Georgina Spelvin is also known as ME Pearl, a psychic and lover of "lowly life forms." In her series of Proper Opossum Care videos, she extolls the wonders of these nocturnal, trash-eating creatures with all the polish of a 1960s TV hostess channeling the spirit of an all-knowing squirrel named Pearl.

In one video she describes how to identify when your pet opossum is sending you alien alerts; another describes how to read your opossum's past lives. In this video, she offers tips on how to relax your opossum with chakra-aligning boops and baps. Its strangeness invited the question–who is the opossum lady? Is she for real?

In actuality, ME Pearl is a character played by actress Anna Dresdon. The off-the-cuff silliness of her videos is intentionally comedic, and her website provides a link to "Georgina's" YouTube profile. However, ME Pearl has her own robust website complete with a donation button, and the videos themselves offer no hints that they are satirical or fake. They're just good-hearted marsupial fun. 

So perhaps the wisdom of Pearl is genuine? At the very least you now know how to properly massage your opossum.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.

In the middle of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin took a moment to note down one of the natural mysteries that dogged him most. "The Greenland whale is one of the most wonderful animals in the world," he wrote, "and the baleen, or whalebone, one of its greatest peculiarities." He goes on to wonder, on paper, why in the world this strange structure ended up the way it did. Why do whales have these huge rows of hairy protrusions, rather than some more common eating apparatus, like teeth or a beak? 

Thanks to new research from the Museums Victoria and Monash University—and a 25 million year old fossil whale named Alfred, dug up in in Washington State—we're now slightly closer to an answer.  

The researchers, led by Dr. Felix G. March, published their findings earlier this week. In the past, they explain, all whales had sharp, spiky teeth. They used them like your average predator, to tear their food apart. But although toothed whales, like sperms and orcas, stuck to this strategy, other contemporary species, like blues and humpbacks, now feed using baleen, which trap enormous amounts of plankton and other tiny creatures while filtering seawater out.

That means that at some point, an in-mouth switch occurred. For a while, researchers thought that whales probably evolved baleen while they still had teeth, and that the former slowly overtook the latter. 

But Alfred—who is an aetiocetid, an indirect ancestor of today's baleen whales—suggests a different path. When scientists examined his fossilized teeth, they found they were covered in tiny horizontal scratches. This is evidence that Alfred probably fed via suction—using his tongue to slurp in prey, along with some scratchier bycatch like sand and small rocks. (Some animals, like walruses, still feed this way, and have similar tooth grooves as a result.)

Over time, as whales perfected this suction strategy, it became less and less advantageous for them have teeth at all. Eventually, the teeth disappeared. Only then did baleen crop up to replace them, the researchers postulate. And as a result, the whales literally stopped sucking.

Perhaps it was inevitable that as Los Angeles expanded its vestigial subway system into a public transit option worthy of a major city fossils would turn up. Los Angeles was built in a place pockmarked with tar pits, and one of the sites on the extension of the Purple Line is at Wilshire and La Brea, not far from the famous La Brea Tar Pits, which daily yields new finds.

Late in November, construction crews found another one, the Los Angeles Times reports. The first piece of an ancient animal that they discovered was a shattered tusk, three feet long, followed by a mastodon tooth. This week, a specialist who monitors the site for fossil finds located another set of tusks, along with a giant skull.

This second set of fossils looks to be the head of an ancient elephant. This elephant lived back in the Ice Age, the Times reports, but scientists aren't yet sure exactly what type of ancient elephant it was.

Because this area is so rich with fossils, the Metro already has a plan for how to handle such finds—they're already built into the project's timeline, and it's a sure bet that more fossils will turn up. It does make one wonder: what else is hidden beneath the vast expanse of L.A.?

The first and only Hand Fan Museum in downtown Healdsburg, California revels in the ladylike elegance of fans.

In collecting hand fans, the museum assembles a history of femininity throughout the ages. As a small accessory used by women (as well some men), fans were witness to all sorts of cultural events. They were used as fashion accessories, of course, but also in ceremony, dance, and even in Samurai battles.

Some fans are lacy affairs covered in ribbons, some are plain paper. Some carry political messages, others have religious imagery. The museum has artifacts on exhibition dating as far back as the 18th century from all over Europe, North America, and Asia.

The museum itself is tiny, but it houses hundreds of delicate fans in cases, on the walls and in windows. The Hand Fan Museum is a lovely step back into the sartorial embellishments of yesteryear.

Thailand’s labyrinthine Chatuchak Weekend Market, which spans 27 acres in downtown Bangkok, is one of the largest open-air markets in the world. The maze-like array of stalls and shops is an immersive and often overwhelming experience, especially during the weekend when the market is packed with local shoppers, tourists, and food carts in the ever-present tropical heat. But this extensive warren of shops hides an intriguing secret behind its rows of kitschy souvenirs and knock-off designer bags.

Tucked away just outside the main cluster of the weekend market is a section few Western tourists ever see: Chatuchak’s vast tropical fish and exotic pet market, home to one of the most impressive (and expensive) collections of live aquarium fish anywhere in the world. Disconnected from the main market, and far from the common points of entry for tourists, the fish market hides in plain sight across from a shopping center; even with directions, it can be difficult to locate.

After a short walk, a few outdoor stalls selling enormous koi, some at prices of several thousand U.S. dollars, indicate the market is nearby. These koi shops proudly exhibit trophies and plaques by their entrances indicating champion koi they have raised—much like with purebred dogs, koi are bred for certain characteristics and koi competitions offer prizes in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Passing through the nondescript entrance, the covered market is cavernous, comprised of long stretches of walkways flanked by stalls on both sides, many literally spilling over into the walkways with brightly lit aquariums. Thai culture has a longstanding love affair with pet fish, which were raised and domesticated as pets in the country long before the modern era. The fish, which they pulled from rice field puddles to compete in elaborate “fights” as early as the 13th century, are now known the world over as “Siamese fighting fish” or simply “Bettas.”

In recent years, Thailand has emerged as a center for fish breeding on a commercial scale to supply both a thriving domestic market and huge international demand; aquarium fish consistently rank as one of the nation’s top exports by dollar value.

Chatuchack’s fish market primarily caters to Bangkok’s huge number of aquarium owners—many of whom are wealthy and willing to spend exorbitant sums on their prized aquatic pets. Much of the market is dedicated to pricey, status-symbol fish like the arowana, or dragon fish, which can cost upwards of $20,000 for a quality specimen. Other rarities like freshwater stingrays—some the size of pizzas—and rare catfish species are prominently on display.

Near one of the side entrances to the market, a pair of two-foot-long “platinum” gar (a rare all-white variant of a large, predatory fish originally from North America) cruise menacingly through an enormous aquarium. Doing a quick mental conversion from Baht to U.S. dollars, the asking price for these giants was roughly $10,000 each.

Despite being much, much smaller than the neighboring complex, the fish market sprawls across a surprisingly large area, extending into narrow alleyways and dead-end corridors. Unlike any aquarium shop you’d likely see in the U.S., fish here are densely packed in small aquariums as they are often sold in large quantities, with tanks turning over multiple times per day.

Many of the smaller shops are family breeding concerns, and barely feature aquariums at all—instead, fish are pre-bagged and ready for sale in neat rows. Each tiny shop or stall usually specializes in a particular breed or category of fish or aquarium—some showcasing colorful but delicate discus and angelfish, others displaying a bewildering array of tiny but colorful freshwater shrimps.

Perhaps owing to their long cultural affinity to fishkeeping, Thai breeders specializing in aquarium fish have an international reputation and supply millions of fish to importers and shops in the U.S. and Europe each year. Just as their counterparts in China and Japan took the common goldfish and selectively bred it into dozens of colorful variants, Thai breeders are constantly cultivating new variants of the fish they breed, selecting out traits for color, body shape, or fin configuration.

The Betta is a perfect example of this—having originated with a mostly brown, unremarkable fish, there are now hundreds of varieties in shades of blue, red, pearl white, most sporting elegant flowing fins. For the local market, albinos, platinum, or bright red mutations are in high demand, selling for hundreds or occasionally thousands of dollars.

One particularly popular fish in the Thai market is the Flowerhorn, a man made hybrid fish which sports a remarkable hump on its head, vibrant colors, and a feisty attitude (these fish do not play well with others). Flowerhorns considered to have good markings and shape are thought to be a symbol of prosperity—a living good luck charm—and are often prominently displayed in local businesses.

The fish market, while open to the public most of the week, is most active in the mornings, with most stalls shuttered by the early afternoon. Like Chatuchak itself, activity peaks on the weekends, when the aquarium market can get extremely crowded with local shoppers.

Each Thursday morning, the market turns over into a wholesale market, when breeders, farmers, and fish collectors from the outlying suburbs of Bangkok converge on the market to sell their fish to wholesalers and exporters in huge quantities.

At those times, every open space in the market is carpeted in fish laid out in plastic bags—thousands of guppies, goldfish, cichlids, all ready to be bought up and shipped to a wholesale facility nearby.

This high-energy scene, with its frenzy of activity and breathless negotiations between buyer and seller, seems more akin to Wall Street trading than the normally subdued fish market, but visitors be warned—it is generally not open to the public and foreigners with cameras are looked at with suspicion.

Even for someone not particularly well acquainted with the hundreds of varieties of rare fish on display, Chatuchak’s aquarium fish market is a fascinating destination for anyone looking for a brief escape from the endless, monotonous shops in the market’s more well-known counterpart.

Although the fish market clearly caters to locals and little English is spoken, most shop owners are polite and happy to show off their specialty fish to a curious visitor. It also offers a rare glimpse of a little-known hobby and industry that is a way of life for thousands of Thais.

It was 1925, and pro wrestling was big business. A throng of fans had packed themselves into a Kansas City convention hall, expecting to see champion Ed “Strangler” Lewis easily defeat Wayne “Big” Munn, a noted former NCAA football player. Munn was a newcomer to the wrestling world, and this was his first true test. Surely, fans thought, he would wipe the floor with the novice.

What the fans got instead was an outcome so unthinkable it created a buzz that shot around the arena. The air was electric. After less than 40 minutes, Munn had defeated the great champion, throwing him across the ring and out of it. It was a loss unlike Lewis had ever faced.

The crowd left that night in amazement, with an incredible story to tell: the night Wayne Munn beat Ed Lewis.

But there was a small problem.

“Wayne Munn couldn’t beat Ed ‘Strangler’ Lewis to save his life,” says Kyle Klingman, director of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame Dan Gable Museum in Waterloo, Iowa. “There’s just no way he could beat him.”

Everyone knows pro wrestling today is “a work.” A planned event. A show, no different than a television episode or film.

But it wasn’t always this way. Pro wrestling started in the world of legitimate sport, in the same way boxing did. Legitimate wrestling bouts sold out arenas across the country. In 1911, when Frank Gotch wrestled George Hackenschmidt at the newly-opened Comiskey Park, it was in front of 30,000 people, one of the biggest crowds in sports history at the time.

But professional wrestling began to change in a way unlike anything ever seen in sports history. While boxing had known to be fixed from time to time, and the “Black Sox Scandal” had briefly tarnished Major League Baseball, no legitimate sport had ever made the full transition into what the WWE now calls “sports entertainment”—fully scripted, predetermined matchups, with chosen champions.

That change didn’t happen overnight. But wrestling historians look to one match, which completely altered pro wrestling’s history: Lewis vs. Munn, Kansas City, Miss., Jan. 8, 1925.

“That really kind of put the stamp on it,” Klingman said. “This completely changed the landscape of professional wrestling.”

Pro wrestling in 2016 consists of larger-than-life characters performing gymnastic feats in prefabricated storylines with matches that have predetermined finishes. This is common knowledge, and honestly, it’s a lot of the appeal of modern professional wrestling. It’s evolved from a sport into more of an artform, where storytelling is paramount, both inside the ring and out.

None of that was the case in the early 1900s. Wrestlers were known as “shooters” or “hookers,” skilled mat technicians who could beat nearly anyone in a legitimate fight. Moves weren’t anything spectacular. Ed Lewis was nicknamed “Strangler” because of his patented finishing hold: A headlock.

Not that it wasn’t an impressive headlock. Lewis was a pretty tough guy, and to practice his arm strength, he created a “headlock machine” that he would grind down on for long periods of time. And he was one of the most well-respected mat technicians in the world, having wrestled in more than 6,000 matches during his 44-year career and losing only 32 of them, according to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He was a tremendous draw, among the ranks of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey in the roaring ‘20s. To put it simply: Ed Lewis was the real deal.

Lewis was so good, in fact, that the matches were starting to get boring. Some could go on forever. Crowds dwindled, and paydays shrunk. In one 1916 match between Lewis and rival Joe Stecher, the match lasted five hours. The matches even received parody in popular culture: In a line from the “The Music Man,” Mayor Shinn notes he hadn’t seen Iowans get so excited for something “since the night Frank Gotch and Strangler Lewis lay on the mat for three and a half hours without moving a muscle.”

It was clear that something had to change, Klingman said.

“It was more of this legitimate style of wrestling, but these matches got unbelievably boring. I mean they were back-and-forth of just nothingness,” Klingman said. “At some point you say, ‘How are you going to make this more entertaining?’”

Lewis, his manager Billy Sandow, and their partner and fellow wrestler Joe “Toots” Mondt—known as “The Gold Dust Trio”—were keenly aware of this, and in 1925, went looking for their new star.

Wayne Munn was a big guy. So big that his nickname was, simply: “Big.”

In the 1936 book, “From Milo to Londos: The Story of Wrestling Through the Ages,” sports journalist Nat Flesicher lists the Kansas-born Munn as six feet six inches tall. He was a college football player at the University of Nebraska from 1916 to 1918, where he was known as “Nebraska’s giant.” Football came naturally to him, thanks to his size and unusual speed, and the school thought of him as “one of the most counted-on men on the team,” according to an old yearbook.

In 1917, Nebraska finished 5-2 and claimed the conference championship. Munn would have been a crucial part of the 1918 team, but left school to join the army. He was a lineman on the Camp Pike football team, and later, served in France before coming back to the United States to sell cars in Omaha.

The Gold Dust Trio saw Munn, and their eyes turned to dollar signs. He had the size, the body, the look—he was everything they wanted for their next star. He just wasn’t very good.

“Munn was a former football player with almost no wrestling background but he had huge name recognition,” said Mike Chapman, author of more than a dozen books on wrestling. “He was a big man, as his title would suggest. Nice looking. And people thought, ‘Here’s our chance to groom this guy, and make a little money off him.’”

Today, this is common. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the most popular professional wrestlers of all time, started as a defensive tackle with the Miami Hurricanes, helping to win the national championship in 1991. Despite going on to become a WWE hall-of-famer, Johnson himself didn’t have any amateur wrestling background. But he was extremely charismatic, and beloved by fans. At the time, though, this was unheard of: Someone without real grappling skill had never been champion.

Munn agreed to the Trio’s plan. He would wrestle around the country, tallying wins against predetermined competitors in on the ruse. Later, he would meet Lewis, who would drop the belt. The big payday would be the rematch.

Lewis, for his part, was fine with losing the belt.

“Ed really did love wrestling, but everybody knew he was the best,” Chapman said. “He wasn’t worried about what the insiders thought, because everybody knew. And he wanted to make a lot of money.”

The one thing he wouldn’t do was lose clean. So the Trio put together an elaborate plan, and on Jan. 8, 1925, the match would get underway in Kansas City, with the winner of two out of three falls taking home the title.

When the match started, it truly didn’t seem like Munn could beat Lewis. Munn had the brute strength, but Lewis was clearly the better wrestler. Yet whenever Lewis would apply a hold, Munn would muscle out of it. Even the patented headlock didn’t work.

To fans’ astonishment, the former football player held his own throughout the match, utilizing a signature football tackle before lifting Lewis high into the air and slamming him to the mat and pinning his shoulders for the first fall at 21 minutes.

Soon after, the two locked up again. This time, Munn lifted Lewis high into the air, and dumped him outside the ring. The crowd was stunned. None of this seemed possible against the great Lewis, but here it was happening in front of their very eyes.

The referee gave the second fall to Lewis, claiming that Munn illegally threw his opponent out of the ring. Sandow pleaded with the ref to end the match and make Lewis the victor. This was illegal, he argued, and his wrestler was injured. The referee didn’t oblige, but gave Lewis 15 minutes to “rest” and come back.

Come back he did, again feigning the injury. Munn quickly lifted Lewis, slammed him again to the mat, and won in less than a minute.

The crowd was ecstatic. They had been rooting for the good-looking footballer to defeat the predictable champion, and had gotten their money’s worth. Lewis was “hospitalized,” and there was word he may never wrestle again.

The Gold Dust Trio had solved two problems: They’d figure out a way to get Munn over despite his lack of wrestling acumen, and they figured out a way for Munn to lose in a way that wasn’t a clean victory.

They didn’t count on problem no. 3: Stan Zbyszko.

Munn would go on a championship tour, defeating Mondt himself, along with Mike Romano, Pat McGill, Wallace Duguid, and Stanislaus Zbyszko. Of all of them, the 46-year-old Zbyszko was the most talented, albeit on the older side.

Zbyszko was a strong wrestler, 5 feet 8 inches tall and 260 pounds. “The King of Poland” spoke 12 languages and had a law degree from the University of Vienna. But his one true love was wrestling.

“He was a gifted man. He could have done anything else,” said wrestling historian John Rauer. “He could have been a politician, he could have been a lawyer, he could have been a judge. But he loved the sport.”

Zbyszko was one of Munn’s first title defenses, and lost to the big man on Feb. 11 of that year in two straight falls, lasting less than 30 minutes total. He was later picked for a rematch on April 15.

During that time, the New York Times reported on Lewis’ condition, as well as a court battle between Lewis and Munn, which was likely entirely planned: Lewis refused to surrender the belt, arguing the match was wrestled under protest.

Munn, meanwhile, was living the life. The same month he won the belt, the Nebraska House voted to honor him for his victory. He received a $100,000 offer to tour Europe. In a publicity stunt, Munn, the untrained grappler, “taught” 1,000 students at Harvard how to wrestle. All of this was building up to the big rematch with Lewis.

On the day Munn had his second bout with Zbyszko, all seemed to be going well. Zbyszko agreed to lose again, and the match would boost Munn’s prestige going into the Lewis fight.

But when the time came, and they stood across from one another, Zbyszko reportedly smiled and said to Munn: “Tonight, we wrestle.”

It was a disaster. Zbyszko legitimately pinned Munn in practically every way possible. The referee, who was in on the finish, refused to count, but fans noticed and screamed for a pin.

After the first fall, Munn’s manager had to think quick. He claimed the wrestler was sick with acute tonsillitis, and tried to talk Zbyszko and the State Athletic Commission into allowing Munn’s sparring partner to finish the match. But it was to no avail.

There was nothing the referee could do. Either he would count the falls, or reveal the “work.” After mere minutes, Zbyszko defeated Munn, took the title, and left the former football player without even his dignity.

“Munn was spoiled by the greatest double cross in the history of professional wrestling,” Rauer said. “There may have been more devious double crosses, but not on such a large national stage, and not with such towering personalities involved as Zbyszko and Lewis.”

Part of the problem was pride. Zbyszko and others objected to the fact that a non-wrestler wore the championship belt. To them, whoever held the title had to be respected by their peers. Munn the football star wasn’t.

Fans didn’t know what to think. Why couldn’t this man, who so handily defeated Ed Lewis, hold his own against Zbyszko? It was a huge blow to Munn’s ego, his reputation, and the business.

“That exposed him,” Chapman said. “As easy as Zbyszko whipped him, it’s tough to talk that away.”

What followed was a series of negotiations and fights, before Lewis finally legitimately brought the belt back into the Trio’s hands. Lewis again fought Munn, this time defeating him easily. Munn’s star was no longer on the rise.

Had Wayne Munn been born 100 years later, he could have been the next Rock. But in the 1920s, in a world of “real” wrestling, he was never the same again. The Gold Dust Trio used him, they all made some good money, and when he wasn’t a draw for them anymore, he left the business.

As for pro wrestling, it kept evolving. Characters became more prevalent, as did the idea of the “heel” and the “babyface”—the bad guy and the good guy. The rivalry, the rematch. Munn’s reign as champion is largely forgettable, but his impact is still felt.

“That did, for all intents and purposes, change the game overnight,” Chapman said.

On June 10, 1897, the Ringling Brothers Circus came to town. A visit from the circus to the tiny town of Wahpeton, North Dakota was a huge event. That same day a major storm was brewing, but despite the dark clouds the circus workers set to putting up the tent. That’s when the lightning began to strike.

Ringling’s 1897 season had been a financial struggle, and cancelling wasn’t an option. The show must go on, so the men struggled to put up the main tent pole. They didn’t realize they were creating a massive lightning rod, and before the pole was fully up, it was hit. Two men, Charles Smith and Charles Walters, were killed instantly, three others were stunned, and foreman Charles Miller later died from his injuries.

Despite the tragedy, the show went ahead as scheduled. During the parade, the weather was so bad that horse-drawn carriages became bogged down in the mud, and elephants had to be used to push them out. The men were buried that same afternoon in the Riverside Cemetery, a little way south of town. The afternoon show's earnings paid for the funeral.

For a few months, the pieces of the tent pole were used to mark the gravesite. In September, 1897, it was replaced with a granite monument, sculpted to represent the remains of the original tent pole. Carved into it is the rope-and-pulley system they were using to winch it up, and you can see jagged lines mimicking where the lightning struck.

Even today, when a circus is in town, it has been reported that the crew visits the graves to pay their respects. The monument stands lonely in the small windswept graveyard, a long way from home for the two men who died that day.

Early this morning, a LC-130 cargo plane, piloted by an Air National Guard pilot, touched down at the Amundsen-Scott Station in the South Pole for an emergency medical evacuation. But they weren't grabbing just any patient—it was Buzz Aldrin, American folk hero and the second man to walk on the moon. Aldrin was "ailing," the National Science Foundation explained in a brief press release.

Aldrin was at the South Pole with a group called "White Desert," a British company that takes tourists to climb snowy peaks and see emperor penguins. Aldrin, who is 86 years old, travels often doing space-related advocacy work, most recently unveiling a NASA-focused "Get Your Ass To Mars" campaign. Two days ago, he was tweeting excitedly about the trip—which, after all, was nothing compared to his most famous jaunt.

I could be a little underdressed for Antarctica. Although I tend to be hot blooded. pic.twitter.com/iuCozGptxw

— Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) November 27, 2016

According to the Washington Post, Aldrin has already been taken from Amundsen-Scott Station to McMurdo, at the tip of the Pole, by an LC-130 cargo plane. Next, he'll go to New Zealand. As of this morning, he was in stable condition, according to White Desert.

2016, please be kind.

The small town of Nanaimo, British Columbia, sits quietly on the edge of Vancouver Island, just a short ferry ride from the mainland. A trip to the local museum mostly shows off fun local events, like its annual bathtub boat races, and the town’s history of involvement in the coal and logging industries. But a small pedestal in the middle containing a handful of artifacts hints at one of the darkest stories in Nanaimo’s past, something that few residents are old enough to remember.

The tale of Brother XII and the cult he created just south of Nanaimo, the Aquarian Foundation, features conspiracy, fraud, adultery, and treasure. Lots of treasure. In fact, this treasure might still be hidden somewhere around this island.

Edward Arthur Wilson, later known as Brother XII, grew up in England in the late 19th century, and spent the first part of his adulthood traveling and sailing all over the world. Wilson met and married Margery Clark in New Zealand in 1902, and the couple had two children before moving to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1907. Some five years later, Wilson abandoned his family to become a sailor; his extensive sailing experience in the following years saw Wilson promoted to navigator and later captain. But at the same time, Wilson became obsessed with religious study, especially the occult.

In 1924, years of theosophy, occult studies, and travel came to a head for Wilson when he retired from seamanship and landed in a small town in the south of France. A series of visions came to Wilson during his stay in the village, and he concluded that he was communicating with one of the Masters of Wisdom—a group of deities that are also referred to by various New Age groups as the Great White Brotherhood. Wilson believed that one of these Brothers (the twelfth Brother, in fact) had taken him on as a disciple. In recognition of his new status, Wilson took on the name that would become the myth: Brother XII.

Over the next few years, Brother XII would create the Aquarian Foundation, publish his spiritual writings, and return to North America to gather followers. In April, 1927, the first group of Foundation members met in Vancouver, British Columbia, and sailed to Nanaimo, a small village on Vancouver Island. The Aquarian Foundation grew at a rapid pace, and Brother XII’s charismatic manner attracted rich and powerful men and women from all over North America. Mary Connally, a wealthy socialite from North Carolina, was particularly enthralled with Brother XII; her first donation to the Foundation was a $25,000 check. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the equivalent of nearly $350,000 in 2016.

The group later spread to nearby DeCourcy Island and Valdes Island, just across the Salish Sea from Cedar-by-the-Sea, the small town south of Nanaimo in which the Aquarian Foundation first settled. Despite all of this growth, some members began to distrust Brother XII and his leadership. Some thought that he was wasting money on construction projects all over the various settlements, and forcing members to do much of the work. Brother XII had also started an affair with a new member of the colony, Myrtle Baumgartner, and started changing his teachings to allow for such behavior.

All of this led some members of the Foundation to become restless with Brother XII’s antics, and a group of members attempted legal action against him, to varying degrees of success. Despite the rift among the Foundation’s members, Brother XII still had many loyal followers both in the colony and around the world. All members paid monthly membership fees, and those that moved to the colony were often required to hand over everything they had to Brother XII. Many members were then given various jobs around the islands, from working on ships to tending to animals on the farm on DeCourcy.  

Brother XII met and became enthralled with a mysterious woman named Mabel Skottowe, who later took the name Madame Z after joining the colony. The other members strongly disliked and feared Madame Z—she was notorious for using her riding crop on members of the colony that she deemed unsatisfactory. Madame Z eventually left her husband, a wealthy poultry farmer that had already given nearly $100,000 to the Foundation, for Brother XII.

As the colony grew and the money flowed in, Brother XII grew paranoid about using banks—one of his many prophecies predicted the downfall of the banking system. Brother XII then started to have members exchange paper money for gold coins, usually American gold eagle coins ($10 and $20 denominations) that were still in circulation at the time.

Brother XII devised a method with Madame Z that would allow him to store and transport his gold easily—to stop his enemies from stealing it, of course. They would fill mason jars to the brim with the gold eagle coins, then seal them up by pouring melted paraffin wax in with the coins to keep everything in place. Those jars were then placed in wooden boxes with rope handles, for easy transport. Brother XII would secretly move these boxes onto his tugboat Khuenaten in the dead of night, transporting his treasure and burying it in different locations around the islands.  

As Brother XII and Madame Z continued their tyrannical rule over the Foundation, members again started to grow weary, fearful, and angry towards their leader. As Brother XII became more and more paranoid, he turned Valdes Island into a fortress and forced members of the Foundation to take up arms in defense of it. Another group of scared and angry members fled the colony and filed a lawsuit against Brother XII in Nanaimo.

The legal proceedings that followed were quite dramatic, in true Brother XII fashion. One story said that an attorney that was suing Brother XII suddenly collapsed during a hearing, followed by an entire row of people behind him, like they had been “knocked out.” Many attributed this event to Brother XII and his the powers that he had been given by the Great White Lodge. In 1933, a judge eventually ruled in the ex-Foundation members’ favor. But the members were unable to collect the money awarded to them in the suit, as they found out that Brother XII and Madame Z had fled the colony.

The mysterious couple left a path of destruction in their wake, ransacking and breaking as much as they could before leaving. Not only did they destroy nearly the entire colony, Brother XII and Madame Z even used dynamite to sink their prized sailboat, the Lady Royal, into the lagoon outside of DeCourcy. They eventually returned to England, before emigrating to Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in August of 1934. According to a death certificate signed by a Swiss doctor (conveniently, a member of the Aquarian Foundation), Edward Arthur Wilson died on November 7, 1934, in his apartment in Neuchâtel.

But there were a number of post-mortem sightings of Brother XII, most notably by Donald Cunliffe, son of Foundation member Frank Cunliffe, who describes seeing Brother XII aboard a ship in San Francisco in 1936. A number of people, both Aquarian Foundation members and outsiders, who were familiar with the story at the time were quite skeptical about the circumstances surrounding Brother XII’s supposed death.

Whether or not he died in that apartment in Neuchâtel or at a later date in a faraway place, what happened to Brother XII’s treasure?

John Oliphant, author of Brother XII: The Strange Odyssey of a 20th-century Prophet, the definitive source on the subject, estimated Brother XII’s hoard of gold coins to be worth about $400,000. That’s just under $6 million in 2016. This number isn’t definitive, but Oliphant told me via Skype that it was corroborated by a handful of contemporary accounts.

The sheer weight of all that gold was surely difficult to transport, though Brother XII did often move it around the islands with the help of his most devoted followers. But to move so many heavy boxes of glass jars full of gold from the islands of British Columbia to Switzerland seems like a tough task for a handful of people.

An easy, boring answer is probably that Brother XII simply had a method of either transporting it all at once or little by little, with the help of some of his few remaining loyal followers. He could have deposited the money in banks around North America or England, or left it with family. Considering the circumstances, it sounds plausible that a secretive, greedy, egomaniac would have kept a tight hold on the money he swindled from his followers, and he did end up in a country notorious for anonymous and protective banking laws.

But treasure hunters have held out hope for years that Brother XII simply had to leave some gold behind. He had moved it around the islands so often, isn’t it possible that it could still be on one of them, hidden so well that it has still yet to be found? According to Oliphant, many people have gone searching for the treasure—exploring mysterious caves on the islands near the colony, or diving in the lagoon near DeCourcy where Brother XII sunk his sailboat while making his escape. But Oliphant only has anecdotes; none of his treasure-hunter sources relayed detailed stories.

In Oliphant’s book, he tells a story from a man named Dion Sepulveda, who had worked as a servant to Brother XII after his family joined the colony. Sepulveda had helped Brother XII build a cement block on an islet just off the coast of DeCourcy Island, and he told Oliphant about the ceremony that Brother XII held around this block. What is not mentioned in the book, Oliphant tells me, is that Sepulveda says Brother XII stored some of his gold in that cement. When Oliphant was researching his book, he eventually found the block—but it was cracked open, hollow but empty.

Much later, Oliphant’s friend related to him a story about a mysterious old sea captain known only to Nanaimo residents as “The Captain.” According to this friend, The Captain claimed to have found Brother XII’s treasure, and said he was keeping it in a safety deposit box in a bank near downtown Vancouver. Oliphant told me that he was never able to track down the man and confirm this, but according to the friend, The Captain had said that he had found the gold on or near Valdes Island—and it was encased in a block of cement.

Perhaps the definitive story, though, is one that suggests that no treasure is to be found. A caretaker for one of the DeCourcy colony’s few remaining residents discovered a trapdoor beneath a small building used as a chicken coop. The man ripped up the floorboards, remembering the many stories of Brother XII’s tendency to hide his treasure in such ways. But when he found the hiding place, he found no gold, just a rolled-up piece of paper.

“Scrawled in chalk on the dark surface was a final message from Brother XII, an angry shout from the past,” Oliphant’s book reports: “For fools and traitors—nothing!”

Serving as the boundary between two street grids that run diagonal to one another, the major commercial thoroughfare of Market Street lends itself naturally to flatiron buildings. And up until the end of the 20th century, the original Phelan Building was one of its most prominent triangular edifices. 

Unfortunately, the grand Phelan Building was destroyed (along with countless other structures) in the 1906 earthquake and fire. After the disaster the son of the building's original owner decided to replace it with an even grander version to serve as a symbol of the city's rebirth.

This second Phelan Building was one of the earliest office buildings to be rebuilt after the catastrophe. It was finished on September 1, 1908, and advertised in a gorgeous brochure with such amenities as integrated motors and a building-wide in-wall vacuum cleaning system. “Cars pass the door every minute,” the brochure boasted—and they still do today, as one of the three walls faces Market Street.

An unusual feature of the building was the inclusion of a small penthouse. Originally adorned by a rooftop garden, it was used by James D. Phelan himself to entertain dignitaries. It later served as a photography studio in the 1960s before being abandoned sometime in the 1980s. 

Once one of the informal centers of San Francisco’s jewelry business, the building is now entirely converted to open floor format, and hosts a number of internet startups.

This small room in the oldest building constructed for the University of Leiden would look fairly unassuming, if it weren't for the fact that it's walls are covered top-to-bottom with doctorate recipients' signatures and graffiti.

The names, dates, and other memorial markings scribbled on the walls are part of a tradition that started when the room was an antechamber where students would wait to defend their dissertations or learn the results of the doctoral exams.

As this was often an understandably nerve-wracking experience, the room came to be known as "Het Zweetkamertje" (translating literally as "The Sweat Room," or more conversationally as "The Sweating Room"). During the wait, some people chose to focus their anxious energy on doodling and putting their signatures on the walls, and a rite of passage was born.

Today, people don't have to wait as long for the results of their doctoral exams, so the signing of the wall is now done after the doctoral bull has been received. Several notable students and recipients of honorary doctorates have placed signatures here, which have been protected with little transparent plates in order to preserve them. These high-profile signatures include those of Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and several members of the Dutch royal family (including the current king).

It’s considerate to cover your mouth and nose when you feel a sneeze coming along, especially with the cold and flu season lurking around the corner. And that's been the case since at least 1945, when the Ministry of Information for Ministry of Health in Britain warned of the dangers of sneezing in this jocular public health trailer.  

The department released a series of amusing health campaign films in the late 1940s to educate people on the spread of disease. In the clip above, titled “Coughs and Sneezes,” a man with a sizable nose sneezes loudly in crowded areas. The narrator explains how sneezers like him “are not a nuisance. They’re a real danger.” The menacing sneezer is pulled aside, gets doused with pepper, and is taught how to properly cover his nose and mouth with a hanky.

Between the Public Health Act of 1848 and the launch of the National Health Service in 1948, public health initiatives were at an all-time high. Posters emblazoned with the popular slogan “Coughs and Sneezes Spreads Diseases” could be seen everywhere around England. More films were made, titled "Modern Guide to Health" and "Jet Propelled Germs." While disease and infection are no laughing matter, the health film campaign succeeded in capturing the public with a touch of humor.

With the success of the “Coughs and Sneezes” trailer, the confused sneezing actor became the star of all the health propaganda films, including one in which learns how to clean his handkerchiefs in a bowl of disinfectant (after being admonished for trying to drink it):

He also demonstrates how to safely cross a busy street.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

After a second date in 1908 with a suitor named Ray Smith, Carol Pardee, the privileged granddaughter of Oakland mayor Enoch Pardee, took out her notebook and, with careless spelling, wrote her opinion about the boy: “To big a sport. Talks to much.”

Later in the year, she met Frank Haudel. Verdict: “[t]oo dirty. Teeth are green.” On January 16th, 1911, after a date with Wyman Smith from Sacramento, she wrote a one-word summary of the courter: “FOOL.”

These pithy reviews—others range from “dandy” to “tiresome” to the frequently used single-word dismissal of “mutt”—are still on display at The Pardee House museum in Oakland in Carol Pardee’s Chap Record, a small volume bound in green and gold with a dapper gentlemen doffing a hat on the cover.

The Chap Record was a mostly blank book with sections to be filled out by the “girl of the period”—things like Name, Date, Place, and Opinion. In the front was a section for the Twelve Most Notable Chaps. Published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company in 1898, it sold for a dollar. 

The title page of the Chap Record had this rhyme, which pretty perfectly sums up its role:

Behold herein, all nice and neat,
A record of the men I meet,
Among them all perhaps, there be,
Who knows, the “not impossible” He.

A few filled-out Chap Records are still hanging around in small museums and historical societies around the country. The Natick Historical Society in Massachusetts has one that was once owned by a woman named Marion Pooke that spans 20 years of dates. The archive of the Texarkana Museum has one by a woman named Aileen who called her suitors either “true blue” (positive) or “fickle” (negative). The one housed in the Harvey County Historical Museum and Archive in Kansas was filled out by 17-year-old Juliette Roff, and it focused more on the positive than negative of her suitors. “Cynical,” she writes for one, “but has lots of good traits.”

While these Chap Records are interesting glimpses into the minds of high-society women, they're also markers in the shifting dynamic in American society from courtship to the kind of dating we know today. Previous to this era, “courtship” involved one man and one woman from the same community being urged by their families to go on a series of dates in the hopes that they'd be comfortable enough with each other to get married. These get-to-know-yous were held in homes, with others keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings.

As Moira Weigel points out in her book Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, it wasn't until 1896 that the word “date” enters the lexicon to its current meaning. (It came from writer George Ade in a short story in The Chicago Record about a neglected boyfriend, worried about other guys “fillin' all my dates” with his gal.) This change in cultural norms was so great, in fact, that police were still arresting young men and women meeting together in public, who'd felt the only way to get any privacy was away from their prying family members at home.

Once this concept of “dating” became more accepted—as well as the idea that it was no longer forbidden for men and women to go on multiple dates with multiple people—the dating economy took off. As Weigel writes, “[f]or the first time in human history, dating made it necessary to buy things in order to get face time with a prospective partner.” The Chap Record was an early entry in the new business of courtship; the first ones sold for a buck just in time for Christmas shopping season.

Perhaps most telling about the Chap Records that survive on the dusty shelves of the small museums throughout the country are just how unexciting they are. The entries are always brief, seemingly rushed, the work of people who feel obligated to write something but can't quite muster up the enthusiasm. As such, they reveal only unimportant sliver of the writers. In Carol Pardee's case, before her death from influenza in 1920, she'd gotten engaged to Jerry Hadar, a prominent attorney in Oakland. He is not mentioned anywhere in her Chap Record.  As always, some things are best left away from prying eyes, even ones coming from a century into the future.

Just up the street from the J.P. Patches statue and right around the corner from the Fremont Troll is a quaint Turkish cafe featuring a nondescript little chunk of concrete that was once a piece of the Iron Curtain.

This concrete is actually a rare segment of the Berlin Wall. Standing at 6 feet by 12 feet, it is relatively minute compared to otherpreserved sectionsof the wall. Yet its presence invokes the same visions of poverty and despair that afflicted Germany during the Cold War.

However, this piece of the Wall that stands in front of Cafe Turko is now just a part of the surrounding neighborhood. The waitstaff are nonchalant about their historic bauble, explaining that it came to them when the local "History House" museum closed up shop, offering the potentially priceless chunk of rebar and concrete to the restaurant simply for lack of a better alternative.

Unveiled on August 19th 1960, the giant statue of Leonardo da Vinci at Rome's Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci Airport has greeted visitors ever since. Millions and millions of people have passed it over the decades, but it was not until 2006 that a secret hidden inside the statue was discovered.

The monumental bronze statue with marble base is the work of the Bulgarian artist Assen Peikov, who expatriated to Italy during World War II. When the city of Rome announced a competition for a work of art to be installed at Fiumicino Airport, Peikov won, and the resulting 60-foot statue of the Renaissance giant holding his famous "aerial screw" design would become the sculptor's largest and best-known work.

In 2006, the statue needed renovation. During the course of this work, one of the workers made a strange discovery: a small hatch, located at a height of about 30 feet, approximately in the middle of the statue. The hatch was carefully opened and inside were found two parchments, still in perfect condition.

One of the parchments, written in classical Latin, tells the history of the area where the airport now stands, going back to ancient times and including descriptions of the landscape that predated human development. The other parchment provided a list of the people who attended the unveiling, mentioning (among others) Giovanni Gronchi (President of the Italian Republic in 1960), and Giulio Andreotti (Minister of Defence in 1960 who would go on to become Prime Minister).

It is assumed that the hatch and parchments were the work of Peikov, but whether that is true—and if it is, why he did it—remains unknown, as he passed away in 1973. Independent work is being done to verify the information contained in the parchments.

Even if the secret of the statue is not widely known, sometimes people can be seen looking the statue up and down with binoculars, much to the amusement of passersby unaware that these peculiar characters are trying to spot the mysterious hatch.

Dr. Alois Pichler was almost always surrounded by books. In 1869, Pichler, originally from Bavaria, became the so-called “extraordinary librarian” of the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg, Russia, a prestigious position that gave him a salary three times higher than the average librarian: 3,000 rubles.

While many librarians have a deep appreciation for books, Pichler was afflicted with a specific irrepressible illness. A few months after Pichler took his position at the library, the staff discovered that an alarming number of books were disappearing from the collection. They suspected theft. Guards noticed that Pichler had been acting strangely—dropping books by the exit and hurriedly returning them to the shelves, refusing to remove his large overcoat, leaving the library several times within a day—and started paying close attention to him.

On March, 1871, over 4,500 stolen library books on everything from perfume making to theology were found in his possession, Pichler committing the largest known library theft on record.

Pichler was put on trial, where his lawyer alleged that the librarian was not in control of his behavior, explains Mary Stuart in the journal Libraries & Culture. He was influenced by a “peculiar mental condition, a mania not in the legal or medical sense, but in the ordinary sense of a violent, irresistible, unconquerable passion,” writes Stuart. This defense was designed to mitigate his punishment, but it didn’t work.  

Pichler, who was found guilty and exiled to Siberia, was a victim of “bibliomania,” a dark pseudo-psychological illness that swept through the upper classes in Europe and England during the 1800s. Symptoms included a frenzy for culling and hunting down first editions, rare copies, books of certain sizes or printed on specific paper.

“Any obsession can become real disease,” says David Fernández, rare book librarian at Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. “One of the aspects that can really be an issue is the financial aspect, even back then.”

The social elite and scholars did everything they could to obtain and collect books—no matter the price. Some collectors spent their entire fortunes to build their personal libraries. While it was never medically classified, people in the 1800s truly feared bibliomania. There are several written accounts, fictional and real, of bibliomania, but the most famous and bizarre documentation is by Reverend Thomas Frognell Dibdin, an English book lover and victim of the neurosis. In 1809 he published Bibliomania; or Book Madness, a series of strange, rambling fictional dialogues based on conversations and real collectors Dibdin had encountered.

“I think a very good word to describe the book is that it’s very bizarre,” says Fernández, who has studied his library’s preserved copy of the 1809 first edition. “It’s a product of the generation in which it appears.” On the title page of the book, an engraving depicts a "book fool," a character originally featured in the 1498 book, Ship of Fools, the first work of fiction to reference the discovery of the new world. That character is described as a vain book collector, the story touching on madness among scholars and collectors, explains Fernández.

According to Reverend Dibdin, the “book-plague” had reached its height in Paris and London in 1789. After the French Revolution in 1799, French aristocrats sold their estates to flee from the country and many private libraries emptied their shelves. Auction catalogs in the 18th century were teeming with French books, explains Fernández. Prices of fine antiquarian texts at least quadrupled in this period, wrote Philip Connell in the journal Representations.

Men and some women collectors purchased books to conserve and preserve Europe’s literary heritage, while others did so as a symbol of wealth and power. At this time, constructing books was a delicate and laborious art completed by hand—from cutting the paper to creating the binding—which added value.

Then as now, collectors desired certain books for highly specific reasons—like the typefaces they used. One favored calligraphic style was known as “black letter.” Scottish poet and writer Robert Pearse Gillies recorded in his 1851 memoir: “There had sprung up a kind of mania for purchasing black letter volumes, although the purchasers themselves, from year’s end to year’s end, did not read, far less write, fifty pages consecutively.”

Then, there was the group of collectors who wanted books for the mere lust of possession. In Bibliomania; or Book Madness, Dibdin describes the symptoms of bibliomania, dramatizing a rather convincing make-believe pathology. He even uses medical language as if it were an actual malady. Dibdin points out eight particular types of books that collectors obsessed over: first editions, true editions, black letter printed books, large paper copies; uncut books with edges that are not sheared by binder’s tools; illustrated copies; unique copies with morocco binding or silk lining; and copies printed on vellum.

In addition to his book collecting and writing, the Reverend founded the Roxburghe Club of book lovers, which became known for secondhand book trading that defined and propagated bibliomania. “Dibdin was the most notorious diagnostician—and indeed victim—of the bibliophilic neurosis afflicting the British upper classes in the Romantic period,” writes Connell.

While others wrote books about bibliomania, including Gustave Flaubert’s Bibliomanie, which dramatized the legendary Spanish monk biblio-criminal who murdered a rival bookseller, Dibdin’s remains the pivotal piece that provided commentary on the time period. “It is the seminal work in the history of book collecting,” says Fernández. “It’s satirical, but not to the point of being humorous. It’s more like a critical reading of the notion of collecting.”

Bibliomania; or Book Madness contains many characters, but primarily follows Lisardo, a wealthy, fatherless young man who frankly confesses to being “an arrant bibliomaniac.” When he is introduced to a particularly glorious library filled with rare, antique books, he succumbs to mania:

“Lisardo ran immediately to the book-case. He first eyed, with a greedy velocity, the backs of the folios and quartos; then the octavos; and, mounting an ingeniously-contrived mahogany rostrum, which moved with the utmost facility, he did not fail to pay due attention to the duodecimos; some of which were carefully preserved in Russia or morocco backs, with water-tabby silk linings, and other appropriate embellishments.”

Although fictional, the characters in Dibdin’s book have uncanny resemblances to real-life bibliomaniacs of the time. “When this book was published in 1809, you know that the reader was someone from the upper class, and they knew people like that,” says Fernández.

For instance, English book collector Richard Heber had eight houses bursting with over 146,000 rare books, a collection he spent a fortune on—around 100,000 pounds—beginning in 1804. Meanwhile, the book collecting of Sir Thomas Phillipps eventually landed his family in debt. Phillipps was obsessed with vellum manuscripts, and stated that he was on the hot pursuit of obtaining one copy of every book.

One of his contemporaries noted that Phillipps’ house had become a dilapidated swamp of books: “The state of things is really inconceivable. Lady P. is absent, and were I in her place, I would never return to so wretched abode,” the man reported. “Every room is filled with heaps of papers, [manuscripts], books, charters, packages, and other things, lying in heaps under your feet, piled upon tables, beds, chairs, ladders.”

Today, behavior like this seems more like hoarding. Indeed, some contemporary scholars have linked bibliomania with obsessive compulsive disorder. “It is clear that what can be seen here is not ‘normal’ collection behavior but something more serious,” wrote Anna Knuttson in the Journal of Art Crime. “The pleasure that hoarders take in collecting can be so profound that it might define a person’s self-image and even give the individual a life purpose.”

Dibdin believed that the cure to bibliomania would come with the commercialization of books. His prediction came true. Over time, the desire to accumulate, catalog, and preserve became less intense with the advent of more efficient steam engine-powered printing press technologies in the 1820s. But Dibdin’s commentary remains a cautionary tale, relevant for today’s obsessives.

Ironically, Bibliomania; or Book Madness was widely popular among Dibdin’s fellow book lovers, with collectors getting in reckless bidding wars at auctions over a copy. The book is said to have spurred a 42-day auction at the 1817 Roxburghe sale.

In Havana, Cuba, street art is relatively rare. The city is full of derelict, sometimes abandoned buildings that in other cities might have been used as canvases for graffiti, but tags or murals are found only infrequently in the Cuban capital. In some neighborhoods, though, haunting figures live on Havana's walls, the product of a young street art movement, led by just a handful of artists.

One of the most prolific and noted is Yulier Rodriguez, who signs his work Yulier P. His pieces feature alien-like creatures with bulbous heads, sometimes more than one, and large searching eyes. Rodriguez said they are akin to souls or fables. They suffer. They wonder. They might be in pain or in a moment of contemplation. They're rarely happy, though.

They peer out of their other-world into Havana but they rarely seem to see it, caught up instead in an internal melancholy.

Rodriguez first started adorning Havana's streets about three years ago. He had been creating art in the studio, looking for a way to express his own experiences, when he began making these expressionist forms. He had met another artist who was working on the street, and he started experimenting.

He has spoken of the “stage fright” that he encountered in his early public work, but now, just a few years later, his art is hidden in plain sight throughout the city, both in wealthier neighborhoods and in some of the poorest.

For his pieces, Rodriguez chooses buildings and walls that have fallen into disrepair: his intent is to add color and aesthetic qualities back to the city as it crumbles. He also looks for spots that are as visible as possible, in part to promote the idea of street art in Cuba.

The pieces don't start with the place, but with an idea: “My ideas or scenes are already drawn or preconceived in sketches,” he says. When he finds a wall with the right characteristics, he can “adapt the idea to the architectural aesthetics of the space,” he says, putting the personality of the destroyed wall and the piece’s design in dialogue.

From time to time, Rodriguez's work is painted over, sometimes by public authorities, sometimes by well-meaning private people, and sometimes by religious detractors who see his figures as devilish. But spend even a bit of time in Havana, and you'll be able to find them.

Rodriguez's art isn't political enough that he's been told to stop (although occasionally the police come by to check on what he's doing), but what he's doing is new enough in Cuba that, he says, like any activity that’s not officially sanctioned by the government, it's looked on with suspicion.

Rodriguez shares a studio on the Prado, a major boulevard that connects Old and Central Havana, where he also works with other self-taught artists to bring art to the community. These days, he sees little difference between the work he does in the studio and on the street. “I think my work has the same intention,” he says, no matter the venue. A viewer’s interpretation may vary, though, depending on the place where they encounter his work. Either way, the intention is the same: to spark conversation.

Mariana Zapata contributed reporting to this article.

 

A photo posted by The Wildlife Center Of Texas (@wildlifecenteroftexas) on Nov 30, 2016 at 1:54pm PST

Alligator snapping turtles might be the most mesmerizing and simultaneously ugly creature on this planet. These freshwater turtles are powerful, heavy, and very large: they look like creatures dreamed up by a nightmare factory.

They often hang out with their mouths spread wide in their triangular beaked heads. Sometimes they’ll linger with their disgusting pond mouths at the murky bottom of a river and let their wormy tongues attract prey into their death-trap mouths. Coming face to face with one is like looking at an alien, demon, and dinosaur wrapped up into one awesome reptile.

As fearsome as they look, alligator snapping turtles, which are native the southeastern United States, are listed as a vulnerable species, in need of protection. In Houston, one in particular needed to be rescued after getting himself stuck in a water pipe.

“The pipe was dented at the opening, preventing the turtle from passing through; he struggled to keep his head up as water rushed over his body,” Patch reports.

It’s not exactly clear how he got there to begin with, but a local fire department and Houston wildlife rescue team were able to dislodge him, which involved pulling him out with a sort of grappling hook:

When they freed him, though, they found that several other alligator snapping turtles had died trying to get through the blocked pipe. The 53-pound guy who caused the blockage, though, is being treated at the Wildlife Center of Texas.

By the time John Muir and his trusty mule Brownie splashed across the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River in the fall of 1875, the Scottish-born naturalist had already seen his fair share of California grandiosity: Yosemite Valley; the high Sierra; Mariposa Grove. Muir had a thirst for exploration and a talent for storytelling. He founded the Sierra Club and dubbed its synonymous mountains the “Range of Light.” When Muir sauntered upon a montane plateau in what is now known as Sequoia National Park on that autumn day, he found a very large stand of very large trees. Drawing his poetry from the obvious he named it, quite simply, the Giant Forest.

The dominant feature of the Giant Forest is the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), the biggest tree on Earth. Thousands of them grow in this 2,300-acre grove, including five of the ten largest specimens in the world. They reach heights of nearly 300 feet; their trunks can span more than 30 feet; and they’re nearly impossible to miss if you’re tromping beneath their canopy. “In every direction Sequoia ruled the woods…” Muir waxed in Our National Parks, “a magnificent growth of giants grouped in pure temple groves.” And yet, at 4:00 a.m. on a warm August morning, our hearty group of scientists and climbers is having a tough time finding the damn things.

“I feel like we’ve gone too far,” says forest ecologist Wendy Baxter, 36, stopping the group. The ivory glow of a full moon offers enough illumination to hike without fear of face-planting, but it makes for a poor navigational beacon.

It’s the fourth day of two weeks of fieldwork led by Baxter and fellow forest ecologist Anthony Ambrose. Scientists at UC Berkeley’s Dawson Research Lab, the two are part of Leaf to Landscape, a program in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey, the National Park Service, and the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, that is focused on studying and managing the health of the giant sequoias.

California, of course, is in the middle of a historically punishing drought at a time when there’s never been more demand for water. According to the United States Forest Service, 62 million trees have died in California this year alone. Since 2011, a total of 102 million trees have perished, with tens of millions more on death's doorstep. California’s forests generate fundamental ecosystem services by creating healthy watersheds, providing wildlife habitat, and sequestering atmospheric carbon, and they’re dying at unprecedented rates. Even the great giant sequoias are showing concerning signs of stress. It’s Ambrose and Baxter’s goal to collect and analyze tree samples to understand how the sequoias are faring under these rapidly changing conditions, and what might be done to protect them. But first we have to find them.

“Have we come to any intersections at all?” asks Ambrose, 48, whose attention has been focused on answering my questions instead of spotting landmarks.

“I remember this tree, for sure,” someone chirps, a sentiment that seems more appropriate as an epitaph on a lost hiker’s headstone than as a vote of directional confidence. After a brief parley, we correct our course up a gentle rise, down into a shallow basin, and past a pair of landmarks, unmistakable even at this dark hour.

The path splits twin sylvan towers standing inches apart and hundreds of feet tall. It’s still too dark to marvel at their height, but the base of each tree inspires awe enough, gnarled and bulbous and swelling with woody knuckles the size of a Toyota Prius. A few hundred yards farther, the trail continues through the hollowed-out center of another sequoia. Fire, the great creator and destroyer, Kali of the Giant Forest, raged here long ago, burning out the tree’s core. The wound is enormous, 40 feet tall or more and nearly the size of the tree’s entire 12-foot diameter. Yet the grand monarch survived the blaze, which also would have cooked off the thick layers of duff that choke seedling growth, offering tiny sequoias a chance to one day touch the sky and survive their own infernos.

The group splits apart at the meadow, each climber heading to the tree they’ll be sampling. The scientists have targeted 50 sequoias for study—“the biggest, gnarliest trees in the forest,” Ambrose says—and this morning he’ll climb a 241-footer. In most other forests a tree like this would be a star attraction with an honorific name and perhaps even a viewing area. Here, it’s simply known as “tree 271.” 

Ambrose has striking blue eyes and wears a woodsman’s beard with a chinstrap of white whiskers. He slides on his climbing harness and tugs the rope anchored to the crown some 24 stories above. He’s been studying trees for more than two decades, first with a focus on coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) as an undergraduate and master’s student at Humboldt State University, and then on giant sequoias for his doctoral and post-doc work at Berkeley. “From an aesthetic perspective to a biological one, these trees are some of the most spectacular organisms on the planet,” he says with the enthusiasm of a boxing promoter. “They are the pinnacle of what a plant can become. They force you to think about life and your own place in it.”

He clips on a pair of jumar ascenders—mechanical devices that attach to the rope and allow him to pull himself up. “You can’t really understand the true character of a tree from the ground,” he says. Ambrose turns off his headlamp, cranes his head toward the canopy, and begins the long, dark climb into a world of mystery.

The giant sequoia has dominated its landscape for millions of years and captivated global imagination since the mid-19^th century when rumors of trees the size of fairy-tale beanstalks came roaring out of the Sierras. One of four redwood species, the giant sequoia is not the world’s tallest tree; that crown belongs to its northern cousin, the coast redwood. But in terms of sheer volume of biomass, no living organism ever to walk, swim, fly, or stand on this planet comes close. They are of such stature that people struggle to describe them and so compare them to other very big things: blue whales, 747s, dinosaurs, the Statue of Liberty, elephant herds, space shuttles. Giant sequoias make mice of them all.

More than 100 million years ago, when the planet was warmer and wetter, the sequoia’s earliest relatives thrived across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Redwood fossils have been found everywhere from Northern Mexico and the Canadian Arctic to England. During the late Miocene, some 10 to 20 million years ago, the closest direct ancestor of the giant sequoia lived in what is now southern Idaho and western Nevada. As the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range continued its uplift and the climate became drier, the giants’ range shrank. Today, the last remaining sequoias are limited to 75 groves scattered along a narrow belt of the western Sierra Nevada, some 15 miles wide by 250 miles long.

Giant sequoias are among the longest-living organisms on Earth. Though no one knows the trees’ absolute expiry date, the oldest ever recorded is 3,200 years old. Muir claimed to have found a stump with 4,000 tree rings, one per year. During their early years the trees are subject to predation and the volatile whims of nature. Once they reach adolescence after a few centuries, however, sequoias become well-nigh indestructible. Their bark is soft and fibrous and contains very little pitch, qualities that make the trees extremely resistant to fire. The tannins that give their wood a rich cinnamon hue also repel insects and fungi.

When a mature sequoia does die, mortality is usually a function of its marvelous size. Root rot can deprive a tree of a solid anchor and fire can undermine its base, but rarely will either actually kill a 30-story monarch. Gravity is the ultimate culprit, for a giant sequoia with an uncertain foundation faces a violent and certain end. The persistent tug of gravity can pull an unbalanced tree to the forest floor with such a thunderous crash that the reverberation can be heard miles away. The sequoia’s fate is an Icarian allegory, met not by flying too close to the sun, but by stretching too far from its roots.

Thanks largely to their ability to withstand disease and drought, it’s extremely rare for a giant sequoia to die standing upright. “You don’t get to be 2,000 years old without surviving a few dry spells,” Ambrose tells me. Which is exactly why United States Geological Survey forest ecologist Nate Stephenson was so alarmed when, in September 2014, he went for a walk in the Giant Forest and saw something unexpected.

“I had been saying with confidence for decades that if you hit a big drought, the first signs of climatic changes would show up in seedlings,” recalls Stephenson, who has studied trees in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks since 1979. “I was completely wrong.”

He surveyed an area that had burned a few years prior, where seedlings had taken root. Crawling around on his hands and knees, Stephenson was surprised to see that the seedlings were rigid and full of water, their leaves a vibrant blue-green. This was the third year of drought in California, and the summer of 2014 was particularly brutal. There should be some evidence of drought stress, he thought. Sitting on the ground, he leaned back, craned his head toward the heavens to ponder the mystery, and found his answer.

Above him stood a grand old monarch. The crown of the tree was almost entirely brown, a scale of dieback he’d never seen. He searched for other trees displaying similar stress and when he found one with branches close to the ground, he touched it. The foliage crumbled off. In more than 30 years of studying these trees Stephenson had only seen two die on their feet. Five years into the current drought, he’s now seen dozens of standing dead.  

Stephenson quickly assembled a team to survey the 2014 dieback before autumn storms could blow away the evidence. The National Park Service (NPS) enlisted Ambrose and Baxter to begin their fieldwork in 2015. While the NPS and scientists working in Montana’s Glacier National Park might already be resigned to a glacier-free future as the climate changes, no one is ready to consider the possibility of Sequoia without its namesake trees.   

“HEADACHE!!!” AMBROSE YELLS.

His warning, the tree-climbing vernacular for plummeting deadfall, fills the forest moments before a branch whooshes passed, inches from my head. It happens so quickly, the broken limb has already hit the ground before I have a chance to move.

“And that’s why we wear helmets when we work around trees,” he explains to the small group of us standing at the base of the sequoia.

The lessons come quickly on our first day of fieldwork. We set up on a steep hillside and Baxter demonstrates how to prepare the rigging for a climb. Tall and lean with a strong jawline and a soft voice, she’s as comfortable doing stable isotope analysis in the lab as she is setting a 600-foot static line in a tree. “I love the combination of physical exertion and intellectual stimulation,” she tells me. “It’s a struggle to get to the top of the tree. You’re sweating and huffing and puffing, but that’s when you start collecting your samples and the science begins.”

In 2015, Baxter and Ambrose did much of the work themselves, identifying and rigging 50 trees, making six climbs a day, and collecting samples and measurements from each one. Their days began at 2:30 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m.—if they were lucky. “That was brutal,” Baxter recalls.

They have more help this time around. Over the course of two weeks, more than a dozen volunteers—students, professional arborists, climbing junkies—will rotate in and out. The schedule, while not nearly as frantic as the previous year, is aggressive. We wake up at 3 a.m. and begin our hike from the Crescent Meadow parking lot into the Giant Forest an hour later. After climbing trees and taking and analyzing samples all day, we head back to our campground for some R&R before collapsing into bed. 

The immediate goal is to understand the severity of water stress the trees are facing, the water content in the leaves, and the amount of the stable carbon-13 (¹³C) isotope the tree uses during photosynthesis, which offers additional insight into how the trees are coping with drought. With that information, scientists and park officials can assess the trees’ health and begin to think about ways to protect giant sequoias through practices like controlled burns, which clear the ground for seedlings and eliminate less fire-resistant trees that compete for water.   

Ambrose’s first exposure to forest management came as a wildland firefighter following his senior year of high school in Chico, California. The experience, he recalls, involved “hours of boredom followed by long stretches of terror,” and gave him a first-hand look at how a policy of aggressive fire suppression can have an adverse effect on forest ecosystems. 

For more than a century, the government’s approach toward forest fire has been one of suppression. But indiscriminately stamping out frequent, less intense, naturally occurring fires disrupts the natural process of consumption and rejuvenation that species like giant sequoias need to thrive. It also allows dangerous levels of fuels to pile up—until one explosive holocaust vaporizes everything. “You get these large landscape conversions, conifer forests turning into brush,” Ambrose says.

In 2013, the Rim Fire swept through the Sierras, consuming more than 257,000 acres. It was the third largest fire in California’s recorded history and burned for 15 months. It never reached Sequoia National Park, but it did sweep through parts of Yosemite some 100 miles north. As a precautionary measure, officials even set sprinklers around of some of Yosemite’s giant sequoias in case the fire got too close.

Giant sequoias, like all trees, play a central role in the hydrologic cycle. Storms drop rain and snow, which giant sequoias can chug to the tune of 800 gallons per day—more than any other tree. As the trees draw water out of the ground, the air surrounding the leaves draws water through the trees and, eventually, back into the atmosphere. That process, called transpiration, creates tension within the tree’s water columns. The drier the atmosphere and the less groundwater available, the higher the tension. Under extreme drought conditions, when that tension grows too high, those columns of water can snap like a rubber band. Gas bubbles form, creating an embolism that prevents the flow of water up the trunk. If this happens enough, a tree will shed its leaves and can, eventually, die.

To measure water tension and other biological processes, climbers sample each tree twice a day, once under cool pre-dawn conditions when the tree is least stressed, and once under the heat of the midday sun. The scientists clip foliage from the lower and upper canopies, which allows them to assess conditions at different parts of the tree.

After the safety talk and rigging demonstration, Ambrose grabs a laminated map from his pack and assigns the climbers to their trees. Pulling on a forest-green arborist harness, he clips a pouch onto each hip to carry his samples. Then he steps into the foot straps attached to the ascenders and begins the climb.

His arms, legs, and core work in an assembly line of movement. Hanging on the rope in a crouch, he slides his right arm up, follows with his left, pulls his knees to his chest, and stands up straight in the stirrups, at which point he repeats the routine—scores of times on his way to the top. Climbers call it “jugging,” a process as onomatopoeically laborious as it sounds.

About 100 feet up, Ambrose stops at the lower canopy, marked by the first significant limbs, which can grow up to six feet in diameter. He clips a handful of tiny branches, puts them into a plastic bag, shoves the bag into his hip pouch, and continues climbing. The tree’s leaves regulate gas exchange through tiny pores called stomata. The stomata take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen and water vapor. When a tree becomes too water-stressed it closes its stomata. This stops water loss through transpiration but also prevents the tree from absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide and using it for photosynthesis. Sequoias have vast carbon stores to help them weather these lean times, but if the stomata stay closed for too long, the trees will eventually starve to death.

As Ambrose works in the tree, I take a short hike up to the top of a hill just above the study site, where the cost of California’s drought reveals itself in spectacular panorama. The Middle Fork of the Kaweah River plummets from the high Sierra into the agricultural empire of the San Joaquin Valley. Polished granite swells and the jagged sawtooth mountains of the Great Western Divide dominate the horizon; pine, fir, and cedar trees blanket the river basin. The colors are rich and electric, but they don’t all sit right. In a sea of green, huge islands of red metastasize across the landscape. These ochre forests are not sequoia. They are thousands and thousands and thousands of dead trees. 

Numerically speaking, giant sequoias constitute a small portion of California’s forest. A few weeks before my foray with Ambrose and Baxter, I hopped on a survey flight with Greg Asner, principal investigator at the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), to get a better understanding of what’s happening to trees across the entire state and what that might indicate for the future of the sequoias.

Asner, 48, runs a flying laboratory called the Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System, a Dornier 228 airplane tricked out with $12 million of custom-built equipment that allows the CAO to measure the composition, chemistry, and structure of a forest in detail and efficiency that, not long ago, was relegated to the realm of science fiction. “In California,” said Asner, “we have exact numbers on 888 million trees.”

We met at 7:30 a.m. at Sacramento’s McClellan Air Park. Dressed in snappy black flight suits, Asner and his four-man team were going through last-minute checks and waiting for the sun to climb higher in the sky, which would allow for more accurate measurements. The goal for the day: map a 3,600-square-mile section of northern California forest.

Collecting such voluminous amounts of detailed data requires a unique toolbox. The plane itself is geared toward special mission work with its high-payload capacity and short takeoff and landing capabilities. An imaging spectrometer, resting atop a hole cut in the belly of the plane, absorbs light across the spectrum, from ultraviolet to short-wave infrared. It allows the CAO to measure 23 different chemicals in the trees, including water, nitrogen, and sugar content. To work properly, internal sensors within the imaging spectrometer are kept at -132 Celsius, atomically cold temperatures.

A laser system next to the imaging spectrometer fires a pair of lasers from the bottom of the plane 500,000 times per second, creating a three-dimensional image of the terrain below, and every tree on it. A second spectrometer, this one with an enhanced zoom capacity, allows the team to take measurements of individual branches on a tree—from 12,000 feet up. Finally, a piece of equipment known as an Internal Measurement Unit records the X,Y, and Z axes as well as pitch, roll, and yaw of the plane to ensure that its positioning in the air doesn’t compromise the accuracy of the data it collects from the ground. “This unit is the same technology as what's in the nose of a cruise missile,” Asner explained. “Because of that, the State Department has a say in what countries we visit.” The CAO studies forests all over the world—Peru, Malaysia, Panama, South Africa, Hawaii.

Once airborne, we dismissed the sprawl of the Central Valley for the coastal mountains. To the naked eye, the Shasta-Trinity National Forest looked splendorous, 2.2 million acres of rivers and mountains. Mount Shasta, a 14,179-foot active volcano, was still holding on to a handsome cap of snow and the landscape was vibrant and green. Asner’s spectrometer shared a different story. “Visual assessment doesn’t tell you much,” he said. On his computer screen, the green trees below were all reading red. They were dead. We just couldn’t see it yet. “A lot of this was not here last year,” he said with the clinical efficiency of a doctor diagnosing a cancer patient. CAO's statewide findings suggest tens of millions of trees might not survive another dry winter.

Sugar pine (Pinus lambertiana), a species that grows in large, contiguous groves and can live 500 years, has been hit the hardest, accounting for some 70 percent of the mortality, but cedar, fir, and oak are all suffering as well. It’s not just the lack of precipitation that’s killing these trees; it’s the cascading effect of climate change. Water-stressed trees make easier targets for mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae), which lay their eggs in the trunk and eat the trees.

Asner shared a map of the Giant Forest. The sequoias were a cool, comforting shade of blue, demonstrating high water content. Water seeks its low point, Asner explained, and the Giant Forest sits in a plateau cup. “It’s an oasis, a refugio. Right now, those trees are of least concern.” It was bittersweet news, like celebrating the last house standing after a tornado.

“Drought is a cumulative process,” Asner explained as the plane made a long bank off the western slope of Shasta. “Forests have biological inertia. We don’t know where the physiological tipping point is. Currently, we’re losing carbon from the forest.”

Forests are supposed to absorb carbon, so I wasn’t sure if I’d heard Asner correctly over the communication system. I tapped my headphones to make sure they were still working. “I’m sorry, did you just say the forests are releasing carbon into the atmosphere?” Automobiles, coal-fired power plants, cattle production—those are all carbon sources. But the mighty forests of California?

“That’s my guess,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine the forests are still carbon sinks.” 

Of the hundreds of feet it takes to climb to the top of a giant sequoia, the first six are invariably the most difficult.

After two days on the ground watching the rest of the team sliding up and down the sequoias, I ask Ambrose for a tutorial. Over the years, I’ve spent enough time on rock and rope to scratch my way up a 5.10, but tree climbing—beyond the scampering variety, anyway—is new territory.      

It looks easy enough. Ambrose has been powering into the canopy in minutes, and Baxter has a fancy one-legged technique that looks like she’s hopping on air. I, meanwhile, can barely get 12 inches off the ground. Those charming fire caves that serve as a window to ancient battles? They’re actually hazardous overhangs that cause a climber to pendulum into a cavern of charred pith. The two feet of duff piled up on the root system? That makes it just hard enough to get the clearance from the tree trunk needed to begin a comfortable climb. I’ve never done the splits, but with my feet strapped into the stirrups I find myself spinning, spread-eagled in endless, dizzying circles. Then I sprain my knee.

If Ambrose and Baxter climb their ropes like graceful inchworms, I look like a marionette having a seizure. Eventually I reach the lower canopy but my knee feels like a water balloon in a pressure cooker and I’m a long way from mastering Baxter’s hop-along trick. I descend in the interest of doing more climbing later in the week.

Back on the ground, I limp over to Ambrose and tell him of my failed attempt. “It’s tricky the first time. You want to avoid gripping the ascenders too tightly. And really, you shouldn’t be using your upper body very much at all. You mostly want to use knees and core.” Translation: The exact opposite of what I was doing. 

A few days later I get my chance on another pre-dawn climb. The tree is one of the largest individuals in the world—220 feet tall and 20 feet in diameter at the base—all the more impressive considering it’s growing in shallow soil atop a plate of granite. Underground, the tree’s been waging war with its rocky substrate for millennia, its roots probing every crack and fracture in a tireless search for water. I clear the first few feet without issue and begin the long journey to the top.

The sequoia is shaped like a giant barrel, tall and fat with hardly a taper. For the first ten stories, the trunk is a sheer wall of wood with an uninterrupted profile. I pass the crown of a neighboring 90-foot pine before even reaching the first branch of the sequoia. As I enter the sprawling branch network of lower canopy, the climb shifts from a smooth glide to a bruising slugfest. I work my way over, around, and between branches, each the size of a normal tree. About half way up, a pair of branches five feet thick shoots out from opposite sides of the trunk and up in an L-shape, like two arms flexing in a proclamation of strength.

Finally, the top. After 40 minutes of climbing, I take a seat to catch my breath. The crown is gargantuan. On one side a half dozen branches converge to create a bench wide enough for a square dance. It’s easy to get lost in the scale, but as my heart slows and the morning brightens, the subtleties stand out. Thousands of green cones the size of ping-pong balls hang from the branches like chandeliers. Unlike the lower sections of the tree, the bark here is smooth and seamless with a purple tint, and etched with fine lines like topographic contours. A menorah of knobby vertical branches, called reiterated trunks, sprouts out of the crown. I scamper up the last 10 feet and perch on the stumpy tip of one of the spires.

The crowns of sequoias punctuate the tree line like bushy, green exclamation points. Surrounded only by a warm breeze and empty space, I find myself completely exposed and suffering through an emotional paradox. There’s freedom up here with the birds, a glorious release from anything familiar. But it’s a narrow liberty. The laws of gravity and my seismic discomfort of heights dissuade me from any spread-eagle “I’m King of The World” moments. A western tanager (Piranga ludoviciana) lands on a branch and swivels its bright red head toward me, confused by the interloper in its realm. On the forest floor, a black bear (Ursus americanus) lumbers about for breakfast. More people have summited Everest—more people have probably walked on the moon—than have stood atop this noble tree.

“There is absolutely no limit to its existence,” John Muir wrote of the sequoia in Our National Parks. “Nothing hurts the big tree.” The sunrise, however, reveals an unsettling future. Even here, in the country’s second-oldest national park, the horizon is the sickly yellow of a cigarette butt, a vaporous mixture of Central Valley smog and forest fire smoke from the myriad infernos burning across the state. 

Muir’s hyperbole is understandable. The tree I’m sitting atop probably took root before Athenian democracy sprouted in ancient Greece. It has lived through the rise and fall of many of the world’s great civilizations, from Romans to Mayans to the British Empire. Its long shadow has fallen over this forest for three millennia, but that can’t obscure the exhaust of human progress. As I clip my climbing descender onto the rope and begin the journey to the forest floor, I can’t help but wonder: Will this tree stand long enough to witness our own fall? Or will it fall first?

A version of this story originally appeared on bioGraphic.com.

Marie's Dictionary from Go Project Films on Vimeo.

As a direct result of colonization, many indigenous languages throughout the Americas have disappeared or are in danger of doing so. In the US alone, there are 130 endangered Native American languages. Among them is the Wukchumni language, spoken by the Yokuts of California. There is just one remaining fluent speaker: Marie Wilcox, who is fighting to keep Wukchumni alive.

This short film, directed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee for Go Project Films, is dedicated to her. In the film, Wilcox says that she stopped speaking Wukchumni when her grandmother died. However, when she heard her sisters trying to teach their daughters, she started to go back to it word for word. Over the course of seven years, she and her daughter, Jennifer, worked on making a Wukchumni dictionary.

Though the language isn’t traditionally written, Wilcox saw this as a way to preserve Wukchumni for future generations. This task is made even more pressing by the fact that Wukchumni is the only surviving dialect of the Tule-Kaweah language.

Once the dictionary was finished, Wilcox set about on an equally important task: recording the sound of her language. Now, she works with her grandson, who in the video is shown speaking freely with her in Wukchumni, to record the sound of each word in the dictionary, as well as the tribe’s mythology. Wilcox and her daughter also offer weekly language classes so that tribe members can regain the language and achieve fluency.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.