WAS IT A VISION or a waking dream? I stood stranded in a ludicrously steep, boulder-strewn gully on a 3,000-foot rock pile called Mount Keen, in a state of physical distress that had moved beyond discomfort and infirmity, past complaint, through muttering and disorientation to a detached state of surrender. The sun beat down.

Wax Highlander

A wax Highlander at Glenfinnan Monument

Highland cows

Highland cows near Kingussie

Glen Avon

Glen Avon

Fulton

Fulton (center) at Glenshield Lodge

I was on the fifth day of a six-day coast-to-coast journey by mountain bike across the deceptively charming Scottish Highlands, a course originating at the Sea of the Hebrides, on the west coast, and wending its way over 220 miles of temperamental terrain toward the rumored North Sea. At the moment, I was no longer on my bike; it was on me, slung over my shoulders. Although I had, earlier in the week, grappled with a hint of hypothermia, a suggestion of sunstroke, numerous intimacies with mud, bramble, running water, and rock, and an ever-shifting array of orthopedic deficits, my most woeful moment was now upon me.

I had set out that morning after a sleepless night, having immoderately sampled the local offerings of haggis, black pudding, and other shadowy offal—treats chased down with a splash or three of the spirits for which the Highlands are justly famous. This day, touted as the most challenging of the trip, had started gently enough, climbing through a patch of remnant Caledonian forest, winding through open meadows infused with a dozen shades of green, following a disused “drove road,” or cattle trail, along a meandering tributary of the River Dee, pausing for breath at the stone ruins of an ancient shepherd’s hostel. But these splendors were all but lost on me. By the time I reached the base of Mount Keen, I was in the clutches of dehydration, legs wilted and head throbbing. My fellow riders, all a good deal more dedicated to the ideology of mountain biking than I—and therefore more prone to exult in suffering—had already crested the ridge above me and no longer offered even the remote companionability of blips on the bare hillside.

Our path, a crude mountainside incision with a grade of around 30 percent, made straight for the summit of this easternmost of Scotland’s Munros, the 284 revered, pesky mountains that occupy the lordly heights between 3,000 and 4,400 feet. It was self-evidently unrideable and, in my current state, barely walkable, cobbled with heaps of stones that gave way underfoot with every step. I lurched unevenly along, the cleats of my bike shoes clacking forlornly. If Samuel Beckett had placed his existentially distressed characters on bikes, I thought, they might look like this.

It was at this point that our leader, John Fulton, materialized beside me. He was clad in Scotland’s flag—a blue-and-white cycling jersey blazed with Saint Andrew’s X-shaped cross—his bike raised above his shoulder like a trophy. Fulton bears a passing resemblance to his countryman Sean Connery and is the kind of outlandish physical specimen for which the region, whose traditional Highland games include log tossing and stone heaving, is renowned. A pioneer of off-road biking in Scotland, he quit his job as an engineer for Otis elevators nearly three decades ago to devote himself to being a guide. He remains, at 61, an extraordinarily powerful and sure rider. His small outfit, Wildcat ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs, leads mountain-biking trips to far-flung destinations like Morocco and Mongolia, but the Scotland coast-to-coast is Fulton’s classic.

“We had a lad from New York City on the ride a few years back,” he said as I continued to struggle uphill. “It was a lovely day, like today, but as we were going up this very path, clouds started coming in. In no time, the skies were black. It started to rain. The wind was blowing brutally. By the time we got to where you and I are now, it was snowing.” He paused and turned to survey the valley below. “This was late spring, mind you. This lad from New York had been overheated one moment, and now he was freezing cold. The path was so slick he kept stumbling as he tried to climb.”

On cue, I slipped. Fulton chuckled, then went on with a grim matter-of-factness. “At one point the fellow looks at me with fear in his eyes and says, ‘John, I think I’m going to die up here.’ “

There was no punchline.

NOTE TO SELF: Next time the firm with which you book your vacation mandates that you load up on travel insurance—and not just to cover lost luggage—consider that your notion of leisure is apt to be seriously compromised. My policy paid up to $1 million for “emergency medical evacuation and repatriation of remains.”

“That’s a lot of remains,” I’d told my wife, who was pregnant and staying home to mind our toddler. She didn’t want to talk about it.

It seemed a peculiar requirement. I wasn’t going off to claw my way up ice pillars, swim among sharks, or otherwise venture into habitats inhospitable to my species. I was going on a bike ride. It was something I’d done with great fervor since childhood, and I thought I was pretty good at it. Over the years, I’d ridden for transportation, for fun, for exercise, for adventure; aside from a few exciting spills and nasty abrasions, I’d never come home too much worse for the wear. I bought my first mountain bike in 1988, in the relative infancy of the craze. Back then, it seemed as though this garishly heavy, seemingly indestructible terror to hiking trails and sidewalks alike had sprung from the depths of a childhood fantasy. It could play rough. In fact, it performed with much greater élan through mud and gravel, over roots and vegetation, than on effete, smooth pavement. For me, it restored to biking a spirit of bravado. Above all, it granted access to the interiors of rugged landscapes previously the exclusive preserve of slow-moving backcountry tourists. Going for a bike ride reclaimed a measure of wildness.

But ten years ago, I moved from Montana to New York. My mountain bike languished in a corner of my apartment until I put it in storage and became the kind of person I’d previously scorned: a road biker. And I soon came to laud my road bike’s virtues—lightness, speed, sleekness—over those of my mountain bike.

It wasn’t until I overheard someone in a bike shop going on about how Scotland was fast becoming the new planetary epicenter of mountain biking—displacing such vaunted but overcrowded sites as Moab and Crested Butte—that I felt my dormant inner trail hound stir. But I was leery of the hype. Scotland was hardly an undiscovered wilderness, its pleasures having long been enjoyed by such adventurers as golfers, whisky tourists, castle enthusiasts, and genealogy buffs. The landscape of the Highlands, deforested since antiquity for agriculture and grazing, was studded with nublike topographical formations I considered to be hills, not mountains. I embarked for the place expecting something like a pub crawl punctuated by a few leisurely turns through meadows.

Indeed, the trip sounded downright easy: an off-road scamper from inn to inn, with day routes covering 30 to 56 miles. (I knew I could cover 125 a day on my road bike.) A van would serve as luggage hauler/shuttle and, in case of sickness or injury or mechanical failure, as sag wagon/support vehicle. We began in Strontian, an end-of-the-earth setting in the far western Highlands, not far from the Isle of Mull. I arrived in the evening, the surrounding hillsides shrouded in fog and a cold drizzle falling. At a restaurant, I sized up our group as we mingled, pints in hand. The youngest was 34; the oldest, 67. You might have met this crowd on a cruise ship, I thought.

“It’s time to fatten you up for the kill,” Fulton told us as we gathered at a dinner table. Over lamb chops and mashed potatoes, we took turns introducing ourselves. I slowly began to suspect that I was surrounded by fanatics. André, 38, from Brazil, had come to Scotland to regain his adventure-racing form after complex shoulder surgery a few weeks earlier. “Maybe I take it not so hard,” he murmured. Strider, 34, a dentist, had spent months training for Scotland at home, in the mountains of northern New Mexico, and had lately added some $1,200 in upgrades to his $3,200 dual-suspension bike, which he referred to as his “starter model.” Named for a character in The Lord of the Rings—as were his two small children—he was so gung-ho, he seemed to have ingested a bike manual.

Barin, a 47-year-old American teaching in Venezuela, was a purist—no GPS or fancy gear for him, just a devotion to legwork and risk—and was joined on the trip by a German friend, Guenter, 67, who arrived from outside Cologne. The two men had crossed paths several years earlier, when Guenter was traveling across the U.S. in an RV and Barin was wandering around Nevada in search of UFOs. “I will not say ‘hate,’ ” announced Guenter, “but I extremely dislike pavement. I need an unpaved road. Nothing else will do. I have a hard time waiting until tomorrow morning to ride. I need a bike under my ass.”

Larry, who lived in the countryside outside Ottawa, was 59 but looked to be in his mid-forties. “For the past 20 years,” he said, “I was addicted to whitewater canoeing and kayaking. Now I’m addicted to mountain biking.” I asked him what he did for a living, and he identified himself, without irony, as an “addiction specialist.”

WE SET OUT the next morning in a dense, obscuring fog through which occasional glimpses of cliffs and scree broke. The trail was rutted and desolate. I rode past a man peering raptly into the murk through binoculars—had he lost his sheep?—then left behind any semblance of the company of civilians. Strider, apparently aptly named, bolted ahead of the group. “Don’t overcook your legs, lads!” Fulton called out. Just ahead of me, an enormous, shaggy cow crossed in front of Barin and then stopped, lowered its head, and showed off its prodigious horns. Barin listed sideways and toppled into a mash of mud and dung. “That’s a Highlands cow,” Fulton commented, maneuvering past. “It produces excellent meat.”

The path began climbing into the low clouds and, long after I imagined it should have leveled off, continued its ascent. We settled into a pace I considered less than leisurely. Fulton had promised an easy first day, but after half an hour I’d already had a stiff workout. Finally, after a short, steep stretch compelled me to rise from my saddle, the path leveled out. Drenched with sweat, I headed into a biting wind. Guenter appeared beside me. “You’re making a lot of noise breathing,” he pointed out.

A strong rain started to fall, and Guenter swore in German. When I paused to don a waterproof layer, he vanished into the clouds, and I found myself on a narrow asphalt path that made a shrill drop out of sight, winding around a series of hairpin turns. I had visions of myself skidding over the cliff’s edge and coming to rest a thousand feet below, in lime-green Loch Shiel. By the time I got to lake level, my hands and wrists ached from braking. The others were far ahead of me in the rain, rising and falling over the roller-coaster-like contours of a rocky trail hugging the shore.

It was now abundantly apparent that I had been mistaken about the specific nature of the ride. The others may have been hobbyists, but they rode with an intense abandon. After pedaling through the rain for five hours, we approached the town of Fort William, site of the 2007 UCI Mountain Bike & Trials World Championships. In the shadow of Ben Nevis, at 4,409 feet the UK’s highest peak, we found a pub and stopped for tea. Guenter refused to enter. “The old guys don’t like stopping,” Fulton whispered. “Afraid they’ll get stuck in place.”

We continued into the Leanachan Forest, west of Fort William, charging through thick, mossy woods on singletrack. It was an exhausting blend of cornering, accelerating up short rock berms, dropping into muddy hollows, pedaling around and over boulders, lurching over roots, and cascading across slick log bridges. We rode into the constant spray of each other’s wakes of dirt, water, and rock. “I’m beginning to like this rain,” Guenter remarked. My arms gelatinous, I wanted only to get to the finish line intact. When I reached our meeting point, a pub in the hamlet of Spean Bridge, it was still pouring.

I looked as if I’d been dragged from a bog. My lips were blue, and my back had been so jolted that it was painful to stand upright. While the others heartily drank beer, gabbing and laughing, I tore into an energy bar and huddled in a corner, dripping. Guenter, who had a GPS unit on his bike, came over and told me we’d ridden about 55 miles, climbing a total of 3,500 feet. I was eager to lie down.

After Fulton dropped me off at a nearby inn, the hostess stopped me at the threshold with an appalled expression.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “You can’t come in here like that.”

THAT NIGHT, I ventured out in a stupor after a shower and a rest. As I sat in yet another pub, the barkeep described the rotten weather to me as “the dreich,” explaining that when such conditions prevail, as they often do, “you can’t see the sides of the mountains, the clouds fill the valleys, and no matter how much you spent on your waterproofs, they do you no good.”

The dreich would persist for the next two days of riding, as we dipped and swerved and labored into the central Highlands. Yet despite the clammy cold and crummy visibility, despite the misery of my exertions, the sensation that mold was creeping over my skin, and a sentimental inclination toward the American Rockies, I was forced to come to terms with an encroaching realization: If a team of cycling fiends were to come up with a plan for an outrageous nationwide mountain-biking theme park, they could hardly improve on the Scottish Highlands.

The Highlands’ 15,000 square miles, about half the country, are home to only 400,000 people, a population density roughly equivalent to that of Idaho. As a mountain biker, you pretty much have the place to yourself, and the barrenness, the wildness, the hauntingly beautiful isolation of the moors and mountains are out of all proportion to the scale of the region. In this compacted landscape, worn to the bone by battering sea winds, the topography is constantly changing. The hills are short and steep, the climbs and descents swift, winding, and furious. You’ll go through dense woods, fight your way up to a rough, treacherous ridge, barrel down into a broad valley, then crash along a cattle path through a swampy meadow and find yourself looking down on an old stone village.

Being on a bike in the Highlands is a little like being on foot in Venice; you’re never quite prepared for what’s coming around the next corner, so you rarely have the opportunity to settle into a rhythm. Crossing an entire country this way, from one coast to the other, in a single week, while staying almost entirely off paved surfaces, is a real trip. As Fulton explained, the Scottish legal provision of “ancient right-of-way” makes all private land accessible to respectful recreational use—except during hunting season. Although he’d led hundreds of rides across Scotland, he rarely repeated the same route twice and was always scouting new possibilities. We rode past farms, hunting lodges, and estates, on hiking trails and horse trails, and in national parks. Since the Highlands are sparsely settled and crisscrossed by a few millennia of footpaths and animal trails, we were usually forced onto paved surfaces only upon entering and leaving the villages we overnighted in.

By the third day, I was beginning to rediscover some comfort on the mountain bike. I allowed my body to relax into turns, laid back on the brakes, and began enjoying the sloppy, bone-jarring thrills of plummeting around blind turns and skipping over stumps. We climbed a few thousand feet to a wide, marshy plateau in the upper reaches of the Cairngorms, a mountainous region in the central Highlands, and found ourselves spinning along above tree line, Gulliveresque among stunted, windswept subalpine vegetation and glowing, kaleidoscopic heather.

Over the next few hours, Fulton upped the ante, guiding us through a water-saturated landscape. First we came to a few small streams that could, conceivably, be crossed via bicycle, provided that the rider pedaled feverishly and had the good fortune not to hit concealed rocks. Then we reached a broad creek whose banks had been washed out by springtime flooding. This one required a willing baptism. We clambered waist deep into the chill, rushing waters, bikes held overhead. (Guenter, who alluded to having nearly been washed away on a previous ride, was not pleased.) We emerged into a glen that looked innocuous enough, but the trail was pencil thin. “I pioneered this trail,” Fulton said, “if you can call it a trail.” He referred to it, coyly, as the Crocodile Run. It was only a moment before riders started plunging from sight. Beneath thick clumps of grass, the ground was studded with mud pits, quicksand-like formations that would swallow both wheels and topple the rider. Up ahead, Guenter went down again and again, issuing a stream of German vulgarities.

“Watch out for crocodiles!” Fulton called over his shoulder.

As the other riders staggered forward, I was left behind with André, the Brazilian with the reconstructed shoulder. He was in agony and had dismounted his bike altogether. I followed suit. We dragged along, plunging through the ground every few steps. In this way we covered perhaps a mile in two hours. When we met up with the other riders, one suggested to André that he might benefit from some Advil before bedtime.

“Advil?” he said. “No. Morphine.”

NO NATURE TALKS, no description of the geological fractures and collisions that had formed this pocked and pitted land intruded upon our relentless push across it. There was to be little emphasis on photo opportunities, no visits to castles or museums, no audiences with bagpipers or fiddlers, and few scholarly stabs at Scottish history—aside from the occasional, obligatory “Bonnie Prince Charlie slept here.” Only once were the words “Loch Ness monster” spoken within earshot of me, and the subject was quickly blanketed in uncomfortable silence. Indeed, it became apparent early on that cultural appreciation was not to be our theme. The daily cycling was so absorbing, our eyes so focused on the few feet in front of us, we had little opportunity to converse with any Scots beyond Fulton and those who supplied us with food, drink, and shelter.

I began to suspect that in our determined pursuit of a good ride, most of us were largely oblivious to the fact that we were actually in Scotland. It had become a nameless country of obstacle-riddled single- and doubletrack and hard-won descents. At night, we gladly sampled the beer and the single-malt whisky and, like conscientiously healthful people, complained about the blandness and heaviness of the food. A shared interest in biking is a thin bond between adults, and to the extent we came to know each other, it was mostly through this lens.

Larry the Canadian, relatively new to the sport—he went over the bars on day two—lacked finesse but was dogged and as strong as someone half his age. Barin, the old-schooler from Venezuela, had a near-philosophical aversion to riding in low gears. Luckily, he had the thighs of a fullback, though I believe I caught him on the smallest chainring once or twice. Barin’s devotion to mountain biking approached poignancy. One night, he spoke of the freedom that he’d always, and only, felt on a bike. He said that, as a teenager, he’d ridden all the way from Mexico to Canada on a road bike and, in his twenties, had coped with the death of his father by taking a long ride alone through Texas’s Big Bend National Park in the heart of winter. He said he didn’t even bring a tent, just rode through the snow for a week.

Guenter was eccentric to the bone, monitoring his vital signs as obsessively as his emotional state. “Today my knee feels very good,” he announced one morning, “but my anger is the same.” He told of how, in a previous incarnation, he’d built himself a boat and sailed halfway around the world, stopping in the Caribbean to, as he put it, “produce a baby in a lagoon.” He was a vociferous spokesman for the spiritual advantages of mountain biking. According to Guenter, it was primarily about escaping the known world. “There’s no adventure on paved road,” he told me. “You always know where you are. You never get lost. I’ve spent so many hours carrying my bike through woods, where no path exists. This is how you know you’re alive.”

On the fourth day, the sun came out. The deep, dark greens of the landscape grew paler and less foreboding, the streams seemed gentler, and everything had the glow of a 19th-century pastoral. I got sunburned. We reached our destination, an old stone hunting lodge, in the early afternoon, and lounged in our bike shorts, drinking and idling. The sun stayed out for the rest of the ride, but the relaxation expired. By the end of the fifth day, I’d made it up and over Mount Keen in my depleted state, suffering every lingering mile into the stodgy village of Edzell, our last overnight spot.

The next morning, as we approached the town of Montrose, the asphalt overtook the trails and we rolled toward the sea, knobby tires singing on smooth pavement, the landscape growing flat and broad. You could see the horizon. Entering the industrial outskirts of town, we rode past factories, body shops, car dealerships, were stopped at traffic lights and caught in the exhaust of delivery trucks and buses. Soon we steered onto an esplanade above a beach, pedaling past a miniature golf course and a snack bar. Workers sat eating lunch in parked cars, looking out at the North Sea. The water was gray and listless and stretched before us its vast, uninflected palate.

The post Mountain Biking Scotland appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

OVER THE YEARS, having read hundreds of adventure stories, interviewed many wilderness survivors, and experienced my own near misses with waterfalls, avalanche chutes, and venomous snakes, I’ve delineated a few major reasons why things go wrong out there: (1) Hubris. The ancient Greeks knew this as insolence toward the gods. I call it the “Dude, I can handle this, no problem” problem. (2) Ignorance. Some people should simply stay home until they know better. (3) Treachery. Rare, usually found only on high-stakes expeditions, but disastrous when it occurs. Examples: arsenic in the coffee, abandonment on ice floes, cannibalization of expedition mates for nutrients. (4) Shit happens. One of the essays that follows is a fine tale about human feces literally falling from the sky, which goes to show that some events are impossible to predict. (5) Miscalculating the risk. I find this last reason most interesting, containing as it does complex and ambiguous human motives. Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, famously said that the whole point of an expedition is to avoid adventures, which are the result of poor planning. But Amundsen, who was a mechanistic, plodding kind of guy, had it wrong. I believe that some of us—many of us, maybe even all of us—head into the wild secretly wishing for things to go wrong. We’re all seeking a worst moment—up to a point.

Think of the great stories you’ve heard. No one remembers much about Amundsen’s trip to the pole, except that he arrived with icy efficiency and, as carefully planned, his team ate their sled dogs on scheduled days during the return. In contrast, what helped immortalize Sir Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance is that he failed in his goal. His genius lay in his skill at escape.

Likewise Livingstone. No one in Victorian England hankered to hear the mundane details of his endless slogs—lasting up to four years—across Africa. Rather, the doctor dined out in London (and raised scads of money) by recounting how a charging lion shook him like a rat in its teeth—this because he’d stupidly approached the hiding beast after wounding it. Or take Lewis and Clark: In two years and four months, they safely traversed about 8,000 miles of the American West, but what we recall best from their countless journal pages are the mishaps: when grizzly bears kept coming despite fusillades of bullets; that night along the Two Medicine River when the Blackfeet attacked. The misadventure is the story.

Granted, it’s doubtful any of us will embark on such epic trips, but we all want stories to tell. What makes a good adventure tale is the unexpected. Most of us are not Amundsens, prepared for the tiniest eventuality. Rather, we place ourselves in spots where the unexpected can ambush us. We’ve all had this conversation: “Carry a compass, map, and matches? Oh, come on, we’re not going to get lost on this little trail.”

On a subconscious level, we need these mishaps. We understand that they pack powerful medicine. They’re antidotes to the quiet desperation of modern life, reminding us that we—as individuals, as a species—are survivors, showing us how truly extraordinary it is what humans can endure, how much we can outwit, outflank, or, with clenched teeth, simply withstand.

We need to know that, lifted out of our bubble-wrapped lives, we aren’t the delicate, ineffectual creatures that governmental institutions and toilet-tissue ads would have us believe. Sometimes we have to set out—presumably innocent of our interior motives—and go have a really bad time.

Peter Stark’s book Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival will be published in March 2014 by Ecco.

Narc Passage

Warning: Convicts in mirror are closer than they appear

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I AM OVER SIX FEET TALL, and my first love and co-conspirator was almost seven feet tall. I mention this because, in the context of danger, size matters. In 1971 and ’72, we hitchhiked through Europe as if in a security bubble. We saw great art and viewed the landscape. Our backpacks remained unstolen; the average European gave us a wide berth. In addition to being extra-tall, we were Marxist, or, rather, he was Marxist and I was the fellow traveler. He was always trying to make contact with the working class but was too intimidating to succeed.

When we got back to the States, the revolution, such as it was, seemed to be passing us by. It was August, sunny and hot, and we were on a trip from Iowa to Wyoming by way of the scenic wonders of South Dakota. We were doing 73 with the windows down and chatting about the labor theory of value. Two hitchhikers appeared. My companion slowed down to pick them up, since we’d gotten rides so many times in Europe.

They ran to the car. They were wearing black and did not look like respectable members of the working class but, rather, charter members of the lumpen proletariat. They got in back—the tall, skinny one behind me, the shorter, heavier one behind my friend. We began talking; it turned out they were just out of the state penitentiary, where they’d served time for drug-related offenses. This was not, on the face of it, a negative. Theoretically, they had something to teach us about aspects of the revolution that we were less familiar with, but we didn’t overhear them making political plans, only talking in low voices about old associates.

My friend and I exchanged a glance. As he turned off I-90 toward the Badlands, I pulled down my sun visor, angling its mirror so I could see the hands and face of the guy behind me. His face was animated. In his hands was a knife. I angled the visor toward the other fellow’s hands. He had a knife, also. I tried to communicate this to my friend by means of gestures, but he was busy drawing them out about their prison experiences.

As we entered the Badlands, we saw that they were truly bad, from our point of view: desolate, beautiful, strange, and isolated, one cliff face and jutting butte after another, in wildly striated and colorful layers. Why were we taking ex-cons with knives into the Badlands, anyway? Well, because we felt we owed them the benefit of the doubt, and also because, since we had talked about how we were headed for the Badlands, we didn’t want to seem to be prejudiced or modifying our trip out of fear.

Beyond that first impression, I don’t remember the Badlands, but I remember perfectly how graceful and slender the skinny guy’s hands looked as he played with that knife. My friend kept talking in a relaxed, friendly manner, but he drove faster and faster. Pretty soon, the colorful rock faces were zipping by, and by late afternoon we were back on the highway, doing 85. As Marxists, we gave no thought to stopping and kicking them out. As big, tall people, we gave no thought to asserting ourselves. We drove. Evening drew on. We approached Rapid City.

“Say,” said the shorter guy, “so-and-so lives here. He’d put us up for the night.”

“I don’t know—” said the skinny guy, but my friend, ever helpful, crossed two lanes and the apron of the exit ramp, bouncing the Chevy over the curb. We paused at the stop sign and whipped around a corner into a Howard Johnson’s. “Need some money?” said my friend. “You could eat here.”

The guys sat quietly, not moving. I watched their hands. Finally, the short one said, “Yeah. We do need some money.” My friend emptied his pockets. He had about 30 dollars, all our money. It’s what they would have gotten if they’d killed us.

As we drove away, we waved. We drove fast, in case they thought to pull out their six-guns and drill us from afar.

Scared Sockless

Stupefied and frozen in a hornet’s nest of hot lead

THERE I WAS, STANDING BAREFOOT in a field of fire with my socks and boots in my hands, obstinately refusing to run for cover until I had put my socks on. Jim was yelling something, but the machine guns kept drowning him out. Then came a brief lull, and I heard his voice loud and clear.

“Jon, fuck the socks! Run!“

It was the spring of 1983. Photographer Jim Nachtwey and I had teamed up to make one of the first trips inside Nicaragua with the CIA-backed contra guerrillas, who were fighting against the left-wing Sandinista regime. I was 26, and I’d never been under fire before. We had just spent an uneventful week with a contra platoon on an intelligence-gathering mission in the hills of northern Nicaragua. We moved around by night and, by day, hid and catnapped in thickets outside villages where the leader of our band, a tall, gangly, mustached man called “the Sparrow,” rendezvoused with peasant collaborators.

Before we set out one evening, the Sparrow told us that at dawn we would reach a road where a Sandinista military convoy was expected to appear. He intended to ambush it. That night it rained torrentially, turning the ground to a mass of slick mud, and in the darkness I fell repeatedly. Before long I was completely covered in mud, and both my trouser legs had ripped all the way up to the crotch. They hung like a split skirt, and I felt miserable and ridiculous.

When we reached the road, the contras fanned out on a bluff, taking up ambush positions. The sky was just beginning to turn blue-gray. Everyone whispered and moved very softly.

I began changing out of my wet and ruined clothes. I took off my boots and socks and had just put on my spare trousers when a terrifying noise erupted. I looked up and, directly above my head, saw red tracer fire sweeping through the trees. It took me a moment to comprehend that we were being ambushed and that everyone around me had vanished. Getting ambushed is a shocking occurrence. When you’re with people lying in wait, you have a sense of immunity to harm. But that was all turned around in a deadly second.

I finally spotted Jim and the others hiding in a shallow trench nearby, urgently motioning me to run and take cover with them. These instructions bewildered me; I still hadn’t put on my socks, and I was determined to do so. So I yelled, “But my socks!” In that moment I learned a lesson that’s served me well ever since: War, in all its manifestations, is essentially about fear—your own fear, collective fear, and how you handle that fear. Nobody knows until they’ve been under fire how they’re going to react. In my case, the sock fixation was a form of shock.

Jim shouted something back, but I couldn’t hear him over the gunfire. “What?” I said. He yelled back, but his voice was again drowned out. This exchange went on for what seemed like a long time, until I finally understood him telling me to run. I ran, barefoot, joining Jim and the others in the trench. When I got there, I realized that I’d brought my socks but left my boots behind. Jim retrieved them for me. And then we all ran like hell for the next five hours; we didn’t stop until we reached the safety of the Honduran frontier.

Surf or Die

Chewed up and spat out by the world's most ferocious wave

JAWS WAS A CIRCUS, spewing 60-foot waves like Neptune was on a rampage. This was last December 15, and a dozen tow-in teams were battling for position at the famous monster break, off Maui’s north shore; 50 more jet skis and a half-dozen boats sat in the channel watching; and five helicopters were flying overhead. No one was following any rules, but despite the crowd my partner Ryan Rawson finally whipped me into a six-story bomb.

The 14-pound board I’d been testing in 30-foot California surf was way, way too light, and I couldn’t hold the line. I fell, and I knew I was in for the beating of my life. I closed my eyes, went Zen, and… baboom!—the wave exploded on top of me.

When I surfaced 20 seconds later I saw a dude on another 60-footer breaking right in front of me. I took a deep breath and dove, but I had two problems: the pair of life jackets I was wearing. I couldn’t get under. My legs were sticking out, so I got “scorpioned”—folded in half backwards, my left heel ramming into the back of my head—while being dragged underwater for about 150 yards. For 30 seconds, it felt like King Kong had me by the feet and was just going apeshit rag-dolling me. I relaxed and took a dozen breaststrokes, but I was still down deep. Stars flashed in the corners of my eyes. I finally broke the surface, gasping for air. A film-crew chopper buzzed overhead, and I thought, I’m saved! But they just sat there filming me die. I prayed for them to harpoon me in the leg and fly me away.

Then the third wave hit. I figured since I was so far in, it would be weaker. Wrong. I surfaced, my left eye temporarily blind from the impact. When Ryan finally came around to pick me up, I thought it was over, but that warm and fuzzy feeling soon vanished. The fourth wave avalanched us both off the jet ski. I came up and saw Ryan swimming, about 30 yards away, with yet another big wall of whitewash pounding down. The rocks were straight ahead. That’s it, I thought, but someone—I still don’t know who—rescued me.

Back on the boat, I hurt everywhere. Squirming with pain, my knee wrapped in ice, I popped a heavy painkiller and chugged a couple of beers. Then I sat back and watched, dazed and confused but wishing I could shake it off and get back in the game.

I’d sustained a concussion, hyperextended my back and hip, yanked a ligament in my knee, and had my ego shattered. I surfed Jaws again last March—and used a heavier board.

Pinto Mean!

The perils of raising a grumpy colt

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I WAS A GRAD STUDENT in northwestern Florida in 1990 when a breakup with a girlfriend exiled me and the dogs to a trailer on several acres in the country. Wandering the adjacent Apalachicola National Forest one afternoon, I encountered a lone horseman, Stetson pulled low, .22 snugged in a scabbard, a string of bloody squirrels dangling from his saddle. My yapping mutts craved those rodents, but the rider reined in his mount, wheeled, and scattered the dogs. Then, with a terse nod, he moved on, like a knight of true country can-do. I wanted what he had: competence, confidence, mastery. At least, I thought, I could get myself a horse.

I found a real beauty—and cheap—a pinto colt with mismatched eyes: one dark, one lunatic blue. I called him Kidd, but from the get-go my equine scion reminded me all too much of myself, the big crybaby. He whinnied for his lost mother all that first day and night, blubbering in the corner of the pasture, and he clung to his resentment as he grew into a half-ton adolescent.

Despite his no-account ways, I made a mount of him—but soon found that galloping a spooky, green horse was an excellent way to break your freaking neck. And he was no fool. He knew my dogs’ deal: no work, nobody sitting on them. After a ride during which I was stuffed into a turkey oak, I threw in the towel and let him chase trucks along the fence with the rest of the pack.

Around this time I began to receive sinister phone calls. Some of my students, disgruntled and dark-intentioned, had to be behind them. I was teaching five freshman English classes—badly—and my dissertation was overdue. My life was a mess. Yet I took great comfort in the proximity of the big beast. Hunkered down in my studies, I’d hear the trailer suddenly begin to crackle like a beer can crushed in a fist. But it would just be the Kidd, scratching his ass with my house.

Returning from school one day, I saw the screen door hanging from one hinge and the front door gaping. My God, I thought, they came for me! Vengeful students! Terrible paranoiac fear gripped me, and behind every tree I suspected maleficent laughter being muffled. Everything—everything—had been dashed and smashed. Such spite! Broken glass, groceries shredded and busted, my possessions torn, strewn, and stomped. Stomped! The den had been more perfunctorily trashed—but unmistakably signed, as it were. On the shag, a halo of bluebottle flies buzzing above, lay a great steaming pile. Of horse manure.

So much for competence, confidence, and mastery. I found the culprit at the very back corner of the property, dozing the doze of the righteous.

Snowplowed

A guided tour through an avalanche, where fear and fascination collide

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

IT LOOKED LIKE A HEARD of white buffalo stampeding down on me. I just had time to yell down to the others, “Avalanche! Hang on!” before it hit me with the force of 10,000 pillows. It was shockingly painless. I catapulted backwards, and my mechanical ascender held briefly to the fixed rope. Then it snapped and I sailed off into space.

Five of us were climbing 20,298-foot Parchamo, a Nepalese peak about 30 miles west of Everest. For the past ten days we’d been trekking up the Thame Valley to reach our 18,500-foot high camp, on the Tesi Lapcha Pass. Now we were going for the summit, and my altimeter had just clicked over to 20,000.

I accelerated to the speed of the avalanche and could do nothing but softly tumble, arms and legs flailing. In spite of my speed, time slowed. I traveled deep inside the mass. Snow pressed me down and held me up. I thought, This is different.

I had time to understand that it was beautiful. The light was a soft translucent blue that became brighter or darker depending on my depth. I never saw sunlight, but could periodically see the surface. The snow looked like tumbling blue dumplings. I watched as one large block skidded beside me for what seemed a long time. It was squarish at first but disintegrated as it slowly rolled over, then veered away. The snow blocks were not malevolent. It was as if they were escorting me, emotionless companions, as we traveled together on the road to hell.

I didn’t think I would die, but I hoped I wouldn’t. This thought never left my mind. Objectively, I realized I could die; subjectively, I wouldn’t allow it. I had to live. Plummeting, I fought to reach the surface, but I couldn’t. I forced my head up and gasped for air. I’d fight until my last breath.

Ultimately we slowed. The deceleration happened suddenly but softly, like a truck plowing into a snowbank. I was facedown, headfirst, thinking, Uh-oh, dead people stop facedown.

Then there was a second surge and I was propelled forward again. It flipped me over and sideways. We lurched to a stop with an audible crunch, the first sound since impact, and I finally saw daylight. I wasn’t surprised to find myself on the surface, but I did feel an eerie satisfaction. I had been swept a thousand feet down and now lay at the very toe of the slide. My ride lasted perhaps 30 seconds.

The fight left me exhausted, with that creepy feeling of coming out of anesthesia. With the little strength I had left, and before the snow totally cemented me in, I struggled to free my arms and legs. I lay as if on a crucifix, arms spread wide, hips high, back arched inelegantly. After freeing myself from my pack and digging out, I realized that I was alive—and alone.

The fleeting rush of having survived was preempted by concern for the others. I saw one friend partially buried nearby and dug out his face. I thought surely some of the others were dead, and I held my head in my hands, inconsolable and utterly spent. But slowly, miraculously, everyone was found or dug out. As we collected ourselves and what was left of our gear, I glanced at my watch: It was 7:45 a.m. The day had barely begun, yet it was already defined for a lifetime.

Itchy and Scratchy

When nature calls in the woods, think before you reach

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I LEARNED TO DEFECATE in the woods while I was still in single digits. Our small Wisconsin farm was surrounded by hundreds of acres of swamp and forest, and my siblings and I were often out of washroom range when the urge struck. We became precocious connoisseurs of organic cleansing media. Wipeability factors varied: Oak leaves gave good coverage, but their slickness limited absorption. Pine needles were worthless, even injurious, but had the benefit of smelling like tree-shaped air fresheners. Moss was fragile, soggy, and sandy, but had a decent swab factor. Finally, I can say without reservation that a fat handful of poison-ivy leaves did the job quite nicely. The initial job, that is. The sequelae, to use a physician’s term, were untenable.

I was 14, which, given my experience toileting alfresco, made my mistake doubly knot-headed. Grandpa had taken a passel of us to a riverside swimming hole. I still remember squatting in the bushes before jumping in, prospecting for leaves after it was too late to relocate. The only trees within reach were pines. I groped behind me and felt a clump of flat, wide leaves. Bingo!

It took a while for the itching to commence. Early on, while still in the water, I felt squirmy twinges of an intimate nature, but, hey, what’s new? Back home two hours later, I was race-walking around the living room, fully prepared to drop my shorts and do the naughty-puppy carpet scoot. Cross-eyed and panting, I racked my brain and reviewed the day. When I got around to reenacting the outdoor toity session, I blanched.

I wound up with such a blistering case that I was taken to a clinic for corticosteroid shots. The doctor also prescribed a topical cream and instructed my mother (a nurse) to apply it daily. Florence Nightingale herself wouldn’t have shown up for that gig. I spent a week sleeping on my stomach, fitful and straddle-legged. Standard bathroom procedure went out the window, replaced by a wincing gavotte in which I lowered myself to the seat, did the deed, drew a baking soda bath, and delicately cleansed and patted myself dry. One misstep and I would collapse into a seizure of spastic monkey-scratching. Years later I came across a poster in a print shop that said IT’S NOT THE BURNING, IT’S THE ITCHING, MAN! and I thought, Amen.

For a long time, the fact that I’d wiped my butt with poison ivy was my little secret. I have to believe Mom had her suspicions, even though I explained it away by saying I’d backed into the stuff while changing into my bathing suit. She kept a log of my childhood illnesses, and the entry for August 7, 1979, says, “poison ivy, lower trunk.” Delicately put, don’t you think?

Cannery Woe

A salmon butchery goes from bloody routine to living hell

BETWEEN JOBS A FEW YEARS BACK, I decided to work in a southwest Alaskan cannery in Dillingham, which is not so much a town as an open-air boat garage by a tent city near Bristol Bay. Shifts ran 16 hours, 24/7. I had not been on the slime line five minutes that day, my fifth, when I was pelted in the throat with a salmon heart. It lay near my boot—a fleshy, violet organ the size of a Concord grape. Across the conveyor belt, a man steeped in piscine vital fluids grinned. “Come on, take a shot,” he said. “Have some fun or you’ll lose your fucking mind.”

Back then I was a great believer in easy money. One day a friend had said he’d gotten a little bit rich gutting salmon in Alaska—and it was a piece of cake. He’d told me to expect “at least five grand.” I’d bought a plane ticket instantly. My new job (cake, indeed, compared with a slot at the beheading station, where a guy had just chopped his hand off) involved wielding a dildoesque wand, vacuuming blood from the spines of flayed fish at a rate of 80 tons per day. The goo bore a disquieting resemblance to blackberry preserves, and the gelatinous rattle it made as the chrome tool inhaled it kept my gorge on the rise.

To ease my horror at having cashed in my summer for a life of gore-strewn monotony, I chatted up the girl beside me, who eviscerated her salmon with a vigor I admired. Her face was luminous with scales, and she wore a skein of golden roe in her hair. I tried to curry her sympathy by showing her my hand, swollen big as a catcher’s mitt from endless vacuuming. She looked at me and said, “I guess this work is tough—if you’re a pussy.”

The shift ended, and my colleagues and I, looking fresh off a Haitian-zombie-powder binge, dragged ourselves to our tents. But sweet sleep was impossible. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds roared under the rain fly. Next door, a couple, unhappy with how their Alaskan “vacation” was turning out, screamed at each other for hours before being interrupted by some bad news: The cannery had announced it was going bankrupt.

The whole place went insane. Armed fishermen stormed the offices. Someone boosted a front-end loader and tried to ransom it for lost wages. With nothing else to occupy them, the drunks and felons I’d worked alongside passed the time by rioting and assaulting one another. Fearing for my life, I skipped town.

I was never paid a cent for my labors, but the experience did no irreparable damage—except to my faith in the notion of a fast buck. My bloated hand returned to normal, and with a lot of scrubbing I banished the slaughterhouse aroma from my skin. I rarely think back on those days, but at the occasional dinner party, when somebody serves me a salmon puff or a lox crostini, I quietly push my plate away, as if there were a scorpion on it.

Belly Dance

Loose of bowels and out of luck in North Africa

FOR A WEEK I’d been laid up in Jerba, a run-down resort isle on Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast, with a ghastly stomach bug that had liquefied my innards. Even so, I was determined to visit Tataouine before leaving the country. This dusty southern settlement at the edge of the Sahara is renowned for its ksours—ancient Berber strongholds built into the rocky hillsides—but Star Wars nerds know that it sits in an area filled with locations used in the first movie. I wanted to go there and poke around. “Tataouine is only a two-hour drive,” I whined to my traveling partner, my then-wife Jackie, as a Jerban doc named Borgi poked my distended gut and scribbled a prescription.

Next morning, I gulped down a handful of mystery pills, rented a car, and hit the road. By the time we got to the vicinity of Tataouine, I was so cramped and feverish that we scrapped plans to return to Jerba and decided to make the daylong trip to Tunis, the country’s bustling capital, in search of an English-speaking physician and a decent hotel.

On a barren stretch of highway, our car’s oil light flashed red. I pulled over and yanked the dipstick: not a hint of oil. Another mile and the engine would’ve seized. After a 25-minute walk in the blistering sun, we found a rickety roadside kiosk. A freshly slaughtered goat hung from the awning, its blood pooling in the hot sand. On a shelf behind the counter I spotted motor oil, which the merchant happily sold me for about $10 a quart.

In Tunis, we checked into a hotel and I set out to return the car, braving the Tunisian rush hour, a snarling mayhem of cars, buses, motorcycles, and pedestrians. Two blocks later, a bus bashed my left front fender. The driver leaped out, waving his fist and shouting in Arabic. His passengers were irate, shrieking and pointing at me. After jotting down a phone number, he darted back to the bus and drove off.

The car was barely drivable. I parked in an alley and staggered to the rental office, making several stops at restaurants along the way to relieve my tumultuous bowels. Nobody at the car place spoke English or grokked my stick-man drawing of the accident, so I indicated to one of the agents to follow me. When we reached my car, it had been booted. The agent scolded me in Arabic, shoved the car keys in my breast pocket, and ran away.

By now it was dusk, and I felt utterly helpless. I returned to the car office and pleaded with the agent to help me, but our language barrier was insurmountable. Rational thought ended right there. I hurled the keys, dashed out the door, and sprinted the eight blocks back to our hotel in the dark.

Breathless and frantic, I told Jackie to pack. We barricaded ourselves in the room, certain that the Tunisian police were scouring the streets for the evil, auto-smashing Americans. At dawn we flagged a cab to the airport. Three hours later we were in Geneva, and by morning I was cheerfully handing stool samples to a Swiss doctor. He wondered why we ever went to Tunisia in the first place. Damned if I could remember.

Kamp Soggy Bottom

Atop storm-raked Mount Washington with a big, useless drip

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

I WAS 16 AND TRAPPED in a thunderstorm on a mountain known for some of the worst weather in the world. Next to me a grown man lay sobbing, whimpering, pounding the mud with his fists. He was my counselor.

It was 1987, and I’d been sent to a tough-love camp in Vermont, a place where they promised to teach resourcefulness and self-reliance. The camp had dispatched us—seven teenage boys plus a pudgy career graduate student I’ll call Wayne (the mud-hugger)—on a three-week hike through New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Things went bad right away. Wayne was clueless, so we’d lost the trail and wolfed down all our rations. Next it started raining—first a drizzle, then a deluge. After three nights in a wet sleeping bag, Wayne was talking to himself.

“Yo,” one of the campers whispered. “I think Wayne’s lost it.”

“Give him time,” I said, feeling increasingly unglued myself. “Maybe the rain will stop.”

It didn’t, at which point the expedition, strung out by hunger and the gathering dread that none of us would ever know dryness again, descended into madness.

On the worst day, halfway through, we reached the top of Mount Washington, the 6,288-foot peak that, according to The Guinness Book of World Records, is the site of the highest sustained surface wind speed ever recorded (231 miles an hour).

As we summited, the rain broke, and a complex of buildings—a mountaintop observatory and cafeteria—materialized in the thinning fog. Desperate and dehumanized, we invaded the cafeteria like crazed animals, foraging in the trash for soggy French fries and half-chewed pizza crusts, slurping ketchup straight from the packets, and raiding the salad bar with bare hands. Meanwhile, Wayne telephoned the camp director and tried to weasel out of the last ten days of the hike.

“Suck it up and get back on the trail,” the director barked. Which we did, just in time to get walloped by a reconstituted storm that seemed like a Hollywood special effect.

“Run!” people on the trails shouted. “Find shelter!” When the storm climaxed in a fusillade of breathtakingly close lightning bolts and hurricane-force winds, we were still above tree line, scrambling to get off a naked ridge. That was how I ended up hunkered in the mud, next to an all-but-catatonic Wayne.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he whined. “I want to go home.”

“I know,” I said.

That night, when I crawled inside my wet sleeping bag, I’d absorbed an important lesson about self-reliance: Adults aren’t actually in control, and they can be just as weak as children. The next day the sun came back, and it didn’t rain again the entire trip. Wayne, however, was no longer our leader. He was just another body on the trail, and when the hike was over and we returned to camp, he quietly slipped away.

Incoming!

On El Capitan, there’s nowhere to hide when things fall from the sky

Worst Moments in the World ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø

WHAT ARE THE ODDS? That one man’s bare behind, hung off the Long Ledge bivouac near the top of Yosemite’s El Capitan, could deposit all its foulness directly on our heads, with us 600 feet lower and dangling from our ropes? I mean, really, when you consider the powerful crosswinds, the ubiquitous updrafts, and the rather loose character of most big-wall bowel movements, it’s got to be one in a million.

But that’s exactly how it happened. My two climbing partners and I were 2,000 feet off the ground, three days into a five-day ascent of the Salathé Wall, widely considered the finest pure rock-climb on earth. Reuben Margolin, our mad and jovial visionary, had just led a very hard pitch, and I stood a rope length below, with our Fish haul bag and our steely-eyed enviro-warrior, Jonathan Kaplan. Then we heard a whistling sound, the terrifying evidence of an object hurtling down from above. Instinct told us it had to be a rock, so we hugged the cliff and awaited the worst—and the worst certainly came, though it took the form of countless fecal asteroids splattering across our heads and shoulders.

Stunned, Jonathan and I stared at the wet brown pie on the bright-red nylon top of our haul bag. Our next bath was 48 hours away. We had no soap, water was in short supply, and that instant hand-sanitizer stuff hadn’t even been invented. So we were screwed, and we suddenly started screaming like stuck pigs, cursing the careless bastards high above and then cursing them some more. After that we dug out a pocketknife to cut every soiled sleeve off our shirts and to snip big locks from each other’s hair. With a few lukewarm drops of water we made a hopeless attempt to scrub the fresh human feces from our already filthy skin, and then we did the only thing we could do: We climbed onward, muttering bloody murder.

But the next evening, when we reached Long Ledge, we found something surprising: a plastic bag with an apologetic note (SORRY, DUDES, WE DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE THERE) and a peace offering that included a box of Lemonhead candies, a can of chicken meat, and a joint. We had plenty of treats of our own, and I’d stopped smoking pot in the 11th grade, but I loved the gesture. Lame though it was, it conjured the guilt they must have felt, their sense of common cause with us, and the bond we still shared, simply for having been on that spectacular wall at the same time, together.

Tour de Farce

Some mountains just want to be left alone

AS AN ADVENTURE PHOTOGRAPHER, every time I take a trip, I’m thinking, This could be the one, the one that makes a million bucks, the one that brings fame, fortune, enlightenment—something. In April 1997, I was part of a group that got permission to traverse the Rishi Gorge, in the Indian Himalayas, and ski 23,360-foot Trisul, where no foreigner had been in at least 15 years. A dream trip.

The plan was to take the peak’s mild north face, but when we got to Delhi a bureaucrat informed us, “You will climb from the other side.” Instead of powdery slopes, we’d be attempting sheer icefalls on the weather-whipped southwest face. With skis. We decided to go for it, cramming seven of us, a cook, a helper, two drivers, a guide, and a month’s supplies into a minibus.

Two days later, we were in Rishikesh, where the Beatles got enlightened. I was in my hotel room when a friend hit the floor—face first. Seizure. Holy shit! Turned out he wasn’t just your typical party animal/ski junkie; he was literally a heroin addict, and he’d quit cold before we left. Maybe he thought the trip would cure him—I don’t know. But as we’d been going up the mountains, he’d been going into withdrawal. We nursed him back to health and moved on. It’ll get better in the mountains, I thought.

But this was just a taste. One day everything self-destructed. We’d made base camp early and sent the porters packing—with our gear. Supplies had disappeared. One group had stolen our kerosene; in the distance, we saw them furtively leaking it to lighten their loads. A while later, smoke wafted up from the valley below. They’d started a wildfire with our fuel! Whether it was the result of sabotage—two of them had been savagely bickering—or a cigarette, we never found out. We watched in horror as acres burned. Once we’re higher up, I thought, it’ll get better.

At 20,000 feet, we saw snow leopard tracks, and for about a minute it seemed like things might turn out OK. But the route was dangerous, the climbing over our heads, and most of our food had been pinched. As we ate our soy nuggets, we pictured the cook’s goat on a spit. Moving on, we soon saw that a huge slide had wiped out our route. Then monsoon clouds rushed in, as if on cue. That was it. Cursed! Our hearts just weren’t in it anymore. We never even saw the summit.

Vanquished, we returned to camp, where the cook dispatched his goat. Within ten minutes we finally saw the sign that told us once and for all to get the hell out of there. It was a sign in the heavens: lammergeiers, vultures with ten-foot wingspans. They knew dead meat when they saw it.

Paddling Fool

On the dark waters of Brooklyn, only a nut goes out at night

I WAS HOME ALONE some years back on a gray and misty Halloween. My girlfriend had gone to Manhattan, leaving me to face the sticky-fingered procession of ghosts and goblins ringing our doorbell. Fifteen lollipops later, I desperately needed to get away, so I bolted to my kayak club, on the western edge of Brooklyn’s Jamaica Bay, for an early-evening paddle.

Jamaica Bay consists of nearly 10,000 acres of brackish water crisscrossed by shipping lanes, and this time of year I usually stayed off it past 4 p.m. Wise policy. I was about five miles out, feeling smug and at peace, when a ghoulish fog descended. In about five minutes I was lost—with no food, water, compass, or foul-weather gear.

Two hours of fruitless meandering later, the sound of traffic drew me to a garbage-strewn beach. I emerged dripping from the shadows, paddle in hand, and slouched toward the road like an escaped kayaking felon. I should have flagged down a car, but as I hopped in place under a streetlight’s spooky glow, I hesitated. Assuming some naive or bizarre soul would even stop to pick me up, would I want to get in? Besides the risk of meeting Hannibal Lecter, it would mean leaving my expensive racing kayak unprotected in a neighborhood of high funk.

Several cars sped by before I spied the flashing red light atop the World Trade Center. Ha! I knew that if I paddled toward the beacon on top, I would hit my home channel. So I jumped back in the boat and started hammering.

Unfortunately, at water level the light vanished, and I ran smack into a labyrinth of islands. Wending my way through the narrow channels like a nearsighted lab rat, I ran aground.

As I pulled my boat through knee-deep mud, a hard rain began to fall. The temperature was 44 degrees Fahrenheit, and I was in shorts and a T-shirt. I blundered onto a hummock and started running in place to warm up. I ran all night, in ankle-deep water. When the rain finally stopped, just after dawn, I sat down and nodded off, head between my knees like a Bowery bum.

I eventually pulled up to the dock at 8:30 a.m., 15 hours after I set out. Standing there were my parents, the commodore of my kayaking club, a few law-enforcement types, and my girlfriend. Do you recall the scene in The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs of Tom Sawyer when Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper come back from the dead and everybody’s happy? Well, I didn’t get much “happy.”

The commodore said it best: “It’s not easy to break that many rules on one paddle. Nice going, dipshit.”

Bleak Streak

Trapped! On the tundra! and having a cold, hard time…

A FEW YEARS AGO, a magazine approached me to write about a quirky and very rich British adventurer who was determined to cross the ocean by car. He planned to put in at the Bering Strait, a 53-mile-wide gap of ice-choked sea. The story sounded like fun—Shackleton meets Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—and I went to the British countryside to observe a test of the adventurer’s customized floatable steed, which looked like a Zamboni mounted on barrels. I should have known something was off. The vehicle entered a farm pond and sank. I spent two days standing in a muddy field while the adventurer, undaunted, struggled to drag the machine ashore. I petted some sheep.

Two months later, I arrived in a tiny Inupiat village on the strait. In short order, I learned that the adventurer had offered a documentary film crew exclusive access to his trials and triumphs, and that my presence in the village was little welcomed. I was tempted to high-tail it home, but the weather—lashing horizontal winds, whirling snowdrifts, sub-zero temperatures—meant that planes could be grounded for weeks.

No doubt the remoteness of the setting influenced my mood. But I experienced a crushing flare-up of the kind of childhood wound that comes from being left off the team. I had some practical problems, too. The adventurer and his crew had taken over the only guesthouse in the village—the weapons-studded compound of a bearish Vietnam vet—and I wandered the outpost’s single lane in search of accommodation. A sorrowful-looking man of around 40 opened his door to me. His name was Echo. He could offer me an old, stained mattress on the floor of a storage room. It was as cold as a meat locker.

I liked Echo. He was as depressed as I was. He spent his days in a monotony of idleness. At night his friends would drop by and play cards until dawn, chain-smoking. I smoked a good deal, too, and did nothing to discourage the card players’ mockery of the adventurer.

So it went, until one morning, a few weeks into my stay, I woke to find clear skies and still winds. I strayed from Echo’s house and trudged to the frozen beach. The sea looked like the world’s biggest, most dangerous Slurpee. I was elated to be outdoors, and to know that the clear skies meant my plane would come soon to take me away. I decided to celebrate by climbing the hulking, ice-encased mountain at the edge of the village.

The footing was a bit tricky, but as I climbed, the view of the strait was glorious. I saw Russia, floating on the sea below. That’s when I slipped. My boots flew out from beneath me. I slid, and kept sliding, and accepted that my last moments on earth would be spent as a missile sailing across tundra.

A few hundred feet down, my backpack got snagged on some stones, and I came to a halt. I traversed the slope on all fours in search of a safe place to stand. In this proud posture, I heard a sound overhead. It was the adventurer, hovering in his helicopter. He shouted down to me. “You OK, mate?” I gave him a thumbs-up. He looked toward me with his toothy, charismatic smile. “Join us for dinner tonight, mate?” I nodded and waved him on. Then I crawled back to the village, packed my bags, and whiled away the night with Echo, the card players, and a giant bag of Doritos.

Tragic Tomes

Great books about bad luck

1907:
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo , by John H. Patterson — Two lions savage a railroad work gang in East Africa.

1919:
South , by Ernest Shackleton — His ship crushed by ice, the explorer rescues his men from certain doom in the Antarctic.

1939:
Wind, Sand, and Stars , by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — Tales from the pioneer of perilous flights across the Andes and the Sahara.

1955:
A Night to Remember , by Walter Lord — The RMS Titanic‘s final hours.

1974:
Alive , by Piers Paul Read — Stranded high in the Andes by a plane crash, Uruguayan rugby players survive by cannibalizing dead teammates.

1988:
Touching the Void , by Joe Simpson — Injured by a fall on the Andes’ 20,853-foot Siula Grande, climber Joe Simpson is dropped into a crevasse and must crawl down the mountain or die.

1992:
Young Men and Fire , by Norman Maclean — The 1949 Mann Gulch wildfire leaves 12 smoke jumpers in ashes.

1996:
Into the Wild , by Jon Krakauer — Chris McCandless walks alone into the Alaskan wilderness, destined to starve.

1997:
The Perfect Storm , by Sebastian Junger — The six-man crew of the Andrea Gail is lost in a deadly October 1991 nor’easter off Nova Scotia.

2000:
In the Land of White Death , by Valerian Albanov — In 1912, a Russian sailor, stranded in Arctic pack ice for 18 months, leads 13 men to seek help, but only two survive.

2000:
In the Heart of the Sea , by Nathaniel Philbrick — In the event that inspired Moby Dick, after the whaler Essex is destroyed by an 85-foot sperm whale, the crew resorts to cannibalism.

2001:
The Proving Ground , by G. Bruce Knecht — A storm decimates a fleet of boats in the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race, drowning six sailors in the Tasman Sea.

2002:
Over the Edge , by Greg Child — Kidnapped by Islamic guerrillas in August 2000, four American climbers plot their escape in Kyrgyzstan’s rugged Pamir-Alai Mountains.

2004:
Shadow Divers , by Robert Kurson — A World War II U-boat wreck becomes a deadly seven-year obsession for a diving crew.

The post Let the Bad Times Roll appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

Many roads lead to the gleaming stop sign on the verge between the human and the wild. Stephen Badhwar, who is in his early ’30s and sports the costume of the self-imposed exile from middle-class society — the ponytail and random facial hair and embroidered sweater and well-worn Birkenstocks — pointed his truck north and west and set off from the outskirts of Toronto one day seven years ago, leaving behind a failed organic farm and a degree in political science. Where was he going? Away.

He drifted through the Yukon and Alaska, and like many other searchers without destinations who end up at the end of the road, he heard windblown whispers of an enchanted wilderness in the remote northwestern corner of British Columbia, where a village that might have dropped intact from some frozen nineteenth-century idyll hugged the shore of an ethereal glacier-fed lake, guarded by grizzlies and wolves, and where horses were said to amble through sloping lanes of Old West architecture. An untamed sweep of land, unbruised by human touch.

So Stephen followed the tremulous needle on the inner compass that leads to the place where there is no going forward and no turning back. He took his truck off the Alaska Highway at a spot east of Whitehorse called Jake’s Corner and headed south through a valley of black spruces and aspens and vibrant wildflowers, catching glimpses of lake water the surrealistically lacquered-blue shade of a suburban swimming pool. The hard-packed gravel yielded to cracked blacktop, and 60 miles later the blacktop came to an abrupt halt and there was no place left for Stephen to drive.

Atlin, the town in which he had dead-ended, resembled the set for a serene acid trip. Mount Atlin rose across the lake like a monumental beached sea creature. A picturesque old steamboat, long disused, swayed at its moorings at the foot of town. Rusted mining equipment lay sunk in weeds around an old one-room schoolhouse. The air was still and silent and the porous light seemed painted on the sky like a ghostly fresco.

It’s as if the place found him, Stephen tells me. He seems moved as he talks. It’s midnight, and the late-spring twilight seeps into the nearly vacant bar of the Atlin Inn. The wilds of the north, Stephen says, maintain an undiminished allure for free spirits. No one tells you what to do or who you are or gets in your way or holds you back. Accordingly, Atlin sometimes has the proud knack of striking newcomers as a piece of improvisational theater — Our Town gone bushwhacking — with its cast of 500 players slipping in and out of archetypal poses: Trapper and Artist and ºÚÁϳԹÏÍør and Healer and so on. Stephen pauses between sips of club soda, staring out at the windswept lake where his wife, Heidi, has been kneeling in a canoe for some hours, posing as a genuine canoeist in a commercial for hiking boots. I’ve met Heidi. Her hair is long and wheat-colored and her teeth are very, very white, and I’m reminded that Atlin likes to call itself the Switzerland of the North, which has a pleasing and misleading ring of neutrality to it.

There are of course other roads to the road to Atlin. The quest for the landscape that corresponds to one’s inner wildness has been known to assume religious dimensions. “This place is heaven,” says white-haired 80-something Irene Coleman, for whom heaven is neither an unpleasant nor a remote prospect. Irene tells me that she hopes to reach the end of her personal road while sitting here, on her porch, gazing over her poppy patch. She was brought to Atlin from Vancouver 61 years ago by her husband.

Back then, the Alaska Highway did not exist, and thus Atlin could best be reached by floatplane or, in winter, by a caterpillar train plying the frozen lake, or by dogsled. Atlin was one of those rare isolated dots on the map, a fortress protected from the distant world of poverty and strife by endless impassable wilderness. It was the feeling of having crossed over into a private wilderness — corridors of ice-capped granite receding into the horizon, moose tracks dropping into weathered limestone canyons, sullen waves of untouched woodland that seemed to absorb one’s inescapable harrowing secrets — that proved most seductive. “I feel so lucky to be sitting in this beauty spot,” Irene tells me, while a warm breeze off the lake stirs the plastic bags that are clipped to her clothesline. “I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else since the day I arrived. Oh, I’ve found paradise here.”

If you live in Atlin or the surrounding wilderness, whose unpopulated and unaccommodating expanse allows you to celebrate the insignificance of the human society that you have rejected, chances are that you live as most people did before the wild places were crosshatched with roads: hand to mouth, with few resources and few needs and plenty of experience in cobbling together a bare-bones living from the ragtag materials at hand. You chop wood, hunt, bang nails, garden, work construction, paint houses, fish, sell homemade crafts from your living room, lead tackle-laden German tourists to pools of enormous lake trout.

“People in Atlin are pioneers,” says Nan Love, who spent a few winters in an old portage cabin with her then-husband, a wannabe-trapper, and their baby 25 years ago. She remembers how ermines nested between the logs of the roof and how the gin froze during two weeks of minus-68-degree days. “It was terribly romantic,” she says.

Love, who returned to Atlin for good in the early ’90s and now hires herself out for secretarial work, is typical of those who accept the bargain of Atlin’s stalled free market. She earned about $10,000 last year. “I don’t have a vehicle,” she says, “but I live very well. I can look at the lake anytime I want to. I don’t have running water in my cabin, but I have a beautiful view down the channel.”

It often feels a little like the drowsy end of the last day on the calendar in Atlin, that fading hour when one’s vigilance is lowered and unruly dreams begin to assert themselves and one’s sleep is haunted by increasingly urgent intimations of the end of the illusion of paradise. It had to happen, one supposes. Progress is coming to town with its fleet of earthmovers, anxious to scoop a long and meandering industrial byway out of the roadless expanse on whose edge Atlin is perched, the better to reach a spot in the wilderness just below a glacier where there stands a mountain brimming with gold and silver and copper and lead. Suddenly, the charmed oasis at road’s end finds itself in danger of becoming a truck stop, overrun with transients and with miners out for a payday binge.

As they wind down from the perpetual day in their gleaming log chateaus and their vinyl-sided ranch homes, lulled to sleep by migrating songbirds and alcohol, Atlin’s residents are forced to brace themselves for the road-borne collapse of their communal fantasy. Gone is their extended and largely unexamined reverie in which the streams run with gold and salmon and their neighbors — the blue-collar types who live in town, the artists and retirees who’ve staked out the nearby hills, the Indians who live in two isolated subdivisions called reserves — are no more at odds with one another than they are with nature.

Where work is scarce, as it always is in Atlin, the designs of an upstart mineral exploration firm such as Vancouver’s Redfern Resources can stimulate old-time gold-rush fever, preparing the way for hostilities of race and class and lifestyle and environmental ethics to come barreling down the road like a runaway ore truck. Redfern aims to parachute into the 4.5-million-acre watershed of the Taku River, an unprotected wilderness the size of Massachusetts, current home to glaciers and intact forests and disarmingly unmanaged rivers, and through this homey terrain build yet another road, a hundred-mile access route from Atlin deep into nowhere, all for the sake of reopening a mine that went defunct in the fifties. (Ore transport through Atlin rather than through nearby Juneau averts Alaska’s opposition to the mine.) During the anticipated nine-year life of the mine, 40 jobs may come Atlin’s way.

Atlinites moon over the promise of steady jobs, though there’s little doubt that almost anyone who moves to the end of the road does so in part to avoid the shallow rapids of consumer society. A self-reliant contempt for big business and big government is more common than frostbite scars in Atlin. This despite the unsavory fact that the Switzerland of the North also happens to be the prettiest little welfare state around, with some 55 percent of the adult population drawing relief checks to make it through the dark, workless winter.

Those months offer more time for enforced meditation than the most evolved guru would request. Daylight dwindles to five or six hours a day, and a murky shroud that the locals call ice fog blows in off the lake and stays for a month or two, and cocktail hour gets earlier and earlier, and the stasis at the end of the road becomes hard for hardy souls to bear.

When you’ve been sprayed by enough waterfalls and felt sufficiently disoriented by the hovering woods, and have gone long enough without hearing another person’s voice and begun to find your own mild baritone mildly unfamiliar, and have admitted to being a little frightened by the nighttime choirs of sharp-toothed mammals that seem to be observing you dispassionately from their concealed perches, then you’re ready for the cosmopolitan respite of Atlin. So you hang a right at the end of the road, and you discover that you’re on Discovery Avenue, central Atlin, and if your eye is caught by a sagging commemorative banner strung from a light post, you’ll learn that you’ve arrived in time for a party, since 1998 marks the centenary of the gold rush that prompted thousands of Klondike fortune-hunters to shift course and flock this very way, like bewitched migratory birds.

Present-day Atlin doesn’t give off much of a celebratory sheen. Atlin likes to recall the glory days of its first decade, when 10,000 folks beat their way through the bush to huddle in tent cities along the banks of mineral-clogged streams, but the town’s more recent history of near-obsolescence exerts a stronger pull on local sentiment.

As recently as the 1960s, Atlin’s population had slipped to about 75, and where there had once been all the amenities of a boom town — shops and banks and a movie theater and a newspaper — now the storefronts in the center of town were boarded up. That Atlin has stubbornly held on to its acre of hallowed ground is testament to the irresistible appeal of being the last stop on the road to luminous oblivion. For Atlinites there are two lifestyle options: Atlin or “outside.” And the more suffocating one perceives the world “outside” to be, the more rarefied is the aura of the few remaining Atlins in the atlas. So Atlin dips and swoons, but like a beautiful misguided idea it is never snuffed out entirely.

In Atlin’s latest bout of soul-searching, though, the notion has begun to take root that to save the village, the village has — in psychological terms, at least — to be destroyed. “We’d be just another town if we weren’t at the end of the road,” one of Redfern’s milder opponents tells me.

Not surprisingly, a different refrain was being offered at the Atlin offices of Redfern Resources, located in the living room of Terry Zanger’s double-wide trailer. Zanger, a soft-spoken man who scrapes together a living overseeing exploratory drilling and surveying for Redfern at the proposed mine site, was joined by a sorrowful character named Stuart Simpson, who mans Redfern’s local public relations effort. Simpson sported a graying crew cut and wire-rimmed glasses and a denim shirt bearing a logo for motor oil. He and his commonlaw wife, I had been told, craft elegant ornamental boxes, but Simpson did not arrive at the trailer bearing his handiwork. He came, instead, equipped with the graceful manner and eager catchphrases of the drone who’d been hired to move among his neighbors and proselytize the bounties of hard-rock mining.

Simpson seemed war-weary. The Redfern project, he believed, was a no-brainer, its environmental beneficence confirmed by science, its goodwill toward the sensible folk of Atlin utterly self-evident. Even the leftist government of British Columbia, which often pledges itself to aggressive environmental stewardship, issued a project approval certificate for the mine last March, after reviewing the findings of an environmental assessment committee. So what’s to argue? “People are getting so sick of this issue,” Simpson said. He and Zanger nonetheless roused themselves for a display of the required zeal. “This is one terrific mine,” Zanger told me. “It’s going to be an award-winner.” Repeating one of Redfern’s favorite claims, he revealed, “There’s actually an improvement in the environment that will come from opening the mine.”

Such statements don’t come cheap. Redfern claims it spent more than four years and $5.4 million studying the mine’s effects on an array of human and ecological concerns and had arrived at nothing but unambiguously optimistic conclusions. The access road and its 69 stream crossings and its night-and-day traffic would barely be noticed by the area’s wildlife, I was assured, and the economic boom wrought by the mine and its promised jobs would ensure a bright future for Atlin, and what’s more, Redfern’s abiding concern for its brothers and sisters in the aboriginal community would be exercised through the disposition of scholarships for the Atlin-based Taku River Tlingit Indians, whose ancestral territory was to be crossed, but in no way upset, by the little big-rig freeway.

“We live here. We care,” Simpson told me in imploring tones. “Who’s going to be a better guardian of this land than the people who are here to stay?” An Indian woman hired by Redfern as a liaison to the Tlingit community sat mutely in her armchair in a corner of the trailer like a long-suffering Indian in a New West version of an Old West movie, taking notes and rolling her eyes with impressive discretion.

“People in town are getting really frustrated with outsiders who don’t understand us coming in and telling us how to live,” Simpson said. Amen, nodded Zanger, complaining of the “propaganda mill” fueled by environmentalist elites, who have produced slick anti-Redfern brochures and videotapes, and who persuaded American Rivers to place the Taku River on its much-publicized endangered rivers list, and who organized raft trips down the Taku for celebrity nature-lovers, and who were said to have funded the local Taku Wilderness Association, which purports to be a grassroots organization but, according to Simpson and friends, operates in secret like a disreputable cabal.

The road and the mine, I came to understand, had attained the status of embattled symbols in a holy war for Atlin’s identity. The terms of the dispute might have been couched in the predictable, mind-numbing exchange of conflicting data, but the underlying and disquieting struggle being waged in Atlin was for control of the magical ethos of a magical if dwindling place. The petty politics that stained communities everywhere had spread to the end of the road and the forest beyond in disappointingly familiar form. “The people who want to put a stop to the mine,” Simpson said, “are trying to change Atlin from what it’s always been — a frontier mining town — into a romanticized lifestyle retreat. The community,” he continued, affecting a look of pouty indignation, “is beginning to suffer feelings of helplessness.”

Atlin has a high tolerance for eccentricity, but the color-comics oddities of the bush advertised by TV dramadies are little in evidence. Atlin’s weirdness is less superficial, and darker. “You don’t move to the end of the road at the edge of the wilderness if you’re normal,” says Don Weir, president of the Taku Wilderness Association and self-appointed sacrificial lamb to the agents of plunder come to tread on his ecosystem. “Atlin,” he says, “is totally free-form.” I’ve joined Weir for coffee on the deck of his cabin outside town, overlooking the greenhouse and the plots of dirt where he grows potatoes and broccoli and currants, just downwind from his outhouse. Weir, who is in his mid-40s, wears a Grateful Dead cap over his silver hair and sits with monkish indifference to the fat mosquitoes clambering over him.

“We don’t earn lucrative salaries here,” he tells me, “but hey, we live in Eden, so it’s OK.” Weir grew up in Oregon and packed his car after graduating from college to set out for the un-trafficked zones. He’s lived in the region for about 20 years, half of which were spent in isolation deep in the bush, where he was the winter caretaker at a jade mine. He would go months at a time without seeing another person and, like other solitary types scattered through the deserted valleys, would come to Atlin for downtime. He recalls that, when he first arrived in the early ’70s, “Atlin was a wild anarchistic town. There were no rules. If you wanted to garden in the nude, then you gardened in the nude. Horses roamed through the streets. We raised some hell back then, but most of us have lost the energy for it,” he says nostalgically. “Now we raise raspberries and flowers instead. Atlin has become gentrified.”

Weir doesn’t strike me as gentrified. He supports himself, barely, as a painter — the walls of his cabin are lined with languid cubist landscapes — and does carpentry and paints houses to fill in the gaps. Since Redfern came to town two years ago, though, Weir has been drawn into the obsessive rhythms of the environmental activist, constructing the logical chain that links the imposition of a restricted-access mining road to global ecological apocalypse. It’s a process beloved of lovers of the earth. (“That hundred-mile road connects Atlin to the global economy,” I was told by one Vancouver-based environmentalist, who is committed to forcing the global economy to take a wider detour around the Taku Wilderness.) Weir describes evidence that documents the shoddiness of Redfern’s rosy environmental studies. Then he links Redfern’s bad science to what he perceives as the provincial government’s bad faith, its undemocratic effort to steamroller the assessment process. Soon the shadowy picture of a broad collusion — the old military-industrial complex of Weir’s Oregonian school days — begins to emerge.

So if you’re Don Weir and you’re bummed by the insight that your backyard, which ranges from glacial outcrops to temperate coastal forests, is on the verge of being ruined by the capricious schemes of a nickel-and-dime exploration company, then you’ve suddenly found that the hours you used to spend on your deck chair studying the gradations of sunlight are now filled with nightmarish outlines of some pretty substantial foes from far and near: The wilderness-colonizing mining industry; British Columbia premier Glen Clark, once embraced as an environmentalist, now seen as a deficit-fearing turncoat; labor unions, more concerned with well-paying jobs than with the feeding habits of bighorn sheep; the suits on the Vancouver Stock Exchange and, by extension, their amoral land-loathing Dow-Jones-boosting brethren on Wall Street, who hound leftist governments into the arms of corporate despoilers. And most poignantly, because most intimately, the very neighbors with whom you used to dance at the Atlin Inn on Saturday nights before the satellite dish came to town with its broadcasts of the world outside — the world from which you sought refuge — and with its beamed-in-from-outer-space sitcoms and game shows, initiated the downward spiral into which the community has slid, so that a few of those neighbors no longer greet you with much tenderness when you cross paths at the post office. And no amount of righteous consternation can alleviate the stress of living in a tiny shattered community, where there is none of the merciful anonymity that comes from living in the large shattered communities that lie on the other end of the road.

But if you’re Don Weir and you’re contemplating some bit of civil disobedience if the capitalist bulldozers start rolling like tanks through the streets of Atlin, then you know that your crusade has cosmic justice on its side. Because the history of roads in the wilderness reveals that roads invariably beget more roads, and the more roads there are, the greater the viability of other activities, like logging the valleys of the Taku watershed to feed the pulp mills of southern British Columbia, or opening new mines, or subjecting the area to gun-toting Lynyrd-Skynyrd-blasting four-wheel-driving good ol’ boys. And none of that will do, since you live at the end of the road, and nothing gives you night sweats in the winter like the spidery image of roads with no end.

I had not been out in the bush, far, far from the nearest road, for more than 10 minutes or so, before I learned that I was responding to the awesome vacancy of the Taku Wilderness in a characteristically white way, since sentimentalists of nature like myself, my instructors implied, are on a distinct continuum with the white armies and anonymous, though white, multinational corporations that stomp out indigenous people wherever they may be found. For the next 48 hours I was to be submerged in the cultural deprogramming machinery that is housed at the Nakina Center for Aboriginal Living and Learning. The CALL, as it’s called, is located on the property of a 44-year-old Tlingit man named Bryan Taku Jack, on a jagged escarpment above the banks of the Nakina River about ten miles above its confluence with the Taku. In summer the river is lit with king salmon returning to nearby spawning grounds, and grizzlies often tramp by Bryan’s cabin on their way to feed at the riverbank, and eagles hover overhead waiting for scraps that the grizzlies leave behind.

Bryan built the cabin in the early ’80s, from dead logs that he milled on site. A few years ago he and his wife, Joan, an Ojibwa originally from northeastern Manitoba, started the CALL as a kind of wilderness-based empowerment center for local Indians and as a retreat for non-Indians interested in purging the cowboy within.

“Most whites don’t understand how privileged they are,” Joan told me when I joined her at the long table that was the CALL’s central gathering place. It was seven in the morning, and she was rolling her day’s stock of cigarettes. “Even the poorest white person is involved in the operations of colonial oppression.” A young white environmental lawyer from Vancouver who was hauling water to the kitchen offered a cry of endorsement before continuing her chores.

Bryan and Joan had arrived back at the Nakina a few days earlier, having led a dozen ragged pilgrims on a five-day trek from Atlin along the Grease Trail, the migratory path trod by the Tlingit when they were hunter-gatherers who wintered on the dry shores of Atlin Lake. This year’s journey was part ritual, part political theater. Redfern’s proposed road will cross the Tlingit path five times and run parallel to it for a long stretch. Those Tlingit who challenge the new road — and Bryan and Joan Jack are the most vociferous opponents — have made noise about raising barricades, not because they share the environmentalists’ obsession with ecological purity, but because they’re bent on preventing another repeat of the centuries-old European land-grab. “Redfern is just beads and trinkets, ’90s-style,” Joan told me. A hummingbird whirled at a feeder outside the window. “Now, instead of shiny pots, they want to give us four-wheel-drives.”

Bryan wandered from the table and let Joan talk. Joan is a prodigious talker. She described a dream she had just had, which involved a dead dog and a hostile white man and a white woman who kept changing form and a carefully wrapped package that was full of animal shit. “My dreams are often prophetic,” she said. I nodded. Joan was a blend of ideological bully and den mother, her bulk draped in a paint-spattered housedress, her hands occupied with the beads she was sewing into a square of deerhide. She was making a medicine bag and was aware of the symbolic power of her stitching. “Every day of my life,” she announced, “I’m either making good medicine or bad medicine. We’re all medicine people.” The non-Indians in attendance lapped it up like good medicine.

Bryan returned and began to speak in his high-pitched, mournful voice. He is one of the few Tlingit who have an intimate knowledge of the traditional territory, and this lends him a particular authority among members of the tribe. “The Grease Trail,” he told me, “is the bloodline of the Taku River Tlingit people. Between the time you start in Atlin and the time you get here, your spirit is changed. Our ancestors are buried all along it, and they’re watching us to see what happens. Guaranteed, if Redfern puts that road along our trail, they’re going to dig up our people.”

Joan claimed that many Tlingit were resigned to defeat and had grown accustomed to having roads built through their lives. “We’re so full of self-hate,” said Joan. “The idea that we’re dirty savages has been ingrained in us. We’re ashamed of ourselves.” Lacking self-love, the Tlingit community in Atlin has suffered the same painful divisions over the Redfern issue that have marred the white community. Many Tlingit are eager to extract some community benefit — a hockey rink, for instance — from Redfern while the company is in the spirit of making peace-offerings. Many Tlingit are anxious for jobs. And not a few continue to harbor bitterness toward environmentalists for successfully redefining fur-trapping as a despised and sometimes illegal practice, thereby forcing Indians off the very land that the environmentalists now want to save.

What Joan knows, though, and what the Tlingit know, is that the Indians are, for a brief moment, poised to determine the Redfern issue for themselves. As the result of a recent ruling by Canada’s Supreme Court, the Tlingit essentially hold veto power over the mine. So the Tlingit are being courted by Redfern and by environmentalists, but they find themselves frustratingly unable to determine their self-interest. The assurances of well-meaning white people echo through Tlingit deliberations with a familiar corrosiveness. While the Tlingit wring their hands and stare off into the traditional territory beyond the end of the road, territory that many of them have never set foot in, preparations are underway for the ground-breaking of the Taku basin’s new migratory route. Spiritual bulldozers are afoot.

Atlin is a wounded town, but it’s not wounded worse than other towns, and it’s not wounded differently, and it may hobble along with mortal wounds for so long that the wounds become part of its posture, and it may, over time, grow so accustomed to its wounds that attempting to distinguish the town from the wounds proves futile, and the wounds become the town, and the town forgets why, or where, it ever was wounded. Then, it would be nice to think, Atlin will be back where it started in the rapturous high latitudes, road or no road. It never was paradise, though for a while it seemed like a good scale model.

Donna Hall is a nurse at Atlin’s Red Cross Outpost. Her mother was the town nurse before her. Her family arrived in Atlin in 1908, when the gold had not yet played out. “Being in Atlin,” she says, “is being home. You’re not passing through. It’s your destination. You might find a town that’s just as beautiful, but not one with as perfect a layout. Everything is in its ideal place. Atlin Mountain is just where it should be. The lake is just where it should be.” And, though the nurse won’t say so in as many words, she seems to suggest that the road ends where it should end.

I had a vision of a town of 500 people that could be understood with the standard diagnostic tools. You talk to an old-timer, a newcomer, a miner and a tourist, an Indian and a construction worker, and you begin to trace the connective tissue that binds the town together. But there is no connective tissue in Atlin, only a road, the one road in and the one road out, and if Atlinites have chased themselves to the end of this road for any good reason, it is to forgo the available ways of thinking. Where is Atlin? The more closely one looks, the more the place changes shape, disappears, reappears at the edge of a different wilderness, the wilderness one needs at this moment, and may need again. There are stories within the self-contradictory stories that people tell when they try to explain why they’ve landed in one absurd place rather than another. There are places as remote and as isolated as Atlin, and sometimes they’re not as remote or as isolated.

Bob Couchman and his wife, Carolyn Moore, led me for a walk on the broad rocky beach along the shore of Atlin Lake, and then we drank scotch at four in the afternoon in their glistening log house, in front of which is parked an old Volvo and a new Pathfinder. They’re from Toronto, as are many of their nearest neighbors. Bob works as a consultant for nonprofit foundations far from Atlin and has spotted black wolves in the meadow outside his office window. Bob and Carolyn are the old new world come again to the end of the road.

Jamie Carlick is a 17-year-old Tlingit who dropped out of school five years ago and whose mother moved away from Atlin because Jamie drank too much. Jamie started drinking at age 11. I find her in a tent, where she is lying in overalls eating sunflower seeds. She says she hopes to work for the government, or to be a lawyer.

Katja, from a town near Cologne, arrived at the end of the road a little more than a year ago in a German military-surplus truck. What she had in mind when she set off on her obsessive drive through the north was the goal of reaching something like an idealized clearing on the other side of the false wall at the limit of mundane existence. She had to drive for a long while. “This place,” she says, “is a magnet for mad people.”

Perry hitchhiked to Atlin in search of work as a miner. As a child in New Zealand he’d read all about prospecting. He tries to sell me a sketch he’s been working on, for $200. The sketch, he says, is called “Lost #9.””It’s an abstract response to the landscape,” he tells me, and I agree.

James Williams, an Indian whose wife owns the local grocery store, remembers being beaten as a six-year-old for speaking the Tlingit language with a friend at the church-run Residential School for Indians that he was forced to attend. He says he would like to relearn his forgotten language, but is afraid. He’s 49 years old. He supports the road.

Leonard Parisien is a salmon fisherman and former trapper who describes coming out of the bush one winter on his snowmobile, dragging the bloody carcass of a wolf, and crossing paths with a fallen cross-country skier. He feels cross-country skiers resent him, and he resents them for this. Nonetheless he stopped to help the woman. He says she seemed confused by his assistance. He supports the road.

There was a woman who refused to talk to me on the empty street because she was afraid of being seen with me.

There was a man in a fishing cap who told me to fuck off when I asked him for a moment of his time.

Guy Anttila is a Finnish-born bush pilot who took me in his two-seat floatplane over the largest stretch of unroaded landscape I’ve ever seen. He flew me over the vagrant channels of a river in flood stage, where the murky water bore the debris of washed-out beaver dams, and he flew me past sunwashed pictographs of sea canoes painted on granite cliffs, and he flew me over the steep canyons and the arid plateaus along which Redfern is set to build its road. It will be an astounding feat of engineering prowess, this road. It will be well worth making the long trip to Atlin in the next century, if there is a next century, after the mine has closed and the road has been paved and widened, to take a leisurely drive through the homeland of the Taku River Tlingit. Guy points to his outfitter’s cabin, down below, at the confluence of two rivers that braid themselves into the Taku. He’s got a good thing going, leading wealthy tourists from around the world on hunting and fishing expeditions. I would bet he’s a expert guide. He knows the best marshy spots to find bull moose and the best rocky outcrops to find mountain sheep. He’s nearly booked through the turn of the century. He opposes the road.

The post Where the World Might Find You appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

“The question is not if but when we’ll be drowned,” says Paani Laupepa, Tuvalu’s point man on climate change.

A thin strip of Funafuti Atoll snakes its way across the Pacific.

Pastor Molikao Kaua worries about the flood next time.

Chief Finiki and his no-good pulaka plants.

One of the many trash pits on the island.

Two Tuvaluans munch raw fish heads as the sun goes down on Funafti’s lagoon.

Siligama Taupale, who drifted for five months at sea before being rescued.

Adieu, Fongafale.

IF YOU HAVEN’T HEARD of Tuvalu, the fourth-smallest country in the world, so much the better, because its nine square miles of dry land may soon disappear from sight like a polished stone dropped in the deep sea. And if that happens, it might be unpleasant to consider that the basic amenities of our lifestyle-our cars and planes and power plants, our well-lighted, well-cooled and -heated homes-have brought about the obliteration of an ancient, peaceful civilization halfway around the world.


I’m getting sunburned. The equatorial heat is scorching, and the conversation of my host-a sneaker-clad 29-year-old conservation officer named Semese Alefaio, who prefers to be called Sam-is inclining toward doomsday. Sam is piloting our skiff into a vast lagoon encircled by the 24 wisps of land that make up Funafuti Atoll. Funafuti is the capital of Tuvalu, a chain of nine islands-six coral atolls and three limestone reefs-scattered across 350,000 square miles of otherwise vacant South Pacific blue. Scads of silvery fish leap above the water’s punishingly bright surface; not far away, a dolphin crests, hangs suspended above a wave, and vanishes.


“This is heaven, yes?” Sam remarks. He speaks in a flat, affectless voice, staring straight ahead as he steers. With long, thick hair pulled back in a ponytail, Sam looks like a Calvin Klein model. But jeans are not what he’s advertising.


“There,” he says, gesturing above the waves with his chin, “that’s the sinking island.” All I can see are waves converging in skittish little folds as we approach a reef.


“Which sinking island?”


Sam tries not to show his impatience. After all, I’m a palagi, an outsider, and Tuvaluan courtesy dictates polite forbearance of my cluelessness. Sam knows that I’ve come here to bring back ghastly news from global warming’s paradisiacal ground zero, since Tuvalu is the first sovereign nation to announce it is being swallowed by the planet.


“Look to your right,” he instructs. “You see now?” I begin to make out a spit of land-a dozen coconut palms clinging above a sidewalk’s width of beach. “Those trees are beginning to fall down from erosion,” he tells me. “That’s what the sinking island looked like a few years ago.” He pauses and looks at me. “Now,” he says, “look straight ahead.”


A barren rocky outcrop comes into view above the waves. “Tepuka Savilivili,” Sam says, naming what’s left of the island. He anchors the boat and I wade toward the rocks. The water temperature, at 84 degrees, is catching up with the air temperature. A recent tide line darkens most of Tepuka Savilivili’s oval remains, which are barely 200 feet long and 50 feet across. I climb ashore, and a fluorescent green crab clatters past me. A tern circles above. Sam tells me he remembers when there was a sandy beach here. Now there’s nothing but black, jagged coral that looks like decoration for a lunar stage set. A shallow, bleached pit in the center marks the spot where a cluster of trees once took root. In 1997, Sam says, Cyclones Gavin, Hina, and Keli blew across the lagoon; the trees were uprooted by wind and waves, and soon afterward the island began to wash away. Where Tepuka Savilivili’s miniature forest once stood, I find some plastic bottles, a container of laundry detergent, and a trio of desiccated coconuts. Waves batter the rock from all sides.


“Tepuka Savilivili is just a sign,” Sam says, “but the signs are everywhere.” The seas, it seems, are heating up, and therefore rising, and Tuvalu’s leaders have warned their population of fishermen and farmers and merchant seamen to brace for a contagion of shrinking and sinking. Other islets in Funafuti’s lagoon have lost up to 80 percent of their land in recent years.


Sam and I climb back into the boat. “People used to come to these little islets if they had a problem,” he tells me. “They’d come here for the day. It’s quiet, it’s natural, they forget their problem and go home with a clear mind.” We approach the dock at Fongafale Islet, Funafuti’s overcrowded, semi-bustling, haphazardly beautiful hub, home to nearly half of the country’s 11,000 citizens. “Now people are trying to leave Tuvalu,” Sam says. “They’re afraid for their lives.”

WHAT DOES A COUNTRY DO when it knows it is of no concern to the rest of the world, has no natural resources to sell, occupies a location so exposed to the elements that it seems geography has played a bitter joke, and emerges from colonial dependency into the warming-up postmodern world?


It does what it can to survive for all the dwindling days that the earth has allotted it.


For the last decade, environmentalists have been eager to christen Tuvalu the proverbial canary in global warming’s coal mine. Jeremy Leggett, who was scientific director of Greenpeace’s Climate Campaign in the 1990s, told me that Tuvalu “is a microcosm of the horrors that await us if blindness and idiocy like that of the present American government continue. Tuvaluans are the first victims.”


Of course, were it not for the reports of its impending demise, few people outside Tuvalu would know that it existed at all. Put together, the nine islands cover less ground than Manhattan, and their highest point is 16 feet above the sea. The nearest movie theater is in Fiji, roughly 600 miles to the south. Under British rule until 1978, Tuvalu didn’t even rate its own colony; instead, the British yoked Polynesian Tuvalu to its Micronesian neighbor Kiribati, calling the package the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. (Tuvalu was Ellice.) Despite its current value to environmentalists, none I spoke with had visited the country or could even pronounce its name properly (accent on the second syllable: Tu-VAH-lu).


Tuvalu, though, has slipped comfortably into its role as environmental cause célèbre. A succession of prime ministers have captivated the press at international gatherings like the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and, more recently, this summer’s World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Tuvalu anted up to join the United Nations in 2000, hoping, according to Ambassador Enele Sopoaga, “to draw attention to the adverse effects of climate change and sea-level rise on the survival and livelihood of Tuvalu’s people.” In March, at a summit of Commonwealth nations held in Coolum, Australia, Prime Minister Koloa Talake predicted that his homeland would be gone within 50 years, and appealed to the leaders of Australia and New Zealand to guarantee Tuvalu’s population a dry migratory destination.


“Flooding is very common. When it is high tide, the flow has gone right into the middle of the island, destroying food crops,” Talake told a news conference in Coolum. “Islets that used to be my playing ground when I was ten or eleven years old have disappeared, vanished. Where are they? . . . These things were there and now they have gone; somebody has taken them, and global warming is the culprit.”


Talake got a cool response from his biggest South Pacific neighbor. The Australian government-which asserts that “the likely impact of climate-change-induced sea-level rises in the Pacific is not immediate”-flatly rebuffed Tuvalu’s calls for immigration. New Zealand, on the other hand, amended an existing temporary-employment program to allow 75 Tuvaluans a year to apply for residence.


At the same summit, Talake raised the prospect of filing suit in the International Court of Justice against the United States and Australia for their prominent role in pumping up the atmospheric greenhouse with carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. Groups like the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, which continues to investigate the strategy of mounting anti-tobacco-style litigation against big global warmers, are aware that Tuvalu could make an agreeably desolate plaintiff. “If I lived in Tuvalu,” Jon Coifman, the spokesman at NRDC’s Climate Center in Washington, D.C., told me, “I’d be concerned with basic justice and with reparations for the fact that my country is about to go underwater.”

IT TURNS OUT THAT JUSTICE and reparations are precisely what Tuvalu is concerned with, though perhaps not in that order. Paani K. Laupepa, a vigorous and articulate 40-year-old assistant secretary in the Ministry of Environment, Energy, and Tourism, is Tuvalu’s point man on climate change. The day I arrived, he greeted me at Funafuti’s airstrip wearing a business shirt, flip-flops, and a skirtlike garment called a sulu, and immediately inquired after the carton of cigarettes, two bottles of liquor, and package of chocolates that he’d asked me to bring him. He expressed his hopes that I would prove useful in his government’s “public relations campaign.” Then he fell silent, and gave me a stern once-over. “What are your motives?” he asked.


Let’s be honest: I’d come in search of imminent catastrophe. But it seemed like a strange question, and instead it made me think: Paani Laupepa, what are your motives? Why has Tuvalu, alone among the world’s five atoll nations and its many low-lying island and coastal countries, embraced the cause of global warming with such single-minded urgency? The Marshall Islands and Kiribati and the Maldives-pancake-flat island chains all-are also prime candidates for erasure, but the world has yet to be serenaded by repeated bulletins heralding their death throes. I had a flash of panic: Tuvalu is sinking, isn’t it?


“My motive,” I told him, “is to learn as much as possible about the impact of global warming on Tuvalu.”


“Relax,” Laupepa said. “Take a swim. You’re in the islands now.”


I wasn’t the only palagi who had beaten a path to Tuvalu’s officially sanctioned farewell tour. During my week on Funafuti, the members of what we jokingly referred to as the Tuvalu Press Corps included an Australian documentary filmmaker who told me he’d wept upon reading Tuvalu’s report to a UN agency on climate change; an earnest American writer-photographer couple whose identification with the natives extended to wearing Tuvaluan garb and spending a night sleeping alongside islanders on mats on Funafuti’s airstrip, which does quadruple duty as runway, playing field, gathering place, and frequent nighttime crash pad for locals; and a Finnish writer who had journeyed there by ship, because she refused to contribute to global warming by flying.


Each of us, I’m certain, was intent on bringing home some version of the poignant and alarming story that had begun to appear in the world’s press. The Japan Times, August 2001: “Their burial grounds, their schools, their homes, their churches will be enveloped by the ocean. The Tuvaluans can never go home again.” The Los Angeles Times, February 2002: Tuvalu “may comprise the first country to pay the ultimate price for a changing climate: national extinction.” The Guardian of London, that same month: “The evacuation and shutting down of a nation has begun.”


It’s irresistible-the stuff of disaster movies and Atlantis myth, perfectly suited to plucking the heartstrings of well-intentioned foreigners-and Tuvaluan officials are only too happy to oblige with print-worthy quotes. “The question,” Laupepa told me, “is not if but when disaster strikes, and not if but when we’ll be drowned.”


Still, I couldn’t avoid detecting, from the moment I arrived, an uncomfortably opportunistic strain in my government hosts’ entreaties. That week, Tuvaluans would be voting on a new national government. Fifteen members of parliament would be elected; since there are no political parties, each of those 15 had his sights set on building a majority coalition and becoming the next prime minister. Koloa Talake had brought attention to Tuvalu’s plight on the world stage, but his four years were up, and some of his critics at home considered him aloof and ineffectual. He faced strong opposition from the likes of former prime minister Kamuta Latasi, an old-timer who opposed dabbling in global affairs and regarded the idea of a lawsuit as a pipe dream.


Prime Minister Talake, however, was bracingly frank about the value to Tuvalu of playing the annihilation-by-global-warming card. He stunned one of my colleagues in the Tuvalu Press Corps by stressing, again and again, that the expense of mounting a legal challenge to the United States and Australia could be justified on practical grounds. “You’ve got to spend money to make money,” he declared.


In short order, then, I came closer to understanding at least one dimension of Paani Laupepa’s motives in regard to the press, generally, and to me, in particular. “You might come in handy,” Tuvalu’s designated enviro-flack told me one morning. “How rich are the readers of your magazine? Very rich? We want to reach the super-rich. Put my name and e-mail in your article in case some of your readers are interested in helping us. If this publicity leads to sympathy and assistance, that’s the fallout-the collateral advantage. We’ll take it.”


Tuvalu may have been sinking, but not as fast as my hopes for a tidy glimpse at the perils of global warming.

BEFORE I LEFT TUVALU, I had ample time to convince myself that global warming is the mother of all scenarios of environmental-and social, and economic-collapse. This is not propaganda: Global temperatures went up by about a degree during the 20th century; in April, an article in the journal Nature suggested that temperatures are likely to rise another 2.3 degrees in the next 20 to 30 years. The largest and most authoritative international body of experts in such matters, the 2,500-member Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), operating under a joint mandate from the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, has warned that the planet might warm up by as much as 10.8 degrees over the course of the 21st century.


Although the warming and its effects are global, Americans, representing 4.6 percent of the world’s population, have plied the atmosphere with about 29 percent of all insulating greenhouse gases emitted by human activity over the last century. Chief among them is carbon dioxide, exhaled in great gasps by every car and every furnace and every power plant. Nonetheless, in March 2001, President Bush renounced his predecessor’s signature to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, calling the treaty “fatally flawed” and inimical to American economic interests. He refused to commit to reductions in greenhouse-gas spewing so modest that most observers considered them merely a symbolic first step.


“Sea-level rise will cause major disruptions,” says Robert T. Watson, chief scientist at the World Bank, who was chair of the IPCC for six years, until the Bush administration, prodded by its friends at ExxonMobil, lobbied vigorously to remove him from the post this year. (He was replaced by Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer from greenhouse-gas-friendly India.) “I believe that the very large majority of scientists-95 percent would be a good number-agree with IPCC findings,” Watson told me.


The IPCC’s weather forecasts, as laid out in its 2001 Assessment Report, make the Dark Ages look like a Tuvaluan beach party. Droughts will afflict much of the world, with especially nasty thirst in store for the 1.3 billion people, including Tuvaluans, who currently lack adequate access to clean water. On the other hand, the quarter of the world’s population that lives in the great river valleys of Asia is apt to find itself treading the waters of deluge due to the rapid retreat of the Himalayan glaciers. Warmer climes will abet the spread of malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and of agricultural pests, and of hungry critters like the beetles that have hollowed out 38 million spruce trees in the past few years in Alaska’s Chugach National Forest. Even marginally warmer seas will bleach, and then kill, coral reefs, which sustain the greater part of marine biodiversity.


As in all things, poor parts of the world will cope especially poorly with the changing climate, while the temperate latitudes of the United States will fare more hardily. But that doesn’t mean that North America is in the clear. Geoff Jenkins, a climate modeler at the British Meteorological Office, one of the world’s leading centers of climate research, says that, on top of the four to eight inches that the world’s seas rose during the 20th century, the water, which heats up much more slowly than land, would be saving its best for the foreseeable future and beyond.


“The average projection for the next hundred years is something like half a meter’s rise,” he told me, though the high end of the estimates verge toward twice that. Even more ominous, the gathering flood will be compounded by its own unstoppable inertia. “Once it gets started,” Jenkins added, “no matter what you do about emissions, the ocean almost doesn’t notice. The sea level continues rising for many centuries afterwards.”


How that affects our weather patterns is tricky. Scientists have only recently begun to discover how abruptly the earth’s climate has shifted in the past from hothouse to ice age-which is to say, nature has a fickle mind of its own. But figuring in the last two centuries of fossil-fuel burning, the current forecast is grim: Higher and hotter seas will bear more frequent and savage storms, accompanied by torrential flooding, like the kind that turned Prague into a Kafkaesque water park this summer. New Orleans and New York will have to undertake massive public-works projects to stay dry; Rotterdam and Venice will be lucky to make it. And perpetually forlorn Bangladesh is in for more good times, with 17.5 percent of its land-home to 17 million people and locus of half its food production-in danger of being engulfed.


“You could have a major dislocation in almost all low-lying deltaic areas, whether it be in Bangladesh, or Egypt, or the Pearl River Valley in China,” Robert Watson told me. “One could conceivably see tens of millions of people being displaced, leading, potentially, to a large number of environmental refugees in areas where there are already regional conflicts.”


And Tuvalu? At an average altitude of six feet above sea level, Tuvalu is apt to be stargazing from the wrong side of the water long before the oceans rise almost two feet. “We are endangered,” said Ambassador Sopoaga. “And you know, endangered people can act in desperate ways.”

I WANT TO TALK to the endangered people. It shouldn’t be hard to do. Even on a good day, Fongafale Islet feels as secure as a precipice. It snakes in a graceful north-south arc for about seven miles, and ranges from 20 feet wide at its narrowest point to about 400 yards at its plumpest. As Paani Laupepa muses during one of our conversations, Fongafale’s highest ground is the upper level of the guest house where I’m staying-about a dozen feet above sea level.


I start out on foot on Fongafale’s eastern side, where a 15-foot surf is breaking close enough to shore that I can reach the waves with a good fling of a rock. A few footsteps inland is a tidy whitewashed structure with yellow window frames, housing Tuvalu’s Department of Meteorology. On a wall opposite the entrance to the building is a framed photograph bearing the caption high tides 9 FEBRUARY 2001. The photo shows the staff of six standing in calf-deep water outside the office.


About a quarter-mile away, across the airstrip from the meteorological office, I meet up with Siaosi Finiki, the chief of Funafuti-a largely ceremonial position, but one that carries great respect among the islanders. Finiki, 68, is barefoot and wears a bright orange sulu, an orange tropical shirt, and a straw hat. For ten generations his family has survived by fishing and planting crops on Funafuti, a practice that he believes he will be among the last to perform. He shows me what is left of his croplands-a plot, perhaps 25 feet square, grown thick with stalks of pulaka, a starchy root vegetable that is one of Tuvalu’s historic staple foods.


“Look at this plant,” he says dejectedly, running his finger on the yellowed edge of a leaf. “It’s limp. It’s no good.” He dips a finger into the water that runs in a shallow drainage channel. “Salty,” he says. “Taste it.” I sprinkle a little brackish water on my tongue. Seawater, Finiki says, has infiltrated the layer of fresh water that sustained his plants. When did it start? “Maybe five years ago,” he says, referring to the same storm that swamped Tepuka Savilivili, in Funafuti’s lagoon. “A big wave came ashore and covered the land. Since then, people aren’t planting so much. The fruit is smaller and doesn’t taste good. Sometimes it’s rotten.”


Finiki glances around at the untended gardens. “Life has changed so quickly,” he says matter-of-factly, “because of how Westerners have oppressed us. When I was young, we lived on fish, pulaka, coconuts, breadfruit. Now everything is money, money, money. I’m the only one in my family who still eats pulaka. I urged my children to try it, but they don’t like it. They like imported foods that take no time to cook, like tinned corned beef. That’s OK, because the crop is no good anymore.” We turn and walk back to the road, where the chief’s single-gear bicycle is leaning in a ditch. “I’ll plant as long as I live,” he says. “The crop is no good, but I’ll keep planting.”


Four miles away is the northernmost house on the island, a cinder-block compound occupied by Bikenibeu Paeniu, Tuvalu’s current finance minister and a three-time former prime minister. In 1989, Paeniu became the first of Tuvalu’s leaders to press ardently for international recognition of Tuvalu’s vulnerability to global warming, and he was for a time a darling of the environmental movement. In 1993, he toured the United States and Japan with Greenpeace, delivering pleas concerning “genocide by environmental destruction,” and received an indelicate snub in his attempts to gain a five-minute audience in the White House with the environmental champions Clinton and Gore. Now 46, of squarish build and weary as an old boxer, Paeniu affects a philosophical approach to his country’s seeming insignificance.


“It’s really sad, the American stance on Kyoto,” he tells me. “I think the global powers know in their hearts and beings that climate change is taking place, but it’s simply not the priority for them that it is for us.”


We sit in the yard beside his house, shaded by fruit trees. Discarded car parts lie near a clothesline. A few women sit on a raised platform, weaving palm leaves into a mat. The ocean is so close I can feel a salty glaze on my skin.


“Listen to that wind,” he says, as the leaves rustle above us. “This is supposed to be the calm time of the year. Now, everything happens randomly. Cyclones come in the dry season, and instead of once every few years, they come two, three times a year. It’s quite unusual. To others, climate change is just a political dispute, but we are experiencing its effects firsthand, and we lack the resources to contend with it.” He kicks the ground with a bare foot. “We have the God-given right to this land,” he says. “If we are forced to move somewhere else, we are nothing but aliens.”

TWILIGHT. The sky over Funafuti’s lagoon is a rich smear of reds and golds worthy of a Turner seascape. At sunup and sundown, the lagoon becomes a communal meeting place for locals. I’m swimming in glimmering chest-deep water 50 feet from the offices of Tuvalu’s policymakers. A couple of men troll the water with nets. I nod a greeting toward a woman who is discreetly soaping herself beneath the water’s surface, then slosh over to a circle of three others who stand gossiping and eating raw fish heads and coconut from a floating zinc bucket. They offer me a scrap of fish and show me how to dip it in the salty water for flavor.


“So,” I ask, “is this water higher now than when you were children?” The women giggle and shake their heads. One makes a dismissive gesture with her hand. “It’s nature’s way,” she says. “Nature will take care of us.”


Nature: Sixty-four million years ago, nature raised a volcanic island here. That volcano has long since sunk beneath the waves, but nature saw to it that Funafuti Atoll remained, poking above the surface. About 3,000 years ago, seafarers from the Polynesian kingdoms of Tonga and Samoa, hundreds of miles to the southeast, spotted the land from their outriggers and came ashore. Even though nature decreed that the islands of Tuvalu were to be graced with poor soil, no mineral resources, and little fresh water, the surrounding seas offered abundant fish and, until not long ago, a comforting bulwark against the rest of the world. Islanders slept on open-air platforms beneath thatched roofs, developed elaborate kinship structures to avoid in-breeding, and devised more ways of cooking coconut than seems possible.


When Tuvalu gained independence in 1978, the natural issue it confronted was how to stay afloat financially, not topographically. Unlike other least-developed countries, it proved remarkably adept at hawking its few assets. Despite its modest per capita income of $1,000, the country is in the black-planning to take in, in 2002, about 50 percent more than the $20 million or so that it is set to spend. It sells fishing rights to the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, and Korea for about $10 million a year; it leased the marketing rights to its “.tv” Internet domain name to a Canadian entrepreneur in a much-publicized deal that has so far brought in more than $30 million (the rights were later leased to VeriSign); it adds capital through the sale of colorful Tuvalu postage stamps; and until 2000, it sold its excess phone capacity to overseas sex-chat operators.


Now Tuvalu’s shrewd managers get to calculate the opportunities presented by nature’s grandest, most worrying potential crisis. “In my next life,” says James Conway, Tuvalu’s highest-paid public servant, as he smokes a cigarette on the beach outside his office, “I want to come back as a small island state. All told, it’s a good deal. Virtually all of Tuvalu’s income comes from one source: the idea of nationhood.”


A 43-year-old Californian with degrees in energy economics from Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania, Conway arrived in Tuvalu 12 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer, working on a solar and diesel electrification project. He fell in love with the country, not least of all for its glorious fragility; during a storm in 1993, ocean waves swept through his house while he slept. “This is the sharp edge of the climate-change debate,” he tells me. “Forget politicians and scientists and activists. What it boils down to is waves in my bedroom.”


After eight years in Tuvalu, Conway moved to Bonn, where, from 1998 to 1999, he worked as an informal adviser for the International Climate Change Secretariat, a unit of the UN. When he returned to Tuvalu, flush with intimations of the climate change to come, it was in his current, amorphous position as special assistant to the Office of the Prime Minister, a role that he says “commands more power, influence, and respect than I’d ever get back home.” Some islanders feel that Conway cuts a mildly suspicious figure-one person used the term “shadow government.” None, however, doubt his devotion to scheming on behalf of Tuvalu’s welfare. He is widely rumored to be the driving force behind the proposed lawsuit, which he describes as “embryonic,” and he coyly admits to fielding inquiries from Greenpeace “and an array of people in the legal profession who are looking for a toehold to bring action against greenhouse-gas emitters.”


Conway is smart-surely the smartest American politician in Tuvalu. He knows that Tuvalu is not the only nation facing a threat from global warming, and that it can easily be exploited for symbolic purposes, since, as he says, “Tuvalu presents an enticing image for getting the message out to viewers.” But above all he knows that symbolic gestures can sometimes generate real revenue streams. “It’s hard to know in what form global warming will bring in funding,” he reflects. “It’s too soon to tell. But I think it will. Compensation is an issue.”


So, no great global-warming windfall yet. But there’s still time. Conway finishes his cigarette and locks the prime minister’s offices. “Obviously,” he says, swinging his briefcase, “Tuvaluans are hysterically concerned about climate change. But Tuvalu has no leverage, internationally, other than its ability to draw attention to its plight and wake up the world. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”


We meander along a newly built road. Night is falling, and I offer to buy him a drink. He declines. He has something of a solitary nature, this palagi power broker. “When they make the movie of the story of Tuvalu,” he jokes, “I hope they get Sean Penn to play me.”

SOMETHING DOESN’T quite compute. My head is full of the dire warnings of the government, environmentalists, and the press. But my eyes are open, too, and I can see that Funafuti is no green haven, and that a substantial chunk of its real estate has been cleared of trees and paved, and that garbage seems to be its most prolific national product, and that the environment has been degraded in ways that are unrelated to the legacy of Henry Ford.


Dozens of casual conversations with Tuvaluans who aren’t associated with the government yield little concern about rising seas. Many, like Teagai Apelu, an 85-year-old curmudgeon who is regarded as the leading guardian of Tuvalu’s oral storytelling traditions, are outright scornful of the notion. “There’s no change in sea level,” he tells me. “It’s rumors. It’s lies. It’s always been the same. When it’s high tide, salt gets in the gardens. When storms come, the sand gets washed away in one place and shows up somewhere else. It’s foolish to say Tuvalu will disappear!”


Government officials caution me not to heed the backward views of the people. “Tuvaluans will hide their real feelings when talking to a stranger,” Paani Laupepa tells me. “They don’t want to admit defeat.” Further, he says, 98 percent of his countrymen are devout Christians who take God’s word for it when he promises Noah that the big flood will not repeat itself. Yet after mass at the Tuvalu Christian Church one Sunday, Pastor Molikao Kaua, a diminutive 76-year-old whose blue eyes are so cloudy they seem to be made of smoked glass, tells me that he has made one thing clear to his congregants. “If there is a flood,” he says, “it comes from man, not from God.”


If. Not far from the wharf in Fongafale, a small fiberglass hut suspended over some pilings houses a state-of-the-art sea-level gauge installed by an Australian institute called the National Tidal Facility. Since 1991, the gauge has detected a rise in the waters around Tuvalu of less than a millimeter per year, which is more than a hair but a lot less than a flood. The Australians attribute the unusual high tides that have been observed by some Tuvaluans to a natural tidal cycle in the region that repeats every 18.6 years and is yet to peak. They also point out that the most dramatic recent changes in sea level have actually been decreases, like the astounding one-foot drop that occurred after the enormous pool of warmed-up seawater caused by 1998’s El Ni-o migrated from the western Pacific to the eastern Pacific.


When I mention the Australian measurements to Laupepa, he abruptly shoots them down. “I’m very cynical about Australian science,” he tells me, noting that the Australian government, which funds the National Tidal Facility’s research, is the world’s largest exporter of the second-most-abundant greenhouse-gas emitter-coal. “The Australian mentality stinks,” Laupepa goes on to say. “Their scientists misrepresent information in a way designed to suit the needs of the piper.”


Australia’s director of the National Tidal Facility, Wolfgang Scherer, who developed the sea-level gauges while working in the U.S. for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is adamant that his government has no influence over his Tuvalu project, and believes that objections to his findings are raised by those with “a political agenda.”


Scherer stresses that while the sea around Tuvalu is rising about a millimeter a year, Tuvalu’s troubles are not entirely the doings of nature. They’re also man-made. He cites, above all, “those flaming borrow pits that the Americans put there during World War II when they built the airstrip.” In 1943, 6,000 troops of the U.S. Seventh Air Force arrived and transformed Funafuti into a combat air base to fight the Japanese. The Americans paved one-third of the arable land with a runway that remains the capital’s dominant physical feature, excavating coral from 11 borrow pits across the island to use as construction material.


“Those borrow pits left a mess of the island, and have never been repaired,” Scherer says. “And there’s never been any attempt to give the Tuvaluans anything back for that.” The pits, he tells me, collect runoff and rainwater; this alters the flow of Tuvalu’s fragile freshwater lens, makes the island’s potable water supply salty, and allows seawater to push its way up through the ground. Scherer also suspects that the destruction of the freshwater lens has enhanced the dissolution of Tuvalu’s limestone underpinnings. It’s likely, he says, that Tuvalu is being hollowed out. He compares the situation to that of Bermuda, with its famous limestone caverns, some of which have collapsed. “There’s substantial fear that something like that may be going on in Funafuti, as a direct result, in some cases, of the borrow pits.”


Still, Scherer says he understands where the Tuvaluans are coming from. “In geological perspective,” he explains, “Tuvalu is one of those volcanic islands that has come to the end of its life. It’s largely a natural process. But for an island person living in that environment, a meter and a half above sea level, it’s not a very comfortable experience.”


When I contact Ursula Kaly, an ecosystems specialist who was Tuvalu’s environment adviser for four years, beginning in 1997, what she tells me further complicates the Tuvaluan script for global-warming-wrought annihilation. The gravest danger to Funafuti, Kaly says, comes from tropical storms, and she hints that the island’s vulnerability to storms has been enhanced by things other than global warming. Tree cover, which defends against high winds and soil erosion, has been reduced to make way for construction; reefs, which help absorb energy from incoming waves, have been damaged by the dumping of waste. “It’s just the diffuse impact of everyday stuff,” she tells me, “building houses and roads and gardens, and trying to make a living on this tiny bit of land.”


The most foolhardy assault on Tuvalu’s environmental well-being was sponsored by foreign-aid donors, including the European Union, who encouraged the islanders to remove a bank of coral rocks from Fongafale’s ocean-side shore. The rocks had been dragged to the beach and deposited there by Hurricane Bebe, a fierce 1972 storm that leveled almost every building on the island. “Experts came in,” Kaly recounts, “and said, ‘You’d better dig up that Bebe Bank, or it will be wasted.’ ” A rock crusher was brought in and the bank was quarried for construction materials, including a seawall built on the lagoon side of the island. The seawall crumbled quickly. And without the Bebe Bank to absorb the energy of ocean waves, the island now faces a nasty sucker punch from the next cyclone to make its way ashore.


But hold on: If global warming isn’t the primary agent of erosion, contamination of fresh water, and abuse to the reef in Tuvalu, and if, indeed, the sea’s waters aren’t yet swelling, why is the government mounting a determined campaign to broadcast its death rattle to the world?


One scientist I talked to who has worked extensively in Tuvalu, but who refuses to be named, put it to me simply: If Tuvalu doesn’t stick to the global-warming-is-sinking-us message, it risks losing access to whatever compensation or assistance might be coming its way. “Even if they’re not 100 percent sure,” the scientist said, “they’re going to have to talk as if they are in order to get heard. . . . I’ve been to a lot of international meetings. If you let into one of those big UN meetings even one little quiver of doubt, you get cut out. So you see, the system has created them.


“I’d be worried about being on Funafuti now if another Bebe came through,” the scientist continued. “I think the stage is set for a real disaster now. Resilience has been taken out of the system-because trees are gone, because the coral reef hasn’t grown back yet, because people pick up rocks, throw rubbish, build houses. There is a sense of overall ecosystem downgrading. Worrying about climate change is like a terminal cancer patient worrying about catching AIDS.”

SO, TUVALU IS GOING DOWN. If not today, then tomorrow, and if not because of a single high-profile cosmic phenomenon, then because of a set of murkier, more depressing, mundane, typically human facts. Global warming may not, at the moment, be flooding Tuvalu, but globalization is. Either way, Tuvaluans are searching for deliverance.


Change has come with staggering speed. As recently as 1978, most Tuvaluans got by on fishing and farming. Although islanders can still be seen walking down the road every afternoon toting huge freshly caught tuna, 70 percent of the country’s food is now imported, and tin cans and plastic bottles float in the borrow pits, line the roadsides, and clog the beaches. As a cash economy replaced a subsistence economy, residents of the eight outer islands, which are far less developed and far more pristine, flocked to Funafuti, seeking jobs in the new national government. With 4,500 people crammed in, Funafuti’s population is now five times larger than it was in 1973.


The overcrowded conditions and limited economic prospects only help to feed First World doubts that global warming is the real source of Tuvalu’s pleas. “We’d take Tuvalu’s position on global warming a little more seriously if the first thing they’d done wasn’t to ask Australia and New Zealand to let them in,” an official in the U.S. Embassy in Fiji tells me. “Of course they want to move. There’s nothing for them there.”


When I met him, James Conway assured me, almost apologetically, that “if a court system were to say that there’s evidence of sea-level rise and that industrial greenhouse gases were responsible for it, and if that court gave Tuvaluans a choice of half a billion dollars or the ability to continue to inhabit their islands for the next thousand years, they’d choose the islands in a minute.”


They won’t be given that choice. Nature and human folly and the internal combustion engine will, at some point, conspire to rid the world of a land that few people knew existed. There’s unlikely to be a court case at all. The costs are too high and the odds too slim. And some environmentalists are already beginning to distance themselves from Tuvalu’s grandstanding. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, issued a press release in November 2001 alerting his constituency that “Tuvalu is the first country where people are trying to evacuate because of rising seas.” Nine months later, when I call him, he admits, “I guess what we were looking for is some canaries in the coal mine, and at first Tuvalu looked like it might be a canary. On closer examination, it’s not clear that it is.”

IF IT WERE UP TO ME, I’d give them the half-billion and throw a big farewell bash. Maybe it would look a little like the election-night party I attend near the end of my stay, at the house of Kamuta Latasi, the feisty 66-year-old former prime minister who, as a member of the opposition in parliament, is looking for a return to power. Dozens of relatives and supporters are sitting on plastic lawn chairs in his yard drinking Chinese beer. A pair of pigs are roasting in the ground beneath a tarp, and a sea turtle, still alive, flails in its overturned shell, awaiting its turn on the coals.


Latasi, who is known as “the old warrior,” was driven from the highest office in 1996 when he insisted on removing the Union Jack from Tuvalu’s flag. He is a staunch nationalist who would prefer that the government focus its efforts on planting coconut trees, improving schools, and restoring some of Tuvalu’s peaceful life, rather than on getting caught up in international affairs.


“When I was prime minister,” he says, standing by the above-ground concrete tomb of his father beside his front porch, “I was very strong on suing the U.S. and the British for damage they did to us during the Second World War. But why are we trying to do this new lawsuit?”


Latasi tosses an empty beer can at a stray dog that is licking leftovers from a paper plate. “I believe that climate change is happening, of course,” he says. “Deep in my heart I know that something has gone wrong here, and it must be the work of man, and not just nature. But who are we? Tuvalu is powerless. How can we stand up to the might of the industrialized world? We’ll be a laughingstock.”


At midnight we learn that Latasi is reelected to his seat in parliament, but that he will be unable to build a coalition to support his bid for prime minister. “Please remember,” he implores me, “that Tuvaluans are human beings, not just hungry animals on a rock.”


The night wears on and the party descends into a raucous, drunken free- for-all. Before I stagger away, I meet a burly man named Siligama Taupale, dressed in dirty jeans and a white tank top inscribed with the words tequila sunrise. Siligama is 38, but he might as well be as old as Tuvalu, because his story of disaster and survival, incredible as it sounds, is a useful reminder that truth and myth are not easily disentangled on this island.


At sunset on May 14, 1997, Siligama left the harbor at Funafuti in a 16-foot plywood boat with a 40-horsepower outboard motor. He was going tuna fishing just beyond the atoll, near the islet of Fualefeke. When night fell, he put down his anchor, consisting of a stone entwined in a rope. He started drinking “hot stuff”-hard liquor-and fell asleep.


“I wake up and see no land,” he recalls.


“The anchor broke. My mind say, ‘Don’t worry.’ But where’s Funafuti? For two days, no worry.” He had no compass and no flares, only a hand mirror to reflect the sun’s light. “Yeah, I get afraid. I think, ‘I’m dead.’ I don’t want to die.”


After three days Siligama spotted a fishing vessel. He had saved enough gas to power his way over to his rescuers. “I see them and I say, ‘Please help me, please help me.’ But they no help. I write the name of that boat in my boat with a screwdriver: Young Star. After that I stay in my boat crying.”


Who knows why Young Star didn’t come to the aid of the fisherman? Perhaps its crew members were busy with their own affairs. Perhaps they didn’t believe he was in genuine peril. Siligama saw more boats over the next weeks and months than he can remember, but he gave up asking for help. He didn’t care about dying anymore.


He ate fish and birds that he caught with his hands. He drank rainwater from the floor of his boat. He sucked on his beard, which had grown down to his chest, for any moisture that gathered there. His clothes disintegrated. He spent hours staring at a tattoo on his shoulder of a woman’s face. “Sometimes in rain-very cold. Sometimes in sun-very hot. Big waves come, big storms. I talk to God. I see my daughters’ faces everywhere, in sky, in water, in bottom of boat.” He goes silent and begins to move away from me. “I don’t want to tell my history,” he says. “It make me cry to remember.”


After five months and three weeks adrift, he was spotted by a Korean fishing boat, the Logas, near Christmas Island, about 1,800 miles east of Tuvalu. The Korean boat took him aboard. He couldn’t walk or keep down food for several days. “Thank you to the Logas for your help to me,” he says, as if I were the one who had saved him.


Siligama was afraid of the ocean for a while. To get by, he took odd jobs working construction. But he still goes out fishing when he has to, which is pretty often, in order to put food on his family’s table. He has stayed in Tuvalu, though what he’d really like to do is move to New Zealand. Perhaps one day the government of New Zealand will grant his wish.

The post Tuvalu Toodle-oo appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

Ìý Ìý Ìý It wasn’t always so. It took the Boers to make the land behave. European interest in the vast malarial plains that include Kruger began in the 1830s, when Dutch settlers of the Cape Colony, at the southern tip of the continent, fled northward to escape the strictures of newly imposed British rule. (The British had, for instance, abolished slavery.) These pioneering voortrekkers went on to establish their own republic, the Transvaal, and in the process slaughtered much of the indigenous wildlife for hides and meat and cleared the land for agriculture. When the British, hearing of gold strikes in the region, followed the Boers north, they brought with them their patrician hobby of trophy hunting. The Boer War, begun in 1899, further depleted wildlife populations; elephants, lions, and rhinoceroses were among the many species hunted close to extinction. Ìý Ìý The establishment of the park was inspired in part by the devastation the land suffered during the war and by Afrikaner desire to lay claim to the territory in a seemingly benign manner. The early caretakers of the park were compulsive outdoorsmen who approached wildlife conservation with a missionary zeal. They pushed local people off the land and began an unprecedented experiment in rehabilitating nature. The park was seen as the embodiment of the Boers’ hardy spirit and attachment to the land. (The name came later, in 1926, in honor of Paul Kruger, four-term president of the Transvaal, himself a voortrekker and the looming figure in Afrikaner nationalism.) Wildlife numbers rebounded, and mammals whose populations had been decimated were transplanted to the park from other regions. It takes a lot of work to mount a gleaming spectacle of nature in perpetuity. Willem Gertenbach, the park’s general manager of nature conservation and the man responsible for carrying out conservation policy, put it bluntly: “The fact is that we are dealing with artificial controls in the park. The game simply can’t move through the fence. And so we compensate for man’s intrusions by trying to reproduce nature. I call it ‘near-natural management.'” For years, officials at the near-natural park knew, for instance, that wildfires were a vital means of regenerating soil and vegetation. To simulate nature, then, starting in 1954 the park was divided into 400 blocks, each of which was burned every three years. Lightning fires were extinguished if they had the audacity to hit a block that was not scheduled for burning. The regimen of controlled burning has been phased out in recent years, partly in recognition of what one park naturalist calls its “chronic homogenizing effect on the landscape.” If the park’s problem wasn’t fire, it was water. Managers at Kruger had to contend with the fact that each of the five major rivers that flow through the territory is depleted by users outside the fences before reaching the park’s thirsty residents. Solution: Engineer a water-provision system that would have made WPA dam-builders proud. By the early seventies, Kruger was pocked with 86 earthen dams and more than 450 artificial water holes supplied by windmill-powered pumps. Of course, wildlife that would naturally migrate over the course of a year, tracking the availability of water from season to season, instead remained in place, and vegetation had no time to recover from grazing. In one instance, managers hatched a scheme to nurture endangered roan antelope by bringing water to the corner of the park where they were concentrated. The new sources of water drew large herds of zebras and wildebeests, however, which in turn attracted predators like lions. In short order, the roan were nearly finished off. As Kruger’s approach to management has gradually been liberalized during the nineties, the park has struggled to reverse its tradition of opening the hydrants for wildlife; about a third of the water holes have been allowed to dry up. But water must still be hauled over the fence, as it were, since animals are prevented from freely straying. Scratch Kruger’s surface, and you begin to feel you’ve uncovered the world’s biggest and best zoo. “It’s fair to say that Kruger is catching up to the rest of Africa in terms of managing biodiversity,” said David Western, former director of Kenya Wildlife Service, when I called him at his home outside Nairobi. “They got caught in a backwater, partly due to apartheid and partly due to an entrenched administration that was resistant to change. They felt they knew how to manage nature, and that was damn well how they would do it. Until very recently, Kruger’s management practices have been based on a concept of nature as a static system that continues to improve itself until it achieves a state of perfection. That’s a nineteenth-century philosophy, and one that is very nearly the opposite of how we believe ecosystems behave.” In other words, Kruger’s managers sought to protect the park and its wildlife from nature itself, and the result was one of the best-looking endangered ecosystems imaginable. Leo Braack, Kruger’s general manager of conservation development, acknowledged that the modernization of the park’s approach to nature has been helped along by the more general climate of change in postapartheid South Africa. The park’s most recent management plan, approved in 1998, is a blueprint drawn up by a younger generation of wildlife scientists. It aims to hoist Kruger into the present by focusing less on species preservation and more on ecosystem preservation. As Western sees it, the park had little choice but to shake itself up. “I don’t think the park could have sustained itself along its old model of management,” he said. “For years they’ve tried to stabilize a fenced-in area, and it’s hard to see how diversity can be maintained that way in the long run. Its uniformity makes the park very vulnerable when extreme events, like droughts, occur. Species would have been pushed into extinction.” Ìý Ìý

Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý In the mid-1970s, when the political chaos wrought by decolonization throughout most of Africa trickled down into nature conservation and poachers began to plunder the elephant and rhinoceros herds, Kruger knew how to respond. The park was, after all, an inextricable part of the culture, and in South Africa the white minority—less than 15 percent of the population—had proved extraordinarily adept at building and maintaining fences, real and metaphoric. Thus the safeguarding of what Kruger faithful refer to as “wilderness values” was left to men of action like Ken Maggs. The trim, no-nonsense leader of the national park system’s Environmental Crimes Investigation Service, Maggs has been the mastermind behind Kruger’s war against poaching since 1994. The walls of his office, set off on an unmarked dirt road outside Skukuza, are covered with maps of Kruger dotted with colored pins indicating poaching activity. Charts display the black market value of rhino horns and elephant tusks, and the kinds of firearms used by poachers. “Instead of waiting for the criminal to come to our national parks, we go out and look for him,” Maggs said. “We try to disorient him, disrupt him, eliminate him.” Maggs has a degree in wildlife management and did police work for South Africa in the former Rhodesia, so, as he said, “I’ve kind of amalgamated my two interests.” His task force employs spies to infiltrate suspected bands of poachers and pays informants in the black townships surrounding Kruger for tips on criminal schemes that are being hatched. “We’ve been very, very successful,” he said. Ìý Indeed, in 1998, five white rhinos out of a population of about 2,500 and only three of Kruger’s 8,500 or so elephants were killed by poachers. “Even a single loss is unacceptable to us,” Maggs said. “If you don’t respond, the situation can get out of hand very quickly.” There have been gun battles in the veld, Maggs acknowledges, and poachers—typically poor ex-military men from Mozambique with good knowledge of the bush and access to firearms—have been killed. The commandants of the park’s security force are the 22 section rangers, each of whom is responsible for controlling vast tracts of land, up to 250,000 acres apiece, with only a team of laborers and a squad of eight to 12 field rangers. Gertenbach calls them “the eyes on the veld.” One morning, I drove north from park headquarters to a deserted outpost called Houtboschrand to meet Gert Erasmus, the 51-year-old ranger who oversees a 230,000-acre section in the narrow center of the park, an area with few roads and no tourist facilities. A bullet-headed man with a gray crew cut, Erasmus was wearing military fatigues with the pants legs tucked into black combat boots. He had little time for conversation. He had been roused late the previous night, he said, to investigate an incident. A van driver had been transporting an ailing park employee back from a visit to the doctor when he collided with a rhinoceros. Erasmus had two immediate tasks at hand: to determine the condition of the rhino, and to see if the driver’s actions required disciplinary response. I hopped into the passenger seat of Erasmus’s Toyota 4Runner. A hand-tooled leather rifle case lay across the dashboard. Behind me, in the backseat, sat a silent and queasy-looking black man—the sick linen-room worker who had been in the van when the accident occurred. Field rangers had been following the rhino’s tracks all morning, Erasmus said, but hadn’t yet located the animal. There was no blood trail at the site of impact, which was a good sign, as was the absence of vultures in the sky. “Most game is extremely resilient,” Erasmus noted, peering in the rearview mirror at the man in the backseat. “Unlike people.” We drove to the accident scene. Erasmus took out his rifle and instructed me and the worker to follow him as he measured the skid marks in long strides. “Stay close to me,” he ordered. “We don’t want lions eating anyone while we’re walking about.” The driver, Erasmus surmised, might have been drifting off to sleep; the length of the skid indicated he had been speeding. “I can’t say officially,” said Erasmus, unofficially, “but discipline will surely be called for.” We got back into the car, drove for awhile, and then pulled off the road and waited by a dry riverbed for Erasmus’s field rangers to report to him. He relaxed considerably, pointing out wild figs and a thick-trunked sausage tree, commented on the quality of the grasses, and observed that lala palm trees like the one in whose shade we were resting provided a potent beer for local Africans. Erasmus was a naturalist with a big gun. Soon, a pickup truck pulled up with a group of rangers, each carrying a .760 R1 automatic rifle capable of putting down a charging elephant and making a mess of charging poachers. They’d tracked the rhino all morning and found nothing, a good indication that it hadn’t been badly harmed. All the field rangers in Kruger—who are organized as sergeants, corporals, and privates—are black. Erasmus bantered with his troops in Tsonga, a local language. There was evident affection between the commander and his staff, and it was just as evident who was in charge. I asked him whether the application of a military model of management to a national park seemed excessive, or at least incongruous. “This park is man’s creation,” he explained. “We put up a fence and we created something. Now we have no choice. We have to manage it.” Ìý Ìý

Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Kruger’s “general code of conduct” for visitors lists 18 items, 17 of which begin with the phrase “It is an offense.” (The 18th employs, for variety’s sake, the injunction “You may not.”) I felt like I was reading Leviticus. “It is an offense,” begins item number 11, “to drive or park in such a manner that is a nuisance, disturbance, or inconvenience to other people.” On entering the park, you will have your trunk searched for contraband, and you will be handed a “travel document” that you must carry everywhere. Your travel document will remind you that when heading off on a self-guided “game drive,” the primary form of recreation in the park, you must “stay in your car at all times,” or at least until you’ve reached an official, fenced-in rest camp. That is, of course, for your own protection; there are real wild animals out there. (In 1998, a refugee was devoured by lions, and a park ranger was killed by a leopard.) The speed limit is a strictly enforced 50 kilometers (31 miles) per hour. On my third day in the park, I was caught cruising ten miles per hour over the limit and flagged down by a pistol-waving patrolman. I surrendered my passport; he gave me a stern lecture. “How long do you stay in Kruger?” he asked, initially addressing me in Afrikaans, which is, much to the chagrin of Afrikaners, no longer the sole official language of South Africa. Two more weeks, I replied. “Then you are in trouble,” he said. “You speed again, we expel you from the park.” Ìý If you are inclined to experience Kruger on foot and you’re one of the lucky few who has reserved a coveted spot on a “bush walk,” you will walk in a single file, accompanied at the front of the line by a voluble white section ranger and trailed by a silent black assistant, both carrying automatic rifles. I went on one such stroll in the remote northwestern fringe of the park. My chipper guide, Frank Watts, wore tight khaki shorts and bright green gaiters and took my group along the banks of the sluggish Letaba River, which was lined by thickets of mapane trees. Watts enthusiastically pointed out the remarkable, sand-castle-like formations of termite mounds, which spiraled ten feet above the ground; implored us to admire a herd of grazing waterbucks; and instructed us to listen to the exhalations of hippos wading in the current. Wilson, the black assistant, scouted the terrain for signs of danger like a Secret Service marksman. It was hard not to feel like a prisoner allowed out for his hour of recreation. Ìý Ìý

Ìý Ìý The official cages at Kruger, the ones that actually look like cages, are run by a bearish, laconic man with the coincidental name of Marius Kruger. Kruger is a manager in the renowned game capture unit. If you need to trap, tranquilize, transport, and cage an animal, the people at Kruger, I was assured by an American wildlife veterinarian, are the best in the business. “We capture anything,” he told me. “Rhino, elephant, buffalo, lion. It’s very technical work.” Kruger gave me a tour of the cages, called bomas, located on the outskirts of Skukuza. Enormous mats, developed to bear loads of ore, had been adapted to haul tranquilized elephants onto flatbed trucks. A series of pens contained a dozen white rhinos that had been sold to wildlife sanctuaries in Australia. The rhinos were becoming acclimatized to restricted mobility and a feeding schedule. Rhinos that are pegged for captivity are darted with tranquilizers from helicopters. “Once it’s down on the ground, we put a cloth over its eyes, tie a rope across its mouth and horn, give it an antidote to partially revive it, then lead it by the rope to its crate,” he said. “If everything goes well, the process takes 20 or 30 minutes.” The penned rhinos languished in the shade of their cages, the very model of docility. The most crowded part of the boma complex held about 20 animals participating in something called the Disease-Free Buffalo Breeding Project, a little exercise in wildlife eugenics being undertaken by the park. In the 1950s, before Kruger was fenced in, bovine tuberculosis (BTB) was introduced into the park’s buffalo population by contact with outside livestock. Today, close to 90 percent of the substantial herds in the park’s southern region are thought to be infected. Predation of sick buffalo by lions has caused the disease to spread widely among the lion population, though Kruger’s officials dismiss reports that bony lions are commonly seen staggering around the park. The Disease-Free Buffalo Breeding Project captures pregnant female buffalo in the wild, tests them for BTB, anthrax, and other diseases, and transports the disease-free offspring to other parks in South Africa in hope of establishing a healthy national herd. Marius Kruger was off that very afternoon to capture some elephants outside the park for relocation to a more suitable habitat. I didn’t want to ask him what became of that vast majority of buffalo selected for the project that tested positive for disease. I didn’t want to ask him because I knew the answer: They were destroyed. Ìý Ìý

Ìý Ìý I was so preoccupied by the dazzling sight of one-legged Carlos Bastos operating the manual transmission of his Kruger-issue Toyota four-wheel-drive that I almost failed to notice our passage through the fence surrounding the Sand River By-Products Plant, a low-slung building that looks like an airplane hangar, located not three miles from Skukuza. Bastos, a stout, bearded man of Portuguese descent, arrived in Kruger 25 years ago, via Mozambique. He was my favorite Krugerite—cheerful and utterly free of bullshit. Bastos was the foreman at the park’s slaughterhouse (euphemistically referred to as the game-processing plant), where for 26 years elephants were made into steak, stew, jerky—lots and lots of jerky—as well as pet food, soap, and some of the more distasteful souvenir-stall items known to man, such as the elephant-foot end table. “We use everything!” Bastos exclaimed. “Nothing is wasted!” The slaughterhouse has been idle for the past five years, but it may be back in business soon. We stood outside the abattoir on a sloped loading dock that led to an enormous steel door. “The elephants would arrive here in the middle of the night,” Bastos recalled, “and the process would begin. Once it starts you don’t stop until you’re done. At maximum capacity we could process 800 elephants each season, a maximum of three bulls each day, or a herd of 12 to 15 elephants of various sizes. A big bull weighs about 11,000 pounds and can produce between 1,750 and 3,300 pounds of meat.” Most of the meat was packed in tins with gravy—over 3,000 eight-ounce cans for a typical batch—and distributed to staff as rations. The rest was made into biltong—jerky—and sold in shops in the park. “I like elephant meat,” Bastos said. “It’s leaner than you’d think, and quite tasty. I can’t tell you the recipe for the biltong. It’s a secret.” In 1994, Kruger, bowing to pressure from wildlife advocacy groups, imposed a moratorium on the culling of its elephant herds. Unpleasant as it sounds, however, there is broad agreement by scientists inside and outside the park that elephants represent the gravest threat to Kruger’s preservation of biodiversity. Mature elephants consume about 300 pounds of vegetation each day, and herds can turn a woodland into a barren moonscape with alarming speed. Alone among the species in Kruger, elephants have no natural predators, and their population is largely unaffected by drought. If Kruger’s elephant herds were to grow without controls and remain fenced in, they could drive the park’s other species to starvation. The best estimate that Kruger’s wildlife managers could formulate, based on data from other countries, was that the landscape can tolerate on average one elephant per square mile—in Kruger’s case, about 7,500 animals. So, in order to maintain that population, from 1967 to 1994 Kruger killed between 300 and 600 elephants a year. And starting in 1968, the carcasses were gutted in the field and shipped to the Sand River By-Products Plant. No matter how efficient the process, elephant killing is a messy business. The rangers and their field staff are the ones charged with the task of culling, and they do not relish the work. “We’re the same guys who are putting our lives on the line to protect the animals,” ranger Gert Erasmus told me, “and when the time comes, we’re the ones who have to kill them. It’s a hard thing to do.” A wildlife photographer who witnessed a cull in the 1980s described the roundup of elephants as terrifying. “After a while, the vultures knew what the presence of helicopters meant, and they would follow the choppers as they chased the elephants into clearings,” he said. Sharpshooters would dart the animals from the air with scoline, a potent muscle relaxant that induces paralysis. Rangers would then rush in to brain-shoot the paralyzed elephants, to minimize their suffering, before they died of suffocation. The carcasses were gutted and the pecking order of scavengers—vulture, hyena, jackal—would descend. “Kenya and Tanzania control their elephant populations by poaching,” one park manager told me with disgust. “We controlled ours by culling.” Then South Africa got caught in the wide net cast by groups like the World Wildlife Fund, which started the elephant-preservation campaign in the late eighties. But after exhaustive attempts to sell its excess elephants to other wildlife preserves proved futile, and after efforts to develop elephant contraceptives produced grotesque results—elephant cows in perpetual heat, besieged by confused bulls—Kruger recently decided to resume killing its herds. This time, the roundup will proceed, more palatably, in the name of biodiversity. Instead of maintaining a constant population of 7,500 elephants, Kruger will allow the numbers to fluctuate, culling only after managers have determined that the habitat needs relief. The process is new, the rationale is new, only the carcasses remain the same. “I’ve done the slaughtering, the deboning, all the jobs here,” Bastos told me. “I’m ready to get back to work.” Until the slaughterhouse reopens, Bastos has been given tasks for which he has no heart, like conducting a count of the 4,000 or so pieces of ivory, weighing around 60,000 pounds, that lie in a vault in a nondescript park building. Park managers eagerly hope that when CITES, the international treaty organization governing the sale of endangered species, meets in April 2000, it will recognize their good management practices and allow Kruger to sell off its ivory stock, which would be a financial boon. “It’s a peaceful life,” said Bastos, philosophically, as a guard chained the gate of the slaughterhouse behind us. “The pay isn’t so high, but, you know, you can’t buy happiness.” Ìý Ìý

Ìý Ìý Apartheid may be over, but the Kruger experience, at least for visitors, remains white, white, white. Joep Stevens, general manager of commercial development and tourism, guessed that as a percentage of the park’s overnight visitors, blacks are represented in single digits. I saw no more than a handful of rather uncomfortable-looking black visitors during the two weeks I spent in the park. I asked Cindy Hart, a young Afrikaner intern in Kruger’s public relations office, why she thought so few blacks visited Kruger. “The blacks came from the bush,” she said. “Why would they want to go back and visit it?” “Until ’94,” confided William Mabasa, the park’s black public relations director, “there were two groups in the park: masters and servants.” Black park workers were housed in cramped, run-down quarters, and the school in the staff village at Skukuza was for whites only, with Afrikaans the language of instruction. Since then the park has aggressively recruited blacks for management positions. David Mabunda, who was appointed park director in 1998—and who once called Kruger “the last paradise of apartheid”—is black, as are two of the seven highest-ranking managers and five of the 22 section rangers. Many whites have quit, and others continue to worry about job security. “My son, who is in university, would love to work here, but there’s no place for him at Kruger for at least the next ten years,” ranger Gert Erasmus told me. “For myself, I know I won’t become a director because I’m white and Afrikaner and we ran the park in the past. That’s reality.” Whites who have remained at Kruger know another dictate of the new reality: that cheerful lip service be given to the notion of “improving relations with local communities.” For the first time in its history, Kruger needs to prove that it deserves the support of a new society. (It has already received substantial cuts in its government subsidies.) Four million of South Africa’s poorest rural blacks live in townships adjoining the park. “In the past, there was a lot of animosity between the park and our neighboring communities,” said tourism manager Stevens. “We said, ‘Here’s the fence line. We’re here; you’re there.’ We’re trying to diversify our product for disadvantaged South Africans. People want to drop off their picnic basket, put on the ghetto blaster, stretch out on the lawn, and relax. This doesn’t fit into the way it was in the old Kruger. But we have to understand that we are in a new situation. The park can’t afford to isolate itself.” Among the new initiatives developed at Kruger is a division called Social Ecology, which manages outreach programs with the bordering townships. On one of my last afternoons at Kruger, I drove around on the other side of the fence with Philemon Ngomane, a rail-thin, world-weary bricklayer and carpenter who had been hired by Social Ecology to train a group of woodcarvers to make and market souvenirs for tourists. It was like entering another country. Instead of thickets of green and red bushes and vast expanses of stunted mapane trees, the earth was a dust bowl, cracked and bare from overgrazing. The sides of the highway were crowded with men herding goats, children pushing wheelbarrows full of water jugs, women haggling at fruit stands. We turned down a rutted lane strewn with trash. Houses were constructed of cinder blocks or scrap wood or dried mud. None had indoor plumbing, Ngomane said, and very few had electricity. We pulled over to talk to a group of residents. Kruger was six miles away. “No, I’ve never been to the park,” one man said. “None of us have been. I’d like to see the animals, but I can’t afford to go.” Another man, who identified himself as Lucas, stepped forward and said angrily, “When it rains, sometimes lions come here from the park and kill our cattle, and the park does nothing—and they won’t even let us shoot the lion.” Elephants, Lucas continued, have also breached the fence and trampled the crops in nearby villages. (News reports credit holes in decrepit stretches of fence for the occasional lion or elephant escape.) “We have no ‘relationship’ with the park,” he said. Ngomane and I returned to the park, entering through the Paul Kruger Gate, near a garish granite statue of the father of Boer independence. Ngomane’s apprentice woodcarvers were whittling away at blocks of jacaranda wood under a canvas tent by the side of the road. Despite the initiative that the park had taken to encourage their work, the woodcarvers had little goodwill toward Kruger. “We remember what the park did to us,” Ngomane said, “and we have a hard time getting past our anger.” What was he referring to? I asked. “Skukuza,” he said. Skukuza was the name given by Africans to James Stevenson-Hamilton, park warden from 1902 to 1946 and the man responsible for evicting the indigenous people from the territory of the newly established national park. Skukuza translates roughly as “he who scrapes the earth clean.” It is not a term of endearment for Africans, though it became the name of the park’s headquarters. The park also boasts a Stevenson-Hamilton Memorial Library and Centre. “Skukuza pushed us off our land, and he killed our cattle,” Ngomane continued. “Why’d he do that? For an African, our cattle is our bank. If I have ten cattle, I’m rich. He made us poor, and he pushed us outside the park, where we live crowded close to each other. There’s a lot of hatred for Skukuza.” I stopped to watch the woodcarvers. One was working on an ostrich; another was scooping out a pair of eyes on a bird. They would blacken them in a fire, shine them with shoe polish, and finish them with a few strokes of paint. A man named Maxon Nyathi had spread his carvings on the ground. I bent down to grab an oddly beautiful bird with flaring orange and blue tail feathers and a red beak. Was this, I wondered, what people who live on the other side of the fence imagine birds to be? I offered to buy one of Nyathi’s carvings, a strange mottled creature with a football-shaped body and a beak curved sharply down. Ngomane intervened. “You want that one?” he asked. “It doesn’t even look like a bird.” Ìý Ìý

Ìý Ìý After two weeks inside the fence at Kruger, I went home to New York. I found myself drawn to the Bronx Zoo, where I strolled through the African section of the park. I saw a lion lapsed in the shade and a cheetah circling again and again on its few hundred feet of dirt path. I watched large families of Hasidic Jews, dressed in heavy black clothing, watching giraffes, and picnic-basket-bearing Latinos watching zebras. I passed people speaking Russian and Chinese, and I passed many blacks, far from Africa, who’d come to see the African animals. It was as if we shared the belief that a few hours of looking at beasts might make us each a little less beastly ourselves. In Kruger, the experience of wildlife had offered me no such consolation. When the zoo closed we all headed to the subway and decamped to our various neighborhoods, where in all likelihood we lived surrounded by others with the same skin color as our own. On the long ride home I considered how rare it is that I venture into a black area in my own city—as rare, I suspect, as a white South African visiting a black township. And I thought how white the faces tend to be in our own national parks—often located on land from which our own indigenous people had long ago been removed. And before the subway went underground, I gazed out the window at all the fences in the tenements and schools and rubble-strewn vacant lots. The best game drive I took in Kruger was with Ronnie Lubisi, a 29-year-old Swazi I’d befriended. He worked as a security guard at the Skukuza rest camp and lived just outside the park. When his eight-day tour of duty was over I offered him a ride home. He wanted to drive my rental car, and Avis be damned, I agreed. Ronnie had never driven a car before. We rolled down the windows, and he proceeded to troll through Kruger in a wonderfully jerky zigzag. Each time he craned his neck to look at an animal, the car swerved. He was having a great time. He opened a can of beer and gained speed. The patrolman manning a radar gun glanced at us querulously as we drove past. “I love the animals,” Ronnie said. “One day I will bring my wife and son here to see the animals.” Ronnie wanted to surprise his wife by returning home behind the wheel of a car, and as we pulled up she seemed afraid at first, and then incredulous. Ronnie’s house was a two-room wooden shack on a squatter’s dirt plot in Mantangaleni, which had recently been renamed Mandela Village, less than a hundred yards from Kruger’s fence. He had plans to build himself a bigger house; bricks that he had formed by hand were piled in a corner of the yard. When his wife told him that one of their hens had been stolen while he was off working in Kruger, Ronnie became glum. “Poached!” he shouted. “Very poor people living here,” he added, gesturing toward the neighboring shacks. We sat on a tiny square of lawn that Ronnie had planted in front of his house, a patch of dust-fringed green as neatly trimmed as any lawn in a Kruger rest camp. “I cut it with scissors,” he said. “I’ve got no machine.” We sat and drank beer and talked about animals and about apartheid and about Ronnie’s hopes for the future. His wife was seven months pregnant. She stood a few feet away from us, barefoot and shy. I asked her name. “Mercy,” she said. “In English,” asked Ronnie, “what is the meaning of ‘Mercy’?” I thought about it for a minute. I could see a line of cars, Mercedes and BMWs and Toyotas, rushing to reach Kruger before the curfew. I had to get back there, too. “Mercy,” I said, “is a combination of love and forgiveness. If someone has harmed you, and you forgive him, that’s mercy.” Ronnie paused. He stared at me hard. “Yes, I understand.” Contributing editor Mark Levine teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The post Eyes on the Veld appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

In my two-wheeled dream, the cracked pavement of Prospect Park, Brooklyn— my customary biking circuit in the real world—has been refurbished with rolling thickets of fluorescent waist-deep grasses. The rats of my adopted hometown have been cleared from my path by sleek birds of prey, and distant high-rises have made their retreat into nature, reemerging as jagged, ice-capped columns of granite. I’m on my bike. I’m bent into a professional-looking crouch, raised slightly above the seat. My left knee no longer makes the ratcheting noise that I’ve come to expect. In fact there’s no noise at all—no ambulance sirens, no traffic, no people. There’s just me, hurtling through the grass and gliding across a rocky ledge and snaking my way down a sheer, dusty cliff without applying the brakes. Damn, I’m good. I make a quick turn to avoid a slumbering turtle (no despoiler of wildlife am I) and hit the roots of an ancient oak and sail across the landscape, air beneath both wheels. I’m not afraid. There’s no need to be, because I land gracefully and continue along at extraordinary speed, unfazed by all obstacles—animals, boulders, waterfalls, the sudden appearance of crevasses. A landslide requires a little quick pedaling but can’t throw me off balance. Brooklyn hasn’t looked this good since the Dodgers moved out west.

A few days later, as if by some process of bicycling wish-fulfillment, I found myself in the dreamscape at the bottom of the world—southern Patagonia. I was on my bike. My knee had resumed making its noise, which comforted me. I was ready for the mystical union of man and machine. And I would have it, before long. But first—this being reality and all—I had to wait just a wee bit.
You see, Patagonia was telling me that I didn’t really know how to ride a bicycle. It was telling me this through its messenger, the wind. The wind had tossed me on a gravel road that cut a path between the Twin Lakes in glacier-strewn Torres del Paine National Park, Chile. My bicycle was riding by itself, like a mountless horse, rolling merrily in the wind toward the icy water of one of the lakes. My bicycle did not need me.

Being twins, the Twin Lakes shared a number of attributes. Each had eerie, frosted blue water. Each was tucked into the narrow floor of a steep, rocky ravine. And though the lakes were modest, each was currently swept with the kind of waves that one tends to associate with larger bodies of water, such as the Pacific Ocean. I watched a gale form at the southern end of the southern Twin and watched it pick up a great spray and drift toward me like a glittering shower curtain. The tundra, tufted with spiky red grasses, was looking as challenging as a good tundra should. I delivered a speech to myself—Experience the wind, I said, make the wind your friend—and I stood. Then the wind approached, bearing its load of lake water and silt, and the wind said to me, Down, boy. And down I went.

I came to Patagonia as a sort of recreational descendent of the fantasy-smitten adventurers who have struggled toward the geographical nether regions for the last 500 years or so. They had come here in wooden ships with a proclivity for getting dashed on boulders and icebergs in a maze of fjords; I came with a marvelously light and responsive new mountain bike, a Schwinn Homegrown Factory XTR, whose components—crafted with materials more typically found on lunar satellites—had yet to be speckled with mud. I thought I knew how to ride a bike. I still nursed triumphant 30-year-old memories of prying the training wheels from a bright red Schwinn that was outfitted with flamboyant U-shaped handlebars and a vinyl banana seat. I remembered pumping the pedals with anguish until I overcame the bike’s wobble and stole a line toward the brick horizon of the next block, unmindful of stop signs or oncoming traffic, an exercise in self-propelled escapism.

A dozen years ago I ignored my poverty and laid down a credit card to procure my first mountain bike, a lugubrious specimen that had the advantage of being able to withstand earthquakes and explosives. Together we were chased by dogs through the tobacco fields of western Kentucky, hid in the dust among rows of Iowa corn, and meandered along overgrown logging trails through the northern Rockies. Technique was unimportant to me. What I liked was the solitary exertion. I liked long uphill climbs and slightly reckless free falls, and I wasn’t averse to occasionally sailing over the front of my bike for a good cause. I rode in lightning storms and in a blizzard or two and through the daunting fusillades of big-game hunting season. As a cyclist, my main attributes—my only attributes—were a good attitude and a suspiciously religious penchant for suffering. Now, through the grace of the bicycle gods, I had been granted the opportunity to ride through one of the remotest, wildest places left on the planet. But first I needed to catch my bike.
I ran until the machine toppled with a sigh into a patch of prickly flora, then lay in wait for one of the brief moments of utter stillness that marked the passing of a gale. I mounted. I shifted into a low gear and started pedaling with all the vigor of a wishful thinker. Giddyap, I cried. A nasty crosswind was careening toward me from the lake. I veered slightly into the wind to give myself a favorable angle of encounter. I tried to stay loose. I tried to remain cheerful as the gust urged me back to the ground, where I belonged.

Before coming to Patagonia, I had read warnings about the persistent winds of the region. My guide, Raúl, a laconic Peruvian who had stayed behind in his tent, shaking his head as I set off for my ride, had offered to explain the Patagonian wind to me the previous night. We were at our campsite, on the edge of gorgeous glacial Lake Pehoe, sheltered beneath a crooked beech tree on which five luminous green parrots clattered. Raúl drew a diagram of Patagonia in the dirt with his shoe, demonstrating how the continent tapered to a point at its bottom, where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were separated by barely 300 miles of land and by the spiny tail of the Andes. “Here you have Pacific wind currents,” he said, drawing a figure eight. “And here are Atlantic wind currents.” Another figure eight. Raúl’s leg traced a series of crescents to illustrate the mayhem that occurred when the currents met. Then he added the effect of the Antarctic landmass pushing the winds back up from whence they came. His diagram was Pollock wrought in dirt. It was Raúl’s seventh year guiding in Patagonia but his first professional trip in Torres del Paine, where the main cause of injuries, he told me, was not falls or drownings, but cars being blown off the road.

Even so, it was beautiful country, worthy of effort in its pursuit. I climbed a long grade against a strong headwind. The slopes were dotted with bramble and blooming cactus. The blackened, ice-capped spires of Mount Almirante Nieto lay obscured behind fast-moving clouds. My cyclometer often failed to register bicycle movement of any kind, but deep down I knew I was moving. When I finally reached the top of the pass, the wind kindly changed direction; I glided downhill giddily, occasionally bucked off balance by a gust at my back, which jolted me like a cattle prod. It was a thrilling ride.

Raúl was drinking a beer when I got back to camp. He told me he’d heard reports of 95-mile-an-hour winds. “Is normal for Patagonia,” he said, adding that the road to the nearest town had been closed by high winds, and that a truck had toppled over just outside the park, and that he’d been told two hikers had been blown off a cliff. I removed my helmet and began to pick sand from my hair. I told Raúl I found the wind interesting. He made no reply but entered into a lengthy colloquy in Spanish with Hector, the gnomelike campground caretaker who could often be found feeding entrails to jabbering crowlike caracara birds. Hector laughed madly and addressed me in Spanish. I asked Raúl for a translation. Raúl cleared his throat. “He says that bicycling in Patagonia is crazy gringo idea.”

Maybe it was.

A friend from Montana writes to me: “My 80-year-old father seems to think that he must go to Patagonia.” Patagonia has occupied an outsize and undiminished position in the New World romance of conquest and adventure throughout the second half of the millennium. European traders seeking an elusive east-west sea passage steered into the turbulent waters between Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego and christened the torturous channel the Strait of Magellan. Sixteenth-century fortune-hunters with fervent imaginations and time on their hands set out for the region in search of a mythical Andean city of gold.

The area was rumored to be occupied by fabulous beasts worthy of a Dungeons & Dragons handbook, and by Indians so towering and ferocious that their rapid obliteration would be required. The name “Patagonia,” a supposed corruption of the Spanish for “big foot,” is thought to be Magellan’s reference to the shoe size of the Tehuelche Indians he encountered after reaching shore in 1520; Jonathan Swift is said to have modeled the giant Brobdingnagians of Gulliver’s Travels on descriptions of Patagonian natives. The marvels of Patagonia—its expanse of rock and ice, its otherworldly wildlife—are associated with primordial states of being, and while 19th-century settlers were mostly interested in colonizing the vast range with sheep in order to supply a booming market with wool, the main commodity that foreign travelers are seeking nowadays is certifiable wilderness. Rarely, however, do they get to survey the landscape on two wheels.
Our party—myself, guide Raúl, photographer Craig Cameron Olsen, and assistants Eddie and Victor, two Patagonia natives who tended to our group’s comforts—set out by van on the first morning of our excursion from Puerto Natales, a fishing village of 18,000 inhabitants on the shore of a Pacific inlet called Last Hope Sound.

The houses of Puerto Natales were sided and topped with protective panels of corrugated metal painted in bright colors. The road north passed through arid plains hemmed in by mile after mile of sagging fences and punctuated by the occasional appearance of a shepherd’s shanty. The landscape reminded me of Wyoming—a vacant and dusty pale green, spotted with the twisted, charred remnants of trees that had been burned to clear pasture.

We pulled onto a narrow road that cut across a ranch and unloaded the bicycles. Skies were fair and winds were calm. “Is not normal for Patagonia,” Raúl assured me. “Can change any minute.” We rode along the south shore of Lake Sarmiento de Gamboa, whose turquoise surface reflected the looming mountains on the opposite shore. Buff-necked ibis with long curved beaks picked for insects along the beach. Sheep with thick matted coats scurried in front of us. The ride was easy going. The deserted landscape, which looked as though it hadn’t been disturbed since the last ice age, was glorious. I was very far from Brooklyn. We stopped for a moment by the sun- and wind-bleached skeleton of a horse. Most of it had been picked clean by predators—condors, foxes, hawks—but a few patches of flesh and hair clung to the ribs. “In winter is a lot of them dying here,” said Raúl. It was late spring now. Sheep were being rounded up for shearing, and wildflowers were out in abundance, and creeks flowed heavy with snowmelt. We rode into an emerald-green pasture where the light was scattered by the leaves of lichen-strewn beech trees, and we were surrounded by a dozen motionless horses. The only sound was of a woodpecker going at a dead log. Raúl broke the silence. “You like horse meat? We bring some horse jerky with us. Soon, you try some.”

The next morning we entered the park on a rarely used horse path. It was a fine piece of singletrack terrain, replete with fallen logs, countless stream crossings, and extensive sections of washed-out trail. I caught a stump and flopped into a dome-shaped thornbush when no one was looking. Raúl took a graceful dive over his handlebars. We climbed out of a claustrophobic valley to a point that overlooked a broad floodplain, 3,000 feet below, pocked with outcrops of red rock. The route down, a treacherous lane of fine black schist, was unfamiliar with the concept of the switchback. I clenched my brakes and took a 1,500-foot skid, trying not to look to my left, where the mountain vanished. Toward the bottom of the hill we came across a pair of Chilean police on horseback. They stared at us incredulously. Raúl negotiated and led us on. He said he was told we were the first people ever to have come down that path on bikes. Raúl admitted that there was some possibility that park regulations prohibited the ride we had just taken. We felt a little bit like outlaw pioneers and thus reached camp in a celebratory mood. Raúl dug through some boxes and produced a grizzled square of something that resembled shoe leather. It was the horse jerky I had been promised.

Over the course of the 10 days we spent together, the five of us took on the attributes of a strange little family. Victor, the driver, had an affection for the van that was peculiarly touching. He slept in the van. While the rest of us would pass our downtime in the kitchen tent, Victor would lean against the van in a protective posture, smoking a brand of Chilean cigarette called Life, looking a little like a small-time gangster in his outfit of a monkey suit and dark sunglasses. Victor had once worked in a slaughterhouse butchering rabbits and took a keen interest in the hares that scampered through the high grasses.

Eddie, who was 22 and baby-faced, had a scar on his forehead and a look of perpetual confusion on his brow. After two days of riding, he declined to get on a bicycle anymore, patting his ass and shrugging by way of explanation. It didn’t take long before I began to suspect that Raúl also didn’t much like riding a bike. “You wish to ride now, in this wind?” he would ask, repeatedly. His own preferences were plain. As a result, much of my riding was a blissfully solo experience. Or nearly solo. Bound by a strong sense of the tour guide’s duty to protect his helpless client, Raúl would command the others into the van and the group would trail behind me at a crawl.
Most of the ridable terrain in Torres del Paine park is on rolling dirt roads that circle the forbidding Paine massif at the park’s center. I felt a little awkward being followed along these roads by my attentive steel chaperone. I would wave the van on ahead of me and, when it disappeared from sight, enjoy the momentary solitude. Despite the local feeling that the 615,000-acre park is being overrun by tourists, all of 62,000 visitors are anticipated for 1999. I always sensed that I had full run of the park and that I was far more likely to encounter mating guanacos—long-faced animals that look like a cross between llamas and camels—than randy backpackers. The birdlife of the region was particularly exotic: flightless birds called rheas, with swooping ostrichlike necks and bulbous midsections, which scampered zigzag through the grasses in a state of seeming panic; condors with ten-foot wingspans; swarms of upland geese whose markings made them resemble airborne bowling pins; and a profusion of flamingos, eagles, larks, plovers, hawks, finches, and woodpeckers.

“Tomorrow,” Raúl would promise, “if no wind, maybe I ride bike.”

A few of the most spectacular sights of Torres del Paine require that bikes be left behind. One morning we drove to Grey Lake, an unruly spill of water emerging from the massive Grey Glacier, which sits at the southernmost extreme of the continental ice cap. We strode along a windswept mile of black beach that marked the boundary of the lake. Icebergs had detached from the glacier, about ten miles distant, and drifted to a halt at the foot of the lake. The lake was littered with what looked like a riot of haphazardly tumbled dice, emitting a watery blue haze. Sculpted by the wind, the icebergs were scooped, bowed, arched, and carved to precarious pinnacles. It was a humbling display of the inhospitality of the Patagonian landscape. Poet Frank O’Hara once wrote, “The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible,” and I knew that the lure of Patagonia was the lure of the unspoiled and unseen lower depths.

A few days later, Raúl, Craig, and I hiked from an estancia inside the park to the park’s most celebrated viewpoint, at the base of the “Blue Towers” for which the park had been named. The trail climbed along the side of a gorge carved 14,000 years ago by retreating glaciers and continued through the enchanted dimness of an old-growth forest teeming with football-size mushrooms. We scampered over boulders and crossed a ridge to find ourselves facing three dramatic teeth of pink granite, each thrusting upward more than 2,000 feet. The bottom of the spires was a wall of ice. Two condors drifted overhead. We sat there for a few hours among three dozen other hikers, watching the light cross the rock faces. The towers looked like the kind of formations that are particularly unwelcoming to human intrusion. I met an elderly Scottish couple, who had made the strenuous hike by dint of sheer determination. They told me they had waited half their lives to see these cliffs.

On our last day in the park, we took refuge from a nasty pelting rain in an abandoned hut on Lake Azul, in the northeast corner of the park. The hut’s tin roof was bolted to the ground with cables. After a few hours, though, the skies shifted with stunning abruptness, and venturing outside I came upon an overgrown trail that wound around the north shore of the lake. I roused Craig and Raúl for a final go on their bikes.

Within a few minutes, I realized that I had discovered the trail I had dreamed about in Brooklyn. It cut through seething green meadows, was diverted for one stretch to a thin strip of ashy black beach, and then traversed a series of lumpy forested hills. Lake Azul was the shimmering blue of imagined lakes. The Torres del Paine emerged from clouds in the distance and shadowed us like a wall.
At times the trail was barely eight inches wide, which lent the riding a certain pinball-machine ferocity. The terrain was constantly surprising. Dead stumps would suddenly appear. We jumped them. We glanced off boulders and skidded around cacti and waded through fragrant bogs. Mostly the winds stayed away from us. There were grueling climbs and twisting downhills that made my arms feel like stone. The trail seemed to go on and on, like a dream. We turned around at a silty brown sinkhole called Onion Pond and arrived at camp like a family that had finally, against all odds, enjoyed a family outing. I was covered with mud, but I wasn’t yet ready to ask Victor to hose me down

The post With the Wind at His Heels appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

When battle lines began to be drawn across the frozen stubble fields of northwestern Alberta, they appeared as faint scribbles, too inconspicuous to attract alarm. Windshields were shattered and tires slashed on construction equipment at a few of the thousands of unmanned oil and gas well sites that hover over the farmland like blackened scarecrows. Sledgehammers were taken to Caterpillars. Nails were strewn like spilled grain on remote roads leased to oil companies. Residents of Alberta’s sparsely populated Peace Country, a vast block of windswept prairie drained by the Peace River, were slow to register the signs of insurrection in their midst. Some attributed the mischief to disgruntled employees of the oil companies that had descended on the region from distant Calgary in recent years, transforming the landscape into a pallid grid of smokestacks and strip malls and strip bars, and infusing the local culture with tolerable amounts of cash and mayhem. Others saw in the vandalism the eternal imprint of teenagers roaming dirt roads with their headlights dimmed, staving off the boredom of long winters; still others saw the imprint of eternally malcontent local Indians.

The vandalism escalated. Acid was poured over monitoring equipment at pump sites. Sharpened spikes were hammered into access roads to gas installations. Soon the attacks branched out to include the region’s forestry industry; railcars packed with bales of pulp were set ablaze, causing millions of dollars in damage. No arrests were made. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police confessed an inability to patrol the vacant terrain. “I would compare it to graffiti,” said Sergeant Dave MacKay, head of the eight-person Beaverlodge detachment of the RCMP, which has investigated many of the more than 130 attacks against industry over the past two-and-a-half years. “Unless you actually see someone do it, it’s very hard to make a case against a culprit.” A year ago, a sniper took aim at gas-company offices with a high-power rifle. Six months ago, a bomb blast ruptured a gas pipeline, and two other explosive devices were defused before they detonated.

Then, at the beginning of August, during a holiday weekend in Canada, a pair of gas wells was destroyed by explosives. High-pressure pipes were severed and “sour gas” — the stuff that smells like rotten eggs and can cripple the central nervous system in a whiff — was discharged into the air in sufficient volume to warrant evacuations and highway closures. The attacks created a nuisance for drivers returning to their farms from bingo halls in the boomtown of Grande Prairie, and panic among energy firms involved in Alberta’s $2.5-billion-a-year sour gas industry. Alberta Energy Company Ltd., a major industrial presence in the region, hosted a rare news conference in Calgary to issue a report entitled “Terrorism and a Fractured Community.” Gwyn Morgan, the company president and C.E.O., spoke of residents “living and working under a state of siege” and bemoaned his helplessness in the face of “life-threatening fallout of the industrial terrorism.”

In clapboard farming towns such as Sexsmith and Goodfare and La Glace and Hythe, residents have reluctantly come to believe that the particularly hateful, urban, elitist creatures known as ecoterrorists are huddling in their midst. Rumor has it that environmental groups from the United States have been fanning the flames by offering moral and economic support to the perpetrators. Local environmentalists, though, point out that the practices of the energy industry — whose airborne pollutants have been linked to cancers, birth defects, and crop destruction — are quite enough to have incited a grassroots insurgency without outside assistance. “I don’t condone acts of vandalism,” says Mike Sawyer of Calgary’s Rocky Mountain Ecosystem Coalition, “but I can understand how people would feel driven to conduct such attacks.”

The community waits uneasily for a break in the case. Security detachments can be spotted parked in overgrown fields, and the breathless debate in roadside coffee shops concerns the wisdom of taking up arms against terrorists. “God knows where the next bomb is going to go off,” a spokesperson for Alberta Energy Company tells me. “I’m scared to death.” The patterns of everyday life in the oilpatch remain seemingly intact: Granaries are well-stocked, and tottering orange buses are delivering rural children to school each morning by the standard icy routes, and the dreary sod continues to yield its sticky flow to the furnaces of North America. But make no mistake: Peace Country is at war.

The gravel road down which I’ve turned, about 25 miles east of Alberta’s border with British Columbia, is lined with orderly stands of bare white poplars. Beyond the trees, tractors sit like ornaments in fields of rime-covered black dirt. A few horses gather in a tight circle against the wheezing horizontal winds, and a cluster of abandoned farmhouses sags toward the ground, disrupting the unrelenting flatness of the yellow-brown vista.

This is a road reserved for martyrs and pariahs and — if one is to heed local sentiment — home-grown subversives. I pass a bullet-riddled Dead End sign with the words “Ludwigs Are” scratched into the paint. A bit farther down the road, a black flag decorated with a white skull-and-crossbones flutters at the entrance to the Trickle Creek farm, home to Reverend Wiebo Ludwig and his 34 family members and disciples. “Beware of the Mounting Anger of the Local Residents,” warns a hand-painted sign erected by the Ludwigs; a torn Canadian flag marks the entrance to the 320-acre compound. Wiebo, 57, awaits my arrival on the porch of his log house, where a “potato gun,” fashioned from a four-foot length of plumber’s pipe and designed to be ignited by a nearby can of Final Net aerosol hair spray, leans against a window like a comic sentinel.

It’s cocktail hour, and Wiebo pours me a glass of homemade wine, alcohol content 15 percent, made from high-bush cranberries plucked from the surrounding woods. It goes to my head quickly. A band of tow-headed children stares at me, speechless, as if I broke away from a herd of alien livestock. “So you’ve come all this way to see the saboteur, have you,” Wiebo says, sizing me up. “You’d best be careful.”

Wiebo moved his brood to Trickle Creek in 1985, hoping to settle down after an unruly past. Born in Holland, he immigrated to Canada at age 10, ran away from home at 15, traveled the world with the “immoral and despairing” Canadian navy, and was deposed from the pulpit of two congregations of the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church in small-town Ontario. Despite the leavening effect of a master’s degree in divinity, he speaks in language dusted with traces of counterculture ebullience. “We had to leave the system before it destroyed us,” he tells me cheerfully, moments after we shake hands. He wears a leather vest over an open-necked white shirt, and a small silver cross on a necklace seems tangled in his snowy chest hair. His bearing, which is often described by acquaintances as “intense” and “in your face,” is part homespun revolutionary, part self-appointed mystical visionary. As such, he is not afraid of wielding the broad brush of generalization or of claiming to have spied the very nature of things worldly and otherworldly. “The system,” Wiebo says, speaking in the calm murmur of a late-night talk-radio announcer, “has its own momentum. It catches you. We had to break with it, get off the treadmill. It was soul rot.” He and the family escaped to Peace Country, he says, on the run from the debilitating influences of materialism, capitalism, the banking system, property taxes, public education, egoism, the dilutions of organized religion and the savagery of ecological destruction and, not least of all, the seductions of “secular humanism.”

Mamie Lou, Wiebo’s 51-year-old wife and the mother of their 11 children, saunters over from the open kitchen, where an assembly line of women clad in peasant dresses and sneakers is dealing with mashed potatoes and applesauce, and confirms her husband’s narrative. The Iowa-bred daughter of a minister, Mamie Lou has a squared-off jaw and washed-out, somewhat ravaged features. She and Wiebo could pass for an aging country-and-western duo who have gone through tough times and lived to sing about their trials. Her red corduroy shirt is cinched with a red vinyl belt, and her head is covered with a red scarf in deference to her husband’s authority. Indeed, all the sturdy, big-boned women of Trickle Creek farm — I count nine who are either at or beyond childbearing age — wear scarves over their blond hair, decline to shave their legs, and carry out their homely chores unsupported by what they consider to be cancer-causing bras. Meanwhile, all the ruddy, bandy-legged men of the household are aswarm in facial hair — seven flickering beards that blend into the burnished landscape and frustrate the task of distinguishing Fritz from Bo from Benjamin. Wiebo engineered the marriages of three of his sons to the three daughters of another middle-age couple living at Trickle Creek, and the dizzying roster at the compound is rounded out by 18 home-schooled, blue-eyed children who can be seen placidly drawing with crayons in Bible coloring books or tugging at the ears of whinnying goats. “Public education is an abomination,” Wiebo reports. “I would rather see my children dead than be taken to school.” None of the cheerful tykes raises a pale eyebrow.

“People know that we’ve devoted ourselves to wholesome family life,” Wiebo says. When Wiebo came to Trickle Creek, only one small cabin, without running water, stood on the property. The family was broke, had no furniture, and ate its meals sitting on the floor. Mamie Lou remembers bringing in frozen laundry from the clothesline and thawing it out in front of the cookstove. “We were living like pioneers,” says Wiebo. Harmony, the couple’s eldest child, who has trained herself as an herbalist and who spins wool sheared from the family’s sheep, passes through the room with a harmonious nod of her scarved head.

Trickle Creek now has three houses; a barn heated in part by solar panels; several outbuildings; a machine shop and a wood shop; cellars stocked with mason jars of pickled vegetables and sacks of carrots, beets, and potatoes; and a wind turbine mounted on a 40-foot platform, spinning like a dervish against the weak northern sun. The Ludwigs have built all of it themselves, from trees in their woods, as part of their mission to achieve “self-sufficiency” from the world at large and to walk in step with nature. One of Wiebo’s sons has learned to butcher the family’s sheep, cattle, and poultry. Another has taught himself beekeeping. Everything that sprouts from Trickle Creek soil is Wiebo-certified organic. The Ludwigs bake bread from their own milled grain, wash with homemade soap, drink “coffee” brewed from roots and dried grains, and treat everything from diaper rash to whooping cough with extracts from their herb garden. One of the daughters is receiving rudimentary instruction in dental work from a nearby dentist, though by the look of the stained teeth and inflamed gums flashed by many of the Ludwig kin, the family has a way to go before it achieves self-sufficiency in oral hygiene.

I sit down with my three dozen new friends to a heaping meal of old-fashioned farm cooking, but not before a little thanks is offered to God for the presence of the dark-haired visitor. I’m touched. The Ludwigs are friendly Christians. They strike me as smart and self-confident and passionate about politics and ecology, and I’m almost hoping they’ll lead me to their stone-ringed campfire in the yard after dinner and sing hymns or folk songs while Wiebo plays the trumpet. It’s clear that Wiebo’s experiment in withdrawal from the vulgarities of consumer culture is in many respects an estimable success. The children seem aglow with contentment, and none of them claims to miss the opportunity to roam shopping malls or swap lipsticks with friends from the Godless world beyond Trickle Creek, or to mind performing their daily chores. Nobody watches television, though tapes of John Denver and the sound track from Titanic rest next to an old stereo. The mess-hall style dinners are lively and relaxed, and each morning’s breakfast is followed by a lengthy session of Bible study and prayer. All the constant activity is presided over by Wiebo, who has been called the “patriarch” of the family but who prefers the title “undershepherd of the Word,” and whose authority at Trickle Creek is final and absolute.

Around 1991, after six years of rugged homesteading and several Ludwig home births, the Trickle Creek idyll began to show cracks. “The system” from which the Ludwigs had sought refuge seemed to track the family down like a malevolent gas cloud. In the early ’90s, the Alberta energy industry recognized the potential for full-scale development of the province’s natural gas reserves; the sedimentary basin of the northwestern plains is so rich in gas that the ground is said to tremble when freshly drilled wells begin to flow. In the last ten years, the number of producing gas wells in the vicinity of the Ludwigs’ property has doubled, to around 2,400, and the preponderance of those produce sour gas, which contains lethal amounts of hydrogen sulfide. To measure the volume of an underground deposit, gas companies will oxidize the contents of a new well into the atmosphere for about a week, burning off some 250 chemicals through 40-foot stacks to dissipate the toxic load. The process is called flaring. On a clear night in Peace Country the flames of flaring gas wells rise from the earth like barbaric matchsticks.

In Alberta, gas wells are allowed to be drilled as close as 100 meters from residences, and Trickle Creek lies at the center of a dainty industrial solar system whose unmoving stars are 10 gas wells, each linked to a pipeline that rings the property. “During the time the Ludwigs have been there,” says RCMP Sergeant MacKay, “this area has turned into the major gas field in North America.” The family says that three leaks have been confirmed at wells within shouting distance from their home, and has prepared an anecdotal record several hundred pages long to support its claim that ill health — three miscarriages, birth defects, chronic respiratory ailments, skin problems, throat infections, eye infections, and memory loss — has been caused by what they bitterly call “fumigation”: exposure to toxins released through leaks and flaring. Wiebo says that 60 of his livestock — cows and lambs and goats — have died and that the trees in his woods are sick at the core and that his soil, while still productive, is laced with ungodly chemicals. “This place used to be full of frogs,” he recalls. “Then we started finding deformed frogs. Now even those are gone.” The family’s prayer meetings are held against the sounds of a chirping choir of caged blue and yellow canaries that are kept for the purpose of detecting vagrant fumes. Twice the Ludwigs have heeded the warnings of the canaries to flee their house in a red-and-white school bus that stands ready in a nearby field.

Wiebo has filed complaints with energy companies, police, and government bodies, but says that his efforts — which have cost him $45,000 and have become a full-time pursuit — have been unavailing. A few years back, he was arrested after he entered the offices of the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, the regulatory agency that environmentalists charge with being a rubber-stamping friend to polluters, and spilled a few ounces of crude oil on their rug. In early 1997, his eldest son, Ben, was convicted for vandalizing a gas company shed, a charge to which he refused to respond. “You know what happens when you corner a dog,” Wiebo tells me, speaking in analogies, as is his wont. “He might be a friendly dog, normally speaking. But when you come for him enough, he’s got nothing left. So he bites you.”

One day late last August, the Ludwigs proceeded to the woods behind their houses, where they gathered to dig the first grave on Trickle Creek farm. They said some prayers and read some poems and set into the ground an unfinished spruce box bearing the grotesquely deformed remains of Abel Ryan Ludwig, who had been born dead to Wiebo’s son Bo and daughter-in-law Renee. In a nearly unbearable five-minute video that the family has produced to document its misfortune and publicize its cause, Bo and Renee are seen cradling the dead infant and stroking his soft, unformed skull, accompanied by a sound track of mournful Celtic-sounding music. The baby’s flesh is loose and peeling; his mouth is agape. The family believes that the stillbirth resulted from Renee’s exposure, during the early weeks of her pregnancy, to a toxic load of chemicals released from gas wells adjacent to Trickle Creek. “Abel Ryan was killed by the polluters,” Wiebo says, definitively. “Sometimes I think we should take the president of Alberta Energy Company hostage, tie him up, make him watch the video of Abel Ryan, and then slit his throat.”

Forty-eight hours after the funeral, a bomb exploded at an oil well a few hundred miles south of Trickle Creek. Roadblocks were set up in the area. Wiebo, Bo, and Renee’s father, Richard Boonstra, who also lives at Trickle Creek, were arrested at a roadblock set-up in the area of the bombing. Mamie Lou was arrested the following morning at the family’s house.

The night of the arrests, 30 RCMP officers converged on Trickle Creek and stayed until dawn, scouring the property for evidence of the family’s involvement in the bombing. Wiebo says they left the house with a smattering of innocuous materials, including some fishing line, a bag of powder used to tan hides, a book called The Dying of the Trees, and Earth First! founder Dave Foreman’s notorious volume, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. The four suspects also surrendered their clothes, which were sent to crime labs in Vancouver for analysis. A few weeks later, prosecutors withdrew charges.

Wiebo will neither admit to nor deny involvement in any ecoterrorist action. Nor will he explain what he and the others were doing near the blast site. He claims to know who committed many of the recent attacks and says he finds himself “in spiritual sympathy” with their motives. “If a man is going to slaughter your family,” says Wiebo, exercising his flair for propositional speech, “and you just stand by and lift your hands in prayer — that kind of passivity I condemn as amoral cowardice. Somehow people believe that Christians have become so weak-kneed that they can be pushed into that corner. Well, you have to love your enemy enough to win him over through persuasion rather than kill him. But if he needs to be killed to restrain his madness, then you kill him. That’s not murder. It’s executing judgment.”

Hythe, population 800, lies five miles east of Trickle Creek and calls itself “Town of Flowing Wells,” in honor of its once crystalline water supply. At the Hythe Motor Inn, though, the tap water in my cinder-block room stank of sulfur. I recalled a moment in another of the Ludwigs’ videos, Home Sour Home, in which a lit match held to a stream of tap water bloomed into a globe of flame. The Ludwigs had distributed the story of their opposition to polluters to media and environmentalists across Canada, and their principled rejection of creature comforts had struck a responsive guilty chord among urbane liberals. The family enjoyed a few moments as media darlings in the Canadian press. Back home, their neighbors were considerably less enamored of the Ludwigs.

One morning in the diner at the Hythe Inn, I found a group of flannel-shirted men nursing their coffee cups and trading banter over the community’s most prominent suspected villain. “What do you want to know about that Ludwig bastard?” one called over to me. They told me what they knew, what they suspected, and what they guessed. Frank Webb, the three-term mayor of Hythe and the owner of a business that operates water tankers, played point man. “Ludwig knows how to get inside people’s heads,” he said. “He’s a clever, educated man, not a hick like the rest of us around here. He loves to read about himself in the media, and the media loves to lap up his BS.” Cam Hastie, a retired building contractor, killed a fly with his pack of cigarettes and pointed out, “It’s impossible to know what’s going on with their health when Wiebo is over there playing doctor, veterinarian, and mortician all by himself.” Some of those present proposed that inbreeding could account for the Trickle Creek miscarriages and birth defects. Abuses were hurled on the Ludwigs’ ability as farmers, and Wiebo’s charge that his livestock had been exterminated by toxic fumes was dismissed as a hoax. It was well known, the men said, that Wiebo had bought lamb carcasses from farmers in the area in order to produce a dramatic shot of a heap of dead animals for his home video. Mayor Webb advised me, “Why don’t you ask other people around here if they’ve had miscarriages and aborted livestock?”

I had, I told the Mayor. I had, for instance, sat in the living room of the Ludwig’s nearest neighbors, Rob and Gisela Everton, grain farmers who live about a mile-and-a-half south of Trickle Creek. The Evertons circulated a petition in which 42 of the Ludwigs’ neighbors — the people who pass Wiebo on the road and raise a hand in automatic greeting — joined in dissociating themselves from the Ludwigs’ complaints against the oil and gas industry. It was a distinctly unneighborly gesture. “He’s not the kind of neighbor you want,” said Gisela. “He’s scary. You’re not welcome there. The only time you see them is when they need some help, like being dug out of a ditch or having their grain dried.”

I had also spoken with Laureen Campbell, the leathery 40-ish bartender at the Hythe Tavern — behind the coffee shop, below the motel. Laureen didn’t have much to say about ecoterrorism or alternative lifestyles. Her boyfriend is a driller in the oil patch, and she has lived around Hythe most of her life, despite repeated efforts to get away. Laureen couldn’t recall having had any health problems she would attribute to industrial pollution. Then she paused. Well, she said in a gravelly voice, come to think of it, her father did die of cancer. So did one of her sisters. Two other sisters had had cancer. So, come to think of it, had she — a weird, rare cancer at that. And of course her daughter had just recovered from cancer. According to environmentalists, Peace Country has an unusually high incidence of cancer — and asthma, and blood disorders. But Laureen has no firm opinion. “We can’t live with the gas companies,” she told me, “and we can’t live without them.”

Peace Country hasn’t determined how it will live with the Ludwigs. At the coffee shop, Mayor Webb groused about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Canadian constitution. “The man on the street,” he said, “would think that the laws are made for criminals.” Then, in a surprisingly Wiebo-like statement, he said, “We’ve gotten so liberal that we’ve rotted from the middle.” As the mayor spoke, Wiebo and Mamie Lou entered the diner and sat in a corner with a pile of newspapers. The room grew quiet. Some tables cleared out. “People around here are talking about how this will end,” Webb whispered. “This is still the Wild West, and we haven’t forgotten the old remedies.” He glanced over at Wiebo, who was scanning the Edmonton Sun through his bifocals. “He struts in here pretty cocky, but God help him — if one person gets hurt, there’s likely to be a lynching.”

It was a lazy afternoon on the farm. The bearded boys took a break from pouring cement at an earth-covered structure that looked like a bunker but was described to me as “the root cellar.” A few of the women interrupted their mopping and bread-baking and swished over to the dining table in their flowing skirts. Allan Johnstone and Carl Bryzgorni, two stalwart members of Wiebo’s ragtag band of neighborhood supporters, had dropped by Trickle Creek unannounced to eat cake and exchange incendiary slogans. The lives of the revolutionaries seemed momentarily tranquil. Everyone was buoyed by the publicity the recent bombings had brought to Peace Country and by what was regarded as the RCMP’s humiliation when the charges against the Ludwigs were dropped. “They’re not eager to mess with us right now,” boasted Wiebo. “They’re afraid we’re going to blow up this part of Alberta.”

“The reason they dropped the charges,” announced Johnstone, a white-haired obsessive from Beaverlodge, “is that the government doesn’t want to settle this thing in court. They want it to flare up like in Montana and Waco so they can eliminate us.”

I was enjoying my cake, which was made with organic eggs and flour and freshly churned butter. Mamie Lou fetched me a cup of herbal tea and joined the conversation. “Just think of the thousands who have already been killed by the energy industry,” she announced. Mamie Lou was surprisingly up-to-date on the crass imperialism of multinational oil companies and was fond of equating the situation of the Ludwigs of Trickle Creek with that of Ken Saro-Wiwa of Nigeria, the plight of northwestern Alberta with that of East Timor. The Ludwigs’ movement of “resistance” had come to resemble a historical and ecclesiastical calling to its participants. Bryzgorni, an awkward gap-toothed farmer from nearby Sexsmith, spoke in affecting tones about how his wheat crop turned yellowish-green and died some years back after flaring from an adjacent sour gas well. “The industry treats us like wild animals,” he said, haltingly. “I’d compare it to Hitler with his gassing.” To which Wiebo replied, “It’s no better than Hitler. It’s just a free country — they gas us free of charge.”

I felt as though drafts of disorienting vapors had been released into the sun-drenched room. At one moment I thought I was sitting among a group of likable, harmless eccentrics who were giddy with the notion of naughty play; at the next moment I thought that this band of freshly minted green warriors was just desperate and disheveled enough to maim someone. “Blood has already been shed by the industry,” said Wiebo, with well-received bluster. “More blood is going to be shed sooner or later. It’s entirely justifiable.” Bryzgorni gazed at the crumbs on his cake plate and said, “We’ve got no choice. They’re choking us.”

Wiebo thrives under a siege mentality, and his family can be seen walking in lockstep directly behind him, straight into the heart of impending crisis. That is Wiebo’s way. “Will we risk being hated by men for the sake of the gospel?” he asks me, as if I’d know. “Do we fear men or God?”

Wiebo fears no men, least of all oilmen. Last summer, shortly before the Hythe-area gas well bombings, Wiebo rejected Alberta Energy Company’s bid to buy his property for $520,000, a sum that local residents figure is three or four times the property’s market value. Wiebo had considered moving the family to Nova Scotia or northern Idaho or remote British Columbia, but was furious when the company’s lawyers added conditions at the last moment that would effectively have banished the family from Alberta and enforced its silence on the company’s environmental practices. For the moment, Peace Country is going to have to learn to cope with the Ludwigs’ emboldened presence. Wiebo knows the authorities are terrified of the prospect of violent confrontation at child-friendly Trickle Creek, and this lends him the aura of invulnerability.

“You’ll be running back here when the days of trouble come,” Wiebo assures me, “trying to steal our food and envying our self-sufficiency.” The family views its poison gas affliction as only one symptom of a world that is spinning toward the fulfillment of its self-destructive promise. In this way, Wiebo’s doomsaying converges nicely with the predictions of those radical environmentalists who support ecoterrorism — even as Wiebo criticizes some environmentalists as “grandstanders” given to “strange pagan rituals.” Wiebo takes me on a whirlwind tour of the not-so-distant future. “It’s clear,” he says, “that this is like the time of Noah. We’re going toward an ultimate collapse.”

Richard Secord, an environmental lawyer who represents the family in its struggle, tells me, “I can’t think of a more remarkable group of people than the Ludwigs. I like what they’re doing as a community. I admire their lifestyle. This is obviously not a family of criminals. But when people feel they’ve been unable to get the attention of industry or regulators, what are they left with but militant forms of action?” The Ludwigs’ militancy is unlikely to be dampened by the family’s unified sense of a coming “conflagration.” What are a few bombs, anyway, when in short order, as Wiebo says, “Everything will convulse, and the elements themselves will melt, and the earth will be renewed”?

One night after dinner at Trickle Creek, Wiebo and his family led me outside to listen to the sound of the low-flying plane that they believe has been spying on them, with its lights off, for the past few months. Indeed, I heard the plane and heard its engines fade away and heard the rumbling return a few moments later. It was exciting to feel observed. The venal world was out there, just beyond the horse corral and the potato patch, lying in wait with its surveillance equipment and incinerated oil field toxins, preying on the slumbering pacified masses of Peace Country. But the Ludwigs could not be bought, and they could not be tricked. The children sat on the porch railing swinging their legs. Dessert could wait. Wiebo ran to the house and retrieved a gas flare pistol, and when the plane circled overhead again, he took aim like a movie cowboy and discharged a taunting flare into the darkened sky. A red streak flashed across the night and dissolved, like a brief, intimate glimpse of the fiery days to come.

Contributing Editor Mark Levine wrote about Bangladesh in the November issue of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø.

The post The Souring of the Good Reverend’s Nature appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

Today’s forecast: Overcast, with gloomy skies and stark, disabling winds. Poor visibility. Unstable conditions bound to deteriorate further. Tropical depression — my own — on the horizon.

Correction: There is no weather here. Here, inside the sky inside the brittle skin of the airplane. We are making our initial descent. The weather-weary world lies below, splayed out, lapsed into a state of watery calm. Pressurized air circulates through the cabin, mouth to mouth, like a vaporous secret. Here, as nowhere else in the country, the climate is controlled. The real air, outside the window, is the mystery, its designs untranslatable. What does the wind want?

A Muslim ventures to Mecca to feel the presence of God on the footpath; a stockbroker tramps through the wilderness, trading paper bears for bears with keen incisors; a student of the meteorology of doom, canvassing the radiant wind currents for clues to the weather, follows a fierce breeze to Bangladesh, the unadorned common denominator of intemperate weather, the zero-at-the-bone destination of the punishing elements. It has it all, and it has it always: five months of drenching monsoon rains each year, annual flooding that has a habit of rinsing away people and their land, severe droughts that devastate the food supply, the most destructive tropical storms on earth. And the best is yet to come, say the prophets of the skies. When the weather outside is frightful — as it seems increasingly to be, in Bangor as in Bangkok as in Bangladesh — we find ourselves trapped in a Bangladesh state of mind, storm-tossed and weather-beaten.

We are making our final descent. The weather on the ground comes into focus. I’ve read the papers. I know that the ongoing Bangladeshi flood of ’98 has officially claimed about 900 lives so far — mostly from collapsing houses, drownings, snakebites, and diarrhea — and has reportedly displaced 25 million people, one-fifth of the population, from their homes. I know that the Padma and the Jamuna and the Meghna, the three huge rivers that churn through Bangladesh looking for the sea, are running perilously high, and that the heaviest monsoon rains are still thought to be weeks away. That’s information, though — not weather. Weather is on the other side of the window, lurking in the shattered landscape, in the unbounded puddle through which a refracted glare of green land shimmers. I can trace the orange clay lines of major roads, which are built on artificially raised ground and which from the air assume the incongruous appearance of geometric order; and then, again and again, I see these roads disappear under water. I see floating clusters of trees and houses, isolated from one another like islands. I see the tips of power lines poking through the surface of the floodwater, and small herds of cattle — four or five heads apiece — huddling on tiny dots of land. I see no people; perhaps, I think, the people have faded in the weather, have reversed the course of evolutionary migration and taken to the sea. But people are always invisible from above.

Present Tense

To know the weather is not to master it. We have installed instruments to track the air, to describe its physical features; we have mounted cameras in space to provide us with frozen portraits of the air as it streaks across our consciousness in infrared bands. Yet all we can do about the air is watch it stalk us, coming closer, unhampered by our shutters and eaves, bored by our pleas, unmoved by the white linen of our surrender.

The weather is present tense. It has no memory and no discernible purpose. The earth spins dumbly on its axis making weather. Weather that gets hoisted from one anonymous geographic blur to the next by dint of impersonal electrical attraction. Weather that collides in its sluggish course with other clumps of weather, producing decorative effects that go largely unseen by the preoccupied humans mired on land, sheltered, air-conditioned, blanketed, dammed, diked, and battened down, escaping the overpowering weather. Bangladesh, we tell ourselves, is on the other side of the planet, darkened beyond recognition by the rainshadow of deprivation and plain bad luck, no threat to our fair skies. The weather, we say, is not our home. Despite the mounting evidence — floods in Texas, frost in Georgia, forests of tinder, parched prairies — we cling to the conviction that ours is the Gore-Tex of nations, cozy and dry and impervious to wind-borne brutes. We want to ignore the weather, conquer the weather, harass the weather into postures of stillness and neutrality. But the weather is not cooperating.

As the ’90s trail off toward the zeros, the weather has come to assume the shape of our collective anxieties, our fantasies about technology, nature, retribution, inevitability. The Cold War is a memory of childhood winters, when winters were really cold. That was before heat swept across our brows like a fever, month after month of record-high temperatures worldwide, six billion of us staggering through the churned-up weather flushed and disoriented. We have overstepped, we whisper, we have changed the weather. Now the weather is going to change us.

Examine the unmistakable patterns of collapsing weather. Haven’t the signs begun to accumulate past the point of mere coincidence, to accelerate, hurtling toward one long, unvaried season of grim vegetation? Our vice-president informed us that the July just past was the hottest month since the birth of the thermometer, and then followed up by announcing that August had bested July. Texans, who soaked their hat brims with sweat for 29 consecutive 100-degree days, nodded. On the abridged 1997-1998 highlight reel, we find a tsunami sweeping over Papua New Guinea. The Chinese army is called out to combat the flooding Yangtze and finds itself outgunned. The monsoon neglects to show up in Indonesia, which consequently stays hungry and on fire a long time. North Korea — forget about it. Africa floods. South America floods. Europe gets chilled and floods. A thick glaze of ice separates Quebec from the rest of Canada. Alaska is weirdly warm; California, weirdly wet. Tornadoes glance across the plains like horseshoes, throttling more people than in any tornado season in 24 years. Florida girds itself for an unusually turbulent hurricane season, though not long ago the Sunshine State was dried out and ablaze. El Ni±o is credited with much of the mischief, though glum weather-watchers ponder why El Ni±o currents seem to be making the rounds more frequently, with a grander sweep, and sticking around longer. Other apologists for meteorological mayhem warn us, in soothing voices, to take the long-term view, and remind us that a few nasty years do not an apocalyptic pattern make. But who can argue with the weather?

And so, Dorothy, you may be wise to retreat to the cellar and start stockpiling the Star-Kist and the Campbell’s Soup, the batteries and iodine tablets, the crayon-streaked pamphlets of the Book of Revelation and the canisters of oxygen, the dog food and the burn kit and as much Prozac as you can steal. You’re not in Kansas anymore. You’re in Bangladesh.

No Problem

It was not suntan weather when I arrived in Cox’s Bazar, a town in the southeastern corner of Bangladesh with a sodden strip of slum-lined beach pounded by the rust-colored surf of the Bay of Bengal. A driving rain fell hour after hour, day after day. The skin on the hands of the marketplace vendor who sold me his last coconut was shriveled from the moisture. Cox’s Bazar had a defeated, used-up air. The people milling through the streets didn’t bother with rain gear. There was no use. A few delicate sorts wore taut plastic bags on their heads.

The people of Cox’s Bazar and vicinity have known their moments of celebrity. The storm systems that hover each spring and fall over the heated-up bay gain fury as they approach Bangladesh, perhaps eager for the opportunity to inflict maximum suffering on the densely populated flatlands of the coastal region. The last time Bangladesh made the cover of an American news magazine was in 1991, when a cyclone twice as large as the entire country funneled up the geographically welcoming Bay of Bengal at 140 miles per hour and hit the area around Cox’s Bazar at high tide, pulling along a watery surge 20 feet high and killing 139,000 people in one night. These are impressive numbers, but they are not without precedent in Bangladesh. A 1970 cyclone killed 500,000. In 1876, when the country had a population of about 20 million, a cyclone reduced that number by a solid percentage point, taking some 200,000 people into the sea.

I hired a small boat with an outboard motor to carry me the three and a half miles through the rain to the island of Maiskhal, where, my intuition told me, the weather could be embraced at its most acute. I was not disappointed. When I stepped out of the boat a sudden gust of wind relieved me of my umbrella. You don’t wear sunscreen in Hades, and you don’t carry an umbrella in Maiskhal. Children wrapped in black garbage bags collected salt from windswept dunes; water buffalo shuddered beside collapsed mud huts. Somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 people died in Maiskhal during the 1991 cyclone, and as soon as I muttered the word “cyclone” in the marketplace, several dozen drenched locals took a breather from hauling sandbags and smashing bricks to gather around me and compete for my attention. The stories came at me from all sides: how women were killed because their saris snagged on debris, how bodies were singed by the 130-degree heat of the storm, how the island was equipped with one shelter for every 35,000 people, how local politicians stole relief materials.

A cheerful schoolboy in a white shirt buttoned to the collar pushed his way forward to describe his experience. “I was eight at the time,” said the boy, named Asel Haider. “My family had just built a new house, and we believed it to be very strong, so many neighbors came to stay with us. There were 47 people in the house that day. Eighteen died.”

Asel paused and turned his face impassively toward the ugly sky. “It was raining heavily all day,” he said, “and the wind was blowing like hell. My father went outside and the wind tore the hair from his head. Around midnight, we all got into bed, but nobody slept. An hour later, the water poured in with great speed. I was confused. I didn’t know if I was in my house or at sea. Then I realized I was in a coconut tree, about 20 feet above the ground. When the sun rose I saw my mother in the branches of a nearby coconut tree. She was naked. Everyone was naked. Our clothes had been torn off by the wind. My mother was crying because my baby brother had been pulled from her lap by the water and she didn’t know where he was. We stayed in the trees all day. You know,” he said, staring through the downpour, as if some lost form were on the verge of materializing before him out of the wind, “the weather that day was very much like this.”

I wandered back to my boat. The sky was black and the tide was moving out. The sea looked rough. Great lumbering swells hoisted from the surface; whitecaps sketched nervously across the chaotic waves. My boatman, a 14-year-old boy with vivid bloodshot eyes, assured me that travel was safe. “No problem,” he said. I liked his bravado. There were no lifejackets on board and no safety equipment. I felt menaced and invigorated, ready for the elements. I removed my shirt and tossed it at the shirtless boatman, who entered into the spirit of the moment and gave me a thumbs-up and playfully wrapped my shirt around his head. I looked for lightning on the horizon to provide an accompaniment to my voyage. The rain was blinding. It was difficult to keep my eyes open, but I did, even when I started screaming.

Perhaps I was only whimpering. I don’t think the boatman heard me, or if he heard me, he might have mistaken me for a whooping American cowboy. The trip took 45 minutes, and 45 minutes of terror is the minimum that a visitor to Bangladesh ought to endure. The boat would crest a wave and glide into a prolonged silence, then drop to the sea with a jarring slap. This action was repeated again and again, as if for emphasis. The plastic seat that I clung to came unbolted. I tried to stay calm by examining the boatman for outward signs of anxiety. When he caught me looking at him, I gave him a thumbs-up. “No problem,” he shouted, with a notable lack of enthusiasm. Water was pouring into the boat and swirled around my calves. There was no shore in sight. I heard the boatman call to me, and though I couldn’t hear what he said, I turned my head and squinted through the rain. A fishing trawler — one of the countless 47-foot wooden ships that could be seen teetering in the bay — was sinking about 50 yards away from us. I studied it. It looked like a sinking ship. My boatman did not swerve. Evidently the notion of attempting a rescue was out of the question, and I felt sick and relieved. The sea seemed to be stuck in slow motion, every wave a prolonged gesture, every sputter of the outboard amplified and struggling to communicate instruction through the storm.

That evening and the following day I walked along the pier in Cox’s Bazar, trying to learn the fate of the sinking fishing boat. No one knew what I was talking about. Men sat in the rain chewing betel and mending nets. Great bloody piles of pomfret and hilsha fish lay on ice. I returned to the capital city of Dhaka and learned from a paragraph in the newspaper that during the storm in the bay at least 21 boats had gone down. A hundred people were dead.

Your Morning Weather

Dawn. The first webs of sunlight unwind across the phosphorescent green waters of Basabo, a middle-class district not far from Dhaka’s center. A line of canoelike boats called koshas sways at the water’s edge. Silence and stillness, except for the sound of a few shallow waves lapping against concrete and a distant shouted greeting that skims along the rippling surface. You might think you’re at the lakeshore.

You’re not at the lakeshore. A ragged column of early commuters can be seen trudging through the thigh-high murk, rising toward you like the perplexed survivors of a shipwreck seeking dry ground. Rush hour: Move aside or be splashed. Office workers wade by with their trousers rolled above the knee and their briefcases hoisted toward the sky. Shirtless laborers pushing against the tide of traffic with tubs of fish balanced on their heads, shopkeepers raising the grates of their storefronts and watching the water pour forth — the chorus of the awakening submerged masses. This is day 35 of the flood of ’98, and the water is becoming wearying. “How are you?” a man calls to me as he creeps past, sandals in hand. “Very good,” I reply. I’m enjoying the weather, the fluid mosaic of bright colors, girls in orange and red saris, men wrapped in plaid lungis knotted high on their thighs like diapers, a dozen women concealed behind black veils, squatting on the soaked planks of a boat. “How are you?” I call back to the man. He points to the sky: strands of charcoal wafting lazily towards us. His voice trails off with regret. “Very bad,” he says.

Water courses through the streets of this cramped city of nine million, cutting doors neatly in half, rising to the level of ground-floor windows, a stagnant blend of monsoon rainfall that has been refused by the city’s drains, trash that has sailed forth from flooded landfills, and voluminous raw sewage. The sight of naked toddlers scampering in the flood is, as a result, less charming than meets the eye. One woman washes dishes in the stream. Another leans out a window and empties a bucket of trash. Another collects water in a ceramic jar. “Are you drinking that water?” I ask her. “No,” she says, “I’m using it for cooking. I get clean drinking water from the mosque half a mile away.”

I’m among the dry ones — those with the means to hire a boatman to navigate the streets with a crude paddle, or those who pay a toll to shuffle along an elevated bamboo walkway fabricated by a local entrepreneur, or those who have engaged a bicycle-ricksha puller, as I have, to haul them through the water. Rich people — and all Westerners are rich in Bangladesh — are not permitted to get wet and hire poor wet people to keep them dry. My ricksha wallah stands astride the pedals of his rusted single-gear Chinese bicycle, bare feet caroming through the water with each revolution. His legs are etched with cables of lean muscle, like those of a professional cyclist. His calves, however, are blistered with sores from prolonged contact with the floodwater. The water deepens. His pedal strokes grow more labored, and he is forced to dismount the ricksha and pull the vehicle along, submerged to his rib cage like a horse fording a deep stream.

I’m enjoying the weather, the theatrical weather. The props are real and the crumbling sets are real and the drafts produced by the offstage wind machine are dazzlingly lifelike. The hot blue sky turns black in a flash, accompanied by a thunderclap. In an instant the street life of Basabo blurs behind an opaque scrim of rain. The monsoon winds, bearing ribbons of moisture from the southern seas, empty themselves in great sexual spasms, a kind of thick relief, a high-pressure rinse to scour the sooty urban film that coats everything here. Like a dutiful nursemaid, my ricksha wallah, squinting through the rain, covers me with a sheet of plastic. He catches me admiring the legs of an elderly boatman, which are decorated with what look like tribal markings: toes and feet and ankles stained a garish shade of neon purple. The wallah shrugs. “The water eats your skin,” he says. “Very much pain.”

Wet and hot this afternoon, with bright patches of discoloration and very much pain.

Baby Taxi

In Bangladesh the weather is obvious, and so are an outsider’s conclusions about weather, which can strike with the bluntness of a hideous blue sky: People shouldn’t live here. The same sentiments, of course, could apply to southern California, which shares with Bangladesh a propensity for earthquakes, landslides, droughts, and tidal waves; or southern Florida, which is nearly as susceptible to tropical storms as Bangladesh; or the Mississippi basin, which is apt periodically to suffer costly flooding. It seems to be a fact of geographic perversity that the least habitable land, logically, is often regarded as the most appealing, economically and aesthetically. We want proximity to beaches and ports and good farmland, and so we locate ourselves on insecure ledges, exposed to the elements. This is our human habit. Bangladesh is simply a concentrated expression of this habit. Bangladesh is the perfection of human vulnerability to nature.

Meet Jahangir. Jahangir drives a three-wheeled motorcycle “baby taxi.” On one of my first days in Dhaka, Jahangir drove me to an appointment in a downtown office building and along the way told me that his house was underwater. “I will show you my house,” he said, “and you will buy me a new one.” I couldn’t resist an invitation to a flooded house. Jahangir came for me later that day, and he took me by boat to his neighborhood, on a flooded island in the Buriganga River, which defines the southern edge of Dhaka. “It’s cheaper to live here than other places,” he told me, and I could see why. Jahangir’s neighbors continued to plod along in squalid rows of shacks that seemed to have been dropped haphazardly in the river. “This is a neighborhood for poor and ignorant people,” one of Jahangir’s friends, who had tagged along for the ride, informed me. Jahangir nodded enthusiastically. Many families had moved to their roofs. One woman called out to Jahangir as we drifted by, telling him that she had been awakened that morning by a snake in her bed. Jahangir laughed. Across the lane, another woman said that her infant had nearly drowned the previous night when he rolled off the bed-mat into water. Jahangir laughed again, and then turned to me and issued a tragic sigh. “This is why you must buy me a new house,” he said. A number of other residents, believing that the presence of a foreigner meant relief was on its way, called to me for handouts as we drifted past. An old woman, angered that I refused her requests, retrieved a paddle and vigorously splashed me. The water was not refreshing. I removed a dirty weed from my hair. Jahangir laughed. He located the spot, 30 feet underwater, where he believed his house to be. We stared into the water. There wasn’t much to discuss. We drifted past flooded shops and watched a pretty sunset. I saw a rainbow that I tried to ignore.

Jahangir received a little private relief from me that night — I gave him about $20, the equivalent of a month’s wages for him — but it wasn’t enough to buy him a new house, and he was disappointed. He dictated his address to me and made me promise to ask my friends and relatives to send him money. During the rest of my stay in Dhaka, Jahangir showed up at my hotel each morning to remind me of my pledge to assist him. I would be eating my omelette and checking the morning papers for tips on good flooded places to visit, and the guards at the gate of the hotel would bring Jahangir to me and stand by disapprovingly while he pleaded. He began to annoy me, and then my bad conscience began to annoy me. I told myself: Jahangir is a real person, not a character in a magazine article. He drives a baby taxi and spends each day sitting in a cloud of noxious fumes and when I take him to dinner after seeing his neighborhood he can’t read the menu and his slum is under 30 feet of water and as a result his two children are sleeping on the floor in a relative’s slum 10 miles outside of town. He boasts to me of his wife’s beauty and of his own sexual prowess. He is annoying. He doesn’t have as much dignity as I would like him to have. He’s willing to resort to begging. His address is S. K. Mohammed Jahangir, 44/10 Plassey Barck, Near Azad Office, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He requests American funds, and would like to remind my friends and relatives in America that packages sent to Bangladesh should be tightly sealed.

Delta Blues

Is geography destiny? Although the overflowing waters, which cover about two-thirds of Bangladesh’s Wisconsin-sized landmass, would surely create havoc in Milwaukee, in Dhaka the flood is being taken in stride, especially by those whose knickers are not waterlogged. “This is not a great flood,” says Mohammed Ershad Hossain, a dapper little man in a Muslim skullcap who is director of the Bangladesh Meteorological Department. (Hossain, it will turn out, speaks prematurely; by September, the flood will grow to be the worst in Bangladesh history.) Hossain spends much of our appointment reciting temperature data to me from a stack of yellowed papers. He is my personal Bangladeshi Weather Channel. A ceiling fan thrums overhead. I slouch in my mildewed chair. “So far,” Hossain explains to me this August afternoon, “only about 12,500,000 people have been affected by the flood.”

Bangladesh, my weatherman tells me, is the inhabited residue left behind by perpetual flooding. Flooding is Bangladesh’s history, its identity. Bangladesh is essentially a drain, the subbasement of the subcontinent, an unsteady formation perched atop shifting sands dumped in the Bay of Bengal over recent geological time. As such, Bangladesh is not only among the world’s least developed nations, industrially; it’s perhaps the least developed, topographically — constantly in flux, sliced up and patched together by the action of holy silt-heavy rivers dropping through the country like a holy terror.

Land is a fleeting and transitory substance in Bangladesh. The most recent catastrophic floods, in 1987 and 1988, killed 4,500 people, disrupted the livelihoods of about half the population, and kept two-thirds of the country in beachwear for a month. When their socks had finally dried off, a consortium of Bangladesh’s foreign-aid donors cobbled together a grandiose paternalistic scheme geared toward the negation of Bangladeshi weather. The World Bank coordinated the endeavor, called the Flood Action Plan, which dreamed of turning Bangladesh into Holland, lining the riverbanks with hundreds of miles of dikes, undertaking large-scale dredging operations to keep the channels free of obstructions, and installing elaborate systems of pumps and embankments around urban areas. Bangladesh has a tradition of frustrating its benefactors, though. The embankment surrounding Dhaka, built in the aftermath of the 1988 floods, held for 40 days and 40 nights of flooding this year but has finally been breached.

Almost $150 million was spent on studies and pilot projects under the Flood Action Plan, which briefly generated some heat before being dismantled in 1996. World Bank flood specialist S. A. M. Rafiquzzaman admits that “no one is talking about making a watertight solution anymore.”

Homeopathy

Weather creates excellent photo opportunities. The flood was a nice story with nice photos. I felt a kinship with my Bangladeshi counterparts on the flood beat. The English-language Daily Star ran a photo feature throughout the flood season under the title “Dwelling in the Deluge,” and in the pictures the flooded people had a glow of classical serene misery. People in weather bear an uncanny resemblance to their spiritual brethren, people in war.

Half of the three million or so residents of Dhaka’s indecorous slums are believed to be refugees from the eroded countryside, where land is wantonly and regularly scooped away by the currents of rivers. Of course, when the rivers recede during dry season, freshly carved sandbars are sometimes exposed, and Bangladeshis — two-thirds of whom make their living from the soil — have been known to contend violently for the right to sow these new lands with crops. Six months later, the sandbars disappear again.

One afternoon I stopped in on a flood-relief shelter on the outskirts of Dhaka. The shelter was in a crumbling and poorly-ventilated secondary school. The 5,000 flood victims had set up camp wherever there was the suggestion of space — in stairwells, corridors, closets. In one smoky 12-by-15-foot room, at least 100 people were sleeping, cooking, and covering their genitals while their clothes were being washed in sewage. I felt like a voyeur among the undifferentiated mass of weather casualties. For the moment, I told myself, we weather-watchers seem to know which side of the lens we belong on, but the harrowing skies can make a photo opportunity of us in a darkened instant. A tiny old woman in an orange sari approached me and placed my hand on her forehead. I recoiled. I was prepared to look, but not to touch. The woman was startlingly feverish. I led her downstairs, where a group of homeopathic nurses was running a clinic. The woman, they told me, was suffering from pneumonia and rheumatism. They gave her one of the three herbal medicines they had on hand, which they assured me were made in America. I asked if the medicines were effective. “Of course,” they said. I asked if the woman would recover. “No,” they said. I asked the head nurse to estimate the percentage of the people in the shelter who were afflicted with serious health problems. “One hundred percent,” he said. It didn’t sound like an estimate.

I left the shelter, rinsing my Tevas beneath a spigot, and recalled a photo opportunity from the previous week, when I’d spent a blazing day drifting in a boat over a vast lake of flooded farmland. On my way back to the mainland, my boat brushed past a woman who was walking in slow, dazed circles through chest-deep water. She was weeping. My boatman called to her, inquiring. In a desolate tone she reported: I’ve lost my duck.

The Red Phone

Not all natural disasters in Bangladesh are natural. Some people are born to suffering, some people have suffering thrust upon them. “It’s unfair to say that Bangladeshis are victims of geography,” said Secretary Azad Ruhul Amin, the highest-ranking appointed official at the Bangladeshi Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief. It was a good line, even if it was not unrehearsed.

I don’t know what I was expecting to hear when I reported to the Secretary of Disaster, whose job it is to make the weather disappear by political fiat. Amin projected the aura of a busy man with important disasters to attend to. A red megaphone was displayed in the corner of his office. He twirled a glass paperweight in each hand while talking to me, and when I asked him questions or told him about the disaster sites I’d visited, he kept himself busy reading his mail. He described to me his ministry’s various tasks of coordinating and supervising and facilitating and implementing. He described the steps that had been taken in the aftermath of the 1991 cyclone to reduce casualties. More shelters had been constructed, he said, and state-of-the-art radar and satellite equipment had been donated to Bangladesh to track storms with great accuracy, and the Red Crescent Society had organized a successful volunteer program to evacuate people when cyclones were imminent. As a result, Amin said, even a cyclone like the one in 1994, which hit the coast at speeds of 155 miles per hour, had caused only about 300 deaths, mostly among fishermen — as well as some 85 political refugees from Burma who were killed when the tin roof of the building where they were being detained collapsed and sliced them up. Every cyclone has a silver lining.

I stared at Amin’s desk, which was arrayed with a comical assortment of nine or 10 telephones, each one a different color. There was a red phone, underneath which was tucked a little red book that contained the secured numbers of 250 very important officials, the Secretary explained. The red phone buzzed and the Secretary picked it up and cooed. And there was a blue phone and an orange phone and a black phone and a green phone, and every so often one of these subordinate phones would buzz and the Secretary would bark into the receiver for a moment before returning his irritated gaze to me. I had a fantasy of these phones being connected to disaster sites around the country, and in my fantasy the phones buzzed all day and all night with pleas for respite and the Secretary offered assurances and consolation in the seductive tones of a chat-line operator.

What, I asked the Secretary, was his ministry’s strategy for preventing the flood of ’98 from worsening during the final weeks of the monsoon? “We’re keeping our fingers crossed,” he said, “and praying to God.”

Circumstance

I like to watch the weather. I often find myself lured outside like a sleepwalker by the encroaching weather. I can feel the change coming. The street noise is suddenly muffled, as if a tarp has been draped over the city. The beer bottle at my lips tastes metallic. My imaginary dog whines beneath the sofa, and the neighbor’s wind chimes are rattling, and the domesticated indoor air is stirred with a tense infusion of air that smells of salt and dirt and ice crystals — air that has been sent from some distant place of urgent weather. I leave the apartment. Pigeons scurry from the gutters. I stare at the agitated inky sky, which looks as though it could unfold like a Chinese box. The sky hesitates. It seems to retreat into itself for a moment of anguished consultation. And then the shards of sky begin to fall like dead weights.

Hostile weather is arousing. Weather is a participatory sport. To be knocked to the pavement by a sudden gust, to see your tracks in the snow vanish beneath squalls — one feels thrust into a living theater of dense atmospheric symbolism.

Who has not on traumatic occasion felt one’s spiritual kinship to the Bangladeshis awakened by the smudged and debauched skies? Early in my junior year of college, a hurricane was forecast to hit the coast of southern New England. Hurricane fever swept the campus. Custodians distributed masking tape, with which we sealed our dormitory windows. Classes were canceled for the first time since activists had occupied the administration building 15 years earlier, proving that while baby boomers were roused by Vietnam, my generation was left to make do with virtual Bangladesh. The hurricane was called Gloria, and the song of that name seemed to be blaring from every radio in Rhode Island. I preferred the Patti Smith version; I was an English major with a fondness for ardent weather. I stayed up all night with a few friends, mixing sugary drinks and waiting for the wind. We roamed through the deserted streets, watching the windblown garbage get wound in trees, trying to decide if the air was hot or cold.

A broad swath of circumstance separates those of us with the luxury to seek out extreme weather from those who are routinely persecuted by it, and for whom the greatest solace would be the absence of weather, the white room across which no sun passes. It would be glib to claim that weather is democratic. It seeks out trailer parks and Bangladeshi slums with particular vengeance, though less calculatingly than the landlords who cede to the poor the poorest refuges. Even those in the path of danger, however, cannot help but seize the power wrought by the obliterating weather. I spoke to a meteorologist at a regional weather station in a storm-battered corner of Bangladesh, who told me that when cyclones were approaching, crowds of townspeople would push their way into the musty room with the radar monitor, eagerly watching the weather approach them and bracing for the overwhelming frisson of landfall. “I can’t deny that it’s very exciting,” he said.

It is exciting. Weather in the foreground, weather in the background. In 1985 my mother died during a winter so brutally cold our house felt like a place of confinement. Ice weighed down the roof. Snow drifted up to the windows and pressed in. It was a season of bad weather absorbing all sound, of silent weather and fear. The squirrels in the attic froze to death. And yet on the day we buried my mother it was as though the sun appeared for the first time in months in a brilliant nimbus that cracked open the earth. I might as well have been in Bangladesh, the disturbance over the bay gaining speed as it lunged toward shore.

One night in Dhaka I wandered through the hot mist in the streets outside my hotel, thinking about weather. It was raining and it was going to rain. Crows shook noisily in the trees. People huddled over fires in vacant construction sites. United Colors of Benetton was holding a “Monsoon Sale,” though prices were not reduced enough to meet the budgets of the millions of Dhaka’s residents who were living in flooded slums or who squatted in the mire outside the American Embassy and sloshed through streets of Mediterranean-style fortresses inhabited by international aid workers and businessmen.

I heard a shout and walked absently toward a ricksha that had stopped beside a gate. Two young girls, perhaps 12 or 13, gestured me toward them, giggling. A lengthy pantomime established that I was American and they were Bangladeshi. They were sweet and shy and friendly, and invited me to ride with them. I climbed into the ricksha and squeezed between the girls, like a tourist taking a buggy ride in Central Park. Only when the rain began to fall harder did I realize that the girls were prostitutes. It was pouring. The girls took turns pulling their fingers through my hair. The drenched ricksha wallah shouted curses over his shoulders at the girls. I sat there rigidly, unsure of what to do next. The rain emptied the streets and made me close my eyes and seemed to wash away my anxiety. It washed away the world in which the ricksha puller was treated like a slave, it washed away the shanties in which the servants of the nearby diplomatic residences were living in water, it cleared the air of malarial pests and the stench of rotting garbage, it fell like an elixir to restore to the children who clung to my wet shirt some semblance of unburdened girlhood. The ricksha finally circled back to my hotel, and though I paid the driver and the girls, it was hard to make them understand through the pelting rain that I’d had all I needed for the moment, a long ride through the transforming weather.

Ninety-Five Percent

Where is God in Bangladesh? God, I told myself, is saturated in the saturated details. That’s what I told myself. I was stalled on a narrow muddy lane on a cliff in the port city of Chittagong, about 135 miles south of Dhaka, making a half-hearted effort to find the site of a landslide I’d read about at breakfast in the morning paper. My effort was insufficiently feeble. Soon enough I found myself being led down the slick mud stairs behind a concrete mosque, into a slum-filled canyon with damp orange walls that were streaked with moss, to a sunken hovel against the side of a cliff.

A dazed man coated with crusted mud was brought to me like a shackled prisoner dragged before a tribunal. His name was Mohammed Altaf Hossain. This was where he had lived with his family for 12 years, and he was currently digging through muck in an effort to retrieve cooking utensils. We stood atop a four-foot layer of mud, which not long ago had been part of the cliff and beneath which Hossain’s 40 ducks and 30 hens reclined in poultry darkness. I surveyed the scene and performed a rapid calculation. I calculated that some small part of Hossain’s vacant spirit — say, five percent — was down in the ground with his livestock.

The other 95 percent, I thought, remained beneath the mud that had swallowed Hossain’s house at four o’clock the previous morning after two days of strong, steady rain. Hossain said that his family had been asleep when the earth took them in with a sudden blow. He was entirely buried, except for his face, and so he continued to breathe. His wife was sunk to her torso. It was dark and confusing, Hossain said. After half-an-hour one of his sons managed to extricate him, and when he stood up he fainted. He was brought to by his wife’s screams. He struggled to dig her out from the mud, and when she was freed he saw that his seven-year-old son had been trapped beneath her. “My son, my son, what has happened to you?” Hossain cried, and fainted again. His son was dead. Soon he discovered that his infant daughter, too, was dead. A funeral had been held later in the day, and now Hossain was beginning to clear the ground to rebuild his house beneath the crumbling cliff.

As we spoke, I could hear Hossain’s wife wailing in a neighbor’s hut like a battered siren. I could hear the loudspeakers of the nearby mosque being tried out in the rain. “Hello, hello,” said a voice, echoing through the canyon. “Testing. Hello.” It might as well have been the mocking voice of God sent to test the resilience of hapless followers, the voice that rang out with scolding frequency throughout Bangladesh. How could Hossain fathom what had happened to his family? How could he be lowered with his family into a family grave, and then find himself risen, and then be forced to go on? How could such a thing be done?

“I asked God whether I have sinned to deserve this,” said Hossain, in a shamed whisper that seemed to drift down from a distant place, beyond the skies, beyond the disintegrating earth. “God will give me the answer when I’m dead.”

The answer may be concealed in the frayed fabric of the sky, the sky that neither begins nor ends in Bangladesh, the sky that scrolls in an uninterrupted belt from the clay ruin staked by Mohammed Altaf Hossain to the shimmering green lawns of weatherproofed, enlightened suburbs. Like a horde of people with ancient, half-forgotten injuries, we can feel in our bones the changing weather, the clouds gathering in the darkness on the edge of our blind spot. Hossain has been there, in the deep weather. You don’t come out whole on the other side.

I turned back toward my rented car, and when I approached the steps to the mosque I heard someone calling to me. It was a neighbor of Hossain’s, a boy. He was breathless. “Mark,” he said, “would you like to meet another family that was buried under debris?”

I paused to consider the boy’s offer. No, I said. No, thanks. Not just now.

Contributing editor Mark Levine wrote about the town of Atlin, British Columbia, in the September issue of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø.

The post A Storm at the Bone: A Personal Exploration Into Deep Weather appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

One man, a biologist, remembers lying awake in bed for hours that night, following the birds' shrill, urgent calls as they circled in search of a place to put down. It cannot be known at what point the geese abandoned their search for the ripe, undisturbed wetlands they favor as rest stops. Surely they must immediately have spotted the strangely sunken body of water that so dominates the valley into which they had crossed, water whose surface area is half as large as the city in whose midst it is set. True, this pond offered no vegetative cover to the geese, no food, and it lay several hundred feet down the steep, barren walls of the reservoir that contained it. But as another man, a geologist, tells me, “Geese aren't too smart. They're hard-wired to react to certain stimuli. They're tired, they see water, they land.” And so, pushed out of the clouds, the geese extended their black-tipped wings and tensed their bodies for impact and dropped beneath the rim of the earth's surface and drifted past a series of weathered tiers cut into the granite walls and chose to rest their exhausted bodies in the largest vat of acid from here to Siberia. Welcome to Butte America.

Welcome to the shadow of paradise, to the scorched garden where the rich soil is best avoided. This is the topography of paradox, built on the side of a hill, an inhabited ghost town whose 35,000 defeated and defiant residents share the broad avenues with the agitated souls of a mythologized and obsolete treasure-hunting past. Pigeons roost in scarred masonry against the backdrop of blue-tinted mountains. The central streets–Mercury and Quartz and Copper–are nearly deserted at midday, their ornate facades separated by gaps driven through the town by arson and demolition. Junk shops occupy the storefronts of buildings designed to flaunt the wealth of turn-of-the-century industrialists. Faded Victorian homes are studded with For Sale signs; most of the remaining population has long since moved down the slope to the tidy, drab grid on “The Flats” below. Beyond the center of town the streets grow narrow and sinuous, crisscrossed by old rail lines, often dead-ending at blasted dump sites. Here and there small fires burn among the rubble. Until recently, it's said, cats could not survive Butte–the dirt they cleaned from their fur was tainted with arsenic.

“No doubt about it,” a local politician tells me, “people in Butte aren't as concerned about the future as they should be.” The much-touted growth industry here is pollution technologies, and there's plenty of pollution to go around. A student at Butte's College of Technology–formerly the School of Mines–suggests building a fence around the town and posting a Keep Out sign for a few thousand years. Another proposal involves transforming the region into a National Environmental Disaster Monument. Butte may not be Yellowstone, but it speaks just as vividly of the American encounter with wilderness.

Welcome to a town perched on the edge of an abyss. Viewed from above on a perilous night, with the assistance of superior avian eyesight, the gutted town appears drawn to the funnel-shaped depression at its edge, a funnel whose bottom lies beyond view, exerting a pressure, like an ache, on the troubled landscape. Butte and its exposed underside are bound together in a kind of absurd ritual dance, partnered like lovers, like desperate enemies, like snakes and geese in an apocryphal struggle.

Say it's early September in a place onÌýthe fringes of the imagination–say Wrangel Island, Ushakovskoye, Siberia, high in the Arctic Ocean, hundreds of miles above the Bering Strait. Wafers of ice have begun to appear, floating in the marshes and swamps; wind currents have begun to shift. A flock of lesser snow geese–formerly known in ornithological circles by the Latin name hyperborea, “beyond the north wind”–responds compulsively to the seasonal stirrings, restless, occupied, writes a nineteenth-century observer, “in adjusting their feathers, smoothing and dressing them with their fatty oil, as athletes might for the ring or race.” The brief summer has been consumed with nest-building, breeding, tending to goslings. For a few weeks in July, the birds are grounded by molting. By the time the northerly autumn winds arrive, their five-foot wingspans are adorned with fresh layers of creamy white feathers.

They take to the air in aerodynamic V's, fanning out in long diagonals, drawn like taut string across the sky. They endure days of nonstop flight, suspended a few thousand feet above the sea, pushed by favorable winds at 60 miles an hour, sighting rough shoreline at the northwestern corner of Alaska. They cross into Canada, following the Mackenzie River down the Northwest Territories. Endless Canadian prairie awaits them, the stubble fields and pastures where they graze, tugging roots and aquatic plants from inland swamps. They parallel the eastern slopes of the Rockies, vast plains to their left, a wall of mountain to their right. Their path is as relentless as it is habitual. They have no choice. Loyal to their mates, obedient to their leader, they pitch themselves ahead of winter, their bodies a white blot on the horizon, their cries a piercing falsetto.

The snake lies in wait. Its pool of poisonÌýoffers an inviting spot for a cool and tawdry splash. The snake of phantom Butte is itself a specter, the sloughed-off and abandoned skin of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, aka the Company. Think back to 1876, year of centennial fireworks. The railroad has not yet reached Butte. Electricity and the telephone are embryonic technologies whose development will consume conductive metals with zeal. Marcus Daly, an Irish immigrant with a precocious talent for locating mineral wealth, arrives in the remote silver mining camp, population 1,000. He prospers. Backed by George Hearst, he buys the Anaconda mine near the center of the low-slung, barren Butte hill in 1882 and proceeds to locate a soaring vein of the red metal, copper. The silver camp is thus transformed into the world's greatest producer of copper, its population ballooning toward 100,000 during the First World War. “A mile high and a mile deep,” Butte–and, eventually, the Snake–assumes economic and political dominion over Montana.

Few places have been mined with such intensity for so long. No one can say precisely how many mines have been sunk in Butte, but the number surely runs into the hundreds. A 1925 photo of the hill shows a town mingled among the steel girdering of 40 mine frames and a half-dozen smokestacks, tokens of a time when the American industrial adventure was shot through with utopian yearning, when the frontier seemed both available and boundless. Something on the order of $25 billion in mineral bounty was extracted from the hill. Exorbitance of scale was the order of the day. In 1955, in an effort to increase the viability of mining low-grade copper ore–ore that yielded on average 15 pounds of metal from every ton of crushed rock–the Company largely replaced underground drilling and blasting with open-pit mining, mining as indiscriminate earth removal, executed by outsize mechanical shovels and trucks that moved on 11-foot tires and could bear away 170 tons of earth at each go. “We moved as much as 300,000 tons in a 24-hour period,” says a former mining boss.

Whole working-class neighborhoods–Meaderville and McQueen and East Butte–were also hauled away, swallowed by the pit. The pit ran night and day for 28 years. “Never thought it would end. Nobody did,” an old man tells me in the darkness of the Helsinki Bar and Sauna, which calls itself the Last of Finntown and dangles a hundred yards from the pit's edge. In 1977, the Company, its Chilean mining properties nationalized by the Allende government, was absorbed by the oil giant ARCO, which shut down operations at the pit in 1983. On Earth Day that year–a hundred years plus one after Daly's epoch-making copper strike–ARCO turned off the pumps that had removed water from the pit and the underground mines at the rate of 5,000 gallons each minute.

Listen closely to the Butte hill. Water–kept at bay for a century so that the traces of metal could be followed ever deeper into the hill–is returning, spilling through vast subterranean channels of abandoned mine workings, creeping toward the surface. In November 1983 a faint pool appeared at the bottom of the pit, 1,800 feet below ground. Twelve years later, the lake was some 850 feet deep, a 26-billion-gallon tank of water growing by five to seven million gallons each day–enough water lost each day to supply the needs of a town of Butte's size. Over the past several years the water level has risen about 30 feet annually, and as it rises the collective gaze of the people of Butte is increasingly compelled toward the surface. “It's a big bathtub,” I've been told. “Somebody left the tap on and went to the store.”

Russ Forba, the Environmental ProtectionÌýAgency's project manager for the Berkeley Pit, says that the facetiously labeled Lake Berkeley is “the largest body of severely contaminated water in the United States. There are smaller, more toxic bodies of water, and there are larger, less contaminated waters, but at this size this is the most contaminated water in the country.” The stew is laced with copper, cadmium, zinc, nickel, lead, and arsenic and, in the summary terms of a scientific paper on hazardous wastes, “contains metals and sulfate concentrations thousands of times those found in uncontaminated water.” The water is sizzlingly acidic. Its pH level, around 2.5, is characterized by various interested parties as comparable to lime juice or battery acid.

A hundred thousand visitors stop to look at the pit each year. The cars and minivans and RVs pull up behind the barbed-wire fence on Continental Drive, and the road-weary passengers wander through a timbered faux mine entrance and down a hundred feet of concrete tunnel to the modestly appointed pit viewing stand. About a mile and a half wide and a mile across–600 football fields of excavated turf–the scope of the pit and the sheerness of its vertical drop are starkly disorienting. The encroaching lake below stretches out innocently and daintily, like a wading pond in which children might race toy boats, until, with the assistance of high-power binoculars, one spots collapsed telephone poles floating in tiny clusters like driftwood. The surface is a thick gloss, and its dark cherry skin reflects clouds and sky and the pastel shades of the surrounding walls, a hypnotic play of light and shadow. It's Big Sky in a tube. Tearing open the hill has exposed a disarming spectrum of colors, pale greens and yellows, rich alluvial burgundy, bleached white. The walls, streaked by erosion, have a watery, stricken quality. The cliffs are scored with vivid geometric patterns, the effect of some 2,500 miles of road cut into the pit walls at vertical intervals of 40 feet–crumbling tiers visible for miles, grand pyramidal slopes, accented by sharp diagonals. It's the haunted geography of a ruin. It's the insides of a town cast brutally into sight.

Nineteen ninety-five brings an unusuallyÌýmild fall to Montana. In early November, Freezeout Lake, 150 miles north of Butte in Teton County, is blanketed with snow geese. Eighty thousand birds are observed in a screeching mass at this traditional migratory stopover point. A feeding frenzy ensues. The depleted geese scour nearby fields for grain and insects and for the gravel that helps grind food in their gizzards. They stay for a few days or a few weeks, until they feel the freeze approaching.

Thanksgiving is near. Hunters linger in the predawn chill in the ponds and marshes surrounding Freezeout Lake. Five dollars for a Montana waterfowl stamp buys a daily bag limit of three white geese. Twenty thousand such stamps are issued each season. The birds are wily, though, and make uncertain targets. They are fleet and jittery and protect one another with blaring calls. The lone hunter wading in the mist is watched by the telescopic gaze of hundreds of eyes. Fewer than 2,000 geese perish in Montana during the autumn hunt.

Those geese that weave through the spiked trap of bullets will cross into Idaho and follow the coils of the Snake River into the Columbia River Valley. They will veer south across the rangelands of eastern Oregon and wait out the season in California's Sacramento valley, whose pesticide-dusted fields provide their winter feeding grounds. This is what snow geese do: feed, fly, avoid the lures of predators below.

​Oran Brazington is a field technicianÌýat the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology who monitors an array of Butte's polluted waters. On the morning of November 14, a clear and calm fall Tuesday following a wintry Veteran's Day weekend, he drove to the edge of the Berkeley Pit water to gather a 2,200-gallon sample for a company investigating the commercial potential of the mineral-rich bath. “We were down hooking up the pumps and we saw a few geese floating around,” he says. “And one lying behind the pump on the ground with its head chewed off. I climbed up the berm, another ten feet, and there were white spots everywhere. I counted something like 177, real quick, floating in the water. There could have been twice that many behind logs, or sunk, or on shore. They were all over the pit.”

In the past, Brazington had occasionally glimpsed scattered numbers of dead waterfowl in the pit: “One here, one there.” Something of an entirely different order was suggested by the white specks now littering the lake's still surface. “It was just a massive kill,” Brazington says. “We were all in awe.”

News of the die-off was first publicly reported the next day. Viewers of local television squinted at serene images of distant commotion: a tiny drift boat, its embattled crew in hard hats and Tyvek suits, maneuvering around the pit, skimming the water with nets suspended on long poles. The carcasses, once retrieved, lined the bank of the pit, wrapped in plastic to prevent scavenging and potential contamination of the food chain. After three days of work, a death toll of 171 snow geese was announced. Within a week, assisted by the elegant logic of fables, the body count precisely doubled to 342.

Sandy Stash, ARCO's Manager of Montana Facilities, is a contemporary breed of corporate animal, in masterful charge of the gestures of sincerity. Assured, energetic, an intently focused Company Woman described to me by her opponents as a “mouthpiece,” Stash has the unenviable job of presiding over ARCO's local exit strategy. The company's Montana Facilities are defunct; in 1985, two years after the Snake closed its last mine in Butte, it bailed out of town entirely, selling its properties at fire-sale discounts to a Montana investor. Under a provision of the federal Superfund law that ARCO would dearly like to see altered, the progeny of the Snake is held liable for its ancestors' misdeeds.

While the snow geese were being swept from the pit, Stash established a ubiquitous presence in the local media, expressing the Company's aggrieved perplexity. In the first newspaper reports of the die-off, Stash was said to have “no idea” about the cause of death. “We're as anxious as everybody is to find out what occurred. At this point, nobody is making any guesses at all.” The following day, however, Stash was more inclined toward speculation. The headline in Butte's Montana Standard–sometimes referred to as the ARCO Standard–read, “Fungus May Have Killed Snow Geese.” It appeared that one of the Berkeley Pit geese, sent by ARCO to a Colorado laboratory, was determined to have been suffering from an acute respiratory infection linked to a fungus. Rotten Canadian grain was suspected. No other unexplained deaths were reported along the length of the Pacific migratory flyway. The Berkeley Pit, it seemed, was merely the magical site upon which the hapless birds had converged to die.

After a few weeks, ARCO's hold on reality was confronting distressed skepticism. The birds had been buried en masse in a dump site not far from the pit, but they could not be made to vanish from local consciousness. A branch of the Montana Department of Justice had run its own tests on pit geese and had found no evidence of murderous fungus. It did, however, describe carcasses that loomed like a nightmare version of Mother Goose: feathers matted with sticky yellow residue, skin blistered with lesions, bodies ravaged with a grisly variety of internal injuries–corroded esophagi and tracheae, livers and kidneys bloated with presumably toxic levels of copper, manganese, zinc, and cadmium. Candace West, the Montana Justice Department's lead lawyer on the case, was not unaware of the emotional and symbolic value of pristine wild birds that lacked the capacity to distinguish pollution from nourishment. West told the Standard, “One thing that became very clear to us is that they really suffered an agonizing death.”

Nonplussed by the findings, Stash chided the state for irresponsibly jumping the gun. “From our perspective this is still an unexplained kill,” she said. She admits to me that the fungus could be ruled out as the likely culprit. “There's no obvious sign of what killed the birds,” she tells me. “Perhaps they were sick when they landed.” It didn't look like cholera or botulism. Pesticides would have to be considered. “But there's nothing jumping out as The Cause,” she says. “Pit effects are one of the three factors we're looking at. Understand, I'm a scientist, an engineer by training, and one does not state a conclusion until one has a conclusion to state.”

Another scientist, Johnnie Moore, a geologist at the University of Montana, tells me that he wasn't surprised when he heard that geese were found dead in the pit: “The only surprising thing was hearing Sandy Stash say it doesn't have anything to do with the chemistry of the pit water. That's the most incredible thing I've ever heard. This stuff is unbelievably contaminated. If you drank a glass of pit water instead of that cup of coffee, you'd be lucky to get out of this room.”

TO FOLLOW THE CLARK FORK OF THE COLUMBIA River from Missoula, where I live, eastward to Butte, is to undertake the pursuit of a trail of waste. The relevant “migration” here is not that of birds or of destitute job-seekers, but of riverborne toxins. The 120-mile stretch of Interstate 90 that connects the two towns is lined with the detritus of gold, silver, and above all the red metal. It might aptly be named Copper Road. The Montana Bureau of Mines notes in one of its publications that the copper removed from below Butte could pave the four lanes and shoulders of I-90 with a radiant six-inch-deep surface for 90 miles.

Consider the seemingly lush waterfowl habitat of the Milltown Reservoir, just east of the Hellgate Canyon, eight miles outside Missoula. Formed by the damming of the Clark Fork at its confluence with the Blackfoot River, the reservoir sits atop a bed of sediments so metallic that the EPA in 1982 was moved to seal the arsenic-contaminated wells that provided drinking water for Milltown's residents. In February of this year, after an ice jam forced the dam to be drawn down, an influx of heavy metals swept downriver, far beyond Missoula, carrying, it's suspected, a huge number of dead fish.

The “Mill” in Milltown was for many years the lumber division of the Anaconda Company, one of the world's largest sawmills, providing timbers for mine shafts and tunnels in Butte, railroad ties, and fuel for upstream smelters. The hills of western Montana still bear evidence of the swath that the Snake cut through the state's forests.

In Deer Lodge, more than halfway to Butte, the Old State Prison dominates the center of town. Wayne Hadley, a fisheries biologist in the state's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, sits in his cramped office in the converted kitchen of the old Warden's Residence and offers me an hour of instruction in the deceptive nature of appearances. I am thinking of the blue heron I saw gliding to the surface of the Clark Fork outside Deer Lodge when Hadley tells me, “From my perspective as a biologist, the river is crippled, and it's crippled by metals. A good estimate is that there's one-third as many fish as there should be.” He relates the progress he has made documenting the fish kills that the Clark Fork regularly suffers. “It's very difficult to detect a fish kill,” he explains. “The river's dirty, and you can't see into it. The duration of the evidence is surprisingly short. You can kill thousands of fish, and in a matter of days you're hard pressed to find any of them. The ravens and the crows and raccoons take care of them pretty quickly.” Hadley waves a keepsake in front of me, the bones of a trout stained green with copper. Before coming to Montana, Hadley lived in western New York and had a son enrolled in day care in Love Canal. He has unwittingly followed a broad band of toxicity on both sides of the Divide. “Punishment for bad behavior in a previous life,” is his exit line.

Thirty miles from Butte, the Clark Fork begins at the juncture of Silver Bow and Warm Springs Creeks. A series of ponds was constructed here to try to separate metals from water before they are carried downstream. The process has created as its by-product millions of tons of sludge. As you approach Butte, the dispersed signs of mine waste begin to emerge more openly. The town of Anaconda, the Company's past headquarters for smelting and administration, lies in the shadow of the Washoe Smelter, whose 585-foot smokestack was the world's largest masonry structure. At the base of the stack, behind fences marked with signs reading “Danger. Contaminated Area,” lies an enormous hill of glossy black slag. The smelter has been shut down since 1982. Vegetation is scarce for a few hundred square miles. In 1902, a ranch downwind of Anaconda sustained losses of about 1,000 cattle, 800 sheep, and 20 horses: arsenic poisoning. In the mid-1980s, the nearby Mill Creek community disappeared from the map, its residents relocated when elevated levels of arsenic were found in children's urine. ARCO is sealing the contaminated soil of Anaconda with a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. Slag is said to make superior sand traps.

Silver Bow Creek leads to Butte, about 25 miles distant. The creek, so named because of the way settlers saw its water lit by sunlight, is barely alive. Mine tailings blanket the floodplain, sometimes four feet thick, for the full length of the creek. As it slips through the bottom of Butte's valley, the creek is channeled by thick, 12-foot-high walls formed from molten slag. Silver Bow Creek begins near the Continental Divide, from which point one can gaze straight down into the Berkeley Pit, whose scooped-out interior, pulverized, rinsed with chemicals, set to intense heat, was carried off by the creek and then the Clark Fork, through Western Montana, bound for the Pacific.

FRITZ DAILY IS THE ANCIENT MARINER OF THE BERKELEY PIT. He has been seized by an apprehension of calamity and is doomed to issue his warnings of impending peril to all who stop to listen. Daily represented Butte in the Montana legislature from 1979 until 1995, and his style is that of a street fighter, scrappy, impassioned. He speaks in staccato bursts about his obsession, the Berkeley Pit. When I first meet him, Daily hands me a hundred pages of documents he has compiled to demonstrate a conspiracy of neglect. Pestering the authorities–the EPA, Montana's Department of Environmental Quality, ARCO–has become Daily's hobby. Butte plundered itself for the good of the country, according to his version of the fable, and deserves fair treatment in return. “The United States wouldn't be what it is without this town,” he says. “We built the communications, the electrical system. Without this town we might not have won the war.”

Butte has always been struck by theatrical notions of itself and tends to conceive of its future in apocalyptic terms. “The disaster hasn't happened yet,” Daily tells me, “but every day it comes closer. There's going to be a disaster.” Plague imagery accumulates in Butte on a matter-of-fact basis. The EPA's strategy for staving off the pit's floodwaters mandates perpetual containment–allowing the water to rise a few hundred feet more and then pumping off further inflow. Daily is not alone in his fear of a cleanup plan that requires perpetual vigilance, and he contends that the cracked bedrock walls of the pit make for an untrustworthy vessel. Discharged pit water, he says, will fan out in an implacable toxic stain. Daily also notes Butte's location astride the Continental Fault, in an active seismic region, and points to the possibility of an earthquake that could foist an acidic tidal wave on the residential neighborhoods below the pit.

THE MOST OPULENT IMAGE OF CATACLYSMIC BUTTE is one of literal collapse. Beneath the Butte hill winds viscera of extravagant proportion–at least 3,500 miles of spidery, interconnected mine tunnels, extending more than a mile underground, flooded with metal-laden waters that have risen more than 3,000 feet since the abandonment of the pumps. At times, wandering through Uptown Butte, I was stirred by an intimation of the lives that passed through the dark cavities of the world inside the world. “Honeycombed” is the term most frequently used to describe Butte's depths, and Butte is rather like a disused beehive that one might stumble upon in a hedge–brittle, more air than substance, a shell that evokes the faint drone of relentless activity that stopped long ago.

The dream of the frontier range was one of horizon and expanse; Butte plumbed the vertical dimensions of the dream. Its cramped, narrow streets, its rowhouses and battered shotgun dwellings, sketch a diagram above ground of the dim, stagnant spaces of Butte's underground habitat. For years, Butte was Bad Sky country, clouded day and night with sulfurous fumes from roasting ores in the midst of town. Neighborhoods grew up around mines, and a dozen “gallows frames”–the imposing, latticed steel triangles that dropped miners into the earth in iron cages–still dominate the town's skyline, strung with colored lights at Christmastime. Daily guides me through some of the remaining Uptown neighborhoods, where hordes of immigrants drawn to Butte by mining settled in ethnic enclaves. Butte, America, was an island set in unfamiliar territory, distinct from the rest of Montana ethnically, religiously, politically, economically. “My mom grew up here, in Dublin Gulch,” Daily says. His Butte is full of memories and waste sites. He pulls up to a sunken patch of dirt, about three feet across, crudely blocked off with sawhorses. “See how it's caved in?” he says. “There was actually a dog down there. They got the dog out.”

Daily dislikes the EPA and ARCO with equal vehemence; he charges environmental groups with being elitist and ineffectual and resents the Snake for abusing and abandoning the town. His love for Butte, though, is nearly inarticulate. He drives me, on this St. Patrick's Day, along a muddy, rutted road through a desolate field above the pit and points to the five mountain ranges visible around us. We're 200 yards from the edge of the Yankee Doodle tailings pond, an enormous impoundment of mine waste, and Daily convinces me that this is great elk-hunting country. Butte is the sight of such paradoxes. One former miner told me, mournfully, of his memories of sledding down a pile of waste rock behind his childhood home. “When you see Butte you probably think it's ugly,” Daily says. “To me it's beautiful. But, when I drive through Kellogg, Idaho”–another folded-up mining camp–“I know it's ugly.”

There's a fatalism in Butte, it's often suggested, that's the result of generations of submission to the Snake, an acceptance of the risks and hardships of mining. Butte has had privileged access to the dim strata below visible surfaces and has learned through this experience the true lesson of the underworld: What you see down there can change you, if it doesn't kill you first.

“Cancer” is a word on everybody's lips in this town. It doesn't matter where I do my eavesdropping–in the M&M Caf‹, whose fluorescent lights bleach the linoleum 24 hours a day, or in the affected confines of the Uptown Caf‹, offering “civilized dining in the wild, wild west”–it's not long before cancer stories are traded. Johnnie Moore, the geologist, has summarized available epidemiological data in a published report that notes extraordinarily high rates of cancer, kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease in Butte. While Butte was actively mined, it had one of the country's highest rates of death from disease. For its rate of cancer among women, who only rarely descended below ground, the county ranked among the top 5 percent of U.S. counties throughout the 1970s. Sickness follows Butte's trail of waste through the Clark Fork basin. Butte and Anaconda high schools enroll the largest proportion of learning-disabled students in the state, a suspected result of exposure to lead. Butte's reputation as a place that breeds sickness is cruelly acknowledged, around the state, in jokes about “Butants.”

MAGICAL THINKING THRIVES IN BUTTE. In the late seventies a man named Bob O'Bill pledged to God that if his cancer-afflicted wife should be spared, he would erect a monument of praise in the mountains. Thus was born Our Lady of the Rockies, a hyperreal, grandiose model of the Madonna, set astride the Continental Divide, watching over Butte, surveying the pit, her gaze turned ever westward. Our Lady, whose floodlit figure appears in the distance like an ornament that might top the cake after a child's first communion, is the grace note in Butte's symbolic landscape. Last December, putting the recently plucked snow geese out of its mind, Butte celebrated the tenth birthday of its statue, recalling the breathless moment when Our Lady's shrouded head was deposited by a Ch-54 Sikorsky Sky Crane 8,500 feet above sea level.

I enter the offices of Our Lady of the Rockies through the copper doors of the former St. Mary's Church, across the street from the gallows frame of the Original mine, and am handed the obligatory stat sheet: height, 90 feet; weight, 51 tons; and so on. A statement of one of the early developers of the project maintains that “the economy of this town will begin to turn around when we turn the lights on her.” I pause before the Heart of Hope, a hollow five-by-six-foot valentine sculpted from quarter-inch steel in proportion to the mountaintop figure. Visitors are invited to deposit notes of prayer into a slot in the heart. “As there is no way to open the heart,” a sign assures me, “nobody will ever read what is placed inside. Once the heart is full, it will be permanently sealed.”

WAS A TIME WHEN BUTTE LOOKED BELOW ground, not above, for guidance. Was a time when anonymous pleas for prosperity would have seemed frivolous, and no one lost sleep over the prospects of toxins remaining “permanently sealed.” What a reckless, dreamlike adventure it must have been–crossing the sea, crossing the sweeping American landmass, groping farther and farther inside the earth for metal that could carry light and sound. Before railcars were run through the mines, perhaps a thousand horses were kept underground, hauling ore. When the horses lost their strength, they were hoisted up the cages and put out to pasture, blind from the years of toiling in darkness.

Emmett Murphy has been described to me several times as “the man who dug the Berkeley Pit.” (“Emmett forgot more about the Berkeley Pit last week than Russ Forba [of the EPA] ever knew,” Fritz Daily has promised me.) Murphy is close to 80 now, gentle and grandfatherly and surprised that anyone would be interested in what an old miner has to say. We sit in the family room of the house he built in 1950. One wall in his living room displays a framed picture of the Belmont mine set against a western sky streaked crimson. On another wall hangs a copper plate inscribed “John Emmett Murphy, Engineer of Mines.” Murphy worked for the Anaconda Company for 38 years. His first job was to wipe down the rail tracks in the tunnels; he rose to be superintendent of the thousands of men working in the Berkeley Pit.

Murphy knows what happened there: “That pit water–no birds could live in it. You could take nails and put them in the copper water and it'll eat them up. Whenever we had copper water down in the mines, we never had corns on our feet–the acid would eat the corns out. Almost everyone's overalls would get eaten up. So I don't know whether it's a warning, but a lot of people think so.” The geese, it seems, are this generation's version of canaries, returned from the mine as harbingers.

Yes, says Murphy, the miners of his time knew perfectly well that the pit meant trouble down the line. But nobody thought that the almighty Snake would ever be finished with Butte. Murphy still talks about metals with a connoisseur's passion. His vision of Butte's future is drawn from dimming memories. “I look to see Butte as a great mining camp again some day,” he says. “There's more ore left in Butte than has been taken out in 100 years. It's all been sampled, all plotted on maps. Oh, beautiful ore there underground, beautiful ore.”

ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN FEBRUARY, when most of the snow geese were long settled in their wintering grounds, about 200 people convened during a blizzard at Butte's Knights of Columbus hall to commemorate the 342 that got left behind. The hall was strung with pale white origami geese. A Chippewa-Cree prayer ceremony began, and a carved pipe was passed among celebrants. Mourners rose with linked arms to sing a round whose chorus proclaimed, “There's a river of birds in migration, a nation of people with wings.” Speeches were read and poems were recited and the inexorable flow of water into the Berkeley Pit was bemoaned and the microphone was open to any who were seized with the elegiac impulse and by day's end it was agreed that a healing time was had by all.

The memorial, sponsored by the Helena chapter of a group called Women's Voices for the Earth, was cohosted by a tightly wound Butte woman in her early fifties, Mary Kay Craig. Craig is the very face of extremism to many Butte residents, who have been convinced that the environmentalist affront to Butte's values is somehow orchestrated by a cabal of wealthy urban fly fishermen. Craig presides over Butte's sole environmentalist group and is the one local figure of sufficient daring and eccentricity to tell Butte that the idealized collective enterprise of its past was an ecological horror. For its efforts in sifting through the daunting mass of documentation related to Butte's Superfund sites, Craig's group–Citizens' Technical Environmental Committee–has been called an “environmentalist cult” in The Technocrat, the student paper at Montana Tech. In the weeks before the memorial, a local television news broadcast ran a story mocking the planned “parade for geese.” Neither ARCO nor the EPA sent representatives to the event. “It just wasn't appropriate to attend,” Sandy Stash said. Fritz Daily told me that the snow geese memorial had been received around town as a joke. “The true Butte person doesn't go for that kind of thing,” he said. “The true Butte person wants the mines to come back.”

APRIL 11, MY FINAL DAY IN BUTTE. I WAKE IN a dollhouse room at the Copper King Mansion bed-and-breakfast, the former home of one of Butte's storied mining barons, overlooking the local Job Service center. The radio broadcasts a report of chlorine spilling from a derailed train near the now-evacuated town of Alberton, 30 miles west of Missoula along the Clark Fork. Scores of people are sent to the hospital, and one man is killed. The rail line that transported the chemicals is owned by a man whose holdings include the single pit mine still running in Butte.

Mining continues to be regarded by many Montanans as economic salvation. A huge gold mine has been proposed for Lincoln, Montana, hovering just above the Blackfoot River–the famed trout stream of A River Runs Through It, now considered by one national group to be the country's most endangered river. The mine is expected to leave behind a chasm comparable in size to the Berkeley Pit. Mine developers, however, say that they've hired an “environmental artist” to sculpt millions of tons of waste rock into an artificial mountain that will be aesthetically compatible with its surroundings.

Under federal wildlife protection statutes, the accidental taking of a migratory bird is punishable by a fine of $5,000 per bird. This spring's snow geese have already passed through on their route back to the arctic, but no enforcement action has yet been taken. An investigation is still underway. Sandy Stash has let me know, however, that at this point ARCO is fairly certain that the deaths were related to the acidic water in the pit. She described a study that ARCO has undertaken in which snow geese deprived of fluids were exposed to a choice between freshwater and pit water. The geese opted for the tastier stew of contaminants, which they imbibed, Stash said, “at extraordinarily high rates.” Within eight hours the birds began to show “effects,” including lethargy and “acting funny.” Within 18 to 24 hours, “mortality” was the observed effect.

ARCO has now set its sights on shooing birds from the pit water. On my way out of town, I stop by the pit viewing stand for a final glimpse of my personal grand canyon. An explosion echoes in swirls around the pit walls like a crisp thunderclap. A series of high-pitched electronic noises follow. Through binoculars I see two men at the rim of the pit with shotguns raised. They've spotted a bird landing in the pit and have sprung heroically into action. It's twilight, and though I can barely make out a speck of brown life–perhaps a duck–near the center of the pond, I can follow the unmistakeable wispy V of its wake. For the next hour I watch the two men strain to haze the bird from the pit. They drive close to the bank of the water and fire their blasts at closer range. They vainly toss rocks toward the bird. They experiment with a Phoenix wailer, a high-priced piece of audio equipment that tries to frighten waterfowl with simulated noises–the calls of predators like eagles and falcons and the mechanical sounds of helicopters and chainsaws. Pageantry in Butte: a cross between Keystone Cops and religious allegory, complete with highly amplified sound track. I can no longer see the bird, but the men's increasingly frustrated mime on the far bank of the pit leaves no doubt that this is an animal beyond the reach of human intervention. They set off flares whose red streaks are scribbled in reflection across the water's surface, and finally they return to their truck and climb from the pit.

LOOK AT THE WATER. WATCH IT RISE. Imagine the surface spreading out, enlarging as the basin fills. Water is all you can see now, crimson, set aglow by the sun. Look at the water. You have traveled a long way and are savagely thirsty. Make your approach. Slide into the water, gently, feet testing the temperature, like a child climbing into a chilly chlorinated pool. Does it sting? Just a little. You're very tired, and the world is very quiet. Relax. Float. Feel yourself uplifted toward the rim. The water begins to spill over, a tentative trickle, gaining speed, developing a current. You are gliding. You are gripped by the tug of the flooded valley beyond the pit. You look at the sky, at the thin gauze of a midday moon. You see a white sheet descending toward you, streaking the sky–white birds, wings tipped black. They are circling and circling, and you watch them; you watch them as you plunge over the edge of the pit toward the decimated settlement below; you watch them as long as you can, which might be forever, and forever they have no place to land.

Mark Levine lives in Missoula, Montana. He is the author of .

The post As the Snake Did Away with the Geese appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.