101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [58]
There were dramatic events, but really, even without the bleeding and the screaming, the place is awful: a parched desert squat with the population density of a refugee camp, but with more noise—the ceaseless battering of amplified techno music—and less hygiene. I mostly hid in the bookmobile, where, on one particularly hot afternoon, a naked man offered me a filthy banana pancake, macerated after being clutched in his bare sweaty hand. Having been in actual refugee camps, I will say that Burning Man made those look like Tanglewood.
JENNIFER KAHN is a contributing editor to Wired magazine and contributor to The Best American Science Writing 2009.
Chapter 94
The Bottom of a Pig Lagoon
Vacations often take place around the water, so it’s tempting to think that a pig lagoon might be a combination of two great things: a swimming hole and BLTs. In fact, what could be better?
If only. As the receptacle for all the waste generated by a modern pig farm, pig lagoons are filled not with water but with shit—and not just shit but everything else that falls through the grates of the pigs’ cages. Blood, afterbirths, dead piglets—they all find their way into the lagoons, which, thanks to blood and bacterial interactions, are not brown but pink.
Lagoons can cover an area of up to 120,000 square feet and reach depths of about three stories. (The average pig produces three times as much feces as your average human, and we slaughter tens of million of pigs in the United States each year—you do the math.) The result is massive stagnant pools of waste contaminated with antibiotics, heavy metals, salmonella, giardia, cyanide, and everything else that passes through the pigs. Unlike most human waste, this sewage is never treated.
Occasionally the lagoons’ polyethylene liners rip. If too much waste seeps under the liners and ferments, the ensuing gas pocket can rise up in the middle of the lagoon like a giant pimple, pushing pig sewage out into the surrounding land. Of course, the farmers are already putting it on the land—there’s so much waste that a common way of reducing the lagoons’ volumes is to spray the liquid onto fields as a fertilizer, or sometimes even to pump it directly into the air in hopes that some will evaporate. The resulting pig vapor contains gases like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, and when inhaled can lead to bronchitis, asthma, nosebleeds, brain damage, seizures, and even death.
But inhalation is nothing compared to the ultimate risk—falling into a lagoon. Consider what happened when a worker in Michigan accidentally toppled in: “His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived into save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in,” wrote Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone. “They all died in pig shit.” It’s hard to think of a more horrible way to go.
Chapter 95
Sohra, India, 10 A.M., During Rainy Season
While beautiful, the Indian town of Sohra is home to two seemingly contradictory phenomena: it is one of the world’s wettest places, and yet every year, it suffers from drought.
Located almost five thousand feet above sea level, it gets hit full force by the Bay of Bengal arm of the Indian Summer Monsoon, which drops an average of about 450 inches of rain per year, much of which falls during the morning. But thanks to Sohra’s high elevation and deforestation, the water doesn’t stick around—it runs off to the plains of Bangladesh, taking with it a healthy amount of soil and leaving Sohra’s residents with a scarcity of potable water. Adding to the problem: the town has no reservoirs. Instead, when it rains, it pours—and when it stops, there’s nothing safe to drink.
Chapter 96
The Thing
I will forgive you if, driving along Interstate 10 in Arizona, you stop to see the Thing. How could you not? Much like the Winchester Mystery House (see p. 20), billboards for the Thing—some 247 of them—advertise its existence for miles in each direction. MYSTERY OF THE DESERT,