628: In the Shadow of the City 2017

Ira Glass

OK. This happens to be Chicago, but every city has a place like this. That weird, desolate area at the far end of town. We're a half mile west of the old abandoned steel mills. We're a half mile north of landfills where methane fires used to burn. Just south of the auto junkyard. Just east of the site of the old city dump, where there was a mountain of raw garbage that would stink up the neighborhood whenever the wind would blow in the wrong direction.

Everybody down here called it Mount Pacini for the alderman who let the city put it here.

Ira Glass

My guide is Charlie Gregerson, who grew up down here. He shows me where a lake-- Lake Calumet-- used to be back in the '40s when he was a kid. He'd go fishing on a rowboat with his dad. Then the city started filling in huge sections of the lake with garbage and incinerator ash. He'd come here in the '70s and see bulldozers pushing around the rubble of some of Chicago's great buildings, which had been recently demolished.

Louis Sullivan masterpieces, like the stock exchange building and the Garrick Theater-- this is where they ended up.

Ira Glass

There were once big plans for this area-- for canals and waterways, a harbor that never really worked out. There are zoning maps of the city that show streets and complete neighborhoods -- a whole grid of them-- that nobody ever got around to building. Instead, now, on top of all the trash stands a golf course. Charlie says that from the clubhouse, he gets exactly the same view that he used to get back when he and his dad took out the rowboat. It's the same spot. That's where the lake once was. You can see clear to downtown. So far away, it might as well be another city.

Well today on our program, we have stories from several places like this, in the shadow of the city. That weird, no man's land, where it always feels like secret stuff is happening, you know? Just out of sight. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today was first broadcast a few years ago. It's in three acts.

Act One, Brooklyn Archipelago. In that act, some passengers set sail one day on a three-hour tour-- a three-hour tour-- and end up getting lost in the wilderness. One fears for his life on a string of islands that is just outside a very, very big city.

Act Two, Troubled Bridge Over Water. A guy goes to a remote spot to help people who do not want to be helped.

Act Three, Please In My Backyard. Controversy over industrial odors coming from a factory. Odors that, for once, people want to keep coming. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Brooklyn Archipelago. Brett Martin has this story which takes place on the outskirts of-- well, perhaps you've already figured out which city.

Brett Martin

Listen, it happens. You go out for a night with your friends and you wind up drunk, in your underwear, soaking wet, covered with blood, and shipwrecked on a desert island, all within sight of the Empire State Building. These things happen. Or at least they did happen to Alex Zharov.

Alex is 17 years old. He moved to the US from a small town in the Ukraine when he was nine. He's skinny and wears tie-dyed T-shirts, a unmanageable spray of frizzy blond hair, and a valiant-- if not altogether successful-- starter mustache. And-- well, he can probably introduce himself better than I can. Here's how he responds when I ask him to state his name for the record.

Brett Martin

Here are a few other things about Alex. He lives with his cute older girlfriend and his exceptionally patient parents in a small apartment in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Instead of going to high school, he's enrolled in an internet home schooling program. He's at work on a science fiction novel and has logged several hundred in-flight hours as a student pilot.

But most of Alex's time is spent as a guitarist, singer, and songwriter for his band, EBuffalo. When I went to see them play at a two-day Russian rock festival last fall, I learned several things. First, there are many, many ex-Soviet immigrants living in Brooklyn. Second, they all, very earnestly, want to rock. And third, Alex Zharov-- whether he's writhing on his back on stage or reclining in the dressing room with a beer and a cigarette-- is kind of a superstar.

Before we get to our story, the other key person you'll need to meet is someone who entered Alex's life at a crucial moment years ago when Alex first came to the States. Alex had an awkward adjustment. He fought in school and was kind of depressed. He was bored. Then one day, Alex was walking along the Brighton Beach boardwalk and saw a group of older guys collecting money for something called the Russian Punk Rock Club of America. Older guys, like 25 and 30 years old. Alex was 12.

One of the musicians he met that day was Roman Gadzhilov, who immediately took to the young Alex.

Brett Martin

Under his new friends' tutelage, Alex began walking around in an old Bolshevik-style hat and trench coat. And his friends gave him books. Dostoevsky, Tolkien, guides to Slavic paganism, The Beats, and also Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. Alex was particularly fond of those.

In our story today, our own seafaring tale happens on a boat that Roman owns-- a 25-foot white sailboat, which Alex likes to refer to as "the yacht." One cool evening last May, Alex, Roman, and another friend named Alex-- Alex Glubochansky decided to take a nice little boat trip in Jamaica Bay, the body of water that wraps around the southern end of Brooklyn. Here's Alex.

Brett Martin

Roman had a slightly less ambitious agenda.

Brett Martin

Things started to go wrong almost immediately. Before they even left the marina, Roman, who'd been making headway through the bottle of rum, fell into the water, and they had to haul him back in. He was clearly in no shape to drive. This is Alex.

Brett Martin

As a responsible journalist, I should say for the record that Roman does have one objection to Alex's version of events.

Brett Martin

Alex and Alex had had a few drinks themselves.

Brett Martin

Somehow, they managed to get out of the marina, gun the engine, and take off across the water toward the Marine Park bridge in the distance. Once there, they decided to try to sail to Brighton Beach and headed toward a land mass. But they got confused and turned back to open water. They drank some rum, or maybe cognac. One way or another, they drank a lot of it.

At one point, they almost crashed into a small island. Gas was running low. But they figured that if worst came to worst, they could always put up the sails and still make it home. Then they got caught in a strong current that turned the boat in circles. The perfect time, you would think, to begin to panic. Or-- if you're the kind of person who forgets trouble the moment you're out of it, or even while you're in it-- the perfect time to shoot off all the boat's flares into the water. Just for fun.

Finally, the series of mistakes reached a critical mass. They had no cell phone. Roman's had died when he fell in the water. No flares, no captain, and almost no gas. Even Alex had to admit they were in trouble.

Brett Martin

It was a glorious spring morning on Jamaica Bay-- sun glinting off the water, gulls calling overhead-- as our young pleasure cruisers slumbered. The light filtering into the boat's cabin woke Roman and Alex Glubochansky first, and they came up on deck. What they saw was not good.

After drifting through the night, the boat had come to rest in the shallows of a small bay alongside an uninhabited landmass. Stretching out behind them, they could see a long furrow where the tide had dragged them deep into thick mud. And as they stood there, blinking and wondering how this might have happened, the wind carried them another 10 feet inland.

They could see the skyline of Manhattan on the horizon, the runways of JFK airport a little closer, and signs of civilization in every direction. They could even see boats passing by in the distance, but these were too far away to take any notice. It was obvious that they were-- in a word-- shipwrecked.

The hungover sailors sat down to decide what to do. Roman and Glubochansky were in favor of waiting to be rescued, or for the tide to rise and pull them out again. Meanwhile, Alex was formulating his own plan. Beyond the island they were closest to lay another landmass, which Alex was sure led somewhere. His idea was to swim to it, walk to civilization, catch a bus somewhere, and bring back help for his friends-- who, as Alex remembers it-- thought the plan was, frankly, idiotic.

These are islands, said Roman, who, in truth, had actually been out on the Bay before and was in a position to know. But Alex was sure that Roman was wrong. So Alex stripped to his underwear. He put what he thought he might need in a waterproof plastic mayonnaise jar. He brought his MetroCard for the bus he was going to swim to, an expired passport for ID, and his favorite Buddhist medallion for luck. He wrapped his clothes in a cellophane blanket and bid his friends farewell. Roman watched him disappear into the surf.

Brett Martin

Except he didn't. Soon, he realized that he was, indeed, on another island, with no way off except to swim back through the freezing water to rejoin his friends. And he wasn't about to do that. He was alone. So Alex set about doing all the things a good castaway should do.

He wrote a giant help in the sand for the benefit of the planes landing at JFK. He circumnavigated the island looking for supplies. He found a stick and a piece of red cloth and made a flag to signal passing ships. Then he found several big pieces of Styrofoam and some wood and spent an hour or two fashioning a raft, but it collapsed when he sat down on it. Undeterred, he went back to searching for something that would be his ticket off the island. And then he found it. It was the hollowed out carcass of a jet ski-- or as he calls it, a scooter.

Brett Martin

Now, there was really no way off the island, even by swimming-- because, well, you know, sharks. It was a galling situation. And it was made even more maddening because the city was right there.

Brett Martin

Ah, yes the ducks. You'll want to hear about the ducks.

Brett Martin

It turns out that the island where Alex was stranded is called Ruffle Bar, and it lies only a 20-minute boat ride away from the coast of Brooklyn. Far from being traumatized or ashamed of his exploits, Alex wanted nothing more than to go back out there. And from the advantage of my overpriced, under-sized apartment, I wanted to see a place where you could be totally alone in the wilderness, smelling your own death in the air, while in at least theoretical commuting distance to Midtown Manhattan. So we hired a boat to take us to Ruffle Bar.

In truth, I wasn't as completely surprised as some might be to learn that such a place exists. I grew up near the islands of Jamaica Bay in a neighborhood called Canarsie. And when I was little, my friends and I would cut through the empty lots near my house to explore the mix of trash and nature on the shoreline. It was a place totally apart from the rest of my mostly urban childhood. A secret place that my friends who lived even 10 or 15 blocks away were unaware existed.

But then the smaller islands around New York have always occupied a weird place on the edge of the city. Home to all sorts of enterprise that the citizenry either doesn't know about or prefers not to see. Sanitariums and prisons, potter's fields, and grand failed schemes. Ruffle Bar itself had been the site of several of the latter. Since the Civil War, it had housed a ferry stop, a resort hotel, and even a short-lived dune community of some 40 buildings. We stop in front of a concrete foundation.

Brett Martin

There are no buildings left here. The island is returned to a deeply wild state. There's a wall of dense brush and a few trees around which sinister gulls are circling. We pass a flock of ducks who take one look at Alex and wisely move away.

Brett Martin

As we search for Alex's Buddhist medallion that he'd left in the excitement of the helicopter rescue, we walk across a plane of thick, dry grass, matted down like a carpet. Underneath, you can hear shells crunching and mysterious things scurrying around. Still, reminders that we are, in fact, in a major metropolis are always close at hand.

For one thing, there's the garbage. Piles of plastic and driftwood, but also shoes, steering wheels, prescription bottles, deflated balloons, a washer dryer, several refrigerators, and, oddly, boats. Three perfectly intact ones, complete with oars. I hesitate to point these out to Alex, though, to be fair, they're probably too heavy for him to have dragged to the water. And then there's this reminder of civilization.

[PHONE RINGING]

Brett Martin

He was always close enough to the city that simply having a cell phone would have had him tucked safely into bed within half an hour. Alex was finally rescued after seven hours, thanks to Roman and Glubochansky. Back on the boat, they were having a fine old time. A police helicopter was performing drills nearby. And apparently-- no slouches in the clicheed castaway department themselves-- they had figured out that they could signal it with a mirror. But why rush?

Brett Martin

Still, as it began to get dark and the cigarettes ran out, the friends thought it was probably time to get a move on. The helicopter soon arrived and airlifted them off the boat. It wasn't until they were safely ashore, wrapped in blankets and being fed complimentary cookies, that either of them happened to mention that there had been a third passenger.

When the helicopter came back for Alex, cold, exhaustion, and dehydration had left him in a trance-like, almost wild state. And for him, this island will always be a place where maybe there'd be monsters.

Brett Martin

And that's what, after many hours spent with Alex, I find myself liking about him the most-- his insistence on finding mystery and adventure everywhere he looks. It's easy to laugh at that, to write it all off as adolescent stupidity. But what if it's more than that? What if it's also a kind of adolescent magic?

Brett Martin

Think about that. Every step of the way, by almost any measure, Alex could not have been more wrong. It takes a special kind of grace to turn that into right time, right place. And how can you help but envy that?

Who wouldn't rather live in a world where if you believe you should have an adventure, you do? In which each of your mistakes doesn't narrow your life, but expands it? In which the worst thing that could possibly happen is being bored, and you can go to sleep on stormy seas and trust that when you wake up, if you're very lucky, you'll be in Utah?

What I'm trying to say is this. Alex does something I never in a million years would have thought possible. He makes me think it might be cool to be a teenager again.

There's a story that back in the 1830s, a ship carrying $54,000 in Mexican gold was hijacked by pirates outside Jamaica Bay, and that the treasure was buried somewhere near Ruffle Bar. On our way back from the island, I tell Alex this, and he listens with great interest. If he found the treasure, he wants to know, could he keep it? Maybe, I say. If he didn't tell anybody. To which Alex answers-- precisely as I know he will, the only way he possibly can. He says, but what if I told everybody?

Ira Glass

Brett Martin. He's the author of Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.

Coming up, the thing about Chicago that nobody outside Chicago believes about Chicago but that actually is completely and totally true. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, In the Shadow of the City. Stories about things happening out of sight from most of us, but very close to us. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Troubled Bridge Over Water.

In 2003, on the edge of a city halfway around the world, in Nanjing, China, a man named Chen Si-- Mr. Chen-- headed out to a bridge away from his wife and daughter. He was there for 10 hours a day. The bridge he chose is this concrete communist monstrosity, four miles long, covered with slogans that celebrate the worker. Four lanes of traffic and thousands of pedestrians on the top deck. Two train tracks on the lower deck, over the Yangtze River into Nanjing, a city of seven million.

Estimates are fuzzy, but the best guess is that one person per week commits suicide off this bridge. Quick heads up, by the way, that this story is going to discuss suicide. Mr. Chen decided he wanted to try to keep them from jumping. And he started to-- singlehandedly, at first, then with an occasional volunteer. The blog that he keeps about this is the most sober, taciturn, non-boastful account of saving lives imaginable.

Occasionally, Mr. Chen will insert his feelings. "Beware heavy thoughts," he declares to himself during one entry. "How I wish that he would soon be free of this shadow," he says about an old man he saved in another. But mostly it's just the facts. Here's a translation from the Chinese.

"On July 25 at 10:30 in the morning, I discovered a woman lying on the bridge railing, on her belly, weeping. I went to her. She wiped her eyes. She said she was just playing, and walked toward the center of the bridge. I went with her, and she-- very ordinarily-- dialed her cell phone. When I returned at 1:10, I discovered that she had already climbed up on the bridge railing. I restrained her and forced her onto a moped. She is from Nanjing's Jianye district.

"Her last name is Zhao, and today she's 45 years old. Because her husband, surnamed Li and 51 years old, is violent towards her and mistreats her, she thought killing herself would be better. However, she is silent when she thinks of her 15-year-old son.

"March 21, 2010. Yesterday at 3:05 PM, I saved a young man in the middle of the bridge. He had drunk a lot of alcohol and was planning to jump over the bridge railing. I at once restrained him and dragged him to safety. As we spoke, I learned the situation was actually quite funny. He was thinking about jumping because last year, his wife promised to start returning to him 200 Yuan of his monthly 1,400 Yuan salary to spend as he pleased. But she had not honored her promise.

"Yesterday afternoon, he started drinking with his friends. And the more he drank, the angrier he got. He believed that killing himself would make her realize that not one cent had come to him. He then said another funny thing. His mother's colleague said that the bridge is haunted and could take one's soul. I said, haha, it is haunted by drunk ghosts, and I took him home. This was the calmest, simplest rescue I've made in recent years."

Many of Mr. Chen's entries are about the people that he does not save. "February 15, 5:30 in the morning, a middle aged man jumped to his death. It is reported at this time that he was holding a photograph of his family.

"August 10, 2008, Saturday afternoon at 1:40 PM, a young woman 300 meters from the south end of the bridge climbed under the bridge railing. I immediately started my moped, but because they accelerated too quickly, the moped leaked oil and ignited. I had to run to her. But when I was 200 meters away, she jumped into the Yangtze. Her silhouette was visible in the water at a spot 50 meters away, and I could still hear her yelling for help until a large wave obscured her from view."

At the end of each year, Mr. Chen does an inventory of how things are going on the bridge. This one is from the end of 2009. He wrote that since he began back in 2003, he saved at that point 174 people from committing suicide, counseled another 5,150 on the bridge, and 16,000 on the phone.

51,000 people had texted him. Total days volunteering to that point-- 646. "With regards to the reasons for suicide," he writes, "emotional problems make up 60%, terminal illness 20%, sudden explosive crises 10%, and domestic violence 10%."

Mike Paterniti wrote a magazine article about Mr. Chen. He first heard about him years ago from news reports. He read a bit of his blog in Google translate. He felt like he had to meet this man, who, on his own, had decided to rescue so many people, and flew to China.

Ira Glass

Mike Paterniti. He first wrote about meeting Mr. Chen for GQ magazine. There's a documentary out there about Mr. Chen and the bridge called The Angel of Nanjing.

Ira Glass

Act Three, Yes in My Backyard. Now this story about some of the mysterious things happening on the edges of the city, in the shadow of the city, right under our noses. And to put this story in some context, we're going to turn now to Jorge Just. You may remember Jorge. He's done some stories for our program.

He says that when you move to a new city, you cannot get into the regular conversations that everybody else gets into. He found this out a little while back, when he did the one thing that everyone in Chicago agrees is the very worst thing that anybody can do. He moved to New York.

Ira Glass

What happened is this. Somebody complained about the chocolate smell. They complained to the Environmental Protection Agency. And the federal government, ever responsive to even a single complaint from any of its citizens anywhere in the country, leapt into action. They sent inspectors to the Blommer Chocolate Company, which has been making chocolate bars and other goodies on Chicago's west side since 1939.

Inspectors found that too much cocoa dust was going into the air-- more than is legal under federal standards. The plant installed filtering equipment. In fact, they say they'd been planning to get that equipment in place even before the EPA dropped by. In any case, fewer cocoa particles in the air means less delicious chocolatey aroma.

Ira Glass

That's Brian Urbaszewski, Director of Environmental Health Programs for the American Lung Association in Chicago. And as he points out-- it has been widely reported here-- the Illinois Attorney General's office has documented over 7,600 violations, similar to the chocolate company violation, at six coal plants in Illinois in the last six years. And the EPA has never gone after any of those coal plants.

Ira Glass

The federal EPA hasn't been talking to the press about the chocolate factory. When I called the Illinois state EPA, the Manager of Compliance and Enforcement for the Bureau of Air-- a cheerful public servant named Julie Armitage-- informed me that there has been a misunderstanding. Yes, she said, the coal plants had belched out too many particles 7,600 times.

But you see, these times was very, very short. At the least, a momentary spike. At the most, six minutes long. Each one was a blip, she said. Automatic monitoring equipment is going 24 hours a day taking readings. Add up all the blips per year, and you get 211 blips per plant per year, meaning that well over 99% of the time, the plants are in compliance with the law.

Ira Glass

And as for the fact that now there may be less chocolate smell in Chicago?

Ira Glass

Well, today's episode of our show was produced by Diane Cook, Robyn Semien and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Amy O'Leary, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Production help from Sam Hallgren, Thea Chaloner, Seth Lind, Tommy Andreas, and B.A. Parker. Matt Tierney is our technical director. Music help from Jessica Hopper.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder Mr. Torey Malatia, who asked me to tell you he can kick the ass of anybody in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.