Skies were clear enough to see the purple mountains of Turkey a short distance across the Aegean Sea. It would be easy on this tranquil evening to catch calamari. These days, he needed a good haul to make ends meet.

史特拉蒂斯．瓦拉米歐斯發動他白色小船的馬達，在一彎弦月下從這個小漁村駛出港，漁村坐落在希臘第三大島列斯伏斯島的北角。

天空清朗，可以看到愛琴海對岸不遠處的土耳其紫色山脈。在這麼平靜的夜晚，很容易捕到魷魚。這些日子，他需要豐收的漁獲才能餬口。

A year ago, he and other fishermen in the tiny village, Skala Sikaminias, were making a more unusual catch: thousands of sea-drenched asylum seekers who streamed across the Aegean to escape conflict and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. As one of the landfalls in Greece that is closest to Turkey, Skala Sikaminias, with its 100 residents, fast became ground zero for the crisis, the first stop in Europe for people trying to reach Germany in a desperate bid to start a new life.

“I’d be in the middle of the sea and I would see 50 boats zigzagging toward me,” Valamios said, gazing across the narrow channel. “I would speed toward them, and they would throw their children into my boat to be saved.”

一年前，他和斯卡拉希卡米尼亞斯這個小漁村的其他漁民，從事的是比較不尋常的打撈：成千上萬被海水浸透的尋求庇護者，源源不絕地橫渡愛琴海，逃離中東和非洲的衝突和貧窮。斯卡拉希卡米尼亞斯是希臘最接近土耳其的著陸地之一，當地有100名居民，很快便成為這場危機的原爆點，是不顧一切想要去德國展開新生活的人們在歐洲的第一站。

瓦拉米歐斯凝望著狹窄的海峽說：「我在海中間，會看到50艘船彎彎扭扭地朝著我而來。我會加速駛向他們，他們會把孩子丟到我的船上，讓他們得以獲救。」

Today the refugees have mostly stopped coming. The coastline, once littered with orange life vests and wrecked boats, has been cleaned to a near-spotless white. But the human drama has left an imprint here, and across all of Lesbos, in ways that have only begun to play out.

The village is nearly empty of tourists this year as Germans, Swedes and other visitors who had long flocked to the crystalline waters of Lesbos choose to vacation elsewhere, wary of spending their holidays in a place now associated with human desperation. Business at the island’s hotels and tavernas has slumped about 80 percent, especially along the 7.5-mile stretch between Skala Sikaminias and the vacation town of Molyvos, where many of the more than 800,000 refugees who survived the crossing last year washed ashore.

今天難民大致上不再來了。曾經滿是橘色救生衣和破船的海岸線，也清理成幾近無瑕的白色。但這齣人性劇已在這個小村，在整個列斯伏斯島上留下印記，而且才剛開始以各種方式展現。

這個村子今年幾乎沒有觀光客，長久以來蜂擁至列斯伏斯島的晶瑩剔透海域的德國人、瑞典人和其他訪客選擇去別處度假，以免在現在已與人類的絕望連在一起的地方度假。島上的飯店和餐館的生意下滑約八成，特別是斯卡拉希卡米尼亞斯和度假城鎮莫利沃斯之間綿延7.5英里的這一段，這裡是去年成功渡海的80多萬難民中，許多人被沖上岸的地方。

Valamios used to supplement his income as a fisherman by working five months of the year at Myrivilis’ Mulberry taverna, facing the bucolic port where fishermen mend yellow nets beneath oleanders and village cats prowl for fish. This year, he was asked to work just one month amid a dearth of customers. Nearly 1,000 Greeks in the area have lost seasonal employment.

瓦拉米歐斯過去每年在邁里維里斯的「桑樹小館」工作五個月，貼補打漁收入，小館面對著頗有鄉間風情的港口，漁夫在夾竹桃下補著黃色的魚網，村裡的貓四處潛行找魚吃。今年餐館顧客稀少，只要他工作一個月。這地區有近千希臘人失去季節性工作。

譯／田思怡

It turns out that poor cellphone reception has been a problem for years in downtown Palo Alto, which has a relationship with technology that is decidedly mixed.

我的手機收訊一直中斷，這毫無道理，因為我位在矽谷的心臟地帶。

實則帕羅奧圖市區多年來一直有手機收訊不良的問題，這個城市與科技的關係無疑是亦敵亦友。

Here in the city where Facebook and Google grew into the world famous companies they are today, many homeowners passionately oppose new cell towers in their upscale neighborhoods, complicating connections.

Palo Alto residents also gripe about traffic. But overall the city has problems the rest of the country would love to have. Startup technology companies are clamoring for the prestige of a Palo Alto address. The vibrancy of Stanford University keeps the city young and humming.

就在這個城市裡，臉書和Google茁壯為今天舉世聞名的公司，市內許多住宅的屋主強烈反對在他們的高級住宅區設置新的手機基地台，提高了改進收訊的難度。

帕羅奧圖市居民對交通問題也有抱怨。但整體而言，這個城市的問題卻是這個國家其他城市求之不得的。新創科技公司爭相設在這個名聲響叮噹的城市。史丹福大學的活力使這個城市保持年輕和活潑。

In an election year, with nearly constant squawking from presidential candidates about well-paying jobs, the mayor of Palo Alto has an unusual message for some of the cash-flush tech companies based here: Go away. Please.

“Big tech companies are choking off the downtown,” Mayor Patrick Burt said. “It’s not healthy.”

在選舉年，總統候選人不斷叨唸高薪工作，帕羅奧圖市市長派翠克．柏特卻對一些總公司設在這裡的現金滿滿的科技公司發出不尋常的訊息：請離開。

柏特市長說：「大科技公司使市區窒息，這不健康。」

As one walks down the sidewalks in residential areas, shaded by mature trees and basking in the city’s sunny, mild weather, it’s not too hard to understand why homeowners are trying to keep Palo Alto small despite its reputation for giving birth to the world’s next big thing.

Last year, the city of 66,000 people set a cap of less than 1 percent a year on the growth of office space in most of its parts. In the charming downtown, where battalions of tech workers from companies like Amazon stroll the streets, their eyes often glued to their smartphones, the mayor is looking to enforce, in some form, an all-but-forgotten zoning regulation that bans companies whose primary business is research and development, including software coding. (To repeat: The mayor is considering enforcing a ban on coding at ground zero of Silicon Valley.)

走在住宅區的人行道上，大樹成蔭，陽光普照、氣候溫和，不難了解為何屋主們努力不讓帕羅奧圖市這個小城市變大，雖然它享有催生世界下一個偉大事物的名聲。

去年，這個有6萬6000居民的城市為大部分地區的辦公室空間設限，每年成長不得超過1%。在迷人的市區，亞馬遜等公司的科技員工成群結隊在街上逛，眼睛通常盯著手機，市長想用某種方式執行一種幾乎已被遺忘、限制土地用途的分區法規，禁止以研究與發展，包括軟體程式設計為主要業務的公司在此設籍。（重複一遍：市長考慮執行禁令，禁止在矽谷的中心點寫程式。）

“This is crazy,” said Kate Vershov Downing, a lawyer who lit up the internet this month when she announced that she was quitting the city’s planning commission because she was moving someplace cheaper. “This is Silicon Valley. We’ve been writing code here for decades.”

律師凱特．佛休佛．唐寧說：「真瘋狂，這裡是矽谷，我們已在這裡寫程式寫了幾十年。」她本月宣布因為將要搬到較便宜的地區而辭去市政府計畫委員會職務，在網路上引起熱議。

譯／田思怡