IT WAS BECAUSE OF ANTHONY, a Brooklyn sage in designer sunglasses, that I got hung up on the sport we'll call urban jet skiing. But before we get into that, let me back up a few years and relate a vision.

Jet ski New York

Stallone and a tourist take off from the terminal at Red Hook, Brooklyn

Ìę

Around 9 A.M. on a gray spring morning in New York City, I was jogging along the Manhattan bank of the East River. For all its reputation as a mafia burial ground, the East River is actually a tranquil waterway, inhabited by sullen barges and a few fishermen brave enough to eat what they catch. But that morning the silence was shattered by a rattling motor. A jet ski raced upriver out of the gloom. A figure in a life jacket sped past me, heading north, doing—what—40 miles per hour? Fifty? Who's throttling through the grimy heart of New York City? I wondered. Then: Envy. I want to do that.

So I went home and Googled—for about five years, off and on. I found nothing. Nobody seemed to rent jet skis or offer guided tours in the Big Apple. But last summer, while staring out my Manhattan office window at the Hudson River, I thought again of that mysterious figure and gave it another go. This time, a ramshackle Web site for a group called the Jetty Jumpers came up. There was a phone number and a command: “Contact Anthony.” I left a message. About an hour later, my phone buzzed, and when I picked up, a man shouted at me in ecstatic Brooklynese: “So you wanna ride the jet ski?!”

Six weeks later, on a bright September morning, my roommate, David, and I headed out to meet Anthony on Coney Island, where he launched his “machine” from a marina next to a sanitation plant. Anthony stood maybe five-six. He seemed to be floating somewhere between his early thirties and late forties and had skin like a rotisserie chicken, inked with an assortment of tattoos. He arranged us on his 2008 Kawasaki Ultra 250X: Anthony driving, me sitting behind him, David behind me.

The next three hours constituted the single most thrilling ride I've ever had in New York—no small boast in the land of the runaway cab. Anthony raced us past the sunbathers on Manhattan Beach. He brought us within yards of the Statue of Liberty's sandals. We saw the city from new and exciting angles: under the Brooklyn Bridge; in the shadow of a hulking cruise ship docked in Red Hook while crews scrubbed the balconies; bobbing next to the buildings of Wall Street.

Back at the Brooklyn waterfront, we topped out at 50 miles per hour—a terrifically uncomfortable speed—until poor David, hanging on to my life jacket like a tin can tied to a wedding-day limousine, begged us to stop. Anthony shrieked with delight.

I understood the feeling. I wanted to drive the jet ski.

HIS FULL NAME is Anthony Stallone—really. He is not the best jet skier in the region. That honor belongs to “Pancake” Pete Scheidt, a freeride professional who lives on the Jersey Shore. But Anthony has an organic, even reverent connection to his pursuit, like fellow New Yorkers David Byrne and Derek Jeter. The morning I met him on Coney Island, as he gestured at the waves coming in from the Atlantic, he looked at me poker-faced and said, “This is my backyard, bro.”

A union carpenter born in SoHo, Anthony bought his first jet ski 13 years ago. He'd never ridden one before. “I seen a bunch of riders out there,” he told me, “and I said, 'This is something I want to be a part of.' I just know my personality and how it is and that I would just love it.”

When he took his jet ski out to a jetty near the Rockaways, in Queens, he found that even tenured New York jet skiers began to gravitate toward him. Anthony christened his growing gang the Jetty Jumpers. It's the only crew of its kind in the five boroughs and now has about 30 members. Most of them have blue-collar jobs and all go by nicknames straight out of The Warriors. Anthony is “Saze.” Lena Nicoletti, Anthony's girl Friday and the group's vice president, is “LeeBotz.” There's a couple, “China” and “Stomper,” who ride stand-up jet skis and call themselves the Fiberglas Mulisha.

Snarling titles aside, the Jetty Jumpers act more like a Rotary Club than a gang. When they're not catching air at the jetty, they're doing volunteer work, like planting buoys for swim races around Governors Island. They also take tourists on three-hour for-hire trips to see the sights from the water. A mission statement on the Jumpers' Web site states that riding with them “may even change your life forever.”

It's certainly changed Anthony's. As he explains it, jet skiing is not a hobby; it's an extension of his being. Some years ago, he was hired for a job at a skyscraper in Jersey City, across the Hudson from lower Manhattan. One morning he found himself staring out a 17th-floor window at the sun-drenched harbor, and he concluded right then and there that he “preferred riding instead of working that day.” He dropped his tool belt, quit the job, and was skimming across the water an hour later.

Last October, Anthony was trying to interest himself in an NFL game at a Coney Island redoubt called Cha Cha's. Lena happened to ride by on her jet ski, and he sprinted out of the restaurant to wave her to the beach. “Lemme go for a rip!” he screamed. “OK,” she said, but then she pointed out that Anthony was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt. So he stripped down to his briefs in full view of gawkers and sped off.

Anthony belies the image of jet skiers as hot-dogging jerks. Though he covets his four-cylinder, 250-horsepower engine, he's a man on a quest for freedom. His passion stoked my own. I might never be a Jetty Jumper, but I had an idea: What if, just once, I ditched the subway to commute to my Manhattan desk job on a jet ski? I'd trade the C train for a rip down the Brooklyn waterfront, a slingshot around downtown, and a triumphant ride up the Hudson.

On a cold day last November, I met Anthony at the Coney Island boardwalk to commune about urban jet skiing. It would be months before it was warm enough to ride again. “Look at the water,” he said, gazing wistfully at golden waves out past the boardwalk. “I want to ride right now.” There was genuine heartache in his voice.

WHEN A PLANE AND A HELICOPTER collided over the Hudson River a few years ago, the press noted that New York's airspace was largely unregulated, unsafe, and chaotic. They should look at the water. There are wicked-looking Russian container ships; the Staten Island Ferry; countless tugboats and water taxis; the luxury cruise ship Queen Mary 2 (“More than twice as long as the Washington Monument is tall”); the Beast, a “water coaster” speedboat for sightseers, with twin 2,600-horsepower engines and sharp teeth painted on its hull; and Anthony on his tiny Kawasaki. Imagine all these vessels, wedged into a sloshing confluence of rivers that can flow both ways with the tides, and almost nothing in the way of traffic control. That's the whitecap jungle of New York. It's as if someone went to LaGuardia Airport and removed the tower.

According to New York state law, any landlubber can walk into the annual boat show at the Javits Center, buy a 35-foot cabin cruiser, and plop it in the water the next day, unlicensed. But to ride a jet ski—make that a “personal watercraft,” or PWC; Jet Ski is a Kawasaki brand name—you must have the proper papers, which are obtainable only after attending an eight-hour lecture and passing a 50-question multiple-choice test.

What I learned from my instructor, a friendly, white-haired Coast Guard master named Kevin Ivany: It's legal to both water-ski and duck-hunt from a jet ski. It's illegal to ride a jet ski faster than five miles per hour within 100 feet of an anchored vessel or anytime after sunset.

Also: Jet skiers die in New York waters with heartbreaking regularity. In 2006, 16-year-old Brooklynite Aristotle Plagianakos and his friend Paul Zaccaria were zooming through Mill Basin, not far from Anthony's home marina, when Plagianakos rammed into his friend's craft. It took divers a month to recover Zaccaria's body. Prosecutors later charged Plagianakos with manslaughter due to reckless endangerment. Though he was acquitted (FREED IN JET SKI HORROR, the New York Daily News blared), he dropped out of high school and swore to never ride again. Last September, a Bronx man named Nelson Aquilar took three teenagers, including his daughter, to ride jet skis off Goose Island. Another accident, another tabloid screamer: BRONX DAD DIES IN JET SKI HORROR.

The Jetty Jumpers embrace the madness of their coliseum. Here's Anthony describing a typically surreal incident on the New York water: “We're out by Kingsborough, a bunch of us, just floating around. We hear this plane: brrrrr. °Őłó±đČÔ—boof!—right into the water. We go over and my friend rips the door off the plane. There's this guy, a Russian guy—he's drunk out of his mind. He's like 'No, I'm OK, I'm OK!' We're like 'You're not OK—you just crashed a plane!'”

Anthony can live with the occasional plane falling out of the sky, the refrigerator bobbing in the water, even the armed interlopers, like the Russian sailor who once pointed a rifle at him from the deck of a ship. What bugs him are the guardians of the New York waterfront, the NYPD and Coast Guard, who are all too eager to “board” a jet ski. Translation: The cops ask you to produce a boating certificate and a host of lawfully required gear (flag, whistle, fire extinguisher, etc.). Fail to produce any one of these things and, says Anthony, “you have to go to court and sit there with all these degenerates.”

He sat with the degenerates a few years ago and is determined that it never happen again. Now, when a group of Jetty Jumpers spots a Coast Guard cutter, they blast off in the other direction. Says Lena, “It looks like someone swatted a beehive.”

COMMUTING BY JET SKI in New York is completely impractical, not least because it requires docking facilities on both ends of the ride. In Brooklyn, this is exceedingly expensive (about $1,000 a year, plus winter storage), and in Manhattan, where marinas cater to wealthy yachties who find the loud crafts annoying and low-class, it's next to impossible. “Why do they hate us?” Anthony asked plaintively when I brought this up.

Thus, the plan—”the show,” Anthony called it—was for me to meet him and Lena at their marina and drive Lena's 2009 Yamaha FZR, while Anthony and Lena piled onto Anthony's ski. I'd convinced the manager of a pier near my office (Chelsea, West Side) to let us pull up just long enough for me to hop off and Lena to reclaim her machine. Several weeks beforehand, Lena let me drive her ski for a few minutes on a flat inlet near their marina, so I at least knew how to accelerate (check), idle (sort of), and turn (not really at all).

New York had been sweltering all summer. So, naturally, on the morning of our commute, it was raining. I'd stashed an extra set of work clothes at the office the previous day and was wearing swim trunks, an appropriately frayed T-shirt, and sneakers without socks.

The sky was dark but the water was calm as we exited the marina at a cruising speed of 35 miles per hour, with Anthony and Lena about 100 feet ahead of me. I immediately experienced one of the secret pleasures of driving such a tiny craft: the intimacy with the contours of the water surface—its potholes. Moreover, piloting a jet ski in a big city is also a humbling exercise in scale, especially when it comes to other vessels. Next to any of the big ships, you're a gnat—and yet the temptation to buzz the behemoths is overwhelming. About halfway through our trip to Manhattan, just before reaching the bridge that connects Brooklyn and Staten Island, we came upon a towering red container ship that had parked in the marine channel. It had a chimney that belched black smoke: a vision of Victorian New York.

The Jetty Jumpers had told me that, on the water, the noise of the city ceased but for the throbbing of your engine. This was true. New York's constant, jittery motion also stopped. Off Brooklyn, most of the big boats weren't moving; they were parked, waiting for tides or official clearance to offload cargo, arranged like plastic pieces in the board game Battleship. Like these boats, New Yorkers are always waiting for a ride: for a subway, a cab, a train. Out here on a jet ski, you can go where you want, when you want, as fast as you want. As Anthony puts it, “everything is just open. Everything is just free. It's just you and ocean. Life is perfect.”

A few minutes later I came into sight of it, more imposing than any container ship: Manhattan. It wasn't the bright, boastful skyline you see in the movies; it was a haunted city shrouded in fog, a Charles Addams cartoon. The water suddenly roared to life. Helicopters buzzed overhead. The topographical dents in the water I'd seen in Brooklyn became troughs, and I took in mouthfuls of seawater. There was real commuter traffic, too: water taxis, the Staten Island Ferry, NY Waterway boats making their dutiful trek from New Jersey. I killed the engine just short of the Financial District so that, like an investment banker, I could call my office and tell them I was close. But after about 30 seconds, Anthony said, “We gotta get going.” A water taxi was closing in on us.

We made a sharp right into the Hudson River. A few of my co-workers, who'd gathered at a window, reported the rest of my ride as follows: I drove in more or less a straight line; I waved at other boats like a moron; I took forever to inch into the pier, so as not to cause a wake and upset the yacht owners; I appeared in the office in swim trunks.

My jet-ski commute had taken an hour—about 15 minutes longer than the subway. After Anthony and Lena headed back to Brooklyn and the glory of the stunt began to fade, I felt a bit like Anthony staring longingly out the window the afternoon he found himself stranded on the 17th floor in Jersey City.

That night, I'd return to the subway. But for one morning, the harbor was my backyard, bro.

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[Editors’ Note: On June 8, 2018, Anthony Bourdain of suicide in France. Bourdain was adventurous, fearless, charismatic, and inspiring. Perhaps most important, though, he was deeply empathetic to the places and people he encountered, which is exactly what made him such a good writer, chef, traveler, and human being. If you are having suicidal thoughts, please contact the : 1-800-273-8255 (TALK).]

It was due to a career change that New York chef Anthony Bourdain found himself sitting on a rock at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, waiting for the Bushmen to bring him the warthog rectum. It was May 2006, and Tony, as he’s known, had left the Manhattan restaurant business to reinvent himself as a television gastro-explorer—a man who would travel anywhere and eat anything for his Travel Channel show, , which completed its third season in September. The warthog had been slathered in dirt and charcoal, then slow-cooked to moist perfection. The creature’s rectum——the “poop chute,”ÌęTony would later call it——was an elongated, translucent tube that looked, if one were being optimistic, a bit like the manicotti you can procure in Little Italy. “The chief of the tribe is offering it to me, the fruit from three days of hunting,”ÌęTony would later say. “The whole tribe is watching, his status is based on being a gatherer of meat, and here he’s giving me the best part. What am I going to do?”ÌęTony was going to choke it down, his eyes glazing over. In typically wry narration recorded for the show after he returned home, he described his appetizer as “barely cleaned,… lightly charred”Ìęand dubbed it——with all due respect to the Bushmen— “the worst meal of my life.”

Not exactly , eh?

The exotic lump of flesh currently before Tony has been extracted from behind the gills of a yellowtail. This savory portion—called the “collar”Ìęwould be trashed at most American restaurants, but here at , the Japanese den in Midtown Manhattan that Tony and I have squeezed into this August evening, it’s a delicacy. In the spirit of culinary adventure, Tony brought me through a barely marked door, down a flight of stairs, and into this retreat of Japanese businessmen to sample a variety of challenging entrĂ©es. He is 51 years old and six foot five, a stork-like creature with salt-and-pepper hair and an ability to remain unnervingly lucid in almost any situation, like when he'll later go Colonel Kurtz on me and confess that No Reservations has so tweaked his outlook that he's ready to abandon America altogether.

Right now, though, he is craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the chef. “I still see the world from his perspective, the guy who’s standing back there through that window,”Ìęhe says.

This is a fair distillation of Tony’s method of world exploration. In a rebuke to the lightweight hosts who populate travel and food TV, Tony has developed a more vigorous approach, one that dares you to stick with him for an hour as he learns about a people by . No Reservations might be best summarized as Paul Theroux with more cigarettes. There is no set format, just a location——frequently exotic (Namibia, Uzbekistan, Polynesia), sometimes not (New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina)——and Tony’s intrepid stomach. Mostly avoiding four-star restaurants, he turns up at market stalls, family weddings, and more primitive food stations to sample whatever’s being served. Each episode plays out like a digressive, impressionistic essay that can veer off in all manner of unusual directions. At times, Tony will be deliriously happy, as when munching on puffin meat in Iceland; at others, he can be inconsolably morose, as when receiving a full-body massage from a sparsely clothed Uzbek man, an experience he called “sexual humiliation.”ÌęThe show draws the highest ratings on the Travel Channel, perhaps because it retains the giddy flavor of real traveling and eating. Thanks to heavy doses of alcohol and profanity, it’s also the only show on the network preceded by a parental warning.

“I have the luxury of being honest,”ÌęTony says, holding a piece of yellowtail between his chopsticks. “I don't know many travel- or food-show hosts that could say that something sucks, that they never want to come back.”

Or, for that matter, decide to say nothing. During an episode in Belfast that aired in January, Tony had prepared for a standup in front of one of the city’s “peace walls,”Ìęwhich for years separated warring Catholics and Protestants. But when the tape started rolling, he looked uncertainly at the camera for a moment and said, “Anything I say on the subject is going to sound uninformed and idiotic.”ÌęThen he walked away.

Professional globetrotter is Tony’s second act. A native of New York City, he spent 28 years pinballing between restaurants on the East Coast, becoming a heroin addict and living hand to mouth before ascending to the position of executive chef at Les Halles, a French brasserie on Park Avenue South. In 2000, he published , a joyous undressing of the restaurant business. (He had previously written two novels.) In it, Bourdain explained why you should never order fish on Mondays and why that hollandaise sauce drizzled over your eggs Benedict probably spent a frightening amount of its life at room temperature. The book dynamited more genteel notions of food writing and became a bestseller, earning Tony writing assignments from Gourmet, The New York Times, and others.

At 44, Tony was married, newly famous, and looking for a change of scenery. So he decided to accrue some frequent-flier miles and write (2001). He also let a camera crew tag along to film a companion series that aired on the Food Network. In 2003, he hopped to the Travel Channel to make No Reservations.

The running joke of the show is that Tony is trying to blend in with indigenous people, but his Gumby physique and innate surliness make this all but impossible. At the beginning, we typically see him roaming the streets and proposing some general theories about his destination. Then he embarks on a series of trials that inspire pithy punchlines. (After receiving a mud bath in Iceland: “I feel like drinking just out of spite.”) There are no breakthrough moments in which our protagonist announces he is one with an alien culture. (During a jungle hike on the island of Borneo with a former counterinsurgent: “My job is to keep the leftist rhetoric to a minimum and not to fall too far behind.”)

What Tony seems to spend most of his time doing is boozing with locals, throwing back shots of rice liquor, jungle moonshine, vodka, and all manner of beer. “It’s important that not just me but the whole crew drinks with them a lot prior to, during, and after the shooting period,”Ìęhe says. “Otherwise, they freeze up. Everybody’s like ‘Welcome to our longhouse, freakish American.’”ÌęWhile everyone gets loose, Tony is often mapping out the show’s narration.

“I would never refer to him as the ‘host’Ìęof the show,”Ìęsays Chris Collins, who produces No Reservations with his wife, Lydia Tenaglia, and Myleeta Aga. “He’s a guy writing essays that we’re filming.”

Chicken skin, our second course at Hagi, has been cooked over charcoal until it is crispy, then wound around wooden skewers. Tony picks his clean almost instantly, refills his glass of Sapporo from the pitcher, and starts telling me that he has fallen in love with Asia. So far, he’s filmed eight episodes of No Reservations on the other side of the Pacific, on top of about ten he did for A Cook’s Tour. His newest book, No Reservations, a photocentric chronicle of the making of the show that will hit shelves at the end of October, contains the official declaration that he has “gone bamboo.”

“To be honest, when Chris, Lydia, and I went out to shoot the first episodes of A Cook’s Tour in Vietnam, that was it for me,”Ìęhe says. “I didn’t care what it cost me. I would do anything to keep doing that, to keep feeling that, to keep seeing those colors. My expectations of life changed so much. My previous life was not enough anymore.”

Your previous life as a cook in America? “Even somebody else's life, somebody more successful and secure than I’d ever been. A nice house in Connecticut with savings and enough money to go on a nice vacation—that’s not enough! When you’ve been to the places I’ve been in Asia, that’s it. You want more.

“It's deeply traumatic,”Ìęhe continues. “It’s like dropping acid. It really is. Your mind expands.”

Letting Tony loose on the world was easy. Reining him in—not so much. “I wouldn't pretend that there aren’t times when I hear something Tony says and I have a deep inhalation of breath,”Ìęsays Pat Younge, president and general manager of the Travel Channel. On the rare occasion that Younge wants to tinker with an episode—to prune a bit of barnyard language, say, or lose some quip that's caused an uproar down in legal—there ensues a long and gladiatorial e-mail debate. “Once I wanted to change the title sequence,”ÌęYounge says, “and Tony sent me an e-mail saying he could feel the blood draining from his veins.”

The Travel Channel knew what they were getting. Tony has never shied away from verbal fisticuffs, and he seems to take particular joy in sniping at the rogue’s gallery of celebrity “chefs.”ÌęIn Kitchen Confidential, he calls Emeril Lagasse “Ewok-like”Ìęand says that four-star gourmands like AndrĂ© Soltner would never invite Tony, a chef of minor repute, to go skiing. (As it happened, after Soltner read the book he did invite Tony to the slopes; Tony has also since developed a grudging respect for Lagasse, or at least his cooking.)

Tonight, he’ll take aim at Rachael Ray. “She’s got a magazine, a television empire, all these bestselling books—I'm guessing she’s not hurting for money,”ÌęTony will say, his voice rising. “She’s hugely influential, particularly with children.

“And she’s .”

A pause.

“It’s like endorsing crack for kids! I’m not a very ethical guy. I don’t have a lot of principles. But somehow that seems to me over the line. Juvenile diabetes has exploded. Half of Americans don’t have necks. And she’s up there saying, ‘Eat some fuckin’ÌęDunkin’ÌęDonuts. You look great in that swimsuit—eat another donut!’ÌęThat’s evil.”

The Sake Den has somehow grown more crowded, and the courses are coming one on top of another. Succulent, snow-white pork bellies lightly seasoned with salt. Thin slices of beef tongue. Liver on skewers. A second?—third? fourth?—pitcher of Sapporo. Now Tony is arguing that manning a sauce station in a restaurant like this, the career that left him broke and strung out, is more emotionally satisfying than writing books or making travel television, the career that has made him famous.

How can that possibly be true?

“Because you know exactly how well you did after 300 meals,”Ìęhe says. “You know absolutely, positively.”

And you don’t know when you write a bestseller? When your show is a hit? You don’t get the same sense of approval?

“You don’t need approval after a busy week in the kitchen,”Ìęhe says. “We all have a bunch of beers and tell each other how great we are. The waiters come over and say, ‘Big tips. Everybody loved it!’ÌęThe owner comes over and says, ‘Yeah, big take at the register today!’ÌęYou know. You sold all your specials. That’s it. Top of the world.”

If you really want to understand how much travel—and especially travel in Asia—has changed Anthony Bourdain, you need to watch the episode of No Reservations called “,”Ìęwhich was filmed in Malaysia and aired in August 2005. Tony goes through the typical motions, huffing and puffing his way up hundreds of stairs to receive a blessing from a Hindu high priest, later washing down spicy bull-penis stew with a coffee concoction that's supposed to work like natural Viagra. But something is off. He appears uncertain, as if his usual life spark has been snuffed. Some days later (a few minutes in TV time), he makes his way upriver to a longhouse. He kills a pig with a spear and gulps down rice liquor with local villagers. But he still doesn’t seem to be fully Tony. The episode closes with a wistful monologue in which he asks if one can be “enriched and hollowed out at the same time.”

“Oooh, Malaysia,”Ìęhe says when I bring it up, sitting back in his chair. “I was generally in a really dark place. I was really sad.”

What was going on?

“A lot of personal stuff had been going on. I was coming out of a marriage and I had other relationships out there,”Ìęhe says. “And I had a lot of history in that part of the world by this point. My expectations for the day—my expectations of life—had been so altered that it happened to come home during the show. I looked around and realized that there’s no going home 100 percent anymore. I was never really going to go back and be a citizen of the USA the way I had been. It was a problem.”

Now he’s telling me that he and his second wife, Ottavia, an Italian whom he married in April and until recently the general manager of Manhattan Japanese-fusion restaurant Geisha, and their four-month-old daughter, Ariane, are moving to Southeast Asia in the next few years. He’s going to write a book about the experience. This is not a midlife crisis, exactly—more like an evolution. A catharsis. Once Tony was a creature that by his own reckoning could exist only in the closed ecosystem of a kitchen. Now he was seeing things—learning things—and Tony could see his own transformation right there in the jungle. The final shot of the Malaysia episode has Tony waving off the helicopter sent to fetch him back to civilization. It is about as close as No Reservations gets to a dramatic metaphor.

“No one will ever understand, or fully get, or be able to share—There’s no describing this,”Ìęhe tells me. “The only people who understand me now are the people in my crew. I stepped outside of my life and not all of me could come back. I’ve defected, I’ve betrayed, I’ve crossed some line. I can go back and fake it, but there’s always going to be a piece of me that expects that of life. Visuals that lush. It’s like the movies, only better.”

Tasted & Approved

Bourdain reviews five of his favorite eateries, from Bali to Brazil

Warung Babi Guling (at Jalang Tegal San #2)

Ubud, Bali

The best goddamn pig in the universe. Whole hog, stuffed with fresh herbs, then lovingly slow-roasted over a low flame and mopped with coconut milk. You will never be the same.

Katz's Deli

New York City

When visiting a strange city, eat what they do best. In New York, we do deli better than anyone. Katz’s is the top of the pile.

Au Pied de Cochon

Montreal

At Martin Picard’s casual, no-bullshit sugar-shack-meets-French-classic, it’s about foie gras, and pork, and sausage, and all good things, in get-the-defibrillator abundance. This is a meal you have to train for.

Salumi

Seattle

This temple to cured meats is one of my Happy Places, and should be a damned national monument. Anything cured or braised—hell, anything they do—is worth trying.

Bar do Mané (at the Mercado Municipal Paulistano)

SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil

Get the mortadella sandwich: a steaming heap of thinly sliced mortadella and gooey melted cheese in a soft roll. This and a cold beer are the breakfast of choice for travelers in the know.

Adapted from No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, out in late October from Bloomsbury USA

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The only thing more intriguing than watching Amanda Beard swim has been watching her grow up. In 1996, she was a made-for-NBC 14-year-old clutching her teddy bear on the Olympic medal stand. By her third Games, in 2004, Beard had, well, matured, posing for racy photo spreads in men’s magazines and, for a time, even holding the dubious honor of world’s most downloaded athlete. “People had the image of me with the teddy bear—this skinny, big-toothed little girl—and then all of a sudden I’m on the cover of a magazine wearing a bikini,” she says. “But it was over eight years. To me, I was very slow growing up.”

Beard quasi-retired after Athens to travel on behalf of sponsors like Speedo and Red Bull. But earlier this year she traded in the bikinis for race suits to make a run at the 2008 Olympics.

What are her chances? Beard is no Anna Kournikova. She set a world record in the 200-meter breaststroke in 2003 and has won seven Olympic medals. And at 25, she’s young enough for a fifth Games. “I still love it, and so far I’ve been pretty good at it,” she says. “Hopefully, I won’t break something, and maybe I’ll be around for 2012.”

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OUTSIDE: What's it like to be back in the pool?
BEARD: Awesome. It's so nice to get back into a regular routine, where I'm waking up in the mornings, I'm working out. I'm back with the coach I had all through high school and I'm training at the USC pool. It's been fun so far. Definitely an adventure. It hasn't been easy, but hopefully it will get better over time.

How did your schedule change from the period where you were retired?
It's weird because I got used to having so much time and having all day to do things and have a life and travel and do this and that. And now I kind of have to remind myself that I can't just zip off once a week. I have to train. I have to be here. I have to work out. So I just have to just change my whole frame of mind and my thinking. It takes a while because I got so used to doing something the last two years… Basically, I had a big vacation. I was working really hard doing other things. But it was a vacation from swimming. Now, I'm getting back into it. It's very [pause] interesting. I have a lot less time. [laughs] I'm more tired now than I've been for a long time.

Why did you decide to retire when you were 22?
I didn't really decide to retire. After the Olympics, I kept getting different job opportunities to do photo shoots or do appearances and travel. I just kept prolonging it. Okay, I'll take the winter off. Okay, I'll take the spring off. Okay, I'll take the summer off. It kept adding on and on and on. I was trying to get back in the water. I'd have two weeks, I'd get in the water and I'd train, and then I'd have to be a off whole month. So it just wasn't working out.

So I was like, “If I want to do this, I have to commit to it, I have to make it a priority. I can't make these other things a priority.” So I put it to the top of my list. I still travel and I do things a lot with my sponsors. But if there's an opportunity to go and do something kind of fun, I have to weigh out the consequences of it.

How many personal appearances were you making a year?
Wow, probably a good 50 to 60 appearances, and then you add on travel days.

So 100 days away from home?
Yeah, and that's not personal days where I'm going to see my family or go snowboarding or stuff like that.

You went from your first Olympics in 1996, where you're 14 years old and holding the teddy bear up on the podium, to posing for the cover of FHM—and winning the world's most downloaded female athlete. Didn't you hold that for a while?
Yeah, I think that was right around the Olympic time.

Did you feel like you were growing up in front of everyone?
It's kind of fun, in a way. But there's definitely a time period where people didn't see me very much. People had the image of me with the teddy bear—this skinny, big-toothed little girl—and then all of sudden I'm on the cover of a magazine wearing a bikini. And they're like, 'Wait a second.' But it was over eight years. To me, I was very slow growing up, slow maturing. It wasn't like, Man, all of sudden…

To other people, it was like, 'Whoa, I thought she was a little girl.'

When you get approached on the street, do fans ask you about swimming or modeling?
Most people ask me about modeling now. It's different, because I'm not used to answering questions like that. I can answer any swimming question someone throws at me. And now I'm like, Modeling? What? Who are you talking about? What's going on?

In Beijing, will your pre-race ritual still be listening to the Grateful Dead and drinking Red Bull?
Oh, definitely. I'm not changing that. That's my thing. I always drink two Red Bulls before I race and I always have either the Grateful Dead or reggae—Bob Marley or something like that. Something kind of relaxing, something that puts me in a good mood, zones me out.

How did the music start?
My family is all Deadheads. I feel like if you're raised in a family that likes Grateful Dead, you like Grateful Dead as well. That's kind of how it started. My sister and everyone in my family is into it. My dog is actually named Jerry after Jerry Garcia.

Some people like rap and hip-hop and stuff like that to pump them up. Red Bull will pump me up enough. I just want to clear my head. I have enough butterflies, enough stuff going on, that I don't need to be excited. I just want to have my own space and kind of relax and do my thing.

Red Bull isn't on the Olympics list of banned substances is it?
I think I'd have to retire if it was.

Is Beijing going to be your last Olympics or are you going to come back for a fifth?
You know what, I have no idea. Because every time I say this is going to be my last Olympics, I stick around for another four years. My thought process right now is, I'm going to keep swimming till I just can't do it anymore or I've decided to do something else. I still love it, and so far I've been pretty good at it. I'll stick with it. Hopefully, I won't break something or anything like that and maybe I will be around in 2012.

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Wait, wait—don’t leave! Bad joke. Sorry. Dude, I’m here to help you. You’re facing a crisis, my brother—a sorry descent into jock purgatory. You could have been the next American ski god; instead you’ve become the gate-bashing equivalent of John Daly, minus the endearing haplessness. You didn’t just blow it in Turin, Bode. You blew it ingloriously.

I know it sucks to hear all this again at the beginning of a new season, but I’ve put together a highlight reel from last winter to help us isolate the root causes. Hit play on the DVD, will you?

That’s you on December 3, 2005, the reigning World Cup champ, winning a giant-slalom race in Colorado. Listen to all your fans, man! Now check this out: I took this shot at a Rite Aid magazine stand on the eve of the Olympics. There’s your stubbled mug on the cover of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, Time, Sports Illustrated… The media couldn’t get enough of you. The rural New Hampshire childhood—no electricity or running water. And you were like Yogi Berra, serving up charming metaphors in your new book, Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun: “Racing is like sex,” you wrote, “you can make all the plans you want, but when it actually happens, it just sort of unfolds the way it wants to.” Brilliant! You were in your maverick prime.

Now—sigh—here’s where the meltdown began. Let’s review that 60 Minutes clip from January 8.

[Competition footage] BOB SIMON, NARRATING: Look at him here in Switzerland, the day after he won the World Cup. He wasn’t as much hungover as still drunk.

MILLER: Talk about a hard challenge right there. I mean, if you’ve ever tried to ski when you’re wasted, it’s not easy… It’s like driving drunk, except there’s no rules about it in ski racing.

Bob even gave you a second chance.

SIMON: Are you saying that you’re not going to do it again?

MILLER: No, I’m not saying that.

Wow. I mean, wow. I don’t have to tell you what happened in Turin a month later. Here’s you not finishing the super-G. Or the slalom. Or the slalom portion of the combined. Your flameout actually wiped the smirk off Bob Costas’s face. Still, you could have made like previous Olympic losers—speed skater Dan Jansen, say—and offered homilies about getting ’em next time. (He won gold in ’94!) Instead we hear reports about you going all Lindsay Lohan between runs. Then you say this to the Associated Press: “I just want to go out and rock. And, man, I rocked here… I’m comfortable with what I accomplished. I came in here to race as hard as I could… I got to party and socialize at the Olympic level.”

“Party and socialize at the Olympic level”?! Dude, who are you? The most gifted American skier of your generation, that’s who. But you came off as though you either didn’t care about winning in Turin, which seems highly bogus, or—worse—you were too cool to admit that you cared about winning, so you were posing as if you came to the Games merely to party. Which is about as ungracious as a loser can get.

Here’s some tough-love wisdom from your book, page 130. Ahem. “Spectacular failure clings like a hobo’s fart.” Well, you know what, Bode? You reek.

OK, I see you getting that “Whatever” stare on right now, so stop it—because I want you to know something: I’m not giving up on you. I care. And, deep down, I think you care, too. And I know what you need in order to turn things around. For starters, you need a hug. Come on, you can do it. Come on over here! That’s right. Good. Feels good, doesn’t it? Let it out, bro. Let it alllll out. OK. All right. That’s enough. Dude, let go.

Now listen up: Your repackaging program begins right here. First, the painful truth. How you do on the World Cup barely matters to Americans. Most of them won’t care much about ski racing again until the 2010 Games, in Vancouver. Of course, you still have to win, but first we need to rebuild Public Bode.

Step One: Privatize the boozing. It’s a bad rap, being a tosspot—an easy joke that Jay Leno is just getting around to forgetting. If you want to throw back a few cold ones, fine, but do it on the deck of your New Hampshire manse—and keep the Kegerator where the cameras can’t see it.

Another banned topic: doping. You’ve said athletes should be able to use EPO to avoid injuries. And—this is just nuts—you told Rolling Stone you were sure Lance Armstrong was doping. The guy is a sports saint—don’t tear him down. In fact, avoid all media interactions. No more cover stories. You’re just not ready to pull off the delicate press massage that rebel jocks like Andre Agassi and Charles Barkley mastered. Bro, you’re closer to Terrell Owens. If reporters should ask why you’ve gone silent, tell them you’re refocusing, rehabilitating, on a vision quest. Tell them anything; just don’t tell them anything else.

When you do venture before the public eye, be humble. Playing outfield for your home-state minor-league team, the Nashua Pride, in July was perfect. Donating $5,000 from the profits to Lance’s cancer foundation was even more perfect. And you made a dazzling, head-over-heels catch near the left-field warning track—Bode Mays!—then got mobbed by your teammates.

That’s right, teammates. Remember them? In the skiing world, they’re the guys who secretly wish you’d disappear into a Labatt’s can. Show ’em some respect. Ditch the ridiculous private RV and travel with the team again. You’ll miss PlayStation 2 on your flat-screen and all the love-machine shag sessions, but you’ll win back the most important fans you’ll ever have.

You will be the new and improved Bode. Confident but decent. Snide but not a motormouth. Happy but not self-destructive. Do as you say in your book: “Lose any baggage, personal or otherwise, go ninja, and wipe your mind clean of the negative thoughts.”

Americans are always hungry for a rebel hero, Bode, and they’ll take you back. They have no choice—they can’t name any other Olympic skiers.

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“This definitely ranks among the coolest things I’ve ever done,” Burnquist crows later as an interviewer proclaims him the first to complete the stunt. To which the stunned observer remarks: Well, of course he’s the first. Grand Canyon plus ramp plus slide plus parachute. As long as you’re making like Rube Goldberg, why not throw in a unicycle and a burro ride?

With Burnquist and other high-flying athletes headlining numerous episodes of Stunt Junkies—the Discovery Channel’s popular new celebration of all things gnarly and stupid—and with ESPN’s annual Summer X Games gearing up for its 12th installment (August 3–6), now is a good time to ask: What the heck is going on with action sports?

The question can’t be ignored, because recent months have seen the onset of a new baroque period, in which skaters and their big-air brethren have defiantly jumped the shark—the term for that ineffable moment when a TV show or entertainer shifts from being over the top to beyond the pale. In that spirit, action-sports stunts are now built around flashy backdrops (landmarks! Vegas!) and props (helicopters! motorcycles!), with desperate spectacle trumping serious athleticism every time.

Consider: On April 6, two weeks after Burnquist’s Grand Canyon leap, skater Danny Way stuck a record-setting “bomb drop”—a free fall onto an angled ramp—off the 82-foot guitar fronting the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas. Garish, sure, but only slightly more so than Way’s 2005 jump over the Great Wall of China. That trick cost $800,000 and earned Way a half-page photo in The New York Times, despite the fact that the distance, 61 feet, was short of his own world record of 79 feet.

Next up, on April 27, Stunt Junkies host Jeb Corliss headed to the observation deck of the Empire State Building wearing a disguise—and a fat suit to hide his BASE-jumping rig. Sans suit, and with helmet cam rolling, he climbed over the rails before guards wrestled him into custody. (Discovery Channel, which claimed ignorance of all this, fired Corliss the next day.) Then, on May 4, live on ESPN, motocross luminary Mike Metzger backflipped his bike over the Caesars Palace fountains in Las Vegas, in what amounted to a very loud commercial for Mission: Impossible III. Amid the glow of the Strip and the ka-ching of the announcers (“Mission accomplished!”), Metzger throttled his already over-revved vocation into a realm where there is no shame.

Downhill mountain bikers and whitewater kayakers have also caught the bug. In February, freerider Jason Rennie took a tow from a motorcycle in Wales, blazing along at 83 miles per hour so he could huck 133 feet over a semi and two vans. In April, paddler Tao Berman launched out of a helicopter into a section of Wisconsin’s Montreal River that was reachable on foot. Why? Because it was there, and because Stunt Junkies‘ cameras were, too.

To be fair, action sports have always aimed to dazzle, to make scores of disaffected youth temporarily affected—and more susceptible to brand messages. This was once accomplished at the X Games and its imitators. But as Madison Avenue began co-opting the amplitude—injecting McTwists into shampoo and frozen-pizza ads—the stakes got higher. In response, athletes have ditched technique in favor of tricks that are more David Blaine than Dave Mirra.

“The bigger the stunt, the happier the sponsors are, since that translates into the mainstream media coverage these athletes don’t often get,” says David Browne, author of 2004’s Amped, a history of action sports. “The sponsors want athletes with credibility, but they want their banners on TV a lot more.”

There were early warnings that the drive to go biggest would end with a crash landing in the cheese pit. The first X Games included a bungee jumper in an Elvis outfit. In 1997, BMX vert rider Mat Hoffman worked a BASE jump into his act. Even sainted skater Tony Hawk played along: In 1998, for MTV, he jumped 18 feet between two seven-story buildings in L.A. Hawk, now 38, admits he’s not sure if the more flamboyant stunts bring new people to the sport or just seem silly. “Do kids think that, to be noticed as a skateboarder, they have to jump over some monument?” he says.

Despite his evolution into a video-game overlord, Hawk is a solid touchstone for what’s been lost. His greatest moment occurred on the halfpipe at the 1999 X Games, where, on the 13th try, he executed the world’s first “900”—two and a half midair rotations. What you remember from that trick is Hawk’s unbelievable hand-eye-board coordination. And his feat gives us a fair place to draw the line. What lingers after the adrenaline fades? An authentic accomplishment? Or shrieking announcers and a stage that has to be disassembled by roadies?

It’s hard to begrudge these athletes the exposure they need. But the real problem is that much of the country still doesn’t believe that action sports are, well, sports, and if you’re going to convince them, you have to show a little more class. When you follow Evel Knievel over the fountains, you’re sacrificing not only athletic credibility but decades’ worth of accumulated cool. After his stunt, Mike Metzger was asked by an orgasmic ESPN announcer, “What does this mean for freestyle motocross?!” For the next few seconds, Metzger desperately sought to avoid the question. The answer he should have given? “Nothing.”

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