Experiencing the great outdoors with your family can be endlessly rewarding: time slows down, discoveries are made, everyone leaves with a sense of well-being. Or you take your kid sailing and accidentally let the boom knock him overboard. Either way, your children will remember all the times you spent outside – and they will thank you for it. We asked three accomplished outdoors writers to share their own stories of raising adventurous kids, traumatizing accidents and all.

How to Raise an Outdoorsy Kid – Without Traumatizing Him by W. Hodding Carter
Learning to Cook the Whole Hog by Jack Hitt
Turning the Outdoors Into a Playground by Anthony Doerr

How to Raise an Outdoorsy Kid—Without Traumatizing Him

I managed to raise a great outdoorsman, despite doing everything wrong

If there was one thing I knew when he was born, it was that I would be the one to guide my son, Angus Kane Carter—named for both the Yeats poem “” and the 19th-century Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane—to be the confident young outdoorsman I never was.

Unlike my own father, who absently set me adrift in the sea of manhood, I had a plan. I would artfully lead Angus to his competent destiny through repeated outings, carefully orchestrated “learning” moments, and even the occasional confidence-building “test.”

Looking back, the first misstep occurred when Angus, now ten, was a toddling two. He could swim as well as a six-year-old as long as he was beside the wall, but I decided to nudge him forward, to reveal to him his obvious skill. Holding him in the middle of the pool, splashing and blowing bubbles like we’d done countless times before, I let go with little warning. Tears flowing, he easily made it back to the water’s edge in a few seconds. And then refused to swim for the next two years.

When he was three, he could tie a number of sailor’s knots and knew how and when to haul in a sheet while tacking our 23-foot sloop across Penobscot Bay, Maine. All was good, until the day my wife and I went out for a short sail, and I let Angus scamper, against Lisa’s advice, untethered on deck while we were anchored in a tossing sea. I didn’t see it coming, only a blur in the corner of my eye, as the careening boom batted him overboard. His mom fetched him back aboard even before the sickening plop! had faded away. The result: he wouldn’t sail until just recently.

Last summer I did it again. Proud of Angus’s precocious canoeing skills—what other nine-year-old so easily performed a cross-bow draw?—I suddenly turtled our Old Town Discovery. Just as I’d predicted, Angus popped above the surface, paddle in hand, and immediately instructed his friend and me to work the boat to the nearest rock so we could flip it safely. Despite all our previous setbacks, he was that sure, brave boy I never was. Best of all, he’d clearly learned from my years of meddling—although it wasn’t quite the lesson I had in mind. Angus hasn’t set foot in a canoe with me since.

Learning to Cook the Whole Hog

The joy of cooking pig, for a new generation of campfire girls

Two or three times a year, I slow-cook a whole 150-pound hog, and not just because there’s no good way to cheat your way to that exquisite flavor. Those 18 to 24 hours of fireside work can’t be done alone, which might be the best part. I learned how to cook a pig from my elders, and they learned the way we all do: getting conscripted to work overnight, staying up until dawn to keep the coals smoking, drinking liquor, and wailing on a guitar, torturing the most maudlin lyrics of the time (then, Leonard Cohen’s). That graveyard shift is practically a rite of passage.

Real barbecue slows down time and gets you back to the very origins of cooking. I’m always shocked by how many people come over in the morning to “help out,” a full six hours before the invite says: because there is no siren call quite like spending a whole day kicking embers in a fire pit while the air coils with pecan smoke.

Over the years, I’ve taught my two daughters my secret of pig prep—simple dry rub—and how to keep the temperature beneath the covered pig running around 210 to 220 degrees. The girls are heading toward college now, and they take the graveyard shift so I can fall asleep listening to far-off, maudlin lyrics (now, Bon Iver’s). I hear them laughing and carrying on, sitting beneath blankets in the dead chill after midnight, a snuck cigarette or beer here and there. I drift off, happy to transmit this tiny body of knowledge to a new generation that has been learning it just the way I did, and on back to long before the last Ice Age, when our deep ancestors worried that their kids might run off with a Neanderthal or hang out with those airhead cave painters in Lascaux. Maybe that’s why it’s impossible not to give thanks when cooking a whole animal—it’s an acknowledgement of gratitude for some really good turn that happened long before we could even put it into words, because those hadn’t been invented yet.

Correspondent Jack Hitt is the author of and .

Turning the Outdoors Into a Playground

Far from Mario Bros. and Minecraft, the real gaming begins

July in Idaho, and my eight-year-old twin sons and I are sleeping in a yurt in the middle of Boise National Forest. We are—I’m guessing—100 miles from home, 30 miles out of cell-phone range, and ten miles from the nearest human. It is deeply, amazingly, unsettlingly quiet here. The hour before dawn comes on so still, so windless, that the sound of my heartbeat, shifting hairs in my inner ear, keeps waking me up.

Many environmental scientists write about scarcity. We’re running out of silence, amphibians, genetic diversity, fresh water. Yet one of the largest challenges my children face is too much access to too much stuff. Together my sons own approximately 47 trillion Legos; they play organized football and soccer and go to lacrosse camp; they have Mario Bros., , Monopoly; and their iPads allow them to do most of these things—build Legos, kick a soccer ball—virtually. Out here at the yurt we have two books, a package of Oreos, and some beef jerky. But rather than get bored, my boys seem only to get happier with every hour. They collect “Gandalf sticks” and yell “You shall not pass!” They ask, “If we catch a chipmunk, can we keep it?”

When the sun finally heaves up above the ridge to our east, we take our Batman fishing poles and go tramping down to the Crooked River, a gorgeous creek with deep trout-filled holes every half-mile or so. Before noon I help my son Henry release his fourth trout: spotted and brilliant and jackknifing in his palms as he lowers it into the water. “Thank you for letting me catch you,” he says. I am reminded: the world is always there, if I can only remember to take them out into it.

Anthony Doerr is the author of , a book of short stories. His second novel, All the Light We Cannot See, will be released in 2014.

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 “I have bought a propane grill,” said my pal. My teeth clenched. We’re old friends, so I knew exactly what he meant. The condemnation hung there in the smoke: We both knew (and knew the other knew) the latest thinking on grills: Charcoal is bad. It pollutes. The inefficiencies can best be understood in the cryptic code of Btu’s and kilowatts per penny, but the math is all there. Propane is cleaner, hotter, better.

I said dĂ©jĂ  vu because it was only a few years ago that I was the first in my crowd to own the chimney starter, that outsize coffee-can-like device that can light a few pounds of charcoal with a piece of newspaper. The real beauty of that invention, however, is that you don’t wind up hanging your righteousness in everyone’s face. Around the dinner table, you can just slip into a bit of commentary about how London broil tastes better without the stench of lighter fluid. Or disguise your piety in Mister Science gee-whiz, tossing off words like “capillary effect” and “convection flow.” As if you knew what they meant.

Now I was back on the other side. My pal had passed me by. His thinking was more advanced. His concern for nature was more profound, his virtue superior. Suddenly I felt, well, guilty. Funny. I had long thought of myself as a dutiful environmentalist. I mean, I compost. I recycle. I keep my winter thermostat at 68. I pay a little extra to get well-designed appliances (like a Weber). I pack out what I pack in. I satisfy most of my appetite along the lower register of the food chain, mostly locally grown. I have been known to let it mellow when it’s yellow. But the grill was a sign of something bigger. Apparently I no longer was a real environmentalist, by purist standards anyway. I don’t know exactly when, but the cutting edge of concern for our planet had up and left me in the dust.

My long wooden fork held still in the air; my shoulders slumped before my smoking kettle. Suddenly I transmogrified into a Dickensian baron poised before what now looked like my very own tiny nineteenth-century coal-burning London factory, spewing black soot, soiling the birds, quite possibly forcing the white peppered moths of my neighborhood to microevolve black wings for protection.

I began to wonder just how many other well-intentioned backyardpersons and outdoorspeople now found themselves slipping on the hair shirt of this new, subtle form of shame. I probably should have seen this coming a few years back, when the stakes were raised in home recycling. Suddenly, folks who earnestly and faithfully separated glass from plastic were looked at askance by those who, without thinking, knew bimetal from tin or polyvinyl chloride from low-density polyethylene. The greener catalog companies began recycling our trash into fleece sweaters, and sneakers made from old diapers. That was then. Now the scolding puritanism that has overtaken our garbage is loose in the backyard, and making a beeline for the forests, the mountains, the deserts, the national parks–our wildlands. I can’t step out my back door without wondering, Is anything OK anymore?

When you camp out, do you swallow your toothpaste? Do you carry out your apple cores and banana peels because they are foreign to the surrounding ecosystem? Do you wear soft shoes? These days what determines proper behavior outdoors begins with the concept of “weight,” a literal lightness of being. A handful of influential outdoor organizations with names such as Leave No Trace, made a reputation asking the above questions. Indeed, their original philosophy of treading lightly on the land always seemed sound to me. But sorry, pack-it-in-pack-it-out is yesterday’s beatitude. Now, the Leave No Trace folks can be found on the Internet, vehemently thinking and rethinking the minutest details of backcountry etiquette, mulling all the ways in which we grind our heavy heel into Nature’s face. They’ve left no stone unturned.

Do you refrain from wearing brightly colored parkas and pants so as to blend more tranquilly into the landscape? Do you strain your pasta water and pack out the leavings? How to Shit in the Woods is actually a book, and the topic is complex. Do you smear your feces across the ground so that the natural processes react immediately and remove your traces within a few days? Do you bury your used toilet paper? Better yet, do you pack it out in Ziploc baggies? Better yet, do you wipe with dried leaves? Better yet, would you use a handful of rocks? All of these are straight-faced suggestions put forward by the freshest thinkers in the business.

Don’t Fish (it scares them).
These matters can be funny, but only because the suggested behavior is so utterly impractical. You don’t drive to Timbuktu to get to Toledo. Likewise, carrying your feces out of the forest, where animals have happily deposited for millennia, just doesn’t compute, no matter who’s saying it’s the right thing to do. For that matter, neither does fishing without a hook so that you don’t harm your catch. But an emerging voice in the ethic of fly-fishing says that’s what you should be doing.

In 1994, an angler from Denver named John Betts proposed an alternative to the practice of “catch and release,” which at the time was the height of angling virtue. Betts correctly pointed out that released fish usually ended up with a shredded lip or a torn face. Worse, fish that enjoyed this humane treatment more than one or twice in a week typically died from all the handling. Filled with remorse, Betts strained to find a solution. And he found one: cut the barbs from his hooks and fish with no intention of ever landing a rainbow, brown, or cutthroat. He calls his new philosophy Touch and Go.

“You get the ‘take,'” says Betts, employing his self-coined jargon. “You know you’ve touched the fish. Then, by keeping some tension on the leader, you can keep it on the hook.” For a split second, Betts says, a good fisherman can keep the fly between the fish’s lips and feel the essence of Gaia tugging from the silent depths, just like in a real fish-fight. But now there’s a democratic justice involved too–a kind of equality. In Touch and Go, the trout theoretically possesses the same power as the angler, maybe more. When the fish decides it’s had enough “touching” of your life force, it can simply slide off the line and move on to touch some other Orvis bedecked human. But do you ever land a fish accidentally? “Land a fish?” Betts barks. “No. You’ve missed the point. You don’t want to land a fish.”

Thinking like this, of course, is practically theological, a latter-day version of counting angels on the head of a pin. I mean, once you’ve started down this road, why pester the fish at all? Sure, you’re getting to “touch” the life force. That’s cool. But aren’t you just pissing the fish off? Traumatizing it? Are you any different, in the eyes of God and Gaia, from a child fussing with a wounded bug?

Frankly, I find the ideology at work in this thinking infinitely condemning: Man’s intrusion into nature is wrong, no matter how light. Heaviness is a mark of shame, and lightness an emblem of virtue. We’ve seen this on the backwoods trails in California, where for at least a decade the seemingly natural allies of hikers and bikers have been at war. There and elsewhere hikers consider themselves truer participants in the wild because they’re on foot, touching the soil with only their boots, while bikers are wicked, with their infernal machines churning up the ground and startling the wildlife with their fat tires and smoking brakes. In fact, hikers in southern California have a new and potent weapon for the fight against bikers: lizards. Hikers claim that the little things are getting run over out on the trail. It’s become a battle cry: “Mountain bikers are creating a holocaust for lizards and reptiles!” proclaimed one hiker at a recent hiker-biker peace summit in Orange County. There is a problem, though: They haven’t produced any evidence, not even the sun-dried skin of a dead reptile, to lift their argument above demagoguery. Why? “It’s the raptors,” explains one hiker. “They pick up the lizards before we can get to them.” Ah, yes, the raptors.

With or without lizards in the vicinity, under the new mountain biking ethic there is officially only one safe condition in which mountain biking should occur: when the soil has achieved a mystical state of half-dry, half-wet known as “loamy.” You avoid the wet, of course, because you tear up the trail, causing erosion. You should avoid the dry because you leave skid marks, also leading to erosion. Some of this makes good sense. But taken too far? This ethic altogether eliminates riding in the boggy Pacific Northwest, the Mississippi Valley, and a good deal of the East Coast–and certainly the dry Southwest. Which leaves, I believe, a single hill in West Virginia.

Of course, we’re used to this kind of hand-wringing in the sport of rock climbing, where two factions have been battling for decades over the issue of bolting, a common practice in which bolts are drilled into the rock to serve as permanent protection. Of course, we’re not used to seeing the battle rage so fervently in the mind of one individual. Meet Ken Nichols, who’s working toward a new, cleaner brand of climbing. The longtime king of bolting on the East Coast and author of the popular Traprock: Rock Climbing in Central Connecticut, Nichols put up many of the most popular routes in the 1970s and later mapped them. But recently Nichols was overcome by guilt. In a Dr. Frankenstein God-what-have-I-done moment, his self-loathing brought him to a kind of conversion. Again, technology is the evil genie that must be rebottled. The new method: Nichols no longer clips in to the bolts. Instead, he simply tosses a skyhook onto a ledge above him and starts climbing, hoping the hook will hold if he takes a fall. As he moves upward, he chops at the same bolts he once installed, a practice that can often leave a different kind of blight-golf-ball-size pock marks in the stone. Meanwhile, in what is becoming a serious problem, local climbers are still using his book. And they’re finding out well above terra firma that his life-supporting bolts are no more.

Even the deep blue sea doesn’t provide much haven from all the nitpicking. Snorkeling, which was once a harmless tourist business in the Caribbean, now prompts technical debates as dreary and dense as a fully convened United Nations discussing mineral rights in Antarctica. The traditional “giant-stride” dive from the edge of your boat is now pooh-poohed, since it may alter water-flow patterns carrying invisible fish eggs. Naturally, touching anything is forbidden. Taking snapshots traumatizes the fish. Suddenly the embarrassingly tacky trip our grandparents took in Florida in the 1950s–the glass-bottom boat–now seems positively avant-garde. Although I think any correct-minded guide these days would install a one-way mirror in the bottom of the boat so the fish don’t have to see all those scary mammalian faces.

Just regular old beachgoers should take heed, as well. That soft sand bodysurfers stand on to get their balance between waves? According to the latest thinking, it’s home to millions of little burrowing creatures whose homes are crushed with each human step. Your only ethical choice: tread water at all times.

Of course the luxury of such thinking–of retreating inch by inch from life in order to live more lightly on the land–is that the possibilities are as infinite as walking halfway down a plank and then halfway again. You never run out of steps to take. There is always another micrometer of virtue to squeeze out of any behavior. But then isn’t the lightest way to live off the land to jump off the plank altogether?

Founded by a schoolteacher named Les Knight, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement–the acronym is pronounced “vehement”–lives by its motto, “May we live long and die out,” and sells its bumper sticker, “Thank you for not breeding.” The goal of the organization is to promote the extinction of Homo sapiens, and like everything in the Age of Irony, VHEMent both is and isn’t kidding. Its propaganda solemnly suggests that folks should channel their sexual energy not into the creation of children but into the adoption of a stream or the care of a bonobo ape. (“They have 98 percent of our genes,” observes Knight).

But wait, isn’t Knight a sellout? What’s this “live long” business? And consume resources? Quite possibly procreate in some drunken act of lust? Check out Snuff It, the quarterly journal of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.paranoia.com/coe/). This group’s argument is perfectly refined: Get the handful of pills now. Find the dry-cleaning bag at once. Call Kevorkian today, this moment, before you finish this article. A quick click on “Frequently Asked Questions” will result in fun how-to instructions for offing yourself this very afternoon. A combo of pills and plastic bag (ecologically unfriendly, true, but think of the greater good) is preferred: “Use a rubber band to fasten the bag around your head. It’s best to hold the bag open while you’re falling asleep, so you can still breathe and not panic. After you fall asleep, your grip loosens, the elastic tightens, and presto: you stop breathing. The only hard part is getting the pills (some folks just use the bag, but this is hard-core).”

Like those nineteenth-century religions that promised salvation but forbade sex, the voluntary suicide set finds recruitment tough going. Maybe you want to be pious, but still live: This being America, there is any number of spanking new “worldviews” promising a full rethinking of how one should exist–so long as you buy the book, attend the seminars, and subscribe to the magazine. Yesterday’s worldviews, topics like permaculture and ecopsychology, are still crowding the shelves in paperback. But this season’s hardback edition in new visions is called “voluntary simplicity.”

“Simplicity is just one aspect of an earth-centered life,” says Dick Roy, cofounder of the Northwest Earth Institute, a nonprofit vehicle for his thinking on pared-down living. “Satisfaction for us is just a state of mind.” Roy, who’s preached his method to staff at Nike and Hewlett Packard, among others, says that it would be hard to even mention one big change in his life since he dropped out of his high-paying Oregon law practice to pursue simplicity full time. He explains that a good deal of simplicity living is mastering the accumulation of many small changes. So he ticked them off. Some of them sounded like Heloise Hints on speed. Among them, he owns only one garbage can, which he filled just once last year. “It’s mostly dental floss,” he says, “which really isn’t recyclable. And then in this context, he actually said, “My wife and I have three children, two of them are adopted.” Roy no longer vacations far from home and has sworn off airplanes.”I hope never to leave the Pacific Northwest again,” he says.

Don’t Bike on Mountains (it crumbles them).
Should you arrive at this exquisite modern condition, you’d have to wonder how you’d measure your virtuousness against someone of comparable good intentions. You’re in luck. Don Lotter, an ecology grad student in Davis, California, has solved the problem. His EarthAware program ($69.95; 916-756-9156) poses 120 questions about every aspect of your life, crunches the data, and then pronounces you an Eco-Titan, Eco-Hero, Eco-Mentor, Eco-Average, Eco-Slowpoke, Eco-Frankenstein, or Eco-Tyrannosaurus rex. Lotter scores in the Eco-Hero range himself. I asked him what advice he’d give others for striving for Eco-Titan. “I buy all my clothes secondhand,” he said proudly. “All of them.”

“All?” I queried.

“Yep. I buy everything used,” he said. “Even socks.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, as if both of us didn’t know the next question. “And, um…underwear?”

“You know,” Lotter piped up, with that it’s-funny-you-asked kind of earnestness. “You’d be surprised how easy it is to get almost-new underwear at used-clothing stores.”

The words hung in that twilight zone of silence on the telephone. I can’t really remember what else we talked about or how the conversation ended. The phrase echoed for a long, long time: almost-new underwear.

Is there a difference between respecting nature and worshiping it? I think there is, and this new shame digs deep into the crevice of that distinction. I return to my backyard and my compost heap. Mine is just a mess of lettuce and carrot tops and onion skins and old apple cores.

But not long ago I found myself in Tennessee at a friend’s home. Out on the front porch on a beautiful, warm summer evening, I met another houseguest named Sanford–the brains behind an innovative concept in communal living that has protected hundreds of acres of river valley against development by buying up surrounding property and putting it in trust. Sanford thinks deeply about every aspect of his life, but none so profoundly as his compost heap.

“My compost is different–it’s better,” he said, leaning on his last word. “I’m adapting bio-dynamic methods developed by Rudolph Steiner. Have you heard of him?” I had, and I knew that he was a turn-of-the-century mystical homeopath known for some very hairy ideas.

“It involves remaking the soil itself,” he said excitedly. “It’s a complicated process. I can’t really describe it. I’m not sure I should. It involves using, you know, yarrow flowers fermented in stag’s bladder.” Then he described a detailed theory about the positioning of the heap, what direction certain things in it faced. He mentioned burying cow manure all winter long and then digging it up to mix with bark that had been stored in an animal skull.

“The food I grow from this soil, man, is different from other food,” he told me. “It’s better. It’s superior. It changes you when you eat it. The vegetables from my garden, I believe, are actually structurally different from the ones you buy in the store. I believe they actually are changing the cellular structure of my body. They’re turning me into something different. When I eat now, it’s like I’m consuming something sacred, something holy, something divine.”

I would occasionally make excuses to secretly jot some notes, because I realized I was listening to something rare. I was hearing a religion emerge, like listening to a first-century Christian describing the awe of holy communion: consuming something divine.

Environmentalism is often attacked for being a religion. But the critics only mean that its advocates (like me) behave like zealots when they do outrageous things like parade around naked to protest fur. What I was hearing from Sanford was a different kind of religion. It was medieval-the beginning of a belief system that, if you took it far enough, could explain every occurrence with a special clarity, from how you were feeling that morning to the shortage of rain this season to, well, everything. The hurricanes that battered the East Coast this fall might have been God’s wrath 500 years ago, but today they were Nature’s fury at global warming. As I listened on the porch, the entire collection of ideas and abstractions that we consider “religion” emerged from their old context into Sanford’s new language: sin (pollution), resurrection (recycling), salvation (balance), rebirth (reuse), redemption (harmony)–if you’re willing to run with this kind thinking, even the tree sitters who block lumberjacks have their counterparts in the early Christian stylites, who sat atop trees in a search for virtue.

As I looked at my new friend who lived off the grid (monastery) to avoid consumption (temptation), wore used clothes (hair shirt) and practiced an isolated lifestyle (eremite), I thought he was so beyond the pale that he was admirable. He is a modern monk who has taken all the traditional vows except chastity. I’m glad he’s there, just as I’m sure Catholics are inspired to know that somewhere, cloistered far away, is a monk sworn to silence and endeavoring to drain his body and soul of all sin. But then there’s the rest of us back in the fleshpots, with our lame compost heaps, our mountain bikes, and our fishing rods. We’re left to stew in the guilt of watching our best efforts ridiculed as if we were a bunch of paleolithic yahoos.

Were I to sit in a house covered in flattened-beer-can shingles, wearing shoes made of Pampers, and kept warm by the now commonplace fleece sweaters spun from the finest plastic soda bottles, I wonder, would I be moving closer to nature? Or would I just be a freak of an ornate consumer culture, living in a synthetic realm made possible only by the accelerating castoffs of a frenzied global turbo-capitalism? When I step outdoors, convinced that my presence in the wild is always damaging, aren’t I just allowing myself to slip into the old habits of romanticism, worshiping nature rather than respecting it?

Where those of us who stoke our Webers (trying to be good) part company from the propane fanatics (certain they are good) is around that weird taste for misanthropy that characterizes puritans of every age. Homo sapiens has caused extraordinary damage. But the accusation is meaningless if it’s not met with the faith that what also defines our niche is the human ability to invent creative ways beyond our own sins.

What saved Dickens’s London from its anthracite-burning, smoke-belching, black-cloud economy was not a few saints agreeing to burn one less chunk of coal each night. It was undone by the discovery of petroleum, a less pollutive alternative. Now that we’re far too addicted to oil, should we press for one more mile per gallon in our subcompacts, or should we hurl ourselves into the hard work of making solar power, or something else, work? I’ll vote for both, but I’d really like to drive that clean car. Retreat and retrenchment are never as interesting as the human imagination. I mean, we can curse the darkness. Or we can light a single candle. Or we can choose the more natural path and invent electricity.

Of course, progress in the protection of the environment isn’t coming so easy these days, whether from Democrats or Republicans. In the last few years, toxic polluters have been invited by congressional poltroons to sit in on the drafting of EPA regulations. And, this year, in a complex web of election-year deals, President Clinton signed into law the protection of more than 1.7 million acres of red-rock country in Utah preserving the Escalante Canyon, the Grand Staircase cliffs, and the Kaiparowits Plateau. The deal, which entails giving a mining company as-yet-unspecified land elsewhere in the West, has plenty of skeptics, but many environmentalists seem to agree that it was basically a sound move. At the same time, everyone knows Clinton well enough to realize that he never would have risked it if there weren’t a lot of people who would back him. A whole lot.

He had the political cover not only from purists chopping rails and wearing almost-new skivvies, but also from bikers and fishermen and kayakers and skiers and hunters and hikers and spelunkers and snowboarders and rock climbers and even the couch potatoes in their RVs lining up at Yellowstone for their annual nature experience.

Puritanism is a great American tradition and manages to show up in every age. But puritans, regardless of the century, are basically pains in the ass. Besides, when sainthood is the goal, we all end up miserable hypocrites. What can I say? Let he who is without sin wipe his butt with stones.

Oh, yeah, my friend with the propane? That night, I barbecued two chickens, slathered in my own secret South Carolina mustard-based sauce, above flames of smoking charcoal. My pal managed to maraud his way through five big pieces, uttering only Homer Simpson grunts. His conscience didn’t stand a chance.

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The 13 Biggest Outdoor Phobias

Sure, fear itself has plenty of fans—people with the good sense to be terrified when the rope snaps, the elephant charges, or the boat capsizes. But what about PHOBIAS, those singular, irrational, often inexplicable anxieties that lurk even in nature’s happiest scenes, waiting to creep you out and propel you into the panic zone? In the confessions that follow, our 13 unlucky writers reveal the things that give them the waking nightmares—from time-tested classics like snakes and vertigo to oddities like engorged ticks and beady-eyed armadillos. But don’t fret! There’s nothing like the shivery pinprick of dread to make you feel truly alive.

Swimming

After one traumatic day at the pool, a lifelong dread

HYDROPHOBIA NAMES NOT ONLY A FEAR but a disease—a generally fatal one, rabies, whose agonies of swallowing are stimulated by the sight of water, hence the name. Of course most phobias have at their root a fear of death, and my fear of water began, I believe, when my father, treading water in a swimming pool, invited me to jump from the tile edge into his arms; I did, and slipped from his grasp, and sank, and inhaled water for a few seconds. It felt, when I gasped, as if a fist had been shoved into my throat; I saw bubbles rising in front of my face as I sank down into a blue-green darkness.

Then my father seized me and lifted me back into the air. I coughed up water for some minutes, and my mother was very angry with my father for his mistake. Even then, it seems to me in the wavery warps of this memory, I took my father’s side; he was, after all, trying to teach me to swim, a paternal duty, and it was just bad luck, a second’s slip-up, that in fact he delayed my learning for several decades. Part of our problem, that traumatic summer day, was that we had little experience of swimming pools; not only did we have no pool ourselves, but no one in our neighborhood or circle of acquaintance did, in that blue-collar Depression world. We were not country-club people. It is a mystery to me how we found ourselves at that particular pool, in bathing suits. Nor do I know exactly how old I was—small enough to be trusting but big enough to surprise my father with my sudden weight.

Henceforth I knew what it was like to look through a chain-link fence at a public pool, its seethe of naked bodies in the sunshine, and inhale its sharp scent of chlorine, but not to swim in one. At the local , the pool was a roofed-in monster whose chlorinated dragon-breath, amplified by the same acoustics that made voices echo, nearly asphyxiated me with fear. Aged twelve or thirteen now, I tried to immerse my face in the water as the instructor directed, but it was like sticking my hand into fire; nothing could override my knowledge that water was not my element and would kill me if it could. At college five years later, where one had to pass a swimming test to graduate, I managed a froggy backstroke the length of the pool, my face straining upward out of the water while a worried-looking instructor kept pace at the poolside with a pole for me to grab in case I started to sink. I think I did sink, once or twice, but eventually passed the test, and stayed dry for years.

In the movies of my adolescence, smiled through the hateful element, using it to display her rotating body, but other movies, glorifying our wartime navy, showed sinking ships and sputtering submarines. One of my nightmares was of being trapped belowdecks and needing to force myself through adamant darkness toward air and light. My lungs felt flooded at the thought; my hydrophobia extended to a fear of choking, of breathlessness. Life seemed a tight passageway, a slippery path between volumes of unbreathable earth and water.

And yet, graduating from college, I took the Coronia to England, and contemplated the ocean calmly from the height of the deck, and slept behind a sealed porthole. Adulthood strives to right the imbalance of childhood, and to soothe its terrors. My fear of water eased as, in my mid-twenties, I moved with my wife and children to a seaside town. Paternity itself, with its vicarious dip into the amniotic fluids, made me braver, and the salty buoyance and the shoreward push of seawater were marked improvements over perilously thin fresh water. We bought a house by a saltwater creek in the marshes, and that was better yet; I plunged into our private piece of creek as if I were one with the grasses, the muddy banks, the drifting current, the overhead vapory clouds—one with the water, my body mostly water. By middle age I had learned to swim and take pleasure in it, but still tended to float on my back, and to keep my face averted from the murky, suffocating depths beneath me.

Freezing

First comes uncontrollable shaking, then a numb, frosty doom

BECAUSE I WAS THE GOALIE, when I fell through the ice it wasn’t simple. My homemade foam rubber pads became two huge sponges. That it happened in a cemetery didn’t help, or that I was at an age when I pointedly ignored things even if they could hurt me. We were there because we didn’t fear death, nonchalantly tromping between the headstones and over the snowy hills into the far heart of the place and down into the bowl that held the pond. In summer, fat goldfish slid under the lily pads, but now it was solid—or so we thought.

I screamed before I realized I was standing on the bottom. The water barely came to my waist. I still needed help getting out, and then the wind hit my wet clothes and skin and I began to shiver.

I had to get inside and get dry, but first I had to take my skates off. The laces seemed tighter now that they were wet, and my fingers didn’t work. A friend had to help. I didn’t think to peel my wet tube socks off (cotton, worthless), just jammed on my Pumas and ran.

The running was uncool, and if I’d been out in the middle of nowhere it would have been dumb. Fortunately, my friend Smedley’s house was only a couple blocks away, and I made it easily.

But in my worst nightmare, I don’t. I’m out in the woods by myself. The shivering turns to even larger involuntary contractions as my body tries to create heat through muscle friction. I lose control of my hands. I stumble like a drunk, my speech slurred, muscles stiffening. The initial pain gives way to numbness. I get foggy and make poor decisions, like walking the wrong way or sitting down at the base of a tree and going to sleep. In the end, I pass out and die in the snow without a struggle, frozen solid, my skin hard as wood.

It didn’t happen—it couldn’t have—but I still have trouble walking on ponds, and forget about hauling a bobhouse out and then sitting in it waiting for a nibble. On shore, I can hear the ice creak, and know that someone’s going in. Not me, I’ll think. No way.

Sleeping Bags

There’s a reason they’re called mummy sacks

ON THE WHOLE, I love sleeping bags. When I got my first, a slippery orange thing lined with images of ducks and shotguns, I quickly discovered that no matter where I slept—the haymow, the back forty, the living room—I felt like I was lighting out for the territory. I took immediately to that snug, toasty, flannelly embryo feeling. You know the one: After a long day of hiking, you crawl in the bag and give out an involuntary little happy-shiver and hug yourself. And yet, a claustrophobic bugaboo lurks in the coziness. As a child, I once wound up head-down in my sleeping bag and went frantic, crazy-ape bonkers trying to escape. Later, I slid from the top bunk in my orange bag, panicked because I was unable to throw out my arms. Even now, I find myself opening the bag before I push my legs in, just to check for teensy wolverines hidden in the toe end. I think of bears arriving, and me unable to escape. Freud would draw conclusions based on the male preoccupation with issues of zippers and entrapment.

After years of cheapo bags, I treated myself to a military-issue mummy sack. “FOR EMERGENCY EXIT,” read a tag sewn inside, “grasp each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly, forcing the slider downward.” Sweet reassurance for the claustrophobe. That night I slept in a farmhouse owned by a pair of photographers. Not wanting to muss the vintage quilts, I unrolled my new sleeping bag, slid in, zipped to chin level, hugged myself with the happy-shiver, and dozed off. It was July, and I woke up 15 minutes later drenched in sweat. Grasped each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly. Nothing. The zipper was jammed. Be calm, I thought, and commenced thrashing on the bed like a prodigious eel. I jammed an arm out the face hole and, with one particularly contorted bounce, wrenched into a sitting position. Deep breath. Think. With one hand waving uselessly at the sky, I grabbed the interior zipper pull with the other. Bit down hard on the liner. Yanked and yanked. When the zipper finally gave way, cool air rushed across my skin.

Love your sleeping bag, I say, but do not trust it.

Lightning

Here’s hoping it never strikes twice

I HAVE A DEEP, incapacitating fear of lightning. On occasions too numerous to count I’ve actually, involuntarily, shrieked aloud at the terror of being struck down by a shimmering electric bolt from the sky.

The first such instance occurred the summer I was eight. My sister, grandmother, and I were alone at our cottage on a lake in Ontario. It’s a great old wooden barn of a place, a hundred years old and drafty, surrounded by pines and junipers and blueberry bushes. It could burn down easily—the cottage and the whole island with it.

One night it decided to storm. My sister and I crawled into bed with Granny while long, terrible spears of lightning lit up the sky like daylight, one after another. The thunder was deafening and constant. Through a screen door that opened onto a veranda, we watched a boathouse on the opposite shore take a bolt to the roof and catch fire. I was speechless with horror, envisioning our doomed evacuation should our cottage go up in flames. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, a solid crash of thunder shook the house. Then someone screamed, a long, fearsome howl. It was me.

In the morning, we inspected the damage. A 60-foot white pine, with a fresh smoldering scar through the bark, lay wedged between the kitchen and the laundry shed, having barely missed both.

Twenty-two years later, lightning no longer scares me when I’m safe inside four walls (cars count), but catch me outside as a storm moves in and the reflexive terror is always the same. With the first fork comes a silent dread, then a panicky, futile attempt to plot my getaway, followed by the grand finale: my scream.

Jumping

Sometimes the scariest thing isn’t out there, it’s inside you

IT’S NOT THAT I’M AFRAID OF FALLING; it’s that I’m tempted—unbearably, almost irresistibly, tempted—to take a leap. I don’t know how or where this developed, but at some point I realized that, whenever I was on a rooftop, all I wanted to do was take a run and then a jump, and feel myself sailing through empty space. I’m not afraid of the emptiness below; I’m afraid of my lack of fear. Some necessary inhibition that most children acquire never seemed to take hold in me.

Fear is, of course, the most irrational, even unreasonable of impulses: Heights and depths are what I tell myself I crave. I grew up in a house on a lonely mountain ridge. I drive, by choice, along ill-paved mountain roads in Ethiopia, Bhutan, Big Sur—a huge drop, and certain death, on one side of me. Yet none of that unnerves me like a hotel room with a terrace, which invites me to go out and look over the wall, see the cars down below, and imagine how I could turn my life around (and the lives of those around me) with a single radical act.

It’s bewildering to me that what I fear is entirely within my control. A few months ago, I gave myself up to fate by driving through the pitch-black mountains of Yemen, a precipice on one side, the man at the wheel furiously chewing qat to keep himself awake. Kidnappers prey on foreigners in those peaks, and teenagers waving large guns occasionally loomed out of the dark to flaunt their power at us. I was ready to surrender. But put me on a rock, a ledge, and all I want to do is act, irreversibly. I’m torn the way you are torn when drawn to a woman you know will undo you. I don’t want to get too close because I want to get close too much. I feel, I suppose, something of what an addict feels.

My phobia of heights is inherently different from the fear of spiders, or of cats or crowds, because what I’m afraid of is not what some malign outside threat will do to me; it’s what I will do to it. What fear can be so abject, and so impossible to cure, as the fear of who you really are, deep down?

Armadillos

Some say they’re cute. I say they’re evil.

THEY COME IN THE NIGHT, up from their burrows, out of prehistory, little sinister dinosaurs from South America. Across Mexican arroyo and Louisiana swamp they’ve traveled, out of the woods and into our Florida backyard, where they dig divots in the lawn, scuffing, snuffling, poking, as if looking for lost change. Genetic freaks—all born in sets of identical quadruplets, and highly susceptible to leprosy—they look half insect, half humanoid. Body of a pill bug, head of one of those poor kids who age too fast. They give my wife, H.B., the creeps.

For me the repugnance is more personal. Back in my single days as a nightlife reporter in Tallahassee I was “Barmadillo,” my byline appearing under a cartoon rendering of an inebriated armadillo. Now I’m just a totem assassin. A typical armadillo whack goes like this: I’m in my pj’s and rubber boots, down on my hands and knees under our deck. My right arm is thrust to the shoulder into a freshly dug burrow. I have a nine-banded armadillo by the tail.

It chirrups and grunts—”Nyuck nyuck, nyuck nyuck“—ratcheting itself deeper into the earth. In its element, the beast is immensely strong, like a rototiller run amok, headed for China.

“Golf club!” I say to H.B., who’s standing by with varmint tools.

I shove the club blade underneath the ‘dillo, then twist and pull. Out it comes like a bad tooth.

And it is hideous, writhing in the flashlight beam, a wizened Piglet far gone into leather and S&M. It scrabbles at my arm with its claws—the horror!—and I let go.

Breaking cover, it corners the house at a gallop, then cowers under H.B.’s car in the gravel drive. H.B. fetches her keys, starts the car, and begins to back up. Alas for Dasypus novemcinctus, its tendency to leap straight up when startled makes it synonymous with roadkill. There’s a clunk and a crunch, and the stricken ‘dillo makes one last dash, trailing viscera.

Suddenly one of our four dogs swoops in and snatches it up in a great mouthful and lopes off into the woods. Silence, and then the terrible scraping of tooth on nubby bone. In the morning, cranky with lack of sleep, we find the armadillo half buried atop a heaped-up ziggurat of dirt like a Lord of the Flies idol, the dogs arrayed in attitudes of worship. Damn. It didn’t have to go down like that.

Lima Beans

Is there anything more sinister than this hateful legume?

IT’S EASY TO BE TERRIFIED OF SPIDERS and dizzying heights and getting lost in a guano-filled cave, but it takes a certain neurotic genius, I submit, to be brought to clammy fear by the genus Phaseolus, that leguminous plant species commonly known as the lima bean.

My lima bean phobia dates back to a family dinner in my very early youth. That greasy little veggie looked to me like some slippery bivalve from under the sea, of an unhealthy gray-green color at that, and was therefore almost certain to be just as strange-tasting.

Still, I might have managed to choke my portion down as I obediently did the fried liver and other disgusting substances that every kid must learn to live with, were it not for the emotional vortex in which I was first forced to deal with the challenge of the lima bean. That dinner was presided over by my father, just home for the weekend from his job a hundred miles away in Toronto. Our attendance was mandatory, in the way of a roll call. But as we kids dutifully assembled in our places at the dining table, my oldest brother, Mike, was missing.

This threw my father, never exactly serene, into a rage. Half an hour later Mike finally straggled in from whatever diversion had warped his sense of time. Dad banished him from the dinner table amid a fusillade of threats and general contumely, followed by the sickening silence that always settles over the scene of a public execution. I stared down, head bowed, at my plate, and sublimated my roiling emotions onto my lima beans.

Mastodons in the root cellar, fire, heartburn 40,000 years before Pepto-Bismol—primitive man had much to be afraid of. But primitive man probably never came face to face with an ominous kidney-shaped legume. If he had, I bet he’d have developed a fluttery stomach and a desire to flee the vicinity, like me. After all these decades, a lima bean has never passed my lips. But I know what they taste like, without ever having tasted one. They taste like fear.

Ticks

They’ve come to suck your blood—and that’s not the worst of it

NOT TOO LONG AGO, I picked an engorged tick up off the floor of my kitchen, thinking it was a stray chocolate chip. It only took a moment for me to see more clearly the minuscule legs and the hideous crease down the underside, but the idea that I had mistaken a tick for something edible freaked me out for days. Because now that I’ve had my midlife mortality crisis and come to terms with just about every fear I used to have (and they were legion), the only one left is ticks.

I have dogs, the best of which is, unfortunately, a golden retriever. A golden retriever is a paradise for ticks—lots of hair to hide in. During tick season here in California, sometimes we see two or three dark-brown ticks crawling around the top of the dog’s head looking for a place to attach. That’s repulsive enough, but it’s the ones who found a spot, ate their fill, and dropped off that I worry about, lying there in the pattern of an oriental rug, waiting to be stepped on.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to find anyone who defends ticks. Spiders and houseflies and rattlesnakes and killer bees and even maggots and leeches have their fans, who inform the rest of us about how useful, well adapted, or beautifully designed their preferred creature actually is—but the only thing you ever hear about ticks is that they carry Lyme disease. It is typical of the malevolence of ticks that the carrier is too small to notice until after she has delivered her insidious message.

Ticks seem to exist for themselves alone. They are ugly as nymphs and grossly disgusting as engorged adults. They live only to reproduce, which females do by dropping thousands of larvae and then dying. They don’t take a meal and move on, like mosquitoes; they dangle by their mouths and get intimate. When feeding, they are motionless and passive. The worst thought when you find a tick in your hair is that it’s been there awhile, that it drank your blood without your even realizing it. You have to ask, in the parade of extinctions, why can’t we trade ticks for something we prefer, like black rhinos or snow leopards?

It happens to be summer now in California, too dry for ticks. I have some breathing room. I might even go for a walk one of these days. While I’m out there, I will visualize a world without ticks. It will be just like our world, only better.

Whitewater

Just because the boat floats doesn’t mean you will

AFTER YEARS OF TAKING FAST WATER FOR GRANTED, I learned to fear the ironic power of river rapids early last spring. The red inflatable kayak I was paddling caught a sharp rock at the top of a sizable and noisy chute coursing through the middle of an Oregon stretch of the Owyhee River, and began to sink.

In an instant I was sucked under the rock and shot over the waterfall, well beneath the surface. The shock of being pulled so quickly under the water precluded taking a decent breath, so by the time I felt the bottom of the Owyhee beneath my feet, I was already hurting for air. I looked around and realized that I was actually standing on the bottom of the river, surrounded by a surreal volume of luminous and silvery fat bubbles. I looked up to see the surface and the churning whitewater five feet above my head. I was being pummeled by a variety of powerful hits from each side and felt a consistent downward pressure on my helmet. Though I was wearing a life preserver and trying to swim, I realized that I was not rising to the surface.

Everything about the experience was dreamlike. The situation conjured no panic, and even the realization that the air-fat kayak was also being held down beside me, even the strange recall of interviews with people who’d come back from near-drowning episodes to report that the experience was not unlike going to sleep, caused a sensation beyond an abiding wonderment. I just stood there, thinking that here, beneath a river in Oregon most people had never heard of, a hundred miles from anything much more than a few earmarked steers—surrounded by the irony of gigantic white balls full of air—I would die.

I was egested from the hole as powerfully as I’d been swallowed. I bounced off six or seven rocks as I rode the rapids on my back, and I began to hear calls of concern from the others. I eventually found a conical rock I could hug downriver, and I remember thinking that no matter what, I would never let it go.

After I was helped onto the bank, I tried to imagine getting back into the red kayak. The thought sent a reverberating sensation that rattled the backs of my shaking legs. I’d once considered river whitewater no more treacherous than a roller coaster—but that had all changed now: I was afraid.

Bats

They may be worth protecting, but they can still creep you out

MAYBE YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE bat-loving types who lectures people that bats are actually very clean animals and they eat half their weight in insects every sundown and it’s a false slander that they get tangled in women’s hair. Batophilia is not that uncommon these days, as evidenced by all the people heading into the flying mammals’ very lairs: high-tech cavers armed with headlamps, special caving ropes, and the ability to use the word spelunk without laughing.

But back in that stone age when all outdoor equipment was bought at the store, caving was an amateur’s game. I was introduced to it in the late sixties by my friend Donald, whose grandmother had a house in Sewanee, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. T-ma, as the grand dame was known, was happy to share her equipment, mostly a pile of old dented lanterns that dated, probably, from the Civil War. You filled the lantern’s bottom with carbide and added water, and once it began to make a certain unmistakable sizzle, the resulting gas—as redolent as boiling ore—was flammable.

In most Tennessee caves there are several fairly unavoidable features—the big cathedral space, the mud room, the fat man’s squeeze. On one occasion, Donald’s father, a noted heart surgeon, was struggling through a fat man’s squeeze. Dr. Eddie was also bald, and every time he’d lift his head, he’d howl as a tiny stalactite dart punctured his scalp. He exited looking like a middle-aged messiah who’d just removed a crown of thorns.

I was next in the squeeze, grinding on my elbows across a gravel floor made more comfortable by a freezing stream of cave water trickling through. The spare plastic bag of carbide I kept in my pants pocket had rubbed open from all the wiggling, and my hip began to sizzle, then to warm up, and finally to burn hot as fire. I’d begun to hump pretty damn fast, squirming in a panic, as my mind foresaw a suffocating gas buildup—or, more likely, a Jerry Bruckheimer-like explosion—when a concerned Dr. Eddie bent down to shine his flame into the tunnel. “Hey, Jack, are you having any—” Boom!

Turns out there was a lot more air in the tunnel than I thought, because right then and there, ten cave bats decided to flutter through on their way out. The sudden chaos of fur—when I think about it, there must have been a hundred bats—encouraged me to discover the virgin pleasure of pressing one’s face into frigid gravel water. Fortunately, bats have that radar thing, so all one thousand of them easily found the space above my prostrate body, although it must have been difficult scrambling down my back given the vibrations caused by all the subaqueous screaming.

When I finally got out, everyone was tending to his own suffering. Dr. Eddie was stanching his head with a rag. No one cared about my encounter with ten thousand bats. Donald’s brother accused me of exaggerating. He said he’d seen only a couple of bats. I don’t know. In my mind—then and now—my ordeal resembled that encyclopedia picture of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk when a million bats roar out like demonic nuncios in a funnel of black terror.

And yet, I still cave. Because even though I fear bats, mine is an exquisitely nuanced phobia. It’s not truly activated unless I’m in a cave and I see a bunch of bats, and then my pants catch on fire.

Being Buried Alive

A convincing case that it’s the worst way to go

VIVISEPULTUROPHOBIA—the fear of being buried alive—is more sophisticated, more existentially bleak, than claustrophobia. It nullifies the most basic human egocentrism—that the universe gives a damn about our whereabouts. Rest assured: You will never be found, certainly not in this lifetime.

As a 15-year-old, camping near the Dead Sea, I blithely explored a series of caves, some natural, some clandestine cisterns carved out by Israelite zealots 2,000 years ago. More than two decades later, my throat closes up in panic at the memory of crawling on my stomach through lightless, birth-canal-narrow sandstone tunnels.

A cave is all well and good, but it still gives you room to flail, scream, and claw with bloody fingers on the rock walls. How much worse to be immobilized? Hemmed in by rock or sand—or even ice. Apparently, glaciologists in Norway have come up with a novel way to gather data: They carve tunnels into the core of a glacier using hot water, then climb through this frigid warren—hundreds and hundreds of feet down—amassing information. They have to work fast; in short order, the enormous pressure of the glacial mass overhead reduces each capacious passage to walkway to crawl space to eventually nothing at all.

Pressure is the force that separates the men from the boys, phobiawise. Think about the cumulative weight of that sand, earth, ice, what have you. It only starts with suffocation: the slow, inexorable squeezing of air from your lungs. Take it to the next level by contemplating the uncomfortable constriction of the thorax, the rush of blood out to the extremities, your hands and feet swollen and full to bursting. And what is that sound? Why, it’s the groan of your pelvis buckling under. See it all clearly as your eyes emerge -like from their sockets, the lids pried open like the gaps in a fat man’s shirt. And there you are, marking each torment as it comes. A martyrdom too gruesome even for the most devout saints.

But that’s just me.

Snakes

They lurk, they bite, they haunt your picnics forever

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1972, rural Illinois. A picnic along the banks of the Mississippi. My friend Elizabeth and I, both 17, were forced to attend as a disciplinary measure. We were wearing gauzy peasant shirts and sullen expressions, and were nursing stupendous, temple-clutching hangovers. While the rest of my family bustled around lighting grills and slapping hamburger into patties, Elizabeth and I winced our way barefoot down to the water’s edge to plunk stones into the current and say scathing things about my mother.

“She ought to try drinking a pint of lime vodka,” Elizabeth said darkly, “and see how it feels.” Behind her, at head height, something shifted on the low-hanging branch of a desiccated tree.

One of the worst sounds a person can hear is the heavy thump of a big snake dropping to the ground at her feet. One of the worst sights? Same snake, churning around in a wide circle, opening its mouth to reveal a pale-white interior, vaguely plush, like upholstery.

Our loyalty to each other was such that we engaged in a brief but violent shoving match, cartoon characters trying to get through a doorway. The cottonmouth unfurled itself and wound past us—four feet long and stout as a man’s wrist, but oddly flattened, like something molded out of clay and pressed into the ground. It slithered down the bank and into the river, lickety-split, like a strand of spaghetti pulled into a mouth.

Thirty years later, I experience startle responses not only to snakes but to lengths of rope, suspicious-looking sticks, and garden hoses, especially black ones draped over a fence or log. I am also spooked by snakish areas, including but not limited to grass, warm roads, stone walls, dirt paths, fields, old barns, sidewalks (trust me), tree branches, and, of course, water.

Being vigilant has worked pretty well, although not perfectly. Once I picked up a garden hose, after carefully making sure it actually was a garden hose, and there was a snake underneath. Elizabeth, on the other hand, recovered just fine and even went on to touch some kind of constrictor with a forefinger during a college biology class. Her professor said we couldn’t have seen a cottonmouth that day; too far north.

That’s what my father said, too, when we came racing up to the picnic table, hysterical and shuddering.

“Oh, boy,” he said agreeably. “Water snakes are big buggers. Scare a guy half to death.”

My mother, squinting as she flipped the burgers, cigarette corked in her mouth, turned to consider us, green-gilled and sweaty.

“People who drink too much see snakes,” she said.

Stars

There’s nothing like the universe to make you feel puny and afraid

INSIDE THE CITY, the night sky is more or less a backdrop, benign and one-dimensional. It comes on predictably, like the streetlights, and I pretty much ignore it. There is the moon. Some planets. That spread-eagled hunter who likes to show off his “belt.”

Then I go backpacking. Without warning, the stars go thick as gnats and the blackness has ominous depth. You can see the other side of our galaxy. The sudden hugeness overhead unhinges me. I’ll look up and practically drop my ramen. It’s The Universe. What frightens me, I think, is the abrupt, mind-slamming shift in scale. Like Alice after the “EAT ME” cake, I am instantly, alarmingly diminished—tiny to the point of disappearing. The longer I look up, the smaller and more vulnerable I feel, dwarfed by something huge and unknowable: God, the evil in men’s hearts, infinity. I suppose, on some level, that the fear I feel is a fear of death, of insignificance and nonexistence. Or else I’m just a sissy.

Falling stars in particular unnerve me. Forces are at work out there, and they are not human. If there’s that kind of weirdness in space, God only knows what’s in the woods ten feet away. I spook easily in the wilderness, and I blame the stars.

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The thing is, there’s this red dot,” says Beau Turner, standing quietly in a long-leaf pine forest on his Avalon Plantation, 25,000 red-clay acres half an hour south of Tallahassee. It’s 6:30 on a late-spring morning, and the humidity is rolling in like a fog; already I regret the hot coffee in my hand. One of our chores today is to band some new woodpecker chicks with Avalon identification, but then the red dot came up and I was anxious to see it. Not much bigger than the head of a pin, the red dot is a nearly Zen idea of nature’s beauty. It sits behind the ear of the male red-cockaded woodpecker, an endangered species that Turner has spent the last four years trying to reintroduce to this land.

Ted Turner’s 114,000-acre Flying D Ranch, near Bozeman, Montana

Ted provides the cash and brash opinions.

Beau “eats, breathes, and sleeps” the work on the ground.

Birdland: Greg Hagan cradles a woodpecker chick.

Star of the restoration drama: a gray wolf penned up at the Flying D

Home again on the range: a portion of the Flying D’s 5,000-head bison herd

Mike Phillips, wolf czar, left Yellowstone National Park to run Turner’s biodiversity programs.

“It’s like a bird hickey,” drawls Greg Hagan, a woodpecker specialist and former U.S. Forest Service biologist who bolted to Avalon four years ago to work with Beau. During mating season, the red dot gets shown off to the females, and it pretty much reduces them to shameless tramps. Hagan points to a towering pine, taking note of a shower of splinters catching the light. It’s no red dot, but it’s as close as we’ll get. Following the wood chips up a column of sunshine, I finally see him. A red-cockaded woodpecker pecking away, foraging.
It is a lovely sight, and the work it’s taken to put that bird in the upper story of this forest is critical to understanding why, at 33, Beau Turner is one of the most important conservationists working the land today.


Reintroducing the red-cockaded woodpecker has cost millions of dollars—probably tens of millions, if you consider that the bird is just part of a much larger attempt to restore Avalon’s entire longleaf-pine ecosystem, which is in turn a mere fraction of the projects under Beau’s management. The youngest son of cable magnate and billionaire Ted Turner, Beau is in charge of an unprecedented bid to return almost two million private acres to their original state of biodiversity—bringing bison back to tallgrass prairies, desert bighorn sheep back to New Mexico mountains, and wolves back to great swaths of the Rockies—in an effort to prove that responsible environmental stewardship can pay off, not only in beauty, but in bottom-line profits, a form of enlightened stewardship that Beau calls “holistic land management.”


At Avalon, that translates into a massive program of weeding thousands of acres of invasive tree species and reintroducing the controversial tool of fire to revive the longleaf pine forests that once thrived here. The hope is to establish selective harvesting of the pines in a land-management system that will do it all: make money, permit the Turners to preserve the plantation’s historic use as a quail-hunting spread, and restore these woods to their ancient role as habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker. So the red dot is an emblem of a larger-than-life ambition—the type of thing Americans have come to associate with the Turner name.


RCWs, as birders call red-cockaded woodpeckers, are “persnickety birds,” says Hagan. They prefer to bore holes about 40 feet off the ground in tall, old, longleaf pines. The hole must be precisely 1-7/8 inches in diameter, not a fraction bigger or flying squirrels will climb in and depredate their eggs. And to keep out snakes and other ground predators, they like to peck little holes around the entrance so that the pine leaks its sap, a stubborn whitish glue.


When Hagan got started at Avalon in 1998, he built 40 RCW nesting chambers in his workshop and placed each box in a notch he chainsawed high up in a pine, complete with sap-mimicking white paint stripes. That year, he released ten young RCWs obtained from the Apalachicola National Forest; one pair flew off, but eight stayed, settling into Hagan’s phony nests for a season before building their own. Each year Beau and Hagan have released another ten birds or so; the current population is near 45 birds, stable enough that the woodpeckers are beginning to breed.


“Check this out,” Beau says. He and Hagan are looking at a small video monitor, part of a device Hagan dreamed up. On a long extendable pole, he’s placed a tiny camera, like something David Letterman might fasten to the head of a monkey. He can dip its lens directly into an RCW nest. On screen, two chicks—bald and helpless—tumble over and over each other. Hagan straps a narrow ladder to the trunk of the pine and climbs up in a safety harness, like a telephone man. At the hole, he uses a dental mirror to peer in, and another little device to scoop up the chicks in a tiny sling. He climbs down and carefully places a chick in Beau’s hands. With the banding tool, Hagan marks the bird twice, once with a Fish & Wildlife number and again as an Avalon chick born this year.


“Take a look,” says Beau, holding the little woodpecker in cupped hands. The bird is curious to behold, but so is the man. Beau’s a boyish-looking adult, with a kid’s flop of hair betrayed only by a few gray strands. His smile is wide and friendly. He’s standing upright (and he’s a good six-foot-three), reminding me not of his father but of Teddy Roosevelt in one of those vintage pictures of him beside a dead bull elephant, chest out, his smile wild with a primal Darwinian pleasure. Beau is holding a new kind of trophy animal, appropriate to this age: a blind, rubbery, neonatal chick with pin feathers, about two inches long, alive.

MULTIPLY THAT CHICK THOUSANDS of times and you get an idea of the national scale involved here. From Ted Turner’s original southwestern Montana spreads—the 22,000-acre Bar None and the 114,000-acre Flying D—the Turner empire has mushroomed to include 20 properties that dip into nearly every North American ecosystem. A quarter-million acres of Nebraska sandhills. Another 138,000 in South Dakota. Forty thousand in the Oklahoma tallgrass prairie. The Vermejo Park Ranch in northern New Mexico, at nearly 600,000 acres, is the largest ponderosa-pine ecosystem in private hands. It joins Turner’s other New Mexico holdings—the 156,000-acre Ladder Ranch and 360,000-acre Armendaris Ranch, both near Truth or Consequences—to constitute 2 percent of the state’s land. At 63, Turner is now the single largest individual land-owner in the country; his personal chunk of America is 1.8 million acres and growing. Compare that to The Nature Conservancy, the nation’s largest land-conservation organization, which owns 1.6 million U.S. acres and manages 5.4 million more. The Turner empire is bigger than Delaware. It is enough mountain and valley and river and prairie that it could rank as the 48th-largest state.
This total does not include Ted’s international property, two estancias in Patagonia and one in Tierra del Fuego totaling another 128,000 acres. Recently, the Patagonian estates have served as fly-fishing retreats for Ted, who’s had sort of a bad year. In its January restructuring, AOL Time Warner put Turner out to pasture, and since then he’s been about as easy to interview as the banished ruler of an autocratic kingdom. When his nervous chamberlains finally made the arrangements, Turner and I conversed via speakerphone, as his scribes took down Ted’s pontifications to ensure accuracy on my part.


“I don’t want all the land, I just want the ranch next door,” Ted bellowed from his bunker at the CNN Center in Atlanta. “That’s a joke, of course,” he yelled, but of course he wasn’t joking. Turner buys land almost compulsively because, he boomed, “we’re heading for extinction at 90 miles per hour,” because “humanity is an endangered species.” As the brochures for Turner Enterprises proclaim, Ted’s dream is to manage these vast lands “in an economically sustainable and ecologically sensitive manner while conserving native species.”


Like all moguls, Ted is a notorious man of action, and he gets prickly with questions that seek reflection. When I tossed him a bunny about his land philosophy, he barked, “You’re the writer, I’m not getting paid to write this article!” When I tried flattering him about the wide range of carnivores now roaming the Flying D, he shouted: “We don’t have any grizzly bears. We don’t have any Indians!” That didn’t sound quite right, so he tried again. “We have Indians visit! And we’ve had some grizzlies walk through, but we don’t have any wolves, so we don’t have all the animals there.”


Ted Turner is one of our loudest citizens, which in this culture of cool television can be perceived as idiocy. He is also vulgar and reckless, qualities that obscure his more charming delphic gifts. Ted has pretty consistently put forward big, round concepts that later paid off: Whether it’s shrinking the world into a global village through cable television or forgiving Jane Fonda or fretting about our debt to the United Nations, he has a way of seizing on an idea with dramatic action (inventing CNN, marrying Jane Fonda, donating a billion to the UN). Now, by his estimation, he’s sunk at least $500 million into biodiversity and bison.


One could easily dismiss Turner’s purchasing escapades and eco-rhetoric as money-wasting billionaire hoohah. (His net worth, estimated at $4.8 billion in late September, puts Turner 25th on Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans.) But when Turner, praised in the business media for hiring brilliant managers, handed the day-to-day implementation of his land ideas to Beau, the second-youngest of his five children, Ted’s paired instincts—make money, save planet—found fertile ground.


Together with his dad, Beau has developed these ideas into what one might call the Turner ethic, a mingling of the southern tradition of hunting-based conservation, a businessman’s eye for profit, and an environmentalist’s appreciation of beauty and biodiversity. In any five-minute period, Beau can coo about the red dot, complain bitterly about the commodity prices for buffalo bellies and pine timber, point his finger at a darting white-tailed deer and go “bang,” and improvise a symphonic paean to what the land looked like centuries ago.


When he talks about the past, the term “pre-Anglo” falls regularly from Beau’s lips. It’s a metaphor for discovery—for finding out what was lost in the East as we replaced millions of acres of forests with patchwork microenvironments, and in the West as we nearly eliminated bison, wolf, prairie dog, and other species from big-sky landscapes. If the work of colonial and industrial settling deflated once-thriving ecosystems in all these places, then the Turners seek nothing less than to reinstate the bustling climax landscapes that naturally thrived there. And in those redeemed ecosystems, to seize on what opportunities lurk for the entrepreneur. It’s a view of nature guaranteed to thrill and piss off everyone from Greenpeace to the beef industry.


To dream up these ideas is one thing. But with Beau in charge, Ted is nailing them to the ground, trying to find out what happens in messy, mucky practice—a fact that impresses even critics who aren’t always sure what the hubbub adds up to. “As I read what ecologists write, there’s always a hypothetical ‘what if’ tone, because they can’t do the experiment,” says Frank Popper, a Rutgers professor known for his Buffalo Commons theory, the idea that the Great Plains’ economic future lies in an ecological return to open prairie, and with it, bison. “Maybe what Turner is doing is a giant experiment—of how biodiversity would actually work, not in the lab or on a computer model, but on a scale that is appropriate for animals the size of buffalo and antelope.”


If so, the Turners’ vision “is of extraordinary importance,” says Dave Foreman, Earth First! founder and leader of the Wildlands Project, an initiative that works with Turner and others to link large swaths of wildlife habitat. “Aldo Leopold said that ‘one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’ The job of an ecologist is to be a land doctor. And some of the things they are doing on Turner’s ranches are the cutting edge of healing the wounds.”


Which is another way of saying that Ted Turner puts his money where his mouth is—and he rather famously has plenty of both.

BEAU TURNER’S ZEAL for the outdoors is apparent the minute a housekeeper opens the front door at Avalon Plantation, with its columns and its stone dogs and a Civil War cannon out front. Piled in a great heap on the delicate furniture of the drawing room, anticipating Beau’s later arrival, is a cargo hold of equipment: seven fishing poles, several rifles, boxes of ammo, a longbow, a crossbow, three tackle boxes, seven pairs of boots for every imaginable terrain, and a machete.


Beau’s interest in the outdoors began on the family’s plantations in South Carolina. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Charleston are two Old South spreads, Hope Plantation and St. Phillips Island, that Ted bought in the late 1970s. “I grew up hunting and fishing there,” Beau says about Hope, “but it was Pop who encouraged us to really find out what was on the other side of the door.” Given the inclinations of Turner fils, it was not much of a decision for Turner ±čè°ů±đ to tap his youngest son to oversee the properties when it came time to divvy up the next generation’s responsibilities. (All of Turner’s other children—Laura Turner Seydel, 40; Teddy Jr., 38; Rhett, 35; and Jennie Turner Garlington, 32—are involved in the family’s environmental work, but none to the same extent Beau is.)
“I remember the day I graduated from the Citadel,” Beau says, recalling that spring of 1991. “Pop was talking to me afterwards about what to do next. I had been accepted to Wharton Business School. And he said I should think about the environment.” Beau describes it as the turning point of his life, as if he can’t quite believe he almost went to a fancy eastern business school. Instead he went to Montana State and started on a master’s in wildlife biology.


By this time western ranches had become the bauble of choice for the billionaire crowd, but Ted wasn’t buying livestock just to complete the cowboy postcard outside some 18-bedroom log mansion. Rather, he set out to redeem the buffalo—an interest that dated back to Ted the kid collecting buffalo nickels, and one that got a little eccentric as Ted maintained a proto-herd on his South Carolina land in the 1970s.


When Beau took over the species work in 1993, the operation snowballed. In 1992 Ted had added a New Mexico property, the Ladder Ranch, to the two Montana ranches, and in 1993 bought the 12,000-acre Snowcrest Ranch, southwest of Bozeman, Montana. The slow accretion of property continued, one or two ranches a year, with high marks like the 1996 purchase of the 580,000-acre Vermejo Park Ranch west of Raton, New Mexico. All the while the Turners were hiring scientists, adding bison, and developing restoration programs.


“Ted has said he would not have been so aggressive in the acquisition of land if not for the interest and abilities of Beau,” says Mike Phillips, the star wildlife biologist hired away from Yellowstone National Park in 1997 to run the endangered-species programs. “Beau’s biggest strength is his passion—unending passion and unending enthusiasm for proper land stewardship. This guy is caught hook, line, and sinker. He eats it, he breathes it, he sleeps it.”


Today, if Ted is the visionary CEO of Planet Turner, Beau is the practical-minded CFO. From its headquarters in Bozeman, not far from the Flying D, the operation is broken down by mission: Turner Enterprises is a for-profit group trying to earn money from the properties by cutting timber, running big-game hunts ($13,000 per elk hunt at the high end), and ranching bison, whose lean meat is sold to upscale groceries and restaurants. The Atlanta-based Turner Foundation is the charitable arm, its trustees Ted and the kids, giving away $44 million in 574 grants last year to every environmental and population-control group imaginable, from $15,000 for Wild Alabama to $500,000 for the National Wildlife Federation. The Bozeman-based Turner Endangered Species Fund is the field operation for the properties, spending $1 million of Turner Foundation money last year on species-restoration programs for listed critters and greenery like the Mexican wolf and the blowout penstemon. As one employee told me, “Turner Enterprises makes the money, the Foundation gives away the money, and the Fund spends the money.”


On the ground, each western ranch manager reports to a single chieftain, Russ Miller, who has managed the ranching business since 1992. His bio-diversity counterpart is Mike Phillips, a renowned bigfoot in wolf restoration. Another sign of the scale the Turners operate on is the arrival of Mike Finley, the new president of the Turner Foundation, and former superintendent of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Everglades National Parks. When the ranch managers get together twice a year, as they did this August in Bozeman, the agenda runs from bison herd projections to fire management to community outreach.


The main business is still bison. Ted now owns 8 percent of the country’s population—27,000 head. With wholesale prices for live bison dropping, though, he recently decided to try to stimulate the demand side. He intends to open five restaurants next year called Ted’s Montana Grill. Run by his eldest son, Teddy Jr., and supplied by Beau, the Grills will sell bison burgers but also regular hamburgers and even chicken. “We’ve got a motto,” Beau says slyly. “‘Nobody beats our meat!’” It’s not clear he’s kidding.

WHEN BEAU AND I sit down to dinner in the formal Avalon dining room that night, the cook serves osso buco—but of course the shanks are bison, not veal. Heavy with meat and bones, the fine porcelain plates are delivered by servants. “Do y’all eat the marrow with the meat like ya supposed to?” Beau asks, all chummy, as if he’s not so sure about this fancy-ass osso buco stuff. He makes you feel like you either could eat the marrow and sip the exquisite cabernet at the table of a billionaire, or just put your elbows on the table and chew damn good meat with Beau. Whichever.


It’s a southern thing, too. Any relationship, no matter how strained, weird, or antagonistic, has to be grounded in the habits of friendship—the back slap, a private detail, booze. After dinner, Beau asks me to put down the pad and just have a drink. We polish off another bottle of wine and talk about friends, wives—Beau married Texas interior designer Gannon Hunt in 1999—and family. I learn about his sister’s heartbreak, a gravely ill child.
His ease can be disarming. At one point, I motion to a portrait of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. The thing is nearly life-size, I say, just like the one in the movie.


“It is the one in the movie,” Beau says, as if he’d just learned it himself. Then he jumps up to show me the purple stain where a drunken Rhett Butler shattered his wineglass just before he took Scarlett upstairs for what we might now call date rape. Beau says that his father “picked it up,” as if Ted had found it at a yard sale.


When the weather comes up, I talk about the strange winter we had in Connecticut, and Beau cites the rainfall totals for northern Florida before dilating on the inaccuracies of the precipitation forecasts for the Dakotas. Rain was pretty good in the Northwest, he says, but he’s concerned about the Southwest, particularly Arizona and New Mexico. There have been rain shortages in those states, which means the possibility of catastrophic fire.


There’s a way to talk about the weather that marks you as a local—a knowledge of the immediate past, of the way it’s supposed to be right now. Beau talks that way about half the country. He looks at tracts of land, entire states, the way I look at my backyard vegetable patch. As a garden.

RATTLING AROUND AVALON in his old Toyota truck, Beau’s intimacy with the landscape shows. At one dried-up peat bog, he talks at length about what will replace it: a 360-acre lake he’s restoring. At another lake he hops out into a biblical gathering of insects.


“Oh, hell, don’t worry about those,” he laughs as the swarms blacken us. “They’re just hatchlings. They won’t do anything.” Unperturbed, he pulls out a fly rod. “How about a sportsman’s shot?” he informs the photographer with me. “Let me catch a bass. Right here.” He walks to the water’s edge and starts examining the surface and the shadows. He casts, and two minutes later a fish is dangling on the line. Then he does it again, like a Saturday morning Bassmaster. The day wears on like this, Beau driving around the lumpy roads of his 25,000 acres, yakking endlessly. “Black bears like to cross through here,” he says at one point, and sure enough, one appears, sees us, and rambles off.
We pull up to some thick woods. The stretch is dense with oak and magnolia; the underbrush is as tall as a basketball player—impenetrable without a machete.


“You’ll never get a better view of past, present, and future than right here,” he says. He asks me to look at this forest, and it just looks like “forest” to me, but then it becomes clear that these woods are supposed to be repellent. If I leave this land knowing anything, he wants me to know that this is wrong.


“Pre-Anglo, this land burned every year,” he says. “Those hardwoods would never make it to this height. This should be longleaf pine.” We continue on, bouncing up and down past different styles of forest, and then come to a clearing where bulldozers are shoveling ripped-up trees into piles to be burned.


“This is tung-nut tree,” Beau says. “It’s not a native species. It was planted in the forties to produce tung-nut oil. But it chokes out the longleaf pine.” So, on about 3,000 acres, he’s tearing out the tung trees and reseeding pine. We drive to a patch of newly reclaimed longleaf forest, where the tung trees have been removed, the hardwoods logged, and the floor cover burned to make it easier for the longleaf to come back.


“Look at that,” Beau says. “It’s amazing. What you’re seeing is a work of art.”


The man who taught Beau to see the land this way is just up the road at Beau’s latest acquisition, an old 8,500-acre pine plantation. We hook up with Leon Neel, Beau’s mentor, an originator of the Turner ethic, and a driving force in its implementation. Neel is an old-timer in this area, a 74-year-old environmentalist who’s worked with loggers all his life. More important, he is a practitioner of fire ecology, the growing school of thought that fire was not just a part of the land “pre-Anglo,” but—whether set by migrating American Indians, by lightning, or by Beau’s employees today—a necessary part of wildlife management.


“You’ve got to understand how this works,” Neel says in his smooth inland drawl. He grabs a small clump of longleaf in the grass stage. He explains how it closes up during a fire, protecting the tree’s heart, and then shoots straight up above the usual fire line, beginning its ascent to the top of the forest canopy.


Longleaf pine produces beautiful, languid, 12-inch needles precisely to create the kind of fuel that will combust into fire every fall, destroying its competitors. The “hand of man,” as Beau and Neel like to say, stopped the fires and deprived the longleaf of its main Darwinian advantage. It started to disappear as the unburned forests easily pushed it aside, and as mill companies clear-cut these woods to make room for fast-growing pulp trees like slash and loblolly pine.


On some level, there’s a tree-hugging sensibility at work here: Neel and Beau look at these woods and can see the difference between overgrown hardwood and the cathedral spaces of a climax pine forest. But this is where Beau also earns the Turner in his name. “Longleaf is a really nice timbering wood for furniture,” he says. “Slash and loblolly aren’t.” Beau believes he can profitably log these woods while maintaining the parklike cathedral conducive to quail and, at the tip of the pyramid, the red-cockaded woodpecker.


“Clear-cutting wrecks your soil, and that’s just going to hurt you in the long run,” says Beau, shouting now. “Economics and environmental sustainability go hand in hand, that’s what we’ve learned.” His mind now fixed on wrongheaded ideas, he recalls the story of a huge $50 million grant proposal that came to him. Some guy had created a hybridized Sahara-type grass that, in an arid environment, produces a wheat grain, a corn grain, and then another grain so that livestock could forage all year long. The perfect plant. He was surprised when Beau asked where the nutrients for this miracle specimen would come from.


“He wasn’t thinking it through,” Beau says, actually pissed off. Then he lets loose with an almost comical “and um” that only Tom Wolfe could spell—“aaaaannnd aaaahhhhhhmmmmm”—before adding, “We can’t go on like this. It’s crazy.” The accent, the tone, along with the disgust, frustration, and impatience, come together into quintessential Turneritude—and there’s no mistaking who this boy’s father is. error waiting for process to exit: child process lost (is SIGCHLD ignored or trapped?)

RAISING WOODPECKERS in the East is one thing; restoring wolves and their chilling howl in the West is another. Out West, the sheer scale of land and humans’ long, troubled history with large carnivores means that wildlife restoration is not a garden-club nicety, but a political act that jeopardizes a “way of life.” The Turners have decided to champion the cow’s shaggy rival as well as bears, wolves, prairie dogs, and other animals perceived as pests. When Ted Turner—an Easterner and a billionaire and a guy with woolly eco-theories—showed up next door, the Welcome Wagon didn’t exactly wheel up to the ranch gates.


“In New Mexico, at least, he’s thumbed his nose at local custom and culture,” says Caren Cowan, the executive director of the Albuquerque-based New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association. “He’s made statements that livestock or cattle should never have been raised in an arid climate like this. Given that we have three different ethnic cultures in New Mexico, some of which have raised livestock for up to 400 years, we feel that this is very insensitive to the local peoples.”
Cowan, a frequent Turner critic, is not as worried about bison on Ted’s property as she is about his reintroduction of undesirables to the neighborhood. “We have a lot more concerns with the endangered species he’s propagating. This organization has taken strong opposition to the whole reintroduction of the Mexican wolf.”


So far, Turner has never released a wolf on his property. He has only assisted—under provisions of the Endangered Species Act—the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, welcoming reintroduced wolves onto his land if they stray from public acreage, which they have done in New Mexico; maintaining captive holding or breeding programs for Fish & Wildlife on the Ladder Ranch and the Flying D; and monitoring Mexican wolves released into the Apache and Gila National Forests. But by hiring Yellowstone’s Mike Phillips as the architect of his wolf program, Turner has invited the wrath of most, but not all, of his fellow ranchers.


One cattleman who finds Turner’s notions worth studying is fourth-generation New Mexican Jim Winder, whose 125,000-acre Heritage Ranch sits ten miles south of Turner’s Ladder Ranch. Winder heads the Quivira Coalition, a group of ranchers and environmentalists trying to create ecologically healthy rangeland. Like Turner, he welcomes reintroduced wolves onto his property; he spotted a large radio-collared male there just last summer. But he also understands ranchers’ hostility. “The wolf presents itself as a cost to these ranchers,” he says, “and the economics of ranching are basically slow starvation. Talking about wolf recovery is like taking a drowning man and pouring a cup of water on his head.”


Winder isn’t worried about bison replacing cattle. “That’s still a specialty market,” he says. “Most ranchers think it’s a joke.” But he has joined an increasing number of western ranchers who are trying the same sustainable practices—pasture rotation and natural grazing patterns—that the Turners use. “I don’t believe their current business is economically wise,” Winder says. “But what Turner does that’s different is he puts a value on conservation. As I like to tell people, Ted Turner’s got the money of a small government, but not the bureaucracy. He’s able to accomplish a lot of things that an individual like me cannot.”


Winder believes that, for landowners of modest means, ecology has to pay for itself. And groups like The Nature Conservancy are sympathetic. “There is sometimes a sense of all or nothing in the environmental community,” says TNC president Steve McCormick from the organization’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. “In some cases, 100-percent conservation is not possible. So if you can get 90 percent because the landowner is getting some economic return and is motivated to keep the environmental quality, then that’s good. If the landowner thinks he has to either sell to conservationists or build condos, then the possibility of selling a few trees, for example, in a sustainable operation is much better.” In other words, a third way. “If ranchers weren’t so damn pigheaded,” Winder says,”they would be studying what Turner is doing and figuring out how to make money from it. Ted Turner is offering a life preserver for ranchers; if you want to ranch, you better be studying what heĂ•s doing. We are.”

“THE WOLVES ARE coming,” says Mike Phillips, pointing to the mountains. On the outskirts of Bozeman, Phillips is cruising down the highway toward the Flying D in a pickup. “This is ground zero of the large-carnivore restoration movement.”


Phillips, a sandy-haired 43-year-old, is pointing not at the mountains, but at the scattered homes, farms, and shops on the outskirts of town. “The wolves are right over that ridge,” he says. “They’re gonna be on the Flying D someday, with its bison, moose, and elk. But still, they’ll leave and walk north into settled lands and into this valley and get stuck among human habitat. They’re gonna eat people’s boots and knock over trash cans and kill the cat. They will cause problems, but they won’t cause as many problems as they’re credited for.”
Openly challenging the ranchers’ perspective, Phillips wants to reintroduce the wolf—as in big bad—to the public. “Do you know how many sheep are killed every year by wolves?” he asks as we pass under the arch marking the property line of the Flying D. Before us unfurls a hilly range that eventually erupts into the 10,000-foot Spanish Peaks. “About six. And cows? About the same. Do you think that’s low? OK, fine, double it. Now, do you know how many cows just die every year in the normal course of the livestock industry? About 30,000.”


To listen to Phillips is to get the sense that all the difficulties of cattle ranching in the West, which are considerable, get blamed on the fanged mug of the wolf.


But the Turners’ efforts to redefine the wolf haven’t always won over environmentalists, either. Last year, their work with some Yellowstone wolves penned up on the Flying D drew fierce criticism from humane groups. Turner biologists, working with Fish & Wildlife, were testing Skinnerian ideas to create a generation of wolves with no appetite for livestock, trying the same methods used to rid Malcolm McDowell of sexual cravings in A Clockwork Orange. The wolves were fitted with electric collars, permitted to approach livestock, and then given a strong shock.


Andrea Lococo, Rocky Mountain coordinator of the national animal-protection group Fund for Animals, excoriated the practice. “We think it’s absolutely ridiculous that we should try to alter the natural behavior of wild animals, particularly to benefit a private industry that uses public lands,” she said. Reaction from the right was no better. “Wolves are killers by instinct,” says Steve Pilcher, executive vice-president of the Helena-based Montana Stockgrowers Association, “and I doubt you can really take that out of them.” Others were merely bemused: “I have to respect Ted’s imagination,” says The Nature Conservancy’s McCormick, “but we haven’t tried to do that. Our scientists would suggest it wouldn’t work.”


To the Turner camp, the experiment embodies a question that’s at least worth asking: If adaptation in nature occurs all the time in the normal hustle of the ecosystem, then why can’t we help adapt the wolf to provide some wildness but not too much? It sounds ridiculous, and typically Turnerian in its hubris, except that we’ve fully domesticated all kinds of animals and partially domesticated scores of others.


But a wolf? Phillips expected flack, and he got it. “No other private organization has ever gone shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. government and helped deal with the daily grind,” he says. “Wolves are tough. They wear you down fiscally, they wear you down emotionally. Nobody likes you.”


This morning, there are eight wolves being cared for on the Flying D—six pups, a mother, and a yearling—not free, but penned. They were killing sheep 60 miles away, so Fish & Wildlife removed them and accepted the Flying D’s invitation to take them in. Phillips believes in a form of “soft release”—keeping them penned up for a while so they lose their homing urge. In the past, wolves that were “hard released” have wandered great distances to get home.


We pick up Beau at his ranch house and head over to a cluster of outbuildings. Phillips pops the door on a freezer truck parked to the side and, stiff as a board, a 300-pound buffalo calf falls out the back, stands miraculously like a ballerina en pointe, and then falls over and thuds into the dirt. Then out come a giant bison drumstick and a rib cage as preposterously large as the one that tipped over Fred Flintstone’s car. The first chore of the morning, apparently, is to feed the wolves.


The truck jackhammers a few miles up and down hills until a fenced-off slope dramatically comes into view. The wolf pen has a perimeter fence to keep out the bison. Inside that is a 15-foot-high chainlink enclosure bent at the top to prevent climbing, and inside that is an electric fence. The gate is locked with a chain, latched with a bolt, and secured with a bungee cord. Phillips undoes them all. Quietly we drag carcasses and parts just inside the pen.


“Step over that,” Phillips says, indicating the threshold at the gate. “It’s hot.” As he closes the gate behind us, the wolves react to our presence. They maintain their distance but take turns sprinting up and down the far length of the fence, really, really fast. We set out the gargantuan lunches and fill the water troughs. Then Phillips says, “Let’s go have a look at them. Stay close.”


As we walk toward the racing wolves, we have to be careful not to stumble on any of the dozens of gnawed hooves that litter the grass. Toward the other side, where the wolves apparently drag their food, the place is a crowded boneyard of ungulate feet. Above us, a half-dozen ravens watch from the trees, making a noise that sounds like a demented laugh track. I look across to see eight highly aroused wolves galloping back and forth, and I am thinking: That’s an agitated mother wolf with six pups; they are hungry and penned in; we are moving toward them as an aggressive pack.


I don’t have my Boy Scout manual on me, but if memory serves, none of this is particularly safe. Yet as we get closer to the pack against the fence, the wolves squeeze out to one side and race to the far fence by the gate, obviously terrified.


“They’ve gained a little weight,” Beau says hopefully, as if he’s talking about frail octuplets in the neonatal ward. Phillips examines the holes they’ve dug to sleep in. Some pups are in one of the wooden shelters. Phillips pops the top and we all stare in at a pup curled and sleeping. They are handsome animals. You want to pet them.


I definitely remember what the manual says about that.

ON THE FLYING D, as at Avalon, Beau can look out the window at any view of the land and strike up a natural-history yarn. Throughout the morning, wildlife passes by as if we were on safari. An elk bugles, a coyote runs through, then a fox. The outsize shield of a bison’s head slowly turns and regards us as we enter every slope or vale.


Given all this, I ask, what is the point of allowing wolves to thrive in a near-paradise of bison grazing lightly on the land?
“First off, deer and elk wouldn’t be dying of chronic wasting disease,” Beau says, mentioning the illness borne of overpopulation and lack of predation. “So there’d be less disease in the landscape.” Then Beau and Phillips start riffing about the land out the window, citing some of the advantages they’ve seen and others that have been theorized around wolf introduction elsewhere.


With deer and elk populations in check, there’d be fewer coyotes and thus more mice and rodents and voles. Meaning more raptors and foxes. Hence a greater variety of carrion, so scavengers would benefit. Wolverine distribution, for example, is directly related to winter carrion supply.


“If ungulates behave differently because of the presence of wolves, then the plants experience a different fate,” Phillips says. “There might be more aspen saplings that make it to adulthood. So then there’d be more beavers, and that might alter your water regime. We don’t know how it will play out after that, but we want to discover, or rediscover, that effect.”


How long will it all take? And who might it piss off along the way? We are all sitting on a little wooden bridge over Cherry Creek, far off from the wolf pen. Here the Turner ethic has already run afoul of many different interests. The Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks agency, working with the Turners, would like to stock the river with westslope cutthroat trout. Sounds simple enough, but all hell has broken loose. The westslope cutthroat trout is an imperiled, though not listed as endangered, fish. It’s native to Montana, but not to Cherry Creek. Actually, no fish is native to the creek, at least not the 70- to 80-mile portion in question, which stretches between a fountainhead lake and a waterfall. Because it’s perfectly isolated and impossible to breach without the hand of man, it would be a great place for this delicate trout to dwell. The problem is that, years ago, rainbow and brook and Yellowstone trout were all stocked in this creek, and they now dominate the isolated section. To ensure that these tough trout won’t drive off any reintroduction of westslope cutthroat, the state agency wants to chemically kill the invasive trout.


Naturally, there are plenty of environmentalists who see this as self-defeating madness. Since part of the creek flows through public lands, the public has standing to sue to halt the plan. A federal suit was withdrawn earlier this year due to overlap with other cases. But a state suit against Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality is still pending, charging violations of the state constitution and Water Quality Act. “The poison they want to use will also kill off the insect population and the amphibians,” says Bill Fairhurst, spokes-man for the Public Lands Access Association and the petitioner in both lawsuits. “They are not killing fish, they are killing an entire ecosystem.”


“They have a point,” says Beau. “They say, Ă”If you guys are all about historical conditions and the wisdom of nature, then the place was fishless in the first place.’ True, but it’s a dandy site for trout. And we’re not willing to take a sense of environmental history to an absurd level if it means we’ll lose a native fish.”

ON CHERRY CREEK, as on most of these lands, the difference between Turnerism and environmentalism could not be starker. Those suing don’t trust the hand of man to fix our mistakes. The Turners believe that when the environment is busted, benign neglect is also a choice, and often a bad one. So they take action, cause trouble, get people talking. Maybe that’s the point. “Our logic,” says Phillips, “is if you can provide a stunning example of something, it sometimes prompts people to do things they would not have done otherwise. We’re trying to excite and motivate others to be good stewards.” According to The Nature Conservancy’s McCormick, mini-Teds are already popping up. Telecommunications magnate John Malone is buying up his own empire and preserving it through conservation easements, legal riders in which, by relinquishing development rights, landowners can ensure their land’s preservation in perpetuity. Several of Turner’s properties, including the Flying D, the Bar None, and Avalon Plantation, carry easements through The Nature Conservancy; after Ted’s death, the properties will go into a trust, which his children will manage until the last one passes away. Then the trust will revert to the Turner Foundation.


But the ambition stretches beyond the family’s own growing acreage. The Turners are at the forefront of a movement to reinvent land management with an eye toward big-picture ecology—to blur the boundaries between public and private land and let vast migration corridors open up, allowing keystone species like wolves, grizzlies, elk, and mountain lions to take back the North American range. “The truth is that there is no way to build a large-carnivore conservation program without public lands,” Phillips says, swinging his legs over the bridge. “No private landscape is big enough to support it. You must have both.” In the end, he says, the Turners intend to continue linking up with efforts on public lands (which abut many of the family properties) to force a reconsideration of what we think when we think about wildness. On the Flying D, that might involve a pretty picture of bison grazing on a montane range, part of a robust system of flora and fauna that includes the natural stress of large carnivores and their natural predators, Homo sapiens, as well.
“I see a day when we’ll add wolves to the hunt here,” Beau says, “when the bison population supports it, maybe even needs it.” Of course, on the Flying D, the wolf will never be the main force thinning the herd. Ted’s Montana Grill will. And the hunting and fishing business will help maintain a balance in the aquaculture and among the game animals like elk, deer, and even wolf. That’s the business side. The aesthetic side, even the spiritual side, is to have a landscape teeming with as much biodiversity as the nutrient content in the soil and the dynamics of plant, bird, and mammal will permit. It is a neo-romantic view, one that sees a kind of beauty in the red dot of the RCW flitting among trees, made beautiful not by its mystery, but by our understanding of why it’s there. After aeons of forcing the land to conform to our demands and economies, by backing off some of the ecosystems we do use, we might begin to see the dynamic of nature differently.


“The wolf is just another critter in the woods, if we understand what he’s doing and why he’s doing it,” Beau says.


“No more right or wrong than a rabbit,” Phillips adds. Just another animal on the land, trying to get along, like us.

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