FLYING ATLANTA to San Francisco to catch the Braves vs. the Giants on the waterfront tonight, I anticipate a reaction as I exit the first-class lavatory wearing a wetsuit. My unsavory, knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth noises couldn’t have gone unnoticed.

San Francisco

A batting-practice splash hit by Bonds

San Francisco

The view from downtown

San Francisco

A couple cold ones

Wrong. Not a glance from the flight crew.

Maybe it’s because I layered baggy clothing over rubber and look only vaguely reptilian. More likely, though, it’s because our flight is three hours late, due to a “major medical emergency” involving drip bags, oxygen, and a gurney for the unfortunate man sitting behind me.

So it goes. My plan was to be floating in McCovey Cove, over the right-field wall of AT&T Park, by first pitch in case San Francisco’s Barry Bonds splashes home run number 754—and possibly 755 and 756—into the Bay. Unfortunately, the game is already under way by the time I find a driver willing to trust a man in a wetsuit. But I’m not worried. Tourists use itineraries to see and do what they want. Travelers use itineraries to wipe up the mess when the kimchee hits the fan.

Sometimes, momentum takes an ugly turn, especially when a trip—this trip, for instance—has been fine-tuned and all stars seem aligned. Offered for your consideration are these Twilight Zone intersectings:

1. It’s July 24, Barry Lamar Bonds’s birthday. He’s 43, and with 753 career home runs, he’s only two shy of tying the record established on July 20, 1976, by former Braves great Hank Aaron. And, after a slump, Bonds has a hot bat: Last week, he homered twice against the Chicago Cubs.

2. The commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bud Selig, is in attendance after conspicuously avoiding earlier Giants games, perhaps because of the BALCO steroids investigation—and maybe because Hammerin’ Hank is his close friend.

3. Atlanta’s starting pitcher is Tim Hudson. A few years back, he couldn’t find a competent catcher while visiting his Florida in-laws, so he had to settle for me, an over-the-hill amateur who still plays the game—hardball, not softball. The man was unfailingly patient while I ran down the ball and threw it back. We’ve been friends ever since.

4. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, also celebrating an anniversary, called out of the blue and asked me to participate in the homer-hunting lunacy of McCovey Cove, unaware that it was Bonds’s birthday; that Hudson was pitching; that I’d caught Hudson; that the guy behind me would stroke out (but live) and my plane would be three hours late; and that I am sufficiently greedy to change, Clark Kent style, in a plane lavatory just on the outside chance I can swim my way to riches by chasing yet another Tim Hudson fastball.
What are the odds?

I CALL AN OLD FRIEND of mine, legendary Red Sox pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, while listening to the game on the radio as my limo stops for red lights, traffic cops, old ladies in wheelchairs—any excuse to use the brakes. It’s the top of the fourth. Not only has Tim been overpowering on the mound; he just singled up the middle: Braves 3, Giants 0.

“Wind’s blowing out, but still I think Bonds is screwed,” Bill says from his Vermont farm. “Hudson’s got a great sinker tonight, and he’s gutsy.” Earlier, I asked Bill to advise me, inning by inning, where to position my kayak when Bonds comes to the plate. Though frequently caricatured as a left-leaning pot legalizer, Spaceman is a brilliant, tireless student of philosophy, weather, and spinning round objects.

“But where should I be?” I ask.

“In center field, drinking beer,” he suggests. “But if you’re wearing a wetsuit, don’t go anywhere near the acidheads. They’ll think a giant frog is swallowing a bald guy.”

Not helpful. Nor was the phone message I received today from Gene Lamont, third-base coach for Detroit and American League manager of the year with the White Sox in 1993: “Randy, it’s Geno. I doubt if Bonds will go long, but if he does, just hope the ball doesn’t hit you in the hands. Someone could get hurt when you drop it.”

Funny.

Secretly, though, I suspect Gene’s right. Tim’s classy and laid-back off the field, but he’s pure Alabama hardass on the mound. “I don’t nibble around the outside corner, and Barry knows it,” he told me yesterday. “I go right at him with fastballs—sinkers and cutters.”

Later, he’ll tell me that veteran Atlanta third baseman Chipper Jones made it clear to the Braves pitchers that they’d better bring their game faces to San Francisco.

“Chipper was razzing us, asking who was going to live in infamy by giving one up to Bonds—you know, kidding but not really kidding. Some guys might think it’s cool to get their name in the record books that way, but it is definitely not cool.”

So it wasn’t going to be an easy night for the Giants’ slugger.

Still, as I hit the waterfront and get my rented kayak rigged and ready, I imagine the looks on the faces of my baseball buddies if I were to call them and say, “One of us just caught a $500,000 baseball. Check your hands.”

It could happen.

BY THE SEVENTH INNING, I’m sitting in an open kayak—cold, cold San Francisco Bay beneath me, 20-knot winds on the water, the glow of stadium lights above—when Bonds strikes out looking on a nasty Tim Hudson fastball.

I pump my fist and say, “Yeah,” then I see the expression on the face of the guy on the surfboard next to me.

“Are you nuts?” he asks.

“Geez, maybe. Gimme a second.”

Valid question. According to memorabilia freaks, Bonds’s 756th home-run ball may fetch up to a cool million. Number 755 could bring as much as half that, and even 754 could sell for ten grand or so.

But, regardless, in McCovey Cove you’d need some kind of Freudian micrometer to determine sanity. There are 14 of us out here, not counting the police boat anchored off the NO WAKE quadrant, which constitutes a fictional sea upon which sails the Bonds Navy, a quasi-fictional armada of regulars who show up whenever the Giants play, day or night. There are ten kayaks, two surfboards, a folding duck boat, and some kind of raft containing what may be a potted fern and a guy in a Giants uniform.

There are a few pretenders, but bona fide flotilla members are easy to spot because of the BONDS NAVY pennants and Giants-orange paint jobs. I’m surprised to discover they’re a convivial group, friendly even to strangers, despite the cove’s reputation as having the toughest lineup this side of Pipeline, the value of the baseballs we’re all jockeying to salvage, and the fact that one of the pretenders (me) is wearing a catcher’s mask.

“Safety first,” I explain.

Not necessary, I’m told.
“Up in the stands, they fight like gladiators over a ball,” says Gene Pointer, a union sign hanger from Petaluma, “but here in the cove it’s pretty laid back. We’re competitive, sure. But we respect each other, too. It takes a special sort of person to do what we’re doing.”

No argument. It’s 59 degrees; water’s 58.
As the game progresses, and as I meet other members of the Bonds Navy, I realize there’s both a loosely structured order to the apparent chaos and a sort of cowboy code of honor.

Home-run balls that land in the cove are called “splash hits.” If a dinger caroms off the quay, it’s not officially a splash hit (although it’s still worth bucks if Bonds hits it), nor is it officially counted as a splash hit if a non-Giant knocks it out of the park.

Pointer, a.k.a. Kayak Man, has five Bonds splash hits to his credit. On Kayak-Man.com, you learn he’s available for “movies, commercials . . . and charity fundraiser events.” His hobbies include surfing and “good times on the high seas.”

Gary Faselli, a retired Stockton cop who retrieved Bonds home run 738 about three months back, makes the pennants. As a member in good standing, he has a lot of say in who gets commissioned.

“You only get the flag if you’ve been out here several years,” he explains. “You’ve got to come to a lot of games.”

Other regulars include Dave “the Spearfisherman” Edlund, a former HP exec who a few years ago retired at age 45 to chase baseballs. There’s Martin Wong, the group’s unofficial photographer. Out here on his surfboard is Patrick Whelly, wearing shades and looking cool despite the cold. Steve Jackson and Tom Hoynes were among the very first “splash dippers,” zooming after balls in their Zodiacs before authorities closed the area to motors.

“It was pretty hairy,” recalls Kayak Man, who used a surfboard then. “They’re good guys, but, man, those propellers are sharp.”

The most famous member of the Bonds Navy is Larry Ellison—not the billionaire founder of Oracle but a 56-year-old salesman who deals in recovery software. Ellison is also very good at scooping balls—so good, in fact, he’s been dubbed the King of the Cove by the media. On consecutive days, he nabbed Bonds homers 660 (Willie Mays’s career total) and 661. The latter he sold for $17,000, some of which he used to buy a custom-made, computer-equipped Kevlar kayak with a baseball sunk in the hull as if embedded there by Bonds. It’s the fastest boat on the cove, according to regulars. Instead of selling 660, he gave it to Bonds, he says, out of gratitude for what he’s done for the team.

Because it is Bonds’s birthday, Ellison has brought along a chocolate cake, a frosted replica of the stadium. Happy birthday, Barry. I take off my catcher’s mask long enough to try a piece. Delicious.

BY THE BOTTOM OF THE NINTH, it’s Braves 4, Giants 0. Tim Hudson is pitching a shutout gem, but his control isn’t quite as sharp. He walks the lead-off hitter, Omar Vizquel, then Randy Winn.(The game will go 13 innings and end 7-5, Braves.)

I’m dialing Spaceman for advice again as the PA system booms, “Now batting . . . number 25 . . . BARRY BONDS!”

The stadium is packed, and the seismic vibration of umpteen thousand screaming fans is transmitted via water through my frozen butt—kind of a tingly sensation.

Spaceman answers the phone. Talking fast, I tell him, “The wind’s still blowing out, but it’s swung west, right to left.”

“For God’s sake, hug the foul line!” he says. “Hudson’s been killing him all night with that sinker.” Because of the stadium noise, I can barely hear Bill add “Drink two rums and call me in the morning” before he hangs up.

Seconds later, I’m paddling hard toward the right-field foul line, into a wind that could push a foul ball fair. I’m the only boat in the area as I cling to a buoy. This is it, I realize: one of those rare moments with sufficient intersectings to qualify as baseball legend. No outs, bottom of the ninth, tying run on deck, and the soon-to-be most successful home-run hitter in history at the plate—on his birthday.

The stadium quiets for a beat as fans take a tribal breath, waiting for Tim, working from the stretch, to kick and deliver. Umpteen thousand people, including my McCovey Cove kindred, want it to happen. Number 754.

I also realize this: I don’t want it to happen.

It’s not because I dislike Barry Bonds. It’s not because of the steroid controversy. Hell, for a season of old man’s baseball, I used the same over-the-counter stuff Mark McGwire used—hit .240 and looked like someone had goosed me with an air hose. Bonds is an athlete. If I thought pills could give me one day playing major-league ball, I’d let someone shoot them down my throat with a damn slingshot.

No, the reason I don’t want it to happen is Tim Hudson. He, too, is an athlete. His senior year at Auburn, he was first-team All-American as a pitcher and utility player—hit .396 and struck out 165 batters. With Oakland, he was named a Sporting News Rookie Pitcher of the Year in 1999 and was runner-up for the Cy Young Award in 2000. But the man isn’t just a pitcher, he’s a baseball player—a rarity in this age of specialization.

There’s another reason I don’t want Bonds to homer: I’m a catcher—never gifted, but I love the game and the position. I like the way the bars of a mask frame the world, tunneling vision so all that exists are the pitcher’s eyes and the spinning trajectory of the ball. There’s an energized dynamic between the mound and home plate, a flowing communication, both linear and intuitive, and a circuit that is completed over and over again through the orbiting exchange of a baseball. I’m a catcher, not a water spaniel—a receiver, not a retriever—and although my attachment to the game may be fanciful, it is an orbit I choose not to break.

In past off-seasons, when I caught Tim, he’d say, “I just want to get loose,” so we’d head to the only ball field on the island where his in-laws live. We’d play long toss for 15 minutes, then he’d take the mound and throw 25 to 35 fastballs—fastballs with freakish movement, tailing as they sank. Once, we took my fishing skiff to nearby Useppa Island and worked out on shell middens built by contemporaries of the Maya, the baseball tracing the flight of ancient arrows.

Good mojo.

Tim’s a little taller than me, weighs 30 pounds less, yet when he touches a baseball, there’s the illusion of some elemental transfer of power between the animate and inanimate. It’s as if, through a blessing at birth, his right hand is a conductor in some mystical, kinetic process by which the ball is infused with energy, and so it seems to glow with a voltaic, accelerating force when it jumps from his fingers.

Not true when I toss the ball back. When I throw, gravity reasserts itself and the ball is smothered by friction, its arc collapsing as if a parachute has been pulled. “Put a little color in that rainbow” is a cliché I’ve heard too many times.

But a baseball has energy, as Spaceman says.

On this night, freezing and afloat in McCovey Cove, I’m grinning: Hudson jams San Francisco’s man with another nasty fastball, and Bonds pops a weak fly to third. I pump my fist. Yeah.

The post Going Deep appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

So much to do, only three sun-drenched months to do it. Let us help. We start by pinpointing the and , then lay out the , , , , , a dizzying slew of summer essentials, and over a dozen more ways to make the season sizzle.

Brandy Armstrong

HELLO, SUMMER: Brandy Armstrong, a runner from Ogallala, Nebraska, hits Cocoa Beach, Florida, in a vintage bikini from MELET MERCANTILE; shorts () from ROXY BY QUIKSILVER.

PLUS: ; ; ;



HEAVY WATER
for Robert Maxwell’s Exposure Photo Gallery of surfing’s invincible underground.

Swellsville, USA

Bare feet on hot sand. Surfboard on the waves. Lobster in the pot. A long, hot season to stay wet and never go back inside. summer starts here—don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.

Tori Praver

Surfer Tori Praver at Cocoa Beach, Florida

Cocoa Beach, Fl While the waves are more mellow than menacing, Kelly Slater’s hometown boasts some serious surf cred. Gear up at one-acre Ron Jon Surf Shop (4151 N. Atlantic Ave., 321-799-8888) and head south toward Patrick Air Force Base, where, if you don’t mind the occasional sonic boom, you can score at breaks like Picnic Tables and Second Light. Refuel seven miles farther south at Da Kine Diego’s Insane Burritos, in Satellite Beach (1360 Hwy. A1A, 321-779-8226). The joint’s outdoor Bamboo Theater screens the latest surf flicks. Montauk, NY It’s just three hours by train from Penn Station to the peaceful right-hand break at Turtle Cove and the smooth lefts at Ditch Plains. Make camp at the Atlantic Terrace hotel ($85–$385; 21 Surfside Pl., 631-668-2050), which overlooks an eponymous beach break fueled by hurricane swells spinning off the Carolinas. Work up an appetite for Harvest on Fort Pond (11 S. Emery St., 631-668-5574), nose-riding wizard Joel Tudor’s favorite spot for monster helpings of seafood and sunset views. Santa Cruz, CA Power up on coffee and croissants at Kelly’s French Bakery (402 Ingalls St., 831-423-9059) and pop next door for a custom foam-grinding session with shaper Ward Coffey. Warm up on the mellow rights at Cowell Beach before risking life and limb in the barrels at Natural Bridges State Beach. Then flop down on the bluffs at Lighthouse Point, where pros boost airs so close to the cliff, you’ll flinch as they pass. Après, fish tacos and cervezas go down smooth at El Palomar (1336 Pacific Ave., 831-425-7575). Coos Bay, OR Frontier town meets surf scene in Oregon’s biggest logging port. Check out Ocean Soul Surf Shop (91122 Cape Arago Hwy., 888-626-7685), where local firefighters and fishermen pick up their surf wax. Co-owner Donnie Conn will steer you to “wherever it’s going off.” For beginners, that might be the cold-water waves at Sunset Bay or, if you like more juice, Bastendorff Beach for intimidating peaks like Shitters. Rogers Zoo and Bizzaratorium, in North Bend (2037 Sherman Ave., 541-756-2550) offers live music. Yakutat, AK Lower 48 just too crowded? Hop the twice-a-month ferry from Juneau and head to Icy Waves Surf Shop (635 Haida St., 907-784-3226). It shouldn’t be hard to find: Yakutat has only two paved roads. Beg directions to the peelers at Cannon Beach; then, after overnighting at Glacier Bear Lodge ($110; 812 Glacier Bear Rd., 907-784-3202), have bush pilot Les Hartley (Alsek Air, 907-784-3231) drop you and your gear on one of countless unknown, unnamed, and potentially perfect point breaks along the rugged coast.

Perfect Pickup Games

A Guide to Summer

TOUCH FOOTBALL: From left, Blake Pearson, a San Diego surf-store owner, wears jeans ($165) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN and a hooded sweatshirt ($301) from R BY 45 RPM. On Nick Fairman, a short-boarder from Winter Park, Florida: boardshorts ($45) by PATAGONIA; cargo shorts ($85) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; vintage button-up shirt by MELET MERCANTILE. On Ryan Heavyside, a Palm Beach, Florida, competitive surfer: boardshorts ($120) by TRACY FEITH; boardshorts ($60) by RLX RALPH LAUREN.

Soccer While the Beltway crowd cheers D.C. United’s 15-year-old ´Ú³Ü³Ù²úó±ô phenom Freddy Adu at RFK Stadium, slide-tackle a lobbyist or knock in a header under the gaze of Lincoln’s statue. Impromptu scrimmages are held most evenings on the National Mall’s soccer-perfect turf. Beach Volleyball As the birthplace of the sport, Manhattan Beach, California, takes its volleyball seriously. Its nearly 100 first-come, first-served courts, spread along a two-mile strand, are tractor-groomed weekly and fill up nightly. Bring a net and ball and you’ve got game. Ultimate Frisbee If you can’t find a game of disk in Madison, you’re just not looking. The University of Wisconsin is home to one of the country’s top college programs, and Madison offers a city league for every season. Walk-ons are welcome nightly at Vilas Park and Olbrich Field, all summer long.

The Swinging Life

Gold Cup 2 Eye

It was just an old rope swing, tied to a pecan tree on the banks of a lake in the Ozarks. But when I stumbled upon it, and grabbed the knot and swung out over the water, what came back to me with a whoosh was my seventh summer, probably forgotten or pushed away because that was the year my mother died.

My old man had nearly brained himself trying to install the heavy rope on the limb of an old box elder. Unwilling to climb up, he’d elected to weight one end of the rope with a claw hammer, which he heaved heavenward in the hope it would sail over the limb. Finally, to my amazement, it worked. He tied a spent Firestone to the rope with a double square knot, installed me inside, walked the boy-bearing tire to the apex of the slope, and pushed.

“What should I do?” I screamed as I soared out toward the water.

He yelled back in his East Texas cracker twang, rich with mules and chiggers. “Y’all figure it out.”

The thing that came to addict me wasn’t just the wild ride and the plunge into the creek; it was that you could apply an infinite amount of torque to the rope by winding up the tire before liftoff, coiling it like a spring. Then, standing on the tire, spinning like a dervish, the test was this: Could I marshal the timing it took to dismount at a point that would deposit me in the water instead of the brush?

In another game, my best pal and I would swallow a Fizzie-kind of like prehistoric Pop Rocks-then wind up the tire, working it like a posthole digger. As the carbonated confection began bubbling in our bellies, I’d climb into the tire while my pal climbed on top. Once airborne and spinning, it was mano a mano until the loser barfed.

But what I liked best was simply the compulsive, solitary act of swinging, pumping my legs for hours to keep the tire in motion. It was the best way to take myself somewhere else.

SUMMER ESSENTIALS
Deck Shoe Revival
Remember these babies? Sperry Top-Sider plates the eyelets on its handmade Gold Cup 2 Eye deck shoe with 18-karat gold, which won’t corrode or rust. Meanwhile, memory foam molds itself to the shape of your sole, while padded deerskin uppers softly cradle the rest. $150;

Rubber Soul

The Pacific stretching westward, rolling hills, empty beaches inhabited only by sea lions—there’s no getting around it: The West Coast’s Highway 1/101 is the classic summer drive. Head out on the 734-mile stretch winding from San Francisco to Astoria, Oregon, for spectacular scenery, crowd-free adventures, and the wind-in-the-hair perma-grin you can only get on the open road. Our weekend guide:

Mile 44: Fuel up on Pacific oysters ordered live from the seawater tanks at the Tomales Bay Oyster Company, a working farm in Marshall. 415-663-1242

Mile 196: Plunge into a swimming hole along the highway as it follows the South Fork of the Eel River through Richardson Grove State Park. 707-247-3318,

Mile 319: Hike beneath 2,000-year-old, 300-foot redwoods at Redwood National Park and Redwood State Park. 707-464-6101,

Mile 513: Boogie-board the 500-foot sand dunes of Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, then bed down in a deluxe yurt at Umpqua Lighthouse State Park. $65 for up to seven people; 800-452-5687,

Mile 640: Sea-kayak, hang- glide, or surf at Cape Kiwanda State Natural Area. 800-551-6949,

Mile 695: Grab a table at the Sea Shack (503-368-7897), on Nehalem Bay in Wheeler, for a bucket of Cajun shrimp and an icy beer. At Wheeler Marina (503- 368-5780), rent a boat and traps to go crabbing off Nehalem Bay State Park.

New American Chopper

Katie Zirnfus

PEDAL PUSHER: Katie Zirnfus, a surfer from Titusville, Florida, heads to the break in Cocoa Beach. Sweatshirt ($52) and bikini ($72) by RIP CURL; vintage bucket hat by ROGAN.

Trade in those riding leathers for a pair of surf trunks and flip-flops and cruise your local boardwalk atop the chopper-inspired Electra Straight 8. With a Shimano Nexus three-speed hub, old-school coaster brake, and red powder-coated spokes, these wheels are Peter Fonda cool. $570;

Who Needs Cristo?

Missed out on the saffron Gates? Head to Amarillo, Texas, where the public art is as large as the 72-ounce steaks dished up at I-40’s Big Texan Steak Ranch. Natural-gas tycoon Stanley Marsh 3 started funding big art back in 1974 with Cadillac Ranch, ten vintage Caddies buried nose first in the Panhandle. Over the years he’s painted a mesa blue; built Giant Phantom Soft Pool Table, a 180-by-90-foot patch of dyed-green grass with 42-inch canvas balls; and commissioned a pair of gigantic sawed-off legs in a field south of town. “Art is a legalized form of insanity,” Marsh has said. “And I do it very well.” Go crazy yourself scoping out Amarillo’s thousands of Marsh-funded street signs, with slogans like I’LL BE RIGHT OUT MA! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! and LUBBOCK IS A GREASY SPOON! Summer here is frying-pan hot, so when yer bod heats up faster than a Texas cheerleader, dive into 6,251-acre Lake Meredith, 38 miles north of town on Texas 136. Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, 806-857-3151,

Fuel Up on Fresh Air

Blue on Blue

Poolside at Blue on Blue

Two Lights Lobster Shack, Cape Elizabeth, Maine
Just south of Portland, on the tip of Cape Elizabeth, this landmark New England seafood stop sits on the rocky shoreline below one of the most photographed lighthouses in the world. Park yourself at a table on the deck and try the fresh clam chowder, boiled lobster, or fried clams and scallops. $1.50–$22; 207-799-1677


Coyote Cafe Rooftop Cantina, Santa Fe
Pull a stool to the edge of this downtown café and settle in with a prickly pear margarita and the Coyote’s famous salsa and guacamole. But save room for chef Mark Miller’s classic southwestern dinner menu—including the mango-avocado chicken sandwich and seared salmon tacos. $4–$14; 505-983-1615


Sports Corner, Chicago
This wildly popular pre- and postgame pub, directly across from Wrigley Field, is one of the few outdoor grills where you can hold a chicken wing in one hand and catch a home run in the other. Cheering—for the unfussy American fare and the Cubs—is mandatory. $5–$12; 773-929-1441


Ted Drewe’s Frozen Custard, St. Louis
Any summer road trip through the heartland deserves a stop at this circa-1941 walk-up window, along old Route 66. Don’t be intimidated by the lines that snake around the side of the building: Their vanilla custard flavored 23 ways—like praline and abocho mocha—is worth the wait. $.50–$4.50; 314-481-2652


The Water Club, New York
Head straight for the Crow’s Nest, the seasonal upper-deck café at this stylish East River eatery. With its colorful umbrellas, palatable prices, and stellar views of the Empire State Building and the 59th Street Bridge, it’s a must for piña coladas and shrimp cocktail from the raw bar. $9–$26; 212-683-3333


Blue on Blue, Beverly Hills
Everything about this poolside café in the courtyard of the Avalon Hotel screams hip: from its inventive American menu (can you say Muscovy duck breast and a side of peach quinoa?) to the cushioned chaise lounges and bamboo-shaded private cabanas. And did we mention the pool? $10–$30; 310-407-7791

Ribs, Sugar?

We say the Memphis way is the only way when it comes to applying smoke and slow heat to the ribs of our oinking friends, so we asked Desiree Robinson, pit mistress of legendary rib shack COZY CORNER, for the skinny on backyard ‘cue in the classic dry-rub style. “Make sure you’ve got nice medium-size racks, not baby backs, with enough fat to make that meat tender,” she says, “plus a good fire so they can sizzle down.” Yes, ma’am. HERE’S THE RUB: 3 tbsp paprika; 1 tbsp chili powder; 2 tsp seasoned salt; 2 tsp black pepper; 2 tsp brown sugar; 2 tsp garlic powder; 1 tsp cayenne; 1 tsp oregano; 1 tsp mustard seed; 1 tsp thyme; 1 tsp coriander; 2 tsp dried green peppercorns, ground; 1 tsp allspice. HERE’S THE DRILL: Rub mixture into ribs at least eight hours before cooking. (Yank the membrane off the bones, too.) Place a fireproof bowl full of water and flat beer in the grill pan. Snug charcoal around the bowl, fire up, and let burn until white but still hot. Lay a foil “envelope” of wet wood chips on the coals, then smoke ribs bone side up for two to four hours, and keep that lid on. Paint with sauce when done, if you like—but, says Robinson, “I usually don’t.”—Chris Davis

SUMMER ESSENTIALS
Lone Star Grill »
Transcend the charcoal-versus-gas debate with the Traeger Texas Style Grill—a cooker powered by pencil-eraser-size wood pellets. A continually rotating auger feeds the fire, allowing you to grill, slow-roast, or smoke your dino-steaks just so. $999;

Swing Shift »
The Byer of Maine Santiago XXL double hammock is a generous eight-foot-long cotton cocoon with a carrying capacity of 400 pounds, so there’s room in there for you and at least one other close personal friend—no matter how many ribs the pair of you just polished off. $80;

Longboard Tech »
Hobie’s Epoxy 9’2 Performer by Surftech looks like a vintage balsa longboard, but wait—that’s an advanced sandwich of PVC sheet foam and Tuflite epoxy resin. Upshot: The Performer is nearly six pounds lighter, yet 30 percent stronger, than a traditional foam-and-glass board. $900;

Hot Rocks

If there’s a deal breaker to a climber’s summer dream scene, it’s rock that’s scalding to the touch. Fortunately, Estes Park, Colorado—a town of 6,000 at 7,522 feet in the Rockies—offers something that desert crags don’t: alpine air conditioning and hundreds of routes just outside of town in Rocky Mountain National Park. “The park is best known for 14,255-foot Longs Peak, but the smaller mountains offer equally challenging multi-pitch routes,” says 24-year-old phenom Katie Brown, a Patagonia-sponsored climber who lives in Moab but spends a month or two in Estes Park each summer. “Lumpy Ridge, a series of granite domes, is my favorite. One dome, the Book, has an awesome 5.9 called J. Crack and a 5.10c called Fat City. I also like to hike the four-mile trail around Lumpy Ridge for the views of Longs Peak.” When Brown craves quesadillas, she heads to Ed’s Cantina & Grill, in town, a favorite hangout of resident climbers like Beth Rodden, 25, and her 26-year-old rock-star husband, Tommy Caldwell. “Estes is about escape,” says Rodden. “You can just run into the mountains and play your heart out.” Rocky Mountain National Park, 970-586-1206; Estes Park visitor information, 800-443-7837.

Pony Express

a guide to summer

HALFWAY TO CAPE CANAVERAL: From left, Ryan rides shotgun in boardshorts ($56) by O’NEILL and OAKLEY MONSTER DOGGLE sunglasses ($145), while Blake sits at the helm in PATAGONIA boardshorts ($45).

This year, an icon of American cruising revs back into action in a major way. We’re talking about the FORD MUSTANG CONVERTIBLE GT, a retro-styled muscle car that feels like freedom even when it’s just sitting in the garage. Drop the top with the push of a button, slap on some SPF 30, and turn the ignition. The 300-horsepower V-8 doesn’t simply roll over; it rumbles, and its giddyup will fairly launch you out on the summer highway. That much is to be expected. What’s new is the tight handling: Just think about changing lanes or charging into a tight corner and the Mustang seems to do it for you. The easy maneuvering’s a nice feature for the curves of California’s Highway 1, but keep your eyes on the road when you pass a congregation of head-turning bodies at the beach or you might tug yourself off course. Better to save your people watching for a stoplight—all the better, of course, for people to watch you. Models with V-8 engines from $29,995;

You Can Dig It

For prime seafood with a stellar view, skip the restaurant lines and shovel up a surfside clambake. We tapped Bill Hart, executive chef of the legendary Black Dog Tavern, on Martha’s Vineyard, for info on how to do it up right. First, make sure fires are legal on your beach—chances are you’ll have to get a permit. Then dig a square pit in the sand, two and a half feet deep and three to four feet wide. Line the bottom with fist-size rocks and toss in some firewood. (If you’re looking for a tinge of sweet in your bake, try cherry or apple wood.) Let your fire burn for about two hours—until the wood is gone and the rocks sizzle when sprinkled with water—before adding a layer of store-bought fresh seaweed. Now lob in your grub: For ten hungry beachgoers, that’d be 20 whole red bliss potatoes, eight to ten Spanish onions (halved), ten ears of corn (husks and all), ten links of linguica sausage, ten lobsters, and three to four pounds of mussels and clams—Hart recommends steamers and littlenecks. Cover it all up with more seaweed and a board laid across the top to lock in the steam. The rest is easy: Shoot the breeze for the next two hours until the clams have opened up (any that haven’t are bad). Slip on your oven mitts, pull out the goods, and serve ’em up with lemon wedges and melted butter.

Cheap Date

Three thousand dollars might seem a little steep for one night in sleepy little Rhinebeck, New York, but I managed to spend it. The reason for the exorbitant fee: I had paid for half of a three-bedroom cottage from Memorial Day to Labor Day (or MD–LD, in classified-ad parlance) and slept at the house exactly one time.


I should have known in March, when my friend Ben and I drove around with Hairsprayed Realtor Lady, that my vacation venture was doomed. The house we rented was sweet-a gray-shingled Cape on three acres of gently rolling hills-but the interior was littered with ladybug exoskeletons. If shiny, rosy ladybugs are cheery good-luck symbols of summer, shouldn’t their postmortem husks be considered bad juju?


I opted to overlook the omen and signed the lease. We signed partly because the realtor’s M.O. was to make us believe that this house was the only good one left. We also signed because each of us had recently been dumped, and renting a summer house was a way of getting on with our lives in a screw-all-y’all kind of way.


We drove back to the city, and in the ensuing months I would imagine scenes from my coming summer in mellow, low-key Dutchess County: I’d be strolling down the sun-dappled dirt driveway, stopping to eat wild blackberries right off the bush, clearly recovered from my breakup.


As it happened, when “MD” rolled around, I was still lonely and sad, and Ben had gotten all hot for a woman whose friends were also coupled up and on the docket for Hudson River Valley fun. A few Saturdays, I drove up to Rhinebeck but, feeling like the seventh-person sourpuss along on a triple date, drove back to the city before bedtime.


Right around the time I watched Ben and his girlfriend drive off to a sunset wine tasting, I realized that my sun-dappled summer was not to be. And so, near the very end of August, I forced myself to actually sleep there, to get my alleged $3,000 worth. It didn’t even come close.

Lazy River

It’s no secret that Boulder, Colorado, offers the best urban inner-tubing in the States, possibly the universe, as locals cool down and bruise themselves “floating” more than a dozen drops of Boulder Creek between Eben G. Fine Park and the take-out of choice, beside the downtown library. These rapids range from tame sluiceways to a shoulder-high waterfall, where teens chill out watching sorority girls lose their bikini tops. Here’s how to tube it right. 1) Get your puncture-resistant, Barcalounger-size radial inner tubes for $12.50 at the streamside Conoco on Broadway and Arapahoe. 2) Sneakers, everyone! If sandals sufficed, you could grab any number washed up on shore. 3) Hide a six-pack of something frosty near the take-out’s sunny south steps. Beer is illegal in Boulder’s parks. Never, ever hide beer. 4) Launch! Feet first, butt up, valve stem down. 5) Warning: That guy over there is probably urinating in his surf trunks right now. Don’t swallow the water. 6) Butt up! 7) After a big drop, plunge your ankles in to catch the downstream current and get dragged away from the froth. 8) Steer clear of the man snorkeling for sunglasses, the bamboo-flute-playing hippie standing midstream, and the marauding gang of boys on boogie boards. Those practicing tai chi under the maples are generally nonthreatening, but you can’t be too careful. 9) Relax your butt. The second half is a mellow drift through a tunnel of cottonwood trees. Can you taste the ice-cold Fanta?

Summer Essentials

summer style

DRIFT ON IN: The photographs on these pages were shot surfside at Cocoa Beach’s landmark 1912 Driftwood House. Owner Rob Sullivan, a local board shaper, runs his surfboard and clothing company, Driftwood, out of the vintage structure.

HOUSE PARTY: From left, on Blake, vintage shirt by MELET MERCANTILE; jeans ($108) by LUCKY BRAND JEANS. On Brandy, camisole top ($198) and leather pants ($1,198) by RALPH LAUREN BLUE LABEL. On Ryan, vintage T-shirt by MELET MERCANTILE; button-up shirt ($50) by WRANGLER JEANS; suede pants ($695) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; flip-flops ($15) by HAVAIANAS. On Victoria, crochet top ($98) and jeans ($165) by RALPH LAUREN BLUE LABEL. On Mike, sweater ($150) and cargo shorts ($85) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; boots ($110) by NIKE. On Nick, vintage jeans jacket by LEVI’S; vintage T-shirt by MELET MERCANTILE; cargo shorts ($85) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; flip-flops ($12) by HAVAIANAS. On Katie, vintage poncho and necklace from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; jeans ($92) by LUCKY BRAND JEANS.


Essential Summer: Liquid Refreshment

Forget the apple martinis. Parallel-park your sloop between the million-dollar yachts at the wharf at Sam’s Anchor Café, in Tiburon, on the sunny north side of San Francisco Bay, or mix up your own tangy glass of SAM’S PINK LEMONADE:
1 1/4 oz citrus vodka
1 1/4 oz 7Up
1/4 oz fresh lemon juice
1/2 oz sweet-and-sour mix
1 oz cranberry juice
Serve on the rocks in a 12-oz glass with a twist of lemon.

—H. Thayer Walker

Wheels Up

With enough vertical feet and hundred-mile views to keep your blood pumping for a week, the Telluride-to-Moab mountain-bike route stands handlebars and stem above your usual summer ride. Operated by privately owned San Juan Hut Systems, this 215-mile route lets you and up to seven pals pedal from the San Juans’ 14,000-foot peaks and spruce-carpeted slopes down to the twisting canyons of Utah’s red-rock country. No need to pack heavy—each night you’ll stay in a one-room wooden hut stocked with sleeping pads and bags (just bring your own liner) and enough bacon, eggs, pasta, and beer to keep everyone in the group satisfied. The seven-day, six-night route—which follows mostly doubletrack fire roads—is open every summer from June 1 to October 1 and costs $553 per person. Go between mid-June and early July, when storms are less likely, and you can catch the lupines and Indian paintbrush in bloom. On the final descent into Moab, opt for the more challenging Porcupine Rim Trail, then stash your bike and head over to the Moab Brewery for a patio pint of Dead Horse Ale and a view of the La Sal Mountains, which cradle the last of the hard miles you just rode. 970-626-3033,

Sweet Freedom

Boston, MA
Boston calls itself “headquarters for America’s biggest Independence Day party,” and we have to agree. The free, all-day extravaganza draws upwards of 700,000 to the banks of the Charles River. The Boston Pops performs, fighter jets buzz overhead, and—for the finale—17,500 pounds of pyrotechnics are launched into the sky from barges. Best seat in the house? Why, the bow of your boat, of course.

Galena, IL
Birthplace of Ulysses S. Grant, this hilly river town of 3,500 kicks off the celebration with a morning parade, just like any small town should, followed by rooftop parties, wine-and-cheese tastings, live music, art exhibits—sponsored by local merchants—and, at dusk, a patriotic sound-off in the midwestern sky.

Telluride, CO
Declare your independence at Telluride’s fiercely funky parade, in which locals and visitors march, ride, skate, gallop, and dance down Colorado Avenue in homemade costumes (picture risqué cowgirls and dancing superheroes). After the local firefighters’ ribs-and-roast barbecue, enter the pie-eating contest, then burn it off during the sack races. At sunset, lie back on the lawn—there’s nothing like fireworks against all the purple mountains’ majesty.

The Beach Rx

While camping on what is now my favorite beach, I once stepped on a scorpion.


I was alone in Cayo Costa State Park, a barrier island of sand and palms about 100 miles south of Tampa, Florida. I rushed to my boat, then to a neighboring island restaurant, where I called the only doctor I knew. It was a Sunday, near midnight.


“Is there much pain?” he asked.


Nope, the slight burning sensation had faded.


“Any dizziness? Uncontrollable salivation?”


It was a scorpion, I reminded him. Not a werewolf.


His indifference changed to irritation. “Did the scorpion sting you on the tallywhacker?”


Was the man drunk? “No!” I snapped. “Didn’t I just tell you I stepped on it?”


“Yes, but I’m a urologist. So why the hell are you bothering me at this hour?”


Return to my camp, the doctor advised, and administer alcohol and ice.


It is a wonderful thing to sit alone on a beach, on a starry night, with nothing to do but drink a thermos of margaritas as prescribed by a pissed-off physician.


Filtered through tequila, a beach becomes more than a percussion skin for waves. This particular beach is many miles long and shaped like a new moon, a convex curve extending into the Gulf of Mexico. My camp spot was at the island’s narrowest point. It was an isolated place with no docks and no homes, centered on a fragile land break bordered by sea, and thus more intimately connected to a wider world. But this small section of beach was now linked to my own small history.


The scorpion was not my last intimate encounter on this beach. My wife and I returned often to that camping spot. Our sons learned to snorkel there. They learned to throw a cast net and how to build a fire that’s good for frying fish.


Both sons-out of college now-still camp there. It remains my favorite place to go for a solitary jog or swim.


Cayo Costa State Park offers primitive cabins ($30 per person per night) and tent camping ($18 per site per night); rental information, 941-964-0375

Rapid Transit

Flush with western Montana’s signature sapphire runoff, the upper Middle Fork of the Flathead is the best float trip you’ve never heard of. Geography is the Flathead’s own permit system—the put-in is tucked away in the Great Bear Wilderness, south of Glacier National Park—so traffic is limited to those willing to fly a Cessna 206 into Schafer Meadows’ backcountry airstrip from Kalispell or horsepack their gear six miles along Granite Creek to the put-in. The river is narrow and steep, meaning you’ll want a slim sports car of a raft and heads-up guiding to make a clean run through four days of Class IV rapids to the take-out at Bear Creek. You’ll camp in Douglas fir and lodgepole pine forests surrounded by the jagged peaks of the Flathead Range, pick rising 20-inch cutthroat out of the herd with a dry fly, and hike to Castle Lake and the cirque-born waterfall that feeds it. The best whitewater is before July, but the fishing peaks later that month during the caddis-and-stone-fly hatch. Four days, $1,095 ($100 extra for horse-packed trips); Glacier Raft Company, 406-888-5454,

The Last Picture Show

a guide to summer

Watch movies under the stars with HP’s ep9010 Instant Cinema Digital Projector. The unit combines a DVD player, a DLP front projector, and a booming sound system and throws a nine-foot image onto any handy garage door or brick wall. $2,000;

WHERE TO FIND IT: DRIFTWOOD, ; HAVAIANAS, ; JET, 323-651-4129; LEVI’S, ; LUCKY BRAND JEANS, ; MELET MERCANTILE, 212-925-8353; NIKE, ; OAKLEY, ; O’NEILL, ; PATAGONIA, ; POLO, RLX BY RALPH LAUREN, and RALPH LAUREN BLUE LABEL, ; POLO JEANS CO. RALPH LAUREN, ; R BY 45 RPM, ; RH VINTAGE, ; RIP CURL, ; ROGAN, ; ROXY BY QUIKSILVER, ; TRACY FEITH, 323-655-1444; WRANGLER JEANS, CREDITS: Stylist: Deborah Watson; Prop Stylist: Forest Watson; Hair: Moiz Alladina for Stephen Knoll Salon; Makeup: Teresa Pemberton/Judy Casey; Production:

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On the phone, Dave tells me that a guy my age, my size, definitely needs a long board. He says, “A long board, that’s the way to go.” I tell Dave, “Yeah, a long board. Precisely what I want.” As I speak, I picture it: Corvette-bright with pinstriping, an iconic shape that would not seem out of place if spiked into a bluff on Easter Island.

Dave tells me that he’s going to build the board with extra tail rocker, three stringers, a long V-panel to facilitate rail-to-rail turns, and thinner rails that will make it easier to keep an edge in the face of a wave.

I don’t know a rocker from a rail, but I answer, “Absolutely. The thinner the rails, the better.”

“And you want it glossed and polished, right?” Before I can answer, he’s describing the process: careful sanding, sealing with rubbing compound and ebony wax, hand buffing.

I picture Dave laboring over the board, and see the material come to life beneath his hands. Dave is six-foot-six, with salt-bleached hair that hangs to the middle of his back. He started shaping in his Miami backyard in the sixties but later moved to California and opened a shop near Encinitas. He ended up in Melbourne, and at 44 he’s still wearing flip-flops and Hawaiian shirts, still closing shop when the surf is pumping. Who am I to question a veteran?

“Of course,” I tell him, “glossed and polished.”

He says, “Oh yeah. And I’ll create a mild nose concave to facilitate nose riding.”

I picture myself crouched on the board, pursued by a wall of water, hair streaming as I tightrope toward the nose.

“Which is why,” Dave explains, “I’m recommending a nine-six. ‘Cause of the extra flotation. A guy your size and age, you’re really going to need it.”

Why does he have to keep saying that?

My imagination blurs. The wave collapses. I no longer tightrope, my hair no longer streams. These days, I am reminded, I don’t have enough hair to sop water.

Dave says, “If that’s the board you want, I can build it. But it’ll cost some money.”

I tell Dave, “Do it.”

I am 45 years old and weigh 220 pounds. friends and family have been selecting delicate, convoluted routes to tell me that I am too old, too bearish to learn to surf. I accept their concern as a measure of their affection. They refer to my knees. Haven’t 30-some years of baseball, squatting behind the plate, slowed me down? They mention my back. A biking accident in the Bahamas made my fourth lumbar vertebra as treacherous as a chained dog. What if I suffer a seizure while in the surf?

“All it takes is one wave,” a doctor friend warns me.

I prefer to alter the inflection, so that his warning becomes a dictum: All it takes is one wave.

I’ve been anticipating that wave for longer than he knows, for longer than I should have allowed myself to wait.

I’m thinking of a farmhouse, seven miles from a microscopic grange town that you won’t find in any atlas. My room was upstairs, with a window that faced west. I spent a lot of years viewing the world from altitude: pear tree, garden, windscapes of corn, sunsets, and new moons. At night, my radio picked up WLS in Chicago and sometimes WBZ in Boston–the outer perimeter of human contact. I heard a song: “Surfin’ USA.” With haying money, I bought the album and a record player. I heard another song: “In My Room.” I’d leave the window open and listen to the music, feeling the sanctuary, absorbing a westerly wind.

Another covert surfer was talking to me, telling me something.

Late one night my buddy Alan Ring called with an outrageous story: Parked outside Becker’s Restaurant downtown was a car with California license plates.

“You’re lying,” I said.

“I’m not. Trust me!”

The last time Alan had urged me to trust him was when he tried to convince me–unsuccessfully, I’m relieved to say–to stick my tallywhacker into the tubes of a milking machine. He claimed to have been doing it for months with startling results.

I got my bike from the barn and flew back roads into town. No streetlights, no traffic, nothing but corn stubble and isolated house lights. It was cold, and I wondered why anyone from California would come to northwestern Ohio.

The car was there, a red Corvette with gold-on-blue license plates and some kind of strange rack on the back. Two guys in their early twenties sat inside Becker’s reading menus while, outside, locals demonstrated their fascination by affecting a rural indifference.

I remember a brief portion of their conversation.

“What’s that rack for?”

“Their boards, you dope.”

“Boards? Jesus Christ, why would anybody carry lumber on a car like that?”

The guys were lean and blond and wore chambray shirts and jeans. They ignored us. One of the local girls strolled by their booth, hoping to goad an introduction. They ignored her, too. My confidence drained–there were things I wanted to ask. Were they from Hawthorne, California? Did they know Brian Wilson?

I’d positioned my bike so that they had to walk past me to get to their car. As they exited the restaurant, I tried to make eye contact, tried to say hello, but couldn’t. They were getting into their car when I finally found voice, asking the only question that I could think to ask: “Do you guys surf?”

The Californian on the passenger side peered up from the bucket seat and allowed a patient smile. It was as though I had asked if the world were round, and yet, I believed, there was also something fraternal in his expression, an acknowledgment of acceptance for no other reason than that I knew the word. As he closed the door, he answered me–“Fuckenay, man”–and then they drove off, popping through the gears, laying a yelp of rubber.

I watched the Corvette meld with the highway and was mesmerized by the potential of a road that really could be ridden from there to anywhere.

That was in 1963, when I was 13. It was November, a month easy to recall.

There are things that can be owned which also represent aspirations that cannot be purchased. I have a friend whose garage is a trophy room of climbing gear. My wife puts her running medals in a drawer but arranges her Nikes as carefully as a row of candles. For me, important things that come to mind are a Sea Master fly reel, a Wilson Pro-Toe catcher’s glove, a Hewes flats skiff…and a custom surfboard.

David Hamilton says it’ll take three weeks before mine is ready, maybe longer. Something about getting “just the right blank.”

I tell him, “No rush.” After postponing the acquisition for more than three decades, what’s a month? To me, this slow approach to a thing I’ve always wanted to do isn’t puzzling, yet I can offer no simple explanation. Surfing, as I always perceived it, is not a sport that can be attacked. It has to be encountered, waited upon until the time is right. There is pleasure in believing that the moment will come.

Here are things I never expected or associated with surfing: Oneness with All Things. Mother Ocean. Mother Nature. Mother Earth. Flipper. Mood rings. Perfect waves.

Here are a few things that I do associate with surfing and find attractive, things that add overtones and depths of inference: Highways. Seascapes. California in the seventies. Sex Wax. Pet Sounds. Summer nights and the potential of undiscovered places.

I read surfing magazines, kept up on the controversies. Would long boards be eclipsed by super-short, tube-probing plastic machines? Would grommets and ho-dads and surf Nazis ruin it all for the few Soul Surfers? And what about those goon cords, or ankle leashes? Was the purity of the sport being compromised?

A year didn’t pass that I wasn’t waiting.

The question is, have I waited too long? The first time I paddled out into big surf, a board beneath me, I was certain that I had. There are factors that those of us who’ve ridden only surrogate waves choose to ignore–among them, that surfing is one of the most physically demanding of sports, that surfers may be the most underrated athletes in the world, and that paddling alone through breaking surf is scary as hell, an existential prologue that scatters romance like so much chaff and leaves the pretender quaking like an aspen leaf.

Me, the pretender.

I got hammered. I got dumped and spun until I didn’t know which way was up. Once I lost purchase in the belly of a wave, and the board whacked me so hard in the face that I saw cartoon starbursts. I not only couldn’t catch a wave, I apparently couldn’t even make it out beyond the reef break.

Later, when a friend told me that I’d resembled a gorilla trying to drown a Popsicle stick, I thought, How can she be so flippant? Doesn’t she know that this is important?

This was several months ago at a surf spot called Beacon’s, 30 miles north of San Diego, when the weather was right, the mood was right, and it seemed to me the handwriting was on the wall. I believed that it was now or never.

I had read that surfing was one of the few sports that could not be taught. I found that attractive. The timing, the balance, the ability to read waves were not linear components like a golf swing. Even so, earlier in the week someone in San Diego had told me about a man who taught surfing. I found him under “K” in the business pages of the phone book–Kahuna Bob Edwards. Kahuna told me that in the last nine years he had taught more than 3,000 people to surf, including men who were older and larger than I.

We met the next morning at La Jolla Shores, where on a soft foam board he demonstrated the basics. This was in waist-deep water with a gentle beach break. Kahuna, middle-aged and athletic, made it look easy. Surfers always make surfing look easy.

I floundered around for an hour but couldn’t manage to stand. It was maddening. My first attempt at snow skiing, I went down the mountain; my first time in a kayak, I made it down the river. Surfing required more. Toward the end of the lesson I got briefly to my feet and then crashed off the board into the sand.

I’d done it: I’d surfed. Or so I told myself. But it was a lie, and the lie grated on me over the next few days, which is why I called Kahuna Bob again and how I ended up at Beacon’s fighting for my life in a screaming riptide. I wanted to try the real thing. Beacon’s was the real thing.

Kahuna put me on an old tandem board that he called The Beast and selected a board for himself, and I tried to follow him out through the surf. I kept dumping the board. When I was engorged with salt water, exhausted, Kahuna paddled back and yelled, “We’re almost outside the break. It’s nice out there!”

It was nice out there. When I finally made it, I sat and looked shoreward. It was like floating on the membrane of some great respiratory system. The beach would rise out of the sea, dilate into a golden border, and then vanish as I watched the backside of breakers sail past.

It was so nice, so peaceful, that I was reluctant to return to the rim of the break. Yet that’s the essence of surfing: to goad yourself into a position to be swept away. I did, and got thrashed. Tried it a second time and felt my right groin muscle tear. Had I not been so frightened of paddling back through the breakers, I wouldn’t have tried a third time, but I did. I felt a wave inflate beneath me and felt the sudden transfer of velocity as the board gathered buoyancy. I almost tumbled as I got to my feet, but caught myself. And then I was… standing, gaining speed as the cliffs rushed toward me, viewing the world from altitude.

I rode the wave all the way to the beach, where a woman with bleached hair and wearing a black wetsuit stood watching. She may have thought me mad the way I, a stranger, hobbled toward her, calling, “Did you see that? Did you? That was my first wave!”

Her expression was amused, fraternal, and distantly familiar. She grinned and said, “Yeah, I saw! Man, you’re really stoked.”

The next week I called Dave Hamilton.

My surfboard now leans against an office bookcase. It’s candy-gloss white with Corvette-bright pinstriping–just like I’d pictured it. Near the nose, the Vector logo is backdropped by a line drawing of the world. I like that. I am also pleased by the board’s shape. It would not be out of place if spiked into an ancient hillside anywhere on that map.

I am less heartened, however, by my recent attempts to catch a wave. I took delivery of the board two weeks ago and spent the next few days on Florida’s east coast, morning until night, being humiliated by Atlantic winter surf. Not once did I get to my feet for more than a millisecond.

Late yesterday afternoon I drove to Captiva, an island off Florida’s west coast, in hopes of taking advantage of surf created by 40-knot winds. In a parking lot, the wind ripped my board off the roof rack, and it hit a rental car in which were two big German women–a circumstance that was never idealized by the Beach Boys.

It was getting late. During the long wait for the police, I used sign language to tell the women I was going into the water. They demanded to keep my driver’s license until I returned. It seemed petty at the time, but it actually turned out to be smart. Once I was beyond the breakers, a riptide carried me out to sea. Tourists lined the bridge to watch this Real Life Drama.

It was after sunset before I finally battled my way to the next island, happy to be alive but absurdly distressed that I had not had a shot at a single wave. The Germans were unsympathetic. The sheriff’s deputy, who was an occasional surfer, couldn’t have been kinder. “Maybe your board blew off for a reason,” he suggested.

“Well… maybe,” I said.

Fight it as I might, I am finding it impossible to approach even the periphery of the sport without continually meeting people who take karma seriously. At Beacon’s, after riding The Beast clear to shore, I’d walked to the top of the bluff and met Rod Aries, a big guy in his forties who is a former ballplayer turned surfer. Aries owned the house across the street, and so for him, checking the break was a morning ceremony. When I told him about catching my first wave, he shook his head with mock sadness and said, “It’s all downhill from here, buddy.”

Even so, he continues to prod me along through the mail. He recently wrote, “In baseball you follow the flight of the ball and you experience it from afar. In surfing you are the flight of the ball and experience it firsthand.”

Surfers say things like that. It can’t hurt to listen.

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Had I known, for instance, that my friend and personal physician, Dr. Hummel, suffered from a phobic aversion to all varieties of snakes, and had I surmised, as I should have, that a prominent thoracic surgeon might become churlish if he were required to billet in anything less than a five-star hotel, it is highly unlikely that I would have invited him to accompany me to the wilds of northeastern Borneo for a two-week exploratory of that island’s Malaysian state of Sabah.

Such a rush to judgment would have been my loss. Yes, I would have saved money. Yes, I would have been spared the humiliation of being urinated upon by orangutans. But neither would I have found myself lost in the upper regions of the Kinabatangan River-a place whose only other active primates appear to be proboscis monkeys and smugglers. I have the good doctor to thank for that.

Early on, Hummel had said, “Dengue fever-now that’s vicious stuff. Hallucinations so intense that it’s known as ‘breakbone fever.’ There’s also the danger of malaria and typhoid. Way back in the bush, without proper medical attention, animals will devour your legs before you’re lucid enough to seek help.” This was while the man was still jockeying for an invitation.

“You’re a chest cutter, not a tropical disease specialist.”

“Yes,” he replied. “But my oath covers the whole ball of wax. The important thing for you to remember is that I can get just about any pharmaceutical I want.”

“For free?”

“More or less. I know your lifestyle. Sooner or later I’ll have your heart in my hands. Your insurance company’s bound to make it up to me.”

Three weeks later we landed in Kota Kinabalu, capital of Sabah, and it was there that I suffered the first niggling doubts about the man as a traveling companion. I had booked, sight unseen, a couple of nights in a cheap rooming house that I will call Toboh’s Bed ‘n’ Curry. It was one of those Asian walk-ups that smells of clove cigarettes and durian fruit, the kind of wayfarer’s crossroads that I favor whenever I’m roaming the Eastern tropics. “Hey, check out this bulletin board,” I said to Hummel. “It’s better than a shortwave radio. Messages from all over the world. Here’s an Aussie hoping to find a crew to sail to Jakarta. And here’s a note from someone named Sanana telling Biff that she’ll wait for him in Penampang. Messages in French and German and even a few with those Scandinavian crossed O’s.” I looked over at Hummel and smiled. “Come midnight, everybody in this place will be slobbering drunk on cheap tapai wine or crazed with jet lag. Pray to God none of them owns a harmonica.”

But Hummel was peering out the window, not listening. “Is that an open cesspool across the street? Raw sewage? There are things floating in it!”

“Waterfront view,” I told him, patting his shoulder. “Think of it in those terms.”
Nor did he seem pleased by our tiny room. Out of old habit, he kept reaching for a bedside telephone that we did not have, attempting to call a concierge that the Bed ‘n’ Curry did not employ, in order to complain about room service that did not exist.

“Three flights of stairs!” he muttered. “We’ve got to climb three flights of stairs just to get a beverage. And in this heat!” More than anything, he hated the communal bathroom. “I don’t mind the Swedes and their endless showers. And at least that German guy tidies up when he’s done. But those French bastards! They’ll spend an hour in there, smoke a pack of cigarettes, pee in the sink, fill the toilet with hair. But they don’t wash. The soap’s still dry when they come out. I know-I checked!”

A good traveling companion must be equal parts mediator, entertainer, father confessor, educator, and psychologist. Fortunately, I’m competent in all of these roles. “You hayseed,” I counseled him. “Never whine about the French. In these international ports, it’s considered a sign of weakness to even acknowledge their existence. Remember: The poor devils haven’t won anything since they rebuffed the Kaiser at Marne. Irritating the world into submission is their only hope. Ignore them when you can, agree with them when you can’t-but never, ever make eye contact. Particularly after dark.”

Mostly I tried to keep Hummel on the move. It was the wisest course. The differences between North America and Asia are remarkable, but the contrast between the Bed ‘n’ Curry and Hummel’s world of exclusive clubs and operating rooms was shocking. If we weren’t busy, he became fretful. As I told him more than once, “If you wash your hands in Betadine one more time, the skin’s going to peel off like a $30 paint job. You want to kill germs? Try gin. It worked for the British. It’ll work for you.”

That’s another obligation of a good traveling companion: Isolate your partner’s weaknesses and then gently convert them into strengths.

Set in the south china sea about midway between Singapore and Australia, Borneo is the third-largest island in the world. For reasons that are as complicated as they are interesting (petroleum, border wars, commie rabble, and white rajas all played roles), the island has been carved into three politically separate entities. Indonesia controls the central and southern portion, while Malaysia controls all of the north, with the exception of Brunei, a tiny, oil-rich sultanate that has few roads but many Rolls Royces.

No matter who is in control, Borneo remains a dark heartland of rainforest with a thin perimeter of villages and roadways maintaining a foothold between jungle and sea. You expect jungle. What you don’t expect are high-tech cities booming with commerce. Kota Kinabalu (KK, as it is known), population 200,000, is a busy canyon of modern buildings, around which enclaves of Third World Borneo still thrive. You find them across the channel among the stilt villages of Gaya Island. You find them down on Tun Fuad Stephens Street, at the Central Market, where you can buy the assorted wealth of Borneo’s heartland one small chunk at a time: palm oil, wild honey, water buffalo tongue, turtle eggs, giant fruit bats, soybean milk, and all the exotic fruits, herbs, and vegetables one associates with Asia-including the infamous durian, which tastes like an onion-fed mouse climbed inside a mango and died.

Hummel liked KK for its Malay-Chinese-European cultural mix and its mingling of Muslim and Christian ways. Though he looked longingly at the exclusive Palace Hotel when we passed by, he also demonstrated an admirable patience while accompanying me to the traditional markets. As a former fishing guide, I had read about Asia’s ox-eyed tarpon, and I spent hours at the markets until I found one. I returned the favor during Hummel’s forays to local health clinics and long conversations with Chinese healers and sellers of medicinal herbs.

Yes, the man was finicky about hotels and hygiene, yet he seemed to have the ability to adapt. Even so, it was way too early in the trip to congratulate myself on my choice of companions. After all, we hadn’t set foot in the bush.

Then a second incident occurred that again triggered all the niggling doubts about Hummel’s grit. I’d heard that the local Hash House Harriers, self-described as a drinking club with a running problem, was holding a run outside KK. I thought it would provide Hummel with a gentle introduction to the wilds of Borneo, because the Harriers always choose bizarre cross-country courses. “The runs are never more than four or five miles,” I told him. “We’ll see some great scenery, and afterward the Harriers drink a lot of beer.”
The run took place late in the afternoon in a jungled area east of KK. The club was made up of Japanese businessmen. Theirs was like no Hash event I’d ever participated in before. The course took us through a primitive village, up a mountainside, over a crest that happened to be on fire, and through dense rainforest. It was while humping our way through the smoke and flames that I warned Hummel, “Keep an eye out for snakes. A burn like this will push them all to open ground.”

He slowed down. “Snakes? You mean like rattlesnakes? I’m not comfortable around snakes.”

“Rattlesnakes?” My laughter was derisive. “Rattlesnakes couldn’t survive a week on this island. If king cobras didn’t eat them, black cobras would.”

Hummel stopped. “Cobras? You never mentioned there were cobras in Borneo. If I’d known we had to deal with cobras, I’d have gotten off back in Tokyo. I’ve seen pictures of those things-they’re like vampires without legs!”

A good traveler is alert to abrupt mood changes in his or her companion, and I instantly perceived the flavor of panic in Hummel’s tone. “Relax,” I said. “Another hour or so, we’ll be back to the highway. After that, I’m going to find the fiend who laid out this course. I’ll try my best to insult him; then we’ll steal all the beer we can carry and leave.” I clapped him on the back. “You go first.”

After that, I had a difficult time keeping up with the man. Hummel seemed to have springs in his legs. It was while he was threading his way downward, through a dense tangle of vines, that the troubling incident occurred. Hummel was 20 meters or so ahead of me, an animated charcoal figure in the jungle gloom. He leaped, landed, and a long stick levered up behind him and smacked him on the backside. But Hummel thought it was a snake, not a stick.

His scream was a terrible thing to hear, the scream of nightmares. He launched himself down the mountainside, tumbling, tumbling. By the time I got to him, he was curled up in the fetal position, moaning softly. Hummel reached his hand out toward me and then gasped, “Bitten…on the butt…by a cobra!”

I had brought the stick with me. I tossed it at him. “Here’s your cobra. Now get on your feet. We’ve got beer to steal.”

Every trip has its watershed moments. Bad traveling companions usually withdraw after any small shock or trauma. They become dead weight, because mentally they’re already on their way home, even though the trip hasn’t ended. Good travelers, however, gather strength from adversity. Frankly, I expected Hummel to wilt.

I was wrong. He finished the run in what I thought was the uncomfortable silence of a broken man. Instead, it was the silence of spiritual rebirth. I began to suspect the change when, as we approached the throng of Japanese Harriers, he said, “If I get the chance, I’m going to sucker-punch the guy who marked that course. Or better yet, convince him he has heart parasites.”

But I knew for certain that Hummel had been born again as a hard-core traveler when, a few days later, as we were flying east toward Sandakan, he looked down upon the unbroken canopy of forest and said, “That’s where I want to go.”

I answered, “You mean Borneo? We’re already in Borneo. Over it, at least.”
“No,” he said softly. “The jungle. I want to go back to the jungle.”

It was while we were visiting the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center, near the Sulu Sea port of Sandakan, that Hummel proposed the idea of hiring a boat to take us up the Kinabatangan River. Sepilok was founded by the Sabah Forestry Department in 1964 to help baby orangutans that have been orphaned-usually as a result of poaching or logging. One of only three such rehab centers in the world, Sepilok has 43 square kilometers of rainforest in which orangutans, under the care of the state’s Wildlife Division, are gradually weaned from dependency on humans.

Hummel and I had spent the morning wandering the boardwalks, watching the red apes gamboling around the feeding platforms, when he suddenly stopped and said, “I know they do great work here, but it feels too much like a zoo. Isn’t there some way we can get out and try to see an orangutan in the wild?”

Impossible, I told him. Orangutans were much too shy. He brought out his map. “This river”-he pointed to the Kinabatangan-“starts west of Sandakan and goes clear over to the heart of Sabah. Why don’t we take a boat as far as we can, then get out and bushwhack? Maybe we’ll see one. It’s worth a try.”

Although I loved the reckless spirit of the plan, I had to repeat that it was a waste of time. “Besides,” I said, “we’re not equipped for that kind of trip.”

The next morning, though, Hummel got me up early and led me to the docks, where he introduced me to a little man named Hial Esten. Esten was standing beside a homemade powerboat. The boat was yellow. The motorcycle helmet Esten held beneath his arm was white. “Hial’s taking us up the river,” Hummel said. “I’ve got water, some food.” He patted his side, to which was strapped a newly purchased machete-a parang, as it is called in Malaysia. “I’ve got everything we’ll need. Hop in the boat.”

I spoke to Esten. “Not until you explain the helmet. I don’t get in boats with drivers who feel they need crash helmets.”

“The only word of English he understands is money,” Hummel said. “I think the helmet is a negotiating tool. It implies that his boat is fast.”

Esten’s boat was fast. With Hummel and me wedged into the console seat, Esten flew us across the bay, twisting in and out of mangrove creeks at a truly terrifying speed. We left rickety stilt houses and dugout canoes teetering in our wake. Then we were on the Kinabatangan River, a conduit of yellow water that augered its way into the jungle. Esten stopped the boat only twice-once to briefly watch proboscis monkeys brachiating through the dark mangroves, and once at a hut that turned out to be a police inspection station. Later I would learn that the Kinabatangan is a favorite smuggling channel for Filipino pirates, but the tired cop we stirred from his hammock was less than animated as he considered us and our boat. He accepted a few Malaysian dollars from Esten, yawned, and waved us on.

An hour later-we might have traveled 40 miles, we might have traveled 60-Esten nosed bow-up to the shore. He pulled off his crash helmet and pointed inland: “Orangutans!”

Impossible, I thought. But Esten was right. Hummel and I entered the forest. First, we heard them: a weighted crashing in the distant tree canopy. We immediately stopped. “Only apes could make a noise like that!” I said, delighted. We stood and listened as the crashing became louder, ever closer…and then we could see limbs high above us writhing as if in a storm, and I had the abrupt realization that the orangutans knew we were there and were deliberately vectoring toward us, two interlopers. Suddenly I was no longer delighted.

“Gad!” I said. “I think they’re attacking!”

“Just stay calm,” Hummel said. “See them? They’re right over us now.”

Actually, they were in a tree directly over me-a big female with a baby clinging to her stomach and a young, shy male. In photographs, orangutans appear to be the sweetest, most benign of creatures. In person, though, in the wild, they are intimidating as hell.
“Look at the size of her,” I said. “She could crush my head like a beer can.”
As I spoke, the female broke off a small limb and dropped it on me. I moved immediately, and the female moved so that she remained above me.

“Interesting,” said Hummel. His was the cool, remote voice of a scientist-or a seasoned traveler. “Notice how she refuses to make eye contact?”

“Eye contact?” I said. It keyed one of the memory electrodes. “Dear God-she thinks I’m French!”

Then I felt an unexpected warmth on my head and shoulders, as if I was standing beneath the jet of a Jacuzzi.

“There’s something about you she doesn’t like,” Hummel observed, backing away. “I think we’d better go.”

The suggestion was unnecessary. I was already running.

That evening, as I stood beside an artificial waterfall in a tiled pool in Sandakan’s five-star Renaissance Hotel, Hummel explained that the apes we had encountered were almost certainly from the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center.

“I just talked to a biologist,” he said. “He feels sure that our man Esten actually dropped us off at the backside of the preserve.”

“Now that’s a dirty trick to pull on anyone,” I said.

“No, I think he’s just a good businessman. We wanted to see orangutans, and he produced them.”

I shrugged and once again stuck my head beneath the pouring water. Even with the best of traveling companions, it’s important to find a few moments of quality private time.

The post Out There appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

The ice climber, Tiffany Levine, was trying to prove a point to this yahoo with the punk earrings and the peroxide-bright hair. To wit: Muscle is no respecter of gender. She’d had a pretty good day on ESPN’s Holographic Ice Tower, a 60-foot wall of water bonded to a steel frame and constantly cooled with liquid nitrogen. Her forearms were still pumped from swinging the ice tools, and her biceps and deltoids were solid as granite.

The mountain biker, a 22-year-old guy named Philip Tinstman who’d won the downhill speed event in the X Games, removed his shirt and sauntered around the bar, showing off his muscles. Levine stood there grinning, shaking her head. The crowd was getting into it. She pulled her shirt off and flexed, too: same kind of washboard abdominals, same taut vein-work traced between skin and muscle cordage.

Levine had matched him in the pose-down, so Tinstman had to up the ante. He unzipped his pants, removed them, and stepped back to see how far the ice climber was willing to take it. Extreme sports required extreme behavior, right?

Which is how the two of them ended up all but bare-butt in a crowded bar, hands locked across a table that until very recently had been lined with pitchers of quality, made-in-America beverages.

ESPN should have had at least a couple of cameras there, plus a producer and a crack editing team to do what ESPN does best: reconstitute the esoteric, filter it, spice it, splice it, and then market and distribute it under the label of “sport.” ESPN had tried hard to create the illusion of crowd enthusiasm on the snow course all week; here in the bar, the enthusiasm was real. Editors could have mixed in interviews, childhood photos, comments from feminists and grunge-rock snow commandos to create the carefully choreographed up-close-and-personal touch. Insert likable Gary Jobson as referee and commentator, and this impromptu showdown might have added a couple hundred thousand viewing households to the rating share.

But no, this match was private and personal. I’d been sitting with Nancy Prichard, a first-rate ice climber who, despite having a disappointing day on the wall, had remained sober and articulate. When I asked her who she thought would win, she said something like, “Who cares? You’ve got to love her attitude.” I’d been attacking the pitchers right along with everyone else, so if that’s not precisely what she said, it’s close. And it was in that instant that I finally grasped why extreme sports in general and the X Games in particular had captured America’s fascination while a long list of other so-called alternative sports had flushed themselves down the television hopper.

It was attitude, the go-for-it posturing that has become a mantra of the nineties: no fear, no limits, no excuses. The Winter X Games, of course, was only a cold-weather permutation of the more successful X Games, held every June, in which contestants compete in such events as “aggressive” in-line skating, stunt bicycling, and sky surfing. ESPN had assessed what it took to be the hard-assed, in-your-face persona of Generation X and assembled a scaffolding of “events” that made it all marketable.

Which is why the arm wrestling contest would have made an ideal addition to ESPN’s 22 hours of X Games programming. It had attitude. It had sex appeal. It had head-banger music pounding in the background.

Finally, the arm-wrestling commenced. The damn mountain biker slammed Levine’s wrist to the table over and over again. But just as Prichard had said, no one cared who won or lost. They were just doing it.

With the exception of competitors and their friends, most people who showed up at Snow Summit Resort to watch the preliminaries on Thursday and Friday not only didn’t seem to care who won or lost, they didn’t recognize the names of those who were competing — nor had they ever heard of the events they were competing in. Super Modified Shovel Racing? Big Air? The Boarder X? What was this lunacy?

Things weren’t much clearer at the press center inside the Bear Bottom Lodge at the foot of the slopes. An ESPN assistant director estimated that 500 journalists representing various media had arrived to cover the event. But after a few days of dealing with the chaos at the press center, it became apparent that out of the multitude roaming around with press IDs flapping from their parkas, there may have been a few dozen at most who had actually come to work. The rest were imposters, hangers-on, and the friends of friends who, by their sheer numbers, helped create a holiday junket attitude that made it damn near impossible to gain working access to the events, let alone the starting areas.

As one journalist from a ski magazine told me, “ESPN doesn’t care about press access. They’re covering this thing — and they’re the only ones who matter.” He was right. The X Games wasn’t a sporting event. It was a television program. The cast was made up of devoted if unheralded adepts at arcane disciplines whose motivation, presumably, was the opportunity to be catapulted onto the national stage. It certainly wasn’t the allure of a $3,000 first prize — a miserly sum in light of ESPN’s multimillion-dollar investment. A bit player in a third-rate sitcom would have been paid more.

Nor did ESPN have much reason to care if spectators arrived to watch the games. The only audience that mattered was umbilicaled to the network and its sponsors via satellite. While a network staffer had, prior to the event, been quoted in a local newspaper as promising that the X Games would attract no fewer than 12,000 people per day to the town of Big Bear Lake, the actual figure was between 2,000 and 6,000. And that is a generous estimate, because judging by the thin crowds in the viewing stands, most of Big Bear’s visitors had come to ski or snowboard themselves, not to watch the games. Indeed, during the women’s downhill preliminaries, the camera crew working the finish line had to assemble a claque of volunteers behind the winners and cheer on cue in order to suggest some semblance of crowd enthusiasm.

ESPN may not have cared, but the local businesspeople did. With a population of 15,000, Big Bear Lake is a San Bernardino Mountain resort town with a racky-tacky architecture of strip malls, plywood cabins, Aspenish chalets, Taco Bells, snowboard rental sheds, and chain motels. It’s a place built for the quick culling of tourist dollars. The townspeople had been promised that cash-carrying hordes would arrive to fill their hotels and restaurants and bars. Instead, business was up only slightly from the regular ski season crowd. “Hey, where did all the people go?” read a headline in the San Bernardino County Sun.

Well…most of them seemed to be encamped at the press center. After a day of being shooed away from starting gates and finish lines, I was not the first working writer to decide, screw it, I’d sit on the press center patio and watch the games on the outdoor Jumbotron, a 20-by-27-foot television screen that was elevated off the bed of a generator truck. Thus positioned, we watched exactly what viewers across the nation were watching.

Which sounds lame. Hell, it was lame. But as I grew used to it, I came to realize that watching the Jumbotron was the perfect way, perhaps the only way, to cover this strange theater. Until the various races had been processed and pasteurized in the production room, the X Games did not exist. A racer’s descent of the snow course or a climber’s ascent of the ice wall, although occasionally spectacular, still remained a relatively drab articulation of lone-wolf sport until ESPN mixed in the critical additives: grunge tunes, contrived drama, and backward-cap yo-dude aggressiveness. It’s a combination of elements that, not surprisingly, has proved essential to most successful video games. And that is exactly what we were watching: a living, breathing video game.

After I realized that, the events were kind of fun. I’d sit on the patio in the sun, sipping free Mountain Dew and eating free sandwiches, watching the Jumbotron and making notes. Not that it was always easy. Sometimes it was hard to find an open table. Apart from all the media milling about, a dozen or so SWAT cops had also chosen to make the press center their permanent hangout. No one could explain their presence, but the fact that there were no terrorist attacks on the press room is a proud matter of public record. The cops would Bogart the tables, lounge around in their green muscle shirts, and then rush into line the moment food was served.

It was at the press center that a couple of other magazine writers and I engaged in a review and assessment of previous sporting events that had been contrived exclusively for television and therefore had died just deaths. There was ABC’s Battle of the Network Stars, in which actors from a TV series competed in a variety of events against actors from another TV series. There was a similar offering that pitted employees of one corporation against another (a show that drew big numbers in Japan but flopped in America). There was the NFL arm-wrestling championship and various outdoor sports challenges that featured whitewater kayaking, rope crossings, orienteering, and climbing. My personal favorite was The Superstars, the granddaddy of the genre and one of the first to be labeled a “trash sport.” It was produced by ABCback in the seventies, and it brought together sporting greats from a variety of fields to compete in a series of events designed to prove, supposedly, who the true Superstar was.

The first couple of Superstars events were held at Rotonda, Florida, an appropriately canned and poured-to-form planned community. I know — I was there. The list of athletes included people such as Johnny Bench, Rod Laver, Kyle Rote Jr., Johnny Unitas, and Joe Frazier. Olympic pole vaulter Bob Seagren won the first Superstars, but it was Frazier who was the crowd favorite. His bicycle broke during the mile bike race, and in a fit of pique he proceeded to beat the bejesus out of the thing. Then, in the 25-yard swim, Frazier dove in and nearly drowned. After he’d been fished out, a reporter asked him why he’d tried to race if he didn’t know how to swim. Frazier replied, “How was I to know I couldn’t unless I tried it?”

Even though the contestants were, for the most part, truly extraordinary athletes with considerable marquee value, ABC failed to capture the event with the kind of balls-to-the-wall spirit that’s been perfected by ESPN. Which is precisely why The Superstars gradually faded away, while the X Games phenomenon — now, according to ESPN executives, the most watched sports category among males aged 12 through 34 — continues to grow.

This is not to denigrate the athletes who came to Big Bear Lake for the Winter X Games. The list of events may have sounded strange, but that doesn’t mean just anyone could leap into the breach and compete successfully. It’s easy to sit on a sunny patio and dismiss the whole production as trash sport; it’s a very different thing indeed to stand at the top of a mountain or at the base of an ice wall — or, to take an event from the summer X Games, to jump from an airplane with a surfboard strapped to one’s feet — and imagine trying to survive.

Even the shovel racers had to possess a double ration of grit. Before being ordered away from the shovel racing pit area, I had a chance to stand around and watch the teams work on these strange vehicles that look something like coffins painted in fluorescent colors and bolted to skis. Some cost as much as $8,000 to build; several used nitrogen-powered pneumatic braking systems and parts scavenged from fighter jets. Yet they were fueled by nothing more sophisticated than gravity.

The true nature of the X Games’ appeal may be illustrated by the fact that shovel racing — which demands little athletic ability — was probably the most popular event of all. Why? Because there were some absolutely bitching crashes. Bill Wick of San Clemente smashed into the retaining wall when his brakes failed. Defending “world champion” Gail Boles of Taos rolled his Thor’s Hammer at least a dozen times and walked away flashing the thumbs-up sign.

I was in the press room watching ESPN’s raw video feed when the worst crash occurred: John Strader, also of Taos, pitchpoled his Viper down the hill, his legs dangling from the cockpit like some drugged rag doll. He had sustained three compression fractures of the thoracic spine, broken his jaw, and sprained his wrist. When his sled finally stopped rolling, I heard an unidentified voice come over the raw feed: “Man, it looked great on TV!”

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To zero in on the most idyllic resorts this side of paradise, we dispatched a crack squad of writers to the Caribbean. They came back with a hit list of places where creature comforts and adventure are not mutually exclusive. Now it’s your turn.

By Katie Arnold

By Janine Sieja

By Randy Wayne White

By Hampton Sides

By Bonnie Tsui

By Grant Davis

By Sally Schumaier

By Mike Grudowski

By Karen Karbo

By Lisa Anne Auerbach

PLUS:
Swimming in Mosquito Bay, sailing the Grenadines, climbing 10,000-foot Pico Duarte, and five other don’t-miss dream outings.

Laluna

A minimalist’s idea of maximum bliss

Caribbean Resort, Grenada

Caribe, anyone? Laluna’s mod seaside lounge overlooking Portici Bay.

ON OUR THIRD MORNING IN GRENADA, we roasted the Chicken. Then we did what any sensible traveler in the Caribbean would do: We beelined it back to Laluna, a sublime refuge tucked into a hidden bay on the island’s southwest coast, and made straight for the sea. We were ridiculously filthy, splattered with mud from a three-hour mountain-bike ride with Chicken—a wiry, calf-strong Grenadian guide who’s such a fanatic cyclist, he’d already pedaled 25 miles before breakfast. (No wonder we beat him up the hills.) Salty but clean, we retired to the private plunge pool on our cottage’s wide wooden deck, taking in the uninterrupted view of Portici Bay. Time to debate the next move: Grab a book and sprawl across the teak settee on the veranda, wander down to the open-air lounge for a cold Caribe and a game of backgammon, loll poolside on a chaise, or have a massage? There’s only one house rule at this tiny, tony anti-resort: Make yourself at home. After three days, we felt so at home, we thought we were home—that is, if home were a stylish, thatch-roofed cabana notched into a hillside above an empty crescent of Caribbean beach. In our dreams.

The Good Life // Designed in 2001 by Gabriella Giuntoli, the Italian architect for Giorgio Armani’s villa on an island off Sicily, Laluna has a pared-down, natural aesthetic: Indonesian teak-chic meets spare Italian elegance. All 16 one- and two-bedroom concrete cottages—painted in cheerful shades of pumpkin, lapis, teal, and plum—are well-appointed but unfussy: Balinese four-poster beds draped with sheer muslin panels, earth-colored floors covered with sea-grass rugs, open-air bathrooms with mod metal fixtures. The same soothing mix of wood, cane, cotton, and thatch prevails in the resort’s beachfront courtyard. On one end is the breezy restaurant, where Italian chef Benedetto La Fiura cooks up Carib-Continental dishes like callaloo soup (an island specialty made from dasheen, a tuber with spinachlike leaves, and nutmeg) and mushroom risotto. On the other is the open-air lounge, with a fully stocked bar and comfy Indonesian daybeds with plump throw pillows, and low tables that double as footrests. Between the two is pure R&R: a sleek square pool with a perfect curve of beach beyond.

Jaw Dropper // Swinging the cottage’s mahogany-and-glass doors wide open at night and being lulled to sleep by the wind in the bougainvillea and the gentle rolling of waves below.

Sports on-Site // There’s no set agenda at Laluna, but there’s plenty to do. Guests with sailing experience can take out one of two Hobie Cats, as well as single and double sea kayaks, for the easy cruise to Morne Rouge Bay, the next cove over. There’s a small stash of snorkeling equipment available (keep an eye out for yellow-and-black-striped sergeant majors near the rocky points at either end of the beach) and Specialized mountain bikes for tooling around.

Beyond the Sand // Fight the urge to cocoon at Laluna and head inland and upward to Grand Étang Forest Reserve, a 3,800-acre tract of rainforest at 2,350 feet, along the island’s jungly spine. We spent a day in the charming company of 64-year-old Telfor Bedeau, known to all as the father of Grenada hiking. He led us on a four-hour ramble around Lake Grand ƒtang, a rogue crater left over from the island’s volcanic past, and along an overgrown tunnel of a trail to a series of five waterfalls (popularly, if erroneously, dubbed the Seven Sisters) and up a hidden path to a bonus cascade called Honeymoon Falls (half-day hikes, $20 per person; 473-442-6200). At A&E Tours, Chicken guides half-day, full-day, and multi-day mountain-bike rides along the coast or through the reserve (our three-hour pedal from the harbor capital of St. George’s over the serpentine, near-vertical Grenville Vale Road cost $25 per person, including bike rental; 473-435-1444, ).

The Fine Print // American Eagle (800-433-7300; ) flies the two and a half hours to Grenada daily from San Juan, Puerto Rico (round-trip from Chicago, about $785); Air Jamaica (800-523-5585; ) flies nonstop from New York’s JFK four days a week (about $400). From December 20 to April 13, rates at Laluna (473-439-0001, ) start at $530 per night, double occupancy, including water activities and bikes (the price drops to $290 in summer). A modified meal plan (breakfast and dinner) is $65 per person per day. Henry’s Safari Tours can take care of your on-island transportation and guiding needs (473-444-5313, ).

The Hermitage

Frangipani breezes, volcano view

THE SOUNDTRACK TO NEVIS, a volcanic bit of emerald-green pointing skyward in the West Indies, lacks a badass steel-drum reggae riff. Nevis, blessedly, is not that Caribbean. Its rhythms require closer attention: nocturnal, chirping bell frogs and murmuring trade winds that rustle the coconut palms and spread the sweetness of frangipani across 50 square miles of overgrown hills and dignified former sugarcane plantations. The most charming of these mansions, the Hermitage, is perched 800 feet above sea level on the southern flanks of dormant-for-now 3,232-foot Nevis Peak. The 15 gingerbread cottages and 340-year-old British colonial lodge are embellished with pastel-shuttered windows and four-poster canopy beds. Despite this dollhouse decor, you won’t feel embarrassed to take your lunch of grilled-flying-fish salad on the veranda after a muddy five-hour hike up the volcano. Just hose yourself off in the front yard first. The Good Life // Amiable American transplants Richard and Maureen Lupinacci bought the Hermitage 33 years ago. Its Great House, reputed to be the oldest wooden building in the Caribbean, is where guests dine by candlelight or sidle over to the bar for rum punch at cocktail hour. (The free-flowing mixture of dark Cavalier rum, syrup, lemon juice, and a dash of cinnamon is part of why the refined Hermitage vibe never crosses over into stuffiness.) Most of the cottages are restored originals—whitewashed, light-filled retreats furnished with regional antiques. All have hammock-equipped balconies for horizontal views of Nevis Peak and the white clouds that usually shroud its summit. The three-acre grounds are dotted with citrus, mango, and cashew trees, and have two pools and a tennis court.

Jaw Dropper // Roam trails crisscrossing the Gingerland District on one of the lodge’s 16 thoroughbreds, or charge up Saddle Hill to an old lookout used by British admiral Horatio Nelson in the 1780s.

Sports on-Site // Explore the terraced gardens of lilies, ginger, and hibiscus or take the ten-minute shuttle to four-mile Pinney’s Beach, the loveliest of Nevis’s sandy stretches. Just a quarter-mile from the inn is the trailhead for the mile-long climb to the summit of Nevis Peak (contact Top to Bottom; $35 per person; 869-469-9080).

Beyond the Sand // A wild donkey—an odd trail obstacle—brayed his displeasure as I pedaled the sea-grape-lined singletrack of Tower Hill. Windsurf ‘n’ Mountain Bike Nevis (869-469-9682, , ) offers half-day rides from $40, including use of a Trek front-suspension bike. At Oualie Beach, on the island’s northwestern coast, let marine biologist Barbara Whitman introduce you to four-eyed butterfly fish, goat fish, flame coral, and pink sea anemones. Under the Sea (869-469-1291, ) charges $40 for a three-hour snorkel, including gear.

The Fine Print // American Airlines (800-433-7300, ) is the only major U.S. carrier serving Nevis. The daily flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, takes an hour and 15 minutes (round-trip airfare from New York City costs about $725; from Denver, about $980). From December 15 to April 15, rates at the Hermitage (800-682-4025, ) start at $325 for a double, including a full breakfast (low-season rates from $170).

Anse Chastanet

This is jungle luxe

Caribbean Resort, St. Lucia

Petit Piton looms as Anse Chastanet’s yacht heads out for a day at sea.

Caribbean Resort, St. Lucia

Walls optional: a hillside villa at Anse Chastanet

MY FIRST DAWN on St. Lucia, a big teardrop of an island wedged between Martinique and St. Vincent in the Lesser Antilles, was disappointing. I’d flown in on the dark of the moon and arrived at Anse Chastanet, a 600-acre resort perched on the rugged southwestern shore, too late to see anything but a macrodome of stars. The next morning, I awoke to warblers singing in the cedars and the scent of begonia shifting in the trade wind. My villa-size room, I realized, barely had walls. Wait, it gets worse. Below was a bay so clear, the coral shimmered like a field of wildflowers. Twin peaks spired out of the forest. The rockier one, 2,461-foot Petit Piton, was unavoidably phallic. Gros Piton, at 2,619 feet, was more rounded and feminine. I looked from the Pitons to the beach, then at my empty bed. What a blunder! Here I was in the most achingly romantic setting in all my years … and I was alone.

The Good Life // I didn’t feel weepy for long. The resort has a five-star list of activities to match the cuisine (spiced-carrot-and-coconut soup, grilled dorado, mango trifle), an attentive 250-person staff (serving no more than 100 guests), and pleasantly esoteric options at the Kai Belté spa. (Try a wosh cho hot-stone massage.) Trou au Diable, a thatch-roofed bistro, sits on a half-mile of secluded beach, while the Piton Restaurant is set among the 49 villas up the hill. My Hillside Deluxe room, with its louvered doors and green heartwood furniture, was like a tree house built by Swiss castaways. Very rich Swiss castaways. But considering the absence of phones or TVs, they didn’t seem to mind being stranded on St. Lucia.

Jaw Dropper // Tucking into a plate of locally raised lamb and fresh snapper cooked under the stars by chef Jon Bentham on an antique cane-sugar pot the size of a kettledrum.

Sports on-Site // Anse Chastanet is famous for spectacular diving; there’s a Platinum/PADI Scuba and Water Sports Center, and boats ferry you out to several world-class dive sites along the Pinnacles reef. But I chose to explore a lesser-known offering: 12 miles of mountain-bike trails winding through the ruins of a 19th-century French sugarcane-and-cocoa plantation next door. Full disclosure: I expected crappy equipment but a fun ride. What I got was a first-class trail system partially designed by NORBA phenom Tinker Juarez and my choice of 50 Cannondale F800s, all fitted with hydraulic shocks and brakes. The ride, over rolling jungle paths, was excellent—I broke a sweat but still had time to stop and pick wild avocados, bananas, and guavas.

Beyond the Sand // Ever bagged a Piton? Me neither. The climbs are notoriously steep and muddy, but if you’re game, the front desk recommends a guide named Meneau Herman ($50 a person for the day). For the rest of us, there are ample opportunities to explore St. Lucia via horse or sea kayak. On my last day, I hit the water with Xavier Vernantius, the head kayak guide. Born on St. Lucia, Xavier, 33, knew all the secret caves to explore. As we paddled around a rocky outcropping called Fairyland, the view of the Pitons in the distance left me speechless. “I grew up here, and I still find them beautiful,” Xavier said.

The Fine Print // US Airways (800-622-1015, ) flies to St. Lucia from New York City for about $700, from Chicago for $760. From December 20 to April 7, a double at Anse Chastanet (758-459-7000, ) costs $455 per night, including breakfast and dinner ($220 per night in the off-season, not including meals). The spa and scuba diving are extra.

Tiamo Resorts

Check your Blackberry at the door and get way, way offline

THE MOST IMPRESSIVE thing about Tiamo is how unimpressive it is. Even as my sea taxi pulled up to the unassuming scallop of beach on the southern half of Andros, I still couldn’t see the resort that was right in front of me. Once ashore, I had to wade through thickets of sea grapes and gumbo-limbo trees to find the central lodge—an unpretentious wooden structure with screened porches and a corrugated metal roof. Was this the place? The sleepy Brazilian jazz seeping out the front door said yes. Hacked out of the Bahamian bush and opened in 2001 by Mike and Petagay Hartman, Tiamo is a fascinating—and so far successful—experiment to test whether assiduous eco-consciousness can coexist with rustic luxury. The ethos here is part Gilligan’s Island, part Buckminster Fuller. With only 11 open-air bungalows, powered by the sun and outfitted with compost toilets, everything is small-scale, low-impact, phosphate-free, and relentlessly off the grid. Accessible only by boat or seaplane, the resort sits on 12 acres of pristine beach along an inland waterway, surrounded by 125 acres of preserved wilderness. There are no air conditioners, no TVs, none of the whirs and bleeps of the digital age. Nope, at Tiamo, messages are delivered strictly by iguanagram. The Good Life // By day, watch a heron or one of the resident iguanas trundle by your screened porch. At night, the hemp curtains billow in the breeze. The bright-green-and-yellow louvered shutters, exposed copper pipes, and bare-metal faucet levers are sleekly utilitarian. My solar-heated beach-rock shower looked out on a mighty specimen of local cactus known as—I kid you not—the Bahamian dildo. The lodge has the same casual vibe. Browse for dog-eared paperbacks and board games in the library; dine on sesame seared tuna and mahi-mahi with mango beurre blanc at the large communal table; or simply fritter the evening away at the rattan bar, clutching a mind-warming Petagay Punch as a local “rake-and-scrape” band sings you back to bed.




Jaw Dropper // A spectacular network of “blue holes” riddle the limestone bedrock all over southern Andros. Kayak out to the Crack, a fabulously deep gash in the seafloor where two temperature zones collide in a thermocline, and snorkel or dive the nutrient-rich broth alongside hosts of wrasse, lobster, sea cucumbers, and freakishly large angelfish.

Sports on-Site // Tiamo is not a destination for hyperactive folks who expect a brisk regimen of “activities.” Basically, Mike shows up at breakfast and says, “What do you want to do today?” Choose between swimming, bonefishing, kayaking, snorkeling, scuba diving, bushwhacking, or my new favorite sport, extreme hammocking. Hikes (led by Shona Paterson, the on-staff marine biologist) are free, as are snorkel trips to the blue holes. There’s a modest fleet of trimarans and sea kayaks at the ready. But the most elaborate activity is … horseshoes. Somehow, that says it all.

Beyond the Sand // Andros boasts some of the finest bonefishing in the world, and Mike can easily hook you up with a guide ($350 per boat for a full day; each boat holds two anglers). Ask for Captain Jolly Boy, a corpulent former bar owner turned Baptist preacher who stalks “the gray ghost” with all the biblical fervor of Ahab. “I feel you, Mr. Bones!” Jolly Boy whispers as he poles the flats. For divers, the Andros Barrier Reef, one of the world’s largest contiguous reefs, lies less than a mile offshore; its sheer wall, home to thousands of species of fish, drops nearly 6,000 feet into the Tongue of the Ocean. Scuba excursions motor out daily, but you must be PADI-certified ($100 for a one-tank dive, $145 for two tanks).

The Fine Print // Delta (800-241-4141, ) and American Airlines (800-433-7300, ) fly to Nassau from L.A. and New York for $600 or less. From there, make the 20-minute hop with Western Air (242-377-2222, ) to Andros; flights are about $100 round-trip. The bungalows at Tiamo (242-357-2489, ) cost $275 per person, double occupancy ($360 per person, single occupancy) year-round; rates include everything but your bar tab, bonefishing, and scuba diving. The resort is closed August 1 through September 30.

Punta Caracol Acqua Lodge

The lullaby of lapping waves

Caribbean Resort, Isla Colon, Panama

The H20 cure: cabanas on stilts at Punta Caracol

TRANQUILO IS THE OPERATIVE WORD at Punta Caracol, located just off the serenely beautiful island of Isla Colón, an hour’s flight by puddle jumper from Panama City and a 15-minute boat ride from the small town of Bocas del Toro. Sheltered by the surrounding archipelago and, about three miles away, mainland Panama, the resort’s six two-story thatch-roofed cabanas are suspended over the water on wooden stilts, spiraling out from a long central walkway to face Almirante Bay. Each solar-powered duplex has its own private terrace and deck, and the sound of lapping water lulls you to sleep. This vision of calm luxury perched at the edge of the world is just what founder and Barcelona native José-Luís Bordas had in mind when he designed Punta Caracol in 1997 as his final project for business school. At dusk on my first evening, I’d already showered and dressed for dinner, yet I couldn’t help heeding the call of bath-temperature, cerulean water. In record time, I changed back into my swimsuit and threw myself—with a war whoop—off the back deck. It’s the kind of place where glittering-green tropical fish jump up to meet you in rapid-fire succession and bioluminescent plankton are the only lights shimmering offshore after sunset. Every detail of the resort, from hand-woven hanging textiles to fresh papaya and pineapple-covered panqueques at breakfast, is well executed by Bordas’s competent local staff. At the end of my four-day idyll, I could tell him honestly, “Es mi idea del paraíso, también.” The Good Life // Each bungalow has native-hardwood floors and French doors that open to the bay, as well as wooden lounge chairs and woven floor mats. Bathrooms are lined with clay tiles with a lime-green-and-plátano-yellow trim—brightly Caribbean without being gaudy. Upstairs, the open-air bedroom has a canopied king-size bed with natural-cotton drapes that double as mosquito nets, but you won’t need them; the cool breezes off the water at night are enough to blow pesky insects away. As for eats, you won’t find fresher seafood: The open-air restaurant-cum-lounge—also on stilts over the water— gets regular deliveries from local fishermen cruising by with just-caught lobster and red snapper, weighed with a portable scale brought out from behind the bar. A must-have: grilled lobster with tomatoes stuffed with rice, fish, and vegetables. (Chase it down with a warm, sweet pineapple slice glazed with caramelized sugar.)

Jaw Dropper // While you’re dining alfresco on flame-grilled shrimp, you can watch dolphins, pelicans, and parrot fish trolling for dinner on the reef below.

Sports on-Site // Swim, snorkel, or paddle in clear, calm Caribbean water along a mile of coral-reef coastline; there’s no beach at Punta Caracol, but your cabana’s private dock is just as enticing. It’s an easy paddle inland, via cayuco (traditional wooden canoe), to Isla Colón’s mangrove swamps—home to howler and white-face monkeys and the unbelievably slow-moving two-toed sloth, or oso perezoso (“lazy bear”).

Beyond the Sand // Pilar Bordas, the miracle-working sister of José-Luís, can arrange outdoor activities on demand: surfing at Bluff Beach, on the far side of Isla Colón; mountain-biking across the center of the island; scuba-diving with queen angelfish near San Cr’stobal Island, four miles away (two-tank dives with Starfleet Scuba, $50; 011-507-757-9630, ). Hire a guide for the 40-minute boat ride to Bastimentos Island National Marine Park, where you can hike through sugarcane to Red Frog Beach ($30 per person).

The Fine Print // American Airlines (800-433-7300, ) flies direct from Miami to Panama City for about $300 round-trip. From there, Aeroperlas (011-507-315-7500, ) has two flights daily to Bocas del Toro for $116 round-trip. The Centers for Disease Control recommends a yellow-fever vaccination and the antimalarial drug chloroquine for travel to the Bocos del Toro region. Double-occupancy rates at Punta Caracol in high season (December 16 to May 15) start at $265, including breakfast, dinner, airport transfers, and use of cayucos and snorkel equipment (from $215, off-season; 011-507-612-1088, ).

Bitter End Yacht Club

Fat sails in the sunset

Caribbean Resort, Virgin Gorda, BVI

Even type A’s need some downtime: the Bitter End

Caribbean Resort, Virgin Gorda, BVI

The North Pier deck at Virgin Gorda’s Bitter End Yacht Club

THE BITTER END, ON THE REMOTE NORTHEASTERN TIP of Virgin Gorda, is a sprawling community of people with one thing on their minds: boating. In addition to the club’s 78 rooms, freshwater swimming pool, and teakwood Clubhouse restaurant, there’s a marina with charter-boat service, a dive shop, a market, a pub, and 70 boat moorings. All the action takes place offshore, specifically in the protected waters of three-square-mile North Sound, with the club’s flotilla of 100-plus vessels, ranging from sea kayaks and windsurfers to Hobie Cats and 30-foot oceangoing yachts. This is no mellow-rum-drinks-on-your-private-beach kind of resort: It’s a playground for Type A’s in topsiders.

The Good Life // The best rooms are the 48 cottages set on a steep hillside, with wraparound decks and views of Eustacia Reef (30 air-conditioned suites climb the sunset side of the hill). Meals (think surf-and-turf) are served under the blue canopies of the Clubhouse.

Jaw Dropper // The staff at the BEYC remembers everyone. It had been two years since my last visit, yet when I walked to breakfast, watersports staffers greeted me by my first name.

Sports on-Site // Thanks to warm water and 15- to 20-knot winds, North Sound is the perfect place to hone your tacks and jibes. Private sailing lessons for beginners cost $25 per hour, and advanced sailing sessions run $50 per class. Use of all the small boats is included in your stay, as are snorkeling trips to nearby reefs. Two-tank dives cost $85, all equipment except wetsuit included, and deep-sea fishing for blue marlin runs $275 a day.

Beyond the Sand // The 30-minute hike to the top of 1,359-foot Gorda Peak offers a commanding view of the entire Virgin Islands region. Don’t miss a trip to the famous Baths, a jumbled collection of giant boulders and knee-deep tide pools.

The Fine Print // Round-trip airfare on American Airlines (800-433-7300, ) from New York to Tortola’s Beef Island Airport is $525. From January 5 to April 30, the five-night Admiral’s Package at the BEYC ($2,925 to $3,850; 800-872-2392, ) includes three meals a day for two (low season, $2,150 to $2,625). The annual Pro-Am Regatta ($2,940) takes place the first week of November.

Maroma Resort & Spa

A mystical hideaway on the Mayan Riviera

Caribbean Resort, Yucatan, Mexico

Your palapa or mine? Get a massage or just toll in the sun on Playa Maroma.

EVER SINCE ARCHITECT José Luis Moreno followed a machete-beaten path through 200 acres of tropical jungle, in 1976, to build this exclusive beachfront resort, Maroma has been deliberately hard to find—tucked off an unmarked gravel road, 20 miles south of Cancún. On my first evening, I followed the flickering lights of a thousand candles along a maze of stone walkways, wandering through gardens of orchids and palm trees until I found myself on a narrow crescent of fine white sand: a heavenly border between jungle and sea.

The Good Life // Designed simply, the 64 rooms in ten low-lying, white-stucco buildings are an elegant mix of saltillo tile, handwoven rugs and bedspreads, mahogany beams, and bamboo shutters. Dine on fresh grilled snapper at the cavernous El Sol restaurant or on the beach-view terrace. Jaw Dropper // The world’s second-longest barrier reef, which runs 450 miles from Cancún to Honduras and teems with coral and fish, is just 200 yards offshore.

Sports on-Site // At the beach kiosk, set up snorkeling and reef-diving trips, sea-kayaking excursions, and day sailing on a 27-foot catamaran ($15 to $120 per person). On land, mountain-bike through 250 acres of protected jungle. Spa offerings include a two-hour Maya steam bath and cleansing ceremony ($90), yoga classes, and nine types of massage ($50 to $120).

Beyond the Sand // The Yucatán is cratered with more than 700 cenotes—limestone sinkholes that offer otherworldly snorkeling, diving, and rappelling opportunities. The resort can arrange a trip 40 miles south to Dos Ojos cenote for $90.

The Fine Print // Continental Airlines (800-523-3273, ) flies from Houston to Cancún for $400 round-trip; American Airlines (800-433-7300, ) flies nonstop from New York for about $700. Double-occupancy rates at Maroma (866-454-9351, ) start at $400 in high season (November 14 to December 18 and January 4 to May 15) and $340 in low season.

Caneel Bay

The true-blue classic

WITHOUT A DOUBT, ST. JOHN’S alluring natural charms get star billing at Caneel Bay. Frigate birds, as angular as pterodactyls, soar over no fewer than seven stunningly pristine on-site strands, from vest-pocket hideaways like Paradise Beach, which you can have all to yourself, to Caneel Beach, shaded by coconut palms and sea grapes and sprawled out in front of the resort’s main lobby. Some 170 manicured acres are cordoned off from the rest of the island—and the rest of the world, it seems—by a trio of 800-foot-high forested ridges. Philanthropist and conservationist Laurance Rockefeller founded Caneel Bay in the fifties, and the place still feels like a summer camp for blue bloods. There’s no shortage of diversions—day trips to the British Virgins, guided shoreline hikes, couples yoga at the resort’s Self Centre. But most of the clientele seem to be seeking stillness and seclusion rather than pampering. Rooms contain no phones, TVs, radios, or even alarm clocks. Management, for its part, tries mightily to preserve an old-money sense of decorum: Collars for gents, please, even on the tennis courts, and evening resort wear for ladies. Expect to see plenty of newlyweds, espadrille-shod martini sippers, and the occasional jackass: Wild donkeys sometimes roam past just in time for cocktails.

The Good Life // Architecture keeps a low profile here. Low-slung rows of 166 guest rooms—done up in dark wood, Indonesian wicker, and botanical prints—are scattered around the property in clusters of a dozen or so and linked by winding footpaths. As a rule, the food in the four dining rooms is tasty if not particularly innovative; standouts include the steaks, aged and tender, the breakfast buffet served on an open-air terrace overlooking Caneel Beach, and the 265-bottle wine list at the Turtle Bay Estate House.

Jaw Dropper // Request one of 20 rooms along Scott Beach. After you’ve spent hours snorkeling with hubcap-size hawksbill turtles, your private deck offers a front-row seat for virtuoso sunsets that give way to the lights of St. Thomas, four miles across the sound.

Sports on-Site // Aside from the 11 tennis courts, built into a terraced hillside, a compact fitness center, and a small pool near the courts, most action takes place on the coral formations a hundred yards from the waterline. Use of snorkel gear—plus a generous selection of sailboards, kayaks, and small sailboats—is complimentary.

Beyond the Sand // Two-thirds of St. John’s 20 square miles fall within Virgin Islands National Park. Sample them by renting a jeep (from $65 a day at Sun-n-Sand Car Rentals, available at Caneel Bay from 9 to 10 a.m. daily) and heading for the Reef Bay Trail, at 2.4 miles the longest of the park’s 20 hikes. Other options include half- and full-day sails to some of St. John’s excellent anchorages, and sea-kayak excursions to offshore cays ($60 to $70 per person through Caneel Bay).

The Fine Print // Most major U.S. airlines fly direct to St. Thomas from various East Coast cities (about $550 round-trip from New York); Caneel Bay guests go by ferry to the resort. From December 17 to March 15, rates at Caneel Bay (340-776-6111, ) start at $450, double occupancy ($300 in low season).

Turtle Inn

The Godfather’s eco-resort

I SIT AT THE DESK OF TURTLE INN’S VILLA ONE, staring through wooden shutters at the Caribbean, hoping for some Maya magic. Turtle Inn is owned by Francis Ford Coppola, and he was here, on the southern coast of Belize, working at this very desk, only a few weeks ago. I’m a huge fan of Mr. Francis (as he’s called by the people who work here). I love the Godfather trilogy, but what I really love is Villa One’s outdoor garden shower, designed by the auteur himself, surrounded by a high wall built by Maya stonemasons and illuminated with Balinese lanterns. I also love the Italian-for-the-tropics cuisine—white pizza topped with garlic and arugula grown from Sicilian seeds in Turtle Inn’s garden, soup made from local lobster—served in the snazzy open-air restaurant. A few nights at the inn, I thought, and maybe I’d absorb some of the creative mojo.

The Good Life // The 18 bungalows, all steps from the beach, are built in the style of traditional Balinese thatched huts, with large screened decks, ample living spaces, and ornate carved doors imported from Bali. The lovely Belizean wait staff (one soft-spoken boy responds to requests with “Don’t worry; I gotcha”) wear white linen shirts and sarongs. Marie Sharp’s Belizean Heat Habanero Pepper Sauce is on every table, the perfect addition to the spaghetti carbonara. All proof that here at the Turtle Inn, the weird fusion of Balinese- Belizean-Coppola culture actually works. Jaw Dropper // The inn is located near the end of Placencia Peninsula—a 16-mile noodle of land with the Placencia Lagoon on one side and the sea on the other. At the Turtle Inn dive shop, on the lagoon, an American crocodile named Jeff has taken up residency near the boat dock. He’s not housebroken, but he’ll pose for pictures.

Sports on-Site // The thatch-roofed bar is about 20 yards from every bungalow, on the ocean’s edge, which allows for a pleasant daily routine: Snorkel a bit, collapse on your chaise, order Turtle Juice (a house specialty made with coconut rum), kayak a mile or so up to Rum Point and back, collapse on your chaise, snorkel, Turtle Juice, rinse, repeat. Some of Belize’s finest beaches—narrow, sandy, palm-fringed—grace the peninsula. When you feel in need of an outing, beach-cruiser bikes are available for riding into the tiny Creole village of Placencia, a mile down the road. Or, from the inn’s dive shop, head out to Belize’s barrier reef—prime location for diving or saltwater fly-fishing. The rub is that it’s an hourlong speedboat ride on sometimes choppy waters. But once out there, it’s not unusual to see spotted rays or even nurse sharks cruising along a 2,000-foot wall, or for anglers to hook bonefish, tarpon, or snook.

Beyond the Sand // Turtle Inn is a great base for venturing into the jungle. The front desk can arrange day trips to Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary (the world’s first jaguar reserve) and a number of large Maya ruins. Monkey River is 45 minutes to the south by boat, through mangrove estuaries that are home to manatees. While cruising upriver, you’ll encounter tiger herons, gargantuan butterflies, six-foot iguanas, and howler monkeys.

The Fine Print // American Airlines (800-433-7300, ) flies to Belize City for about $500 round-trip from both Miami and Dallas. From there, it’s a 35-minute flight on Maya Island Air ($140 round-trip; 800-225-6732, ) to the Placencia airstrip. From January 4 to April 30 (excluding the week of Easter), seafront cottages at Turtle Inn (800-746-3743, ) are $300 per night, double occupancy, including Continental breakfast and use of bikes and sea kayaks (from $200 per night in low season).

Jake’s

How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?

Caribbean Resort, Jamaica

You can almost see the Pelican Bar from here: a cottage at Jake’s

“IF WE DON’T ENCOURAGE GUESTS to leave the property, they wouldn’t,” says owner Jason Henzell. He ought to know. Ten years ago, Henzell, 34, and his mother, Sally, opened a small restaurant on six acres overlooking Calabash Bay and named it after a local parrot. A small guest house followed, and each year, as the Henzells’ gospel of sophisticated laziness spreads beyond the fishing village of Treasure Beach (pop. 600), on Jamaica’s southwestern shore, more rooms are added. Which only makes it easier to give in to inertia. Lounging under the acacia trees next to the tiled saltwater pool, a pair of still-pale English thirty-somethings allow that they’ve been devouring books from the well-stocked library for four days. They reel with shock when my boyfriend and I start naming off the places we’ve been (Great Pedro Bluff! Black River fruit market!) and the things we’ve seen (dolphins! crocodiles!) and eaten (grilled conch! jerk crab!) in just two days. Soon, they wobble off on mountain bikes, determined to find out what they’ve been missing.

The Good Life // From modest wooden cabins with funky mosaic bathtubs to bright adobe bungalows topped with open-air rooftop chill zones, the 15 cottages at Jake’s are a mélange of Moroccan style and iconoclastic tiling—all sans TVs or phones but avec CD players. (The bar has a stellar music collection for your listening pleasure.) Lucky us, our pink palace came with a wooden porch overlooking the surf and an outdoor shower with claw-foot tub, plus swanky Aveda potions. There are two chow houses: Jake’s, the poolside bistro, where the coffee’s delivered fresh daily by a woman who roasts it over a wood fire; and Jack Sprat’s, a beachfront joint where Fabulous (yep, that’s his name) serves up jerk crab and coconut ice cream, and a DJ spins dance-hall reggae into the wee hours.

Jaw Dropper // A pilgrimage to Shirley Genus’s wooden zareba—basically a hut with a sauna—is required. Strip down next to a steaming terra-cotta pot filled with a healing soup of organically grown lemongrass and other herbs, then sweat like the dickens. Afterward, let Shirley hit all the pressure points ($30 for steam bath, $60 for massage; book through Jake’s).

Sports on-Site // Sea-kayak or snorkel through the rocky maze that hugs the beach. (Kayaks are free; snorkel gear can be rented at the bar for $10 a day.) Or hire a local to take you out fishing for snapper, jack, kingfish, and grouper; trips can be arranged at the front desk ($35 an hour per person).

Beyond the Sand // One day, on our way to ogle crocodiles along the Black River, 16 miles northwest, our boat chugged past the Pelican Bar, a tiny shack on a lick of sand. Our captain shouted out a lunch order to Floyd, the owner, and on the way back we parked, waded ashore, and dug into $6 plates of steamed fish, grilled onions, doughy white bread, and bottles of Red Stripe ($35 per person for Black River boat tours; book through Jake’s).

The Fine Print // Air Jamaica (800-523-5585; ) flies round-trip to Montego Bay from New York for about $600, from L.A. for $800. From December 19 to April 20, a double-occupancy room at Jake’s (877-526-2428, ) costs $95 to $395, meals not included ($75 to $325 in low season).

The Essential Eight

Had enough paradise? Add some intensity to your Caribbean life list.

Kayak the Exuma Cays Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, in the Bahamas, spans 176 square miles of reeftop emerald water that laps the marine caves and white-sand beaches of hundreds of undeveloped limestone islands. Shallow, calm seas are perfect for paddling, snorkeling, and swimming. Do all three on a nine-day trip with Ecosummer Expeditions. ($1,695; 800-465-8884, )

Climb Pico Duarte More travelers each year are tackling the Caribbean’s tallest peak. At 10,414 feet, the rocky summit of Pico Duarte rises up from the tropical lowlands of Armando Bermudez National Park, along the Dominican Republic’s Cordillera Central. Iguana Mama runs a three-day, 29-mile mule trek to the top. ($450; 800-849-4720, )

Hike to Boiling Lake Deep in the heart of Dominica, hot magma warms the rocks and pushes volcanic gas through vents to keep one of the world’s largest boiling lakes at an eerie, gray simmer. Getting there requires a muddy three-hour rainforest slog on seldom-signed paths. Reserve a guide through Ken’s Hinterland ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Tours. ($40; 767-448-4850, ) Swim in Mosquito Bay Every night, a bright concentration of bioluminescent organisms lights up Mosquito Bay, on the south side of Vieques, just east of Puerto Rico. Paddle 15 minutes from shore with Blue Caribe Kayaks, then jump overboard for a glow-in-the-dark swim. ($23; 787-741-2522, )

Sail the Grenadines The unspoiled Grenadines—30 small islands, 24 of them uninhabited, from St. Vincent to Union Island—have long been favorite waters of the yachting elite. Now you can sail them without chartering an entire boat: Reserve one of five cabins aboard Setanta Travel’s 56-foot luxury catamarans for a seven-day cruise. ($3,990 per week per cabin, double occupancy; 784-528-6022, )

Dive the Bloody Bay Wall Just off Little Cayman’s north shore, the seafloor takes a half-mile-deep plunge along Bloody Bay Wall, where you’re sure to spy huge eagle rays and hawksbill turtles. Paradise Divers offers two-tank boat dives. ($80; 877-322-9626, )

Kitesurf Aruba Plan a pilgrimage to Aruba’s arid eastern shore, where 80-degree water and consistent winds make Boca Grandi the ultimate surf zone for seasoned kiters. Vela’s Dare2Fly offers a three-day introductory course in calmer waters ($350; 800-223-5443, ).

Fish the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve In the protected white-sand flats on the south side of 90-square-mile Ascensi—n Bay, in the Yucatán, bonefish run wild. Sign on for a week of guided fishing, eating, and lodging at the funky, thatched cabanas of Cuzan Bonefish Flats. ($1,999 per person, double occupancy; 011-52-983-83-403-58, )

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“Ka-ba-OOHM!” emphasizes Angel, a man who delights in imagery as well as interpretive sound effects.

As we have already learned, a choke point is an unavoidable route that one's car must travel. The X is a spot where one is most likely to be shot, rocketed, or (Angel's favorite) bombed by terrorists or similar scum. “Sputnik City,” Angel explains. “We're talking roadkill.”

I don't doubt that he is correct–and if I did doubt him, I wouldn't admit it. Angel, though likable and articulate, resembles a Tasmanian devil reanimated as a descendent of Pancho Villa. When Angel talks, people interested in avoiding death by terrorism listen. He is an expert on explosives, tactical weaponry, evasive driving, and other oddments useful if one is planning to invade a small country.

“Or if you're planning to leave the house,” insists Angel. “These days, no matter where you go, there's a threat of terrorism or criminal attack. You could be whacked at any time. Like the people pulled from their cars and beaten during the L.A. riots. Or the German tourists in Miami. In country or out. If you travel, you're at risk.”

A desire not to be whacked is why I have enrolled in BSR Inc.'s Executive Security Training course, held in Summit Point, West Virginia. I travel a lot. I spend an inordinate amount of time driving foreign cars, lost in foreign cities. True, it has been my experience that people around the world are uniformly pleasant, if not downright hospitable. But there are exceptions, and BSR Inc. has the slide show to prove it: image after image of human carrion created by politically dysfunctional terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades and the Shining Path.

“You never know,” joked Matthew Croke, director of training, prior to his colorful introductory lecture on assassinations. “Terrorists could mistake you for someone important.”

If they do, the bastards will have only themselves to blame: The experts at BSR don't graduate pantywaists. In my four days at this school, I will learn how to use an automobile as a weapon. I will learn how to execute forward and reverse emergency turns. I will learn how to analyze surveillance operations and detect car bombs. I will learn how to keep my car on the highway during high-speed pursuit scenarios, while being fired upon by attackers. This is no namby-pamby theorist's school, either–though classroom work is part of it. At BSR, students experience situations not suitable for the faint of heart.

In short, here I will learn to survive rush hour or assault by terrorists in places like Chicago and Baghdad. If James Bond had to choose a driving school, this would be it. It is the real-life choice of the U.S. Department of Defense, various specialized military teams, and assorted clandestine organizations, many of which are conveniently located an hour and a half away in Washington, D.C.

Where else can you sit in a room decorated with framed quotations from international murderers and learn how easy it is to make a car bomb using a Ping-Pong ball, a dab of superglue, and a third ingredient that Angel is judicious enough not to reveal?

“The point is,” he says, standing in front of a display case of homemade bombs, “that it is easy to blow up a car. What we want to teach you is attack recognition–how to be a tough target.”

Angel refers us to a Baader-Meinhof slogan on the wall: When you are hungry, it is foolish to hunt a tiger when there are plenty of sheep to be had. “That's one of the keys,” he says. “Don't be passive. Be a tiger. If you're attacked, outrun them. If you can't outrun them, we'll teach you how to lay a little Goodyear on them.”

The thought of that obviously pleases Angel, for he grins before summarizing: “In other words, make the bastards pick on somebody weaker than you.”

I'm all for bad guys picking on somebody weaker than me; the nobility of mankind has been reduced by crime and terrorism and, in a tight spot, my own nobility puckers accordingly. The problem, unfortunately, is that it is unlikely that terrorists will be able to find someone–anyone–who is an easier automotive target than me. This is not a play for sympathy; I'm proud of it. I think fast drivers are dopes. Squealing tires and revving engines are the pubescent cries of mullocks desperate for attention. Cars scare me; I admit it. Indeed, I have a bedrock horror of ending up the victim in some roadside tableau: plasma bags and hubcaps amid the ditch weeds, all because of some pimply-headed geek or a bored taxi driver in a fast car. Is there a more adolescent way to die? Is there a dumber way?

But as Brent, my own personal driving instructor, tells me, “Any idiot can press a gas pedal to the floor. That's not what this school is about. There is craftsmanship to high-speed evasive driving. That's what we're here to teach you.”

BSR has reduced the craft to a science. Ten to 12 hours a day, students shuttle between classroom lectures on automotive theory and the thrills and chills of driving the school's Chevy Caprice police cruisers, which our instructors urge us to use to their full 350-horsepower advantage.

For me, there are more chills than thrills. The first time Brent demonstrates a high-speed lap around BSR's two-mile, ten-turn road course, I climb out of the car with my teeth clicking like dice on a Reno craps table. Had we really approached that 90-degree turn doing 115 miles per hour?

“You'll be doing the same thing in a few days,” Brent assures me. “In a life-or-death situation, you need to know how to get all you can out of your vehicle. Don't worry–you'll learn all the necessary skills a step at a time.”

According to instructors, no student has been so much as scratched at the school. But I'm no fool–they make us wear helmets for a reason.

When it comes to cars, understand, I was born worried. But Brent is determined to teach me, regardless.

Set off by itself in the scenic wooded hills of eastern West Virginia, the BSR training center is a fascinating place. Along with the road track, the 472-acre facility offers a small skid pad, nine shooting ranges, an explosives range, a 40-foot rappelling tower, and three drop zones for parachute jumps. It doesn't surprise me that several of my fellow students, though thoroughly pleasant, do not wear name tags. (“It's best not to ask about my occupation,” more than one has told me.) Nor is it surprising that most of them perform better than I do on the skid pad. Though BSR now welcomes students from the private sector, all of whom must pass a screening process, I am the only nonprofessional in this course. Two pupils and one instructor per car, we wheel out onto the asphalt doughnut soaked by sprinklers and give our respective vehicles the gas until they begin to spin crazily. At least, that's what the other students do. Brent finally loses patience with my tentativeness and puts his foot on the accelerator while I steer.

“When the car begins to slide,” he tells me over and over, “shift your eyes to a positive goal and steer toward it. Remember: Steering takes priority over braking! If you look at only what you don't want to hit, you almost certainly will hit it.”

The technique is called Positive Ocular Response Driving–the validity of which I no longer doubt, having rammed many objects that couldn't move and a couple that should have.

I do better in the threshold-braking exercises. At 100 miles per hour, Brent suddenly yells, “Brake right!” and I mash the left pedal with enthusiasm, all the while trying to weave my way through a maze of plastic cones.

However, the high-speed pursuit exercises (an “evolution,” as the instructors call each drill) thrust my bumbling amateur personality back to the fore. “You have to force yourself to go faster,” Brent keeps telling me. “The only way you can learn a vehicle's limits is to explore the envelope. Remember, this is a life-or-death situation. You're running for your life.”

Running for my life is something I've always believed I would be good at. But when I get behind the wheel of a car, I just naturally take my foot off the accelerator when approaching a series of hairpin turns. Same with a hill–who the hell knows for certain what's waiting on the other side? By steeling myself, I can manage 110 mph on the straightaway; I can skid into the first turn and drift through it bravely enough. But when confronted by a hill and a series of S-turns, I just can't make myself hold the pedal to the floor.

“You have to push the limits,” Brent repeats. “Yours and the car's.”

But this course is not just about driving fast, and I find the lectures on the analysis of attacks by terrorists and criminals riveting. Daily, we study how targets are selected, how attacks are planned, practiced, and deployed. By scrutinizing the details of well-known attacks, we learn how the attacks might have been avoided or how victims might have saved themselves. Our instructors refer obliquely–never openly–to certain antiterrorist teams of which they seem to have some knowledge. And they also make inside jokes about their love of rental cars. (“Don't wear a BSR hat to the Hertz desk–they'll kick you out.”)

Our “evolution” on Vehicular Evasive Tactics effectively demonstrates why that is so. After driving us to an open stretch of track, Brent tells a fellow student and me, “Attacks are commonly initiated by a ruse: a faked accident or a broken-down car, some kind of roadblock that forces the target to stop on the X. Today, you'll learn three very effective ways to get off the X and flee the killing zone.” Brent then shifts the car into drive, accelerates to about 40 mph… and then locks the emergency brake while turning the wheel a quarter turn. Tires shriek, and the car revolves sickeningly before Brent releases the brake and hits the gas: amazingly, we are already traveling at speed in the opposite direction.

“That's sometimes called a boot turn,” Brent explains, “named after the bootleggers who used it to outrun police. Think of it as a forward 180-degree turn.”

Brent then shifts into reverse and floors the accelerator, counting aloud, “Thousand one, thousand two, thousand three, thousand four,” before removing his foot from the gas and spinning the steering wheel toward the empty lane. Just as quickly, the front end of the car swings around and we are traveling in the opposite direction. “That,” he says, “is a J turn. Think of it as a reverse 180-degree turn.”

We spend the next hour practicing the turns. When I finally start to get the hang of it, I too find myself eager to sign my next rental-car contract. But we are not done for the day. We have one more evasive tactic to learn: Barricade Breaching. (“Think of it as ramming,” says Brent.)

Angel takes charge of this evolution, in which, student by student, we crash through a wrecked car that blocks the road. The key, says Angel, is to fake a stop by slowing to 10 or 15 mph, then accelerating through the barricade. “Hit their tire with your tire! Make their car absorb the impact. Never brake!”

Intentionally crashing into another car goes against all instincts, and that's doubly true of keeping one's foot on the gas throughout the collision. But with Angel looking on, yelling like some demented Sergeant Carter–“Move it! Move it! Move it!”–it's not as hard as one might think.

We wrap up the course with two graduate-level evolutions. The first, held on the road track, consists of instructors chasing us, banging our bumpers at crazed speeds, and firing blanks at us while herding our cars toward roadblocks, where those not delirious with fear are expected to react with the proper boot turn, J turn, or ram. The second requires students to pile into a van and drive peacefully through the streets of nearby Winchester, Virginia, pinpointing surveillants and the spots where terrorists are likely to transform us into roadkill.

Guess which of the two evolutions I prefer.

Being spied upon is exciting. We spend four hours driving to and from our fictional workplaces, ever alert while passing choke points, dutifully logging the physical description and license-plate numbers of suspicious-looking people. (Surprisingly, sleepy little Winchester is awash with them.) We note suspected terrorists in Volvos and Cadillacs, jogging and guzzling wine, pushing baby carriages (one of the oldest terrorist tricks in the book), and rummaging through dumpsters. The bastards are everywhere–or so it seems to our paranoid group.

Actually, most of our suspicions are wasted on “ghosts” (code for “innocent citizenry”), but we aren't always wrong. Agents (I think) are working in concert with us as a proactive antisurveillant squad, and once we have eliminated them from the list of suspects tailing us, zoning in on the terrorists becomes easier. Feeling bad about my performance on the road track, I decide to try to demonstrate to my fellow students that I'm not a total putz by carefully analyzing the four pages of data in our log. My prediction: We will be attacked at the corner of Whittier and Amherst streets by two women and three men.

One hour later, that's exactly what happens: At the corner of Whittier and Amherst, a car pulls out as a roadblock, and we are attacked by two women and three men.

Impressed only slightly, Brent will later comment, “Observation is a critical part of the game–but just be glad they didn't try to chase you.

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