Category: 2-3-4s

Islands, 2, 3, 4

“A Grim Military Past on Japan’s Cuddly ‘Rabbit Island'”

The pretty little island of Okunoshima is known for two things: It was there that the Japanese military once cooked up chemical weapons, a mission so guarded that the spot did not exist on official World War II-era maps. And it is totally overrun by fluffy bunny rabbits.

. . . .

For animal lovers, this sounds downright precious, and it is. But on a gray day, with a chill in the air, it also feels something like the establishing scenes of a Hitchcock movie, before things go so horrifically wrong.

Wander past enough English signs labeled “Remains of the poison gas storehouse” and you can’t help wondering whether the two things that make this island so unusual are, in fact, grimly linked. In 1997, the former director of the poison gas museum told Tokyo journalists that the rabbits now on the island had nothing to do with lab animals in bygone weapons tests. Instead, the story goes, rabbits were left on the island decades ago by schoolchildren — and did what rabbits do so well.

Emily Alpert, Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2013

Roads, 2, 3, 4

“Silent Darien: The Gap in the World’s Longest Road“

Stretching from Alaska to the pencil tip of Argentina, the 48,000km-long Pan-American Highway holds the record for the world’s longest motorable road. But there is a gap—an expanse of wild tropical forest—that has defeated travellers for centuries.

The gap stretches from the north to the south coast of Panama—from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It’s between 100km and 160km (60-100 miles) long, and there is no way round, except by sea.

It was only in 1960 that anyone managed to cross the Darien Gap by car—in a Land Rover dubbed The Affectionate Cockroach and a Jeep. It took nearly five months, averaging just 200m per hour.

Carolyn McCarthy, BBC News, August 14, 2014

Rain, 2, 3, 4

“Making Perfume from the Rain: Indian Villagers Have Found a Way to Bottle the Fragrance of Monsoons”

The mitti attar was in an inch-tall glass bottle on the counter. I twisted off the little gold cap, closed my eyes, and breathed in the scent of the Indian rain. It smelled like the earth. It smelled like the parched clay doused with pond water in the Siyarams’ backyard. The aroma was entirely different from the memory of rain I carried from my childhood and my part of the world—ozone-charged air, wet moss, Wolfe’s “clean but funky” scent of the south. But it was entirely appealing: warm, organic, mineral-rich. It was the smell of waiting, paid off: 40 years or more for a sandalwood tree to grow its fragrant heartwood; four months of hot, dust-blown summer in northern India before the monsoons arrive in July; a day for terra-cotta to slow-fire in a kiln.

Cynthia Barnett, The Atlantic, April 22, 2015