She flew down early on a Monday without telling her husband or kids where she was going or what she was doing. By the time she landed in BogotĂĄ it was late. The sky was hazy and dark, the air surprisingly cool, the roads crowded and chaotic.

Her hosts had prepared a bed at their apartment, but she couldn’t really sleep. The two gene therapies she would receive the next day—contained in dozens of vials packed in dry ice—had just arrived from the U.S., and everyone stayed up late talking about how they could change the course of history. When they drove her to the clinic on Tuesday morning, she stared through the window and tried to tune out the world, and then she hunched over her phone and texted her kids: “I love you.” Few people involved in the experiment, if any, even knew she was a mother.

In studies she’d read and videos she’d seen, mice that had received the treatment she was about to get were reborn, their fur glistening, their muscles newly taut. The change was almost immediate—a matter of days, weeks.

But lab mice are different than people. She knew that countless drugs that work on them do nothing for us. “I was hoping for magic,” she says. “Of course I was.” She imagined the needles piercing her skin, the clock suddenly spinning in reverse, the ravages of time and weather and hardship visibly undone. She thought about what all this could mean someday, for her and everyone else: the end of death.

The room at the clinic was clean and spare. There was a bed and, on her right, an IV drip, and there was a changing area where she slipped into a white gown with a blue pattern of atomic particles. In a video of the procedure that she agreed to show me almost three years later, her long hair spilled over the pillow as she lay down. She tried to lighten the mood by telling jokes, the same thing she’d done during the births of her two children. The others in the room—a doctor, a nurse, and two men with video cameras—chuckled. Then they started putting in the needles.

Over a period that lasted well into the night, there would be more than 100 injections, in her triceps and thighs and buttocks and even her face, just below the cheek. The pace was agonizingly slow. “So you’re saying this will still get to my organs, right?” she asked the doctor as he inserted a needle below her kneecap. It would, he assured her.

Some of the vials were still frozen, and the doctor pulled them out one by one, cradling them in his hands until they thawed. “Ready for this?” he asked as she rolled over to expose her shoulder blades. She hugged a pillow. “Hurry up,” she laughed. “I can’t wait to get this done.”

It was after midnight when she got the last injection. She was hungry and out of jokes and unsure of what would come next. It was September 16, 2015, and a strange kind of medical history had been made: in an untested procedure that would have violated federal regulations in the U.S., Elizabeth Parrish, a healthy 44-year-old from Bainbridge Island, Washington, the founder of a small biotech startup called BioViva, had received what she believed was a more potent dose of gene therapy than any other person ever had. She did it to fight what she called the “disease” of aging. She was, in her own words, Patient Zero in the quest for radically increased longevity.

Two days later, after monitoring her for fever or vomiting, the doctor decided she was safe to fly. Parrish, who is tall and blond, of Scandinavian descent, wore a surgical mask to the airport and went home. Even then she didn’t tell her family what she’d done, letting them believe that it was just another trip for her new business. “I didn’t want my husband to be stressed out, and I didn’t want him to stress me out,” she says. “I just needed everything to be normal.” When I asked later if I could interview her husband, she requested that I not. “I would really like to keep my family out of it,” she said. It was part of a pattern: She preferred that I never come to her home, so we talked on the phone or met in nearby coffee shops. She asked that I schedule interviews through BioViva’s satellite office in London. She wasn’t particularly used to people paying attention to her—and now, after she’d genetically modified herself, they did more than ever. The scrutiny made her uncomfortable.

Two weeks after Bogotá, when Parrish’s company issued a press release about the experiment, it didn’t let on that she was the guinea pig. “,” the release said. “The subject is doing well and has resumed regular activities.” She did her best to do just that. She read books and wrote e-mails and did laundry and made dinner and walked the dog in the woods and took her kids to school. She didn’t exercise much—no more than usual, less than doctors might recommend. She kept a journal. She looked in the mirror. She waited for something to happen. Every day for months she took a photo of her face, but if there were any changes, she couldn’t see them.

Until one drizzly morning in January 2013, less than three years before she became Patient Zero, Parrish was “mostly normal,” she told me, just an ordinary mom and a part-time working housewife. That day she dropped her husband off at the Bainbridge Island ferry terminal, across the bay from Seattle. Then she took her nine-year-old son to a doctor’s appointment. The boy had been getting up a lot at night to go to the bathroom, and she and her husband noticed that he kept getting thinner. At the clinic, a doctor checked his blood, checked his urine, and then looked at Parrish with a grave expression. “You have to go straight to the emergency room,” he said. “He has Type 1 diabetes.” Type 1, once known as juvenile diabetes, is a chronic condition in which the pancreas fails to produce insulin, the hormone that allows sugar to enter cells and supply energy. For a child to remain alive and healthy, the new reality is a life of carefully managed blood-sugar levels and, in some cases, endless injections.

Parrish dialed her husband and handed the doctor the phone, unable to deliver the news herself. Her son begged her to let him go home. Instead they drove straight to the ferry and rode across the choppy waters of Elliott Bay, watching in a daze as downtown Seattle rose before them. Her husband was waiting near the ferry dock; together they sped to Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Things like this weren’t supposed to happen to her kids. “I was such a nervous parent,” Parrish says. Before the family’s move to forested Bainbridge Island, when the children were young and they lived in Seattle, she’d made her house the neighborhood hangout—partly so that they wouldn’t be out of sight. Soccer was allowed, but she didn’t let them try riskier activities like river rafting or climbing. And yet none of that had helped her son.

Seattle Children’s Hospital sprawls across 25 acres in the city’s wealthy north end. It’s consistently ranked among the best pediatric facilities in the U.S., and its 403 beds are filled with the nation’s neediest cases—kids with cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, brain damage. The nurses and doctors gave Parrish and her husband a multi-day crash course in diabetes management. They assured her that her son had a manageable disease. “I can’t say enough good things about Children’s,” Parrish says. But experiencing the routines of modern American medicine also left her angry.

Even before her son’s diagnosis, Parrish had obsessively read medical news and science journals and the Facebook page I F#ing Love Science, tracking clinical studies like some people follow sports. Working with people she’d met on the internet, she had launched a nonprofit group, Stem Cell Voice, to educate the public about stem cells and ultimately push regulators to get life-changing treatments put into practice faster. Her son’s condition prompted Parrish to take a deeper look, and she became bothered by a disconnect. Science seemed to be accelerating—we’d decoded the human genome, cloned human stem cells, and started growing replacement organs—but medicine was standing still, she thought, held back by an overzealous FDA that required years of trials and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of R&D before new treatments were approved. Now that her son was lying in a hospital bed, the delays were personal.

“Why don’t we biobank his pancreas?” she asked her son’s nurse. She figured they could save part of it, freeze it, and wait for a future when it could be reengineered to produce insulin again. Didn’t they know what was possible now with stem cells?

“Look around,” the nurse said, trying to give Parrish some perspective. Her son would survive. Many of the surrounding beds held kids who would not. “But that was even more unacceptable,” Parrish says. “I just remember being so angry, so angry that kids were dying.”

The family went home to Bainbridge, and Parrish went into a dark place. She imagined her son dead. She imagined his funeral. She imagined her death. She tried to meditate but instead saw herself walking downstairs and finding his body, replaying the image of him being dead over and over.

Before long her son went back to school and her husband to work, and Parrish went online, channeling her sense of urgency into a hunt for cures. She traveled to medical conferences, where she stopped researchers in the halls with a question: “Can this help kids?” she asked. “How can it help kids?”

In September 2013, Parrish flew to Cambridge, England, for the sixth biennial conference of the SENS Foundation. SENS, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, is co-led by the anti-aging movement’s most recognizable face, Aubrey de Grey, a beer-loving polymath with a long, ragged beard. De Grey, who starred in a 2014 documentary called , has a background in computer science and biology, and he uses money he inherited, along with donations from Silicon Valley titans like Peter Thiel, to fund rigorous research into aging. The conference attracts researchers and philosophers and scientists like George Church, the famed Harvard geneticist. All the attendees are thrown together in the Queens College dorms.

Parrish, one of roughly 200 people in attendance, raced after experts when they finished their talks, peppering them with questions, discussing the future of genetics with Church—whose projects at Harvard include trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth by cloning—before she really even knew who he was. She watched presentations on calorie restriction and gene editing and tissue regeneration, and she heard speaker after speaker mention something called telomeres—tiny pieces of genetic material described as the body’s internal clock. People here were dreaming openly of an immortal future, of cures for all ailments, and when Parrish asked antiaging researchers her usual question, some seemed to say, Yes, this science could help kids. Of course it could. Curing death would help everyone. “What do you need?” she asked. They needed more money.

Money’s easy, Parrish thought. She’d helped her husband in the family’s software business, and she’d watched other tech companies bring it in. Funding this research seemed a lot more important than creating an app. Though she didn’t have the right degrees and she’d never launched a startup, she was desperate for cures. She had a mind for science. She knew she could charm people. She decided to start a company.

Without realizing it, Parrish was just ahead of Silicon Valley and its newly middle-aged billionaires, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page among them. Less than two weeks after SENS 6, Google launched a life-extension unit called Calico, seeding it with a reported $1.5 billion. A year later, the hedge-fund manager Joon Yun established the $1 million Palo Alto Longevity Prize. In 2016, the Bay Area startup Ambrosia began offering parabiosis treatments—transfusions that mix the blood of older adults with blood drawn from teenagers and young adults—for $8,000 per liter. Last year, Silicon Valley’s new Longevity Fund, led by 23-year-old Laura Deming, raised a quick $22 million, and the Bay Area’s Unity Biotechnology, which aims to zap dying cells from the body before they can accumulate, completed raising a $151 million round of funding from the likes of Thiel and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Valley had found a new problem to hack. If the body was a machine, death was just an engineering challenge.

A fellow conferencegoer from SENS 6 told Parrish that there was someone she really had to meet. His name was Bill Andrews. He was an ultramarathoner, a microbiologist, and a leading expert on telomeres—perhaps the only person in the antiaging world with the status of de Grey, with whom he would costar in The Immortalists. Parrish called Andrews almost as soon as she got home from Cambridge. She doesn’t remember the details of their first conversation, just that he had answers. “We really hit it off,” she told me. “We talked and talked and talked.”

For Bill Andrews, now 66, the quest began in 1962, when he was ten. He was in his front yard in Southern California, looking up at the night sky through a secondhand telescope—his Christmas gift—with an eight-inch reflector. Andrews’s father, who was tall and thoughtful like he is, had noticed his son’s intense interest in science. “He came out to the front lawn,” Andrews recalls, “and he said, ‘Bill, when you grow up, you should become a doctor and find a cure for aging. I don’t know why nobody’s done that.’ ” Andrews never forgot his father’s words. “I plan to live forever,” he writes in his new book, . “A lot of people claim that aging is something that we can do gracefully. It’s not. Aging is one of the worst things that can happen to a person.”

Even before Andrews went to college, and well before he earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Georgia, he had questioned the prevailing theories about aging. “Everybody used to think that we age because of exposure to the environment,” he says, the consensus being that we simply broke down “like old trucks sitting in a field.” But that didn’t seem right. Why did people living at high latitudes age at the same rate as people at the equator? Why did dogs and cats age at different rates?

“I thought there had to be a clock that ticks inside of us, and that’s the only way to explain aging,” he says. Andrews was in his forties by the time he heard about a concept that made sense. In 1993, at a California hotel near Lake Tahoe, he attended a talk by Calvin Harley, then the chief scientific officer of the Geron Corporation—which takes its name from gerontology, the science of aging—and listened in awe as Harley argued that repetitive DNA sequences called telomeres serve as the body’s cellular timepieces. Afterward, Andrews raced to the front of the room and asked Harley for a job. He got it.

Telomeres sit at the tips of chromosomes, inside the nuclei of human cells. Whenever a cell divides and its DNA is replicated, the telomeres become incrementally shorter, shrinking and shrinking until they’re nearly depleted and the cells can divide no more.

Telomeres and telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens them, were discovered in the late 1970s and early 1980s by scientists Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak. They made independent breakthroughs by studying pond scum and yeast cells, and their work turned out to be so consequential for other organisms that it won them a Nobel Prize in 2009.

At Geron, Andrews and his team were tasked with finding the human telomerase gene—which in theory could produce the enzyme and help replenish depleted telomeres. They looked for the telltale sequences in cancer cells, then Andrews used a computer program he had written to analyze the structures of promising candidates. In just over three months, they found the right gene: TRC3, later renamed TERC, or telomerase RNA component. A year later they discovered the crucial protein component, hTERT, or human telomerase reverse transcriptase. They began testing it in petri dishes, watching normal cells divide endlessly. They tested turning hTERT off in cancer cells, stopping the production of telomerase, killing the cancer cells by accelerating their aging. Soon Geron researchers were growing human skin from the cells of old people on the backs of lab mice, then treating the tissue with telomerase and seeing wrinkles, blisters, and age spots disappear.

In 1995, Geron published its telomerase discovery in the prestigious journal Science. It filed a raft of patent applications, some of them in partnership with the University of Colorado. The company thought it might have two breakthroughs on its hands—a cure for cancer, which would involve inhibiting telomerase in cancer cells, and a cure for aging, which would involve adding it or inducing it to healthy ones. It chose to focus on cancer first.

“That just shocked me,” Andrews says. “People have been looking for something to cure aging from the beginning of time, and this was the closest thing yet.”

Andrews left Geron and, in 1999, started Sierra Sciences, a biotech company focused entirely on aging. Bankrolled by five major investors, he began racing to find a pharmaceutical solution—in essence, a telomere drug. With dozens of staffers by the mid-2000s and a monthly budget of a million dollars, they identified more than 900 chemicals that measurably induced telomerase. Immortality seemed right around the corner. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and funding dried up.

By 2013, when Liz Parrish called Andrews, Sierra Sciences was operating on about $100,000 a month, kept afloat largely by the intellectual property it licensed to other companies. Until Andrews could round up serious money again, an FDA-approved telomere drug would be nowhere in sight. When Parrish phoned, he was 61, half a century older than when he’d first decided to cure aging, and the clock was still ticking.

There’s an interesting recording of Parrish and Andrews’s early conversations: a short-lived podcast that Parrish started when she launched the company that preceded BioViva, which she’d called BioTrove Investments. The two of them go over the basics of telomerase, hTERT, and a concept called the Hayflick Limit, a scientific principle established in 1961 by Leonard Hayflick, a professor of medical microbiology, and his colleague, Paul Moorhead.

Until then it was believed that human cells functioned like bacteria—that they could divide forever. Hayflick proved this wasn’t true. He observed that human cells in a petri dish could divide a finite number of times, around 50, before stopping and entering a kind of zombie state known as senescence. A young person’s cells, in general, can keep doubling longer than an elderly person’s.

“Somehow, the cells know how old they are,” Andrews says on the podcast. “The number of divisions levels off. That’s the Hayflick Limit. What’s now known is that it’s caused by telomere shortening.” Parrish asks how telomerase affects the Hayflick Limit. “Well,” Andrews answers, his voice picking up, “it obliterates it.”

Andrews goes on to say that gene therapy is the easiest way to get around the limit, but that the FDA is unlikely to approve such a treatment because aging isn’t classified as a disease. He cautions that the consequences of activating telomerase in all of one’s cells are unknown, and that gene therapy is a serious commitment—you can’t just undo it. “Maybe that might be OK,” he says. “We just don’t know yet.”

He also mentions a 2010 study led by Ronald DePinho, then of Harvard University, in which the result of turning on the telomerase gene in lab mice was a visible and dramatic return of youthfulness. “Whether it’s a true reversal of aging requires more studies,” he concludes. “But it sure looked good. I’d sure like to be one of those mice.”

Parrish laughs. Perhaps she already knows that Andrews will agree to construct part of her gene therapy. “Yeah,” she says. “I think we all would.”

Six months before Bogotá, in March 2015, Parrish made her first public appearance as CEO of . The setting was a business park in Scottsdale, Arizona, that serves as the meeting place of People Unlimited, a self-described “educational, lifestyle, and social organization for people passionate about living unlimited life spans.” This was a friendly crowd of a few dozen, many on the older side, and they were especially open to Parrish’s message.

The group, whose three leaders had previously run an outfit called the Eternal Flame Foundation, had just lost one of them, a preacher named Charles Paul Brown, who had begun assembling his flock in the 1960s after experiencing what he called a “Christing of the flesh” and supposedly becoming immortal. Acolytes had paid thousands of dollars a year to learn from him and his wife, Bernadeane, and their friend and business partner, James Strole. But Brown had suffered from Parkinson’s and heart disease, and he died at 79. A People Unlimited spokesperson admitted that Brown hadn’t really practiced what he preached—he hadn’t exercised enough, for one thing—and Strole and Bernadeane continued on, trying to inspire the flock without him.

Parrish took the stage at People Unlimited wearing a collared blouse and black blazer, finding her place between a baby grand piano and a clutter of other musical instruments. She’d always hated public speaking. But she was becoming a different person now.

“The reason I got into this was to cure childhood disease,” she said. “I never thought I’d be speaking on longevity. But when I started to look into the science, I started to realize it was time to fight a new war—the first old man’s war. By curing aging, we can help many of the diseases that children have.”

With remarkable fluency, she ran through a history of mortality. Humans once died mostly from infectious diseases. Then we developed antibiotics. Now we die mostly from the maladies of aging—cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s. We need to develop a new kind of breakthrough technology, she said. We need gene therapy.

A logo appeared on the screen behind her. “This is my company, BioViva,” she said. She opened her arms grandly, smiled broadly, then giggled. “We want to change everything.”

To get U.S. government approval “to bring gene therapies to you,” Parrish went on, “I would have to go raise almost a billion dollars. It would take about 15 years of testing. And when I’m looking out there, I’m seeing people who don’t want to wait 15 years.” The crowd began clapping, and Parrish fed off it. “How do we actually change this paradigm? Well, what we do is we burn and raze everything to the ground. And we start over.” People hooted and cheered.

In the U.S., she continued, bioethics “go kind of like this: A doctor shall not harm, and yet a doctor shall put you on every pharmaceutical. They’ll put lines into your body. They’ll keep you alive until you absolutely can’t stay alive anymore, and then they’ll let you go, and they’ll feel like they’ve done a good job. I want to change that. I want to say that their experiment has effectively failed. We will now move into what they consider experimental medicine.”

By the time of her talk in Scottsdale, Parrish had already called investor after investor, finally securing one who could provide the $250,000 needed to pay for a gene-therapy experiment in BogotĂĄ. She already knew the test subject would be her.

She had also assembled a team of doctors and scientists at BioViva, including a radiologist named Jason Williams who had signed on as the company’s chief medical officer. Williams was noteworthy for two reasons. First, it was Parrish’s understanding that he had experience with the use of a gene-therapy treatment meant to inhibit the protein myostatin, which regulates muscle growth. (Experiments that inhibited myostatin had resulted in comically ripped , as well as the birth around 2000 of a very robust boy in Berlin, who doctors called Superbaby.) Second, he had recently opened a clinic in Bogotá after clashing with the FDA over unapproved stem-cell treatments that he was providing in Alabama.

One of the first things BioViva would do involved “a very special gene therapy,” Parrish told the People Unlimited audience. “It’s special because it’s the only gene therapy that’s actually reversed aging in animals. It reversed aging in every human tissue it’s been applied to.” She smiled again. “This is our biggest hope. Why it has never been used in a human body, I have no idea. I guess that’s why I came along.” The crowd cheered again. “Thank you, thank you,” she said.

As Parrish knew, Strole and Bernadeane were planning something big for 2016: a gathering in Southern California they would call RAADfest—the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival—which would bring together the true believers of People Unlimited with the more scientific set from SENS 6.

“I understand we’ll be meeting in 2016,” Parrish told the crowd at People Unlimited. “My company will shoot to have results of age reversal by the time we meet.”

As it happened, the news of Parrish’s gene therapy broke before RAADfest. In late 2015, Antonio Regalado, a reporter from MIT Technology Review, began poking around, calling BioViva’s scientific advisers and pressing for details about what had happened in the experiment. At least one of the unpaid advisers, who in many cases had met Parrish at conferences and had been charmed enough to be listed on BioViva’s website, now had questions of their own about what she had done.

She decided to get ahead of the Technology Review reporter, who didn’t initially know that she had been the experiment’s test subject. On a Sunday morning in October, three days before his story was published under the title “,” she logged into Reddit, introducing herself as “the woman who wants to genetically engineer you” and as the CEO of BioViva. “I am not a medical doctor or scientist,” she wrote. But BioViva had just treated its first patient for aging. “AMA,” she typed—.

The first commenter asked her favorite pizza topping. “Sun-dried tomatoes,” she answered. “:)”

The next person asked: How did you pick the first patient? “I am Patient Zero,” she answered. “I have aging as a disease.”

Testing BioViva’s products first on herself, Parrish said, had been the only ethical choice. She had been injected with both hTERT and a myostatin inhibitor. The Redditors praised her bravery. “I am proud to have taken part in helping millions of people, even if it has bad results,” she wrote. “I am happy to be Patient Zero. It is for the world, for the sick children and sick old people.”

Was there a cancer risk? someone asked. BioViva would be monitoring all known cancer biomarkers in her body, Parrish answered. But inserting the telomerase gene in lab animals hadn’t increased their cancer rates, she said.

“Do remember that the most important risk factor for cancer is growing older,” she wrote. “Most cancers occur in people over the age of 65.”

What about ordinary people: Would they be able to afford the treatment? “Gene therapy technology is much like computing technology,” she replied. “We had to build the super computer, which cost $8 million in the 1960s. Now everyone has technologies that work predictably and at a cost the average person can afford.”

As the AMA went on, the questions started to become more existential. “If/when this becomes reality for the general public,” someone asked, “how will this affect population rates?” And what about the physical limitations of the planet? What about the possibility that we could create two classes of people: an overclass that could afford to pay for these therapies and an underclass that dies right on schedule?

BioViva wasn’t “trying to determine who should live or die,” Parrish wrote. “Everyone has a right to life without suffering.” A user assailed her logic: “It’s not obviously true that life-extension technology will reduce the number of lives lived in suffering.
 You are trying to create technologies which, if successful, are likely to change the distribution of deaths among the population, and the potential wider effects of that change deserve some consideration.”

She responded quickly. “As life span increases, fertility rates go down all over the world,” she wrote. “Humans will create better technology and space travel will increase.” She soon signed off. The good outcomes that had seemed obvious to her were apparently less obvious to the rest of the world.

By the time the MIT Technology Review article came out in October 2015, one member of BioViva’s scientific advisory board, University of Washington gerontologist George Martin, had resigned. Another, George Church, stressed his support for proper clinical trials and seemed to downplay his ties to BioViva.

“I advise people who need advice, and they clearly need advice,” he later told The Guardian—even as his lab accepted the blood samples Parrish sent in after the Bogotá experiment. Early telomere advocate Michael Fossel, a physician who wrote the 1996 book Reversing Human Aging, along with The Telomerase Revolution in 2015, and who now ran a biotech company that planned to use hTERT to combat Alzheimer’s, offered damning praise for Parrish on his blog.

“We cannot help but applaud Liz’s courage in using herself as a subject, a procedure with a long (and occasionally checkered) history in medical science,” he wrote. And doing so “undercuts much of the ethical criticism that would be more pointed if she used other patients.” But the standard path, including FDA-approved trials, assured three things: safety, efficacy, and credibility. In Parrish’s case, what had happened was more like a single trial with a single subject, which wasn’t rigorous enough to provide credible proof of anything. “It is easy to act, it can even be easy to act with genuine compassion,” Fossel concluded, “but it is hard to act effectively and harder still to ensure that compassion is not only the intent, but the final reality.”

Parrish’s Reddit AMA and Regalado’s story were followed by a flood of blog posts, YouTube videos, and interviews with sites like Singularity Weblog and Longevity Reporter. The Guardian and Discover magazine called.

“The experiment seems likely to be remembered as either a new low in medical quackery or, perhaps, the unlikely start of an era in which people receive genetic modifications not just to treat disease, but to reverse aging,” Regalado had written. In the fringe where Bill Andrews and Aubrey de Grey often dipped their toes, where real science mixed with something approaching religion, Parrish became an immediate hero. Conference bookers invited her to give keynote speeches around the world. She was soon flying to Moscow, New York, Hong Kong, Paris, Oslo, Oxford, and even Astana, Kazakhstan. She began living part-time on Bainbridge Island, part-time out of a suitcase.

She told her best friend what she’d done, then her dad, who’s in his seventies and has early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. He told her she did the right thing. And yet, for another seven months after the Reddit AMA, even as more news stories ran and Facebook lit up with her name, Parrish still kept the news from her husband and kids.

Then one day in the spring of 2016, her son came home from middle school with a question. He’d read on the internet that she’d genetically modified herself. Was this true?

She couldn’t withhold any longer. “I was like, ‘Oh, honey, I did,’ ” she recalls. The boy, now soccer obsessed and successfully navigating life with diabetes, took it in. Then he started singing: “Mom’s gonna live forever. Mom’s gonna live forever.”

Parrish says her husband was livid when she finally told him, but she still felt sure that her actions were necessary. It wasn’t right to ignore a problem, especially one as big as death, and just leave it for the next generation to try and solve. She did this for the kids, she told her husband. “I’m teaching them how to live.”

It was clear that something had changed inside her, but as time passed it was less than clear whether that something was physical. She hadn’t turned back into a 25-year-old. Nor, on the bright side, did she appear to have cancer. Her biomarkers—triglycerides, C-reactive proteins, muscle mass—were promising but ultimately inconclusive, since they were the results of just one person, and not published in a peer-reviewed study.

In April 2016, BioViva issued another press release: “First Gene Therapy Successful Against Human Aging.” The results of Parrish’s telomere tests were in. Comparing blood that was drawn before and after her procedure, a specialist lab in Houston had determined that her white blood cells’ telomeres—whose length was measured by counting the number of DNA base pairs—had increased by 9 percent. The release said that this was equivalent to reversing 20 years of aging. But there was no published study to go along with it, and the news was easy to dismiss.

Throughout Parrish’s ascent to telomere superstardom, Bill Andrews remained largely silent about her gene therapy—until recently. “I take full blame,” he told me. “I was a chickenshit. You can quote me on that.” He doesn’t regret getting Parrish excited about telomeres, and he doesn’t regret his part in her gene therapy. What he means is that, because he told her he couldn’t be involved in any experiment—because he didn’t want to jeopardize his years of research if it went awry—he wasn’t there at her side to make sure she did it right. “She’s really made telomere biology come out to the forefront,” Andrews says. “She’ll never be left out of the history of telomere biology.” But the fact is, she looks pretty much the same as she did before, and what she did wasn’t a scientific trial. “I can’t even tell if she used a legitimate protocol” when she used the gene therapy, Andrews says. “We didn’t get enough data. We don’t have anything we can really measure.” To Andrews, Parrish is an example of someone who was incredibly brave, but not someone who became young again.

When RAADfest 2017 opened its doors last August, Parrish was halfway through her 46th year. She wore a black dress and red lipstick and an Apple Watch, and in her purse she had an iPhone with an app that let her track her son’s blood-sugar levels in real time, day or night. For the second year in a row, Strole and Bernadeane were hosting RAADfest at the Town and Country San Diego, an old 42-acre resort hotel with swimming pools and plastic flamingos and a convention center that was only a few feet from the edge of Interstate 8.

Beneath the Town and Country chandeliers, gray-haired attendees took slow steps on faded carpets, making their way to the main stage or the exhibition area, known as RAADcity, where marketers hawked nutraceuticals, deuterium-free water, stem-cell banking, ozone therapies, and $100,000 “health-optimization packages.” Bill Andrews sometimes stood next to a nearly full-size portrait of Bill Andrews, which advertised an antiaging skin serum called One Truth 818. One man walked around wearing a shirt that said MAY I BID ON YOUR CRYONICS LIFE INSURANCE?

Parrish tried to steer clear of RAADcity. All the unscientific claims made her uncomfortable, she told me. She strode tall through the conference center, trailed at times by a film crew from the BBC, and strangers and friends kept stopping her. I watched her field questions from a young woman on crutches, then hold hands for half an hour with a hunched old lady from People Unlimited who was begging for access to BioViva’s gene therapy. A young man from New York City whose mother was terminally ill followed Parrish around, writing down everything she said. Just a few years ago, at SENS 6, this had been her. Now she was on the other side, trying to give people hope.

What Parrish had been saying about genomics—that we were on the verge of a revolution—seemed to be coming true. On the first day of RAADfest, just as a biomedical engineer from George Church’s lab at Harvard gave a talk on using the genome-editing tool Crispr to switch genes on and off, attendees saw a headline pop up on their phones: “.” A few weeks later, the FDA would approve the first gene-altering treatment to fight leukemia, a therapy from Novartis called Kymriah. Two months after that, it would approve a similar gene therapy for the blood cancer non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That fall, gene therapy would also be shown to save children with the fatal brain disease adrenoleukodystrophy, and doctors in Europe would use gene therapy to regrow the skin of a young Syrian boy, saving his life.

At the main stage, I watched Parrish give a rousing speech about medical choice—“You have a right to do with your body what you wish!”—and get a standing ovation. Then I listened as Aubrey de Grey anointed her with a surprise endorsement. Pacing the stage in a red shirt and faded jeans, he described a revelation he’d only had well into his adulthood: not everyone agreed that death was the most important problem in the world.

“You don’t enter into discussions with people about obvious stuff, right?” he said. “I never said, What color do you think the sky is?” He now understood that it wasn’t enough to explain how humans could extend life—they also had to explain why. He could do the science part. Strole and Bernadeane could do the motivation part. “RAADfest is a success because of the combination of those two things,” he said. “But the best thing we could possibly have is to see that combination in a single person. And I believe that Liz Parrish does that better than anybody else.”

Parrish barely caught de Grey’s speech. She was spending a lot of time in the dining hall, huddled at one of the round tables with Andrews, talking in low tones about deals and contracts. A mysterious investor, or rather the mysterious employee of an unnamed potential investor, appeared and disappeared. Another man, with a shaved head and a thick build, sometimes hovered, too.

For two years, Parrish had been claiming that BioViva would soon open overseas clinics—perhaps in the Caribbean or Latin America, perhaps somewhere closer to Europe. Not long before RAADfest 2016, she and Andrews had made a coordinated announcement: they were partnering in a new venture called BioViva Fiji. They showed off an architectural rendering of a generically modern gene-therapy clinic, all steel beams and big windows and wood accents. They seemed to be waiting on funding—Andrews’s usual state of suspended animation, and now, it seemed, Parrish’s, too. When the Fijian press caught wind of BioViva Fiji, authorities told journalists that it didn’t exist, not even on paper. And at RAADfest 2017, neither Parrish nor Andrews seemed too keen to talk about it anymore.

It took a few months before I understood what I was seeing in the dining hall. It was the prelude to a breakup, a friendly (and perhaps temporary) parting of ways. In December 2017, a new company called Libella Gene Therapeutics, run by a bald occupational therapist from Kansas, Jeff Mathis, announced that it had secured an exclusive license from Bill Andrews for his AAV Reverse (hTERT) transcriptase enzyme technology. Libella was now recruiting patients for a first-ever study in Cartagena, Colombia. “By inducing telomerase,” a press release said, “Dr. Andrews and Libella Gene Therapeutics hope to lengthen telomeres in the body’s cells.”

There was no mention of BioViva, no mention of Parrish, no mention of her self-experiment. Parrish and her ambiguous results seemed to be missing from the story. Telomerase had “never been put into humans, except at low doses,” Andrews excitedly told an interviewer. He was certain it was going to work. The upcoming trial in Cartagena, he said, “is actually the first opportunity in over 25 years of research where we’re actually going to be able to show that everything I’ve been doing was worthwhile.”

“We fall into time,” Parrish likes to say. It’s meant to sound futuristic. We always keep ourselves busy, she means. We fill the space. It’s her stock answer to a question immortalists often hear: If we live forever, won’t we get bored? It may also explain how she became Patient Zero, and how nothing and everything has changed since then. Life keeps hurtling forward.

On a recent sunny day on Bainbridge Island, Parrish and I met for lunch so she could tell me about BioViva’s new direction. She looked like a healthy and normal 46-year-old. She said she felt like she had at least a little more energy than before. She wanted to order the soup, but it wasn’t vegan, so she went for a salad.

“So, BioViva is now a bioinformatics company!” she announced. It was pivoting. It wasn’t trying to do clinical trials for the time being. Even offshore, away from the FDA, they cost millions of dollars, and raising that kind of money to do traditional trials would amount to the kind of slow-moving medicine she was trying to overcome. BioViva would be a data platform for other companies, collecting and analyzing the information they gathered from their trials. She mentioned a budding partnership with the broker Integrated Health Systems, which has a sparse-looking website, put together in the past few months, that claims to connect biotech companies and paying patients with doctors who specialize in gene therapy. She mentioned another potential partnership with a company in Hong Kong that does machine learning. She didn’t have anything to say about Libella. She just wasn’t focused on what they were planning in Colombia.

Parrish seemed less guarded than before. Lately, she told me, she had been trying to spend more time at home with her son, like in the days before his diagnosis, before she started traveling constantly. “I’m just so stuck on this kid,” she told me. “He’s getting so big. I’m so proud of him.” She told me about his soccer team. She kept checking his insulin levels with the phone app. She seemed genuinely happy. It was as if she’d stopped trying quite so hard to live forever, but she was still trying hard to live. 

McKenzie Funk () is the author of He lives in Seattle.

The post Liz Parrish Wants to Live Forever appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In 2010, the people of Russia were , and the people responded—creating 24,000 cartoon bears, tigers, saints, snowflakes, witches, and wolves in just three months, a forest of candidates, a seeming triumph of democracy. The upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics, in the southerly city of Sochi, had until then been Vladimir Putin’s pet project. The new Russia was to be showcased at the president’s favorite Russian ski area and coastal resort, with facilities in the Caucasus Mountains and along the Black Sea built from scratch by his most favored oligarchs.

Sochi Construction Workers

Construction workers in Krasnaya Polyana

Seaside Santorium

A seaside sanatorium in Sochi

Sochi Map

Sochi Inset Map

Olympic Lodging Sochi

Olympic lodging being built above Krasnaya Polyana

Sochi's Halfpipe

Sochi's halfpipe

“Sochi is a unique place,” Putin had told the International Olympic Committee in 2007, when his personal touch helped Russia beat out Austria and South Korea for the chance to host the Games. “On the seashore, you can enjoy a fine spring day—but up in the mountains, it’s winter.” Putin had flown to the IOC meeting in Guatemala just to deliver his country’s pitch. He’d spoken English, one of the few times he’s done so publicly. Now, to ignite similar Olympic passions in Russia, his government held a mascot contest. Common citizens would submit designs and vote for a winner. Whoever came up with the champ would receive two tickets to the Games.

Forty minutes after it was introduced online, a to the top of the ranks, and it stayed there until the contest was done. There are a few reasons why. One is that democracy, even carefully managed democracy, is messy. Another, as I witnessed over and over when I visited Sochi last February, is that Putin’s Olympics are Putin’s Russia in microcosm. The frog wore a tsarist crown on its head— a reference to “nationhood and spirituality,” explained its creator, the Moscow cartoonist Egor Zhgun, with faux solemnity. In its eyes, in place of pupils, were rotating Olympic rings: black, yellow, blue, red, and green. The frog was covered in fur—these being the Winter Olympics, after all—and it had no hands, which left many people wondering about the intended metaphor. (Zhgun says he simply neglected to draw them.) Its name was Zoich, a clever use of letters and numerals. To a Russian eye, the 2 in 2014 looks like a Z. The 4 looks like the letter Ч, which is pronounced ch. With a squint, or a bit too much vodka, “2014” reads “Zoich.”

, the frog is seen sipping a martini in a disco with the Cookie Monster, paratrooping into a city while attached to a string of balloons, kicking a rival candidate (a freshwater dolphin on skis) into a pit, and having a drink with one of the other subversive mascots, Pila, or “Saw”—a reference to the financial corruption, known as “sawing the budget,” that everyone expected to plague Olympic construction. The video was viewed 700,000 times. Love for Zoich spread to national newspapers and television. While no one knew quite what to make of the frog, its popularity felt dangerous. It was hard to see Zoich as anything but a protest candidate.

I met Zhgun in a Moscow cafĂ© during a layover on my way to Sochi last winter, almost exactly a year before the Games would begin. Twenty-seven years old, tall and lanky, he was a soccer and hockey fan with no particular interest in the Olympics. “When I was drawing Zoich,” he told me, “I didn’t realize he would become a symbol of the opposition, but I was OK with that.” People started making bootleg Zoich T-shirts and ashtrays. Zhgun began dreaming up games to put on Zoich’s website. “One was like Jenga,” he said. “I wanted a game with the Olympic stadium made out of blocks of money. How much can you steal before it falls down?”

At the time of the contest, Putin, who had taken the lesser position of prime minister after reaching his presidential term limit, was quietly orchestrating a return to the top. The opposition—mostly urbanites like Zhgun— was beginning to mobilize. In a little over a year, there would be 100,000-person protests and counterprotests in Moscow, prompting bloody clashes with police. When Putin successfully reclaimed the presidency in 2012, with 64 percent of the vote, election observers noted that, despite allegations of ballot “irregularities,” fraud wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the government controlled who got to run in the first place. The real opposition wasn’t even on the ballot.

The final round, a televised poll aired on Russia’s Channel One, attracted more than a million viewers—the highest number for a single broadcast since the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest. The polar bear had been far ahead with the public, but on the morning of the vote, Putin, who was visiting with schoolchildren in Sochi, was asked which mascot was his favorite. It happens that there’s a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) leopard-breeding program based inside a national park outside the city. There’s a leopard pen in the park that was built with Olympic money. Putin—who has been photographed flying heroically with storks and shooting tigers with tranquilizer darts—has twice shown up to personally welcome transplanted leopards, still groggy after flights bringing them from Turkmenistan and Iran. By now the leopard mascot had been professionally retouched and given a new name: Barsik. According to his official bio, Barsik is the epitome of an intrepid but solitary leader. He is “a rescuer and mountain-climber who lives in the uppermost branches of a huge tree, on the highest peak of the snowy mountains in the Caucasus. He is always prepared to help those in need.”

“The leopard is a strong, powerful, fast, and beautiful animal,” Putin told the kids. “Leopard species had been destroyed around here, but now they are being regenerated. If the Olympic project, at least in some way, should help the local environment, then it would be symbolic.” After voting ended that night, three official mascots were unveiled: a bunny, a polar bear, and the not-too-surprising winner, Barsik the snowboarding snow leopard.

THE WWF’S LEOPARD enclosure was hidden in the forest to our left as photographer Simon Roberts and I drove up into the Caucasus from Sochi International Airport, but we didn’t have time to stop. A year before the Olympics, Sochi’s newly built mountain facilities were hosting test events: skeleton and luge, skiercross and boardercross, halfpipe skiing and snowboarding. Teams from all over the world were converging on Russia’s only subtropical city, a resort town close to Turkey once known mostly for the sanatoriums where Soviet workers came to recharge. Opening ceremonies and half of the 2014 events—ice skating, hockey, curling, anything requiring a roofed stadium—would be held in what organizers call the Coastal Cluster, which sits beside the Black Sea about 20 miles south of the center of Sochi, an urban sprawl that’s home to nearly 400,000 people. The main 40,000-person stadium, called Fisht, features a translucent egg-shaped shell through which spectators will be able to see the snowy Caucasus. But to get to the slopes and the rest of the events—the Mountain Cluster—they will have to travel (as Simon and I did) an hour or more up the gorge of the Mzymta River, to the village of Krasnaya Polyana, a journey slightly shorter than that between Vancouver and Whistler during the 2010 Winter Olympics. The traffic was so bad when we neared Krasnaya Polyana that we turned onto a side street, and our rental car bounced on to the hotel through cavernous potholes of mud. We arrived just in time for the welcome party: dancing Cossack boys pounding on drums, girls spinning and shouting, and dozens of foreign snowboarders and freeskiers clapping and drinking.

By this time, the world was beginning to worry about Sochi’s proximity to Chechnya; about the pledge by the jihadist Caucasus Emirate to put a stop to the “satanic games”; about the exiled Circassian people, Sochi natives for whom 2014 was the 150th anniversary of a genocide; about Russia’s new laws restricting homosexuality; about Russia’s role in Syria; about graft and the Games’ record-breaking $51 billion price tag—greater by at least $8 billion than the cost of the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, the last time an authoritarian country decided to build the Best Games Ever from scratch. Some even worried about who would win and lose. But in Krasnaya Polyana, all this seemed far away. Who would win if the Games came together and were deemed an international success was obvious: Putin. The people on the losing side were everyday Russians, who saw their mountains and coast and city turned into the biggest construction project in Europe— especially the everyday Russians who dared to try and stop it.

It was the middle of winter, but Krasnaya Polyana had no snow. Even in daylight, it had almost no color: a construction site in gray scale. The village’s clamor of jackhammers and dump trucks and worker transports began at dawn, and Simon and I stepped out to follow groups of Uzbek and Kyrgyz guest workers through the side streets. They walked to their job sites with their heads down, smoking, skirting puddles. Others were already scrambling through the half-built shells of buildings that seemed to fill the valley wall-to-wall. I saw sparks from distant welders’ torches and stopped in front of one complex to count its cranes: 13. “It’s like a gold-rush town,” Simon muttered. Banners hung from the sides of many buildings, depicting the ritzy slopeside condos and hotels that would be in place when the Games begin on February 7. February temperatures in Krasnaya Polyana average 34.7 degrees, but the buildings on the banners were covered in snowdrifts. Until the clouds pulled back and I caught a glimpse of the steep peaks above, this was the only winter in sight. I found a pair of rental skis in a tiny shop across from a workers’ canteen adorned with Coca-Cola signs.

A few days before we arrived, ‹Putin decided to crack down on ‹delays and overruns by making an ‹example of one of Russia’s Olympic Committee officials, Akhmed Bilalov. At an unfinished ski jump a few hundred yards from where we stood, Putin had shamed him on national television, strongly hinting that he was corrupt. Twenty-four hours later, Bilalov was out of his post; a few months after that, he surfaced in a German hospital, where he was undergoing treatment for an inexplicable case of mercury poisoning.

The only part of the village that seemed close to completion—two rows of tall hotels and pedestrian walkways flanking the Mzymta River—was where Simon and I went to catch a gondola to the test events. If I ignored the fresh paint and endless construction mess as we approached the modern Doppelmayr gondola station, this could have been Colorado. The impression lasted until I saw Russian soldiers with automatic weapons—a nod to what lay due east of us: restive Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia. The soldiers manned a metal detector. They made me scan my boots but not my skis or poles. There were also white-clad snipers hiding on the slopes, athletes said, but I was never able to spot one myself.

Some test events had been canceled for lack of snow, and disappointed competitors were already streaming to the airport. The same thing had happened the previous winter, when World Cup skiing came to Sochi for the first time. But this year there was a halfpipe, a slab of ice and snow formidable enough to have survived two weeks of rain, albeit in imperfect shape. Men’s snowboarding teams were competing as planned. To get to the halfpipe from the midway station, I had to boot-pack around a temporary fence, dodge rocks while going down a groomed run, and hop over a drainage pipe. A hundred-person crowd was assembled below, adjacent to the Olympic mogul field, which was mostly brown slush. I watched a Chinese snowboarder drop in, then a Norwegian. A competitor from the Bahamas was so proud after his last air that he pumped both arms triumphantly as he exited the pipe— and promptly caught an edge, crashing hard enough to knock his helmet off.

“Now the Italian style has arrived in Sochi!” the announcer boomed in English. An Italian boarder raced down, launched too far off the sidewall, and landed on the flat bottom of the pipe with a sickening thud.

I couldn’t understand why Putin loved to ski at Krasnaya Polyana, or why the Games would be held here, until I rode a higher lift to the top, at 7,612 feet. And then I understood very well. I popped through a cloud layer partway up, and an archipelago of peaks stretched to the horizon. Russia has many higher mountains, many mountains farther north, but here the Caucasus were equal in beauty to the Alps. The sharp, mostly treeless Aibga Ridge extended for miles to my right and left. The slopes tipped over and dropped relentlessly down. A downhiller or a sport-loving president-for-life could go fall-line for thousands and thousands of vertical feet, which I did, skiing untracked powder until it thickened into toothpaste and I dropped into the fog.

THE USUAL VICTIMS of the world’s mega-projects—unpaid or grossly underpaid migrant workers, residents forcibly evicted to make way for construction—were featured this year in a major Human Rights Watch report on Sochi alongside an unlikelier group: the 226 members of the local branch of the Russian Geographical Society. The report came out just before I visited, and the people of the RGS, accidental dissidents suddenly cast against the whole of the Russian state, became my guides to understanding what was happening to greater Sochi.

Founded in 1845, the RGS is Russia’s oldest scientific club, historically as respected and apolitical as the National Geographic Society is in the United States. During the Soviet era, branch offices were meeting places for scientists and explorers, launching points for expeditions inside the country and abroad. The club held its national meeting every five years in St. Petersburg, but otherwise each branch operated independently, setting its own agenda and raising its own funds. Though small in terms of population, Sochi was granted a branch in 1957 on the basis of the region’s extraordinary geographical variety. Local RGS members, some of the most active in all of Russia, kept it afloat by contributing dues, charging for lectures and school visits, and selling rock and plant collections as study kits to universities.

The Sochi RGS occupies the former home of a general who had been in charge of guarding Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, whose vacation dacha was hidden in thick forest just up the hill. It overlooks the gentle waves of the Black Sea and a set of train tracks carrying a rush of construction supplies in one direction, rubble in the other. The yellow house was stately and worn, and like many Russian properties, it appeared to have been suspended in amber since at least December 25, 1991, the day the Soviet Union dissolved. When Simon and I arrived from Krasnaya Polyana, however, members were building something new: a government-mandated decorative fence, which they had been ordered to install and pay for themselves. It cost nearly $14,000. The property bordered the main road between downtown Sochi and the Coastal Cluster. Everyone along the route was expected to do their part to help the city shine.

Inside, scientific secretary Maria Reneva, a soft-spoken, 40-year-old geologist and the branch’s day-to-day leader, and Yulia Naberezhnaya, a 37-year-old ecologist who wore hiking boots and a purple Gore-Tex jacket, described how they landed in Putin’s crosshairs. Maria’s husband, father, and mother were geologists, and her mother had preceded her as secretary. Maria joined the RGS in 1989 at age 16, just as the Soviet Union was breaking up. After the fall of communism, the Sochi RGS became legally independent, left to fend for itself. As other local scientific institutes collapsed along with the Soviet state, their archives found a home in the branch’s musty library, making it all the more important that the RGS stay alive. “We did everything to survive,” Maria said. “Environmental-impact assessments, geological work—everything.”

When Putin’s oligarchs began building an $8 billion combined highway and railway to the event sites in Krasnaya Polyana, aiming to cut Olympic travel time in half, the lead construction company ran into extensive limestone caves where it was planning to place a tunnel. Company officials sought out local speleologists and were directed to the RGS branch, which had Soviet-era cave studies in its library and the scientists who wrote them on its membership rolls. In this way, the branch got an early glimpse of what was about to happen to Sochi, and its members decided that they were against the road, against the Games, against all of it.

“We didn’t need to vote on whether we should oppose the Olympics,” Yulia said. “It was obvious to everyone that they were going to ruin everything.” The mountains would get more ski lifts, the river valleys highways, the caves tunnels, the beaches seawalls, and the wetlands stadiums.

Members of the RGS worked with local environmental groups to publicly voice concerns about the Olympics, but the hall they reserved was suddenly made unavailable, supposedly because of an accidental double booking. Another press conference, planned for the seashore adjacent to the new stadiums and disappearing wetland, was blocked by the government construction firm Olympstroy, which soon won a permanent injunction that effectively made certain public beaches private. To get the word out, members published articles in journals and on the club’s website, and they did as many media interviews as they could.

All of which attracted Moscow’s attention. In late 2009, the national leadership of the RGS called an extraordinary meeting: it had been decided that the organization needed a new charter. Under the proposal, branch offices would be stripped of their independent legal status. They would now get funding—and marching orders—from regional offices, which in turn would take orders from a new office of the executive director, based in Moscow. In effect, the RGS would be federalized—and the Sochi branch muzzled. In a separate vote, Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s minister of emergencies and a prominent member of Putin’s United Russia party, was elected the new president of the RGS. Until that day, he had not even been a member. Putin himself was given the surprise invitation to chair its board of trustees, which he accepted in a speech before the delegates.

“We are now the last branch that is not part of the new system,” Maria said. Any day now, a lawsuit would come from Moscow—they had been told it was imminent—and local officials were already making vague threats. “If we don’t join, we will have ‘problems,’ ” Maria said. Problems with their papers, problems with their taxes—whatever problems authorities wanted to find. Under the new charter, RGS branches could not own property, and the Sochi branch’s seaside house could be worth millions to the right oligarch. Just up the hill, glass-walled palaces were under construction along the road to Stalin’s dacha; they were rumored to belong to the local governor, another United Russia stalwart, who would use them to host guests during the Olympics. Maria and Yulia were trying to carry on as usual as they awaited the lawsuit. They told Simon and me that the branch’s monthly show-and-tell, which featured slide shows and expedition reports from regular members, would take place the coming Sunday. And if we wanted a reality tour of Olympic venues, they could give us one the day after tomorrow.

THAT SAME AFTERNOON, before Simon and I retreated to the faux luxury of our Sochi hotel, we went uphill to check out Stalin’s dacha, which you can arrange to tour. Built in 1937, its every detail was focused on keeping the dictator alive and healthy. The exterior was painted forest green, making the compound mostly invisible from above. The keyholes were airtight, so assassins couldn’t pump in poison gas. The couch in the movie room was stuffed with horsehair, which made it practically bulletproof. The steps on the staircase were precisely 13 centimeters apart, a height calibrated to Stalin’s gait, so that the brutal man who killed at least 20 million Russians wouldn’t trip and injure himself.

Every room had open windows and a balcony, a caretaker explained, “so that Stalin would get fresh air and the air would heal his lungs.” Few Russians were aware of Stalin’s poor health, she said, but it was the reason he came to Sochi in the first place. He had bad lungs and a bad back. His left arm was damaged in a childhood accident. When Stalin was born, one of his legs was an inch shorter than the other, so he wore special boots. “The second half of his life was torture,” said our guide, a wry woman who also worked as a bookkeeper. “But this is the place where sea air mixes with coniferous air. It is good for the lungs.” Stalin found his daily saltwater swims rejuvenating, too, and he decided that Sochi would be as much a boon for the average Soviet worker’s health as it was for his. The sanatoriums happened mainly because of him.

The woman walked us past Stalin’s bedroom. For $250 a night, you could sleep here and be served three meals a day in the dacha’s dining room. She showed us where the five-foot-four dictator posed for official photos— always shot by his personal photographer, who knew how to make him look tall and powerful, sometimes by asking him to sit on a pillow. In a corner room was his billiard table.

“Stalin’s friends were scared to beat him,” she said. “They always let him win. But one of the gardeners here, one year he lost—and the next year he won! After that, Stalin improved his living conditions.”

Stalin seemed to love Sochi as much as Putin does. “What would Stalin think about the Olympics coming to Sochi?” Simon asked.

“Stalin wouldn’t have let this event happen,” she said, “because it’s just ruining the city.”

VLADIMIR PUTIN also has a Sochi dacha— three, in fact, if rumors are to be believed. The rumors are backed up by property records, leaks from whistle-blowers, federal guards at the fence lines, and photos taken by activists and construction workers and posted online. Everyone in Sochi accepted them as settled truth. At least five people—scientists, translators, mountaineers—told me they had seen a secret presidential residence with their own eyes.

One of the dachas, a $350 million Italianate mansion known as Putin’s Palace, was on the Black Sea coast north of Sochi. Another was in the woods behind Krasnaya Polyana, close to the site for the 2014 downhill-skiing events. But the one I wanted to visit was more than 6,000 feet up the snowy flanks of the highest peak in the western Caucasus, 9,363-foot Mount Fisht, the namesake of the main Olympic stadium. The place was called Lunnaya Polyana, or Moonglade, and depending on whose map you believed, it was either inside or on the border of a protected Unesco World Heritage site—“one of the few large mountain areas of Europe that has not experienced significant human impacts,”Unesco pointed out when the western Caucasus were chosen for designation in 1999.

Once construction of a main lodge began in 2002, the site was officially listed as a weather station or a “scientific center” and given the name Biosphere. But then came ski lifts and helipads and Swiss-style architecture and multiple chalets and dozens of guest rooms and four new snowcats, and it became clear that Moonglade was something else: an elite private ski resort inside a onetime wilderness. There were no passable roads here; construction materials were brought by helicopter, presumably at enormous cost. Someone had nevertheless found room in the budget for flatscreen televisions, a moose head, a swimming pool, and at least two billiard tables.

After pictures of Moonglade appeared online, Putin’s press secretary said his experiences there were “exactly” like those of “ordinary tourists.” It was an odd statement, since ordinary tourists lack helicopters, and if they came to Mount Fisht at all it was during summer, when they could follow once popular Soviet trekking routes through fields of flowers and into the stunning high country.

Hikers had been some of the first to notice the strange construction at Moonglade. Some reported being chased off by guards who forced them to delete photos from their cameras. Images got out anyway, thanks in large part to the homegrown group Environment Watch on the North Caucasus, or EWNC, which began hiking to Moonglade for annual “inspections” in 2007. Photos and surreptitiously shot video appeared. In Moscow, opposition leaders added Moonglade to a list of increasingly lavish presidential perks that they cataloged in a 2012 report called “The Life of a Galley Slave.” The title was a reference to something Putin declared after his first turn as president: “All these eight years I toiled like a galley slave, from morning until evening, with every ounce of my strength.” According to the report, Moonglade was one of 20 palaces and country cottages that Putin had available for his personal use, along with four yachts, 15 helicopters, and 43 aircraft. The authors enlarged photos of Putin’s wrist taken during various public appearances and identified a watch collection worth roughly $657,000—more than six times his official annual salary.

I had arrived in Sochi with ski-touring gear, a map of Mount Fisht, and a half-baked plan to do a Moonglade inspection of my own—but the same rains that ruined various Olympic test events scuttled my chances. Jeep roads to the trailhead were impassably muddy, there wasn’t enough snow to move quickly on skis, and the mountain guides I called laughed at my plan, saying it would take me most of a week to hike up Mount Fisht and back. So I settled for an evening train trip northwest along the Black Sea to meet the founder of EWNC, Andrey Rudomakha, a legendary Caucasus activist who was perhaps the region’s most persistent thorn in Putin’s side. My train mates passed the time smoking, drinking tea, and talking loudly on their cell phones. But when sunset came and we passed empty pebble beaches lapped by dark waves, everyone stared out the windows and there was a moment of reverent silence.

AT THE STATION in Krasnodar, the regional capital, a group of college-age men met me with a cardboard sign that read STATE DEPARTMENT. One explained the joke: “Everyone thinks we’re funded by America.” Dissent in Russia was increasingly maligned as a foreign plot, and Putin had just signed a controversial law saying that any organization that receives money from abroad has to state clearly on paper and electronic documents that it is a “foreign agent.” My hosts and I piled into a junker Lada with a missing seat and raced to the small offices of Yabloko, or Apple, a green political party. Politics were Rudomakha’s latest experiment, an attempt— not yet very successful—to see if there was a way to fight for the Caucasus beyond picket lines and press releases.

Inside, young volunteers were devouring pizza while Rudomakha—in his youth a rock guitarist, Che Guevara admirer, and founder of a commune—typed quietly at a computer. His goatee and trademark pile of dark hair were now trimmed, almost respectable. He and I grabbed slices and sat down in the kitchen. The Olympics, Rudomakha told me, were an environmental disaster that he and the EWNC were protesting at every turn. Moonglade was just as “ecologically dangerous,” because the area had formerly been so pristine, but it was also where Rudomakha had achieved a major victory. A few years ago, authorities started to build a paved road to Moonglade through the heart of the wilderness, and the EWNC filed a lawsuit, sent activists to block machinery and loggers, and made an emergency appeal to Unesco. A public warning by Unesco that it might have to add the western Caucasus to its list of threatened World Heritage sites was enough to get the road canceled, even if the ski lodge remained, and even if a fight now loomed over a different road project, to access Moonglade from the other side. “There is no law in Russia,” Rudomakha said. “That’s why most of our fights are fights to lose. But this has Unesco. We may have a chance.”

Why did the oligarchs need a road at all, I wondered, when they had helicopters? “National security,” Rudomakha explained. According to yet another rumor, impossible to confirm, Putin once became stuck at the dacha when a winter storm grounded his chopper. He had to go back down the mountain on foot, like an ordinary tourist. That was unacceptable.

Rudomakha had hiked in to inspect Moonglade four times, and with each visit he saw more security. Most recently, he said, there was a fence and a watchtower. Rudomakha’s deputy, a clean-shaven man named Dima, pulled out a laptop to show me on Google Maps how to find Putin’s palace on the Black Sea, which also occupied public land and was surrounded by a tall fence. Dima told the story of a time when he and another well-known EWNC activist, the biologist Suren Gazaryan, made an inspection of the palace. Inside, they came across a surprised security guard and a man in camouflage, who told Dima he was an officer in the presidential guard.

“What is the Presidential Security Service doing here?” Dima asked.

“None of your business,” the man replied.

Officers from the FSB, the successor to the KGB, appeared, along with border guards, although any border is over a hundred miles away. Then came local police and men from a private security company. “They took all our cameras,” Dima said, “and suddenly there was no mobile-phone service. They broke into Suren’s car and took notebooks, laptops, phones, modems—everything electrical.”

The activists were taken to a police station to give a written explanation of what they were doing in the supposedly public forest. “I saved one memory card in a sock,” Dima said. “It was the only media that survived.” Gazaryan was later convicted for damage to a construction fence—someone had painted THIS IS OUR FOREST! on it—then charged with attempted murder because he had picked up a small rock and told a security guard to keep his distance. Facing years in prison, he fled Russia in November 2012 and is now in exile in Estonia.

“DO YOU HAVE just one daughter, Yulia?”‹I asked her this on a rainy morning as we set out with Maria to do the RGS tour of Olympic sites. It was just small talk, but she wheeled around in the front seat of the car and stared fiercely at me. “How did you know that?” she demanded. She calmed down when I reminded her that I had seen the little girl at the RGS branch earlier in the week, but in an instant I understood the atmosphere of fear that now pervaded everything. Soon the news would trickle out that Russia had set up a surveillance system in Sochi that would monitor every tweet, e-mail, and phone call made by visitors during the Olympics.

Yulia, I learned, was also a longtime member of the EWNC; she had even lived on Rudomakha’s commune in the nineties. Rudomakha and Gazaryan, meanwhile, were RGS members as well as EWNC leaders. But it was important that I distinguish between the two groups, Maria said. The Sochi RGS’s opposition to the Games wasn’t in any way political; it had everything to do with what we were about to see.

Our destination was an important wetland for migrating birds—some 200 documented species, Yulia said, plus various rare plants. A decade ago, she and the RGS spent a year and a half leading a detailed survey of flora and fauna. She handed me an old brochure showing frogs, ferns, swans, and the snowy Caucasus reflected in the deep blue of a pristine pond. “This territory was going to be a preserve,” she said. “We had all the documents prepared. It was going to be protected by the Ramsar wetlands treaty. Then it was gone.”

We turned off the highway and followed a . Fisht and other partly built Olympic stadiums were rising out of the mud, surrounded by gravel roads and a growing forest of high-rise housing for athletes, media, and spectators. The din of construction was audible even through the closed windows of the car. Maria groaned. Yulia peered out the window. “It’s hard to say in one word how this makes me feel,” she said. “I want to be a giant and take all the buildings and trucks and break them.” She made a snapping motion with her hands. “It is horrible to make such things with nature.”

“We say this area is like Oman,” Maria said. “It has become like a desert, with no trees.”

When we got to what remained of the wetland, Maria and Yulia said nothing. They didn’t need to. A series of barren ponds marked the intersection of two mud tracks plied by a steady rush of trucks. Their banks were littered with plastic bottles, construction debris, and piles of slash wood. A stray dog stood next to two portable toilets, and next to the toilets were two signs, one in Russian, one in English, that declared this apocalyptic scene the NATURAL ORNITHOLOGICAL PARK IMERETINSKAYA LOWLAND.

“On the whole territory of the Natural Park,” said the signs, “it is prohibited to perform actions leading to changing its historically formed natural landscape.” habitat for animal species—above all, endangered species—had to be preserved. Specifically, one could not hunt, damage breeding spots, harvest wild plants, pollute the water with raw sewage, or decrease the “ecological, aesthetical, and recreational qualities of the Natural Park.” The cynicism was almost brave.

From the wetland, we drove to a residential neighborhood overlooking the Coastal Cluster, stopping only for water and bread at a gas station. Yulia ate her portion in the rain in the parking lot. We were looking for a street called Bakinskaya that neither Maria nor Yulia had ever visited, but it wasn’t hard to recognize once we found it. An entire block of homes, most of them still occupied, were tilted at strange angles, as if Yulia’s angry giant had swung and missed the Olympic site and hit these houses instead. Just downhill, two apartment buildings looked like Sochi’s version of Pisa: they leaned drunkenly toward one another, propping each other up.

For two years, residents here had watched dump trucks arrive full at the top of the hill above them, then return empty. Up to 30,000 tons of Olympic debris, most of it from railroad construction, ended up in an illegal landfill. One day, after a rain, the hillside suddenly slipped, and all the homes’ foundations slipped along with it. Ten months before we visited, the government had finally agreed to resettle Bakinskaya’s residents. But ten months had passed, and the dump trucks kept dumping, and the people were still living in their slumping homes. A man Simon and I met on the street told us that he feared more landslides. Why not move? “I spent all my money on this house,” he said. He couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.

Our last stop—new to Maria but not to Yulia—was an activist encampment on the north bank of the kudepsta River, manned 24 hours a day by local residents and the occasional EWNC member. They had occupied the site for nine months, ever since a construction company put a temporary bridge here and prepared to drive heavy equipment over it. A 367-megawatt gas-fired electrical plant was to be built on the other side to power the 2014 Games. The activists, many of them pensioners in fraying sweaters who sat around a stove in a shelter made of tarps and scrap wood, feared that its noise and air pollution would alter the neighborhood forever.

They were holding a press conference today. A few minutes after we arrived, two leaders— one wearing a Yabloko jacket—began speaking to a crowd of perhaps 50 people who had gathered at the bridge. For 20 minutes they seemed formidable, ready to throw their bodies in front of the machinery again if it came rolling across the bridge. But after the local journalists left, the gathering became a discussion about strategy, and then the discussion became a bitter argument about tactics. As the rain poured down, the argument nearly came to blows. Maria led Simon and me to the car. “How can they ever win?” Simon mused. Democracy was laudable. Compared with Putinism, it was also frail.

ON MY LAST DAY in Sochi, I attended the Sunday show-and-tell at the RGS, and for a few hours no one even mentioned the Olympics. Three members, one after another, held court in the conference room, which was down the hall from the library and next door to a tiny museum filled with photos of glaciers and caves and with any geologist’s dream rock collection. Three dozen people, young and old, had packed in to see the presentations. First up was a guy who had taken a fairly standard tourist trip to the Crimean Peninsula and had the slide show to prove it. As older members lobbed questions—“What’s that called?” “Were cars allowed?”—the man sitting in front of me took frantic notes on a Hello Kitty notepad. Next was a video of a high-level trek through the Caucasus set to upbeat elevator music. Images of ibex and green alpine meadows flashed on the screen. The mountains above Krasnaya Polyana looked as stunning in summer as they did in winter.

The last presentation was totally unexpected: a gold-toothed member named Andrey had hitched exactly 19 rides and hopped an unknown number of freight trains and built one log raft and spent no more than 5,000 rubles (about $150) to travel to the top of Siberia and back the previous summer. The trip lasted 58 days. He was attacked by one seagull. “Now I will show you 259 photos,” he said. He quickly had the whole room laughing and clapping and singing along to songs he’d written on the road. I was seeing the spirit that foreigners are sometimes surprised to find in Russia but always do. It was the Russia Putin should be proud to showcase to the world in 2014.

I got an e-mail from Yulia a few days after I left: Loggers and bulldozers had been discovered cutting a new road to Moonglade, this time from the other side. She went there immediately with the EWNC and did an inspection, and she held on to her camera’s memory card; images are now all over the Internet. A little more than a month later, officers from the FSB and Russia’s Center for Combating Extremism burst into the EWNC’s main office in the nearby city of Maykop. They forced the activists to log in to their e-mail accounts, then spent 90 minutes reading through messages. They “recommended” that an upcoming EWNC report on the 2014 Olympics not be published, lest it “damage Russia.”

A few months later, Andrey Rudomakha was asked to meet with a supposed whistle-blower at a Krasnodar bus station. The man had said he was a “concerned citizen” named Alexei who had information on an illegal landfill. Instead he was from the Center for Combating Extremism, and he carried a letter from a prosecutor. Rudomakha was forced to read it out loud while the officer filmed him. Register the EWNC as a “foreign agent,” the letter said—or else.

In late April, heavy machinery and seven private security guards arrived at the north bank of the Kudepsta. Residents climbed onto parts of the bridge and jumped into the shallow river, briefly stopping their advance. Then as many as 70 police arrived and forcibly dragged them out. Three people were sent to the hospital. The machines reached the other side.

As for the Sochi RGS, the lawsuit from Moscow came in early March, as promised. But the next month, just as protesters were being pulled out of the Kudepsta River, something remarkable happened. “You may congratulate us,” the e-mail from Maria and Yulia read. “We won our case yesterday.” Moscow was signaling that the Sochi RGS would be allowed to exist. They were surprised. I was surprised. I was also reminded of something Maria had told me in Sochi. “Whatever happens to us,” she said, “they will wait until after the Olympics, when no one is paying attention anymore.”

McKenzie Funk's book was published in January 2014 by Penguin Press.

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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 șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű
• 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-Palin Alaska 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-breaking Eskimos, 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. 

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—șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor Tom Bissell—make a fateful (read: inebriated) decision to walk the 500-mile pilgrimage route of Spain’s . He will exchange directionless 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), begins 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, the company’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 unyielding dedication 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. 

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 șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű 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 a veteran 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. Dybek 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. 

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. The action 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’s narrator, like the author himself, has the wisdom of a half-century of reflection.

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ABOUT A DECADE AGO, Philip Connors toiled as a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal. The environment did not suit him. “Maybe it was a case of egocentricity, but I discovered I had things to say that could not be said in the pages of a daily newspaper,” he writes in Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout (Ecco, $25). “Plus, when the weather cooperates, I prefer to work shirtless.” In the summer of 2002, Connors visited a friend employed as a fire lookout in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest. One taste of the life was enough: in the tradition of Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, Connors quit his Journal post and joined the thinning ranks of “freaks on the peaks,” spending the next eight summers scanning for “a smoke”—lookout-speak for the first tendrils of fire. Fire Season is full of things that cannot be said in a newspaper, about solitude, pleasure, the mendacity of trail signs, and the usefulness of naps. It’s full of wry wisdom and humor, as well as love for the Gila’s “20,000 square miles of cruel and magnificent country,” and contains perhaps literature’s first description of fire as an endangered species.

In short, it’s one of the best books to come out of a government gig since Ed Abbey turned a ranger’s wage into Desert Solitaire. Writing in beautifully spare language at an essayist’s pace, Connors considers topics ranging from U.S. fire policy to Kerouac’s stint on Washington’s Desolation Peak to the necessity of a hobby (his is Frisbee golf). By the end, he almost had us convinced that we too could love the life of the lookout—and not go batshit crazy. “Time spent being a lookout isn’t spent at all,” he writes. “Every day in a lookout is a day not subtracted from the sum of one’s life.”

Powerful Stuff

Hope sells, or at least publishers and politicians often bet that it will, and this month three new works face down the energy crisis with something that approximates optimism. In Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change (Hill and Wang, $26), eco-icon L. Hunter Lovins and carbon-offset executive Boyd Cohen make the case that with entrepreneurs creating profits from things like home insulation and biofuels, global warming can be defeated by the free market. It’s cheery stuff, but one has to wonder: What happens when corporations—say, Monsanto, which is developing drought-resistant corn—see an upside to climate change? Popular Science editor Seth Fletcher’s Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy (Hill and Wang, $26) is a more rewarding read. As he traces the lithium battery from 18th-century Italy to the laboratories of 1970s Exxon (Exxon!) to modern Detroit to the salt flats of Bolivia, Fletcher provides a history of the tech that could fuel a green uprising among automakers. He also puts to bed the myth that “peak lithium” is as great a threat to the new economy as peak oil is to the old. But better batteries won’t be enough to charge the future, argues Alexis Madrigal in the beautifully wrought Powering the Dream: the History and Promise of Green Technology (Da Capo, $28). With an eye to misfires in America’s past, including the electric carriages and solar water heaters of the early 20th century—failures that were more sociological than technological—he astutely points to what it might take: technocrats wise enough to see that we need to reinvent not just our technology but our relationship with it.

By Our Contributors

Edward Hoagland Sex and the River Styx

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Map by Andrew Berry)

FIVE YEARS AGO, after Mininnguaq Kleist became Greenland’s national badminton champion but before he officially became a philosopher, well before he took the helm at the Office of Self-Governance, he discovered secession theory: the study of whether one country has, or doesn’t have, the moral right to break free from another. At the time, he was a master’s candidate without a thesis topic. He’d been frantically searching for six months, and the problem was getting almost as bad as his first philosophical crisis, when he’d tried to apply the Aristotelian ideal of the good life to every little thing in his real life and ended up paralyzed, staring into a theoretical abyss. Mininn­guaq’s discovery of secession theory, like his discovery that not every action can be moral, was a revelation.

“I found arguments that are never used up here,” he says. Over the next year he wrote his thesis, “Greenlandic Autonomy or Secession: Philosophical Considerations,” at his university in Denmark, the colonial power that has ruled Greenland for nearly 300 years. He wrote it in Danish, and he pushed arguments that beat back the colonizers using their own rules, even as they ran slightly counter to those laid out in the nineties by the father of modern secession theory, Duke University philosopher Allen Buchanan.

“According to him, you have to be wronged to justify it,” Mininnguaq says. “Denmark has to wrong Greenland in a really bad way before we break away. I don’t agree with that part. Sometimes you have to view this as a marriage: adults, consenting people, divorcing of their own free will.”

I first meet up with Mininnguaq in the Kangerlussuaq airport, a building on the tundra of western Greenland that feels like a ski lodge in the Alps: lounge chairs, huge windows, a cafeteria with trays, rich tourists in Gore-Tex. Mininnguaq lopes in with a badminton friend, Kim, a handsome Dane with an iPhone who happened to be on his inbound flight, and we sit in the cafeteria and reminisce about their sporting years. “He always beat me,” Mininnguaq says. “Except in our last match.”

Among his friends, Mininnguaq goes by “Minik.” He’s 35. He wears horn-rimmed glasses “my old-school Ray-Bans,” he calls them and brown hipster kicks with thick blue laces. He has black hair and aquiline good looks that locked up the teenage-girl vote during his one, failed bid for political office, in 2007, when he ran to represent Greenland in the Danish parliament. He lives in a trendy part of Nuuk, Greenland’s 15,000-person capital city, where he recently blew thousands of Danish kroner on a tube stereo system. Friends come over and they all just sit there and listen to it. It sounds awesome.

To its natives, Greenland now officially goes by the name Kalaallit Nunaat “the Land of the People.” As a colony, it’s been part of Denmark since 1721, when Lutheran missionary Hans Egede showed up and started saving souls. The first Danes taught the Inuit that Hell was very hot rather than very cold. They taught that communal living shared food, shared hunting trips, shared wives was sinful. They taught that rocks and birds were not endowed with spirits. Greenlanders had no bread or concept of bread, so Egede translated another pillar of Western belief the Lord’s Prayer to fit Greenlandic reality. “Give us this day our daily harbor seal,” they prayed.After 290 years, Greenland is oddly, lopsidedly modern Scandinavian by design but not always by nature. Kim, whose wealthy family runs an electronics chain in Nuuk, is on his way to mainland Europe, where he went only a few months ago, hanging out at the Cannes Film Festival on Russian yachts with beds that rotated 360 degrees “just for the views,” he marvels. Minik, meanwhile, is heading up the west-central coast to Upernavik, a thousand-person town with no sewage system, where, several mornings a week, the streets are lined with yellow bags of excrement waiting to be picked up by sanitation teams.

Upernavik is the first stop on the second leg of a road show led by the Office of Self-Governance, a department local authorities set up at the end of 2007 to bring independence or at least the idea of it to the people. It’s now early September 2008, and by November 25 he wants to have reached nearly all of Greenland: 57,000 people spread out in 57 villages and 18 towns across an area of 836,000 square miles, three times the size of Texas and 50 times the size of mainland Denmark. November 25 is the date of an island-wide vote, a referendum on divorce from Denmark. If it passes, then on June 21, 2009, the summer solstice, Greenland will wake up to a new reality. Not secession, exactly, but a big step in that direction.

In chemistry, there’s the concept of activation energy: Add heat, get a reaction. In Greenland, there’s the reality of global warming: Add heat, get an independence movement. Warming is melting Greenland’s ice, which is extending its shipping season and revealing massive oil and mineral deposits, which is making possible a mining boom and the royalties that go with it, which is convincing Greenland’s people that eventually they may not need the $600 million in annual subsidies they get from Denmark more than $10,000 a person. Which is convincing Greenlanders that soon they may not need Denmark at all.

Climate change means oil finds and zinc mines and also better fishing: cod, herring, halibut, and haddock migrating north as the ocean warms. It means disaster tourists: people coming to see glaciers slide into the sea. (Since 2004, cruise-ship arrivals have jumped 250 percent.) It means farming: potatoes and broccoli and carrots growing where they didn’t grow before, more grass for more sheep. It means gushing rivers: an endless supply of freshwater that Greenland proposes to sell to a thirsty world.

Of course, it also means doom for distant countries like Tuvalu and Bangladesh, which may go under because of Greenland’s melting ice cap. The cap covers 81 percent of the island, and if it melts entirely something that’s unlikely to happen before the end of this century global sea levels could jump 20 feet. Since 2003, the cap has shrunk by more than a million tons, so much that the underlying bedrock rises four centimeters each year, like a ship slowly unweighted of its cargo. The land is rising faster than the sea.

It is climate’s role in the independence movement the possibility that people could be set free by embracing a crisis, that for all the countries destroyed by global warming, one will be created that’s brought me to Kangerlussuaq. Before we board our next flight, Minik introduces me to a pack of Greenlandic politicians, two women and three men who are part of his revolutionary road trip. They wear backpacks and street clothes: jeans, fleece, tennis shoes. One man carries a video camera. I wonder, for a moment, if I’m staring at people for whom global warming serves a higher good.

ON DAY SEVEN of the tour, after seven meetings in seven villages and towns, the politicians relax in a government guesthouse outside the Qaarsut airport, waiting to go home. The flight isn’t until 4:30 p.m., and we have the entire day off. There’s a buffet with muesli, yogurt, and fresh-baked bread. The TV is on; we pull out cell phones and laptops and flip through the newspaper. Then the premier walks in and announces that a hunter’s boat is ready to take us on a quick visit to the village of Niaqornat, population 68, more than an hour up the Nuussuaq Peninsula. Going out again is masochism. Only Minik and I agree to join him.

The open boat is maybe 15 feet long. We hop in at a gravelly beach below the airstrip, timing the surf so our feet don’t get wet. Minik puts his laptop in a plastic bag. He and I keep low out of the biting wind, but the premier, wearing jeans, thin gloves, and a baseball cap, stands in the back of the boat, watching the coastline zip by.

The water is smooth, and there are beaches the whole way; above them, slopes rise steeply to 6,000-foot summits already covered in snow. We pass seals and house-size icebergs and finally loop into Niaqornat’s natural harbor. The village is stunning, on a spit of low-lying land between an oceanside turret of rock and the white peaks of the peninsula. There are bright wooden houses but no cars. There are racks where villagers are drying junk fish for the sled dogs and strips of halibut and seal for themselves. Open boats and icebergs share the harbor. The sun is shining. It is, for once, the Greenland of my imagination and perhaps that of the premier’s as well.

The meeting is held in the schoolhouse, and a quarter of Niaqornat shows up, if you count the baby. To make a projector screen, they flip a big map of Greenland and hang it over the blackboard. Above the map are classroom diagrams depicting everyday items and their Danish names: balloon, spaghetti, anorak, radio, king, pizza, cigarette. As the premier talks, I check out a poster showing eight local whale species and their specs: weight, top speed, length, amount of time they can hold their breath, etc. A man in a T-shirt that reads deep sea shark fishing asks about money, and Minik flips through some slides I haven’t seen before: projections of mineral revenues skyrocketing into the future. One shows the oil blocks that Greenland has already sold to foreign firms. They’re just on the other side of the peninsula.

We have lunch in the home of one of the premier’s supporters, a great hunter whose walls are decorated with narwhal tusks and walrus skulls and pictures of dead polar bears. He lays out dried, jerky-like whale meat, then serves us cold narwhal skin, which his daughters and the premier slice into chewable chunks. His CD collection and computer are in the corner, along with his daughter’s pet gerbil. His teenage son walks in with a premade sandwich and sticks it in the microwave. The premier gorges on narwhal. “If we did not eat what the sea gives us,” he says, “we would not be here.” When we reach the dock to meet our boat, the village has gathered to see us off, and someone has distributed little Greenlandic flags, which the citizens wave back and forth until we’re out of view.

A few months from now, Niaqornat will become one of a handful of villages to vote 100 percent in favor of self-governance. The referendum will pass by 75.5 percent across Greenland, but in tiny Niaqornat, there will be no doubters. Just in time for the solstice, at the start of this new era, the premier will lose his job to Kuupik Kleist. This will only accelerate the drive toward independence: Kleist’s party wants it all the more, and even his partner in the new governing coalition, Jens B. Fredriksen, will be stirred to patriotism.

“We have one goal,” he tells reporters. “The ultimate independence of our country.”

EARLY IN OUR TOUR, Minik worried that he was forgetting much of the philosophy he’d studied. “I’ve been too much into politics,” he told me. But during our last conversation, he becomes a philosopher again, pondering not just the morality of secession but the means to this end. We’re in Ilulissat, Greenland’s big tourist town, where we have a final layover. Nearby is the fastest-sliding glacier in the Northern Hemisphere, Sermeq Kujalleq, which spits 35 trillion liters of ice into Disko Bay every year.

I spend the early evening on the boardwalk of the Hotel Arctic, a cliffside landmark that happens to be hosting the Nordic Council’s Common Concern for the Arctic conference: European dignitaries in nice suits fretting abstractly about the warming north. Peering into a bay full of icebergs at sunset, I hear one of them chat up an attractive blonde by rattling off facts about the coming doomsday. His tone is solemn, his voice almost a whisper. “I don’t mean to scare you,” he murmurs. It’s the first time I’ve heard someone try to use climate change to get someone else into bed. “I really don’t mean to scare you,” he says again. She doesn’t look scared at all.Upstairs, Minik and I order hamburgers and stare at the lights of Ilulissat. We contemplate the future. “It’s so strange,” Minik says. “The more the ice cap melts, the more Greenland will rise. These other countries are sinking, and Greenland is rising. It is literally rising.” Below us, the dignitaries file into their banquet. “We know Black Angel was really bad for the environment the first time,” Minik continues. “It ruined the fjord. Is it OK to ruin three or four fjords in order to build the country? I hate to even think this, but we have a lot of fjords. I don’t know. That’d be utilitarian philosophy, wouldn’t it?”

He shakes his head. “We’re very aware that we’ll cause more climate change by drilling for oil,” he says. “But should we not? Should we not when it can buy us our independence?” I look at him. I can see he doesn’t really know the answer, either.

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Greg Michaels in Bolivia

Michaels on Bolivia’s Jachcha Condoriri

Greg Michaels in Bolivia

Michaels (right) on the road to Uyuni

Greg Michaels in Bolivia

The village of Atocha, between Tupiza and Uyuni

Greg Michaels in Bolivia

The author on the flanks of Jachcha Condoriri, with twin volcanoes bordering Chile in the distance

Greg Michaels in Bolivia

Llamas in Sajama National Park

Greg Michaels in Bolivia

Women at the Tomarapi eco-lodge

Of all the arguments Greg Michaels employs to make his life’s work seem less inane, the best may be the one about the millennium. “I would sort of debate with my NASA friends,” he says. “I’d talk to them about confluence hunting and they’d be like, Oh, yeah, whatever,’ and then later on I’d find out they thought it was a really stupid idea. I talk to my friend George and he’s like, The confluence point has no meaning, it’s just totally arbitrary, it doesn’t relate to anything, why would you want to go after something like that?’ But then I’m like, how about the millennium, you know?

“George made a really big deal about the new millennium,” Greg continues. “I think he went to Easter Island to celebrate it. But it’s an arbitrary time. In a lot of ways it’s the same: Everyone can agree on the millennium as a marker of time. But a confluence is something everyone can agree on as a marker of place.”

Greg tells me this as we stand, lost, in a village in western Bolivia, surrounded by alpaca droppings and bicycle tracks and adobe huts with straw roofs and cactus-wood doors. Our location is 18°50.983’S, 68°31.233’W cer­tainly nothing special, not for a man of Greg’s stature and we’re just miles from the border with Chile, which is marked by a reddish, perfectly conical volcano. Ahead, across the Altiplano plateau, are the glaciated peaks of Sajama National Park, home to the highest confluence point in the Western Hemisphere. We think we can see the mountain we’ll have to climb to reach it, but we can’t be sure, and in any case it’s 65 miles away. First we have a bog to negotiate.

Our driver, Criso Ibieta, and cook/navigator, Maria Garcia Medina, clearly have never been here. Since yesterday afternoon, they’ve been bickering about directions and relying heavily on photographer Paolo Marchesi’s Bolivia map and on my new GPS, which now sits between them in an honored spot on the front seat of the Land Cruiser. Soon there are two dirt tracks to choose from; we go with the one that heads straight toward Sajama, bouncing along for a mile until it dead-ends at a river in a broad, soggy meadow. Beyond the river are sand dunes, more volcanoes, and hundreds of alpacas. We get out and walk up the banks, trying and failing to find a place to cross. We stare at the volcanoes. Greg stops to snap a photo. He’s sporting sunglasses, a soul patch, and a pair of those zip-off travel pants that convert into shorts looking, as always, about a decade and a half fitter and younger than his 39 years.

“We’d probably be on some tourist path if we didn’t have this mission,” he says. “You might think I get a little carried away, and some people say that I am, but most of the world has been explored. This is a measured way to assure that we visit all the in-between spaces that we see what’s there. Confluence hunting is the last frontier.”

WHAT GREG MICHAELS DOES, to be precise, is make expeditions, GPS in hand, to the places on the earth’s surface where integer latitude and longitude lines intersect, like 44°N 144°E, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, one of his many Asian prizes. He was the first to bag a confluence in Taiwan, the first to bag one in Vietnam, and the first to bag what he calls “the center of the northeastern quadrasphere” 45°N 90°E, in western China. It was Greg who tried (and failed) to sweet-talk his way into North Korea to claim that country’s first confluence, posing as a journalist and trying to hitch rides with Russian and Chinese boat captains. It was Greg who decided to go after the world’s ten highest confluence points and reached what may be the very highest, at 19,113 feet on a nameless Tibetan peak, in May 2005. That expedition involved a week of hitchhiking, a 70-hour bus ride, severe altitude sickness, and cat-and-mouse games with the Chinese military.

Greg’s description of the Tibet experience on confluence.org, the official Web site of the Degree Confluence Project (DCP), is second only to his description of a 2004 victory in Japan over skilled confluence hunter Fabrice Blocteur, a French-Canadian whom he raced mightily for the last of the confluences on Japan’s main island, Honshu. The point’s thick-jungle approach had previously beaten back Blocteur. Greg won after finding a waterlogged dinghy, paddling it down a river to bypass the worst of the jungle, and scaling a cliff, Princess Bride style, to reach the spot. A few months ago, Greg was featured on the home page of the DCP Web site for bagging the last points in Europe: four in Bosnia that others had avoided because of land mines. He carried maps from the Bosnia-Herzegovina de-mining commission and somehow survived with all his appendages.

According to the DCP which was founded in 1996 by Alex Jarrett, a bored New Hampshirite looking for something to do with his new GPS there are some 16,232 “primary” (i.e., not in the middle of an ocean) confluences on the planet: 14,029 on land, 2,203 in water but within sight of the shoreline, and 151 on what’s left of the polar ice caps. So far, about a third of these, 5,324 points, have been visited and documented, and 10,405 confluence hunters in 177 countries on seven continents have snapped 71,929 pictures to prove they were there. Thanks to Greg, every confluence in mainland Europe has now been reached. Thanks to his compatriots, every confluence in every American state but Alaska has been reached. The DCP’s map of the lower 48 has become a sea of red dots.

There are easy confluences and there are hard confluences, and if you’re standing on this planet, you’re never more than 49 miles from one. Some people simply get in their car and visit those nearby; some visit the same points again and again. But Greg does neither. Until last summer, when he made an attempt at the highest confluence in North America, 26°N 144°W, at 13,418 feet in Alaska’s Wrangell St. Elias National Park, he’d never even bothered to try one in the States. His 27 successful visits are thus a paltry few compared with those of 100- and 200-confluence legends Captain Peter, Gordon Spence, Targ Parsons, and Joseph Kerski, but a confluence hunter cannot be measured by stats alone.

“Captain Peter kind of cheats,” Greg says of the Sicilian freighter captain Peter Mosselberger, who has racked up 230 confluences in 52 countries. “Well, not cheats, but he has a cargo ship, right, so he just goes and gets the ones offshore.” Brits Spence and Parsons, meanwhile, are obsessed with reaching every point in the UK and China, respectively. Kerski, a former USGS geographer, sticks mostly to the United States. Their feats don’t seem to impress Greg. While others go around gobbling up dots, he is something different: a visionary, a seeker of truly superlative nowheres, a man with an eye for only the most special arbitrary places.

ON GOOGLE EARTH, 18°S 69°W is shown perched on the southeast face of a dormant volcano called Jachcha Condoriri, protected by cliffs above and below, its crosshairs marking a bulge of igneous rock in a field of scree. Its elevation is an imposing 16,961 feet, but the surrounding terrain does not look impassably steep. To gaze at it on Google Earth is to play God, flying back and forth above a digitized, photorealistic mountainscape, spinning until you’ve seen it from every angle and taken in every obstacle. There could be a snowfield or two to navigate on the hike in. There’s a possible couloir route between the cliffs. If bad weather rolls in, the scree slope may be the way to make a quick escape.

Zoom out and the approach becomes obvious. A quarter-mile north of the confluence, via either a couloir or an open slope that skirts the cliffs, is a false summit at 17,477 feet. Leading directly to it is a clear, treeless ridgeline with a relatively gentle angle. Zoom farther out and the world becomes ever more barren and volcano-spotted, and you see the faint outline of a jeep track that happens to bisect the bottom of the ridgeline. The track leads to a nearby village just nine miles across the Altiplano as the crow flies and if you zoom back in you can see its name: Tomarapi.

Tomarapi is tiny, but a Web search reveals that it is home to a new, Aymara Indian run eco-lodge: room and board for less than $40 a night. The giant volcano lording over Toma­rapi and the confluence mountain turns out to be Nevado Sajama, at 21,463 feet Bolivia’s highest peak, and the area surrounding it turns out to be Bolivia’s oldest national park. Because national parks the world over tend to have transport for hire, logistics will be the easy part.

As for the approach routes to Tomarapi and to Bolivia itself, they were outlined in Greg’s Lonely Planet guidebook. He flipped through it in Brazil, where he was posted as a geophysicist aboard a roving seismic-survey ship his day job and later that week boarded a string of buses. First from Rio to some islands off the Atlantic coast (a getaway with a local girl he’d met); then to Iguaçu Falls, at the Argentina border (where there was a mock Mardi Gras at a hostel famous for its huge swimming pool); then nonstop across the width of Argentina to the town of Salta, near the Bolivia border (“I had to go there,” Greg said, “because it’s Atlas spelled backwards.”) In Salta, he tried to buy some soap (ÂáČčČúĂłČÔ) at a grocery store and ended up in the ham (ÂáČčłŸĂłČÔ) section. Greg does not speak Spanish. That night he went out for pizza with a pack of 14-year-olds he’d met on the street and one of their moms. The next day he went on a tour of the nearby canyon country. The day after that he got himself across the border.By the time Paolo and I caught up with him, in the desert town of Tupiza, Bolivia, Greg had spent 68 hours riding public buses toward the confluence, and together we did another eight to reach the town of Uyuni, where we switched to a Land Cruiser. He rode without complaint or apparent discomfort, jamming out to his MP3 player, reading Berlitz’s Spanish in 30 Days, and blithely falling asleep as we traversed knife-edge ridges above thousand-foot drops. The bus smelled vaguely of green tea from all the local coca-leaf chewers, Greg thought. We passed eight-foot cacti, a desert funeral, and a woman riding a bicycle while holding a shovel. The driver stopped every half-hour or so to pound on the chassis with a wrench, but Greg slept through it. When he woke up, he fixed his eyes on the T-shirt I was wearing, which had a large image of a king crab.

“This being a landlocked nation,” he said, “that must really freak people out.” Then he went back to sleep.

SO THAT’S HOW WE GOT where we are. How one gets to this point in a metaphysical sense is more complicated. “My life’s story is pretty convoluted and twisted,” Greg told Paolo and me over a dinner of Hawaiian pizza in Tupiza. “But it all kind of relates to exploration.”

Greg wanted to go to Mars. This was his earliest dream, and he’d meant it: His majors in college were astronomy and geology. His first foreign language, which he studied during a semester in Moscow, in 1990, was Russian the era’s other language of space exploration. His first real job was as an assistant on NASA’s Magellan mission, in the early nineties, examining every photo the Magellan spacecraft sent back from Venus, becoming the first human to “see” large swaths of the planet. His master’s was in planetary geology. And his moment of disillusionment came not when he applied to be an astronaut and was rejected only a handful of the 5,000 applicants made the cut, and he could apply again but when he realized that modern astronauts were going only as far as the International Space Station.

“My dream was to go on land somewhere,” he told us. “I decided I just wanted to explore Earth more.” In the grad-school library at Arizona State, he flipped through career books until he found the geophysical firm that worked in the most countries across the globe. That it turned out to be a petroleum-surveying company bothers the environmentalist in him, but Greg’s story illustrates how hard a guy has to work these days to find something to explore. He’s had to make some sacrifices.

For Greg, the end of the Cold War was a window of real, if fleeting, opportunity. One of his favorite stories is about when the walls were coming down, and he happened to be in Vienna, and he happened to have a raft, and he happened to notice that the Danube River flowed straight into Czechoslovakia. He climbed in and floated to Bratislava. “There was no passport control, and nobody said anything,” he recalled. “I just noticed that all the buildings looked different.” When he reached the city, he was surrounded by patrol boats with machine guns. When the police realized he was an American one of the few they had seen they gave him a hero’s welcome, stamping his passport on the spot.

Greg’s first geophysical assignment was in the Caspian Sea, which allowed him, during a drunken port call with the mostly Azerbaijani crew, to sneak visa-free into Turkmenistan a place few Westerners have seen to this day. When the Caspian job was done, in 1999, he and a friend bought a Niva an old Soviet jeep and spent months driving it around Georgia and Russia. Siberia was close to China, and China was opening up, so he drifted east, traveling overland until he’d crossed the entire continent. He went to Taiwan, where he became obsessed with learning Mandarin, which he studied until the oil money ran out. “I had to start teaching English,” he says.

Globalization kept creeping on, and Greg kept teaching first in Taiwan, then in Japan. During summers he began leading tours in China for the growing horde of outsiders coming to see it. Asia was becoming less exotic, though Greg himself wasn’t. One time he went alone to a Chinese zoo and noticed that everyone was staring at him instead of the monkeys. Trying to lighten up an awkward moment, he hunched over, scratching himself and making ape noises, while the crowd, still expressionless, stared harder.

You might say the confluence project gave Greg newfound purpose. But his brand of modern, confluence-driven exploration poses problems of its own. Our trip to Bolivia, for instance, was originally meant to be a trip to Peru. After I first contacted him, I invited myself along on his next expedition, and we planned it for months a trek to 12°S 76°W, in the Andes, supposedly the highest confluence in the Western Hemisphere. Then I got a late-night e-mail from him slugged “interesting development.” On the DCP Web site, he told me, the Peru confluence had suddenly been demoted to number two, and an obscure point in Bolivia had been elevated to highest in the Americas. The reasons were unclear, and were only slightly less so after Greg’s techy explanation:

It looks to me like the project is now
using elevations from Google Earth.
They originally used elevations from the
GT30 1km footprint elevation data.
Then, in 2005, I got a hold of the SRTM
(Space Shuttle Radar Topography) data
(the best data to date), and convinced
them to change the data for the top 50
highest confluence points. Now it has
changed again, and I’ve already contacted
the project to find out their
source. I want to make sure it is worthy.

Greg went into overdrive to find the source of the updated elevation data, spending weeks e-mailing back and forth with a shadowy Google Earth authority code-named Penguin Opus, a German- and French-speaking Scottish topography expert with an Italian name, and various DCP coordinators in Canada, Russia, and the Middle East. I received messages from him with titles like “russian plot,” “a plot of points,” and, eventually, “Bolivia.” It was finally confirmed: We were going to 18°S 69°W, a confluence that was according to all the best data sets at least 300 feet higher than the one in Peru.

A truism of confluence hunting is that you never really know what the obstacles will be. In a string of last-minute e-mails from Brazil, Greg advised Paolo and me to be ready for anything. What looked “so inviting” on Google Earth could be treacherous in real life. We should bring crampons and ice axes. We should bring a tent and a stove. We should factor in extra time for things to go wrong.

“It could be a walk in the park,” he wrote, “but, as in a lot of confluence hunting, you just need to be prepared for the unforeseen.”

WE ARRANGED TO RENT a Land Cruiser in a dimly lit office in Uyuni, arriving at 6 p.m. and hoping they could have it ready by six the next morning. Time was running out for Criso and Maria, who we were told would pilot the jeep, to buy fuel and supplies, but Greg was meticulous, almost rudely so, reading a checklist out loud and asking repeatedly about water, food, spare tires, hotels along the way, what the food was, what the hotels were like, how many spares there were, how well Criso knew his vehicle, etc.

“I’ve had problems with Land Cruisers in Tibet,” he explained. He was agitated, as if the closer he got to the confluence, the more it weighed on him, the more he wanted to control the variables. In the morning, he got up at 5 A.M., an hour early, waking himself just to organize his backpack and ensure all his gadgets were in order. He was so thorough that he was still the last one ready.

Between Uyuni and the confluence is the world’s largest salt flat, some 65 miles by 65 miles. The Salar de Uyuni sits at 12,000 feet, is shaped like an amoeba, and is filled, unsurprisingly, with salt: man-made salt mounds, a salt hotel, a salt highway, saltwater springs, and blinding salt-pan views from cactus-dotted “islands.” We rolled onto it at dawn, and Greg was serene again, happy about Criso and Maria’s (short-lived) familiarity with our surroundings. We stopped briefly at a salt-mining operation. We ate breakfast at the salt hotel, at a table made of salt. Undisturbed, the Salar’s perfectly white surface had dried to form a mosaic of interlocking hexagons that stretches miles across the emptiness, and in the distance we sometimes saw mirages or speeding trucks whose hum sounded like a jet taking off. Greg bent over to lick one of the ridges “just to make sure” it was salt. It was.

Our route took us less than a mile from 20°S 68°W, low-hanging fruit that had been bagged twice before. Perhaps for the benefit of Paolo and me, Greg decided we should go for it anyway, so after lunch he and I pulled out our GPS units and watched the numbers tick down. On Greg’s wrist was an altimeter/compass watch. He had the Google Earth screen shots on his music player as well as printouts of the same, plus photocopies of some military topos. He had a backup GPS, a backup camera, and a backup compass in his bag. Combined with the arsenals Paolo and I have, this brought us to a total of three compasses, four GPS units, six cameras, and perhaps three dozen maps. We were ready for action, and I could not deny the excitement of the moment when it came.

“Tell him to slow down and go to the left,” Greg told me, and I relayed his message in Spanish. Criso veered off the track, and the hum of our wheels quieted. My GPS showed the distance dropping rapidly: 1.35 kilometers, 900 meters, 250 meters, 45 meters. “Now, now, now Stop!” Greg yelled. We threw open the doors. It was windy out and very cold, and the salt crunched underfoot as I waved my GPS back and forth, trying to follow it in.

“Now I usually get out my compass and try to figure out where I need to go to make the zero,” Greg said. “The GPS read .007, which meant we were a little south.” We strode north, then slightly east, and my newer GPS locked it in: 20°00.000’S, 68°00.000’W, accuracy plus or minus three meters. “Photograph it as quickly as possible,” Greg advised. “It’ll change.” He lurched back and forth, trying to get his own GPS to zero out the “confluence dance.” Soon he hit it, too, and grabbed for his camera. We snapped photos in the four cardinal directions of salt, salt, salt, and salt, respectively. Greg pulled out a pad and scribbled some notes. He smiled. We were done. As we left, he took a one-boliviano coin from his pocket and placed it on the confluence agift for any brave explorers who followed.

Thus baptized, we drove out of the Salar and into the unknown, following a web of dirt roads toward Sajama, stopping for directions in almost every windswept village, relying more and more on the GPS and map. In one village, Llica, Criso asked the guys at an auto shop which direction we should go. Straight, they said. We passed a family of quinoa farmers working a barren patch of dust, Maria hopped out, and we all watched as they pointed back the way we’d come.

We found our way across a smaller salt flat, then rumbled through the Altiplano, passing deserted villages, sand dunes, and Stonehenge-like clusters of rock tombs, called chullpas, which Maria said are filled with the bones of an ancient race of midgets who were killed by the sun. We picked up and got directions from a hitchhiking grandmother and her four grandchildren, backtracked out of the bog, talked down some soldiers who wanted a bribe, got lost and found our way a half-dozen times, and overnighted in a truckers’ hostel in a run-down border town. Now, on the afternoon of the second day, we’ve finally reached Sajama National Park, where we see a herd of alpacas grazing on the flanks of the namesake volcano.

Opposite the volcano is the confluence peak we recognize it on sight and Greg has a final request for Criso and Maria: that we use the remaining daylight to detour toward the peak and scout our line. They bristle. “Our job was to take you to Tomarapi,” Criso says.

“No, no, no we need to get as close as we can,” Greg says, his voice tense. “It’s so ridiculous. Of all the out-of-the-way stuff we did today, we can’t do this? This is the most important thing.”

They go silent and make long faces, hoping he’ll relent. He doesn’t. Just before Toma­rapi, we turn off and drive most of the way up the jeep track and stare at our destiny. It looks more or less like it did on Google Earth. Even so, we use Paolo’s long lens to shoot close-up photos of the confluence, the volcanic bulge it sits upon, and the cliffs guarding the approach. That night, after a quinoa-and-soup dinner at the eco-lodge, we pull out my laptop, upload Paolo’s photos, and compare them with maps and printouts until we’re certain our ridge route is best. Paolo and I go to bed early, but Greg stays up late, shuffling and organizing, readying his pack, his cameras, and his multiple GPS units.

AT 5:30 A.M., WITH THE WORLD still dark, Greg sits upright in bed and flicks on his headlamp. For 15 minutes he stays wrapped in his blankets and barely moves, the beam of his headlamp conveniently pointed across the room at my face as I try to keep sleeping. Various alarms on watches, cell phones, etc. begin going off, but he doesn’t move to disarm them, instead grumbling about the cold and loudly blowing his nose. He gets up and puts on deodorant, then begins walking back and forth across the room, pulling things out of bags, putting them in other bags, scattering his gear about the floor. Paolo and I get dressed. When Greg finishes his shuffling, he remembers his contact lenses and walks to the bathroom to put them in. He takes a moment to slick back his hair in the mirror. We’re ready to go.

A park employee picks us up, and after 20 minutes we’re at 14,700 feet, throwing on our packs in a boulder field near the foot of the ridge. The temperature hovers around freezing. A herd of wild vicuñas stands a few hundred yards uphill, and the clouds hugging the surrounding volcanoes are already burning off. Before we start walking, Greg pulls out a bag of coca leaves Maria gave him. He kneels and sticks a few down an animal hole near a big rock his way of currying favor with the native goddess of the earth: “Uh, OK, Pachamama, here you go.” He also sticks a few leaves in his mouth, hoping they’ll make his altitude headache go away.

We walk up the scrub slope, passing juniper-like queñua trees the highest-altitude trees in the world. The false summit is dead ahead, bathed in early sunlight; glacier-covered Sajama is directly at our backs.

“I think this is going to be easy a piece of cake,” says Paolo.

“I think it’s going to be harder than we think,” says Greg.

“Tomorrow we should go on a jeep tour,” says Paolo.

“Let’s think about tomorrow tomorrow,” says Greg. “Right now let’s think about the confluence.”

After an hour and a half, we gain the ridge, which greets us with a blast of cold wind that nearly knocks Greg and Paolo down. The confluence is before us, somewhere on an escarpment in the middle of a vast bowl of scree our first good view. Greg waves his arms and yells through the wind: “I’ve got to take a bearing!” When he’s done, we back away from the edge until we’re out of the wind. He fiddles with his altimeter watch and peers up the hill. “You know,” he says, “people thought it was stupid when Edmund Hillary tried to climb Everest, too.”

The altitude sinks in. My head starts to pound. Greg starts taking break after break, hunching over with his right hand on his knee, almost hyperventilating. Only Paolo seems unaffected: He’s bounding ahead, waiting for us at every rise and flat spot. We reach the final pitch just after 2 p.m., and Greg stuffs his mouth with the rest of the coca leaves. He surges forward the first to reach the false summit, the first to take in its vertiginous views of Sajama, the twin volcanoes to our west, and the twin lakes at their base. Paolo and I follow, and in that instant, confluence hunting makes perfect sense: It’s an excuse to see places like this. For 20 minutes, we take photos in every direction. Greg gets antsy. “All right, all right, let’s go get it,” he says. “Let’s go.” We snap a few last shots. When we look up again, he’s gone, running with newfound energy downhill toward the confluence.

Paolo and I follow Greg’s footsteps down a scree slope, skirting the couloirs and the first band of cliffs, then sliding on our tails down a ten-foot patch of steep, icy snow. Greg waits just long enough at the saddle for me to catch up. “We’re 134 meters away,” he says, breathless. We run up a small knoll, weave through vertical fins of reddish rock, and start dropping again. “One hundred meters!” he yells. Up ahead, the escarpment appears to fall off into nothing. “What the hell is on the other side of this?” he asks this isn’t how Google Earth said it would be.

We proceed slowly. The rock underfoot is loose. The wind picks up. At 40 meters out, we begin downclimbing a steep slope that rolls over into a true cliff; at 17 meters, Greg ditches his pack and descends alone into a scree-filled chute. Below him, one slip away, is a yawning drop tens or hundreds of feet high we can’t see the bottom. The wind sends pebbles avalanching over the edge. “I’m going to try to get all zeroes,” Greg yells. He inches downward, his left hand on the rock wall, his right hand holding the GPS. He swings the receiver right, then left 17°59.994’S, 69°00.008’W 17°59.993’S, 69°00.006’W. He’s still a dozen meters away. Shaking, with gloved hands, he documents the imperfect visit photos of the north, east, south, and west and then gets a slightly better reading, 17°59.994’S, 69°00.000’W, that appears as he and I scramble out. And he’s not done.

Back on the rim we find a shivering, suddenly delirious Paolo, who’s being blasted by the wind as he shoots photos of Greg’s conquest. His Camelbak has frozen; his head hurts; he’s dehydrated. Greg jogs past him. “Wait, wait, where are you going?” Paolo asks. Greg tells him we’re going the long way around a route back that could take us closer to the base of the cliff, closer to the confluence. “It’s getting really windy,” Paolo growls. “It’s getting late. If anything happens now, it’s a big deal. If anyone gets hurt, it’s a big deal.”

Greg is unmoved, and I, admittedly, back him up I want to see him bag it. We climb to the saddle and race down a scree field, surfing on sliding rocks and kicking up clouds of sulfurous yellow dust. Our shadows grow long. Once parallel to the base of the cliff, Greg begins to traverse a steep slope of loose rock an inch or two of gravel over frozen earth, too slippery to stand on. He pulls out his ice ax for extra purchase. He crawls eastward like a crab, confluence-bound, and for a moment I believe nothing will stop him. But then he slips and falls, and he slips and falls again, and he sits down and stares wistfully at his prize, 200 yards away. Reality sets in. He starts to descend.

The slope funnels us to the bottom of a broad valley, and we’re alone in the Andes, our footprints the only ones as we tromp through the sand. Sajama is a beacon, the last thing illuminated by the fleeting daylight, and the wind is gone, the air calm. We walk toward the volcano and slow our pace. Greg gives Paolo some of his water. He looks up at the cliff. “Well, we got the confluence,” he says. “We didn’t get to check out that bottom part, but we got it. We got the highest confluence in the Americas.” He pauses. “I might have to come here someday with ropes,” he says. He pauses again. “We can still go back tomorrow and get the bottom,” he says. “I mean, if you guys want to.”

The post Because It’s There. (Sort of.) appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On our way from Oregon to Vail, we stopped at every major store in every major city in three states. We stopped at every RadioShack. There are only so many, and we could get only so many components at each one without raising suspicions. We bought everything in cash and in small quantities. An alarm clock and maybe a bottle of water from a Fred Meyer. A box of matches from an Albertsons. A spool of wire from a hardware store. We always wore baseball caps to shield our faces from overhead cameras, just in case.

We stopped at a motel in Utah to assemble the timers for the incendiary devices. It was a nightmare. Avalon had instructions, but he'd never built this kind before. These timers were digital, with longer delays than the ones he'd used—delays long enough for us to get down off the mountain and out of the area before the fires started. Half the clocks we bought didn't end up working with the design. We abandoned them altogether after we realized they wouldn't work in the cold.

Once we got to Vail, we tried to drive the fuel—some gas, some diesel—up the mountain one night, but there was too much snow, and my truck got stuck. We spent hours trying to dig it out. There were maybe 75 gallons of fuel in the back, it was starting to get light out, and there were hunters around. We stashed the fuel cans in the woods and got out of there. The fuel was still miles below our target, a string of buildings and ski lifts on a ridge at 11,000 feet; it would have to be hiked up the mountain. We drove a few hours away to meet some others who'd come out from Oregon to help. Now there were a half-dozen of us, but nothing was set. Most of the group just didn't believe it was possible, so they went back to Oregon. I wasn't really thinking that Avalon and I would end up doing it alone, but that's what happened.

I dropped Avalon where we'd hidden the fuel, and we set a meet time for a few days later—long enough for him to hike fuel can after fuel can several miles and hundreds of feet up the hill and hide them near each of the buildings. When I picked him up, he was exhausted. He rested for a few hours in the campsite I'd found way up a logging road, but there wasn't much time: The bulldozers were supposed to start rolling the next day. We finalized our plans, and I dropped him back at a trailhead in Vail. I returned to my camp and waited. The night of October 18 was cold, but I couldn't make a campfire—it might attract attention. I just stood in a forest of pines and firs and took everything in. I barely slept at all.

We weren't arsonists. Many of our actions didn't involve fires at all, and none of us fit the profile of a pyromaniac. I guess “eco-saboteur” works. To call us terrorists, as the federal government did, is stretching the bounds of credibility. I got involved at a time when a right-winger had just bombed the Oklahoma City federal building—killing 168 people—and anti-abortionists were murdering doctors. But the government characterized the ELF as a top domestic terrorism threat because we burned down unoccupied buildings in the middle of the night. It shows their priorities.

Now that it's all over, I don't mind talking about my own role in the actions, and I don't mind talking about what my codefendants have already said. But otherwise I don't want to say who did what or name names. Maybe that seems funny to people who have condemned me as a snitch. I understand the general principle that turning your friends in to the cops should be discouraged. I understand it in a more personal way than my critics, actually, since I'm doing nine years because my friends turned me in.

It was just that nearly everyone had already admitted guilt, committed suicide, or fled the country, and the idea of spending the rest of your life in prison isn't something you can fathom until you've faced it. I knew that if I refused to cooperate and became a martyr for these actions, I wouldn't have been able to be honest in my critique of what we did. I felt like it was important, for the movement, to speak the truth, and not just be a cheerleader. Other radicals need to learn from us. Simply dismissing us as snitches doesn't explain why we'd all abandoned these tactics years before we were arrested.

I don't like the term hippie. It's too associated with dirty, drugged dropouts—which my parents definitely were not. They were back-to-the-landers from Philadelphia who came out west in 1975, bought eight acres of forest outside Sweet Home, Oregon, and built a house. I was born at home, fed nutritional yeast and sprouts, and not allowed much TV. No Happy Meals. My mom was a preschool teacher, then a biology undergrad, and my dad worked at an electronics company. After they divorced in 1980, I lived some of the time in the Eugene area. At Mom's house we got mailings from Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd—urgent, graphic accounts of whales being slaughtered. My dad got the Earth First! Journal, and when I kept borrowing it, he got me my own subscription.

When I was 15, I worked for the , maintaining Oregon's hiking trails. I saw miles and miles of clear-cuts. By the next summer, my dad had given me his old Subaru, which he had a shop paint forest green for me. I drove it to Cove/Mallard, in central Idaho—a huge timber sale inside one of the largest roadless areas in the lower 48. That's where I met Avalon, an influential part of the campaign. He was 28, and I was 16—the youngest person there.

Through Earth First! I was exposed to deep ecology, the philosophy that all species have inherent rights, that humans don't have dominion over the Earth. From there it isn't a big leap to see that the only ethical society is a sustainable one in harmony with its environment. A sustainable society cannot use fossil fuels to make disposable plastics or produce most of the things that constitute our economy. When I saw that political and economic systems themselves were the problem, working within these systems began to feel not only ineffectual but almost unethical.

It may seem unrealistic to say the problem is civilization itself. To me it's equally unrealistic to say that something like carbon credits are a solution. Running ethanol in SUVs won't change anything. At all. We don't live in a plastic bubble; everything is connected. Things will have to change whether we're ready or not. We're smart enough to learn that if you shit in your water supply, you eventually get sick. As a species, we need to evolve past our self-destructive patterns.

I hesitate to say this, because I don't want to sound like a terrorist. But in 1995, when I was at the Evergreen State College, up in Olympia, Washington, I read the , which had been published in The Washington Post. I didn't agree with what he did, but what he wrote made sense to me: that the Industrial Revolution had been a disaster, causing psychological suffering in the First World, physical suffering in the Third World, and great damage to the natural world. It was like someone put all this stuff I'd been thinking into words.

At Evergreen, I got involved with the local Earth First! group. We did a blockade of an old-growth-timber sale going ahead under the “salvage rider”—a 1995 congressional provision that exempted some sales from significant environmental regulation. After just a few hours, the blockade was broken up and the timber trucks were rolling. For me it was a turning point: If the people destroying the environment didn't have to follow the law, why should the people defending it?

I saw Avalon not long after that, and I told him I was becoming disillusioned with aboveground activism. He didn't say much to encourage me. I dropped out and soon joined an underground cell.

The Earth Liberation Front wasn't a group as such, and Avalon wasn't our leader. In general, we didn't know each other's names, phone numbers, or addresses. We used the ELF label as a way of telling people, “That wasn't just a random fire.” Avalon recruited some of us, but we were anarchists—you couldn't tell us what to do. When people had particular skills, like deploying incendiary devices, their experience was respected. I was often the communiquĂ© sender. I was good with words and computers—all the message-relaying and encryption we did weren't intuitive.

Targets were chosen by individuals. For example, someone would find a logging company, do some research, and then talk with whomever else they wanted involved. The first recon was usually a drive-by in a car, and the last involved walking the site at night, wearing all black and watching for neighbors, dogs, security guards, late workers, etc. We looked for spots to place the devices—overhangs, alcoves, anything that would reflect back the heat.

A big factor in selecting targets was safety—our own and that of other people and nontargeted buildings. We never wanted to put anyone at risk. In Eugene in the late nineties, more than a couple of timber-company offices were saved by the proximity of neighboring homes. In contrast, the Childers Meat Company—a meat-distribution plant that we destroyed in 1999, on Mother's Day—stood away from any homes at the corner of an intersection. The incendiary device we developed involved an electrical current, matches, a road flare, and a bucket of fuel. The term firebomb is misleading. The fires started out with a very small flame that, over the course of ten minutes, got bigger and bigger. It went straight up. It never exploded. It was never a sudden, giant fireball.

We tried to be smart about imagining the ways we could be caught. We mapped out traffic cameras, ATMs, and gas-station cameras so we could drive around them. We cleaned the fingerprints off everything, even wristwatches, which I thought was overkill until I lost a watch climbing over a chain-link fence. We were very good at it. That's why the government didn't know who did these things until someone who was involved told them.

It was October 1998 when Avalon showed up at the cabin I shared with my partner, Stan, outside Eugene and asked if we wanted to take part in a really big action. It would be my first arson, and it would be Stan's first action of any kind. We said yes. We went on a walk in the meadow, because we never discussed anything indoors. A few days later, we followed Avalon east in my truck. We didn't know where we were going until we got to Colorado. He told us the target was the Vail ski area.

I had read about Vail's plans to expand into an 885-acre wilderness where, 15 years prior, Colorado's last wild lynx had been spotted. seemed like the worst of the worst: not only destroying critical habitat but also destroying local businesses and communities. All for corporate profit earned by building second homes. There had been a large public-outreach campaign, administrative appeals, and lawsuits, but it was still going to happen. If any company deserved to be targeted, Vail did.

In the predawn hours of October 19, with everyone else but me gone back to Oregon and with no timers, Avalon set all the fires himself, by hand. He had to travel on foot, running from building to building on the mile-and-a-half-long ridge. As he lit the last ones, the flames from the first ones were lighting up the sky. There were some scary moments. A hunter was sleeping in a heated restroom in one of the buildings. Avalon opened the door, saw him there, and left it alone.

Down below, I had no way to be sure he'd be back on time. When I was returning from my campsite to pick him up, I heard over the scanner that the police and fire departments were looking for a blue pickup, which was exactly what I was driving. There was nothing to do but keep going. I had to meet Avalon down in town, at a popular trailhead.

I got there right on time. It was morning, it was light out, and day hikers were showing up. I stayed in my truck and shuffled through my things, pretending to be getting ready for a hike. Up on the trail, Avalon had exchanged his black clothing for the hiker's garb that he'd carried in a backpack, and whenever he heard voices coming, he stepped into the woods and hid.

I waited ten minutes, then 20. After a half-hour, as I was wondering if I should leave, Avalon appeared. He just walked up to the truck and got inside. He said two things: He was injured. And the action was successful. It wasn't the time to get details. I just drove.

The first thing we did was go to a library in Denver, and I looked up his injury: a strained Achilles tendon—he'd done too much running. It required ice, not surgery. We went to a second library. He could barely walk, so I entered alone and e-mailed the communiquĂ©.

In the days that followed, I read the news, and it was funny to see speculation that was so completely off base: that at least a dozen people had been responsible, that it must have been an inside job, etc. People tend to think this stuff is much harder than it actually is. We did $12 million in damage—a big part of the $15,894,755.42 I'm supposed to pay in restitution. The expansion went forward—we didn't stop them—and insurance money paid to replace the buildings. But it didn't pay back the $13 million they lost in revenues. Call that the ELF tax.

And we were looking at a much larger canvas anyway, even if, as we later found out, we each had our own concept of what we were achieving. To some degree Avalon still believed in the political process. He thought we could shift the middle of the debate: By being so far at one extreme, we'd make the rest of the environmental movement appear more reasonable. That didn't really ring true to me from the beginning, and after the fallout from Vail—which turned out to be detrimental to local activism—it was even clearer. But even for Avalon, Vail wasn't really about Vail. It was about what we as a society are doing. It was about inspiring people, and that certainly did happen to some extent.

During the four years that I was most active with the ELF, there were parts of my life that were enjoyable. And there were parts that were not. Like being in a hotel room for days on end, everyone clad in painter's suits and face masks and hairnets and multiple layers of latex gloves, craned over tiny electronic devices and soldering irons. Nothing working out, and all of us sweating, frustrated, yelling at each other.

But then there was running around in the wilderness at night, and this incredible sense of being alive. You got to that point of just being totally in the moment. I felt connected to the natural world and really empowered in defending it. The emotion is hard to articulate—like we'd broken through the veil of what was possible. Like things didn't have to be the way they were. Some would call that idealism.

By 2001, everything was falling apart. People were getting more reckless just when I thought we needed to be more careful. There was reason to believe Jake was on the radar of investigators, but instead of keeping a distance, some of the others invited him along on another action. That spring's trial of Jeff “Free” Luers, an activist who had set fire to three SUVs at Eugene's Romania Chevrolet Truck Center the previous summer, was coming up, and pressure was building. One night in March, Avalon, Stan, and three others (but not Jake) went to Romania and burned another 35 SUVs—an attempt at solidarity.

Many of us who weren't involved in Romania thought it would result in a longer sentence for Free and increase the heat on the activist community. We were right on both counts. Free got 23 years, and, by a twist of fate, Jake ended up becoming a prime suspect in Romania, an action he hadn't done and knew nothing about. Coincidentally, the day after it happened, he was accused of having stolen his former housemate's truck. The cops found the timing of that suspicious—though it was actually unrelated—and he was served with a subpoena. He didn't talk then, but it was the beginning of his relationship with the feds.

Since 2000, we'd been holding meetings of what we called the Praxis Book Club—a forum to discuss techniques and share skills. There'd been one in Eugene, another in Tucson, another in Santa Cruz, another in Olympia. At the fifth and final Praxis meeting, in Sisters, Oregon, things came to a head. Romania had exposed fissures. We talked about them, about strategy in general, and suddenly it was clear that we all had very different ideas about what we were doing and why. In the radical movement there is a lot of reading and philosophizing about direct action, and we'd wanted to focus on actually doing it. We should have had that discussion much earlier. There didn't seem to be any reason to meet again. I decided it wasn't safe for me to stick around, and I left Eugene.

A few months later came September 11. I was in another hotel room, getting ready to do another recon. The TV in the next room was blaring: A plane had hit a building or something. So I turned on my own TV and watched all day. The newscasters kept talking about all the crazy security; everything was on high alert. Military jets kept flying back and forth overhead—the hotel was near an Air Force base. It was the wrong time to be creeping around in black in the middle of the night, and we called the recon off.

My aunt lives in Connecticut, and my grandmother was in Philadelphia, and that November my family and I went out for Thanksgiving. Before my flight back out of JFK, I took a few hours to visit Ground Zero. The World Trade Center and Pentagon had been the heart of an American empire responsible for a lot of violence around the world, so I wasn't shocked by the attack. But I wasn't hardened to it, either. It was a tragedy, and Ground Zero was a powerful place. I walked around sobbing.

After leaving Eugene in 2001, I spent six months hiding out in Canada. This time was like an extended retreat for me. In my years as an activist, I'd never taken any time for myself. The problems of the world were so urgent, I felt ike it was self-indulgent to just relax and have fun. But it was a mistake not to have a balanced life. We'd sacrificed so much that our egos were enmeshed in our actions. We were so steeped in bitterness about the world that it spilled over into the group and broke us apart. Away from all that, I could see it more clearly, and I decided I wanted to do things differently.

My move away from my ELF cell was a gradual process, and it was hard. I was still underground. I'd started living with Darren, a Canadian activist who'd done time for animal releases, and he wasn't legally allowed in the country. We went to San Francisco, then Portland, both using fake identities. We couldn't talk to any of our new friends about our past. I had a pre-paid cell phone to call my family, and I was very careful about when and where I turned it on.

In Portland I started DJ'ing. The beat that defines house music is the same beat as a human heart; the connection to life and the Earth is intuitive. I often played music with a subversive, overtly political message. It was January of 2005 when I played a party in Eugene and Jake showed up, already wearing his FBI wire. I didn't want to be rude, but I didn't spend much time talking to him.

The following October, he showed up in line at a Portland coffee shop. I made small talk and bought him some food, since he'd always been broke, but I didn't tell him anything. In late November of 2005, a week before my arrest, I played one of my best sets ever, at a martial-arts studio in Eugene. The studio had been decorated in a jungle motif—big plants and overhead netting—and I played African-influenced rhythms until the whole place was jumping up and down.

Jake just happened to stop by. The government had arranged to have a Childers Meat Company truck parked right out front, hoping it would prompt me to reminisce about the action. It didn't work. I was focused on performing, and the agents got to listen to boom boom boom all night.

The day I was arrested, I'd driven to a coffee shop in northwest Portland and was stopped outside. Two cop cars blocked the intersection in front of me, and one came up from behind. There were at least two others. The agents approached my door, guns drawn, and yelled, “Put your hands on the steering wheel.” They pulled me out, handcuffed me, and stuffed me in the back of an unmarked sedan.

At the FBI headquarters, they showed me a picture of the Bonneville Power Administration tower we'd downed. They said other people had been arrested and were talking, and that I should, too. I asked if I could have a cigarette. They let me go outside. I don't smoke very often, but I knew I was going to jail for a while, and I wanted to take advantage of my last bit of freedom. I watched some birds and tried to take in the trees, wind, grass, and sky. When I came back in, I went to the restroom and threw up.

I resisted cooperating for almost two months. I argued and argued with my court-appointed lawyer. I didn't think it was ethical to put someone else in jail so I could get out of jail. Just before Christmas, Avalon killed himself in his cell. I learned that other people were beginning to talk, one after another. Soon I knew of at least eight, six of whom would testify against me. I was facing a mandatory minimum of 35 years, and it reached a point where I felt my cooperation wouldn't put anyone in jail. So I talked.

Later, some of my codefendants got a deal in which they were allowed to cooperate without naming names. This wasn't possible for me. They had minor roles in one or two arsons in Oregon. I could have been indicted for nine major actions in five separate federal districts spanning the entire period of the conspiracy, so I had much greater culpability. Colorado investigators were determined to get me to say who else was involved in the Vail arson. They were convinced Avalon and I couldn't have done it alone, and they seemed disappointed when I told them the truth.

Jail is overwhelmingly beige. I rarely get to see anything natural or beautiful here, except, occasionally, small bits of sky. I have a daily routine. Sleep through 5:30 a.m. breakfast. Lunch at 10:30. Read the newspaper. Exercise for two or three hours. Yoga. Shower. Write letters. Eat dinner. Work on whatever requires concentration after lights-out. Meditate for an hour or two. Sleep.

I'd never been a particularly spiritual person, but meditation came to me as a way to be at peace with a seemingly untenable situation. I've started to feel more grounded—more intertwined with the spirit of life while alone in my concrete box than I did during much of my time in the free world. Activists need to incorporate this internal work into the movement. It's the basis of true compassion. Once you realize that there's really no “them”—no other—moral action is not sacrifice. It's just aligning yourself with what is good.

Were we wrong? I don't know if I can answer that yet.

I don't regret doing what I felt was right. I don't regret trying to protect the environment. I had good intentions, and I don't regret that I dedicated so much of my life to this. I can't change the past, and I'm not sure I would. The actions were important for my personal evolution—and also for the evolution of the radical movement. I wouldn't be where I am without those experiences. I don't mean sitting in jail. I mean my mind-set.

Even now I can't say that destroying property is always wrong. Our main motive at Vail and in other actions was to inspire people, and we did that. But we were wrong to think more people would adopt our tactics. I can finally understand why they didn't. Activism is motivated fundamentally by compassion and a desire for peace. It's a big step to use force, and it should be.

It's an act of violence to close your heart to anyone, even for a moment. We were certainly guilty of that. We didn't really consider how our actions would impact individuals. We felt the pain of the Earth, and that was what we focused on. A few lost jobs didn't even measure on the scale of the extinction of species. But it doesn't matter what the scale is. You're hurting someone, and you have to grapple with the consequences of that.

True compassion has to apply to everyone: lynx and skiers. I apologized to my victims in court, and I meant it. I couldn't have done that two years ago. The primary responsibility we have as activists and as human beings is to ensure that whatever action we take is based on love. In my involvement with the ELF, we didn't do that, and in that sense we failed.

In martial arts there's a concept that you're not fighting against another person but taking a stand against violence itself. You use only the minimum amount of force necessary to stop an attack. I'm in jail. I'm not going to be doing any more direct action, and I'm not saying anyone else should. But what would a truly moral direct action look like? Maybe it would mean taking in the pain of your victims—opening your heart to them, being wholly present with them—and at the same time truly taking in the pain they're causing to the natural world. Meditating on it. Fully contemplating it. And then, at the end of that process, perhaps deciding that the most compassionate thing in the world is to light their buildings on fire.

As told to McKenzie Funk by Chelsea Gerlach.

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