I'd never been called a dingbatter until I went to Ocracoke for the first time. I've spent a good part of my life in North Carolina, but I'm still learning how to speak the ‘Hoi Toider’ brogue. The people here just have their own way of speaking: it's like someone took Elizabethan English, sprinkled in some Irish tones and 1700s Scottish accents, then mixed it all up with pirate slang. But the Hoi Toider dialect is more than a dialect. It's also a culture, one that's slowly fading away. With each generation, fewer people play meehonkey, cook the traditional foods or know what it is to be mommucked.
Located 34 miles from the North Carolina mainland, Ocracoke Island is fairly isolated. You can’t drive there as there are no bridges, and most people can’t fly either as there are no commercial flights. If you want to go there, it has to be by boat. In the early 1700s, that meant Ocracoke was a perfect spot for pirates to hide, as no soldiers were going to search 16 miles of remote beaches and forests for wanted men.
Webster saw himself as a saviour of the American language who would rescue it from the corrupting influence of British English and prevent it from fragmenting into a multitude of dialects. But as a linguist and lexicographer, he quickly ran into trouble with critics, educators, the literati, legislators and much of the common reading public over the bizarre nature of his proposed language reforms. These spelling reforms – for example, wimmen for ‘women’, greeve for ‘grieve’, meen for ‘mean’ and bred for ‘bread’ – were all intended to simplify spelling by making it read the way that words were pronounced, yet they brought him the pain of ridicule for decades to come.
In our world, weather forecasts are so ubiquitous that we treat them as notable only when wrong. It’s easy to forget what a crucial role they play, and to overlook the monumental achievement they represent. But Andrew Blum’s new book, “The Weather Machine” (Ecco), asks us to pause and marvel at the globe-spanning networks of collaboration required to turn the weather from something we experience to something we can predict.
It wasn’t always possible to be so complacent. Wartime made the stakes of weather forecasting especially plain. Sometimes, as with D Day, visibility was important; at other times, cloud cover and fog could help conceal a position. Alongside the battle for land, sea, and air, then, a quiet war over the atmosphere was being waged. The weather war even had its own clandestine undercover missions in search of mundane treasures like data on temperature, pressure, and wind speed.
One summer, I tried fishing on Lac Catherine, a small lake in Quebec near the village of Entrelacs. Around this privately owned body of water is a deep band of forest and only three habitable structures, including the two-room cabin that my husband and I rent for a month each summer and the capacious log home of the owners, our friends Anne and Arne. They live there year-round and use some of the 121 hectares of forest to make maple syrup in the spring. Come summer, local fishermen sometimes pay them a fee to drop their lines in Lac Catherine. Usually, they leave a few hours later with one or two or three small trout. This alerted me to the fact that, technically, evidently, there were fish in the lake—fish that other people caught. So I was happy when a friend of our son, an experienced angler, showed up at our cabin one day. I would learn his secrets, I schemed, and catch a fish at last.
Roberto was in his early thirties, a lifelong fisherman from Brazil, where, he tells me, they sometimes fish with worms called minhocuçu that are three feet long. Now we’re talking! He arrived at our cabin with his partner, Madeleine, their three-month-old baby, Celeste, and a large, heavy tackle box that appeared to come a very close second to the baby in its significance for Roberto. First, he presented the baby to us, coaxing laughter out of her by flubbing his mouth against her belly. Then he brought his tackle box into the cabin and placed it reverently in the centre of the room. When he opened it, a three-tiered bleacher expanded into jewellery-box compartments packed with lead sinkers, bright feathery lures, and hooks that ranged in size from a comma on a page to a pirate’s prosthetic metal hand. “Those are for carp,” Roberto said, “which can get very big in Brazil.”
I met the Petersons just moments before their ceremony. The Portland, Oregon-based couple decided to dress casually for their wedding. The groom was in dark denim jeans and a blue button-down top that featured small embroidered tacos, while the bride donned a short, form-fitting mustard yellow dress that showed off her large, striking tattoos. There were no tuxedos, no veils, no flower girls. This wasn’t the first time either of them had gotten married, nor was it the first time either of them had gotten married in Vegas.
“I just wanted to have a wedding that was non-traditional, but also wanted to top both of our previous weddings,” explained Breanna when I asked her why they chose the Taco Bell chapel.
Claire Lombardo's The Most Fun We Ever Had probably won't be the most fun you'll ever have (I hope not, for your sake), but it's a wonderfully immersive read that packs more heart and heft than most first novels. Lombardo, a Chicago native and recently minted University of Iowa MFA graduate, has crafted an intricate multigenerational saga about the vicissitudes of a passionate but not perfect marriage over a 40-year span. Her capacious novel also encompasses the "vast hormonal hellscape" the couple has spawned — four cattily close, constantly sparring grown daughters trying to figure out their place in the world as they measure themselves against their mother and each other.
Once, my very best darling, the sea
and the land were all one mass
and the light was confused and hadn’t found
a place to rest. And, Megan, love,
An adult shad has 1,300 bones,
but that’s not why I always order it:
I remember fingers of white flesh, flaky-fried,
or a sac of red roe slapped into a pan
with a pat of butter,