William T. Vollmann Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online

The California Lake Killing Everything Around It

sperkins-pom — Wed, 02 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000

The water's edge at the south end of North Shore—a shuttered, graffiti'd, ruined resort town which, as you might have guessed, lies near the north shore of California's Salton Sea—was no different than usual, the beach comprising not sand but barnacle shells, fish bones, fish scales, fish corpses, and bird corpses, its accompaniment an almost unbearable ammoniac stench like rancid urine magnified. Fish carcasses in rows and rows, more sickening stenches, the underfoot crunch of white cheek-plates like seashells—oh, rows and banks of whiteness, banks of vertebrae; feathers and vertebrae twitching in the water almost within reach of the occasional half-mummified bird. Meanwhile, the dock was crowded with live birds—long-necked white pelicans. Their coexistence with the dead birds was jarring, but then so was the broken concrete, the private property sign, the half-sunk playground slide.

It had been worse in other years—seven and a half million tilapia (African perch) died on a single August day in 1998—but this evening it happened to be better. Oh, death was there, but matter had been ground down to submatter, just as on other beaches coarse sand is gradually ground fine. The same dead scales, the barnacles licked at by waves of a raw sienna color richly evil in its algal depths, set the tone, let's say: crunch, crunch. Without great difficulty I spied the black mouth of a dead fish, another black mouth, barnacles, a dead bird, and then, of all things, another black mouth.

The far shore remained as beautiful as ever. When each shore is a far shore, then the pseudo-Mediterranean look of the west side as seen from the east side (rugged blue mountains, birds in flight, a few boats) shimmers into full believability. Come closer, and a metallic taste alights upon your stinging lips. Stay awhile, and you might win a sore throat, an aching compression of the chest as if from smog, or honest nausea. I was feeling queasy, but over the charnel a cool breeze played, and a family approached the water's edge, the children running happily, sinking ankle-deep in scales and barnacles, nobody expressing any botheration about the stench or the relics underfoot. Could it be that everything in this world remains so fundamentally pure that nothing can ever be more than half-ruined? Expressed in the shimmer on the Salton Sea—sometimes dark blue, sometimes infinitely white, and always pitted with desert light—this purity is particularly undeniable.

Honeymoon paradise and toxic sump. Teeming fishery stinking of dead fish, bird sanctuary where birds die by the thousands. (What choice do the birds have? are gone!) Lovely ugliness—this is the Salton Sea.

Skulls and feathers form the beach at North Shore. (William T. Vollmann)

If you are confused, so is everybody else. in 1905–1907, when an attempt to divert the Colorado River (and, incidentally, to steal a lot more of Mexico's water) sent a series of floods into the salt-caked basin of California's Imperial Valley, the new sea kept rising, for like all seas it has no outlet. Farms, saltworks, and pieces of towns went under, and by the time the leak was plugged in 1907, the sea covered 500 square miles. Experts predicted evaporation within 20 years. And the water level did go down, at first. But a century later, it still takes up 380 square miles.

In the beginning it was a freshwater realm; trout survived here as late as 1929; a National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1930. Tourists came right away, but the golden age of fishing and waterfowl hunting that old-timers remember started to fade in the 1960s, when the sea began to stink a trifle and the resorts began to board up their windows. Ecologists were already warning that if the salinity—fed by irrigation runoff from the Colorado Desert's salt-rich soils, souvenir of a prehistoric ocean—continued to increase, the sea would become a wasteland. It did rise, of course, and the sea itself crept higher, too; Salton City and Bombay Beach lost houses beneath these strange reddish-brown waters.

Where were those waters coming from? From the Alamo River, 52 miles of irrigation runoff in whose bamboo rushes Border Patrol agents now play out their pretend-Vietnam cat-and-mouse exercises; from the rather irrelevant Whitewater River, trickling in from the northwest; and from the New River, with its reputation for filth, gathering sewage, landfill leachate, and industrial waste in the Mexican boomtown of Mexicali before turning north to receive fertilizers and pesticides from Imperial Valley fields, meanwhile picking up a little more salt and a little more salt.

The great die-offs began in the 1990s—150,000 eared grebes in 1992, 15,000 pelicans in 1996, fish by the millions, tilapia and croaker and corvina that had been stocked back in the fifties. Environmentalists raised alarms about the dead birds, the algal blooms, the hypersalinity, and the selenium, a naturally occurring trace element that in high concentrations can be deadly to plants and animals. They studied the sea, but none came to the same conclusions, or they came to no conclusions at all. The only thing everyone agreed on was that the sea was now 25 percent saltier than the ocean itself, and that it would only get saltier until the birds and fishes still surviving there were gone.

They say that as California goes, so goes the nation. And to me the Salton Sea emblematizes California. What can we do about it? What should we do? What does it “mean”? I decided to undertake a course of aquatic exploration. I would ride the New River from its source in Mexico to the Salton Sea, which I'd never heard of anybody doing. How navigable the river was, how dangerous or disgusting, not a soul could tell. My acquaintances in Imperial County said that yes, it did sound like a stupid thing to do, but probably not that unsafe; the worst that would likely happen to me was sickness. The U.S. Border Patrol advised against it, incidentally promising me that should I cross into the United States by means of the New River, I'd infallibly get arrested.

North of the border, the New River curves and jitters for 60 miles in a backward S to a sort of estuary on the southern shore of the Salton Sea, equidistant from the towns of Calipatria and Westmorland. On a map of Imperial County, the towns and road-crossings of its progress are traced in blue, right down to the last demisemiquaver. But immediately south of Calexico's stubby fan palms and pawn shops, there runs a heavy line demarcating the end of California and the beginning of Mexico, and of the state of Baja California. Here the New River becomes the Río Nuevo, and vanishes upstream from all but one of the maps I've ever seen, each time in a different way.

My plan was to cross from Calexico into Mexicali, hire a taxi, and get the driver to take me to the source of the Río Nuevo—wherever that was, but according to most accounts, just a few miles outside of town. Then I would rent a boat and ride downstream. But once I arrived in Mexicali and sought to zero in on the mysterious spot (excuse me, señor, but where exactly does it start?), people began to tell me that the river commenced right here, in Mexicali itself, in one of the city's industrial parks, where a certain Xochimilco Lagoon was fed by a secret spring. Moreover, the municipal authorities of Mexicali were even now pressing on into the fifth year of a very fine project to entomb and forget the Río Nuevo, sealing it off underground along a concrete channel below the median strip of a new highway, whose name happened to be Boulevard Río Nuevo—a hot white double ribbon of street adorned with dirt and tires, an upended car, broken things. Along its median they'd sunk segments of a long, long concrete tube that lay inconspicuous in a dirt trench; and between some of these segments, where the tube had been buried, were grates. Lifting the grates revealed square pits, with jet-black water flowing below, exuding a fierce sewer stench that could almost be some kind of cheese.

Not far from the border, a yellow pump truck sat roaring as its hose, dangling down into the Río Nuevo, sucked up a measure of the effluvium of Mexicali's 750,000 people. This liquid, called by the locals aguas negras, would be used in concrete mixing. What treasures might the river gather here on its way to the United States? Bacteria that could lead to typhoid, hepatitis, amoebic dysentery, perhaps a few other things, says the Environmental Protection Agency. (Well, the kids have respiratory problems just from living here, said one señora who lived a few steps away. They have coughs, she said, and on the skin some pimples and rashes.) Beside the truck were two wise shade-loungers—the temperature was 114 degrees—in white-dusted boots, baseball caps, and sunglasses. I asked what was the most interesting thing they could tell me about the Río Nuevo. They conferred for a while, and finally one of them said that they'd seen a dead body in it last Saturday.

One of the men, José Rigoberto Cruz Córdoba, was a supervisor. He explained that the purpose of this concrete shield was to end the old practice of spewing untreated factory and municipal sewage into the river, and maybe he even believed this; maybe it was even true. My translator, a man who, like most Mexicans, does not pulse with idealism about civic life, interpreted the policy thus: They'll just go to the big polluters—American companies or else Mexican millionaires—and say, “We've closed off your pipe. You can either pay us and we'll make you another opening right now, or else you're going to have to do it yourself with jackhammers and risk a much higher fine.” No doubt he was right, and the clandestine pipes would soon be better hidden than ever.

The generator ran and the Río Nuevo stank. The yellow truck was now almost full. Smiling pleasantly, Señor Cruz Córdoba remarked, “I heard that people used to fish and swim and bathe here 30 years ago.”

(Rebecca Bradley)

That night, at a taxi stand in sight of the river, the cab drivers sat at picnic tables, and the old-timers told me how it had been 25 years ago. They'd always called it the Río Conca, which was short for the Río con Cagada, the River with Shit. The river was lower then, and they used to play soccer here; when they saw turds floating by, they just laughed and jumped over them. The turds had floated like tortugas, they said, like turtles; and indeed they used to see real turtles here. Now they saw no animals at all.

For three or four languid days, I sat in the offices of Mexican civil engineers, telephone-queried American irrigation-district officials, and then, in the company of various guides and taxi drivers, went searching for the source of the Río Nuevo. Sometimes the street was fenced off for construction, and sometimes the river ran mysteriously underground—disappearing, say, beneath a wilderness of pemex gas stations—but we always found it again, smelling it before we could see it. At Xochimilco Lagoon, liquid was flowing out of pipes and foaming into the lagoon's sickly stinking greenness between tamarisk trees.

But the lagoon was not the source, because there was no single source; the Río Nuevo drew its life from a spiderweb of irrigation drains and sewers and springs and lagoons, most of which ultimately derived from the Colorado River. Easing my way past the sentry at a geothermal works, I discovered waters of a lurid neon blue; what had stained them? That water entered the Río Nuevo, and so did this channel and that channel and that channel drawn on the blueprints of the engineers. From a practical point of view, the end came when I peered into the stinking greenness of Xochimilco Lagoon and the taxi driver appropriately said, “The end.”

I'd already realized that my plan to raft the Río Nuevo was shot. Early one evening, the heat stinging my nose and forehead deliciously, I had gone to the river, peered down one of the square pits, and wondered whether I would stand a chance if I lowered myself and a raft into it. The current appeared to be extremely strong; there was no predicting where I'd end up. At best I'd drift as far as the border, five miles away, and be arrested. Should there be any underground barrier along the way, my raft would smash into it, and I'd probably capsize and eventually starve, choke, or drown.

While I considered the matter, my latest taxi driver stood on a mound of dirt and recited “El Ruego,” by the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Thus Mexico, where the most obscene feculence cannot prevail over art. It was settled. Since I couldn't spend my own death benefits, I decided to begin my little cruise in the USA.

How many Río Nuevos, how many Salton Seas on this planet already lay poisoned—if they were poisoned—for the long term? The Aral Sea? Love Canal? Lake Baikal? Would their new normality become normative for the rest of us? How bad off is the Salton Sea, really?

“Stories of a polluted Salton Sea are greatly exaggerated,” a recent brochure from the Coachella Valley Historical Society informed me. In 1994 the author of the pamphlet, “Salton Sea: California's Overlooked Treasure,” had taken a drive around the sea with her husband and experienced “a wonderful sense of what is right with the world.” Five years later, the authors of an alarming and beautifully photographed volume titled described that same idyllic sea as “a stinking, reddish-brown sump rapidly growing too rancid for even the hardiest ocean fish” and “a death trap for birds.” The New River, in particular, “claims the distinction of being the filthiest stream in the nation,” the authors wrote. And as Fred Cagle, head of the California Audubon Society's Salton Sea Task Force, told me: “Nine million pounds of pesticides a year on Imperial Valley fields have got to go somewhere!”

I decided to ride the New River from its source in Mexico to the Salton Sea. The Border Patrol advised that if I tried crossing into the U.S. that way, I'd infallibly get arrested.

There you have it, but according to that confederation of counties and water districts called the what you have is no more than “Myth #5: The Sea is a Toxic Dump Created by Agriculture.” According to the SSA leaflet “Myths and Realities,” “Pesticides are not found at any significant level in the Sea.” Moreover, selenium levels are only one-fifth of the federal standard, and (if I may quote from the rebuttal to Myth #4), “Water carried by the New River from Mexico is not a major contributor to the Sea's problems.” Still, the leaflet freely if euphemistically confesses the “bird disease outbreaks,” “fluctuating surface levels” (which I take to be a tacit reference to the half-buried houses, or to the mostly submerged Torres-Martinez Indian Reservation on the northwest shore), and “nutrient-rich water, algal blooms, and fish kills” (symptoms of what ecologists call eutrophication, which occurs when too much sewage or detergent or fertilizer enters a body of warm water and algae rushes in to exploit, growing like crazy, sucking up all the oxygen, and suffocating the fish). The leaflet acknowledges only one cause for these problems, the one everybody agrees on: salinity. Needless to say, salinity cannot explain algal blooms. As the leaflet reminds us, “We do not know all there is to know about the Sea.” There again you have it.

Not that we haven't tried: Is there an agency in the area—international, federal, state, tribal, or local—that has not dipped its sample vials in the waters of the Salton Sea and the New River, looking to discover its secrets? U.S. Fish & Wildlife, the Imperial Irrigation District, the Twentynine Palms Band of Luiseno Mission Indians, the Regional Water Quality Board, the University of California-Davis—all of them and more have monitored selenium levels and nutrient levels and oxygen levels, testing for this and for that. Did their data overlap? No one knows, there was no clearinghouse, they didn't have the funding, that person no longer works here. But in 1998, Congress passed the Salton Sea Reclamation Act, which provided for the Salton Sea Restoration Project, which will conduct more studies. That same year the University of Redlands created the Salton Sea Database Program, whose aim is to collate that lost information and map the environment of the sea. Then will we know?

As for the pelicans, the grebes, and the other birds, they continue their tragic dramas. Whether they get sick from eating the dead fish or from something else entirely nobody knows, but they keep dying—from avian cholera, botulism, and Newcastle's disease. No matter that scientists haven't pinpointed the cause: If you walk the crunching beaches of North Shore, you cannot help but have a feeling that something about the Salton Sea is causing these die-offs, with their increasing if unpredictable frequency.

“We seem to have far too many of these,” admits Tom Kirk, the executive director of the Salton Sea Authority. “But keep this in mind, Bill. Twenty thousand birds died at the Salton Sea last year. That's less than 1 percent of the bird population.”

José��Lopez, and ex-marine with a cheerful, steady, slightly impersonal can-do attitude, clerked at the motel where I was staying in Calexico. When I told him that nobody seemed willing to take me on the New River or even to rent me a rowboat, he proposed that I go to one of those warehouse-style chain stores which now infested the United States and buy myself an inflatable dinghy. I asked if he would keep me company, and he scarcely hesitated. “Anyway,” he said, “it will be something to tell our grandchildren.”

The store sold two-person, three-person, and four-person rafts. I got the four-person variety for maximum buoyancy, selected two medium-priced wooden oars, paid $70, and felt good about the bargain. I'd prevailed upon José to bring his father over the border from Mexicali; the old man would drive José's pickup truck and wait for us at each crossing of the road, always going ahead rather than behind, so that if we had to walk in the heat we'd be sure of which direction to go. If we waved one arm at him, he'd know to drive to the next bridge. Two arms would mean we were in trouble.

I worried about two possibilities. The first and most likely but least immediately serious was that we might get poisoned by the New River. The second peril, which seriously concerned me, was dehydration. Should we be forced to abandon the boat in some unlucky spot between widely spaced bridges, it wouldn't take long for the heat to wear us down. It was supposed to be not much over 110 degrees, so it could have been worse.

José was behind his desk at the motel on the eve of our departure, laboriously inflating the dinghy breath by breath whenever the customers gave him a chance. This was the kind of fellow he was: determined, optimistic, ready to do his best with almost nothing.

At seven the next morning, with Imperial County already laying its hot hands on my thighs, the three of us—José, his father, and I—huddled in the parking lot of a supermarket, squinting beneath our caps while José's father stick-sketched in the dirt, making a map of the New River with the various road-crossings that he knew of. We were just north of the spot where the river comes through a gap in a wall that marks the border; across the highway, a white Border Patrol vehicle hunched in the white sand, watching us.

The first place that the old man would be able to wait for us was the bridge at Highway 98, about a mile due north but four miles'��worth of river, thanks to a bend to the west-northwest. The next spot he could guarantee was Interstate 8, which looked to be a good ten miles from Highway 98, if one factored in river bends and wriggles.

Sheep-shaped clots of foam, white and wooly, floated down the river. Still, all in all the water didn't smell nearly as foul as in Mexicali. We dragged the dinghy out of the back of the truck, and José, who from somewhere had been able to borrow a tiny battery-powered pump, tautened his previous night's breath work until every last wrinkle disappeared. From the weeds came another old man, evidently a pollero—a coyote, or smuggler of illegal immigrants—who laughed at the notion that José and I were going to be literally up Shit Creek.

We dragged our yellow craft down a steep path between briars, and then the stench of the foaming green water was in our nostrils as we stood for one last glum instant on the mucky bank. I slid the dinghy into the river. A fierce current snapped the bow downriver, and I held the boat parallel to the bank as José clambered in. Then, while José's father gripped it by the side rope, I slid myself over the stern and felt José's trapped breath jelly-quivering flaccidly beneath me. I had a bad feeling. The old man pushed us off, and we instantly rushed away, fending off snags as best we could. There was no time to glance back.

Shaded on either side by mesquite trees, paloverdes, tamarisks, bamboo, and grass, the deep-green river sped us down its canyon, whose banks were stratified with what appeared to be crusted salt. An occasional tire or scrap of clothing, a tin can or plastic cup wedged between branches, and once what I took to be the corpse of some small animal, then became a fetus, and finally resolved into a lost doll floating face down between black-smeared roots—these objects were our companions and guideposts as we whirled toward the Salton Sea, spinning in circles because José had never paddled before in his life.

Every now and then I'd see us veering into the clutches of a bamboo thicket or some slimy slobbery tree branches, and I'd drop my notebook or camera and snatch up my oar, which was now caked with black matter (shall we be upbeat and call it mud?). Then woody fingers would seize us, raking muck and water across our shoulders as we poled ourselves away. The first drops on my skin seemed to burn a little bit, but no doubt I was imagining things.

José kept spraying me by accident. There was not much to do about that; certainly I couldn't imagine a gamer or more resolute companion. He was definitely getting tired now, so I laid down my notebook between my sodden ankles and began to paddle in earnest. We were passing a secluded lagoon into which a fat pipe drained what appeared to be clear water. We sped around a bend, and for no reason I could fathom the stench got much worse—whiffs of sewage and carrion, as in Mexicali. I vaguely considered vomiting, but by then we were riding a deeper stretch that merely smelled like marsh again. The water's green hue gradually became brown, and the white foam, which occasionally imitated the faux-marble plastic tabletops in some Mexicali Chinese restaurant, diluted itself into bubbles. Everything became very pretty again with the high bamboos around us, their reflections blocky and murky on the poisoned water. Occasionally we'd glimpse low warehouses off to the side.

The New River from the U.S. side, flowing in from Mexico. (William T. Vollmann)

Another inlet, another pipe (this one gushing brown liquid), and then we saw a duck swimming quite contentedly. Black-and-white birds, possibly phoebes, shrieked at us from the trees. I got a beautiful view of garbage snagged under dead branches.

The heat was getting miserable, and my end of the boat, having punched into one bamboo thicket too many, hissed sadly under me, sinking slowly. Since the boat featured several airtight compartments, I wasn't too worried, but I didn't really like it, either. Meanwhile the river had settled deeper into its canyon, and all we could see on either side were bamboos and saltcedars high above the bone-dry striated banks. A wild, lonely, beautiful feeling took possession of me. Not only had the New River become so unfrequented over the last few decades that it felt unexplored, but the isolating power of the tree-walls, the knowledge that the adventure might in fact be a little dangerous, and the surprisingly dramatic loveliness of the scenery all made me feel as if José and I were explorers of pre-American California. But it was so weird to experience this sensation here, where a half-mummified duck was hanging a foot above water in a dead tree! What had slain it?

At midmorning the river, now a rich neon lime, split into three channels, all of them impassable due to tires and garbage. Above us, José's father waited at the Highway 98 bridge. I called it quits.

Even after taking a shower my hands kept burning, and the next day José and I still couldn't get the taste out of our mouths. We used up all his breath mints lickety-split; then I went to Mexicali for tequila and spicy tacos. The taste dug itself deeper.

Poor José��only got��$100. I had to give Ray Garnett, formerly the proprietor of Ray's Salton Sea Guide Service, $500 before he'd consent to take me down the last ten-mile stretch of the New River. Ray had been a fishing guide for decades. Now that he was retired, he still went out on the Sea pretty often, to keep even. He called the Salton Sea the most productive fishery in the world.

“How about the fish, Ray?” I asked.

“I've been eatin'��'em since 1955, and I'm still here, so there's nothin'��wrong with 'em,” he replied.

As a matter of fact, he thought the Salton Sea must have improved, because he used to get stinging rashes on his fingers when he cleaned too many fish, and that didn't happen anymore.

About the New River, Ray had very little information. He'd never been on it in all his 78 years, and neither had anybody else he knew. That was why he was willing to hazard his $800 aluminum water-skimmer with its $1,200 outboard motor on a cruise. He was even a little excited. He kept saying, “This sure is different.”

Ray preferred corvina to tilapia, and he brought some home-smoked corvina along in the cooler. Probably I was imagining the aftertaste.

Stocky, red, hairy-handed, round-faced, Ray did everything slowly and right, his old eyes seeing and sometimes not telling. We put the boat in near Westmorland, and the river curved us around the contours of a cantaloupe field, with whitish spheres in the bright greenness, then the brown of a fallow field, a dirt road, and at last the cocoa-brown of the river itself, whirling us away.

The New River's stench was far milder here, the color less alarming; and I remembered how, when I'd asked Tom Kirk of the Salton Sea Authority how much of the Salton Sea's sickness came from the New River, he'd promptly answered, “People point their fingers at Mexico and at farmers. The perception that the Salton Sea is Mexico's toilet is unfair.”

Maybe he was right, God knows. Maybe something else was causing the fish deaths and the bird deaths.

“You think there are any fish in this river, Ray?” I asked.

“Flathead catfish. I wouldn't eat 'em. One time we did core samples of the mud in these wetlands. It has just about everything in it.”

“Like what?” I asked, but Ray stayed silent.

A little later, he said, “Must be something wrong with this water, 'cause I don't see any bullfrogs. I been watchin'��the bank. No turtles, either. Bullfrogs and turtles can live in anything.”

Swallows flew down. The river was pleasant, really, wide and coffee-colored, with olive-bleached tamarisk trees on either of its salt-banded banks. We can poison nature and go on poisoning it; something precious always remains. There is always something that our earth has left to give, and we keep right on taking.

Lowering our heads, we passed under a fresh-painted girder bridge that framed a big pipe. There was a sudden faint whiff of sewage, but the river didn't stink a tenth as much as it had at the border, let alone in Mexico. Passing a long straight feeder canal with hardly any trash in it, we found ourselves running between tall green grass and flittering birds. To the northwest, Villager Peak in the Santa Rosa Mountains was a lovely blue ahead of us.

“Have another piece of that corvina,” Ray said.

The river was pleasant, really, wide and coffee-colored. We can poison nature and go on poisoning it; something precious always remains.

Now there were just hills of bamboo and grass on either side, like the Everglades. Four black-winged pelicans flew together over the grass. The sunken chocolate windings of the New River seemed to get richer and richer. But another smell began to thicken. “The sea's right on the side of these weeds here,” Ray was saying.

“What's that smell, Ray?”

“I think it's all the dying fish, and dead fish on the bottom. It forms some kind of a gas. It's just another die-off. It's natural.” Was it? Ducks were flitting happily, and we saw dozens of pelicans as we came out into the sea.

“You get away from the smell when you get out here fishin',” Ray said, and he was right. Out on the greenish-brownish waves—”That's algae bloom that made the water turn green. Won't be any fish in here today”—the only odor was ocean.

“They've had studies and what have you ever since the late fifties,” Ray sighed. “In 1995 we put 420 hours in and didn't catch a fish. But in '97 and '98 they started coming back. Whether the fish have gotten more tolerant or whether it's something else, I don't know.”

Deep in an orangish-green wave, Ray thought it best to turn around. As we approached the river we grounded on a sandbar.

“If you don't mind getting your feet wet,” Ray said, “it sure would make things easier.”

We pushed. From the shore came a sickening sweet stench of rotting animals, and I soon had a sore throat and my eyes began to sting. When I left him, Ray gave me a kind and gentle smile, and an entire bag of smoked corvina.

“No face which we��can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth.” That is what Thoreau wrote when he was measuring and meditating upon Walden Pond. “For the most part,” he continued, “we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.”

Throughout my researches into the New River and the Salton Sea, I found myself similarly in two cases at the same time. My fault lay in this: I had drunk in a certain doctrine, whose sources are as obscurely ubiquitous and whose substance is as tainted as New River water: that only an “expert” has the right to judge the acceptability of the water of life. The only way I could think of to decide the matter was to abrogate my own judgment and pay technicians to analyze a water sample from the river, and another from the sea. And then I'd know, because a printed report would tell me. But I already knew the truth. The Salton Sea is ghastly. The New River is ghastly.

Squatting over the stinking green water a few steps from the spot where José and I had launched our dinghy, I lowered sterile sample bottles one by one in my latex-gloved hands, standing partly on a fresh human turd to avoid falling in. The chemical odor seemed more dizzying than usual. What was it? I was hoping to find out. I was angling for your basic herbicide-pesticide sweep, including the chlorinateds (EPA method 8151); a CAM-17 for heavy metals; a full method 8260, needless to say, with MTBE and oxygenates; a TPH (that's total petroleum hydrocarbons to you); a surfactant; and a diesel test while I was at it. Originally I'd craved a fecal coliform count so badly I could taste it, but Tom Kirk had told me that the levels of fecal coliform, high at the border, dipped and then rose again at the mouth of the Sea, thanks to all the birds. So to hell with it.

I took my Salton Sea sample up in North Shore. It seemed like a good place because it was far enough away from the New River to reflect the base level of filthiness, so to speak, and it was also good on account of all those fish bones and salt-stiffened feathers. There was only one dead bird on the beach this time, a fluffy little baby. On the pier a man was fishing, perhaps not impressed by the selenium health advisory strongly suggesting that no one eat more than four ounces of Salton Sea fish-meat per two weeks.

I got my two water samples analyzed at California Laboratory Services in Sacramento. Sample one was the New River. Sample two was the Salton Sea.

“On the chlorinated acid herbicides, your 2, 4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid took a hit on sample one,” said the lab man. “On sample two, everything was non-detect. Let's see now, your diesel in the very first sample took a very small hit; the second sample was non-detect. For metals your first sample showed beryllium and zinc, and your second had barium and selenium. Both samples were well below the maximum legal contaminant levels on all that. We ran the 8260 for volatiles plus oxygenates. Both samples were clean.”

(William T. Vollmann)

I inquired how my samples compared to other water they'd tested.

“Relatively clean compared to other wastewater samples,” the lab man said. “They're certainly not nearly as nasty as some of our samples from Brazil, Singapore, and China.”

I called up the Audubon Society man, Fred Cagle, who'd always struck me as extremely levelheaded and independent. “Do these results surprise you?” I asked him.

“Not at all.”

“Well, is the New River the most polluted body of water in North America, or one of the most polluted, or what?”

“It's been getting cleaner,” he said. “But it still gets that reputation. It depends on who you talk to. They've found cholera, TB, all that kind of crap.”

“What about the metals and organics, from pesticides?”

“It varies tremendously. We've taken hundreds of samples, and they all come out different. The stuff in the sediments may not be soluble; there are just so many variables. Of course you can't figure it out. Scientists can't figure it out.”

“And those nine million pounds of agricultural chemicals you mentioned, where do they go?”

“Some of them break down, some of them get oxidized by bacteria. But we don't know that. Scientists get confused too.”

“Would you agree that the Salton Sea is the most productive fishery in the world?”

“It's the most productive fishery, but it's also the most limited fishery. All the fish are artificial. We're getting right close to the edge of the salinity window. And why spend $100 million to save a $10 million fishery? Tilapia are an amazing fish. You know, they're a freshwater fish, and in 30 generations they've modified themselves to live in the Salton Sea. But has anybody told you about the parasite levels on those fish? They're enormous. Parasites are in their lungs, everywhere. The people who eat those fish might not enjoy them as much if they knew that.”

“I still have a little smoked corvina left,” I said. “Maybe I won't send it to you.”

“Good idea.”

From the mouth of the New River, on the southern edge of the Salton Sea, it's a straight shot halfway up the sea's west coast to Salton City, followed by Salton Sea Beach, then the nearly defunct Sun Dial Beach, and finally Desert Shores, where beside the rickety dock stinking white fishes gaped in the sun, swirling with each algal wave. A couple backed their boat down the boat ramp, the man steering, the woman craning her head with extreme seriousness. Fish corpses squished beneath their wheels. Meanwhile, Salton City's attractions included a broken motel with drawn-in palm fronds and shattered windows. Emblems of stereotypical cacti and flying fish clung to the motel just as a fool clings to his dying love; its customers were heat, rubble, and cicada song.

The article on California in the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911, states that irrigation along the Colorado River, which naturally bears only desert vegetation, has made it a true humid-tropical region, growing true tropical fruits. Wasn't that the golden age? Actually, the golden age hasn't ended even now. Looking around me at the Salton Sea's green margins of fields and palm orchards, I spied a lone palm tree far away at the convergence of tan furrows, then lavender mountains glazed with confectioner's sugar; this is the landscape where all is beauty, the aloof desert mountains enriched despite themselves by the spectacle of the fields.

Fertilization, irrigation, runoff, wastewater—the final admixtures of all these quantities flow into the Salton Sea. I couldn't condemn the state of the Sea without rejecting the ring of emerald around it. About the continuing degradation of that sump, José Angel of the Regional Water Quality Board very reasonably said, “It's a natural process because the sea is a closed basin. Pollutants cannot be flushed out. You could be discharging Colorado River water directly into the Salton Sea, or for that matter distilled water into the Salton Sea, and you would end up with a salinity problem, because the ground is full of salt! The regulations do not provide for a solution to this. You have to build some sort of an outlet.”

Will they? Are they? The Salton Sea Restoration Project, that congressional marriage of the Salton Sea Authority and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, attended by a wedding party of some dozen other agencies, is following the favored bureaucratic course of studying the problem some more, and maybe some of its proposed alternatives will even do something: evaporation ponds, fish harvesting, carcass-skimming barges, wetlands habitats, displacement dikes, diverted Colorado River inflows, desalination ponds. But what about the salt and chemicals rolling in from the fields? “What can you do?” Angel had asked me. “Because fertilizers have a legitimate agricultural use.”

I could see that legitimate agricultural use, reflected in the stylized elegance of a palm grove's paragraph of tightly spaced green asterisks and in the ridge-striped fields south of Niland, where sheep and birds intermingled, the cotton balls on their khaki-colored plants so white as to almost glitter. And in a brilliant green square of field, a red square of naked dirt on the left, a double row of palms in between, with their dangling clusters of reddish-yellow fruit. Legitimate use, to be sure, from which I benefited and from which bit by bit the sea was getting saltier and fouler with algae and more selenium-tainted, creating carrion and carrion-stench, which kept seagoers away.

Legitimate use made the half-scorched rubble of the Sundowner Motel, whose rusty lonely staircase used to offer a vantage point across the freeway to Superburger and then out to the sparse pale house-cubes of Salton City. On a clear day one could see right across the Salton Sea from those stairs, but if there was a little dust or haze, the cities on the far side faded into hidden aspects of the Chocolate Mountains'��violet blur, and then the stairs too were carried off by the myrmidons of desert time. Meanwhile the Alamo flowed stinking up from Holtville, with its painted water tower, and the Whitewater flowed stinking, and the New River bore its stench of excrement and something bitter like pesticides. And Imperial County flowered and bore fruit. Through that lush and luscious land, whose hay bales are the color of honey and whose alfalfa fields are green skies, water flowed, 90 percent of it not from Mexico at all, carrying consequences out of sight to a 380-square-mile sump.

From a distance it looked lovely: first the hand-lettered sign of may's oasis, then the Salton Sea's Mediterranean blue seen through a distant line of palms, and then the smell of ocean.

Novelist William T. Vollmann wrote about the Canadian Arctic in the July 1999 issue of ��ܳٲ��.��

The post The California Lake Killing Everything Around It appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

Tough Trips Guide

sperkins-pom — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Go On, We Dare You

Whatever agonies and miseries the sufferer may endure on his pilgrimage to the heights, and however often he may swear never to return there, longing to do so is certain to recur.

—C. F. Meade, British mountaineer

Attention adrenaline junkies: if you're already a veteran antarctic ski expeditioner, or if your mountaineering resume lists a half-dozen Himalayan climbs, or if you can boast a handful of first descents on long-lost rivers in the Amazon, skip this introduction and go directly to our travel roster beginning on page 62.

As for the rest of us, let's be honest. Hard-core adventureis something we've merely brushed up against in the course of shorter, less exacting voyages. Such journeys are bracing, but they won't revolutionize your life. For that, you need to push yourself a step or two beyond what you thought you could do—and then push a little farther. You need to go through the kinds of trials that produce what climbers call the North Wall Look:the stare that says you've been to the edge and survived. In other words, you need to take a Tough Trip.

Tough Trips require months of training, research, and discipline—and then they pay you back with hardship, sore muscles, and second thoughts. But somewhere along the way—say, after you've ascended Denali's West Rib or skied the face of the Grand Teton—you may catch a glimmer of the sublime.

To give you a sense of the options laid out before you on this less-traveled road, and to help you tackle some key questions (Guide or no guide? Will I need a satellite phone? What, exactly, do the words “forbidden zone” mean?) we've assembled the hardest adventures we could find and tapped the brains of a few of our favorite writers who have been there and back. These journeys span the globe, so get out your atlas. And remember, going the distance is only half the fun. The other half isn't so much about the sacrifices or the miseries you endure, but the sense of having touched something so far out in the world, and yet so deep in your core, that you can't wait to get out there and do it all over again.

The Tough Trips Guide

Mountaineering
Patagonia
Alaska
Bolivia

Wildwater Paddling
Bhutan
Greenland
California

Trekking
Peru
India
Canada
New Zealand

Ski Mountaineering
The Tetons
British Columbia
Maine

Expedition Biking
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The Continental Divide

Polar Exploration
The North Pole
The South Pole

Tough Parables

William T. Vollman: The Bell-like Ping of Freezing Sweat
Peter Stark: Really Tough Love
Holly Morris: In the Land of the Leech
Mark Jenkins: The Unguided Route
Denis Johnson: Wing-Tips in the Mire

Mountaineering

Storming the Citadel

Scaling Patagonia's Torres del Paine
OUTFITTER: Aventuras Patagonicas; 888-203-9354; www.patagonicas.com
COST: $5,500*
DATES: November 14 December 5, 2000
*Prices throughout do not include airfare.

About 150 miles north of the Straits of Magellan on Chile's Patagonian ice cap soars a set of 8,000-foot pink granite teeth that are perhaps the closest Mother Nature has come to creating a scream in stone. If the prospect of scaling these spires—the Torres del Paine—isn't sufficient to inspire religious conversion, the savagery of the wind will at least leave you convinced that the Almighty is one hell of a housekeeper. Locals say la escoba de Dios, the “broom of God,” sweeps this landscape—a fitting metaphor for the 100-mile-per-hour gusts that routinely lash climbers clinging to the Torres' walls. “That's the way it goes in Patagonia,”shrugs Rodrigo Mujica, director of the Jackson, Wyomingbased guiding company Aventuras Patagonicas. “Every day, you get your ass kicked.”

To summit any of these peaks on your own, you need to be a highly proficient aid climber with plenty of rock experience in rain, sleet, and snow. If you come up short on these requirements and don't have the time to acquire highly developed aid-climbing skills through a lengthy apprenticeship, then you need a guide like Mujica, a 36-year-old Chilean-American mountaineer who plans to take clients up the Central Tower, the most demanding and exposed of the tower routes, this winter.

“It takes a special kind of person to do this,” admits Mujica. And for good reason. With crux moves up to 5.10c/A2, only strong climbers need apply for the privilege of attacking the 19 pitches (six to high camp, 13 more to the summit). “It can be very, very scary,” adds Mujica, who also guides difficult trips in Antarctica (see Polar Exploration, page 78). And just as invigorating: “I learned I was a lot stronger than I thought,” says Patrice Spencer, a 5.11 climber who hired Mujica to guide her up the neighboring North Tower in December 1999. “Up there, you can't afford to think, 'Oh my God, what am I doing here?'” And agood thing, too. He'd never hear you over the wind.

NEXT TIME, TRY:

Climbing Denali's West Rib
OUTFITTER: Mountain Trip; 907-345-6499; www.mountaintrip.com
COST: $5,000
DATES: June 7, 2000 and June 7, 2001

Yeah, yeah, we know: North America's highest, coldest, and most famous peak is so well-trodden that tackling it may strike hard-core innovators as a bit of a cliché.Last year alone, 1,183 climbers attempted Mount McKinley. But only someone who's never gaped at its 20,320-foot summit and witnessed the ferocity of its storms, which routinely reduce tents to Taco Bell style lettuce shreds, would dismiss Denali as passé. So if you're looking for that extra measure of challenge, stick with Denali, but bypass the popular West Buttress/Washburn Route and take a crack at the West Rib.

The route, Alaskan Grade 4, shoots up 8,400 feet in roughly two miles, and has technical sections of mixed rock and ice, as well as ice couloirs and an airy ridge at 16,500 feet. Last year it saw only 60 climbers—18 of whom actually summited. Because the Rib is far more exposed than the West Buttress, it can be extremely dangerous (at 17,000 feet, the route intersects a notorious chute tactlessly called The Orient Express, where eight Asian climbers have fallen to their deaths). But when the weather holds, the challenges can provide one of the most satisfying ascents in all of North America. And best of all, you'll probably have the entire thing to yourself. “It's a beautiful climb,” says Alaska-based Mountain Trip guide Gary Bocarde, who's done the Rib five times. “Hopefully, you won't get blown off it.”

OR, DO IT YOURSELF…

Traversing Bolivia's Mount Illimani
WHEN TO GO: August

Looming over the streets of La Paz, Bolivia, Mount Illimani is more massif than mountain. While many have climbed 21,201-foot South Peak, the highest of Illimani's five summits, only two groups have ever linked all five peaks (the lowest of which is 20,042 feet). The ten-mile traverse on an exposed ridge was hailed by Yossi Brain, the foremost authority on Bolivian climbing who was killed in an avalanche last year, as “the longest and most impressive mountaineering expedition in Bolivia.” And it's easy to see why. The ridge, a beautiful blade that separates the country's arid altiplano from its steamy jungles, rarely dips below 20,000 feet, meaning a minimum of three nights of fitful sleep. La Paz is teeming with climbing agencies happy to drive your team the four hours to the trailhead and back for roughly $320. In addition to a solid four-season tent, you'll need a multi-fuel stove that fires reliably at 20,000 feet. Bring lots of non-fatty foods—although once on top, you probably won't feel like eating. At this altitude, the only thing your body wants is down.��

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SCALING THE TORRES DEL PAINE: HAVE YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES?

Strength/endurance: Climbers will need strong upper bodies to jug pitch after pitch, hauling heavy packs of gear up the wall. A successful summit bid can require 18 solid hours on the rock. Clients must also be fit enough to ferry equipment and foodstuffs up steep terrain to high camp before storms hit.

Mental Fitness: Be ready to come home exhausted, having given it your all for three straight weeks and possibly still not conquered the summit. Those with summit-or-bust attitudes should do themselves a favor and attack something with better odds.

Environmental Challenges: Expect to climb only a few hours a day for most days before the “freight train” winds arrive and spit you off. As an added bonus, the near-freezing to below-freezing temperatures will make your hands ache, but you won't be able to put them in your pockets because you've still got to belay Mujica. His life—and yours—depend on it.

Skills: Although Mujica leads all the pitches, clients must be solid 5.9 climbers. Familiarity with ascenders, daisy chains, atriers, and other aid-climbing equipment and techniques is a must. You've got to know how to clean protection—and how to avoid dropping it while fiddling with frozen hands.

MOUNTAINEERS' READING LIST:

For Inspiration: Annapurna, A Woman's Place, by Arlene Blum. The author chronicles her 1978 all-women expedition to place the first American, and the first woman, on the summit of the world's tenth-highest peak.

For Practical Know-How: Freedom of the Hills, edited by Don Graydon, published by The Mountaineers Books. Acomprehensive primer on all aspects of mountain travel and safety.

To Scare Yourself Silly: Touching the Void, by Joe Simpson. While climbing in the Andes in 1985, Simpson broke his leg, fell off a cliff into a crevasse, was given up for dead by his partner, climbed out, and hobbled for three days back to camp, arriving just before his friends, who had burned his gear, were about to depart. A horrific account of what can go wrong in the mountains.

The Bell-like Ping of Freezing Sweat

Tough Parables

Most of the difficulties I've experienced on expeditions have been the result of my own failures. For instance, when I once passed a couple of weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole in midwinter, I suffered frostbite in my fingers and toes, got haunted by a hallucination of the Angel of Death (who had long brown hair and who cried when I didn't want to go with her), and kept feeling colder and colder and colder, all because the custom sleeping bag I'd ordered, rated (said the manufacturer) to 70 degrees below zero, was no good at 40 below. I had worried about this beforehand when I first laid eyes on the skimpiness of the goose down, but because it had been very expensive and because there was nowhere nearby that was cold enough to really test it, I chose to trust the liars who'd sewn it for me. Most of the responsibility for my discomfort therefore remains mine, and indeed, since my purpose at the Pole was to write about some 19th-century explorers who'd died in those parts, and since, like them, I got a good measure of strangeness and of fright (the sweat freezing nightly under my clothes with an audible, bell-like ping), it all worked out for the best. My sentences at least rang true.

Difficult trips? I never went on one voluntarily—the trip from here on out to my cemetery plot will be difficult enough. But years ago, during the Soviet-Afghan War, I crossed into Afghanistan illegally, and for me that walk remains memorable for a number of reasons: The high green hills near Parachinar, the boulder-choked rivercourses at dawn with the full moon overhead, the snow, the spaciousness, the endlessness—and ahead, the sinisterness—almost overruled my own exhaustion. I was young, and until then had only trespassed upon the premises of nuclear power plants, so breaching the sovereignty of an entire country made me feel awfully excited. I had the notion of helping people (in this case, the Afghan resistance), and so I was prepared to do any number of stupid, thrilling-sounding things that I couldn't have justified in my own name alone. It was a Great Project, you see.

Prepared, did I say? Oh, I might have been in decent shape a month earlier when I arrived in Pakistan, before amoebic dysentery turned me into a walking skeleton, but just as with my sleeping bag, I figured I'd come out all right because somebody promised me I would. That somebody, a well-meaning insurgent, told me that our walk would take us over a little hill. It was supposed to last about three or four hours. It took two days and a night, and involved the ascent of two mountains and an evening descent upon (and through) a rotten glacier. We did not fall far. Trickling snow roofed us as we walked down another stony river. Then the roof became an ice canyon, then melted away altogether as we came into Afghanistan. I had to stop every couple of hours due to diarrhea. Shaking their heads, the mujahideen wondered why Washington hadn't sent a strong American.

I was ashamed then, and still feel embarrassed whenever I think about that walk. I wore good hiking boots; they wore sandals. I got blisters; their feet literally left blood on the rocks. I'd come to take photographs to sell so that I could maybe send them money. They'd come to fight, possibly to die. But they were very happy. They believed that if they were killed by the Soviets, they'd go instantly to heaven. And if they survived, they'd run the Soviets out of their country—which is exactly what happened.

What was I on that trip but an irrelevance? Any notion of challenging oneself in such conditions for purposes of “self-fulfillment” or for any other reason would be laughable. And what did I ever do for the Afghans in the end? Oh, I raised some money—it wasn't enough to buy a Stinger missile, so they endowed an elementary school library.

Challenges make me tired; thrills are evidence of my own incompetence. It's all very interesting to read about, like a true-crime story, but who wants to be a victim of a true crime? Long and exotic trips, on the other hand—why not? If I could, I'd love to go to the moon, and to the bottom of the ocean. In both places Icould kiss the unknown. The danger itself wouldn't interest me; for danger I could play Russian roulette. But to be a human in an inhuman environment would be as glorious as taking one's first step onto the high-school dance floor.

These journeys would be subject to unknown chances, but I'd try to keep them as smooth and steady as I could. I've become a tranquil robot of checklists and routines. If you pack your own parachute instead of letting somebody else do it, then you can aspire to an idyllic free fall. And if matters work out otherwise, it's better to blame only yourself.

William T. Vollmann's fifth novel, The Royal Family, will be published next month by Viking Penguin.

Wildwater Paddling

Riding the Liquid Maelstrom

Paddling Bhutan's whitewater
OUTFITTER: Nantahala Outdoor Center; 888-662-1662; www.nocweb.com
COST: $3,400
DATES: November 12-21, 2000
MILEAGE: 25

In the 18th century, unrepentant Buddhist criminals were manacled, shoved into canvas body bags, and heaved off the balcony of Trongsa dzong, a monastery in central Bhutan. If the deviants survived their plunge down the 3,000-foot black bedrock cliffs to a river called Mangde Chhu, they'd done their penance and were deemed reformed. The cliff-fall is an appropriate metaphor for kayaking that river, according to Don Fowler, a former Nantahala Outdoor Center client from Virginia. “I'd get to the bottom of a rapid and say, 'Thank you, Lord,'” recalls Fowler, who has also kayaked in Nepal and Honduras. “I felt like one of those criminals on just about every river.”

Class IV-V Mo Chhu and Puna Tsang Chhu are also steep, punishing, and survived by NOC kayakers partly by the grace of God. The three rivers, which clients paddle in an eight-day period, flow from frigid glacial headwaters at 20,000 feet, gaining speed as they roar through boulder fields toward Bhutan's tropical southern plains. Bees' nests and golden langurs speckle the sheer canyon walls above the upper seven-mile section of the Mangde Chhu. Rhododendron and magnolia forests flank the five miles of the northern Mo Chhu. Rice paddies and deserted orange groves—left by some of the 100,000 Nepalese Hindus who fled ethnic persecution in the early 1990s—grow beside the lower Puna Tsang Chhu and its runnable ten miles.

Below Bailey Bridge on the Puna Tsang Chhu, David Alardice, the guide who pioneered all three river routes in 1997, will point out a hole that even the hubristic should avoid. The cottage-sized hydraulic can “clean nostrils out with the efficiency of a Rug Doctor,” he says—with the conviction of someone who's prayed for a second chance.

NEXT TIME, TRY:

Sea-kayaking northwestern Greenland
OUTFITTER: Whitney & Smith; 403-678-3052; www.legendaryex.com
COST: $3,950
DATES: August 19-September 2, 2000
MILEAGE:66

Preparing to sea-kayak northwestern Greenland is a study in extreme gear. Client must-haves: one pair of knee-high wool-lined Cabela's boots for portaging over the pack ice in Inglefield Fjord; a full-body survival suit to insulate against the 31-degree-Fahrenheit water. Guide must-haves: .44 Magnum for scaring away yellow-tusked rogue walrus and marauding polar bears; ice ax, ice screws, and climbing rope to negotiate frozen beaches. But most often, the ocean and scenery are startlingly serene … and the hand cannon stays in the Pelican box. The 24-hour sun warms the permafrost enough to bring blueberries into bloom. At the heads of some fjords, pink quartzite walls soar 4,000 feet overhead. And if tempestuous catabatic winds blow, the itinerary allows plenty of time to wait them out in four-season tents.

OR, DO IT YOURSELF…

Kayaking California's Kern River
WHEN TO GO: May-July
MILEAGE: 55

When expert boaters finish paddling the headwaters of the Kern in south-central California, they take out where commercial trips put in. The reason: After two days of hiking and four days kayaking 55 milesof secluded Class V whitewater, ten miles of Class IV froth just isn't as appealing as a square meal.

The headwaters are remote and are best run without piggish rafts. Which means that bivy sacks and lots of PowerBars must be stowed in the ends of large-volume creek boats that are then either carried 20 miles over the flanks of 14,494-foot Mount Whitney or packed in by mules over 40 miles of trail to the starting point at Junction Meadows. There the snow-fed Kern flows as steeply as a creek, dropping 200 feet per mile on average, and as powerfully as a river—about 1,500 cubic feet per second is an ideal flow. Since the steep canyon walls and the dense pines often make it difficult to track downriver progress, boaters must rely on topo maps and altimeters to locate the one unrunnable section, a 60-foot cascade. At the bottom of the run, just below the takeout at Johnsondale Bridge, a large road sign directed at riverside picnickers serves as an apt warning to prospective paddlers: “Do not swim. 185 people dead since 1978.” For more information, contact the Otter Bar Lodge Kayak School in northern California at 530-462-4772 or www.otterbar.com.��

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KAYAKING BHUTAN: GOT WHAT IT TAKES?

Strength/endurance: Prepare for the contortions of technical kayaking with yoga. The extended triangle, lotus, and eagle crunch are especially helpful because they simulate rolling and bracing.

Mental Fitness: Even if the whitewater doesn't scare you, the fact that the nearest advanced medical facility is at least a two-hour walk, four-hour bus ride, and two-hour plane flight away should.

Environmental Challenges: To minimize icy rolls in glacial runoff at 7,000 feet, practice at home on rivers one skill level higher than you'll be running in Bhutan—this means Class V—and get comfortable paddling in gloves and a dry suit.

Skills: Ask yourself, as NOC instructor Bill Hester will ask you, “How do I catch that one-boat eddy in the middle of this Class IV rapid? Do I use a dufekt or a dynamic bow-draw?” In other words, you need skills to handle all types of Class IV rapids: technical creeks, powerful big water, and fast-flowing rivers.

PADDLERS' READING LIST:

For Inspiration: Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, by Wallace Stegner. The account of John Wesley Powell's pioneering run of the Colorado River is more dramatic than Powell's own journal—as well as being more comprehensive and accurate.

For Practical Know-How: Kayak: The Animated Manual of Intermediate and Advanced Whitewater Technique, by William Nealy. A must-have.

To Scare Yourself Silly: Awhirl in the Land of Perverse Fun, by David Quammen, ��ϳԹ��, June 1998, A rollicking tale of spooky misadventure and sphagnum moss above Hellfire Rapid on New Zealand's South Island.

Trekking

The Ancient Way

��ϳԹ��-running across Peru's Cordillera Blanca
OUTFITTER: Andes ��ϳԹ��s; 310-395-5265; www.andesadventures.com
COST: $2,700
DATES: June 29-July 14
MILEAGE: 140

Why walk the Inca trail when you can run?

Ultramarathoner Devy Reinstein was enjoying a leisurely sprint up the John Muir Trail to the top of California's Mount Whitney one day in 1994 when he was struck by an unusual idea: Why not start a business that combined his loves for his native Peru and for long-distance trail racing? (He's completed more than 15 ultra marathons in the last sevenyears.) The result was Andes ��ϳԹ��s, a travel company whose keystone trip, which Reinstein still offers several times a year and which is always fully booked, includes a 27-mile run that concludes with a spectacular entrance into the Lost City of the Incas, Machu Picchu. Encouraged by the success of this venture, Reinstein recently set out to create an even more challenging adventure-running odyssey: the Cordilleras Blanca and Huayhuash ��ϳԹ�� Run.

“This event is not for everyone,” warns Reinstein in what can only be called an ultra-understatement. Clients spend nine of the trip's 16 days jogging 140 miles on rocky trails up, down, and across two mountain ranges in north-central Peru. First comes a three-day, 40-mile “warm-up”run that includes a complete circuit around Huayhuash and through parts of the Cordillera Blanca—at 20,000 feet, the world's highest tropical mountain range. After a mere one-day's rest, clients embark on a five-day, 100-mile loop through the Cordillera Huayhuash, crossing ten 15,000-foot-plus passes through terrain equaled only in the Himalayas: 22,205-foot Mount Huascarán, the highest peak in Peru; 20,846-foot Chopicalqui; Yerupaja, a 21,765 footer; and 20,100-foot Sarapo. Keep in mind that you'll be carting your own emergency clothing, food, and water each day, as well as a radio in case you get separated from the pack. Muleteers provide aid stations stocked with Peruvian cheese sandwiches, coca tea, and other energy foods along every trail; camps await runners at the end of each day. Villagers met along the way greet you warmly, if a little quizzically—nylon tights and chronometers have yet to enter the native Peruvian culture.

NEXT TIME, TRY:

Trekking India's Himachal Pradesh
OUTFITTER: Ibex Expeditions; 541-345-1289; ibexexpeditions@compuserve.com
COST: $3,400
DATES: September 23-October 21, 2000
MILEAGE: 85

If you'd rather spend nine non-VO₂-max hours a day on the trail, consider Ibex Expeditions' Unknown Great Himalaya Trek. Veteran trip leader Bruce Klepinger begins this exploratory trip at a barren 13,000-foot trailhead in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh and ascends to an 18,000-foot glacier. Participants spend at least a week navigating the snowfields and camping on the ice amid dozens of 20,000-foot peaks before descending into Himachal's rocky Spiti district. Long closed to outsiders, the course crosses parts of an ancient Tibetan-Indian trade route dotted with 2,000-year-old monasteries. The trip also includes an optional six-day extension for those who want to tackle another 18,000-foot pass and wind up on a tributary of the Ganges.

OR, DO IT YOURSELF…

The Trans Canada Trail
WHEN TO GO: May-September
MILEAGE: 10,000

When Canada turned 125 years old in 1992, burgeoning national pride led outdoor enthusiasts to dream up an integrated hiking trail running from St. John's, Newfoundland, to Victoria, British Columbia, with a dogleg up to the Arctic. No one has yet tackled the entire route, namely because maps and trail linkages are still in the making. Which means that a unique distinction awaits the intrepid adventurer willing to embark on some seat-of-the-pants route-finding across the third-largest country in the world. “It runs through remote grizzly territory—and be aware of wild cats,” warns Geoff Kloos, spokesman for the project. “There also can be hundreds of miles between resupply points.” Call the Trans Canada Foundation in Montreal at 800-465-3636.

New Zealand's Te Araroa Trail
WHEN TO GO: December-March
MILEAGE: 1,500

Linking the North Island's Cape Reinga to the tip of the South Island at Bluff, the Te Araroa is so inchoate (it opened in 1998) and untracked (at press time, two British hikers were attempting the South Island section's first test-run) that route-finding and food drops are likely to give as much trouble as any of the 6,000-foot passes and 200 miles of ankle-turning beaches. Complete the route, however, and you'll be rewarded with the most diverse terrain on earth: white-sand coasts, blasted volcanoes, glutinous rainforests, and glacier-carved fjords. In most sections, Appalachian-style huts are available, but tents and food drops are required. Contact the Te Araroa Trust at 011-64-9-378-4873 or www.teararoa.org.nz

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RUNNING THE ANDES: HAVE YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES?

Strength/endurance: “The trails aren't like those in national parks,” says Mike Duncan, a 1998 survivor of the Cordilleras Blanca and Huayhuash ��ϳԹ�� Run. “There are no switchbacks. It's straight uphill.” To prepare, he and Reinstein both recommend basic ultraracing training—especially hill-running—with at least one 20-40 mile run each week. The hill work helps develop your quads for the 32,000-foot total elevation gain.

Mental Fitness: “Most important,”says Reinstein, “is doing long runs on back-to-back days. You need a kind of training that builds the body and the mind.” That mental toughness will pay off when you're awakened at 5:30 a.m. in subzero temperatures to begin the day's run.

Environmental Challenges: Expect rain, snow, and every other type of precipitation. The route itself can be slick and frozen over, and exhausted runners may be prone to hypothermia in the thin, cold air. Deal with it.

Skills: There's no substitute for logging the miles, and ultramarathon experience is a necessity. The more ultras you've run, the better prepared you'll be during that four-day stretch of running nearly 20 miles per day.

TREKKERS' READING LIST

For Inspiration: The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz. A Polish cavalry officer who was sent to the Soviet gulag in 1939, Rawicz escaped and walked 4,000 miles to India and freedom. It'll put your slog up hypoxic Dead Woman's Pass on the Inca Trail into perspective.

For Practical Know-How: The Complete Walker III, by Colin Fletcher. The standard—and indispensible—trekker's bible.

Really Tough Love

Tough Parables

We were just short of 15,000 feet when I decided that marrying Amy maybe wasn't the right choice after all. Red-cheeked and panting in the thin air, she was slogging up a grassy mountainside in eastern Tibet, fuming at me while coaxing along a small white horse that carried our baggage. Would this be my life—the shouting matches, the angry tears, the all-day silences along the trail? Her eyes blazed angrily as she trudged past. “Screw you!” she hissed. Except she didn't put it quite so politely.

My mother-in-law had warned us, “If your marriage can survive this trip, it can survive anything.” The callow optimist, I dismissed this bit of wisdom as a mother's cluckings to protect her daughter from a son-in-law's half-baked schemes. “Naw, it can't be that bad,” I replied. “I've made difficult trips before, and so has Amy.” Which was true. But we'd never made them together or made them—I could barely utter the words, the concept was so new and strange—as husband and wife.

Married in April, we struck out for the Yangtze River in July. We'd start with a month-long trek along the headwaters and finish 3,000 miles downstream on a passenger boat docking in Shanghai. The point was to write a travel book about the Yangtze and to have an extended honeymoon in the process, though my true motives lay buried in a steamer trunk full of regret, ambition, and other psychic baggage that I unwittingly hauled along. At age 20, during a particularly troubled period of my youth, I'd attempted to reach the remote regions of the Tibetan Plateau and had turned back short of my goal. Now 33 and newly married, I would try again. This time nothing—least of all my wife—would prevent me from getting there.

I first sensed my dimming chances for success late in our first day on the trail while following a small tributary of the Upper Yangtze known to Tibetans as the Belly-Button River. That's when my bride, wielding an upraised spatula, chased our Chinese interpreter out of camp. Introduced to us simply as Little Cheng, he was the sidekick to Mr. Nian, our sullen and authoritarian government liaison officer. The two were contemptuous of both our Tibetan guides (“They never have a bath and they love to drink and fight”) and of Amy (“You should do more to cook for your husband and wash his clothes”). That first evening, as she cooked the fish that one of the Tibetans had hooked, the two Chinese insisted on turning up the flame on the gasoline blowtorch they'd provided as a stove. “She ruined the fish!” Little Cheng crowed as dinner was predictably engulfed in a mushroom cloud of smoke. “She is not an expert!”

The second day started badly and turned worse. At breakfast, we ran out of water. As we loaded the yaks and horses, Mr. Nian and Little Cheng ordered the Tibetans about like slaves while tossing their noodle wrappers and empty lunch-meat cans in the meadow grass. We clawed our way up a high mountain ridge covered in fine, shifting talus and on the far side got caught in a thunderstorm. Later, while crossing a rain-swollen stream, Little Cheng slipped from his wooden saddle and tumbled into the rapids.

That evening, as we limped into camp in a yak-herder's corral, Little Cheng turned to me, trembling in anger. “Mr. Peter!” he barked. “Tomorrow Mr. Nian and I go home!” We'd already hit the balking point—when one or more of the party's key participants announce they'll proceed no farther—and we'd barely seen the Yangtze.

The next morning i was sitting on a boulder, lethar-gically dangling a fly rod over the muddy river, when Amy accosted me. She'd asked me to talk to Mr. Nian and Little Cheng about their poor behavior—toward the Tibetans, toward her, toward the trip for which we'd paid a very hefty sum. Now our fledgling marriage assumed the geopolitical tension between an oppressive China and a struggling Tibet. I told her I didn't want to confront the men because I was afraid that Mr. Nian would cancel the trip. “We have to stand up to them,” she kept saying. “What they're doing isn't right.” I ignored her, concentrating instead on casting my muddler minnow into the river, feeling like an embattled Ricky Ricardo in some high-altitude episode of I Love Lucy.

“You've got a problem between your employees and your wife!” she finally shouted in frustration.

I pretended not to hear. That's when she hurled a water bottle at me. It bounced off the boulder and plopped on the sandy shore, half in the water, as if it couldn't decide—like me—whether to float clear out of this canyon and out of this marriage or stay and stick it out.

I did stick it out, after an epic and hyperventilated argument with Amy up that grassy incline with the white horse in tow. It came down to my simple realization that this was as much her journey as mine, that we were in this together for the long haul. I then confronted Mr. Nian in a dusty stable after his surprise announcement that Amy and I weren't permitted by government order to enter Tibetan villages along this stretch of the Yangtze. “Goddamn it!” I screamed, hurling my notebook into a heap of dried yak dung as a group of nomads looked on in amazement. “This is China!” he shouted back, as if that explained everything. He demanded that I shut up, and when I didn't, he canceled the trek on the spot.

We were nearing its end anyway. Amy and I gladly left Mr. Nian and Little Cheng as soon as legally possible, dropped off the Tibetan Plateau, and made our own way along the Yangtze across China. Five months after we began the trip, we arrived, weary and battle-scarred, in Shanghai. We returned home and I sat down to write my travel book, but after many wobbly attempts I finally put it aside. It's only now, more than a decade and two children since our honeymoon trip, that I've completed the book. And it really has very little to do with the Yangtze River.

Peter Stark edited the anthology Ring of Ice, and wrote Last Breath: Death at the Extremes of Human Endurance. His next book, Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, will be published in March 2014 by Ecco.

Ski Mountaineering

The Goal Is Not to Fall

Tetons' Ski and Snowboard Mountaineering Camp
OUTFITTER: Exum Mountain Guides; 307-733-2297; www.exumguides.com
COST: $850
DATES: May 30-June 3, 2000

On June 16, 1971, Jackson resident and Snow King ski school director Bill Briggs skied Wyoming's 13,770-foot Grand Teton. He was the first and he did it alone, without Gore-Tex, avalanche beacon, GPS, or cell phone. In the decades since, the Tetons have become the core of American ski mountaineering, but it's not because they're easy. Jagged and toothy, the Tetons' vertical walls are broken by discontinuous couloirs that in winter are best described as avalanche paths, forcing glisse mountaineers to wait for the warm days and cold nights of spring, when avalanches are more predictable and easier to avoid. Snow conditions range from black ice to perfect corn snow to thigh-deep slush. What's more, all descents of the Grand to date, except one, have involved treacherous rappels over rocks. Missing a turn can mean a 1,000-foot slide and, if you can't self-arrest, death by multiple blunt trauma.

Interested? Sign up for Exum Mountain Guides' five-day ski and snowboard mountaineering camp in the Tetons. You won't necessarily ski the Grand from the summit—in fact, only 100 or so people have since 1971—but if conditions allow, you'll take on some of its lower chutes and bag one or more of its neighbors. The camp holds its first two days at Jackson Hole Ski Resort, where your guides ostensibly teach you steep-skiing technique. In reality, they're screening you. If you can't descend 40-degree slopes with confidence at the resort, you have no business on 50-degree slopes in the backcountry. Which is not to say that you need to be an extreme skier capable of sticking 60-footers either: As guide Kevin Pusey puts it, “When you're seven hours from the nearest road, you always have to ask yourself, 'If I fall here, what's going to happen?'”

The goal of ski mountaineering, after all, is to not fall, a skill mastered by Exum guides like former World Extreme Skiing champion Doug Coombs and Tom Turiano, who has free-heeled more than 50 Teton peaks. Coombs and Turiano focus on the finer points of belayed skiing and rappelling into near-vertical couloirs, while ice-climbing experts like Pusey and avalanche professional Mark Newcomb train you in safe mountain travel. It's your job to pay attention: Your gear may be state-of-the-art, but if your skills aren't at the same level, you'd best restrict your expeditions to the Poconos.

NEXT TIME, TRY:

Skiing the Wapta Traverse
OUTFITTER: Yamnuska; 403-678-4164; www.yamnuska.com
COST: $570
DATES: February 26-March 3, 2001; April 16-21, 2001

Once you've honed your steep-skiing technique in the Tetons, it's time to learn a few more skills in British Columbia. Canadian guide company Yamnuska offers a five-day ski-mountaineering trip outside Lake Louise dubbed the Wapta Traverse. The tour includes two elements you probably didn't encounter in Wyoming: powder snow and glacier travel. While hauling your gear and food from hut to hut, you'll be learning to negotiate crevasses, ice falls, and high cols—skills you'll need for future, unguided trips. A strong group of expert skiers can expect to climb and ski as many as four peaks in five days.

OR, DO IT YOURSELF…

Climbing and Skiing Maine's Mount Katahdin
WHEN TO GO: December-April MILEAGE: 17

Forget Tuckerman's Ravine. The skiing's great, but you can pretty much count on being taken out by a drunk “Joey.” For bona fide East Coast ski mountaineering, head up to big-shouldered Katahdin in Maine's Baxter State Park. You and three others must register for the four-day expedition with park rangers at least two weeks in advance, and provide proof of winter climbing experience. You'll need it. You'll start off towing a sled full of gear from the Abol Bridge Trailhead, nine miles from Millinocket, to the Roaring Brook campground, 13 miles away. From there, your party will don crampons and climbing helmets, strap skis to packs, and climb another 4.4 miles above treeline. Most skiers prefer the North and South basins, but try any line you want. For more information, contact Baxter State Park at 207-723-5140.��

��

SKIING THE TETONS: HAVE YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES?

Strength/endurance: Train by hauling a 50-pound pack up 5,000 vertical feet and then skiing back down—with the pack still on.

Mental Fitness: You need to know when it's OK to relax, and when relaxing can be fatal. As the guides say, “Low danger doesn't mean no danger.” You'll also have to deal with what Pusey calls “That, 'I can't do this! Why am I here?' inner game.”

Environmental Challenges: Expect to work hard and confront terror at 11,000 feet—not exactly Denali or the Himalayas, but high enough to cause hypoxia-related problems for lay climbers.

Skills: This is a camp for expert skiers (fixed and free-heeled) and boarders comfortable riding 40-degree slopes—expert runs at most ski areas—in all snow conditions.

SKI MOUNTAINEERS' READING LIST:

For Inspiration: Teton Skiing: A History and Guide, by Tom Turiano. A turn-by-turn map down some of the steepest first descents in the Tetons, with beta that enables you to follow—if you dare.

For Practical Know-How: Ski Mountaineering, by Peter Cliff. Instruction in all elements of glisse mountaineering, plus detailed intelligence on some of the world's classic routes.

In the Land of the Leech

Tough Parables

At a clinic near my home in Seattle, I watch the eighth silver needle plunge into my arm. “You've come in too late to be protected from dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis,” says the nurse, almost delightedly, as she vaccinates me against whatever hell awaits me in the Southeast Asian jungle.

Two weeks, three continents, six airports, and two boat rides later, I'm in Bukit Lawang, at the edge of Gunung Leuser National Park in north-central Sumatra, about to schlepp to the park's western side. Back home I was feeling uncomfortable, folded and locked behind a desk. Now I'm hearing about Sumatra's least endangered species: the leech. “Burn them off with a lit cigarette,” says Rev, our Indonesian guide, with a flick of his Marlboro.

My traveling companion, Ruthie, and I follow Rev into the park's dense interior, where a wall of almost certainly malarial mosquitoes immediately engulfs us, adding a new layer of irritation to the 100-degree-plus day. Soon I feel a dull pain behind my knee. I look, and it's a slimy brown-and-black tiger leech picked up at the last river crossing, filled to the gills with O-positive. Philip Morris to the rescue.

Our trek should take two weeks. By day three, my skin is burned and peeling and encrusted with sweat and myriad strains of slime. In my mild delirium, I become convinced that I am molting. The miles and days bleed into one another as we hack our way through the sea of vines. Ten days in, I am miserable, awash in self-pity. I am broken.

But the next day, I begin to flick leeches and slap mosquitoes with the thoughtlessness previously reserved for the lowly gnat. I settle into my role as blood donor and inconsequential ingredient of the rainforest, and just as Ido, we breach the jungle's perimeter and come out the other side. Exhausted, Rev and Ruthie and I crawl under our tarp for a final night of writhing and sweating. At 4:45 a.m., with the Muslim call to prayer echoing over the hills from Ketembe, I awake, strangely renewed. I walk up a rise and scale a tall, heavily limbed tree. Up there, looking back over the thick folds of jungle, I feel more alive than I've felt in years. I decide in that moment to quit my job and to chase adventure full-time.

And so I do.

Holly Morris is the creator of the PBS series ��ϳԹ�� Divas (www.adventuredivas.com) and the host of the Discovery Channel's Treks in the Wild World.

The Unguided Route

Tough Parables

Awhile back I was on a travel panel in Berkeley with Richard Bangs, author, adventurer, and founder of Sobek, one of the first and most successful adventure-travel outfitters. We had both been babbling on about the joys of adventure when a young woman stood up and cut us short.

“But how do you actually do an adventure?” she asked.

“Sign up and send your check,” joked Bangs, beaming.

“Buy a plane ticket,” I retorted.

Half the audience jumped to their feet and a free-for-all ensued. Bangs—whose do-it-yourself credentials are impeccable but who knows the importance of guides—naturally maintained that the best way to take any journey or adventure was to hire an outfitter. Outfitters know the language, the culture, the history, and they have the requisite outdoor skills. Plus they do the dirty work, making all the arrangements so you'll never wind up sleeping in the rain or watching your gear float downriver.

Bangs was correct on all counts, and for flush but flat-out travelers, an outfitter is the answer—especially if your dream adventure involves physical struggle and a healthy element of risk. If you want to climb a mountain but are not a mountaineer, or hope to kayak a river but are not a paddler, you need a guide. Certain trips require such a high level of competence that managing them is beyond the reach of all but the experts and those who pay to be led by them.

That said, I ardently believe that when you hire an outfitter you often cut out something essential from adventure travel. Namely, the entire epic process of adventure, which starts with your first stab at planning and ends when you get your exhausted, mind-blown self back home. It's true that with an outfitter no one gets stuck in a tent on a high desolate pass, no one gets stranded in a remote malarial village, no one gets confused and takes the wrong trail. On the other hand, if you do the trip yourself, you're guaranteed to wind up stuck for the night on that high pass (where you'll see the sunrise that haunts you forever), missing the bus out of that village (where you wind up dancing the night away with the local tribesmen), and taking the wrong trail (down which you meet the fellow-trekker who saves your life and becomes your best friend).

��ϳԹ�� means embracing both serendipity and disaster, and it happens when you—yes you, no one else—suddenly have to solve a problem in which the wrong move can have dire consequences. So for truly hazardous journeys—or at least until you've learned enough from good teachers and guides to know what you're doing—go with an outfitter. But pay close attention, be a passionate student of outdoor lore, and live for the day you go out and do it all yourself.

Contributing Editor Mark Jenkins writes The Hard Way column.

Expedition Biking

Hell on Wheels

Biking from Kazakhstan to Pakistan
OUTFITTER: KE ��ϳԹ�� Travel; 800-497-9675; www.keadventure.com
COST: $3,345
DATES: July 28-August 19
MILEAGE: 590

As you pick your way through the landslides, washouts, yaks, and myriad other obstacles on the torturous climb to 15,525-foot Khunjerab Pass on the Karakoram Highway, you will ponder a dismount. And as you curse and crank through this, the 16th day of your 590-mile slog from Kazakhstan to Pakistan, it won't be the first time you've wavered. Don't succumb. Keep pedaling and think about all that you've accomplished so far. You have biked a total of 35,000 vertical feet through the five major mountain ranges of Central Asia (including three other 10,000-foot-plus passes), all of them on eroded jeep roads and knife-carved singletrack.

You began by breaking in your jet-lagged legs with a relaxed 40-mile ride through the narrow Oyzhaylau Gorge out of Almaty in the foothills of the Tien Shen Range. On day three, facing a 3,500-foot climb to the top of Kazakhstan's Zhambas Pass, you glanced longingly at your six-wheel-drive Russian support vehicle, so bleary-eyed that you almost missed the background views of the 7,000-meter peaks of the Kungay Alatau Range. You survived the ballistic descent from the Mingtur Pass into Kyrgyzstan, clinging to steep, rice-terraced, and scree-sloped canyons. You cycled against fierce headwinds toward Kashgar, China, along an old Soviet-era double electric fence with nothing but a high desert of shocking brown to distract you. And in the half-day's rest allotted for the trip, you gathered strength for a side climb to the 14,000-foot base camp of Mustagh Atah and canvassed the Kashgar markets of a trading oasis that's seen traffic as a Silk Road cloverleaf for more than two millennia.

Now focus again on the Karakoram Highway below your tires—a road that took more than 20 years to build, claiming at least 500 Pakistani and Chinese lives prior to its official opening in 1986. It's widely considered to be one of the largest engineering feats since the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. Still not inspired? Picture the 7,000-foot descent from the top of Khunjerab Pass down through apricot orchards and poplar stands into Pakistan's lush, glacier-carved Hunza Valley. That should do the trick.

OR, DO IT YOURSELF…

The Great Divide Mountain Bike Trail
WHEN TO GO: May-September
MILEAGE: 2,468

“It's the first time I've had to walk my bike in 20 years,” says Brian Martindale, tour director of the ��ϳԹ�� Cycling Association, a Missoula-based bicycle-touring group, about his 74-day, 2,468-mile Great Divide Trail mountain-bike journey last summer. The ride, through public lands over dirt roads from Port of Roosville, on the Montana-Canada border, to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, is a challenge, to say the least, and not just because of the climbing (more than 3,000 feet per day) or the constant repairs (chains, spokes, and drivetrains don't fare well on the rutted roads). More taxing, it turned out for Martindale, were the surprises involved in a prolonged, remote cross-country epic: “In New Mexico,”he says, “we hit summer monsoons that left us pushing our bikes through a foot of mud for two days when it was supposed to be warm and dry.”

The ACA offers a guided tour, but the Great Divide is ideal for experienced bike tourers who covet self-contained adventure. Detailed maps with geographical information and a directory of grocery stores, bike shops, and post offices to ship bike parts in advance along the route are available from the ACA for $56. And this year's book, Cycling the Great Divide, by Michael McCoy, provides information on suggested riding distances, campsites, and natural history. “But when the monsoons hit,” says Martindale, “you're on your own for mud flaps.” For more information, contact the ��ϳԹ�� Cycling Association at 800-755-2453 or www.adv-cycling.org.��

��

CYCLING THE KARAKORAM: HAVE YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES?

Strength/endurance: “This trip is much more demanding physically than it is technically. It's for people who love their bikes, and spend the bulk of their free time riding,” says Dan Hudson, a 1998 veteran of the journey. Two months prior to the trip, try to fit in two high-intensity, short rides and one 40- to 50-mile ride each week.

Mental Fitness: “The catalog description alone does half of our client screening,” says Mark Van Alstine, a guide on the 23-day trip. “Then we make sure those interested are as prepared mentally as they are physically.” Clients should be adaptable to harsh conditions: washouts, mud slides, closed passes, and 30-mile-per-hour headwinds.

Environmental Challenges: The trip runs in midsummer, but at 10,000 feet, a wide range of conditions is possible, from Death Valley heat to full-on blizzards.

Skills: Ability to balance on two wheels required.

EXPEDITION BIKERS' READING LIST:

For Inspiration: Bicycling Across Siberia, by Mark Jenkins. The whirlwind account of four Russians' and three Americans' 7,000-mile, five-month ride from the Sea of Japan to Leningrad.

For Practical Know-How: Bicycle Touring: How to Prepare for Long Rides, by Steve Butterman. A concise tutorial that answers all your burning questions in 88 pages. Pound-for-pound, it's the best book on the subject.

Wing-Tips in the Mire

Tough Parables

I'm trying to remember all the wonderful gear I carried with me on a hike I took into the bush in Mindanao, in the Philippines, to interview a rebel leader, or dato, named Mantokan. The dato, who had been subsisting on pilfered livestock and meager tribute in the jungles of the big southern island for a dozen years, led a ragged pack of Muslim separatist guerrillas who took potshots at whatever and whoever represented the government at the time. It was a slow, simmering uprising that had never quite been put down, not even after an all-out bombing campaign during the latter years of Ferdinand Marcos's dictatorship, in which tens of thousands of Mindanaoans perished.

I had what I needed to make it in and out comfortably, or so I theorized. Nothing very fancy: a Ziploc bag holding a pound of my homemade instant energy drink (equal parts powdered milk, Nescafé, protein powder, and chocolate-flavored Nestlé's Quik), a few ounces of powdered Purex laundry bleach (for disinfectant), notepads made of rainproof paper, and even a NASA-designed pen that could write in zero-gravity conditions, just in case. I had a sharp hat, too, one of those Australian hats with a brim that snaps. And I was in shape. I'd been training for months, lifting weights and backpacking in the hills of northern California. Days before boarding the plane for the Philippines, I'd taken a five-mile trail with a full pack over mountainous terrain in under an hour. Never before had I been so fit, and never since.

The plan seemed simple at the time. I'd made arrangements to hook up with a pair of guides in a tiny mountain hamlet called Ang-gaan, which was a ten-mile hike from my base of operations, the village of Damulog, in central Mindanao. On the first day I would have to carry everything I'd brought with me to the islands, not more than 20 pounds in all. Once I reached Ang-gaan I would shed a few pounds before starting the hard part, a long march further into the mountains. As it turned out, I trudged through such a succession of tropical downpours and encountered so much mud in that first, putatively easy ten-mile stretch that I felt obliged to discard my canvas hiking shoes in Ang-gaan and put on my dry ones, a pair of street shoes. Wing-tips, as a matter of fact. The next morning I hiked into the jungle hills prepared for any social occasion.

My guides were Roberto Saliling, the headman of Ang-gaan, and Siawan Mantawil, an uncle of Mantokan. The old uncle had the flat, weary features of a very wise Eskimo. Both he and Roberto were shrunken and nearly meatless—almost, you might say, like animated mummies. They were each close to 60, but still they moved right along. Roberto carried a liter-size Coke bottle full of water on a string, and Siawan carried a spear. They brought nothing else.

Judging by a map I'd bought in Manila at a store where women sat at tables drawing them out by hand with colored pencils, my rendezvous point with Mantokan on the Polangi River lay 25 to 30 miles away. The jungle people we met were curious about where I was going. “Don't go to the Polangi River,” they all told me. “You'll meet vampires. Witches. They have malaria and diseases. You can be kidnapped by the Tad-tad”—a twisted Christian sect whose name meant “chop-chop.” I didn't worry about any of this because I trusted my guides to keep me safe. And anyway, I'd lived in Manila for half my childhood without getting bit by malarial mosquitoes or vampires.

For the first five miles, we hiked along a wide path beaten smooth by carabao hooves. It narrowed gradually until we were holding our arms to our chests to keep from being sliced by thorns. Soon the path became a figment in Uncle Siawan's mind. No getting away from the thorns now, and the blood ran down our arms. The general rhythm was up and over one small mountain after another. The ground was an aggressive and savage red muck as fully alive as the plants growing out of it, really maniacal stuff that clung to my shoes, building up under the soles, clambering over the sides and engulfing me up to the ankles. It didn't dissolve in water and couldn't be swished away in a creek. I struggled along with my wing-tip footwear encased in two massive red cakes as heavy as concrete. Meanwhile Siawan and Roberto, barefoot, floated along like a couple of ghosts.

About 12 miles in we waded into a sea of chest-high elephant grass with a six-inch-wide path cut through it, somewhere in the region of our feet. Now, in addition to the mud underfoot, we had the sun overhead. I perspired in torrents. My khakis were sopping, my pockets full of sweat. I filled my jug at every creek, and still it was always empty. I knew I was drinking too much—it was making me queasy. Siawan and Roberto took only an occasional mouthful from their liter bottle and spat it out.

“You shouldn't drink from the streams,” Roberto told me. “There are people using the stream for bathroom.”

I wasn't listening. If it did kill me—good! A little rest!

Coming up a rise not a mile from the camp where we were to meet Mantokan, my legs suddenly turned to mush and I collapsed and fainted. The two 60-year-olds hoisted me upright, got my arms around their tiny shoulders, and dragged me up the hill to a level spot where I could lie down and recover while they stood around chatting and smoking cigarettes rolled from some foul leaf.

I got no article that trip. I made the last mile, but Mantokan never showed. We spent three days and nights in a barn with two dozen emaciated young Muslim guerrillas, at least half of whom were down with a vicious strain of malaria. Out behind their makeshift barracks were 30 or 40 fresh graves.

With the help of Roberto and Siawan, I made it back to Damulog, and by a series of lucky flukes I snagged buses, jeeps, and jets in quick enough succession to get me home to northern California before the intestinal microbes struck. While waiting for pills in a local clinic, I got the chills. Then I discovered I was pissing blood. I spent nine days in the cardiac care unit of a Santa Rosa hospital with malaria, hepatitis, and dysentery. It was a good three months before I was able to get out of my sickbed and start looking for fresh ways to embarrass myself.

Denis Johnson is the author of Jesus' Son and Fiskadoro, among other works. His new novel, The Name of the World, is out this month from HarperCollins.

Polar Exploration

The Vanishing Point

Skiing to the North Pole
OUTFITTER: The Polar Travel Company; 011-44-1364-631-470; www.polartravel.co.uk
COST: $45,000
DATES: Feb 25-May 18, 2001
MILEAGE: 690

By the time U.S. Navy Admiral Robert E. Peary boasted of having become the first person to reach the North Pole, on April 6, 1909 (a claim that's still disputed), he had made a total of six attempts, during which he ended up eating his weaker dogs and losing eight toes to frostbite—two of which he broke off while removing his socks. Today, getting to the top of the world isn't nearly so traumatic.Guests on a standard trip aboard a nuclear-powered ice-breaking cruise ship have access to a sauna on the way up, and then they can shake mittens at the champagne-and-barbecue celebration on the ice once they arrive. But for those seeking a more challenging experience that still won't entail dining on doggie or losing digits, British polar guide Pen Hadow's premiere spring 2001 ski odyssey from Cape Arkticheskiy, Russia, to the Pole and a flight back might be the way to go.It'll take you two months and span more than 690 miles. And for every step of the journey, you'll be hauling a 225-pound sledge loaded with fuel, comestibles, tents, and other pieces of gear designed to prevent you from becoming a permanent part of the landscape.

The trip will merge the misery of Sisyphus with the mission statement of a Grand Canyon pack mule. After a nine-hour day hauling your baggage over, say, 11 miles of ice, followed by a night shivering with your tentmates in minus-40-degree cold, you might wake to discover that wind-driven pack ice has transported your heavy kit and your exhausted caboodle seven miles back south—sometimes all the way to where you were the previous morning. Pushing northward again—and again and again and again—takes perseverance.

And flexibility. “The only thing predictable about skiing to the North Pole is that it's unpredictable,” says Caroline Hamilton, who collaborated with Hadow on a North Pole trip in 1997. “Just when you start to relax, something happens.” A beautiful day transmogrifies into a soul-numbing whiteout; ice ahead of you buckles into an insurmountable ridge. But the blend of uncertainty, hardship, and challenge can offer an elixir far more intoxicating than cheap champagne, says Hadow, a 12-year veteran of polar travel who traces his love of the Arctic to his childhood caretaker, Nanny Wigley, who also looked after famed polar explorer Sir Robert F. Scott's son. The agonizingly slow progress also means you'll have time to discover, digest, and appreciate the Arctic's subtle aesthetics: the vibrancy of total silence, the adamantine clarity of a polar dawn, ice blocks carved into abstract shapes that Henry Moore would envy. “You'd think going to the pole would be all white, but it's not,” says Hamilton. “You see so much blue. It's incredibly beautiful, that nothingness.”

NEXT TIME TRY:

Skiing to the South Pole
Aventuras Patagonicas; 888-203-9354; www.patagonicas.com
November-December 2000

Although 17th-century mapmakers called Antarctica “Terra Australis Incognita”—the Unknown Southern Land—skiing to the bottom of the world is less of a mystery than reaching its polar opposite. No decisions about which way to go around frigid leads, no drifting ice. Point your skis south, and south you'll go. That's not to say, however, that skiing halfway across the world's highest, driest, and coldest continent is easy. Rodrigo Mujica, the owner of Jackson, Wyoming-based Aventuras Patagonicas, plans to lead a group on a 600-mile, 60-day unsupported ski expedition from the foot of the Ellsworth Mountains to the South Pole during the austral summer. In addition to the continent's ever-present cold (minus 25 isn't rare) and blinding windstorms, clients will encounter a level of bleakness unmatched anywhere else on the planet. “There's nothing for hundreds of miles,” Mujica admits. “It can make you crazy.”

DON'T DO IT YOURSELF

Only veterans have the experience to overcome the myriad dangers in the world's polar regions, where the learning curve is steep and where falling off it means you'll probably die. Upshot: Go with a guide, or don't go at all.

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The Very Short History of Nunavut

sperkins-pom — Thu, 01 Jul 1999 00:00:00 +0000

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On the first of April, 1999, I had the privilege of watching as a new territory came into being, for most of the right reasons. The birth happened at midnight, in Canada’s far north, with fireworks instead of bloodshed. I had just returned from Kosovo, and while I was watching the bright detonations over Iqaluit, the new capital of the new Nunavut,

NATO bombers were busy over Yugoslavia. I could not help thinking of the faraway blossoms of those incendiary shells as I stood at the edge of the sea-ice that night when Nunavut became real, with Inuit children calling and roaring with happiness at each explosion. The fireworks hung like palm fronds around the full moon, offering green comets instead of leaves, and the silhouettes of gloved and parkaed people standing in the snow took on noonday life for a moment, until the light faded. Snow scuttered like gravel underfoot. There came more and more bursts, celebrated by fur-ruffed kids sitting on a high hillock of snow that had gone glassy with ice. With the windchill it was 40 below; my face was numb; my pen froze. I’ll never forget the dark figures on the pale snow, the rapturous cries, the fireworks’ remarkable purity and clarity in that cold air. Every fiery star seemed as solid as a shard of glass in a kaleidoscope, and we could see its slowly dimming fall to the ice. Witnessing all around me the joy of the Nunavummiut, who had regained some control over their nation at lastùafter all, Nunavut means “our land”ùI was moved almost to tears.

If you look at a map and take in the vastness of that balsamic paradise called Canada, you will quickly see why Nunavut, huge as it is, remains outside the ken of so many Canadians, let alone the rest of the world.

“Nunavut? What’s that?” said a taxi driver in Montreal when I passed through on my way north to Iqaluit. “Le Grand Nord,” I tried to explain. “ðle de Baffin, ðle d’Ellesmere, ðle de…”

He shrugged. He didn’t really care. Because Nunavut lies so far away from almost everything! We’re speaking of one-fifth of Canada’s landmass, it’s trueù730,000 square miles with one paved road, only 25,000 people, and 27 times that many caribou. But Canada, like Russia, can scarcely see and count herself in her entirety. Two square miles or two million, it’s all the same to Canada. And so until now the conception, the idea, of Nunavut has lain neglected, misunderstood. But the actual ground of Nunavut itself? Well, for centuries explorers, whalers, merchants, politicians, and soldiers have been coming here to the frozen edge of the worldùfirst only to where the ice began as they crept and surveyed, clinging to the safety of water, the safety of summer’s final channels, dark blue and corduroyed with sunlight, with the white cloud-puzzles overhead, past overhung ice-puzzlesùand then the white people calculated, gambled, stepped onto the ice.

Pretty soon some were doing well, like a Quebecer taxi driver I know in Iqaluit who stops by the Navigator Inn late at night when Inuit carvers sell their greenstone animal figures cheap because they crave drunkenness; my acquaintance pays $60 per piece and sends them to his sister down south, who sells them for $400, keeps a ten percent commission, and returns him the rest, so he clears a tax-free ten grand a year from that racket alone. Decades of cigarette smoking have awarded him the voice of an Inuit throat-singer, and in those ragged tones he always promises to lead me to the best carvers or, if I don’t go for that, he can score me drugs, or anoint me a member of a top-secret club whose purpose is to help me get really close to Inuit girls.

I rarely stay in Arctic towns on my visits north. I come with my shelter on my back; I get off the plane and I start walking. Two or three miles outside of town I pitch my tent. I come in a few times and try to make friends. I go to church on Sundays and listen to the Inuit pray for the Queen of England in Inuktitut. But mostly I leave them alone. I am here to listen to wind and water.

What does Nunavut look like? This is difficult for me to say, not only because deep down I don’t want you to go to the Arctic, and I feel guilty about going myselfùNunavut should be left to the Nunavummiutùbut also because so many happy images and memories swirl behind my eyes whenever I think about this land. I wrote a novel set in the Canadian Arctic landscape, and I could write many more: pods of whales, polar bears, caribou running on ridge tops, summer moss, summer berries, mosquito crowds dense enough to blacken your face, cold that hurts, a sun that goes round and round in the sky like a clock without ever setting, long days and nights of winter moonlight bright enough to read a newspaper by (if you could stop shivering), the low elongations of the land, the blues and purples of the frozen sea, the sulphur-smelling crags of Baffin Island, waist- and shoulder-high rivers to ford, herds of musk oxen gathered (their spiked horns pointing out) in circles like immense wagon wheels, fossilized ferns and pine needles in valleys of icy shale, light, closeness to the sky, and above all, solitude.

I love that land, but it is not mine. It can never belong to me. When I was younger I once thought about settling here, in which case I would have become a member of the 15 percent of the Nunavummiut who aren’t of Inuit extraction. Few of those people stay for long. So the land is truly not even mine to describe. To do so is to describe the Inuit themselves, because the Inuit are the land and the land belongs to them.

An Inuit woman named Elisapi has been my translator on several visits to the far northern settlement of Resolute; she is gentle, quiet, and plain, a serious, fortyish woman to whom I have always felt I could say anything. What word can describe her better than pure? But then I am always saying this about Inuit. To borrow from some idiot’s remark about pornography, I can’t define purity, but I know it when I see it. In Elisapi’s case I think of kindness and patience and an unassuming spirituality. I hate even to write this much; I don’t want to invade her soul with my conjectures and blundering definitions. Once, when I asked her what she thought was the most beautiful place in the Arctic, Elisapi looked at me in surprise and said, “Why, the land, of course. All the land.”

What Elisapi loves above all else is to be “out on the land”ùa phrase of almost mystic significance to Nunavummiut. Out on the land! On one of my trips to Iqaluit I met the wife of a carver, a slender woman who engraves brooches of walrus ivory. “I love to hunt anything,” she saidùthe same words I’d already heard uttered by so many. “I’ve killed caribou, seal, walrus. I never killed a whale or a polar bear but my niece killed both already.” She spoke with immense pride.

Elisapi, her husband, Joe, and their children have spent many a summer in a hunting camp on the ice. Even non-Inuit get infected. I’ve heard a Quebecer schoolteacher here use the same words: She was going to take her children out on the land for Easter, if the wind didn’t prove too cold for the little ones. A young Anglo man I met in Apex, a little offshoot of Iqaluit, was always saying, “Man, I wish I were out on the land. Man, I wish I had a machine.”

I remember the day Elisapi told me about the way she feels about the land. There was a strange light upon the hills and hollows, the armpits and throats of the white country, with the snow-covered sea pale blue like open water, and when Elisapi spoke, a feeling between love and sadness came over me, the same feeling I have year after year in the Arctic when I’m alone with mountains or musk oxen, far away beneath the sky.

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Do I have your permission to compress the history of the Canadian Arctic into nine paragraphs? In 1576 Martin Frobisher sailed from England to seek the Northwest Passage. He anchored off Baffin Island, which now forms the eastern boundary of Nunavut, and loaded up his ship with tons of fool’s gold while kidnapping other cargo: a man and an Inuit woman holding a small child by the hand. Frobisher’s men carried them away from an elder, perhaps the child’s grandmother, who “howled horribly.” Perhaps it is no wonder that the capital, the only town of any size (population 4,500), which stands upon the site of the mariner’s landing and which for years and years was called Frobisher Bay, changed its name to Iqaluit—”the place of many big fish.” The locals would rather not remember him.

In Frobisher’s time, Inuit families were self-sufficient, or else they starved. But then whalers from England and Scotland and elsewhere began to trade knives, needles, tea, rifles, and bullets for furs, meat, and ivory. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, subsistence hunting lost ground to the fur trade—although even now, as much as half of what some Nunavummiut eat remains “country food”: caribou, seal, whale, ptarmigan, and the like, killed by relatives or friends. It was only in the second half of this century, when Canadian and American World War II air bases and then English-language schools mushroomed in the high Arctic, that the Inuit began to live in towns, 28 little government-created settlements scattered over the snow and ice.

The growing dependence on trading with outsiders proved sometimes beneficial, sometimes pernicious. What happens if, instead of killing caribou to feed my family, I hunt Arctic foxes to sell their skins for bullets? Then we earn a lot of bullets, provided that the price of fox skins stays high in the south and my caribou hunting is easy. But if the price falls, we just might starve, which dozens did in the 1934-35 central Arctic famine. We might also starve, or simply become idle and despondent, if hunting seals or whales were no longer acceptable, as happened in the 1970s and ’80s when Greenpeace and other environmental and animal-rights groups crippled the international sealskin trade. These do-gooders are accordingly hated throughout the Arctic; with varying degrees of justification, unemployment and suicides have been blamed on them. Many’s the time in Nunavut and Greenland that I’ve been asked, “Are you a spy from Greenpeace?”

It was in part to protect the Inuit from a drastic boom-and-bust cycle that, in the 1960s, Canada’s federal politicians began to encourage the construction of hamlets where people could enjoy medical care, education, warm beds, and an uninterrupted food supply. An old lady who’d been born in an igloo once told me, “In old days we had a very hard time. Government came, and it got easier.” We sat on the sofa in her house in Iqaluit’s tumble of old military hangars and prefab housing and unnamed gravel roads. I asked her, “If people wanted to live on the land again, would you go with them or would you stay in your house?” Sitting with her hands clasped in her lap, her head trembling, perhaps from Parkinson’s disease, she peered at me through her huge and rimless spectacles, and then replied in high-pitched, glottal Inuktitut, “I can’t stay in a remote outpost now. From the hospital they’re giving me medicine, so I must stay in town.”

And so, on southern Nunavut’s green-mossed rock, painted oil drums, painted wood-and-metal houses, and garbage dumps rose up in the summer rain. In northern Nunavut, the colored houses appeared upon tan gravel banks. Of course, this new way of life further accelerated the very dependence which had already caused so much harm. I wonder if by then the future was already as evident as a yellow light bulb in Iqaluit glaring down on rock-hard snow. That future was mass welfare. Animal populations declined near the towns, making hunting less practical and more occasional. Dog teams sickened in the close quarters. More than one hunter came home in those days only to find that the Mounties had shot all his dogs in the interest of public health—for the white people, it seemed, always knew best. Could this have anything to do with the fact that Nunavut has six times the national suicide rate?

The most famous of these resettlement efforts took place between 1953 and 1955, when the government forcibly relocated some 17 extended Inuit families from Inukjuak to new settlements at Resolute and Grise Fiord. Inukjuak lies way down in northern Quebec, nearly 400 miles south of Nunavut as the Arctic raven flies. To me it is almost paradise. It is green, not white. In summer the tundra hangs thick with crowberries and caribou run everywhere. In winter the sun never disappears entirely. Elisapi’s mother, Old Annie, who sewed my kamiks, the sealskin boots I wear on my feet, was born in a camp there. She never wanted to leave. But they shipped her north.

Some Inuit believe that the Canadian government wanted to assert sovereignty over the high Arctic islands in the face of the American air bases strategically placed there in World War II, and therefore settled them with the indigenous people most likely to survive. But it should also be said that Inukjuak was not so edenic in the late 1940s: The caribou herds were dwindling, the price of fur had fallen, the people were falling deeper into welfare addiction. The government figured, paternalistically, why not just move some Inuit to the northern ice and let them become the self-sufficient hunters of old. For good measure, they also relocated some families from Ellesmere Island’s Pond Inlet—northerners to help the southerners settle in. But the relocations were accomplished against people’s wills, with misinformation, and with appalling results. The people from Inukjuak were unfamiliar with the hunting strategies they needed to succeed on the Arctic pack ice; they didn’t even get along with the Pond Inlet Inuit, who didn’t even speak the same dialect. Look at a map of Canada to see how far away from home these people were taken. See Inukjuak on the northeastern shore of Hudson Bay? Now let your eyes sail north as the Canadian Navy sealift-supply ship C.D. Howe did, carrying those Inuit families: first 300 miles into what is now Nunavut (we’re out of Hudson Bay at last) and then perhaps 1,000 miles farther north and 200 miles west, almost to the magnetic North Pole.

The first time I went to Resolute, it was mid-August, around the same time the settlers had arrived, and it was snowing. By the time I left six weeks later, I had to chop up my drinking water with an ax. “When we arrived it was dark and cold,” an old woman told me. “My child was really skinny from starving.” The Inukjuak Inuit, who had never built igloos, constructed houses out of old packing crates and foraged for food in the garbage dumps of the whites, a sparse scattering of whom were stationed there with the Mounties, who oversaw a trading post in Resolute. For high prices, payable in furs, an Inuit hunter could obtain a scant few supplies, but sometimes there was an additional price—the sexual services of his wife. The results of the relocations: hunger, tuberculosis, lifelong bitterness.

The communities in Resolute and Grise Fiord survived, because Inuit are pretty damned tough. And in the more than 20-year-long tale of the land-claims negotiations that created Nunavut, one reads a similar tenacity. What Nunavut gained—besides more than a billion Canadian dollars over the next 14 years and valuable mineral rights—was a measure of self-governance. Nunavut is now a territory, exactly like the Yukon, exactly like the Northwest Territories it had been part of. What the Inuit gave up was the land. One of the only native North American groups who had never entered into a land treaty, many Inuit were anxious about extinguishing aboriginal title, and when the matter first came up for election in 1982, only 56 percent voted in favor of division. But what ultimately passed in 1993—the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act—was the biggest land deal between a government and an aboriginal people in North American history. Suffice it to say that in the face of federal skepticism and infighting and bureaucratic foot-dragging and worse, a partition line was at long last drawn through the Northwest Territories. What lay east became Nunavut.

To me it was a kind of miracle that this good thing was about to happen. And Iqaluit, which like so many Arctic towns is saturated with militaryspeak from the air-base days, seemed filled instead with joyspeak. Late in the evening on that last night of Northwest Territoriality, the bunkerlike elementary school filled with crowds come to hear the Anglican service in honor of Nunavut’s birth. The stage was bedecked with figures in red and white robes, and the minister said, “We must remember that what we call Nunavut, our land, is in fact God’s gift to us.” In front of me was a little girl, half asleep in her mother’s amauti, a parka with a hooded pouch in back for carrying babies. “We pray for our new commissioner,” the minister went on, “for our new premier, for their families, for our new justices, who will be sworn in in a few moments, and most of all we pray for ourselves.” In that cavernous, windowless gymnasium, built on concrete like a shop floor, they rose and prayed in English, French, and Inuktitut. “Now may the blessing of God Almighty be with us, both now and indeed forevermore. Amen.” Then the minister smiled, checked his watch, and said, “Twenty-two minutes,” and everyone laughed. In Inuktitut they sang “Now Thank We All Our God” in sweet and steady voices. A woman in a crimson vest embroidered with a white polar bear leaned her head upon her husband’s shoulder as she sang.

A Nunavut for Nunavummiut—only some of the white cab drivers were sullen about it. Their taxi lights shone slow on the glassy night snow between the still, cold lights of the settlement.

The new territory purports to represent the interests of all residents, but the ultimate goal is to create a de facto self-governing Inuit homeland—not now, of course, but in 20 or 50 years. Today the non-Inuit 15 percent of the population holds a disproportionate number of the government, medical, and teaching jobs. Few Inuit are trained. Only a third of Nunavut’s teachers are Inuit; there are no Inuit doctors; there is only one Inuit lawyer in all of Nunavut, 34-year-old Paul Okalik, and he has been elected its first premier. A high-school dropout from Pangnirtung, a little village on the eastern shore of Baffin Island, Okalik wrestled with alcohol problems, jail, and his brother’s suicide before going back to school on student loans. Despite his involvement in the Nunavut negotiations, he is as freshly minted a politician as Nunavut is a territory: He passed the bar and became premier within six weeks. The new territory’s elder statesman—the father of Nunavut—is John Amagoalik, the journalist-politician who negotiated the land-claims settlement that created it and ran the Nunavut Implementation Commission that shaped its government. Sixteen of Nunavut’s 19 legislators are Inuit, too—a few former mayors, some businessmen, a snowplow operator. Starting on Nunavut Day, when a white person in the territorial government wrote a memo to his superiors, the reply might well come back in Inuktitut.

“They cannot just want to throw white people away,” a Quebecer teacher named Thérèse, who works at the elementary school in Iqaluit, told me. “Not all of the Inuit are qualified.” But then she added quietly, “I know some white people are afraid of losing their jobs, but gradually they should be replaced.”

Plenty of Caucasians do fine in Nunavut: Elisapi’s husband, Joe, for one, is white and as northern an individual as I have ever met. But many find living in Nunavut difficult. The language daunts them; the mores are so different. Thérèse had spent four years in Iqaluit, but she planned to return south. She had a few Inuit friends, acquaintances really, from work. But Nunavut was not hers.

Meanwhile, in northern Quebec, the Inuit region known as Nunavik (from which the relocations to Resolute and Grise Fiord were carried out) harbors similar, half-concealed aspirations to autonomy. And down in Ottawa, even as Nunavut set off its fireworks, Cree Indians were drumming and singing on Parliament Hill in protest of the new territory, on the grounds that 31,000 square miles of their land have been stolen to create it. And of course, many Quebecers long to secede from Canada and form their own Francophone nation. The white taxi drivers I talked with in Iqaluit are among this number: They told me that this whole Nunavut business was all shit. The Inuit weren’t ready, one of them opined. Quebec should secede, but not Nunavut. Quebec pays too much in taxes, and Canada just called Quebecers fucking frogs. The Prime Minister was an asshole. This last cabbie was an angry, stupid man, but, like the Inuit themselves, all he really wanted was some kind of recognition.

Finally, from what now remains of the Northwest Territories comes talk of further partitions and ethnic homelands. There was a move to rename this region Denedeh because so much of it was Dene Indian land, but the whites (who’d become the majority after the partition of Nunavut) voted down the measure, after which a bitter joke went around the Northwest Territories that the only real way to satisfy them would be to call the territory by the Anglo name of Bob.

Given the desire of so many places to un-Canada themselves to varying degrees, I was all the more impressed when the prime minster of Canada, Jean Chrétien, who had flown up to Iqaluit for the Nunavut Day festivities, rated justice over expediency in his speech that night. “We have come to recognize the right of the people of the north to take control of their own destiny,” he proclaimed. And everyone stood up and cheered, and I cheered.

It would be as pleasing as it would be false to end our tale with the close of that inaugural ceremony in one of the concrete military hangar bays, as tiny old Helen Mamyaok Maksagak, first commissioner of Nunavut, hugged to her heart the flag of her territory, presented to her by Inuit boys from Canada’s Boy Scouts, the Junior Rangers. Or to conclude on Nunavut Night, the evening after the fireworks, where a heavy-metal band from Kuujuaq was entertaining one crowd with noise and dry-ice vapor while two hangars down the little kids were jigging to banjo and fiddle, and the old ladies in parkas were nodding, smiling, clapping, and everyone was applauding, and Premier Okalik was wandering around in his sealskin vest, floating in a shyly happy dream.

The air grew hot with the fragrance of bubble gum, wet fur, human sweat. Dancers came out, circling and snaking to the repetitive melody; an old man in a red cap and a collar of wolverine skins with the claws still on jogged happily up and down, watching. So many people with Nunavut hats and T-shirts, so many with the new Nunavut sweatshirts! But finally it was time to go back out among the gray snowdrifts and glaring streetlights of April, back to the steep-roofed houses to sleep. And the next morning and forever the tale of Nunavut must continue, this time without miraculous ceremonies.

“I’ve already given you enough beer,” the white waiter in Iqaluit’s Komatik Restaurant told the Inuit grandmother and her toothless boyfriend. “So I’ll just put your next beer in the fridge and give it to you next time.”

At this, the boyfriend started crying out in Inuktitut, and the grandmother joined in, wailing, “How come you? How come?”

“You cannot drink them tonight because you don’t need the beer,” the waiter insisted. “You’ve had too much. That’s the end of the conversation.”

“Where’s my beer?” the grandmother demanded. “Where’s my goddamned beer?” She wore a T-shirt printed in memory of a friend who’d died. Her eyes were lights glaring on ice; her words were breath-steam in the night. She was 44 years old.

“If you keep this up,” the waiter said, “there’ll be trouble.”

It was two nights after Nunavut Day. I’d seen her earlier that afternoon before she was drunk, a big, squat woman with cropped hair, upslanted eyes, and a downpouted mouth. She was pale and old; her arms were covered with cooking burns. One of her sisters had died of cancer, another of alcoholism, a brother in a car accident (the car ran over his head). The last brother had hanged himself “because he was crazy,” she said.

Now, as the waiter refused to serve her and her boyfriend, I invited them back to my hotel, which stood almost within sight of the restaurant. The grandmother’s boyfriend didn’t want to come. He stayed on at the Komatik, wiggling his fingers, feebly bewildered.

So the grandmother and I walked and she whined and wept, because she was very cold. Her ancient parka didn’t zip anymore, and the alcohol had only pretended to warm her, in much the same fashion that the low sun can gild a house’s siding so that it glows and shines against the blue snow with spurious preciousness. I offered to let her wear my parka but she wouldn’t. She kept crying: “Too cold! Ikkii!” She touched my hand and said: “You cold. Cold! You too cold! Ikkii! Better you eat like Inuk. Eat meat. Eat caribou, walrus, seal…”

Anytime I wanted her to smile, I only had to ask her what animals she liked to hunt. She’d reply: “Any kind!” and would commence counting off the different animals on her fingers, uttering the Inuktitut names. Earlier that evening, with the beer not yet raging in her, she remained a wise old huntress. Just as caribou are sometimes silhouetted against snow, especially on ridges and when they crouch down to graze, snowy-white-on-white, so her memories stood out or hid, browsing and drowsing within her, living their own life. She could scarcely read or write, but (or perhaps therefore) she could remember. And for her, animals were the most vividly numinous entities.

I said that I wanted to go hunting sometime with her or her family, at which she began to check me out very seriously and soberly, saying, “OK, Bill, you got the mitts, you got the coat; you can come hunting. Your pants gonna be cold, though.” Not having planned on hunting again this trip, I’d left my windpants back in America.

We were outside then. It was 20 below zero. Later that night, I wandered wearily through one of Iqaluit’s arcade malls, my hood thrown back, my parka unzipped, wearing my kamiks since I had no other shoes, my mitts dangling conveniently from strings at my sleeves. A slender young Inuit girl, high or crazed, began mocking me and eventually came running down the hall and punched me and kicked me, shrieking: “Where are you from, Daddy-o? What are you doing with all that fuckin’ stupid gear?”

She herself was dressed like a southern California girl, and I wondered whether she had been among those serenely happy crowds on Nunavut Day, those people clapping grimy work gloves and sealskin mitts, while the fur ruffs of their parkas swirled in the wind. So angry and sad, did she care about Nunavut?

For her, the beauties of utility had given way to the beauties of fashion. Moreover, in so many young people’s eyes, utility and fashion married one another in synthetic apparel. On a walk in Apex, I found myself promenading beside a young Anglo guy with dyed hair along the community’s frozen shore, past rocks and trash cans protruding from the snow. He wore camouflage pants and a brand-name American parka. As we approached the frozen drifts on the frozen sea, with the wide, low domes of snow-islands ahead, he was telling me about one of his adventures over the winter. “We were fuckin’ set up, man. We had fuckin’ beer and the whole fuckin’ nine yards. Then we got slammed with a 120-kilometer wind and, well, we lay down between our snowmobiles and we made it.” He had no use for caribou-skin clothing, and neither did I.

In that mall, to be sure, I was ludicrously overdressed. My old huntress did not find me so. She was charitable and practical; she was gentle, open, giving. But later that night she was drunk; now she was crazy, too. A hundred years ago, she might have been better off—unless, of course, she’d starved to death. Now she could drink herself to death.

For her, perhaps, Nunavut had arrived too late; it would differ too painfully from her code of life. This new thing, Nunavut, is as beautiful as a woman’s parka trimmed with strips of fur and strips of patterned cloth, as ugly as scraps of plastic dancing in an Arctic wind.

But who can foresee Nunavut’s future even five years ahead? It’s an experiment, full of vigor and nobility, the government resolutely, democratically local, with its ten departments housed in ten widely spread Arctic towns. And Premier Okalik is an Inuit leader, as bright and optimistic as the territory. No doubt he and the other young politicians will grow old; perhaps they’ll fall into nepotism and inertia until the political landscape freezes like the laundry on a clothesline covered with Easter snow. But for now he seems committed.

On Nunavut Day, the elders gathered in the hangar bays cheered Okalik—he was their young man, homegrown. But precisely because he was theirs, they didn’t have to stand on ceremony, and so their kids ran loudly in and out. Perhaps Okalik won the election because he exemplified the pragmatic modesty and moderation that has always served Inuit so well, the genial humility that had his colleagues in the territorial negotiations introducing one another’s speeches with aw-shucks humor, insisting that at the beginning they didn’t even know what a land claim was. Now, when Okalik came to the podium, he declared, “We have achieved our goal through negotiations without civil disobedience….We hope we can contribute to the prosperity and diversity of Canada.”

Here was no separatist poison, no threat to the sovereignty of the country at large. Nunavut remained Canadian—with a difference, of course. At the conclusion of the inaugural ceremony, they sang the national anthem, but this rendition of “O Canada” must have startled Prime Minister Chrétien and the other federal politicians, for the Inuit decorated its melody at beginning and end with an ancient ayah song, performed by three women.

Nunavut remains her own place, an extended family even after all the decades of damage, the community a superorganism that tries to warm all in its bosom. But can the fresh new super-superorganism truly give itself to all Inuit? Almost 60 percent of the Nunavummiut are under 25 years of age. And the alteration of almost every aspect of material culture has occurred so rapidly that the elders and the kids riding their bikes in the April snow almost constitute two separate societies. Sometimes I think that the old huntress and the girl who kicked me had more in common with me than with one another.

At her house in resolute, Elisapi’s mother, Annie, takes a hunk of frozen raw caribou or seal from the freezer, sets it down on cardboard on the kitchen floor, and chops off splinters of meat with a hatchet. Annie says her favorite boarders are those who eat her “country food,” and she always smiles at me because I fall to with relish.
At community feasts, the Inuit drag in whole animal carcasses, and tear out raw intestines with their teeth; so the fact that I’ll eat almost anything helped endear me to Annie, one linchpin of her culture being the sharing of home-killed meat. When by happy chance I found Annie and Elisapi living in Iqaluit not long after Nunavut Day, my hair was long and Annie liked that too, because it made me look like a native. She told me this with Elisapi’s help, because she cannot speak English.

For the people of Annie’s generation, Nunavut is above all a vindication, a gift, a balm to wounded pride. Annie is entering her second childhood. Elisapi and the other sisters will take care of her. She’s too frail to sew kamiks anymore. She’ll never use a computer. She’s already home. She’ll die safe from the unimaginable changes now looming over Nunavut.

For Annie, and for so many Inuit, men and women alike, to be oneself is to hunt. Everybody hunts for survival: People raised on that basis know how to share, how to kill, and how to handle firearms responsibly. I once went out on a walrus hunt and watched a seven-year-old boy instructing his five-year-old brother in gun safety, with no adults in attendance except me. On that same hunt, I saw a seal killed with three shots and a walrus with one.

Many tourists from down south simply don’t possess such attributes, but if the new territory of Nunavut gets what it wants, there will be more white hunters, more white visitors out on the land. The outfitters in Nunavut will soon be swimming in business, I imagine. They will take birdwatchers and whale-lovers out to stalk their prey with binoculars, telephoto lenses, and watercolor brushes. They’ll learn to pamper the ones who forgot their warm clothes. They’ll learn that legal liability hangs over them at all times. They’ll be treated to cries of amazed disgust when somebody from a city sees a hunter butchering a bloody seal on an icy gravel beach. It’s all for the good, I suppose, as long as local people make money. Over time, Nunavut will be receiving a diminishing income from the federal government, so why shouldn’t tourism make up the shortfall?

Today only about 8,000 tourists a year come to Nunavut, most of them dogsledders, hunters, and wildlife watchers bound for the remote interior or for Baffin Island, and its belugas and killer whales. The adventurous few climb Mount Thor or Mount Asgard, or sea kayak the fjords of Baffin Island. But if it weren’t for the shiny glints of increased tourism and development, why were corporate Canada’s congratulations on the birth of Nunavut so loud?

Elisapi and Joe were hoping to rent out their house to the rich tourists who undertake expeditions to the North Pole. Elisapi had come to Iqaluit, in fact, to enroll as a communications student. She wanted to go into public relations or journalism. Since public relations is generally employed by businesses and governments rather than by aboriginal hunters, her new career seemed fairly certain, however indirectly, to further “develop” the land.

In that sense Elisapi reminded me of the carver’s wife I met in Apex; the woman liked Nunavut, she said, because there would soon be more jobs. According to recent national census and provincial labor figures, 40 percent of the Inuit residents of Nunavut, and 9 percent of the other residents, do not “participate in the labor force (wage economy).” Moreover, the remote Nunavummiut must pay between two and three times more for basic goods and services than southern Canadians do. So the carver’s wife was worried about being left out in the economic cold. But she also hungered for solitude, preferring Apex to Iqaluit because it was quieter. Like Annie, she’d been born in a hunting camp.

There was a term for these new Nunavummiut: weekend hunters. Their philosophy was to let the new life come and to benefit from it while living the old life as long as they could. But as new careers and tourism push the caribou back, where will their land be? It made me worry about the next 20 years. I said as much to Elisapi’s sister Laila, but she cut me off. “Don’t worry about us,” she said with an angry smile. “We’ll survive.”

And why shouldn’t Elisapi learn to shape the world’s understanding of Inuit? Other people have. One sardonic old Inuit joke used to run that the average Inuit family comprises 6.5 individuals: a husband, a wife, 3.5 children, and a nosy anthropologist from down south.

“Objectivity” may be lost, but much else will be gained, when Elisapi replaces the anthropologist. And if her public relations contribute to the development of Nunavut, who am I to say that’s a bad thing? And as Nunavut increasingly caters to tourists, wouldn’t it be excellent, given that many of those caterers will doubtless be capital-rich entrepreneurs from Toronto or Sydney or Los Angeles, if Elisapi could make her percentage? As Inuit culture becomes a commodity, can’t Elisapi sell it better than I can?

But what is Inuit culture? Endless hunting for the sake of prowess, the sharing of killed food, a knowledge of Inuktitut, sexual easiness and earthiness, old stories, a reserved smile, tenderness with children and confidence in them, respect for family, cheerfulness in the face of physical discomfort, ayah songs and throat-songs, animal-skin clothes? I can buy the garments; can I buy the rest?

If in the future they open resorts in Nunavut, remember solitude, and let someone else patronize them. If you must go, expect discomfort, inconvenience, and high prices. If you possess less experience than you will need to survive on your own, by all means find a local outfitter who can help you, and be guided by his advice. Above all, if you visit Nunavut, take care that your actions don’t transform the region into a mirror image of the place you left.

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For the next three months, Elisapi, with her two sons and Annie, was going to be staying at her daughter Eunice’s place, an immaculate house (too much so for Elisapi’s taste) with snow-white wall-to-wall carpet. In a corner niche I saw a group photograph, taken by a social worker back in 1955, of Annie and her family waiting to be relocated to Resolute, sitting forlornly on the rocks of Inukjuak.

I’d met Eunice once or twice in Resolute, the first time when she was about 13. She drew for me a picture of a polar bear stalking a baby seal on an Arctic midnight. When I got home I mailed her some colored pencils. She moved down to Iqaluit a few years later, and now, at 24, she has two daughters and is a famous throat-singer whose albums are sold to strangers across the Atlantic. She had performed in traditional dress at the Nunavut gala. She’d already been to Hawaii three times.

Fifteen minutes after I arrived, Eunice said she’d see me around. Her husband had just bought a new snowmobile; they were going for a ride out on the land. This was not rudeness on her part, but the habitual casualness of the Nunavummiut, who come and go as they wish. Eunice told me what I already knew, that I was welcome to stay for as long as I pleased, and indeed I visited with her relatives for another two hours before I went on my way.

Getting ready for their ride, Eunice had slipped her younger daughter into the amauti, because it was one of those cold days when breath-steam rose high above everybody’s hoods. I had asked Eunice what kind of fur she used for her hood’s unfamiliar ruff, and she made a face: “I don’t know,” she had replied. “Some ugly kind. I should get it replaced.” But Elisapi and Annie both knew what kind of animal it came from, and they immediately told her—or told me, I should say, because Eunice wasn’t interested. The ruff was coyote, from way down south, like her carpet and her snowmobile.

I never got the chance to ask Eunice if she still hunted, and in a way it doesn’t matter. Her strain of Inuitness, like her mother’s, will survive even after that hypothetical day when all the shores of Baffin Island have reared up their apartment forests in mocking imitation of the trees that could never have lived here. Fluent in both English and Inuktitut, and deriving both recognition and cold cash from her culture, Eunice seems likely to thrive. Maybe someday she’ll be the Voice of Nunavut, emerging from radios and loudspeakers like the muezzins of Pakistan calling people to prayer.

What Nunavut will Eunice live in then? Perhaps the land will be changed, developed. Perhaps she and Elisapi and their family will live in a city of skyscrapers. Perhaps every seal will be tagged by then, transmitting its location and vital signs to wildlife officials, and Eunice’s throat-songs will comprise their own signals in a realm of signal, human and animal equal. Why not? Which is to say, who knows? This spring, Nunavut was a promise. Now Nunavut will become a mystery as socioeconomic forces weave their half-blind ravelings.

On the last night of my trip, I stood on a snow-ridge between Iqaluit and Apex, gazing up at the aurora borealis sprinkling itself across the sky like confectioner’s sugar, mingling with the city’s steam-trails and smoke-trails. After a while it began to ooze slowly downward like white fists and frozen white winds swirling between stars. Far away, the lonely headlight of a snowmobile rushed across
the land.

William T. Vollmann is a novelist whose books include The Atlas, Butterfly Stories, and The Rifles. He lives in Sacramento, California.

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OUT ON THE LAND
��ϳԹ��s in culture for the icebound

Even if you are undaunted by the shifting pack ice, the trailless interior, or the uselessness of your compass at such high latitudes, the best way to see Nunavut is still with an outfitter using Inuit guides. Not only will they handle complicated logistics—permits, cold-weather gear, and charter flights—but they can also offer insights into indigenous Arctic culture: On a dogsled trip to the floe edge you might carve seal meat, cook it over a quiliq stove, and sleep in an igloo.

But tread lightly, cautions author William Vollmann. Respect Inuit elders, and be patient with discomfort, inconvenience, and high prices. “We are worried that tourism will dilute our culture,” declares Roxann Hynes, travel counselor at Iqaluit-based Nunavut Tourism. “Fortunately, most visitors want to see our traditional way of life, and outfitters are catering to that.”

The Facts: Iqaluit is the main hub for flights from the east; Yellowknife, from the west. In March, temperatures swing between 30 and minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit; by July, the average temperature is 46, and the sun dips below the horizon for fewer than five hours a day. Nunavut Tourism (800-491-7910; www.nunatour.nt.ca) can recommend lodging in Iqaluit, and its Website offers an extensive roster of tour groups.

Outfitters: Between March and June, Seattle’s Arctic Odysseys (206-325-1977) runs nine-day dogsled tours departing every week for Broughton Island, near the mazelike archipelago of Auyuittuq National Park. Inuit guides build igloos and fish through the sea-ice for cod. Cost is $3,850 per person, including the flight from Ottawa or Montreal. Whitney & Smith runs two 15-day sea-kayaking trips ($3,595, including airfare; 403-678-3052) a summer through the walrus- and beluga-filled fjords of northeast Ellesmere Island, where modern whale-rib houses mix with Paleo-Inuit ruins. The July and August trips promise a guide for every four clients. The Banff-based outfitter also offers backpacking trips through the glacial meadows of Ellesmere National Park, ranging from day hikes to two-week treks. For shorter jaunts from Iqaluit into Frobisher Bay, Inuit Sea Kayaking ��ϳԹ��s offers daily rentals (800-331-4684).

—ERIC HANSEN

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The Very Short History of Nunavut

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