If you were paying any attention to the news over the past few weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that pioneering American aviator Amelia Earhart had, at last, been found. The headlines were written at a fever pitch.

“Bones from Pacific Island Likely Those of Amelia Earhart, Researchers Say,” .

“Bones Discovered on a Pacific Island Belong to Amelia Earhart, a New Forensic Analysis Claims,” .

“Amelia Earhart Found!” . “Great for Science, But Sad News for Mystery Buffs.”

The blitz came after the journal Forensic Anthropology released a , professor emeritus and director emeritus of the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center. Jantz compared old data from about 13 human bones found in 1940 on the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro with what’s known about Earhart’s physique. Although the bones in question have long since vanished, they were examined at the time by a Fiji-based forensic anthropologist named D.W. Hoodless, who concluded that their size indicated that they came from a male. Revisiting the info, Jantz scrutinized the remains relative to old photographs of Earhart and to clothing that once belonged to her. He decided that given Earhart’s likely skeletal structure and height (about 5’7″), they were consistent with a body type very similar to hers.

“This analysis reveals that Earhart is more similar to the Nikumaroro bones than 99 percent of individuals in a large reference sample,” Jantz wrote.

“In the case of the Nikumaroro bones,” he continued, “the only documented person to whom they may belong is
Earhart. She was known to have been in the area of Nikumaroro Island, she went missing, and human remains were discovered which are entirely consistent with her and inconsistent with most other people.”

Great. Except there’s no “documented” evidence that Earhart was anywhere near Nikumaroro. Jantz’s argument depends on accepting the claim that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crashed on Nikumaroro’s reef and survived there for a while as castaways. But this notion remains the unlikely and unproven theory of a single organization: the (TIGHAR), which is run by a Pennsylvania-based aviation enthusiast named Ric Gillespie. Though Jantz is not a member of TIGHAR, Gillespie helped facilitate the cooperation of a Purdue University archive that provided measurements from a pair of Earhart’s trousers. Jantz himself calls his relationship with Gillespie “collaborative.”

“TIGHAR had a lot of resources that enabled me to get what I got,” says Jantz, reached at his home in Tennessee. “It was TIGHAR that got the measurements from Purdue University archives on her clothes
I know there are criticisms of TIGHAR, but TIGHAR has invested heavily in the Nikumaroro hypothesis, and there was evidence she was there.”

But what if Gillespie’s contention that Earhart crashed on Nikumaroro is wrong? Jantz acknowledges that there’s nothing about the bones in and of themselves that establish them as being Earhart’s. “It’s pretty clear on bone length alone that Earhart would have looked like a male, because she’s so tall,” he says. “So that’s as much evidence as there is that the bones point to female. If there were just these bones and nothing else, the argument would be much weaker.”

The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan

The assertion that Earhart’s bones have been found fits in with a long pattern of TIGHAR claiming that some new artifact or lead was about to solve the mystery for good. Indeed, if the recent flood of headlines sound familiar, it’s because they are.

“Researchers Think They Know Where Amelia Earhart Died,” in the spring of 2017.

In 2014, after Gillespie announced finding a photograph of Earhart’s plane, a Lockheed Electra, showing an aluminum patch that could, maybe, resemble a piece of aluminum scrap recovered from the island on a prior expedition, he declared, “We reached a point where we feel very confident we have a part of the airplane.”

“On a scale of 1 to 10, Gillespie’s confidence is at 9.8,” . “Finding proof could happen soon, with a June expedition planned.”

All this after the huge wave of hype surrounding a TIGHAR expedition that happened in the summer of 2012, which was based on newly discovered images that, according to Gillespie, showed a piece of the Electra’s landing gear in the waters off Nikumaroro. “I’m quite sure it’s there,” he told the Washington Post. Among those who bought in were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who stood before cameras at the State Department to throw support behind TIGHAR’s dream. “Even if you do not find what you seek,” she said, “there is great honor and possibility in the search itself.”

This kind of thing has been going on since 1989, when TIGHAR’s first expedition to Nikumaroro yielded a metal bookcase that, Gillespie was convinced, came from Earhart’s plane. Ultimately, nothing came of this object, which Gillespie once referred to as “the grail.”

In the years since, TIGHAR has made 11 more trips to a largely barren island just 4.5 miles long by 1.5 miles wide—a place reached by a five-day, thousand-mile voyage from Fiji. During that time, they have found a woman’s shoe, a bottle that may have once contained freckle cream, a wooden box that may have held a sextant, a piece of aluminum and assorted other items, and a baby skeleton in an island grave that they dug up.

Over time, none of these leads have panned out. That landing gear? Side-scan sonars found no sign of it. An effort last year involving forensic dogs that was supposed to find remains of Earhart and Noonan? The dogs got excited at the base of a tree that was supposedly the site of the human bones found in 1940, but excavations uncovered nothing.

These speculations abound in part because there aren’t many established facts about Earhart’s last hours. But there are some, and they are important. In 1937, as Earhart got underway on the longest and most dangerous leg of her around-the-world flight, she was flying from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island. Howland, too, was small—a bare speck in the sea—but it had a landing strip, a fuel cache, and the Itasca, a waiting U.S. Coast Guard cutter with trained radio operators helping to guide Earhart in. Flying with her was Noonan, a deeply experienced aerial celestial navigator who had pioneered Pan Am’s Clipper routes across the Pacific.

Although Earhart’s radios were not working properly and she was unable to hear the Itasca, its radio operators could hear her. Among other communications, she reported a position at 200 miles out and then again at 100 miles out. Operators on the Itasca recorded signal strengths on a one-to-five scale, with five the strongest and clearest. During each report, her signals gained in strength. She was, it seems, heading to Howland as planned, in clear-sky conditions.

During her approach, Earhart said, “I must be on you but cannot see you,” at which point the radio operator recorded the strongest signal yet, a 5+, so strong that men ran out onto the deck expecting to see her plane. They didn’t, and Earhart’s next transmission, which came soon after, dropped to a five as she reported that she was nearly out of fuel and flying north to south along compass bearing 157–337, which bisected Howland Island.

And then nothing. Silence. Earhart and Noonan had vanished.

What Happened to Earhart and Noonan?

Gillespie and TIGHAR believe that the pair flew farther south along that line until reaching Nikumaroro, where they successfully landed on the island’s exposed reef. Over the next five nights, they were able to power up the Electra and send a series of cryptic radio transmissions, picked up by listeners as far away as the United States. Before long, waves washed the plane into the ocean, and for weeks the castaways lived on the island, eventually dying of thirst and starvation.

But the castaway theory is full of holes. Nikumaroro lies 350 nautical miles south of Howland, and Earhart herself reported that she was running out of fuel near the island. Those radio transmissions supposedly picked up by random people thousands of miles away? None have been verified as coming from Earhart. Navy search planes flew over Nikumaroro a week after her disappearance and saw nothing related to the aviator: not a human, not an airplane or the debris of one, not a smoke signal, not an SOS written with palm fronds.

What about the various pieces of junk and bones found there over time? Fishermen and voyagers had been stopping at Nikumaroro for centuries. Waves and wind send flotsam and jetsam across vast stretches of ocean. There had been at least one documented attempt in the 19th century to create a coconut plantation on Nikumaroro, and one night in 1929, the SS Norwich City, a 400-foot freighter, ran aground on the reef. Of the ship’s 35 crew members, 11 perished on or near the island. The 24 survivors made camp until their rescue a few days later.

For these and other reasons, TIGHAR’s theory is absurd, argues Dave Jourdan, who’s been looking for Earhart since 2002. A former Navy submarine officer and physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Jourdan began developing sophisticated ocean navigation and locating software for the U.S. Navy in the 1980s, helping it track and locate its submarines.

After leaving Hopkins, Jourdan teamed up with Thomas Dettweiler, a veteran deep-ocean explorer who managed the discovery of the Titanic in 1985 and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s Deep Submergence Laboratory. Together, they began locating objects in the ocean for a variety of clients, including the Navy. Many of their projects remain classified, but among their more famous finds are the I-52, a World War II–era Japanese submarine that they located in 1995 at a depth of 17,000 feet, and the Israeli submarine Dakar, which vanished in the Mediterranean in 1968. They found that one in 1999 at a depth of 10,000 feet.

In 1999, a detailed analysis of the fuel consumption of Earhart’s plane—done by Fred Culick, a professor of mechanical engineering and jet propulsion at Caltech—determined that Earhart was, as she stated, nearly out of fuel right at the time when she said she was, putting Nikumaroro far out of reach. Jourdan modeled her radio signals, which supported the Itasca’s conclusions that Earhart was on her intended flight path, coming closer with every transmission, and “within tens of miles” of Howland Island.

Jourdan fed all the known data into his proprietary Renav software, which spit out a likely crash area. He then performed what’s known as a Monte Carlo analysis, a blind statistical game in which a computer randomly modeled every possible permutation of 4 million flight paths, again resulting in a likely crash area. In a third analysis, he asked questions about each possible data point: How accurate was Earhart’s compass likely to be? How accurate was Noonan’s navigation? This, too, resulted in a high probability area.

Where all three analyses overlapped is where Jourdan believes Earhart crashed—somewhere near Howland Island, inside an area measuring 6,000 square miles, about twice the size of Connecticut, in water 18,000 feet deep. During three expeditions since 2002, he has searched 3,600 square miles with side-scan sonar at a resolution of one meter, leaving him with 2,400 square miles still to go.

Amelia Earhart Found? Not Likely.

Jantz’s forensic paper and its recent press notwithstanding, Jourdan remains incredulous about TIGHAR’s claims. “Everything that they declare as evidence isn’t evidence at all,” he says. “You take an item that in itself cannot be connected to Amelia Earhart in any way, and then take ten more items that in themselves can’t be connected to her, and say we have all this evidence, and together they give weight and people believe it. So many people say this that it must be true. But the consensus about the wrong answer is still wrong.”

TIGHAR’s whole theory, Jourdan believes, persists because it’s easy and cheap for a group of amateurs to look on an island instead of under 18,000 feet of ocean, which requires massive amounts of money, know-how, and technology. “An island is a much easier place to search than under 18,000 feet of ocean,” he says.

So, what comes next? Asked if the latest development in the Earhart case will be followed by another expedition, Ric Gillespie says, “We have no immediate plans to go back to the island.” Having combed the place so many times, the only thing left is to search the deep ocean off Nikumaroro, which, as Jourdan says, is daunting. “We’d like to go back, but what needs doing is a very thorough underwater search for the airplane, and that’s very expensive,” Gillespie says. “You need a lot of tech and a much bigger boat, and I’m not about to go beating the bushes for that.”

“And, look, it doesn’t really matter what happened to Amelia Earhart,” Gillespie adds. “She’s dead. The real value in what we’re doing is that her mystery is a wonderful opportunity to explore and teach the scientific method of inquiry.”

Which leads to an odd possibility. At TIGHAR’s greatest moment of triumph—“Amelia Earhart has been found!”—it almost sounds like they’re giving up.

The post Has Amelia Earhart Really Been Found? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

States of grace can be elusive, but Christy King had found hers, if only for a moment. It was 3 P.M. on Monday, September 9, 2013, and King was basking in the glow of a well-ordered campsite. The 39-year-old Australian had just finished her first day leading seven Australian men, one New Zealander, and 19 local porters on a planned six-day trek in Papua New Guinea, from the highlands down to the coast, along the Black Cat Track, an arduous, precipitous, and overgrown 42-mile trail first opened by Aussie gold miners in the 1920s and later the site of one of Australia’s most harrowing battles in World War II.

They’d started walking at six that morning, through an epic landscape that began as steep hills covered in high grasses. The clients ranged in age from their early forties to 67, but King was surprised by their high level of fitness. By 2 P.M. they’d made the first campsite, at Banis-Donki, a clearing set amid thick jungle with the trail entering and exiting at either end. In a cold drizzle, the porters went to work, setting up an orange tent for each trekker. For themselves they strung a silver-colored tarp from the trees.

The clients quickly disappeared into their tents to change into warm, dry clothes. The porters started a fire and put water on to boil. Porter Kerry Rarovu, hungover, just wanted to crash. King had known him for years, and as she horsed around with him and other porters under the tarps, she stood where he was trying to set up his bed. “Get off!” he barked, jokingly. “I need to sleep!” Matthew Gibob, another porter, flopped down next to Rarovu.

The rain stopped, and Rod Clarke and a few other clients emerged. It was often rainy up here in the high hills, and nobody minded—that was part of the adventure. Smoke from the cooking fires swirled around the campsite as rice bubbled in pans of water. Nick Bennett was still in his tent. Zoltan Maklary was in his, listening to his iPod. A few of the boys, as the porters called themselves, were collecting firewood in the forest.

Everything was perfect. And then the men with machetes burst out from the trees.

They entered the clearing from the far end of the track, fast, with a level of aggression that shocked King. Three men, each wearing homemade balaclavas with small eyeholes, sprouting strange little ears, like Halloween masks. One carried a World War II–era .303 rifle, the two others three-foot-long machetes, known as bush knives in PNG. One of the machete carriers also had a sawed-off shotgun. The men were short, small.

“Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!” they yelled, pidgin English for “lie down.”

Clarke and the others hit the ground. King went to her knees.

Rarovu woke up just as the men swept in and started slashing the tarp and its guy lines. He opened his eyes, lifted his arm. The first blow came down, cleaving his hand in two along its length, between the middle fingers. The next blow split his skull open. And the next and the next. Eight times. The thumping sound was unforgettable.

Bennett, in his tent, heard shouting. He thought something fun might be happening outside; maybe the boys had found a cuscus, a species of possum. He grabbed his camera and was about to exit the tent when he felt a crushing blow, heard an explosive noise in his brain. He thought he’d been shot, but he’d been hit by a rifle barrel. Blood poured from the wound.

Maklary shifted in his tent and started to take out his earphones when a blade came crashing down into his arm.

“Want the boss man!” the attackers screamed, striking the Australians with the flat sides of their machetes.

The men cowered on the ground.

King stood. “I am. What do you want?”

“Money, money, money, money,” they shouted.

King’s tent was at the end of the row and she got up, pointed to it, said the money’s in there—she was carrying half the porters’ wages and all the money they’d need for paying villagers along the route, about $5,000. The attackers separated her from the others, made her get the money out of her tent. She thought they would just grab the cash and run. But as the man with the .303 stood watching while she gathered it, the other two ran back and forth in a frenzied state, rifling through the tents, slashing any porter who moved.

“Sleep! Sleep! No look!”

They hacked Gibob, lying next to Rarovu. They shoved Peter Stevens’s pointed walking stick into his calf. They yelled for Bennett’s camera and the money in his pockets, and then they brought a machete down, hard, into a tree next to him to emphasize the command. They slashed and cut and cut and slashed—the legs of almost every porter, slicing their calves and Achilles tendons, chopping so fiercely that bones shattered. The trekkers were lying down, listening to the thumps, the screams, but King was seeing much of it, thinking, planning. What was she going to do?

Silence.

“Have they gone?” someone finally said.

The survivors raised their heads. Stood. Twenty, maybe 30 minutes had passed. The camp was destroyed, tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, clothes strewn everywhere. Bennett watched Matthew Gibob take his last breath and die. Dick Reuben, another porter, was in shock, his eyes rolled back, as Bennett dressed him, put socks on his bloody feet. A few of the porters, who’d been out collecting firewood when the attackers came, were gone, disappeared into the bush. Porter Joe Gawe had ducked his head just enough as a machete nicked his face, then raised his arm as the next blow came, slicing his forearm. All the others were cut in the legs, unable to stand—except for two: a nine-year-old son of a porter, and a porter who held the boy when the attack was under way.

“It was horrific,” King told me two months later. “Like a war zone. I’m a nurse and used to seeing flesh and death and the shitty things that can happen to human beings. But Rarovu was butchered. His head was massively split open, and there were limbs and bodies and blood everywhere.”

“Christy, Christy, help us,” the porters cried. “We’re dying.”

King went into autopilot. She located the first-aid kits, threw around bandages, and found one of the trekkers’ Australian cell phones. It had a signal—they were still in range. She couldn’t get a local number but reached her father-in-law in Australia, told him they’d been attacked, told him to call her husband, who lived in PNG. She found a PNG phone, called a friend who worked for Morobe Joint Mining Ventures, the operator of a giant gold mine near the start of the trek, called everyone who could help, said to send villagers up the trail.

She ran the numbers. Thought about her responsibility to the clients, who were bleeding, traumatized. Dark was coming, and in the highlands that meant a long, cold night. She decided. They’d bandage everyone up as best as they could, make the porters as comfortable as possible, and walk out the way they’d come, a roughly six-hour trip. “It was hard to leave them, but we couldn’t do anything more, and we needed to get help,” she said.

The only problem: that was the direction the attackers had gone, too. “It was eerie and scary,” King said. “We’d walk for ten or fifteen minutes and smell their marijuana, stop, keep to a tight group.” They had headlamps but were too afraid to turn them on, so King led them stumbling through the darkness.

“Adrenaline kept us going,” said Bennett.

After several hours, they encountered a mass of villagers on the trail, and by 10:30 P.M. they were in the Morobe Mine’s clinic.

But the porters were still up there, on the killing ground.

The attack got little attention in the United States, but Papua New Guinea—an independent nation covering roughly 173,000 square miles on the eastern half of the island of New Guinea—is a former Australian colony that gained independence in 1975, and within 48 hours the trekkers were home, their ordeal exploding across TV, radio, newspapers, and the Internet. Accounts invariably showed photos of Bennett with his head wrapped in gauze, reported that Stevens had been speared, and called the attackers robbers or bandits. The more thorough stories included a line or two quoting locals who said a dispute between tribes may have played a part—a theory that Mark Hitchcock, one of the owners of , the company that sponsored the trip, disputed. The motive, he told reporters, was clearly robbery. “This is an isolated 
 incident that shocked us all,” Hitchcock was widely quoted as saying. It was, he said, “totally out of character for the track.”

As the days passed, police on the ground and in helicopters combed the hills and jungles for the perpetrators. Then, a week later, came another story: relatives of a porter who’d died had attacked someone who was suspected of harboring one of the killers.Ìę

At first I watched this all unfold from afar in the U.S. Having spent the past three years working on a book about the 1961 disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in New Guinea, I’d traveled for several months in remote areas of the island’s western half, Indonesian Papua, where I’d lived with a tribe on the southwest coast. Although tribal customs vary widely across the island, the idea of reciprocal violence—of balancing the world through constant warfare and the taking of what Westerners would call revenge and tribal people call payback—is nearly universal. Reports of horrific violence in PNG were becoming increasingly common, including attacks against people perceived as sorcerers—itself a form of reciprocation, this time against the spirits—who were causing trouble in corporeal form.

It wasn’t just happening in remote areas but in the country’s largest cities, too, like Port Moresby, Lae, and Mount Hagen, as men from warrior cultures became unmoored from the sacred customs governing and controlling that violence, then found themselves poor and jobless in cities and further removed from village and tribal embrace. Although the and their ordeal, one thing was clear: while Bennett had been hit in the head, Maklary slashed in the arm, and Stevens impaled in the leg with his walking stick, none of the clients had been badly hurt. Emotionally traumatized, yes, robbed, yes, but nobody had lost so much as a finger or required more than a few stitches. This in a crime characterized by brutal chopping. If they’d been struck at all, it had been done with the flat side of the machetes’ blades. A certain care had been taken.

The porters, who ranged in age from twenties to forties, were another matter. Two had been killed right on the spot, a third was so cut up he died within days, and six others had been brutalized with a specificity suggesting that what happened was a lot more complicated than robbery.

I was shocked by the incident but also curious about it, as a window into Papua New Guinea and what can happen when well-heeled Western tourists venture into the remotest corners of the world—complex places with deep cultural practices, emotions, and antipathies that Westerners little understand or are completely oblivious to. I wanted to know more.

Christy King was briefly quoted in initial reports, but then the woman widely hailed as the incident’s hero went silent. My e-mails to some of the Australians weren’t answered, until Rod Clarke finally wrote to say the trekkers were unable to speak further, because they were negotiating an exclusive media deal in Australia, a country with a long history of checkbook journalism. Finally, one day, I managed to get Pam Christie, the co-owner of PNG Trekking, on the phone, but she, too, refused to comment. None of this helps tourism in Papua New Guinea, she said, and it was time to move on. When I asked her to put me in touch with some of the porters or King, she said, “Absolutely not.” If I wanted more, I should call the PNG Tourism and Promotion Authority, which had been “fully briefed.”

I hired a friend in Australia, who managed to track down King’s parents, who passed on her telephone number, and when my researcher told King what I wanted to do—come to PNG to try and understand what had really happened—she said I could contact her. This loosened the tongues of the trekkers themselves, especially later, when their media deal fell through.

Two weeks after that I was in PNG, slowly assembling the picture.

Twenty-four hours before the attack, Nick Bennett was bumping along in the bed of a Toyota pickup in the highlands of PNG. He and the seven other Australians had just flown from Port Moresby, the country’s steaming capital, into Bulolo, an airport consisting of two converted shipping containers, and now they were going up, up, up into higher terrain.

It was wild and rugged, beautiful, the kind of place that makes your chest swell, makes you laugh out loud, makes you feel lucky. The road was dirt, rutted, potholed, passing through dense green jungle one minute, cutting along the edge of steep hillsides another. Sometimes the truck forded fast-moving streams, and the sky was huge and full of clouds that were gray, green, and white and were pierced with rays of sunshine, a sun that felt warm in the fresh, cool air of the 4,000-foot mountains. Sometimes they passed Papuans trudging along the road. Small, black-skinned men in shorts and T-shirts, carrying machetes, women in flowered meri blouses—the colorful muumuus introduced by Protestant missionaries 100 years ago—with net bags full of sticks or sweet potatoes hanging behind head slings.

Bennett felt thrilled. He was 55, originally from New Zealand, had served in the New Zealand police’s diplomatic protection corps and then moved to Australia, where he’d worked as a tour guide and trainer and had competed in the epic Sydney to Hobart sailing race. He loved adventure, exotic cultures, deep experiences—and then he’d been felled by a heart attack. Bennett fought back. He started doing yoga, began a 20-week fitness program that included long hikes and hill climbs, and now he was here at last, strong, healthy, triumphing over age, rocking along in the middle of nowhere. In terms of landscape and cultural strangeness, it doesn’t get much more intense, beautiful, weird—different—than PNG, and his journey was only starting.

Hikes like the one he’d signed up for are big business. The Kokoda Track, a much more famous trail than the Black Cat, is traversed by some 4,000 tourists a year and is “the single most important experience for Australians visiting PNG,” according to a 2012 economic analysis of Australian tourism. The hike runs from Port Moresby to Kokoda through the Owen Stanley Range, and it’s a well-oiled machine. Trekkers pay companies like PNG Trekking șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs, which then contracts out for guides, porters, supplies, and logistics. A locally run trail organization collects a fee from every trekker and manages the route. It’s all so smoothly run, the guides and porters and villages they pass through so enmeshed in a well-developed business relationship, that there’s little crime on the track itself.

Looking to expand, the PNG Tourism and Promotion Board and PNG Trekking had begun opening up the Black Cat in 2004. Kokoda was already near capacity, and the Black Cat offered even more history and relics and raw challenge. Though shorter, it was far more technical, overgrown, and it passed through remote territories belonging to tribes like the Bong, Iwal, and Biangai. Developing it as a commercial trek promised a huge opportunity for everyone. But by the time of Bennett’s arrival, only a few commercial groups had actually done the trip.

Late that afternoon, Bennett and the others pulled into the village of Wau and a last oasis of sorts—the home of Danielle and Tim Vincent, longtime PNG residents and former colonial Australians who owned , which they’d created to handle logistics for the start of the trek. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the Vincents’ fenced compound was jungle, dirt roads, the smell of smoke and dampness and dust, and all those inscrutable Papuans. Inside their house it was burnished wood floors and plush white overstuffed furniture and glass cabinets. Over wine and a big dinner, the eight men, all middle-aged and most former military, got to know each other and the woman who was to guide them and would have responsibility for their comfort and safety.

Their trip leader was blond and tan, and the men were startled by her beauty and poise. “I thought maybe she’d have her husband with her,” said Clarke, “and that if she was leading the group, it really must be safe.”

Christy King isn't a woman who needs any help from a man. A hard-charging Australian expat, she’s an intensive-care nurse and an endurance athlete. She’s lean and muscled, with bulging calves the size of knotted softballs. She exudes competence.

Married into a former Australian colonial family that operates the largest chain of pharmacies in PNG, as well as an expanding set of grocery stores, she is a member of the white Australian expat elite that still plays a powerful role in PNG’s economy and politics. Lae, PNG’s second-largest city and its largest port, is positioned just an hour across the Huon Gulf by boat from Salamaua, the village at the base of the Black Cat. Lae has been home to members of the King family for 50 years, and Christy and her husband, Daniel, had been living there for the past decade, starting a family that now includes two school-age kids. Christy spoke Tok Pisin, the pidgin English language spoken all over PNG, and the family knew everyone, from government officials to the locals in Salamaua, where the Kings maintained a rustic beach house.

King doesn’t sit still. She runs daily, starting at 5 A.M., on Lae’s ruined streets, trailed by guards in a vehicle. In 2011, she ran the Black Cat’s 42 miles (a journey that takes most trekkers six days) in 31 hours. She did that to prepare for a race on Kokoda—60 miles—which she finished in 30 hours. She was supremely fit, knew the terrain, the people, the local language, all the political players.Ìę

Just a few miles from the Vincents’ house, as the trekkers and King were celebrating the adventure to come, so too were Rarovu, Reuben, and 17 other boys in a village called Kaisinik. For uneducated men from villages without power, plumbing, and often even roads that access them, in a country with few opportunities, carrying loads for trekking parties was a plum job, paying $50 a day plus tips and whatever goodies tourists left behind, from hiking shoes to digital cameras. Even more important, proximity to affluent, educated tourists was an education in itself, exposing villagers to a wider world and whatever opportunities they might be able to leverage from that. Every village profited when the trekkers passed through. “We pay for everything,” King says. “Every bucket of water. Piece of fruit. Firewood.”

In the hierarchy of native porters and guides, Rarovu was a star, an example of what a smart, motivated, and ambitious Papuan villager could do. He was reliable, showed up on time in a society where Western notions of time don’t exist. Trekking agencies wanted to use him, tourists wanted him on their treks, and he’d risen to the status of head guide, earning an extra $10 to $20 a day, picking up Western ways easily. “Kerry had very good English,” says King, “and great relationships with all the expats.”

He had hiked on Kokoda, and he led all the treks on the Black Cat. Traveling en route, he stayed in the same hotels as the Westerners, ate dinner with them, felt comfortable doing so. An expat in Lae had given him a mountain bike, and before long he was doing wheelies and tricks and racing it in local expat events. His stature in his home village rose, as did his affluence, slight though it was. He built a wooden plank house in his village, opened a store in its front rooms, was becoming a big man providing for his two children and extended family. “We saw Kerry as our leader,” says his cousin, Hubert Koromeng. King had used Rarovu for all her challenging runs.

But he’d also gotten a little cocky and apparently had started drinking too much. So for this, her first time as trek leader, King chose another man, Dick Reuben, as head guide. Reuben wasn’t as experienced as Rarovu, but he was quieter, more thoughtful, a handsome, well-spoken man whom King instinctively trusted and liked. Also, he was from Salamaua, the beach village where her family had their house.

Once Reuben got the job, his first task was to begin hiking inland, up toward the trailhead, and King had told him to make sure he collected porters along the way from the major villages, so that the wealth of the operation would be spread evenly along the route. No village—and, more important, no tribe—should be left out.

Reuben had selected a handful of boys from his own village and recruited more on the way, and they hiked barefoot under heavy loads, 40 miles through steep mountains in two days. By Monday evening there were 19, including Rarovu, at the village of Kaisinik, in the house of Ninga Yawa, the chairman of the Black Cat Track Association. As King and the Australians celebrated a few miles away in Wau, the porters celebrated in Yawa’s palm-mat house without electricity or plumbing, chewing betel nut, smoking and partying late into the night. In a few days they’d all have $300 in their pockets, and if this trek went well, more tourists would be coming, a stream of money and opportunity for a people who had nothing.Ìę

I spent three days with Yawa, who took me into the highlands, to the start of the track, and put me up in Kaisinik. Far away from PNG’s cities and expat community, this was a separate world, a place where tribal and cultural identities and differences were powerful and stark and on everyone’s minds.

In PNG, especially in the highlands, tribal violence is always close by, and Yawa was a Biangai. He was relatively well-off: he drove a four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup, and his family had been village leaders for generations. As we bumped into Kaisinik—a grassy median nestled between steep hills, the fast-moving Bulolo River running past—he said that his house had once been five bedrooms, was made of plank, and was raised on iron pylons. Not anymore. Now it and all the other houses in Kaisinik were simple palm-mat affairs, the kitchens an open fire under a palm roof. In 2009, the neighboring Watuts, with whom the Biangais have been engaged in a land dispute for decades, raided the village with spears and bows and burned it to the ground, killing five. In a rare move, Yawa had convinced his neighbors not to retaliate; instead, they were fighting the Watuts in court. But things were still so tense that five men slept on the porch of the little hut I was given to sleep in. “Your safety is our responsibility,” Yawa said.

The next morning he took me up to the trailhead, where the porters and the trekkers had met for the first time in a cool drizzle. Despite the rain and low clouds, the place was sublime, a mostly treeless world of green grass carpeting steep, undulating hills, the ridges in the distance covered in thick pines, a high rainforest they’d reach in a few hours. It appeared to be uninhabited country, not a village in sight, but up there, in there, lived people, whole communities unconnected to the outside world. It was the chance to see those people, interact with them—and their porters and guides who themselves were from those places—that had drawn Bennett and Clarke and the others as much as the challenges of the hike and its history.

Bennett had hiked Kokoda a few years before. “The boys would sing, and it was a joy just walking in the jungle and getting to know the culture,” he’d told me. This time his porter was a shy, quiet young man named Andrew. “It was his first trek,” Bennett said, “and had it continued, I would have gotten to know him very well.”

As the other porters met their clients—one head guide, one for each of the eight trekkers and King, plus nine more to carry the food and tarps and cooking equipment—King was surprised to notice that Rarovu smelled of alcohol. And although King had told Reuben to hire porters from villages spread evenly along the trail, 11 of the 19 were from Reuben’s own village. Which meant that, at the end of the trek, three or four thousand dollars would be flooding Salamaua, with much less going to the others. Only one porter was from Kamiatum, two from Mubo, one from Goudagasule, and two from Skin Diwai. Rarovu and Gibob were from Biawen, just up the road from Kaisinik.

But it was too late to change the makeup of the porters. And King trusted Reuben’s decisions: he knew tribal politics better than she. For his part, Reuben believed then—and believes now—that the distribution of his hiring was fair and appropriate.

Around 7 A.M. the trek began, 27 men and King, the porters in baseball caps and bare feet under heavy backpacks, the Australians wearing brimmed bush hats and carrying hiking poles. Each porter walked behind his client, Rarovu and King at the rear. The trail led from the road down a steep hill and then began climbing into the grassland, a narrow, slippery track. By nine they reached the carcass of a World War II B-17 that lay broken in two but was mostly intact after crashing into the hillside 70 years before. Everyone posed for photos, grinning, looking excited even in the drizzly weather, Reuben and Rarovu kneeling, proudly holding up their most important tool in the bush—a long machete.

They set out again, soon reaching the ridgetops and entering a thick, wet stand of woods. It was foggy, cloudy; the trees dripped. The Australians were going deeper, in every way, into the folds and complexities of a very complex place that few whites, even longtime PNG residents like the Kings, fully understood. To the Australians it was all just wilderness. That night they would camp at Banis-Donki, and from there they’d head to the thatch huts of remote villages.

But the Papuans, I was learning from Yawa and the men who sat around his fire at night, saw it all differently. Salamaua was in a region of Bong-speaking coastal people scattered in distinct small villages; Reuben’s was called Lagui. As the track rose inland, it entered territory that looked the same but wasn’t—the home of the Iwal people, centered in the villages of Mubo and Bitoi. And then, toward the head of the track, it entered Yawa and Rarovu’s territory, the lands of the Biangai.

The Bong, Iwal, and Biangai all knew where their respective territories began and ended, knew who owned what, knew who was from where just by looking at them. And they all spoke different languages. PNG had been like that for 40,000 years, a patchwork of hundreds of language groups and tribes whose relationship with their neighbors over the next ridge or across the next river often had been either nonexistent or violent, though on the Black Cat Track everyone had always gotten along.

On the Black Cat, additionally, there was a difference between the two ends of the route and the middle. Lagui, along the coast, was an hour by boat from Lae and had been in contact with the outside world for 150 years. Though undeveloped, it had cell service, tourists coming and going, a small but constant stream of income. The same was true of Wau and Kaisinik and Biawen at the highland end, which were reachable by road and set amid coffee plantations and a large and growing gold mine.

But villages in the middle were wilder, poorer, had no cell service, and were connected to the world only on arduous footpaths. The villages along the track itself, like Mubo, at least saw the occasional trekker. Villages like Bitoi, across the ridge from Mubo, saw no outsiders at all.

The Iwal in the middle wanted a system in which porters would work only inside their own tribal boundaries, with trekkers changing porters along the way, thereby ensuring that each region and tribe got work. But the trekkers and trekking companies didn’t like that arrangement. Trekkers wanted to get to know one porter for the duration of the hike. The companies didn’t want to have to deal with the complex logistics of switching porters around. And since most of the track went through Iwal country, the Bong and Biangai at either end would see far less work and revenue.

King was aware of these issues, as was everyone who lived in the area. A year before, she and her husband and Reuben had hiked up to Mubo, carrying a load of donated medical supplies for its clinic. The place had given her a bad feeling. But she thought they’d be OK, and she’d specifically asked Reuben to pick boys from every village.

King and the Australians didn’t know it, but in the village of Kamiatum, Reuben had encountered a group of men who questioned him. “They asked me if I was going to take porters from each village, and I said that’s what I was doing,” Reuben would tell me later. “I asked the boys where they were from, and they said Bitoi.” When King and the trekkers arrived at Banis-Donki to set up camp, the attack had already been planned, set in motion by that encounter. It was the only campsite that was remote, not in a village, away from prying eyes. And the attackers were there, waiting, hidden in the bush.

One evening at Yawa’s house, a large group of Biangai elders began arriving to discuss their land suit against the Watuts. One by one they trickled in, until more than 20 were sitting around an open-air fire, drinking tea and coffee, chewing betel and smoking. The fire crackled and the sound of the Bulolo’s rushing water filled the night as they recounted a much more detailed version of what happened after the attack.

The Australian clients stumbled down the mountain and were quickly flown home. But even as they were being sewn up that night, Wele Koyu, a former Kaisinik village counselor and veteran porter, gathered four policemen and 24 local boys and began hiking up the track after midnight, along with the Morobe Mines logistics officer Daniel Hargreaves. Arriving at the attack site at 4:30 A.M., they tended to the injured porters and cleared a landing zone.

“It was cold, there was blood everywhere, and the porters were crying,” Koyu said. In two helicopter flights that morning, the injured were taken to Lae’s Angau hospital. They got there at the same time that a massive bus accident flooded the hospital with more dead and injured. There they languished, without blood, antibiotics, or painkillers.

In a country not known for its police efficiency, the Kings and their friends called PNG’s prime minister, Peter O’Neill. “From the minute it started, expats took control,” an expat who had closely watched the case had already told me. They pressured O’Neill, pressured the police, made sure helicopters were up and operating, oversaw the hospitalization and treatment of the porters, talked to the police after every arrest. Immediately, a helicopter and a mobile reaction force—a well-trained and heavily armed unit of the federal police created to combat tribal violence—began combing the area around the track. After the injured porters had spent four days in the public hospital, the expats moved all of them to the private Lae International Hospital, even as a third porter, Lionel Aigilo, died from his injuries. The expat liaison began paying off one of the suspects’ brothers, “To keep channels open,” he told me.

The expat’s message to me was clear: in a culture where payback was standard, where suspects under police custody often “died” before making it to court, the understanding was that anyone who turned themselves in would be safe.

Which, in light of what happened next, was a pretty good offer. In the minds of the Papuans, there was no question about what had occurred: Kerry Rarovu had been assassinated. The big man who got all the work had been struck first, targeted and hacked into oblivion. Matthew Gibob, also from the Wau area, had been next. Just as obvious was where the attackers came from. Everybody believed they were Iwal people from the villages of Bitoi, Mubo, and Wapali, long jealous of the work given to the people from either end of the track—even though, since they wore masks, their faces hadn’t been visible.

“The next day, the boys from Kaisinik went out searching for the culprits,” Koyu said, leaning in close, “in two groups, and we searched day and night.” In the Western world, people often live anonymously, away from family, unattached electrons floating free from all bonds. In places like PNG, everyone is bound to something, and there’s nowhere to hide. In the villages, everyone knows everything: who you are, who your parents and cousins and aunts and uncles are, where you’re from by your language or looks. And in Papuan cultures, reciprocal violence is everything, and always has been. On Saturday, four days after the attack, the brother of Gibob, the second porter to die, caught wind of a family suspected of harboring one of the attackers in Bitoi.

“Matthew’s brother and relations” killed three, Koyu said. “They went in and cut them and chopped them and killed them with the bush knife.” As Koyu told the story, the men around us all nodded in approval. The act created no moral or ethical dilemma for them. Here, such violence was more than expected. It was necessary, and it was how the world was balanced.

There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and the boys from Biawen and Kaisinik and Lagui were scouring the ridgetops, the valleys, the villages, ready to burn and cut anyone who had anything to do with the attacks. Jail was safer than trying to escape. On Sunday, the day after Koyu and a gang arrived in Wapali with a police patrol, three men surrendered in exchange for being whisked away in a helicopter. “Otherwise the boys would have butchered them, chopped them to pieces,” Koyu said.

King and the eight clients all insisted they’d seen only three attackers. But as the next month unfolded, ten men were arrested, every one turning himself in to police, including some of the uninjured porters themselves, who were connected to the three main culprits by their cellphone records.

The attack, it turned out, was an inside job. Though the exact sequence of events may never be known, and none of the alleged attackers has faced a trial yet, the basic outline seems clear. Three brothers from around Bitoi, one of them nicknamed Rambo, were career criminals who’d done jail time for robbery and murder. They escaped and, up in the hills around Bitoi and Mubo, heard of the coming trek, knew of the envy and resentment of their fellow Iwal, and knew of the cash the party would be carrying. Robbery and payback coincided, mated.

In the morning, Yawa drove me back down to Lae and I flew to the coastal city of Madang, where I found the wounded head porter Dick Reuben sitting in a hospital bed. Crowds milled around the grounds outside, filled the halls. In PNG hospitals, patients are responsible for much of their own care, so he was being tended 24 hours a day by a man named Labi, from Reuben’s village, Lagui.

Two months had passed since the attack, but Reuben’s wounds remained hard to look at. His left leg had healed, a Frankenstein-like scar running across the cut Achilles tendon, but he still had little movement in his foot. His right leg was another matter: a gaping pink gash, three inches long and an inch wide, remained in the meat of his calf, where the machete had sliced deep. It was a strange scene. After a week of reporting, I knew something Reuben didn’t—even as he languished, the police suspected Labi, his caretaker, of complicity in the attack. (At press time, however, Labi had not been arrested or charged with anything.)Ìę

I spent a few hours with Reuben, watched as the doctor checked his wound. Raw and open as it remained, it was clean, healing, and at some point soon he’d be allowed to go home. To what, exactly, was unclear. He could walk slowly, haltingly, but he’d never again carry a 40-pound pack up or down mountain trails, and he had no idea how he’d support his four children, the youngest newly born. I bought him a couple of bags of groceries and some cellphone credit, and flew back to Lae, where I boarded a local boat packed with 16 Papuans and one bandicoot and traveled across the Huon Gulf to his village.

Lagui is beautiful, a narrow isthmus of white sand between sparkling blue water. Quiet, with no roads, no cars, no engines, only the sound of wind in the coconut palms and children’s voices. The houses are palm thatch, lit at night by kerosene lanterns and candles. It is a lovely place, bursting with pink and purple bougainvillea, the perfect ending to an arduous hike through the mountains, from clouds and chill to brightness and balmy heat. But for the foreseeable future, there won’t be any trekkers coming, no tents pitched on its beach.

“Not until our demands are met,” said Nick Aigilo, whose brother Lionel was killed in the attack. I was sitting with Aigilo on the bamboo floor of his house, an open fire smoldering on a bed of mud. With us was a porter named Jeremiah Jack, who’d been sliced in both legs. He was quiet and shy, thin, with a wisp of a mustache, his English poor. He thought he was “about 22.” Now he was a cripple who could barely walk. “These legs have done so many things,” he said. “They walk up and down, and so they chopped them so they won’t walk again. It wasn’t just robbery.”

The Black Cat Track is closed, and no one—not Koyu up in Kaisinik or anyone in Lagui—thinks it will open anytime soon. The region remains tense. “The Iwal must pay,” Aigilo said. “What we call bel kol: money and pigs, traditional things, and until then the boys don’t want to see any Iwal around. We’ll crucify them.” For all the people inland along the track, it remains the only route to the outside world—either through Kaisinik and Biawen in the highlands, or through Lagui to the coast and to Lae. Already, they say in Lagui, two people from interior villages have died because they couldn’t get to the medical clinic on the coast.

I walked through the quiet village with Gilan Sakiang, the local elder. Lionel’s grave looks over the sea, covered in masses of colorful plastic flowers. His mother accosted me, weeping. “Why?” she said in English. “Why have you come to remind me of Lionel?”

PNG Trekking paid for funeral services for the dead but won’t pay anything further to the maimed porters, maintaining that PNG’s worker’s compensation law should take care of them.

“We sit here and look at the white men’s houses,” said Sakiang, “but we get much more from tourists on the Black Cat. Now we have nothing.”

The trekkers themselves are shaken but moving on. They have created a fund to help pay for their porters’ medical expenses, but the idea—to hike the track again with a TV crew—fell apart. Things were just too unsettled, too hot.

Which is a common sentiment, often expressed by people who think of themselves as travelers, not just tourists, people eager to get out of their hotels and really plunge into the world. I had said much the same thing myself many times. But I wondered, as I headed back across the Huon Gulf to Lae in a boat packed with people from tiny villages perched on the edge of the sea and the jungle, whether we ever really saw beyond the facade. It was easy to hang out with complicated people from remote places but much harder to know them.

Bennett was feeling optimistic. “The world is a violent and wild place, but that’s the adventure,” he’d told me. “And lightning never strikes twice, right?”

Christy King wasn't so sure when I spoke with her in Lae. The original TV deal the Aussie clients had been trying to negotiate would have required her to accompany them on a hike of the whole track. It collapsed when she refused to take part.

“I would never do it again,” she said, smoking a cigarette behind the high walls of her house, an old habit she’d temporarily resumed after the attack, the only outward sign of its toll. “It’s too dangerous.” King added that, during the incident, she was “worried that the clients might try to do something—they were all big, tough guys, but none tried to be a hero, and they just obeyed and stayed down, so we were lucky. But the Black Cat, unlike Kokoda, is so remote, you can’t do it without carrying large amounts of cash to pay the porters and for everything along the way.”

King loves PNG and always will. But it’s time for her kids to be able to walk to school and play in the streets, she says. For them to have a normal childhood. Though her husband will remain in Lae, tending the family business, she and the kids are moving to Cairns, Australia. Who knows if she’ll ever walk the Black Cat again?

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Mumbai: The city’s cattle class train commute has put a big question mark over the future of a brilliant sixteen-year-old girl. Raushan Jawwad, who scored over 92 percent in her class X examination a few months ago, lost both legs after being pushed out of a crowded local train near Andheri on Tuesday.

The Lunatic Express

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The Lunatic Express

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The Lunatic Express

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The Lunatic Express

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The Lunatic Express

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The Lunatic Express

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—Times of India, October 17, 2008

“Everything in that book is true,” said Nasirbhai. It was almost 100 degrees, the humidity of the Arabian Sea pressing down, and he was wearing a white dress shirt over a sleeveless undershirt, pleated black slacks, and black oxford shoes. Small scars were etched around brown eyes that studied me from a wide, inscrutable face; a big stone of lapis studded one finger, and a silver bracelet dangled from his wrist. He had a barrel chest and his hands hung at his sides, ready, waiting—never in his pockets. He looked immovable, like a pitbull, like a character from another time and place, and in a way he was. “That book” was Shantaram, the international best-selling novel written by Australian Gregory David Roberts, who’d escaped from prison in Oz and found his way to Bombay two decades ago, where he’d become deeply involved with its criminal gangs and Nasir—who always carried the honorific bhai, “brother.”

“We met in the 1980s,” Nasirbhai said, standing on a corner in Colaba, one of Mumbai’s oldest neighborhoods and its tourist epicenter, the streets lined with vendors selling tobacco and sandals and newspapers and bangles, pedestrians as thick on the sidewalks as attendees at a rock concert. Roberts was famous now, a Mumbai legend, and through a friend of a friend had connected me to Nasirbhai, who agreed to take me deep onto the commuter trains of the most crowded city on earth, where the day’s simple commute was a matter of life and death. “Traveling on these trains is very risky because they are so full,” Nasirbhai said. “But people must be at work, they must not be late or their boss will fire them. They must get to their destination, so they lean out of the doors, hang on to the windows, climb on top of the train. They risk their life to get to work every day.”

By population, the city—just nineteen miles across, with 19 million souls—was bigger than 173 countries. The population density of America was thirty-one people per square kilometer; Singapore 2,535 and Bombay island 17,550; some neighborhoods had nearly one million people per square kilometer. A neverending stream of Indians was migrating to Mumbai, which was swelling, groaning, barely able to keep pace. In 1990 an average of 3,408 people were packing a nine-car train; ten years later that number had grown to more than 4,500. Seven million people a day rode the trains, fourteen times the whole population of Washington, D.C. But it was the death rate that shocked the most; Nasirbhai was no exaggerating alarmist. In April 2008 Mumbai’s Central and Western railway released the official numbers: 20,706 Mumbaikers killed on the trains in the last five years. They were the most dangerous conveyances on earth.

As we threaded through packed sidewalks and streets toward Chhatrapati Terminus, still mostly known by its old British name, Victoria Terminus (or VT for short), Nasirbhai talked about his life and meeting Roberts. “I was a big man then,” he said. “Fighting every day. Drugs were my business. I sold hash and brown sugar.” Usually when he sold drugs to foreigners, Nasirbhai did the deal and the transaction was over; dealer and buyer went their separate ways. For some reason, however, he and Roberts toked together. “I don’t know why. Destiny. I loved him. And then he started doing brown sugar and I hated him.” The rich smell of garbage and shit filled the heavy air, and Nasirbhai guided me like a child, between lines of traffic and careening buses. “If you’re not like me you cannot live in this city. You have to be tough.” Roberts, like so many foreigners, eventually disappeared, and Nasirbhai didn’t hear from him for fifteen years. He continued to live off the streets and deal drugs. Then, in 2000, he was arrested. Set up. “I sold a lot of drugs to Bollywood stars—I grew up with them, with superstars, including Fardeen Khan,” the son of the late legendary director Feroze Khan. For his deals, Nasirbhai used a taxi driver he trusted. The driver had been arrested for selling heroin a few days before, and, under pressure, had agreed to cooperate with police. By the time Nasirbhai met Fardeen on May 4, 2001, police from the Narcotics Control Board were waiting. “We were just making the deal”—Nasirbhai had nine grams of cocaine—”when a car came up in front and another in back. They jumped out with guns. Fardeen hit the locks, said, ‘What do we do?’ I said, ‘nothing, there is nothing we can do. They have guns.'”

The Bollywood star was released from prison in six days. “His father got him out,” said Nasirbhai, who spent eleven months in Mumbai’s notorious Arthur Road Prison. A few years later, Roberts suddenly reappeared out of nowhere. A ghost, returned. And he wasn’t running from the law anymore, smoking dope and shooting heroin in his veins. He was free, rich, and famous. “It was my destiny; I do not know what I did to deserve this. He told me to stop selling drugs and to reinvent myself. He paid for my house, my daughter’s wedding, my kids’ school, and now he pays me to work for him, only him. He is a man of his word and he saved me. First he became my friend. Then my brother. Then my boss and Godfather.”

VT was like a huge funnel, sucking and channeling the hordes inside; sixteen ticket windows lined the walls, each with a line snaking fifty feet; all of India was here, lying on the floors, walking, running, selling, buying. The line moved quickly.

Nasirbhai barked a few words and out spit two tickets for fifteen rupees each—about twenty-five cents. We threaded and bounced through the jostling crowds, passed through a bank of inactive metal detectors into the vast departure hall, a vaulted, corrugated roof on cast iron pillars. Built by the British Raj between 1878 and 1888, it echoed Victoria Station in London. “I will show you my style of traveling,” Nasirbhai said. “But first, chai.” It was a constant ritual. Over the next three days, on seemingly every corner, every train station, Nasirbhai and I paused for the sweet milky tea, served in thin, hand-formed clay cups vigorously thrown to the ground or smashed into a bucket when we were done.

“Listen,” he said, as we sipped our tea and a tide of people swept past, “It is very difficult to get inside a train, and once you get in it is more difficult to get out. Sometimes you have to get out three or four stations ahead because you won’t have a chance later.” Many Mumbaikers had commutes of two and three hours each way in and out of the suburbs. A long time to stand up, many had taken to riding the train the wrong way first, to the beginning of the line, where they might get seats. “But sometimes the train changes its route! They get stuck on the wrong train and have to start all over again! And sometimes you get so dirty from the train you feel ashamed. Sometimes it’s so crowded you have to hang outside and there is a very small place between the train and the poles and you hit the poles and you’re fucked. But what can you do? You must reach your job, man. It is fucking terrible.”

We finished our tea, threw the cups on the ground, and strode down the platforms, six for the Central Line and one for the Harbor Line, some with waiting trains. Nasirbhai’s eyes darted back and forth like he was scanning for roadside bombs. “Follow me,” he said, dashing in the door of a waiting train and out the other side, to change tracks. “You’ve got to watch all the time. There is the right place to stand and the wrong place; you can get pinned with your hands up on the straps and you can get pickpocketed—people have a lot of practice. You have anything in your pockets? Camera? Wallet?”

I didn’t; one of my cardinal rules of traveling was never to carry anything in my back pockets, and I kept my cash divided between the two front pockets, my passport and credit cards and most of my cash strapped to my leg.

“Be careful. You stay close to me. They will look you in your eyes. I meet them and say, ‘Fuck you, man.’ Do what I do, okay?” Sometimes, he explained, when it got really crowded he jumped in the cars reserved for handicapped riders. “And even that is crowded, jammed. People say, ‘You look good, man. Show me your [handicapped] card.’ I say, ‘You show me yours first.’ Fights happen, man. People get killed for their seats.” From his years on the streets Nasirbhai saw the world offensively, a place full of opportunists and thieves and danger lurking around every corner. He was a boxer on the ropes, his guard up every minute. The crowd was a current piling up on the platform like at the wall of a dam—saffron and crimson saris and men in blue jeans, and beggars shuffling on their knuckles. “With this crowd, the pickpockets come,” Nasirbhai said. “They work the crowd. But listen, they don’t have magic! They cannot stand far away and make your wallet or phone come to them. They must touch you. So never let anyone touch you anywhere in the world. The beggars are trained. ‘Hello, hello,’ they’ll say, and they’ll feel your pockets. They’ll bump you once. You don’t do anything. They’ll bump you again, and you don’t do anything—you think it’s an accident. But they’re watching your reaction; the third time they’ll take your wallet or your phone.” In the crowds, hanging on the straps, he warned, opportunists might try to block me with their elbows. But they’d never get Nasirbhai. “My eyes and my brains are how I make money. I can tell: he’s a pimp; he’s a robber. I have that judgment.”

We pushed to the edge of the platform, the crowd building. Waiting. Anticipating. A train came. The crowd shifted; it was one entity. We shuffled to the left, we shuffled to the right. Where would the doorway stop? And before it did, sudden chaos—like the hike of a football on the line of scrimmage. One organism full of individual parts, we scrambled and pushed. The faces were hungry, desperate, and I grabbed the door’s rail and pulled myself onto the train. “And it’s early, man!” said Nasirbhai, laughing, when we squished in. “Come, follow me.” The vestibules were wide and big, but I followed Nasirbhai, squeezing past hot bodies, into the corridor between seats. The trains were industrial, no attempt made for comfort: metal floors, metal walls, metal benches facing each other in groups of two, bars on the windows, hundreds of handles hanging from the ceiling. Nasirbhai pushed me between the windows. It was his spot; there, standing with my ass in one person’s face and my crotch in another’s, my side to the wall, no one could pickpocket me, and fresh air streamed in through the window. Nasirbhai looked triumphant.

The train rocketed through Mumbai, north toward the suburbs. It stopped every few minutes and a mad rush ensued at the doorways. A stream of beggars moved through, including an exotic, sharp-featured woman with skin like mahogany and long black braids woven with marigolds and a red bindi the size of a quarter on her forehead. She wore a tight gold sari and a gold ring in her nose. Nasirbhai gave her a coin and I followed. She blessed us, touching our foreheads. There was something strange and beautiful about her. “A man,” said Nasirbhai.

A man and little girl squeezed through and came to rest, standing, at the end of the bench. Nasirbhai touched the shoulder of the man seated on the end. He ignored Nasirbhai, who tapped again, harder, motioned with his hand to move. Nasirbhai had the look; you didn’t mess with him. The man moved, the woman next to him moved, the whole organism squished more closely together to produce another six inches for the girl to sit.

Nearing Dadar station, we began working our way back toward the doorway. Nasirbhai pulled me tight against the walls; we were in a dense crush, the doorways open, people hanging out. “You get ready,” he said. As the train slowed, people ran up toward the doors, started grabbing the handles and swinging in—but there was nowhere to go, we were packed and already pushing out—and before we stopped the edges piled out, and we lunged and leapt onto the concrete. “I had a friend,” Nasirbhai said, as we headed to a tea stand, “who chewed tobacco. He had to spit and when he leaned out to spit, his head hit a pillar and it was his last spit.”

We moved to another platform over a bridge and steps that were shoulder-to-shoulder with people. Sometimes, Nasirbhai said, men just walked up and down the stairs in the crush feeling women. “They go up and down ten times. I don’t understand it, but women, they get fucked. In India, if there weren’t red-light districts, women would not survive.”

We boarded again, this time staying near the open door. DO NOT LEAN OUT OF RUNNING TRAIN AS IT IS DANGEROUS AND CAN BE FATAL, read a sign. Which was like telling the ocean not to leak into a wooden ship. I leaned out, feeling a constant pressure on my back, a wall pushing against me that required resisting at all times. Electrical poles whipped by just six inches away. We cut through slums and past crumbling buildings, black with mold and dripping open pipes, makeshift tents of plastic tarp and string and old tires a foot from the train whipping by. Men and women dozed on charpoys—wooden beds—and cooked over open braziers two feet away.

At Thane station I noticed two battered and dented aluminum stretchers leaning against the wall outside the stationmaster’s office. “We have an average of ten deaths a month within seven kilometers of this station,” said Miland Salke, Kandivali’s deputy stationmaster, below a hand-lettered sign: LIST OF HOSPITALS AND UNITS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF KANDIVALI. He shrugged, waggled his head. Today, he said without emotion or amazement, there had been three accidents. Just outside of the station a man had walked up to the tracks and then, at the right moment, laid his head down on the hot steel. He died instantly. A suicide. At 1:00 a.m., nine hours before, the last Western Line train of the night slid into Kandivali Station and cut a fifty-five-year-old man into two pieces. He was trying to cross the tracks. And a few hours later, as another Central Line train pulled into Thane, the crowd ejected a young man out the door. I could feel it, had just felt it as we’d pulled into the station like a watermelon seed squeezed between your fingers. He, too, died instantly.

It was now rush hour, and after another round of chai we prepared for battle. Passengers ten deep waited on the platform stretched out over 100 yards, the women—a riot of swirling purples and blues and golds, of black braids and golden bracelets and bangles and nose rings—in their own group, angling for the “ladies'” cars. A train came—they came in fast. It was full, packed, not an inch to spare. The crowd became one again. A thing. It moved forward. Left. Right. Slowly at first; you couldn’t know, after all, where the open doorways would pause. Then, suddenly, an explosion, a riot, a volcanic eruption, a struggle balancing on the edge of life and death.

The train was slowing. People burst from the doorways and leapt into a crowd that was surging forward toward the very same door. The struggle was short and violent; you pushed, were pushed. Your body feels a crushing weight, a powerful wave at your back. You cannot stop or even pause. But your feet cannot move fast enough. You shuffle your feet forward, try to keep them under you. Your only hope is to grasp the door, a pole, a handle. Anything. There is punching. Elbows sharp in my kidneys. I see a man palm another man in the face. I am nearly at the doorway. The man in front of me falls—his body is being pushed, but his feet can’t move fast enough—they get stuck at the step up onto the train. Another man falls onto his back—this is how people are trampled to death—and I am next. I grab the edge of the door to steady myself, to resist the surging weight and wall at my back, to pull into a place where there is no room. The men will be crushed. The crowd is a spasming muscle. One of the downed men shouts. Somehow, hands reach down and pull them up. A shoe is left behind; it will never be recovered. And then we’re in. Tight, from hips to shoulders. I cannot move, but I must. To stay in the doorway is to risk death at the next station when the next violent pulse comes. “In ten years,” Nasirbhai said, “you will need helmets and football pads just to travel to work!”

It was now dark, after 8:00 p.m., and I felt exhausted. “Come,” Nasirbhai said, “I have some friends I want to see. They’re all bad guys, but they’re my family.” We jumped off the train in the Muslim neighborhood of Mumbra, grabbed an auto rickshaw, and navigated through a swirling phantasmagoria of humanity. Goats. Donkeys. Beggars cross-legged in the streets as cars and rickshaws and motorcycles careened and inched around them. Women in full black burqas. Fish sizzling on grills and dangling carcasses and dust and noise. “Ten years ago there was nothing here; Mumbra was a village,” Nasirbhai said. “There was a single bullock cart and you had to make a reservation if you needed it to take you anywhere.” Now there were one and a half million people living in four square kilometers.

We emerged from the rickshaw at a concrete apartment building, and I followed Nasirbhai down an alley of rubble, the building completely dark, without electricity. We wound through narrow concrete halls and up concrete stairways, and came to a one-room apartment full of shadows and dancing candlelight. There was one chair, a television, a mattress pushed up against the wall, and a poster of Mecca, and three men sat cross-legged on the floor. One of them was old, with a single tooth, wearing a skullcap, and was called Nima—grandfather, said Nasirbhai—introducing me to his son-in-law’s father and his sons. As they talked in Hindi, someone brought out a chillum—a hash pipe—and a ball of moist Kashmiri hash, which Nasirbhai rolled and mixed with tobacco in the palm of his hand, back and forth, back and forth, and packed it into the pipe. “I don’t drink or smoke anymore, since my mother died. It makes me bad; I want to fight.” He took a square of white muslin, wet it, squeezed it, and wet it again and squeezed it tight and wrapped it around the mouthpiece and we smoked, except for Nasirbhai, the pipe passing around, as a little girl wandered in—the old man’s great-granddaughter—and plunked down in his lap and two generations of the family got stoned together, and the hash was good and sweet and the talk and language rolled and I wondered where I was and how exactly I’d gotten here and the world seemed so varied and rich and beyond my comprehension. We smoked a couple more bowls, the pipe passing round and round, and by the time Nasirbhai and I were back on the train heading downtown, it was nearly empty, just a big steel tube clacking and rattling, the wind hot and smoky at the door, fires burning on the tracks illuminating the dim shadows of hundreds ofpeople walking and squatting in the night.

Nasirbhai knocked on my door at six-thirty the next morning in order to hit the morning rush hour. “Come,” he said. “I have been up since five and we must have breakfast and tea.” We entered a cafĂ© full of round wooden-legged tables topped with thick marble slabs, the walls covered with mirrors, the waiters all in dhotis and caps, with beards. “This place is very old,” Nasirbhai said as we sipped tea. “It’s been here since I was a boy and it is just the same.”

We spent the morning fighting the crowds on the Churchgate line and, near noon, Nasirbhai took me to St. George’s hospital, around the corner from Victoria Terminus. “Let’s find some bodies,” he said, “some victims of the trains, and you can see for yourself.” That seemed weird and impossible, but he insisted, said he had a friend at the hospital who’d help. The hospital was a huge block of stone, built by the Raj in 1908, with arched windows open to the dust and heat. We stood in an open hall—hushed—as ceiling fans beat the humid air and the twittering of birds wafted in. A man sat in a wheelchair, his head swathed in bandages like a character in a movie; another man lay on a stretcher. Nasirbhai talked to people, stalked the halls and said his friend wasn’t here—he had been injured on the train! It seemed a joke, but Nasirbhai didn’t acknowledge the irony. “But don’t worry,” he said. “I am known and people will see me and come.” Which people did, approaching him and whispering in his ear, until Nasirbhai barked “Come!” and took off out the front door. We padded down the steps, walked around the hospital and down a cobblestone alley that turned into a crowded row of shacks and houses running alongside the hospital. Big black crows hopped and cawed; mangy dogs covered in scars, with drooping teats, lolled in the sun. Smoke. The reek of garbage. Geese and roosters pecked at the heaps of trash. We came to an eight-foot-high concrete wall, mottled black with mold and soot. A steel gate, crooked on one hinge, lay open. The flag- stone courtyard of a small concrete building with a corrugated roof piled with broken chairs, the limbs of bare trees, a couple of rubber tires. Those big black crows everywhere. Watching. Waiting. Cawing. This was the hospital’s mortuary.

Two men were sitting on a wooden bench. Nasirbhai strode up to them and spoke in rapid Hindi. “Sit down, Carl,” he said, introducing me to Santosh R. Siddu and his son, Sanjay. Santosh, fifty-five, had a long brown face and a prominent, almost Roman nose, a thin mustache. He wore unhemmed plaid shorts, battered flip-flops, and a Nike golf cap atop his gray and orange-colored hair. His son was twenty-five, and sported a pair of hip, rimless glasses. Nasirbhai dug into his pockets and pulled out a chillum and a round pea of hash, and the Siddus passed the pipe around in the heat and sun and eerie cawing. When we were done Nasirbhai said, “They do the postmortems for the hospital and they will tell you anything; you can ask them anything and they will show you anything.”

I followed Santosh inside: the room was twenty feet square, unpainted concrete, black with age and mold. Two marble tables stood in the middle; haphazardly spread across one of them, and on shelves in a corner, were plastic jars. “Spleen,” Santosh said, pointing to one that looked like a sponge soaked in blood. “Intestines. Heart. All of these are filled with body parts.” A white enamel tray held a stainless-steel hammer and chisel, a pair of scissors. They had dark stains, bits of something. I had a feeling of dread; it felt hot and cold at the same time. “We have a minimum of two or three bodies every day from the trains,” Santosh said. “Maybe seventy-five percent are unknown, and sometimes the bodies are so destroyed we can’t tell much. Sometimes suicide, sometimes they’re drunk, sometimes they are old and get jarred so much in the crowd they have a heart attack.” A goose honked and poked its head into the room. Death—raw, banal death—hung in the air. So much ceremony surrounded death, gave it meaning, raised it to sadness and glory, and nowhere was that truer than in India. Except this felt like I was seeing the man behind the curtain. One minute you were riding a train to work or to hang out with your family, the next you were cut up on a marble slab in a hot, dirty concrete room. Dead. No glory. No future. A piece of meat. Santosh poked around in a corner piled with papers and pulled out a log book. “Today Balkishan Kakoram. Forty-seven years old. Hindu. He was traveling and fell. He is railway postmortem number 290.” That was, the 290th victim within eight to ten kilometers of the hospital this year. He had died an hour and a half before our visit. “The station sweepers take the body and the railway police bring it here.” In the last twenty-four hours there had been four deaths. One had lost his arm, two their heads.

Santosh led me out of the room, to a tiny antechamber with a corroded steel door with a refrigerator-like handle. He pulled it open. The smell of death made me gag. I almost vomited. A dark room. Bodies lay on shelves. A crumpled, bent, contorted figure lay in a pool of liquid on the floor. Meat. Human meat caught in the mad wheels of the daily grind. A commute that chewed you up and spit you out, so mammoth an assembly line of human movement going so fast that not everyone could keep up.

The crows cawed. Santosh shrugged. “One of them, a man, his whole right side is gone; his liver is gone.”

A call came; a doctor was heading over from the hospital to watch Santosh perform the postmortem on Balkishan Kakoram. He threw on a plastic apron and some rubber gloves and we went outside. He finished quickly. Fifteen minutes later he came out and we squatted in the alley and drank tea, and father and son smoked another bowl of hash. Three small boys played a game of cricket with a chipped bat against the mortuary wall. “He went for his job and didn’t reach his office. The train came into VT station at nine-thirty this morning and he jumped off but he jumped the wrong way and his ankle got caught and he broke it and fell and hit his head.” Father and son were close; they leaned on each other, bumped bodies, held hands, draped their arms around each other. And they lived next door to the gruesome place. “He fell hard; his brain was full of blood.” Sanjay was twenty-five and would take over from his father, who’d been conducting this grim business for twenty-eight years. “I can do ten a day,” Sanjay said, taking a long draw off the pipe. “But some bodies come in decomposed and there are many maggots and gangrene and my father has to do it. I can’t. The bodies smell so bad I faint.”

Another round of the pipe; Nasirbhai knew his stuff, knew how to make people talk. “But it is hard, you can’t bear it,” said Santosh. “Any normal person would faint within minutes.”

“We drink together,” said Sanjay.

“I must eat after a postmortem,” said Santosh. “Meat. Lots of meat and drink!”

They jostled each other, laughed loudly. But it was a mask. “Without drink,” said Santosh, “you cannot do this job.”

“When I travel on the train,” Sanjay said, taking a long hit off the pipe, “I am very cautious.”

IT WAS TIME for me to leave Mumbai; I wanted more crowds and decided I’d push on to Bangladesh via a train to Kolkata. Nasirbhai said he’d get my ticket, and late that afternoon I hopped on the back of his motorcycle and we ripped through the streets of Colaba. Every streetcorner had groups of men and boys lounging, sitting on cars and motorcycles and curbs, and Nasirbhai roared from corner to corner, pausing, talking, introducing me. There was an army here, just sitting and waiting and watching, and soon Nasirbhai had them getting me a ticket. I paid in advance, and he said my ticket would appear at my hotel that evening. “Don’t worry,” Nasirbhai said. “You will get your ticket. They wouldn’t dare not come through.”

Which they did, and at five the next morning I threaded past rows of bodies wrapped in blankets and scarves lying on the sidewalk, to VT. The waiting room was a mass, a formless huddle of color and sleeping bodies. There were hundreds, all packed close into a square, touching; since Indonesia I had this increasing picture of the world as a place with masses and masses of people huddled together, touching, always touching each other. Nobody seemed to mind; they expected it, felt comfortable with it—craved it, in fact. I had asked for fourth class, but it turned out my ticket was in third, technically known as non-air-conditioned three tier, which was an open space of eight bunks. The train was battered, dented, scraped, with bars on the windows and swept clean, as all things in India are. I showed my ticket to people and they pointed me onward, until I found the right place, which was soon filled with five of us, as men chained and padlocked their bags to steel wire rings beneath the bottom benches. We pulled out at six on the dot and fifteen minutes later hit another station, where more people piled on, three women in yellow and purple saris, with a small barefoot girl, squeezed onto the bench next to me. A man asked to see my ticket; suddenly he started yelling at another man sitting on a bench with his legs extended. He yelled back; an explosion erupted; the man grabbed the seated guy’s knapsack and threw it to the ground, grabbed the guy’s lapels, pushed him violently. They both sat, fuming, and the young one said to me, in English, “This is ridiculous!” We passed fields, the shiny brown backsides of people relieving themselves, some of the 600 million Indians without toilets. Cattails. The sky white. Rice fields between dikes. A searing, dusty wind blew in through the window.

Someone shook my shoulder. I woke with a start, lost for a minute, unsure of where I was. The conductor, in a black blazer and white pants. “Ticket,” he said. I handed it to him. He studied it. “Your ticket is not right!” He pointed to the man who’d had the violent outburst. “I will reaffirm and return,” he said, marching off. Fifteen minutes later he came back. “Your ticket is affirmed,” he said, “but it is not for here. You must move.”

I pulled my bags from under the bench. People stared, as I squeezed and bumped through crowded aisles down six cars.

“Are you Washington?” said a man with a gray mustache, glasses, and gray pinstriped slacks, his bare feet wiggling in the air.

My ticket said where I lived instead of my name. “You are late, but you are welcome!” I squeezed in. Directly across from me sat a young couple, she in gauzy saffron sari and shawl that covered her hair, with a gold nose ring; he with a small beard and thick, heavy lips. They eyed me suspiciously, four brown eyes burrowing into me. The train rattled and shook, the noise roaring, wind pouring in, sometimes thick with the smoke of burning trash and burning fields. Goats munched on stubble. Cotton fields and bullock carts, a now blue sky, the endless fields and villages of mud brick of the motherland passing by hour after hour. A stream of beggars slid, skidded, and shuffled by. A man with no legs. A boy with no toes, his foot just a formless round ball. A man with no eyes in a soiled dhoti, led by a withered-looking woman singing a haunting melody. When the man with the mustache gave a coin, so did I. Chai sellers. Sellers of newspapers and magazines. I quickly became covered in dust and grime. At noon a man in a uniform came by and rattled away in fast Hindi. “Do you want lunch,” asked Mustache.

“Yes,” I said.

He returned a few minutes later with paper plates of dal and naan and a vegetable curry, but there wasn’t enough to go around. Mustache insisted I take his. I tried to refuse, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I tucked into Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, even though reading on trains or buses often felt unnerving. Books sweep you up, take you away, transport you. I read Philip Marlowe’s gritty tromp through 1930s Los Angeles and stopped and looked up and felt totally lost. I wasn’t in 1930s Los Angeles or my living room or on my front porch. I was on a train hurtling through India. Suddenly I felt the dirt and heat and wind, and an utter aloneness, strangers crowded against me. It was one thing to be in it constantly, to be focused and present, another to forget it and myself for a few minutes, and then to be suddenly conscious of where I actually was—the puddles on the bathroom floor, so many eyes staring at me, all alone rattling through India. Which sent me into overwhelming feelings of alienation and disconnect, feelings that had been slowly growing with every mile, especially since Indonesia. Desperate to talk to someone, to touch, to feel love and human warmth—that was the flipside of my wandering. No matter whom I talked to in my travels, whether it was Moussa on the train in Mali or Fechnor in Mombasa or Daud on the Siguntang, I couldn’t kid myself. They were fleeting connections, shallow and temporary and no substitute for the real thing. As the steel train clacked and shook and rattled and a man with a leg twisted at some impossible angle hobbled by on wooden crutches, I wondered what I was doing there. For the first time I wondered if I’d been fleeing from human connection itself. If that’s why I felt happy on muddy dirt roads in the farthest Amazon—not the escape from bills and deadlines, the mundane details of everyday life—but from the emotional tentacles of human intimacy. Out here I could miss my family, my crazy parents and my friends. I could fantasize that I was a whole person who was just away for a job. There must be a reason, I had to admit, that I couldn’t stay home, that I always sought another adventure, that the idea of spending five months away from home on the world’s worst conveyances felt so good,that escape was so much part of my life. It was a stark realization. It hit me hard. It crashed down on me, swallowed me up. I scribbled in my notepad: I wanted to be known, not just for a few days by strangers passing me on conveyances. The truth was, I had a fear that if people really did know me, they’d flee, and I hadn’t felt known or understood by anybody for a long time because I’d hidden myself from them, kept them away. I looked around. Poor old Fechnor in Africa, still sad over the charcoal seller with trading in her blood; he and I, we were both hiding in places where no one could ever really know us.

By nine that night I was rattled. I had been sitting bolt up- right on a hard bench by the open window for fifteen hours. Every muscle and bone in my body ached. I was hungry. The woman across from me winced, rubbed her stomach in distress, picked her nose. Her husband spat out the window, a tiny drop hitting my face, showed her his gums. And I was cold now and covered with a layer of black dust, my hair stiff and gritty.

I thought of Santoso holding my hand on Buru and how good that had felt. Maybe it was all starker in places like India and Indonesia or Africa, where family was everything, where there was no personal space, where there was no being alone, where everyone felt deeply connected to their home. Could I reconnect?

Couples rarely publicly embraced in India; there was no such thing as a public kiss even in Bollywood. But the staring couple across from me sat close; her head lolled on his shoulder as she fell asleep to the shaking train and the heat.

Mustache peeled an orange, broke it in two, and handed me half.

The post The 290th Victim appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Tim Roman punches a button atop the glass coffee-table-cum-fish-tank in his living room. An electronic chime echoes through the house, and out shuffles his cook. “Ribs tonight, Crispin,” Roman says.

Africa

Africa

Roman in the cockpit of his Gulfstream II in Kinshana

Ìę

“Yes, boss,” Crispin says with a bow.

“And two Cokes,” Roman adds, sucking on a Marlboro. “They got the best Cokes in this country. All local sugar. None of that corn syrup.” He takes another puff and laughs. “It's great. I push a button and they bring me a Coke!”

“This country” is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. Roman's spacious house sits behind high walls topped with coils of razor wire in Kinshasa, a teeming city of eight million on the verge of chaos. It's November 2006, and three months ago the country held its first democratic elections since 1960, a $500 million project overseen by the United Nations. Joseph Kabila and his main rival, Jean-Pierre Bemba—a former personal assistant to the long-deposed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko—were forced into a runoff just a week ago, and the votes are still being counted.

Kabila is expected to win, and Roman is part of Kabila's circle of contacts. No one knows how Bemba will react if he loses, but in a place like Congo, he who loses—and we're talking about not just one man but his whole posse, including armed militias and their access to diamonds and gold—loses everything. Out on Kinshasa's streets there are thousands of UN troops in sandbagged machine-gun nests, set amid chickens and burned cars and spiraling columns of smoke. Kinshasa is so crumbling and crowded that it looks like the set for some post-apocalyptic Hollywood extravaganza. This house has been attacked twice, and twice Roman has returned fire.

“I got the razor wire on the inside,” he says, swigging his Coke. “That way, they'll get tangled up when they hit the ground.” Right now all is relatively calm inside the boss's place: CNN is cranking loudly, the A/C is humming, a white toy poodle, Boxy, is jumping on the sofa, and Roman, a hyperactive American expat, is juggling two cell phones that never stop ringing. No leaving the house today; he's down with a touch of malaria. He's 43 and big, really big. Fat. There's just no other word for it. But despite his massive bulk, there's something attractive about his large brown eyes and expressive face, something grizzly-bear cute. His voice is deep, gravelly, and his small hands are lively when he talks.

The phone rings, Roman sighs, and—no hello, no pleasantries—just starts talking. “So he's got malaria? So big fucking deal! If he's sick, tell him to go to the fucking hospital. Here. If he goes home, he's not coming back.”

Roman hangs up, exasperated. One of his American engineers says he's sick, but Roman isn't buying it. “He's in love!” he croons in a baby voice. “Can you believe it? He buys a menyapa in the village—not a queen who lives in Kinshasa but a woman who lives in a mud hut—and he's in love and wants to bring her home!”

Roman is creating an empire in Congo. He's got a thousand guys working for him, building roads and bridges in the middle of the jungle. A 50,000-acre farm. A two-million-acre mining concession. A “country house” at a lovely bend in the river that he bought from “a chief for two hundred bucks and a bag of beans.” He's got Wimbi Dira Airways, an airline hauling 1,000 tons of cargo and 3,000 passengers a month. Not so long ago he was just a flying cowboy, free. Now he's stuck on the ground—a big man in Africa trying, as he says, “to control the uncontrollable,” addicted to the adventure, addicted to the perks of the expat life, but entwined in something so big and complex that it's hard to get a handle on. He's got vicious heartburn, the malaria comes and goes, he's having trouble sleeping thanks to all the pressure. He's got a wife in Pennsylvania whom he hasn't seen in eight months, and he's fed up with the endless strain, but he's half African himself now.

Suddenly CNN falls silent; the A/C stops. The power is out. Roman cocks his head and curses. There's a bleep, and the generator roars to life. He nods. The phone rings again. This time Roman is all obsequiousness.

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Where would you like to go, sir? One question, sir: Do you have clearance to land? I'll text you in one minute, sir.” He hangs up. “Fuck,” he says. “The minister of finance. And I don't have a copilot. Do you have a pilot's license?” he asks me. A flurry of calls and in ten minutes it's done. “OK, we're set. Anybody else I would have said ‘Fuck you,' but he writes the checks, you know. We're going to Nigeria. The minister needs to see the president.”

THEY ARE THE WORST OF THE WORST, violent hellholes where the last person you'd expect to find living large is some small-town American. Congo is a country the size of Western Europe, with only 300 miles of paved roads. It's a country reeling from 32 years of despotic one-man rule and another ten of civil war, a place where, in late 2006, 18,000 heavily armed UN troops were trying to keep the peace long enough to hold the elections. And where, the grapevine said, there was this guy from Pennsylvania making big money and having the time of his life.

“I'm sitting here watching Six Feet Under and the pool and hot tub are ten feet away,” Roman said when I called him from the U.S. “What's not to like? Come on out for a visit. I make the best damn martini on the continent!”

Roman arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, in late 1996, when the heart of Africa was pumping blood. In Rwanda, the Hutu had recently hacked to death 500,000 of their Tutsi countrymen. The Tutsi chased many of the murderous Hutu across the border into eastern Zaire, where more than a million of them gathered around the town of Goma. That was the beginning of the end of Zaire and its storied big man, Mobutu Sese Seko. It was also the beginning of Roman, a white guy from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, who helped take over a country.

When he arrived, Roman was 33 and knew nothing about Africa. But he had a thirst for adventure and he'd been around, to put it mildly. His father operated a farm, a construction company, and an airport-services operation in Hazleton. Flying and working—that's all young Tim did. By age 17 he had a private multi-engine-airplane license. Later, he became a fire-bomber pilot for the U.S. Forest Service, flew for USAir, and started a construction business and aircraft-maintenance shop in his off hours. When he got laid off from USAir in 1992, he bought his first Nord 262—a French-made two-engine turboprop with high wings, good for hauling cargo or passengers on and off short landing strips. Then a friend in the maintenance business told him about a Colombian he knew who had a Nord in Panama that had been shot up in the 1989 U.S. invasion.

That's how Roman found his true calling, the perfect business for a pilot who loved money but didn't mind a little discomfort. Wherever there is chaos and violence on the ground, you'll find men (and a few women) like Roman: Westerners with airplanes—complex, expensive machines that soar over roadblocks and pirates and borders and rapacious rebel armies and trackless jungles. Sometimes they work on their own, sometimes they do dirty work for governments or governments-in-waiting. Sometimes they do a little of everything. They're gods, of a sort, not bound to the land. If things get too bad, they just take wing and fly away.

Roman went to Panama in '92, got the plane running, and flew it to BogotĂĄ. The Colombian needed airplanes to fly “things.” The Nord was perfect, so Roman bought 13 more. But then the Colombian and his partners ran into a bit of trouble—one was arrested, the other killed. Suddenly Roman had a bunch of planes and not enough business, so he leased them to operators in Honduras, Guatemala, and Kenya, where he went to personally train the crew in the aircraft's operation and maintenance.

Africa is even more tangled than South America. Roman wasn't flying tourists over game parks; he was flying the amphetamine-like drug khat into Mogadishu, Somalia, where he got shot at, he says, “every fucking day.” And Zaire, just a few countries away, was not just a blank nothingness of jungle and desperate people; it was one of the richest places on earth. Under its jungles and savannas, in its immense rivers, lie gold and diamonds and copper, uranium and cobalt and oil. Riches so immense they boggle the mind and aid the rise and fall of nations thousands of miles away.

When the Hutu fled to Zaire, all hell broke loose. Zairean rebel Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a native of eastern Zaire, had been fighting Mobutu for some 30 years. Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire was born, backed by Rwanda and Uganda, and full-fledged war broke out in eastern Zaire.

In Nairobi, Roman watched. The guns of Mogadishu didn't bother him as much as not getting paid—after three months in Nairobi he still hadn't received the monthly leasing fee for his airplane. He could file suit to repossess the aircraft, but Roman sensed a better opportunity: Some passengers needed to get from the Rwandan city of Kigali to Goma, the Hutu stronghold. He fired up the Nord and took off, his Kenyan copilot and the plane's Kenyan “owner” fully expecting the Nord back in Nairobi in a day or so. But Roman wasn't coming back. He was seizing his own plane and flying it to the safest place he could think of—the middle of a violent African war zone, a place without rules or laws about who owns what, a place where more than four million people would die over the next few years.

Roman flew to Kigali, picked up his passengers, and flew on to Goma, in the thick of the war. The thing was, everyone spoke French. “I was fucked,” Roman says. But, while standing around on the airport's ramp, he fell into conversation with the sole English speaker, a young Congolese man named Joseph. They talked, they laughed, they shot the shit. That afternoon a Mercedes SUV pulled up and the driver waved Roman over. Joseph was inside, as was an older man. “We have a mission for you,” they said. “Can you do it?”

“If I know what it is,” Roman said, “I can do anything.”

They asked him to fly three dead and two wounded to a country that Roman won't name. “In the dark,” he was told.

“Not at night,” Roman said. “But I'll take off at 5 a.m. in the dark and land in the light.”

Joseph, it turned out, was Joseph Kabila; the older man was his father, Laurent. When Roman dropped off his cargo, his mechanic and the Kenyan copilot ran away—”They were scared shitless,” he says—and Roman returned with a load of weapons. And never stopped. For the next five months, Kabila's forces marched south and west toward Kinshasa, aided by Rwanda and Uganda.

“I did frontline support and hip-hopped my way to every dirt strip from Goma to Kinshasa,” Roman says. Bukavu. Kisangani. Lubumbashi. One shithole after another, a big fat white American smack in the heart of an epic African war and loving every minute of it. “I am an adrenaline junkie with a high tolerance for aggravation,” he says.

He flew rebel VIPs and weapons, under fire, to strips without navigation aids, strips that had been mortared, through thick African smoke and tropical thunderstorms that were “harum-scarum violent motherfuckers.” He slept in the plane, slept under the plane, ate whatever they fed him. He flew giant 105-millimeter howitzer shells, 30 to a load, two loads a day. In May 1997, Kabila's forces swept into Kinshasa and Mobutu fled the country. Kabila became president. Zaire became Congo. The U.S. embassy was in lockdown behind double rows of steel girders and a fortress of walls and barbed wire—but there was Roman, out and about.

“I left the bank in a Toyota pickup filled with sacks of cash,” he says, “and drove through Kinshasa sitting on top of the money with a soldier holding an AK-47.”

IT'S 6:30 A.M. WHEN ROMAN picks me up in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. We race through the streets of Kinshasa, swerving around potholes that could disable a bus and immense piles of fermenting garbage. Barefoot people are thwacking mangoes out of trees, and gnarled women are tending gardens in the median strips. The city is Bemba territory, and it's tense. A pro-Bemba handbill is being passed around that rails against Kabila for being a puppet of the muzunga—whites from the World Bank and the UN—and calls on the people to rise up. “This place is gonna be on fire!” Roman says, laughing.

We drive through the “red zone”—where Bemba loyalists rioted in August 2006, killing 34—pick up copilot Bruce Watson, and head for N'djili airport, 16 miles east of the city. Watson is 61, thin and gray-haired, an Australian citizen who's barely set foot in Australia, having lived his whole life in Congo. The former chief pilot for Air Zaire, he's got 23,000 hours of stick time—”an all-star in the flying game of Africa,” Roman says—and is now chief pilot for Roman's airline. The road to the airport passes through a “łŠŸ±łÙĂ©,” a slum so dense it seems impossible. There are tens of thousands of people on the roadside, hanging on to the roofs and bumpers of minivans, running through the street. The car windows are up, the doors locked, the side-view mirrors pulled in tight. “They'll rip the mirrors right off the car,” Roman says.

“Ever heard of the word lapidation?” asks Watson. “It means being stoned to death. That's what they do here.”

We pass the airport, turn up a side road, come to a gate manned by soldiers packing AK's. “Presidente!” yells Roman. They salute, the gate swings open, and we roll onto the flight line, right up to a small executive jet that looks like it's seen better days. Soldiers are everywhere. A skinny guy opens the plane and starts wiping down the stairs; Roman checks the flaps, peers into the engine, and whips out a stack of $100 bills, which he hands to the fuelers.

Suddenly four men in dark suits appear, accompanied by more soldiers—the DRC's minister of finance, the Nigerian ambassador to the DRC, and two bodyguards. Watson is already in the copilot's seat. Roman sees the men into the plane, stows their bags, and motions me in. The plane is tiny—six leather seats—and threadbare. It's 30 years old, the gold carpet is stained gray, and I squish a cockroach as I strap into a flight attendant's seat behind the cockpit.

Ten minutes later we're up, breaking through heavy clouds into sharp sunlight, climbing to 31,000 feet at 440 knots. The heat and humidity and pathos of Kinshasa are gone. We are free. Roman fires up a Marlboro.

SOON AFTER LAURENT KABILA took over Congo in 1997, he called Roman in for a meeting. “He asked me to get a small jet,” Roman says. He bought the Sabreliner we're flying in now—and later a Gulfstream II—and became the unofficial official state pilot. Mobutu was out, Kabila was in; it was time for peace. But this was Africa, and the two countries that had helped Kabila were exacting their rewards in the east, sucking diamonds out of the country. Kabila believed his power was secure; in July 1998, with the stroke of a pen, he sacked his Rwandan chief of staff and ordered all Rwandans and Ugandans out of the country. The second Congo war began. Rebels allied with Rwanda and Uganda hijacked a 707, filled it full of troops, and flew it to Kitona, on the Atlantic coast. Within weeks they and other troops had marched on Kinshasa, cut power to the city, and taken over half the airport.

Kabila reached out to his neighbors, and Roman and Watson went to work. With power out and roads blocked, a helicopter plucked Roman from his house and flew him to the airport; it was shot down two flights later. Roman used the Sabreliner to shuttle generals to Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Sudan, while Kabila hunted frantically for troops and weapons.

“The airport was on fire, and the rebels had RPGs and American-made Stingers, so I'd take off in the dark at full power right on the deck until I was three or four miles out, then I'd streak to 13,000 feet.” He flew to Johannesburg and back twice a day, 16 hours nonstop. That month he flew 180 hours in all. (In the U.S., the FAA limits commercial pilots to 100 hours a month.) The shuttling paid off: Troops and weapons poured in from Angola and Zimbabwe and Chad, flown by Watson, who carried more than 500 troops per load in a 707. Amid the frantic flights a Congolese diplomat named Kikaya Bin Karubi came face to face with Tim Roman for the first time.

“I was flying to Zimbabwe,” Karubi recalls, “and I was asked by the president to look after the pilot, and I was shown Tim. I said, ‘What kind of pilot is this?' Laurent-DĂ©sirĂ© Kabila had been a rebel his whole life. He was known for his anti-American sentiment, and this was a huge contradiction in my mind. I said to the president, ‘Who is this man? Do you trust him? He could be working for the CIA!' And the president said, ‘I trust him with my life.' Tim took many risks and flew many dangerous missions. He played an important role in our country.”

Kinshasa was soon secure, but the old man's days were numbered. In 2001 Roman was downtown when his telephone rang. “There's a problem,” said the caller. “Go to the airport. Now.”

By the time he got there, rumors were flying: The president had been shot by one of his bodyguards and was hurt bad. “The airport was in lockdown,” says Roman. “My mechanics ran away like dogs and my driver jumped out of the car at 50 miles an hour.” Soon the phone rang again. It was Joseph Kabila. The old man was dead. “Don't move the airplane,” he told Roman, “unless it's my voice.” Roman sat in the plane for three days. When things finally calmed down, Joseph, at 29, had become the youngest president of potentially the richest country in Africa. Over the next few years Roman flew to every country on the continent—South Africa, Chad, Algeria, Libya, everywhere. “I met the colonel—Qaddafi—three times.” And he made, he says, “millions and millions of dollars.”

TWO AND A HALF HOURS AFTER taking off from Kinshasa, we land in Abuja, Nigeria. After refueling—Roman pays with 31 $100 bills—we park the plane next to a brand-new Nigerian air force 737. A red carpet leads our group to a building filled with more red carpet, Oriental rugs, and clusters of cushy leather chairs. The minister and the ambassador sit in one group, we sit in another, and we wait. And wait. We drink tea out of bone china embossed with the presidential crest; we ogle the horseless presidential horse guard, dressed in knee-high black leather boots, red tunics with brass buttons, and white pith helmets topped with spear points.

Africa is about waiting, and Roman can sit like this for days, barely moving, barely speaking, an improbable figure in size 54 Levi's and white Nike sneakers. “Once I flew to Algiers for a ten-minute meeting and we waited for a week,” he says, shrugging his massive shoulders.

But Watson is a talker, filling the dead air with tales of Stanley and Livingstone, Congo's beauty in colonial days, and the politics of dictators and minerals. “Mobutu in Congo, Pinochet in Chile,” Watson says, leaning in close, the sound of conspiracy in his whisper. “Why'd the U.S. support them for so long? Uranium. It's right at the surface in both places. The minute they found uranium in Australia, Mobutu and Pinochet were gone. In the eighties, the Soviets were taking over Angola, and I made ten flights between Congo and Brussels in a DC-8 carrying 40 tons of uranium in kegs.”

Late in the afternoon a cadre of generals arrive. We stand. In sweeps Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, decked out in flowing green robes and a little green Kewpie hat. He gives us a wave and a thousand-watt smile, shakes hands with the minister; the Africans disappear into an adjoining room. Ten minutes later it's over. Obasanjo glides down the red carpet into his jet and we pile into cars, racing down Bill Clinton Drive toward downtown Abuja.

“Nigeria is English, right?” says Roman, lighting a cigarette. “Maybe they've got bacon here. You can't get good bacon in Kinshasa.”

“And lamb,” says Watson, sucking on a cigar.

Compared with Kinshasa, Abuja looks like Paris. The Hilton is polished and vast. The lobby is packed. There are American oilmen in khakis and polos, Nigerians in diaphanous robes, Arabs in caftans. The minister needs to be in a suite, his guards need to be next door, and each of us needs a room. But the hotel is full, and one of the guards, a small, angular fellow with a gold police badge on his belt and an automatic on his hip, can't speak English. Roman—massive, gruff, sweating—bends down, props his belly on the desk, leans in, and turns on his mysterious charm. Suddenly he's a harmless boy, his little hands doing an innocent dance. The woman behind the desk is batting her eyes, laughing, flirting back. And then—poof!—the rooms are found. The guard counts out 35 hundreds from a two-inch-thick wad and we're set.

The next morning, when Roman tries to fire up the Sabreliner, it's dead. The starter on one of the engines is broken. In a flurry of phone calls he locates a spare in Kinshasa and finds a jet in Lagos. In all, he's told, it will cost $30,000 to have the jet come pick up the minister, fly him to Kinshasa, pick up the part, and take it to Lagos, where it can ship commercial to Abuja.

We pace, we drink tea, the minister frets, Roman works the phone, and late that afternoon the jet arrives. The bodyguard reaches for his banded stacks of hundreds, forks over two bricks of $10,000 each, the minister flies away, and we head back to the odd netherworld of the Abuja Hilton. We wait two more days, eating Mongolian barbecue and drinking in the bar as a Little Richard look-alike shimmies onstage. I hear Roman tell someone he's “the last warrior in Africa,” and we make one foray into the city—to buy eight pounds of bacon and two large legs of lamb.

By the time we roar out of Abuja, it's three in the afternoon on day four. Soon we're at 39,000 feet and the continent unfolds like a carpet of green cut with shimmering blue rivers. This business of flying in your own plane in Africa is addictive. We're suddenly unstuck from the stickiest place on earth. As Roman is fond of saying, “What's not to like?”

IF ROMAN HAD CONFINED himself to flying and gone home after he'd made his money, he could be sitting on a boat in the Caribbean with a cold beer, millions in the bank, and a bunch of good yarns to spin. But he wanted more. So when things settled down (more or less), Roman returned to his roots—the construction business. With his family building roads in the States, Roman thought, why not build some in Congo?

It's dawn when we head to the airport for a one-hour commercial flight to a place called Kikwit to see his biggest project. The moment we land—piling into a four-wheel-drive pickup and heading out—it all becomes clear. Building roads is nothing like flying. To fly is to be untethered, a privateer, an adventurer. To build roads is to be stuck.

We're into the bush in minutes, weaving around potholes and ditches and bicyclists and women carrying loads of charcoal and branches on their heads, into a world of sticks and mud and trees. The pavement ends and we slow to a crawl. The driver is grinding the gears, inching around holes, and Roman is growing apoplectic.

“Vite! Vite!” he yells. “Fucking monkey—he can't drive. Stop. ArrĂȘtes. Pull over, you idiot.” He kicks the driver into the backseat and takes over, roaring through the mud and dirt.

For this project, which is funded by the Congolese government and the World Bank to the tune of $21 million, Roman is building 150 miles of road and four bridges, the largest 1,200 feet long. He imported 150 pieces of heavy machinery that took six months to bring in by river and road. Now it's on the verge of falling apart, of spinning out of control, all for a road that some bureaucrat somewhere imagined would transform a country. Every one of Roman's 25 GM trucks has been destroyed by brutal roads and careless driving. He's using 75,000 gallons of fuel a month, and it takes 40 days to get it to the job site … if it gets there at all.

“Can you imagine what that does to your cash flow?” he says. He erected a satellite dish at the camp, but it was ruined by lightning. His workers are siphoning off the hydraulic fluid and selling it as diesel; it rains constantly, a downpour that turns everything to gray peanut butter.

After three hours we reach the road he's been building, and it's worse than the one we were just on, nothing but canyons of ruts. We pass villages containing a handful of mud huts, an inscrutable world that makes Roman seem like a speck of dust. “The trucks are ten-ton trucks carrying 30 tons, and they destroy the road the day after we scrape 'em,” he says. We inch and bump and then race along wildly where the road permits. People leap out of the way; Roman narrowly misses goats and dogs and children but aims for the chickens.

“Got that fucker,” he yells as we hear a momentary thump. “No one builds roads in the middle of nowhere anymore. Man's work. People come out here and suddenly they're working for the Peace Corps or something. But I'm gonna scare 'em today. We gotta get this fucker done or I'm gonna run out of cash.”

After eight hours we reach the head of the project, where his equipment has plowed a red-earth line through thick green bush. He's almost Kurtzian now, being driven mad by the place, caught in its web. “We're a thousand goddamned miles from anywhere, chief,” he says, “and there ain't no Wal-Mart.” In the cockpit of his airplane, Roman is necessary—only he can fly it. Out here he's subject to a thousand African vagaries that he can't control, and the frustration is driving him nuts.

He slides to a stop by a huge Caterpillar shovel that's silent. “Quel problem?” he shouts to a terrified Congolese driver. “Quel problem?” The driver's eyes are wide with fear; he tries to explain. Roman cuts him off. “Get in that fucking machine!” he screams. “Now. Start it up. Now.”

The guy climbs in and tries to move the shovel. “Fuck, the seal is broken,” Roman says. “That's brand-new. You're fired. Back to Kinshasa for you.” Then he jumps in the car and careens away to the mission station where his camp is based to hunker down with his foreman.

AS DARKNESS FALLS in the camp, Roman gets word from Kinshasa. The election results are in: Kabila has won, Bemba is claiming fraud, and the city is bracing for trouble. “We gotta get out of here,” Roman says. “If the shit hits the fan, I gotta be there. If planes stop flying we could get stuck out here for weeks and weeks.”

At midnight we pile into the truck and go. It's pitch black. Pouring rain. The road is almost impassable. We crawl through the night, Roman berating the driver. “You fucking asshole!” he shouts.

After nine hours of kidney-thumping automotive violence we roll into Kikwit and Roman's cell phone lights up. “Shit, the chagas—street people loyal to Bemba—have taken over the łŠŸ±łÙĂ©,” he tells us. “The embassy is in lockdown.” As his camp manager fights for seats on the airplane at the ticket office, streams of soldiers jog along the street, hundreds of them, all heading in one direction.

“You see these guys?” Roman asks. “There are too many in one place. They're massing, and they don't belong to the chief—they're all from the west. I don't trust Bemba.” It's an eerie scene. Their boots are clomping on the pavement in a steady beat, Roman is covered in dirt and sweat, unshaven. The camp manager emerges: no seats until the second flight.

“There will be no fucking second flight, and we'll be lucky if there's a first,” Roman barks. “That son of a bitch just wants money. Tell him I'll call his boss in Kinshasa and get us on that fucking flight.” Ten minutes later the manager emerges with two tickets. As we pile into the truck, a soldier with mirrored sunglasses comes up to us and starts shouting. “Fuck him,” Roman says. “And drive.” We ignore the soldier and take off. Roman tells the manager, “The airport will be safe, but when you drop us off go straight back to the camp, immediately.”

Three hours later we're back in Kinshasa, cruising through a largely deserted city. The block in front of Bemba's headquarters is full of guys throwing rocks, 15 UN armored personnel carriers lined up one street over. But other than that, the city is calm, with no apparent need for an embassy lockdown.

“Americans are pussies,” Roman says. “Let's go home.” The gates to his home swing open, Boxy the poodle comes bounding up, and the house smells delicious. “Check this out,” he says, dragging me into the kitchen. “Wanna smell split-pea soup like your mama used to make?”

Suddenly the phone rings. It's Joseph Kabila. The president. “Yes, sir,” Roman says. “Yes, sir. Congratulations. Now you've got a country to build. Yes, sir.”

“Shit,” Roman says when he hangs up. “He wants to build 10,000 kilometers of road in the next ten years. And prisons. He wants to build prisons.”

He pauses a moment and stares into space. The pool is shimmering. The walls high. “God,” he says, lighting a cigarette, “I made millions and millions flying for these guys and I just poured it back into the country. Sometimes I just want to go home, do something different. I'm worn down. But I've been to just about every country in the world, stayed at every Four Seasons hotel, slit kilos of coke with my finger, flown jets. What else could I do now? Where else could I go?”

He hits the button, the chime sounds, and Crispin comes out with a bow.

“Yes, boss?”

“How about a couple of martinis?”

The post Strange Bird appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

SAN FRANCISCO

Run

TRAVEL: 15 MILES

Hit the Dipsea Trail (), a seven-mile, 2,000-vertical-foot thigh-burner, from Mill Valley to Stinson Beach. Then ease sore muscles with a deep-tissue massage at Sausalito’s Casa Madrona Hotel & Spa (bay-view doubles from $309; ).

Surf

TRAVEL: 114 MILES

Grab your board and head for Asilomar State Beach (), in Pacific Grove, for a consistent overhead break. Later, spend the night in the beautifully renovated Tradewinds Carmel (doubles from $325; ), an Asian-inspired luxury hotel in ultra-quaint Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Rock-Climb

TRAVEL: 123 MILES

Ascend a volcanic vent at Pinnacles National Monument (). Surreal spires and 80-foot walls with hundreds of routes (from beginner to 5.14a) make this one of the best sport-climbing areas west of the Sierra, especially during the cooler days of fall. Afterwards, pitch a tent at Arroyo Seco Campground (from $20; ), the most remote spot in the Salinas Valley.

Paddle

TRAVEL: 147 MILES

Raft Class V+ rapids on Cherry Creek. The one-day run on the Upper Tuolumne is the hairiest commercially guided whitewater trip in America, dropping an average of 110 feet per mile through slick Sierra bedrock, with 16 Class V rapids packed into just nine miles. The river is so unrelenting (the longest flatwater is a mere 400 yards), clients of Sierra Mac River Trips (one day, $290; ) must undergo a fitness test that includes swimming 140 yards midcurrent and running 70 yards uphill on one breath. Don’t fret: In 25 years of commercial trips, no one has died on Cherry Creek. When the excitement ends, stay just outside Yosemite National Park at the 17-room, Gold Rush-era Groveland Hotel (doubles from $145, including breakfast; ).

New York City

Mountain-Bike

TRAVEL: 9 MILES FROM DOWNTOWN

Ride gnarly trails without leaving Manhattan. Last May, the Fort George Trails, in Highbridge Park, became the city’s first sanctioned MTB trail system. Working with the city’s mountain-bike association and the IMBA, the parks department transformed undeveloped land into three miles of trails, including two knotty, experts-only singletracks. The new area boasts enough obstacles and variety to satisfy even the most jaded city dweller. Best of all, unlike everything else in Manhattan, it won’t cost you a dime (open daily until dusk; ).

Eat

TRAVEL: 50 MILES

Treat yourself at star chef Michel Nischan’s Dressing Room (), a timber-and-fieldstone-fireplace- enhanced, all-sustainable-all-the-time eatery on the grounds of the historic Westport (Connecticut) Country Playhouse. Then make it a weekend at the nearby Inn at National Hall, a 134-year-old former bank overlooking the calm waters of the Saugatuck River (doubles from $325; ).

Hike

TRAVEL: 88 MILES

Explore the Shawangunks (also known as the Gunks), where two new ridgeline trails add seven miles to what was already world-class hiking and climbing. The Lenape Ridge and Minisink trails pass crags and cliffs east of the Neversink River, taking in distant south-facing views of the Delaware River Valley below (). Your crash pad is 15 minutes away at the Inn at Cliff Park. Built in the 1820s, it has large rooms and 500 acres of trail-lined grounds (doubles from $129; ).

Surf

TRAVEL: 118 MILES

Ride the waves of Long Island’s break-blessed Montauk with Izzy Paskowitz. The California-based surfing champ will lead an all-day clinic on September 15 ($300; ). Or simply rent a board from downtown’s Air and Speed Surf Shop (rentals from $35; 631-668-0356) and tackle the waves any weekend you like, using the funky East Deck Motel (from $110; ), in Ditch Plains, as base camp.

Los Angeles

Canyoneer

TRAVEL: 20 MILES

Hook up with Alpine Training Services ($120; ) to rappel down 70 feet of cascading waterfalls in the San Gabriel Mountains’ Little Santa Anita, a bolted canyon located in the Angeles National Forest (). Or, for a bigger challenge, try tackling nearby Fox Canyon (natural anchors only), where the highest of more than eight waterfalls drops 100 feet.

Surf

TRAVEL: 66 MILES

Score some uncrowded waves on the back side of Channel Islands National Park (). Island Packers ($85; ) runs ferries from Ventura Harbor to Bechers Bay, on Santa Rosa Island. From there it’s a seven-mile hike past marshland and through Island Chumash archaeological sites to East Point, where a strong south swell can produce six-to-ten-foot waves. After a day in the surf, camp in the backcountry, less than half a mile from the action (reservations required; call 805-658-5730 for availability).

Mountain-Bike

TRAVEL: 156 MILES

Test your skills on Pine Valley’s Tour de Noble (), just east of San Diego. The three-trail network covers more than 30 miles of singletrack, including ten miles of Southern California’s classic Noble Canyon Trail. After conquering the grueling climb known to locals as “L’ Alpe d’Wheeze,” recover with beer, local wine, and homemade ratatouille (all complimentary) at the nearby Orchard Hill Country Inn (doubles from $195, including breakfast; ).

Eat

TRAVEL: 161 MILES

Nourish your soul (and kitchen acumen) at La Cocina Que Canta, the new farm-to-table culinary school at Baja California adventure spa Rancho La Puerta. The 4,500-square-foot school sits on a six-acre organic farm a two-mile hike from the resort—the perfect setting for learning how to prepare seafood skewers in a curry corn sauce (classes from $125; doubles from $411, seven-night minimum; ).

Philadelphia

Rock-Climb

TRAVEL: 49 MILES

Trek through Tohickon Valley Park toward the 200-foot shale cliff known as High Rocks. The wall is craggy enough to give both experienced and newer climbers a workout and, once summited, offers expansive views of the Tohickon Creek valley. When the sun starts to dip, camp near the banks of the creek (campsites from $15; ).

Road-Bike

TRAVEL: 85 MILES

Spin through the sleepy countryside of Lancaster County. This 84-mile road ride () through the Susquehanna Valley features 6,000 feet of climbing and the chance to break at Susquehannock State Park (). Afterwards, roll into the Harvest Moon Bed and Breakfast, in nearby New Holland, where the innkeepers are also your personal chefs (doubles from $99; ).

Eat

TRAVEL: 130 MILES

Go green at Natural Acres, an organic farm in Millersburg that recently opened a five-room bed-and-breakfast serving raw-milk cheeses, farm-raised organic eggs, and homemade white spelt bread (doubles from $65, including breakfast; ).

Paddle

TRAVEL: 309 MILES

Canoe down the placid Clarion River in Cook Forest State Park, a sprawling 8,500 acres of woodsy goodness that features some of the tallest and oldest trees in the country—including white pine and hemlock. Then step ashore to explore the park’s more than 30 hiking trails, or cast a line in the Clarion, chock-full of trout, bass, and catfish, before sleeping in one of 22 cabins or at one of hundreds of campsites (campsites from $15; ).

Seattle

Seattle

Mount Rainier

Relax

TRAVEL: zero

Escape reality without leaving the city at Hotel 1000, Seattle’s newest and plushest urban resort. Packed with high-tech amenities like ambient-heat sensors that warn maids not to knock when you’re in your room and golf simulators that allow you to “play” St. Andrews and Pebble Beach, the hotel is within easy walking distance of Pike Place Market and the newly expanded Seattle Art Museum. It’s also the perfect base camp for kayaking on Lake Union or cycling the Burke Gilman Trail. Plus the resort is home to Spaahh (the name says it all) and BOKA, a hip oasis of blown glass, bamboo sculptures, and modern American cuisine (doubles from $225; ).

Mountaineer

TRAVEL: 81 MILES

Climb 14,410-foot Mount Rainier with the help of the experienced mountain guides at Rainier Mountaineering Inc., an outfitter with 38 years’ experience leading clients up America’s tallest volcano. Over a three-day summit bid along the Disappointment Cleaver Route, clients will bunk in huts at Camp Muir and learn skills like traversing glaciers, route-finding, cramponing, and self-arresting (from $805; ).

Paddle

TRAVEL: 166 MILES

Sea-kayak among seals, sea lions, and even the occasional orca with Cathlamet-based Columbia River Kayaking ($125; ), in southwestern Washington’s Willapa Bay (). Then go ashore to walk or run 24-mile Long Beach before turning in at the 111-year old Shelburne Inn (doubles from $139; ), with its antique furnishings and Shoalwater Restaurant.

Mountain-Bike

TRAVEL: 221 MILES

Rip along Whistler Mountain Bike Park’s125 miles of trails, 6,000 feet up WhistlerBlackcomb, Canada’s premier ski resort (). Or try West Coast Freeride Guides’ Floatplane Biking șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű ($280; ), which airlifts clients to Warner Lake, feeds them lunch, and leads them along 24 miles of advanced singletrack through the Southern Chilcotin Mountains. When the riding ends, downshift at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler, with its new Wine Room restaurant ($159; ).

Denver

Drink

TRAVEL: 30 MILES

Sample local wines at some of the Front Range’s 20 wineries (), including award-winning Viogniers at Boulder’s Bookcliff Vineyard tasting room (), on Pearl Street, dry, rich merlots at the Boulder Creek Winery (), and honey wine at Redstone Meadery (). Then pass out at Boulder’s Briar Rose Bed and Breakfast, where the next day you can relax in the meditation room or enjoy an organic breakfast before heading home (doubles from $149; ).

Fish

TRAVEL: 70 MILES

Cast a line for the kind of fish that keep fly-fishermen up at night. Nursed back from the brink of extinction, greenback cutthroat trout are vibrant Front Range natives now fishable in Rocky Mountain National Park (). Hike or ride a horse in with Wild Basin Outfitters (from $250 per day; ) to Odessa Lake, where cuts salivate over Parachute Adams. Later, spend the night at the 90-year-old Baldpate Inn (doubles from $100, including breakfast; ).

Relax

TRAVEL: 164 MILES

Soak in the buff at Valley View Hot Springs, the San Luis Valley’s secluded wilderness resort. The natural pools have seen heavy traffic since at least 1873, when local iron miners came here to bathe. These days, visitors come to experience the tranquillity of one of the state’s unofficial spiritual centers. Call in advance to reserve a tent site, historic cabin, or room in the communal lodge (from $52, including use of hot springs; ).

Paddle

TRAVEL: 228 MILES

Boat the narrow channels of the 22-mile-long Blue Mesa Reservoir, Colorado’s largest body of water, with Alan Bernholtz, Crested Butte mayor and owner of Crested Butte Mountain Guides. CBMG leads overnight sea-kayaking trips (camping gear provided) on the reservoir, taking you past eerie volcanic formations in the high desert ($240; ).

Boston

Paddle

TRAVEL: 40 MILES

Rent a boat from North Shore KayakOutdoor Center ($20; ), in Rockport, paddle almost three miles to Thacher Island (), and climb to the top of one of the twin lighthouses where, on a good day, you can see all the way to Provincetown. Back on the mainland, enjoy the view of Rockport Harbor from an oceanfront deck at the Peg Leg Inn (doubles from $145; ).

Relax

TRAVEL: 75 MILES

Land a suite for the weekend at the Winnetu Oceanside Resort (doubles from $260; ), on Martha’s Vineyard, then hit the beach with your rod and reel. Try your luck with stripers in the surf at South Beach—only 250 yards from your door—or bike over to Menemsha and fly-fish for albacore.

Mountain-Bike

TRAVEL: 89 MILES

Roll over 15 miles of new and refurbished singletrack inside central Massachusetts’s Wendell State Forest. The three-mile Hannah Swarton Trail skirts past rock ledges and laurel thickets and down switchbacks (). At the end of the day, quench your thirst with a Red-Headed Stepchild at the Northampton Brewery Bar and Grille before heading to the nearby Hotel Northampton (doubles from $175; ).Ìę

Hike

TRAVEL: 189 MILES

Work your legs in Maine’s Mahoosuc Mountains on the new 13-mile addition to the Grafton Loop Trail (). Unveiled this summer, it traverses some of the most rugged and, until now, inaccessible land in the state. Follow the Appalachian Trail from Grafton Notch State Park and climb up 4,180-foot Old Speck, the third-highest mountain in Maine, then connect with the GLT and make your way up to Sunday River Whitecap for one of the best views of the Mahoosucs. With 39 miles of trails and eight campsites in the area, multi-day adventures abound, but after a long day you may crave a little TLC, so make tracks to the spa at Sunday River Resort (doubles from $115; ).

Chicago

Kiteboard

TRAVEL: 51 MILES

Stick your feet in the sand and feel your city stress fade at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore (), a 15,000-acre park on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. Or get your adrenaline fix by signing up for kiteboarding lessons with Chicago Kitesurfing ($150; ), then pitch a tent at one of the park’s 78 campsites.

Bike

TRAVEL: 99 MILES

Hammer the 30 miles of singletrack that lace the glacial hills of Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine State Forest (). The John Muir trails are the most popular, so skip them. Instead, ride the 8.4-mile Emma Carlin loop and the ten-mile Connector, which are more technical (steeper, with more mini-boulders and roots) than the Muir but see only a fraction of the riders. And bring your road bike, too: features printable, user-friendly guides to two dozen popular paved routes throughout the state forest. Bed down beneath stands of old-growth hardwoods at one of two walk-in car-camping sites at the Ottawa Lake campground (), or head to Lake Geneva’s Bella Vista Suites for fluffy robes and a private balcony overlooking the lake (doubles from $189; ).

Relax

TRAVEL: 145 MILES

Book yourself an Immersion Suite at the Kohler Waters Spa (doubles from $663; ), in Kohler, Wisconsin. With plasma TVs, whirlpool baths, and a dozen in-room treatments to choose from, you’ll never want to leave your Eastern-influenced pad. Bonus: This December, Kohler will open a satellite spa in Burr Ridge, Illinois, a scant 19 miles from downtown.

Fish

TRAVEL: 210 MILES

Nymph, single-hand fly-fish, or learn to speycast (it’s an artful, two-handed technique) for 20-pound steelhead on Michigan’s wide-open Muskegon River with local expert and Gray Drake Lodge owner Matt Supinski (doubles $500, including guiding and lessons; ).

Washington, D.C.

Paddle

TRAVEL: 45 MILES

Kayak Class III rapids on the Mirant Power Plant’s 16-year-old artificial course with Tsangpo veteran Tom McEwan’s outfit, Liquid șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs ($110; ). Located in Dickerson, Maryland, the course is a training center for the USA Canoe/Kayak National Whitewater Slalom Team.

Rock-Climb

TRAVEL: 136 MILES

Send the Narrows, a 1,300-yard cliff band of sandstone from 20 to 200 feet high, full of ledges, horizontals, and imposing roofs, just outside Cumberland, Maryland. Nearly unclimbed until 2002, it now has close to 100 established routes ranging from 5.2 to 5.10+, including multipitch and some top-roping. While there, stay at the Stonebow Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in nearby Grantsville, where you can cast for trout on the Casselman River ($135; ).

Hike

TRAVEL: 147 MILES

Explore Assateague Island National Seashore’s backcountry, a sublime 48,000 acres of wilderness on the Atlantic seaboard. There’s the pounding Atlantic surf on one side, Sinepuxent Bay on the other, and, in between, rolling sand dunes, pine forests, and green salt marshes where wild ponies and sika deer roam. With no potable water available, chances are you’ll be one of the few at any of the waterfront’s six first-come, first-served backcountry campsites (from $5; ).

Mountain-Bike

TRAVEL: 241 MILES

Tear up the 100 miles and 1,500 vertical feet of doubletrack, singletrack, and fire roads spread over 11,000 acres at WestVirginia’s Snowshoe Mountain. Or tackle the four-year-old bike park, featuring ladders, jumps, and drops ($37; ). At night, recover in the hot tub at the Rimfire Lodge (doubles from $154; ).

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