RIO DE JANEIRO â€" Germany became World Cup champion for the fourth time on Sunday night, and the first European team in history to clinch soccer's greatest prize on South American soil.
It did so courtesy of a winner deep into extra time from substitute Mario Gotze, who displayed a brilliant piece of skill to decide a contest of outstanding quality.
Gotze took a pass from the left from Andre Schurrle in the 113th minute of action, trapped it on his chest and swiveled it past Sergio Romero and into the Argentina net. The goal proved to be enough to give Germany a 1-0 victory.
For the second World Cup final in a row scores were level after 90 minutes, but unlike when Spain beat the Netherlands four years ago this was no snoozefest.
It was tense and cagey and royally entertaining. And it was sealed by a 22-year-old who had come on as substitute for Miroslav Klose with just two minutes of regulation time remaining.
Gotze's strike was the first time Argentina had trailed in the entire tournament and sent his nation into delirium, securing its first world title since 1990.
For Argentina it was agony. Lionel Messi and his team came so close but it wasn't enough. In the end, the Germans were too strong, too clinical, and in every way the best all-round collection of players at this event.
While Gotze's goal was the only score of the evening there was action, flow, chances aplenty and a spectacle the sport could be proud of. The finishing was poor, but the quality of play was outstanding.
Argentina had the best early chance, the kind that leaves forwards holding their head if they miss them. This time the unfortunate man was Gonzalo Higuain, who was sent through by an ill-conceived backward header from Germany's Toni Kroos. But Higuain scuffed his shot completely with only Manuel Neuer to beat.
Soon after Higuain did manage to put the ball in the net, to the temporary delight of the Argentinean support, only for it to be correctly whistled back for offside.
Germany's possession game was slick and sharp but missing a little extra ingredient. Sami Khedira had been ruled out through a late injury, then his replacement Christoph Kramer went down with a sickening head clash midway through the first half, bringing Schurrle into the fray.
The Germans should have gone ahead on the stroke of halftime, with Benedikt Howedes surging forward to aim a powerful header at goal, only for his effort to crash against the post with Romero beaten.
While Messi toiled and teased in the second half it was Germany that was taking control and Toni Kroos, one of the players of the tournament, marked an uncharacteristically sloppy display with a tame shot with nine minutes of normal time to go.
Extra time sometimes gets bogged down into cagey stalemate, but not so on this occasion. In the very first minute of the additional period, Schurrle's strike on target had to be pushed away by Romero to quicken pulses on both sides.
The pace did not slacken, not a bit. It was relentless; Sergio Aguero broke clear at the other end and foolishly tried to shoot from an angle instead of cutting back, while substitute Rodrigo Palacio, on for Higuain, went clear minutes later but skewed his attempted lob over Neuer but wide of net.
Penalties had been used as a decisive factor in the World Cup final just twice before â€" when Brazil beat Italy at the Rose Bowl in 1994 and when Italy defeated France following Zinedine Zidane's infamous headbutt in 2006.
Just when potential takers were being discussed around the iconic Maracana Stadium it was time for Gotze, one of Europe's most heralded youngsters, to step up. He stepped quickly to move clear of the defense, with balance to steady himself â€" and forwards, into history.
In 1976, in Shelbyville, Ind., a city of about 20,000 southeast of Indianapolis, a film premiere was held. The picture was Fellini’sCasanova. A highly conceptual Italian art house flick about sexual deviance was not what this audience was used to; the house, nonetheless, was packed. A local was in it, a 21-year-old everyone knew about but whom few knew well. She now sat nervously waiting for it to start, concerned about what her neighbors were going to think of it, of her.
“For his giant work, he even imported a giantess from America,†one news article about the picture had read, a find that had ended director Federico Fellini’s, “worldwide search for an amazon.â€
She was credited: “Sandra E. Allen â€" Giantess.â€
In the film, Casanova, played by Donald Sutherland, first meets the Giantess in a chaotic pub, where she is humiliating men one by one at arm wrestling. A loud thud, and cheers, a loud thud. She is made even more enormous-seeming by the camera’s low angle and the large veil she wears.
He finally approaches, and asks, “Who are you, mythological creature?†Sandy’s replies are not her own voice; Fellini dubbed his film in Italian. The woman who voiced Sandy sounded particularly effeminate; Sandy’s real voice was deeper, mannish.
Intrigued, Casanova follows Sandy to her room, where she is bathed in a large wooden tub by two dwarfs. One catches our voyeur and with a wink, continues to let him watch. The audience never sees anything but Sandy’s milky back.
Sandy was a modest girl, a churchgoer. In the darkened theater she grew more and more nervous and eventually rose, and left, though probably not without being noticed. At a little over 7’5â€, Sandy held the Guinness World Record for being the tallest woman alive, a title she’d received about two years prior. (She was still growing; her eventual record-holding height would be 7’7¼â€.) On one hand, the title meant she would live a life much more glamorous than those of the other residents of Shelbyville â€" this premiere was evidence of that. On the other, it meant the divide that existed between her and all other people would only continue to grow.
I was a college freshman when a guy remarked that I had the same name as the title of a pop song by the New Zealand band Split Enz called “Hello Sandy Allen.†For a strange second I thought someone had written a song about me, but then I googled the title, and caught my first glimpse of its subject. It’s a weird moment when you realize you have the exact same name â€" first, last, middle initial â€" as the tallest woman alive. I gawked at her.
Likewise, Split Enz frontman Neil Finn gawked when he met Sandy backstage at a talk show in 1976. “Hello Sandy Allen / the world’s tallest woman†Finn’s lyric begins. He goes on to say he felt “uneasy†when he first laid eyes on her and the enormity of the handshake. That sense quickly abated when he saw how optimistic she seemed. “Appearance never held you back,†he goes on in the chorus, “Must be when you’re number one / You don’t have to try so hard.â€
Though on occasion I’d mention in passing that I shared a name with the tallest woman alive, I didn’t actually think of Sandy often â€" until 2008. I saw in the New York Times that she had died and I read about the years she spent in a nursing home even though she was only 53. I read how rare gigantism is, and how it ensured poor health and physical pain on top of the constant ridicule and anguish. The deeper I dug, the more I realized how much more there was to consider than a coincidence of names â€" and the more I realized how wrong Neil Finn turned out to be.
Sandy Allen visits with local children at the library in Shelbyville, Indiana in 1995. AP Photo/Phil Meyers
Sandy Allen was born an average-sized baby. This is how all biographies of her begin. Her mother lived up in Chicago and had problems, drank, and brought Sandy home to Shelbyville soon after she was born, where she was raised by her grandmother, Emma Warfield. Her father was rumored to be a truck driver. “Allen†was the name her mother wrote on Sandy’s birth certificate, Sandy’s longtime friend Rita Rose explains to me, adding she doesn’t know if her mother didn’t just make it up.
Their house was small and its paint peeling. Indoor plumbing had come only years before and didn’t always work. Warfield, whom Sandy called “Ma,†worked as a housekeeper and was, in Rose’s words, “a total sweetheart.†Sandy’s mother was not. She moved in when Sandy was in junior high, bringing along one of Sandy’s several half-siblings, a boy named Michael. As Rose describes it, Sandy’s mother was emotionally abusive, especially toward the boy, and an embarrassment to Sandy; especially given that it was a small town, people talked. “She just caused this turmoil in the household,†Rose says.
Sandy Allen’s fifth grade class photo. Courtesy of Rita Rose
Meanwhile, Sandy grew. By fifth grade she was 6’3â€. By her freshman year she was 7’1â€. Her grandmother struggled to keep her clothed and shod. Her 8-foot bed was set up in the dining room. Sandy was very protective of her brother, something of a surrogate parent. She used to call home from school at lunchtime to make sure he was alright.
Her peers teased or ignored her. She had few friends. She was tall enough that they saw her only as tall, and then as someone not worth seeing. Coaches at her high school momentarily thought she might be useful on the basketball team but she wasn’t really athletic. Her leg bones had grown so quickly, in fact, she needed surgeries, two of them, just to walk, which she then did with a limp.
After graduation she worked as a secretary at an oil company, then at the Indianapolis Bureau of Motor Vehicles, in the abandoned vehicles division. Her third job was as a secretary again, this time in the state veterinary office. It was there, in 1974, that some co-workers, prodding to know how tall she really was, kicked off their pumps and climbed on desks and chairs and dangled a tape measure down. They sent the figure to Guinness, in London, which replied that she was taller than any woman they had on record but the measurement needed to be verified by a medical professional. Sandy got in her car â€" which was hard-earned, and into which she barely fit â€" and drove to her family physician, where the figure was confirmed. Her name and picture were printed in the 1976 edition of the book.
In an interview with local news soon after its publication, Sandy seems genuinely excited. She wears a teal dress and hangs her white shawl as she enters her office. Her dark hair is boy-short. Though she is extremely tall, she seems almost childish.
“Are you sensitive about your height or do you enjoy it?†the reporter asks up at her.
“When I was a freshman in high school I used to get a lot of comments about my height, especially from the boys, and that really upset me,†Sandy replies, her square glasses shining. “But now that I’ve gotten to be the World’s Tallest Woman I’m going to take advantage of all the publicity I can get. I’m really enjoying it now. That’s why I feel like if I grow a few more inches, what the heck.â€
Sandy was asked up to Minneapolis to do a Marriott opening and flew on an airplane for the first time out to Los Angeles, to be interviewed on TheDavid Frost Show. Soon after an agent contacted her about the Fellini film. She’d never heard of the director before, but Sutherland she had. The state veterinary office wasn’t about to let her leave for the several weeks of shooting until the governor intervened and off Sandy went to Italy.
Imagine her: a 19-year-old Christian girl of little means in home-sewn enormous clothes, who’d barely left Indiana, let alone America, as she stepped off that plane in Rome. Heads swiveled; bulbs flashed. Sandy, who’d been told by her boss that Italian men liked to pinch “rear ends,†walked through the terminal with her purse behind her. Filming took time; Fellini asked Sandy to stay six weeks rather than the original three. She toured the countryside with the director and his wife, had her first glass of wine, saw Bianca Jagger on set, stayed in Roman Polanski’s mansion, which Sutherland had rented. Fellini and his wife were kind enough to get a limousine for her so she could tour the Vatican, and there, on the cobblestones, soldiers and tourists swarmed her. She was, in some sense, more holy a sight.
After she returned from Europe she finally went to an endocrinologist. She was in her early twenties and hadn’t ceased growing. It was now that she finally heard the word “acromegaly.â€
Acromegaly is a rare condition caused by an excess of growth hormone, often because of a tumor on the pituitary gland. Gigantism is an ever more rare prepuberty onset of the condition. Because patients with acromegaly are adults, meaning they’ve finished growing, they do not grow taller, but they do get thicker. Their teeth space apart, their hands balloon. Dr. Laurence Katznelson, professor of neurosurgery and of medicine at Stanford University, explains to me what acromegaly “looks like†by mentioning Richard Kiel, who played Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. His disease, in other words, made him a villain. (“You really have the same name as the person we will discuss?†Katznelson had asked at the beginning of our call.)
Rita Rose says Sandy had been taken to a specialist as a pre-teen, who explained that she needed brain surgery, but as her family was uninsured, they simply didn’t return. Now doctors told her that the tumor, which was near her optic nerve, would eventually cause her to go blind. The surgery capped the then-20-year-old’s height at the record 7’7¼â€.
“She had to wear a wig for a year,†Rose recalls. Her long friendship with Sandy began around that time; they’d first met when Rose interviewed her for a story she was writing for the Indianapolis Star. Rose laments the fact that Sandy’s grandmother and mother didn’t just agree to the surgery initially. “If she had the surgery at that time, then she would have been a tall person but a normal tall person.â€
Gigantism does not affect height only. “It affects all organs,†Katznelson explains. “It affects the heart. It can affect pancreatic function. Patients often have diabetes. Thyroid can be enlarged so they have goiters.†He lists other what he terms “co-morbidity†factors, including joint problems, sleep apnea, other hormonal deficiencies, depression. Men have low testosterone; women don’t menstruate (according to Rose, Sandy never did). He summarizes, “All acromegaly, including gigantism, begets premature mortality.â€
Sandy’s doctors told her she shouldn’t expect to see her 30th birthday.
Sandy Allen’s senior class portrait. Courtesy of Rita Rose
Sandy would always have two options: a life lived publicly â€" one that embraced her title, perhaps attempted to do good with it, but invited judgment â€" or a private one. Soon after she became aware of how short her life might be, she elected the former. A Scottish promoter named Norman Adie first took Sandy to Australia, where she appeared at several department stores. That summer she did appearances at Adie’s Fantastic Facts and Feats in Wildwood, N.J. Sandy brought along Michael and adopted a dog she called Adie. After two summers there, she decided to take a job at the Guinness Museum in Niagara Falls, Canada.
“At that point her family needed money, and she wasn’t making it too well on a secretary salary,†Rose says. “She could be out on her own and make it for herself. That appealed to her.â€
The 1981 Canadian documentary Being Different shows how Sandy spent her eight years at the museum. She is announced and comes out from behind a curtain. She wears blue eye shadow and pink slacks. Seated, she is still tall. She holds a Superscope microphone into which she begins her very rehearsed-sounding spiel: “Good afternoon, all you short people. How you doing today? My name is Sandy Allen and I’m the tallest living woman in the world.†It’s peppered with tame jokes, many of which she’d repeat throughout her life, in interview after interview. She asks short guys to “eat their hearts out.†She recites her 450-pound weight, “give or take an ounce.†She then opens it up for questions. “Don’t hesitate,†she commands after a pause. “I’ve been asked everything from ‘How is your sex life?’ to ‘How big is your toothbrush?’†The room chortles. One woman asks if she has kids. She replies she doesn’t; Michael is the boy who’s entered alongside her. A man asks whether she eats more than average. “Well, for breakfast this morning I only had three short people, so that’s not too much,†she answers, a little too breezily.
“Her shoe size is 22,†the male narrator says as footage rolls of Sandy’s petite grandmother helping her into a jacket. “All her clothes must be custom-made.†The narrator adds that she’s made a choice to be “on exhibition.â€
“Well, my height is there, why not take advantage of it?†Sandy asks. “I’m proud of my size. I’m not running away from it. I’m doing this in order to show people that I can handle the problems that were presented to me by my size; now, why can’t you handle yours?†And in some respects, it seems this was a proud time for her. She made a decent living, had her own apartment, met a lot of people, doing something relatively easy. The curtain. The spiel. Repetitive questions. Invasive questions. Insulting questions. Stooping for photos. Children with sticky hands. Indifference. Laughter. A dozen or shows a day, eight hours a day, five days a week, for eight years. But the tourists who came â€" did they really come to have their hearts and minds changed? (Are my motives for investigating Sandy any more pure?)
“Basically it was a freak show,†Rose says.
During her years with Guinness, Sandy traveled to Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Japan twice, and Thailand, where she visited an alligator farm and was kissed by an orangutan. During her second Japan trip, the media found it funny to sew her an extra-large bridal gown and stage a fake wedding between her and her choice of the world’s two largest living men. Though it was just for show â€" both men were married â€" they spared no expense. They kept the dress but would send it if she ever requested. She never did. By many accounts she never had a serious relationship. By many accounts she would have been an incredible mom.
Sandy eventually could take it no more, and returned to Indiana. She became a secretary in the office of Indianapolis’ Mayor William Hudnut, a job she enjoyed. They outfitted her with an extra-large desk, an extra-large chair. She could type 90 words per minute despite her fingers. Once the Indianapolis Indians visited and had more fun talking with her than they did with the mayor. (She was a big fan of them, and also of the Pacers, who helped her buy shoes.) After, she worked briefly at a sewage treatment plant. By this point her health and mobility were declining and she elected to go on government medical aid. The poverty she’d known as a child would stalk her until her end.
A man named John Kleiman, who’d formerly managed fellow Indianan Bobby Helms, most famous for his rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock,†approached Sandy at a parade and asked to be her manager, to which she agreed. In the late ’70s and ’80s, she’d had scattered talk show appearances, including Oprah.
With his help, she appeared on more shows, including Jerry Springer, whose host dropped his usual sensational antics while she and other Guinness holders appeared. She appeared on Vicki Lawrence alongside the man who could smoke the most cigarettes at once. She was on Montel alongside the world’s shortest twins and a man with a bone in his nose. She did Leeza Gibbons alongside the man with the world’s longest mustache, the man with the world’s best memory, the woman who had lost the most weight, the woman who was the most flexible, and an escape artist, who escaped on the show from a washing machine. In the mid-’90s, she twice did Howard Stern.
“I have dwarfism of the genitalia,†Howard says, and asks whether her genitalia are normal or proportional.
“I believe everything is proportional,†Sandy replies, playing along. He gets her to say she can’t use regular-sized Tampax and that she’s still a virgin. “My moral standards are, I guess by today’s standards, a little old-fashioned,†she admits.
“You ever get horny for a man?†he asks.
“Of course I’d like male companionship,†Sandy answers with thought. When a caller who’s 6’3†calls in and asks her to have tall children with him, Sandy says she gets asked out all the time by less-than-desirable-seeming gentlemen. Howard’s parting advice to her is that she buy a Hitachi Magic Wand.
While Sandy felt Maury Povich was nice, the talk show host who was her favorite was Sally Jessy Raphael. The first show she did for her, “Don’t Stare, I’m Still Human,†featured a woman who had a severe skin disease, a baby who had a mole that covered a third of her body, a baby with a disease that made her pee smell like maple syrup, a man who ate uncontrollably, and a girl who had a disease that affected her muscles and her bones. Sandy enjoyed that such programs encouraged people to understand and sympathize with those who suffered from strange and unusual diseases â€" and the humiliation, the isolation, the pain therein. When Raphael more or less repeated the program with a different slate of guests, she let Sandy co-host, a first.
She did these appearances, and spoke at Tall Clubs â€" an organization for men taller than 6’4†and women taller than 5’10†â€" churches, and elementary schools. She did it not for the money (she couldn’t make too much and lose her disability): She did it to spread the tolerance of difference.
In a Guinness Book television profile of her from the ’90s, it shows her as she’s wheeled out before an auditorium of squealing elementary-schoolers. With a hand on a male teacher’s shoulder, she raises herself to her full height and the kids roar. Seated, Sandy talks to them. “The toughest thing for me was when I was growing up because everybody wanted to make fun of me just because I was tall,†she says. “And that didn’t fit in with what everybody else was, regular size.†She called her speech “It’s Okay to Be Different.†She released an inspirational video of the same name, which could be purchased by calling 1-888-BIG-SANDY.
She wouldn’t have traveled had she not cared so much about her cause: Traveling was extremely difficult for her. As Kleiman explains to me, television producers often didn’t understand the need for a first-class bulkhead seat, the limo or suburban for transportation. If they were traveling for more than two days, she’d need a woman to help her dress and bathe in the hotel room sink. Sometimes a fire department needed to meet her on the tarmac to help hoist her off the plane. And then, of course, were the glares and sighs and stares from PAs, flight attendants, other travelers. Appearances also garnered negative attention in the press. She was slandered in tabloids all the time. This was before the internet or reality television, before social media might have connected Sandy more intimately with her fans, and before the rise of reality television devoted to capturing lives that are somehow different â€" for better and for worse.
“She couldn’t go anywhere without people recognizing her,†Kleiman says. Since I’ve begun researching Sandy, I’ve been surprised at the number of people who do say they met her once, they saw her once, and where, and what she said to them. She was someone you do not forget. Once, during an appearance at a San Francisco museum, she was approached by a figure in dark sunglasses who revealed himself to be Michael Jackson. He told Sandy he was a fan of hers and mailed her an autographed record.
“In the hundred of times we were out in the public, I never saw her be nasty to anyone who came up to say hi to her,†Kleiman says. “She would be eating, and a crowd would gather around and she’d stop eating and sign autographs. “I have never known anyone with a heart like Sandy Allen.â€
In addition to her knees, Sandy had lung troubles early on, and early-onset arthritis. The tumor returned and was again removed. Though her body required a lot of water, going to the bathroom was such a production that she often had urinary problems. She got a bad sinus infection, and a blood one. She had to watch out for falls, for ceiling fans and doorways, for not getting stuck in bathtubs. She walked all day long once at Disney World, and the resulting blister grew so bad she eventually had her big toe amputated, compromising her mobility. The older she grew, the harder it was for her system to recover. The longer she was made to stay in bed, the more bed-ridden she became. “She almost died three or four times,†Kleiman says. He credits God, and the fact that she stayed so active, trying to spread a positive message, for her ability to live so long.
“She was the longest-lived giantess in the history of the world!†he exclaims, and there’s something in this phrasing, the majesty of it, that I feel impressed to even be talking to a man who knew her well.
But Sandy was depressed. Kleiman seems disappointed to admit this, as if she would let down her fans if they realized that she wasn’t as positive as she outwardly seemed. Kleiman lived just a floor above her. Sometimes, he recalls, she stopped taking care of herself. Sometimes she physically hurt herself. She always hated hospitals, doctors. More than once she’d been brought to the hospital against her will, Kleiman tells me, which involved the need for five or six medical personnel, her legs dangling out an ambulance’s back door. He admits she was admitted to a psychiatric facility at least once as well.
He recalls the movie My Giant, one line in particular â€" “You’ve never seen an old giant, have you?†â€" and says that affected her greatly. “She would have much rather been normal and not have been noticed by anyone.â€
When she could no longer travel, he wrote a book about her called Cast a Giant Shadow, which he self-published in 2001. Half of it is written as her, in the first person; the other half he wrote as himself, giving an outside perspective. He says she didn’t mind this form, that she read what he’d written and approved it, changing, according to him, “about six words.†When I realize this, I’m bothered that the only testimony I would have thought was Sandy herself was instead someone speaking for her. Really, like everything, it’s just an impression of what the outside world thought of Sandy Allen.
As her health continued to fail, she went from nursing home to nursing home, eventually ending up in a Shelbyville facility where her grandmother had died some years before. It was also where, coincidentally, the then-World’s Oldest Woman, 115-year-old Edna Parker, lived. (It’s said they were friendly.)
Sandy had a private room with a television and computer and a closet. “She had everything you could possibly want if you’re going to live in one room,†Rita Rose says. People would visit her some, but she was frustrated with her circumstances, once so much that she was even caught wheeling down the street, headed down to a local bar. “She just wanted a normal night out with her friends,†Rose says, recalling visits in Sandy’s room, bringing her cigarettes.
“I went to the nursing home and we sat there and ate and I read the entire manuscript to her. It took, like, four and a half hours. I wanted her approval,†Rose says, which Sandy apparently gave. “Then two weeks later she died.†It was early in the morning, Aug. 13, 2008. Sandy lived to 53. (Edna Parker outlived her by three months.)
Rose explains that Sandy had wanted to be buried in a blue nightgown, because her grandmother had also been buried in a blue nightgown, but they couldn’t get the one they’d bought to fit her. Instead she was buried in a Pacers jersey, and Pacers earrings too. Her funeral was packed, and the streets, as people bearing signs and flowers tried to get a glimpse of her coffin as it was wheeled by on a wagon. “It was like a parade,†Rose says. “It was a great funeral as funerals go.†Sandy’s mother attended, Rose recalls, on the condition that she not make a scene, which she did not.
The Shelbyville graveyard where Sandy is buried is mostly empty the twilight I visit. Sycamores block the view of the factory on the edge of town. I walk what feels like the entire large cemetery’s paved paths before I find her grave. It’s at a far edge, separated by an unpaved path from all the others. Adjacent to a crumbling old barn and a chain-link fence, it is the loneliest grave. And where her specially constructed, extra-large casket was laid into the ground in four adjacent plots, they did not, it seems, attempt to replant the lawn as they have on the other graves; rather there is hard dirt, patches of weeds.
In other ways it is the most the most solitary grave, and the most beautiful. A group of her friends and admirers, who raised the funds for the gravestone after her death, purchased one of an unusual teardrop shape, upon which has been inscribed her name, and mine â€" Sandra E. Allen â€" and the phrase “Gentle Giant.†They also purchased a little white bench, so visitors could sit and face her, and the elementary school beyond the fence. Rita Rose tells me Michael once went to school there.
I’m struck by how perfectly her grave reflects her life: at once dilapidated, lonely; and yet unique, inviting, nearby to children. What are all those other little graves with their knickknacks compared to this one off here on its own.
I sit on the white bench. I look at the expanse of earth before me, trying to picture the enormous woman below. I say, “Hello.â€
Photograph by Sandra Allen / BuzzFeed
correction
A previous version of this story misstated when Edna Parker died.
The world's tallest waterslide, located in Schiltterbahn's Kansas City waterpark, opened to the public this Thursday. I had the honor/horror of being part of that public. This is my story.
If you're not familiar with the world's tallest waterslide by this point, here are a few fun facts about its record-breaking delights:
It's called the Verrückt, which I think is German for public colonic. [Ed. Note: It actually means "crazy," which is also appropriate]
It's 168 feet and 7 inches tall. That's about 51.38 meters if you use the metric system, and a little more than 168.5 $5 footlongs if you use the Subway system.
It goes between 40 and 50 mph depending on your weight and whether or not anxiety farts can propel a watercraft to go faster.
Its first drop is, in strictly scientific terms, super-effing steep.
If you're curious how one survives a waterslide with that kind of statistical baggage, let me be your sage guide, one who was pleasantly surprised not to have peed herself at all at any point, no sir.
Bring and/or make friends
Not just any friends. You'll need one to two friends (you can make them in line; the very best case scenario is about a two-hour wait, so you've got plenty of time). They'll need to be taller than 54 inches, weigh a collective 400 to 550 pounds between all two or three of youâ€"presumably if you're under the limit you'll just fly off into the air after that first hump, like the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factoryâ€"and with whom you feel comfortable verbally agreeing to a situation that includes the possible risk of death.
I've never heard people so excited to be told they're 400 to 550 pounds.
No, really. Before you ride, they ask you things like if you're pregnant or have any physical ailments, and oh P.S. are you cool with the chance of maybe dying? And you're just like, "Sure! One ticket for possible death please!"
Mentally prepare yourself for the walk up
There are 264 stairs that lead to the top of the Verrückt, which may not sound like an insane amount if you're bad at visualizing numbers like I am. It's probably more helpful to think of the total trip as 17 flights of stairs, which as you might imagine gives you plenty of time to consider just how high up you are and how far down you have to go and if you need to make any adjustments to your will.
Comforting factoids along the way.
The walk up is decorated with signs that give you a perspective of just how high up you are. I'm guessing they're also meant to distract you from the fact that you're only halfway there and just learning you might have stair climbing-induced asthma.
So. Many. Stairs.
A fun game you get to play at the top is to see how much weight you lost in sweat when they weigh you for a third and final time. We collectively lost one pound.
Just be cool and enjoy your well-earned scary water death dive
At the top, one ride supervisor ended each sentence with "the top of world's tallest waterslide." For example:
"Welcome to the top of the world's tallest waterslide."
"Please make your way to the raft at the top of the world's tallest waterslide."
"Please don't start cry-puking at the top of the world's tallest waterslide."
I don't think I've ever taken part in something that was the declared "-est" of that thing. So, it made me feel very accomplished, which was a nice feeling to feel right before they strapped us into what could potentially be our own personal water coffin.
One of my final sentences before going down was, "Has anyone vomited on this thing yet?"
To which one person responded, "No. So don't be the first."
View from the top.
For me, the scariest part of the ride was when they inched our raft to the top of the slide and announced "30 seconds" as in "Your ride will start in 30 seconds" as in "Enjoy what may be the last 30 seconds of your existence."
And then we were off. Before I could finish yelling, "Clear my browser history upon death," we were falling down that first insanely steep drop, which in the moment felt like going off a waterfall while Velcro-ed to a pool noodle. That drop is so jarring and quick that the hump at the end of the slide feels like a kiss on the cheek from an angel baby who also spits on you a little. And then you float, checking to make sure you're still registering a heartbeat. The whole thing lasts about 15 seconds.
Surviving the Verrückt was very much worth it, in that once-in-a-lifetime/potential-last-moment-of-your-lifetime sort of way. I give it five $5 footlongs, 17 flights of stairs, and all my thumbs.
Mia Mercado is a writer based in Kansas City. We can confirm that she is indeed still alive.
I've never been able to hear well. As a child, I was in and out of the hospital as doctors struggled to treat chronic ear infections that left me in throbbing pain and, eventually, relative silence. By the time I went to college, I had only one half-functioning ear drum and no hope of regaining the hearing I'd lost after years of damage. Surgery was too risky, the doctors said. This year, I decided to take the risk, and the results were extraordinary.
My Life of Quiet
Being partially deaf is an interesting experience. It turned my life into a guessing game, where I would wonder if I should do semi-dangerous things like ride a bike in New York City for fear that I might not hear a car behind me. I couldn't swim because water would leak into my inner ear. Social engagements were, well, challenging. At work, everyone thought I was a big grumpâ€""brusque" was the word my boss usedâ€"because I usually couldn't hear what anybody was saying in meetings and failed to react. Dates were hilarious, especially when I met soft-spoken women in crowded bars.
I got pretty good at reading lips. I got great at nodding and smiling. I found myself always retreating into music, because good ear buds would pump sound waves straight past my broken ear drums, past those tiny bones, and straight to my brain by way of the auditory nerve which, luckily, managed to remain intact despite the infections. Bass felt good, because I could feel it.
My reality was a quiet one, peaceful even. The busy streets of Brooklyn never bothered me at night because I simply couldn't hear the car horns or the garbage trucks. It was easy to stay cool in tense conversations, because it simply didn't register when people raised their voices. Maybe I did become a little brusque over time. But I was luckier than many people with hearing loss. My right ear was in better shape than my left, and I leaned on it like a crutch. When walking down the sidewalk, I made it a habit to keep people on my right side. I figured out how to get by, but I was constantly thinking about my hearing loss, as I tried to piece together conversations from muffled voices.
My Quest for Normalcy
And then I realized I had limited time. My hearing was getting worse, and one day, it was going to go away completely. So starting in college, I visited every ear doctor I could find to see if there might be a fix. Pretty much everyone said that my left ear, for one, was in such fragile shape, they were afraid that surgery might do more harm than good. My hearing got even worse, so they suggested hearing aids, which are bulky at best. Instead, I started watching TV with subtitles turned on and staying after class to copy other people's notes.
I'd all but given up when I found my way to the otolaryngology department at NYU Medical Center. There, suddenly and finally, the doctors had good news. (Pro tip: If you live in New York or move to New York, skip the doctor search and seek out NYU faculty. They're fantastic.) The first guy I talked to, Dr. Kenneth Schneider, told me that my ears could be rebuilt thanks to some newer techniques. I would need surgery. There would be scalpels. And there was still a chance it wouldn't work. However, without surgery, there was a chance that my hearing would continue to degrade. One day, I could be completely deaf.
My next visit was with the surgeon, an affable fellow named Dr. Sean McMenomey. In his midtown office, wearing a head mirror, Dr. McMenomey explained what was going on. My left ear was basically broken. The ear drum was full of holes, and had collapsed onto the middle ear, which itself was also a mess. The tiny bones in there were so completely out of whack that they basically didn't work. My right ear was in a similar, albeit less severe, condition. The diagnosis: maximal conductive hearing loss.
The problem, in a sense, was a mechanical one. Your eardum and ossicles (a.k.a. "those tiny bones") exist to conduct sound waves from outside the ear to the auditory nerve in your inner ear, the same way that a bridge carries cars from one side of the river to the other. Thanks to years of infection, that bridge had basically collapsed in my left ear. In my right ear, the damage was critical, but sound could still make it across.
There was some good news though; a hearing test revealed that everything beyond that point was in good shape. If they could rebuild the middle ear and repair the ear drum, there was a good chance my hearing could be restored. We'd start on the left side.
"I might have to cut your ear off," Dr. McMenomey said matter-of-factly.
My eyes widened.
"Not all the way off!" he smiled in the most reassuring way possible, considering the news. "Depending on how it looks when I get in the operating room, I'll either go in through the ear canal or make an incision back here," he pointed the area directly behind the ear, "And peel it back."
My eyes remained wide.
"Don't worry it'll be a small incision. People probably won't even be able to see the scar."
"That's reassuring," I was lying but only a little bit.
"Once I'm in there, I'll have a better idea of how bad the damage is. If it's really bad, I'll have to do the surgery in two stages. If not, I think we can have you in and out of the OR in an hour." He turned to the cross section diagram of an ear on the wall, "First, I'll put those bones back in place. I'll most likely install a titanium prosthesis in your head."
"So I'll be a cyborg?"
"Technically, yes," he laughed. "But it's small and non-ferrous, so you won't get pulled aside at the airport or anything like that. In fact, you won't even notice it's there."
I nodded.
"Then, I'll rebuild the ear drum," Dr. McMenomey said. "I'll probably need to borrow a little cartilage from outside your ear to patch it up, but you won't really notice that either."
It all sounded too good to be true. But I was lucky. While my hearing loss was severe, it was operable. And the procedure was a far less invasive than, say, installing a cochlear implant. My hearing would also, hopefully, return to some semblance of normalcy, whereas a cochlear implant is different.
"Sound like something you'd be into?" he asked casually. I booked an appointment as soon I could.
My Day Under the Knife
Within a month of my consultation with Dr. McMenomey, I found myself in a hospital gown with an IV in my handâ€"my sweaty, nervous hand. It took nearly two hours to cycle through all the various players that would be involved in my relatively short surgery. The nurse that checked my vitals asked my why I was there. I assumed she knew.
"A lot of people are going to be asking you that," she explained. "It's a liability thing."
I had not considered the idea that the doctors would perform the wrong surgery. So I told her I was getting surgery on my ear. She asked me which one. Again, I assumed she knew. I pointed to my left ear.
The anesthesiologist came by, and we had the same conversation. He also explained how I would barely even notice the surgery. I'd fall asleep pretty much as soon as the oxygen mask hit my face, and I'd wake up in recovery.
Finally, Dr. McMenomey showed up in scrubs. We had the same conversation. (I knew he knew, but you know...) He pulled out a sterile Sharpie and put his initials on the left side of my head with a line pointing to my ear. Good God, I thought to myself, how many people had to have surgery on the wrong side before this Sharpie thing became a thing.
Before I felt ready, they wheeled me up to the OR. I hopped onto the table. It was uncomfortable. The nurses started strapping something to my legs and then something to my arm. The anesthesiologist tried to make small talk but before I could quip back I saw the oxygen mask heading towards my face. Moments later, I woke up on a gurney with a pounding headache and a bandage over my left ear. I couldn't hear anything.
My Revelation
Dr. McMenomey had said it would take a couple weeks to heal. During that time, I had to keep the ear covered. Seeing the bandage in the mirror was like looking at freshly wrapped Christmas presents under the tree but struggling with the fact you'd have to wait a few more days to open them.
The day I took the bandage out was a normal day. I'd spent my working hours listening to music and blogging and stuff. When quitting time came, I went to the bathroom, and unceremoniously pulled out the packing. I don't know what I expected, but it didn't seem any different without the bandage. I tried snapping my fingers on the left side of my head. Did it sound louder?
I left the office with my coworker Bob. Bob's from Scranton and enjoys chatting, so we chatted while we strolled to the subway. I slowed to a walk, when I felt anxiety creep up my spine. My hands were shaking a little, and Bob asked me if I was alright.
"Yeah, I..." I couldn't figure it out at first, but then it hit me like a locomotive. "Holy shit, I can hear you!"
Bob looked confused.
"I felt like something was wrong," I explained. "Then I realized that you were standing on my left side, and I could actually hear what you were saying! That's never happened to me before."
"Wait, so you're telling me all this time we've been working together you haven't been able to hear me?" Bob looked upset.
"No no no," I was getting flashbacks to the "brusque" conversation I'd had with my boss a few years before. "I mean yes, I couldn't really hear you, but I'd know what you were saying. Now I can actually hear you, and it's tripping me out."
Suddenly, the cacophony of the city swirled around me. A car door slammed down the alleyway. A couple chatted on the corner. The subway rumbled underneath. These were all sounds I'd heard before, but not like this. It was as if I suddenly had superpowers. It was incredible.
My Recovery
In the weeks that followed the hearing got better and better. When I went for my first post-op appointment, Dr. McMenomey told me the inside of the left ear looked "awesome," and that was a new experience, too. Usually when doctors looked at that ear, they'd gasp. I'd have to explain that I knew it was screwed up, but there was nothing to be done. When he looked at the right, he said he'd like to give it the same treatment whenever I was ready. But for now, I should expect to start hearing a lot more.
I guess I'd finally done it. Or rather, the surgical team did it. About a month after the surgery, the ear was healed well enough to swim. It had been a decade since I'd gone underwater, and I could do that again. (I still haven't, because I'm scared.) I could hear people when they talked to me. (Again, this was a novelty.) And most importantly, I could sleep easy knowing that I wasn't going to go completely deaf in that ear.
A few weeks later, I flew down to Tennessee to surprise my mom for her birthday. We ate some pizza and had a grand old time. Later that night, I was watching a movie, while my sister took care of some things around the house. She eventually sat down and tried to follow the movie.
"Why do you have the sound on so low?" she asked.
"Huh?" I didn't understand.
"Can you turn it up, please?" she asked more directly.
"Oh..." I pumped the volume up.
"Wait," my mom said from across the room. "Can you actually hear that, Adam?" I would usually wake up the neighbors when I watched TV.
"I guess I can," I said, kind of surprised.
"Wow," my mom said.
It was around then that I took stock of the past few months. The most incredible thing about the surgery was the simple fact that I didn't have to think about hearing any more. Before, the struggle to make sense of what people were saying ruled every interaction I had, leaning in so that I might catch a sentence with my good ear or watching their lips to try and make out works. Now, I could simply hear them.
When I went back for my follow up hearing test recently, I didn't know what to expect. I'd had a million tests like it. I basically failed them all. But this time was different. The audiologist laughed when she showed me the results. In my last hearing test, about a month before the surgery, I could hear about 38 percent of what was going on in my left ear. Now, I can hear 93 percent. All thanks to a good surgeon, a lot of patience, and a tiny fleck of titanium.
In his ‘Jennifer in Paradise Series’, Constant Dullart revisits this image by John Knoll. Endlessly shared on the internet, the original high res version is impossible to find.
Remembering Jennifer in Paradise: Constant Dullaart at Carroll / Fletcher, London
The Dutch artist Constant Dullaart investigates the infancy of the world wide web, in particular the specific virtual semantics and consumer climates that have arisen from its birth. Currently exhibiting his first solo show in the UK at Caroll / Fletcher Gallery, Dullaart navigates through and beyond post-net nostalgia (no comic sans and glitch aesthetics here), exploring the correlation between digital mediation and traditional, craft-based art forms. His focal point is global and symptomatic of the infinite, virtual space that connects every citizen of the globe with a wifi-connection.
With ‘Terms of Service’ (2012/14), he has created a website that transforms the Google search box into a mouth that recites Google’s ever-changing privacy policy, a manifestation of the absurdity of digital pedagogy and information accessing. At the same time, Dullaart shows the audience how local and young the Internet is; Steve Wozniak’s (co-founder of Apple) family photographs from 1984 (the dawn of the digital era) and abstractions from Bill Atkins’ (creator of Macpaint) first computer drawings reveal how the Internet has been subject to a corporate hegemony from the very beginning.
With his project ‘Jennifer in Paradise Series’ (2013-present) Constant Dullaart has created one of the most important pieces of virtual archeology as of yet (an area of study that will surely gain popularity in the next couple of years). Here, he redistributes and mediates a stock-like image of a topless woman reclining on a beach in Bora Bora, an image so recognizable and ingrained in our collective virtual memory that it is impossible to signify. The image was originally taken in 1988 by John Knoll, one of the original creators of Photoshop, and it was subsequently used as an example of the first digitally manipulated photograph ever. However, high-resolution versions of the image were never officially distributed, and despite the wide circulation and appropriation of the image, it is now practically impossible to find online. Meditating on this ‘extinction’, Dullaart acts as an archivist and tries to restore the image while processing it through current Photoshop filters â€" he even reached out to Jennifer in a public letter published on Rhizome in September last year, in an attempt to assert the need for such digitally-mediated histories to be discovered and discussed. Constant Dullaart’s solo show ‘Stringendo, Vanishing Mediators’ is an important reflection on digital history as well as the visual, semantic and political components that constitute our virtual climate. Until July 19th.
Anyone we could marry would, of course, be a little wrong for us. It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Perfection is not on the cards. Unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, one encounters some couples of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term relationship: some people simply shouldn’t be together.
How do the errors happen? With appalling ease and regularity. Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest and also costliest mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary, and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are.
It’s all the sadder because in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories.
One: We don’t understand ourselves
When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’
It isn’t that such desires are wrong, they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy â€" or, more accurately, not consistently miserable.
All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do â€" and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.
The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that â€" over decades â€" create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’
The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner â€" and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures. On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen â€" and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use work to gain a sense of control over life â€" and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.
With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.
Two: We don’t understand other people
This problem is compounded because other people are stuck at the same low level of self-knowledge as we are. However well-meaning they might be, they too are in no position to grasp, let alone inform us, of what is wrong with them.
Naturally, we make a stab at trying to know them. We go and visit their families, perhaps the place they first went to school. We look at photos, we meet their friends. All this contributes to a sense we’ve done our homework. But it’s like a novice pilot assuming they can fly after sending a paper plane successfully around the room.
In a wiser society, prospective partners would put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed at length by teams of psychologists. By 2100, this will no longer sound like a joke. The mystery will be why it took humanity so long to get to this point.
We need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person we’re planning to marry. We need to know their attitudes to, or stance on, authority, humiliation, introspection, sexual intimacy, projection, money, children, aging, fidelity and a hundred things besides. This knowledge won’t be available via a standard chat.
In the absence of all this, we are led â€" in large part â€" by what they look like. There seems to be so much information to be gleaned from their eyes, nose, shape of forehead, distribution of freckles, smiles… But this is about as wise as thinking that a photograph of the outside of a power station can tell us everything we need to know about nuclear fission.
We ‘project’ a range of perfections into the beloved on the basis of only a little evidence. In elaborating a whole personality from a few small â€" but hugely evocative â€" details, we are doing for the inner character of a person what our eyes naturally do with the sketch of a face.
We don’t see this as a picture of someone who has no nostrils, eight strands of hair and no eyelashes. Without even noticing that we are doing it, we fill in the missing parts. Our brains are primed to take tiny visual hints and construct entire figures from them â€" and we do the same when it comes to the character of our prospective spouse. We are â€" much more than we give ourselves credit for, and to our great cost â€" inveterate artists of elaboration.
The level of knowledge we need for a marriage to work is higher than our society is prepared to countenance, recognise and accommodate for â€" and therefore our social practices around getting married are deeply wrong.
Three: We aren’t used to being happy
We believe we seek happiness in love, but it’s not quite as simple. What at times it seems we actually seek is familiarity â€" which may well complicate any plans we might have for happiness.
We recreate in adult relationships some of the feelings we knew in childhood. It was as children that we first came to know and understand what love meant. But unfortunately, the lessons we picked up may not have been straightforward. The love we knew as children may have come entwined with other, less pleasant dynamics: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating, in short: suffering.
As adults, we may then reject certain healthy candidates whom we encounter, not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced (too mature, too understanding, too reliable), and this rightness feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. We head instead to candidates whom our unconscious is drawn to, not because they will please us, but because they will frustrate us in familiar ways.
We marry the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong â€" undeserved; because we have no experience of health, because we don’t ultimately associate being loved with feeling satisfied.
Four: Being single is so awful
One is never in a good frame of mind to choose a partner rationally when remaining single is unbearable. We have to be utterly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to have any chance of forming a good relationship. Or we’ll love no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us being so.
Unfortunately, after a certain age, society makes singlehood dangerously unpleasant. Communal life starts to wither, couples are too threatened by the independence of the single to invite them around very often, one starts to feel a freak when going to the cinema alone. Sex is hard to come by as well. For all the new gadgets and supposed freedoms of modernity, it can be very hard to get laid â€" and expecting to do so regularly with new people is bound to end in disappointment after 30.
Far better to rearrange society so that it resembles a university or a kibbutz â€" with communal eating, shared facilities, constant parties and free sexual mingling… That way, anyone who did decide marriage was for them would be sure they were doing it for the positives of coupledom rather than as an escape from the negatives of singlehood.
When sex was only available within marriage, people recognised that this led people to marry for the wrong reasons: to obtain something that was artificially restricted in society as a whole. People are free to make much better choices about who they marry now they’re not simply responding to a desperate desire for sex.
But we retain shortages in other areas. When company is only properly available in couples, people will pair up just to spare themselves loneliness. It’s time to liberate ‘companionship’ from the shackles of coupledom, and make it as widely and as easily available as sexual liberators wanted sex to be.
Five: Instinct has too much prestige
Back in the olden days, marriage was a rational business; all to do with matching your bit of land with theirs. It was cold, ruthless and disconnected from the happiness of the protagonists. We are still traumatised by this.
What replaced the marriage of reason was the marriage of instinct, the Romantic marriage. It dictated that how one felt about someone should be the only guide to marriage. If one felt ‘in love’, that was enough. No more questions asked. Feeling was triumphant. Outsiders could only applaud the feeling’s arrival, respecting it as one might the visitation of a divine spirit. Parents might be aghast, but they had to suppose that only the couple could ever know. We have for three hundred years been in collective reaction against thousands of years of very unhelpful interference based on prejudice, snobbery and lack of imagination.
So pedantic and cautious was the old ‘marriage of reason’ that one of the features of the marriage of feeling is its belief that one shouldn’t think too much about why one is marrying. To analyse the decision feels ‘un-Romantic’. To write out charts of pros and cons seems absurd and cold. The most Romantic thing one can do is just to propose quickly and suddenly, perhaps after only a few weeks, in a rush of enthusiasm â€" without any chance to do the horrible ‘reasoning’ that guaranteed misery to people for thousands of years previously. The recklessness at play seems a sign that the marriage can work, precisely because the old kind of ‘safety’ was such a danger to one’s happiness.
Six: We don’t go to Schools of Love
The time has come for a third kind of marriage. The marriage of psychology. One where one doesn’t marry for land, or for ‘the feeling’ alone, but only when ‘the feeling’ has been properly submitted to examination and brought under the aegis of a mature awareness of one’s own and the other’s psychology.
Presently, we marry without any information. We almost never read books specifically on the subject, we never spend more than a short time with children, we don’t rigorously interrogate other married couples or speak with any sincerity to divorced ones. We go into it without any insightful reasons as to why marriages fail â€" beyond what we presume to be the idiocy or lack of imagination of their protagonists.
In the age of the marriage of reason, one might have considered the following criteria when marrying:
- who are their parents
- how much land do they have
- how culturally similar are they
In the Romantic age, one might have looked out for the following signs to determine rightness:
- one can’t stop thinking of a lover
- one is sexually obsessed
- one thinks they are amazing
- one longs to talk to them all the time
We need a new set of criteria. We should wonder:
- how are they mad
- how can one raise children with them
- how can one develop together
- how can one remain friends
Seven: We want to freeze happiness
We have a desperate and fateful urge to try to make nice things permanent. We want to own the car we like, we want to live in the country we enjoyed as a tourist. And we want to marry the person we are having a terrific time with.
We imagine that marriage is a guarantor of the happiness we’re enjoying with someone. It will make permanent what might otherwise be fleeting. It will help us to bottle our joy â€" the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing gold flakes across the sea, the prospect of dinner in a little fish restaurant, our beloved in a cashmere jumper in our arms… We got married to make this feeling permanent.
Unfortunately, there is no causal necessary connection between marriage and this sort of feeling. The feeling was produced by Venice, a time of day, a lack of work, an excitement at dinner, a two month acquaintance with someone… none of which ‘marriage’ increases or guarantees.
Marriage doesn’t freeze the moment at all. That moment was dependent on the fact that you had only known each other for a bit, that you weren’t working, that you were staying in a beautiful hotel near the Grand Canal, that you’d had a pleasant afternoon in the Guggenheim museum, that you’d just had a chocolate gelato…
Getting married has no power to keep a relationship at this beautiful stage. It is not in command of the ingredients of our happiness at that point. In fact, marriage will decisively move the relationship on to another, very different moment: to a suburban house, a long commute, two small children. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.
The Impressionist painters of the nineteenth century had an implicit philosophy of transience that points us in a wiser direction. They accepted the transience of happiness as an inherent feature of existence and could in turn help us to grow more at peace with it. Sisley’s painting of a winter scene in France focuses on a set of attractive but utterly fugitive things. Towards dusk, the sun nearly breaks through the landscape. For a little time, the glow of the sky makes the bare branches less severe. The snow and the grey walls have a quiet harmony; the cold seems manageable, almost exciting. In a few minutes, night will close in.
Alfred Sisley, The Watering Place at Marly-le-Roi, 1875
Impressionism is interested in the fact that the things we love most change, are only around a very short time and then disappear. It celebrates the sort of happiness that lasts a few minutes, rather than years. In this painting, the snow looks lovely; but it will melt. The sky is beautiful at this moment, but it is about to go dark. This style of art cultivates a skill that extends far beyond art itself: a skill at accepting and attending to short-lived moments of satisfaction.
The peaks of life tend to be brief. Happiness doesn’t come in year-long blocks. With the Impressionists to guide us, we should be ready to appreciate isolated moments of everyday paradise whenever they come our way, without making the mistake of thinking them permanent; without the need to turn them into a ‘marriage’.
Eight: We believe we are special
The statistics are not encouraging. Everyone has before them plenty of examples of terrible marriages. They’ve seen their friends try it and come unstuck. They know perfectly well that â€" in general â€" marriages face immense challenges. And yet we do not easily apply this insight to our own case. Without specifically formulating it, we assume that this is a rule that applies to other people.
That’s because a raw statistical chance of one in two of failing at marriage seems wholly acceptable, given that â€" when one is in love â€" one feels one has already beaten far more extraordinary odds. The beloved feels like around one in a million. With such a winning streak, the gamble of marrying a person seem entirely containable.
We silently exclude ourselves from the generalisation. We’re not to be blamed for this. But we could benefit from being encouraged to see ourselves as exposed to the general fate.
Nine: We want to stop thinking about Love
Before we get married, we are likely to have had many years of turbulence in our love lives. We have tried to get together with people who didn’t like us, we’ve started and broken up unions, we’ve gone out for endless parties, in the hope of meeting someone, and known excitement and bitter disappointments.
No wonder if, at a certain point, we have enough of all that. Part of the reason we feel like getting married is to interrupt the all-consuming grip that love has over our psyches. We are exhausted by the melodramas and thrills that go nowhere. We are restless for other challenges. We hope that marriage can conclusively end love’s painful rule over our lives.
It can’t and won’t: there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal in a marriage as there is in single life. It’s only from the outside that a marriage looks peaceful, uneventful and nicely boring.
****
Preparing us for marriage is, ideally, an educational task that falls on culture as a whole. We have stopped believing in dynastic marriages. We are starting to see the drawbacks of Romantic marriages. Now comes the time for psychological marriages.
In the late 1960s, a man turned up in the Brazilian state of Acre, deep in the Amazon region. He was wearing a loincloth and a feather, carried a bow and claimed he was Tatunca Nara, chief of the Ugha Mongulala. No one had ever heard of an Indian tribe with that name. In addition, the man bore no resemblance whatsoever to an Indian. He was white and spoke with a strong French accent.
He said he had inherited the accent from his mother, explaining that she was a German nun who had been taken by the Indians. His people, he said, lived in an underground city called Akakor, and that German was one of the languages spoken there -- a byproduct of the offspring of 2,000 Nazi soldiers who had once traveled up the Amazon in U-boats.
His story would have raised eyebrows anywhere else. But outlandish stories are not uncommon in the Amazon region, so no one paid much attention to Tatunca Nara. Otherwise, he made a friendly impression, and nothing much would have come of his appearance if it hadn't come to the attention of Karl Brugger, a correspondent with Germany's ARD television network at the time. He visited Tatunca Nara in Manaus and recorded his story on 12 audiotapes. Brugger called it: "The most unusual story I have ever heard." It was a tale of extraterrestrial visitors, secret rites of the "ancient fathers" and incursions of the "white barbarians," all described copiously and in great detail, and without interruption "from the year zero to the present."
Even more surprising was the fact that Brugger's book, "The Chronicle of Akakor," enjoyed a certain level of success. In New Age circles, Tatunca's stories were studied as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. They included lines like, "Five empty days at the end of the year are dedicated to worshipping our gods."
Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau hired Tatunca as a guide when he explored the region with his boat, the Calypso, in 1983. The 2008 adventure film "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is about a sunken city in the Amazon called Akator, and an Indian tribe called the Ugha Mogulala. The action figure for the film is dressed in a loincloth and a feather.
Does the original exist? Is Tatunca alive? This reporter recently traveled to Brazil in an effort to find the legendary man.
The Almirante Azevedo II, a river steamer, has been traveling up and down the Rio Negro for more than 30 years. The trip upstream from Manaus to Barcelos takes 35 hours, a journey through black waters turned acidic by decaying vegetation. It is the rainy season and the rainforests are flooded, transforming the Rio Negro into a vast, watery network of tributaries and putrid swamps.
Raimundo Azevedo, the captain, is squatting next to a stack of tires on the lower deck, having his back massaged by a physical therapist who came on board at some point. When asked about Tatunca, he says, "The Indian from Germany? Of course I know him. Everyone on the river knows him. Of course he's still alive -- as long as no one shot him last week."
The Almirante Azevedo II has traveled through the inky black night, in a bubble consisting of the sounds of water rushing past and the numbing chug of its diesel engine, sounds reflected by the wall of rampant, tangled vegetation along the riverbank. Captain Azevedo puts on a shirt and hauls himself up the stairs to the upper deck to play cards.
Sinister Rumors
The few dozen passengers are lying in their hammocks, packed together like sausages in a smokehouse. A Pentecostal Christian crosses himself and prays, while the boy next to him is engrossed in pictures of vaginas on his mobile phone. It seems each person has a different way of starting out the day. The captain, who has heard about Tatunca's jungle fortress, says: "No one dares go there, because he has installed booby traps and attached guns to trees. No one knows what he is hiding there." An occasional shrieking noise can be heard as the boat slides past the shore.
"There was a German who wrote a book about Tatunca," says the captain. "He even had a turtle tattooed over his heart, just like Tatunca. They killed him in Rio."
"The bullet went straight into the turtle," adds Lucio, a fat taxi driver with a piece of his elbow sticking out of his wrist, the result of a motorcycle accident.
"But that wasn't Tatunca."
"Maybe not."
The riverboat creeps up the river, pushing its way through prehistoric organic matter, and the longer it evades drifting tree trunks and floating islands, the more the group discusses rumors about this German living upstream -- and the more sinister they become.
Some bones were found seven years ago, says Lucio. "Long bones. It was no Amazonian. Probably a German." Tatunca killed him, says Lucio, to gain access to his money and his wife. "That's what people say. But Tatunca says it wasn't him."
"Maybe not. They say he's on the run from the police in his country," says the captain. By now, Tatunca must be well into his seventies. And yet, the captain notes, he is still strong and fit. "He hates gringos," says another man. He pauses for a moment, looks at the others, and says: "You're gringos."
The shore glides by, empty and yet promising. A shadow occasionally slips out of the water, one of the pink dolphins native to the Rio Negro, which are said to go on land at night and impregnate women.
German adventurer Rüdiger Nehberg also encountered this white Indian, Tatunca Nara, during an expedition among the Yanomami Indians. The two men hated each other at first sight and accused each other of lying, murder and delusion. Their mutual animosity apparently persists to this day. "Tatunca wants to personally drown me in the Rio Negro," Nehberg wrote in an email in May.
Murders and Disappearances
The animosity stems from the fact that Nehberg published a book in 1991 titled "The Self-Made Chief." In it, he revealed that Tatunca Nara's real name is Hansi Richard Günther Hauck, and that he was born in Grub am Forst, a town near Coburg in Bavaria and not on the Rio Negro, in 1941. According to Nehberg, Hauck, who had read a lot of "Tarzan" books as a young boy, abandoned his wife and children in 1966, took a job on board the freighter Dorthe Oldendorff and eventually disappeared in Brazil. Former friends said that, as a child, Hauck once claimed to have witnessed the landing of extraterrestrial beings.
This would all be harmless if there weren't three deaths that remain unexplained to this day, deaths that occurred along the upper reaches of the Rio Negro. All three victims had been drawn to the region after reading "The Chronicle of Akakor," and had asked a certain Tatunca Nara to lead them to the sunken city. And, according to witnesses, he had made the same promise to all three: "I will show you Akakor."
The German Federal Criminal Police Office launched an investigation into the suspected murder and disappearance of three individuals "against German citizen Günther Hauck, who lives in Brazil, under a false identity." But the investigation came to nothing.
After 35 hours of painfully slow-moving travel, Barcelos appears on the left bank like a prophecy some 500 kilometers (312 miles) upstream from Manaus. There are 30 Evangelical churches in this town of 15,000 residents, some of whom drive around proclaiming salvation into the motionless, dusty air from sound systems mounted onto their pickup trucks: "God does not deny you any miracles!" It is the religion of the up-and-coming, those who prefer to believe in the future and not the hereafter.
Tatunca has booby-trapped his hut in the rainforest with dynamite, says Faltermann. "He has friends in the military. That's helpful, because lots of people would like to shoot him dead. He apparently told a girl he was her father and that she had to come with him, in his boat. The man is incredible."
A cool breeze occasionally drifts over from the river on this hot day. Faltermann opens another can of Skol beer, waits until a flatbed truck thunders by and says: "His stories sound like a whole lot of bullshit. And his Portuguese is lousier than mine. It's like a big ego trip. But he knows the area better than anyone else. And he's on to something in the Indian region, up on the Rio Araçá."
On to something? "El Dorado. It's supposed to be up by the two mountain peaks, above the waterfall. Tatunca is the only one who's been there so far." To the people of Barcelos, "El Dorado" seems to be a place just like any other.
Alfred Sisley, The Watering Place at Marly-le-Roi, 1875