A place one can never return to grows in the mind. In mine, wind scours a scree field; a long-haired man peers down between the crenellations of a mud watchtower; a woman dozes on a wooden bed in an enclosed courtyard. The steep V of a mountain pass marks a half-remembered, half-imagined map. This is the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where there are few roads and many bandits known as badmash. Much of the land is tribal, and the laws of the nations to the west and east don’t apply. Between 2001 and 2004, I reported from the area with too much familiarity. Even though it was stunningly risky and illegal, I kept emerging unscathed, so I grew cocky. I thought I knew the place, because I found solace in its forlorn landscape and cherished the dark humor of the people I met. I believed I belonged. This was my first mistake.

IDP

Char-i-Qambar Camp, Kabul

Little

The IDP’s fled their homes in Helmand Province to escape the unrest and fighting between NATO forces and the Taliban.

Basbibi’s grandson.

One-armed

Jangora, North West Frontier Province

I arrived on October 7, 2001, . F-16’s roared westward overhead to launch air strikes against the Taliban. The tribesmen could hear but not see the fighter jets, so they fired their rifles into the sky. On my second visit, when an American photographer and I were staying in the tribal areas with a family we’d befriended, members of the local Taliban came and demanded, “Give us the Christians.” My hosts refused. We spent a sleepless night listening for fighters climbing the high earthen walls surrounding the home, then left at dawn. On my third visit, I traveled to South Waziristan, on the Pakistan side of the border, during a lull in fighting against a powerful mujahideen leader named Nek Mohammad, who was . I lay in the backseat of a taxi, pretending to be the sick wife of one of Mohammad’s fighters. In 2004, I traveled for several days with a friend and seasoned Afghan Newsweek reporter, , to meet a well-known Pakistani journalist named . As we drove the border’s steep mountain roads, Khan gave me his wife’s burka and flip-flops and put his two-year-old daughter on my lap so we would blend in. Khan was later assassinated for his investigative reporting, and his wife has since died in a mysterious bomb blast.

On that trip, I saw monkeys in pine trees. I saw women gathering wood who claimed to never have seen a car before. I saw the side of a mountain strewn with white rocks. Until several months earlier, they’d spelled out LONG LIVE MULLAH OMAR—. At the trip’s end, at the very moment I thought I’d made it to the relative safety of Bannu, we were detained by Pakistan’s military intelligence, blindfolded, cuffed, and bundled into the back of a car. The windows were papered over. There was a gun to my head. I was let go on an airstrip in the middle of nowhere pretty quickly, but Yousafzai was detained in prison for six weeks to serve as an example: You don’t travel with an American.

Until that point I saw myself as different, special, destined to work on this border. The contacts I had and the fact that I was a woman convinced me that I could navigate a landscape others couldn’t. I’d made my peace with risk, but until that point I hadn’t realized that I wouldn’t be the one to pay for my mistakes. The imprisonment of my friend changed that.

[quote]“Zama mashoom halek day,” I said—“I am having a boy.” The women all clapped and murmured. My host pulled her dress up around her breasts so that her bare stomach was exposed. “I’m not pregnant,” she cackled. “I’m sick!” She stopped laughing.[/quote]

After Yousafzai was released, I accepted that I could never return. If I did, I’d further jeopardize others—translators, drivers, friends. It was a painful decision made more so over time. At first, I didn’t realize how deeply the place had impacted me. It wasn’t about missing the rush; I didn’t long for the metallic taste of cortisol in the mouth, the aftermath of an adrenaline jag from one dangerous drive or another. I missed the stories. And the best came from women. I’d spent most of my time in villages lazing around on wooden beds called charpais, listening to people talk. The men discussed who had a new weapon, the going price for a cartridge. The women told remarkable stories—of the village’s blood feud, the heroin addict who’d come in search of safe haven. Men here may eat first, but women hold the power of story.

Women make up roughly half of the 42 million Pashtun people in the borderland. The kind of hardship they know is rare. Some are bought and sold, others killed for perceived slights against family honor. But this doesn’t render them passive. Most of the Pashtun women I know possess a rebellious and caustic humor beneath their cerulean burkas, which have become symbols of submission. This finds expression in an ancient form of folk poetry called landay. Two lines and 22 syllables long, they can be rather startling to the uninitiated. War, drones, sex, a husband’s manhood—these poems are short and dangerous, like the poisonous snake for which they’re named.

To ask a woman to sing a landay is to ask what has happened to her. If she agrees, in those two lines she’ll sing you the story of her life and of the places she comes from—places that, for me as for most of us, are impossible to go to. The lure of such danger may no longer drive me as it once did, but the fascination with borders, with traveling to the edge of a place, still has a pull. Before Thanksgiving 2012, I decided to return to the Afghan side of the border to collect landays. It was safer than the other side and as close as I’m likely ever to get to the region that haunts me like no other.

Along with , a photographer who has worked in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, I’d begin in Kabul, then venture as close to the remote Pashtun villages as it was reasonable to go. We’d give ourselves a month to gather enough landays to . Seamus and I met more than a decade ago, when he saved me a seat on a bus bound for northern Iraq at the beginning of the war. We’ve been close friends ever since. He’s an excellent guy to have on your side—kind, funny, virtually indestructible. We’ve kept a fierce pace while working together in Somalia, Nigeria, and Afghanistan, but this trip was different.

At four months pregnant, I was moving slower than usual. I threw up some mornings. It felt like an ant colony occupied my calves. Due to the exigencies of morning sickness, I was living on crackers, which are in short supply in Afghanistan. So I hauled several pounds of energy bars along with gifts: lipstick, scarves, and books of my own poems. (These proved unpopular.) In Kabul we met our translator, whom I’ll call Z. A tenacious young woman who has been her family’s breadwinner since her father died when she was a child, Z. belongs to a new generation of urbane Afghan women who’ve flourished with the influx of foreigners since 2001.

She met us in the Afghan home where we stayed with two friends: an American named Jean Kissell, who lives and works between Afghanistan, the Emirates, and Vermont, and her colleague, Mohammad Nasib. When the Taliban fell, Nasib, an Afghan-American who’d been living in Washington, D.C., and working with the United Nations, decided to do something about the rampant problem of drug addiction in Afghanistan. With the help of Kissell, he founded the , which, among other things, operates rehabilitation centers for addicts. WADAN’s ties to rural people run deep, so Nasib and Kissell know how to do unusual work, like collecting poetry in hard-to-reach places.

Refugee camps in Kabul seemed the right place to begin. There, farmers who’d recently fled tribal villages were trying to eke out an existence until it was safe to go home. We started at Charahi Qambar, a camp of 6,000 on the outskirts of Kabul. The previous winter, nearly two dozen people had frozen to death there. Traffic was worse than ever as we approached the camp. Toyota Corollas jockeyed for inches at roundabouts and waited for hours as convoys of U.S. military vehicles crawled east toward the Pakistani border, beginning the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The road to the camp was lined with boys hawking pomegranates. The fruit was rock hard, its flesh brown and green. Behind the market stalls, a tent city rose abruptly. We pulled in front of two tents that served as a clinic and a school. With WADAN’s help, we’d set up a meeting with the camp’s elders—there’s no way to talk with a group of Afghan women at home without speaking first to their husbands. Our hosts, a cluster of about a dozen men, did not look welcoming. Some appeared incredulous, others bored or stoned. They eyed us sharply, and one ushered us into the circle of broken chairs that served as their conference room. It can be rude to wander into a refugee camp. People are often forced to live private lives in public due to lack of space and shelter, so the illusion of modesty and propriety is important. Hoping for the best, we introduced ourselves and asked how the camp was faring.

“Nothing has changed since last year,” said one elder. Glassy eyes shone from a gray face. Since the tragedy of the previous winter, when the refugees had frozen, there’d been a spate of disappointing press visits. “People come to visit and do nothing,” the man said. “We’re still cold and we’re starving.” The aid program at camp seemed to work like this: Kids who went to school received bags of rice and wheat to take home. If the kids didn’t show up at school, the family didn’t eat. After a few minutes of general discussion, I asked about the poems we’d come in search of. I hoped the men might find it refreshing that we were interested in culture rather than the familiar woes.

[quote]To ask a woman to sing a landay is to ask what has happened to her.[/quote]

“We don’t know anything about poems,” the man snapped. “We’re uneducated people.” Many of the men began to wander away. But one, sturdy and middle-aged, with a smile in his eyes, pulled me aside. He led me into a warren of tarps and earthen alleyways. Heaps of garbage and human waste were piled among the narrow paths. I hopped over puddles of gray sewage in a pair of old sneakers while Z. proved perfectly nimble in high heels. Without saying anything, the elder deposited us in front of a blanket stitched with dust that served as the door to his home. Inside the makeshift shelter, his wife was dressing to go to a neighbor’s wedding. She was tall, with strong white teeth and gold wire earrings.

“I’m pregnant, too!” she cried, looking at me. She grabbed my puffy gray coat, then rubbed her hands over her protruding belly. Two twentysomething women in heavy velvet dresses appeared from two different blanketed doorways: her daughters-in-law. Then a half-dozen other women appeared out of nowhere.

“Zama mashoom halek day,” I said—“I am having a boy.” The women all clapped and murmured. My host pulled her dress up around her breasts so that her bare stomach was exposed. “I’m not pregnant,” she cackled. “I’m sick!” She stopped laughing. Her abdomen was swollen with a mysterious ailment. “Can you tell me what is wrong with me?” she asked.

She barked at a daughter-in-law, who disappeared behind a woolen blanket and reemerged with a white box of pills, which she handed to me. This was the medicine the clinic at the camp had given her: birth control. “What is this?” my host asked. “How do I take it?”

The directions were in English, so I read them aloud as Z. translated. “It’s birth control, “ I said. “This will keep you from having a baby.”

“I’m too old anyway,” she shrugged. “And something is wrong with me.” Still, she was grateful for my help and invited me along to the afternoon’s wedding. She grabbed my arm and pushed me under the blanket and back into the neighborhood’s alleyways. Soon we came to a compound made of dribbled mud: the bride’s home. Inside, the air was warm and heady with sun, sweat, hay, and the press of dozens of bodies. Weddings are segregated by sex, so there were no men. The women were chanting—growling, almost. One, with gold front teeth, was beating a hand drum. The dirge sounded more funereal than celebratory. I understood one word—Sangin—the name of an opium hub in the restive province of Helmand, from which these women had fled some months earlier. Z. translated for me: They were singing of war. One morning before dawn, as a NATO bombing raid raked fire over their village, these women had gathered up their children and fled. An old woman with a white braid said that a helicopter gunship had mistaken a dozen farmers for fighters and shot them all. Her husband was among them. Shrapnel had shredded her three-year-old grandson’s eye. Others, I was told, drowned when the swarm of terrified people surged onto a bridge too narrow to hold them all.

To the drum, they sang:

What should I do, oh God?

My homeland of Sangin is besieged by NATO helicopters.

It wasn’t easy to pry landays out of the women. After the wedding in Charahi Qambar, I tried to meet with the lead wedding singer, the woman with the gold teeth.

“This is impossible,” my host, the woman with the swollen belly, told me. “She must come from another camp, and she can only travel for weddings. If you go there and her husband finds out that she sang for you, he will kill her.”

She proposed an alternative. “There’s an older singer, a widow named Basbibi,” she told me. Perhaps, if I returned to the camp another time, Basbibi would sing. A few days later I returned. Once I was seated in my host’s home, she opened my bag and took my iPhone. She thought it was a voice recorder. I wasn’t to record any of the women, she said. I turned off the phone. Basbibi entered and tugged the burka from her head. She wore a white braid down her back and placed her three-year-old grandson on her lap. He had one scarred eye. She tried to give a fake name at first, but I recognized her from the wedding as the older of the two singers, whose husband had been killed by the NATO forces.

“There are too many sorrows to sing of,” she said. She’d lost her husband; her grandson was half-blind. Life in the camp was no better. Her brother had recently been arrested for killing another man in a fight over water. He’d been taken away to the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi prison, . She crouched and sang,

In Pul-e-Charkhi, I’ve nothing of my own

Except my heart’s heart lives within its walls of stone.

Each night I counted the poems I’d collected as if hoarding treasure. It was slow-going. Usually, when reporting, there is a midway moment when I realize I’ve got the story. That moment wasn’t arriving. There was something about the bubble of the capital that made us feel disconnected. Then there’s the fact that eight out of ten Afghan women don’t live in cities. We weren’t getting close enough to the mountains where these poems were born. We had to travel nearer to the border. But my calculus was different now. The choices I made had bearing on the person temporarily making his home inside me.

Seamus had already given our unseen friend a name: Puddin’ Jelly, after a poorly translated menu item at our favorite restaurant in Kabul. When we were sleeping on floors, he wordlessly handed over his mattress so that Puddin’ would have extra padding. He always gave me the last Snickers. After a bumpy ride, he’d turn to me and ask, “How’s Puddin’?”

His thoughtfulness reassured me, and we decided to head east to Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province. One of the country’s largest cities, Jalalabad . Before Islam arrived, it was a sacred Buddhist region. The road from Kabul east to Jalalabad is less than 100 miles of switchbacks and tunnels blasted out of the rock by the Russians. Now the road was undergoing urgent construction to facilitate the Western pullout from Afghanistan. Winter was a bad time to drive it. This wasn’t simply a matter of militant roadblocks. It was a question of car accidents. Seamus and I decided to fly and bought empty seats on a flight that the Japanese government had chartered for its aid workers.

[quote]I felt no surge of relief, no sense of accomplishment. There was nothing finished about these poems, and I’d soon leave the women who sang them behind.[/quote]

This, too, comes with risk. Many flights to Jalalabad are greeted by Taliban gunfire. Our pilot dove steep and straight toward the airport, a military base, in order to avoid the threat of bullets. As we taxied, I spied two American soldiers in shorts going for a jog. Behind them, in a hangar, were two diminutive snub-nosed aircraft with propellers: space-age versions of remote-control planes kids built from kits. It took a moment before I realized they were drones.

In town we slept on the floor of an office owned by friends of Kissell and Nasib. (The hotels in Jalalabad are expensive and loaded with Taliban spies.) To keep a low profile, our hosts requested that I wear a burka outside at all times. I loathed the constriction, but there was a perk to stifling beneath that blue fabric: it earned me the right to study the market crowded with tailors and peddlers, the outdoor pool hall with snooker tables tucked under a tarp meant for refugees.

On our third day, we discovered a trove of landays in the person of Sharifa Ahmadzai, a fiftyish businesswoman who owns rug factories throughout the country, whom we met through a local professor. She couldn’t travel to her home village anymore, because the Taliban wanted her dead. For people who represent the modern world, it’s no longer safe to go home to villages now dominated by militants. Still, Ahmadzai loved the ancient poems. She recited one she’d heard by phone from a kinswoman in her village, the mother of a Taliban fighter named Nabi who’d recently been killed by a drone strike:

My Nabi was shot down by a drone

May God destroy your sons, America, you murdered my own.

We didn’t go into the borderlands, but we managed to reach them another way: a local women’s affairs office arranged for seven teachers from faraway villages to collect landays from girls. At week’s end, we hosted a small lunch for the teachers, paying bus fare for them and a family escort. They filed into the office with scraps of paper scrawled with landays they’d gathered from teenage schoolgirls. Listening to them and carefully recording the treasures they’d brought was a bit like a game of telephone. I taped them one by one, hoping I was getting the words right.

The next day, it was time to return to Kabul, so we tried to finagle cheap seats on a charter plane. There wasn’t one. We had to go by road. The night before we left, Seamus stayed up late watching a pirated copy of on his laptop. Through the office wall, I could hear Carrie’s hysterics. The next morning, around 5 A.M., the sound of a blast woke us. “Shit!” I uttered, sitting up fast and clutching my swollen belly. “Bľ±˛őłľľ±±ô±ô˛ąłó!” Z. said at the same time. About three miles away, a suicide bomber had blown himself up. Seconds after, another. The bombers .

A few hours later, Seamus, Z., and I climbed into an SUV owned by our host to run the winding gauntlet from Jalalabad to Kabul. Our driver was a mustached man in a leather coat who spoke no English. There was only one working seat belt, and I grabbed for it. “Sorry, I need the seat belt,” I said. Z. glowered beside me. She didn’t much care about the belt, but she had to sit in the middle, which was neither comfortable nor culturally appropriate, since she had to squeeze in leg to leg next to Seamus. I pretended not to notice. On both sides of the road, the jagged river valley rose over sheer rock faces. The walls looked too steep to harbor armed militants, but they did. The black mouths of the tunnels that the Soviets blasted in the eighties gaped at us. Entering them has always stopped my breath. This time my jaw was clenched too tightly for nausea. After a few minutes we emerged from the tunnels, and the landscape cut into sharp valleys that we drove through at top speed. Our driver exhaled deeply and picked up his phone to call our host once again and report that we had made it beyond the hairiest part of the drive. I pulled Diet Cokes from the plastic bag at my feet and handed them to Z. and Seamus.

I felt no surge of relief, no sense of accomplishment. There was nothing finished about these poems, and I’d soon leave the women who sang them behind. When the military convoys rolled out of Afghanistan on roads the Russians had built, what would happen to brash young women like Z.? The only world she knew was one where she was free to do as she pleased. When the international community was no longer paying attention, what jealous member of her family might rise up against her, claiming religion as his cause?

I thought of this landay, which one of the schoolteachers brought us:

When sisters sit together, they’re always praising their brothers

When brothers sit together, they’re selling their sisters to others.

I wondered, too, what the next year would yield in my life—whether I’d have the courage and capacity to return, or if, by necessity, I would leave this place behind.

Eliza Griswold’s is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The post Landays: Cries of the Pashtun Women appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

I WAS A twentysomething divorcĂ©e sitting behind a flesh-toned cubicle wall atĚýVanity FairĚýmagazine. This was a desk that many coveted, but not me. Don’t get me wrong—the magazine was a terrific place to work. Its sleek blocks of frosted-glass offices were lined with smart, caustically funny people editing some of the most vibrant voices on earth at the turn of the 21stĚýcentury.

But I was blindly impatient and headstrong. I loathed sitting still. I couldn’t figure out how I was being paid (barely) to keep my butt in an office chair even though I had so little to do. I wasn’t even allowed to answer my boss’s phone, since he and his friends played elaborate prank-call jokes on one another. So I whiled away afternoons reading great stories. Without realizing it, I was learning that curious people could support themselves by traveling and writing about the world’s problems. One day I was sent to the offices of Human Rights Watch to fetch photographs of possible war crimes that Sebastian Junger had shipped back from Sierra Leone. As I waited for the photographs, someone pulled me aside and told me the story of honor crimes: women who are killed by their families for rumors of sexual dishonor in Jordan and on the West Bank.

This was a story that demanded reporting, I thought, and I decided to go to the Middle East and do it myself. This was ambitious, yes, but I had nothing to lose and I knew it. I had few expenses, and I was responsible to no one. (I was living in my parents’ guest bedroom following my divorce.) There was no chance in hell thatĚýVanity FairĚýwould send me, so I pitched the story toĚýThe New Republic.ĚýIf I could do it, the editor said, the magazine would publish it. After just nine months at Vanity Fair, I’d left my desk behind for good to pursue a life as a writer.ĚýAbout a year after publishing that first story, on an achingly bright September morning in 2001, I was walking through Central Park with my sister when emergency vehicles began to race past us. I called up The Sunday TimesĚýof London and offered them my services as a stringer in New York. After filing a few dispatches for them, I scrambled and found a women’s magazine that wanted a story on refugee camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. At the time, the United Nations was sending journalists to Pakistan. In addition to helping secure visas fast, the UN would arrange for a flight if the journalist had an assignment.

I landed in Islamabad wearing sneakers white with the dust of 9/11 and rushed into the refugee camps from which the Taliban had sprung. For the next three years, I worked for whoever would pay me.ĚýI left Pakistan for MedellĂ­n, Colombia, to report on child assassins. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I reported on pygmies who claimed that rebels had killed and eaten their family members. I returned to Pakistan several times to report from the tribal area of Waziristan. And each time, I returned home to the same set of pink twin beds in my parents’ apartment.

I finally moved out, but I’ve kept going for the past decade, working primarily on issues of religion and justice in Africa and Asia. My story isn’t uncommon. There’s a whole itinerant pack of us who came of age in the shadow of the falling towers. As I’ve grown older, I’ve mellowed with the realization that the good things—jobs, skills, careers, love—take time. Talent is the least of it. But the attributes I learned during that unsettled period continue to serve me: curiosity, empathy, and a desire to return to desperate places. As a wise friend told me years ago, the greatest challenge is getting there.

is the author of .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fire in the Sky

WORST CASE: STRUCK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cutlass Supreme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in the Saddle

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

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

Crash-Test Dummy

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

Avalanche

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huevos Fritos

Sometimes a man is his own worst enemy.

Jeans

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

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

So. Let’s get it over with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thumb Sucker

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

Hitchhiking

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

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

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

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

“Albuquerque.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So There You Were…

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

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

The post Worst Case Studies appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

THE BOY HOLDS HIS BLACKENED PALM TOWARD THE CAMERA. Soot rings his eyes. Behind him, two plumes of factory smoke billow into the choked sky. Soon it will begin to rain.

Antonin Kratochvil

Self-Portrait by Antonin Kratochvil

Willem Dafoe

Willem Dafoe in New York, 1990 by Antonin Kratochvil

“The raindrops were black,” says Antonin Kratochvil, who took the photograph.

It’s a June morning in Manhattan, and a barefoot Kratochvil, 62, is lounging on a white couch in the Tenth Avenue loft he shares with his fourth wife, Gabriela, and two of his three sons. This is an uncommon moment of repose for a man who’s so tightly coiled and peripatetic that he’s known as “the Bouncing Czech.” Family chaos swirls all around him, the floor a minefield of dump trucks belonging to his 19-month-old son, Gavyn. Gabriela, a willowy blonde 20 years younger than her husband, is simultaneously sautĂ©ing chicken at the stove, captioning photographs at her desk, and preparing to wake their teenage son, Wayne.

Ěý

Kratochvil, oblivious, flips through photographs he took in Eastern Europe in 1991, after the fall of Communism. He pauses over this boy with the soot-ringed eyes, who was living in the Transylvanian town of Copsa Mica, one of the most polluted places on earth. “I empathize with people who are being fucked,” he says. “When I photograph them, I am photographing myself.”

Coming from anybody else, that would sound grandiose, but Kratochvil has an innate understanding of what his subjects go through, because he’s lived it. He spent his early childhood in a Czech labor camp and grew up in Communism’s grip. After he fled Czechoslovakia, at the age of 19, he wandered Europe illegally for years, in search of refugee status, was conscripted by the French Foreign Legion, and later deserted the brutal army. He drifted to Amsterdam and then Hollywood and built a career as a photojournalist, doing what came naturally: searching out the places where conflict and suffering were rife.

The world is full of bold photographers who earn their keep by traveling to rough regions. Kratochvil towers above them all, in large part because his extraordinary background gives him a preternatural cool not to mention credibility that can’t be taught. “In what we do, the most important faculties are instinct and intuition,” says photojournalist Chris Anderson, who calls Kratochvil his mentor. “Antonin is the embodiment of instinct. His persona is that of an ogre, but he is frighteningly intelligent, the most astute observer of human behavior I know.”

During his 35-plus years in the field, Kratochvil has traveled to radioactive Chernobyl, blood-diamond mines in Sierra Leone, the Niger Delta, Pakistan in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Darfur, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In the past two years, he’s navigated the Zambezi River to follow malaria’s ravages and been airlifted to remote U.S. military bases in the Philippines to photograph Special Forces units.

In a few days, Kratochvil will travel to Prague to act in a film for the first time, playing the lead role appropriately, an artist in exile in a new project by Czech director Jan Hrebejk. He’s grown his sandy hair long, and a new, grizzled beard sprouts from his round face. He’s missing a chunk of his left thumb. When I ask him what happened, his blue eyes twinkle wickedly. Kratochvil’s device for deflecting serious questions is ribald humor, and he claims he lost the thumb while having sex with a virgin. “She clamped down,” he says.

His two-bedroom loft looked different 20 years ago, when Gabriela first arrived. She met Kratochvil in Czechoslovakia when she was 17 and a close friend of his oldest son, Michael. Their romance started four years later, when she was 21. When she moved to New York to be with Kratochvil, the loft was raw space really raw. There wasn’t much in it but a table piled high with negatives. Kratochvil slept in a sleeping bag. Like a gentleman, he offered Gabriela his spare.

Despite his gunslinger’s slouch toward life, Kratochvil is dead serious about his work and what drives it. His freedom is his god. “I struggled all my life for freedom. I don’t know what the fuck it is besides that it is a responsibility,” he says, meaning responsibility to those he left behind. “I owe it to them because I got out, and I have to go back.” That sounds like survivor’s guilt, but he insists it isn’t. “I have no guilt,” he says. “I’m a different beast.”

BETWEEN THE AGES of two and five, Kratochvil caught rats in a Czechoslovakian labor camp. To count his kills, he cut off their tails and showed them to his father, Jaroslav. He remembers the rodents, but he has no memory of the home where he was born. In 1949, when Kratochvil was two, men in leather coats arrived at his family’s house in Lovosice, in western Czechoslovakia, and beat up his father, an upper-class photographer and artist with social-democratic political leanings.

The apparatchik thugs declared the Kratochvils enemies of the new regime, which had been ushered in the previous year when the Soviet-backed Communist Party of Czechoslovakia seized power. Soon the government confiscated all of the Kratochvils’ possessions and shipped the family to Vinor, a labor camp outside Prague. There, Antonin’s mother, Bedricha, plowed potato fields while his father worked in a tool shop. To survive, they scavenged the dregs of the harvest.

Ěý

Four years later, the Czech government moved the Kratochvils to a Prague tenement building that housed enemies of the state. At night, neighbors threw rocks at their windows. There was no toilet in the apartment, so to get to the bathroom, six-year-old Antonin had to walk down the hall and pass under a looming crucifix lit by a red votive candle’s flickering flame. Kratochvil counts this memory not any scene from a war zone as his most terrifying. Years later, he returned to that apartment, found the dusty cross in the attic, and took it. “I have that little bitch, that little Jesus, at home now,” he says. (He reserves the term “little bitch,” his highest praise, for only a few people, including Christ. Everyone else he calls “baby.”)

Whether it be image or object, Kratochvil handles what unsettles him by possessing it. Other things he’s hung on to: his United Nations Refugee Agency identity card and a length of barbed wire from the Czechoslovakian border, which guards snipped for him as the Iron Curtain was being torn down during the 1989 Velvet Revolution.

When Kratochvil was seven, his father gave him his first camera, a boxy Kodak Brownie, and he took to wandering the woods outside Prague with a young crew of fellow outcasts, photographing his buddies. Because of his family’s status, he had to leave school and start working for the state after ninth grade. He spent his adolescence doing construction full-time in Prague and taking pictures for fun. At 18, he got his girlfriend, Olga, pregnant and married her. She gave birth to a son, Michael. One year later, sick of hanging drywall under Communist rule, he decided to escape. He asked Olga to come with him, but she refused.

So in 1966, at 19 years old, he fled, crawling on his belly under the barbed wire that ran along the border with Austria. He took nothing with him, not even a camera. For the next four years, he moved from country to country Austria, France, and Sweden among them seeking official refugee status. He calls this period his “walkabout.” To eat, he begged, and he often ended up in jail.

In 1969, to get from Italy to France, he swam the Mediterranean for more than seven hours, from Ventimiglia to Menton. While drying his clothes on a beach in Menton, he was arrested and, weeks later, conscripted into the French Foreign Legion, the notorious army made up of foreigners and refugees. The Legion shipped him to the north-central African nation of Chad, where he fought against Libya-backed rebels for a few months. Later that year, while lugging ammunition at a Legion base in Marseille, he stole a length of rope and used it to lower himself off a high wall. He ran to a nearby rail station, hopped a commuter train, and fled toward Holland, which he’d seen only in pictures.

“I’m a professional escapist,” Kratochvil says, grinning. It isn’t so funny at night, according to Gabriela, to wake up and find him peering in your face, trying to figure out if you’re friend or foe.

In 1970, at 22, Kratochvil reached Amsterdam, walked into a police station, and was granted political asylum. Soon after, with little more than a borrowed camera and his middle-school education, he wrangled his way into the Gerrit Riet­veld Academie, a prestigious art institute in Amsterdam. While there, he married his second wife, an American named Laurie Ahlman. He graduated a year early with a bachelor’s degree in photography and art history, and the Kratochvils moved to California, where Antonin hit the streets with his black-and-white portfolio.

It wasn’t long before his gritty photos won him consistent freelance work in Hollywood. After a short stint in 1973 as an assistant art director for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, he started photographing album covers for Motown groups like the Pointer Sisters and the Commodores, eventually landing gigs taking celebrity portraits for Premiere magazine. He began a rise to fame, and he loathed it.

“I hated L.A., and the place was changing me,” he says. In 1977, şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř assigned Kratochvil a photo essay on Route 66. The story never ran, but he took his $5,000 check and a hash brownie a sympathe­tic editor offered as consolation and set out for a trip around the world that has never really ended. His father, Jaroslav, had recently died, and it was once again time for reinvention. He left Laurie behind, in his mind doing her a favor by giving her the chance to be with someone more reliable. (Laurie still uses the name Kratochvil and is a prominent photography editor. In 1978 Antonin met an American named Jill Hartley, who would become his third wife by common law. She would leave him in 1983.)

“I paid a high price for being free,” he says. “I wasn’t about to give it up for the middle-class trappings of American life.”

IT’S A WARM EVENING, and Kratochvil is waiting outside New York’s United Nations Secretariat, where a retrospective of his work from the past 20 years is about to open. A tall, well-dressed Czech woman in designer flats and a red babushka approaches him. “Are you Antonin Kratochvil?” she asks. He is. She has never seen his work before. “Will you come out to Long Island and take pictures of my house?”

“Sure!” he says. “In this economy, you never know.” He follows her through the metal detector. When she sees his photographs, her face falls. Here is a church full of people during the Rwandan genocide, which Kratochvil witnessed firsthand. Corpses were stacked hip deep, and he had to wade in among the bodies to take this picture, apologizing to the dead for the desecration. As Kratochvil ambles off to greet the ambassador from the Czech Republic, the woman collapses onto a nearby couch. “Sad,” she keeps saying. Sad.

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Kratochvil specializes in heavy topics the show contained his photographs from the Czech Republic, Rwanda, and Iraq. But he rejects the “war photographer” label outright and hates the self-promotional concept of bearing witness that’s in vogue among some photojournalists. “Antonin detests the notion of self-aggrandizement that photographers make a living off of,” says Gary Knight, a colleague of Kratochvil’s and co-founder of VII, the New York based agency Kratochvil started in 2001 with six other photographers: Knight, Ron Haviv, the late Alexandra Boulat, Christopher Morris, James Nachtwey, and John Stanmeyer. Still, Kratochvil understands strife. He was raised in conflict, and he’s made his name and a very good living by returning to it.

Some of Kratochvil’s most controversial photographs came out of Iraq following the 2003 invasion. He was on assignment for Fortune, but he didn’t embed with the military; he entered the country by driving a rented Mitsubishi across the Kuwaiti border in the wake of an American tank, hiding in the dust. He survived by eating scraps of MREs left behind by soldiers and using tricks picked up over the years. For example: Always park ass-in, so you can get out quickly; to hide film or memory cards in a hurry, turn around and pretend you’re pissing.

The digital images Kratochvil sent back stood out immediately. He was tilting the camera at such a sharp angle that the world looked off balance. I reported from Iraq in 2003, and I remember, upon returning to the U.S., seeing a slide show of Kratochvil’s work at the International Center of Photography, in New York. In frame after frame, the charred ground loomed over oil drums, water jugs, and tank treads. Why, I wondered, given the amount of suffering, had Kratochvil taken so few pictures of people? This topsy-turvy, degraded land mirrored the apocalypse he was trying to evoke. The vertiginous angle was secondary; the ground was his primary concern. As he says, “I love the earth.”

Kratochvil’s work is so distinctive that those who know it don’t need to see the credit on his photos. Ask any of his professional admirers about his style and you’ll hear this refrain: Kratochvil is a photographer’s photographer. And, like the man himself, the work is technically much more careful and considered than it first appears. His influences range from the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch to post World War II street-photography icons like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. Kratochvil is an art photographer who chooses crisis as his subject: a mutt.

The closest thing he has to a peer is his countryman Josef Koudelka, 71, best known for a series on gypsies he shot in Czechoslovakia in the sixties. One of Koudelka’s most famous photos, of a tear-streaked boy wearing angel wings and riding a bicycle, hangs by Kratochvil’s bathroom. “He’s still alive, baby. That little bitch is still alive,” he says of Koudelka.

The episode that has come to define whatever sets Kratochvil apart his intuition, composure, or, as he calls it, his “loose” occurred in a Croatian refugee camp in 1993. Kratochvil was visiting the camp with British photojournalist Michael Persson, then a 28-year-old hotshot working for the wire service Agence France-Presse. Persson spent the day diligently shooting a series of images he considered newsworthy: breadlines, barbed wire, refugees getting vaccinations. Kratochvil spent the day loafing around, looking at people, and occasionally lifting a battered Nikon, his arms flailing awkwardly as he shot. Looking back now, Persson laughs and says that Kratochvil looked like “a sack of shit sitting on his ass.”

At day’s end, Kratochvil asked Persson what he “got.” When Persson rattled off his list, Kratochvil said, “If that’s what you got, you didn’t get it.” It wasn’t until the two reviewed their images months later that Persson understood: Kratochvil’s pictures of lounging refugees accessed the emotional reality of the camp: boredom, drudgery, and despair, which he intuitively recognized.

Among those who work with Kratochvil, such stories are common. “Antonin swings his arm around and I can’t even tell what he’s taking pictures of,” says Haviv. “Then we go back to the hotel, and I can’t believe he got that. I was standing right next to him.” Kira Pollack, Kratochvil’s photo editor at The New York Times Magazine, says viewers don’t see one aspect of the man’s genius: his 36-photo contact sheets. Whether shooting film or digital, Kratochvil never wastes a frame.

A FEW DAYS AFTER the UN opening, I accompany Kratochvil to a Long Island medical laboratory. He’s been assigned to take a portrait of a scientist researching a cure for Alzheimer’s. As Kratochvil directs, the scientist flattens his face like a fleshy pancake against the lab’s glass door. In his white coat, the brilliant doctor looks like a crazed patient. “Beautiful,” Kratochvil says, snapping away, inches from the pane. They stop in the stairwell.

“This reminds me of Escher,” Kratochvil says, referring to the Dutch artist whose etching of an infinite stairway evokes a man trapped in his mind. We come to a hooded lab station marked HAZARDOUS.

“Can you put your head in there?” he asks.

“No, it’s hazardous,” the scientist answers.

“Are you sure?”

“No! That stuff is yuck!” the scientist snaps. Unruffled, Kratochvil hustles him on to the next shot, seating him near a window and saying that a slash of sunlight against the wall represents inspiration.

After the shoot, we return to Manhattan and drop by VII. There, in a stuffy, windowless office in the back of the slick gallery, a photo too graphic for public consumption hangs above a layout table. The image shows the corpse of a political outcast in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A rope tail hangs around the man’s neck, his head is skinned to the skull, and his pants are pulled down. Kratochvil took the photo in 2004 on assignment for Time, but the image never ran. It appeared only once, in a show at Manhattan’s Hasted Hunt gallery, where it caused an uproar, especially among parents.

Kratochvil picks up a stack of photo books and glances at the shot. “He was probably raped and tortured before his body was dumped from the car,” he says. He is, for the moment, unmasked by what he witnessed, and his eyes flash in full-blown rage. Gone is the easy, devil-may-care mien, gone the raunch and ribaldry. He is haunted by this decisive moment. What he intended to capture possesses him.

“Since I was little in refugee camps, I’ve seen people hang themselves,” he says. “I don’t close my eyes.”

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