I have a friend who for many years wrote obituaries in theÌęNew York Times. He became very good at it, but it is an art I hope to never master. The breadth and depth of extraordinary lives—most everybody’s full life—at first seems overwhelmingÌębut then must be stewed down into a list of finite achievements, necessary but necessarily shallow.Ìę

It strikes me that sometimes, for some truly iconic lives, the simplest obit would be best, something that might read like this: Man. River. Fire.Ìę

In this instance, the man would be the writer Barry Lopez, whose comparisons to the luminaries in the American literary pantheon—Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold—are not hyperbole, for Lopez was in every way an heir to the genius of their labors, and by that measure he was and will remain a national treasure.Ìę

The river would be Oregon’s McKenzie
or any river in the world that you feel some deep attachment to. And the fire would be the Holiday Farm Fire that ravaged western Oregon in the summer and early autumn of 2020
or any other evidence of the catastrophic consequences of global warming.Ìę

As for Barry’s death itself, we have two dates to choose from: September 8, the day the fire came over the mountains and down toward the river, or December 25, the day he stopped breathing. Born on Epiphany, 75 years ago;Ìędied on Christmas Day. The true truth is always metaphorical, Barry once told a friend, and his greatest belief was in the power of stories, and these seem to be the paths to follow here.Ìę

Unless we are simpletons, we are all to some extent paradoxes, and Lopez was both an indefatigable traveler and, as writers must be, a monastic homebody. The man who found the time to travel and work in 80 countries lived in the same house for 50 years, an hour up the road from Eugene, where he had come in his early twenties to get an MFA at the University Oregon. (He didn’t get the degree.)Ìę

A rare piece of permanence in a voyager’s life, the house was wood-shingled and gabled and mossy, in a rainforest grove of everlasting shade cast by towering Douglas firs, in a ferny compound clearly managed by a guy obsessed with stacking firewood. The illusion of its Tolkien-esque isolation was fractured by its scary close proximity to the McKenzie Highway, a north–south artery thundering with logging trucks and sclerotic with tourists. On the far side of the pavement, though, flowed the exquisite McKenzie, and when the road was quiet, you could hear through the open windows of Barry’s study the hooting snatches of ecstasy of the river runners in their drift boats, carried off swiftly in the current.Ìę

The property remained much the same for decades until 2007, when Barry married a former student of mine, Debra Gwartney, herself a formidable writer, and she moved into the house, which had, I suppose, adequate space for one author but not enough oxygen for two, so her husband built her a beautiful studio about 50 yards from the kitchen door. I think my wife and I and our three dogs were the first guests to be housed in the studio, on a visit in the summer of 2013. Our last night at dinner, when we asked if he could suggest a wild stretch of coastline where we might camp unmolested the following night, Barry, with a gush of nostalgia, recommended a place called HorsfallÌęBeach, where he had often pitched his tent in perfect solitude back in the ’70s.Ìę

In the morning, Barry wandered over to the studio’s deck to sit with us during breakfast, and we discussed with increasing excitement and intensity the book he was working on, which he described as a 65,000-year-long autobiography—65,000 years being, at that moment, the best scientific judgement for the emergence of Homo sapiens, before they began to spread out into Europe and Asia and, woe unto this day, intermingle their genes with dumbass Neanderthals. I’m not sure what happened to that book. I suppose it morphed into the next one, , his last, the 17th, which would be published in 2019. I recall during our conversation that I had a profundity to offer. Barry’s gimlet eyes said Wow! and he wrote it down. I forget what it was, but you might well imagine he was always writing things down—a habit more significant than any particular thing I might have said.Ìę

After breakfast, we packed up and went over to the coast, to the highly recommended HorsfallÌęBeach, which, if Barry had ever set foot on since 1975, it was only in a nightmare. Multiple dozens of little shits and big beer-bellied shits and gray-haired ma and pa shits blasted and corkscrewed and fishtailed through the dunes on $10,000 ATVs. The sun was going down, and we were stuck, apologizing to our dogs, who deserved better after our long haul from New Mexico to the Pacific.

Ah, Barry,ÌęI laughed to myself, this is what comes from having the equivalent of the Hubble telescope for a pair of eyes. You end up seriously farsighted, focused on the mysteries and panoramic wonders, with a nearsighted myopia to the flaws in the frame. These little blind spots, WTF specks of cognitive dissonance: that fucked-up highway; that horror of a desecrated beach. After living in that house for a while, Debra finally said to herself, “You know, that river’s not just to look at,”Ìęand rented kayaks, something Barry had never done.Ìę

His mind was always locked into the gifts. He loved the places most that were existentially scary—the desert, the ocean, the Arctic, where he lived for five years. “It’s the big open that engages me,” he once told an interviewer. “It’s a bare stage for me to work on.” He loved the wind in his face—subzero was just fine with him. He loved to watch, observe, witness, listen, report, struggle to see, struggle to understand—he was a National GeographicÌęExplorers Club–class adventurer who wasn’t interested in adrenaline or thrills. The rush for him was of the mind and spirit, not of the flesh, and yet for 50 questing years he did the wildest things, smitten by the tastes and the smells and the music of the elemental world and its species and its tribes.Ìę

Those amusing transgressions I mentioned above provide a sort of bridge to something of the greatest seriousness: Barry’s integrity. He was a man who insisted upon a level of individual responsibility that shared in the blame for what was happening to the planet. One thing I always appreciated about Barry was that he did not hesitate to implicate himself in the trouble. To pretend you knew better when others didn’t, to pretend this was not your fault, to pretend you were a holy messenger and everyone else was a foolÌęwas his very good definition of a sin. We have painted ourselves into a corner. Everybody, Barry rightly insisted, held a brush. We all know the clichĂ©:ÌęCan’t see the forest for the trees. Lopez understood that its truth works just as well in reverse. Those many years ago he had walked away from HorsfallÌęBeach and into the farthest reaches of the world.Ìę

That morning at breakfast, which is the last time we saw Barry, we told Debra and him the quick story of our unrestful night in her lovely studio. “Did you hear it?”Ìęwe asked. “Hear what?” they said. “Really, you didn’t hear that alarm going off all night long?” we said with disbelief.Ìę

“What alarm?”Ìę

After we fell asleep, the fire alarm in Debra’s studio had started going on and offÌęrandomly throughout the night. Just as we would start to fall asleep, it would blare for a minute or two and then stop, and we were helpless to fix it. It was so loud we thought they must hear it in the main house.Ìę

“What alarm? The fire alarm! The fire alarm!”Ìę

“Nope.”ÌęThey both shook their heads. “Never heard it. Didn’t know that alarm had a ghost in it.” Never heard it again, even though it surely sounded again, when the firestorm raced down the valley. But by then they were gone.Ìę

In the late 1970s, Lopez began publishing, and the books came in a flurry—three collections of fiction and fables: (1976); (1977); (1979); and the critically acclaimed work of nonfiction, (1978), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.Ìę

I’m not sure which book he was reading from when I first met Barry in 1978, as we walkedÌętogether out of the auditorium at the University of Missouri, where I was in grad school. I wanted to write fiction, which was what Barry was reading, and he had wrapped me in sentences like cords of luminosity. His lyricism and his textures were sublime, and he woke me up to my own desire to paint these same strokes with words. He made language as potent as science in penetrating the mysteries. For a writer who would become most renowned for his nonfiction—he won the National Book Award for in 1986—it was his short stories and fables and trickster tales that I most cherished, learned from, stole from.Ìę

The next time I saw Barry was years later, more than ten, and by that time my own work had become a presence on the literary scene. We were both working for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű and ±áČč°ù±è±đ°ù’s, and Barry really stunned me by treating me like a long-lost friend. In fact, Barry seems to have been good friends with just about every soul he ever met across the planet. It’s no exaggeration to say he connected with everybody, at every level. It was never only his writing that attracted people to him—it was his radiant humanity, his true respect for others, especially those who could teach him what he most wanted to know: How do we live together, not just with each other, but with the earth?Ìę

I don’t think I’ve ever personally known a man or woman who was so loved by so many.

The books kept coming;Ìęthe stream of articles and essays never abated. The lectures, the keynote addresses, the honors and awards piled up, and yet, like with the scientists themselves, there was a sense that his work was underappreciated, that as a society we were not extending the right amount of attention to what Barry and his peers were telling us about how the earth was changing, about how urgent it was that we begin to reimagine the worldÌęand our place in it. To explain what he intended as a writer, he would offer a metaphor of migrating birds.Ìę

“Geese fly in a classic V formation,” Barry once told me, “with an undisputed leader, everybody else following behind. If the leader somehow fails, so does the flock. Cranes, however, migrate in undulating lines, spread out on a horizontal axis, with no true leader, everyone simultaneously searching for a thermal to make the labor of their journey easier, and when somebody in the line finds a thermal—and therefore vision—everybody zeros in and benefits.” There’s no better metaphor for an artist’s role in society.Ìę

Any dinner table discussion with Barry inevitably turned to the dynamics of telling a story. He had spent weeks and months and years among the traditional Indigenous cultures of the far north, trying to learn what they have to teach us, trying to understand the role of the writer in society. “It’s a mistake to tell all the stories of all the people,” Barry would tell you. “The question of quantification is not useful. The distinction is between inauthentic or authentic.”Ìę

Barry once told me about a question he asked tribal elders in traditional cultures. “‘What do you mean by a storyteller?’ They answered, ‘When the stories you tell help’—and it has to do with your mature perspective on what in fact helpsÌęand what diminishes that dynamic in a society or an individual. The question ‘Is it helpful?’ is ultimately a community decision.” For Lopez, writing was an essential act of community, no matter that it was born and executed in isolation and self-exile. The point you had to come to, he emphasized, was this: Am I alone after reading this story? With any great writer, you never touched bottom, and you never felt alone.Ìę

During our visit to Finn Rock back in 2013, Barry told us the news we never wanted to hear: He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and would be starting an array of treatments later that summer. But by the end of August, the prognosis had darkened. “It is bad news,” Debra wrote us, “but we find ourselves feeling oddly hopeful.”ÌęThe cancer had metastasized, moving to his bones and lymph nodes. “But you well know Barry’s deep determination,” Debra wrote, “when he gets his teeth into an effort.” Overnight, she became the diet Nazi, depriving him of his beloved coffee and much-adored sugar, adding kale and turmeric and fish oil to everything.Ìę

Years ago, one of Barry’s cherished mentors had told him, “The only thing to understand is that you can never quit. You can’t ever say, ‘Well, this is hopeless.’ We’re all going to go down the tube.”Ìę

His expiration date should have been up soon after his diagnosis that August, but in the ensuing years, I never heard a word about Barry slowing down. He had made for himself a life that leaned into the light, but neither was he a stranger to darkness, and he was determined to keep going. He and one of his best friends, the writer David Quammen, talked about endings, just disappearing on a plane that goes down in some jungle somewhere, the fantasy of aging sojourners, but Barry, when I checked in, was always in some airport lounge, headed out, or being touted in New York, or over lecturing in Lubbock, where his archives were housed in Texas Tech’s Sowell Collection. In the outbuilding on his property that served as a repository for his books and manuscripts, he had one remaining load of boxes destined for the archives, which he planned to deliver himself, driving down to Texas in the spring of 2020, but COVID-19 interrupted that trip, and the folks at the university said let’s wait until next year.

On the night of his first death, September 7, 2020, burning into September 8, Barry and Debra anxiously watched the eastern sky before they went back into the house and to bed and to sleep. There was a sinister orange aura rising above the ridgelinesÌęand a baking wind blowing down the banks of the McKenzie. Around midnight, they were awakened by a firefighter banging on their door, who told them they had five minutes to evacuate. “It was hellish,” Barry texted friends. “No warning. We just ran.” They grabbed the cat and Debra’s wallet and that was it, nothing else. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, they could see the flames advancing over the ridge behind the house. When they drove away, the life they would return to three weeks later would be nothing like the one they left behind that night as they escaped to Eugene. The house and Debra’s studio were still standing, though severely smoke damaged, but the archive shed housing the rest of Barry’s papers had burned to the ground. All the other outbuildings were lostÌęand, most cruelly, his beloved truck, the one he dreamed of taking to Texas on his last road trip.Ìę

It was now October, and the fire had come for Barry, too. You want to say that the erasure by wildfire was ironic, but from a better angleÌęit seems like a perfect last piece found and inserted into Lopez’s own cosmic puzzle. While the mind rushes to the irony of the event, the heart seems to understand the correctness of the devastating moment, which is not ironic. Nature never loses. Whether you’re trying to destroy it or save it, the whale wins.Ìę

Just a handful of days ago, Barry awoke in his bed early on Christmas Eve and looked around at his gathered family, his four beloved stepdaughters and Debra, and said, “It’s a wonderful morning. How is everyone?” Fresh air was blowing through the window, and the room was filled with mantras of love. Those were Barry’s last words, as if he were Mr. Rogers, but for this man, the neighborhood he called his own went to the horizon and beyond. His passing the next morning was gentle, Debra said. They washed him with water from the McKenzie River and wrapped him in a buckskin and Pendleton blanket. A future son-in-law built a handsome pine coffin with cedar trim and beaver-stick dowels, in which they laid him out on New Year’s EveÌęand filled it up with things he loved and flowers and ferns and flora that was already growing back on their fire-scarred property, and then his daughters had the sacred duty of pushing him into the furnace and back into the flames, andÌęfrom there, inÌęthe hands of Debra and the girls, he would find his way down to the river.Ìę

For just this moment alone, you would have to say he was a lucky man.

The post Remembering My Friend Barry Lopez appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

For many hundreds of years, in Costa Rica's Central Valley and its lush surrounding highlands, one well-respected family has been known for one enduring distinction—not for its great wealth or political influence or cultural prowess, but for the extraordinary beauty of its women. Lya Battle, who looks like a petite, auburn-haired heroine on Game of Thrones, is living proof of the Barrantes family’s legacy, and 49 years of being put through the wringer hasn’t really dented that firepower.

Yet any true story about Lya plays out between the opposite poles of what is beautiful and most desired in the world and what is ugly and unwanted. In the emotional heartlands between those two realms, Lya became famous, not just in Costa Rica but around the globe, for her undying devotion to ugly—not just plain old ugly, but fugly (“fucking ugly”), a word you often hear in one of her favorite sentences, “Oh, my love, you’re so fugly, give me a kiss”—and her generous kisses make her perhaps the most promiscuous woman on earth, with hundreds of panting, downtrodden lovers, most of them with four legs, if not three, and wildly scrambled pedigree.

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One could be forgiven for thinking that as a dog lover (or “dog slut,” as she laughingly describes herself), Lya Battle is out of control. But out of control is a matter of perspective. Especially considering how it was that Lya became renowned as the Mother Teresa of Mutts, the mistress of a place called (roughly translated as “kingdom of strays”), a situation that might never have happened the way it did if one day her father, who she adored, had not shot her mother, who she did not.

Ìę

The journey to the Territorio is so cartographically challenging that somewhere along the way, you begin to believe that the place is imaginary, a mythical Dogtopia of endless, drooly love. It seems impossible to get there, and yet eventually you do, zigzagging through the provincial capital of Alajuela’s maze of avenues and alleys, winding your way up into the mountains through a puzzle of villages and coffee plantations, frowning at your cell phone as its Waze app tells you to turn on routes that bear no markings. Somewhere ahead is the town of Carrizal, and beyond that the Poás volcano, and in between, the dogs.

Past Carrizal’s parish church, you turn up a narrow potholed lane that climbs the mountainside, passing through a neighborhood of ramshackle houses, scowling old men in tank tops sitting on their stoops, guys washing their cars on the street. Nobody waves back, and although the vibe is not exactly hostile, it’s certainly not welcoming, either. In fact, Lya and the community are at war, she claims.

Beyond the last houses, the lane goes up and up through dense jungle until it is blocked by the Territorio’s massive gate, flanked by high walls that vanish into the bush. Here, rain or shine, in the middle of the road, sits an extraordinary white dog, Yiya, less of a guard than a self-appointed greeter, a solitary figure separated from everybody else by another quarter-mile of driveway. Yiya telegraphs the message “I’m a born outlier but an essential part of the operation.” He’ll leave his station at feeding time, go up the hill to eat, and then return to duty at the gate, not a fellow with an identity crisis.

The drive carves around a grassy slope, arriving at a small plateau and the first signs of spreading chaos, punctuated with tail-wagging clusters of bedlam. On the plateau, and in the pastures above the central compound, there’s a mad flow, like English soccer fans or swarming bees.

I don’t know who counted them, but reportedly there are . One-fourth are pets, which means 750 million are zaguates—strays, mutts, mongrels, village dogs, scavengers, pariahs, or whatever endearment or insult you wish to assign them. The Territorio’s fluctuating population is six or seven or eight hundred, Lya is never quite sure, although there’s a continuous effort with pro bono vets to vaccinate, neuter, and tattoo them all.

My wife and I arrive on volunteer day. The visitors seem to be just playmates, each with his or her own pack of admirers dotted across the terrain, which is exactly what Lya hoped for when she invited regional businesses and organizations to donate their employees’ time. There are also weekend events, hours-long hikes that sometimes attract hundreds of people from down in the capital, San JosĂ©, which sprawls all the way to Alajuela. When I ask Lya the size of the Territorio de Zaguates, her smile is uncertain and she gestures up the mountainside into the clouds; later she’ll explain that the dogs run on about ten acres of her family’s 142-acre farm.

From the moment we park, we are a magnet for dozens of barking dogs, half-suspicious, half-delighted, a subgroup best categorized as Who’s There!? Not everybody cares. The majority group, clearly, belongs to Let’s Go Somewhere!, a prevailing sentiment with an irresistible appeal for those so inclined, no matter their mobility or lack of it. But other spirits are determined to hunker down and can’t be budged, the sick or the slothful looking on from the sidelines, the paranoid or obsessively territorial glued in place.

There is something so fantastical, and a bit freakish, about Lya’s vision, that its actual existence blends naturally into magical realism. Dogs gaze at us from within sections of concrete culverts, or stare over the top of individual foxholes they’ve burrowed into the red soil, or follow us with sleepy eyes from the shady bushes. I expect to see them up in the trees as well and am not surprised when we reach the main building, part storehouse, part bunkhouse, and find dogs head-high up on the supply shelves, peering out from the shadows like barn owls. They’re under the shelves, too, and huddled into open closets, and sprawled on every inch of the veranda not already occupied by a row of donated baby strollers, each containing a partially paralyzed dog or, less charmingly, a muttering furball who refuses to be evicted.

Incredibly, every dog has a name. Everybody’s different, clownish and hilarious: fuzzy splats of happiness, skeletal shells of wincing eagerness, buoyant lumps of grinning muscle, the faltering and the withered, the robust and the dignified, dogs like pieces of frayed rope with legs and head, senatorial dogs like Boris, old and wise and reposed, a seeming mix of corgi and Bernese mountain dog that resembles the 30-pound butt of a half-smoked cigar. Blanquita is a dirty-white floor mop who has betrothed herself to Ronney, one of the workers, and cries inconsolably from the minute he leaves the compound until his return the next morning. There’s a sweet little dog I of course call Stumpy, his right front leg hacked off with a machete by his owner after a long night drinking at the cantina. And there’s Milu, one of the precious cohort Lya calls her “walking dead,” who came to her with distemper a couple of years after she opened the Territorio in 2008. To save a dog from distemper is no small task, and now Milu, in his dotage, weighs less than a fart and walks like a drunken tarantula.

Behind the building are the holding pens for a handful of seriously bad kids—Lya declares that they made their own hell and now they can live in it—and the newbies, who take days or months to assimilate. Today’s newcomers are, unfortunately, typical—a teat-swollen, wailing mother dropped off without her litter, a handsome Rottweiler abandoned because he jumped on people to greet them, and an enormous slobbery bulldog-mastiff mix, who only Lya can approach because he’s learned to hate men. His owner drove up in an expensive SUV with a large sack of food, a rifle, and the dog. Take him or I’ll shoot him, said the man, who wrongly claimed that the dog was deaf and therefore worthless.

Down the length of this terrace of pens and outbuildings stretches a long, gutter-like cement trough where a trio of Nicaraguan workers lay down hundreds of pounds of kibble each morning, igniting a quasi-orderly hierarchy of eating, a four-wave sequence based on personality types, until everybody has snarfed their fill.

Watching over it all in black rubber boots, khaki pants, and a white T-shirt is the imposing figure of Alvaro Saumet, 47, the Territorio’s seemingly gruff alpha commander of the perros. Alvaro is a Colombian, and you can readily imagine him in a military uniform, leading his men on a raid of a guerrilla hideout. He is also Lya’s husband and the former lingerie king of Costa Rica. Connecting the dots between bras and bulldogs is fairly complicated.

It's easy to forget or overlook that beauty has a price, sometimes extracted from its source yet often paid by its admirers. Lya has, like an alchemist, transformed something ugly into something beautiful, and that would also be the story of her family, except in reverse. Decades ago, the Territorio was the farm of Lya’s maternal grandfather, a short, dark-skinned man—part indigenous Indian, he claimed—praised for his nobility and goodness, who became one of the first pharmacists in Costa Rica. He married Lya’s famously pretty grandmother, who everybody said looked like a movie star, yet she shared a more problematic trait with the other Barrantes women—a cold, closed heart. Lya’s grandfather loved German shepherds, but his wife, who hated them, would poison her husband’s dogs. Together, Lya thinks, they must have screwed up her own beautiful mother’s brain.

Lya’s mother, Maria Barrantes, was an exceptional student, and her father sent her to the University of Toronto, where she met Matthew Battle Murphy, Lya’s father, whose family had immigrated to Canada from England after World War II. Matthew was a biologist, Maria an educator. When Lya was five, her homesick mother decided to return to Costa Rica. Lya and her younger brother, Steven, grew up in an old, affluent neighborhood in San JosĂ©, in a house with a father who always looked at life positively and a mother who only saw the dark side of everyone and everything. Her overprotective parents would not allow Lya to have a boyfriend until she turned 15. Nor were they role models of any healthy exchange of affection. Lya, meanwhile, had inherited her father’s fascination and tenderness toward the nonhuman world.

“Who isn’t loved? Snakes?” she says. “Then I love snakes. Who isn’t loved? Toads? Then I love toads. These are the things that keep you going. I’m the kind of person who says it hurts to see cattle or pigs or chickens in trucks. All I knew about animals is how much I loved them.”

Seriously afflicted with attention deficit disorder, Lya struggled through school. She studied preschool education in college, then allowed herself to be prematurely talked into marriage with a perfect gentleman from one of San José’s best families. She was 22 when they divorced.

Then she met Alvaro, who, though younger than Lya, was more mature than the society bons vivants she’d been dating. Alvaro was an entrepreneur with an eyebrow-raising profession—he smuggled high-end women’s underwear from Colombia to Costa Rica and sold it on the black market. He told her he couldn’t guarantee her the life of a princess, but they moved in together and he went legit, opening the first TouchĂ© lingerie franchise in Costa Rica, then two more. Lya spent her days working as a tutor, helping high school kids with their college applications, which she still does.

At the same time, however, Lya’s younger brother decided to become an operator in Costa Rica’s booming travel industry, packaging cruise tours, and lured the family into the mess he eventually created. As his project slid into bankruptcy, Lya and Alvaro’s business began a slow tumble, and Steven’s foibles inflamed their parents’ already volatile relationship. What happened next, as Lya tells it:

And one day there comes a time when a kind man has finally had enough—Dad just shot her. This is a man who couldn’t squash a fly. They were arguing about Steven. My dad always carried a pistol in his car, because every week he had to drive into the mountains to pay the workers at the farm in cash. So this day he picked my mother up after her exercise class in the city and told her he wanted to drive up to the farm to get a weed whacker, and they started arguing, and he stopped at a vacant lot and shot her, dragged her body out into the lot in full view of people in the area, and drove on to the farm, where he cleaned off the seat, picked up the weed whacker, drove home, and acted like nothing happened.

That was in 2000, and her father went to jail the next year, where he remains today, at age 83. After the murder, her brother tried to seize the farm; after eight years in court, Lya and her father got it back.

By this time, Alvaro and Lya were facing a radical restructuring. “We were going to make our life simple,” says Lya, which in retrospect sounds like a cosmic joke. Unable to afford their suburban home in the hills, they moved into a smaller place in town. Previously, Lya had kept a dog, abandoned by a construction worker, and a pet pig. The new place, however, had a backyard, and that’s how her dog love took over.

“We started picking up strays, taking them to vets,” Lya remembers. “I started thinking, What happens to the dogs you rescue but can’t keep? So I started keeping them.”

A year passed, and then another, and Lya had about 30 dogs. At first it wasn’t really a problem—there were no neighbors—but then someone built on the lot behind them. By this time, Alvaro’s shrugging tolerance for Lya’s passion had transformed into his own big-hearted love for the dogs, yet the situation quickly became untenable. They married on 8/8/2008 (the only date Lya was certain she would not forget), the farm emerged from litigation, and Alvaro suggested that they move the dogs there. The idea was to hire a family to take care of them, but that never worked out. So Lya and Alvaro commute 45 minutes to the farm most days.

By 2009, they had about 120 dogs. Then one day they heard that a large shelter in the capital was closing and had decided to euthanize its 80 dogs, so Lya and Alvaro took them, and two years later simply stole the same shelter’s dogs when, infuriated, she learned it had never actually closed. “We kind of did know that we were crazy,” she says, “and now we had 300 dogs, but still nobody knew about us. And we couldn’t afford to buy another grain of kibble.”

The first guardian angel to appear on Lya’s doorstep was a young woman named Marcella Castro Wedel, pushing a doll carriage with Puppy inside, a diminutive pit bull with paralyzed hindquarters. A solitary go-it-alone dog rescuer, Marcella started coming over to photograph Lya’s dogs to post on Facebook. “We were enjoying the dogs and not really worried about what was going on outside,” Lya says, “but Marcella changed that.” She convinced Lya that the .

As the Territorio’s profile began to blossom on social media, one of Costa Rica’s biggest advertising agencies, , decided to launch a public-service campaign aimed at animal welfare; to Lya’s astonishment, it chose the Territorio as its centerpiece. The agency created a brilliant, joyful video celebrating what it promoted as the unique, one-of-a-kind breed of every individual mutt—the Bernese mountain corgi, for instance, or the golden doodle terrier and the German Staffordshire retriever. Highway billboards advertised the mutts, television stations broadcast features, and Lya and her dogs began to garner media attention around the world. Then Superperro, Costa Rica’s biggest dog-food manufacturer, stepped in to the campaign, donating kibble for every Facebook like.

“We never wanted to grow,” says Lya. “It happened because it happened, and now people from all over the place were dumping dogs at our gate. We just wanted the dogs to have a better life and for people to get that shit out of their heads about mutts.” Generally, in Central and South America, strays are accepted as an unappreciated part of the landscape by everyone except private rescue agencies and compassionate individuals. Now people were showing off their mutts and competing for the most eclectic “breeds” as status symbols. “But the campaign caused more problems,” says Lya.

A popular Costa Rican joke describes a man selling lobsters from two baskets, one basket labeled imported, with a lid on it, and the other basket lidless, labeled local. When asked about the difference, he explains that you don’t need to put a lid on the Costa Rican lobsters, because if one tries to crawl out, the others will drag it back in.

“This is very true of our society, people pulling down anybody who tries to rise above the bottom,” she says. “I don’t mind having a shitty car, living in a little house—my happiness is with the dogs.” Four years ago, she alleges, “there was this former volunteer who managed to hack our Facebook page and shut it down, 84,000 followers just disappeared, and we had to start over from scratch.”

Some organizations were angry about Lya’s loud criticisms of shelters and their shabbiness. Others still feel the Territorio is overpopulated. “My personal opinion is that they have too many animals,” Lilian Schnog, manager of the , told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in an e-mail. “I never visited them, but we get a lot of last year’s vet students at our shelter; they were in tears and said all the animals have ehrlichiosis. I do not believe that a shelter can run properly without a vet present.” To this Lya replies that the tick-borne disease is indeed a problem in Costa Rica, but a veterinarian from the National Animal Health Service (Senasa) does visit the Territorio monthly to certify that the animals are in decent health.

The ongoing battles with neighbors are particularly disheartening. The boundaries of the Territorio are porous, and occasionally a dog will wander downhill into town and end up poisoned. Vandals have smashed irrigation pipes to deprive the dogs of water. Recently, Alvaro and his crew noticed vultures circling above one of the high meadows and hiked up to find five of the farm’s eight horses had been butchered by poachers to sell the meat to illegal sausage makers.

Inevitably, there are the issues with waste and sanitation. (Not to change the subject: after our first visit, my wife retrieved her cell phone from her handbag to discover, inexplicably, a mysterious dollop of poop on its screen.) Disposal is a Sisyphean chore usually handled by the Nicaraguan laborers, who shovel the excrement into empty dog-food bags. The bags are hauled to the municipal dump, and Lya is given a receipt to verify the transaction.

The neighbors, she says, claim “we contaminate the land with our shit, the underground water supply with our urine. Oh, I say, do your cows not piss in the fields? But now I had to get legal proof. It costs thousands of dollars to get scientific proof to satisfy Senasa. And here, you’re guilty until proven otherwise. But we always find angels in the darkest moments.”

One day an elderly woman who followed the contacted Lya, offering the free services of her daughter, an environmental engineer. The daughter was able to certify that the mountain’s aquifer was clean. “There’s nothing our neighbors can do,” says Lya. “They’ve tried everything. And now it’s traffic—they say we’re damaging the road.” True or not, the narrow road through the neighborhood leading to the farm becomes impassable on days when the Territorio opens its gates to the public. “When people say, ‘Why do you go through all this shit?’ I say because what we’re doing is right, and conventional shelters are not the solution.”

Indisputably, there’s an overload of sadness and pathos and loneliness out there in Shelterland. Cue the lugubrious ASPCA commercials back in the States, the wretched images and bereaved voice-over so depressing you want to shoot yourself. In the Territorio, though, you’re always smiling.

We're hiking up the mountain with the dogs, through pastures and bush and canopy, hoping the afternoon rains hold off for another hour. My wife is ahead with Alvaro and Daniel, one of the local employees, while Lya and I dawdle behind with the main pack, scores of mavericks spread out on our flanks, a river of raucous fur flowing euphorically up the slope, a sight every bit as marvelous, even in its reduced magnitude, as the wildebeests on the Serengeti plains. Unless, of course, you don’t like dogs.

“If you can hold on to your problems while you hold on to a dog,” Lya believes, “you have bigger problems than you think. We have to go through hell with our dogs, but it’s how we grow. If you can’t connect with a dog, then there’s something really wrong with you.”

From Lya’s perspective, nobody’s more dangerous than someone who would hurt an animal. It’s a subject that invites diatribes from her about Costa Rica’s success at living off the fame of being eco-progressive while its toothless animal-welfare law doesn’t seem to care how you treat an animal as long as you pick up its shit. Noncompliance benefits everyone from the meat industry to cockfighters to hunters who poach sloths in the rainforest. “It’s illegal to have dogfights, and what’s the punishment? Nothing,” she says. “We call it the Ley de Mierda—the shit law. We printed the actual law on dog-poop bags, and put turds inside the bags and took them to the government in protest.” Finally, after years of promised reform, the national legislature is close to passing a referendum meant to toughen enforcement.

As we ascend the mountainside, Alvaro and his local muchachos, in front of us and racing toward the clouds, qualify not only as extreme athletes but as some of the world’s best anger-management specialists. Back at the compound a thousand feet below, which sometimes has the anticipatory feeling of a crowded open-air bus terminal where all the passengers are excited dogs, bubbles of tension form regularly, and a visitor quickly realizes that to be employed at the Territorio, you have to have a big, authoritative voice. Somebody’s always bellowing, “Don’t do that!” When the tension turns into a scuffle, Alvaro or the nearest available muchacho jumps into action, hollering “Vamos vamos vamos!” and sprinting up the slope. The incipient brawl dissolves into thin air, dogs by the dozens peeling off from the rumble to gallop after them.

About 500 feet above us, Alvaro and Daniel and my wife and 300 of their best friends have paused to rest, and above them rolling thunder echoes off the Poás volcano as storm clouds gather darkly. Lya and I don’t hear the command to turn around, but suddenly the pack reverses course and cascades down toward our own pack of 200, and in a few minutes they merge riotously. Daniel, approaching us, has the impulse to throw himself flat on the ground, and within seconds he’s invisible under a smothering tsunami of dog love.

Every dog is determined to lick Daniel’s laughing face. Every dog cannot lick Daniel’s face. Ergo, a fight erupts, and Lya and I watch speechless as a little brown and black punk, a min pin, a dwarf Doberman, flies out of the heap like a rocket-propelled grenade and bites my wife on the calf, then flies away in guilty glee. “You little shit!” Lya and my wife both shriek in outrage, but the attack was so cartoonish in its ridiculous lack of motivation that we had to stop ourselves from laughing. After all these years, Lya has been bit so many times that she claims she’s no longer impressed.

No matter what, no matter how badly the dogs have been mistreated before they arrive here, no matter that they’re a mangy mess, they still want to be around people, which is why Lya and Alvaro started the public walks, and the dogs, even the malefactors, are infectiously exuberant as communal beings. In fact, their happiness raises a question that doesn’t seem to have a perfect answer.

Before word of Territorio de Zaguates began to spread, Lya and Alvaro would adopt out three dogs a month, a rate that’s since quadrupled, the running count to about 130 dogs, with 10 to 15 new dogs arriving weekly. Superperro has developed a, which helps match people with strays in need of a home, but Lya and Alvaro are particular about who can have their dogs. Before they agree to an adoption, they want to meet the potential owners and follow up with a phone call a month later.

On our first day visiting the zaguates, we met Amanda, a young woman from San Francisco searching the hordes with her mother-in-law, who on a previous trip had fallen for a dog she wanted to take home. Trying to imagine the arc of that dog’s destiny seemed impossible, but Lya is full of stories with happy endings. She takes out her phone and shows me a photo of one of her dogs, Chifrigo, lolling around Miami with a pair of cats and a bichon frise. A vicious chow mix known as El Chapo, after the notorious narcotrafficker, is now Kate. She has become adorable.

But the likelihood that the hundreds of other dogs will ever be adopted is zero, which raises the eternal existential question: So what? The difference between shelter dogs quivering in a kennel and Lya’s zaguates scampering through the idyllic meadows of a canine paradise is profound and, ultimately, irreconcilable. “You don’t have to adopt them,” Lya says, “but at least you can be nice to them,” a philosophy that applies to all refugees, human and nonhuman, from an insecure life, and in this case only Lya and Alvaro know the real cost of that kindness. “Yesterday,” says Alvaro, “I promised I wasn’t going to take any more dogs. I’m so tired. But you find out the horrible things that happened to them, and you can’t tolerate it.” Sometimes there’s no money to pay their workers at the end of the month.

Only man, says Lya, can domesticate an animal and then ignore it. The zaguates are never asked to be not-dogs. The dogs are provided food and companionship without any inclination to compromise their freedom. It’s hard to say if, without the proper funding, the Territorio can provide a sustainable model on its own terms, or one that can be reproduced in other countries by other rescuers. Regardless, the Kingdom of Strays exists as a realized, functioning vision of a better, more humane world.

The day before we arrived, we’d spent the night at an isolated resort on Costa Rica’s magnificent Pacific coast. At dinner that evening in the resort’s outdoor restaurant, I watched as a little black dog stopped at a table where a young couple were dining and waited patiently for a handout that never came. Perhaps the dog sensed my disapproval of her lousy people judgment, and she finally gave up and approached our table, where she hit the moocher’s jackpot. My wife wondered what her name was, and I said she must be Negrita—little black one. The waitress stopped by and indeed confirmed her name—Negra, black but not so little, because the staff, when they sit down to eat their own meals, always fix Negra a plate as well. She comes and goes as she wants, said the waitress, but most nights she follows guests back to their rooms, and sometimes they invite her in and she sleeps with them. And so it was in the morning. I woke up to find Negra lying on the sofa, my wife feeding her cold cuts.

We had found the only zaguate in Costa Rica who had no need for Lya and Alvaro and the embrace of their boundless, sheltering love. Still, I couldn’t help but think that Negra was missing out on all the fun.

The latest book by contributing editor Bob Shacochis is . His 2013 novel, , won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

The post Our Lady of Strays appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Reading the autobiography of any elite athlete devoted to an extreme sport—or, in the case of surfing, the radical zone of an otherwise benign and accessible sport— you might find yourself wondering how the author ever stayed alive long enough to write the book. It requires a great deal of luck, and William Finnegan’s memoir ($28, Penguin Press) is at its heart the chronicle of a lucky man.

A pair of writers in parallel universes, Finnegan and I have ridden many of the same literary swells, but as a surfer he kicked my ass and left it high up on the beach thirty years ago. If I’m doing the math right, the only time I ever crossed paths with Finnegan in the water was on the south shore of Oahu in the mid-sixties, when I was a 14-year-old East Coast kook on a Hawaiian vacation with my parents and he was a 13-year-old California transplant, there for a year and then gone—a foreshadowing of his extraordinary promiscuity in the decades ahead, paddling into uncharted waters for a week or a month, a pilgrim and at times a pioneer, a free spirit whose professed ambivalence for the surfer’s lifestyle and what he calls its “incessant demands” never really put a dent in his almost religious obsession. “Calling surfing a sport,” writes Finnegan, “did get it wrong at nearly every level.”

Chronically peripatetic, Finnegan never anchored himself until he moved to Manhattan in the 1980s and became a staff writer for The New Yorker. There he achieved deserved fame for his words and reportage, if not for his tubes, though Barbarian DaysÌęwill surely correct that imbalance.

I’ve always considered it a type of sin against the vast and wondrous panorama of life to make your world small, shrink-fitted to convenience, immunized against change and unfamiliarity. It’s the experience-hungry girls and boys like Finnegan who inherit the earth, but when you add up all the journeys, a simple rundown of the book’s chapters is unrevealing. Finnegan surfed here, here, and here times a hundred. Asia, Africa, the South Pacific, Hawaii, Portugal, Long Island, the British Isles, Mexico, the moon.

There are thematic templates for how to read and comprehend a work of literature, a framework that doubles nicely as a way to understand human nature and a person’s life. There’s man against man, man against nature, and, finally, man against himself. It’s when Finnegan works these dynamic currents that Barbarian Days becomes more than a journal of time and destinations. What are the vulnerabilities of a solitary self, never more alone than on the ledge of a big wave? What of the unavoidable competition among one’s brothers? The impact of the almighty ocean on one’s psyche and character? The self-questioning that attends risk and recklessness? The quest for identity and how it aligns, or not, with the quest for purity and beauty? When Finnegan paddles into that lineup, he’s fearless and full of grace.

On Our Nightstand

Two celebrated authors explore humankind’s fragile, not always friendly rapport with the animal kingdom in new novels.

,Ìęby Sarah Hall ($26, HarperCollins)
The Gist: An expat zoologist returns from Idaho to help an earl reintroduce wolves in the northern England countryside.
Management Tools: Industrial-grade fencing, GPS
Result: Success!

, by Mia Couto ($25; Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Gist: Hunters try to protect a small village in Mozambique from a barrage of deadly lion attacks.
Management Tools: Rifles, spells
Result: Semi-success.

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In the central Siberian city of Tomsk, children play a game called Dead Telephone, whispering a sentence around a circle until someone fails to repeat the original wording accurately, and for the child who gets the sentence wrong, the penalty is “you must go live in Kamchatka.” Meaning that the loser has been imaginatively banished from the relative comforts of Siberia to the very end of the earth. Kamchatka, perhaps Russia’s most famous nowhere, the wild east of the Russian and Soviet empires, nine time zones and 10,000 kilometers distant from Moscow.

Tundra. Shimmering twilight. A slow, high-banked river the color of tea, as if it flowed from the spigot of a samovar.

Where I should have been was on a vodka-clear, rock-bottomed river, fast and wild, somewhere to the north and farther inland with a phantom cadre of biologists, fly-fishing for salmon specimens on the Kamchatka peninsula. Where I’d ended up was about three klicks inland from the , on an estuarine section of another river that I’d been advised, by the self-proclaimed criminals who deposited me here, to forget about, or else.

We had come from the end of the road, three hours across tundra and beach, atop my host’s — let’s call him Misha — GTT, a large, blunt-snouted all-terrain vehicle that came into his possession when the Soviet military began to disintegrate in 1991. Despite Misha’s earlier assurances, not only were we not going to the river I’d traveled thousands of miles to fish, in hopes of seeing what I’d never seen before — the phenomenon of a massive salmon run — but we’d be leaving in the morning, a day earlier than I thought had been agreed upon. Misha, who looked like a blond-haired, cornhusking quarterback, had Brandoesque mannerisms; waiting for my tantrum to subside, he tilted his head back and cocked it coolly, peering down the nascent beefiness of his ruddy face, and then chided me in the hushed cadence of the ever-reasonable gangster.

“Robert,” he said, “I’m Mafiya, Mafiya, Mafiya — not a tour agent.”

Then he wrapped his hands around his throat, as if to strangle himself, and said he would, if I wanted, take care of my inept outfitter back in (P-K), and for a moment I thought, Nice guy!

At the Mafiya’s oceanside fish camp, when I explained that, to salvage something out of the trip, I wanted to be ferried across the lagoon to spend the night upriver, Misha considered this desire stupid and pointless, but mostly he considered it dangerous. Bears were as thick as gooseberries over there, he said, and I didn’t have a gun, but when I persisted he ordered his boatman to take me across. Rinat, my half-Tatar, half-Russian interpreter/driver, was coming with me. Sergei, our wilderness guide, said he’d rather not.

Now, standing on a tiny tide-swept island in waist-high grass at the end of this remarkably strange day, I cast futilely for silver salmon with my spinning rod, the strong wind sailing the lure within inches of a sandy patch of beach jutting out below the opposite shore. On the steep bank 10 feet above me, Rinat had his nose in the food bag, tossing spoiled provisions out onto the ground.

“Rinat! Are you mad? Throw that food in the river.”

Kamchatka is said to have more and larger grizzly bears per square mile than any place on earth, but Rinat was churlishly indifferent to their presence. A city boy, born and raised in P-K, the peninsula’s largest metropolis, he was employed by a local tourist company trying to bluff its way into the wilderness biz. His employer — my outfitter — let him come out into the ever-perilous, grizzly-roamed outback without a proper food container, without even a tent (I’d brought my own). Earlier in the summer, we’d done soberingly foolish things together, taken risks that Rinat never seemed to recognize—traversed glaciers where one slip would send you plummeting into oblivion; edged ourselves out onto melting ice bridges; stood on the fragile crater floor of the belching Mutnovsky volcano, our lungs seared by sulfurous gases. How, I often wondered, was this puckish, hardworking fellow ever going to survive his occupation, here in one of the last great wild places left on earth?

“Sushi,” Rinat giggled irreverently, pitching stale bread and moldy cheese into the river, making a reference to Michiko Honido, the renowned bear photographer, who was eaten by his Kamchatkan subjects last year.

A minute later I hooked up with a good-size silver salmon, which cheered me deeply, here in the land called the Serengeti of Salmon, where I had been consistently thwarted in my (apparently not) simple quest to savor a fine day of fishing. The fish made its freedom run, keeping me well occupied, and when I looked up again, Rinat, the imp, had set the tundra on fire.

I landed the fish, put my rod down, hopped back to the mainland, and began hauling pots of water while Rinat slapped at the rapidly spreading flames with a fiber sack. Though I’d just reeled in the first salmon of my life, the experience had been akin to losing one’s virginity while your little brother’s in the room, playing with a loaded pistol.

Later, as I planked one of the filets for smoking, Rinat cut the other into steaks for the cookpot. We lolled around the campfire, uncommonly taciturn, because Rinat had found it politic to give away our last bottle of vodka to the boyos.

“Here we are with the criminals,” he said, shaking his head morosely. “Here we are with the bears.”

Imagine an Alaska sealed tight for 50 years, suspended in isolation, inaccessible to all outsiders until 1990, when the sanctum’s doors ease slowly open to the capitalists on the threshold, the carpetbaggers, the tycoon sportsmen, and, of course, the gangsters. Unworldly Kamchatka, with a not-quite-propitious swing of history’s horrible pendulum, is called upon to reinvent itself, and not for the first time.

As gold had once inspired the conquest of the New World, the lust for fur — beaver in North America, sable in Russia — accelerated the exploration of two continents and the spread of two empires. Russia’s eastward expansion very much mirrored America’s westward expansion — the genocidal subjugation of native peoples in the pursuit of natural riches and trade routes. White guys on the move.

Annexed for the czars by a Cossack expedition in 1697, Kamchatka provided Peter the Great with a global monopoly on the fabulously valuable sable. Within 40 years, the ruthless, plundering Cossacks had decimated the coastal-oriented Itelmen and reindeer-herding Koryaks — who had crossed the Bering Strait to North America. A native rebellion in 1731 resulted in a mass suicide, and before long 150,000 tribal people had been reduced to 10,000, their number today, barely 2.5 percent of Kamchatka’s population. Racially and culturally, Kamchatka is as Eurocentric as a bottle of Perrier.

In 1725, Peter the Great sent Captain Vitus Bering on an unsuccessful mission to determine the relation of eastern Siberia to the American continent. Bering was recommissioned by Peter’s successor, and his Great Northern Expedition, which took years to plan and execute and eventually involved 3,000 people, is rightfully remembered as one of the greatest voyages of discovery. Bering sailed his two packets, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, into Avachinsky Bay in 1740 and founded the town of Petropavlovsk, named after his ships. The following spring he set sail for the coast of North America, sighting land in July — Kayak Island off the Alaskan coast — and throughout the summer and fall he mapped the Aleutians, charted the Alaskan shoreline, and then turned back toward Kamchatka, discovering the Commander Islands. His efforts had irrevocably opened the Russian Far East and Russian America for development and trade-in particular, the fur trade, which continued to dominate the peninsula’s economy until 1912, the year St. Petersburg banned the trapping of sable for three years to restore the species’ population.

Surprisingly, no one showed much interest in the more available resource — salmon — until 1896, when the first fish processing plant, sponsored by the Japanese, was established at the mouth of the Kamchatka River, once the site of the peninsula’s most prolific run. By the time the last Japanese left the peninsula 31 years later, Kamchatka had been thoroughly incorporated into the Soviet system, and both the salmon fishery and the sable trade were transformed into state monopolies. Kamchatkans were free to harvest as much salmon as they wanted until 1930, when the state’s imposition of limits radically affected subsistence fishing, and by 1960 the official allowance, 60 kilos a year, was barely sufficient to keep a sled dog from starving. Meanwhile the commercial fishery was booming, and by 1990 Kamchatka’s total annual salmon catch had increased from 30,000 tons to 1.5 million tons. As in Alaska, the fishery began to develop dry holes — a river here, a bay there, under severe pressure.

As Kamchatka receded behind the curtain of official xenophobia after World War II, Moscow rapidly developed the area’s defenses — a submarine base in Avachinsky Bay; ICBM launch sites, satellite tracking stations, military outposts up and down its coastlines — and expected in return “gross output.” Not just salmon and sable; now everything was up for grabs. By the late ’80s, central Kamchatka’s primary forests, 60 percent old-growth larch, were decimated; the Soviets had managed to annihilate Kamchatka’s herring spawning grounds as well. Today, in a debauchery of joint ventures with foreign companies, Moscow has taken aim at the crab and pollock fisheries, at risk to suffer the same fate as the larch, the sable, the herring. Nor has the end of Communism spelled anything but crisis for Kamchatka’s legendary brown bears. By 1997, the peninsula’s Cold War population of grizzlies, an estimated 20,000 bears, had been halved by poachers and trophy hunters. At the rate things are going, says Boris Kopylov, the vice-director of Kamchatka’s State Environmental Protection Committee, the most powerful federal agency mandated to preserve the peninsula’s natural resources, “In the next five years all the endangered species will be at a critical level, the sea otters and bears especially.” This year, the agency’s staff was halved: Conservation law enforcement in remote areas vanished as helicopter patrols were reduced from 300 flying hours to zero, and the system, as Kopylov lamented, didn’t work anymore. “If you want to save Kamchatka,” said Robert Moiseev, one of the peninsula’s leading environmental scientists, “You’re welcome to pay for it.”

Shortly after dawn, the criminals returned to collect us, a humorless sense of urgency in their manner. The chiefs were mightily vexed, they told us, having last night discovered that thieves had spirited away 1,200 kilos-one ton-of caviar the gang had cached on the beach.

“Check Rinat’s knapsack,” I said. The criminals smiled uneasily — heh-heh — and we loaded our gear into the skiff. I’d come to Kamchatka, twice, to fish, and so far I’d been allowed to do damn little of it. In July, a rafting trip on the Kamchatka River quickly devolved into some awful hybrid of absurdity — Samuel Beckett meets Jack London. The rafts were dry-rotted, the river had been dead for 10 years, the mosquitoes were nightmarish, our fishing “guide” was actually a hawk-eyed tayozhnik, a taiga woodsman, who had given his stern heart to hunting and horses but had probably never seen a sportfisherman in his life.

On my second expedition to Kamchatka, the day I arrived in P-K from Anchorage an M1-2 helicopter crashed, killing everyone aboard, and I no longer had a ride to the mythical river up north. My local outfitter hadn’t considered a Plan B. The only alternative, untested, that the outfitter could offer was for Rinat and me to head out to the coast and try to beg a lift across the tundra with anybody we could find in possession of a GTT — the acronym translated as “Tracks Vehicle: Heavy.”

First we drove in Rinat’s truck to a village south of P-K to collect Sergei, the wilderness guide, a Russian version of Bubba, attired in camouflage fatigues, who was an erstwhile law-enforcement officer for RIVOD, the peninsula’s Fish Regulatory Board. He was now employed as a field worker by TINRO — the Pacific Scientific Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography, a state agency operating in association with the Russian Academy of Science but in cahoots with commercial interests. From 1990 to 1996, hard currency gushed in as TINRO became a clearinghouse for the avaricious flow of foreign investment into Kamchatka’s fisheries. “Everybody in the institute got very rich. There was so much money they didn’t know what to do with it,” a TINRO scientist had told me. “The bosses built big dachas, bought expensive cars.” The institute’s sudden wealth finally attracted the attention of Moscow, which began sucking up 90 percent of the institute’s revenues and controlling quotas.

Sergei, as a quasi-scientific government employee, was our insurance, along for the ride not only to steer us clear of official trouble, but to legitimize whatever it was we might end up doing that was a bit too diki — wild, independent — for the apparatchiks.

At the last town before the windswept barrenness of the coast, we turned down a dirt road toward a pre-Soviet Dogpatch, a cluster of clapboard and tar-papered houses, stopping in front of the first one we saw with a GTT in its yard. There on the wooden stoop was Misha, barefoot, wearing camouflage bib overalls, one of his forearms intricately tattooed. He could have been any midwestern hayseed waiting for the glory of team sport. Sergei hopped out, explained our mission, and offered to hire Misha and his machine.

“Nyet,” insisted Misha. Money, he explained, was nothing to him; therefore, yes, he would take us up the coast, but as his guests. I had no way of measuring the offer and began to ask predictable questions, anticipating predictable answers. The house wasn’t his, he said; he came here on the weekends from P-K with his friends to relax.

“What do you do in the city?”

“We are criminals,” he replied. “Even the FBI knows about us.”

“What’d you do,” I joked naively, “sell missiles to Iran?”

Misha narrowed his eyes and demanded to know why I asked such a question. I swore I was only kidding around, and he studied me hard for a good long minute before his demeanor changed and, clapping me on the back, he decided, I suppose, that I was good entertainment out here in the hinterlands — an American writer dropped into his lap.

“Robert, you will write your story about me, you will put me on the cover of your magazine, you will tell the truth,” he declared matter-of-factly, an extravagant display of hubris.

The truth, as I understood it, went something like this: Years ago Misha had committed a crime, the nature of which he refused to explain except obscurely. The old system — the commies, I suppose — threw him in jail in Siberia for “not fitting in,” where he fell in with like-minded troublemakers sharing grandiose, if not exactly morally based, ambitions for a better life. Most significantly, he connected with his fierce partner — let’s call him Viktor, and then let’s forget that we ever called him anything.

Gorbachev, perestroika, freedom, the implosion of the USSR, crony economics, the democracy scam — Misha and his Siberian Mafiya crew moved to Kamchatka and became underworld oligarchs. These were the days, the early ’90s, of the diki Mafiya: no rules, every man for himself, and bodies in the streets. As best I could determine, Misha and friends privatized — seized — a huge tract of state property on the coast, an expansive fiefdom containing four or five rivers plus a processing plant, and went into the caviar business. Eventually the Mafiya and the government realized they had to coexist, so now, after massive greasing, the Mafiya had all the requisite documents and licenses they needed in order to legally do what they were doing — harvesting and processing an astonishing 30 tons of caviar a season to ship to their associates in Moscow.

“The Mafiya,” explained Misha, “is a state within a state,” and perhaps it was destined to morph into the state itself, because if the government ever tries to recover the properties and companies and concerns the Mafiya had sunk its claws into, “there will be a coup d’Ă«tat,” said Misha emphatically, “and there will be a civil war.” Which was exactly the sort of dire prediction I’d been hearing from every upright citizen in Kamchatka throughout the week.

We went inside the austere little house, where Misha sat me down at the kitchen table and smothered me in hospitality, happily watching me shovel down the grub he set out — pasta with minced pork and silver salmon dumplings. Someone appeared with a large bowl of fresh curds and whey. Bonbons? asked Misha, sticking a box of chocolates in my face. Out came a bottle of Armenian brandy. The cross-cultural we-are-all-brothers stuff proceeded splendidly until I made the mistake of cussing.

“Blyat,” I said — shit. I can’t even remember about what.

“Robert,” Misha objected, “don’t hurt my ears with bad words. Real men,” he admonished in his lullaby voice, “don’t need to talk to each other this way.”

In the morning, Misha double-checked the tide chart he carried folded in his wallet. “Robert, let’s have one for the road,” he said. What he meant was, Let’s have one bottle for the beginning of the road. Aspirin and vodka, the breakfast of criminals. Afterward we mounted the GTT and crawled headfirst through the hatch covers into the cavernous interior. We bucked and roared out of town, across the east-west highway and onto the much-scarred tundra, stopping long enough for Misha, Rinat, and myself to climb up on the roof, where we each wrapped a hand around safety ropes and held on as the driver slammed the beast into gear and we slopped our way forward through the bogs.

An hour later we arrived at the coast, littered with the shabby sprawl of a government fish operation. We churned onward through the pebbly sand, the blue Sea of Okhotsk to our left, huge slabs of tundra peat eroding from coastal bluffs on our right. Misha, surveying his kingdom, took delight in pointing out the sights — white-tailed eagles swooping down out of the moody heavens, flocks of berry-fat ptarmigans tumbling clumsily out of the scrub, a pod of all-white beluga whales, scores of sea otters bobbing in the waves off a river mouth. We crossed another without a hitch and Misha happily announced that we were entering private property — his.

We saluted the first brigade of his workers, a motley crew of caviar cowboys. They looked like — and perhaps might someday soon be — partisan rebels in their black rubber waders, filthy overcoats, stubbled faces. We cracked open another bottle of vodka, ate lunch, and Misha wanted pictures, group pictures, buddy pictures, and I took out my camera. We went on, conferring with another survivalist cell of workers farther up the coast, always a guy with a rifle or shotgun standing nearby.

Misha had become a bit nervous, his bonhomie turned brittle. Somewhere up ahead was his jack-booted partner Viktor, who had outlawed alcohol in the camps. If you signed onto a brigade, if you were lucky enough to be asked, you came to work, worked yourself to numbing exhaustion, but after a 12-day cycle of setting nets, pulling nets, tearing the roe out of thousands of now-worthless salmon and processing the eggs into caviar, you went home with a small fortune — $1,500 a man. Then, and only then, you could drink your Russian self blind, for all Viktor cared.

Twenty minutes later, we came to a pair of Ural trucks ahead on the beach. “No pictures!” Misha warned as I followed him to the dune line, toward a storm-built village of wooden-hulled shipwrecks. At this moment I had to be honest with myself about Misha’s character flaws relevant specifically to my presence there on the beach: His pride — he wanted to boast. His gregariousness — he wanted to be liked and appreciated. His generosity — he wanted everyone to understand he was a big man who looked after his own. Viktor, Misha’s partner but apparently the first among equals, had no such flaws.

“Here is Viktor,” said Misha. It wasn’t an introduction. I glanced toward Viktor, who looked at me steadily, his round face icy with menace, and I immediately turned and walked away, careful not to acknowledge him, as he was so clearly offended by my existence. Misha had erred in bringing me here with my retinue, playing games when there was serious work to be done, caviar to salt, traitors to whack, and now he vied for Viktor’s forbearance of this cardinal sin. When we rendezvoused with Misha back at the GTT, he was singing the same tune of camaraderie, but in a different key.

“Robert,” he said, gazing meaningfully into my eyes, “don’t write about us … or I will lose all respect for you,” which I suppose is how a real man says I will have your ass.

Which brings everything back to this lagoon behind the Mafiya’s northernmost outpost, where I stood that morning after my night out on the tundra with Rinat, not caring so much about how the treachery of the stolen caviar might somehow come crashing down on us when we reunited with Misha and Viktor at low tide, but instead far more concerned with my new belief that I was destined never to have a solid day of good fishing here in the angler’s paradise of Kamchatka.

When Misha had dropped us here the previous afternoon, we’d spent a moment discussing the nature of things, fishwise. His men had gawked at me, the sportfisherman. Not a one had ever brought in a fish unless he had gaffed, gigged, netted, snagged, or somehow scooped it out of the water like a bear. When Misha finally understood the style of fishing I was intent on doing, he frowned.

“Nyet, nyet, nyet,” he said. “Don’t bring that here. We don’t want catch-and-release here.” We argued: If he kept harvesting the roe at such a pace, where would the fish be for his children, his grandchildren? “Robert,” Misha smiled, “you and I alone are not going to solve this problem.”

And then, too quick, always too quick, it was time to go. Back in Misha’s orbit, the criminals actually were in high spirits. It had been a good season so far, the silvers were starting to arrive, and the interior of the GTT was packed solid with wooden casks of precious caviar.

“I don’t like to catch fish,” Misha said breezily. “I like to catch money.”

Kamchatka’s exploitation was both an old and a new story, but so was the campaign to preserve its wealth of resources. In 1996 Russia bequeathed more than one-fourth of Kamchatkan territory to the UN Development Programme. A stunning gift to mankind — a World Heritage site that includes the Kronotsky Biosphere Nature Preserve, 2.5 million acres of some of the most . The Kronotsky Preserve contains that is second only to Yellowstone’s, and the Uzon Caldera, filled with steam vents, smoking lakes, mud cauldrons, and dozens of hot springs. It also is home to three times as many grizzlies as in the entire Yellowstone ecosystem, plus the greatest known populations of Pacific and white-tailed eagles. The park has 22 volcanoes, including the Fuji-like , 15,584 feet of elegant cone, the tallest active volcano in Asia or Europe.

Many Kamchatkans fear that, as the economy plummets and the country opens itself to the unchecked appetites of the free market, the peninsula’s natural resources will be raided and areas like Kronotsky overrun by tourists. When I spoke with Boris Sinchenko, vice-governor of the Kamchatka region administration and one of the men at the helm of Kamchatka’s future, he told me, “In five to 10 years, we expect to host five to 10 million tourists annually and to have built the infrastructure to accommodate them. The territory is so large, we can easily lose 10 million people in its vastness.”

Many Kamchatkans also harbor a corollary fear. The peninsula’s total population is less than 500,000, three-quarters of which lives in or around P-K. An environmental scientist told me with a shrug, “When’s there’s no electricity, the people say, ‘We don’t care about nature, give us heat!'” One day, Rinat had slapped an orange sticker on the front of my notebook, given to him by his ex-wife, who worked for a Canadian gold mining conglomerate: Hungry, Homeless, Need a Job? Call the Sierra Club, Ask About Their No Growth Policy. Only the most arrogant conservationist would demand that Kamchatkans remain impoverished in order to preserve their wonderland for a future less hopeless and bleak than the present. Talking with Sinchenko, however, I sensed there was something a bit cynical about signing over a quarter of the peninsula to the enviros at the UN, as if now that it had proved its enlightenment, the state had earned carte blanche to do what it pleased with the rest of its resources.

There were precedents for such cynicism. Twice, in the ’60s and the ’80s, the Soviets began to erect power plants on swift-flowing rivers inside or near the reserve, destroying spawning grounds and wasting millions of rubles. Nevertheless, a large hydroelectric project is under construction on the Tolmachevo River, and the gorgeous, fish-rich Bystraya River flowing through the village of Esso was stuck with a dam and power station. Sitting below the areas around Esso are some of the richest unmined gold deposits in the world. When I spoke with Boris Kopylov of the State Environmental Protection Committee, he mentioned that his agency had been successful in stopping exploratory drilling on west coast oil deposits and halting placer mining for gold near the mouth of the Kamchatka River, but it was clear that sooner or later the oil was going to be drilled and the Esso gold deposits were going to be extracted, ultimately endangering spawning grounds in central Kamchatka. “In previous years all the [environmental] agencies were completely against all exploration for gas, oil, and gold,” said Kopylov. “Now our position is to change a little.”

In the salmon fishery, the magnitude of greed, multiplied in many instances by a struggle for survival, was mind-boggling. “Illegal fishing out of Kamchatka yields $2 billion a year,” David La Roche, a consultant for the UN’s environmental mission to Kamchatka, told me over beers in a P-K cafĂ« as we talked about the local flowchart for corruption. “The legal fisheries are yielding not as much.”

The economic pressures that confront the ordinary Kamchatkan were made viscerally clear to me in July when I met Vladimir Anisimov, the headman of Apacha, a sprawling collective farm about 150 kilometers due west of P-K. A prosperous dairy farm until Gorbachev presided over the nation’s demise, Apacha’s ability to survive had seriously corroded, its herds whittled away by the state from 4,000 to 400 head, its buildings in sad disrepair. In desperation, the Apacha villagers had signed an experimental one-year contract with the Japanese to collect mushrooms, herbs, and fiddlehead ferns from the surrounding forest. And then, like almost every other collective in Kamchatka, Apacha had gone into the fishing business.

Everyone was waiting, waiting, for the fish to start their run, but when I returned to Apacha in September, I learned that, as in much of Alaska this summer, it never happened — the July run of salmon never really came in from the sea. Nobody in the village had been paid a wage in recent memory. Vladimir was at a loss; the collective hadn’t netted half its quota of 1,200 tons when, if truth be told, it had counted on netting its legal quota and then doubling it with another thousand tons off the books, as is the common practice. Apacha was rotting on the hoof, the central government gnawing away at the resources that the people had struggled 50 years to create. Since the middle of August, the ruble had lost two-thirds of its value, and the last day I saw Vladimir, shops were empty of basic foodstuffs, and Apacha was without electricity because there wasn’t any fuel to run its generator. Even in such dire straits, the kindness and generosity that all Kamchatkans had shown me did not abandon Vladimir, and he embarrassed me by siphoning gas out of his own vehicle so that I could go fishing.

Sergei, heretofore simply along for the ride, suddenly awoke to the idea that it was time to take control of our half-baked expedition, now that we had parted with the Mafiya and exhausted every option in our one and only plan to head north to that never-fished river. Pointing for Rinat to take a turnoff up ahead on the east-west road, Sergei allowed that if all I truly wanted to do was fish, then he had an idea that might finally relieve me of my obsession.

Sergei disappeared down a path. I sat in Rinat’s diesel truck, praying that something good might come of this. Rinat wouldn’t look at me, and I could hardly blame him. His country was falling apart around him, and he was stuck chauffeuring a sport-crazed American, one of the nominal victors in an ugly game we had all been forced to play. All he could do was resign himself to an even uglier truth — foreigners equal money equals hope: Drive on.

Sergei reemerged from the trees, beaming. He had a pal, the local tayozhnik, who owned a skiff and was caretaker of a hunting cabin about a half-hour’s cruise downriver at the base of the mountains, at the mouth of a tributary as thick with char and mikisha (rainbows) as the main river itself was obscenely packed with the season’s final run of pink salmon. The tayozhnik would be willing to take us there.

“But there’s a problem,” said Sergei, wincing. “No gasoline for the outboard motor.”

OK, that was a problem — there was only one gas station within 100 kilometers, and it was closed. We drove to a shack atop the bluff above an invisible river and picked up the tayozhnik, an unshaven backwoods gnome we might have roused from an Appalachian hollow, and together we traveled a half-hour to Apacha, where Vladimir, the destitute headman of his destitute people, came to our rescue with the siphoned gas. Two hours later, back on the bluff, while I repacked my gear for the boat, Sergei and the woodsman suddenly took off to run unspecified errands.

Rinat and I broke out the medicine and resigned ourselves to further delay. Then began the cirque surreal. First to wander across the clearing was a lugubrious old man who stood gaping at me with wet eyes, as if I were the Statue of Liberty. I passed him the bottle of vodka so that he might cheer up. Then a group of hooligans from Apacha screamed up in their battered sedan, disco blasting, apparently convinced we had come to the river to party. Obligingly, I passed around another bottle. Another hour ticked off the clock.

Sergei and the tayozhnik returned, followed in short order by a carload of RIVOD inspectors, blue lights flashing, replaced only a few minutes later by the militia, who sprang from their car patting their sidearms. Again, we passed the bottle.

Night was quickly falling. Just as I bent to hoist my duffel bag, a van rolled into the clearing and out flew a not unattractive woman in a track suit and designer eyeglasses. “I heard there was an American here!” she shouted breathlessly and, zeroing in, almost tackled me in her excitement. She dragged me back to the van and shoved me inside, where her three companions rolled their eyes with chagrin, handed me a plastic cup, and apologetically filled it with vodka. My abductor — Marguerite — knelt in front of me, her hands on my knees, babbling flirtatiously.

“What gives?” I said, utterly bewildered. She slipped a business card into my shirt pocket and pleaded that I allow her to represent me, refusing to hear my explanation that there was nothing to “represent.” OK, she said, let’s do joint venture.

“Robert?” I heard Sergei calling me. They were ready to go, no more endless dicking around.

I tried to get up, but Marguerite pushed me back in my seat. I grabbed her hands, looked her in the eyes, and firmly declared, “I have to go fishing.”

“Nyet,” she cried, “nyet, nyet, nyet,” and she kissed me. Her friends looked straight ahead, as if it were none of their business.

I lurched for the door, but she had me wrapped up. This couldn’t be more bizarre, I told myself — until Marguerite began stuffing six-ounce cans of caviar into the pockets of my slicker. OK, I said, if you want to come, fine, but I’m going fishing now. Marguerite relaxed just long enough for me to bolt out of the van, but there she was again, welded to my arm, attached to me in some frightening, unknowable way.

There was a quick, sharp exchange between her and the gnome, and the next I knew I was threading my way, alone and free, down the bluff through the darkening slope of stone birches. The air was warm, but when you inhaled it was the river you breathed, its mountain coldness, and I felt transcendentally refreshed. Then we were all in the boat, sans Marguerite, shoving off into the main current of this perfect river, the Plotnikova, clean and fast and wild enough for any harried soul.

Ìę

We were carried forward on a swift flow of silver light, stars brightening in the deep blue overhead. Then the light died on the river too, just as the tayozhnik beached the bow on the top end of a long gravel bar, bellying out into the stream. It was too late, too dark, to forge on to the hunter’s camp, and I said fine. Sergei begged off again, said he’d be back to pick us up tomorrow, and I said fine to that too. Rinat and I threw our gear ashore, and I pushed the skiff back into the current and then stood there, the black cold water swirling around my waders, singing praise on high for the incredible fact of my deliverance. This river made noise; this river sang.

We dug out our flashlights and dragged our packs about a hundred yards up from the water’s edge to the trunk of a huge tree ripped from the riverbank and washed onto the bar. Rinat collected wood for a campfire, and soon we squatted in a private dome of firelight, watching a pot of water boil for tea. I hadn’t eaten all day, and my stomach growled.

“Rinat, where’s the food?”

He cleared his throat and confessed he’d given everything to the Mafiya, mumbling some ridiculous explanation about the code of the wilderness.

“Where’s my candy?”

“I gave it to the criminals.”

“You gave the Mafiya my candy! They had their own candy.”

“It was the least we could do,” said Rinat, “since, you know, they didn’t kill us when you hurt their ears with bad words.”

We rocked into each other with laughter, howling at the absurdities we had endured together. Our assorted adventures, supernaturally screwed up and filled with hazard, were over but for one true and honest day of fishing, out on the sheer edge of a magnificent world, in a nation going to hell. I patted my pocket for cigarettes and discovered a tin of Marguerite’s caviar, Rinat produced a hunk of brown bread, and we ate. He rolled out his sleeping mat and bag and tucked himself into the tree trunk. “Let me apologize in advance,” I said, “if the bears come to eat you.”

And in the morning, the fish — like the trees and the gravel bar, like the screaming birds and humming bottleflies, like the sun and its petticoat of mists and everything else to be found in its rightful place — the fish were there. I had never seen anything remotely like it, the last days of an immense salmon run. What first struck me, as it hadn’t last night, was the profound stench. The gravel island was carpeted with the carcasses of pink salmon — humpbacks — from the height of the run, one of the most concentrated runs in recent years, as if so many fish within its banks had made the river overflow. Now the slightest low spot on the island was pooled with rotting eggs where fish had spawned. Maggots were everywhere, a sprinkle of filthy snow across the rocks and mud and weeds, and dead fish everywhere, rimed with a crust of maggots. I slipped into my waders, walked down to the river through shoals of decomposing fish, and entered the water. Humpback salmon nosed my boots as they struggled wearily upstream; like the prows of sinking ships, the gasping jaws of debilitated male humpies poked out of the water as the fish drifted by, their milt spent, their energy spent, the last glimmer of life fading into the sweep of current. In the shallows, gulls sat atop spawned but still — living fish, tearing holes into the rosy flesh. Fish still fresh with purpose threw themselves into the air, I don’t know why, but what I did know was that the salmon were bringing the infinite energy of the sea upriver, an intravenous delivery of nutrients funneling into the land, the animals, the insects and birdlife and the very trees.

Here, in a salmon, nature compressed the full breath of its expression, the terrible magnificence of its assault, and I stood in the current, mesmerized. On the far bank at the mouth of a tributary there were poachers. At first glance it seemed that they had built low bonfires on the opposite shore, the red flames licking and twisting, but where was the smoke? I wondered, and as I looked more deliberately I saw my mistake: The writhing flames were actually fish. One poacher worked at the base of the tall bank, poised like a heron above the stream, using a long staff to gaff salmon — females, hens — as they swam past and then flipping the fish overhead to a pile on the top of the bank, where his partner crouched, gutting out the roe.

When the spell broke, I sat down on a log and finally accomplished the one thing I had passionately desired to do for days, months, all my life: I rigged my fly rod for salmon fishing.

I decided to head down the bar to where the currents rejoined at the rapids below its downstream point, an eddy splitting off to create slack water. The island was probed by wayward, dead-end channels, trickling into basins where the sand had flooded out, and as I waded through the biggest pool scores of humpback salmon, coalesced into orgies of spawning, scurried before me in the foot-deep shallows like finned rats. In the deeper holes the season’s last reds cruised lethargically in their scarlet and olive-green “wedding dresses,” as the Kamchatkans call a fish’s spawning colors. I sloshed onward to dry land, the fish gasping, the birds screaming, and everywhere the reek of creation.

On the tail of the bar I planted my feet in the muck and cast into a deep turquoise body of water that resembled nothing so much as an aquarium, waiting for the connection, that singular, ineffable tug that hooks a fisherman’s hungry heart into whatever you want to call it — the spirit of the fish, the bigness of life or even the smallness, the euphoric, crazed brutality of existence, or simply a fight: the drama of the battle between man and his world. Not every cast, but most, ended with a fish on my hook, a glorious humpback, three to five pounds each, the hens painted in swaths of mulberry, green, and rose, the males beautifully grotesque with keel-like dorsal humps and hooked jaws like the beak of a raptor.

A day of humpies landed on flies here on this grand river was enough to quench my deepest craving for the sport, but then my rod bent from the pressure, the reel sang its lovely shrill song as the line escaped, and here came the silvers, big and angry, like bolts of electricity, filled with the power of the sea. Rinat finally joined me in this dance, and by the late afternoon, when Sergei and the tayozhnik returned, we had two fish apiece, the limit, silvers as long and fat as our thighs.

We gathered more wood, Rinat started the fire, and Sergei brought his cookpot from the boat. “I’m going to show you how to make a poachers’ ukhĆŸ,” said Sergei, cutting off the salmon heads and tails and sliding them into the boiling pot with diced potatoes and onion and dill. I had caught dozens of pinks but kept only one, a female, and Sergei slit her belly to make instant caviar, unsacking the eggs into a bowl of heavily salted water.

We sat in the gravel with our backs propped against the fallen tree and gazed lazily out at the fast blue dazzle of the river, slurping our fish soup. A raft floated down from around the bend, paddled by two RIVOD officers. The poachers on the opposite shore vanished into the forest, the wardens paddled furiously into the tributary, and we listened as the crack of gunshots resonated over the river, here in the Wild East.

Sergei, waxing philosophical, quoted a poet: “It’s impossible to understand Russia, only to believe in it.” Then he lifted a spoon of caviar to my lips, and I recalled the last fish I had caught that day, a hen, which had no business hitting my fly, ripe as she was. When I brought her from the water she sprayed a stream of roe, an arc in the air like a chain of ruby moons, splashing over my feet onto this most eternal, unsettled world of the river.

The post Here The Bear and The Mafia Roam appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

We each have our dreams and if they are meant to mean anything at all you hold tight and don't let them go. You can dream of love or money or fame or something much more grand than a fish, but if a fish swims into your imagination and never swims out it will grow into an obsession and the obsession might drag you anywhere, up to the metaphysical heights or down into an ass-busting nightmare, and the quest for my dream fish—South America's dorado—seems to run in both directions.

The author with his prized catch.

The vast Ibera Wetlands.

Noel Pollak (right) with a client in the Parana Delta.

Kids in the delta.

Dinner at the Pira Lodge.

Poolside at Pira.

Of course the dream is never just about a fish but about a place as well, an unknown landscape and its habitat of active wonders, populated by creatures looming around the primal edges of our civilized selves. A place like the ancestral homeland of the GuaranĂ­ Indians at the headwaters of the RĂ­o ParanĂĄ, near where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay come together. In the GuaranĂ­ language, ±èŸ±°ùĂĄ means “fish,” and this fish, the , is called ±èŸ±°ùČčÂáĂș, the affix meaning “yellow.” In my dreams the ±èŸ±°ùČčÂáĂș skyrockets out of its watery underworld, a piece of shrapnel from a submerged sun, like a shank of gold an archaeologist might find in the tomb of an Incan king.

After years of unrequited dorado lust, last spring I seized the dream by the gills and finally took off for the Southern Hemisphere. I would be hooking up with a guide known worldwide as the king of dorado, Noel Pollak, the best person wired into the fish and its latitudes, the guarantor of the dream and your insertion into its depths. Six months earlier we had schemed to meet in Bolivia at a Pollak-discovered location that had become renowned as dorado nirvana, but we had not been able to manage that trip, for reasons I'll get to in a moment. Instead, we were now connecting at the end of what should have been the fair-weather season somewhere in Argentina's Iberá Wetlands—an area almost seven times as large as Florida's Everglades—although the specifics of our rendezvous weren't exactly clear to me. Get on a plane, find me. Noel was frequently off in the bush, out on the water, and our communications had been last minute, the logistics addressed in a manner all too breezy and cavalier.

But that's how dreams operate—you fling yourself into their spell and expect it will all work out. What you really must expect however is the strong possibility that such immoderate optimism will be sorely tested.

AFTER A DAYLONG flight from Miami, I land after dark in Buenos Aires and check into the Hub Porteño past midnight. No one at the hotel has heard of my final destination, Mercedes, Corrientes. Indeed, even the placard at the airport ticket counter the next morning doesn't identify it on the flight manifest. At our first stopover, everybody disembarks but me and a Chinese businessman, and an hour later we put down in the weather-beaten colonial town of Mercedes, which is probably like flying into Chicken Neck, Louisiana, in 1955. Descending, I can see curls and snakes and catchments of muddy water everywhere, a saturated landscape, a fishery run amok, and I imagine schools of dorado patrolling the floodwaters of the pampas like marauding tigers, gobbling up rabbits and lambs.

Someone named Ricardo has come to fetch me in his mud-encrusted pickup truck. Hello, I say, how do you say mud in Spanish? Barro. We drive through somnambulant streets to a two-lane highway and then onto a deeply rutted dirt track, its surface melted to goo. Mucho barro, I say to Ricardo, who struggles mightily with the steering wheel. Too much rain, ČőĂ­? ł§Ă­, he nods. The fishing has been affected, ČőĂ­? A little, says Ricardo. We pass through endless flat ranchland, small rivers swollen with floodwater, the pastures lapped with water, sheep and cattle crowded onto the high spots. The clouds roil overhead, looking ever more threatening, the truck sliding in and out of the ruts until we finally skate sideways off the roadbed, axle-deep into the slop.

It's midafternoon by the time we mud-surf into Pirá Lodge. Pirá is the first five-star lodge dedicated exclusively to dorado fishing, built in 2000 by an outfitter called . The compound is quietly welcoming, an understated outback haven for one-percenters, although put me to bed in a cardboard box, for all I care—my idea of privilege is limited to landing a ferocity with fins.

Of the original team of hotshot guides at PirĂĄ, only one was Argentine, a fish-crazed kid from the capital named Noel Pollak, a self-described “born fisherman” who looks like most of the sinewy, bantamweight rock climbers I've known. In 1987, when he was 13, Noel decided he was a fish geek and taught himself fly-fishing, practicing at a lake in a city park. At 21, he dropped out of university to become a professional sport fisherman. For him it wasn't a decision, it was beyond intelligence, it was a calling, like entering the priesthood in waders.

He started giving fly-fishing lessons to friends and writing fishing articles for a magazine, Aventura. Then Argentina's largest newspaper, , asked him to write a biweekly column. But after two years on the beat, Pollak was sick of it all, fed up with writing—actually, fed up with being edited—and he walked away from the job. Instead of buying a car with his savings, he bought a skiff and began guiding in the nearby Paraná Delta, 45 minutes from downtown Buenos Aires. Then Pirá Lodge came into the picture. He guided at Pirá for ten seasons; by the third he was promoted to head guide, eventually managing the place. Then in 2006 he took an off-season trip to Bolivia, where he would encounter both glory and betrayal.

NOEL TAKES ME directly to the boat dock, where the lodge's pair of Hell's Bay flats skiffs are tied up on a channel of swift, caramel-colored water, providing access to the marshes and lagoons and the headwaters of the RĂ­o Corriente, a tributary of the ParanĂĄ. Both the ParanĂĄ and the RĂ­o Uruguay farther to the east eventually merge north of Buenos Aires to form the RĂ­o de la Plata, the widest river in the world.

Standing on the dock, even a newcomer can see that conditions are not normal here. The channel has overflowed its banks, submerging the lower trunks of willow trees, sending water up the lawns of the lodge. Two days earlier, a low-pressure system over the Amazon Basin descended into Argentina and dropped 20 inches of rain in 48 hours, resulting in the worst flooding in ten years. Not to be deterred, Noel fished the downpour with his last stubborn client, Jimmy Carter, who had left the lodge that morning to dry out in BA.

My moment of truth has now arrived. I'm an agnostic, an unapologetic philistine, one devolution away from fishing with dynamite. Noel puts his gorgeous bamboo fly rod in my hands, wants me to feel its craftsmanship, wants me to love it, wants to see what I can do, but it might as well be a nine-foot piece of rebar in my clumsy grip, and so I show him just how graceless an otherwise competent man can be, stripping out line like an infirm monkey, noodling my cast up and up until it plummets ineffectually midway into the channel. Because he has teaching ingrained in his personality, Noel seems to think he can help me overcome my deficiencies, and he probably could, but there's too little time, and I have no intention of spending it feeling frustrated and dumb. “No one who is learning should ever feel stupid,” Noel says, trying to console me, but honestly, screw it. For once the art is beside the point. I don't want to learn, I want to fish, and I know how to handle my spinning rod.

Noel, unlike the majority of fly-fishermen I know, is an easygoing, tolerant guy. He maintains his composure in the face of my blasphemy and we go fishing.

WE BLAST DOWN the esoteric maze of pathways through the marshlands, the channels no wider than a suburban sidewalk. Noel pilots the boat like a motocross driver at full throttle, slaloming through serpentine creeks, making hairpin turns, rocketing ahead across small lagoons into seemingly solid walls of vegetation, the fronds of the reeds whipping my face.

After 20 minutes, the marshes open up into bigger water, providing a clearer picture of why the Argentines call this region Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. The horizons are tree lined, but out here vast clumps of floating islands composed of reeds and their root systems define the ecosystem. As the water gets deeper and as wide as the length of a football field, horses are suddenly everywhere in the stream, washed out of their range. Only their heads are visible, nostrils flared red, chased by swarthy gauchos in pirogues trying to herd them back to terra firma. Farther on, where the marshlands pinch in again at the headwaters of the Corriente, Noel cuts the motor and climbs atop the poling platform bolted onto the stern and we drift, El Maestro calling out advice and wisdom to me, poised in the bow.

To fish for dorado requires the hyper-accuracy of a marine sniper, every cast by necessity a bull's-eye or you're in the vegetation. Of course, as a marksman, Noel uses the equivalent of a bow and arrow, and I'm firing a rifle. His mantra is persistent but gentle—Cast at that riffle, cast at that inlet, cast at that confluence. After dozens of fruitless casts, I'm thinking, Fine, let's do dozens more. That old man Jimmy Carter bounced around out here in hard rain for two days and boated eight dorados.

Try over there, says Noel, pointing to an eddy line where a channel runs out of the reeds into the main current. Kaboom is the noise you don't hear but feel when a dorado strikes, and the next thing you know the beast is in the air, a solid gold furious thrashing bolt of life, and the next thing you know after that is farewell, goodbye, it's gone, and you are inducted into the Hall of Jubilant Pain that is dorado fishing. The fish launches out of the water with a hook in its bony jaws and razor teeth and when it comes back down after a three-second dance it's perfectly free and you're bleeding internally, experiencing some pure form of defeat. ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę

“If you love fishing you're going to fall in love with this fish,” Noel declares. “But they make you suffer, hombre. Like the woman who you really fall in love with, they always keep you at the edge. I will admit it, I like the difficult fish.” With the sun about to set, I conjure a second fish into the sky and lose it, too.

AT BREAKFAST Noel jokes that he'll wear his lucky hat today, “The one I was wearing when I discovered this place in Bolivia,” but then again, Bolivia didn't turn out so well. We take off in the skiff down the channel into the marshlands but the flooding is now unprecedented; its surge has separated vast platforms of the vegetation, breaking apart floating islands and jamming together new ones. We finally plow our way out into the Corriente and pole and drift the edges, both of us fishing for three hours. Nothing. We try every possible combination of structures and depths. Nada. Shit. Noel has never seen these waters like this. The Paraná—a four-hour drive north—will be better, he promises. The drainage is different, the riparian geology less susceptible to the washout here in the marshes. We head back to the lodge, pack up, and hit the road. Ìę

Fishing guides are in many respects the most innocent people in the world, always believing in the best, believing in the next cast, another chance, embracing a type of aesthetics and idealism found most bracingly in nature. Fly-fishermen especially are dismayed by a cretinous mentality, unable to comprehend a certain type of laziness and a certain type of greed.

Noel and I go to the ParanĂĄ because we can't go to Bolivia, where he and his investors built what became a legendary dorado camp, the Tsimane Lodge, up in the jungled foothills of the eastern flank of the Andes. Days of walking through the jungle, days of shitty fishing, then a flight in a bush plane and days more being paddled upriver by bow-and-arrow Indians in a dugout canoe, until finally the murky water cleared, the air brightened, the river was beautiful, and Noel experienced the most amazing day of dorado fishing in his life. They were all giants, and they came to him one after another. “I almost want to cry, remembering this,” he tells me.

Three years of discovery and development, three years of fabulously successful operations, and then the money disappeared, all the profits—even the staff's salaries—vanishing into a wormhole. Noel doesn't want to air the details, but suffice to say that his greatest success was also his greatest ass-kicking, a pattern that seems close to the essence of existence, dorado style. Back in Buenos Aires, he couldn't even lift himself out of his bed for months. But he had left Nervous Waters, the outfitters of and in his opinion the number-one fly-fishing outfit in the world, on good terms, and when his depression lifted Noel and Nervous Waters hatched a scheme for a new partnership built around a dorado trifecta—day trips out of Buenos Aires to the delta, a future lodge elsewhere in South America, and the first dorado operation on the upper reaches of the Paraná. This new place, called the Alto Paraná Lodge, based out of a 100,000-acre estancia named San Gara, would open for business in October.

It's a tedious drive north through flat countryside from Pirá to the estancia, where we arrive long after dark and meet Christian, the son of the owner, and two of Noel's friends—Mariano and Alejandro. Beautiful guys—they have boats, we don't. We're fed beef with side dishes of more beef and shown to austere rooms in what seems to be a converted barracks for the resident gauchos—the estancia runs 3,500 head of cattle and 300 horses. In the morning, I awake to a riot of obnoxious parrots who inhabit, by the hundreds, the crowns of the palm trees clustered at the end of the veranda. The four of us squeeze into Mariano's pickup truck and tow his boat to the river, about five miles down flooded gravel roads. Rheas dash across the road, foxes, the huge but rarely seen swampland deer known as ciervo de los pantanos, flushed out to higher ground. The upper Paraná has been victimized by the same weather system—20 inches of rain, the river rising three feet out of its normal banks. In fact, as bad as the Iberá marsh was, the Paraná is worse.

The river is expansive, miles across, Paraguay out there somewhere on the eastern bank, separated from us by an archipelago of midstream islands cloaked with impenetrable jungle. The water is the color of dulce de leche, whipped by a steady breeze. We roar away to known spots, to unknown spots, scouting and fishing and roaring away again, all the familiar exposed sandbars and beaches now underwater from the deluge.

Within an hour I have my first dorado, but it's minnow size, four or maybe five pounds, and then I lose a second, bigger one. I'm spin-casting a spoon off the bow and Alejandro's fast-stripping a streamer from the stern, losing fish after fish. When Noel takes his place, the story's much the same, although he boats a half-dozen ±èŸ±°ùĂĄ pita, a smaller fish with as much fight as dorado, using dry flies. After a couple hours of happy frustration, we head out to the islands and their solid walls of jungle, the first line of trees and bushes half-submerged, the shorelines sculpted with mini coves and overgrown inlets and gaps and twisting eddies. It would be impossible to get out of the boat but unfortunately I find a way, kneeling in the bow to retrieve Noel's fly, entangled in a branch just out of my reach, and I fall slow-motion into the fucking water. I'm only three feet offshore but there's no bottom to touch and I swim to the stern of the skiff and am pulled back aboard by my wide-eyed friends. As dips go it's pleasant enough, but with 12-foot caimans and truck-size catfish throughout the river, I'm not keen on getting back in the water around here.

THE FISHING is grueling. We're casting from about 80 feet offshore into tiny pockets between the foliage, beneath the foliage, alongside downfalls, the trickiest shots imaginable. We're all expert marksmen, but nobody is perfect enough in the wind to stay out of the branches. Further on into the jungle we can hear the eerie rumbling of colonies of monkeys, their vocalization like pigs, not squealing but a low persistent collective grunting. Noel picks up his rod again and now there are three of us fishing, perfectly synchronized, our casts each landing within a yard of one another in separate pockets along the bank at the same moment, and something wonderful happens. “A triple!” shouts Alejandro at the wheel. Three dorado simultaneously erupt into the air, looking like a jackpot lineup on a Vegas slot machine, then fall back into the current, gone, all three.

That night two of the Pirá Lodge guides, Augustin and Oliver, arrive from the south to join us on the Paraná. In the morning, as a river otter frolics in the shallows, we zoom off in two boats toward the islands. I'm daunted by the wind and the choppy, dirty water and ask Noel how hard he thinks it's blowing—fifteen knots? Twenty? That's not the scale I use, says Noel. My scale is Perfect, Nice, Shitty, Awful. This is between Shitty and Awful.

But the day has its rugged magic, at least a window into the magic. Augustin, in Mariano's boat, lands a 12-pound hunk of what one American magazine referred to as “gaucho gold,” and on an assassin's shot between two downed trees I'm struck by lightning, so to speak. The strike is immediate, a nanosecond after my diving plug hits the surface, and like a Polaris missile launched from a submarine, up comes the dorado, 15 pounds, jumping into the air above our heads. Like orcas, a dorado will jump out of the water onto land a full yard to pursue its prey—in the dorado's case, sabalo, panicked baitfish. Somewhere in the sequence I can feel the release of the hook and the fish is free again but honestly it hardly matters, Noel and Alejandro are hooting and will talk about that fish with a thrill in their voices for the next two days—Oh man, that fish—because it was huge and magnificent and for a moment it was ours. When the two boats reunite, Augustin tells us Oliver has spent the day “harvesting the forest,” which means he's been an inch or two too far in all his casts, but at least he hasn't gone swimming. Noel and Alejandro tell him about the monster I hooked and lost. “And then,” Oliver, an Englishman, says to me, “you were left with your thoughts.” But there wasn't a thought in my head. I was left with only heartbreak. Yet to have owned the fish for a few seconds, to see it in the air, suspended between outcomes, has to be enough.

La vida es sueño, the Latins say—life is a dream. I think of Noel and his struggle in Bolivia. This time it's not the fish but something much, much bigger, and it stays in the air for what seems like an eternity but in fact is only three years, and when it falls back to the water, it's gone, receded back to the dream, you thought you had it but you never did and its descent is a form of bittersweet devastation. Sometimes you can catch the big one but the result is pathos and tragedy. And you can lose the big one and yet it persists and remains, a triumphant vision, something to carry forward beyond the dream. There's clarity here—these fishermen, these lovely men, the spread and flow of big water, the dance of the big fish, the ascendant luminosity, a blazing star built of muscle and teeth and fury, the golden arc of sweetness and sorrow, possession and loss. That's what you discover in the marshes, what you bring home from the river. That, finally, is the meaning of the dream.

The next day on the ParanĂĄ is a screaming disaster. Noel and I fly back down to Buenos Aires to fish the delta. In the morning, we are greeted by squalls but head out anyway into shining moments of solitude and silence, autumn light and autumn colors and yes, kaboom, up a little creek one last bull's-eye next to a log. ±ÊŸ±°ùČčÂáĂș, the GuaranĂ­ god of water, strains for the sun.

A week later, in the suburbs of the capital, scores of people will be swept away by the floods. Any dream has its limits, and this dream had breached its boundaries, waiting to be dreamed again, and better.

Contributing editor Bob Shacochis is the author of .

The post The Quest for the Golden Dorado appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Halfway Round
Teenager Abby Sunderland was on track to become the youngest person to solo-circumnavigate the globe. the ocean had other plans.

I WAS 16 AND ALONE in the southern In­dian Ocean, exactly halfway into my attempt to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world. My brother Zac had set the record the previous year, when he was 17. And if he could do it, I definitely could, too.

When you're that far south, you expect bad weather. But my 40-foot racing yacht, Wild Eyes, was holding up against the swells, and I would stay below, tied into bed, reading books, listening to music. One of the best parts of the day was checking my e-mail.

About three weeks out of Cape Town, the storm hit. There were mountains of water all day. The boat was knocked down four times, but, with its heavy ballast, it always righted itself. Night falls really early down south. At 4 P.M. it was already dark, but by 5:30 the storm had died down, so I called home. I'd had some trouble with my engine, and my dad helped me get it running again. Then the call dropped. I set my sat phone down on the chart desk. While I was replacing the engine cover, a rogue wave struck.

I flew across the cabin and hit my head. Everything faded out for a second. When I came to, I was sitting on the ceiling in a foot and a half of water. Things were falling everywhere. It was pitch black. After 20 seconds, the boat slowly rolled back over.

The mast was gone. I could feel it missing as the boat righted. When you lose your mast, you immediately think, OK, I'm going to jury-rig that. I sliced through some lines that were blocking the door and went out to see if the hull was damaged. The carbon-fiber mast was dangling in the water; the boom, also carbon fiber, was snapped in half. There was nothing left for me to jury-rig. I sat outside on deck in my jeans and T-shirt for a few minutes thinking there was nothing else I could do. Waves were dumping over the boat. I was shaking from fear and cold.

Back inside, both of my Iridium phones were soaked and shorted out. I knew that activating my emergency beacon was going to trigger an all-out rescue effort back home. I was sitting there soaking, still kind of dizzy and nauseated from my fall, thinking about what would happen if I pushed that button. Finally, I did. It was like admitting defeat. Then I set off my little handheld EPIRB as well, so they'd know it wasn't an accident.

My most immediate concern was the dangling mast, which could have punched a hole in the side of the boat. But I knew that if I tried to cut it loose while dizzy, I'd end up in the water. I left it for the night.

I couldn't sleep. I was having nightmares. By morning the boom had started to wear a hole in the ballast tank. I found my saw and crawled out on deck. There wasn't a lot to hold on to, and the boat was rolling gunwale to gunwale. I tied myself to a broken stantion and started sawing. Every time I spied a big swell coming, I untied myself and got inside.

I sawed, and I prayed. Ten seconds after I started praying, a huge plane flew overhead. I ran down below and turned on the radio. The voice was really broken up. They were calling, “Wild Eyes … Wild Eyes.” I said, “This is Wild Eyes.” They told me a rescue ship was 24 hours away.

I finished cutting the mast loose. When the boom slid into the water, it smacked the VHF antenna. Twenty-four hours later, I turned the radio on, waiting for the ship to call. Three hours later: nothing. I was starting to worry, when another plane flew over. I could hear them calling, but they couldn't hear me. I started shooting off flares.

The rescue ship appeared out of nowhere. I had been outside maybe a minute before. I thought, Oh, my gosh, where did that come from? It was a 150-foot French fishing ship. They came alongside and lowered a dinghy to the water. I hopped into it and they brought me over. There was this long ladder I was supposed to climb, but just as I was about to step onto it, a big swell lifted the dinghy up to the rail of the boat, and the guys pulled me aboard.

One day I will sail around the world, solo, nonstop and unassisted. I don't need to do it straightaway. For now, I'll do high school and get a driver's license—all that normal stuff. I have to work hard to keep myself busy. I'm daydreaming when I'm supposed to be writing papers for school. I get bored, and my mind wanders off to the boat.

This article has been changed since publication. Originally it said that the mast and boom in Abby's boat were wooden. They were in fact both made of carbon fiber.

Fire in the Sky

WORST CASE: STRUCK

On July 21, just after noon, 17 climbers were caught in a lightning storm as they descended from Wyoming’s 13,770-foot Grand Teton. The ensuing epic required a record 83 rescuers. This is how one group of five unguided climbers, the Tyler party, was saved.

1. Summit, 9:15 A.M. The last of seven Exum Mountain Guides and their 15 clients top out. “There were big black clouds and lightning on the horizon,” says Exum co-owner Nat Patridge. By 10:30, all guided groups have descended.

2. 200 to 600 feet from the summit, 12:15 P.M. A series of strikes pummels the three unguided groups still on the mountain: the Tyler party, spread along the Owen Chimney; the Kline party, on the Exum Ridge route; and the Sparks party, at the Belly Roll, on the Owen-Spaulding route. Brandon Oldenkamp, a 21-year-old in the Sparks party, falls 2,500 feet to his death.

3. Owen Chimney,12:18 Steven Tyler, the leader of his group, resuscitates his son-in-law, Troy Smith, who hasn’t been breathing for 30 seconds. Meanwhile, Tyler’s younger son, Dan, is dangling unconscious in his harness 50 feet below. When he comes to, his legs don’t work, but he manages to rappel to the bottom of the chimney. Steven calls 911.

4. Lupine Meadows, 12:27 A page goes out to Grand Teton National Park rangers at Jenny Lake. They gear up for the rescue.

5. Lower Saddle, 11,650 feet, 2:02 The first rangers arrive at the Lower Saddle by helicopter. Ranger Jack McConnell and Exum guide Dan Corn begin their 100-minute ascent. “There were people all over that mountain,” says pilot Matthew Heart, who would fly rescue runs and recon flights for the next eight hours.

6. Bottom of the Owen Chimney, 3:40 McConnell and Corn reach Dan Tyler. He still has no use of his legs, his fellow climber Henry Appleton has no use of his right leg, and Troy Smith has regained consciousness. All are flown off the mountain in “screamer suits,” body harnesses that dangle by a rope beneath the chopper.

5:06 Another storm moves in. More lightning, snow. “The first bolt hit with this tremendous scream and roar,” says ranger Marty Vidak. Only Jack McConnell is zapped, when he touches a charged rock.

7:15 Steven Tyler is short-hauled to the Lower Saddle and flown to Lupine Meadow, where he joins his son Dan in an ambulance. “It’s not a terrible experience to ride on the end of a rope,” says Steven.

7:56 All 17 climbers are off the mountain. Seven are short-hauled out, while the rest are escorted to the Lower Saddle and flown to Lupine Meadow. Every climber bears the classic entry and exit wounds of a direct lightning strike. Five are admitted to St. John’s Medical Center in Jackson, and one is taken to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center. Climber Betsy Smith loses a finger in surgery.

Cutlass Supreme

When you go out looking for the Nigerian Taliban, bad things happen.

A HOT FRIDAY MORNING in August 2007 in the Nigerian trading town of Maiduguri. From the cramped backseat of a compact car, I squinted through the windshield, looking for a group of thugs who called themselves the Taliban. I’d come to Maiduguri, once a respected center of Islamic learning, to investigate the rise of a group of militants who terrorized locals for “protection” money and took their name from Afghanistan to try to shore up their power. I’d been here for three weeks with Irish photographer Seamus Murphy, but so far we’d struck out. All I saw through the windshield was hundreds of men teeming about, waiting for noon prayer to begin. I looked but couldn’t find a single woman.

Our translator, Mohamed, a soft-spoken English teacher, had brought us to the market to change U.S. dollars into Nigerian naira. It wasn’t a great idea to have two pink-skinned people in the market on a holy Friday, so we stayed in the car while Mohamed searched for the money changer. Seamus sat in the passenger seat, idly snapping photos. Having worked in Afghanistan for more than a decade, he was accustomed to throngs like the one surrounding our car, and so was I. Still, I felt claustrophobic as the midday sun rose.

I glanced out the window as Seamus took photos—click, click. What was he looking at? I saw nothing special.

Then, in the crowd, I noticed one man staring at our car. He strode up to the open passenger window. I glanced at our driver. He was half asleep, hunched over the wheel.

“Give me that film!” screamed the stranger, clad in his Friday whites. Seamus tried to explain that there was no film, but the man had never heard of digital cameras. He poked his head through the window. A crowd gathered behind him. Suddenly, six hands, then eight, reached into the car to snatch the camera; we held on against the tug of hands, gripping tightly as Seamus tried to reason with the men, murmuring quietly, as one might address a spooked animal.

That’s what the mob felt like—a beast turning more agitated with each second. People began to rock the car, and then, in an instant, every man was suddenly armed with the long machetes Nigerians call cutlasses. Through the window I saw a sea of knives.

We are dead, I thought. The mob rocked the car but couldn’t open the doors, because there were no exterior handles—a design flaw Seamus had been bitching about ten minutes earlier.

The crowd’s rage moved like water. The bloodlust periodically petered out, then rose again in a wave, cresting over the car roof. Each breath felt like it took an hour. Mohamed appeared in the crowd. Men grabbed him.

“Please use your fists, not the blades,” he pleaded before he disappeared beneath a hail of blows.

Our driver pushed his door open, climbed out, and ran away. But, perhaps in a twisted gesture of mercy, he left the keys in the ignition. Seamus grabbed them. The car swayed like a dinghy in a squall. Then, out of the crowd, a man in mirrored sunglasses appeared with a tiny, wizened elder.

“I’m a policeman!” Sunglasses screamed. The crowd continued to rock the car. Suddenly, another face appeared at the window.

“Move away from the car!” commanded a tall man in white. I could tell by his dress, by his small, white hat, that he had been on his way to the mosque.

Together, this religious teacher, the policeman, and the tiny old man—a community leader—pushed themselves against the windows, absorbing blows. It took all three to wrest our translator from his attackers. Then Seamus opened the door and all four men climbed into the car. The religious teacher took the wheel and nosed the car through the slowly dissolving mob.

We felt a bump in one of the front wheels as we drove off. When we reached a safe distance, we stopped to see what the problem was. One of our attackers had shoved a cutlass into the tire. The policeman told us we’d just met Nigeria’s Taliban.

Back in the Saddle

A brutal crash ended Jens Voigt's 2009 Tour de France. he wasn't looking for a repeat the next year.

AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, no cyclist likes to abandon the Tour de France. It leaves a terrible taste in your mouth. So, in 2009, when I was still lying in the hospital after my crash with a fractured cheekbone and concussion, I’m like, OK, this is not going to be the end of my Tour de France story. I want to finish with proper honor. Well, I think it was on the 16th stage again this year when my front tire blew up. When you’re doing 60 or 70 kilometers per hour, there’s not much you can do except think, Ooh, this is going to be bad. And then boomp, you’re down. So I’m lying there on the road, everything hurts, but nothing is broken. I have 20 patches of road rash. My arm is bleeding. Blood is running down my elbow to my fingertips and dripping to the ground. It’s like some bad horror movie. My bike’s front rim is broken. The derailleur has fallen off. The frame is shattered. Then I see everybody coming past. Five riders. Twenty. Thirty riders. Way back I see one guy all alone and I think, Fuck, he’s the last rider, and now I am. I’m just here bleeding. Then I start thinking, No, I’m not going to let this happen again. I’m going to make it. There’s nothing going to come between Paris and me. But at that moment there was no team car behind me, because they followed Andy Schleck, our captain. So I start saying to the doctor and a policemen nearby, “Hey, guys, I need a bike. Someone get me a bike!” Pretty soon a car pulls up with a spare from the juniors program. It was canary-bird yellow and the size of a little baby mountain goat. It had toe caps. As I’m getting on, the broom wagon stops next to me and the driver looks out like a damn vulture, saying, “Hey, you, want a ride?” I’m like, “No, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to make it.” After 15 or 20 kilometers, I get my normal spare, which my team director left with a policeman, and eventually I catch the last peloton group. A teammate looks at me and says, “Jens, what the hell happened to you?” I’m bleeding still. My jersey’s back is ripped off. But I’m so happy to be in the last group. I just could have kissed every single rider. I was like, Oh, my God, I love you all. It was such a relief knowing we’d make the stage finish. I’m going to be safe and make it to Paris!

Crash-Test Dummy

Brad Zeerip knows how risky it is to ski the backcountry alone. which is why he brought an air bag.

Avalanche

Zeerip in the slide's aftermath, “looking up at what I got flushed down”

ON MAY 3, 2010, I started skinning up Oscar Peak, near my home in Terrace, B.C. It’s a place that is rarely skied. I ski in the backcountry more than 120 days every year, 30 to 50 of those days by myself. It was spring. The conditions seemed perfect, since new snow had come on wet and heavy and then firmed up with some cold weather.

I dropped in and made three or four cuts. It felt stable, so I started skiing down. Ten turns in, I could see surface snow sloughing around me. I moved to my right, along a rock face, to get away from the slough. Then the snow started melting all around me like wax.

I tried to ski down and to the left, but I didn’t have the speed. The slide hit me at full force, pulling my skis out from under me. I pulled the cord on my Snowpulse, an avalanche pack with an integrated rescue air bag that I’ve skied with every day for the past two winters.

The bag inflated around my head like a giant pillow. It was a reassuring feeling. Then the slide took hold of me. I lost my view of the sky as snow boiled up over me. The slide built into a deafening, pulsing roar. I felt my left ski hit something and grab. I thought I was going to be split like a wishbone. But then my ski ripped apart and I pulled my feet together.

The torque of my ski catching flipped me around. I was still on my back, but now riding the slide at full speed upside down, when I hit something and started cartwheeling. I’m still convinced that if the air bag hadn’t been inflated around my head, it would have split my skull like a pumpkin. I was still hauling ass, but the bag had pulled me up to the surface. I must have slid a good 1,500 feet down a steep 45-degree-plus chute.

The slide started to slow down and set up. I knew this was the most dangerous part—when you can get buried. Another tongue of the slide came again all of sudden—like waves hitting a beach. It hit me hard, and I started swimming and kicking with the other ski to try to stay above it. I went back under, but the air bag pulled me back up. Then a third wave hit.

When it finally settled, I was buried on my side with my head and left shoulder above the snow. My right leg was buried and attached to a broken ski. My left leg and right ankle were definitely injured, but nothing seemed to be broken. I got my shovel out of my pack and dug myself out within a few minutes.

Getting back to my car was more difficult. I spent over six hours crawling, sliding on my one broken ski, using my poles as crutches, and stumbling out of what should have been a one-hour hike. I had a SPOT Personal Tracker and could have hit it for help, but I felt a strong sense of personal responsibility.

I’m embarrassed. I’m not proud that I was caught in a slide. But the air bag saved my life. I certainly will never ski without it.

In July, I went back and found my hat. Another big, wet slide had swept it down to the valley floor, and it had melted out in the snow.

SCENARIO NATURAL DISASTER STRIKES WHILE ABROAD
YOUR WAY OUT: Smart preparation, like packing a SPOT satellite messenger device () or signing up with Global Rescue (), will save you in most situations, especially in wilderness areas. Didn’t bother? Take down the phone number for the nearest American embassy (); they’ll get local authorities on your side or direct military personnel to pluck you from the rubble. Otherwise, head to the usual expat hangouts, like a famous hotel—even if they’re in shambles. Intact or not, those areas often see the first response from American authorities.

Huevos Fritos

Sometimes a man is his own worst enemy.

Jeans

“I felt like I had just ridden a rhino bare-assed for 30 miles.”

THIS IS A SMALL STORY, inhumanly cruel, and it ends with a terrible howl. It takes place in a dark forest on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the Russian Far East, an inhospitable place known for exploding volcanoes, mosquitoes that swarm like hornets, and, most fearsome, bears. The story itself contains a cosmonaut, more grizzlies than almost anywhere on earth, a criminally amused wife, and the unimaginable horror that befell its narrator, a pitiable soul named Poor Me.

So. Let’s get it over with.

I’d come to Kamchatka to connect with the Russian mafia, who had, in their ever-inspiring entrepreneurial spirit, begun stealing entire rivers, netting wild salmon, and shipping illegal caviar back to Moscow. My wife had come along; she was obsessed with catching one of Kamchatka’s legendary monster trout, something in the 20-plus-pound range. Which she would do, a bona fide Grade Two worst-case scenario: too much bragging.

We had an idle day before our expedition launched into the distant wild, so we piled into our fixer’s pickup and drove an hour north of Petropavlosk, the capital, to a national park at the base of a Mount Fuji–like volcano. The road ended at a cluster of dachas next to a frothing river. The park headquarters, clearly marked on our map, did not exist, and the park itself, on the far side of the river, was what it had always been—a vast, dense spruce-and-birch forest, accessed by a shabby cable-and-plank footbridge.

“Let’s cross over and go for a hike,” I suggested, and my wife said sure and our fixer, Rinat, said absolutely not. “We will absolutely be eaten by bears,” Rinat declared, and settled into the truck to await the eventual recovery of our chewed-upon corpses.

Because this story also contains a six-ounce can of pepper spray stuffed into the left front pocket of my jeans, I felt it was not irrational to be respectfully nonchalant about the bears.

My wife and I clambered across the rickety bridge and followed a primitive road leading deep into the sun-dappled forest. We hiked ahead, alone in the woods, enjoying the solitude, until suddenly a rusty blue Soviet-era van pulled alongside us. The driver, a lean, blond-haired man, wagged his head at us, frowning, and said something in Russian. His wife and teenage son nodded gravely.

“We don’t speak Russian,” I said, and the man switched to En­glish. “Go back,” he said. “Are you crazy? The bears will absolutely eat you. You cannot walk here without big gun, eh?”

“It’s OK,” I said. “I have pepper spray.”

“You have pepper spray?” he snorted. “What for? To make bear cry before he absolutely eat you? Turn back now.”

Ten minutes later we came upon them again, parked in a glade, each carrying a carbine and a bucket. Again, a lecture from the driver. Then he sighed and said, OK, as long as you are here, come with us. They were headed up to a meadow to pick berries.

“From this place,” the driver said, “you have excellent nice good view of volcano.” I asked him where he’d learned English, and he revealed that he was a cosmonaut on vacation with his family.

We followed them through the woods to a raging river spanned by a fallen tree, its wet trunk just wide enough to walk across, slowly, carefully, single file. My wife looked at the whitewater rapids below the log and said she wasn’t doing it. The cosmonaut said, “Come on, just up the top of bank you can see volcano.” I told my wife I’d be right back. But the opposite bank led to a treeless plateau overgrown with brush so high it was impossible to see anything at all. Just ten more minutes, said the cosmonaut, but I knew I couldn’t abandon my defenseless wife, so I headed back down the steep bank.

As soon as I took a couple of steps out onto the log, I lost my balance and instinctively crouched to steady myself. I have a permanent visual image of what happened next—my wife waiting on the bank, her quizzical expression turning to wide-eyed, jaw-dropping astonishment as she watched me, poised above the river, rear up from my crouch in a roar, digging frantically into my pocket, pulling out an object that resembled a smoke grenade, and hurling it into the rapids.

Bending over to regain my balance, I had triggered the can of pepper spray, its aerosol blast locked into an open position aimed directly at my crotch. Imagine a tiny jet engine in your boxer shorts. Imagine that engine throttled up to its white-hot afterburn. How to minister to such a grievous, potentially life-altering injury, how to relieve the suffering? Only the kindest, most selfless nurse would have a clue.

When I finally stopped howling, my wife had trouble keeping a straight face, eyeing my wincing, bowlegged gait back through the forest. Perhaps something about watching a guy self-immolate his nuts brings out the mirth in women. I felt like I had just ridden a rhino bare-assed for 30 miles. My wife kept reminding me that the afterscent of pepper spray, once its stinging properties have faded, is a bear attractant, smelling much like an order from Taco Bell.

That would be one overcooked burrito with a side of huevos fritos.

Thumb Sucker

In hitchhiking, there's a fine line between being open-minded and foolish.

Hitchhiking

There was no key in the ignition, just a rat's nest of wires. This was someone else's lowrider.

THERE ARE probably dozens of ways a hitchhiker could wind up riding in a stolen car, but I only know the stupid one. I’d been standing on the highway leading out of AbiquiĂș, a small town in northern New Mexico, for maybe 20 minutes. It was barely enough time to put Sharpie to cardboard—SANTA FE, ALBUQUERQUE, TEXAS—and certainly not enough to forget the first law of recreational thumbing: Don’t be a dumbass. That rule should hold until you’ve waited for hours, when heat and boredom and the fear of being stranded start affecting judgment. I’m afraid that wasn’t the case.

It was a morning in July 1996, and traffic was heavy. Most of the vehicles were small vans or sedans that slowed so kids inside could wave. Then a lowrider rolled into view, floating over the asphalt until the engine suddenly gunned and it swerved to hit me. I jumped into some weeds as it slid to a stop, then backed up, spraying gravel. The occupants were kids in bandannas and wife beaters, the driver in his twenties, the passenger at most 15, both laughing. When the younger guy rolled his window down, the elder said, “Get in.”

This idea struck me as imprudent. “Where are y’all headed?”

“Albuquerque.”

“Dang, fellas, I’m not going to Albuquerque,” I said.

The driver pointed at the cardboard still held to my chest. “Your sign says ‘Albuquerque.'”

I looked at their car, a long, two-door Monte Carlo from the seventies, painted glass-glitter royal blue like a drum kit, with a perfectly matched crushed-velvet interior. The next town, 20 miles away, was Española, the renowned Lowrider Capital of the World. This was an invite to the kind of cultural exchange that prompted me to hitch in the first place. I got in.

The ride got weird immediately. As I wedged myself behind the passenger—the front seat was tilted back so far the car was effectively a two-seater—he adjusted his mirror so it pointed straight at me. The driver did the same with the rearview. Once we were moving, they kept their eyes on me and talked in Spanish, which I didn’t understand. Then the driver addressed me. “You fucked up, man. We’re going to Kansas. And you’re going with us.” I opted not to believe him, perhaps as some self-preservation reflex. Or maybe it was because when he gave me a menacing look and turned up the stereo full-blast, “Vacation,” by the Go-Go’s, came on. He hit the eject button, then cussed and beat the dashboard. The cassette was stuck in the tape deck.

Which was when I realized that the tape wasn’t his, and neither was the car. There was no key in the ignition, just a rat’s nest of wires hanging from the steering column. This was someone else’s lowrider.

For the next 15 miles I reminded myself that the other reason to hitchhike was to get home with a story to tell. This would qualify. The guys went quiet as the tape played on, apparently a mix of eighties hits. “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me” played as we passed roadside stands selling statuettes of Catholic saints.

When we hit Española I started to worry. The driver took a left and headed north, clearly not the way to Albuquerque. I decided that if we actually were going to Kansas, there’d be plenty of gas stops on the way and chances to bolt. But he turned into a neighborhood and stopped. I looked out the window at a row of adobes and started thinking about The Silence of the Lambs. I pictured two scenarios. In one I broke free as they led me to a house; in the other I got eaten.

We sat without talking for a long five minutes, the driver’s eyes never leaving the mirror. But he seemed to be looking past me. Finally he said, “A cop has been following us the past ten miles. I think he’s gone.” He turned the car around and rolled into town.

He stopped again, at a little rim shop. “I need to talk to a man who sold me some wheels,” he said. “They don’t fit. You can wait in the car or you can move on.”

I tried to look like I was mulling it over. That seemed gracious. “You know, you guys have been great. But I think I’ll try the highway.”

So There You Were…

We put out the call for your own worst-case scenarios—scary, dangerous, or just plain dumb. The winner was the only one that made us blush.

On a spring-break trip in the Florida Keys, eight of us decided to camp out on a barrier island. It was supposed to be a remote key, roughly two miles out. But after three hours of paddling, we realized the “island” was only a mangrove forest, and we had to paddle back. Daylight was fading fast. An hour into the return trip, cold and exhausted, we called search-and-rescue. But since there wasn’t a medical emergency, we were advised to contact a towing service. We couldn’t afford it, so we kept paddling. Soon a pontoon boat came sidling up. The captain yelled, “Need a lift?” It wasn’t until we were on board that we noticed the boat was labeled Couples Massage Trips. While explaining to the captain how we’d gotten stuck, we began hearing passengers down below—passengers in the throes of passion and not modest in the least. After 15 minutes, an attractive woman came up and told the captain he was needed below. She took the wheel, and he headed down. Within minutes, another “couples massage” had begun. When we reached land, we quietly drove to the nearest pizza place and ate in silence. It was the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. And, yes, it was the most beautiful silence I have ever heard.

The post Worst Case Studies appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

ON A SUN-BROILED morning in central Mozambique, we headed 19 miles into the bush, our destination a shrinking stretch of soupy pool, one of the last remaining catchments in the withered river, where the hippos had hunkered down during the wasting days of a dry season that refused to end. Afterwards we would be choppering to other sites—remote wonders, unique to the area—although my attention had drifted when the itinerary was explained. The limestone gorge, perhaps, where Africa’s Great Rift Valley arrived at its southern terminus? The lacy cascade of waterfalls off the westward escarpment? The cathedral-size grottoes housing countless hordes of whispering bats? Not that it mattered—bad luck, you could say, since we would never get farther than the hippos.

Greg Carr

Greg Carr in his hometown of Idaho Falls

Mozambique

Because of the heat, and I guess for the breezy fun of it, Segran, the young pilot up from South Africa, unhinged the front doors off the R44, a Robinson-manufactured helicopter aviators call a “little bird,” and we strapped in, the four of us, and ascended skyward from the small grass airstrip at Chitengo, the headquarters of Gorongosa National Park, considered among Africa’s premier game preserves until it was destroyed by decades of unimaginably brutal war and savage lawlessness, its infrastructure blasted to rubble, its bountiful population of animals slaughtered, eaten, reduced to gnawed bones and memory.

In the copilot seat, with the panoramic sweep of the continent expanding out my open door—loaves of mountains rising like a time-lapse video of Creation Day, the veldt ironed out into a haze of plains spread east toward the Indian Ocean—I adjusted the mike on my headset and joined the conversational squawk behind me: the park’s American co-director, Greg Carr, and his Portuguese director of communications, Vasco Galante, stuffed into the rear seats, already sweaty between doors that could not be removed, although they were dressed much more sensibly than me for the tropics, or what would have been sensible if the word malarial were not so lethally affixed to Mozambique’s ecology.

Carr and Galante, it was becoming clear, were fearless, a matching set of muzungos—white guys—with a true affinity for the bush. Like Carr, the Boston philanthropist who’s committed his time and considerable energy and $40 million of his foundation’s money to the restoration of Gorongosa, Galante too was a successful business entrepreneur, a former pro basketball player who’d slammed the brakes on the life he was living, thrown away his map of old assumptions, made a U-turn, and gone to Africa.

Many of their sentences began, “During the rainy season,” and I would be directed toward something that was not as it should be this deep into December—the evaporated Lake Urema, shrunk from 77 square miles to four; a wilting Gorongosa massif and its deplenished watershed; the cracked and burning floodplains of the savanna. What now expressed itself as terra firma would require boating skills during the approaching summer, when the park’s bottomlands swelled with watery overabundance. Awed and exhilarated, I leaned out into the rush of air, watching the scatter of antelope below.

At Carr’s instruction, Segran dipped the helicopter down into the high-banked channel of the Urema River and we roared along its downstream course at treetop level, my companions remarking upon the bed’s sorry condition—black patches of dampness embroidered with a fringe of hoofprints, scum puddles churned by expiring catfish, and weed-clogged runs where the absent flow had encouraged a vibrant bloom of flora, the greenest thing in sight.

A year earlier, when 60 Minutes came to Mozambique to produce a feature on the 49-year-old Carr and his turnaround of Gorongosa—only three years into its 20-plus-year course and already the hottest conservation story in Africa—they had filmed the river from the air as scores of Nile crocodiles flipped one after another off the banks into its robust current. Maybe there were some crocs down there now, nestled in the mucky overgrowth, but we couldn’t see them. Reedbuck and the occasional impala bolted across the golden sand into the cover of the jungle, but it was Africa’s flamboyant birds that owned the desiccated river. Egyptian geese, grotesque marabou storks showcasing the ass-bald head and plucked neck of carrion eaters, graceful herons and lanky crowned cranes, majestic fish eagles. Then we were hovering over the upstream edge of the pool, the squiggle of crocodiles visible in the khaki-colored water, and Carr pointed to a grassy bar about a thousand feet back where he wanted to put down.

ON THE GROUND, Segran announced that he would stay with the aircraft and keep the engine running, and we climbed out with the rotors thumping over our heads and began walking through the high grass at the base of a steep bank. This was my first time in Africa, but even before Galante’s warning I realized we were in elephant country, their rampant footprints postholed shin deep in the hardening cake of fertile soil, an ankle-twisting hazard. I’d also registered Galante’s sudden intensity of manner, the heightened alertness, his head rotating as he scrutinized our surroundings. “OK,” he said, trying to sound lighthearted, “this is a place where elephants come. If you see an elephant coming from the north, you go south. Turn and go.”

Although more people are killed by hippos than any other wild animal in Africa, the elephants—the remaining elephants—of Gorongosa are unforgiving. For generations now they have been engaged in a kill-or-be-killed war with humans, the once prolific herd decimated by rebel soldiers harvesting ivory to finance their insurgency or just gunning down the giants for the wicked hell of it. By the end of Mozambique’s civil war, in 1992, only 108 of an elephant population 20 times larger were left alive, and though their numbers had since grown to 300, they were “skittish and aggressive,” according to cinematographer Bob Poole, who’d been filming in the park on and off for a year for National Geographic Television. If you were on foot, as we were, walking into an elephant’s sight or range of smell could be justifiably categorized as suicidal.

But as we approached the pool, crocodiles underfoot in the soggy weeds or a land-foraging hippo spooked by the sudden appearance of humans between it and the water were more immediate concerns. Carr and Galante traversed the bankside, climbing higher for a better vantage and, I suspected, to be better positioned in case of a charge.

In the wild, the pittance of what’s left of it, the ancient primal verities still apply. (Extreme) caution and (mild) anxiety translate as ingrained virtues, rational responses to the perilous unknown, yet once Carr and Galante trained their binoculars on the water, I could feel the tension in the air undergo a euphoric collapse. Hippos! Exactly where they should be, according to their birthright, at peace in their own habitat after 3,000 of their kin were wiped out during the seemingly endless war.

As my companions dialed the aquatic spectacle into focus, I began to share the joy, unpuzzling the strange visual logic, a rippling logjam of glistening tubs of chocolate flesh, googly-eyed and agitated, clustering down below in the muddy water, choreographed by paranoid shifts and rearrangements that never really changed the tight composition of the jam until a bull slide-paddled forward to calculate the threat of our presence. Saucer-size nostrils flared and exhaled spray, a wet snort like the release of hydraulic brakes in the fragrant stillness, now absent the distant background thrum of rotor blades.

The pilot, for reasons known only to him, had shut down the engine. Occupied by the marvel of the half-submerged pod, we simply noticed an improvement in the depth of the silence around us and made no mention of it. There we stood, spellbound and revering, allowed by the moment to believe in an Edenic world so harmoniously, benevolently perfect one forgets to remember that the most readily available dish on the menu might very well be you.

The glory of the hippopotamus seems shaped by hallucinogenic juxtapositions—the utility of its rounded amphibious design packaged in the exaggerated ugliness seen elsewhere only in cartoons; its blob-like massiveness adorned with undersize squirrel ears and stubby legs akin to a wiener dog’s; bullfrog eyes that are nevertheless beady; pinkish, peg-toothed jaws like a steam shovel’s attached to the compressed porcine features of its face. We were enthralled, flies on the wall of hippo heaven. Then we withdrew as gently as shadows, back to the helicopter, which maybe had a problem. But, dreamy and high with hippo love, we didn’t much care.

We climbed into the chopper, Segran muttered something about weak batteries, we climbed out. “I don’t think I’d let my mom ride in this helicopter,” said Carr. He and I walked upriver and sat cross-legged across from baboons collecting on the far bank, remarking on what we could figure out about the tribe’s hierarchy and habits, occasionally extrapolating our insights into opinions about the primates half a world away on Wall Street, the two of us content and carefree.

Then Galante walked down the bank to tell us what we already suspected: The helicopter, with a dead starter, wasn’t going to get us out of here.

HAD I COME TO GORONGOSA in the sixties, I would have experienced “the jewel of southern Africa,” a Rhode Island–size safari expanse of 54 distinct ecosystems—from the park’s predominant savanna to miombo forests, thickets, montane woodlands, and dry jungle—with Lake Urema expanding and contracting at its center and 6,112-foot Mount Gorongosa guarding its northwestern flank, high enough to create its own weather system. Protected as a private hunting reserve since 1920 and designated a national park in 1960, Gorongosa was romantically known to hunters, photographers, and wildlife tourists as the place where Noah must have unloaded the ark. What other conclusion was there? The 1,540-square-mile park once hosted more predators than South Africa’s 7,523-square-mile Kruger National Park, denser herds of elephants and buffalo than the Serengeti, and thousands upon thousands of plains animals.

All of that, gone. In the three decades of war that began with Mozambique’s struggle for independence from Portugal in the sixties, the park was transformed from Eden to wasteland. The lions and hippos were extinguished; the elephants reduced from 2,200 to 108; 3,000 zebras nearly gone; 2,000 impala gone; rhinos, gone; buffalo, gone; a herd of 5,500 wildebeest reduced to zero; 129 waterbuck left from a herd of 3,500; the ubiquitous warthogs nowhere in sight. Cheetahs, wild dogs, hyenas, and jackals, apparently exterminated. Leopards, no one could say.

But to arrive in December 2008 was to see a place being reborn. Since 2005, when the nonprofit Carr Foundation first started working in Gorongosa, Carr and his biologists and consultants had rebuilt the park’s headquarters at Chitengo, constructing the open-air restaurant in soaring rondavel style and putting up new air-conditioned cabanas with hot showers. They’d trained local guides to take tourists on photo safaris and up Mount Gorongosa, and begun offering incentives to help the park’s 15,000 villagers, along with some 250,000 more living in the surrounding buffer zone, move from a livelihood of clear-cutting and poaching to one of planting trees and protecting wildlife. In 2006, park workers fenced off a 23-square-mile sanctuary and began reintroducing animals, brought in from other reserves around southern Africa. By the end of 2007, the numbers were modest but rising: 4,930 waterbuck, 3,830 warthogs, 580 impala, 200 blue wildebeest, 160 hippos, 300 elephants, 35 lions, and 1,300 of the world’s largest crocs. Similar efforts are happening elsewhere. “Public-private” and “multinational cooperation” are the buzzwords in conservation management today, and Gorongosa’s sister parks—Limpopo, Banhine, and Zinave—are getting outside help. But rarely has a country basically handed the job to a private citizen. In June 2008, Mozambique and Carr made their four-year relationship official, signing a $40 million agreement for the Carr Foundation to restore the park—and then give it back, in 20 years.

How that marriage came about is one of the unlikeliest stories in Africa, and it begins with the two men who will administrate the park’s future together: Greg Carr and Lieutenant Colonel Bernardo Beca Jofrisse. It seems implausible that some lives might ever intersect, separated by every divide destiny can thrust between two people, yet should their story lines somehow twist together, they form a single braid of near mystical affirmation of unlimited possibility. Say, for example, an American tycoon and an African warrior. One a former Marxist-Leninist freedom fighter, the other a capitalist swashbuckler who made his fortune in information technology.

A genuine introduction to Jofrisse’s country begins with the unsettling sight of an AK-47 assault rifle emblazoned on its flag. And the story of modern Mozambique—its tyrannies and bloody struggles, its transformation from the planet’s biggest nightmare into one of the very few nations in sub-Saharan Africa where hope and stability are not delusions—can be found in the proud generation of woefully scarred and stoically victorious people like Jofrisse, a gentle, statuesque man whose frozen stare into the whirlwind of the past is regularly broken by embracing smiles.

In 1968, at 19, Jofrisse began his long walk north, across the length of Mozambique to the border with Tanzania, to join the luta rmada—the armed struggle for independence from Portugal, which had inflicted a 500-year-long battering of the mainland’s indigenous populations since 1498, the year Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and landed at Ilha de Moçambique. The white man’s ravenous enterprise had many appetites—in the 17th century, gold; in the 18th, ivory; in the 19th, slaves—and in the 1880s, during the European powers’ Scramble for Africa, Portugal established formal control over four colonies—Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde—each of which would erupt in rebellion 70 years later.

The battle here was waged by the Mozambican Liberation Front—Frelimo—from its headquarters in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. When Jofrisse enlisted in the revolutionary army, he could scarcely have imagined that more than 20 years later he would be fighting on, his country still a raging war zone, his enemies his own misguided people.

In Tanzania, the literate Jofrisse excelled as a student of military basics, which earned him a trip to the Soviet Union for more advanced training and an indoctrination into the tenets of Communism. Returning to Africa, he was deployed back into the fray and, in 1972, ordered to cross the Zambezi River; his unit battled their way south into the province of Sofala, the home of Gorongosa National Park, which was forced to close in 1973, engulfed in combat and the scorched-earth campaign of the colonial military.

By 1974, Portugal’s trifecta of wars in Africa had proven to be a losing ticket, and a new government in Lisbon quickly agreed to hand over Mozambique to Frelimo. The independent Republic of Mozambique was proclaimed the following year. The Portuguese—250,000 of them—pulled out in an orgy of sabotage and vandalism, leaving behind an infant nation with too little infrastructure and too many guns.

Out of this maelstrom of “peace,” another monster was born: the Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo), a disorganized but homicidal insurgency assembled by its sponsors—first white-ruled Rhodesia and then apartheid South Africa—to ensure that black majority rule in Africa was synonymous with disaster. Renamo’s objective was to sow havoc, wreck everything, and paralyze the country, and the civil war that ignited in 1976 between Renamo and Frelimo would bathe Mozambique in blood for the next 16 years. Gorongosa itself became a shooting gallery, a shifting headquarters for both armies, the area swarmed by destitute refugees, the footpaths rigged with land mines, the animals serving as a type of ATM machine to fund and supply the combatants.

In 1992, Frelimo disavowed its Marxist ideology and signed a peace agreement with Renamo, forming the current multiparty democratic government. Mozambique was alive again, though not by any measure discharged from the intensive-care ward of the underdeveloped world. But for the first time in memory the country seemed to be sitting up and smiling. Its near-death experience had imbued Mozambicans with a laid-back joie de vivre balanced by a sustaining sense of civility, the correct antidote to fratricidal madness.

Like the soldiers on both sides, Jofrisse had lost scores of friends in a conflict that had left more than a million Mozambicans dead and millions more wounded or maimed. He retired from the army, pursued an engineering degree, and dedicated himself to the reconstruction of what had been lost. The war had left him with an unrequited love—a passion for nature and the forests of central Mozambique, the beauty of the thousand-year-old baobabs, the surreal haunted groves of yellow fever trees in the provinces where he’d fought as a young warrior. Wildlife conservation was back—Gorongosa itself had reopened for good in 1995, with a new staff of 50 former soldiers and aid from the African Development Bank, the European Union, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature—and in 2007 Jofrisse’s friends in the Frelimo government sent him to study natural-resource protection at the Southern African Wildlife College, across the South African border.

A year later, Beca Jofrisse would become the ministry of tourism’s representative and oversee Gorongosa’s radical transformation, he and Greg Carr now partners in a pas de deux between a nation and an outsider, quite unlike any heretofore performed in the continent’s jungles.

WE WERE IN NO-MAN’S-LAND, the great bloodthirsty Darwinian free-for-all, probably 20 klicks beyond the Chitengo compound’s cell-phone range. The VHF radio on the little helicopter was of no use, and we had to assume that our chances of being rescued before tomorrow were zero.

There was a boyish brightness in Carr’s eyes when he suggested we go for the full unadulterated experience, seize the rare opportunity to traipse (illicitly) in the park, cross the river and hump all day through the forge-hot primordial jungle into the happy zone of cell-phone reception, and text-message the cavalry.

“So what do you guys think?” Carr asked as we stood on the wrong bank of the croc-infested river. “Wanna walk?” Galante and I looked at one another and shrugged. We were not bound to see much indecisiveness from Carr, a man whose permanent optimism is exceeded only by his irrepressible, well-aimed, and sometimes kooky enthusiasm. Anything could happen tramping around in the jungle, but we faced one certainty: It was not yet noon and we had to be safely back to civilization by sundown, the predatorial commencement of people-eating time.

When I’d arrived at Gorongosa the night before, Carr had told me, “I was hoping to show you a lion tonight”—the first thing he ever said to me, yet I had arrived too late to enter the locked preserve. The lion Carr had in mind, however, had roared throughout the evening, and this morning we’d driven out looking for it but found only vultures convened at the skeleton of its kill. Less than 24 hours later, Carr’s desire to hook me up with a lion was quickly losing all of its appeal.

I asked Carr and Galante if either one of them had the foresight to bring along a sidearm—you know, just in case. Carr said no, and Galante said, “Yes, this is my pistol,” showing me the miniature penknife he carried in his pocket. I was the only one with any gear, a shoulder bag crammed with nothing useful except our water bottles, and to lighten the load I removed a book, William Finnegan’s A Complicated War, a chronicle of Mozambique’s years of civil strife, and tried to give it to Segran, who had chosen to remain behind, but the pilot did not want it. “What else have you got to do?” I said, frowning. The book was staying.

For several miles, we hiked upstream along a game trail flattened through the grass, the riverbed still glazed with stagnant water beneath a lush carpet of weeds—an ideal habitat for lurking crocodiles, as advertised by the warthog carcass we hurried past, its hind­quarters shorn off as it had tried to flee. Farther on, the channel’s vegetation began to get mangy, exposing islands of muddy skin, their crusty appearance more to our liking as we walked ahead, the bed drying out until Carr had convinced himself conditions were favorable for a clean and effortless crossing. “Let’s try it,” he said, and I watched in horror as he and Galante took six steps out into what I assumed was quicksand, their legs disappearing in a steady downward suck.

I responded in the manner most typical of 21st-century Americans, grabbing my camera to record the flailing of their last astonished moments.

CARR’S PREDICAMENT WAS in some ways reminiscent of the scene that had first lured him to Mozambique.

High in a tree in Africa a desperate woman clutches a baby, her feet submerged in floodwaters. For Carr, like most people watching CNN’s footage of the devastation caused when Cyclone Eline slammed into Mozambique in 2000, this wretched image blipped the African nation onto the screen of their awareness, however momentarily. Even then, like Carr, many of those viewers would be hard-pressed to articulate a single fact about the country beyond a general announcement of its condition: hell on earth.

Two years later, in New York City, a friend introduced Carr to Mozambique’s ambassador to the United Nations, a congenial diplomat who asked, “Why don’t you think about helping us out?” It was a question Carr had come to expect. What else would you ask a philanthropist sitting atop a stack of money? In this case it was $200 million, an amount that for Carr served as the answer to the question “How much wealth is finally enough?”

By the mid-eighties, at age 27, Carr had already morphed into an ĂŒber-capitalist. A history major at Utah State, he’d left his hometown, Idaho Falls, exchanging the mountains of the West for the manicured quads of Cambridge and enrolling in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he began an intensive study of the breakup of AT&T’s monopoly on telecommunications, smelling opportunity in its divestitures.

Carr convinced a friend, Scott Jones, a 25-year-old MIT scientist, to go into business with him, maxing out their credit cards for startup funds. In 1986, their new company, Boston Technology, started selling voice-mail services to the emerging Baby Bells. Four years later, Boston Tech was the nation’s top voice-mail provider, and by the mid-nineties Carr was chair of both that company and Prodigy, an Internet-service pioneer. In 1998, Carr—by then a very rich man with, he says, “a pretty bad case of ADD”—walked away from it all to create the Carr Foundation to focus on three philanthropic areas: human rights, the arts, and conservation.

Visionaries resist typecasting, but with a pince-nez and Rough Rider garb, Carr could pass, in stoutness of physique as well as spirit, for a young Teddy Roosevelt. To explain how he thinks or to illuminate his moral universe, he quotes Buddhist philosophers, Nelson Mandela, and David Foster Wallace, cites the authors he considers seminal to his swooning love of nature—Darwin, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. Were Carr a more conventional businessman, when he took a powder from his fortune making at the age of 38, the temptation to describe his action as a midlife crisis would have been irresistible, yet for him it was a long-awaited chance to shift gears.

Behind the change was a lifelong conviction that the span of a career should contain a yin-yang of profit and nonprofit, an exuberance for making money married to a passion for giving it away. Passively giving back, just checking the do-gooder box, wasn’t the point. The point was unleashing happiness, animating your value system with injections of old-fashioned fun, which is precisely what he thinks rich guys without a sense of largesse are missing out on. Darting an elephant to replace the batteries in its radio collar ranks high on Carr’s list of neat things to do after breakfast.

On a deeper level, though, he saw capitalism without a conscience as a socioeconomic steroid, proving itself no more useful to humanity and its huddled masses than other abused ideologies. Rise alone, fall together. The selfish detachment of cowboy capitalism from the welfare of a community, he believed, created mayhem, a danger not only to itself but to the planet, plundering the resources of an ecology with the same rapacity as soldiers pillaging a national park.

Ideally, making a boatload of money allowed you to cut to the front of the line as an agent of meaningful change, and by 2002 Carr was inundated with projects: turning the former headquarters of the Aryan Nations, in Hayden Lake, Idaho, into a peace park; donating $18 million to establish Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy; starting a radio station in Afghanistan. He was conducting a marching band of altruism, on fire with intellectual stimulation yet yearning for something with “a little vision to it, some mystery, some romance, some difficult problems to solve,” something to satisfy his lust for immersion.

Intrigued by the Mozambican ambassador’s invitation, Carr began to research conservation projects in the country, visiting for the first time in 2002. Two years later, he climbed aboard a helicopter with government officials to tour six potential sites. The second was Gorongosa, the park in shambles, long forgotten as a destination, a lost cause. Nothing there anymore worth bothering with, Carr heard often, a sentiment that collided with his intolerance for cynicism. But when he first set foot in the park, “it was—boom—let’s go!” Returning home to pace around the house and think about it would have been antithetical to his tally-ho style.

What Carr saw at Gorongosa, with a historian’s perspective, was Yellowstone, which he’d grown up near, in eastern Idaho. “When Yellowstone was made a national park, in 1872,” says Carr, “the animals had been extirpated. It wasn’t this pristine thing and the government said, ‘Oh, we better protect it.’ No, no, no. It had been hunted out. The bison, the elk, the bears were gone or mostly gone. The point of Yellowstone park was to recover it, and a hundred years later it’s back. I look at Gorongosa that way. This was the first national park in the Portuguese-speaking world. Both parks are the flagships of their respective nations. Both of them have big charismatic fauna, including carnivores. Both are dangerous places.”

The first contract he signed with Mozambique, a 2004 memorandum of understanding, essentially stated, says Carr, “Look, this is one day at a time, toss me out whenever you want, and let’s just get to know each other.” He wasn’t buying Gorongosa or leasing it or taking it over as a concession but, instead, agreeing to manage the park on a provisional basis. It was by any measure an unusual arrangement—an auspicious foreigner assuming control of an iconic sovereign asset—and Carr hoped it would provide a template for saving stressed-out national parks throughout the developing world.

Gorongosa’s business manager, Joao Viseu, calls Carr’s approach “the new philanthropy—not just giving but doing,” a paradigm splitting the difference between two more-recognizable models. One is the Paul Farmers or Greg Mortensons of the world, who start with nothing but a calling (providing health care to Haitians, educating Muslim girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan) and gradually accumulate resources because people believe in them. The other, says Viseu, is “the rich guy who has his billion dollars and then says, ‘There you go.’ “

At age 40, Carr rode the elevator to the ground floor, the place where everything looked and felt different—where he looked and felt different. “I didn’t sit in Washington, D.C., and mail checks,” he says. “I came here and said, ‘I’m going to be here for 20 years, and I’m going to wear these silly cutoff shorts.’ To make things work in rural Africa, you’ve got to be hands-on, and you run a real risk of making things worse if you intervene from a distance.”

ONE NIGHT AT DINNER—grilled prawns, gin-and-tonics—I’d listened as Carr and Jofrisse, Gorongosa’s two lordly silverbacks, got to know each other better. In practice, the work will mostly be Carr’s: Jofrisse will remain 750 miles away in the capital, Maputo, work with Carr to perform quarterly reviews of park operations, and basically serve as the government’s representative. But partners they would be, and currently they were discussing an issue of vital importance: the forthcoming annual soccer game between management and staff. Carr suggested that, as co-administrators, he and Jofrisse should be the goalkeepers. Or, given their age, together they’d make one goalkeeper.

“Maybe,” said Jofrisse. “I’m not good.”

“Or maybe we should be somewhere else,” said Carr, who’d hardly ever played soccer, and the two of them leaned into each other like brothers, laughing.

“But we can,” insisted Jofrisse.

“Sim, podemos,” Carr agreed. Yes, we can. The game, with Carr and Jofrisse on the field against the youthful staff, would end in a crowd-cheering tie.

From where we sat in Chitengo’s new restaurant, Chikalango, gazing out into the beast-filled wilds just a minute’s walk away, I found it difficult to imagine the devastation Carr had encountered three and a half years earlier. When he first drove in with his multidisciplinary team (scientists, engineers, economic advisers, tourism developers), there was barely running water, and only a small generator for electricity. The few walls left standing in the rubble of what had been the park’s post office, banquet hall, shop, and first-aid clinic were riddled with bullet holes; bomb casings were lying around. Carr hired a labor force from local communities, former Frelimo soldiers and Renamo rebels who required occasional lectures on the rewards of playing nice. Slowly, Chitengo’s infrastructure—reception center, mechanic shop, two new swimming pools—began to rise from the ashes, its reincarnation adorned with Internet satellite dishes.

Until he moved into a spacious campaign tent, Carr slept in the back of a pickup truck, high enough off the ground to keep safe from snakes and (he hoped) lions, a stargazer’s preference that landed him in the hospital, semi-comatose with the first of three bouts of malaria.

An intrepid hiker back home in Idaho, he quickly became an obsessive explorer of the park, gleefully “discovering” thermal springs, waterfalls, caves, species. The animals were not entirely gone, as he’d been led to believe, but hiding, still harried by rampant poaching. A revitalized team of rangers—their numbers are now up to 135, many of them former poachers themselves—began to patrol Goron­gosa, its dry season plagued by wildfires set by illegal hunters to drive game into snares. In 2006, with the completion of the new fenced sanctuary, the park reintroduced its first large number of grazers—54 buffalo brought in from Kruger—to the overgrown grasslands and began to supplement the antelope populations with blue wildebeest that hadn’t been seen in years. In 2008, more hippos and elephants were trucked in from South Africa, but the zebras remained unavailable, trapped behind the Zimbabwe border by political turmoil.

Tourists trickled back, 30 or so camping out the first year, fewer than 1,000 in 2005, 8,000 (a mix of tourists and other visitors) in 2008—compared with 20,000 in Gorongosa’s golden years, in the sixties and early seventies, when big-game hunters swam in Chitengo’s two swimming pools and the restaurant often served 400 meals a day. From day one, Carr understood that the fate of Gorongosa depended on ecotourism, a tricky proposition for an unfamiliar destination so distant from the world’s centers of affluence. Still, in ten years, Carr’s team believes it will be able to easily accommodate 100,000 tourists a year—an egalitarian mix of self-drive campers and luxury-addicted adventuristas—and even at four times that capacity Gorongosa would still maintain the same “tourism density level” as the famous Kruger without damaging the character of its wilderness.

Yet before more tourists can be seduced back to Gorongosa, the project’s near- and long-term success depends on its ability to cultivate the support of the 250,000 villagers living in the buffer zone—a 1,900-square-mile Sustainable Development Zone—surrounding the park. The overwhelming majority are subsistence farmers, living in a sprawl of mud-and-thatch villages and scattered homesteads, vulnerable to disease and famine, too poor even to generate garbage, which explains the remarkable litter-free cleanliness of the countryside’s roads and footpaths.

Humans and the environment invariably compete with each other, yet without synergy between the two, Carr believes, both are doomed. The Gorongosa project lies at the center of a controversy in conservation science, positioned between a movement called Back to the Barriers—basically, turning the resource into an off-limits fortress—and a more porous, community-based management approach. Barricading Gorongosa from its swaddle of communities, Carr told me, was both infeasible and perhaps morally arrogant, an artificial separation between integrated eco­systems and social patterns that would have minimal effect on the three practices that most endanger the park: slash-and-burn agriculture in the watershed, charcoal production, and hunting. The key to all this, of course, was to galvanize everyone with a financial stake in conservation.

One day, we waded hip deep across the Pungue River to visit Vinho, the community closest to park headquarters. As we scrambled out of the flow, I mentioned that Gorongosa’s head safari guide, Adolfo Macadona, had told me that a week earlier a villager had been eaten by a crocodile while fishing at this same spot on the bank. “I think about it as getting hit by a car in Harvard Square,” Carr said. “It happens.” Drying off as we toured Carr’s work in Vinho—a brick-and-mortar school with a WiFi computer lab, a clinic and nurses’ residence, a bore well drawing potable water—Carr told me he had promised to improve or construct dozens of schools and additional health clinics throughout the district. Gorongosa already employs 500 newly trained locals, and an additional 5,000 people benefit from those paychecks.

When Carr reached out to the villages dotted across the Gorongosa massif, many locals had rarely seen a muzungo, and certainly not one bearing swag—cloth, wine, tobacco—to appease the resident spirits. Near Nhatsoco, a settlement on the mountain where people were clear-cutting for charcoal, Carr was rebuffed by the area’s curandeiro (spiritual leader, witch doctor—take your pick) when his team arrived in a flurry of bad juju: Their helicopter was a sinister color, a village chief wore inappropriate clothes, and an unhappy ancestor—a snake—chose to make an appearance. Carr apologized but persisted, eventually gaining the priest’s blessing. By 2006, locals were being paid to guide tourists up the sacred peak, build tree nurseries, and replant hardwoods across the slopes.

Everywhere Carr goes in the district these days, he’s treated like a rock star distributing goodwill and golden eggs. In return he asks the villagers to stop setting fires in the park, give up poaching, quit hacking down trees. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the bad habits carry on, though a shift in attitudes is palpable. Carr, with no illusions, says, “It starts somewhere”—a more felicitous life, a less destructive way of doing things—but by the time he hands Gorongosa back to the Mozambican government, no one doubts that its human and ecological landscapes will have undergone a mind-boggling transformation. The project’s staff, 98.5 percent Mozambican, already light up with the feeling that that future, with its attendant sense of triumph in their remaking of a war-torn country, has pulled into the station.

IT WASN’T QUICKSAND after all but a bog of liquefied silt. Carr and Galante bottomed out crotch deep and eventually extracted themselves from the goop, and we continued our march upriver, though in a matter of minutes Carr, undaunted, had plunged into another bog. This time as he struggled free he began to notice that wherever a plant with tiny yellow flowers grew, the bed would support his weight, and farther on we came to a place where the flowering zigzagged across the channel. Heedless to my admonitions, Carr race-walked toward the far shore as if he were trying to beat oncoming traffic. Perhaps he worried about crocodiles hidden in the weeds, though I had begun to learn that Carr’s momentum was an indomitable force, at times imprudent, and uninhibited by ambivalence. Certain now that what we were doing was a variation of crazy, I looked across the river at the opposite bank, the feral tangle of thicket, vine, and scrub palmetto roasting in the feeble shade of blanched trees and spiked ilala palms, and resigned myself to the crossing.

We scrambled up a natural drainage chute carved into the bank, found the seldom-used safari track we’d hoped was there, and followed it back downstream for two miles, a stretch where several days later Galante and I would find elephants coming up off the river and a hippo cow and calf napping in the bush not 30 feet away. Then the track turned away from the river into the windless, stifling heart of the jungle, and we were soon inhaling intense fumes, the unforgettable leathery piss odor of wild Africa.

For the first half-mile, the trees were stripped, toppled over, the smashed aftermath of leaf-eating pachyderms passing through like a tornado, and we became instant students of their mounded dung, studying the color and relative dryness to determine the herd’s proximity. “Just keep talking,” Carr said hopefully, and whenever our conversation flagged I would loudly announce to the jungle that we were, in fact, still talking.

We walked with relentless determination. With the sun overhead, there was little shade on the track, the sauna-like ferocity of the heat as threatening as the thought of lunging carnivores or slithering black mambas, and after an hour it was evident that we lacked sufficient water to stay hydrated. Magically, my shoulder bag filled with rocks, and we began to share the punishment of lugging it. Sweating profusely in jeans and leather boots, I envied my companions’ bwana shorts and minimalist footwear—Jesus sandals for Galante, preppy sockless boat shoes for Carr, the current muzungo styles for a jaunt through the goddamn jungle.

The second hour, Galante and I began to drag our feet ever so slightly, the monotonous slog of the trek contradicting its urgency. Carr, on the other hand, was having a terrific time, supernaturally energized to be shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere, an opportunity flush with the thrill of rule-breaking, and by the third hour, as my need for two-minute breaks became more frequent, he would shuffle restlessly, unable to stand still as Galante and I squatted in the shade, parched and mindless. Our slowdown finally summoned Carr’s inner (antsy) child, and he suggested we stay put while he went on alone searching for the elusive cell-phone signal. No way, Galante and I protested. Our pride would not allow it, and we stuck together for another mile or so until, on the verge of heatstroke, it became painfully obvious that our pride wasn’t quite the virtue we had imagined.

We shook hands, wished Carr godspeed, and watched his blithe disappearance around a bend in the track, wondering which body parts he might be missing if we ever saw him again. The late-afternoon sun had begun to splinter into golden beams, planting shadows in the jungle. Unable to depend on the success of Carr’s mission, we began walking again, our pace marginally faster than zombies. After a ways, Galante snatched up a long stick. “What’s that for?” I asked a bit dubiously.

“Just in case,” he said. “For animals.” Minutes passed in silence and I kept thinking I should pocket one of the occasional rocks I saw in the track.

“Vasco,” I said, “what kind of animals are you going to hit with that stick?”

“You never know,” he said, and we both laughed at this absurdity. He told a safari joke that ends with a hapless fellow preventing an attack by throwing shit at a lion, which he scoops out of the deposit in his own pants.

BY FOUR O’CLOCK, we arrived at a landmark that Galante, for the past hour, had expected to see any minute now: an old concrete bridge spanning a dry wash. “This is it,” he said, removing his shirt and collapsing flat on his back. I pulled off my boots and socks, rolled up my pants, unbuttoned my shirt, and lay down as well, dazed and blistered and generally indifferent to what might happen next. We had walked ten miles from the near side of the river, plus another three or four trying to find a crossing. It was unlikely that Carr would be in phone range yet, four miles farther on, and so we were puzzled when we heard a search plane overhead, flying out toward the hippo pool, unaware that our failure to return had set off an alarm in Jofrisse that had now reached the highest levels of the federal government, or that a large herd of elephants was nosing around the disabled helicopter while Segran, engrossed in Finnegan’s book, read the first eight chapters.

Barking signaled the approach of baboons, challenging our right to recline on their bridge. The jungle dimmed toward twilight, its harshness replaced by a counterintuitive sense of abiding peace. I closed my eyes, remembering the quizzical eyes of the antelope we had seen throughout the day—oribi, waterbuck, nyala—poised to flee but not in any rush as we passed by in quiet admiration. What a shame, I dared to think, that we had not seen a pride of lions or trumpeting elephants. A sun-stricken fantasy, akin to a death wish. When Galante asked what time it was, I told him 4:30. They’ll come for us by five o’clock, he predicted, and, as night fell upon Gorongosa, they did.

We found Carr blissed out, up to his sunburned neck in the cool blue water of Chi tengo’s new swimming pool, eating a bowl of fresh fruit cocktail, a full moon rising behind the happiest philanthropist on earth. The safari guides would call us damn fools for our reckless misadventure. Fair enough, and we would have to live with the mischievous glow of that assessment, persuaded that our bad luck—an outlandish privilege, a backhanded gift—might never again play out with such serendipity, marching across Africa in league with just the sort of heaven-sent fool a better world could thrive on. A world, I would expect, where standing around waiting to be rescued is not an option.

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FOR SERIOUS ANGLERS, reluctance is an unbecoming mood, vaguely sacrilegious, and yet here we are at eight in the morning piddling around. Carl Hiaasen, boffo mystery writer and Miami Herald columnist, is standing on the concrete skirt of the brand-new swimming pool at his house on Florida’s Lower Matecumbe Key, staring grimly at the tentacles of the broken brand-new pool sweep, glowering at it as if this thing, this perfidious techno-object, had been crammed down his throat by the scoundrel-ridden government. Then, because I’m making cell-phone calls in my car and exhibiting an absolute lack of urgency, Hiaasen rearranges the garbage cans. Eventually we drag our feet down his dock and load gear onto the boat with icy fingers and half a warm heart between us. You get the picture.

carl hiaasen florida

Carl Hiaasen at home in Islamorada, Florida, May 2004

carl hiaasen florida

carl hiaasan florida

We haven’t seen each other in almost ten years, and here’s our chance to get out on the water in pursuit of salvations wet and wild. But Carl knows it, and I know it, and the birds know it, too: This is a lousy day for bonefishing in the Florida Keys. It’s crybaby cold, and a 20-knot spring wind is blowing straight out of the north, down the scrubby backbone of the archipelago, greatly diminishing any chance that we’ll find schooling fish and a moment of glory to break like bread between us.


Hiaasen frowns behind the console of his 17-foot Hell’s Bay flats skiff, the 90-horsepower Merc gargling as we push off from his dock. He’s not sure how to handle this weather and, after a minute of pinched reflection, guesses we should head ocean-side and slams the throttle forward.


If we were anywhere near the U.S. Navy, they’d blow us out of the water. We resemble a pair of jihadists racing into Allah’s arms, dressed in jackets bulky enough to conceal suicide belts. Hiaasen has on some sort of Al Qaeda–brand ski mask that hides everything under the bill of his cap except his nose and sunglasses, and water pours off my mullah’s beard as we thunder toward the channel between two islands, the skiff bucking and yawing through the turquoise chop.


“Tarpon fishermen,” Hiaasen shouts over the engine as we race past a small flotilla of anchored boats bobbing in our wake, a flick of contempt in his voice. A world-champion bonefisherman, Hiaasen has stalked these flats for decades, but these guys are just snoozing on their backsides, freelining live bait on floats.


We head offshore, speeding across deeper water, but another skiff off our starboard bow seems to have the same idea.


“Where’s this moron going?” says Hiaasen, scowling, but the boat fades off to the south. It’s worth noting that whatever faces of displeasure he makes have little effect on the sparkle of youth in his blue eyes: At 51, Carl looks like a tallish, lean, but graying college sophomore on summer break, driving an ice cream truck around the neighborhood.


But I appreciate his impulsive vitriol toward other boats; our mutual fantasy is selfish and mildly misanthropic and yet curative as well. We want the water, the Keys, the beaches, all of Florida all to ourselves, which is about as deep as you can get in the angry utopian eco-nostalgia that I seem to share with Hiaasen and I don’t know how many other Americans. Maybe it’s just a baby-boomer disease, but I doubt it. We have both experienced another, lost Florida, timeless and lovely and free, with nary a traffic jam, and miss the hell out of it, miss the balance, miss its buggy hum and its hush.


As the water shallows up, Hiaasen cuts and raises the engine, unlatches the long pole from the gunnel, and monkeys atop the poling platform in his bare feet. I step up onto the bow platform and, because—and only because—it’s a ritual of mighty comfort, begin casting at imaginary fish.


And we talk. Hiaasen has a new novel, his 14th, coming out in July: Skinny Dip, a high-speed, gonzo murder mystery revolving around a nature-hating marine biologist spiritually deformed by greed. Hiaasen seems to have invented a subgenre that goes hand in glove with South Florida’s uninhibited lunacy—the darkly comic eco-thriller, savage and sardonic pulp Ă  la Tarantino, complete with command performances by Nature and cameo appearances by its endangered toothy creatures and avenging servants. No matter how many plot twists you use to enthrall a reader, it’s usually literary poison to let one’s narrative turn frothy with an overt moral agenda, especially one as aesthetically bright-eyed and potentially smarmy (Edward Abbey notwithstanding) as the environment. Yet Hiaasen performs his root canals with plenty of nitrous oxide, and he’s among the anointed in the stable of legendary Knopf editor in chief Sonny Mehta, installed in the winner’s circle with the likes of Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, and Richard Russo.


At the moment, though, who cares?


The wind strips the veneer off our psyches down to a tender layer of angst. No fish in sight. And for some reason that belongs on a barstool, we swap insecurities about our respective writing lives. Hiaasen confesses to being in possession of a bundle of neuroses. I admit to the same.


Jesus. Bad day.

IN THE SUREAL CULTURAL MATRIX of the Sunshine State, in which all oddity and strange extravagance are entertained, Carl Hiaasen, born and raised west of Fort Lauderdale on the erstwhile frontier of the Everglades, has emerged as an icon of the peculiar craziness that is Florida, in some ways its troubadour, in more important ways its homegrown Old Testament–righteous scold.


Why, a friend once asked me, is Hiaasen so pissed off? Say what? If you love Florida as much as Hiaasen does—purely, passionately, obsessively—you have two choices: Get mad and leave or get mad and engage the plague of vermin. Even as he eulogizes a Florida buried under landfills, Hiaasen is a brash champion of a future that should, and must, generate hope for a better way of doing things. The two published collections of his columns, which he began writing in 1985, are titled, pugilistically, Kick Ass (1999) and Paradise Screwed (2001). He seized upon Mickey Mouse like a monitor lizard in 1998, ranting against the corporate soul-rot of the Walt Disney Company in a book-length attack called Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World.


For the relentless, muckraking scorn he has directed at South Florida’s institutionalized axis of greed—politicians, developers, multinational carpetbaggers, agri-industrialists—the Miami city commission once passed a resolution condemning Hiaasen. Former Miami mayor Xavier Suarez, thrown out of office in the midst of an election-rigging scandal, wrote an open letter to the Herald shortly after Hiaasen’s first novel, Tourist Season, was published in 1986, suggesting that the author issue an apology to “the entire human race.” Hiaasen had indelicately asserted on Good Morning America that “there’s nothing wrong with Florida that a force-five hurricane wouldn’t fix.”


So he regrets such a seemingly callous comment, right? Hiaasen’s eyes light up. “Do you want people to die? Do you want carcasses floating down Biscayne Boulevard?” he says. “Of course not. But nature’s here to remind us, and it does, that it can kick our ass, that we’re just gnats.”


Let’s face it: They are narcotically uplifting, the apocalypse-by-nature scenarios in Hiaasen’s fiction. But the truth is, he despairs of South Florida’s slide into unlivableness, its apparently irreversible decline as a habitat for anything, even as its population rises at the rate of 800 a day, not counting a zillion googans—exceptionally clueless tourists. He drives the crammed highways and looks at the solid horizon of concrete where he used to ride his bike and fish and go out in the woods, and part of him knows it would be easy to get beaten down and surrender. “Half the time I feel like just turning around and driving to the airport and getting on a plane to Patagonia or Alaska or somewhere,” he says. “But then you can’t walk out on a fight. How do you walk out on a fight?”


Lately, Hiaasen’s fight of choice has been the Everglades. Few battles in Florida’s history have been as combative as the effort to restore the Everglades, and even as the restoration moves ahead and he permits himself cautious words of praise for Jeb Bush’s no-brainer leadership on what constitutes an apple-pie issue for Floridians, Hiaasen still won’t let go of the bone, even making his latest villain in Skinny Dip, Chaz Perrone, a thievin’, lyin’, cowardly, chickenshit . . . field biologist.


“The truth is, the Everglades are gone,” Hiaasen says. “They’re trying to put something back together that is a very, very pale sort of plumbing system that basically reenacts what nature used to do. You’re never going to have the old Everglades back—it’s already been carved up. You can’t make it pristine again, but you can restore the flow, and at least Florida Bay and the reefs and everything downstream can be helped.”


Of greatest concern to Hiaasen now is the looming philosophical battle over the why. Why are they doing it? Who are we really saving the Everglades for? The developers? Big Sugar? How much of the $8 billion budget to restore the Everglades will be outright stolen or funneled to lobbyists and contractor pals? “There’s going to be an ugly, seamy side to this whole thing, as there is to every big public-works project,” he says, “and it’s still not an excuse to stop it. There’s going to be scandals. Already the sugar industry is backing off some of its commitments. That’s no surprise. You need to keep the heat on those bastards.”


Skinny Dip, you might say, is a blowtorch on the unwashed hairy underside of their balls.

SO, WHERE WERE WE?


Thanks to the cold front, the fish have vanished from the flats and receded back into my dreams. Once in a while a lone bonefish will jet across the eelgrass in front of us, but nothing you can throw at. My competence with a fly rod is on the low side of remarkable, but now the wind is screwing up my backcast. I sit down to untangle a figure eight in my leader.


“I’ll do that for you,” Hiaasen says kindly.


“No!” For a moment I feel like a kid fishing with my dad, and the sensation is depressing. With the line now unsnarled, I suggest we switch places—I’ll pole for a while, Hiaasen can fish.


He won’t do it. If I’m his guest, that means he’s my guide, and it’s a role that as much as anything seems to define the man. Guide, guardian—he became a father himself with his first wife when he was still a teenager. Married his high school sweetheart; went to Emory University, in Atlanta, borrowing money from his lawyer father to make it through; grew up way too fast; graduated from the University of Florida journalism school in 1974; went straight to a job as a cub reporter in Cocoa until two years later, when the Herald offered him $100 more a week. He’s been “appallingly prolific” (he likes to accuse other people of this) at both writing and fishing every minute since, this morning being the exception.


By his own measure, Hiaasen is wound so tight that, he says, “relaxing is very hard for me.” He’s not a boozer or a clubber; traveling makes him uptight. Here on the boat is the closest he comes to cutting loose, poling himself around the flats for an hour and a half at sunset, sweeping the shit out of his brain, therapy for the driven man. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t think about dropping the anchor on his career, not a single day when he doesn’t say, “What am I doing? I’m killing myself here—my kids are growing up, and all I do is write?”


More than 1,500 columns, 14 novels—including a wonderful 2002 children’s book titled Hoot, about saving rare owls from developers—the Disney book . . . five million copies sold and yet Hiaasen worries absurdly that if he doesn’t produce a book every other year, he’ll plunge into instant obscurity. Like his protagonist in the 2002 novel Basket Case, he frets constantly about mortality, especially since his father died at 50, a year younger than Hiaasen is now, and one of his closest friends, musician Warren Zevon, to whom he dedicated Skinny Dip, passed away last year.


BUILT TO GRIND is the logo on his cap, but it might as well be stamped on his prose-slaving soul.


Now Hiaasen’s muttering again about the other boats on the water, and when the wind clicks around a few degrees to the east, I watch him study the horizon for approaching evils from the north. We zip our jackets, crank the Merc, and rocket back bay-side, to a baseball-field expanse of flats from which you could hit a home run into Hiaasen’s compound.


Wind’s the same, but the robin’s-egg-blue water has less churn. Hiaasen begins poling, I step up onto the bow, poised with my fly rod, trying to push away the images that drop like white-hot pellets into my unrequited desire: the photo of Hiaasen holding an enormous 14-pound bonefish and the trophies for winning the Bonefishing World Championship in 1997 and 1999; another shot of Hiaasen barely able to lift a satellite dish that is actually a 43-pound permit; the saucy pictures of his gorgeous second wife, Fenia, hanging on his office walls . . . oops, sorry, pal.


“Nothing,” laments Hiaasen as we drift closer to the south end of the flat. “Nothing.” Pole. “Nope.” Pole. “Not a fucking . . . Wait!”


The bonefish are right over there, a silvery school materializing out of the greener water to graze the shrimpy mud of the flat.


“Not yet,” Hiaasen coaches as I strip line from the reel. “Not yet. Get ready. Another ten feet.”


“Five feet,” Hiaasen whispers with an intensity that underscores his total concentration. But then, suddenly, the bones are gone. We’re skunked. Zed, zero, nada.

OK, THEN. YOU KNOW IT AND I KNOW IT and Hiaasen knows it, too—the other half of fishing is lying out your ass, so take that into account as I tell you the rest of the story. . . .


The water in front of us slices upward in a mighty rooster tail of spray as a speedboat pivots into a turn atop our schooling bones. The blinding sheet rains back down upon us, laden with soggy Burger King trash tossed out by the infidel at the helm and the flame-haired floozy in the Band-Aid bikini sitting next to him.


“Earth-bashing googan motherslapper,” Hiaasen seethes. He drops the engine and we’re in hot pursuit. It dawns on me that this chase is eerily familiar—like, doesn’t Hiaasen’s 2000 novel Sick Puppy open this way, sort of, with a guy in a Range Rover throwing burger trash out his window and being stalked by an enraged citizen, or am I remembering that right?


Suddenly the speedboat decelerates, and Hiaasen and I are both sickened by what we see: The boat is trying to run down a cormorant. The bird flies for a stretch and then dives, and each time it does, the driver guns after it in a dogged attempt to kill it.


“This is breaking my heart,” Hiaasen says, boiling. He shouts for me to trade places with him while he rigs a spinning rod with a large plastic minnow, a hefty deep-sea plug bristling with multiple sets of treble hooks. I’m thinking, Now what? when Hiaasen braces himself in the bow, flips the bail on the spinning reel, raises the rod into the air with both hands, and, with a bloodcurdling rebel yell, deadeye-casts that plug with cruise-missile accuracy, the lure arcing brightly through the noonday sky straight onto the shoulder strap of the speedboat driver’s life vest. With a wrathful yank, Hiaasen sets the hook and the dirtbag comes flying backwards out of his seat, cannonballing into the water.


Whoa—wasn’t it Joey Perrone, the heroine of Skinny Dip, who dispatched a creep with a similar display of spinning-rod justice, using “a large plastic minnow, a hefty deep-sea plug bristling with multiple sets of treble hooks”? I shift into neutral and let the skiff glide toward the sputtering fool, but I can’t take my eyes off the babe in the boat—buxom, yessir, and hair the color of a house on fire, with tattoos of twin cobras gliding down her belly toward what appears to be the best real estate in Florida.


“Who’s the dame?” I ask Hiaasen.


“Chiqui Liqui,” he says soberly. “My muse.” She’s working undercover, he explains.


For a moment I think I recognize the slob in the water. “Hey,” I say, “isn’t that Johnnie Byrd?” The neocon Byrd, speaker of the House in the Florida legislature, infamous for shoving a self-aggrandizing agenda down the taxpayers’ throats, a guy who exists to make Hiaasen cross-eyed with fury.


“Nah,” snarls Hiaasen. “Byrd is a lot greasier and more stupid-looking than this guy.”


“So what are we gonna do with him?”


“He’s not a keeper,” he says, biting off the line, and we resign ourselves to the fact that bad guys seldom get what they deserve.


The plot twist might have ended there, the slob hauling his sorry ass into the stalled speedboat and motoring back to his toxic life of pettiness and cruelty, but the bay fills suddenly with the dazzle of baitfish, swirling in the water like cosmic fire. It’s like SeaWorld out there, scores of porpoises slashing through the bait, the air teeming with bottle-nosed dolphins as if they’re popping out of toasters. A pod cuts away to playfully nudge our wide-eyed malefactor, but then they’re poking him and soon have his pants off.


I know that the phenomenon we’re witnessing is the governing metaphor in all of Hiaasen’s fiction, that he believes in an unforgiving form of lightning-bolt-direct natural justice—like the villain in 1991’s Native Tongue, who gets sodomized to death by a bottle-nose. I also know that what’s about to happen here is, to Hiaasen, poetry at the highest level. But, my God, aren’t we letting things go too far? Is this really going to look good on our karmic rĂ©sumĂ©s? Are we going to be able to laugh about this tomorrow, Carl?


Carl?

SO, WHAT’S REAL, WHAT’S NOT? That’s the perverse irony of Hiaasen’s fiction: His novels don’t create the wacky pathologies of Florida, they simply mirror them, right? Well, maybe.


It’s the Miami Vice paradox—the show’s weekly body count made the city more attractive to visitors, not less. You can bet his books have done nothing but increase tourism in Florida, upping the sucking power on the state’s strange magnetism, and the fact that he has been handsomely rewarded for that leaves him a bit dumbfounded and flirting with guilt.


Therein lies Hiaasen’s singular challenge: to stay ahead of the curve of weirdness, that metaphysical trajectory into the social labyrinth where art and life seem to melt into an existential goo. As he chases after the real-life weirdness in the headlines, it’s circling back on him, a snake biting its own tail. The minute I’m gone he’ll be back hammering away, 24/7, a man unable, he says, “to take for granted or accept as inevitable the kind of corruption and the scandals and the sleaze that is sort of a trademark of Florida.


“What are we telling our kids if we just start shrugging this stuff off? That this is right? Look what we’ve done to the planet, look what we’ve done to the place where we live. Somebody has to learn a lesson from this.”


Hiaasen is a man inflamed, a man to the diatribe born. And when Florida counts its blessings, his name belongs on the list.

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Tundra. Shimmering twilight. A slow, high-banked river the color of tea, as if it flowed from the spigot of a samovar.

Where I should have been was on a vodka-clear, rock-bottomed river, fast and wild, somewhere to the north and farther inland with a phantom cadre of biologists, fly-fishing for salmon specimens on the Kamchatka peninsula. Where I’d ended up was about three klicks inland from the Sea of Okhotsk, on an estuarine section of another river that I’d been advised, by the self-proclaimed criminals who deposited me here, to forget about, or else.

We had come from the end of the road, three hours across tundra and beach, atop my host’s — let’s call him Misha — GTT, a large, blunt-snouted all-terrain vehicle that came into his possession when the Soviet military began to disintegrate in 1991. Despite Misha’s earlier assurances, not only were we not going to the river I’d traveled thousands of miles to fish, in hopes of seeing what I’d never seen before — the phenomenon of a massive salmon run — but we’d be leaving in the morning, a day earlier than I thought had been agreed upon. Misha, who looked like a blond-haired, cornhusking quarterback, had Brandoesque mannerisms; waiting for my tantrum to subside, he tilted his head back and cocked it coolly, peering down the nascent beefiness of his ruddy face, and then chided me in the hushed cadence of the ever-reasonable gangster.

“Robert,” he said, “I’m Mafiya, Mafiya, Mafiya — not a tour agent.”

Then he wrapped his hands around his throat, as if to strangle himself, and said he would, if I wanted, take care of my inept outfitter back in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski (P-K), and for a moment I thought, Nice guy!

At the Mafiya’s oceanside fish camp, when I explained that, to salvage something out of the trip, I wanted to be ferried across the lagoon to spend the night upriver, Misha considered this desire stupid and pointless, but mostly he considered it dangerous. Bears were as thick as gooseberries over there, he said, and I didn’t have a gun, but when I persisted he ordered his boatman to take me across. Rinat, my half-Tatar, half-Russian interpreter/driver, was coming with me. Sergei, our wilderness guide, said he’d rather not.

Now, standing on a tiny tide-swept island in waist-high grass at the end of this remarkably strange day, I cast futilely for silver salmon with my spinning rod, the strong wind sailing the lure within inches of a sandy patch of beach jutting out below the opposite shore. On the steep bank 10 feet above me, Rinat had his nose in the food bag, tossing spoiled provisions out onto the ground.

“Rinat! Are you mad? Throw that food in the river.”

Kamchatka is said to have more and larger grizzly bears per square mile than any place on earth, but Rinat was churlishly indifferent to their presence. A city boy, born and raised in P-K, the peninsula’s largest metropolis, he was employed by a local tourist company trying to bluff its way into the wilderness biz. His employer — my outfitter — let him come out into the ever-perilous, grizzly-roamed outback without a proper food container, without even a tent (I’d brought my own). Earlier in the summer, we’d done soberingly foolish things together, taken risks that Rinat never seemed to recognize-traversed glaciers where one slip would send you plummeting into oblivion; edged ourselves out onto melting ice bridges; stood on the fragile crater floor of the belching Mutnovsky volcano, our lungs seared by sulfurous gases. How, I often wondered, was this puckish, hardworking fellow ever going to survive his occupation, here in one of the last great wild places left on earth?

“Sushi,” Rinat giggled irreverently, pitching stale bread and moldy cheese into the river, making a reference to Michiko Honido, the renowned bear photographer, who was eaten by his Kamchatkan subjects last year.

A minute later I hooked up with a good-size silver salmon, which cheered me deeply, here in the land called the Serengeti of Salmon, where I had been consistently thwarted in my (apparently not) simple quest to savor a fine day of fishing. The fish made its freedom run, keeping me well occupied, and when I looked up again, Rinat, the imp, had set the tundra on fire.

I landed the fish, put my rod down, hopped back to the mainland, and began hauling pots of water while Rinat slapped at the rapidly spreading flames with a fiber sack. Though I’d just reeled in the first salmon of my life, the experience had been akin to losing one’s virginity while your little brother’s in the room, playing with a loaded pistol.

Later, as I planked one of the filets for smoking, Rinat cut the other into steaks for the cookpot. We lolled around the campfire, uncommonly taciturn, because Rinat had found it politic to give away our last bottle of vodka to the boyos.

“Here we are with the criminals,” he said, shaking his head morosely. “Here we are with the bears.”

Imagine an Alaska sealed tight for 50 years, suspended in isolation, inaccessible to all outsiders until 1990, when the sanctum’s doors ease slowly open to the capitalists on the threshold, the carpetbaggers, the tycoon sportsmen, and, of course, the gangsters. Unworldly Kamchatka, with a not-quite-propitious swing of history’s horrible pendulum, is called upon to reinvent itself, and not for the first time.

As gold had once inspired the conquest of the New World, the lust for fur — beaver in North America, sable in Russia — accelerated the exploration of two continents and the spread of two empires. Russia’s eastward expansion very much mirrored America’s westward expansion — the genocidal subjugation of native peoples in the pursuit of natural riches and trade routes. White guys on the move.

Annexed for the czars by a Cossack expedition in 1697, Kamchatka provided Peter the Great with a global monopoly on the fabulously valuable sable. Within 40 years, the ruthless, plundering Cossacks had decimated the coastal-oriented Itelmen and reindeer-herding Koryaks — the likely descendants of indigenous people who had crossed the Bering Strait to North America. A native rebellion in 1731 resulted in a mass suicide, and before long 150,000 tribal people had been reduced to 10,000, their number today, barely 2.5 percent of Kamchatka’s population. Racially and culturally, Kamchatka is as Eurocentric as a bottle of Perrier.

In 1725, Peter the Great sent Captain Vitus Bering on an unsuccessful mission to determine the relation of eastern Siberia to the American continent. Bering was recommissioned by Peter’s successor, and his Great Northern Expedition, which took years to plan and execute and eventually involved 3,000 people, is rightfully remembered as one of the greatest voyages of discovery. Bering sailed his two packets, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, into Avachinsky Bay in 1740 and founded the town of Petropavlovsk, named after his ships. The following spring he set sail for the coast of North America, sighting land in July — Kayak Island off the Alaskan coast — and throughout the summer and fall he mapped the Aleutians, charted the Alaskan shoreline, and then turned back toward Kamchatka, discovering the Commander Islands. His efforts had irrevocably opened the Russian Far East and Russian America for development and trade-in particular, the fur trade, which continued to dominate the peninsula’s economy until 1912, the year St. Petersburg banned the trapping of sable for three years to restore the species’ population.

Surprisingly, no one showed much interest in the more available resource — salmon — until 1896, when the first fish processing plant, sponsored by the Japanese, was established at the mouth of the Kamchatka River, once the site of the peninsula’s most prolific run. By the time the last Japanese left the peninsula 31 years later, Kamchatka had been thoroughly incorporated into the Soviet system, and both the salmon fishery and the sable trade were transformed into state monopolies. Kamchatkans were free to harvest as much salmon as they wanted until 1930, when the state’s imposition of limits radically affected subsistence fishing, and by 1960 the official allowance, 60 kilos a year, was barely sufficient to keep a sled dog from starving. Meanwhile the commercial fishery was booming, and by 1990 Kamchatka’s total annual salmon catch had increased from 30,000 tons to 1.5 million tons. As in Alaska, the fishery began to develop dry holes — a river here, a bay there, under severe pressure.

As Kamchatka receded behind the curtain of official xenophobia after World War II, Moscow rapidly developed the area’s defenses — a submarine base in Avachinsky Bay; ICBM launch sites, satellite tracking stations, military outposts up and down its coastlines — and expected in return “gross output.” Not just salmon and sable; now everything was up for grabs. By the late ’80s, central Kamchatka’s primary forests, 60 percent old-growth larch, were decimated; the Soviets had managed to annihilate Kamchatka’s herring spawning grounds as well. Today, in a debauchery of joint ventures with foreign companies, Moscow has taken aim at the crab and pollock fisheries, at risk to suffer the same fate as the larch, the sable, the herring. Nor has the end of Communism spelled anything but crisis for Kamchatka’s legendary brown bears. By 1997, the peninsula’s Cold War population of grizzlies, an estimated 20,000 bears, had been halved by poachers and trophy hunters. At the rate things are going, says Boris Kopylov, the vice-director of Kamchatka’s State Environmental Protection Committee, the most powerful federal agency mandated to preserve the peninsula’s natural resources, “In the next five years all the endangered species will be at a critical level, the sea otters and bears especially.” This year, the agency’s staff was halved: Conservation law enforcement in remote areas vanished as helicopter patrols were reduced from 300 flying hours to zero, and the system, as Kopylov lamented, didn’t work anymore. “If you want to save Kamchatka,” said Robert Moiseev, one of the peninsula’s leading environmental scientists, “You’re welcome to pay for it.”

Shortly after dawn, the criminals returned to collect us, a humorless sense of urgency in their manner. The chiefs were mightily vexed, they told us, having last night discovered that thieves had spirited away 1,200 kilos-one ton-of caviar the gang had cached on the beach.

“Check Rinat’s knapsack,” I said. The criminals smiled uneasily — heh-heh — and we loaded our gear into the skiff. I’d come to Kamchatka, twice, to fish, and so far I’d been allowed to do damn little of it. In July, a rafting trip on the Kamchatka River quickly devolved into some awful hybrid of absurdity — Samuel Beckett meets Jack London. The rafts were dry-rotted, the river had been dead for 10 years, the mosquitoes were nightmarish, our fishing “guide” was actually a hawk-eyed tayozhnik, a taiga woodsman, who had given his stern heart to hunting and horses but had probably never seen a sportfisherman in his life.

On my second expedition to Kamchatka, the day I arrived in P-K from Anchorage an M1-2 helicopter crashed, killing everyone aboard, and I no longer had a ride to the mythical river up north. My local outfitter hadn’t considered a Plan B. The only alternative, untested, that the outfitter could offer was for Rinat and me to head out to the coast and try to beg a lift across the tundra with anybody we could find in possession of a GTT — the acronym translated as “Tracks Vehicle: Heavy.”

First we drove in Rinat’s truck to a village south of P-K to collect Sergei, the wilderness guide, a Russian version of Bubba, attired in camouflage fatigues, who was an erstwhile law-enforcement officer for RIVOD, the peninsula’s Fish Regulatory Board. He was now employed as a field worker by TINRO — the Pacific Scientific Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography, a state agency operating in association with the Russian Academy of Science but in cahoots with commercial interests. From 1990 to 1996, hard currency gushed in as TINRO became a clearinghouse for the avaricious flow of foreign investment into Kamchatka’s fisheries. “Everybody in the institute got very rich. There was so much money they didn’t know what to do with it,” a TINRO scientist had told me. “The bosses built big dachas, bought expensive cars.” The institute’s sudden wealth finally attracted the attention of Moscow, which began sucking up 90 percent of the institute’s revenues and controlling quotas.

Sergei, as a quasi-scientific government employee, was our insurance, along for the ride not only to steer us clear of official trouble, but to legitimize whatever it was we might end up doing that was a bit too diki-wild, independent-for the apparatchiks.

At the last town before the windswept barrenness of the coast, we turned down a dirt road toward a pre-Soviet Dogpatch, a cluster of clapboard and tar-papered houses, stopping in front of the first one we saw with a GTT in its yard. There on the wooden stoop was Misha, barefoot, wearing camouflage bib overalls, one of his forearms intricately tattooed. He could have been any midwestern hayseed waiting for the glory of team sport. Sergei hopped out, explained our mission, and offered to hire Misha and his machine.

“Nyet,” insisted Misha. Money, he explained, was nothing to him; therefore, yes, he would take us up the coast, but as his guests. I had no way of measuring the offer and began to ask predictable questions, anticipating predictable answers. The house wasn’t his, he said; he came here on the weekends from P-K with his friends to relax.

“What do you do in the city?”

“We are criminals,” he replied. “Even the FBI knows about us.”

“What’d you do,” I joked naively, “sell missiles to Iran?”

Misha narrowed his eyes and demanded to know why I asked such a question. I swore I was only kidding around, and he studied me hard for a good long minute before his demeanor changed and, clapping me on the back, he decided, I suppose, that I was good entertainment out here in the hinterlands — an American writer dropped into his lap.

“Robert, you will write your story about me, you will put me on the cover of your magazine, you will tell the truth,” he declared matter-of-factly, an extravagant display of hubris.

The truth, as I understood it, went something like this: Years ago Misha had committed a crime, the nature of which he refused to explain except obscurely. The old system — the commies, I suppose — threw him in jail in Siberia for “not fitting in,” where he fell in with like-minded troublemakers sharing grandiose, if not exactly morally based, ambitions for a better life. Most significantly, he connected with his fierce partner — let’s call him Viktor, and then let’s forget that we ever called him anything.

Gorbachev, perestroika, freedom, the implosion of the USSR, crony economics, the democracy scam — Misha and his Siberian Mafiya crew moved to Kamchatka and became underworld oligarchs. These were the days, the early ’90s, of the diki Mafiya: no rules, every man for himself, and bodies in the streets. As best I could determine, Misha and friends privatized — seized — a huge tract of state property on the coast, an expansive fiefdom containing four or five rivers plus a processing plant, and went into the caviar business. Eventually the Mafiya and the government realized they had to coexist, so now, after massive greasing, the Mafiya had all the requisite documents and licenses they needed in order to legally do what they were doing — harvesting and processing an astonishing 30 tons of caviar a season to ship to their associates in Moscow.

“The Mafiya,” explained Misha, “is a state within a state,” and perhaps it was destined to morph into the state itself, because if the government ever tries to recover the properties and companies and concerns the Mafiya had sunk its claws into, “there will be a coup d’Ă«tat,” said Misha emphatically, “and there will be a civil war.” Which was exactly the sort of dire prediction I’d been hearing from every upright citizen in Kamchatka throughout the week.

We went inside the austere little house, where Misha sat me down at the kitchen table and smothered me in hospitality, happily watching me shovel down the grub he set out — pasta with minced pork and silver salmon dumplings. Someone appeared with a large bowl of fresh curds and whey. Bonbons? asked Misha, sticking a box of chocolates in my face. Out came a bottle of Armenian brandy. The cross-cultural we-are-all-brothers stuff proceeded splendidly until I made the mistake of cussing.

“Blyat,” I said — shit. I can’t even remember about what.

“Robert,” Misha objected, “don’t hurt my ears with bad words. Real men,” he admonished in his lullaby voice, “don’t need to talk to each other this way.”

In the morning, Misha double-checked the tide chart he carried folded in his wallet. “Robert, let’s have one for the road,” he said. What he meant was, Let’s have one bottle for the beginning of the road. Aspirin and vodka, the breakfast of criminals. Afterward we mounted the GTT and crawled headfirst through the hatch covers into the cavernous interior. We bucked and roared out of town, across the east-west highway and onto the much-scarred tundra, stopping long enough for Misha, Rinat, and myself to climb up on the roof, where we each wrapped a hand around safety ropes and held on as the driver slammed the beast into gear and we slopped our way forward through the bogs.

An hour later we arrived at the coast, littered with the shabby sprawl of a government fish operation. We churned onward through the pebbly sand, the blue Sea of Okhotsk to our left, huge slabs of tundra peat eroding from coastal bluffs on our right. Misha, surveying his kingdom, took delight in pointing out the sights — white-tailed eagles swooping down out of the moody heavens, flocks of berry-fat ptarmigans tumbling clumsily out of the scrub, a pod of all-white beluga whales, scores of sea otters bobbing in the waves off a river mouth. We crossed another without a hitch and Misha happily announced that we were entering private property — his.

We saluted the first brigade of his workers, a motley crew of caviar cowboys. They looked like — and perhaps might someday soon be — partisan rebels in their black rubber waders, filthy overcoats, stubbled faces. We cracked open another bottle of vodka, ate lunch, and Misha wanted pictures, group pictures, buddy pictures, and I took out my camera. We went on, conferring with another survivalist cell of workers farther up the coast, always a guy with a rifle or shotgun standing nearby.

Misha had become a bit nervous, his bonhomie turned brittle. Somewhere up ahead was his jack-booted partner Viktor, who had outlawed alcohol in the camps. If you signed onto a brigade, if you were lucky enough to be asked, you came to work, worked yourself to numbing exhaustion, but after a 12-day cycle of setting nets, pulling nets, tearing the roe out of thousands of now-worthless salmon and processing the eggs into caviar, you went home with a small fortune — $1,500 a man. Then, and only then, you could drink your Russian self blind, for all Viktor cared.

Twenty minutes later, we came to a pair of Ural trucks ahead on the beach. “No pictures!” Misha warned as I followed him to the dune line, toward a storm-built village of wooden-hulled shipwrecks. At this moment I had to be honest with myself about Misha’s character flaws relevant specifically to my presence there on the beach: His pride — he wanted to boast. His gregariousness — he wanted to be liked and appreciated. His generosity — he wanted everyone to understand he was a big man who looked after his own. Viktor, Misha’s partner but apparently the first among equals, had no such flaws.

“Here is Viktor,” said Misha. It wasn’t an introduction. I glanced toward Viktor, who looked at me steadily, his round face icy with menace, and I immediately turned and walked away, careful not to acknowledge him, as he was so clearly offended by my existence. Misha had erred in bringing me here with my retinue, playing games when there was serious work to be done, caviar to salt, traitors to whack, and now he vied for Viktor’s forbearance of this cardinal sin. When we rendezvoused with Misha back at the GTT, he was singing the same tune of camaraderie, but in a different key.

“Robert,” he said, gazing meaningfully into my eyes, “don’t write about us … or I will lose all respect for you,” which I suppose is how a real man says I will have your ass.

Which brings everything back to this lagoon behind the Mafiya’s northernmost outpost, where I stood that morning after my night out on the tundra with Rinat, not caring so much about how the treachery of the stolen caviar might somehow come crashing down on us when we reunited with Misha and Viktor at low tide, but instead far more concerned with my new belief that I was destined never to have a solid day of good fishing here in the angler’s paradise of Kamchatka.

When Misha had dropped us here the previous afternoon, we’d spent a moment discussing the nature of things, fishwise. His men had gawked at me, the sportfisherman. Not a one had ever brought in a fish unless he had gaffed, gigged, netted, snagged, or somehow scooped it out of the water like a bear. When Misha finally understood the style of fishing I was intent on doing, he frowned.

“Nyet, nyet, nyet,” he said. “Don’t bring that here. We don’t want catch-and-release here.” We argued: If he kept harvesting the roe at such a pace, where would the fish be for his children, his grandchildren? “Robert,” Misha smiled, “you and I alone are not going to solve this problem.”

And then, too quick, always too quick, it was time to go. Back in Misha’s orbit, the criminals actually were in high spirits. It had been a good season so far, the silvers were starting to arrive, and the interior of the GTT was packed solid with wooden casks of precious caviar.

“I don’t like to catch fish,” Misha said breezily. “I like to catch money.”

Kamchatka’s exploitation was both an old and a new story, but so was the campaign to preserve its wealth of resources. In 1996 Russia bequeathed more than one-fourth of Kamchatkan territory to the UN Development Programme. A stunning gift to mankind — a World Heritage site that includes the Kronotsky Biosphere Nature Preserve, 2.5 million acres of some of the most spectacular landscape on earth. The Kronotsky Preserve contains a geyser field that is second only to Yellowstone’s, and the Uzon Caldera, filled with steam vents, smoking lakes, mud cauldrons, and dozens of hot springs. It also is home to three times as many grizzlies as in the entire Yellowstone ecosystem, plus the greatest known populations of Pacific and white-tailed eagles. The park has 22 volcanoes, including the Fuji-like Klyuchevskaya, 15,584 feet of elegant cone, the tallest active volcano in Asia or Europe.

Many Kamchatkans fear that, as the economy plummets and the country opens itself to the unchecked appetites of the free market, the peninsula’s natural resources will be raided and areas like Kronotsky overrun by tourists. When I spoke with Boris Sinchenko, vice-governor of the Kamchatka region administration and one of the men at the helm of Kamchatka’s future, he told me, “In five to 10 years, we expect to host five to 10 million tourists annually and to have built the infrastructure to accommodate them. The territory is so large, we can easily lose 10 million people in its vastness.”

Many Kamchatkans also harbor a corollary fear. The peninsula’s total population is less than 500,000, three-quarters of which lives in or around P-K. An environmental scientist told me with a shrug, “When’s there’s no electricity, the people say, ‘We don’t care about nature, give us heat!'” One day, Rinat had slapped an orange sticker on the front of my notebook, given to him by his ex-wife, who worked for a Canadian gold mining conglomerate: Hungry, Homeless, Need a Job? Call the Sierra Club, Ask About Their No Growth Policy. Only the most arrogant conservationist would demand that Kamchatkans remain impoverished in order to preserve their wonderland for a future less hopeless and bleak than the present. Talking with Sinchenko, however, I sensed there was something a bit cynical about signing over a quarter of the peninsula to the enviros at the UN, as if now that it had proved its enlightenment, the state had earned carte blanche to do what it pleased with the rest of its resources.

There were precedents for such cynicism. Twice, in the ’60s and the ’80s, the Soviets began to erect power plants on swift-flowing rivers inside or near the reserve, destroying spawning grounds and wasting millions of rubles. Nevertheless, a large hydroelectric project is under construction on the Tolmachevo River, and the gorgeous, fish-rich Bystraya River flowing through the village of Esso was stuck with a dam and power station. Sitting below the areas around Esso are some of the richest unmined gold deposits in the world. When I spoke with Boris Kopylov of the State Environmental Protection Committee, he mentioned that his agency had been successful in stopping exploratory drilling on west coast oil deposits and halting placer mining for gold near the mouth of the Kamchatka River, but it was clear that sooner or later the oil was going to be drilled and the Esso gold deposits were going to be extracted, ultimately endangering spawning grounds in central Kamchatka. “In previous years all the [environmental] agencies were completely against all exploration for gas, oil, and gold,” said Kopylov. “Now our position is to change a little.”

In the salmon fishery, the magnitude of greed, multiplied in many instances by a struggle for survival, was mind-boggling. “Illegal fishing out of Kamchatka yields $2 billion a year,” David La Roche, a consultant for the UN’s environmental mission to Kamchatka, told me over beers in a P-K cafĂ« as we talked about the local flowchart for corruption. “The legal fisheries are yielding not as much.”

The economic pressures that confront the ordinary Kamchatkan were made viscerally clear to me in July when I met Vladimir Anisimov, the headman of Apacha, a sprawling collective farm about 150 kilometers due west of P-K. A prosperous dairy farm until Gorbachev presided over the nation’s demise, Apacha’s ability to survive had seriously corroded, its herds whittled away by the state from 4,000 to 400 head, its buildings in sad disrepair. In desperation, the Apacha villagers had signed an experimental one-year contract with the Japanese to collect mushrooms, herbs, and fiddlehead ferns from the surrounding forest. And then, like almost every other collective in Kamchatka, Apacha had gone into the fishing business.

Everyone was waiting, waiting, for the fish to start their run, but when I returned to Apacha in September, I learned that, as in much of Alaska this summer, it never happened — the July run of salmon never really came in from the sea. Nobody in the village had been paid a wage in recent memory. Vladimir was at a loss; the collective hadn’t netted half its quota of 1,200 tons when, if truth be told, it had counted on netting its legal quota and then doubling it with another thousand tons off the books, as is the common practice. Apacha was rotting on the hoof, the central government gnawing away at the resources that the people had struggled 50 years to create. Since the middle of August, the ruble had lost two-thirds of its value, and the last day I saw Vladimir, shops were empty of basic foodstuffs, and Apacha was without electricity because there wasn’t any fuel to run its generator. Even in such dire straits, the kindness and generosity that all Kamchatkans had shown me did not abandon Vladimir, and he embarrassed me by siphoning gas out of his own vehicle so that I could go fishing.

Sergei, heretofore simply along for the ride, suddenly awoke to the idea that it was time to take control of our half-baked expedition, now that we had parted with the Mafiya and exhausted every option in our one and only plan to head north to that never-fished river. Pointing for Rinat to take a turnoff up ahead on the east-west road, Sergei allowed that if all I truly wanted to do was fish, then he had an idea that might finally relieve me of my obsession.

Sergei disappeared down a path. I sat in Rinat’s diesel truck, praying that something good might come of this. Rinat wouldn’t look at me, and I could hardly blame him. His country was falling apart around him, and he was stuck chauffeuring a sport-crazed American, one of the nominal victors in an ugly game we had all been forced to play. All he could do was resign himself to an even uglier truth — foreigners equal money equals hope: Drive on.

Sergei reemerged from the trees, beaming. He had a pal, the local tayozhnik, who owned a skiff and was caretaker of a hunting cabin about a half-hour’s cruise downriver at the base of the mountains, at the mouth of a tributary as thick with char and mikisha (rainbows) as the main river itself was obscenely packed with the season’s final run of pink salmon. The tayozhnik would be willing to take us there.

“But there’s a problem,” said Sergei, wincing. “No gasoline for the outboard motor.”

OK, that was a problem — there was only one gas station within 100 kilometers, and it was closed. We drove to a shack atop the bluff above an invisible river and picked up the tayozhnik, an unshaven backwoods gnome we might have roused from an Appalachian hollow, and together we traveled a half-hour to Apacha, where Vladimir, the destitute headman of his destitute people, came to our rescue with the siphoned gas. Two hours later, back on the bluff, while I repacked my gear for the boat, Sergei and the woodsman suddenly took off to run unspecified errands.

Rinat and I broke out the medicine and resigned ourselves to further delay. Then began the cirque surreal. First to wander across the clearing was a lugubrious old man who stood gaping at me with wet eyes, as if I were the Statue of Liberty. I passed him the bottle of vodka so that he might cheer up. Then a group of hooligans from Apacha screamed up in their battered sedan, disco blasting, apparently convinced we had come to the river to party. Obligingly, I passed around another bottle. Another hour ticked off the clock.

Sergei and the tayozhnik returned, followed in short order by a carload of RIVOD inspectors, blue lights flashing, replaced only a few minutes later by the militia, who sprang from their car patting their sidearms. Again, we passed the bottle.

Night was quickly falling. Just as I bent to hoist my duffel bag, a van rolled into the clearing and out flew a not unattractive woman in a track suit and designer eyeglasses. “I heard there was an American here!” she shouted breathlessly and, zeroing in, almost tackled me in her excitement. She dragged me back to the van and shoved me inside, where her three companions rolled their eyes with chagrin, handed me a plastic cup, and apologetically filled it with vodka. My abductor — Marguerite — knelt in front of me, her hands on my knees, babbling flirtatiously.

“What gives?” I said, utterly bewildered. She slipped a business card into my shirt pocket and pleaded that I allow her to represent me, refusing to hear my explanation that there was nothing to “represent.” OK, she said, let’s do joint venture.

“Robert?” I heard Sergei calling me. They were ready to go, no more endless dicking around.

I tried to get up, but Marguerite pushed me back in my seat. I grabbed her hands, looked her in the eyes, and firmly declared, “I have to go fishing.”

“Nyet,” she cried, “nyet, nyet, nyet,” and she kissed me. Her friends looked straight ahead, as if it were none of their business.

I lurched for the door, but she had me wrapped up. This couldn’t be more bizarre, I told myself — until Marguerite began stuffing six-ounce cans of caviar into the pockets of my slicker. OK, I said, if you want to come, fine, but I’m going fishing now. Marguerite relaxed just long enough for me to bolt out of the van, but there she was again, welded to my arm, attached to me in some frightening, unknowable way.

There was a quick, sharp exchange between her and the gnome, and the next I knew I was threading my way, alone and free, down the bluff through the darkening slope of stone birches. The air was warm, but when you inhaled it was the river you breathed, its mountain coldness, and I felt transcendentally refreshed. Then we were all in the boat, sans Marguerite, shoving off into the main current of this perfect river, the Plotnikova, clean and fast and wild enough for any harried soul.

Ìę

We were carried forward on a swift flow of silver light, stars brightening in the deep blue overhead. Then the light died on the river too, just as the tayozhnik beached the bow on the top end of a long gravel bar, bellying out into the stream. It was too late, too dark, to forge on to the hunter’s camp, and I said fine. Sergei begged off again, said he’d be back to pick us up tomorrow, and I said fine to that too. Rinat and I threw our gear ashore, and I pushed the skiff back into the current and then stood there, the black cold water swirling around my waders, singing praise on high for the incredible fact of my deliverance. This river made noise; this river sang.

We dug out our flashlights and dragged our packs about a hundred yards up from the water’s edge to the trunk of a huge tree ripped from the riverbank and washed onto the bar. Rinat collected wood for a campfire, and soon we squatted in a private dome of firelight, watching a pot of water boil for tea. I hadn’t eaten all day, and my stomach growled.

“Rinat, where’s the food?”

He cleared his throat and confessed he’d given everything to the Mafiya, mumbling some ridiculous explanation about the code of the wilderness.

“Where’s my candy?”

“I gave it to the criminals.”

“You gave the Mafiya my candy! They had their own candy.”

“It was the least we could do,” said Rinat, “since, you know, they didn’t kill us when you hurt their ears with bad words.”

We rocked into each other with laughter, howling at the absurdities we had endured together. Our assorted adventures, supernaturally screwed up and filled with hazard, were over but for one true and honest day of fishing, out on the sheer edge of a magnificent world, in a nation going to hell. I patted my pocket for cigarettes and discovered a tin of Marguerite’s caviar, Rinat produced a hunk of brown bread, and we ate. He rolled out his sleeping mat and bag and tucked himself into the tree trunk. “Let me apologize in advance,” I said, “if the bears come to eat you.”

And in the morning, the fish — like the trees and the gravel bar, like the screaming birds and humming bottleflies, like the sun and its petticoat of mists and everything else to be found in its rightful place — the fish were there. I had never seen anything remotely like it, the last days of an immense salmon run. What first struck me, as it hadn’t last night, was the profound stench. The gravel island was carpeted with the carcasses of pink salmon — humpbacks — from the height of the run, one of the most concentrated runs in recent years, as if so many fish within its banks had made the river overflow. Now the slightest low spot on the island was pooled with rotting eggs where fish had spawned. Maggots were everywhere, a sprinkle of filthy snow across the rocks and mud and weeds, and dead fish everywhere, rimed with a crust of maggots. I slipped into my waders, walked down to the river through shoals of decomposing fish, and entered the water. Humpback salmon nosed my boots as they struggled wearily upstream; like the prows of sinking ships, the gasping jaws of debilitated male humpies poked out of the water as the fish drifted by, their milt spent, their energy spent, the last glimmer of life fading into the sweep of current. In the shallows, gulls sat atop spawned but still — living fish, tearing holes into the rosy flesh. Fish still fresh with purpose threw themselves into the air, I don’t know why, but what I did know was that the salmon were bringing the infinite energy of the sea upriver, an intravenous delivery of nutrients funneling into the land, the animals, the insects and birdlife and the very trees.

Here, in a salmon, nature compressed the full breath of its expression, the terrible magnificence of its assault, and I stood in the current, mesmerized. On the far bank at the mouth of a tributary there were poachers. At first glance it seemed that they had built low bonfires on the opposite shore, the red flames licking and twisting, but where was the smoke? I wondered, and as I looked more deliberately I saw my mistake: The writhing flames were actually fish. One poacher worked at the base of the tall bank, poised like a heron above the stream, using a long staff to gaff salmon — females, hens — as they swam past and then flipping the fish overhead to a pile on the top of the bank, where his partner crouched, gutting out the roe.

When the spell broke, I sat down on a log and finally accomplished the one thing I had passionately desired to do for days, months, all my life: I rigged my fly rod for salmon fishing.

I decided to head down the bar to where the currents rejoined at the rapids below its downstream point, an eddy splitting off to create slack water. The island was probed by wayward, dead-end channels, trickling into basins where the sand had flooded out, and as I waded through the biggest pool scores of humpback salmon, coalesced into orgies of spawning, scurried before me in the foot-deep shallows like finned rats. In the deeper holes the season’s last reds cruised lethargically in their scarlet and olive-green “wedding dresses,” as the Kamchatkans call a fish’s spawning colors. I sloshed onward to dry land, the fish gasping, the birds screaming, and everywhere the reek of creation.

On the tail of the bar I planted my feet in the muck and cast into a deep turquoise body of water that resembled nothing so much as an aquarium, waiting for the connection, that singular, ineffable tug that hooks a fisherman’s hungry heart into whatever you want to call it — the spirit of the fish, the bigness of life or even the smallness, the euphoric, crazed brutality of existence, or simply a fight: the drama of the battle between man and his world. Not every cast, but most, ended with a fish on my hook, a glorious humpback, three to five pounds each, the hens painted in swaths of mulberry, green, and rose, the males beautifully grotesque with keel-like dorsal humps and hooked jaws like the beak of a raptor.

A day of humpies landed on flies here on this grand river was enough to quench my deepest craving for the sport, but then my rod bent from the pressure, the reel sang its lovely shrill song as the line escaped, and here came the silvers, big and angry, like bolts of electricity, filled with the power of the sea. Rinat finally joined me in this dance, and by the late afternoon, when Sergei and the tayozhnik returned, we had two fish apiece, the limit, silvers as long and fat as our thighs.

We gathered more wood, Rinat started the fire, and Sergei brought his cookpot from the boat. “I’m going to show you how to make a poachers’ ukhĆŸ,” said Sergei, cutting off the salmon heads and tails and sliding them into the boiling pot with diced potatoes and onion and dill. I had caught dozens of pinks but kept only one, a female, and Sergei slit her belly to make instant caviar, unsacking the eggs into a bowl of heavily salted water.

We sat in the gravel with our backs propped against the fallen tree and gazed lazily out at the fast blue dazzle of the river, slurping our fish soup. A raft floated down from around the bend, paddled by two RIVOD officers. The poachers on the opposite shore vanished into the forest, the wardens paddled furiously into the tributary, and we listened as the crack of gunshots resonated over the river, here in the Wild East.

Sergei, waxing philosophical, quoted a poet: “It’s impossible to understand Russia, only to believe in it.” Then he lifted a spoon of caviar to my lips, and I recalled the last fish I had caught that day, a hen, which had no business hitting my fly, ripe as she was. When I brought her from the water she sprayed a stream of roe, an arc in the air like a chain of ruby moons, splashing over my feet onto this most eternal, unsettled world of the river.

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Often, during a stretch of many happy years, I’d find myself at the southern tip of Ocracoke Island, on past the village and the ferry docks and the lighthouse, staring out across the channel and its fatal toss of waves to a luminous bar of sand, golden and divine, that connected to the sea-hazed horizon of trees on the next isle down, Portsmouth. In the summer I’d rake the sound side of the point for clams, the water up to my chest, feeling with my toes for the hard bumps below in the sand, my two setters swimming circles around me (because if I’m clamming, they’re clamming too), glancing over my shoulder at that place, that mystery. Occasionally I’d hear a gunshot out in the inlet—some cowardly fools trying to boat a cobia, which is something that’s tricky and dangerous if the cobia’s big and the boat’s small—and see that place, Portsmouth Island, shimmering in the heat.

There was a boat, I had heard, that would take you from Ocracoke to the abandoned eighteenth-century village of Portsmouth, once the region’s most active commercial port, but I held back from the place, as if the idea was to preserve something inside myself by staying away from it. I’d drive back home to Hatteras, somehow gratified by the sight of that other, inaccessible island, the ideal of it, the dreamy itch.


I don’t know why I clung to that notion of Portsmouth, but I did. I did, until I could no longer live on the Outer Banks, chased off by development and traffic jams and the dog-hating, people-hating cops masquerading as the National Park Service, whose intention seemed to be to turn the Outer Banks into a sanitized theme park for a steady flow of retirees. Only then did I tell myself, as if my life depended on it, I’ve got to get to Portsmouth.


A tiny, private wooden ferry, which can haul no more than four vehicles at a time, runs from the village of Atlantic, on the mainland, out to the island. Surf fishermen want to go, a few shell collectors—nobody else. Portsmouth is too raw, too primitive and windblown, to appeal to anybody who can’t go all the way with nature, as we have it here on the last true scraps of the eastern seaboard.


But what I want from a place is a sense of the fundamental constant, the weight of the elements pounding you or soothing you with the message that there’s little time left for things that hardly matter, and an eternity for things that do. Upon first setting foot on Portsmouth, as I drove to the beach through the clapboard fishcamp that serves as the island’s only nod to civilization, a five-foot wave popped up in the surf, and in its absinthe-green translucence, like an insect suspended in amber, was a 12-foot-long hammerhead shark, backlit by a sun about to set, its silhouette like a logo for a wild heart.


Whatever dune lines there are on Portsmouth are natural, which means the island overwashes during storms. I pitched my tent on a knoll of sand and for dinner grilled a redfish, caught on the rising tide. The next night I tied my tent to the truck as a nor’easter blew in hard and fast, and in the morning when I woke up I was surrounded by foaming water, on an endless strand of foaming water, a riot of seagulls in the tempestuous air, the only person in the world, waiting for the storm to slacken, and—make your own sense of it—I was happy.

Twenty-three miles long, Portsmouth Island, part of Cape Lookout National Seashore, is a primitive haven for birdwatchers, fishermen, sailors, and ocean junkies. It once boasted Portsmouth Village, the largest town on the Outer Banks, but hurricanes and Civil War evacuations eventually turned the village into a ghost town of a dozen historic cottages, a post office, and a well-preserved Methodist church — still a popular spot to tie the knot.


Getting There: Morris Marina (252-225-4261), in Atlantic, operates car-ferry service to Portsmouth Island. Boats depart three times daily; round-trip fare is $13 per person, $65 per vehicle.


On Your Own: Perhaps the best way to explore Portsmouth and environs is from the deck of a 16-foot motorboat, with Captain You at the helm. Rent one in Ocracoke from Byron Miller (252-928-5480) for $95 a day. Keep in mind, however, that private boats must be anchored offshore, and stock up on supplies before you go, since there are no grocery stores on Portsmouth. If your plans include catching dinner, Tradewinds (252-928-5491), a full-service fishing shop in Ocracoke, can give you the latest on what’s biting where—no license is required.


Outfitters: Ocracoke șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs (252-928-7873) offers half-day, naturalist-guided sea-kayak trips ($35). Fishermen, meanwhile, may avail themselves of the local wisdom provided by Dave Nagel, captain of The Drumstick (800-825-5351), who runs deep-sea excursions for $650 per day.


Where to Bunk: Morris Marina Kabin Kamps ($100-$110 per night; 252-225-4261) offers Portsmouth’s only overnight accommodations. Each of its 20 cabins sleeps six. Camping is free and allowed almost everywhere, but fires are permitted only below the high-tide line. For more information, call Cape Lookout National Seashore at 252-728-2250.

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