Just Me and My RV
NEW YORK TIMES | A western road trip to the world's largest RV rally.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 18, 2012
I HAVE SPENT THE NIGHT in a Walmart parking lot. I have driven through a national park with a trail of cars in my rearview mirror. I have learned how to dispose of my waste through a plastic hose, and I have filled my gas tank more times in one week than I thought was possible.
But this is to be expected when you’re driving a small studio apartment, or, as I began to call it, my “rig.” One man in a rural California border town even called it cute. He said it reminded him of a Doritos delivery truck.
The rig was a 19-foot-long, gleaming white, class-C motor home — an RV that I rented from Cruise America, the country’s largest recreational vehicle rental company; 800-RV-4RENT was prominently emblazoned across the exterior, as were colorful images of America’s national parks and natural patrimony.
It was a proverbial flag patch sewn on a backpack, and as someone who makes an effort to downplay the fact that I’m a tourist when I travel, this granted no disguise. And just as well: I had never driven an RV before, and for this I could say I had never experienced my own country as millions do every summer, and have for more than a century.
When I booked the RV online a couple of months earlier, I found myself signing up for not so much a mode of transportation as a set of desirable feelings. “With a Cruise America RV,” the Web site said, “you can roam wherever your spirit takes you, throughout the US and Canada. And with a full kitchen in your RV, you can skip out on endless drive-through menus and enjoy more satisfying meals and snacks.” Roam, spirit, satisfying meals: these are not the sort of words used to tout a rental car or an airplane seat. An RV road trip promised the distinction of freedom and flexibility, comfort and convenience: a travel experience unencumbered by the need for reservations.
I enlisted my friends Tyson and Angelina, and we mapped a vague plan: Oakland, Calif., to Oregon and back, in eight days. We’d go where we wanted to go, when we wanted to go. We’d tour less-visited national parks and rural towns and sleep wherever it suited us.
RVers constitute a certain tribe on the road, and I learned that thousands were converging in central Oregon for what was billed as the Greatest RV Rally in the World. On a July afternoon, after receiving instructions in the Cruise America parking lot on how to check the RV’s water levels and empty the waste tank, we headed off on Interstate 80.
Packing for an RV road trip is like preparing for a weekend at a cozy cabin. The luxury of space and the semblance of domestic life inspired me to carry things like candles and paprika, soft cotton sheets and extra pillows. I took sharp knives, folding chairs and musical instruments and put avocados and lemons in a bowl on the kitchenette counter. We hung up our coats in the closet, with hangers. As I drove the rig, Tyson and Angelina put away groceries.
A compact RV drives like a van, but its bulky size soon altered my personality behind the wheel. I paid close attention to the yellow speed advisory signs for a change, and I rarely switched lanes, feeling unusually content to cruise in a patient, linear fashion. (Abrupt turns would cause the drawers and cabinets to fly open, anyway, prompting a scramble for rolling onions.) From a higher perch the landscape appeared wider, more available. Once we joined Interstate 5 in California’s Central Valley I began to feel a closer kinship with the truckers on the road, especially that first evening, after we pulled into a Walmart.
OF all the things Walmart is best known for (low prices, litigation, the demise of mom-and-pop stores), an overnight stopping place for RVers is not among them. But drive any evening into a Walmart lot along a busy highway, and you’ll probably find parked motor homes.
RVers often spend weeks on the road: that road is long, and there are many Walmarts along the way. As the company sees it, RVs arrive with their own bathrooms, and their drivers are well positioned to shop: everybody’s happy. Searching online from my phone I learned there were three Walmarts staggered along 30 miles of Interstate 5 in Northern California.
Around sunset, I checked in, so to speak, at the store in Red Bluff. There was plenty of vacancy. Another motor home rolled into the lot after me; its driver, a middle-aged man, placed a footstool outside the side door and made himself at home. He told me he was a semipermanent resident there and commuted to a local community college. “I just came from the gym,” he said.
It was still early, so my friends and I patronized our host: I bought a power inverter while they picked up flip-flops and bottled water. We cooked dinner on the RV’s gas burners, and set up lawn chairs on the asphalt. All night long, the glowing Walmart sign flooded the motor home like pale rays of moonlight.
In the morning we branched east on Highway 44 into the volcanic foothills of the southern Cascade Range. The fertile single-crop fields of the Central Valley transitioned to a forest of spindly firs and pines and pumice rock. In Shingletown, Calif., I spotted a hand-painted sign: “Great Food. Bakery. RVs OK.” It began to dawn on me how the world not only looks different from the seat of a big vehicle, it also treats you differently because of this.
We also needed less from the world. Traveling with our own toilet, mini-mart and motel room left us open to make unessential pit stops with little concern for time. We could roam.
Down the road an eccentric roadside carpentry workshop caught my attention: “Paul Bunyan. Holiday Log Style Gifts, World’s Best Bird Houses, Benches, Teepees and More.” I pulled over and found a tall man holding a chain saw, wearing a hard hat and overalls with an American flag lapel pin on the strap. He introduced himself as Steven Pelloza, “a k a Paul Bunyan, and I certainly live up to that. We’re the Paul Bunyan Conservation Society.”
This was a pro-timber environmental group, Mr. Pelloza explained. “We clean the forest and build products, like the world’s greatest birdhouse, which that is,” he said, pointing to one carved out of pine, with two little holes. We chatted a bit longer about the area, and he told me stories about being a logger in southeast Alaska, after the Exxon Valdez spill. (“Truckloads of money. Total bonanza.”) As I made to leave, he reached for a birdhouse. “Here,” he said. “You take this one.”
The native Modoc people once called California’s sparse northeast corner “the Smiles of God.” Then in 1915, the area seemed to incur God’s wrath with the eruption of Lassen Peak, which blanketed the surrounding high desert in volcanic ash. One county’s official slogan today is “Where the West still lives,” although the area’s history is laid bare in boarded-up places like Uncle Runts Watering Hole, in Old Station, and abandoned homesteads.
Hardscrabble frontier life seems not to have eroded a sense of whimsy; the sidewalks in Alturas, a town near the Oregon border, are lined with stores like the Belligerent Duck (an outdoor outfitter); Skirts N Spurs (a hair salon); and Classy Lassie (an apparel shop). We passed signs on front lawns that read: “Land of the Free Because of the Brave.” Outside the Adin Supply Company (since 1906), in the town of Adin, we were advised: “Starbucks is 70 Miles Away. Our Coffee Will Get You There.”
Nearly every town seemed to have its resident hoarder with an antiques and collectibles shop. “Some people can’t come in,” said Sally B, a self-described “hard-core junkie” who owned Just Stuff, in New Pine Creek, Ore. “They just stick their head in and walk out. But others just get consumed by it.” As did my friends: Tyson, a musician, found an antique toy piano; Angelina walked out with a black leather jacket and beret.
Just Stuff in New Pine Creek, Ore. Credit: Andy Isaacson
Our meandering had taken us past dark, so we parked for the night by a stream a few miles up a national forest road.
RVs have long been bound up in the American myth of freedom and mobility and independence, with allusions to the covered wagon, that symbol of the Western frontier.
Recreational vehicles (which include motor homes, fifth-wheel trailers, folding camping trailers, travel trailers, truck campers and sports utility RVs) date back to the Model T. In 1922, The New York Times estimated that of 10.8 million cars then on the road, 5 million would be used for motor camping. Initially these “auto campers” just attached tents and other supplies to the outside of their vehicles, but eventually a few craftier individuals were affixing platforms to support canvas tents.
Solid-sided tents were built with cabinetry and wardrobes and also kitchens. Later, in the 1920s, commercial manufacturers began mounting “camp bodies” over auto chassis. During the dry years of Prohibition, even Anheuser-Busch built RVs, advertising in the pages of Field & Stream magazine.
As the towing capacity of automobiles increased, so did the size of house trailers, which by the late 1930s contained built-in iceboxes, kitchen ranges and flushing toilets. Some even had front-mounted airplane-style propellers to drive a wind-powered generator.
Courtesy of AAA California
Recreational vehicles promised to make vacations easier and cheaper. “ ‘Home Sweet Home’ Wherever You Roam,” claimed a 1936 brochure for the Kozy Coach trailer. “Is there anything finer than ‘to get away from it all’ now and then? Out on the water. Hunting through the woods. Tramping over the hills, or just lolling under the open sky. That’s the life!”
Early auto campers were derided as “Gypsies,” “trailer trash” or “tin-can tourists.” In the winter of 1919, a group of 22 families parked their jerry-built mobile shelters at Desoto Auto Park, near Tampa, the first public campground in Florida, and founded the Tin Can Tourists of America, a fraternity of RVers that by 1935 had swelled to some 300,000 members.
Today there are many RV clubs and, of course, blogs. Some cater to specific RV brands, like the Wally Byam Caravan Club, for Airstream owners, founded in 1955, with 5,600 loyal members today. Others are for certain RV lifestyles, like Escapees, a club for “full timers.”
The Greatest RV Rally in the World, which is held three times a year in different parts of the country, was taking place on expo grounds on the outskirts of Redmond, Ore., and was put on by the Good Sam Club, the world’s largest RV club, with 870,000 member families. My friends and I arrived just as the 1960s crooner Bobby Vinton took to the main stage as the evening’s entertainment.
In the registration building, attendees had decorated a map of the United States with pins over their hometowns, which spanned from Hawaii and Alaska to the border town of Pharr, Tex. One RV came from Homestead, at the southern tip of Florida, a 3,191-mile drive away. A yellow Post-it affixed off the Eastern Seaboard read: Germany.
I splurged on a parking site with full electrical and sewage hookup. Many of the 2,500 rigs, sprawled across the sagebrush like a marina of yachts, had American and state flags flapping overhead, or fake flowers in vases that rested on artificial grass rugs beside the front door. Address placards hung in the windows, like “Grammy and Grumpy’s Motorhome.” One motor home in particular caught my eye, possibly the most gaudy vehicle in the lot — or the most awesome: a 45-foot, black-and-tan Country Coach Veranda 400, tricked out with a glass-walled outdoor deck that came off the side of the living room.
I found its owner, Steve Collins of Atkins, Iowa, perched on a leather bar stool on the deck wearing fuzzy bear-paw slippers and sipping a beer. A baseball game played on a 42-inch flat-screen television. The rig was a stunning McMansion on wheels. On the ground beside the motor home lay three electric skateboards, a golf cart, a remote-controlled toy helicopter and a plastic Nascar racer, all of which fit into spacious storage bays below the RV. “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world,” he said, offering me a bottle of Bud. “I’m in awe every time I look at it.”
Mr. Collins said he and his wife leave their RV parked beside their home, behind its own remote-controlled gate. Every so often they take to the road, packing their two Great Danes and a flock of parakeets, which Mrs. Collins had advertised for sale on a lawn chair. When they drive up to a convenience store, kids will ask Mr. Collins if he’s a musician on tour, which flatters him. The RV had a vanity license plate that spelled TOYZILLA. Mr. Collins explained that his wife wanted IGOTMINE, but he didn’t want people hating on him. “My first choice was PRIAPISM,” he said.
The rally featured nightly entertainment, including the country singer Vince Gill (“Howdy campers! Although RVing isn’t really camping.”) and Herman’s Hermits, the 1960s British invasion rock group. Before that show, I joined 1,798 of the rally’s 6,500 attendees in attempting — and, we believed, setting — the Guinness World Record for most simultaneous high-fives (it turns out that a group in Norway had bested the record a couple of weeks earlier).
I also attended a dog show one morning in a tent on the expo grounds. “The doggie swimsuit competition is up first, so get those suits on,” the M.C. announced to kick it off. “If anyone needs a cleanup bag, they’re behind the stage.” More than a dozen RV owners trotted out their pooches, colorfully outfitted in swim caps, plastic sunglasses, bikini bottoms and, in one case, nothing save a red paper crown and sign that read: Nude Beach Queen 2011.
“We’ve got some real canine bathing beauties here, let me tell you,” the M.C. noted. To a soundtrack of Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love,” a black Labrador passed before me in a pink polka-dot one-piece and swimming goggles, followed by a bichon wearing the retired Speedos of his master. There was a fluffy black poodle with pink toenails. Giggles filled the tent after one contestant in the “Double Vision” category (a dog/owner look-alike contest) introduced his pet Chihuahua shepherd. “I know what you all are thinking,” the M.C. said. “Chihuahua-shepherd sex is pretty funny.”
RV rallies have always been about both camaraderie and merchandising, and there were serious deals to be made at the Greatest RV Rally in the World. Vendors hawked RVs, RV awnings, satellite TV packages and concealed-weapons permits, and there were seminars, too, like “Green RVing” (not an oxymoron) and “Feel Better and Keep Energized While on Road” (drink green tea and exercise).
I met a retired couple from Maryland who were heading north to the Columbia River Gorge in Washington after the event. From there, they said, they would just head “wherever the wind blew.” A full-timer from Michigan told me how friends often ask how she could sell her house for a life on the road. “It’s just stuff,” she said. “The way we look at it, we’re home wherever we are.” I may have been one of the younger attendees at the rally, by about 30 years, and probably the only RV driver with a rental, but all this made sense to me. These were travelers inclined to roam, in the words of Cruise America, wherever their spirits took them.
AFTER three days at the rally, my friends and I blew westerly into the Cascades, passing by Crater Lake National Park, which was the magnificent blue hole in the earth that I’d always imagined. Friends had told me about undeveloped hot springs on national forest land down the road. I pulled into a gravel parking lot, beside an outhouse, with the sign: “NUDITY. Nude bathing is common at Umpqua Hot Springs. If this makes you uncomfortable, we recommend you not go into the area.”
Next to my rig was parked a 1966 cream-colored, vegetable-oil-powered Gillis school bus, towing a yellow VW van. Its passengers were milling about. One woman, with yellow dreadlocks, wore a quilted skirt made of leather scraps and a coyote tail. I asked the group where they were headed.
“We’re all Gypsies,” replied one man. “We don’t move on until we get moved on.” Another, who had “I may be lost but I’m Makin good time” scrawled on his pants, said he’d “been from where the wind blows since 1998.”
Their driver was a longhair named Manny, who told me that he’d just picked the others up at the annual Rainbow Gathering, in Washington State. Manny wore frayed overalls and a Grateful Dead shirt under a brown hoodie. His bus had a Family Coach Motorhome Association placard affixed to it, which I’d seen on many RVs at the rally. Just as my mind began to grapple with the cognitive dissonance of holding Manny in the same company as retirees at a Bobby Vinton concert, he said he was also a life member of the Good Sam Club.
“But they kicked me out of one of their campgrounds,” he said nonchalantly. “They said: ‘Your bus is too old. Other campers won’t want to camp beside it.’ Whatever.”
Umpqua attracted the kind of people prone to detour down the side road. Tubs were carved from the rock on a steep riverbank overlooking the misty hemlock forest. In one sat a Japanese family, wearing modest bathing suits. In another tub I chatted with a couple on their way home from a Kinetic Sculpture Race (a contest of human-powered amphibious sculptures) on the Oregon coast. As night fell, a group of neo-pagan women nearby, who had just met at a “summer witch camp” in southern Oregon, sang hymns.
HARVEST HOSTS is the name of a new program that allows RVers to stay free overnight at wineries and farms across the country. (As at the bakery in Shingletown, RVs are O.K., but cars in this case are not.) The annual membership fee is $35, and joining gave me access to a network of hosts, which is how I arrived the next evening at Hillcrest Bonded Winery 44, in nearby Roseburg.
The proprietor and winemaker Dyson DeMara was casual and welcoming. He poured us lovely wines; Hillcrest is one of Oregon’s oldest estate wineries, home to the state’s first pinot noir vines.
He then pointed out a grassy patch beside the tasting room where we could park the rig for the night. Next to it was a stone fire pit stocked with wood. “It’s in the spirit of wine,” Mr. DeMara told me when I asked how he’d become a volunteer host. “In the New World it’s a business, but in the Old World, wine is an open-your-doors kind of thing.”
We drove back across the California border and joined Highway 101 in Crescent City. There I spotted a man on a street corner slumped against a stop sign with a cane, thumbing it. The rig had room and he looked harmless, so I offered him a ride.
His name was Dan. He was 61, a former trucker from North Carolina, and spoke with a polite drawl. He was hitching his way down the coast, taking it as it came. A year earlier, Dan said, he was hospitalized after striking a deer on his Harley. Doctors gave him a short time to live, but he kept living, and figured he’d been dealt a second life. He jumped on a bus going west to Seattle.
Dan was roaming in the manner of Manny and his band of neo-hippie “Gypsies,” just like the Good Sam Club RVers and the Tin Can Tourists a century before them. My rig had brought me a similar freedom: something in which to wander “wherever your spirit takes you,” without reservations. An endless drive-through menu, after all.
Dropping In on Obama's Kenyan Grandmother
SLATE | What it means to be an Obama in Africa.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN SLATE, OCTOBER 28, 2008
KOGELO, Kenya—Last Sunday morning, while Barack Obama stumped in Colorado, his paternal grandmother, 86-year-old "Mama Sarah" Obama, stood before a microphone and a crowd of several hundred villagers on a plot of land in Kogelo. Beside her was Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whose helicopter had descended unexpectedly onto her tin-roofed homestead moments earlier. Streams of excited villagers ran across the surrounding corn and cassava fields and from a soccer game at Senator Barack Obama Secondary School.
Odinga addressed the crowd and the Kenyan TV cameras that followed him in Luo, the local tongue: "Today we have gathered here to say hello to Mama Sarah. The boy from here, he's gone to compete. We are praying for him so that he succeeds. Are you happy with Obama?"
"We are happy!" the crowd responded. "Are you happy with him?""We are!"
Though I may have been the only person for miles around who actually has a vote in the U.S. presidential election, the occasion seemed oddly like a campaign rally. In a sense, it was. For Prime Minister Odinga, who, like the Obamas, belongs to the Luo tribe, and whose loss in a tainted presidential election last December touched off devastating ethnic violence, the appearance with Sarah Obama was not only an expression of solidarity, but also unambiguous political groundwork for what he might one day claim as a direct channel to the White House. For Obama's grandmother, the arrival of the Kenyan prime minister was another indication of how the phenomenal rise of an Obama child has changed the lives of the other Obama family half a world away.
"At the beginning, I thought it was something that would be short-lived, but it's been getting bigger every day," Obama's uncle Said had told me earlier that day on the drive from the provincial city in Kisumu for what I expected would be a quiet interview with the family matriarch. "It will continue to be a major preoccupation—or maybe my employment." Said wasn't referring only to his changed daily routine, which now involves rising at 4 a.m. to track the latest U.S. campaign news on Anderson Cooper 360—"people will ask me to comment on a development, and I don't want to be caught unawares"—before a full workday as a technician for a spirits company, followed by night school for his business management degree. Said was also referring to what it has meant, and what it may mean for at least the next four years, to be an Obama in Kenya: the frequent visits from people asking for money or help getting a U.S. visa; the requests to help sponsor scholarships for study in the United States; and the random pale faces, African dignitaries, and international journalists that have been arriving at Mama Sarah's home on a daily basis for the last year, paying respects and seeking favors and quotes.
"You can't fail to see there's a perception that we are in a better place economically," Said said. "People know that if you are in a senior position, you become rich. Leaders here steal. But our lives go on. We are a hardworking family. We should not just stand idly and think Barack is going to fix everything for us."
A 36-year-old cousin of Barack's, a hairdresser in Nairobi who has returned to Kogelo to support Mama Sarah during the final weeks of the campaign, told me that he tries to maintain a low profile. "I won't be able to walk freely," he said, asking that his name not be publicized out of concern for both unwanted attention and personal safety. His girlfriend, he added, doesn't even know about his family ties to the U.S. senator. "She might think I've been hiding money from her. She'll expect a lot." Last August, Italian Vanity Fair "discovered" Barack's half-brother George, who lives in the marginalized outskirts of Nairobi; his plight was sensationalized by international media and in turn exploited by conservatives who suggested that the candidate doesn't care for his own family. Because of the widely brachiated nature of the Kenyan Obama family tree, as for many traditional African families, notions of family are very complicated. Certainly, the Obamas that Barack seems closest with appear loved, financially secure, and not at all resentful.
A perception of family wealth was likely the motive of an attempted burglary of Mama Sarah's home in September. When I arrived at the homestead, I was met by armed Kenyan police officers posted behind a newly erected 8-foot fence. I was asked to sign a visitors log. Hundreds of names from all over the world had filled the book since the first entry on Sept. 16.
The guards were securing what may be the world's most modest gated compound: With the exception of a small solar panel on the corrugated tin roof of Mama Sarah's two-room home, the most obvious signs of affluence appeared to be a pair of cows, which mooed as I walked in.
Mama Sarah's living room had obviously been configured to accommodate visiting delegations. Several wood couches and chairs were neatly arranged arm-to-arm around the perimeter of the cement floor, their cushions covered by plain white cloths with embroidered fringes. A television draped in a decorative cloth sat atop a table in one corner, and a life- size photo cutout of a smiling Barack presided over the room from another. Other Barack memorabilia and family portraiture hung from the walls: a framed black-and-white image of Barack Obama Sr., an image of Sasha and Malia Obama watering a seedling in front of a Masai tribesman while Barack snapped a picture, and an autographed poster from Barack's Illinois state Senate campaign, signed, "Mama Sarah: Habari! And Love."
"Barack is a good listener," Mama Sarah told me. "He is somebody who pays attention to the plight of people. With those kinds of attributes, I think he will be in a better position to sort out the problems that are bedeviling the world. I think he's got all it takes to be a world leader." Clearly reining in her normally spontaneous personality, Mama Sarah was proud and on-message: "We are leaving everything to God. We know it's been a long wait, and, God willing, we hope that everything is going to be OK."
The day before, in Kisumu, I was talking about Obama to a boatman on Lake Victoria when a nearby car radio blared the following judgment: "God has already chosen Obama on Nov. 4! Who are you to say no?" Nowhere in Kenya—perhaps nowhere in the world outside of blue-state America—is there more optimism about an Obama victory as in Kisumu, a predominantly Luo city on Kenya 's western border with Uganda, which still bears the scars of last winter's election violence. Indeed, the widely held fear that vote-rigging on Nov. 4 could snatch the election from Obama reflects the lingering sentiment among Luos here that Kenya's tainted presidential election—in which Odinga officially lost to Mwai Kibaki—was stolen from them. I've been asked several times, "Do you think John McCain can steal the votes?"
Obama's likeness appears on watch faces, key chains, posters, T-shirts, calendars, and women's shoes. Hawkers offer CDs of Obama-inspired reggae and Luo songs in the open-air bus depot. Mockups of $1,000 bills with Obama's portrait filling the oval are plastered on public minivans. ("I just asked the designer to pimp the van, and it came back like this," the driver told me.) A generation of newborns named "Obama" are entering the world. A schoolteacher in a local village says her students sing Obama songs: "He is a genius/ He is a hero/ He comes all the way from Africa/ To go compete in the land of the whites/ He makes us proud/ For at least he's made Africa known to the world." The campaign 8,000 miles away has been closely observed. When I arrived in town, my tuk-tuk driver offered punditry of the third debate: "For the first 20 minutes, it was competitive and McCain was good, but then Obama was much smarter."
Daniel Otieno, the local bureau chief of Kenya's the Nation newspaper, believes the fierce partisanship is a legacy of the area's early bullfighting days, when Luo clans rallied behind their favored bull. "Barack Obama is their bull," he says, adding that "a victory on Nov. 4 will be felt as a consolation for the Kenyan election." Bundled with that pride is an exaggerated expectation that Obama will support Kenya, and especially the Kisumu area, currently crippled by the country's highest incidence of HIV/AIDS. Unemployment here is rampant, and many of the young and jobless I spoke with believe an Obama presidency will directly improve their lives—a belief that I hope does not turn into resentment if and when they are disappointed.
While the TV cameras rolled in front of Mama Sarah's home, Prime Minister Odinga attempted to temper these expectations. "Kenyans know that Barack will be first and foremost the president of the United States of America, not a Kenyan president in the United States." He added, "Under an Obama presidency, trade and investment between Kenya and the United States will increase. Kenyans hope that there will be more scope for cooperation. We also think that Africa will get more attention than it has received in the past."
With that, Odinga and Mama Sarah walked toward the car that would drive the prime minister to his helicopter. He was a step ahead of her, and just as it seemed he was about to get into the car, a reporter reminded him that Mama Sarah was behind him, anticipating a goodbye. Odinga turned, offered a warm and genuine embrace, and then drove out of the compound.
The villagers dissipated, the reporters disassembled their tripods and climbed into SUVs, and Mama Sarah headed toward the house. Said called out, "Intercept her!" Then he led her by the arm to a waiting chair in the shade of an avocado tree, where a Canadian TV crew was setting up for an interview.
Extended relatives of Barack Obama celebrate his election in Kogelo, Kenya. Credit: Andy Isaacson
In Search of the Best American Truffles
WSJ. | Long considered inferior to European varieties, American truffles are making a comeback with a festival in Oregon and a few highly skilled dogs leading the way.
Tom, a Lagotto Romagnolo, hunting Oregon winter white truffles with his trainer, Jim Sanford. Credit: Laura D'Art
FIRST PUBLISHED IN WSJ. MAGAZINE, APRIL 2014
"ALL RIGHT, TOM, lavora!" barked Jim Sanford at the curly-haired dog sniffing the duff. A cheery, bilingual Lagotto Romagnolo, Tom possesses a nose finely trained to the scent of culinary truffles. Some years ago, Sanford boasted, Tom unearthed 200 pounds of black Périgord truffles in a Tennessee orchard—a haul worth $240,000. On this January morning, Tom hunted the Oregon winter white truffle, a wild fungus that thrives beneath young Douglas firs in the Willamette Valley. I watched as Tom, latching on to a whiff, suddenly dashed over to the trunk of a tree. He raised a leg. "OK, now he's going to pee," Sanford explained. "He always has to approve the stand of woods. I'm Tom, and I approve this forest."
The forest Tom approved of is located behind a bed and breakfast near Eugene. Oregon is home to four of the seven wild culinary truffle species native to North America. At a mushroom symposium here in 1977, James Beard, the dean of American gastronomy and an Oregon native, is said to have tasted a local white truffle and deemed it as good as Italian white truffles. Today, Italian white truffles command $2,000 per pound; Oregon whites, in top form, fetch $400 per pound. At some point, Oregon's wild truffles acquired a reputation as a second-rate talent. It's hard to find one served on a dinner plate outside of Oregon. This frustrates Charles Lefevre, who holds a Ph.D. in forest mycology from Oregon State University, where researchers have been studying truffles for a century. "The market underappreciates it, but we have a culinary treasure here," he said.
In an effort to rehabilitate the stature of American truffles, in 2006 Lefevre and his wife, Leslie Scott, founded the annual Oregon Truffle Festival. It was the first festival of its kind outside of Europe. "Our intention was to stimulate the birth of an industry," Lefevre told me in January. This year's festival, held at the peak of truffle season, sold out. There were truffle forays and truffle-cooking classes and a taste of many things–plus–truffles: beef tenderloin, cured with Oregon white truffles; cupcakes, baked with Oregon black truffle–infused butter; and popcorn dusted with truffled caramel.
Oregon white truffles have a garlicky-cabbage aroma similar to the Alba white truffle, the jewel of Italian cuisine. By a wide consensus, they are not as intense as the Italians, "but what they lack in intensity they make up for in aroma complexity," said Jack Czarnecki, author of the Beard award–winning A Cook's Book of Mushrooms, who holds the only license to produce truffle oil in the United States. The Oregon black truffle—tasting of pineapple and musk—is altogether distinct from the French black Périgords. Over the years, Lefevre has pitted Oregon truffles against the prized Old World varieties in a number of unscientific blind tests. "The Oregon truffles have always come out on top," Lefevre told me. "I would not conclude that the Oregon white truffle is necessarily better. But the European variety still costs me $1,500 a pound, where the Oregon white truffle at that time was $80 a pound."
Truffles are the strange fruit of a fungus. Unlike mushrooms, they develop entirely underground, and when fully ripe, emit a beguiling, aromatic gas—an "eat me" broadcas—designed to lure an animal to spread its spores. Truffles actually mature and ripen over several months, like tomatoes on a vine; an immature truffle has the aroma of a Styrofoam ball. Foragers in Europe use trained dogs or pigs to sniff the ripe ones, ensuring a crop of uniformly high quality; Italian law even mandates the use of dogs. (Sows are drawn to the wild Italian white truffle by a scent that resembles the sex pheromones of male pigs.) In Oregon, mushroom foragers—"hippie harvesters," as one local chef put it to me—have historically used steel rakes to collect local truffles. Raking is an indiscriminate method; it reaps both mature and immature. Early on, odorless truffles—carrying the culinary value of green tomatoes—ended up in the hands of chefs. The reputation stuck.
When Lefevre founded the Oregon Truffle Festival, there were hardly any truffle dogs west of the Mississippi River. In east Tennessee, a plant pathologist named Tom Michaels, a graduate of the same Oregon State University truffle program as Lefevre, was cultivating Périgord truffles using oak trees he'd imported from France. Michaels brought his truffles to Blackberry Farm, a luxury inn at the foot of the Smoky Mountains. He and the proprietors struck a deal: Michaels would supply Blackberry with black truffles if the farm would lend him a dog when he needed.
"This dog started everything," Sanford told me, as we followed Tom following his nose across a carpet of fir needles. "Dove? Dove? Good boy, Tom. Molto bene." After a career as an elephant trainer, Sanford ended up at Blackberry Farm, where he trained Tom to find Michaels's truffles. (Sanford-trained dogs now sell for $6,000 each.) Lefevre, looking to give Oregon truffles their due, recruited Sanford to train dogs at the truffle festival. When Tom trotted into his first Oregon forest, he unearthed 25 ripe winter white truffles in half an hour. I watched him take about a minute to find one, an exhilarating sight. He announced this discovery by quietly pawing the ground: Buried under a few inches of duff, like a rough jewel, was a knobby, golden-colored truffle.
Students at Sanford's training seminar had brought their Labrador retrievers, German shepherds and one poodle. There are now at least four truffle-dog trainers on the West Coast. "It's exploded," Kris Jacobson, a former K9 cop in Eugene who founded Umami Truffle Dogs, said about the demand from chefs for dog-hunted truffles, which cost twice as much as raked truffles.
At Sanford's training I met Jason Germick, a bearded 37-year-old who showed off a bowl containing two dozen freshly picked white truffles. He led a shaggy Lagotto Romagnolo named Aldo—Tom's grandson. Germick had recently left a 12-year career as a financial advisor with JP Morgan Chase in Seattle to "pursue his passions." He saw a fertile opportunity in truffles. His friend owns a few acres in Washington, where they intend to plant oak and hazelnut trees inoculated with Périgords. (It takes five to seven years for a baby tree with Périgord spores to bear fruit.) An Oregon couple I'd met over truffle eggs that morning had a similar plan: They handed me a card for their crowd-funded campaign to build a Perigord truffle orchard.
Lefevre sees an industry for the wild Oregon truffles as well as the lucrative Périgord truffles, which sell for $800 per pound and thrive in the same terroir as the area's grapes. (No one has successfully cultivated the Italian white truffle outside of its native habitat; Lefevre is in the early stages of figuring out how to farm the wild Oregon varieties.) "This group of people is comparable to the demographic that pioneered the wine industry in California 50 years ago," said Lefevre, who has a 14-year-old business, New World Truffieres, selling oak and hazelnut seedlings inoculated with Old World truffles to farmers across North America. In a 2009 feasibility study, Lefevre and his colleagues estimated that sales of cultivated and native truffles produced in Oregon could earn $200 million annually—and bring in $1.5 billion more through other economic benefits, like tourism.
"This is not emus—one of these hobby crops where somebody's just selling an idea but there's not actually a market," Lefevre told me. "There is a big market for truffles already. It's just a matter of figuring out how to do it to reduce the risk, to make it more reliable, more predictable. I believe we are at the very early stages of a burgeoning industry."
How Humanity Is Killing The World: 'Racing Extinction'
WIRED | Attention, humanity! You are ruining the world. And The Cove’s Louis Psihoyos is back to make you confront what you’re doing.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN WIRED, SEPTEMBER 2015
AS A SEAFOOD restaurateur and founder of Sawyer Culinary Adventures, Louie Sawyer sought out exotic tastes for his intrepid Western clientele. During a scouting trip to Hong Kong in 2013, he and five associates dropped by a major shark fin processing facility, run by a short, fast-talking kingpin who goes by the name of Mr. Eddie.
All 14 of the species most prevalent in the shark fin trade are classified as threatened or nearly threatened, partly due to Chinese consumption of shark fin soup, but Hong Kong’s teeming markets are insensitive to this fact. Cluttered storefronts also openly sell endangered sea horses and hawksbill sea turtles, along with elaborate elephant tusk carvings. Mr. Eddie’s operation—“the Walmart of the endangered-species trade,” Sawyer called it—is not in the habit of welcoming camera-toting foreigners, and Mr. Eddie was initially suspicious of the group. He scrutinized their business cards and peppered them with questions. As his gruff manner grew more intimidating, one of Sawyer’s colleagues suggested they ought to leave. It wasn’t until they made for the door that Mr. Eddie relented. “No, it’s OK. Come, come. I show you around here.”
Sawyer’s crew had reason to feel uneasy, considering that their identities were, in fact, a ruse. Louie Sawyer was actually Louis Psihoyos, an activist filmmaker whose first documentary, The Cove, exposed the clandestine slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese seaside town, earning an Academy Award in 2010. His second film, Racing Extinction, airing on the Discovery Channel on December 2, takes up the man-made causes behind what biologists call the sixth mass extinction—the spate of plant and animal losses that threatens to eradicate up to half of all living species on Earth within this century.
During the same week they were in town to collect their Oscar for The Cove, Psihoyos’ team conducted an undercover sting of a Santa Monica, California, restaurant that served whale meat, ultimately shaming the restaurant into closing. Among other stunts portrayed in Racing Extinction: They posed as importers of fish oil supplements to infiltrate a mainland Chinese shark dealer; captured unprecedented footage of humans swimming alongside migratory blue whales in Mexico; and, using a Tesla retrofitted with a powerful projector, blasted the sides of US corporate facilities with images of the animals that their business activities are said to endanger.
In Hong Kong, Mr. Eddie led Psihoyos and his undercover team across an alley to a building with a shark sculpture hanging off the facade. He typed a code into a keypad and slid open the front door to reveal a storage room filled with bags of dried sea creatures. On the walls hung posters that identified various shark species and the characteristics of their fins, which fetch up to $2,000 a pound on the Asian market. Psihoyos and three accomplices wore tiny pinhole cameras disguised as shirt buttons, which had been provided by a specialist who designs covert video surveillance gear for human rights groups and law enforcement agencies. In China, merely wearing such devices is grounds for imprisonment. Two others with Psihoyos, including Shawn Heinrichs, a cinematographer and marine conservationist who’d been kicked out of Mr. Eddie’s facility before for attempting to film, wore digital SLR cameras dangling around their necks, discreetly capturing video.
“It is hard to catch a shark, you know?” Mr. Eddie told the group. “If you get the shark, every part of the shark can be sold for money. So we are not going to throw away any meat from the shark. But a lot of the greenie people, they are misunderstanding our industry. They think we take the fin and let the live shark go down into the sea and die struggling like this. You know, very bad. But that is not the truth. That video is made by the greenies themselves.”
Mr. Eddie was referring to videos like the widely circulated PSA about shark fin soup, created by the environmental organization WildAid and starring Chinese basketball star Yao Ming. It showed a tawny nurse shark in Indonesia lying on the seafloor with its fins dismembered, desperately trying to swim. Heinrichs, who was standing next to Mr. Eddie, had actually shot that footage. Psihoyos and the others made a show of agreeing with Mr. Eddie’s opinion of environmentalists, and the ice was broken. They were in.
Next, Mr. Eddie brought them up to a roof. Against a scenic maritime backdrop stood rack upon rack of severed shark fins—thousands of them—laid out to dry under the sun but out of public view. “Somebody can tell you that there are 70 million sharks being killed for the fin trade every year, but when you actually see the evidence and witness this gorgeous animal being reduced to piles of appendages, there’s a horror that becomes rage,” Psihoyos says later. “Especially when you know it’s a nutritionless and tasteless fabrication from a bygone era.” Downstairs, in a small showroom off the street, wood-paneled cases displayed dried sea animals. Mr. Eddie held up a worm. “44,800 US dollars per kilo,” he boasted. “44,800. It is a wholesale price! They believe—that’s why I say, they believe—it can cure cancer.”
He grinned. “Chinese have a lot of beliefs.”
Psihoyos documents shark fins drying on a rooftop in Hong Kong. Credit: Shawn Heinrichs
This eco-vigilante approach has become Psihoyos’ signature brand of filmmaking. “The Cove was the result of watching too many James Bond movies and Jacques Cousteau specials as a kid,” he says. The film wrapped an environmental documentary around a caper flick—PBS meets Ocean’s 11. A reviewer for The New York Times called it “one of the most audacious and perilous operations in the history of the conservation movement.”
Psihoyos wears such descriptions as a badge of honor. “Most documentaries feel like you’re going to a medical lecture, where you’re just getting a lot of facts but there’s no story. The goal is to be a fly on the wall,” he tells me at a Santa Monica hotel, after a late night spent at the Port of Los Angeles projecting blue whale images from the Tesla. (Between 1988 and 2012, there were 100 reported cases of large whales struck by ships along the California coast.) “But if you can wrap that around a tale of adventure, of thrill and redemption, and tell a really goddamned good story, people will listen to almost anything. When people see our films, I want them to feel like they landed in a different world, like, this is not my beautiful life. We’re trying to wake people up to what is actually going on.”
Psihoyos is 58, with silver hair and an unassuming Midwestern accent. He describes Racing Extinction as “a real-life Avengers.” In the film, he visits the scientists and activists working on the front lines of a global catastrophe: Earth, they tell us, is losing species 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of extinction. The baiji river dolphin, Western black rhino, and golden toad are among the disappeared in recent years; the population of Maui’s dolphins in New Zealand has plummeted by half since 2004—there may be as few as 43 of them left. Blue whales in the southern oceans are down to just a fraction of historical levels, and plankton production is just 40 percent of what it was a half century ago. Forty-one percent of all amphibians are considered threatened. “We’re losing species faster than we can describe them,” Psihoyos laments. “When you’re talking about losing all of nature, it’s no longer a spectator sport. Everybody has to become active somehow.”
Psihoyos came to his own activism by way of journalism. In the mid-1970s he was among a breed of so-called concerned photographers—“a highfalutin name for people who try to affect social issues with photography,” as he puts it. His early subjects included Pete Seeger, who was then campaigning to clean up chemical pollutants in the Hudson River. Psihoyos recalls sitting around a campfire with the folksinger and other musicians after a concert. “These people were trying to dream of a better world,” he says. “And they actually made it happen.”
In 1980, Psihoyos was hired by National Geographic. His first assignments for the magazine were to document the rise of recycling and the environmental fallout of Wyoming’s energy boom. He shot four stories around the world about the Mesozoic era—the age of dinosaurs—assignments where “extinction was always in the back of your mind.” He soon earned a reputation for elaborately constructed portraits and expensive conceptual projects. For a 1995 feature on the information revolution, Psihoyos had Bill Gates hoisted 55 feet above a forest floor in a sling, over a tall stack of paper, to demonstrate the volume of information that at the time could be stored on a single CD-ROM.
Psihoyos befriended Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, while shooting his cover portrait for Fortune. At the time, Clark was building a 155-foot sailing yacht namedHyperion. The two became scuba buddies. Clark took Psihoyos to some of his favorite dive spots around the world. In Papua New Guinea, they encountered a once-thriving reef in a state of ruin. During a trip to the Galápagos Islands, they watched as longline fishermen pillaged a protected marine sanctuary. “Jim turned to me and said, ‘Somebody should do something about this,’” Psihoyos recalls. “And I said, ‘We’ll use your money and my eye, and we’ll make films.’”
In 2005, Clark provided the seed money to fund the nonprofit Oceanic Preservation Society, installing Psihoyos as its executive director. Clark then built what Psihoyos calls the best underwater camera in the world, which has an 80-megapixel sensor and a custom-fitted glass dome that produces no color aberrations. “We call it the doomsday camera, because we take this camera and document the best surviving reefs in the world, in a resolution that nobody’s ever been able to see,” Psihoyos says. “My entire career is built on this notion that we can show people something they haven’t seen before in a way that they’ve never visualized—images that make it impossible for people to forget.”
The story of mass extinction is in part a story about global warming, whose main cause is ubiquitous yet mostly invisible to the human eye. So in Racing Extinction, Psihoyos employs an infrared camera fitted with a color filter that brings into stark relief the sources of carbon dioxide in our environment—the lawn blowers, smokestacks, and parades of smoldering tailpipes on a rush-hour freeway. Seen through the camera, an Airbus 380 gliding down the runway at LAX appears dragonlike, billowing gas. In a voice-over, Psihoyos reflects: “To be able to see this hidden world, it’s like you’re let in on a magic trick, but the magic trick is actually killing the planet.”
The retrofitted Tesla projects a blue whale onto a building. Credit: Andrew Eckmann
The black Tesla Model S is parked a bit too conspicuously across from the Shell oil refinery in Martinez, California, a sprawling complex of scaffold towers and gaseous plumes that resembles a launchpad. It’s late one night in March 2014, and the road is quiet. Two GoPro cameras are aimed at Leilani Münter, a dark-haired Nascar driver who races under the moniker Carbon Free Girl and who sits behind the wheel of the Tesla in black faux-leather pants and pumps. The rear seats have been stripped and replaced with a 24-volt lithium-ion battery pack and solid-state drive. The back window has been removed to install a 15,000-lumen video projector mounted on a retractable steel frame that can extend and pivot in any direction like the artillery cannon on a Batmobile.
The Tesla retrofit is the brainchild of Travis Threlkel, a former techno-psychedelic-folk rocker who cofounded Obscura Digital, a San Francisco company that has pioneered immersive-projection and object-mapping technologies, real-time holographic displays, and Minority Report-esque multitouch displays. For scenes that appear inRacing Extinction, Threlkel’s team orchestrated rogue projections of endangered species across New York City. Sharks swam across the facade of the Stock Exchange; the words “Acidifying the Oceans” ran like a news ticker along the exterior of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. During last year’s Climate Summit, with permission from the United Nations, Obscura projected a vivid short film about extinction featuring Jane Goodall onto the iconic Secretariat Building. Throngs watched from the sidewalks. “With projection you can make people see things in new ways,” says Threlkel, wearing cowboy boots and a vintage polyester shirt. “Once you break out of the rectilinear format, the observer is more open to getting a message.” The filmmakers bought the Tesla after meeting with Elon Musk himself, who appears in Racing, and Obscura embellished the exterior with a coat of electroluminescent paint, which can toggle the car’s color from black to luminous blue when a current is applied. “It’s like a modern-day Bond car,” Psihoyos says.
The crew has permission from the city of Martinez to film the Tesla “and trains,” although the part about trains was of course a feint. They are here to capture their own projections of the chemical symbols of hazardous air pollutants onto the refinery’s towers.
Within 10 minutes, a security guard appears across the road in the empty parking lot of a liquor store. Two Contra Costa County Sheriff cars arrive soon after, followed by two men in a truck with amber warning lights, who step out in red jumpsuits emblazoned with the Shell logo. Psihoyos and his coproducer, Gina Papabeis, talk to the authorities as the film crew slyly rolls the camera from a distance. Handing over the permit, they explain that they are there to film an electric car promotion.
Papabeis wears a button camera, while Psihoyos holds a plastic water bottle that conceals a tiny videocam. The Shell guard explains that the US Department of Homeland Security now regards oil refineries as critical infrastructure, and anyone caught filming them must be reported.
Psihoyos denies any such intention, but gesturing to the towers looming beyond the fence across the road, asks, “What if we photographed your smoke?” The Shell guard quickly corrects him, saying that the heaving emissions are only steam. Looking down at the phone in his hand, Psihoyos begins reading off the names of chemicals that oil refineries are known to release: “Sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide—”
“For someone who’s not here to film a refinery, you sure seem to know a lot about them,” the guard says. (Psihoyos tells me later, “There might have been a minute of theater in there, but I just wanted to get him to think.”) It’s time to move on. The crew retracts the projector, and Psihoyos drives off with Münter in the Tesla.
A few days later, we’re sitting by the pool at a Santa Monica hotel as Psihoyos recounts a story that occurred 30 years prior but still seems to haunt him. While living as an artist in New York, he drove one weekend down to a flea market in Perkiomenville, a town outside Philadelphia, to collect found objects. A family of four walked ahead of him, past tables of antiques and junk. Psihoyos noticed a pickup truck with large side mirrors pull up behind them. “I could see from my angle that this mirror might hit the family,” Psihoyos recalls. “It’s a busy flea market, people are laughing, there’s music going. I started to scream, and I felt people looking around at me like, what are you doing?” And so Psihoyos muted himself. “Do you ever scream in public?” he asks. “No, it’s very uncomfortable.”
It was just a moment of self-conscious silence. But by the time Psihoyos gathered himself and yelled out again, the truck’s side mirror had smacked the son and daughter, knocking the children down beneath the vehicle. “They died right in front of me,” Psihoyos says. His lips are quivering. “Blue-fucking-sky day, and I realized that it was my weakness. This family was crushed; two lives were extinguished. And it was because I was too fucking embarrassed to scream in a crowd.”
Psihoyos brushes a tear with his finger, becoming more impassioned. “Now, if you believe that we’re losing half the species on the planet and it’s because of our behavior? If we’re burning oil because it’s cheap? We’re losing this world before we have a chance to understand that it’s here. I think about that family that died because I couldn’t speak up, and now I look at my whole world dying. Everything that we’ve known. I don’t mind being the guy screaming in the room at this point. If I can tell it in a beautiful, elegant way and take people on an interesting ride, I’ll scream as loud as I can.”
The 36,201 FT (Deep) Man
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE | It was one of the last great feats of exploration: Diving alone, in a sub, to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. For three years the quest consumed an idealistic engineer and a single-minded record-setter. This is their untold story.
THE MAVERICK: Engineer Graham Hawkes and his team show off their latest invention: Super Falcon. Credit: Douglas Adesko
FIRST PUBLISHED IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE, OCTOBER 2009
WHEN STEVE FOSSETT strapped himself inside a two-seat stunt plane and took off into a bluebird Nevada morning on September 3, 2007, he was on the verge of his most remarkable achievement. The famed aviator, the only person ever to travel around the world nonstop and alone by both plane and balloon, was in the final stages of planning a journey to the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. If successful, he would be the first to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench—36,201 feet down, 190 miles southwest of Guam—since U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard in 1960. The consummate record-setter, Fossett wanted to gain the spot, called Challenger Deep, alone.
At the start of the project, there wasn’t a submersible in the world that could dive much below 21,000 feet. The water pressure at the bottom of the ocean is a crushing 16,000 pounds per square inch, nearly the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus. Fossett’s search for a sub capable of withstanding those conditions led him to an engineer named Graham Hawkes. After a career at the forefront of deep-sea exploration, the British-born Hawkes had begun work on a new type of submersible, one that cruised through the ocean more like anairplane than a hot-air balloon, astraditional subs do. He had success-fully tested three prototypes onshallow missions, setting a solo diverecord of a thousand feet in theprocess. But in an age of roboticexploration, he had struggled tofinance his manned projects.
Fossett first called Hawkes in early 2000. It was apparent from the start, however, that the two had conflicting agendas. Most notably: Hawkes wanted to be in the driver’s seat. “Look back to the early days of aviation,” he says. “The guys designing the aircraft were the same guys building it and the same guys flying it. The whole challenge was one ball of wax.” Hawkes offered to build two subs—one for himself and one for his client—but Fossett declined. He wasn’t interested in a Walsh-Piccard reprise. (“I’m not a passenger type of person,” he once said.) Hawkes then offered to test the sub fully before handing it over to Fossett. “That probably ended any chance of our becoming buddies,” Hawkes recalls. Fossett responded with a wry smirk and insisted on retiring the machine to the Smithsonian after a single deep dive. A deal could not be reached.
It took more than four years for Hawkes to reconsider his position. “Ultimately, Steve was right,” he says. “His argument was, ‘I’ll get the record, you’ll get the technology.’ I came to realize that that was fair.” Hawkes reached out to Fossett in November 2004, and the two met at Fossett’s palatial vacation home in Carmel, California. “We presented Steve with various records that I felt we could help him break in addition to Challenger Deep, but he was only interested in the big one,” Hawkes says. “He liked that this would be a record no one could ever beat.” They agreed that Fossett would finance research and development of the sub, called Deep Flight Challenger, after the Royal Navy vessel that surveyed the trench in 1951. Hawkes would own the intellectual property. Fossett would get the record. The project would be kept secret until the very last minute.
HAWKES OCEAN TECHNOLOGIES occupies a modest, low-lying office complex in a marina on the San Francisco Bay. The work- shop, a cluttered 2,000-square-foot space, resembles the stock- room of an air and space museum, with cold cement floors, shelves stocked with parts, and a few computers rendering CAD drawings. Hawkes’s first breakthrough, Deep Flight 1, rests by the door. Sleek and lightweight, with a pair of stubby inverted wings, the microsubmersible dove to 3,000 feet in 1996, laying the groundwork for Challenger a decade later.
On the day I visit, Hawkes is dressed casually in a sweater and jeans, with disheveled hair and a couple days’ worth of stubble. The 61-year-old engineer doesn’t care much for chitchat, preferring instead to occupy his mind with the task of solving problems. “We can be at a dinner party,” says his wife, Karen, “and I’ll look over at Graham, staring off into the distance, using his hands to shape something in the air. When I ask him where he is, he’ll say he just designed a critical part of a submersible.” On his first ski trip Hawkes was so unhappy with his boots that he devised a new pair. He is chronically searching for his car keys, wallet, and glasses, Karen says, devoting little mental space to “the mundane details of life.”
A born engineer, Hawkes wasn’t always interested in the sea. But after graduating from England’s Borough Polytechnic Institute in 1969, he saw opportunity in the deep and took a job designing underwater swimmer delivery vehicles for the British Special Forces. “Ocean engineering was so back- wards that I knew I could just make leaps and bounds,” he says. In 1979 Hawkes invented the Wasp, an atmospheric diving suit for offshore oil workers, and in 1981, the Mantis, a microsubmersible with mechanical arms. Throughout the 1980s he designed multiple versions of Deep Rover— one of which was used by owner James Cameron to film Aliens. But after creating more than 60 robotic microsubs for the offshore oil and gas industries, Hawkes shifted his focus to manned submersibles. He wanted to go underwater himself.
The world of manned ocean exploration has long been dominated by a handful of government-backed oceanographic institutions operating five subs. The Russians own Mir 1 and 2; France, Nautile; the Japanese, Shinkai 6500. (China has also reportedly neared completion of a submersible that could reach 23,000 feet.) The U.S. Navy maintains the oldest and most productive vessel, Alvin, a three-person sub built in 1964 and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. All of these vessels work in much the same way: A devoted support ship drops the heavy sub overboard. Loaded with steel weights, the craft sinks. After the scientists inside do some close-range exploring—Alvin’s current floor time is around four hours—the pilot jettisons the weights, and the sub surfaces.
In Hawkes’s view, these submersibles are like mainframe computers, too heavy and expensive to be practical. (Alvin, which Woods Hole is spending $21 million to update, weighs 35,200 pounds and requires a crew of 30.) Hawkes blames the subs’ design (or lack thereof) for the sorry state of ocean exploration. “We’ve explored 5 percent of the seas—at best,” he says. “I love Alvin, but who dreams of diving in an underwater elevator?” Hawkes’s deep-flight concept is his answer to the status quo. With inverted wings and five-prop thrusters, the subs weigh one-seventh as much as traditional manned submersibles, travel seven times as far, and cost much less to own and operate. According to Hawkes, they also “bridge the imagination gap” for a new generation of private underwater explorers. “There is something about the freedom to fly that strikes a chord with the human spirit,” he says. “People intuitively understand it. It sets them daydreaming.”
In Fossett, Hawkes found a kindred spirit, someone who immediately understood the value of his flying submersibles. He also found a piggy bank for what he now calls his “era of experimentation.” “I always thought that building a sub to go to full ocean depth would be what I’d do when I was 90,” he says. “For a submersible engineer, reaching 37,000 feet is the holy grail.”
DURING THE FIRST MISSION to Challenger Deep, Piccard and Walsh dove in Trieste, a then revolutionary bathyscaphe designed by Piccard’s father, Auguste. But after a four-day journey to the dive site through rough Pacific seas, the vessel wasn’t in top form. “[It] looked like a victim of battle rather than an undersea laboratory,” Piccard wrote in the August 1960 edition of National Geo- graphic. Confined to a 50-foot-diameter spherical hull, Piccard and Walsh descended “at the speed of an elderly elevator,” sitting on stools and eating Hershey’s chocolate bars. Suddenly, at 32,500 feet, they heard a sharp cracking sound; the cabin trem- bled. “Could we have encountered an undersea monster?” Pic- card asked. “Could it be shrimps?” (It was a damaged Plexiglas viewing port—not life threatening.) After nine hours, Trieste landed with a thud on a layer of diatomaceous ooze. It was, as Piccard wrote, “a region of eternal calm, an immense mysterious domain where the fish of the deeps open their avid eyes in the darkness.” After spotting a foot-long fish with round eyes on the top of its head, and red shrimp, they dropped lead pellets and returned to the surface.
Fifty years later, Challenger had a farmore graceful flight plan. Cheyenne, thecatamaran that Fossett sailed to anaround-the-world record in 2004, was retrofitted to ferry the ultra- light sub from San Francisco across the Pacific to the Mariana Trench. Strapped stomach-down, Fossett would fall aggressively at seven miles an hour in a thousand-foot-wide spiral. After one hour and 46 minutes, an acoustic beam would detect the seafloor nearly seven miles down. A hundred and fifty feet before touching bot-tom, Fossett would flip a switch, the lead weights would drop off, and the craft would become slightly positively buoyant—lighter than the water it travels through. By activating the sub’s thrusters, Fossett could explore up to 12 miles of the seafloor and locate the absolute deepest spot on the planet.
If Challenger’s descent was straightforward, its construction was anything but. To limit costs, Hawkes scavenged for parts. He bought lithium-ion batteries in China similar to the one used in the Tesla electric car. He covered the wing lights in repurposed sapphire crystal. For buoyancy, he custom-ordered blocks of syntactic foam, an epoxy embedded with billions of microscopic glass spheres. “Cost a fortune,” Hawkes says. “Only half a dozen companies in the world build deepwater flotation, but they had never been this deep. We said, ‘We’ll give you the contract if you’ll give us some samples.’ Three of them couldn’t resist the challenge.”
Designing the hull presented the greatest hurdle. At 36,201 feet deep, the sub would have to withstand 16,000 pounds of pres- sure per square inch. The Trieste survived the crushing force by brute strength: Its spherical hull was reinforced with thick steel walls. Most conventional submersibles today, including Alvin and Shinkai 6500, use lighter titanium, but the material can’t handle pressures much below 20,000 feet. Hawkeswould need to design a new composite material four times stronger than titanium.
Fortunately, Hawkes knew that a U.S. Navy scientist named Jerry Stachiw had been secretly working on the same problem at the National Deep Submergence Facility, in San Diego, two decades earlier. At the time the Navy was interested in developing light- weight, cylindrical hulls for unmanned vessels that could dive below 20,000 feet, and Stachiw had researched different composites, including ceramics, glass, and carbon. Hawkes called up Stachiw, since retired, and asked him to be a consultant on the project. “It just happened that the diameter of the cylindrical hull we were looking for was very close to the one Jerry had been developing,” says Hawkes. “So we picked up where he left off. We’d just need to push the strength of materials another 10 to 20 percent and we were home free.”
Hawkes subcontracted the hull to a company in California that builds composite mate- rials for industrial applications. “They were very, very confident,” Hawkes recalls. “I gave then a set of numbers. They gave me a margin that they expected to hit. But they didn’t get there. It was just failure after failure.”
ONCE A MONTH Fossett drove up from Carmel to check on Challenger’s progress, usually arriving in some exotic car—an Aston Martin, or a Mercedes McLaren—that Hawkes’s engineers took great interest in. Fossett was accustomed to delays in his projects, and his feelings about the sub’s setbacks were inscrutable. “There was no small talk,” Hawkes recalls. “I’d say, ‘We had a failure here, and this is what we need to do to fix it.’ He’d just sit there and”—Hawkes nods his head up and down—“seem to agree, but you had no idea.”
By age 63, Fossett, who built his fortune as an aggressive commodities trader, had set 115 new world records. His public image was that of a balding, paunchy man standing alongside expensive machines in jumpsuits. (Richard Branson once described him as “a sort of half android, half Forrest Gump.”) There was Fossett in a gray outfit after completing his solo, round-the-world hot-air balloon journey; in a yellow suit, next to the glider he flew into the stratosphere; in a white Virgin Atlantic onesie, waving beside the single-engine jet aircraft in which he circumnavigated the globe, nonstop, on one tank of gas.
But whatever drove Fossett to devote himself so completely to record setting remains a mystery. Publicly, he was demure. “I have a very low boredom threshold,” he once said. “It’s internal. It doesn’t lend itself to explanation.” Will Hasley, co-author of Fossett’s autobiography, suspects that an explanation lies in Fossett’s roots as a Boy Scout (an organization he supported throughout his life, serving on the national board). “I think part of his drive as an adult was still as a Boy Scout getting merit badges,” Hasley says. “Only the merit badges were world records.”
Hawkes recalls Fossett’s single-mindedness vividly. “I remember thinking, It’s such a shame that the guy writing the checks doesn’t get satisfaction out of the process,” he says. “We’re engineers, so there is pleasure in the process. The guy’s so focused, all he wants to hear is, ‘We’re done, we’re moving on.’”
Engineer and financier danced around differences in style—Hawkes pushing for more flair, Fossett reining him in. “I’d say, ‘Well, if you’re going down there, let’s not put on blaring lights and destroy the eyeballs of all the creatures. Let’s try something more subtle.’ And he would ask, ‘How much would that cost?’ Steve was adamant that he did not want to pay for unnecessary R&D. He was singularly focused on his record. Which meant get- ting down and back safely”—Hawkes corrects himself—“no, getting down alive. I would now, knowing him, drop the word ‘safely.’”
As the project progressed, Hawkes tried to convince Fossett that Challenger meant more than a record. “We’d sit at lunch and I’d say, ‘Steve, if you look at the path of human development: We had to explore the continents. We had to sail across the seas. We had to go into space. And we have to go down there. Circling the globe on one tank of gas is optional. Circling the globe in a balloon is a brilliant, beautiful piece of science art, but it’s optional. Getting human access to full ocean depth is not optional.’
“He began to agree with me, but per- haps he was already heading there. To take credit for influencing Steve Fossett,” Hawkes chuckles, “is a little optimistic.”
A YEAR INTO the project, Jerry Stachiw, the hull consultant, died. A year later, with millions invested, Fossett was growing impatient. He wanted to press for- ward by eliminating safety precautions required for commercial subs. “An escape for the pilot is mandatory for anything you sell,” Hawkes says. “We didn’t build one. Steve didn’t want any costs associated with a likely unnecessary.”
Hawkes wanted to continue testing the materials’ strength. The carbon composite hull had successfully reached a safety factor of 1.5 (the American Bureau of Shipping strength and performance standard for commercial vessels), but Hawkes hoped to reach 2. “I wanted this thing to be bulletproof. But Steve said, ‘No, we’ve spent enough money, go with what you’ve got.’”
To those who knew him, Fossett was not a daredevil. He was meticulous and methodical, and he carefully planned his endeavors to minimize risk. “Everything he’s done, he’s taken a calculated risk with,” Richard Branson has said. But this was not the first time Fossett disagreed with his engineer about safety. According to Hasley, the record-setter and Burt Rutan debated the readiness of Virgin Atlantic, the single-engine aircraft Fossett piloted around the world in 2005. Rutan, the engineer, wanted another six months of testing. “Steve said, ‘I know that the plane is safe enough. You’ve minimized the risk enough for me to take possession of it.’ Steve would do his own rating of the risk level he was willing to take. He would sometimes believe, OK, this is the safety I need to feel comfortable.”
In May 2007 Challenger was ready for its first full-scale trial. Hawkes secured a test facility at the Applied Research Laboratory Building at Penn State, where the Navy tests torpedoes. Hawkes and his team of six were there, as was Fos- sett. In previous tests the engineers had built scale models to evaluate material strength. Implosions would occur without warning, jolting the ground and rattling their nerves. This test would simulate a depth of 37,000 feet with 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. It was late in the day when Challenger was lowered into a tank, its systems running, lights flashing, and life support systems in full operation.
Everything appeared to go smoothly. The hull survived, intact. But as the sub was lifted out of the tank someone noticed a small crack in the glass observation dome. It was, Hawkes reflected, “a spectacular failure.” Fossett was stoic. Hawkes was perplexed. “The data from the test was difficult to understand,” he says. “Some of it was so anomalous that I dismissed it. Steve wanted answers right then, and I didn’t have them. It was intense. We were all shell-shocked.”
Hawkes was desperate to figure out why the glass had failed, but it wasn’t until the next morning, once Fossett had left and his team had gone to the facility to dismantle the sub, that he had a moment alone to review the data. “OK, Graham, I said, sup- posing this anomalous stress pattern data wasn’t anomalous but was real. What could that mean? Suddenly this lightbulb went off in my head: Oh my God.”
It occurred to Hawkes that if the glass dome sealing the hull was beveled and did not sit flush on its titanium base, the pres- sure would have been distributed unevenly, causing the dome to crack. “They’re about to dismantle the sub and we’ll never know, so I ran a quarter mile to the facility and beat the hell out of the door. I couldn’t speak I was so out of breath. I said, ‘Don’t dismantle this thing, I’ve got to get inside!’”
Challenger was still dripping wet. Hawkes needed to climb into the cockpit to check if there was space between the dome and the titanium rings. “I figured if the gap was four-thousandths of an inch or more, that would account for it. The guy that runs the place was dubious. He lifted the glass and I climbed inside and said, ‘OK, put the glass back on.’ They’re like, ‘You don’t have life support, are you gonna be all right?’ I said, ‘Put the freaking glass on. I’ll give you hand signals!’”
Hawkes, now reclining inside the hull, fished for a dollar bill in his pocket. “I couldn’t see the gap, so I wanted to see if I could poke a bill in between the rings. And damned, it went in. So I got another one. If two got in, that was a big problem. Two went in. I didn’t have any more dollars. I got them to open the glass. ‘Anyone have a dollar?’ I asked. They’re all fussing for bills. Well, I got seven of these things in.”
The error was an embarrassment for Hawkes—a manufacturing issue, not a design failure—but it would set the project back several months and hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Steve was really disappointed,” Hawkes says. “I thought it was over. But at that point he was more interested in time than money.”Fossett, having now spent $3 million, was eager to manage the project more closely. “He saw his risk areas as the design and testing,” Hawkes recalls. “He would consistently ask, ‘Is the design done?’ When I said yeah, he said, ‘Well, the job of your team is kind of done.’ ‘Like hell it is,’ I said. ‘The devil’s in the details.’” Fossett eventually fired the project manager. “That kind of made matters worse,” Hawkes says. “Still, I was surprised about how it went forward with him micromanaging. We just wanted to get this thing done.”
Then, a little over two years ago and a few weeks before the initial open-water test for Challenger, Fossett took off in a two-seat Super Decathlon from the Flying M Ranch in Nevada, heading south along U.S. Route 395. He never returned. The next day Hawkes received word of his disappearance and rallied the team to western Nevada for a ground search. Back in the Bay Area, Karen Hawkes scrambled to enlist helicopters and volunteers for the effort. After six futile days scouring the rugged terrain by truck and on foot, they returned home. In November 2007 an Illinois court declared Steve Fossett dead. His plane was found a year later by a hiker out on a morning walk.
THIS SPRING AN unmanned submersible operated by Woods Hole became one of the first vessels to reach Challenger Deep since Piccard and Walsh in 1960. The hybrid remotely operated vehicle (HROV), named Nereus, was tethered to a surface ship via a hair-thin cable that provided electrical power and transmitted high- speed broadband video and data. “We’re on the verge of being able to do an awful lot of this exploration the way we’ve been exploring Mars—with fairly smart robotic vehicles that can go around and investigate and report back,” says Laurence Madin, director of research at Woods Hole. National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic in 1985, is just as bullish on the future of unmanned exploration. “I’m not looking for a spiritual experience while diving,” Ballard says. “I’m looking for discoveries. I’m looking for results.”
Dan Howard, superintendent of the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanc- tuary, recently spoke with Hawkes about using his flying machines for deep-ocean research. Howard sees certain advantages to manned exploration—including depth perception, peripheral vision, and on- the-spot evaluation—but he questions Hawkes’s approach. “Graham’s selling point was how deep and how fast his submersibles travel,” Howard says. “Our question to him was, How slow can it go? How maneuverable is it at very low speeds?”
Ultimately, perhaps Hawkes’s best defense for his deep-flight technology may be sentimental, rather than scientific. “You send a robot to explore Mars,” he says, “but would you build a robot to climb Everest?” The exploration of our planet, Hawkes believes—the quest to reach and discover new frontiers on Earth—is a fundamentally human endeavor. And as Challenger neared completion, Fossett had come to agree. “Initially the idea was a one-shot dive and then it goes in the Smithsonian,” Hawkes says. “Then the program sort of changed. Steve would talk about forming a foundation for underwater exploration.”
Challenger is still housed in Hawkes’s San Francisco workshop, but the unfinished vessel now belongs to Fossett’s estate. If Hawkes wanted to continue the project, he’d have to come up with a substantial amount of cash he doesn’t have. “Maybe it’s a self-protection mechanism, but I’m not devastated,” he says. “The numbers work. I understand the process now. For an engineer, that’s 99 percent of it.” Hawkes has started designing “work” versions of the sub that can accommodate two passengers and include functions useful to researchers, such as robotic arms. And two years ago, Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley venture capital titan, paid Hawkes $1.5 million to develop Super Falcon, a two-person submersible that Perkins could launch from his megayacht, The Maltese Falcon. Hawkes built two, one for Perkins and another for himself, using much of the same technology, hardware, and systems he’d devised for Challenger. “Steve brought this technology up to speed,” Hawkes says. “He has paved the way for others to explore.”
Hawkes sees Super Falcon as his greatest achievement. He calls it “a sculpted piece of beauty” and a manned sub for the digital age. Perkins, whose fortune was built with a keen eye for technology (like Google), agrees, calling it a masterpiece. John Scully, the former CEO of Apple Computer, said of the sub after a test ride: “If Apple wanted to build an underwater spaceship, this is the one it would build.”
Early one morning this past summer, I visited Hawkes in Monterey, California, to dive in Super Falcon. Hawkes had spent a month operating the sub from a dock in Monterey Bay, training would-be recreational pilots and pitching influential people—ocean researchers, politicians, capitalists. The day I was there, he was coaching Greg Bemis, an entrepreneur who owns salvage rights to the notorious R.M.S. Lusitania.
Super Falcon looks like something between a hammerhead shark and George Jetson’s hatchback. “This is not your father’s submersible,” Hawkes announced. His team of three engineers and interns slid the 4,000-pound sub down a boat ramp from the back of an SUV. After a Zodiac towed it out of the marina, Hawkes took over using a single joystick.
Graham Hawkes in the Super Falcon. Credit: Andy Isaacson
The visibility was terrible that day—a thick green plankton bloom clouded our view of Monterey’s kelp forest—but we were flying nonetheless, traveling through the currents the way most subsea creatures do, with the exception, perhaps, of the chambered nautilus and humans in conventional subs. After dipping down 70 feet, Hawkes pointed the vessel up, pressing me into my seat as the water gradually lightened above my head. We breached the surface like a whale and floated lazily in the harbor. Sea lions eyed us warily.
As Super Falcon reached the boat ramp, with water dripping off its wingtips, I thought about a moment in Hawkes’s workshop a few months before. We were standing in front of what’s left of Challenger. Propped up by metal beams, the hull was surprisingly small, hardly bigger than the five-foot-eleven Fossett. It looked like a cast-aside piece of scrap metal, not a one-of-a-kind carbon composite. Hawkes looked down at the sub, taking the mea- sure of a three-year labor of love that he cannot afford to buy back and fly himself. “What you’re looking at,” he said, “is a moon launch, and the rest of the world is just trying to reach orbit.”
Channing Tatum and the Quest for the Perfect Buzz
MEN'S FITNESS | How two young entrepreneurs and one Hollywood A-Lister, with the help of a caffeinated Amazonian “super leaf,” are trying to shake up the $30 billion energy-drink market with a healthier alternative.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN MEN'S FITNESS, MARCH 2015
CHANNING TATUM HAS A RECURRING DREAM in which he sprints furiously across an unfamiliar landscape, then, arms outstretched, takes flight, soaring above the terrain like a hang glider. A version of this dream comes to him one night in spring of 2014, while dozing in a hammock deep inside Ecuador’s rainforest. This time he runs up a hill dotted with tall trees. At the crest stands a forbidding wall that rises as he draws nearer. Barefoot, he bounds up the wall and, reaching the top, sees a vast territory unfurling toward the horizon. He pauses, then plunges down the other side.
The next morning Tatum recounts the details of the dream to a group of us sitting on tree stumps around a smoldering fire, in a remote indigenous Sápara settlement near the border of Peru. The villagers have painted our cheeks with a reddish pigment made from tree seeds, issued us each Sápara names (Tatum takes “Tsamaraw,” which means “protector spirit”), and blown tobacco smoke into our faces to expel negative energy.
In our hands are coconut shells that contain a caffeinated elixir we’ve traveled 4,000 miles to find: guayusa, a plant native to the western Amazon, whose green, elliptical leaves have been a staple of the region’s indigenous populations for thousands of years.
The Sápara drink guayusa (“gwhy-YOU-sa”) for stamina, and as a tool to interpret dreams. Shipibo medicine men in Peru prescribe a strong, guayusa-based drink to patients who suffer from trauma, as a way to conquer fear. The Kichwa people, in Ecuador’s northern jungle, say the plant also kills hunger, and often pack guayusa leaves as their only sustenance on long hunting expeditions.
A Kichwa man had described to me the mystical circumstances surrounding the discovery of the plant’s energy-boosting properties. It was during an era of tribal warfare; one night the spirit of a tree told a sleeping Kichwa sentinel, “Hey friend, I can help you.” The sentinel awoke to find a bush rustling nearby. He chewed its leaves, and immediately felt alert and animated. Today the Kichwa refer to guayusa as “the night watchman’s plant.”
Tatum, the star of Foxcatcher and this summer’s Magic Mike XXL, has come to the Amazon to sample the plant for a different reason. An investor in the New York-based beverage startup Runa (a Kichwa word meaning “fully alive”), the first company to produce drinks containing guayusa, he wants to learn everything there is to know about it. We’ve spent the last few days with Runa’s co-founders, Tyler Gage and Dan MacCombie, drinking, farming, and literally bathing in guayusa as women pour bucketfuls over our heads.
Gage and MacCombie represent the latest entrepreneurial rush into the rainforest—a place from which, in recent years, marketers have emerged with billion-dollar beverage products like açai. Leveraging Tatum’s celebrity, the pair hope to break into the $30 billion energy drink market, a field dominated by Red Bull and brands like Monster Beverage, which has concocted a juggernaut out of guarana, another caffeinated Amazonian plant. Trouble is, unlike guarana, few people have heard of guayusa. Tatum, Runa’s unofficial spokesman (his exact role is still being hashed out), hopes to change that.
After Tatum finishes describing his dream, a soft-spoken Sápara man focuses on him: “Your running represents the instinct of always striving to go further,” he says. “By making it to the top, you made it in your personal, professional, and spiritual life—there is nowhere else to go. But that expanse on the other side: That is the platform to recognize who you truly are.”
I wait for Tatum to lighten the mood. After all, this is the Jump Street star whose dick jokes have gone viral. He’s also a well-known prankster off camera. In fact, earlier this trip, he yanked me from a raft into a fast-flowing river and goaded me into eating a squirming grub from a palm tree. I expect him to respond to this shamanic psychoanalysis with a self-deprecating joke.
Instead Tatum nods along earnestly, pauses, then takes a sip from his coconut shell and launches into yet another dream, about waking up in a room from which he can’t escape. “This happens a lot,” he begins, “and I wonder what it means...”
The day before, at Runa’s factory in Archidona, Ecuador, Gage, MacCombie, Tatum, and his producing partner, Reid Carolin, take a tour of the company’s guayusa factory. Inside a low-slung white building covered in plastic, a woman in hospital scrubs and a surgical mask stirs beds of leaves, allowing them to dry and oxidize. They smell pleasant, like freshly cut grass, and Tatum snatches a pile and burrows his nose in it. He and Carolin first discovered Runa at a Whole Foods in New Orleans while shooting 21 Jump Street, in 2011, and the drink became their lifeblood as they raced to finish the Magic Mike script. “We were hammering it like it was a drug,” says Tatum. “Runa went in smooth and left smooth, and gave a longer buzz than coffee.” He now starts every day with a can of it. The next morning, I watch as he slams one then backflips off a 50-foot bridge into a river.
An 8.4-oz can of Runa’s energy drink comes in two flavors: Berry, with 17 grams of sugar, and Original Zero, a sugar-free version. Both have 120 milligrams of caffeine from guayusa leaves, which are dried in Archidona, shipped to a facility in New Jersey, then brewed into the carbonated energy drinks as well as a line of glass-bottled teas flavored with mint, hibiscus, and lemongrass.
Before Gage and MacCombie launched their company, not a single scientific paper had been written about guayusa. The Kichwa people say the plant can replace food on lengthy jungle trips. Both Gage and Tatum say that after drinking guayusa, they feel a pleasant boost without the jitters coffee gives them. “I needed something that gave me a longer burn and didn’t leave me cracked out,” says Tatum. Gage recalls a curious sensation the first time he drank guayusa. “I felt very awake but rooted at the same time,” he says. “I wasn’t sure why, but it was striking to me.”
Recent research conducted by Applied Food Sciences, a U.S. supplement firm that plans to market guayusa extract, offers evidence to support the “slow burn” claim. The plant is part of the holly family, and appears to offer the virtues of both tea and coffee: Its leaves contain significant levels of various antioxidants, including the catechins found in green tea, which reputedly fight cancer and boost metabolism, and the chlorogenic acid in unroasted coffee beans, which spurs weight loss by slowing the uptake of glucose from the intestines.
In addition to natural caffeine, guayusa also contains theobromine, a stimulant abundant in chocolate. Ounce for ounce, there’s less caffeine in guayusa than in dark roast coffee, but for reasons not yet well understood—having to do with the synergistic effects of these various compounds—the body metabolizes the caffeine in guayusa over a longer period of time.
“For endurance athletes who’d like to have more of a sustained release if they’re doing something more than a quick run—this really helps for that,” says Chris Fields, vice president of scientific affairs at Applied Food Sciences, which is starting clinical trials to investigate guayusa. “It’s a really unique plant, and now we seem to understand why it’s been used for centuries by Amazonian groups—it has so many medicinal benefits.”
Guayusa lacks tannins, the compounds in green and black tea that give it its bitter, puckery quality. When I drink a 14-oz bottle of Guavo Zero Unsweetened Runa, it tastes like watered-down tea. The first thing I notice sipping an 8.4-oz can of Runa Original Zero (with a hint of lime) is a sharp acidic tinge of artificial lime that instantly dissolves into a leafy, tea-ish aftertaste. The fizzy, one- two punch reminds me more of a store-bought Arnold Palmer than it does a syrupy Red Bull. (This is not a bad thing.)
Guayusa’s energy kick is gradual, more tortoise than hare. After one serving, I feel a subtle caffeine lift, rather than a spike. (For those who rely on the jolt of a Grande Pike Place or Monster, take note.) Two servings later, though, my body feels alert, and I’m humming along like a machine. I can see why Tatum and Carolin drink it during script-writing marathons. “The whole reason we [embraced Runa],” says Carolin, “was because we saw the effect this product had on our creativity.”
By offering a product with this unique rush, and by touting its claim of clean energy, Runa hopes to muscle into a marketplace cluttered with less healthy choices. The definition of “energy drinks” is somewhat elastic—they’re marketed as dietary supplements—but all tend to share large doses of caffeine combined with taurine, glucuronolactone, carnitine, B vitamins, and ginseng, various forms of stimulants, which, in excess, can give rise to harmful side effects. Most energy drinks also pack lots of sugar. An 8.4-oz can of non- diet Red Bull has nearly seven teaspoons of added sugar. (The American Heart Association advises no more than nine teaspoons of added sugar a day for men.)
Though the health effects of all the various chemical and herbal ingredients used in energy drinks and their possible interactions with caffeine are largely untested, the consequences of excess caffeine consumption are well understood: tachycardia, arrhythmia, hypertension, seizures, insomnia, and anxiety. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a health advocacy group, FDA documents show that in the past decade, 34 deaths have been linked to, and possibly caused by, energy drinks. “Energy drinks are clearly causing symptomatic arrhythmias,” says Stacy Fisher, M.D., director of complex heart diseases at University of Maryland School of Medicine. Market research firm Mintel reported last year that nearly six in 10 Americans who consume energy drinks or shots—mostly 18– to 24-year-olds—say they now worry about their health.
“Right now, our low-hanging fruit is reluctant Red Bull drinkers who are like, ‘I drink this stuff but I know I shouldn’t, I know there’s something better’—which I think is a huge audience,” Gage says. “We just need to communicate in the right way to get them.”
Guayusa had never been grown commercially until five years ago, when Gage and MacCombie, two friends from Brown University, began shipping bags of the leaves to the U.S. Today Runa is sold in 7,000 stores across the country, including Safeway, Whole Foods, and Vitamin Shoppe. Last year, the company took in $2 million in sales; this year it’s on track to make $8 million. Runa has also attracted an eclectic mix of investors, including responsAbility, a Swiss sustainable management fund; a successful musician and producer named Dr. Luke; and the founder of Zico coconut water, Mark Rampolla.
Another investor, New York artist Neil Grayson, who’s a friend of Tatum’s and knew of the actor’s taste for Runa, connected him with Gage in 2013. Tatum immediately noted an auspicious coincidence: The character he’d played in his 2006 breakout film Step Up was also named Tyler Gage. If for no other reason, he tells me, “the sheer sake of weirdness” piqued his business interest in Runa.
Gage first tasted guayusa in 2005, after his freshman year in college, when he was in Costa Rica doing research with an American ethnobotanist. At the time, Gage, who’d been recruited to play soccer at Brown, was obsessed with health, nutrition, and peak performance. He’d tried going vegan for 18 months and Paleo for a spell, and even experimented with lucid dreaming. “I was interested in what the human mind has the capacity to do,” he says.
Eventually Gage came upon books by a decorated triathlete named Mark Allen, who’d studied the teachings of a Huichol shaman from Mexico. “He was relatable to me, from an athletic performance point of view,” says Gage, who reached out to Allen after his freshman year. “This wasn’t a dude who believes in spirits and wooah. No—homie won the freaking Ironman six times, and he attributes his success to the strength he learned with shamanism.”
Gage studied with Allen, who inspired him to study plant medicine in the Peruvian Amazon. There, for college credit, Gage researched the ethnolinguistics of the Shipibo people, while the Shipibo shamans put him through intensive ceremonies and diets. “Every day I had to get up at sunrise, drink these gnarly plants, and basically sit out in the jungle by myself,” he says. “It was really intense and really cool. And I can’t really explain it, but that’s when I remember feeling things shifted inside me.”
When Gage got back to Brown, his friend MacCombie was enrolling in a class on social entrepreneurship; he dragged Gage along. The course required that they write a business plan. In Peru, Gage had seen how Amazonian communities are often drawn into business with oil and logging companies for lack of any economic alternatives, so the two conceived of a company selling a guayusa-based beverage. As far as they were concerned, it was a class exercise. But their professor—an entrepreneur named Danny Warshay, who’d worked for Duncan Hines—urged them to think otherwise. “It hadn’t even crossed our minds,” Gage confesses. Over late nights, however, the idea marinated. In December 2008, two days after he and MacCombie graduated, they flew to Ecuador.
After six months of backpacking among villages to secure guayusa suppliers, Gage and MacCombie landed a $50,000 small business grant from Ecuador’s Ministry of Export, which in 2010 they used to build Runa’s first research facility, a steel drying-chamber in a bamboo garage full of chickens. Larger grants from the Ecuadorean government and the U.S. Agency for International Development allowed them to build the first real Runa factory. They shipped guayusa back to the States and managed to sell the first boxes to Whole Foods. At a natural foods trade show in 2011, Gage and MacCombie were hawking samples of their “Amazonian tea” from a remote corner booth when Neil Kimberley, former brand director at Snapple, happened by and offered to help formulate their product. “You guys seem pretty cool,” he told them. “Give me a call.” He’s now on Runa’s board of advisors.
Today, Runa’s harvest comes from over 3,000 local farmers, who tend the bushy plant in traditional gardens called chakras. The company’s also launched a nonprofit that funds the largest reforestation program in the Ecuadorian Amazon, partly supported by the MacArthur Foundation, and is also helping guayusa farmers form cooperatives.
We’re sitting on a grassy airstrip beside another Sápara settlement when Gage reaches into a cardboard box and pulls out a few prototypes of the Runa energy drink can, which prominently features a guayusa leaf and the words “Clean Energy.” One of Runa’s investors, Kim Jeffery, who, as the president and CEO of Nestlé Waters North America, had helped turn it into the continent’s third-largest beverage company, has advised Gage on the importance of a clear, succinct message. “His thing is: You have three seconds to tell people what your product is,” Gage says. “What we want people to say about Runa is not that it’s tea, or light tea, but that it’s better than tea. Categorically better, and categorically different.”
Tatum doubts whether the can’s current design accomplishes that. “One thing Red Bull has done really well is that it can be sitting all the way over there, even in the dark, and you know exactly what it is,” he says, pointing across the runway. “Just, bang—I know it. So, the leaf: I know that’s what it is. But is that what we’re advertising? What are we trying to get people to understand? The biggest thing for me is to figure out how to key into exactly what it should be used for and what it’s going to deliver. It’s alive. It sharpens you. It gives you insight into your world—focused presence, not just jacked up. The packaging should say what it’s going to do for you. Then if people wonder what it’s made from, they’ll turn it over and read the ingredients and find out it’s natural and it’s made from a leaf in South America.”
Carolin adds, “I think people want to feel like they’re holding a symbol in their hand, and that’s what Red Bull has become.”
“You’ve got to make it cool to drink,” says Tatum. “I hate to be some kind of idiot American saying that, but look—you can’t deny the product. It makes you run faster, jump higher. Now you just have to—.”
“Put the ‘swoosh’ on it,” Carolin says. “Yes!” insists Tatum. “That thing that says: This is why it’s fucking cool.” Gage, for his part, wants people to think of Runa as an alternative to Red Bull in a way that some now see Vita Coca—the country’s top-selling coconut water brand—as a replacement for Gatorade. His challenge is to distinguish guayusa from tea, and somehow make it hip. “This is 99% of what’s going to determine if we’re a $10 million company or a $500 million company,” says Gage.
Yet he recognizes this is all nearly impossible without someone like Channing Tatum. In 2011, Vita Coco, whose celebrity investors include Madonna and Rihanna, ran a billboard campaign that featured Rihanna urging consumers to “Hydrate naturally from a tree, not a lab”—a jab at Gatorade and Powerade. That year the company saw its revenue double to nearly $100 million.
To date, Runa’s celebrity weaponry has been small gauge. The company sends products to a “Runa Tribe” made up of athletes like wakeboard world champion Darin Shapiro and pro kiteboarder Damien LeRoy—“individuals who embody what it means to be Runa,” according to the company’s website—hoping they’ll spread the gospel. But the star power of Tatum, Runa’s unofficial pitchman—he’s discussing with the company various ways they might leverage his celebrity—actually has the potential to blast the brand into the mainstream. “We’re dealing with guys [Tatum and Carolin] whose entire professional business is public entertainment, and what’s cool and sexy. And they’ve been successful at that. Channing has his finger on the pulse of the average American: what they do, how they think, and what they want.”
A few weeks after returning from the Amazon, Tatum, in preparation for Magic Mike XXL, begins a 10-week regimen with celebrity trainer Arin Babaian to mold his body back into male stripper form—workouts fueled by guayusa. “We buy into things we believe in, and this is something I can completely get behind,” he says on our way back from Ecuador. “Someone can just be like, ‘Oh, you’re just getting paid for this, right?’ and I can say, ‘No, I actually just drink the shit out of it.’” ■
The Incubator
AUDUBON | Once USGS biologist Sam Droege gets a research project up and running, he dreams up a new one—and builds it.
In Droege's lab at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, pizza boxes provide storage to thousands of pinned bee specimens. Volunteers Gene Scarpulla (in green) and Tim McMahon peer through microscopes to ID the insects. Credit: Robert Wright
FIRST PUBLISHED IN AUDUBON, NOV-DEC 2014
IT WAS A BRIGHT, BREEZY DAY in late April, the flowering azaleas having finally shrugged off the winter that overstayed its welcome, when Sam Droege sailed onto the grounds of the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., behind the wheel of a pterodactyl. It was actually a '98 forest-green Saturn, which Droege had painted with yellow wings and a red-and-yellow beak that tapered to a point down the center of the hood. A piece of wood, lined with a rusty crosscut saw, had been bolted to the roof: the crest. Little jingle bells, inspired by richly adorned buses in Pakistan, dangled from chains screwed into the rear bumper. Droege still had designs for neon undercarriage lights, and a mosaic of mirror shards to line the car's ceiling—"but why stop there?" he wondered. It was a work in progress.
Droege, 56, is a biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, in Maryland. He's an expert on both birds and pollinator species, though he doesn't fit the mold of a government scientist. His spectacular macro portraits of bees, shot using a camera rig he devised by modifying one used by the U.S. Army, have several hundred thousand online admirers, yet he doesn't consider himself a photographer. Relentlessly creative, he has produced a spate of grassroots programs with names like Bioblitz, Frogwatch USA, and Cricket Crawl that enlist volunteers to inventory local flora and fauna. Droege is the Johnny Appleseed of citizen science.
Four years ago Droege launched a pilot program that, if funded, would become the first survey of North America's wild bee population. It's another volunteer effort, supercharged by an army of biologists from the U.S. Forest Service and other land protection agencies who send Droege little plastic baggies filled with bees plucked from the deserts, dunes, sagebrush plains, and prairies where they work. Honey-bee decline is now a well-documented phenomenon, even if its precise cause remains uncertain, but data are scant about the relative status of the 4,000 known species of native bees. Droege aims to change that, although "when you have these extensive surveys all based on volunteers, if I get 50 percent [participation], that's really high."
On the day we met, Droege was doing his rounds, checking up on volunteers and constantly netting bees. He parked the pterodactyl by a trail that meandered into the arboretum's native plant collection. He wore black Levi's, hiking boots, and a vintage cardigan ski sweater. His graying blond hair lay in a skinny braid at the back of his neck.
Ever upbeat, Droege grabbed a few vials and his butterfly net from the car, and began creeping slowly down the trail. "You're looking for a motion that's not in sync with blowing leaves," he said. Upon reaching a cluster of wild geraniums, he stopped. A bee darted busily among the flowers. Droege hovered closely with the net poised—the "swing ready" position. Giving it a quick snap, he scooped up the bee and cradled the net rapidly back and forth like a lacrosse stick. He then continued on. The most efficient method of bee collecting, he explained, was to accumulate several bees before transferring them into the vials. "I talk about this a lot in my lab: How does doing something increase your 'bees per hour'?"
Droege has been obsessively counting and collecting since he was a young boy traipsing through the woods near his childhood home in suburban Maryland. He started off gathering rocks. He and a friend would crack them open with their dads' hammers, pronouncing each one to be as valuable as the rose amethyst they'd seen in a book. He had various other hobbies—stamps, old bottles—but his first true love was birds. There weren't any ornithology role models in the blue-collar neighborhood where he grew up, so he equipped himself with Boy Scout binoculars and set off into the forest. Because his father wouldn't let him take his grandfather's dated bird guide out of the house, Droege was forced to assign identification to memory.
Eventually he discovered the Birds of Maryland and the District of Columbia at the local library. The book was coauthored by Chandler Robbins, a USGS biologist in Patuxent. Using the phonebook, Droege tracked down Robbins, who invited the teenager into his bird club. "It was over then," Droege recalled. "I was surrounded by my people."
While his high school peers smoked pot under the bleachers, Droege cut class to find birds with the grown-ups. Even then he could deftly switch between animal families. His idea of spring break in Florida during college was hunting elusive Zoraptera insects in the Everglades; he compiled the second-largest collection of insects at the University of Maryland-College Park. Droege was a regular on Audubon's annual Christmas Bird Counts, often alongside his mentor Robbins, once clocking 12 counts in a single season.
"There's a certain component of people I completely resonate with," Droege said, "people who obsess with the details, who don't have off switches. They walk outside, hear the pink of the bobolink, and wonder, 'Why is there a flock at this time of day? The 'birdhead' brain hears this obscure sound, and the whole database thing clicks in. It's almost drug-like. It's not the way the average person floats through the universe."
Droege first began hanging around Patuxent in college, working there as a part-time lab tech. He then pursued a drawn-out master's degree in wildlife management at SUNY Syracuse. It was the Reagan era, which Droege says caused his student stipend to evaporate, consigning him to a life of ad hoc survivalism: One year, he lived in an attic and later in his office, sleeping on cardboard under an old Army blanket. He worked out a deal with the crew team to use its showers, raided undergrad parties for beer, and made lists of school functions where there might be leftover food. His office abutted an old cemetery that had maple trees; Droege convinced the caretaker to let him tap the trees, then boiled down the sap in pans in his lab, using Bunsen burners to make his own syrup. He became notorious for trapping squirrels outside his office window; one year he ate a hundred of them. He also acquired the nickname "Roadkill Droege" (raccoon was his favorite). "It was a Turkey Vulture lifestyle," Droege told me. "Whatever was dead and free was mine."
After graduate school, in 1985, he was floating around Northern California, doing fieldwork, but found the area way too mellow. He was seeking more of an "eastern edge." One of the researchers from Patuxent called to ask if he'd like to take over the Breeding Bird Survey, a model citizen science program that Robbins himself had initiated at Patuxent in the 1960s. Droege coordinated the survey for six years, during which time he reversed its flagging participation rates, recruited state coordinators, and "schmoozed people into running more [survey] routes," before moving on to fill a new post at the USGS, unofficially titled the Nongame Bird Czar.
"He's not the usual image of a federal lab scientist," his supervisor, John French, said. "Sam is a very imaginative guy, and he's got all sorts of excellent ideas. For someone like that, you want to allow those ideas to come up and be explored and find out which ones work and which ones don't."
Meanwhile, Droege also took over what became the agency's Bird Phenology Program. Phenology is the study of periodic biological phenomena, such as plant flowering. Droege hired a young biologist named Jessica Zelt to mine a century-old collection of bird migration data that had been gathering dust. She has since recruited several thousand volunteers to digitize the archive, and those data are now being analyzed for links between climate change and bird migration.
Many of Droege's citizen science projects are designed to dive into the kind of habitats—backyards, regional parks, wetlands—that the average research scientist would pass over for, say, Papua New Guinea or Madagascar. "If you're a university person, this isn't going to give you tenure," he said. Monitoring long-term population trends with an eye for impending crisis is Bureau of Census stuff—"dreadfully boring." The North American Amphibian Monitoring Program, for example, another Droege endeavor, involves volunteers counting the frog and toad calls that they hear at designated survey locations across the country three times each spring.
Yet Droege seems inclined to database work, to counting and taking stock. He often leaves the analysis to others. "What characterizes Sam is that he's not at all proprietary about his data," French says. Droege explains that he enjoys setting up projects and troubleshooting the kinks. "Then I'm looking for someone to pick it up so I can work on the thousand million other cool things sitting out there as ideas waiting to be implemented. I'm always attracted to over-the-horizon, and thinking about how I can make this better, bigger, faster."
Though Droege considers himself a good generalist naturalist, he currently wears the hat of a bee specialist—and he collects them every chance he gets. "I love the minutiae of learning how to identify things," he said. "I'll go to weddings, do my face time, and then go off" gathering specimens. He's attracted to the urban margins, which harbor pockets of feral habitat. "If you want to have safe passage in a nasty part of a city," he said, "just carry a butterfly net. You're considered to be completely harmless. Kind of pathetic, but clearly not a threat."
Above his desk droege keeps a photo of George Washington Carver, who was an early childhood hero and remains his scientific role model. Droege read his biography several times in grade school. He relates to Carver's connection to plants and nature despite a hardscrabble upbringing, how he bootstrapped his way to a Ph.D. while pursuing art, and how he created a science program at Tuskegee University from scratch, with whatever equipment he had available. "He was his own man, remained quirky, worked his entire life, and died at his job," Droege said.
Droege is proudly carrying on that spirit. Much of the equipment in his lab, in an 80-year-old brick building on the USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center campus, is hacked together from disused labs on the property. "If other people are not doing something, it becomes attractive to me," Droege told me. "I tell the interns: In this lab, we're all about failure. If you're not failing, you're not really doing anything."
In that low-tech, citizen-friendly way, Droege has developed all manner of one-offs and oddball techniques. He's found that you can obtain "beautifully coiffed hair" on even the longest-haired bumblebees if you shake them around in a paper towel. Or you can use a hair dryer. (He'd previously tried drying bees using a hotdog turner, but "it was mostly a failure.") Lately Droege has been experimenting with digital photography, which led to another inspired bit of technological improvisation: By suspending his bees in a cuvette (the transparent vessel chemists use for spectroscopic analysis) filled with hand sanitizer, he could obtain fine-art-worthy close-ups. In fact, one day after posting the portraits on Flickr, his daughter said, "Dad, I think these are your pictures on Reddit." The bee images had made their way to a Reddit forum called WoahDude ("The BEST links to click while you're STONED!")—not exactly the intended target, but they received 200,000 views in two days. "None of these people would ever go to one of my lectures," Droege told me. "This is a completely new doorway to engage people in bugs."
Droege is also leveraging digital photography and social networks to crowdsource images taken from designated "photo stations" around the country in order to monitor long-term changes in landscapes. "We have satellites collecting broad information, but we're lacking detailed information," he explained. "Like, what's going on in terms of this dune that's in front of my house? Lichens have a relationship with air quality: Take regular pictures of the same rock and you can measure the colonies." He figures the Fish and Wildlife Service might want a camera station in a refuge to document how the land is changing. A national park might be interested in the status of a remote trail. As with all of his initiatives, Droege intends to incubate the idea, develop techniques and protocols, build a database, and then hand the program over to someone else, such as a nonprofit group, to administer. For now, though, Droege is too indispensable to walk away from the bee survey. "I can't really extract from the bee community until there are more like me out there," he said.
That evening, I drove with Droege back to his house in Maryland, which sits on an acre of land beside state woods. Droege often runs in the area—for years barefoot, after reading about its benefits in a Science Daily article, but now wearing modified sandals for skin protection ("something Jesus might wear if he were modern"). A pickup was parked on the grass; it had been stippled all over with sponge paint. Droege built his turquoise home out of straw bales; a smaller annex nearby, which had originally been constructed as a natural-building demonstration on the Washington Mall, housed his friend Eric—"a vagabond"—and served as a therapy room for his wife, Kappy, a breathwork practitioner. The inside of the main home had uneven plaster walls, unmilled timbers, a composting toilet, and tiered rooms, giving it the look of an insect dwelling. "I really like flowy things," Droege explained. "All of this in a way is a reaction against uniform anything. I won't put drywall in my house. I don't like the whole mentality that even likes drywall."
Droege has two college-age daughters from his first marriage. His wife had permitted him to name the older Wren but felt another bird name would scar the second child, who instead grew up lamenting that she'd been given a boring name (Anna). For years Droege told her the lie that she'd been named after Calypte anna—Anna's Hummingbird.
"Most of what my wives have done is tempered my extravagances," Droege told me over grilled cheese sandwiches that night. "Which is a good thing, because then I'd have even fewer boundaries." He gave me a partial tour of his extravagances, such as they were. Over his front porch dangled a surplus government CO2 cylinder with the base cut off—a wind chime! After dark he took me out to the back of the house, where moths had gathered around a black light and fluorescent bulbs he'd set up to attract them. He snapped photos, which he would later send to a colleague conducting a moth survey.
Nearby, I noticed dozens of bullet-hole-sized chinks bored into the plaster wall. Droege explained that two species of Anthophora bees had taken up residence. We walked around to the side of the house, where a sliced-up tire lay on the ground. Droege was experimenting with ways to use recycled tires as a construction material. Eventually he hoped to build a rubber bridge that could span the Patuxent River. It was another work in progress, he said. "That'll be on my tombstone."
Deep Impact: Attenborough at 88
AUDUBON | Never mind old age. David Attenborough still does his own stunts in a lifelong quest to bring wildlife to your living room (or mobile device).
FIRST PUBLISHED IN AUDUBON, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH MAY BE 88 years old, but you will not find him eating green Jell-O on a Barcalounger. Recently, the octogenarian was braving minus-40-degree weather in Antarctica one day and piloting a glider alongside a digitally rendered pterosaur on another. “Rather more fun than sitting in the corner slobbering, isn’t it?” he teased last June at Wicken Fen National Nature Reserve, near Cambridge, where I found him filming scenes for Conquest of the Skies, a three-part series in 3D about the evolution of flight.
For more than 60 years—in black and white, color, HD, and, recently, 3D—the legendary broadcaster has introduced millions of people to bowerbird courtship displays, lyrebird mimicry calls, and countless other amazing wonders of the natural world. In Britain, where he lives, Attenborough was recently voted the most trusted figure, in a public poll, and is widely considered the “greatest living national treasure.” (He’s also an extinct treasure: A Mesozoic reptile, Attenborosaurus, bears his name.)
Wicken Fen’s meadows and sedge beds make up one of the most species-rich habitats in Britain, and offered an ideal setting for filming dragonflies. Attenborough lay on the grassy bank of a canal beside a foot-long fossil cast of a griffinfly, a giant dragonfly-like predator that conquered the skies during the Carboniferous Period. The sky above was cloudless and warm, and Attenborough wore his signature blue, short-sleeve collared shirt and khaki slacks, in the fashion of a gentleman naturalist.
As the crew from Atlantic Productions aligned the 3D cameras, Attenborough ran a comb through his thick silver hair. By his nature—and that of his work—Attenborough is not one to rely on hair and makeup people. A couple of months earlier, in Borneo, he had gamely offered to hang from a rope 250 feet high inside the Gomantong Caves as a million bats flew past him on a feeding exodus. In Scotland he took part in a high-speed boat chase down a loch with a flock of swans.
“I joke that Daniel Craig always does his own stunts for Bond, and, well, David does his own, too,” said Anthony Geffen, the series producer. “He doesn’t want someone else to.”
When David Attenborough speaks, it is in a soothing, melodic voice that can take the form of an enthusiastic whisper. “Let me tell you, when you’re sitting next to a gorilla, you don’t shout,” he told me.
This day at Wicken Fen, murmuring to himself, Attenborough rehearsed the lines he’d prepared for his “piece to camera,” the classic field bit he is sometimes known to utter while short of breath. Attenborough carefully scripts each program himself, leaning on scientific papers and various specialists, but will often tweak the wording of a line right up until the shot. “He’s careful not to exaggerate things, because then you quickly run out of platitudes—he lets the stories be told by the creatures around him,” Geffen said. “But often he will highlight an extraordinary thing, or he’ll just suddenly think, ‘Well, isn’t that just a better way into the story.’
The director, David Lee, called for quiet. “Are we ready? And . . . action!”
Attenborough began slowly in his distinctive cadence, as if lecturing to a class of undergraduates. “This is a cast of the oldest fossilized wing yet discovered,” he said to the camera, which was affixed to a 10-foot crane. “As you can see, it looks very like that of a dragonfly. Except that it is . . . gigantic.”
Take two. James Manister, a scientist working with the production company, pointed out that the fossil was in fact the oldest “complete” wing fragment. Attenborough started in again. “It was found in rocks dating from 290 million years ago, in North America. And its owner must have had a wingspan of around 60 centimeters.”
With dramatic flair, he scrunched his face: “It was a monster.”
Even Americans who might reach for the name David Attenborough—“Is that the Planet Earth guy?”—would easily recognize his voice, which has pretty much become synonymous with natural history television. (It has also lent itself to self-parody; Attenborough fans will enjoy the mock narration he did last year, for BBC Radio 1, of a Great Britain-U.S. women’s Olympic curling event: “Off she goes, gently but flamboyantly launching the oversized walnut down the frozen river . . .”)
Across his astonishing career, Attenborough has written, narrated, or appeared in more than 100 programs. Taken together, they amount to an unabridged survey of life on earth—from the planet’s origins to its polar habitats to insects to birds to evolution. But Attenborough’s earliest interest was fossils.
As a child he kept a museum of stones and fossils in his family’s home in Leicester. At 13, purportedly without his parents’ knowledge, he bicycled alone for three weeks to the Lake District and back, on a collecting trip. In grammar school he read about the journeys of the 19th century British naturalists; at 14, he once said, he thought “that the only thing any decent, red-blooded male could want to do in life is climb Everest.” (He has trekked around the north and south poles, and many places in between, but alas, never to the world’s highest peak.) Attenborough went on to study natural sciences at Cambridge but realized he was not cut out to be a scientist. At 26, after a two-year stint in the Royal Navy followed by a spell editing children’s science textbooks, he landed his first job as a BBC producer.
Back then, animal TV programs consisted of a London Zoo employee, under glaring studio lights, describing an animal that he’d plucked from its cage. “These poor creatures looked like oddities—I mean, they looked like freaks,” Attenborough told an audience in 2011. “I thought, why can’t we show the animals in the wild?” Sixteen-millimeter film limited the quality of pictures taken inside a dark rainforest, but Attenborough figured that the BBC could at least film zoo people trapping the wild animals and then describe them later in a studio. Zoo Quest, which pioneered on-location wildlife filmmaking, began in Sierra Leone, where the crew, including Attenborough as the sound recorder, captured a White-necked Rockfowl. When the zoo employee fell sick, Attenborough pinch-hit in the presenter role: In Guyana, he got a close-up with some anteaters; in New Guinea, Zoo Quest was the first to capture a bird of paradise display in the wild. Recalling this a few years ago, Attenborough said: “I thought, what a racket. Wow, if I can play my cards right, I can get away again.”
Today there are few corners of the planet where David Attenborough hasn’t traveled—on his programs, he’s fond of beginning a sentence on one continent and completing it on another—although he’s as happy at his Richmond home, on the outskirts of London, gazing at the ducks and rare plants in his garden pond. Since Jane, his wife of nearly 40 years, died in 1997 of a brain hemorrhage, Attenborough has lived there with his daughter amid displays of fossils, aboriginal art, and books on many subjects. He doesn’t think of himself as a savvy socializer (“I’m not very good at cocktail parties,” he’s said) or a misanthrope (“I’m not obsessed by the natural world to the exclusion of human beings,” he told me). However, there is one human issue that keeps him up at night: Population growth—the world’s numbers have tripled since Attenborough started making programs. He’s affiliated with Population Matters, a U.K.-based think tank, and is outspoken on the issue: “I believe that almost every ill that afflicts the world today can be put down to increasing population size,” he said.
After getting a pacemaker in 2013, Attenborough (seen here in Borneo) said, "I've been broadcasting for 60 years. I don't want to slow down. Retirement would be so boring." Photo: Credit: Colossus Productions
At Wicken Fen, while the cameramen set up another shot on a footbridge by the visitors center, Attenborough sat quietly by himself in a lawn chair under a canopy. He’s still spry, but as he ambled around, slightly hunched and swaying, his body resembled an aging elephant. At his feet rested a black Samsonite briefcase stickered with “DA,” which contained The Times, a handwritten address book, and an outmoded cell phone.
The next scene on the bridge (ultimately scrapped from the film) involved Attenborough describing a prehistoric dragonfly on the railing that would be rendered using computer-generated imagery. Since the mid-1960s, when he ran BBC Two and oversaw the introduction of color television, Attenborough has kept apace with technological advances as a means to tell better, current, unseen stories. For Conquest of the Skies, he wondered at the outset how the producers could get cameras in the air to simulate a true bird’s-eye view. Atlantic Productions then developed, from scratch, a 3D “octocopter” that holds two cameras side by side, which it says is the first of its kind. “He’s not a gadget king, but I’m constantly talking to him about new technology, and he loves it,” said Geffen, who has made 10 programs with Attenborough, including Micro Monsters 3D, which used fiber-optic cameras. Their next project, about the Great Barrier Reef, will employ satellite photography and cutting-edge underwater cameras. “He’s like a kid,” Geffen said. “ ‘What can it do, let’s have a look at it.’ ”
Take one. Attenborough reached the empty spot on the railing and looked to the camera: “How is it that these ancient dragonflies grew to be that size, whereas no dragonfly today can?” he asked. “The answer seems to be with the air. Or, rather, the amount of oxygen that’s in the air.”
Attenborough’s great talent is in distilling the stuff of lengthy scientific papers into pithy, descriptive sound bites, and telling stories that manage to feel fresh despite the fact that we’ve all seen countless clips of hummingbirds and coral reefs. In Britain, Attenborough programs draw on a certain national nostalgia, but it’s nevertheless remarkable that an 88-year-old in grandpa pants has managed to stay relevant—and as popular as ever—in the age of Finding Bigfoot and Pit Bulls and Parolees (two Animal Planet hits).
The director called for another take. Excusing himself for a moment, Attenborough walked behind the camera and pulled a field guide out of his briefcase.
“Classic David,” remarked Geffen. “This is going across the world, and he wants to make damn sure it’s right.”
The Ski Resort That Crowdsourcing Built
NEW YORK TIMES | The young owners of Powder Mountain in Utah use their networking skills to draw investors to their planned ski resort.
Guests in the lodge at a Summit Series weekend at Powder Mountain in January had views of the Wasatch range. Credit: Jim McAuley
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 12, 2015
EDEN, UTAH — Shortly after a sunset that was deemed “epic” by a young man wearing a beanie, a crowd assembled one Friday night in January at a private lodge atop Powder Mountain, a ski area an hour’s drive from Salt Lake City. A 30-year-old Finn who was a founder of a mushroom beverage company out “to make ’shrooms the new kale” mingled with a former chief creative officer for Microsoft and a founder of PayPal. On a sofa, a New Yorker with the music licensing agency Ascap received a shoulder massage from a self-described “bohemian capitalist” working in health care technology.
The invited guests, most of whom had paid $1,000 to be there, moved into a circular lounge with cushions, designer pendant lights and panoramic views, where a 19-year-old musician from Queens, Candace Lee Camacho, sat behind a piano. An artist in residence that week, Ms. Camacho said it was her first time in the mountains.
Since buying the Utah backwater two years ago, Powder’s owners — a group of entrepreneurs, most of them around 30 years old with no experience in resort development — have hosted several of these salon-inspired “weekend jams” on the mountain they plan to develop, as well as a Pay for Success symposium with the White House, off-site retreats for Patagonia and the Knight Foundation, and the country’s first fat-biking national championships.
This summer, they plan to break ground on a public village envisioned as a next-generation alpine town. Picture a vehicle-free Main Street lined with farm-to-table restaurants and pop-up stores and co-working spaces and second-story condos. It will have funding for public art and only environmentally responsible hotels; naturally, the cafes will provide almond milk without your having to ask for it. A mash-up of postmillennial civic and lifestyle ideas, with an ethos of social entrepreneurism: Telluride meets the Mission District, perhaps.
The “4-Hour Workweek” author Timothy Ferriss, the Hollywood producer Stacey Sher, the former N.F.L. linebacker Dhani Jones and Blake Mycoskie, the founder of Toms shoes, are among the hundred or so people who have already purchased homesites around the future village. Homeowners are required to use approved architects and are forbidden to build McMansions.
“What Tesla did to cars,” Elliott Bisnow, a Powder Mountain owner, explained, wide-eyed, to the group visiting in January, “we’re going to do with towns!”
Other than being idealistic and unabashedly earnest, Powder’s young owners are also savvy connectors. In 2008, Mr. Bisnow, then 23 and a founder of a successful real estate industry e-newsletter company (Bisnow Media), gathered 19 entrepreneurs at the Alta Mountain ski area in Utah. A bonding ski trip turned into another company called Summit Series, which has hosted annual conferences in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, and Washington. In April 2011, Summit chartered a cruise ship around the Bahamas for 1,500 attendees, while also raising nearly $1 million with the Nature Conservancy to support a marine protected area there. The next winter, the company took over much of the Squaw Valley resort in California for a weekend.
“Our convening power grew because no one was really reaching out to a generation of entrepreneurs,” explained Jeff Rosenthal, one of Summit’s four founders, along with Brett Leve, Jeremy Schwartz and Mr. Bisnow. The conferences melded talks about global poverty and keynote speeches by folks like Bill Clinton and Richard Branson with shark-tagging outings, seminars on lucid dreaming and private performances by acts like the Roots. They were essentially networking events designed to foster stronger ties. (“Summit Series is about character,” attendees were told. “It’s not about résumés. So show love to all the start-ups, and don’t fanboy the big-timers.”)
Some 10,000 people have attended Summit Series events, from founders of digital media start-ups to professional athletes, clothing designers to scientists. The company Qwiki, maker of an iPhone video sharing app, was hatched at a Summit event and acquired last year by Yahoo for $50 million; Basis, a company that makes wristwatch health trackers, secured its first major investment at Summit and was sold to Intel last year for over $100 million. (Summit Series itself was an early investor in Uber and Warby Parker.) People in nonprofits have met philanthropists; musicians have found collaborators. In early 2009, Summit Series brokered a meeting between new Obama administration officials and 40 Internet entrepreneurs, including the founders of YouTube, Twitter, Method and Zappos; it has worked with Unicef Innovation to link entrepreneurs with global issues; and held a fund-raiser for the Clinton Foundation at Russell Simmons’s Manhattan apartment.
“We learned about the art of just gathering great, innovative people from disparate industries into a shared space and seeing what happens,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “If you want to think about it in terms of provenance, we were a bit of a younger, hipper TED or Davos.”
Alvin Cobabe, a Utah physician, founded Powder Mountain in 1972 on his family’s sheep ranch. There’s nothing Davos about the place. The resort lies at the top of a winding road leaving from a four-way stop in Eden, a sleepy community in the Ogden Valley that has a general store and a Mexican restaurant. Powder receives as much average annual snowfall as ski areas near Park City but a third of the visitors, and its lack of pretension is precisely its appeal. The base lodge — a cafeteria with wooden rafters and a dive bar — is a quaint throwback to the Nixon era. The mountain has just six chairlifts and no snow-making equipment, but this disguises untapped potential: Powder has around 7,000 skiable acres, which makes it the largest ski area in the country, its owners say.
In 2006, Dr. Cobabe sold the resort to a group of Utah business partners, who rankled locals with sprawling plans to build 18 ski lifts, 2,700 homes, lodges and hotels, corporate retreats and golf courses. After they tried to circumvent a zoning disagreement by using a controversial state law to incorporate the land into a town, Eden residents sued. Meanwhile, the real estate market tanked. Powder went quietly back on the market.
Greg Mauro, a venture capitalist with a second home in Eden, who had attended a Summit Series event, approached the company’s founders, who at the time were living together in a mansion in Malibu, Calif., about buying the resort.
“The thinking by then turned to how this could become a permanent home,” Mr. Rosenthal said. Summit found around 50 families and individuals in its network, including Mr. Branson; the WPP chairman, Martin Sorrell; the former Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman; Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records; Danny Davis, a professional snowboarder; and Sophia Bush, an actress, who were willing to invest up to $2 million each and enable Summit to purchase Powder Mountain in 2013 for a reported $40 million. The company has since held a dozen town hall meetings with local residents, received approvals for zoning and entitlements, and with an $18 million infrastructure bond from the county, laid miles of roads, bridges, sewer and power lines.
Possessing a deed and a blank canvas for their intellectual enclave, Powder’s owners had set out looking for inspiration. They visited Aspen, Colo., where in the 1950s Walter Paepcke, a Chicago industrialist, founded the Aspen Institute, attracting America’s cultural elite to the town long before Aspen became a metaphor for something that involved Prada. They also admired the pedestrian-friendly Swiss Alps towns Mürren and Wengen, and saw resemblances in the cascading hillside topography of Positano, Italy.
“We crowdsourced the funding, the development, the design, the architecture,” Mr. Bisnow said. “For us, it was to say: ‘Hey, this month we’re really diving into land planning. Who are the best land planners in the world?’ ”
They worked with the land-planning company Hart Howerton of New York, whose portfolio includes Montana’s Yellowstone Club, and Langvardt Design of Salt Lake City.
Eron Ashley, a principal of Hart Howerton, said, “There was a lot of collective searching for a physical place,” adding that the owners did not want it to “feel like a traditional, prefabricated ski town.”
Phillip Tabb, an architecture professor at Texas A & M specializing in traditional English country village design, came up with the idea for a horseshoe-shaped town on a plateau where several peaks converge. “It’s like the feminine core of the mountain,” Mr. Bisnow said.
On a Saturday afternoon in January at the Sky Lodge, where Summit’s guests had gathered the previous night, a San Francisco State University neuroscientist, Adam Gazzaley, led a talk with Ryan Garza of the D.J. duo Thievery Corporation about his research on the brain’s response to music. Elsewhere, others took a snowshoeing excursion, yoga classes and sound healing treatments. Mr. Mauro, the resort’s chairman, led a group of skiers by snowcat to a glade of aspen trees across the summit ridge. On the way, he stopped at the future site of Powder Mountain village.
It was a clear, cloudless day. The outskirts of Salt Lake City were visible through the northern Wasatch Mountains. Mr. Mauro pointed out an island in the Great Salt Lake where the sun sets on the summer solstice. Across the valley loomed the majestic peak that inspired the Paramount Pictures logo.
The village will become the base of the ski resort, and in addition to bars, restaurants and what the organizers call a “curated artisanal retail experience,” there are plans for education facilities, a culinary school, an innovation lab and a recording studio. Powder’s owners are in closing discussions with several boutique hotel groups.
The overarching design eschews ersatz Bavaria for a rustic-chic aesthetic that Mr. Rosenthal characterized as “organic modernism.”
“Heritage materiality with modern shape; things that fit in with the natural surroundings,” he explained. Behind him, at Summit’s offices in Eden, was a wall lined with photos of inspired cabin designs. Some 500 homes and cottages, each restricted to 4,500 square feet above ground, will occupy an area of cottonwoods and aspens beyond the village center. Mr. Bisnow said: “We’re not merchant developers trying to build as many units as possible and then go back to our houses in Florida. We want to keep the four-way stop.”
That evening, Summit hosted a dinner for its 120 guests at a lakeside lodge in the Ogden Valley. Food was served on long communal tables, family-style. After the meal, M. Sanjayan, a conservation scientist and TV host, screened clips of his PBS series, “Earth: A New Wild,” before it debuted the following week. Prince Ea, a spoken-word artist and Internet sensation, then rapped a piece he conceived while snowshoeing earlier: “We can change the world, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. They didn’t erect statues for critics.”
One often hears this sort of boosterism around Summit events.
“There seems to be a genuine interest to try to do something good,” remarked Gerry Erasme, who oversees Nike’s urban marketing efforts in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and London. Mr. Erasme first visited Powder one summer weekend two years ago, when Summit put up 400 guests in tents.
“The community really got to me; you could have been a billionaire from Northern California, or you could have been Gerry Erasme from Harlem,” he said. He has since invested in a homesite.
The next afternoon, after an informal talk on disaster response by Desiree Matel-Anderson, the former chief innovation adviser at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, most of Summit’s guests dispersed back to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
For many of them, the trip to the Salt Lake City airport was aided by another sign of Summit’s growing influence: Eden (population 600) had recently become one of the smallest communities served by Uber.
At The Top Of The World
WORLD WILDLIFE | Snow leopards, fresh water, and climate change in Kyrgyzstan.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN WORLD WILDLIFE, WINTER 2015
In the upper reaches of the Tian Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan, beyond fertile valleys dotted with apricot trees and ancient Silk Road settlements, the arid climate isn't particularly friendly. "Tian" means celestial in Chinese, and the jagged peaks here are among the closest on Earth to the heavens: Jengish Chokusu, on the country's rugged, southeastern border with China, rises above 24,000 feet. The cold, thin air and treeless steppe seems more fit for snow leopards and Siberian ibex than for people, who for centuries have subsisted here by herding their horses and sheep across barren slopes in search of pasture. Even before the weather changed, it was never an easy place to live.
Kurmanaliev, gesturing across a flat, exposed valley lying between umber foothills. A small brook courses through the middle, runoff from the steep flank of a mountainside dusted with late spring snow. Alongside the water, a low mat of grass carpets the rocky soil—an oasis at which a small herd of bony cows munches away.
Kurmanaliev is 48, with a weathered face and thin moustache; he wears desert fatigues, his uniform as a part-time ranger at the nearby Sarychat-Ertash State Nature Reserve. For five generations, his family has lived in Ak-Shyrak, a remote village in the adjacent valley. Their modest home, like those of the other 30 families there, is a single-story, mud-brick dwelling with a pitched roof and powder blue window shutters. Beside it stand an outhouse and a livestock pen. Kyrgyz television news and Russian movies beam into the carpeted living-dining room from a satellite dish erected above the goats' enclosure just outside. There are electricity lines but no telephone link.
Photo: Andy Isaacson
For years, residents have relied on a predictable seasonal cycle. Each spring, they bring their cows, sheep, and goats to feed in the rocky ravines and basins where snowmelt collects. In a typical year, these wetland pastures grow well into October, when the herders harvest and stockpile the grass for fodder during the harsh winter months.
But winters have become longer and drier, Kurmanaliev says. Warmer summers, meanwhile, have melted the layer of subterranean permafrost that holds groundwater close to the surface vegetation, so the wetlands are drying out. With more meager pasture in the fall now, villagers have resorted to buying hay from lower-lying areas—a five-hour drive away.
It’s a familiar story all across Asia's high mountains. In the Himalaya, local farmers report the annual monsoon season now arrives later than usual; weather is more erratic across the region. Invasive species are creeping into higher terrain, rendering pastures unpalatable to livestock that is not adapted to these new (and in some cases toxic) plants; herders are forced to graze their animals in neighbors' pastures, causing conflicts within communities that never before existed.
More worrying still is the rapid glacier melt now occurring in alpine regions, which is altering river flows and the seasonal availability of water. The melting also leads to the formation of glacial lakes behind relatively weak ice "dams," which can burst suddenly, flooding valleys below. The consequences of climate change threaten endemic species, downstream settlements, and agricultural productivity. Residents of Central Asia's high mountain communities, notes Karin Krchnak, director of WWF's freshwater programs, "are coming up against changes in their environment that their grandparents never saw."
Central Asia's major mountain ranges—the Tian Shan, Kunlun, Altai, Pamir, Hindu Kush, Karakorum, and Himalaya—meet in and around Kyrgyzstan, and fan out across 12 countries. They hold the sources of fresh water for an estimated 300 million people. Conservation of these cross-border ecosystems in the face of climate change requires getting nations—even traditional adversaries—to collaborate.
But how to get them to the table?
As it happens, these high-mountain headwater areas are also the habitat of, and vital travel corridors for, the endangered snow leopard (Panthera uncia). "When you start thinking about ensuring the future of the snow leopard, you naturally come to the issue of watershed stewardship," Krchnak says. "That can be a nice, gentle segue to getting everyone together to talk about protecting these critical watersheds for the benefit of all."
Omurbeck Kurmanaliev's elders used to talk about the snow leopard as a sacred animal. Its presence was viewed as auspicious. "They thought if snow leopards moved into the area, it would bring peace and prosperity," he says. Some Kyrgyz believe that the birth of a snow leopard in their area foreshadows a milder winter. Parents admonish their children to be as strong and clean as a snow leopard. "My father used to warn me," Kurmanaliev adds, "'Don't harm a snow leopard or it will bring about a curse.'" There are approximately 150-200 snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan today. It is broadly estimated that across their entire range, only somewhere between 3,500 and 7,000 remain.
Photo: Andy Isaacson
Nestled at 10,500 feet beneath the mountainous Chinese border, Ak-Shyrak was first established as a geological survey station for Soviet mining interests. The settlement sits in a treeless, high mountain desert whose lakes and tributaries make up the headwaters of one of Central Asia's great rivers, the Syr Darya, which flows west through Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan into the remnants of the Aral Sea. The extreme conditions and rocky, sparsely vegetated slopes at these elevations are ideal habitat for the snow leopard and its prey, which include the spiral-horned argali (also known as the Marco Polo sheep), Siberian ibex, and gray marmot.
When the first settlers arrived in the area, the hills were full of argali. Omurbeck Kurmanaliev recalls his grandparents admonishing him not to kill female mountain sheep. "They gave us their homeland," the elders would say. But attitudes changed after 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Kyrgyzstan gained its independence. Once Soviet mining operations ceased, hundreds of residents abandoned Ak-Shyrak. Those who remained began breeding cattle. Some, out of desperation, turned to poaching. "The income from argali and ibex meat and the skins of marmots and martens allowed us to stockpile food for the winter," Kurmanaliev says.
When WWF began working there in 2009, almost 80% of Ak-Shyrak's population was hunting wildlife. "Poverty was so high," recalls Farida Balbakova, WWF's project coordinator in Kyrgyzstan. "It was difficult to convince them not to poach, so we tried to offer them alternative sources of income."
Balbakova remembers spending many sleepless nights contemplating the deforestation, disappearance of animals, and degradation of pastures that she witnessed across the country's various elevations and habitats. "I felt as if the land was asking," she says, "'Please save me.'" She was up against the all-too-often ingrained human tendency to regard nature and wildlife as things—almost exclusively—to be consumed. "I realized," she recalls, "it was first necessary for the villagers to see that the Earth was theirs to protect—that it belongs to them."
Balbakova remembers spending many sleepless nights contemplating the deforestation, disappearance of animals, and degradation of pastures that she witnessed across the country's various elevations and habitats. "I felt as if the land was asking," she says, "'Please save me.'" She was up against the all-too-often ingrained human tendency to regard nature and wildlife as things—almost exclusively—to be consumed. "I realized," she recalls, "it was first necessary for the villagers to see that the Earth was theirs to protect—that it belongs to them."
Photo: Andy Isaacson
She held workshops on alternative income for the adults, and taught ecological theater to the children, who performed skits and songs about biodiversity. She also organized games and festivals around events like Forest Day. "At first, children were writing about how argali meat was so delicious and tasty—because their parents cooked it for them," recalls Balbakova. "Now they're writing about how proud they are to see the sheep and telling their parents not to poach."
With her husband, Azat Alamanov (who also works with WWF), Balbakova also organized the third annual Snow Leopard Festival, held in conjunction with the International Day for Biological Diversity. On a chilly Saturday in May 2015, about 160 people—residents from Ak-Shyrak and two other area villages—gathered in Ak-Shyrak's community hall, a cement building with a small stage and a rainbow globe light on the ceiling (the hall often doubles as the village discotheque). Teenage girls arrived at the event wearing leopard-patterned fur suits—each sported painted-on black whiskers as well. A grown man turned up in a brown bear costume. Outside the building, Kyrgyz soldiers from the nearby border outpost stood taking drags off cigarettes before going in.
In front of a panel of judges—which included WWF staff members and an official from the Kyrgyz state environmental agency—teams representing the three mountain villages competed against each other, American Idol-style. With songs, skits, and original dances, they promoted environmental stewardship. There were women in blue chiffon dresses who played the part of water ("I was a pretty spring once, before people threw trash in me…"), and the Ak-Shyrak girls in snow leopard outfits brought down the house with a dance number set to a thumping beat. Farida Balbakova was delighted. "I feel like I awoke something that was sleeping inside of them," she says.© Andy Isaacson/WWF-US
For his part in the festival, Omurbeck Kurmanaliev acted in a scene in which he played a bumbling poacher who gets his foot caught in the claws of an animal trap. A former poacher himself, he is now one of 10 local villagers who work as park rangers at the Sarychat-Ertash State Nature Reserve, an isolated valley over the mountain from Ak-Shyrak that contains Kyrgyzstan's highest density of snow leopards. Since the Kyrgyz government established the park in 1995, park territory has been doubled to nearly 370,000 acres (149,733 hectares), thanks in no small part to the efforts of Balbakova and other conservationists, who lobbied the president and worked to block mining exploration in the park.
The reserve is home to five rare and endangered mammal species—snow leopard, Tian Shan brown bear, argali sheep, Siberian ibex, and Pallas's cat—a number of rare plants, and nine rare or endangered bird species, including the saker falcon, golden eagle, Himalayan griffon, Eurasian eagle owl, and ibisbill. WWF has provided technical support to the rangers, as well as uniforms, wildlife camera traps, and wind turbines that power two ranger stations. When the park was formed 20 years ago, the argali sheep population had dwindled to just 50 individuals—even the rangers were poaching them. Today, they number about 2,500. Ibex in the area have also rebounded.
The last known poaching of a protected animal at the reserve occurred in 2008. In the past two years, high-level government delegations from all 12 snow leopard range countries have met in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, and pledged to work together to ensure survival of the endangered cat. Those officials designated 2015 as the International Year of the Snow Leopard.
Now, conservation groups like the Snow Leopard Trust and WWF are contributing scientific research and community education, helping local women earn extra income through handicrafts and snow leopard tourism programs, and advising villagers on methods for protecting livestock. And Kyrgyz government agencies and nonprofits have started working together with INTERPOL on a national antipoaching program that trains, publicly honors, and financially rewards park rangers and community members who successfully apprehend wildlife poachers.© Andy Isaacson/WWF-US
Photo: Andy Isaacson
According to a world bank report, Kyrgyzstan ranks third among countries in Europe and Central Asia that are most vulnerable to climate change. Global warming is expected to increase average annual temperatures throughout Central Asia, and bring about fewer frost days and longer-lasting heat waves. Severe droughts aren't expected to plague the region, as they are in parts of Africa and the Mediterranean, but Central Asia's mountains are expected to get drier as precipitation levels fall and glaciers, which feed the region's rivers, continue to melt. These changes have consequences not only for agriculture and drinking water supplies, but for downstream hydroelectric power generation as well.
As temperatures rise and glaciers melt across Asia, forests will ascend to higher elevations in alpine regions, posing significant challenges for snow leopards and herders: Higher tree lines will put them in greater competition with each other for dwindling alpine grassland resources. The Bishkek Declaration, signed by the 12 snow leopard range countries in 2013, acknowledges that "mountain ecosystems inhabited by snow leopards provide essential ecosystem services, including storing and releasing water from the origins of river systems that benefit one-third of the world's human population."
WWF, with USAID, hopes to accomplish more integrated, watershed-level planning and conservation action—from stanching illegal deforestation to encouraging best farming practices—that will increase the resilience of Asia's high mountain ecosystems to climate change. Alpine desert communities like Ak-Shyrak, for instance, are at risk of desertification, as overgrazing and more erratic weather conspire to render entire swaths of land untenable for both livestock and snow leopard prey, and erosion fills rivers with sediment that overwhelms hydropower turbines and irrigation systems farther downstream.
"After the Soviet collapse, people started using the same pasture all year-round," Azat Alamanov explains. "We're trying to remind them of their parents' tradition of seasonal pasture rotation." Balbakova and Alamanov are also encouraging local herders to switch from sheep and goat to yaks, a semi-wild, lower-maintenance animal indigenous to the Tibetan Plateau that is less taxing on the land and better adapted to the harsh native climate. This is an especially opportune time to switch to yaks, since yak meat is currently in demand in Central Asian cities because it is seen as "ecologically clean"—free of antibiotics and hormones. Three years ago, Balbakova and Alamanov introduced a WWF demonstration herd of 20 yaks that has since nearly tripled in size.
Another way of adapting to climate change, of course, is to derive an income from sources other than livestock herding. WWF has trained local women to produce felt souvenirs that are sold at an annual crafts fair on Lake Issyk-Kul. Last year, Balbakova and Alamanov also set up low-interest, microcredit loan funds in Ak-Shyrak and Enylchek, another mountain village, seeding these funds with $5,000 per village and the stipulation that villagers not provide food, accommodation, or other assistance to poachers who pass through their areas. There are also plans to increase energy efficiency of buildings and promote renewable power.
Still, it's only a start. More planning is needed, both from the Kyrgyz government and from other countries in the region, to mitigate climate impacts, expand protected area networks, and manage freshwater resources.
Photo: Andy Isaacson
Because we've learned repeatedly that no country can go it alone. Consider the Aral Sea, straddling Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which was the world's fourth-largest lake until intensive irrigation for industrial cotton drained the rivers that fed it. Today the Aral Sea is both a scrub-covered desert and a cautionary tale.
As WWF climate adaptation and resilience expert Ryan Bartlett notes, the Aral Sea's fate is also "a harbinger of the kinds of regional water security challenges that will only become more difficult as climate change worsens." It is exactly the type of tough challenge that our snow leopard collaborations may help us start to address.
Photo: Andy Isaacson
Photo: Andy Isaacson
Springtime on the Border
ALTERNET | Instead of waiting for Washington to take action, the Minuteman volunteers bring Washington to the border, demanding attention for an illegal immigration storm.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN ALTERNET, APRIL 19, 2005
THE WARM, BREEZY SUMMIT of Coronado Peak, in Southeast Arizona's Huachuca Mountains, offers a fine view of the seemingly endless arid grassland below, a high desert plain of brown earth accented by a fertile strip of green willow and ringed by gentle mountain ranges. A faint dirt road slicing the plain marks the division between the United States and Mexico. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado once ambled exhausted through this rugged terrain with a legion of soldiers, Indians and priests on a "missionary undertaking" seeking the fabled "Seven Cities of Gold" to the north.
Every day, more than 450 years after that historic expedition, the scene continues unabated. Under the hot daytime sun and the dark cloak of night, quiet squadrons of drug runners march right through the meager barbed wire cattle fence marking the U.S.-Mexico border, and through the Huachucas, to supply addicts as far as New York. Indians from the Central American highlands trudge for days up dry washes lined with bramble bushes, some told that the ocean lies only a day's walk ahead. Church groups supply water to these migrants, hoping to stem the deaths that claim more than a hundred lives annually. And Mexicans, finding no trace of gold in their homeland, flow illegally north seeking the fabled 7-Eleven, or just about any job that will pay.
Cochise County, AZ is evidence of how illegal immigration is crippling the United States at the very same time it seems to benefit. The intense enforcement effort concentrated on the California and Texas borders has shifted migrant flow into Arizona, and the Tucson sector has bore the brunt of that redirected stream. In 2004, approximately 350,000 migrants were caught along the Arizona border, almost half of these apprehensions occurring within this county. This status sits uneasily with locals here. In the wake of streaming migrants and smugglers comes littered belongings, damaged property, strained social services, an enforcement presence and a violent edge. It's a reality that local resident May Kolbe calls "living in a war zone."
In a way, it's always been like this. Cochise County is steeped in a rich "Wild West" history of lawlessness. It's the land of Wyatt Earp and Geronimo, gunfights at Tombstone's OK Corral, copper mines, Army forts, Indian wars, cowboys, cattle rustlers and gamblers.
A Call to Arms
Situated blissfully in the middle of the valley, a mere two miles from the border fence is the Miracle Valley Bible College, where the Minuteman Project has set up its headquarters.
Hundreds of volunteers from across the nation heeded a call put out over the internet by a loosely organized coalition of immigration activists to join a grassroots gathering that would spend the month of April here, patrolling a 23-mile stretch along the nation's most penetrated section of border. The volunteers, calling themselves the Minutemen-- after the Massachusetts colony militia who were the first to arrive at a battlefield -- were retired military, teachers, and construction workers who brought a modest air force, communications equipment, guns, lawn chairs and sunscreen to perform "the job the government won't do."
Not easy to typecast, the volunteers who descended on the desert represented a spectrum of backgrounds and views -- moderate to extreme -- but united by a core sentiment. They're indignant at an illegal invasion that sees immigrants, drug smugglers and possible terrorists streaming across a porous and undefended border, unchecked, by the thousands. Many are "Pat Buchanan Republicans" who feel "Bushwacked" by a president who looks the other way to the problem while lining his political pockets with the support of employers who profit off the exploitation of cheap labor. They see a corrupt, Mexican government flagrantly assisting the illegal flow, washing its hands free of impoverishment while collecting remittances from migrant workers who send back their wages in amounts that have now surpassed domestic oil revenues. And they arrived out of concern for the changes in their communities, the violence they feel is a byproduct of impoverished immigrants seeking economic opportunism and the demographic changes they view as threatening the American way of life.
They included Cindylou Dampf of Denton. TX, who worked in security most of her life, but whose job as post-commander at Andrews Corporation ended last year when the plant closed and moved to Mexico. A displaced worker and single mother, she held fast food and housekeeping jobs. When she learned about the Minuteman Project, the relative of Harry S Truman quit her two jobs, left her 20-year-old son behind, "with resolve, to carry on the family name" if something were to happen to her, and drove the 900 miles to Cochise County.
And there were those like Curtis Stewart from San Antonio, TX who felt they were the vanguard of a silent majority frustrated with the government's ineffectiveness.
"How many demonstrations have we had in the United States for women, lesbians, blacks - minority demonstrations, right? Never have you had the white, right wing say 'I've had it.' This is the first demonstration - for the country - since the Boston Tea Party," said Stewart, driving a truck with a "Liberal Hunting Permit" sticker on the windshield.
What made their act of civil disobedience different from marches on Washington was that rather than bring an issue to Washington, it succeeded in bringing Washington to the front door of an issue -- here at the border -- enabled by the throngs of media that surrounded the volunteers in what seemed, at times, to be equal numbers.
"What we're doing right here is First and Second Amendment, plain and simple," aid volunteer Greg Coody of Waco, TX. There's not any insurrection or vigilantism -- except to the extent that President Bush said to be 'vigilant' after 9/11. We're trying to close this sieve that's called a border. If you don't want it to be against the law -- then get rid of the law. But if you're going to have a law, then enforce it. What part of 'illegal' don't they get?"
What also made the Minuteman Project different from other demonstrations was its Anglo-Saxon tapestry, inciting accusations of racist intentions. But volunteers here cloaked their racial and cultural views under a legal banner. They said it's not about who comes in, but how.
"If I'm in my house, and I see my neighbor's house being broken into and call the police, I'm not a racist just because the burglar was black, brown or some other color besides white," said Coody. "A burglar is a burglar. This is not a race thing, it's a law thing."
While officially there to assist law enforcement, the Minuteman Project perilously walked the fine line between civilian watchdogging -- like volunteers driving around their neighborhoods observing and reporting suspicious activity -- and vigilantism, taking the law into your own hands when the authorities are felt to be falling short. Local residents and authorities there eyed the arrival of these outsiders suspiciously, mostly out of a concern for the potential violence they would usher in, fueling an already raging fire.
Tailgating on the Border
Aware of the intense scrutiny and the high stakes for success, Chris Simcox, publisher of the Tombstone Tumbleweed and an organizer of the event made clear to volunteers at an orientation meeting on April 1 in Tombstone that their job was to observe illegal activity, make no contact with "illegals," and report to border patrol. "Hold the line, but put your ideals before any instant gratification," warned Simcox, whose group Civil Homeland Defense is one of a few civilian border groups that have operated controversially in the region for years, tracking down and reporting migrant and drug smuggling activity.
By acting as a deterrent on the border to would-be crossers, the Minutemen hoped to prove to policymakers that with political will, the invasion can be stopped on two fronts. First, by going after the supply side -- stemming the flow across the border -- and the demand side -- punishing the employers across the country that exploit the migrants.
After the first orientation meeting, Simcox downplayed the project's paramilitary resemblances. "If you want to talk about training for volunteers," he quipped to reporters, "I guess that would consist of knowing how to unfold a lawn chair, how to look into camera monitors, and how dial a cell phone." The group seemed to hold to standard operating procedure. A week into the watch, a volunteer was sent home because, although he had offered a distressed migrant a bowl of cereal and $20, he had shaken the man's hand, thereby breaking the "no contact" policy.
Indeed, it soon seemed that the hysteria over the armed and dangerous Minutemen was much ado about nothing. Retired men and women sitting on the backs of pickup trucks in six-hour shifts, concentrated along a two mile stretch border fence eyeing the vacant desert, appeared more like a group on a bird watching excursion than a violent, paramilitary force.
The kaleidoscope of overlapping characters that swirled around them, however, created a cultural circus. A flurry of reporters and camera crews watched young, liberal ACLU representatives in white "Legal Observer" T-shirts watch over middle-aged, middle- American Minutemen. The Minutemen kept watch over the desert for migrants, some of them retired military communicating in command speak through walkie talkies with a grain of self-importance and nostalgia for their days in service. Border Patrol agents cruised by, responding to remote sensors planted in the brush that all these onlookers had tripped.
For a time in April, the Minutemen found themselves amidst the multiplicity of interests that define life along America's most active stretch of border. With their arrival, they brought out the wide panorama of contradictory voices that characterize the debate over illegal immigration.
Cross-Cultural Détente
On a hot afternoon, a mile south of the border fence, Sergio Medrano peered through binoculars, combing the Mexican desert for a trace of migrants. "No hay migrantes," he said. "They're intelligent enough not to cross here."
He shifted his focus to the 40 vehicles and handful of satellite TV trucks stationed along the fence "Why does this have to happen for people to find out really what happens on the border? Why does there have to be these activities of racist and anti-immigrant groups? I don't know why there are groups of people that don't like us -- every person has the human right to better himself, in any part of the world."
Medrano is a former "coyote," a migrant smuggler who was caught 49 times shepherding illegals across the border before records-keeping technology caught up with him and forced him out of the game. He turned to drugs, became homeless, and later checked himself into a drug rehabilitation center in Mexico, which he now directs. His organization operates Agua Para Vida, a humanitarian program supplying water and food to migrants on their path north.
"So many people have died here in the desert in past years; why does it take all this [to call attention to the problem]?" says Medrano, pointing to the media circus across the line. "They come here, see what happens, and then they'll just forget about it. We'll keep fighting for our people so that they don't die trying to realize the American dream."
After checking on the water drums his group leaves under shady trees across the desert, Medrano and a couple of volunteers from the center -- one a former drug smuggler now undergoing rehabilitation -- decided to walk up to the border fence. Curious media and Minutemen alike clustered around Medrano, at first excited that he might have been a migrant attempting to cross, but then engaging him in what might truly have been the only cross-border dialogue both sides will see during the month-long confrontation.
"Mexicans that work in the United States send their money back home -- and they use the doctors and hospitals here. President Fox tells them to come here because he wants us to pay for their health," an elderly woman says to Medrano in Spanish, holding an American flag in each of her hands.
"I think if the U.S. didn't have any Mexicans it would have serious problems," Medrano replies. "Is anybody hungry?" he asks the volunteers and media congregated around, handing them a Ziploc bag packed with snacks he has brought for migrants.
"What do you think of the Minutemen?" asks a reporter.
"They do what they do. But there are people appointed by the government with this job. It would better if [the Minutemen] were home taking care of their families instead of being on the border and getting in the way of the border patrol."
"When Mexicans come to the United States why don't they want to learn English? If I was going to live in a different house I would learn that language." asked the woman with the flags.
"For me," replied Medrano, "English is difficult."
As he walked away, a volunteer from California shouted "Viva Mexico!" Her friend then pointed to the shopping bags stuck in the shrubs on the south side of the fence left by journeying migrants. "I want to tell you something light, a little joke we talk about. See those white plastic bags? I've given them a new name. They're called 'Mexican Samsonite.' Isn't it true? They're all over the place..."
From Agua Prieta to Douglas
Douglas, AZ sees a steady flow of Mexicans who come over the border for the day to shop. Along its historic main street, cars with Mexican license plates are stuffed with items purchased from the shoe, clothing and variety stores up and down the strip. On the other side of town, icons of American consumerism - McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Radio Shack - feed south-of-the-border appetites. Walk down to the international border gate, past a cluster shopping carts left by Wal-Mart shoppers, and the scene suddenly changes. Dusty streets with potholes, taco trucks, music and ice cream stores line a main street flowing with pedestrians and vehicle traffic.
Agua Prieta, Mexico used to be a sleepy town with a population equal to its American sibling north of the fence, but this staging ground for drug and human smuggling has burst into a sprawling town of single story buildings with a population of 135,000.
In the main plaza, Hispanic organizations from Southern California were rallying "in solidarity" with Arizona civil and human rights organizations to denounce the "racist" Minuteman Project and the group's complication of a multifaceted problem that calls for more peaceful, systemic solutions.
"What we're simply saying is give workers access to globalization," said Christian Ramirez, who directs the U.S./Mexico border program for the American Friends Service Committee. "Why is it that the borders have come down for transnational corporations but it has become more deadly for working people on both sides? It's been 11 years since NAFTA was introduced, and the issue of labor movements has not been resolved. Allow workers the same rights that we have allowed products."
Jose Jacques Medina from the Los Angeles-based Comite Pro Uno, dismisses any idea that undocumented migrant workers, while boosting domestic product, cost the system.
"In order to be productive you have to be at least 15 years old, right? You have to feed, educate, and raise this worker from the day they're born. This is money the people of Mexico have invested in any given individual ready to work. The United States doesn't invest a single coin in this human being, but it is ready to exploit and take all the production out of their body. That's a free thing that is given to the U.S. economic system."
Credit: Andy Isaacson
A mile from the main plaza, Javier Rodriquez, 20, and his two friends from Guadalajara have arrived in Agua Prieta. They sit bleary eyed and travel weary in the courtyard of La Iglesia Sagrada, a church which provides shelter to those migrants en route to a better life north, or those freshly deported.
Flyers with depictions of crossed shotguns have been distributed by church groups to migrants warning them of the Minutemen's presence on the line and the increased attention on the border that has followed in its wake. The three of them saw this first hand when they snuck up to the line earlier in the day but retreated, discouraged.
They sat in near silence in the courtyard, with no money to pay the coyotes and polleros that guide migrants for as much as $2000 to far-flung destinations such as Atlanta, North Carolina and Tennessee, all of which have seen sharp rises in illegal job seekers in recent years.
"I want to go to New York because I hear the wages are better. But I'll work wherever - at factory, car wash, pizzeria - whatever pays," says Rodriguez, whose father died least year, leaving him the eldest son in a family of five.
At dusk, after eating a meal the church will provide, Javier and his friends will set out.
Between mile markers 8 and 12 on the Geronimo Trail east of Douglas, U.S. Border Patrol agents sit in waiting. The dry washes that meander up from the borderline and cross this dusty road are frequent migrant trails, and with the Minutemen and increased patrol presence concentrated west of Douglas, more migrants have begun traveling these remote routes. The agents are expecting them, and drive their trucks along the shoulder with their eyes peeled for footprints and other signs of traffic. With night vision scopes they locate movement in the brush, and then pursue the migrants by foot and ATV.
By 10pm, the night had gotten busy. Agents came across a young Mexican man and his sister - the rest of their traveling group had been caught earlier that day, and the couple had waited in the brush until dark. Shortly afterwards, a group of 14 young Mexican nationals were apprehended and sat orderly along the side of the road, illuminated by the glow of patrol headlights. Agents say that when they are spotted, migrants stand still rather than run and risk injury, while their guides turn tail back across the border.
The processing that takes place on the roadside is cordial and routine - the migrants' items are gathered and searched, their bodies frisked and paperwork is signed. They will be brought back to the border gate in Douglas, temporarily detained, and sent back to Mexico. The whole scene resembles a mother catching her child pilfering a cookie from the jar: she catches her child because that's just what moms do, but knows that kids will be kids, and will try for the cookie as soon as she turns her back. The child wants - even needs - that cookie, and while being caught red-handed is a disappointing setback, he knows that he's only due for a light slap on the wrist. Tomorrow, he'll try for the cookie again.
Home on the Frontlines
Since last October, agents in the Douglas, AZ corridor have caught 102,341 migrants attempting to cross illegally into the United States. For every one that's apprehended, unofficial estimates are that three or four make it through. But even those migrants apprehended will usually make it through, eventually, perhaps on their twelfth try.
The vast majority of those apprehended are Mexican, but a rising number are OTMs -- Other Than Mexicans -- a trend that some point to as evidence of how the border has become a convenient entry point for large numbers of people from countries with large populations hostile to the United States. While the U.S. Border Patrol does not release exact OTM figures or provide country breakdowns, citing sensitive intelligence, local residents have found prayer rugs, journals written in Farsi, and Korans littering their property. One rancher north of Douglas tells of an Iraqi asylum-seeker who walked onto his property one night crying, "call the police!" The man's father had been killed, his mother and sister were missing, and he had journeyed from Iraq to Turkey, Guatemala and Mexico before reaching this rancher's front gate.
Those who sneak past agents on Geronimo Trail will soon find themselves walking across Warner and Mary Glenn's cattle ranch, a breathtaking 15,000 acres of sensitive mountain desert habitat home to white-sided jackrabbits, pronghorn, mountain lion, and black bear. The Glenn's have joined with other ranch owners to form the Malpai Borderlands Group, an innovative grassroots project -- one of the largest "ecosystem management" experiments in the country -- that is protecting 800,000 acres of contiguous open space ranchland stretching into New Mexico.
Mary Glenn has seen a lot of traffic through her property over the past decade. There was a time, she says, when they would recognize almost half the people coming through every year because they were returnees, like the "spiffy-looking" man who would walk through their pasture on his way to a job in Chicago carrying a briefcase and wearing dark glasses. "But boy, I'll tell you, they're all different now," she says. "They're from way South, and there are more of them."
Almost every landowner in the area confronts incredible stories of human struggle, like that of the migrant woman who gave birth in Glenn's pasture. The woman cut the umbilical cord with broken glass, tied it off with an unraveled sweater and sought help on Glenn's porch holding the new American citizen in her arms. Others arrive on Glenn's porch hungry, injured and lost -- some have spent four days walking the desert in circles, devastated when told they have only journeyed five miles from the border.
But in their wake, the migrants have laid waste to the pristine landscape. They defecate near water sources, leave toilet paper, sanitary pads, piles of food containers and discarded clothing. Some neighbors' cattle have died ingesting plastic bags left in the pastures. The Glenns secured a grant from the Bureau of Land Management to hire someone to clean up the garbage. "But what a waste," she says. "It's good money that could go to improving the land, but instead we're picking up trash."
As policymakers debate the economic equation of illegal immigration, and consumers across the nation benefit from a lifestyle of cheap goods and services, residents on the front line bear most of the costs. Among those "losers" out of the immigration phenomenon -- those who stand to gain the least, while sacrificing the most, from the influx -- are those living in border communities like Don and Grace Wiggens.
One afternoon, the Wiggens' granddaughter arrived from school to an empty ranch house. No sooner had she walked into the living room and locked the front door when four migrants banged on the door, demanding that she open it, feed them, and drive them to where they needed to go. Rattled, she called her grandmother, who called border patrol. Only after brandishing a gun and exposing the muzzle through the Venetian blinds did the migrants run off.
Many local residents in Cochise County share these horror stories of borderline life, a reality that "comes with the territory" but terrorizes all the same. Dogs bark throughout the night at passing migrants, as their owners lie sleepless. The Wiggens were so fed up with repairing damages to the barbed wire fence surrounding their property that they installed a section which migrants could take down and secure behind them to aid their passing. Don Wiggens arrived home from his job as security head at the local airport to find his horse tangled up in the barbed wire fence which migrants had removed and left on the ground. They coughed up the $1,000 in veterinarian fees. Other neighbors have found migrants butchering their newborn calves, opening water lines to drink -- leaving them flowing -- and stealing their trucks.
Although locals recognize these crimes as the doings of only a minority of passing migrants, their outrage gets to the emotional heart of what angers those calling for tougher border security: the government is not doing what it should be to protect the safety and honor the rights of its legal citizens.
This feeling has hit home for the Wiggens. Their daughter, now living in California at a military base, at one time was a single mother and applied for government assistance to help raise her child. "Here was a someone who had served her country, but the office turned down her application," says Grace Wiggens. "They gave food stamps to the man in the next cubicle, who couldn't speak English, had no proof of address - and may have even been illegal." A few months ago, their granddaughter sprained her arm, but none of the county hospital emergency rooms -- in Douglas or Bisbee -- had open space. They went to Douglas anyway, and after waiting several hours they learned that illegal immigrants had taken up the beds.
The Wiggens say they are compassionate people, but their emotions -- like those of the majority of Americans who polls show favor a crackdown on illegal immigration -- run high as they weigh the opposing forces of compassion and practicality. The United States was built by immigrants seeking to better their lives, but the system cannot accommodate those who come through the back door.
Make a Run for the Border
At dusk, back at the Minuteman compound, the jagged peaks of the Huachuca Mountains to the west stand silhouetted against a glowing magenta sky. A white aerostat blimp looms omnisciently above, launched below from Ft. Huachuca, the country's largest military intelligence complex. The blimp, which contains some of the most advanced military intelligence technology known to human civilization hovers, ironically, over a rampant smuggling route across one of the most penetrable borders known to human civilization.
"It frustrates me that politicians want to have this 'war on drugs' yet don't want to take the steps to stop the ones coming through our backyard," said Terry McCormick, 37, an ex-marine from California who enlisted in the Minuteman Project not out of a concern for illegal immigration but for the more insidious and flagrant drug smuggling that flows under the noses of authorities.
Credit: Andy Isaacson
Away from the media spotlight, to the west of where retirees stand watch over the desert, McCormick quietly commandeers a small group of former and current Marines that are "doing the dirty work and the ground pounding."
The day before, at the base of Coronado Peak, his group had spooked a crew of drug runners carrying backpack loads of heroine and marijuana on U.S. soil, and chased them across the border. Drug smuggling operations have sophisticated weaponry, communications and a network of tunnels that they use in the Huachucas.
McCormick, his wife, and a couple young marines load into a jeep in camouflage uniforms and leave the Minuteman compound, heading down a maze of dusty ranch roads toward the border fence. They want to get a closer look at "Cocaine Cabana," a white building visible across the border which McCormick says acts as a staging ground for smuggling operations.
"These routes go from here to Los Angeles up to Canada" he says. "We figured we'd hit them hard here and see how it affects California. We're here to do our duty, to do our part. It makes us feel good when we come out here and find out that this border is slammed and shut down, even if it's just for a 10 mile length. This basically opens up the government's eyes to say that this can be done, if done and implemented properly - - by putting our national guard back on the line and regaining control, and by getting an immigration policy that actually works and enforcing the laws already on our books."
After a week along the border, it appeared as though the Minutemen were finding enemies in those who stood to profit from the status quo. Volunteers around the Minuteman compound stepped up their internal security, installing guards and ground sensors around the perimeter of the compound. The violent Central American gang MS- 13, they said, had also jammed their communications and rumor had it were planning attacks.
A Coca-Cola delivery truck entered the compound, and Cindylou Dampf radioed to the communications center through her walkie-talkie. "It could be Al Qaeda in the back," she said. "I'm joking, but you never know."
Jim Gilchrest, a retired accountant from Orange County, CA who organized the project along with Chris Simcox, arrived to say the FBI had just passed along credible death threats against his family. "I have to go, I have a family to protect," he yelled, driving off.
According to the U.S. Border Patrol, apprehensions for the first ten days in April in the corridor where the Minutemen were posted decreased by almost 6,000 from the same period a year ago.
But a USBP spokesperson said that whenever Mexican authorities are out in greater numbers on their side of the fence -- which have assembled in the wake of the Minuteman presence and media attention -- "our numbers plummet." The enforcement presence had been beefed up on the U.S. side as well. Not coincidentally, the Bush administration deployed 500 more border patrol agents just days before the Minutemen arrived - locals said they had never seen so much government law enforcement in the area.
Whatever the reason, Minuteman volunteers are calling the project a resounding success. Emboldened by the turnout and the attention it garnered, there is talk about staging similar protests along the borders New Mexico and Texas, and even one in June against employers who hire illegals, another target of their frustration.
"The thing about marrying up a willing worker with a willing employer, that these people re doing jobs that 'Americans won't do' -- you need to further that sentence. It's the jobs that Americans won't do at that price," says Minuteman volunteer Greg Coody of Waco, TX.
But the economic forces at play may be stronger. "If the market needs it, the market will attract it," says Salvador Reza, who operates a day laborer center in Phoenix and came to the border to watch the Minuteman events unfold. "It's like a river: You can block a river, but if the river has enough rain, it will go around."
From the summit of Coronado Peak, the San Pedro River below flows through a contiguous landscape that only relatively recently saw a barbed fence dividing north from south. Despite the efforts of the Minuteman, and those of the border patrol agents in the evening, several hundred migrants will have reached U.S soil by daybreak.
The sight of a hundred migrants trudging single file across private property indeed resembles an "invasion" on the homeland if looked at through the prism of nationalism.
But from high up in the Huachuca Mountains, the desert valley below just looks like land, not like two different national homelands. And long before Coronado marched through here - in fact, since the beginning of human history all across the world -- populations have shifted across lands, following resources and seeking self-preservation. In their wake, over time, demographics and cultures have changed.
The Minutemen, in demanding the enforcement of laws and the preservation of a more unified culture, might be waging a fight in futility, as the forces that have governed the flow of human beings across lands since time immemorial - wealth, greed, power and human survival - are very deep and historic phenomena.
What's to stop those now?