Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (23 page)

In his Milwaukie, Oregon, orchard, Seth Lewelling specialized in cross-breeding cherry trees. In 1875 he grafted branches from several different cherry trees onto a Black Republican cherry, one of the first dark cherry trees ever developed. (Today the Black Republican is used to flavor most black-cherry-flavored foods.) The resulting fruit was dark red, firm…and twice the size of regular cherries. He named the new fruit Bing cherries, after his orchard foreman Ah Bing, a Chinese laborer who’d cared for the new plants. When Lewelling exhibited Bing cherries in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, they were so big that fairgoers thought they were crabapples. Lewelling made a fortune shipping Bings on ice via railroad to the East Coast, where they sold for 3 cents each—the equivalent of 60 cents today.

In 1928 Whittier, California, mailman Rudolph Hass bought a dozen avocado-tree saplings and planted them in his backyard. He thought he was getting all Lyon trees, but one of them bore black, bumpy avocados, not the smooth, green fruit of the Lyon. Hass wanted to chop down the odd tree, but his children begged him not to—they thought the fruit was smoother and richer than the Lyon avocados. So Hass took out a patent on the plant in 1935 (and named it after himself). Then he hired a local nursery owner named Harold Brokaw to market it to grocers. It was an easy sell—the Hass tree yields more fruit than the Lyon, and does so year-round. Today, 80 percent of the seven billion pounds of avocados sold worldwide each year are Hass.

William Wilmer, an ophthalmologist who practiced in Washington, D.C. in the early 1900s, was one of the most distinguished eye doctors of his era. Among his patients were eight different presidents, from William McKinley to Franklin Roosevelt. He also treated Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator; Joseph Pulitzer, the New York newspaper tycoon and creator of the Pulitzer Prize; and countless other prominent Americans. But perhaps his most unusual claim to fame is the fact that in 1921 he managed to talk a prestigious medical journal,
The American Journal of Ophthalmology,
into printing a ghost story.

The story had been recounted to Dr. Wilmer by one of his patients, whom he identified only as “Mrs. H” to protect her privacy. The strange occurrences she and her family experienced began in 1912, shortly after she, her husband, and their children moved into a large, run-down old house that hadn’t been lived in for about a decade. The house didn’t have electricity—it was lit with gaslights and heated by an old furnace in the basement.

The gloomy old house soon began to exert a strange influence on its new occupants, as Mrs. H recounted in Dr. Wilmer’s article. “Mr. H and I had not been in the house more than a couple of days when we felt very depressed,” she wrote. The floors were covered with thick carpets that absorbed all sound of the family’s servants going about their tasks, and Mrs. H found the quiet a little overpowering. But even more disturbing than the silent footsteps of the people who were in the house were the noisy footsteps of people who
weren’t
there…or at least could not be seen with the
naked eye. “One morning, I heard footsteps in the room over my head,” Mrs. H recounted. “I hurried up the stairs. To my surprise, the room was empty. I passed into the next room, and then into all the rooms on that floor, and then to the floor above, to find that I was the only person in that part of the house.”

The house’s strange power seemed to grow over time. Soon the entire family began to suffer from headaches and exhaustion, yet whenever family members took to their beds to regain their strength, the headaches and fatigue only grew worse. The children were affected most of all: They were pale much of the time, often felt tired and ill, and had poor appetites.

No part of the house offered refuge: When Mr. H sat in the dining room, he was so overcome by the sense of an unseen presence standing
right behind him
that he began turning his chair to face the hallway so that he would see anyone who tried to sneak up. The children developed an aversion to spending time in their playroom on the top floor of the house, Mrs. H. remembered: “In spite of their rocking horse and toys being there, they begged to be allowed to play in their bedroom.”

By December Mrs. H and the children were so worn out that she decided to take them on a short vacation while Mr. H remained at home. The break worked wonders for Mrs. H and the kids, but poor Mr. H was more tormented than ever. Strange and unexplained noises disturbed his sleep at night, making it impossible for him to get any rest. “Several times he was awakened by a bell ringing, but on going to the front and back doors, he could find no one at either,” Mrs. H said. “Also several times he was awakened by what he thought was the telephone bell. One night he was roused by hearing the fire department dashing up the street and coming to a stop nearby. He hurried to the window and found the street quiet and deserted.”

In early January, Mrs. H and the children returned home, but no sooner were they back inside the house that the trouble started again. The children came down with colds—which normally would necessitate remaining indoors, especially in the winter. But
their symptoms seem to
lessen
when they went outside, only to recur when they came back into the house. Soon Mrs. H, like her husband, was awakened at night by strange noises—the sounds of doors slamming, pots and pans being thrown around the kitchen, and heavy footsteps climbing a staircase behind the wall in her bedroom. “There was no staircase behind the wall,” Mrs. H. wrote.

The live-in servants weren’t spared the house’s torments, either. During the day they had the feeling that someone—or something—was following right behind them, on the verge of reaching out and grabbing them as they went about their duties. At night they, too, were awakened by strange noises: tinkling and rattling china, heavy footsteps walking on the upstairs floors, and furniture being dragged across floors and shoved up against doors.

Then came the apparitions.

All that Ramchandra Katuwal wanted was a happy marriage. But his first wife, whom he married in 1985, left him for another man. So Katuwal, whose job is to carry heavy loads for people across the steep Nepalese terrain, found another woman and married her. “My second wife also ran away,” he said, “and the third one, too.” He tried again…and again…and again…and by 2001 he’d been married 24 times in 16 years, give or take a wife or two (Katuwal says he’s lost count). He believes that they all left him because he’s poor and his job pays very little, so he finally gave up and declared that he would never marry again. But he couldn’t even keep
that
vow, and soon after married a 23-year-old woman named Sharada—her first, his 25th. “A house is not a house without a wife!” said a proud Katuwal.

What is rice? It’s a grain, technically a member of the grass family, of which there are more than 100,000 varieties. It’s also
the
staple food for about half of the world’s population.

Carbon-dated evidence shows that a wild variety of rice was being cultivated on the banks of the Yangtze River in China as far back as 8,000—and possibly even 11,000—years ago. Around the year 5,000 BCE, as settled communities began to appear in Asia, rice was developed into a domestic crop. Scientists think that rice cultivation occurred simultaneously across various parts of central and southeast Asia, eventually extending to China, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Korea, Japan, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

By 800 BCE, rice was grown in the Middle East, by 700 CE in Spain, and by the 1400s in Italy and France. In 1694 rice was successfully cultivated in the New World in what is now South Carolina, a few decades after the Spaniards brought it to South America. Today it’s grown in 110 countries, on every continent except Antarctica, in a variety of climates and conditions.

Rice can be grown on dry uplands, on land fed only by rainfall, or in flood-prone fields of deep water, but 75 percent of the world’s rice is grown in
paddies
—level land covered with a shallow layer of water. In most of Asia, where farming is generally not mechanized, it’s a labor-intensive crop cultivated by hand. The seeds are germinated, and 30 to 50 days later the seedlings are transplanted—one at a time—into the paddies. Weeds are pulled by hand; fertilizer is spread by hand. After three more months, the rice is mature, and the fields are drained to let the ground dry out before the grain is harvested (by hand). The grasslike stalks are cut and then threshed to separate the grains from the stalks, and the grains are dried. Each dry grain is still covered with a hard husk that protects the kernel inside; these grains are called “paddy rice” or “rough
rice.” In the final step of the harvesting process, the paddy rice is milled to remove the husks.

•
Brown rice.
Any variety of rice can be “brown,” because brown rice is simply rice with only the outer husk removed. It’s more nutritious than white rice because it still has the bran layers that contain minerals and vitamins, especially the B-complex vitamins, but very little brown rice is eaten worldwide. Brown rice is perishable because of the high oil content in the bran and the germ. Maximum shelf life: only about six months.

•
White rice
is any rice that’s been milled to remove both the outer husk and the brown bran layer. (That’s what makes it white.) It cooks in half the time of brown rice.

•
Parboiled (or converted) rice
has been put through a process of soaking, steaming, and drying before it’s milled. When cooked, the kernels fluff up, but they’re firmer and less sticky and retain more vitamins than ordinary white rice. Parboiled rice can be overcooked without losing its shape or getting mushy, which makes it well suited for restaurant use.

•
Instant rice
is precooked and then dried so that it can be reconstituted in as little as three minutes. Unfortunately the texture suffers, compared to ordinary white rice (which takes 15 minutes to cook) or parboiled rice (which takes about 18 minutes).

• The world’s top five rice producers
and
consumers: 1) China;

2) India; 3) Indonesia; 4) Bangladesh; and 5) Vietnam.

• Irrigated rice can be grown on the same land year after year and can produce two or three harvests each year.

• Rice is cholesterol-free, nearly fat-free, high in fiber (especially brown rice), and a good source of B-vitamins. It’s a complex carbohydrate (for a slow, steady source of energy) and is relatively low in calories: 205 calories per cup of cooked white rice, compared to a large potato at 270 calories.

• Ever wonder if Rice Krispies are actually made of rice? Yes, they’re “crisped rice”—grains of white rice that have been steamed, and then toasted. It’s a process similar to popping popcorn.