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Contents

CoverTitle PageWelcome

Tory Johnson, The ShiftBeth Macy, Factory Man

Wallace J. Nichols, Blue MindMaximillian Potter, Shadows in the Vineyard

John J. Ratey, MD and Richard Manning, Go WildJosh Sundquist, We Should Hang Out Sometime

Matthew Paul Turner, Our Great Big American God

NewslettersCopyright

MONTH 1

The Conversation

This day is going to suck.Its Tuesday, December 20, 2011, a cold, dark winter morning. Having given up on a good nights

sleep, I make my way into the shower. Today, I am meeting with Barbara Fedida, senior vicepresident for talent and business at ABC News. She is the highest-ranking woman in the newsdivision, and Im a contributor on Good Morning America. Its my first time having a one-on-onewith Barbara, and I am fairly confident that there is only one item on the agenda: my weight. I thinkshe plans to tell me that I am too fat to be on TV and that I must slim down. I am panicked because Idont just like my job, I love it and want to keep it for a long time.

With a towel perched on my wet head, I take in the quiet of the early morning. This is my safehaven: a three-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, a storied New York neighborhood thathas been featured in movies ranging from Annie Hall to Spider-Man. Each room is filled with thepeople (and the dog) I love. My husband, Peter, is asleep in our bed. Friends say that hes a crossbetween George Clooney and Russell Crowe. I can see that, but he also has a wit and warmth that isall his own. He is my champion and best friend. If he were awake, hed be giving me the pep talk ofthe century. Hes always telling me how beautiful I am, and I am so grateful. But I know that no matterwhat he sees or says, this meeting is about my weight and Ive got to steel myself for what lies ahead.

My family has supported me in my ongoing battle of the bulge, but I am the only fighter on thisfield. Gaining a few pounds in his forties hasnt hurt Peters looks at all. Men are lucky that way.Down the hall, my fourteen-year-old twins, Jake and Emma, are sleeping. No weight problems there,and yet I worry that if I cant get my act together and overhaul my diet and my body, I will pass alongmy legacy of being overweight and the mental burden that comes with constantly struggling with yoursize.

I stare in my closet, frantically pulling pieces off the rack, wondering what outfit will give me thebest illusion of thinness for this meeting. My closet has two bars. The eye-level shelf is for the thingsthat fit no matter what size I am: shoes and bags in all the designer labels that I have worked so hardto afford. The other rack holds the black clothes that fitGap, Banana Republic, Talbots, EileenFisher. They dont make high-end designer stuff in my size.

I want a superhero costume, something bulletproof to protect me from the blow that I know iscoming. Instead, what I grab is uninspiring at best: black wool pants and a black silk shirt, and I put

them on with all the courage and hope that I can muster, which is not much right now. Im so tired ofthis, of never really being happy with the way I look, no matter where I shop or how much I spend onclothing. Im sick of the mind games I play, trying to convince myself that Im not really that fat, thatplenty of people weigh a lot more than I do, that America is in the midst of an obesity epidemic, that Iam in good company.

My office is just fourteen blocks from my home, and when I get there I find the first of severalemails from Barbaras assistant. With each one, the venue for our meeting becomes more depressing.First, its Le Pain Quotidien, the French bistro nearby that specializes in coffee and buttery croissantsfor breakfast. Then its Barbaras office at ABC News near Lincoln Center: she is so busy but reallywants to meet today. Finally, its the ABC cafeteria. Oh, great. Im to be humiliated over a Styrofoamcup of coffee as GMA colleagues stroll by and guess exactly why Barbara has summoned me.

I have survived not one but three anchor teams at GMA: Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer, Dianeand Robin Roberts, and now Robin and George Stephanopoulos. Not one of them has ever said aword to me about my weight. In fact, the bosses routinely praise my work, which enables me to thinkthat a job well done means theyre willing to overlook the obvious. But Im not naive: I have beenaround television news long enough to know that thinness rules. My fit colleagues underscore thattruth.

I arrive a few minutes early to scope out the scene. Barbara walks in on time wearing a fittedbrown sweater that complements her bouncy brown hair. If shes wearing any makeup, its very little.There is an effortless beauty to her, a trait she shares with many women in TV news.

We pass through the breakfast displaybreads and muffins, cold cereal, eggs, bacon.What would you like? Barbara asks.Clearly, shes testing me to see if Ill biteliterally.I opt for only a bottle of water. She grabs coffee. We find a table.I deliberate: Take off my coat or leave it on? It adds bulk but also hides bulges. I remove it but

keep it on my lap, thinking Ill fool her.I keep watching the clock. We spend fifty minutes catching up, talking about everything but the

matter at hand: our kids, New York City schools, husbands, and GMAs ratings surge. We talk abouthow some women lack assertiveness in their careers. Barbara is funny and smart, like a character in aNora Ephron movie. I marvel at her confidence. It could be just another great conversation with oneof the many savvy women Ive met over the years in network news, except I am aware of the fact thatBarbara is not here to bond with me. She is warm, but she is also extremely direct. I know I am aboutto get it. Then I do.

You dont look as good as you could, she says, smoothly changing the topic. I dont think yourclothing does you any favors.

In an instant, the blood rushes to my head. I feel slightly faint. My palms become sweaty and I startto twist my wedding ring, a nervous tic Ive never once experienced before now. My mouth is dry. Itry to remain composed even though Im freaking out.

Im wondering if anyone is watching us. It doesnt matter that no one I know is around. Im certainthat Barbara is starting out slowly and will soon move in for the kill: How could you expect to be onTV when youve let yourself go? Dont you have any self-respect? You knew this day would come,

right?But she says none of that. Instead, Barbara offers to connect me with Sandy, a stylist who helps

women make smart wardrobe choices.Im staring blankly at her on purpose. Im not going to make her job easy by giving her even a hint

that I know my weight is a problem, that although I can easily and happily talk to millions of viewerson TV, dressing for my segment is an ongoing challenge. Finally, I crack a smile and say as cheerfullyas I can, Sure, that sounds great. Id be happy to meet Sandy. Id love her help.

This is a lie. Unless Sandy has a magic wand that will whisk away the pounds, I doubt she can doany good.

But Barbara is not done. I always feel better when I work out. Exercise gives me so muchenergy, she presses, mildly, neither asking if I exercise nor ordering me to.

I could tell her the whole sordid story about how much I hate breaking a sweat and how I haventtaken a gym class since elementary school, about how in junior high a kid named Brian called me a fatcow when I corrected his answer and how the whole class, even the teacher, erupted in laughter. Butthat would go against rule number one: I do not discuss my weight with anyone except Peter. I wouldnever share the anxiety I have about my size with people I work with, let alone someone who has thepower to fire me.

Barbara continues talking as if she and I are old friends and as if everything she brings up, fromher favorite spin class to the flattering effect of V-neck sweaters, is just girlish chitchat. I stare at herBlackBerry, praying for it to ping and summon her back to her office upstairs. Please, God, give hera crisis. Please, God, let this be over. But there is no such relief. At exactly the one-hour mark,Barbara wraps up our meeting. Numbly, I thank her for caring enough to have this chat and tell herthat I look forward to meeting Sandy, which I do not. At all. We hug good-bye and wish each other ahappy holiday. It is five days before Christmas. After six happy years on TV, I feel like somebodyjust put a lump of coal in my stocking.

As I walk quickly down the escalator and out the door onto West Sixty-Sixth Street, I try to assessthe damage. I did not cry. Advantage Tory. She didnt put me on the spot, humiliate me, or embarrassme. Three points for Barbara. I marvel at how slick she was. She did not threaten me. Not once didshe call me fat, say I had to lose weight, or even hint that my job was in jeopardy. The words fat,overweight, or obese never came up. But I also take her words for the clear warning shot theyare meant to be: lose weight or else.

What the F am I going to do?

About the Author

Tory Johnson is wild about small business success, which can be traced tohaving been unexpectedly fired from a job she loved. The permanent scarfrom that pink slip led Tory to shift from employee to entrepreneur. Shesbuilt two multi-million-dollar businessesWomen for Hire and Spark &

Hustlewhile serving as a weekly Good Morning America contributor, NewYork Times bestselling author, contributing editor to SUCCESS magazine,

and a popular speaker.

You can visit her online at shiftwithtory.com.

Hachette BooksSeptember 2014

PROLOGUE

The Dusty Road to Dalian

John D. Bassett III was snaking his way through the sooty streets of rural northern China on a three-day fact-finding mission. It was 2002, and the third-generation Virginia furniture maker was gatheringammunition for an epic battle to keep the sawdust in his factory flying. He was close to the border ofNorth Korea, on the hunt for a dresser built in the style of a nineteenth-century French monarch. If hecould find the man whod made that damn Louis Philippe, he might just save his business.

Back at Vaughan-Bassett, his factory in Galax, line workers had already deconstructed the dresserpiece by piece and proved that the one hundred dollars the Chinese were wholesaling it for was farless than the cost of the materialsa violation of World Trade Organization laws. The sticker on theback read Dalian, China, and now here he was, some eight thousand miles away from his Blue RidgeMountains, trying to pinpoint the source of the cheap chest of drawers.

It was November and snowy. The car creaked with every icy pothole it hit.Word had already reached him through a friendly translator a few months earlier: There was a

factory owner in the hinterlands, a hundred miles outside of Dalian, whod been bragging that he wasgoing to bring the Bassett furniture family down.

If they were going to war, Bassett told his son Wyatt, their family needed to heed Napoleonsadvice: Know your enemy.

Today, for once in his life, JBIII sat silent. The car lurched along northward, farther into theremote province of Liaoning.

The first time John Bassett visited an Asian factory was in 1984, and it was only after dinner and waytoo many drinks that an elderly factory owner in Taiwan revealed his real opinion of Americanbusiness leaders. The man was so candid that at first, his own interpreter clammed up, refusing totranslate his words.

The Taiwanese businessman had negotiated plenty of deals with Europeans and South Americans,but hed never met people quite like the Americans.

What do you mean? JBIII pressed.I have figured you guys out, the translator finally relayed.Tell me.If the price is right, you will do anything. We have never seen people before who are this greedy

or this naive.The Americans were not only knocking one another over in a stampede to import the cheapest

furniture they could but they were also ignoring the fact that they were jeopardizing their own

factories back home by teaching their Asian competitors every nuance of the American furniture-making trade.

When we get on top, the man said, dont expect us to be dumb enough to do for you what youvebeen dumb enough to do for us.

It would take many more trips to Asia before it became clear to JBIII what the Taiwanese furnituremaker meant. During that time, two events helped ensure China would indeed get on top: Chinasadmission into the WTO, and the great exodus of 160 million rural Chinese to the citiesthe largestmigration in human history.

It would take the hundred-dollar dresser and getting eyeball-to-eyeball with the man behind itbefore JBIII fully understood the battle he was about to enter. The rules of war had changeddrasticallyand cowboy capitalism seemed to be the only rule of international trade.

It was cold inside the factory where Bassett finally met with businessman and Communist Partyofficial He YunFeng in northern China in November 2002. The workers breath froze in little puffs ofvapor. The Chinese furniture magnate looked him in the damn eye, Bassett recalled. Then he saidsomething that raised the hair on the back of the Virginians neck.

He YunFeng would be happy to provide Bassett with the dressers at a fraction of what they cost tomake, a feat Bassett knew would not be possible without Chinese government subsidies. All Bassetthad to do in return, He YunFeng said, was close his own factories.

Close his factories? John Bassett pictured the whole lot of his hard-charging forebears turning enmasse in their graves. He thought of his 1,730 workersplainspoken mountain types, many of whomhad followed their parents and grandparents into the factoriesstanding in unemployment linesinstead of assembly lines. He thought of the smokestacks that for a century had borne his familysname and of the legacy he wanted to leave his kids.

Back at home, he felt alone in the industry, with only his two sons and his scrappy little factories.He was the last American furniture maker willing to raise hell about what was happening. If he couldprove the Chinese were selling the product below the cost of the materials, if he could prove theirfactories were buoyed by Communist government subsidies in an illegal price dump designed to driveAmerican companies out of business, then his company just might survive. If he could convince amajority of his industry to join him in persuading the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S.International Trade Commission of the truth, maybe the entire industry could be saved.

But those were big ifs, with potentially huge pitfalls. Surely he would be scorned by both hislongtime customers and his competitors. Hed be ridiculed by the handful of families that had ruledthe fifty-billion-dollar industry, as well as some members of his own family, who were too busyclosing down factoriesand cashing their checksto protect their furniture-making legacy.

Hed be ostracized for trying to stop the flood of furniture jobs from America, for striking backagainst the one-percenters who were about to move damn near all their plants to Asia and tear theheart out of the Blue Ridge region he loved.

From the taverns of Virginia to the halls of power in Washington, DC; from the factory floor to theback roads of Liaoning, China, where he would uncover a great lie at the heart of globalization, JohnBassett was going to war.

1The Tipoff

What were all them little people doing at work today?BASSETT FURNITURE LINE WORKER ON THE PRESENCE OF TAIWANESE FACTORY MANAGERS

Once in a reporters career, if one is very lucky, a person like John D. Bassett III comes along.JBIII is inspirational. Hes brash. Hes a sawdust-covered good old boy from rural Virginia, a larger-than-life rule breaker who for more than a decade has stood almost single handedly against theoutflow of furniture jobs from America.

Hes an asshole! more than one of his competitors barked when they heard I was writing a bookabout globalization with JBIII as a main character. Over the course of researching this book, over thecourse of hearing his many lectures and listening to him evade my questions by telling me the samestories over and over, there were times that I agreed.

I first heard about him in Rocky Mount, Virginia, about half an hour from my home in Roanoke,while eating breakfast with my neighbor and good friend Joel Shepherd. Joel owns Virginia FurnitureMarket, a Rocky Mount retail establishment that began thriving at the same time the import boom hit.Right now as I type, Im sitting in a paisley recliner that my husband and I still fight over because itsthe comfiest seat in our 1926 American foursquare. I remember Joel showing it to me in his store,rocking it back and forth. Despite what I might have heard about made-in-China furniture, he told me,a swarm of high-school wrestlers could pin one another on this chair and it would not fall apart. Withthe friendly-neighbor discount, I bought it for a hundred and sixty bucks.

I had invited Joel to breakfast to pick his brain. I was working on a Roanoke Times series on theimpact of globalization on southwest Virginias company towns, articles inspired by the work offreelance photographer Jared Soares, whod been making the hourlong trek from Roanoke toMartinsville three times a week for more than a year. His photos were gritty and moving: churchservices and tattoo artists; a textile-plant conveyor belt converted for use in a food bank; a disabledminister named Leonard whiling away the time in his kitchen in the middle of the afternoon. Thepeople of Martinsville and Henry County, Virginia, were refreshingly open about what had happenedto them, Jared told me, and hed long wondered why our newspaper didnt do more to document theeffects of globalization in our mountainous corner of the world.

Not that many other media outlets had done any better. According to a 2009 Pew Research Centersurvey, the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression was largely being covered from thetop down, primarily from the perspective of big business and the Obama administration. Thepercentage of economy stories that featured ordinary people and displaced workers? Just 2 percent. Ifthe people of Henry County wanted their stories to be heard, Jared and I were going to have to help.

It would be up to writers and photographers like us to paint the long-view picture of what hadhappened when, one after another, the textile and then the furniture factories closed and set up shopinstead in Mexico, China, and Vietnam, where workers were paid a fraction of what the Americanlaborers were earning. In the Henry County region alone, some twenty thousand people had lost theirjobs.

In the early 1960s, Martinsville was Virginias manufacturing powerhouse, known for being hometo more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country. But by 2009, one-fifth of the townslabor force was unemployed, and many of the millionaires had fled for cheerier landscapes. HenryCounty was now the capital of long-term unemployment, with Virginias highest rate for nine of thepast eleven years.

A week before my breakfast with Joel, an empty Bassett Furniture plant had burned to the ground.Police arrested Silas Crane, a thirty-four-year-old Henry County man whod been trying to salvagethe factorys copper electrical casings to sell on the black market but instead had sparked anelectrical fire. His burns were visible in his police mug shot. Id heard many similar stories, as someof the desperate moved from the unemployment rolls to the crime rosters. A stranger approached onewoman I know outside a CVS pharmacy and offered her a hundred dollars if shed sign for thepurchase of the cold medicine pseudoephedrinethe main ingredient used to make methamphetamine.

Most people, though, were scraping by in legal waysbabysitting, growing their own food,working part-time at Walmart. The director of an area food bank told me that he could divine whatpeople used to do for work by their disfigurements: The women whod been bent over sewingmachines all day making sweatshirts had humps on their backs. The men who culled lumber weremissing fingers. Were the last, last, last resort, to come stand in line and get a box of old food, hesaid.

But, Joel explained, there was this feisty old man in Galax, a small town about seventy miles awayfrom Rocky Mount, whod managed to buck the trend. He was from the family that had once run thelargest furniture-making operation in the world, Bassett Furniture Industries. His name was John D.Bassett III, and, yes, he was from that Bassett familythe name inscribed on the back of so manyAmerican headboards and dressers; the name often stamped on the bedroom suite behind door numberthree on Lets Make a Deal . The story of how he fought against the tides of globalization was full oflegal cunning, political intrigue, and, judging from what Joel told me about Bassetts Asiancompetitors, some serious cowboy grit.

As Joel explained over a plate of sausage biscuits and gravy that morning, imitating the patriarchsbooming voice and cringe-inducing chutzpah: The fucking Chi-Comms were not going to tell himhow to make furniture!

But there was another, even juicier element to the story. John Bassett was no longer living in theeponymous company town of Bassett, Virginia. Hed been booted out of his familys business by adomineering relative. Three decades later, the family squabble turned corporate coup still had localtongues wagging with talk of a living-room fight scene (some say it was the front porch), a rescue-squad call, and, my favorite detail: John Bassett tipping the ambulance driver a hundred bucks not totell anybody that hed had his battered brother-in-law hauled away, like something out of Dynasty.

But was any of it true? And what did the family infighting have to do with John Bassett giving themiddle finger to the lure of easy money overseas?

Plenty, it would turn out. But peeling that onion would take me more than a year. It would have me

burning up U.S. Route 58, the curvy mountain road that meanders through the former company townsjust north of the Virginia North Carolina line, where it hits you why the people of Henry County havecome to call what happened the 58 virus.

It would send me across the Blue Ridge to John Bassetts billowing smokestacks in Galax; to theInternational Home Furnishings Market in High Point, North Carolina, to meet a crop of young MBAsand marketing execs in their skinny suits and aggressive glasses; and, on the advice of laid-off StanleyFurniture worker Wanda Perdue, to Surabaya, Indonesia, where much of the worlds woodenbedroom furniture is now made.

I first met Wanda in early 2012 outside a community college computer lab, where she came forregular tutoring in math. She was fifty-eight years old, cobbling together a living by working part-timeat Walmart and hoping to land a full-time position as soon as she got her associates degree in officeadministration. Her one splurge was buying Lucks pinto beans, the only non-store-brand food sheallowed herself.

The farthest shed been from home was a trip to Myrtle Beach shed taken three years before. Itwas her first time seeing the oceanat the age of fifty-five.

I want you to see what they do in Indonesia and explain to me why we cant do that here nomore, she said.

Fair enough, I thought.

Joel and I were sitting in a landscape of rusted silos and vacant factories. Weeds sprouted throughcracks in empty parking lots. Across the street from us was the shell of Lane Furniture, anotherdefunct furniture maker that, like Stanley, had family connections to Bassett. In the 1920s, EdwardLane pushed the notion that every teenage girl in America needed to store her trousseau in a hopechest made of protective cedarwood, a safe place to keep her hopes and household accessories untilshe landed the man of her dreams. By the time soldiers returned from World War II, the cedar chestwas ubiquitous, a must-have in the starter kit for a suburban home. Its the Real Love-Gift, SayAmericas Most Romantic Sweethearts, proclaimed a 1948 ad featuring Audie Murphy, thedecorated combat soldier and movie star.

Joel pointed to the silk mills where his aunts had once worked, now closed, every one of them: thevictims of what economists call creative destruction. The lost jobs and vanishing industries thatresulted from the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and Chinasjoining the World Trade Organization in 2001 were necessary outcomes, the theory goes. Over time,society becomes richer and more productive, and citizens across the globe benefit from higher livingstandards.

Thomas L. Friedman devotes nearly all 639 pages of The World Is Flat to the benefits ofglobalization, noting that it saved American consumers roughly $600 billion, extended more capital tobusinesses to invest in new innovations, and helped the Federal Reserve hold interest rates down,which in turn gave Americans a chance to buy or refinance homes.

Or as Joel put it, reminding me of my hundred-and-sixty-dollar recliner: Weve all enjoyed thebenefits of falling prices. A person can get far more value for [her] furniture dollar now than shecould thirty years ago. Not to mention that globalization has improved the standard of living amongfactory workers in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, people who used to toil in rice paddies and farm

fields.The car put the carriage makers out of work, just like the Internet hurt mail carriers and many of

my own newspaper colleaguesone of the reasons my newspaper shrank its core coverage area andno longer has a Henry County beat.

But as the daughter of a displaced factory worker, I wondered about the dinghies being sunk byglobalizations rising tide. I questioned why the unemployment stories rarely quoted the displacedworkers or mentioned the fact that many folks in the corporate offices had simply switched jobs fromfactory bosses to global-sourcing managers.They were still there, still fabulously employed, somehauling in seven-figure salaries. When the big guys werent off traveling the globe, their cars wereamong the few left in the company parking lots.

In small towns across America, the front-page stories about escalating drug crime and lower testscores seemed somehow linked to the page 3 briefs on deaths in faraway garment factories. But thatconnection was hard to defineand even harder to report ongiven the complex Spirograph ofinterlooping supply chains, impotent regulators, and press-avoiding CEOs.

No one, it seemed, was minding the back room of this new global store.My first memory: Riding with an older sister to pick up my mom from work at Grimes, the

aircraft-lighting factory in Urbana, Ohio. Mom worked the graveyard shift when the economy wasgood. When it wasnt, she waitressedbadly, she saidand watched other peoples kids. AtGrimes, she sat with other women at long tables in a cavernous, dimly lit rooms, tucked into a row ofQuonset huts. They soldered strobe lights for airplanes. When she got home, she used to pay me aquarter to rub her throbbing neck.

I remember pointing to airplanes passing by overhead and saying to my friends, See that light?My mom made that. So what if the lights Mom soldered were fixed to military transport planes, notthose passenger jets I pointed out. My moms handiwork was stellar. You could see it up there, rightnear the stars.

The Vietnam War ended, and it would be a long economic slog in Urbana before the aircraftlighting workers benefited from a thirteen-million-dollar contract to make searchlights for BlackHawk helicopters, in 2012, some fifteen years after the heirs of inventor Warren Old Man Grimescashed out. Honeywell International now runs Urbanas aerospace lighting operations in modernfacilities staffed by about half the number of assembly workers it once employed. The company thatused to be the towns sugar daddy now employs about 650, down from 1,300 at its peak, with much ofthe production accomplished via circuit cards and high-tech machinery rather then hand labor. One ofmy high-school buddies helps manage the outsourced engineersvia video teleconferencinginBangalore, India, where theyre paid one quarter of what their American counterparts earn.

Throughout my childhood, my dad nursed his psychological wounds from World War II in VFWand American Legion halls. He was a housepainter by trade, but in my shame, I saw him as theserially unemployed town drunk. He didnt attend my band concerts or my softball games or even myhigh-school graduationlapses that seem almost criminal to me now that I have kids. But thats theway it was, and since I didnt know any different, it didnt keep me awake at night. The best thing heprovided was access to a doting grandmother: his mom, who lived next door, taught me to read whenI was four, and kept a roof over our heads (she owned our house).

We werent victims of globalization. But, like the blue-collar folks I interviewed in Bassett andGalax who followed their parents and grandparents to the assembly lines, we didnt have a lot ofoptions beyond high school. I managed to get to college thanks to the nudging of wonderful teachersand friends (and friends parents), federally funded Pell Grants, work-study jobs, and scholarships.My older brother edged his way into the middle class through grit and brains. A high-school dropoutwith moderate epilepsy, he progressed through a series of car-safety jobs until he landed at a majorautomotive research-and-development center in Raymond, Ohio, where he designs crash-test fixtures.By the time I graduated from college and got my first newspaper job, he was making more than twicemy salary.

A few years back, a group of researchers at the University of Virginia invited him to share thedetails of his work. My brother, with his GED and a few community college courses under his belt,was summoned to Mr. Jeffersons University to tell those PhDs what hed put together by way ofexperience and elbow grease. Not long ago his company gave him a bonus for inventing a newprocess that saved it thousands of dollars. Hes been lucky to get to use his innate intelligence despitehis lack of a formal degree. Its no big deal, he tells me when I brag about his ability to make or fixnot just cars but anything. Mostly its just common sense.

The moment I heard there was a company owner who had actually taken on big business and thePeoples Republic of China, I knew I had to find out who John Bassett was. He had not only kept hissmall factory going but somehow managed to turn it into the largest wooden-bedroom-furniturefactory in America.

I got on the highway to Galax to meet the Southern patriarch, then seventy-four, at his Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company. Id already mapped out his insanely twisted family tree at the VirginiaRoom of the Roanoke City Library, already called around to get the real scoop about his long-simmering family feud. Id already interviewed several Henry County textile and furniture workerswho were laid off not long after Taiwanese managers showed up to take pictures of the Virginiaassembly lines so they could copy them back home.

One woman described her mom hobbling home from work, her knees shot from decades ofstanding on concrete floors, and wondering aloud, What were all them little people doing at worktoday?

I already knew that JBIII (as I began to refer to him) was grooming his middle-aged sons, Wyattand Doug, to take over. Both had returned home after business school to help save the familycompany. Id heard, too, that hed cut their salaries when the recession hit rather than lay off moreline workers, and he personally stopped pulling a paycheck during the leanest years.

One rainy afternoon, a furniture-store owner in nearby Collinsville described for me howglobalization had taken a 70 percent bite out of his business, a store that used to be frequented bypeople who worked in the Henry County textile and furniture plants. Delano Thomassons father hadworked down the road from Bassett at Stanley Furniture, in Stanleytown, and his mother downanother road at Fieldcrest, a sprawling textile plant started by Chicago-based Marshall Fieldsandnow the site of a weekly community food bank. (In the ladies room of the Fieldale Caf, a meat-and-three diner frequented by retirees, a framed photograph proudly displays what put this town on themap: a stack of Fieldcrest towels.)

Bassett Furniture was no longer made in Bassett, Delano explained in his Southern drawl as rainplinked into metal buckets set down to protect the sofas and bedroom suites (pronounced suits inSouthern furniture lingo). With his determination, John Bassett probably would have kept some ofBassett Furniture factories going if he couldve kept the company.

I should have made up a shorthand for that statement the first time I heard it. Ive interviewedscores of people since then whove said essentially the same thing.

Delano knew all about JBIIIs covert mission to Dalian, China, and he had his own version of theevil-brother-in-law yarnthe story of the man whod elbowed JBIII out of the CEO job at BassettFurniture, the company John Bassett III had been reared to run. But would any of the Bassetts open upto me about those things? Would JBIII reveal what it felt like to be the family black sheep with adresser-size chip on his shoulder? Would he tell me the real story of how hed fought the Chinese? Ifhe wouldnt, would the people who grew up under the thumb of the family that ran the company townbe bold enough to spill the beans?

You dont even realize what kind of spiderweb youve got going, said Bassett Furnitureslongtime corporate pilot, a man who worked for years under John Bassetts brother-in-law andnemesis, Bob Spilman. War and Peace will seem like a ten-cent novel compared to your spiderweb.But lucky for you, the scorpion is already dead, he added, referring to Spilman, the Bassett CEOwho could be equally brilliant and biting.

JBIII comes from an imposing family of multimillionaires whose ancestors signed the MagnaCarta and who maintain a persistent but unspoken code that, no matter what, one should always keepthe family secrets where they belong: in the family closet. What secrets would he tell me, the daughterof a former factory worker?

I relate better to people like Octavia Witcher, a fifty-five-year-old displaced Stanley Furnitureworker who gave me her elderly mothers phone number as a contact, because her own phone wasabout to be turned off. And to people like divorced former Tultex worker Mary Redd, who describedtrying to raise her fourteen-year-old daughter alone, working the only job she could findas a thirty-hour-a-week receptionist, with no benefits. When she told me that, I recalled receiving full financialaid for college because my mom, widowed by that time, made just eight thousand dollars a year test-driving cars for a Honda subcontractor.

When Mary recounted running into the former Tultex CEO at a party she was helping cater forMartinsvilles elite, what she said to him literally made me gasp: If Tultex were to open back uptoday and the only way I could get there would be to crawl on my belly like a snake, I would do it.

John Bassett grew up with chauffeurs, vacation homes, and prep schools. I was the longshot and theunderdog, but fortunately for me, John Bassett was too, whether he was ready to admit it to a reporteror not.

With any luck at all, he would help me explain this circuitous piece of American history, from itshardwood forests to its executive boardrooms; from handsaws and planing tools to smartphones andSkype; from the oak logs that sailed from the port of Norfolk, Virginia, to Asia and then returned,months later, in the form of dressers and beds.

About the Author

Beth Macy writes about outsiders and underdogs. Her work has appeared innational magazines and the Roanoke Times, where her reporting has wonmore than a dozen national awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for

Journalism at Harvard. She lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

You can visit her online at intrepidpapergirl.com.To learn more, visit littlebrown.com/factoryman.html.

Little, Brown and CompanyJuly 2014

1Why Do We Love Water So Much?

Water is lifes matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.ALBERT SZENT-GYRGYI, M. D.,

DISCOVERER OF VITAMIN C

Im standing on a pier at the Outer Banks of North Carolina, fifty feet above the Atlantic. To the leftand right, forward, back, and below, all I can see is ocean. Im wearing a light blue hat that looks likea bejeweled swim cap, and a heavy black cable snakes down my back like a ponytail. Even though Ilook like an extra from an Esther Williams movie who wandered into Woody Allens Sleeper bymistake, in truth Im a human lab rat, here to measure my brains response to the ocean.

The cap is the nerve center of a mobile electroencephalogram (EEG) unit, invented by Dr. StephenSands, biomedical science expert and chief science officer of Sands Research. Steves a big, burly,balding guy of the sort that could be mistaken for the local high school science teacher whos also thefootball coach, or perhaps the captain of one of the deep-sea fishing boats that call the Outer Bankshome. An El Paso (a city on the San Antonio River) resident by way of Long Beach, California, andHouston, Texas, Steve spent years in academia as a professor, using brain imaging to researchAlzheimers disease. In 1998 he established Neuroscan, which became the largest supplier of EEGequipment and software for use in neurological research. In 2008 Steve founded Sands Research, acompany that does neuromarketing, a new field using behavioral and neurophysiological data to trackthe brains response to advertising. Peoples responses to any kind of stimulus, includingadvertising, include conscious activitythings we can verbalizeand subconscious activity, heonce wrote. But the subconscious responses cant be tracked through traditional market researchmethods. When groups of neurons are activated in the brain by any kind of stimulusa picture, asound, a smell, touch, taste, pain, pleasure, or emotiona small electrical charge is generated, whichindicates that neurological functions such as memory, attention, language processing, and emotion aretaking place in the cortex. By scrutinizing where those electrical charges occur in the brain, Stevessixty-eight-channel, full-spectrum EEG machine can measure everything from overall engagement tocognition, attention, the level of visual or auditory stimulation, whether the subjects motor skills areinvolved, and how well the recognition and memory circuits are being stimulated. When youcombine EEG scans with eye-movement tracking, you get unique, entirely nonverbal data on howsomeone is processing the media or the real-world environment, moment by moment, Steve says.

Given current perplexity about the value of promotional efforts, Steves data are increasinglysought after. Sands Research does advertising impact studies for some of the largest corporations in

the world; its perhaps best known for an Annual Super Bowl Ad Neuro Ranking, which evaluatesviewers neurological responses to those $3.8-million-per-thirty-second spots. (Among those thatSteves team measured were the well known ads that featured people sitting on a beach, backs to thecamera as they gazed at white sand and blue water, Corona beers on the table between them, and onlythe lapping of the sea as a soundtrack. That campaign made the brewer famous, forever associatedwith tropical ocean leisure.)

In the months prior to my trip to the Outer Banks, Id been contacted by Sands Researchs directorof business development, Brett Fitzgerald. Bretts an outside kind of guy with a history of workingwith bears in Montana. Hed heard about my work combining water science with neuroscience andcontacted me to see if we could do some sort of project together. Before I knew it, he was on a planeto California, and we met along the coast north of my home to talk brain on ocean. Not long after, Iwas on a plane heading to North Carolina.

Today Brett has fitted me with a version of the Sands Research EEG scanning apparatus that candetect human brain activity with the same level of precision as an fMRI (functional magneticresonance imaging). The data from the electrodes in this ornamented swim cap are sampled 256 timesper second and, when amplified for analysis, will allow neuro-scientists to see in real time whichareas of the brain are being stimulated. Typically such data are used to track shoppers responses instores like Walmart as they stop to look at new products on a shelf. In this case, however, the sixty-eight electrodes plugged into the cap on my head are for measuring my every neurological up anddown as I plunge into the ocean. Its the first time equipment like this has been considered for use at(or in) the water, and Im a little anxious about both the current incompatibility (no pun intended)between the technology and the ocean, but also about what we might learn. So is Brettthe cap andaccompanying scanning device arent cheap. In the future such a kit will be made waterproof and usedunderwater, or while someone is surfing. But for today, were just hoping that neither the equipmentnor I will be the worse for wear after our testing and scheming at the salt-sprayed pier.

Its only recently that technology has enabled us to delve into the depths of the human brain andinto the depths of the ocean. With those advancements our ability to study and understand the humanmind has expanded to include a stream of new ideas about perception, emotions, empathy, creativity,health and healing, and our relationship with water. Several years ago I came up with a name for thishuman water connection: Blue Mind, a mildly meditative state characterized by calm, peacefulness,unity, and a sense of general happiness and satisfaction with life in the moment. It is inspired by waterand elements associated with water, from the color blue to the words we use to describe thesensations associated with immersion. It takes advantage of neurological connections formed overmillennia, many such brain patterns and preferences being discovered only now, thanks to innovativescientists and cutting-edge technology.

In recent years, the notion of mindfulness has edged closer and closer to the mainstream. Whatwas once thought of as a fringe quest for Eastern vacancy has now been recognized as havingwidespread benefits. Today the search for the sort of focus and awareness that characterizes BlueMind extends from the classroom to the boardroom to the battlefield, from the doctors office to theconcert hall to the worlds shorelines. The stress produced in our overwhelmed lives makes thatsearch more urgent.

Waters amazing influence does not mean that it displaces other concerted efforts to reach amindful state; rather, it adds to, enhances, and expands. Yet this book is not a field guide to

meditation, nor a detailed examination of other means toward a more mindful existence. To use awater-based metaphor, it offers you a compass, a craft, some sails, and a wind chart. In an age whenwere anchored by stress, technology, exile from the natural world, professional suffocation, personalanxiety, and hospital bills, and at a loss for true privacy, casting off is wonderful. Indeed, JohnJerome wrote in his book Blue Rooms that the thing about the ritual morning plunge, the entry intowater that provides the small existential moment, is its total privacy. Swimming is between me andthe water, nothing else. The moment the water encloses me, I am, gratefully, alone. Open your BlueMind and the ports of call will become visible.

To properly navigate these depths, over the past several years Ive brought together an eclecticgroup of scientists, psychologists, researchers, educators, athletes, explorers, businesspeople, andartists to consider a fundamental question: what happens when our most complex organthe brainmeets the planets largest featurewater?

As a marine biologist as familiar with the water as I am with land, I believe that oceans, lakes,rivers, pools, even fountains can irresistibly affect our minds. Reflexively we know this: theres agood reason why Corona chose a beach and not, say, a stockyard. And there are logical explanationsfor our tendency to go to the waters edge for some of the most significant moments of our lives. Butwhy?

I look out from the pier at the vast Atlantic and imagine all the ways that the sight, sound, andsmell of the water are influencing my brain. I take a moment to notice the feelings that are arising. Forsome, I know, the ocean creates fear and stress; but for me it produces awe and a profound,immersive, and invigorating peace. I take a deep breath and imagine the leap, cables trailing behindme as I plunge into the waves surging around the pier. The EEG readings would reflect both my fearand exhilaration as I hit the water feet first. I imagine Dr. Sands peering at a monitor as data comestreaming in.

Water fills the light, the sound, the airand my mind.

Our (Evolving) Relationship to Water

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.W. H. AUDEN

Theres something about water that draws and fascinates us. No wonder: its the most omnipresentsubstance on Earth and, along with air, the primary ingredient for supporting life as we know it. Forstarters, ocean plankton provides more than half of our planets oxygen. There are approximately332.5 million cubic miles of water on Earth96 percent of it saline. (A cubic mile of water containsmore than 1.1 trillion gallons.) Water covers more than 70 percent of Earths surface; 95 percent ofthose waters have yet to be explored. From one million miles away our planet resembles a small bluemarble; from one hundred million miles its a tiny, pale blue dot. How inappropriate to call thisplanet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean, author Arthur C. Clarke once astutely commented.

That simple blue marble metaphor is a powerful reminder that ours is an aqueous planet. Wateris the sine qua non of life and seems to be all over the universe and so its reasonable for NASA to

use a follow the water strategy as a first cut or shorthand in our quest to locate other life in theuniverse, Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View,California, told me. While it may not be the only solvent for life, it certainly makes a great one sinceit is abundant, its liquid over a broad temperature range, it floats when solid, allowing for ice-covered lakes and moons, and its what we use here on Earth.

Whether searching the universe or roaming here at home humans have always sought to be by ornear water. Its estimated that 80 percent of the worlds population lives within sixty miles of thecoastline of an ocean, lake, or river. Over half a billion people owe their livelihoods directly towater, and two-thirds of the global economy is derived from activities that involve water in someform. Approximately a billion people worldwide rely primarily on water-based sources for protein.(Its very possible that increased consumption of omega-3 oils from eating fish and shellfish played acrucial role in the evolution of the human brain. And, as well discuss later in the book, the seafoodmarket is now global in a manner that could never have been imagined even a few decades ago.) Weuse water for drinking, cleansing, working, recreating, and traveling. According to the U.S.Geological Survey, each person in the United States uses eighty to one hundred gallons of water everyday for what we consider our basic needs. In 2010 the General Assembly of the United Nationsdeclared, Safe and clean drinking water is a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life.

Our innate relationship to water goes far deeper than economics, food, or proximity, however. Ourancient ancestors came out of the water and evolved from swimming to crawling to walking. Humanfetuses still have gill-slit structures in their early stages of development, and we spend our firstnine months of life immersed in the watery environment of our mothers womb. When were born,our bodies are approximately 78 percent water. As we age, that number drops to below 60 percentbut the brain continues to be made of 80 percent water. The human body as a whole is almost thesame density as water, which allows us to float. In its mineral composition, the water in our cells iscomparable to that found in the sea. Science writer Loren Eiseley once described human beings as away that water has of going about, beyond the reach of rivers.1

We are inspired by waterhearing it, smelling it in the air, playing in it, walking next to it,painting it, surfing, swimming or fishing in it, writing about it, photographing it, and creating lastingmemories along its edge. Indeed, throughout history, you see our deep connection to water describedin art, literature, and poetry. In the water I am beautiful, admitted Kurt Vonnegut. 2 Water can giveus energy, whether its hydraulic, hydration, the tonic effect of cold water splashed on the face, or themental refreshment that comes from the gentle, rhythmic sensation of hearing waves lapping a shore.Immersion in warm water has been used for millennia to restore the body as well as the mind. Waterdrives many of our decisionsfrom the seafood we eat, to our most romantic moments, and fromwhere we live, to the sports we enjoy, and the ways we vacation and relax. Water is something thathumanity has cherished since the beginning of history, and it means something different to everyone,writes archeologist Brian Fagan. We know instinctively that being by water makes us healthier,happier, reduces stress, and brings us peace.

In 1984 Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard University biologist, naturalist, and entomologist, coinedthe term biophilia to describe his hypothesis that humans have ingrained in our genes aninstinctive bond with nature and the living organisms we share our planet with. He theorized thatbecause we have spent most of our evolutionary historythree million years and 100,000 generationsor morein nature (before we started forming communities or building cities), we have an innate

love of natural settings. Like a child depends upon its mother, humans have always depended uponnature for our survival. And just as we intuitively love our mothers, we are linked to naturephysically, cognitively, and emotionally.

You didnt come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are nota stranger here.

ALAN WATTS

This preference for our mother nature has a profound aesthetic impact. The late Denis Dutton, aphilosopher who focused on the intersection of art and evolution, believed that what we considerbeautiful is a result of our ingrained linkage to the kind of natural landscape that ensured oursurvival as a species. During a 2010 TED talk, A Darwinian Theory of Beauty, Dutton describedfindings based on both evolutionary psychology and a 1997 survey of contemporary preference in art.When people were asked to describe a beautiful landscape, he observed, the elements wereuniversally the same: open spaces, covered with low grass, interspersed with trees. And if you addwater to the sceneeither directly in view, or as a distant bluish cast that the eye takes as anindication of waterthe desirability of that landscape skyrockets. Dutton theorized that thisuniversal landscape contains all the elements needed for human survival: grasses and trees for food(and to attract edible animal life); the ability to see approaching danger (human or animal) before itarrives; trees to climb if you need to escape predators; and the presence of an accessible source ofwater nearby. In 2010 researchers at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom asked forty adults torate over one hundred pictures of different natural and urban environments. Respondents gave higherratings for positive mood, preference, and perceived restorativeness to any picture containing water,whether it was in a natural landscape or an urban setting, as opposed to those photos without water.

Marcus Eriksen, a science educator who once sailed a raft made entirely of plastic bottles fromthe U.S. Pacific coast to Hawaii, expanded upon Duttons hypothesis to include seacoasts, lakeshores,or riverbanks. In the same way the savannah allowed us to see danger a long way off, he theorized,coastal dwellers could see predators or enemies as they came across the water. Better, land-basedpredators rarely came from the water, and most marine-based predators couldnt emerge from thewater or survive on land. Even better than that: the number of food and material resources providedin or near the water often trumped what could be found on land. The supply of plant-based and animalfood sources may vanish in the winter, Eriksen observed, but our ancestors could fish or harvestshellfish year-round. And because the nature of water is to move and flow, instead of having to travelmiles to forage, our ancestors could walk along a shore or riverbank and see what water had broughtto them or what came to the waters edge.

While humans were developing an evolutionary preference for a certain type of water-containinglandscape, the human brain was also being shaped by environmental demands. Indeed, according tomolecular biologist John Medina, the human brain evolved to solve problems related to surviving inan unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion. Imagine that you are one ofour distant Homo sapiens ancestors, living in that ideal savannah landscape more than 200,000 yearsago. Even if you and your family have inhabited this particular spot for a while, you still must be alertfor any significant threats or potential sources of food. Every day brings new conditionsweather,

animals, fruits, and other edible plants. Use up some sources of food and you have to look for more,which means constant exploration of your environment to learn more about where you are and whatother sources of food and water are available for you and your family. Perhaps you encounter newplants or animals, some of which are ediblesome not. You learn from your mistakes what to gatherand what to avoid. And while you and your children learn, your brains are being shaped and changedby multiple forces: your individual experiences, your social and cultural interactions, and yourphysical environment. Should you survive and reproduce, some of that rewiring will be passed on toyour descendants in the form of a more complex brain. Additional information for survival will besocially encoded in vivid stories and songs.

A nervous system is the part of an animal that coordinates activity by transmitting signals aboutwhats happening both inside and outside the body. Its made up of special types of cells calledneurons, and ranges in size and complexity from just a few hundred nerve cells in the simplest worms,to some 20,000 neurons in the California sea hare, Aplysia californica (a very cool mollusk whoselarge, sometimes gigantic, neurons have made it the darling of neurobiologists for the past fifty years),to as many as 100 billion in humans. Well be looking in detail at the human brain and DNA in laterchapters, but theres an important point to be made before we leave our ancestors on the distantsavannah: just as the human brain changed and evolved over the millennia, our individual brainchanges and evolves from the day we are born until we die. Critical studies starting in the 1970s and1980s demonstrated that our brains are in a state of constant evolutionneurons growing, connecting,and then dying off. Both the brains physical structure and its functional organization are plastic,changing throughout our lives depending on need, attention, sensory input, reinforcement, emotion,and many other factors. The brains neuroplasticity (its ability to continually create new neuralnetworks, reshape existing ones, and eliminate networks that are no longer used due to changes inbehavior, environment, and neural processes) is what allows us to learn, form memories throughoutour lifetimes, recover function after a stroke or loss of sight or hearing, overcome destructive habitsand become better versions of ourselves. Neuroplasticity accounts for the fact that, compared to mostof us, a disproportionate amount of physical space in a violinists brain is devoted to controlling thefingers of his or her fingering hand, and that studying for exams can actually increase the amount ofcortical space devoted to a particular subject (more complex functions generally require more brainmatter). As well see later, it also accounts for certain negative behaviors, like obsessive-compulsivedisorder.

You will hear the term neuroplasticity a lot in this book, because it exemplifies one of thefundamental premises of Blue Mind: the fact that our brainsthese magnificent, three-pound massesof tissue that are almost 80 percent waterare shaped, for good or ill, by a multitude of factors thatinclude our perceptions, our emotions, our biology, our cultureand our environment.

Youll also hear a lot about happiness. While the pursuit of happiness has been a focus ofhumankind since almost before we could put a name to the feeling, from ancient times onwardphilosophers have argued about the causes and uses of happiness, and composers, writers, and poetshave filled our heads with stories of happiness lost and found. In the twenty-first century, however,the pursuit of happiness has become one of the most important means of judging our quality of life. Happiness is an aspiration of every human being, write John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, andJeffrey D. Sachs in the United Nations World Happiness Report 2013 , which ranks 156 countries bythe level of happiness of their citizens.3 Its a vital goal: People who are emotionally happier, who

have more satisfying lives, and who live in happier communities, are more likely both now and laterto be healthy, productive, and socially connected. These benefits in turn flow more broadly to theirfamilies, workplaces, and communities, to the advantage of all.4

The purpose of our lives is to be happy, says the Dalai Lamaand with all the many benefits ofhappiness, who would disagree? As a result, today we are bombarded with books on happiness,studies (and stories) about happiness, and happiness research of every kind. Well walk through someof the studies later, and discuss why water provides the most profound shortcut to happiness, butsuffice it to say, greater individual happiness has been shown to make our relationships better; help usbe more creative, productive, and effective at work (thereby bringing us higher incomes); give usgreater self-control and ability to cope; make us more charitable, cooperative, and empathetic;5 boostour immune, endocrine, and cardiovascular systems; lower cortisol and heart rate, decreaseinflammation, slow disease progression, and increase longevity.6 Research shows that the amount ofhappiness we experience spreads outward, affecting not just the people we know but also the friendsof their friends as well (or three degrees of the famous six degrees of separation).7 Happy peopledemonstrate better cognition and attention, make better decisions, take better care of themselves, andare better friends, colleagues, neighbors, spouses, parents, and citizens.8 Blue Mind isnt just aboutsmiling when youre near the water; its about smiling everywhere.

Water and Our Emotions

Some people love the ocean. Some people fear it. I love it, hate it, fear it, respect it, resentit, cherish it, loathe it, and frequently curse it. It brings out the best in me and sometimesthe worst.

ROZ SAVAGE

Beyond our evolutionary linkage to water, humans have deep emotional ties to being in its presence.Water delights us and inspires us (Pablo Neruda: I need the sea because it teaches me). It consolesus and intimidates us (Vincent van Gogh: The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the stormterrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore). It createsfeelings of awe, peace, and joy (The Beach Boys: Catch a wave, and youre sitting on top of theworld). But in almost all cases, when humans think of wateror hear water, or see water, or get inwater, even taste and smell waterthey feel something. These instinctual and emotionalresponses occur separately from rational and cognitive responses, wrote Steven C. Bourassa, aprofessor of urban planning, in a seminal 1990 article in Environment and Behavior. Theseemotional responses to our environment arise from the oldest parts of our brain, and in fact can occurbefore any cognitive response arises. Therefore, to understand our relationship to the environment,we must understand both our cognitive and our emotional interactions with it.

This makes sense to me, as Ive always been drawn to the stories and science of why we love thewater. However, as a doctoral student studying evolutionary biology, wildlife ecology, andenvironmental economics, when I tried to weave emotion into my dissertation on the relationshipbetween sea turtle ecology and coastal communities, I learned that academia had little room for

feelings of any kind. Keep that fuzzy stuff out of your science, young man, my advisors counseled.Emotion wasnt rational. It wasnt quantifiable. It wasnt science.

Talk about a sea change: today cognitive neuroscientists have begun to understand how ouremotions drive virtually every decision we make, from our morning cereal choice, to who we sit nextto at a dinner party, to how sight, smell, and sound affect our mood. Today we are at the forefront of awave of neuroscience that seeks to discover the biological bases of everything, from our politicalchoices to our color preferences. Theyre using tools like EEGs, MRIs, and those fMRIs to observethe brain on music, the brain and art, the chemistry of prejudice, love, and meditation, and more.Daily these cutting-edge scientists are discovering why human beings interact with the world in theways we do. And a few of them are now starting to examine the brain processes that underlie ourconnection to water. This research is not just to satisfy some intellectual curiosity. The study of ourlove for water has significant, real-world applicationsfor health, travel, real estate, creativity,childhood development, urban planning, the treatment of addiction and trauma, conservation,business, politics, religion, architecture, and more. Most of all, it can lead to a deeper understandingof who we are and how our minds and emotions are shaped by our interaction with the most prevalentsubstance on our planet.

The journey in search of people and scientists who were eager to explore these questions hastaken me from the sea turtles habitats on the coasts of Baja California, to the halls of the medicalschools at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, to surfing andfishing and kayaking camps run for PTSD-afflicted veterans in Texas and California, to lakes andrivers and even swimming pools around the world. And everywhere I went, even on the airplanesconnecting these locations, people would share their stories about water. Their eyes sparkled whenthey described the first time they visited a lake, or ran through a sprinkler in the front yard, caught aturtle or a frog in the creek, held a fishing rod, or walked along a shore with a parent or boyfriend orgirlfriend. I came to believe that such stories were critical to science, because they help us makesense of the facts and put them in a context we can understand. Its time to drop the old notions ofseparation between emotion and sciencefor ourselves and our future. Just as rivers join on theirway to the ocean, to understand Blue Mind we need to draw together separate streams: analysis andaffection; elation and experimentation; head and heart.

The Tohono Oodham (which means desert people) are Native Americans who reside primarilyin the Sonoran Desert of southeastern Arizona and northwest Mexico. When I was a graduate studentat the University of Arizona, I used to take young teens from the Tohono Oodham Nation across theborder to the Sea of Cortez (the Gulf of California). Many of them had never seen the ocean before,and most were completely unprepared for the experience, both emotionally and in terms of having theright gear. On one field trip several of the kids didnt bring swim trunks or shortsthey simply didntown any. So we all sat down on the beach next to the tide pools of Puerto Peasco, I pulled out aknife, and we all cut the legs off our pants, right then and there.

Once in the shallow water we put on masks and snorkels (wed brought enough for everyone), hada quick lesson on how to breathe through a snorkel, and then set out to have a look around. After awhile I asked one young man how it was going. I cant see anything, he said. Turns out hed beenkeeping his eyes closed underwater. I told him that he could safely open his eyes even though his headwas beneath the surface. He put his face under and started to look around. Suddenly he popped up,pulled off his mask, and started shouting about all the fish. He was laughing and crying at the same

time as he shouted, My planet is beautiful! Then he slid his mask back over his eyes, put his headback into the water, and didnt speak again for an hour.

My memory of that day, everything about it, is crystal clear. I dont know for sure, but Ill bet it isfor him, too. Our love of water had made an indelible stamp on us. His first time in the ocean felt likemine, all over again.

The Beginnings of Blue Mind

In 2011, in San Franciscoa city surrounded by water on three sidesI gathered a group ofneuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, marine biologists, artists, conservationists, doctors,economists, athletes, urban planners, real estate agents, and chefs to explore the ways our brains,bodies, and psyches are enhanced by water. I had realized that there was a constellation of innovativethinkers who had been trying to put the pieces together regarding the powerful effects of water, butthey had mostly been isolated from one another. Since then, the Blue Mind gathering has become anannual conference that taps into a growing quantity of new mind/body/environment research andcontinues to produce new and startling insights on how humanity interacts with our watery planet.Both the brain and the ocean are deep, complex, and subtle realmsscarcely explored and poorlyunderstood. However, we are on the cusp of an age when both the brain and the ocean are giving upmore and more of their secrets to dedicated scientists and explorers. As more researchers fromvaried disciplines apply their expertise to the relation between water and humanity, the insights fromtheir collaborations are illuminating the biological, neurological, and sociological benefits ofhumanitys Blue Mind.

Every year more experts of all kinds are connecting the dots between brain science and our wateryworld. This isnt touchy-feely lets save the dolphins conservation: were talking prefrontal cortex,amygdala, evolutionary biology, neuroimaging, and neuron functioning that shows exactly why humansseem to value being near, in, on, or under the water. And this new science has real-worldimplications for education, public policy, health care, coastal planning, travel, real estate, andbusinessnot to mention our happiness and general well-being. But its science with a personal face;science practiced by real people, with opinions, biases, breakthroughs, and insights.

At subsequent Blue Mind conferences on the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific, scientists,practitioners, and students have continued to share their research and lifes work, huddling together todiscuss, create, and think deeply. Weve produced documents describing what we think we know(facts), what we want to explore (hypotheses), and what we want to share (teachings). At BlueMind 2013, held on Block Island, we discussed topics like dopaminergic pathways, microplasticsand persistent organic pollutants, auditory cortex physiology, and ocean acidification, but for those ofus drawn to the waves, no discussion of water is without joy and celebration. At dawn we sangtogether, overlooking the sparkling blue Atlantic Ocean, and in the evening we drank wine, thosewaters now black and sparkling, and listened to former Rhode Island poet laureate Lisa Starr.

Listen, dear one, it whispers.You only think you haveforgotten the impossible.

Go now, to that marsh beyondFresh Pond and consider how the redburgeons into crimson;go see how its been preparing foreverfor today.

This is poetry, this is science; this is science, this is poetry. So, too, are oceans and seas, riversand ponds, swimming pools and hot springsall of us could use a little more poetry in our lives.

We could use a lot more, tooand, in some cases, a lot less. Too many of us live overwhelmedsuffocated by work, personal conflicts, the intrusion of technology and media. Trying to doeverything, we end up stressed about almost anything. We check our voice mail at midnight, our e-mail at dawn, and spend the time in between bouncing from website to website, viral video to viralvideo. Perpetually exhausted, we make bad decisions at work, at home, on the playing field, andbehind the wheel. We get flabby because we decide we dont have the time to take care of ourselves,a decision ratified by the fact that those extra hours are filled with e-mailing, doing reports,attending meetings, updating systems to stay current, repairing whats broken. Were constantly tryingto quit one habit just to start another. We say the wrong things to people we love, and love the wrongthings because expediency and proximity make it easier to embrace whats passing right in front of us.We make excuses about making excuses, but we still cant seem to stop the avalanche. All of this hasa significant economic cost as stress and its related comorbid diseases are responsible for a largeproportion of disability worldwide.9

It doesnt have to be that way. The surfers, scientists, veterans, fishers, poets, artists, and childrenwhose stories fill this book know that being in, on, under, or near water makes your life better.Theyre waiting for you to get your Blue Mind on too.

Time to dive in.

About the Author

Wallace J. Nichols, PhD, is a research associate at the California Academyof Sciences and founder-codirector of Ocean Revolution, SEE the WILD,and LiVBLUE. His work has been broadcast on NPR, BBC, PBS, National

Geographic, and Animal Planet and featured in Time, Newsweek, GQ,Outside, Fast Company, Scientific American, and New Scientist. He lives in

California with his partner, Dana, and two daughters.

You can visit him online at wallacejnichols.org.wallacejnichols

wallacejnichols

Little, Brown and CompanyJuly 2014

CHAPTER 1

The Grand Monsieur

The sun over Burgundys seemingly endless expanse of richly green vineyards belonged to latesummer. What few clouds there were, were fantastical, fat, and luminousgiant dollops of silver andwhite acrylic paint that had not yet finished drying onto Gods vast canvas of sky. Plush canopies ofleaves on the tens of thousands of vines fluttered in breezes so faint that if not for the subtle sway itwould have appeared there wasnt any breeze at all. Chirping sparrows swooped every which way,as if theyd spent the night drinking from an open barrel in one of the nearby cuveries. With the gentlerise and fall of the terrain, the vineyards resembled a slow rolling ocean of unpredictable currents.

The temperature that September morning in 2010, in the Cte dOr region, which is the heart ofBurgundy, and for many serious wine collectors the only part of Burgundy that matters, was alreadywell on its way to sweltering. The humidity was as present as a coastal mist. Soon, the workerswould spill from the villages to tend to the vines. The enjambeurs would arrive: The spider-shapedtractors, with their high tires to easily traverse the meticulously ordered vine rows, would scurryabout dodging the tourists bicycling along the narrow ribbons of dirt road between the vineyards. Forthe moment, however, the landscape was quiet; as far as the eye could see the only person among thevines was the Grand Monsieur.

Dressed in shades of khakieven his wide-brimmed, cloth hatseventy-one-year-old Aubert deVillaine walked in the parcel called Romane-St.-Vivant. Tall and thin, he waded through the vinesas he had done for more than four decades: in bursts of long strides, arms out slightly from his sides,palms skimming the vine tops.

Every so often he would stop, fish the handkerchief from his pocket, wipe the perspiration fromhis brow, and look about. Monsieur de Villaine knew that everything and nothing was unfoldingbefore his eyes, and that it was his challenge to determine which was the everything and which wasthe nothingto find the clues in natures mystery.

At moments like this, surrounded by the sublime splendor of the vineyards before the harvest, theGrand Monsieur sometimes thought of the French mastersPissarro, Renoir, Monet. He suspectedthey would have appreciated Burgundy and understood his work.

One must have only one masternature, Pissarro had said. Renoir had put it this way: Youcome to nature with your theories and she knocks them all flat. And Monetah, Monet. Was it anywonder he described it best of all? A landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape because itsappearance is changing in every moment. But it lives through its ambiance, through the air and light,which vary constantly.

Though Monsieur de Villaine would have insisted he was unworthy of such a comparison, he hadmuch in common with Monet. When Monet first picked up his brush he saw and painted the naturalworld in pieces. He put the water here and the sky there; the field went here; flowers and trees went

here, here, and there. Each was an element unto itself, existing almost independent of its surroundings,as if, just like that, any one of the elements could have just as easily been placed in another scene,transported to another painting.

As he matured, however, Monets work became less technical and more organic, spiritual. Hecame to understand natures power. It was as if one day, while standing alone on the banks of thatpond covered in water lilies, Monsieur Monet discovered a crease in the universe, pulled it open likecurtains, stepped inside, and turned and viewed the world from another dimensionfrom aperspective that allowed him to see the interconnectedness of it all, to see the light and air, and theflicker and flow of energy among all natural things.

It was then that Monet began to make the invisible visible. The lines he had once thought definedand separated some natural order dissolved into a liquefied oneness, filling the canvas for others todrink in, and, if only for a few moments, to experience the divine.

This was what the Grand Monsieur labored to do. Only with grapes. His life had been dedicatedto transcending the technical and vinifying natures invisible energy.

As he studied the masterpiece of the landscape around him, the Grand Monsieur prayed for a sign.He prayed although he wasnt as confident in the power of prayer as he once had been. Because ofrecent horrific events and the possibility of unsettling outcomes, the Grand Monsieur had begun toquestion Gods very existence.

You wouldnt have been able to detect his fermenting anxieties just by looking at him. Or maybeyou could have. If you were among the very few he trusted to know him well enough, and youhappened to glimpse him in a moment like thishis long, weathered face and forlorn brown eyeswhen he thought no one was looking at him, when he thought he was alone and could be himself.

Then again, it had been so long since Monsieur de Villaine had known what that was like: aprivate moment, unto himself. There was no himself. Only the tangle of what he represented: thevines, the families, the Domaine, Burgundy, Francethe storied legacy of countless holy men and oneunholy prince. A legacy subjected to the currencies of markets too often ignorant of how to trulyappreciate a bottle of Burgundy, and that were instead driven by the whims of buyers who wereobsessed with the bangs of auction gavels and status-symbol trophy bottles.

For the longest time Monsieur de Villaine had wanted no parts of any of it. He had resisted. Itwould be fair to say he had fled Burgundys vines. But crawling into a blackness that he believed wascertain death, riding horseback into the starry night of the American West, repeatedly enduring theheartache of the unbornwell, these things have a way of altering a man.

Over time, like the best Pinot Noirs, within the bottle of his skin Monsieur de Villainescomposition had become something other than what it had been. He matured. He came to accept andto appreciate what had always been his destinycaring for his enfant vines, and producing the mostmagnificent and most misunderstood wine in the world.

Hi s employs referred to him as the Grand Monsieur. The moniker signified their respect. Arecognition of his grace and kindness. Monsieur de Villaine put up a reserved front, but his peopleknew it was a faade, his way of protecting the Domaine and also his own heart, broken several timesover and patched together, it seemed, with rose petals.

Years ago, when one of their beloved fellow workers, distraught over a lost love, was foundhanging from a rafter in the winery, it was the Grand Monsieur to whom they turned for guidance. Theworkers gathered in the winery and bowed their heads as he led them in prayer and reminded themthat the Lord indeed works in mysterious ways. He told them this was part of Gods plan. Hepetitioned them to have faith, to believe.

When the torrents of rain came and lasted for days and drowned their scheduled vineyard tasks, aswas often the case in mid-to late summer just before the vendange, it was the Grand Monsieur whoassuaged their concerns. Although during such times he more than anyone else worried that theywould fall behind or the crop might be lost, he exuded a serenity; he reassured his crew that when theskies would clear they would be able to complete the work. In due time, he would tell his men whentheir partners, God and Mother Nature, were ready. Have faith, he would say to them. Believe.

Although the Grand Monsieur presided over the Domaine that was above all other Burgundiandomaines, a national treasurea cathedral of a winery, as a French official in Paris had once put itand a winery that had made him one of the wealthiest men in France, Monsieur de Villaine carriedhimself with equal parts dignity and humility. He emanated gratitude and took nothing for granted. Hewas ever mindful of the time when the Domaines wines made no profit at all, and he never lost sightof the fact that such a period could easily come again.

He was often one of the first to arrive at the Domaine in the morning, in his silver Renault stationwagon, and he was among the last to leave. His back was just as sore as theirs; his hands just ascalloused. He was the kind of Grand Monsieur who once, when his wife, Pamela, asked him to travelinto Paris to meet her at a party hosted by an American starlet, he lingered at the farm, as he calledthe worlds greatest Domaine, for as long as he could, and then only grudgingly attended the soire.He arrived late, as one of his family members recalled the evening, dressed in his khaki farmhandclothes.

During the long days of the vendange, the Grand Monsieur made sure his pickers were paid muchbetter than the other domaines crews were paid; he contracted a locally renowned chef to preparetheir meals. Rather than ensconce himself in an air-conditioned office, he opted to be in the cuverie,or in the vineyards for the clipping and sorting, often inquiring about his employees welfare and theirfamilies. He asked, his people knew, because he cared. As far as the Grand Monsieur was concerned,anyone who worked at the Domaine was family; they grasped they were part of something veryspecial.

One day during a harvest, as the Grand Monsieurs vendangeurs picked the Domaines vines in theparcel called Richebourg, one of his workers approached me. Squat, husky, with a nose that lookedas if it got smashed crooked and flat by a barroom one-two wallop. He wore shorts, a white T-shirttank top, work boots, and a skullcap. A cigarette dangled from the side of his mouth. He struck me assomeone who would be more at home as a stevedore on the docks heaving bags of coffee beans orbundles of bananas rather than given over to the painstaking, delicate detail work of harvesting tinybundles of berries.

He shouldered a backpack pannier and was tasked with transporting the picked fruit from thevineyard to a nearby flatbed trailer. Pannier! Pannier! The pickers called for him when their

harvesting baskets were filled. For days as he worked Id watched him stealing peeks at some of thefemale pickers as they bent over using their wire-cutter-like secateurs to clip off the clusters of thePinot Noir. At least once hed caught me watching him. Id gotten the impression this MonsieurPannier didnt care to be observed. I thought he was going to tell me as much when he approachedme.

Can I tell you something? He spoke to me in English. By then Id been around the Domaine fortwo harvests and for enough months that everyone at the Domaine knew I spoke very little French. Hestood with his face inches from my face. I could smell his sweat and the nicotine on his breath.

Bien sr, I answered. Of course. I tried to use what little I knew of the language.He flicked his cigarette onto a nearby ribbon of road. I reassured myself that it was unlikely he

would pick a fight with me here, in front of everyone.The big boss, he said, nodding in the direction of Monsieur de Villaine. The big boss was well

out of earshot, over on the back of the flatbed, alone, sorting through the grapes that had been pickedand carefully poured from the panniers into the plastic crates that would be transported to the cuverie.

Oui? I said.Son cur est dans la terre.Pannier could see I was trying to process his French. He knelt down in front of me. Genuflected

was more like it. He took his right hand and pressed his palm flat to his chest, over his heart. Helooked up at me, his eyes locking on to mine, to make sure I was watching his gesture.

Son cur, he said.His heart?Oui, son cur. He removed the hand from his chest and pressed it into the soil. Est dans la

terre.Is in the earth?Oui. He stood. He looked into me until he was satisfied I understood.He softly punched my shoulder and said it again:Monsieur de Villaine, le Grand Monsieur, son cur est dans la terre.With that, Monsieur Pannier smiled in the big bosss direction and walked off back into the vines

to see the sights and wait for his next load of fruit.

On the quiet morning in mid-September 2010, as the Grand Monsieur walked through the vines ofRomane-St.-Vivant and looked to the sky, he searched for clues that would help him determine whento begin another years vendange.

Off and on, for centuries, ruling aristocrats and government officials had set the date for the startof the harvest for all of Burgundy. Typically, and most unfairly, this ban de vendange correspondedwith the wishes of the wealthiest owners of the finest vineyards, which produced the highest qualitygrapes. In theory, the policy of a unified harvest period made sense, as the harvest took over the entireregion. Horse-drawn wagons filled with grapes on their way to the wineries clogged the rural roadsand tight city streets. Businesses closed, willingly or otherwise, to allow friends and family ofvignerons to pick and sort. But in the way that mattered most, for bureaucrats to choose when theharvest would begin for all was inherently flawed policy.

Only the vigneron who tends his vines knows when his berries are ready. Only the vine farmerhimself knows that the grapes growing in one section of his vineyard, say, where there tends to bemore exposure to sunlight and wind, will mature faster than the berries in another section of that sameparcel. An east-facing slope of vines likely gets more of the hot midday sun. And so on.

Then theres the myriad farming techniques. Each Burgundian grower has his own way of doingthingsa hybrid of science and metaphysical voodoo, informed by tradition and faith, and, of course,viticulture. So many nuances. In the end, no one understands the contours of a parcel of vines betterthan its vigneron. The way Mark Twains riverboat captains knew the secret shoals of theMississippi. The way a husband understands the curves and mysteries of his beloveds form.

France is relatively small country, eight thousand square miles smaller than the geometricallysimilar state of Texas. The Burgundy region, the mostly pastoral countryside to the southeast of Parisand comprising four departmentsthe Yonne, Nivre, Sane-et-Loire, and the Cte dOrrepresents only about one-twentieth of the country. The roughly forty-mile-long by three-mile-widecorridor of Cte dOr wine country, which stretches from the city of Dijon to just south of the city ofBeaune, is little more than a wrinkle in the universe.

Yet within that wrinkle, the temperature and the terrain vary dramatically. The Cte dOr isdivided into two regions: Vineyards in the south belong to the Cte de Beaune, and the vineyards inthe north are in the Cte de Nuits, which at the time was where all but one parcel of Monsieur deVillaines vines grew. Although the two ctes (literally, slopes) are in such intimate proximity, theymay as well be on different planets when it comes to late summer weather. So the officials in Beauneultimately surrendered to the reality that the decision of when to harvest should rest where it doesnow, with the vignerons themselves.

When Monsieur de Villaine walked his vines he would sometimes picture the prehistoric ocean thatcovered this part of France. Visions of ancient fish floated like sunspots before his eyes. He watchedthe creatures swim, then, as the earths crust moved apart and came together, pushing up mountainsand cracking off faces of cliffas the ocean recededhe watched as the sea creatures fossilized,atomized, sprinkled down, and vanished into the soil. He saw the holy ghosts enter the wild landthemonks in their pointed hoods cutting away brush, raking the earth, then kneeling and putting the earthin their mouths, and then marrying their vines to the soil.

Monsieur de Villaine sensed the energy in the veins of the earth around him, an energy that wouldinfuse the Burgundy wines that King Charlemagne had so very long ago declared worthy to beconsecrated the blood of Christ. The Grand Monsieur imagined the princely namesake of his Domainepacing these vines, ensuring his parcels were not too densely planted, insisting that quality never becompromised in favor of quantity. Of course, too, the Grand Monsieur would see himself as a boy inthese vines, disinterested and trailing behind his own father and grandfather.

Like virtually all Burgundians, the de Villaines were Catholic. The Grand Monsieur had spent afair amount of his life in churches. He likened the many thousands of vineyards of Burgundy to theshards of a stained glass window. Thousands upon thousands of parcels divided, seemingly withoutrhyme or reason, and within those parcels, a range of asymmetrical climats that were at once untothemselves and yet exquisitely pieced together into a meticulously engineered, breathtaking whole.

So far, the growing season of 2010 had brought much rain and humidity. Which could meandisaster for the Pinot Noir. Pinots are so named because the clusters of this grape varietal resemblea pinecone. Just as the structure of a pinecone is as dense as it is delicate, the Pinot grapes grow intight bunches that leave little room for the flow of air betwee