In June, Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz wrote an to his employees, calling the ski world “overwhelmingly white, with incredibly low representation from people of color,” and pledging to change that. Currently, just 1.8 percent of American skier days are logged by Black people, according to the . That number hasn’t risen in a decade.

But it might be a lot closer to zero were it not for the National Brotherhood of Skiers. Launched in 1973 with the mission of creating a national Black ski summit and attracting more Black people to the sport, the Brotherhood’s has seen up to 6,000 attendees gather in a premier ski town—Vail, Park City, even Innsbruck, Austria—for a week of revelry. There are giant outdoor feasts, rollicking on-snow dance parties, and all-night celebrations. Skiers in matching parkas perform choreographed mogul assaults. The organization also coordinates discounts on lessons and rentals for first-time skiers—the NBS calls them never evers—while its cadre of experts, the Sno-Pros, provide mentoring and tips.

The NBS acts as an umbrella group that unites 55 regional Black ski clubs scattered nationwide. With an all-volunteer staff and a $250,000 annual budget coming from donations, fundraising, and sponsors like REI and New Belgium Brewing, the group has received considerable media coverage, and has introduced thousands of Black people (both children and adults) to snow sports. It’s also supporting Black skiers and snowboarders hoping to make the U.S. Olympic team.

As the NBS moves into its 47th year, it faces a new set of challenges. Its founders—Ben Finley and Arthur “Art” Clay, now 81 and 83, respectively—have become legends, but the group’s membership has aged, without an influx of younger constituents. In March, the group made news after its summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, had a devastating encounter with the coronavirus—scores of members fell ill, . Now it’s wrestling with how to leverage the momentum of a national reckoning with racism.

Recounted in the voices of its own members, here is the story of how the NBS came to be, its accomplishments, and the direction it’s heading in the future.

The post An Oral History of the National Brotherhood of Skiers appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Free yourself from the shackles of reality for a moment and join me, please, in imagining a utopian ski area. Would there be 450 inches of fresh, fluffy powder each year? Absolutely! Would the lift tickets be free? Sure! And could we accord all lodge workers and hospitality staff commodious slopeside condos replete with tidy little woodstoves?

Certainly we could do that—in an imaginary world. In the real world, there’s freezing rain and boilerplate ice and, worse, the almost inexorable market forces that have caused too many ski areas to become elitist havens where Gucci and Prada stores crowd the base lodge and low-paid employees are obliged to schlep an hour out of town to find affordable housing. But what if somebody tried to create a ski utopia? And what if they waged their campaign in the hardscrabble hinterlands of western Maine?

, a Boston investment firm that specializes in shoring up struggling local economies, is doing just that. On January 31, Arctaris spent $6.5 million to purchase a beloved but troubled backwoods ski mountain—, which has been shuttered for the past five seasons. Arctaris plans to radically renovate the base lodge this summer. It’ll open the lifts in December and will eventually spend $38 million in hopes of turning Saddleback into a funky and humane nirvana, replete with affordable housing, fair compensation, day care, and bus transport for its workers—and also, yes, crazy-steep trails and a laid-back lodge where the PBR will flow at an amiable people’s price.

Arctaris’s Saddleback bid typifies an investment model that’s mushroomed since the term “impact investing” was coined in 2007Ìęto describe funds seeking to effect social change as they make money. The Global Impact Investing Network estimates that the market size boasts in such managedÌęassets. As other funds fight climate change and advocate for clean water, Arctaris, founded in 2009, has instead helped create about 200 jobs on Washington’s Yakama Indian Reservation by expanding a fiberglass plant, and also reopened a defunct paper mill in Michigan. In MaineÌęit hopes to breathe new life into the charming but financially challenged outdoor sports mecca that sits at Saddleback’s base—Rangeley, population 1,100—and indeed the whole of Franklin County,Ìęa sprawlingÌęexpanse of piney forests, snowmobile trails, and killer fishing holes that sits two and a halfÌęhours north of the nearest major city, Portland, and is home to 30,000 people, precious few wine bars or yoga studios, and many, many moose.Ìę

Arctaris will start by shelling outÌę$7.3 million to improve uphill capacity at Saddleback, which has a vertical drop of 2,000 feet and a storied glade called Casablanca that’s central to the mountain’s reputation as an authentic and uncurated gem. A creaky 1963 top-to-bottom double chair will be replaced by a new high-speed quad. An old T-bar will likewise give way to a spiffy new one, allowing the mountain to stay open on winter’s windiest days.Ìę

That’s just the beginning. The founder and managing partner of Arctaris, 47-year-old Jonathan Tower, who happens to be an avid skier, also aims to provide Saddleback’s projected 220 employees with a staffing program unique to the ski industry—one that would link winter employees to warm-weather jobs (say, as fishing guides or dishwashers) and also provide full-timers with 401(k)Ìęplans and health care benefits. The snowmaking pumps at Saddleback will, naturally, be powered by a soon-to-be-built solar-energy farm, per Arctaris’s plan.

If Arctaris operated within the confines of traditional ski-industry financing, its ambitious plan for Saddleback would be a pipe dream, especially when you consider the decrepitude of the ski area’s current lifts and the tangle of weeds growing on its 66 forlorn trails. Arctaris works outside the box, though. While it’s infusing Saddleback with $28 million of equity and debt, it’s also expecting $5 million from the feds through the , established by Congress in 2000Ìęto incentivize investment in low-income communities. Finally, it hopes to raise a total of $5 million from donors. (So farÌęit’s brought in $3 million from 250 parties. The largest donations were in the neighborhood of $400,000, coming from people whose families had been in Maine for generations and contributed without an expectation of return.) Saddleback is one of the first American ski areas to be wholly owned by an impact fund.

“A traditional private-equity firm wouldn’t have been able to make Saddleback profitable,” saidÌęTower. “An impact fund was the right fit.”Ìę

Tower concedes that profits will be a long time coming at Saddleback. “We don’t expect to realize the profit on our investment until we sell the mountain,” he said. “This is a seven-to-ten-year project.” Still, he’s hopeful. “When we got to Rangeley,” he said, “the prevailing winds were already blowing in the right direction. People really wanted the mountain to reopen.”Ìę

Remote and wild Saddleback has always functioned as a blank slate onto which ski-world idealists have cast their grandest hopes. First conceived by a group of Rangeley businessmen, who leased forestland belonging to a paper company in the late 1950s, it was initially billed as the ,Ìępromising long runs and deep snow. But its founders faltered: they opened a year late, in 1960, with but a single T-bar. A few lean snow years, followed by a Carter-era gas crunch, made Saddleback’s ride into the midseventiesÌęsomewhat uneven, financially speaking, and during one 18-year period, between 1969 and 1987, the mountain had six different owners.Ìę

When Donald Breen, a pharmaceutical kingpin from Massachusetts, took Saddleback over in 1987, he recast the resort as a yee-hawÌęwestern-themed wonderland, giving trails names such as Bronco Buster and Cowpokes Cruise. But Breen spent fighting the National Park Service, which attempted to take over the top section of Saddleback Mountain by eminent domain. (The Appalachian Trail winds across the summit.) Ultimately, anÌęNPS spokesperson told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, “a negotiated settlement was reached that met the needs of both parties.”Ìę

In 2003, Breen sold the place to Bill and Irene Berry, who harbored a health care fortune, and while the Berrys spent $50 million installing two shorter chairlifts, building trails, and fortifying snowmaking, they weren’t nimble enough to meet growing demand: when visitorship swelled in the 2010s, they never replaced that 1963 double chair—and lift lines grew to 40 minutes long. The Berrys, who are both over 80Ìęand owned the mountain with their seven grown children, abruptly shut the ski area down in 2015, disinclined to sink millions into replacing the the old chair with its meager uphill capacity.

An apparent white knight emerged in 2017, in the form of Sebastian Monsour, head of the Australian development firm Majella, who promised to build an eight-mile tram from Rangeley to the base lodge and “transform Saddleback into the premier ski resort in North America.”Ìę

Monsour cut the Berrys a $500,000 check—earnest money—and actually choked up at one public conference, proclaiming that he was reviving Saddleback as anÌęhomage to his late mother. But leaked to News Center Maine, an NBC affiliate,Ìęrevealed that at a Majella staff meeting Monsour said, “Opening the mountain is not a primary concern for us.” His main aim, he confessed, was to take advantage of the federal government’s , through which foreigners can attain green cards if they invest in a job-creating U.S. business. (The minimum investment was $500,000 in 2017; it now stands at $900,000.) Majella never bought Saddleback. Monsour is now facing in Australia.Ìę

Arctaris emerged in Maine headlines as a prospective buyer in 2018. In the months that followed, the citizens of Rangeley monitoredÌęacquisition talks in the local papers as Saddleback loomed above them, east of town, its curving, tree-lined trails a drain on the Rangeley psyche.Ìę

A logging town almost since its inception in the mid-19thÌęcentury, Rangeley has always been a tourist town, too. Hunters and fishers rode some of the earliest trains into Maine, and while Rangeley still has a strong logging industry, today most of its jobs come from tourism. Legions of snowmobilers visit every winter, and in the summer, Rangeley hosts big outdoor concerts (the Steve Miller Band played last year). Saddleback, meanwhile, is the cornerstone of the economy. In 2016, the year after the mountain closed, sales revenues in town dropped about 30 percent, according to some local business people, prompting a population exodus.Ìę

In its injured state, Rangeley was a perfect candidate for Arctaris’s help. “Every town Arctaris takes on has lost its major employer,” saidÌęTower. “We wanted to be part of the solution of bringing Rangeley back.”Ìę

Arctaris’s courtship of Saddleback was a cliffhanger, though. Closing was never a certainty, and Saddleback’s devotees had already waited and suffered for years.Ìę

As the Arctaris deal neared closing, the denizens of the ÌęFacebook group grew anxious trying to read the tea leaves of the abstruse negotiations. “This memo,” one wrote, noodling over a letter Tower wrote to a Rangeley conservationist, “would seem to point to the Arctaris deal being off.”Ìę

“No news is bad news!! Ugh,” wrote another awaiting an Arctaris update.Ìę

Arctaris did close on Saddleback, though, on Friday, January 31, and moments after, the faithful were drinking cold beer on the ski area’s deck—never mind that it was 20 degrees out. The next day, I left my home in central New Hampshire and began driving toward Maine.

I entered Franklin County on Route 16, which is thickly appointed with flashing yellow road signs warning of moose collisions. Off to my right was the frozen expanse of Rangeley Lake, its nearest shores a green blanket of spruce and firs, and spreading beyond that,Ìęthe old stream-riven stomping grounds of Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby, an intrepid 19th-century Maine woman who hunted caribou in the 1890s and then wrote a syndicated outdoors column that established Rangeley as a fly-fishing Valhalla—a destination that, even today, lures anglers to its half-dozen hotels in the high-season monthsÌęof May and June.Ìę

In Rangeley, I landed at Sarge’s Pub andÌęGrub, a onetime dive, recently renovated but still ground zero for raw Saddleback joy. I was 24 hours late for the unfettered pandemonium, but already the delight over Arctaris’s closing was flowing into new creative channels. Fifty-one-year-old bar manager Crystal Sargent, the daughter-in-law of Sarge’s owner, told me that she was putting together an all-female rock band to play at Saddleback’s launch party in December. A tall, angular woman wearing a blue Sarge’s hat topped with a pom-pom, Sargent was particularly proud of the name she’d devised for the band: Cougar Skyway. “None of us can play an instrument,” she said, “but we have a band, and we’re gonna start having band practice. I’m the lead singer, and Krista’s the lead guitarist,” she said, naming other Rangeley locals, “and Tyler’s the drummer. Oh, and Peggy is the bass player. You can’t leave her out. She’d be insulted.”

Somehow, Cougar Skyway struck me as significant. The project’s unrehearsed charm seemed to epitomize the down-home spirit Saddleback can bring to the ski world. Whether or not the idea for the band was a joke, in my heart, I was already holding a Bic lighter aloft for Cougar Skyway.ÌęSo I was happy when, the next day, I crossed paths with the band’s 29-year-old guitarist, Krista Jamison.Ìę

Jamison, who works as a realtor in Rangeley, told me, “Now that Arctaris closed, everyone wants to look at houses here.” Jamison added that, in recent years, her contemporaries have been fleeing Rangeley; the town has become grayer and stodgier. “But I think young people are going to come back,” she said. “They’ll want to start families here. There’ll be a new energy.”Ìę

Karen Seaman, the manager of Forks in the Air, a Rangeley restaurant, also sees the town rising out of dire straits. “Right now,” she said, “you just can’t hire people. Even in summer, restaurants here are closed two nights a week because they can’t find staff. If Arctaris offers employees year-round work and health insurance, that’ll be a huge draw for people.” Seaman told me, “I like how Arctaris is thinking.”Ìę

But to really register the new hope that’s blossomed in Rangeley, I needed to drive up the winding hill to Saddleback’s lodge and talk to Jimmy Quimby. Fifty-nine years old and weathered,Ìęhis chin specked with salt-and-pepper stubble, Quimby is the scion of a Saddleback pillar. His father, Doc, poured concrete to build the towers for one of Saddleback’sÌęfirst lifts in 1963Ìęand later built trails and made snow for the mountain. His mother, Judy, worked in the ski area’s cafeteria for about 15 years. “We were so poor,” Quimby told me, “that we didn’t have a pot to piss in, but I skied every weekend.” Indeed, as a high schooler, Quimby took part in every form of alpine ski competition available—on a single pair of skis. His 163-centimeter Dynastar Easy Riders were both his ballet boards and his giant-slalom guns. They also transported him to mischief. In his teenage years, Quimby was part of a nefarious Saddleback gang, the Rat Pack. “We terrorized the skiing public,” he said. “We built jumps. We skied fast. We made the T-bar swerve so people fell off.”Ìę

Just days after his 18th birthday, Quimby left Maine to serve 20 years in the Air Force as an electrical-line repairman and managed, somehow, to spend a good chunk of time near Japan’s storied Hakkoda Ski Resort, where he routinely hucked himself off 35-foot cornices while schussing in blue jeans. When he returned to Maine in 1998, he commenced working at Saddleback and honed such a love for the mountain that, when it closed in 2015, his heart broke. He simply refused to ski after that. “I decided,” he said, “that I just wouldn’t ski anywhere else.” Friends in the industry offered him free tickets at nearby mountains; Quimby demurred and hunkered down at Saddleback, where he remained mountain manager. The Berrys paid himÌęto watch over the nonfunctioning trails and lifts during the long closure. “I’m a prideful person,” he explained. “OK, I did do a little skiing with my grandchildren, but they’re preschoolers. I haven’t made an adult turn since Saddleback closed.”Ìę

Quimby is now working for Arctaris, which owns Saddleback Inc., but that’s a technicality. His mission is spiritual, and when I met him in his office, I found that I had stepped into a shrine, a jam-packed Saddleback museum. There were lapel pins, patches, bumper stickers, posters, and also a wooden ski signed in 1960 by about 35 of Saddleback’s progenitors. Quimby’s prize possession, though, is a brass belt buckle he bought in the Saddleback rental shop in the 1970s. “I used to wear it every day,” he told me, “but when Saddleback closed, I put it on a dresser and never wore it again.”

Quimby stood up from the desk now, to reveal that he was wearing the buckle once more. In capitalized brass letters, it read “SKI.”ÌęHis eyes were glassy with emotion.Ìę

“We’re going to do this,” he said quietly, speaking of Saddleback’s resurrection. “We’re going to make this happen.”

But is Arctaris’s vision for Saddleback pie in the sky?Ìę

Certainly, the ski industry is facing myriad challenges—climate change arguably the biggest. A 2018Ìępaper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters noted that the snowy season in the lower 48 states has become, on average, Ìęcompared to 1982. Saddleback, which averages about 148 inches of snow a year (compared to 141 and 128 inches at Sugarloaf Mountain and Sunday River Resort, respectively, its biggest Maine competitors), could conceivably enjoy a few above-average bounty winters over the next decade, but Sean Birkel, a climatologist at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, said, “Maine’s warming climate is expected to bring shorter winters with less snow and more rain overall.”ÌęArctaris plans to spend $2.3 million on new snowmaking, but it’s not clear if that will be enough.Ìę

Still, today’s ski industry is arguably most threatened by its own profligate excesses. A one-day lift ticket at Vail, Colorado,Ìęcan cost $209. In skiing’s most exclusive and exalted redoubts—like Aspen and Vail—billionaires are now displacing mere millionaires in the battle for slopeside real estate. Condo owners can rent their places for $600 or more a night on Airbnb. It’s become all but impossible to get by as a low-budget ski bum. Those eager kids who used to toil all winter for a free season pass? They’ve almost disappeared. “The need for labor in the nation’s 37 ski states remains critical,” saidÌęDave Byrd, director of Risk and Regulatory Affairs at the National Ski Areas Association. “We’re closely monitoring Saddleback to see if they’re able to find and retain labor.”Ìę

Can a scruffy Maine mountain do that—and also become a gentle paradise? It’s too early to tell. Right now Arctaris’s first priority is the logistical challenge of making Saddleback skiable. Jimmy Quimby needs to hire at least 15 people over the next four months, and then those folks need to go into ballistic mode, disassemblingÌęthe T-bar and the 1963 chairlift to make way for lift-installation companies. They need to hack the weeds off the trails and chainsaw down the saplings that have sprouted over theÌępast five years.Ìę

Arctaris hasn’t even developed a site plan for affordable housing yet. The employee busing and day care are still in the early planning stages, as is the solar farm, and while Arctaris’s Jonathan Tower is working with the State of Maine, hoping to get the staffing office launched by next winter, he might not meet his deadline.

Still, it would be wrong to write Arctaris off, considering the man that Tower has hired to serve as Saddleback’s general manager andÌęQuimby’s boss. Andy Shepard, 62, is a South Freeport, Maine, visionary who 20 years ago founded the Maine Winter Sports Center (now called the Outdoor Sports Institute), a nonprofit that bought and transformed two defunct Maine ski areas—Bigrock Mountain and Black Mountain Maine, the latter of which he purchased for one dollar.Ìę

When Shepard first took over at Black Mountain, the base lodge was frequently flooded with sewage. He built a new lodge, tripled the mountain’s vertical drop by installing a new chairlift, and created a museum honoring the six Olympians that Black Mountain has produced. Both Bigrock and Black Mountain are still thriving family destinations, and in 2013, endeavoring to boost rural economies, the Outdoor SportÌęInstitute gave these two mountains away—each to a localÌęnonprofitÌęthat isÌęfocused on fostering the regional economy as it promotes skiing.Ìę

Shepard is a carefully spoken man and also a dreamer. When I met with him and his wife, Betsey, one quiet evening in Rangeley, in the posh and rustic pine-paneled environs of the dining room at Loon Lodge Inn, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and an ornate Tyrolean sweater as he spoke of western Maine in reverent tones.Ìę

“We honeymooned right here at Saddleback Lake Lodge, in 1981,” he said. “The people of western Maine are no-nonsense. They don’t care what kinds of clothes you wearÌęor what kind of car you drive. If you love skiing, you’re in here. And the mountain itself”—he gestured toward Saddleback—“it’s been part of the lives of tens of thousands of families.”

The same could be said of Black Mountain, of course, one of Shepard’s successful turnarounds. So a couple weeks later, when I was passing through western Maine, I dropped by there, hoping to get a taste of the casual magic that might pervade the new Saddleback.Ìę

In the rental shop, I talked to clerk Peter Chase. “We used to be a local ski area,” said Chase, a town selectman in nearby Rumford. “Now 70 percent of our skiers come from places like Augusta and Lewiston and Auburn.” He spoke of these small Maine cities in awed tones of appreciation before adding, “But we’re still the kind of ski area where people are willing to get down on their hands and knees to help a little boy put on his ski boots.”

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, under azure skies, hundreds of skiers were braving the ten-degree chill, not all of them with alpinist grace. (Black is not a black-diamond mountain.) By midafternoon the packed base lodge was almost steamy with human heat. Upstairs, in the Last Run Pub, a veteran singer-songwriter—Jim Gallant, a native of Mexico, Maine—played soulfully. I sat at the bar nursing an ale as I watched the crowds clomp in and out in their ski boots. I basked in the warmth and the happiness undergirding the applause that followed each song, and as I neared the bottom of my pint, I cast my mind nine months forward to Saddleback’s grand-opening party.

Cougar Skyway is going to rock that bash.

Editor’s Note: The story has been updated with the original name of the Outdoor Sports Institute.

The post The Ambitious Plan to Create a Ski Utopia in Maine appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When the Environmental Defense FundÌę(EDF) emailed me in December, hoping to daylightÌęa manufacturer filing an anonymous application to use a toxic chemical, the message carried the sort of dire rhetoric that the EDF has, in past campaigns, unleashed on Dow Chemical Company and DuPont. The phrases “lung waterproofing” and “concern for systemic and male reproductive toxicity” glinted on my screen alongside a note fromÌęthe EDF’s lead senior scientist, Richard Denison.ÌęDenison described a new product whose key chemical ingredient was rejected for commercial use by the Environmental Protection AgencyÌę(EPA) late in 2018, and then oddly approved by the same agency last June, through a decision-making process that is largely hidden from the public.Ìę

What was this noxious new stuff heÌęwas decrying? Insecticide? A solvent to degrease construction machinery? No, Denison and the EDF wereÌęfocused on a lightning-fast ski wax.Ìę

The chemically complex glide wax was developed by Swix Sport, a venerated 74-year-old Norwegian company that today commands a 60 percent market share in the $150 million global ski-wax industry. Swix’s new wax compound has application for skiers in all disciplines and also for snowboarders, but it’s aimed mainly at nordic ski racers, who can save minutes in a single 50-kilometer event if their skis glide well. The wax’s active ingredient is a chemical whose tight molecular bonds, yoking fluorine and carbon, are super stable and thus both impervious to ski-slowing moisture and very resistant to breaking down. This chemical belongs to a large and notorious family ofÌę, which are collectively known as PFAS. Often called “forever chemicals,”ÌęPFAS are sold in vastly greater quantities in firefighting foams and as a waterproof coating for frying pans, raincoats, and pizza-delivery boxes.

Fluoro wax has been a staple of cross-country racing since the late 1980s. Still, Swix’s rollout of a new fluoro seems oddly timed. The EPA has found PFAS to cause liver and kidney damageÌęas well as cancer and tumors in lab animals. A just-released film, , stars Mark Ruffalo as an intrepid lawyer battling DuPont in the early 2000s after the chemical giant began making a PFAS-based product, Teflon, at its factory inÌęParkersburg, West Virginia, whereÌęchronic illness and untimely deaths spiked among nearby residents. Several states, New York and Ohio among them, have filed lawsuits that seek compensation for health problems caused by drinking water polluted by PFAS. DuPont and 3M are frequently defendants inÌęthese suits.

The ski world is conducting its own clampdown on fluoro wax. The , the sport’s international governing body, which oversees nordic skiing’s World Cup, announced in November that it will begin enforcing a ban on fluoro in November 2020, citing its “negative environmental and health impact.” The FIS has yet to decide on penalties, but in many high school and collegiate nordic ski leagues in the U.S., along with youth and amateur leagues in Europe, fluoro is already banned. Scientists have found it lacing the snow on nordic trails in Norway, and while fluoro might have scant ill effects on casual ski racers who wax with it twice a year, a 2010ÌęScandinavian study showed that World Cup ski technicians had on average 45 times as much fluorocarbon in their blood as nonskiers.Ìę

And yet, according to documents provided to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű by the EDF, Swix approached the EPA in November 2018 for approval of a newÌęfluorocarbon chemical.Ìę(Later, a spokesperson for the company would inform șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that theÌęnew compound was planned “for use in a small number of high performance waxes while [Swix]Ìętransitions to fully fluoro-free product lines.”)ÌęThe company was able to seek what’s called a low volume exemption (LVE) and bypass the agency’s standard process for evaluating a new chemical, because it planned to produce less than the EPA’s threshold of 10,000 kilograms (approximately 22,000 pounds) of material a year. As such, the wax maker wasn’t required to make public its company nameÌęor the chemical makeup of its new product.Ìę

The EPA denied Swix’s request for approval, saying that the unnamed chemicalÌęwould have a “high environmental hazard.” But Swix fought the EPA’s ruling, hiring a Washington law firm—Wiley Rein, which has also represented auto tire makers and the plastics industry—to write the agency and paint a dire picture of what would happen if approval weren’t granted. If the agency denied the exemption, Wiley Rein said, Swix might have “no choice but to revert to more environmentally harmful” wax-making processesÌęsimply to “stay in business.” The EPA wrote back two months later, reporting that it had “reconsidered its assessment.” It granted Swix a three-year exemption in a letter that equivocated over the wax’s likelihood to cause lung waterproofing, a condition in which the tiny air sacs in the lungs, the alveoli, become dysfunctional and unable to pump oxygen into the blood. The EPA said lung waterproofing was “not expected” before noting that “uncertainty” surrounded the issue.Ìę

In a written statement to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, a publicist contracted by Swix focused on the chemistry of its new compound, which is nowÌęincorporated into current versions of Swix’s fluorinated race waxes, andÌęsellingÌęin shops and . (Flourinated waxes make up about 30 percent of the productsÌęSwix sells.) She noted that it’s made of “C6 fluorocarbons,” which “are better for both the environment and for human health than C8 fluorocarbons.”

C6? C8? There are, in broad terms, two categories of ski wax containing PFAS. Historically more prevalent, C8 wax boasts eight fully fluorinated carbon molecules in its long backbone. C6 wax features only six such moleculesÌęand breaks down more easily, though how much easier is still unclear to scientists. A 2015ÌęFood and Drug Administration found that C6 lacked the “biopersistence and potent systemic and reproductive toxicity that are characteristic of C8 fluorocarbons,” but also acknowledged that few studies have been done on C6 toxicity and stressed that it’s not clear yet whether C6 is a “safer alternative.” The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), a policymaking branch of the European Union, has called C6 “a substance of very high concern due to its very persistent and very bioaccumulating properties.” In July, the ECHA will begin enforcing its ban on the sale, manufacture, and import of all “nonessential” C8 products in Europe. It is now contemplating a ban of C6.Ìę

Swix is certainly attuned to the dangers of fluoro. The company has already spent ten years and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to design a fast fluoro-free wax, and in September—three months after Swix gained approval from the EPA for its C6 fluorocarbon—Steve Poulin, CEO of the subsidiary Swix Sport USA, told ,Ìę“What I want to happen is a fluoro-free environment. I am pushing Norway for a fluoro-free environment and a fluoro-free company. We need to lead by example, because we are a market leader.”Ìę

Swix did not break any laws by lobbying the EPA to let it introduce a new fluoro wax. But itsÌęhiring of Wiley Rein to appealÌęthe EPA’s initial rulingÌęcertainly seems at odds with itsÌęeco-friendly rhetoric, as does the company’s continued use of fluoro at all. BothÌęmake business sense, though: despite the fact that the new wax won’t be legal on the elite racing circuit next winter, amateur racers will still use itÌęin great quantities.Ìę

In its statement to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, Swix depicted its new use of C6 chemistry as “a short-term bridge to get the company to its ultimate goal of producing a high-performance fluoro-free wax by 2022. While the company is committed to the transition to fluoro-free, the new technology is not yet ready for commercial use.”Ìę

Despite what we know about fluoro’s environmental and health risks, nordic skiing isn’t likely to be free of it any time soon. There is simply no existing ski wax that is as hydrophobic—and hence as fast—as fluoro. Every serious skier out there has several bars of it in theirÌęwax kit, even if they’reÌęfated to no glory greater than 11th place in theirÌęage bracket at the local 10K. And it’s likely that not a single world-class nordic skier is fluoro-free. StoresÌęstill sell the waxÌęthat the FISÌęis poised to ban, and the consumer who wants to avoid the most harmful stuff probably lacks the investigative impulses and chemistry knowledge to decipher wax makers’ careful fluoro messaging.Ìę

In Norway, a tiny nation that boasts one of the world’s top cross-country ski teams, the media is trying to help. In a scathing, ongoing series of stories on fluoro, the Oslo-based newspaper Ìęhas argued that, while the industry says it has largely switched to a “so-called C6 technology,” science proves otherwise. (Waxes aren’t labeled with details of their chemical contents, let alone whether they’re C8 or C6 fluorocarbons.) In reporting a story that , Dagbladet bought 11 fluorinated waxes from ski shops, then took them to a chemistry lab at the University of Stockholm for a test of whether their C8 content exceeded the limit set by the ECHA—25 nanograms per gram. The lab found that the waxes’ C8 values were, on average, 134 times higher than the 2020 limit. Swix waxes were not the worst wax currently on the shelves, though—that distinction went to a Swiss company called Toko, which produced a wax that is 1,215 times over the current limit. (Swix bought Toko in 2010. In response to DagbladetÌęand șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, the company said the wax was produced in 2009, is no longer sold, and should not have been on shelves when the publication did its test.)

The Dagbladet series Ìę“sky high” levels of a PFAS compound were found in the blood of workersÌęat a now-defunctÌęItalian factory called Miteni, which manufactured C8 wax for Swix as well as products for other companies. Ultimately, these workers suffered cancer, diabetes and cirrhosis,ÌęDagbladet said, citing a 2019 study done by epidemiology researchers forÌęthe local government in Italy’sÌęVeneto region. Miteni poisoned the drinking water of over 120,000 people,Ìęaccording to Dagbladet and a 2017 report by the .

In an email to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, Swix brand director Age Skinstad says that Swix’s current management knew nothing of the Miteni scandal until it was approached by Dagbladet in 2019.Ìę“Miteni didn’t inform Swix of the problems,” Skinstad said. “The way Miteni has acted is totally unacceptable and in breach of the contract Swix had with them.” Skinstad went on to suggest thatÌęeven if Miteni caused environmental problems, it didn’t do so by making ski wax. Swix products constituted “a max. ofÌę0.5% of the total production of Miteni and was not connected to the PFOA production,” he wrote to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, naming the particular PFAS chemical found in the workers’ blood.Ìę

Miteni went out of business in 2018, but products incorporating C8 are stillÌę. In the U.S., it’s still legal for any company, except those in the more heavily regulated carpet industry, to import it. C8 is still widely used by outdoor apparel makers. Only a few brands—Mountain Hardwear, for instance, and Patagonia—have transitioned to waterproofing with C6.

Most other makers of our foul-weather garments are unlikely to curtail their fluoro use anytime soon. Under President Donald Trump, the EPA has proven very friendly to the chemical industry. Last yearÌęit unveiled a new PFAS Action Plan, but critics have argued that it lacks teeth. “[It’s] all plan and no action,” Scott Faber, a senior vice president for government affairsÌęat theÌęEnvironmental Working Group, in the newspaper The Hill. “Instead, it promises merely to ‘examine’ information about PFAS discharges. 
 EPA must still ‘determine’ whether to force utilities to filter PFAS from our water.”

“We’re very concerned that the EPA is allowing new chemicals onto the market without scrutinizing them enough,” says Richard Denison of the Environmental Defense Fund. What’s particularly troubling to Denison is the agency’s low-volume-exemption program, which has, since its inception in 1985, allowedÌęapplicants to cloak their identity. Each company submitting an LVE bid can opt to say it contains Confidential Business Information (CBI) and thus should remain private. If the EPA allows theÌęCBI claim,Ìęthe bid (and thus the company) are known to the public solely by its case number. Swix’s bid was numbered LVE L-19-0033, and you’re reading about it now only because an anonymousÌęwhistle-blower divulged the number to the EDF, which in turn filed a Freedom of Information Act request for files relating to that number, eventually sharing this information with journalists.Ìę

Denison stresses that his group didn’t set out to shame the ski industry. Instead, the EDF hopes to highlight what it sees as the hypocrisy of a federal agency that now tolerates the corporate use of 86,000 chemicals and, in Denison’s view, routinely “cuts corners,” green-lighting 89 percent of all the LVE applications it’s received since tweaking toxic-chemical rules in 2016.Ìę

“We were interested,” Denison says, “in finding a case in which [the] EPA denied use of a chemical and then decided to approve it, despite its own staff’s recommendations.”Ìę

If all this political strategizing sounds far removed from the sylvan splendorsÌęof gliding through the woods, have faith, for there are options for nordic skiers who want to avoid fluoro waxes. Hydrocarbon-based ski wax, which is sold by Swix and several other brands, breaks down muchÌęquicker than fluoro does, and it tends to be cheaper. Next fall, Swix also plans toÌęintroduce a new, fluoro-free race wax called Pure Marathon, which it claims will be “the most durable, eco-friendly wax available today.” Its chemical makeup is a proprietary secret, but Swix says it will be faster (and more expensive) than hydrocarbon. Meanwhile, an array of super woke, eco-friendly glide waxes have recently emerged on the market. , for example, sells “plant-based” waxes composedÌę“entirely of renewable resources,” according to company literature.Ìę

For the foreseeable future, though, fluorinated wax will continue toÌęsing with a dark allure to the nordic ski world. It remains legal at many recreational races, among them , which draws more than 10,000 competitors to Wisconsin each February, and its exit from school and college leagues is far from complete. “For anyone who wants to go fast, it remains a necessary evil,” says University of Vermont nordic ski coach Patrick Weaver, who this winter will don chemically resistant gloves and a $1,200 ventilated face shield to fluoro-wax 250 pairs of skis for his athletes. “Most of the ski world wants to get rid of it, but on wet days, if you don’t use fluoro, you’ll be greatly disadvantaged,” he adds. “Until it’s gone from the sport, fluoro wax is going to be tempting.”

On the FIS’s World Cup circuit, where top skiers rake in millions of dollars a year, the temptation could lead to a different problem. With C8 now banned, and the ban of C6 likely imminent, will there be cheating?Ìę

Illegal blood doping and have been nagging problems on cross-country’s World Cup circuit for decades—and currently, the FIS has no streamlined system for testing whether a ski is fluorinated. In enforcing its ban, the governing body has engaged an Oslo lab, the Ìę(NILU), which has developed a method for detecting fluorine in skis by using an ungainly washing-machine-sizeÌęX-ray device. But the FIS still hasn’t “validated” this system, says Martin Schlabach, a senior chemist for the NILU. It also needs to spend about $200,000 to develop a mobile X-ray scanner capable of testing skis at a prerace starting lineÌęrather than at a remote lab, which could only deliver results days later.Ìę

As a stopgap, the NILU may open the 2020–21 season using specially trained sniffer dogs to suss out whether skis are fluorinated. “The dogs would give us a strong indication, but they would not be a final measure,” Schlabach notes.

Schlabach will, of course, be fighting an age-old human impulse. When I recently phoned Vince Rosetta, who chronicles World Cup nordic racing on his popular YouTube channel, , his mind went at once to how, exactly, skiers will cheat the new rules.Ìę

“I can assure you that right now, in a basement somewhere, there are people focused on nothing but beating the system,” he said. “Maybe they’re looking for a masking agent—something to hide the smell of fluoro on skisÌęso the dogs can’t detect it. Maybe they’re trying to think up a way to squirt some liquid fluoro onto skis, prerace, right after the test is done. We’ll only know what they’re up to after the first person gets caught.”

The post Nordic Skiing Has an Addiction to Toxic Wax appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The map of southwest Tasmania is an unbroken expanse of forest green. There are no towns and no roads on this remote section of Australia’s largest island. There’s nothing save for a few sharply creased mountains and an array of lakes and streams. In many pockets of the rainforest, an endemic tree, the slow-growing horizontal scrub, sprouts a noxious tangle of drooping branches that spawn vertical shoots and crosshatching suckers until the woods are all but impenetrable. In 1822, when the Brits ran penal colonies in Tasmania, a group of escaped convicts ate one another while attempting a getaway through this forest.Ìę

Last year, though, a Swiss explorer, 47-year-old , set out on a three-month, south-to-north solo traverse of Tasmania that included a long push through this thick rainforest. Moving forward at roughly two miles a day, carrying a 75-pound pack in the constant rain, Marquis hacked through the vinelike woody snares with a machete. She clambered at times to the top of the thicket, where she was frequently forced to trample on tree limbs 15 feetÌęabove the forest floor. She could have died stepping on a rotten branch.

But what got her was a steep ravine roughly 500 yards across at its top. On the second day of thrashing her way down through the first side of the ravine’s waterlogged, vine-snared V, the muddy soil gave way beneath her, and she was swept, along with a cascade of rocks and ferns and trees, into a cold river. She blacked out, and when she awoke, she was facedown in the water. Her left arm screamed in pain. Her satÌęphone was useless at the shadowed base of the canyon. Was she just going to die down there?Ìę

Marquis had certainly been in tight spots before. She’s a hiking specialist who spends months, sometimes even years, walking across scarcely traveled swaths of earth. From 2010 to 2013, she trekked 10,000 miles from Siberia to the Gobi Desert, then (after 13 days on a cargo ship) across Australia. In 2015, on another visit to Oz, she spent three months subsisting almost entirely on roots and grubs that she caught and fish that she snared. She has camped in minus-30-degree coldÌęand endured blizzards, sandstorms, mudslides, dengue fever, and an almost fatal tooth infection.Ìę

Marquis is a modern-day explorer—but though anguish and suffering are as part and parcel ofÌęher expeditions as they were to early polar explorers like Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen, her goals are different. A hundred and ten years ago, the objectives of exploration were clear: you pointed yourself at some blank spot on the map and then muscled toward it and planted your flag. Today, however, nearly all terra incognita on the planet is gone. Conquering is a dead art.Ìę

“We’ve moved away from focusing on exploration for exploration’s sake,” says Cheryl Zook, director of the Explorers Program at the National Geographic Society. TheÌęprogram now funds filmmakers and oceanographers, anthropologists and crime investigators. It also funds Marquis, who’s been a National Geographic Explorer since 2015Ìęand is the author of seven French-language books about her expeditions.Ìę

OK, there are stillÌęa few superstrivers who chase after clearly delineated iconic goals—American Colin O’Brady, for instance, who last year became the first person to cross all 932 miles of the AntarcticÌęlandmass solo, unaided and unsupported, a feat he accomplished in 54 days while pulling a 300-pound sled. Arguably, though, the new soul of exploration lies in less harried and more imaginative quadrants, where a disparate constellation of world wanderers is dreaming up new ways to draw meaningful lines on our thoroughly traveled globe. Think here of Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist now on a multiyear, 21,000-mile global walk that is retracingÌęthe paths of the first human migrants to disperse from Africa in the Stone Age. Salopek’s cross-cultural journey is of a pieceÌęwith an earlier feat of new-school exploration, swimmer Lynne Cox’s of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia in 1987. In 44-degree waters, in the shadow of the Cold War, Cox was trying to forge dĂ©tente between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

Modern exploration isn’t necessarily steeped in geopolitical themes. It’s about probing new depths on old turf with an inventive flourish and passion. Last June, on Strava, the recently retired Tour de France cyclist Ted King posted a 182-mile, nine-plus-hour Vermont-to-New Hampshire back-roads ramble, captioning it, “I rode to see my dad to wish him a Happy Father’s Day.”

Yes, I thought, pressing theÌę“kudos”Ìębutton within the app. The man’s an explorer.

SometimesÌęthe new-school explorer travels inward, searching for forgotten zones of the human psyche. Marquis says she travels—and crawls through deserts and rivers and mud—to “rediscover the lost language between humans and the animal kingdom.” She aims, always, for an unmitigated one-on-one communion with nature. She wants to prove that, even amid the abstracted digital fog of our 21st-century lives, a human being can still sit alone by a campfire and feel primitive, like an animal.Ìę

Marquis’s goal is entirely her own invention—she is, if nothing else, a free woman—and in chasing after that goal, she has been catcalled and harassed in most of the earth’s major languages. She has not flinched, perhaps because she’s been too focused on evading the other crazy perils that pervade all great adventure.

Down in the ravine, it turned out, Marquis had snapped the top of her humerus, the big, upper bone in her arm. She considered downing an emergency dose of Tramadol, a painkilling opiate. But she couldn’t afford to numb her senses. There were scores of black snakes in the underbrush, and her satÌęphone wouldn’t work down there, amid the thick vegetation. She would need to hike out for three days to findÌęreception and a clearing big enough for a helicopter landing.ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę

So she did. Off-balance, thanks to her pack and her gimp arm, she fell, over and over. Each crash sent a crescendo of pain into her shoulder. SheÌęmet the copter, and then, two weeks later, against doctor’s orders, returned to her hiking route. She had to skip the last section of dense bush, butÌęshe spent three weeks completing a modified, easier version of her intended hike, walking mostly on flat, treeless paths, wincing each time her pack jostled her shoulder.Ìę

It’s January now, nearly a year after the completion of Marquis’sÌęTasmanian expedition, and I’m visiting her in Switzerland, in her tiny, 400-square-foot, seventies-era chalet,Ìęwhich sits half a mile off the nearest all-season road in the Swiss Alps. It’s cold outside, and she’s wearing a black fleece, black sweatpants, and beige Uggs as she sits on a stool in her kitchen. Her long blondÌęhair is in disarray. We’re watching snow fall in the sparse forest outside, down onto the boughs of the evergreens. There are houses nearby, but they are snow-caked summer houses, and the world is so quiet that I think I hear the snow falling.

Marquis bought this house, the long-neglected summer abode of a distinguished Geneva family, in 2017. Trash cluttered the home’s warren of mini bedrooms at closing; there was a dessicated crow in the chimney. Still, Marquis envisioned the place a “quiet writer’s cave.” In an e-mail, she told me, “I’ve been waiting all my life for such a place.”Ìę

In the past, she’s tapped out her books in a mountain bungalow in Thailand, on a windblown crag in the Swiss Alps, and deep in the Spanish countryside. NowÌęshe’s pinioned at home, nursing a broken rib, this injury sustained in a prosaic tumble down a snowy Swiss staircase. She’s writing a book about her Tasmanian travels, and taped to a picture window, on Post-it Notes, are hand-scrawled ideas for her first draft. I feel like I’ve stepped into her mind, into her dream. I remember what she wrote to me earlier, discussing the cabin: “I will spend the harsh winter of the Swiss Alps here, with no vehicle access. I’ll move with a canoe in summer and on foot in winter.”

I’ve come here to imbibe Marquis’s idyllic cabin lifeÌęand also to meditate on a question that I often ask myself, being a journalist who’s reported stories on six continents: How does a restless person find a still spot in the world? How can a nomad make a home, that is at once sustaining and invigorating, not boring?Ìę

I want Marquis to tell me that she’s going to learn the names of all the plants and birds outside her door. I want her to tell me that she’ll live in this house until she dies, that she’s already 800 pages into writing a book about the place. But now, as she cooks us some organic vegan whole-wheat pasta, she’s backpedaling from her florid e-mail. “This is just a base camp for me,” she says. “That’s all. It’s a place to store my fancy clothes. This is not my type of bush here. I belong to the Australian bush. I know every bird there, every tree, and I’d take a eucalyptus over a pine any day. And no”—she laughs, rolling her eyes before dissing me in her Australian-tinged English—“I don’t think of dying here. I don’t even have a bloody idea what I’m doing next week.”Ìę

Jeezum, did I fly all the way across the Atlantic to get tacks thrown into my path like this? I can already sense a certain tension: I’m a man, here to write about a woman who’s prevailed in life because she’s kicked back against men who sought to write her script.Ìę

On the steppes of Mongolia, drunken nomads on horseback galloped out toÌęMarquis’s tent night after night and surrounded her, taunting her, just for fun. Marquis, in turn, terrorized two such antagonists after they charged at her with their horses. “I throw myself toward them all at once, arms in the air and screaming like a madwoman,” she writesÌęinÌę, the only book of hers that has been translated into English. She’s intent on “scaring them and throwing them off balance,” and sheÌęsucceeds. “They glare angrily, understanding that I’m not afraid,” she writes. “They depart without another word.”

During my four-day stay, Marquis will be nothing but gracious, buying me one Swiss chocolate bar after another. But throughout,Ìęher message remains clear: men need to reframe how they think about women in exploration.Ìę

Marquis and I travelÌęone afternoonÌęto the nearby village of Chandolin, to visit the onetime home of her childhood idol, legendary 20th-century Swiss explorer and writer Ella Maillart. Maillart competed in the 1924 OlympicsÌęas a sailorÌęand then went on to lead an all-women’s sailing mission to Crete and travel across the Takla Makan Desert from Beijing to IndiaÌęwith journalist Peter Fleming. Marquis becomes incensed when we discover that the town’s only Maillart museum is a single, unattended room arrayed with a few dusty photographs. “This is bullshit,” she says. “If Ella Maillart was a man, there’d be a brand-new museum here, with videos and sound effects.”

In timeÌęI’ll learn of how Marquis slept in pink leggings every night in the Mongolian desert, just to feel feminine as she towed a bulky cart through the dirt. I’ll discover her Martha Stewart side, when she gives me a copy of her coffee-table bookÌęLa Nature Dans Ma Vie (Nature in My Life), which gives readers tips on how they can be just like her, supported byÌę40 photos of the author—Marquis sitting lotus style, her flowing tresses exquisitely coiffed, her makeup just so; Marquis communing winsomely with a wicker basket of garden-fresh carrots; and so on.Ìę

Sarah Marquis is reframing what an explorer can do and be. So can’t I reframe my own understanding of how her life works?

Maybe I’ll have to, for she has never fit neatly into anyone else’s story line.

Marquis grew up on a farm in Switzerland’s rainy north country, surrounded by ducks and chicken and sheep, in a village so remote that she didn’t see a movie in a theater until she was 15. She and her brother, Joel, who’s two years younger,Ìęnamed each of the towering beech trees near their home. They climbed into the crowns of the trees, balancing on narrow branches 60 feet up as they swayed in the wind.Ìę

Starting when Marquis was five, her mother took her into the forest to hunt for mushrooms and medicinal plants. “I was learning everything about survival,” says Marquis.Ìę

As a teenager, she left home for a railway job that involved traveling all over Switzerland, managing the operations of trains. Her coworkers, older men mostly, harassed her. (According to a New York Times Magazine , on her first day, one colleague proclaimed that he could smell when she was on her period.) She took such taunts as a challenge. At age 17, alone, she rode a horse across Turkey. Then, in her twenties, she worked as a waitress at a ski resort and ventured, often, on brave expeditions that tested her still meager outdoor skills. She ventured into theÌębush of New Zealand’s South Island, for example, endeavoringÌęto live for a month only on fish that she speared. She lost 15 pounds.Ìę

Eventually, when she was 29, Marquis conceived her first grand expedition—an 8,700-mile loop around the interior of Australia. She was still a waitress; major sponsorship was a pipe dream. But Joel, by then an accomplished engineer andÌęwindsurfer who traveled the world in search of waves, was in her corner—and he was lucky. One dayÌęJoel bought a two-dollarÌęlottery ticket and found, scratching it, three miniature TV icons in a row. He’d earned aÌęhard-to-come-byÌęinvite onto a Swiss game show.Ìę

Before a live audience, Joel won $25,000. He used the funds to launch his sister’s expedition. “Nobody thought she could make it,” he explained to me, “but I knew she could. When we climbed those trees, she was steady and strong.” Joel flew to AustraliaÌęso he could serve as expedition coordinator, and the siblings collaborated with an ease and a fluidity that at times transcended language. “There wasn’t any need to explain things,” Marquis says. “We were in a desert, without landmarks or trees, and he’d leave a food drop, and I’d know where it was.”Ìę

Marquis’s first book,ÌęL’aventuriĂšre Des Sables (The șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűr of the Sands), published in 2004, recounted that Australia trip. She self-published it, at the age of 32. Then she visited every bookstore in French-speaking Switzerland and genially, over coffee, cajoled dozens of store owners to buy the book on her own special terms—money up front, no returns. She spoke at over a hundred schools, accompanied by her dog and her brother, who punctuated her stories by riffing on his didgeridoo. Video snippets of her Australian adventure began showing up on Swiss television.

In 2006, Marquis spent eightÌęmonths on a solo hike through the Andes, battling altitude sickness as she made her way to Machu Picchu. In 2010, she began her trek from Siberia to Australia. Gradually, and quite casually, Marquis became a household name in French-speaking Switzerland. A loyal contingent of fans bought every book that she wrote, and her fame seeped into France. The French edition of her 2014Ìębook,ÌęWild by Nature,Ìęsold 180,000 copies, and in 2018, the French sports magazineÌęłąâ€ÍÖ±çłÜŸ±±è±đÌęput her on the cover.Ìę

Marquis is now sponsored by Icebreaker (an underwear brand), the North Face, Sportiva boots, Tissot watches, and Debiopharm, a Swiss pharmaceutical company. But she says she gets no salary. “They just fund an expedition if they like it,” she says of her sponsors. “I have to fight for the money every time. I still work my ass off.”Ìę

Marquis’s publisher, Elsa Lafon, says that the explorer is popular because there’s really nothing transcendent or superhuman about her. “SarahÌęhas no background as an Olympian, and she’s not an extreme skier or snowboarder,” explains Lafon. “She’s walking, and walking is something everyone can do. It’s also a spiritual activity. People want to live as she does, and when I was with her in Switzerland, everyone stopped her to take pictures.”

Like so many celebrities, Marquis is torn about her status as a public figure. In a way, she loves it. When we’re at a restaurant one afternoon, she begins snapping photos of our food. “You can’t even imagine how many young women follow me on ,” she explainsÌęhappily. “There’s a whole new wave of single women out there traveling alone now. They’re not waiting for the perfect partner to do the journey.” Marquis knows she’s their role model. “I’m not attached to some magical guy who’s paying for everything,” she says. “And you’ll never see me doing a photo shoot in a bikini. I could have played that game. I didn’t.”Ìę

But if Marquis loves inspiring young acolytes, she still likes her privacy. We’re sitting in a remote booth at the restaurant, to avoid gawkers, and now she tells me that her highest ideal is “pure exploration. I want to be in nature until I become nature,” she explains, “until it doesn’t matter whether I’m a man or a woman and I arrive at the core of things.”Ìę

When Marquis bought the chalet,Ìęit should have been razed. Starting afresh—building a brand-new cabin—would have been easier than breathing new life into a ruin, but the local Swiss zoning regulations forbid teardowns.Ìę

Marquis turned to her brother for assistance—that was a given. No one in her life (save perhapsÌęher mother) has been more unwaveringly supportive. When Sarah and I meet Joel one afternoonÌęat a cafĂ©, I note that sister and brother share the same tilt to their heads, the same glinting smile. Joel is more settled now. He and his partner have two kids, and he has a lucrative gig as a Swiss Alps tour guide. He’s always up for a challenge, though, so he and Sarah spent a month filling two dumpsters with garbage as they meditated on an architectural challenge: How do you transform a moldy, claustrophobic bunkhouse into a stylish writer’s hermitage?Ìę

Their scheme came together jaggedly, with nothing written on paper. “We came up with a new plan every day,” says Sarah, “and then we changed our minds.”

The process, more intuitive than logical, is of a piece with the strategies Marquis deploys to survive in the wilds. She prepares meticulously, drying and vacuum-sealing all her own food, but out in the field she’s guided quite often by her gut. Once, when she was camping beneath a cliff in China, she had a premonition that there’d be an avalanche. She moved her tent. Ten minutes later, according to Sarah,Ìęthe rocks buried her earlier campsite. In Australia in 2015, she says, she evolved a Spidey sense as to which creeks contained crocodiles and which didn’t. (“I became a crocodile,” she says.) She claims to carry an internal compass, so that she can tell which way is north, without even consulting the stars.Ìę

“Women have more of an animal sense,” she says. “We’re made to bear a child. We’re hormonal creatures, and we are able to feel our bodies and the earth. And surviving in the wild isn’t just about strength. You need to have an understanding of the landscape. Women have that, and they can use that to survive.”Ìę

Even though she’s intent on liberating women everywhere, there’s still a bit of the old-world explorer about Sarah Marquis. In the tradition of travel writers such as Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul, she is unafraid to be dismissive of the people she meets in the field. Wild by Nature sees her lampooning some of the Mongolians she encounters as “fat” and as “idiots” as she gripes about how they “pee right next to me” and frequent a bar that “smells of musty oldness mixed with vomit.” In fairness, she also reports on the generosity of local women who help her out. In reviewing the book, Publisher’s Weekly complained about her “long diatribes,” saying they “sometimes border on the culturally insensitive.”

When I ask her about that review, she’s not pleased with me. “Americans,” she says, “have no idea of how the world works.ÌęWhat is that reviewer saying? That it’s OKÌęfor me for me to be attacked every night? So I’m culturally insensitive? I bloody don’t care. That’s your problem!”Ìę

I’m not sure if she means me or the reviewer, and I’m a little afraid to ask. But I guess I’m not shocked that her rough travel experiences have leavened her romantic streak with a sliver of grim, Hobbesian skepticism about human nature. “Look,” she says, still dwelling on her Mongolian attackers, “it’s complicated. On that trip, I learned empathy. I became a better person. But we are all animals at the base. Everyone’s got their own world, and sometimes you are not welcome in that world. I wasn’t welcome there.”Ìę

So she keeps coming home, back to the mountains of Switzerland, where she has now finally built a house of her own, through arduous labor.

In the end, Marquis tore out most of the chalet’s walls and folded the kitchen around a new wood-burning stoveÌęthat feeds to the chimney. There are still distinct rooms, but there are no doors on the office or the dining nook, and light pours in through the glass entry door. The white pine decor, meanwhile, is buoyantly bright.

For me, though, what leaps out is that this chalet is shaped to house a single creative person—a second resident would be a stretch. In Wild by Nature, Marquis covers her romantic life glancingly, alluding to “hairy, bare chests where I rested my head for an instant,” and in another book she mentions a breakup that “left me as scarred as if I’d fallen from a five-story building.” At one pointÌęshe tells me, “I love everything about men. There is nothing so exciting as a man who knows his strengths, his inner beauty.”Ìę

But she still seems likely to keep inhabiting her tiny home by her lonesome. “I’ve had long relationships,” she tells me, “but always, after some time, the man wants more, and I’m like, More of what?ÌęWhat they want more of is me, and I will not compromise who I am to be with a man.”Ìę

Marquis gazes out the window, contemplating, then continues. “But I don’t know,” she says. “Love has everything to do with freedom—with deep communication, with allowing your partner to do what they want. But I’ve never met a man who’s understood me completely.” She rises up from her chair now. “Oh!” she says, throwing her arms up in faux exasperation.Ìę“Let’s go for a walk.”Ìę

We step out of the chalet, Marquis coughing a bit each time the frayed edge of her rib tickles her lungs, and we stroll along a cross-country ski trail, chatting about the guises she assumes out on expedition. “I dress like a man,” she says, “for safety, and if I need to talk to somebody, I’m like this.” She drops her shouldersÌęnow, so her arms hang, apelike and foreboding, by her sides as she continues in a low, gravelly voice. “‘Where’s water?’ If they say something,” she continues, “I jump right in. I don’t give them any time to think.” Her voice goes gravelly again. “‘Is it a good stream? How far?’”Ìę

We keep walking. She tells me about the training she does in the six-month lead-up to each expedition. On a typical day, she says, she might run for an hour, then do a three-hour hike to a peak carrying a 65-pound backpack before swimming two or three miles. “By six at night,” she says, “I am dead.”

We pass a lone skier poling along, and then Marquis shares a trick she learned years ago, studying karate. It involves watching one’s opponent closely, waiting for his focus to ebb, and then moving in for a flash strike. To my surprise, she demonstrates, suddenly jabbing her arm toward my chest, so I stagger backwardÌęa step. “It’s useful,” she says of the move.

When we reach the village and come to the garage where she parks her car, she opens the back to load some stuff in, and then, wanting to be of help, I press down on the hatch, trying to close it. The thing does not budge, not at all, so then, instinctively, I just reef on that hatch. I push down on it, hard, until I hear Marquis beside me, shuddering in distress. “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t! It’s hydraulic!”Ìę

“Oh,” I say. “Sorry.”Ìę

As we wind down out of the mountains, switchbacking, gazing at the roofs of the houses below, I apologize again. But then, when we’re in a parking lot with the hatch open, I forget. I find myself muscling down on the damned thing again.

“Bill, Bill, Bill!” Marquis says, copping a feigned scolding tone. She’s laughing, but still I have to wonder why I’m doing this. I’m a spacehead—that’s part of it. But do I also feel the need to demonstrate my strength? I have to admit, I do. I feel intimidated by Marquis. She’s blended her feminine qualities and raw physical strength to become a force on her own terms, an athlete and explorer I’ll never match.Ìę

It’s easy for men to say they champion the end of sexism in the outdoors, but when women start thrashing usÌęor even marginalizing us? That takes a little recalibration. Speaking plainly, it’s hard on the fragile male ego. It stings sometimes. I’m not condoning the drunken Mongolian nomads or the Swiss dingleberries who threw Ella Maillart’s life history into a closet-sizeÌędustbin, but I do understand their mindset—and also how pathetic it is.ÌęÌę

I’m staying in the village, in a sunlit hillside condo. I can’t tell you the name of the burg (I promised), but there are a few hundred people hereÌęand a post office and a cafĂ©ÌęinÌęwhich the village’s most distinguished female residents gather each morning at 8:30 to chat. The ČőłÜ±è±đ°ùłŸČč°ùłŠłóĂ© carries only one small rack of books, all of them by Sarah Marquis, but when fans show up, seeking an audience with the author, the store’s clerks throw them off the scent.Ìę

The realtor across the street from the storeÌęis also protective of Sarah who, before buying theÌęchalet, lived in the village on and off for yearsÌęin a succession of rentals. Françoise is seventy-something, and petit, and inclined to wear black leather trousersÌęĂ Ìęla Joan Jett. It is she who sold Sarah her house. “Other people were interested,” she tells me, “but I said, ‘No, it is not for sale.’”Ìę

Françoise, I think, felt a kinship with Sarah. She’s done some exploring herself—in 1980, she flew around the world on the Concorde—and the two women are friends. When I meet with them for coffee one morning, they sit side by side and regard one another with a glimmering affection, reveling, it seems, in the knowledge that they are both free spiritsÌęand fierce.

Still, when I’m invitedÌęone eveningÌęto celebrate Françoise’s birthday at the cafĂ©, Sarah isn’t there. The fondue party goes on without her. And Françoise, speaking precisely, suggests that the absence carries a certain rightness.

“She is part of the village, and she is not,” Françoise says. “As she wishes.”

“So,” I ask, “where are you going for your next expedition?” Marquis is taking me to the train station. “Antarctica?”

“That’s for the boys. They love to gear up and go fast. They love that physical challenge.” I scribe these words into my notebookÌęand, watching me as she swoops through the switchbacks, MarquisÌębecomes irked. “Come on,” she says. “I knowÌęyou’re going to use that quote out of context.”Ìę

I change the subject. “OK,” I say. “But what’s, like, your system for determining where you’re going to go?”

Do I really expect there to be an intricate mathematical process? Or that she’ll let me in on the secret? She tells me she looks for signs. EarlierÌęshe showed me a picture of a dragon’sÌęblood tree on Yemen’s arid Socotra Island. It was at once Seussian and soulful, a giant, mushroom-shaped thing with knotted brown branches and palmlike green needles. “One day,” she says, “I’d like to go there.” When Yemen’s civil war ends, she means.ÌęÌę

We wind pass the church spire in a lower village. “But how long do you think you’ll keep doing expeditions?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Sarah says sharply. “I don’t think the way you do.” A moment later, she softens. “I’m going to be an awesome old woman,” she says. “My face will be a topo map of all the places I’ve been. I’ll be a little dry apple, but I will never get old.”

When we reach the train station, I remember the hydraulic thing as I retrieve my suitcase from the back of the car. Sarah walks me out onto the platform. Per Swiss tradition, she kisses me three times on the cheeks—right, then left, then right. And then she walks away, and I watch the woman who can go anywhere in the world climb into her car and start back up the switchbacks toward her chalet in the snow.

Editor's Note: The story has been updated to specify that Colin O'Brady crossed the AntarcticÌęlandmass but not the continent's ice shelves.Ìę

The post Sarah Marquis Is Breaking Up Exploration’s Boys Club appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When he was 19 years old, Adam Gorlitsky never wore his seat belt because—well, what could possibly happen? Life was good. He was a sophomore at the University of South Carolina and a fit guy. In high school, he’d run a 4:50Ìęmile and played varsity basketball. Now he was a pickup-game star, a talented outside shooter, a business major, and an esteemed brother at Sigma Chi. On the day it happened—December 30, 2005—he’d just signed the lease on a sweet new apartment.

Gorlitsky moved furniture into the place that day, and then, just after nightfall, climbed into his dad’s Chevy Tahoe to make the two-hour journey home from Columbia to his parents’ house in Charleston. He was sober, but he was also weary, and he says that when he was careening along Highway 26 at 80 miles perÌęhour, he nodded off for a second. An instant later, his car was rolling down the grassy slope of the median. ItÌęsmacked sideways into some trees. The accident threwÌęGorlitsky around the inside of the vehicle until he lay, finally, in the back seat, spitting up blood. He was unable to move. Soon afterwardÌęhe was airlifted to the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston, where X-rays revealed that he’d suffered a T9 spinal fracture. He was paralyzed from the belly button down.

By the time Gorlitsky got into rehab, he had lost 45 pounds from being on a ventilator and still had a tracheotomy tube in his throat. He was so weak that he needed to be lifted into his wheelchair. In a flash, his unformed young life had been inflected with a question he never anticipated: how could he become an adultÌęnow that it seemed he would never walk again?

But beginning on March 22, he plans to walk 26.2 miles. At the Los Angeles Marathon, Gorlitsky, now 32, will attempt to become the first American paraplegic ever to walk a full marathon. Relying on an $80,000 robotic exoskeleton, he’ll commence the race in the dark, after 10 P.M., more than 24 hours before any other competitors, and then hobble out of Dodger Stadium and along Sunset and then Hollywood Boulevards.

American marathons have been including wheelchair athletes for more than 40 years, but Gorlitsky’s 26.2 debut comes as the races are growing more welcoming to athletes with disabilities, and also more lucrative. At next month’s Boston Marathon, wheelchair athletes will vie for $125,000 in prize money, up fromÌę$84,500 in 2018. (The total purse of last year’s race was $830,500).ÌęÌę

Racing the Los Angeles Marathon in an exoskeleton, Gorlitsky will only be chasing after glory. If he finishes in less than 36 hours and 37 minutes, he’ll become the fastest paraplegic marathoner in the world.

SoÌęis this another feel-good inspirational story about a disabled guy?

Yes. And also no. If only it were that simple.

“When you’re permanently disabled,” Gorlitsky says, “you wake up every day battling against two things—your spinal-cord injuryÌęand also society’s perception of who you are. You’re constantly playing from behind.”

Gorlitsky had an uphill road after the accident. He finished nine weeks of rehab, then graduated from USC a year behind schedule. But when he tried to launch a career, it didn’t materialize. He was passed over for an internship with a TV production company because, he thinks, he couldn’t climb the stairs to the office. He produced some short films, including a moody and ambient music video for the Charleston roots-gospel rock ensemble . He set out to create a feature film, but the only money he made came from workingÌęfor his parents’ successful mail-order business, , which sells holistic products for dogs and cats. “When I posted pictures of myself on Tinder,” he says, “I cropped out my wheelchair. I didn’t want people to see it.”

But then, in 2015, Gorlitsky says, came the moment that would lend him both agency and self-esteem. At a spinal-cord-injury clinic in Charleston, Gorlitsky tried out a space-age apparatus—the ReWalk exoskeleton, designed to let paraplegics walk again. For the first two weeks, all he could do in the ReWalk was stand there. The stabilizing muscles in his core, unused for a decade, were so taxed that they would ache deeply for days, steeping him in a pain he’d never known as a high school runner. Ten weeks passed before he could walkÌęa city block. Still, he’d regained a part of his old self. “Suddenly,” he says, “I went from a seated four foot nineÌęto a standing six foot one.”

Released in 2011Ìęafter years of development by Israeli engineer Amit Goffer, the Ìęis an ungainly 60-pound assemblage that consists of two heavy, black leg braces, each containing a whirring motor. Each motor angles forward the hip that it’s attached to, bringing the leg along with it. You activate the motors by throwing your weight forward onto low crutches, thereby tripping a sensor in the ReWalk.

The ReWalk is slow—rarely much faster than one mile an hour. ButÌęsoon after Gorlitsky took his first few steps, lurching like a landlubber on a heaving boat, he hatched a new career plan. “Instead of trying to make a movie about someone’s else’s life,” he decided, “I’ll turn my own life into a movie.”

L.A. will be Gorlitsky’s 35th road race. Three years into his racing life, he’s already walked 10K portions of both the Marine Corps Marathon and the Walt Disney World Marathon, landing himself on theÌęCBS Evening News and ESPN SportsCenter. He’s well-known in his native Charleston, and once, when he found himself with a dying ReWalk battery at a 5K on the South Carolina shore, a half-dozen soldiers came to his rescue and carried him atop their shoulders a quarter mile to the finish.

The metaphors surrounding Gorlitsky’s journey are monumental, and he works it. In 2016, he abandoned film and launched a nonprofit, , with a proclaimed mission of “improving the lives of the disabled community.” I Got Legs has always been a one-man enterprise, but it now has a board of five directors, drawn largely from the Charleston business community, and a budget plan that prays for $150,000 in 2019, as compared to the $52,832 it reported on its most recent tax forms, which document 2017 revenues.

But what thrills Gorlitsky is storytelling and human drama. The stylish website of I Got Legs, shaped by Gorlitsky himself, highlights an Ìęcampaign set up to raise funds to help other people with disabilities purchase assistive technology. The photos show Gorlitsky sitting in a wheelchair, then rising, half-bent, and finally standing erect, towering and sturdy, vanquishing frailty in his exoskeleton—as if, thanks to robotics, humans could evolve to a new plane of existence.

The first timeÌęI reached Gorlitsky, on a late-night phone call inÌęNovember, I found him simmering with disdain for the man he calls his arch nemesis: , the 34-year-old Brit who ReWalked the London Marathon in 36:37 last April.

Like Gorlitsky, Kindleysides is paralyzed from the belly button down (his paralysis was caused by a brain tumor). Gorlitsky’s beef with him is that, on Facebook, Kindleysides said he finished in 27:30, a time that excludes numerous stops for battery changes and mechanical fiddling. “When I read his post,” Gorlitsky said, “I thought, Oh my God, that’s so lame! I told him, ‘If we to go by your logic, anyone could take breaks whenever they wanted, and it wouldn’t count toward their overall time.’”

“I want to race this guy one-on-one,” Gorlitsky said to me. “I’m thinking the New York Marathon next fall. I want it to be intense—just like the World Wrestling Federation!”

Gorlitsky and Kindleysides stand together atop a tiny worldwide community of six or so exoskeletal long-distance racers, competing in a sport so nascent that it lacks codified timing standards. Can’t Gorlitsky just try to get along? He is, statistically speaking, the slower athlete: in his only half marathon, in Portland, Oregon, last year, he finished in just under 20 hours. Beyond that, Kindleysides presents himself as a soft-spoken guy. He’s a rising pop singer who recently joined Geri Horner, once Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls, as a singing judge on a season of the BBC One show All Together Now. “I tried to be nice and polite with him,” Kindleysides told me in December. “But he kept writing me on Facebook, saying things like, ‘I’m going to kick your ass.’”

Gorlitsky, it seems, is inclined toward the grand statement. On the phoneÌęhe told me, “I Got Legs isn’t some pat-on-the-back nonprofit. I run it like a Fortune 500 company.” He said that he sees himself as the social entrepreneur version of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He envisions building a GotÌęLegs! digital network built, as he puts it, “around entertainment, retail, and fund-raising.”

But as the public face of U.S. exoskeleton walking, Gorlitsky hasn’t convinced everyone who has a disability. Bill Fertig, a paraplegic who serves as director of the New York–based Spinal Cord Resource Center, argues that for most paralyzed people, ambulation is not a paramount concern. “Walking is overrated,” Fertig says. Indeed, when the North American Spinal Cord Injury Consortium reported early this year on a survey of 1,800 constituents, it found that their principal hope was not to walk, but to restore bowel, bladder, and sexual function. The majority of paraplegics rely on catheters.

Fertig blames the glorification of walking on well-meaning but clueless able-bodied types who use terms like “wheelchair bound.” A former police officer who was injured in an off-duty motorcycle accident in 1999, he devotes his time to other pursuits: he swims and also water skis, using a padded extrawide ski topped by a metal cage for stabilization. Winters, he takes to the slopes on a sit-ski. “I don’t have time to worry about walking,” he says.

Fertig concedes that walking is good for the human body, pointing out that it’s crucial for bone density and bowel function. “We’re meant to be upright,” he says. “But exoskeletons are so expensive that I just can’t see them getting much play.” Only about 500 ReWalks are in use worldwide. Other manufacturers also make exoskeletons, but they’re not as robust and race ready. ReWalk dominates a small market, and while the company does have plans to release faster units, few ReWalk buyers are eligible to be reimbursed by their insurance.

Fertig just doesn’t see the ReWalk changing the game for paraplegics. “This thing,” he says, “is for the skydivers and the spelunkers of the disabled world.”

I arrive in Charleston in mid-December, on the eve of I Got Legs’ second annual gala, a road race. But this isn’t just another boring 5K—it’s a beer mile, a four-lap chugalug sprint of the city block surrounding .

Gorlitsky’s alluring race poster (an exoskeleton sporting Nikes) announces that it’s the Betty Carlton Beer Mile, a nod to his late grandmother, who was a chain-smoking roller-derby queen. There is even a Betty Carlton Beer Mile Queen, real estate agent and former TV reporter Sydney Ryan, who delivers just the right amount of ironic ohmygod squealing when a faux-solemn Gorlitsky crowns her with a tiara. Just under a hundred competitors, most of them around Gorlitsky’s age, and at least as many spectators have gathered not out of a piteous sense of obligationÌębut rather because, well, where else would a Charleston hipster quaff ales at 11 on a Saturday morning?

Everyone here is, it seems, a Gorlitsky fan, and he works the crowd with aplomb, grinning, dropping wry one-liners, pausing dutifully each time someone asks him to pose for a selfie. “He’s got a really good cause,” says Howard Thomas, a police officer working the scene. “We see a lot of bad accidents, and it’s nice to see something positive come out of one of them.”

“He’s a good model to anyone in a wheelchair,” says beer miler Thomas Sessions, an engineer who is paralyzed from the armpits down. “He’s motivating me to become an activist and to think about getting an exoskeleton.”

When I join Gorlitsky out on the race course, shuffling beside him as he picks his way to a sub-one-hour mile, I find myself in the midst of a happy family drama. Gorlitsky’s dad is walking behind him, holding his hand at times, lest his son falls. Stan Gorlitsky, 69, was a veterinarian before he started Allergicpets.com, and in a thick accent redolent of his native New York, he tells me, “I do this every race. Every race. And I have to train for this, you know. I’m on the treadmill five times a week. At my age, it’s a pain in the ass.”

“I’m not drinking today,” says Stan, who has three other sons, including one who’s living at home with Asperger’s. “I’m the designated driver. If he slips and I don’t catch him, he’ll go down like a cut tree. And it’s a bitch to stand him up again.”

Gorlitsky pokes his crutches forward, one at a time, as a handful of admirers fan out behind him, their own race long over as they sip beer.

We round a corner. “Any tilts, any sand, any cracks in the pavement, any grates or walkways,” Stan says, “forget about it. I have to concentrate. A lot of times, I just tune out conversations.”

TodayÌęhe’s not missing much. After the second lap (and third beer), Gorlitsky says, “I’m already drunk!” After the third lap, he says of his exoskeleton, “I wouldn’t wear it on a first date. I’m a little self-conscious in it. It takes up a lot of space. But on a second or third date? Definitely!”

Just before Gorlitsky crosses the finish line, he allows himself to dream of next year’s beer mile. “I want to have bands,” he says. “I want it to be a relay race, a festival. I want to make it a love letter to Charleston.”

Gorlitsky’s emergence as a public figure in Charleston was filled with sparkle and hope. In April 2016, Julian Smith, the longtime director of Charleston’s premier road race—the , a 10K that draws 40,000 racers each April—welcomed Gorlitsky into the event, even though he knew that the man would be out on the courseÌęposing traffic issues forÌęmuch longer than the average runner. After Gorlitsky finished, in just under seven hours, Smith invited him to speak at a national conference for race directors. Gorlitsky, in turn, got a tattoo on his right arm that reads “17,932”—the number of steps his ReWalk took in the race.

But last year, Smith contracted glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, and inÌęJanuaryÌęhe decided to step down. Before the 2018 race, Gorlitsky locked horns with the race’s deputy director, Irv Batten, who (in the interest of time, permitting, and insurance issues) wanted him to race in a wheelchair. Gorlitsky refused—“I probably dropped some f-bombs,” he acknowledges—and was ultimately picked up, ingloriously, by the race’s sweep van near the two-mile point, unable to complete the course in the three hours allotted all racers.

Batten declined to comment for this story, but when I visit Gorlitsky at the comfortable two-bedroom house he rents from his dad in the suburbs of Charleston, he has no qualms about describing his feud with another Bridge Run luminary, Marka Danielle Rodgers, a 62-year-old quadriplegic. Rodgers, a ballet instructor and disabilities advocate, has an incomplete spinal injury, meaning that she retains some motor skills and was able to finish the 2016 Cooper River race in just over two hours, using a less elaborate (but still uncommon) set of $20,000 mechanized leg braces made by the German company Ottobock. In 2017, she began to wonder what I Got Legs had actually accomplished, 18 months after incorporating as a 501c3.

“What is actually happening with your foundation?” she wrote Gorlitsky on Facebook Messenger in late November. “Where is the money going? Who are you helping?”

He wrote back, calling her “passive-aggressive,” and said that her “emotional statements” called to mind Donald Trump, whoÌęboth he and Rodgers abhor.

Rodgers is reluctant to criticize Gorlitsky, focusing her concerns instead on the ReWalk. “To put it out there to the public that you can just go to your doctorÌęand get a scrip for this device and go walking—that’s misleading,” she says. “It’s almost dangerous. It takes half an hour just to put a ReWalk on. It takes a lot of work to learn how to use one.ÌęIt’s very frustrating.” And for people whose spinal injuries are incomplete, Rodgers says, a ReWalk won’t work. “It’s jerky on the body. If I tried to use one, it could induce muscle spasms.” Ìę

Still, Rodgers’sÌęprincipal question is a good one. What’s happening at I Got Legs?

When Gorlitsky started the nonprofit, he hoped to help other paraplegics buy exoskeletons. Soon, though, he realized that the demand for such devices was low. “They’re too expensive,” he says, “and they wear out after only a few years.” InsteadÌęhe decided, “We need to help others toward their own version of getting legs.”

In recent months, I Got Legs has helped promote a fund-raising dinner for a 13-year-old paraplegic girl who needs an elevator in her home. It also made plans to aid two other mobility-related campaigns:ÌęOne, set up by a Charleston physical-therapy student, aims to teach Ugandans how to build wheelchairs inexpensively. The other involves a disabled Ohio woman trying to scrape together $2,000 for a hand bike.

The latest tax documents of I Got Legs reveal that it received $38,117 in contributions in 2017, along with $14,715 in program revenues. Much of this went toward the 2016 Ford Explorer that Gorlitsky uses to drive around Charleston and to races. I Got Legs received a deep discount on the vehicle, along with a Braunability wheelchair ramp, from Charleston-based , which adapts vehicles for people with disabilities. As for the remaining contributions, “almost all came from sponsorships,” GorlitskyÌęsays,Ìę“meaning that a business contributes money and in exchange they receive signage or advertising at our events or on the car.”

Gorlitsky says that I Got Legs spent the sponsorship funds on two awareness programs: One is his own One Million Steps Tour, which sees him trying to log that many paces at road races (he’s currently up to 217,189). The second is what he’s dubbed the ReEnabled Racing Circuit, which includes the beer mile and two Charleston-area events that are not run by I Got Legs—a Turkey Day 5KÌęand a July FourthÌęFirecracker Run.

Thus far, Gorlitsky says, about tenÌęathletes with disabilities have joined him—in wheelchairs, in leg braces, and wearing prosthetics—to compete in the ReEnabled Circuit. I Got Legs has not yet given money to any mobility-impaired individuals, though it plans to in 2019, through a Got Legs! Give Back Fund. It has, however, already launched a program, I Need Legs, designed to help disabled people raise funds. Last year, in its first effort, I Need Legs helped a Charleston-based blind woman—Gina Applebee, a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology—raise about $10,000 for a tiny home she described on her GoFundMe page as the “perfect fit for my blind feng shui.” I Got Legs helped Applebee by, for instance, hosting a happy-hour fund-raiser at a local bar and introducing her to news reporters. ÌęÌę

Throughout 2018, Gorlitsky worked with a pair of Charleston consultants, Sandy Morckel and Frank Sonntag, whose outfit Solutions for the Greater Good helps nonprofits with organizational management. As Sonntag sees it, Gorlitsky is a “big thinker” whose vision surpasses I Got Legs’ tiny budget, and who's already looking to fund stem-cell research and create an endowment. Sonntag would like to see I Got Legs focus on aiding the mobility impaired. But he tells me, his tone judicious, “Adam isn’t a pushover. He doesn’t just flatly follow our lead.”

Gorlitsky says he arrived at his $150,000 budget for 2019 with the help of SonntagÌęand the board. Without divulging specifics, he claims he’s got some large donors lined up. “I’m into big rhetoric for sure,” he says, “but people are starting to see that I’ll live up to the rhetoric.”

“From day one,Ìęmy philosophy has been:ÌęYou have to raise public awareness. From there, you can leverage fund-raising money,” Gorlitsky says. “We’re a content-driven nonprofit,” he adds, alluding to the thousands of autobiographical videos he’s uploaded to Facebook and other platforms. “We create content, and we leverage it to build community and educate people. I don’t give a shit about money. If your nonprofit places too much emphasis on giving money away—well, then you’re just a GoFundMe. ”

On the morning after the beer mile, I join Gorlitsky for what is hisÌęfirst marathon-training sesh—a ten-mile hand-bike spin through a quiet suburban neighborhood. He’s on the hand cycle; I’m on wheeled roller skis. As we glide along, he tells me that soon he’ll be walking about tenÌęmiles a week and also doing frequent hand-cycling and gym sessions. “I’d like to walk more,” he says, before considering his training partner. “But I have to be mindful of my dad’s body, too.”

Stan has been training on the treadmill, and he says, “I’m 99 percent sure I’ll make it. Bottom line: I’m his roadie. He needs me.”

Logistics will be complicated in L.A. In December, Gorlitsky received a legalistic 11-paragraph letter from the Los Angeles Marathon officeÌęgreen-lighting his participation but also making clear that its officials were not about to stop traffic for 30-plus hours. “You will start at the 32K mark at 6:30 A.M.,” the letter reads. “Your walk to the start line is not sanctioned.”

In other words, Gorlitsky will need to travel the first 20 miles on the sidewalk—over the cracked pavement and patches of sand that give Stan Gorlitsky nightmares. He’ll move with an entourage—at least one ReWalk technician, a few supporters, and also a filmmaker, Caitlin Weiler, who’s including Adam’s journey in a documentary on her late father, a quadriplegic. Gorlitsky’s crew will carry some food and water on the back of his wheelchair.

Simon Kindleysides navigated London with a team as well. He did the last 18 miles of his marathon on sidewalks, alongside streets streaming with traffic. Which means that when Gorlitsky guns for Kindleysides’s record, he’ll be ReWalking onto a level playing field. “I’d say I have an 80 percent chance of beating Simon’s time,” he tells me. “I ran a 4:50 mile in high school. I played varsity basketball.”

Gorlitsky questions Kindleysides’s claim to have moved along at a 62-minute-mile pace at the London Marathon. “How’s that even possible?” he asks. Kindleysides says he told Gorlitsky, “Look, every disabled person has different abilities.”

A ReWalk service engineer, Wai Li, sheds a little light on this question. “Gorlitsky is not too smooth,” says Li,Ìęwho walked the Portland half marathon beside him. As is true to a certain extent for all exoskeleton users, he says, “When Adam gets tired, he leans in many directions. He leans over the crutches so much. Supposedly, they are just there for balance, but his hands got bruised. In the end, he had to stop every block and rub them.” Kindleysides, who is better able to recruit his core muscles, walked more upright. His hands were sore but not bruised after his marathon.

“Simon has huge trunk control,” Gorlitsky tells me at the tail end of my visit. We’re at his house, and he begins scrolling through his rival’s Facebook feed. “There’s a lot of selfies,” he says. “There’s a boy-band thing going on. He’s got the tattoos, the hair.”

As I drive toward the airport, I remember something Gorlitsky said in an e-mail early on: “Every time I say the F-word to someone,” he wrote, “I do give them a big hug and tell them I’m sorry immediately after.” Gorlitsky gets it. He’s young, and he’s had a life freighted with more frustrations and challenges than most. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before he learns to channel the frustration within.

Simon Kindleysides may already be there. When I call him to ask for his thoughts on Gorlitsky’s upcoming race, his voice is cheery as his kids squeal and cavort in the background. “He says he’s going to beat me,” Kindleysides says, “that’s he going to smash my record. WellÌęthen, why doesn’t he just bring it on? Isn’t that what competition is all about? I wish him good luck.”

The post The Paraplegic Marathon Man appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

For me, the biggest mystery swirling around fitness guru Kale Poland is why the retail giant Walmart has thus far failed to offer him corporate sponsorship. A few years ago, when Kale was competing in the excruciating Peak 500 footrace in Vermont, running a muddy mountain loop over and overÌęamid torrid rainstorms, his mildewed, blistered feet swelled up like balloons. His running shoes became skin-shearing straitjackets,Ìęso Kale made a strategic move that would now be legend, if only Walmart had been paying attention: he sent his wife to the nearest Supercenter to buy him a pair of $13, size-13 Walmart-brand boats.

After the missus came back with the shoes, Kale proceeded to wear them through the race’s remaining 320 miles. He wore them as he ran through the midnight chill. He wore them as he stumbled through the race’s final loop, hallucinating, somehow seeing mannequins in the woods and letters printed on boulders. He wore them as he crossed the finish line, victorious.

And in the aftermath of his Peak 500 triumph, Kale Poland, who’s 36, has only proven himself more qualified to be a Walmart spokesmodel. An amiable, can-do country boy who grew up in a tiny Maine farm town, he is the mastermind behind Cleetus Fit, a one-man school of exercise science meant to evoke a mythical, slack-jawed hillbilly.

Cleetus Fit flourishes on , where some 3,000 friendsÌęlap up Kale’s wry three-a-day posts about, say, his dog Sage’s stick-fetching habits, his swim workouts, and his he-man runs through raging blizzards. It also lives and breathes in the green hills of New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where 25 or so of his personal-training clients join Kale in eschewing the gymnasium toÌębuild muscle by towing dumpsters across parking lots and doing push-ups atop the underside of a wheelbarrow. The Cleetus juggernaut at times strays into relatively more esoteric corners of the fitness universe—with a partner, Kale recently opened , a studio in Meredith, New Hampshire—but a chummy, hat-backwardsÌędudeness permeates all things Cleetus. See, for example, Kale’s eloquent Facebook diss of highfalutinÌęcross-country skiers (“I don't drive a Subaru or a Volvo and I don't lie awake at night dreaming about how I am going to win the waxing debate tomorrow”).ÌęOr consider a recent selfie that captured Kale out on aÌę185-mile training ride dressed in a cotton hoodie and stuffing pizza into his maw.

“BEAST!!” wrote one friend, adding a comment to the robust dialogue that accompanies all Kale posts.

“I thought that was raw bacon,” wrote another.

“You,” rejoiced a third, “are a marvelous hack.”

On November 6, the world’s largest retailer will once again miss a chance to embrace this populist hero. That morning, Kale will leap into a University of New Orleans swimming pool to commence ​​​​​​, the first-ever Deca Ironman—that’s ten Ironmans in a row—to be held in the continental U.S. The race will see 16 brave athletes attempting to swim 24 miles (in other words, 792 laps) before they shuttle to nearby to bike 1,120 miles (160 mind-numbing repeats of a flat seven-mile loop). The sufferfest concludes on foot, with no less than 262 out-and-back repeats of the same half-mile-long patch of dirt. The clock will be running constantly, meaning that front-runners will likely retreat to their course-side sleeping tents for maybe three hours a night before finishing in roughly nine days.

The deca, born in Mexico in 1992, is still only held two or three times a year worldwide. It’s gaining popularity, and there are now even occasional double and triple decas for the most depraved sadists. None of these races drawÌęthe fun-run multitudes, however. When Kale came in second in his first deca—the World Cup Ultratriathlon Challenge in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2012, crossing the line in 12 days, 10 hours, and 20 minutes—he was also the last-place finisher.

In Louisiana, race director Wayne Kurtz says Kale is most likely to distinguish himself by spending very little money on the race. “If you give Kale a T-shirt,” Kurtz says, “he’ll wear it for ten years.” As Kurtz sees it, Kale is a possible dark horse at Decaman. (It’s almost impossible to handicap a race that so brazenly courts human decay, but a wise bettor would do well to back Ferenc Szonyi, a 54-year-old Hungarian who was the lone finisher in June’s , a 300-mile running race that traversed the Indian Himalayas, summitingÌęfive peaks.) “Kale’s weak in the swim,” says Kurtz, “but the guy can ride, and he’s great on sleep deprivation. We know he can grind through the night, but his biggest asset, really, is his calmness—and his dad’s calmness.”

Kale’s father, Wes Poland, who run the parts department at a tractor dealership in Auburn, Maine, is his son’s pit-crew chief. It’s a challenging job with its own adventures in sleep deprivation and stormy emotion. “The deca is a soap opera,” explains Kurtz. “At one race last year in Mexico, three or four people on this one crew started screaming at eachÌęother in Portuguese. Soon enoughÌęthey were leaving, midrace, and flying back home to Brazil. Kale and Wes, they’re steady. I can see Kale going top five.”

As it happens, I live near Kale’s current home in the Lakes Region. We’re in the same cycling group, and in early September, I decided that America needed to hear his story. A few days later, at dusk, he and I were road-tripping to his parents’ cabin in western Maine, so that he couldÌędo an all-night-long trail run followed by a punishing, sleep-deprived morning bike ride over a mountain pass.

“The thing about the deca,” Kale says, driving along, “is you’re miserable most of the time. It’s not like there’s joy in the misery. It’s just misery, so the training is all about building mental toughness.”

In the lead-up to that first deca in Mexico, back before Kale was a sought-after, $50-an-hour personal trainer, his daily life had such hardships built in. He was living in Laconia, New Hampshire, pulling a graveyard shift as a supermarket shelf stocker then and also working full-time at Eastern Mountain Sports down in Concord, and even though EMS was 26 miles from home, he commuted on a bike—on a single speed, in the winter. “Sometimes,” he tells me, waxing nostalgic, “I’d look at my schedule and realize, ‘Oh, God, I can’t sleep for the next two days.’”

In the years since the Monterrey deca, Kale has sought out new ways to sabotage his sinew. In 2015, he established an ultramarathon cyclingÌęrecord, traversing a 255-mile-wide swath of Maine in 15:01. More recently, he’s taken to running the trails of New Hampshire’s White Mountains in pursuit of fastest known times.

We keep driving. The lawns around us are still bearing Trump signs two years after he was elected. We get passed by a pickup truck fluttering two American flags from the tailgate. We’re on Kale’s home turf. He grew up in Turner, Maine, which theÌęPortland Press Herald “one of Maine’s most conservative towns,” a “farming community that prizes self-sufficiency and low taxes.”

Turner, it so happens, is home to one of New England’s largest chicken farms, a sprawling environmental nightmare whose scent permeated the town. “In the spring, when it got warm,” remembers Kale’s old friend Nick Harrington, “the manure started to thaw out at the chicken coops, and you’d need to put up fly strips. You’d need a few dozen fly swatters in your house.”

“You could never get anyone to come to Turner for barbecues,” remembers Linda Poland, Kale’s aunt.

In Kale’s childhood, motor sports were holy. “We might have had a shutoff notice from the light company,” says his uncle and neighbor, Dan Poland, a mechanic, “but we still had boats, four-wheelers, snowmobiles, campers, go-karts, and minibikes.”

Kale was five when he was given his first snowmobile, a 295cc 1972 Polaris Colt. By the time he was ten, he and his buddies were ranging miles from home and changing out their own spark plugs and belts. Their favorite pastime involved climbing into plastic sleds, so they could be snowmobile-towed at blistering speed to the crest of a hill.

When Kale began dabbling, at age 12, in cross-country ski racing, his cronies regarded him as a defector. They called him a “forest fairy,” Kale says, and at first he steered clear of his new sport’s most effete practices. He refused to wear Lycra and instead raced in wind pants and a hoodie. He brought the same raw ethic ofÌęhis adolescent forays into triathlon. In his first tri, he swam over a mile with his head up, out of the water (he’d never learned the crawl). His borrowed department-store road bike had a ruined bottom bracket, and even though he was a formidable runner, he finished deep within the bottom third of the field in a lowly all-comers race.

The seed was planted, though, and in his undergraduate days at University of Maine–Machias, Kale bought his first real bike. Glory was only a few thousand workouts away.

When Kale and I reach the cabin, Wes Poland is already there, seated at the kitchen table, drinking a Coors wrapped in a beer cozy. A merry and slightly jowly raconteur with a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache, he launches right away into comic stories. He tells me how at one quintuple Ironman, when the balls of Kale’s feet became two giant blisters, he duct-taped sandals to his son’s ravaged dogs, giving them a chance to air out as he hobbled along. “We fixed the problem,” he says, before gesturing across the table at his wife, Belinda, who is a nurse. “Your mother wouldn’t be too impressed by how we fixed it, but we fixed it.”

“I just can't watch Kale’s races,” says Belinda, who has aided Wes in crewing, along with numerous relatives. “My job is to make people better.”

Wes shrugs, snickering. Then he lays out his philosophy, which he honed partly by crewing at rural Maine stock-car races back in the seventies and eighties. “You just gotta suck it up if you want to finish what you started,” he says. “You can’t have any sympathy for the athlete. You can’t let him wallow in self-pity. You’ve just got to keep him moving and fed. And you’ve gotta stay focused. I don’t pay attention to what anyone else is doing—that’s their business. And I try to keep things consistent. Kale is excellent at consistency. On the bike, you could set your watch by his laps.”

By nowÌęKale is stuffing three headlamps into his backpack. It’s 10 p.m., time for his run up the two peaks of nearby BaldpateÌęMountain, elevation 3,812 feet. I’ve already elected to forego the outing in favor of a little shut-eye, but when Kale gets back to the cabin at 3 a.m, dripping with sweat, we touch base, whispering in deference to his dad who needs to wake at four for a busy day at the dealership. “Right now,” he says, “I do not feel like getting on my bike, and I think that’s exactly how I need to feel. I need to be exhausted.”

“Noted,” I think, and then drift back into sleep.

At dawn, with Kale still gone, I head out for a walk on a winding back road. After maybe an hour, I hear something behind me, a bike, and then Kale and I are ensconced in a pivotal moment. He has full license to just zip past me, head down. It’d be kind of a dickish move, sure, but he’s training, and it’s cold outside. Does he really want his muscles to stiffen up in the damp?

Kale slows down until he’s right beside me, moving at a piddling three miles an hour as he and I shoot the breeze. “Did you go up to that quarry?” he asks. There’s a sweetness in his tone, a caring. The original plan had been for us to ride together, but I tweaked my back. The injury’s put me in a slightly maudlin mood, and Kale, it seems, has picked up on this. He rides all the way in beside me, chatting. It’s no big deal—just an easy gesture of kindness—but it makes me realize that there’s so much more than sweat and snideness to the Cleetus program. There’s a humility and an unrehearsed warmth. Ìę

Everything Kale does in fitness has a welcoming vibe. His mission in life is to make outdoor sports fun for all, even if they’re not ectomorphic gear geeks. A decade ago, while living in Maine’s northernmost county, he dreamed up a footrace, the , to rebut the Tough Mudder, which he regards as a “fake tough race for fake tough people.” He obliged competitors to linger at “torture stations” as they slogged 30 miles through boggy river bottoms and over old railroad beds. The fitter the runner, the more often they wereÌęasked to chain themselves to a truck tire or lug cinder blocks up a hill or push helmeted volunteers through the woods on a refrigerator dolly. There was no entry fee and no trophies, but Kale rewarded all finishers with a rusty railroad spike. One competitor so loved the Dirty 30 that he got a spike tattooed on his calf.

The Dirty 30 is no more (for liability reasons), but in recent years, Kale has continued to accrue fans—from personal training and also from theÌę, where he’s taught cross-country skiing to grade-schoolers and also led mountaintop yoga, often luring 30 or 40 pilgrims who climb to the summit to partake of Kale’s guidance through downward dog.

The man is not unaware of his cult status, and at times his Facebook posts seek out a sonorous, sermon-like depth. “Everything I have seen,” he wrote one morning last July, after the early death of a beloved Gunstock employee, “validates a theory I have had all along: Life is short. DO IT NOW. SPEND THE MONEY. TAKE THE TRIP. LIVE WILD.”

One hundred and thirty likes ensued, along with 55 loves and 27 comments:

“WŽÇ°ù»ć.”

“T°ùłÜłÙłó!”

“Amen to that!”

The next time I see Kale, on a warm September afternoon, he’s heading to a small, crunchy New Hampshire preschool—Saplings, it’s called—to do a 90-minute session in his new role as the school’s mindfulness/yoga instructor. We ride there together in his pickup, and in a way it seems odd that a self-described redneck—a man who voted for Donald Trump in 2016—would take such an assignment.

But Kale’s interest in yoga is sincere, even if he first took to the mat for branding reasons. (“People were afraid of doing personal training with me because they figured that I was too hardcore,” he explains. “I wanted to soften my image.”) Over the last couple of years, he’s gone all-in. He’s partaken of a heart-chakra-opening yoga workshop on a blood moon, and recently on Facebook he drifted into the namaste mists when he proclaimed, “I am still in my infancy as a yogi.”

Kale’s woo-woo credentials are seriously undercut by his taste for beer yoga,Ìęwhich involves swilling large quantities of Pabst Blue Ribbon, but whatever. This fallÌęon Facebook, he wrote with thrilled lyricism about Saplings: “You guys. I went to a special place today. Kids were muddy and jumping off rocks and playing with frogs.”

When we reach the 22-acre wooded campus, the children are inside a yurt, their teacher hushing them upon the sound of our footfalls. “Owl eyes and mouse mouths, everyone,” she says. “Kale is here.”

He stoops low and enters the yurt wearing a long-sleeved plaid shirt, tattered shorts, and a ski hat, and soon the day’s mindfulness regime begins. It consists, basically, of running around in the woods, with Kale leading the pack. “Let's go to the stump circle!” he shouts. We all scramble out there, snaking through the trees and the brush. When we sit down to pass the sharing stick, one little boy says that his favorite thing about Saplings is “going on adventures and running.”

“Yeah,” Kale says, nodding solemnly as he clutches the stick. “I second that. Definitely.”

We quack like ducks as we weave along toward the Big Rock, then climb atop it before clambering on toward the muddy shores of the brook. Then a moment later, it happens: some kid steps on a yellow-jacket nest, and suddenly we’re all sprinting down a hill, the children screaming in terror, the adults scooping them into their arms. The yellow jackets move with us, a blackÌęmenacing cloud, and each time a child gets stung, an anguished cry pierces the forest.

We keep running. The wasps go into hiding now, lodging under everyone’s shirts. Kale and the teacher begin stripping clothing off kids. One little boy looks up at me, the interloper, and in tears he asks, “Are the bees going to keep chasing us forever?”

We reach safety on the leafy playground, finally, and a week later, after I’ve spent many hours icing my welts, I learn that every single sapling has fully recovered. “They didn’t even say the word bee,” Kale tells me after his next visit. I start imagining these kids as future deca stars. I mean, they’ve got the whole pain-tolerance thing down
.

Kale is in focused-training mode now. As autumn comes on—as the leaves flame orange and then drift down onto the roads, becoming cold slime under our tires—his Facebook feed attains a quiet and sober timbre. Anyone who has ever entered a race knows the goose-pimply chills that precede the call to the starting line. Now that feeling seeps into Kale’s words, so that one morning in late October, he dials in on the specific agonies his trial will entail. “Contact and extended exposure,” he writes. “The sun on the skin. The chlorine from the pool where the goggles press your eyes. The weight of your body on the bike seat pressing up against your ass. The wind in your eyes.”

Sage the dog is momentarily left unmentioned. In these last, critical days, the PBRs retreat into the dark recesses at the back of the fridge. Homeboy’s got a race to run—a long one. He needs to be ready.

The post The Proudly Backwoods Fitness Trainer appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Tour de France broadcasts are almost cruel in their teasing. First there are the helicopter shots of the lovely French countryside: the green hills, the little stone churches, the sloping pastures filled with sleepy-eyed cows. Then we see the peloton snaking through some tiny upland village, past the boulangerie, the charcuterie. Then, just to drive the knife home, the camera’s focus narrows onto some completely charming outdoor cafĂ© as the sun spills onto the cobblestones. In that instant, we’re almost programmed to think about alighting in a small village for a month, existing on fromage and Beaujolais.

Ultimately, most of us will shake off the fantasy. But it really is possible to vanish into the French countryside. I know this because in 1980, my uncle bought a crumbling, centuries-old house at the northern edge of the Pyrenees, an hour from the Spanish border, and never returned to American life. William Joseph Donahue was a Catholic cleric—both a monk and a priest—as well as a sensitive poet who in middle age came to regard his Benedictine order in Washington, D.C., as hidebound and archaic. After writing a pained 28-page letter to the pope, beseeching His Holiness for “release from my religious vows,” and following a brief stint as a newspaperman in Canada, my uncle moved to Montastruc-de-Salies, a small village where the church bells toll hourly and sleekly clad cycling squads spin through in springtime, mixing with tractors and stray dogs wandering the road. The Tour passed through Montastruc in 2008, and this year, on July 24, Stage 16 will wend 1,300 feet up and down the Col de Portet-d’Aspet, about 15 miles from the village.

In Montastruc, my uncle settled into a different sort of monkish life, staying so close to home that he once managed to keep a fire burning in the hearth for 77 days straight. Sustained by a meager pension, he spent his mornings engrossed in a singular project: translating Thucydides’s eight-volume from Greek into Latin. He bent over each page with a magnifying glass and scribed his work into small perfect-bound notebooks, his handwriting so minuscule and precise that, looking at it today, I find it luminous, like the calligraphy on a medieval scroll. On afternoons he tended a meticulous vegetable garden in the shadow of a cragged peak, Paloumùre, elevation 5,280 feet, from whose summit the entire Pyrenees is visible, stretching snowily from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

It’s difficult to convey how dear and formative, and also perplexing, it is to have such an uncle. He was a man of letters, and as a brooding and outrĂ© teenager inclined toward Hermann Hesse and Albert Camus, I idolized him. Uncle Bill had escaped the excesses of American materialism—a coup, in my eyes—and there was something beautiful and delicate about him. He stood apart. I knew this, I think, even when I was three years old and he showed up at my family’s house in Connecticut on a hot summer day, mischievously smirking and light on his feet when he grabbed the hose and doused me with cold water as I ran all over the yard, squealing with glee. He was a slight man—five foot seven and 140 pounds—and all his life he retained the buoyant, playful spirit of a small boy. I loved him; that never wavered.

Still, ensconced by his smoky fireplace in the Pyrenees, my uncle was so far away from the suburbs of Hartford, where my father, his only sibling, was an estate lawyer and where I myself, despite my anti-capitalist leanings, was a high school ski racer, an expensively equipped habituĂ© of Mount Southington. Later I was busy with college. I got married, then began raising a daughter. I’m ashamed to admit that during the 26 years Uncle Bill was in France, I visited him only three times. We corresponded often, but there was a formality to my uncle’s letters, which might linger on the German theologian Hans KĂŒng before signing off “Your Kinsman.”

At Saint Anselm’s Abbey School in Washington, D.C., he’d been a beloved teacher of history and Latin. He was a brilliant and socially nimble man, but at age 53 he took to his hermitage, embracing the Voltaire quote that would ultimately be engraved on his tombstone: “We must cultivate our own garden.”

Is it OK to cut away from the life of work, as my uncle did, and from everyday interaction with other people? In the dozen years since his death, I’ve wondered. I’ve also missed him. During this time I’ve become a diehard road cyclist, a whittled Strava striver with the standard fetish for vintage Gitane frames and cols de whatever. France exerted a certain tug on me. So this spring, a few months after my own 53rd birthday, I flew to Toulouse, rented a car, and began climbing into the hills. Ìę

I reach MontastrucÌęon a cool Thursday evening, just as the village church bells are striking six, bracing myself for a sad story. Montastruc was an agricultural village when my uncle moved there, but family farming has suffered in France, and now, a French tourism official wrote me about the place in an e-mail, “Most of the inhabitants are old, quite old.”

When I step into the town hall, I’m surprised to find that the mayor, 57-year-old Bertrand Lacarrùre, is slim and dapper and readying for a backcountry ski trip in Spain. Lacarrùre, who also plays guitar in a rock band, is a socialist and a Paris native whose family roots in Montastruc date back to the 17th-century reign of Louis XIV. As a child, he spent summers roaming the countryside here—“like Tom Sawyer,” he tells me. “I caught trout in the river with my hands. I went hunting. I climbed into caves with other kids and met up with girls. I always knew that I wanted to do something for this village.”

The issues confronting the Lacarrùre administration are small-timey (on billboards all over town, I’ll see public notices announcing the purchase of a municipal photocopier), but the mayor harbors a larger vision: to keep the village “vital.” He’s succeeded. The population is currently about 300 and growing. The Football Club Montastruc-de-Salies is 30 members strong, made up largely of twentysomething lads who work in Toulouse and return on weekends to ­occupy ancestral homes and enjoy the region’s burgeoning outdoor scene. These days the skies above Montastruc are often filled with paragliders dropping down from the spires of the Pyrenees. Nearby is the low-key ski resort Le Mourtis, with 1,600 feet of vertical drop. And in summers, open-air concerts are held in the ruins of a 12th-century monastery, Bonnefont, a half-hour away.

When I meander back out onto the street from the town hall at dusk, I make my way toward the cemetery at the base of the church tower. Because I can’t remember exactly where my uncle is buried, I stroll the gravel pathways, marveling at the flowers on the graves and the distinctly French plaques that crowd the long, flat top of each tombstone, memorializing the departed—a grandfather, a husband, a great-uncle.

There are, it seems, only three last names in this cemetery: EsquerrĂ©, Lassale, and Mailheau. My uncle is an outsider, and I hate to think of him lying here all alone, for I remember how much joy he brought me. When I was ten or eleven, Uncle Bill and I often played Ping-Pong in my family’s basement. Our battles were cutthroat. Once, after smacking a forehand that went wide, he slammed his sandpaper paddle on the table and cursed, “Damn!”

“I’m sorry, Bill,” he added quickly, remembering that he was a priest. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

When I reach his grave, I find six memorial plaques. One I’d left there myself; another is from friends of my family. The remaining four are a happy mystery that I won’t solve tonight. I’m jet-lagged and ready for sleep.

My uncle's house is in a quartier of Montastruc known as Escat, a hilltop mini ham-let that consists of four dwellings and the ruins of a 700-year-old castle. The house is tidy and well maintained these days, occu­pied by a 13th-generation Montastruc native—a schoolteacher—and her husband, a football player.

When my uncle first arrived, he was the quartier’s only occupant, and the plaster skin on the walls of his house was so ravaged that blunt stones poked through. There was no insulation and no heat source, save for the fireplace—never mind that he was situated 1,500 feet above sea level and subject to the odd soggy snowfall.

What I remember most from my visits is the dim, amber quality of the light inside the house, and the cool, cave-like air, and how, when you stepped to the windows in the morning and threw open the wooden shutters, life poured in. There was sunlight suddenly, and songbirds darting about in the bushes; the peaks of PaloumĂšre shone snowy white in the distance.

My uncle loved being here, in touch with an ancient, elemental world. In his letter to the pope, he said that he’d conceived “a roman­tic love for medieval history and Gothic art” as a teen, and in his poetry, which was never widely published, he described “the phoebes calling / through the reedlands of April / the almond-colored castles up irre­traceable pathways.”

It was serendipity that he ended up on this particular hilltop. In 1975, when he was working on the editorial page of the Ottawa Journal, he met some young travelers, recent university grads from the Pyrenees. The Journal was ceasing publication, and my uncle’s new acquaintances offhandedly suggested he begin life afresh in France. A few weeks later he called one of them—a health care administrator named Nicole BĂ©gué—from the train station in Toulouse, intent on looking for real estate.

In a village with almost no other foreigners, my uncle was known as l’AmĂ©ricain. In 1996, when he acquired his first neighbors, Christian and Nicole Bosc, they became “the people who live next to l’AmĂ©ricain.” He was well mannered and generous, freely sharing the fruits of his garden and loaning out his car, but he was so discreet that the Boscs didn’t even know he was Catholic. Intrigue built up around him. When my uncle gave the village officials a simple gift—a sundial he found in his house—it was regarded as possibly valuable, perhaps a remnant from the old castle. When I visit the mayor’s office, in fact, the sundial is still there, locked in a closet, a gray slab with a long, thin, rusty rod for a dial. Mayor LacarrĂšre tells me, “I’d like to put it out, but I’m afraid it would be stolen.”

To me the prospect seems unlikely. The dial looks suspiciously like circa-1970 rebar.

Nothing of materialÌęvalue existed in my uncle’s immediate orbit. This became crystal clear in 2006, when he died, at age 78, of kidney failure. My father flew to France to make the funeral arrangements. He called me from Montastruc and said, “I think we’re just going to get rid of everything here.”

“All of Uncle Bill’s papers?” I asked, suddenly stricken, doing the math. “All of his notebooks?”

“Look,” Dad said. “You are never going to read any of that stuff. No one else is, either.”

My father had some reason to regard his younger brother’s withdrawal to France as frivolous. His own life had been infinitely practical. For 50 years, he had worked at the same law firm, stowing in his closet five business suits—a Monday suit, a Tuesday suit, and so on. He put three kids through college, and he represented his brother legally, working with the Benedictines to leverage his small pension. But Dad also saw something pure in his brother, and when I protested that Uncle Bill’s papers had to be saved, it was he who paid for my transatlantic plane ticket.

I ended up cleaning out the whole house, which was not difficult. My uncle’s array of possessions had been pared down to the contours of his simple life, so much so that each object seemed to shine—this wooden spoon, this black-and-white television, this battered radio with a cord gnawed by mice. I couldn’t bring myself to take these items to the local version of Goodwill, and trying to sell them seemed absurd, so I summoned his neighbors to the house and, two by two, they arrived, offering condolences before solemnly trundling the relics home.

I gave the Boscs an aluminum stepladder, and Nicole told me that when my uncle was growing frail, she looked out for him. “The first thing I’d do in the morning,” she said, “was peer out my window to see if there was smoke coming out of his chimney.”

The bond was rooted in mutual respect. My uncle had grown up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, back when the area was still agricultural, and as a kid he’d earned a dime an hour helping a local farmer with his haying. He kept a victory garden during World War II. Country life was virtuous in his eyes, physical labor honest and good, and in Montastruc he was enchanted to be around people attuned to the land. Once, he told me, he went to a small party where a local family was unveiling its farm’s most recent vintage of homegrown wine. A man stood up and pronounced, “I can taste the rocks on the back of the hill.”

My uncle brought to gardening the same zeal for perfection that imbued his study of Latin and Greek. He was intent on cultivating one very specific sliver of land—maybe 50 feet by 40 feet—on the southeast-facing slope of a hill adjoining a cow pasture at latitude 43 degrees north, as expertly as he possibly could, and his gardening journals reveal an agronomist at work. Writing in French, he recorded the variety of each seed he planted, the date and the weather, and his stratagems for dodging the torrents of nature. “As a result of last night’s storm,” he wrote on August 15, 2001, “the corn fell. I tried to straighten it with string.”

A vague sense of defeat pervades every passage. “The potatoes are good,” he writes, “but they’re small.”

I suspect that he wished his connection to the French soil was not intellectual but rather ancestral, in his blood and bones. His closest friends in Montastruc—AndrĂ© and Jeannette Touzet, first cousins roughly my uncle’s age—lived together in the same rambling stone farmhouse where their fathers were born. My uncle spoke of the Touzets with a certain awe, as though they were made of a rare element yet to be discovered by science. “When daylight savings comes,” he told me once, “they never even touch their clocks. They live by the hours of the sun, and at home they don’t speak French. They speak Languedoc,” a regional Latinate patois.

My uncle met the Touzets during his first Montastruc winter. When his pipes froze one night, he walked a quarter-mile downhill to their home bearing a few plastic jugs and, in gentlemanly tones, asked if he could fill up at their spigot. Soon he was visiting once a week to chat about the weather, or the eggplant in his garden, or the mushrooms he found while foraging in the woods.

AndrĂ© Touzet died in 2006, but Jeannette is still flourishing. When I knock on her door and announce that my name is William Donahue, I am instantly accorded VIP status. She is 90 now, and though she is silver haired and stooped, her smile still glows; in her wholesome, earthy way, she leaves Catherine Deneuve in the dust. I’m smitten, too, but thanks to my bad French and her challenged hearing, all we can ­really do is grin at one another as we sit at the long wooden table by her brick hearth, which has been seared black by decades of fire.

When I return with an interpreter, Madame Touzet is able to tell a story that pierces me. We’re talking about the Touzets’ dogs. “They were all hunting dogs,” she says, “and Monsieur William never hunted. He had no interest in killing things, not even a snake that got into his garden. He was interested in the dogs, though, and he always wanted to be included, so he went on a couple of hunts, just to watch. He became friends with the dogs. Sometimes he fed them scraps.”

She shows me a picture of my uncle, 55ish and lean, wearing a white T-shirt and high mud boots as three dogs circle tightly around him. He’s bending low to pet one, and his face glows with delight. “See this one here?” she says. “When she wanted sympathy, she would always go up the hill to Monsieur William’s garden. When she was very sick, she wanted to be with him, so I called him. He came down and laid her in his car. She died right there, in the passenger seat, on the way back to his house.”

“How did you know that the dog wanted to be with him?” I ask.

“I just knew,” says Madame Touzet.

It was only after my uncle died that I realized how much suffering his sensitivity caused him. His 1975 letter to the pope is a long confession exploring the anguish he suffered as a youth, as he set one woman after another up on a pedestal, only to be crushingly rejected. “At 16,” he writes, “I already cast myself in the role of the poet reaching out for unattainable beauty in romantic love.”

When he was 23, he told the pontiff, his devastation over one young woman was so total that he decided “I would probably never be able to love anyone else.” He gravitated toward the Church and became a novice monk at 25. The rites of Catholicism—the incense, the gleaming Communion chalice—held a shimmering allure for him. He romanticized these things in the same way he did women, and he hoped, he wrote in his papal letter, that his carnal longings “would all be positively subsumed by my growing interest in the understanding of the Gospel and theology.”

They weren’t. The whole time my uncle wore the cloth, women kept falling for his gentleness and wisdom. He was the sage to whom they wrote long, soul-searching letters. The relationships were platonic but steeped in shared secrets and a tenderness that set my uncle in a tizzy. In the early seventies, when he met a nun poised to leave her religious order, he was as innocent and vulnerable as a middle schooler. A true romance blossomed. Then it disintegrated, and my uncle fell into, he writes, “a state of utter desolation and confusion.”

His fragility was not simply emotional. It was neurological as well. He had epilepsy, but he didn’t learn this until after the nun left him and he sat down to draft a poem. Concentrating, he suffered a grand mal seizure that left him unconscious for 45 minutes. “I hoped that I would die,” he wrote the pope, “or that I would be a permanent invalid for whom any future would be impossible.”

Soon after he arrived in France, his friend Nicole BĂ©gué—one of the travelers he’d met in Ottawa—married a doctor, Henri Llop, who was so taken by my uncle’s quiet charm that he insisted my uncle live close by, in case the epilepsy flared. Over the ensuing 26 years, he dined with the Llops once a week. By candlelight in my uncle’s dimly lit kitchen, or beneath the chandeliers in their elegantly appointed home, they ruminated and laughed over delicately prepared foie gras and goblets of Bordeaux. “No one could listen like he could,” remembers Nicole. “If someone died, if you were grieving, he would grieve with you.”

“You look just like him,” she told me when we met. “You even walk like him.”

My uncle flourished in Montastruc, seizure-free. He’d left a religion that required the suppression of natural urges to partake in keen sensual pleasures—the sun on his back as he hoed broccoli, the piquant taste of a tomato he’d grown himself, in cow shit given to him by the Touzets. He was happy.

Which is not to say that Uncle Bill let his hair down. He remained celibate. I don’t know why—it’s not something he would ever have spoken about to anyone. But my read is that, once he came out from under the weight of the Church’s strictures, his sense of personal deprivation began to dissipate and he gradually became OK with being a little different from others. Maybe he realized that what he had to offer the world was a certain stillness, a shining peacefulness.

His retreat from the mania of modern America was nearly total. When I visited him in 2003, he was unaware that there was a chain of coffee shops called Starbucks. All he could tell me about the Internet was that he’d read about it somewhere.

In the weeks since my return from Montastruc, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a single life can add up to. It is good, I’ve decided, to achieve things—to rack up 300-mile weeks on the bike or to build a stable career. But very few people are able to transcend the rat race with sustained elegance. I’ve tried to do it myself, moving from a big city to the sticks of New Hampshire, but I keep buying crap on Amazon Prime. My uncle actually left the fake, ephemeral world behind, and of late I’ve felt like showing his notebooks to everyone I meet and saying, “Look at this—in our own time, someone lived with an antique patience and care.” I often feel like his example could save us. It could slow us all down just a little.

But the story of his years in France is, at bottom, not cosmic. It is small; it is local. Just before leaving Montastruc, I visit Madame Touzet again, this time with Nicole Bosc, and we talk about the plaques left on my uncle’s grave. “Yes,” Madame Bosc says, “that was us. That was everyone in the village, every­one from every quartier. You wouldn’t allow a person like that to die without being honored. Your uncle created an interest—in the simplicity of his life, in his friendliness. That he came from so far away and took the time to learn about us and to care—that was important.”

Madame Touzet is sitting across from me, her hands clasped on the table, nodding in assent. When our eyes meet, she smiles: a flicker of incandescence. I feel myself swooning inside. Then she speaks.

“He was interested in the village and ­everyone in it,” she says. “The gardens, the cows, the dogs, the cats. He was a good person. He was esteemed.”

Bill Donahue ( @billdonahue13) wrote about biologist Bernd Heinrich in November 2017.

The post The Monk’s Tale appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Great lives often begin amid tumult and suffering. Seventy years ago, long before Bernd Heinrich became one of history’s , and ages before his scientific studies on ravens made him a , he was a skinny, impoverished kid living in a hut in the forest of Hahnheide, in Germany. Before World War II, his family had owned a vast agricultural estate roughly 400 miles east of there, in Poland, with foxes and storks and rolling fields of potatoes and sugar beets; but after the Eastern Front pushed west, they became refugees. Bernd’s father shoveled manure to survive, and the family lived mostly off forage—nuts, berries, mushrooms, and also trout, which Bernd caught with his bare hands.

It was a confusing time. Bernd and his sister had no other playmates, and he spent long days exploring the forest on his own. His father, a top entomologist specializing in wasps, was marginalized in postwar Germany, and he could be tyrannical. Once when Bernd was five years old and collecting beetles, he found a prized rare specimen at the base of a stump, and his father confiscated the insect to punish him for being “overstimulated,” as he put it, when the boy leaped for the bug. Real men, Gerd Heinrich believed, were unflappable, with nerves of steel.

Was it there in the Hahnheide that Bernd formed the spine to notch an American record for the 100 kilometers, running the distance at a 6:25-mile pace in a Chicago race in 1981? Did hardship form the writer whose classics and offer readers both impassioned tales about animals and meticulous science?Ìę

No, a later, happier chapter made him who he is.

In 1951, when Bernd was 11, his family wrangled passage to the U.S. and landed in western Maine. They planned to grow pota­toes. Instead they were taken in for a summer by a kind family, the Adamses, whose ramshackle farm was a mess, a melange of dogs and cows and chickens and broken tractor equipment. To Bernd, the place was paradise, as he writes in his 2007 memoir, , recalling the adventures he shared with the two eldest Adams kids, Jimmy and Billy. The boys built a raft out of barn wood and spent countless hours watching baby catfish and white-bellied dragonflies. The Adamses taught Bernd English. He killed a hummingbird with his slingshot. He ran around barefoot and shirtless.Ìę

Bernd Heinrich is now 77 years old and the author of 21 books. The vaunted biologist E. O. Wilson speaks of him as an equal, calling him “one of the most original and productive people I know” and “one of the best natural-history writers we have.” Runners also revere him, for his speed and for his 2002 book, . “He was the first person of scientific stature to say that ultramarathoning is a natural pursuit for humans,” says Christopher McDougall, author of the 2009 bestseller . “He did the research himself, in 100-plus-mile races.”

But let’s set aside the literary plumage for a moment. In many ways, Bernd remains the same inquisitive kid who found bliss in his first American summer. He still runs, though no farther than about 12 miles at a time. He still watches wildlife, intently, and he still climbs trees. Sometimes he even climbs trees in snowshoes. In old age, he is embracing the joys of youth anew.Ìę

And he has returned to the Maine woods, to a 640-acre plot about 15 miles from that old farmhouse where he spent the summer of 1951. He owns a pickup truck and drives without compunction, but he does not have running water, phone service, or a refrigerator. He heats solely with wood and relies on a small solar panel to power his laptop and Wi-Fi router. He sometimes goes two months without ever leaving the property.Ìę

Bernd is hardly a hermit. For the past three years, he has shared the homestead with his partner, 57-year-old Lynn Jennings, a nine-time U.S. cross-country champion and the 10,000-meter bronze medalist at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. It’s a happy and fruitful arrangement. Over the past five years, Bernd has staged a late-life creative tear that calls to mind Johnny Cash or Georgia O’Keeffe, churning out a steady stream of academic papers, columns for , and four books, including , a just-published guide cowritten with Nathaniel Wheelwright, as well as 2016’s , which renders certain jays and blackbirds on his property as unique individuals, as fully realized as Elaine and Kramer on Seinfeld.Ìę

When I began adding up Bernd’s septuagenarian streak, I realized that here was a rare man—a throwback. We live in an age that affords little time and space for communing with nature. We’re busy. Our days are fragmented. But Bernd has dug in his heels against this collective drift. He has recognized where he wants to be in old age and settled in, with purpose.Ìę

In recent years, my life has echoed Bernd Heinrich’s to a degree. I, too, have recon­nected with my own private Eden. In the autumn of 2014, after my only child left the nest, I moved from Portland, Oregon, to the countryside of New Hampshire with dreams of roughing it. I would heat with wood. I would spend winters without running water. The idea was to reinvent a rambling, 1790s-built summer home that has been in my family since 1905. My grandmother swam in the nearby lake as a child. I caught fireflies on the lawn when I was five. My new life there would be just like Walden, except with Wi-Fi.Ìę

One of my first moves came that fall when, for $400, I bought a used woodstove and hired two musclebound guys to hoist the squat, 300-pound iron box up over the door lip, around a corner, and into place beneath an ancient brick chimney. The air was warm that evening, but there was a gentle breeze and a dry rustling in the trees, and I shivered with the prospect that I would soon be ensconced in the cold, wintry brilliance of my adventure.Ìę

I was also anxious, for I harbored a secret so humbling that I was afraid to share it with anyone: I had never actually operated a woodstove. I’d seen other people build fires in stoves, but I had always watched from a distance, enviously, feeling helpless and pathetically urban. At 50, I was still a fire-building virgin, and now my survival hinged on a skill I lacked.Ìę

That September, I watched numerous instructional videos on YouTube. Then I lit my first fire. The flames danced behind the glass of the firebox. The room filled, slowly and subtly, with a warmth that seeped into my bones, and the joy that I felt was primal: a campfire is home, especially when it warms a house like the one I was living in. The place has six bedrooms, an attached barn that has been gently tilting into the earth for over a century, and a scruffy 1.2-acre lawn denuded of trees. Not a single wall was insulated, so I had to shut down the plumbing and use the privy in the barn, lest the pipes burst.

Still, that first winter was grand. I holed up in a single sealed-off room, sustained by the fire. I chipped crusted snow to boil for dishwater and cross-country-skied every afternoon. I carried armloads of firewood in from the barn and wandered the cold house in old sweaters flecked with bark, a ragamuffin lord presiding over a new, untapped universe. No one had wintered there for nearly 80 years.Ìę

But I wouldn’t say I was living in that house, exactly. The place was still owned by my mother, who was 84 and afflicted with Parkinson’s. I was just camping there, fecklessly, experimentally. I’d never once used a chainsaw. The names of the animals ranging across the lawn remained a mystery to me. In order to ground myself, as I craved, I needed to go deeper. I needed to learn things—about living on the land and about aging with grace.Ìę

I had this vague notion that what I needed was a mentor, and I’d heard about Bernd. I’d read his book on running, and I’d seen a recent photo of him scything his own grass, shirtless, his senior-citizen sinews reminiscent of a Greek statue. In time, feeling slightly cowed, I wrote him an obsequious note. Generously, he invited me up to his cabin for a visit.Ìę

Bernd lives three hours northeast of me, half a mile off a country road and up a hill on a path that in winter can be negotiated only on snowshoes. He returned to western Maine in 1977, after earning his Ph.D. in zoology at the University of California at Los Angeles and starting a job teaching at UC Berkeley. He bought a sliver of forest appointed with a battered shack that he lived in very part-time. He soon built a rough log cabin, felling the trees himself. He often stayed there four days a week, commuting east from the University of Vermont, where he began teaching biology in 1981. But after retiring in 2004, he and a stonemason friend reorganized a jumble of stones, the remnant of a vanished cabin’s foundation, into the base for Bernd’s new home.Ìę

I start climbing toward that home late on a winter afternoon, when the conifers are laced with new-fallen snow. I follow the path until it levels out, then I hook left and find myself in a clearing that contains, magically, all the sights I’ve read about in Bernd’s books. Here is his older cabin, a muted brownish silver, at the edge of the woods. Here is the gleaming new cabin and, on one wall, the doughnut-size hole that a northern flicker, a star character in One Wild Bird at a Time, carved into it. Woodsmoke billows out of the chimney.Ìę

Bernd and Lynn step out onto the porch to greet me, each cradling a mason jar filled with beer.

“You made it!” says Bernd. “You’re here!” says Lynn. There’s a specialness about arriving that would be absent had I simply stepped in from a parking lot.

Inside, the house is immaculate and sparsely appointed. The pine floors are lustrous, the books on the shelves upright, the interior woodpile absent of dust. A wooden chest that Bernd made in the eighth grade sits in the living room, and upstairs there’s a battered thermometer screwed to an exposed beam. The clutter is so minimal that each little item seems almost holy: this ladder leading upstairs, this knotted rope hanging beside it.Ìę

In the fading light, Bernd is somehow of a piece with this unassuming decor. He is a humble man, withdrawn and shy, with a five-foot-eight frame and wispy white hair. I’d come expecting a crisp German accent, but no, he speaks with the down-home inflections of Maine, saying “remembah” for remember and invoking “wicked” as an all-purpose adjective. There is nothing hifalutin about him.

But he exudes a quiet force, and he moves directly to the topics that matter. Within five minutes of my arrival, Bernd assures me that he will be buried on the property. “My afterlife will be here,” he says. “My body will be here, in the trees, in the birds, in all living things.”

He talks about the joys of hunting deer on his own property. “Anywhere else,” he says, “it’s just shooting.”

He speaks with disdain for people who are overly pious in their regard for nature—who, for instance, are against wood-burning stoves or think that bird feeders are bad because they build up dependence. “I hate people who want to put a fence around nature,” he says. “How can you be a part of nature if you don’t interact with it?”

We drink and we eat, and in time Lynn throws open the door so the night cold sweeps in. Then she steps to the coolest corner of the cabin, the closest thing they have to a refrigerator, and scoops a squirrel carcass up off the floor. She flings it outside, onto the snow.Ìę

“Come here, owl!” she cries.

“Come here, owl!” Bernd cries. They cast their voices skyward, up toward a tree, where a barred owl is perched on a limb. This owl is an old friend of Bernd’s. On many other evenings, it has swooped down to the snow, almost to the doorstep, to retrieve a tossed chunk of squirrel.Ìę

“Come here, owl!”

“Come here, owl!”

The owl levers its head slightly, watchful, but it does not heed commands. We are in a wild place.

The next morning, Bernd and I strap on snowshoes and go for a run. It’s an unnerving enterprise. Long ago I was a decent runner, but I’m now a skier and cyclist. Before driving north, I’d read a 2015 article that described Bernd, then 75, finishing off a workout at a 6:05-mile pace. He can still run a 10K in about 47 minutes, and I’m worried: Is this old man going to smoke me?Ìę

He could, possibly, but he’s merciful. He starts out at a gentle 12-minute-mile crawl, glancing back at me every so often, solicitously. “Is everything OK?”

Everything is OK. The packed snow has a fresh dusting on top, and we dip and climb through thick woods until we’re standing on Hemp Hill, where long ago Bernd discovered a flourishing marijuana crop, cultivated by an unknown entrepreneur. I think of him hunkering down in the nearby blind, researching , his 1989 landmark work, and its 1999 follow-up, . He studied both wild ravens and birds he hand-raised from nestlings and kept in a huge 40,000-square-foot aviary before releasing them. Ravens can live more than 50 years in captivity, and over time Bernd apprehended a Shakespearean intricacy in their social lives.ÌęHe noted the obeisance that lesser males displayed around Goliath, the alpha. And observing ravens calling loudly near a moose carcass, he wondered if they were being altruistic in summoning their friends to a feast. To find out, he hid in a blind made of balsam fir and spruce branches, playing recorded calls on a loudspeaker, and spent countless dawns watching ravens from the top of a tall spruce tree. Bernd went on to famously demonstrate that the calling ravens were actually motivated by self-interest. They were rootless juveniles, it turned out, who had discovered food in a mature raven's territory. By inviting other ravens to feed, they avoided being chased off themselves.Ìę

As we run, he tells me that in 2014, Goliath and his mate, Whitefeather, found themselves in conflict with a third. “For a couple days,” he says, “I saw huge aerial displays involving three ravens”—the pair, most likely, and an interloper. “I’d see two birds displaying their feathers at once. I’d see one bird chasing another, trying to get rid of it.” It was a love triangle, probably, but however it resolved, Bernd has not seen the pair since 2014, and he’s left only with questions: “How long do ravens stay together? What about jealousy?” Even now, Bernd finds himself scanning the woods in vain.Ìę

We pass a river crusted in ice and stand on the shore as Bernd explains how, each summer, he and Lynn clear rocks from their chest-deep swimming hole. At one point, Bernd says, “That’s where Lynn shot her first deer.”Ìę

“I know the landscape,” he tells me, “and so I notice when something’s out of place—when the grass is bent, say. I didn’t know what I was going to research when I started living here full-time. But now I’m open to what­ever comes along. It’s like being a kid again; I just go to nature and find the question.”Ìę

A few years ago, Bernd saw some ruffed grouse diving under the snow. He started watching them and established, finally, that they did it not to sleep but rather to hide out in daylight from predators. He might have submitted his observations to Nature or Science, but instead he sent it, as he has sent 11 consecutive scientific papers since 2013, to , a journal that 56 years ago, when it was known as Maine Field Naturalist, published an article that later embarrassed Bernd.Ìę

“Weasels in Farmington” was Bernd’s first published paper, and it was little more than a medley of simple, clipped sentences. “Rabbits were plentiful during both seasons,” it reads, “and ruffed grouse seemingly scarce.” When Bernd was in his thirties, teaching at Berkeley, he expunged the paper from his curriculum vitae and eschewed the titleÌęof naturalist, choosing instead a label that implied more scientific rigor: biochemical biologist. He was bowing to public opinion, he says, which held that “being a naturalist was being a sissy.”Ìę

But over time, he says, he grew uneasy with the esoteric quality of the papers he read in scientific journals. He became so nostalgic for the simplicity of “Weasels in Farmington” that last year he gave a speech bearing the title. Meanwhile he resolved that going forward, he would only make observations from nature. “Popular thinking,” he says, “holds that naturalists are not critical thinkers. They can’t do ‘hard science.’ But a naturalist is someone who is a keen observer, and to do something original and true, you have to be an observer first. I consider myself a biologist, but I became one by being a naturalist first.”

For me, what stands out about these papers is the curiosity Bernd brings toÌęfamiliar turf. Nearly all of us spend our days as he does, plying the same paths, and for millennia—right into my grandparents’ earliest days—we were obliged to notice subtle shifts in our local landscape, to ask whether it was time to bring in the wood or to harvest the acorns. Now our senses are dulled, our eyes fixed on the screen. Do we ever notice the natural world?

As Bernd and I run, we watch for wildlife. Beneath some old apple trees we find the tracks of wild turkeys that have been picking at rotten fruit in the snow. Nearby are the tracks of three coyotes, one of which appears skittish: its marks come right up to recent human footprints, then dart away. Bernd had observed this behavior, possibly this coyote, before. Now he bends to the snow to investigate.

Anyone can look at coyote tracks, of course. But when I see Bernd do it, I’m aware of a larger story—of a man who experienced the trauma of war as a child, then learned that peace lies in nature and decided to make his life about connecting to it and understanding it.Ìę

But Bernd’s wartime experience exerts a natural force of its own; the pain lingers in his animal brain. In 2016, he traveled with Lynn back to the Hahnheide forest. He went to search for memories, for places that figured in his family’s exile, and he located the exact spot where, seven decades earlier, he’d captured a rare wasp that he was able to trade back to his father for the beetle that was taken away.Ìę

“I saw that,” he says. “I saw that and…” Now his head crumples into his hands, and he begins sobbing in a mix of anguish and joy. “I thought, Look at how fortunate I am and look at what I came from: nothing. We could have been stuck behind the Iron Curtain forever.”Ìę

Soon, in discussing a recent trip to New York City and the endless gray expanse of buildings he passed on the outskirts, Bernd surprises me with another spasm of weeping—a flashback to a wartime horror. “All I could think about,” he says, “was going through Hamburg with Papa. The city was rubble as far as the eye could see.”

He talks about his life not as calcified fact but as a mystery he’s still trying to make sense of, right now, as he’s speaking. “I don’t know how I happened to come back to this land,” he tells me. “It was brewing in my subconscious for a long time. I always wanted a cabin, and I guess I was doing things in an unconscious way that were bringing me here.” It was only after he’d begun construction that he found, through research, that long ago Jimmy Adams’s father, Floyd, had lived in the house whose stones form the base of his new cabin.Ìę

As Bernd and I speak, Lynn is in the kitchen, washing the dishes. During her pro career, she was a warrior in the scrum of middle-distance contests, a fighter known for her merciless kick. Her brio has not dwindled. These days she’s a competitive rower. She can ride her bike 100 miles in just over five hours, and she still runs a bit, sometimes with Bernd, with whom she enjoys a playful rivalry.Ìę

She applies most of her energy to homesteading, though. She rhapsodizes about the “moments of exertion” that come with dragging an 80-pound sled filled with groceries up the hill. To get the old newspapers they use to start fires, she dives headlong into the recycling bin at the local dump, invoking, she quips, a “Fosbury Flop combined with a half gainer.”Ìę

Cabin living has been a lifelong dream for Lynn. In 1978, when Runner’s World ran a story celebrating her early prowess, she said, “You know what I’d like to do someday? I’d like to homestead. It would be great. Build your own house, forget about telephones and television
”

“I remember reading that article,” Bernd tells me. “I thought, ‘That’s the girl for me.’ ”

For a split second Lynn glowers at him, scandalized. “Bernd!” she says. “I was 18 and you were—what? Thirty-eight?”

Bernd shrugs, smirking slightly. But he says nothing, and I reckon he’s savoring the fact that eventually he did meet his dream girl, in 2011, when Lynn invited him to speak to her running camp in Vermont. At that point he was single, in the wake of a divorce. (He’s been married three times and has four grown children.) He invited her to visit the cabin.Ìę

“I got a quarter of the way up the hill,” Lynn remembers, “and I knew this was where I was supposed to be.”Ìę

Bernd writes about Lynn in One Wild Bird at a Time. As the couple sat around a winter bonfire at night, sipping red wine, he noticed that his beloved barred owl had shown up by surprise, and he regarded its arrival, equally appreciated by Lynn, as the most wonderful thing he could hope for. “In the moment of joy and mystery,” he wrote, “I felt connected with all the moments of my past and now my prospects for the future.”

A special place can contain all stories—all of the past and all of the future, all the beginnings and endings. In 2016, the summer before my mom died, I drove her up to New Hampshire for a final visit. By then she was heavily medicated, but when we crested the final hilltop, with its stunning view of the local pond, her eyes glimmered with delight.

Her reaction was rooted in long memory, and also in nature. She was a naturalist. So many of us are, in our way, and as Bernd sees it, this is a fine thing. Indeed, it could save us. “A naturalist,” he e-mailed me, “is one who still has the habit of trying to see the connections of how the world works. She does not go by say-so, by faith, or by theory. So we don’t get lost in harebrained dreams or computer programs taken for reality. We all want to be associated with something greater and more beautiful than ourselves, and nature is the ultimate. I just think it is the one thing we can all agree on.”

Six months later, in January, my mom died and I begin to contemplate a new chapter for the house. When I ask Bernd for advice on how to attract wildlife, he becomes evangelical; he actually visits to advise me. He stops by with Lynn, after giving a talk to birders nearby. The moment they pull in, at 7:30 a.m., Bernd spots a bird—a dusty gray phoebe—bobbing over the lawn. He follows it: down the hill from the parking area, around a brick terrace, until there he is, my honored guest, standing under the barn, six feet away from the base of the privy. “It went in right there,” he says, pointing.

I can’t get enough of his accent. They-ah.

Soon he notes the abandoned start of a phoebe nest. It is graying and matted and set atop a support beam under the barn. It has been there for five or ten years, Bernd guesses, but I never noticed it. I have no memory of anyone at our house ever remarking upon a single bird.Ìę

“You could open up that window there,” he says pointing, “and then maybe you’d have barn swallows. I’d also have a clearing around your house,” he continues. “But see this grass here?” On the steep slope to the brook, he means. “Just let it grow. Don’t worry about it.” Eventually, he says, bugs will settle amid the long stalks, then birds—indigo buntings, say, and chestnut-sided warblers—and then, finally, predators: mice, voles, shrews…

His advice is not revelatory; I’ve read his books. But his being there is something. This man is New England’s avatar of wild living, and I want to develop what he has. I want the ability to hear a whole story coded into a single chirp from a bird’s beak.

So in the weeks that follow, I open that window in the barn. I drag some brush out from the woods, to give juncos and chickadees a place to alight before fluttering towardÌęthe new feeders I’ve hung. And I watch this one bird I spotted with Bernd, a downy woodpecker perched high on the trunk of a maple, pecking away, a bright tuft of red at the nape of his neck. “He’s building the nest,” Bernd had told me.Ìę

I begin checking that tree every morning, and for weeks—nothing. I’m crestfallen, and I say as much one day, writing a friend. But seconds after I hit send, I look out the window and see something red: Mr. Woodpecker himself, pausing on the trunk, then plunging into his hole—nesting, likely siring his brood. Right there in my own yard. I feel almost paternal.Ìę

But then Bernd writes to say he’s raising a clutch of baby crows and deepening his rapport with a resident swallow family. “I spend hours watching them every day,” he says. He’s been on hand, beside their feather-lined nest, for the birth of five babies, and he’s been transfixed by something startling: the male is bringing in the feathers. “The usual avian sex roles are reversed,” he writes, in a fever, “and it means much else is different, too. And so I need to know every nuance of behavior from beginning to end.”Ìę

Attached to the note is a photo, taken by Lynn, of him sitting outside on the grass, in a chair, holding a white feather at arm’s length. His body language seems stiff,Ìęfrozen. It’s a weird picture, I think. Until I see, frame left, the blue blur, the swallow, fluttering past tree branches and rocks and weeds, right toward Bernd Heinrich’s waiting hand.

Longtime șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor Bill Donahue () is the author of two e-books,Ìę and . is an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing photographer.

The post Seeking the Lost Art of Growing Old with Intention appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Cyclist Danny Chew completed his first 200-mile day when he was 10 years old. It was 1972. He rode an orange Schwinn Stingray with high-rise handlebars and a banana seat. He rode for 23 and a half hours through the rolling hills near Lodi, Ohio, through daylight and darkness, then limped into his family’s shag-lined Ford van, a small kid in cutoffs and sneakers. His back was sore but his heart singing. “I felt satisfied,” he says modestly. “I knew that I’d done something pretty cool.”Ìę

For many people, the thrill might have been a passing thing, an evanescent boyhood delight. But Chew has Asperger’s Syndrome, and even though he is now 54, his giddy, kid-like fervor has never waned. It has instead distilled into a bright, lifelong monomania. He is arguably the most focused cyclist in the world. When Chew was 21, he resolved that he would ride a million miles before he died. He started logging his rides, obsessively, in hardbound notebooks. He kept records on how many thousand-mile weeks he rode, on his centuries and double centuries, as well as his streaks of 100-mile days. Graphs captured his yearly mileage and number crunching revealed that between 1978 and 1982 he rode an average of 14,867.0 miles a year. Neatly penned notes recorded strange adventures—like the time he rode the long way from Pittsburgh to Cleveland, 182 miles, without drinking water or eating. He decided that he would never pursue a career, and that dating was not his cup of tea either. “It’d be nice to have a relationship,” he thought, “but then I’d have to get a job. She’d want kids. My riding time would go down, and I’d end up resenting it.” Ìę

Chew lived with his mom. He remained a virgin until he was 38. He became the world’s greatest cheapskate, subsisting on little more than stale bread and expired jars of mustard, and he rode, fast. Chew completed the Race Across America eight times and won it twice, in 1996 and 1999.Ìę

What Chew is most famous for, however, is an annual post-Thanksgiving bike ride that he helped launch on a snowy day in Pittsburgh in 1983 and has coordinated solo since 1986. The Dirty Dozen climbs 13 of greater Pittsburgh’s steepest hills, with riders racing the ups and coasting the downs. Eleven-time winner Steve Cummings calls it a quintessentially “Chewish” event. “He picks the worst weekend to do it,” Cummings explains, fondly. “The weather is horrible, and he never gets any permits—he just shows up and starts it.” Ìę

Cycling Toward Recovery

This year’s Dirty Dozen will raise money for Chew, the event’s longtime coordinator and guiding spirit.

Read More

The 34th Dirty Dozen, set for Saturday, November 26, will draw about 300 riders and will also, tragically, be a fundraiser for Chew. On September 5, he suffered a life-changing accident. While out for a ride in the green countryside in eastern Ohio, where he was visiting friends, he crested a gentle hill and then began descending at a ho-hum 20 or 22 miles per hour. It was a placid day—sunny, with no wind. He and his training partner, Cassie Schumacher, were chatting when suddenly Chew felt dizzy. “He veered left,” Schumacher says, “into a ditch, a typical drainage ditch with high grass, and I never heard any screaming. He never lost consciousness, but he hit his head and he just lay there, face down, saying, ‘I feel freaky. I can’t feel my legs. Am I still part of the bike?’”Ìę

He was 783,000 miles into his million-mile quest. ÌęÌę

It’s early October now, and Chew is lying in his bed at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, reckoning with the cold reality that he is now paralyzed from the waist down, with drastically decreased abdominal function and also a reduced ability to curl his fingers and grip. The accident broke his neck and irreparably bruised some of the roughly one trillion nerves in his spinal cord—nerves that simply don't regenerate with the vigor of other tissues.Ìę

“It’s a good thing I don’t have a loaded gun or Dr. Kevorkian with me,” he says, his voice nasally and flat as I arrive for a three-day visit. “It’s a lot to take—to give up that sense of freedom that comes with riding a bike.” Ìę

Typically a dry-eyed stoic, Chew is now weeping whenever the Dirty Dozen comes up. “A lot of people have children,” he says, “but the Dirty Dozen is my kid, and it’s all grown up now, and I’m so proud. I’ve had people come up to me after the ride and say, ‘Thanks for the greatest day of my life.’ I give these people a goal—to finish every hill.”Ìę

Still fresh from the accident, Chew is now almost wholly dependent on the rehab staff: moving him from the bed requires two caretakers, who wriggle him into a sling attached to a small crane that hoists him up before lowering him down into his wheelchair. Still, he has a new goal: he wants to complete his million-mile quest on a hand cycle. “If I could ride 200 miles a week, 10,000 miles a year,” he says, “I could do it.” Ìę

His physician, Elliott Roth, the chair of Physical Medicine and Rehab at RIC, has warmly embraced Chew’s mission, saying, “I don’t think it’s impossible at all. Danny’s got a lot of things working against him, but 50 percent of people’s outcome is related to their own determination.” Meanwhile, there are so many competitive hand cyclists with Chew’s level of disability (technically speaking, he is afflicted with T1 quadriplegia) that an entire division, Class H2, is reserved for them in international Paralympic races. The H2 world champion—42-year-old former Team USA wheelchair rugby player Will Groulx—rides 180 or so miles a week.Ìę

On this crisp fall morning in Chicago, however, Chew doesn’t even own a hand cycle yet. He is moving through the hallways in a large, clunky, high-backed wheelchair designed to be pushed from behind, and when his physical therapist steps into the room, asking him to self-propel that chair for six minutes, he is jittery, terrified. “Six minutes?” he says. “I’m going to be exhausted.”Ìę

Chew’s neck is still broken and braced. The shoulder muscles surrounding his broken neck are taut. His hands cannot grip very well and—worst—his newly paralyzed body is not effectively regulating his blood pressure. “Before,” Roth says, “the muscles in his legs pumped blood up into his heart. Now that’s not happening, and his body is adjusting to the change.” Ìę Ìę

Chew begins pushing the wheelchair down the corridor, and it’s a bit agonizing to watch. He is a world-class athlete; now he is moving with the weary doggedness of a 90-year-old in a nursing home. He is gritting his teeth and grimacing, and the wheels of his chair are not quite rolling, but rather eking forward in tiny, spasmodic lurches. The discrepancy between past and present is so profound, and so humbling, that it almost seems like giving up would be the most graceful course. But Danny Chew is used to racing through the night on three hours’ sleep. He’s crossed the plains of Arkansas at 2 a.m., riding into the wind with his neck aching and spittle on his face, and now he knows that only by resorting to his greatest strength—his focus—can he lift himself out of despair. He keeps pushing the wheelchair. Then, one minute and 50 seconds into the session, he stops. He is ashen and afraid that he will pass out. When the PT takes his blood pressure, it is 81 over 52. Later, after she bends to the floor with a tape measure, she announces that he has covered 46.9 feet. Ìę

“I’m really tired,” he says. “I’m so tired right now that I could fall asleep.” The PT rolls him back to his room. He’s airlifted back into bed, and I stand over him as he nods off. His body is long and lean under the sheets—devoid of body fat, ripped. And now his legs do not operate. Listening to the rise and fall of his breath, I feel nothing but mournful.

Life is complex, though. Many times during my visit, Chew is all lit up—bright-eyed, zany, and on. My second day there, he subjects me to what he calls his “RTP” mode of conversation, short for “Random Thrust Process,” asking me scores of questions—about my relationship history, my shoe size, my political views, my exercise regime—and scarcely ever awaiting an answer. He says he gets his eccentricity from his late father, Hal, a special-education Ph.D. and a proud freak—a vegetarian, a yogi, a devotee of Transcendental Meditation, and a man whose shag-lined Ford van bore a handmade wooden trailer capable of towing 13 bicycles. Hal Chew, he says, was a sort of guru. He was beloved by every hitchhiker he picked up on road trips, and in his basement, hanging barbells from two-by-fours, he built a bare-bones gymÌęthat carried his two sons to cycling prowess. (Danny’s older brother, Tom Chew, was a member ofÌęthe U.S. Olympic development team in the 1980s.)Ìę

The talk turns to romance. Chew tells me that his first kiss came when he was 27—and that he bowled his date over. “She got down on her knees, this beautiful woman,” he tells me, “and she says, ‘Do you want to make love?’ I said no—no way. I love being different from the masses, and being a virgin was just another way I could be different.”Ìę

When Chew was 38, radio shock jock Howard Stern invited him on air. The segment was entitled “Pick the Virgin.” Stern shouted at Chew: “You’ll never get a woman! You’ll die a virgin!”Ìę

“That motivated me to spite him,” Chew says. “Within four months, I was in Oregon, living on a houseboat with this woman, and it was really nice. Whenever I came back from a ride in the rain, she’d have put warm blankets out for me.” The relationship was brief, and Chew doesn’t linger on it, reverting, instead to RTP mode, delivering me advice about matrimony—“Never marry anyone before you’ve lived with them for three years!”—before segueing into personal finance.

“Never ever eat a meal in a restaurant!” he says, shaking his index finger at me. “If you leave a two-dollar tip—that’s money that could be invested. And when it comes to cutting your hair, just buy a $20 clipper from Wal-Mart. How much talent does it take to shave your head bald?” The man is resolute about living life on his own terms.

Weeks pass. On Facebook, Chew’s older sister, Carol Perezluha, a professor of math at Florida’s Seminole State College, posts a video of her brother being rolled along a Chicago bike path looking out on Lake Michigan. He’s elated in the clip, saying, “This is the furthest I’ve been out on the wheelchair since I was hospitalized.” An accompanying photo shows him canting his feet skyward in his chair, lakeside, so he can regulate his low blood pressure. The blood pressure remains a concern. It is still erratic. “Sometimes it gets so low he blacks out,” his sister tells me. Once it spiraledÌęso high that a host of caregivers rush toward his bed, hovering. He is also having trouble regulating his body temperature. Sometimes, even after he asks aides to bring him four blankets, his teeth chatter as he shivers in his bed.Ìę

Pre-accident, Chew suffered from occasional lightheadedness. The undiagnosed condition caused his crash. Is he fated to have a worse case of orthostatic hypotension—poor blood pressure regulation—than most paralyzed people? Dr. Roth doesn’t think so. “His problem is very common for patients with spinal injuries,” Roth says. “It’s something that over time he can manage, by wearing tight stockings, for instance, and abdominal binders.” Ìę

Still, for Chew's family—a loving group who once spent summer weekends together, riding—the crash is a nightmare that has thrown his two siblings into a search for a wheelchair-accessible van, handicapped-friendly housing, and ongoing care. His sister tells me that their mother, now 84, has been in “an awful state” of late. “Every day, she tells me she wishes it didn’t happen. She’s become disoriented.” Ìę

There are promising signals too, though, and when Chew phones me (the calls come in at odd hours: 6:48 am, 10:11 p.m.), his news breaks are triumphs: “I can transfer myself out of bed now,” he says. “I rode my wheelchair nine laps through the hallways. It’s nineteen laps to the mile. I did the hand cycle for an hour.”Ìę

On November 14, his physical therapist, Kate Drolet, tells me, “Danny’s improved immensely. He’s got a motorized wheelchair now and he’s completely independent on it. He goes all over the floor by himself, and after the Cubs won the World Series, we went to the victory parade. Even in the crowds, he didn’t need any help navigating. He is one of the most motivated patients I have ever seen. He is very intent on setting personal goals. He loves numbers.”Ìę

A plan gels for his release. He’s slated to leave RIC on December 5, and this winter he’ll live with a friend in eastern Ohio. This friend, it so happens, owns a gym, and Chew is already looking forward to the track there—it’s nine laps to the mile. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh firmÌęDesmone Architects has stepped forward, offering to redesign the family's home to make it suitable for Danny and his aging mom. The construction will cost over $100,000. “Between Danny’s mind and Mom’s body,” Carol PerezluhaÌęsays, “I think they can do it.”Ìę

Dr. Roth predicts that Chew should be able to get out on the roads, on a hand cycle, roughly a year from now, and a Pittsburgh friend is standing by, ready to serve as Chew’s coach. Attila Domos is a paraplegic. A 48-year-old onetime bodybuilder who fell from a ladder in 1993, Domos handcycled 407.7 miles inside 24 hours last August. When I call him, he is effusive with praise for Chew. “Danny trained me,” he says. “He told me that when you’re doing a 24-hour-ride, the night goes on forever. And he was right.” Ìę

Another of Domos’s remarks lingers most, though. “Recovery has almost nothing to do with how hard you work,” he tells me. “After my accident, I stood for three or four hours a day, hoping that feeling would come back to my legs. It never did.” ÌęÌę

What if Danny Chew doesn’t recover enough to hand-cycle great distances? I ask him. “That’s not an option,” Chew says. “I’ve already ridden the wheelchair half a mile, and Attila tells me that translates to three miles on a hand cycle. He said he hates wheelchairs—that he’ll never do another marathon in a wheelchair. “Look, I’m just at the beginning of my recovery. I’ll get there.”

The post Danny Chew Won’t Let Paralysis Keep Him From Riding 1,000,000 Miles appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When 300 cyclists gather in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 26 for the grueling Dirty Dozen, the event will in many ways be an exact repeat of a bizarre sufferfest that's been celebrated annually since 1983. The riders will climb greater Pittsburgh's 13 steepest hills, with race points going to the fastest 10 men and 5 women on each climb. Victory will go to whoever scores the most points, cumulatively, on all the hills. The whole chilly 50-mile escapade will last about five hours.

One thing will be different, though: the ride will be a fundraiser for race founder Danny Chew, who was paralyzed in early September. Ìę

This year's race director, Jonathan Pratt, expects to give about $10,000 in entry fees towards Chew’s recovery. “I've been Danny's friend for about 40 years,” he says, “and he's in a real bind now.” Chew needs to pay off over $15,000 in uncovered medical expenses, buy a handicapped-equipped vehicle, and pay for a $100,000-plus renovation of his Pittsburgh home. Ìę

A Dirty Dozen bike jersey with a picture of Chew is , and a tribute T-shirt reading “Danny Chew Is My Spirit Animal” is . The proceeds from the sale of both shirts will go to Chew. Ìę

Supporters can also donate to a created by Chew's nephew, Stephen Perezluha, a 2011 Race Across America finisher. ÌęÌę

Ìę

The post Cycling Toward Recovery appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.