I hope never to take a plane again. I’ve flown in my share, and I never collected miles, so I don’t have any to use up. To me, rewarding frequent fliers with miles is like giving well-behaved inmates the perk of spending more time in jail. I remember when comedians used to make jokes about airplane food—if only! Now the semi-undeclared civil war that our country is currently engaged in takes place vividly and luridly in the aisles of commercial flights, with cursing, spitting, brawling, and the assault of flight attendants. I want to miss as much of this rage-filled period of our history as I can.

Today I do my traveling on foot, aided by public transportation. I live in New Jersey, and a great wilderness for adventures lies about 15 miles east. New York City, blessed in its geography like no place else, contains expanses of wild urban outdoors that very few know about. Yes, you can rock-climb in Central Park or kayak on the Hudson River and surf or windsurf at Rockaway Beach, but that’s not the kind of adventuring I’m after. I used to fish all over the city, and have taken the subway under the East River to a favorite spot to catch striped bass—that almost unheard-of technique of catching fish by first going beneath them. Nowadays I don’t fish so much. Instead I go looking for the hidden wild places in the middle of everything, places you might see every day without imagining how wild they are.

Sometimes I get up early in the morning and walk to the commuter train and catch the 4:54 to Penn Station. From there I take the subway to a far-flung stop and get out and ramble all day through woods and weed zones and under elevated highways and along waterfronts within the city limits, where I’ve seen deer, wild turkeys, feral cats, dog packs, hawks, fish, seals, large rats, coal-black squirrels, and not many other people. Those humans I do come across generally seem half-wild themselves. Walking on a jetty on the ocean side of Queens, I saw a guy in black bathing trunks and rubber slippers who was fishing with a trident, moving in and out among the rocks and incoming waves. He assumed a position of ambush, crouched with his trident raised. Never had I seen anybody fish like that. His basic English sufficed for him to tell me that this is the way he used to fish in the Mediterranean Sea when he was growing up on Malta.

Over the centuries, humans have changed the landscape, but there is only so much they can do to it in a place like New York, where big ecosystems meet. The ocean is still in the same basic location, relative to the shore, that it’s been in since the last glaciers melted, about 14,000 years ago. In 1972, the federal government created the 26,607-acre Gateway National Recreation Area—preserving huge tracts of land in parts of New York City and Monmouth County, New Jersey—out of the land-ocean interface, mostly because urban residents didn’t have a lot of options. Might as well give the geography a name, and an official recreational status, and pretend we have some control (sea-level rise, take note).

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The longer I sit still, the more I yearn to move. The pull of motion isn’t a calm desire; it’s a nagging that builds up until I imagine that it enters the couch or the bed I’m on. I can’t stand lying there another second. Then I wonder if the bed, itself infected with yearning, has begun to move. It creaks as if it’s about to start. The key moment, the passing between the two states—from motionlessness to motion—will be almost undetectable. I keep watching for it. Is the headboard just slightly farther from the wall than it was a minute ago? We know that all beds secretly want to fly.

I grew up in Ohio, the centrifugal state. For no reason I can explain, Ohio takes people who were born there and spins them around and flings them in every direction. It’s no accident that the first man to fly, the first American to orbit the earth, and the first man to stand on the moon all came from Ohio. I come by my radical, excessive footloose-ness honestly, from my constantly spinning Ohio childhood. As kids, my friends and I roamed the local woods; by the time we were in junior high, we had started to hitchhike. In my late teens, I walked to the Ohio Turnpike, climbed the fence, stuck out my thumb, and ended up in Wyoming or Boston, almost on a whim, depending on whether I chose the westbound or eastbound lanes. Today, as an ex-Ohioan—a flung Ohioan—I am just as restless. My basic idea of how to get somewhere is to jump in the car and drive there, whether it’s to the store or to the edge of the tree line in Canada. I would rather drive for 20 hours than fly in a plane for three. But in the end, I’ll settle for any transport that will carry me.

Sometimes in everyday life I ride a commuter train. The New Jersey Transit, which serves our suburban town, has a lot of double-deckers, and when one of these is in the station in New York, the view from the lower level presents you with the boarding platform at shoe-top height. On the other side of the window, inches away, is the yellow zone at the edge of the platform, with its grid of little round bumps to keep people’s feet from slipping. Black, stenciled letters next to it say Stay Behind Yellow Line. The train doors make their ding noise and slide shut.

Then, with almost imperceptible slowness, the no-skid bump on the other side of the window, the particular one I’m concentrating on, starts to move backward. I switch my gaze to another bump; it’s also moving backward, but slightly faster. I try to hold my focus on individual bumps as they come into view, but then they all accelerate into a yellow blur and lose their physicality like fish in a blender. For a moment the transition is painful. Only after the train has entered the blackness of the tunnel do I relax and enjoy the speed.

I think about another train, one that I rode in Siberia. Some years ago, I was driving across Russia with two Russian guys. Back then the road did not go all the way across but ran out at a remote Siberian railroad-junction village called Chernyshevsk. To this day it is the worst place I have ever been. At Chernyshevsk, travelers had no choice but to put their cars on the train if they wanted to continue across a 560-mile swamp between the village and where the road resumed. Hundreds of cars had been waiting for days for a place on the train. In and near the station there were swarms of sinister, crew-cut Russian guys and begging, heartbreaking, rapacious children, and no working bathrooms. There were no public trash barrels. Garbage covered the ground, and large flies as shiny blue as oil slicks buzzed all over. The month was August. We waited our turn to get on the train inside the piping-hot vehicle with the windows closed to keep out the crew cuts and the kids and the flies. After two days we finally got on, in a dark, closed freight wagon. More hours passed.

I will never forget when that train started to move. It began haltingly, after a few lurches and the clatter of the couplings, one after the next­­­—a sound that diminished down the length of the train. Then it started to roll so slowly that it seemed always on the verge of stopping, but never quite did. I had thought we might remain in Chernyshevsk in remote eastern Siberia forever. I never expected such bliss as that first delicious feeling of motion. The train took a day and a half to cross the swamp, sometimes at what seemed about 15 miles an hour. I didn’t care how slowly it went as long as it kept going.

“So long, suckers!” That is what the object in motion sometimes shouts to the objects at rest. The objects at rest shout something back, but the object in motion can’t hear it above the wind in its ears.

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I had not expected that it would tick. As soon as the sun hit it in the morning—at 6 a.m. or so, in June, in northern Michigan—the metal would start to expand in the heat: łÙŸ±łŠ°ì
tŸ±łŠ°ì
tŸ±łŠ°ì. My first summer living in my van, in the Pigeon River campground near the town of Vanderbilt, I almost never succeeded in sleeping past dawn. And I was not prepared for how stuffy it got with the windows rolled up against the mosquitoes. I thought the overhead light, which had come loose and dangled by its wires above the rudimentary plywood bed and foam-rubber mattress that I slept on, would be enough light to read by. It wasn’t.

Nowadays people fix up their vans, and interior-decorate them, and live in them, and it’s a thing. When I started living in my van, in my early thirties, almost nobody was doing that. No one could tell me what it would be like. I’d never had a vehicle for my address, and every day the experience seemed to get richer, or worse, depending on your perspective.

For instance, I had not foreseen the problem of keeping possession of my campsite when I had to go into town to buy beer. With the van absent, the campsite appeared unoccupied. Once, other campers took the spot despite my valid registration card on the little post by the campground road. I had to find a new campsite, and to prevent that from happening again, I pitched a small tent to be a placeholder when the van and I were gone. The tent was a sorry affair, so leaky I used it only to store my spare tire, which I had begun to trip over when I got up in the night.

That necessity was more difficult than anticipated, too. A lot of monkeying around was required to get myself from inside the van to the closest restroom (or more likely the bushes) and back. Then, for a while, I would lie awake and look at the moonlight on the curtains that the guy who “customized” the van for me had thoughtfully put over the back windows. The curtains were decorated with a pattern of blue lines that exactly resembled tire tracks.

Nearby ran the Pigeon River, one of Michigan’s wonders. Following the example of the late Jack Gartside, fly-fisherman extraordinaire, who slept in his car in the summers while fishing the great rivers of the West, I was spending every day on the river. Its elegant sand and gravel bottom grows mayflies of many kinds, including the giant Michigan mayfly, Hexagenia limbata, which excite the trout to frenzy when they emerge from the gravel to hatch. If I ever wondered why I was lying sleepless at night with my head sometimes pillowed on my van’s engine cover, the sight of big brown trout slurping hexes from the surface explained it.

Upstream from the campground, the river ran through property owned by a group that followed a yoga guru. I knew nothing about them except that sometimes I saw them in town in their yellow robes. Nobody fished on the “yoga ranch,” as locals called it, but one day, out of curiosity, I worked my way upriver into that area, being careful to stay in the river so as not to trespass. I was fishing a wet fly under beaver lodges, and I hooked a huge fish that gave me hope until I netted it and saw that it wasn’t a trout but a whitefish, a bottom-feeder. I looked up from that disappointment and saw a young woman in a bikini sunbathing on the hillside.

She said hello, we started to talk, and I got out of the river. She seemed to have a sense of humor. She told me she worked as the cook at the yoga center, and we laughed about the funny brand names for vegetables—“Look Mom!” brand carrots, for example—that we’d seen in local stores. After an hour or so of conversation, I suggested we could meet again. I said, “I’m right nearby. I’m living in my van.”

One of the first important things I learned about living in my van was: Don’t tell people you’re living in a van. If you want to impress, that is. Our conversation went almost no further. I waded back into the river, and soon afterward a mean-looking guy on a dirt bike trailed me to make sure I didn’t get out again.

It was awkward, living that way. But what the hell, I felt free. I spent many more nights in the van, and later I drove it all over the Great Plains. I loved being able to pull off to the side of the road and sleep, then wake up in the morning with the van rocking in the wind and nothing but prairie and sky all around. The van and I both looked pretty sketchy; nobody would cash my check if I went to a bank’s drive-through window. I had as free an existence as I’ll ever have.

Contributing editor Ian Frazier is the bestselling author of 12 books.

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The world’s largest ice-fishing contest does not mess around. It’s in the middle of Minnesota, in Crow Wing County, near Brainerd, the county seat, on two square miles of ice about two feet thick, on a lake called Gull Lake. When the event happens, usually on the weekend before the Super Bowl, some locals who live along Highway 371 near the venue do not leave their houses, because of the crowds. To direct the thousands of arriving vehicles, road crews put out lines of plastic road barrels and orange signs that say EVENT CONGESTION and DWI ENFORCEMENT ZONE. About 10,000 ice fishers show up. They wear heavy, dark snow gear and knitted face masks and fur hats with earflaps, and many pull big plastic tub-sleds full of tackle and supplies. A hundred and fifty prizes are given out, and the biggest fish wins a brand-new Ford or GMC truck.

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In January, I flew to Minneapolis two days before the event and drove the 150 miles north from there. White tents like the kind used for outdoor weddings rose on the ice about half a mile from shore. I parked my rental and slipped and slid out toward the tents in my running shoes. The produce the contest. They got the idea for it in 1990, as a way of making money for charity and livening up the off-season in this tourism-dominated part of the state. Volunteers handle the logistics and labor, the selected charities get all the money, and the influx of visitors helps local businesses. For 27 winters the Ice Fishing Extravaganza, as it’s called, has not missed a year.

The Jaycees are an international organization of men and women between the ages of 18 and 40 who want to build leadership skills and help the community. A Jaycee named Mike Kuck, while setting up a sound system that was playing “Dare,” by Gorillaz, deafeningly, saw me sliding by and shouted, “You gotta get some ice cleats!” Then the music suddenly stopped, and in a more normal voice he told me where I could buy them. He and some other Jaycees had arranged the tents and a few trailers at a kind of mini village, and we stood in its main intersection, its Times Square. The sun was setting, and white, blue-shadowed ice stretched into the distance all around.

Thomas, the photographer for this story, and his assistant, Christian, had already arrived. Young fellows in their thirties (or almost—Christian was 29), both of them residents of Brooklyn, they had rented a Nissan Rogue SUV to carry their extremely bulky and heavy and abundant photo gear. Unlike me, they did not waste time walking to the tents but drove straight out onto the ice, found a supervisor, and inquired if they could go farther out and do donuts. The guy said, “Sure.” When they asked him where the best place for that might be, he looked at them and said, “Uh, anywhere.” So they drove a mile or so farther and started spinning the SUV all over, doing 180’s and 360’s and 720’s and so on, until they hit an ice rut and knocked a rear tire off its rim. Finding themselves with a flat in the middle of a lake in a rented Nissan full of their photo equipment, they unloaded, hauled out the spare, changed the tire, drove off the ice, went to Brainerd, got the flat fixed, and had dinner.

I joined them for breakfast the next morning at the Grand View Lodge, where we were staying. It’s a pleasant place, and bedbug-free, unlike the Washington, D.C., motel where I had spent three nights earlier that winter while attending the presidential inauguration and the Women’s March. I showed them the large, itchy bedbug bites I had acquired on my right shin as souvenirs of the new administration. Bedbug stories were exchanged. Then:

“Back when there was DDT, you never saw a bedbug,” Christian said.

“DDT was killing the bald eagles. They banned it, and now we have bald eagles again,” Thomas said.

“And now the bedbugs are back,” Christian said.

“So what do you want: bald eagles and bedbugs, or no bedbugs and no bald eagles?”

“I don’t know. I think I’d rather have no bedbugs.”

“Yeah. I hate bedbugs. And bald eagles have hair like Trump.”

“Yeah. Bald eagles do look like Trump. Fuck bald eagles.”

The Mills Fleet Farm store in Brainerd was almost out of ice cleats, so I had to buy the most expensive brand, the only kind left, and I never regretted it. These cleats are made by Yaktrax, and they pull on over the bottom of your shoes, where their triangle-shaped steel teeth bite into the ice. After breakfast, I sat at a picnic table by the lodge and put on the cleats and then strolled out onto the ice. It was like a dream. I didn’t slip or slide even a little. The freedom reminded me of when I first learned to ride a bicycle. With my cleats I walked on the sheerest, slipperiest ice as if on my own front lawn. I rambled all over the lake for miles.

Big pickups were driving everywhere. Even far out on the lake you had to be aware that you could get run over from any direction, like in a mall parking lot. Ice bumps crunched under the tires, providing aural warning. When I traversed a less frequented area, I could hear how the ice itself sounded. It creaked and groaned, and twice it made a muffled boom that started the ice fragments rustling and tinkling with a sound that shot to the horizon like the trail of a rocket sled.

In the contest zone, among the tents of the Extravaganza’s village, a hundred or so volunteers were preparing to drill 20,000 ice-fishing holes. , a maker of gas-powered ice augers, had provided 60 machines. Folks with snowmobiles and ATVs were standing around, waiting until they would be needed to cruise the ice and refuel the drilling teams. Some snowmobile conversation:

“I was goin’ along on my snowmobile on Tomahawk Trail by Lake Vermilion, doin’ about 70, at seven o’clock in the morning, and I look up and here’s a DNR guy with a radar gun—up in a tree! He’s wearin’ an orange jumpsuit, waves me over, yells down, ‘Do you know how fast you were goin’?’ ”

“Up in a tree? Get that man a hobby.”

“Minnesota’s one of the only states that’s got a speed limit for snowmobiles.”

“And what do you need a speed limit for, anyway? In mine I can do 120 flat out with no problem at all.”

“Did the guy give you a ticket?”

“No, just a warning. Seventy isn’t all that fast anyway.”

“Seventy is nothin’. ”

The augers started, one after another, adding to the other engine noises and exhaust fumes that already hung in the air. Two-person teams of drillers hefted the augers and headed out, following a pattern of markings that the snowmobiles and ATVs had laid down. Each pair of drillers, with their auger between them, looked like a dancing couple on a windup clock; facing each other, they held the auger and bowed together as it drilled down through the ice. Then together they stood up, and water whooshed up with the auger when they pulled it out.

Some contestants appeared later in the day to scout around and pick their holes. Tom Krueger, a retired hospital maintenance worker from Ingleside, Illinois, sat in his pickup just outside the contest area and surveyed the scene. “I’ll be fishin’ by myself tomorrow,” he told me. “I’m really more of a bass fisherman than a walleye or pike fisherman, which are the two types of fish that usually win here. I’ve done some pre-fishin’ already, caught a couple walleye on a glow jig. I do this ’cause I’ve loved to fish since I was old enough to hold a cane pole. Now I’ve got a bad heart, and my doctor wants me to quit smoking. Heck, I’d rather be on the ice any day than inside lookin’ at walls.”

Mysee Yang, an administrator in the offices of Hennepin County in Minneapolis, wore narrow hexagonal sunglasses as she minded her rod at a nearby hole and watched her battery-powered fish finder. She was smiling and saying hello to passersby. “Yes, I am pretty experienced at this,” she said when I stopped to kibitz. “We ice-fish down by the Cities. Last year was our first year to come to this contest, and we didn’t catch anything, but it was great just to be here. We’ve been looking forward all year to coming back.” Her husband sat on an overturned bucket, intent, at a hole 12 feet away.

A man was lying on his stomach on the ice. I came closer and saw that he had his face directly over a hole and was shading his eyes as he peered down. As I crouched opposite him, he offered me a glimpse. The view through the hole quivered with life. In the optically perfect water, the pebbles on the bottom, eight feet below, lay like colored beads. Small perch came and went through the field of view, with only parts of them visible sometimes—an orange pectoral fin, a gold and black eye, a camo green side. Then one flared at the bait, took it, and was hauled skyward, flapping.

“We’ve caught a bunch here already,” said the angler, a young man named Derrick Blair, as he sat up. “So this is where we’ll fish tomorrow.” He told me he was from Swea City, Iowa, and worked as a heavy-equipment operator. He said he had heard about the contest for years because his dad fished it, but this was the second year he’d participated himself. Then he told me a story about a hog truck that had rolled in a ditch near his house the week before and how he had pulled it out with a wrecker.

At three o’clock on Saturday morning, nine hours before the contest was to start, I began to wonder about where you could buy bait. A savvy contestant might want to purchase his or hers extra early, before whoever was selling it got hit with a rush of 10,000 anglers and ran out. So I went to investigate. In fact, there was somebody selling bait at three in the morning, at a store called S & W Bait and Tackle, on Highway 371 about four miles south of the lake. Alone in the late-night lull, Guy Stillings, the brother of the owner, was sitting behind the counter and watching The Bourne Ultimatum. When I walked in, the movie had just reached the part where the evil CIA guy is telling Matt Damon how he has been tricked and used. Stillings wore a sweatshirt that said YET DESPITE THE LOOK ON MY FACE YOU’RE STILL TALKING, and he had an expression to match.

“In about half an hour the people will start coming,” he said. “Then it will get crazy. We’re open all night only two nights a year—tonight, before the contest, and in May, on the night before opening day of summer fishing season. Sherree, my sister, owns this place. My dad started it as a bait and liquor store. Now it’s just tackle and bait. I come up from Anoka to help her. She makes enough on this contest to last her through the rest of the winter, when she might get only a customer or two a day.”

I wandered the store, and he turned his attention back to Matt Damon. Mentally I rated this as an A-number-one tackle store. It had fishing stuff I didn’t even know existed, and a wall shingled with trophy-fish photos dating back to the first Bush administration, and burbling tanks full of bait that swam like soup noodles and often jumped above the surface with a wild hope. On a multilevel metal cart by the door, clear plastic bags full of water and minnows had been piled up, waiting for customers. Under the store’s bright lights, the two-inch-long crappies, rainbows, and shiners filled the room with their nervous alertness.

Stillings asked me if I was going to fish in the contest, and I said I planned to just watch. Stepping outside for a cigarette—“I’ll do this one last time while I have a chance”—he went on, “I won’t fish tomorrow, either. I don’t touch the contest. And in May, I skip opening week entirely. I don’t like all the crowds and rigmarole. When I fish, I go to the other side of Gull Lake, where not so many people go, and I catch my dinner, and I fillet it and cook it and eat it in peace and quiet.”

A car went by on the highway, followed in a minute or two by another. Then an extended-cab pickup truck turned into the parking lot with a crunching of ice, raked us with its headlights, approached, and pulled to a stop. Two guys hopped out, their faces set and purposeful, and strode into the store. Stillings put out his cigarette and went in to help them.

The rules say that no contestant may enter the contest zone before 8 a.m., and no fishing is allowed until the starter cannon goes off, at noon. Also: no contestant vehicles in the zone, no ice-fishing houses, no tents, no canvas or other coverings (“All contestants must remain completely visible while fishing”), no glass bottles, only two holes per angler, admission tickets displayed at all times, entry into the contest area through inspection checkpoints only, no bait longer than four inches, and “All fish entered into the contest must be brought to the weigh station immediately and must be alive.” The contest is catch-and-release and lasts three hours. A cannon at three o’clock announces its end.

Eight a.m. disclosed a dull winter morning, with low-lying, darkish clouds and the temperature holding at 21 degrees. American flags now adorned the site, including a festive avenue of them that led across the ice beyond the main checkpoint. The flags were standing out almost straight in a stiff breeze from the northwest. Long lines of anglers formed, began to pass the entry checkpoints, and dispersed to their chosen holes. Most early arrivals headed for the northwest quadrant of the two-mile square, where drop-offs in the lake bottom were said to hold a lot of fish. When the anglers found the holes they wanted, they put personal items near them to mark them as taken: mittens, bags of charcoal, rod cases, camp chairs, backpacks, Coors Light 30-packs, thermoses, and a clear plastic clamshell of little chocolate-covered doughnuts.

I had walked out to the site from the lodge, wearing a lighter version of my cold-weather gear so as to be more mobile. On my way, as I reached a patch of slick, unrutted ice, Thomas and Christian pulled up behind me in their SUV and did a perfect 180 that swung them around in front of me. Smiling, they rolled down their windows. They had been all over the ice for most of the night, taking pictures, and showed me a few on their phones.

Thomas eyeballed the surroundings and gestured to a line of ice huts outside the contest zone. We saw a Trump flag and a Confederate flag near it.

I pointed out that those were the only examples of those kinds of flags among the many dozens of banners now fluttering on the ice (HOOSIER ANGLERS ROCK! and GRAND CASINO MILLE LACS and, strangely, BUD LIGHT WELCOMES HUNTERS). I told them not to fret: a majority of Minnesotans were Democrats anyway. The guys spun their wheels and drove off, skeptical but cheerful.

A continuous shuttle of school buses brought people from the parking area at , a few miles away. On a road leading along the lake the buses unloaded, and then throngs of small silhouettes made their way across the ice, increasing hour after hour until they had filled the contest zone. Everybody said what good weather it was. No one ventured the opinion that 21 degrees with a strong and unimpeded breeze blowing across a sweep of ice is still pretty cold; the stoicism of ice fishermen and women goes without saying. For a while there was a lot of chopping as contestants applied crowbars and ice chisels to the holes, which had frozen over during the night. Then, for a couple of hours, 10,000 people waited with their backs to the wind.

At four minutes to noon, a Brainerd choral group, prerecorded, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” over the loudspeaker. The flag on a tall flagpole in the middle of the ice village drew the attention of the whole crowd, which turned toward it as one; many attendees put their hands over their hearts and took off their hats, leaving their heads uncovered to the wind. A guy near me was wearing a buffalo-horn fur hat, which he held over his heart. Then the cannon boomed, the fishing lines went down, and everybody bent to their holes. Not long after that, people started running to the weigh station; as has happened before, the biggest fish was caught early, in the first half-hour.

A local radio station was playing fishing-related music so loud that you sometimes couldn’t understand human speech. I had never before heard the classic “Jiggin’.” (I’m gonna jig me up a walleye right now!) In the ice village, crowds were standing around the food stands (fried cheese curds, Polish sausages) and talking to the army recruiter and watching people bring fish to be weighed. A petite woman walked by with a big bucket that had a huge forked tail sticking out of it, and everybody oohed and aahed. At the ice village’s Times Square, a lit-up digital leaderboard like the ones at golf tournaments showed the rankings. Soon a contestant named Les Laidlaw had taken over first place with a northern pike weighing 5.54 pounds. Laidlaw brought his fish in at 12:21. A hook had somehow gone into his finger, but he got the fish weighed before visiting the first-aid station.

The weigh-in tent showed the Brainerd Jaycees at their super-efficient peak. Contestants with fish in water-filled buckets or plastic bags lined up, checked in, gave relevant data to volunteers filling out forms at the information table, and then brought their fish to the weighing table. At a row of scales, low-impact soft-plastic nets held the fish for a half-minute of careful weighing and recording. Then the fish went into a kind of basin cut into the ice, where employees of the observed them as they revived. After a while the survivors swam through holes in the bottom of the basin, thus completing their speedy circuit from watery obscurity to local fame and back again. Laidlaw’s pike, having won the contest—no other fish as big would be caught that day—was back in the lake by 12:30.

More than a third of the fish did not make it. For some, being hauled up from depths of 50 and 60 feet stressed their systems and caused internal injuries, such as having their swim bladders pushed up through their mouths. Of the 826 fish caught, 375 died and were set aside in coolers. Later, most of these fish would be cleaned and frozen and donated to Pike for Vets, a Minnesota organization that provides free fish dinners to veterans.

On the ice, a giddy communal mood prevailed against the overcast sky and persistent icy wind. Many people took breaks from fishing and strolled around. Strangers stopped and talked as if they’d known each other forever. A guy told me how he had injured his rotator cuff lifting a road-killed deer into his truck while neighborhood dogs threatened to take it from him. A young blond woman in a pink snowsuit noticed me and said, “Are you just wanderin’ around?” She was Michelle Cheney, a career army officer and transportation specialist, 28 years old, who had served in Iraq during the 2011 drawdown. “This is such a friendly contest,” she said. “Last year, I caught a walleye that weighed point-three pounds—more of a minnow, really—and people were cheering me as I ran to the weigh station. They’d probably cheer if you put a beer can in a sack of water and started running.”

A jumpsuited guy detained me to tell me about a nine-pound catfish he had just caught. The absence of that species in Gull Lake undermined his credibility somewhat, as did the frozen beer suds in his mustache. A retired paper-mill worker, Dana Deans, explained to me why so many local paper mills had gone out of business: “Foreign competition,” he said. “Most of our paper in America now comes from overseas. Italy, China, Argentina—they all make paper cheaper than we do. About the only paper made in America anymore is bathroom tissue. That’s because tissue is too bulky to ship economically.” When the mill in Brainerd went out of business, hundreds of employees lost their jobs—more reason for morale-improving, community-building events like this.

A lady with short gray hair and a pointy face was smoking and holding forth to several listeners on camp chairs: “So he says to me, ‘Trump is the 45th president, and this Super Bowl will be the 51st Super Bowl. So does that mean we had a Super Bowl before we had a president?’ I looked at him and said, ‘Now, Jaden, come on—think about what you just said.’ ”

From a distance, I saw Thomas and Christian in the bucket of a lifter arm that had elevated them above the crowd. Soon after, they were next to me on the ice, agitated about a news story on their phones. “Did you see this about Trump’s travel ban? Google has called all its foreign-national employees back to the States!” Thomas said, scrolling to the headline on his screen. The next I looked, he and Christian were flying overhead and taking pictures from a helicopter.

Toward midafternoon, I was hanging out with a group of electricians from the greater Twin Cities who had chosen holes in the northwesternmost corner of the contest area. They had figured they would do better at a corner, with no competing anglers on two sides. Back in 2010, one of their number, Dan Rudolph, had caught a fish that took 20th place in the contest. Because 2010 was the contest’s 20th year, he won a special prize—a Suzuki KingQuad ATV, plus $3,000 for using a sponsor’s lure. Since then the friends had come back every year and never finished in the top 40.

Passing a bottle of bourbon, they reminisced about past contests: the year when it was 20 below, and the year a windstorm came from the north and blew everybody off the lake and onto the shore, and the year it was 39 degrees and raining and people were fishing in T-shirts and guys were running and diving into the slush and sliding. They asked how I happened to be doing this article—“What was it, did you draw short straw?” I told them I liked to write about the middle of America and hated that sometimes it was referred to as flyover country. They said that term didn’t bother them at all, and in fact they hoped people on the coasts would continue to ignore them and stay away.

On this corner of the contest zone, with no human windbreaks between us and the wind, it really was cold. All of us were red-faced, runny-nosed, more or less shivering, and shifting from foot to foot as the ice radiated its chill up our legs. No one was catching fish, nor was such an outcome likely, here at contest’s end. Finally, I turned to one of the guys, Dave Youngblom, an elevator mechanic who wore a jacket with OTIS on it, and asked, “Why do you do this?”

“You can’t sit in your house all winter long,” he said. “You have to go out, be a part of the season, see other people, do stuff. How much TV can you watch? It’s a huge amount of fun to come out here. You have adventures with your friends. For a day you’re living in the world.”

The cannon sounded and the anglers started putting away their gear. In the distance, along the highway, the shuttle buses assembled. In the ice village’s Times Square, so many people were standing around the leaderboard for the final results that at first I couldn’t get close. The board listed all 150 winners, with the names appearing 20 at a time. At certain moments, when the next 20 names went up, scattered cheers arose. Meanwhile the crowds began to depart, as if leaving a state fair at the end of day. Their trek across the ice had the quality of a Grandma Moses painting, the figures distinct against the landscape. Below the buses they merged into small, dark lines moving up the incline of the shore.

Thomas and Christian had to leave to photograph demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and would hardly have time to stop at their apartments on the way. At daylight the next morning I saw no tents, no trailers, no portable johns—no sign of the ice village or the contest at all. I walked out to where I thought the site had been, but at first I could not even find it. Finally, I got my bearings from the one remnant I came across. The ice basin where the fish had returned to the lake had frozen over, but a wooden pallet had been put over it, probably so the remaining hole wouldn’t trip someone or break any axles. In all that empty ice, the pallet was like a tiny bandage on the spot where the laparoscopic surgery had gone in.

A line of boys with litter grabbers, ice chisels, and black plastic garbage sacks were moving slowly and picking up small scraps. The boys with the chisels were even chipping out the cigarette butts that had frozen to the ice. About the only refuse they didn’t take was chewed-up sunflower-seed husks and fragments of unused bait. A grown-up accompanying them identified the group as Boy Scout Troop 43, from Brainerd, and said he was Jim Petersen, the assistant scoutmaster. They had been doing this post-contest cleanup every year for four years. Boys were yelling, “Hey, here’s some cheese curds! Who’d throw out perfectly good cheese curds?” and “Hey, here’s a pickle!” and “Hey, here’s three buns and half a bratwurst!” Behind them the ice was picked almost clean.

Orienting myself by the pallet, I envisioned the rest of the ice village and approximated the location of Times Square. Nobody was there now except for two fishermen who said they had chosen that spot because they knew nobody had fished there yesterday. I figured that was good thinking. They had drilled their own holes; no luck so far.

I walked farther out on the ice and looked back. The Boy Scouts and the fishermen dwindled into a smallness almost too small to see. Today the sky was blue, with clouds at high altitudes. In the absence of people and their works, the lake became itself again. The ice shimmered and the sun reflected off it, and the majesty of the place reappeared.

Contributing editor Ian Frazier wrote about cane toads in April.

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When I’m trying to figure out where I am nowadays, I generally use my phone. But when I’m thinking about where I want to be, I use the of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. I’ve seen road maps of other countries, and I will go out on a limb and declare this atlas to be the all-around best in the world. I prefer the big paperback version, which always falls apart and which I replace every few years. All the vehicles I’ve owned had Rand McNally pages trodden into the floor or strewn across the rear seats.

The map application on your phone cannot give you the big picture. Rand McNally’s atlas is about the breathtaking, wide-screen picture—America the Beautiful, in full, including Alaska and Hawaii, with ancillary, somewhat less detailed maps of Canada and Mexico. I consider this atlas a work of literature, and I pore over it for hours on end. Years ago, when I had just moved to New York City, I often became homesick for the middle of the country, where I grew up. I consoled myself by taking out my atlas and reading the names of small towns in Missouri or lakes in Minnesota or rivers in Michigan. For example, there, on the northern shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: See the tiny blue thread of the Two-Hearted River? Literary glory of the most powerful sort is connected to the name. The map shows a North Branch and a West Branch of that river; I’m not sure which of those was also known as the Big. When Ernest Hemingway sojourned in Michigan, he mostly fished the Black River, but he titled his great short story “Big Two-Hearted River” because that name is poetry.

Romance lives in every page of Rand McNally. From the Upper Peninsula, I cast my eyes down through Michigan to the little town of Maybee. A poem, forsooth! I want to put it in all caps or italics: Maybee, Michigan! And then I go into northwestern Ohio, to Huron County, where my family is from. Then I flip the pages to Wyoming, to the town of Bill, with nothing around it for miles. Bill, Wyoming! Without Rand McNally, how else would I know of this town?

Thank God the atlas is a perennial bestseller and will be published forever. Diligently and annually, it offers the mysterious fascination of American place names. When I go out on an adventure, I’m seeking poetry in the highway’s prose.

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When my wife was little she had a doll she was always losing; the family named it Where-she, from her plaintive cries. By that example, camping trips should be called Where-car-keys, foreign travel should be called Where-passport, and phones have been Where-phones ever since they stopped being permanently connected to walls. We accept that the universe is chaos. As for my own excursions into the outdoors, they produce entropy in such abundance that I even lose the list of things I’ve lost. And on my way home, that suede jacket I left on the airplane


It’s easier and less painful to recount the epiphanies of finding. On a trip to the Ausable River, my watch was on the muddy ground below the deadfall branches that I’d been walking on before falling through them; from miles up the river, I carefully retraced my steps and found it. On the Delaware River, my fly rod lay among the reeds on the bank where I’d set it when we were hauling out the canoes. Finding it, at twilight, when I’d almost given up until a silvery glint of ferrule betrayed it, had the quality of a miracle—as if a reed suddenly became a fly rod. In Providenyia, Russia, across the Bering Strait from Nome, a black nylon bag full of expensive photo equipment had been put away for safekeeping by the kind and well-meaning woman we were staying with. The photographers, my companions on the trip, to whom it belonged, spoke no Russian. I knew just enough—“Gdye veshchi?” Ìę(“Where are our things?”)—to produce the bag and avert a possibly awkward scene.

Coming upon items that other human beings have lost, in situations where one’s own carelessness is not an issue, can be the purest joy. Walking a footpath along the Pigeon River in northern Michigan I once found an arrowhead. I’ve found a number of arrowheads and other Indian objects in my life but can never convey the bliss they bring me. That day I was fishing, looking for a better spot, when suddenly I saw the willow-leaf-shaped point in the gray sand of the trail. Picking it up and rubbing the sand off it produced a thrilling mental swoop through space-time. Near that same river, among high ferns on the floor of a pine forest, I found an aluminum hunting-arrow with plastic fletches and a formerly razor-sharp barbed steel point now rusted and crumbling. The stone point had held up better.

I could spend my life walking along and looking for things. A museum on the Texas plains (I forget where) displays a spur lost by the expedition of Francisco Coronado (1540-42), which a local man had found; I wondered if the conquistador who it belonged to noticed he’d lost it, and if he’d brought a spare. And if he hadn’t, did he fret about it, and blame himself, and think he must be going out of his gold-hungry mind? ÌęIf the universe is entropy, finding lost items restores a tiny piece of order, and suggests a heaven where every sheep has been found; as in, “Seek and ye shall find.” That’s why, when you lose all the cash that you and your friends have pooled together to pay the rafting guide, and that has been entrusted to you, the proper attitude is not the hyperventilating and panicked self-recrimination you will fall into. Instead, have faith. It must be somewhere. The conquistador probably got upset about the spur, blamed himself, ransacked his conquistador kit bag, and decided someone had stolen it. But the truth was revealed in time.

When I was eleven my brother and I decided it would be fun to dive for the red plastic mouthpiece of one of the snorkels our grandmother had just bought for us. This was off Smathers Beach in Key West, a place with a more complicated bottom than we had expected. We never found it, and Grandmother remembered that lost snorkel mouthpiece for the rest of her days. It will be one of the first subjects she mentions when I meet her on the other side. Then St. Peter will tell us where it is right now, with GPS coordinates and photographs.

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America seen from a satellite at night blooms with lights, up one coast, down the other, and all across the middle. If you ­focus on the lights of South Florida and then move in closer on a metro area—say, Naples or ­Miami or West Palm Beach—and then zoom in on a particular mall or commercial strip or residential area, and then on a particular streetlight, and then on the illuminatedÌęcircle that the streetlight throws on the ground, you may see some frog-like shapes. Go in as close as you can, down to the round, black, gold-flecked eye of one of those shapes, in which the light above it is a pinpoint blue reflection. You are eye-to-eye with a , one of the most successful invasive species on the planet.

Cane toads flock to lights. Across South Florida, in all kinds of man-made places, they appear on warm evenings. A bug drawn to the glow hits the glass and falls; a cane toad snaps open its wide mouth and gloms the bug with a long, adhesive, party-­favor-like tongue. The toad’s mouth closes.

Multiply that cane toad, and the two dozen or so others in its vicinity, by a whole lot of South Florida streetlights. Is this an oncoming ecological disaster? Experts on invasive wildlife don’t know. None can say for sure how many cane toads the state has already. Nor can they estimate how much or how quickly the cane toad population will expand. The phenomenon of the cane toads may be news to the rest of the country, but to South Floridians it’s not. Consider the classic toad facial expression, the humorless, fake-sleepy look most species have. Cane toads are like that, only super-intense; behind their deadpan demeanor, the fierceness with which they want to live and make more cane toads is almost sublime. Cane toads happen to thrive best in close vicinity to humans, and of course the number of humans in Florida is likely to increase. So yes—in the future, there will be more cane toads.

What it’s like in some places right now: Step out of your house in the morning and cane toads are squatting on the front walk. They are in the garage in the coils of the garden hose. They climb up the screen on your lakeside cabin’s front door to get closer to the outdoor light. They are in your window wells and by the hot tub on the patio and next to the swimming pool filter motor. They sit and look at you as if you owe them money; a creepy shiver excites your shoulder blades.

Cane toads have these things going for them: they are bigger than other toads (the biggest cane toad on record weighed 5 pounds 13 ounces, almost as much as a Kalashnikov rifle); they lay huge numbers of eggs, perhaps 30,000 in a breeding season (the southern toad, a species they appear to be displacing in Florida, lays about 4,000); and they are highly poisonous (their venom, carried in glands in their shoulders, , and could kill a person, though so far no Floridian is known to have been poisoned by it).Ìę

On top of all that, they can . All amphibians are carnivorous, but cane toads stretch the description. Besides insects, they vacuum up snakes, worms, grubs, snails, mice, small rats, bats, young birds, other amphibians (sometimes their own young), pet food, and garbage. They differ from most other frog species in that they can identify food that is not moving. Cinnamon Mittan, a graduate student who has done field work on cane toads, told me that once, behind a Home Depot in Florida City, she saw a cane toad sitting in a pizza box and eating the cheese off a slice.Ìę

Cane toads originate from South and Central America, with a natural range extending as far north as southern Texas and as far south as central Brazil. They were once thought to be seaside animals, hence their scientific name, . They are also called marine toads or giant toads. Many Floridians call them bufo toads. In the jungles of Suriname and Costa Rica, they inhabit open areas at the edges of ­thicker vegetation. The only person I know who has encountered cane toads in their original habitat says that the ones she saw were hanging out by the lodge. In the , where they ate beetles and seemed to reduce crop destruction. They’ve been deployed around the world for pest control.

Florida’s cane toads are believed to descend from escapees from an exotic-­animal importer at the Miami airport, where a hundred of them got away in 1955. Earlier introductions in the state, evidently for use in cane fields, seem to have failed, although genetic studies will determine if the current population comes only from the 1955 group. Perhaps surprisingly, there is a demand for cane toads as pets. The appeal is the toads’ cuteness and their appetite. If given enough food, they can become so fat they’re almost spherical. When they get to know you, they can be ­winsome and cuddly. They’re easy to care for. All they need is a terrarium, water, and dry dog food.

Kevin, a former Marine who lives in a suburban development in Palm Beach County and has never told me his last name, says he prefers to have a more conventional pet. His three-year-old brown and black Yorkshire ­terrier, Sophie, weighs six pounds “but doesn’t know she doesn’t weigh 200,” he told me. “She will take off after dogs twenty times bigger than her and run them out of the dog park.”

One afternoon, Kevin went into his backyard and saw Sophie worrying something in her mouth. Looking closely, he identified it as a cane toad. She thought he wanted to play and went romping around the backyard, chewing on the toad and not letting him have it. He freaked out, knowing how poisonous the toads are. Finally, he got the toad away from her and washed her mouth thoroughly with the hose, careful that none of the water went down her throat, following the instructions of toad-poison advisories. Then he drove Sophie to the veterinarian.

The cane toad’s poison—a white, viscous substance like marshmallow topping—is a complex chemical that affects the heart. The toads do not squirt it but rather secrete it from their shoulder glands when attacked or roughly handled. Dogs and other animals that get it in their mouths salivate, cry, and rub at their foaming tongues with their paws. Their gums turn bright red. Soon they may go into convulsions and die.Ìę

Maria Chadam, a veterinarian in Delray Beach, has been practicing in South Florida for 11 years and has treated dozens of dogs for cane toad poisoning. She has seen several dogs die of it. Chadam is a pretty, dark-eyed woman with a straightforward manner and a zeal for telling people about the danger. “ lots more small dogs than big ones,” she said when I met up with her at a coffee place in Delray Beach. “Bigger dogs can absorb the poison better, but in small dogs like terriers it works fast. It’s horrible for owners to watch a dog die of it. The poison’s main components are biogenic amines and steroid derivatives that produce muscle spasms, constrict blood vessels, and cause heart arrhythmia. The treatment is a combination of drugs, including propranolol and atropine, to stabilize the heart and stop the salivating, along with a sedative. Usually, the dog can be saved if we get it quickly enough.”

She went on: “For some reason, cane toads are really attractive to dogs. I have a coonhound, and she loves to track them through the grass. I think they must have a scent that’s intriguing—it may be sweet or smell like meat. The toads are less of a danger to cats. I don’t want to generalize, but cats are more cautious—OK, smarter—than dogs. Some dogs have repeat encounters with cane toads and never learn. I’ve treated several dogs for toad poisoning more than once. The best rule for everybody is to keep your pets away from all toads.”

Sophie, the Yorkshire terrier, did make it to the vet in time. As other terriers have done, afterward she remained aggressive and un-wised-up about cane toads. Their numbers in Kevin’s neighborhood kept on increasing.Ìę

is a 26-year-old biologist who has traveled the steppes of Mongolia, studied the social behavior of owl monkeys in the forests of Argentina, and worked as an intern burning invasive grasses in Arizona’s . She attended the University of Florida, in Gainesville, where she wrote her master’s thesis on cane toads. Her question to be determined was ­whether the cane toads are moving into wild and undis­turbed natural areas. Wilson is slim and tanned, and in the field she restrains her mop of curly dark hair with a multicolored woven head wrap. Her T-shirt, cargo pants, and running shoes get drenched when she has to wade through swampy parts of the Florida outback, a common occurrence that does not faze her.

In midsummer she was staying in a tent in a campground in the town of Sebring, about two hours southeast of Tampa. One morning I met her for breakfast in a Sebring cafĂ©, and she explained the project. Her equipment consisted of listening devices that record sounds at regular intervals. She had put them out in the bush four months earlier, and they had been compiling data since. ­After retrieving the devices, which she called “frog loggers,” she would upload their data into a program that scans it to detect the unique mating call of the cane toad. From the number of calls, she could estimate the number of cane toads in a particular area. If the toads were, in fact, invading these places, that’s bad for the amphibians that they may displace and for the predators that might eat them and die—a potentially serious problem in the .

Wilson set out for the backcountry and I accompanied her, sometimes riding along in her lab’s pickup truck, sometimes following in my rental car. On foot she led the way through scrub country where wild hogs burst from the palmettos, and along canals in failed real estate developments that had reverted to wilderness, and onto the dock of a local colleague with shoreline property. Often the temperature was pushing 100. She hiked through sand, and took paths cut up by hog rooting, and ducked under barbed wire, and crossed pastures and hammocks. With tools from a little kit she had received for her high school graduation, she unscrewed each device from the pine tree or cypress or other uprightÌęobject to which she had attached it and then stuffed it in a backpack and carried it out.Ìę

Two days of this exercise put us in the vicinity of Naples, where at the end of the second day we drove to a commercial strip and had dinner at a Chili’s restaurant. The sun was low in the sky when we went in, and it had set by the time we left. Cane toads emerge in greatest numbers after sunset. When we walked out the door of the Chili’s, they suddenly sprang from our feet on ­either side. Beneath the landscaped hedges, facing the restaurant’s brightly lit-up walls, toads waited like basketball players boxing out for a rebound. They sat in crowds by the door and along the grass borders. In ­scattered profusion, they clustered around the screened-off dumpsters where Chili’s puts its garbage.Ìę

During our backcountry treks, we had noticed all kinds of wildlife—whitetail deer, a leatherback sea turtle, an alligator, black racer snakes, red-shouldered hawks, quail, ospreys, night herons, a swallow-tailed kite, and a green tree frog that jumped suddenly out of some leaves onto Wilson’s bare collarbone without causing her to scream or even start—but not one cane toad. She had wanted me to hear a cane toad’s call, the sound that is the basis of her study, but none had presented itself. Then, in the Chili’s parking lot, she stopped. “That’s it!” she said. “That’s a .”

We followed the sound through a thin border of trees and into the next parking lot, which connected to a shopping mall. Near the parking lot’s entrance was a long ditch with water in it. Male cane toads call to attract females, and when a ­female shows up the male gets on her back in a position called amplexus. The inner sides of a male’s thumbs, called the nuptial pads, are black and sticky and help him hold on. She then exudes the eggs into the water in long strings as he fertilizes them. The call of the cane toad has been described in a field guide as “a low-pitched, slowly pulsed, rattling trill.” Some have compared it to an idling diesel engine.Ìę

The toad kept calling. Wilson listened. The sound seemed to come from the far edge of the ditch. The night was quiet, with the usual passing traffic. A light breeze stirred. The ditch held the reflection of a glowing Walmart sign, blue and red and white, its lettering backward and rippling on the surface. From somewhere near the reflection the toad called again. To me the trill resembled the staccato rhythm of a starter motor before the engine kicks in. Had I not been told otherwise, I would have been certain I was listening to a machine.

Sightings:
> Cane toads have almost no fear. Sitting in exposed places does not seem to make them nervous. In downtown Sebring on a summer night, at a gleaming white apartment building whose name, the Fountainhead, stretched across its multistory frontÌęin script lettering, the silhouette of a large cane toad could be seen under a hot white light next to the building’s entry. Up the street, toads hopped around the Jack Stroup Civic Center and the public library. By the library door, a flagpole held an American flag—at half-mast, because of a recent mass shooting. Lights in a concrete base shone upward at the flag. A group of seven or eight toads had gathered on the base around the footings of the lights.

Using my flashlight in a lakeside park nearby, I observed toads in the cement-lined creekbed, along the paths, in the playground. Young people and not-so-young people suddenly popped up around me, staring at their phones and walking like zombies. One guy noticed my light and inquired if I was looking for my car keys. He said he and his friends were trying to catch PokĂ©mon characters. He asked what I was doing and I told him. “Why are you looking for toads?” he said, mystified.

> Another night, in Belle Glade, one of Florida’s more run-down cities, the parking lot of a Winn-Dixie super­market was lit up and empty. I strolled the multi-acre expanse, nosing around the hedges in the parking dividers. No toads. Then I walked toward a far area of the lot where a streamlet from the drainage pipe coming down from the massive AC unit on the store’s roof continued across the pavement. Near the flow squatted a female cane toad the size of a dessert plate. Her mouth, an inch and a half across, had an insect leg sticking out of it. I picked her up. Her skin was dry, soft, and not unpleasant to the touch, like a well-worn baseball glove.

I avoided touching the poison glands, but the toads don’t secrete their venom unless they’re frightened. Even if the poison had gotten on my hands, I could have rinsed it off without harm. Cinnamon Mittan told me that she once got venom in a cut; it hurt horribly but caused no other symptoms. Without complaint, this monster of the Winn-Dixie accepted being handled. I set her back on the pavement, and she slowly and massively hopped away.

> At a 24-hour Walgreens in Belle Glade, well into the night, toads sprang from my feet when I stepped out of the car. Along the curb leading to the drive-through window, 12 or 15 toads stood in a row. I walked next to the curb and they hopped along the wall, bumping up on it, until they reached a crack in the cement and dove in. My flashlight picked up toads packed in tightly—an eye here, a foot there.

The following morning, I talked to a daytime manager at the store. “No, we don’t do nothin’ about the toads,” she said. “Exterminators put out poison for the rodents, but it don’t affect the toads. Certain times they just come out and be everywhere, like when the farmers are burnin’ the cane fields. I’ll be honest with you, I’m afraid of ’em.”

“The toads don’t harm nobody. They got a right to live,” said a young woman employee standing nearby.

Kevin, the former Marine, would take exception to that. Night after night, the later the better, he walks his neighborhood and with a flashlight mounted on the barrel. He began the hunts before his dog’s close call and has killed hundreds since. Wanting to spread the news about the cane toad problem, he let me come along on a windy, full-moon night. I met him just before ten in front of his house. The development was upscale, with royal palm trees of an ancient Egyptian forcefulness dominating the neatly landscaped yards, and big houses sitting close to one another as if on a Hollywood soundstage. Kevin has a square face and a friendly, businesslike manner, and he wore a T-shirt, shorts, running shoes, and a black baseball cap with the logo of the Sooners of Oklahoma University.Ìę

The first toad we saw was little, and ­Kevin spared it because at that size it’s hard to tell a cane toad from a southern toad. The next was bigger, and definitely a cane toad, without the southern toad’s prominent ridge between the eyes. A sharp zap from the pistol and the toad flopped dead. Kevin pulled on blue plastic surgical gloves and put it in a double plastic bag. A neighbor came out with a phone at her ear and said, “Kevin? I’m talking to my friend across the street, and she says there’s a man with a flashlight in her yard.” Kevin explained that he was shooting toads, and the woman encouraged him to kill all he could. She said there were some big ones by the basketball pole in her driveway.

In fact there were. They made a break for it, and Kevin concentrated on the biggest, which accomplished several quick, long hops until it came up against the garage door, which it bumped into repeatedly. Then it turned and lunged for the SUV parked nearby. Two shots hit the toad before it could get under the ­vehicle. It went under anyway, flinging its arms and legs like a human. When it flopped out the other side, and several shots finished it off, its back was white with venom.

Two neighbors sitting on a stoop cheered Kevin on as we passed by. Otherwise the houses kept to themselves, the blue glows from screens filling windows here and there. The pellet pistol stopped working, and several extra-large toads got away. By the end he had shot and retrieved four toads, which he laid on top of a transformer. They were several pounds in all, a lot of toad mass. He said, “This works out perfectly, because I’ll drop them in the trash, and garbage pickup is tomorrow.”

I asked if he knew about the practice of putting toads in the refrigerator and then the freezer to euthanize them. He said, “I hear that’s what they do in Australia. But then they don’t have guns in Australia. Didn’t the Australians give up their guns sometime back in the 1990s?”

. A scientist brought around 100 of them to the northeastern part of the country in 1935, during a rough time for Australian sugarcane farmers, when beetles were wiping out their crop yields. The farmers welcomed the toad as a savior. It made no dent in the beetles, however, because of their habit of frequenting parts of the cane stalks above its reach. Development of an insecticide controlled the bugs, but nothing could rein in the now superfluous toads. In 82 years, they have spread across the northern part of Australia, along the coast and into the interior. All that appears likely to stop them from occupying the entire country is the fact that much of the ­interior is dry, and Australia is less warm in the south than in the north. Amphibians need to keep moist, and cane toads seem .

Much oddness and cultural change has accompanied the Australian toad invasion. Two excellent documentaries, and its sequel, , both by ­filmmaker Mark Lewis, tell this story. People write songs about the toads or make tableaux with toads they have stuffed. Snakes and crocodiles, having had no past experience with toads of any kind, eat them and die. A man electrocutes himself when he slices a power cable while trying to jab a metal spear into a cane toad. There are Aussie cane toad lovers and very many virulent Aussie cane toad haters. Methods of fail. .

Many Australians still do own guns. ­After a mass killing in 1996, a buyback program took in more than 600,000 automatic weapons, but that was only about a fifth of all the guns in Australia. If Australians want to shoot toads, they still can, but they will need a lot of ammo. Today the country has a population of about 24 million humans and an estimated 1.5 billion cane toads.

, an Australian author of books for children between eight and twelve years old, has written the world’s only known works of cane toad fiction. His novels about anthropomorphic cane toads who go on various quests attract a wide following in Australia. “I’ve talked to thousands of schoolchildren in Australia about cane toads,” he said when I reached him at his home in Brisbane, “and I’ve had curly-­headed moppets tell me how they nail cane toads to the garage door and cut their bellies open with daddy’s hardware knife and see if the entrails will stretch to the front gate. Usually, we teach children to respect living creatures, but with cane toads all bets are off. Darker impulses that society usually restrains are permitted to come out. It’s not healthy or helpful for us as moral beings.”Ìę

Reducing the toads’ powerful reproductive capacities through genetic modification or other methods may be the best way to slow them down. Recently, scientists at the Universities of Sydney and Queensland made a new trap for cane toad tadpoles that used the adult toads’ venom as an attractant. It caught 40,000 in a few days. If there’s any breakthrough in the cane toad situation, it will likely come from Australia.

How far the toads spread in the United States depends on how they adapt to cold. Cinnamon Mittan—whose name is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable of “Mittan,” which makes it less Christmasy but still memorable—is working on a Ph.D. thesis at Cornell University that examines their cold tolerance. Studies in Australia have shown that cane toads at the front line of the invasion seem to be evolving characteristics different from those of cane toads not at the front line. The , stronger leaps, and the habit of moving in straighter lines. That is, there seems to be a special type of pioneer Aussie cane toad, more athletic and bold than the cane toads that find a comfortable place to stay and don’t push on. Mittan’s thesis, based on research done in Australia at the University of Sydney, will try to determine if similar changes are taking place inÌęFlorida cane toads with regard to cold.

Aside from a few outliers, no cane toads have been found in Florida north of DeLand, a city about 45 miles north of ­Orlando. For her study, Mittan collected cane toads from the northern part of their ­Florida range and cane toads from the southern part and compared how each group reacted to cold. After getting them accustomed to a moderate temperature in a lab, she then subjected them briefly to colder conditions. She measured a toad’s ability to tolerate cold by noting whether, once chilled, it could still right itself after she had turned it upside down. Preliminary results seem to show that the northern group of toads can take cold better than the southern group.

I asked her whether it was possible that cane toads might keep evolving until they are able to live through subfreezing temperatures, the way toads in colder climates do. She said, “What we’re seeing here are mostly adaptive behavioral changes, not ­major evolutionary ones. Cane toads in the north of Florida get through cold spells by crawling into and under stuff and by stealing other animals’ burrows, and they also may become more tolerant of drops in temperature. But they haven’t changed to the point that they can survive for long below their critical thermal minimum of about 45 degrees.”

What about an amphibian like the wood frog, which can freeze nearly solid and survive? Might the cane toad ever do that? “That would require much more than adaptation; it would have to be a systemic physiological change, not something we’re likely to see in any measurable amount of time,” she said. “Right now the thing to watch is whether the cane toads will move into the Florida panhandle and up into Georgia. So far there’s no sign it’s happening, but it might. Establishing a species in a new environment usually takes a while, and an important part of stopping invasives is finding out early when they’re on their way.”

Rich in promise, sunshine, and deception, Florida extends its shaky gangway into the waters of the south, and lots of flora and fauna scramble aboard. As I traveled around the state, my interest in cane toads wasn’t everybody’s. But it did seem as if most people I talked to felt they were about to be overrun by something. A ­woman in Everglades City complained about the mangroves (which are native) taking over the city’s shoreline, and the Brazilian pepperbushes (which ­aren’t) colonizing her yard so that she could barely keep them back. Three men and two little boys fishing from a bridge in the Picayune Strand State Forest, near the Ever­glades, asked Wilson and me, when we stopped to talk, if we had seen any deer. We had, but none out there. The men then said that cougars—cougars!—had eaten up all the area’s deer, so there weren’t any more for the ­locals to hunt. The men wore Alabama Crimson Tide jerseys and seemed to resent the cougars especially for being from Texas. The newcomers were brought in to crossbreed with the threatened native Florida panther, whose fortunes they have revived.

As for the cane toads, these men brushed off any concern. “We got ’em all around in theÌęneighborhood where we live. My dog hunts ’em,” one man said. “He’s a big dog, and the poison don’t seem to hurt him none. He comes back to the house, and he’s foaming at the mouth and shakin’ his head around. In a little while he’s all right again.” To myself I wondered if this might be a case of canine substance abuse. In Australia, dogs have be­come addicted to mouthing the toads and getting high from milder doses of the ­venom. There are even said to be humans Down ­Under who boil the toads and drink the broth, with all kinds of psychedelic and horrible consequences.

Torpedo grass, , , Japanese climbing ferns, iguanas, Caesar’s weed, brown anoles, and (recently) the mos­quito that carries the Zika virus—­Florida is swarmed upon from land, sea, and air. At , near ­Sebring, I happened on Andrew Dupuis, a park ranger for whom cane toads are just one of his worries. The Cuban tree frog, a large invasive whose aggressiveness calls into question the survival of several species of ­native Florida tree frogs, is common in the park, and Dupuis goes out looking for it. When he catches Cuban tree frogs, he puts them in a bag and removes them. He said that most of the fish in the waterways that run through the park are now jewel cichlids and other invasives from Africa. “Yesterday I picked up nine walking catfish that were walking out of our parking lot,” he said, imitating the fish’s elbow-crawl. The catfish are not native, either.

Probably the best known of Florida’s modern-day invasives, the , also arrived via the pet trade. People rarely see the pythons, andÌęscientists are still learning about their secretive lives in the swamps. Their huge effect on the ecosystem can be inferred from the drop in the Everglades’ small-mammal population, but their physical, visible appear­ance occurs mainly on the rare occasions when one is run over on a road.Ìę

Far more resources go into studying the pythons than into studying cane toads, ­according to Steve Johnson, associate professor in the department of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida. “The fact is that the cane toads will affect the general public a lot more than the Burmese pythons ever will,” he said. “Most Floridians will never encounter a Burmese python in the wild, but the toads are widespread and quickly becoming more so, and they’re in areas where people live. We are past the point of getting rid of them. We’re in management mode now. Cane toads may not be able to attract the funding, but everyone in Florida could stand to be more educated about them.”Ìę

Crows, ravens, and blue jays sometimes learn to kill toads by turning them over and eating them belly first, thus avoiding the poison. Ants can get under them and consume them from that direction. However, these kinds of predation are rare. No expert I talked to has ever seen a wild animal attack a cane toad. As with many animals, humans are its default chief predator.Ìę

Given that situation, you would think there would be a lot of exterminators in Florida specializing in cane toads. In fact, all the exterminators I asked said they knew about cane toads and had received requests to remove them, but none actually did that work. The consensus among them was that nobody knew how to get rid of cane toads; killing a bunch of them almost never meant that they had been removed. A pest-­control service manager I met said, “If you don’t want cane toads getting in your house, make sure your porch screens don’t have holes in them. That’s about all you can do. There’s no poison for them that I know of. In fact, they make it hard sometimes for us to use these bait stations we put out for rats and mice. The toads will go in the bait-­station door and eat the poison bait, which has no effect on them because it’s designed for warm-blooded animals. Then more toads will pack in there until it’s so full no more can fit in. When I open the bait station to check it the toads all come out, doing just fine.”Ìę

The State of Florida has no program to control cane toads. It merely advises people on the most humane way to euthanize them—the refrigerator-to-freezer method. As with other invasives, the state does not have any laws at all restricting the taking of them. You can do anything you want to cane toads, at any place or any time. Every man’s hand is against them. For me that gives them a kind of perverse cool. They are outlaws, at once set-apart, sociopathic, and holy.Ìę

When Audrey Wilson returned to Gainesville after retrieving her frog loggers, her own pet cane toads were doing fine. She has two—D.W. and Arthur. Arthur had grown quite large on the dog-food diet, while D.W. seemed not to like the dog food and had stayed about the same. Even among high-appetite invasive toads, there’s no ­accounting for taste. At the university’s ­biology labs, using a program to scan for cane toad calls, she exam­ined the recordings made by all 33 of her frog-logger devices. The results showed a clarity and starkness uncommon in scientific inquiry.Ìę
The frog loggers she had put in the ­natural ­areas—in the far-flung hammocks and palmetto scrub country and Everglades swamps—had recorded no cane toads.Ìę

These findings reinforced the results of her research from the previous year, when only a single cane toad was heard in natural areas. That toad was near an Everglades campground and may have been a hitchhiker, she believes. Further, the frog loggers she had left in 2016 in man-made places—the ones we had picked up from recreational lakeside settings, and those from a golf course and other suburban places in Tampa—recorded many cane toad calls. “Basically, this is good news,” Wilson informed me over the phone. “It means that the cane toads are not moving into wilderness or other undisturbed areas, which gives those species that they have impact on, such as southern toads, plenty of places to escape to. This also means the toads are not poisoning predators in the still-natural parts of the state.”

As had been suspected, cane toads prefer lawns and shopping centers to swamps and woods. They like our fast-food restaurants and ongoing sprawl as much as we do. In a way it’s kind of flattering. But it’s also weird. You’re just not supposed to have toads all over the place. This should be self-evident from the aesthetics of it, and from the uncanny feeling you get when you see a whole bunch of them under a city streetlight. Venomous animals usually keep to their own sequestered haunts, in nature as well as in our imaginations. Animals that can poison your dogÌę
to death should not be at the Winn-Dixie.

In my mind, I sometimes go back to the Walgreens in Belle Glade and the toads ­waiting along the curb by the drive-through prescription window. If I pulled up to that window with some illness at ten o’clock at night, the sight of a welcoming party of cane toads on the curb would not make me feel better. Things are getting away from us. What do we do about tomorrow? Florida will become hotter, as will everyplace else, and then why wouldn’t the toads move north? At the moment, the lighted scoreboard seems to read: advantage toads.

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You are hiking in some remote,Ìęun­frequented place. Shafts of sunlight come over the ridgetop. The quiet is the quietest you have ever heard. The earth itself seems to hold its breath. You pause on the trail. You look around. You are all alone. A thought occurs to you. The place you are in reminds you of


National Parks Centennial

100 reasons to love the parks (and a few things we'd improve)

Ìę

Stop right there! Restrain your inspiration, if you can! What you are thinking, and what you are about to whisper to yourself, and what (if you are a writer) you will want to write in an article or a book when you describe this moment, is that you feel as if you are in “a magnificent outdoor cathedral.”

It’s an understandable impulse. Thousands if not millions of people in similar circumstances have felt the same way, have had the same words on their lips, and perhaps have even typed them, later, on their computer screens. In the process, these falsely inspired have not only made themselves dumber but have made other people dumber, too, and contributed to all-around dumbness. I don’t dispute the awe they’re trying to convey and will take their word that the place they’re describing is beyond wonderful. But it is not a cathedral.

With some of the things that we say, we are only under the illusion that we are saying them. In fact, they are saying us. They are using us as the vectors by which they keep replicating themselves in the world. This they do by many means, such as familiarity, unavoidable aptness, and clichĂ©. I’ll give you an example. One night I was watching a baseball game on TV. In the dark blue sky over the stadium a half-moon rose. The camera showed it and the announcer said, “It’s a beautiful night tonight, folks, and there’s a beautiful full moon over the stadium.”ÌęHis description defied the visible fact that the moon was only a half-moon, but nobody corrected him. The familiar phrase “beautiful full moon” and its tongue-friendly interior rhymes carried all before it, including the reality of the half-moon that was actually in the sky.

“I felt I was in a magnificent outdoor cathedral”—such a proud, powerful clichĂ©! Every time I come across it, I do a slow burn. There’s an insufferable smugness to it, a piousness, a fake counterintuitiveness, as if most of us fool­ishly think cathedrals are cathedrals, while the real, true cathedrals exist unnoticed out in nature, where the average dummy never thinks to look. Sayings related to this one are “I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, either!” (always sure to get a chuckle at a dinner party) and “The sane people are the ones in mental institutions, and the crazy people are free and walking around!” These insights don’t hold water, either. Believing in God does not equal believing in the Easter Bunny, and the people in insane asylums, generally speaking, are unwell, while those on the outside, with some exceptions, are sane.ÌęAND THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A MAGNIFICENT OUTDOOR CATHEDRAL!

I admit that I have used the phrase ­myself, or it induced me to write it, in a piece I did 34 years ago. I was quoting someone I admired, and I thought he had hit on an amazing truth. I was young and suggestible. By the time the concept possessed me, it had already been around for at least a hundred years, ever since that shift in history when people stopped being afraid of the outdoors and ­began to get mushy about it. You see evidence of it in all the Cathedral Rocks and Cathedral Ridges and Cathedral Peaks and Cathedral Buttes that are out there. Long ago Teddy Roosevelt, , referred to Yosemite National Park as “a great solemn cathedral.” For centuries we had been hacking away at the continent, killing animals, cutting down forests, and suddenly, when we were no longer terrified of it—behold, a cathedral! The significant upside of the cathedral concept, then not yet hardened into a clichĂ©, was that it helped inspire the creation of our national park system. Coinciden­tally, this was also at a time when the last free Native Americans were being forced onto reservations. ­Cathedrals can’t have people living in them.

For the metaphor to work, the MOC (magnificent outdoor cathedral) must be empty of human beings, except of course for the observer. And the MOC must draw the eye upward, to the requi­site ecclesiastical sunbeams. Bugs areÌęunwelcome, also. You never hear the people on Duck Dynasty waxing elo­­quent about the magnificent outdoor ­cathedral they live in, because they live inÌęa swamp. In fact, the metaphor rules out most of the planet. Globigerina ooze, the calcium-rich goo left after the deaths of tiny shelled sea animals, covers vast reaches of the ocean bottom; ­nobody who ventures to the glob-ooze seafloor refers to it later as a cathedral. Steppes don’t get tagged asÌęcathedral-like, nor do deserts, ice caps, tun­dra wastes, or lava fields, much less the Anthro­pocene-era paved landscapes in which we spend most of our time.Ìę

The word comes from the Latin cathedra, which means “chair.” In church ­usage, a cathedra is the chair where a bishop sits; the cathedral contains that chair. The MOCÌęmetaphor refers subliminally to that origin—i.e., it makes us, the describer, feel like a bishop in holy solitude with our wilderness church enclosing and sanctifying us. We overlook the fact that real cathedrals were built to hold hundreds or thousands of people. In our MOC, a crowd of hundreds or thousands is the last thing we hope to meet up with. This combination of nature-loving high-mindedness with the exclusion ofÌęalmost everybody except ourselves is what gives the MOC its special bogus appeal.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about my friend Leonard Thomas Walks Out, who died last August at the age of 73. He was an Oglala Sioux, of the tribe of Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, and he called himself Le War Lance. When I first met Le, he was living in Manhattan, in an apartment with the head of a buffalo drawn in carpenter’s pencil on the ceiling. The first time I visited, he explained that he had been lying on the floor staring at the ceiling when suddenly, from the cracks, the details of a buffalo head emerged in a kind of vision, and he then penciled theÌęvision in. I lay on the floor myself and looked up, and for a moment the sensation was like being eye-to-eye with the White Buffalo of Lakota mythology.

Later, when I was in eastern Colorado to give a speech, a woman named Kelly took me to a cave on her friend’s ranch near the ­Arkansas River. A little way in, on the rock ceiling, was an ancient pictograph of a buffalo calf. You had to lie on your back to see it. A faint application of red paint still colored the image, which seemed to have been ­elicited from the irregularities of the surface, as on Le’s ceiling. The red calf seemed to tremble. I’ve seen the Mona Lisa face-to-face, and this image had a similar aliveness. Because of Le, I had a sense of what I was seeing—the depiction of a vision. I came to the edge of the cave and looked out at the miles of prairie along the river, and an overwhelming feeling of the place’s holiness grabbed me. Luckily, by then I knew enough to leave it at that.

Because of legal problems in New York State, Le had to move back to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. HeÌęreturned to Oglala, his hometown, and when I was living in Montana I often visited him there. The main thing we did together was drive—almost always in my car, because he was often drunk and had long ago lost his driver’s license, not that either of those considerations would have stopped him. The reservation landscape, which looked like empty ground to me, teemed with history, much of it blood soaked. In other parts of the country, historical markers on certain sites note their connection to important past events. Not on Pine Ridge. The spot on the Jumping Bull Ranch where two FBI agents were murdered in 1975 during a tribal civil war is unmarked and resembles any of a million other acres of western ranchland. Le’s running commentary filled in the landscape and peopled it as we passed by.

If I had said, after being shown the red calf or while standing with Le by an awe-inspiring chasm in the reservation’s badlands, “I feel as if I am in a magnificent outdoor cathedral,” I would have been a sap. Such a flight of metaphor was not mine to make and would have violated Will Rodgers’s helpful maxim “Never miss a good chance to shut up.” What applied in those cases applies outdoors in general. You have no real idea what went on in a place, what it has meant to humans before you, what it will mean after. Your own take is never definitive, nor should you think it is. Or, as another philosopher once said, “It don’t do to be too goddamn cocksure.”Ìę

Most of the places where we live our lives have fixed meanings. They areÌęalready labeled or, worse, “branded.” Much of the trash that drifts all over the planet nowadays has brand names on it, and the MOC concept resembles that trash. It’s a sort of psychic branding. When the MOC gets into your consciousness, it’s hard to shake. The great thing about the outdoors is that it has no one meaning. If you want to think a place is an MOC, that’s your business, but it’s only polite to keep the clichĂ© to yourself. Otherwise it will grow weedily and crowd out other ways of looking at the place. The people your MOC excludes will have no idea what you’re talking about—the young, for example. It’s already hard enough to peel kids from their screens and persuade them to do stuff outdoors, and today the national parks suffer from a scarcity of young users. If we tell them, “And don’t forget, you’re in our magnificent outdoor cathedral,” how will they react? They’ll redefine the place in their own defiant way, we’ll object and complain, and the rich soil of cross-purposes will sprout gatedÌęreal estate and dull regulations.

Le asked his relatives to scatter his ashes in the Black Hills near the reservation. The U.S. government stole the Black Hills from the Sioux after gold was discovered in them in the 1870s. The tribe considered the Black Hills holy, and still does, though the chance of them ever being returned to the Sioux and receiving that status seems small. Le never referred to the Black Hills as a cathedral. On the subject of their holiness he was vague. I got the impression that he didn’t want them officially declared holy, but he didn’t want them not holy, either. This benign vagueness seems the best approach to me.Ìę

Shakespeare is buried in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford; Le now reposes in the Black Hills. A verse possibly of Shakespeare’s own making, with the line “Curst be he that moves my bones,” carved on his gravestone, has so far kept the curious from rummaging in the remains of the language’s greatest writer. Le could curse with the cursingest, but wherever his ashes have drifted, no written curse protects them. I hope a purpose of forbearing tact nonetheless keeps development from messing with the places where they lie or, for that matter, with any of the still-undeveloped parts of the Hills. May we tread carefully everywhere, and with ­reverential doubt—“It don’t do to be too goddamn cocksure.”

As for the MOC, it will outlive every person currently on earth. Very few living creatures are as hardy as a clichĂ©. Space travelers in ­future millennia will probably bring it with them when they find the next habitable planet. “I feel as if I am standing in a magnificent outer-space cathedral,” a pioneer will report, the sound of his voice reverberating in his helmet. Anything that exists wants to exist more, and that goes for the MOC. To be honest, I can’t guarantee I’ll never use it again myself. But if I do, I’ll forgive the lapse, because I’m only one human being, while the great, undead MOC lives on.

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Almost the first thing Sylvia Earle said to me was, “The oceans are dying.”

We were at a small dinner in Manhattan last fall, celebrating the New York premiere of a documentary about her called . As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater. In the depths, swordfish and bioluminescent fish and humpback whales in midsong have swum by her, done a double take, and stopped to check her out. From her life’s experience, she has become no longer really terrestrial. She is like a super-apex sea creature that has somehow wound up on dry land and is walking around and telling everybody about the terminal ruin humans are inflicting on her home.

Every day more signs appear that seem to prove her dire predictions right. She sees portents of human beings’ alteration of the oceans visible to no one else. Our leavings are now everywhere: she knows that off California, about 10,500 feet down, a solitary white plastic patio chair sits on the bottom as if its occupant had just gotten up to turn the steaks. She watches sea life being destroyed from every direction, between over-fishing and pollution and rising temperatures, with the ocean’s chemistry going to hell and reef paradises that she used to love now dead and rotting. As Pope Francis noted in his recent encyclical on climate change, “Coral reefs comparable to the great forests on dry land 
 are already barren or in a state of constant decline.” Sylvia began warning about that nightmare decades ago.

Last May, a small story on page six in The New York Times that Chinese ships, as observed by Greenpeace, had been fishing illegally off the west coast of Africa. The coastal waters of China have been so gravely depleted that Chinese vessels must now go much farther from home. Off Africa, their bottom-trawling methods ripped up the ocean floor and took fish without regard for limits or species, Greenpeace said. China responded by saying that its ships provided fees and other benefits to the African countries in whose waters they fished. The observed offenses occurred at the same time that some of those countries were in near chaos, fighting the Ebola virus. This story, we may imagine, contains a sketch of the future that Sylvia is talking about.

Video courtesy of Kip Evans from

When the adventurer Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Pacific by raft in 1947, he saw no trash. Today, garbage patches the size of small countries rotate in the centers of various oceans. A in 2009 found that cigarette butts were the most common debris, with plastic bags second. Of unknown danger are the much smaller pieces of plastic that infuse the seas and probably will forever. Marine animals ingest plastic fragments and die. Lost or discarded nylon fishing nets and monofilament longlines drift endlessly, catching and killing hundreds of thousands more every year. According to , a detritus-filled part of the Pacific holds six pounds of floating trash for every pound of natural plankton.

In the Florida Keys and the Caribbean region, as much as 80 percent of the coral reefs are dead or in severe decline as high water temperatures bleach them. Excess CO2 in the atmosphere leads to ocean acidification, which is already destroying the shells of sea snails and other tiny creatures near the base of the ocean’s food chain. When CO2 in the atmosphere exceeds 560 parts per million—a level we are likely to reach by the end of the 21st century—all coral reefs, the incubators of life, will eventually disappear. Perhaps 70 percent of the oxygen on the planet comes from photosynthesis taking place in organisms in or near the few sunlight-rich feet of water at the ocean’s surface. The ocean supplies about two of every three breaths we take. What climate change will do to that oxygen production is ominous and uncertain.

Most of the big fish in the oceans are gone. “We have to stop killing fish” was the second thing Sylvia said to me. Populations of larger predators like cod, marlin, halibut, and sharks are at less than 10 percent of their numbers from 70 years ago. We’re now taking swordfish that have barely reached the breeding stage. “Eating these fish is like eating the last Bengal tigers,” she says.

Her response to the plummeting fish numbers and to the crisis in general is to establish —protected places in the ocean where dumping, mining, drilling, fishing, and all other forms of exploitation are prohibited. She has picked out almost 60 places for this status, and she dreams of having 20 percent of the ocean fully protected by 2020. Right now about 2 percent has that protection. A big victory in this quest came in 2006, when she happened to sit at the same table with President George W. Bush at a White House dinner, and helped influence him to create a 140,000-square-mile, fully protected marine national monument around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Establishing many more Hope Spots is the principal goal of Sylvia’s life.

And yet, somehow, there’s also a sense that nobody is listening. Sometimes, Sylvia’s sea blue eyes have the same gentle sorrow with which wise and kind aliens look at foolish earthlings in movies. “Many people I love have no idea of the trouble we’re in,” she says. When she started talking about the decline in fish populations, 25 years ago, the number of bluefin tuna remaining had fallen to about 10 percent of the total when the species was healthy. Today only about 3 percent of bluefin tuna remain. She keeps on telling us; we keep on not listening. She is like a bright red stop vehicle immediately light that’s been blinking on the dashboard for 25 years. But the car seems to keep going, so we keep on driving.

Last April, I saw Sylvia give a talk and a video presentation in Tampa. The event was in a historic-landmark theater with an old-fashioned marquee that puts performers’ names in lights, and Sylvia’s was on top, above that of her fellow speaker, a woman biologist known for her studies of the forest canopy. The audience, about three-quarters female, cheered when Sylvia took the stage with her arms uplifted in a touchdown gesture. She wore black slacks, dark glasses (because of a flu-like case of “airport-itis,” she said), and a dress jacket of aqua blue, her signature color.

“You can do it, too!” was the inspirational theme. Her often told autobiography rolled out: how she earned degrees in marine botany from Florida State University and Duke at a young age; how she went on a round-the-world oceanographic cruise in 1964 with 70 other scientists and crew members, all of them men; how she became a national celebrity in 1970 when she led a group of five women scientists in an experiment living in a capsule underwater for two weeks on a coral reef; how she served as the first woman chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for 18 months in the early nineties but resigned because of her greater sympathy for fish than for the fishermen helped by the NOAA; how she founded companies to build mini submersibles, one-to-five-person crafts that can descend thousands of feet; how Time magazine named her a Hero for the Planet in 1998.

On the subject of saving fish from overfishing, she showed a frightening clip of herself in 2012 swimming next to a school of menhaden as it was being netted and sucked up into a factory ship for processing into omega-3 fish oil. The video bounces with the motion of the waves as crewmen in yellow slickers yell and wave frantically at this small, agile, determined, wetsuited woman to get out of the way. How she avoids being netted and inhaled into the maw herself is not clear. “When that school was captured, I felt as if a piece of me was ripped out of the ocean,” she told the Tampa audience. They cheered her throughout and at the end of the evening rose as one in a standing ovation.

She then sat and signed copies of her latest book, , for more than two hours. Such devotion of fans to their star, or vice versa, I had never seen. To some, Sylvia gave five or ten minutes, listening to their personal stories and posing with them for photographs. People said, “You have been my hero since I was a little girl!” and “I knew Dr. Harold Humm at Duke, and he adored you!” Theater staff turned out some of the lights, and the signing progressed in the near dark until someone found a lamp. Each inscription received her careful attention. At the end of the line, an auburn-haired young woman waited patiently while the minutes and then hours went by. When her turn finally came, she crouched by the signing table. Leaning her face close to Sylvia’s, she said, “I want to be you.”

Sylvia smiled and said, “Just be yourself.”

The worsening emergency keeps Sylvia on the road for more than 300 days in a year. I felt lucky whenever she gave me an extra moment. Over the holidays, when she was taking a short travel break at her main residence in Oakland, California, I flew out there. This time we met in front of San Francisco’s Aquarium of the Bay, where she had an appointment to talk to the director about his plans to add mini-submarine excursions for visitors. Sylvia brought an entourage—her daughter Liz Taylor, who now owns and runs (DOER), a marine consulting and engineering company Sylvia founded; Laura Cassiani, the COO of Sylvia’s foundation, ; Jane Kachmer, then a consultant working with SylviaÌę(and now the foundation’s CEO); Colette Cutrone Bennett, then director of sponsorship for Rolex, which has backed some of Sylvia’s enterprises and for which she has done ads; and Heather, whose last name I didn’t catch, also with Rolex. Heather and Colette, both knockout blondes, had flown in from New York the evening before and were flying out that afternoon. Colette had sat next to Donald Trump at a recent equestrian event in Palm Beach and had talked business, and he gave her his phone number. She discovered that she had misplaced it, however.

As we entered the building, Sylvia saw, first off, an exhibit of a big cylindrical tank full of anchovies swimming around and around. It stopped her. She looked at it for a while, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “This is not the way to see these animals. This makes them look like a mass. They are not only that—not just some endlessly abundant school. Each one of these fish is also its own individual being.”

At a display about shark attacks, she frowned again. “Sharks do not attack people,” she corrected, standing under a surfboard with a large bite out of it. “Sometimes, extremely rarely, they mistake a human for food. They’re not these evil, malevolent creatures, although we like to think so, in order to thrill ourselves. If that description fits anybody it’s us, when we hack the fins off the living animals for shark-fin soup and then throw the mutilated sharks back in the water.”

She didn’t really perk up when the museum director led us through the clear glass tunnels that make visitors feel as if they are walking under the sea. But when he led us backstage and upstairs, onto catwalks atop the tanks through which the tunnels pass, she became absorbed in looking down at the fish, and she was no longer with the group when we emerged into the aquarium’s inner hallways. “Maybe she jumped in,” someone suggested, and when she caught up she said she had wanted to. During the meeting that followed, she returned to her basic mood of enthusiasm and optimism, bobbing back up like a cork with her touchdown gesture and saying “Yes!’ That was her reaction when the director announced his plan to make the aquarium a “sub hub” for mini subs transporting “citizen scientists” and wealthy donors on research trips into San Francisco Bay.

Suddenly, she thanked everyone, and she and her entourage said goodbye and hurried off to cabs. Another meeting awaited—something at the Autodesk Pier 9 facility with Rolex. I went back to the anchovy display and stared at it for a while. Although I tried to pick out individual anchovies and identify them the next time they came around, I could not say I succeeded. In fairness, one anchovy really does look a lot like another. But as I noticed this one flare its gills or that one rise to take something off the surface, maybe I got her point.

Sylvia has been married three times: to John Taylor, a zoologist; to Giles Mead, an ichthyologist; and to Graham Hawkes, an engineer. Reporters have always asked her more about her personal life than they would have asked a man in her position. During the early days of her fame, stories about her played up this angle and featured photos of her American-girl good looks and wide, gleaming smile.

She had a son and a daughter with her first husband, and a daughter with her second. With Hawkes, her third husband, she had no children, but together they founded two companies devoted to the design and building of mini submarines. In Sea Change, an autobiographical book published in 1996, she included a photograph of Hawkes wearing a tuxedo and piloting a mini sub. This was perhaps a reference to Hawkes’s role as a villain in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, in which he fought and lost a submarine battle with Roger Moore’s Bond. Hawkes and Sylvia divorced in about 1990; she has said he was more interested in treasure hunting than in science. (On her own she started DOER in 1992, and he is not involved with the company.)

In truth, Sylvia’s life is so wide-ranging and complicated—so oceanic—as to be a challenge to describe. The swerve she made into the mini-sub business puzzled many of her scientist colleagues. Liz Taylor, head of DOER, does not resemble the late movie star of the same name. This Liz has strawberry blond, wavy hair, and an engineer’s calm, analytical poise. Two days after the aquarium visit, I was supposed to meet Sylvia at DOER’s headquarters in Alameda for a tour. When I arrived she wasn’t there, so Liz showed me around.

DOER’s factory, in a dockside hangar next to Alameda’s harbor, is big enough to hold a small ocean liner. Over the years, DOER has sold unmanned remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) to many customers in government, business, and science, and to several foreign navies. The factory resembles a deep box of giant Legos. Liz pointed out the six-foot-across bubbles of clear acrylic that the submariners sit in, and the subs’ many-hinged mechanical arms (in ads, these arms have had Rolex watches strapped to them), and the container-size support modules, and the smaller submersible robots that can work on offshore oil rigs and unclog municipal water tunnels. The pieces of equipment suspended here and there in the hangar’s twilight gave the high-walled space an undersea quality.

DOER’s most ambitious goal is to build three-person submersibles that can travel to any depth—all-access subs. One design would be able to descend quickly, the other more slowly. The research has been completed and the project is ready to go, but funding for a test model is not yet there. The key element of the design, a thick-walled, precision-crafted bubble made of glass rather than acrylic, costs too much for DOER to finance without help. (An estimated price for the two all-access subs is $40 million.) Instead, the company is currently building a pair of subs for $5 million that can go down to 3,300 feet and will be able to accept glass spheres and go deeper when the time comes. When an all-access sub finally is built and scientists can use it to travel the ocean anywhere from top to bottom, the discoveries may be exponentially greater than those made possible 70 years ago by the invention of scuba diving.

Sylvia says some things over and over. When she showed up at DOER and we went to lunch, she repeated a few of them, such as how she persuaded a higher-up at Google to include the oceans in Google Earth’s picture of the globe by telling him that, without the oceans, Google Earth was only “Google Dirt.” Another standard: “Fish and lobsters and crabs and squid aren’t ‘seafood,’ they’re precious marine wildlife. A fish is much more valuable when it’s swimming in the ocean than when it’s swimming in butter and lemon slices on your plate.” At refrains like that, my mind wandered. Mission Blue, the movie about her, is mostly engaging, but less so during the parts where one of the codirectors injects himself into the story. Now I found I had some sympathy for this codirector. How does one respond to statements like “the ocean is dying”? The concept is imponderable and upsetting, so of course our thoughts return to that familiar and fascinating subject, ourselves.

I remembered what New York City was like without power or services after Hurricane Sandy. I walked the beaches of Brooklyn and Staten Island and saw that the ocean had indeed gone insane. Houses near the shore were blown out from back to front, piles of sea wrack mounted three stories high, beads of styrofoam lay everywhere along miles of shoreline like an infinitude of dirty snow. Plastic drinking straws, red-and-white swizzle sticks, and brown Starbucks coffee stirrers had been woven into the chain-link fences of softball fields in a mega-profusion I could not have conceived of had I not seen it. The most disquieting aspect of the hurricane, though, was that it had no interest in the spiderweb-thin strands of my own life and concerns, or of anybody’s. Nothing in our cherished plans pertained to it. It spread its destruction, killed or didn’t kill, and never bothered about us.

Sylvia and I were supposed to talk more on the following day, but at the last minute a chance came up for her to fly to Chile, where she discussed with Chile’s president the possibility of creating a Hope Spot in the Pacific Ocean around Easter Island.

Almost half a century ago, before being on the world stage had crossed her mind, Sylvia made her reputation as a scientist with a now classic Ph.D. dissertation about marine algae (seaweed), entitled “.” Phaeophyta are the brown seaweeds. There are also green seaweeds and red seaweeds. By the time she was 30, Sylvia had learned more about the brown seaweeds of the Gulf than anyone had ever known. Doing all the collecting herself, without any grants or subsidies, and using scuba equipment, then still in its early stages as a research tool, she amassed specimens by the thousands. The eastern Gulf was her region of study, because she lived in the coastal town of Dunedin, near Tampa, as a girl and young woman. Of the tens of thousands of marine algae specimens she has collected in her life, about 20,000 are now in the botanical department of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Algae do not sound exciting and call to mind ponds or poorly tended swimming pools. In fact, algae are the principal flora of the oceans, the planet’s workhorse photosynthesizers and oxygen producers. Under healthy conditions, algae species exist in rainforest-like abundance. They can be tiny single-cell organisms or 150-foot-long kelp; mostly they are hand size or smaller. Prochlorococcus, a single-cell blue-green alga, or cyanobacteria, that is perhaps the most abundant photosynthesizing organism on earth, produces an estimated 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen supply. Sylvia’s thorough catalog of phaeophyta showed what a thriving Gulf looked like. Pollution, oil spills, and dredging destroy algae, hurricanes rip them from their environments and kill them, and nitrate pollution from fertilizer runoff enhances the growth of certain algae at the drastic expense of others. Like everything else in the ocean, the seaweeds are under assault. In retrospect, Sylvia’s study serves as an essential reference point for what the Gulf was like before late 20th-century development came along.

Her dissertation is also a work of art, as I discovered when I read it; excitement and romance infuse its scientific language in a hard-to-explain way. She did all the drawings herself. I asked her if sometime she would show me a few of her specimens at the Smithsonian, and one afternoon, when she happened to be in D.C., she met me there. If you’ve seen her before, as I had, it can be a surprise to remember that she’s five feet, three inches tall and 80 years old; she appears to be simply herself, and not of any particular size or age. Her walk is easy and casual, as if she almost disdains to do it. The only time she moves like her real self is when she’s swimming. With her that day was Robert Nixon, a producer and codirector of Mission Blue. (He’s not the codirector who kept intruding in it.) As they came up the steps, they were talking about the mesh size of squid nets. She was saying to Nixon that the best size of mesh in squid nets is no nets at all.

Three scientists of the Smithsonian greeted us just inside: James Norris, David Ballantine, and Barrett Brooks, all of them experts in marine botany and equal in their awed deference toward Sylvia. She had set up the afternoon’s viewing session with a phone call to Norris, a cheery man with glasses and a neatly trimmed white beard. He said he had an exhibit he wanted her to see, and he led us to a display case. Pointing to a piece of coral covered with a reddish lichen-like growth, he said, triumphantly, “This is the deepest-dwelling alga ever found—278 meters!”

Sylvia cocked an eye at it and nodded in approval. “These deepwater photosynths are getting short shrift in our assessment of the O2 productivity of the oceans,” she said. “At this depth, it’s photosynthesizing with one-tenth of one percent of the sunlight available at the surface. How can it live? We know almost nothing, really, about deeper-dwelling ocean life.”

Through back hallways, we made our way to a cavernous inner room where elbow-high cases of flat drawers stretched into the distance. At a place where the fluorescent lights were brighter, tan paper folios had been laid out on the case tops. Sylvia opened the folios carefully, one by one. Here was an alga called Avrainvillea sylvearleae, unknown to botany until she discovered it on some rocks in two meters depth near Wilson’s Pier off the town of Alligator Harbor, Florida. Here was Padina profunda Earle, found attached to limestone and fine shells in 60 meters depth 19 miles off Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas. “In the water, it’s a translucent alga, like glass,” Sylvia remarked. Here was Hummbrella hydra Earle, found in 30 meters depth off Chile, which she named in punning tribute to her beloved mentor, marine botanist Harold Humm. “In their habitat, these branches look like pink umbrellas turned inside out,” she said. “Very Dr. Seussian.”

“They’re all such beautiful specimens,” Barrett Brooks said. “You dried and pressed all of them yourself, and you generally didn’t use formalin.”

“I never liked formalin. I mean, it’s embalming fluid! Think of how much of that stuff I would have in my system by now.”

“It’s great you didn’t, because formalin scrambles DNA,” he said. “If you had, we couldn’t do DNA sequencing on your specimens.”

As the folders opened, every specimen revealed a different structure—some broad-leafed and fan-like, some resembling stick insects or needlework sewn microscopically fine. She explained how an alga called Phaeostroma pusillium, which she found in the Gulf, constitutes probable evidence for the nonexistence of Florida during the high-water Pleistocene era, because the alga is also found in the Atlantic, from Georgia to Rhode Island. “To most people, all these beautiful plants would probably just be the gunk you pull off your boat propeller,” she said.

Tactfully, Nixon interrupted to say that they now had to rush to Sylvia’s next appointment. Their schedule had got backed up because their previous meeting had gone on too long, Nixon said. It had been with the vice chairman of land and natural resources of Tanzania, who had talked at length to Sylvia about his country’s problem of fishermen who fish with dynamite.

“That happened to me!” Norris said as he walked us out. He had been diving at about 30 feet, collecting algae off the southwestern coast of China, when a fisherman threw three sticks of dynamite into the water nearby. The explosion tore off all his scuba gear, crushed his chest, rearranged his internal organs, and blew out both his eardrums. He would have died if not for the extraordinary efforts of the U.S. Embassy, a British Petroleum helicopter, and a French diving physician who was in the area. After a few days in a hospital in Hong Kong he flew to Washington, where he spent more than a year in rehab. Eighteen months after having been dynamited, Norris was diving again.

Sylvia shook her head in sympathy. “Dynamite fishing is a real problem nowadays,” she added. “When all the catchable fish are gone, people use dynamite to bring up any little ones who might be left.” She and Nixon then said goodbye to the scientists and to me, hurried out the front entry, and caught a cab. The four of us, as if in her wake, stood in the lobby and talked about her. “What impressed people about Sylvia from the beginning was that she was a scientist, not a technician, making these dives,” Norris said. “In the past, a lot of our ocean science had been like flying over the Amazon in a plane looking out the window and not getting down on the ground. But Sylvia always pushed to go down and see what the heck was going on for herself.

“And she’s sure not exaggerating the ocean’s problems, I can tell you that.”

Sylvia is from New Jersey originally. Her parents had a small farm near the Delaware River in the southern part of the state. Her father, Lewis Earle, an electrician who worked for DuPont, could build or repair anything. Sylvia gets her engineering skills from him. Her mother, Alice Richie Earle, loved the natural world and showed interest rather than alarm when Sylvia came back from a nearby creek with animals she had found. Sylvia was the sixth of their seven children and the only girl. The couple lost their first four, all of them boys—two in infancy, another to an ear infection at the age of nine, and their oldest in a car accident. Such tragedies could have destroyed a marriage, but the Earles kept going.

The family moved to Dunedin in 1948, when Sylvia was 12. At that time the town was an undeveloped, almost frontier place. Their house had the Gulf of Mexico in its front yard. Sylvia first used scuba gear at the age of 17—Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan had invented the equipment just ten years earlier. She went all over the Gulf, using her family’s 18-foot outboard or hitching rides with shrimp boats or Navy divers, always in search of new seaweeds. She can describe vanished Florida in a way that makes you mourn—the inland freshwater spring lakes “as blue as morning glories,” the reefs (now mostly dredged up along the urbanized coasts, and gone), the groupers that watched her work and got to know her and would have followed her up onto the shore if they could have. (“Almost all the groupers have disappeared. They were friendly and curious, like Labrador retrievers, and they also happened to be delicious.”) She pronounces the complicated Gulf Coast names without a pause, from the Tortugas to Apalachee Bay, Pass-a-Grille Beach and Big Gasparilla Island, and the Homosassa and Caloosahatchee and Apalachicola and Tombigbee and Pascagoula Rivers, and so on up to Grand Terre, Louisiana. The wider ocean she travels has its center in the Gulf and radiates outward from it.

The last house that Sylvia’s parents lived in still belongs to her. It is in a once rural part of Dunedin, on wooded acres that include a lake. When the family moved there, in 1959, the area was mostly orange groves and wild land. By then Sylvia was living elsewhere, but she often returned while doing her algae study, and when she had children she brought them for vacations. The place is still a refuge for her. She told me she would be making another pause in her travels there in early May.

From the outside, the live oaks all around the gray one-story ranch house seem to be pressing it down to about half a story, but inside, the living room is ample and comfortable, with toy stuffed alligators on the couch and idyllic Florida landscapes on the walls. Sylvia led me through a door to the back and then along a narrow boardwalk to a lake that was so smooth and green with duckweed, it resembled the top of a pool table. We sat on a dock. Sylvia was wearing clamdiggers, though she would never dig a clam except for research. I creaked as I sat, but she moved without hitch or creak.

Her father had built the house; the dock and boardwalk were added later. She pointed out the cypress trees he had planted around the lake, which they now buttressed with their large knees. “This lake doesn’t have a name,” she said. “Maybe it’s just Lake Earle. It used to be tannin colored and beautifully clear. There were bass and gar, and toads along the bank, and flying squirrels in the trees. I really miss the flying squirrels. Runoff from the surrounding development made the water murky and fed the duckweed.”

We walked on the boardwalk through the trees as she pointed out other plantings and improvements her father had made. Her parents come up often in her conversation. She describes them as her “best friends” in the dedication to Sea Change. They were devout Methodists and helped build a church in Dunedin, she told me. I asked her if she goes to church, and she said not really.

We got in her sea blue rented SUV and drove to the Gulf shore. A loud scraping kept coming from under the car. She said it must be a stick and it would fall off soon, but it didn’t. When we got to a downtown parking lot, she jumped out, lay on the piping-hot pavement, and pulled out a good-size tree limb with green leaves still on it. After several stops in town, including at a fish store, where she looked with displeasure at the iced casualties for sale, we headed north along the coast. I had made the mistake of telling her that I liked to fish, and she kept asking me why. I said I just loved it because it’s my bliss and I want to follow my bliss. That argument had no effect. “But why do you enjoy torturing wildlife? It’s just a choice for you. It’s life or death for them. Why not just observe them without torturing them?” I mumbled an answer about the thrill of the chase.

Her family’s first house in Dunedin had been on Wilson Street. She took us there and pulled over where the street now ends, at a gate you need a card with a magnetic stripe to open. As we peered beyond the gate, high-rise buildings dwindled to a perspective point where a small square of blue Gulf peeked through. A sign offered three-bedroom condos starting at $780,000. “You know that the misconception that fish can’t feel pain has been completely disproven, don’t you?” she asked. I said yes, I had seen studies in which fish jaws were injected with bee venom and the fish showed pain. I said I knew hooks hurt, having sometimes hooked myself.

Searching for a stretch of original shoreline, she continued out of town, across a causeway, and down a one-lane road to Honeymoon Island State Park. Here the shore was undisturbed and thick with mangroves. We got out and walked along a sandy trail through stands of palmettos, cabbage palms, slash pines, and live oaks. “This is what the open country around Dunedin used to be,” she said. An osprey hovered overhead, sunlight coming through the edges of its wings, and she took pictures of it with the camera she had brought.

At an opening in the mangroves, we came upon a small bite of sand beach—finally, the actual Gulf. A widescreen vista opened out. Turquoise shallows marked by brown patches of turtle grass darkened to a deeper blue distance where stacks of white clouds piled up. In the light breeze, the waves did not break but slapped. Striped mullet jumped. We took off our shoes and waded in. Among the prop roots of the red mangroves, a large troupe of fiddler crabs were doing a back step that mimed getting away from us as fast as possible, each crab with one claw raised. At the tide line, Sylvia found tiny pointed periwinkle-like shells, and black snails, and an epiphytic alga that grows mostly on spartina grass, and a marine gnat smaller than this semicolon; we watched it navigate the varicolored grains of sand.

I asked her what the death of the ocean would look like. A remote look came over her. She described gray-green dead zones like the one that exists already in the Gulf off New Orleans, and the disappearance of certain organisms and the rise of others we may not even know of yet, and coastal sterility, and a lack of coral reefs. Some animals, like horseshoe crabs, have survived acidic oceans before, and might again, she said. About soft-bodied animals like jellyfish we don’t have enough fossil records to say for sure, but jellyfish are doing OK so far and might do even better in a mostly dead ocean. New Ebola-like microbes might emerge. The planet’s oxygen densities might go down and the air become too rarefied in higher places for them to be habitable. Her voice trailed off. She said, “As a species we depend upon the ocean, so the eventual result would be the same. No ocean, no us.”

People often ask Sylvia what they can do. Her focus is not on heading up popular movements—she isn’t organizing beach cleanups or fish-market boycotts. She tries to reach the elites. At the end of her in 2009, she told the technology, entertainment, and design invitees in attendance: “I wish you would use all means at your disposal—films! expeditions! the Web! new submarines!—and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, Hope Spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.”

Her foundation, Mission Blue, has identified 58 Hope Spots around the world, from the Outer Seychelles, off southeast Africa, to the East Antarctic Peninsula, to Micronesia, to the Bering Sea Deep Canyons, the Gulf of California, the Patagonian Shelf, the Sargasso Sea, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Ascension Island, and the Gulf of Guinea, off the west coast of Africa. Questions about what any particular Hope Spot’s protected status would consist of, or how it would be enforced, often remain unexplained. So far, some marine protected areas have had success. , a protected area in Mexico’s Baja peninsula, has seen an almost fivefold increase in its biomass since it was created in 1995, and a tenfold increase in big fish. (Sylvia loves Cabo Pulmo and says it’s one of her favorite places to dive.)

Any notion that a Hope Spot’s purpose is to grow fish for people to catch makes her mad. The sanctuaries are to be places set apart in perpetuity where the ocean can recover, not nurseries for Mrs. Paul’s. I once asked her what was the point of creating Hope Spots if the whole ocean will continue to acidify from excess CO2 anyway. She said that the more sanctuaries there are, and the larger amount of ocean they cover, the better the chances for the ocean’s resilience, when and if CO2 is under control.

To an extent, her strategy of persuading the elites has worked. People like Gordon Moore of Intel have given a lot of money to saving the ocean, and George W. Bush, when nudged by Sylvia, created the national monument around Hawaii. Bush’s executive act provided a precedent for Barack Obama, who last year expanded the protected area of the to 490,000 square miles, establishing the largest protected marine network so far. Sylvia says we live in the perfect time to make changes that will benefit the planet for thousands of years. A recent idea, the creation of marine protected areas in the 200-mile , which by international treaty extends from the shoreline of every maritime country, increases her optimism. Most fishing is done within three miles of land, so inshore protected areas (Cabo Pulmo is one example) could have a sizable effect on fish numbers.

But if you don’t expect to hang out with the president, make a film, or build a mini submarine, what can you do yourself? When I sent an e-mail to Sylvia asking her advice for ordinary people, she didn’t answer, but eventually Liz Taylor did. Her list of recommendations included avoiding plastic drinking straws—a good idea, given what I saw after Sandy—bringing your own plate, cup, and utensils to summer barbecues, volunteering at your local aquarium, keeping an eye on changes along the shoreline, helping your state fish and wildlife officers, getting your omega-3’s from algae-based products rather than from fish or krill oil, donating money to environmental groups that educate kids, and stopping the use of lawn chemicals like Roundup weed killer.

Sylvia is a one-in-seven-billion individual, and she encourages other individuals to do what they love and care about the oceans. Collectivity does not seem to be in her nature. But for the ocean to be saved, it seems to me that an enormous, widespread popular movement must rise up someday. In that sense, when Sylvia tells the TED folks to “ignite popular support,” she is handing off the hardest part of the job. People can be induced to care about lovable, wide-eyed animals like seals, or to donate to dolphin rescue, or to visit and buy souvenirs at places that rehabilitate stranded sea otters and turtles. But getting across the real, immense, nonspecific, unsexy fact of the ocean’s impending death in such a way that billions of people will care and want to do something about it is a problem nobody yet has solved.

Sylvia has not persuaded me to stop fishing, but I have decided to use only fly-fishing equipment from now on. And since I met Sylvia, I have eaten almost no fish. The sight of sushi now embarrasses me. It is likely that big fish like swordfish, tuna, cod, and grouper will soon disappear from the sea, or from our diets, or both. We might as well completely stop eating those fish now.

Driving again in Sylvia’s sea blue SUV, we went up to Tarpon Springs to see the old sponge-boat docks. She said they looked picturesque, but in the old days, when there were actual sponges drying all over the place, the smell was unbearable. By now the afternoon had moved into rush hour. She was still thinking about my fishing and asked me how hooking an animal in the mouth and watching its desperate struggles could possibly be enjoyable. I explained about the relatively non-injurious aspects of fly-fishing, how it uses only a single hook, etc. She asked why I didn’t quit fishing entirely if I wanted to do less damage to the fish. Approaching Dunedin, we turned off the highway and onto a back road. She said, “Now I want to show you my parents’ church.” When I didn’t answer, because I was still thinking of an answer to her previous question, she said, “Well, I’m going to show you the church whether you’re interested or not.”

She had told me that, in addition to the cypresses by their lake, her father had planted trees around their church. I had pictured a little border of trees around a church lawn. We turned from the back road onto a winding drive. This was no patch of lawn but a spacious green expanse, like an old-time camp meeting grounds. I am a lover of frontier American churches, and her parents’ Methodist church was one of them, in 1950s style. The modernist, almost cubist angles of the church’s walls and roof and entryway showed ingenious architecture combined with heartfelt pioneer-handyman carpentry. The trees she had known as saplings now stood in tall columns, with mote-filled shafts of late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the leaves.

We sat awhile with the engine off. “This is actually the second time I’ve been here today,” she said. “I was here this morning. I come here every time I’m in Dunedin. This was where the branch got stuck under the car.”

The church and grounds were like a place in a dream. The light through the leaves matched the sunlight that descends through coral reefs—those celestial shafts that light up the bright reef fish swimming through. As Americans we have an attachment to the Good Place, the Peaceable Kingdom. Hope Spots might be the latest, trans-global, transoceanic expression of that vision. Once you’ve glimpsed such a place for even an instant, you’ll pursue it for the rest of your life.

Contributing editor Ian Frazier is the author of the forthcoming Hogs Wild: A Collection of Essays and Reporting.

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I was sitting on a front porch in Helena, Montana, with my 14-year-old son on a hot summer afternoon when the smoke of nearby forest fires made the air even hotter. A black Labrador belonging to nobody we knew came walking along in a low, overheated mood. On a neighbor’s lawn, a sprinkler was going. The dog saw it, bounded into the spray, and stayed there for a long while. Then he came out, shook himself a lot, and walked up onto the porch. He sat on his haunches looking at us. This was one happy dog. This dog owned happiness. Regarding us benevolently, his eyes had the fogginess of total bliss. Just sitting there, wet and dripping, he embodied the sound ahhhhhhhhhhh. My son and I agreed that we had never seen a human being as happy as that dog, and suddenly we became happy ourselves.

A dog’s sense of smell is said to be ten thousand times better than a human’s, and that’s also how much better dogs are than humans at being happy. Human happiness is a shabby thing compared with a dog’s. For eons, humans benefitted from the canine gift for happiness and favored happy dogs, who thus passed along their happy genes, producing a species that is now besotted, almost deranged, with happiness. Of course, many other animals take pleasure in being alive—eagles soaring, otters skidding down slides, cows content to the point of smugness. But there’s a selfishness to that happiness. Dog happiness always looks outward. To reach fullest expression, a dog’s happiness has to be lived large and strewn around. The only thing that slows down a dog’s happiness is if he can’t infect you with it so you can be happy together.

And dogs laugh! Not only do they laugh, they mean it, unlike such sarcastic types as monkeys, hyenas, and dolphins. (I know dolphins are friendly, but that high-pitched chuckle of theirs can wear on you.) A dog will laugh at anything. Hiding the ball, then pulling it out of your coat—hilarious! Watching you load the car before the vacation—a riot! Dogs are like an audience someone has already warmed up so that they laugh and voice their approval the minute the featured act (you) steps onto the stage. Dogs laugh even when they don’t get the joke, which is often. But hey, if you’re laughing, it must be funny, and that’s good enough for them.

To understand the sense of humor dogs have, it’s useful to contrast it with that of their main pet competitor: cats. Cats do not really have a sense of humor. In its place, they cultivate a deep sense of the ironic. The detached, ironical pleasure cats take in watching and inflicting suffering is a horrid substitute for the hearty wholesomeness of dog laughter. And a cat never laughs out loud. The best that cats can muster is a sardonic smirk, an “I told you so” bared in their pointy incisors.

Dogs laugh just as hard when the joke is on them, but cats hate being the butt of laughter. One time my cat was asleep on the mantelpiece in the living room. In his sleep, he turned over, woke up, found himself lying on empty air, and began scrabbling frantically on the mantel with his front paws to keep from going down. Cartoonlike, he lost the struggle and dropped to the floor. I saw the whole thing and laughed my head off. Only the cat’s dignity was injured, but he never forgave me, for the course of his half-hour memory span. He slunk around and shot me dirty looks and was really a bad sport about it, I thought. A dog would’ve made that same pratfall and hopped back on the mantel and done it again just for laughs.

Best of all, dogs live to go outdoors, where they find their funniest and timeliest material. They want to show you that running fast to nowhere in particular and then back, muddy and burr-covered, is such great comedy that you ought to join them in guffawing and jumping around with your tongue hanging out. They invite you to follow them to the railroad tracks and the run-over opossum that will be a good joke for them to roll in, or to the Canada geese on the baseball field, where a side-splitting chase scene will ensue. The bits are somehow even funnier because the dog is confident that you will love them as much as he does.

Dogs exult in the world itself. No matter if your neighborhood is interesting or not, your dog will want to go out in it. This is a godsend for human beings, most of whom would otherwise vanish into their screens. When I ramble around the part of New Jersey where I live, I see very few people on the sidewalks, and blue glows in many windows. The actual world has been abandoned for the virtual one—but not by dogs. They lobby for the world’s reality and the unending comedic opportunities it provides. The only other humans I see on my rambles in the worst weather are the ones who have to walk their dogs. Dogs never stop showing us that gigantic happiness inheres in the world, waiting to be run to earth or sniffed on a tree.

Contributing editor Ian Frazier’s September 2013 story “The One That Got Away” was included in .

More happiness strategies, tested by șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű editors:

We Hugged More People
We Took Zumba Classes
We Discovered Microadventures
We Chased After Flow State
We Got Radically Honest on Facebook

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