by Sheila Heti
The day before the San Fernando Festival del Mar, Gabriel García Márquez had died, but it was perfectly clear that the magic realism attributed to that writer was not going to disappear quickly in either Mexico or Colombia. I mention this because an official from the Tamaulipas tourist office insisted I interview two men wearing snow-white pants and guayaberas, topped by traditional Colombian vueltiao hats. They were Arnold and Plácido Verera Murillo, restaurateurs from Cartagena—owners of the Ostería del Mar Rojo—who assured me they had been drawn to San Fernando by its good shrimp, and had experienced no problems in terms of personal security. The official bulletin issued later by the Government of Tamaulipas quotes the two men as saying, “Cartagena is a wonderful city, but it cannot equal what we’ve seen here; it’s like a dream, I never imagined I’d have the chance to come to the Gulf of Mexico and visit the Laguna Madre, the Queen of Shrimp.” In addition to comparing San Fernando to what is considered one of the world’s most beautiful cities, the official bulletin noted that the two Colombians were overjoyed that “the governor and the municipal president were regenerating the beach resort, because that doesn’t happen everywhere, and the authorities often just forget about a place, which isn’t happening here.” What the bulletin never mentioned, although some Colombian newspapers did, is that the Verera brothers were on an expenses-paid trip to Mexico to learn how to prepare the largest shrimp cocktail in the world, since Cartagena was planning to make a bid for the same title within a few years.
When I approached to interview them, the Colombians were talking to Arturo Ponce Pérez, one of the two chefs overseeing the preparation of the cocktail. Despite his worried expression, Chef Ponce said he was feeling highly motivated. Perhaps he was nervous, because he couldn’t remember the last time he had made a small shrimp cocktail. While he preferred meat to seafood, he told me he had spent the last two weeks taking courses in preparation for the Guinness record bid, and now had everything needed for the event: just over a ton of frozen shrimp, 40 gallons of ketchup and 26 of clamato juice; neither lime nor avocado is included in the Guinness World Records rules. While the chef was coordinating the work of his 20 assistants on one side of the main pavilion, some youths with maracas passed; it had been announced that the governor was finally about to arrive, and their task was to provide a party atmosphere to welcome him. They were joined by more youngsters with tambores, and when the official claque had assembled, the assistant cooks were given a pep talk by the second chef. The most excited of these assistants were two men carrying giant spoons to stir the tomato sauce in the cocktail tumbler. Dressed from head to toe in white, including their face masks, they were like nurses about to concoct a dish of high-quality protein, vitamins, minerals, a lot of cholesterol, and phosphorus, an aphrodisiac.
A local official came to inform me that the San Fernando shrimp was unique, and that its exquisite flavor was without compare. He then said, enthusiastically, that thanks to the shrimp and natural gas, his hometown would once again be an economic powerhouse. He spoke of the 18 million cubic meters of natural gas shipped to Reynosa, and from there to the United States, and in a low tone, as if trying to ensure few bystanders overheard, added that two more large fields had been discovered: Trión 1 and 2. After that he began to complain that Pemex hadn’t offered a peso toward the shrimp cocktail celebrations, and that the same was true of the other 28 energy companies in the region, excepting Geokinetics, which had donated a sum he preferred not to specify. The Tamaulipas authorities had paid 20,000 US dollars to Guinness just for the use of its logo in the publicity campaign. True, they had been, however, spared the travel expenses of the international team of judges, as none of the Guinness employees were willing to travel to San Fernando, given the high risk such a journey entailed. The official thought this was a shame, and said it was just an image problem, “all because of those 72 dead undocumenteds there on the border with Matamoros. They come dumping them on us here, and what can you do?” When I asked about the clandestine mass graves and shootouts of recent years, he fell silent, and then picked up his eulogy to the exquisite San Fernando shrimp where he had left off. “They really are the best in the world. I’ve eaten shrimp in San Francisco and Europe, and they don’t even come close.”
We had to break off conversation as the levels of activity increased in the pavilion. The governor’s helicopter had landed. One of the bodyguards took a moment to joke with another who was helping a man in a shrimp costume to get into place. As they were passing, he said, “Hey, don’t let that shrimp get too close.” (In Mexico, camarón—shrimp—is one of the many euphemisms for the male member.) Meanwhile, the governor’s head of logistics was arguing with two young organizers: “The governor is going to have his cocktail served up there on the stage. No way is the governor going to any cooler to pick it up himself.” Surprisingly, the governor decided to walk to the pavilion through the crowd, occasionally waving to those present. When he came to the row in which the two Colombians were sitting, he stopped to receive the presents they had brought from their native land, and had his photo taken with them.
In the front row the mayors of Méndez, Valle Hermoso, Burgos and other regional towns were awaiting him in their orange T-shirts; also present were the colonel and captain in charge of the San Fernando military detachment. The governor, who was also wearing the requisite T-shirt, had not brought his wife; but his father, Egidio Torre López, had accompanied him, and when he took his seat in the front row, was heartily welcomed by the mayor of San Fernando, who then took the microphone to announce that very soon “we’ll be in the news as an example of perseverance. They’ll be talking about ordinary people who have done something extraordinary.” The civic dignitary then thanked both Mother Nature and the governor for having made it possible for San Fernando to prepare the largest shrimp cocktail in the world.
Once the mayor had concluded his speech, the emcee announced they were going to show a video sent by the Guinness World Records executive committee in London. Absolute silence fell over the crowd, and on a giant screen the image of a young blond woman with a big smile and a discreetly low-cut top appeared to whistles of appreciation from the male public. In a kind of Tex-Mex Spanish, she first thanked Governor Egidio Torre (pronouncing the double “r” of Torre with great care), and while she was, with equal care, listing the names of other officials, a couple of refrigerator trucks pulled up behind the screen, and the two chefs plus their germ-free assistants dressed in white began to unload the 50-pound packs of shrimp. When the assistant chefs had thrown in pack number 22, the San Fernando cocktail weighed 1,120 pounds, and had officially beaten the previous record set by Mazatlan, Sinaloa. Jubilant cheers echoed around the venue, but this time the emcee held his tongue. The event reached its climax at the moment the tumbler weighed 2,300 pounds, and Mariana Seoane appeared, walking toward the seat allocated to her in the front row.
The cries of excitement resounded throughout La Carbonera, and the emcee could contain himself no longer; in his absolutely unmistakable tone he bellowed, “Tourism doesn’t come beeeet-ter.” Seoane had only just taken her seat in the front row when she was exhorted by members of the audience to stand and show off her body. “We want to see you, Mariana,” they chanted. And she stood, turned around, and said, “What a lovely audience.” She then ascended to the stage to assist the governor in sampling the dish. When they got a view of the actress’s shapely body from a better angle, the audience exploded into even louder outbursts of euphoria. The mayor and his wife also appeared to pose with the chefs, Seoane, and the governor beside the tumbler of shrimp. In the midst of the excited celebrations, the governor gave a speech that lasted less than two minutes, and concluded with, “This is our Tamaulipas. We work hard every day. And what do we do on our days of rest? We break world records.”
After his anticlimactic intervention, the governor gave an impromptu press conference with the small number of reporters present. He made absolutely no mention of the marches in which up to a thous
and people demanded peace in Tampico, nor of the petition organized by the Parents’ Association suggesting classes should be suspended after the Easter vacation until there was evidence that the situation was under control, and their children’s safety was guaranteed. He then walked through the crowd for a minute or two, paused for a few photos, and less than an hour after his arrival was on his way out of San Fernando. He didn’t even stay for the shrimp. For her part, Seoane was besieged by fans at every step of her way to the performance stage, and then left before two in the afternoon. While she was singing, hundreds of San Fernando residents were lining up for their portion of the largest shrimp cocktail in the world. On the beach, the party was being equally enjoyed by families making giant sombreros from cardboard Tecate beer boxes and participating in impassioned games of volleyball. There were also ad hoc lifeguards, people selling mosquito spray, fathers carrying beers and tricycles, cowboys in shorts singing Norteño songs at the tops of their voices, and groups of friends in camouflage gear noisily drinking beer until four in the afternoon came around, when Sonora Dinamita finished their set, and the festivities were over. At that exact moment, I went back to the main stage. The tumbler containing the shrimp was completely empty. Over 17,000 small crustaceans were being digested by some 4,000 human stomachs on La Carbonera beach.
That Good Friday afternoon, after spending the day on La Carbonera beach, I returned to the center of San Fernando, where dozens of houses and businesses were empty or abandoned, some of them ransacked or in ruins. The night before the municipality achieved its shrimp-cocktail feat, a youth had been kidnapped from his home by one of the warring factions still operating in the area. A week before, a taco vendor had been arrested for acting as a mafia spy. Three weeks before, the Navy had shot down the daughter of an evangelical pastor, accusing her of being an assassin. A month before, there had been an almost hour-long shootout in a nearby valley. Two months before, the local parish priest, who in exceptional cases acted as a hostage negotiator, had been beaten up after handing over a ransom. Three months before, a group of young people had been kidnapped by another armed commando group; they are presumed to have been forced into slave labor. Four months before, 20 people had been kidnapped in the space of a week, and then freed in exchange for sums of between five-hundred thousand and a million pesos. None of these events were covered by the press.
The feeling of those who spoke of them was that San Fernando hadn’t yet seen the worst; in fact, the worst was a day-to-day occurrence. Some of the residents I interviewed were annoyed about the Guinness record. Just as with any other human beings, the arrival of spring brought a smile to their faces, and they were pleased that a public space like La Carbonera beach had been reclaimed—if only for a few hours—but the fear of being kidnapped or murdered prevailed. The mayor’s and the governor’s idea of the largest shrimp cocktail in the world as a means of removing the stench of death from the town—more a public image exercise than a daily reality—was looked upon with skepticism. For the residents it was a smoke screen, more pathetic than naive. “You can’t cover up the reality of San Fernando with a shrimp cocktail, no matter how big it is,” one said. Another added, “Well, when we’ve got a governor who hasn’t even solved his own brother’s murder, how are we supposed to believe he really wants to solve the security problems the rest of us suffer? This is a no-man’s-land.”
As the sun went down, a small Good Friday procession made its silent way through the center of town. All the parishioners were dressed in white, and it was easy to imagine that what they required from their government was not a gastronomic world record. Early the following morning, as we drove out of the San Fernando valley, with its shimmering, green pastures and beautiful grasslands stretching to the purple-tinged horizon, it took an effort of will to believe that while Tamaulipas remains a pool into which Mexican democracy is sinking, its authorities are attempting to wipe out the horror with a shrimp cocktail.
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS
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The Uninhabitable Earth
FROM New York Magazine
I. “Doomsday”
Peering beyond scientific reticence.
IT IS, I PROMISE, WORSE THAN YOU THINK. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas—and the cities they will drown—have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault—a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.
The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.
Maybe you know that already—there are alarming stories in the news every day, like those, last month, that seemed to suggest satellite data showed the globe warming since 1998 more than twice as fast as scientists had thought (in fact, the underlying story was considerably less alarming than the headlines). Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now has just three miles to go—by the time you read this, it may already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as “calving.”
But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume clim
ate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.
In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen—that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.
