Long Live The Working-Class Hunk

by Anne Helen Petersen

Look at Jeremy Renner, star of Bourne Legacy, and you’ll see something familiar: a certain set to the jaw, a coiled muscle build, a face that looks, quite frankly, like it’s been busted. You look at his body — the thick forearms, the barrel chest — and sense it was not made in the gym. It is a body that has labored, inflected with what Vulture’s “Star Market” column calls “real, swaggering, gritty machismo.” At 5’9″, right about 150 pounds, and with the skin of a smoker, he could be your cousin.

I look around my hometown in northern Idaho, a burnt-out crater of a timber town, and I see men with the same look and build. A lot of these men don’t have jobs, or at least don’t have the jobs their fathers did. In that, they’re not unlike Renner, who toiled for twenty years before winning a role in The Hurt Locker. He made a Hollywood working class wage — $65,000 — playing an army sergeant, another role many men in my town have taken. Renner’s recent roles may have put him in well-tailored suits (Mission Impossible) and left him buried amongst superheroes (The Avengers), but he was still, at root, a man who did things with his body. According to Avengers director Joss Whedon, “his fight work is wonderful: precise, heroic, and you seldom have to double him.”

The traditional jobs of the working class have evaporated, but the downturn has drubbed up nostalgia for a time when men could make a living with their bodies and hands. Not writing code, à la our protagonist in The Social Network, or trading stock futures like Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis, but laboring.

Off-screen, profiles construct Renner as a laborer, detailing his years buying and remodeling Los Angeles homes. He and his buddy “lived in temporary, torn-up structures, without plumbing or power, trying to squeeze out a few more dollars.” They were flipping houses, but they did it the old-fashioned way: sleeping on the floor, construction dust in their hair.

Renner’s rise to stardom is indicative of an industry-wide re-embrace of working class American masculinity. Compare his career and look to those of Tom Cruise, George Clooney and Matt Damon, who he replaced in Bourne. Renner’s two Oscar nominations are for playing a member of the military and a Boston low-life — men who, one, two generations before, would have toiled in the factory or the mill, but America’s post-industrial turn forced them overseas, or to the streets.

We see this embrace in the resurgence of “mancrafting,” we see it in the eroticization of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, with whom women fantasize about living a quiet existence in a backwoods cabin. It’s in True Blood’s Alcide, and in the return of the 80s “hardbodies” in The Expendables.

We even see it in this summer’s Magic Mike, in which a man who yearns to work with his hands is driven to exploit his body as stripper. Behind the gyrations, Mike despairs at the demise of the feasibility of a working-class life. On the construction site, the main character is boxed out by non-union, under-trained labor, and his all-cash stripping-income makes it impossible to get a loan to build his own furniture. He’s good at stripping, but in ten years, that job, too, will leave him behind.

But we love its hero: this year alone, Channing Tatum’s films have grossed $393 million domestically. He is, as Hollywood analyst Zach Baron put it, “having a better 2012 than anyone. He probably will be our next big movie star. Maybe he already is.” He’s “masculine,” according to Steven Soderbergh, “but not in a bogus way.”

Tatum and Renner’s characters evoke two sides of the same working-class coin: one driven to dance, the other to service, both screwed by the government in various egregious ways. They come to embody our anxieties and our hopes while raking in massive box office profits.

In this, Renner and Tatum are reminiscent of another working-class star, one who rose to fame when the working class was first truly threatened, when the Red Scare and rising tide of the middle-class called it into question. That man was as well-muscled as Renner; his characters had the same barely-tempered self-loathing. He was Marlon Brando, and he heralded a “new direction in the iconography of masculinity.”

That masculinity was sexual, emotive, and explicitly working class. He wore “dirty dungarees” and white t-shirts, and refused the Hollywood “glamour treatment.” When gossip columnist Hedda Hopper mentioned his name to her coffee-clatch, they exclaimed “Marlon Brando? He’s exciting! Marlon Brando? He’s coarse, he’s vulgar! Marlon Brando, he’s male!”

The Method he espoused was complicated, yet its effect was simple. He bulldozed Hollywood.

Today, we fetishize that young Brando, reading him into the likes of Renner. But his body and mind went to seed, and his gradual decline paralleled the decline of the American working-class as the nation transitioned into a post-industrial, service-based economy. Brando’s final roles present him as a wreck of his former self: a broken, bloated, incoherent man desperate for work.These new working-class stars help wipe that terrifying memory clean.

When analysts call Renner and Tatum the next big movie stars, it’s not just a declaration of worth. It’s also one of desire: people want to pay to watch this person, and what he seems to stand for, on screen. The Hollywood image of the American male has transitioned countless times over the last century, but this archetype persists. It’s the cinematic descendant of the rugged frontiersman, the cowboy, John Wayne and Gary Cooper, of course, but it has more recent iterations. Han Solo, after all, was a working-class cowboy in space, played by rugged-looking dude who George Lucas plucked from his backyard, where he was busy building him a deck. Bruce Springsteen, drenching his white t-shirt and red bandana in sweat, the very young, deceivingly normal Tom Cruise in All the Right Moves — they were antidotes to the very real decline that Reagan worked so skillfully to mask. (Of course, it’s no coincidence that Reagan himself rose to stardom in the 40s playing working-class roles, parlaying that image, and America’s hunger for it, into a presidency.)

These stars and the roles they play represent an America that no longer exists, yet remains fundamental to America’s self-conception as a nation of strength and individualism. When a way of life dies, we grasp for the thing that looks like it: its afterimage, its hollow simulacra, its projection onscreen. The working class is dead; long live the working-class hunk.

Related: “Mission Impossible”: I Don’t Understand How Tall Everyone Is

Anne Helen Petersen writes Scandals of Classic Hollywood when she’s not thinking about Idaho.

17. Wrapping
16. Toilet
15. News
14. Towel (included only because it should be called towelpaper)
13. Fly
12. Construction
11. Rice
10. Printer
9. Tissue
8. Origami
7. Sand
6. Ruled
5. Rolling
4. Wax
3. Wall
2. Butcher
1. Blotting

Edith Zimmerman edits The Hairpin and is 100% sure there are no papers she left off this list.

Photo by Oleg Golovnev, via Shutterstock

How Do You Know If You Have Wanderlust?

by Megan L. Wood

I became afflicted with wanderlust at an early age — in elementary school. I had one pen pal in Sri Lanka and another in Kenya. It seemed grossly unfair that I wasn’t from anywhere exotic. Part of my wanderlust was longing for an ideal place where I would fully belong and be completely understood. The other part was curiosity and an adventurous spirit. With so many different cultures and countries out there, I knew I had to see the world. As soon as I finished college, I fully succumbed. I searched for my tribe like Ponce de Leon searched for the fountain of youth. I lived with actors in Hollywood, joined the Peace Corps in South America, got married and divorced, fled to New York, Asia, and Africa. I searched for my people on a yoga mat in Mexico, in a Mayan village, and on Craigslist. Ponce de Leon never encountered the fountain of youth, but at least he got to see Cuba before the travel embargo. Me, I still research around-the-world tickets.

How-to know if you have wanderlust:

• You toss and turn at night worrying that Croatia is becoming more and more Westernized everyday.
• You watch Dateline’s coverage of the disappearance and death of vacationing American teen, Natalee Holloway, and feel jealous that she got to visit Aruba.
• You troll strangers’ Facebook pages for their vacation photos.

• You consider breaking up with your partner because he or she doesn’t know where Uruguay is.
• You can say ‘hello’ and ‘love’ in fifteen languages.
• You get rid of possessions based on the idea that you won’t need them in Zambia.
• You think that being part of a harem wouldn’t be so bad as long as you could get a free ticket to the Middle East.

• Your family and friends and school and work and hobbies seem like the absolute worst.
• You know you could be amazing if you could only ride an elephant in Thailand or a camel in Morocco.
• You follow travel bloggers on Twitter and hate them.
• MTV’s “Exiled” was your favorite TV show.

• You’ve memorized TSA’s carry-on baggage restrictions.
• You can’t stop talking about how much you loved the bread in Paris when you studied abroad. And how awful American bread is by comparison.
• Working as an au pair sounds like a good idea.
• You fantasize about getting on a flight and disappearing, never telling anyone where you’ve gone, maybe one day sending a cryptic postcard from the road.

• You set price alerts for flights to countries you’re not sure how to pronounce.
• You start dating a musician in hopes that he’ll take you with him when he goes on tour.
• Peace Corps sounds like a good plan.
• You convince yourself that your hometown is slowly suffocating you and the only cure is to get on a plane and go somewhere else.

Photos by Megan L. Wood

Megan L. Wood uses her middle initial to distinguish herself from all the other women named Megan Wood.

This content series is produced in partnership with smartwater. smartwater, good taste travels well. click here to learn more.

Remember how, after the mass murder in Aurora, a certain group of people were all, “Now, in the wake of the tragedy, is not the time to talk about these things, because you would be blatantly politicizing them to serve your own agenda”? Well I guess they’ve come up with a pretty perfect strategy for keeping the conversation quiet: So long as we have a solid shoot-em-up every couple weeks we can keep kicking any kind of debate down the road indefinitely. Be careful out there.

There seems to be some dispute as to whether his birthday falls on the 24th or the 25th of August, but in either event Howard Jacobson will be seventy years of age by tomorrow. Jacobson, perhaps the funniest living comic novelist, won the 2010 Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, and has a new novel, Zoo Time

, coming out in October, but if you’re unfamiliar with his work let me recommend The Mighty Walzer, which is one the most hysterical books I’ve ever read. Anyway, many happy etcs., Howard.

“Next comes a reproduction of the Oval Office and an ersatz Rose Garden, complete with colonnade. In a virtual game room, or ‘sophisticated leadership training simulator,’ visitors will have a chance to respond to the many crises that Bush faced, including the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the 2008 financial meltdown. Bush will then appear on video and explain his rationale for what he calls ‘decision points,’ the key choices of his administration — some of which helped render him one of the least popular presidents in history.”
 — Remember that guy who broke the country? Where is he now?

You work hard every day. Yea, as Freddie Mercury so eloquently put it, you work til you ache your bones. And what is your reward? Probably a paycheck, although the way things are going during The Current Crisis even that isn’t necessarily a safe assumption. Anyway, today is the one day a year that we acknowledge the pressures of your labor and the need to ameliorate the anxiety with what is still mankind’s most perfect stress management technique. That’s right, today is National Duck Out For A Drink Day (Observed). Today’s the day you take time for yourself to sneak out to a nearby tavern and knock back a couple beers, slam a few shots, or, depending on how long you think you can linger, treat yourself to a few jumbo cocktails. Be sure to bring a few co-workers with you: National Duck Out For A Drink Day is even more enjoyable if you think about it as a team-building exercise that you’ve put together on your own, where the only “trust falls” are actually stumbles. Remember, if you’re out at the bar during work hours it’s like they’re paying you to drink! Go do us proud, workers of America! If you manage to make it back and are still in any condition to type, tell us your stories in the comments. And make sure somebody brings some mints along for when you go back.

Photo by AISPIX, via Shutterstock

by Manuel Gonzales

A friend of mine recently diagnosed himself as having ADHD. He decided I must also have ADHD and told me so and then sent me a book to read on the subject, which I keep next to the bed because I think it’s funny to send a person you think has attention problems a book to read about attention problems.

I’m not saying he is wrong. I’m only saying I would be more interested in finding out if he was right if he had sent me a YouTube video to watch instead.

Still, the book, which I haven’t read yet, has made me wonder if I am ADHD, and so I’ve begun collecting informal data sets in hopes of making some kind of more formal determination, which is how I approach all personal medical issues.

For example, a month ago I found a check that had been paid to me over a year before but that I had forgotten to deposit, perhaps because I had seen something shiny out of the corner of my eye or remembered I hadn’t yet finished watching the second part of the two-part “Knight Rider” pilot, which is, in and of itself, may not be so damning because depositing a check normally requires driving to the bank, filling out a form, waiting in line, and so forth, except that our bank has long allowed us to deposit checks using our phones.

Still, I found the check at the bottom of a box of what I had labeled in my head as “trash,” and that I was quickly shuffling through to make sure I could throw everything in it away. Maybe you are saying to yourself right now, That is a sign, sir, a clear sign that if you have ADHD it is of the Executive Functioning type, which, for those not familiar with the categories, is akin to being an alcoholic but of the functioning sort, and maybe you are right, but I needed exactly that much money, almost down to the very last dollar, then and right then for something I had planned for my wife, and so I like to think of it as lucky, instead, that I hadn’t deposited it earlier.

I’m not very good at math but I’m pretty sure that I would have had less money than I needed had I deposited it earlier.

The other day I took my daughter to a birthday party and sat next to another parent who told me about her own son’s ADHD diagnosis, a diagnosis she then used to unofficially diagnosis her husband, who listened to her rattle off the symptoms of Executive Function ADHD only to say, That’s not ADHD, that’s how I am, and I like to picture her pointing to her nose and giving him the old “ding ding ding ding, you just won our prize” routine, though she claimed that that is not what she did. But the fact that it is hereditary and that I might also have it and have passed it on to one or both of our children upsets me. Already, our daughter’s teachers have told us that when she can focus, she’s smart and engaged and grasps complex ideas, but that half the time she lives in what they referred to as “unicorn land.”

The problem is, she has a unicorn that she calls Uni. It’s a Beanie Baby toy she obtained in Tennessee, at a McDonald’s in the middle of the Appalachians, and that came with the name Fable, which is a horrible name for a small stuffed unicorn with a purple horn and purple hooves, and my daughter felt the same way, and she renamed her Fable Heart, which is better, but still isn’t as good as Sabre Bitch, which is what I would have named her.

According to my daughter, who later renamed the unicorn again, Uni was on a train with her parents on her way to Colorado, but then she fell off the train somewhere in Texas and she tried to run and catch up to the train to get back to her family but the train just wouldn’t stop, and so now she has to live with us, which is a problem because I think that unicorn is distracting my daughter from her schoolwork.

I owe the IRS a tax-form — the one about dependent care — that I just remembered I owed them as I started writing about it here, which, remembering, just now took me to the internet, where I found the form and filled out half of it before I remembered I had been in the middle of an essay referencing this tax form, and now here I am again.

I have a warrant out for my arrest. It’s been so long, I have a hard time remembering why. But maybe you should know that about me, too.

I don’t know if that’s ADHD or if that simply means that I have difficulty remembering to do things I’m supposed to do, or that I’m bad at finishing one task before starting a new

I find myself going to the grocery store a lot. I am in charge of most of the cooking and baking in our house because I once owned a pie company, though it took me some time to convince my wife that I had once owned a pie company. I burnt the first pie I tried to bake her, early into our courtship. It had been a pecan pie. She loves pecan pie and I make a really good pecan pie except for when I make a mistake and burn it and then it’s not so good because burned pecans don’t smell or taste that appealing. It burned because I forgot I’d put it in the oven. And then I tried to make her a second pie, right after burning the first, and set apples to cook on the stove because I was trying a new technique, but then I forgot about the apples — she claims she had nothing to do with it but I imagine she was distracting me with her feminine wiles — and made apple sauce instead.

I go to the grocery store a lot, back and forth, back and forth, because I make lists but forget to put all of the things I need on the list, or I won’t make a list because I will need two things, only two things, but will come home with two things that aren’t necessarily the two things I went looking for.

A week ago, I pulled down the ice-cream maker from the top shelf of our pantry because we hadn’t used it in over a year and to pack it away because we are moving, and I found ice cream still in it. Well. Whatever ice cream becomes after being left inside an ice-cream maker for a year. I can remember doing this. We had people coming over and I didn’t want to clean the ice-cream maker because it’s a pain to clean because it’s frozen and my hand sticks to it, and so I hid it back in its place to be cleaned later that night.

It’s clean now.

But that, if that’s ADHD, if that’s a thing I can blame for how I am, if I can lay myself at the feet of ADHD and thus be absolved, then, sure, ADHD is what I am. I am exactly that.

Manuel Gonzales is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, which will be published in January 2013 by Riverhead Books. He is the director of Austin Bat Cave, a non-profit writing & tutoring center for kids in Austin, Texas. You can follow him on twitter, and on tumblr at miniaturewife.tumblr.com and whatstheworth.tumblr.com. Photo by Patrick Ashley.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Inferno Canto XXVIII

Who could ever capture in words,
Even using prose and retelling countless times,
The bloodbath and carnage I was now seeing?

Every tongue would prove inadequate
Because speech and intellect have strict limits
And can only accommodate so much.

Even if you reassembled all those
From the troubled land of Apulia
Who cried over their blood

Shed by the Trojans; plus those who fell in the long war
That ended in a heap of rings cut from corpses — 
As Livy, who was never wrong, writes;

Add in those who gasped in pain
When wounded resisting Robert Guiscard;
And those whose bones still cover the field

At Ceperano, where every Apulian turned traitor;
Plus those near Tagliacozzo who fell
To old Alardo, who won without using weapons;

Even if one held out a stabbed arm, and another the stump
Of an amputated leg, it still wouldn’t come close
To the horrific spectacle of the ninth pocket.

No wooden casks, not even one missing a top-middle
Or side slat, have a wider gap than the soul I saw
Ripped open from chin to where one breaks wind:

His insides were hanging between his legs;
Heart, lungs, liver, were visible, as well as the sorry sack
That makes merds from whatever one swallows.

While my stare was pinching him like a pair of tongs,
He looked at me and tore open his chest,
Saying, “Look, I’ll tear myself open

And show you a mutilated Muhammed.
Alì is in front of me, in tears, his face split open
From his chin to the lock on his forehead.

And all the others you see here,
While alive they spread strife and divisiveness;
That’s why down here they’re now torn in two.

There’s a devil back there that sticks it to us
With such cruelty, cutting us all with his sword
As if we were a ream of paper

Every time we circle this sorry road,
Since all our gaping wounds
Will have closed before we pass him again.

But you on the ridge, regarding it all intently,
Maybe you’re trying to delay serving your sentence
For your own self-confessed sins?”

“Death hasn’t gotten to him, and neither has guilt
Brought him here to be tormented,” said my teacher,
“But so he can learn what he needs to know.

I’m dead, so it’s my job to lead him through Hell,
From circle to circle — which is every bit as true
As that I’m here speaking to you.”

Hearing that, over a hundred stopped suddenly
To stare at me in awe,
Forgetting for a moment their agony.

“In that case, since you might see daylight soon,
Tell Fra Dolcino that unless he wants to follow me
Down here shortly,

He’d better stock up on provisions
So a blizzard doesn’t hand the Novarese a victory
They wouldn’t otherwise so easily earn.”

Muhammed paused midway through a step to say this,
Then shifted his weight forward
On his foot and walked on.

Another one whose throat was cut
And whose nose was hacked off
To just below his eyebrows and who had only one ear,

Having stopped with the others to gape in amazement,
Stepped forward and pried open his throat,
The outside of which was smeared with red,

And said: “Since you haven’t been sent here by guilt,
And since I saw you above in Italy,
Unless I’m mistaking you for a look-alike,

If you ever find your way back to that plain
That gently slopes down from Vercelli to Marcabò,
Remember Pier de Medicina

And tell the town of Fano’s two men of import,
Misters Guido and Angiolello,
That unless our future-sight lies,

They’ll be tossed off their ship
Wearing ankle weights near La Cattolica
Because of a double-crossing brutal despot.

Between the islands of Cyprus and Majorca,
Neptune never saw a crueler crime,
Not by pirates nor by seafaring Greeks.

That one-eyed traitor who rules the city
That someone down here with me
Wishes he’d never laid eyes on

Will call them to a meeting; when he’s done with them,
They’ll no longer need prayers or promises
To escape the shipwrecking winds of Focara.”

I told him, “If you want me to talk about you
To those up above, name and point out the one
Who bitterly regrets having ever seen that city.”

He took the jaw of one of his companions
In his hand and yanked his mouth open; he said,
“This is him, but he can’t talk.

After he was thrown out of Rome, he hightailed it
To Caesar and convinced him to act, in spite of his doubts,
By telling him, ‘He who hesitates is lost.’”

I thought he seemed stunned,
His tongue cut out from the back of his throat.
It was Curio, who’d been such a confident speaker.

Then one who’d had both hands chopped off
Raised the stumps up in the murky air,
Turning his face into a blood-spattered canvas,

And said, “You’ll also remember Mosca. I’m the one
Who stupidly said, ‘A done deed deserves an end,’
Which was the seed of misery for the Tuscan people.”

To which I added, “And the death of your nearest
And dearest.” Sorrow heaped on sorrow,
He ran off like Lear, raging with grief.

I stayed, looking into the crowd,
Where I saw something I’d hesitate to report
Without a corroborating witness,

Except that I’m reassured by my conscience — 
That best friend that backs someone up
Beneath the bell jar of a pure heart.

I distinctly saw, and can still envision it,
A headless body walking along, moving
Just like the others in the unhappy mob.

He held his severed head by the hair,
Letting it swing in his hand as if it were a lantern;
It looked up at us and said, “Oh, my!”

He had made a lamp of himself;
They were two in one, and one in two.
How this can be, only He who decreed it knows.

When he reached the bottom edge of the bridge,
He lifted the arm to bring the head closer,
So we could hear him. He said:

“Take a look at this mortifying punishment — 
You, observing the dead while still breathing air
In and out — see if there’s any more awful than this.

So you can carry news of me back to the world,
I’m Bertran de Born, the one
Who egged the Young King on with wicked advice.

I turned father and son into enemies;
Even Ahithophel wasn’t worse
When he evilly incited Absalom to rebel against David.

Because I divided people united like that,
I carry my own brain, divided from its beginning — 
Which, regrettably, is in this body.

When you look at me, you see perfect retribution.”

Mary Jo Bang’s most recent collections are The Bride of E and Elegy, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Her translation of the Inferno

, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, is just out from Graywolf Press.

If you find yourself stopped mid-motion in the middle of what we call our life, why not reinvigorate yourself with a tour through The Poetry Section’s archives? You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Robert Sullivan

Day two in a series exploring how the trail of the Battle of Brooklyn, beginning with the British landing on August 22, 1776, would pass across modern-day New York. Shown above, the hills of Greenwood Cemetery.

In the lull before the battle — the first battle of the Revolutionary War, the 236th anniversary of which is coming on August 27th — it made sense to go out and look around, like a scout. A general on the side of the Americans would have used this time to survey the landscape, to traverse the hills and woods of Brooklyn and into New York (here are the receipts Washington sent to congress for that very job). Whenever I’m out and about, I try to see the areas as they might have been, and what I’ve often found is that: the old landscapes are closely related to the current one, sometimes the same, especially in the big picture.

In my own case, there is obviously less urgency that there was for the commanders of the Continental Army. I take it slowly. For me, this is a recreational pastime, like a long chess game, or hiking the Appalachian Trail; glimpses of distances, understandings of relationships in topography are like hard-earned thrills. I feel as if I have an insight in to the city’s old landscape every few months or sometimes once in a few years. Most of them are no-brainers, and if you live on the block that I am thinking about or standing on, you would surely consider any insight of mine to be obvious. But for me, these spots are all over, geo-cached, and I am finding that in a campaign that lasted a lifetime you would be hard pressed to see them all.

Sometimes friends call me to show a view I would never have found on my own. One winter, I had a friend who’s an ecologist call me out to Alley Pond Park in Queens. The word ‘alley’ describes a valley through which George Washington is said to have come through at one point, probably to get a boat out of Flushing Bay and over to Manhattan. It’s a big park with an old and productive forest; you can see owls there that make you feel as if you are far away in New Hampshire.

I took the Long Island railroad out to the Bellerose station, the place I played stickball as a kid, and walked a mile or so, finally crossing beneath the Grand Central Parkway to enter the park. This is a park that happened to play a strategic importance in my childhood landscape; when people on my block trapped squirrels in their attics, they took them to Alley Pond, to be set free. Across the street was a state mental-health facility, Creedmore, which mesmerized us as kids. Unbeknownst to me Woody Guthrie was a patient there when he died in 1967, after which his ashes were sprinkled off Coney Island. Just past Creedmore, I met my friend and walked to a parking area that is just alongside the Grand Central Parkway, and he pointed southeast.

“There,” he said. It was a widescreen view to Long Island, a look out on the plains that make up the neighborhood called Jamaica Plains. Because we were close to two hundred feet high, we could see out past the sparkling water of Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge (home to more bird species than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined) and well down the southern shore of Long Island. We had front row seats in an amphitheater that looked out on the harbor and the Atlantic. It was an amazing view and it existed because we were standing on the terminal moraine. The Battle of Brooklyn played out along the moraine; if the Battle of Brooklyn were an HBO miniseries, the glacial moraine in Brooklyn would be an early set. (Once a local filmed it low budget with kids on bikes.)

The city itself, the rocks of it, are, grossly put, a combination of two big geologic stories — one that is a vertical story as you look down at the map (see the northeast trending valleys that create the East River the Harlem and Bronx rivers or the Palisades along the Hudson) and one that is a horizontal story: see the glacial moraine as it runs through Brooklyn and Queens, a miniature two-borough mountain range, usually invisible unless, say, you go to Ridgewood Reservoir in the fall and take in the amazing view of Manhattan on the one side, most of Long Island on the other. The vertical geology is the result of stresses and fractures that are related to the very old Appalachian Mountains; the horizontal geology is related to the not-as-old Wisconsin glacier, which pushed a lot of junk to New York from elsewhere and left the forward hills as if marking how far it had gone. In Central Park, it all mixes, and, as tour guides and land artists often note, you can see the glaciers scratches on the rocks: “Imagine yourself in Central Park one million years ago. You would be standing on a vast ice sheet, a 4,000-mile glacial wall, as much as 2,000 feet thick,” wrote Robert Smithson.

In the days between the first British landing on Brooklyn and the face off itself, Washington and his staff could only make guesses as to what the British were thinking, as to whether the war would be fought in the glacial landscape, you might say, or the Appalachian one. Washington seems to have thought maybe the British were faking a Brooklyn battle, getting ready to swing in on the East River, or the Hudson. He had did not yet realize that there were upwards of 32,000 Redcoats preparing to march against his 10,000 poorly trained, gunshot-happy men. The Americans had built forts all along the moraine; the idea was to hold the Redcoats back at the passes, the cuts in the glacial hills. There was a fort in Brooklyn Heights, near the Promenade. There was a fort at the top of what would become Fort Greene Park.

A map detail from The Pictorial Field Book Of The Revolution

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The fort that is marked today by a plaque in front of the Trader Joe’s at the intersection of Court Street and Atlantic Avenue was called the Ponkiesberg Fortification — Ponkiesberg is Dutch for Cobble Hill. Where today people line up as if in a Great Depression-era relief line before the store even opens to buy discount organic food, there were once soldiers from New England building a fort on a plot of land that was then a little higher (the British had some prisoners chip down the hill after the Battle of Brooklyn). Whenever I see the line, I am reminded that Trader Joe’s is owned by the family trust of someone who fought against the American army during WWII, Theo Albrecht, who had served in Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, in Tunisia, where in 1945, he was captured by the U.S. Army.

After the soldiers built the fort, Washington and his generals, spent a lot of time looking back towards the British, to count British campfires, to scan the horizon with their spyglasses, always Washington has his spyglass. Meanwhile, they sent scouts out into the woods and fields. The historian I. N. Phelps Stokes in his monumental historiography of the Revolutionary War, written between 1915 and 1928, quotes the journal of a soldier, Jabez Fitch, writing after the British landed: “I this Forenoon, Observ’d several peculiar Smoaks, arising at Different places on Long Island…,” he wrote. “About Sunset we March’d forward, & pass’d ye Lines or Breast Work, soon after which were ordered to Load our Pies [guns], Our Reg’t & Col Tylers . . . took Post in a large Wood, where we spent ye Night; not a Man Allowed to Sleep a Wink, or put his Pies out of his hand.”

Where were the woods? How can I see the woods? Can I reenact the hills? Or re-place myself in them? These days, there are a lot of people trying different sorts of Battle of Brooklyn reenactments. See, for instance, the 2010 assault by the street artist General Howe.

But I like to just get out on my bike and look around, in the days before the battle. A couple of years ago, when I was searching for something that resembled the old Brooklyn hills, tree-covered and hilly, I hit pay dirt in Sunset Park. So for today, I headed out there again, bringing my camera, to shoot.

I biked from the Brooklyn Bridge out past Trader Joe’s, dodging double-parked cars. Then I went down into the Gowanus watershed, past the future canal-side site of Whole Foods. I headed slowly up the moraine to Greenwood Cemetery, a grind. As you reach the top there are spectacular harbor views; if you are me, you can’t believe how high up you are. For years, the cemetery has hosted a formal reenactment of the Battle of Brooklyn. But I don’t go into the cemetery. Rather I head down to around 30th Street, on Fifth Avenue, and just look in. There are hills and trees that shoot backwards, and I never have to leave the present, or wear a tricorne hat and wig. Cemeteries are known as repositories of old breeds of roses, and this is a case of a cemetery being a repository of an old landscape. When I got there on this foray, I pulled out my camera to take a photo, and was shocked to see that I was out of battery. I panicked, until I remembered I had my phone. I left victorious.

Previously: The Landing In New York

Robert Sullivan is the author of a several books, including Rats, How Not To Get Rich, and the Meadowlands. His newest book My American Revolution will be published out Sept. 4 and is available for preorder.