Of our expedition Plan, the less said the better. So many have condemned our goals in the general press—doubted us, harangued us, and in some cases actually withheld funding from us—that it is too dispiriting an endeavor to detail our famous mission yet again. Still, I am proud that even as monsoons plunged us into the near-madness of dehydration, not one of my men showed the slightest fear at the Cossack attacks or the screech of the wolfchildren—nor even at the cruel desolation of outer space.

Should this journal be found I want the facts recorded. Unlike explorers of other nations (whose names I shall not utter!), we have mistreated neither our Manchurian ponies nor the many slaves we captured along the way. Will we find the Great River upon which no human has ever set foot? Can men ever discover who created these cave-paintings of the Northwest Passage? And whether the light that shines down on them is particle or wave—or both? Alas. We set out from our homeland certain of only one thing: that some among us would perish along the route, and that those who did return would have a grand tale to tell. That sounds like two things, but it is actually one, bipartite thing.

Every journey offers a vision of hell. Four months into our expedition, the men under my command were emblems of sad-eyed humanity. Our last animals had died. We ate the dogs and smoked the camels. Also, we killed the parrots, which had been nothing but a nuisance the whole trip. This was it. We would have to uncrate our precious last 90 days’ supply of food: the beef tenderloins, the escargots, even the risotto with those little asparagus tips.

Heartened by the scent of citrus groves, we portaged the kayaks to a caldera flanked by moors and iron-red scree. We rappelled down the canyon walls, believing we’d found an oasis of sorts. But it was here that young Major T. E. Randolph, my second-in-command, soon would be taken from us in the most Horrible manner.

Sometime between one dawn and another dawn, Major Randolph lost his footing and plunged into a crevasse between the Great Reef and an alpine meadow. We spent two hours of the morning (and nearly another hour after lunch) roping him out. It was a dreadful business: Judging from his difficulty breathing and doing the officers’ laundry, the poor lad had broken his neck.

Randolph had always been a solitary fellow—strangely detached from whatever adventure we set out upon. I would often chide him with shouts of “Randolph, you must wake up!” or “Better get a move on, Randolph!” And he would pretend not to hear, even when I tried to warn him about the snakes with cries of “Randolph! Look out!”

Later, the men informed me that his name was Phipps, not “Randolph” as I’d always thought. This was quite possibly a clue as to his unresponsive temper. But those intimate few who knew him best—myself, Jerry with the Red Hair, and a fortyish man I believe is from Australia—are certain Randolph wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

As the poor devil lay gasping for air, we knew there was no turning back. It was the beginning of the end for Randolph, the end of the beginning for others—and for some, like me, it was three-quarters of the way through the middle part of the beginning.

Randolph never gave up hope until his final hour (though then he gave up hope loudly and with great enthusiasm!). Beneath the deep booming of the blizzard outside the stained-glass windows of our tent, we could hear his agonized coughing, along with the sad rantings of a man who has lost all reason. “I blame you, Pike,” he raved, as we looked on uncomprehendingly. “Your incompetence caused my death!” and so on, etc., etc. At long last, he shuffled off this mortal coil, and also died. We removed his Mercury 7 medallion and folded his scuba gear into an origami Buddha, then buried him up in an old chestnut tree.

Of course, there is no loyalty without mutiny. Randolph’s demise turned many of the weaker men against me. A few tortured souls seemed to have caught the dead man’s rhetoric like a fever, shouting “Pike is unfit for command!” and whatnot. I was thus compelled to set 40 of them adrift in open boats. As fate would have it, the pond was quite small, so we all met up again later in the afternoon.

That night we huddled in the mist, gazing joylessly out at the stars and back toward the cloudy blue Earth. The bleakness was taking hold. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months—but luckily for us, turned back into days again.

Is it all a ghastly dream? I cannot know. We sailed nearly 25,000 miles to behold people that Time (and even Newsweek) forgot—a cryptic race that had never had the benefits of modern medicine. This backwardness was a great sorrow for them, as our crew were by this time carrying all manner of pestilence: cholera, trench mouth, and a perplexing “moodiness” I dare not describe. Having lost nine fingers and a thumb, I myself suffered from sheep rot, stigmata, and what our medic liked to call “Cupid’s Itch.” I also had that thing where your ear is plugged but won’t quite pop, and when you try to make it pop the ear just gets worse, despite all your yawning and swallowing. But, triumphantly, I would abide. For my fellows and my Sovereign, with no access to a reliable ear doctor, I would abide.

Our amazing first brush with the Lost Colony came on a stark winter’s afternoon. We lay moaning and half-starved (as we awaited High Tea) when one of them hobbled out of the bush. It was obvious we were outsiders: What native would be seen here without a trilby hat and shillelagh? Our startling new friend was four feet tall, with striking blue eyes, and ears that also apparently were on strike. In an exotic language fashioned from a wild waving-about of arms (and passable English), he indicated that his name was Pino, and that he was this glacier’s preeminent tangelo peddler. He greeted us with the traditional military handshake, accompanied by that ululating sound I can never quite get a handle on.

Despite Pino’s odd conventions, he was a good fellow. Had we been stronger, we would have enslaved him and shown him the wonders of the real world. He’d have been quite a curiosity back home. He was dressed, as per custom, in mukluks and poncho-draped lederhosen—in other words, the same dusty stereotype we have of these people, but standing in front of us, incarnate.

With a parched rasp of voice, I asked if we might see his village. Pino cheerily agreed (by yodeling, just like in the movies). We rode his ricksha far beyond the Mayan ruins and into the igloo sector of the heath, where natives with lip-plates waved sprigs of purple heather to bless us. Clearly, the tribe had never seen white men before, as the children kept touching our skin and snapping Polaroid photos of us. For some reason, many of them asked us for pens and Western candy. Among the tumbleweeds and eider ducks, we then watched an indigenous holy ritual: Hula-skirted younglings did a Basque clog-dance while we drank our flagons of mead.

One morning, during a midsummer squall, Pino strode into my chalet and decreed that I must meet the chief’s eldest daughter. I’d been listening to the strains of balalaika music issuing from a nearby pueblo, and nodded my assent despite the fake neck-brace I had been obliged to wear, for the tribe was by its nature litigious. Pino sternly conducted me to a beachfront cabana owned by the delta’s Lord Mayor. I would never be the same.

The girl was dark-eyed, platinum-haired, and cloaked in a lace chesterfield: the very prototype of a Gypsy trader. When first I laid eyes on her, she was skimming along—rather too fast, to my way of thinking—on one of those papyrus-reed catamarans you see in the Forbidden City. We locked eyes. Time stopped. Despite the solar winds, she strode fearlessly toward me across the veldt. I hardly knew what to say, and was groping for my few phrases of Portuguese, when she led me through a banana thicket to the village duomo. The air was so still you could hear nothing but the roar of macaws and the faint chugging of the steamboats.

Arm in arm, we strolled down to the creek and pretended we could see all the way to the opposite shore. I snatched up a coconut from the bluegrass and flung it as far toward Alcatraz as I could (it’s farther than it looks!). For a moment, we felt as though the Parthenon itself was smiling down upon us—that all of antiquity was there, gazing with us out upon the bamboo-dotted vineyards, crouching alongside us beneath the jagged stalactites. She removed her matador hat. I kissed her. We lay down in the edelweiss and, hidden by the rainforest canopy, indulged in the Physical conduct of love.

Sixty days have passed since the crew and I began the arduous ocean voyage home. It is said of our country that the cherry trees are in bloom—and we long for the welcoming stillness of the siroccos, to say nothing of the taste of plain old sweetbreads. But it is possible we shall never enjoy those simple pleasures again. The men once more look gaunt and pale, though our supplies of windburn makeup and artificial beards are growing scarce.

We are hungry and I think dying. As a restorative, the crew has taken to swimming with exotic finned creatures that follow our craft. I am cheered by the sudden arrival of even larger fish—”greyfins,” we fondly call them—that, judging from their immense size and lifeless, black eyes, will revive the men’s spirits even more. This afternoon, the entire company shall dive in to frolic with them. I am confident the greyfins will not outpace us, as they tend to swim in furious circles.

It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. Should we perish on the journey, these rough words will have to tell the tale.

For God’s sake, look after our people.

Also, my goldfish. Look after my goldfish.

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Daytona Beach is a killing field—so smiles, people, smiles! Christie Neal, a cocaptain, looks over at one of the hulking guys on her squad. She knows instinctively that he needs a word of support, for she has the experience. At 22, she has been on two championship teams already, as many as any cheerleader ever. She is blonde and 96 pounds. Her waist, from the looks of it, is seven epidermal layers thicker than a spinal column. She locks eyes with the boy, gauging the type of motivation he requires at this instant. A flurry of ideas and emotions races through her mind until a well-earned wisdom settles across her features. She leans forward; her shoulders recoil and the corners of her mouth begin to burst apart. “Get jiggy with it!” she shrieks instructively. “Get jiiigggyyy with iiiiiitttttt!“

The sun is splintering like something out of Camus, but none of the Louisville girls are sweating. Every sinew beneath their pleated red skirts and black midriff tops is primed and ready to go; there is no hair ribbon out of place, no Cardinal face tattoo that has cracked in the punishing heat. Christie keeps the squad fired up by chanting “U … of L! U … of L!” She calls them into prayer huddles, thanking Jesus for leading them all the way here, to the . “Y’all talk to each other,” she says, grinning into the sun. “If you talk to each other, you won’t have time to worry about your own stuff!”

Having choked in the NCA finals last year, the Louisville cheerleaders have come to this oceanside band shell to reclaim a title they’ve won six times in the past 12 years. Unfortunately, something has gone horribly wrong with the auditorium power supply; the tournament grinds to a halt while electricians work out the bugs in the system. Despite the delay, and with just one team left to perform, no one in the crowd is leaving. They’ve seen plenty of moves that were something-rific; now they want to see something-tastic.

 currently clings to the lead with a score of 8.66. That school’s mascot is a Seminole Indian, as embodied by a glum teenager covered in suede and thick brown makeup. Trapped in the 90-degree heat, he’s looking increasingly like abandoned chocolate. The Louisville squad politely steps around him, alternately hugging and drifting back into huddles.

Huddles are Louisville’s way of preserving their cheer solidarinosc, of being a 20-celled organism that, any moment now, will tumble and fly with a single purpose. When it’s not conferring, the team practices its routine out behind the band shell. During the walk-through, a girl named Amy can contain herself no longer. “Love you all!” she suddenly shouts. The females in the squad shout “love you!” right back. Cheerleader law dictates that no word of support may go unanswered.

Of course, the team’s practice offers only a hint of the acrobatics to come. Louisville’s routines — and modern cheerleading as a whole — are the bastard child of and . Soon we will be treated to tumblers careening across the stage and missing one another by a few perfectly timed inches. Girls will grind their hips and beckon us with kinetic, kitten-with-a-whip choreography. Cheerleaders will be held aloft in a dazzling array of star-shaped pyramids, each of which topples as neatly as it rose. There will be “full-up awesomes,” in which girls are pitched upward and garishly stand — stand, on one foot — upon a guy’s uplifted palm. For the first time ever in competition, a female will try a double awesome: She’ll hold two fellow cheerleaders high above her head, one on each hand. “We want to show ’em something new,” says Lynley Wolf, the whiskey-voiced sophomore who will attempt the double. “I learned it a month ago. Up till recently, no one much thought about a girl doing it. It’s unrational.”

In contrast to the tiny females, the boys on the Louisville squad are blocky, with inmate bodies and inmate scowls. They’re like the scene-shifters of Kabuki theater, who dress in black and are thus considered invisible as they do the heavy lifting that makes all illusions possible. Guys, in cheerleading, are the muscle beneath the flesh. Cheer isn’t about males working as spotters. It’s about the girls — their perfect smiles, and the agility beneath the smiles, and the spirit beneath the agility.

All of which lies fallow as Louisville stands and waits. A voice on the loudspeaker promises on no visible evidence that “we will soon be able to wrap up the competition.” As an added taunt, Florida State’s numbers are frozen on the half-lit scoreboard while the technicians puzzle out why everything has gone awry at this climactic moment of the tournament.

James Speed, Louisville’s coach, spins the delay as advantage. “This is great,” he assures his team. “The later it gets, the lower that sun’s gonna go, and it’ll get cooler.”

“I like sun,” says a cheerleader named Scott Foster. “Gives me tan.” Foster has the furrowed brow of a 45-year-old bouncer. He registers joy by looking angry and anger by looking bored. Unless he’s actually performing, he always seems to be scowling at something in the middle distance that’s really pissing him off.

At long last, Louisville is called to the stage; the loudspeaker voice proudly announces that the electrical troubles are over. CBS cameramen, taping the show for broadcast in a few weeks, waddle to their positions. The team takes a single breath. “Nothing affects you,” Speed says, dragging his hand across his balding pate like Robert Duvall. “There is no competition here.”

As she often does, Christie adds pep of her own, this time with a shard of mystifying syntax. “Go the energy,” she tells the squad. “Trust, everybody!”

Louisville jogs out to meet its destiny. The crowd of 8,000 (mainly other cheerleaders who have finished competing) emits a deafening rumble of support. But to everyone’s amazement, the power flickers out yet again — this time because of the sheer amount of electricity that TV cameras require. Louisville bounds offstage one more time. Out back, Lynley Wolf distracts herself by doing back flips on the scalding concrete promenade.

There was an age, not long ago, when cheerleading was a sideshow, a blurring arc of saddle shoes and wool sweaters. The pursuit began in 1865 as something called “yell leading.” lay claim to the first yell in history: “Tah rah rah! Tiger Tiger Tiger!” (It goes on quite a while from there, and it doesn’t get any better.) But yell-leading would not be organized until exactly 100 years ago, when a Minnesota medical student named Johnny Campbell became a “yell marshal” and made a team of it, augmenting his rhyming ability with familiar old expressions like “Ski-U-Mah.” By the 1950s, girls had joined the fun and acquired pom-poms, which were all too fleetingly known as “shake-a-roos.” It comes as no surprise that Katie Couric, Sally Field, and Raquel Welch were cheerleaders. But who among us would not pay a month’s wage to see the rheumy-eyed antics of Jack Lemmon at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, the stirringly perky portrayals of Meryl Streep back in Bernardsville, New Jersey, or the spooky levitations of Sissy Spacek?

[quote]Cheerleading makes an important statement about Who You Are in the outside world. Lynley Wolf was hired for her summer job because the company knew she’d be disciplined. They also knew she’d be sharp; cheerleaders must maintain a rock-solid 2.0 average.[/quote]

These days, team spirit can sustain itself without teams. Cheerleading uniforms and training camps are a $200-million-a-year industry. Hundreds of colleges offer scholarships solely for cheer. Louisville awards its top 16 cheerleaders amounts up to $2,000, but there are schools (the , for instance) that dole out full-blown stipends.

Like that other college moneymaker, football, cheerleading can be dangerous. Judged from that dark perch, it’s one of the most athletic pursuits to which students can devote themselves. Between 1982 and 1994, most catastrophically injured female athletes (those killed or paralyzed) were cheerleaders. In 1990, a survey by the found 12,405 injuries, and that was only the number of wounded who showed up in hospital emergency rooms.

Even in Daytona, blood and bruises are commonplace, but the girls are made of tougher stuff. On the day of the finals, while practicing on concrete, a Louisville girl named Megan sustains an impressive gash on the knee. Once Speed bandages it up for her (actually, long before the bleeding is stanched), she is blithely caught up in an unrelated conversation.

Lynley Wolf herself has had countless black eyes, bad sprains, and torn muscles — but she knows three people back home who will never shake off the pain. “They’re paralyzed from the neck down,” she says. “It happens from tumblin’ on grass with rubber shoes, or trying a stunt without the right kind of spotters below you.”

Cheerleading is an undeniably grueling obsession. Working with James Speed in particular is like training for the Olympics with . It’s an intense and virtually year-round job — culminating before the NCA championships in two daily sessions lasting as long as four hours each. The team learns to polish each tumble, hit its marks, make things stick.

Speed also plays mind games with his kids, to armor them against the unexpected — just in case, say, their NCA final is delayed by an electrical snafu. Sometimes he orders his tumblers to loosen up, and then forces them to wait an hour before practicing. “James has seen it all,” says Christie Neal, “and he considers it all.”

At 36, Speed is an extremely polite man with a carnivorous grin. Like many of the guys under his tutelage (and TV’s !), he was originally lured into cheerleading by a girl he met in school. Today he has won more championships than any living coach. When he strolls through a crowd in Daytona, he doesn’t need to wear a Louisville Cardinals logo; other coaches stop him and clap him on the back, trying to steal some of his winner’s warmth. “Truth is, I don’t know all those guys personally,” he says. “Some of ’em recognize me from TV. In a sport that most coaches burn through in three or five years, I’m an old man.”

Kentucky, of course, is a cheerleader’s paradise. If basketball players walk the streets like gods, cheerleaders are their puny seraphim and cherubim. Given this status as a role model in the community, the Louisville cheerleader must adhere to strict standards of conduct. “We need to maintain an image,” says Christie, mouthing the line as though she has learned it by rote. “We must be presentable both physically and psychologically.”

To live up to this image, she says, “you must be a personality person.” You must carry yourself with respect, knowing that children look up to you — why, they run up to you for autographs! If you smoke, you must smoke in your room, and if you drink, you must drink in your room. In this way, cheerleading makes an important statement about Who You Are in the outside world. Lynley Wolf was hired for her summer job expressly because she’s a cheerleader. The company knew she would be steadfast and disciplined. They also knew she’d be sharp; cheerleaders must maintain a rock-solid 2.0 average.

“School comes first,” Lynley says. “There have been times when I’ve sat down at practice and studied.”

If ever nature designed a cheerleader from scratch, Lynley Wolf is that woman-child. She has spent 14 of her 19 years as a circus performer. “My mom was a ringmaster, but now she just eats fire,” Lynley explains. “We had trainers from Ringling Brothers who taught us German hand-balancing, and others from Bulgaria.”

The circus, for Lynley, was a foray into gymnastics. She was inducted into the when she was only three days old, and spent much of her childhood working small carnivals in the Midwest. All of this toil has been part of a grand design. “After college,” she says matter-of-factly, “I hope to work in the accounts receivable department of a major corporation.”

Cheerleading, with its logical culmination in accounting, has offered Lynley a bridge between two worlds. It all comes down to problem-solving and presentation. Christie Neal, too, has her eye on the rough-and-tumble world of finance. “I’m way into marketing and international business,” she says. “You can’t just cheer your whole life!”

The written word bears out these girls’ theories about image. According to the NCA’s almanac on the subject, cheerleaders must be “goodwill ambassadors, spreading positive word about your school.” To reflect this “up” attitude, each member of the Louisville squad wears a penny threaded into the lace of his or her right shoe. The coins are punctured to look like smiley faces; one of the eyeholes has blown out the back of Abe Lincoln’s head (just like in real life!). Every penny is accompanied by a laminated poem called “The Happy Cent.” One of its stanzas reads, “The trials we encounter are many / It is often quite easy to frown / But a touch or a glimpse of my penny / Helps me focus on the good that abounds.”

And the kids find goodness everywhere. Lounging on the pavement a few hours before the finals, they know they’re on the threshold of an experience unlike any other in their young lives. They are partners — family — drawn together not to compete with others but to build confidence in themselves, to be that strange role-model cross between and .

Somebody heats up the team boom-box, which offers the competitors a moment of repose. Akinyele, a popular hip-hop band, comes on. A blond cheerleader dances to its lilting, bubblegum melody and lip-syncs the lyrics: “Put it in my mouth / My motherfucking mouth / And you can eat me out …” The team grins nostalgically. This is evidently their anthem. The guys take extra pleasure in watching the girl spank herself and act out a portion of the catchy tune that involves swallowing something or other.

“Well, this doesn’t sound like PGA-approved relaxation music!” says Dan Kessler, a 28-year-old assistant coach, widening his eyes to prove he has honestly never, ever heard it before. “This won’t be part of the program!”

There are no kiddies with autograph pads hovering nearby, so the squad enjoys its anthem in peace. The rich imagery of singer Kia Jefferies continues to inspire team unity. But let our Kia speak: “Well you can lick it, you can slick it, you can taste it / I’m talking every drip-drop, don’t you waste it / I’ll be strong once I feel your tongue / In the crack of my ass …” It’s a magical, candyland moment, one these youths will cherish for the rest of their days.

With a childlike awareness of their bodies, the girls drape themselves languidly over the guys, who are rhino-size in comparison. The Florida sun is baking glitter and makeup into their faces as if this were the last stop in a Barbie factory. As they give each other slow back rubs on the sidewalk, there are always a few strangers in sight. Occasionally a man with a camcorder stops by, or a tattooed drifter sits and watches from a clever distance, waiting for one of the girls to drift too far from the pack.

They are natural marks. Cheerleaders, inescapably, are packaged as Lolitas. On the Internet they are a pornographer’s dream. On stage, with their come-and-get-it expressions — always showing a little tongue, just to play to the back of the crowd — they aren’t quite the upstanding citizens their coaches must pretend they are. They are wicked little innocents, shaking it for a culture that applauds innocence and aspires to wickedness.

[quote]In a break with convention, male cheerleaders are being flung in the air as well as females. “They shouldn’t let the guys be fliers,” says one coach, shaking his head in disgust. “You can’t have them doing that on TV. I mean, that’s entirely feminine. It’s gay.”[/quote]

Speed ignores the chaff. He is blind to anything that doesn’t touch the performance of his squad — but that’s what makes Speed Speed. His kids are mature enough to know when to lip-sync and when to achieve. They are not supplicants, having traveled 900 miles in hopes of touching a trophy. Most of them are so psyched up that they regard the NCA finals as a formality. The savvy ones point out that they won in 1992, ’94, and ’96, and that this is an even-numbered year — you figure it out! They just have to do their program as they have thousands of times before. “I know you’re gonna hit your shit,” Speed says, pacing in shade. “Now conserve! Conserve!”

Athletes suffer most when they are at rest. Something about the sting of a muscle at full impact is pleasing to them; pain is the only cure for doubt.

At the band shell, electrical crews have performed nerdy acrobatics of their own, but to no avail. Louisville has been waiting to perform — waiting to make this even-numbered year come true — for almost 90 minutes.

“If something happens,” Speed says, now spouting out random scraps of advice, “you just keep going and win the damn national championship!”

The crowd is restless; time has to be filled somehow. Louisville’s mascot, the Cardinal Bird (named in this redundant way, apparently, to distinguish him from any Cardinal Fish or Cardinal Deer that happens by), amuses the house with some improvised antics. Eventually, cheerleaders in the audience start tossing one another around — but, in a break with convention, males are being flung into the air as well as females. After all the stress and delay, Dan Kessler is finally piqued. “They shouldn’t let the guys be fliers,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. “You can’t have guys doing that on TV. I mean, that’s entirely feminine. It’s gay.”

But as day must follow night, electricity is rediscovered. “OK, let’s go and win this bullshit,” Speed quietly tells the team. “We are too fucking good. Y’all go ahead and pray real quick.”

“Control!” Christie shouts, as if she has suddenly found herself in a wingless plane but is tickled by the challenge. “Con-tro-o-o-lll! Trust Him!”

The guys on the squad are not bashful about seeming competitive. “None of you would let somebody come into your house and take something,” says Scott Foster, looking calm and therefore angry. But Speed cuts him off before he can finish this well-crafted metaphor: “Get out there and have fun.”

At last, the team runs onto the vast blue performance mat. Speed leans on the edge of the stage and watches with a surprising air of impassivity. Now and then he makes an obligatory “woo-woo” sound just to add noise to the crowd’s nihilistic howling. But for the most part he appears to be watching a fond memory on video.

The routine starts with a blur of tumbling and back flips. All at once, the stage is filled with symmetrical chaos. In what’s called a basket toss, two guys pitch a girl 30 feet into the air and watch her do Olympic twists and spins before she falls gracefully back to earth. Five girls are raised into perfectly synchronized full-up awesomes. Seconds later, two girls sail outward and one launches straight up, as if someone at the back of the stage has invented a human fountain.

Throughout the routine, cheerleaders whip the crowd into a frenzy with raise-the-roof gestures and air-humping. There’s even a subtle version of the spanking move that the squad practiced earlier.

The routine clicks. Megan’s bloody knee holds. The performers up front are in top form: now smiling, now making their nasty-girl faces, all timed on a razor’s edge. How a cheerleader smiles — straight ahead, as if she’s gazing out toward a wonderful future in accounts receivable — makes up a whole discipline of the sport, “facials.” Christie is the greatest sincere-smiler of her generation, while Lynley favors a sultry pout. But they are equally jiggy.

As the routine comes to its bombastic close, Lynley steps to the front of the stage and pulls off the double awesome as second nature. Without so much as creasing her brow from the effort, she holds two girls aloft and casts them off, raising her fists in triumph. Even this well-versed crowd doesn’t seem to fully appreciate how powerful she is.

Slowly, like a lion watching a kill, Speed shows his teeth. He senses a seventh trophy, a new addition for the three-tiered, 42-foot-long display case back in his Louisville gym.

The team scurries back to the safety of a huddle. A male cheerleader with prominent cheekbones is weeping. Lynley looks dazed. Christie, too, seems stunned, and anchors herself by hugging anything that moves.

The crowd waits for scores to tell the tale. Florida State’s Seminoles encircle their sticky brown mascot, while Louisville surrounds its Cardinal Bird. The judges wait an extra beat for drama before revealing the numbers, so Louisville sneaks in another prayer-quickie.

Apparently, Jesus is a fan. Louisville pulls an astonishing 9.16, one of the few times in NCA history that any team has broken the 9.0 mark. The one deduction has occurred because of an imperceptibly muffed cradle-catch near the beginning of the program. Now everyone is weeping except James Speed, who keeps himself polite and composed for a CBS interview. Scott Foster, looking extremely angry, is carrying a tiny weeper around by the waist, as if he won her at one of Lynley’s carnivals.

Christie blinks slowly, realizing that she has set a personal record at this event. “I’m the first girl,” she says, covering her perma-smile with babyhands. “I’m the first girl ever to have three!”

Not all the cheerleaders in Daytona are happy, of course. One squad huddles primarily to muffle its crying. A Cameron Diaz lookalike sobs so noisily that even the melting Seminole helplessly looks around for someone to console her.

For other teams, there’s always next spring. For Louisville, there will always be tonight. Thirty years from now, the girls’ smiles will be marked by fulfillment or nicotine or defeat, but tonight they are exquisitely blank. Their whole world, for this one moment, is swathed in Cardinal red. And the only sound anyone can hear is a roar of jubilation from the crowd, which is giving its own aimless cheering an encore ovation.

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Explorers are not a dying breed. For the most part, they are very actually dead. Admiral Scott perished in the whirling drift; the dry bones of Henry Stanley, last white man to hear Livingstone’s voice, lie not in the Congo but in Pirbright, Surrey, though he’s still a long way from home.

Colonel John Blashford-Snell, resplendent in Saville Row khaki, near his home in Dorset, England

But a few old-school explorers are still hacking their way through the brush, square-jawed envoys to the secret world—and Colonel John Blashford-Snell is the most vividly drawn of the lot. He is quite possibly the only expeditioner who has his gear tailored on Savile Row. Or to have hauled an 800-pound grand piano 350 miles through punishing jungle deep in Guyana as a publicity stunt to raise relief aid for the flood-beleaguered Wai-Wai village.
There’s no telling his life narrowly. Blashford-Snell was born in 1936 on the Isle of Jersey; his father was an army chaplain and his mother ran a menagerie of wounded and orphaned wildlife. Raised in the faded shadow of empire, Blashford-Snell spent 37 years in the British Army as a Royal Engineer. In 1968, when Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie invited the Army to attempt the first (and rather unlikely) descent of the Blue Nile, Blashford-Snell was called to lead it. When his team’s aluminum boats proved impossible to use in African whitewater, he rigged up inflatable Avon boats with extra rubber coating, which had the advantage of bouncing off, not smashing upon, rocks. Because of this innovation, many credit Blashford-Snell with revolutionizing whitewater adventure.


After the Blue Nile voyage, the colonel and nine other “like-minded nutcases” cofounded the Dorset, England-based Scientific Exploration Society, which shepherds researchers on improbable diving-and-archaeology-and-cryptozoological expeditions into the world’s last remote climes. Blashford-Snell is forever intertwining his trips with humanitarian work—bringing eye specialists to the Dalak Islands in the Red Sea to perform cataract surgeries on the locals, setting up communication links between children in far-off lands and schoolkids in Britain.


When he’s not lost in the wilds, Blashford-Snell lives with his wife of 41 years in the unforbidding terrain of Dorset. We talked with him there one day after he’d returned from a South American expedition on the reed boat Kota Mama (devised to gauge whether ancient tribes could have traveled down the Amazon into the open sea)—and he was just about to make his first foray into the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland, which has only recently allowed foreigners across its borders.


şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř: You’ve got quite a life story. Even the bar-bones facts are unbelievable. Where are you off to next?



Blashford-Snell: Among other things, we’ll be doing our fourth Kota Mama expedition. The first one was in 1998. We took a fleet of reed boats from Lake Titicaca to Lake Poop-. And we found a number of city sites on the way that were previously undiscovered. That was a short journey, only about 250 miles. The second time we went, in 1999, we built a much bigger reed boat and sailed from the southeast corner of Bolivia, 1,800 miles through the R’o Paraguay, the R’o P aran‡, the River Plate, and ended up in the Atlantic. Same time, of course, we did a lot of archaeology and community-aid projects—because you have to do the hearts and minds to get the people to tell you where the archaeology is. Along the route, we pulled out 1,500 teeth from the local Indians.

O: Pardon?



Blashford-Snell: They wanted it. They had incredibly bad teeth. They eat sugarcane.
O: You’re not personally traveling around yanking teeth?



Blashford-Snell: No, we had a dentist along from London. These people had never seen a dentist in their lives.


O: How did the last trip go?



Blashford-Snell: The real problem for us was that there were 300 miles of rapids on the Bolivian-Brazilian border. So we had to design a boat that was capable of going through whitewater. And, near as possible, we followed the traditional design. We produced a trimaran—three boats joined together by cables, slung very close, side by side. We got through some incredible rapids. And almost at the end of the rapids, we hit a Grade 5, or, some say, a Grade 6. It was quite extraordinary. The boat went into a hole, which was about 15 feet deep. One of the outriggers immediately tore itself away from the main hull, and we flung up in the air and capsized. All the men were thrown in the water. This boat, which by that time weighed about 20 tons, was absolutely stopped dead. And then she went down into another bad hole and rolled out of that one. Amazingly, the hull rerighted itself, rather like one of these lifeboats coming up the right way. There were still four guys clinging to the wreckage.


O: Wow.



Blashford-Snell: And there were 11 in the water at this point. They managed to swim out and were picked up by the rescuers. The boat then drifted downriver, and at this point I could see that there was no way the four men left on board could control it, so I ordered them to be taken off. We watched the boat sadly disappear into the sunset over the next lot of rapids. Next morning, I flew 20 miles downriver, and there was the boat! She was tied up at the bank, looking as if nothing much had happened to her. We rebuilt the damaged stern on the main hull, and she sailed for another 1,600 miles. That’s how resilient the reed boats are.


O: Have you always been adventurous, even as a boy?



Blashford-Snell: I was pretty sickly as a kid. I suffered from asthma, I had flat feet, I had hay fever, and I was allergic to cats. But my parents were very adventurous. My mother and father spent a lot of time galloping around the bush with Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. And they brought me up very much along those lines. Eventually my asthma disappeared, thank God. I’m still allergic to cats. But it’s very useful when there’s a tiger around. I can smell ’em a mile away. When I’ve been in the forests of Nepal, for example, usually just about the time my elephant senses it, I can smell tiger if there’s one close by.


O: You had a hellish parasite in Fiji. Is that the sickest you’ve ever been?



Blashford-Snell: I’ve had parasites—but malaria is the worst thing. I had malaria three times in Africa, and once it was nearly fatal. It’s a rather unpleasant disease. The trouble is, the drugs are also unpleasant. When I was in South America in ’99, I was on a drug that gave me hepatitis. So I had six months of that.


O: The drug gave you hepatitis?



Blashford-Snell: It’s a side effect. I went bright yellow, and couldn’t drink whiskey for six months. Terrible for me.


O: What’s the most exhilarating moment you’ve had in your travels?



Blashford-Snell: Crikey. There are so many. I suppose coming out of the Congo River in ’75, when we’d come 2,700 miles. Coming out of the river and onto the ocean, and suddenly you realized that the river wasn’t tugging and pulling at you; you were just riding up and down gently on a swell in the Atlantic. A chaplain we had with us had a service, and we stood there with the sun going down behind us. It was a service of thanksgiving on the Atlantic for the fact that we’d all lived and got through, because no one had been killed, which had been miraculous. That was certainly one of the most thrilling moments of my life.


O: Is there any obstacle that’s gotten the better of you?



Blashford-Snell: I’m not in it for pure adventure. I don’t tackle obstacles like the South Pole, the North Pole, or Everest—I don’t need to prove anything to myself. I know just about what I can do. I believe that any bloody fool can be uncomfortable. If I go on an expedition, I try to make it as pleasant and comfortable as I possibly can. I’m not averse to having a bottle of scotch carried along, and a few decent glasses to drink it from. If you asked me to climb Everest, because there was some reason to climb it, such as a rare plant on top that might help people find a cure for cancer, I think I’d build a scaffolding up the side.


O: I’d like to see you try.

Blashford-Snell: Having said that, it’s difficult when you’re trying to find lost cities or strange animals. I remember the first year we went to look for what was thought to be a mammoth in west Nepal. I didn’t really believe there was a mammoth alive—but all the local people said that there was, and that it was lumping around in this jungle. When we first got there, all I had found were these footprints, which were 22 and a half inches across. So whatever this thing was, it was enormous. The first year, we searched river valleys, brought whitewater boats down, we talked to the people, and we couldn’t find anything, except these huge footprints. The second year, I took the precaution of offering a little incentive to the local people—a week’s pay—to anyone who could actually show me the creature. And of course that worked to charm. Within days a man had come into our camp and said he knew just where this thing was, because it had just eaten his banana plantation. And we sent off a man who, as it happens, came from Marks & Spencer.


O: The UK department store.

Blashford-Snell: Yes, this guy was the manager of the big store in Belfast. And because he was the sort of guy who spent his life working out what size knickers women wore, I reckoned that he was an ideal chap to work out the size of a footprint. He went off into the jungle with this Nepalese man, and they found the footprints, and followed them. And these led into some thick jungle. So we mounted up and followed them.


We came to the outside edge of this forest. Suddenly my elephant, a dear old thing called Honey Blossom, put her ears forward, like parabolic reflectors, and she began to twitch. She could see something ahead in those trees that I couldn’t see. As we watched, I saw what I thought was a rhinoceros coming out. Then this massive dome and gigantic curved tusk stuck its head round a tree and looked at us.


Into a slight clearing in the trees came not one but two absolutely enormous bull elephants. They did look like mammoths. But they weren’t hairy. We tried to get them out into the open. And my secretary was behind me. She suggested we get all our females (our elephants were female) to trumpet, to give a few mating cries. It had no effect. And she said, “Oh, my God, we’ve got two gay elephants out there.” But we did draw them out, and we got film, and CNN showed this film all over the world. Eventually we learned they’re a type of Asian elephant. They’d been driven up into the foothills of the Himalayas by the pressure of mankind in India.


O: Do you think there’s an element in your adventuring of…well, a glimmer of madness in it all? I’m not suggesting that you’re clinically insane.



Blashford-Snell: Only those who attempt the ridiculous achieve the impossible! They say of the Royal Engineers that we’re all “mad, married, and Methodist.” I’m not Methodist, but I am married. Probably a bit mad. My great challenge has always been when someone says it can’t be done; my curiosity is sparked as to why. And that’s probably the main reason I go on these things. “You can’t get a grand piano up the Essequibo!” “Well, why not?” Basically, I’m an engineer. Having been a Royal Engineer for most of my life, everything’s always been a challenge. But I’m not like some guys who want to go walk to the North Pole on roller skates or whatever.


O: It’s hard to connect the sickly boy that you were with the person who is driven to go anywhere in the world.



Blashford-Snell: If you’re a bit seedy and you have to struggle, it makes you keener to live life to the full. What saved me was learning to dive, because my chest grew and expanded, and that helped me to get rid of the asthma. Part of the problem was that my mother had a great love of cats. She had 28 cats.


O: Your mother had a sort of menagerie.



Blashford-Snell: She had a monkey, cats, dogs, donkeys, guinea pigs, rats, you name it.


O: A monkey? Where’d that come from?


Blashford-Snell: From a regiment in Ireland. It was a South American monkey that had been a mascot. But unfortunately somebody had slammed a canteen door on its tail, which had given him a perpetual hatred of anyone in khaki! So it wasn’t really an ideal animal to have.


O: It’s a strange association for a monkey to make.



Blashford-Snell: Yeah. He was a grand chap. He was one of my great pets.


O: What was his name? Do you remember?



Blashford-Snell: Oh, with monkeys it’s always the same: Jacko.


O: Oh, right. Of course. That’s the law.



Blashford-Snell: He was funny—quite a vicious monkey. The trouble was, we couldn’t get the right food for him during the war, and his fangs grew to enormous length. And I remember, one day when I was four or five, I was teasing him.


O: You musn’t tease the monkey.



Blashford-Snell: And he bit me in the throat. Missed my jugular vein by half an inch.


O: Yikes. So, all in all, what do you think the future of exploration is?



Blashford-Snell: The battle goes on to help conservation. Sadly, as the rainforest is being destroyed, we’re losing more and more plants. It’s vital that we get the knowledge of what is there. I’ve seen the effects of herbal medicine on my colleagues who have been injured and had nothing else to use. That’s one of the reasons why I feel passionately that we shouldn’t destroy the rainforest, because we’re destroying man’s natural laboratory. I support any projects that are trying to save it. It’s a question, really, of education.

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