It was onlyĚýeight o'clock on the evening of May 30, 2013, but the beach was completely dark. The moon hadn't yet risen above Playa MoĂ­n, a 15-mile-long strand of mangrove and palm on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. A two-door Suzuki 4×4 bumped along a rough track behind the beach. The port lights of LimĂłn, the largest town on the coast, glowed six miles away on the horizon. There was no sound except the low roar of surf and the whine of the engine straining through drifts of sand.

Riding shotgun was Jairo Mora Sandoval, a 26-year-old Costa Rican conservationist. With a flop of black hair and a scraggly beard, he wore dark clothes and a headlamp, which he used to spot leatherback sea turtle nests on the beach. Mora's friend Almudena, a 26-year-old veterinarian from Spain, was behind the wheel. The other passengers were U.S. citizens: Rachel, Katherine, and Grace, college students who had come to work at the Costa Rica Wildlife Sanctuary, a nonprofit animal-rescue center. Almudena was the resident vet, and the Americans were volunteers. By day they cared for the sanctuary's menagerie of sloths, monkeys, and birds. Working with Mora, though, meant taking the graveyard shift. He ran the sanctuary's program rescuing endangered leatherbacks, which haul their 700-plus-pound bodies onto Playa MoĂ­n each spring to lay eggs at night.

The beach's isolation made it both ideal and perilous as a nesting spot. The same blackness that attracted the turtles, which are disoriented by artificial light, provided cover for less savory human activity. In recent years, the thinly populated Caribbean coast has become a haven for everything from petty theft to trafficking of Colombian cocaine and Jamaican marijuana. For decades, Playa MoĂ­n has been a destination for hueveros—literally, “egg men”—small-time poachers who plunder sea turtle nests and sell the eggs for a dollar each as an aphrodisiac. But as crime along the Caribbean coast has risen, so has organized egg poaching, which has helped decimate the leatherback population. By most estimates, fewer than 34,000 nesting females remain worldwide.

Since 2010, Mora had been living at the sanctuary and patrolling the beach for a nonprofit organization called the Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network, or . His strategy was to beat the hueveros to the punch by gathering eggs from freshly laid nests and spiriting them to a hatchery on the sanctuary grounds. This was dangerous work. Every poacher on Moín knew Mora, and confrontations were frequent—he once jumped out of a moving truck to tackle a huevero.

Rachel, Grace, and Almudena had accompanied Mora on foot patrols several times over the previous weeks. (Out of concern for their safety, all four women requested that their last names not be used.) They had encountered no trouble while moving slowly on foot, but they also hadn't found many unmolested nests. On this night, Mora had convinced Almudena to take her rental car. She was worried about the poachers, but she hadn't yet seen a leatherback, and Mora was persuasive. His passion was infectious, and a romance between the two had blossomed. Almudena was attracted by his boundless energy and commitment. Something about this beach gets in you, he told her.

The sand was too deep for the Suzuki, so Mora got out and walked toward the beach, disappearing in the night. MoĂ­n's primal darkness is essential to sea turtles. After hatching at night, the baby turtles navigate toward the brightest thing around: the whiteness of the breaking waves. Males spend their lives at sea, but females, guided by natal homing instincts, come ashore every two or three years to lay eggs, often to the same beaches where they hatched.

Around 10:30, Almudena got a call—Mora had found a leatherback. The women rushed to the beach, where they saw a huge female baula backfilling a nesting hole with its hind flippers. Mora stood nearby alongside several hueveros. One was instantly recognizable, a 36-year-old man named Maximiliano Gutierrez. With his beard and long reddish-brown dreadlocks, “Guti” was a familiar presence on MoĂ­n.

Mora had forged a reluctant arrangement with Guti and a few other regular poachers: if they arrived at a nest simultaneously, they'd split the eggs. After measuring the turtle—it was nearly six feet long—Mora and Rachel took half the nest, about 40 cue-ball-size eggs, and put them into a plastic bag. Then Guti wandered off, and the turtle pulled itself back toward the surf.

When they returned to the road, a police patrol pulled up. The cops warned Mora that they had run into some rough characters earlier that night, then drove off as Mora and the women headed south, toward the sanctuary, just six miles away. Soon they came upon a palm trunk laid across the narrow track—a trick the hueveros often played to mess with police patrols. Mora hopped out, hefting the log out of the way as Almudena drove past. Just as Mora put the log back, five men stepped out of the darkness. Bandannas covered their faces. They shouted at everyone to put their hands up and their heads down. Then they grabbed Mora.

“Dude, I'm from MoĂ­n!” he protested, but the men threw him to the ground.

Masked faces crowded into Almudena's window. The men demanded money, jewelry, phones, car keys. They pulled Almudena out and frisked her, and the Americans stayed in the car as the men rifled through it, snatching everything of value, including the turtle eggs. Almudena saw two of the men stuffing a limp Mora into the tiny cargo area. The four women were jammed into the backseat with a masked man sprawled on top of them. As the driver turned the Suzuki around, Almudena reached behind the seat and felt Mora slip his palm into hers. He squeezed hard.

The driver pulled off next to a shack in the jungle, and the men, claiming to be looking for cell phones, told the girls to lift their shirts and drop their pants. Mosquitoes swarmed them. After being frisked, Almudena caught a glimpse of two of the men driving off in the Suzuki. Mora was still in the trunk.

The four young women sat on logs behind the hut with two of their captors. The guys seemed young, not more than 20, and were oddly talkative for criminals. They said they understood what the conservationists were trying to do, but they needed to feed their families. One said that Mora “didn't respect the rules of the beach.”

The men announced that they were going to get some coconuts, walked away, and never came back. After an hour, the women decided to make a break for it. Huddled close together, they walked down to the beach and headed south toward the sanctuary. They were terrified and stunned, barely speaking and moving on autopilot. Two hours later they finally reached the gate but found no sign of Mora. Almudena started to sob. A caretaker called the police in LimĂłn, and soon a line of vehicles raced north along the beach track. At 6:30 a.m. the police radio crackled. They had found Almudena's car, buried up to its axles in sand. There was a body beside it.

Mora was found naked and facedown on the beach, his hands bound behind him and a large gash on the back of his head. The official cause of death was asphyxiation—he'd aspirated sand deep into his lungs.

The news spread quickly. A chorus of tweets cast Mora as an environmental martyr akin to Chico Mendes, the Brazilian rain forest activist who was assassinated in 1988. The BBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post picked up the story. An online petition started by the nonprofit called on Costa Rican president Laura Chinchilla for justice and gathered 120,000 signatures. Paul Watson, the founder of the and the star of , offered $30,000 to anyone who could identify the killers. “Jairo is no longer simply a murder statistic,” Watson wrote. “He is now an icon.”

There was a sense, too, that this killing would be bad for business. Long the self-styled ecotourism capital of the world, Costa Rica relies on international travelers for 10 percent of its GDP. “What would have happened if the young female North American volunteers were murdered?” wrote one hotel owner in an open e-mail to the country's ecotourism community. “Costa Rica would have a huge, long-lasting P.R. problem.” Not long after, President Chinchilla took to Twitter to vow that there would be “no impunity” and that the killers would be caught.

That task fell to detectives from the Office of Judicial Investigation (OIJ), Costa Rica's equivalent of the FBI, and LimĂłn's police department. The OIJ attempted to trace the victims' stolen cell phones, but the devices appeared to have been switched off and their SIM cards removed. Almudena, Grace, Katherine, and Rachel gave depositions before leaving the country, but it was clear that finding other witnesses would be a challenge.

MoĂ­n is backed by a scattering of run-down houses behind high walls. It's the kind of place where neighbors know one another's business but don't talk about it, especially to cops. The hueveros met OIJ investigators with silence. When detectives interviewed Guti, he was so drunk he could barely speak.

Not everyone kept quiet, though. Following the murder, Vanessa Lizano, the founder of the Costa Rica Wildlife Sanctuary, dedicated herself to fighting for her fallen colleague's legacy. I e-mailed her and asked if I could come visit, and she welcomed me.

I flew to San JosĂ© two weeks after the killing, arriving at the sanctuary after dusk. Lizano, 36, unlocked a high gate adorned with a brightly painted butterfly. “Welcome to MoĂ­n,” she said in a theatrical voice, her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail. The property covered about a dozen acres of rainforest and was dotted with animal pens. Paintings of Costa Rica's fauna adorned every surface. Lizano opened a pen and picked up a baby howler monkey, which wrapped its tail around her neck like a boa. “I keep expecting Jairo to just show up,” she said. “I guess I haven't realized it yet.”

Lizano had been running a modeling agency in San JosĂ© in 2005 when she and her parents decided to open a butterfly farm near the beach. She leased a small piece of land and moved to MoĂ­n with her infant son, Federico, or “FedĂ©,” her parents, and a three-toed sloth named Buda. They gradually transformed the farm into a sanctuary, acquiring rescued sloths and monkeys, a one-winged owl, and a pair of scarlet macaws seized from an imprisoned narcotrafficker. FedĂ© pulled baby armadillos around in his Tonka trucks and shared his bed with Buda.

Lizano operated the sanctuary with her mother, Marielos, and a rotation of international volunteers, who paid $100 a week for room and board—a common model for small-scale ecotourism in Costa Rica. The sanctuary was never a moneymaker, but Lizano loved working with the animals.

Then, one day in 2009, she discovered several dead leatherbacks on the beach that had been gutted for their egg sacs. “I went crazy,” she says. She attended a sea turtle conservation training program in Gandoca, run by Widecast, a nonprofit that operates in 43 countries. There she met Mora, who'd been working with Widecast since he was 15. Lizano arranged for the organization to operate a turtle program out of her sanctuary, and in 2010 Mora moved to MoĂ­n to help run it.

They soon developed something like a sibling rivalry. They'd psych themselves up by watching Whale Wars, then compete to see who could gather more nests. Normally a goofball and unabashed flirt, Mora turned gravely serious when on patrol. He loved the turtles deeply, but he seemed to love the fight for them even more. Lizano worried that his stubbornness may have made things worse on the night he was killed.

“Jairo wouldn't have gone without a fight,” she said. “He was a very, very tough guy.”

Lizano told me that her mission was now to realize Mora's vision of preserving Playa Moín as a national park. She had been advocating for the preserve to anyone who would listen—law enforcement, the government, the media. It was a frustrating campaign. The turtle program had been shut down in the wake of the killing, and poaching had continued. Meanwhile, Lizano seemed certain that people around Moín knew who the killers were, but she had little faith in the police. On the night of the murder, when Erick Calderón, Limón's chief of police, called to inform her that Mora had been killed, she screamed at him. Since 2010, Calderón had intermittently provided police escorts for the sanctuary's patrollers, and by 2013 he'd suspended them because of limited resources. Prior to the killings, Lizano and Mora had asked repeatedly for protection, to no avail. The murder, Lizano said, was Calderón's fault.

But there was plenty of recrimination to go around. The ecotourism community blamed Lizano and Widecast for putting volunteers at risk. The family of one of the Americans, Grace, had demanded that Widecast reimburse her for her stolen camera, phone, and sneakers. Lizano told me the accusations were unfair. “The volunteers knew what they were getting into,” she said. “We would say, 'It's up to you if you want to go out.' ”

Still, she was overwhelmed with guilt. “I know Jairo was scared, because I used to tease him,” she said. “We'd make fun of each other for being afraid. We'd always kidaround that we would die on the beach.” She'd tell him that she wanted her ashes carried into the surf by a sea turtle. Mora was less sentimental. “He always said, 'You can do whatever, I really don't care. Just drink a lot. Throw a party.' ”

We sat in the open-air kitchen, and Lizano held her head in her hands. “If you've got to blame somebody, blame me,” she said. “I was the one who took Jairo and showed him the beach, and he fell in love.”

Mora was born in Gandoca, a tiny Caribbean town near the Panama border. He caught the wildlife bug early, from his grandfather, JerĂłnimo Matute, an environmentalist who helped found the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge, a sea turtle nesting area. Jairo began releasing hatchlings at age six. Once
he became a full-time Widecast employee, he sent much of his salary home every month to his mother, Fernanda, and completed high school through a correspondence program.

By 2010, Mora had moved to Moín, living in a tiny room over the sanctuary's kitchen. Some days, Mora and the volunteers—college students, mainly, from all over the world—counted poached nests or monitored the sanctuary's hatchery; some nights they'd go on patrol. Mora was clear about the risks involved, and some chose not to go, but others joined eagerly. It didn't seem that dangerous, especially in the early days, when the Limón police accompanied the patrols.

Still, there were tensions from the beginning. During nesting season, the hueveros squatted in shacks in the jungle. Most were desperately poor, many were addicts, and all considered Lizano and Mora competition. Lizano had no qualms about reporting poachers to the police.

A leatherback typically lays 80 fertilized eggs and covers them with about 30 yolkless ones. Poachers consider the yolkless eggs worthless and usually toss them aside. Lizano and Mora often placed those eggs on top of broken glass, causing a poacher to cut himself while digging for the good ones. Lizano even set volunteers to work smashing glass to carry in buckets to the beach. She sometimes found obscene notes scrawled in the sand. She'd write back: Fuck You.

Lizano got caught in shootouts between police and poachers at the beach four times, once having to duck for cover behind a leatherback. In April 2011, she was driving alone at night on MoĂ­n when she came across a tree blocking the road. Two men with machetes jumped out of the forest and ran toward her truck. She floored it in reverse down the dirt road, watching as the men with the machetes chased, their eyes full of hate.

In the spring of 2012, Calderón suspended the police escorts. Limón had the highest crime rate in Costa Rica, and the police chief was spread too thin trying to protect the city's human population, never mind the turtles. Mora and Lizano shifted to more conciliatory tactics. They hired ten hueveros and paid each of them a salary of $300 per month, using money from the volunteers' fees. In return, the men would give up poaching and work on conservation. Guti was one of the first to sign on. The hueveros walked the beach with the volunteers, gathering nests and bringing them to the hatchery. It was a steep pay cut—an industrious huevero can make as much as $200 a night—so Lizano pushed the idea that the poachers could eventually work in the more viable long game of ecotourism, guiding tourists to nesting sites. But the money for the project quickly ran out, and Lizano wasn't surprised when poaching increased soon after.

Around the same time, a menacing poaching gang showed up on Playa MoĂ­n. They seemed far more organized than the typical booze-addled hueveros. The group dropped men along the beach by van, using cell phones to warn each other of approaching police. They were led by a Nicaraguan named Felipe “Renco” Arauz, now 38, who had a long criminal history, including drug trafficking and kidnapping.

In April 2012, a group of men armed with AK-47's broke into the hatchery, tied up five volunteers, and beat a cousin of Mora's with their rifle butts. Then they stole all 1,500 of the eggs that had been collected that season. Mora, out patrolling the beach, returned to find the volunteers tied up. He went ballistic, punching the walls. Then he exacted vengeance, going on a frenzy of egg gathering, accompanied once again by armed police protection. Mora collected 19 nests in three nights, completely replacing the eggs that had been stolen. But a few weeks later, CalderĂłn once again suspended escorts, and no arrests were made.

A month after the hatchery raid, in May 2012, the dangers became too much even for Lizano. She was at a restaurant in downtown LimĂłn when she spotted a man taking FedĂ©'s photo with his cell phone. She recognized him as a huevero and confronted him angrily: “It's me you want. Leave the kid out of it.” The man laughed at her. That was the final straw. She moved with FedĂ© back to San JosĂ©, returning to MoĂ­n alone on weekends.

Mora remained, however, and when the 2013 season began in March, he returned to his patrols—mostly alone, but occasionally with volunteers. By this point, the volunteer program was entirely Mora's operation. The Americans, who arrived in April, knew there were risks. But according to Rachel, Mora never told her about the raid on the hatchery the year before. She entrusted her safety to him completely. “I had gone out numerous times with Jairo and never really felt in danger,” she told me. “I knew he was there and wouldn't let anything happen to me.”

But just a few weeks before his death, Mora told a newspaper reporter that threats were increasing and the police were ignoring Widecast's pleas for help. He called his mother, Fernanda, every night before he went on patrol, asking for her blessing. When Lizano saw Fernanda at Mora's funeral,Ěýshe asked for her forgiveness.

“Sweetie,” Fernanda replied, “Jairo wanted to be there. It was his thing.”

CLICK-CLICK.

The cop next to me, young and jumpy in the darkness, pulled his M4's slide back, racking a cartridge. As I crouched down, I saw two green dots floating—the glow-in-the-dark sights of a drawn 9mm. About 100 yards off, the police had spotted a couple of shadowy figures. Hueveros.

I was on patrol. Following Mora's killing, the sea turtle volunteer program had been suspended, but two of Mora's young protégés, Roger Sanchez and his girlfriend, Marjorie Balfodano, still walked the beach every night with police at their side. Sanchez, 18, and Balfodano, 20, were both diminutive students, standing in bare feet with headlamps on. They weren't much to intimidate a poacher, but Sanchez was fearless. Before we set out, he told me with earnest bravado that he planned to patrol Moín for the rest of his life. When we saw the hueveros, we'd been walking for three hours alongside an escort of five officers from Limón's Fuerza Pública, kitted out with bulletproof vests, sidearms, and M4 carbines. Perhaps it was just a publicity stunt by Calderón, but it was a comforting one. We had encountered a dozen plundered nests, each one a shallow pit littered with broken shells. The hueveros, it had seemed, were just steps ahead of us.

Then the cop on my right noticed two figures and pulled his gun. Three of the police told us to wait and confronted the two men. After several minutes we approached. The cops shone their flashlights on the poachers and made them turn out their pockets. One wore a knit cap, and the other had long reddish dreadlocks—Guti. They were both slurry with drink, and the cops seemed to be making a show of frisking them. The men had no contraband, so the cops let them stumble off along the beach.

After a while the radio crackled. Another police truck had found two nesting leatherbacks. We rushed to the spot. In the darkness, a hump the size of an overturned kiddie pool slowly shifted in the sand. The baula's great watery eyes looked sidelong toward the sea as it excavated a nest in the beach with back flippers as dexterous as socked hands. With each labored effort, it delicately lifted a tiny scoop of sand and cupped it to the edge of the hole. Sanchez held a plastic bag in anticipation, ready for her to drop her clutch.

Then Guti's drunken companion stumbled up to us, knelt beside Sanchez, and offered a boozy disquisition on sea turtle biology. The cops ignored him, and the spooked animal heaved forward, dragging her bulk away without laying any eggs. A few more heaves and the foaming waves broke over the turtle's ridged carapace.

The night wasn't a complete loss, though. A short distance away, the second leatherback had laid its nest. Soon a second patrol truck pulled up and handed Sanchez a bag of 60 eggs. We hitched a ride back to the sanctuary and a wooden shed packed with styrofoam coolers. Sanchez opened one, sifted beach sand into the bottom, then began placing the eggs inside. I noticed that a pen had been stuck into one of the coolers. Next to it, a set of stylized initials was scratched into the styrofoam: JMS. Altogether, there were perhaps 1,000 eggs in the coolers. Almost all of them had been gathered by Mora.

A couple of days later, I went to see Erick CalderĂłn at the police headquarters in LimĂłn. With his small build and boyish face, he seemed an unlikely enforcer, and he'd clearly been affected by the pressure the killing had brought on his department. Since the murder, CalderĂłn said, the police had patrolled MoĂ­n every night. “I want to make the beach a safer place, control poaching of eggs, and educate the population so the demand isn't there,” he said. But it was unclear how long he could sustain the effort. He said that only a dedicated ecological police force would make a lasting impact. They'd need a permanent outpost on MoĂ­n, a dozen officers supplied with 4x4s and night-vision goggles.

Then CalderĂłn insisted that Mora's murder was an anomaly and that Costa Rica was “not a violent society”—an assertion belied by the fact that the previous afternoon, a shootout between rival gangs had happened just a few blocks from the station. He seemed ashamed that the murder had happened on his watch, that Lizano had screamed at him. “I know Jairo was a good guy,” he told me.

That afternoon I met up with Lizano's father, Bernie. His means of processing his sorrow had been to turn himself into a pro bono private investigator. A former tuna fisherman, Bernie was 65, with a full head of white hair and a pronounced limp from an old boating accident. As we drove around LimĂłn, he seemed to know everyone's racket, from the drug kingpins behind razor-wire-topped fences to a guy on a corner selling drinks from a cooler. “He keeps the turtle eggs in his truck,” Bernie whispered conspiratorially. At one house he stopped to chat with a shirtless, heavily tattooed man. The guy offered his condolences, then said, “Let me know if you need any maintenance work done.” As Bernie pulled away he chuckled: “Maintenance. That guy's a hit man.”

We drove to a squat concrete building with dark-tinted windows on the edge of town—the office of the OIJ. After Bernie and I passed through a metal detector, one of the case's detectives, tall and athletic, with a 9mm holstered in his jeans, agreed to speak with me anonymously. He said that OIJ investigators in LimĂłn were the busiest in the country due to drug-related crime. I asked whether he thought the killers were traffickers, and he shook his head wearily. “If they were narcos, it would have been a disaster,” he said. “Every one of them would have been killed.”

Like CalderĂłn, he promised that Mora would not be a mere statistic. He insisted that they were closing in on serious leads. Walking out, Bernie told me he had spoken in private with the detective, to whom he'd been feeding every scrap of information he'd gotten. “He told me, 'We are very close to getting them, but we don't want them to know because they'll get away.' ”

Bernie's PI trail led back to Moín, where he had tracked down a potential witness—a man who lived near the beach. The man had been the first to find Mora early on the morning of May 31. He walked Bernie to the spot where he'd found the body. As he described it, there were signs of a struggle from the footprints around the car. It looked to him like Mora had escaped his captors and dashed down the beach. Another set of tracks seemed to show a body being dragged back to the vehicle.

Bernie had begged the man for some clue, mentioning Paul Watson's reward, which had now swelled to $56,000. “He said, 'No, no, I don't need the money. It's not that I don't need it, it's just that they did something very bad.' ” If he talked, he was sure that he and his family would be killed.

OnĚýJuly 31, the OIJ conducted a predawn raid, called Operation Baula, at several houses around LimĂłn. Dozens of armed agents arrested six men, including Felipe Arauz, the 38-year-old Nicaraguan immigrant suspected of being the ringleader of the violent hueveros. A seventh man was caught ten days later. The suspects were Darwin and Donald SalmĂłn MelĂ©ndez, William Delgado Loaiza, HĂ©ctor Cash Lopez, Enrique Centeno Rivas, and Bryan Quesada Cubillo. While Lizano knew of the alleged killers, she was relieved that she hadn't worked with them. “Thank God none were my poachers,” she said.

Detectives from the OIJ had been talking to informants and quietly tracking Mora's stolen cell phone. According to court documents, one of the suspects, Quesada, 20, had continued to use it, sending incriminating texts. One read: “We dragged him on the beach behind Felipe's car and you know it.”

To Lizano, the motive was clearly revenge, but the authorities cast the crime as “a simple robbery and assault.” They also laid blame on Mora and Lizano's failed attempt to hire poachers for conservation. An OIJ spokesman claimed that the program had bred resentment among hueveros. The accusation infuriated Lizano. “They're just looking for a scapegoat,” she said.

Lizano thought that the authorities were deflecting blame. It turned out that on the night of the murder, a police patrol had encountered several of the suspects—they were the same men the cops had warned Mora about. A few hours later the gang lay in wait. Whether or not they intended to kill Mora will be argued at the trial later this spring.

Even so, the arrests haven't brought much closure to those closest to Mora. Almudena, back in Madrid, was deeply depressed when I reached her. “Jairo is dead,” she said. “For me there is no justice.” The only positive outcome, as she saw it, would be for a preserved beach. “In ten years, there have to be turtles at MoĂ­n,” she said. “If not, this has happened for nothing.”

Lizano, meanwhile, redoubled her efforts to protect MoĂ­n. Any legislative change to preserve the beach is far off, and the turtles now face an additional threat—a massive container-port development project that a Dutch conglomerate hopes to build nearby. Still, Lizano told me, “I really believe it has to continue. I can't stop and let the poachers win. For me it's not an option.”

In July, Lizano brought Fedé back to Moín. She woke him up one morning before sunrise, and together with a group of volunteers they walked to the beach. The night before, at the sanctuary, the first turtle hatchlings had broken up through the sand in their styrofoam-cooler nests. Lizano showed Fedé how to lift the tiny flapping things out and set them gently on the sand. The people stood back and watched as the turtles inched down the beach, making their way toward the breaking waves and an uncertain future.

wrote about Australia's northern territory in February 2012.

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THE SCENE FADES IN from black. A hand-held camera pans the inside of a car weaving through the streets of Misrata, on Libya’s coast. It’s April 20, 2011, and the city, a stronghold for antigovernment rebels, is under siege by forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. We see the driver, a rakish rebel, and his passengers, several photojournalists looking out the windows at the smoldering remnants of buildings. The cameraman asks, “Which way is the front line from here?”

British photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington poses for a photograph before he boards a medevac helicopter during ‘Operation Rock Avalanche’ at the Korengal Valley, East Afghanistan on October 25, 2007.

At that point, you realize what you’re watching: Tim Hetherington on his way to die. Hetherington, the man holding the camera, was one of the most respected conflict photographers in the world. Within a few hours of the car ride, the 40-year-old Briton was killed in a mortar attack, along with renowned American photographer Chris Hondros. Hetherington’s femoral artery was ruptured by shrapnel, and he bled to death in the back of a pickup truck on the way to a hospital.

Hetherington’s question, which arrives just minutes into the film, is also its title. premiered at Sundance in January and airs on HBO in April. It was directed by writer Sebastian Junger, who became a close friend of Hetherington’s when the two worked together in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. The 80-minute documentary takes the measure of the photographer’s extraordinary life and work, weaving Hetherington’s own footage, from Liberia to Afghanistan to Libya, together with Junger’s interviews with heart-broken friends, colleagues, and family. As with the new Hetherington biography , by American author Alan Huffman, it presents a powerful case that, in the age of citizen journalism, when anyone with a camera phone can be a contributing reporter, dedicated and talented professionals still deliver the most revealing stories.

Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? suggests that Hetherington’s success had as much to do with his personality as his ability to capture the essence of war. Lanky and affable, Hetherington charmed everyone he met. A born searcher, he came to photography in his mid-twenties to, as he later put it, “try to explain the world to the world.”

Hetherington’s most penetrating imagery stands out for what it isn’t: gory, brutal, or shocking. His vision of warfare had him seeking out the pauses between the action that transfixed so many of his colleagues. Beginning in the late 1990s, he spent years in West Africa photographing the fallout of conflicts—victims of land mines, children blinded by war criminals, an abandoned hospital. Hetherington’s 2007 shot of an exhausted American soldier in Afghanistan won the Photo of the Year award from the World Press Association. And in Which Way Is the Front Line from Here?, Junger describes a poignant episode during the filming of Restrepo, the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary the two made about an American platoon in Afghanistan, in which Hetherington snapped portraits of soldiers as they slept.

Hetherington also distinguished himself by his level of commitment. During the Liberian civil war from 1999 to 2003, he and fellow Briton James Brabazon were the only foreign journalists to live behind rebel lines, which prompted president Charles Taylor to call for their capture and execution. He worked with Human Rights Watch on a number of projects. In Afghanistan, he and Junger financed much of Restrepo themselves while on assignment for Vanity Fair.

Ultimately, Hetherington allowed his sensitivity and empathy to direct his camera, an approach that may have been his greatest strength. As Brabazon says in Which Way Is the Front Line from Here?, “Tim didn’t see a division between being a photographer or a videographer or a humanitarian or a participant. He was just Tim.”

View some of Tim Hetherington’s photos here.

The post Sebastian Junger Shoots For the Truth appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

This originally appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of .

CTA train and kayakers on the North Branch, from the Wilson Avenue bridge.

Near the mouth of the Chicago River in 1831.

A small flotilla of boats passes through the open State Street Bridge on the Chicago River.

Urban Kayakers taking a break at Wolf Point.

The desolate stretch of territory alongside the South Branch of the Chicago River is littered with the shed husks of the city’s industrial past. Along overgrown banks, the rusting ribs of derelict warehouses poke out beneath crumbling storage silos. Just before South Ashland Avenue cuts across the river, there is a small spit of land where the South Branch splits—a couple of acres at most. Canal Origins Park is choked with weeds and windblown trash. Its concrete path leading to the river is lined with historical signs, now sun-bleached and obscured by a palimpsest of graffiti tags. A line of electrical pylons marches along the riverbank toward the hazy skyline of downtown, four miles distant.

Locals gather at a railing, fishing in the brown water. One angler, a retired limo driver originally from Michoacán, Mexico, chomps a cigar beneath his handlebar mustache and surveys the scene. I ask him if he ever eats fish from the river, and he just laughs. He’s a regular here, he tells me, but returned to the spot only a few days ago after having stayed away for weeks.Ěý

“The day after it rained, there was so much dead fish floating around,” he says, gesturing toward the river with his cigar. “Hundreds of ’em.” Chicago’s sewer system, overwhelmed by the heavy rainstorm, had overflowed again. He points to the concrete drainpipes that had disgorged tens of thousands of gallons of untreated waste and pollutants into the river. “They tested the water, said it was safe,” he says. “Maybe it was. I left, and I didn’t come back. It was horrible—the smell.”

It’s been a troubled stretch of water for a long time. Made infamous in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, the south fork of the South Branch served as the gutter for the vast Union Stock Yards, at one time the world’s largest meat producer, where several hundred million head of livestock were processed in the century after the Civil War. As Sinclair vividly described it, the creek was so clogged with grease and offal that people would mistake it for solid ground and fall in. Sometimes the surface would catch fire. Bubbles of methane would periodically rise up from the depths and burst, giving it its nickname, Bubbly Creek.

A shout goes up at the rail as a second fisherman struggles with his bent-double rod. (“Might’ve got one!” he yells out to his friends, before adding the requisite punch line: “But it’s got three eyes!”) When he finally hauls his catch onto the bank, it is revealed to be not a fish at all, but rather a large (and angry) red-eared slider turtle. A group gathers around as he frantically tries to remove the hook without losing a finger to the turtle’s snapping beak. Eventually the hook is freed, and everyone steps back as the dripping creature scuttles to the edge and launches itself over, splashing down and vanishing beneath the murky water.

The turtle is a strange visitor in such a profoundly altered landscape, one where the natural world seems buried beneath a sedimentary burden of human detritus. But as unloved and forgotten as this little river junction appears, it has been as central to Chicago’s history as the skyscrapers piled up theatrically in the distance. It’s hard to ascribe majesty to such a dirty, ruin-crowded waterway, a rill so narrow it can be easily spanned by a well-thrown baseball. But it would be even harder to overstate this river’s importance to both the past and future of its city. Chicago—and America along with it—grew up around this river. A burgeoning nation’s commerce, sweeping migrations of humanity, colossal feats of engineering and architecture: all combined on either side of its banks to form the “stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders” that Carl Sandburg invoked in his great poem “Chicago.”

More than a century ago in this exact spot, human ingenuity shaped nature to its will, smashing through the earthen barrier that separated the Mississippi River drainage area from the vast freshwater reservoir of the Great Lakes, stitching together the commercial energies and distinct ecosystems of the North American continent. The consequences of that decision are still playing out today in a metropolis where more than seven million people draw their drinking water from Lake Michigan—and where those same people pump their sewage back into the river. Myriad threats, from water pollution to flooding and invasive species, have made the question of what to do about the Chicago River one of the most important questions facing the city. And simply by asking it, Chicagoans are acknowledging a basic existential struggle.

That struggle is between two competing visions. One is remedial and pragmatic, the province of engineers and bureaucrats. In their eyes, the river can and should be cleaned up only to the point where it can operate as a safe, functional waterway that exists to meet the demands placed on it by commerce, flood control, and the dispersal of wastewater.

In the alternate vision, however, the river meets all of these demands—and more. Its proponents seek nothing less than to turn the Chicago River into a civic treasure, its newly cleaned banks lined with parks and homes and restored ecosystems, its very presence a clear and shimmering symbol of a great city built on making, trading, connecting: a symbol of American history’s inexorable flow toward progress. And in the bargain, they seek to make the river a living—and flourishing—example of environmental innovation and ecological stewardship, one that generations of Chicagoans will cherish.

THE LANDSCAPE OF PRESENT-day Chicago was formed by the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier some 14,000 years ago, which resulted in a flat and marshy plain at the southern end of the enormous Great Lakes basin. The area was settled by Algonquian tribes, who called the slow and sinuous creek flowing into Lake Michigan shikaakwa, after the wild leeks that grew on its banks. When the French explorers Marquette and Jolliet canoed up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers in 1673, native guides showed them a portage—a few miles of swampy land that required the dragging of boats across a mud flat—linking the Great Lakes via the Chicago River to the Mississippi River system beyond. And so did a leech-infested marsh become one of the most strategic transit points in all of North America: a key to the continent.

From this stroke of great geographical good fortune, Chicago evolved as a center of commerce and a key transportation hub, Sandburg’s “Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler.” In 1848 a canal was dug to formalize the connection between the Chicago River and the lake, and railroads started pinwheeling out from the young city’s center. By the turn of the century, Chicago had grown an astonishing fiftyfold, to 1.7 million people, making it the fifth-largest city in the world. Its breakneck population growth put enormous strain on the river that cut through the city’s center and emptied into the lake, the source of its drinking water. The river flooded frequently and had become hideously polluted: outbreaks of dysentery, typhoid, and cholera throughout the 19th century led to fears of a city-destroying epidemic.

The water had to be managed in some way. A municipal agency called the Sanitary District of Chicago had been formed in 1889 to address wastewater and flooding issues for the rapidly expanding city. The idea seized upon by the political bosses was devilishly simple: reverse the Chicago River. By digging a long canal to connect it to the neighboring Des Plaines River, the agency could divert the flow and effectively flush the city’s waste downstream—and ultimately into the Mississippi—thus protecting Chicago’s drinking supply, controlling flooding, and opening up a much faster transportation route. Their solution, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, was 160 feet wide, 9 feet deep, and 30 miles long, much of it carved through solid limestone. At the time of its completion, in 1900, it was hailed as a visionary feat of engineering, one that would wash Chicago’s troubles away and bear the city into a healthy and prosperous new future.

ONE OF THE CHIEF logistical hurdles Chicago has faced is how to deal with its wastewater from sewage, storms, and flooding. Because of the city’s marshy location, flooding was a problem from its inception; in 1855 the city council ordered that downtown Chicago be elevated to accommodate a new drainage system. Armies of men working in tandem literally jacked up buildings, streets, and sidewalks by as much as 14 feet.

But the city’s water problems have persisted to the present day. In July 2011, a single storm dropped nearly seven inches of rain overnight; thousands of basements were flooded, and municipal sewers containing both storm runoff and raw sewage overflowed into the Chicago River. To prevent the river from leaping its banks, the locks into Lake Michigan were opened, and millions of gallons of sewage flowed out into the lake. Such floods and sewer overflows have become increasingly common, with untreated human waste gushing into the river after nearly every heavy rain.

To deal with the problem, Chicago’s water agency in 1972 launched one of the largest civil engineering projects in history. It was officially known as the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP), but was popularly known as the Deep Tunnel, a massive system which, its champions claimed, would be able to absorb runoff from even the most severe storms. More than a hundred miles of tunnels were dug through layers of bedrock, some as deep as 300 feet belowground, creating a subterranean complex with the capacity to store more than two billion gallons of wastewater. New reservoirs, the other half of the plan, would be able to hold billions more. Forty-one years and several billions of dollars later, completion of the Deep Tunnel is currently slated for 2029.

To get a sense of what the city has to deal with, I drive out to the Mainstream Pumping Station, alongside the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, 15 miles west of downtown. Passing through the enormous circular gate at the facility’s entrance gives me a sense of the Deep Tunnel’s scale: at 32 feet in diameter, it’s the same size as some of the underground pipes that carry Chicago’s waste here. This is one of three such stations in a system that serves more than 10 million people, the vast majority of whom are unaware of its existence.Ěý

With Henry Marks, a cheerful, bearded engineer, I ride an elevator 30 stories down into the earth, eventually stepping out into a brightly lit chamber as large as two indoor basketball courts. Pumps whir and hum as they push Chicago’s sewage from tunnels back to the surface, where it will be treated. A giant steel screen in the pumping system catches the larger hunks of urban detritus that might jam or damage the pumps. (Marks has plenty of stories about all kinds of oddities that have been stopped by the screen: car hoods, railroad ties, bowling balls, even snowblowers.) The pressures, both literal and figurative, are enormous. If one of these pumps were to blow, the entire station would fill up to ground level with raw sewage.

The Deep Tunnel must be constantly monitored; it must also be emptied out as much as possible before intense rains to free up space. The entire system can process 2.6 billion gallons a day, although when TARP is eventually completed, its capacity will be 17.5 billion gallons. Marks has worked for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD)—as the Sanitary District of Chicago came to be known in 1989—for 27 years. I ask him if this increase in capacity will be enough to eliminate regular discharges into the river. “We hope!” he says, chuckling sheepishly.

From Mainstream the city’s sewage is pumped to the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, six miles away. Stickney is the largest wastewater treatment facility in the world; it sprawls across 414 acres and processes 750 million gallons of waste a day. Sewage is first pumped to scores of circular settling tanks, where solids are separated, and then to aerated digester troughs, where aerobic bacteria break down the waste. When I visit, there is no smell whatsoever in the air, just the bubbling sound of trillions of microbes, happily at their labor.

After treatment, the water is pumped back into the canal and eventually flows down to the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike every other major city in the United States, however, Chicago doesn’t currently disinfect its wastewater, a process that typically involves UV radiation or chlorination. Levels of E. coli bacteria in non-disinfected wastewater sent from Stickney into the canal have registered 700 times above the legal limit for swimmable water. After years of legal pressure from groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth), the MWRD in 2010 finally agreed to begin disinfecting its wastewater by 2015.

After leaving Stickney I drive past miles of sludge-drying lagoons to the site of the McCook reservoir: the long-delayed final stage of the Deep Tunnel project. From its edge I peer down at what appear to be, from a height of 300 feet, toy-size dump trucks loading quarried rock that will be sold as construction aggregate. When MWRD negotiated the digging of the reservoir, the excavation schedule was set according to the market vicissitudes of the construction industry. TARP’s giant hole, it was agreed, would be dug only as fast as its excavated rock could be sold off. If market demand slowed (as it did, dramatically, during the latest recession), the pace of the digging would slow correspondingly. At current projections, the reservoir’s promised capacity of 10 billion gallons will not be reached until at least 2029. If that goal is met — which is anything but certain—it will have taken nearly 60 years to complete.

MEANWHILE, AS THIS GLACIALLY paced drama unfolds, a specter haunts the dreams of Chicago’s water managers in the form of a silvery, flashing mass of , swarming north along the Mississippi system toward the Great Lakes. Originally imported to the United States in the 1960s to eat the algae that were clogging commercial fish farms, the carp may have entered the Mississippi River system as early as the 1970s. The fish reproduce rapidly and are voracious eaters that can grow to be 110 pounds, outcompeting many native fish species.

The sport and commercial fishing industry in the Great Lakes is worth an estimated $7 billion annually, making it one of the most valuable freshwater fisheries on Earth. Were Asian carp to establish themselves in the lakes, the fish would be nearly impossible to eradicate and would likely lead to ecological and economic catastrophe in many sensitive areas. “They could destroy the ecosystem by, quite literally, devouring a great deal of it,” says , a senior policy analyst with NRDC. The carp, she notes, are filter feeders, “meaning they don’t seek their prey but rather open their mouths and simply take in whatever passes by.”

Since the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal is seen as the carp’s most likely route to the Great Lakes, it is, appropriately, where one of the most concerted governmental efforts to stem the carp’s advance is taking place. One approach that has received considerable support from scientists, environmental advocates, and lawmakers was laid out in a 2012 report by the Great Lakes Commission, an international agency formed by the U.S. states and Canadian provinces that border the lakes. Its report advocated the “hydrologic separation” of the Mississippi and Great Lakes ecosystems. It’s a wonky way of describing a dramatic step: restoring the physical barrier between the two ecosystems, in a process that could eventually lead to a restoration of the Chicago River’s original flow—away from the Mississippi watershed and back into Lake Michigan.Ěý

Separation is a highly controversial proposition. It has been decried by Chicago’s politically connected shipping industry as a job killer. Others raise fears that without the canal as an outlet for Chicago’s stormwater, the city is but one good flood away from devastation. Mainly, however, opponents simply say that the costs would be prohibitive. But whatever the costs of physical separation, many think that it would be effective at keeping the carp out of Lake Michigan—far more effective than the series of electric barriers that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers currently operates in the canal, which malfunction from time to time.

“It’s a no-brainer that a physical barrier is going to be more effective than any other kind,” says David Lodge, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Environmental Change Initiative. “But that’s different from saying that’s what should be done.” Lodge sees his role as educating people about long-term risks and rewards, and then leaving the public and policy makers to decide. One of the difficulties he faces is getting all parties to think in terms of a longer time frame, rather than an immediate cost-benefit analysis. “What’s the likely future cost if we don’t do anything?” he asks. “What’s the cost of the status quo?”

A VAST ARRAY OF possibilities arises from that very question. In decades of raging debates over the fate of the Chicago River, perhaps no organization has been more emblematic of the status quo, and the frustrations borne of Chicago-style politics, than the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

David St. Pierre, the MWRD’s new executive director, has an unenviable job. It’s certainly not easy overseeing such a vast system, what with perpetually squeezed budgets and hell to pay whenever people’s basements flood or the city’s lakefront is shut down by a sewage outflow. The two most extreme rain events in the city’s history have occurred in the past five years. Meanwhile, as he ponders the ramifications of that particular fact, he has many different constituencies to satisfy: government, business, environmental advocates, and the general public.Ěý

St. Pierre says he wants “to look at problems in a holistic sense,” placing everyone’s competing needs on an equal footing. Toward this end, he’s more than willing to have an open dialogue about the most pressing issues facing the river—even the hugely complicated prospect of separation and reversal. The fact that he’s willing to talk about these ideas at all represents a significant step forward for the MWRD. The agency has long been seen as averse to any form of outside interference. (It resisted disinfection of its outgoing treated wastewater for decades, for example, with one member arguing that disinfecting water that reentered the river would only encourage people to swim, and lead to more drownings.)

All the same, St. Pierre says he could support a separation scheme so long as it met or exceeded current water-quality levels and flood-control capacity. In person he comes across as both open-minded and skeptical; he understands all the arguments for separation and appreciates the alternatives the Great Lakes Commission and others have put forth. But when it comes to discussing their chances of success, he’s as blunt as an alderman up against the wall at a raucous town hall meeting. “All of them are cost-prohibitive,” he says. “Nobody has that kind of money right now.”

But cost isn’t the issue, says , the former (and founding) Commissioner of Environment for the city of Chicago and now the director of . “They should comply with the law,” he says. Arguments about whether or not this or that particular solution makes economic sense can’t be allowed to become “the escape hatch for complying with water quality standards.” Henderson sees such rationalization as betraying a deeper problem within the organization. “Their resistance is cultural; they do not want to be told what to do. MWRD is historically a very insular operation, and they don’t like external direction.”

The excuse that a crucial initiative may be worth doing—but that the money, alas, simply isn’t there—is as old as politics itself. But it forces one to ask questions along the lines of Lodge’s and Henderson’s. Shouldn’t short-term economic concerns be balanced against, say, compliance with the Clean Water Act? Against the need to do right by the future citizens of Chicago? Perhaps the most troubling implication of MWRD’s inertia, of course, is the suggestion that the agency has always privately viewed the river, first and foremost, as a sewer—and that any other value or imaginative possibilities it might hold come in a distant second.

There are, however, promising signs that the agency’s ossified culture may be shifting. More than any of his predecessors, St. Pierre seems open to progressive ideas. It’s just that his job requires wrapping his mind around billion-gallon (and billion-dollar) units. He says, for example, that he’d like to see a workable plan for creating 2,000 gallons of green infrastructure storage for every home—an advance, he believes, that would be large and noteworthy enough to have a real impact and create a true sense of shared stakes and responsibility. Something like that, he believes, would force Chicagoans to identify the river’s sad state as “a community problem.” And people have to start thinking in those terms, he says, “if you’re going to change the culture.”

AS IT HAPPENS, THERE are plenty of people within the larger Chicago community who are already thinking in these terms. One group working to “change the culture” is , an advocacy organization founded in 1979. John Quail, its director of watershed planning, understands well the political challenges and bureaucratic inertia that have always stood in the way of real change. But, he tells me, in recent years Chicago’s mayors have come to realize that “the river is an asset for economic development and recreational development.” He has seen real progress, accompanied by some powerful visual symbols: an otter was spotted swimming in the main stem of the river not long ago, the first such sighting in generations. But, Quail says, “You’ve got to make the water improvements and the habitat improvements at the same time. Because if you’re releasing sewage into the river 200 times a year while you’re putting condos or restaurants on it, or having people paddle on it, that’s not a sustainable situation.”

Perhaps the most high-profile local figure engaged in the task of reimagining the Chicago River is the . Gang is a MacArthur Fellow who has designed stunningly innovative buildings for cities all over the world. Her Aqua skyscraper, completed in 2010, rises 859 feet above Chicago, its wavelike facade a gorgeously undulating contrast to its modernist and art deco neighbors.Ěý

I meet Gang one day at her office, where a team of architects bustles around us. She shows me her proposed redesign for Northerly Island, on Chicago’s lakefront: a park featuring a seamlessly integrated marina, amphitheater, and range of wildlife habitats from woodland to lagoon to reef, all built on the site of a former municipal airport. This blurring of the divisions between human uses and the forms and functions of the natural world is a signature of Gang’s design work, and has led to her ongoing creative engagement with the possibilities for redeeming the Chicago River.

Intrigued by a on the need for hydrologic separation, Gang embarked on a yearlong project that turned the idea into the basis of a classroom exercise for her students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She encouraged them to think broadly, to engage not just the physical challenges of the site but also the social, cultural, economic, and educational possibilities.

One student’s project sought to incorporate the now-derelict Fisk coal plant into a barrier: wastewater from the canal would pass through a series of “vertical wetlands” within the soaring volume of the building’s huge turbine hall, which would be further repurposed into a public water-education center. Another student imagined a barrier that doubled as a pedestrian bridge connecting two neighborhoods, Pilsen and Bridgeport, separated by the canal. It would be yet another meaningful symbol: two historic Chicago communities being brought together at the same time that a natural division was being restored.

A third proposal entailed building a network of neighborhood-scale wetlands on disused tracts across the city; together they would form a natural buffer, absorbing wastewater and runoff before they reached the river. It’s an example of green infrastructure on a scale both epic and intimate (and one that’s not so far off from what David St. Pierre has said he’d like to see). Still another student looked at ways of incorporating green technology into the riverfront’s many abandoned industrial spaces. “A power grid, a fish farm—new industry to replace the lost industry,” Gang says. Encroaching Asian carp, she adds, could even be harvested for processing into biofuel or fertilizer.

I ask Gang if these aren’t just pipe dreams, impossible to get past Chicago’s political gatekeepers or a skeptical public. “Nothing gets you more involved with politics than having your basement flood,” she says. The key, she believes, is to break what may seem like an impossibly large project into discrete, manageable efforts: “It’s not an easy time to get anything to happen. But you can incentivize things to happen on a more dispersed, networked scale—things like building green infrastructure.” It occurs to me that what she’s describing is a kind of utopian incrementalism: a poetic inversion of the frustrating slowness the city brings to its own progress on huge projects like TARP.

The question must be asked: Why ˛őłó´ÇłÜ±ô»ĺ˛Ô’t Chicago reimagine itself in a big way? After all, it has done so several times. When it was literally elevated to a higher grade, back in the 1850s. After the great fire of 1871, when it arose, phoenix-like, to become the first modern city, erecting the first skyscraper in 1885. And, of course, in 1900, when it reversed the flow of the Chicago River. Now, it would seem, is the time to conjure those same spirits of optimism and daring and to put all of Chicago’s Big Shoulders—and big minds—to work once more. It begins with Chicagoans’ deciding what it is they really want, and having the audacity to say that they deserve it. And then, says Gang, “you just work backward. It’s step by step.”

ON A PERFECT, BLUE-sky summer morning, I take the El to the North/Clybourn stop and walk to the boat launch by Goose Island. I rent a kayak, strap on a life jacket, and slip the boat into the water. Mallards bob along the shoreline, and a panorama of the city spools out before me. Every hundred yards or so, a concrete sewer pipe pokes out into the river like the entrance to a sea cave. Newly built condominiums and retrofitted warehouse buildings line the banks in many places. The river, long ignored (except when it’s dyed green on St. Patrick’s Day), has recently become something of a magnet for development—recognized finally for its aesthetic value, at least: the view of it, from a high apartment window, is considered an amenity.

Turning east into the main stem, I dodge ferry traffic as I paddle beneath a series of bridges. Tourists peer down at me. The scene is astonishingly beautiful. Many of the iconic works of 19th- and 20th-century architecture rise above the river: the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, the Sears tower. Even the Trump International Hotel has a glittering phallic majesty to it.

Does it really require a crisis—floods, pollution, an invasion of carp—to make meaningful change happen? When he served as President Obama’s chief of staff, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel was fond of instructing his staff to “never allow a crisis to go to waste.” One wonders if he’ll take his own advice when it comes to the Chicago River. In his iconic poem, Carl Sandburg spoke of a young city laughing “under the terrible burden of destiny.” That historical burden—that sense of a city grasping toward the limits of what is possible—still seems manifest.

As I pass under Lake Shore Drive, there is only one lock separating me, and the Chicago River, from the deep blue, oceanic expanse of Lake Michigan. I spin around in the slow current and look back down the river as it slips through the monuments of human ingenuity. If all this was made, it occurs to me, it can be made right.

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By 2020, the International Energy ­Agency predicts, the United States will be a net ­exporter of natural gas. By 2035 we will be energy independent. This is largely due to the current boom in domestic gas drilling, using a controversial series of techniques known as hydraulic fracturing—or fracking, in which pressurized water and chemicals release natural gas and petroleum trapped in underground shale formations. There are temporary financial windfalls for the communities at the surface, as well as environmental degradation; anti-fracking campaigns have become a cause célèbre, with stars like Mark Ruffalo joining the fight. Now Hollywood weighs in with Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant, the auteur of American angst. The director and the film’s cowriters, Matt Damon and John Krasinski, have stated repeatedly that Promised Land takes no sides. But right-wing media outlets are gleefully predicting bias, and Participant Media—which backed advocacy documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and The Cove—helped fund the film. So is Promised Land an agnostic work of art or a cleverly disguised polemic?

First, the plotlines: Matt Damon plays Steve Butler, a Big Energy shill who is dispatched to gorgeously dilapidated McKinley, Pennsylvania, to secure drilling rights by any means necessary. Butler dons work boots, buys rounds, and spins fantasies of untold riches to anyone who will listen. He also falls in love with Alice, a schoolteacher played with down-home allure by Rosemarie ­DeWitt. Butler repeatedly tells her that he’s “a good guy,” and he believes it, convinced he is ­offering economic freedom.

Butler’s operation is complicated when activist Dustin Noble (Krasinski) shows up, plastering the town with posters of poisoned cattle. What follows is a war for the hearts, minds, and shale gas of the people of McKinley, a battle about which Noble insists “there is no neutral position.” The film does its best to take one, however, thanks in part to a smartly executed surprise at the conclusion; like any good work of art, Promised Land leaves many ambiguities on the table. Still, a newcomer to the issue won’t come away feeling warm toward the Chesapeake Energies of the world. Spoiler alert: fracking and Hollywood don’t mix.

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On Election Day, a week after Hurricane Sandy had brought the largest city in America shuddering to a halt, there were still lines of cars at gas station stretching for blocks. At polling stations, the lines of voters stretched nearly as far. The Manhattan skyline twinkled with light again, and most of the subway tunnels had been dewatered by the Army Corps of Engineers. The parks buzzed with the sound of chain saws. After one of the worst disasters in its history, indomitable New York City seemed to be dusting itself off and returning to some semblance of its usual frenetic normalcy.

At an emergency clinic in the Far Rockaways.

Dr. Lucy Doyle, a physician with Doctors Without Borders, examines patients in a makeshift medical clinic in a building at the Ocean Village housing complex.

Dr. Lucy Doyle, a physician with Doctors Without Borders, examines a patient in a makeshift medical clinic in a building at the Ocean Village housing complex.

But crossing the Marine Parkway Bridge onto the Rockaway Peninsula, the densely populated 15-mile spit of sand that shields New York City from the open Atlantic, signs of destruction and catastrophe were everywhere. Breezy Point, at the tip of the peninsula, had lost more than 100 houses in a wind-whipped conflagration at the height of the storm. For miles the sodden contents of gutted houses lay in heaps on sidewalks, ruined family photos had been laid out to dry in the thin sunlight. Convoys of National Guard humvees rolled through intersections with dead stoplights. Soldiers unloaded crates of vacuum-sealed military rations to hand out to the thousands still without power, heat, and water. The massive silhouette of the helicopter carrier USS Wasp loomed on the horizon.

Nearby, in Far Rockaway, an impoverished enclave of wood-frame houses and brick public-housing towers stacked along the beach at the far terminus of the A train, there was little evidence of the government relief effort that was assembling just a few miles west. Hundreds of swamped and scattered cars had been pushed into piles, dune grass still packed into their wheel wells. A white Cadillac Escalade sat wrecked on the median, its vanity plate reading “UENVME2.” People strained behind shopping carts of supplies in the sand-clogged streets.

A vast relief effort led by city, state, and federal agencies was under way, but the affected area was so widespread that many people, particularly along the poorer, low-lying margins of the city, felt forgotten and abandoned by their government. Lights were on in Manhattan, but a week after the storm there were still pockets, like Far Rockaway, that had received scant aid. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited the neighborhood a few days earlier, one desperate and frustrated woman screamed at him in front of rolling news cameras: “Where’s the help? Where’s the fucking help?”

A BLOCK IN FROM what remained of the beach and its shattered boardwalk, in a community meeting room on the ground floor of the darkened Ocean Village apartment towers, the international humanitarian-aid group had set up an emergency clinic with a volunteer staff of a dozen or so doctors, nurses, and assorted health professionals. A folding table was piled high with medical supplies, and a sheet strung up in a corner created a makeshift private screening area. An empty Starbucks jug doubled as an ad hoc sharps disposal container. Misha Friedman, a Moldovan photographer in his thirties with a shaved head—a veteran of Doctors Without Borders missions from Sudan to Uzbekistan—was briefing a pair of volunteers about the dire health situation faced by 800 senior residents in a nearby housing complex who had had no running water or electricity for a week.

“No one’s been evacuated,” he told me. “There is no evacuation. Doctors have been flooded out, pharmacies have been closed. Some patients are on dozens of medications, and they kind of fall off the grid.”

All across Far Rockaway, high up in the darkened towers and out in the flooded houses, scores of sick and elderly people, cut off from access to their doctors and medical care, needed help. When the clinic door opened at 10 a.m., there was already a group of patients waiting.

Doctors Without Borders (known around the world by the initials of its French name, , or MSF) was founded to be quick on its feet, rushing into disaster and post-conflict zones to respond to the emergency medical needs of affected populations, seeking to fill the gaps left by the often slow and inadequate relief efforts of local governments and the international community. Working with a volunteer base of doctors and other health professionals, it has conducted emergency health care interventions in over 70 countries, a roll call of catastrophe: Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Libya. It was awarded the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts.

The scene in Far Rockaway could certainly have passed for any global disaster zone, so perhaps it ˛őłó´ÇłÜ±ô»ĺ˛Ô’t seem strange that Doctors Without Borders had arrived to do exactly what it does in crises around the world, from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Banda Aceh, Indonesia. But this was the first time in the organization’s 40-year history that MSF did its work on American ground, on the devastated periphery of the most powerful city in the world.

SOPHIE DELAUNAY, THE EXECUTIVE director of MSF, spearheaded the organization’s relief work in the wake of Sandy. “When these things happen in developed countries, we assume the government knows how to deal with it,” she told me. “That isn’t necessarily the case. We assumed with Katrina that authorities would cope with medical needs.” So the organization had decided to sit out the disaster. “By the time we realized we were wrong, it was too late, and the moment when we could have most helped had passed. It was a bitter experience.”

Self-critique is an essential part of MSF’s philosophy, and Delaunay said the organization had become “much more vigilant” in assessing what role to play when a large-scale disaster hits the developed world. It established mental-health trauma clinics after the 2011 Japanese tsunami, and in the first few chaotic days after Hurricane Sandy made landfall, Delaunay dispatched a half-dozen volunteer medical “explo-action” teams to the hardest-hit areas around New York City. When MSF realized that Far Rockaway had a large population of chronically ill people who were now cut off from their primary physicians—not to mention heat, water, and electricity—it set up the clinic. The main goal was to establish amid the chaos of the early response what is called a continuum of treatment, to make sure that ailing people could receive everything from insulin to asthma inhalers.

One of the volunteer doctors in Far Rockaway was Maureen Suter, a 34-year-old family physician from New York City’s northern suburbs who had driven down with her friend Sean Jones, a mental-health officer. Suter had recently returned from a nine-month MSF mission in the Congo, where she had worked with a local hospital and helped organize small health clinics spread out around the countryside. “This really isn’t all that different,” she said, headlamp on, scanning a printed spreadsheet filled with the names and addresses of a dozen patients.

This was MSF’s fourth day on the ground in the Rockaways, an area that has a very poor public-health picture at the best of times. It is geographically and hence economically isolated; the neighborhood’s median income is less than half that of the rest of New York City. It is filled with elderly people, many of whom don’t speak English, with a wide array of chronic health problems. Diabetes, hypertension, and asthma are pandemic. The pharmacies had been closed for a week, and local doctors had no way of getting in touch with many of their patients.

Prior to MSF’s arrival, much of the relief work was done by a highly organized group that had arrived on the scene earlier than most: Occupy Sandy. A new iteration of the lower Manhattan based anti-one-percent group, was incredibly fast and organized in its response, bringing food and supplies to hard-hit areas like New Dorp, Staten Island, and Red Hook, Brooklyn, as the official response only began. And it wasn’t slowing down; a week into the crisis, Occupy Sandy’s massive Rockaways relief effort looked like a DIY version of the Normandy landings. Its early reports of the dire medical need in Far Rockaway had helped stir Doctors Without Borders to action. The list of patients Suter was working from had been compiled by Occupy volunteers, who had canvassed the desolate blocks of the neighborhood and the darkened halls of housing projects, knocking on doors and assembling names of people with medical needs. Now Suter was taking that list to make some house calls.

“It’s a mess down here,” she said. “Like you stepped into a little zone that somehow the radar just skipped over.”

Suter and Jones piled into her car—one of the few in the area with a full tank of gas—and I tagged along. The first stop was a house a few blocks away. MSF had mandated that all volunteer staff go out in pairs; there had been some press reports of robberies, and the New York Police Department had arrested more than a dozen looters in the neighborhood in the immediate aftermath of the storm. There were even rumors of people posing as FEMA agents and forcing their way into apartments. People were on edge, and many were reluctant to leave their homes or even answer the door. The first house Suter tried was empty, as she pounded on the door and announced that she was with MSF. After several minutes, we trudged to the next address.

As Suter knocked at a second door, a heavyset woman called over from across the street, where she was looking after a sick neighbor. Her name was Agatha Duke, a 66-year-old Trinidadian woman who walked with a pronounced limp. “Miss Duke,” as she introduced herself, showed us around to the back of her house, just a block from the ocean. The front door had been swollen shut by the storm surge that had coursed down her block. Inside, the house was a wreck. The floodwaters had swept through and soaked the carpets, which were already beginning to smell of mold. The lower level of the house would likely need to be gutted. She had been alone in the cold and dark house for a week, heating water over an oil-barrel grill in the backyard, sleeping under a pile of blankets and eating ramen noodles brought to her by relief volunteers. A bible was propped open on top of her television, and a fragment of the 82nd psalm caught my eye: “Do justice to the afflicted and needy.”

Suter took Miss Duke’s blood pressure, which was elevated, and examined the medications she took. She had no insurance and suffered from hypertension. The stress of the situation clearly wasn’t helping, but she didn’t want to leave. Miss Duke said there had been no sign of the government on her block since the storm, an assertion supported by the fact that just walking around the neighborhood, several people had asked me, with a mix of frustration and resignation, if I was a cop or with FEMA. Suter promised to have someone check in on Miss Duke the next day. Then she moved on, working her way down the list and racing against the afternoon sunlight. After dark the unlit clinic would need to be shuttered.

“At baseline this is a very underserved, neglected corner of New York City,” Suter said, as we walked past a row of wrecked cars to the next address on her list. “Add to that a disaster of this magnitude and you really feel that it’s turned into something more like a war zone, that kind of level of neglect.”

A disaster like Sandy reveals fractures in our public-health system. It pulls back the curtain on stark inequities and structural flaws, but long-term institution building is not MSF’s mission. It wants to get to an emergency quickly, and with a minimum of red tape, to fill the gaps in treatment while gargantuan institutions are just getting going. To foster that capability, Delaunay would like to see a sort of disaster waiver established that allows experienced organizations like MSF to do their work quickly and without fear of liability. As Delaunay put it, “We aim to have a very quick response, and a very brief presence.”

So MSF will not be staying long in the Rockaways. At a certain point, very soon, it will hand off the work it has done there to the larger governmental agencies responsible for maintaining public-health infrastructure. Delaunay was impressed by the size and scale of New York’s emergency system, their ability to get water and blankets to people. But as was shown by Sandy, a system so vast can be completely overwhelmed or overlook crucial deficiencies. “The continuum of care was not anticipated,” she says, and the city needs to rethink how to take care of its most vulnerable citizens during a large-scale and complex disaster.

New York City is not Port-au-Prince, of course, and Delaunay does not view MSF’s presence on the ground after Sandy as being an implicit critique of the government’s handling of the disaster. “It’s absolutely not political,” she says. “We want to understand how to maximize the response. We found a niche where we tried to intervene.”

AFTER VISITING MISS DUKE, Suter moved on to a nearby 20-story apartment building. With the power off, people had jury-rigged refrigerators, hanging what fresh food they could find in bags from their windows. The city had managed to connect a generator to the building, but it was only sufficient for emergency lighting in the hallways and stairwells. The apartments were still dark, and the water ran only to the sixth floor. People gathered around a power strip in the lobby, charging phones.

With the elevators out, Suter and Jones climbed nine stories up the stairwell. Suter knocked on an apartment on the ninth floor. Two sisters from the Dominican Republic lived there, Urania and Reinira Castillo, both in their seventies. We had enough Spanish and English between us to find out what medications they were running low on, and Suter called in a prescription to the only open pharmacy in the neighborhood.

And so it went, apartment after apartment. Some people were afraid to open their doors—several residents told me there had been a shooting in the building the day before—and Suter told them information about the MSF clinic through their locked doors. The medical needs were endless: insulin, blood thinners, asthma inhalers, blood-pressure meds. This was not treating gunshot victims in Liberia, but Suter’s role was no less vital in keeping people alive.

“There are a lot of these silent-killer diseases,” Suter told me. A weeklong lapse in treatment or medication of diabetes or hypertension can be a disaster. And there was no clear sense of when things would return to normal. “We really don’t want to drop the ball.”

We panted our way up to an apartment on the 13th floor, where an 81-year-old Puerto Rican man named Harold Rosario opened the door. He had come by public transport all the way from Pennsylvania to visit his friend Maria, who had diabetes and high blood pressure and was a cancer patient. Harold had bad knees, so it had taken him a half-hour to climb the stairs, but she’d been trapped here for a week, too frail to leave for supplies and make the long haul back up.

Rosario told Suter he was doing fine, though he wished we had brought a “big bottle of whiskey.” Maria pulled out a huge container of medications, many of which were running low. Suter called in more prescriptions to the pharmacy.

The view from Maria’s window was exquisite, the afternoon light setting the wide reach of Jamaica Bay aglow, in the distance the twin ranges of midtown and lower Manhattan etched the horizon. The lights would soon wink on there, and though Manhattan was only 10 miles away it may as well have been another country. The A-train causeway that stretched across the bay to the city like an umbilicus was knocked out and would remain so for the immediate future. Tonight, on election night, Far Rockaway would be cold and dark. I asked one older man in a darkened apartment if he was able to vote, and he just laughed and shook his head. The next day a second storm, a nor’easter with snow and high winds, would pummel the city.

Suter and Jones worked their way down the stairwell and had almost reached the lobby when they came across an old man with a cane, trying to haul a grocery cart of supplies and water up the stairs. He stopped at each stair to catch his breath, stooped over. Suter asked him what floor he was going to. Fourteen, he replied, wheezily. She and Jones glanced at each other, and each grabbed an end of the man’s cart. They turned and carried it, all the way up the dozen flights they had just descended.

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The World’s 4 Best Motorcycle Journeys

Exploring by motorcycle ranks high on our list of adventures. There’s the obvious stuff: the blur of road beneath your feet, the shifting horizon. Then there’s the satisfaction that comes from, say, fixing a broken chain in the middle of nowhere. These are our favorite long hauls.

• Ruta 40, Argentina
• Grossglockner High Alpine Road, Austria
• Manali-Leh Road, India
• Route 6, New Zealand

The Best Motorcycle Journeys: Ruta 40, Argentina

For distance, scenery, and the great outdoors, there’s no better ride on the planet: Argentina’s national highway parallels the Andes for 3,100 miles, from the bottom of Bolivia to Tierra del Fuego, the tip of the continent. Rent a bike in the colonial town of Salta, 235 miles below the Bolivian border. Then point it south for as long as you like. The road passes through red sandstone deserts, the wine regions of Mendoza, and the Patagonian adventure hub of Bariloche, where you can kayak 1,400-foot-deep Lake Nahuel Huapí. Beyond that are the granite peaks of Los Glaciares National Park and, eventually, Ushuaia, the southernmost city on earth.

The Best Motorcycle Journeys: Grossglockner High Alpine Road, Austria

No route is as renowned for hairpin turns as the Alps’ serpentine Grossglockner High Alpine Road, which winds 30 miles over Hochter Pass. Paired with glaciated peaks and Sound of Music landscape, it’s a motorcyclist’s dream. Rent a BMW R1200GS at (from $194 per day), in Mozart’s hometown; it’s a torquey mountain goat perfectly suited to steep asphalt curves. You’ll wind past blooming mountain pastures, fragrant forests, and mighty cliffs. At the top of the pass, hop off and hike up Edelweiss Peak for more vast views. Then it’s on to Heiligenblut for a little ˛ą±č°ůè˛ő-łľ´ÇłŮ´Ç°ů°ů˛ą»ĺ at the beer hall of your choice.

The Best Motorcycle Journeys: Manali-Leh Road, India

From chaotic megacities to some of the most isolated terrain on earth, India is a never-ending adventure for two-wheeled travelers. Grab a Royal Enfield from in New Delhi (from $95 per week) and follow the 1,500-mile Grand Trunk Road northwest into the jungled Himalayan foothills. Watch for monkey crossings in the hippie mecca of Manali before snaking over 18,000-foot passes to Ladakh, a.k.a. Little Tibet—a high-altitude moonscape dotted with Buddhist monasteries. Warm up with momos (Tibetan dumplings) and yak-butter tea in Ladakh’s capital city of Leh, then ride all the way to the Himalayan snows of Khardung La. At 17,582 feet, the mountain pass is nearly as high as Everest Base Camp.

The Best Motorcycle Journeys: Route 6, New Zealand

The 200-mile stretch along the South Island’s west coast is a fantasia with unparalleled scenery—misty mountains, dramatic cliffs, and countless waterfalls. Launch from the capital city of Christchurch, on the east coast, with a Harley-Davidson Road King from (from $260 per day). The town of Greymouth, 150 miles northwest, is your starting point. Head south to Franz Josef Glacier and strap on a pair of crampons. The glacier, located at the mouth of a dry riverbed, looks like a raging flash flood paused in time. Farther south, you can’t get out of Queenstown without some nut-job excursion like heli-biking, bungee-jumping into a 440-foot canyon, or paddling the Class IV Shotover River. Or head 180 miles southwest onto Route 94 to the sheer green cliffs of Milford Sound for penguin spotting.

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Summer isn't just for easy beach reads. Pick up any one of these intelligently written books for a change; you won't be able to put it down.

• Alaskan Travels: Far-Flung Tales of Love and şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř
• A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful
• Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
• The Eskimo and the Oil Man: The Battle at the Top of the World for America's Future
• When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man
• Canada

Hot Reads for Summer 2012: Road Warriors

An old master and a new voice add to the travel-lit canon

From to , lighting out for the territory is a time-honored tradition in American literature—the writer setting off into a boundless landscape as backdrop for an inner quest of self-discovery. Few have mined that vein as deeply as Edward Hoagland. At 79, he is the author of some 20 books spanning a half-century of wandering. His latest, (Skyhorse, $23), is a hauntingly lyrical look back at a joint midlife love affair—with both the “national dreamscape” of 1980s Alaska and the sensual public-health nurse who drew him there. Hoagland’s pre-PalinĚýAlaska is “a destination created out of anger and quests,” full of outcasts and fortune seekers mixing with an indigenous population struggling against a fast-changing world. Fur-trapping hippies, boomtown realtors, jail-breakingĚýEskimos, amputee Vietnam vets on snowmobiles—Hoagland gathers their stories as if laying in stores against the Arctic winter. He tries to understand what has drawn them all—himself foremost—to fall for a land of “entrenched savageries” so harsh that “the very snow emitted strange, pained, squeaky sounds underfoot, as if suffering too.” This is Alaska before the state’s frontier spirit became a pop-cultural product. The result is too dark and sharply etched to be nostalgic, but it manages to bear the sadness of a vanishing place on every page.Ěý

For a younger generation of writers, raised in a world circumscribed by and , the existential allure of travel still holds, but its rewards seem more fleeting than ever. In (Riverhead, $27), essayist Gideon Lewis-Kraus finds himself mired in a postcollegiate bohemian haze of art parties and dive bars in Berlin. Tortured by his absolute, paralyzing freedom, he and a friend—şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř contributor Tom Bissell—make a fateful (read:Ěýinebriated) decision to walk the 500-mile pilgrimage route of Spain’s . He will exchangeĚýdirectionless choice for “pointless direction.” This is no saccharine pop-philosophy conceit, though: Lewis-Kraus is a skeptically inquisitive narrator, with a sharp eye for the slapstick agonies and gonzo seekers of the Camino, and his wit and empathy keep him attuned to the ironies and epiphanies of the long walk. Modern pilgrimage, he writes, “isn’t about freedom from restraint but freedom via restraint.” The pilgrim bug leads him to other routes around the globe, and the result is an often hilarious and ultimately moving perambulation toward an idea of what it means to be a traveler—and a person—in the modern age.

Hot Reads for Summer 2012: Power Brokers

Two new books tackle the energy crisis from very different angles

WHEN SUMMER hits and gas prices shoot up along with the temperature and we all wonder why, books about oil become required reading. Steve Coll’s sprawling, Tolstoyan (Penguin Press, $36),Ěýbegins with one oil spill, the , and ends with another one 21 years later, . In between, there is everything else: the fall of the Soviet Union, the long reign of Exxon CEO Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond, theĚýcompany’s campaign against climate science, small wars in Indonesia and Nigeria, dodgy deals in Equatorial Guinea, Chad, and Russia, the invasion of Iraq, Exxon’s use of SEC-defying accounting, its record profits, its billion-dollar political donations, its embrace of tar sands, its embrace of fracking, and, always, its unyieldingĚýdedication to the “Exxon way.” Its way, that is, or the highway. There is no reason a 600-page book about an oil company should be this gripping, but it is. Coll and his researchers interviewed more than 450 people; he traveled to Alaska, the Sahel, the Niger Delta, and the Middle East; the pace never relents. “We need to face some facts,” says Lou Noto of Mobil, a company eventually swallowed by a hungry Exxon, in what will serve as Private Empire’s guiding passage. “The world has changed. The easy things are behind us. The easy oil, the easy cost savings—they’re done.” Everything here flows, or doesn’t, from that.Ěý

If Exxon once famously denied climate change, its rival has embraced it: since 2005, Shell has spent $3.5 billion in an attempt to tap northernmost Alaska’s melting Beaufort and Chukchi seas. This is the subject of şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř contributor Bob Reiss’s (Business Plus, $28), which focuses on the Inupiat mayor of the North Slope Borough and the Shell executive sent to win him over. The book is well timed—drilling may finally begin this summer—but is quieter than Coll’s. Reiss shows the most outrage not over the collapsing Arctic environment, not over the resource curse that Coll describes so well. What he’s angriest about, after watching Shell’s man and the mayor reach a pro-exploration dĂ©tente, is governmental red tape. If drilling is inevitable in the Alaskan Arctic, we may as well streamline it. This makes his book one about process, while Private Empire is about power. In the end, Reiss writes, what makes America great is compromise. The story of Exxon—whatever one thinks about the corporation itself—suggests the opposite.

Hot Reads for Summer 2012: Young Men Vs. Wild

Green protagonists grapple with harsh landscapes in the summer’s best fiction

The season’s standout novels—one from a rookie and the other from aĚýveteran man of letters—concern young males knocked loose to come of age in the northern wilds. Both are set in weathered, isolated places in the pre-Internet age, and the landscapes don’t let the teenage protagonists mature without tragedy. Nick Dybek, son of noted novelist Stuart, debuts with (Riverhead, $27). It’s 1986, and 14-year-old Cal Bollings, too young to accompany his captain father to the Alaskan crab fisheries, stays home in the village of Loyalty Island, Washington, with his flighty mother. The local fisheries have been exhausted, and the crabbers are increasingly dependent upon bigger boats owned by one man, John Gaunt. When Gaunt dies and leaves the fleet to his only son, the town’s livelihood is threatened. Cal is caught in a game of deadliest catch after he overhears the fishermen plotting the heir’s disappearance at sea.ĚýDybek can paint a salty landscape—“Loyalty Island was the stink of herring, nickel paint, and kelp rotting”—but it’s the fast whirlpool of lies, murder, and moral dilemma that drives the book.Ěý

In (Ecco, $27), Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford ventures to the far north to deliver the finest book of his career. No special effects here—bank robbery and murder are foretold on the first page—just overcast realism rendered in clean prose. It’s the early sixties in Great Falls, Montana, when Dell Parsons, 15, watches his father, a de-winged bombardier, run afoul of beef-rustling Cree Indians. Soon after, Parsons’s parents rob a North Dakota bank and are sent to prison. Dell is smuggled to Partreau, a ghost town on the Saskatchewan wheat veldt, and taken under the wing of Charley Quarters, a lipstick-wearing goose-hunting guide. Their employer is Arthur Remlinger, a hotel owner who caters booze and girls to the hunters and who poses as Dell’s surrogate uncle. TheĚýaction comes to a head when two shady characters from Remlinger’s past come for him and Dell has to choose sides. “If you say he should never have brought me there that night, that he changed if not the course of my life, then at least the nature of it … if you say these things, you would be correct,” Dell narrates. “Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.” Both novels culminate in murder, but Dell’s choice is far more devastating; Ford’sĚýnarrator, like the author himself, has the wisdom of a half-century of reflection.

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Play the Field

Australia has it all—unexplored wilderness, Mad Max–style desert, astonishingly diverse reefs, and empty beaches. Get your fix with these seven smart trips.

Paddle

Hinchinbrook Island

Phillip Island

Phillip Island

You have to see the Great Barrier Reef. So does every other tourist in Australia. Luckily, there’s a better way: head to Hinchinbrook Island, a 152-square-mile national park in northeast Australia surrounded by the waters of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The only accommodation, Hinchinbrook Island Resort, remains closed due to cyclone damage. Instead head to Mission Beach, 40 miles up the coast. That’s the starting point for a five-day trip with , during which you’ll explore Hinchinbrook’s wild rainforest and granite peaks, watching for dolphins and saltwater crocs and camping on sandy beaches ($1,640). To see the GBR, catch a boat from Mission Beach to snorkel or scuba dive on the outer reef (snorkeling, $169 per day; two dives, $264; ). The trip out takes only an hour—half the length of the commute from bigger hubs like Cairns.

Primary Sources: Anthony Yap

24, Melbourne native, Australian Kayak Team captain

“I have Australia’s lack of river water to thank for my paddling—it forced me to take to the ocean and find the biggest waves I could kayak. My favorite spot will always be Phillip Island, off the coast of Victoria. It gets the most amazing swells from all directions, so you’ll always find excellent waves for surf kayaking. I head to , , or —between those beaches, you can’t go wrong. When I’m in the mood for calmer waters, I like to sea-kayak in Cat Bay’s slow, long, rolling sets. If I bring along my rod, I’ll catch a bit of fish to grill on the camp stove.”

Ride

Barrington Tops National Park

Barrington Tops National Park

Barrington Tops National Park

This 288-square-mile park, 163 miles north of Sydney, is one of the protected enclaves that make up the World Heritage–listed , a living fossil of ferns, conifers, and primitive flowering plants. It also happens to be a river-running and mountain-biking paradise. The best way to explore it? ’s two-day multisport trip ($375). Day one: traverse 20 miles of rainforest on your Kona mountain bike. The next day, paddle the beginner-friendly Barrington River in a Bass kayak. Bonus: Barrington Tops sits at the north end of the Hunter Valley, one of Australia’s best wine regions. When the adventuring’s done, drive 100 miles south to sample the goods at Stonehurst Cedar Creek Vineyard and crash in a private fireplace-and-grill-equipped cottage (from $159; ).

Surf

Seal Rocks

The village of (pop. 25), situated on an undeveloped peninsula in New South Wales and jutting into the Tasman Sea, is quaint and sleepy. The waves aren’t. The area has point breaks in all directions and consistent four-to-six-foot barrels. Rent a board from the Seal Rocks general store ($12 per day; 011-61-2-4997-6150) and explore Boat Beach and Number One Beach, or book a two-to-four-day surf camp with , with meals, equipment, and dorm accommodation at nearby Sundowner Tiona Tourist Park (two days, $200; four days, $440). Nonsurfers: set up shop at (doubles, $220). Then drive to the Sugarloaf Point lighthouse and swim a couple hundred feet offshore, to Bird Shit Rock, and jump off the 20-foot cliff into a deep tide-water pool. There are also about 20 shipwreck sites at nearby Latitude Reef; see them on a half-day scuba trip from ($110).

Primary Sources: Mick Fanning

30, New South Wales native, two-time surfing world champion

“The thing about the is that the weather is always sunny and warm, with little wind. When you’ve got six-foot waves on the Gold Coast points, it’s magical. I love surfing D’bah or Snapper Rocks, on the northern side of Point Danger and the southern end of the Gold Coast. I try and go out around 8:30 in the morning, just as the kids are making their way to school. If there are waves, I’ll surf all day. But if there are crowds, I’ll head down the Tweed Coast and farther down into New South Wales to escape.”

Dive

Ningaloo Reef

It’s 186 miles long, 12 miles wide, and populated with 500 species of tropical fish. The 700 miles north of Perth on Australia’s west coast, sees significantly fewer visitors per year than the Great Barrier Reef. Plus you can pull on your fins at the beach and swim out to it in minutes. If you’ve got the time, the 11-day road trip from the hub of Perth is worth it. Along the coastal highway from the city, stop at , a resort where a pod of wild bottlenose dolphins feeds off the beach (doubles, $238). Take a catamaran trip to Shark Bay to check out a huge colony of dugongs—like manatees with fluked tails (yacht charters, $80 per person). Then make for Exmouth or Coral Bay—good bases to paddle out to Ningaloo to swim with giant, gentle whale sharks and spot migrating humpback whales.

Trek

Six Foot Track

On the Six Foot Track

On the Six Foot Track

Stanley Chasm, Larapinta Trail

Stanley Chasm, Larapinta Trail

The beauty of this trip, a 28-mile route that cuts through rainforest and over 1,000-foot ridges in the wild, 3,500-foot Blue Mountains, is the access: it starts in Katoomba, just a 90-minute drive or two-hour train ride ($15.60 round-trip; ) from Sydney. Spend the night before the trek at the , a sprawling three-story colonial affair (doubles, $130), then set off. Sydney-based outfitter offers a guided trip with tents big enough to stand up in (from $380). Or pack your own tent and explore the stands of stringybark trees and the sandstone cliffs overlooking eucalyptus valleys yourself. Allow three days and two nights—spend one night ten miles in at the ($35 per person)—to reach the Jenolan Caves, a series of ancient limestone caverns. After exploring, catch a bus back to Katoomba ($40; ).

Primary Sources: Tim Macartney-Snape

56, longtime ­Victoria resident, first Australian to summit Everest

“The magic places in the outback are where the plains meet the hills—that’s where you find the freshwater springs. My favorite springs are on the side of Mount Giles, a ways off the famous . There the water comes up naturally out of the rocks and is so pure, it’s drinkable. These places—where you find permanent water in such an arid landscape—never cease to amaze me.”

Ěý

Splash

Noosa National Park

Noosa lineup

Noosa lineup

Located in the middle of Australia’s east coast, between Brisbane and Hervey Bay, Noosa is a 15-square-mile playground of white-sand beaches, rainforests, and wildflower fields. Base yourself at the resort, just outside the park (doubles, $195), then head to Sunshine Beach for the area’s most consistent surf. Rent a board from on Hastings Street (half-day rentals, $35) or take a lesson from Merrick’s (day lessons, $115). Paddlers can explore the surreal lava-rock formations near Laguna Bay on a daylong sea-kayak trip with ($145). No waves? Hike the 2.5-mile Tanglewood Track through 200-foot-tall kauri pines in Noosa’s rainforest, or head to secluded Tea Tree Bay, where dolphins and humpbacks breach (maps available at the park information center; 011-61-7-5430-5000).

Climb

Grampians National Park

Tree hugger

Tree hugger

MacKenzie Falls, Grampians National Park

MacKenzie Falls, Grampians National Park

This 648-square-mile park west of Melbourne is considered the center of creation by some Aboriginal people, and for good reason: it’s got five sandstone mountain ranges, three fish-filled lakes, and vast eucalyptus valleys. Make Halls Gap (pop. 300) your base and set up camp in one of ’s tree houses (doubles, $250). Then hire the guides at to belay you on everything from short bolted routes to challenging multi-pitch affairs (from $75 per half-day). When you want a break from the harness, tackle the five-mile, 1,528-vertical-foot hike up Mount Difficult for panoramic views. And don’t miss the park’s ancient rock-face paintings (information at the ).

Primary Sources: Greg Child

54, Sydney native, climber

“, some 200 miles northwest of Melbourne, is the place that basically ruined my life and made me a climber. It shoots right up out of the flat savanna; the red sandstone is bullet hard, and every inch of it is covered with holds, some so easy even my seven-year-old daughter enjoyed herself. At the same time, Araps is home to plenty of challenging 5.14’s—some of which are just 40 feet tall. But they’re intricate and require the energy of much bigger climbs. You can walk around this rock for days and have a complete free-climbing experience unlike any you’ve had before.”

Access and Resources

How to get there —Ěýand around

flies from Sydney to Darwin (from $230 round-trip). If you’re going to road-trip in the NT, you want a four-wheel drive. Go with a Toyota Land Cruiser Bushcamper with a snorkel, kitchen, solar shower, and sleeping loft, from in Darwin ($120 per day). In Darwin, crash at the slick (doubles, $150). In Kakadu, catch a wildlife cruise with ($66). Don’t miss dining in the bush with ($150). At Uluru, stay at the (doubles, $269). Also, we’re serious about the water: where you see beach closed signs in the NT, don’t go in the water. The box jellyfish, or cubozoans, grow big as basketballs, can be deadly, and also show up in Queensland and New South Wales between November and March.

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It's a 100-degree October morning at the sweltering end of the Dry, and I’m barreling down south of Darwin, the coastal capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. A roadside dial indicates that the fire danger is Very High. This is three levels below Catastrophic—not so bad. The landscape here alternates between conflagration and inundation. There are two seasons: the Dry and the Wet. The latter, a six-month period that can see as much as three feet of rain, should be arriving a few weeks from now. Roadside posts measure the height of flooding over the road during the Wet. The warning signs are higher than the hood on my rented 4×4. Nearly every truck on the highway has a precautionary snorkel coming off the roof to get air to the engine in a flood. Mine doesn’t, but that’s fine. I’m just glad the motorcycle plan didn’t work out.

Dinner?

Arnhem land welcome

Australia’s Northern Territory, or NT, is one of the wildest landscapes on earth, an area twice the size of Texas with one-hundredth the population. It winds its way for 3,400 miles along Australia’s northern coastline, abutting the Arafura and Timor seas, and reaches 1,800 miles down into the heart of the country, a vast desert known as the Red Center. When my wife, Jess, and I looked into the idea of a road trip, we planned to ride a motorcycle 1,350 miles in ten days, from the coastal north to , the ancient 1,142-foot sandstone monolith, also called Ayers Rock, that’s the geologic heart of the Red Center. But the bike rental fell through, and that’s a good thing. This is not a place where you need to manufacture action. At a gas station, the headline on the local daily screams, “I DRANK MY OWN URINE TO SURVIVE!”

As I steer the 4×4, Jess reads the insurance waiver on our rental agreement aloud. It denies coverage of the following: anything that may fall on the vehicle’s roof or get tangled in the undercarriage, and any damage incurred by hitting an animal between dusk and dawn.Ěý

“Thrifty’s really covering its bases,” Jess observes. We head southeast, bound for the jungles of , passing the desiccated carcasses of cattle, wallabies, and buffalo hit by passing trucks.

SITUATED 130 MILES southeast of Darwin, Kakadu is twice the size of Yellowstone National Park. Its mangrove swamps, monsoon forests, and wetlands are home to 280 species of birds, 68 types of mammals, 120 reptiles, and 55 kinds of fish; its rock shelters hold some of the most ancient art on earth, 20,000-year-old Aboriginal paintings. During the Dry, most of the park’s creatures gather at billabongs, streambeds or pools that fill annually. After a miserable night of camping—pounding tent stakes into the ground was like hammering into a sidewalk, our single-wall tent managed to trap all the heat in the bush, and only an excellent Australian sémillon drank straight from the bottle brought any relief—we, too, make for the water. The Yellow Water billabong is a year-round network of floodplains, channels, and swamps. At a boat launch, Dave Darrington, a guide with salt-and-pepper hair and a fixed grin, beckons tourists. We climb aboard a 40-person aluminum boat and push off into the slow brown water.

Flocks of rainbow lorikeets hurtle past. A comb-crested jacana stilts its way across a skein of lily pads. Two big eyes rise to the murky surface, the pupils narrowing in the morning light. With a sweep of its crenellated tail, a 12-foot saltwater crocodile strokes alongside our boat, close enough to touch if you’re tired of your arm. Darrington informs us that these animals can jump six feet out of the water. Soon they’re everywhere, slipping down the banks and submerging like reptilian U-boats. The crocs were hunted to near extinction in the 1960s, but the population exploded after they were declared a protected species in 1971. Now they have the run of the place. A recent survey found 280 “salties,” which are larger and more dangerous than their freshwater cousins, in this billabong.Ěý

Soon, two adults begin thrashing on the far bank. One breaks free and glides slowly across our bow. There’s a ragged stub where its right front leg was moments ago but no blood—a crocodile’s circulatory system can divert blood flow away from missing limbs. I ask Darrington how long a person could make it in the water here. “About 25 seconds,” he replies.Ěý

The NT is a poor place for watersports. Saltwater crocodiles patrol the forested coastlines and can travel 100 miles inland along flooded waterways during the Wet. The beaches? Many are closed year round thanks to deadly box jellyfish, which can cause cardiac arrest. So you generally don’t swim here. But you really want to. The heat is visible, hanging in a thick haze.Ěý

By midday, Jess is scouring the map for relief. After a 25-mile drive up a washboard dirt road we reach Gunlom Falls, which pours 328 feet over a rocky escarpment into a deep pool. A couple of Aussie retirees in swimsuits cheerily tell us it’s safe—there are only mellower freshwater crocodiles in the vicinity. In the river below the falls, a huge steel croc trap has been baited with a rancid hunk of meat. We cut up a steep trail to the top of the escarpment, beyond the reach of the most adventurous reptile, where we plunge into a series of basins sluicing above the falls. The water forms a natural infinity pool looking out across Kakadu’s gum forests. Relief is that much sweeter when it’s hard-won.

THE EXPLORER’S HIGHWAY is a postapocalyptic-movie scout’s dream. From Kakadu it unspools in a straight line, changing quickly from tropics to desert. In places, wildfires have raged through unchecked, leaving an eerie tableau of charred branches and giant termite mounds. Somewhere past Past Pine Creek, I press the radio’s seek button and the stereo scrolls endlessly. In place of music or talk radio or anything at all, Jess reads aloud from the journals of , a Scotsman who braved scurvy and boomerang attacks to explore Australia’s interior in the mid–19th century: “My powers of endurance were so severely tested, that, last night, I almost wished that death would come and relieve me from my fearful torture.”

Jess says, “Glad to hear it’s not just me.”

There’s little traffic except for the road trains. The highways in northern Australia are straight enough that the semis can hitch up three or four trailers at once. South of the dusty market town of Katherine, I pull up next to a road train at a weigh station and introduce myself to the driver, a tattoo-covered guy named Rod who’s missing his front teeth. Rod walks down his line of trailers, checking the pressure in all 62 tires by whacking them with a tire iron. He’s driving three trailers of mangoes nearly 2,000 miles to the southern city of Adelaide. At full speed, it takes him a quarter-mile just to stop.ĚýI ask if that presents a problem, with animals wandering out into the road. “You don’t even feel the roos,” he tells me. “The cattle you do.” Despite the long hours and mind-numbing distances, Rod insists that the life of a truckie is a fine one.

It occurs to me that the Australian preference for infantilizing nicknames— “truckie,” “brekkie” for breakfast, “footy” for their sadistic version of football—might be a linguistic defense mechanism for living in such a harsh landscape. This nicknaming trend has had unfortunate consequences. One of them can be seen pretty frequently on the Explorer’s Highway: the wedge-tailed eagle, or wedgie, which feasts on the dead kangaroos at the side of the road.

THE ABORIGINAL communities of the NT adapted to the harshness of life here over millennia, but their experience since the arrival of Europeans in the 18th century has been particularly grim. Aborigines, who make up one-third of the NT’s population, live, on average, 16 years less than whites. Poverty, alcoholism, and domestic violence are entrenched. Aborigines were not granted the right to vote in federal elections until 1967, but in recent decades the land-rights movement has restored some traditional homelands—including national parks like Kakadu and Uluru—to their Aboriginal owners. Key to this “native title” struggle was a 1992 decision by the High Court of Australia that overturned the doctrine of , which held that the Australian continent had been a no-man’s-land until the Europeans arrived. These days much of the NT’s economy is driven by tourists who come to see the art and culture of a group that not so long ago was treated as subhuman. ĚýĚý

Nowhere are these ironies more apparent than in , the tourist gateway to the outback. The Alice, as it’s called, is sheltered by the 5,000-foot peaks of the , and the city itself is filled with Aboriginal art galleries and some of the best Thai food outside of Bangkok. Dog Rock, an outcrop of stone that’s sacred to the local Aborigines, sits in town. You can visit it and then, if you’re hungry, walk across the street to the McDonald’s.

One evening we travel into West MacDonnell National Park with Bob Taylor, a local chef and guide. As night falls, we pull into a campground surrounded by ghost gums. After chopping up some mulga wood with an ax, Taylor starts a fire and prepares a multi-course fusion of Australian and Aboriginal “bush tucker” cuisine. Dinner is a terrific array of emu sausage with locally foraged spices and kangaroo fillets, medium rare.

Taylor has a sturdy build, with wavy, gray-tinged hair and a light brown complexion. In New York City he could pass for any of a dozen ethnicities; in Australia he was raised with a single abstract label: “colored.” Taylor’s mother is white, his father Aboriginal. A common government policy, even as recently as the sixties, was to remove mixed-race children from their families. Taylor, born in 1960, was a member of this “stolen generation.”Ěý

“There wasn’t a choice,” he says, turning the emu over the smoking coals. “Mom couldn’t do anything but console us. They didn’t have to arrest you; they’d just put the heavies”—the territorial authorities—“on you and they would move you.” When he was eight, Taylor and his three siblings were removed from their parents and sent to an institution in Adelaide. He didn’t see his mother for two years, his father for twenty.Ěý

Taylor is grateful for some of the education and opportunities he received from the white world—he trained as a chef in Adelaide and has worked all over the globe—but he feels most at home among the Aboriginal community. “Sometimes people will say mixed race don’t know where they fit,” he says. “I know exactly where I fit, mate. It’s my skin and my body.”Ěý

We dig into a miraculous dessert of pudding with quandong fruit and wattle (acacia) seeds. “Aboriginal people still have an opportunity, because we’ve got lands, to live in a traditional way,” Taylor says. For him, this means developing tourism that teaches visitors to respect the landscape. “They come to the heart of the country,” says Taylor. “They come to watch the sunset and climb the rock.” He means Uluru, our destination. “To Aboriginal people,” he says, “it’s a lot more than that.”

THE ROCK rears into view soon after we nearly hit a feral camel lumbering across the road. , named by an Australian surveyor in 1873, or Uluru, as it’s been called by the Anangu people since time immemorial, is the eroded remnant of a massive sedimentary slab thrust skyward some 400 million years ago. It rises 1,142 feet straight up from a sea of dunes and spinifex grass, breaching like a red whale. Uluru was deeded back to the Anangu in 1985, along with Kata Tjuta, a series of nearby sandstone domes. Both sites are key to the creation mythology of the Anangu. Upon receiving the land, the original owners immediately leased it back as a national park in exchange for a 25 percent cut of park entry fees.Ěý

At a gate near the eastern end of Uluru, we come across a sign that lays out the ethical dilemma faced by the 300,000 visitors who come here each year. Please Don’t Climb Uluru, it says in half a dozen languages. Before it was handed back to the Anangu, climbing Ayers Rock was what every tourist came to do. It has been a source of debate since the return, the traditional owners claiming it’s a violation, tour operators arguing it’s an economic necessity. There’s a plan to ban climbing in the next decade, but for now it’s merely discouraged. Still, about 100,000 people make their way to the summit every year, hauling themselves up a chain bolted into the rock at the steepest pitches. Three dozen or so have died—from heatstroke or, as one guide tells me, falling down “the world’s largest cheese grater.”Ěý

A smudge of boot prints traces up Uluru’s flank, and the Anangu contend that the lack of bathrooms on the three-hour climb has contributed to the contamination of the sacred water holes around its base. And the conflict over Uluru hasn’t exactly been defused by the antics of some visitors: a French woman who stripped on the rock and an Aussie footballer who .

The desire to distance myself from this kind of jackassery overrides the urge to look down at the world from on high. In the predawn hours of the next morning, we head to the far edge of Uluru and walk the six-mile trail around its base as the sun breaks the horizon. The rock is an astonishing interplay of geology and light, all red waves and folds. We say nothing, and we have the place to ourselves. And then we don’t. Reaching the base of the climb, we encounter a crowd of Japanese tourists. They stare balefully at the summit, which is closed to climbers due to high winds. Foiled, the Japanese have their photographs taken next to the CLIMB CLOSED sign. Then they clamber back into the comfort of their air-conditioned bus. We reach our vehicle and do the same. It’s mid-morning and already in the mid-nineties. Uluru is empty.

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The existence of Z and the fate of Fawcett have been the subject of debate ever since. Dozens of expeditions followed his trail into the jungle, encountering venomous snakes, vampire bats, electric eels, piranhas, flesh-eating maggots, disease, cannibals, and madness. In 2005, David Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was bitten by the same bug. To report The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon ($28, Doubleday), he rifled through folders of crumbling letters, searched out long-lost relatives, and finally tromped through the rainforest to a village near where Fawcett was last heard from. Grann is no hard-as-nails explorer, and his self-deprecating personal narrative—he can barely find his way out of a Manhattan camping store, he totes his laptop into the jungle—serves as a comic counterpoint to the superhuman exploits of Fawcett. Grann may not be able to hack the wilderness very well, but as a storyteller he’s first-rate, tracing Fawcett’s path from North Africa, where the explorer served as a spy, to the Amazon’s farthest depths. Grann’s Fawcett is the last of the great individualist explorers, a larger-than-life character pushed aside by an age in which scientific specialization and technological advances forever altered the way we understand the world. (Brad Pitt’s already signed on to play Fawcett in the film.) The neat trick Grann pulls off is restoring a pre-modern legend in the postmodern consciousness: At the book’s surprise close, he points to archaeological evidence hidden beneath the jungle that suggests Fawcett may have been right about Z all along. Grann doesn’t solve the mystery of Fawcett’s fate, but that’s OK. Some endings are best left to the imagination. Or Hollywood.

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