Late on afternoon in the ­Ecuadoran Amazon, a short but imposing Achuar tribeswoman walked up to me with a knife in her hand. The Achuar are the tribe next door to the Shuar, who are known for their historical tradition of shrinking the heads of slain enemies. (Both tribes were formerly, and politically incorrectly, known as the JĂ­varo, which comes from the Spanish ÂáĂ­ČúČč°ùŽÇ, meaning “savage.”) The Achuar had, at the time I visited in 1998, the world’s second-highest murder rate. I was there with an anthropologist named John Patton, who studies intratribal murder and revenge, and the Conambo River Valley was a fruitful place for him to be. Achuar men do not so much as go out for a piss without bringing a rifle.

The woman spoke loudly in words I couldn’t understand. With her free hand, she grabbed my hair. “She wants to make paintbrushes,” Patton said. My hair is finer than Achuar hair, and the woman saw its potential for achieving precise lines and decorative ­embellishments on the clay bowls she crafted. I went back to the States minus a crudely lopped hank of hair and with a new story that grew with each telling. The knife, which might have been a pair of scissors—I honestly don’t recall—became a machete. The machete ­acquired bloodstains. The potter took on a stony glower that I claimed to have interpreted as: This scrawny woman in the bulbous shoes ­annoys me, and I will take her head.

It was a preposterous story. The Achuar were not head shrinkers—as adversaries of the Shuar, they were the shrinkees—and I knew this. I was the latest in a long line of white folk who’ve visited Jívaro country and come home with embroidered tales of scary encounters.

American’s fascination with ­“savages” and shrunken heads began in the early 1900s, with the publication of the first English-­language JĂ­varo ethnographies and the arrival of the first tsantsas, as ceremonial heads are known, in U.S. museums. The fascination flourished throughout the first half of the 20th century. In the thirties and forties, self-styled “explorers” like and made a living off travelogues depicting life in deepest, darkest you-name-it. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű travel as a recreational pursuit did not yet exist. If a man went deep enough into the bush, no one could check his facts.

MY FOUR YEARS WITH THE HEAD HUNTERS OF THE AMAZON, announces the cover of a circa-1940 brochure detailing a lecture that a man named would give, for a fee, at your local Shriners club or ­ladies’ auxiliary. The pamphlet describes him as the sole survivor of an “ill­fated botanical expedition.” Struve, it says, was ­taken captive by headhunters, married the chief’s daughter, and learned “the secret process of shrinking human heads and even entire bodies.”

Shrunken bodies? Struve appeared to have proof; a photo showed a shrunken man nestled in his palm like a passenger in a bucket seat.

Longtime readers of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű might recognize Struve’s name from a 1994 article called “Little Men,” by natural-history ­writer Caro­line Alexander. Having learned about two shrunken men on display at New York City’s Museum of the American Indian (MAI), Alex­ander set out to determine their origins. Museum ­records provided little beyond this: a doctor from Ecuador, Gustav Struve, had sold them to the museum in the early 1920s. Eventually, Alexander located Struve’s son, now deceased but then living in Quito, who told her interpreter, “Papa used to make the mummies.” No ­explanation or ­motive was offered. The ­director of an archae­ological museum in Gua­yaquil, ­Ecuador, told Alexander that he’d heard of medical students around that time shrinking unclaimed bodies “as a joke.” The trail ended there, leaving the reader with an image of Struve as an enigmatic grotesquerie.

One person who saw the story was Struve’s grand-nephew David Brown, the manager of a natural-foods co-op in Boise, Idaho. During an expedition to his parents’ Idaho basement in 2003, Brown stumbled upon a box of the old man’s papers. Gustav’s wife, Gertrude, was the sister of Brown’s grand­father. Gustav and Gertrude had no children, so the elderly couple’s belongings wound up with Gertrude’s brother and eventually made their way to the Browns’ basement.

A few years ago, Brown contacted șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű to clarify some minor points in the original article. He mentioned the box he’d found and offered to make it available (a generous offer, given that Brown is at work on a book about all this). Even better: Brown was headed to the Chicago-based to ­examine a “shrunken boy” that Gustav had donated in 1935. This one was a new specimen, distinct from Alexander’s mystery men and the one pictured in Struve’s lecture brochure. And, best of all, it could be viewed in person. Both Alexander and Brown had been denied permission to look at the MAI bodies. (They were removed from public display in the late seventies. Modern political correctness, along with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, have turned heads and other human remains into ethical hot potatoes.)

It was a rare opportunity to examine a shrunken body and what would appear to be the uniquely twisted mind of Gustav Struve. The story Alexander began could now be told in full.

There’s a reason hunters’ trophies tend to end at the neck. A head is more practical than a body. It’s easier to transport, it’s less time-consuming to prepare, and it confers the same bragging rights. Today, I count 29 heads—most taxidermied, some ­shrunken—on display in the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűrs Club’s spacious old headquarters in downtown ­Chicago. Plus four attached to torsos: mine, David Brown’s, club honcho Howard Rosen’s, and that of Struve’s shrunken boy.

We’re having lunch around the club’s Long Table, a pair of rectangular surfaces pushed end to end and running the length of the main room. The walls and ceiling beams are hung with fringed expedition flags commemorating the adventures that are the primary requirement for membership here. To qualify, an adventure must include “the element of risk to life or limb.” During the club’s heyday in the first half of the 20th century, this often took the form of big-game safari hunting. These days, the definition has been relaxed somewhat. Rosen, a CPA in nearby Riverwoods, earned his flag by fishing for peacock bass in Colombia’s Orinoco River Basin. The peacock bass is not dangerous, but Rosen says he was “almost killed by a gang of 12- and 13-year-old thieves” outside the Bogotá Hotel Intercontinental.

Brown is here to do research. He has taken two years off from his job to devote himself to “Investigating the Life of Dr. Gustavo Struve” (as stated on his current business card). He is 57 but looks younger, the gray in his beard just starting to get the upper hand on the red. He wears a chunky sweater-vest and a tweed blazer with leather elbow patches. Brown’s attire and soft-spoken manner give him a professorial stiffness at odds with the bully-bully, wisecracking camaraderie of the club regulars who drift in and out during lunch hour.

Like a cop or an undertaker, Brown has grown blasĂ© about the grisly particulars of his current work. He refers to head shrinking as a “kind of craft.” As in, “It wouldn’t bother me to have my head shrunk. If I found someone who did this kind of craft.”

“Teach me!” Rosen says in his gleeful, booming bass. “If you go before me, I’ll do you!”

Lunch plates are cleared. A staffer has unlocked a glass-fronted display cabinet and is wordlessly removing bell jars that hold the museum’s collection of shrunken heads, placing them in front of Brown and me. It’s like some cheesy horror movie where the guest is treated with the utmost decorum until he lifts a plate cover and finds he’s been served the head of his beloved.

“Here comes the boy,” Brown says.

Thirteen inches from heel to crown, the specimen is mounted on a mahogany stand that could serve as a paper-towel holder. The first thing you notice is the skin color. The Shuar believed that killing a man created an avenging soul that would leave the corpse via the mouth and come after the perpetrator. Lips were sewn shut to prevent this, and true ceremonial tsantsas have blackened skin, the result of the killer having rubbed it with charcoal to prevent the victim’s spirit from “seeing” out. This child’s skin is the buff color and rough texture of a dried kala­mata fig. Based on its proportions—the plump bowed legs, the nubbin of a penis, the fat cheeks—it looks more like a mummified infant than a shrunken boy. In fact, the inventory lists it as “stillborn.”

“Gustav told us it had been given to him by the Shuar and that he carried it out when he escaped,” Brown says. “He never told us that he himself shrunk humans.”

Brown has his laptop open and has been clicking through images from his family’s photo albums. He shows me a 1955 shot of Gus and Gert—as American friends sometimes called them—seated at a restaurant table for a family dinner in Los Angeles. Bowls and spoons are set before them. Struve looks at the camera with the mild peevishness of an old guy who wants to have his soup. He wears dress suspenders over a short-sleeved button-down shirt and sports the pencil-thin mustache he wore most of his adult life. I remark to Brown that it’s hard to picture this natty gentleman flaying bodies and boiling skins.

“Check the pattern on the shirt,” he says. I lean in closer. The shirt is decorated with a row of tsantsas, life-size and garish, with lips sewn shut and flowing Wonder Woman hair.

“So he was a bit of an odd one,” I say.

“Well, bear in mind,” Brown says quickly, “America was in the midst of a ­shrunken-head craze.” He calls up a 1960s TV ad for a toy Witch Dr. Head Shrinkers Kit (“Shrunken heads for all occasions!”) featuring a pith-helmeted actor hacking his way through what looks like a Kansas wheat field.

Brown seems a little conflicted. On one hand, he hopes to launch a writing career by conveying the lurid escapades of his great-uncle. On the other, he seems protective of a beloved family member’s reputation. Earlier today when we met for coffee, he told me how, as a child, he would visit a mall near his parents’ house that featured a tank of ­piranhas. “I would stand there and visualize the stories my great-uncle Gustav told me about killing monkeys and slitting their throats and tossing them in the river to distract the fish so they could cross,” he said. This was immediately followed by: “He was a warm guy, loved kids.” The most memorable of Gustav’s stories, of course, involved jungle savages who shrank their enemies’ heads and bodies.

It’s the bodies that, for me, raise a red flag. None of the Jívaro ethnographies mention a anything below the neck. Members of a Shuar war party would strike and retreat swiftly, sticking around just long enough to hack the heads off the fallen and string them on strips of bark or tie them to their headbands. Then they’d flee the scene, heads bobbing against their backsides. To drag off a whole body—even a boy’s—would slow a warrior down and put him at risk of retaliation.

So where did this ghastly object come from? Did Struve make it, as Caroline Alexander suspected? Why? Who shrinks a child?

Gustav Struve was born in Ecuador in 1893 to parents of German descent. He earned a surgical diploma from a university in Gua­yaquil in 1918, a year after marrying an Ecuadoran woman, with whom he had one son. His ­rĂ©sumĂ© lists a span of six years spent traveling around South and Central America in an unspecified “commercial capacity.” He settled for periods in Lima, Panama, the Amazon, and his prolonged absences from his wife devolved into a permanent separation. He traveled to the United States in 1925, settling in Chicago, where he worked for the Argentine consulate. In 1939, he married Gertrude.

Brown has been unable to find any record of the 1914 botanical expedition mentioned in Struve’s lecture brochure. The drafts of a memoir Struve was writing contain no names of fellow party members. “It’s incredibly vague,” Brown says. Did Struve simply make the whole thing up?

“Maybe,” says Brown. “But look at this.” On his laptop, he pulls up a scan of a news­paper clipping he found among Struve’s ­papers. It details a talk given by a German engineer named Herbert Huth, who claimed to have been taken prisoner by cannibals near the headwaters of the Amazon in the 1920s. Forced to watch his companion tied to a tree and then burned alive (while ­“Indians danced and sang around the flames”), Huth claimed, he lost consciousness. When he came to, he found himself married to a Jívaro woman, just as Struve had described in his lecture brochure.

And then the clincher. “He claimed to have learned various secrets of the Amazonian Indians, among others a method of reducing the size of human heads and of bodies,” the story says. Brown suspects this story was Struve’s “inspiration”—that he swiped its details to fit his props and then set himself up on the travelogue circuit.

As for the props, several facts suggest that Struve fashioned them himself. Brown recalls coyote and fox heads that Struve said he’d shrunk. (It’s not that difficult. See “Do Ick Yourself.”) In a letter to Gertrude dated 1939, he describes visiting a San Francisco museum with a shrunken-heads display. “One of the small heads, of a ­woman,” he writes, “it has been done by me.” In his 1923 book , explorer Fritz W. Up de Graff mentions a man in Panama who “makes a business of preparing and shrinking heads, and who has even shrunken two entire bodies, one of an adult, the other evidently a child.” By one ­account, Struve lived in Panama in 1923. Perhaps he did some shrinking there. Or perhaps he just did his head shopping there.

Whether or not Struve made all the specimens himself, he was clearly, as Brown puts it, “a purveyor.” Brown shows me a letter from June 1937, a reply from the ­director of the Fleishhacker Zoo, in San Francisco, whom Struve had contacted for advice on where to sell “JĂ­varo shrunken head ­trophies.” Struve sold one to the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűrs Club in 1933 for $52.50—about $860 in today’s dollars. And one of the two shrunken men purchased by the MAI fetched $500, a big sum in 1923. Struve’s grandson told Brown that he recalls his grandmother talking about her husband’s trips into JĂ­varo country to provide medical care. He added, in an e-mail that Brown had ­translated, that she would not have ­approved of trafficking in cabezas reducidas—­shrunken heads.

And thus, perhaps Struve omitted that part of the story in his communications with family. It is, admittedly, a bit awkward to explain.

One reason Brown has traveled to the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűrs Club is to inspect the craftwork on the shrunken boy. He wants to compare it with that of the shrunken men Struve sold to the MAI—which in 1989 was absorbed by the congressionally established (NMAI)—to see if they all look like the work of the same hand. The two MAI specimens appear to have been stitched, not glued. Brown learned this from an NMAI anthropologist via an e-mail description; following its standard policy, the museum would not permit him to see the bodies or have them photographed.

Now, handling the boy in Chicago, he turns the body over to inspect the seams on its back. They look glued with some sort of crude sealant, not sewn. So it appears that there were at least two body shrinkers at work.

Likely far more. A spin through the various Jívaro ethnographies reveals that counterfeit human shrinking was a thriving cottage industry. “The majority of heads which leave the country 
 were never in the hands of the Jívaros but were prepared by various individuals from the bodies of unclaimed paupers to supply the constant demand of tourists and travelers,” ethnographer M. W. Stirling wrote in a 1938 volume of the bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology.

Given that shrunken bodies are not true indigenous remains, why shouldn’t the NMAI let Brown photograph them? Basically, because remains of any sort are politically volatile. The NMAI would very much like the little men to go away, but repatriation is tricky because the bodies are not definitively known to be Jívaro.

“You kind of don’t know what to do with them,” Mary Jane Lenz, an archivist with the department, explained when I spoke with her by phone. For now, the pair reside in a storage facility whose location I’ve promised not to reveal.

M. W. Stirling contended that counterfeit tsantsas were made at various places in ­Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama as far back as 1872, when “a white man living on the borders of the Jívaro country” apparently learned the craft from the natives. The time frame—late 1800s to early 1900s—corresponds with the equally gruesome and lucrative trade in freshly buried corpses dug up by body snatchers and sold to anatomy schools in England and the U.S.

If you know what to look for, it’s usually a simple matter to detect a counterfeit tsantsa. The fakes often have facial hair; the Shuar took care to singe it off. The lips of counterfeit tsantsas are closed with unwoven strips of vine rather than string, and they lack the holes in the head that would enable a warrior to hang it around his neck during ceremonies.

It wasn’t just tourists and collectors who fell for the ruse. Major institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, own a mix of Jívaro-made tsan­tsas and knockoffs. Of 125 museum-held and privately collected heads examined and photo­graphed by James L. Castner, author of a 2002 book called , only 23 turned out to be authentic.

It’s possible these curators knew they were acquiring fakes and didn’t care. Shrunken heads were a tremendous draw, bodies more so. “They were the stars of the third floor,” Lenz said of the MAI’s pair, which went on display with great fanfare when the ­museum opened in 1922. She recalls when they were taken off exhibit in the 1970s. “We’d get people who had childhood memories of having seen these figures, and now they were coming back with their children and their grandchildren. They were just crushed that they weren’t there anymore.”

Here’s what surprised me most: the Shuar themselves were prolific commercial head shrinkers. Beginning in the mid-1940s, word spread throughout the region that a tsantsa could be traded for a shotgun. Around the same time, anthropologist John Patton told me, the Shuar gained a tactical advantage over the Achuar. The Achuar had long controlled the rivers, affording access to trade routes and opportunities to barter for superior firearms being made in Brazil and traded up through Peru and Ecuador. Because Shuar headhunters faced retaliation from the better-armed Achuar, head-taking raids were sporadic and carefully considered. And then the balance shifted. A critical ­section of border closed, cutting off the Achuar’s access to trade and ammunition. The Shuar got busy.

“A hundred and fifty Shuar warriors would go and take heads, whole families,” says Patton, “partly because they had a commercial outlet for it and also because when the ­Achuar were reduced to using spears it was a lot easier to do.” Patton told me that the Shuar, around that time, would refer to the Achuar as fish—as in, “Let’s go catch some fish.”

It’s impossible to know how many Achuar were killed as a consequence of the market demand for shrunken heads among curators, tourists, and collectors. It’s safe to say that a lot of what passed for adventure in the Amazon back then was little more than ugly commerce. Brown has a 1933 newspaper clipping about an adventurer named Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, interviewed in his hotel room in Chicago with 17 shrunken heads laid out on the bed. Looked at in this light, Struve was just another guy who figured out a way to spin a living from, as Brown put it, “his good looks and shrunken goods.”

Inside the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűrs Club, Brown closes his laptop. The boy is returned to his place in the display cabinet, near a General Tojo suicide photo and a deck of cards that Roald Amundsen carried to both poles.

“All these guys traveling around with suitcases full of shrunken heads and bodies, filling the public’s collective mind with ­images of crazed savages,” he says, summing up. “Meanwhile, the folks down south are cranking out heads, picking up the slack when the Jívaro failed to keep up with the demand. And the ‘professionals’ at museums would put them on display as genuine artifacts and ­enjoy the extra sales at the ticket booth. What a trip.”

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The bobcat was no man’s enemy. It is one of the hundreds of wildlife roadkill whose pelts, bones, and tissue samples help make up the research collection of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. My friend Monica Albe runs the preparation lab. I asked her if she might be interested in shrinking a head.

As it turns out, the most challenging part of head shrinking isn’t the shrinking; it’s the skinning. A shrunken head is basically skin removed from the skull and then contracted and hardened by boiling it and filling it with hot sand.

It takes Monica ten minutes to get from frozen bobcat (“He’s so pretty! Bye!”) to partially thawed bobcat with skinless head. It would have gone faster had I not helped. I did the top of the head, which is a straightforward skinning task, but some details take skill. Detaching outer ear from inner, cheek from gums, is confusing. There’s no dotted line. I quickly hand the scalpel over to Monica.

Our future shrunken head is now a floppy pelt draped over Monica’s gloved fist, a ­furry hand puppet that should never be given to a child. Next comes the part one ethno­grapher has called “the boiling of the flesh-head.” Monica drops it into a pot of simmering water. Never put your flesh-head on a roiling boil, because the hair may fall out.

After an hour and a half, a remarkable transformation has taken place. Most of the fat has melted out, and the boiling has thickened and drawn together the skin, more or less like boiled wool. Probably less. The flesh-head is not only visibly smaller but has retaken its original shape and become stand-alone firm. The hide has doubled from a tenth of an inch in thickness to two tenths of an inch. Monica fishes the object from the water and slips it over a tall glass jar to dry.

Monica pauses to review. “OK, so that’s drying, and we’re heating up the sand.” It could be Emeril talking to his studio audience. While I stir the sand, Monica sews up the eyes and mouth. Traditionally, this was done to trap the victim’s spirit inside and thwart attempts at revenge, but it also keeps the sand from spilling out. The sand part is tedious—many rounds of heating, pouring, replacing—and achieves little compared with the boiling.

In the end, the head has gone from six inches across to three and a half, the ears from three inches long to two. The effect is less impressive than a shrunken human head, because a shrunken bobcat head just looks like a house cat. In the weeks that follow, Monica will hone her technique and shrink a fox head by a full 50 percent, a reduction that even a JĂ­varo warrior could be proud of.

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The PERRIS SKYVENTURE vertical wind tunnel is a hurricane in a can. Inside the core of a cylindrical building that looks like an air-traffic-control tower, air driven by huge fans whooshes upward at 100-plus miles per hour. The tunnel probably isn’t the tallest building in Perris, California—a sprawl of malls and tract homes a couple of hours east of Los Angeles—but it feels like it. Near the top, two sets of doors open onto the column of wind. Customers walk through the doors, lean into the air as they spread their arms and legs, and are lifted off their feet. It’s the sensation of free fall without the danger or rush: skydiving with its balls removed. If it’s your first visit, a staff person helps steady you—in case you drift upward and panic or start bouncing off the walls like an air-popped kernel.

Baumgartner

Baumgartner in California, test-driving the suit he'll wear during the 120,000-foot skydive.

Baumgartner

Baumgartner in Salzburg, Austria

Baumgartner

Fine-tuning the suit at the David Clark Company

Baumgartner's jump

Illustration by McKibillo

Today is Felix Baumgartner’s first visit to SkyVenture, but no one will be holding on to him. A photogenic 41-year-old Austrian, Baumgartner is a high-profile professional stuntman and BASE jumper. BASE is an acronym for “buildings, antennae, spans [meaning bridges], and earth [cliffs],” and Baumgartner has parachuted off all of these many times. You can go on YouTube and watch him jump off the outstretched right arm of the enormous Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro—or, more prosaically, the roof of the 20-story Warsaw Marriott. For most of his stunts, Baumgartner wears a skydiver’s jumpsuit. In the Marriott video, he’s dressed in business casual. He did this to pass through the hotel lobby without arousing suspicion, but as you watch him walk to the edge of the roof in his tie and dress shirt, the impression you get is that jumping off buildings is, for Baumgartner, just another day on the job.

THIS EVENING FINDS Baumgartner dressed like an astronaut. He’s in Perris training for his role in the Red Bull Stratos Mission, an elaborate, expensive, and very risky project sponsored by the Austrian energy-drink company. The mission’s aims are twofold—part record-breaking athletic feat, part serious science. I’m here because I’m interested in the aero­medical-research side of things.

During the Stratos jump, Baumgartner will test a modified emergency-escape space suit designed by the Massachusetts-based David Clark Company, makers of protective suits for test pilots and astronauts since the early days of jet flight and space exploration. Starting in 1986, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, astronauts have been required to wear pressurized, oxygen-fed suits not only while spacewalking but during launch, reentry, and landing—the most dangerous parts of a flight. Baumgartner will wear the test suit to stay alive during a “space dive” from 120,000 feet up, or roughly 23 miles. Though that height doesn’t technically qualify as space—true space, with its almost complete absence of air, starts at around 62 miles up—it’s close. Atmospheric pressure is less than a hundredth of what it is at sea level.

The jump is slated for late summer or fall in an undisclosed locale—most likely in New Mexico—that Red Bull is treating like an atomic secret. Wherever and whenever it happens, it will provide engineers with hard-to-come-by information about the behavior of a falling body in a pressurized suit in extremely thin air, along with data on the reactions of that body to transonic and supersonic speeds. This is not information with everyday practicality, but someday—if government-sponsored space exploration takes off in a big way, as it would during a long-term Mars mission, or if commercial space tourism ever becomes commonplace—the functionality of such suits could save lives.

Because there’s so little air resistance in the atmosphere’s upper reaches, Baumgartner is expected to reach the speed of sound—around 690 miles per hour—rather than just the 120-mph terminal velocity of a skydiver at lower altitude. No one has ever bailed out in a spaceflight emergency, and it isn’t clear how best to do it safely. Baumgartner’s plunge will help fill in the knowledge gaps.

Baumgartner says he’s proud of the contributions he’ll be making to safer space travel, but he’s mainly interested in breaking records. The current skydiving altitude mark is 102,800 feet. It too was set by a man testing survival gear, in his case a parachute system. In 1960, in a project called Excelsior, U.S. Air Force captain Joe Kittinger stepped out of an open-top steel gondola carried by a helium balloon and skydived, in a partially pressurized suit, 19 miles to the ground. (Kittinger is an adviser on the Stratos mission.) In transcripts on file at the New Mexico Museum of Space History, in Alamogordo, Kittinger says he broke the sound barrier, but he wasn’t carrying the necessary measuring equipment to make the record official. Thus Baumgartner will probably also enter the record books as the first human to reach supersonic speed without being inside a jet or spacecraft.

For now, Baumgartner is slumped in a low chair, sipping water during a much-needed break. Today is the first time he’s worn the suit in wind-tunnel testing. He looks sweaty and undelighted. Pressure suits are heavy, claustrophobic, and restrictive. “There are some hot spots on the shoulder,” he says. He means places where the suit is rubbing.

The technicians exchange glances—there aren’t supposed to be any hot spots. “But it doesn’t matter,” Baumgartner says, adding that the jump is only six minutes long. He shrugs. “I’ll get used to it.”

BAUMGARTNER LEARNED about precision skydiving and aerobatics on a special-forces parachute team in the Austrian military from 1988 to 2002. A 1996 visit to Bridge Day, an annual BASE-jumping event in West Virginia, sparked a passion for this exceedingly dangerous sport. The BASE Fatality List on is, as of June 2010, at 147 deaths.

Tonight’s schedule includes only 15 minutes of “media time with Felix,” and later access was denied by Red Bull, so I can’t tell you as much as I’d like about the man inside the suit. Is Baumgartner the egotistical, publicity-thirsty “stunt-monkey” that critics on the blog would have you believe? (Among other things, his detractors say he falsely lays claim to the record for lowest BASE jump.) Or is he a talented, focused, career-savvy athlete who inspires jealousy and sour grapes? I saw no evidence of the former during my (admittedly limited) time with him, though Baumgartner’s Web presence is, it must be said, fairly devoid of humility. The Felix Baumgartner Wikipedia page lists his nickname as “God of the skies.”

From a purely visual standpoint, godlike isn’t too far off target. Baumgartner resembles a grittier, turbocharged Mark Wahlberg. To quote an industrial-products pamphlet I saw not long ago, he has very good bulk and edgeline toughness. He’s in the wind tunnel now, holding himself facedown in the classic free-fall position. He reaches around to his front to get a feel for the placement of the ripcord. (He can’t see it, because the space suit prevents him from bending or turning his neck.) Next he straightens his legs, assessing the suit’s flexibility. This adds surface area for the wind to push against, and he shoots up ten feet and then stops, hovering above a group of onlookers like a Macy’s balloon. He drops down again. Then up, then down, each time stopping an inch or two short of the webbing that forms the wind tunnel’s “floor.”

Red Bull Stratos technical project director Art Thompson cringes. Baumgartner’s chest pack contains an array of delicate medical instrumentation. “Felix!” Thompson barks into his mouthpiece. “Watch the chest pack!”

To get in position for the jump, Baumgartner will ascend in a custom-designed, pressurized capsule suspended below a huge—30 million cubic feet—helium balloon. (See “This Way Down,”) Once he jumps out, his biggest problem will be controlling his body’s position during free fall, due to the lack of air molecules in the upper atmosphere.

To get a sense of the problem, imagine holding your hand in the rushing air outside a car window. By angling your hand to present more or less surface to the wind, you can feel obvious shifts in direction and pressure. If the car were traveling 23 miles up, you’d feel none of that. Without air to apply counterforce, it’s harder for skydivers to stop a spin, and a poorly designed suit would make the situation worse. Baumgartner will need to free-fall for about 30 seconds before he gains enough speed to generate the wind force needed to control his position—or to benefit from the emergency stabilization chute he’ll carry.

The dangers of spinning were explained to me by retired Air Force colonel and master parachutist Dan Fulgham. Fulgham was Joe Kittinger’s backup before the record-setting Excelsior jump and is a veteran escape-system tester for the Air Force and NASA. During a 1963 test of the ejection system for a high-altitude jet called the X-20 Dyna-Soar, Fulgham went into a flat, turntable spin and experienced centrifugal forces so strong that he couldn’t hold his arms to his chest or control his legs.

“It was like I was encased in iron,” he said in a telephone interview. His chute opened automatically, but he still came close to dying. Sensors clocked him spinning at 163 revolutions per minute. “We ran some monkeys on the centrifuge at Wright-Pat, where the force was outward on the head at about 145 rpm,” he said, referring to the Wright-Patterson Aero Medical Laboratory, in Ohio. “The brain compressed enough into the top of the skull that it separated from the spinal cord. That should have happened to me.” He also could have died from “red-out,” wherein blood is spun into the brain with enough force to rupture blood vessels.

ONE THING BAUMGARTNER and the Stratos team will check out today is whether the space suit will allow him to get into proper “tracking” posture: angled downward with his arms extended from his sides in a V.

The mechanics are explained to me by Art Thompson, who is overseeing tonight’s tests. Thompson uses a pair of folded reading glasses to demonstrate. By shifting the center of rotation, the proper tracking position converts a tight, level, turntable spin into a larger, slower, more controllable three-dimensional spiral. If that doesn’t work during Baum­gartner’s jump, the forces of the spin will trigger the release of a stabilizing chute called a drogue. The drogue will pull his head upright, keep him from spinning into a red-out scenario, and, one hopes, save his life. (Unless it deploys prematurely, winds around his neck, and chokes him until he passes out, as Joe Kittinger’s did in an Excelsior dress-rehearsal jump from 76,400 feet. Kittinger’s main chute, triggered by an altimeter, opened automatically, saving his life.)

There is no way, down on earth, to simulate free fall in a near vacuum. The Air Force, in the 1950s and ’60s, used to try it by dropping anthropomorphic dummies out of high-altitude balloons. The results were worrisome: lots of high-speed spinning and tumbling. On a side note, civilians would sometimes be passing through the drop zone and head over to see what was going on. Because the project was operated in secrecy and the recovery teams behaved in a furtive, scurrying manner—and because the dummies had fused fingers and no ears or noses—the tests fueled long-standing rumors that the military was secretly recovering the bodies of aliens who had crashed in the scrublands outside Roswell, New Mexico.

On one occasion, the alien was Dan Fulgham himself. Fulgham and Kittinger crashed one Saturday morning in 1959 when their balloon came down in a field on the outskirts of Roswell. The 800-pound gondola had been released too early and begun to tumble, coming to a stop on Fulgham’s head. When he took off his helmet, his entire head swelled so severely that Kittinger described his face as “just a big blob.” Fulgham was taken to the hospital at Walker Air Force Base, in Roswell, which was staffed in part by civilians. I asked him if he recalls people pointing and staring.

“I don’t know,” he said, “because the only way I could see was to put my fingers up and pry my eyelids open.”

Art Thompson thinks the dummy results were misleading and that high-altitude spinning is unlikely to be a serious concern for Baumgartner. I brought up Fulgham’s near-lethal spin and Kittinger’s drogue-chute problem. Thompson pointed out that, back then, people didn’t skydive for sport the way they do now. “They weren’t used to the idea of controlling body position in flight,” he said. “There’s been so much advancement.”

But astronauts aren’t skydivers. And while Baumgartner will begin his descent at zero miles per hour, jumping from a balloon that’s drifting on air currents, a person ejecting from a spacecraft during reentry would be traveling in the neighborhood of 12,000 mph. It’s not a neighborhood you’d want to spend any time in.

JONATHAN CLARK, THE RED BULL Stratos Mission medical director, is well qualified for his post. Clark was a high-altitude-para­chute specialist working with the U.S. military’s special operations. He’s been a flight surgeon for NASA Space Shuttle crews, and he was involved in the investigation of the Columbia, which disintegrated over Texas during reentry in February 2003, killing all seven astronauts onboard. Clark’s team examined the autopsy reports to determine at what point the astronauts perished and how, and whether anything could have been done to save them.

Clark isn’t with us in Perris. I met him more than a year ago, up on Canada’s Devon Island, in the high Arctic, where NASA performs lunar and Martian expedition simulations at a site called the HMP Research Station. Clark showed me a PowerPoint about the technologies that air forces and space agencies and, lately, private companies have come up with to keep fliers and astronauts alive when things go wrong. It also covered the things that happen when those technologies fail—or, as Clark put it, “all the things that can kill ya.”

We sat at his desk in the medical tent. No one else was around. A wind turbine outside made a haunted, droning sound. At one point, without comment, Clark handed me an STS-107 mission patch, like the one Columbia‘s astronauts had worn. It seemed like a good time to ask about his work on the investigation.

I knew from reading a government document called the “Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report” that the astronauts didn’t have their visors down when the crew compartment lost pressure. I wondered if they might have survived had their suits been pressurized and they’d been equipped with self-deploying parachutes.

The closest thing to a precedent was the crash of test pilot Bill Weaver. On January 25, 1966, Weaver survived when his SR-71 Blackbird broke up around him while traveling at Mach 3.2—more than three times the speed of sound. His pressure suit—and the fact that he was flying at 78,000 feet, where the air is about 2 percent as dense as the air at sea level—protected him from the friction heating and windblast that would, at lower altitudes, handily kill a person moving that fast. (Weaver briefly blacked out, but his chute deployed automatically at 15,000 feet.) Columbia was traveling at nearly Mach 17, but, given the negligible density of the atmosphere at 40 miles up, the windblast was about the equivalent of a 400-mph blast at sea level. It presented what Art Thompson describes as a manageable risk. “It’s survivable,” said Clark.

But the Columbia astronauts faced crueler threats than windblast and thermal burns. “We had some very unusual injury patterns that were not explainable by anything that we are accustomed to,” Clark said. (By “we” he meant flight surgeons: people accustomed to brains spun off their stems and limbs snapped by windblast.) “We know how people break apart,” Clark continued. “They break on joint lines.” Like chicken. Like anything with bones. “But this wasn’t like that. It was like they were severed, but it wasn’t from some structure cutting them up. And it couldn’t have been a blast injury, because you have to have an atmosphere to propagate a blast.”

As he talked, I was looking at the Columbia patch. The seven crew members’ last names were stitched on the perimeter: MCCOOL RAMON ANDERSON HUSBAND BROWN CLARK CHAWLA.

Clark. Something clicked in my head: When I first arrived on Devon Island, I’d heard that the spouse of one of the Columbia astronauts would be here. Jonathan Clark, I now realized, was the husband of astronaut Laurel Clark, who’d died. I didn’t know whether to say something, or what that something should be. The moment passed, and Clark kept talking.

The atmosphere at 40 miles up is too thin for blast waves but not for shock waves. The team concluded, mostly through a process of elimination, that it was shock waves that killed the Columbia astronauts. Clark explained that in high-speed breakups, like those above Mach 5—five times the speed of sound, or about 3,400 mph—an obscure phenomenon called shock-shock interaction is thought to come into play. When a reentering spacecraft breaks apart, hundreds of pieces—none with the carefully planned aerodynamics of the intact craft—are flying at hypersonic speeds, creating a chaotic web of shock waves. Clark likened them to the bow waves behind a water-skier’s boat. At the places where the shock waves intersect, the forces come together with savage, otherworldly intensity.

“It basically fragmented them,” Clark said. “But not everyone. It was very location-specific. We had things that were recovered completely intact.” One searcher who combed the Columbia‘s 400-mile debris path in Texas found a tonometer, a device that measures intraocular pressure. “It worked.”

PROTECTING PEOPLE in these conditions is a complicated challenge. Any spacecraft-escape system works with a limited range of altitude and speed. Ejection seats, for instance, work for the first eight to ten seconds of launch, before Q force—the interplay of air density and speed-generated wind force—builds to a lethal level. An ejection system needs to quickly blast the astronauts far enough away to keep them from smashing into the craft’s appendages or getting caught in the fireball of a catastrophic explosion.

To survive the extreme speed and heat of reentry is more problematic still. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, has tested prototypes of an inflatable crew-escape pod called a ballute (an amalgam of balloon and parachute). Heat shielding on the broad forward face of the pod is designed to protect the terrified occupants, and the large surface area creates the drag needed to slow the pod to a speed at which a multistage parachute system could, if all goes well, lower it safely to earth. But such a system has never flown all the way from space to the ground, even in tests.

Alternatively, a parachute could lower an entire capsule or crew cabin to the ground. (NASA’s new Orion capsule may be used initially as an escape pod for the International Space Station.) The chute would be heavy and costly to launch—and in the case of the Space Shuttle, the process of separating the crew compartment from the rest of the craft pre­sents serious technical challenges.

While we’re at it, what about a more obvious customer base: airplane passengers? Is there a way to bail out safely from a jet that’s about to crash? Why, other than the weight and expense, don’t airlines outfit every seat with a portable oxygen supply and a seat-back parachute? For many reasons, but the main ones involve windblast and hypoxia.

At the halfway point of the Beaufort Wind Force Scale, air travels at 31 mph. “Umbrella use becomes difficult,” states the Beaufort, a tad overdramatically. The scale tops out at 73+, the starting point for hurricane-force winds that can reach 190. That’s about all the blow nature can muster. Where the Beaufort leaves off is where windblast studies begin. Windblast isn’t weather. The air isn’t rushing at you; you’re rushing at it—having bailed out or ejected from an imperiled craft.

At the speed of most private planes—135 to 180 mph—the effects of windblast are mainly cosmetic. The cheeks are pressed flat against the skull, bestowing a taut, facelifted appearance. I know this both from hideous photographs of me in the SkyVenture wind tunnel and from a 1949 Aviation Medicine paper on the effects of high-velocity windblast. In the latter, a man identified as J.L., handsome at zero mph, appears in a 275-mph windblast with his lips blown agape, gums in full view like an agitated, braying camel.

At 350 mph, the cartilage of the nose deforms and the skin of the face starts to flutter. “The waves begin at the corners of the mouth,” the Aviation Medicine paper explains, “and progress across the face at the rate of about 300 per second to the ear, where they break, causing the ear to wave.” At faster speeds, this Q force causes deformations that can, as Aviation Medicine gingerly phrases it, “exceed the strength of tissue.”

Cruising speed for a transcontinental jet is between 500 and 600 mph. At that speed, you cannot bail out. “Fatality,” to quote Dan Fulgham, “is pretty much indicated.” A windblast of 250 mph will blow an oxygen mask off your face. At 400 mph, windblast will remove a helmet—as it did to Bill Weaver’s SR-71 co-pilot. His visor was blown open and acted like a sail, snapping his head back against the neck ring of his suit and breaking his neck. At 500 mph, “ram air” blasts down your windpipe with enough force to rupture elements of your pulmonary system. A 1957 paper by the late Air Force colonel John Paul Stapp—a pioneering expert on survival during high-speed bailouts—mentions a case study from an aviation-industry interim report wherein an airman ejected at more than 600 mph. The windblast inflated his stomach like a pool toy. In this unusual instance, it helped the man survive when he hit water. “The estimated three liters of air in the stomach,” Stapp wrote, “substituted for flotation gear, which he was in no condition to inflate.”

AT SUPERSONIC SPEEDS, your body would face the kinds of Q forces that used to shake jets to pieces. Fulgham has seen autopsies of pilots who ejected at 600-plus. “Ejection seats back then had metal wings on each side of the head to keep it from flopping around,” he said. “When they did autopsies, they found the brains had just been emulsified because of the tremendous vibration of the head between those steel plates.”

That is why, whenever they can, fighter pilots stay with a crippled jet until they can slow it down, reducing the Q load. On this score, Red Bull has ample cause to be nervous about Felix Baumgartner. He could be vibrated to death inside his suit as he approaches or surpasses the speed of sound.

As this story went to press, Baumgartner had been doing test jumps from helicopters, and he’d already survived one close call. On March 21 of this year, unable to see the various handles on the front of his space suit because of his limited mobility, he cut away the wrong chute. He jettisoned his main chute instead of his drogue stabilizing chute. He did have a reserve chute, but he couldn’t tell, by feel, the difference between its deployment and cutaway handles. (The handles have since been modified.) Baumgartner began to tug at the cutaway handle, which, had it activated, would have left him without a chute. Dead.

Fortunately, the release was rigged so that it would not activate in those conditions. As risky as skydiving from extremely high altitude is, it’s still probably no riskier than Baumgartner’s other occupation—jumping from extremely low altitude. If something starts to go wrong during a space dive, you have six minutes to figure out how to remedy it. On a BASE jump, you barely have six seconds—and no reserve chute.

If you ask Baumgartner how he feels about the possibility of something going terribly wrong, he’ll give you the standard daredevil shrug: “I could die in my sleep.” Art Thompson isn’t worried about him. “He’s gonna be fine,” he told me in Perris. Let’s hope so.

Mary Roach’s new book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void—from which this article is adapted—will be published IN AUGUST by W. W. Norton & Company.

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LAST AUGUST, when my husband’s friend Dale was visiting from New York, I read in the paper that the Perseid meteor shower was about to happen. Dale claimed to have never seen a shooting star, so we dragged him out to a hiking trail a few miles east of our Bay Area home to perform this summertime ritual. We kept him up until 2 a.m. We made him lie down in the dirt. After half an hour and a few wan streaks, Dale looked over at us. “You said it was a shower.”

In the meteor shower of one’s imagination, there is no downtime. You expect them to come in by the dozens, a catapult siege against the king’s ramparts. You expect to go home stunned and awed and talking like Rutger Hauer on the rooftop in Blade Runner: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion …”

Instead you say, “Guess we should have gone out later.” Meteor showers often peak during the hour or two just before sunrise. Since few of us are willing to stay up until 4 a.m., we blame ourselves when the spectacle disappoints. As it always seems to. Very few people, when they read “as many as 110 meteors per hour,” bother to do the math. That is just under two shooting stars per minute. For 58 out of 60 seconds, nothing save the slow seizing of muscles in your neck and shoulders is going on.

I took this up with Jack “the Star Gazer” Horkheimer, PBS’s astronomer for the people. He sounded a little squirrelly, as if on some level he knew it is his kind who are responsible for perpetuating the hype. “I’ve said for over 30 years that the phrase ‘meteor shower’ is wrong,” he told me. “It should be ‘meteor sprinkle.'” He made a noise into the phone. “Sorry, I’m eatin’ grapes and crackers here.”

I decided to give the meteor shower one last chance. The Geminids, a winter shower, is said to be the most dependably impressive of the four major meteor events that happen each year when the earth passes through the trail of debris left by this or that comet as it orbits the sun. It is the only meteor shower that peaks at a semi-reasonable hour: from 1 to 3 a.m. Scientists think Geminid meteors are denser than average, so they burn more slowly, leaving long, lazy trails that last for countable seconds.

And this shower has a preponderance of bright meteors, or fireballs. Fireballs makes them sound bigger than they are, though. Most meteors are the size of a speck of pepper. One showy enough to be classed as a fireball is perhaps as big as a golf ball. In all cases, what you’re seeing is not the object itself but the gases of the atmosphere illuminated by the friction of the object ripping through at 80,000-plus miles per hour.

For once, the conditions would be perfect: The night of December 13–14, the peak of the 2007 Geminids, would coincide with a nearly new moon. I found a spot in the Sierra Nevada, a four-hour drive from our house, that appears on a list of notably dark California skies posted on a Web site called Skykeepers.org. Specifically, Skykeepers cites the sky above the Alpine County airstrip, just outside Markleeville. So that’s where I’d go.

IT IS A SPECIAL KIND OF DORK who travels 200 miles from a warm bed to set up a lawn chair on a snowy airstrip in the frigid dark. I am that kind of dork, and so is my friend Jeff. Jeff owns a telescope and regularly freezes on remote hilltops for the chance to view spectacular astral bodies. He is coming with me, as is my husband, Ed, and Jeff’s girlfriend, Krista.

Skykeepers lists the sky over the airstrip as a “Class 3 Bortle.” Bortle refers to the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale and to John E. Bortle, the astronomer who created the scale. A Class 1 Bortle is a place with virtually no light pollution. It is so dark you can’t see the outlines of your fellow dorks. At present, thanks to the ubiquitous orangey glare of sodium vapor lights, no sky in the continental U.S. is classified Bortle 1. Only one spot rates a 2: Utah’s Natural Bridges National Monument, the world’s first official Dark Sky Park, as certified by the International Dark-Sky Association. We’d planned to go there, but the forecast had called for snow.

Astronomers say the Geminids shower is good for producing bolides, which are especially bright fireballs that can explode as they crash through the earth’s atmosphere. Kim Youmans, who tallies sightings data for the American Meteor Society, told me he once saw a fireball that was “as wide as the full moon, and all along the wake, you could see colors popping, every color you could imagine.” We pull into town anticipating apocalypse.

The first half-hour at the airstrip is the dependable letdown, only colder. “There went one,” I say, pointing to a feeble trail near Mars. It does not blaze or astonish in any way; it just appears, silently and without drama, like a line drawn on an Etch a Sketch.

Even Jeff starts losing interest. Inside his sleeping bag, he drops one of his chemical hand warmers down his pants. “Whoa,” he says. “Hey, Ed, try this.”

Abruptly, around 12:30, the pace picks up. They’re coming in clusters now, three or four in close succession. A few are fireballs. One seems to swerve in midcourse, something none of us has ever seen.

Youmans told me that while you see the most meteors during the peak night of the Geminids, you often see more fireballs the following night. We aren’t keen on a second night of ten-degree cold, so the next day we hatch a plan to bribe the staff of nearby Grover Hot Springs State Park into letting us stay on after closing.

As we find out, the hot springs are open after dark anyway. There’s a family Christmas event going on. A bedsheet is tacked to a shed beside the pool, and the rangers are screening all 100 minutes of The Polar Express, parboiling the children and loosening their skin. The projector is set up on a narrow table inches from the pool’s edge. “If you sit in there, you can be the fireball,” says Jeff.

We decide to pack it in. Out in the parking lot we see three fireballs in a row. One burns brightly for several seconds. On the drive back to our hotel, I open my window. Through the sliver of sky between the spine of the mountains and the lowering clouds, I see a fireball that makes me yell so loud that Ed nearly goes into a skid. For five seconds, it parallels the mountaintops, skipping twice like a stone on water and throwing sparking projectiles in its wake. It’s so spectacular that, for a moment, I worry that I’m seeing the Space Station fall from orbit and explode.

Now that I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, some advice: Wait for the Geminids and screw the Bortle ratings. Go out for half an hour anywhere reasonably dark, anytime on the night after the shower’s peak. Take a sleeping bag, and heed the advice of Jack Horkheimer: “Bring lots of hot cocoa. Put a shot of rum in the hot cocoa. Little antifreeze. Keep your blood circulating. Ha!”

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ONE OF THE MORE DISTINCTIVE WAYS TO DIE in the 19th century was to get knocked into the sea by a dangling sheet of blubber. Blubber—or whale fat, which was melted down to oil and was pretty much the whole point of whaling—was stripped off its owner by floating the corpse alongside the ship and peeling it like an orange. As the blubber and skin were pulled from the body, they were hoisted high over the deck and cut into massive 12-foot-long chunks that were lowered through the hatch of the blubber room, to be cut down some more. Though the decks were slick with oil and the fat swung wildly when seas were rough, blubber-related deaths were an uncommon occurrence.

Which makes ghosts of blubber-processing crewmen pretty rare. Nonetheless, people have been saying they’ve seen one in the blubber room of the Charles W. Morgan. The Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship in existence, is berthed at Mystic Seaport, a maritime museum in the form of a make-believe whaling port—Williamsburg by the sea—in Mystic, Connecticut. For months, tales of a blubber-room spook have been rivaling Ken Lay for dead-guy press coverage. Fox News aired a story about him, as did CNN and the CBS Evening News. Tonight, a crew from Good Morning, America and a reporter-photographer team from The Boston Globe are showing up.

The draw—along with the alleged ghost, of course—is the loaded-for-bear presence of the group of energetic ghostbusters who started the whole thing. The Morgan mystery comes to us courtesy of the Rhode Island Paranormal Research Group (TRIPRG—the T standing for “The”), a club of after-hours ectoplasm enthusiasts who volunteer to check out mysterious happenings at people’s homes and other locales. The group’s founder and director, 49-year-old Andrew Laird, and seven TRIPRG members are descending upon the Morgan to try and document the greasy wraith with their technology-laden kit. The media will be here to watch them, and the MysticSeaport public-relations department will be here to watch the media.

TRIPRG says they’ve received some 40 letters and e-mails from tourists describing spooky experiences belowdecks on the Morgan. Three of the correspondents—writing independently from Tucson, Arizona; Albany, New York; and London within a span of a few weeks—described seeing a six-foot-tall ghost in 19th-century clothing, hanging around and smoking a pipe in the blubber room. Why visitors to a Connecticut tourist attraction would report their experiences to a Rhode Island ghostbusting group is an additional mystery (like most states, Connecticut has its own spirit-tracking outfits), as is TRIPRG’s refusal to share the letters with the media.

I spent a year covering paranormal research for my last book, Spook, and I know better than to expect anything solid to come of TRIPRG’s outing. But, like most people who know better, I still harbor a nagging desire to see or hear a ghost. Because if you see one, then maybe one day you’ll be one, and that’s a nicer prospect than just being dead.

WITH OR WITHOUT the pipe guy, Mystic Seaport is a ghost town this morning. It’s early on a rainy June day, during a summer when gas prices have put a notable damper on family outings to Mystic. (The name, which lends a puzzling New Age cast to the town’s more resolutely unmystical undertakings—e.g., Mystic Tile & Carpet—comes from the Pequot word missi-tuk, meaning a type of river.)

I’ve been wandering the gravel streets, talking to staffers dressed as coopers and captains’ wives. I’m hearing about ghosts, but not much about the Morgan. The staff will tell you that the Joseph Conrad, another of the museum’s ships, is also haunted, as is the historic Buckingham House and the Membership building, where the late Mildred Mallory, perhaps an early feng shui buff, occasionally rearranges items in the lounge.

The Morgan, my final stop, is a glorious, black-flanked, three-masted sailing ship, just over 100 feet long. She slept 30, in the way a prison cell in South America might sleep 30. Twenty-two bunks are crammed into the tiny crew’s quarters, or forecastle (pronounced fock-sull), one deck down and right next to the blubber room, at the bow of the ship. The captain and his mates dined and slept in the relatively luxurious but still cramped captain’s quarters, at the other end. The top deck housed the kitchen and an outdoor stove for boiling down blubber, while the bottom deck, or hold, was for storage.

Right now, the blubber room is quiet. Fifty feet long and half as wide, it’s empty except for some atmospheric casks, an anchor chain, and a lighted plaque that names various Mystic Seaport donors. I’m down here with staff interpreter Steve Purdy, who fills me in on what took place in this room. Basically, as he puts it, “the dividing of the blubber up.” The fat was lowered from the deck above and cut into boilable strips. A whaling ship stayed at sea until the hold and much of the blubber room were filled with barrels of whale oil—up to 2,000 of them. Since a sperm whale yielded, on average, 40 to 50 barrels, and months could pass between kills, it was not uncommon for a whaling ship to be at sea for three or four years.

It’s awfully cramped in here, which makes me wonder about the six-foot ghost, because the ceiling beams of the blubber room are just over five feet high. When I ask Purdy about this, he seems perplexed. “I guess he was like this bendy ghost,” he says.

IT’S 7 P.M.—ghostbusting time. Andrew Laird is the first buster up the gangplank. He’s built like the magician Penn Gillette: six foot five, conspicuously larger through the middle than on either end. Laird weighs 300 pounds, he tells us, and struggles with diabetes. “I’ve lost 80 pounds,” he says, unpacking a video monitor from its case and setting it on the captain’s table. That’s an impressive amount of fat to lose. I find myself calculating yield. Eighty pounds of blubber means around nine gallons of oil. If a barrel holds 31.5 gallons…

Laird and his 46-year-old colleague Gene Miller, a social worker by day, spend the next two hours setting up. Modern ghostbusting is a high-tech affair bearing little resemblance to the old-school methods used by Scooby and the gang. (In a nod to his Saturday-morning counterparts, Miller owns a pug named Lady Scooby Deaux but does not bring her along on cases.)

Laird believes the reason we can’t see or hear dead people is that they exist and communicate in wavelengths outside the spectra of human sight and hearing: infrared and ultraviolet light, infrasound, ultrasound, etc. So he and his crew set up cameras and microphones that detect energy in these wavelengths. For this case, Laird sets up four infrared video cameras: in the blubber room, on deck, in the hold, and in the forecastle. The cameras will be wired to a closed-circuit TV with a four-way split-screen monitor, the one set up on the captain’s table. This will allow Laird and the eight journalists and cameramen on hand to observe what’s going on all over the ship.

At the moment, that isn’t happening. What’s happening is a scene reminiscent of what happens when ordinary people try to disconnect the VCR and hook up the DVD. Jacks going in, jacks yanked out. Intermittent cursing. Laird has been ghostbusting for 20 years, but you don’t get a sense of that from watching him.

“I got two screens jumpin’ up and down,” he says in the flat nasal accent of Rhode Island. “And I got two of the same picture.” He leans over and yells down the length of the ship. “Hey, what’s goin’ on with the camera in the fock… the fore… the front of the ship?”

Not wishing to distract him, the Globe reporter asks Gene Miller whether Laird prefers to go by Andy or Andrew. “It’s Dr. Andrew Laird,” states Miller.

Laird looks up from his pasta of wires. “Andy’s fine,” he says. Laird is a likable, humble, if not especially scientific sort of guy. “It’s just an honorary doctorate,” he says of his degree. “It’s from… I forget where it’s from.”

Laird got into ghosts during college. A friend dragged him along to an abandoned insane asylum, which he insisted was haunted. Laird dropped the skepticism when a dead lunatic appeared from out of nowhere and just as quickly disappeared. Ghostbusting doesn’t pay—it costs, big time—so he earns his living elsewise. These days he works as a freelance photographer.

While Laird and Miller grapple with the electronics, four female TRIPRG “sensitives”—including Miller’s smoky-voiced wife, Steph—wander the ship, gathering psychic impressions and checking for “cold spots,” which they interpret as a sort of invisible spirit-world calling card. Most of them also carry TriField Natural Electromagnetic Meters and/or handheld gauss meters, both of which measure electric and magnetic fields. They wear headlamps and carry their gear in canvas tool aprons. Paranormal “investigators” resemble utility-company employees on a field call, until you talk to them.

The Globe reporter asks Miller what a gauss meter measures. Miller thinks for a minute. “Andy?”

Laird answers without looking up. “It’s like when a car pulls away, it leaves a residue, a smog,” he says. “Our theory is that when a ghost uses up energy, that’s what it leaves behind, an electromagnetic smog… Sonuvabitch, now we lost the blubber room!” At the end of the evening, gauss-meter “hits” will be one of the things mentioned by Laird as an indication of paranormal activity on the ship.

Several days later, I call a company that manufactures gauss meters and ask what sorts of things could make the needle jump on a 19th-century whaling ship. I learn that iron carries residual magnetism and that simply moving the meter past, say, the anchor chain or the windlass, each of which has its own magnetic field, could register a hit. The man I speak with is the president of the company, but he won’t let me use his name, or its name, for fear that being associated with a paranormal organization could hurt business.

The makers of the EMF meter that TRIPRG members use, Salt Lake City–based AlphaLab, take a more pragmatic approach: They’ve actually marketed their TriField Natural EMF meter as a “ghost detector.” I ask their production vice president, an unflappable guy named Joseph Hicks, if he thinks the meters actually detect ghosts. “Who knows?” he says. “Maybe they do.”

TWO HOURS INTO the setup routine, Laird’s face and neck are wet with perspiration. We could all use a cold spot. There are 18 (live) people on the middle deck right now, plus the combined heat of two video monitors, two television cameras and the lighting they require, two computers, a sound boom, and four infrared/UV cameras. All of which are producing electric and magnetic fields, meaning that the ghostbusters may be detecting more busters than ghosts.

The sensitives are in the forecastle, getting psychically tuned for their sĂ©ance, which they call a “sit-down.” Gary Wynn, a producer with Good Morning, America, has been eager for this portion of the evening to begin, because now there’ll be something to film besides people fiddling with equipment.

Wynn is over six feet tall and carries a bulky TV camera. Every time he stands up or comes down the steep, narrow staircase to the captain’s quarters, he hits his camera or his head or both. While we wait for the sensitives to be wired with microphones, Laird tells a story for the GMA camera. He recalls that the first time he visited the Morgan, he saw a man up on deck, leaning on the rails and looking out at the water. Thinking this was a security guard, Laird crossed the deck to talk to him. When he got there, the man had vanished. Laird believes it was a ghost.

“I can’t prove it,” he says, with camera lights blanching his face. “It’s just a feelin’ I got.”

The GMA soundman attaches a mike to one of the sensitives. He bends over and leans in to the collar of her T-shirt. “Check!” he says to her neck. All in a row, the sensitives head toward the forecastle. Although the sightings were reported in the blubber room, the feeling among the sensitives is that there will be a higher concentration of energy in the sleeping quarters.

Wynn’s forehead collides with a crossbeam. “Mike!” he hollers to his cameraman. “Do me a favor.”

“What do you need, buddy?”

“Get me a fuckin’ helmet.”

The forecastle of a whaling ship is a claustrophobe’s hell. Laird has mounted a video camera in here, which, he says, gathers images in both infrared and UV. It occurs to me that the “blue light” you see being used by forensics guys on TV to detect semen is some kind of UV. So in that sense, Laird’s cameras probably are capable of detecting lingering traces of dead whalers.

The forecastle is crowded, so I go back to monitor the sit-down in the captain’s quarters. The infrareds make the women’s eyes glow like hyena eyes on Animal Planet. Infrared cameras read heat, which makes them seem like an odd choice for detecting entities that register as cold spots.

The sensitives begin their sensing. “If there are any spirits here, come forward,” says Steph. “Let us know. You can either use our meters, a rapping noise, or tell us telepathically.” A dead whaler steps up to the telepathic mike, but, alas, he is speaking a foreign tongue.

“Meena na mee ku,” says a sensitive, repeating what she’s hearing in her head. Her eyes are shut and her palms are turned up.

“I think he’s speaking Nigerian,” a colleague offers. “Is Nigeria in Africa?”

“Ma taq a ku!“

“I’m getting England. Did this ship go to England?”

“Did it carry precious minerals?”

The Globe reporter has been leaning against the wall beside me, listening to the proceedings. “It was a whaling ship,” she says.

IT’S TOO BAD the Morgan‘s crew are coming through in gibberish, because whalers had grisly stories to tell. Bagging whales was big-game fishing taken to its illogical, frequently lethal extreme. Hooking a whale by harpoon—the killing happened later, with a lance—was done at close range, by a six-man whaleboat whose crew sometimes flanked their quarry within arm’s reach. The moment the harpoons were sunk, the oarsmen would scramble to put distance between themselves and the peeved cetacean. While it was typical for a harpooned whale to take off at top speed, pulling the boat on a “Nantucket sleigh ride,” some whales managed to identify the source of their pain and attack the boat, thrashing it to pieces with their flukes.

Or worse. “With its long underjaw, a sperm whale could easily bite a whaleboat in two, ‘chawing’ it in its powerful jaws and sometimes taking an arm or a leg or two in the process,” wrote the late Mystic Seaport curator John Leavitt in his book The Charles W. Morgan. (In fact, the Morgan lost a crewman this way.) When the whale kill was over, six men with oars had to tow a 50-ton corpse all the way back to the ship.

Tonight, life aboard the Morgan isn’t quite so exciting. While the sensitives carry on in the forecastle, Laird explains the sound recordings he’s been collecting. He says his team will often see spikes in the infrasound range, which human hearing cannot detect. I ask how they can be sure that what he’s picking up is coming from paranormal, rather than normal, sources of infrasound. Whales, for example, communicate in infrasound. “We do a lot of scrutiny with it,” says Miller.

Laird nods. “This was set up by a guy who knows what he’s doing.”

I suggest that, if there’s a ghost onboard, it’s the ghost of a whale. As for the pipe smoker, I have an intuition about that. In fact, I’m getting a name. I’m getting Mike… Mike… O’Farrell.

Mike O’Farrell is Mystic Seaport’s PR man. I don’t mean to be a bunghole, but I wonder if the combination of sinking museum revenues and dependable media interest in the supernatural made a trumped-up ghost story a tempting proposition. Along these lines, I tried to get a look at the three “almost verbatim” letters from the visitors who said they saw an old-timey figure with a pipe. Laird didn’t return my calls about this. When I asked O’Farrell about it, he said the people had stated they “didn’t want anything shared.”

I find this odd. People who believe they’ve seen or felt a ghost are always coming up to me at readings, wanting to share stories. Is this ghost a phantom? I can’t prove it. It’s just a feelin’ I got.

IT’S 1:30 IN THE MORNING. Miller is peeling duct tape from the Morgan‘s deck and packing up cameras. Laird is telling a Good Morning, America camera that he’s pleased with how things went, but there’s a general sense of fizzling out. The sensitives say there were too many people on the ship; we scared away the pipe guy. Earlier, I asked O’Farrell if I could camp in the blubber room after everyone left. He agreed to it, provided I let someone from public relations check in on me during the night.

After the busters leave, I bed down in a corner near the forecastle. Something about the rain is causing the ship’s planking to make noisy pops, like the sound of burning firewood played through an amp. The sounds bounce around in the hold. An eerie glow at the far end of the room turns out to be a tiny light above the donor plaque. I want to be scared, but mostly I’m just uncomfortable.

But then, sometime around 3 a.m., I’m awakened by something I’ve never heard before. It’s a strange, clotted, desperate sound, like a man choking on blubber. It’s frightening. It’s definitely in the room with me. It’s…

It’s Mike O’Farrell’s uvula. O’Farrell—who, it turns out, is not merely checking in but staying all night—is crashed out by the doorway to the captain’s quarters, snoring wetly.

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The 13 Biggest Outdoor Phobias

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

Swimming

After one traumatic day at the pool, a lifelong dread

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

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

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

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

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

Freezing

First comes uncontrollable shaking, then a numb, frosty doom

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleeping Bags

There’s a reason they’re called mummy sacks

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

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

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

Lightning

Here’s hoping it never strikes twice

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

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

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

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

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

Jumping

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

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

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

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

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

Armadillos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lima Beans

Is there anything more sinister than this hateful legume?

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

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

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

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

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

Ticks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whitewater

Just because the boat floats doesn’t mean you will

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

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

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

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

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

Bats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Buried Alive

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

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

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

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

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

But that’s just me.

Snakes

They lurk, they bite, they haunt your picnics forever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stars

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

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

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

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

The post What Scares Me appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

YOUNG STEVE BLICK HAS BEEN COURTING A PLAYBOY PLAYMATE. He has wooed Miss April with flattering words, and now he kneels before her with gifts. In Blick’s duffel bag are a hundred pairs of Oakley sunglasses, with vaporized metal coatings and patented XYZ Optics. Blick does not wish to possess this woman in a physical way. He wishes to possess her in a marketing way: He wants to sponsor her bones.

The woman, 33-year-old Danelle Folta, is captain of Team Playboy X-Treme, an adventure-racing squadron that consists of 22 former centerfolds in their twenties and early thirties. Since its inception in 1998, Team Playboy has run one Eco-Challenge—the famously grueling slog across one or another of the world’s most unwelcoming landscapes—and nine Hi-Tec șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Races, daylong competitions here in the U.S. Unfortunately the team was disqualified in the 2000 Eco-Challenge for failing to reach a checkpoint in time, but placed second in the women’s division in four Hi-Tec races. The Playmates also compete in non-endurance events, including volleyball and golf tournaments. Regardless of their standing, the women feature prominently in television coverage of these games. To date, the team has 14 corporate sponsors, including Adidas, St. Pauli Girl, Red Bull, and Oakley. A popular ice cream brand is considering launching an X-Treme Girl flavor, despite the questionable tact of naming a lickable product after soft-porn models.
Blick, 33, has driven from Oakley’s Orange County headquarters to Santa Monica, where ten members of the Playboy team have gathered for a skills camp run by an outfit called șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Training Consultants. He has come to introduce the women to the sunglasses that they will be “running,” which is what Blick says instead of “wearing.” The group is standing in a corner of the parking lot outside the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Training gym. Blick finishes his spiel, and the women descend on the black bag.


“Hey, Steve, what other fashion frames did you bring?”


“Steve, do you have any more like Danelle’s?”


“I can’t get my lenses in my M-Frame.”


“Mine won’t fit right on my nose.” Playmate Echo Johnson shows Blick how the frames hover above her provocatively upturned appendage. Blick fiddles with the frames and then tells her to try sliding them on over her hair, to which Johnson firmly replies, “No.” șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Training Consultants is owned by an affable 44-year-old triathlete named Scott Zagarino, who runs classes and training camps for endurance athletes. He periodically coaches the Playmates as they prepare for upcoming events. They’ve got several Hi-Tec races in the months ahead, along with their second Eco-Challenge, which takes place in Fiji in October.


Zagarino is a Buddhist, but you can tell that his Zen is being stretched thin by the distraction Blick’s swag bag has presented. He has three days to cover rock climbing, sea kayaking, land navigation, and advanced mountain biking. Ten minutes ago, the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Training van was scheduled to be on the road to Point Dume, a sea cliff a half-hour north of here. All around him, women in sunglasses are checking their reflections in other women’s sunglasses.


“You look awesome!”


“These are totally fly.”


“Can I try yours?”


Zagarino cups his hands to his mouth. “Can we please start moving toward the van!”

TEAM PLAYBOY X-TREME is a brilliant idea, but it wasn’t Playboy’s. It was Danelle Folta’s. Folta, a five-foot-ten redhead who likes to snowboard, wanted to use her celebrity to inspire women to get fit. She recruited 21 of her buffest centerfold friends, then lobbied parent company Playboy Enterprises for seed money. Playboy gave the team $100,000 and waived the licensing fee for use of the Playboy name, but that has been the extent of the formal relationship. Sponsors now pay for most of the team’s expenses. It is, as Playboy Enterprises communications director Bill Farley says, “a win-win-win situation.” Playboy gets exposure because of the team’s name, and the team gets exposure because they are Playmates. The networks that air the events get lots of viewers, and the viewers get to look at Playboy Playmates. It’s synergy at its best.


In 2000, three members of Team Playboy X-Treme decided to take on the mother of all adventure races, the Eco-Challenge. The 320-mile race, held in Borneo, involved three days and nights of kayaking, 30 hours of mountain biking, two days of canoeing, and two days of jungle navigation, along with miscellaneous skills like caving and extracting leeches from unspeakable places. The Eco-Challenge has always been a hit with TV viewers, in part because competitors don’t have to do much to qualify other than pass a few strenuous but rudimentary physical tests. As a result, catastrophes abound. There’s always someone getting lost in the jungle, suffering mental collapse, and/or requiring rescue at sea. Not coincidentally, the Playmates’ debut marked the first time the race was broadcast on the USA Network rather than the Discovery Channel. As the home of the World Wrestling Federation, the USA Network instinctively understands our national weakness for blood and boobs and cheesy human drama. Now that hapless adventurer could be someone who’s posed for a magazine in only pearls and high heels.
Since Eco-Challenge teams require four members and must be co-ed, Folta invited her friend Owen West, a 32-year-old former Marine and author of a swashbuckling military novel called Sharkman Six. Predictably, the cameras ignored Owen, though he still had a fine time: “I learned a lot,” he says, “and I’m a better man for it.”


Just as predictably, the other teams made fun of the Playmates. They were dissed for all manner of transgressions, in particular for wearing bikinis rather than Speedos for the swim test and for sucking up media attention even after they were disqualified halfway through for not reaching the biking checkpoint in time. (Though out of the race, the team decided to soldier on, showing the same pluck they had early in the competition when they hammered their outrigger canoe back together after a wave swept them into some rocks.) Some suspected that the team had received preferential treatment by the TV producers, who had good reason to try to keep them in the race. “I think many people were sympathetic toward them until they saw the USA Network’s program and couldn’t figure out where they got a hammer and nails [to fix the boat],” says Bev Abbs, a racer whose team was sponsored by a software company called Discreet. Competitor Rebecca Rusch reported that a rumor had been circulating that the Playboy team received not only repair equipment but also clean clothing and extra food.


In the end, many competitors wound up admiring the Playmates’ perseverance. “I was skeptical of them initially, because they acted more like bimbos than athletes before the race started,” says Maureen Moslow-Benway, a member of Team Booz Allen. “However, as the race progressed, I was impressed with their gutsiness. All in all, they’re good athletes deserving of the chance to compete in the Eco-Challenge. They got what most teams want—lots of publicity—and unfortunately, there’s sour grapes from some people who can’t deal with that.”


Folta and her team were in the awkward position that beautiful women often find themselves in: They were given special treatment because of their looks and then resented for it, despite the fact that they did not ask for or expect any help. Their looks are at once their greatest asset and their most frustrating liability. “People not in controversial roles don’t have to be on top of their games like we do,” says Folta. “I hope that doesn’t sound conceited, it’s just that people are more critical of our performance. Sometimes it feels like we have to work twice as hard. People don’t think you can do anything, but then you go out there and kick their butts.”

THE PLAYMATES are standing around the beach at Point Dume in “X-Treme Girl” T-shirts and lank ponytails and black sweatpants, waiting for the climbing instructor to arrive. Their sweatpants are unlike any I grew up with, in that they have bell bottoms and cling provocatively to the buttocks and thighs. No one has panty lines. The women are well toned, but you wouldn’t call them muscular. The main thing that sets them apart from the average female athlete is, well, their breasts. You could fill a set of C cups with an elite female athlete’s calves, but rarely with her breasts, owing to changes in lean-fat ratios and estrogen levels during intensive training. None of that going on here.


Folta is the only one who trains and competes full-time. The others are models or artists or moms. They don’t claim to be hard-core. They are just gals who love the outdoors, love sports, love travel and camaraderie, and love having sponsors pay their way. The team’s collective sports rĂ©sumĂ© includes mountain biking (22 of 22 women), distance running (12), in-line skating (10), and snowboarding (11).
Only five of the ten women here today have tried technical rock climbing, partly because it’s rarely included in adventure races. They will learn how to tie in to a climbing harness, attempt a 5.6 route, rappel back down to the beach, and attempt a second, 5.9 route. It’s an ambitious plan for one day. When I took introductory rock climbing, the course lasted two days and culminated in a 5.5 climb that a quarter of the class failed to finish.


The instructor, Tom Magee, has arrived and is unloading gear. He turns to the women and says “Who’s worn a harness?” with absolutely no trace of a smirk. Magee is a former body-builder and WWF wrestler, a man who has answered, at various turns, to both “Mr. British Columbia” and “Joe MacKenzie, the Cruel Canuck.” These days Magee is heavily involved in climbing.


The former Mr. British Columbia kneels down to help the former Miss January, Echo Johnson, with a leg strap. Like everyone else on Team Playboy X-Treme, she has a well-turned sofa-bolster ass and enviable thighs. The harness sets off the sofa bolster in a fetching manner. Although I have worn a climbing harness before, the similarity to a garter belt has heretofore escaped me.


One after another, the women climb the 5.6 arĂȘte as though it were the escalator at Nordstrom on a 40-percent-off day. They are clearly strong and seemingly fearless. The ones waiting their turn sit on the sand, talking and gossiping (“That female wrestler grew a penis from taking steroids!”) and feeding sound bites to the two TV cameras that have shown up. A reporter from Channel 13 News tells Folta that his station is doing “a story on hot women who do extreme sports,” which she relays to the team as “a story on cool women in sports.” Either way, Channel 13 has an interesting concept of news.


On the ground, Playmate Victoria Fuller, blond and sultry-eyed, is talking to her teammates about a disastrous modeling shoot. “You should have seen what they had me in. The makeup people were laughing at me. Then the stylist took half my hair down. I looked like Predator.”


To hear the Playmates tell it, nude modeling can be as X-Treme as much of what they do on the team. One recalls a Playboy shoot during which wooden props had to be made for her feet because her legs were cramping from being on tiptoe too long. “Basically,” Deanna Brooks explains, “if it’s uncomfortable, it looks good. ‘Arch your back, put your chest out, now twist 45 degrees, now reach up and stick your hand in your hair…'” To the near-palpable disappointment of the Channel 13 man, she does not demonstrate.


Another hour passes as the women take turns on the cliff. Some start eating lunch. Jennifer Lavoie, a compact, high-wattage Playmate who now designs handbags, picks a veggie sandwich out of the cooler and then abandons it for tuna, crying “Gimme some meat!”


The Playmates do not eat like models. They work out too hard to be on diets. I asked six of them about their regimens and all reported daily or near-daily trips to the gym. Lavoie, who was on the 2000 Eco-Challenge team, e-mailed me her schedule: “Monday: 60-minute lift and 30-minute cardio. Wednesday: 45-minute lift, 60-minute spin class. Thursday: 60-minute Butts & Guts class, 25 minutes cardio, 60-minute yoga class. Friday: 60-minute lift, 20-minute cardio. Saturday: 35-minute swim, 60-minute spin class. Sunday: 60-minute lift. Tuesday is my off-day.”


Team captain Folta’s prerace regimen consists of six to 12 hours a day in the gym and on the bike and a 20-hour training session every other week. For multiday adventure races, she adds one 40- to 50-hour training session to “make sure I know how the team will cope with sleep deprivation and exhaustion.”


Because she and the Playmates lack mountaineering skills, Folta decided to skip last year’s Eco-Challenge, which took place in New Zealand. “We’re not a cold-weather team,” she says. She admits that they might miss this October’s Fiji race, too, if a deal goes through to produce a Team Playboy X-Treme TV show, the rights for which have been purchased by Endemol, the company that brought you the ogle-fests Fear Factor, Spy TV, and Big Brother.


While the women eat, I ask them what they find to be the most challenging aspect of Team Playboy X-Treme. Most of their answers have to do with not being taken seriously as a competitor. I listen and offer words of understanding, and then I ask about their chests.


Do exceptionally large breasts handicap an athlete? Not really, is the consensus, though Lavoie confesses to wearing two sports bras at once and Nicole Woods has trouble with her golf swing. Folta says tartly: “If you were interviewing a male athlete, would you ask him if an exceptionally large package hinders him in his sport?” I reply that no, I wouldn’t, unless his team were called, say, Team Playgirl or Team Clydesdale Penis—and then you bet I would. To make it up to Folta, I tell her I will pose the question to the next well-endowed athlete I come across. This is a lie, because that athlete would be Tom Magee, who is wearing a climbing harness, which does for packages what push-up bras do for bosoms, and I cannot bring myself to say it.


From high above, we hear a strident, agitated sound. Seagull? Police car? No, it’s Victoria Fuller. Fuller has never climbed before. Three-quarters of the way up, she is plastered to the rock, arms and legs splayed like Wile E. Coyote. The women shout encouragement, and, as if powered by their collective will, Fuller reaches the top. Now she must rappel down—or, as one woman puts it, “propel” down. The team’s mastery of climbing lingo has been the one thing that marks them as beginners. “On belay!” has variously come out as “On Vuarnet!” and, in a moment recalling the late Teddy Roosevelt, “Bully!”


The rappel requires Fuller to lean against her harness, step backward off the small ledge, and trust her fate to a strange man 70 feet below. She flaps her hands and lets out a long “Noooooo!” This devolves into a scream that provokes looks of alarm and forces a retake of the Channel 13 tagline (“See Playboy’s X-Treme Team like you’ve never seen them before!”). Coaches Magee and Zagarino decide to hike up the trail on the back side of the cliff, haul Fuller up the remaining five feet of the wall, and escort her back down. Folta intervenes. “Vic’s just veryÉcommunicative. She’ll be OK.” With shouts of support from her teammates, Fuller eventually makes it down, dignity and French manicure more or less intact.


By 3 p.m. the women have moved on to the 5.9 route. All of them make it at least halfway, and most make it to the top. By any standard, it’s an impressive performance. Magee smiles broadly.


“These girls are risk takers,” he says.


“Climbing a rock face and taking off your clothes both go against your natural instincts. I knew they’d kick ass.”

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They’re still out there: the untrodden trail, the lost coast, the mountain vally from another century—some near, most far, all wide-open places waiting to expand your horizon and repair your fractured sense of time. Here’s our guide to 30 of the most amazing remote places on the planet. So clear your calendar, and drop us a line when you get back.

Live Vast

Author Ian Frazier explores what it means for something to be “far away.”

First tracks in the Australian outback.

I LIKE TO think that people I talk to have no idea how far away I am. Yes, I seem to be standing next to them at the bus stop and taking part in a conversation about the new commuter train and how it will cause real-estate values in our New Jersey suburb to rise; actually, however, in my mind I’m in eastern Montana, in the blankest part of the map, miles from anywhere. Often I pick out one remote place and carry it around as a secret destination to repair to inwardly if I can’t stand the ordinariness of the day. In certain jammed-up city situations, the mere thought of Dawes County, Nebraska (say), is soothing to me. When I let people glimpse this thought, the effect is a weird kind of geographic name-dropping snobbery: In midconversation, with no preamble, I’ll blurt out, “Well, I’ll be going to Dawes County soon. You never heard of it? It’s in western Nebraska—a great place—about 36 hours of driving from here.”

FOR ME, REMOTENESS is everything. I usually want to get as far away as I can, no matter where I am. If I go to the mall, I park in the parking lot’s farthest corner, with no other cars for acres around. I sit in the back row of the balcony at lectures and I stand in the hardest-to-reach nook at cocktail parties. I love the back of the bus. I wish you were allowed to wait on the roof at airports, and could consult with the doctor not in his claustrophobic office but on the farthest edge of the hospital lawn. Once, in the editorial offices of a magazine in New York City, someone made a remark to me that I didn’t like, and instead of replying I left, picked up a travel bag at my apartment, took a subway to the George Washington Bridge, and began to hitchhike west. I was all the way to Ohio before I cooled down.
I understand that this is not the healthiest approach to life. Almost as soon as I actually go to the remote place I’ve been fantasizing about, of course I want to be somewhere else. It’s a crazy frame of mind, and not particularly fair to the places themselves. I’ve noticed, too, that the better-known remote places recognize my type, and protect themselves from the affliction we are. When in my early thirties I decided to move to Fiji (mainly because of its name, and how cool I thought “I’m moving to Fiji” sounded), I went to the Fijian consulate in Manhattan to make preliminary plans. A somber man in a dark suit took in my hippyish appearance, sat me down, and ran through a carefully practiced list of reasons why I should not go there. Clearly, discouraging destination-crazed people from visiting Fiji was a major part of his job; with me, he succeeded.

Every place is “far away” to somebody. When you come back from a broken-down country overseas, the average airport men’s room in America can look like an unreachable island of luxury and light. But thank the gods of geography for the idea of remoteness itself, and for places that are “far away” to almost everyone. The dark end of the subway platform, the last stop on the train, the town in the Alaskan bush with a population of 20, the research station you can only get to two months a year, the Outer Hebrides, Tierra del Fuego, Guam, finis terrae—they’re an insignificant part of the earth’s surface, and we may never go to them, and if we do we probably won’t stay long. But their very existence aerates the imagination, like pinholes in the lid of a collecting jar. Circumstances enclose us all our lives; remote places are the perpetual promise of getting out and away.

: Falling off the Edge

A day’s walk into the Moroccan Desert, Sebastian Junger confronts a dizzying temptation.

Sticks and stones: an 11th-century mud-and-brick mosque in the Niger River trading port of Djénné, Mali.

WHEN I WAS 19 YEARS OLD, I saw a Royal Air Maroc travel poster of nomads on camelback. They were coming off the desert in a group, and there was something about the dust and the sunlight and the expressions on their faces that grabbed me. I put the poster on the wall of my college dorm and after a year of looking at it, I bought a plane ticket to Morocco with my oldest friend, a woman named Sarah. She was considering a job in the Peace Corps there. We flew to Casablanca and then worked our way over the Atlas Mountains by bus. The weather was bitterly cold, and after a couple of weeks we decided to go as far south as the roads would take us—to a garrison town called Goulimine. Not only did it look like the edge of the world, but it was the jumping-off point for Moroccan troops heading south to fight the Polisario guerrillas in the Sahara. It was as far as I could imagine ever getting from anything I knew.


We arrived at dawn after an all-night bus ride. There were a lot of soldiers in the streets, and they stared at us as we walked by. Goulimine was not a tourist town. We walked down the dirt main street until we came to a cheap rooming house, and we ducked into the doorway and asked the owner how much it cost for the night. It was something like a dollar. While Sarah negotiated with the owner, I looked around the dark room and realized it was filled with men sitting on the floor, drinking tea and studying us. Something about it didn’t feel right. One of them caught my eye: a blond-haired kid in a djellaba who looked at me and slowly shook his head, a warning. He wasn’t Moroccan; he looked like a European expat who had gone completely native. I looked around the room one more time, grabbed Sarah by the arm, and pulled her out.


We left our bags at another rooming house and immediately decided to walk out into the desert. I don’t know why—the simple urge to keep going? The pull of 2,000 miles of emptiness to the south? We cleared the last mud houses and started out across the brush-covered hardpan that extended, almost featureless, to the horizon. We walked all afternoon like that, without talking, without direction. Nothing changed but the position of the sun, which slowly swung from east to west behind flat gray clouds. We were about to turn around, thinking we would get back to town just after dark, when we saw something in the distance: a tent, and camels. It took us a long time to reach it, and as we got close, two men stepped out and waved. We walked up cautiously and greeted them in the Islamic way, with our right hand at our chest. They had tea boiling over a twig fire and were talking in a language that was not Arabic. They wore blue cloth that stained their skin and wore knives on their belts and had a flintlock rifle leaning against the tent post. They were Tuareg. The only object of Western manufacture was a plastic jug used to carry water. They motioned for us to sit down, and Sarah and I glanced at each other and took a seat in the sand.


The tea was served with great ceremony, poured beautifully into cups out of a battered tin teapot. I spoke French and Sarah spoke a little Arabic, but our hosts didn’t seem to understand much of either. I pointed to Sarah and myself and said, “America.” They just shrugged, so I drew a map of North Africa in the sand and gestured where our country was. It meant nothing to them. One of them swept his hand to the south and clapped his chest. I nodded. They asked the word for Allah. “God,” I said, and the younger one—a piercingly handsome guy of about 35&3151;tried out a few prayers, using the word God instead of Allah, collapsing in laughter at the end.


By now it was almost dark, and Sarah and I faced a long walk back to town. They gestured that we were invited to stay for dinner and the night. The older man—more reserved than the other, possibly his servant—cooked a bowl of stew in a clay pot banked with embers. They served us food on tin plates. After dinner I gave them my Swiss Army knife, and they gave Sarah some handmade jewelry. We were about to go to sleep when the younger man indicated that he had something important to say. He and his companion had come north to sell their camels, he explained; then they would go back into the desert. Six months from now they would be back in this same spot. If we wanted to join them, he promised he would return us safely to Goulimine in mid-July. It was their invitation. It was our choice.


It was a staggering idea—almost too staggering to contemplate. We would be completely dependent on these people for the next six months. We would be living with nomads somewhere in the largest desert on earth; there would be no way to get help, no way to leave, no way to communicate with home. We had to trust these two men utterly. It was something I’d never done before.


We went to sleep that night rolled up in goatskins. Maybe I’d already made my decision, I don’t know, but the next morning I woke up before dawn and pulled on my boots and jacket and walked out onto the desert. I couldn’t decide which was more upsetting—the idea of vanishing into the desert, or the idea that I wasn’t the kind of person who could do that. Sarah had already told me that she wouldn’t go, but that if I decided to, she would reassure my parents that I was safe. I stood there in the wind watching the sunrise, and when the lower rim had left the horizon and I felt the full warmth of the sun on my face, I walked back to camp. I simply had my limits, I realized.


Just contemplating that choice had altered me forever. I had stood on the threshold of a completely alien world, and even though I’d lacked the courage to cross over, at least I knew it existed. That knowledge was strangely humbling. It was also strangely reassuring. It seemed like maybe the one sure refuge we all had in the face of whomever it was we were taught to become.

: She Left My Heart In Jarbidge

Joh Billman’s searches for matrimonial bliss in Nevada’s loneliest town.

Home of the man-eating devil: Jarbidge Mountains, Nevada.

I COME FROM A FAMILY of elopers. My parents ran off to Deadwood, South Dakota, when Deadwood was the quintessential ghost town. Grocery clerk as a witness, then off to the Old No. 10 Saloon to dance and drink until my mom had to go out on Main Street and hurl. My half-brother, Coe, is a biker-blacksmith who has eloped a handful of times in a half-dozen Western states. No penguin suit. No white cake. No beer cans tied to the bumper, rice spraying your face like sleet. Eloping is the wedding and honeymoon all in a single rhinestone-spangled road trip.


I wanted to elope where the cartography gets fuzzy, and there are plenty of options within driving distance of my small Wyoming town. The wedding photos in my mind had a forty-niner daguerreotype quality to them, love prospectors in the hard country. My plan featured Nevada. The state smells like opportunity, I believed; driving through the basin-and-range country, UFO whack-jobs on late-night talk radio, it’s nearly possible to get ahead of yourself, like outdriving your own headlights. I imagined my beloved and me somewhere downwind of Reno and Vegas; no Elvis Chapel, no casino reception. Specifically, we aimed for Jarbidge, which bills itself as the Most Remote Town in the Lower 48. A hundred miles north of Elko, half of that on dirt and gravel the size of baby heads, infamous for the Shovel Brigade—conspiracy-theory anti-gubment types who banded together to reopen a Forest Service road closed to protect the endangered bull trout.
Jarbidge. Just saying the name had begun to taste like champagne.


We tossed our backpacks and a cooler in the truck and drove toward Elko. I was palms-sweating nervous. Hilary had the paperwork in her lap as we drove, dotting i’s, crossing t’s.


No air-conditioning, windows down, we rambled north through the sublime overgrazed bombing-range sagebrush steppe into the cool mountain range we’d been chasing on the horizon and turned off on a dirt road toward baby-please-don’t-quit-me. The little four-cylinder engine wound, wind scouring the west side of everything with sand.


In Jarbidge we pitched camp along Bear Creek, walking distance to downtown. The sound of the creek would be romantic, I figured, but it only succeeded in keeping us up most of the night. The eve of the nuptials we hiked to the Red Dog Saloon for Angel Creek Amber Ales. I asked the barmaid about churches, small talk, figuring I’d warm up to full-blown questions of marriage. “We’ve got Preacher Bob,” she said. “He holds services over there.” She pointed to an old board-and-batten whitewashed community hall straight out of Unforgiven; the last bona fide church had burned down years ago.


That night, Hilary dreamt she was walking around Jarbidge and none of the people had faces. She woke in a sour mood. I slipped away for a run up the canyon past abandoned gold mines and a lone rattlesnake and came back with endorphins enough to get married on. After bathing in icy Bear Creek, I put on my best snap-button Western shirt; Hilary in a sundress, we strolled to town. Jarbidge is one street running north-south splitting a steep canyon. As we walked hand in hand, Hilary noticed a historic marker informing visitors that “Jarbidge” is Shoshone for “bad or evil place.”


Things went sort of downhill after that. The Nez Percé and Shoshones believed a man-eating devil lived in this canyon and steered clear, never mind holding weddings here. Preacher Bob was nowhere to be found and Hilary announced that she refused to get married in a bad or evil place.


A midday window of sunlight from the slot in the clouds: high noon.


“Let’s go back to Wells,” I said. “We’ll get married in Wells.”


We drove a hundred-mile horseshoe out of Jarbidge Canyon and into southern Idaho, then Jackpot at the border and U.S. 93 south to Wells. I flipped through the Yellow Pages under “churches” and called them all. Every preacher in Wells was out—took it as a sign. Tying the knot in Nevada wasn’t meant to be. And buddy was it a quiet drive back to Wyoming, Buck Owens’s “Cryin’ Time” on the AM, Hilary as remote as Jarbidge.


Two months later we were married in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a cowboy/hippy justice of the peace who peppered the ceremony with cheerful Shoshone legend. Hilary refuses to go anywhere near Nevada, but I’d like to go back and throw flies at the redband trout in Bear Creek, sit on the deck at the Red Dog, and sip a beer among the faceless residents. Pay homage to our first efforts at conjugation, punch the devil in the nose, and try the town again.

: High Lonesome

Finding deep solitude in the Himalaya’s busy Everest region, Ronald Kral discovers, is surprisingly easy.

A few steps off the trekking highway: a windswept view of 26,750-foot Cho Oyo.

TO: outsidemag.com // FROM: rkral@thesoloist.com // SUBJECT: A Himalayan New Year’s
SO THERE I WAS, CAMPED AT 18,000 FEET, up an unnamed peak way off the beaten base-camp paths here in the Himalayas. Was hoping to catch first light of the new year on Everest, which dominates the eastern skyline. Nice view: Everest in one direction, 26,750-foot Cho Oyu in the other. Shame about the blizzard.


Not that it was entirely unexpected. Yesterday morning I was sipping yak-butter tea at Gokyo Namaste Lodge, staring at the huge lenticular over Cho Oyu. “Don’t worry,” said the lodge owner. So out I set, backpack packed with tent, North Face expedition bag, Therm-a-Rest, food, med kit, etc., for a two-day trek to this perch: 360-degree views, unusually warm, skies afire, a high alpine lake—mostly frozen—all creaks and moans, air trapped under the ice.


During the night, snowstorm. Kept up for two days. Soon my tent was a snow cave, walls molded by my hands. Had to crawl in and out through a hole until the weather broke.


SUBJECT: How to disappear in the mountains
Oops. Sorry to leave you hanging. I’m writing from Kathmandu, an Internet cafe with power problems. Bear with.


Let me tell you about the trek: connecting moraines, scrambling, threading boulder-strewn hillsides. To my right, 700 feet straight down to the Ngozumba Glacier. To my left, landslides off the high ridgeline. I’m 200 miles from the nearest road. A trail not fit for goats; no one would even know where to start looking.


That’s the thing about this place. Step just days away from the Himalayan highways, both literal and figurative, and you disappear. Start walking like I did, and pretty soon you’re wrapped in the arms of pure solitude.


SUBJECT: What did you do today?
God, did I sleep well in my cozy little snow hole. No signs of AMS. Or frostbite. Finally, a sunrise; time to head down. Much snow, ice, I glissaded pell-mell to the shore of an alpine lake. Then up again over another ridge. Arduous, but not as bad as defrosting my shoelaces in the evening to get my boots off, then redefrosting them in the morning.


Day five. Provisions for four. I drank snowmelt, scavenged in my pack for ramen, seaweed, etc. Trashbags on my legs for warmth, repeatedly flexed my toes and fingers; it was way below zero. Reached a mantle high above the Ngozumba. A crack in the cliff, no end run possible. I had to make a leap of faith, edge to edge, a hundred feet of air beneath my feet—


SUBJECT: Survivor
Made it! (SORRY, damn outages.) More exposed scrambling. One slip up there and I’m paste. When I reached bare, flat ground at last, I knelt down and kissed it.


Day seven. Still had many ridges to cross; small, flat valleys. Food and fuel gone, but I hoped the lodge owner hadn’t organized a rescue; I was only supposed to be out for four days, max. Pitched camp in a cave, moon floating over Cho Oyu. Would have been more fun if it wasn’t minus 30. I burned almost everything—diary pages I started in Africa, two pairs of socks (they should have been burned!), a pair of pants. Next day, I came stumbling into the lodge, past gaping trekkers and a man on a cell phone saying, “Looks like he’s alive.”


I’m a fool, I know, but I love these solo Himalayan romps. Already logged more than 1,000 miles in Nepal, Pakistan, and India, mostly alone. Would I recommend it? Certainly, if you’re into prolonged self-punishment. For me, heaven on earth.


I’m only passing through Kathmandu. Already I feel the crush of humanity; can’t wait to get back out again. Maybe further north. I hear China’s beautiful this time of year.

: Maximum Dose

Roland Merullo fled to Micronesia in search of a new life. He found it – but it was not what he expected.

Metropolitan Micronesia: the bustling Truk atoll.

WHEN THE PEACE Corps informed me that I was being sent to Micronesia, I went straight to my atlas. After much searching and squinting I found a sprinkling of dots just north of the equator and 2,000 miles east of the Philippines. Finally I located the Truk islands, my soon-to-be home: 11 small grains of pepper on the map’s wide blue middle.


Almost immediately I constructed an imaginary Micronesia—beautiful island women, succulent fruit, warm trade winds, translucent seas. I would spend my mornings helping desperately poor islanders, my afternoons snorkeling in wild, unpolluted waters, my nights reading in my thatched hut, or making love. At 25, I had already spent years dreaming of an Eden free of the rush, spoilage, and obsession with money that I felt surrounded me. Now I was sure I’d found it.
After a long flight across the Pacific and a few weeks of training on Guam, it was a two-day sail to my island, a speck of sand called Murilo, in the Hall group, eight degrees north latitude. Finally, on a brilliant September afternoon, I climbed down the ladder of the field-trip ship and into the skiff that would take me to the atoll. Above hung an enormous sky burned white by the tropical sun. Ahead was a Robinson Crusoe­like crescent of land fringed with palms and pandanus trees. On all sides, as far as I could see, the green Pacific sparkled and rolled. For a minute or two I was struck full in the chest by the wonderful mercilessness of the nonhuman world, the immensity. Salt spray flying up against my sunglasses, I sat amid an embarrassment of luggage, bearing big dreams.


Murilo was home to 200 people. Its summit stood six feet above sea level; you could walk the entire shoreline in 15 minutes. During the day, the heat was so intense that the Murilans sought shade whenever they could. But as soon as the sun set, bathing the cumulus clouds stacked on the horizon in scarlet and lavender, a sweet breeze rose off the water and blew until dawn. Yet it quickly became apparent to me that my visions of paradise had been absurd. The humidity curled up the edges of my notebook paper and glued my envelopes closed. Tiny flies swarmed my face and arms. The single females were all under the age of eight. The food—fresh fish of a hundred varieties, breadfruit, taro, coconuts, bananas, pumpkin, lobster, pig, dog, snails—while as tasty as I’d imagined, carried bacteria that plagued even the locals.


There was no mail. The only way on or off Murilo was the field-trip ship, which stopped by with supplies every three months. Worst of all, however, was the fact that I was completely superfluous on Murilo. The people were content—more content, by a good measure, than those I’d left behind. The women sang as they made rope from coconut-husk fibers. The men passed cigarettes around a circle, two puffs apiece, and carried buckets of fish over to a neighbor’s house after a lucky afternoon at sea. My elaborately detailedPeace Corps job—writing up the island laws into a kind of constitution—took an hour a month.


I filled the broiling, empty days by teaching myself to fish with a snorkel, a spear, and a slingshotlike loop of surgical tubing the locals called a Hawaiian sling. The waters around Murilo were full of sharks, nurse and black-tipped reef sharks, mostly, but tigers and hammerheads too, so the speared fish had to be killed immediately—by crushing the skulls between my back teeth. Every morning I returned to the sea, losing myself in schools of angelfish, surgeonfish, and barracuda, diving down after my speared lunch—living, for a few hours at least, like a full citizen of the natural world.


Despite the thrill of spearfishing, I lasted only five months, climbing back onto the field-trip ship with my idealism bruised and my body host to battalions of infections. The Murilans, friendly and hospitable as they were, simply didn’t need me. Still, when I stepped out of Logan Airport, after the 30-hour flight from Truk, I was carrying a fishing spear wrapped up in cardboard and tape. I keep it in my workshop now, a rusty reminder of the most remote place I’ve ever been. And sometimes, swimming in the waters off Cape Cod, I take a breath and dive, running my chest along the sandy bottom, imagining a solitary surgeonfish there, just ahead, just out of range.

: White on White

In Antarctica, visitors fall from the sky, discovers Mary Roach,. What they find there comes from both heaven and hell.

Cold, but windy: gliding above Port Lockroy, Antarctica.

THE INTERIOR OF ANTARCTICA is one of those rare places that look the same on a map as they do in real life: blank, vast, and entirely void of contours. These places attract me—polar ice sheets, Saharan wastes, the tundras of Greenland. Their beauty is somehow more forlorn and compelling for their utter unavailability to all but a persistent few. The fewer who’ve been there, the thinking goes, the greater the prize.


In the case of 76 degrees south, 156 degrees east, south-central Antarctica, the number couldn’t have been more than a dozen: the five members of The Antarctic Search for Meteorites team who spent a summer season there, the pilot who flew them in, and a handful of visitors, including myself. At first sighting, the place was just such a prize. “Meteorite City”—four canvas tents, seven Ski-Doos, and a sled packed with Top Ramen, salami, and prune-size shards of old shooting stars&3151;sat on a luminous pale-blue ice sheet whose surface dipped and rolled like a flash-frozen ocean. The wind had scoured away most of the snow, and carved the rest into sculptured banks of brilliant white, Styrofoam-hard sastrugi. Ribbons of snow-smoke woundpast my ankles. The ice was sequined with sun, and the sky was the kind of clear, deep, lit-up blue that you feel behind your eye sockets. It was the first day of my stay, and it felt like heaven.


Three days later, I wasn’t so sure. Heaven has a toilet and something good to eat. The uncomfortable realities of life in a tent at 30 below had begun to present themselves. Prime among them was a plastic bottle, labeled “P” for “pee”; it saved me from suiting up and crawling outside in the middle of the night. To keep its contents from freezing, I had to bring the bottle inside my sleeping bag, where it made friends with my contact-lens solution and the ten or 12 mini hand warmers with whom I also shared my bed. Otherwise I would have had a “P”opsicle, which could not be emptied out in the morning and which no one would want to thaw out over their camping stove for me.


Dinner was chicken patties with Tang sauce. Polarfleece became more familiar to me than my skin. Aside from Ski-Dooing back and forth on the ice searching for galactic rubble in 40-mph gales (constant, screaming wind is a necessary element of meteorite hunting because it exposes the elusive quarry) and reading in the 24-hour daylight, there was nothing to do.


By week’s end, it was okay to be leaving this beautiful place that I had dreamed of, staring at the white on the map and thinking, “I’m going to a place where no one ever goes.” Because now I knew why.

: In the Mountains of My Youth

Risk comes with the territory when trekking in Bolivia’s backcountry. But go with a posse of teenagers, as Joe Kane did, and the stakes get even higher.

Where few men dare to float: the sometimes fierce, sometimes meandering Tuichi River, Bolivia.

FOR QUALITY TROUBLE, give me South America. Whole countries get lost down there. (Ask ten people where Suriname is; only one will even know the continent.) Yes, you can get yourself in a good jam right here in El Norte, but there’s almost always a safety net. Cell phone, sat phone, GPS, radio: Help is an uplink away. Expensive help, but they take credit cards. Go remote down south, though, and six seconds of inattention will land your ass in a serious sling. Then what? Call the park rangers? The army? Sure. QuizĂĄs, tal vez, de repente, as they say in Peru&3151;maybe, perhaps, we’ll get right on it. Mañana posible.


I’ve visited the South American backcountry often enough to screw up with the sort of depth and regularity that is inconceivable without an expense account. In YasunĂ­ National Park, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I found myself thrashing through bush so thick I didn’t see the sky for three days. No maps. No food. No sense of direction. I was traveling with Huaorani Indians, whose jungle navigation skills are perhaps the finest in the Amazon—and they were lost. By the time we stumbled out, I was close to starvation.
Or rafting the ApurĂ­mac canyon, in the Peruvian Andes. The ApurĂ­mac is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon; our maps, made by the Instituto GeogrĂĄfico Militar, had big white spaces where the river was supposed to be. We certainly hadn’t expected to encounter Maoist guerrillas down there. But there they were, firing at us at dawn one morning. Cerebral edema at the source of the Amazon in the Andes? The medevac, if you’re lucky enough to have one, eats grass and wears a saddle.


After several close calls in South America, I did what any rational man would do: I went back with nine teenagers. I volunteer in a program that sends high school kids to Bolivia for six weeks every summer. Some are rich, some poor, some beamed in from Mars. One year, in one of those decisions that seems logical at the time but insane in retrospect, we took them on a backpacking trip way off the grid, from the Andean crest on an old Inca highway, then down into the Amazon basin. I worked sweep behind the only two girls. The trail was solid stone and slick as an ice rink. One girl wore Birkenstocks; at 16,000 feet she blew out an ankle. I emptied her pack into mine. The other girl got blisters and hurt her back. I took most of her stuff, too. My load now totaled about a hundred pounds. I kissed my knees good-bye.


We got blasted by snow, hail, rain, and wind until, late that first afternoon, we lost the rest of our group. Suddenly, characteristically, the Andes went from barren to so thickly forested you couldn’t step off the trail without a machete. The sun set. It got darker and colder. Only then did it occur to me that we had no food, water, or shelter and that if we did not reach our campsite we would spend the night standing up on the steep, narrow trail, alone, in the blackness and rain, hypothermic and hungry. We’d made mistakes; the bill had come due. But the girls soldiered on. They didn’t complain; they didn’t say a word.


Somehow we stumbled our way into camp, a barnyard I’d call fit for pigs except that I’ve met pigs who had it better. Two days later, when we reached an inn, I walked by the girls’ room and noticed that the stuff I’d been hauling included hardback books, jars of cosmetics, a copy of Clueless on videocassette. I stifled a scream.


Because by then we’d had a conversation. “It’s like there’s this whole other world out here,” said one. “I can go home, but nothing will ever look the same again.” Trite, perhaps, but for a 17-year-old girl who totes mud mask into the Bolivian backcountry, poignant. I knew what she was saying; I experienced the same feeling—like the rust was blasted off my soul—the first time I went south. Fifteen years later, I still do.

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