballast tanks broke and the pressure gage circuited the electrics. The power was on but the lights couldn’t be fixed from inside. I wasn’t angry like the others. Lev would

challenger deep

a short story

by marina keegan

illustrations by maria haras


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pace around and scream things in Russian or slam his fist against a door, but he was young and louder than the rest of us. I preferred the days when no one spoke, or at least not about the surface. There wasn’t a point, I told them once while we were eating dehydrateds, there’s really no point.

I waited in the periscope for the rest of shift C because it was my sleep break anyway and I wanted to see if the currents changed and the jellyfish came back. I sat there for a while but they never came so I pulled out the ripped piece of shirt to tie back around my eyes. It’s easier when you pretend to be blindfolded. I heard this on a cave tour in Arizona but Ellen was the only crew member who listened. It was a small ship, only an Alvin II, so I could pass whomever I wanted to if I took the right turns. I heard Lev talking to the Captain by the desalination tank, which was easy to find because of its dull hum.

“We’d know if we were rising.” The Captain must have been sitting down.

“Maybe, not, sir. Maybe the pressure streams are different in the trench.”

“We’d know.” He repeated. “We’d feel it.”“Then how do you explain the goddamned

fluorescents? You know damn well cnidarians can’t survive in near freezing!” He was pacing now.

“The geysers are heated —”“The geysers are heated. Poshol na khui sooka!”

He kicked the metal and I inhaled. “Ellen?” The Captain had heard me. I was always

accidentally listening in because I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“No, sir. It’s Patrick.” I said. “I was just coming back from the sail. Wanted to make sure we didn’t miss them if they came back.”

“They’re not coming back.” It was Lev’s voice and I heard him lean against the wall. I waited for the Captain to reply but he didn’t.

“I just wanted to make sure.” There was silence and I could hear Hyun clicking the switchboard down the passage. He was Korean and couldn’t really speak English but he was the best technician at Woods Hole lab. We listened to his taps for a while until we fell back into ourselves. The Captain walked over to the air vent so it blew on his face and hair. I knew everyone was zooming out, imagining once again what we looked like from far away.

“It was nice,” Lev finally said from the wall. “I forgot what it was like.”

“I know,” the Captain said. “My hands.” I pictured the tiny dots floating out like stars. The

way it looked like outer space from the periscope windows. For the first time in a long time I thought about my sister and the house I lived in as a child. Lev stood up and walked out to his berth. He didn’t leave at B shift but there wasn’t much we could do about allocations anymore.

We had no concept of time and soon the darkness made it hard to remember what was real. I’d imagine tables that weren’t there and reach for railings that had never existed. After a while I stopped having visual dreams — shifting in my sheets as my mind recounted sounds and sensations that were all cold or steel or underwater. We talked less about trees and more about nothing — playing endless games to name the elements or species of fish until one of us would hit something or start crying or simply not respond.



Once when we were all together, Lev wondered aloud whether China had a deep capacity submarine that no one knew about. It was stupid, but we spent the next three days hypothesizing about why and how the international community might be able to procure it and send it down to get us out. Ellen believed it most of all because she was in love with a man named Daniel who lived in London. She told me when we were cleaning the interhull vents and the other three were sleeping. I’m not sure why she decided to tell me —probably because I don’t say much. She was skinny for thirty and wore a blindfold like me. I remembered then that she’d told us this was her first real dive.

“He’s a teacher,” she said softly. “We met online through this Web site.” I’d heard that that could happen but I didn’t really understand how. I took the solution and ran it on a cloth pipe through the holes. When she sat up her braid flew up and fell again on her back with a small thud. “We haven’t made real plans but I think we’re going to get married.” Ellen was the only one who still spoke about home in the present tense.

“What does he teach?” I wasn’t sure what to ask. “Social Studies.” She paused. “I did my marine Ph.D.

at Cambridge so that’s why we met.” I was trying to get the dust from the vent sheets but I couldn’t see whether or not it was working. Ellen was working too and I liked that about her. She wasn’t a very pretty girl if my memory was right, but she had really long hair and her eyes were a sort of green. “I don’t —” but she broke off.

We worked for a while until it was mostly done and then I asked if she wanted to eat now or later and she said now. We traced our way to the dry box that held our rations and added water to the powdery protein mix. Regulations required six months of meal on all H-certified vessels and the Alvin II was about eight weeks into what should have been a two-week Experimental. We sat at the small half-counter and ate until Ellen fell quiet and started to shake. For the first time in my life I think I was happy to be alone. I wouldn’t want anyone up there to be shaking for me.

It wasn’t long before people started whispering. The darkness and circles were getting unbearable and most of us were beginning to crack in our own ways. Lev started advocating for “alternatives” to waiting it out. There wasn’t enough food. No sub could go deep enough. It was now or six months from now. But the ship’s design required five people to operate it, so everyone had to agree before anything was going to happen. I disagreed at first but the idea had fallen like a seed. I felt it when I lay in my

berth, when I tried to sleep, when I had dark dreams, and when I half-woke to eat protein and walk around the same five rooms in the same five patterns until I slept and had the same dark dreams.

Ellen didn’t want to. No one needed to ask anyone else because it was just obvious. Hyun and the Captain were too rational not to agree and Lev was the first one to really lose it. He started groaning and hitting his head from inside his door. The Captain admitted that he could still see in his dreams. He rushed through his maintenance so he could close and open his eyes. If the lights hadn’t gone when the pressure snapped the ballast tanks I think things might have been different. I think we might have been able to wait until the powder ran out.

“Here!” Lev screamed from the center control. “Here, here, now!” He was shrieking and we could hear banging so we all ran to the control. The Captain sat Lev down until he stopped thrashing. Hyun seemed scared and Ellen was hanging back to the side.

“I can’t do it,” said Lev. We couldn’t see him but we could hear the violent quiver in his voice. “I’m sorry. Look, I can’t do it. I see things in my head. Faces and all the water, it’s. My sobiraeMsya, chtoby uMeret' zdes' vy vse poniMaete, chto My budeM zhdat' i zhdat', i togda My budeM uMirat.' There are voices and — the darkness and —.” He erupted into a sob and the Captain went over and must have put his hands on his shoulders because he quieted down. Hyun never said much but we heard his quiet voice speak up from Lev’s other side.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. No more do.” I didn’t say anything and neither did the Captain but everyone understood that we couldn’t. We needed to wait. We heard Ellen inhale like she might say something but her lips closed and she shifted her feet. There was a silence and I almost said something about the time or temperature gages but then Ellen finally spoke.

“I just,” she paused. “I just … there’s no point in not waiting. They might … it’s not impossible.”

The darkness and circles were getting unbearable and most of us were beginning to crack in our own ways.


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“It’s impossible.” Lev spoke the words quietly, straightforwardly. She was hurt. “It’s impossible,” Lev repeated, louder. But Ellen had shifted to move and walked out of the room. I heard the Captain run his hands through his hair.

“She has someone,” I said. “We have to wait for her. We have to wait for her because he’s in England and Ellen....” No one said anything and we waited in that room for a long time until Lev began rocking in his seat again. I started thinking about trees even though I knew it would only make the aching worse.

Things were different after that. We became suspicious of each other, of all two-person conversations. Ellen didn’t talk to anyone much, but we knew she was listening. I passed her one night standing by the dry-box. I wasn’t sure what she was doing with it open but I wondered if maybe she was trying to calculate portions or time. There were five shift jobs and five people so we couldn’t run the ship without all of us. Lev might have been crazy, but he knew this too and he knew we all had to agree. So we waited. We waited two weeks until one day after circuit repairs when I couldn’t hear Ellen in her station.

I thought she might be upset in her berth so I walked by her door. I wanted to tell her that it was okay and that we were going to wait, that there was no rush. We could make it half a year if we wanted to. We could wait. But she wasn’t in there. She wasn’t by the dry box or desalinator and when I screamed her name it rang through the steal of the ship but there was no response. Then I heard Hyun’s tiny voice call back from a passage that we hadn’t used since before it got dark.

The Captain came running and we fumbled for the switch that pushed the door to the launching suits. When it was open we couldn’t see but I started brushing my arms as fast as I could along the floor where the wires were stored feeling one, two, three and then it was missing. There were only four deep water suits and

I think we all realized what had happened at once. We opened the screen vent to the ante-room that opened out to the water and pulled in the cord with the auto-simulator. The ocean was black just like the walls so when we heard her body thump into the chamber we couldn’t tell. I ran in and felt the cold on her face and the wet on the suit, but the veins in her neck were still throbbing. She’d cracked the helmet and her face had ice shards on the sides.

“Ellen!” I screamed, but she didn’t respond. “Ellen! Ellen!” But then I realized what had happened. What the depth had done. I shook her quickly, and she stirred, coughed, choked over to the side. I moved immediately to her ears and felt the warm blood trickling out and into her long black hair. Her eardrums had burst and she was trapped in darkness and silence and a giant iron suit. We moved it off her and her hand reached up to touch my face. It felt strange and I wanted to move away but I let her feel my nose and mouth and eyes until she knew it was me. She’d done it on purpose but she didn’t know we’d find her in time.

“She’s deaf,” the Captain said. Lev was groaning again from the other room. We didn’t know what to do so we carried her into the counter room, heated water, and poured it on her over her clothes. It felt darker than it used to, and I wondered for a minute if that was possible. If we had drifted into a trench of the trench where we would soon hear tectonics crunch into lava and draw us down.

Ellen moaned. I ripped my blindfold cloth in two and balled it up into her ears to stop the bleeding. She lay there like that for a long time until she was quiet. We gave her food and she seemed like she was okay so we moved her into her berth and went back to our stations. I could hear Lev pacing and Hyun clicking and the comfort of the desalinator hum and ventilator air and imagined Ellen alone in the silence of her world —confined entirely to the universe of her thoughts and half-drawn memories of days somewhere in England.

She emerged much later with her arms outstretched, feeling around corners she already knew by heart. We’d squeeze her shoulder when we passed, but that was all we knew how to do. She was lost. And the reality of her attempt had silenced our philosophizing. We were waiting now. We ate and moved and ate and moved.

I was on Sonar Detect when we picked up the signal from the rover. It had no metal detection and looked like it’d been traveling blind straight through the trench. It was small, robotic and probably the only thing they could construct to withhold the pressure in limited time. Lev went

I imagined Ellen alone in the silence of her world — confined entirely to the universe of her thoughts.



running and screamed and I guess Ellen could feel the vibrations he made on the floor because I heard her door shut behind her.

“It’s audio,” said the Captain. “There’s an antenna. No one’s coming.” We turned up the Sonar controls and heard a short five-minute clip play twice through the wave detectors before it slipped past in its motion and out of sight. They knew our range and they knew we’d have five minutes to hear it on either side. It was expensive, I could tell by the frequency. A million dollar message.

It was my sister and the Captain’s old lieutenant and Lev’s best friend and Hyun’s mom. The last voice was Daniel’s and it spoke in a shaky whisper: “Ellen, I love you. Ellen, I can’t look at the ocean anymore.” He went on but I was too dazed to remember more. Ellen moaned and walked around, confused. Daniel, I traced on her arm. Slowly, so she could comprehend

each letter. A message. She didn’t understand. My hand was shaking, so I did it slower. A message. The ocean. He loves you. But we couldn’t remember any more —our own thoughts scratched with our own words. She jerked away and went wandering back through the ship until we found her later collapsed and sleeping by the vent.

The hours blurred as our food box emptied, but I never stopped dreaming black dreams. Sometimes, when the Captain was in the controls or Lev was asleep, I’d climb into the sail and stare through the periscope at the thousands of leagues. I closed my eyes and saw stars but the jellyfish never came.

·

Vol. xxxviii No. 5 March 2011

naked rainNot the girl in the pink skirt,at seventeen,who asked me to dance under seedy lightswhile flies buzzed unseen over platesof half-eaten French fries, hiding wet glints in her smile when I said yes.

Not the girl who wore necklaces of coke-can tabs,bent back and forth to the alphabet,to twist off on the letter “M,”showing she could wear my name.

The girl standing across the street from the Ziegfeld Theater,ankles crossed delicately above the tinfoil-clogged gutter grating,is no longer seventeen or in pink.

The way your green skirt smoothesaround your hipsunder the wind’s insinuating touch, tempts me with hidden nakedness,and I imagine lyingabove you underblankets and betweensoft sheets, alive with the rhythm of the rainpelting against its own reflectionin the dirty mirror of the windowpane.

— Clio Contogenis

naked rain ™ cazoniere 164 © prishtinë

r

Poetry

rebecca zhu / contributing illustrator



cazoniere 164And there — I hear the last sound of the night,Heaven too far and earth too close to rest.Women, men and boys turn off like lights;The courts are calm, as seas wave less and less.So not am I, whom love provokes and tellsOf quests and chests I lost and found and miss,Those kept in depths where treasures go unheld.My soul so agitated, I enlistIn The Dull Company — I cry and singIn joy and rue, as in a doubtful ease.I bite into the comb where honey stingsAnd therein suck the cure from my disease.I strike; there’ll be no darkness tonight.In blindness I endure my last respite.

— Mackenzie Rivers



prishtinëIt came from the sky like rainand broke the plane.I was sixteen, I thought:They broke the plane!I did not run. I watchedthe fire and guns in the airthe celebration.

It came from the sky like rainat the Field of Blackbirdsshit on the statues: Skanderbeg,our Alexander.

The dust was on everything,urea, nitrogen, the rawingredients for bombs—intending, like porcelain or bronzeto last an age.

See the settling in of powerin all its offices, the pigeons clearingoff the windowsills, the widowshanging pictures on the gate by Parliament?

It came from the sky, the rainturning the dust to mud though the orange paint stayed brighton the new apartments.

— Mari Michener Oye




I stood with my arms slightly lifted like a duckling. Mom tucked her hands under my armpits and raised me to the back seat, while I giggled from

the itch. I twisted my hips into a comfortable position, my lunchbox, pencil case, exam papers, and textbooks rattling in my backpack. “I’m ready!” I declared. Mom was already gripping the handlebars. With her right foot, she pushed the ground once, twice, three times. The bike zigzagged under my weight, but Mom steered with ease. She glided for a few seconds before sitting down on the front seat, the white plum blossom prints at the corners of her cotton dress smoothed out by the breeze. Here it started, my daily trip between home and school.

Sitting on the back seat of Mom’s bike felt like being in a 3D movie. Mom never rode fast. When biking downhill, she clamped her fingers around the brake levers until they made a shrill sound and the bike started to jolt. When pedaling uphill, she leaned forward, lowering her back into a bow-shape, and I could suddenly see the road ahead. Most of the time, my eyes wandered, drifting over newly-bloomed peonies, dried purple mulberries, or schoolgirls in uniforms jumping rope with their braids bouncing up and down.

I was a second-grade girl with hair just touching my ears and a backpack hiked on my hips. I ran on the standard 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. schedule with math team

and calligraphy practice alternating after class each day. Waiting for me at the school gate, Mom would lean against her sturdy “Flying Pigeon,” their two shadows fused on the ground.

The back seat was not really a seat. Unlike the front seat, a soft pad wrapped in black leather with springs inside, the back seat was made of several crossing steel bars and was originally used to carry Mom’s books or

watermelons from the afternoon market. Mom never transformed it into a real child carrier, as did other parents, who screwed onto their back seat an iron basket that had a pair of plastic handlebars and two openings for the child’s legs. Tiny spots of rust always corroded those baskets, but they looked comfortable nonetheless.

The wheels rolled in silence. Around me, rows of poplar trees stood straight like soldiers. In the breeze, their limbs bent and small palms clapped gently.

Mom’s voice came from the front: “What new characters did you learn today?”

“Hmm … Jing Cha, Bang Yang, Mo Fan, and …”“Write them.”With my right index finger, I started to draw the

first character of Jing Cha on the back of her blouse, one stroke after another, careful not to let my fingernail cut too deeply. Three seconds of silence while Mom was reading the touch. The vague trace of the strokes disappeared slowly. I looked up. “Right,” she said without turning her head. “Next one.”

We reached the afternoon market. The smell of soil and vegetation blended with a fishy scent, and the squawk of distant fowl rang in concert with bargaining slang. Mom slowed down when she entered the stream of bikes inching forward in the aisle between two rows of vendors. I lifted up my legs, trying not to kick those squatting at the side to pick out vegetables and fruits.

“Those are all fresh. Look!” A vendor with a Shandong dialect briskly broke off two segments of brown lotus roots from the middle, showing an incredulous buyer their snow-white insides. “That’s three jin? Can’t be!” another buyer across the aisle questioned loudly, bending down to examine a bag of eggplants dangling at one side of the steelyard balanced in the vendor’s hand. Further down the aisle, livestock merchants and

the back seatD by helen gao D

Personal Essay

Sitting in the back seat felt like being in a 3D movie. Most of the time, my eyes wandered.



fred strebeigh



fish sellers were lined up. Geese crowded in cages, screeching and dodging their master’s fatal hand. Carps flapped their tailfins in small, plastic ponds, opening their mouths above the shallow water into an “O” and gasping for air.

“I want taros!” I demanded in the back seat when a stack of taros, round and even-sized, still covered in dirt as if just dug from the ground, flashed into view. Mashed taros was my favorite dish — our home version of mashed potatoes, but better.

Mom got off the bike, flicked down the kickstand, and tugged her skirt between her knees before kneeling down: “How much is the taro?”

“Two Yuan per jin,” the vendor answered without raising his head.

Mom picked up two taros, rolled them around in her palm before putting them into a nylon bag she pulled out from her pocket. When the bag was half-filled with taros, she handed it to the vendor, who weighed it with a small steelyard, quickly tied the opening into a knot, and gave it back. “Five Yuan.” He opened his right palm and waved it in front of our eyes. Mom paid him and put the bag into the front basket. I could already see the taros, all washed and peeled, rolling onto the cutting board and rolling into the wok, sitting, steaming hot, on a delicate piece of china.

As the border of the sky turned crimson, we were cycling along Weiming Lake — the Nameless Lake, in Peking University. The setting sun, hanging among the clouds like an egg sunny side up, cast its last glow onto the water. The weeping willows on the shore, with their long branches dipped into the lake, stirred ripples glistening like fish scales. College couples snuggled on the benches and whispered into each other’s ears while looking into the distance at the Marble Boat, which sat hushed at the other side of the Lake. Once standing majestically in the middle of the central lake at the Old Summer Palace, later smashed into pieces by foreign invaders, the Boat was reassembled and sent to the University to be preserved. The rough surfaces of the fore and aft had been smoothed by kids sliding down them, and its broad deck had become the secret nest where couples lay and stared at the stars. I remembered the icy feeling of the marble stone against my cheeks, and the tadpoles dashing under water when I once stuck my head over the side of the deck to gaze into the lake.

The path along Weiming Lake led to the University’s West Gate, the landmark of the school built in red pillars and gray tiles. Across the street was Weixiuyuan, the yard where I lived. When we entered the yard, my eyes immediately turned to the second window from the left on the fifth floor of the building on the far east corner. A warm yellow — Dad is home.

Mom parked the bike under the shed and lifted me off. I rubbed my hips, numb from sitting still and pressing against the steel bars. Mom put a horseshoe lock around the bike’s back wheel and clicked it in. Having fulfilled its daily duty, the bike stood motionless with its front wheel slightly tilted, like a napping head.

Once when Mom was fiddling with coins in her purse, her back facing me, I stuck my feet between two spokes of the back wheel and

ventured, not without a couple of clumsy kicks and scary slips, to bring myself onto the bike. I flashed her a triumphant smile when she turned back and saw me. The corners of her mouth were drawn back half way, but they froze the moment she spotted the two bent spokes in the back wheel: “Aiya! What did you do!”

Once when Mom was pedaling up the slope just inside the West Gate, I adjusted myself in the back seat and suddenly felt my feet, for the first time, touching the ground. I looked down: the tip of my sneaker had left a faint trace behind me on the dirt ground, next to the heavy print of the bike wheels. As the bike rolled forward, the two lines grew longer side-by-side, in the same direction, at the same speed. I stretched my legs further. Reaching the ground with my toes, I pushed hard against the dirt road once, twice, three times.

Once a pink keychain with a small bike key was dropped into my palm. No more numbness from the crossbars, no more Chinese pop quizzes. Now I could roam around Weiming Lake, stop at the ice-cream vendors at the market, or ride to the poplar woods for hide-and-seek. I would take it slow, just as Mom did, but this time grip the handlebars with my own hands.

Of course it did not happen that way. At 7:30 a.m., I rushed downstairs, threw my backpack into the front basket, jumped onto the bike, and dashed out. I was half-standing on the bike, my hips off the soft front seat, back bowed, neck stretched forward, and eyes focused straight ahead. The wind blowing by my ears reduced the chirping of sparrows and the peddling of vendors to a low hum and the blooming peonies, dried mulberries, and schoolgirls to patches of blurred colors. The back wheel jostled against the cobblestone road, while the steel bars of the empty back seat clinked and clattered. The trunks of the poplars flew by, and the wind sighed. I felt I had left something behind but did not have time to look for it. Class started at 7:50.

Time for school.

D D D



Dear Cupid,

Nancy should adopt an approach that aggressively targets the source of the problem: Sam’s adherence to religious doctrine. She needs to persuade him that being in a romantic relationship with her is not a violation of his beliefs. The best way to do this is to convince him of her own religiosity.

Nancy should start by asking Sam to pray with her every day, for extended pe-riods of time. The key here is endurance. Even if Sam starts to hint that his joints are aching or that he has to leave for a meeting or that he desperately needs to take the medication that prevents his lungs from collapsing, Nancy should not relent. Sam will eventually be so im-pressed by her spiritual devotion that he probably won’t even notice that his legs are beginning to develop gangrene.

Nancy should also take advantage of extant religious imagery to further her case. The Virgin Mary, as one of the holi-est figures in Christianity, is revered by all Catholics. Nancy should start emulating her in both manner and dress. She ought to wear multiple shapeless cloaks at all times and make sure to clasp her hands

and look mournfully at the sky whenever she is seated. All questions directed at her should be answered in Hebrew. It would also be helpful to keep a book light hid-den in the folds of her clothing so that she can emit a holy glow wherever she goes. When Sam observes the uncanny similarity between Nancy and the moth-er of Jesus, he will not be able to help the upwelling of divine love in his breast.

Finally, if Sam remains at all hesitant, Nancy should roll out a religious vision. The next time she and Sam are together, she should suddenly break off their con-versation, stare blankly for several min-utes, and then awaken gradually from her trance, bearing a look of wonder upon her face. When Sam asks her what hap-pened, she should tell him that she just received a message from the Angel Ga-briel, who revealed that she should join with Sam in blessed union, or risk the horrors of a plague spreading over both their hometowns. Once Sam is confront-ed with this divine mandate, he will have no choice but to sanctify his feelings for Nancy.

Go forth and help them multiply,Dana

Dear DanaDear Dana,

My friend (let’s call her Nancy) is in love with her best friend (let’s call him Sam). They are like soulmates and share their deepest thoughts and feelings, and it is obvious to

everyone that they are meant for each other. Unfortunately, Sam won’t go out with Nancy because he is a sexually-repressed Catholic. (Yes, he went to an all-boys Catholic school where he was brainwashed by nuns.) What should Nancy do to “encourage” the next step in her relationship with Sam?

Sincerely,Hopeful Cupid

GKKKKKNDana Zhu has all the answers. Got a problem? E-mail [email protected].

Christopher Buckley ’75. Fareed Zakaria ’86. Samantha Power ’92. YOU?

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