Since 1992, Men's Journal has stood for solid journalism, fine photography, and uncompromising good advice.

To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we have published the original versions of the 11 stories revisited in our June 2012 issue, including David Roberts’ profile of iconic climber Jeff Lowe, which ran in our debut issue, and Matthew Power’s “Lost in the Amazon” (June 2009), which recounts Ed Stafford’s 860-day journey to become the first person to travel the length of the Amazon River on foot. Take a look to see how far they — and we — have come.

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Return to Form, by Russ Ewald (May/June 1992)
Dara Torres, Olympian, races out of retirement.

A Mountain of Trouble, by David Roberts (May/June 1992)
After sinking to the depths of personal crisis and financial disaster, Jeff Lowe decided he needed to climb the most dangerous rock face in the world.

How it Feels to be Yvon Chounaird, by Doug Stanton (May 1999)
He’s climbed the mountains, made the money, surfed the waves, caught the fish, and seen the world. Now, at 60, he’s looking for a challenge.

Killing Libby, by Mark Levine (August 2001)
The EPA calls it the most severe exposure to a hazardous material in American history. The only people in Libby, Montana, who didn’t see it coming were the victims, who are dying to know if it’s really possible to poison an entire town and get away with it.

The Eco Warriors, by Jonathan Miles (November 2002)
They’re waging their own brand of vigilante environmentalism — Harrison Ford spotting polluters from the air, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. bringing them to justice. Amazing what a couple of guys with a helicopter can do.

Deeply Obsessed, by Chris Heath (December 2002)
Five years ago, James Cameron made the most successful movie of all time. But Titanic was just the beginning. Since then, he’s helped invent an underwater robotic camera, made dozens of expeditions to the bottom of the ocean, and become the first to film inside the sunken Bismarck. Now that he’s done with the sea, what’s next — Mars?

Lance Armstrong: The MJ Interview, by David Hochman (October 2003)
The five-time Tour de France champ on music, surfing, and the “bikesexual.”

What Goes 95 Miles Per Hour for 17 Days Straight Through Mud, Sand, High-Speed Smash-Ups and Marauding Bandits? by Jonathan Miles (May 2005)
In its 27-year history, the Dakar Rally has been the world’s most dangerous sporting event, claiming the lives of dozens of racers. This year the author joined in, and it was more savage than ever.

Raid on the Killing Cove, by Peter Heller (February 2008)
Every year in a hidden lagoon in Japan, some 2,000 dolphins are slaughtered in brutal fashion. Last fall a group of celebrities and surfers decided to intervene, with our writer in tow. Here’s what happened next.

Lost in the Amazon, by Matthew Power (June 2009)
One man’s absurd quest to become the first person to walk the entire length of the Amazon River — floods, electric eels, and machete-wielding natives be damned.

What the War Did to Andy, by Matthew Teague (April 2010)
In the Air Force special ops, my friend Andy Kubik was the best of the best, a true American hero. As much as any one man, he was responsible for breaking the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan. But now, back at home, he’s fighting just to stay sane.

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In nine cover stories, we've recounted Lance Armstrong's victories, setbacks, controversies, and comebacks.

In our 20th anniversary issue, on sale now: Josh Eells profiles Lance Armstrong, the world’s greatest endurance athlete; Tom Brokaw interviews Patagonia founder, philanthropist, and environmental activist Yvon Chouinard; Jonathan Miles rides shotgun for the crash-filled, two-week Dakar Rally; and Paul Solotaroff learns about the degenerative nerve condition plaguing the best American climber of all time.

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From Josh Eells’ Lance’s Next Challenge:

On wanting to win the Ironman:
“I certainly don’t have the confidence or cojones to say I’m going to win. But I’m very comfortable saying I want to win. And I want to start winning right away. If everything goes right, I’ll be there in any race. To win the Ironman is very difficult. You can’t screw up nutrition or hydration; no mechanical or technical problems. Basically you can’t make any mistakes. But man. It’d be cool.”

On how an Ironman win could affect people’s opinion of him:
“There aren’t too many people on the fence about me. But if I am on the fence, maybe I look at [an Ironman win] and go, ‘I don’t know what to believe. But this fucking guy has been at the top for 25 years, they’ve thrown everything they could at him, and dammit, the guy is still there.’ I want this bad. If I thought it was cool and good for business, I could just go through the motions and have a respectable finish. But I don’t want to be given the charity slot and get 20th. I want to win.”

On teammates Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton accusing him of doping:
“I’m not even going to comment on those guys, because it opens me up to civil cases and stuff. But I wasn’t surprised. The truth is, one of the riders [Landis] was making threats for years. After a while, I was like, ‘You know what? Go ahead — do it or don’t. Leave me alone.’”

On the investigation:
“The most frustrating and confusing thing I’ve ever been through. I was miserable. If people think I was an asshole before. . . . There were days where you just damn near crack — personally and privately.”

On the ongoing investigation by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency:
“In my mind, I’m truly done. You can interpret that however you want. But no matter what happens, I’m finished. I’m done fighting. I’ve moved on. If there are other things that arise, I’m not contesting anything. Case closed.”

On the possibility of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency stripping him of his titles:
“It doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t run around bragging, feeling like I have to be a seven-time Tour de France champion. I worked hard for those, I won seven times, and that’s great. But it’s over.”

On celebrating after the investigation was closed:
“We just got fuckin’ plastered. About five of my buddies came over, and we just sat there and got hammered. I don’t even remember the night. I was shitfaced. Tequila. Shots. I don’t even remember getting to bed — I was that kind of drunk.”

On his reputation for being arrogant:
“I don’t know about arrogant. Definitely a big ego. But all champions have a big ego. If I said something, I backed it up — unless it was the comeback. Whoops.”

On his early relationship with girlfriend Anna Hansen:
“We were never even dating. She’d come to Austin, or we’d meet in Aspen and just hang out. That went on for six weeks — and then she called and said she was pregnant, which I was under the impression wasn’t possible.”

On Jimmy Buffett:
“Talk about somebody who has nothing to worry about. He has fun, and he does exactly what he wants. Fucking Margaritaville, all the time. And he’s loaded — he has hundreds and hundreds of millions, but you’d never know it. I wish I could be more like that. Just a regular guy.”

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Shelby designed cars for 51 years, most notably the AC Cobra and the Shelby Mustang. Photo: flickr/OnInnovation

The chicken farmer turned hot-rodder was one of the most recognized names in automotive history.

by Blaine McEvoy

Carroll Shelby, who helped Ford dominate the 1960s racing scene and designed the AC Cobra and the Shelby Mustang, died Thursday. He was 89.

Shelby, who survived 40 heart attacks and spent 12 years hunting big-game in the Congo, dabbled in the farming, trucking, and ready-mix cement businesses before racing his first car at 22.

Last August, Jon Wilde spoke to the fast living Texan about building ass-kickers and dodging death.

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How does a man find his calling?
You’ve got to find out early in life what you’re good at and follow that. I got out of the Air Force in 1945 and kept trying to go into business — trucking, chickens, ready-mix cement. Finally a friend from high school had an old MG and he says, “Let’s go to a car race.” When we got there, he says, “Let’s put a seat belt in this thing.” And I raced it and won. I was driving home that night and said, “This may not be a way to make a living, but this is what I’ve always wanted.”

What should every man know about women?
Take them as they are and don’t try to figure them out. I’ve been married six times — though two brides I brought in just to become citizens years ago when I was racing. I’ve lost two — the last one in an automobile wreck right outside of the place where I am now. I’ve got a good one from England now. Been together 14 years.

What should every man know about money?
The most unhappy people I’ve met in my life — and I’ve driven for a lot of them — are billionaires. Money has never been my objective in life. Like now, there’s some mediocre car I could build that would make a lot of money, but I’ve turned it down because I’m interested in my brand, and my brand is to build ass-kickers.

What’s the best way to motivate men?
Pick the person who is capable of what you’re hiring him for, then let him do it. Don’t be a boss — be a leader.

Who’s the toughest guy you know?
My father. He was a postal clerk. My mother was a difficult woman — she had anxieties — and so my father had sky-high blood pressure by the time he was 20. His ambition was to get me and my younger sister through high school. She graduated June 1, 1943, and he died that October, at 46. He had to fight in life to reach that, and that impressed me more than anything.

Have you ever cheated death?
I’ve been close a helluva lot of times. I died for six or seven minutes when I had my first bypass. The doctor had to jump on my chest. Then when I had a heart transplant, they said I’d had 40 heart attacks. I’d thought it was angina. They had my heart pickled in a jar at Cedars-Sinai, it was so bad.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
I was poppin’ off to my father when I was about 14. He says, “Well, son, you don’t know what I’m talking about now, but you remember what I’m going to tell you: You’re not ever so slick you can’t be greased.” Every time I want to criticize somebody, I think of that: You’re not the smartest thing; respect other people’s opinions.

What role does religion play in a man’s life?
I was raised a southern hard-shell Baptist. Worst whippin’ I ever got was for going fishing one Sunday. I’m not a hard-shell anymore. But I know there’s something stronger than we are that’s put all this together.

What adventure most changed your life?
I went to Africa in 1968 to see some friends and wound up staying there nine months a year for 12 years. All the long-tusk elephants left in the world were in the Congo — they came across the river there into central Africa — and we had a hunting company. I don’t really like to talk about it, and I’ll tell you why: I’m sorry I ever shot an elephant. It was stupid. I wish I’d spent more time just driving around Africa, seeing what most people never get to see in a lifetime.

What advice would you give the younger you?
Get a law degree and an accounting degree. What I love is building cars, but I spend half my time talking to attorneys and accountants. That’s life.

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Fowler joined a golf club only after going pro. Photograph by Karen Fuchs

Fowler, 23, beat D. A. Points and Rory McIlroy on the first playoff hole at the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship.

by Blaine McEvoy

Last July, we wrote that shaggy haired duffer Rickie Fowler was bringing swagger back to the gentleman’s game. This weekend, he finally did it.

Clad in all orange at the Quail Hollow Club, the 23-year-old Californian scored his first PGA tour victory, defeating Points and 2011 U.S. Open champion Rory McIlroy by one stroke.

Last summer, senior editor Jesse Will talked to Fowler about how to deal with hecklers and his signature style of play.

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At 22, you’ve got a fan following that otherwise wouldn’t care about golf. Why?
My style’s different than most. I’m young, I don’t dress the same, and I come from a common background instead of a country club, golf-nut background. The first time I actually belonged to a course was last year.

How did you come to the game, then?
My dad was a professional motocross racer, so by age three I was on a dirt bike. I spent a lot of time riding. My grandpa just happened to start playing golf, so I did too.

Was there a moment when you realized you were done messing around with bikes?
Yeah. When I was 15, I was out in the desert on a 50cc bike. After a jump, I had to ditch the bike midair. I broke my right foot and blew out my knee. I said, “I’m going to hang up the bike. Think I’m a golfer.”

Your style of play looks different. It’s quick. Sometimes you look like you’re just letting it rip.
Well, you can’t think a whole lot about it. The more you think, the more you screw up.

Your dad won the Baja 1000 in 1986. Do the racing skills he taught you transfer to golf?
Commitment is huge. If you’re on a bike or swinging a golf club, and you commit and it turns out bad, it’s always better than if you didn’t. And in both, there are risk/reward situations. Racing on a track, you’re waiting for the spot where you can make a move and overtake someone. Just like a par 5.

Are they similar thrills?
On Sunday with a few holes to go, the blood starts pumping. But there’s nothing much like being in the air on a dirt bike.

Is golf still too stuffy?
The PGA Tour is in a transition phase. They’re loosening up — allowing cell phones on the course is a step in the right direction.

When the hecklers say, “Cut your hair!”…
I just ignore them. I don’t acknowledge anyone who’s trying to dis me.

You don’t follow them into the parking lot?
No, man, I just let it go. I’ve got a lot of golf left to play.

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In its 27-year history, the Dakar Rally has been the world’s most dangerous sporting event, claiming the lives of dozens of racers. This year the author joined in, and it was more savage than ever.

by Jonathan Miles

What I am about to do has been denounced by the Vatican as “a vulgar display of power and wealth,” drawn the ire and fire of Islamic terrorists, stranded European royalty and thrill-seeking riffraff in the Sahara, cost hundreds of millions in damages, and claimed the lives of more than 30 people. Likened to “blood sport from a science fiction novel,” it’s been judged the world’s most dangerous legally sanctioned sporting  event. Seventeen years ago Sports Illustrated decreed that with “any luck, or common sense,” it would never happen again; yet it did, and has every year since.

Most commonly it is called the Paris–Dakar Rally, though Paris has been just a flickering presence in recent years. More accurately it’s called the Dakar Rally, and it’s a bone-crushing, will-killing off-road race from Europe to the African city of Dakar, in which cars, motorcycles, and trucks slog 5,500-plus miles through the deepest orange undulations of the Sahara, with its biblical sandstorms and locust swarms and arid empty vastness, to the beautiful blue sea-spray of the Senegalese coast. Half my fellow competitors, revving their engines in the starting lineup, won’t see that blue beauty — for every one that finishes, another will fall prey to injury or exhaustion or mechanical failure, and the race will leave them behind. More darkly, the odds say that at least one of us will not return alive; on average, in the Dakar Rally’s 27-year history more than one competitor has died at each running.

This time, however, when it’s all finished, at least five people will lie dead, including a legendary Italian racer, a five-year-old Senegalese girl, and a jovial Spanish motorcyclist who shared my team’s support truck. A suspected Al Qaeda operative will be arrested and charged with “plotting to kill as many participants as possible.” Spain’s Green Party will demand that the Spanish government extract itself from the rally, while a French lawmaker will plead with his prime minister to ban the race altogether. The rally’s major motorcycle sponsor, KTM, will publicly admit misgivings about the race, wondering, as many have before, if death in the desert outweighs the bright glory of a Dakar victory.

At this moment, however, as my partner and I watch the line official count down the start of our first stage with his fingers, five, then four, three…the truth is, at this moment, I have no fucking clue what I’m about to do.

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One day earlier, in an auto shop on the outskirts of Barcelona, I stepped back from the race car after affixing a sticker bearing my name to the left front fender. The sight, for me, was a peculiar one: I’d never raced before — I’m notorious back home, in fact, for my slow, meandering driving style. Just a couple months prior I’d been asked to take the co-driver slot in a Men’s Journal–sponsored car. Immediately I said yes, because for anyone with a thirst for adrenaline, the Dakar Rally is the ultimate cocktail, the ne plus ultra of reckless abandon. And for another reason: Like the summit of Everest, or the finishing tape of an ultramarathon, the Dakar is something to measure oneself against, a yardstick of endurance and nerve steel. I wanted to know if I could hack it. As race rules required, I affixed another sticker to the car, just beside my name. On that sticker was my blood type.

I’m thrown back in my seat as the car vaults off the line. As co-driver, or navigator, my job is to tell my partner where to drive via the aid of a roadbook (half in French), a trip computer (basically, a digital odometer), and a GPS unit bolted to the dash. Right now, though, as we begin a quick 3.7-mile qualifying run on a Barcelona beach, I’m just trying to hold on to my roadbook. Being a co-driver, at this point, feels like being a toddler driven around by an angry and potentially suicidal parent: I’m strapped into a bucket seat via a five-point harness, and I really feel like screaming.

We fly too fast over a five-foot-high jump, the car’s front end smacking hard and a wash of sand spraying across the windshield. “Fuhhhhhck!” my driver  Darren Skilton screams. “Last thing I want to do is bust an axle in Europe.” A pause. “By the way, mate,” he says, “don’t put your hands up when we’re landing hard. You could lose them if we roll. Second-last thing I want to do is send you home with no hands.”

A broodingly intense 37-year-old with short-cropped khaki-colored hair and round, wide eyes that seem to expand when he’s driving, Darren is a second-generation racer with a fierce passion for speed and the desert. His father, Clive Skilton, was a drag racer in England, where Darren was born, before relocating to Southern California in 1976 to compete on the American drag circuit. Off-road racing came next and Darren was there for the ride. The son entered his first race at the age of 23, and since then he’s captured four SCORE Desert Series championships, including three victories in the Baja 1000 and a win in the Baja 2000, the longest off-road race ever staged in North America. This will be his third Dakar rally, after a sixth-in-class finish in 2000, followed by a second attempt, in 2001, that ended with a blown engine in Mali.

Our car is a five-year-old, fire-engine-red Kia Sportage. The frame is stock, as is the six-cylinder, 3.5-liter engine, but the rest is all race-issue. The front end is fiberglass, to save weight, while the rear of the car is mostly engulfed by a 90-gallon fuel tank and three spare tires. The interior is almost comically spartan, a hodgepodge of unmarked switches, dirt-encrusted gauges, an oversize tachometer, loose wires, tubular foam padding, and bare metal. Nothing about it is even remotely comfortable; after my first ride — a short spin around Barcelona — I proclaimed it an “ergonomic enema,” which made our two mechanics laugh but not Darren.

The mechanics — Barrie Thompson, a Jeep racer from the high desert country of Apple Valley, California, and Todd Mason, a moonlighting pro snowboarder from Australia — will trail us in an eight-ton 4×4 Mercedes truck, sometimes via the rally course, sometimes on an alternate route. The truck is stocked with enough parts, wheels, tires, and body panels to all but rebuild the race car from the bottom up, which, to my unschooled eye, might already be necessary. And I’m not alone: In the shop near Barcelona, where five or six cars and trucks were being readied for the race, a French driver examined the Kia for a while before asking, “Thees car — Dakar Ralleee?” I nodded. He stared at the car a little longer. “Thees year?” I nodded again. “Holy sheeet,” he said, with a caustic Gallic laugh.

The echoes of that laugh would bang about my skull for weeks. On the way to “scrutineering,” the pre-race vehicle inspection, the car’s headlights kept shorting out, forcing us to drive through Barcelona either in total darkness or by the blinding white aurora of our off-road lights. Darren was restive, frowny, knotted with mechanical worries. The gear shifter stuck constantly. The alternator seemed troubled. Exhaust fumes were seeping into the car, choking us. The windshield wipers didn’t function. “The trip computer isn’t working,” I noted, futilely pushing buttons as we zoomed along an unlit Barcelona highway en route back to the shop. “Nothing is working, mate,” Darren said. “It’s going to be a total fucking thrash all the way to Africa.”

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A total thrash, however, would be in very precise keeping with the original spirit of the Dakar. In 1977 a French motorcyclist named Thierry Sabine got lost in the Libyan desert while racing in the now-defunct Abidjan–Nice Rally. By all accounts it was a harrowing, hallucinatory ordeal, but Sabine apparently enjoyed it, in much the way the French enjoy Mickey Rourke movies and the works of Jacques Derrida, and decided to repeat it the next year with as many racers as would join him. “A challenge for those who go,” went Sabine’s slogan, “a dream for those who stay behind.” One hundred and seventy competitors raced in the inaugural Dakar Rally, blasting 6,200 miles through Algeria, Niger, Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and Senegal. One of them, of course, died, as did Sabine himself a few years later, during the 1986 Dakar. But the thrash lived on.

“This is the ultimate adventure,” an American named Ronn Bailey is saying to me. We’re standing beside our cars at the port of Algeciras, Spain, three days into the race, waiting to load them onto a ferry to Tangier — and thus to Africa, where the real shit begins. A 55-year-old data-security magnate from Las Vegas, with a preternatural suntan and printer paper–white teeth, Bailey is here on an expensive whim. “Nine months and two days ago,” he tells me, he decided to (a) race in the Dakar Rally, which meant he had to (b) custom-order a race car, and (c) quickly learn to drive it. For years he’d been hearing about the Dakar from fellow travelers he’d encountered on his solo motorcycle trips to Central America and the Arctic Circle, and, well, with about a million bucks burning a hole in his pockets, why not? “Tell me another race in which you can be a total amateur and get to compete against the best in the world,” he says. And it’s true: The Dakar nurtures its amateur element, opening the rally to anyone with a vehicle, the cash (15 grand to enter, plus anywhere from 20 grand to a million more to cover costs), and the little experience needed to qualify for a racing license. Roughly 20 percent of the car drivers, and a whopping 40 percent of the truck drivers, will be competing for the first time this year.

Though little known in the U.S., the Dakar is a sports juggernaut in Europe, where France’s state broadcasting company runs more than 25 hours of coverage and the leading drivers and riders are accorded the same status we give to Super Bowl quarterbacks. The American presence in the race has always been small — nonexistent on occasion — and something of a novelty. This year’s race, however, is different: A record number of five Americans, including me, are here, most notable among us Robby Gordon, a top-tier NASCAR driver who’s claimed six off-road championships and a near win at the 1999 Indianapolis 500. Already, Gordon has made history. His victory on the rally’s first day, in Barcelona, marked the first time an American has ever won a Dakar stage. Gordon, like Bailey, is a Dakar virgin. Of the Americans, only my partner Darren has raced the Dakar before.

At this point, 13 days of racing lie ahead for this year’s 162 cars, 230 motorcycles, and 69 trucks, our southward passage divided into noncompetitive “liaison” stages and white-knuckled “special” stages (see “Dakar 2005,” right) that get longer and more grueling as the race goes on, particularly when they hit the raw depths of the Sahara. Our second day in Africa delivers a first small taste of what those specials will entail — what the French might call an amuse-bouche. We’re rollicking along on a 76-mile special in Morocco, south of Rabat, through green meadows where shepherds gather on rock mounds to watch us pass, and across flat nasty fields of craggy brown rocks. Our trip computer still isn’t working — some sort of battery problem — so I’m forced to navigate by the landmarks noted in the roadbook.

With the trip computer, navigating is not, in theory, terribly difficult. At km 243.5, say, the roadbook will direct you to veer right off the visible trail when you come to some longer collines avec rochers, and even if, like me, you don’t know a colline from a croissant, there’s a rudimentary sketch indicating that these collines are round, like rocks, or maybe holes. Without the trip computer, however, all I can do is guess at the mileage, and try to formulate some instructions for Darren. Leave the trail to the right before you hit some, uh, round things. All this at 80 mph.

“Horn!” Darren is shouting. “Hit the horn! Horn!” I sound the horn twice — that’s my job, along with operating the wipers, since Darren’s hands need to stay glued to the wheel — to signal to a Mitsubishi in front of us that we want to pass. As Darren swerves left and right, searching for an opening, I return to the roadbook, desperate to know where the hell we are. A few moments later I glance up and see two things: the Mitsubishi directly beside us, three feet to our left, and a four-foot-high cairn with stones the size of medicine balls right in front of us. “Holyshitlookout!” I yell, and Darren, who’s been focused on the Mitsubishi, makes a split-second choice. We slam into the side of the other car. Fiberglass shreds spew across the windshield. Our left front fender is ripped off.

“Thanks, mate,” Darren says calmly. “Good eye.” Thirty seconds later we pass the Mitsubishi with its mangled rear fender. Weirdly, its inhabitants do not flip us off.

We end that day’s racing with an alternator failure, forced to drive 262 dark liaison miles through Morocco using only our low-voltage off-road lights to conserve the battery. Even powering my map light is too risky; I navigate by the flickering glow of my cigarette lighter.

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Years ago, prior to the running of a Dakar, Thierry Sabine was asked at a press conference who he thought would win. “The desert,” he replied. It was an honest, accurate answer. Except for a very few elite pro racers up front, the Dakar Rally is not, at heart, a contest among the competitors; the battle, instead, is between mankind — more precisely, Western mankind, with all its fire-breathing machinery and inexorable arrogance — and Africa, which has been proving itself untamable for centuries now. Yet it isn’t about “beating” Africa — that, as even the first-place winners will attest, is a ridiculous notion. It’s about Africa not beating you. For most of the competitors, winning the Dakar has little to do with the standings on the final day, and everything to do with making it to the final day.

We set out on the fifth day’s course, a 149-mile liaison followed by a 237-mile special through Morocco, with a fresh new alternator and trip computer installed. And for 80 miles we’re rolling well: passing cars, hitting the correct turns, eluding all the traps — the holes, the ditches, the subtle tricks the course-makers plant in our GPS codes to steer us off the route. But then, as we’re running fast along a bumpy, rock-strewn trail, the front right wheel falls off — falls right off the race car — and sends us into a deadening thunk of a stop.

“Fuhhhhhhhck!” Darren screams, ripping off his helmet. Already that aggrieved curse is becoming a refrain. After wrenching all night on the car with the mechanics, he’d neglected to manually tighten the lug nuts. To boot, I’d neglected a major item on my daily pre-race to-do list: check the lug nuts. Bump by bump, they had worked themselves off.

Still, I think, this shouldn’t be a major problem. I fetch the runaway wheel from a ditch on the opposite side of the trail, skittering across the sand to avoid a Russian racing truck careening by. The wheel is trashed, sure, but we’ve got two spares in the back.

It is a major problem, though — the lugs are stripped. In fact, they look melted. We try to steal a lug off each of the other wheels, figuring we can secure a new wheel with just three wheel studs, but they’re not all uniform, and won’t fit. By this time we’ve fallen so far behind that the support trucks — the big racing-shops-on-wheels that trail behind the factory-sponsored cars — are starting to chug by. We flag one down. The spare lugs they’ve got on board don’t fit either. We’re stranded, and out of decent options.

“All we can do,” Darren finally concludes, with a wrecked sigh, “is file.”

File: meaning, file new threads onto the melted lugs. One at a time, by hand. We take seats on opposite sides of the trashed wheel and tire, back to back, and hunch over the lugs, scraping at the silvery globs that once had been screw threads, eyeing them, scraping some more, trying to twist a nut onto them, cursing, scraping, trying, cursing, scraping. Small funnels of reddish sand come whipping at us, stinging our eyes. We don sand goggles and keep at it. An hour passes, then two, the sandy-edged wind increasing as the sun drips westward, the Moroccan desert eerily silent after the last-place stragglers have all passed us by.

“What’s the maximum time allowed on this special?” Darren asks.

“Eleven hours, I think.” The prospect of not finishing within the time limit hasn’t occurred to me until now. “What happens if we don’t make it?”

“We take a penalty,” he says. “It’s not a huge thing. The key is making it to the start of each stage. If you miss a start, you’re out of the race. It’s over.”

“So we’ve got all night, technically,” I say, not particularly comforted by the idea.

At twilight, with the desert washed in purple, its hills like the folds of a king’s velvet robes, I’m finally able to screw a lug nut onto a third stud. We replace the wheel, load into the race car, strap on our helmets, fasten our harnesses, and pull back onto the course.

“That pretty much sucked,” I say.

“It’s not over yet,” says Darren.

Just 30 miles later the left front hub assembly explodes — another wheel falls apart — and once again we’re trailside. Darren rests his head against the steering wheel for a minute or more; he’s beyond cursing, driven to something like prayer or seething or both. Then he slowly and silently gets out of the car, pulls out the tools, and goes to work.

“We may not make it, mate,” he says after a while, lying beside the wheel and a jagged metal mess of parts and wrenches, trying to jury-rig a precarious fix while I aim a flashlight at the wheel and shiver in the unexpected chill of the Moroccan night. “Once you get to Africa” — turning a wrench, muttering — “the first thing the organizers do is try to break your car. (Hand me the 5/8th wrench.) That gets the weaker cars out of the race. (No, sorry, the 11/16th. Thanks.) Next, they try to break you, to get the weaker drivers out of it. If we can get this car through Morocco, I think we’ll be okay.”

We load back into the car sometime after midnight. “It’s peg-legged,” Darren says, before slipping on his helmet, “but it might make it.”

Which it does, but not without another crisis.

The fumes seeping into the car since Barcelona have worsened, and are loading the interior with pungent exhaust; we slide open the postcard-size window vents in an attempt to clear out the exhaust, but all we get is colder. The fumes are affecting Darren worse than me — whether because the leak might be on the driver’s side or because 18 years of smoking Camels has inured my lungs to all other pollutants, I can’t say. But sometime past 2 am, as we’re cruising at 90 mph on the flat moonscape of a dry lake bed, Darren starts slowing down.

“What is it?” I ask. By now we’re at school-zone speeds. “Problem?”

Full stop, an engine stall, then silence.

“Darren?”

He’s wearing a full-face helmet, so I can’t see his eyes, but his head is immobile and tilted toward his chest. I repeat his name four or five more times before punching him, which rouses him only slightly; he makes drunk bear noises. He’s blacked out from the carbon monoxide, his body weakened that much further from lack of sleep. We trade places.

Driving a race car isn’t too far a cry from driving any other sports car, but driving one through Africa in the middle of the night offers a wide scree of new sensations. As I drive I keep seeing trees that aren’t there — low, thick-trunked ones, like live oaks — and have to wag my head to expel the images. I always thought of mirages as heat-induced, daytime phenomena. Perhaps it’s the sheer nothingness of the desert here. The brain can’t accept the emptiness the eyes are seeing — it wants plants, boulders, animals, anything.

According to the roadbook, balanced against the wheel, I’m currently driving through a military zone. Here in southern Morocco, where a dispute over the Western Sahara has been simmering for decades, that often means land mines, so I tightly follow the visible tire tracks, overmindful of something Darren jokingly told me in Spain: “The trick with land mines,” he’d said, “is to go fast enough over them so that they blow up behind you.” “Helluva trick to practice,” I’d said. I step on the gas hard, envisioning what it must be like to outdrive a land mine — like dancing a jig when someone’s shooting at your feet. “Slow it down, mate,” Darren moans every now and then, drifting in and out of consciousness.

By the time I reach the checkered flag at the end of the course, at 4 am, the finish-line post is deserted. A few miles away, at the rally bivouac in Smara, I’m barely halfway into my tent before crumpling to the ground. I wake the next morning with my legs hanging out the tent flap. Whether Darren ever made it out of the car to sleep that dark morning — or even made it out of his helmet — I cannot say. Shortly after daybreak, when I pull myself up after two and a half hours of sleep, he’s already under the car, wrenching its guts out.

—

On each of the 13 days that the Dakar Rally runs through Africa, a new, halogen-lit city rises from the sands, and then, 24 hours later, disappears altogether. In this phantom city you can get a bottle of wine and a plate of duck confit; an examination by a doctor; a shower, occasionally, but at least a bucket of clean water; and as many cans of Red Bull as you can carry. Its citizenry includes hundreds of administrators, cooks, physicians, and journalists, and then, as the motorcycles and cars and trucks trickle in from the course, hundreds more  racers and support-crew mechanics. This is the Dakar bivouac, a military-issue compound that’s assembled and disassembled daily, then flown on to the next location, in pieces, via jumbo jets and a slew of big-muscled trucks. All through the night it hums and rattles with the sounds of vehicles being torn apart, rebuilt, repaired, revved. Motors squeal, generators rumble, mechanics shout for tools in 20 languages. No one is still save the sleepers, tucked into one-man tents or crowded tight as puzzle pieces on the ground beneath canopies, earplugs insulating them from the mechanized din.
Today, however, is different. It’s the morning of Friday, January 7, in Tichit, Mauritania, a desolate stone village that’s changed little since the 12th century, except to crumble. The bivouac is like a ghost town, just a cluster of tents on a sand-whipped plain with a few people milling about. Partly this is owing to the fact that support trucks are banned from the bivouac for the current “marathon” stages. But more important, it’s because most of the competitors are still out in the desert, stranded, or struggling yet to finish.

We pulled in at 5 am. The special — a grueling 410-mile slog through sand dunes first, and then more than a hundred miles of camel grass (clumps of dry grass rooted in hard sand mounds as tall as three feet) — was so murderous that race officials have cancelled the next stage, ostensibly because of a sandstorm that’s grounded the helicopters, but also because it would mean abandoning perhaps 75 percent of the competitors in the Sahara. Though we’d started 142nd among the cars, and took 16 hours and 49 minutes to finish, we were the 37th car in.

Distress signals have been pouring in all night from the racers we spied out there in the dark: motorcyclists huddled together under silver emergency blankets, drivers standing beside their dead cars holding makeshift signs reading oil gas please, or need petrol. All the talk at the bivouac is about the missing or defeated: Two-time Dakar winner Jean-Louis Schlesser is out of the race, his self-designed buggy broken in the sand. Four-time winner Ari Vatanen is out of gas somewhere. Robby Gordon, who rolled his car the day before, limped in with less than a liter of fuel. Ronn Bailey is nowhere to be seen.

Our car is alive, but only barely. Early in the stage we busted the transfer case, which meant we lost our four-wheel drive — an odious development in an off-road race. To cross sand dunes in two-wheel drive, you have only one tactic available: Barrel up them as fast as you can, so that your momentum will carry you over the impossibly soft sand at the crest. The only problem with that, of course, is that you have no clue what’s on the other side of that crest — sometimes a sheer drop, sometimes a car stuck at the bottom, sometimes both.

Near the end of the course we took a wrong turn and, instead of the mountain pass marked in the roadbook, found ourselves at the edge of an 80-foot, 80-or-so-degree sand cliff above the plains of the Tagant desert. We got out and walked to the edge, our headlamps doing little to illuminate the ground far below. Sans four-wheel drive, there seemed no turning around. It smelled like doom.

“Why don’t I run up and flag a truck?” I said. “Maybe someone will pull us out.”

“They couldn’t get close enough without getting stuck down here themselves,” Darren said. He was staring down the cliff.

“Maybe we could swing it back up that way. It’s just a short climb before it levels out some.”

Darren glanced up, then shook his head. “The car can’t go anywhere but forward,” he said.

“Forward isn’t really an option.”

He got into the race car and started the engine. “Let me try something,” he said.

Figuring he’d reconsidered my proposed tack, I backed away, crossing my fingers that he’d be able to turn the car back around and, with luck, get it back toward the course.

Instead, he revved the engine twice, threw it into gear, and went over the cliff.

—

In the Dakar, the dangers are obvious and everywhere. You’re riding or driving as fast as you can through unfamiliar terrain, much of it roadless desert, often with little or no sleep and little or no food. Take a dune too fast and you can end up planted in the sand like onions. Miss one of the hazards marked in the roadbook — all the holes, ditches, bumps, and dry washes cratering the desert — and you can flip, roll, or just plain crash. Animals are a constant danger: Camels, monkeys, and livestock roam the trails. (One story that made the bivouac rounds concerned a donkey that walked in front of a Mexican motorcyclist. The rider jumped off the bike, but the bike kept going, hitting the donkey, and, rumor has it, cutting it in half.) And man-made hazards loom just as large, or larger. In 1996, near the Mauritania-Morocco border, a Mercedes truck hit a land mine, incinerating one of the passengers. That same year a sniper fired at a Mitsubishi support truck, narrowly missing its driver. In 2002 the threat of terrorist attacks convinced organizers to reroute the rally at the last minute.

The cliff, for us, was just the start of it. While I ran-slash-tumbled down the cliffside after the car, fully expecting to watch it roll below me and smash headlong into a rock face at the bottom, Darren crab-walked it down the sand — a twisted feat of technical driving. He was waiting for me, calmly, at the bottom. “You’re fucking insane,” I said.

“Welcome to the Dakar, mate,” came his dry reply. “Get in.”

In northern Mauritania we got another welcome.  As Darren and I were slowly climbing a boulder-strewn path, about 15 tribesmen appeared out of nowhere and descended upon the car, opening the doors, yanking everything out that they could. They rifled through my backpack, even tore out the Kia’s hood pins. When Darren slammed the car into reverse, then forward again, rocking through the boulders to unsettle the men’s grip on our stuff, a grapefruit-size rock hit the Plexiglas driver’s side window with a loud thwack. The window remained bowed for the rest of the race.

In Mali we hit a low-hanging tree limb, which shattered the front windshield; for days afterward we raced al fresco, gathering leaves, twigs, and a thick coat of desert dust inside the car. In Senegal we hit a hole too fast and the car went airborne, flying nose-down over the trailside foliage.

Our mechanics, driving slower and steadier, fared even worse. In the dunes of Mauritania the truck flipped onto its side. Barrie cracked his head hard enough to lose some blood, and the duo had to spend the night in the Sahara until they could wrangle help to get the bruised truck back upright.

Even the few calm, collected moments of racing were shadowed by threats: In Mauritania a rumor spread through the bivouac that the U.S. embassy had contacted the race organization, having intercepted a terrorist plot to ambush an American team.

When I lay down to sleep that night, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell I was doing here. Risking life and limb for pleasure is at least defensible. But risking it all for misery is another matter altogether — a demented subset of masochism. The adrenaline that had been sustaining me for more than a week was going rancid, like milk left in the hot sun. I wanted to quit. It wasn’t simply that I was bloodshot-eyed, sand-encrusted, physically spent, that my hips were bruised from the violent up-and-down smashing of the camel grass crossings, that I had barely slept in two weeks and was surviving half the time on hot Red Bull and baguettes. Nor was it just the machine gun–fast disasters: the three hours spent digging the car out of sand as fine as talcum powder, the midnight roadside repairs, the bad GPS heading we followed that took us through a nightmarish series of virgin dunes and more and more camel grass. It was all of this, yes, but also something more: I’d lost my will. At some point, when you’ve been hanging by your fingers from a cliff, letting go begins to feel like the better choice.

I learned of the rally’s first fatality the next morning: Jose Manuel Perez, an amateur Spanish motorcyclist who’d been sharing storage space on our support truck, had died following a crash. I watched one of his teammates, a woman, get the news: She fell to the sand wailing. The next day Fabrizio Meoni, a 47-year-old motorcyclist who was in second place in his 13th Dakar, crashed his bike a hundred or so miles out of Atar, Mauritania. He died in the desert.

“This is not a true rally,” a Spanish racer told me several days later in Bamako, Mali. It was 3 am, and we were standing at a table in the bivouac, washing down our dinner with warm French beer from a can. “This is a contest to see who is tougher than who. How many dead already? Two? Every year I vow never to do it again. But then every year I do — for 19 years. Why? Because maybe I am crazy. That must be it. I am crazy.”

—

Insanity — while seemingly accurate, in the doldrums of poststage exhaustion — is too reductive and facile an explanation for why otherwise rational people shell out minor fortunes to suffer like mad and take the fierce chance of losing their lives. Something else is at work here, something I’m just beginning to comprehend. Today is January 15, a golden-hued day, and we’re rolling fast on a 140-mile special between Tambacounda and Dakar in Senegal — the last true leg of the rally. The car, it seems, is going to finish, despite its endless traumas, and we are too, despite our traumas. “Double-down hole in 300 meters,” I tell Darren, eyes darting from the roadbook to the road and back again. “Then it’s shitty and bumpy in the vegetation for 1.5k.”

“Does it actually say ‘shitty’ in the roadbook?” he asks with a smile.

“My loose translation of the French,” I reply.

A ticklish new sensation is washing through me, vastly different from the low psychic valleys I mined just days ago — not enjoyment, necessarily, or contentment, but more like understanding. I’m recalling something Darren told me, months ago, when I first met him in California to plan our long voyage. “Will this thing ever be fun?” I asked him. “No,” he said, “not fun. Not at all, really. But a few weeks later, or maybe a few months, you’ll think back on it and wonder if maybe it wasn’t actually fun, because you’ll have this great feeling of satisfaction about it.” Satisfaction: It’s a weak word, the bland stuff of consumer survey cards, yet it’s precisely what I’m starting to feel, a kind of past-tense high. You do not race the Dakar to experience it, I’m beginning to see, but rather to have experienced it. What I’ve been through has plainly been awful, an acid bath for the body and soul. Yet that I’m going to survive seems glorious.

Senegal whizzes by in a greenish-brown blur, the desert having given way to dense jungle, mud huts, windy shaded trails, the promise of water and life. “Keep to the right when you see a well, about 400 meters,” I tell Darren. “Double-down descent following, it’ll be stony. Then you’ve got a village, check speed.” Villagers line the course on both sides, cheering, dancing, egging us on. What a vast difference from Mauritania, where the women cowered behind burqas and young boys pelted us with stones. Our every slow pass through a village feels like a parade. With the mud huts in our mirrors, and open earth before us, Darren guns it. The car rockets forward, its metallic scars gleaming in the African sunlight — a bright red symbol, like all the vehicles about to pour into Dakar, of speed and survival. “Nice fast trail for 4.5k,” I say. “Open it wide.”

—

We finish 64th among the cars. Of the 162 cars that started in Barcelona, 75 survived to Dakar. Of the motorcycles, 104 of 230 made it; of the trucks, 37 of 69. On the last stage, a 19-mile special on the beach at Lac Rose, in Dakar, we come in 29th place, one slot ahead of Robby Gordon, who finished 12th overall. “Toughest thing I’ve ever done,” Gordon says to me later, at the postrace party held at Dakar’s Club Med. We’re still drinking Red Bull, only now it’s spiked with vodka. Several German racers are in the pool, singing beer-hall songs, and the dance floor is jammed, a sweaty jumble of inebriation and exhaustion and relief.

“But I’m coming back,” Gordon tells me. “I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it, and I know I can put together a team that can win it.” Later at the party I’m startled to encounter Ronn Bailey, whom we hadn’t seen since he fell behind on the gruesome stage to Tichit. “We drove to Dakar anyway,” he says. “It was amazing — like a grand tour of Africa. Did you know there are crocodiles in the Sahara? I saw them. What a wild ride.” He, too, vows to return. The Dakar is a hard mistress, but still she seduces. The glory she promises, coyly, seems difficult to resist.

Whether that glory is worth the Dakar’s hulking costs is ripe for argument. Auto racing, no matter where and how the races are held, will always kill and maim; NASCAR’s predictable oval tracks and continuing safety innovations have not kept it from sending drivers to their graves, and likely never will. Over the years the Dakar’s organizers have made serious efforts to improve safety — linking the horns of race vehicles to receivers in others, tracking each racer via GPS, an additional medical helicopter, strict speed limits through villages. Yet still the deaths pile up: Just outside Dakar, a five-year-old girl was killed when she ran in front of a support truck. Earlier the same day, in Dakar, a pair of Belgian motorcyclists, unofficially following the race, were killed in a crash. With the deaths of Jose Manuel Perez and Fabrizio Meoni, that brought the race’s fatal toll this year to five. It seems, darkly, that no degree of safety measures can protect the Dakar from itself. For as long as it continues, it will always be a high-speed, off-road race through the wildest and wooliest corners of Africa, a competition founded on danger and colonial exoticism, designed to thwart and batter those who enter it.

Early the next morning, following the party, as the city of Dakar is stretching itself awake to the rhythmic sounds of the waves, I make a last visit to the car before it’s to be loaded onto a freighter and shipped back home. Its windshield is a piece of makeshift Plexiglas. The turn-indicator lights are missing. The rooftop air intake is shredded. The right side mirror is gone, along with the left rear fender and the entire rear bumper. The front fenders are patched and held together with red duct tape. I pat its hood almost fondly, not for what it did — I will always hate it for that — but for what we went through together. “Dakar Ralleee?” I say, imitating the cynical Frenchman from the shop near Barcelona. “Holy sheeeet.”

The five-time Tour de France champ on music, surfing, and the “bikesexual.”

Interviewed by David Hochman

It would be hard to imagine a more magnificent performance. Sure, it was ugly and stressful and way too close for comfort, but victory number five at the Tour de France may have been Lance Armstrong’s greatest trick yet. In a good year the win would have sealed his place in history, but bearing in mind Armstrong’s two crashes, his faulty shoes, his diarrhea, his sore hip, his cracked bike — not to mention his marriage woes (and, lest we forget, his battle back from cancer) — cinq is damn near miraculous. Six might be next, but that’s not all he thinks about. Hell, one gnarly wave might get him to change gears altogether, as he tells Men’s Journal.

How long did it take after winning this year for you to start thinking about 2004?
At that final press conference I said I would take a month or so. Lo and behold, I went back to the hotel and damned if it didn’t take five minutes before my team director, Johan Bruyneel, and I started figuring out what we did wrong, what could be different. It’s in our fiber.

So I take it that means you’re going for six? Nobody’s ever won six. What will you do differently?
Believe it or not, I had almost begun to take victory in the Tour de France for granted, a very dangerous mind-set for an event that’s three weeks long with tons of variables. So I won’t do that again. I’m getting older, the others are getting younger, and it’s not easy. I think I can pare down. Back in the old days I would go to training camps with Johan, a mechanic, and a soigneur [a masseur/equipment manager]. But over the years we built up to ten riders, an army of mechanics, soigneurs, friends. It’s too many people on the road. It takes the Rocky factor out of it. I’ll go back to training alone this year.

The crash in the Pyrenees seemed to really energize you. Would you have won without it?
I think I would have won by more. It was definitely a hard crash, all impact. The crash cracked the bike, which meant it didn’t pedal the same. And I lost my water bottles, which may sound silly, but you’re talking about a 30–40 minute effort with no hydration, no sugars. But I certainly had a big adrenaline rush I would not have had otherwise. I was in a full rage. Johan came up in the car and said it was the first time in the Tour he had seen me with “that face.”

Who are the riders to watch? Do you think Tyler Hamilton has a shot at ever winning the Tour?
Tyler has my problem. He’s not a young guy. Because he’s new to the top level, people assume he’s 26, but he’s 33. We all race against our birth certificate at that point. Beloki [Dorronsoro, from Spain] is a couple of years younger and was riding great before his crash this year. He might have been the spoiler, and he’ll be strong next year. Jan Ullrich is, of course, good enough. He won it once and would have won five more times if some other guy hadn’t shown up.

Ironically, despite tensions between the U.S. and France, the anti-American and anti-Lance attitude seems to have waned. Any explanation?
I’ll let Jacques Chirac be Jacques Chirac and G.W. be G.W., but the French people were better to me than ever before. It helps that I’ve been around a while and have made a real effort to speak their language and respect their events. The real change was that they saw me suffer this year. The first few years they thought, Who the hell is this robot? This time I was at my limit the whole time, and they loved that.

In your new book [Every Second Counts, out this month from Broadway Books] you again write a lot about surviving cancer. Is that something you actually think about during tough moments on the Tour?
You better believe it helps. I had the yellow jersey, but I was down. I lost a minute and a half in the first time trial and had only 15 seconds going into the last time trial. I thought, This thing’s over. But being down is good for me. I know I’ve been even lower and I can draw upon those experiences to rescue myself. I think my team understands that too.

Were stories about your marriage a distraction? Your wife, Kristin, was posting diary entries on the Internet this year about your relationship problems.
It certainly hasn’t been the easiest time, and it was definitely on my mind. But the things we’re dealing with are everyday issues, and we’re trying to work through them. It’s a constant effort anyone who’s married definitely understands. We have trainers and coaches for everything else in our life. Nobody has marriage coaches, and we probably need them.

Does anything in particular relieve the stress? You’ve said this was your most anxious Tour.
Robin Williams is a very good, loyal friend and a fanatical cyclist, and he’d come into the bus before the start of a day, and that would do it. Half our team doesn’t speak English, but he’d be going off on somebody or something. Once he was in the car on a flat, boring day, and he stole Johan’s radio and just started doing his Robin Williams thing. He told us he’s “bikesexual.”

What about music? Any particular songs get you through?
I needed heavier stuff for motivation this year. Metallica’s St. Anger album got me a lot of mileage. I love the song by Three Doors Down, a Mississippi band, called “When You’re Gone.” It reminds me of my children. The morning of the big attack on Luz-Ardiden in the Pyrenees, my teammate George Hincapie pulled out his iPod and said, “This is your song for today.” It was by a band called P.O.D. and the song is called “Alive.” Talks about a man who feels like he can fly. That did the trick.

You recently took up surfing. Do you see any hidden connection to cycling?
I tried it for the first time last November in Maui, and I absolutely loved it. The real connection is to swimming, which I grew up doing. The key is getting the feel of the water and the speed to catch the wave, both of which I got pretty easily. I’ve committed to surfing the rest of my life.

What about other sports?
I still don’t get golf. But I recently discovered enduro, a kind of motocross. A year ago I did a trip in Baja with my friend Lyle Lovett, and it was just phenomenal. It’s similar enough to cycling that I adapted well, and just being out there was awesome. Baja is a rugged, strange place. We rode for four days on this coastland that looks like what L.A. looked like 200 years ago. And there are, like, three cows standing around. This year we’re thinking about going from Ensenada all the way to Cabo.

Your vote for the greatest athlete of all time?
Jordan slightly over Ali. MJ had great skills, but he also worked harder than anyone else and that’s why he’s such an inspiration.

Don’t you ever just want to break out a bag of chips and down some cheeseburgers?
I flew down from Denmark to Geneva last night and downed a big old bag of chips and salsa. I had, like, five Coronas. It was excellent. It’s the time of year for that.

Speaking of working hard, on a 1–10 scale, how sore is your body during the Tour?
I was right up to 10 this year. Look, if you’re getting dropped and you can’t hold the pace, you’re at a 10. ’Cause if you were at a 9, you’d go to a 10 to keep up. Whereas in the past I was at 7, 8, and maybe in the time trials I’d get up to a 10. But this year I was hurting big time.

Doesn’t that officially qualify you as a masochist?
This year, yeah. And I hope to not repeat that. Not that I’m unhappy with the results.

Five years ago, James Cameron made the most successful movie of all time. But Titanic was just the beginning. Since then, he’s helped invent an underwater robotic camera, made dozens of expeditions to the bottom of the ocean, and become the first to film inside the sunken Bismarck. Now that he’s done with the sea, what’s next — Mars?

by Chris Heath

James Cameron’s assistant tries to distract him one more time — he is an hour late for an appointment — but he can’t be stopped. Even when Cameron finally apologizes and says that he must go, I have to ask only one more question about the last hours of the Bismarck, the legendary German battleship, and he is up on his feet, colored felt-tip pens in his hand, drafting diagrams and schematics on the large board that runs along the meeting table in the Santa Monica offices of his production company, Lightstorm Entertainment . . . drawing out the ship’s construction, its armor belt, the “armored citadel” within it, the offset stairways . . . sketching missile trajectories, torpedo paths, and listing angles . . . exhorting the merits of plunging fire . . . telling of the Swordfish torpedo that initially slowed the Bismarck and compromised its rudder with a one-in-a-million shot (“A great story! It’s like Luke Skywalker attacking the Death Star!”) . . . and on and on, entranced by his own excitement at what he knows, and what you do not. His words are those of a smart, persuasive storyteller, part prosecutor, part scientist, clearly fluent in a wide range of disciplines, but his body language is that of an excited child in a bathtub, playing with his battleships.

Although he has dipped his toe into television by producing the sometimes-engaging, now-canceled Dark Angel, James Cameron has not made a feature film since 1997’s Titanic, the most successful movie of all time. His next movie project will be announced before the end of the year, he says, but he has been concentrating on other adventures. This summer, for instance, he visited the Bismarck’s wreck and became the first person to guide cameras inside the ship since it sank, in May 1941, with the loss of more than 2,000 German lives; a two-hour documentary airs on the Discovery Channel on December 8. At one point in our conversation, I mention that the keenest fans of his work, as much as all this interests them, might be wondering why he is not making movies.

“Because,” he retorts, “I’m not living my life for them.” And exploration is what has possessed him recently. “Hey,” he says, “I was a wreck diver before I was a filmmaker. As far as I’m concerned, there are plenty of wrecks out there. And every wreck is a story. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I could do it for the next 25.”

—

James Cameron was born in Canada 48 years ago, the oldest of five children. For most of his childhood, he grew up in Chippawa, just upstream from Niagara Falls, where his father worked as an electrical engineer at the local paper mill.

One day, when James was in grade school, his mother took him to the Royal Ontario Museum, where he saw an underwater habitat built by a Canadian scientist named Joseph MacInnis. It was called Sublimnos, and MacInnis was using it in the Great Lakes. It was large and yellow, and Cameron stared at it for a long time, while his mother kept trying to get him to go because they were going to miss the bus. “I understood exactly how it worked,” he says. “There are certain moments when you just get it, and then you have to do something about it. You have to act.”

Back home, he drew pictures of Sublimnos, then began working on his own version with his brother Mike, who’s two years younger. The two were always building things: an elaborate tunnel system that ran under the neighborhood, model rockets they fired into the sky, a hot-air balloon made out of dry-cleaning bags and fueled by candles, which is said to have roused the attention of the fire department and appeared in the local paper as a possible UFO. The Cameron brothers, even then, were sometimes partners, sometimes rivals. “I was usually the instigator of the plan,” Cameron says, “and Mike would sometimes go along with it. Or sometimes it would be a younger-brother competitive thing, and he would have to go and do his own plan.”

For his Sublimnos project, Cameron used a mayonnaise jar, pieces of his erector set, and his pet mouse. He wanted to prove that life underwater was possible. He and Mike put the mouse in the jar, hung the contraption on a rope, and lowered it into Chippawa Creek. “The mouse went to the bottom of the river, sat there for half an hour, and then came back up,” he remembers, and he still seems rather satisfied by this.

Young James was a dreamer, obsessed by science fiction films, as many boys are. “I especially loved films about exploring other planets,” he recalls.  But unlike other kids, he was always focused on ways of making his dream world come true: “I was never satisfied to just live in my head. I really wanted to go and do those things.” This was the heyday of the space program, in the late sixties, and there was nothing cooler than being an astronaut. Cameron figured that, realistically, the odds were stacked against his ever getting to space, so he set his sights on something more attainable: going downward. Although he lived 400 miles from the ocean, when he was 15 he pestered his dad to let him take scuba-diving lessons. He dived in the only places he could, in the local lakes and streams. “With the ducks,” he says.

—

As an adult, Cameron became a successful film director. His family had moved to the U.S. in 1971, and he studied physics at Cal State Fullerton. But he dropped out before graduating. He’d wanted to make films ever since he was a kid watching 2001: A Space Odyssey over and over and shooting amateur movies with homemade special effects on his father’s super 8 camera. But he had short careers as a machinist and a truck driver before he got a job making models for low-budget exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman. He took what he learned there and established himself by writing and directing The Terminator in 1984. He developed a reputation for his potently brash, emotionally simple (and strangely romantic) effects-heavy movies — Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies — and for his forceful personality: a bullying, egocentric bighead to those who didn’t like him; a focused and forceful visionary to those who did. Even during his greatest moment of triumph — Titanic’s 11 Oscars at the 1998 Academy Awards ceremony, when he stepped to the podium and hollered, “I’m king of the world!” — what many saw as the understandable celebration of a talented man getting his just reward for his obsessive, glorious labors, his detractors saw as a perfect example of the gracelessness and insensitive egotism they witnessed in both his working practices and the work itself.

In the meantime, Mike Cameron forged a career in aerospace technology, but over the years his older brother would call on him to help with his film business more and more often. The movies James Cameron wanted to make always seemed to require technical innovations and inventions that made possible something or other that had never been done before, and Mike was up to that kind of challenge. One can’t help thinking that it’s the very essence of James Cameron’s nature to want what doesn’t yet exist. As he puts it: “I have a hard time finding the exact line between fantasy and reality. I don’t mean in any kind of delusional sense. I just think that if something is worth thinking about, it’s worth doing.”

It was in 1995, when Cameron set his mind on exploring what he calls “the ultimate shipwreck,” the Titanic, that the two of them took on their first major technological challenge. The ship lay about 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, 12,500 feet beneath the ocean’s surface. Previously, people had filmed 35mm motion-picture footage at such depths only by shooting through the windows of submersibles. But Cameron wanted a camera outside the submersible so that he could pan it and tilt it and move it around as if it were in his hands. He approached people in the maritime community and was told it was impossible. “They seemed a little know-it-all and standoffish,” he says, “and I just had this basic kind of truck driver’s sense that it can’t be that hard.”

Mike, of course, agreed to try. They shrank the camera and then fitted it, as James says, “in a big-ass can with a really thick titanium wall” to withstand deep-sea pressure. Cameron’s interest in the camera’s success wasn’t just financial or technical. A camera casing that imploded next to the submersible could kill them. “It would be like setting off a few sticks of dynamite right outside the window of your submersible,” he explains.

He went on the first dive, two and a half hours down, the pressure slowly rising to almost 6,000 pounds per square inch. By 500 feet, it was pitch-black; the lights had to remain off to conserve battery power. The only hints of life were the occasional purple, pink, or blue iridescent trails of passing bioluminescent organisms. Cameron and two pilots sat squashed into a seven-foot sphere, heated by nothing but the craft’s electronics and their body heat, condensation dripping from the walls. Down, down, down . . . until, as Cameron would later recall with characteristic melodrama, they came upon the Titanic so quickly that they nearly crashed into it. The camera casing, however, was fine.

Over the next few weeks, they went down to the wreck 11 more times to get footage for the movie. Their exterior camera was encased in a large, 200-pound ROV (remote-operated vehicle) that was attached to the submersible by thick cables, meaning it couldn’t roam inside the ship without running the risk of being snagged and lost.

On one of their last dives that year, however, Cameron took the risk and guided the camera inside the wreck. It couldn’t go far, but it went in about 15 feet, just a little way down the grand staircase, far enough that he nearly didn’t get it out again. (Most of the movie’s footage of the underwater interior was shot on a set in Mexico, constructed by using the original manufacturer’s detailed blueprints and a bit of imagination.)

The expedition was a success; the movie it spurred even more so. (It grossed $1.8 billion worldwide.) But that wasn’t enough for James Cameron. In the back of his mind, it was driving him crazy: what he had seen down in the wreck, and what he had nearly seen. “It was dark,” he remembers, “but in the dark was a deeper darkness, and just at the end of the lights you could see it.” Something just out of reach of what was possible, just farther down the hall than anyone could see. “And I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to go down that hallway?”

—

It’s these missions — on the edge of ambition and science and safety and possibility — that seem to most excite Cameron. I ask him what it is that he gets from being down there, under the sea, doing something no one has done before.

“I’m living the fantasy,” he says. “And the fantasy is that I’m living in a science fiction story. I’m at the cutting edge of technology, I’m exploring, I’m in a little spacecraft and I’m seeing something that no one’s ever seen before. I’m not just along as a visitor. I’m part of the process. I’m a crew member on the first human expedition to Jupiter. That’s how I see it.”

In following these passions, Cameron believes, he is simply fulfilling a

basic biological drive, one that many people have been distracted from. “I think exploration is a fundamental aspect of the human character,” he says. “And I think as a culture we have sort of reached a point where we view exploration as a kind of extreme sport, like bungee jumping, with no greater value. But in fact, if you look at the history of human civilization and our survival to this date, and our accomplishments, the cultures that were dominant were always the ones with the strongest exploratory nature: the British, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Portuguese. You know, these are the cultures that have become technologically dominant, and therefore economically dominant.”

I ask him whether he consciously thinks he’s doing his bit for the future prosperity of North American civilization.

He laughs. “I don’t give a shit about that,” he says. “Not at all. I couldn’t care less.” For Cameron, his filmmaking is the excuse that justifies his exploration. “I think that it’s much easier to find a moral justification or an ethical justification for going and doing these things if you’re bringing the experience back, and you’re sharing it,” he says. “Let’s say I want to spend $50,000 to have somebody guide me up Mount Everest. Mount Everest has been climbed. We have pictures of it. There are oxygen bottles lying all over it. To do that is to give oneself a $50,000 present of an experience. It’s not something that gets shared with the human race.”

When Cameron visited the Titanic for the first time, back in 1995, he said it was to collect footage for the movie. He now swears that the truth was the other way around. “I don’t think the studio executives believe it, but I wanted to make Titanic because I wanted to dive the wreck. I thought: How can I dive the Titanic and get somebody to pay for it? I’ll make a movie.”

So, I clarify, the biggest-grossing movie in motion-picture history is just a little side effect of a personal whim?

“Exactly.” He reconsiders the question, as though pondering whether I have somehow slighted him. “It’s not a whim,” he objects. “A whim implies ‘I think I’ll go play pool tonight.’ ”

Quest, then.

“Quest,” he agrees. Quest is a much more James Cameron word. “That’s good,” he says.

—

After all the hullabaloo of making Titanic was over, the Cameron brothers, along with a few friends, went to the Bahamas on vacation, on a dive trip to feed sharks. It was there that Cameron began to talk about how he was going to be able to see more of the inside of the Titanic (which, it was already obvious to him and anybody who knew him, would have to involve making some kind of new film).

What they needed was a much smaller ROV that could be launched from the submersible, one that wouldn’t stir up the 90 years of delicate silt “as fine as cigarette ash” that had collected in the Titanic, and would be able to avoid the five-foot-long stalactitelike rust formations that, with no more than a bump from the camera, could crumble into clouds of red and turn the whole experience into something “like diving inside a bowl of minestrone.”

The breakthroughs came slowly: building the vehicle’s frame out of something called syntactic foam, the only known solid that’s buoyant at a depth of 12,000 feet; using battery power for the ROV; using a much thinner filament to deliver control instructions to the ROV and download footage; overcoming the microfractures caused in parallel fibers at that pressure by suspending them in a thixotropic gel . . . Cameron gets so excited talking about this stuff that soon you’re nodding with near-thrilled agreement at each new ingenious solution. It’s only later that you realize you have not even the faintest idea what a thixotropic gel might be.

Cameron decided to use these new ROVs — they built two of them and named them Jake and Elwood — to make an Imax movie about not only the Titanic but also the Bismarck, which sank 400 miles southwest of Ireland during World War II. Though Cameron would become as passionate about the Bismarck as he is about the Titanic, at this stage it principally offered a nice counterbalance as another deep-water wreck that had been discovered but little explored. When it was launched, the Bismarck was the largest battleship on the world’s seas, and, like the Titanic, was considered unsinkable. But on its first mission, it was engaged by British ships and planes, harried, and — after a chain of events much debated by historians — sunk. Of the estimated 2,200 men on board, 115 survived. The film based on Cameron’s new footage of these two wrecks would be called Ghosts of the Abyss. Before visiting the wrecks, he interviewed Bismarck survivors in Hamburg.

Then, in August 2001, he finally returned to the Titanic and guided the ROVs inside. His fantasy was becoming a reality. “That was a strange experience for me,” he says. He had been through these corridors before, on the set he had built in Mexico. “I would turn a corner, projecting my consciousness into the ROV, and I would know what was going to be around the corner — the number three elevator on D deck — and I’d come around the corner and there it would be. And I had been in that elevator. Or a simulation.”

James Cameron was at the bottom of the ocean at the wreck of the Titanic, on the ninth of his team’s planned 12 dives, when a message came from the surface that something very bad had happened. It was September 11. The Bismarck expedition was postponed. Ghosts of the Abyss (which is now due in Imax theaters around April 2003) would focus on only the Titanic.

—

Not long after Cameron and his colleagues got home, they began to work out how to continue the Bismarck project. The Discovery Channel agreed to finance a two-hour television documentary, James Cameron’s Expedition: Bismarck. “I tried getting somewhere with the other established natural-history expedition people — not naming any names — but they were dicks,” Cameron says. “They were dicks. They just didn’t get it. ‘Oh, we don’t do it that way. Show us your script and we’ll think about it.’ Fuck you. We’re going to go and do something really cool. Then we showed it to the Discovery people, and they said, ‘Hey, this is really, really cool.’ ”

Andrew Wight, who produced Ghosts of the Abyss and Expedition: Bismarck, and who has made many documentaries with both the Discovery Channel and the longer-established

National Geographic Society, suggests: “I think there was probably more of a potential for a pissing match with NGS. Discovery was quicker

to defer to Jim’s judgment and experience as a world-class filmmaker. I don’t know that he would have gotten the same latitude from NGS to do what he has done.”

The expedition arrived at the site in the ocean 16,000 feet above the Bismarck’s wreck on May 27 of this year, the 61st anniversary of the ship’s sinking. The two German survivors they had brought with them, Walter Wentz and Karl Kuhn, threw a wreath from the back deck into the gray, rolling ocean. Two days later, Cameron did the first of six dives.

For Cameron, going inside the Bismarck was a very different experience from the Titanic. For one thing, he didn’t know what was going to be around the corners. “The Bismarck had a much more threatening feeling,” he says. “It felt grimmer. I mean, there’s a romanticism around the Titanic. And you know when you’re exploring those spaces in the bow, the dining room, you can appreciate them for their past beauty. But they’re not in and of themselves the scene of the death, because most of the people evacuated abovedecks and went into the water or got to the stern. In the Bismarck, you’re surrounded by death everywhere you look.”

To get approval for filming, Cameron promised the German government that his crew would not be disturbing any human remains. Cameron’s team argued that in high-pressure, low-calcium water, aided by opportunistic deep ocean bacteria, the bodies would have long since dissolved. When you die like this, everything dissipates over decades except whatever leather you were wearing. “What you get is — it’s like something from a science fiction movie — there will be a set of clothes there,” Cameron explains, “and the shoes.”

From their dives, Cameron and his people pieced together what happened to the Bismarck in its final hours, and much of Expedition: Bismarck will deal with evaluating such evidence, particularly in relation to whether in the end the proud Germans scuttled the ship, as survivors have claimed. (Cameron’s conclusion seems to be that they did, and that, though the ship would have sunk eventually, it was the scuttling that directly dragged it down.) Just as in his movies and in his life, Cameron is prepared to challenge the line between fantasy and reality in order to dramatize the truth as he sees it: He filmed a week of reenactments with about 25 actors in North Carolina.

His brother Mike was involved throughout the expedition, and they both have big plans for the groundbreaking new ROVs. In fact, when this story was first being reported, Mike agreed to take me out off the California coast to explore a wreck with one of the ROVs. Then word came that the brothers had fallen out, and Mike would no longer cooperate with the story. It was then that I recalled the look on James Cameron’s face when we had been discussing his turbulent youthful collaborations with his brother. “It’s always been like that,” he had said, and smiled; maybe the falling out had already begun by then. “And the psychology of that persists today.”

“That’s called families, and that’s called brothers,” says Wight, who sometimes flies helicopters with Mike for fun on his days off from working with James. “One week they’re not talking, the next week they are. And when you’re close in age and you have one brother who has done exceedingly well publicly, and you reckon . . . and you probably are as smart if not smarter . . .” He stops and reconsiders. “Sibling rivalry, at any age, doesn’t care whether there’s someone wanting to do an article on you.”

Wight describes how the Cameron brothers work together: “One will propagate an idea and then, like a terrier dog, one will pick it up and run with it and then claim it as his own and develop it, and then it’ll bounce back to the other for more refinement, which usually results in the first major argument. It can be adversarial — they really push each other to the limit. . . . If you ever meet Jim’s mother, she’s quite a card when it comes to talking about Mike and Jim — she just wants to knock their heads together and make them grow up.”

—

In recent years, the ambition Cameron abandoned as a child — when he decided to go down into the oceans rather than dream of space — resurfaced. He began talking to the Russians about visiting the Mir space station and making a film there. He went through the biomedical screening process in Russia for six weeks so he could qualify for cosmonaut training, and was negotiating to do a Soyuz launch to take him to the space station. When Mir was allowed to burn up during reentry in 2001, Cameron started investigating the only alternative, the International Space Station, and sought NASA’s cooperation.

“We actually hammered out an agreement under the Space Act to develop a filmed space mission,” he says. “It didn’t mean they’d agreed. It meant that they wanted to explore it.” Cameron had been planning to live in Russia for 18 months to go through the full cosmonaut training, because he wanted to be the first noncareer astronaut to spacewalk, and to take a camera with him. After September 11, he put the project on hold. He now intends to investigate a simpler mission: using an astronaut as a cameraman and directing him from inside the space station.

I ask him about Lance Bass, ’NSync’s wannabe spaceman. Cameron approves; maybe he knows what it’s like to be dismissed as a populist with overgrown dreams. “People are going to make fun of him, say, Oh, this is frivolous,” he says. “Now, Lance Bass is going to go and have himself an experience. But what’s the good that comes from it? You’ve got a bunch of kids who look up to this guy, and he’s not some rapper with a bunch of gold chains and a big white Cadillac, squandering his money. He’s saying, All right, I’ve got a lot of money now. What am I going to do? Get a bigger house? Buy a jet? No, I’m going to go do something that I think is important, something that all of this wealth, all of this American dream, doesn’t give me.” To Cameron, it’s missions like these that lift us onto the first rung of the ladder to exploring the rest of the universe. “We’re not going to go out there and meet all those cool alien civilizations and see other planets if we don’t take the first step,” he says. He’s unstoppable now; I guess this is the James Cameron many love, and some loathe: forceful, evangelical, and entirely without self-doubt. “Learning to live in space for long periods of time is the true first step. Going to the moon was a sprint. Those guys were up there for only eight days. I can put up with anything for eight days. To go to Mars, the nearest planet that we can land on, that we could possibly physically explore and walk around on, the only one that stands any chance of being Earth-like enough to ever sustain life in some form, would take two to two and a half years — unless we have some huge breakthrough in propulsion.”

Would you go?

“Mmmmm,” he says. “Well, that’s an interesting question. And it is something that I have my characters in my Mars story [one film project he is working on] struggling with, because when you have a family . . .” He laughs at this pretense of weighing the pros and cons; he knows we both know the answer. He can’t, and he won’t . . . but given the slightest chance . . .

“Absolutely.”

They’re waging their own brand of vigilante environmentalism — Harrison Ford spotting polluters from the air, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. bringing them to justice. Amazing what a couple of guys with a helicopter can do.

by Jonathan Miles

Roughly 700 feet above the Hudson River, 60-some miles north of New York City, Harrison Ford dips his Bell 407 helicopter toward the river’s eastern bank and frowns. You know the frown, of course: It’s the frown on Han Solo’s face when he’s ensnared in the Death Star’s tractor beam, or of Jack Ryan untangling some terrorist plot. Twenty-five feet tall on the silver screen, that frown – with its crooked, clenched jaw – has become iconic. Up in Ford’s helicopter, however, it merely means that something is wrong. “There’s a brown pipe coming out from that quarry,” Ford says to his passengers. “Comes out at the woods there. See it?”

Seated beside Ford is Basil Seggos, a 27-year-old legal investigator for Riverkeeper, an environmental watchdog group that tracks and prosecutes Hudson River polluters. Seggos cranes his neck for a better view. “Whoa,” he says. “Look at this.” Down below, a rust-colored pipe leading out from a gravel quarry is spewing a foamy jet of pump water into the wetlands that line the river. “We’re flying directly over a pipeline that this quarry is using to pump out sediment,” he explains to the three of us in the helicopter’s rear: Alex Matthiessen, Riverkeeper’s executive director; photographer Timothy White, an old pal of Ford’s; and me. “Oh, man,” says Seggos, his voice almost cracking. “That’s gotta be illegal.”

In April, after years of hunting down polluters with kayaks, powerboats, hiking boots, and subpoenas, Riverkeeper’s investigators received an offer that they leapt at: A New York-based pilot was willing to take them up on aerial surveillance runs, and, to boot, he had a photographer friend willing to document the abuses. That this pilot, a longtime Riverkeeper patron, happened to be the biggest-grossing star in cinema history was a glitzy bonus, but it was the prospect of using Harrison Ford’s helicopter that truly thrilled Seggos and company.

“See all that shit coming out of it?” says Ford, his eyes on the pipeline. “Tim, I’m going to give it to you on the right here.” White lifts his camera up to the window glass, aims, and focuses. “Go ahead, Tim,” says Ford. “Fire away.” Click. Within each frame, gallon after gallon of discharge spills into the marsh and seeps toward the Hudson in a curved plume, marking its entrance into the river’s wide stream. Click. Click. Click-click-click. Up front, Seggos is giddy; he and Matthiessen came with a list of surveillance targets – sprawling riverside junkyards, leaky Superfund sites, illegally filled-in-wet-lands – but this discovery is a surprise. “We never would have seen that without a flyover,” Seggos says to Ford. The actor doesn’t respon, which is not unusual for him, but the frown seems to soften.

This isn’t the first time Harrison Ford has put his helicopter to good use. Two years ago, he piloted a rescue team to the top of Wyoming’s Table Mountain, near the home in Jackson where he lives part time, to help a 20-year-old hikers who was too sick and dehydrated to descend. Ford ferried her to a local hospital, where she recovered. Last year, he located and rescued a Boy Scout who’d been missing for a night in Yellowstone National Park.

Not that Harrison Ford wants you to call him a hero. He doesn’t want you to think, Gee, what a guy, saving Boy Scouts and damsels, whapping polluters with a real-life bullwhip. And he certainly doesn’t want you to say that the planet would be worse off if it weren’t for him. In fact, Ford really doesn’t want to talk about this extracurricular stuff at all. He’d almost prefer that questions be addressed to his helicopter, since it’s really the helicopter doing the heavy lifting. That’s why Ford has rarely taken the standard celebrity tack in do-gooding, that is, being a spokesman. “Emotion is the language of movies,” he once said. “not yammering on.” It’s a dictum he applies to the wider world as well.

As a ten-year board member of Conservation International, a nonprofit group that seeks to safeguard biodiversity trouble spots around the globe, Ford has traveled to endangered zones in Brazil, Venezuela, and other South American nations. “He’s an engaged and immersed leader,” says Peter Seligmann, Conservation International’s chairman, “who’s deeply involved in the substantive issues of the organization. Visibility is the most minor part of what he gives us. He’s a strategic thinker, and as passionate an advocate as we have.” In other words, Harrison Ford is a man of action, literally. “I am not,” as Ford says, “a poster child.”

Case in point: Riverskeeper. Ford had been sending checks to the New York-based organization for years when he encountered Riverkeeper’s chief prosecuting attorney, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at a fundraiser this spring. Although Ford spends a good deal of his time at his 800-plus-acre Wyoming ranch, he keeps his main residence close to the Hudson River, in New York City, where two of his children attend private school. An avid, even obsessive, pilot for the past six years, he stores some of his six aircraft – including a single-engine de Havilland Beaver biplane, a twin-engine Gulfstream IV jet, and his $2 million Bell helicopter – in a hangar in Teterboro, New Jersey, just across the river.

“I think I said to Bobby, ‘If there’s anything I can do to help . . .’ “ Ford recalls. “He said he might be looking for pilots to fly the Hudson watershed, and I said, ‘Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll do what I can.’ “ Kennedy says the surveillance flights were Ford’s idea, not his, but we can probably chalk that disagreement up to dueling modesty. Either way, Riverkeeper gained its first aerial volunteer.

Back in Ford’s helicopter, Matthiessen follows up. “We recognized that with a staff of 15 or 20, it would be impossible to crack down on all the polluters along the river. So we’ve embarked on a program to enlist average citizens, and” – with a nod toward Ford – “not-so-average citizens, to be our eyes and ears. The idea is to allow local people to do some of the work of protecting their river – to let them serve as mini-riverkeepers.”

“So, something like a neighborhood watch for the environment?” I ask.

“Exactly,” Seggos says. “By the program’s first anniversary, we’d recorded 169 complaints, and the rate is skyrocketing. We accept help from anyone who wants to give it to us, from anonymous sources, at the low end of involvement, and, at the another end, a few full-time volunteers: fishermen, kayakers, people like that. Right now, though, Harrison is the only volunteer who can give us an aerial view.”

“Red-tail right beneath us,” Ford announces. All eyes focus on the hawk as it glides upstream, until a junkyard strewn with tires and rusted automotive husks appears on our left. White lifts his camera as Ford swings the helicopter toward their target.

Riverkeeper grew out of the dismay of fishermen, both commercial and recreational, back in the sixties, when the Hudson River was a national joke, a viscous, sludge-streaked, chemical-ridden brown sewer line running beside New York City. Under the provisions of an obscure 1888 law that awards citizens a bounty for turning in polluters, the fishermen began waging a legal war against companies that were dumping into the Hudson, shutting down the polluters and collecting half the fines. In 1983, the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, as the organization was then called, hired its first riverkeeper, a full-time investigatory with a commission to patrol for evidence of pollution. A year later, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the slain U.S. senator, joined the organization, eventually becoming chief prosecuting attorney in 1993. His goal was simple: expose and prosecute, expose and prosecute. In the past two decades, Riverkeeper has used that tactic to nail more than 300 polluters, including behemoths like Exxon, General Electric, and, most recently, the city of New York, which pleaded guilty last year to negligence that had led to mercury leaking into the drinking supply.

The resurrection of the Hudson River, partly creditable to Riverkeeper’s dogged fieldwork and legal campaigns, has been dramatic. Some anecdotal evidence: My next-door neighbor is a commercial fisherman on the river, which is walking distance from my door. Just the other day, he delivered to me a weighty sack of soft-shell crabs he’d pulled that morning from the Hudson, a routine kindness that not so long ago would have been unthinkable. Two decades back, a sack of Hudson River crabs on the doorstep would have carried the same message as a black rose. But today? “Today, it’s the only major river system that has strong spawning stocks of its historic migratory fish,” says Kennedy. Though polluters still menace it (and fish-consumption warnings still stand), the single largest threat to the river these days is from development; after decades of strenuously avoiding the Hudson, says Kennedy. “people now want to live beside it.”

Unintended consequences aside, the river’s turnaround has proved a durable model for environmentalists nationwide; there are currently 90 licensed “keepers” on waterways across America, with an additional 300 applications awaiting approval, according to Kennedy. “we get up every morning and fight for rivers,” he says. “We’d like to see ourselves put out of business, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

A few hundred feet about the Hudson’s eastern bank, Ford’s helicopter hovers atop a square of land jutting into the river in a clearly artificial way – clearly artificial, at least, from this altitude. “This is a yacht club,” explains Seggos. “A while back, they illegally filled the riverbank to make themselves some new space. We also have an informant telling us that oil drums and old appliances were being dumped here.”

“This was a case referred by a citizen watchdog,” adds Matthiessen.

“Looks like they filled in about an acre, huh?” says Ford, and the frown returns. The Hudson may be 306 miles long, and an acre just an acre, but it’s this type of thing, this gnawing away at nature, that annoys him. “We keep pulling out pieces of the puzzle,” he tells me later, “an expecting it to heal itself.” The Hudson may be hemmed in and its banks built up, but its current still runs wild.

Wildness, on water and land and in the sky, has beckoned Ford since his childhood. As a boy growing up in Morton Grove, Illinois, Ford retreated from neighborhood bullies – whol liked to roll him down a hill – into the wildish edges of his subdivision, which sparked his early ambition to be a forest ranger. But after flunking out of Wisconsin’s Ripon College, Ford headed to California, where he flirted with acting and then went with carpentry, which provided him a living for nearly a decade. Then came American Graffiti (1973), then Star Wars (1977), and you know the rest. Never comfortable with fame, never at ease with Hollywood’s tacky apparatus, Ford found refuge in his Wyoming ranch, and then, later, in the cockpits of his plane and helicopter, where, he says, he can keep “from thinking about anything but flying.” That and the wide earth below him.

“There’s still time left to hold the line,” he tells me, “to save sufficient biodiversity, to preserve what’s necessary for nature to function.” Does it ever frustrate him, I ask – flying over some denuded stretch of clear-cut forest? “No,” he says. “Never. People don’t need to despair. They need to know that there are solutions – good, practical solutions – and they need to keep up the good fight.”

“You getting your shot back there, Tim?” Ford says as he buzzes the yacht club, dipping toward it. “About three o’clock on the right, where it juts out into the river. I’ll make another pass. The rule, by the way, in case anyone is interested, is that we’re supposed to be 2,000 feet horizontal and 1,000 feet vertical from any person or object. Obviously we’ve dicked the shit out of that one today.”

Call it vigilante environmentalism. If the government can’t enforce the laws, the people will, by finding and exposing polluters, taking them to court, forcing them to shut off an ugly spigot. “We usually get calls before the government does,” Kennedy tells me later. “If you call the Department of Environmental Conservation, or the EPA, whomever, the chances of something getting done are slim. And don’t even think about calling after hours or on a Saturday. But if people call us, they know that something will get done.” Riverkeeper’s mission is not fluffy and utopian; it’s a grouchy, populist, your-dog-can’t-shit-on-my-sidewalk kind of environmentalism. As Ford puts it, “This is simple stuff; that’s a violation of the law, and the law is there to be enforced.”

Up above the Hudson, headed south, Seggos is explaining what will happen next with the quarry we spied earlier. “We’ll talk to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, check on the permits using the Freedom of Information Act, investigate it further on the ground, and then, if necessary, take them to court.” (As it turns out, the quarry does have a permit to discharge eight million gallons per day of “pump-out water and storm water,” and the state alleges that the drainage does “not have a significant impact on the environment.” Which means it’s legal, but, as Seggos later tells me, that doesn’t always mean it’s kosher. Riverkeeper has filed a complaint with the state about the quarry’s permit, and investigators will collect water samples in the fall, from boats and kayaks, to monitor the discharge’s actual contentes.)

“See all those swans over there?” Ford cuts in. Near the Hudson’s western edge, a bevy of swans sit bobbing in the river. “They’re trumpeters,” he says, and banks the helicopter eastward. “I don’t want to disturb them.” The swans continue their rest as if they never noticed us, high above them in this jet-powered contraption, and that, it seems, is exactly the point. “That’s cool,” Ford whispers, and, with the Bronx ahead of us in the hazy urban distance, he follows the river home.

The EPA calls it the most severe exposure to a hazardous material in American history. The only people in Libby, Montana, who didn’t see it coming were the victims, who are dying to know if it’s really possible to poison an entire town and get away with it.

by Mark Levine

At U.S. Highway 2 crosses Montana, it is dotted along its six-hundred-mile length with signposts bearing white crosses. They flicker past like small anonymous advertisements, punctuating the mostly empty road, which stretches across the sparsely populated top of the state – from the wheat fields of Wolf Point in the east, past the wind-scoured town of Chinook, where the plains collide with the Rocky Mountains, skirting the lower fringes of Glacier National Park, and continuing through a claustrophobic corridor of ragged hills. The crosses mark the sites of highway fatalities. Some of them are hung with plastic wreaths; some have names scratched on their surfaces; some are bent by winds and ice; many are rusted.

For a while, as if playing a child’s game with myself, I keep tally of the roadside body count, which lends me the impression that I am being shepherded along my route by specters, that death forms the backdrop of this journey. Near Libby, a hamlet on the northwestern edge of the state, the white crosses begin to multiply, like rogue vegetation. In one innocuous stretch, just outside town, there is a cross every hundred yards or so, a cross stands beside a sign announcing the town limits, in view of the great charred steel skeleton of a former sawmill; yet another one decorates the lawn outside the Libby Area Chamber of Commerce, whose officials have spent the past few years battling the notion that the town, population 2,675, has become, as one resident put it, “America’s Chernobyl.”

Directly behind the Chamber of Commerce sits a charmless rectangle about the size of a pair of football fields, hemmed in by a chain-link fence. This is Libby’s cemetery, adorned with its own bland rows of crosses. Diane Keck knows this place. Until 1954, when she was fifteen and her family moved away, her father was the town undertaker. “In the course of my father’s job, he noticed something strange,” she says. “A lot of the men who worked up at the mine just outside town were dying young. He made a connection. He told us kids to stay away from the stuff from the mine.” Some of that stuff – a micalike mineral of a thousand uses called vermiculite, which is tinged with tremolite, a naturally occurring and particularly virulent form of asbestos – was forever drifting through the air around Libby. The mineral hung in dust clouds over the town and accumulated on the ground at a plant where ore was processed and shipped. “They would dumb it into open boxcars and there would be a big poof of smoke,” Keck remembers. “And there were big piles of it, like mountains, and we would play blindman’s bluff around them.”

Ten years ago, Keck started coughing , and she hasn’t stopped since. When she hikes in the woods, she gets short of breath. Doctors tell her that she has signs of asbestosis, an incurable lung disease that is caused almost exclusively by industrial exposure to asbestos. A few years ago, Keck learned that most of the children from her old neighborhood had also been diagnosed with asbestos-related lung disease. Her brother has it; so does her nephew, who grew up nearby; so, too, it seems, does nearly everyone in town.

It takes little more than five minutes to drive through Libby, but I have no intention of passing through. The town is the site of a toxic contamination that is unprecedented in American history, and I have followed a trail of white crosses here to meet the people and to hear their stories. Libby has always been remote and rugged, even by Montana standards, and until recently it was a tightknit, seemingly idyllic community, shadowed by the rough peaks of the Cabinet Mountains, their slopes drenched in blue light. You don’t have to hike very far into the hills around town to come upon a chain of secluded lakes, and you can still spend days at those heights without crossing paths with another person. Grizzlies roam the woods, and trout cluster in the shallows of the Kootenai River, which cuts through town. But the fresh, folkloric Rocky Mountain air has become a burden rather than a blessing for many of Libby’s residents, who, like Keck, are enduring the effects of a lung-thickening disease and opening their homes to hazardous-waste workers in hooded Tyvek suits who are equipped with respirators and sensitive monitors.

This is the short form of the telling: Just north of Libby stands a hill that once looked like any other hill. For sixty-seven years, the shape of this hill was altered by explosives and earthmovers, and by the labor of men who were brought up the hill on clattering buses. The men came up, and the rock they dug out was brought down, tens of thousands of pounds of rock each hour. It was hard work, removing the top of the hill, but it was good work. It supported generations of families. True, the miners died young, but danger was an accepted part of their daily routine; grousing about pain and misfortune was not. Miners kept their suspicions about the vermiculite dust that coated their work clothes to themselves.

Then, in 1990, the hill was vacated by W.R. Grace, the multinational corporation that had operated the mine since 1963. Although the company possessed detailed knowledge of the asbestos hazards to which its workers had been exposed, it had kept that knowledge to itself. State and federal governments had also been aware of the risks. Ironically, Marc Racicot, Montana’s attorney general from 1989 to 1993, and its governor from 1993 to 2001, was raised in Libby. But even that didn’t compel state officials to inform the community.

By 1995, a few families had noticed that miners’ wives were dying of their husbands’ ailment, and the miners’ children, too, had learned that they often shared it, as if the hazards of the trade were genetically passed on. But not until 1999 did residents begin to notice that asbestosis was showing up in people who had never been at the min and had never lived with miners. Still, there was no organized outcry about the contamination until the end of that year, when the Environmental Protection Agency began a belated full-scale investigation of the town’s legacy of pollution.

The EPA discovered that asbestos has probably shortened the lives of most of the 1,898 workers who toiled at the mine between 1940 and 1990. What’s more, the effects are ongoing. An astounding one third of Libby’s residents are believed to have contracted asbestos-related lung disease. “We haven’t begun to count the number of people who have been, or will be, killed by this,” an EPA scientist, protective of his identity, told me, before adding with disgust, “This was deliberate murder.”

Soon after I arrie in Libby, I meet a man named Les Skranstad, whose thin, wavering voice barely rises above a whisper. Skramstad, sixty-four, is grizzled and bowlegged and wears a camouflage cap with a dirty feather stuck in its side. A toothpick often hangs from his mouth when he speaks. Although Skramstad didn’t receive a high school diploma until he was in his forties, he is as forceful and eloquent a man I have met. He has worked as a rancher and a logger and a mechanic. Once, for barely three years, he worked as a miner in Libby and as a result has full-blown asbestosis. “Full-blown is when you got a death sentence,” he says. “You better put your affairs in order.” In 1997, Skramstad sued W.R. Grace for personal injury. His was the first of only three cases in Libby to reach a jury, and he won a judgment of $660,000 against the company, which has made him something of a pariah in town. But his victory didn’t dispel his bitterness about what he and his community have suffered. “Should a person have to die just because they live in Libby?” he asks.

“It was more or less like a brotherhood at the mine. The first day of work, I got on the busy downtown and they hauled us up on the hill. There was a guy named Tom DeShazer, and I walked over to him and said, ‘Here I am,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to go be a sweeper in the mill.’ He sent me over to the warehouse to get a respirator. I’d never seen a respirator before. A guy named Shorty Welch handed it to me, and I said, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ and he kind of laughed and said, ‘Well, wear it if you can.’ It was a little aluminum gadget, about the size of your hand, that fit over your nose and mouth.

“I got on the man-lift and rode up to the top floor of that mill, and, my God, I’d never seen anything like it in my life. I guess a guy has seen a dust storm before. The dust was probably three, four inches deep. It was almost like walking on a real plushy carpet. It was so dusty that it was hard to see what the heck was going on.

“I believe I was getting $2.10 an hour. I really wanted that job, so, boy, I started sweeping with all my might. After about fifteen minutes, Jesus, I couldn’t breathe. So I threw that respirator off, and it was plagued with dust. I thought I was going to suffocate. Everyone who worked up there looked the same after a few hours. We all looked brown.

“I was beating this dust off myself so I could eat lunch when Tom DeShazer said, ‘Oh, don’t pay any attention to that. It’s just a nuisance dust. It won’t hurt you. You can eat a ton of it and it’ll never hurt you.’ ” —Les Skramstad

I am standing on the porch of a whitewashed house three miles from W.R. Grace’s defunct mine.  The house is owned by history buff, gentleman farmer, and amateur toci-contamination expert Mike Powers. Powers, sixty-four, came to Libby twenty years ago and Kootenai, where he tends his small herd of exotic Swiss cattle and lives in an old farmhouse built from hand-hewn logs.

Once, long ago, Powers’s farm played host to the workshop in which the potent dust that helped build and bury Libby was first stirred up. The wizard of Libby, a man named E.N. Alley, who died two years before Powers’s birth, slept in the house where Powers now sleeps, and left traces of his handiwork all over the property.

In 1921, Alley ventured into a disused forty-foot-deep shaft that had been dug into a hill near his ranch. He carried a torch to light his way. Before long, he heard a sizzling sound. His flame had roasted some of the loose rock in the tunnel, and the pebbles had puffed up, like popcorn, and drifted before his eyes. Alley had found the world’s largest deposit of vermiculute, whose peculiar exfoliating properties are due to the evaporation of water molecules between the rock’s layers. Alley staked his miner’s claim, came up with the suitably Jazz Age name Zonolite for his product, and christened the mountain after the brand. What he didn’t kow was that the vermiculite was inextricably braided with asbestos fibers, and that inhaling those fibers – especially in high concentration, especially over long stretches of time – would kill a man.

Zonolite was marketed as a lightweight, nonflammable additive to construction materials, and by 1926 a hundred tons of it were being produced in Libby daily. Its most widespread application would be home insulation – today, as many as 15 million attics in the United States may contain asbestos-laced Zonolite. A mill was built on top of Zonolite Mountain to separate valuable ore from waste rock. The mill stood ten stories tall, higher by far than any building in Libby, and featured a tangle of grinders, steel screens, conveyor belts, and chutes. Ore would be poured in at the top, and by the time it tumbled to the bottom, being crushed as it fell, it had been sifted into a granular residue. The milling produced plumes of thick, white dust – containing up to five thousand pounds of asbestos each day – that billowed from atop the mountain, settling on the hillside and in creek beds and hovering over Libby like a fog. Children in town would write their names in the dust on sidewalks.

By 1942, when the state of Montana first contacted the Zonolite Company to express its concern about the dust at the mine, there was already ample medical knowledge about the danger of asbestos. The author of a 1937 article in The New England Journal of Medicine did not mince words. “Asbestos,” he wrote, “is extremely dangerous and fatal.” Such warnings did not deter W.R. Grace, then based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from buying Zonolite in 1963, or from doubling the mine’s daily output – to 15,000 tons of ore, containing 900,000 pounds of asbestos – between then and 1990, when the mine closed after mounting signs of a future filled with asbestos-related litigation had become impossible to ignore.

Although Powers never worked in the mine, he recently learned that his lungs are diseased from inhaling asbestos. “My only exposure,” he says, “is living here.” We tour his farm, and everywhere we go he points out glittering flecks of vermiculite. Standing in the former chicken house, Powers tells me, “The carpenter who helped me work on this building – his lungs are full of asbestos. The guy that worked on the furnace shield has it. The electrician, the plumber – they have it.” Powers figures that the property into which he has sunk his saving and his labor is unsalable. “Maybe,” he says, “W.R. Grace will buy this farm and turn it into an asbestos theme park.” As he talks, Powers bangs on a wall and jolts a puff of vermiculite dust loose into the air.

“Look there,” he says. “Strange how it catches in the cobwebs.”

“I’d come home from work pretty well laden with dust, and my kids were little at that time, and they’d meet me at the door and grab my legs, and they’d get a blast of it. Then my wife, Norita, would give me a hug at the door, and she’d get a dose of it, too. I contaminated them every single day. If it had just took the lives of us miners, that would have been bad enough. But I carried it home and gave it to my wife and three of our five children. That’s a pretty poor percentage. My daughter Laurel, she’s got six kids. She’s got it. And my boy Brent, he’s got it real bad, like me, full-blown. My grandfather lived to be eighty-eight. My dad lived to be seventy-eight. I may not make sixty-eight. Brent, he may not make forty-eight. Any man should look out for his family first, and being that I had a hand in their destiny, that’s pretty grim.” —Les Skramstad

Chris Weis, a forty-seven-year-old toxicologist, was not, at first, alarmed. Based in Denver, Weis specializes in emergency response for the EPA’s Region 8 office, which covers the northern Rockies. Just before Thanksgiving 1999, while attending a meeting in Helena, Montana, Weis was paged by his managers. The agency had seen an inflammatory report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer concerning a small town that Weis had never heard of where close to two hundred deaths and another four hundred cases of fatal illness were being attributed to exposure to mine contaminants.

“Look,” he tells me, in the EPA’s field office in Libby, “I’ve got a doctorate in toxicology and a doctorate in medical physiology. My first reaction to the reports was, This doesn’t happen.”

Weis nonetheless went to Libby to investigate, visiting the former mine and a number of sites where ore was processed and handled. He contacted a pulmonologist in Spokane, Washington, two hundred miles to the west, who had treated hundreds of Libby residents for asbestos-related lung disease, which occurred in town at sixty times the national average rate. He learned of at least nineteen local cases of an invariably fatal cancer called mesothelioma, whose only known cause is exposure to asbestos, and which is so rare that, as Weis says, “one case in a population of a million is considered an epidemic.” He spent some time talking to residents. “Libby is a small town,” he points out, “so if you talk to fort or fifty people and every one of them has a neighbor or family member with an asbestos-related disease – to say the least, that’s unusual.” Weis returned to Denver persuaded that Libby had the distinction of hosting “the most severe human exposure to a hazardous material this country has ever seen.”

Within two days, the EPA descended on Libby in full force, bringing in a team of scientists, physicians, geologists, and toxic-cleanup experts. None of them were prepared for the dimensions of the disaster they would discover. They learned that W.R Grace had “pumped so much asbestos fiber into the airshed here, it hung in the center of town in concentrations that were probably twenty times higher than the present occupational-exposure limit,” Weis says. They learned that when W.R. Grace left town in 1990, the company had done a sloppy job cleaning up its former properties, which remained highly contaminated. And there was more. “We found disturbing evidence that the material had been readily accessible to the general public in Libby. Ore was often free for the taking. Kids played in it; it was in sandboxes and on ball fields. People would load up their pickup trucks and take it home to use in their gardens as a soil amendment and on their driveways as a surfacing material. When the high school track needed resurfacing in the 1970s, W.R> Grace brought down truckloads of raw ore – almost, in some cases, pure asbestos – and covered the track with it. Kids ran on mine tailings until 1983.”

Finally, the EPA called in the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a division of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, which invited the residents of Libby and the surrounding valley, past and present, to undergo screening for signs of asbestos-related disease. As Weis recalls, “We anticipated that, given the severity of exposures in Libby, we might see possibly as much as 10 or 12 percent of the population come back with scarring on their lungs.” Chest X-rays were taken of 6,144 people. Preliminary results released this March, representing 1,078 of those examined, revealed that 30 percent showed symptoms of lung disease. “We just weren’t prepared for that,” Weis says. “What’s unprecedented is that so many of these sick people had no known source of exposure to asbestos. They only lived in Libby.”

Weis was also shocked to discover that his predecessors at the EPA and other federal agencies had been well informed of the dangers in Libby. “The pieces of this situation were put together in the seventies,” he says. “Very detailed studies were done. The results were unequivocal.” While it’s true that until 1970, when Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, regulatory oversight of work places was severely limited, rarely had a year passed since the mid-fifties in which some government agency did not visit Libby and come back with troubling findings. In 1968, for instance, the U.S. Public Health Service warned W.R. Grace that “the dust concentrations are from 10 to 100 times in excess of the safe limit.”

Nonetheless, a series of EPA memos in the early eighties addressing the health risks at the mine were allowed to languish. At that time, President Reagan, in his first term, was intent on reducing government spending in order to cut taxes. (In a report issued this spring, the office of the EPA’s inspector general acknowledge that the “EPA did not place emphasis on dealing with asbestos-contaminated vermiculite due to funding constraints and competing priorities.” It’s worth noting that in 1982, Reagan convened a closed-door gathering of advisers to come up with suggestions for where to trim the budget. The group, called the Grace Commission, was chaired by an old friend of the president’s, J. Peter Grace, the president and CEO of W.R. Grace.

The EPA is still cleaning up Libby, having spent $12 million on its efforts in 2000, with another $16 million budgeted for 2001. Sixty to seventy percent of Libby’s homes are thought to contain vermiculite insulation. Most yards have vermiculite in the soil. At dusk, the streets downtown still glisten with a sheen of powdery ore. Nights at my motel, I often pass hazardous-waste workers in the hallway. They have been brought to Libby by the EPA. By day, they can be seen entering sealed houses around town, beating pillows, vacuuming curtains, and dusting mantels in an effort to measure how much asbestos fiber has worked its way into the fiber of daily life in Libby.

Naturally, the ore that was taken from W.R. Grace’s mine did not stay in Libby for long. It was transported to more than 250 processing plants around the country. The EPA has barely started examining these sites. In Minneapolis, though, the agency tracked down fifty-seven former employees of a factory that had received its share of Libby’s vermiculite. Twenty-four of those workers either had died or were dying of asbestos-related disease.

“You can still go to your local Kmart and buy gardening supplies that contain Libby vermiculite,” says Weis, who is in charge of gathering and evaluating scientific data on Libby’s contamination. “Speaking purely as a toxicologist, I’ve never seen as hideous a poison as this material.”

“Around the last part of 1960, a boss at the experimental lab come down and told us, ‘I want you to get in the pickup and go up on the hill and get a load of asbestos.’ That was the first time I ever heard the word. I’d seen a lot of it up there, but I didn’t know what it was. We got shovels and picks and dug it out of the hill. We brought it down to town, and spread it out as thin as possible in our work area, and put electric heaters on it to dry out. We got on our hand s and knees to pick out rocks from it, because we’d been told they wanted 100 percent asbestos. We worked every day on it, all day long, for a couple of weeks. When the stuff got dry, the wind would blow through the door and scatter it all over the building. We didn’t want to lose any of it, so we sealed up all the doors with rags. I had no idea what they wanted it for. But like I say, we were just paid to do a job. There was not a peep about it being dangerous.” —Les Skramstad

Its name comes from a Greek word meaning “inextinguishable,” and it endures fire, flood, and frost as fiercely as it clings to a person’s lungs. A human hair is well over a thousand times as thick as one of its strands. It can be woven like cotton, which cannot be said of any other mineral. It has been an ingredient in at least three thousand products, common and rare, and, despite the widespread and mistaken impression that it has been banned – efforts by the EPA to do so, in 1989, were overturned on legal technicalities – it remains ubiquitous, not only in insulation but in clutch and brake linings, in pipe and boiler insulation, in wallboard and floor tiles, in oven mitts and plastic pot handles, and in baby powder.

Its advocates and apologists will dispute it, but over the past century, a vast medical literature has exhaustively described the means by which asbestos has killed, according to EPA estimates, 259,000 people in the United States, with another 166,000 deaths anticipated over the next thirty years. Among the proud array of carcinogenic products, natural and fabricated, only tobacco has contributed to a higher death toll. Most of its victims will never know what caused their death, because they are unaware they have been exposed to it, and the lapse between exposure and the onset of illness is typically longer than ten years. In this way, it maims not like a gun, inflicting harm at the moment of contact, but rather like a land mine, which lies dormant for years.

“There’s something about this fiber that’s not average,” says Dr. Brad Black, the director of Libby’s new Center for Asbestos-Related Disease. Black’s job is not what he bargained for when he opted to be a small-town doctor in a place served by a twenty-four-bed hospital and fewer than ten physicians. Since the “asbestos clinic,” as everyone in town calls it, opened last year, Black has seen, he estimates, four or five hundred asbestos-diseased patients, including the construction worker whose chest X-ray he has put on display for me.

“See those large patches of white?” Black says, pointing to blocks of washed-out-looking glare that rim the dark crescents of lung. “They wouldn’t be there in a healthy lung. It’s scarring.” Black explains that tremolite asbestos fibers, once inhaled, embed themselves in the lining of the lung — the pleura — like needles, and stay there. The body can’t flush them out; medicine can’t destroy them; surgery can’t cut them out. Surrounding tissue responds to the irritation by calcifying. A healthy pleura is as thick as Saran Wrap; in a person with asbestosis, it may be as thick as an orange peel. Then the lung itself gets covered with calloused tissue; oxygen struggles to find its way into the lung, and carbon dioxide struggles to find its way out. “It’s just a progressive scarring,” Black explains, “until respiratory or heart failure.”

If one were to attempt to devise the perfect suffering, death by asbestosis would come close to fitting the bill. It is slow and incapacitating. It steadily wastes the patient. It brings the patient to the very verge of suffocation and allows him to remain there for months, even years, on end, to reflect on his situation. A typical patient will cough until he vomits. His lungs will fill with fluid. He will feel as if he is swimming in the fluid, drowning.

Just ask Don Kaeding, who survived four years as an artilleryman during the Second World War, but is paying for his twenty-eight months of service on behalf of Zonolite. I find Kaeding yoked by a fifty-foot length of tube to a noisy machine in the corner of his living room. The tubing fits snugly in his nostrils, curls over his ears, runs down his shirt, and snakes its way along the wall to a canister that feeds Kaeding his breath. “God damn, but this is an irritating disease,” he says apologetically. “I got these cords to drag around, and they’re always in everybody’s way. My wife’s mother tripped on them one night and broke her arm.” Kaeding is seventy-eight. His skin is ashen, his hair waxy, his lips blue. He’s been on supplemental oxygen for five years, like a puppet on a life-giving string, and, as he tells me, “ain’t no one volunteers for this.”

Kaeding – who filed a personal-injury suit against W.R. Grace, only to have his claim dismissed for exceeding the three-year statute of limitations – is one of a cadre of Libby residents being kept alive by mechanical means. Most of them don’t leave the house much, because the effort of slipping into a portable oxygen unit, which weighs down a frail body and which gets unpleasantly frosty, tends to consume as much energy as an oxygen-deprived person can muster on a given day. Nonetheless, I spot shoppers resting their air tanks in their carts at the local grocery store. I see an oxygen-outfitted man wheeling a bicycle around town, stowing his gear as others would their Gatorade. And one of my new circle of asbestos-diseases acquaintances  tells me the tale of an old woman in Libby who, not long ago, while hooked up to her air supply, put her head beneath her bedcovers, lit a furtive cigarette, and blew herself straight to the next world.

Exceprt from the deposition of Earl Lovick, former Libby Mine superintendent, October 27, 1998
Q: And yo knew at least by 1962 that your men were being diseased, correct
A: Yes, sir.
Q: It wasn’t at risk of disease, they were in fact being diseased, correct?
A: Some of them, yes, sir.
Q: And they were in fact dying, correct?
A: Some of them, yes, sir.
Q: You had absolute proof that these men had been diseased up there at the mill by 1966 at the latest? Is that true?
A: Yes, sir, that would be true.
Q: And none of the records you had on that were shared with the men. Is that true?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: And so at this point it wasn’t just a matter of men being exposed to something that might injure or kill them, these men were already injured and dying, and they were continuing to be exposed every day, is that true?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: And is it fair to say that since you knew that workers were going home with asbestos dust on them, that they were taking home toxic dust?
A: Yes.

Alan Stringer is in a bind. Stringer, fifty-seven, is an engineer of mines, after all, not an engineer of facts, and it turns out that it wa an easier job to run an operation that exposed a town to hazard, as Stringer did in Libby from 1981 until the mine shut down, than it is to deal with the emotional, medical, and political fallout. But Stringer is a loyal man, a company man, and when W.R> Grace called on him to be its stand-up guy in Libby once again – dealing with flak from the press and the EPA and the community – he opened an office on Mineral Avenue, downtown, just down the block from the EPA, a few blocks from the Center for Asbestos-Related Disease.

“There’s no question, it’s a sad story,” he says. Sadder, too, because W.R. Grace was an excellent record keeper, which only makes Stringer’s job of defending the company tougher. A detailed paper trail demonstrates the company’s awareness, even before it purchased Zonolite in 1963, of the asbestos problem in Libby. How to respond to a 1956 report by an inspector for Montana’s Division of Disease Control noting that “the asbestos dust in the air is of considerable toxicity”? Or to an internal company memo, from 1967, that refers to “a potentially large group of employees who may already have the beginnings of [asbestos]”? Or to a 1969 company briefing, marked CONFIDENTIAL and given the subject heading “Vermiculite Report for Mr. Grace,” that concludes with the sentence “Tremolite asbestos is a definite health hazard at both the Libby operation and at the expanding plants using the ore”? Well, for Alan Stringer, the response is, “It was another time, another understanding.”

Indeed, when times were good in Libby, no one – not workers, nor union representatives, nor politicians in a community in which W.R. Grace was the largest taxpayer – felt pressed to inquire too deeply into the health of miners. Among town doctors, silence was the rule. While the mine was active, W.R. Grace always occupied a seat on the board of the local hospital. As Black remembers, “If you’d have brought up this topic for discussion, you’d have been run out of town as a rabid environmentalist.” The company was a pillar of the community. When civic groups were raising funds, the company was there. When the ball field needed new bleachers, the company was there.

But the company also failed to share the results of its own medical-screening program with its employees, even when, in 1969, those tests showed that 92 percent of longtime mineworkers were diseased. It would not, it seems, have been cost-effective to acknowledge that working at the mine could make a man terribly sick. A 1968 memo from high-ranking W.R. Grace executive Peter Kostic suggested that thirty-two diseases miners be shifted to less-strenuous work so that “we may be able to keep them on the job until they retire, thus precluding the high cost of total disability.” The company failed, as well, to provide workers with on-site showers, an amenity that might have reduced the amount of toxic material miners brought home with them. Nther company memo, from 1983 – when Stringer was mine superintendent – considered the $373,000 cost of installing such showers in forbidding tones, concluding, “I recommend that no action be taken at this time.”

W.R. Grace says that the company compiled with ever-changing regulations limiting asbestos exposure, which became more stringent during the 1970s and ‘80s, and that, alarmed by high rates of lung disease in its workers, it did take steps to reduce dust at the Libby mine. Only in retrospect, the company says, did it become clear that workers and residents had been exposed to harmful levels of tremolite asbestos. Still, the company’s files are filled with material that has given Stringer a serious public relations headache.

But slick PR doesn’t seem to be a strength at W.R. Grace, which was notably vilified in the book and movie A Civil Action for allegedly dumping cancer-causing chemicals in the drinking water of Woburn, Massachusetts. The company’s image wasn’t burnished any in Libby when, in this past April, W.R. Grace filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11, citing its need for protection from some 325,000 personal-injury claims that had been made against its asbestos-containing products, especially a fire-retardant spray-on insulator called Monokote. By its own account, the pared-down company, which began spinning off its assets in 1995, when it had revenues of $6 billion, did only $1.6 billion in business in 2000, while it forecasts asbestos-related liabilities of $878 million. “Grace cannot defend itself against unmeritorious claims,” said Paul J. Norris, the company’s chairman, president, and CEO, in announcing the bankruptcy.

Two days after the announcement, I meet with Roger Sullivan, a lawyer in Kalispell, Montana, ninety miles away. About fifteen years ago, a handful of diseased miners in Libby started suing the company, receiving small settlements – generally said to be less than $100,000 each – and agreeing to remain silent about the details of their suits. By the time Sullivan began advocating on behalf of clients in Libby in 1995, settlements had begun to creep up into the middle six figures – still barely enough to cover long-term medical costs. “In the course of developing a few early cases,” he tells me, “the circle of victims just kept getting bigger and bigger.” Sullivan and his partners, Jon Heberling and Allan McGarvey, have since settled thirty cases against W.R. Grace, have won three trials – including that of Les Skramstad – in front of juries , and have eighty suits pending, representing two hundred individuals.

Of course, these suits have been put on indefinite hold by W.R. Grace’s bankruptcy filing, and according to Sullivan, his clients are “frustrated and confused by the chasm between the law and justice.” Those with claims pending against W.R. Grace, and those who only recently learned of the harm done to them by the company, now stand a better chance of getting a payoff from gaming machines in local casinos.

“It ought to scare the hell out of the whole town, but it don’t. The town looks at us like were the villains. Like this was a nice little town and we come along and upset the apple cart. A lot of people think we’re dreaming this up and taking out on this poor company. Well, if I strangled a single person – and that’s what it amounts to if you’ve got asbestosis, you suffocate – I’d be in the penitentiary. And yet they do it to families, they do it to kids, and they get away with it.” —Les Skramstad

Every weekday morning at then, a group of men, mostly middle-aged or older, meet for coffee and conversation at a grimy little Mexican restaurant in downtown Libby called La Casa de Amigos. The restaurant doesn’t open for business until eleven, which suits the members of the coffee klatch just fine. Although they would deny it, their meetings are not open to the public, but are instead the preserve of Libby’s dilapidated power elite. Among the regulars who gather beneath faded piñatas and walls hung with threadbare serapes are an assortment of bankers, lawyers, and businessmen, as well as Alan Stringer, the mayor, and a representative to the state legislature. They take wagers on who will pay for their seventy-cent cups of coffee, and they trade gripes about the stigma that has blotted their town. “We’re in dire straits,” says Mike Munro, who runs a bar and restaurant called Treasure Mountain Casino, “and we’ve got no way of turning it around. The EPA has brought a different kind of cancer to this town.” The men are scornful of the claims of those affected by asbestos-related disease. “There are people in town who are disappointed they haven’t been diagnosed,” one of them tells me. Another adds, “They thought they’d hit the lottery with this asbestos thing.”

Since the EPA arrived in 1999, the town has fractured into a collection of outraged tribes. If Libby was, at one time, divided between blue-collar workers and managers – they lived in different neighborhoods, drank at different bars, prayed at different churches – now it is health, not wealth, that turns neighbors against one another.

Some, like the men in La Casa de Amigos, think the health hazards have been overblown by the shiftless residents looking to cash in at the expense of W.R. Grace. Many others have refused to be examined for asbestosis, not wanting to condone the hysteria. Businessmen worry about the local economy: Tales have circulated about out-of-towners calling the Chamber of Commerce to ask if it is safe to drive through Libby, even with the windows rolled u. And there are those who want nothing more from W.R. Grace than acknowledgment in the form of an apology, which has not been forthcoming.

Then there are Libby’s sick, who believe they are being persecuted for staining the town’s reputation and ruining its economy. According to Laura Sedler, Libby’s sole clinical social worker, who runs support groups for people with asbestos-related diseases,  “There’s an old-fashioned term for what happened to victims in this community: shunning.” In 1997, when Les Skramstad took W.R. Grace to court, his suit didn’t receive a word of coverage in the local newspapers. The country courtroom was empty of spectators, except for a few widows who wanted to find out what had happened to their husbands. More recently, a woman whose husband had just died of asbestosis stood in the checkout line at the supermarket and listened to the clerk gripe, “I’m sick of hearing about asbestos. We won’t be done with this until they all just die off.”

But residents in Libby are not only coming to terms with the realization that they have been liberally sprinkled with toxic dust; they also seem to be experiencing a childlike sense of abandonment. In the past decade, a prosperous silver mine shut down, and the timber mill that was the largest local employer scaled back its operations by 80 percent. Two thousand jobs have been lost, prompting an exodus of young, able-bodied, and motivated residents. Libby is the seat of what is now the second-poorest county in the second-poorest state in the country. A quarter of the town’s population lives below the poverty line; another quarter isn’t doing much better.

It’s hard not to wonder whether the remoteness of Libby, and the complacency and lack of wealth and lack of influence of its residents – compared, in particular, with that of a onetime Fortune 500 company that donated $764,618 to political campaigns during the 1990s – might have allowed the disaster to occur in the first place. Several hundred sick poor people don’t make for much of a political constituency.

Still, the week after W.R. Grace filed for Chapter 11, about two hundred residents air their grievances to a U.S. senator, Max Baucus. Baucus embraces the role of crusader for Libby’s wounded. Facing the crowd at a local theater, he takes off his jacket, rolls up his sleaves, radiates Clintonesque empathy, and tells the audience, “What happened here is an outrage. We’ve got to get you jstice. Grace can buy all the fancy lawyers they want, but I’m going to make sure you will be made whole.” He listens to pleas for health-care facilities, pleas for criminal action against W.R. Grace, and, toward the end of the meeting, a plea from a young man, just diagnosed with scarring on his lungs, for Little League ball fields to replace the contaminated old diamonds. Then, just as suddenly as he arrived in Libby, Baucus is gone.

I mingle with the crowd after the meeting breaks up. I nod at Alan Stringer, who sat forlornly through the event in the back corner of the auditorium with his windbreaker zipped up. I spot Don Kaeding, with his oxygen tank, and Les Skramstad, in his loudest western shirt. Diane Keek is there, coughing dryly, and a few feet away stands Mike Powers, speaking vehemently about the need for aggressive cleanup of private homes. And I exchange a word or two with Jimmy Racicot, who has asbestosis and is a relative of the former governor. Or, as he tells me, in a joking and contemptuous tone, “He’s related to me.”

When I turn to leave the auditorium, I spot a plaque about the theater entrance, listing the donors who funded its renovation, and I read the familiar name W.R. Grace.

EXCERPT FROM THE DEPOSITION OF LES SKRAMSTAD, JANUARY 13, 1997
Q: I understand you have had some psychological problems?
A: Yes.
Q: Tell me about those.
A: I have a little problem once in a while justifying my existence on this planet.
Q: Since you were diagnosed with asbestosis, have you experienced an increase in the bouts of depression?
A: Somewhat, yes.
Q: And what do you think it is attributable to?
A: Lack of air.

The day before I am to leave Libby, I give myself a tour of the haunted landscape. I start at the base of Rainey Creek Road, the dirt road that miners took up Zonolite Mountain for sixty-seven years. Chris Weis, of the EPA, told me he will no longer drive up the road without wearing respiratory equipment. Yet it remains open to the public. A few days earlier, I saw a young man motor up Rainey Creek on a dirt bike, kicking up a storm of dust. Barely a mile up the road, I pass a clearing littered with beer bottles – and littered, according to recent tests, with asbestos – where teenagers party. Farther up lies a pond, rimmed with high grasses and cattails. Geese float on it. The pond was constructed to capture and neutralize waste from the mine. A hawk glides overhead. Cottonwoods are reflected in the surface of the water. The day is thoroughly still.

Rising above the pond is a reddish-brown world of loose rock, hundreds of feet high, striped with late-season snow. This is the waste mountain: millions of tons of discarded ore – slag – brimming with some five billion pounds of asbestos. The state of Montana once gave W.R. Grace an award for reclaiming the mountain, for planting yellow sweet clover and seeding the tailings with grass and speckling it with pine saplings. But as far as I can tell, nothing is growing there.

I drive back down the road, past the site where, for years, ore was sifted into bins and moved across the Kootenai River on open conveyor belts, and then dumped into boxcars of the Burlington Northern Railroad and spread across the country. Then I drive back to town, past the oval track at Libby High School, home of the Libby Loggers. A lone pole-vaulter practices his stride. I continue my drive past W.R. Grace’s old expansion plant downtown, where the ore once popped like popcorn. The storage shed is still standing. It looks like the weathered plank barn in an Old West theme park. Part of a rope dangles from a rafter.

If Libby were a fallow kingdom in some obscure myth, a hero would appear to restor the landscape and its people. Libby, being real, has no such luck. When the EPA decides it has scraped W.R. Grace’s old facilities clean, it will leave town. But being clean is not the same as being healthy. W.R. Grace says it will cover the medical costs of residents with asbestos-related diseases in perpetuity, but give its bankruptcy proceedings, its word is no longer considered good in this town.

Justice for Libby is a fantasy beneath the western sky. Senator Baucus vows to do his best to convene a Congressional inquiry into what happened in Libby and whether anyone at W.R. Grace should be held criminally accountable; perhaps he’ll succeed. There is a legal precedent: In 1993, three managers at Film Recovery Systems, a silver-extraction company in Chicago, pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges after a worker died of cyanide poisoning in 1983. But no one in Libby is counting on it. Late this past May, thirty-two townspeople, realizing their efforts to get legal redress against W.R. Grace were futile, filed suit against the state of Montana, saying the state had “conspired with Grace to conceal the results of … studies and correspondence” related to the mine. The suit is the stuff of symbolism, which is not in short supply in Libby, and which will have to do for the moment.

Driving out of town the next day, I see a local named Richard Weeks standing on the side of the road, and I stop to say goodbye. Weeks claims to be a prophet – or, more specifically, as he tells me, “the seventh spirit of Moses.” He refers me to the texts in the Bible that prove his visionary powers, and that establish Bob Dylan as the prophet Ezekiel. Weeks lives in a red-white-and-blue van parked by the river. He has half a mustache and half a beard, which may be the right look for a town as divided as Libby. “I’ve been thinking about this asbestos thing,” he says. “Dylan has a song about a great flood that will rise up and wash away sin. The flood begins on the Day of Reckoning, which is coming anytime. Look,” he says, pointing to the sky, “it’s beginning to rain.”

Indeed it is. I drive off and leave Weeks standing in the rain, waiting for a cleansing tide to find its way to Libby. I roll down my window and let the rain wash in. It feels good. And the air, the mountain air, tastes good, full of spring. I leave town and take a deep breath and hold it in my lungs. Breathe out. Breathe again.

He’s climbed the mountains, made the money, surfed the waves, caught the fish, and seen the world. Now, at 60, he’s looking for a challenge.

by Doug Stanton

The wind is blowing at 60 knots, gusting to 70, and we’re walking this broad, yellow plain, and we’re going fishing, Yvon Chouinard and I. Ahead of us, a dust storm rises and screws its way upward into the blue sky. Chouinard says, “You can feel it.” Feel what? “The fishing is going to be shit-hot today,” he declares, smiling. “It feels like that moment before an avalanche.”

Green carnations of foam are exploding across the Río Grande as the river surges through the bare Patagonian hills. Beaten by the wind, it almost appears to flow backward, as if surrendering and retreating to its source in the foothills of the Andes, across the Argentine border in Chile, 30 miles away. This is sacred country to Chouinard, his favorite wilderness, and each year he stays at a lodge called Villa Maria to fish this remarkable river, recognized as the best sea-trout water in the world.

Chouinard punches merrily through cyclonic blasts of wind, his fly rod quivering: He’s happy under these conditions — typical of Tierra del Fuego — not because they’re inherently dangerous, but because they’ll make the fishing more challenging.

“Incredible!” exclaims Chouinard. “You gotta love it! Unbelievable!” He looks back at me, grinning wildly. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?” And I can’t help but grin, too. I hunch over, pull down my hat, and try to keep up with him.

Which is when Yvon Chouinard — supremely fit and tanned at age 60; a pioneering mountaineer; an expert fisherman, kayaker, and surfer; a blacksmith and a gourmand; a lover of Beavis and Butthead and the poetry of Charles Bukowski; an environmentalist, an entrepreneur, and the founder of the clothing company Patagonia — stops to study the river thoughtfully, and then steps off the bank into thin air, to catch the biggest trout on Earth.

—

In a world of shrinking horizons, Yvon Chouinard has come to embody something near-mythic: a life lived hard-on-the-edge, perfectly and gracefully. These days, even as supermodels sport Patagonia jackets at art galleries, climbers are still wearing them on Everest. Almost single-handedly, and with just a handful of patents, Chouinard has democratized adventure by inventing and manufacturing outdoor clothing so effective that even your grandmother might survive a journey to the North Pole in it.

In many ways, Chouinard wishes this were not the case. “An adventure is what happens when you screw up,” he tells me. He insists that adventure is something you’ll never really find on prepackaged trips or by donning one of his mountain parkas. Still, he acknowledges that he’s selling a dream: “Everyone wants to play.”

He speaks politely, with a tiny drawl — perhaps the way Henry Fonda would have sounded if Henry Fonda had been a California-bred surfer. Now, however, Chouinard is a surfer whose company tallied sales of  $180 million last year, and who is quite possibly having as much fun as anyone on the planet. He’s climbed in Nepal and Chamonix. He has skied the Alps. Lately, he’s surfed in Australia, salmon-fished in Iceland, and bonefished off Christmas Island in the Pacific. Next, he’s planning a trip to Chile and a 46-day trek through China. Between expeditions, Chouinard kayaks rivers in the American West and surfs the point-breaks near his solar-powered house just north of Santa Barbara.

Of course, his life hasn’t always been fun. During the ’80s, Patagonia’s ­profits soared, but in 1991, recession forced Chouinard to lay off 120 of his 620 employees, a step that he found extremely painful, priding himself as he does on providing a vibrant and supportive work environment. He emerged from the crisis with a bold purpose: He would change American business by using Patagonia as a model of “sustainable industry,” one that neither harms the environment nor grows so quickly that its own viability is jeopardized.

Patagonia shirts and pants are now made of organic cotton, its jackets are spun from recycled plastic bottles, and Chouinard annually donates more than a million dollars to eco-groups that otherwise might receive no funding at all. Business schools invite him to lecture; Yale has awarded him an honorary degree (doctor of humane letters); and President Clinton has praised him as a “responsible corporate citizen.” He counts Tom Brokaw, Harrison Ford, and novelist Tom McGuane among his friends. Life is good.

Yet the good life for Yvon Chouinard has little to do with the cachet of running a multimillion-dollar company. He has always preferred to categorize himself as a craftsman-turned-businessman. Even now, he refuses to read the business section of a newspaper, so Malinda, his wife of 30 years, peruses it for him. You learn that he doesn’t have a savings account because he plans eventually to give everything away. He dreams of living on $200 a month, without electricity and eating whatever he can raise in a garden or catch by fishing. He dreams, in the end, of owning absolutely nothing.

Which is partly why he loves Tierra del Fuego. On the Río Grande, he’s in search of what he has always looked for outdoors: the Perfect Moment, a flash of “lucidity, focus, and emptiness,” the psychic intensity that hardship brings. But there’s a slight problem. Though the fishing has been great — superb, in fact — the Villa Maria, part of the historic Estancia José Menendez, a ranch outside the town of Río Grande, has come to seem, well, too plush. Chouinard wants something more. He wants to test himself, even in his favorite place. He wants more hardship, period. His longtime fishing companion Tom McGuane explains it like this: “Whenever he gets comfortable, he gets suspicious of everything, and he sort of smells a rat. We have a camp on the Dean River [in British Columbia] where we have warm beds and where somebody cooks for us, and I know that bothers him.” McGuane adds: “He always wants to do things the hard way.”

So we’ll fish the Río Grande in comfort for now, and then we’ll do something Chouinard has always wanted to do: We’ll disappear up a nearby river that he once glimpsed, for a moment, from an airplane, and whose image has lain in his memory, burning and beckoning. We’ll scrounge for food and eat with our fingers; we’ll sleep under the stars beside the silver river. Maybe we won’t catch anything at all. We’ll suffer; we’ll know happiness.

—

It’s now midday at a pool called Nirvana, and Yvon Chouinard has just hooked a trout. It’s a big one, getting bigger as he reels it in. Chouinard’s back is curved like a violin, his knees are braced against the current, and he’s not making a sound. The fish’s only apparent effect upon him is registered in the flexing of his jaw muscles, in the minute adjustments of his black eyebrows. All morning, we’ve been blasted by the howling, line-tangling wind, and I’ve caught zip. Chouinard has landed and released 3 gorgeous brown trout, none under 15 pounds.

Then, as if no longer able to stand his own concentration, Chouinard lets out an invigorating chortle, crescendoing into a cry that his friends later describe to me as his “cave-man laugh,” as in: “AHHHH . . . HAAAAA!” It’s startling, to be sure, yet so heartfelt that you can’t help but love it.

“God, what a trout!” he says. The huge silver fish leaps and then drops back from its skyward course as if repelled by the sun, descends beneath the surface, and holds there, trembling, on the river bottom. Chouinard kneels, cradles the exhausted fish — which he guesses weighs 20 pounds — and rocks it gently in the current. A fish to remember.

“You know,” he says, after releasing the trout, “fishing this place is one of the few things in life that keeps getting better. When I first came here in ’68, I thought I was stepping back in time.”

That year, Chouinard — along with Doug Tompkins, the founder of the North Face; champion skier Dick Dorworth; climber/filmmaker Lito Tejada-Flores; and an English climber named Chris Jones — piloted a secondhand van 18,000 miles from California to Mount Fitzroy, about 400 miles from where we are now. The journey, which took six months, was a traveling circus of surfing, skiing, and mountain-climbing — a road trip à la Neal Cassady, with a soundtrack by Mingus. “The whole point of the trip,” jokes Chouinard, “was a search for the perfect flan.”

In its scope, the excursion was akin to taking a hang glider to the moon. The group’s successful ascent of the 11,000-foot Fitzroy — the third ever — took 60 days, many of them spent trapped in snow caves by hideous weather. On the summit, the four men unfurled a flag that read “VIVA LOS FUN HOGS!” It was a landmark climb; no American had ever summitted Fitzroy before. “It really opened up Patagonia,” says Dorworth. “It really changed our lives.”

You might think Chouinard was a bankrolled hippie with a lot of free time on his hands; actually, he was the son of a French-Canadian couple of limited means. Chouinard recalls that, as a young boy, he watched his father sit down with a bottle of whiskey and a pair of pliers and pull his own teeth — all of them — because he felt the dentist was charging too much for dentures. “Because I inherited some of these genes,” Chouinard wrote years later, “I have a preference for learning and doing things on my own.”

He discovered climbing while pursuing falconry, which he’d taken up at age 12, rappelling to the birds’ nests high in the mountains of the San Fernando Valley. By 1957, when he was 19, he had already revolutionized mountaineering by creating a piton that could be nailed into and then removed from rock, unlike the European kind, which had to be left in place. He could make two in an hour on his portable forge, and he sold them from the trunk of his car for $1.50 each.

“His first ascent of El Capitan was, in its time, the hardest climb in the world,” says Tom Frost, a photographer and fellow gearhead who accompanied Chouinard in 1964 as he pioneered a route up the massive North American wall in Yosemite. In 1968, the year of his epic journey with the Fun Hogs, he finished designing his now-legendary climber’s ice ax, one of which is included in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. When he wasn’t pushing the limits of his craft, Chouinard would sit around Yosemite’s infamous Camp 4, the vortex of America’s burgeoning climbing scene, copying aphorisms from books he was reading — Camus, Nietzsche, the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. He was cultivating a lifelong credo, he says, based on Zen-like ideas of simplicity and impermanence.

“Every one of those friends of mine. . . [we] never wanted to work, we never wanted to become stable citizens. All we wanted was to climb, forever. It was as valid a life as anything we could think of.”

—

Some stories people tell about Chouinard: “I remember one time we were on the Kautz Glacier in Washington, and I’d had what I call the ‘Three-Minute Yvon Chouinard Short Course in Crampons,’ ” says Tom Brokaw. (Together, Brokaw, McGuane, and Chouinard constitute a sporting threesome they call the Do-Boys.) “We were [crossing] this very treacherous stretch of black ice, and if you slipped, it was at least 2,000 feet before you’d stop. So I turned to Yvon and said, ‘Shouldn’t we rope up together here?’ And he said, ‘NO WAY! If you go, I go!’ He said, ‘This is just like getting a taxi in New York! It’s every man for himself!’ There’s no bullshit factor when you’re with him. With Chouinard, you can either do it, or you can’t. And I live in a bullshit world,” says Brokaw, laughing, “so it’s a perfect antidote to that.”

“It’s Brokaw’s stories that have kept me from similar adventures,” says Harrison Ford, a neighbor in Jackson, Wyoming, where Chouinard owns a home. This month, Ford will present Chouinard with the Riverkeeper Environmental Excellence Award for his conservation-minded work ethic. “I’ve gone fishing with Yvon and I’ve played tennis with him,” says the actor, “but I have not gone up a mountain with [him]. I don’t trust Yvon to know the limits of a natural human being.”

“One day he was looking at the magazine Earth­watch,” says writer Rick Ridgeway, “and it had this picture of a spire on this island, and he said, ‘Hey, we oughta climb that sucker.’ ” It was 1988, and Chouinard, at 50, had begun to wonder if he still had his edge.

A few months later, Chouinard and Ridgeway, with Doug Tompkins and Jim Donini, a fellow climber, were on a fishing boat steaming from Puerto Natales, Chile, in search of the unnamed peak. They didn’t even have a map. The captain steered for the island by looking at the photo Chouinard had ripped from the magazine.

“The boat left us on this uninhabited archipelago with a month’s food, our climbing gear, and our kayaks,” says Ridgeway. “We didn’t even know if we were in the right place.” After a few days, the weather cleared — and there was the peak, right above them. But the wind had kicked up, blowing so fiercely that every time the men tried to stand, they were knocked to the frozen ground. They spent two weeks hunkered in tents, waiting.

As soon as the weather broke again, Donini and Chouinard quickly began an ascent, both thinking they’d make a few pitches, look around, and return to camp. Soon, the men passed some mental point of no return. They continued climbing for 14 hours, hammering pitons and fixing ropes, finally summitting the 4,000-foot peak in frigid darkness.

Chouinard and Donini were forced to crawl back down the mountain through the night. Ridgeway and Tompkins were lying in their tents, weeping, certain that their friends were dead. In the morning, the two half-frozen climbers reappeared, their clothes shredded. And now they faced a 75-mile paddle to the mainland.

“The winds were so strong,” says Ridgeway, “that you had to do everything to keep from flipping over. Chouinard was flipped in one of the worst gusts, and it just held him down.” Bobbing in an ocean laden with icebergs, he turned hypothermic but managed to climb back onto the upturned boat and paddle himself to a nearby island, where his friends built a fire to thaw him out. They finally made the mainland the next day.

“I really scared the shit out of myself on that climb,” Chouinard tells me. “Before, I’d always had enough to take it right to the edge. I came too close to going over.”

“When we pulled the kayaks up on the beach in Ushuaia,” says Ridgeway, “we all looked back at what we’d just come from. And I’ll never forget it: Yvon suddenly got this big grin on his face. And the first thing he said was ‘Well, that’s just what I needed!’ ”

—

It’s 10 minutes to dusk, and I’ve been watching Chouinard fish, feeling compelled to be better than I am, which is the signature effect of his life. We’re standing at a pool called the Secret Spot, waiting for what Río Grande fishermen call the Magic Hour, the silken time just before dark when the fish bite readily. I ask Chouinard for a casting lesson.

You catch these capricious Río Grande trout by plopping your fly on a far bank and drifting it into the current in a steady pattern: cast, drift, take two steps downstream, then repeat. But my fly line swims skyward with each thunderous blast of wind. Part of the problem is that, with my smaller 8-weight fly rod, I’m underpowered: De rigueur on the Río Grande is the longer power-stick known as a double-handed spey rod — like Chouinard’s — which can drive a fly line through a brick wall.

Chouinard proceeds to demonstrate the balletic moves of spey casting, praising me when I nail it. Soon, I halfway have the hang of it. Chouinard told me earlier that rock-climbing was about “making links,” about finding a zone and wasting no effort. “Fishing,” he said, “is like that, too.”

As I stand on the riverbank, thinking about this, I start casting in a new rhythm, a new zone, reaching water I haven’t reached before. Still, I can’t touch the Secret Spot completely, so I cross the river and climb the opposite bank, as Chouinard did that morning. On my second cast, the line comes tight. I can tell the fish is big, but who knows how big? It’s dark. The trout sulks on the bottom. Finally, I turn him, and he rises slowly. As he swirls in a blurred pane of moonlight, I see he is the biggest trout I will catch in my life.

Crossing the river, Chouinard calls “Hey, Doug! Way to go!” And the trout, with a beat of its tail, runs up the stony beach and comes to rest at my feet: a male weighing 25 pounds.

“My God,” Chouinard says. “Look at that fish!” He shakes my hand, telling me maybe 20 people out of the hundreds who have visited the lodge in its 10-year history have caught a brown trout as enormous as this one. That night, Chouinard toasts me over dinner. We seem ready for the river of his memory, for still more unexplored territory.

—

Look at these hands!” It’s early morning, and we’re heading down an empty gravel road into the interior of Tierra del Fuego, to the secret river. “Paper cuts!” Chouinard is saying. “I’ve got paper cuts! All I do is work!” He can’t wait now to suffer, can’t wait to sleep on cold dirt under the stars.

The road rises past tin houses that rattle in the cold wind. It’s a sound that maybe only 10 people a year get to hear, the landscape is that empty. Sheep and cattle scatter as we pass. After 2 hours, we arrive at the 50,000-acre Estancia Marina, southwest of Río Grande.

Yes, he will lead us to the river, the estanciero — the owner of the ranch — tells us. “I have no idea if it’s got fish,” he says, “but, please, be my guest, fish it. And tell me if it’s any good.”

This idea of an unfished river astonishes Chouinard, and we follow in our rented pickup as the estanciero leads us along a path through dense stands of beech trees that seem to close behind us as we pass — I begin to imagine that we’ll never find our way back. The sun is warm on our faces, and I look up and see the snow on the mountains and feel the cold wind and hunch down in my jacket and feel lonely and happy all at once. Chouinard says, “Jesus, what country, what country.” At a camp on a hill above the river, we build a fire at dusk.

Across the water, we can see a kind of tepee, a 40-foot cone of carefully arranged logs — the former home, the estanciero told us, of the last Ona Indian to have lived in Tierra del Fuego, dead for some 20 years now. The story may or may not be apocryphal, but the tall, blackened doorway suggests an uneasy emptiness, as if someone has just stepped back from it into the shadows. Wherever we look, we see it out of the corners of our eyes. “Spooky,” says Chouinard.

At the campfire, Chouinard starts making dinner. He lays our steaks — the only food we’ve brought — directly on the fire’s red coals. Even though I am aware that we have no plates or cooking utensils with us, I still can’t believe what I’m seeing. I’m certain that our entire food cache is turning to cinders.

It’s then that I realize we haven’t brought any water with us either. In fact, I have outfitted myself for this three-day camping trip with nothing except a tent and a sleeping bag. Chouinard has brought along even less. “I didn’t even buy a tent until I was 40,” he explains. “I could always find a cave, or a tree, out of the wind. . . .”

After a while, though, the lack of supplies doesn’t trouble me. I start to think, Who needs all that shit? Chouinard is squatting by the coals, smiling at the glow. “This will work out great,” he says. “I once taught a class about cooking outdoors without pots and pans. You can make bread, you know, just by using a stone.” He snatches the steaks from the fire and sets them on a mossy log. They’re not burned, and they’re not coated with cinders. They’re perfect, in fact. We eat in the dark with our fingers, tearing off pieces with our teeth.

—

At dawn, we find the fish. They’re in six inches of water, hovering, as if in a clarifying fluid, along the banks. They seem to look up, unafraid, as we pass by. Maybe it’s been years since anyone has walked here; maybe no one ever has. These are rainbows and browns, two, three, and four pounds each, and I catch five of them and keep one for dinner. I walk downriver as I cast, my head feeling as if it’s bumping against the sky.

Chouinard, for his part, is being driven to his usual fits of ingenuity. Crouching on the bank in stealth postures, he tries sinking lines, then floating lines. Every few minutes, I hear him: “Ah, shit! Missed ’em! ”Then: “Jesus, did ya see that fish!” It’s an endearing lecture to himself, filled with wonder, as he catches one glorious fish after another. He walks up to me, smiling, and sits on the bank. “What a day we’re having,” he says. “We haven’t seen another footprint. What a day.” Winding up the slack on his reel, he stares at his rod, then finally gives it a jiggle. “This,” he says, “is one of the best days of fishing in my life. Fabulous.”

Before long, Chouinard is up again, walking and casting. At one point, a swallow lands on his fly rod, mistaking it for a tree branch, then disappears in a frantic burst of tiny purple wings. Chouinard catches so many fish he loses count: 45, 50, 65. . . . I can just barely see him now, walking downstream, bobbing in the waves of heat boiling from the valley floor.

Resting on the bank, I recall something Chouinard read to me, something he’d written about a climbing experience he’d had on El Capitan when he was young: “Nothing felt strange in our vertical world. Each individual crystal in the granite stood out in bold relief. . . . After a period of time, the artist gets caught up in the sculpture, and the material comes alive.”

That afternoon, when we are driving out, picking our way down the valley and looking for our hidden passage back up through the beech forest, I point from the car window at the distant silver river threading through the green valley. Chouinard is staring at it, too — he has been glancing at the river the whole time he’s been driving, not saying a word.

He turns slowly, as if he has just remembered that I’m in the car. His eyes are bloodshot, his lips are cracked, his face is baked red. He’s been wasted by sun and wind. We both have.

“Tempted?” I ask.

Sitting up, he says, “Oh, yeah, I am definitely ready to play.”

After sinking to the depths of personal crisis and financial disaster, Jeff Lowe decided he needed to climb the most dangerous rock face in the world.

by David Roberts

Climbing hard all day, Jeff Lowe forced the route through a wilderness of false leads and frustrating dead ends, but darkness caught him short of the ledge he had hoped to reach, stranding him in a vertical labyrinth. He was left with no choice but to carve a makeshift cave in a fan of snow plastered against a steep rock, then crawl inside. Wet, cold and physically spent, he lit his balky stove and began the task of turning pot after pot of packed snow into drinking water.

In the middle of the night the storm hit. A heavy snowfall poured out of the black sky, and as the snow gathered, it set loose spindrift avalanches that filled Lowe’s cave and threatened to smother him. All night he lay in his sleeping bag, pashing and pounding the walls of his flimsy bivouac sack to maintain some breathing space inside the cave.

A lifelong tendency toward claustrophobia compounded Lowe’s distress. As he grew drowsy, he would be sized with panic; ripping open the door of the bivouac sack, he would gasp fresh air, allowing snow not only to spill inside the cave but to fill his sleeping bag, where it melted and soaked his clothes.

By morning, Lowe was in a perilous situation. It was February 28^th, his ninth day on the north face of the Eiger. He had climbed 4500 feet over those nine days, but in the 1500 feet of frozen limestone that still hung over him, he was sure he would find the hardest passages of all. His food was almost gone. He could not stay warm at night. And he was on the verge of exhaustion.

This, Lowe knew, was how climbers died on the Nordwand. In just such a way the audacious Toni Kurz had come to grief, his rappel jammed on a knotted rope; or Stefano Longi, left behind by his partner to freeze to death after a bad fall; or Max Sedlmayer, climbing hopelessly toward the avalanche that would pluck him from his life.

Getting down from so high on the north face, in the midst of a storm, would take a desperate effort, if it was indeed possible at all. At the moment, with avalanches thundering over the cliffs above and sweeping the fan of snow, descent was out of the question: Lowe could not even escape his snow cave.

Hunkered inside his claustrophobic hole, alone in a gray universe of nothingness, Lowe brooded on his predicament. During the last few days, with the weather holding, he had climbed so well; at last he had felt in perfect form, as success had dared to whisper in his ears. Now the prospect of failure loomed larger with every hour of snowfall. And if the situation got any worse, Lowe would be in a battle for his very life.

No, things were not going right — and the pattern was all too familiar. For a year now, things had been going wrong for Jeff Lowe. Major things, disastrously wrong. Bankruptcy. The failure of his marriage. Separation from his two-year-old daughter. He had scrambled to hold it all together, but his despair had peaked in late October, just after his fortieth birthday, leaving him sleepless, his antic mind tormenting him with a parade of furious creditors and disapproving friends. Out of the nadir of that depression had come the decision to climb the Eiger. A new route on the north face — a clean, direct vector between the Czech and Japanese lines. Solo. In winter. Without bolts.

If he could pull it off, it would be greatest climb ever accomplished by an American in the Alps. And at a deeper, more personal level, the Eiger might somehow tame the internal voices howling of failure and loss. It would be a way for Lowe to return to his strength, to the thing he did better than almost anyone in the world.

Twenty-four hours after burrowing into the mountainside, Lowe was still stuck inside the inadequate snow cave. As he prepared to spend a second night there, shivering in a soggy sleeping bag, he got out his two-way radio and warmed the batteries against his body. Rousing his support team at the hotel far below, Lowe spoke slowly, his voice seamed with fatigue: “I’ve got a decision to make. Whether to go up or down. It’s a tough one.”

There was a long pause. “I don’t know how hard it would be to get down from here,” he said. “I figure it’ll take three days minimum to reach the summit if I go up. And that’s only if the weather’s good tomorrow and Saturday.”

Another pause: “I guess tomorrow’s going to tell. If I go for it, I’ll have to pull out all the stops.”

The Purist
Had Jeff Lowe been born a Frenchman or a German, he would be a celebrity, sought after for product endorsements, asked to write his memoirs. But in the United States, great alpinists remain as obscure as chess champions.

Lowe, moreover, is a purist. He makes a wry distinction between “expeditions” — large, highly publicized assaults conducted in the spirit of the Desert Storm campaign — and “trips with friends,” on which, from one to three cronies, he can attempt brazen routes on unexplored mountains. From his only Everest expedition, a massively funded attack on an easy route involving fourteen climbers, Lowe came home disenchanted. But on some of Lowe’s trips with friends, he has performed splendid deeds on spectacular Himalayan mountains such a Tawoche, Kwangde and Nameless Tower, on his ascents of Pumori and Ama Dablam, the only friend was himself.

Climbs like Tawoche and Ama Dablam, however, do not make headlines in the U.S. Since his early twenties, Lowe had been one of the two or three best ice climbers in the world. Names such as Bridal Veil Falls, Keystone Green Steps and the Grand Central Couloir — extraordinary ice routes that Lowe was the first to master — can bring an awed hush over parties of cognoscenti, but they mean nothing to the lay public.

In the last two decades, the cutting edge of mountaineering has become “good style” — and nobody’s style has been cleaner, bolder or more prophetic than Lowe’s. Says Michael Kennedy, editor of Climbing and a frequent climbing partner of Lowe’s, “Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he’s the most visionary American Himalayan climber who’s ever lived.”

In a family of eight children growing up in Ogden, Utah, Lowe and his brothers were pushed hard by their lawyer father to excel in sports. He was climbing seriously by fourteen, quickly developing his skills and managing to survive the usual near disasters of adolescent ambition. After he spent three years at unaccredited Tahoe Paradise College on a ski-racing scholarship, Lowe became a full-time climber; meanwhile, he scrounged up a living from the kinds of marginal jobs most American climbing addicts resort to: pounding nails, teaching at Outward Bound and tutoring beginners in the sport.

In 1968, Lowe’s older brothers Greg and Mike launched an outdoor-equipment company called Lowe Alpine Systems, which quickly gained cachet for its innovative packs and began turning a robust profit. Fifteen years later, Jeff Lowe started his own company, Latok — named for a mountain in Pakistan that was the scene of one of his most memorable climbs — which sold technical climbing gear. His first full-scale business venture, it began to collapse in 1987, and Lowe’s brothers took over the company’s debts to bail Jeff out.

Looking back, Lowe says: “I think part of my business problems stemmed from a feeling that I had to be more than a good climber, that I had to do something more ‘meaningful.’ And that may come from my father.”

As if remounting the horse that had thrown him, Lowe soon joined with Texas entrepreneur Dick Bass to organize the first international climbing competition on American soil, at Snowbird, Utah. Contests on artificial walls had become one of the hottest new spectator sports in Europe, and Lowe was gambling that Americans would similarly embrace the spectacle. In the end, Snowbird ’88 was an aesthetic success, but far fewer people than anticipated were willing to fork over twenty dollars to stare at the inch-by-inch progress of European climbing stars they had never heard of.

Undaunted, Lowe incorporated himself as Jeff Lowe Sport Climbing Championships Inc., attracted sponsors and investors and laid plans for an ambitious nationwide series of climbing competitions to be held in 1989 and ’90. Thus began the downward spiral that in two years sucked Lowe into a whirlpool of failure. None of the events came close to breaking even, and Lowe’s debts piled up to vertiginous heights. He began borrowing from future projects to pay off past ones. By the time the final competition of 1990 approached — an event organized by the late Bill Graham, the legendary rock promoter, to be held in Berkeley, California, in August — Lowe was teetering on the brink of financial ruin.

In need of a quick infusion of cash just to pay his personal bills, Lowe concocted a trip with friends to Nameless Tower, a soaring tusk of granite in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan, to be filmed for ESPN. The big draw for European sponsors would be a summit push pairing Lowe with thirty-one-year-old Parisian Catherine Destivelle, the most famous woman climber on the planet.

The Berkeley competition, which took place while Lowe was out of the country, turned into yet another financial fiasco plagued by dismal attendance. Lowe persuaded the North Face, a purveyor of high-end outdoor gear, to lend its name to the event as the leading sponsor. In order to keep the competition from sullying its good reputation, the company claims it was forced to cough up $78,000 to cover Lowe’s bills. “We believed that when Lowe went to Pakistan, he’d secured his loans,” says Ann Krcik, director of marketing operations for the North Face. “Three days before the event, it became evident that Sport Climbing Inc. didn’t have the money.” Bart Lewis, an entrepreneur who helped market the competition, claims that when the dust cleared, Lowe owed him $40,000. Lowe counters: “That’s absolutely insane. I owe Bart not even close to $40,000.” Other creditors emerged, clamoring for payment. Says Lowe: “I always emphasized the risks involved. Those who were misled, misled themselves.”

On the other side of the glove, meanwhile, Lowe and Destivelle managed to climb a difficult route on Nameless Tower. The film was broadcast on ESPN, but several European sponsors had backed out at the last minute. The upshot was that Lowe came home from Pakistan deeper in debt than ever, owing money even to close friends and fellow climbers who had worked as his support party. For decades Lowe had been one of the most admired figures in the tightknit fraternity of American climbers; now, around certain campfires, in various climbers’ bars, his name began to elicit bitter oaths and tales of fiscal irresponsibility.

By the fall of 1990, Lowe had been married for eight years to a woman he’d met in Telluride, Colorado, where she was a waitress. The couple settled in Boulder, where Janie Lowe became her husband’s full-time business partner. In 1988 they had a daughter, whom they named Sonja.

On Nameless Tower, Lowe was deeply impressed by Destivelle’s performance. As their teamwork evolved, Lowe realized that with only one or two men had he ever felt so confident climbing in the great ranges. At some point, he and Desitvelle began an affair. Because her private life is intensely scrutinized in France, and because she had a longtime partner of her own back in Paris, Destivelle urged Lowe to be discreet about their relationship.

When Lowe returned home from Nameless Tower, “he seemed very angry and distant,” says Janie Lowe. “It was as if he wanted nothing to do with me. I asked him if he was having an affair with Catherine. ‘No, no, no.’ Finally, it came out. I asked him, ‘Why did you lie to me?’ That hurt me so bad. He said, ‘I’d promised Catherine.’ I said, ‘After twelve years, you tell me your loyalty to Catherine is greater than your loyalty to me?’ ”

On September 30, 1990, Lowe turned forty. He was deep in a whirlpool, clutching for flotsam. At the end of October, Lowe declared bankruptcy. As his business partner, Janie took an equal brunt of the misfortune, and their relationship grew more troubled. As she tells it: “Jeff would come home and go straight into his study and close the door. Sonja would say, ‘Mommy, why doesn’t Daddy want to talk to me?’ ” In mid-December, Jeff moved out of the house, and they began the process of getting a divorce.

“I fell apart,” Jeff says. “I felt hopeless. All I knew was that I couldn’t stand it after a couple of weeks. I had to start dealing with things one by one.”

By early February, Lowe was in Grindelwald, Switzerland, staring up at the north face of the Eiger.

Beguiled by the shape of this unfolding drama, Jon Krakauer and I had come to Switzerland as well, to serve as Lowe’s support team. Lowe’s business woes were common knowledge in the climbing community, and word of his Eiger project had spread far and fast. More than one observer suggested that Lowe might be on a suicide mission. Boulder writer and climber Jeff Long, a loyal friend of Lowe’s, later admitted, “With all the pressure he had on him, I was afraid he was going to the Eiger as some kind of exit.”

Suicidal or not, the scheme — a new route, solo, in winter, without bolts, on the most notorious face in the Alps — seemed wildly improbable to most climbers. Destivelle later told Lowe that her French friends were of a single mind: “He’ll never do it. It’s too cold in winter, and too hard.”

Jeff Lowe does not look like a climber: an accountant, you might guess on meeting him, or maybe a viola player. He stand five feet ten, weighs about 150, his spender physique seems more wiry than muscular. Cleanshaven, he has an open face, on which alertness struggles against natural placidity. He wears the wire-rim glasses of a professor. The long, straight blond hair conjures up the hippie he once thought himself to be. Though his hairline is receding, he combs his locks straight back, as if daring them to retreat further. When he smiles, his eyes crinkle shut, and incipient jowls shadow his jaw. To call his low, cadenced speech a drawl is to suggest a regional twang it does not possess: His voice is rather that of a tape recorder whose batteries are running low.

“For the first five years, we were extremely happy,” Janie had told me. “I think our problems had a lot to do with having a daughter. When Sonja came along, things changed.”

Now Jeff Lowe commented obliquely on marriage and business. “It’s a lack of freedom,” he said. “I’m trying to get my freedom back. I could have saved my marriage if I had chosen to. But when I was forced to take a new look, I realized, ‘Hey, it’s not what I really want — it’s a weird thing, but climbing is still at the center.”

Lowe paused. “The Eiger — even if I succeed — isn’t going to make all the other shit go away. I don’t expect this climb to make everything right.” A grin spread across his face. “It’ll just feel real good.”

The Base Camp
The hotel at Kleine Scheidegg near Grindelwald is a rambling Victorian masterpiece, festooned with tiny rooms supplied by elegant if quirky plumbing, with linen wallpaper and richly varnished wood wainscoting, cozy reading nooks, eighteenth-century engravings and oak floors that creek and undulate like a glacier. For fifty-six years the hotel has been the headquarters for Eiger watching. As he prepared for his ascent, it became Lowe’s base camp.

The hotel is owned and run by the legendary Frau von Almen. She is a handsome woman of seventy with an imperious manner and a constant frown of disapproval on her brow. Checking in on the three of us, I told her about Lowe’s plans. The frown deepened. “This is insane,” she announced. “It is more than insane — it is mad.” She turned and walked away. “I do not like the accidents,” she nattered. “Because they are so unnecessary.”

To stay in the hotel is to put up with Frau von Almen’s tyrannical regime. There was a lengthy codex of unwritten rules, a good portion of which we managed to break. I wore my climbing boots upstairs; Krakauer and Lowe brought sandwiches from outside and ate them in her café; I foolishly asked her to unlock the front door of the hotel before 8:00 a.m.; and Krakauer had the nerve to wonder if he might move and photograph a portrait of the pioneers who had made the first ascent of the Nordwand in 1938.

There was no way to get on her good side. After dinner one night, I complimented her fulsomely on the four-course repast. “And did your friend enjoy the dinner, too?” she asked ominously.

“Oh, yes.” I answered. “Because he will not eat like this up on the mountain.”

Only Frau von Almen’s longtime guests — those who had come every winter for more than a decade and skied innocuously each afternoon — seemed to bask in her approbation. The truth was the she was down on the climbers. And this was sad, because her husband, Fritz, who died in 1974, had been the climbers’ best friend, watching them for hours through his telescope, exchanging flashlight signals with the bivouacs each night. The Frau still had the telescope but would unpack it, she said, “only for emergency.” An old-timer told us that a few years ago some climbers accidentally knocked over the telescope and broke it, then ran away.

On February 11^th, Catherine Destivelle arrived from Chamonix. Five feet four inches tall, with curly brown hair, a conquering smile and a formidable physique, she is a superstar in France, yet fame has left her relatively unaffected. Though they could hardly disguise the fact that they were staying in the same room, at first Lowe and Destivelle maintained a demure propriety. Gradually the handclasps became less furtive, the kisses semipublic.

For a first-rate climber, Lowe seemed woefully disorganized. For days his gear was spread all over his hotel room, but as he inventoried it, he discovered that he was lacking essential items. From Krakauer he borrowed a headlamp, pitons, first-aid supplies and a crucial pair of jumars for ascending ropes. Destivelle brought him foodstuffs (she swore by powdered mashed potatoes) and a two-way radio.

Destivelle was scandalized by Lowe’s preparations. “I can’t believe he is climbing with equipment he has never used before,” she told us again and again. “I would never do this.” Lowe dismissed the problem, omitting one of its causes: He was so broke he had to sell much of his climbing gear and now was dependent on the largess of European companies intrigued with his Eiger project.

On the night of February 18^th, Destivelle joined Krakauer and me in the bar, where she chain-smoked half a pack of Marlboros. (Ordinarily, she goes months without a cigarette.) At breakfast the next morning, she said she had dreamed obsessively about an all-out war in which everybody was hunting Lowe. She had spent a fitful, miserable night, while beside her Lowe had slept soundly.

In the morning, Destivelle rode the cog railway up to the Eigergletscher station, where she kissed Lowe goodbye. He put on his skis and headed for the base of the wall.

The Nordwand
On February 19^th, the first day on the Nordwand, Lowe waltzed up 2000 feet in only two hours. The going was easy but dangerous, a matter of planting the picks on his aces in a steady rhythm, of stabbing the crampon points strapped to his boot soles into brittle ice overlying steep rock. He soloed without a rope: If he slipped, he would die. But Lowe was in his element on the nerve-stretching ground. The speed and precision that had made his technique famous among a generation of American climbers spoke in every swing of his axes.

It was, however, still the heart of winter, and this was the Eiger. Over the last six decades, it was the easy start on the north face that had seduced so many alpinists. Between fifty and sixty of the best climbers of the world had died there, in a variety of gruesome ways.

The names of the Eiger’s most historic landmarks — the Ice Hose, the Death Bivouac, the Traverse of the Gods, the White Spider — are canonic touchstones to alpinists everywhere. Whether or not they have ever seen the notorious wall, all climbers grow up with a keen awareness of its history.  Eight of the first ten men who set out to climb the Nordwand were killed trying. The first man to attempt a solo ascent backed off prudently, only to die on a subsequent attack with a partner. The second, third and fourth solo attempts all ended in death. Early on, the wall acquired its punning German nickname, the Mordwand.

Accounts of these disasters built up the Eiger mystique. Every climber knows the tales, as visceral as tribal legends passed on around the campfire: Hintertoisser falling to his death as he tried to reverse his traverse on iced-up rock. Angerer strangled by his own rope. Toni Kurz expiring when the knot jammed in his carabiner, only a few feet above his rescuers, as he spoke his last words, “Ich kann nicht mehr” (“I can do no more”). The last words of Longhi, borne on the wind from the ledge high on the face where he froze to death: “Fame! Freddo!” (“Hungry! Cold!”)

At the foot of the sheer 350-foot rock cliff called the First Band, the climbing abruptly turned hard. As Lowe used his rope for this first time, his pace slowed to a vertical crawl. In three and a half hours, he gained only 110 feet. On the second day, a dogged and ingenious struggle over nine intense hours won Lowe a mere 80 feet more.

On other great mountain faces, clean vertical cracks, good ledges and solid rock abound. The Eiger, however, is notorious for limestone knobs that crumble as you grasp them, for down-sloping ledges covered with ice and for a scarcity of good cracks. The severity of the terrain brought out the best in Lowe, as he used tiny metal hangers and the tips of his axe blades to “hook” his way upward.

But already there were problems. Lowe had what he called fumble fingers, dropping three or four of his most valuable nuts and pitons, and the pick on one of his axes had worked loose. He climbed on anyway, adjusting his technique to the loose wobble of the pick, which meant he could never really swing the ax hard and plant the blade securely into the ice. It was a bad compromise, like driving at 30 mph on a flat tire.

Late on his third day of climbing, he had put most of the First Band beneath him, but the climbing was the most frightening yet. The storms of the last few weeks had glued snow and ice onto vertical and even overhanging rock. Lowe had to shift back and forth between rock and snow, from spidering with bulky plastic boots and gloved hands among the limestone nubbins to crabbing his way up the hollow snow with crampons and axes. When he could, he placed protection — a machined nut or piton in the rock or a screw in the ice.

At 2:50 p.m., Lowe clung to a particularly flimsy patch of rotten snow. Two thousand feet of cold, empty air fell away beneath his boots. He doubted whether he could reverse the moves he had made above his last protection eight feet below and had no idea whether he could find protection above or climb through the looming overhang, that blocked his view of the rest of the gigantic wall. For all he knew, he was creeping into a vertical cul-de-sac.

The boldness of Lowe’s choice to go without a bolt kit was now manifest. Throughout his efforts to surmount the First Band, he had been stymied right and left by blank, unclimbable rock. With bolts, it is possible to drill the rock and build a ladder through the most featureless impasse. Every other new route on the Eiger in the last thirty years had employed bolts; the Japanese who had pioneered the imposing line just to the right of Lowe’s had placed 250 of them.

Bolts also bestow a huge bonus in safety. When a climber is “running it out” — leading into uncertain terrain, with bad protection — he never knows whether he can find a reliable anchor before he reaches the end of his rope. With bolts, a solid anchor can be manufactured where nuts and pitons are useless. Without bolts, the process is like creeping farther and farther out on a lake covered in thin ice.

Lacking bolts, Lowe fiddled with a tiny nut, trying to wedge it into a crooked, quarter-inch crack that split the First Band. Suddenly the snow broke loose beneath his feet. He was falling.

In conventional climbing, with two people on a rope, one anchors himself to the precipice and feeds out the rope as the other leads above. If the leader falls, he plunges a little more than twice as far as he was above his last protection, until his partner “belays” or stops him by holding tight to the rope. For a soloist, the belayer is a mechanical apparatus. As one might suspect, solo-belaying is far less reliable than the kind afforded by a human partner.

As he started up the wall three days before, Lowe carried a new kind of self-belay device he had never used. Before his first hard pitch, he had not even taken the contraption out of the plastic bag it was sold in. The question now, as he fell through the air, was whether the device would work.

An abrupt jolt gave him his answer: The rig had done its job. Lowe was unhurt. He had not even had time to be scared, but now the delayed adrenaline rush started to surge. In response, he edged his way back to his high point, where he found another plate of snow to try. Gingerly he moved up it, anticipating another fall with each step, until he stood beneath the rock overhang.

The only way to proceed was to angle left through a weakness in the browing cliff. Lowe made a series of delicate moves on rock, until he could plant the picks of his axes on snow above, the left pick wobbling in its disturbing fashion. But here the snow was worthless, sloughing loose under the slightest touch. For a full hour he struggled in place, patiently probing the terrain for its arcane secrets. At last he found a small patch of more reliable snow. He planted both axes, moved his feet up and stabbed the front points. The snow held. He moved a few feet higher, then surged upward.

He was over the First Band, but by now it was getting dark. Lowe placed three ice screws at his high point, then rappelled back down to the snow cave he had slept in the night before. He crawled into his thin sleeping bag and pulled the frosty bivouac sack over him. Tired though he was, sleep escaped him. His problems danced mockingly in his mind, their shadows darting from wall to wall inside the cave of unhappiness in which he’d lived for a year. The loose pick on his axe nagged at him, and at the rate he was burning stove fuel, he would run out of gas canisters long before he could reach the summit. And he needed those nuts and pitons he had dropped.

In the morning Lowe turned on his walker-talkie and called down to Krakauer and me at the hotel. “Guys,” he said in his slow, gravelly voice, “I’m thinking about a slight change of plans.” He had decided, he told us, to leave his rope in place over the most difficult part of the First Band and, while he was still low enough on the wall to do so, descend briefly to Kleine Scheidegg, where he might fix his malfunctioning ice axe, replenish his supply of food and fuel and replace the hardware he’d dropped. Then, in a day or two, he could go back up the wall.

Lowe reached the hotel before noon. “Why did you not tell me before the weekend that you were coming down?” Frau von Almen complained, fingering her room charts. It happened to be Friday. “Now I have to put you in 88, way up on the fourth floor.”

“That’s fine with me,” said Lowe.

“I know,” said the Frau as she walked away. “But you are very simple.”

A stack of faxes was waiting for Lowe at the hotel, most of which were from furious creditors demanding payment. These did not appear to rattle his composure, but a long missive from Janie seemed to trouble him deeply.

Having come to admire and like Lowe, I was puzzling over the vehemence of his detractors. Jim Bridwell, who claims Lowe still owes him $3000 for Nameless Tower, had said: “I think of Jeff as a climber and what that used to mean. You used to be able to trust climbers. But Jeff’ll say one thing and do another. I just think he’s disturbed. Either he doesn’t know he’s lying, or … ”

Janie Lowe thought Jeff’s problems had been compounded by his pride. “He can’t say he’s sorry,” she told me. “ ‘Hey, I really fucked up.’ Just a few sentences would resolve his debt with his friends.”

One voice in Lowe’s defense, however, was that of Jeff Long, who insisted: “These people want Jeff’s professional corpse swinging in the wind. I think what they did in investing in Jeff was to invest in his vision. What collapsed, they thought, was a whole vision they shared. The brotherhood of the rope. But what was going on was really just business.”

For all her sorrow, in any case, Janie was determined to keep the channels open. “We’ll always be parents,” she said. “We have a wonderful little daughter. For Sonja’s sake, I hope we can keep our own bullshit in the background.”

One night in the hotel, Lowe had watched the three-year-old daughter of a guest carrying her plate heaped with food from the salad bar. The sight had brought tears to his eyes. “Yeah, I really miss my daughter,” he admitted.

As Janie had pointed out, though: “Yes, he totally loves Sonja. But you know what? He doesn’t love her enough to be with her.”

In his own way, Lowe acknowledged that stricture. “I think I know now,” he said in a reflective moment, “that you can’t do this sort of climbing and have a domestic side. You’re not a practicing father if you’re not there. You’re maybe a visiting father.”

There had been a snowstorm on the morning of Lowe’s descent, but by the following day the precipitation had ceased and the weather had stabilized. The temperatures were strangely warm, however — well above freezing at the 6000-foot elevation of the hotel. That was better than brutal cold, except it meant bad avalanche conditions. In the weekend prior to his start on the Nordwand, thirty-one people had died in avalanches across the Alps.

There were, in short, plenty of reasons to give up the climb, excuses lying ready to be seized. But Lowe spent the evening in room 88, sorting his gear in his slow, fastidious fashion. Early in the next morning he returned to the foot of the wall, and by noon he was back at his bivouac cave, at the lower end of the ropes he had left in place. By the time the evening fell, he had reascended the ropes and wrestled his 100 pounds of gear up to his previous high point.

Then, boldly, he led on into the dusk. It was not until three hours after dark that he suspended a hanging tent from a pair of ice screws and crawled into his sleeping bag. He was halfway up the Nordwand.

“Good morning, Vietnam,” he radioed us in the morning. “I just woke up from one of the best sleeps I’ve had in a long time.” When he started climbing again, his route coincided for a few hundred feet with the classic 1938 line. This section of the route, known as the Ice Hose, had been a formidable test to most of the expert climbers who had attempted the Nordwand over the years. For Lowe, with his impeccable ice technique, it was almost like hiking. He raced up the Ice Hose and across the Second Icefield and at day’s end was bivouacked at the base of the summit head wall.

Only a little more than 200 feet of climbing remained, but it promised to be severe and unrelenting. And as he inched his way up into the dark, concave head wall, it would be increasingly difficult to retreat. Somewhere on that precipice, he would reach a point of no return, after which descent might well be impossible, and the only escape would be up and over the summit.

It was Monday, February 25^th. The forecast from Zurich was for continued good weather though Wednesday; then a warm front bearing heavy snow was predicted to move into the area. A fiendish scenario began to propose itself. With two days’ steady climbing, Lowe might well find himself near or at that point of no return, only to get hammered by a major snowstorm.

The Storm
Krakauer and I were using the coin-operated telescope at the gift shop next to the hotel to follow Lowe’s progress, but he was so high now that we could tell little about his individual moves. On Tuesday night we took a walk. There was a full moon directly behind the Eiger. We caught sight of a pinpoint, impossibly far above us, three fifths of the way up the wall: Lowe’s headlamp, as he dug his bivouac site, a lonely beacon of purpose in the mindless night.

Later, his voice came in on the radio, raspy with lassitude. “Watch that forecast real carefully,” he said. “It’s going to be a strategy-type thing. If it comes in hard and I’m not in a good place, it’s not going to be good.”

On Wednesday night, the storm indeed came in hard, forcing Lowe to hole up in the claustrophobic snow cave he’d dug in the vertical fan of snow. It was from the pathetic shelter that he’d wondered aloud over the radio “whether to go up or down.” After a long, pregnant silenced, he confessed: “I don’t know how hard it would be to get down from here. I figure it’ll take three days minimum to reach the summit if I go up … if I go for it, I’ll have to pull out all the stops.”

Lowe’s miserable snow burrow proved to be a poor place to ride out the tempest. On Thursday morning, he remarked over the radio: “I’ve never been so pummeled in my life. There’s a big avalanche coming down every five minutes. I couldn’t move if I wanted to.”

At noon Lowe radioed again. He had managed to get out of his snow hole, but a search for a better bivouac site had been fruitless. The avalanches were still rumbling down, his clothes were soaking wet, and he was cold. It seemed that Lowe had little choice but to descend, and even that would be exceedingly sketchy. Much to our surprise, however, he declared, “I’m going to sign off now and try to get something done.” He had resolved to push for the summit.

More than a week before, I had probed Lowe’s motives by alluding to the suggestions I had heard of a suicidal impulse. “I think everybody has had thoughts about checking out early,” he said. “But I wouldn’t do it this way. I’d do it a lot simpler.”

Even if Lowe could complete his route, what lasting difference would it make in his life? Magnificent though the climb might be, was it little more than superstitious gesture, a way of lashing back at the furies that bedeviled his path? The finest climb ever accomplished by an American in the Alps could indeed bring with it a huge bestowal of self-esteem. And in the chaos that his personal affairs had become, self-esteem might what Lowe needed most.

He had said: “For me there’s no future. All I’m interested in is now.” In the hotel, that had sounded like wishful thinking. Divorce and bankruptcy turned now into a crumbling wall between the flash floods of the past and the future. But up on the Eiger, all that changed. The past was the piton ten feet below, the future was that handhold three feet above and to the left. Now was what held him to the world, and the trance of grasping its ledges and cracks gave it a glorious breadth. It expanded and became the ocean of all that was.

Friday, March 1^st, marked the sixth day of Lowe’s second attempt on the Nordwand, his tenth day of climbing overall. A south wind sent hazy wreaths of fog sailing over the mountain, but the favorable weather that had blessed the first week of the climb had returned, although another storm was forecast to arrive by Sunday. If he didn’t reach the top before it hit, his prospects for survival might be grim. By noon, Lowe had hauled all his gear up to a distinctive ledge called the Central Band. Only 1200 feet remained.

Here the wall was scored with ice-glazed ramps leading up and to the left, most of which led nowhere. The protection was minimal, the climbing nasty. Lowe was aiming for the Fly, a small ice field 500 feet above. But now, when he needed to move fast, with the threat of the next storm hanging over him, he was slowed drastically by what turned out to be the most difficult climbing yet.

Watching through the telescope, I could gauge how steep the cliff was when I saw him knock loose chunks of snow that fell forty feet before striking rock again. At one point it took him more than an hour to gain twenty-five feet. The rock had turned loose and crumbly; stone towers, teetering like gargoyles, sat waiting to collapse at the touch of a boot, and pitons, instead of ringing home as he pounded them, splintered the flaky limestone and refused to hold. Bolts would have been a godsend.

Yet on those pitches, Lowe’s brilliance came to the fore. He thought of one particular stretch of fifty feet as a kind of never-never land: it was the crux of the whole route to this point. A more driven, impatient alpinist might succumb to dizzy panic at this point, where the slightest misjudgment could rip protection loose and send him hurtling into the void. With his phlegmatic disposition, Lowe inched his way through his never-never land in a cloud of Buddhist calm.

On Saturday, Krakauer started up the west ridge — the easiest route on the Eiger and the path by which Lowe would descend. Krakauer wanted to camp near the top to greet Lowe and, if need be, help him down. As soon as he skied above the Eigergletscher station, however, Krakauer realized the venture was a mistake. A few days before, he had cruised halfway up the ridge in only two hours; but in the interim, the conditions had completely changed. The storm had blanketed the slope with steep, unstable snow; without skis, Krakauer sank in to his waist, and even with skis on he plowed a knee-deep furrow as he zigzagged laboriously upward.

At the fastest pace Krakauer could sustain, it would take days to get to the summit. What was worse, the slopes were dangerously close to avalanching; indeed, as he climbed slowly up the ridge, his skis periodically set off small slides.

At two o’clock Krakauer came over the radio. “I’m getting the hell down,” he said in a jumpy voice. “The hundred feet just below me is ready to avalanche. Watch me carefully. If it releases, it’s going to be massive.” With a series of slow, deliberate turns, he skied down as delicately as he could. The slope held.

When Lowe next radioed, I had to tell him about Krakauer’s retreat from the west ridge. He took the news calmly, even though it raised a specter of serious danger for his own descent. For the first time we talked about the possibility of a helicopter picking him up on the summit.

Lowe climbed on. By early afternoon clouds had gathered around the upper face, where it was snowing lightly, even though the hotel still baked in sunshine. Pushing himself beyond fatigue, again well into the night, he managed to set up an uncomfortable bivouac just below the Fly. His two-day push from the Central Band had been a brilliant piece of work, but the Sunday storm was coming in early, and 700 feet still lay between him and the summit. He was well past the point of no return.

That evening he slithered into his dank bivouac sack and tried to sleep. Lowe had two gas cartridges left to melt snow, but his food supply was down to a couple of candy bars. His hands were in terrible shape — the incessant pounding, grasping and soaking had bruised his fingertips until they had swelled into tender blobs, and the nails had begun to crack away from the cuticles. Each morning, his fingers were so sore and puffy that merely tying his boot laces was an ordeal.

Worse, his sleeping bag, thin to begin with, was soaked like a dishrag: It provided almost no warmth at all. That night Lowe got not a wink of sleep. For fourteen hours he shivered, waiting for dawn, as the snow fell outside his cave.

On Sunday morning it was still snowing. “Where I am,” he radioed, “it’s hard to even peek out of the bivy tent without dislodging everything. I’m going to sit here and hydrate.” He faced an acute dilemma. If he hunkered down and waited for the storm to end, he could run out of food and gas and succumb to hypothermia. If he pushed upward prematurely, on the other hand, the storm itself could finish him.

By noon he had not moved. At two o’clock, through a break in the clouds, we saw him climbing slowly above the Fly. As he started to climb, however, he grew deeply alarmed. Something was wrong. He felt week all over, weaker than he should have from fatigue alone. He had been going on too little food, not enough liquids, insufficient sleep. This was how climbers died on the Eiger. This was too much like what had happened to Longhi and Kurz. After stringing out 300 feet of rope, Lowe returned to his bivouac hole of the night before and spent the rest of the day resting and hydrating and trying in vain to get warm.

Once more, sleep was impossible. Lowe shivered through another night, even though he lit the stove and burned precious fuel in an effort to heat his frigid cavern. The weather had cleared late Sunday afternoon, and the sky was now sown with stars. There was odd acoustic clarity: Toward morning he could plainly hear dogs barking in Grindelwald, miles away and 10,000 feet below. And he thought he heard something else: a humming, crystalline, harmonic music in the air. Was it an aural hallucination? Was he beginning to lose his grip?

The Fall
Monday dawned luminous and clear, a perfect day, of which he would need every minute. Good weather had been forecast to last through the evening, but a major storm was due on the morrow. We called REGA, the government run rescue service, and alerted it to a possible need for summit pickup. Then we watched Lowe climb. At 9:15, he turned a corner and disappeared into a couloir we could not see. Two hours later, there was still no sign of him, no murmur over the radio. Though we did not admit it to each other at the time, Krakauer and I each separately trained the telescope on the base of the wall, where we swept the lower slopes. In just such a way over the decades, the fate of several Eiger victims had been discovered.

Lowe had hoped that once he was above the Fly the going would get easier. But in icy chimneys broken by bands of brittle rock, he was forced to perform some of the hardest climbing yet. Normally he never let himself be rushed on a climb: It was one of the secrets of his sang-froid and his safety. Now, however, he kept looking at his watch, and his brain hectored, Oh, no, hurry! Ever so slightly, his technique lost some of its famous precision. He felt less weak than he had the day before, but the sense of struggling to meet a terrible deadline oppressed his efforts.

It was hard to place good protection anywhere. Lowe found himself hooking with front points and axe picks on rounded rock wrinkles that he had to stab blindly through the snow to locate. His balance was precarious, and then, just before it happened, he knew he was going to fall.

The picks scraped loose: He was in midair, turning. Twenty-five feet lower, he crashed back into the rock. The self-belay had held, but he was hurt. He felt as though someone had taken a baseball bat and slammed it into his kidneys.

Oddly, instead of panicking him, the long fall calmed him down. Okay, he said to himself, you’ve done that. Don’t do it again.

He pulled himself together, starting up again and found a way through the dicey hooking sequences despite the pain pounding in his back. At last he surmounted the buttress and reached a good ledge, only 400 feet below the summit.

But here he faced a problem. The warm sun has loosened the summit snowfields. Every chute and depression became an avalanche track. One swept right over Lowe, filing his goggles with powder snow, buffeting his body as it tried to knock him from the wall.

He was moving faster now, as slides shot down all around him. For two hours he climbed doggedly on. During that time, three more avalanches engulfed him. One of them knocked his feet loose, but he managed to hang on with his axes. At 3:20 he called.

“God, Jeff, those avalanches looked bad,” I said.

“Yeah, they were pretty horrendous.” His voice was ragged with strain. “I got really douched. I’m totally wet. Am I about a pitch from the west ridge?”

“A pitch and a half, maybe.”
“I’m going to call for a pickup. I just want to get up this thing.”

We signed off and called REGA. They were waiting in Grindelwald, ready to fly the moment Lowe emerged from the west ridge, a few feet below the top. But a stiff wind had begun to blow a steady plume off the summit. The wind could prevent the helicopter from approaching close enough to execute a pickup or even cause it to crash.

To our dismay, Lowe disappeared once more into a couloir. The minutes ticked by. At 4:15 he emerged, fighting his way through out of the top of the gully, spindrift hosing him at every step. He was only forty feet below the crest of the ridge.

We prepared to call REGA, then watched in distress as Lowe stopped at a mottled band of rock and snow, only twenty feet below the ridge. For ten minutes he thrashed in place; we saw him grabbing chunks of black limestone and tossing them into the void below.

In the hidden couloir, Lowe had found it impossible to get in any protection. He had dashed upward, aiming at the mottled band, but when he got there, he found only a skin of ice holding together rocks that were as loose as a pile of children’s blocks. When he flung stones aside and dug beneath, he found only more of the same. He could engineer no kind of anchor — neither piton, nut nor ice screw would hold.

Only twenty feet short of safety, he had run out of rope. His own anchor, 300 feet below, was imprisoning him. In despair, he realized he would have to climb down at least forty feet to the previous rock band, try to get some kind of anchor there, rappel for his gear and jumar back up. He was not sure he could make that down-climb without falling. What was more, he was running out of daylight.

Lowe got on the radio. Krakauer said what we were both thinking.
“Jeff, if you just dropped your rope and went for it, could you free solo the last twenty feet?”

“No problem,” said Lowe. “But are you sure the helicopter can get me?”

If we urged Lowe to abandon his gear and the helicopter failed, he would be stranded near the summit without ropes, sleeping bag, food, stove or even his parka. He was soaked to the skin. The wind was whipping hard, and the sky had grayed to the color of lead. Tuesday’s storm was arriving early.

Krakauer said, “I’m almost positive they can pick you up.”

“Let’s do it,” said Lowe.

He untied his rope and draped the end over a loose rock. He was abandoning all the gear that he had fought for nine days to haul up to the 6000-foot precipice and, with it, deserting his own last refuge.

We called REGA, the helicopter took off from Grindelwald. To be picked up on the summit of the mountain was not a true rescue; more than one previous Eiger climbers had resorted to flying from the top when he was far less strung out than Lowe was. It would, however, be a kind of asterisk attached to his great deed. It would not be the best style, and that would bother Lowe. But it was survival.

He sprinted up the last twenty feet. All at once, Lowe had escaped the north face. He stood on a broad shelf of snow on the west ridge, just below the summit. The helicopter spiraled upward toward him.

Still talking to us on the radio, Lowe couldn’t keep the shivering out of his voice. Krakauer instructed him: The helicopter would lower a cable, which he was to clip on to his waist harness.

Now the chopper was just above him, hovering in the stiff wind. Suddenly it peeled off and flew away toward the Jungfraujoch. For the first time, Lowe seemed to lose it. He wailed, “What the hell’s going on?” Nervous about the strong winds, the helicopter pilot, we later learned, decided to drop off a doctor and a copilot who had been on board, so he could fly as light as possible when he made the pickup.

The helicopter reappeared and hovered above the summit, its rotors straining against the wind. The steel cable dangled from its belly. We saw Lowe swipe for its lower end, miss once, then seize it. He clipped in, and the helicopter swept him into the sky. Down at the hotel, the guests and skiers cheered wildly all around us. Lowe was off the Eiger.

The cable wound upward as he rode it toward the open door. The winch man reached out his hand. Lowe climbed through the door and crawled back into the conundrum of his life.

Dara Torres, Olympian, races out of retirement.

by Russ Ewald

In 1984, when she was seventeen years old, Dara Torres swam the fastest women’s fifty-meter freestyle ever. Four years later, she set an American record in the 100-meter freestyle. She won gold and bronze medals in freestyle relays at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics. Torres retired thereafter, but two years ago she viewed a videotape of herself competing and was inspired to make a comeback. Now twenty-five, she is one of three swimmers — and the only woman — to make the U.S. Olympic team for a third consecutive time. Her younger colleagues call her Grandma. Maturity becomes her.

“I figured this is the last chance for me to win a gold in an individual event,” she says. “Only twenty weeks after giving up her Job at NBC’s SportsWorld and returning to full-time training in Gainesville, Florida, Torres swam the 100-meter freestyle in her best time ever and the world’s third fastest in 1991. In the U.S. Open Swimming Championships, she won not only the meet’s U.S. Swimming Comeback  Award but also the women’s high-point trophy.

“I have a more mature attitude this time around,” she says. “I’m swimming for myself, not for coaches and parents.” She says she feels comfortable training in with her teenage rivals at the University of Florida. “We’re all out there working for the same goal,” she says. “I just try to fit in and have fun.”

The daughter of a model and a Las Vegas impresario, Torres is also more focused than she was growing up in Beverly Hills. She gets up at 5:55 in the morning six days a week and swims 7000 meters, lifts weights or does aerobics, runs thee or four miles and is in bed by ten at night. “No one else does the leg work I do,” she claims. “I even climb the fence and swim on my own on Saturdays.”

The training schedule has limited her social life to movies and college sports events. “Even though I make sacrifices, I get satisfaction from all the work I put in,” she says. “Others don’t know what it’s like to stand up on the podium at the Olympics. Unless you’re up there with the medal around your neck and the national anthem playing, you can’t really know.”

Photograph by Travis Rathbone

A Cut Above
Few tools match the testosterone-spiking thrill of a chain saw — until its kickback makes you shake like a dashboard hula dancer. Enter the Stihl MS 271, which uses a sophisticated antivibration system to dampen its 2.6-kilowatt engine’s oscillations, killing the shakes (and keeping your hands from going numb). It’ll be tough not to deforest the whole backyard. [from $430; stihlusa.com]

Photograph by Jeff Harris/Artmix

Triple-Duty Digger
Translated from Japanese, hori hori means “dig dig,” but the seven-inch carbon-steel GrowTech Hori-Hori can do more than just displace dirt. The sharp bevel and serrated edge make it surprisingly capable when it comes to cutting sod or even chopping roots, and when it’s time to dig, the depth markings on the blade ensure every bulb you plant will be exactly two inches deep. [$22; wood-avenue.com]

Better Barrow
Hoisting heavy logs, stones, or sod into a standard metal wheelbarrow is a groin pull waiting to happen. Forgo the pain (and any awkward application of Icy Hot) with the Allsop WheelEasy. Its durable, 350-pound-capacity canvas sling collapses flat on the ground, giant dustpan–style, creating an opening into which you can easily roll items — no strain. [$115; allsopgarden.com]

Stronger Spade
Sure, the sour apple–green, O-shape handle makes the Radius Pro-Lite Flat Spade look like a child’s toy. But try it: The rounded, nonslip surface lets you grip the handle anywhere to create more ground-piercing force than you would have with a standard, flat-handled spade. Now go show that chunk of sod who’s boss. [$25; radiusgarden.com]

Photograph by Travis Rathbone

Root Blaster
When weeds dare pockmark your manicured lawn, use the Fiskars UpRoot Weed & Root Remover to snatch them out. Drive its stainless-steel claw into the ground near the weed, step on the pedal to clamp the claw shut, and pull the handle to drag the pest out, taproot and all. Pump the telescoping handle, shotgun-style, to send the infiltrator sailing. [$35; fiskars.com]

Mix Master
The average compost bin is little more than a box that attracts rodents and emits the smell of rotting plants. The 55-gallon, two-chamber Algreen Terra Dual-Batch Tumbling Composter solves both problems by utilizing a drum that’s lifted off the ground and sealed with a sturdy sliding door. Because it rotates, you can mix up compost by simply turning a handle, rather than poking around in the pile with a pitchfork. [$190; gardensupermart.com]

Photograph by Jeff Harris/Artmix

Collapsible Cutter
Slicing through small branches with a chain saw is like using a blowtorch to light birthday candles. For less aggressive jobs, look to the Silky BigBoy. The coarse-fanged folding saw’s 14.2-inch blade is lined with precision-ground teeth, which use four distinct cutting angles to tear through branches up to eight inches thick. When folded, it’s less than 16 inches long, so it can be easily stored in a toolbox. [$73; silkysaws.com]

Photograph by Jeff Harris/Artmix

Grip and Rip
Spend a couple of hours tending to your yard in stiff, old gardening gloves and you’ll end up with more callouses on your hands than a teenage boy with unrestricted Web access. Designed by an orthopedic surgeon, the cabretta leather Bionic Elite Gardening Gloves features just the right amount of padding while maximizing grip. Silicone on the thumb and fingertips provides an extra layer of protection against stick stabbings, and ventilated webbing prevents sweaty mitts. [$30; bionicgloves.com]

Sharper Sprinkler
Unlike most stationary sprinklers, which can spray your patio along with your lawn, the Gilmour Pattern Master offers a neurotic level of customization so you’ll avoid wasting water. Both spray shape and reach can be adjusted to precisely water any plot of land, no matter how wide or narrow — up to 4,000 square feet. [$20; amazon.com]

Shear Brilliance
Masterfully sever branches, saplings, or your annoying neighbor’s prized azalea bush with the Husqvarna 8-1/4-Inch By-Pass Technical Pruning Shears. The blade maintains a sharp edge even after serious snipping sessions, while the angled, beaklike design maximizes power transfer to easily gnaw through yard trouble up to seven eighths of an inch. A nonslip coating helps keep your digits intact. [$43; husqvarna.com]

"The Highest Pass" is out April 27 in L.A. and New York, with additional cities coming soon.

The new documentary The Highest Pass follows a group of seven searchers on a motorcycle trip through the Himalayas — the highest drivable roads in the world. Over 21 days, they weather altitude sickness, flooded streets, and crashes on a journey that pushes them to their physical and emotional limits. We talked with the film’s producer and star Adam Schomer about the highlights and lowlights.

by Maria Fontoura

You agreed to follow your Indian guru, Anand, on a motorcycle trip through the Himalayas without ever having ridden a motorcycle before. Why?
I was very resistant at first. I’d been on a moped a year earlier and I was terrible — I crashed with someone on the back. When a few of my friends heard I was going on the trip they were like, “Really?” Because they’d seen my moped skills. But I had been hiking in the Himalayas before, and I remember just not wanting to stop. When it was time to leave, I had felt the Himalayas saying “Come on man, come back home.” That was a big reason I said yes.

As the group hit serious altitudes — 13,000 feet and higher — people start getting sick, and snow and slush make the already-treacherous roads near-impassable. The frustration is evident on people’s faces. Why didn’t anyone quit?
It was the most grueling thing I’ve ever done in my life. The bikes we were on weren’t made for touring. Sometimes we were on the bike for 14 hours a day — your back hurts, you get tired, and when you’re at that altitude, you’re incredibly winded and have a headache. But I think everybody had a strong inner desire to grow. And here’s the thing that helps more than anything: Having no choice. That’s very helpful when you’re stuck on a mountain. You can’t go back alone. So you surrender all your bullshit. And you move on.

That sounds like a yoga-influenced state of mind. You started practicing while you were a soccer player at Cornell in the mid-’90s and once taught Los Angeles Galaxy players like David Beckham. What has yoga taught you, particularly in sports?
Yeah, I had long hair in college. And a goatee. You’d see me meditating at the goal an hour before the game, in my Birkenstocks. I was that guy. But when I started integrating meditation and yoga into my training, I saw a huge shift in my play. I went from being real fiery — I’d get a lot of yellow and red cards for yelling at referees or getting over-emotional — to having that same passion but really being able to harness it. Very quickly I saw the power in taking time to look at your emotions so you’re not so owned by them. Instead, when they come up you say, “How can I use my energy to play as well as possible?” Or, “This player that’s trying to egg me on really doesn’t matter.” It totally flips the tables so you’re using all that emotion to your advantage. Plus, in athletics, you have to let the moment pass all the time. Your previous mistake was your previous mistake. You just have to move on.

The bikes you guys ride in the film, Royal Enfield Bullets, look awesome.
Yeah, they’re the real deal, 1950s-style military bikes that the Brits brought over to India way back. They have very simple, sturdy design — they can go through slush and water and altitude and not have the problems modern bikes have. And they’re easy to fix, which is important when you’re in the middle of the Himalayas. It’s the number one bike in India, and I’m thinking about buying one here, because they’re really great.

Are you still riding?
Yeah, I have a little bike I tool around on in Santa Monica, a 250 Honda Rebel. I love riding a motorcycle now. I see why people are so into it and want to journey and across countries. But the funniest thing is that, for some reason, when you pull up somewhere on a motorcycle, people tell you all their horror stories. If I ride up in a car, people aren’t like, “Oh I had a friend who got in a car accident a year ago.” Or if you’re eating candy, they don’t walk up and go, “I had a friend who got diabetes from too much sugar.” But they’ll do it when you ride a motorcycle.

You’re planning to film a sequel in September.
Yes, there’ll be a ride up into the Himalayas and then hiking in for a couple of days, and then we’re paddling into ancient caves, meditating where gurus have sat for years. So, a mixed journey that’ll go a little deeper into the people and the teachings.

What’s the most important lesson you took away from reaching the highest pass?
I came away with a deep faith — not a religious faith, but a faith in a higher self that doesn’t abide by the laws of time or ego; the ability to recognize that trust and grace are always present and to live with those ideas more fully.

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Follow us on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter: @MensJournal and @MJGearGuy

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Follow us on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter: @MensJournal and @MJGearGuy

Mountain Hardwear SuperMega UL 2
2 pounds, 2 ounces
Although its name brings to mind something massive, the Mountain Hardwear SuperMega UL 2 weighs in at just more than two pounds. The freestanding tent maintains its slim figure by way of ultra-light aluminum poles, ripstop nylon/polyester walls, and a silk fly. The tent lacks excessive elbowroom, but that’s to be expected when the design focuses on reducing weight. Still, steep walls make the most out of the 27 square feet of available floor space, and two hikers can sleep soundly inside. In our tests, the tent packed down easily and proved able to withstand rain, wind, and all the scuffs of active use. [$430; mountainhardwear.com]

Therm-A-Rest NeoAir Xlite
12 ounces
Once upon a time, the idea of sleeping on an air mattress during a night in the backcountry gave hikers the shivers. Why? The mattresses provided good cushion but zero insulation. Fortunately, the Therm-a-Rest NeoAir Xlite is the lightest comfortable air mattress available. Multiple layers of crinkly reflective sheets within the mattress’s core provides sleepers with warmth, while a cushy 2.5 inches of padding protects their hips and spine from the hard ground. The standard-size 72-inch mattress packs down to the size of a water bottle and weighs a mere 12 ounces. [$160; cascadedesigns.com]

REI Igneo
1 pound, 15 ounces
The three-season, 800-down filled REI Igneo is one of the best sleeping bags a weight-watching backpacker can carry. Rated to 19 degrees, the one-pound, 15-ounce bag stays warm in freezing temps, but breathes incredibly well on even the hottest days, so its innards don’t become balmy. A water-resistant shell deflects the wet stuff, while the bag’s unique insulation system keeps 60 percent of the down fill on the top half, where you need it most. It’s cut comfortably snug around the chest, yet doesn’t feel constrictive. Amazingly, it packs down to the size of a softball. [from $329; rei.com]

Leatherman Style PS or CS
1.58 ounces or 1.4 ounces
Weighing a mere 1.58 ounces, the stainless steel, three-inch Leatherman Style PS lets you pocket eight tools, including pliers, a wire cutter, small scissors, tweezers, a file, and both Philips- and flat-head screwdrivers. On a recent hike, it proved well suited to such tasks as servicing backcountry stoves and straightening bent bike spokes. One drawback: The PS lacks a simple knife blade. If you need one, you can trade up to the 1.4-ounce CS model, which drops the pliers in favor of beefier scissors and the addition of a knife blade (handy where the ability to cut cleanly through a variety of materials comes in handy). [$20 and $25 respectively, leatherman.com]

MountainSmith Phantom 40L
3 pounds, 9 ounces
Reducing the bulk and weight of the gear you put in your pack means you can also reduce and size and weight of the pack itself. Mountainsmith returns to its ultralight roots with its new Phantom 40 backpack, which weighs in at three pounds, nine ounces. The 40-liter capacity pack holds everything you’ll need for 2-3 days on the trail, so long as it’s all lightweight, low-bulk gear. Also, the suspension system makes the trip comfortable, thanks to adequate padding and firm support for loads of 30-35 pounds. The 210-denier ripstop pack absorbed a substantial beating as we scrambled around the desert on multiple trips. [$150; mountainsmith.com]

Snowpeak LiteMax
1.9 ounces
The Snowpeak LiteMax butane canister stove is an exercise in minimalism – just 1.9 ounces of titanium and steel, with a few rubber O-rings for safety’s sake. No fuel line, no extra framework. The stove simply puts your cooker atop a small fuel canister. But the small stove still churns out more than 11,000 BTUs (and can do so for 45 minutes straight on a 100-gram fuel canister). The flame can be adjusted down to whisper should you care to sauté rather than blast-boil, although the latter still happens in four minutes and 10 seconds for a full liter of water, even when we were at an elevation of 4,500 feet in the Washington Cascades. [$70; snowpeak.com]

Dan McLaughlin spends six hours a day, six days a week at the golf course in the hopes of going pro — in six years. Photograph by Jake Stangel

Two years ago, at age 30, Dan McLaughlin quit his job as a commercial photographer in Portland, Oregon, hoping to become a pro golfer — despite never having played a full round of golf in his life. Since then he’s been learning to play, six hours a day, six days a week. His goal: cracking the PGA Tour by 2016.

by Gavin Edwards

Today, under the gray Oregon skies, McLaughlin gets ready for work. He rubs his hands together to ward off the chill and opens the trunk of his silver Hyundai, revealing a pair of muddy shoes and a bag of golf clubs. Four clubs, to be exact: a sand wedge, a pitching wedge, an 8-iron, and a putter.

McLaughlin specialized in taking pictures of dental equipment. Unsurprisingly, he grew bored. He had saved up $100,000, earmarked for business school, but when he went to his first finance class and realized it was going to be devoted to learning Microsoft Excel, the prospect of an MBA started making him physically ill.

McLaughlin considered other options: becoming an architect, getting a medical degree, starting a sparkling-water company (“I’m really into carbonated water”). Eventually he realized he wasn’t the only person trying to break free from the gravitational pull of an established career — he longed for a trajectory that would inspire not just himself but other people as well. “I wanted a challenge that was nearly impossible, but theoretically possible,” McLaughlin says. So, golf.

McLaughlin called his project “the Dan Plan.” One friend gave him a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Outliers; another presented him with Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated. Both books draw on the research of K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University. The 140-character version of Ericsson’s research: Becoming a world-class expert in any field, from software design to concert violin, requires 10,000 hours of practice. Usually that means 10 years of hard work or “deliberate practice,” but McLaughlin wants to cram the hours into six years. Ericsson says that nobody has ever tried to log their 10,000 hours at as late an age as McLaughlin, and he cautions that spending the time “does not guarantee that expert performance is attained.” In other words, in 2016, McLaughlin might not have anything more than calluses.

McLaughlin walks to the driving range at the Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club in North Plains, Oregon. The oxygen here seems to be permeated with money. While his fellow golfers sport new Nike gear, McLaughlin wears threadbare gray khakis with holes. He has cut his expenses so he can play golf all the time and says he owns just two pairs of pants.

He greets his coach, Christopher Smith. While McLaughlin is a slender 5-foot-9, Smith looks like a jock, tall and broad-­shouldered. He regards McLaughlin with an amused ­distance.

“My lag putts are good on the course but not in practice,” McLaughlin reports.

Smith shrugs. “Stop practicing your lag putts. Seriously,” he says.

McLaughlin takes some swings. Some are square and solid, some veer off, and some are hozzle rockets, violently squirting low and to the left. Here’s what McLaughlin doesn’t do: visibly react to any of them. Whereas you or I would probably chortle at the good shots and curse at the bad ones, he just squares his shoulders and takes another swing.

Smith lays a large yellow plank on the ground, forcing McLaughlin to modify his swing or smack his club into the plank. Smith says, “One thing that really motivates people to change is pain.” McLaughlin hits the ball perfectly, and it sails onto the fairway. He allows himself a small smile.

“I’ll just bring a two-by-four to my practice sessions,” he says.

“Hit yourself over the head with it,” Smith suggests.

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"When I started," says McLaughlin, "there was a zero percent chance of making the tour, and now I'm up to maybe 1.3 percent. But that's astronomically higher than zero." Photograph by Jake Stangel

Initially, Smith didn’t like McLaughlin. “The first time I met Dan, I was insulted,” Smith says. “I told him, ‘Do you have any idea how hard golf is? Go play tiddledywinks.’ ” But McLaughlin kept coming back: At their second meeting, they discussed Ericsson’s precept of expertise requiring 10,000 hours of practice. Before their third meeting, McLaughlin not only had read Ericsson’s academic work, he had also talked to the professor on the phone. Convinced of McLaughlin’s serious intent, Smith took him on.

Smith saw his mentoring of McLaughlin as an opportunity to reinvent the teaching of golf. Given a willing student and thousands of hours, what was the optimal method? He told McLaughlin that he’d gradually work away from the hole. When he had mastered a one-foot putt, he could move back to three feet, and then five feet, and so on. “I thought it sounded like a good idea,” McLaughlin says. “I didn’t know that meant I would only putt for the first five months.”

McLaughlin started the Dan Plan two years ago and became notorious at his local municipal course as the guy who showed up six days a week with his own sandwich, carrying a bag with a single club, putting for six hours a day — even in the pouring rain, when it was just him and the greenskeepers. Winter in Portland is wet. So are spring and fall. “I would be the only guy out for entire weeks,” McLaughlin says.

After five months, Smith allowed him a pitching wedge. After two more months, the sand wedge. “I literally have never even touched a driver,” McLaughlin says, almost bragging. He thinks that if he had started with a full set of clubs, he might be burned out by now, but a new challenge every few months keeps up “the passion and the momentum.”

McLaughlin’s swing started with a simple instruction from Smith: “Hit the ball.” Since then, Smith has given him a couple of pointers or modifications every week. McLaughlin spends 45 minutes every morning focusing on the biomechanics of his new swing: 15 minutes in slow motion, 15 minutes at half speed, and 15 minutes full out. But McLaughlin needs to focus on what he’s doing: Sloppily driving balls for an hour (or 10 hours) might be cathartic, but it wouldn’t make him a better player.

Conrad Ray, coach of the Stanford golf team, says, “There are players who come late to the game who are superathletic and are able to play at a competitive level.” Which seems encouraging — until you discover that by “late to the game,” he means “in the eighth grade.”

“I would never quash a man’s dream,” says Brandel Chamblee, former pro and now an analyst at the Golf Channel, when considering McLaughlin’s mission. “But he forgets that every 30-year-old golfer right now is also playing and practicing, doing all the things he wants to do. So at age 36, even though he would have practiced, he’s getting into the age where he’s losing his athleticism. You need extraordinary abilities to play the Tour, and then you need to do more with those gifts than everyone else around you.”

“Everything’s easier when you’re younger,” says Jane Clark, with a sigh. She’s a professor of kinesiology at the University of Maryland. “Think about the massive amount of work the body has to do for a golf swing. Well, if you try to learn that when you’re 30, it’s very hard. It’s never too late to learn a second language, but you probably will always have an accent. And you’re not going on the pro circuit.”

McLaughlin says the only way he’d consider the Dan Plan a failure is if he stops before he logs his 10,000 hours. He is not worried about getting bored, but has been working out to reduce the possibility of serious injury. He’ll run out of money in a couple of years, but he has faith that some sponsors will emerge by then. (So far, Nike has helped him with some free equipment.) But the ultimate mark of success would be getting onto the PGA Tour — a tall order, considering there are just 125 slots.

“Every day it’s a little more possible,” McLaughlin says of the Tour. “When I started, there was a zero percent chance, and now I’m up to maybe 1.3 percent. But that’s astronomically higher than zero. At the end of the year, I could be up to a three percent chance.”

Scott Stallings, a 27-year-old on his second Tour, has one of those 125 coveted cards and has paid attention to McLaughlin’s quixotic mission. “I think he’s unique for being willing to try this,” Stallings says. “And by unique, I mean crazy. It’s not out of the realm of possibility.” Pressed for a number, Stallings confidently says, “Twenty-five percent.”

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McLaughlin's ultimate mark of success would be getting onto the PGA Tour — a tall order, considering there are just 125 slots. Photograph by Jake Stangel

“A lot of people expect me to be better than I actually am,” McLaughlin says, sitting on the clubhouse porch at Pumpkin Ridge. “But I’m just starting.” He pulls out a waterproof notebook filled with tiny scrawls, a daily record of shots made and missed. Whether he succeeds or not, he hopes his stats will provide a road map for the next person who tries to go pro. “It’s a long process, but we’ve got time.” Sometimes it means tearing down a whole part of his game and rebuilding it: “If you want to be great,” McLaughlin says, “you’ve got to let go of good.”

The implication of a slogan like “talent is overrated” or a story like McLaughlin’s is that anyone can become a top-notch golfer or guitarist or geneticist. In fact, the willingness to stop going to movies and eating out, the desire to spend a chunk of your life on a mission that might not pay off — those are rare qualities. Very few people are willing to spend 10,000 hours on anything that isn’t sleeping or watching TV. Some people tell McLaughlin that they can’t believe he’s spending six years training himself with no guarantee of a payoff. The incomprehension is mutual, since McLaughlin can’t understand why people stay for years at a job they hate. He meets plenty of people who don’t think he’ll stick with the Dan Plan for all six years.

I’m not one of them. I think his chances of turning pro are only a bit better than his chances of going to the moon, but I don’t sense an ounce of quit in him. His quest may not take him to the Masters, but it’s already doing what he wanted it to: turning him into a better version of himself.

The crucible of golf has burned away McLaughlin’s indecision and replaced it with passion. He and his girlfriend broke up, and she moved out, for reasons “not really related to golf,” he says, but honestly, everything in his life now relates to golf. “I don’t really care about other things,” he says. “I wake up; I think about it. When I go to sleep, I’m thinking about it.”

McLaughlin flips through his notebook, contemplating the last 24 months of his life, then shoves it into his pocket. “You can golf by playing two balls. People say your first ball is where you’re currently at, and then the best ball of the two is your potential. If I play best ball like that, I can always get a birdie. I know that ability’s in there, but summoning it for 70 straight shots — that’s a little harder.”

Maybe you should practice, I tell him.

McLaughlin nods, as if he had never considered the notion. “Yeah, yeah. Practice a little more.”

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Becoming a world-class expert in any field requires 10,000 hours of practice. McLaughlin wants to cram that into six years. Photograph by Jake Stangel

1. A Game of Golf Begins Before You Hit Your First Ball

“For a long time, the first two holes of a round were my worst because I wasn’t mentally there yet. I found that if I sit down and visualize the first two holes, walking through them in my head, by the time I get up to the first tee, it feels like I’ve already played a couple of holes.”

2. If You Walk Slow, Swing Slow

“Base the tempo of your golf swing on the way you walk. If you’re a slow stroller, never in a hurry, you’ll probably have a nice slow swing. If you’re like me, overly excited, you probably have a faster swing. One’s not better than the other, but one will probably come more naturally. If you’re off-tempo, your swing will be out of sorts.”

3. It’s Not About How Good Your Gear Is, It’s Getting Your Gear Tuned

“All modern equipment’s good. The important thing is not which clubs you get, but getting them fit for your body type and your swing, to see where you’re making contact with the ball. If your clubs are too short, you can add inches to the club or bend them — every one degree you bend is about an inch on the club.”

Kelty Basecamp Kitchen
Even campsite chefs need a clean, level surface on which to cook, chop, mix and prepare. (Tree stumps don’t quite cut it for kebab vegetables, after all.) Kelty’s portable cooking set-up transforms your campsite into a workstation fit for a sous chef.  Your camp stove goes on the central tabletop, while seasonings and other accouterments fit conveniently on the small shelf underneath. Chopping, mixing and other food preparation happens on the broader, right-hand countertop. For neat freaks, an optional zippered pantry below the Basecamp’s surface securely stows pots and pans into a series of zippered enclosures. The entire package folds up and weighs only 18 pounds, making it a cinch to schlep and store. [$159; kelty.com]

Sea to Summit Ultra-Sil Kitchen Sink
No campground cookspace would be complete without the proverbial kitchen sink. Made of waterproof, siliconized nylon, this sack-like pseudo-sink can hold up to 10 liters of water for washing everything from s’more-smeared dishes to gunky-eyed morning faces. Best of all, it’s light – only 1.7 ounces – yet also super durable. We failed to puncture the material even when furiously washing titanium cutlery, steel spatulas and ceramic knives. Also handy: Tough handles that allow you to carry the sink fully loaded with sudsy water and dirty dishes.  When you’re done, just shove this contraption back into its tiny, 4-inch stuff sack and carry on camping. [$30; seatosummit.com]

Primus Firehole 300 Stove
Bringing culinary power and precision to camp, this 14.76-pound stainless steel stove’s dual propane-fired burners each kick out 12,000 BTUs – enough to boil a quart of water in three minutes – but can also be dialed down to a whispering simmer to finish delicate sauces. Twin flip-down windscreens on the side can also be used as prep surfaces, while an integrated LED light provides illumination when cooking after dark. The Firehole also features a built-in timer (so your food never burns), a spoon and spatula that join to form tongs, and a fuel line that winds securely into a fitted niche built into the bottom of the stove. [$295; primuscamping.com]

MSR Flex 4 System Cookset
Though it contains enough pots, pans, mugs, and deep dishes to cook and serve four people, this comprehensive, camping-optimized cook- and dining-ware set can be neatly squeezed, Babushka-style, into its signature 5-liter pot. The hard-anodized aluminum pot is also ideal for boiling pasta, thanks to a latched on, partially-perforated lid that doubles as a strainer when you flip the whole thing upside down.  The smaller, 3.2-liter pot’s non-stick surface is ideal for heating up the sauce, since cleanup is easy. On the dining front, four deep-set plates and double-walled cups can serve up everything from cold cereal and orange juice to steaming hot baked beans and coffee. [$160, rei.com]

GSI Titanium Kung Foon
Toss your grizzled old ‘spork’ and dig into your camp fare with this all-in-one utensil, which improves on the trusty spoon/fork hybrid by adding chopsticks to the mix.  Slurp gazpacho off the spoon, spear steamed asparagus with the fork, and – with a quick tug to pull them out — shovel rice with the sticks.  When you’re done eating, lock the hardwood sticks together in the spork’s handle to create an extra-long grip and start scraping grime out of deep pots – or just use it to stir some fireside cocktails. [$20; gsioutdoors.com]

Handpresso Wild Hybrid
Most campsite coffee pots make a brew that tastes as though it was filtered through a moldy old towel. For a more gourmet campground eye opener, look to the new Wild Hybrid. Unlike its predecessors, this portable espresso maker can make a demitasse-sized shot using either E.S.E. pods or loose coffee (the latter is not only better for the environment, but is easier to find in any random and remote general store). Fill the reservoir with hot water, squeeze the bicycle-style pump to build up a consistent 16-milibars of pressure (essential for authentic espresso flavor), and add grounds into the coffee compartment. Then, close up the entire contraption to push through a perfect cup (only one 1.34-ounce cup at a time, alas). [$150; handpresso.com]

Justin Verlander has unshakable confidence. "I was born to be a pitcher." Photograph by Thomas Prior

The majority of major-league hurlers are pitch-counting technicians who think six-innings is a full day’s work. Then there’s Justin Verlander.

by Pat Jordan

Justin Verlander has been called a freak, an anomaly, a monster, a beast, a load, a throwback. He’s 6-foot-5, 225 pounds, unshaven, with a pug’s belligerent jaw. His fastball is regularly clocked at 91 mph in the first inning of a baseball game, 95 mph in the fourth, 98 mph in the seventh, 102 mph in the ninth. His overhand curveball drops straight down from a batter’s chest to his shoe tops, like a mallard shot on the wing. It’s unhittable, unfair. He has a slider and a changeup, too, but who cares. His fastball and curve are the best in Major League Baseball since the days of Nolan Ryan, and Ryan’s may have been the best ever.

Last season, Justin Verlander, of the Detroit Tigers, won 24 games, lost five, and led the American League in victories, winning percentage (.828), strikeouts (250), innings pitched (251), and earned-run average (2.40), and he was given the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards — the first time a starting pitcher has won both in 26 years. He also pitched his second career no-hitter, and took no-hitters into the sixth, seventh, and eighth innings of three other games. While most starting pitchers struggle to last six innings in a game, Verlander threw at least six innings and 100 pitches in every one of his 34 starts. He’s 29, and the Tigers pay him $20 million a year. He owns a Ferrari, a Ma­serati, an Aston Martin, and a Mercedes-Benz SLS. He’s not married, but he has a girlfriend whom he has been with for 11 years. “She really hung in there,” he says. “She’s the one, but I’m not ready.” He spends his time with men his age, friends, teammates. They work out, play golf, hang out. Their frat-boy banter is taken straight from a Judd Apatow movie (“How’s your wife . . . and my kids?”), except these frat boys have money — in Verlander’s case, big money — and endless time to fill.

“I’ve been blessed,” he says, not for the first time this day, or the last. We’re in a golf cart, puttering toward the fourth hole of the Isleworth course outside Orlando, Florida, on a cool February day. Verlander is teamed with a guy named Mike, against two of his friends, Pat and Frankie. (This, by the way, is Frank Viola III, a minor-league pitcher and the son of former Cy Young winner Frank Viola Jr.) The bets are $100–$100–$200. Verlander is having a rough first four holes. Sand trap, rough, sand trap, and now, woods. “You play this game much?” I ask him. He glances at me and says, “Actually, I’m a very good golfer. This is the worst I’ve played because of you.” Verlander does not like to be interviewed. He’s a man of few words, mostly cryptic topic sentences. I ask if he drinks. He looks at me, says, “I’m a baseball player.” I ask why he plays golf. “Why not? I got nothing else to do all day.” Does he read books? “No.” Watch baseball on TV? “Don’t have the attention span.”

As a kid he had no work ethic. “I played video games,” he says. “I was a couch potato.” His father would drag him outside for a catch. His dad had no sports background, but he knew immediately that his son could throw a baseball, so he bought him a “how to pitch” book for kids. (“Step 1. Put your foot on the rubber.”) Eventually, he paid for a college coach to teach Justin the finer points. By 13, Verlander says, “my curve was always there.” I ask him to show me how he rotates his fingers over the ball to make it break down. “I couldn’t tell ya,” he says. “That’s too much thinking for me. I’m more of a feel pitcher. If something’s wrong, I don’t watch a video. I go throw in the bull pen until it feels right.”

Verlander stops the cart, and we go into the woods to look for his ball. Two egrets, each standing on one leg, point it out. He drives it out of the woods and into a sand trap. We get back into the cart. Frankie ambles by and says, “There’s some pretty flowers in the woods, huh?” I say, “Yeah, Justin’s showing me the whole course — woods, rough, water hazards.” Verlander replies, “I’m just trying to be a good host, show you all aspects of the course.” I say, “Then why don’t ya show me one of the greens?” I pause, and then say, “With your ball near the pin.” Verlander glares at me, and then laughs. “People in real life don’t get ballplayers’ humor, the way we talk in the clubhouse,” he says. In “real life,” people say things they don’t mean. Ballplayers do the opposite. Verlander says, “I’m always hurting someone’s feelings.”

He sprays sand out of the trap, his ball barely reaching the green. Three shots later, we head off toward the next hole. His fastball topped out at 86 mph his senior year of high school, and scouts weren’t interested. So he went to Old Dominion University in Virginia and spent the winter lifting weights. He gained 20 pounds, and by the end of his freshman year, his fastball had been clocked at 96 mph. “All 20 pounds of muscle went to my legs,” he says, which helped him drive toward the batter with his fastball. “Blessed, I guess,” he says. “I was born to be a pitcher.”

After his junior year, he was drafted by the Tigers and signed for a $3 million bonus. I ask him about the current $20 million a year he gets. “I love the money,” he says, “but I’d play for free. I know I have a lot of money, but I don’t spend it. Did you see Elton John went bankrupt?” He shakes his head. “He spent $10,000 a day on flowers. You make it, you gotta keep it.”

His father helped him negotiate his first bonus. Did he give him an agent’s 15 percent commission? “No.” Verlander hasn’t given his parents any of his money because he’s “waiting for the right time in the future.” When he was younger, Verlander says, he took his father for granted — until he saw the movie Field of Dreams. “Finally, I got it,” he says. He’s had a great relationship with his father ever since. He feels bad for men who “don’t get their father” until it’s too late.

Verlander reached the majors in his second pro season, and by his third, he had a 17–9 record and was a star. I ask if he had a plan in case he didn’t make the majors. “I had no other interests but baseball because I never thought I’d not make it. No. Never.” I tell him I hate guys like him, without doubt. He laughs. “What can I say? I’m a confident guy.” He tells me that when some pitchers pitch a great game, they worry about whether they can duplicate it. When he pitches a great game, he thinks, “I’ll be even better next game.”

The secret to Verlander’s confidence is simple: He has overpowering stuff and an overpowering body. He’s like a cyborg out of one of the Terminator movies. He has no worries, no angst, no need even to think. He says he doesn’t have big swings in the quality of his stuff from game to game. His curve always falls off a table, his fastball always approaches 100 mph when he needs it, and “I don’t get tired in the ninth inning. Never. Oh, once I did, in Atlanta when it was, like, 100 degrees.” Then what does he worry about? Batters hitting his best stuff? He laughs. “Never happened.” Flaws in his motion? “My motion is automatic. I don’t think about dropping my left shoulder to drive my fastball. I just do it.” Mental lapses? He laughs again. “I don’t struggle mentally.” If he has a bad start, he doesn’t agonize over it. “I just get over it and prepare for my next start.” He tells me most pitchers overthink things. He points his finger to his forehead and says, “I try to keep this guy out of the way because he interferes.”

He has what every great athlete must have: ocular block, the ability to focus all his energy, concentration, and physical ability on only one thing: his craft. Most great athletes learn to do this after years. Verlander does it by nature. And with intelligence. He’s smart enough to know that his repertoire is so overpowering that it can be diminished only by thinking. He doesn’t question God’s gift.

We are at the ninth green now, his best hole so far. He’s chipped to 10 feet from the pin — a difficult putt, but if he makes it, he and Mike will win the first nine holes and take 100 bucks. He gets his putter and says, “This is what we’ve been talking about. Crunch time in a shitty game where I didn’t have my best stuff early on. This is where I bring it 101 mph in the ninth because it’s all or nothing.”

He sinks the putt. Mike gives him a high five. Pat mutters, “Go fuck yourself, Verlander.” Verlander just laughs. He never had any doubt. “He’s got this insane internal confidence,” says Frankie, who is currently out of pro ball and looking for a new team. “I never had that.”

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Verlander sees himself in the mode of classic power pitchers like Nolan Ryan: no pitch counts, no relievers, no excuses. Photograph by Thomas Prior

On the back nine now, we pass faux-Spanish-Mediterranean stuccoed mansions. He says, “You know, I could live in one of those.” I say, “Why? They’re so sterile.” He says, “Yes, but I’d feel isolated and protected.” He says that when he goes out to bars, sometimes he gets into unpleasant situations, some drunk guy giving him a tough time. I ask what he does. He says, “I walk away. It’s hard because I’m a prideful person, but I have to.”

We are making our way toward the next hole when, for the first time that day, Verlander asks me a question. “Mantle or Mays?” I say Mantle because I was a Yankees fan as a kid, but Mays was the better all-around player. This prompts a discussion about Old-Timers versus Modern Players. I tell him I favor the guys I watched in my childhood: Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Whitey Ford, Warren Spahn, Bob Feller. Wrong answer. He shakes his head no. “Today’s players: bigger, faster, stronger,” he says, not bothering with full sentences. I tell him today’s players might be more physically talented, but the old-timers had more depth of talent. They could do a lot of things well — hit behind the runner, hit the cutoff man — that today’s players can’t, or won’t. I mention his two teammates, third baseman Miguel Cabrera and first baseman Prince Fielder. “You’re gonna be pitching with two fat boys in the infield who can’t pick up a ground ball, much less reach one.” He shrugs, “I don’t mind. I can always cut down balls in play by striking guys out.” Then he says, “Miguel’s the best hitter in the game. He’ll look like shit on a pitch, and then you’ll never get him out on that pitch again.” He raises his eyebrows, adding, “Did you ever see the swings on those old-timers?” He means they had long, sweeping swings rather than the more compact, muscular efforts of today’s players. The longer the swing, the sooner the batter has to commit to a pitch and the easier it is for a pitcher to fool him with a curve­ball or a fastball.

“I’m not saying the old-time stars couldn’t play today,” he says. “DiMaggio would always be DiMaggio. But the guys at the bottom of the order wouldn’t have a job today.”

Paradoxically, Verlander considers himself a throwback to the old-timey pitchers, who threw a lot of innings, completed a lot of games, and threw a lot between starts. “I like that part of the old-time game,” he says. “No pitch counts like there are today. Not every pitcher gets tired after 100 pitches.”

His idol is Nolan Ryan, whom he most resembles as a pitcher. Ryan had a reputation for being a headhunter, quick to throw at a batter’s head if the batter even got a loud foul ball off him. One time, Carlton Fisk, the Red Sox’s great catcher, hit a single off Ryan. Ryan was so pissed that he threw over to first base six times. “Not to keep me close,” Fisk once told me, “because he knew I wasn’t stealing. The son of a bitch was trying to hit me.” I ask Verlander if he can be a prick on the mound like Ryan. He says, “I can be a prick. I threw at four guys last year. Did I hit them? No. I missed them all.”

A few holes later, I bring up his post­season pitching performances. A sore point. He’s been less than mediocre in his two post­season appearances, in 2006 and 2011. Won three, lost three; earned-run average of 5.57; 45 hits in 42 innings; 20 walks.

“Last year it was just my timing. The rain delays. I wasn’t locating the ball. The delays got me out of rhythm.” He seems disturbed by the question and, for the first time all day, unsure of himself. I press him about 2006. “Oh, my arm was dead. I had nothing left at the end of the season.” He’s quiet for a moment, and then adds, “In the postseason, the batters are more focused in a short series, jacked up, but pitchers . . . well, pitchers have to fight getting jacked up. It throws their timing off.” I ask if his legacy will be diminished by his postseason performances so far. He says, “Hopefully, I’ll have a lot more time. I think about that. But there’s nothing I can do about last time but forget it.”

We complete the next few holes in silence. Finally, Verlander says, “Don’t you have any more questions for me?” I say, “I have one more deep-think question, but you said you don’t think.” He says, “Try me.” I tell him what Socrates once said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Does he ever examine his life? Does he wake up at 3 am and see his sins floating on the ceiling? He says, “You’re a funny guy. No, I never see my sins on the ceiling at 3 am. I sleep like a baby. But I do examine myself privately. I mean, if I find I did something wrong, I admit it, to myself . . . but I don’t tell anybody.” Now we both laugh.

At the 18th green, he drops me off at the clubhouse. He says he enjoyed our little conversation. I tell him I had to carry him for the first four holes, force him to jack up his fastball from 89 mph in the first few holes to 95 mph by the ninth, and 101 mph by the 18th. He says, “I actually think you brought me down, but we won’t go there.” I ask him one last question. “Do you ever wonder, ‘Why me?’ ” He says, “No.”

Nathan Myhrvold in the cooking lab of Intellectual Ventures. Photograph by Chris Buck

Since cashing out of Microsoft, software genius Nathan Myhrvold has lived a nerd fantasy — digging up T. rexes, dabbling in Formula One, and creating a cooking bible only a mad scientist could love.

by Joe Hagan

As usual, Nathan Myhrvold has to get the dinosaur question out of the way first: Is it true, asks a saucer-eyed brunette with cleavage bursting through her zip-front denim jumpsuit, that he has a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in a glass solarium in his massive Bellevue, Washington, home?

“Hahahahaha!” Myhrvold guffaws. Sigh. “Yeah.”

“That is amazing,” the woman coos. The dinosaur as decor is indeed impressive, but Myhrvold, being Myhrvold, is a bit embarrassed to report that he didn’t actually discover the skeleton himself. “I bought it,” explains the former Microsoft technology guru. “It’s like having the head of someone else’s deer on your wall!”

Which is why, he says, he later bankrolled a team of paleontologists, led by the consultant from the film Jurassic Park, to comb the Montana badlands until they discovered a T. rex for him, which Myhrvold donated to the Smithsonian. Then his team discovered 11 more — the most T. rexes found by a single team in the past 100 years.

But we’re not here for the dinosaurs — or to review what Myhrvold learned studying astrophysics with Stephen Hawking or to discuss his Formula One race-car period or the bungee jumping or nature photography or scuba diving or spelunking or fly-fishing. We’re in his vast and brightly lit laboratory, surrounded by glass beakers and humming machines, to talk about food. And not just food but, in fact, molecular gastronomy, the avant-garde approach to cooking that uses chemistry and technology to invent novel, even ludicrous, edible creations. Tonight Myhrvold is putting on the equivalent of a NASA cooking show in front of two intimate tables of pros, including Andoni Luis Aduriz, chef at the number-three restaurant in the world, Spain’s Mugaritz; Scott Boswell of New Orleans French Quarter’s bistro Stella!; and Johnny Iuzzini, pastry chef at Jean Georges, on whose arm we find Claire Robinson, the bubbly Food Network hostess and Myhrvold’s jumpsuited dinosaur ­inquisitor.

Standing with formal authority in his white chef’s smock, Myhrvold beams with delight as he presents a tiny cracker with a butter spread made of peas that were spun in a centrifuge at 50,000 times the Earth’s gravity for one hour. Here, ladies and gentlemen, are French fries that have been soaked in an ultrasonic bath, perfectly crisped and ready for dipping in a creamy bone-marrow mousse. Have a sip of this mushroom cappuccino topped with whipped bacon cream. This preposterously tender roast chicken? Myhrvold injected it with brine and hung it for three days in a refrigerator, roasted it for four and a half hours at 145 degrees, then cooked it for five minutes at 600 degrees. “We use liquid nitrogen to chill it first,” he says, “because that really keeps the inside moist.”

If this food is far out, that’s where Myhrvold generally resides. He takes his hobbies, like dinosaurs and cooking, to baroque extremes, unconstrained by money. Retiring in 1999 as Bill Gates’ personal tech visionary at Microsoft — Gates once called him the smartest man he knows — ­Myhrvold has a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The two live in the same lush, woody neighborhood of techno-mega-­mansions near Lake Washington, a few miles from Microsoft headquarters.

The dinner is to showcase Myhrvold’s most recent spike in the ground: a six-volume, 2,438-page cookbook called Modernist Cuisine. It’s a lavish objet d’art bursting with lush photography and elaborate, painstakingly researched charts, diagrams, maps, and formulas. The book costs $625, took nearly 10 years (and well over a million dollars of Myhrvold’s own money) to produce, and is, by every account, the final word on the science of cooking.

It explores everything from the spherification of liquids to the microregional barbecues of the southeastern United States. It documents the exact ways steak and hamburgers cook on a grill, down to the molecular level, with annotated pictures taken with high-powered microscope cameras.

Here in this lab, he explains, a full-time staff of 18 helped him perform tasks like cutting open convection ovens and coffee­makers with lasers to expose how they work from the inside out and filming bullets with a stop-motion camera as they pierce ballistics gelatin and eggs and other foods. Why?

“Because, why not?” he says, happy you asked. “If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!” Some of it is even ­practical — like Myhrvold’s advice that you “hyper-decant” a bottle of young red wine by putting it in a blender for one minute. “Particularly if you have a wine expert over,” he says. “Because, oh, my God, the look on their face is worth the whole thing.”

Fair haired and cherub-faced, Myhrvold has the wide-eyed, and somewhat maniacal, presence of Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, giving off high-pitched, nutty-professor chuckles as he shows off a local clam with a large, offensive-­looking appendage coming out of it.

But believe it or not, Myhrvold also wants to be taken seriously. At 53, he isn’t satisfied with going down in history as the biggest lobe in Bill Gates’ brain trust, or even as an eccentric Renaissance man with a dinosaur in his house. He wants a legacy he can call his own. And instead of focusing on one big thing, he’s hedging his bets: The lab where we’re dining isn’t just an experimental kitchen for his landmark book but a 20,000-square-foot research center for the exploration and creation of new technologies. It houses obscure inventions like “an incredibly exotic antenna that will one day revolutionize communications” and a refrigerated closet full of mosquitoes for vaccine experiments. “In fact, if you come this way,” he says, during a guided tour, “we actually have a system where we can shoot mosquitoes out of the sky with lasers.”

Myhrvold is founder and CEO of a kind of invention incubator called Intellectual Ventures, a company that both invests in new things and manages a portfolio of tens of thousands of patents acquired with money from big investors, including Gates. “If we could create invention capitalism,” he says, “that would be a helluva legacy, that would be a helluva thing to do. . . . We could actually turbocharge the rate at which the world invents things. I thought that was a cool idea.”

It’s not all mad-scientist hijinks, though. In recent years, Myhrvold has developed a reputation as a “patent troll,” attacked by critics who say he’s operating a kind of roving pirate ship that scoops up patents for mobile phone and internet software and then extracts fees from companies that need them to develop new or more advanced products.

Some feel Myhrvold has become a bottleneck to progress, not a catalyst for it. And stories abound of Myhrvold’s company profiting from patent trolling. It’s a reputation he acknowledged with a rueful joke at a TED Conference in 2007, saying he’d been cast as “the nerd Tony Soprano,” displaying a headline from a Norwegian magazine profile: PATENTMONSTERET. “I’m not thinking ­monsteret is a good thing,” he says. Myhrvold, in addition to being credited for his patents, would clearly enjoy being liked as well.

“Words can hurt you,” he tells me. “In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.” Which is perhaps where the cookbook comes in. If there’s a recipe for having one’s space-age cake and eating it, too — being respected but also beloved, like Steve Jobs — Nathan Myhrvold is determined to find it.

Inside his office at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Myhrvold has an elaborate shadow box mounted on the wall, featuring all the elements in the periodic table. Besides being amazingly beautiful, almost all of the 118 compartments contain actual samples of the elements, including the gases. “The noble gases are in little neon signs that light up,” he says. “Some of the other radioactive ones are in there — but not the most radioactive ones.”

Myhrvold is himself a man of many compartments, conversant in a wide array of sciences. He has two master’s degrees, one in geophysics and space physics, another in mathematical economics, and a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics. In the early 1980s, he studied quantum field theory with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, but he gave it up to pursue a more lucrative career, starting a computer company called Dynamical Systems Research with his younger brother, Cameron. After two years, the business was acquired by Microsoft for $1.5 million, beginning a long relationship with Bill Gates. Myhrvold spent 13 years at Microsoft, becoming chief technology officer and launching its research arm, which incubated things like Kinect for Xbox 360 and many iterations of Windows.

In 1995, Myhrvold and Gates co-wrote the bestseller The Road Ahead. A big part of Myhrvold’s job was producing research reports describing in precise terms what the future of computing would look like so that Microsoft could exploit it. He was often pretty damned accurate: In 1991, Myhrvold predicted the emergence of the iPhone down to the smallest detail, describing a “digital wallet” that would consolidate all personal communication — telephone, schedule manager, notepad, contacts, and a library of music and books, all in one. It would record and archive everything you asked it to, he surmised. “The cost will not be very high,” he wrote. “It is pretty easy to imagine a $400 to $1,000 retail price.” Microsoft, however, was too cost conscious and risk averse to execute Myhrvold’s vision. “Hey, it was better than predicting the wrong thing,” Myhrvold says now. “Sitting around being bitter all the time, that’s not fun. But Microsoft certainly could have done more about it. One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing.

“It’s what I did with my cookbook, frankly,” he adds.

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Microsoft's would-be iPhone, circa 1991. Photo: Courtesy Nathan Myhrvold

Myhrvold was raised in Los Angeles by his mother, a Jantzen swimsuit model and schoolteacher. He announced his intention to become a scientist when he was two years old and soon leaped ahead of his peers, graduating from high school at 14 and ending up at Princeton soon after. Myhrvold describes himself as a precocious, even insufferable child. “I would stand up and correct the teacher, if the teacher said something wrong,” he recounts. “I remember I was in fourth grade, but I was very young, and they were talking about bears hibernating. I said, ‘Bears don’t hibernate.’ There are some animals that hibernate. Turns out bears aren’t one of them.” In hindsight, he’s proud of it, even if it alienated him from others. “It took a lot of courage,” he says. “I was a shy little kid. I was so much younger than everybody else. But I thought it was OK to say that.”

If the child is father of the man, then the grade-school Myhrvold still animates the adult. He can be arrogant and knowier-than-thou, and he’s interested in the comedy of bodily functions as a matter of course, especially if they involve dinosaurs. In the 1990s, he became fascinated with what he called “the biomechanical issues associated with reproductive behavior” in dinosaurs, he once told a reporter. “Or, put more plainly, how did they fuck?”

His latest research paper is similarly jejune. “It is the definitive treatise on dinosaur vomit,” he says. “The study of fossil shit has been important to all kinds of things, but — strangely! — fossil vomit was left to me to name. Not only is it the best paper on fossil vomit, it is, by God, the first paper on fossil vomit!”

His restless curiosity and elastic attention span can lead him from wormhole to wormhole. When I met him, he’d begun his day logging data on a dinosaur study he was writing up but was soon on his hands and knees for two hours with the pool man, investigating a mysterious leak. “I often get very hands-on with things like that, which is a little bit weird,” he says. “Most people in my zip code don’t.”

He likes his expensive toys, of course. When I ask him what kind of car he drives to work, he says, “It’s just a boring Lexus. My PR people will kill me for saying this, but once you’ve got boats and planes, cars aren’t that interesting, anyway.”

But what Myhrvold seems to enjoy most of all is simply showing off his pyrotechnic mind and vast collection of novel experiences, from driving M1A2 tanks for sport to four-wheeling through the Utah wilderness to test out high-powered panoramic cameras for the weekend. Sometimes his Buckaroo Banzai résumé can all seem like material for the ongoing story of Nathan Myhrvold — a story he clearly savors telling in interview after interview, speech after speech, TED Conference after TED Conference.

“There’s an element of performance, an element of storytelling,” says Bran Ferren, the former tech guru at Disney and Myhrvold’s best friend. “And Nathan’s a good storyteller. You have to compel people to understand your path and direction. Just as in performance, you want to touch them or move them or persuade them. It’s the same with Nathan.”

For the past 12 years, Myhrvold has been trying to sell the world on what he considers his biggest and best idea of all, an incubator of new inventions. It’s a kind of for-profit think tank featuring Myhrvold and a rotating cast of brilliant thinkers, his buddies, from a cross section of sciences. It’s exactly what you’d imagine: They sit around a room together, dreaming up new ideas for inventions that might become lucrative patents — while a team of lawyers records the freewheeling conversations to document every iota of potential intellectual property.

Since Intellectual Ventures started, in 2000, the company has licensed more than 35,000 new patents in the U.S. and has thousands of applications under submission. “Invention is about as close to magic as we get here,” Myhrvold explains. “That’s what we’re trying to do, create a business model for a liquid capital market for invention.”

It’s an attractive and possibly ingenious vision, but patenting novel new inventions is only a small part of Myhrvold’s plan. The real business of Intellectual Ventures has little to do with magic and everything to do with teams of lawyers collecting fees for patents Myhrvold had nothing to do with.

For all his childlike wonder and marvelous powers as a raconteur, there’s a glint of steel in Myhrvold’s eye. He wants to see the world in as clear and crystalline a way as possible, which, in the Microsoftian culture where he grew up, means ruthlessly.

In the late 1990s, he was among the first to see that patents were as much the future of technology as inventions themselves, that they would be the land grab of future megaliths like Google and Apple, and he wanted to win that game under his own name. So as hundreds of start-ups went under during the implosion of the dot-com boom, Myhrvold and his investors began snatching up the patents from failed companies, bundles of patents for small and medium technologies that might yield profits in the future internet. A portfolio of these patents, the thinking went, amounted to tens of thousands of tollbooths through which other companies would have to pass as they tried to develop new ­applications.

Last year, Myhrvold was the subject of a scathing story on This American Life, the NPR program hosted by Ira Glass, which told the story of a young software company that received a bluntly worded cease-and-desist letter from a patent troll. Though the letter didn’t come from Intellectual Ventures, the story cast Myhrvold as a greedy villain, with Chris Sacca, a former Google executive, quoted as saying Myhrvold’s company can “literally obliterate start-ups.”

The patent wars have ramped up with Motorola, Google, Apple, and Microsoft battling for giant patent portfolios that will allow them to compete with as little financial and technological friction as possible, virtually blotting out smaller innovators.

Myhrvold, of course, saw it all coming. “Once upon a time,” he says, “the West had no barbed wire, and there were no land rights. One set of people wanted to drive their cattle willy-nilly; the other said fences and cattle. In some cases, there was literally a shooting war. But guess what? The property guys won, because ultimately you do need private property. The tech companies and internet companies came out to a green-field situation like the Wild West, and they said, ‘All right, let’s go out there, and party on!’ If you look at all the high-stakes litigation we’ve had in the last six months, I’m more right every day.”

The more we talk about the patent issue, the more defensive Myhrvold seems to become. He’s learned to see attacks on him as sour grapes, or just part of a larger power struggle that he happens to be winning.

“People called Microsoft a bunch of names, but I’m proud of what I did at Micro­soft. The only great research lab in the last generation was the one I made! But people pilloried us in the press all the time.”

For all his forward-thinking futurism, Myhrvold remains culturally Microsoftian. He prefers a BlackBerry over the iPhone, still uses a Hotmail email address, and isn’t on Twitter or Facebook. His worldview is libertarian. He recently wrote a column for Bloomberg News (“I’m a columnist now! For God’s sake!”), arguing that hydrofracking, the controversial technique for extracting natural gas that can have devastating environmental consequences, is so effective it will stall the green-energy revolution for years to come.

“If the conventional energy is cheap, it cuts the legs out from under the alternative energy,” he says. “It’s just a damned fact!” It’s a zero-sum worldview that, while great for a wealthy swashbuckler like Myhrvold and lucrative for Intellectual Ventures, doesn’t always endear him to the little people. “I think Nathan is one of those guys who doesn’t ­really get the fact that he’s extraordinarily gifted and everybody can’t do what he does,” says a person who knows him from culinary circles. “He has very little social conscience because he thinks ­everybody should take care of themselves.”

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Myhrvold attended culinary school in France while working simultaneously at Microsft. Photograph by Chris Buck

“This and this,” explains Myhrvold, “we use all day, every day.” He’s showing off to a table of guests his two favorite kitchen tools in the lab: the Sorvall RC-5C Plus Superspeed Centrifuge and the Omni Macro ES Digital Programmable Homogenizer. The former can make an excellent pea butter; the latter a constructed gelato. These, he hopes, will one day be part of everyday cooking.

If Myhrvold wants to bridge his ideas to reality and not be deemed a mere opportunist, or monsteret, what better route to the public’s love than through its stomach?

Myhrvold got serious about food in the early 1990s, working nights at a Seattle restaurant to get enough experience to be accepted to La Varenne culinary school in Burgundy, France, while working days at Microsoft. It was at La Varenne that he learned the art of sous vide, a core technique of much of molecular gastronomy, which involves putting food into a vacuum-sealed container and cooking it at a very low temperature for long periods of time, enabling laser-like precision and producing intense flavor.

His life was changed when he befriended Heston Blumenthal, chef at three-star British restaurant the Fat Duck, who was famous for making creations like bacon-and-egg ice cream and later a seafood dish that required an eater to wear an iPod, with sea sounds for audio accompaniment.

At the time, molecular gastronomy was considered an elite experience and, indeed, was meant to be: Ferran Adrià, the Spaniard behind legendary molecular-gastronomy restaurant elBulli, who is one of Myhrvold’s heroes, compared it with rarefied pursuits like jazz and Formula One racing.

“It’s a specialized thing that will appeal to a small number of people,” says Colman Andrews, Adrià’s biographer and a fan of Myhrvold’s book. Which is why Myhrvold saw an opportunity not only to create the bible for the molecular-gastronomy world but also to become its pied piper. “I’m going to build what I want, and then I’m going to hope that other people want what I want,” he explains. “It’s much riskier. A lot of great disasters have been made this way, but also a lot of great successes have been made this way. I recognized that every penny I spent on this might be lost.”

Myhrvold published the book himself, overseeing every detail down to the packaging. It was so massive — the ink alone ­accounts for four pounds of its weight — the binding didn’t hold together, and the container had to be redesigned at great expense. When it finally came out, however, the mere fact of the book — its size, cost, and eccentric and media-loving creator — made its own kind of stir. It was hailed by culinary celebrities like David Chang, of New York’s Momofuku, and Adrià himself, who donated a recipe to the book, saying it would “change the way we understand the kitchen.” And it’s hard to deny how detailed and vivid the book is, both as a monument to gawk at and as an elaborate encyclopedia to get lost in.

Myhrvold wants his book to change the way modern American kitchens operate. He’s closely monitoring the book’s impact, noticing, for instance, that whereas people once referred to this cooking as “molecular gastronomy,” they are increasingly referring to it with his term. “Oh, my God, it’s switched over almost entirely to ‘modernist cuisine.’ And that’s great, and I take some credit for that. So that’s what it’s called now!”

Myhrvold says the book will sell 40,000 copies in its first year. At $500 a copy, he points out, “that’s like selling 20 million of a $1 retail book.”

But whether people are using the book as something other than decor remains an open question. Last year, New Yorker food critic John Lanchester praised Myhrvold’s book but said its ultimate effect “will, if anything, widen the gap between ordinary and professional cooking. The truth is that this stuff is for the pros.”

When I recite this passage to Myhrvold, he gets animated. “We’re totally equalizing things,” he argues. “Any amateur can learn something at the same time as Ferran Adrià does. That’s an equalizing factor. I would argue that it’s the awww-pposite of that.” But what about the barriers to entry? Not everyone can lay down $625 (the actual price) for a cookbook, let alone $10,000 for a Sorvall RC-5C Plus Superspeed Centrifuge. At this, he sighs, clearly annoyed. “So why is $500 expensive?” he asks. “If it was a $500 car, it would be a cheap car. If it was $500 of textbooks to go through a college course. Oh, my God! It’s a trivial fraction of the overall costs.

“We wanted to make something that was different, that had a level of quality and level of detail that was unlike anything else,” he says. “And, yeah, it costs something! But ­really good parmesan cheese costs more than the supermarket crap! You can decry it as elitist, or you can swallow hard, buy it, and grate it over something.” Myhrvold argues that even if only middle- and high-end chefs adopt modernist techniques, that will create a kind of culinary trickle-down economy, with his ideas finding their way from his lavishly funded kitchen to your not-so-lavishly funded kitchen, eventually enriching everyone. He expects we’ll see evidence of it in the years to come.

“Ten years from now, you could stop by a roadhouse and say, ‘That dish! That dish right there!’ ” he exclaims.

It’s not yet clear what “that dish” will be. But even if the chef at the local roadhouse never uses a centrifuge, and even if Modernist Cuisine doesn’t travel beyond pro kitchens, all is not lost. Myhrvold, after all, has a diversified portfolio. There’s the mosquito laser and the tens of thousands of patents in his company’s portfolio, a kind of wide net for catching money from Google or Foursquare or Twitter or dozens of young companies trying to foment innovation in the digital age. Or maybe — who knows? —there’s something nobody has ever thought of before, which will change the world forever and have Nathan Myhrvold’s stamp on it.

Dinosaur vomit!

Whatever the case, for one evening in Seattle, Myhrvold has an audience oohing and aahing at his wacky creations. A fake quail egg made of passion fruit. A zebra-striped omelet. Creamed spinach with chlorophyll butter. Six hours of eating in all, a kind of endless parade of novelty and exotica. Wine flows, cheeks go ruddy, and laughter, for a while, overtakes the hum of machines in the background. Everyone is jovial, and perhaps no one more so than Myhrvold. A bit ruddy himself, he bounces from table to table, answering any questions posed by the CEO of Viking stoves or Pierre Hermé, the famed French pastry chef, explaining the vacuum-infused vegetables or the cocoa seaweed or the consommé that requires the meat to be juiced using “a hydraulic press that will squeeze with 120 tons — and that gets it real flat!”

“He just wants to have fun,” whispers the drunken wife of a top food critic.

And it’s true, cooking seems like a kind of therapy for Myhrvold, a place where he can aim his supreme ambition and laserlike attention toward humans in a way that won’t make them have to hire lawyers. And maybe — who knows? — they may even love him for it. “If Pierre hates the meal, is it the end of my career?” muses Myhrvold. “No. But we’re anxious to please them because it’s what you do when you cook.”

He says it like it wasn’t always obvious.

Sometime after midnight, as the mammoth meal winds down, he examines a tray of last desserts just then coming off the assembly line. “Wanna bite?” he asks, as I walk by. It looks vaguely like banana — and, in fact, it is. Centrifuged. “Isn’t it fucking ­excellent?”

Airbags, long available to backcountry riders in Europe, are just becoming available in the U.S. Photo: flickr/David Domingo

In a season full of avalanche fatalities, personal air bags become a hot commodity.

by David Browne

Pro snowboarder Meesh Hytner learned the hard way why avalanche air bags have become this season’s most-talked-about gear. In late January, near Montezuma, Colorado, Hytner was hit by a wall of snow, pulled the rip cord on her new air bag, and was brought to the surface. “It kept my head above the snow,” she says. “I just rode it out.”

Avalanche air bags — backpacks with one or two nylon bags that inflate by canister — have been a staple on European slopes since the Eighties and arrived in the U.S. about five years ago. This season, which as of March has seen more avalanche fatalities in the U.S. than last year, according to the American Avalanche Association, has put a spotlight on the safety devices.

In February, three experienced skiers were killed in an avalanche in Stevens Pass, Washington; the lone survivor, pro skier Elyse Saugstad, was wearing an air bag. Within days of Saugstad’s accident, sales of the devices shot up. Mammut, one of the leading U.S. manufacturers, sold out its stock, and North Face announced it will enter the market with two new air bags this fall. “Three or four years ago, you would see one of these air bags a week, usually from someone visiting from Europe,” says Mike Rheam, avalanche expert at Jackson Hole, which requires its ski patrols to wear the packs. “Now all the locals have them.”

In the ski and snow community, nearly everyone agrees the bags work, but they cost about $1,000 and, thanks to air-filled canisters, add several pounds. “There are issues with size and weight,” says David Furman of Mammut. “They add bulk.” Others worry that they make riders think they can survive an avalanche — which typically travels at over 50 mph — and therefore encourage riskier behavior on the slopes. “There’s a concern that you give a 16-year-old kid an air bag, and they feel like RoboCop,” says Doug Workman, a ski-patrol guide in Wyoming who survived an avalanche with an air bag in 2010. Hytner says she was lucky to end up in a field, with no bruises. “It’s like an insurance policy,” she says. “I’m just lucky it performed the way it did that day. I could have easily been a corpse with a backpack on.”

Guillén's comments about Fidel Castro angered members of Miami’s Cuban-American community. Illustraion by Phil Disley

The suspended Marlins skipper first cited his admiration for Castro in an October 2008 interview with Men’s Journal.

by Blaine McEvoy

The Miami Marlins suspended their manager, Ozzie Guillén, for five games this morning, citing pro-Castro commentary the Venezuelan shared with Time magazine as their rationale.

Guillén, 48, told Time‘s Sean Gregory he “loves Fidel Castro” and respects the Cuban leader for staying in power so long, echoing sentiments published in the October 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.

When challenged four years ago by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Rick Telander to name the toughest man he knows, Guillén — then manager of the Chicago White Sox — listed Fidel Castro.

“He’s a bullshit dictator and everybody’s against him, and he still survives, has power. Still has a country behind him,” Guillén told MJ in 2008. “Everywhere he goes they roll out the red carpet. I don’t admire his philosophy. I admire him.”

Read the entire 2008 interview with Ozzie Guillén here.

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"People in my business," says Frank, "are much more willing to listen to the voters than the voters understand." Photo: flickr/World Economic Forum

After more than 30 years in office, the cunning congressman from Massachusetts is retiring. And still telling it like it is.

Interviewed by Sean Woods

What man most changed your life?
Actually, it was Pope John Paul II. In 1980 I was a member of the state legislature of Massachusetts. I figured I had nowhere to go politically, so I was going to leave office, start a law practice, and come out. (I was closeted at the time.) But that spring, Pope John Paul ordered a Jesuit priest, Congressman Robert Drinan, not to run again — the pope didn’t think it was right for priests to be in politics. And on two days’ notice, I moved to the city of Newton and replaced him. So, if not for the pope, I would not be a congressman.

What’s the best advice you ever received?
To understand that we live in a world of limited possibilities. I learned that as a junior in college, and it has served me well ever since. John Dunlop, a professor of labor law at Harvard who went on to become secretary of labor, said that the easy decisions are good versus evil. The toughest decisions in life involve the trade-off of good things. The second most important piece of wisdom is in the same vein, and it came from the 20th-century philosopher Henny Youngman, who joked, “How’s your wife?”/“Compared to what?” Except I’ve updated it with me and my friends to “How’s your husband?”

What have you learned about campaigning?
That it sucks. It’s the most godawful human activity that doesn’t involve physical pain. It’s high tension, and it’s boring and difficult work — begging people for money and debasing yourself. I’ve known people who claim they’ve enjoyed it, but I think they’re lying.

What should everyone understand about the political system?
That they have more power than they think! That people in my business are much more willing to listen to the voters than the voters understand. The problem is that voters don’t often speak. Small-town democracy works better than people know. Big money is very important, but on issues that the voters speak out on, they will kick big money’s ass.

How should a man handle getting old?
By accepting the good side of it. People are more solicitous; other men aren’t as challenged by an older man — there’s less machismo involved. You shouldn’t try to stay young. You can’t. You’ll fail. You should enjoy old.

How should a man treat his enemies?
As enemies.

What’s the best way to win an argument?
Carefully analyze what people say and throw it back at them. People say all kinds of things they don’t realize, and if you listen, they will, at some point, be inconsistent or inaccurate.

What’s the best way to handle regret?
With acceptance. My ­biggest regret is that when I was still closeted, I was undisciplined about it and did not have proper control of my ­emotions and physical drive. I should have come out earlier. I am a much better openly gay man than I was a closeted one. My other ­regret is that I haven’t written more. I am easily distracted. It doesn’t take much to drive me away from a blank page.

How should you endure scandal?
By being as open as ­possible about what happened. What happens in all these scandals is that you are ­accused of both what you did wrong and many things you didn’t do. The lawyers come and tell you not to admit anything. But you can’t deny some things and be silent on others. Just be completely open: Deny what’s not true and admit what is.

What human characteristics are overrated?
I think patience is greatly overrated — and directness, which is sometimes called rudeness, is greatly ­underrated. Too much patience and not enough directness make you ­ineffective. I couldn’t get nearly as much done if I ­followed the conventional views on both of those.

Photograph by Greg Broom

Classic
Inspired by field jackets worn by U.S. officers in the Korean War, Tommy Hilfiger updates the look with a cinched collar and stretch waistband.

Photograph by Greg Broom

Classic
The ideal option for a windy day, this tough nylon wind­breaker from Theory has a pared-down sophistication that works with most outfits.

Photograph by Greg Broom

Classic
This cropped Woolrich Woolen Mills jacket recalls the British-made Baracuta G9, worn by Frank Sinatra, who popped it in Assault on a Queen.

Photograph by Greg Broom

Tough
With a detachable inner vest for added warmth, this hooded polyester jacket from Gant Rugger comes in classic olive and has ample pockets.

Photograph by Greg Broom

Tough
The 182-year-old company Woolrich John Rich & Bros. dresses up a jacket with tailored sleeves, high armholes, and these signature concealed buttons

Photograph by Greg Broom

Luxury
Expect to pay top dollar for the high-quality, buttery-soft suede of this rich brown jacket from Polo Ralph Lauren.

Photograph by Greg Broom

Luxury
Dark-blue suede and masculine breast and side pockets on this Burberry Brit number pair well with a modern cut that’s trim throughout.

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

Jimmy Chin, Conrad Anker, and Renan Ozturk reached the summit of India’s 21,000-foot Mount Meru on October 2, 2011. At 31, Ozturk (far right) was the youngest and least experienced of the three, who are all salaried North Face climbers. During the ascent, he brought up the rear for Anker (center) and Chin (left), who have 60 expeditions and four Everest summits between them.

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

At 21,000 feet, Meru doesn’t qualify as a particularly high-altitude peak, and the Shark’s Fin (or central summit) isn’t even its highest summit, but elite climbers care far more about pure technical difficulty and the sheer majesty of whatever it is they’re climbing. The Shark’s Fin rings both these bells, as well as another, more elusive one known as “complexity.” Meru presents its many challenges in a difficult and baffling sequence.

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

The climb itself has four parts: the 2,500-foot wall of steep snow and ice — a deadly serious climb in its own right — with constant exposure to rock fall and avalanche; the so-called Alpine Ridge, a 500-foot section of hard mixed climbing, with rock, ice, and snow; the 1,000-foot stone prow known as Shark’s Fin proper; and finally, the summit ridge, still untouched by human hands.

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

A steady procession of elite-level climbers tried to climb Meru in the 1990s and 2000s, “but it kept shutting people down,” Anker says. “Trip after trip got beat. Paul Pritchard, Johnny Dawes, Scott Backes.”

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

The wall is so steep and so sheer — so devoid of cracks and handholds — that it simply cannot be climbed without complex equipment (such as hooks and pitons) and a portaledge to sleep in between days of painstaking climbing.

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

Pete Takeda, a Colorado-based alpinist who has tried and failed three times on the Shark’s Fin, compares it to a femme fatale: “She’s complex, she’s alluring, she throws up all these obstacles — it’s a test of how badly you want her.”

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

Time is of the essence on big mountains: Weather can pop up at any moment, and climbers typically sprint back down from the summit almost immediately to begin the difficult descent.

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

The trio raced up the lower snow-and-ice slopes in a single, furious, nonstop push to avoid getting trapped by weather.

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

“Everyone falls in love with the top half,” says Takeda. “What’s diabolical is how technical the rock turns out to be.”

Photograph by Jimmy Chin

The view and the moment at the top were precious for Anker, Ozturk, and Chin. Four thousand feet below, they could see the vast white expanse of the Gangotri Glacier, source of the Ganges, and distant Tapovan meadow where the sadhus live and pray.

2012 Jaguar XJ Supersport
Its lithe design may evince all the calm of the cool exec in the corner office, but underneath lurks muscle that could only be forged in the boxing gym. For its line-topping sedan, the XJ Supersport, that brute power comes in the form of a 5-liter, 510-hp supercharged V8 which, come workday’s end, propels it to sixty mph in a scant 4.7 seconds. With more leather, wood, and fine English speakers than a cigar bar, that figure seems an anomaly — until you find out that an aluminum frame partially offsets the added weight of those posh amenities. On our test drive, a laggy infotainment system caused a few minor headaches, but its all-day torque offered enough respite to make every ride ten times more fun than any corporate retreat.

2012 Hyundai Genesis 5.0 R-Spec
This might be the sleeper sedan of the year: Korean manufacturer Hyundai has given their Mercedes-fighting full size car a kimchi kick in the form of a new 5-liter V-8 engine called the Tau, which brings 429hp to the pavement. That powerplant scoots the rear-wheel-drive R-Spec to 60mph in just 5.1 seconds, and thanks to a fancy house-made eight speed automatic transmission, the new engine makes just one less mile per gallon than its smaller V-8 counterpart. Sure, the R-Spec’s derivative styling won’t turn many heads — and it lacks the near-predictive steering feel of its German rivals — but damned if a test drive in this won’t make you think twice about dropping twenty grand more on a similarly-equipped Benz.

2012 Volkswagen Beetle Turbo
Much has been made of the newly redesigned Beetle’s butched-up looks and VW’s grab for more male buyers. But what about the new bug’s guts? In its Turbo guise, the car brings surprisingly good stuff: It gets same 2.0-liter, four cylinder turbocharged engine found in the brand’s boy-racer model, the GTI, tied to a six-speed dual clutch automatic transmission. Though a test drive through deep Brooklyn proved the Turbo’s acceleration and cornering lack the hardcore bite of the GTI, it still scored points — and attention — for its mini-Porsche looks, courtesy of the rear spoiler.

2012 Buick Regal GS
60 Minutes is a phrase aging Buick buyers are surely familiar with. Six point seven seconds is most likely not. Get acquainted: That second figure is the zero-to-sixty time of the Regal GS — Buick’s first true performance car since the ’80s. At its heart is a strong (270hp), smart (32mpg highway), turbocharged 2-liter four, corralled via a six-speed standard transmission (yep, a Buick with a stick!). Brembo brakes add extra stopping power, and an adjustable suspension can firm up on the fly. Its slightly whiny engine note might not inspire lust, but consider this sport sedan an introduction to Buick for dudes who are more likely to stream an episode of Top Gear than tune in to Morley Safer.

2012 Volvo S60 R-Design
How can you ensure your family’s thrill rides don’t end when Wally World closes for the season? Hit the Volvo dealership and strap the kids in back of this ride. At the point of purchase, distract your significant other with the S60’s five-star safety rating, then check the “R-Design” box on the options sheet, which, for $4,500 on top of the S60’s $38,450 base, nabs you a turbocharged 325-hp inline six along with stiffer suspension bushings and deep, clingy leather sport seats. It’s the most powerful production Volvo sedan ever. Just don’t mention that to the wife until you’ve pulled out of the lot. —Jesse Will

Steamboat Springs is Colorado's most genuinely western mountain town. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

When the lifts shut down in America’s mountain towns, out come the flip-flops, microbrews, and inner tubes. For a real recharge this summer, spend some time at our favorite high-altitude hotels, restaurants, and outfitters.

by Robert Earle Howells

Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Stay
Hotel Bristol
With its downtown setting and Old West flavor, the Hotel Bristol is like walking into a Zane Grey novel.

-

Eat
Sweetwater Grill
The owners of the Sweetwater Grill used lottery winnings to create their dream restaurant on the banks of the Yampa River. Fresh local fare with ethnic flourishes.

Outfitter
Steamboat Flyfisher
When a world-class river flows through town, you’ve got to toss it a fly. A half-day float trip will set you back $325.

For details on MJ-endorsed hotels, restaurants, and outfitters in Truckee, California, click here.

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Gold-rush hub Truckee is within 10 miles of 11 lakes. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Truckee, California

Stay
Cedar House Sport Hotel
The new Cedar House Sport Hotel—sleek, minimalist, and meticulously eco—exemplifies the best of new Truckee.

Eat
Cottonwood
Cottonwood, up on a hill above downtown, is the place to quaff a happy hour brew and take in the view from an outdoor deck, catch live acoustic music, and tie into some grass-fed beef or Asian-tinged seafood.

Outfitter
Sports Exchange
Sports Exchange, right on the Truckee River, rents the requisites for a full-fledged Truckee visit: Kayaks, tubes, and fly-fishing gear (from its own in-house fly shop), and experts in all of the above are on staff.

For details on MJ-endorsed hotels, restaurants, and outfitters in Red Lodge, Montana, click here.

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Red Lodge is cradled in a valley just outside the northeast corner of Yellowstone. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Red Lodge, Montana

Stay
Pollard Hotel
The 1893 Pollard Hotel is in the heart of downtown within walking distance of everything in Red Lodge.

Eat
Bridge Creek Backcountry Kitchen
The Bridge Creek Backcountry Kitchen serves “mountain cuisine” that puts local beef and elk to highly creative use.

Outfitter
Beartooth Bike Tours
The best way to see America’s Most Beautiful Highway is from the seat of a cruiser, riding downhill.

For details on MJ-endorsed hotels, restaurants, and outfitters in Ketchum, Idaho, click here.

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Ketchum is one of the most isolated spots in the country. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Ketchum, Idaho

Stay
Sun Valley Lodge
Sun Valley Lodge, built in 1936 in an inspiring setting surrounded by the Sawtooth Mountains, is the archetypal American ski hostelry — and the place where Hemingway finished For Whom the Bell Tolls (Suite 206).

Eat
Roosevelt Grille
Chowing down on Idaho lamb, baby back ribs, or a flatiron steak on the Roosevelt Grille’s rooftop deck is a quintessential Ketchum experience.

Outfitter
Silver Creek Outfitters
Sun Valley is surrounded by trout streams, including the Big Wood, the Salmon, and legendary Silver Creek. Silver Creek Outfitters guides them all.

For details on MJ-endorsed hotels, restaurants, and outfitters in Warren and Waitsfield, Vermont, click here.

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Sister valley villages Warren and Waitsfield has "the underlying flavor of a place that has not been discovered," according to one local. Photo: flickr/Dougtone

Warren and Waitsfield, Vermont

Stay
The Pitcher Inn
Located on Main St. in Warren, the Inn has 11 rooms and suites, each decorated with a Vermont theme, including “school,” “trout,” and “Calvin Coolidge.”

Eat
American Flatbread
American Flatbread epitomizes the Mad River Valley’s infatuation with fresh local food. Located on a working farm and open only on weekends, it serves pizzas baked in a wood-fired oven that are worth the inevitable wait.

Outfitter
Sugarbush Soaring
Take a glider-plane lesson or just go up to catch the view — a superb soaring wave gets you high fast.

For details on MJ-endorsed hotels, restaurants, and outfitters in Talkeetna, Alaska, click here.

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The closest thing to a big-box store in downtown Talkeetna. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

Talkeetna, Alaska

Stay
The Roadhouse
The Roadhouse, in the heart of town, has rooms from $50 (and sourdough hotcakes at breakfast bigger than the plate they’re served on). Or for a supremely Alaska experience, ask for Trapper John’s Cabin, off by itself near the old village airport.

Eat
Foraker Dining Room
The Foraker Dining Room in Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge serves Alaska fish and game, and you can’t beat the view of McKinley and the Alaska Range.

Outfitter
Alaska Bush Floatplane Service
A flightseeing gander at Mount McKinley ($210) is mind-blowing, but so is a drop-off trip into the backcountry for hiking or fishing.

For details on MJ-endorsed hotels, restaurants, and outfitters in Crested Butte, Colorado, click here.

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Don't miss Crested Butte's newly opened Montanya Rum distillery. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Crested Butte, Colorado

Stay
The Ruby of Crested Butte
The Ruby of Crested Butte B&B provides free, bright red townie bikes (and an après-ride hot tub), plus the owners are outdoors people who know the area trails.

Eat
The Wooden Nickel
Make that the “World Famous” Wooden Nickel — Crested Butte’s oldest meatery (its bar came in by train and horse-drawn wagon circa 1895) has a cool vibe and serves up hearty slabs of beef and elk.

Outfitter
Crested Butte Sports
Besides renting full-suspension and hardtail Cannondales, Crested Butte Sports serves up informed beta on the nearly endless list of hot local mountain bike rides.

For details on MJ-endorsed hotels, restaurants, and outfitters in Park City, Utah, click here.

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Park City is associated with the Sundance Film Festival, but locals love the trails the most. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Park City, Utah

Stay
Summer rates will make you feel like you’re stealing a room at posh, legendary Stein Eriksen Lodge.

Eat
Slopes by Talisker
The new Slopes by Talisker, at the Waldorf Astoria at Canyons Resort, has a French chef who emphasizes locally sourced ingredients in a swarthy, antler-bedecked setting.

Outfitter
Park City Yoga Adventures
Whether it’s paddleboard yoga in a hot spring within a cave, hiking and yoga out on the trail, or yoga in a backcountry yurt, this isn’t your everyday yoga studio.

For details on MJ-endorsed hotels, restaurants, and outfitters in Bryson City, North Carolina, click here.

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Kayakers come from all over to run rapids in Bryson City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Bryson City, North Carolina

Stay
Watershed Cabins
Watershed Cabins places you in a designer log/stone cabin in the woods, complete with an oversized porch and views of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Eat
Freymont Inn
The Freymont Inn is all open-beamed woodsy and serves up Southern chow like lamb shanks, local mountain trout, and country ham.

Outfitter
Nantahala Outdoor Center
NOC is the crossroads of the Smokies for river sports, including raft trips and whitewater kayak lessons—plus it rents mountain bikes and sells a full spate of outdoor gear.

For details on MJ-endorsed hotels, restaurants, and outfitters in Taos, New Mexico click here.

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Find rafting, petroglyphs, and hot springs in the Rio Grande Gorge, near Taos. Photo: flickr/laszlo-photo

Taos, New Mexico

Stay
Taos Inn
The downtown landmark bills itself as “the living room of Taos.”

Eat
Doc Martin’s
After the rattlesnake appetizer, try any dish with northern New Mexico’s greatest contribution to the culinary arts—green chile.

Outfitter
Los Rios River Runners
The Rio Grande’s superb, Class 3–4 stretch through Taos Box is at its best in May and June.

The wine: BR Cohn Doobie Brothers Red
The story: Bruce Cohn, the Doobie Brothers manager, owns the Sonoma-based vineyard and winery.
The blind test: “Bright and drinkable with a leathery note — a backyard BBQ wine. It’s pretty juicy, but it shuts off pretty quick and almost has that synthetic fruity smell to it.”

The wine: DelaCain Finale Cabernet Sauvignon
The story: Jonathan Cain, the keyboardist for Journey, brought on winemakers Dennis De La Montanya and Daryl Groom but participates in winemaking.
The blind test: “Earthy, smells great, really balanced — which is a tricky thing for winemakers to do. This is not an inexpensive wine. I’d eat this with game meats like lamb.”

The wine: Greg Norman Paso Robles Petit Syrah
The story: The former world-no.1 golfer owns vineyards and wineries in the U.S. and Australia. His Petit Syrah comes from Paso Robles, a few miles north of Santa Barbara.
The blind test: “It’s got licorice, nutmeg, and stewed plums — this would go great with hearty Asian food like Korean BBQ. There are telltale signs of being responsibly handcrafted.”

The wine: Pursued by Bear Cabernet Sauvignon
The story: Actor Kyle MacLachlan (Desperate Housewives, Twin Peaks) collaborates with Walla Walla-based winery Dunham Cellars, tasting and blending alongside winemaker Eric Dunham.
The blind test: “Woof. It’s really in your face. It’s got a chocolate-y note, like chocolate covered blueberries or cherries. It’s smoky. It would be an end of night wine, for someone who likes a really full-bodied wine.”

The wine: Warrant Red
The story: The band that brought you “Cherry Pie” teams with winemaker Kristian Story. The members taste the wine with Story and work with him to adjust the blend.
The blind test: “Bright cherry, almost black cherry cola — it’s a lip smacker. This would be a great takeout wine — maybe with pizza because it’s got that juiciness that would go well with tomatoes.”

The wine: Whitesnake Zinfandel
The story: David Coverdale, the lead singer of Whitesnake, collaborates with Northern California winemaker Dennis De La Montanya.
The blind test: “Tart, with a hint of sweetness. This is well structured and tastes like its an expensive wine to make. It almost has an Italian feel and would go great with pasta and red sauce.”

Twenty-five percent of all U.S. marijuana enters via the Nogales-Phoenix corridor. Photograph by Peter Van Agtmael

Drug smugglers and human traffickers have seized control of a narrow corridor of untamed Arizona desert along the U.S.–Mexico border, turning ranches — and even backyards — into killing fields. A visit to the most lawless place in America.

by Jeff Tietz

In late 2010, after the ninth corpse or body part had been discovered on his ranch in a span of 12 months, David Lowell sat down and drafted a document that he later took to calling, with a grain of dark pride, “my map of atrocities.” Lowell lives in southern Arizona, 11 miles north of Mexico, in a hinterland canyon in the middle of the busiest drug- and human-smuggling corridor in the United States. Lowell’s map, “Sites of Recent Border Violence Within the Atascosa Ranch,” renders the ranch boundary as a thick black line. Inside the line glow 17 red dots, each stamped with a number. Among the descriptions in the corresponding key: “Rape tree with women’s underwear” (2); “Fresh human head without body” (3); “Skull” (3A); “Body found 500 yards west of Lowell home” (6); “Body found 100 yards south of Lowell home” (7); and “Patrolman Terry killed by Mexican bandits” (12).

Lowell, who is 84, has owned and run the Atascosa Ranch for more than 35 years. He is slight and chalk-pallid but possessed of a steady vigor. He handed me a copy of the map in his office before taking me on a tour of the ranch. “In the case of the human head,” Lowell said as I was examining the map, “one of our cowboys came to the house holding a Safeway bag and said, ‘You wanna see something interesting?’ And I said, ‘Sure,’ and I opened the bag and inside there was a fairly fresh human head. Meat. Fresh-looking meat.”

After telling the cowboy, Martin, to put the head back exactly where he’d found it, Lowell called the Santa Cruz County sheriff’s office. Neither the responding deputies nor Lowell nor Martin could find a corpse. Eventually, the county medical examiner matched the head to the remains of a body recovered a mile away. The deceased was an illegal immigrant who had probably been abandoned by his guide and died of hunger or exposure. Animals had dissected his corpse.

About five years earlier, the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful drug-­trafficking organizations, had assumed control of the smuggling corridor, which runs from Nogales to Phoenix and is roughly 8,000 square miles. All of the human smugglers work for the cartel now. (“The days of the independent coyote are gone,” several locals told me.) Decapitated enemies and illegal immigrants left to die are the detritus of a newly disciplined, unitary system.
The Nogales–Phoenix corridor is one of the roughest, least-accessible swaths of land along the U.S.–Mexico border. It became the Sinaloa Cartel’s primary trafficking route not long after the 9/11 attacks, when “border security” was a touchstone phrase and lawmakers worried that bomb-bearing terrorists posing as illegal immigrants would exploit the country’s permeable southwestern border. The Department of Homeland Security sought to move beyond mere deterrence and achieve “operational control” of the border. It assigned the Border Patrol a special “priority mission”: to prevent “terrorists and terrorists’ weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, from entering the United States.” Legislation in 2004 and 2006 provided funding for 10,000 additional Border Patrol agents, mandated 700 miles of new fencing, and authorized the deployment of advanced surveillance systems: laser range finders, mobile ground radar, unmanned aerial vehicles, infrared cameras.

The technology and agents are in place, and much of the fence is complete, but the new tactics seem to have rerouted illicit traffic as much as decreased it. With superior fencing and detection equipment, and a recent burst of manpower, DHS has successfully shielded populated areas and shut down some major trafficking routes. Elsewhere, though, agents are scarcer, and the new fence is not continuous or uniform: Pedestrian fencing alternates with vehicle barriers and long stretches of open border. Much of the Nogales–Phoenix corridor is, in any event, so mountainous as to be unfenceable, and its isolation and immensity make it inimical to law enforcement. As DHS selectively tightened the border and drug seizures increased, the cartel moved into the corridor. The infrastructure and counter-­surveillance systems it has established there make its operations virtually ineradicable. It now ships an enormous volume of narcotics through the corridor each year, including as much as a quarter of all the marijuana that enters the United States.

Lowell occasionally sees smugglers hiking through canyons on the ranch. There are typically 10 porters and two armed guards. “They’re very often a matched team, all about the same size, muscular and in good condition. Our policy is to turn off at a right angle or go back the way we’d come. I’ve had one or two experiences where I’ve thought, ‘Somebody might really take a shot at us.’ ”

It is unlikely that a trafficker would deliberately shoot at a U.S. citizen. The more attention traffickers attract, the less efficient they become, and cartel bosses prioritize efficiency. “The Sinaloa Cartel includes some of the best entrepreneurs of all time,” a senior DEA agent based in Tucson told me. “These guys know how to make billions of dollars better than anybody.” They prefer their assault rifles to be used against bandits.

Confrontations between traffickers and bandits, or “rip crews,” account for most of the violence here. When bandits become too disruptive, the cartel reportedly deploys teams of assassins. In 2010, a sheriff in Florence received an intelligence report from the DHS: Cartel leaders planned to send “a group of 15 very well-equipped and armed sicarios [assassins]” into the Vekol Valley, south of Phoenix. A month later, two men were killed there, in what appeared to be a sicario ambush.

We left the office, taking with us Lowell’s springer spaniels, Ginger and Spook. The Sonoran monsoon had greened the canyon. Lowell’s house, built of stone and 100-year-old adobe, stands above the canyon’s wash, which had just received a braid of water. To the west, the canyon climbs into the foothills of the Atascosa Mountains. To the east, it widens into a valley that approaches the Santa Rita Mountains.

Lowell said that the cartel had scouts on mountaintops across the ranch. “I’m sure people will be watching us today,” he said.

I said that must be disturbing.

“Oh, we kind of forget about it,” he said. “But one of the dilemmas we do run into is that, fairly often, we see groups coming past our house — maybe a hundred feet away.”

Until recently, Lowell and his wife, Edith, reported these sightings to the Border Patrol. “But after 2010 — 14 dead bodies, or people shot at, or people killed — we’re not quite so enthusiastic about calling,” he said. In the last two years, unknown assailants shot and killed an Arizona rancher named Rob Krentz and a New Mexico landowner named Larry Link. Rumors along the border hold that they were murdered in retaliation for reporting drug activity.

Edith, who had been running errands in Nogales, pulled up to the house and came over to say hello. “There was a helicopter hovering over the ridge, and two cars stopped where I drove in, and two female Border Patrol agents were out of their vehicle,” she said. “So, a little action today.” She told us to have a good time and walked inside.

The helicopter returned and hovered at the end of the Lowells’ driveway. The Border Patrol had increased its presence in the canyon after bandits killed an agent named Brian Terry in December 2010 (number 12 on Lowell’s map), but until then traffickers had used the intersection of the driveway and a county road, Avenida Beatriz, as a vehicle-staging area.

The concentration of agents has just pushed traffic into adjacent canyons, Lowell said. “The cartel is still bringing drugs down this canyon on a regular basis.”

We climbed into his SUV and started down the driveway, immediately passing the ranch junkyard and hay barn. Loads of dope had been found in both places on multiple occasions. Border Patrol agents once found paraphernalia in the hay barn; a drug mule had been smoking marijuana out of a soda-can pipe. “Which was not optimal from our point of view,” Lowell said, “because of the risk of fire.”

One night Edith found a car parked in the middle of the driveway. Annoyed, she approached it. “To her horror, the trunk was open and two fellows were filling it with marijuana,” Lowell said. “They looked at her, and she looked at them, until they’d gotten all the marijuana in the car and rode off.”

We passed the Border Patrol SUV at the end of the driveway and began a steep climb up the canyon ridge. The road turned to dirt and the ridge narrowed. Ravines fell away on either side. In all directions sharp canyonlands stretched to spurred foothills and peaks. It was a landscape human beings should be moving around, not through. Sheriff’s deputies sometimes had to be lowered into it by helicopter.

“One dead body was over there,” Lowell said, stopping and indicating a point on a ridge. “Between there and our canyon were two others. The human head was found near where that road disappears. A second human head was found in the last year in about the same place. But it was an older head, more of a skull. We have one rape tree” — where the smugglers rape women they’re guiding — “that I know about. But we have a neighbor who likes everything tidy, and she went up and collected all the women’s underwear.”

Two friends of Lowell’s, out hiking southwest of the ranch, had found a tree with 32 pairs of women’s underwear hanging from its branches.

“Some of them showed signs of having been there for a year or two,” Lowell said. “It was a repeated rape site. There’s some really bad people involved in this.”

Later, back at the house, Edith joined us in the living room. The windows afford a view of the wash and the ridge beyond. I asked if it was hard to relax in the evenings.

“Well, we’re careful to pull the curtains,” she said.

“And we automatically lock all the doors,” Lowell said. “We have a sophisticated alarm system with motion-sensing lights and three sirens, and we have guns.”

Someone had tried to break into their bedroom once, but the dogs had scared him off. Six men had snuck up to the house and demanded money and food from Lowell’s secretary, but she’d run them off with the dogs, too. A few years earlier, they had hosted an event for a state representative who was looking into the trafficking situation. Edith told the representative that drug carriers walked right by the house, and pointed out a window. “And right then I looked out, and here came a group of drug mules,” Lowell told me. “In our yard! Fifty feet from the house. And they didn’t pay any attention to us. They just hiked by with their packs.”

One night, he said, Ginger started growling, and when he let her out she stopped on the porch and pointed. “I pretended that her head was a rifle sight, and I got behind her and sighted between her ears and over her nose. Soon two fellows walked through a gap in the bushes. Maybe 150 feet away.”

“If Ginger starts barking loudly, we know there’s someone around,” Edith said. “Once in a while we hear noises getting closer, and our lights go on, and we get alarmed enough to get up and look out. Otherwise, we have peaceful evenings.”

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Rancher David Lowell with his "map of atrocities." Photograph by Peter Van Agtmael

Lowell’s neighbor Jim Chilton owns a 50,000-acre ranch that shares a five-mile border with Mexico. Hundreds of smuggling trails cross it. Guided by scouts and aided by a paucity of roads and law-­enforcement patrols, the smugglers move easily through the terrain.

When I showed up at his house, Chilton opened a small barred window set into his heavy front door and scrutinized me for a moment, then invited me in for cowboy coffee in his kitchen with his wife, Sue. Chilton is 72, Sue, 69. They are relaxed and of modest stature. Sue, a naturalist, said that at 3,500 feet, mesquite grassland gives way to oak grassland and that the region has a bimodal weather pattern (convective and frontal). With a cackle and sidelong glance, Chilton said, “I just read cowboy things.”

“Oh, don’t believe him,” said Sue. “He has a great, great interest in history.”

Chilton, whose family has been ranching in Arizona for five generations, has a large library where he likes to sit and read Bancroft’s Works or 19th-century magazine articles with titles like “My Adventures in Zuñi.”

Chilton brought a Ruger .44 pistol and a Ruger .223 rifle with us out to his pickup, and we drove south into a landscape that lay furrowed or broken between mountain ranges. Ranchers here lease most of their land from the state or federal government, and their permits restrict material improvements. The majority of the corridor runs through national forests or monuments, or semiautonomous, undeveloped Native American reservations. Law-enforcement officers consequently have very few roads to use and no operating bases — 96 percent of Chilton’s ranch is publicly owned. Its scarce roads are gashed and serpentine.

“How on Earth,” Chilton asked, “would a border patrolman ever see anyone coming through this country?” He slowed above a notably green arroyo called Yellowjacket Pasture. “The Border Patrol rarely get out of their vehicles — they patrol the roads. Now imagine you got people down there in Yellowjacket Wash. Look down there. Look at all the hiding spots.”

The wash had produced thick stands of mesquite trees, and an opaque profusion of ocotillo and guajilla and creosote and prickly pear cactus.

As we continued south, Chilton began pointing out trail after trail coming down through the hills: little switchback scars, bare tracks descending arroyos. “There are literally hundreds,” he said. “There’s no way law enforcement can cover all these trails.” Smugglers could cross the border at night without resistance, Chilton said, climb the mountains, come down these trails, and disappear.

Like Lowell, Chilton told me that scouts have stationed themselves on mountaintops all across his ranch. According to the DEA, the Sinaloa Cartel employs between 200 and 300 surveillance teams along the length of the corridor. Drug loads can be passed from one team to another, all the way north. Scouts have night-vision goggles, infrared telescopes, and military-grade two-way radios with rolling encryption. Land-mobile radio repeaters boost the strength of outgoing transmissions, so no signal degradation occurs as the radio waves flow north. Portable solar panels power the devices. The cartel can reprovision its surveillance teams over a period of months a hundred miles into the United States.

Individual scouts can be chased from their locations, but only temporarily, and they usually succeed in remaining invisible. The mountains are full of caves — “spider holes,” Border Patrol and DEA agents call them — and when scouts can’t find caves they remain deep in brush, beneath rock overhangs or under camouflage tarps. When scouts are spotted and flushed, they’re rarely caught. If you see them, they see you, and they have strict orders, Chilton said, to drop everything and run. The cartel doesn’t care about losing equipment; it worries about giving up information. “Chasing a scout,” one Border Patrol agent told me, “is like chasing a unicorn.”

Shortly afterward, we saw a Border Patrol SUV parked on the side of the road. “He’s there to prevent vehicle traffic,” Chilton said. “He’ll just sit there.” In the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which encompasses the corridor, the agency has at most one agent for every 21 square miles of territory. We would spend seven hours traversing the ranch that day and not see another patrol unit.

The farther south we drove, the rougher the terrain became. We entered the Bartolo Mountains. Halfway down a narrow canyon, Chilton pulled over. The other side of the canyon, he said, was Mexico. He grabbed his rifle, and we got out and climbed down to a small plateau. A cattle fence, making acute angles as it traveled through the mountains, marked the border. The fence was so low and insubstantial, it disappeared as soon as you shifted your gaze. We were far beyond the scope of any patrol, Chilton said. He doubted the cartel even bothered to station scouts here.

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Illegal immigrants crossing the border near Jim Chilton's ranch. Photo: Courtesy Jim Chilton

I returned to the border the following day with Deputy Omar Rodriguez, a member of the Santa Cruz County sheriff’s office. A good portion of the southern half of the smuggling corridor runs through Santa Cruz County. Our patrol was part of Operation Stonegarden, an anti-trafficking initiative whose objective was to get more “eyes on the ground.” A guarded, thoughtful, crew-cut realist, Rodriguez had been a deputy since 2006, and there were parts of the county he still hadn’t seen. In addition to the detection problem so evident during my ride with Chilton, law enforcement also faced an apprehension problem. To maximize coverage, Rodriguez said, deputies went out alone — but couldn’t apprehend armed traffickers without backup. And the traffickers usually got away before backup arrived.

The patrol with Rodriguez would serve as a kind of inventory of the advantages enjoyed by the traffickers: cartel engineers who devised methods for circumventing physical barriers; U.S. citizens on the traffickers’ payroll who provided logistical support; scouts who meticulously documented the habits of U.S. law enforcement. From Nogales, the county seat, we drove northeast into the Coronado National Forest, passing through the Patagonia Mountains, some of whose peaks approach 7,000 feet. Several signs along the road read smuggling and illegal immigration may be encountered in this area. Now and again we saw trailers and houses. I asked Rodriguez whether he’d be comfortable living there, or even hiking. “Me, personally?” he said. “No.”

We turned south, descended steadily, and came upon a handful of singlewide trailers and tar-shingled bungalows. Ahead of us, an arroyo widened into a weedy field, and the road ran under a steel gate. “That’s Mexico,” Rodriguez said. A derelict sign on the gate faintly read 1975 and Lochiel Port of Entry. Low, anti-vehicle Normandy barriers, recently installed, ran along the border. Rodriguez said that traffickers use flatbed tow trucks to drop dope-filled vehicles over the barriers. They drive over higher vehicle barriers on portable, custom-built metal bridges. When I asked him how much of the Border Patrol’s most formidable fencing — deeply anchored steel posts with concrete cores, 30 feet high — protects Santa Cruz County, the fullness and duration of his laugh surprised me. “Not much,” he said. Later I got the exact figure: 2.8 miles.

Traffickers know a lot about law enforcement on this side of the border. They see almost everything. They hire U.S. citizens to collect intelligence. A person living on a fixed income in a mobile home in the Coronado National Forest might accept a stack of bills from a stranger if all they have to do in exchange is call a number on a prepaid cellphone when a sheriff’s deputy drives by or a Border Patrol technician installs a sensor. Traffickers hire locals to obtain police reports and press releases after major seizures and debrief drug mules forced to drop their loads. They will know which agencies were involved, which kinds of vehicles were used, whether air support was available.

Cartel surveillance teams generally know how long it will take a law-enforcement unit to get from one point to another — they measure response times. They are familiar with the protocols of Border Patrol shift changes. They know that there are fewer agents in the field on weekends. They have mapped everything — all the forest lanes wavering away from the Lochiel gate, for example, as well as the dead-end spur roads. They know whether the Border Patrol has been using trackers in an area and how much lead time a group will need to outpace them.

If a vehicle crossing the border at Lochiel trips a sensor or is otherwise detected and law enforcement responds, scouts direct it onto a spur road, where its driver covers it with brush and a camouflage tarp. (Scouts may also note the potential presence of a new sensor.) Already provisioned for this eventuality, drivers will wait for minutes or hours or days, until the roads are clear.

Traffickers use decoy groups to walk across the border at known sensor locations. Or they may employ banzais, who simultaneously scale border fences and scatter, vacuuming up manpower. Jim Chilton told me that 12 men with assault rifles once marched across the border and straight at a National Guard surveillance post. The men paused while the alarm rippled through the system and then crossed back. As Border Patrol units and tactical teams and sheriff’s deputies and helicopters descended on the post, smugglers crossed en masse for miles on either side.

From Lochiel, we headed to the Santa Cruz River, which runs into Mexico about 10 miles east of Nogales. Drug mules often cross the border and hide in the brush along its banks until scouts signal them to continue. We pulled over a few miles north of the border and began walking along the river’s south bank until we came to a camp. Amid a jetsam of empty water bottles and bleached shreds of cloth and bits of clothing stood improvised shelters: a lean-to of tarp and driftwood stakes, a canopy of tarp pulled through a lattice of low branches, a roof of viney undergrowth and cardboard on legs of salvaged PVC pipe. We found another camp close by, and then another, and another.

Rodriguez said that traffickers pay locals to resupply people in the camps. He had stopped river-bound cars full of pizza, roasted chicken, and soda, all purchased in bulk from Walmart. In one scenario, a driver picks up provisions at Walmart while three sentinels with cellphones and binoculars station themselves between the store and a drop-off point along the river. If no law enforcement is present, the sentinels authorize the drop and the driver deposits the supplies and leaves. None of these U.S. citizens interacts with cartel traffickers or visibly break the law, and none have information beyond a simple set of instructions for performing a discrete task.

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Jim Chilton, shown here with his wife, Sue, guards his house with a Ruger .223 rifle. Photograph by Peter Van Agtmael

The corridor’s smuggling routes complete their convergence in Pinal County, which extends south from Phoenix. For the past five years, the county has seen unprecedented levels of drug trafficking and violence.

“It’s hard to tell how much violence there actually is because there’s so much shit that goes on out here we don’t see,” Lt. Matthew Thomas, commander of the Pinal Regional SWAT team, told me. The county’s 220 deputies patrol 5,500 square miles. Thomas conducts some of the most aggressive anti-narcotics operations in the smuggling corridor.

I met Thomas one morning before dawn at a sheriff’s office substation in the dilapidated desert town of Arizona City. We climbed into his unmarked silver Chevy Tahoe and turned onto Sunland Gin Road, a thoroughfare sometimes used by traffickers. He wore a long-sleeve SWAT T-shirt, desert army pants, and beige combat boots. He had a tactical knife in a scabbard strapped to one leg.

Earlier that morning, Thomas told me, blacked-out SWAT vehicles had dropped off eight deputies near surveillance positions in two nearby mountain ranges that smugglers use to move north through the county.

“If we keep relatively current on the activity of smuggling routes, we might catch somebody,” Thomas said. “The smugglers switch routes, but they might keep a successful one going a little longer than they should.”

Because the cartel’s own surveillance coverage is so advanced and comprehensive, Thomas can never be sure whether his men will make it to their positions unseen.

“The bosses know when the dope is moving, and they’ll start asking, ‘What’s out there?’ ” Thomas said. “They’ve mapped the area and all their scout locations. If it’s hot they’ll say, ‘Shut it down,’ and the smugglers will run their load into a wash, cover it with camo and brush, and wait. When they do that, it’s very hard to find them. They’re very good at hiding. And they’ll wait as long as days.”

The cartel’s resupply vehicles sometimes spend all night provisioning scout positions, making the rounds from one peak to the next. Occasionally they drop off prostitutes for a day or two. Two weeks earlier, Thomas had impounded a car containing 200 pounds of dope and copious supplies for scouts. He pulled out his cellphone and showed me pictures of the supplies: packets of socks and underwear; Levi’s jeans with the tags still on them; cans of beans and bags of tortillas; cases of Sprite, Coke, and Gatorade; bottles of ­tequila and beer; a carton of Marlboros; a Glock 9mm pistol; a two-way radio charger and two phone chargers, all wired to portable solar panels; Remington and American Eagle ammunition (9mm, .38 super, .22); and an all-weather Puma smartphone with embedded solar panels. Still in its case, the phone had just been released in Europe. It wasn’t available yet in the United States.

Traffickers make their own roads, running one three-quarter-ton pickup right behind another, crushing vegetation and replacing tires and vehicles as needed. The drivers navigate a landscape of washes, mesquite thickets, irrigation berms, and foothill canyons.

“I’ll tell you what, their drivers amaze me,” Thomas said. If the SWAT team can’t overtake smugglers, they’ll try to push them toward Border Patrol tactical teams. “But at night we have to have an air asset in front of us with infrared and night vision, because if we’re pushing them we need to know where to set up choke points.”

SWAT operations yield apprehensions and seizures, but to be effective they mostly rely on the criminals making mistakes. Thomas and his men have to hope that smugglers will overuse routes, that cartel scouts won’t discover SWAT surveillance positions, that traffickers’ evasion techniques will fail, that an air asset will be available.

“There’s no misconception that we’re ever ahead on any of this stuff,” he said. “They’ve got more time and more money and more manpower.”

The sky lightened as we drove through cotton fields and mesquite flats. We entered a construction zone, slowed to a crawl, and passed a dented pickup in the opposite lane. Its occupants glanced at us, then glanced again.

“It’s highly likely they’re a lot more than farmworkers,” Thomas said. From a distance, the Tahoe looked like any other SUV, but up close you noticed its antennas and the maximum tint of its windows. “If we think we’ve been made by scouts, we try to act natural. Let them think it’s just some dumb cop on a regular patrol.”

One by one, Thomas’ men radioed in to say that they’d seen no activity that night and dawn had revealed no traces of movement along the routes. Another SWAT team member radioed in. He’d picked up a drug mule standing by the side of the road. The mule had delivered his load sometime earlier that night — he had the telltale backpack ruts on his shoulders — and he knew that he could only be charged with illegal entry. He would likely be processed and bused home, which he preferred to walking. The dope in his pack might sell for $70,000, nearly twice the salary of a first-year deputy.

Thomas agreed to show me the notorious Vekol Valley, the last leg of an alternate smuggling route running up the western edge of Pinal County. We drove west on Interstate 8 and entered the Sonoran Desert National Monument on Vekol Valley Road. Scouts often sit in the brush here, guiding smugglers north through the desert to load-out spots along the highway. We turned onto a Bureau of Land Management road, which was hardly graded and not easily distinguishable from the land itself, and stopped at a hollow below a ridge joining two low hills. Thomas told me a trafficker had recently killed a rip crew member here.

We climbed one of the hills. The Vekol Valley opened out below us. In some di­rections, you could see for 20 miles. Law-enforcement vehicles would be easy for an unaided eye to pick out. With night-vision goggles, you could spot a blacked-out SUV. Disciplined scouts with high-powered binoculars and infrared telescopes would see everything that moved in the valley.

We drove back to I-8 and pulled over. “There’s so much traffic that any place that’s a natural hiding spot along the highway, you can go in there and it’s pretty much guaranteed to be a load-out spot,” Thomas said. We climbed down an embankment and into a brushy arroyo. In the arroyo were backpacks, blankets, sweatshirts, empty bottles of the rehydrating sports drink Electrolit, disposable razors, burlap sacks for marijuana bundles, four pairs of “carpet shoes” (or “sneaky feet”) to confuse trackers, and the same sort of improvised shelters I’d seen along the banks of the Santa Cruz River, 150 miles to the south.

On the way back to Arizona City, Thomas said, “Realistically, we know we’re not stopping the flow. When you debrief people on the cartel side, when you get all the drugs and people you seize and you know how much actually makes it north, it’s not much. On a good day we might get 20 percent. Normally we’re probably getting five to 10 percent. And I would say that’s everyone: Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the other task forces.” A few years back, he said, Pinal SWAT seized an unprecedented 10,000 pounds of dope in a month. Later, one of Thomas’ informants told him that the cartel was moving 15,000 pounds through the county every week.

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The desert in Pima County, Arizona. Photograph by Peter Van Agtmael

Some law-enforcement officials, and many conservative politicians, advocate militarizing the border. “We need 6,000 armed soldiers on our border to protect America,” Matthew Thomas’ boss, Sheriff Paul Babeu, recently said. “Commit the military to this border,” former Colorado congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo has demanded. “We have a war. We are facing a military on the other side.” Texas Governor Rick Perry has said that he considers the border “a war zone as dangerous as Iraq.”

It’s instructive to imagine what militarizing the border would actually require. Rich Stana, the former director of homeland security for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, has said that a zero-incursion barrier would be “something akin to the inner German border during the Cold War, where very few, if any, could penetrate it without fear of losing one’s life.” A militarization project would entail blasting and grading a security zone from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, erecting 1,900 miles of double or triple fence along its length, and deploying many thousands of soldiers to man guard towers and patrol the zone. (South Korea, by way of comparison, has more than 250,000 troops stationed along its 150-mile border with North Korea.) The soldiers would be authorized to shoot and kill Mexican citizens. In the meantime, demand for drugs in this country would remain stable. Our coasts and airspace and wide-open 5,500-mile-long border with Canada would welcome pioneering importers.

Sheriff Tony Estrada, Deputy Omar Rodri­guez’s boss, does not take militarization seriously. “I always say, ‘The border is more secure than it’s ever been; it’s just not sealed,’ ” he told me. “It cannot be sealed. You have tourism, you have international commerce. If you want zero everything — mission impossible.” He measures border security by the local crime rate, which is low in his county. He understands the suffering of ranchers like David Lowell and Jim Chilton, but his priority is the overall safety of the county.

Unless we’re willing to establish a DMZ along the southwestern border, this is the only rational perspective available. The ­Department of Homeland Security has already adopted it. “The specific theory of action [is] to push people out of easy urban places to cross the border and get into the transportation network,” the former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Alan Bersin, said last summer. DHS deters and apprehends wherever it can, and it forces traffickers around populous areas. That strategy, of course, will always be problematic for the people living in the traffic’s redirected currents, who justifiably feel as though they have accidentally moved out of their own country.

—

Consider in that context the residents of the Silverbell Estates, arguably the most cartel-oppressed subdivision in the United States. An exurban isolate in the open desert of southern Pinal County, it is too remote for timely police response and is by design diffuse and unassuming. The streets, named for Greek gods and the signs of the Zodiac, are unlighted; the landscaping is muted; the faux-adobe homes sit on multi-acre lots. It is also almost perfectly centered in the corridor.

Not long ago, a resident of the Estates was surveying the desert landscape from his rooftop deck when he noticed a form on nearby Wildcat Peak. He examined it through binoculars he kept on the roof for viewing wildlife. A cartel scout was standing outside of a cave.

I heard this story at the home of a retiree named Pat Murphree. We were sitting at his dining room table, drinking iced tea with his wife, Pennee, and their neighbors, Jay Stewart and Sam Schreiner. At one end of the table a picture window framed Wildcat Peak. A telescope on a tripod pointed at the scout’s cave, but you could see it clearly with a glance.

People here first became aware of the trafficking in 2007, when the sound of three-quarter-ton pickups bludgeoning their way through the desert began waking them up in the middle of the night. Running without lights, the trucks tore up the two-mile fence encircling the Estates.

“We repaired, what, 11 breaks in the fence about two years ago?” Murphree asked.

“About a quarter mile of fence, wasn’t it?” Stewart said.

“And about a year ago, 14 breaks were repaired, and there’s probably five or six of them out there now,” Murphree said.

Residents called the Border Patrol and the sheriff’s department, but the trucks were usually gone before they got there, and the traffic followed no pattern.

Stewart, a US Airways pilot, flies a single-prop plane recreationally, taxiing it out of his hybrid hangar-garage and onto a short unpaved runway. From the air he started spotting caches of goods in the desert. There were also pickups and SUVs camouflaged for future use or totaled and abandoned, jugs of gasoline, spare tires with mounted rims, cases of bottled water. He once landed near a Humvee, fully loaded with features, a Coach purse on the front seat.

“That was a guy’s dream vehicle. He’d worked his butt off, owns a framing company, and here these SOBs steal it,” Stewart said.

Dozens and dozens of vehicles were appearing in the desert, and the numbers haven’t declined. “There’s so many vehicles I’ve quit counting,” Stewart said. He has found abandoned smugglers’ vehicles at the end of his driveway and groups of illegal immigrants at the end of his runway. One day he took off, looked down, and saw 40 people.

“But that’s what it’s like living out here,” he said. “You never know what’s coming.”

When he sees a group, he contacts the Border Patrol, sometimes staying up and “orbiting” the illegal immigrants, holding them in place until the agents arrive.

“So you’ve been an air asset of the Border Patrol?” I asked.

“More than once,” he said. “But I moved down here to have fun, not to fight the drug cartel.”

After the scout sighting, Pinal SWAT stormed and cleared Wildcat Peak, and Stewart and Murphree hiked to the cave and began cleaning it up.

“The trash, you can’t imagine,” Stewart said. “They’d been going up there at least six months, and you couldn’t see it — they had it all covered with camo tarp.”

“I think we took out 19 bags of trash,” Murphree said. “That stuff stunk so bad.”

“I was standing knee-deep in that rubbish pile,” Stewart said. “It was all cans of menudo, and full of scorpions and black widows, and it was gag-a-maggot. It was bad.”

There are also the casualties of human trafficking.

“They cram the pickup beds with people standing up and put a rope around them,” Schreiner said. “And the sway of the bodies can bend the sides of the bed about 45 degrees. They lie on the cab roof, they lie on the hood, they take all the seats out.”

About four years ago, just before dawn, in front of the big white stucco pillars of the subdivision’s entrance, a pickup carrying 35 illegal immigrants took a turn too fast.

“I had to dodge dead bodies going to work that morning,” Stewart said.

Murphree remembers seeing 26 people lying on the ground. Four of them, he could tell, were dead. Ten eventually died. Six rescue helicopters evacuated the dead and wounded. The helicopters had to queue up in the air. The cleanup took seven hours.

Early that evening, Murphree took me to visit Susan and Nathan Cary, who live at the southern edge of the Estates and are most exposed to the traffic. The Carys are children’s advocates for an international organization called Compassion in Jesus’ Name, whose motto is “Releasing Children From Poverty.”

In their living room, they told me that they have always tried to feed and shelter illegal immigrants abandoned by their guides. It’s become frightening, though. They have suffered break-ins, and they don’t know whether the perpetrators are desperate immigrants, armed drug mules, or scouts. Of a man who showed up one winter, Nathan said, “He was cold, he was cold, and I thought, ‘What am I going to do with him, this poor soul.’ But you don’t know who they are, who they’re with.”

One night, Nathan said, someone killed their dog. The animal’s senses had shielded the property for many years. The killer had stabbed the dog in the eye with a fine-pointed object or shot it in the eye with an air gun, Nathan couldn’t tell. He recognized the pointlessness of reporting the incident, but he felt that he should somehow mark the death of a loved creature.

“I don’t feel safe walking here anymore,” Susan said. “When we moved here, I walked all the time.”

“I walk in the morning, but I take the dog, and I take a firearm,” Nathan said.

They recently fenced in the property, which has helped hold down the number of people who come to the house unbidden. They keep the gate closed, but not locked.

“I’m not a hateful man, and if people want to come in because they need to, then they can,” Nathan said. “The closed gate says, ‘We’re not expecting you, approach respectfully.’ ” Although they offer strangers the shelter of their covered front porch and food and water, they also call the Border Patrol. They will allow the house to be used as a comfort station, but not a refuge.

“When you’re alone, it’s unsettling, but when we’re together we work as a team,” ­Susan said. “He speaks more Spanish than I do, and I stay in here with the phone and the gun locked and loaded.”

“So if I get knocked off, she’ll make the call and have the gun ready,” Nathan said.

When I left, he came out with me to open the gate and make sure I had my bearings. He held a rifle in one hand and a law-­enforcement flashlight in the other. He kept the rifle barrel down but held the flashlight just above it like a scope — ready, should the worst happen, to sight and shoot a figure coming out of the night.

Studies now show that fitness and muscle strength decline less with age than previously believed. Photo: flickr/midwestnerd

A decade-by-decade guide to getting stronger, faster, fitter, and healthier as you age.

by Daniel Duane

Every guy wants to be fit, lean, sharp, and sexually active as he ages. An avalanche of recent research has upended conventional wisdom about how to eat right, exercise, and take care of your body for a longer life. What this means is men who want to increase longevity and vitality have a new road map with more direct routes to reach these goals.

Total cholesterol, for example, was once considered the final word on heart-disease risk. Today advanced new blood tests like the Vertical Auto Profile — not even on most doctors’ radar — provide a vastly more precise picture of actual heart health. Scientists also say that how much omega-3 fat you consume is more critical to preventing cardiovascular problems than how much saturated fat you do or don’t eat. And study after study suggests that physical fitness and muscle strength decline less with age than previously believed, and that a committed exercise program can drastically slow this decline well into your seventies.

Exactly what you eat, how you exercise, which medical tests you get, and which supplements you take are imperative, though. We’ve sifted through reams of new research and talked to leading experts to come up with a crystal-clear action plan for living long and performing at your peak in every decade of life.

To learn how to get stronger, faster, fitter, and healthier in your 30s, click here.

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You have the potential for amazing performance in your 30s, so challenge yourself with kettlebell swings. Photo: flickr/.:Danka:.

In your 30s, do this 25-minute routine twice a week.

Warm-up Two to three minutes of dynamic stretching — active exercises like leg swings and lunges that mimic natural movements — to help increase elasticity and mobility. Research shows static stretching, such as touching your toes, may even be harmful.

Cardio-Strength Combo Fifteen minutes of alternate kettlebell swings to near-failure; one minute of light rope-jumping to rest between swings. Do three sets of three Turkish get-ups to each side, with one minute of rest between. To do a Turkish get-up, lie flat on the floor with a kettlebell in one hand above your head and stand up straight.

Recovery Two to three minutes on a foam roller, massaging your calf muscles, glutes, and lower back.

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You can do tabata intervals on the treadmill, track, road, stationary bike, and rowing machine. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

At least once a week in your 40s, dedicate a portion of your workout to tabata intervals.

Tabata intervals can work with almost any aerobic exercise that engages your entire body, but the best way to do them is on a rowing machine or stationary bike. Both machines allow you to go 100 percent while allowing you to gauge progress, either by using the metrics on the machine or by measuring how far you’ve traveled during each interval. Treadmill running works, too, but you have to preset the speed to do each 20-second interval (it’ll take to long to work up to the pace by constantly pumping the speed button), so you can’t truly go all-out. It can also be tricky (not to mention dangerous) jumping on and off a fast-moving treadmill. To keep things interesting, consider switching exercises between cycles: Try starting with eight complete intervals (20 seconds hard, 10 seconds rest, performed eight times) on a rowing machine. Then, after two-minutes rest, perform a second eight-interval cycle on a stationary bike. As your fitness increases, take a two-minute rest after eight intervals before doing another eight.

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Prehab — muscle-specific exercises that strengthen injury-prone areas — can help you stay healthy in your 50s.

Alternate upper- and lower-body prehab days in your 50s.

Each workout should take 15 minutes. Do one or two sets of 10 to 12 repetitions of each of the following:

Lower-Body Prehab Day

External hip rotation Place a resistance band just above knees, and stand with feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, and hips back. Keeping chest up and feet flat, move knees in and out.

Bent-knee lateral walking Place a resistance band just above the knees, and stand in a quarter-squat, feet shoulder-width apart. Keeping chest up, back flat, knees apart, and toes forward, step laterally to one side with one foot, and then step the same distance to the same side with the other foot. Repeat to the other side.

Upper-Body Prehab Day

Bent-over Ys Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, arms at your side. Hinge forward 45 degrees, with back flat and chest up. Hold shoulder blades back and down. With thumbs pointed up, raise arms overhead to form a Y. Return to start position, and repeat.

Bent-over Ts Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, arms down and straight, and palms forward. Hinge forward at the waist with hips back, back flat, and knees slightly bent. Pinch and hold shoulder blades back and down. Raise your upper arms until they form a T with the lower body; rotate upper arms until forearms are parallel to the floor. Return to start position, and repeat.

To learn how to get stronger, faster, fitter, and healthier in your 60s, click here.

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Before using a barbell bench press, start by holding a dumbell in each hand to develop mobility. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Old-school weight training is the key to performing better in your 60s.

Aim to complete three strength-focused workouts per week, as follows:

Day One

1. Warm-up. Perform unweighted “air” squats and standing dumbbell presses. To do a standing dumbbell press, hold a light dumbbell in each hand at shoulder height, and press both simultaneously straight up overhead.
2. Do squats. Perform three sets of five repetitions each with a weight that allows you to complete all sets and reps. Start by holding a dumbbell at shoulder height in each hand, held, instead of a barbell, so you can add weight in small increments and learn proper form (the weight of the dumbbell will move naturally in a straight up-and-down path — essential to good squatting technique). Add 2.5 to five pounds each week if you’re comfortable and can maintain proper form.
3. Bench press. Follow the same protocol for squats, with three sets of five reps each. Start by holding a dumbbell in each hand to develop shoulder mobility before progressing to a barbell. Add one to two pounds each week if you’re comfortable and can maintain proper form.

Day Two

1. Warm-up. Do a 15-minute cardio workout that elevates your heart rate.
2. Complete a chin-up ladder. Chin-up ladders let you accumu­late volume and build muscle quickly, even if you can do only one or two at a time, since reps can be repeated frequently when using just your body weight. After two months of ladders, you should be able to do significantly more reps. To do a chin-up ladder, complete one chin-up (like a pull-up but with palms facing toward you), then rest for one minute. Do two chin-ups, then rest for one minute. Lead each rep with your chest, keeping shoulders back, and continue until you can’t do any more. Take a short rest, and start again.

Day Three

1. Warm-up. Do push-ups until your heart rate is elevated and your muscles are warm.
2. Dead lift. Do one set of five repetitions of dead lifts at a weight that allows you to complete all five reps. Start with a dumbbell or light kettlebell in each hand, instead of a barbell. Add 2.5 to five pounds each week, if you’re comfortable and can maintain proper form.
3. Complete a push-up ladder. To do the ladder, follow the same protocol as the chin-up ladder described in Day Two.

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Bruce Springsteen Wrecking Ball
It may feature a female rapper and drum loops, but at its core, this is traditional Springsteen: a rock album about fading American ideals. Loss permeates, especially when Clarence Clemons’ sax kicks in from beyond the grave. —Andy Greene

Justin Townes Earle Nothing’s Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now
The 30-year-old singer-songwriter and son of Steve Earle lives up to his pedigree, fusing classic Nashville and Memphis soul in smart, heartfelt songs. —Jon Dolan

Dr. John Locked Down
The 71-year-old New Orleans rhythm-and-blues master hooks up with Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach and boils a batch of scalding psychedelic-funk gumbo, thick with Afro-beat grooves and late-night sermonizing. —Jon Dolan

The Shins Port of Morrow
James Mercer breaks from the Portland band’s early folk-pop sound and makes like a pop-radio tune machine, churning out choirboy melodies that would make Hall & Oates smile. —Jon Dolan

"As a guy coming home from work," says Tusk, "you want to cook something quickly without a lot of components, but with a lot of flavor.” Photograph by Tom Schierlitz

Too often, Tuesday night dinner feels like surrender, as if the best you can do is assemble a reasonably healthy meal that doesn’t arrive at the doorstep in a Styrofoam box. So we asked Michael Tusk, one of our favorite chefs, to concoct a dinner that aims to do more than merely suffice.

by Howie Kahn

At his two San Francisco restaurants — the Michelin-starred Quince and the elegantly rustic Cotogna — Michael Tusk has shown his broad mastery of Italian food, serving everything from wood-fired pizzas to multicourse tasting menus. Here he shows us how a simple technique can elevate a common fish dinner: “Cod has a fairly high moisture content. Doing a light cure allows you to set the fish in the pan really quickly and get a nice crust. I chose it to create a textural contrast between the savory eggplant, and also to include a technique that maybe people haven’t tried at home.”

Michael Tusk’s Cured Cod on a Bed of Greens, Eggplant, and Olives
Ingredients
•1 lb Atlantic cod fillets, skin removed
• 2 tbsp salt
• 2 cups Japanese eggplant, peeled and cut into 1/4 -inch rounds
• 2 cups collard greens, cut into chiffonade
• 1 cup celery, cut ­diagonally
• 1/2 cup picholine olives, cut in half
• 1/2 cup red wine vinegar
• 1 cup olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1/2 cup red onion, thinly sliced
• 1 cup cherry tomatoes, cut in half lengthwise
• 1/4 tsp hot pepper flakes

Preparation
1. Season the fillets with 1 tbsp salt, place them on a rack, and leave in refrigerator uncovered for 1 hour. At the same time, season the eggplant with the remaining salt and place in a colander for 1 hour. Meanwhile, boil the collard greens for 2 minutes.
2. After 1 hour, rinse the fish with cold water and pat dry. Rinse salt from the eggplant. Fill a 2-quart sauce pot with water and bring to a rapid boil. Add the eggplant and cook until tender, approximately 3 minutes. Remove the eggplant with a slotted spoon and place on paper towels. In the same water, boil the celery for 5 minutes, until al dente, and then combine with picholine olives and eggplant in a bowl. Add half the vinegar and half the olive oil to the eggplant-celery mixture.
3. Heat a 12-inch sauté pan until warm and add the remaining half cup of olive oil. When the oil is warm, add the garlic and toast until golden, then discard. Add the onion and sauté quickly (about a minute), then remove and add to the eggplant-­celery mixture. In the same pan, cook the collard greens on low heat until tender, about 5 minutes. Reserve warm, covered, until ready to serve.
4. Preheat oven to 450˚. Heat an 11-inch nonstick pan until hot, and then add a small amount of olive oil. Sauté the fish for 2 minutes and then place the cherry tomatoes in the pan and season them with pepper flakes. Remove from the stove and place in the preheated oven for 3 minutes. While the fish is cooking, spoon the collard greens onto the center of each plate.
5. Remove the pan with the fish from the oven. Place the fish on top of the collard greens and spoon the eggplant-celery relish, fish juices, and cherry tomatoes over the fish. Serve immediately. Serves four.

Brautigan, at left, with Hjortsberg in Montana in 1973. Photo: Courtesy Marian Hjortsberg

Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan chronicles the novelist’s high times and dark days.

by David Browne

It was late one Seventies night in Pine Creek, Montana, after perhaps a bit too much to drink, when William Hjortsberg stumbled outside into the darkness with his friend Richard Brautigan. Celebrated author of the 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan was part of the Montana Gang of writers, actors, and filmmakers who’d come to the American West in search of a neo-cowboy idyll. Hjortsberg, who first met Brautigan in 1968 at a reading in the Bay Area, knew very little about his friend’s past. But standing beneath the dark sky that night, he got his first clue as to what the writer must have been like as a child. The lawn was alive with night crawlers, and Brautigan, waving a flashlight, ran maniacally around the yard pulling them from the mud — mentioning in an offhanded way that as a boy in Oregon, he’d sold worms to make money. “Richard was always reticent about his youth,” Hjortsberg says. “He never talked about it, ever. I realized then how little I knew about him.”

Inspired to learn more about Brautigan, Hjortsberg began a journey that led to his work on Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan, an 880-page brick of a biography nearly 20 years in the making. Brautigan’s genre-defying writing — a combination of rugged Americana, subtly whimsical humor, surrealism, and prescient postmodernism — placed him in the 1960s hippie avant-garde. But he was also known for the time he spent in Montana with other celebrity transplants, like Thomas McGuane, Peter Fonda, Jeff Bridges, Jim Harrison, and Jimmy Buffett. When they weren’t trout fishing or riding horses, they were partying like Grateful Dead roadies. The book recounts Buffett dancing on the hood of a friend’s car in his golf shoes; a drug-and-booze-fueled sing-along with Warren Zevon; and epic food fights (with wives and girlfriends in their bras and panties), during which Brautigan, McGuane, and others hurled all manner of edibles at one another and trashed McGuane’s house. “We were young men on the verge of fame, and we had to blow off steam in some way,” Hjortsberg says. “It would kill me to try to party to the extent we partied back then.”

Hjortsberg knew Brautigan at his calmest (pulling trout from a cold river), his craziest (people sought sanctuary at Hjortsberg’s home when Brautigan started shooting guns in his), and his most volatile: “[There was] many an ashen-faced young thing trembling over coffee” in his kitchen after a night at Brautigan’s. He spoke with Brautigan’s absent father; reviewed the records from a mental breakdown he suffered at age 20; learned of his penchant for bondage. He even found love notes from his ex-wife to Brautigan.

In 1984, at age 49, with his career and personal life in a downward spiral, Brautigan took his own life, shooting himself in the head. His body wasn’t discovered for more than a month.

Today, more people remember Brautigan as a Sixties cultural relic than as a writer — if they remember him at all. “When I told people I was doing this book, a lot of them asked, ‘Who?’ ” Hjortsberg admits. But he knows that the two decades he devoted to his old friend have been worthwhile. “Richard captured something essential about the times in America in which he lived,” he says. “In his own quirky way, he was in the tradition of Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Hemingway. And in 49 years, you can live a lot of life.”

Courtesy Felt Bicycles

Throwback Cruiser
Early-20th-century motorcycles and the custom BMX bikes of the 1980s inspired Jeff Heesch’s design for the Felt Deep Six, the latest of the company’s nostalgic cruisers. “It’s a killer combination of old-school styling with modern features,” he says. And the result is striking: The black-cherry frame, balloon tires, spring seat, and flip-down handlebars make for a retro ride fit for both summer boardwalks and city streets.

Courtesy Miami Marlins

The Marlins’ New Home
On April 4, the Miami Marlins’ season opener will occur on the Bermuda grass of the team’s brand-new 37,000-seat stadium. According to designer Greg Sherlock, it’s a fitting tribute to Miami’s culture. “The city is in its DNA,” he says. La Playa, a South Beach–esque private pool behind the left-field wall, gives fans a place to sit, soak, and search for home-run balls; a pair of 24-foot, 450-gallon aquariums, filled with Floridian aquatic life, flank home plate; an 8,300-ton retractable roof closes to prevent rain delays; and, in case you forget where you are, a 60-foot moving glass wall near left field offers a Miami skyline view.

Courtesy Uniqlo

Partners in Style
The brand known as the “Japanese Gap” broadens its apparel line with Uniqlo Undercover, a street-inspired take on its classic style.

Courtesy FortyThree PR

Hell’s Bells
The AC/DC pinball machine, a tribute to Australia’s greatest rockers (sorry, Silverchair), is stocked with 12 of Angus and Co.’s hits, including “Thunderstruck” and “T.N.T.,” to accompany your flipping. Best played wearing schoolboy gear.

Courtesy Suunto

Your Backwoods Best Friend
Beyond its fitness components (it tracks heart rate, pace, etc.), the Suunto Ambit’s 3D compass and GPS snag your location faster than ever before. Oh, and it clocks altitude, logs ascents, and tracks the weather, too.

Courtesy Panasonic

Micro Superzoom
Point-and-shoots can’t get much smaller. The next step is to shoehorn more tech into their tiny bodies, as Panasonic has done with its Lumix ZS20. The 14.1-megapixel cam is only 1.11 inches thick but boasts a 20x zoom, making it the slimmest eagle-eyed cam in that range.

On "Crash Course," Richard Hammond competes with drivers on our country's toughest roads. Photo: Gilles Mingasson for BBC America

As one of the three hosts of BBC’s Top Gear, Richard Hammond drives the world’s rarest cars in some of the most beautiful places on Earth. But his new show Richard Hammond’s Crash Course puts him in the driver’s seat of a different type of exotic — tanks, trucks, and specialized work machines, tested on job sites across America.

Interviewed by Jesse Will

Break down your new show. What will we see?
It’s about a short Brit who thinks he knows everything who comes to America and tries to operate some of the most demanding work site machines around. I’ve got just a few days to pick out the basics of something that usually takes years to learn, and then as a kind of exam, we see if I can cut it on the site. But really it’s as much about the people doing the jobs as it is about the machines that are used to do the jobs.

For ten years you’ve been driving some of the fastest machines ever produced — Lamborghinis and Ferraris and cars even crazier than that. Now you’re driving stuff that goes about 1/10th the speed. Isn’t that a regression?
No. These are single-purpose machines — whether it’s a 100-ton scraper on a landfill site or an Abrams M1A1 tank, they have one job to do. Quite often, they weigh over 100 tons, and I’ve found them pretty daunting.

Did your instructors ever get annoyed?
Say they’re a firefighter in Fort Worth. Normally, the alarm goes off and they run out, suit up, jump in, and go to work without thinking. But for them to actually explain to this little idiot boy who thinks he knows everything about how a firetruck actually works… I think they enjoyed it. Everybody likes to talk about what they do, and sometimes it does you good to break it down and think about it.

You’ve now driven nearly everything on wheels, so you’re fairly qualified to give notes back to the designers of the Abrams tank on how the thing handles. What would you change? How’s the cornering?
Well, I’m a civilian, so on the M1A1 I’d just work on the interior. I’d put less sharp corners inside it. I think I’d put some leather in there, a bit of suede. There is nothing wrong with a bit of Alcantara. And there was no cup holder in the driver’s area.

Of all the vehicles in this series, which one would you bring back and put in your garage if your wife let you?
I don’t think anybody would let me bring the tank back, which is a shame. But it’d be fairly harmless, because I’d never remember how everything worked. On the show, I missed a target by half a kilometer at one point, so nobody would be in any danger.

In the tank, you fire a missile at a minivan. In a logging machine, you toss trees 50 yards through the side of a family car. What’s the problem? Is everything okay at home?
One day, you wake up and think, “oh God, it’s today, isn’t it? Today’s the day I’ve gotta have a minivan.” And then you accept your fate and shuffle into middle age and trundle about. But me, I drove a bulldozer over one. I saved some people from that awful fate, and that’s good of me. It’s a service I provide.

Soon, you’ll be back to driving Top Gear supercars. What new knowledge will you bring to that program?
It’s made me just think before I operate something. If you praise a Ferrari, that’s a single purpose vehicle. But if you’re driving an everyday, ordinary vehicle that has a much wider span of purposes, you have to judge it very differently. “What am I doing? Am I just driving to the shops, going to work, racing around a track?” If nothing else, it’s taught me to stop and think, “what is this thing for?”

NASCAR recently took a survey to figure out why young male fans are leaving the sport. One of the answers they found out is that in general, young men say they don’t have an interest in cars like previous generations did. Is car culture dying?
It’s just a trend. The operation of machinery, whether that machine is designed to help you lift, dig, carry, dominate, go fast, impress a mate — whatever it is, that’s an essential human layer that chimes with all of us, because at a primal level, whatever we’re trying to do, there’s a vehicle for it. I don’t think that fascination will ever leave us.

Richard Hammond’s Crash Course premieres Monday, April 16 on BBC America .

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Now is the time to start thinking about seeds. Photo: flickr/timsackton

A simple guide to figuring out what to plant, where to find it, and when to get it into the ground.

by Adam Weiss

What to Grow

The number one factor when deciding what to grow is the amount of space you have. Here’s a list of popular vegetables and type of space they’re best suited to:
• Small Gardens (multiple medium to large pots on a terrace or roof deck): Lettuces, peas, spinach, herbs, beets, carrots, and radishes.
• Medium Gardens (small section of a yard with a bed of soil): All of the above plus kale, Swiss chard, broccoli, bush beans, onions, leaks, and bok choy.
• Large Gardens (more than one bed of soil): All of the above plus tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, zucchini, and cauliflower.
• Extra Large Gardens (multiple large beds of soil): All of the above plus winter squash, melons, and pumpkins (which need 30-36 inches between them).
Note: There are always exceptions to the above. If you love tomatoes and only have a small terrace, for instance, you may choose to just grow tomatoes. That said, if you grow butternut squash in your small garden, you might only have one plant.

Where to Get It

Online or Mail-Order
First and foremost, always buy organic. Mail order catalogs and online garden stores are becoming an increasingly popular way to stock up on seeds. The advantages are value and variety. Also, seeds can be ordered for the upcoming season as early as January and bought all at once, at a time when a lot of garden stores are either closed or running with minimal stock. I like Territorial Seed Company, Totally Tomatoes, and Seeds of Change. If you do buy early, store seeds in a cool, dark place to keep them fresh until planting. While fancy packaging and boutique seed companies are on the rise, it’s all down to individual taste and trial and error — experimentation is half the fun.

Your Local Garden Store
As the season gets going, nothing beats a personal relationship with a good local shop. If you happen to have one near you, limited selection can be made up for in expert advice and a well-curated stock. Either way, the back of your seed packet provides most of the information you’ll need to plant, including seed depth, soil temperature, days to germination, light requirements, and seed spacing.

Seeds vs Starter Plants

Most vegetables —  tomatoes, eggplants, broccoli, Swiss chard, peppers, and melons — are better off being put into the ground as starter plants and, therefore, can be seeded early indoors. If you have the space for this, you’ll end up with stronger, healthier and more mature plants once it’s time to move them outside. But you’ll need special equipment like heat mats and ultra-violet lights and a little extra know-how. A simpler way to get a head start is to buy starter plants from your local garden shop and put them into the ground the same day. If seeding directly into the ground, pay special attention to timing. Vegetables such as lettuces, beets, and carrots are best planted as seeds directly into the ground because they’re hearty against early season chill and don’t like to be moved once planted.

When to Plant

Timing is entirely dependent on the weather and it changes from season to season – last spring was a particularly cold and wet one, for instance, which resulted in poor germination.
• As a general rule, the first seeds that go into the ground are unusually peas around mid-March.
• Early to mid April also is the time to seed lettuces, carrots, and beets.
• By early May, it’s time to plant, larger leafy greens such as Swiss chard and kale.
• The week following Memorial Day (or once the ground temperature has warmed to 65-75 degrees), is when to put your warm weather vegetables such as zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants into the ground.

Adam Weiss is a master gardener, certified through the Cornell University extension. He also runs gardening seminars through his Woodstock-based B&B, Pike Lane, and writes a blog full of tips, tricks, and wisdom.

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In more than two decades of exploration, Horn has traveled, often alone, to every corner of the planet. Photo: Photos 12/Alamy

Mike Horn, arguably the world’s most versatile living explorer, details his upcoming voyage to East Africa’s Great Rift Valley.

Interviewed by Blaine McEvoy

When you last spoke to Men’s Journal in 2008, you detailed a four-year plan to take 144 teenagers, 12 at a time, on two-week tours of the world’s most threatened areas. To date, what’s been your most memorable takeaway from those adventures?
The world still has amazing, undiscovered places, and each time, it never ceases to amaze me that our passengers come back completely changed. Seeing the kids’ eyes light up, the happiness on their faces — that’s been the best memory of all.

You once turned down an offer to captain the Calypso, Jacques Cousteau’s old ship. What were the circumstances surrounding that decision?
I watched The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau as a child and admired what he did about the Calypso. But I wanted to take his actions one step further by involving youth in eco-exploration, so we created Pangaea.

You named your 35-foot sailboat Pangaea. What is the story behind that designation?
Pangaea, in brief, means “one world,” and the boat becomes “one world” for all those aboard. We respect each other’s culture, religion, and habits, and it’s a place where we can share our common passion for nature and establish projects to conserve it for future generations.

Pangaea’s expeditions are sponsored by Panerai, the Italian watchmaker. What influence, if any, do they have aboard your ship?
Panerai engineered the instruments aboard Pangaea, but most importantly, they made my watch, which functions over 650 feet below surface and up over 26,200 feet in the Himalayas. It can also withstand extreme temperatures, from the heat and humidity of the Equator to dry coldness of the North and South Poles.

Pangaea has sailed from Siberia to the Amazon Basin to Antarctica. This summer, you’ll set sail for East Africa’s Great Rift Valley. What are you searching for?
The Great Rift Valley is home to spectacular lakes, glaciers, and volcanoes, offering some of the most breathtaking scenery on Earth. So for this mission, we’ll use the valley as an example of how human impact is negatively affecting the world’s water resources. Our youth want responsibilities — they want to take care of the planet for their descendants. Let’s give it to them, and guide them in the right direction.

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Of all the great things about Harrelson, perhaps the most unexpected is how great an actor he has turned out to be. Photograph by Sam Jones

He lives off the grid in Hawaii with his wife and kids, his kiteboard, his organic garden, and his stoner buddies, 3,000 miles away from the Hollywood studios that never stop calling. No wonder Woody’s pretty much a walking, talking ray of sunshine. Until he’s not.

by Erik Hedegaard

Despite his best efforts, this is sometimes how it goes for Woody Harrelson. He’s in New Orleans making a movie, sitting outside a fair-trade-type coffeehouse, happily sucking a blood-red, beet-based concoction called a Vampiro through a straw. He’s telling about his morning — woke up around eight, took a leak, brushed his teeth, practiced a little tai chi (“just to get the organs moving”), went on an hour-long bike ride (wearing a borrowed helmet that “smelled like old sweat”), met with some movie people, and ended up here, hanging out around a little metal table, 72 degrees in the sun, just about perfect. So far, so good.

“And I got a good night’s sleep last night too,” he says, stretching back. “For a few days before, I was in L.A. working but then, afterward, hanging with people, cool parties and stuff, until all hours. Alcohol is one of my downfalls.” He frowns. He didn’t mean it like that. “I mean, I’m not addicted to it, but when I’m in a social situation, I tend to drink — it was St-Germain and vodka, goes down so easy — and the fact that I did it four nights in a row . . . well, maybe it was three, but anyway it was brutal.” He thinks about that. “Yeah,” he says, lighting up with a goofy, Woody-from-Cheers smile. “I’ve come to New Orleans to dry out.”

And to work, because he’s always working — even though this time he almost turned the part down. “I waffled and waffled,” he says, stirring his Vampiro. “I’ve never had a harder time leaving home, where it just felt like ripping my heart out. I cried the day I left. Maui is heaven. My family is there” — he has three kids, five, 15, and 18, with wife and 25-year partner Laura Louie — “and my buddies . . . the good times never stop. A year could pass and you wouldn’t even notice. Kitesurfing, soccer, living off the grid, eating fruit from your trees.” He throws his arms open. “That’s my heaven. That’s how life is meant to be lived.”

Yet leave heaven he did, for reasons even he doesn’t know. “It’s not like I feel a compulsion to work,” he goes on, “because, honestly, I feel a compulsion to be the laziest bastard you ever met, and yet I can’t . . . ”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. He just lets the words, delivered in his slow Texas drawl, hang there and returns to sucking up red stuff through his straw, looking none too upset anyway, even deeply OK, which, it seems, is kind of a habitual state with him. “He likes to talk about himself as the ‘happy hippie,’ and I’d say most of the time, that’s what he is,” says Oren Moverman, who directed Harrelson in The Messenger, a role that earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in 2009, as well as in the recent Rampart, as a dirty cop on one heck of a serious decline.

And for much of today, Harrelson is indeed just that, the happy hippie, laid-back, grinning, a fun fellow to hang around with as he holds forth on his love of sports (favorites include but are not limited to tennis, basketball, ping-pong, soccer, kitesurfing, surfing, stand-up paddleboarding, bocce, darts, and foosball — “I love foosball!”) and his penchant for gambling (“I’ll gamble on most anything”) and how funny it is that Chihuahuas shiver so often (“I don’t know why they do that, but it’s funny!”). In this regard, as has often been noted, he is among the most affable of men.

But then later, after he’s smoked half a joint at his hotel, it goes a different way for him. The topic is his late father, Charles Harrelson. “He was very loving, never hit us,” he says. “He was one of the most charming people you ever met, incredibly bright and articulate.” He was also a ladies’ man, a gambler, an encyclopedia salesman, and a hit man for Texas lowlifes. He spent close to 30 years in prison, which is where he died in 2007. Naturally, Harrelson doesn’t like talking about him. He’d rather everyone kept their noses out of it. But as a fact of Harrelson’s life, it’s hard to ignore. And yet if you don’t, be forewarned. Darkness will fall.

To continue reading Woody Harrelson’s (Mostly) Happy Ending, click here.

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At 50, Harrelson has lost some of his youthful idealism. "If you manage to stop the timber industry from cutting this forest, they'll cut that forest." Photograph by Sam Jones

Of all the great things about Harrelson, perhaps the most unexpected is how great an actor he has turned out to be. During his time on Cheers, playing Woody Boyd, from 1985 to 1993 — five Emmy nominations, one win, not bad for his first Hollywood outing — it seemed crazy to think that he could do more than lovable and dim-witted. His name was Woody; he was Woody. But then in 1991, while casting White Men Can’t Jump, director Ron Shelton decided that since Keanu Reeves, his first choice for the lead, couldn’t shoot hoops worth a damn, he’d go with Harrelson, who could indeed jump. For the first time, audiences got to see an indication of his range. He proved himself more than adept at cracking wise, faking innocence, and displaying the sting of betrayal, not to mention laying hands on Rosie Perez at her finest.

After that, he went on a tear, making a name for himself in some of the decade’s most controversial movies, including Indecent Proposal, as a broke yuppie architect willing to pimp his beloved for $1 million; Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, as a media-mad serial killer; and The People vs. Larry Flynt, doing the near impossible — making Flynt a sympathetic human being — which earned him an Oscar nomination. Along the way, he has done buddy movies (The Cowboy Way, Money Train), slapstick comedy (Kingpin, eminently rewatchable), horror comedy (Zombieland), and even the occasional total bomb (Surfer, Dude). Only once has he ever been at odds with Hollywood: In 1996, after the Larry Flynt movie created a political firestorm, offers dried up, and Harrelson semiretired to Maui, to try out the laziest-bastard-ever lifestyle. He couldn’t hack it, and soon enough he was back.

Now he’s got three new movies out, all about as different as you might expect from a guy like Harrelson. In The Hunger Games, he’s Haymitch, stringy-haired mentor to the kids about to do battle. It’s a small part but pivotal enough that it may warrant reprising should the flick, which is based on the first of Suzanne Collins’ young-adult books, turn into a blockbuster franchise. “I turned it down,” he says. “But then the director, Gary Ross, called and said, ‘I don’t have a second choice, you’re the part. You have to do this.’ And I said, ‘In that case, let’s do it.’ ”

In Game Change, the HBO movie about the John McCain–Sarah Palin fiasco, Harrelson plays Steve Schmidt, the political consultant who put forth the idea of Palin as a viable running mate and then realized she was both a nutcase and a basket case. At one point, to get a better sense of Schmidt, he hung out with him and had his expectations totally upended. “I wouldn’t imagine myself wanting to have anything to do with the guy, but I really found myself liking him. He’s a political animal, but I feel like he’s an idealist and not bogged down in all the bullshit. Let’s face it. Obama was a phenomenon. They knew they were going to get beat, so choosing Palin was just a Hail Mary pass. It was just a wild idea.” So is he more sympathetic toward Republicans now? His eyes boggle. “Fuck, no! The shit those people say just makes me weep for humanity!”

And then there’s Rampart, with Harrelson playing a down-and-dirty cop during the LAPD’s Rampart scandal, in the late Nineties. It’s brutal stuff. “Yeah, it’s heavy, man,” says Harrelson, still working over that Vampiro at the coffee shop. “Just because what the guy’s going through is intense, the emotions he’s feeling, as everything starts to break down around him and paranoia becomes almost his leading, primary emotion.” Yet what Harrelson is able to do in that movie, as violent as his cop character is, he does in a way that makes you honestly care about the guy’s fate. When he grins, you grin; when he frowns, you frown; when he lights up a cigarette and blows away some innocent guy, you wish you still smoked and at least owned a gun.

His pal Owen Wilson once called him “a beloved figure in our culture.” Much of that still derives from misty recollection of Cheers, of course, but it also comes from the wide-open way Harrelson has lived his life — the pot smoking, the hemp clothes and hemp-as-a-cash-crop proselytizing, his acts of civil disobedience (refusing to pay taxes in 1995, scaling the Golden Gate Bridge to protest redwood logging in 1996), the whole vegan-and-raw-food lifestyle, his avoidance of talking on a cellphone, his joining ranks with PETA to win the release of 14 research chimpanzees, the occasional thumping of a paparazzo, etc. He does what he wants to do, consequences (lawsuits and arrests, mostly) be damned, and has done so for a long time.

“We’d have staged arguments on the subway,” recalls Clint Allen, his best friend in college and New York roommate. “This girl he dated, we’d be in a restaurant and they’d just start making out, like disgusting making out. He just didn’t care. The day we moved to New York, our car got towed. He actually went down and tried to steal it out of the impound lot. He was definitely a loose cannon, a total free spirit, and like lots of people, I was addicted to him from the word go.”

“He’s determined to get as much out of life as he can,” says Ted Danson, who played Sam on Cheers. “I remember showing up for rehearsals and Woody wouldn’t be there, and then we’d get a message, ‘Sorry, the Berlin Wall is coming down, and I just have to be there.’ ‘Sorry, Bill Clinton just won, and I have to go to Little Rock for the party.’ I love that about him. He’s kind of fearless.”

Says Moverman: “I don’t know anyone like him. In many ways, he doesn’t have filters. He’s a guy who embraces all the contradictions of the state of being alive.”

But he is 50 now, and he does seem to have slowed down a little. He once was a proud sexual profligate who made no bones about it to the women in his life, telling them monogamy and marriage were out of the question. “I once watched Woody pick up a New York City Ballet prima ballerina in less than a minute,” says Courtney Love, his costar in The People vs. Larry Flynt. “He’s like, ‘I’ve had a lot of conversations, sweetheart, but I ain’t never had one that ended with an orgasm. And let me tell you about my orgasms, OK, because I don’t have them [he really didn’t, because he’d mastered the yogic art of the ejaculation-free orgasm], but you will have a lot of them.’ And then he made it very clear that he had a family and an open marriage with a commitment. And it was supercharming. And it was all honest. And off she went to have an adventure.”

But four years ago, Harrelson changed his tune on his brand of sexual revolution and got hitched to Laura Louie. (“Eventually you cater to the needs of those you love.” Pause. Grin. “Did I say cater or kowtow?”) He was once almost fanatical about wearing only hemp, but today he admits to wearing “embarrassingly little of it.” And the activism that used to be such a big part of his life is much smaller. He has become disillusioned. “If you manage to stop the timber industry from cutting this forest,” he says, “they’ll cut that forest. If you stop oil drilling here, they’ll go drill there.”

He sighs. “Coming up as a kid, you don’t think about that shit. You feel unending optimism for the country. But there are a lot of heavy realizations you come to about the way our world works.”

For the most part though, he’s still the same old gap-toothed Woody. As he’s driven to his New Orleans hotel that afternoon, he’s got the window down, his arm hanging out, and his mind on short, punchy jokes. He tells the old one about what the blind man said when he entered the fish shop (“Evening, ladies!”) and shouts, “That’s one I hope my wife doesn’t hear!” Then he tells a few jokes first heard from his Maui pal Willie Nelson. “A doctor tells a guy he’s dying, and the guy says, ‘Doc, is there anything I can do?’ And the doctor says, ‘You could take two to three mud baths a day.’ And he goes, ‘Do you think it’ll help?’ And the doctor goes, ‘Nope, but it will help you get used to the dirt.’ ” He whoops up a laugh and shakes his head happily. “It’s such a rough ending.” And on he goes, reeling them out. At one point, it becomes apparent that he’s reading from his BlackBerry and trying not to let anyone see him doing it. It’s kind of odd. Then again, he is kind of odd, but only, like now, in the most endearing ways.

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In 1973, Woody's father was convicted of the 1968 contract killing of a Texas grain dealer, a fact he learned from the radio. Photograph by Sam Jones

Before he was Woody, he was Tracy. That’s Harrelson’s middle name and what he went by growing up in Texas, mostly around Houston. By the time he was seven, his father had vanished from his life, leaving no forwarding address. He had two brothers — one younger, one older — and their mom raised them solidly in the Presbyterian faith. “I used to have Bible studies at my house,” he says. “I was in the choir. I was mischievous but also a real mama’s boy. It was a pretty happy childhood.”

It must have been a very unusual kind of happy. Before entering the first grade, Tracy had already been kicked out of at least three schools. A typical story involves Tracy being bullied by some kindergarten tough, Tracy squealing to the teacher, the teacher calling Tracy a crybaby, Tracy kicking her in the shin, the teacher telling the rest of the class to “get him,” and him having to whip a belt around to keep them at bay. Expulsion followed. In another, a teacher accused him of stealing her purse; feeling falsely accused, he sassed her; she slapped him; “and before you know it, three teachers are all kind of whaling on me,” after which he went outside and set about breaking every school window he could, bloodying himself as he went, not caring.

“Things like that did happen,” he says, sounding almost puzzled. “Weird shit.”

Around that time, he was labeled an emotionally disturbed hyperactive dyslexic and was put on Ritalin. At one point, he was placed in a school for kids with learning disabilities. Tracy loved the place. Finally, he wasn’t the only one with issues. And the teachers genuinely cared. After three years, though, he left for another school and found himself having to deal with kids who knew all about his father — in 1973, Charles was convicted of the 1968 contract killing of a Texas grain dealer, a fact that Harrelson learned about from the radio — and taunted him about it mercilessly. Shortly thereafter, his mom moved the family to Lebanon, Ohio, to start over.

And that’s when Tracy became Woody. “Why? I wanted to get away from . . . whatever,” he says, a little uneasily. “It was almost like changing personalities, and I kind of did change personalities. I decided, as an act of will, to be more outgoing. I mean, there were still a lot of fights at school. The biggest one I got into was in junior high, with a bully named Tim. In the locker room, he had told me, ‘Punch me in the mouth. Come on, hit me, you pussy.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to hit you; you hit me.’ And he goes ‘Bam!’ I got a bloody mouth. So from that day on it was constant taunts, him calling me a pussy, a fag. He’d follow me home. He knew I was weak — not weak, but afraid. And one day I couldn’t take it anymore. I threw down my books, charged him, tackled him, got him down on the ground, and just started beating the shit out of him. He never fucked with me again.”

He stops for a bit, thinking about his history of fighting, which in earlier years, he seems to have engaged in with considerable gusto, once going so far as to say, “I think there’s many times that if I’d been holding a weapon, I would have killed somebody” and that he possessed “an unearthly violence that just came out in spurts” and to call violence an “aphrodisiac.”

“I don’t know why I always seem to elicit someone’s need to mock or ridicule or give me shit,” he says today. “I didn’t feel like it was something I was searching out. I don’t know why.”

For the most part, though, things got better. Harrelson was a good athlete, playing on the track and football teams, and then, shortly after Elvis died in 1977, he got up on a table in the school library, belted out a version of “All Shook Up” — “Well, bless my soul/What’s wrong with me?” — to thunderous applause. Afterward, a girl he liked told him he should try out for theater. He did and found that, as much as anything, he loved the attention. And he got the girl.

He attended Hanover College in Indiana, where he began losing his religion in his second year, drank his first drink in his third year, and took his first hit of weed in his fourth year, before leaving with a degree in theater arts and English. Then it was off to New York, to lose 17 jobs almost as fast as he got them, party like crazy, drink like crazy, smoke pot like crazy, sleep with all the women he could, and try to become an actor. After two frustrating years, he finally landed a part as an understudy in the Neil Simon play Biloxi Blues; shortly thereafter, an acting buddy told him that Cheers was looking to replace Nicholas Colasanto, who had played Coach and recently died, with a character who would be a country rube. And his name would be Woody. Perfect. Harrelson auditioned, got the part, and was soon showing everyone what he was all about.

“Woody,” Diane Chambers says to him in an early episode, “I want to speak metaphysically.”

“And you need money for the language lessons,” says Woody. “No problem.”

Woody Boyd sure wasn’t smart, but like Woody Harrelson, he sure could be sweet.

—

Back in his penthouse hotel room, he kicks off his shoes, and goes into the bathroom. A bicycle is in the living area and a number of the things that make up the Harrelson experience are on a nearby table. There are various bottles of vitamins or vitaminlike substances (Insomnitrol, Vitamineral Green, vitamin C), a helping of cacao nibs, $100 in twenties, a couple of children’s books, two New Orleans Saints lighters, and a single tiny marijuana bud (“Ha, ha!”).

Harrelson digs up a joint and sits at a table on the balcony. Evening is coming on, with a spectacular sky about to bloom on the horizon and big bunches of birds fluttering through the air. He lights up.

“Did you have role models growing up?” I ask.

“When I was a kid, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Jesus, mostly. He was the man, for sure.”

“Did you ever idolize your dad?”

“Yeah, I did. When I was a kid.” He tilts his head. “Nice segue, by the way.”

“Did he take you fishing or camping?”

“No.”

“Baseball game?”

“None of it. That never happened.” He takes another hit.

“Did you ever live life the way you wanted with your dad?”

“No. In terms of our relationship, no, because I never . . . I would have liked to have a period of time which. . . . An ironic thing happened. I never told this story, but fuck it. When I was a senior in high school, I came back from a track meet and saw him sitting on the living room couch. He’d been in jail since I was seven, so for 10 years. I didn’t even know he was out. I saw him, and I just started bawling. The next day, we were in his car, and my dad picked up a roach clip with a little roach in it, lit it, and offered it to me. Well, to me, this was a terrible thing. I had a really intolerant attitude about that drug, which is the ironic thing. I got so furious with him that I didn’t go out with him that night, and he left the next day, and the next time I saw him, he was in prison again.” He was in prison because he killed a federal judge on behalf of a drug dealer and was sentenced to two life terms plus five years. He died of a heart attack in 2007, in a supermax prison in Colorado. But why Harrelson has never told this story is not exactly clear. There’s nothing in it to damage him or his father. Maybe it’s because it forces him to deal with the memory of the last time he saw his dad as a free man, and it still hurts.

“Did he give you any parental advice?”

“He always said, ‘Son, all I ask is you keep an open mind.’ He was speaking generally. His big thing was to encourage me to keep my mind open. Also, he loathed organized religion. When I was 19, I saw him, and he said, ‘Within two years, all those things you believe about religion, you’re not going to believe anymore.’ I thought he was out of his mind, but he was right.”

“Did that lead to the party Woody?”

He smiles. “It led very directly.”

He eats a few kale chips.

“Do you look more like your mom or your dad?”

“My dad. I look just like him. Well, not just like him but . . . pictures of him when he was a newlywed with my mom. We look just the same when I was that age. We have the same space between our front teeth.”

And then he just sits there, staring off, with more birds collecting in the distance.

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"There's only one Woody Harrelson," says Oliver Stone. "He's an original." Photograph by Sam Jones

Lots of actors, when called upon to plump a fellow actor, do so perfunctorily, if at all. In Harrelson’s case, the difference is palpable.

“Oh, his stony little nature!” says Juliette Lewis, his costar in Natural Born Killers. “He’s disarming. He’s funny as hell. But he also has this other side, this intensity and a stillness. He has everything. I think he’s great.”

“He’d get into fights, he’d get his car stolen. There wasn’t a woman in town he hadn’t, um, met,” recalls Ted Danson. “At the same time, he’d write poetry and plays. He’s just got this huge heart. You could never pigeonhole him. He’s just a wonderful combination of, I don’t know, I just love him. I love him from the bottom of my heart, almost irrationally so.”

“There’s only one Woody Harrelson,” says Natural Born Killers director Oliver Stone. “I can just see him at the age of 95, with a Nick Nolte voice, hanging out in Tucson, at a bus station with a blanket on him, squaw man. He’s an original.”

“He’s what we in Brooklyn call a stand-up guy,” says Rosie Perez, his costar in White Men Can’t Jump. “He’s just so laid-back and fucking hilarious. But if you were to piss him off, get ready, because he would go there. He has a very strong sense of right and wrong. There’s not one phony bone in his body.”

All these people obviously care, and care deeply, about Harrelson. He’s loved. He’s loved a lot. And all just for who he is.

—

Later on, a mist begins to settle on the balcony. Harrelson grabs his lighter and pads inside, flops down on a couch, lights the same joint again, does the second half. A moment later, he’s up again and standing by the glass door. Across the way, starlings, hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, have gathered into a murmuration and are sweeping across the sky as one. “Wow,” he says, “that’s incredible. Now watch. They’re going to come back around. It’s almost like they’re doing a circle.” But then they break the circle, flinging themselves up and across, fanning out, like brushstrokes on canvas. Harrelson is enthralled.

“They’re going on a little joyride. I bet it really is that. Like just a fun thing for them.” They reverse directions. “Oh, dude. Oh, my. Oh, you guys are showing off now. I guess I would too if I was you.”

He stands there for a while longer, happy in the mystery, ascribing to the starlings what has often been ascribed to him, the way he approaches life as a kind of joyride, doing what he does just because he wants to, with others standing back and watching, thinking they would too if they were him. Wouldn’t that be nice. But what’s born in a bird is both born and bred in a man.

He sits back down, doesn’t turn on the lights. It’s almost dark in the room. He seems to be quite stoned, the cadence of his voice slowing almost to drops of molasses. Although he doesn’t like to talk about his father, he will, for a while longer. “One cool thing that happened: He was, at the time, in Huntsville — no, I think it was Atlanta. They’d vote on what to watch, and they used to always vote for this other show that was on at the same time Cheers was on. My father never told anybody I was on it. Somehow, someone got wind of it, told everybody, and every Thursday night after that, they voted Cheers unanimously. That’s one of the cool things that happened.”

“Was he a guy who could say he loved you?”

“Oh, yeah, every single time I saw him, every letter he sent me.” Another instance of love. He lets that settle and narrows his eyes, their centers turning hard as BBs. Something in him has shifted. “How much of this is going to be about my dad?” he says. “I feel like it’s going for sensationalism, plain and simple.” And just like that, all the light that had surrounded Woody just a few hours earlier falls away. He sits in the shadows and stares right straight ahead, straight through what’s in front of him, and shuts down almost entirely, brushing off all attempts at day-saving frivolity.

“So, Woody, are you ticklish?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“All the typical places.”

“Like where?”

“Knees. Thighs.”

Silence.

The air becomes so thick with weirdness that the only thing you can do is blink and try to address the situation half directly. “Woody, what kind of mood are you in right now?”

He doesn’t answer. Lifetimes come and go. Eons pass. At last, he says, “Fair.” And frankly, when he says that, the way he says it — flatly, blankly, with no emotion whatsoever — it’s almost enough to make you jump out of your skin and flee.

Harrelson is wrong, though. Nothing about all this is about his father. It’s about him and how he has managed. And just how he has managed — he once said he’d been through stuff that would crush most men — is one of the greatest of great things about him. Look at him now, suffering memories in an unlit room, having successfully overcome the urge, no doubt, to beat the shit out of somebody. All those fights, that quick-sprung temper, remanded to corners elsewhere. Later, he draws a self-portrait. He draws himself in profile, just a few scattered lines, a nose, a chin, an eye, with the rest of himself hidden from view. “I didn’t put that stuff in there,” he says plainly. “Just pretend it’s inside a doorway. Just pretend there’s a doorway there.” The way Harrelson seems to see it, anything is possible. All he asks is that you keep an open mind.

Bartolotta's dishes are straightforward and brilliantly uncomplicated. Photograph by Tom Schierlitz

With a little ingenuity and effort, you can concoct a simple meal that still puts a premium on flavor and technique.

by Howie Kahn

Paul Bartolotta is best known for Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare, his lavish seafood restaurant at the Wynn Las Vegas. But for all of his restaurant’s sourcing and presentational pomp, his dishes are straightforward and brilliantly uncomplicated. One of Bartolotta’s preferred homemade meals is chicken, the most common — and most commonly overcooked — protein. Here the chef demonstrates how easy it is to do it right. “Our favorite cut is the thigh. It’s the most flavorful, and we do it supersimple — just roasted with garlic and rosemary. Every day, we cook this kind of food.”

Brown Rice
Ingredients
• 2 tbsp butter
• 3/4  cup onion, diced
• 3 cups chicken stock
• 3/4  cup red bell pepper, diced
• 11/2 cups brown rice
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper

Preparation
Preheat oven to 375˚. Melt butter over medium heat in an 8-inch sauce pot. Add onions and cook until translucent. Add stock and bring to a boil over high heat. Stir in bell pepper and rice. Season with salt and pepper, and return to a boil. Cover with lid. Place in the oven and cook for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Let stand for 5 minutes before serving. Serves four.

Chicken
Ingredients
• 8 bone-in chicken thighs, with skin on
• 2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 16 garlic cloves, smashed with skin on
• 16 asparagus spears, cut into 2-inch lengths
• 8 rosemary sprigs
• 1/3  cup dry white wine
• 1 tbsp lemon juice

Preparation
In a mixing bowl, combine chicken with salt, pepper, olive oil, and garlic. Place in an 11-inch roasting pan, and roast for 25 minutes along with the rice. Remove from oven, add asparagus and rosemary, and roast for 10 minutes more. Transfer chicken and asparagus to a serving plate. Add wine and lemon to the pan and cook over a medium flame until slightly reduced. Spoon over the chicken. Serve with brown rice.