James Howard Kunstler, a stout, bald 57-year-old author from Saratoga Springs, New York, is in the throes of his modern-day hydrocarbon jeremiad. He’s pacing. He’s yelling. He’s livid. And just in case you missed his point, he’s jabbing his fingers downward to show the direction of things to come.

America, Kunstler argues, is about to become one fantastically miserable place. Why? Because our entire standard of living is propped up by cheap oil, and the days of cheap oil are over. “No combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to run the United States the way we’ve been used to running it,” he tells the Dallas crowd. And though tonight he’ll resist calls to pinpoint when the nightmare will begin, he’s told the online environmental magazine Grist.org that “we’re going to be feeling the pain” in as little as three years, and suburban collapse might start in ten.

Sounds preposterous, on the face of it. But Kunstler bases his predictions on a geoeconomic concept called “peak oil” that is gaining credibility even within the petroleum industry. The theory holds that humankind has nearly, if not already, tapped 50 percent of the world’s fossil-fuel reserves—the half that’s highest in quality and easiest to pump out of the ground. Once we hit “peak,” as the halfway mark is called, the global supply will decline and extraction costs and gas prices will skyrocket ($7 per gallon by 2010 is one ballpark figure that gets thrown around) while demand continues its inexorable climb. This doomsday scenario—along with what Kunstler calls the American propensity for “sleepwalking into the future”—is the basis for his hot-selling 2005 book The Long Emergency, now in its tenth printing.

Kunstler, meanwhile, has been on what might be called an “eve of destruction” speaking tour. Tonight’s stop is Dallas’s Southern Methodist University for an event called “The Unfolding Energy Crisis and Its Impact on Development Patterns.” Even with a stultifying title like that one, the auditorium is packed.

Hanging on Kunstler’s every caustic word are students, enviros, urban planners, and fans like Jeffrey Brown, 49, a native Texan and concerned independent oil producer who helped organize this peak-oil talk.

A clutch of buttoned-up oil-biz men sit in the front rows, among them the legendary tycoon-turned-hedge-fund-manager T. Boone Pickens, who invests in oil and gas futures and alternative-energy firms. Nearby are some execs from Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy, which, like Pickens’s firm, kicked in $5,000 to SMU to help pay for the event. The petro-professionals mainly showed up to hear the first speaker in this doubleheader, leading oil-industry investment banker Matthew Simmons, whose book Twilight in the Desert concludes that Saudi crude is running out. Stockbrokers, lawyers, traders, and Herbert Hunt, of the famous Texas oil clan, are all on hand. Although, at the moment, they probably wish they weren’t.

“We are going to have tremendous problems!” Kunstler is shouting. The crowd sits erect, at attention, looking somewhat wan. Without cheap crude, Kunstler declares, the earth can’t support six billion people, and so a lot of us aren’t going to make it. Modern-day agriculture, with its gas-guzzling infrastructure and natural-gas-based fertilizers, will collapse and be replaced by enraged waves of citizens forced into hardscrabble lives of subsistence farming. “The long emergency is going to make a new, large group of losers,” says Kunstler, holding his fingers up in the shape of a capital L. “And they will be very angry about that!”

Suburbs—which Kunstler believes have turned Americans into depressed, overweight blobs—will become ghost towns once exorbitant gas prices make commuting unaffordable. Wave goodbye to the swingin’ big-city life, too, Kunstler says—we’ll survive only in small towns where we can grow our own food. Wal-Mart? Big-box stores? Doomed. And say ciao to the U.S. as we know it: While the nation battles China (and others) for access to the remaining oil overseas, the states back home could likely Balkanize into fractious mini-regions.

Nuclear power can’t help—nobody wants a plant near them, and even if they did, it takes too many years to get one running. Fuel cells, biomass, whatever techno-fix you favor—nothing, says Kunstler, is ever going to be as plentiful, practical, and scalable as oil, and no amount of positive thinking and good ol’ Yankee ingenuity can save us.

“History is merciless,” he says, sounding like a Yale philosophy prof while he reloads the flamethrower. “History doesn’t care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It’s up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!”

The crowd starts clapping—resoundingly. As if to concur, Yes, most absolutely, we are screwed!

“We have created thousands and thousands of places in America that aren’t worth caring about,” Kunstler continues, “and when we have enough of them, we’re going to have a country that’s not worth defending.”

And if the audience was applauding before, now they’re really putting some muscle into it. Even the oilmen join in.

JIM KUNSTLER MIGHT BE the loudest and grouchiest person to talk about peak oil and social chaos, but he certainly isn’t the first. Today, end-of-oil mania is a cottage industry, including the 2005 book by Matthew Simmons and another, The Empty Tank, by Jeremy Leggett, plus two 2004 books—The End of Oil, by environmental writer Paul Roberts, and Powerdown, by Richard Heinberg. There’s also the influential 2003 opus Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage, by Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, who examines the peak-oil theories first floated by visionary Shell geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956.

There are Web sites and blogs devoted to the topic (, , , ) and full-page oil-company ads in the nation’s dailies touting a bountiful future filled with their post-oil alternatives. There are concerns raised by President Bush himself, who touched on the nation’s oil addiction in his 2006 State of the Union address and traveled the nation this winter to promote fossil-fuel alternatives.

Against all that background noise, Kunstler has emerged as a leading voice—and a very unlikely one at that. He’s not an oilman or a geology expert. He’s not an economist, sociologist, architect, or even an urban planner. He’s a New York City–born former Rolling Stone writer, longtime journalist, and thrice-divorced autodidact who graduated from the State University of New York at Brockport with a major in theater. After an early career spent largely as a newspaper reporter, he became a full-time writer in 1975 and has since produced nine novels and four works of nonfiction.

He’s also been harping on his doom theme, in one way or another, since 1994, when he published The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. It was his first assault on suburban living, and while it wasn’t a bestseller, it became something of a cult hit in college architecture and urban-planning departments. It also made him a guru of the burgeoning New Urbanism movement, with its emphasis on well-planned “walkable” communities where jobs, stores, schools, and other basic necessities are a bike ride or short jaunt away. Kunstler followed up with two other similarly themed takes—Home from Nowhere and The City in Mind.

By 2001 he also had his own Web site, Kunstler.com, where you can read everything from his movie and book reviews to a hysterically funny section called Clusterfuck Nation (clusterfuck being his word for the ugly amalgamations of modern life, chief among them the “chain stores, franchise fry-pits, muffler shops,” and other “nauseating furnishings” of the suburban landscape).

Through it all, Kunstler has been an equal-opportunity assailer of the left and right. He’s a registered Democrat but a highly aggrieved one. He received a flurry of hate mail after he took a jab last summer at lefty comic actor Harry Shearer (of This Is Spinal Tap and NPR’s Le Show) for his anti–Iraq war positions. “Has Harry Shearer seen any of his children join the army and go to Iraq to preserve his entitlement to drive all over Los Angeles in a spiffy car?” he asked on his Web site.

Last May, in the online magazine Salon.com, Kunstler also lit into green-energy sage Amory Lovins, of the Snowmass, Colorado–based Rocky Mountain Institute, after Lovins published a study about how practical alternatives can help us win “the oil endgame.” Among other things, Kunstler trashed one of Lovins’s projects—a 100-mile-per-gallon alternative-fuel car—as a “stupid distraction” from our problems. (“Serious students of this subject,” Lovins countered on Salon, “may be forgiven for preferring our well-documented analysis to his qualitative contentions.”)

The upside of Kunstler’s anger is that he’s getting people to sit up and take notice. “You could write about this in a very academic way, but then nobody would listen,” says David Ehrenfeld, the founding editor of Conservation Biology and a professor in the Rutgers University Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources. “If there’s a problem with Kunstler,” Ehrenfeld adds, “it’s that his breezy style belies the fact that there’s a very solid underpinning to his book and his ideas. But it’s a successful style.”

It’s an odd style, too. Kunstler doesn’t offer many solutions or think that anything will ultimately save us. He believes his mission is to sound the alarm bells, period: America’s love of magical fixes makes his skin crawl. “I call it the Jiminy Cricket syndrome,” he says. “It’s the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams can come true. It’s delusional.”

And yet the buzz about him and the speaking offers just won’t quit. Since the Lovins spat and the publication of The Long Emergency, there have been interviews on the BBC and NPR, appearances at tech-investor conferences and peak-oil gatherings, and speaking offers from universities nationwide.

In the December 2005 issue of Fortune, billionaire investor Richard Rainwater professed to being a fan and said he handed out copies of The Long Emergency in bulk to friends and colleagues. Rainwater told Fortune that Kunstler’s predictions probably weren’t totally right, but he was worried they weren’t totally wrong, either.

Even Google execs invited Kunstler to lecture last year at their Silicon Valley company headquarters, which Kunstler likens to a giant kindergarten. “They have these great snack stations deployed at 30-foot intervals so you can never be without a pineapple or malted milk ball,” he says. Worse, no one wanted to believe his prophecies. “One Googler after another,” he adds, “said, ‘Dude, but we’ve got technology!’ “

Techno-wizards aside, Kunstler appears to have tapped into something of a national anxiety complex about the American way of life. Drive-through-window living and endless commutes from the ‘burbs aren’t exactly what a lot of us aim for. The country is at war with an elusive enemy in a faraway part of the globe. A hurricane practically wiped New Orleans off the map and sent oil and gas prices skyrocketing. Recent rebel attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria and a thwarted terrorist assault on a Saudi oil plant had the same effect—for a time, at least. For those and lots of other reasons, some people aren’t in the mood to insist that the future looks bright. And if there’s any doubt, Kunstler is there to reassure you: Your way of life is kaput.

IT’S THE DAY BEFORE THE SMU TALK—a typical rush hour in the Dallas metro zone—and most of the region’s 5.7 million denizens are behind the wheel, nearly eight out of ten of them driving solo, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Dallas North Tollway is a slow-moving six-lane river that weaves through 22 miles of suburbia, from the manicured lawns of Highland Park, through the mirror-image ‘burbs of Addison, Farmers Branch, and Plano, and finally into the exurban netherworld of Frisco—a 90-minute rush-hour commute that a few years ago took 35.

Today Kunstler is one of the prisoners of gridlock: Jeffrey Brown is squiring him to a few of Dallas’s New Urbanism developments, the compact, stroll-friendly communities designed to combat the hydrocarb habit. The ten-mile-per-hour idling past strip malls, chain restaurants, and office parks has put Kunstler in a funk. “I get so depressed when I come to these places,” he says. “I really wonder what these people are thinking.”

Brown nods. “All this has to go,” he says, sweeping his hands across the asphalt-and-steel horizon. “It’s unsustainable. The sooner it happens, the better.” Yes, despite the fact that he makes his money in oil, and despite the fact that he lives in a Dallas suburb, Brown is a Kunstlerian.

In the meantime, the problem with getting Kunstler to the New Urbanism sites is that you have to use the freeway to reach them. Brown has segued off the tollway and is now on I-75 heading toward the just-completed five-tier, $261 million highway interchange between U.S. 75 and I-635.

“This is one heroic motherfucker of an interchange,” says Kunstler, in the mock Texas twang he’s been using since his plane touched down a couple of hours ago.

“I thought you’d appreciate the majesty of it all,” Brown says.

Brown, for his part, believes he has seen the future in the vanishing black gold of Texas, and it has scared him. Last spring he picked up a copy of Hubbert’s Peak, in which Deffeyes expands on Hubbert’s classic theory. This winter, Deffeyes posted a stunning update on his Web site: The planet reached peak production in December 2005, he concluded. If that view frightened Brown, The Long Emergency terrified him.

“There are two camps,” Brown explains. “The peak-oil community believes there are roughly two trillion recoverable barrels of supply left.” In the other camp, he adds, are major oil companies, the Saudi government, and people like oil-industry analyst Daniel Yergin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1991 book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. This crowd thinks there are about four to six trillion recoverable barrels in the ground, enough to satisfy demand for decades.

Yergin, one of Kunstler’s chief opponents, predicts that we might hit global peak in 15 years. But he doesn’t believe this would precipitate a remorseless decline into chaos. Instead, he says the oil supply would ebb and flow in undulating cycles while, in the backdrop, advanced new technologies would help boost production.

Figuring out who’s right, unfortunately, is a near-impossible task. The Saudis don’t disclose statistics about what’s left of the planet’s biggest oil fields, leaving peak-oil theorists like Simmons and Paul Roberts to tease out conclusions from mountains of technical papers and reports in oil-trade journals.

“We are in the minority opinion right now,” says Brown, as he navigates yet another traffic clot. “But we’re a growing minority.” Then his countenance brightens. He’s hosting a dinner for Kunstler this evening, along with faculty from SMU’s environmental-science program, but beforehand he wants to show off just one last New Urbanism project, and the place is finally within reach.

He winds through the suburb of Addison, finds the site, and drives through. Kunstler peers out the window at the supposedly walkable community. “I give Dallas credit for trying,” he sighs. “But just try and walk from one of these developments to another one—it would be a Bataan death march.”

IF YOU WERE IN A CAR with Kunstler or at his SMU speech or at his visit to Rice University, in Houston, two days later—in fact, if you were anyone facing his wrath—you might wonder just what makes the man happy. To answer that question, you’d probably have to visit Saratoga Springs, New York, where he’s lived since 1976.

It’s one of those classic upstate New York burgs, population 28,000, with a thriving downtown and cultural scene. Sure, it has its strip malls and sprawl. But it’s the home of Skidmore College and the leafy Yaddo Foundation for artists, as well as the summer venue of the New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra. If you live near the town center, as Kunstler does, you can almost avoid using a car.

Kunstler shops locally most of the time. He walks or rides his bike all the time. When he’s not forced to take airplanes to get to his speaking engagements, he works from his home office. There are farmlands nearby, so townsfolk aren’t completely beholden to the outside world for food.

But Kunstler hasn’t entirely forsaken modern life. He owns what he calls “a station-wagon type of thing” (it’s a new Toyota RAV4), which he bought recently after the frame of his 1992 Toyota pickup rotted out. “The American motoring program is mandatory,” he says. “I suppose people might say I’m a hypocrite, but I’m still a part of this world—I haven’t dropped out. And nobody has built a railroad system that can get me around, so what can I do?”

What can anyone do? What can a suburban family of four do? A family that has to commute every day in order to make their mortgage payment can’t exactly shelve it all and start “living locally” at the drop of a hat. The American motoring program is mandatory for them, too.

Kunstler understands this, but he says that he, along with everyone else, will soon be forced to live more locally. Even though he is in the process of signing a two-book deal with his publisher, Grove/Atlantic—one book is a novel about life in a post-oil world, and the other is a journalistic follow-up to The Long Emergency—he believes his future job prospects aren’t guaranteed. “I’m making other arrangements,” he says. “I’m prepared to start a local newspaper in my hometown if I have to.”

He’s not building a bomb shelter, or hoarding water and Spam, but he thinks he’s positioned himself in the right place to survive a long emergency. And living in the Kunstlerian future—though he doesn’t say it outright—might not be such a bad thing. Yes, there will be losers. But after all the social destruction, Kunstler’s new world is almost a gauzy-eyed take on Main Street America. It’s a return to locally owned stores and trades—and lending a hand to raise a barn. It’s about community, interdependence, and knowing your neighbors. It’s Mayberry R.F.D.

SUBURBAN TEXAS is not Mayberry, of course—far from it. And megalopolitan Houston, home of Rice University, is further from it still. That’s why, when Kunstler visits with optimistic-minded faculty members at Rice—where Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley did his work in nanotechnology—he throws enough darts to pop all their balloons.

Whatever miserable suburban problems Dallas has, well, Houston’s got ’em double, he announces. “And don’t think anything’s going to change if there’s different political leadership,” he says. “Bill Clinton was as much of a cheerleader for the suburban economy as anybody.” And John Kerry? “He’s just a haircut in search of a brain.”

Kunstler rolls on like this until a young professor reminds him that he’s telling a “very bleak story about our future.”

“Uh-huh,” Kunstler agrees.

“What are we supposed to do?” the professor asks. “Go out behind the barn and shoot ourselves?”

“You have to think about what’s necessary,” Kunstler says. Rescale agriculture, reorganize local commerce networks, replace the box and chain stores . . . he goes down the list. And don’t forget to rebuild the railroads. “Nothing would have a greater impact on our petroleum use than a better train system, and the fact that we aren’t talking about it shows what a bunch of clowns we are. We are clowns! We aren’t paying any attention to what’s important in this country!”

The professor ponders this impossible to-do list. And then his survivalist instincts kick in. He’s got a second home in the rural Texas Hill Country! He’s got solar panels and he barely draws electricity from the grid, and he’s got crops under tillage. Isn’t that a decent survival plan?

“In times of significant upheaval, the countryside tends to be a really disorderly place,” Kunstler naysays. Texas would have extra trouble: Too many people with guns, he explains.

AT THE SMU EVENT, the mood is similarly funereal. At the evening’s end, Kunstler and Simmons, the Saudi oil expert, take the stage for a question-and-answer period. Kunstler doesn’t toss many lifelines.

“Aren’t there any solutions?” everyone asks him. “What can we do?” people want to know.

Kunstler replies with assorted variations of “nothing.” “There are no panaceas,” he says.

Most people seem willing to accept this assessment, perplexed as it might leave them, but one nondescript guy just refuses to take curtness for an answer.

“But what exactly can be done to reform the train system?” the man insists. “How do we convince transit authorities that they’re in the mobility business?”

“I really can’t answer that question,” Kunstler tells him.

When the event is finally over, the oilmen circle Simmons, asking him if the administration appreciates the seriousness of the situation. (He doesn’t know.) Clumps of others are busy trying to get face time with Kunstler when the train man breaks in, determined to nail him down. “What exactly can be done to fix the train system?” he says again.

After 20 minutes of being harangued about transit authorities and setting smarter train schedules, Kunstler makes a break for it. Jeffrey Brown is waiting near the exit, and Kunstler walks toward him briskly, taking frequent looks over his shoulder.

“Who the fuck is that guy?!” Kunstler asks, nearly in a frenzy of frustration. “He kept twanging on me, on and on, about the train system. Everybody always wants a remedy. I don’t think there is a remedy! I always get these people twanging on me for solutions. Hey, that’s not my job. I’m here to tell people that the problem is real!”

Brown chuckles. Kunstler almost smiles as the two men walk out of the auditorium into the emptying parking lot.��He’s a magnet for wonks like the train guy, but after a 14-hour day listening to his own voice, Kunstler needs a break, and some food would be nice, too. There’s a late-night Japanese restaurant next to Kunstler’s hotel. “C’mon, Jim,” says Brown. “I’ll drive.”

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Strel, 49, doesn’t look like Aquaman: At five foot 11 and 230 pounds, he’s a potbellied fireplug. But for 58 days on central Europe’s Danube, in 2000, 68 days on the Mississippi, in 2002, and 24 days on Argentina’s Paraná, in 2003, Strel—wearing a wetsuit and goggles, swimming freestyle, and escorted by a support team in kayaks and a motorboat—stroked an average of 12 hours and 40 miles a day. Along the way, he racked up world records for the longest nonstop swim (313 miles over 84 hours, set on the Danube) and the longest continous swim (the 2,360 miles he stroked down the Mississippi).

On all three rivers, Strel allowed himself just one daily creature comfort: a bottle of Slovenian wine called Cvicek, half of which he drank during onshore lunches to wash down his energy bars, the other half with dinner at a hotel. “I like it,” he says, “because it doesn’t get me drunk right away.”

Even with a buzz, marathon swimming is rough. One dark morning on the Danube, Strel collided with a barge and was trapped underwater for more than a minute. On day 41 of the Mississippi swim, lightning struck a buoy three feet from Strel, blasting him halfway out of the water. (He kept going.) Two weeks later, a stomach infection forced him to switch to the backstroke so he could roll to one side and barf.

Strel says he first began dreaming of epic swims as a young boy. At 23, he quit teaching guitar and began racing in open-water swimming events, but didn’t feel “psychologically mature” enough to take on extreme distances until 1997, when, at 42, he raised $50,000 to make a 48-mile crawl from Cape Bon, Tunisia, to the Italian island of Pantelleria.

Thousands of miles and millions of dollars in sponsorships later, Strel says the swimming will continue until his body falls apart. “It’s taken me over like a drug,” he admits. He’ll get his next fix this summer in China, where he plans to swim 2,610 miles of the Yangtze—and down ten gallons of Cvicek along the way.

Walking the Seven Seas

Rémy Bricka: Stalking the 7 Seas

RÉMY BRICKA FIRST CROSSED the Atlantic Ocean in 1972, sailing luxury-class aboard France, a 1,035-foot passenger steamer. For his second trip, he decided to walk.


The French-born Bricka, then 38, left the Canary Islands on April 2, 1988, with his feet lashed to a pair of 14-foot fiberglass pontoons. Behind him, he towed a raft outfitted with a coffin-size sleeping compartment and carrying fishing tackle, compass, sextant, and three portable water desalinators. Walking 50 miles a day with a precarious upright rowing technique that made him look like a drunk nordic skier, Bricka aimed for the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, subsisting on fish and plankton he scooped up from drifting schools.


Strange as it seems, given these foolproof preparations, there were problems. Two of Bricka’s desalinators bonked halfway through his stroll, so he supplemented his hydration with a daily quart of seawater. Two months in, a Japanese trawler plucked him from the Caribbean near Trinidad. Emaciated and hallucinating (“I saw trolls attack my legs!” he recalls), he’d dwindled from 160 pounds to 110.


The feat—a 3,502-mile hike over open ocean—earned Bricka a Guinness world record but grabbed few headlines in France, where he’s famous for another form of performance art. Clad entirely in white, Bricka tours the country with two dozen instruments strapped to his body and a pet dove and rabbit riding shotgun on his shoulders. He’s known to one and all as L’homme Orchestre, or the One-Man Band.


So far, the only person to challenge Bricka’s water-walking record is Bricka himself. In April 2000, he left Los Angeles, planning to walk the Pacific and arrive in Sydney in time to crash the Summer Olympics. Stoeffler, a French deli-foods company, donated an 11-pound tub of sauerkraut and put up $100,000 for equipment, including freeze-dried meals, an Iridium satellite phone, and a GPS unit.


En route, Bricka ran out of food and his Iridium service shut down. A cyclone packing 50-foot swells thrashed his raft. Using a handheld messaging device, he e-mailed a plea to his wife, in Paris: “Come pick me up now or I’ll have to hitchhike.”


Ten days later, an American tuna boat found Bricka 500 miles south of Hawaii. He’d failed, but it was a grand failure: The oompah man of the sea had covered 4,847 miles in 153 days.

Jogging for 27,705 Miles

Genshin Fujinami Ajari: Jogging for Buddha

“THE ONLY ADVICE I GOT before setting out was to keep my feet warm,” says Genshin Fujinami Ajari, a 46-year-old Buddhist monk in Japan. “Of course, the day before I started, it snowed. I thought to myself, Oh, this is going to be tough.”


Well, nobody ever said enlightenment was easy. Last September, Fujinami, a member of Japan’s devout Tendai sect, finished the ultimate ceremonial slog: a seven-year, 27,705-mile series of laps around the five peaks northeast of Kyoto. He’s only the 49th monk since 1585 to complete the Hieizan Sennichi Kaihogyo, or “Mount Hiei Thousand-Day Circumambulation Practice”—and when you break down what he did, it’s easy to see why so few have triumphed.


For 100 consecutive days in each of his first three years as a pilgrim, Fujinami rose at midnight, prayed, ran and walked 18 miles (stopping 250 times to pray), did chores back at the monastery, ate, and hit the sack. In years four and five, he upped his total to 200 consecutive days. Year six saw him complete a 37-mile course every day for 100 consecutive days, then endure the doiri—seven days without food, water, or sleep while sitting upright and chanting 100,000 mantras. In year seven, he trekked 52 miles a day for 100 straight days, usually from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m., then 18 miles a day for 100 consecutive days.


Fujinami looped Mount Hiei through sweltering humidity, typhoons, and snowstorms, wearing only white cotton layers, straw sandals, and (when needed) a straw raincoat. He also carried a rope and a knife—so he could hang or stab himself if he failed on his quest. (Records don’t indicate whether a Tendai runner has ever killed himself, but you’re required to be ready to take this step.)


“The fourth, fifth, and seventh years were the toughest times,” says Fujinami, who hasn’t visited his family since 1996 and won’t for another five years. “No. The sixth year was the toughest, actually, because of the doiri. But also the seventh year: The distance was extended, so that was the hardest part, also.” Pause. “Actually, there was no year that was easy.”


“But,” chirps the saintly master of the severe practice, “I’m thinking of going back to walking the 100 days this year. Why? Because it’s so beneficial to my appreciation.”

Running Seven Marathons in Seven Days on Seven Continents

Sir Ranulph Fiennes & Dr. Michael Stroud: Marathon Madmen

ON JUNE 7, 2003, famed British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 59, suffered a heart attack so severe that he underwent immediate double-bypass surgery and didn’t come to for three days. And yet on October 21, 2003, with only two and a half months of training under his belt—and post-op wires still in place to keep his chest cavity shut—Fiennes and his longtime comrade-in-extremes, Dr. Michael Stroud, 48, stashed a defibrillator in a duffel, flew to Chilean Patagonia, and set out to complete seven marathons on seven continents in seven days.


“Originally, I’d rung Mike up to see if he might have any interest in climbing Everest,” says Fiennes, a gallant gent who insists you call him “Ran.” “But when he learned you can’t do it in under three months, he proposed the marathons instead, to keep it short and sweet.”


Short and sweet? Only for a pair who in 1993 spent 95 days dragging 500-pound sleds across Antarctica. On the marathon trip, air transport alone would have crushed most mortals: 11 flights, 45,000 miles, and 75 hours in the sky.


British Airways helped by comping the men with first-class seats, but Fiennes and Stroud still had to make their flights if they were going to stay on track. Twice, they had only six hours to land, get through customs, run a marathon, and catch their next plane. Their itinerary took them on an east-north-west horseshoe, from Tierra del Fuego, in Chile, out and back to the Falkland Islands (a last-minute substitute for Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands, where a storm had halted flights), then on to Sydney, Singapore, London, Cairo, and, finally, New York, for the only formal, everyone-else-is-doing-it marathon of the lot. They ran their first marathon in 3:45; they crossed the finish line in Central Park in 5:25. Both men nearly quit after the heat and humidity of Singapore, where Stroud started passing “brown muck” in his urine.


“Myoglobin,” he recalls. “My muscle-tissue destruction had reached 500 times the normal rate.” A gastroenterologist, Stroud is one of the world’s leading experts on physical responses to extreme conditions. He says he and Ran made fine guinea pigs for his research, which, he points out, suggests that some runners may not require extended periods of recovery.


“The day after we returned, I went straight back to work,” he says. “Not a problem.”

Heinz Stücke: Pedaling the Planet

Heinz Stucke: Pedaling the Planet

IN 1962, 22-YEAR-OLD tool and die maker Heinz Stücke rode out of Hövelhof, Germany, on a three-speed bicycle, with $300 in his pocket and a plan to see the world. After 42 years and 300,000 miles, there’s still more he wants to see. Sometime in the early eighties, after two decades with no fixed address, Stücke decided to extend his trip to every country on the globe.


“It was clear that I wasn’t going to stop,” he says. “One day I said, ‘I am going to drop dead on my bicycle.’ ” So in 1996, when he notched his last country—the Seychelles—he just kept going.


At first, he pedaled simply to “see around the next corner.” But as the years piled up, he was driven as much by not wanting to return home, citing “the fear of going back to the factory, and to the very small-minded people in my village.”


Stücke, a compact man with a friendly smile, says he averages 68 miles a day, lugging 80-plus pounds of gear. He’s spent around $130,000 in all, funding his travels with sales of an autobiographical booklet and photographs, and occasional donations—including, in 1963, $500 from Ethiopia’s emperor at the time, Haile Selassie. Along the way, he’s been hit by a truck in Chile’s Atacama Desert, chased by an angry Haitian mob, beaten unconscious by Egyptian soldiers, detained by Cameroon’s military for “slandering the state” (“I have no idea what I did wrong,” says Stücke), and attacked by bees while bathing in a river in Mozambique. But even when Zimbabwean rebels shot him in the foot, in 1980, Stücke never considered quitting. “In the middle of Africa, you don’t have a choice, anyway,” he says. “You don’t go to the nearest airport and fly home.”


Now 64, Stücke has set up temporary shop in Paris to sort through souvenirs, photos, and letters he accumulated during his days on the road. Since 2001, finances have limited his travels to half the year, but he’s chasing the 22 or so remaining territories—like Greenland and Christmas Island—that he needs to capture the title of world’s most traveled person.


“It is not my real ambition, but it is something to keep your eyes on,” he says of the record. “Which is what we all need, isn’t it?”

Hiking Britain Naked

Steve Gough: Go Nude

“THERE’S A PART OF ME that says, Don’t be stupid,” Steve Gough confided to a reporter from the Glasgow-based Sunday Herald shortly before he strode into the hamlet of John o’Groat’s, at the northern tip of Scotland, this past January 22. “Just sort of go home and sort of be normal. But part of me thinks, Go on, Steve, go on.”


Seven months earlier, in June 2003, the rangy ex–Royal Marine turned New Ager, then 44, had departed Land’s End, Cornwall, on a bold mission—to walk the 900-mile length of Britain wearing naught but boots, a hat, and a rucksack, regardless of weather—and John o’Groat’s was the end of the road. The man Fleet Street calls “the Naked Rambler” had been arrested 14 times, spent nearly five months behind bars, had his nose broken by a gang of thugs, and suffered public excoriation at the hands of his estranged common-law wife, Alison Ward, for deserting their two children, ages six and seven. (Her tart assessment in the Scottish Daily Record: “I think he was struggling with the anonymity of his life.”)


There’s no law in the UK against public nudity (Gough was arrested for breaching the peace, among other charges), but in recent years emboldened nudists—including one who chained himself to a gate at Prime Minister Tony Blair’s London residence—have adopted the language of the American civil rights movement, aiming to “stop the segregation” of people who prefer to let it all hang out. In line with this loosely knit group, the soft-spoken, occasionally stuttering Gough insists he’s neither streaker nor naturist but an advocate of “the freedom to be yourself.”


“If there was a catalyst, it was one summer when I was looking after my children,” says Gough, speaking by telephone from his girlfriend’s London flat. “They’d strip off and run around naked, and I thought it was great. But I started to notice how often other adults would suggest, in subtle ways, that they put their clothes back on. It really galvanized me. I realized that most of us are damaged in that way from childhood—taught to feel shame.”


What’s next for Gough? A documentary, a book deal, and, no doubt, ongoing legal hassles. “The walk hasn’t ended,” he insists. “The question—do I want to be me or what others want me to be?—didn’t end at John o’Groat’s. It continues.”

Vacation in War-Time Iraq

Derick Williams & Harvey Gough: “Baghdad Sounded Like Fun”

“THERE I WAS, OUTSIDE the Palestine Hotel, sitting in front of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and sipping an Amstel tall boy,” recalls 35-year-old Texan Derick Williams of his first hours cruising wartime Baghdad, in April 2003. “Then somebody started shooting at us. It was a little surreal.”


Probably so. At the time, Baghdad had just fallen and was rife with looting and potshots. Some 135 U.S. soldiers had been killed and another 495 reportedly wounded. Williams wasn’t in town as an aid worker, journalist, or human shield—he was a freelance risk enthusiast, making him a prime candidate to be shot or arrested. But Williams, a burly Dallas home restorer, didn’t mind at all. “I went for the adventure,” he says, “and I just felt like everything would be OK.”


Williams was traveling with a partner, a 65-year-old Army vet, superpatriot, and burger-joint tycoon named Harvey Gough, who was on a quest to find a Saddam Hussein statue to match the one of Vladimir Lenin perched outside his Dallas restaurant. (“I went because Tommy Franks said I couldn’t,” scowls Gough. He served with the original leader of Operation Iraqi Freedom during the first Gulf war, when Franks was an assistant division commander in the First Cavalry.) After flying to Jordan, the two hired a driver and a Chevy Suburban and bluffed their way into Iraq, claiming to be from a Texas food bank. Their first stop was an isolated airstrip called H3, which was guarded by U.S. Special Forces in tricked-out dune buggies.


“They were big, buff guys in caps and sunglasses, and their guns were drawn,” Williams says. “They were really edgy.”


Other highlights from the five-day tour included browsing for AK-47s at the Baghdad souk and whistling their way into the heavily guarded HQ of the Army’s V Corps. Their hairiest moment came during a day trip to Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, when Gough tried to swipe a flag from an abandoned police station. A pissed-off mob chased him away. “That was Harvey’s thing,” sighs Williams. “These guys thought he was being disrespectful, and I thought they were right.”


In the end, Gough didn’t find his statue, but Williams certainly scored a lifetime of adventure. “I’d do it again,” he says. “In a second.”

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When Ed Lucero plummeted 105.6 feet over Canada’s Alexandra Falls, he set a new world record for the highest plunge in a kayak. What was he thinking? John Galvin finds out.

Last summer, on a river-running safari in Canada’s Northwest Territories, world-class kayaker and madcap steepcreeker Ed Lucero, 37, stopped off at a roadside park to admire Alexandra Falls, a raging 105.6-foot drop on the Hay River. Intrigued, he spent a week studying the “perfect curling line” that flows over the left side of the cataract. Then, on the afternoon of July 31, he strapped on his custom-made polyethylene-armored life vest and nudged his playboat over the edge. After falling ten stories, and being held under for a solid four seconds, Lucero popped out at the bottom—separated from his kayak, but otherwise intact—the shaken-but-still-sentient owner of a new world record.



John Galvin:
So, Ed. You flung yourself off a 105.6-foot waterfall. That seems a little crazy, doesn’t it?



Ed Lucero:
If you don’t know anything about it, you would think it was crazy. But if you’ve run wild-ass waterfalls for 12 years, and set up safety for them, and got trashed, and made mistakes, and then some magical day you see the highest waterfall you’ve ever seen, and you say to yourself, “This one looks doable”—then it’s not crazy.


John: Um, OK. Take me to the edge. What was it like?
Ed: It felt like I was on a conveyor belt that had just speeded up. Then I go over and I’ve got my head tucked fully down, ready for impact. That was probably the calmest moment of my life. I didn’t hear the waterfall anymore. It sounds nuts, but it’s relaxing. I was in my own little world for what seemed like a long time. Then WHAM-O! BOOM! I hit the water and there was an incredible tone in my head, like BUUUUUUhhhyoooooing. Eeeeee.

John: What happened as you went under?
Ed: I was pulled almost all the way out of my boat. It was like diving in headfirst, and you hit the water and your pants are down below your ankles. My first thought was to pull myself back in, but I knew I could have broken something, so I moved very slowly to see if I was hurt. But I was OK; nothing was broken. If I had been leaning just a little bit to the side, I could have snapped my spine. That would have changed my day for sure.


John: Still, it must have hurt.
Ed: It didn’t hurt at that moment, but a shock wave went through my body. We drove home that same day, and we were cramped up in a truck and I took a nap. When I woke up, I could barely get out of the damn truck to go to the bathroom, it hurt so much.


John: Were you scared?
Ed: During the week before, when I was going back and forth in my mind about what could happen, I would visualize myself going off it, and it was terrifying. I was wondering, Am I too old to do this? I don’t kayak every day, like my young, rippin’ friends.


John: Speaking of your young friends, most of the kayakers you were with are a lot younger than you. Did you think maybe you shouldn’t be playing the same games as them?
Ed: Definitely. I remember one day in particular, we were surfing this monstrous wave on the Slave River, and these guys are up on their heads, doing 360s, helixes—everything. I thought, These guys are pushing the limits, and I’m not at their level of kayaking. It was a little sad. I told them I didn’t think I was the man for this drop. Then a little later I was like, Dude, what are you thinking? You designed this life jacket, you’ve been running waterfalls for years. If there’s anybody who can run this drop, it’s you. Don’t be an insecure, down person.


John: So you didn’t go with the intention of setting a record?
Ed: Exactly. I hadn’t even heard of this waterfall before.


John: Did you know that it would be a record if you made it?
Ed: I wasn’t sure. I knew it was the biggest, most powerful waterfall I’d ever run, and I knew it would be an attention-getter.


John: Uh-huh. The last time you tried to get some attention, you embarked on something called the Soul Tour, where you drove around the country spreading the gospel of kayak safety. Do you see a paradox in here anywhere?
Ed: Hey, something allowed me to be here—like a life jacket, like a small kayak, like 12 years of running falls. Safety is key.


John: The park manager at Twin Falls Territorial Park told me he was surprised you made it out alive.
Ed: I believe it. This waterfall is just the latest drop where people have questioned my sanity.


John Galvin, a frequent contributor to ���ϳԹ���, wrote about the Mississippi trash man in August 2002.

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THE INEXPLICABLE disappearance of Amy Wroe Bechtel, on July 24, 1997, near Lander, Wyoming, awakened the town’s close-knit outdoor community to a frightening realization: that a disturbed sociopath could be lurking in the trailside shadows.

On the morning of her disappearance, Bechtel, a 24-year-old runner and Olympic marathon hopeful, said goodbye to her husband, climber Steve Bechtel, and drove into town. The last verifiable sighting of her was in a local art gallery at about 2:30 p.m., wearing a yellow shirt, black shorts, and running shoes.


When Amy hadn’t returned home by 10 p.m., Steve called her parents to see if she was with them. She wasn’t. Shortly after, he called the sheriff’s office. Amy’s car was found at about 1 a.m. on Loop Road, which runs through the mountains of the Shoshone National Forest just outside of town. The car was unlocked, with the keys under Amy’s to-do list on the passenger seat. She had been planning a 10K race in the area, and it is suspected she was scoping out the course. Before dawn, a group of Steve and Amy’s friends began scouring the nearby woods but turned up nothing. As continued searches—involving horses, dogs, helicopters, the FBI, and the National Guard—came up empty, theories proliferated: She’d been a victim of a hit-and-run, and the driver had buried her body or sunk it in a nearby lake; she’d been attacked by a mountain lion or bear; or she had run away.


The authorities, faced with few other plausible options, began to focus on her husband. Steve Bechtel, now 33, says he was rock-climbing with friend Sam Lightner 75 miles north of town on the day Amy disappeared; Lightner backed up this alibi. But some, including Amy’s mother, JoAnne Wroe, continue to suspect that he may have been involved. Steve, who has never been charged, has steadfastly maintained his innocence and has remained active in ongoing efforts to find Amy. The most recent twist in the case is the pending trial of Dale Eaton, a Wyoming man accused of the 1988 sexual assault and murder of an 18-year-old Montana girl whose car was found buried on his property, north of Lander. Fremont County sheriff’s sergeant Roger Rizor, the lead investigator in the Bechtel case, has declined to comment until Eaton’s trial is resolved.


“None of us are ever going to have all of our questions answered,” Steve says. “That’s going to be a really hard thing to deal with for the rest of our lives.”


Amy’s mother disagrees. “We will find out,” Wroe says. “Whoever is responsible is going to make an error at some point that will lead us to answers.”

Stranded

Roanoke Colony vanishes forever

IN 1587, a group of 117 English colonists sailed to North America to establish a city on Chesapeake Bay but ended up on Roanoke, a small island near the Outer Banks of present-day North Carolina, stranded at the end of the summer with few supplies. Their governor, John White, returned to England with the ships that had brought them, promising to be back by spring. It took him three years.


When White finally returned, he found little trace of the former inhabitants except for a few abandoned cabins and the word CROATOAN carved into a tree. None of the colonists was ever seen again. The most plausible explanation is that some of the settlers traveled to a more hospitable island 50 miles south, while others crossed over to the mainland. Residents of Jamestown, established in 1607, heard tales of white people that had been massacred by Indians, or held by inland tribes as slaves; others reported seeing wild, blue-eyed children in the woods. But relentless research (four books on the mystery have been published recently) hasn’t turned up anything conclusive. Four hundred years later, America’s original missing-persons case is still its most mysterious.

Chainsaw Massacre

Accused tree-killer Grant Hadwin may still be armed and dangerous

THE QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS, a world biosphere reserve 60 miles off the coast of British Columbia, was home to the earth’s last giant golden spruce—a single specimen of Picea sitchensis “Aurea.” The tree had stood for 300 years, and was fast becoming the Queen Charlottes’ main tourist attraction. But Grant Hadwin had other plans for it. A former logger and gold miner known for erratic behavior, Hadwin ripped into the six-foot-diameter spruce with a chainsaw on January 20, 1997. Two days later the legendary tree toppled.


Hadwin, who immediately claimed responsibility for the act, sent a Unabomber-style rant to local papers, indicting “university-trained professionals” for “the destruction of life on this planet.” He was charged with criminal mischief and the illegal cutting of timber, and a trial date was set for February 18. But Hadwin, who left Prince Rupert Harbor on a stormy February 13 in his kayak, never made it to court. Four months later, pieces of his smashed boat were found on an island 70 miles north of Prince Rupert. Investigators at the time believed the wreck couldn’t have been more than a month old. Hadwin could have capsized in the water or been killed in his kayak by enraged locals. But it’s equally plausible that he paddled up the coast, went ashore, and then set his boat adrift. He was a competent woodsman and would have had no problem traveling inland through the bush and back into mainland civilization anonymously. (Some speculate that Hadwin was involved in the 2000 chainsaw vandalism of Luna, the redwood tree that Julia Butterfly Hill made famous.)


Back in the Queen Charlottes, local Haida Indians took cuttings from the golden spruce and planted one of the saplings in a park. It is surrounded by a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire—in case Hadwin ever returns.

Escape Artist

How one man faked his death—twice

ALL MILTON HARRIS wanted was to disappear—permanently. A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Harris faked his own death twice in an attempt to collect on nearly $3 million in life insurance policies, and then fell off the face of the earth for the (presumably) final time in 1995.


His first vanishing act was staged on a ferry off the coast of South Australia, where in May 1985 he jumped from the deck en route from Adelaide to Kangaroo Island. Reportedly, Harris was sitting on the seafloor breathing from a concealed oxygen canister when found by a 70-year-old retired police officer who had jumped in to save him. Four days later, Harris turned up in New Zealand, where he paid a young hitchhiker to help him disappear again. This time, Harris slipped off a New Zealand ferry as it departed. Once the boat reached open water, his accomplice shouted, “Man overboard!” and threw a life buoy with Oscar-worthy enthusiasm. Harris was gone.


Four years later, Harris was picked up by New Zealand police in Auckland, sent to the U.S., and sentenced to five years in prison for insurance fraud. Three years after his early release in 1992, he went missing again. “The authorities gave up searching for him,” says Harris’s sister, who wishes to remain anonymous. “It’s one of those things that you’ll always wonder about: Was there foul play, or did he pull another disappearing act?”

One Giant Leap

With $200,000 strapped to his body, D. B. Cooper stepped out the back of a plane and into history

AT 2:53 P.M. on November 24, 1971, a tall, nondescript man boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 305 from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. Five hours later, with $200,000 in ransom money tied to his waist, he parachuted out the back of the Boeing 727 into the dense forests of southern Washington—and into the pantheon of folk heroes.


The man gave the alias Dan Cooper when he bought his ticket (an erroneous news report supplied the name D. B., which stuck). Wearing sunglasses and a dark suit, he found a seat in an unoccupied row. As the plane was taking off, he passed the flight attendant a note stating that he had a bomb in the briefcase on his lap and demanding $200,000 in small bills and four parachutes when they landed in Seattle. When his demands were met, Cooper released the passengers and directed the pilot to take off toward Mexico at an altitude below 10,000 feet and a speed of less than 200 miles per hour. Shortly after 8 p.m., Cooper ordered the flight attendants into the cockpit, put on two of the parachutes, lowered the aft staircase, and stepped out into the stormy night somewhere near the Washington-Oregon state line. To this day, it stands as the world’s only unsolved skyjacking.


Despite one of the most extensive manhunts in FBI history, agents found no body or parachute and never determined the hijacker’s real identity. Meanwhile, Cooper was rumored to be drowned in the Columbia River, dead and eaten by animals in the forest, laundering his cash in Reno or Las Vegas, or alive in New York, Florida, or Mexico. People came forward with skulls, deathbed confessions, and tales of a man who looked like the FBI’s composite sketch, but none of it ever amounted to anything. Cooper’s legend blossomed, inspiring a 1981 movie, The Pursuit of D. B. Cooper, with Treat Williams in the title role. In 1978, a hunter in Washington found a plastic placard that was verified to be from the rear stairs of the 727. In 1980, an eight-year-old boy playing in the sand on the banks of the Columbia River unearthed $5,880 of Cooper’s loot. Those 294 bills are the only part of the ransom that has ever surfaced, and they seem to lend credence to retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach’s less than romantic version of what really happened.


“Most likely he was injured on impact,” says Himmelsbach, who worked on the case from 1971 to 1980 and posits that Cooper died by the side of a creek. “And then later, the creek overflowed and carried him and the money downstream, where the money was found.”


Sounds logical, but logic never killed a folk hero. The most recent fuel for the fire comes in the form of Duane Weber, a 70-year-old Florida man who, as he was dying in 1995, confessed to his wife that he was Dan Cooper. His widow, Jo Weber, contacted the FBI. She began to wonder about some of Duane’s strange behavior—like the 1978 nightmare in which a sleep-talking Duane said something about fingerprints on the aft stairs, or the 1979 vacation to Washington during which Duane walked down to the banks of the Columbia by himself just four months before the portion of Cooper’s cash was found in the same area.


“If Duane was not Cooper, someone will have to explain a lot of things to me,” says Weber. “It is a story with so many coincidences that it defies the odds.”


The FBI recently visited Weber’s Florida home and removed gloves, an electric shaver, and hair samples, presumably for the purpose of extracting Duane’s DNA to compare with that extracted from cigarette butts that the hijacker left behind. The FBI has confirmed that the case is still open, and will remain so indefinitely.

Gold Fever Dreams

Buried treasure beckons on the Atlantic coast

OVER THE PAST TWO centuries, six men have died in the Money Pit on Nova Scotia’s Oak Island, site of the world’s most famous treasure hunt. Legend has it that when the Pit claims its seventh life, the treasure will be revealed.


The Pit—which has lured FDR, John Wayne, and Errol Flynn to the hunt—has been variously rumored to hold the loot of Captain Kidd and Blackbeard, the crown jewels of France, and the Holy Grail. In 1795, as the story goes, three local teenagers discovered the shaft and eventually dug to a depth of 90 feet, encountering a stone that supposedly told of a treasure buried another 40 feet down. At 93 feet, they struck a booby trap that filled the cavern with water from the sea.


The Pit has now been explored to more than 200 feet, with little to show for it but several links of a gold chain and persistent rumors of a severed human hand and a preserved corpse deep inside. According to professional skeptic Joe Nickell, who has debunked mysteries from the Shroud of Turin to Jack the Ripper’s diary, the shaft and the flood tunnel are natural features in the region’s porous limestone geology. “Instead of asking, ‘What might this fabulous treasure be?’ we should be asking, ‘What treasure?'” says Nickell. “If it sounds too good to be true, maybe it is.”


Or maybe not.

No One Knows

Was 20-year-old Everett Ruess a suicide, murder victim, or something else?

“WHEN THE TIME COMES to die,” wrote 18-year-old Everett Ruess in a letter in 1932, “I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.” No one could have predicted it would happen so soon. In November 1934, just shy of his 21st birthday, Ruess left home and never came back. It was the end of a long, strange journey he’d begun four years earlier.


In 1930 Ruess, a dough-faced boy from Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a painter, set off alone into the Sierras with a set of watercolors, a camera, and a journal. A peripatetic loner, he ranged through the Sierras and later the Four Corners region, sending home paintings and ecstatic letters describing the natural world—an ebullience that contradicted his darker musings. Ruess’s story bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Chris McCandless, the 24-year-old wanderer who died in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992. (Jon Krakauer devotes a large section to Ruess’s story in Into the Wild.) Like McCandless, Ruess was charismatic and self-confident but also exhibited extreme mood swings. He dodged practical concerns—money, work, or parental expectations—that interfered with his free-spirited ramblings. Each year Ruess pushed deeper into the wilderness. When he hit Utah’s rugged Escalante country in November 1934, the letters home stopped. Three months later, his burros, a bridle and halter, and candy wrappers were found in Davis Gulch, an offshoot of Escalante Canyon. Searchers followed Ruess’s footprints out of the gorge, but the tracks disappeared at the base of the Kaiparowits Plateau. The only other clue was the word NEMO—Latin for “no one”—scratched into a rock and an old native dwelling in Davis Gulch.


Neither Ruess’s body nor any conclusive evidence of his fate has been found, spawning endless speculation. It has been suggested that he was murdered by a Navajo named Jack Crank, who supposedly hated whites. Others are convinced that he was killed by cattle rustlers. Then there’s the possibility he committed suicide, and left the NEMO carving as his farewell note. In 1999, the excavation of a mound thought to be Ruess’s grave, near Hole-in-the-Rock, Utah, was discovered to be nothing but a pile of dirt.


W. L. Rusho, author of Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, doubts Ruess made it out of Escalante alive, and guesses that the lad fell while climbing or got himself trapped in a side canyon. “It’s very doubtful at this time that anyone could find Ruess’s remains,” says Rusho. “I think Everett’s fate will always be a mystery.”

Without a Trace

The mountain gods swallow another life

ON JULY 8, 1999, Bronx-born journalist Joe Wood hiked up to Mount Rainier National Park’s Mildred Point Trail. A 34-year-old African-American editor for a New York book publisher, Wood was in Seattle for a minority journalists’ conference when he decided to spend a day bird-watching. He was not a novice in the outdoors—he’d been an Eagle Scout—but he may not have been prepared for conditions in the park. Rainier had received the fifth-heaviest snowfall in its history, and the six-mile hike was lined with tree wells and treacherous snow bridges.


On the trail, Wood encountered Bruce Gaumond, a retired Boeing employee who came forward after he heard that Wood was missing. Gaumond told the National Park Service that the two had chatted briefly about birds, the length of the trail, and a dicey creek crossing ahead. Wood was never seen again. Did he fall into the creek or stumble off a snowy cliff? The Park Service thinks so, but Wood’s mother, Elizabeth, is not so sure. She remains haunted by the possibility that some kind of foul play may have occurred. Searchers scoured the area for five days, but a warm spell had melted the snow, obscuring Wood’s tracks. When a final search in September 1999 turned up nothing, Joe Wood was listed as the 65th person to disappear on Rainier.

An Untimely End

A photographer turned up dead in placid Isabella Lake, and there’s no explanation

ADVENTURE PHOTOGRAPHER Barry Tessman survived a lot during his ten-year career behind the lens—two years in Siberia; ventures in Tibet, India, and Pakistan; and Class V torrents from China to northern Canada. But it was on a cold, calm day, on a glassy lake he’d paddled hundreds of times, that Tessman met his fate.


At 7:30 a.m. on January 16, 2001, Tessman, 41, a Class V river guide, backcountry ski patroller, and trained EMT, loaded his 19-foot Phantom racing kayak onto his truck and set out for the North Fork Marina for an hourlong flatwater workout on Isabella Lake, near his home in Kernville, California. By 10:30 a.m. he had not returned, and his wife, Joy, seven months pregnant with their second child, called Tom Moore, Tessman’s friend of 20 years, to find out if he’d seen him. Moore had not, but promised to check the marina. Using binoculars, he spotted Tessman’s kayak floating in the middle of the lake with its paddle stowed, but Barry was nowhere in sight. A 50-person sweep of the lake turned up no sign of the missing paddler. Then, on February 18, a Kern County park ranger discovered Tessman’s body floating near Boulder Gulch, three-quarters of a mile from where his kayak had been found. The official cause of death was drowning, but a second autopsy showed that Tessman had also suffered blunt-force trauma to the head, raising the disturbing specter of foul play, and prompting his family to post a $20,000 reward for information about the case.


No one has stepped forward, and investigators at the Kern County Sheriff’s Department have deemed Tessman’s death an accident, while admitting to a lack of evidence. “We are no closer than we were the day his body was discovered,” says Moore. “All the different theories we’ve come up with have gaping holes in them.”


It’s possible that Tessman flipped his boat and somehow cracked his head on an exposed rock, but that wouldn’t explain why his paddle was stowed. He may have gone ashore to scout photo locations on Rocky Point, fallen, hit his head, and then slipped into the water. And then there is the more troubling scenario: Was he a victim of a random act of violence?


Tessman’s death may never be fully explained, leaving his loved ones to grapple with the mystery. “Maybe they needed a photographer up in heaven,” says Moore. “That’s the only peace I can make of it.”

Forever Wild

We don’t know where Edward Abbey is buried. Maybe it’s better that way.

“THE LAST TIME ED SMILED was when I told him where he was going to be buried,” says Doug Peacock, an environmental crusader in Edward Abbey’s inner circle and the prototype for Abbey’s most famous character, George Hayduke, in The Monkey Wrench Gang. On March 14, 1989, the day Abbey died from esophageal bleeding at 62, Peacock, along with friends Jack Loeffler, Tom Cartwright, and Steve Prescott, wrapped Abbey’s body in his blue sleeping bag, packed it with dry ice, and loaded Cactus Ed into Loeffler’s Chevy pickup. After stopping at a liquor store in Tucson for five cases of beer, and some whiskey to pour on the grave, they drove off into the desert. The men searched for the right spot the entire next day and finally turned down a long rutted road, drove to the end, and began digging. That night they buried Ed and toasted the life of America’s prickliest and most outspoken environmentalist.


Abbey’s grave, a closely guarded secret for 13 years, has become a legend. His friends broke several laws by transporting Abbey’s corpse without a permit, interring him illegally on federal land, and forging a death certificate. Ed would have been proud. Peacock and Loeffler, both of whom have written about the backcountry funeral, refuse to spill the beans, saying only that Abbey’s grave is somewhere in the southwestern Arizona desert, decorated with feathers, shells, rocks, and other trinkets. There is a rough epitaph hewn into a nearby rock. It is, according to friends, one of the most beautiful and fragile spots in the American desert—a good reason why Peacock and his undertakers hope to keep the secret forever.


If by chance you find yourself in southwestern Arizona and accidentally stumble upon a decorated mound of dirt, avert your eyes, take a swig of whiskey, and head in the opposite direction. Some mysteries are best left unsolved.

It’s Weird Out There

From Sasquatch to the Mothman, our writer takes on the supernatural

Paranormal mysteries are rarely solved; they’re just tarnished by schlocky film adaptations. Mel Gibson’s performance in Signs couldn’t stop the centuries-old CROP-CIRCLE phenomenon, in which large-scale patterns mysteriously flatten sections of wheat fields and other crops. Teenage pranksters claimed responsibility for the 15 interconnected circles that turned up in June in a wheat field near Fairfield, California, but true believers (known as “croppies”) suspect aliens at work…. SASQUATCH, the hairy North American man-beast still reeling from the box-office stinker Harry and the Hendersons, took another one on the chin last December. That’s when the son of Northern California logger Ray Wallace announced that his pop had punked the world by faking the footprints that spawned the modern Bigfoot legend, in 1958. Ray died a few days before the announcement…. Meanwhile, the Brits keep hunting for Big Shaggy’s snowbound Himalayan cousin, THE YETI. Scientists were baffled by the DNA in so-called yeti hair discovered by a British expedition in Bhutan two years ago. “It is not a human, not a bear, nor anything else we have been able to identify,” said Bryan Sykes, of Oxford University’s Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. “We have never encountered DNA that we couldn’t recognize before.”… Nobody’s filmed the MOVING ROCKS IN DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK yet, although creeping boulders would have livened up Matt Damon’s 2002 wander-in-the-desert snoozer, Gerry. The rocks, some as heavy as 700 pounds, inexplicably move across a region of the park known as Racetrack Valley, leaving long trails on the hard desert floor. One theory holds that rainstorm runoff saturates the ground, making it slippery and allowing heavy gales to push the rocks. Another says a thin coating of ice might move those big boys…. Richard Gere’s recent thriller The Mothman Prophecies hasn’t inspired any new sightings of the MOTHMAN, the bizarre seven-foot-tall, winged apparition that haunted the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1967. Perhaps Mothy moved south and mutated into EL CHUPACABRA, the feared Latin American goat-sucker that’s said to resemble a fanged kangaroo with wings. Chupa began draining the blood of goats, chickens, and rabbits in Puerto Rico in 1995. Since then, reports of Chupa have come from Mexico and Central and South America. Some believe the critter was born of a NASA genetic-tinkering experiment gone horribly awry. The Chilean news agency EFE quoted a Chilean architect as saying, “The gringos had at least three genetic experiments run away from them.” Calling Hollywood: Can we get a Chupa biopic in development already?

Enduring Enigmas

These classic cases have stumped investigators for years—and perhaps always will

AMEILA EARHART

The 39-year-old aviator disappeared in the central Pacific on July 2, 1937, near the end of her 29,000-mile around-the-world flight. Neither her body nor her plane was ever found. Were Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, U.S. spies, and were they captured by the Japanese? Was Earhart the voice of WWII radio broadcaster Tokyo Rose? According to American explorer Dave Jourdan, who’s planning a two-month 2004 expedition to search for the missing aircraft, the truth is much more mundane: Earhart likely ran out of gas and drowned when her plane crashed into the ocean.


JOHNNY WATERMAN

Waterman proved his alpine skills with a five-month first ascent of Alaska’s 14,573-foot Mount Hunter in 1978. But as Jonathan Waterman (no relation) reported in his 1994 book In the Shadow of Denali, Johnny’s behavior became increasingly erratic after that climb. On April 1, 1981, 28-year-old Waterman attempted a solo first ascent of the east face of Alaska’s 20,320-foot Mount McKinley. Witnesses say he carried very little food and gear when he started up McKinley. Did Waterman slip into a crevasse, or did he deliberately die on the mountain—as his father, Guy, would do 19 years later, freezing to death on New Hampshire’s Mount Lafayette? GLEN AND BESSIE HYDE

The Idaho newlyweds were last seen walking down a Grand Canyon trail toward the Colorado River in November 1928. A month later, their wooden scow was found floating right side up at the western end of the Canyon, sans the Hydes. In 1971, a client on a Grand Canyon rafting trip claimed that she was Bessie Hyde, and that she had murdered her husband on the river years earlier. But Canyon locals long suspected that river guide Georgie White was the real Bessie; the Hydes’ marriage certificate was said to be in her possession when she died in 1991.


CHRISTOPHER MCCANDLESS

McCandless headed into the Alaska wilderness in April 1992 to live off the land. Four months later, hunters found the 24-year-old dead outside of Denali National Park. As chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild, McCandless likely died of starvation. Journal entries indicate that he’d become too weak—possibly after eating poisonous seeds of the wild sweet pea—to continue foraging. But the question still remains: Was McCandless simply naive, or did he have a death wish? “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again,” he wrote to a friend before his trip, “I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.”

Case Closed?

After years of investigation, these fatal mysteries—from a trailside murder to the fate of a missing snowboarder—are now filed under “solved”

DRY CRIME
THE CASE: Best friends Raffi Kodikian, 25, of Pennsylvania, and David Coughlin, 26, of Massachusetts, got lost while hiking in the arid canyonlands of southern New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park in August 1999. When park rangers found their campsite four days later—just a mile from the trailhead—Coughlin was dead, and Kodikian confessed to killing him.
THE LATEST: At a May 2000 trial, Kodikian claimed that after several days without water, both men had become dehydrated and delusional. When Coughlin allegedly begged to be put out of his misery, Kodikian obliged and stabbed him twice in the chest with a folding pocketknife. Kodikian served 18 months for second-degree murder in a New Mexico prison and was released in November 2001.


MOUNTAIN MANHUNT
THE CASE: In 1998, when federal investigators fingered Eric Rudolph in a series of bombings—including the 1996 incident that killed one and injured scores more at the Atlanta Olympics—the 31-year-old carpenter headed deep into the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. The feds combed the Nantahala National Forest on foot, with bloodhounds and heat- and motion-detector-equipped helicopters, but the wily Rudolph eluded capture for nearly five years.
THE LATEST: In May, a rookie cop busted Rudolph digging through a dumpster in Murphy, North Carolina. The grizzled survivalist has pleaded innocent to charges of bombing an Alabama abortion clinic. He’ll go on trial in early 2004.


TRAIL OF TERROR
THE CASE: Hikers Lollie Winans, 26, of Maine, and Julianne Williams, 24, of Vermont, were found bound, gagged, and stabbed to death at their creekside campsite near the Appalachian Trail in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park in June 1996. The FBI interviewed thousands of locals and hikers, to no avail—and anxiety levels in the area soared.
THE LATEST: After nearly five years of investigation, in April 2001, federal prosecutors charged Darrell David Rice—a Virginia prison inmate serving 11 years for attempting to abduct a female cyclist in Shenandoah National Park in July 1997—with the 1996 AT murders. His trial is scheduled to begin October 20.


MISSING SNOWBOARDER
THE CASE: Twenty-three-year-old Duncan MacPherson, a professional hockey player from Saskatchewan, took a beginner’s snowboarding lesson at Austria’s Stubaier Glacier resort on August 9, 1989. Afterward, he had lunch with an instructor and got on a nearby chairlift. MacPherson’s car was found later in the resort’s parking lot, but he was never heard from again.
THE LATEST: In July 2003, a Stubaier resort employee found MacPherson’s frozen and partially buried body near a chairlift, at 9,800 feet. An autopsy is pending at press time.

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It's early morning on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, 20 miles downstream from Evansville, Indiana, and the walls of a rickety white houseboat called The Miracle are pulsating to the sound of the Beastie Boys song “Girls.” Tied up across from Dead Man's Island, a narrow, sandy stretch thick with skeletal cottonwoods, the boat is stocked with Little Debbie P.B. & J. Oatmeal Pies—Girls, all I really want is girls—a half-eaten package of Oscar Mayer salami—and in the morning it's girls—and a jar of Folgers instant coffee. Inside, wearing a blue baseball cap that he will take off only once, briefly, during seven straight working days is Chad Pregracke, the wiry, five-foot-six, 27-year-old trash zealot of the mighty Mississippi and her major tributaries—'cause in the evening it's girls.

Up a messy river (from left to right) Eric “Yam” Louck, Mike Havlis, and Living Lands and Waters founder Chad Pregacke

Chad

Left to right: Dave Sparks, Chad, Mike, Larry Williams, Yams, Jonas (the dog)

Yam in the houseboat

Weld-Master Dave

Yam & Larry on the Ohio

Mikes Mitts

The bike crane: power by Yam

Chad reeling in a big ‘un

Brent Pregracke (left) & Mike

The Haul Journal

Chad on a log jam

Then, as if to remind himself that today is the first day of his nine-month trash-picking season—something that makes him sooo happy after a winter going stir-crazy on land—Pregracke strikes an Incredible Hulk pose and lets loose: “Arrrrrrgh!”

“Big day today, dudes!” he hollers at his four-man crew as he steps outside into a crisp blue-sky morning. “Big day! Huge! We're going to get four boatloads of trash, OK? At least four boatloads! Arrrgh! Arrrrrgh!”

Lashed to the boat, which Pregracke (say “pruh-GRAK-ee”) salvaged from the bottom of the Illinois River three summers ago, are a pair of large river barges soon to be piled high with junk, and a small tug with sponsors' logos plastered on the side.

On the back barge, Pregracke's childhood friend Dave Sparks, 28, is busy modifying a manually operated crane, rigging it so that two mountain bikes can power its shaft—Pregracke having decided that cranking the thing by hand takes too long. While Sparks works away, Pregracke and the rest of the crew—Mike Havlis, 34, Eric “Yam” Louck, 24, and David Maasberg, 30—pile into a pair of 30-foot flat- bottomed boats, aiming the bows for nearby Henderson Island and all the trash that adorns it.

Pregracke and the boys are the heart and soul of Living Lands and Waters, a nonprofit operation that Chad founded in 1997 to pursue a straightforward goal: to collect any and all of the visible crapola that litters the Mississippi River and major tributaries like the Ohio and Illinois. There's a lot to choose from on waterways that are both terribly littered and seriously polluted. Though it's impossible to tally exactly how much trash finds its way to the rivers, Pregracke and his crews remove more than 200,000 pounds a year—recycling what they can, taking the rest to a landfill. A lot of it comes from illegal dumping, but the main source is the huge floods that scour the Mississippi every two or three years and pick up anything on the floodplain that isn't chained down, plopping it on islands and muddy riverbanks.
Pregracke's trash-picking season begins on the Ohio. He has a multiyear plan to work upstream from Cairo, Illinois, to Pittsburgh, where the river is formed by the merger of the Monongahela and Allegheny. So far, he's covered 180 miles of that waterway, making it almost to Evansville.

In June the group switches to the main event: the Mississippi, where Pregracke's teams have policed 900 miles of shoreline up and back between St. Louis and Gutenberg, Iowa. In October the guys return to the Ohio to pick up where they left off. In the winter they all go do something else. Chad holes up at his parents' house on the banks of the Mississippi in Hampton, Illinois, where he raises money and does repairs for the next season.

On this bright spring morning, with the trees not yet leafing out, the riverscape is drab. French explorers called the Ohio “La Belle Riviere,” but it's not very belle today. The water is a murky brown, and the banks are cluttered with cement plants, freight terminals, and tons and tons of trash.

But trash is what these boys came for, so they happily descend on Henderson Island and scurry off in all directions, returning with armfuls of refuse, piling it on the bank, and going back for more. After a few hours their impressive bounty includes 36 tires, a yellow plastic Little Tykes truck with blue wheels, 20 antifreeze jugs, five 55-gallon oil and chemical drums, two propane tanks, and at least one sniff-certified bottle of captain's piss. “They're named for the tug captains who urinate in them and then toss them overboard because they can't leave the deck,” says Maasberg, suspiciously eyeing one of the half-full bottles of foamy yellow liquid.

Havlis, whose right work glove reads LOVE and whose left glove reads HATE, returns with a basketball and a plastic goose decoy. Pregracke pops into view dragging two tires and a coppery race-car helmet, number 44, balanced on top of his cap. “That's tight, dawg,” Pregracke says, admiring the goose. He and Havlis start wrestling a refrigerator onto one of the boats. “Mike,” he suggests, “you pull from inside the boat.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dude, don't call me sir.”

“Oh, sorry. Yes, dude.”

“That's tight, dawg,” Pregracke says, nodding and smiling.

WHEN YOU ADD IT UP, Pregracke's teams have pulled more than a million pounds of trash out of riverbank muck, including 5,000 truck, tractor, and car tires, 1,133 steel drums, 527 plastic drums, one sunken barge, one houseboat, 128 pesticide containers, 287 refrigerators, enough Styrofoam to cover a football field two feet deep, a sex doll named Lulu, a message in a bottle that said “Whoever opens this bottle sucks,” and a cooler with a horse's head stuffed inside. (“Dude,” Pregracke says, “that smelled horrible.”) There's been much more, including an entire 1970 Ford Econoline Van, 348 antifreeze bottles, 350 propane tanks, 49 barbecue grills, and yes, 49 kitchen sinks.

Despite its unglamorous preoccupation with trash, Living Lands and Waters is a well-run, well-funded outfit. In certain circles Pregracke is even rather famous. In 1997 the Davenport, IowaÐbased Quad-City Times ran a local-boy-makes-good story on his trash-picking crusade. It was picked up by the wires, got some national play, and generated a brief segment on CNN.

This year, five summers after that splash of fame, Pregracke is on course to raise $420,000 for the project, out of which he pays himself $25,000 a year. His crew members—usually young people on their way to other things, who tend to come and go fast owing to the work's rigors, messiness, and poison ivy—earn $1,500 to $1,800 a month, with a $1,000 bonus if they stay through the season. (Soon after my visit, Maasberg leaves and a guy named Larry Williams comes aboard.) They get health benefits, a boat floor to sleep on, and all the junk food they can eat.
How does a 27-year-old who says “dude” all the time raise that kind of money? Tom Harper, a 52-year-old Moline, Illinois, lawyer who once hired a teenage Chad Pregracke to help remodel his home—and who now sits on the project's ten-member board of directors—puts it this way: “He just asks. He doesn't know that he shouldn't ask, and it turns out people want to help. He's got so much energy it's hard to turn him down.”

Pregracke's seemingly infinite zeal grew out of his love of the Mississippi, a love spawned, oddly enough, on a summer day 12 years ago when he almost killed his older brother, Brent. Then 15, Chad was spending his first day helping 20-year-old Brent catch freshwater clams on the Big Muddy. Chad's job was to sort clams on the skiff while Brent dove and worked the river bottom. Chad was supposed to watch Brent's air hose and bubbles, but Chad claims Brent never told him that part.

While Chad sorted, strong currents knocked Brent around until the hose knotted and cut off his air. Another diver who was working with the boys popped out of the water and yelled at Chad to bring Brent up. Laid out in the boat like a stunned fish, Brent was ash white, his lips blue, and he remained immobile for a full ten minutes. Then he lamely motioned Chad over and whispered in his ear, “I'm going to kill you.”

Things got better. Over the next three summers, Chad and Brent lived out of sleeping bags on the Mississippi's many islands and clammed professionally. It was during the second summer that Pregracke became obsessed with how trashy the river was, and particularly with a huge pile of plastic barrels about 15 miles from his parents' house. That winter he called the Illinois Department of Natural Resources several times, bugging them to clean up the mess.

“I got nowhere,” Pregracke recalls. “They were really defensive. They kept saying things like, 'Where's the garbage?' 'That's not our responsibility.' 'There's no money for that.' And then they'd ask, 'Who are you, anyway?'

“So I started thinking about that,” he says. “Who am I? Well, I've been on every island on the Mississippi from Fort Madison, Iowa, to Dubuque, and I've clammed on the bottom of most of it, or my brother has. Then I realized that's who I am, and these people on the phone are in some office in Springfield, and what do they know about the river?”.

One weekend in the spring of 1997, while watching NASCAR on TV, Pregracke experienced an epiphany. “I started noticing all those logos on the cars,” he says. He grabbed the yellow pages and looked up the aluminum company Alcoa, an outfit that, he sort of knew, employs a couple thousand people in the Quad Cities area of Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa.

“Dude! I didn't even know what Alcoa did,” he says. “But I called and got this man on the phone, and I told him that I want to go pick up the trash on the Mississippi River, and would they sponsor me? He started asking me all sorts of things, like, Did I have a budget? Was I a 501c? I didn't even know what a budget was, but I told him I'd get one. I just wanted to clean the river.”

A week later, after Pregracke's mom taught him how to create a budget, he showed up at the office of Alcoa vice-president Tim Wilkinson, asking for $77,000 to clean 440 miles of the Mississippi and pay for boat insurance and five employees. Wilkinson gave Pregracke $8,400 for a more modest effort: picking up Mississippi River trash, by himself, in the Quad Cities area.

Which is exactly what Pregracke did. “I worked from the start of the summer until the ice froze me off the river,” he says. Then 21, he single-handedly dug 45,000 pounds of trash out of the riverbanks, dumping the load in his parents' yard until he could sort it, recycle it, or haul it off to a landfill. In the fall he started taking courses at Heartland Community College in Normal, Illinois, and returned home on weekends to finish the job.

The next summer Alcoa kicked in $20,000 and Pregracke raised $100,000 piecemeal from other companies. Suddenly, picking up garbage was a full-time thing. He left school, though he did finish his associate's degree in 2001. Today, the logos on his various boats testify to the success of his original NASCAR inspiration. Among his current sponsors are Alcoa, agribusiness giant Cargill, Honda Marine, Caterpillar, and the makers of O'Doul's, the nonalcoholic brew.

“Dude!” says Pregracke. “My middle name is O'Doul's. They gave me $50,000 this year!”
��

IT'S FRIDAY NIGHT AT THE DUEY'S CORENR TAP, a busy workingman's bar on the riverfront in Port Byron, Illinois, a few towns upriver from Moline. Pregracke has come home to pick up an extra boat and attend a Saturday-morning meeting at which Alcoa will present its annual self-graded green report card to local enviros and citizens.

Tonight Chad is joining his parents, Gary, 60, and KeeKee, 57, for their end-of-the-week ritual of feasting on fried catfish and cheese fries. Tom Harper is also on hand. Rounding out the group, dressed head to toe in urban-wear black, is Lisa Eno, Chad's 27-year-old girlfriend.
Gary is a retired high school teacher who spends his days and insomniac nights rehabbing a small ranch house that Chad recently purchased across the street from his parents' place. KeeKee runs the early childhood development program at nearby Black Hawk College, but she's also in charge of keeping Chad's operation running smoothly. She sits on his board, answers his e-mail, and schedules school visits. Chad says he phones her every day, but insists, “I am not a mama's boy!”

“You won't believe this, Chad,” Gary says, debriefing his son on local news and gossip. “You know this lady who's running for governor of Illinois? Well, I just saw that one of her campaign promises is that she's going to clean the Illinois River!”

“Clean the Illinois River?” KeeKee says, exasperated. “Chad already cleaned the Illinois!”

“Yeah,” says Chad. “We really cleaned the Illinois. It was totally trashed.”

Harper changes the subject to operations on the Ohio. “Are the guys showering regularly?” he asks.

No, they're not: Yam hasn't showered in three weeks. “That's one of the things we wanted to put in the budget this year,” Harper says. “We wanted to pay for one night at a motel a week, so these guys could take showers and sleep on a decent bed.”

After dinner Chad heads off somewhere with Lisa, while I check out the headquarters of Living Lands and Waters: a bedroom turned office on the second floor of Gary and KeeKee's house. One wall of the office is covered with awards, including appreciations from the Rock Island Rotary Club and the Daughters of the American Revolution. There's also a signed photo from rock star Lenny Kravitz: “Chad, thanks for the inspiration.” Kravitz phoned Pregracke after seeing him on CNN, invited him to a concert in Bloomington, Illinois, and then wrote a song inspired by his trash-picking work called, “Can We Find a Reason?”

“He was cool,” says Pregracke. “But he's just a guy, you know what I mean?”

The next morning, when I meet up with Pregracke for the Alcoa meeting, he's looking sharp in pressed khakis, a button-down shirt, and, yes, the baseball cap. The Quad Cities environmental community—including fishermen, Ducks Unlimited guys, and Sierra Clubbers—has gathered at Alcoa's Davenport Works to hear about the company's record.

As they all probably know, Alcoa has black marks in its not-too-distant past. In 2000, as a result of pollution originating at its Warrick operations plant on the Ohio River, the company settled a lawsuit brought by the United States Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, agreeing to pay an $8.8 million penalty for violating the Clean Water Act. But according to Jen Hensley, 27, the Chicago-based grassroots coordinator for the Illinois chapter of the Sierra Club, the company is trying to do better. “They used to be one of the river's biggest polluters,” she says, “but they've really cleaned up.” Alcoa's Davenport plant, for example, has reduced toxic air emissions from 4.5 million pounds to 250,000 pounds in the last 13 years. Using a $13 million closed water system, it has reduced its intake from and release into the Mississippi by 90 percent.

Tim Wilkinson, Chad's Alcoa patron, is running today's meeting, and he starts off by reminding everyone that it's been a rough business year, which makes it harder to think green. “We're hoping that's going to turn around soon,” he says. “We're committed to the environment, but it has to make economic sense. We're working on everything from reducing air emissions to using soy diesel in our factory vehicles, reducing our vehicle emissions by 30 to 60 percent.”

Pregracke raises a hand.

“Yes, Chad?” Wilkinson says. br.
“Can I pull our tug up to the factory and fill it up with some soy diesel?”

“That's a discussion we better have later,” Wilkinson says, while the audience laughs. He continues with his slide show, clicking to a photo of Pregracke driving a trash-filled boat and looking a lot like Washington crossing the Delaware. Wilkinson suggests a round of applause. As it washes over the trash man, he hides under the brim of his cap, embarrassed just ever so slightly.
��

“YOU FEEL AND HEAR WEIRD THINGS when you're underwater clamming,” Pregracke says during our drive back to the Ohio from his parents' place. “It's pitch-black down there, and it can get really creepy, like when you're feeling around for clams and you grab a doll's head, and then you start screaming through your dive mask. You know you have to feel your way back to it and make sure it's not a dead baby, or you'll never be able to forget it. Couches feel really weird when you bump into them. The catfish sound like bullfrogs, barge props sound like helicopters. I used to sing that song 'Night Shift' so I wouldn't get creeped out.”

Despite his underwater beginnings, Pregracke limits his trash operation to what he can see on the riverbanks and in shallow pools. “There's trash way underwater, but most of it is on the banks,” he says, arriving back at the trash flotilla.
After dumping his bags in the houseboat, Pregracke joins Mike Havlis in a boat heading upstream, while David Maasberg and Yam Louck go downstream. Later, when Pregracke and Havlis find them again, Louck and Maasberg are looking glum. Before them are more half-sunken tires than you could count, a baby-blue bowling ball, two refrigerators, a half-dozen 55-gallon drums, a Wilson Sharp Shooter basketball, a depleted 20-ounce bottle of Budweiser, and a can of Liquid Chisel Bilge Cleaner.

There's so much trash that it sometimes makes the whole trash-cleaning endeavor seem overwhelming. And of course, the Mississippi's problems go way beyond garbage.

“The biggest problem on the river is runoff and sewage,” says the Sierra Club's Jen Hensley. “Several cities dump raw sewage right into it. There are also industrial hog farms, whose pools of waste flow into the river during floods.” That runoff threatens the 18 million people who rely on the river for their drinking water, not to mention the 278 species of fish and mussels that live there. Add to that increased siltation from the lock-and-dam system on the Mississippi, which causes river mud to pile up. This makes it hard for plants to root and reduces habitat for everything from piping plovers to threatened species like the Higgins eye mussel. All of which raises the question: Does Pregracke's litter-removal program really help that much?

Hensley thinks so. “It makes a big difference,” she says. “For one thing, it's not great for wildlife habitat to have a bunch of trash around—it's hard for mussels to live on refrigerators. And they pull a lot of things out that leak into the river, like vans and chemical barrels. But Chad also draws a whole different group of people to these river issues than what we bring. I speak every year at the Quad Cities River Relief community cleanup, which Chad organizes. There are a lot of boaters, fishermen, and hunters who would normally see the Sierra Club and say, 'Whoa, I don't know about this.' But we share the same goals when it comes to the river, and those people have a lot of respect for Chad, so it really helps.”
��

BACK ON THE OHIO, Pregracke continues his manic pace, digging up junk, tossing it on the boats. Just now he has stopped in his tracks. Twenty feet in front of him, a rusted-out pickup has been driven off the bank. On top of it is a pile of washers, dryers, and more junk.

“Damn, dude,” he says. “Look at that—a hillbilly dump. There's no way we can pick all this up.” For the first time in a week Pregracke seems deflated.
We return to the barges. The sun is beginning to set, but Chad wants to make one more run. He steers his boat back toward Henderson Island, where he remembers seeing a fridge. He beaches the boat. Just to the left of him, floating in the water, is a fully unrolled bleach-white condom. “We call that an Ohio River tapeworm,” he says.

Isn't he going to pick it up?

“Dude, I'm not touching any condom. My brother almost quit commercial fishing because of an incident with a condom on the Mississippi, but I'm not even going to talk about it, because he'd kill me.”

After searching the island for ten minutes, Pregracke finds the fridge he was looking for. He liberates it from the dirt, then starts rolling it end over end in a sprint all the way to the boat.

It's a stirring picture of the trash zealot in his element. But what about two years from now? Or five? “Coming to a river near you,” he says. “That's my motto. I might clean the Hudson next. I've got a lot of ideas about restoring these rivers to their natural state. I can't tell you about them, because I don't like talking about things before I do them—let's just see the results, you know what I'm saying?” With that he stands up in the back of the boat, sets the throttle wide open, and—looking like Washington crossing the Delaware—says, “I'm going to do some big shit before I die. I am.”
��

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Polar Chic

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Putting the “Loo” in Lewis and Clark

An archaeologist’s search for a long-lost privy

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Four Coloradans wander the desert, leading their people to adventure-racing’s promised land

For the Record

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