More than 250 million years ago, in the Triassic period, what is now western Utah was a broad coastal flat of the supercontinent Pangaea. The Moenkopi Formation, as it is known, saw five million years’ worth of sedimentary layers—gypsum, siltstone, mudstone—dumped onto the flats by oceans and rivers.

Nearly 200 million years later, the gradual seismic uplift of the Colorado Plateau produced a rugged topography, sculpted over time by wind and water into a craggy collection of buttes, canyons, and mesas. Today that ancient sedimentation, hoisted upward and exposed to air, is visible in the form of striking multi-hued bands.

One of those uplift features, known as Gooseberry Mesa, just south of Virgin, Utah, is a huge flat-topped butte with a towering 5,200 feet of elevation, prized by mountain bikers for its lunar-like slickrock surface. Trailing away from Gooseberry like an alligator tail is a long, thin, jagged ridge that has lost its protective caprock surface. In the slow march of geologic time, it is crumbling away.

For the past two years, this ridge has been home to Red Bull Rampage, the world’s most famous—some might say infamous—freeride mountain-bike event, which each year generates a torrent of jaw-dropping footage, streamed live to hundreds of thousands of viewers, along with hand-wringing social media posts from fans and pundits wondering if this is the year it all went just a bit too far.

Like its counterpart in snowboarding, freeriding began as a maverick pursuit, with early-nineties mountain bikers attempting to ride the seemingly unrideable. “We sent it as raw as we could,” says Brett Tippie, a former pro who helped pioneer the sport in Kamloops, British Columbia. “We might kick a few stones out of the way, but it was basically raw mountain.” The first , in 2001, had the same DIY spirit, but over time the lines have become more engineered, the runs more flowy and trick filled, the jumps bigger and the stakes higher. To date, no one has died at Rampage, but serious injuries are not uncommon—in 2015, a crash left the rider Paul Basagoitia paralyzed.

The goal of Rampage is to descend from a wooden platform just below Gooseberry Mesa to the finish corral, more than 600 feet below, in less than three minutes. Riders get two chances. Along the way, navigating that ancient sedimentary geology, they perform any number of tricks, from Supermans to suicide no-handers, no-foots to nac-nacs, tailwhips to front flips. Each ride is scored on the difficulty of the line, control and fluidity, air and amplitude, and style.

(Rampage, much to the ire of the freeride community, has always been an all-male affair. This year, Red Bull halted its fledgling women’s event, called Formation. The company says it’s “postponed” and is working on an eventual return.)

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It’s 5:30 A.M. on an unseasonably warm October morning, and I’m standing in the driveway of my New Jersey home, waiting for my friend Paul. The lawn sprinklers have just kicked on, their susurration joining the predawn chorus of crickets. A bright, waxing gibbous moon is reflected in the hood of my Subaru. I’m about to take a good, long hike—the longest I’ve ever done in a day—for no real reason other than an obscure edict from the 26^th president of the United States.

On December 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt signed, with little fanfare, , headlined “Marine Corps Officers’ Physical Fitness.” It directed each officer of the United States Marine Corps to undergo a physical examination and a series of tests every two years.

The tests were simple. Officers would have to ride a horse 90 miles, “this distance to be covered in three days.” Officers ranked “in the grade of captain or lieutenant” were also required to walk 50 miles, with “actual marching time, including rests, twenty hours.” Seven hundred yards of this needed to be completed “on the double-time”—something like a slow jog. This test too could be spread across three days, allowing the soldiers sleep and recovery time.

Order 989’s rationale was spelled out bluntly: “In battle, time is essential and ground may have to be covered on the run; if these officers are not equal to the average physical strength of their companies the men will be held back, resulting in unnecessary loss of life and probably defeat.”

Neither the Army nor the Navy, which each got their own respective executive orders with the same test, escaped Roosevelt’s attention. “I have been unpleasantly struck,” he observed in a letter to Secretary of the Navy Truman Newberry, “by the lack of physical condition of some of the older officers, and even some of the younger officers.”

Roosevelt was in the waning days of his presidency, a time when outgoing leaders often try to settle up unfinished business, notes Ryan Swanson, associate professor of history at the University of Mexico and author of . “Executive orders sort of come and go, and aren’t really that enforceable.” But the one-time Rough Rider’s final volleys stemmed, Swanson argues, from concerns that, after a long period without a war, the Army was becoming a bunch of bureaucrats, unprepared for conflict.

And then there was Roosevelt himself. There was probably no other President in U.S. history so concerned with the bodies of the body politic. “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life,” he said in a famous 1899 speech that mixed personal uplift with more than a bit of saber rattling. Swanson says that Roosevelt, like other Progressive-era reformers, worried that “urbanization was making us weaker”—that we were living in unhealthy cities, that we were toiling in offices rather than plowing the fields of the Agrarian Republic (by 1900, only 40 percent of the country worked in agriculture).

There was, undoubtedly, some political stage-management at work. Roosevelt knew how to project the image of a strong leader. But he certainly walked the walk. Plagued by asthma and extreme myopia as a child, battling injury and struggling with his own weight as an adult, Roosevelt spent virtually his whole life engaged in the “strenuous life.” One of the first things Roosevelt did upon assuming the White House was to build a tennis court, on which he played hundreds of times. He was an avid boxer and dabbled in jujitsu. And one of his favorite ways to shake off the stresses of high office, notes Swanson, was to set off on impromptu hikes through Rock Creek Park, five miles north of the White House. He particularly favored what he called a “point-to-point walk” wherein he would perambulate from point A to B, directly, no matter what cliff, pond, or impenetrable vegetation was in the way. Roosevelt, recalled British ambassador Mortimer Durand, “made me struggle through bushes and over rocks for two hours and a half, at an impossible speed, til I was so done that I could hardly stand.”

And so, when Roosevelt issued his series of executive orders on the fitness of the military branches—the predecessors to today’s physical readiness tests, or PRTs—it wasn’t merely the fiat of an armchair general. This was a man, after all, who, after being shot during a speech in Milwaukee, continued orating with a bullet inside of him. (The bullet was slowed somewhat by a sheaf of papers tucked into the inner pocket of his coat).

The orders immediately kicked up complaints. As historical journal The Grog recounts, “Navy Surgeon James Gatewood complained that the endurance test would leave participants in a ‘depressed physical state.’” The Navy’s surgeon general said it could put the lives of officers over 50 at risk. As if to carry the torch for his own initiative, on January 13, 1909, Roosevelt (then 51) and a small party of Naval officers set out for a horseback ride to Warrenton, Virginia, a distance of 49 miles each way. Following a 3:45 A.M. breakfast of steak and eggs, Roosevelt, on his own steed Roswell, set out into a day marked by freezing rain, eventually returning to the White House at 8:30 P.M., declaring the ride—yep, you guessed it—“Bully!”

Shortly after, Roosevelt was out of office. His successor, William Taft, demolished the tennis courts. A , 193, did away with the test and called for a monthly ten-mile walk, “to be completed in neither more than four nor less than three hours.” Roosevelt’s challenge may have faded into historical memory, were it not for its later rediscovery by John F. Kennedy who engaged in his own Rooseveltian crusade, albeit with a Cold War twist.

According to the podcast Ultrarunning History, Kennedy charged his Marine Commandant with putting a group of his officers to the test in 1962. While not intended for the general public, word got out, and there was a brief, nationwide “50-mile frenzy” in the early 1960s, with everyone from Eagle Scouts to a mother of three to the President’s brother, Robert, completing 50-mile walks. But this mania soon subsided, and all most of us know today of Kennedy’s fitness program were the push-ups and shuttle runs we might have been asked to do in our grade school gyms.

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A few years ago, after a decades-long, 60,000-mile-plus love affair with road cycling, I started dabbling in mountain biking. I did this largely because I’d moved from New York City, where the discipline was essentially alien, to New Jersey, where the off-road riding was not only close by, but surprisingly good and abundant. I initially pictured the transition to be merely a shift in terrain. A bike is a bike, after all. But I was vastly mistaken. Like anything in the world of cycling, mountain biking comes with its own inscrutable rules and mores, its own fiercely inhabited subcultures, and its own baffling array of clothing and equipment choices. Did I need a trail bike? A cross-country bike? A “downcountry” bike? How much travel did I need in my suspension? Did I need 27.5-inch wheels, or the 29-inch variety? Never had I seen 1.5 inchesÌęloom so large in people’s worldview.

But soon enough I was out on my local trails. Like beginner drivers, my motions were twitchy and hesitant, my focus almost entirely on what was directly in front of me—every fearsome root and rock flooding my brain with data. In road cycling, the asphalt you’re riding on, barring a pothole or two, is an afterthought. But in mountain biking the surface was a moving puzzle, requiring careful attention, planning, and decision-making.

I plodded along, my improvement hindered by the inconvenient fact that, for me, mountain biking requires driving to a trailhead versus riding straight out of my garage. So I usually defaultÌęto road riding, keeping my mountain-biking mediocrity safely intact.

Thus was the state of affairs when, one weekend last summer, I was invited to ride in Vermont with a group of friends. There would be some gravel riding—more equipment choices, more rules, more subcultures—and some mountain biking, including a visit to . I had been dimly aware of the movement by ski resorts to try and generate summer dollars by ferrying cyclists on lifts up to their snowless summits, but I’d never stepped foot in such a place. Which was quite obvious to me when I arrived at the so-called Beast of the East wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and a traditional bike helmet, and found myself amid what looked like a casting call for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome; it was packed with dusty men and women, with thousand-yard stares, wearing body armor, neck braces, and full-face helmets. A sign, no doubt crafted at the behest of a lawyer somewhere, warned: “Injuries are a common and expected part of mountain biking.”

A friend glanced at my bike and advised me to lower the seatpost: “You’re not going to be pedaling much.” That’s when I realized I’d never bothered to set up the dropper post on my Canyon Neuron. Coming from road riding, where a precise saddle height is sacred and Never to Be Changed, I figured it’d be superfluous. (And, full confession, I couldn’t figure out the install instructions that synced up the little switch on the handlebars to the seatpost.) I hastened to the repair room, where the park’s mechanics quite graciously set up my post in a matter of minutes, making no comment about this forehead-slapping moment in noob history.

We hoisted our bikes onto the lift, rode to the top of Snowshed, home to the beginner terrain, took in the verdant, panoramic view, and then headed down Easy Street, one of the park’s few green runs (bike parks, I learned, retain the green-blue-black rating system utilized by ski areas everywhere). I rode it, tentatively and with excessive amounts of braking, entering the precisely sculpted banked berms low and exiting high, exactly counter to how it should be done. For my efforts I was rewarded with a more technical blue trail, known as Step It Up. According to Strava, I was among the slowest riders to ever descend that route—I ranked 5,077 out of 5,459—but it still felt like I was flying. And then, a minute or so into the ride, I encountered a sloped earthen structure looking like one of the . This was a “tabletop.” It is meant to be jumped. But it was also, as they say, rollable, meaning it could simplyÌębe ridden over. Which I kept doing: barreling toward the upward slope before suddenly freaking out and jamming on the brakes, trying to maintain control as my body pitched forward.

That afternoon was a revelation. Normally, in my cycling life, I’ve suffered on the climb and been rewarded on the descent. Killington flipped that idea on its head. Here I suffered on the descents—my heart was in my throat, my hands, back, and knees were on fire, I crashed more than once—and was rewarded with a tranquil, breezy lift ride to the top. (And whatever you may think about the lack of pedaling, at least has found that the majority of a downhill ride results in a heart rate in “a zone at or above an intensity level associated with improvements in health-related fitness.”)

But I was left with the nagging feeling that I’d left something on the table—or the tabletop, more precisely. I wanted to know what it would feel like to leave the ground on my bike. I wanted to catch air.

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Last winter, laid up in bed with a severe bout of the Omicron variant, I began obsessively watching Martijn Doolaard’s . Doolaard is a 38-year-old Dutchman who, about a year earlier, had bought a set of primitive shepherd’s cabins in the western Italian Alps for less than the price of a decent new car. He had the immediate intent of fixing them up, and a broader, more abstract goal of living simply in nature.

The first video he posted, in October 2021, laid out what might be called the Doolaard style: A Kubrickian drone shot, gliding over a wooded, fog-enshrouded mountaintop, backed by a minimalist orchestral score. The shot then cuts to the back seat of his car, and we see Doolaard driving through the forest, en route to his new adventure. “Hey guys, welcome to this channel,” he says. “My name is Martijn Doolaard.” His first name, pronounced in the Dutch way, comes across as something like “muhr-tine.”

In the year since that humble start, over more than 50 episodes, he has built a feverishly devoted base of half a million subscribers and growing. They tune in to watch Doolaard, who uses a single tripod-mounted camera, the occasional drone, Google Sketch, a suite of power tools, and an almost preternatural sense of calm as he tackles a seemingly never-ending list of tasks involved in trying to make a home from a pair of century-old buildings that lack heat, plumbing, and electricity.

And while the performance of those tasks is shown in painstaking detail, one gets the sense that, for many viewers, this is far more than a home-improvement show. It’s a form of therapy—an antidote to modern life, online and off. It’s a small, carefully ordered world they can return to week after week.

“Every Monday morning I come to my office, turn on my computer, check for Martijn’s new video, and ask myself if I will ever be able to change my life the way he did,” one commenter writes. “We’re all mesmerized,” says another. “You’re quirky but common, quiet but full of expression, alone with a plethora of viewers, brilliant but humble, serious but whimsical and we can’t get enough.” Another fan puts it simply: “This is more addictive than love.”

I am one of those addicts. Bingeing doesn’t quite seem the right word; it feels more like lapping up a slow drip of sweet dew, a kind of IV for the soul. First there’s Doolaard himself. Tall, bearded, and wearing a dark, wide-brimmed hat, he looks plucked from the world of 17th-century Dutch portrait painting. Unlike so many frenetic, teeth-whitened influencers who populate social media, he struck me as a serene old soul—an idea further supported by the Amish hipster getups (suspenders, vests) he wears while sawing planks of wood or hauling rocks up a hill. Then there’s the way everything is shot, like Norwegian slow television with a healthy side helping of ASMR; I never imagined woodworking could be so worth watching or hearing. In line with the current vogue in social media of romanticizing your life, Doolaard has a way of making the most mundane things—polishing his work boots, brewing coffee in a moka pot—seem like reverential ceremonies.

There are any number of YouTubers chronicling the renovation of an old homestead in Alaska or France’s Loire Valley, but none have struck me in quite the same way. They aren’t as good with a camera; their content consists of couples or families, so you feel less like a spiritual partner in the project and more like an invited spectator; sometimes they get professional help for the hard stuff.

Doolaard, meanwhile, is an unabashed aesthete who turns manual labor into visual poetry. This is a man, after all, who admitted to buying a scythe to cut the grass because he saw a character do it in Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life. He’s not afraid of the hard stuff, plunging into fields in which he has no experience with a mixture of steadfast resolve and take-it-as-it-comes pragmatism. As he installed the first source of running water on the property—after watching some instructional YouTube videos—he looked at the plumbing line he’d just put in and said, with a shrug, “I hope it’s buried deep enough.” He’s learning in real time, making mistakes, and even these he handles with calm aplomb. As someone who tends to freak out when a screw gets stripped, I found it cathartic, and tremendously inspiring.

“I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” So wrote Henry David Thoreau, famously, in Walden, the totemic 19th-century ode to downscale, off-the-grid living. Thoreau’s simple life in the woods was never quite as simple as he made out—for one thing, he lived just a short walk from his family home, and received weekly visits from his mother and sisters. But the spirit of the thing endures, and I kept seeing parallels between Walden and Doolaard’s YouTube channel.

“I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread making,” wrote Thoreau; Doolaard, during a number of episodes, experiments with baking over an open fire. Like Thoreau, who devoted a whole chapter of Walden to “Sounds,” Doolaard becomes exquisitely attuned to the natural soundscape around him—and learns to deal with his “brute neighbors,” meaning wildlife. And like Thoreau, who wrote, “I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it,” Doolaard seems as interested in the process as the result.

But what does it mean to live a Walden-like life of natural solitude in the always-on realm of social media, where your exploits are followed, in close to real time, by an audience of hundreds of thousands? What possesses someone to trade the comforts of contemporary life for cold outdoor showers and no mailing address, to tackle a tricky renovation amid challenging conditions, in a country where you don’t speak the language—and why would so many find that an appealing viewing experience? I wanted to meet the man behind the channel, so I headed to Italy.

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In the summer of 2019, Tomas Quinones, a Portland-based artist, quality assurance engineer for the mapping app , and enthusiastic long-distance cyclist, was undertaking a seven-day bikepacking trip, covering some 360 miles of remote high desert country in Southern Oregon, not far from the Nevada border.

His trip had been punctuated with the usual minor random setbacks and sketchy moments that bedevil the adventurer. He’d lost his shoes, and was riding on a pair of Bedrock sandals. He’d heard a low growling outside his tent one night—a mountain lion—and gripped his only defense, a small fixed-blade knife. His water supply was sometimes uncertain. But there had also been those moments of unexpected grace: a couple parked on the side of a dirt road that offered to share their lunch; or the guy in the pickup truck who pulled up alongside Quinones and quizzed him about his sandals. “He was like, ‘hey are you doing a mountain bike ride, cool!’” recalls Quinones. “Then he said, ‘Here, have a beer!’ And I thought, it’s ten in the morning, but sure, a nice early beer.”

On the penultimate day of his trip, he was riding down a dusty track when he came upon what he first thought was a cow, sprawled across the ground. It turned out to be a man, slipping in and out of consciousness on the desert floor. The man was clearly dehydrated; Quinones had a hunch he might be diabetic. He tried to give him some water, with little success. A cursory examination of the man’s nearby campsite turned up a pistol in a pillowcase. “My mind went to some pretty dark places,” he says. “Like, was this a drug deal gone bad?”Ìę

Quinones, who had done a bit of training as a volunteer in a search-and-rescue group, tried to rationally sift through his options. The nearest paved road was a good bike ride away. He thought about climbing a nearby ridge in the fleeting hope of getting a signal, but wondered if his sandals would be up to the task (he’d also been hearing plenty of rattlesnakes). He thought about trying to flag down whatever was kicking up dust on the horizon, but it turned out to be just cows. Finally, he decided to send an SOS—his first ever—on his SPOT location tracker. “I didn’t really know what to expect,” he says. “I knew from experience that when the SPOT has to send up any notification, it can take 20 minutes.”

On that day, the fates spun a propitious web of geosynchronous orbits, terrestrial emergency response, and a particularly prepared cyclist, and an ambulance arrived within an hour. As Quinones would later learn, the man whose life he saved, Greg Randolph, was a 72-year-old retired Air National Guard technician and keen backcountry explorer whose Jeep had gotten wedged in a hole in a dry creek bed. He’d been in the desert for five days. He was out of food, water, and was, in fact, diabetic, without medicine, and in the early stages of a coma. Quinones says for all the strangeness of the situation—“it’s such an unlikely scenario to come across a person laying in the middle of the road”—he never had a doubt about what he would do. “There was no hesitation, I had to do something. There’s literally no one else out here that’s going to find this guy,” he says. “Within the next 24 hours, he’s going to be jerky—the buzzards will be eating him.”

Quinones, who’d received little gestures of help over the course of his trip, paid it forward, with interest.

Odds are, if you have spent any time in the wilderness, you too will have experienced these gestures of kindness from strangers, or given them yourself—even if they were nothing so dramatic as the aid rendered by Quinones. As a keen and longtime cyclist, I have always been amazed that when I have had some mechanical issue, or simply been stationed on the side of the road to check my phone, alone or even in a group, another passing cyclist will almost inevitably ask: “You alright?”

Once, in California’s Marin County, I was out on a bike ride, in a fairly remote area, when I got a flat tire. I realized I’d foolishly forgotten to pack my tools and tubes. My cell phone showed zero bars. Soon though, a woman pulled up in an old Ford pickup. “You need help?” She gestured for me to throw my bike in the back, and drove me to the nearest town. It later struck me that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten a ride from a stranger; in fact, it may have been the first. The woman, it turned out, was a native of Denmark, and I remembered wondering if this was more common behavior there.

Hitchhiking is one of those things, notes sociologist Jonathan Purkis in his book , that is presumed to be obsolete, killed off by sensationalistic reports of highway violence, so-called “litigation culture,” as well as neoliberalism’s ethos of, as Purkis writes, “favoring of individualistic and consumer-driven attitudes toward social problems.” Even Lonely Planet, that original Bible of the hippie trail, now posts disclaimers like: “hitchhiking is never entirely safe and we cannot really recommend it.” Indeed, very little in this world is ever entirely safe.ÌęFor that pickup driver, I might have been a harbinger of violence; less statistically likely, she might have been a serial killer with a fetish for lycra. Both of us agreed, in that moment, to put these thoughts aside and engage in what Purgis, quoting French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, calls “the power of the gift without return.”

What is it about being outside, in nature, that seems to prompt people to want to help? The first, and perhaps most obvious, explanation, is that in the wild there may not be any other help. In what psychologists term the “diffusion of responsibility,” or the “bystander effect,” the more people who are in the presence of someone needing help, the less likely any of those people are to actually provide it. They might think others will help, they might be unsure of what to do, or the mere fact of others not doing anything provides a modeling cue for them not to do anything. When Quinones found Randolph, there were no bystanders. “If I had seen this guy in downtown Portland, where there’s a lot of homeless people, I probably wouldn’t have batted an eye,” he told me. “Because I see it all the time.”

But another idea, one that has been receiving an increasing amount of research attention, is that there is something about nature itself that seems to promote what psychologists call “prosocial” attitudes. As a in The Journal of Environmental Psychology suggests, exposure to nature can prompt feelings of transcendence—a sense of connection to other people, to the world around you, to the cosmos. “Experiencing transcendence,” the authors write, “is associated with less of a focus on the self as a distinct and uniquely important individual, while simultaneously increasing focusing on entities outside the self, including nature and other people not necessarily part of one’s immediate social groups.” In that study, researchers interviewed subjects in a parking lot, before or after they set out on a hike. In exchange, they were given the chance to enter a drawing for an iPad or to make a small donation to charity. People were more likely to make the donation after they hiked than before. There was one exception in which charitable giving shrank: when people, in a separate study, were asked to first write about a time they felt distinct from others.

These findings have been replicated elsewhere. In , people who watched a five-minute clip of Planet Earth were more generous in an experimental economic game; in still another study, people gazing up at tall trees were more likely to provide help than people looking at a tall building.Ìę To sum up all these experiments: when you feel cosmically small—standing in front of a vast gorge or in the middle of a silent forest—you are more likely to act big.Ìę

Altruism is often underplayed in narratives about humans in nature, which have privileged notions of frontier self-sufficiency or Emersonian self-reliance. But the first thing Thoreau did when he went to build his cabin in Walden was borrow an ax from his neighbor—and the land he built it on belonged to his buddy Emerson. It is tempting to read books like Into the Wild as homages to rugged individualism, but viewed through another lens, the story of Christopher McCandless is one of repeatedly getting help from, or giving help to, the myriad strangers he meets (the last person he saw gave him a pair of rubber boots—and wanted to give him more).

Perhaps the greatest concentration of kindness from strangers in the wild is the “trail magic” experienced every year on the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails. “Trail magic, in its most basic sense—random acts of kindness from strangers—has been going on since people started hiking the trail,” says Justin Kooyman, Associate Director of Trail Operations at the Pacific Crest Trail Association (PCTA). “Everything from the ride into town, to paying for a hiker’s meal, to offering someone a place to stay.”

Hikers helping hikers, in light of the previous arguments about nature and prosociality, makes sense: when you’re one of a relatively handful of people in the midst of trying to get through a hard task in challenging wilderness, it would be hard to resist someone’s direct appeal for help. But what about the many non-hikers who participate in trail magic? “From what I’ve seen on the trail,” Kooymans says, “there just seems to be a pretty genuine appreciation, respect, and desire to support people who are in the middle of a pretty hard endeavor.”ÌęÌę

Troy Glover, a professor of Recreation and Leisure Studies at Canada’s University of Waterloo, has examined the phenomenon of trail magic on the Appalachian Trail. One theme he kept seeing repeated in hiker’s accounts, apart from the surprise of receivingÌę what he calls “nonnormative kindness” out of the blue, was the almost utopian sense of community that emerged on the trail, one that was often hard to leave behind. Many of those former thru-hikers, Glover noted—often experiencing a post-trail letdown—became trail angels themselves. “The hikers’ gratitude for their receipt of trail magic,” he says, “led them to contribute to an already established norm of upstream reciprocity.”

As thru-hiking has increased in popularity, including on the Pacific Crest Trail, there has almost been an overabundance of helping behavior, which has led to challenges for the PCTA. Unattended food, for one, and the bears it brings. But there are also reports of large encampments stationed at the trailheads—equipped with lawn chairs, solar showers, food and drink, and what Kooymans calls a “party-type atmosphere.” This, he says, “can really detract from the more natural, undeveloped environment that many people are going out to experience.” He’s wary, he says, of “finger wagging,” but the idea is there: keep the magic in trail magic.

When we venture into the wild, we become vulnerable. “Being in a vulnerable position,” writes Purgis in Driving with Strangers, “makes you look at the world differently.” It can also change how people view you; to admit or reveal vulnerability can bring out the best in others. In her book , Rebecca Solnit chronicles how people living through natural disasters, contrary to falling apart, actually come together, strongly. “In the suspension of the usual order and failure of most systems,” she writes, “we are free to live and act another way.” Similarly, in the wild, where we are stripped of our normal possessions, surroundings, and identities, we seem more willing to go that extra mile for someone; it’s in nature, ironically, that we can learn new things about humanity.

Ìę

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The first thing Ted Metellus did when the 2021 wrapped up, apart from getting a decent night’s sleep, was to start planning for this year’s race. “It’s on my mind all the time,” says Metellus, the race director and vice president of the New York Road Runners (NYRR), which puts on the race. This was last February. Stretching across five boroughs in the country’s largest, densest city, with as many athletes on course that would normally fill the stands at a sporting event—though it also has its many thousands of spectators—the marathon is a complex negotiation of time, space, and people. “It is one of the single largest mobilizations of resources in the city,” says Metellus.

By sheer numbers, it is impressive. Last year, even with a reduced pandemic field of more than 21,000 runners, some 41,240 gallons of Poland Spring water—and 1.4 million paper cups—were dispensed to runners on course (in addition to the 45,000-plus bottles given out at the start); along with 30,000 Honey Stinger gels. Some 122,760 pounds of clothing was shed by the runners at the start, then collected and given to Goodwill. There’s a medical station every mile, even therapy dogs and psychologists at the start. “Sometimes people just need a moment to kind of settle themselves in when you’re getting ready for an event of this scope,” says Metellus.

This year, the marathon is back at full strength, with more than 50,000 participants expected to throng the streets of New York this Sunday. The job of understanding how that small city’s worth of people will travel the 26.2 miles from Staten Island to Central Park—and to ensure it happens with as little friction as possible—falls largely to Marcel Altenburg, a senior lecturer in crowd science at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Born in Germany, and a former Captain in the Bundeswehr, Altenburg went to Manchester to pursue a degree in crowd science, a discipline, he notes, that got its real start in 1989 with the infamous , when 97 people were killed in a crush caused by overcrowding. He stayed on and became a lecturer.

Since then, he’s been involved with numerous high-profile events, from presidential inaugurations to rock concerts to football championships to, most recently, managing the massive crowds that queued to pay respect to Queen Elizabeth. And, of course, any number of marathons, from Berlin to Chicago. In 2016, he began working with the NYRR on the world’s largest race. On Sunday, at 8 A.M., when the first wave of athletes—the professional handcyclists—set off on the course, Altenburg will be at the start village, looking to see if his exquisitely calculated script plays out as calculated.

The starting process is itself massive: It will easily take longer to dispense the five waves of runners, in 15 “corrals,” across three starting points, than it will take the best runners to complete the race (it takes 18 minutes, less than a pro can run a 5K, just to dispense each group). And the start, from a planning perspective, is everything. “It is the last moment we can influence the race,” he says. “It’s the last time someone listens to you—the last time we can tell them, stay right, wait for a second. FromÌęthen on, the race is on them.”

It’s a bit like a water tap. You can control the source, but once the water is flowing, you cannot easily call it back. When he started working with the Road Runners, he had a revelation. “We were convinced that the way we start impacts everything on the course,” Altenburg says. “That everything on the course is of our own making.”

Once you had accurately modeled the start, you could predict, with unprecedented accuracy, everything that happened afterwards. After backwards engineering previous years’ data, Altenburg advised that changing to 15 corrals, from 12, would allow better control. He told Metellus: “If you give us the start, we can predict the finish, and the whole 26.2 miles in between.”

Breaking the race up into five minute windows, Altenburg projected that the largest finishing wave would consist of 1,366 runners. There were 1,367. “I know who the guy was,” Altenburg says, laughing. “He was from Mexico.” But his overall estimate was 99.93 percent accurate. The code had been cracked, his “Start Right” predictive algorithm born. Now, any contingency that might arrive—even a global pandemic that suddenly required six-foot social distancing—could be modeled.

The rolling-start, as opposed to the “open start,” is now fairly de facto at most major international marathons, but some races, Altenburg notes, “are in love with this big crowd picture at the start of the race—a guy shoots a gun, and everyone start at the same time.” But that’s no longer possible in the largest events. “The races are bigger,” he says, “and the cities are definitely not getting bigger.”

With chip timing, he adds, “they don’t need to be on the start line—you get to start two hours later and still get your finishing time.” Key to this, he says, is making the departure point narrower than anything they’ll experience on course—and keeping the “water tap” open only to 70 percent. It’s a bit like “ramp metering,” those traffic lights that tell you when you can enter the highway. In essence, you go slower to go faster.

What differentiates a marathon from other crowd-management scenarios is its dynamic nature. While it is, essentially, a rolling queue, it’s a queue, says Altenburg, “in which everyone is constantly changing the order of everything.”

Compared to even a large event like the Queen’s funeral, which saw upwards of 250,000 people, “a marathon is, to be honest, 50,000 times more complicated.” With something like a soccer match, the crowds may be massive, but the behavior is generally constrained. “I need to get them in, that’s a big task. I need them to sit down, then they go to the loo, then they go home.” These are all big steps, he says. “But in a marathon, they never sit once.” They are arriving “by all means of transport,” then circulating around the start village, then they get on the road, then they’re finishing, grabbing their poncho, and trying to find their family or friends. “Fifty-five-thousand people are making their way in shorts, and everybody’s got their own story, everybody with their own pace.”

Marathons, in effect, cannot be understood as a system. Armed with huge amounts of computing power, data from previous races, and a hope that people more or less run at the pace they have said they are going to run, Altenburg needs to calculate every single runner. “The ideal experience is that I see the same 100 people throughout most of my race,” he says. “The organizer is going to great lengths to minimize the number of overtakes on the course.”

Being constantly overtaken, or by contrast constantly having to “zig-zag” past groups of other runners, is not only stressful, he says, but can be unsafe (the algorithms provide for an ideal of three square meters for each runner, a number that was briefly increased during the era of social distancing). The professional field, says Altenburg, will “immediately stretch,” while runners further back may spend more time together. But people are not data points, they will do the unexpected. They are chaos. I speak here from experience. When I, eager and undertrained, participated in the event in 2017, I ran a fairly brisk half-marathon, passing many runners—which was often not easy on narrow Brooklyn streets—before slowing in the second half, and essentially blowing up at the end. While my finish was statistically average, I was, at a more micro level, often an outlier.

And then there is the city itself. “It’s the same race every year, the name is the same, but New York is a living organism,” Altenburg says. Roadways are altered, massive construction sites arise, new bike lanes are built; all things that might not affect the individual runner, Altenburg says, but could have system-level implications. During the pandemic, on-street dining emerged, and many structures have remained, further constraining the streetscape (for some, NYRR asks for temporary closures). Every five years, the course is painstakingly measured.

Working with the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT), the NYRR conducts a number of course inspections in the months leading up to the event, flagging potential obstacles. “We do not allow steel plates on the roadway,” the DOT’s Jessica Colaizzi told me. “We stand very firm on that and we work closely with contractors to make sure the plates disappear.”

Then there are things that are outside of anyone’s control, but must still be factored in, like weather. This year’s event is promising higher-than-normal temperatures. “When the temperature goes up by five degrees Fahrenheit, we run a different simulation,” Altenburg says. Medical resources can be shifted to potential trouble spots (temperatures above 70 degrees, as Sunday is promising, are associated with an elevated risk of heat stroke).

For the professional field, Altenburg says, this will hardly matter—they’ll be finished by the time warmer temperatures set in. But for everyone else, this could have an impact. And not only, Altenburg says, for the slower, later-starting runners. “You might not be a professional, but someone who knows what they’re doing, and wants to break the three-hour barrier. That’s exactly when it’s hot, when you’re going to your limits.”

While each runner runs their own race, Altenburg has observed some aggregate trends about the New York City Marathon over the years. “People always speed up when they hit Manhattan,” he says, “even though the advice is don’t—you still have eight miles to go!”

But another trend is that as the race gets larger, it is actually getting slower. “They are attracting a lot of people who see it as a bucket list race,” he says. “It’s slower because it’s more inclusive. It’s an amazing race, and you want to do it at least once.” Altenburg himself has run it, in 2015. But in his head, and on his computers, he’s always running it. “As a scientist, it’s bananas. I absolutely love it.”

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One night, settling into my sleeping bag beneath the stretched nylon of a tent, I felt a familiar sense of vague dread. With my headlamp extinguished, a suffocating darkness enveloped me. The overwhelming quiet was punctuated by unsettling sounds: cracking twigs, strange cries, the rustling of the wind echoing like the breath of some malevolent god. The feeble barrier of the tent—good for stopping little more than insects and moisture—was suddenly like a screen, upon which I projected, like shadow puppets, random fears dredged from my memory. It would be a long night.

I know what did this to me: horror movies. More specifically, that popular strand of the genre that features people—usually young, often a couple—in the woods, encountering some dark force, whether human, supernatural, or some combination of the two. In England, they call the genreÌę“forest horror.” This rich tradition includes well-known titles like and ; lesser known, hard-to-find entries like or ; and more recent offerings like last year’s , now streamingÌęon Netflix, orÌęParamount+’s , just out this month. And I have seen them all.

Like all genres, forest horror traffics in a number of timeworn tropes. The protagonists of the film, after first driving from some crowded urban setting, will soon find themselves on quieter roads. They will sing along to old songs on the radio. They will stop for gas or supplies in some greasy, fly-specked dive, where they encounter a cantankerous clerk whose face will assume a foreboding expression the minute they leave. They may, in a bit of foreshadowing, unexpectedly strike an animal on the road. In the woods, they will find there is no cell service. They will get lost. They will be missing some key piece of equipment. They will come across some Runic symbols carved into a tree. If it is a group of friends, only one is likely to make it out alive. If it is a couple, some simmering history or unresolved tension will come to the boil—forest horror reveals camping to be the ultimate relationship stress test.

As someone who occasionally makes his living by being outside, I find my tent-terror obsession a bit self-defeating—like an aviation enthusiast who pores over the black-box recordings of plane crashes. Why would I want to mix up my love of nature with all these troubling visions? After all, there are enough ways for things to go wrong in the wild without adding on depraved locals or Pagan sacrifices. Maybe it’s just another endurance test. Or perhaps I’m simply exorcising a ghost that lives in all of us: an ambivalence toward nature. As Berenice Murphy, a lecturer at Trinity College, suggests in her book , we might simply be subconsciously replaying the country’s founding, when Puritans encountered a wilderness that, before it was later rendered sublime and uplifting, was often a source of dread (see: ). “The U.S. in the 21st century may be a predominately urban (and suburban) nation,” she writes, “but something keeps drawing writers and filmmakers back to this point of initial contact, and to the cultural constructions that have sprung up around it.”

She quotes the environmental historian William Cronon, in a passage I might borrow as the mantra of forest horror: “In the wilderness the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between natural and supernatural, had always seemed less certain than elsewhere.” The dualistic idea that wilderness can be both darkness and Eden lurks behind the sheer number of entrants in the genre; there are many more horror films set in the woods than in big cities. Maybe our urban fears are already too familiar, too human—but who knows what lurks beyond the radius of a headlamp as you stare into the boreal depths?

With Halloween upon us, here, in no particular order, are some of my favorite forest horror movies, flicks that put the gore in Gore-Tex, that deliver Class V scares, that will have you draining your lantern batteries to stem the oncoming night.

The Evil Dead (1983)

“Why are we getting it so cheap?” This fateful question is asked by one of a group of college students, en route to a Tennessee holiday rental, in director Sam Raimi’s celebrated low-budget shocker . The film is arguably the originator of the “cabin in the woods” archetype. “You mean no one’s even seen the place?” queries another. This kind of vacation insecurity helped launch Airbnb, but what do you do when your amenities include cellar trap doors that flap open for no reason and your superhost is an undead Sumerian? (Pro tip: When you see a poster for in the basement, run!) Originally called The Book of the Dead, the film got a standing ovation at Cannes but was initially deemed too intense to handle by U.S. distributors; a rave by Stephen King in the pages of Twilight Zone magazine—“it has the simple stupid power of a good campfire story”—helped to open doors.

Backcountry (2014)

, directed by Adam MacDonald, is based on the true story of an Ontario couple who was attacked by a predatory black bear in 2005 at their remote camp site in Missinaibi Lake Provincial Park As in many forest horror films, the dramatic arc is amped with a too-confident city dweller who has a merit badge in mansplaining. “I know the park well,” he says, turning down a ranger’s offer of a map, then chiding his girlfriend for bringing bear spray. (Also, a digital detox is nice and all, but bring your phone). Winningly, the film employs a real black bear in the shooting—a reportedly placid creature made, via editing and music, to come across as properly terrifying. One of the film’s scariest moments is seemingly more mundane: the couple climbs a crest, expecting to see a landmark, and instead just sees a vista of unending trees.

The Descent (2005)

In forest horror films, women are often depicted as unenthusiastic companions who’d rather be in some cushy hotel or encumbrances inevitably getting tripped up by a root as they flee some baddie. British director Neil Marshall’s The Descent was a welcome, -passing departure, focusing on a group of five female friends who routinely get together for some unadulterated Type 2 fun. Following the accidental death of the main character’s husband, the group reunites for a weekend of spelunking in the Appalachian Mountains. This is nature as restorative therapy, in theory, but clearly not all interpersonal issues have been resolved—one reason the film succeeds is that this is no simple tale of nurturing sisterhood. Ratcheting things up is the claustrophobic, airless environs of the unmapped underground—actually a soundstage in England, as real caves can be, er, dangerous, even when they aren’t the refuge of humanoids who have adapted to underground life.

The Ritual (2017)

Based on by novelist Adam Nevill, the British horror film , like The Descent, posits the wilderness as a place for potential healing. A group of friends are kicking around ideas their annual “lad’s holiday” when one is killed in a liquor store robbery. A year later, the survivors, to honor his memory, embark on a three-day hike on the Kungsleden, a 270-mile-long hiking trail in Northern Sweden. The guys aren’t particularly likable, they don’t seem like each other that much, and they’re not particularly outdoorsy—think instead of . “Fuck every hill in the world,” one says, while climbing. It doesn’t take long to sense that it’s the inner demons that will torment as much as those lurking in the birch trees. Like most horror films, the buildup is better than the eventual reveal, but it’s a very good scramble for a while. (For a less supernatural hiking horror movie, see ).

Black Water (2007)

Australia is bigger than the continental U.S. but has less than one-tenth its population, with some 90 percent of the population living within 30 miles of its coastline. In other words, there’s a whole lot of wild. Not surprisingly, Australia has produced its fair share of “Outback horror,” from the seminal to . One famous true story there spawned two separate horror films: in 2003, a group of teenage boys quad-biking near Darwin , one fatally. Both films it inspired, (directed by Wolf Creek’s Greg McLean) and , are worth seeing, but I preferred the lower-budget, lower-key Black Water, which sticks closer to the actual event, following a group of friends on a fishing outing. It gets at the beauty of the mangrove swamps—and the threat contained within, with nary a trace of CGI in sight. One of my favorite moments comes when the group is assessing what useful items they’re carrying, and one unearths a loyalty card for a café—one of those humdrum tokens of our everyday lives, now rendered absolutely useless in this place outside civilization.

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Back when I was living in Brooklyn, New York, I would often see Jody Rosen on a bike.

I wouldn’t say we were the closest of friends—we went to college together, but now, as then, we moved in slightly different circles. Still, we’d often have a street corner stop and chat, trading the sort of shop-talk only of interest to two full-time Brooklyn journalists.

Rosen, typically clad in a newsboy cap, a bag strapped across his shoulder, andÌęastride a bright red cruiser bike—replete with almost cartoonishly large off-white tires—became a talismanic presence for me on the neighborhood streets. I’d see him taking his son to school on the back of the bike, or coolly navigating the heavy traffic of Court Street at a pace somewhat below the usual frenetic velocity of New York City cyclists. When I didn’t see him, I often saw his bike chained to a parking meter outside a coffee shop orÌęleaning against the natural foods store window. Spotting it became a sort of game for my daughter and me. One day, she called out: “Look, Jody’s seat is missing!” (Alas, someone had pilfered the saddle.) Like most urbanites, my eyes were carefully attuned to the sidewalks, and seeing Jody’s bike was like ticking a square in some game of Gotham bingo.

In his new book, , Rosen, a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, brings both his acuity as a pop-cultural critic and his genuine—though never overweening or in-your-face—passion for the bicycle to bear in a freewheeling global journey. It begins in a church in a small town in England (where people claim to see, with almost religious conviction, a proto-bicycle in a stained-glass artwork that predates the device’s invention by centuries), and ends with Rosen trying to ride a fixie, less than successfully, in the onetime Kingdom of Bicycles, the city of Beijing.

As you might expect, Rosen has a lot to say about the joys, and travails, of urban riding. “Bike riding is the best way I know to reach an altered consciousness,” he writes. “Not an ennobled state, exactly, but definitely an enlivened one. A bike ride is far better than yoga, or wine, or weed.” The bike is the “best way to imbibe New York, to make sense of the pace, to gulp the town down.” Off the bike, Rosen writes, New York becomes “larger but less magnificent.”

While Rosen’s lyrical odesÌęto city cycling do not lack conviction—or fail to find a complicit audience in me, despite the fact that I now live in New Jersey—what makes Two Wheels Good a particularly fascinating read are his explorations into the rich and peculiar history of the bike, which recount at times the writer Greil Marcus’s foray into the “old, weird America.” The bicycle seems to pop up everywhere and in the most unexpected places. Rosen tells, for instance, the story of a young, aspiring Yukon prospector who falls ill and misses the achievable window to get to the gold fields via dog sled team, so instead acquires a bike and rides for months in sub-zero conditions to beat his gold-rush competitors.

But it’s not always the story you expect. “The popular literature on the bike is a highly sentimental and romantic literature,” he told me, “which construes the bike as this kind of liberating emancipating device, the liberating green machine, the little 19th century machine that’s going to save the world.” There’s something to that, of course, but Rosen says he was interested in a more “tough love” version of bicycle history, whether it’s the extractive industries used to produce it or its curious role in the Age of Empire.Ìę“The bike reached many places in the world when it was ridden by soldiers, or prospectors, or missionaries, and that interests me,” he says. One of the most egregious examples, he notes, is the connection of the late 19th century bicycle boom—all those new rubber tires—and the brutal colonization of countries like Brazil or the Belgian Congo. “In Brazil, one person perished for every 150 kilograms of rubber reaped,” he writes. In the Congo, “the figure was one death for every ten kilograms of rubber.”

Which is not to say the bikeÌęis nefarious, or that it doesn’t historically figure, Rosen says, as a “means of resistance,” or an “agent of social change.” After assuming power in 1933, Rosen notes, one of Hitler’s first acts was to crush the country’s cycling union (which had become associated with anti-Nazi parties). In 2016, the theocracy of Iran declared a fatwa on female cyclists (“It attracts the attention of male strangers and exposes society to corruption,” the country’s supreme cleric declared). Iranian women, not without risk, have continued riding. “For millions of women across the world,” he writes, “biking riding remains inherently political.” People are always downplaying the bike, forgetting its power. Rosen quotes New York Times editor Harrison Salisbury in 1967 as he delivers testimony to the U.S. Senate on why the U.S. was encountering such headwinds in its war in Vietnam. “I literally believe that without the bikes [the North Vietnamese Army] would have to get out of the war.”

The bike, says Rosen, is ultimately a tool, whose inherent usefulness is not limited to any political party or social group.Ìę“To me, the real signal moment of this was during the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020 in New York City,” he says. “You had a lot of people on bikes in the streets protesting, and they were met by the bicycle cops.” And these were notÌęyour normal shorts-clad bicycle cops pleasantly patrolling a pedestrian mall. “They were up-armored, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cops, who wear hockey goalie gear and use the bike as a shield and a battering ram,” he says.

And when the bike is not being used to battle in the streets, it’s often at the center of a rhetorical fight. In recent years, he notes, it’s become a loaded symbol on the right, of a piece with arugula and lattes. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch even lambasted, Rosen notes, the inclusion of “bicycle repair shops” in a list of businesses deemed essential during the pandemic. And sometimes, the bicycle can even seem just a twee lifestyle accessory, displayed in the windows of upmarket boutiques, parked in a rack (but seemingly rarely used) in front of luxury hotels.

But what Gorsuch clearly did not have on his mind was the fact that, as Rosen notes in the book, “around the world, more people travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation.” Sure, bike culture includes Instagram accounts with well-dressed people on beautiful bikes, hipsters on fixies, and Lycra,Ìębut it also includes, in a city like New York, a massive fleet of working-class riders—sometimes called deliveristas—who were, particularly during the pandemic, an essential factor in keeping the city functioning.

In less supple, more dogmatic hands, a book like Two Wheels Good might begin to coast a bit on its own self-congratulatory spin, but Rosen pulls off that most wonderful non-fiction trick: making the familiar strange. His narrative is a bit like his self-described cycling style: it’s not rushed, but itÌędeftlyÌęmaneuvers through crowded terrain, with impressionistic, cinematic glimpses of the world sliding by. One minute you’re learning about a 19th century Edison film called Trick Bicycle Riding—produced by a roller-skate pioneer—the next you’re in Scotland, with ace trials rider Danny MacAskill, as Rosen (a self-professed “turkey” when it comes to raw cycling skill) tries, and fails, to keep up on what he terms a “beginner’s level mountain bike trail.” MacAskill, on the heels of Rosen’s wipeout, says: “I’m a wee bit worried that you’re going to kill yourself.”

I can’t help asking Rosen about that old red bicycle I used to see on the street (which, it turns out, was a Felt “Big Chief”). He’s moved on a bit, stylistically, and is currently riding a bike from ; as a self-described “terrible” mechanic, he lauds the low-maintenance belt drive. The Big Chief, however, remains in reserve in his condo’s basement storage area. And as it happens, I wasn’t the only one whose eyes were caught by that two-wheeled steed. Once, years ago, the bike was stolen while parked outside a cafĂ©. Rosen took to Twitter, essentially asking New Yorkers to keep watch. And, in fact, someone spotted the bike, fixed by a cheap combination lock to a pole in Union Square. Within hours, he was reunited with the Chief.

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I am sitting with Francis Mallmann, the famed Argentine chef, on the deck of his house, perched on La Isla, a nearly 15-acre island within a remote lake in Patagonia. Before us are a strip steak and thinly sliced potatoes, both cooked in clarified butter and just removed from an iron parrilla, or grill, gently smoking nearby. I’ve offhandedly told him about a volume of essays and poems by Jorge Luis Borges, an even more fabled Argentine, that I’d recently bought at a bookshop in central Buenos Aires.

Mallmann, holding an almost comically bulbous glass of Chilean wine, brightens, and then asks: “Do you know the ‘Two English Poems’ by Borges? ” He reaches for his phone, searches for a moment, then begins reading. “What can I hold you with?” one poem opens, followed by a catalog of declarations, such as: “I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.”

It’s the sort of moment I’ve come to regard as pura Mallmann, a heady, intoxicating foray into the empire of the senses. The scent of something sizzles away on a nearby plancha, or griddle; a soft tango plays in the background; people are gathered under a huge sky, with weather that seems to change on the half-hour; and the chef, with a broad, sympathetic face and flowing white hair, is declaiming some verse whose words, per Dylan, glow “like burning coal.”

Mallmann’s story has already reached near-legend status, but in case you haven’t heard it: A poetically inclined, libertine chef from Argentina is cooking French cuisine at some of the top restaurants in the world, winning awards, when, at age 40, he has a midlife crise de foie and turns instead to a sort of gastro-anthropological passion project to bring traditional Argentinean cooking—everything from the hot-rock-lined curanto pits of the Indigenous Mapuche, to the metal-grates-over-hot-coals campfire cooking of the gauchos—to the wider culinary scene. At the time it was a head-scratching move, but one that worked out for him, resulting in nine restaurants around the globe, adored cookbooks, television shows in Argentina, and big-name fanboys, including David Beckham, Tim Ferriss, and the late Anthony Bourdain. Perhaps his most famous endeavor is a noted appearance, during which he barbecues meat via a staggering variety of outdoor pits, bonfires, and grills, and poignantly waxes by turns adamant and wistful about his many romantic loves. In the end, Mallmann’s name has become virtually synonymous with one word: fire.

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The first piece of Vollebak clothing I ever held in my hands was the planet earth hoodie, which landed on my New York City doorstep in late February 2020. The 30-person company was founded in London in 2015 by twin brothers Steve and Nick Tidball, who’d come from the world of advertising and displayed a penchant for highly technical, highly conceptual adventure clothing. The brand is small—“We’re not going to give Nike any sleepless nights,” Steve said—so the brothers rely on fervent word of mouth and offbeat marketing. In 2019, for example, to launch their incredibly niche Deep Sleep Cocoon—a “self-contained microhabitat” to help the wearer shut out the noisy world of long-haul space flight—they rented a billboard across the street from SpaceX, in Hawthorne, California, that read: “Our jacket is ready. How is your rocket going?” (No response from SpaceX founder Elon Musk, but the brothers said that they did get an invitation from NASA to give a talk.)

The Planet Earth hoodie, made from Australian merino wool with a brushed-fleece interior, struck me as well-made and comfortable, if hardly revolutionary in a world swimming with hoodies. There was one detail, however, that stood out: a hinged merino face guard of sorts, with small ventilation holes. “From NASA space helmets to explorers’ balaclavas,” read the company’s description, “protecting your face and head has always been high up on the list of priorities for people on a mission.” Fair enough, I thought, even if my “mission” rarely went beyond typing at my laptop.

And then, a few weeks later, the pandemic struck. Suddenly, the idea of covering one’s face no longer seemed extreme. Like most everyone, I spent a not insignificant portion of the next two years behind a mask. And at the height of the pandemic, when the sound of sirens filled my Brooklyn neighborhood, I often found myself throwing on my Planet Earth hoodie and pulling up the merino visor over my N95 for an added layer of protection. What I’d first dismissed as folly now seemed eerily prescient.

Flash forward nearly two years and I’m in the cozy Vollebak offices near the Soho section of London, hovering around a conference table with Steve and Nick, admiring their latest piece of space-inspired clothing, the Mars jacket. Sleek and shiny, it looks plucked from the set of Dune. The company describes it as “industrial workwear fit for any planet.” Nick, who trained as an architect and handles the design work, excitedly points out the details. It is made from ballistic nylon to resist the corrosive effects of space dust. There’s an abundance of Velcro straps, “a gravity surrogate in space,” he says. And there’s a 3D-printed “vomit pocket” containing an orange PVC sack, should you suffer space-adaptation syndrome, a type of motion sickness. “The vomit bags are really beautiful,” he says. They’re designed with large deployment tabs and are brightly colored because, he notes, “when you’re puking, your eyesight’s crap and the vomit bag has to be really, really recognizable.”

Steve, who sees to the company’s sales strategy, admits that the actual functional market for Mars clothing is precisely zero. “But the idea is, we’re probably not going there for 30 years,” he says. “If we’ve been designing clothes for Mars for 30 years, testing them on earth, I’ll reckon we’ve got a good shot at making decent clothes for Mars.” Not everyone who goes, he says, will be “a Russian cosmonaut who’s been training for 20 years.” Instead, he says, it will be regular people with regular human needs who won’t want to live in a space suit 24/7.

“No one,” he says, “has asked us to do this.”

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