Keahole-Kona International Airport and later the narrow concourses and the baggage claim and the shuttle buses at Honolulu International Airport, hundreds of wiry triathletes crowing silently with their torsos, billboarding their feat. More navy blue Ironman shirts dot the aisles on the DC-10 bound for the mainland; they pepper the crowds at LAX and then pop up in Dallas during a layover for a connecting flight. Amazingly, annoyingly, one of the damn things even saunters past me in my hometown airport, its wearer showing a large rictus of a smile.

You have the white T-shirts for all the spectators. You have the baby blue T-shirts for the volunteers, and red T-shirts for the construction crews, and forest green T-shirts for the media, and light green T-shirts for the medics. To participate in the Ironman in any capacity requires a T-shirt, color-coded by task but available in only one size–which is usually no problem, because triathletes come in only one size: whippet-thin medium. Long lines of wispy athletes are shuffling just now through the lobby of the King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel, occupied with the pre-race event called the Ironman Expo. Aswim in a noisy bazaar of fitness commerce, the racers surge up against the promotional tables of Wigwam athletic socks and Saucony running apparel and many others. But the most popular attraction in the lobby is one of their own, Darryl Haley, an affable 35-year-old second-year Ironman. Darryl is a very unlikely triathlete: a black man standing six-foot-five and tipping the scales at 300 pounds–literally twice as big as the average Ironman. As if by gravity, he has attracted a ring of fellow racers. They orbit him, their eager white faces swirling three deep, and reach out to cuff his shoulder or touch an arm. He hugs a couple of them, moves a few feet, hugs a few more. His race and size and the crush of admirers are not the only reasons Darryl sticks out in the crowd. Alone among the hundreds of people in the lobby, he’s not wearing an Ironman T-shirt and flimsy jogging shorts. There isn’t a T-shirt that would have fit him. Even if there were, he probably would have stuck with what he’s worn all weekend: nicely pleated and pressed dress shorts, a pressed polo shirt, leather loafers, and a natty straw hat.

I’ve been hanging out with Darryl for a few days, and everywhere he’s gone, he’s been mobbed. Still, the scene in the lobby is overwhelming. Every few moments a new body rushes up. A sock manufacturer’s rep pushes a case of ankle-highs into his hands: “Darryl! Darryl! Here, take some of these.” A staffer from a triathlon magazine shoves some copies for Darryl to autograph, which she’ll then pass out as promos: “Darryl! Sign some issues for us, will you?” Here comes a stunningly white sales rep: “Yo, my man Darryl! You’ll bop by our booth, won’t you?” Darryl smiles and wades deeper into the crowd. A pack of six triathletes, three midwestern men and their shadowing wives, sights Darryl, and they shout their greetings and then snatch at him like he’s some long-lost relative.

“You’re racing again this year aren’t you Darryl?”

“We’ve been looking for you all over. Hey, have you lost weight?”

“I heard you moved to Kona to train full time.”

“What bike are you riding this year, Darryl?”

“We’ll wait for you again at the finish. Like last year.”

Darryl throws a huge arm around the shoulders of one of the men and visits with the group, chuckling at their stories, catching up. A full head taller than any of them, he bends down to their height and nods and smiles and casually reciprocates their ceaseless tactility. He’s genuinely thrilled to see them. But his wife is arriving soon from Maryland, where she and their four-year-old son are living until Darryl gets settled enough in Kona for them to join him. The bachelor condo he rents needs some serious tidying if it is going to pass a wifely inspection, so Darryl pulls himself free of the group, which waves a collective and blusterous good-bye.

Q: Darryl, who were those people?

A: You know, I have absolutely no idea. But they sure seemed glad to see me, huh?

To travel 40 yards across the Expo takes Darryl two hours, mostly because of the gauntlet of clinging athletes and sponsors he has to run. He’s invited to race (all expenses paid) in triathlons in Australia and Japan. Well-wishers bestow on him a pricey computerized heart-rate monitor, energy bars, Speedo swim trunks. He’s acquired a half-dozen T-shirts, including a few Ironman shirts–too small. I get an official Ironman shirt just because I’m with Darryl. At the first Hawaii Ironman, 20 races ago, the 15 contestants had to provide their own blank T-shirts, which were silk-screened with the Ironman name, but only if they finished. Now the Hawaii Ironman is a multimillion-dollar business with ten lucrative licensed tie-ins and a two-hour-long coproduced Saturday afternoon special on NBC that is consistently the network’s highest-rated sports event after football. Some 25,000 spectators watch the race in person; 5,000 volunteers work it; 300 people tackle security. In 1995, 1,441 people started the race; 1,328 finished it. And Darryl, the star attraction at the Expo and at the sign-in and at the Carbo Loading party–everywhere, really, where there are triathletes or companies trying to make money off them–chugged across the finish line only minutes before the 17-hour cutoff time. He finished in 1,323d place, five people from dead last.

The King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel is the site of most of the weekend’s activities, and I’ve been spending a lot of time here watching Darryl and the other Ironmen go about their race prep routines. A moldering hint of the middle 1970s distinguishes the hotel, which relies heavily on the questionable charms of budget-priced wood paneling. The location is nice, though; the starting line is a snip of white sand beach a few feet from the hotel, and the finish line is a short walk from its front door. Inside the hotel, rooms are banked for race check-in and other critical business, like the sale of Ironman key chains and Ironman mug holders and Ironman digital watches. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, palms are strung with fluttering banners touting Timex and NBC and Reebok. The crumbling seawall edging the harbor has additional banners hung from it. Saturday morning, before the 7 a.m. start, a peeved announcer pleads for the spectators sitting on the wall to please not dangle their feet in front of the signs. “We want to make sure those sponsors get as many hits as possible on television,” he explains.

Even the triathletes have absorbed the heady spirit of enterprise, and they wear logo-festooned clothing and imprint their bodies with temporary tattoos shilling products like Kestrel bikes and Mrs. T’s Pierogies, lending them the air of fiscally ambitious punks. One company, PowerBar, goes so far as to pay a cash bounty to any athlete who wears a PowerBar T-shirt and gets the brand name on television or in a magazine. On one level, the race and the racers are just a handy canvas upon which to project product, and Darryl–the largest man ever to race the Ironman–is the biggest and choicest canvas of all. He’s also perhaps the choosiest. For several days he’s been haggling with a marketing guy from Boll‰ sunglasses, which hopes he’ll pose for their catalog and wear a pair of their wraparounds in the race.

“I’d be happy to,” Darryl finally tells the man. “But your people haven’t got back to me with a firm offer. I like your product, but I need something more than some free glasses in return. I’m trying to make a living here. Plus I have Oakley after me.” The Boll‰ rep says yes, yes, yes, by all means, and then hustles off to call his supervisor.

Darryl has a shiny oval of a face, and he smiles all the time and is unusually courtly. Before he became a triathlete, the Los Angeles native spent seven years as an offensive lineman in the National Football League, after being drafted out of the University of Utah in 1982. He played mostly for the New England Patriots and was good enough to be named NFL Player of the Week once, and the Patriots were good enough in Darryl’s playing days that during the 1985-1986 season they made it to Super Bowl XX, which they lost very badly to the Chicago Bears. That was the championship for which the Bears cut a music video, and Bears quarterback Jim McMahon launched a plummy career in commercials by creating hype over which logo headband he’d wear in the game. Darryl, more than most of the triathletes around, knows a little something about marketing and buzz. While in the NFL he negotiated his own contracts and, in his spare time, founded a profitable fitness consulting business. Although he entered his first triathlon just to compete, he realized pretty quickly that he might make something more of the sport.

This week Darryl’s been planting several story lines with the Ironman crowd, the cleverest being his refusal to divulge the brand of bike he’ll ride in the race. Over the last few days dozens of people have asked after his mystery bike. Past winner Mark Allen cornered Darryl and grilled him about it. Paula Newby-Fraser, who won an amazing eighth Ironman this year, interrogated him too. The murmurs rebounded to the bike reps, who began imploring Darryl to please, please, stop by and talk a little business.

Q: Darryl, is there anything unusual about your bike?

A: Nah, it’s just my old Cannondale. But I noticed that when I wouldn’t tell people about the bike, that only made them want to know all the more. So I figured, what the heck, I’ll make them wait and see if it works for me.

Last year Darryl was able to compete here for the first time, thanks to a special exemption granted by the World Triathlon Corporation, the Florida-based company that stages the Hawaii Ironman. The race is triathlon’s premier event and is credited with launching the sport, which now boasts 750,000 participants worldwide. Athletes normally have to qualify in another race or gain entry through a lottery system to race in Hawaii. Darryl tried the lottery, and when he lost out, the powers behind the race signed him up anyway. “We don’t make any secret of the fact that from time to time, whether for sponsorship purposes or public relations purposes, we give someone permission to run the race,” is how Rob Perry, the Ironman’s advertising and public relations director, explained it to me. The fact is, Darryl was about as qualified as many of the racers. Since seeing his first triathlon on television in 1993 he’d entered and completed triathlons in St. Croix and Chicago, notched ten additional long-distance courses, and attended Newby-Fraser’s triathlon camp in Boulder. She told him he would succeed in the Ironman as long as he raced at his own pace, which is pretty good advice to give a 300-pound man.

Darryl shows up for the race at 5:30 in the morning, and the starting area is already teeming. Racers wander around, looking slightly stunned with anticipation. Some fiddle with their bikes, which are arranged in endless rows and being protected from the spectators by wildly zealous security guards. A few racers investigate Darryl’s Cannondale–it’s obviously Darryl’s, because the saddle towers about five inches above all the rest. Other racers wait in line at the outdoor toilets or slather grease on one another for the swim or just stretch silently. Darryl has occupied his pre-race time greeting people, hugging people, and talking through his race. Charm precedes him like an avalanche of warm fine sand, smothering everyone in its path. He’s wearing Oakley sunglasses against the brightening sun. “Oakley won,” he says. “Boll‰ kept stalling, and I’m done negotiating. I’m not in the mood to negotiate today.” Darryl arrived wearing his dress shorts and polo shirt and straw hat, and when he begins a slow peel down to his black Speedo a hush settles on the immediate crowd, which stares at this dark tower looming over a sea of diminutive white forms.

“Get some of Darryl! Get some of Darryl!” A field director is shouting at an NBC cameraman, ordering him to shoot footage of Darryl as he lowers himself into the ocean for the 2.4-mile first leg. Even in the water Darryl chats up his startled neighbors, stopping to give one a quick hug before the gun report launches the race. Water roils with furious arms and legs, and Darryl moves smoothly and quickly out into the harbor and then goes missing in the crowd.

Since barely finishing last year’s race, Darryl has devoted himself to the idiosyncratic realities of triathlon training. Rising daily at 4:30, he swims, lifts weights, runs, and then rides a bike 20 miles to a Four Seasons Resort outside Kona, where he teaches wealthy vacationers how to be fit. In the evening he rides back home. The swimming portion of the race has always made Darryl particularly anxious. Before he became a triathlete his relationship with water was at best dysfunctional. One of the goals he set for himself this Ironman was to shave up to 20 minutes off last year’s swimming time of 2:14–a very substantial improvement.

Sure enough, Darryl pops out of the water about two hours later and does a little celebratory jig. Before the race, I talked with race physician Bob Laird about Darryl, and he remarked that Darryl’s size actually helps him in the swim, since he tends to be more buoyant than a lot of the skinnier competitors. He also mentioned that when the medical staff first heard Darryl was coming to race, their main concern was whether the cots would hold him if something went wrong. So far, everything’s fine with Darryl. In just a few minutes he’s changed clothing, and now he huffs past on his bike. Even though 90 percent of the field is already well into the 112-mile bike course–and the leaders are about a fourth of the way done with it–Darryl looks encouraged.

The bike portion of the Ironman runs along the Queen Kaahumanu Highway and is remarkable mostly for the stilled ripples of black lava that the road bisects. By 10 a.m. the temperature in these lunar fields is above 100 degrees. Sun-poached volunteers work the many rest stations, passing out water and Gu energy gel and Exceed replenishing drink to the racers as they struggle by. In years past Gatorade was the drink being offered, but the World Triathlon Corporation is thinking about bringing out its own drink next year and didn’t want to promote any serious competitors, so this year they distributed the less-popular Exceed to the athletes. Volunteers have been told to use the name as often as possible. Every few seconds one of them shouts “Exceed! Exceed!” at the passing cyclists, which I imagine must annoy them. But when Darryl chugs by they shout “Darryl! Darryl!” instead, and he shoots them a shaka hand wave.

What mostly makes Darryl appealing to the Ironman is his winning personality and his value as a human-interest story. For the last few years the WTC has been working to, as its marketing executive says, “grow the word Ironman as a recognizable name brand.” The best tool it has for doing this is the annual Ironman broadcast. With a strong mass-market identity the WTC can hatch profitable partnerships, like the one with Timex that produces the Ironman line of sports watches. (Timex sells two million watches a year, and the WTC reportedly gets 50 cents per watch.) Reebok now has an Ironman shoe and Huffy recently introduced its Ironman bike, with part of the profits from each kicking back to the WTC. The company embraces anything that might help shed the common perception that the Ironman is the domain of a bunch of obsessive fitness kooks and promotes the notion that it is a simple celebration of Everyman’s indomitable spirit. Darryl, a scary-bright preacher’s son from Compton who played pro ball and was big and slow-looking–well, here was a stereotype-busting Everyman.

When Darryl signed up for last year’s race the WTC quickly paired him off with an NBC producer, who got to work scripting a long and uplifting profile of Darryl for the Ironman broadcast. It ran with lengthy segments on the oldest competitor and the youngest competitor and various handicapped Ironmen. Mark Allen, who won the race, got hardly any profile coverage at all.

As I followed Darryl around for the days leading up to the race, he continued to be a wonder. Not only did he play Boll‰ off of Oakley, but he’d worked deals with several other companies, including a cellular phone outfit that gave him a free cell phone that he used every few minutes to work even more business deals. Darryl recently moved to Kona full-time to work at the Four Seasons Resort spa. His job description is personal trainer and nutritionist, but he is also a jumbo-size sales tool. The hat he wore all weekend was stitched with the word “Hualalai,” which is the name of the spa. Hualalai promotes the fact that it has an Ironman and a former NFL pro on staff, and Darryl promotes Hualalai. The surprise is that Darryl makes such cross-promotion and salesmanship seem effortless and correct. Worldwide, there are about 150 professional triathletes, but Darryl is probably the sport’s first true pro.

On the afternoon of the Expo Darryl drove out to the airport to retrieve his wife, Shiba, their young son, Rene, and Darryl’s friend Phil, a jazz saxophonist who will undergo a conversion during the weekend and decide that he too wants to be a 300-pound triathlete. Shiba is beautiful and petite and enjoys a finely attuned sense of the ridiculous that presents itself at the most inflating times. Later in the day we visited a local Baptist elementary school, where Darryl had been asked to award a plaque to the student who showed the most Haleyesque desire and persistence. Phil, Shiba, and Rene sat in the back pew of a church sanctuary, which doubled as the school auditorium. “We are here today for the presentation of the Darryl Haley Award,” a teacher solemnly announced to the roomful of children. “The Darryl Haley Award,” Shiba stage-whispered. “Lord help us.”

But it was a touching moment, the plaque handed to a tiny girl with a cleft palate who burst into tears onstage. Darryl and Shiba fussed over her until she dried up, and then Darryl passed out Hualalai caps and a sack of little gifts he’d brought for the children.

Q: Darryl, why did you leave football?

A: See, on a football field you can be all these things that you can’t be walking down the street in normal society. You have to be a total lunatic, an assassin, a maniac, a hit man. You can be aggressive, you can be tenacious. I could do things to you on a football field that I couldn’t think about doing while walking down the street–and get away with it. There’s a level of competitive aggression you enter, this little zone, this bubble, and you perform there with skill and grace and tactics and precision to make it all work. You take ten other guys and orchestrate this plan of attack to the inch and it’s all about dominance and destruction. It’s controlled violence. When the game is over, you have taken a guy who is the best at his position and you have totally broken him. And one day I realized I wasn’t able to do that anymore.

The Ironman goes well for Darryl until the turnaround at Hawii, near the midpoint of the bike leg. The temperature has continued to rise, and when I catch up with Darryl again he’s not smiling anymore. As he passes, I can see that the muscles in his ample upper arms are spasming uncontrollably. Bike-racing 112 miles when you are Darryl-size is not easy, and not just because of the exertion involved. The simple physics of the feat are daunting. To remain aerodynamic, Darryl has to squeeze his massive thighs so close to the bike frame that by mile 45 he’s rubbed two large holes into his spandex shorts. Cutting down on wind resistance also requires Darryl to curl his bulk into the bike, and this compresses his chest and drops his oxygen intake. And Darryl must move 330 pounds–which is what he and his bike and his water and some energy bars weigh–into a 15-mile-per-hour headwind. At various times he must pedal this mass from sea level to 600 feet. Last year, event physicians estimate, he burned more than 17,000 calories during the race, replenishing them with homemade egg-and-bean burritos and 25 bottles of Gatorade, which he gulped down along the way.

Unlike Darryl, the best triathletes zip along with daunting and colorless efficiency; the Belgian Luc Van Lierde, who was crossing the overall finish line with a winning time of eight hours and four minutes as Darryl was still tackling the second half of the bike leg, mowed down the competition while consuming just a few bananas and energy bars with his fluids. In a fit of misguided emulation, Darryl has also gone nutritious this year, sticking with Gu energy gel and fruit and energy bars. He’s probably not taking in enough fuel.

Q: Darryl, do you think that potential sponsors will lose interest in you if you don’t finish the race?

A: Frankly, I think they’ll want me even more, because this year my goal is not just to finish the race, but to compete. You take the average triathlete and they say, ‘Well, this guy finished again, but so what?’ This year they’ll look at me and say, ‘Hey, he really went for it! He raced it.’ I think they might appreciate that.

As he labors to beat last year’s time in the bike leg, Darryl’s body begins shifting resources to his overtaxed muscles and is unable to cope with his extreme fluid loss. Race day has remained scaldingly hot. His blood volume starts to decrease; adjusting, his body wants to trim the blood flow to his engorged muscles, but it overrides that instinct and forces instead a reduction of blood to his stomach, which begins to cramp. A vicious circle is developing. Since his stomach can’t process fluids efficiently, his blood distribution decreases and the large muscles in his legs are not refreshed as effectively as they should be. This causes metabolic products such as lactic acid to begin building in his thighs, which start to cramp as well. Also contributing to the cramping is the awkward way he must position his huge bulk on a tiny bike seat. Several times in the first 20 miles after the turnaround, Darryl shudders to a stop, gets off his bike, and massages and works his legs. To keep the Ironman both manageable and safe, cutoff times have been established, and all racers must reach the bike finish line within ten and a half hours after the race begins or they are not allowed to continue. Last year he nicked in under this time by only four minutes. If he can’t overcome the cramps and make up lost time, the margin this year will be even narrower.

Say he does make it. That he skips one water station and blows through on his bike, opening the slim window he’ll use to clear the bike cutoff. Then he’ll head back onto the course, jogging a few yards, walking a few. The pace will alternate until, by the 15th hour of the race, he’ll abandon jogging altogether and simply walk for two hours, pushing himself up hills and stumbling down their far side. The crowds lining the course will start chanting “Darryl, Darryl,” as they did last year, and Shiba will be waiting at the finish, not knowing where her husband is until he can be seen cresting the top of Ali’i Drive and loping clumsily toward her, and she’ll dissolve into tears and begin leaping up and down as he reaches her and she vanishes within his hug, and the whole scene will be caught in dramatic slow motion by NBC and replayed with some gauzy New Age score behind it. At the chaos of the finish loudspeakers will blare out pop songs and an announcer will shout out the triathletes’ names and their hometowns and a snippet of personal story, like the finisher is a veterinarian, perhaps.

After ducking behind the pylons and into the showers, Darryl will emerge, still damp and walking carefully. He’ll move to the sodium-lighted finish area and begin hugging racers as they cross the line, draping first a pair of meaty arms and then a lei of palm fronds around their necks. “Hey!” the announcer will shout. “There’s the big man, Darryl Haley, the Ironman, helping bring our runners home! Congratulations Darryl!” Darryl will smile humbly and thank the announcer and then, responding to their endless calls, wave again and again to the crowd.

Q: Honestly Darryl, what’s the very highest you can ever hope to finish in a triathlon?

A: Top ten. That’s a fact. I look at what I do at twice the size of any competitor and I look at the times they’re doing. They can’t get any faster. But if I work and work, I can get faster. So I’m not stopping until I hit top ten.

Q: You have to say that, and perhaps even believe that, to help motivate yourself. But it really isn’t possible, is it?

A: It is possible. Mentally and physically I’m going to make it happen. Look at it this way: I’ve got nowhere to go but up.

Say he doesn’t make it. That the few extra minutes that trickled away as he was shaking off cramps put him just moments past the bike cutoff time, and that when he climbs the last small hill and bursts into the carpeted bike transition area the large digital race clock has ticked a few ticks too many, and none of the spectators will look Darryl full in the eye. Then he’ll stagger over to an official and gasp out, “Did I make it?” When the truth hits, his eyes will fill and tears will flow down his face, mixing with salty-white trickles of sweat. He’ll be joined by other athletes who hug him consolingly under the glare of the NBC cameras, and then the inevitable reporters will creep up and ask what happened, and Darryl will explain the cramps and the lactic buildup and then, polished at this from his days in the NFL, make a gracious exit.

He’ll shower, alone in the tent, the other racers long since moved on. Standing under the full spray, his eyes closed and mouth open, he’ll ready his speeches, forming an edited version of his emotions in phrases so perfectly couched that they could be the work of a speechwriter and internalized enough that for the remaining days I’m with him the quotations will never change, not even by a word, no matter what audience he is facing. In the quiet murk of the tent Darryl will dress slowly, and when he finally emerges he’ll have a humble smile for the gathered crowd. “Sometimes you just have to go for it,” he’ll tell a camera. “And I’m happy I did. This is only going to help with everything.”

On the final night of the Ironman weekend is the awards ceremony, for which everyone dresses in coats and ties and slinky gowns; after several days of seeing them wearing next to nothing, the formal wear conspires to make them look faintly ridiculous, like a chihuahua wearing long pants. A JumboTron video screen shows bits of the race just past and more from races in previous years. Darryl and his family have been seated with the professionals and the VIPs, at a table next to Allen and Newby-Fraser and Scott Tinley and Mike Pigg–the marquee names of the triathlon world. Although triathlon is now pretty big business, the money being doled out to athletes is still relatively minor. About the only people making a comfortable living from just their racing–an income, say, in the low six figures–are the handful of racers sitting near Darryl. As a moneymaker, Darryl is already nipping at some of his neighbor’s heels. “If anyone can become a cottage industry from participating in the Ironman, Darryl can,” Rob Perry, the advertising director, explained when I asked him about Darryl’s prospects. “He’s very personable, very smart, the companies love him–everyone loves him. There’s no reason why, simply by participating in this race, that five years from now Darryl can’t be the best-known Ironman in the world. Which he can then use to move into fitness consulting or nutrition programs or infomercials. If anyone has that type of potential, Darryl does.”

Q: Darryl, do you think you’ve gotten this far mostly because of the way you look?

A: Yeah, that’s probably true. But I’ve been given certain abilities to use as a platform to promote the sport, to deflate stereotypes, to sow some cross-cultural education. So yes, I attract attention because I’m black, where all the other triathletes are white, and I’m big, where all the other triathletes are small. But what I choose to do with this attention, the good I can bring from it–well, that’s a different story.

At one point in the evening Darryl is brought onstage to thunderous applause–the audience recognizing his effort–and the video-projection clip backdropping the stage shows him pedaling away on the course, waving to the camera. Shiba sits at the table, smiling bemusedly. When this is all over she and Rene will head back to Maryland, where she manages gospel singers and bands. Once offstage, Darryl works the room, plopping himself down at a table of triathletes from Japan. He nods uncertainly as they speak Japanese and broken English, and sits there getting pawed. By the time he leaves the group, he’s secured a freebie plane ticket to Tokyo, a starting slot in the Ironman Japan, and several places to stay.

Maybe it really doesn’t matter when Darryl finished the Ironman, or whether he finished at all. The sponsors who are currently working with him, and those who hope to work with him in the future, wish to do so not because he’s succeeding, but simply because he’s participating. When I asked an Ironman marketer about this, he suggested that Darryl’s appeal is likely to grow regardless of his performance: “Usually if an athlete doesn’t win or do well, the coverage drops and the sponsorship drops. In Darryl’s case, he has more staying power. He attracts attention, and sponsors like that attention. If he struggles, it only makes him more human and identifiable to a larger number of people. In many ways, he’s the future of triathloning.” Darryl himself declined to acknowledge this line of reasoning before the race began. He felt a real pressure to succeed and had never not finished any of the 12 races he’s entered.

Out on the bike course, while he was a little more than a mile from the finish, Darryl felt certain that he could make it–that he had to make it. There were so many people not to disappoint. Shiba was waiting for him at the marathon’s finish line, as were Rene and Phil. During the week, dozens of people had approached Darryl to wish him luck and explain that they came all this way solely because they wanted to see him compete. NBC had been filming him. And I was here, too. “I’m very aware of the value that being in ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø will bring to me,” he told me shortly after we met. “I want to do well.”

Darryl had about two minutes left. He could see the bike finish area. The cramps had returned, but if he could ignore them and just make it across the line in time, he’d have a moment to get a quick rub and take some soup before he began the 26.2-mile marathon, which he could complete by managing a fast walk. He was closing quickly and the crowd was screaming and Darryl hunched over his bike and pedaled. It was going to be very close. He began tallying the two minutes he lost when he stopped to use the bathroom, the extra minute he spent adjusting his shoes. He looked up briefly at the course and gauged his sprint and put his head down, and he was pedaling hard enough that you could hear him grunting and the components of the overburdened bike creaking and the large crowd yelling for him to hurry, you can make it–sure he can, he’s almost there–and Darryl was thinking that he might not make it, but maybe if he pushed he just might; and through it all–and this was probably a symptom of pain or exhaustion, surely not joy–he was smiling again.

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Not having been forewarned about this collection, I stand gaping at the wildlife until Lee appears, at which point my gape shifts to him. Harry Lee, 63, is the longtime sheriff of Jefferson Parish, a long, narrow county a few minutes west of New Orleans that runs from Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico. Six feet tall, he carries 320 pounds of personal bulk with a surprising nimbleness, is a first-generation Chinese-American, and looks like an older and sunnier version of Oddjob, James Bond’s hat-wielding nemesis in Goldfinger. “How yawl?” is how he greets me.

I’m in Lee’s Metarie office because of an animal he’s been hunting recently, although I fail to find this particular specimen on site. Word has it that Jefferson Parish is under invasion from many thousands of large, furred, burrowing aquatic rodents known as nutrias, which are said to be inflicting millions of dollars of damage on the levees and drainage canals that help keep the whole thing from going underwater. Last year, Lee cracked beneath this pestilence and, like Buford Pusser, started taking matters into his own justice-dispensing hands. What he’d done, it seems, was send his Special Weapons and Tactics team to conduct search-and-destroy missions in the parish’s quiet neighborhoods, even joining the nocturnal hunts, armed with a laser-scoped rifle.

Now, in late March, the hostilities have escalated dramatically. After several months of nutria recon and tactical experiments, Lee is in the midst of a huge offensive, a rodenty Tet, to knock the nutria population back down to acceptable levels. For the last several weeks, his hit squads were idle, occupied with Mardi Gras and its attendant criminality. The nutrias, emboldened by this cease-fire, seized the opportunity to resume their vandalistic outrages with cocky vigor, mowing vegetation from the banks of the parish’s 270 miles of drainage canals and then burrowing repeatedly into the denuded berms.

The holiday has ended, though, so Lee and 20 SWAT-team marksmen are again patrolling the canals in the predawn hours, looking to kill every one of the raccoon-sized rodents they see.

“Listen,” Lee says, as he eases himself onto a couch, shoving aside Cabela’s catalogs and boxes of ammunition, “if we had a rabid dog out in the neighborhood, it would be my duty to go out and get that dog. That’s the position I find myself in now. These things are threatening the parish, and in my simple way of thinking this is the most cost-effective way of addressing it.”

Lee gestures toward his SWAT team leader, Tom Rushing, a rugged-looking major in his forties who has been showing me around. “I said to Tom, ‘Listen, we can do this. If we got the guys that can shoot humans, we got the guys that can shoot nutria.’ We’re very serious with this.”

Major Rushing turns to me. “In other words,” he says, “we’re not a bunch of yay-hoos with .22 rifles and a six-pack in the back of a pickup truck.”

It’s hard not to like Rushing. He’s languidly self-assured and speaks with the engagingly overprecise diction of law-enforcement lifers. (The next night, commenting on a wounded nutria that struggles valiantly to escape, he’ll announce, “That is a singularly motivated nutria. However, there is a good possibility that he has expired.”) Rushing has become the sheriff’s nutria expert, and he embraces the many ironic pleasures of the role–a few weeks ago, for example, he gave Lee a luxuriant coat fashioned from nutria fur.

“Constructed,” he explains, “from 20 very large nutria.”

The state’s 30 million nutrias trace back to an original 13 rodents imported from Argentina in 1937 by Tabasco tycoon E. A. McIlhenny. His motives remain a mystery. As an amateur naturalist and a professional capitalist, he hoped either to diversify the wildlife in Louisiana’s swamps for his own obscure scientific reasons or, more likely, to undercut the then-profitable muskrat-fur market with nutria pelts, in which he would have a monopoly. Whatever the case, in 1940 a storm bashed apart McIlhenny’s nutria cages, and the rodents were loosed on the bayou, where they became known to the Cajuns as le rat Ned–after McIlhenny’s nickname, Mr. Ned–and propagated with staggering success. (Over 16 months, a single female and her progeny can produce more than 150 nutrias.) The ever-growing horde was kept somewhat in check through trapping, but in the mideighties the fur market collapsed, trappers stopped taking nutrias, and their numbers exploded.

The nutria is an odd farrago, with a beaverlike hide and gouging teeth, a round, pink thumb of a tail, and vacant eyes. “He either a cute little animal or a ugly little animal, depend on which way you look at him,” Lee explains. “You look at it from the side, he ain’t too bad. You look at it dead on, he’s an ugly little sucker. What happens is he grows up to anywhere from 18 to 25 pounds, and then all he wants to do is eat and screw. And that’s OK, until he start to eat away at my canals.”

While Lee’s guerrilla operation may seem swollen with cruelty, there’s little argument that nutrias are a serious problem. The afternoon before my field trip with Lee, I meet with Marnie Winter, the parish’s beleaguered, willowy environmental director. A conga line of nutria skulls fringes Winter’s window, ending at framed photos of her two sons. Situations like rodent infestation fall to her by default. Last year, when the drainage department began tallying the harm that the burrowing rodents were causing to the canals and the figure reached more than $8 million, Winter was called in.

By official estimates, some 10,000 nutrias have immigrated to Jefferson Parish over the last few years. Others peg the population at closer to 100,000. Having advanced from the bayou–where their numbers are also causing havoc, including great “eat outs” of swamp firmament and thus wildlife habitat–the nutrias have rapidly honeycombed beneath the parish’s roadways and along its canals. This being floodplain territory, residents are obsessive about both drainage and escape routes. Furthermore, the nutrias have become increasingly bold, reportedly attacking dogs and in one instance confronting a parish councilman, Willard-like, as he bent to retrieve his morning paper. “They just sat on it, staring at me,” he told a reporter.

At various times last year, Winter debated having the canals lined with concrete (at a projected cost of $750 million, this idea did not last long) and experimenting with gnaw-resistant ground covers. She also considered working with state wildlife officials, whose solution involved increasing nutrias’ value to trappers by creating a market. “We could sell millions of pounds of meat to African nations,” one official told me. Nutria coats are also being promoted by the state, with limited success. Maison Blanche, a swanky department store, recently offered a selection of such coats–dyed in nutria-masking reds and purples. None sold.

To Winter, a better tactic was to curb the nutria population itself. Various methods were discussed in parish council meetings and, more heatedly, in the media: tiny nooses to trap and drown the rodents as they crawled out of their holes, floating barges piled with poisoned sweet potatoes, gassing, and finally shooting.

“The animal-rights groups started sending me all sorts of proposals on how not to kill the nutria,” Winter says. The idiocy of these suggestions tended to undercut their moral authority. One group claimed that nutrias could be frightened away simply by lining the canals with giant xenon strobes. “Of course,” the author noted helpfully, “their effect on motorists would have to be considered.” Another suggestion was to hire a person to roam the canals, shooing nutrias away with “a focusable noise gun” or deploying “specially trained harassment dogs.”

“It amazed me that people who don’t have a problem with rat control were bothered by this,” says Winter, who admits to some sympathetic qualms about Lee’s wholesale rub-outs. “I guess it’s a size thing. You reach a certain size, pet size, and they get all upset.” Winter was resigned to a long, possibly futile process of studies, state contracts, and more studies when Sheriff Lee abruptly stood up in a council meeting last spring and volunteered to go out and just kill the things himself.

“A lot of people laughed and thought it was a joke,” Winter says. “I know Sheriff Lee, and I knew it wasn’t a joke. Course, it wasn’t until later, when I saw his animal collection, that it actually made a little sense.”

Back in Sheriff Lee’s office is a wall of fame, among the most impressive I’ve ever seen, and I waste the better part of an afternoon studying it. Lee grew up in New Orleans, where he toiled in the family restaurant for a time before escaping to law school and then to a federal magistrate position. Finally, in 1979, he was elected to the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s office. Sheriffing proved to be Lee’s forte, his forcible personality and iron-hard crime stance drawing 80 percent approval ratings, national attention, and periodic allegations of police brutality. Lee is a statewide celebrity now, evidenced by the grip-and-grins covering his wall. There are shots of Lee in the clutches of Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Gerald Ford, and rascally former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards; of him eating fried chicken with Tip O’Neill, hugging John Glenn, Walter Mondale, Al Haig. Celebrities receive equal time on an opposite wall, where Lee sings with Willie Nelson, hunts with Steven Seagal, and chums around with Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Dennis Hopper, and a very young John Travolta. There are certificates of appreciation, honorary plaques, assorted kudos, all detailing 16 years as possibly the best-known pol in the state.

“Sheriff Lee is the most natural politician in the country,” boasts his press officer, the wonderfully named Johnny Fortunato. “He’s got more stroke than Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George Bush combined.”

The budget for Lee’s department is $65 million annually. His professional plate brims with murders, drugs, robberies; he supervises 1,450 people. When he holds his birthday fais do do, also a fund-raiser for his political war chest, 5,000 revelers pay $100 each to spoon jambalaya alongside the sheriff. With his obvious star status, I have to wonder: What’s he doing driving around in the middle of the night blasting rodents?

“If there was some way I could become a Pied Piper and lead them back to the swamp and leave them there, I’d do it,” he says. “But if I let it go, sooner or later the nutria will overrun everything and some child will get hurt and the headline will go, WHY DIDN’T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS?”

An assonance among many big men is their ease-making skill, and Lee plays this note expertly. He’s endlessly engaging and matter-of-factly certain of his own common sense. Explaining why, last October, he abandoned his red-hot gubernatorial bid–in the Democratic primary, Lee had moved from the middle of the pack in a field of 13 to second place–he says, “I just realized I didn’t really want the governorship. Some people were upset, but that was my decision.

“I guess in this little part of the United States, I’m the closest thing there is to being a king,” Lee says. “The only one looking over my shoulder is the voter. What I like most about this job is the autonomy. Like with the nutria thing. As you can see, I hunted all my life. I knew what a .22 bullet can do. I knew that they would kill the things. I knew that they’re inexpensive. I knew I could schedule our people to address the problem. And I just went ahead and did it. It’s not really the nutria’s fault. They just a problem. And even as ugly as it is, I don’t have any personal dislike for a nutria. Course, I don’t have any love for a nutria. Although…here, let me show you something.”

Lee returns with his fur coat–Rushing’s present, a shimmery curtain of nutria. “When I first saw this, I thought it was artificial. It is so soft. I mean, a nutria’s an ugly little son of a bitch, but that’s a beautiful coat. Just beautiful.”

He pets the coat.

After several near-misses, I finally connect with the man who is doing all he can–which, admittedly, is not much–to stop Lee’s nutria jihad: animal-rights activist Jeff Dorson, who meets me in the lobby of the Jefferson Parish administration building. He’s a bendable reed of a man, 38 years old, breathy and seriously mussed, though smartly turned out in blue blazer, tan slacks, and rep tie. Seven years ago, while living in Minneapolis and working as a tennis instructor, Dorson awoke one day and “came to the sudden realization that animals are very precious.” Sensing in this epiphany that the number of potentially imperiled creatures would be highest in the Deep South, Dorson and his wife hied it to New Orleans and started Legislation in Support of Animals, which together with other animal-rights groups voices displeasure about the parish’s eradication efforts. While reading up on the situation I also ran across a group called the Nutria Liberation Army, a discovery that offered the exciting prospect of seventies-style armed radicals, but it turned out to be a joke by a local newspaper columnist. Major Rushing seemed as disappointed as I was by the NLA’s nonexistence.

“Really?” he said, when I gave him the news. “That’s too bad. However, it did seem a little unusual for Louisiana.”

Since I have yet to see a nutria, I ask Dorson if he’ll help me find one. As we cruise the parish in my rental car, he describes Jack Sprat’s, the vegetarian restaurant he started two years ago. “We wanted to expose people down here to good, flavorful vegetarian food, but it’s not doing well,” Dorson says. “This is big meat country. But when it takes off, we’ve got great franchising possibilities with our character, Jack Sprat. You know, provide an alternative to that awful Ronald McDonald.”

I park the car and, while walking along a roadside canal, get Dorson talking about the protest groups’ opinion of the nutria. Dorson hands me a booklet called “About Nutria and Their Control,” which presents a rodent that is far more benign than the one I’ve heard described. In it, cartoon nutrias dress up in hats, ride about in cars, and throw birthday parties for each other.

“Nutria are very cute, with darling orange teeth,” he says as we stalk along. “They’re playful, always in twos or threes, very sociable.” I mention their ratty mien.

“Well, I like them,” he says.

It turns cold. We pace alongside the canal, which forms a brackish median for six lanes of buzzing traffic. Dorson is very thin, and he hugs himself for warmth. When we come to a nutria burrow, he pokes it with his black loafers. “They really don’t do that much harm,” he says, referring to the hole. “I can live with that.” As it happens, this is the protesters’ current stand on the issue. At first, when the parish floated the idea of trapping or poisoning the nutrias, these groups hurriedly claimed that the canals held no nutrias. Later they admitted the animal’s presence but disputed the damage being caused. Now they admit to the damage but insist that the parish is cooking the dollar figures involved. “I’m not sure that there is all that much to it,” Dorson says. “It’s become politicized.”

Obviously, we aren’t going to see any nutrias here. It’s too brisk, too noisy, too windy for them. Dorson grimly marches on, however, his wispy hair whirlpooling in the wind and his eyes tearing. We start talking about Sheriff Lee, and I tell him about the nutria coat. Bad idea. “This is a joke to him?” he asks, suddenly furious. “Something funny?”

He launches into a “living things” speech. I listen, but not really, because just then I spot a dead nutria floating in the canal–a casualty, most likely, of an earlier hunt. I hope Dorson doesn’t see it; his fragility is shiny and near, and I fear a meltdown. He’s muttering something about “Chinese-American rednecks.”

“That’s…that’s…that’s what it’s like down here,” he says, struggling for footing on the canal’s steep banks. “Every day, I’m surrounded by every violence possible against animals. Slaughterhouses, hunting, animal testing… It’s, it’s, it’s… Why can’t we learn to be a kinder species? Why can’t we live peaceably with the wildlife? Why can’t we all just get along?”

Yikes.

Twenty-three hundred hours. A Dunkin Donuts on Veteran’s Memorial Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare paralleling the Mississippi River. Members of the parish SWAT team congregate inside, variously dressed in camouflage or serious-looking black coveralls, with weapons belts and walkie-talkies attached. Soon 20 officers are present, drinking free coffee and eating free donuts.

“Damn cold out. We going to freeze our asses.”
“You seen the sheriff’s nu-tra coat?”

“He the Mecca of nu-tra in that thing. He come out in it and they all rush round him, worshiping.”

“Maybe he could just march ’em back to the swamp.”

Sheriff Lee arrives, wearing an insulated black jumpsuit and bright orange hunting cap. “Hey, there they are, the varmint killers,” he says.

A waitress rushes up with coffee as Lee finds a stool. “You got any of them cremes tonight? Bring me a couple, will you?” We wait while Lee eats his donuts, orders a third, finishes his coffee. “You be careful out there now,” the waitress tells Lee as he leaves.

“Don’t let one bite you, you’ll get hep’titis.”

“Don’t you worry none.”

Tonight, part of the squad will work the canals west of the Mississippi while the rest patrols the eastern side of the parish. Sheriff Lee, Major Rushing, and a few others plan on venturing into Kenner, a city within parish boundaries that has been suffering particularly severe damage. A while ago, citizens there asked the police chief to shoot the nutrias. “My men are not in the extermination business,” Kenner’s chief sniffed to the local paper. Lee ignored the jab, saying that if Kenner wanted its nutrias shot, he’d be happy to have his team do it.

We form a caravan with a squad car in front, then a flatbed truck, Lee’s car, and finally a truck from the drainage department. “We tried it on foot for a while,” says Major Rushing. “But it is just like Patton’s theory–strike quickly and move.” I climb into the flatbed with Rushing and a SWAT sharpshooter; these two will be doing the shooting, along with the truck’s driver, who fires from his window. Another officer rides atop the truck’s cab, working a high-power spotlight across the canal banks and the water’s surface.

Once in Kenner, we pull off the road and creep along at five miles per hour, past trailer homes and the Airline Adult Bookstore. It’s still unseasonably cool, which will keep the nutrias sluggish and might affect the number of kills. Last week’s shoot, the first full assault after Mardi Gras, reduced the local population by 440. Rushing predicts half that number tonight.

A long time passes before we even see a nutria, though. Canals lead past a clutch of low-income apartments called Chardonnay Village, through an industrial park, even onto a commercial drag lighted with a Wal-Mart and chain restaurants. The shooters, bored, discuss the vagaries of rifles and ammunition. You using that German round? No, Remington subsonic. Matched grain? And on.

Then, as if a gate has been swung, the nutrias appear. First singly. Then in pairs. Then whole churlish batches of them, a dark cabal slicing through the water, visible beneath a full moon.

“Here comes one, Jack.”

Bang.

“Oh, ouch.”

“Over there.”

Bang bang.

“Against the bank. Other side. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. That one goes 20 pounds, easy.”

Bang bang bang bang.

“Check the ripples. There it is, hold it. Good shot, good shot. Who got that one?”

Spent cartridges plink to the bed of the truck. The caravan is a riot of activity. Rushing shouts instructions to the driver, the spotlight officer, the shooters. Dogs are barking throughout the neighborhood. When hit, a nutria launches itself in a frenzied twist, like a hooked trout dancing across the river on its tail, before collapsing in the water. Many of them are stilled with one shot, but dozens of others take ugly multiple hits, feral squeals erupting as they try to flee.

“A whole family!”

“Pull up, pull up, pull up.”

“Right there.”

Bang bang bang bang bang bang.

“There’s another bunch.”

“Talk about a target-rich environment.”

It proceeds this way for several hours: the slow careful crawl, scrambled shooting, then the furred carcasses being pitchforked from the canals by drainage workers in chest-high waders. At one point a worker slips, plunging into the freezing water. Sputtering, soaked, and cursing, he’s hauled away to change clothes. For an hour there is no corpse retrieval. The many dead nutrias simply float away, a grisly spectacle that draws barely a comment from the shooters. They, in fact, seem divorced from their work, exhibiting only rare shards of excitement for the tricky marksmanship involved–as if they’re spending a few hours practicing on an especially challenging range.

We roll through Kenner until two in the morning and then take a rest break at a neon-bright convenience mart. Lee chats pleasantly with the female sales clerk and then peels off dollars for snacks. As he sits in his truck, a young officer approaches with a pen and scrap of paper.

“What’s up?” Lee asks, removing a candy bar from his mouth. “She wants your autograph,” the officer says, indicating the sales clerk. “What’s her name?” Lee says. The officer spells it, and Lee signs: “To Nuria, Your friend, Harry Lee.” He studies the woman’s name. “Damn, that’s just like nutria. Tell her she needs a t in there.”

Lee brushes crumbs from his mouth and begins zipping his coat. “OK,” he says. “I think I’m ready to shoot me some.”

Eager for a less violent view of nutrias, I head to the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. A chipper, friendly employee named Debbie Pearson walks me through the park. I recognize parts of it from the movie Cat People, which was filmed here and which includes a satisfying scene wherein Ed Begley Jr. gets his arm ripped off by a leopard. “They made the whole place look medieval, very spooky,” says Pearson. We move into an ersatz swamp that features a tumbledown swamp shack, an upturned skiff, and the air of a hurriedly abandoned moonshine operation. “It’s very realistic, isn’t it?” she asks.

One of the shacks actually houses the reptile exhibit and a makeshift nursery for infant nutrias, which eventually will be displayed in a modest exhibit nearby. Inside is a large tin trough, filled with hay and warmed by heat lamps. Tucked within this nest is a pair of three-week-old nutrias. Heather Parker, a young staff member, plucks one out. The infant nutria is the size of her closed fist. Its large, webbed rear feet cling frightenedly to her sleeve, and it mews when I raise its front legs for inspection. They are long and slender, with dark curved claws–excavation tools. “Here, look at this,” Parker says, using a thumb to peel back the nutria’s upper lip, exposing orange, chisel-like teeth.

Parker proceeds to describe nutria husbandry, their capacity for domestication and play, all the while affectionately stroking the baby’s coat while it tries to bury itself in the crook of her elbow. I watch this cute display awhile, before becoming aware of a deep thunk, thunk, thunk echoing from a back room: Nutrias, casualties of Sheriff Lee’s war, are being quartered for feeding to the alligators.

“We’re having a hard time with this batch,” says a staffer. With a long blade she skims the fur from a pinkened carcass; then she switches to a meat cleaver and lops off head, feet, tail. The pelt is tossed into the trash. “Usually the bullets just fall out of them during skinning, ding, ding,” she says. “And they just have head shots, normally. But this batch is riddled, four or five slugs in them each.” She looks at me, puzzled.

“Well, the sheriff was shooting last night,” I offer.

“Oh. OK.”

A bloody plate of nutria chunks in her hand, Parker climbs into the alligator exhibit. She stands on a log bridged across the water, and for a few moments nothing moves. Then a pair of alligators silently glides beneath the log, and one of them launches itself at her feet. “Hey!” she says, jumping back. Both the alligators are albinos, rarities for which the zoo is famous. They are wrenchingly beautiful, paper-white skin luminous from a recent scrubbing by zoo staff. Parker sticks a piece of meat on the end of a long pole and waves it over the water while the alligators scramble after it. She briefly teases them like this before lowering the meat to be gobbled.

“We could feed the nutrias to them whole, skin and all,” Debbie Pearson says. “The alligators love that. But we decided it would be upsetting to zoo visitors.” She throws monkey chow to some penned nutrias and leads me from the zoo.

As I mentioned to Parker, Sheriff Lee finally got around to shooting. Borrowing a rifle from one of his men, he laboriously climbed onto the back of the flatbed, which canted about 15 degrees to port. With his black jumpsuit and formidable girth, he was Brando as Kurtz, bunkered-in 40 clicks upriver, awaiting the watery emergence of personal justice. His first few shots sailed high; then, overcorrecting, he fired below the nutrias; the sights on the gun giving him trouble. Soon, however, he found the range, the rodents barely skittering into the search beam before Lee ended their lives. When the night was done, Lee and his men had tallied their 2,000th nutria overall, a fifth of the parish population if you accept the conservative estimate of their numbers.

Late in the night we ended up on the edge of a country club development, Chateau Estates, with $300,000 homes nosed up to the banks of the canal. “Don’t the people in these homes get upset with gunfire this near to them?” I asked Danny Russo, one of the sheriff’s men.

“Ah, no,” he said. “These are the first people to complain when the nutria get in their yards. They got those pricey little dogs. Yippy ones. They get killed or bit, they’d be up in arms.”

Russo often seconds Lee on his hunts, and we talked about those for a while: the time Lee got the zebras, the cougar hunt, gatoring with Steven Seagal. I was still curious about overlap, about whether Russo thought any of those experiences informed tonight’s activities, if Lee hadn’t perhaps internalized this nutria thing a bit too much.

“You know, there is no hatred between the hunter and the animal,” Russo said. “Most animals we hunt, you listen to the sheriff talk about these animals and he talks about the beauty of them and all this kind of stuff and it’s a sport like anything else. When you’re in a very stressful job, like the sheriff’s job, hunting and fishing is the greatest relaxation there is.”

So he doesn’t think the sheriff hates nutrias?

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t think so.”

So what was all this?

“This here? This is just killing.”

The post Stalking Tall appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

On the morning when the fair-market value for the world’s finest unassembled real-bone Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton was to be established, Frederick J. Nuss, owner of what is arguably the world’s second-finest real-bone T. rex, was in line outside Sotheby’s auction house in midtown Manhattan, waiting to get inside. He wore a black tie with a dinosaur running down its length, and he smiled at the people waiting with him in the warm fall sun—an engaging smile dimmed not in the least by the absence of several front teeth. As a commercial fossil dealer, Nuss possessed a strong professional curiosity about this day’s auction, yet he was even more keenly interested from a fiduciary standpoint. For the past five years Nuss had been offering for sale his own dinosaur, a skeleton discovered in South Dakota in 1992 and dubbed Z. rex. Despite its being for much of that time the only such specimen on the open market, he had received few credible offers, and none even remotely approaching his $10 million asking price. This state of affairs was frankly both puzzling and annoying to Nuss and his business partner, Alan Detrich. They felt that their markup was reasonable. (“$10 million is a giveaway price,” Detrich told me when I first encountered the two men several years ago.) They could also claim a roster of distinguished and satisfied customers, including the actor Charlie Sheen, who purchased for his personal use a 70-million-year-old mosasaur skull, for which he was charged $30,000. “A very good amount, and Charlie was quite pleased,” Detrich explained. Hollywood actors aren’t really the core market for T. rexes, however, and Nuss’s trophy T. rex had sadly gone buyerless, despite nibbles from several large foreign corporations and a few stateside museums. The problem was, no one really knew how much a T. rex was worth, since the few that had changed hands did so casually, between museums, decades ago. Nuss hoped that this October auction, the first commercial sale ever of a fossil T. rex (only 22 of which have been found) would prime the sales pump and set a high market price. Although Sotheby’s estimate for the item was “in excess of $1 million,” Nuss and the people he’d brought with him from his offices in Otis, Kansas, scoffed at the amount. In their pre-sale betting pool, Nuss had wagered that the bones would fetch a million dollars times ten—not coincidentally the same price he still hoped to obtain for his own T. rex—and he repeated this number aloud several times while we filed into the building and found our seats on the sales floor.

A capacity crowd of about 300 directed its attention toward the front of the room, where both an auctioneer’s lectern and part of the object for sale at the auction—its skull—were situated. Arrayed along the sides and back of the room were many dozen members of the media, and behind them, in lighted glass display cases, were arranged additional portions of the offered item: the femurs and vertebrae and other bones from a 90-percent-complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, mostly still in dirt-packed slabs and shrouded with plaster forms and aluminum foil. In other words, in more or less the same state it had been in when a 38-year-old commercial fossil dealer named Peter Larson wrenched it from a South Dakota hillside in late 1990. The Sotheby’s auctioneer stepped up to the lectern. “We announce this at every auction,” he declared in a clipped British accent, “but today the warning is especially apt. All items are sold as is.” Most everyone laughed.
The bidding started at half a million dollars and progressed quickly, growing more rapid as the amounts spiraled upward. When each million-dollar threshold was reached, Nuss and his team let out a polite whoop and then sat back giggling while the hundreds of thousands flew by. After stalling at $5 million for a brief, suspenseful moment, the bids hummed along until the selling price reached $8.36 million, whereupon the gavel came down. A few minutes later a spokesman for the pleased buyer, Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, stepped forward to read a long prepared statement. It was revealed that the museum was operating as part of a syndicate whose members included the McDonald’s and Disney corporations; the Field Museum’s president acknowledged plans to eventually send a full-size replica of the T. rex to Disney World, where it would pimp for Mickey Mouse in a newly created attraction to be called DinoLand USA; two additional replicas were to be sent around the world on behalf of that latter-day carnivore, the McDonald’s Corporation. The crowd of paleontologists and science journalists greeted the news by erupting with laughter again.


As the press conference was winding down, one young Nuss associate clambered over some chairs to reach Nuss and explained that he was endeavoring to get a list of the failed bidders’ names. Nuss looked puzzled. Speaking more slowly, the young man continued, “We’re getting the names of everyone in the country who wanted to spend millions on a T. rex and weren’t able to. People who might still want to buy a T. rex. Like, maybe ours? Is this ringing any bells for you?” Nuss, who gave signs of being a little flustered by all the disposable cash floating in the air, finally got it, and the two began pulling eight-by-ten glossies of their rampant dinosaur from a binder, preparing to hustle off in search of customers. Before they scattered, however, Nuss’s colleagues discussed a rumor that had traveled the floor earlier. It was said that one of the losing bidders for the bones was pop star Michael Jackson, who had famously attempted to acquire the bones of the Englishman John Merrick, the Elephant Man. “Maybe he’s starting a collection,” someone ventured, which led to a dialogue among the Kansans regarding how one might get in touch with Jackson. “We should find that out,” someone else declared, to general agreement.

At this same moment, at the precise instant when the bones he had unearthed passed into the open arms of the Field Museum and McDonald’s and Disney, Pete Larson was dutifully honoring the terms of his parole by staying within 50 yards of his place of business, the Black Hills Institute, which is headquartered in a converted gymnasium on the quiet main street of a town named Hill City, in western South Dakota. The restrictions were strict, forbidding Larson from wandering even across the street to the Mardi Gras restaurant, there to get his favorite lunch of a Deluxe T-Rex Burger and fries.


He was able to monitor his loss by cellular phone, however, receiving mournful calls placed by his wife and others from the floor of Sotheby’s. It was the end of a painful chapter, really. Over the last five years Larson had been the tattered bird in an unusually surly game of badminton, first harshly bad-mouthed by an academic community resentful of the growing power of commercial collectors, then bopped again by the federal government, which has been known to lash out when it suspects someone of quarrying profitable bones from public lands. And now it had come to this. In the beginning, no one had had any reason to be anything but overjoyed. The affair had started on a fateful August day in 1990, when a member of Larson’s small team of commercial collectors was reconnoitering a vacant butte in the South Dakota badlands and spotted a fossilized femur poking through the earth’s flesh. After a preliminary investigation, Larson jotted out a $5,000 check to the bemused landowner, who’d casually given permission for the group to wander around his land, and over the next few weeks the team pulled from the ground the nicest T. rex ever discovered, which they named Sue after the team member who found it. Within a few weeks, however, the possibility that this might be something of value occurred to the landowner, an unprosperous Cheyenne River Sioux rancher named Maurice Williams, who wisely decided that he had not granted permission or made a sale after all. Eventually, the courts awarded ownership of the T. rex to Williams. (During the Sotheby’s auction, Williams could be seen in a plush office overlooking the sales floor, drinking champagne and dancing dreamily as the magical millions rolled in.)
In the months following Sue’s excavation, however, Larson had proceeded under the assumption that he was its rightful owner and began lovingly preparing the fossil. This painstaking work was interrupted one dawn with the surprising arrival of 39 armed FBI agents and national guardsmen, who seized the crates containing Sue and spirited them off in a convoy of camouflage-painted trucks, with Larson and a fair number of the Hill City citizenry chasing after them in their pajamas, wondering what the heck was going on. By the time the resulting legal battles were over, BHI was virtually bankrupt, Williams had been granted the right to sell Sue (after much debate as to whether his land was actually his or belonged to an adjacent Sioux Indian Reservation), and Larson had been tossed into jail, convicted of two seemingly negligible crimes that actually involved the overseas sale of some other fossils (although the facts of the case had been shaken loose during the course of the Sue investigation). In a press conference staged on May 14, 1992, the day of Sue’s seizure, the U.S. attorney in South Dakota announced for the cameras that his motive for calling in the FBI was the fear that Sue had been kidnapped from public land. He soon added that he also acted to prevent South Dakota’s precious paleontological specimens from falling into grubby commercial hands, a statement that gained some irony in light of subsequent events.


Even so, by the time the auction rolled around, Larson was in a forgiving mood. While locked in his cell for 18 months in a minimum security prison in Florence, Colorado, he’d had time to reflect on events, and he’d reached that stage that convicts sometimes reach, where the most logical next step is to just make the best of things and not dwell on the past. In a phone conversation a few days before the auction, he explained to me that, in a gesture of good faith, he’d helped Sotheby’s prepare its materials for the auction, and in return he was allowed to publish a somewhat plaintive request—it was included in the auction catalog—that BHI be retained by the buyer to finish preparing Sue. The $500,000 such a consulting contract would provide was sorely needed by the firm, which was still reeling financially from Larson’s legal bill (more irony) in excess of $1 million.


Unlike Fred Nuss, Larson had felt that Sotheby’s estimate was overly optimistic, and he’d somehow talked an elderly South Dakota businessman named Stanford Adelstein into traveling to New York to bid on Sue and hopefully to bring the bones back to Hill City in triumph. Adelstein and his entourage arrived at Sotheby’s with handmade signs inscribed “Bring Sue Home to South Dakota!” and “Save Our Sue.” Adelstein, who was dressed in a pale greenish-blue suit and who bore a pleasant resemblance to Gabby Hayes, made the most of his brief flash of fame, entertaining reporters and glad-handing the city folk right up to auction time. Unfortunately, he’d apparently earmarked not much more than a million dollars for the rescue effort, because when the bidding reached $1.2 million he scowled and threw down his bidder’s paddle angrily. He spent the remainder of the event in what appeared to be a dark and unapproachable mood.

As it happens, a couple of years ago I went dinosaur hunting in the immediate vicinity of where both Pete Larson’s Sue and Fred Nuss’s Z. rex were found. This was shortly before Larson fell into the firm hands of the American penal system, and he was my guide. But I had actually come to South Dakota to meet not Larson, but two men who on occasion worked with him, a pair of amateur paleontologists known within the discipline as the Sacrison Twins.


Paleontology’s areas of affiliation can be indistinct, but they basically fall along commercial, academic, and amateur lines. Commercial dealers such as Larson and Nuss gather specimens for sale to individuals or to museums; some also study fossils and, on occasion, write papers. Academics typically organize digs and also teach, or administer grant programs, or oversee private and public collections. Both of these groups employ amateurs from time to time, often as excavators or as finders of fossils; amateurs, however, are considered the unwashed within the science’s castes, and this is where the Sacrison Twins rank.


The two, who were born in 1956, have no formal schooling in paleontology, nor do they exactly make a living at it—Steven Sacrison is a construction worker and a part-time grave digger; Stan Sacrison is a fitfully employed electrician. Yet together they are the most successful finders of T. rexes in history. “There’s this golden aura around them,” says Mike Triebold, president of the American Association of Paleontological Suppliers and a man who has beheld the Sacrisons at work in the field. “Fossils just seem to leap up at them.”


Both Sacrisons have the pale coloring of Scandinavians and are tall and slim and seldom without baseball caps atop their heads. Stan is considered the more garrulous of the two, which means that his spoken sentences sometimes contain a clause. Back in 1992, when Fred Nuss and Alan Detrich decided they wanted a T. rex to sell, they drove to the slowly evaporating town of Buffalo, South Dakota, to seek out the twins, who were beginning to acquire a reputation within paleo circles. Nuss and Detrich had spent many futile months hunting for a T. rex. “We searched Montana and South Dakota but never found a damn thing,” said Detrich. “Then I ran into Steven and Stanley. They were digging a water ditch outside of town. We got to talking, and Stan says, ‘I know where there might be a rex.’ We went out and yep, there one was.”


The fossil was on private land, and after clearing things with the landowner, Detrich’s crew brought up the T. rex. They had been unable to find the lizard’s skull, however, an oversight that severely diminished the skeleton’s value. Resigned to the loss, the crew began closing the dig site. Then Steven stopped by. He found the skull.


The Sacrison Twins have also located three T. rexes while working for Larson, including the finest existing mounted specimen in the world, named Stan. (BHI, having paid the twins modest finder’s fees, added the fossils to its small museum, and started making big plans.) Stan—the human Stan—is thought to have located a fourth and probably a fifth T. rex, which he has not yet formally announced. He offers no elaborate theory to explain his skill. “Let’s just say I know where to find them,” he says. “When I need one, I’ll go take a poke at it.”


In short, even if you don’t count the two T. rexes Stan seems to be holding in reserve, the Sacrisons are responsible for locating nearly one-fifth of the known T. rex fossils ever found.


Around Buffalo, Steven’s fame as a bone-finder was matched only by the renown he had gained by marrying, at the age of 23, a 15-year-old local girl. It was a wedding that occasioned much spirited discussion, but by the time I got to town Steven had quieted the talk by proving a steady husband and doting father, and attention now settled on Stan, about whom more than a few people were worried, since it seemed that he’d taken to living in his car. Indeed, I found him in it on the morning he and Steve, together with Larson and me, were to go fossil hunting, and I knocked politely on the hood and stepped away to give him some privacy.


The four of us drove out into the arid grasslands surrounding Buffalo until we arrived at a ranch located on a geological site known as the Hell Creek Formation. Fanning out across an ancient riverbed, the fossil men began working the landscape. Larson, attired in a khaki outfit furnished with loops and epaulets to hold his instruments, worked slowly and methodically, pausing every few steps to kick at rock formations. Stan, for his part, was dressed in old jeans and a T-shirt, and he shambled along with a stuttery gait, a Big Slam no-spill coffee mug dangling in his right hand and a Marlboro in his left. He walked without aim, scanning the ground for invisible objects, mumbling to himself. When the Marlboro flared out against its filter he dropped the cigarette, ground it with his toe, and then snatched up the stub and stuck it, still smoldering, into his pocket. Steve was far off on the edge of the riverbed, seemingly daydreaming.


When Stan spotted something, he checked his stride and chugged happily over to a dusty square of ground. On both knees now, he began to scrabble at the earth. A small hole appeared, exposing a reticulated chunk of blackened rock. Stan excavated with his fingertips, then whole cupped hands, and finally a six-inch-long survival knife, which he grasped by the blade and angled across the length of rock as if paring it, like a carrot. Revealed, the thing was not a rock but a fossilized horn, and soon Stan had another horn bared, as thick as a forearm and more than a foot long. “Triceratops,” he announced, sketching in the air the dinosaur’s eight-foot-skull and serrated fan. “Hmmm.” He stood up. “Already got one of these in my parent’s garage.” Larson, who was now at his side, replied, “Yeah, it’s probably not worth much.” They left it in the ground.

Larson and Stan had met in 1992 in Rapid City. A mutual friend and fellow fossil hunter had introduced them, and soon Stan was taking Larson out and showing him some bones that Larson immediately recognized as a T. rex. Larson named it after Stan. In 1993, Stan led Larson to another T. rex, which they named Duffy, after Larson’s lawyer, Patrick Duffy, who was handling the criminal aspects of the Sue imbroglio. Two years later, Stan’s brother endeared himself to Larson by discovering yet another T. rex, which they named Steven. Of these three, Stan the T. rex was by far the most complete and therefore valuable specimen, and by the fall of 1995, when I visited South Dakota, the fossil had become the crucial element in the model of what Larson also hoped to achieve, in business terms, with Sue—if he ever got her back.


Reduced to its essentials, BHI’s plan was to generate cash flow by adopting the showbiz razzle-dazzle of a circus and the tourist-magnet allure of a science-based theme park. One afternoon I spent some time watching Larson and his crew prepare a cast of Stan for sale; the real-bone skeleton was then on tour in Japan, earning a hefty fee. Portions of the BHI building are given over to a museum, while other parts house offices and prep areas and storage. The bone work—the teasing apart of dirt and rock from bone—is done on long benches by hand or with jeweler’s tools, and Larson mostly hires accomplished amateur rock climbers to do this work. “They just have a better feel for where rock ends and fossil begins,” he explained.
Even before he had Stan prepared and mounted, Larson had trademarked the name and was talking demographics with a marketing consultant named Arthur Novell, who handles things for Jim Henson Productions—the Muppets, in other words. Novell had definite ideas about how Stan should be positioned, entertainment-wise.


“We’ll take Stan before a focus group and find out his Q rating,” the impressively enthusiastic Novell told me. “We want to find the common denominator for all groups, even the ethnic groups. American Indians don’t like dinosaurs, for instance, so I don’t think that’s going to be a good audience for us. We’ll be looking at home video outlets and pay-per-view. A hologram in the middle of Grand Central Terminal, perhaps. Have you noticed I’ve avoided amusement parks? We don’t want to do a Disney thing here. And do we want to tie-in with a fast food chain? No. Happy Meal dinosaur meals? No. A Stan doll is possible—unlike Kermit, Stan isn’t an icon yet, but we think he can be very big. Clearly Kermit is forever, and we’d like to do that again.”


This, of course, was well before Disney had fleshed out its plans for DinoLand USA, with a faux Sue as a major attraction. But Novell and Larson could already see where things were heading in paleontology. Toward the end of my visit, Larson showed me one of the casts of Stan (which he sells to museums for $100,000 a pop), and then the two of us hiked up to a spot overlooking Hill City where Larson hoped to build his permanent museum, a place where Stan and perhaps even Sue could find a home. It seemed perfectly innocent, but to some of Larson’s defenders, this was exactly the kind of visionary thinking that had provoked the ire of his persecutors—a frank assessment that in the future the science of fossils was going to have to be yoked to entertainment if the discipline was to survive.


In fact, grants for academic paleontological research have declined significantly over the past decade, and the total funds available for research last year amounted to less than what Michael Crichton received as a payday for his last dinosaur novel. “Paleontology is being trivialized,” Don Wolberg, president of the Dinosaur Society, explained to me. “In the United States there are probably fewer than 5,000 paleontologists, and they’re all scrambling for jobs that disappear just as they find them. So the distinctions are being broken down; you’ve got Ph.D.’s who are classified as amateurs because they can’t get jobs in a museum anymore. There’s a lot of resentment, and as the leading commercial firm, BHI and Larson catch a lot of that.” Bob Bakker, the model for the lead paleontologist in Crichton’s Jurassic Park, puts it more colorfully: “The sense of doom and gloom out there in paleontology is just incredible.”


Back on that fall day in Hill City, it was difficult to see anything sinister or dire about the ambitions of a guy who talked expectantly about pulling some traffic from Reptile Gardens, or at least from nearby Crazy Horse Monument or maybe Storybook Island, and certainly from the Flintstones Bedrock City. After I walked Larson back down the hill to a small lot beside his offices and watched him climb into the trailer he and his wife still live in to this day, I drove to Rapid City, where at the time Sue’s bones were locked in a utility room at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.


The security guard at the School of Mines had scant interest in the evolution of paleontology, however, and despite much begging he refused to allow me in to see Sue. Thus my first glimpse of her would come many months later, after her first owner had gone to prison and lost her, and just before larger ambitions than Larson’s took possession of her in a dark-blue building on York Avenue in Manhattan.


In the days after the sale at sotheby’s, Stan and Steve decided to become a little more serious about all this dinosaur stuff. “The amount surprised me, that’s for sure,” Stan told me, speaking about the final bid for Sue. In the market just created, he figured he’s essentially given away about $20 million worth of T. rexes, a situation that encouraged him to rethink his priorities. He recently set up a Web site and began selling some of his own fossils, and he reminded himself of Fred Nuss’s promise to “share a nice fee” when and if Z. rex is sold. (The price tag for Z. rex has now been ratcheted up to $12 million.) “Also, I’m thinking about getting out a little more often and taking some pokes at those sites I know have T. rex sign,” Stan went on. He’d also been thinking about a duck-billed dinosaur he’d sold BHI for $2,000. “Kinda seems like a ridiculously low price,” Stan said. “It was probably worth $50,000 at least.” Stan hadn’t mentioned this to Larson, who recently purchased the hilltop tract he had shown me and still plans to build his dinosaur museum. In fact, Stan probably would never bring it up. But next time, he’d be sure to get a fair price. All things considered, Stan and Steve were feeling a little more proprietary these days, a little less willing to share. In a small way, I could understand what they meant. One afternoon a few days after I’d first gone hunting with them, I sat in my hotel room thinking about the triceratops we—well, they—had found. It was beautiful, particularly the horn, which glowed like ancient mahogany. The horn would be a nice thing to own. After a while I got into my car and drove out to the ranch on which we’d explored. The rancher who owned the place appeared, and as I passed I waved to him as if he’d invited me back. I spent several hours searching the riverbed, thinking the entire time of justifications for my impending theft of a valuable artifact, and I’m saddened to admit that I probably would have taken the thing, if I ever had found it.

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But start earlier: Open on Phi Phi Lay, a curling slip of an isle in the Hat Noppharat Thara National Park, 400 miles south of Bangkok. Pure chance has covered Phi Phi Lay in dark green casuarinas, bamboo, pandani, and palms. It brought red jellyfish and leopard sharks and angry green crabs into the bay, and set upon these creatures the inevitable predators: hungry macaques and hornbills and Andaman kites. Decades ago chance led the chao náam—small bands of Thai nomads—to Maya Beach, only to chase them away again when a random discovery on the island yielded a bounty of fragile swiftlet nests. Boiled and served as soup, the birds’ nests are worth their weight in gold to Chinese gourmands. So off were shooed the chao náam settlers, and in 1983 Phi Phi Lay was declared officially uninhabited, no overnighters—yet another law for the island, immutable as the natural ones, and enforced by park rangers policing the shoreline in belching longboats, lest a swiftlet grow disturbed in its nesting by an errant human.

The ephemeral influence of fiction first came to Maya Beach in the form of a popular novel, The Beach, written in 1997 by a 25-year-old Englishman named Alex Garland. His book tells the story of a young backpacker who by luck and chance locates a paradisiacal Thai beach, befriends its blissed-out occupants, and then unwittingly brings the Eden to a bloody and cinematic ruin. The best-selling novel—which is glib and fast and possessed of icy dark undercurrents—reads like a screenplay.

Thus, inevitably, one drizzly morning in the middle of 1998 a location scout for Twentieth Century Fox motored into Maya Bay, looked around, and declared it fine. For two weeks in January of last year, a full production crew—200 bodies led by director Danny Boyle, who had explored Scotland’s underbelly in the film Trainspotting—made its long way to Phi Phi Lay. Eager to spin Garland’s novel into celluloid gold, they brought with them Leonardo DiCaprio, who had contracted for a reported $20 million to play the backpacker, known only as Richard. When the luxury yacht carrying the actor glided into the shadows of the island, DiCaprio hopped off, followed a boardwalk overland, and emerged from the canopy of trees onto the gentle slope of the perfect beach.

Now one more scene, several months later: The commercial harbor in Phuket, Thailand, a scrim of fog cloaking the rusting trawlers and tankers. A charter boat pulls from the dock with 40 Taiwanese tourists aboard, 20 young couples on a pilgrimage to the location of a movie they have not yet seen, based on a book they have not yet read, and starring an American actor they know mostly from Titanic, a film that still plays in theaters in Taiwan. Call it chance that I was on the same boat.

“You are going to Leo Island?” a member of the tour, a young Taiwanese woman, asks.

You mean Phi Phi Lay?

“Yes, Phi Phi Leo,” she answers. It is an hour past dawn, already hot, the Andaman Sea shiny-calm except in patches where schools of fish foam, feeding at the surface. Like the other passengers, the woman wears a name tag and has dressed to match her date, in black cargo shorts and a black-and-white-striped shirt. Every few minutes a couple leaves the gently rocking deck and clutches along toward the bow, laughing. Curious, I follow.

When I reach the front the boy in the striped shirt hands me his video camera. “Would you film us?”

He and his girlfriend step their way to the bowsprit and, after signaling me to begin filming, strike a pose: the woman’s arms thrown wide like wings, the boy encircling her waist, the two of them leaning face-first into the wind. The scene from Titanic. A second pair of young Taiwanese wait patiently off-camera, clapping. When the first couple finishes, the next two hand me their camera, move into position, and assume the pose. So it goes much of the morning, Leo after Leo, Kate after Kate, while the signature cliffs of Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Lay gather shape on the gray horizon and a woman behind me, for the benefit of the video sound track, sings Titanic‘s theme song in a not-bad voice.

———-

Here, here I am, in Dyersville, Iowa, on the baseball diamond from Field of Dreams; that’s me at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, the one from The Shining; and that’s me in Austria, outside Leopoldskron Palace, which was the Trapps’ home in The Sound of Music. There I am in Tuscany, in the town from Stealing Beauty; and that’s me in Istanbul, in the bazaar from Midnight Express; and here’s me in Rockville, Maryland, the town called Burkittsville in The Blair Witch Project. Now those are the stairs from the Exorcist, and that’s the crater from Starman, and that was the town from The Last Picture Show, which wasn’t really a town but is now, sort of, because of all the tourists. You saw those movies, didn’t you? Because then you’d recognize these places…

———-

The clerk at Hello Internet Café glanced over my shoulder to see if the computer was working, and then wandered away. It was early in Bangkok, a weekday, and the place was quiet. An albino Thai boy loitered near the front of the open-air café, moving only to glide past my table and flash a palm of hash at me. The attendant watched uninterestedly; drugs were common on Khao San Road. Last night they’d been offered by the taxi driver who ferried me through the city’s monsoon-flooded streets, and again by a disheveled woman in the lobby of the New Joe guest house, where I took a sagging bed. At breakfast a German backpacker mimed a heady drag, pointed, and nodded, Yes?

Backpackers come to this strip from all over the world for the dope or the prostitutes, or to make cut-rate arrangements to get somewhere else. Scrubby guest houses and cheap massage parlors cram the place, and narrow alleys spike off this road, where discount travel booths peddle no-fuss arrangements to Angkor Wat and Kathmandu and Phnom Penh—perennial must-sees on the backpacker circuit. Among the trips for hire along Khao San are a Good Morning, Vietnam tour (the movie was filmed in Bangkok and on the island of Phuket) and several Emmanuelle tours, featuring the French soft-core classic acted for real in Bangkok’s infamous Patpong district. The film allusions allow for a type of sellers’ shorthand, sketching the experience and lending richer visuals than a crude brochure.

Shortly before I arrived on Khao San Road, a small travel company called Sunshine Travel began offering a Beach tour. It was simply a trip to the remote but somewhat well known island of Phi Phi Lay, no different from the one offered last season or the season before that. But Hollywood had altered the worth of the small island, and increased its marketability.

What is there to see? I had asked the girl in the Sunshine booth, which was no more than a cart wheeled onto the puddle-clogged lane, two wheezing dogs slumbering underneath.

“Very nice beach, bird’s nest cave, good snorkeling,” she answered. She was about 19 years old and had long and wickedly curved fingernails on her left hand only, painted gold.

And the movie?

“Oh, yes, very good movie,” she said, as if she had seen it already. We talked money, even though I wasn’t planning to use a tour to get to the island, and I thanked her and left.

Next morning, under the bright sun, the street seemed less exotic and far shabbier. The tang of the city came in a rush, a mix of rot and sweet and smog that burned my nose. Before I headed south to the islands, I wanted to gauge the heat of an ongoing controversy surrounding the filming of The Beach, so I spent the morning at the Hello Internet Café, reading back issues of the Bangkok Post and the South China Post and the various Web sites that had sprung up to either flack the film or claim outrage at the destruction it had allegedly caused on Phi Phi Lay.

One activist, a 39-year-old Bangkok-based filmmaker named Ing Kanjanavanit, appeared frequently, frantic about the way Twentieth Century Fox was mistreating her country. Fox was, for instance, planting 60 additional palm trees on Maya Beach for the benefit of the cameras, and bulldozing sand to widen the strip, and temporarily uprooting native spider lilies and grasses. More than once she burst into tears of frustration before the reporters, her sobs placed into the record as she wailed about the ineffectualness of her efforts and the thickening corruption of her nation.

“Everything in this country is for sale,” she told one reporter, suggesting that the $100,000 fee that Fox was paying to film on the island was pure payoff. “This affair of The Beach is like a mirror. It shows me what sort of country I’m living in.” In the preceding months Ing and her allies had petitioned the U.S. Department of Justice to halt the filming, citing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and she oversaw the marshaling of 39 Thai law professors in a petition to the Thai government, which successfully called for Fox to post a larger security bond prior to filming.

On the Web, small factions of pro-film and anti-film advocates did battle, the latter calling for boycotts of the movie and public rallies and heated debate on the serious environmental issues, while the former relied heavily on the yumminess of Leonardo DiCaprio for its ammunition. And in fact, had the extraordinarily popular DiCaprio not been involved in The Beach, it’s likely the production would have passed through Thailand with barely a ripple. Phi Phi Lay, after all, was not even a cinematic virgin: Cutthroat Island, an unfortunate film starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine as pirates, was filmed on Maya Beach in 1995; not a protester was to be found. But as any agent can tell you, Matthew Modine is not Leonardo DiCaprio.

From the computer at the Hello Internet Café I noted the charges leveled by environmentalists and the defenses offered by Fox and the film’s director and DiCaprio himself. (“I would never be part of any project that did anything to harm nature,” the star declared in a statement last January.) The sites were entertaining. There were photos of a serenely desolate Maya Beach in the weeks before the production, and blurred telephoto shots of the actors at work, and plenty of good gossip: Leo passes out from jellyfish bites; Leo impregnates his teenage costar; Leo requires a $45,000 mobile home to be shipped in from Britain; Leo looks fat.

The movie was re-creating a journey from a novel that I also was attempting to re-create, in part because I wanted to see what became of places that happened to slip, usually by chance, into popular culture. In his novel, Alex Garland has Richard start his journey on the Khao San Road. There he meets a Scottish backpacker who, prior to killing himself, gives Richard a map showing a necklace of small islands far to the south of Bangkok, near the popular tourist destination of Ko Samui on the eastern side of the long Thai peninsula. Rumors of a beach—unspoiled, idyllic, peopled with a small and happy community of expats—had been buzzing along the backpacking circuit, and Richard decides that this map is evidence of such a place. Armed with the map, Richard and a young French couple he has met (she: slender brunette, winning eyes, partial to toplessness; he: undeserving) set off to find the beach. The three move from Bangkok to Ko Samui, and from there to a smaller island, and finally to a smaller island still, where they find the beach. Richard and friends are accepted into this beach society, and several pleasant months follow—the expat islanders fishing and gardening for sustenance, smoking dope and playing soccer for recreation. But Garland infects Richard with Vietnam War fantasies, and these, coupled with the presence of armed Thai marijuana farmers on the island, slowly ratchet up the tension until the place erupts in an orgy of bloodletting, triggered by the arrival of several more backpackers on the beach—a not altogether subtle suggestion of the effects of tourism.

As it happens, Phi Phi Lay, which is located on the western side of the Thai peninsula, is never mentioned in the book. Garland based his fictional island on one he knew from the Philippines and then sited it in Thailand’s Phangnga Bay. But this is a distinction that will soon be lost, since the film effectively trumps Garland’s novel. The Beach is forever now on Phi Phi Lay.

———-

There, there, that’s me at Devil’s Tower, in Wyoming, the butte from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and me on the Chattooga River in Georgia, the one from Deliverance, and that’s me with Blue Lagoon Cruises in Fiji on Nanuia Lailai Island, next to where they filmed The Blue Lagoon, which is Turtle Island, and you can visit that too…

———-

Up close, the limestone cliffs of Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Lay appear melted, as if a massive blowtorch passed up and down the five-story-tall faces, bubbling the stone and causing great long rivulets to run to the sea. But from a distance, say on a charter boat coming from Phuket, the whitened cliffs catch the sun and shine like spinnakers in a yachting regatta, locked side by side in a never-moving race.

For the past week, before heading for the Phi Phi islands, I had traveled a path defined by Garland’s book, from Bangkok to Surat Thani to Ko Samui and Ko Phangan and the other islands in the Ang Thong Archipelago. It was the tail of the season, a week before the monsoons would begin in the southern portion of Thailand; they had already begun up north.

What remained on the islands were mostly backpackers, young Europeans and a few Americans and Asians—people Garland certainly would have recognized, budget travelers who skittered around Asia looking for the unspoiled place even as they herded together in picturesque backpacker ghettos such as Ko Samui. Garland had in fact been one of them, as he had explained to me over the phone. “I’d been backpacking since I was 17, and I started out as a vicarious-thrill kind of backpacker who treated Southeast Asia as an adventure playground,” he said. “I think later I started querying aspects of that, and that’s what started the ball rolling with the book.”

On a straight reading The Beach seems to cast backpackers into two types, divided by a shorthand ideology. The first is the sort Garland admits he once was, a thrill-seeker who looked on the native culture as an exotic treat and who charted his travels by the Lonely Planet guidebooks. The second type is the sort who feels outrage at the presence of other backpackers and who is ever seeking virgin spots yet unsullied by them. The character Richard falls into this category.

While the novel can read like a critique of the noisy, boorish, carefree vagabonds who swarm places like Khao San Road and Ko Samui, it’s actually far more damning to pious travelers like Richard, who often muck up the pristine places they’re so keen to discover. Unfortunately, this critical nuance can sail, untouched, over the dreadlocked heads of most of the young Western travelers hopping the jeweled islands of southern Thailand. Concurrent with the paperback publication of The Beach was its adoption as a sacred text for backpackers, and it was impossible to walk on a Thai beach without spotting a young foreigner sprawled on the sand with the novel, beach towel littered with postcards and cigarettes. More than one person told me they wished they could find a beach just like the one Richard finds. “I hear wildly different accounts from backpackers on what, exactly, the book means,” Garland said to me. “And I accept that I misjudged and failed to represent some things in the way I wanted to represent them, and that I left them open to interpretation. But what was I going to do? I was 25 years old; I’d never written a book before. I got some things wrong.”

As the tour boat made its way to the Phi Phi islands, it began to rain, a short squall which soon died away, the sky clearing to a milky white. At Phi Phi Don we moored beside several ferries carrying organized tour groups and a dozen speedboats that had brought backpackers and divers to the island. A few hundred yards up the beach ran a small line of shops and food shacks, and the tourists made for them. At the beach’s opposite end grew a copse of curving palms, where the backpackers sprawled in the dark beneath. Thai girls in thin sarongs attended to them, massaging necks and legs while the scruffy young men reclined in satisfaction, some with drinks in their hands: a postcard of languid sensuality. I walked to an empty spot of sand between the shops and the shaded hollow, settled in, and dug a copy of The Beach out of my bag.

Beneath the entertainment of the novel’s plot, Garland parries with the different ways in which to wander the world—with the notion that there are tourists and there are travelers and the breeds are distinct. “I had ambiguous feelings about the differences between tourists and travelers—the problem being that the more I traveled, the smaller the differences became,” muses Richard in The Beach. “But the one difference I could still latch onto was that tourists went on holidays while travelers did something else. They traveled.”

Richard is echoing a point made four decades ago by the historian Daniel Boorstin, who argued that in the middle of the last century—just at the time the word “tourist” first came into use—the character of foreign travel began to change. “It was the decline of the traveler and the rise of the tourist,” Boorstin wrote in 1961. “The traveler…was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him.”

It was peculiar, lazing in the sun within swimming distance of Phi Phi Lay and thinking about these twin islands passing from the hands of travelers and fully into the hands of tourists. In the early 1970s the few visitors who happened onto Phi Phi Don came for the unusually fine diving and snorkeling, or to climb the two islands’ high cliffs and tally the exotic bird life. They were destinations with no amenities, and accommodation was a mesh hammock or a woven mat smoothed flat on the sand. But word gets out, as Garland’s Richard laments, and greater numbers followed. Several bungalow hotels sprang up on Phi Phi Don, and a pizza joint or two, and then several bars serving hamburgers and tacos and warm Mr. Pibb. Even Lonely Planet grieved, and without irony, in the 1997 edition of its Thailand guide: “Bay packed with boats…new hotels building by the pier…endless rows of dreary, crowded bungalows,” it laments. “Where’s the nature? No one harvests nuts anymore and no one fishes. Why bother when you can ferry farangs around the coral reefs?”

Off on the horizon were even more foreign tourists, more farangs. The Thai government was counting on it. “This is the perfect commercial for the [marine] park, and for Thailand,” Thai Forestry Director-General Plodprasop Suraswadi, whose agency issued the filming permit, said last March. “You couldn’t buy better publicity for a tourist destination.” The film’s producer, Andrew Macdonald, joined in the boosterism: “Thailand will become famous as a country where paradise is possible.”

Whether it does to the degree the bureaucrats hope is now mainly dependent on the filmmakers’ skill, and following them, the critics. After all, the movie might stink. Early screenings suggested as much, or suggested trouble at least, as preview audiences found the film too dark and violent, all in all too un-Leo. Fox elected to shoot new scenes and re-edit the film, pushing the release date from a Titanic-like Christmas 1999 opening into the non-blockbuster precinct of mid-February 2000. And should the fixes not take hold and the movie flop, well then a pilgrimage is a hard sell, as Richard Bangs, founder of the tour company Mountain Travel­Sobek, discovered. “We saw no shortage of interest in Kenya after Out of Africa,” Bangs told me. “So in 1992 we put together a trip called At Play in the Fields of the Lord, to northern Brazil. But the movie completely bombed, and there was no interest in the tour. It just died.” Of course, the star of At Play in the Fields of the Lord was the actor Tom Berenger, and as any agent can also tell you, Tom Berenger is no Leonardo DiCaprio.

———-

See, see, there’s me on the Na Pali Coast on Kauai, where they filmed part of Jurassic Park; and that’s Fripp Island in South Carolina, where Forrest Gump was made; and Squam Lake, New Hampshire, which is the real On Golden Pond; and that’s the town in Finland where they shot Doctor Zhivago, except it looks so much like Russia that when tourists come to Saint Petersburg and want to know where the movie was, the Russians have to lie to them about it…

———-

Phi Phi Don had grown quiet in the muggy afternoon. The shade beneath the palms no longer held a Gauguin tableau, and the day-tourists had vanished as well. I began to consider how I would get to Maya Beach. For a moment I thought about swimming the mile of open water, as Richard does in The Beach, but then I remembered that I’m a lousy swimmer. Hiring one of the boats that gave tours of the bay wouldn’t work, because they are required to keep close watch on the visitors they bring to Phi Phi Lay. What I intended to do was spend the night on the beach. I had originally hoped to see if I would recognize the signature landmarks from both the novel and the movie: the lagoon completely enclosed by cliffs, or the soaring waterfall from which a terrified Richard leaps to gain access to the beach. Before I even got to the island, though, I learned that no waterfall marked the entrance to the beach—DiCaprio’s stuntman made his leap over the Haew Suwat Falls in the Khao Yai National Park, 120 miles north of Bangkok. And the lagoon was digitally enclosed by the Computer Film Company.

I also wanted to get a sense of the beach itself: to find out if there existed an untouched feel to the place, or if both the novel and the movie were projecting onto the island a character it did not naturally possess. Overnight stays on the beach are not allowed, but I’d traveled far enough to believe that I needed to have at least one evening on the island, absent all souls.

Along the beach, local fishermen had spread woven nets and monofilament line and were knotting and smoothing and coiling to prepare for the evening’s work. Maybe I could hire a fisherman to drop me on the beach and then pay him enough not to return until the next day. I knew money had tightened in the weeks since the film production left. The flush crowds everyone expected to descend on the two islands wouldn’t arrive until after the release of The Beach, at least. Until then it was mostly a fishing life again for the locals, a hard life, and one that they were apparently eager to leave.

In the early stages of the protests against Fox, environmental activists argued that the filming should be forbidden because it would disrupt the economy of the local workers. But when protesters staged a sit-in on Maya Beach during pre-production, they were booted off Phi Phi Lay not by Thai police or Fox security, but by furious locals from Phi Phi Don. “It was a very exciting day,” Andrew Macdonald, the film’s producer, recalled with enthusiasm in an interview with Time. “These ten wimpy greens from Bangkok facing off against 60 to 100 angry locals.” For most of the remaining weeks of filming, the fishermen—now on the Fox payroll—formed a floating blockade of longboats across the mouth of Maya Bay, keeping protesters and paparazzi away.

On Phi Phi Don, the issues of the mainland and foreign activists gained no traction. Everyone knew Maya Beach wasn’t unspoiled; foreign travelers had been going there for years. Trash could be found on the beach, and the coral in the bay was dying or dead from the props of fishing boats. In fact the efforts of the production actually seemed to benefit Phi Phi Lay, an opinion set forth by, among others, a committee of environmental experts appointed by the Thai Forestry Department who visited the set and deemed the island in fine condition. The environmental watchdog group EcoLert also gave a positive report, as did the independent organization Reef Watch, which noted that the coral in Maya Bay actually appeared healthier than it had prior to the filming.

Far down the line of brightly painted longboats I saw a fisherman who owned just one net, which he had draped on a tepee of bamboo stalks to dry in the sun. It took only a moment to reach an agreement. A few minutes later we were moving across the channel to Phi Phi Lay, the water going from pale blue to emerald with increasing depth. Hugging the island, the boatman stayed close to the limestone walls that overhung the sea. At the base they had been cut by years of sea action, and as we neared the gap into Maya Bay he steered the noisy craft beneath the roof of stone and smiled at the hollow echo.

I was the only one. I walked up and down the sand, and when the sand ran out I walked into the bay, running my hand along the craggy boulders that ended the beach. The rocks continued for a while and then gave way to sand again. I waded around them and back onto land, and then turned away from the water and toward the island itself.

Rising through the forest was a faint trail, a curving line of pale green between the dense green of the trees. I followed it up, careful with my footing on the steep slope, stopping only to clear cobwebs from my eyes. The heaviness of the jungle hung in the air, as fecund as a hothouse. I was on the cliffs that cupped the bay like a giant’s hand.

As the trail ascended it leveled out, gradually becoming no more challenging than a flight of stairs. I pushed at the branches that clogged my path. Air ferns spilled like unkempt hair across the branches and large black beetles clung to the strands, swinging in the breeze. Near the top the trees cleared out, and suddenly I was standing on a knob of rock high above the bay.

Over the wall of cliffs I could watch the Andaman Sea and the lumps of trawlers backlit on the horizon, but there was nothing on the water within several hours of me. Behind my head the jungle moved with birds and insects and things I could not see. The moon was already in the sky, though the sun had a few hours left to go.

I found the trail that returned to the bay, emerging at a spot far down the grinning curve of the beach. The tide had lifted all the footprints from the sand, including most of mine. What few remained had been discovered by crabs, which hurried from one depression to the next and then hunkered down until their eyes were level with the sand. I watched them until the sky grew orange and the bats came out, and I watched the bats feed until Maya Bay filled with moonlight.

I had brought a bag with fruit and bread and several Thai beers, and I put my dinner together before it grew too dark. I had brought a small candle lantern with me as well, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to use it. I certainly wasn’t going to build a fire and signal to the evening patrol that I was on the beach.

After some time I lay back on the sand and listened to the island. The waves were almost inaudible, a gentle metronomic swish in the middle distance. Green crabs made their own noise, a rapid clicking as they scrambled on the rocks and, in the near silence beneath this sound, a ticking that might have come from the contact of their claws against their hard shells as they settled into a crouch. The island’s birds had mostly quieted for the night, and if there were other things on the beach or even nearby, they were moving toward sleep as well. I did hear something large crashing in the inland trees, but the sound came and left too quickly to place. I stayed on my back in the still-warm sand, following the river of stars above.

In the morning when I woke there were footprints on the beach, but no sign that a boat had landed. I never saw the person.

An eternity ago, in 1922, the poet Vachel Lindsay went into a darkened room crowded with people and emerged 30 minutes later, having experienced his first motion picture. “It has come then,” he wrote, “this new weapon of men, and the face of the whole earth changes.”

A few months ago, a reporter asked Alex Garland whether the film of his novel would have any effect on Maya Beach, and whether he worried about that. “I really don’t see Leo fans jumping on planes and coming to Thailand,” Garland answered. “I hope not.”

A few weeks ago I called Garland up and told him that Leo fans were indeed jumping on planes and coming to Thailand. There was a significant pause. “If that’s true, then there’s a part of me that feels I fucked up,” he said. “I find that slightly dismaying. I don’t know how to feel about it.”

A few days ago I dug out the snapshots from my weeks in Thailand. There was me in Bangkok, in a chrome-heavy tuk-tuk swamped to the floorboards by floodwater; me near Chiang Rai, hiking along a high bare ridgeline with Myanmar below; me in Phuket, leaning into the wind at Laem Phromthep point, the Buddhist monks in their pumpkin robes coloring the foreground. There was me on Maya Beach, just another tourist lingering too long without invitation, one of the first of many. There was me on the Chao Phraya River, and me in Krabi Town, and finally me in a tiny velvet-lined taxicab, the background blurry with motion, on my way to the airport, on my way home.

———-

Here, here I am on a different island in Thailand, one of those limestone uplift isles that look like giant furry thumbs pushing out of the ocean. It’s in the Phangnga Marine Park, about 40 miles north of where they filmed The Beach. You can actually get to it from there, do them both in the same day if you find a speedboat fast enough and if the sea stays nice and calm. Anyway, do you recognize it? About 25 years ago they came and filmed The Man with the Golden Gun here—you know, the one with Roger Moore and Christopher Lee as that guy Scaramanga and the midget Hervé Villechaize as his assistant. This was Scaramanga’s hideaway, where James Bond finally tracks him down and saves the world again. There’s that great scene where Bond lands his seaplane on the tiny beach and when he gets out the midget is there with a silver tray and a martini and says, “Welcome, Mr. Bond.” Well, that’s me on that beach. It was a hard picture to get because the beach was packed with tourists, and there were boats everywhere and dozens and dozens of souvenir shacks selling T-shirts and other guys selling Singha beer and everyone seemed to have a radio on too loud and after a few minutes you start feeling nervous and uncomfortable and begin looking for the boat to get you the hell out of there. Which is too bad, because it’s a gorgeous island. It’s called James Bond Island, and it’s funny because that’s even the name they have on a lot of the maps. Before the movie came out it was called Ko Pingan, but my boat driver said that if you told someone nowadays that you wanted to visit Ko Pingan, they wouldn’t know where to take you. I guess no one uses that name anymore.

———-

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The yeti, mythic kin to bigfoot, has puzzled the west since 1832 when a British naturalist reported tales of a “hairy ape-like creature” loping nonchalantly across the Himalayan snowfields. For decades circumstantial evidence of such an animal — 16-inch-wide footprints, monstrous scat, the neatly skinned remains of snacked-upon yaks — has teased travelers to the region. Sir Edmund Hillary claimed to have seen footprints; Sherpa Tenzing Norgay insisted he’d spotted several of the beasts themselves. Still, no one could definitively prove the yeti’s existence.

Then last month the famed Tirolean alpinist Reinhold Messner announced that, at long last, he had solved the riddle. Messner, who in 1978 accomplished what is still considered the greatest feat in mountaineering — the first solo ascent of Everest without oxygen — is a legend in Europe, a wealthy 53-year-old adventurer who resides in a 12th-century castle nestled in the Italian Alps. Messner first saw the yeti in 1986, has enjoyed several sightings since, and says he has evidence that will prove the yeti to be a rare nocturnal Tibetan bear known to occasionally walk erect. More precisely, Messner describes the yeti as a cryptozoological dichotomy, the sum of the living, breathing Tibetan bear and the centuries-old legend. About 1,000 of them are thought to remain, haunting the high Himalayas by night, shadowing the movements of trekkers, sleeping the day away in caves. Messner has published his controversial findings in a new book, Yeti, and he was in Munich defending himself when we found him.

Q. Royal Air Nepal once used a yeti as its symbol. Does your yeti look like that one?
A. No. The living yeti is clearly a bear. There’s no doubt. I followed this being for 20 years and only after last summer was I sure that I could prove what is the yeti.

Q. Then what do they look like?
A. They are huge. When they are startled they get up on two legs and on two legs they are really huge. They are two meters and 20 high. They also whistle.

Q. They whistle like they’re happy?
A. No they whistle like [makes whistling sound] when startled. I can’t prove it, but I have a feeling this means “go away.”

Q. When you saw your first yeti you described it as having bright red or black hair.
A. It was dark, so I wasn’t exactly sure what is the color. The next one I saw in the moonlight. It was black. But I was not able to tell what it was. Only that it was big, it stood on two legs, it was hairy, it was stinky.

Q. Stinky? What did it smell like?
A. Like garlic.

Q. A nice garlicky smell, like pasta aglio olio?
A. No, no. Like rotten fat. It’s not a good smell.

Q. You also saw a yeti with long white hair …
A. One with a white head, yes.

Q. It was big, smelly, with long white hair — like Gregg Allman?
A. A little bit maybe, like on the head. I took one photograph last fall in the western Himalayas of one sleeping on the highlands. When he woke he looked at me like a scientist looking at a foreigner. For a moment his was like the face of a child.

Q. He recognized you as a foreigner?
A. He was thinking … maybe he’s not able to think, we don’t know … but he looks like, “Who is that? What are you doing?”

Q. Sir Edmund Hillary said that yetis don’t like the smell of foreigners. Is that true? Or did they just not like the way Sir Edmund smelled?
A. I think that is right. They do not like human meat, in that they do not like our smell like we do not like their smell. And normally, they go away when they smell human beings. They live on the edge of human places. The local people in remote areas call them by other names. “Yeti” is a Sherpa name. It means “man of the rock.”

Q. Like Gregg Allman again?
A. Jah, the man who lives in rock.

Q. Hitler hoped to find a yeti, didn’t he?
A. Hitler liked to leave people with the fantasy that there is a snowman. The Nazis had this view that life came from heaven, from the ice, and they hoped that somewhere in the Himalayas some original Aryans survived as snowmen and they could find one and show that they came from the ice and from heaven.

Q. Hitler thought his ancestors were yetis?
A. He was hoping. Well, more Himmler that Hitler. The SS chief. He was crazy.

Q. But he believed in the yeti, like you?
A. In a special way of the yeti. I believe in the yeti as an animal.

Q. Do people call you crazy?
A. They called me crazy before, and they call me crazy now.

Q. A former Nazi gave you a yeti skeleton, right? How did that happen?
A. This man wrote me that he had a skeleton and head of a yeti. Of this Tibetan bear. When he died a professor wrote me that maybe the widow would give me the skeleton if I asked her, because she’d like to get it out of the house.

Q. Maybe it smelled …
A. Not from the smell. It’s perfect. I’ll put it in my castle. All the fakes and the mummies and the skeletons of the yetis will be in a tantric room. You know what a tantric room is? I have a tantric room exactly like I have seen it in Tibet, and I’ll put it in my tantric room.

Q. You know, Sting is into tantric things.
A. Who?

Q. Sting.
A. He could come and see it, jah.

Q. Tibetan legend says that female yetis like to harrass women, while the male yetis like to kidnap pretty women. Should female climbers and trekkers be scared?
A. Actually, the legend says that female yetis are catching men and bringing them into their caves and having relationships.

Q. In 1984, two Australians say they saw yeti tracks on Everest’s summit. Which route do you think they took?
A. This is bullshit. This is not possible. Yetis do not live at that altitude. They are living between 4,000 meters and the glaciers. They walk on glaciers if they have to cross one valley to the next to look for females. You’ll see, in 10 years it will be clear about the yeti — like today we know about the gorillas in Africa, but at one time it was the same story. The yeti has a zoological answer, but the legend will still be alive.

Q. So you’re not killing the legend?
A. I’m changing the legend. My yeti legend is based on reality. And the reality is only possible in the wilderness. If you take away wilderness from the world, the yeti is gone. If you put the yeti in a normal American zoo it’s just an animal. It takes three things to make the yeti: a real animal, a legend, and the wilderness. If you have these three things you can make a yeti. All our real legends, they were born in wilderness, but wilderness doesn’t exist anymore. You have a little bit in Alaska, a little in Tibet, a little in Antarctica. And so these beautiful legends will disappear, because we let the wilderness die.

Q. In the way you’re describing, the yeti is really sort of a state of mind isn’t it?
A. Yes, the yeti is a state of mind.

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