OVER THE YEARS, having read hundreds of adventure stories, interviewed many wilderness survivors, and experienced my own near misses with waterfalls, avalanche chutes, and venomous snakes, I’ve delineated a few major reasons why things go wrong out there: (1) Hubris. The ancient Greeks knew this as insolence toward the gods. I call it the “Dude, I can handle this, no problem” problem. (2) Ignorance. Some people should simply stay home until they know better. (3) Treachery. Rare, usually found only on high-stakes expeditions, but disastrous when it occurs. Examples: arsenic in the coffee, abandonment on ice floes, cannibalization of expedition mates for nutrients. (4) Shit happens. One of the essays that follows is a fine tale about human feces literally falling from the sky, which goes to show that some events are impossible to predict. (5) Miscalculating the risk. I find this last reason most interesting, containing as it does complex and ambiguous human motives. Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, famously said that the whole point of an expedition is to avoid adventures, which are the result of poor planning. But Amundsen, who was a mechanistic, plodding kind of guy, had it wrong. I believe that some of us—many of us, maybe even all of us—head into the wild secretly wishing for things to go wrong. We’re all seeking a worst moment—up to a point.

Think of the great stories you’ve heard. No one remembers much about Amundsen’s trip to the pole, except that he arrived with icy efficiency and, as carefully planned, his team ate their sled dogs on scheduled days during the return. In contrast, what helped immortalize Sir Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance is that he failed in his goal. His genius lay in his skill at escape.

Likewise Livingstone. No one in Victorian England hankered to hear the mundane details of his endless slogs—lasting up to four years—across Africa. Rather, the doctor dined out in London (and raised scads of money) by recounting how a charging lion shook him like a rat in its teeth—this because he’d stupidly approached the hiding beast after wounding it. Or take Lewis and Clark: In two years and four months, they safely traversed about 8,000 miles of the American West, but what we recall best from their countless journal pages are the mishaps: when grizzly bears kept coming despite fusillades of bullets; that night along the Two Medicine River when the Blackfeet attacked. The misadventure is the story.

Granted, it’s doubtful any of us will embark on such epic trips, but we all want stories to tell. What makes a good adventure tale is the unexpected. Most of us are not Amundsens, prepared for the tiniest eventuality. Rather, we place ourselves in spots where the unexpected can ambush us. We’ve all had this conversation: “Carry a compass, map, and matches? Oh, come on, we’re not going to get lost on this little trail.”

On a subconscious level, we need these mishaps. We understand that they pack powerful medicine. They’re antidotes to the quiet desperation of modern life, reminding us that we—as individuals, as a species—are survivors, showing us how truly extraordinary it is what humans can endure, how much we can outwit, outflank, or, with clenched teeth, simply withstand.

We need to know that, lifted out of our bubble-wrapped lives, we aren’t the delicate, ineffectual creatures that governmental institutions and toilet-tissue ads would have us believe. Sometimes we have to set out—presumably innocent of our interior motives—and go have a really bad time.

Peter Stark’s book Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival will be published in March 2014 by Ecco.

Narc Passage

Warning: Convicts in mirror are closer than they appear

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I AM OVER SIX FEET TALL, and my first love and co-conspirator was almost seven feet tall. I mention this because, in the context of danger, size matters. In 1971 and ’72, we hitchhiked through Europe as if in a security bubble. We saw great art and viewed the landscape. Our backpacks remained unstolen; the average European gave us a wide berth. In addition to being extra-tall, we were Marxist, or, rather, he was Marxist and I was the fellow traveler. He was always trying to make contact with the working class but was too intimidating to succeed.

When we got back to the States, the revolution, such as it was, seemed to be passing us by. It was August, sunny and hot, and we were on a trip from Iowa to Wyoming by way of the scenic wonders of South Dakota. We were doing 73 with the windows down and chatting about the labor theory of value. Two hitchhikers appeared. My companion slowed down to pick them up, since we’d gotten rides so many times in Europe.

They ran to the car. They were wearing black and did not look like respectable members of the working class but, rather, charter members of the lumpen proletariat. They got in back—the tall, skinny one behind me, the shorter, heavier one behind my friend. We began talking; it turned out they were just out of the state penitentiary, where they’d served time for drug-related offenses. This was not, on the face of it, a negative. Theoretically, they had something to teach us about aspects of the revolution that we were less familiar with, but we didn’t overhear them making political plans, only talking in low voices about old associates.

My friend and I exchanged a glance. As he turned off I-90 toward the Badlands, I pulled down my sun visor, angling its mirror so I could see the hands and face of the guy behind me. His face was animated. In his hands was a knife. I angled the visor toward the other fellow’s hands. He had a knife, also. I tried to communicate this to my friend by means of gestures, but he was busy drawing them out about their prison experiences.

As we entered the Badlands, we saw that they were truly bad, from our point of view: desolate, beautiful, strange, and isolated, one cliff face and jutting butte after another, in wildly striated and colorful layers. Why were we taking ex-cons with knives into the Badlands, anyway? Well, because we felt we owed them the benefit of the doubt, and also because, since we had talked about how we were headed for the Badlands, we didn’t want to seem to be prejudiced or modifying our trip out of fear.

Beyond that first impression, I don’t remember the Badlands, but I remember perfectly how graceful and slender the skinny guy’s hands looked as he played with that knife. My friend kept talking in a relaxed, friendly manner, but he drove faster and faster. Pretty soon, the colorful rock faces were zipping by, and by late afternoon we were back on the highway, doing 85. As Marxists, we gave no thought to stopping and kicking them out. As big, tall people, we gave no thought to asserting ourselves. We drove. Evening drew on. We approached Rapid City.

“Say,” said the shorter guy, “so-and-so lives here. He’d put us up for the night.”

“I don’t know—” said the skinny guy, but my friend, ever helpful, crossed two lanes and the apron of the exit ramp, bouncing the Chevy over the curb. We paused at the stop sign and whipped around a corner into a Howard Johnson’s. “Need some money?” said my friend. “You could eat here.”

The guys sat quietly, not moving. I watched their hands. Finally, the short one said, “Yeah. We do need some money.” My friend emptied his pockets. He had about 30 dollars, all our money. It’s what they would have gotten if they’d killed us.

As we drove away, we waved. We drove fast, in case they thought to pull out their six-guns and drill us from afar.

Scared Sockless

Stupefied and frozen in a hornet’s nest of hot lead

THERE I WAS, STANDING BAREFOOT in a field of fire with my socks and boots in my hands, obstinately refusing to run for cover until I had put my socks on. Jim was yelling something, but the machine guns kept drowning him out. Then came a brief lull, and I heard his voice loud and clear.

“Jon, fuck the socks! Run!“

It was the spring of 1983. Photographer Jim Nachtwey and I had teamed up to make one of the first trips inside Nicaragua with the CIA-backed contra guerrillas, who were fighting against the left-wing Sandinista regime. I was 26, and I’d never been under fire before. We had just spent an uneventful week with a contra platoon on an intelligence-gathering mission in the hills of northern Nicaragua. We moved around by night and, by day, hid and catnapped in thickets outside villages where the leader of our band, a tall, gangly, mustached man called “the Sparrow,” rendezvoused with peasant collaborators.

Before we set out one evening, the Sparrow told us that at dawn we would reach a road where a Sandinista military convoy was expected to appear. He intended to ambush it. That night it rained torrentially, turning the ground to a mass of slick mud, and in the darkness I fell repeatedly. Before long I was completely covered in mud, and both my trouser legs had ripped all the way up to the crotch. They hung like a split skirt, and I felt miserable and ridiculous.

When we reached the road, the contras fanned out on a bluff, taking up ambush positions. The sky was just beginning to turn blue-gray. Everyone whispered and moved very softly.

I began changing out of my wet and ruined clothes. I took off my boots and socks and had just put on my spare trousers when a terrifying noise erupted. I looked up and, directly above my head, saw red tracer fire sweeping through the trees. It took me a moment to comprehend that we were being ambushed and that everyone around me had vanished. Getting ambushed is a shocking occurrence. When you’re with people lying in wait, you have a sense of immunity to harm. But that was all turned around in a deadly second.

I finally spotted Jim and the others hiding in a shallow trench nearby, urgently motioning me to run and take cover with them. These instructions bewildered me; I still hadn’t put on my socks, and I was determined to do so. So I yelled, “But my socks!” In that moment I learned a lesson that’s served me well ever since: War, in all its manifestations, is essentially about fear—your own fear, collective fear, and how you handle that fear. Nobody knows until they’ve been under fire how they’re going to react. In my case, the sock fixation was a form of shock.

Jim shouted something back, but I couldn’t hear him over the gunfire. “What?” I said. He yelled back, but his voice was again drowned out. This exchange went on for what seemed like a long time, until I finally understood him telling me to run. I ran, barefoot, joining Jim and the others in the trench. When I got there, I realized that I’d brought my socks but left my boots behind. Jim retrieved them for me. And then we all ran like hell for the next five hours; we didn’t stop until we reached the safety of the Honduran frontier.

Surf or Die

Chewed up and spat out by the world's most ferocious wave

JAWS WAS A CIRCUS, spewing 60-foot waves like Neptune was on a rampage. This was last December 15, and a dozen tow-in teams were battling for position at the famous monster break, off Maui’s north shore; 50 more jet skis and a half-dozen boats sat in the channel watching; and five helicopters were flying overhead. No one was following any rules, but despite the crowd my partner Ryan Rawson finally whipped me into a six-story bomb.

The 14-pound board I’d been testing in 30-foot California surf was way, way too light, and I couldn’t hold the line. I fell, and I knew I was in for the beating of my life. I closed my eyes, went Zen, and… baboom!—the wave exploded on top of me.

When I surfaced 20 seconds later I saw a dude on another 60-footer breaking right in front of me. I took a deep breath and dove, but I had two problems: the pair of life jackets I was wearing. I couldn’t get under. My legs were sticking out, so I got “scorpioned”—folded in half backwards, my left heel ramming into the back of my head—while being dragged underwater for about 150 yards. For 30 seconds, it felt like King Kong had me by the feet and was just going apeshit rag-dolling me. I relaxed and took a dozen breaststrokes, but I was still down deep. Stars flashed in the corners of my eyes. I finally broke the surface, gasping for air. A film-crew chopper buzzed overhead, and I thought, I’m saved! But they just sat there filming me die. I prayed for them to harpoon me in the leg and fly me away.

Then the third wave hit. I figured since I was so far in, it would be weaker. Wrong. I surfaced, my left eye temporarily blind from the impact. When Ryan finally came around to pick me up, I thought it was over, but that warm and fuzzy feeling soon vanished. The fourth wave avalanched us both off the jet ski. I came up and saw Ryan swimming, about 30 yards away, with yet another big wall of whitewash pounding down. The rocks were straight ahead. That’s it, I thought, but someone—I still don’t know who—rescued me.

Back on the boat, I hurt everywhere. Squirming with pain, my knee wrapped in ice, I popped a heavy painkiller and chugged a couple of beers. Then I sat back and watched, dazed and confused but wishing I could shake it off and get back in the game.

I’d sustained a concussion, hyperextended my back and hip, yanked a ligament in my knee, and had my ego shattered. I surfed Jaws again last March—and used a heavier board.

Pinto Mean!

The perils of raising a grumpy colt

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I WAS A GRAD STUDENT in northwestern Florida in 1990 when a breakup with a girlfriend exiled me and the dogs to a trailer on several acres in the country. Wandering the adjacent Apalachicola National Forest one afternoon, I encountered a lone horseman, Stetson pulled low, .22 snugged in a scabbard, a string of bloody squirrels dangling from his saddle. My yapping mutts craved those rodents, but the rider reined in his mount, wheeled, and scattered the dogs. Then, with a terse nod, he moved on, like a knight of true country can-do. I wanted what he had: competence, confidence, mastery. At least, I thought, I could get myself a horse.

I found a real beauty—and cheap—a pinto colt with mismatched eyes: one dark, one lunatic blue. I called him Kidd, but from the get-go my equine scion reminded me all too much of myself, the big crybaby. He whinnied for his lost mother all that first day and night, blubbering in the corner of the pasture, and he clung to his resentment as he grew into a half-ton adolescent.

Despite his no-account ways, I made a mount of him—but soon found that galloping a spooky, green horse was an excellent way to break your freaking neck. And he was no fool. He knew my dogs’ deal: no work, nobody sitting on them. After a ride during which I was stuffed into a turkey oak, I threw in the towel and let him chase trucks along the fence with the rest of the pack.

Around this time I began to receive sinister phone calls. Some of my students, disgruntled and dark-intentioned, had to be behind them. I was teaching five freshman English classes—badly—and my dissertation was overdue. My life was a mess. Yet I took great comfort in the proximity of the big beast. Hunkered down in my studies, I’d hear the trailer suddenly begin to crackle like a beer can crushed in a fist. But it would just be the Kidd, scratching his ass with my house.

Returning from school one day, I saw the screen door hanging from one hinge and the front door gaping. My God, I thought, they came for me! Vengeful students! Terrible paranoiac fear gripped me, and behind every tree I suspected maleficent laughter being muffled. Everything—everything—had been dashed and smashed. Such spite! Broken glass, groceries shredded and busted, my possessions torn, strewn, and stomped. Stomped! The den had been more perfunctorily trashed—but unmistakably signed, as it were. On the shag, a halo of bluebottle flies buzzing above, lay a great steaming pile. Of horse manure.

So much for competence, confidence, and mastery. I found the culprit at the very back corner of the property, dozing the doze of the righteous.

Snowplowed

A guided tour through an avalanche, where fear and fascination collide

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

IT LOOKED LIKE A HEARD of white buffalo stampeding down on me. I just had time to yell down to the others, “Avalanche! Hang on!” before it hit me with the force of 10,000 pillows. It was shockingly painless. I catapulted backwards, and my mechanical ascender held briefly to the fixed rope. Then it snapped and I sailed off into space.

Five of us were climbing 20,298-foot Parchamo, a Nepalese peak about 30 miles west of Everest. For the past ten days we’d been trekking up the Thame Valley to reach our 18,500-foot high camp, on the Tesi Lapcha Pass. Now we were going for the summit, and my altimeter had just clicked over to 20,000.

I accelerated to the speed of the avalanche and could do nothing but softly tumble, arms and legs flailing. In spite of my speed, time slowed. I traveled deep inside the mass. Snow pressed me down and held me up. I thought, This is different.

I had time to understand that it was beautiful. The light was a soft translucent blue that became brighter or darker depending on my depth. I never saw sunlight, but could periodically see the surface. The snow looked like tumbling blue dumplings. I watched as one large block skidded beside me for what seemed a long time. It was squarish at first but disintegrated as it slowly rolled over, then veered away. The snow blocks were not malevolent. It was as if they were escorting me, emotionless companions, as we traveled together on the road to hell.

I didn’t think I would die, but I hoped I wouldn’t. This thought never left my mind. Objectively, I realized I could die; subjectively, I wouldn’t allow it. I had to live. Plummeting, I fought to reach the surface, but I couldn’t. I forced my head up and gasped for air. I’d fight until my last breath.

Ultimately we slowed. The deceleration happened suddenly but softly, like a truck plowing into a snowbank. I was facedown, headfirst, thinking, Uh-oh, dead people stop facedown.

Then there was a second surge and I was propelled forward again. It flipped me over and sideways. We lurched to a stop with an audible crunch, the first sound since impact, and I finally saw daylight. I wasn’t surprised to find myself on the surface, but I did feel an eerie satisfaction. I had been swept a thousand feet down and now lay at the very toe of the slide. My ride lasted perhaps 30 seconds.

The fight left me exhausted, with that creepy feeling of coming out of anesthesia. With the little strength I had left, and before the snow totally cemented me in, I struggled to free my arms and legs. I lay as if on a crucifix, arms spread wide, hips high, back arched inelegantly. After freeing myself from my pack and digging out, I realized that I was alive—and alone.

The fleeting rush of having survived was preempted by concern for the others. I saw one friend partially buried nearby and dug out his face. I thought surely some of the others were dead, and I held my head in my hands, inconsolable and utterly spent. But slowly, miraculously, everyone was found or dug out. As we collected ourselves and what was left of our gear, I glanced at my watch: It was 7:45 a.m. The day had barely begun, yet it was already defined for a lifetime.

Itchy and Scratchy

When nature calls in the woods, think before you reach

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I LEARNED TO DEFECATE in the woods while I was still in single digits. Our small Wisconsin farm was surrounded by hundreds of acres of swamp and forest, and my siblings and I were often out of washroom range when the urge struck. We became precocious connoisseurs of organic cleansing media. Wipeability factors varied: Oak leaves gave good coverage, but their slickness limited absorption. Pine needles were worthless, even injurious, but had the benefit of smelling like tree-shaped air fresheners. Moss was fragile, soggy, and sandy, but had a decent swab factor. Finally, I can say without reservation that a fat handful of poison-ivy leaves did the job quite nicely. The initial job, that is. The sequelae, to use a physician’s term, were untenable.

I was 14, which, given my experience toileting alfresco, made my mistake doubly knot-headed. Grandpa had taken a passel of us to a riverside swimming hole. I still remember squatting in the bushes before jumping in, prospecting for leaves after it was too late to relocate. The only trees within reach were pines. I groped behind me and felt a clump of flat, wide leaves. Bingo!

It took a while for the itching to commence. Early on, while still in the water, I felt squirmy twinges of an intimate nature, but, hey, what’s new? Back home two hours later, I was race-walking around the living room, fully prepared to drop my shorts and do the naughty-puppy carpet scoot. Cross-eyed and panting, I racked my brain and reviewed the day. When I got around to reenacting the outdoor toity session, I blanched.

I wound up with such a blistering case that I was taken to a clinic for corticosteroid shots. The doctor also prescribed a topical cream and instructed my mother (a nurse) to apply it daily. Florence Nightingale herself wouldn’t have shown up for that gig. I spent a week sleeping on my stomach, fitful and straddle-legged. Standard bathroom procedure went out the window, replaced by a wincing gavotte in which I lowered myself to the seat, did the deed, drew a baking soda bath, and delicately cleansed and patted myself dry. One misstep and I would collapse into a seizure of spastic monkey-scratching. Years later I came across a poster in a print shop that said IT’S NOT THE BURNING, IT’S THE ITCHING, MAN! and I thought, Amen.

For a long time, the fact that I’d wiped my butt with poison ivy was my little secret. I have to believe Mom had her suspicions, even though I explained it away by saying I’d backed into the stuff while changing into my bathing suit. She kept a log of my childhood illnesses, and the entry for August 7, 1979, says, “poison ivy, lower trunk.” Delicately put, don’t you think?

Cannery Woe

A salmon butchery goes from bloody routine to living hell

BETWEEN JOBS A FEW YEARS BACK, I decided to work in a southwest Alaskan cannery in Dillingham, which is not so much a town as an open-air boat garage by a tent city near Bristol Bay. Shifts ran 16 hours, 24/7. I had not been on the slime line five minutes that day, my fifth, when I was pelted in the throat with a salmon heart. It lay near my boot—a fleshy, violet organ the size of a Concord grape. Across the conveyor belt, a man steeped in piscine vital fluids grinned. “Come on, take a shot,” he said. “Have some fun or you’ll lose your fucking mind.”

Back then I was a great believer in easy money. One day a friend had said he’d gotten a little bit rich gutting salmon in Alaska—and it was a piece of cake. He’d told me to expect “at least five grand.” I’d bought a plane ticket instantly. My new job (cake, indeed, compared with a slot at the beheading station, where a guy had just chopped his hand off) involved wielding a dildoesque wand, vacuuming blood from the spines of flayed fish at a rate of 80 tons per day. The goo bore a disquieting resemblance to blackberry preserves, and the gelatinous rattle it made as the chrome tool inhaled it kept my gorge on the rise.

To ease my horror at having cashed in my summer for a life of gore-strewn monotony, I chatted up the girl beside me, who eviscerated her salmon with a vigor I admired. Her face was luminous with scales, and she wore a skein of golden roe in her hair. I tried to curry her sympathy by showing her my hand, swollen big as a catcher’s mitt from endless vacuuming. She looked at me and said, “I guess this work is tough—if you’re a pussy.”

The shift ended, and my colleagues and I, looking fresh off a Haitian-zombie-powder binge, dragged ourselves to our tents. But sweet sleep was impossible. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds roared under the rain fly. Next door, a couple, unhappy with how their Alaskan “vacation” was turning out, screamed at each other for hours before being interrupted by some bad news: The cannery had announced it was going bankrupt.

The whole place went insane. Armed fishermen stormed the offices. Someone boosted a front-end loader and tried to ransom it for lost wages. With nothing else to occupy them, the drunks and felons I’d worked alongside passed the time by rioting and assaulting one another. Fearing for my life, I skipped town.

I was never paid a cent for my labors, but the experience did no irreparable damage—except to my faith in the notion of a fast buck. My bloated hand returned to normal, and with a lot of scrubbing I banished the slaughterhouse aroma from my skin. I rarely think back on those days, but at the occasional dinner party, when somebody serves me a salmon puff or a lox crostini, I quietly push my plate away, as if there were a scorpion on it.

Belly Dance

Loose of bowels and out of luck in North Africa

FOR A WEEK I’d been laid up in Jerba, a run-down resort isle on Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast, with a ghastly stomach bug that had liquefied my innards. Even so, I was determined to visit Tataouine before leaving the country. This dusty southern settlement at the edge of the Sahara is renowned for its ksours—ancient Berber strongholds built into the rocky hillsides—but Star Wars nerds know that it sits in an area filled with locations used in the first movie. I wanted to go there and poke around. “Tataouine is only a two-hour drive,” I whined to my traveling partner, my then-wife Jackie, as a Jerban doc named Borgi poked my distended gut and scribbled a prescription.

Next morning, I gulped down a handful of mystery pills, rented a car, and hit the road. By the time we got to the vicinity of Tataouine, I was so cramped and feverish that we scrapped plans to return to Jerba and decided to make the daylong trip to Tunis, the country’s bustling capital, in search of an English-speaking physician and a decent hotel.

On a barren stretch of highway, our car’s oil light flashed red. I pulled over and yanked the dipstick: not a hint of oil. Another mile and the engine would’ve seized. After a 25-minute walk in the blistering sun, we found a rickety roadside kiosk. A freshly slaughtered goat hung from the awning, its blood pooling in the hot sand. On a shelf behind the counter I spotted motor oil, which the merchant happily sold me for about $10 a quart.

In Tunis, we checked into a hotel and I set out to return the car, braving the Tunisian rush hour, a snarling mayhem of cars, buses, motorcycles, and pedestrians. Two blocks later, a bus bashed my left front fender. The driver leaped out, waving his fist and shouting in Arabic. His passengers were irate, shrieking and pointing at me. After jotting down a phone number, he darted back to the bus and drove off.

The car was barely drivable. I parked in an alley and staggered to the rental office, making several stops at restaurants along the way to relieve my tumultuous bowels. Nobody at the car place spoke English or grokked my stick-man drawing of the accident, so I indicated to one of the agents to follow me. When we reached my car, it had been booted. The agent scolded me in Arabic, shoved the car keys in my breast pocket, and ran away.

By now it was dusk, and I felt utterly helpless. I returned to the car office and pleaded with the agent to help me, but our language barrier was insurmountable. Rational thought ended right there. I hurled the keys, dashed out the door, and sprinted the eight blocks back to our hotel in the dark.

Breathless and frantic, I told Jackie to pack. We barricaded ourselves in the room, certain that the Tunisian police were scouring the streets for the evil, auto-smashing Americans. At dawn we flagged a cab to the airport. Three hours later we were in Geneva, and by morning I was cheerfully handing stool samples to a Swiss doctor. He wondered why we ever went to Tunisia in the first place. Damned if I could remember.

Kamp Soggy Bottom

Atop storm-raked Mount Washington with a big, useless drip

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I WAS 16 AND TRAPPED in a thunderstorm on a mountain known for some of the worst weather in the world. Next to me a grown man lay sobbing, whimpering, pounding the mud with his fists. He was my counselor.

It was 1987, and I’d been sent to a tough-love camp in Vermont, a place where they promised to teach resourcefulness and self-reliance. The camp had dispatched us—seven teenage boys plus a pudgy career graduate student I’ll call Wayne (the mud-hugger)—on a three-week hike through New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Things went bad right away. Wayne was clueless, so we’d lost the trail and wolfed down all our rations. Next it started raining—first a drizzle, then a deluge. After three nights in a wet sleeping bag, Wayne was talking to himself.

“Yo,” one of the campers whispered. “I think Wayne’s lost it.”

“Give him time,” I said, feeling increasingly unglued myself. “Maybe the rain will stop.”

It didn’t, at which point the expedition, strung out by hunger and the gathering dread that none of us would ever know dryness again, descended into madness.

On the worst day, halfway through, we reached the top of Mount Washington, the 6,288-foot peak that, according to The Guinness Book of World Records, is the site of the highest sustained surface wind speed ever recorded (231 miles an hour).

As we summited, the rain broke, and a complex of buildings—a mountaintop observatory and cafeteria—materialized in the thinning fog. Desperate and dehumanized, we invaded the cafeteria like crazed animals, foraging in the trash for soggy French fries and half-chewed pizza crusts, slurping ketchup straight from the packets, and raiding the salad bar with bare hands. Meanwhile, Wayne telephoned the camp director and tried to weasel out of the last ten days of the hike.

“Suck it up and get back on the trail,” the director barked. Which we did, just in time to get walloped by a reconstituted storm that seemed like a Hollywood special effect.

“Run!” people on the trails shouted. “Find shelter!” When the storm climaxed in a fusillade of breathtakingly close lightning bolts and hurricane-force winds, we were still above tree line, scrambling to get off a naked ridge. That was how I ended up hunkered in the mud, next to an all-but-catatonic Wayne.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he whined. “I want to go home.”

“I know,” I said.

That night, when I crawled inside my wet sleeping bag, I’d absorbed an important lesson about self-reliance: Adults aren’t actually in control, and they can be just as weak as children. The next day the sun came back, and it didn’t rain again the entire trip. Wayne, however, was no longer our leader. He was just another body on the trail, and when the hike was over and we returned to camp, he quietly slipped away.

Incoming!

On El Capitan, there’s nowhere to hide when things fall from the sky

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

WHAT ARE THE ODDS? That one man’s bare behind, hung off the Long Ledge bivouac near the top of Yosemite’s El Capitan, could deposit all its foulness directly on our heads, with us 600 feet lower and dangling from our ropes? I mean, really, when you consider the powerful crosswinds, the ubiquitous updrafts, and the rather loose character of most big-wall bowel movements, it’s got to be one in a million.

But that’s exactly how it happened. My two climbing partners and I were 2,000 feet off the ground, three days into a five-day ascent of the Salathé Wall, widely considered the finest pure rock-climb on earth. Reuben Margolin, our mad and jovial visionary, had just led a very hard pitch, and I stood a rope length below, with our Fish haul bag and our steely-eyed enviro-warrior, Jonathan Kaplan. Then we heard a whistling sound, the terrifying evidence of an object hurtling down from above. Instinct told us it had to be a rock, so we hugged the cliff and awaited the worst—and the worst certainly came, though it took the form of countless fecal asteroids splattering across our heads and shoulders.

Stunned, Jonathan and I stared at the wet brown pie on the bright-red nylon top of our haul bag. Our next bath was 48 hours away. We had no soap, water was in short supply, and that instant hand-sanitizer stuff hadn’t even been invented. So we were screwed, and we suddenly started screaming like stuck pigs, cursing the careless bastards high above and then cursing them some more. After that we dug out a pocketknife to cut every soiled sleeve off our shirts and to snip big locks from each other’s hair. With a few lukewarm drops of water we made a hopeless attempt to scrub the fresh human feces from our already filthy skin, and then we did the only thing we could do: We climbed onward, muttering bloody murder.

But the next evening, when we reached Long Ledge, we found something surprising: a plastic bag with an apologetic note (SORRY, DUDES, WE DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE THERE) and a peace offering that included a box of Lemonhead candies, a can of chicken meat, and a joint. We had plenty of treats of our own, and I’d stopped smoking pot in the 11th grade, but I loved the gesture. Lame though it was, it conjured the guilt they must have felt, their sense of common cause with us, and the bond we still shared, simply for having been on that spectacular wall at the same time, together.

Tour de Farce

Some mountains just want to be left alone

AS AN ADVENTURE PHOTOGRAPHER, every time I take a trip, I’m thinking, This could be the one, the one that makes a million bucks, the one that brings fame, fortune, enlightenment—something. In April 1997, I was part of a group that got permission to traverse the Rishi Gorge, in the Indian Himalayas, and ski 23,360-foot Trisul, where no foreigner had been in at least 15 years. A dream trip.

The plan was to take the peak’s mild north face, but when we got to Delhi a bureaucrat informed us, “You will climb from the other side.” Instead of powdery slopes, we’d be attempting sheer icefalls on the weather-whipped southwest face. With skis. We decided to go for it, cramming seven of us, a cook, a helper, two drivers, a guide, and a month’s supplies into a minibus.

Two days later, we were in Rishikesh, where the Beatles got enlightened. I was in my hotel room when a friend hit the floor—face first. Seizure. Holy shit! Turned out he wasn’t just your typical party animal/ski junkie; he was literally a heroin addict, and he’d quit cold before we left. Maybe he thought the trip would cure him—I don’t know. But as we’d been going up the mountains, he’d been going into withdrawal. We nursed him back to health and moved on. It’ll get better in the mountains, I thought.

But this was just a taste. One day everything self-destructed. We’d made base camp early and sent the porters packing—with our gear. Supplies had disappeared. One group had stolen our kerosene; in the distance, we saw them furtively leaking it to lighten their loads. A while later, smoke wafted up from the valley below. They’d started a wildfire with our fuel! Whether it was the result of sabotage—two of them had been savagely bickering—or a cigarette, we never found out. We watched in horror as acres burned. Once we’re higher up, I thought, it’ll get better.

At 20,000 feet, we saw snow leopard tracks, and for about a minute it seemed like things might turn out OK. But the route was dangerous, the climbing over our heads, and most of our food had been pinched. As we ate our soy nuggets, we pictured the cook’s goat on a spit. Moving on, we soon saw that a huge slide had wiped out our route. Then monsoon clouds rushed in, as if on cue. That was it. Cursed! Our hearts just weren’t in it anymore. We never even saw the summit.

Vanquished, we returned to camp, where the cook dispatched his goat. Within ten minutes we finally saw the sign that told us once and for all to get the hell out of there. It was a sign in the heavens: lammergeiers, vultures with ten-foot wingspans. They knew dead meat when they saw it.

Paddling Fool

On the dark waters of Brooklyn, only a nut goes out at night

I WAS HOME ALONE some years back on a gray and misty Halloween. My girlfriend had gone to Manhattan, leaving me to face the sticky-fingered procession of ghosts and goblins ringing our doorbell. Fifteen lollipops later, I desperately needed to get away, so I bolted to my kayak club, on the western edge of Brooklyn’s Jamaica Bay, for an early-evening paddle.

Jamaica Bay consists of nearly 10,000 acres of brackish water crisscrossed by shipping lanes, and this time of year I usually stayed off it past 4 p.m. Wise policy. I was about five miles out, feeling smug and at peace, when a ghoulish fog descended. In about five minutes I was lost—with no food, water, compass, or foul-weather gear.

Two hours of fruitless meandering later, the sound of traffic drew me to a garbage-strewn beach. I emerged dripping from the shadows, paddle in hand, and slouched toward the road like an escaped kayaking felon. I should have flagged down a car, but as I hopped in place under a streetlight’s spooky glow, I hesitated. Assuming some naive or bizarre soul would even stop to pick me up, would I want to get in? Besides the risk of meeting Hannibal Lecter, it would mean leaving my expensive racing kayak unprotected in a neighborhood of high funk.

Several cars sped by before I spied the flashing red light atop the World Trade Center. Ha! I knew that if I paddled toward the beacon on top, I would hit my home channel. So I jumped back in the boat and started hammering.

Unfortunately, at water level the light vanished, and I ran smack into a labyrinth of islands. Wending my way through the narrow channels like a nearsighted lab rat, I ran aground.

As I pulled my boat through knee-deep mud, a hard rain began to fall. The temperature was 44 degrees Fahrenheit, and I was in shorts and a T-shirt. I blundered onto a hummock and started running in place to warm up. I ran all night, in ankle-deep water. When the rain finally stopped, just after dawn, I sat down and nodded off, head between my knees like a Bowery bum.

I eventually pulled up to the dock at 8:30 a.m., 15 hours after I set out. Standing there were my parents, the commodore of my kayaking club, a few law-enforcement types, and my girlfriend. Do you recall the scene in The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs of Tom Sawyer when Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper come back from the dead and everybody’s happy? Well, I didn’t get much “happy.”

The commodore said it best: “It’s not easy to break that many rules on one paddle. Nice going, dipshit.”

Bleak Streak

Trapped! On the tundra! and having a cold, hard time…

A FEW YEARS AGO, a magazine approached me to write about a quirky and very rich British adventurer who was determined to cross the ocean by car. He planned to put in at the Bering Strait, a 53-mile-wide gap of ice-choked sea. The story sounded like fun—Shackleton meets Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—and I went to the British countryside to observe a test of the adventurer’s customized floatable steed, which looked like a Zamboni mounted on barrels. I should have known something was off. The vehicle entered a farm pond and sank. I spent two days standing in a muddy field while the adventurer, undaunted, struggled to drag the machine ashore. I petted some sheep.

Two months later, I arrived in a tiny Inupiat village on the strait. In short order, I learned that the adventurer had offered a documentary film crew exclusive access to his trials and triumphs, and that my presence in the village was little welcomed. I was tempted to high-tail it home, but the weather—lashing horizontal winds, whirling snowdrifts, sub-zero temperatures—meant that planes could be grounded for weeks.

No doubt the remoteness of the setting influenced my mood. But I experienced a crushing flare-up of the kind of childhood wound that comes from being left off the team. I had some practical problems, too. The adventurer and his crew had taken over the only guesthouse in the village—the weapons-studded compound of a bearish Vietnam vet—and I wandered the outpost’s single lane in search of accommodation. A sorrowful-looking man of around 40 opened his door to me. His name was Echo. He could offer me an old, stained mattress on the floor of a storage room. It was as cold as a meat locker.

I liked Echo. He was as depressed as I was. He spent his days in a monotony of idleness. At night his friends would drop by and play cards until dawn, chain-smoking. I smoked a good deal, too, and did nothing to discourage the card players’ mockery of the adventurer.

So it went, until one morning, a few weeks into my stay, I woke to find clear skies and still winds. I strayed from Echo’s house and trudged to the frozen beach. The sea looked like the world’s biggest, most dangerous Slurpee. I was elated to be outdoors, and to know that the clear skies meant my plane would come soon to take me away. I decided to celebrate by climbing the hulking, ice-encased mountain at the edge of the village.

The footing was a bit tricky, but as I climbed, the view of the strait was glorious. I saw Russia, floating on the sea below. That’s when I slipped. My boots flew out from beneath me. I slid, and kept sliding, and accepted that my last moments on earth would be spent as a missile sailing across tundra.

A few hundred feet down, my backpack got snagged on some stones, and I came to a halt. I traversed the slope on all fours in search of a safe place to stand. In this proud posture, I heard a sound overhead. It was the adventurer, hovering in his helicopter. He shouted down to me. “You OK, mate?” I gave him a thumbs-up. He looked toward me with his toothy, charismatic smile. “Join us for dinner tonight, mate?” I nodded and waved him on. Then I crawled back to the village, packed my bags, and whiled away the night with Echo, the card players, and a giant bag of Doritos.

Tragic Tomes

Great books about bad luck

1907:
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo , by John H. Patterson — Two lions savage a railroad work gang in East Africa.

1919:
South , by Ernest Shackleton — His ship crushed by ice, the explorer rescues his men from certain doom in the Antarctic.

1939:
Wind, Sand, and Stars , by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — Tales from the pioneer of perilous flights across the Andes and the Sahara.

1955:
A Night to Remember , by Walter Lord — The RMS Titanic‘s final hours.

1974:
Alive , by Piers Paul Read — Stranded high in the Andes by a plane crash, Uruguayan rugby players survive by cannibalizing dead teammates.

1988:
Touching the Void , by Joe Simpson — Injured by a fall on the Andes’ 20,853-foot Siula Grande, climber Joe Simpson is dropped into a crevasse and must crawl down the mountain or die.

1992:
Young Men and Fire , by Norman Maclean — The 1949 Mann Gulch wildfire leaves 12 smoke jumpers in ashes.

1996:
Into the Wild , by Jon Krakauer — Chris McCandless walks alone into the Alaskan wilderness, destined to starve.

1997:
The Perfect Storm , by Sebastian Junger — The six-man crew of the Andrea Gail is lost in a deadly October 1991 nor’easter off Nova Scotia.

2000:
In the Land of White Death , by Valerian Albanov — In 1912, a Russian sailor, stranded in Arctic pack ice for 18 months, leads 13 men to seek help, but only two survive.

2000:
In the Heart of the Sea , by Nathaniel Philbrick — In the event that inspired Moby Dick, after the whaler Essex is destroyed by an 85-foot sperm whale, the crew resorts to cannibalism.

2001:
The Proving Ground , by G. Bruce Knecht — A storm decimates a fleet of boats in the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race, drowning six sailors in the Tasman Sea.

2002:
Over the Edge , by Greg Child — Kidnapped by Islamic guerrillas in August 2000, four American climbers plot their escape in Kyrgyzstan’s rugged Pamir-Alai Mountains.

2004:
Shadow Divers , by Robert Kurson — A World War II U-boat wreck becomes a deadly seven-year obsession for a diving crew.

The post Let the Bad Times Roll appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

LAST WINTER, I came home from a trip to Panama hosting a worm. The parasite, which invaded my left ankle while I was reporting a story, had been living in me for about two weeks, and had suddenly become quite active. It was white and tiny—about a half-millimeter long—and it left a meandering, pus-filled track that looked like a piece of angel-hair pasta trapped under my skin. I discovered the creature while in the shower and showed it to my wife.

“What do you think?” I asked, still in my towel, proudly holding out my ankle.

“It’s revolting,” she said. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

“How do you know it won’t lay eggs in you, or migrate to another part of your body, like your brain?” she asked.

Decent questions. I went off to find answers, relying on that old, trustworthy medical source, the Web. I quickly found a site devoted to exotic skin maladies and diagnosed myself with “creeping eruption” caused by Ancylostoma braziliense, a hookworm that normally lives in dogs and cats but sometimes invades humans. The site featured photos of A. braziliense, blowups that revealed the creature to be a sort of Hollywood alien, eyeless and toothy, with a menacing black vortex of a mouth.

Was it gross? You bet. Was it dangerous? It seemed not. Humans are accidental, dead-end hosts for A. braziliense, noted eMedicine.com. The worm isn’t equipped to suck blood or lay eggs inside the intestines of humans—they can only do that in dogs and cats—so I probably wouldn’t suffer much harm.

I put off going to the doctor. Meanwhile, the worm wandered with great energy, sometimes covering three inches a day. But this was not the George W. Bush of parasites. Instead of pursuing a path relentlessly, it flip-flopped and crossed over its own tracks as if it were blind, which, of course, it was. It often ended up exactly where it started, and never once did it roam into the ample spaces beyond my greater ankle.

Before long, I had a raging skin infection. My ankle blew up to the size of a softball and leaked prolific amounts of worm juice, a syrupy yellow pus that was as slippery as slug slime. At first I tried to conceal the mess, but as I quickly learned, parasites don’t necessarily make you a pariah. They can also make you popular. People wanted to see the worm, and a few wanted to touch it. After someone in my office snapped a digital photo and e-mailed it around, news of the worm’s existence spread far and wide. Soon, old friends I hadn’t heard from in years were writing to ask if I had given it a name. (Never got around to it.) My four-year-old nephew gave a report about the parasite to his preschool class, in which he bragged, “My uncle has a worm in his ankle!”

The cachet was so sweet, I began to grow fond of my worm. Many people I know who work in the tropics—whether they’re missionaries, scientists, or gold miners—like to tell horror stories about the afflictions they’ve endured: scorpion stings, trench foot, dengue fever, vampire-bat attacks. As soon as I could, I told everyone I knew about my little hitchhiker, and the response was unanimous: None of them had ever had a worm under their skin. They were jealous.

The only people who failed to appreciate the worm were my wife, who thought I was crazy not to get rid of it, and her mother, who was convinced that it was contagious and rushed to our apartment the day after she heard about it and scrubbed the floors with bleach. To reassure her, I paid a visit to my physician, Dr. Blanche Leung, who gave me a prescription for albendazole, a medicine that, she said, would screw up the worm’s metabolism and kill it.

“Then what?” I asked glumly.

“Probably it’ll just decompose and get flushed out of your body,” Leung replied. But there was also a chance for one last act of gross-out theatrics—the worm might bolt for the exit, so to speak, in which case I should prepare for the sci-fi scenario of a live worm wriggling out of my mouth or one of my nostrils. I could only hope it would happen at a crowded dinner table, under a bright light.

WORMS REALLY aren’t funny, of course. They infect one-fifth of the world’s population, quietly sponging off their hosts. Tapeworms, for example, live in the gut and can grow up to 85 feet without calling much attention to themselves, aside from the fact that—being parasites—they steal your caloric supplies, kind of like a deadbeat neighbor tapping into your cable-TV line.

My hookworm was similarly nonlethal: A. braziliense lacks the necessary enzymes to bore deep into the human body, scientists believe. But hookworms in general are serious threats.

One species is called Necator americanus—”American killer” in Latin, so named for the damage it did in the American South after the Civil War. Necator and related hookworms have largely been eliminated from the U.S. and other industrialized nations, but they still thrive in underdeveloped countries where the climate is warm. Peter Hotez, chair of the microbiology and tropical-medicine department at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., says hookworm infestation, then and now, is “a disease of poverty, a rural disease.”

The near-invisible larvae lurk in warm, moist soil or sand, infecting their host by penetrating the skin, usually through the soles of the feet. They travel through the bloodstream to the lungs, then they’re coughed up, swallowed, and wind up in the small intestine. There they suck blood, grow into adults, and produce massive amounts of eggs.

“The worm causes blood loss in the intestines,” says Hotez, who is developing a hookworm vaccine in partnership with the Sabin Vaccine Institute, in New Canaan, Connecticut. Health problems get particularly nasty, he says, when people harbor “a heavy load,” or between 40 and 160 worms. “When you lose enough blood, you get anemic, you experience fatigue,” Hotez explains. Communities where hookworm is prevalent tend to be economically disadvantaged, at least partly because of the debilitating effects.

The worms also have terrible impacts on children, in whom a heavy load can create protein and iron deficiencies that retard growth and intellectual development. In places where walking barefoot is common but indoor plumbing is not, it’s easy for kids to get infected. The eggs travel from the intestine to the ground and thrive as larvae in feces, which eventually get stepped on.

In the early 20th century, the hookworm plague in the U.S. was eradicated with help from a legendary public-health campaign led by John D. Rockefeller, the oil baron, in an effort that pounded home the virtues of sanitation. Hotez hopes to accomplish the same thing on a global scale with his vaccine, which is being heavily funded by another charitable industrialist, Bill Gates. The vaccine will be a two-stage antigen “cocktail” that triggers an immune response in the host. Clinical trials could start as early as next year.

“Hookworm is an international health problem of tremendous significance—some studies show that, in terms of numbers, only malaria causes more misery,” Hotez says. But because it’s primarily a Third World disease—and anti-worm vaccines and medications aren’t likely to make huge profits—the drug industry hasn’t paid much attention. “As with so many other diseases, there’s no incentive for a drug company to make a product, and for one reason: It doesn’t affect Americans.”

AFTER A THREE-DAY course of albendazole, I waited for the worm’s dramatic exit. And waited. But instead of leaving my body, the worm went AWOL. A week later, I was playing soccer when my ankle started to feel weird. I took off my shoe at halftime, and there it was, squiggling angrily, as if I’d awakened it. The albendazole nauseated me and made my urine smell like sulfur, but I suffered through another round of it. And again, the worm vanished, but resurfaced when I finished the pills.

It appeared I had an indestructible parasite, which didn’t bother me too much as long as it stayed in my ankle. My wife, however, was dying inside. “I can’t stand it,” she confessed. “I’ve never found anything in my life so disgusting. Please, get rid of it. I’m begging you.”

A Brazilian friend told me he knew exactly what to do. “Don’t bother with doctors,” he said. “This is a very common problem in Brazil. Just get a needle and some thread and sew a circle around the worm. Pretty soon he will have nowhere to go, and he’ll pop out of the skin all by himself!”

Ultimately, I went to see Dr. Kevin Cahill, a famous tropical-medicine specialist and president of the Center for International Health and Cooperation, in New York City. In 1959, Cahill, now 68, worked in the slums of Calcutta with Mother Teresa, and he later became known for his relief work in war zones like Somalia, Sudan, and Nicaragua. Today he treats seemingly all the foreign correspondents and diplomats in Manhattan. His office on Fifth Avenue is decorated with poison-tipped arrows and an antelope-skin quiver from a pygmy tribe in Central Africa, plus 16 of the 30 books he’s written on relief operations and tropical medicine. When Cahill himself appeared, he looked like a ship’s surgeon in Her Majesty’s Navy— small, cherubic cheeks, caterpillar eyebrows, and a dollop of white hair combed à la Horatio Hornblower.

“So you’ve got a worm,” he said cheerily. “Let’s see.” I pulled up my pant leg.

“Ha!” Cahill said. “There it is.” He cradled my foot in his hands and squinted. “Where’d you get it?”

“Panama,” I said.

“Of course, Panama. Good place to get one. You can put your shoe back on.” The doctor seemed less than impressed. I felt disappointed.

“Do you see this a lot?” I asked.

“Just saw an entire wedding party infected with creeping eruption last week. Twelve people. The ceremony was on a beach in India.” He patted his butt. “They were sitting in the sand, where the worm larvae like to hide.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Creeping eruption itself is not. But there’s always the chance that what you have is not creeping eruption but a condition called visceral larva migrans, caused by a similar worm. In that case, the parasite wanders through the body, looking for a home. It doesn’t find it in the bowels, it doesn’t find it under the skin. It wanders and wanders”—I thought I saw him smile, relishing the details—”until it reaches, very often, the back of the eyeball.”

I smiled wanly, feeling much less brave.

“A few times a year, I get a call from some surgeon who just removed a patient’s eye, and instead of finding what he expected to find—cancer, say—there’s a worm.”

“I see.”

“I can offer you a remedy,” he said. “A stronger parasiticide called thiabendazole. The tablets will make you sick, but they’ll do the job. Or you can see if the worm goes away on its own.”

I chose the medicine and began taking it that night, though I was on my way to a wedding in San Francisco. There would be partying and merriment all weekend, but I would lie in my hotel room, blurry-eyed and dizzy, writhing in agony as the chemicals coursed through my body and burned into my intestines, which felt as if they were dissolving in flames.

THE WORM FINALLY went away, after living inside me for five weeks. As soon as I felt the effects of the thiabendazole, I knew its run was over. By this time, all the novelty had worn off, and I was eager to see my ankle return to normal size.

Six months later, though, people still ask me, “What happened to the worm? Do you still have it?” And when I say no, some of them say, “Are you sure?”

In fact, I’m not.

Sometimes I feel a little tingle in my ankle and reach down to see if it’s what I think it is. Sometimes, if I’m running low on caffeine or if things look fuzzy through my smudged glasses, a tremor passes through me, and I have visions of a surgeon holding up an eyeball, calling out to the interns, “Look at this!”

“Would you feel a worm migrating through your body?” I asked Cahill during an anxiety-induced follow-up visit.

“I don’t think so,” he chuckled. For a second he reconsidered. “Well, you might.” Then he thought about it again and said, “No, it’s definitely too small.”

Not long after, I called Peter Hotez on my cell phone as I was driving on I-684 in New York. He happened to be meeting with—of all people—Adan Rios, Panama’s ambassador to the U.S. for health and technology, and he put me on a speakerphone so we could all talk. I pulled into a rest area.

“Where did you get your worm?” the ambassador asked. I told him my best guess: a fancy resort on the Pacific coast, where I’d gone barefoot on the beach.

“Oh, I know that place,” he said. “Excellent fishing there. Quite beautiful.”

“What can I help you with?” Hotez broke in. When I told him about my fears, he didn’t sound amused. “You know,” he said, “there’s a condition called worm psychosis.”

“Really?” I rolled up my car window to hear him better.

“Yes,” he continued. “People think they’re infested with worms. In fact, they think their bodies are literally overflowing with them.”

“And are they?” I asked, starting to get his point. “No. It’s all in their head.”

“Have you ever met these people?”

“Well, there aren’t many scientists out there who study worms, so I actually have worm groupies, people I correspond with, who e-mail me all the time. The interesting thing is, they’re not delusional in any other way. It’s just the worms. Sometimes they send me their worms, or what they think are their worms.”

“And what are they?”

“Nothing. Pieces of lint in a jar. It’s fascinating.”

I thanked Hotez, though at that moment I didn’t really feel thankful. The worm’s physical presence was gone—I truly believed that. But the creepy feeling—that sense of being inhabited—would always be with me. The worm was dead. Long live the worm.

The post The Worm and I appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

In Yaviza, a town of contrabandistas, barefoot prostitutes, and drunken men fighting in the streets with machetes and broken bottles, I'm spotted by two Panamanian policemen and ordered to the cuartel (barracks). It's noon on a Saturday, and I've just arrived in this forlorn 3,200-person trading outpost in the Darién Gap.

“Pasaporte,” demands the sour-faced officer at the cuartel. Taking it from my hands, he asks, “Americano?” Then he writes my name in his registry of visitors. “Have a seat,” he says. “The comandante is coming.”

Yaviza, 30 miles from the Colombian border, is famous for lawlessness—it's a magnet for fugitives, poachers, and bootleggers. Many of the restaurants openly sell sea turtle eggs (fried or scrambled), a prized but illegal delicacy. Put out the word that you want a blue-and-yellow macaw as a pet and eventually there will be a knock on your hotel-room door. Yaviza's whorehouses have long been favored by anti-government guerrillas from Colombia—indeed, a high-ranking rebel is said to maintain a pied-à-terre here.

So there's irony in being grabbed by the police. But the humor vanishes when the balding comandante, dressed in fatigues, shows up and tells me the whole area has been shut down.

“Shut down?” I ask. “Including Darién National Park?”

The comandante nods. “For security reasons,” he says.

The national park is what I have come to see. It's December 2003, and I've traveled 145 miles southeast from Panama City by a succession of rickety buses and farm vehicles. The 2,200-square-mile park, untamed and essentially roadless, sits like a lopsided U against the Colombian border. The rarely visited area, which makes for an impassible divide between North and South America, is a mystery zone within an extraordinary, much larger wilderness—the 10,000-square-mile Darién Gap. Stretching from the sandy shores of the Caribbean south to the rocky cliffs of the Pacific, the Gap begins just beyond the suburbs of Panama City and sprawls east, thickening as it goes, until it has erased all roads, all telephone lines, all signs of civilization, turning the landscape into one solid band of unruly vegetation filled with jaguars, deadly bushmasters, and other exotic wildlife.

The mere existence of such a throwback in the modern world suggests an inviolate timelessness. But as I learned in Panama City, the park is in trouble, jeopardized by its remoteness, the very quality that in the past has ensured its survival.

Indra Candanedo, a 38-year-old biologist in the Panama branch of the Nature Conservancy, introduced me to the possibility that the Gap might be eroding. As we sat in her office overlooking the capital's gleaming skyscrapers, she described a set of disturbing satellite images she had recently seen.

“It looks bad,” she said, noting that huge swaths of the park appear to have been deforested.

Candanedo couldn't be certain about this, because satellite imaging usually doesn't give a complete picture in places like rainforests, with their heavy precipitation and cloud cover. So why not check things out on the ground?

That option isn't so easy. Neighboring Colombia, just across a porous border, is one of the bloodiest countries in the world, making the Gap an intensely dangerous place. In the mid-1990s, following a spate of kidnappings and massacres related to the endless Colombian civil war, conservation programs and scientific research were drastically scaled back—at a time when the Gap was coming under increasing strain from landless farmers making new homesteads, slashing and burning to clear agricultural plots inside the park. Even Panama's own security forces withdrew, leaving large sections of the park unmonitored.

Candanedo, who had been the park's director in the mid-1990s, knew exactly how vulnerable it was, and she had enough information to be troubled. “You should see it for yourself,” she said. “If you can.”

The next day, upon returning to the cuartel in Yaviza, I find that the police have inexplicably changed their minds. I will be allowed to continue toward Darién National Park, provided I receive permission from the police in El Real, another tiny town that serves as park headquarters.

Leaving the cuartel, I walk to the Yaviza waterfront. In the shadow of La India, a raucous cantina adorned by a mural of a naked blonde, I make a deal with the owner of a dugout canoe and resume my journey, by river, into the heart of the Gap.

An “abyss and horror of mountains, rivers, and marshes,” in the words of one 16th-century traveler, the Darién Gap is Panama's Bermuda Triangle: a place where things seem to go wrong more often than everywhere else. As an old saying goes, the Spanish conquistadores defeated the Andes, the deserts, and the Amazon, but not the Gap, which foiled their advances.

The Gap is small compared with tropical wildernesses like the Amazon and the Congo. Yet it feels huge, with its slight population—roughly 100,000 people, half afro-Caribbean and half native Panamanian—mainly concentrated in isolated bush villages like Yaviza. In Panama and Colombia, it is known as El Tapón (“The Plug”), because it blocks the flow of human exploration. The Spaniards discovered it in 1502, founded their first mainland colony there, and then set the tone for centuries to come with a staggering atrocity: the murders, over an eight-year period starting in 1513, of tens of thousands of natives, many of them killed by vicious war dogs that attacked their villages.

By the late 18th century, the Spaniards, repulsed by the Gap's inhospitable environment, had left the region to rot in peace. Nourished by one of the wettest climates on earth—up to an inch of rain per day during the rainy season—Darién's jungle flourished unchecked, providing an ideal refuge for outlaws, pirates, runaway slaves, and fiercely territorial Kuna Indians. Over time the “myth of Darién” would arise from a series of spectacular tragedies, including the deaths, in 1699, of 2,000 Scottish colonists (from shipwreck, malaria, and starvation) and, in 1856, of seven explorers who became hopelessly lost on a U.S. Navy survey expedition. Canals were planned for the Gap, which is approximately 50 miles wide at its narrowest sea-to-sea point, but none were executed.

Today, having resisted five centuries of encroachment, the Gap may finally be running out of time. As environmentalists have stood by, helpless to get involved on the ground, a multitude of unseen enemies—poachers, poor farmers, refugees, small-scale timber companies—have been whittling away at its forests.

The question is, how did the situation suddenly get so precarious? Hoping to find out, and ignoring a U.S. State Department advisory emphatically discouraging travel to eastern Panama, I first visited the Gap in the summer of 2003, spent three weeks unsuccessfully trying to get inside Darién National Park, and returned twice in subsequent months. On each occasion I ran into the problem that has bedeviled outsiders from the start: access. Though not impenetrable, the Gap remains a formidable challenge to navigate. From Panama City there is only one road, the Pan-American Highway, which dead-ends in Yaviza. From there until Guapá, Colombia, some 90 miles away, there are nothing but mud tracks and footpaths.

The Gap is still a refuge for outlaws—only today, instead of pirates, there are the guerrillas and their ultra-rightist enemies, the United Self-Defense Forces, who are generally known as the paramilitaries. The guerrillas belong to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); they come to neighboring Panama not only for the nightlife in villages like Yaviza but to buy and stockpile weapons. (According to a recent report by the Rand Corporation, a nonpartisan California think tank, Panama has become “the single largest trans-shipment point” for the majority of small arms flowing into Colombia, “mostly across the densely forested Darién Gap.”) The paramilitaries, who are funded by Colombia's wealthiest landowners, come for the same reason, as well as to fight over a tremendously lucrative drug pipeline. The violent contest between these two groups constitutes the most urgent threat to the Gap today; the chaos they create prevents government and conservation watchdogs from doing their jobs.

Indirectly, their fight is also a threat to the United States. For decades the Gap has kept South American problems from spreading—not just illegal immigration but contraband and diseases that, while not exclusively South American, don't exist in the north.

“We let the jungle protect our border,” says Stanley Heckadon, 60, a Panamanian anthropologist and former head of INRENADE, the precursor to ANAM, the national government's top environmental authority. Since the 1989 U.S. invasion to topple General Manuel Noriega, Panama has been without an army, and until recently its police forces have had an unspoken policy of not confronting the Colombian militants.

Letting the Gap serve as a natural barrier “requires very little investment,” Heckadon adds. “And in the past, it has actually tended to work.”

A week before my trip to Yaviza, on my first foray into the park, I visited Jaqué, a village of a few thousand people where the guerrillas buy groceries and get their cavities filled. Jaqué lies 200 miles southeast of Panama City, just outside the national park, along a rocky section of Pacific coast marked by lengthy stretches of exquisite black cliffs. There are no roads nearby, and the government maps are covered with blank spots marked INSUFFICIENT DATA. As I flew in aboard the twice-weekly plane from the capital, I tried to keep track of our position, but all I saw was an endless span of green extending into the cloud-covered peaks of the local mountain range, Serranía de Jungurudó.

In the seat behind me was Julie Velásquez Runk, a 35-year-old graduate student from the Yale School of Forestry. A native of Detroit, Runk has spent much of the past seven years studying historical ecology in the Gap and living with the Wounaan, an indigenous tribe that dwells along its rivers. I'd asked her to accompany me so I could see the Gap through her eyes. Our plan was to find a guide with a boat, then ascend 20 miles up the Río Jaqué to the heart of the national park.

Our base was the Tropic Star Lodge, a strange outpost five miles west of Jaqué that was built in 1961 by Ray Smith, a Texas oil baron. The Tropic Star sits on secluded Piña Bay, circled by mountainous jungle. It's a Thunderball-style palace that offers prime access to what many consider the greatest sportfishing in the world. After Smith's death, in 1968, the property was sold to a series of gringos who converted it into a $1,000-a-night resort, popular with U.S. senators, John Wayne, and Saudi sheiks.

After settling in, Runk, with help from a Tropic Star employee, found a motorista to take us upriver. We'd been under way for anhour when we arrived at a police station. There, a double-chinned comandante told us, “No one without a permit goes upriver.”

So we turned around and found ourselves a poacher. Carlos, an acquaintance of a Tropic Star employee, is a 37-year-old refugee who fled Colombia after, he said, “the paramilitaries started cutting off people's heads” in his village. He'd been living illegally in eastern Panama for nine years, supporting himself by hunting, also illegally, in the park. He wore a cobalt-blue tank top that read STALLION in big letters; at his waist hung a machete.

Carlos took us an hour west by speedboat to Punta Caracoles, a peninsula jutting out from the national park that teems with bush dogs, tapirs, and other tenacious wildlife. I'd been told that only the park's residents could hunt inside it, but Carlos, who lives in Jaqué, told me, “If I don't hunt here, someone else will.” He grinned. “Besides, I only take a little.”

Environmentalists consider poachers like Carlos, who are wiping out entire populations of peccaries, howler monkeys, and tapirs, a serious problem. “The greatest threat to the park is not some big entity like a multinational conglomerate or a development project,” says Líder Sucre, the thirty-something executive director of the Asociación Nacional Para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (ANCON), Panama's largest nongovernmental conservation group. “It's the fact that the park is huge, its staff is small, and there are hundreds and hundreds of little guys whittling away at it.”

After landing on a stretch of white beach, we plunged into the forest along a well-cleared path, which made me wonder how many hunters use this area. “It's not necessarily people who keep the paths clear,” Runk said. “It could be white-lipped peccaries,” a two-foot-tall species of wild boar weighing as much as 60 pounds.

I looked at Carlos, who was sniffing the air. “Do you hear them gnashing their tusks?” he asked. All I heard were the waves crashing on Punta Caracoles.

“It's quiet,” I said.

“That's because the other animalitos are hiding,” said Carlos.

“Watch out if the peccaries come our way,” said Runk. “Climb a tree, do whatever you have to do. You don't want to be gored.” As much as the peccaries scared her, Runk was hoping we'd see them, because, she explained, “a large herd of white-lipped peccaries is an excellent indicator of healthy forest.”

“What's a 'large' herd?” I asked.

“Oh, 200 animals. You'll definitely know they're coming.”

Suddenly Carlos hissed for us to be quiet. We heard a grunt from the undergrowth, then a rustle of leaves, then something pawing impatiently at the ground. Carlos yelled, “Run!” Which he and Runk did, but my legs had turned to jelly. A streak of brown fur tore out of the bush and hit me squarely on the calf.

“What was it?” I yelled, looking down and expecting to see blood. But there was no wound. The animal, which must have weighed about ten pounds, wobbled dizzily back to the bush.

“I think it was a ñeque,” said Runk.

“A what?”

“A ñeque. A little mammal. Sort of like a big rat.”

I looked into the forest and saw the dazed ñeque, gearing up for another charge. Then I noticed Carlos, who was laughing so hard he'd almost fallen on his machete. “I should have cut off his head,” he said, gasping for air. An hour later, we came across a poacher's campsite, an empty lean-to made of palm fronds, with the hunter's underwear hanging from the roof. Next to it, a campfire smoldered, and Carlos found two burlap sacks stuffed with smoked peccary meat. “This is too much,” he frowned, taking out a fist-size chunk of the meat, which he tore into strips and passed out to us.

That afternoon, as we hiked eight miles farther into the park, we saw more signs of a healthy forest: the footprints of a jaguar, one of the five species of cat that lives in the Gap; an ancient palm called a cycad; and, back on the beach, a clutch of sea turtle eggs buried arm-deep in the sand. Runk decided that the forest in and around Caracoles was “doing more than OK.”

“I've seen forest that's in worse shape,” she said. “A lot worse.”

War can be good for the environment—sometimes. In Poland during World War II, the wolf population increased substantially, and the Vietnam War gave the Vietnamese tiger an opportunity to rebound. One obvious benefit of armed conflict is that it scares people away from forest they might otherwise destroy.

Because of its proximity to the equator and its location between the continents, the Gap features an unusual mix of creatures, such as crab-eating foxes, brocket deer, and pumas, as well as an extraordinary level of biodiversity that includes at least 2,400 plant species and more than 900 species of mammals and birds. “There's nothing like it,” says Líder Sucre, of ANCON. “No other rainforest in Central America is as well-preserved.”

The trade-off is that Panama lacks access to South America and has no control over its own eastern border. Thirty years ago, the U.S. government decided this was an unacceptable situation. It provided more than $100 million to build a section of the Pan-American Highway connecting Panama to Colombia. The rest of the highway was already complete, stretching from Alaska to the southern tip of Chile.

The physical obstacles were daunting, including swamps deep enough to sink a ten-story building. Nevertheless, it wasn't the terrain but a virus, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), that kept the project from going forward.

FMD is the doomsday plague of the livestock industry, an illness whose outbreak can shake global stock markets. Most recently, an epidemic of FMD ravaged England in 2001, causing more than $7 billion in economic losses. No cases of the disease have been reported in Panama, and the last U.S. outbreak occurred in 1929. But in Colombia, FMD was endemic during the 1970s and remains present today.

“If FMD were to invade Central America, it could have very rapid access to the United States,” says Harold Hofmann, 61, associate regional director of the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), an agency within the Department of Agriculture that's charged with protecting the U.S. food supply from pests and diseases. “Therefore, the government's plan is to keep it as far away as we can.”

Because of concerns about FMD, in 1975 the highway plan was challenged in court by groups including the Sierra Club. The project was eventually scrapped. Meanwhile, yielding to pressure from the U.S., the Panamanian government established Darién National Park, in 1981, as a way to carve out a cattle-free zone in the jungle. Today, APHIS's $4.5 million regional budget covers the salaries of 90 Panamanian livestock inspectors who patrol the country looking for sick cattle. It also funds the battle against another potentially catastrophic South American scourge, the screwworm, whose larvae consume the flesh of live cattle, which can lead to fatal secondary infections. To control the insect, the agency drops a sterile male version of it from airplanes, in batches of 40 million, over the region every week.

“If screwworm got loose in the U.S., the effect on producers would be about $800 million lost per year,” says Hofmann. “Foot-and-mouth would far exceed that. It's a very dangerous disease—something we all fear.”

The good news is that Panama remains free of FMD and appears close to eliminating the screwworm; the bad news is that over the past 15 years the jungle on the Colombian side has shrunk.

“There's nothing left but cattle ranches,” says ANCON's Sucre.

Meanwhile, the forest on Panama's side is dwindling, too, thanks to an influx of Panamanian farmers drawn by the opening of the Pan-American Highway from Panama City to Yaviza, in 1988. Since then, eastern Panama's population has doubled, and essentially every acre of forest not on a mountainside is in danger of being cut down or burned—which is what makes protecting the park so vital.

Twelve miles up the Chucunaque River from Yaviza, continuing my December 2003 journey from there by dugout, the owner of the boat drops me in El Real, a weirdly inert village where a smiling pig's head, bobbing in the river, greets me as I step on dry land. Eight miles west of the park boundary, El Real is the headquarters for 14 dedicated but pathetically underequipped guards charged with patrolling an area the size of Puerto Rico.

At the ranger office—a wooden building with several basketball-size holes in the floor and a network of old PCs, none of them working—I meet Jorge Vásquez, 38, a Kuna Indian and senior park ranger. Vásquez is sinewy like a high school wrestler, and endearingly oblivious to how odd it may seem that one's desk sits next to a hole in the floor. Initially he tries to be upbeat about the park's troubles. “We're doing great!” he tells me, though some of the rangers have gone months without paychecks, and their gasless speedboat sits on blocks outside the station.

Later, though, after a few beers at a cantina in El Real, Vásquez confesses his frustration. “We can't do our jobs,” he says. “We don't have the resources or the security. You can't protect a park if you can't get around in it.”

I tell him about the satellite images, and he says he has a pretty good idea where the deforestation is happening. Back at headquarters, he shows me a faded wall map. “See here?” he says, waving his hand over virtually the entire border. “This belongs to the guerrillas. It's too dangerous to patrol.” He points at a different region. “This belongs to drug traffickers. We can't go here, either.”

Sometimes war isn't so good for the environment. Before the guerrillas invaded the park, the rangers maintained three monitoring stations; now they have only one, a mountain retreat called Rancho Frío. The others, abandoned to poachers and contrabandistas, “haven't been visited in almost a decade,” says Vásquez.

Meanwhile, refugees from Colombia have been pouring across the border. According to the Vicariato Apostólico del Darién, a local charitable affiliate of the Catholic Church, about 5,000 Colombians have immigrated to Panama over the past seven years, more than 300 of whom currently live inside or near Darién National Park. Those inside form clandestine communities that the church has tried to protect, because there's a high risk that they'll be killed if the Panamanian authorities send them back to Colombia. Manuel Acevedo, a human-rights activist at the vicariato, concedes that the refugees are among those burning forest, and that during the dry season “the amount of smoke coming from the park is tremendous.”

Vásquez and I decide to hike into the park; miraculously, the El Real police give us permission. “I'm going to show you what an amazing place this is,” Vásquez promises.

We leave El Real on a dirt road that cuts through farmland and rows of spiny cedar, take a shortcut beneath some barbed wire enclosing a herd of cattle, and walk through several miles of scrubby undergrowth. Then we enter the park, and suddenly, dramatically, everything changes. The trees are bigger, of course: We see several specimens of roble, a prized hardwood, that might be a few centuries old. The atmosphere is dark, wet, even chilly; Vásquez points out the footprint of a puma. It's like walking into a dark room and realizing, when the lights come on, that you've stumbled into a cathedral. There's practically no need for trails, because the ground appears to have been swept clean. We are in one of the rarest of all jungle settings, a true triple-tiered canopy. “What do you think?” Vásquez asks.

“It looks like God's greenhouse,” I say.

An hour after sunset we finally reach Rancho Frío. We'll have to camp here, because the police at a local checkpoint have threatened to arrest us if we keep hiking. “How much farther to where the deforestation shows up in the satellite images?” I ask Vásquez.

“A lot,” he says. Vásquez is dour, and at first I think it's because of the station, which is dirty and abandoned. But, as I soon find out, he has something much worse on his mind. Last year, just a day's walk away from here, the paramilitaries invaded Púcuro, a hamlet on the park's boundary, where he grew up. During that raid they brutally killed his father, Gilberto Vásquez, 58, a village chief.

The incident began on January 26, 2003, during a coming-of-age ceremony in Paya, a Kuna village inside the park. The paramilitaries, disguised as guerrillas, entered the village and requested a meeting with the chiefs. At the meeting they turned their guns on the hosts and said they were going to punish the Kuna for helping the FARC. Two chiefs and an unarmed Kuna policeman were executed. Afterwards, the paramilitaries stole the village's livestock, killed its dogs, and mined its paths so nobody could get in or out. Then they started marching toward Púcuro, forcing Gilberto Vásquez to serve as their guide. Someone had already alerted Púcuro, however, and the village was empty. So the paramilitaries shot Vasquéz in the head inside his own house.

No Panamanian police officers were in Púcuro or Paya the weekend of the massacre. Since then, however, security has greatly improved—in Púcuro and Paya alone, the police have added 100 officers—a development that Vásquez calls “the one good thing to come out of the killings.”

Yet many find the changes disturbing. “Panama used to be neutral regarding Colombia,” says Eric Jackson, the 51-year-old publisher of a muckraking paper called The Panama News, in Panama City. “Now it seems it is starting to take sides with the paramilitaries.” Villages thought to be guerrilla resting and staging areas have been ransacked and burned—not only by the paramilitaries but also by the Panamanian police.

“The government doesn't want people to know what's going on,” says Manuel Acevedo. “And so no one does.”

Vásquez and I leave Rancho Frío and return to El Real. Along the way, we pass through a few hamlets and chat with the remaining residents. “Most people got scared and left,” says one resident. In one community, the only inhabitant is a toothless old woman tending chickens.

Soon, though, we come across an abandoned village that is starting to fill up again. “Who are these people?” I ask Vásquez.

“Colombians,” he says. “Refugees.” One of the residents waves at us. He's wearing rubber boots and holding a Stihl chain saw. In his backyard, a little pile of brush is already burning.

Several months after my Yaviza visit, in March 2004, I return for another look. As soon as I arrive, I call the police and request permission to fly over the park to investigate the deforestation. Four days later I'm told that the national director of police, Carlos Bares, is personally “indisposed” to my request, because of the security situation along the border.

So I phone a tour operator, ANCON Expeditions. Loosely affiliated with the environmental group ANCON, the outfit flies ecotourists to an abandoned gold mine as far inside the Darién Gap as you can get, just five miles from the Colombian border. The mine, known as Cana, is halfway up a 4,000-foot mountain and 30 miles from the nearest town. It's so isolated that the police consider it too much of a hike for the guerrillas, and therefore safe for foreigners. The only way to get there is by plane.

A few days after my call, I squeeze aboard a charter carrying 14 American birdwatchers to Cana. During the flight over the park, all I can see are clouds, mountains, and a lush lowland rainforest.

At the mine, a path leads into cloudforest, and along the way I can see over waves of razor-sharp ridges into South America. Nothing but a horizon-spanning canopy and layers of dark rain clouds fill the view. From here, crossing the Darién Gap looks as formidable as a trek across the Sahara.

During my first night at the Cana Field Station, a converted mining camp, I wake up at 1 A.M., having soaked the bed in sweat. The next day my temperature is all over the place, and a worker at the lodge discovers me shivering in bed. “Uh-oh,” he says. “Looks like malaria.” I later find out it's hepatitis A combined with amoebic dysentery. The Darién Gap has started taking a toll on my body—I've lost ten pounds—so I'm extremely happy when a plane shows up the next day to take me back to Panama City.

I've been expecting its arrival: I chartered it before I left Panama City. Shortly before takeoff, I beg the pilots to let the ten-seat Islander “drift off course” by a few miles, and fly at a lower altitude.

Once in the air, the Islander starts its usual route west before banking sharply to the north. Instead of climbing, it remains wafting above the treetops, buffeted by columns of warm air rising out of the jungle. A low ridge signals our entrance to the Tuira Valley, and suddenly below us lies the landscape that the police so determinedly tried to shield from our eyes—the area revealed by the satellite images as a minuscule yet potentially catastrophic fracture in the otherwise perfect seal of the Gap.

To be fair, it hasn't been turned into a wasteland. More than a few trees remain. Here and there, in fact, it appears that the ecosystem is already on its way to recovery. But one would never describe this landscape as “forested.” On the contrary, it appears indiscriminately and brutally cut, and in many places burned. Moreover, much of the destruction looks fresh—new fires burn below as we fly over.

Going back to at least the 1880s, when the U.S. Congress passed legislation calling for a hemispheric system of railroads, the end of the Darién Gap has been confidently and even gleefully predicted. But, like the oceans, the Gap's resilience seems endless—and yet, as with the oceans, we know it is not. Sometime during this decade or the next—without fanfare, almost certainly—a milestone will be reached. The last trees will go down and the first breach between North and South America will open.

“How far to the border?” I ask the pilots. One of them unfolds a map and measures the distance with his fingers.

“About 20 kilometers,” he yells over the roar of the engines. Roughly 13 miles. Thirteen miles of dwindling Gap dividing the hemisphere in two.

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