In 1778, two decades before he became the second president of the United States, John Adams nearly died at sea. Actually, by his own count, he came close to dying six different times.

I discovered this while researching my new book, , which traces the history of U.S. presidents and the books they wrote. Adams, it turns out, wrote America’s first presidential memoir shortly after leaving office. Autobiography has always been popular in this country. Of the first five presidents, three others besides Adams tried writing their life stories, though they usually focused on their public roles and refused to share anything too personal.

Adams’s book was different because Adams was different. He was emotional and impulsive, and those traits pushed him to write an autobiography that was shockingly intimate. You could see this when he wrote about his private life: “My children may be assured that no illegitimate brother or sister exists.” You could see it when he wrote about his enemies, including Alexander Hamilton, who’d recently died after a duel with Aaron Burr. Hamilton’s grisly death did not give Adams pause. In fact, Adams wrote that he would not forgive his rival for their disagreements just because “the author of them, with a pistol bullet through his spinal marrow, died a penitent.”

And yet the best place to see Adams’s passion, I came to realize, was in his thrilling retelling of his time at sea during the Revolutionary War. It’s one of the longest and most revealing episodes in his forgotten book, a story that captures the adventure and brutality of a transatlantic voyage in the 18th century during wartime. Here, largely in Adams’s words, is that lost tale.

Early in 1778—during the same bitter winter that George Washington and his soldiers spent at Valley Forge—Adams said goodbye to his family in Massachusetts. Congress had asked him to go to France to serve as a diplomat, and Adams, as always, had said yes. John Quincy, his ten-year-old son, would accompany him on the voyage, meaning two future presidents would be making the trip. On February 13, Adams and his son boarded the Boston, a 24-gun frigate. They did not join the ship until just after it had sailed outside its eponymous city, in part because Boston boasted plenty of British spies. But that was hardly the only thing to fear. For both John and John Quincy, this would be their first time on so large a ship.

The Boston was a newer vessel with a newer crew, but it had experienced leaders, including Samuel Tucker, a burly captain with a voice so loud that Adams could hear him pray through the cabin walls,Ìęand William Barron, a lieutenant who’d sailed all over the world. Adams admired both men, though he noted disapprovingly that Barron had once worked in the slave trade. But he still felt anxious about crossing the Atlantic, which could take three weeks or more—often much longer in the dead of winter. He fretted about seasickness, bad weather, and enemy ships. In his autobiography, he summarizedÌęhis mood with characteristic honesty: “I supposed I had bid farewell to my native shore perhaps forever.”

On February 17, the Boston finally began its voyage. By the next day, Adams had checked off the first of his fears. More than half the crew became sick, including John and John Quincy. The ship’s smells worsened their nausea: the smoke from the kitchen, the salt from the sea, the sweat from the nearly 200 passengers and crew, packed in tight.

Then, on February 19, the Boston spotted three sails in the distance. It was a tense moment for any ship of that era. Were they British or French, enemy or friend? Did they boast better cannonry than the Boston? Most pressing: Could they catch up?Ìę

The ships turned out to be British. The Boston outran two of them, but the third one stayed close. The chase stretched on for days. At dawn, Adams would climb on the deck and scan the horizon—at first it would look like they had escaped, until he spotted a stubborn sail. “Sometimes she gained upon us,” he wrote, “and sometimes we gained in our distance from her.” Tucker and Barron ordered their crew to keep the Boston’s cannons rolled out and ready, their barrels jutting from the sides of the ship, their powder and shot piled beside them.

The Boston escaped its pursuer on the 21st, but it soon ran into a new problem. The wind was picking up; dark clouds were filling the sky. That night, a terrible storm hit. The Boston, with its guns still rolled out, was not prepared, and everyone rushed to store the weaponry. A dazzling bolt of lightning struck the main mast. SomehowÌęit missed the casks of gunpowder still strewn across the ship. But it hit a sailor, leaving a scorched divot in his shoulder, a nasty wound that would eventually kill him.

The storm dragged on for three days. The churning sea—“vast mountains of water above us, deep caverns below us”—caused the ship to pitch and roll. Even below decks, even when they screamed, the passengers could not hear each other over the gales, the gushing water, and the chairs and trunks slamming around. The only way Adams and his son could keep still was to grip each side of their bed and brace their feet against the bottom. The worst sound, Adams wrote, wasn’t the storm. It was the Boston itself, the way it seemed to be breaking apart: “a constant cracking night and day from a thousand places in all parts of the ship.”

Once the storm ended, it tookÌęseveral days to repair theÌęBoston’sÌęmast and get back on course. The sailors started whispering about omens and luck. “They said the ship had been so unfortunate that they believed some woman was on board,” Adams wrote. “Women, they said, were the unluckiest creatures in the world at sea.”Ìę

By the final day of February, the ship wasÌęmaking good progress again. Adams remembered sleeping “as soundly as in my own bed at home.” He confessed that the chase and the storm had unsettled him, but he was proud of how he’d handled the danger in the moment. (He was even prouder of John Quincy: “The child’s behavior gave me a satisfaction that I cannot express.”) Now they both tried to block out their unease. Adams practiced his French, a language he would need as a diplomat. He distracted himself by cataloging how frequently the sailors swore (“a most abominable degree”). He noted how filthy the Boston’s kitchen and quarters were, as if they’d been designed, he clucked, to “have bred the plague.”

The calm didn’tÌęlast. On March 10, the Boston’s crew spotted another British sail. This timeÌęthe Americans gave chase. After Tucker asked Adams to go below, the Boston sped toward the ship, an armed British merchantman named the Martha. The Martha fired several shots at the Boston, the cannonballs buzzing over the Americans gathered on the quarterdeck. The Boston curved around, revealing its superior cannonry, and the Martha immediately surrendered. As Tucker checked on his crew, he saw John Adams with them, brandishing a musket.Ìę

“My dear sir,” the captain asked, “how came you here?”Ìę

“I ought to do my share of fighting,” Adams replied.

Tucker put a small group on the captured ship, to pilot it back to America, and the Boston resumed its voyage to France. Adams continued to struggle with seasickness. Using a dual-language edition of Moliùre’s plays, he tried and failed to work on his French. “Our little world was all wet and damp,” he recalled.

A few days later, the Boston encountered yet another ship—French this time. The Boston prepared a signal shot, to convey its friendly intentions, but as the cannon fired, it exploded, spraying barrel shards all over the deck. Several sliced into the rightÌęleg of Barron, the lieutenant. It was a gruesome injury. The doctor on board decided to amputate, and Adams held Barron in his arms and listened to him talk about his family while the doctor applied a tourniquet, then sawed off the leg just below the knee. The lieutenant died a few days later, with the whole ship attending his burial at sea.Ìę

By this point, the Boston was finally closing in on the European coast, but its bad luck was not over. Another five-day storm shook the ship so violently that Adams had to hug a beam to stay upright. Then an officer got angry at a disrespectful passengerÌęand chopped off his big toe. Finally, there was one last encounterÌęwith the British—two hulking men-of-war that sailed so close to the Boston that Adams could clearly identify individual crew members in the moonlight. The ships kept sailing, a surprise for which Adams and the Americans were thankful.

At last, on March 23, five weeks after the Boston had departed, a lookout spotted the Spanish mainland. Adams borrowed a telescope to see it for himself. SoonÌęhe and John Quincy were looking at windmills and church steeples on the shore. They saw flocks of sheep and Spanish farmers plowing their land. In his autobiography, Adams remembered his emotions at the end of this voyage—his relief and wonder. “How many dangers, distresses, and hairbreadth escapes had we seen?” he wrote.Ìę

The voyage was not quite finished, however. Once theÌęBostonÌęapproached the coast of France, it had to spend several days waiting to dock, a peaceful but frustrating delayÌębrought on by uncooperative wind. “Nothing could be more tedious to me than this idle life,” Adams admitted. “I had not yet learned the French word, ennui, but I felt enough of it.”

More than two decades later, after Adams hadÌęserved as president for one term, he lostÌęto Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800.ÌęHe responded by entering another period of “idle life.” The ex-president retreated to Massachusetts, to the home he called Peacefield. He started working on his autobiography, rereading old diaries, studying histories of the Revolutionary War, and writing more than 400Ìępages.

Adams never finished the book. The reason why is right there in his description of the end of his 1778 voyage. Writing a memoir eventually became as frustrating to him as floating on a frigateÌęjust off the coast of France. He could write vividly about the shock of being on that ship—about the sights and sounds that, as he wrote of the “cracking” storm, “were new to me, except in the histories of voyages and the descriptions of the poets.” But he could never keep it up for long.ÌęIn the end, the same passions that made Adams a radically personal writer also kept him from completing his book. HeÌędidn’t want to describe life, and he certainly didn’t want to describe history. He wanted to live it.Ìę

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For eight years, Joe Anderson drove by McDoel Baptist Church on his commute from the center of Bloomington, Indiana, to the bland exurban warehouse that housed Hoosier Heights, one of several climbing gyms he owns across the Midwest. He’d always admired the old church—its limestone exterior, its historic charm. When he saw it was for sale in 2016, he had a crazy thought: Business was growing at the Bloomington gym, and he wanted to move it to a more central spot. Why not turn the church into ?

McDoel’s congregation hated to lose itsÌębuilding, which had anchored McDoel Gardens, a neighborhood of blue-collar bungalows, since it opened in 1925. In the 1960s, the church added a second sanctuary with a capacity of around 250. “We would fill the whole place,” remembers longtime parishioner Pat Suits, 83, who still lives one house down from the old building. “We had so many kids going there, a new youth group.”

But like so many churches across the country, McDoel’s membership declined in the following decades as the congregation aged and shrank. According to the , conducted by the nonpartisan research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, 2018 when Americans who didn’t attend church outnumbered those who go every week or nearly every week. At McDoel, instead of a new generation of kids, the regulars consisted of elderly people like Suits, and their historic building was now causing them headaches—the only bathrooms, for example, were down a long flight of stairs. Eventually, the congregation decided to sell theÌęchurch and move into a smaller space nearby.

A climbing gym might seem like a weird and worldly replacement, but a few have popped up in churches across the Rust Belt, including , and . It’s a match that makes sense (sanctuaries have high ceilings) but often brings distinct difficulties (sanctuaries can be too narrow for belaying). “I’ve looked at quite a few churches,” says Adam Koberna, president of U.S. operations for Walltopia, one of the world’s leading climbing-wall companies. “And they rarely work out.”

The physical structure is only part of the problem. In Cleveland, Chick Holtkamp and Niki Zmij tried to convert that was built in 1885. “It was a big space,” Holtkamp says, “but more than that, it was an interesting space.” They toured dozens of gyms, hired architects, gave enthusiastic interviews—only to watch the church they’d hoped to save . In the end, residents were too worried about the extra traffic that a commercial property would bring. “Honestly, it was politics,” Holtkamp says. “The people who didn’t want it had a more powerful voice.”

There can also be issues with historical-preservation requirementsÌęand with securing the financing required to rehab a quirky old building. In Cincinnati, Chris Wiedeman and his brother, Joe, have put tens of thousands of dollars over the past yearÌęinto stabilizing a beautiful, abandoned 1870s church that they hope to turn into a gym called . “The church has been exceedingly neglected,” Chris says. “There were holes in the floor.” The construction of the ambitious design, which highlightsÌęthe building’s arched windows and architectural details, is proving tricky enough, though it’s made more feasible by the fact that Chris himself works as a general contractor. The fundraising is even trickier. “That’s where we’re running into the most trouble,” he says.

In Bloomington, Joe Anderson understood the potential problemsÌębut decided to give the renovation a shot anyway. “Doing a gym like this is a labor of love,” he says. “It was not a purely economic decision.” And it did not go smoothly at first. “There were literally bats in our belfry,” he says, and that wasn’t the only hiccup. Working with Walltopia to design and build the gym, he had to consider the limitations of the old structure while finding a way to support enormous freestanding climbing walls.

To pull it off, he wound up adding a second building for top roping. But, Anderson says, “It was important to me that you still walk in and say, Whoa, this feels like a church.”ÌęSo pews became seats for changing into climbing shoes. Carabiners clipped the sanctuary’s vintage pendant lights to the sloped ceiling, creating more clearance for the bouldering wall. The church’s kitchen became the spot to clean the holds, with its giant hood sucking up the vinegary smells. And the choir loft morphed into a secluded spot for advanced climbers to train on MoonBoards.

In 2018, after more than a year of construction, the facility opened with 16,000 square feet of climbing. The location, just off Bloomington’s popular , allows many climbers to walk or bike to the gym. That’s been especially helpful in luring students from the city’s Indiana University; for the first time in a while, young people are filling up McDoel.

As for the McDoel congregation, itÌęstill gathers on SundayÌęin a rented office building in the same neighborhood. TheÌęserviceÌęusually draws about 20 worshippers, and Pat Suits notes how thankful everyone is that the bathrooms are located on the main level. “It’s all just right there,” she says.

Two blocks away, Hoosier Heights opens on Sundays at 9 A.M. Anderson is happy that the gym has boosted the neighborhood and that saving an old building has proven economically and environmentally sustainable. But most of all, he’s thrilled to see so many people using the space, whether it’s the neighborhood association hosting its annual Christmas cookie swap, just like it did at the church, or climbers reaching for their next hold as sunlight filters through the stained glass. The gym captures the sense of communityÌęand wonderÌęthat has defined theÌębuilding for close to a century. “We took over a place designed for positive community gatherings,” says Anderson, “and we’re trying to still be that.”

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Like a lot of dads, Fred Guttenberg loved to take his kids camping. Also like a lot of dads, he geared up for his trips with a visit to Dick’s Sporting Goods. That’s where he bought the family tent, the air mattresses, and the camp-stove fuel. With his son, Jesse, and his daughter, Jaime, Guttenberg camped at parks all over the state of Florida. “Those are memories, with both of my kids, that I’ll always cherish,” Guttenberg says. “They’re all I’ve got now.”

On February 14, Jaime Guttenberg, a student at Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, was murdered when Nikolas Cruz opened fire on his former classmates, killing 17. Following two weeks of funerals and vigils, and the first flickers of the surviving students’ activism, the Parkland teenagers returned to class. But something else happened that day. The CEO of Dick’s, Edward Stack, went on and said that the sporting-goods retailer, the largest in the country, with stores in 47 states, would no longer be selling assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. And if customers were under 21, Dick’s wouldn’t sell them .

Stack is a navy-suited business type, but when he appeared on TV he sounded more like an activist. He spoke in simple terms. “We need to do something,” he said, dismissing the potential backlash. “If the kids can be brave enough to organize like this, we can be brave enough to take these [products] out.”

It was a powerful gesture. “I didn’t see it coming,” Guttenberg says. “It was one of the few moments that week that made me smile.”

But it wasn’t an easy thing to do—not in a divided country and not by a multibillion-dollar retail chain. In the past few years, and especially since the election of Donald Trump, some of the nation’s largest and most visible corporations have weighed in on a range of polarizing topics. What at first seemed like a fad or a marketing ploy has morphed into a new way of living, shopping, and politicking in America. Forget the culture wars. Now we fight the commerce wars.

The debate over gun control—and the way it intersects with the outdoor industry and some of its most prominent brands and retailers, including Dick’s, REI, and Yeti—shows just how messy the conflict can be. In fact, the closer you look at any single company that takes a strong position on the issue, the harder it is to figure out what they’re trying to accomplish, even if it sounds like they’re on your side.

America has a long tradition of gaining social leverage through economic pressure, including consumer boycotts, corporate lobbying, and high-profile endorsements. (Witness Nike’s deployment of Colin Kaepernick and the backlash that followed.) But in the age of Trump, companies are adopting a wide variety of public stances. “Over the past two or three years, it’s come to a head,” says Akshay Rao, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota.

After the Parkland shooting, for example, over 20,000 REI customers calling for the co-op to stop carrying products made by Vista Outdoor brands. Vista is the Utah-based parent company of CamelBak and Giro, but its real moneymaker is ammunition. REI responded by on Vista orders.

Six weeks later, the National Rifle Association alerted its membership that Yeti had ceased offering discounts to the NRA’s charitable arm, the NRA Foundation. hinted that members should let Yeti know how they felt about that. Yeti that it had ended discounts for a number of organizations. The episode concluded, perhaps inevitably, with gun lovers blowing up $300 coolers on YouTube.

Businesses and CEOs often adopt a proud tone when addressing political topics, even if the issues fall outside their industries. As REI said in its Vista statement, “Companies are showing they can contribute if they are willing to lead.”

It’s worth remembering how quickly companies have changed their approach. Consider Target. At the company’s 2011 shareholder meeting, its CEO at the time faced questions about gay marriage. He punted. “We are going to be neutral on that particular issue,” he said, “as we would be on other social issues that have polarizing points of view.” But in 2016, the Minnesota-based retailer on its website encouraging customers to use the restroom corresponding to their gender identity—a response to state legislatures passing anti-LGBTQ bills. It was a call for equality that, Target hoped, would be “relevant for the conversations currently underway,” according to the message.

The move earned Target equal parts praise and scorn. Other companies had similar policies, but few publicized them, and Target’s actions quickly gave rise to protests, Flush Target billboards, and a petition reportedly signed by 1.5 million customers pledging to boycott the store.

Why risk boycotts and blown-up coolers? In part, it’s a response to cultural trends. If corporations are people and CEOs are celebrities (Elon Musk, anyone?), it makes sense that both would be more likely to share their beliefs. When everyone has a voice, we’re more apt to notice those who say nothing. As Leslie Gaines-Ross, of public relations firm Weber Shandwick, puts it: “No company wants to be shamed on social media for not speaking up.”

Customers appear to agree. Over the past few years, a series of polls by the research firm Global Strategy Group asked participants whether corporations should stand up for their political beliefs. only 44 percent believed that they should. , that number jumped to 76.

There’s another reason companies go political: to build goodwill, particularly among (and potential employees). Even if there’s short-term pain, the thinking goes, the haters will eventually jump to the next outrage. That was the consensus on Target’s bathroom announcement, even as it went viral. “Over the long term, this blows over,” one analyst predicted to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Except that it hasn’t. In 2016 and 2017, Target’s sales and stock price slumped, and while there are plenty of potential causes, including competition from Amazon and Walmart, the bathroom announcement seems to be one of them. “It’s an emotional issue and clearly part of Target’s decline,” says Robert Passikoff, president of research firm Brand Keys. Twice a year, Brand Keys compiles its Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, which surveys more than 50,000 respondents to calculate the reputations of national brands. Anything close to 100 is a great score; under 70 suggests trouble ahead. Before the bathroom controversy, Target was at 84. In the weeks after, it plunged to 74. Two years later, the company is stuck at 75.

Which made the decision by Dick’s that much riskier.

A retailer like Dick’s is particularly vulnerable to consumer blowback for a simple reason: size. In 2017, Patagonia, which has taken some aggressive positions of its own, had 30 stores nationwide and revenue “approaching $1 billion,” CEO Rose Marcario said in a 2017 interview (the company declined to confirm that number); for REI it was 151 stores and $2.6 billion. During that same period, Dick’s had 716 stores, $8.6 billion in revenue, and a business model built on appealing to as many people as possible.

Richard Stack founded Dick’s in 1948 as a bait and tackle shop in Binghamton, New York. Yet in every way that matters, the company is his son Edward’s. Growing up, Edward helped around the store. He dreamed of law school until his father’s health forced him to come on full-time. He never left. When Richard retired in 1984, Edward took over running the business, and he expanded it into a retail empire.

It was a good time for that kind of ambition. The 1980s saw the rise of the so-called category killers—nationwide chains dominating a single product type (books, toys) by assembling a huge selection in a warehouse-size retail location (Barnes and Noble, Toys“R”Us). Dick’s capitalized on burgeoning interest in athletics and the outdoors, luring shoppers with everything from Ping-Pong equipment to Pelican kayaks.

Stack proved to be a sharp, hands-on CEO, personally scouting future Dick’s locations, which grew to be much larger than the competition’s. The company expanded quickly, from 12 locations in 1994, the year it moved its headquarters to suburban Pittsburgh, to 141 in 2002, the year it went public. Dick’s declined to grant șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű an interview for this story, with Stack or anyone else. But today everything about the retailer—from the huge selection to the wide aisles to the dad rock playing over the store speakers—suggests a desire to please a broad national audience.

If there’s one thing that’s lethal to category killers, of course, it’s a still larger selection—like, say, the internet’s. During the 2000s ­e-tail boom, however, Dick’s continued to expand, protected in part by steady gun sales. In 2013, a Barclays analyst told CNBC that he estimated the hunting and firearms category to account for as much as 10 percent of Dick’s total sales, with category-­wide growth of 5 percent year over year from 2008 to 2012. On quarterly earnings calls, during which Stack spoke with investors and analysts, he discussed gun sales frequently and fluently: how they drove foot traffic, how they bolstered earnings, how they fluctuated depending on the news. After all, his business was growing in part due to firearms owners who worried that President Obama would push through new gun-control measures. They stockpiled firearms and ammunition—what Stack called panic buying.

Whatever consumers’ motives, guns were good for business, and in 2013 Dick’s unveiled a five-year plan that included $1.8 billion in capital expenditures. One goal was to open 55 new Field and Stream stores, focused on hunting, fishing, and camping, to take on existing retail chains like Cabela’s. (Field and Stream is not associated with the magazine of the same name.)

Since Stack controls more than half of Dick’s voting stock, it’s important to note that he is, or at least has been, a Republican. During the and elections, he donated more than a quarter of a million dollars to GOP candidates and to super PACs affiliated with Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell. Stack was rumored to be considering his own Republican bid for the U.S. Senate in 2012.

An exception to his came in 2016, when Stack cut a $300,000 check to a Democratic super PAC called House Majority. Perhaps the CEO’s politics were changing. Or perhaps he wanted to support his sister, Kim Myers, who was running for Congress as a Democrat; the following week, the PAC began supporting Myers’s campaign, .

Stack makes a surprising gun-control advocate. But it’s also important to note that, during 2017, his company struggled, its stock price plummeting from $54 to $28.74. There were many reasons for this, but a big one was that the entire gun industry was in trouble—mainly because the election of Donald Trump had curbed panic buying. The dozens of Field and Stream stores that Stack had opened by that time were looking like a terrible bet. “What’s been weighing on this industry has been the hunt business,” Stack said in a November 2017 earnings call.

Three months later, Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at Stoneman Douglas. After Cruz’s name surfaced, someone at Dick’s searched internal databases to see if the shooter had purchased any guns from one of the retail chain’s stores. (Cruz had bought a shotgun at Dick’s but hadn’t used it in the shooting.) At company headquarters, Stack later told Good Morning America, everyone agreed that it was time to amend store policy.

Dick’s had tried this once before. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, it quietly announced that it would suspend sales of assault-style rifles. When those Field and Stream stores started opening the following year, they carried Bushmaster AR-15’s and other similar weapons. When reporters took notice, Dick’s declined to comment. The rifles remained in stores.

In 2018, however, Stack wanted to make bigger changes, including taking AR-15’s out of Field and Stream stores, and to announce the decision Dick’s launched a splashy media campaign, granting interviews to The New York Times and NBC Nightly News. After he wrapped Good Morning America, Stack hustled to the studios of CNN’s New Day. “Everybody talks about thoughts and prayers, and that’s great,” he said during his appearance. “But that doesn’t really do anything.” Throughout the morning, Stack stressed that Democrats and Republicans needed to work together. “We hope that it spurs a conversation,” Stack said.

That’s an interesting word, conversation, with its notes of civility and well-meaning compromise. Because America hasn’t been having conversations for a while now. —Republican versus Democrat, us versus them—has become the most powerful and distorting force in politics. Americans exhibit the same herd-like movements and yellow-card manners as a couple of youth-soccer teams in mesh pinnies (which Dick’s conveniently carries in red and blue).

Polling from nonpartisan outlets like Gallup and the Pew Research Center paints : while Republicans are more tribal and more ideologically cocooned than Democrats, these traits warp both parties, probably because they warp all of humanity. Study after study shows that partisan identity can overpower evidence, ideas, and reason—and that being informed can actually make things worse. “The partisan divide is deeper than it used to be,” says Frances Lee, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland.

“It’s bigger than the issues. You know where you belong.” In other words, the specific policies don’t matter as long as they’re your team’s policies.

The gun issue is a good example. The NRA cultivating passionate, single-issue voters—the panic buyers. And it has successfully linked ownership of firearms . “The NRA has framed gun rights really well,” says Scott Melzer, a sociologist at Michigan’s Albion College. “If you lose gun rights, then a tyrannical leftist government will tamp out every other right as well.”

That framing appears to have been effective. For 25 years, the Pew Research Center has been asking : Which do you think is more important—to protect the right of Americans to own guns, or to control gun ownership? Republicans used to be divided on this, even during the debate around the Clinton-era band ban on assault-style rifles. (That ban expired in 2004.) As late as 2007, near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, the GOP remained basically split, 50 percent to 45, in favor of rights. After Obama was elected, though, the party went full NRA. The latest numbers, from 2017, show that 79 percent of Republicans believe gun rights matter more than gun control, and that same pro-gun slant crops up in other data. The number of Republicans who believe that having a gun in the home makes it safer since 2000, even though gun ownership . Republicans know that their team likes guns, so they like them, too—even as and .

Partisan identity can provide a boost in revenue to companies that are smaller or more focused than Dick’s. REI is a good example. , which studies consumer behavior, says that liberals are 82 percent more likely than the general public to shop at the co-op. When REI took a stand on the gun issue, it surely made more customers happy than mad.

That may not be the case with Dick’s. According to , conservatives are 15 percent more likely to shop there. But that number predates the backlash to the announcement. In the two months after Dick’s revealed its new gun policy, conservative media pounced. Fox News mentioned the company at least 36 times (sample chyron: “Firearm Fury”), and Breitbart ran at least 14 stories on it (“Dick’s Sporting Goods Enacts Corporate Gun Control”). When Dick’s said it would destroy its assault-style rifles instead of returning them to distributors, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch mocked the announcement in a video that received more than 700,000 views. When two under-21 employees quit Dick’s in protest, Fox News got them on the air. “I was standing up for my rights,” one of them told news anchor Neil Cavuto.

Republicans became obsessed with Dick’s in a way they never had with Walmart or other stores with . They began to see Dick’s the way they saw Target: as a member of the opposing team.

If that view holds, Dick’s will find itself in real financial trouble. It’s too soon to track in terms of revenue, especially since many gun sales happen in the fall, when hunting season kicks off. “We just don’t know yet,” says Christopher Svezia, an analyst with Wedbush Securities who has gun-industry expertise. Still, the retailer should be less worried about losing Republicans who buy guns than Republicans who buy golf shirts. In post-Parkland earnings calls, Stack has mentioned that gun-control supporters are making a point to shop at Dick’s. (“Buycotting,” it’s called.) But studies on partisan identity suggest that there’s far more energy on the side that feels aggrieved. When market-research firm Morning Consult did a survey of brands that broke with the NRA, it found that Republican anger easily eclipsed Democratic support.

Plenty of Democrats and Independents support Stack’s decision. “Dick’s has been amazing,” says Fred Guttenberg. “They built commonsense gun safety into their business model, and it didn’t trample anyone’s Second Amendment rights.” On social media, liberals crowed as the company’s stock price crept up a few dollars this year, to about $38.

Yet a key reason why Dick’s has done better is the Trump tax cut, which it used not to raise wages but to nearly sextuple its share buybacks, funneling cash to investors. “They increased their buybacks more than average,” says Howard Silverblatt, an analyst at S&P, “and buybacks support the stock.”

Neither the right nor the left can count on any company to put politics above profit, not over the long term. Dick’s wasn’t the only one to go quiet after coming out for gun control. REI also declined to talk to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. (Yeti supplied a statement about being “unwavering in our commitment to the Constitution and its Second Amendment.”) The pattern of a strong statement followed by selective silence characterizes a lot of corporate activism. Even Target, as The Wall Street Journal reported last year, decided to once again avoid publicizing its position on social issues. Go back to REI’s Vista statement, the one about companies being “willing to lead,” and you’ll see that it promises not a permanent break but one to “assess how Vista proceeds.” How is REI proceeding? The company wouldn’t say.

In April, Dick’s hired the D.C. firm Glover Park Group to —another story that fired up the conservative media. But in the months since, it has paid that firm less than $10,000. By contrast, the company has spent nearly $200,000 lobbying for tax reform since 2017.

It seems unlikely that Stack will reverse Dick’s new gun policy—not after meeting with parents like Guttenberg and declaring on TV that assault-style rifles will “never” return to his stores. But it’s hard to gauge how committed he is to fighting for change, given how quiet he’s been and how little he’s spent on the effort. Did Stack break with the Republican party in 2016, and does the new policy represent his sincere beliefs? Or was the CEO looking for a way to exit the gun business and its boom-bust cycles? Was Dick’s planning another gun-control push when it hired that lobbying firm in April? Or has the backlash been worse than expected, pushing the company into its current silence as it waits for conservative customers to forget?

The answer to all these may be yes. But that leaves one last question: How can you truly be part of the conversation if you’ll only speak on your own terms?Ìę

Craig FehrmanÌę() lives in Bloomington, Indiana. This is his first feature forÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

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When you live far from the city, it can feel like there are only two options: move or be forgotten. Yet a pair of new books—one set in the red rock canyons of Utah, the other in the pastures of Pennsylvania—suggests a third possibility: adapt.

In , out last month, John Branch tells the story of the Wrights, a family that settled in southwestern Utah 156 years ago. Today Bill Wright, the aging patriarch, tends to a couple hundred cattle. He and his wife have thirteen children, many who have children of their own. (Wright seems to have a firmer headcount on his herd than on his grandkids.)ÌęEach year, the family reunites to brand the new calves. Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The New York Times, describes the action expertly—the noise, the dust, the smell of scorched flesh. “It smells like money,” one participant says.

Maybe, but it doesn’t bring much in. Branch runs down the factors that make life increasingly hard for mid-sized ranchers—drought, corporate competitors, environmentalists. But the Wrights have a surprising solution: the rodeo circuit. Bill’s boys earn millions riding saddle broncs. Branch captures the life of a modern rodeo star, from the crushing travel to the baby powder, an essential product given all that leather and sweat. (“You got that cheap Great Value stuff?” one Wright asks another. “No, it’s Johnson & Johnson.”)ÌęWhile rodeo cash props up the livestock, it also drains the drama from Branch’s ranching chapters. The Last Cowboys makes clear that the Wrights are now a rodeo family who happen to raise cattle, and not the other way around.

The subjects of Eliza Griswold’s , which arrives onÌęJune 12th ($27; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), have far less money and far bigger problems. Like the Wrights, the Haney family have remained in one place—southwestern Pennsylvania—for generations. Stacey Haney is a single mom who works at the local hospital. She embodies both the old rural economy (living on a farm) and the new one (entertaining an offer from a fracking corporation that wants to set up operations near her land).

This kind of complexity saturates the book. Griswold, an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor and an acclaimed poet and journalist, carefully sifts through Haney’s reasons for finally deciding to sign a lease with the billion-dollar outfit. Haney knows the region needs jobs, she’s tired of all the war over oil, and she wants to build a structure to protect her family’s show animals. “On the six hundred dollars she made a week,” Griswold writes, “the dream barn remained a dream.”

Things go wrong immediately. The rumble of heavy trucks appears to damage her house’s foundation, the water goes bad, and she and her kids become terribly, mysteriously sick. Griswold narrates Haney’s response to the fallout, and the reaction from her pro-fracking neighbors, in lean, captivating prose—it’s part legal thriller and part medical mystery. Mostly, though, it’s a tragedy. If we could turn outrage into electricity, Griswold’s book would power the planet.

Yet there’s something more here than energy politics. Griswold and Branch both skip the country clichĂ©s and simply show what the Wrights and Haneys love about their lives, whether it’s running cattle or grooming a goat for 4-H. These books don’t just reveal the reasons rural Americans must adapt, but also the reasons they might want to.

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The sinking of the SS El Faro, on October 1, 2015, was America’s worst maritime disaster in decades. El Faro was 790 feet long and hauling 25 million pounds of cargo from Jacksonville, Florida, to San Juan, Puerto Rico. About halfway through its voyage, the ship ran into Hurricane Joaquin’s 130 mile per hour winds and 40-foot waves. None of the ship’s 33 crew members survived.

El Faro slowly became a rich subject for writers. The National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the sinking turned up thousands of documents, and there were weeks of public hearings trying to figure out what went wrong. Most important, there were 26 hours of audio straight from El Faro’s bridge, preserved on a black box and retrieved from the wreckage nearly three miles underwater by a robot submarine.

When El Faro’s two defining traits come together—the tragedy and the archive—they create an incredible true story of nautical disaster, of real human beings facing things the rest of us can’t imagine. So it makes sense that, this spring, New York publishers are releasing three different nonfiction books on the ship. The books’ titles make for a morbid Venn diagram of overlapping words: There’s Boston-based journalist Rachel Slade’s , Miami-based journalist Tristram Korten’s , and New York–based author George Michelsen Foy’s . Thankfully, all three avoid sensationalism and offer serious looks at the sinking, though one does emerge as the most insightful exploration of this unthinkable disaster.

When people think of them at all, most of us think of cargo ships like El Faro as indestructible. They are so big, so federally regulated, so fortified by modern technologies of navigation and weather forecasting. How could this happen in 21st-century America?

For a lot of reasons, it turns out—most of them small. When El Faro left Jacksonville on September 29, captain Michael Davidson knew about the coming storm. He had a good reputation in his industry. (“A by-the-book mariner,” William Langewiesche called him in a recent .) But Davidson also seemed to be angling for a promotion, and he didn’t want to annoy his bosses at TOTE Maritime Inc. by asking for more time and fuel. The bridge microphones caught him reassuring his crew: “You can’t run [from] every single weather pattern.” So the ship followed its normal route with only minor deviations, even as it moved closer and closer to the storm.

That storm kept growing stronger, eventually becoming a Category 4 hurricane. But a software glitch left El Faro’s officers with weather data that was hours old; the ship’s anemometer had broken weeks before, which meant they couldn’t tell how fast the winds were blowing. A few people on the bridge tried to convince Davidson to change course, but they didn’t try hard enough, or he didn’t listen hard enough—as in any workplace, it’s difficult to know the histories behind a decision. “I think he’s just trying to play it down because he realizes we shouldn’t have come this way,” said Danielle Randolph, the second mate, when the captain wasn’t on the bridge. “Saving face.”

The bridge audio abounds with moments like that, simultaneously humanizing and heartbreaking. When Davidson finally decided to ring TOTE’s emergency call center, he got stuck in the sort of loop you’d expect if you were calling about problems with your cable box. (What’s your best callback number? Can you explain the problem again?) Even near the end, El Faro’s crew seemed more shocked than terrified. When Randolph finally saw the storm on the horizon, all she said was, “There’s our weather.”

The end, when it came, came quickly. The waves and wind became too much even for a ship the size of El Faro. It began to list severely, taking on water until it lost its engines, until the cars in its hold were bobbing around themselves. The ship continued to tilt and started to sink; Davidson gave the order to abandon ship, but in the middle of a hurricane, lifeboats and immersion suits were useless. The air was so saturated with rain and spray that it would have been as impossible to breath above the water as below it.

All three books capture the tragedy and suspense of El Faro. The timing might make this seem like a ghoulish scramble, something the publishing industry has certainly managed before. (A deadly 1998 yacht race in Sydney, Australia, also produced .) But each El Faro volume finds a unique angle, even if their titles all sound the same. Slade spends the most time with the crew’s families and their persistent grief. Korten broadens the narrative to include the M/V Minouche, a smaller ship hit by Joaquin, and the Coast Guard’s attempts to rescue the crews of both.

Foy does the best job. He tells the story briskly and confidently while working in helpful asides: how cargo containers are fastened to a ship deck, how forecasts are determined, how huge ships stay upright (and how they don’t). Run the Storm is too dense in a few spots, especially in its footnotes, but it gracefully covers everything you’d want to know about El Faro’s sinking and the 33 lives that went with it.

Still, the most moving parts in all three books come from those recordings. Take the end of the tape, right before the audio cuts out—when Davidson and his helmsman, Frank Hamm, were the only ones left on the dramatically slanted bridge, with the ship’s alarms ringing in the background, with their voices rising into screams. All three authors have the good sense to basically quote it verbatim:

Hamm: “My feet are slipping. I’m going down.”
Davidson: “You’re not going down.”
Hamm: “I need a ladder.”
Davidson: “We don’t have a ladder. I don’t have a line.”
Hamm: “You’re gonna leave me.”
Davidson: “I’m not leaving you. Let’s go.”
Hamm: “I need someone to help me.”
Davidson: “I’m the only one here.”
Hamm: “I can’t. I can’t. I’m a goner.”
Davidson: “No, you’re not.”
Hamm: “Just help me.”
Davidson: “Frank, let’s go. It’s time to come this way.”

At the end of Moby-Dick, after Ahab and his ship have vanished, Melville describes the ocean enduring: “Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled 5,000 years ago.” The sea still rolls, but one thing that’s changed is the technology that records it. This technology isn’t perfect—software still hiccups, anemometers still break—but El Faro’s black box has commemorated the crew in a way nothing else could. The lines remain so powerful because they are freighted with the knowledge that the speaker will soon be dead.

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The inside of a minivan might seem like an odd place for a thru-hiker epiphany. But that’s where Teresa Martinez found herself when she came up with a campaign to add permanent markers along the 3,100-mile Continental Divide Trail.

Martinez is the executive director of the Continental Divide Trail Coalition (CDTC), a Colorado-based nonprofit that supports the many volunteers and agencies that manage the CDT. In the fall of 2016, she and a couple colleagues were driving from Colorado to New Mexico on one of their regular road trips to meet with trail angels, tribal councils, federal officials, and mayors whose towns sit along the CDT. Of course, Martinez always likes to get out on the trail as well.

On this particular trip, the conversation turned to the CDT’s sign problem—too many in some places, too few in others, and long stretches that had never been signed at all. Martinez proposed a push to put new markers along the entire trail by the end of 2018, which marks the 40th anniversary of the CDT’s designation as a National Scenic Trail. As the minivan drove down I-25, she and her colleagues grew more and more excited. They brainstormed how the idea could actually work, finally settling on a big crowdsourced campaign where hikers and trail lovers could pitch in and put up signs. They settled on a name: . “We were joking how that takes on a totally new meaning if you’re in Colorado,” Martinez says with a laugh.

Now, after a lot of preparation, the CDT is finally getting blazed this summer, and that’s a big deal for a trail that sometimes feels like the overlooked member in long-distance hiking’s triple crown. (Disclosure: My wife is editing a book with the coalition, which is how I first learned of the project.)

The CDT is younger and less established than the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails, but it also offers a different experience. The CDT traces the Continental Divide from Mexico to Canada, crossing through some of America’s best scenery, like Carson National Forest, Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and Glacier National Park. Then there’s the divide itself. There are places along the trail where you can watch as two watersheds slope downward, one heading east and eventually to the the Atlantic Ocean and the other running west toward the Pacific Ocean.

Still, the most striking thing about the CDT is its remoteness. There aren’t many communities along this trail, and the few that exist are small. There aren’t many hikers—about one-third of the number on the PCT or AT—perhaps because the trail is so taxing. The PCT, for instance, features just a handful of passes where the elevation exceeds 10,000 feet; the CDT stays above that level for basically all of Colorado.

But what is often most astonishing to new hikers is the stark landscape. The CDT’s southern tip begins in New Mexico’s arid boot heel, and after the coalition’sÌęshuttle drops hikers off, the shock is immediate. “You see people’s faces as the shuttle leaves,” Martinez says. “Like, ‘Oh my God.’â¶Ä

The CDT has seen some big changes in the past few years. Before the 2009 Public Lands Omnibus Bill passed, which designated lands and funds for conservation, parts of the trail ran along highways or two-track dirt roads. Today, 95 percent of the CDT is protected, which makes for more solitude and better views.

But long stretches still lack any kind of marking, and that can cause trouble even for experienced hikers. “I’ve been doing this for a long time,” Martinez says. “I worked on the AT for 20 years. I’ve worked on the CDT for 11. And I’ve been on the trail with and maps and still gotten lost.” In the San Juan Mountains, Martinez says, hikers sometimes mistake a well-worn sheep trail for the CDT; in Montana, it’s old forest roads. “It isn’t uncommon to hear about people who’d hiked for half a day before they realized they were not on the trail,” she says.

Blaze the CDT will fix that. With funding from the Forest Service, REI, Osprey, and PPM, a printing company based in California, the CDTCÌęhopes to put up about 10,000 signs along the trail, most of them 3.5-inch aluminum triangles that will be nailed to posts and trees. (The signs feature a blue center, a nod to the DIY markers that began cropping up on the CDT in the 1960s, when locals would wash out tuna cans, spray-paint them blue, and use them to trace the trail.) The CDTC also hopes to recruit an army of volunteers to install those signs. On , you can see hundreds of miles that still need blazing, including big chunks in Wyoming and Montana.

Even if you’re interested in other areas, there’s still a chance to help. “As soon as possible,” Martinez says, “people should reach out by on our website. We’ll be in almost immediate response.” The CDTC can provide some online training and a pack with hammers, nails, signs, and a 14-page “marking guide” that it crafted with input from the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Martinez says her organization will try to accommodate most schedules, and she loves the idea of strangers walking and working on the trail together. “We want to sign it with as many people as possible,” she says.

The CDT Coalition hopes its campaign will create momentum for future projects, including more prominent signs at trailheads and road crossings. But given the CDT’s fledgling status compared to the more developed trails, even a 3.5-inch marker represents a big opportunity. As Martinez says, “This is the trail our generation gets to influence.”

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The summer’s hottest documentaries take on conservation, climate change, and doping.

Icarus

WithÌę, writer and amateur cyclist ­Bryan Fogel set out to make a ­lighthearted docu­mentary about experimenting with performance-enhancing drugs. But when he contacts , the chief of Russia’s anti-doping program, Fogel becomes wrapped up in an international scandal. In a Bond-thriller twist, Rodchenkov admits to providing to hundreds of Russia’s athletes, on orders that allegedly come all the way from the Kremlin.—Matt Skenazy

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power

So much has shifted since 2006, the year former vice president Al Gore’s Oscar-winning climate-change documentary debuted. The year 2014, for example, became the . Then . And . Then, in June, President Trump . Premiering July 28, Gore’s newest documentary, , brings us up to date on what’s improved and what’s gotten worse (spoiler: everything).

Like the first entry, Sequel follows Gore through his daily life—working on his laptop, reflecting on his career, and delivering his data-heavy lecture and climate slide show to large audiences. But the film improves on that formula in almost every way. Directed this time by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk,Sequel feels more cinematic, pairing helicopter shots of melting glaciers with the unnerving sound of water plop-plop-plopping into a rising ocean. The scope is also more international, including terrifying cell-phone footage of the 2013 floods in the Philippines and Gore’s behind-the-scenes work at the same Paris accord that Trump would later abandon.

Both of Gore’s movies come to the same conclusion: we need to change now. In the first installment, that was enough. But Sequel leaves you wondering how to alter our behavior, and why more of us haven’t. Part of the problem is that, for many voters and politicians on the right, opposing environmental initiatives has become a core principle. Since 2006, the number of conservative Republicans who believe global warming is a serious problem has declined. And therein lies Sequel’s biggest fault: it overlooks the shift to uglier politics, preferring to focus on renewable energy and a message of hope.

Gore is right that the climate is a moral and ethical issue. But in the end, saving the planet is less about motivating individual viewers with jarring graphs and glacier shots than about securing political and legislative victories. And that makes dealing with it much, much harder. —Craig Fehrman

Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman

On August 31, amid the season premieres of Manhunt: Unabomber and Fast N’ Loud, Discovery is airing a thoughtful portrait of conservation efforts in the Amer­ican heartland. , based on , was unveiled at Sundance in January and recounts the fight to protect wild spaces at the foot of Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, the soil under industrial-scale farms in Kansas, and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico’s fisheries. The protagonists in these struggles aren’t lefty environmentalists, but rather a rancher, a farmer, and a fisherman—all unpretentious and tough skinned, and carrying on the work of their fathers and grandfathers. The documentary, directed by veteran filmmakers and , verges on wonky, but the people in it, backed by Tom Brokaw’s steady narration, compellingly demonstrate how individual efforts to protect our land and water make a difference. —Luke Whelan

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Yellowstone has been luring artists since before it was even a park. In the 1870s, when Congress was debating whether to establish it as our first national park, a painter named Thomas Moran did a lot to rev public opinion. His sketches gave many Americans their first glimpse of the park, and his —an astonishing oil painting that measures 7-by-12 feet—captured its color and scale. “If ever a subject justified the use of a gigantic canvas,” wrote one critic, “surely this one does.”

And yet, when it comes to depicting Yellowstone, there’s something to be said for the humble hardcover. Consider Peter Heller’s terrific new novel, Celine ($26; ). In it Heller shows that he’s a better noticer and describer than the rest of us, and it’s a pleasure to see the park through his prose. But Heller’s novel offers more than mere descriptions. He carefully layers people and settings, emotions and environments; he shows how, in our brains and in our hearts, they so often collide. Celine takes a place we know and uses it to illuminate a character we don’t—and in doing so reminds us that there are some things only a Yellowstone novel can do.

Heller might be the only living author whose biography includes stints as aÌędaring expeditionÌękayaker and a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s written several award-winning books of outdoorsy nonfiction. (Heller is also a contributing editor at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.) More recently he’s published two novels, and , both set in the Western U.S.Ìę

Celine is his third, and it’s a detective novel. It opens on a Big Sur beach in the 1970s, and you can immediately see Heller’s relish for relating nature: “It was bright and windy, with the poppies flushing orange down the slopes of the bluffs, all mixed with swaths of blue lupine. The Pacific was almost black and it creamed against the base of the cliffs.”

Heller’s scenes always hum like this. He captures scenery with spry verbs (a lake’s water wrinkles; fallen trees silver in the sun). He activates a reader’s senses of smell and sound (an unseen elk calls to her calves). His portrayals, whether of the California coast or the Wyoming wilderness, feel less like a static canvas than a living, breathing event.Ìę

On the beach that day occurs one of the two tragedies that will drive Celine. A young girl named Gabriela arrives with her parents, only to watch her mother die, swept out in a surprisingly violent tide. A few years later, Gabriela’s brokenhearted father also disappears. He’s a talented photographer, doing a shoot of Yellowstone’s grizzlies. Local authorities find his empty car a half mile outside the park, surrounded by bear tracks and a big smear of blood.

Two decades later, Gabriela shares her story with Celine, a New York detective and the novel’s heroine. Celine is tough, tired, and very funny—exactly the sort of person you want to spend 300 pages with, or who you want to solve your Arctic-level cold case. (“She had no patience for a bad liar,” Heller writes. “A good liar, on the other hand, was someone to learn from.”) Celine agrees to revisit the death of Gabriela’s father, which means traveling to Yellowstone and uncovering some dark secrets along the way. It’s a pulpy, twisty plot, but Heller keeps it fun without letting it turnÌęclichĂ©. This may be hardboiled fiction, but it’s made with a free-range egg and served with a side of Jacques PĂ©pin’s mustard sauce.Ìę

A lot of this elegance flows from Celine herself. Start with the unexpected fact that she’s nearly 70, an old-money sophisticate who, when she first became a private eye, used opera glasses on stakeouts. And yet, throughout her career, Celine has preferred to work pro bono, assisting the world’s underdogs. She brims with contradiction. She loves teriyaki beef jerky and marzipan cheese. She quotes Wallace Stevens from memory. AsÌęa disguise, she favors orange vests and floppy-eared hats since hunters can go most places without raising suspicion. (“Furthermore, hunters are well armed,” she says. “Always a plus, I’ve found.”) With this many eccentricities, Celine might seem in danger of slipping from quirky to cloying, and in the novel’s one weak stretch she nearly does—after a crackling start, the second quarter bogs down with too many flashbacks and too much backstory.

But the novel’s back half fully recovers. Heller stuffs it with tingling mysteries and thrilling solutions, like Celine’s clever plan to discover a tail’s identity. (It involves diner pancakes.) He makes room for lively supporting characters—a Latvian waitress, a weathered sheriff—and imbues each with humanity and humor. He keeps everything moving thanks to an increasingly tense plot: there are stolen documents, tapped phones, a greedy stepmother, and rumors that Gabriela’s father once worked for the FBI or the CIA.

Still, the best thing about Celine is that it’s a terrific piece of fiction. And the best way to trace this is by considering the power of its Yellowstone setting. Heller probably chose this setting because it adds one more contradiction to Celine—a contrast to her aristocratic big-city milieu. (He also probably chose it because it’s a setting he clearly loves.) Because it’s a novel, though, Celine can offer more than just lavish descriptions or the comedy of an elderly woman exploring mountainous terrain. It doesn’t simply present Yellowstone, the way a painting by Thomas Moran does. It gives us Yellowstone as seen by Celine, and thatÌęcombination (complicated place,Ìęcomplicated heroine) form a revealing and reinforcing literary whole.Ìę

At one point, Gabriela reminisces about her father: “I think he tried to live every day just so he wouldn’t die.” That outlook applies to lot of characters in Celine, none more than Celine herself. She’s experienced her own tragedies over her long and strange life. But Heller suggests that one way to confront this kind of sadness is to do what makes you feel useful, what you’re good at. For Celine, that means being observant, whether of potential suspects or gorgeous landscapes. There are several moments in the park where she slows down and notices, like this one by a lake near Jackson Hole: “Dusk was moving over the water with a stillness that turned half the world to glass,” she thinks. “The wall of mountains had gone to shadow as had the reflections at their feet.ÌęIn the stillness the rings of rising trout appeared like raindrops.”Ìę

This is Celine taking her time, soaking in the scenery, savoring the smell of a far-off campfire—not dissolving her grief, but diminishing it. And reading it, you’ll feel like you understand something true about a person and a place and everything that exists in between.

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The sinking of the USS Indianapolis, at the tail end of World War II, was the worst at-sea disaster in U.S. naval history. Nearly 900 sailors died, an outcome that led to the unfair court-martial and, later, pardon of Captain Charles McVay. The Indianapolis also inspired a in Jaws about one character’s fictional stint on the ship. When a writer first told Steven Spielberg the Indianapolis’ story, the director could hardly believe it. “I remember just saying, ‘Hey, this is a movie!’” he . “‘Somebody someday should do a movie just about the Indianapolis.’â¶Ä

Now somebody has.

On November 11, USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage chugged into theaters in a limited release. (It’s also available on demand.) You might remember the movie from earlier this fall, when the internet at its trailer—heavy on Nicholas Cage and sharks. The movie doesn’t disprove that reaction. It’s a cheaply made dud, with Cage channeling his usual barely subdued mania as Captain McVay while the sharks basically jump themselves.

And yet the movie also provides a chance to remember the true story of the USS Indianapolis—a real-life survival tale that’s far superior to the Hollywood version.

The basic facts of the Indianapolis remain powerful and tragic. In the summer of 1945, the ship went on a stealthy solo voyage from San Francisco to Tinian, a small island in the Pacific. The objective was to deliver two key components for the atomic bomb that would ultimately fall on Hiroshima. “For this secret mission,” Cage says in a weary voiceover, “we are in effect a glorified postal service, delivering two packages with no protection.”

The Indianapolis delivered its cargo, of course, ensuring that the bomb would drop. But while the ship was heading to the Philippines, it encountered a Japanese submarine and took two torpedoes to the hull. The American ship sank in just 12 minutes. Of the 1,197 sailors aboard, about 900 escaped. Four days later, a plane spotted the remaining men, but only 317 made it home alive.

Here’s how those men survived. After their ship slid out of sight, the remaining sailors—a few on life rafts and many more clinging to life jackets or floating debris—found themselves bobbing in a dark and eerie quiet. Everything had happened so quickly that most were naked or in their underwear. Fuel oil covered the ocean in every direction.

Once the sun rose, they evaluated their situation. Some discovered cans of Spam and other supplies in the rafts; others located emergency fishing gear and flare pistols. As the sun grew hotter, they began to develop sunburns and skin rashes in addition to their burns from the ship’s fires. Almost everyone was vomiting due to the fuel oil, which had coated their eyes, noses, and mouths.

The sharks came next. At first they seemed curious, unused to humans floating in the ocean, and circled the men at a distance. Many of the men had never seen a shark. “I had seen pictures in a movie,” one sailor remembered in , a terrific oral history of the ship. Now he was seeing them in the flesh, their fins getting nearer and nearer until the sharks slipped beneath the water and passed so close that the men could watch them even through the oily murk. “One of the sailors drifted away from the group,” the sailor continued, “about 25 feet away. While I was watching, his head went under, and I did not see him again. Made one wonder who was next.”

While the men tried to stay in their groups, they had no idea where the sharks would strike. Whenever the men saw a fin, they would cup their hands and smack the water or even hit the shark, hoping to scare it away. Eventually, the sharks focused on the dead sailors drifting among the living. There were more and more casualties to choose from. As the sun set on that first day, the broiling heat turned to a deep and persistent cold. The men’s life jackets grew waterlogged, which left them sitting lower and lower until their chins were just above the water. Even in the dark, they could feel the sharks brush against their legs.

On the second day, many of the men encountered a new enemy: themselves. They were dehydrated from vomiting and delirious from the conditions. Nobody had slept for more than a few minutes at a time because the waves kept jolting them awake. They were hungry. (A few had tried eating the Spam, only to find that the meat drew even more sharks.) Those who gave in to drinking saltwater began to hallucinate. One common vision was that the ship hadn’t completely sunk but was floating a few feet under the ocean—that the swimmers could dive down and find fresh water or cool ice cream. Another man swore he saw an A&W root beer stand hovering up ahead, just out of reach.

Most of the men who chased these hallucinations never came back. The sailors continued to die, but they also continued to live. After four days, an American pilot spotted them—only the first step in a long and precarious rescue.

USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage doesn’t do justice to those four brutal days, in part because it tries to be too many different movies—a war movie about the crew, a disaster movie about the ship, and a courtroom drama about the captain. It should have stuck to being a survival movie, a story of courage, drowning, dehydration, and, yes, sharks.

The shark scenes are probably the best parts of the movie, capturing the terrifying randomness of the attacks. But USS Indianapolis doesn’t show enough of the sailors fighting back—and it certainly doesn’t do enough to illustrate challenges like the oil or the hallucinations. “You ain’t scaring them off,” one sailor tells another who’s swinging at the sharks. “You’re ringing the dinner bell.” In truth, most of the real sailors believed fighting off the sharks kept them alive. But the movie seems more interested in wised-up dialogue than depicting the actual rigors of survival.

USS Indianapolis and the people behind it have their heart in the right place; the movie is dedicated to the survivors and their families. But it strings together far too many clichĂ©s: Cage’s inspirational speeches, a moment on the home front where someone enters a Southern mansion and actually quotes Gone with the Wind, a scene in a smoke-filled room where some admirals decide the ship’s fate. “That’s a damn suicide mission,” says one. “If it works, they’re heroes,” says another.

They were heroes. In one of USS Indianapolis’ early scenes, we meet the ship’s chaplain, a man so beloved by his fellow sailors that they throw him a surprise party to celebrate his final tour. It’s the kind of calculated moment that guarantees the chaplain will die, and that’s exactly what happens. But the real USS Indianapolis had a real chaplain. His name was Father Thomas Conway, and he was from Buffalo, New York. After the ship sank, he swam from group to group, encouraging the living and praying over the dead. On the third day, he died of exhaustion. “Father Conway was saying prayers and thrashing the water,” remembered another of the survivors, “when he collapsed in delusion and expired.”

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This summer, when the Republican Party announced its official platform, one passage stood out to outdoorsy readers: “Congress shall immediately pass universal legislation . . . requiring the federal government to convey certain federally controlled public lands to states.” Whether or not the management of America’s public lands should be handed over to states has become a strangely polarizing question—and what happens on November 8 could determine the answer.Ìę

In the West, especially, there’s a lot of public land: the federal government ownsÌę of the region.ÌęAmericans have long debated how to regulate the mining and logging and ranching—and, of course, the outdoor recreation—that occurs there. But turning all that land over to the states has never made much sense. It would saddle the states with enormous expenses. (One Utah study found that if the state took over its public lands it would spend a year managing them.) It would also open the door for some states, especially the ones required to balance their budgets, to one day sell the land to private interests. Most Westerners seem to realize this. The region’s newspapers have published opposing the transfer of public lands to the states. In polls, of its residents oppose it. Only 33 percent support it.

And yet, for many Republican officials, transferring public lands remains a live political issue. This desire isn’t purely partisan—when Montana’s only congressman, Republican Ryan Zinke, saw the party's new platform, he —but it is a huge waste in taxpayer money and legislative time. More importantly, it's a very real threat to our public lands.ÌęHere are the four races that could have the biggest impact on this issue.

Utah’s 4th Congressional DistrictÌę

The public lands debate has a long and heated history. (See the in theÌę1970s.) But our most recent argument started in the states.ÌęIn 2012, Utah Republicans demanding the federal government hand over most of its public land within the state’s borders, even though theÌędemand has no constitutional basis. At first, other states tried to follow Utah’s lead, but the amount of anti-public lands legislation has since slowed down. In Western statehouses, lawmakers introduced more than 30 bills ; only six passed. , those numbers dropped to 16 bills introduced and one passed.Ìę

With the states at least partially stymied, Republicans have moved their attention and energy to —and Utah is again a key battleground. In the state’s 4th District, which includes a significant portion of Salt Lake City, Democrat Doug Owens is running against Republican Mia Love in the state’s only semi-competitive congressional race. In 2014, Love beat Owens by five points, and now they’re mired in a rematch. While in Washington, Love has sponsored legislation that would Ìęto enforce laws on public lands from the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to state and local authorities; sheÌę to President Obama opposing the plan to make Bears Ears a national monument; and, on her , she blasts D.C. bureaucrats and argues that,Ìęin most cases, people in Utah “are best equipped to manage the land.” Owens faces long odds in a staunchly conservative state. But he’s trying. “If Love were to lose,” says Jessica Wahl, who manages government affairs forÌęthe Outdoors Industry Association, “I think it would be a huge swing of the tide in keeping public lands public.”Ìę

Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District

Colorado loves the outdoors—it recently became the first state to create —and the public lands debate has emerged as a big issue in its largely rural 3rd District, which covers much of the western half of the state. The incumbent, Republican Scott Tipton, finds himself in a surprisingly close race with Democratic challenger Gail Schwartz. Schwartz’s campaign has attacked Tipton for being lukewarm on public lands, including the proposed San Juan Mountains Wilderness Act, which enjoys widespread support in the area. “His approach to public lands,” she told , “is bought and sold by his special interests.”

Tipton’s campaign has called this a distortion, pointing to his and to the fact that he’s rejected the GOP platform’s section on state takeovers. But a biggerÌęcontroversy in this district has been one of Schwartz’s TV ads. In it, a camera swoops past the state’s mountains and lakes and big blue sky before zooming in on Schwartz in a pastoral field. “This is the Colorado none of us want to lose,” , the wild grass brushing against her knees. “Scott Tipton wants to cut off our access to these lands for generations to come.”ÌęIt just goes to show you that America’s beautiful outdoors and its bare-knuckled politics can mix better than you think.

Montana’s GovernorÌę

Montana is a hotspot for both outdoor lovers and divisive politics. (A few years ago, two out-of-state billionaires to elect Laurie McKinnon to the state’s Supreme Court, apparently with hopes that she would restrict public access to the rivers and streams on their sprawling estates.) This year, the state’s gubernatorial contest has frequently featured public lands talking points—and thus serves as a reminder that the states will continue to play a part in the issue’s future.

One thing states can do is avoid fruitless legislation like Utah's. In 2015, Steve Bullock, Montana’s Democratic governor, a bill that would have created a new task force charged with studying federal land management, a billÌęmany saw as a precursor to Montana’s own attempt to take over that management for itself. But states can be proactive, too. During his reelection bid, Bullock has promised to hire a new state employee who will specialize in protecting and expanding access to public lands.

Bullock has also found a way to turn this issue into a political weapon. His opponent, Republican Greg Gianforte, has praised public lands. But Gianforte is a wealthy businessman who owns landÌęalong the state’s East Gallatin River. In 2009, one of Gianforte’s companies sued the state in an attempt to remove an easement that provided public access to that river. The matter was later that year, but that hasn’t stopped Bullock from portraying Gianforte as a multi-millionaire trying to keep regular Montanans from hiking and fishing. In fact, in , Bullock brought a copy of the lawsuit on stage. “Here’s the lawsuit,” he said, unfolding the document. Ìę

Gianforte complained to the moderators that possessing an outside document was against the debate’s rules. “I just want to note the governor violated the rules,” he said.

“I just want to note Greg Gianforte sued all of Montana,” the governor shot back. Ìę

President of the United States of America

While our governors matter, the next round of public lands bickering seems destined for Congress—and most of what happens at the national level breaks down along party lines. While he was running for president, Republican Senator Rand Paul , “I’d either sell or turn over all the land management to the states.” Republicans Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz made similar promises on the presidential trail.Ìę

Given the issue’s partisan tone, the presidency (and its veto) could play a crucial role in keeping the public lands free. Hillary Clinton seems to be a proud defender of the public lands, and her website includes a typically for protecting and strengthening them. Ìę

Trump is harder to read. In a January interview with , he sounded like a public-lands proponent. “I don’t think it’s something that should be sold,” he said. “We have to be great stewards of this land. This is magnificent land.” And yet, one month later, at one of his mega-rallies, Trump Ìęthat public lands were “not a subject I know anything about.” No one’s quite sure what to think. “Trump is a bit confusing,” says Jessica Wahl. “He’s an unusual candidate.”Ìę

So while the presidential race isn’t as clear as the others—at least on this issue—Clinton does seem like the safer bet. The most important thing, of course, is that you vote. Every vote counts, whether for public lands or many other issues.

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