Rich legacy / Hidden knowledge

Today: Kim Kelly, author of FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor, and editor of the metal newsletter Salvo; and Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.

Issue No. 473

The Bones of Gåshamna
Kim Kelly

My Friend Raj Persuades Me That Moby-Dick Is Already in My Life
Amy Chu

The Bones of Gåshamna

by Kim Kelly

For days, the only colors I had seen were blues, greys, and browns. But I wasn’t complaining; it was impossible not to marvel at the silvery glacier ice and glistening rocks, the sun-bleached polar bear bones we clambered past, the unearthly cyan of the crystalline icebergs floating silently around our ship, or the teal and jade and lapis tones of the Arctic Ocean herself. Even the dun-colored clay that stuck to my muck boots didn’t look half-bad once it dried, pale and silty.

It was August at the top of the world in the High Arctic, just a few clicks away from the North Pole, and the cool palette matched the grey and gloomy weather. Rain and fog were persistent, and while the midnight sun kept up a day-long purplish glow, a rare break of true sunshine was cause for celebration. As my friends back home sweated out a wretchedly humid mid-Atlantic summer, I was tramping around Svalbard in wool base layers and a parka with a bunch of artists, scientists, and Arctic guides—and as much as I love going down the shore, I wasn’t too upset about hanging up my bikini for the season. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts, but more importantly, I was going to see a whale.

Or at least, that’s what I was hoping for. In 2024, I spent two weeks aboard an old Russian icebreaker ship circumnavigating one of the world’s northernmost archipelagos. The crew maintained a running list of wildlife sightings for our benefit, and each day brought new thrills. We saw ringed seals, who quizzically popped their little heads out of the water and followed our Zodiacs with puppylike curiosity; stately reindeer would stroll over to observe our hikes; Arctic skuas and guillemots ruled the skies (and Arctic terns dive-bombed us on land when we accidentally got too close to a nesting site). All the while, I impatiently waited for a whale to reveal itself. A few of my shipmates, the lucky bastards, did see a beluga, but I missed the figurative boat on that one.

I’d read a ton of books about whales and the whaling industry over the years as part of my very normal obsession with maritime history, but had never managed to meet a cetacean in person. Now here I was, closer than I’d ever been or would probably ever be again; each day I’d hang my head over the rail and squint out across the water, hoping to spot a blow spout or a mighty fin slicing through the glassy surface. Seeing a whale in the flesh had felt like an impossible dream back home in South Philly, but now, I was in their neighborhood.

The most famed whale-watcher (and occasional whale-butcher) of all, Herman Melville, had never made it this far North. By the time he sat down to write his maritime magnum opus, the Arctic whaling grounds had been so severely overfished that it only made sense to look South to start the Pequod’s journey. Ishmael and his crewmates didn’t have to worry about getting trapped in the sea ice; the food wasn’t great but they weren’t futzing around with pemmican and chocolate like polar explorers, and when they did sight land, it was lush and tropical, not dotted with glaciers and predatory mammals. I’m not saying that they had it easy—they famously did not!—and whaling was a horrifically brutal job, especially under a captain like Ahab, but I reckon it would’ve been a whole lot harder to chase down that mythic white whale in frozen socks. 

The day I finally saw the whales, we did not recognize one another. Old whalers have written about moments when they got close enough to a bloodied, dying whale to look it in the eye, and saw something human in its mournful gaze. I’d dreamed of experiencing something like that (minus the harpoons and sadness), but when we beached our rubber boats on the rocky shore of Gåshamna, the only living creatures in sight were a few seabirds, who wisely kept their distance. They already knew what we would shortly discover: we were walking into a burial ground. Gåshamna is the site of an old English whaling station that dates back to the 17th century. After playing host to a coterie of Russian scientists in 1900, a Norwegian trapper’s tarpaper cabin is now the only modern-ish structure left. Outside, the barren ground is littered with bones. Whale bones. 

I was a few centuries too late to see the bowheads and right whales who had once lived and played in these waters before being slaughtered for their precious fat, but at least I could visit their graves.

One of the first things you see is an odd heap of material that turns out to be the ruins of a whaler’s cabin, all jumbled wood and whalebones. Humps of gravel hide the remains of blubber ovens over which blood-slicked men once sweated and cursed; their own bones lie quietly beneath the sandy soil, too, invisible and exhausted. As we walked further inland, I began to notice something strange. Beneath the slate-blue sky, amidst the taupe landscape of rocks and lichens and bones, patches of lime-green moss began to appear. These shocks of color were spaced seemingly at random, but when I looked closer I realized that at the center of each verdant carpet sat a bone, or a pile of bones. Moss gently enveloped each massive vertebra, nestling into cracks and softening sharp edges. 

Our guide explained how centuries of exposure had leached out the marrow secreted within the dead whales’ bones and nourished the soil around them, allowing fragile Arctic mosses to grow. Each green spot was a shrine to death and rebirth, an entire life cycle made miniature. Crouching there among these beautiful little monuments felt like walking into a cathedral, guilt and all; that these enormous, mysterious creatures were treated so cruelly for so long remains a black spot on humanity’s permanent record. It’s something worse than a sin, and the living graves of Gåshamna refuse to let us forget. 

NEWS ON FIRE

Ecce Femina

The Spanish woman who did a little amateur, ah, anointing of her church’s Jesus fresco died on Monday. Cecilia Giménez was 94. In 2012, she took it upon herself to restore Elías Garcia Martínez’s 80-year-old Ecce Homo, which had started to flake in the dank air of the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain. The result, it was often said, made Christ resemble a monkey, though an infinitely more reverential way of looking at it is that she had made a monkey more Christlike.

The obituaries for Giménez note that she initially shrank from notoriety, with local authorities weighing legal action and the parish priest insisting he had not authorized the touch-up. Then the tourists started showing up, creating a boom in her little town of Borja—“miracle,” in the judgment of a librettist who wrote a comic opera about the incident. Young artists entered competitions in which they painted their own Ecce Homos, and Giménez gave out the prizes. Menaced by the law, denied by her priest, hung up for public mockery on the site now known as X, she endured a dark night of the soul (not to mention a self-imposed fast) and emerged a maker of miracles, inspiring acolytes and pilgrims across the world. A gospel, kinda, but smudged. – Tommy Craggs

Viral Loads
A hitherto unknown right-wing YouTuber named Nick Shirley posted a video this past Friday purporting to be an on-the-spot “investigation” of a fraudulent Minnesota daycare center receiving federal funds: further evidence, Shirley claimed, of government fraud already being investigated in that state.

It was, for those of us not born earlier this week, a transparently deceptive political attack, and not a new one: it was strongly redolent of the same deeply questionable tactics the activist James O’Keefe used to destroy the community group ACORN more than a decade ago. Once again, no one could even say for certain whether the claims in the viral video were even true. Once again, it didn’t matter. After two days of increasingly breathless media coverage, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it was halting all federal childcare payments to Minnesota, cutting off support to some 19,000 children, and managing to demonize both the Somali community and Governor Tim Walz in one blow. Meanwhile, the usual suspects on X the Everything App were busily posting dotted maps of daycare centers in other blue states like it was the War Room before D-Day.

I would like to say that the people have grown too wise for this sort of thing, and that so transparent an act of racist, mob-mentality demagoguery won’t work. I’d like to have said that to the people of Charlottesville, or Tulsa, or Nuremberg, too. Maybe some day it’ll be true. – Zach Rabiroff

My Friend Raj Persuades Me That Moby-Dick Is Already in My Life

by Amy Chu

Amy Chu noticed a friend at the library reading a good-looking copy of Moby-Dick... the same book, over weeks. So when Moby-Dick Week began, she decided to talk to him about the book and what it meant to him. The result is a freewheeling conversation engaging with this work from ground zero. For example, Raj on the connection between Ishmael and Queequeg: 

...this strange Polynesian man named Queequeg. And Queequeg is full of tattoos and it’s just so like, yeah, this is like the most exotic possible person but there's, human connection, or you know, it's like there's enormous game recognize game. They sleep together and they’re just talking and smoking for a bunch of nights.

HAPPY 2026 FROM ALL OF US AT FLAMING HYDRA.