At 13, I was sure I was the only American boy who hadn’t yet gotten his mouth onto someone else’s mouth. They were doing it on the school bus and down at the teen center, really kissing. It was so serious, so sickeningly actual: kids my own age engaged in that full-on, gnawing oralness I’d only seen in movies and had chalked up to trick photography. Kissing frightened me, but I knew that not to have kissed was a deadly social deformity whose only corrective serum was teenage saliva. I had to get it done.

At camp that summer in Vermont, I attempted to compensate for my shameful truth with even more shameful lies. I put it around that I’d had some needle-drug experience. I claimed I played guitar for a well-known hardcore band. The sexual rĂ©sumĂ© I falsified was thicker than the phone book of my hometown.

And then, on the last afternoon of a camping trip through a riverine gorge, I wound up in the orange gloom of a tent with Jen, a girl far too wise and pretty for a creep like me. My courting strategy was a literal impersonation of Pepé Le Pew. By unguessable magic, it worked.

Of the kiss itself, I have no memory, because what I mainly wanted to do was stop and ask the other kids who were also necking in the tent, “Hey, guys, could you watch us, please? Are we actually doing the thing? Does it look like on TV?” I also wanted to get Jen to sign something or at least verbally attest that the kiss had taken place. And I wanted Jen to explain how this impossibility had happened, not understanding that fate’s bestowal of make-outs would forever remain an occult phenomenon beyond the powers of inquiry.

A counselor soon broke up the business, I suspect to everyone’s relief. Children again, we went swimming in the gorge, a setting the moment’s production designer had overdressed with the fitments of a coming-of-age tale. The water-sleekened canyon walls were a scaled-up model of the sculpture Ruth Gordon fondles in Harold and Maude: “Stroke, palm, caress, explore.” On tentative feet, we minced through sparkling pools beneath a cable footbridge whose swaying shadow belabored a theme of perilous crossings. The river itself was a standard-issue metaphor of time’s ungraspable flux and constancy. It culminated at a cervix formation in the channel into which you could lodge yourself while the river bothered itself into a fizzing pile at your back.

But time and the river could be balked only for a pressurized second before they blasted you downstream like a champagne cork. There you floated, feigning bliss, belly to the sun. But already you felt the river broadening, its current straying into less coherent patterns. The protective cushion of water thinned out. You had to wrack and stiffen your now-older body to slip past the sharp rocks, the adult debris of beer bottles and auto parts, and the forsaken lines and hooks of luckless fishermen.

Frequent șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor Wells Tower wrote about Great Smoky Mountains National Park in May 2016.

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The welcome sign is not entirely legible, because a large tourist stands in front of it with her selfie stick. The real tip-off is the river of brake lights past her shoulder. We have entered Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Park rangers meander through the traffic jam. To what purpose? To exact a foliage-season surcharge? To search the block-long motor homes for undocumented ­domestics? In fact, they are here to warn us that elk are visible in the field to our right. To prevent astounded drivers from crashing, the rangers have set up a pull-off area, where motorists are discovering what distant ruminants look like on a smartphone screen

The local elk count is lower than the mini­van count, slightly higher than the roof-mounted-GoPro count, and, if the quantity of ­Florida license plates means anything, far short of the south-­migrating-snowbird count. Though perhaps the plates mean nothing: we three are North Carolinians, from four hours east of here. I had reserved a Jeep for the trip, but the car-rental clerk had his own feelings about what is proper for a weekend in the Smoky Mountains and instead assigned us a Chrysler Town and Country minivan with Florida tags.

But to visit Great Smoky and complain that it’s choked with out-of-staters and Winnebagoists is like going to the Grand Canyon and complaining that it’s a large hole. Great Smoky is America’s (if not necessarily trodden) ­national park. Close to 11 million people come here annually—nearly twice the Grand Canyon’s tourist haul—and all the house­guests are taking their toll. The park’s fog-cloaked valleys resound with Harley pipes. Smog has cropped the ridgetop views. Acid rain has killed off brook trout in some high-­elevation streams and is threatening red spruce. Thanks to industrial, vehicular, and coal-power emissions, air quality in Great Smoky has been among the worst in the eastern United States, though, fortunately, ground-level ozone has decreased in the past 15 years due to tighter air-quality regulations. For these reasons, although I’ve spent most of my life within a half-day’s drive of the park, I’ve never once been tempted to make the trip.

But then one day, life finds you with a three-month-old son who, so far, has practiced his enthrallment with trees mostly through windowpanes. Curating a child’s preferences is, of course, a doomed endeavor. Still, we’d like Jed to be fond of wood smoke and galaxies, to grow into a knowledge of books but also splitting mauls, the bowline, the taut-line hitch. Yet winter is on its way. Wait until spring to take him camping and he may already have become a version of his dad, a sluggish, indoorsy type who stores against his own father memories of Chef Boy­ardee warmed over Sternos and interstate-side KOAs, where firelit drunks at the next site over cast frightening shadows on the walls of the tent.

Now is the time to get him out-of-doors. But where? Somewhere lovely but close. (At about the four-hour mark in his car seat, our boy gets purple and loud.) Somewhere not too far from a 110-volt outlet to keep our breast pump humming. Somewhere with trees, mountains, online campsite booking, and enough human clamor to keep the bears at bay. No use resisting: Great Smoky is the place. You hate to add your family to the burdens of America’s most put-upon national park, but then it may be wise to let the boy tick Great Smoky off his list while there’s still park left to enjoy.

A mile into the park, the traffic thins. The dusk is upon us. The roadside is astrobe with foliage the color of goldfish, carrots, and scab. Our home for the next two days is Smokemont Campground (and RV dump site), near the park’s southern access at Cherokee, North Carolina. Yes, our camp­site is smaller than our old New York City apartment and surrounded by about as many people, a proportion of whom are not our sort of folks. Two of our neighbors’ pickup trucks fly Confederate flags. ­Another bears a decal of an AR-15 under the antibiotic slogan Assault Life. But it is a handsome campground, in the deep shade of sycamores and tulip poplar fed stout by a chuckling brook. If there are toxins in the air, they are undetectable beneath the scent of damp earth and ferns.

My goal for our weekend is modest: to provide Jed with a camping experience less grubby and miscarried than those my old man arranged for me. Breakfast with him was peanut butter sucked off a spoon, dinner cold spaghetti between two slices of Roman Meal. His tent was a frail, magical device whose special power was to summon storms so that it could collapse beneath them. I remember few nights that did not end with a sudden flight to the station wagon, where mosquitoes expected us, whetting their swords.

Seeking to avoid my father’s organizational shortfalls, I have packed the Town and Country to the rafters with gear. Courtesy of corporate donors, we have: a Coleman tent that sleeps six, four different models of ­infant tents and sleeping pens from ­KidCo, a wearable sleeping bag from Selk’bag, ­another wearable sleeping bag from Poler, two camp chairs, and a compact wood-burning camp stove from BioLite that can cook food and charge an iPhone if not download kindling from the World Wide Web.

It falls to me to set up camp while Erin feeds the baby. Unpacking our tent and ­other equipment is a swift return to childhood. But the Christmas-morning ecstasy of uncrating new toys disintegrates under the problem of their assembly. In my defense, the tent is barn-size and best raised with a team of Amish powerlifters. For more than an hour, I bash stakes into a graveled earth whose revulsion for aluminum is vehement. At last I build something resembling two fat men in a nylon donkey suit. Then there is the rain fly to deal with. The problem of draping it does not drive me to tears—just wrathful, high-pitched squeals and a glossolalia of curse words. The tent keeps slipping the shroud. It’s like putting silk pajamas on a bull.

After a time, I repair to the Town and Country, panting and fuming. I venture the sullen claim that the tent is unusable due to factory defects and suggest we all sleep in the minivan. Erin, now soothing two babies at once, reaches out and wipes my brow. “It’s strange,” she says. “Generally, I feel like you handle stress really well, and then some little thing comes up and you just snap and can’t handle
 dick.”

The campsite next door is home to a quar­tet of Australians, which we know ­because they speak to one another as though across a crowded ­stadium. ­Judging from their ­supply of beer, they’ll have no cause to stop yelling until 4 a.m.
or so.

Erin, a preternat­urally sunny person, sighs grimly. “I love you,” she says, “and I mean this in the gentlest possible way, but this camping trip is bullshit. We get all this stuff and drive all this way so we can listen to these people party? We’d be more away-from-it-all if we’d pitched the tent in our yard.”

But the night is on us, and there’s nothing to be done. We put the baby in his crib inside the tent. We get the rain fly sitting right—or sort of right, given the rhomboidness of the thing beneath it. “It’ll be fine,” I say. “I don’t think it’s going to rain.” The darkness deepens. We bed down. The rain begins.

The rain fly reports for partial duty. Inside the tent, it’s not a downpour so much as a sifting Britishness. We position Jed’s crib in the driest corner. Except for the maternity ward, Jed has never passed a night anywhere but our house. Yet he settles easily into sleep, grunting over the depth of his slumber.

His mother and I are doing less well. We have brought a brand-new queen-size inflatable mattress. But the manufacturer forgot to label the box in giant, hazard-orange letters: “Pump not included but very much required! Mattress cannot be inflated orally! Unincluded pump is the difference between comfort and misery! Without pump, mattress will give your ass a Ph.D. in gravel! Without pump, you will lie awake wondering why you made your family leave your warm and pleasant house to spend a chilly night listening to RV generators and an Australian beer party! Without pump, you will pass eight moist, black hours conceiving the proper torment for the Coleman em­ployee who left WARNING! PUMP REQUIRED off the mattress box! Habanero seeds tamped beneath the fingernails with an ice pick is what you’ll settle on around dawn or so!”

All night long, the rain falls outside and inside the tent. A cheerful little brook runs past my cheek, swells the butterflied diapers I’m using to cushion my pelvis, forms a pond near my toes. Just as the sky is bluing, it lets up. The baby is gurgling. His parents are sore and sad. We determine that some sort of stroll might lift our spirits and disperse the bruises on our hips. A campground official happens past. I ask her if she knows of any good trails around here. “To be honest, I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just up here from Florida.”

By 8 a.m. the rain is again pelting down. There is nothing to be done but drive to the nearest big-box store to buy a ­mattress pump. After, we loiter in the parking lot while the shower swells to grapeshot. The sky, an opaque whey, will not be running out of water anytime soon. If asked, I would have a hard time naming a place I’d less ­rather spend a rainy day than a Walmart parking lot, but it beats our wet tent by a mile. “I’m not often in a situation I’m really bummed about, but I don’t want to go back there,” Erin says. “I suppose it’s good for us, but I don’t see how. It’s like being forced to go to church.”

But we must go back. And what’s more, owing to the seasonal crush at Smokemont, I was unable to reserve the same site for two consecutive nights. We have to move the tent to new digs, some 300 yards away. Erin’s opinion is that the tent must be broken down, dried, repacked, and rebuilt. But pitching the tent was such a conniption-­inducing experience that I am resolved against full dismantlement.

Over Erin’s prophesies of injury and failure, I collapse a few load-bearing members and hurl the wet, leggy mess onto the roof of the van. With Erin at the wheel and me standing on the running board while holding the thing in place, we manage the relocation. Tilting the tent upright takes me the better part of an hour. I am drenched beyond all caring, but it’s on its feet again. This time I get the fly taut enough to bounce a nickel. “Dry” would be overstating the condition of our shelter, but it is no longer raining within.

Under a tarp, calmly strung, I get a fire roaring. I scorch some burgers, boil some water, and sterilize a batch of bottles for the boy. We chow hastily and retreat to the tent, which now contains a mattress that doesn’t hurt to lie on. Jed finishes his dinner and does the postprandial performance that I love. He wobbles on his haunches and goes into a gourmandizing pantomime, sculpting in the air the ecstasy of milk enjoyed and recalled. His mouth works in O’s and beaklike shapes. It is a silent song and dance about the miracle of nourishment. In time he comes to the awareness that the milk he celebrates is milk that was, not is. This causes him to weep and sue for reapplication to the breast. He eats some more, grunting with a contentment that his mother and I are surprised to find we share. “Babe, I’m proud of you,” Erin says to me. “You got the camp all fixed up. You were totally the man of the family, and you had ideas that actually worked.”

On the face of it, car camping of this sort should deliver none of the pleasures of actual camping. It brings you among throngs, not away from them. You climb nothing, push no physical limits, interface with no wildlife that could not be seen in Central Park. Perhaps the car camper is a special sort of idiot. At considerable expense and inconvenience to himself, he contrives a burlesque in which the provision of food and shelter becomes a minor pain in the ass he can congratulate himself for coping with.

Or perhaps the car camper is a practical genius. He understands that adventure’s pleasure principle is scalable, that one need not lose his nose to frostbite to taste the joy of survival. Tonight, in the crowded Smoke­mont campground, I am as satisfied with life as I lately have been. We are dry and full of beef. Our delight with our ­inflated mattress is worth the night we spent on rocks. In a puny sort of way, I’ve spent today being necessary. I cannot recall a day apart from the birth of my son that I have glanced less at my phone.

All across the campground, amid the RVs, travel trailers, and multi-room nylon chateaux, scores of campfires spark and crackle in the dusk. The night gives off the congregational feeling of cigarette lighters at concerts or paper lanterns set afloat. We have, of course, done nothing very great in coming here. In fact, given the air-quality issues in Great Smoky, one wonders if shuttering the campground wouldn’t be the best thing for the park. But it’s somehow moving that with so much to do indoors these days, people still believe that existence may be enriched simply by sleeping in a wet and crowded stretch of woods.

By morning the clouds have left a sky of propane blue. We can finally get out into the park. A helpful fellow at the rangers’ shanty gives his recommendations of spectacles that are accessible to people encumbered with babies and diaper bags. Clingmans Dome, the park’s highest point, is the main thing to see. This we already know by the steady stream of automobiles flowing that way. The drive winds through vistas whose beauty is nearly grandiose. Red and orange bosk-oramas. Lemonscapes mallow-topped with roiling mist. Announcing every scenic overlook is a queue of folk bearing iPads, tripods, and Nikons with bazooka zooms.

The scene at Clingmans Dome confirms Great Smoky’s transformation from an actual place to an abstract pop phenomenon. Up at the summit, dense fog has shrunk the valley view to about four feet. But here, too, dozens stand with selfie tackle, though the vista could be perfectly reproduced by a gray flannel bedsheet. The park, it seems, now shares a status with the Statue of Liberty or the Mona Lisa. Sheer numbers insist it is a thing to be experienced before we die. One need not climb it, touch it, or even see it necessarily. A picture of a grinning head before a white monotony still serves its purpose in a photo album so long as the location tag reads Clingmans Dome.

Away, away from Clingmans Dome, through the calico mutt-pelt hills, out through Cherokee, past the ­moccasin dealers, the gem flumes, the retailers of “moonshine souvenirs,” past the minigolf courses and go-kart tracks, past the Teddy Bear Motel, the Hiawatha Park and Cabins, and the Gear Head Inn (Welcome BangShift Forum Freaks), and onward to our first actual hike in the park: the Juney Whank Loop Trail, near Bryson City.

The Juney Whank, we’ve been told, offers three separate waterfalls, all easily accessible to the infant-laden and infirm. We are not the only people come to savor the trail’s convenient wonders. The parking lot is full, but after a ten-minute wait a spot opens up.

“Where you from in Florida? We’re from Bradenton,” a genial lady tells me as I’m fitting Jed into our ventral baby holster. I explain that the Town and Country is the only Floridian among us, with apologies that she drove so far to be confronted with such crowds. “This is nothing,” she says. “The other side of the park? Gatlinburg? It’s bumper-to-bumper for miles. And this isn’t even the real foliage season. This ain’t even peak.”

Say what? This ain’t peak? The newspaper told me that this would be peak. In some abstract sense, I do understand that the Great Smoky Mountains are not the same thing as the Gregg Allman show at the Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, yet I do feel as though I’ve learned, after shelling out for my ticket, that he will not play “Ramblin’ Man.” This is the trouble with Great Smoky: the park is so encrusted in its own celebrity that you come here not as a human creature encountering earthly terrain, but as a ticket holder to a spectacle annually endorsed and certified by 22 million eyes. You feel cheated when the flora isn’t turning in the performance of its life.

Up we go to Waterfall Num­ber One. Humanity on the foot trail is no less dense or international than on a moving sidewalk at ­LaGuardia. Ahead of us is a pair of young Chinese aristocrats, he in Prada shoes and a lustrous pompadour, she in a red floral dress with a Coach purse and a Borsalino hat. Behind us is a South Asian American family whose vanguard is a boy of nine or ten in a Duck Dynasty T-shirt, rapping fiercely and treading on my heels when my pace flags.

Ten minutes later, we’re standing on a bridge beneath which the waterfall spills into a steep, gold-greenness of mountain laurel, tulip poplar, and fern. The landscape seems no uglier or realer than a painting by Bob Ross. Beside the falls is a big mossy rock. By some undeclared agree­ment, we all understand that we have not ­really fulfilled a visit to Waterfall Number One unless we have been photographed sitting on that rock, our smiles suspended by invisible hooks.
The photo boulder is a close relative, I think, of the section of plastic log, bolted to a chair, on which we were told to fold our arms by the man who snapped our senior portraits back at Chapel Hill High School.

Honestly, I am not trying to be a snoot about those of us who cannot see the park but through a viewfinder or a screen. The general problem of how to experience ­nature’s seasonal beauty is not easily solved. What to do with the spasm of desire and memory that dying leaves summon in the human beast? They have me thinking of a bygone fall when I was seven. Under the season’s influence, my brother and I broke into our friend’s house and burgled his toys. Our thinking was that he was better off than us and would get new stuff for Christmas. When, fleeing with the loot, we bumped into our pal and his mother coming up the street, we threw his things into a leaf-strewn ditch and said, “What toys?” I am thinking, too, of a pretty girl at an autumn yard party many years ago. She was chilly. I draped my corduroy jacket around her, and she fell into the bonfire. Steal stuff. Be horny. Get your last licks in, says October. Get on in years and the purchase of an overpriced leaf blower is how you answer the season’s call. Or you take up splitting firewood by hand. Or you come out to Great Smoky for the plenary experience of autumn, just as shivering in Times Square is the plenary experience of New Year’s Eve. But getting close to autumn’s soul is tough spiritual work. Gaping at a ripening leaf­scape, one is haunted by the question: Am I getting it? Am I feeling enough? How does one consummate the beauty of the natural world? A big Nikon kills these questions. Take a picture of the mossy rock. File the photographic evidence in its megapixel envelope and decode it later.

But, to be fair, the photomaniacal family ahead of us is having a lot of fun. They bustle along the path with all the purpose of a ­media gaggle, logging a snapshot every ten feet or so. The duties of model, photographer, and editor circulate among them. It appears to be good for the parents’ marriage. Their favored pose is an open-mouthed makeout, reenacted with equal ardor whenever the path winds past a suitable backdrop.

Down the grade to get a gander at Waterfall Number Two, the Tom Branch Falls. A steep blackness, silvered with falling ­water. A flotilla of young people in tanks and cutoffs are gamely trying to tube the brook while holding coozied beers. The water depth is about nine inches in many places, so tubing involves a close, scooching survey of the creekbed with one’s butt. The operation looks more painful than pleasurable, but one nonetheless envies the tubers. They are the only people along the Juney Whank, myself included, who seem to be experiencing the park as mammals and not as clientele.

Correction: my son seems to get the place. His eyes blink and swivel at a canopy the ­color of blood and Gatorade. The strangeness of it thrills him. His tiny heart beats pertly against my ribs. I kiss and sniff his fontanel. He squeaks and biffs me in the jaw. I’m spoiling the view.

To reward my family for two nights spent in the woods, and because Jed is in need of a scrub, I have booked for this evening an electrified and climate-controlled accommodation at a place I will call the Very Adorable Kuntry Kabin, a short drive from the park. At the main house, a stolid woman greets me through a screen door, parted no wider than necessary to transmit the Kabin key.

The Kabin, one of six identical twins, is nice. Or rather it is “nice,” a modern, modular cottage to be appreciated by that guy with the Assault Life sticker on his truck. It is made 100 percent of chemicals: plastic flooring, enameled-tin doors, marble-print wallpaper, nylon window bustles, etc. An apple-spice Air Wick so powerfully suffuses its interior that in two breaths flat your insides are coated with a holiday glaze. Other amenities include three TVs, a cornsilk scarecrow, an earthenware cartoon frog, and a guest book with kitties on the front. It is the sort of mountain getaway where salesmen of puffy stickers come to break their marriage vows.

A note from the proprietress tells us that the scarecrow, the frog, and the rest of it have been inventoried against theft. A numbered list of Kabin facts advises that “breakfast does not come with a cabin stay.” Also: “Do not feed the ducks” and, the last commandment, “Have a good time and enjoy the mountains as we do.”

“This place is so much worse than camping in the rain with no mattress,” Erin observes. We put the Air Wick on the porch, probably risking a serious fine. Then we sleep as quickly as we’re able and lead-foot it for home with the rising sun.

So that was it. That was Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That was our first family trip. What did we really do? We pitched a tent, moved a tent, saw some traffic jams, some ­water, and some pretty leaves, and milled about with the past the roadside corpses of washing machines, pickups, and excavators, past a country church whose sign this week reads Fall Leaves, Jesus Does Not.

No one is on the trail this morning. The Cataloochee doesn’t lead to the park’s uppermost vista or greatest quantity of water­falls. It simply goes into the woods. The forest is dark, belichened, wetly tick­ing. Other sounds are the lowing of an owl and the howling of a dog that, if Jed were older, he would insist was a coyote or wolf. The park’s air may be more polluted than in some cities, but here it feels better, cleaner, unbreathed by other human lungs. In spots the trail hits the ridge, but unpruned brush obscures the views, and anyway the opposing mountainsides are too far off to show their colors to advantage.

By silent assent, Erin and I tromp along without speaking. I jot no notes. She takes no photographs. There are no marquee attractions for the Instagram feed. No cataracts or geysers or faces in the rock, just tall hardwoods with no people around. But after three days of hordes, traffic, and spectacle hunting, we are stunned mute to find a beautiful semiwilderness free of selfie-ists and three-wheel Gold Wing motorbikes.

In the end, what do we want from the woods? Primitively put, we want the woods to put in us a feeling that doesn’t happen indoors. Its symptoms are looking around, shutting up, and greedy respiration. It’s a feeling that has something to do with our helplessness before nonhuman splendor and geologic time, a feeling one can’t describe without risking language best left to the druid grove or the kitty guest book back at the Very Adorable Kuntry Kabin. To profess registering this feeling while not 20 minutes down a path a mile from the blacktop may strike the reader as meretricious and unearned. That’s OK. Whatever it is, we are glad to stay dumb with it for ten full minutes more, until the baby starts to cry and we head back to the car.

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You consider yourself a gentleman, and so it's important, when you wake up with A STRANGER IN YOUR UNDERPANTS one remorseful summer morning, that you manage the matter with due delicacy and grace. What complicates things is that it's not a fellow Homo sapiens you brought home last night but a Dermacentor variabilis, which translates roughly to “moody flesh nibbler,” a.k.a. the American dog tick.

Yes, you exercised poor judgment, but it's too late to worry about that. She's already gotten herself attached—way, way too horribly attached—to the tenderest organ known to men. You hate to be caddish, given the intimacies you've already shared, but be honest with yourself: You two simply don't have a future together. Don't be drawn in by that transparent “Oh, but I'm so tiny and vulnerable” routine. She's a parasite, no two ways about it. She knows she's got a good hustle going here, and she won't leave you alone until she's bled you to a husk.

You both could use a drink. Pull that pint of Kentucky Gentleman out of your liquor cabinet (no need to waste the Knob Creek). Take a strong dose yourself, then tilt the lip of the bottle against your little visitor. Hold it there for 90 seconds or so. Give her a nice long slug. Never mind the sting.

Ah, now she's feeling no pain. If her head weren't buried in your special purpose, you'd see a little woozy smile dawning on her face. Head for the bathroom. Take out your trusty Revlon needlenose tweezers. Now get a good grip, close to the jaw, and pull. That's a good girl. Let it go.

Now she's gazing at you, pinched in the tweezers' grasp, her eyes dark with the fury of the scorned. But a quick goodbye is what the occasion calls for. Grab the book of matches on the back of the commode and set her tactfully on fire.

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MY BROTHER DAN AND I ARE 40,000 FEET over the Atlantic, bound for Venice, where we will spend five days doing nothing much beyond paddling a kayak through some of the comeliest urban waterways on Planet Earth. A national media organ is picking up the travel costs. Yet, somehow, we are unhappy.

Venice

Guido Baviera/Corbis

Venice

“I'm getting the feeling that this whole thing is gonna be an insane bitch,” Dan says, glowering at the guidebook splayed on his lap. He's been reading up on our trip's capstone event, the Vogalonga, a 19-mile noncompetitive rowing regatta, held in late May, that promises a breathtaking tour of the old republic's lagoon and outer islands. “Man, you didn't tell me 'Vogalonga' means 'long row,' ” he says. “And check this out.” He flips to the guidebook's back cover, where the author has listed among his credentials “one attempted Vogalonga.”

“Attempted,” he repeats, anxiously pinching an ingrown hair on his cheek. “I'm a little worried we won't get this fucker done.”

I'm worried, too, though not about the Vogalonga. What troubles me is the prospect of spending a week in a tandem kayak with Dan, whom I recently described in print as “the only person in the world I've sincerely tried to murder.” Dan and I do not get along. Our last trip together (chronicled in the April 2008 issue of this magazine) nearly ended in a fistfight. More or less since infancy, our relationship has been a reliable source of juicy conflict, which I've exploited for a shameful volume of column inches. In recent years, I've made so many journalistic and literary meals out of our hostilities that when people ask me what I do for a living, I could pretty honestly say, “I don't get along with my brother.”

Lately, we've both gotten tired of it. “Hey, do you think you could, sort of, not write about us anymore?” Dan asked after the publication of my most recent dispatch on the subject. “It's depressing.”

“I totally agree,” I said. “No more. Promise.”

About four minutes later, my inbox chimed with an e-mail from my editor, who proposed that Dan and I head to Venice for a little float.

“What's next, a reality-TV show?” Dan said when I pitched it to him.

“So you don't want to go?”

“Free trip to Venice? Hell, yeah, I'll go,” he said. “Only problem is we're getting along pretty good right now. I guess I'll have to beat your ass or something so you'll have some material.”

AS IT TURNS OUT, Dan's offer to stage strife is unnecessary. The following morning, in Venice's soigné Marco Polo Airport, our contretemps begin in earnest.

I've brought along a brand-new, deluxe, rudder-and-spray-skirt-equipped, collapsible two-man kayak called the Greenland II, a loaner wrangled from Folbot, of Charleston, South Carolina. My enthusiasm for this product is total and tedious and sort of creepy. I have panted about the boat to everyone in my acquaintance. I have brought its spec sheet to dinner parties. For weeks, I've been unpacking the craft to pet its rudder and heft its featherweight ribs while making covetous, Gollumish gurglings in the back of my throat. It's 17 feet long and a scant 62 pounds yet is reportedly untippably stable, with a 600-pound payload, and fits, paddles and all, into a pair of extremely stylish, rubberized canvas bags, checked through to Venice for no additional fees. Yet Dan, as we wait for the conveyor to disgorge our craft, starts to quibble.

“I don't know about this boat you got us,” he says.

“What are you talking about?” I say. “It's an astounding boat. State-of-the-art. People paddle the Arctic in these things.”

“We should've just rented a canoe. Did you try to rent a canoe?”

“Why the hell would we want a canoe when we have a folding kayak? And, anyway, what are you complaining about? We have a boat, a fantastic boat, and you got a free trip to Venice.”

“What I'm complaining about,” my brother says, “is that we've gotta paddle 20 miles in this thing and it's in a goddamned suitcase.”

In sullen silence, we board a water bus and go bumping off across the lagoon. We debark at the touristic cattleyard that is the district of San Marco, bashing the hefty Folbot duffels into rose merchants and necking couples as we go. Storms of upset pigeons and madrigals of bystander invective herald our approach as we cross the piazza.

With the exception of sun-cured gondoliers grifting for fares, I do not spot another unescorted man. The bougainvillea is erumpent, and the rosĂ©-and-apricot vistas of faded plaster look decoupaged from a Barbara Cartland novel. Accordionists traipse after honeymooners, wheezing out strains of “BĂ©same Mucho.” My brother pauses in his tracks to belch, squeeze his ingrown hair, and remark that he would trade any number of accordionists and Murano-glass gewgaws for a good old-fashioned supermarket selling beer and sacked ice.

When Dan and I at last reach our hotel, just before noon, I'm sorry to learn there's been a misunderstanding about the nature of our relationship. Our room, the clerk tells me, contains one double bed. An attempt to leverage my credentials for a room with two beds goes nowhere.

“You will like the room you have,” says the clerk, flashing a licentious smile. “Write that Venice is the city of lovers.”

ONCE SETTLED in our room, I'm suddenly anxious to get our ducks in a row. We have four days until the Vogalonga, and to avoid being left pondering instructions as the regatta heads out Sunday morning, I propose that we haul the Greenland II out to an alleyway, assemble it, and take it for a spin.

Dan, who's lying in our bed and draining a huge can of Peroni, says, “Let's just put it together here.”

“Where?”

“Right here. In the room.”

I look around. I point out that the room is perhaps ten feet long, seven feet shorter than the boat.

“We'll do it on an angle,” Dan says.

“And get it downstairs how?” I ask. We're on the fourth floor.

“Easy,” he says. “We'll lower it down on a rope.”

I point out the tort liabilities of dangling a 62-pound boat 50 feet over a crowded Venetian alleyway; the impossibility of assembling a 17-foot boat in a ten-foot room, diagonally or no; and the fact that we have no rope. None of this sways him. Dan is an attorney and a passionate contrarian, and his zeal for an argument always swells in proportion to its absurdity. He's also a real-estate investor who oversees a fair number of home renovations, and today he seems to feel this is tantamount to an engineering degree.

“Look, goddammit,” he says, “I build stuff for a living. I know what I'm talking about. Go get us a rope.”

“This is insane,” I say. “We're taking the boat to the street.”

Dan sets his jaw. “Man, this is why I get frustrated with you. You're such a goddamned 'my way or the highway' type of dude.”

“What are you talking about? I mean, yeah, in this case, it's my way or your way, which is so colossally fucked up that it's not even a way!”

He cracks another tallboy and settles back against his pillow. “Tell you what, give you an option,” he says in a voice of compromise. “Option one is we put the boat together here and do the thing with the rope. Alternatively, you could take it down to the street and assemble it yourself.”

Here I feel the onset of certain central-nervous-system responses I experience only in the presence of my older brother. My vision goes red. An uncomfortable balloon of rage inflates behind my ribs. I begin to experience a sensation that I imagine is akin to what a werewolf goes through on nights of full moon.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I more or less scream. “I bring you to Venice and you won't help me put the boat together? Really? Please tell me that again, in a complete sentence, on the record, so that I can write it down.”

He rolls his eyes and lets out a long, forbearing sigh. Then he stands, grabs the nearest boat bag, and leads me out the door.

CURSING AND GRUNTING under the weight of our bags, we plow through the extremely narrow streets of Venice. I've maneuvered Dan into carrying the longer of the two bags, with which he's terrorizing gelato-besmeared tourists as he passes, but this gives me little pleasure.

Ten blocks later, groaning and clammy with sweat, we unpack the boat in a dead-end alley giving onto a placid, narrow waterway a safe distance from the havoc of the Grand Canal, Venice's largest aquatic boulevard. Most of the Ikea bookshelves I've tangled with have been tougher to put together than the Greenland II. Within 30 minutes, it's assembled, an aluminum skeleton sheathed in a comely blue-and-black hide of rubberized nylon. At the sight of it, not to mention the prospect of actually paddling the thing, I'm literally trembling and panting with cupidity.

Yet I am nervous, too. The last time Dan and I were in a small watercraft together, 20 years ago, it ended in first-degree burns (hot brownie batter flung like napalm, long story) and a broken arm (my right ulna, fractured against a paddle Dan was using to block blows to his face). Dan, who outweighs me by 50 pounds, takes the stern, and I snug myself into the bow. The cruise starts off pretty magnificently. We glide through confidential alleys where the sunlight turns the water a startlingly lovely radioactive green; slip under moss-flocked bridges where pale crabs cling; dart between gondolas, our craft swift and nimble as a trout. Dan, at last, seems properly delighted. From the stern, I hear him giggling and cussing with joy. Our paddles dip and draw in easy rhythm, and we are, to my amazement, working in harmony.

I'm a little less worried about drowning on Sunday.

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IF YOU ASK the Vogalonga's organizers about its genesis, they'll tell you that the regatta's origins were lighthearted but that the event soon became political. According to local caterer Antonio Rosa Salva, whose grandfather and father are generally credited with bringing off the first outing, in 1975, the Vogalonga morphed into a protest against the growing scourge of motorboats, whose wakes assail the foundations of Venice's antique buildings, some of which date to the seventh century.

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As we hit the Grand Canal, we meet the motorboats, which likewise begin to erode the morale of Team Tower. Ninety-foot vaporetti nearly swamp us, their smirking passengers taking photographs of us. We churn our way through a Class IV onslaught of propeller wakes as sleek wooden speedboats race past. I am frankly terrified, but Dan utters no words of assurance or encouragement. Rather, he decides that the best response to the rough seas is to ship his paddle and speak exclusively in the imperative mood.

“Paddle right! Paddle left! Left, motherfucker! C'mon, get it in gear!”

“Don't fucking tell me which side to paddle on!” I yell, glaring back. “You're the rudder man. You're supposed to steer! And why the hell aren't you paddling?”

“Because I like how fast we're going with just you paddling.”

We survive the GC and then make our way back through the 1,300-foot-wide body of water known as the Bacino di San Marco, past Venice's thousand-year-old Byzantine cathedral, the Basilica di San Marco, and up into the Giudecca Canal. At last we locate the boathouse where I've made arrangements to garage our craft and soon find a section of seawall with marble steps that might do for a take-out spot. The Giudecca, however, is half a mile across, deep enough to accommodate cruise liners, and the four-foot swells make for a nervous debarkation.

Dan scrambles onto terra firma. I stay in the boat, which is being drubbed against the seawall. “What the hell are you waiting for?” my brother yells. “Get out.”

I don't feel like getting out. Idiotically, we've attached no bowline to the kayak, and I'm afraid that, as I hoist myself ashore, the precious Folbot will float off on the violent tide or I'll get tangled in the spray skirt or I'll simply slide off the slick, mossy steps and into the green Giudecca, whose waters still allegedly contain worrisome concentrations of human and industrial waste.

As I parse my options, Dan squats on the bank, abusing me. “What the hell's the matter with you?” he roars. “Be a man and get outta the fucking boat!”

Red waters flood my vision. “I'll kick your ass!” I scream, though the odds of my kicking anyone's ass in the present circumstances are extremely long. At this point, a laborer laying flagstone nearby takes pity on me, reaches out his hand, and pulls me ashore.

I thank him, and because of his kindness, my blood pressure begins to return to normal. But then the fellow turns to Dan and, nodding at me, says, “This guy, he is not so—” and points at his biceps.

Dan breaks into braying laughter—and pretty much doesn't stop until he's asleep.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Dan and I venture over to the Vogalonga's temporary headquarters, a cavernous marble palace off the Grand Canal where I make the acquaintance of Erla Zwingle. Erla Zwingle is the nicest person I have so far met in Venice, and her musical name, if chanted three times, is sure to buoy your mood. A transplant from Washington, D.C., she's a volunteer for the regatta and a former editor at National Geographic. The Vogalonga press office has been singularly unresponsive to my pleas for tips on good people to interview, so I ask Erla, a fellow member of the fourth estate, for suggestions.

“I know someone you might talk to. He's a native Venetian and has rowed in every Vogalonga since it started,” she says. She pulls out a cell phone and speaks, in flawless Italian, to someone on the other end. “He'd be happy to talk with you. His name is Lino. Full disclosure: He's my sweetie. Are you free for dinner tonight?”

Shortly after eight o'clock, Dan and I join Lino Farnea and Erla at their apartment, which is fragrant with the rich pasta carbonara Lino is cooking while we talk. Erla met Lino, a handsome man with olive skin and a tidy crop of white hair, while on assignment in Venice in 1994. A lifelong teacher of Venetian-style rowing and lagoon lore, Lino was Erla's instructor in the locally cherished set of strokes with which gondoliers manage to propel their crafts with precision and deliberateness while rowing from a single side. The stroke is a rococo cousin of the J-stroke, somewhere between stirring a cauldron and frosting a cake. In the time it took Lino to teach Erla to row in the Venetian way, they fell in love, and Erla decided she had no interest in going back to the United States.

In the course of our conversation, I recount the motorboat unpleasantness in the Grand Canal and ask about the Vogalonga's history of struggle. Actually, reports of the Vogalonga's activist origins are somewhat overstated, say Erla and Lino, who emerges from the kitchen to fill our glasses with wine.

“Yes, the waves caused by the motorboats are the cancer of Venice,” says Erla. “Every time a wave hits the foundation of a building, it carries something with it. On any canal in the city at low tide, you see foundations of palaces with holes in them like this”—she raises her arms, describing a cavity of beach-ball girth—”and you wonder how they're still standing.”

“But the Vogalonga didn't start as a pro­test,” says Lino, with Erla translating. “It was born from a bunch of friends who loved rowing, and anyone who wanted could come along. And it's not a protest now. You see the people in the boats—they're laughing, they're partying. They're not worrying about the problems of Venice. And when the boats have returned to the Bacino di San Marco you'll find the waves of motorboats are back again, so it's absurd to say it's against the motorboats because, four hours later, they're back again. So what kind of protest have I made?”

But while the Vogalonga's PR assault on the gas-powered menace hasn't been entirely successful, early on it revived Venetian rowing traditions, bringing new business to gondola builders. Rowing clubs multiplied. Erla says there are 40 or so now, but membership is anemic and graying. Most kids prefer motors.

Despite the native disinterest, however, Erla tells me that this year more than 5,000 people are likely to turn up for the Vogalonga, the majority of them foreigners in English-style rowing sculls or kayaks or canoes. She and Lino will be part of an eight-person Venetian boat, which, she says, makes for a much less exhausting experience than paddling a solo or tandem craft.

“So,” says my brother, “is this thing like a marathon?”

Lino, uncapping a jug of piquant, gentle grappa and pouring generously, assures us that we'll finish the loop in four hours or so in a kayak. “But,” he says, “it is tiring, and at times it seems impossible. Maybe you think, I'm dead tired; I will never do this again. But when you come down Grand Canal, you get this lump in your throat. You see all the boats, all the people, and what a beautiful thing it is.”

THE NEXT DAY is clear and breezy. Briny mistrals roll in off the lagoon, and Dan and I, in good spirits, fetch the kayak for an hour's jaunt through the canals.

I perch in the bow with the intent of jotting some descriptions down. The trouble with writing about Venice, of course, is that there isn't a single flagstone in the city that hasn't already been fawningly described by scores of hacks. Echoing in my head is Mary McCarthy's line from 1956's Venice Observed: “Nothing can be said here (including this statement) that has not been said before.”

I am nevertheless trying very hard to jot down a few lines about the glories of seeing Venice by kayak, away from the gelato hordes and postcard racks, how on Venice's streets you more or less drift like a ghost through a bethronged nonplace, a place that's not so much a city but a—let's see—an extremely high-class burlesque dancer so gorgeous and charming that you don't mind that she's not actually a person but a very comely device whose sole purpose is to pry cash out of you, but here in these confidential canals, coasting past barnacle-studded walls and expanses of failing plaster and getting up-close views of the tidal gingivitis line, where the waters are slowly gnawing away foundations of centuries-old brick and marble, it's as though the show is over and you've followed the dancer home, where she's dropped her false grin and scrubbed off her makeup and revealed to you her affecting vulnerabilities, which make you see her as an actual person and not merely a charming photo object and dollar receptacle, etc., etc., yet there's no way to jot any of this stuff in your handy Rite in the Rain waterproof notebook, because your brother is screaming at you to paddle on this side or that side every 15 seconds and you're screaming back at him to, for the love of God, shut up before you jam this paddle as hard as you can against the bridge of his nose, ideally driving bone flĂ©chettes deep into his frontal lobe.

At every canal junction, Dan and I argue about which way to turn. When I pause to put on sunscreen, we argue about that. Snapping a photograph? Of that stupid wall? That's an argument. Putting a camera in the drybag? Argument. It's sort of like having a joint superpower. We're a two-man twist on King Midas, turning everything before us into conflict.

The trouble with arguing about absolutely everything is that you essentially argue about nothing. That is, when an issue such as who got the larger pizza slice inspires the same degree of rancor as, say, whether or not to paddle in front of a speeding garbage barge, it quickly becomes impossible to distinguish an important battle from an utterly idiotic one.

Returning to the storage hangar, Dan and I have our 10,000th argument of the day, this time about how best to land the boat. We've agreed to take out at a floating dock convenient to the boat hangar. I'm for landing at the calm, leeward side of the dock, where there's a tiny bit of seaweed and befoamed trash floating around. Dan makes the case that only a fool wouldn't land on the windward side, where there's a handy, well-worn little step to climb onto, never mind that it's under heavy assault by man-size rollers piling in from across the Giudecca.

I really ought to continue arguing for a leeward landing, but my brother has already used the word “pussy” about three dozen times in reference to the other day's assisted debarkation, and so I say nothing. Wave after wave crashes over the deck as we pull alongside. The boat is rolling. We fight for balance and scream at one another. And then all is cold and quiet and green. We have tipped the untippable.

I come up gasping inside the capsized cockpit, trying not to imagine the solvents and carcinogens I'm soaking in. Dan is elsewhere, treading lagoon water and bellowing my name.

In grim silence, and with considerable effort, we climb the little step, wrest the boat from the water, and lug it up to the sidewalk, where we sit, dispirited and dripping, for a long while. Then a fleet of kayakers arrives at the dock. Without a second thought, all of them paddle to the leeward side and clamber out, safe and sound. As it would be pointless to point this out, I just shake my head.

“I lost my sunglasses,” I say glumly.

Dan has retained his—a triumph, he explains, of his superior coolheadedness in a crisis. “When that boat went over, my first thought was, Where are my sunglasses?” he says. “My second thought was, Where's Wells?”

Many hours later, over dinner, we're still lamenting the spill and assaying blame. Tomorrow is the day we're supposed to paddle 19 miles together. The prospect now seems not only difficult but possibly suicidal.

“Look, man, here's the problem,” Dan says at last. “A ship can't run with two goddamned captains, and two captains is what we got.” He knocks back a dark dose of wine. “Really, I've about had it, man. Why don't you just be the captain? Tomorrow, you sit in back. You call the shots.”

“Fine.”

He shakes his head. “I just didn't expect that we'd be fighting like this.”

“I know. It's like we get in that boat and turn into a couple of five-year-olds. We need to figure out some way to nip these retarded squabbles in the bud. Maybe we need a safe word or something.”

“A what?”

“You know, like a word or something we say to stop fighting, to take a time-out and check ourselves,” I say. “What's a good safe word, do you think?”

Dan refills his glass and mulls the notion with a frown. “How about 'Quit being such a fucking asshole'?”

I SUFFER TERRIBLE VISIONS that night: Our tragic inability to cooperate reaches its fullest expression as Dan and I drown out in the lagoon. Thus far, we haven't been able to paddle 50 feet without vows of fratricide; 19 miles seems an impossible challenge. I can't sleep. Dan, however, is sprawled across 75 percent of our mattress, his snoring like a symphony of madmen blowing into broken kazoos. I fold my pillow over my head and pray for dawn, fretfully pondering tomorrow's route.

The flotilla moves out at 9 A.M. from the Bacino di San Marco. We'll head northwest for a kilometer or two, tracing the shores of Vignole, St. Erasmo, and San Francesco del Deserto islands. Ten or so miles in, we'll hit Burano and then Mazzorbo, after which, according to Lino and Erla, the thrill of the trip begins to degrade. Between Mazzorbo and Murano lies a long, grindingly dull stretch of open water where I imagine Dan and I will pass the time by screaming at one another. From Murano, we'll plod to the homestretch, the Cannaregio Canal, which is usually thronged with exhausted racers vying for position and which, according to Erla, resembles “a little bit of hell.” If we survive the maelstrom at the Cannaregio's mouth, it's on to the Grand Canal, under the Accademia and Rialto bridges, to fetch up at last where we started.

Neither Dan nor I have done a push-up in years, and I've got no experience at the Folbot's helm. If we finish at all, I'll be grateful.

Just before eight o'clock, we set off for the boathouse. I'm agitated and overcaffeinated. Dan, despite his solid eight hours of sleep, is darkly sullen. The air is damp and cool as the wind herds tin cans and pizza tissues over the empty sidewalks. We retrieve the boat and put in on a quiet canal. As Dan eases his 240-pound bulk into the bow, the frame creaks and buckles. With the bow ballasted by my brother's substantial poundage, the Greenland II feels a little less lithe and hydro­dynamic than on prior cruises, but we still go slipping gracefully along and enter the Bacino di San Marco seconds before the starting cannon goes off, lofting a tidy white curd of smoke over the holy bulbs of the Basilica di San Marco.

Choking the basin is a riotous mess of boats—several thousand of them, spanning every species of nonmotorized craft—jostling toward the lagoon. Gondolas of every description bob along—black-lacquered, brocaded numbers that look like caskets for heads of state; five-person, vaguely Vikingish barges of unpainted planking. There's a preponderance of insectile rowing sculls, their leggy oars making a nuisance. A team of roistering Germans paddles past in what appear to be two aluminum canoes welded together into one superlong boat. They give full-throated song and, despite the early hour, seem to have already achieved a healthy buzz. Abreast of us, a prepubescent pilots a magenta kayak that looks like a candy cigar. Flags of uncountable nationalities ripple from passing sterns. The horizon is thorny with paddles and oars.

“Jesus, isn't this unbelievable?” I call.

“Ask me in four hours,” says Dan, dipping his paddle.

The array of boats, which range from ancient elegance to jackleg improvisations, makes me feel a good deal better about our odds, perched as we are in our comparatively state-of-the-art vessel. And in the early moments of the regatta, we do a fair job of staying with the fleet. But ten minutes later, rounding the island of Sant'Elena, we're smacked in the face by a fearsome headwind, which helps topple a few boats. (Before the day is over, the rough weather will have upset 30-odd boats and left some 50 people in the drink, awaiting rescue.) The regatta slows to some very glum fraction of a mile per hour.

During the moment of respite between strokes, the Greenland II slides perceptibly sternward. Crafts less sleek than ours are having an even more miserable time of it. To our left, a coed pair of Venetian-style rowers churn against the tide, the woman's white sundress billowing about her in the blue of the morning. By my watch, it takes them seven minutes to move their boat about 15 feet. Windblown sheets of water break across the Folbot's deck, sluicing over the spray skirt and down my shirt to pool electrifyingly in my crotch.

Dan seems to have already abandoned the mission. His body has gone fairly limp, and he's adopted a style that basically involves letting his paddle drag through the water like a dead limb. In as diplomatic a tone as I can muster, I plead with him to deepen his strokes and even out his cadence. He's too tired to give me even a halfhearted “Go fuck yourself.” All he can manage is “This is horrible. Shoulda brought my trolling motor.”

As we near a stretch of coastal scrubland at San Francesco del Deserto, the wind relents. I'm hoping we'll be able to make up some time. “OK, bro, put your back into it,” I call out.

“Pull over,” says Dan, indicating a marshy berm where a crew of Scandinavian oars­women, having beached their scull, are enjoying a snack. “I'm hungry and I've got to take a leak.”

I protest, “Look, I'm captain, and I say we—”

“Personally, I'd be happy to piss in the boat. Don't know how psyched you'd be about that, though.”

I rudder us in, thinking that at least I can maybe swap some pleasantries with the ladies while my brother is off in the bushes. But, against my entreaties, Dan unholsters himself right there on the beach and enacts a candid, languorous urination in plain view of the Scandinavians. They move along, and Dan and I picnic in silence on chocolate and wet bread.

By the time we fold ourselves back into the boat, the flotilla has considerably thinned. Lactic acid congealing in our arms, we crawl along the coastline for Burano. Presently, a pair of elderly women paddling arrhythmically in a tandem kayak lurch past us—a painful testament to my inadequacy as captain. I try to pull it together.

“Come on, man,” I call out. “We can't let those old ladies dust us.” Dan grunts in agreement and we strain after them, but it does no good; they soon vanish into the distance, along with pretty much everyone else.

Dan peers over his shoulder. “I don't see a whole lot of people behind us,” he says. I turn around for a look. Save for some guy in a buckskin-trimmed canoe that seems less a viable boat than a gimcrack plucked from the walls of a family restaurant, the lagoon is empty.

DESPERATE TO AT LEAST appear to be a part of the regatta, we bend to our paddles in silent determination. But at the four-hour mark, at which Lino assured us we'd be done, we've just reached the island of Burano—roughly halfway through the course. I'm officially exhausted. With each stroke, an ember of pain glows in my right triceps. As captain of Team Tower, I'm loath to show any weakness in front of my brother, but I can't help letting out a little high-pitched shriek every third stroke or so. Luckily, my whimpering inspires Dan to paddle with a fervor that gentle coaching could never summon.

“Put that paddle in the water and get in the goddamned game,” he yells, spurring us hard past Burano's teetering clock tower.

“I'm having some problems,” I say.

“Buddy, there's one solution for every problem you run into on the Vogalonga: more paddling.”

I painfully acquiesce. As we round a turn and enter a narrow boulevard of water flanked by shoreline homes, we find ourselves pointed back at the lagoon—and suddenly, wondrously, the wind is behind us. We gasp with pleasure, ship our paddles, and glide along at a smooth clip.

“This is the name of the game!” cries Dan. “Jesus, I just about had a Ph.D. in headwind. That was awful.”

With the wind at our backs, our mood is transformed. Gliding away from Burano and into the broad green prairie of the lagoon, we lean back in our seats and let the wind ferry us along. On the horizon, we can see the bell tower in the Piazza San Marco, marking the finish line. The sun is warm but unoppressive, muted by a layer of blue clouds. A marvelous bird with a gorgeous green head strafes the bow and then banks off toward the snowcapped mountains in the west.

“This is absolutely killer,” says Dan. “Man, thanks so much for bringing me. I'm serious. I don't know why in the hell we don't do this stuff more often.”

“I know, I know. We should,” I say, and I actually mean it, too. This is Team Tower's other superpower, our ability to turn on a dime, from homicidal to earnestly genial. Before we've hit the island of Murano, the final waypoint before we make for San Marco, we've made a plan to head to Maine soon after we return, to paddle the Penobscot River.

It's late afternoon, and we've evidently taken so long that the motorboat prohibition has expired. Water taxis rush past, rocking us with their wakes. Our brows are crusted with salt, our clothes sodden. We look such a pitiful sight that a coast guard vessel cruises alongside us and a pair of officers ask if we're OK. We nod feebly. They pop a prosecco cork and, rather cruelly, hoist their glasses at us before moving on.

Past Murano, the tailwind subsides, making it necessary to once more paddle in earnest. The lava in my right arm has spread into my ass, and I'm on the verge of tears. I await the spiritual boost that Lino said we could expect on reaching the Grand Canal: the cheering throngs, the fanfare. But when we arrive, the crowd has gone home. On the Accademia Bridge, a drunken remnant of bellowing tourists await. Some jackass chucks a napkin-stuffed bottlecap at us, beaning Dan in the chest.

“Assholes,” he says as we pass under the bridge. “At least they didn't throw a bottle.”

The finish line is more anticlimactic than you can imagine. We've taken eight hours to complete the loop—and will later learn that our visit just happened to coincide with the arrival of the worst weather in the event's history, which saw many an old hand giving up or staggering in hours later than planned. The confetti throwers are long gone, so we crawl across the canal to the narrow waterway that runs close to our hotel. Soon we pull along-side it and wrestle the boat out of the water.

Naturally, at the moment, the sky breaks open. We dismantle the Greenland II in a downpour. But, while exhausted, we are, amazingly, happy.

As I finished packing up the boat, Dan nips into a shop and returns with two cans of cold Italian lager. We eagerly crack them, and he puts his arm around me, raising his can in the pelting Venetian rain.

“To you, the captain, the pecker in chief!” I hear him say.

“Pecker?”

“Paddler,” he says. “Paddler in chief.”

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The river is as black and flat as freshly screeded tar. Submarine visibility is at a distressing half-inch or so, max. Anything could be down there.

I’m floating the Wekiva River north of Orlando, moving at what feels to me like a pretty good clip, when a husky teenager in a decrepit red kayak slips up alongside.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Are there alligators in here?”

“Yeah, kind of,” he replies. “Just saw one back there. Not too big. Seven feet, about.”

“Back where, exactly?”

Obviously more intrigued by my vessel, he halfheartedly jerks a thumb upriver.

“Where’d you get that boat?”

“I made it,” I say.

He hoists his eyebrows in an expression of very mild impressedness.

“Awesome.”

He toodles off, leaving me to fend for myself in a craft that probably wouldn’t survive an attack by a determined koi. I’m piloting an inner tube, and I’m doing so with great pride. I’m confident that, gator vulnerabilities aside, mine is the swankiest custom-made personal flotation device ever to cruise a backwoods creek. The chassis (courtesy of Ontario, Canada’s ) is a 44-inch tire tube sheathed in a ballistic-nylon skirt of bold electric blue. It was already a handsome little barge, but with a long trip ahead of me, I spent several days in the shop of my fabricator friend George souping it up with post-factory snazz. With calipers, compasses, and a Delta upright bandsaw, we cut a 20-inch birch-ply deck to support a seat back and armrests (butchered from a lawn chair) and an extremely bitching adjustable sun canopy. Then, with great effort and cursing, I hammered brass grommets into the nylon skirt, through which I secured the deck and lawn-chair anatomy with zip ties. Next, we stitched a CAUTION: SMALL CRAFT! pennant out of orange camo fabric and, amid a shower of sparks, chopped some threaded rod into three two-foot lengths, creating a portable flagpole I could reassemble with couplers. Plans for a sail and rudder foundered at the blueprint stage. To my greater sorrow, schemes for a wet-bar-and-cooler sidecar never made it out of the wind tunnel.

I built this glorious rig not merely to astound the locals but to keep me comfy on what was supposed to be a five-day river voyage through an intermittent fantasy river, made up of my own quixotic selection of the crystalline, spring-fed waterways of north-central Florida.

The basic concept is a loaner from John Cheever’s classic short story “,” from 1964: One hungover Sunday, Neddy Merrill and his wife are drinking gin and lounging poolside at the Westerhazys’ when Neddy gets the idea to swim the eight miles home, through a suburban “river” composed of the innumerable backyard pools strewn across New York’s Westchester County.

“His life was not confining,” writes Cheever, “and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape. He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.”

My River of the Mind, however, is a far larger and even more harebrained waterway than Neddy’s chimerical stream. As I’ve conceived it, mine will loosely trace the artesian output of the Floridan Aquifer, a subterranean freshwater sea whose natural eruptions—primarily in the northern half of the state—pay out some of the purest water, flowing through one of the most staggeringly beautiful riparian corridors, in the world.

I’ve waited for the more congenial temperatures of September to tube an ambitious seven springs and rivers, starting here in suburban Orlando, then north toward Gainesville, and then south toward whatever river will spit me out into the Gulf of Mexico. I haven’t figured that last part out yet.

Due to a few logistical miscalculations, the plan isn’t coming together too well. First, I didn’t mean to begin my journey in this Stygian creek. I’d meant to embark upriver, at , whose pure waters resemble nothing so much as a large, handsome spill of Crest Gel.

To my dismay, when I showed up this afternoon, a park employee informed me that any “craft” not approved by the Coast Guard was forbidden. He then directed me downriver—but not before remarking that deploying a tube in the Wekiva was not really something he’d recommend.

Just minutes into the tube’s christening, I’m impressed by its hydrodynamism and zip. Spurring myself along with a kayak paddle, I can churn forth at a decent pace. There’s only one problem: Each stroke swings me around about 45 degrees—now clockwise, now counterclockwise—so I don’t so much glide as swivel like a hockey puck under heavy English. OK, two problems: When road-testing the tube on the floor of my friend’s shop, I failed to take into account that, once in the water, my butt would sink down, down, down into the giant void in the center.

Picture a toddler jackknifed rearward into a toilet.

But, this design flaw and the water’s grottiness notwithstanding, the Wekiva redeems itself. Water lily gardens nod in the current, trumpet-trunked cypress trees lines the channel, and a great rumpled monument of cloud lies twinned upon the river’s surface. As I pass, turtles with striped faces shoot me looks from half-sunken logs before plopping grumpily into the water. My contentment is high when I round a bend to find an elderly man in a silver canoe, eyeing something in the shallows.

“Alligator here!” he calls out. I look over and catch a glimpse of its steel-belted-radial hide.

“Seen any others?” I ask in a panicked whinny.

“Just the two right behind you!” he cries.

“Ha-ha!” I say, frantically swiveling away.

Bringing up the rear, I should mention, is my support vessel, a canoe piloted by a slender, fine-boned blonde, my friend and assistant Suzanne Bennett—or “Miss Bennett,” as we’ve agreed I’ll call her for the trip’s duration, in order to maintain a Cheever-appropriate air of postwar propriety. (In fact, I’ve assented to give Miss Bennett one cold beer each time I fail to address her so.)

With a gator in our midst, now would be a good time for Miss Bennett to offer me the aluminum sanctuary of the canoe, but in a potentially homicidal dereliction of her duties, she ignores me and goes over to have a look-see. My bare feet dangle temptingly overboard. Every bubble floating past looks like a surveillant eye.

“Miss Bennett!”

She finally paddles back over, unhurried by my plight and grinning in zoological rapture. “You should’ve seen that fucker! Man, it was scary! The second I saw him—dude, I just went cold. That was some old, hardwired, predator-prey shit right there.”

“Could we discuss this later, please?” I ask, drawing in the puckered morsels of my toes.

“That was so cool! But, damn, I was terrified.”

“Could we not—”

“I’ll tell you one thing: You wouldn’t catch me out here in a tube.”

“Please, Miss Bennett.”

“What, you scared?”

I paddle on, but, before long, what gets to me is not so much the prospect of getting munched but a presentiment of the posthumous jeering I’ll surely suffer in the local media.

Newscaster: “Jerry’s coming to us live from the banks of the Wekiva River, where some guy tubing through alligator-infested waters met with, well, what he pretty much had coming. So what’s the deal, Jer? He didn’t know there were gators in there?”

Correspondent: “Oh, sure, he knew, Linda. I guess he thought they were vegetarians. Har-har.”

At this point, it seems wise to pronounce the Wekiva officially tubed. I tie my craft to Miss Bennett’s stern and clamber aboard.

Later, back at the “marina”, which consists of a fleet of leprous canoes capsized in front of a beer-and-bait shanty, a clutch of large men linger by the plywood bar and regard me as though they can’t quite figure out whether my tube is really cool or something I ought to be assaulted for. Finally, one of the heavyset bald ones calls out, “Hey, man, how was that floatin’ tube?”

“Rode like a dream,” I yell.

Early on in the Cheever story, Neddy’s neighbors supply him with booze as he makes his way across the county, so I of course jog over expectantly. I’ll surely be handed multiple chilled Budweisers as I astonish one and all with talk of my grand expedition. But once I get there, I can’t even attract the attention of the bartender, a shirtless man with pectoral muscles like horseshoe crabs. He’s too busy chatting up a tan, bikini-clad woman who stands in contrapposto, coyly fingering a long, pale scar on her abdomen.

“Can I give you some beer, get you drunk, take advantage of you?” he asks.

“You don’t need to get me drunk to take advantage of me,” the woman says.

“My virgin ears!” the bald man cries.

I drag the tube back to our rented Jeep.

In search of purer waters than these, Miss Bennett and I ride north to Blue Spring State Park, just outside the town of Orange City. But the springs are mostly off-limits, to keep snorkelers from hassling the manatees. Undaunted, I tube zestfully up and down the little abridgement of the springs but receive suspicious looks from a family of swimmers clearly discomfited by the presence of a grown man haunting a state park at dusk in a pool toy.

In the morning, I attempt to tube the St. Johns River, one of the world’s laziest, thus an appropriate waterway to cruise via the world’s laziest means of transportation. But due to recent hurricane activity, the put-ins are closed.

I lapse into a funk, both because the mission has so far failed to achieve epic scope and also because the rental car has no roof rack. Miss Bennett’s canoe (a $100 junker purchased off Craigslist Orlando) is lashed improperly, its gunwales cushioned by three washcloths (stolen from a hotel), four pairs of socks (clean), and one pair of underwear (dirty). The tie-down straps vibrate with a loud and terrible sound, as though the Jeep is being strafed by giant, farting hornets.

I suppose a little adversity’s appropriate. As Neddy Merrill continues on his quest, his river takes a stagnant turn. He finds one pool empty, another strangely cold. The day’s clemency gives way to a thunderstorm. His neighbors, unamused by his quest, are suddenly not so friendly.

Miss Bennett is saying all kinds of things about the noise. I try to distract her by pointing out some pleasant roadside landscaping.

“Look at those pretty flowers, Miss Bennett. Don’t they buck you up?”

“Let me remind you that you’re in punching distance.”

“And remind me to get you a pad and paper, Miss Bennett, so you can write down all your bonnest mots.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be your job?” She has a point.

“Maybe I’ve screwed this whole thing up,” I say. “Maybe I should’ve come alone. I mean, this is supposed to be, like, a man’s solitary journey through, you know, the jungle of adult self-delusion and disappointment.”

“Screw that,” says Miss Bennett. “I can’t believe you’re trying to reduce one of the most beautiful short stories ever written to some sort of adolescent dude odyssey.”

In an attempt to stoke her zeal for the project, I suggest to Miss Bennett that I might name my fanciful stream after her, just as Neddy names his after his wife.

“Would you like that?” I ask cheerily.

“I don’t think I want any tubers on my river,” says Miss Bennett.

More than 700 springs burble up out of the Florida soil. , this is the greatest concentration of freshwater springs on the planet, fed by the largest (more than 100,000 square miles), oldest (more than 20 million years), and deepest (more than 2,000 feet) artesian aquifer in the southeastern U.S. The most ballyhooed of these is , on the western edge of . Silver Springs disgorges a remarkable 550 million gallons per day and is such a beloved attraction that the theme park incarcerating the source somehow gets away with charging $35 a head to gawk at the splendor. I, however, intend to avail myself of a little-known loophole in the easement provisions. By canoeing five miles up the Silver River, one can stiff the ticket agents, drop one’s tube on the limpid tide, and float blissfully back down.

As you paddle into the Silver River from the Worcestershire-hued canal running by the boat launch, the water turns so suddenly clear that one experiences an onrush of vertigo, as though, like Wile E. Coyote, you’ve suddenly paddled off a cliff. The water is so startlingly transparent that it hardly seems to be water at all but some species of coagulated air. It’s bizarre to see this familiar element assume such a radically different character, sort of like finding out that, under certain circumstances, gravel is good to eat.

“Holy shit, man! Have you ever seen anything so gorgeous?” asks Miss Bennett as we paddle upriver.

We hold a brief roundtable on other beautiful destinations visited: New Zealand’s black-sand beaches, the waters off the GalĂĄpagos, the Swiss Alps, the Maine coast. The Silver River, we decide, takes the cake, due not only to its stupefying loveliness but also to its being so unspoiled despite proximity to a busy highway, condos, and subdivisions—and to the complete absence of any other humanity on this lovely autumn afternoon.

“I can’t believe there’s no one else out here,” Miss Bennett says. “We live in a nation of lazy bastards.”

It is, in fact, sort of mind-blowing that the Silver isn’t mobbed with vacationers, considering that people have been freaking out about the river’s outlandish clarity, in print, for about two centuries now. (Indians first settled here roughly 10,000 years ago, but later European arrivals found the springs too pretty to share.) In 1826, an Army captain claimed he could see the holes on a button resting 40 feet down. “This will no doubt appear to you incredible but it is nevertheless a downright fact,” he wrote in a letter. The glass-bottom boat was invented here in 1878. Silver Springs’ clear waters also launched the boom in early underwater filmmaking. Many of were filmed here, as was .

The water owes its lucidity to the mortal sacrifices of hundreds of millions of tiny marine organisms that lived and died in the seas that covered central Florida 30 million or so years ago. Their corpses sank to the bottom and very slowly compacted into a blanket of limestone more than 1,000 feet thick. This substrate essentially acts as the world’s largest Brita filter, emitting, through its artesian fissures, water that is 99.8 percent pure, consistently temperate (72 degrees no matter the season), and, according to one naturalist, even clearer than water purified by artificial means.

But neither here nor anywhere else in the state is the water as clear as it once was. Not only was the great strip-mall-and-ranch-home Tartarus of Orlando recently angling to tap the river system to the tune of 100 million gallons a day, but, due to agricultural and other nitrate runoff (as well as a dash of septic-tank leakage), algae plagues the waters. Most of the eelgrass growing in the shadows is pretty well bearded with the stuff. You can’t look at the water for long without a trembling green curd of it floating past.

What’s really upsetting, though, is the fact that it can take half a century for a drop of rainwater to percolate through the topsoil, into the aquifer, and then out in the springs, which means that the algae you see today could be the effect of nitrates introduced into the water table before Hawaii was a state—and when the population of northern Florida was about a quarter of what it is now. Every day, as ever-larger helpings of slow-journeying nitrates spill out of the water table, the spring river grows warmer and murkier. Even if everyone in north Florida could somehow be persuaded to abandon their homes and take their septic tanks and fertilized lawns with them, the river wouldn’t run as clear as it does today for a long, long time.

After a three-hour upriver struggle, Miss Bennett and I have at last commandoed our way to the grand artesian fissure. Glass-bottom boats prowl water of such blue-green intensity as to make a Caribbean inlet cloud over with shame.

“Well,” says my assistant, “what are you waiting for?”

A little ways back, we passed a sign forbidding swimming. And up on shore, two security gentlemen are giving me the hairy eyeball.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m sure tubing’s against the rules here. There’s a chance I could be arrested.”

She groans in exasperation and cries, for all to hear, “God, you’re a pussy! Weren’t you just saying you wanted to get arrested? That it’d be an adventure? Jeez!”

It’s true. I was just saying that. Grudgingly, I untether the tube. Performing a heretofore unattempted “navy mount,” I cantilever my butt over the side of Miss Bennett’s canoe in a latrinely pantomime and then hover there. I look over at the skipper of a passing glass-bottom boat. In the midst of a droning public-address recital of springs-related miscellany, he glares at me, clearly wishing he had six kinds of torpedoes.

At one point in “The Swimmer,” Neddy is surprised to find himself unwelcome at a party he’s come upon in his quest. Undeterred, he hits the bar, downs a whiskey, dives into the pool, and swims its length.

I tump into the tube with a splash and am whacked on the nose by my articulating canopy. No one tries to arrest me. The sun is sinking fast, so I start swiveling downriver. A middle-aged couple cruises past in a canoe. The man lowers his glasses.

“Buddy, you are rockin’ and rollin’, ” he says. “Rockin’ and rowin’!”

“Yes, sir!” I soon lose sight of them.

The theme park gradually recedes. Pushed by an insistent current, I make good time to the mouth of the Silver, past worlds of native fauna: a nation of lazy, log-hunkered turtles, limbs outstretched in funny supplicating poses so that the sun makes little brown radiances of their interdigital membranes; long nerdy gars, the Ichabod Cranes of the fish world; lank anhingas hanging their wings out to dry; big blue channel catfish; long-billed ibises; dark-footed cormorants; regal great blue herons, their daggerlike beaks parted, striding minnow shoals with a canny, high-legged gait in perfect embodiment of the verb stalk; a fume-spewing powerboat laden with large men having drinks and blaring Van Halen’s “Panama” in perfect embodiment of the plural noun assholes.

My enjoyment of all this majesty, however, is cut short by the wailing of Miss Bennett, who’s encountered a headwind. Her canoe is revolving in the stream like the needle of a spastic compass.

“You just need to rudder a little bit,” I offer. “Do you know the J-stroke?”

“This is not a technique issue!” she yells.

“Do you want me to tow you?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

We drift on in this manner until we spot an eight-foot alligator sunning itself.

“I think I’d like to get back in the canoe now,” I say.

The tube is flaccid by day three, and I’m suffering from a darting lower-lumbar neuralgia. Today, I plan to tube a portion of the Ichetucknee River, a cherished aorta of north Florida’s freshwater vasculature. It’s far and away the most vaunted tubing destination in the state, and I feel considerable pressure to get the tube into maximum spruceness and tumescence before my voyage.

In the town of Fort White, 35 miles northwest of Gainesville at the edge of , we pull over at a tube-rental place to attend to maintenance and then install the Tube Pro booster saddle I’d thought unnecessary but, luckily, brought along anyway. My craft’s improved ergonomics should help undo the damage to my back.

The proprietress of the is a pretty woman named Linda Soride, and we chat for a moment before a purple, circa-1987 Camaro, pulsing with megabass, pulls up. As she turns away to diagnose the occupants’ needs, I fall a little bit in love with Linda. My mind drifts and I see myself, having patented the tube design, return to the ITC to license it exclusively to her. Revenues soar, and we soon depart the run-down filling station for a grand neon showroom. I’m the muscle of the operation—keeping the compressors shipshape, manning the patch kit—while Linda remains its comely public face. At the close of business each day, we head to the Ichetucknee and go floating off together, accompanied only by cool waters, cheering egrets, and some Riunite on ice.

Minutes later, I trot my tube—freshly inflated, booster seat in place—over to Linda. “This is just the prototype,” I rave proudly. “Once I get the kinks out, maybe you and me could do some business together.”

She shies away, cooing, “Maybe so, maybe so,” in a quiet, suspicious voice imparting the suggestion that I might be a little bit insane. (As Cheever’s story progresses, Neddy shows signs that he is not in command of his senses. The echo is unsettling.)

After I recover from this minor slight, Miss Bennett, who has to skip this portion of the journey to drive the car down, drops me at a designated embarkation point on the Ichetucknee. This river would inspire ecstasies in anyone with a pulse, but my ardor for spectacular scenery has reached a point of diminishing returns. I feel like a competitive eater tucking in to his 47th foie gras tart. The Ichetucknee offers more of the pellucid water and old-growth forests slung with buntings of Spanish moss. But while I’m relieved to discover, as advertised, no gators in sight, there’s also a disappointing shortage of amazing birdlife. Just the odd egret and heron, skulking on the bank like underpaid park employees. Plenty of people, though.

While my own capacity for amazement is waning, my superb invention, I would like to inform the proprietress of the ITC, is so enthusiastically admired by my fellow tubers that I’m to have no peace for the entire four-mile float. Seconds into the ride, two young women from St. Augustine beckon me into their flotilla. We enjoy a cozy interlude until a thickly built friend of theirs comes by and says “I want that tube” in a manner that is not unmenacing. I break away and into the path of a kayaking lady who pronounces mine “the Cadillac of tubes.” (A bespectacled professor following behind her describes it, a touch sneeringly, as “an interesting contraption.”) Even a fearsome river stud in a straw cowboy hat—reclining on a little inflatable yacht, trailing a miasma of marijuana fumes, a zaftig beauty on his arm—pauses to tell me that he deems the tube “a pretty badass setup.”

At last, I am among my people.

In this newfound fame and bliss, I drift on for hours. Toward the end, as I glide to the pullout, having made it halfway across Florida, the sky darkens. I struggle up the dock, where Miss Bennett waits for me in a shower of pelting rain.

Next up: The Rainbow River, which runs through the town of Dunnellon, 25 miles west of Ocala. After overnighting near the Ichetucknee, we proceed to what I’ve been assured by my fellow enthusiasts is a tubing destination not to be missed. Around 9 A.M., we arrive at , which has a shuttle, meaning Miss Bennett gets to tube along with me. After filling out a stack of paperwork befitting a Soviet border crossing and shelling out the extraordinary sum of $18, we’re driven by a cranky employee to the launch.

In parting, the driver gets in a few cheap japes about both the tube and the irrefutably natty fedora I’m affecting. He then offers a warning: “If you hear banjo music, keep movin’!” Har-har. There’s nothing at all Deliverance about the Rainbow River, which carries us past a dispiriting parade of suburban bungalows. The vibe is decidedly more Cocoon, the backyards peopled with retirees downing mimosas at riverside patio sets.

“Silver Springs just ruined this for us,” says my assistant. “I wanna see some fucking flamingos.”

For the float’s duration, a contest for thickest and most acrid emissions is vigorously waged by a fleet of squat pontoon boats. What’s more, proceeding at roughly one mile per hour, the Rainbow’s current is too sluggish for me to outstrip the local population of lovebugs, an exhibitionist variety of fly whose chief pleasure is to swarm around committing coitus on the wing. They bed down all over my sun canopy, hang flagrante delicto from my hat brim, and get all tangled up in the tall grass of my arm hair. When at last we debark, I feel vaguely taken advantage of.

The journey’s end in sight, all that remains is to find a proper route to the Gulf of Mexico, which lies just 15 miles to the west. Miss Bennett and I spend the morning querying park officials and thumbing the tourist literature for the right watercourse to the Gulf. We get recommendations of several rivers by which I might conclude my voyage (the Chassahowitzka, the Crystal, etc.). All sound splendid—and therefore inappropriate to the spirit of bleakness haunting Cheever’s tale.

Unsatisfied, we stop at an RV park outside Weeki Wachee—famed home of kitsch royalty the Ìęand site of the deepest natural springs in the U.S.—to see if the locals might know of a grittier path to the sea. Out on the office’s patio, a twenty-something man and a seventy-something woman avidly toke on Old Gold cigarettes. They are credibly tan, that rare Floridian shade you might achieve by crouching in a hickory smoker for a couple of weeks. I explain my plight, and the man contemplatively runs a thumbnail through his stubble.

“Well, there’s the Mud,” he finally says.

“The what?”

“Mud River. It ain’t pretty, but it’ll get you to the Gulf.”

The mud slinks by a multilevel saloon before winding under an overpass. It is not without remorse that I launch myself and the tube on our final flight. The patrons gathered out on the bar’s deck applaud.

“Oh, that is too damn much!” yells a well-nourished woman. “Where’s your beer?”

“I don’t have one,” I say, sticking my lip out, my voice quavering a little. She makes a queenly gesture to a man in a baseball cap, and he jogs inside for my first free beer. He’s soon making his way down the bank, so I merrily start swiveling over. We both have to reach and strain, and the folks on the deck watch with great interest.

Gilt by the afternoon light, the Miller Lite handoff is a scene of great charity and neighborly grace, a sort of Florida-style Sistine Chapel ceiling tableau.

Cold beer safely crotched, I yaw out into the onion-consommé tide once more, Miss Bennett following in silence. I ease into a narrow canal coursing through a cheery Floridian Venice where manses shoulder in among rusting modulars. At a Y in the stream, I pause to get instructions from a trio of seniors out for a swim.

“Hello,” I say, “which way to the Gulf?”

“You’re going to the Gulf?” asks a man somehow able to tread water and maintain a healthy ember on a cigar.

“Trying to,” I say.

He indicates the right fork. “Shit,” he says. “Good luck.”

I paddle on, past knots of teens petting one another in the waves, past docks equipped with complex nautical machinery, 2-D wooden manatees, decorative swaths of fishing net, signs painted with jolly sloganry: FISH STORIES TOLD HERE, NO SKINNYDIPPIN’, and NO FARTIN’. A boat bearing three generations of bikini’d ladies blats past. They dance wildly to deafening country music.

“We’re not drunk!” one of them shrieks. “We’re just havin’ fun!”

Around a curve, the houses peter out into an empty plain of marsh grass and salt-ravaged palms. The estuarine water is far from the reviving 72 degrees of the inland springs, offering the disagreeable lukewarmth of old dishwater. Miss Bennett peels off for shore. In the broads, fishing boats with insectile outriggers tear past, smacking me with high white wakes. The tide, I’m sorry to note, has turned against me. Paddling the tube becomes ludicrous. The sensation is of trying to crawl up a down escalator. It takes about two minutes to go ten feet, and I experience the breathless panic of a child striving through the waves toward his parents’ maddeningly receding beach blanket. Few boaters can resist commenting on the futility of my project.

“Where in the world you goin’—Cuba?” asks one.

On and on I grind, toward a spit of land where an American flag corrugating in the wind marks the end of Florida and the beginning of the Gulf. Some elderly folks on a pier gaze down. Their expressions are not admiring. Churning forth with what feels like the last of my strength, I’m joined, impossibly, by a kindred seagull flying into the wind and towing three lead weights, which hang on a length of monofilament tied to a hook in his beak. He keeps pace, evidently recognizing me as a colleague in poor judgment.

In the final paragraphs of “The Swimmer”—after we’ve begun to glean that our protagonist, though in nothing but trunks, has borne many heavy burdens on his journey—Neddy Merrill fetches up home at last, weary, cold, and waterlogged. But instead of feeling the elation that comes with a feat accomplished, he finds himself the victim of an existential switcheroo: The house is locked, empty of furniture, bereft of life; his wife and children are gone; and Neddy—has he lost his mind?—is left shivering and bewildered on his own doorstep.

But mine is a different story. Florida is behind me now, yet I’m seized by the perverse compulsion to go on fighting the tide. Sweat brines my eyes. My arms are gone to noodles, but I crank on, shoulders creaking. A speedboat pulls abreast and slows. The captain looks at me and then at the blue-brown emptiness ahead. His cheek skews with a disgusted concern.

“Buddy,” he says, “what in the hell are you doin’?”

It’s a fair question.

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Progressive Candidates

Get the scoop on each of this year’s Best Towns. Plus, check out our interactive map with archives of past years’ Best Towns.

Ìę

Washington, District of Columbia

Chattanooga, Tennessee

New Orleans, Louisiana

Ogden, Utah

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Tacoma, Washington

Ithaca, New York

Louisville, Kentucky

Eureka, California

Crested Butte, Colorado

Columbia, Missouri

The Rest of the Best

Ìę

Washington, D.C.

Mid-Atlantic

THE REVIVAL: High crime, buttoned-up Beltway vibe, sweltering summers, a coked-out mayor, taxation without representation, and eight years of an unpopular administration aren’t great for a city’s image, but don’t let all that stuff fool you. D.C. has been busily working for change lately.

Ìę

After Marion Barry made a mess of the mayor’s office, Congress exercised its right to rule and took charge in 1995. When the D.C. regained control, in 2001, the money started pouring in, jump-starting a civic revival overdue since the race riots of 1968. Run-down neighborhoods northwest’s Adams Morgan, U Street, and Chinatown began attracting young entrepreneurs. “D.C. has seen an influx of independent business owners,” says Warren Brown, a lawyer turned baker who opened hugely popular on U Street in 2002. “Before that, it was like Where’s the creativity?'” In the Capitol Riverfront ‘hood, along the Anacostia River, the Nationals’ new baseball stadium debuted this spring as the first LEED-certified ballpark in the country. And this summer, D.C. launched the country’s first bike-share program, with a fleet of 100 four-speed cruisers; $40 gets you a year of access all over town.

THE LIFE: Just ask young, ultrafit D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty. The three-mile run along the National Mall, from Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial, is, um, monumental. Off-road, 1,754-acre offers 40 miles of urban trails, or ride or run the in Georgetown. Upstream, offers Class V rapids. On U Street, chill with some vino at , then catch live jazz at .

THE WORD ON THE STREET: D.C.
“Don’t think D.C. is all about politics; it’s full of diversity, and practically any adventure you want is within a three-hour radius of the city.”

Ìę

Chattanooga, TN

Southeast

THE REVIVAL: Chattanooga’s surrounded by mountains and rivers, but like so many manufacturing towns, it turned its back on its natural assets. In the mid-’60s, the city went from industrial boom to rusting bust when local steelmakers and foundries closed their doors, leaving a decrepit, nearly abandoned downtown and a community in dire need of an aesthetic and economic overhaul.

The Tennessee River flows through town, and urban renewal in the ’90s centered on a total do-over of the nearly nonexistent waterfront, including construction of an aquarium and ten-mile river walk; 2002 saw $120 million invested in, among other things, a pedestrian pier, free public boat slips, and the new Renaissance Park, on the . “That’s the Chattanooga way,” says forester Gene Hyde of the community-driven overhaul. The program will invest $2 million over three years to transform downtown condos, offices, and shops into LEED-certified buildings; the project recruits locals to plant some 2,000 trees in the urban forest; and there are plans to develop 100 miles of singletrack within ten miles of Chattanooga by 2010. All of which has remade downtown into a live/work/play crossroads with half a dozen parks, a new organic grocer, and the annual Riverbend music festival, which spans nine days and six stages.

THE LIFE: The much-revered Tennessee Wall serves up year-round trad climbing, and mountain bikers flock to Raccoon Mountain both just a few minutes from downtown. Chatta­nooga’s best carbo load comes compliments of , an all-day pancake joint in the up-and-coming North Shore district.

THE WORD ON THE STREET: CHATTANOOGA
“A very scenic, very happening, and very easy place to live, with unlimited options for climbing, caving, biking, hiking, and paddling.”

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New Orleans, LA

You say you want a reconstruction? In the Big Easy, it's the regular folks, with help from a host of smart non-profits, who are resurrecting the city.

Rocheblave Street, in New Orleans’s Broadmoor district, resounds with the squabbling of wild parakeets and the whine of power tools. It’s a Monday morning in late April in this recovering 2,400-home neighborhood, initially marked for demolition by the mayor’s rebuilding commission. The breeze is thick with the smell of fresh paint. The street is nearly shadowless, the Louisiana sun unbroken. This pronounced absence, open sky where the crowns of trees formerly reigned, is the reason arboricultural philanthropist Monique PiliĂ© is down on hands and knees, preparing a hole for a lissome Japanese magnolia sapling, which sits in a pot nearby. With two volunteers from a team of 15 or so, she combs the black Delta soil clean of roofing tiles (deposited 32 months ago by Hurricane Katrina), then plants the tree in their stead. It’s roughly the 1,900th PiliĂ© has put in the ground since the floodwaters subsided.

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“We lost 70 percent of our tree canopy in the storm,” she says. “Well over 100,000 trees. I wanted to do something. I wanted to give back to my city.”

So she headed for high ground. A few months after the storm, in the winter of 2005, PiliĂ© sold her house, quit her job, and began her Hike for KaTreeNa, a fundraising trek up the Appalachian Trail. Her plan was to return home and plant a tree for each mile that had passed under her boots: 2,175 of them. All told, PiliĂ© has raised more than $100,000, and since October 2006, when she crossed the AT’s finish line and descended Maine’s Mount Katahdin, she’s been a storm herself, of sweat, dirt, and shovels. Every week, across the Crescent City, she plants 50 to 60 trees live oak, magnolia, and cypress saplings. All you need is a front yard. If her green thumb doesn’t blow out first, PiliĂ© expects to hit her goal this fall, three or so years ahead of schedule. Then, well “I guess I’ll have to go back and walk the trail backwards.”

If people like PiliĂ© keep at it, New Orleans’s new reputation as the nation’s capital of grassroots initiative and vigilante dogooderism may soon eclipse its renown for crime, poverty, and ill-considered toplessness. Nearly three years after the levees broke, it’s not the governments of Louisiana and the United States but the citizens, the volunteers still pouring in by the thousands every season, and a host of pathbreaking nonprofits that are re-creating New Orleans and, in the process, striving to make it a model 21st-century American city.

Crooner Harry Connick Jr. and saxophonist Branford Marsalis, both natives, dreamed up the soon-to-be-completed Musicians’ Village, a 72-home, Habitat for Humanity built community in the famously ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. It promises to bring many displaced jazz and blues artists back to this too-quiet town. “We wanted to do what we could to facilitate the continuation of traditional music in New Orleans,” Connick says. “I’d worked building houses with Habitat before Katrina, and after the storm the Musicians’ Village was a perfect opportunity to help get musicians into their own homes some of them for the first time in their lives and to do something for the city in a way that was close to my heart.”

Before the sandbags were even dry, L.A.-based eco-stewards Global Green moved in and began a number of ambitious projects. In collaboration with actor Brad Pitt (who’s since spun off with his Make It Right Foundation, a volunteer-and-donation-based initiative aimed at building hurricane-proof homes designed by leading architects), GG “adopted” the Holy Cross neighborhood in the Lower Ninth, where it’s undertaken a green housing development that would make Al Gore fall to his knees in ecstasy. Just this March, they completed the first house in the city to attain a LEED Platinum designation, a futuro shotgun with enough eco-gadgetry to render it carbon neutral and use zero net energy. Other projects include community education and grants for the greening of schools.

Speaking of New Orleans’s schools, heretofore among the most neglected in the nation: Uptown on Valence Street, at the Samuel J. Green Charter School a blighted junior high before the storm teacher Donna Cavato has paired with Alice Waters, of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, to build a Louisiana version of the celebrity chef’s Edible Schoolyard program, a student-managed garden workshop. Here, inner-city kids (98 percent of whom live below the poverty line) learn organic agriculture, nutrition, seasonal foodways, and composting. A scant year and a half after breaking ground in the fall of 2006, ESY NOLA transformed a school that “looked like a prison,” as Cavato puts it, into an urban oasis. Five days a week, kindergarteners to eighth-graders gather for lessons under an airy pavilion and then, armed with trowels, mulch, and seeds, roll up their sleeves and go to work tending a cornucopia of native crops tomatoes, okra, satsuma trees, etc. where once lay an expanse of cracked concrete.

Here on Rocheblave Street, PiliĂ© plants the last tree of the day, a leggy crape myrtle with pale green leaves. She heaps the dirt in a wide ring around the trunk to capture and retain moisture.”A levee,” she says.

“The good kind,” says a volunteer, dusting dark earth from her hands.

Then Pilié climbs into her pickup and rolls a few blocks over, to a construction site on South Tonti Street. Under the mild spring sun, with the help of Home & Garden TV and nonprofit carpentry corps Rebuilding Together, a crew of paint-stained volunteers is welcoming a family of nine back into a house they left under seven feet of water.

PiliĂ© chats with Hal Roark, a resident who’s been helping oversee the Broadmoor district’s revival. “They were going to bulldoze this place, all these homes,” says Roark. “We said, Screw you. We’ll bring it back ourselves.’ ” He gazes with pride at the porch roof, where a volunteer, brush in hand, is slathering an optimistic shade of sky blue on a gable. “Almost three years later, we’re not waiting for the government,” Roark says. “When the government fails, this is the kind of thing you have to do. You have to be the cavalry you want to see coming over the hill.”

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Ogden, UT

Mountain West

THE STATS

Pop. 81,000
Median age: 29
Med. household income: $36,500
Med. home value: $114,700
Avg. commute: 22 mins.
Largest employers: IRS, McKay-Dee Hospital, Weber School District, Autoliv, Weber State U.

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THE REVIVAL: A hundred years ago, this Utah outpost 45 minutes north of , in the foothills of the Wasatch was a hopping railroad junction. But after the diesel engine and I-15 came through, in the ’50s and ’60s, Ogden faded into anonymity as a blue-collar manufacturing burg with gobs of overlooked natural assets.

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Soon after 38-year-old mayor Matthew Godfrey took office, in 2000, he hatched a mad plan: Transform Ogden into the adventure-sports capital of America. “Boulder pales in comparison to what we have,” says Godfrey, who took an “If you build it, they will come” approach and green-lighted the construction of two kayak parks (the Class III IV Ogden and Weber rivers flow through town); a paved trail network; and a rec center complete with climbing wall, vertical wind tunnel, and standing surf wave. Soon after, ski-brand giant Amer moved its HQ to town, along with 20 other outdoor-gear makers. Next up: a year-round, holographic ice tower (the brainchild of climbing legend and Ogden native Jeff Lowe), aquatic centers, and a velodrome. For now, Ogden is unpretentious and adrenalinized. And, unlike in Boulder, you can still nab a midcentury brick bungalow right in town for less than 200 grand.

THE LIFE: When more than nine inches of snow hits the mountains, Ogden rings the “powder bell” and locals hightail it to uncrowded , 20 minutes away. Come summer, mountain bikers hammer the Shoreline Trail’s 20 miles of foothill singletrack. The ‘s cafĂ©/bakery, on the Ogden River, is the rendezvous point for a.m. caffeine and weekend rides.

THE WORD ON THE STREET: OGDEN
“Don’t tell too many people about it.”

JERYL DETMER, SUBSCRIBER

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Portsmouth, NH

Northeast

THE STATS

Pop. 20,600
Median age: 38.5
Med. household income: $45,200
Med. home value: $318,000
Avg. commute: 22 mins.
Largest employers: Liberty Mutual, Portsmouth Regional Hospital, City of Portsmouth, Lonza Biologics, Demoulas Market Basket

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THE REVIVAL: A shipbuilding center in the 18th century, this Piscataqua River town, just up­­stream from the coast, lost its best customer (the British) after the War of 1812, and its historic waterfront quickly turned Skid Row. In the ’70s, urban planners threatened to raze the place, but preservationists blocked the wrecking ball.

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Are cobblestone streets and tchotchkes still de rigueur? Sure, but Portsmouth is now an unexpectedly hip town with a decidedly DIY vibe. “Some things have stayed the same, but plenty has changed,” says historian J. Dennis Robinson of the city’s old-and-new vibe. These days, this compact, walkable city an hour from both Boston and Portland has become a magnet for emerging musicians and artists with eight indie theaters, including the renovated (circa 1878), half a dozen galleries, a film fest, a slow-food movement, and live music seven nights a week at the and other hole-in-the-wall clubs. (When the alternative newsweekly invited local bands to record albums, it got 165 submissions.) Homegrown creative startups like Hatchling, a boutique animation firm, and the , a warren of artists’ studios, have taken over downtown’s brick warehouses. And, thanks to the and microbreweries, even the beer is locally crafted.

THE LIFE: In June, New Hampshire became the first state to mark its (admittedly small) portion of the , a 3,000-mile multi-use trail that runs parallel to the coast from Maine to Florida. For pretty reliable waves, try the sandy beach breaks at Jenness Beach or the Wall, about five miles south of town on Route 1A. For the best fresh seafood, head to .

THE WORD ON THE STREET: PORTSMOUTH
“We have the best of both worlds, no matter the season. Enjoy the water, or drive an hour to the White Mountains or Boston.”

Rhonda Stacy-Coyle, subscriber

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Tacoma, WA

West

THE STATS

Pop. 199,700
Median age: 36
Med. household income: $44,300
Med. home value: $228,300
Avg. commute: 24 mins.
Largest employers (county): Fort Lewis, Tacoma Public Schools, McChord Air Force Base, State of Washington, MultiCare Health

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THE REVIVAL: Except for a brief heyday in the 1880s, when the Northern Pacific Railroad was completed and “the City of Destiny” became its western terminus, this port has been overshadowed by Seattle, 30 miles north. In the 1980s, trains stopped running to Union Station, and Tacoma’s business district became a dead zone

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But nothing breathes new life into an inner-city ghost town like a couple thousand college kids. In 1990, the University of Washington opened its Tacoma campus, on Pacific Avenue, and Union Station was resurrected as a federal courthouse. Plus, with the renovation of a number of 1920s-era vaudeville theaters and the construction of several new museums, Tacoma’s now known as a vibrant arts center. The city’s 2006 cleanup of the , once a toxic Superfund site, prompted a major rethink of the languishing Commencement Bay waterfront. “Our vision is to increase urban density while respecting the natural space,” says the city council’s Marilyn Strickland. “We’ve tapped only about one-tenth of its potential.” An $84 million initiative will expand an already extensive parks system, which includes 702-acre Point Defiance. With 15 miles of trails, a kayak launch, and squid jigging off Tacoma Narrows, it’s one of the largest city parks in the country.

THE LIFE: On a clear day, ‘s snow cone looms, just 40 miles away, and it’s just 60 to the slopes of Crystal Mountain. Divers take the South Sound plunge at Titlow Beach, but kayaking Commencement Bay is the after-work adventure du jour. On Sixth Avenue, locals enjoy fresh oysters at and live music at .

THE WORD ON THE STREET: TACOMA
“Mount Rainier, a mild climate, Point Defiance Park, scuba diving, clean air, Commencement Bay, no state income tax “

LUCINDA WEDDLE, SUBSCRIBER

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Ithaca, NY

Northeast

THE STATS

Pop. 30,000
Median age: 22
Med. household income: $21,400
Med. home value: $183,500
Avg. commute: 14 mins.
Largest employers: Cornell U., Ithaca College, BorgWarner, Ithaca City School District, Cayuga Medical

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THE REVIVAL: It’s not too hard to shine when you boast more than a little Ivy League intellect, but even this progressive, two-college town at the foot of upstate New York’s has had a run of bad luck. In the ’60s, the loss of small-scale manufacturing along the city’s Cayuga Lake waterfront sent Ithaca into prolonged stagnation.

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Thankfully, with Cornell University and Ithaca College facing off above town, locals didn’t have to look far for creative solutions. Phase one: transforming two and a half blocks of down­town into the Commons, a mid-’70s version of Burlington’s and Boulder’s trendy walking malls. Things got crunchier in 1996, when the country’s largest , a 60-home sustainable community with two organic farms, opened outside of town. The pace of change has only escalated in the past ten years, with a much-needed spiffing up along Cayuga’s shores. Two miles of paved waterfront trail have already been finished, with four more to go, and local visionary Mack Travis and his son, Frost, are cleaning up and transforming the Ithaca Gun factory (a crumbling brick structure with a lead-contaminated field next to 150-foot Ithaca Falls) into condos. Downtown, the old Woolworth building is now the library, an abandoned printing plant is now live/work, and the EcoVillage is adding another 30 homes.

THE LIFE: Locals cycle centuries around Cayuga, trail-run portions of the 562-mile Finger Lakes Trail, and hike to Lucifer Falls, in nearby . The legendarily veggie has been a Seneca Street landmark since 1973.

THE WORD ON THE STREET: ITHACA
“Where else in the U.S. does the Dalai Lama have a residence?”

JENESS RUHANEN, SUBSCRIBER

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Louisville, KY

Southeast

THE STATS

Pop. 701,500
Median age: 39
Med. household income: $43,400
Med. home value: $141,600
Avg. commute: 21 mins.
Largest employers: UPS, Ford, Norton Healthcare, Humana, Jewish Hospital & St. Mary’s Healthcare, GE

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THE REVIVAL: Louisville, a hub for higher education, horse culture, and bourbon distillation since the 19th century, never quite hit bottom. But this independent-minded, even-keeled city on the Ohio River it’s not quite the South, not quite the North, and not quite the Midwest took a turn for the worse in the ’70s and ’80s, when locals fled town for the ‘burbs and urban rot set in.

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As luck would have it, though, back in the 1890s prescient city fathers hired landscape guru Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm to design more than 1,500 acres’ worth of urban parks. In 2005, longtime mayor Jerry Abramson announced ambitious plans to create 4,000 acres of new greenspace and link all city parks with a 100-mile walk-and-bike trail. To date, 23 miles of the Louisville Loop have been completed, winding through woodsy, historic neighborhoods dating back 150 years. The cyclist mayor has also added 40 miles of bike lanes to city streets and required that all new roads be built with designated lanes. Downtown is rebounding with a vengeance, fueled by a surge in the local logistics business UPS moved some of its operations here in the early ’80s, and in the past decade more than 100 other companies have followed and over $2.5 billion in new construction.

THE LIFE: , in the new , is the city’s hippest address, with contemporary art on the walls and 50 Kentucky-made bourbons on the menu. Located almostentirely within city limits who knew? 6,200-acre Jefferson Memorial Forest offers easy-access hiking, fishing, camping, and horseback trails.

THE WORD ON THE STREET: LOUISVILLE
“Big-city action, small-city price, hometown feel.”

ANDREA HIGGINS, SUBSCRIBER

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Eureka, CA

West

THE STATS

Pop. 27,000
Median age: 37
Med. household income: $29,600
Med. home value: $262,250
Avg. commute: 15 mins.
Largest employers: City of Eureka, Schmidbauer BuildingSupply, SN Servicing, Costco, the Times-Standard

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THE REVIVAL: Four hours north of , Humboldt County is home to half the world’s old-growth redwoods, so for much of its 155-year history, timber was king. With the remaining trees mostly off-limits, Eureka’s economy has been in dire need of diversification these past few decades.

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Counterculture roots (wayward San Fran hippies have long found refuge here) and prime real estate on Humboldt Bay, however, have helped make Eureka an emerging NoCal arts capital. Last year saw the reopening of the 1920 Sweasey Theatre, in Old Town, a historic district dotted with hundred-year-old Victorians. Small independent businesses and boutiques that had fled for the malls in the seventies, depressing downtown in the process, are moving back. Long a haven for more traditional painters, Eureka’s gone mod in the past few years, with the opening of contemporary-art spaces like Accident Gallery, in an old warehouse/roller rink. A five-block boardwalk has breathed new life into the waterfront along Humboldt Bay, which still generates about two-thirds of the state’s oyster harvest and is kept clean by Humboldt Baykeeper.

THE LIFE: A bridge connects Old Town Eureka to Woodley Island, which shelters an egret rookery and has a marina that rents sea kayaks. When the harvests are bountiful, crabbers sell their catch right off the boat for $4 a pound. Head south 30 minutes to to mountain-bike or 20 minutes north to Trinidad to surf.

THE WORD ON THE STREET: EUREKA
“Great atmosphere, and you can travel from five to 30 minutes and be completely surrounded by wilderness.”

CINDY SHERER-HORN, SUBSCRIBER

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Crested Butte, CO

Mountain West

THE STATS

Pop. 1,600
Median age: 31
Med. household income: $41,250
Med. home value: $301,100
Avg. commute: 10 mins.
Largest employer: Crested Butte Mountain Resort

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THE REVIVAL: Crested Butte made its name as a coal town in the 1880s, then relaunched 80 years later as a ski bum’s nirvana. But thanks to inconsistent snowfall and a remote, road’s-endlocation at the foot of the West Elk Mountains, hard times came calling in the late ’80s.

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The energy returned when the town’s eponymous ski resort changed hands in 2004. News of its imminent modernization triggered a real estate feeding frenzy, with dilapidated Victorians and miners’ shacks alike starting bidding wars. Now, with long-awaited upgrades under way at the ski area including a totally revamped base area, swank lodges, and the possible, controversial expansion to adjacent Snodgrass Mountain “Colorado’s last great ski town” is all abuzz. Once the holdout of elite athletes, former hippies, and powder dropouts, down-to-earth CB is attracting a new crop of young families and telecommuters looking for a laid-back and affordable alternative to glitzier counterparts like Telluride and Aspen. There’s a boutique bookbinderon Second Street, a new farmers’ market every Sunday in summer and fall, and a steady stream of locals on cruiser bikes.

THE LIFE: The ’80s saw a slow and steady proliferation of singletrack outside town, making the Butte a true trail-riding mecca. Even on a sleety night, you’ll see locals taking to the Lower Loop with snowsuited toddlers strapped in back, and half the town volunteers to maintain their beloved trails, like the legendary 401. Fly-fishing, hiking, and skiing are literally just out the back door.

THE WORD ON THE STREET: CRESTED BUTTE
“It’s a beautiful place, the skiing is sick, and the bike trails are sublime. A quirky community of wonderful people.”

J.C. LEACOCK, SUBSCRIBER

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Columbia, MO

Midwest

THE STATS

Pop. 92,900
Median age: 28
Med. household income: $38,300
Med. home value: $164,700
Avg. commute: 15 mins.
Largest employers: U. of Missouri, Columbia Public Schools, Boone Hospital, City of Columbia, MBS Textbook Exchange

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THE REVIVAL: Before the University of Missouri was established, in 1839, Columbia in the rolling foothills of the was just a stagecoach stop en route to California. As it grew, it became a hub for higher education (downtown boasts three colleges) and insurance firms but gained a rep as a staid, boring, and straitlaced community in need of a makeover.

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Done. CoMo is swinging these days. In 2000, local filmmaker David Wilson, 33, helped open the , a small indie-film house downtown. Four years later, he co-founded , an annual documentary-film festival that draws international raves and is at the forefront of Columbia’s creative revival. Developers have retrofitted old meatpacking warehouses into SoHo-style lofts and art spaces. Nearby, you’ll find “the Diaper Factory,” which houses a dance troupe, artists’ studios, and a cafĂ©. This summer, the 1928 Tiger Hotel will get a boutique facelift, complete with requisite mod eatery. Columbia recently scored a $22.5 million federal grant to develop a citywide trail system to add to its 65 urban parks, including 32-acre Capen Park, with its limestone top-rope routes.

THE LIFE: The nine-mile, run-or-ride MKT spur links downtown Columbia with the Katy Trail, a 225-mile rails-to-trails traverse that follows Lewis and Clark’s route along the Missouri River. Nearby Easley Hill is central Missouri’s toughest bike climb, and boaters float the mighty Missouri from Catfish Katy’s to Cooper’s Landing, 90 minutes downstream. Back in town, fresh-obsessed sources its ingredients from local farms and growers, and is the locals’ pick for pizza.

THE WORD ON THE STREET: COLUMBIA
“My stress level is half what it was on the East Coast, and so is my rent. Heaven for cyclists.”

EMMA MARRIS, SUBSCRIBER

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The Rest of the Best

Here’s the scoop on the nine other towns that made our list this year

OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI (POP. 14,100)
In Oxford, bookish is beautiful. Despite Mississippi’s ranking last in high school graduation and among the highest in poverty, the town has developed into a cultural hub for the Deep South by taking full advantage of its local institution of higher education, Ole Miss, and by celebrating its unique literary history both William Faulkner and John Grisham have called Oxford home. The town taps into that history as much as possible, whether through the museum at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, or with its famous , held each spring. Even the town’s mayor is in on the game he’s the owner of the independent bookstore anchoring the town square. And this fall, the Mississippi hamlet will take a national spotlight as it hosts the first general-election presidential debate expect an unfettered flow of ideas on the nation’s future. Just don’t be surprised if the best ones come from the Oxonians themselves.

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA (POP. 397,000)
Want to curb urban sprawl, boost the economy, and reduce inner-city crime? Get people to move downtown. It worked for Jerry Brown. In 1999, Oakland’s then-mayor decided to direct more of the city’s focus on downtown Oakland through his 10K Housing Initiative, a plan to attract 10,000 new residents to the city center by streamlining the permit process and creating economic incentives for developers. The result? More than 10,000 housing units are in various stages of planning or completion far surpassing the original goal and the area is home to some 40 new restaurants, 15 new art galleries, and 18 new nightclubs. Even the skyline is different, thanks to a 20-story condo complex on Lake Merritt and a nearly completed 22-story high-rise on Grand Avenue. All this in a town that, according to Rand McNally, has the best weather in the country.

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA (POP. 453,800)
Why transform only a section of the city when you can transform the entire region? That’s what Sacramento is hoping to do with its Railyards project, one of the largest urban-restoration initiatives in U.S. history. Once the terminus of the 1869 Transcontinental Railroad, downtown Sacramento has more recently been known as a terminal wasteland. Now the Railyards is offering the city a 240-acre blank slate of real estate to reenvision its future on. The plan calls for some 12,000 housing units, more than half a million square feet of retail space, a museum, plazas, a marketplace, and even a new rail center. It will take 20 years to complete, but when it’s finished it will nearly double the size of the downtown business district, bringing in an estimated $2.7 billion of business per year. Some of which has already arrived: Since 2007, 23 restaurants have opened downtown, along with 37 retail stores and a number of new hotels, including the Citizen, a 197-room boutique hotel, opening this fall, whose name was chosen by the citizens.

LEVITTOWN, NEW YORK (POP. 44,000)
American suburbs have always lacked originality, but the country’s first suburb, Levittown, 20 miles east of , is breaking the mold. , a unique partnership that exemplifies the best kind of civic harmony, has brought together the city government, a regional nonprofit, and local businesses to send canvassers door to door, explaining the benefits of going green (e.g., saving money) and then helping them do it. The changes range from simple like converting to compact fluorescent lightbulbs, 12,000 of which were given away to more ambitious, like replacing inefficient heating boilers. Homeowners are offered special low-interest loans to help pay for the upgrades, and businesses from a solar-panel manufacturer to a local appliance store offer their services at reduced rates. So far, more than 1,800 homeowners have signed on, and the goal is to reduce the city’s carbon emissions by 10 percent this year alone. It’s heartening proof that residents, businesses, and the environment can all win.

CORVALLIS, OREGON (POP. 49,800)
Corvallis is far from the undiscovered jewel it once was it’s within 90 minutes of world-class skiing, the Oregon coast, and blue-ribbon salmon fishing but in recent years the city has picked up verve from a new promenade on the Willamette River and a steady transition to renewable energy. In 2006, Corvallis became the second U.S. city (after Moab) to be named an EPA Green Power Community. Thanks in part to Pacific Power’s Blue Sky Program, 15 percent of power users from the city government to businesses to residences are participating in the purchase of renewables like wind and geothermal power. The green push began in 1997 as part of the town’s 20/20 Vision Statement, a blueprint guiding all aspects of the town’s growth until 2020. The new riverfront park, completed in 2002 as part of the vision statement, has helped attract more than a dozen new cafĂ©s, restaurants, and spas, proving that being farsighted isn’t so bad after all.

WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA (POP. 95,900)
A famed railroad town and shipbuilding port during WWII, Wil-mington suffered mightily after the war effort ended. But Port City recaptured its past glory by turning to its port. The state’s ports authority purchased skyscraper-size cranes to handle cargo containers, and the cityinvested millions to preserve historic buildings along the waterfront. The efforts helped attract new businesses, diversify the economy, and make Wilmington one of America’s fastest-growing cities in the nineties. With nearby beaches along the Cape Fear coast, an ever-expanding Riverwalk, a National Register historic district comprising more than 230 blocks, and a renewed economy that has been fueled partly by an active filmmaking sector, “Wilmywood” has become much more than a shadow of its former self.

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON (POP. 582,500)
Want a green city? Elect a green mayor. Want a green planet? Elect Seattle’s mayor, Greg Nickels. Since taking office in 2001, Nickels has been at the forefront of fighting global warming, convincing more than 850 U.S. cities to sign on to his U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which aims to meet or beat Kyoto Protocol target=s. Not surprisingly, Nickels is just as devoted to his own constituents, doing everything from installing hundreds of bike racks around the city to backing a $75 million renovation of iconic . As with his national agenda, it’s his green initiatives here that get the most attention, like bringing the city’s fleet of hybrid vehicles to 330 (plus the one Nickels traded his Town Car for), and his newest planet-saving brainstorm: placing a 20-cent “green fee” on all paper and plastic shopping bags, with the city providing free reusable bags for residents. For Seattleites, grassroots are great, but it also helps to have a good head on your shoulders.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA (POP. 40,300)
Back in the ’70s, when Charlottesville’s now iconic downtown pedestrian mall was being constructed, three dozen willow oak and ash trees were planted along the central walkway. By the ’90s, the mature trees were paying off, drawing people downtown to the shady sidewalks. C-ville took notice and kicked off a management plan for its urban forests. This year the city is using GPS and satellite imagery to inventory the trees on all its public land and analyze the city’s tree canopy. The information will be used to balance out the natural environment within the urban surroundings, both for environmental benefits, like air quality and carbon sequestration, and for aesthetic appeal. To offset the urban-heat-island effect, the city has installed green roofs on city hall and the police station, with a goal of covering 40 percent of the city in green. Charlottesville is finally reaping the rewards of having planted a few key seeds.

BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT (POP. 11,700)
Even for dedicated locavores, the 100-mile diet is mostly an idealistic notion. But for the residents of Brattleboro, buying local is a way of life. The small town hosts one of the largest farmers’ markets in New England, with 50-odd regional vendors; is home to more than half a dozen Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, farms, selling shares of everything from apples to pork; and has a local-food co-op that boasts more than 4,500 members, almost half the population. Nearly every store on Main Street is locally owned, stocks local products, or markets itself as fair trade. Brattleboro nonprofit Post Oil Solutions promotes community gardens for residents and organizes weeklong locavore challenges in which participants source all of their food from within the state. Farms sell starter kits for the event, restaurants serve special entrĂ©es, and residents even hold nightly potluck dinners. In Brattleboro, the best stuff is always just around the corner.

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