The Atlantic
March 2010
Edited by Don Peck
© Bill Donahue

“DEAR FATHER,” the announcer intoned over the darkened arena, “we ask that you put your mighty hands on this event, not only on the cowboys, but on the livestock as well.”

The 7,500 fans crowding the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon, to see the rodeo—an event put on by Professional Bull Riders, Inc., and one steeped in God and country—went hush. Earlier, a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force had marched, ramrod-erect, onto the loose dirt of the bullring and asked 23 saluting recruits to solemnly raise their right hands, so as to be sworn into the force. A battery of explosives burst in the darkness, leaving three fiery letters—USA—burning bright in the soil. Then, as dry-ice fog crawled the arena, a spotlight settled on a man in a white cowboy hat, his hands on his hips Old West–style, his cold grimace terrifying, as the announcer hailed “the reigning … world … champion!”

Guilherme Marchi? From Leme, São Paulo, Brazil?

Well, yes. Brazil has the world’s largest commercial cattle herd—more than 200 million head—and its own burgeoning rodeo culture. And now, as the PBR launches its 17th season, bringing its 40-rider show to 31 cities coast to coast, several Brazilian riders are in the hunt for the tour’s $11 million in prize money—and for the Ford 4×4 pickup bestowed upon the winner of the PBR World Finals, slated for November, in Las Vegas.

The riders mount snorting 1,800-pound animals specially bred to kick and buck. They endeavor to stay on for a full eight seconds, and last year Marchi, who’s 27, succeeded about 60 percent of the time. He is square-jawed, with plaintive brown eyes and a little crease of a scar in his chin, thanks to a cow that kicked him when he was 6. When he appeared recently on the cover of PBR’s media guide, shilling for what promoters call “the toughest sport on Earth,” the scar was displayed prominently, and Marchi was festooned with every imaginable emblem of cowboy masculinity: ropes, a fist-sized belt buckle, leather chaps.

Away from the spotlight, though, the machismo vanishes and Marchi exudes a common touch, climbing over 10-foot fences to be photographed with fans. “He talks American pretty good,” Dean Woods, a retired heavy-equipment operator, told me. “And he’s not like your basketball and football players—he stops and signs autographs.”

Marchi had plenty of Portuguese-speaking company in Portland. Wiry Renato Nunes performed a backflip off the bullpen fence. Paulo Crimber, from São Paulo, often moonwalks in the ring. Robson Palermo—5 foot 6, 163 pounds, and a bit chubby for a bull rider—has tried dirt dancing, too, but he stuck to bull riding when I saw him. “I have three slipped discs,” Palermo, the 2008 Vegas winner, told me backstage, afterward, “and I’m not a very good dancer.”

A moment later, Palermo was genially grinning as my interpreter showed him cell-phone photos of her children. “It’s funny,” he confided. “Sometimes when you’re with the bulls, you’re laughing and joking. And then you see the TV cameras are on you, so you have to act all serious and mean.”

The pose doesn’t come naturally to the Brazilians, for in their country rodeo is more homey than steely. The 10-day Barretos International Rodeo, which draws 800,000 fans every year, is a sort of festive state fair, replete with petting zoos, outdoor concerts, and barbecue joints. The prize money is paltry, and the cowboys bear a sense of inferiority. “Rodeo is just getting popular in Brazil,” Marchi explains, “and so you want the fans to like you. You try to be nice.”

Palermo once made $30 a month as a cattle hand, and lived with his parents in a remote shack with an outhouse. There was no TV reception, but if he cranked the generator, Palermo could watch bull-riding videos. He learned the art, at first, by bucking and heaving about on his tattered couch.

Today, he’s earned more than $1 million on the PBR circuit. With his wife and infant daughter, he lives on his own Texas ranch, an 82-acre spread in Tyler. He has 10 horses, and he is breeding bucking bulls. But what he cherishes most is the mounted deer head that an admiring PBR fan gave him for his wall. “In Brazil,” he mused, “we only kill deer to eat them. It’s strange what people do in this country, but I think I’m staying. I like it here.”

Channeling Sappho

Reed Magazine
Autumn 2009
Edited by Chris Lydgate
© Bill Donahue

She was a tall woman, maybe, and a sultry beauty. In the paintings we have of Sappho, the lyric poet who lived circa 600 BC, her eyes are often soft and beguiling. Her robes are loose and flowing in the warm island breezes of her native Lesbos, and her skin is alabaster and tender—painted with a sweet affection reminiscent of Caravaggio.

Usually, she is carrying a lyre, for in her largely preliterate culture, Sappho was a singer-songwriter—a feminist voice, and a sort of Ani DiFranco of her day. She performed at weddings and funerals, sometimes alone, and sometimes with a chorus of teenage girls. Some believe that she ran a finishing school for the wealthy young debutantes of her day, tutoring them in fashion and the arts. Others contend that Sappho’s school was secular, and cultlike in its embrace of homosexual love. This latter theory has a certain seamy marketability today (your alumni magazine herewith directs you to sapphosflame.com), but in truth Sappho’s poems are not raw anatomy lessons. They tend, instead, to be pain-acquainted notes on Eros’ sting. Consider this poem, as rendered in a famous American translation:

With his venom

Irresistible

and bittersweet

that loosener

of limbs, Love

reptile-like

strikes me down

For several centuries, Sappho was venerated. In his first- century-AD treatise, “On The Sublime,” the Greek critic Longinus reveled, “Are you not amazed at how she evokes soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, skin, as though they were external and belonged to someone else? And how at one and the same moment she both freezes and burns?”

But just a few years later, in 180 AD, the theologian Tatian dissed Sappho as a “pornikon erotomanes”—and Christianity was only beginning its purifying ascent. In 1073, according to one Renaissance writer, Pope Gregory VII coordinated the burning of Sappho’s work in both Rome and Constantinople.

The bonfires may be apocryphal. What matters is that Sappho’s poems went out of vogue. The pottery bearing her words turned into dust. The papyrus got tossed, mostly, and all that remains is a few fragments—a line here, a word there: a corpus so scant that it instills longing. It’s as though we can hear Sappho’s voice, just barely, calling out of the past, asking to be heard and deciphered.

Let me tell you this:

someone in some future time

will think of us

It is strange how things happen. You have a poet who stood on a Greek isle singing into the wind, and then 25 centuries later, in about 1930, here at Reed, a young woman from Vancouver, Washington, tunes into Sappho—and goes on, in 1958, to publish what many regard as the definitive English language translation of literature’s first significant female voice. Mary Barnard ’32 was an established poet by the 1950s, celebrated for her spare evocations of the Northwest landscape. Her slender book, Sappho: A New Translation, excerpted throughout this piece, is lucid and lean, delivering around 100 of the 200-odd extant Sappho fragments in free verse, in plainspoken American idiom. For example:

If you are squeamish

Don’t prod the

beach rubble

Nearly every English translation that preceded Barnard’s was a dog—a bona fide clunker that endeavored to twist Sappho’s clean Greek into bouncy rhymes. Lord Byron’s circa 1820 stab at Sappho, for instance, includes these regrettable lines:

Equal to Jove that youth must be —

Greater than Jove he seems to me —

Who, free from Jealousy’s alarms,

Securely views thy matchless charms.

Barnard’s rendering of the same stanza reads:

He is more than a hero

He is a god in my eyes—

the man who is allowed

to sit beside you—he

who listens intimately

to the sweet murmur of

your voice

When A New Translation appeared, it was instantly celebrated. “The sheer penetration Miss Barnard achieves is staggering,” opined The Hudson Review. “She is Sappho, here.”

Barnard’s book remains the default Sappho—the best selling of the twenty-odd Sappho translations on amazon.com and also, probably, the translation most widely used at American colleges. In the eyes of many, Mary Barnard brought Sappho to the American public—and helped, inadvertently, to spawn a new vision of the ancient poet, as lesbian activist. Witness the 1970 call to arms, “Sappho Was a Right-On Woman,” by Sidney Abbot and Barbara Love—and also the eighties-era all-women a capella group, the Sapphonics, whose specialty hit was, “There Is Nothing Like a Dyke.”

In her later years, Barnard was often embraced as an avatar of the Movement. “She would get fan letters that would begin, ‘Like you, I’m a lesbian. I read your book every night before going to sleep,’” remembers her friend James Anderson ’76. “She was a very open-minded person, but it perturbed her.”

Indeed, Barnard was no libertine revolutionary. Apolitical and single throughout her entire life, she was a remote and self-contained person. The poet Marianne Moore called the tall, bespectacled Barnard “trim, pale and spare,” and Sarah Barnsley ’95, a British academic now at work on a Barnard biography, labels her “an aesthete, and an immensely private person.” Barnsley spent eight weeks in the library at Yale University, sifting through the 3,000 letters that Barnard wrote to her parents. She has found no evidence that the poet ever had any romantic liaisons, and she is still not sure whether Barnard was gay or straight.

Deliberate and exacting, Mary Barnard produced only about 150 poems, all told, and they are burnished little jewels devoid of Sappho’s soft sensuality. They’re almost absent of people, in fact, and lonely. Consider:

Sweep the mind

clean

like a field of dry stubble

when the constellations

of daisies have been mown

Reed grads of the 70s and 80s remember Barnard as a wry and crisp éminence grise who obligingly entertained poetry novices at her immaculate condo in Vancouver, Washington. “She had an old-school propriety,” says John Sheehy, ’82. “You’d go over there and she’d serve you tea and cookies.”

One has to wonder: How did such a cool character ever pull off a translation of Sappho that was so white-hot, so on the money? Likely, no one will ever know, but with the centennial of Barnard’s birth looming—she was born on December 6, 1909—it is time to piece the story together.

It all began, arguably, in the mouth of a crocodile. When the late Greeks and the Romans tired of Sappho, they treated the papyri bearing her work as something like old, coffee-stained newspapers. They used it as packing material—and one day in 1900, as a workman was digging in the Fayum basin of Egypt, looking for mummies on the site of an old Hellenist city, Oxyrhynchus, he unearthed the leathery body of a mummified croc. Inside its mouth were blackened papyri; hundreds more crocodiles were likewise stuffed. Most of the long-buried papyri were dross—IOUs, invitations, tax returns, laundry lists. But Oxford grads Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt kept probing through a nearby ancient garbage dump. They gathered scraps as small as postage stamps in reed baskets and brought them to England. By 1915, they’d reassembled texts from Euclid, Pindar, and Euripides, along with 56 undiscovered fragments of Sappho.

The new Sappho prompted great joy in London, for there a brash young American expat poet, Ezra Pound, was hatching a new literary movement—modernism—that was at war with Victorians like, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and their longwinded, fanciful musings. In founding a lit journal called Des Imagistes, Pound called on writers to present “images of concrete things arranged to stir the reader.” He also advocated a vigorous mining of classical texts, sprinkling his own poems with snippets of Greek. Sappho’s clarity and elusive mystique thrilled him. And as the Sappho papyri were shipped to the British Museum during the nineteen-teens, Pound was often there in the refreshment room, sharing buttered toasts and cream puffs with his old flame, the poet Hilda Doolittle, or HD, as they argued over verse that Hilda had written in Sapphic style.

Mary Barnard was starstruck by the whole episode. In a letter to her parents, she asked that they give her both the poems of HD and a translation of Sappho for Christmas. At Reed she veered from an institutional mania for T.S. Eliot (“It was Eliot, Eliot, Eliot all the way,” she wrote) to embrace the man who edited Eliot’s antiepic, The Wasteland: Ezra Pound. “He knew more about the technique of writing poetry than any other living poet,” she says in her 1984 memoir, Assault on Mount Helicon, “and I had a sneaking suspicion that he might like the kind of poems I wrote.”

In 1933, with the ink still wet on her Reed degree, she was living at her parents’ house in Vancouver, babysitting here and there for 50 cents an hour and arduously writing. She finally screwed up the courage to send Pound six poems and a note beseeching advice. Pound responded as he did to all letters—with a garbled note that reads like an antediluvian text message. “Age?” he harrumphed. “intentions? how MUCH intention? I mean how hard and for how long are you willing to work at it? . . . Nice gal, likely to marry and give up writing or what Oh?”

Barnard responded with sass: “I’m a nice gal, yes, but not in the least likely to get married. I abhor kitchens, I’m scared to death of children, and I have an extraordinarily chilly disposition. That I should give up writing is inconceivable.”

Soon, the correspondence between Barnard and Pound was flowing. She played earnest student. He rattled off hoary advice—and launched her into the giddy swirl of literary life. With reference letters from her mentor, Barnard moved to New York in 1935 and befriended Marianne Moore. William Carlos Williams—26 years her senior, and a known philanderer—made an unrequited pass at her on the Brooklyn Bridge, then became a close pal. In 1940, New Directions Press included her, along with John Berryman, in a momentous slim volume, Five Young American Poets. She found work as an indexer and research assistant.

But still her life was not easy. Barnard was an odd bird—on the outside and alone in many a social setting. The only child of a traveling lumber buyer, she’d spent her freshman year at Reed with “no friends at all,” she writes. And when she traveled to New York, she was “green as grass” and “very shy, and more than a little terrified.” Her life was solitary, and small. In recounting her time in New York to James Anderson, she once told him a story about buying a warm winter coat. “That was the highlight of her whole year,” says Anderson.

She was never robust, and in late 1950, after losing her job, she came down with what her autobiography calls “the Bug-of-the-Year. I became more and more depressed, probably because I was already ill,” she writes in a rare confessional moment. “In January, when my landlord decided to put in a new boiler during a cold snap, it was the last straw.” Her weight plummeted to 105. She checked into the hospital. She spent a month convalescing at a friend’s apartment. In the spring she traveled home to Vancouver, so that her aging mother could tend to her in the family’s generous, tree-lined home near the center of town. Upon arrival, she came down with hepatitis B.

This bout of illness changed her life. She would lie in bed for about six months, and she would never again seek full-time work. Indeed, it was only a matter of time before she’d pull up stakes in New York. In 1957, she would leave the city and settle back into her parents’ home, on a permanent basis.

For Sappho, probably, a personal decline would have been splendid literary grist. So many of her poems express heartsickness. For instance:

It is clear now:

Neither honey nor

the honey bee is

to be mine again.

Barnard didn’t feel that 20th century writers were entitled to bellyache so. Indeed, after going to see James Agee read from Let us Now Praise Famous Men, a self-involved, sorrow-tinged nonfictional book about Southern sharecroppers, she snipped, “It was like listening to a man saying his prayers.”

Mary Barnard didn’t disdain Agee simply because she believed in privacy. She was also an heir to a certain artistic tradition. The modernists espoused impersonality, and the aesthetic is perhaps best enunciated by T.S. Eliot, who, in his seminal 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” laid down a complex dictate: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Barnard had personality and emotions, and when she was sick she wanted to escape from them. In her memoir, she writes of being “hooked up to a glucose bottle” at a Vancouver hospital—and of protesting vehemently when a doctor instructed, “Stay in bed another month.”

“I felt that I must do something to make this catastrophe pay,” she continues. She cracked open two Greek grammar books and began honing her rusty language skills, first acquired at Reed, where in the evenings her classics professor, Barry Cerf, read Homer aloud to his charges.

In bed, Barnard reread parts of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Then by chance a friend sent her a new Italian translation of Sappho done by Salvatore Quasimodo. It was “very beautiful,” Barnard writes, “spare but musical, and [it] had, besides, the sound of the speaking voice making a simple but emotionally loaded statement.” Reading in a language she knew only vaguely, she was “free to balance between the Greek phrase and the Italian phrase while I search for the truly equivalent phrase in living, not lexicon English.”

At first, Barnard just did translation in her head. But eventually she felt the prod of a note that Ezra Pound had sent her back in 1934, advising her to translate Sappho. (“You hate translation???” Pound thundered. “What of it? Expect to be carried up Mt. Helicon in an easy chair?”) She sat up and started to type, limiting her sessions, per doctors’ orders, to one or two hours. Each fragment went through about 40 drafts, and when she wasn’t writing, she did what she calls “pillow-work.” She lay in bed, rolling the fragments “around and around in my mind, trying different words and different arrangements of words, asking myself over and over: what did she mean?”

As Barnard describes it in Assault on Mount Helicon, the translation was sort of like doing a crossword puzzle: She searched for clues, then wrote things down. You figure, reading the memoir, that her translations are literal. But actually she pruned; she bridged fragments together. She made brazen assumptions, and then, for each fragment, she devised a title. Look at these two related fragments as they were rendered in an intentionally literal translation by poet Anne Carson in 2002:

1. Evening

you gather back

all that dazzling dawn has put

asunder:

you gather a lamb

gather a kid

gather a child to its mother

2. of all the stars most beautiful

Now, look at Barnard’s condensation:

The evening star

Is the most

beautiful

of all stars

Likewise, Carson records these words:

but I to you of a white goat

and I will pour wine over

Where Barnard writes:

And I said

I shall burn the

fat thigh-bones of

a white she-goat

on her altar

In truth, Sappho never said anything about the goat being fat, or about thigh-bones. But in Barnard’s almost filmic version we can see the meat crisping and sizzling, and the word “altar”—not in the Greek, either—gives the whole tableaux a shimmering holiness, without being highfalutin. Surely, as she lay there, devising her clear, concrete imagery, Barnard was thinking of Pound munching his toasts.

And maybe she thought of Sappho as a friend, too, for the ancient poet—despite all her modern guises (Super Dyke, Porn Queen)—shared much with the odd bird laid low in Vancouver. On the page, Sappho does not present as a brazen Amazon ringleader, but rather as an outsider, a sensitive artiste so astonished by the hurt of life that when she speaks of a girl losing her virginity it is:

like a hyacinth in

the mountains, trampled

by shepherds until

only a purple stain remains

on the ground

“There’s a sense of loss about Sappho,” says Sheehy, now a San Francisco-based writer and editor. “She wrote so much great poetry, but then it just disappeared. And there was something tragic going on in Mary’s life, too. She’d had all this promise and now there she was, in her forties, sick and living with her parents.”

How did Barnard contend, artistically speaking, with the drab misery of it all? It seems almost certain that she’d read Eliot’s manifesto, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—and that she heard its call for “concentration.” Eliot wrote that poetry is a “concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all.” And in a 1989 letter to a graduate student, Angela Christy, Barnard hints at how she concentrated her bedridden interlude into poetry. The letter discusses this Sappho fragment, as translated by Barnard:

Pain penetrates

me drop

by drop

Christy has just written a thesis speculating that Sappho was thinking of dripping stalagmites. Barnard corrects her. “I’m sure that she did not have stalagmites in mind,” she writes, “nor did I. I thought of a faucet dripping—in the next room, say—then of a heartbeat, then of the pulse, then of throbbing pain. The comparison is not with a hard stone pointed object, but with rhythmic liquid movement, inside the body. The Village Voice published a long poem by Joel Oppenheimer at the time of his death. In it he described what it felt like to be eaten by cancer and treated by chemotherapy, and in the midst of it he quoted those six words of my translation. I’m sure he understood it exactly the way I meant it.”

In her memoir, Barnard says she likely couldn’t have translated Sappho had she been leading an active life: “I would never have had the patience to work so long over each fragment.” She also speaks fondly of the house in Vancouver where she grew up and did her translation, extolling its large porch and the cleared back yard running down to nearby railroad tracks.

The place is still there, in a quiet, leafy neighborhood just off Main Street. It’s just a few miles from my home in Portland, so recently, on a spring afternoon, I pedaled my bicycle over the bridge and rolled up to the lawn.

The Barnard house was grayish blue, the paint flecked, and the roof rotting and speckled with moss. Inside, a large dog was barking at a plasma TV sitting amid a cluster of cardboard moving boxes still unopened by the new owners. I knocked. A young woman came to the door, and then I stood on the porch explaining my mission.

The woman looked at me, skeptically. “Are you a Reedie?” she asked.

In time, she warmed up. She offered to let me come back and tour the place once her husband got home, and for a while I did plan on returning for Mary Barnard instilled a certain sadness in me. Just like Sappho, she’d almost vanished. She’d left behind no heirs, and although she did write a memoir, it was close to the vest. I wanted some tangible hint of her life: I wanted to touch the walls that she touched. I wanted a bead on the story of her life in that house.

But soon, as I kept reading the poems, that urge for facts faded—and felt rather silly: A New Translation is, really, all about imagination. Sappho, working when literature was a new medium, imagined a fresh way to tell the truth, and Mary Barnard, lying on her back, stared up at the ceiling over her sickbed. She imagined the evening star, and she made it the most beautiful of all the stars.

The First Dude in His Element

Sports Illustrated
March 11, 2009
Edited by Chris Hunt
© Bill Donahue

Behold Todd Palin’s snow machine, dangling from a truck’s winch in the icy gray murk of an Alaskan winter morning. The machine is gleaming, new, scarcely ridden. It is orange and black and pointy-nosed, with thin, tensile orange steel suspension arms jutting from its sides like the wings on a menacing insect. This is, no doubt, a machine that could inflict a nasty sting, but right now its engine is stilled, and a certain awed quietude prevails on Big Lake, outside Anchorage, at the start of the 2009 Tesoro Iron Dog, a 2,000-mile snow-machine odyssey that crashes through the Alaskan backcountry, northwest to Nome and then east to Fairbanks.

“That an Arctic Cat F600?” one bystander murmurs.

“Yup,” says his bud.

“Ohlins shocks?”

“Yup.”

Racers of lesser means did not arrive here with winches. No, they wrestled their 500-pound machines out of their pickups with the engines snarling, exhaust spewing everywhere as they heaved the things down little makeshift ramps. Palin’s sled settles on the newly fallen snow soundlessly, and then he just stands beside it, buff, grinning and vigorously gnawing on chewing gum.

Yes, we are talking about that Todd Palin — Sarah’s husband, the First Dude — and yes, the Dude is in his element here at the Dog. Forget the campaign trail, the whole black suit and sound-bite thing. Todd Palin grew up in rural Alaska, fishing in slime-spattered rain pants, and for most of the past two decades he’s worked in a British Petroleum plant on the frigid North Slope, monitoring turbines and pumps with a tool belt slung from his hip. Nothing else could have prepared him better for the rigors of the Dog — the -60 degree cold snaps, the darkness, the mechanical breakdowns, the wipeouts at 95 mph. Palin, who has entered 15 of the 25 runnings of this annual race, has won four and placed second three times.

The Iron Dog is an accrued-time partner race, in which teams of two riders, each on his own sled, are clocked only when the rear guard arrives at a designated point. Since 2003 Palin, who’s 44, has paired with another snow-machine celebrity, 49-year-old Scott Davis, who has won the Dog seven times (once with Palin) and run the race every year since its 1984 inception. The impresario of a large concrete business, Davis is, like Palin, a striking physical presence: chiseled and lantern-jawed, with the erect bearing of a resolute middle-aged mensch.

More snow machines roll out of pickups. The air thrums — a high-pitched throttly scream here, a low bassy engine roar over there. Soon a 53-year-old knifemaker, Roger Comar, approaches Palin and Davis reverently. Comar has traveled from his home in Marion, N.C., expressly to give each rider (and Sarah, too) a custom-made jackknife whose blade is crafted from the metal of an Arctic Cat F600 drive chain. Each knife took Comar 20 hours of shop time, and in his moment of glory he tells Todd Palin, “You can skin a moose with this thing.” Then he turns to Sarah and says, “This is a message from western North Carolina that we want you to make a run for president in 2012.”

But then there’s a political resonance to the whole scene. On two race sleds are bumper stickers reading AMERICA. LOVE IT, DEFEND IT, OR GET THE HELL OUT. On another there’s a mock ALASKA TERRORIST HUNTING PERMIT, good through 2050, with the license number 9-11-01. Tina Fey is not here amid the wafting aroma of two-stroke motor oil. Neither is Michelle Obama.

And so Todd Palin is free to be … the Dude. There are no Secret Service types shadowing him, no spin-doctoring publicists. No, he’s just another guy wandering the crowd, slapping old friends on the back, shooting the bull. And Sarah, too, is relaxed. Stylishly coiffed and hatless at 15 degrees, she takes a microphone and makes a few chummy remarks before praying that the snow machine’s enjoy “God’s protection.” The Air Force Honor Guard plays The Star-Spangled Banner in formation on the frozen lake, and one by one 35 teams zoom away, over the ice and into the bush.

*****

The Iron Dog is a marathon punctuated by required rest stops. Long ones. Though the race takes six days (this year, Feb. 8-14), winners typically finish with elapsed time of about 40 hours. This includes “wrench time,” which is critical. The course of the Dog — over tree stumps, rocks and large, heaving berms on the first 1,000 miles, then over smaller, rattling wind drifts on the frozen Bering Sea and various rivers — is so destructive to snow machines that, of the 600 or so teams that have started the race since 1984, only about 40 percent have finished. Most of the other drivers have broken bones or wearied of the cold or watched their engines fry under strain.

When the Dog began, it had a survivalist vibe. Racers would show up at the starting line with doubly reinforced steel sled skis and 50 pounds of spare parts roped to their tool bags. In recent years, though, a nimbler ethic has emerged. Snow machines now have independent front suspension, making them more stable and better able to endure the treacherous terrain, and race organizers allow riders to scare up spare parts at rest stops. Today, Iron Doggers can actually race.

Well, kind of. Davis and Palin are banking on an old-school approach. They’re going around the hellacious berms, saving their sleds. They’re riding with soft suspension — not optimal for the course’s undulating first half, but possibly a lifesaver on the small, sled-wrecking bumps that stretch onward from Nome. Yes, ever since Arctic Cat sent them their sleds — at a deep discount — in November, Team 22 has tried to exercise hoary wisdom.

But brash youth is out on the trail as well, embodied most by two top pairs of twentysomethings who’ve cut their teeth on the hurly-burly, crash-heavy Alaskan sprint circuit, in races like the Klondike 150. Team 8 and Team 16 are friendly with Palin and Davis. Indeed, Todd Minnick, 25, the sturdy, no-nonsense leader of Team 16, spent two summers on Palin’s commercial fishing boat a decade ago; his teammate, builder Nick Olstad, also 25, trimmed out the Palin manse in Wasilla.

The young guys don’t have the lean, gym-sculpted physiques of Davis and Palin, who trained off-sled for the race, running and lifting to build quad and core strength. But it’s unclear that this is significant. On last year’s winning team was a self-described “fat guy,” Marc McKenna, who at this year’s Dog was witnessed savoring a second helping of chicken-fried steak — for breakfast.

As they take their first layover — beyond Ptarmigan Pass in the Alaska Range, in the village of Unalakleet — on Feb. 10, Palin and Davis are in sixth place. The kids are beating them, and Tyler Aklestad, a smirking, baby-faced 23-year-old on Team 8, is having a blast. Just before the village of Koyukuk, he flew along on the banks of the Yukon at 10 p.m. It was so cold, the snow dust was blue, and suddenly — out of nowhere, in the darkness — he saw a man sitting on his snow machine by the side of the trail, broken down and battling hypothermia. “I missed him by inches,” says Aklestad, “and I just kept going at, like, 90 miles an hour.”

*****

Snow machine marathons are not spectator-friendly. Basically, you watch each racer rocket by for, say, four seconds before he roars out of sight, swallowed by the wilderness, for hundreds of miles. All you can do after leaving Big Lake is fly to the halfway point, Nome, and kill time hanging out at Wilderness Skidoo, a shop that in Nome (pop. 3,500) has an almost holy aura.

The snow machine season in northwest Alaska lasts about seven months, and it begins, according to Wilderness Skidoo owner John Vahnke, in late September when the year’s models arrive. “We fire ‘em up,” Vahnke says, “and then a lot of guys, they just stand around, just to get the smell of the oil burning.” Vahnke’s parts guy, Andy Peterson, adds, “I’ve had friends tell me that if there was a cologne that had that smell, they’d wear it. It’s … well, words cannot describe that smell.”

“No,” Vahnke corrects him, his eyes going dreamy. “It’s like a woman wearing Chanel No. 5.”

The race is a battle of brethren. All but two of the teams this year are Alaskan, and if you read the race program, nearly every rider is a hardworking fellow who, on weekends, enjoys fishing and hunting and riding snow machines through powder (a whole different sport). But not all racers are equal.

Some Iron Doggers have spent upwards of $30,000 to finance a once-in-a-lifetime run into the wild heart of Alaska. Tapping their credit cards, they’ve shelled out $10,000 each for a 2009 snow machine, $10,000 more for an identical training sled, $2,500 for the race entry fee and a few thousand more for trailing airplane support. Palin and Davis, in contrast, have spent almost nothing. They are prodigiously sponsored, with their names monogrammed in script on their matching Arctic Cat jackets. (Palin even has the names of his five kids and his wife, SARAH, THE GOV, appliquéd on his snow machine hood.) They give inspirational speeches at trade shows. They are both adored and reviled. They are the New York Yankees of snow machining.

*****

On Feb. 12 Palin and Davis pull into Nome for a 40-hour rest, now in fourth place, a surmountable two hours and eight minutes back. Davis kind of runs the show. Out on the trail he almost always leads, even as other teams switch off riding fore and aft. And here in Nome, where Team 22 has borrowed a king cab Chevy pickup, Davis always drives. When he and Palin go over the dings on their parked sleds, Davis directs.

“What do you think of this leak right here?” Palin asks.

“That one’s going to need an exhaust manifold,” Davis intones as Palin silently nods.

“All right, let’s turn this thing over and check out the track.”

Later, over pizza, Palin is still quiet and stoical, even as the talk turns to the 2008 race, in which he hit a sunken oil drum and spilled 400 miles from the finish. Palin broke an arm then but still finished fourth, running the last 150 miles on a wrecked sled pulled by Davis. Didn’t that hurt?

“Pain was the least of my worries,” says Palin. “You talk to any active Alaskan, and you’ll see that we all end up with a few bumps and bruises.”

What about that Iron Dog a few years back in which his steering column buckled, pitching him onto the snow each time he took he a left turn? “Well, any time your snow machine can’t turn and you’re flying through the air, away from it, it’s not good,” Palin says. “It’s bad.”

There is something masterful about Todd Palin. He is almost invariably calm, and he is handsome and rock-steady in an affable, unobtrusive way. He is the perfect political husband. But he is also a sort of sphinx — you keep trying to crack the enigma and glimpse the gears spinning away in his mind. You watch him.

One afternoon in Nome, Palin comes out of his bedroom in the little apartment that he and Davis are borrowing. Freshly showered, he lumbers toward the TV. “Let’s see what’s on,” he says, twiddling at the remote. Grainy snow blasts onto the screen, so Palin flicks the thing off and just slumps on the couch. Silently, he stares out at the frozen Bering Sea, glittering in the sun, and you have to wonder: Is he thinking of what Herman Melville called the “dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows,” or is he thinking of nothing at all?

Palin’s sangfroid does crack, sometimes. Over drinks in Nome, an Arctic Cat mechanic, Calvin Nolan, tells a story about helping Palin and Davis ready their sleds for the race. “Todd was having rear suspension issues,” Nolan says, “a lot of shock issues, and on bumps he was bottoming out. The studs in the track were puncturing his cooler, so his antifreeze seeped out. He overheated. Several times, he had to get towed back from Cow Lake. He was really frustrated.”

What did Palin say?

Nolan shakes his head, laughing. “You don’t want to print it,” he says.

On the trail to Nome, Davis blew a shock himself, but he and Palin fixed it in the -45 degree splendor of a subarctic night, and they remain hopeful. Last year’s winners — the beefy McKenna and a brainy engineer named Eric Quam — were 90 minutes back at the midpoint. “It’s a war of attrition,” Davis says, noting that both of this year’s leading teams scratched after Nome in 2008 because of mechanical problems. “When I was young,” he says, “I did exactly what they’re doing right now. I broke trail and ruined belts.”

Davis hopes for a blizzard that will force everyone to ride blind, relying on poise and a deep memory of the terrain. “A storm would be great,” he says. “Bad weather is an equalizer.” Minnick, the lead driver of Team 16, says, “I’m hoping it doesn’t snow. We just want to keep on keeping on.” But the next morning, at the restart, leaden skies are dumping cold, dry snow. The racers press east through a swirling whiteout.

*****

Tanana (Pop. 300) is 250 miles from the Iron Dog finish. Like so many stops on the trail, it is a largely Native Alaskan village isolated from the state’s road system. The most beloved Iron Dogger there is a rangy 23-year-old Athabascan, Tyler Huntington, who lives downriver in Galena. Huntington’s granddad and several cousins reside in Tanana. When the principal at Maudrey J. Sommer School lets students out to watch Huntington’s team come in, you expect banners and chants and tense finger-crossing out in the cold.

But the Iron Dog defies such maniacal fanhood. It’s informal — homey, even. Officials often time racers with analog watches lacking second hands, and refueling is a funky proposition. If the village attendant likes the racer, it might go fast. But if he doesn’t — well, there’s the tale about a guy whose gas cap was reattached crosswise, so that it jolted off and hit him in the face as he peeled out of a village.

The Tanana faithful mill quietly by the banks of the Yukon, and when Huntington’s grandfather, Roy Folger, is asked how he might celebrate a family victory, he shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “Have another cup of coffee, I guess.”

Huntington arrives moments later — in fourth, and in an ill temper. The towrope tugging his idle sled broke off just outside of town. He retied it and now, at the checkpoint, says of his machine, “It run out of gas, and it was plumb full in Ruby!”

Davis and Palin pull in 53 minutes later, in sixth, niggled by more suspension hassles and out of the running. The leaders have been there for hours already. They’re holed up in the spacious bed-and-breakfast over the store, padding around in their long johns and gloating a bit. “I dare you guys to say, ‘Hey, Todd, what took you so long?’” Aklestad quips, his voice a giddy whisper.

No one takes up the dare, and later Aklestad is deferential as Davis kvetches. “It’s been an odd race,” Davis says. “Not one of the top 10 teams has broken down.” He blames it on the snow, which, he contends, didn’t cut visibility enough and made the trail east from Nome cushier, less rattling to the stiffly shocked front-runners. “This race isn’t as tough as it used to be,” he says.

Palin sits nearby, silently spitting chewing tobacco into a cup as he watches a TV show about the manufacturing of postage stamps. He sleeps well, and the next morning, over biscuits and gravy, someone notes that he doesn’t seem that fazed by losing.

“What gives you that impression?” he snaps. “Maybe I don’t express myself when I’m pissed off inside, but this race is very important to me. I wouldn’t devote so much time to it — I wouldn’t spend so much time training and wrenching — if it wasn’t so frigging important.” His eyes are electric. For a second you see the fire that has propelled him into the winner’s circle and that flames up whenever, as he puts it, “that kangaroo court down in Juneau tries to ruin my wife’s reputation.” Todd Palin is irked.

But a second later he is the soul of cool bonhomie. “So,” he shouts to his pals at the breakfast table, “we got a pool going on who’s gonna win?”

*****

There is but a minute and 42 seconds separating the lead teams. Minnick and Olstad of Team 16 have been ahead almost from the get-go. But Team 8 — Aklestad, the wisecracker, and his partner, an unassuming sheet-metal worker named Tyson Johnson, have been a close second the whole way. And now, leaving Tanana, they begin narrowing the gap.

Beyond Manley, 180 miles from the finish, Olstad breaks a stud on his track. Aklestad and Johnson pass him as he stoops over his damaged sled with a wrench. They come across his partner, Minnick, driving toward them to aid in repairs.

“It was looking good,” Aklestad will say after the finish, “but about five minutes later I hit a wind drift about four feet tall.” Aklestad launches at 90 mph. “I got like 10 feet of air,” he will remember, “and I kicked the sled away from me.” He lands on his back as his sled slams the ground, nose up. He slides. His head hurts. He can’t get up. His partner runs toward him, to lift him up onto his sled — and right then, he says, “I see Todd Minnick hit the same bump.”

“I landed it,” Minnick will say, “but my head hit the windshield real hard. It didn’t hurt none, though, so I got back on the sled. It was purring like a kitten.”

Both teams scramble forward, battered. Minnick has a cracked windshield. Aklestad’s rear tension bolts are bent, so his track is loose and rattly as it churns over the snow.

The two teams meet again in the next town, Nenana, the last stop before Fairbanks. Minnick and Olstad get there first, but there isn’t even a gas pump in Nenana. There’s just a fuel truck waiting for racers down by the Tanana River, with a single nozzle. Minnick uses it as his father, a former racer, helps Olstad gas up from three five-gallon gas cans that he’s brought (a perfectly legal maneuver). Meanwhile, the owner of the Fairbanks Skidoo shop, a sponsor of Aklestad and Johnson, begins funneling fuel into his riders’ tanks. “But the jugs weren’t filling our tanks good,” Aklestad will lament. “We were in a hurry. Gas was spilling all over the place, and they were getting away from us.”

But in the end the fumbling doesn’t matter. Aklestad can go no faster than 80 mph with his wrecked track. Minnick and Olstad win by three minutes, with a time of 37:19:08, eclipsing Palin and Davis’ course record by 49 minutes. They celebrate quietly. There is no champagne, no cigars.

Governor Palin is there, though, in her own monogrammed Arctic Cat jacket, and when Todd’s team arrives, still in sixth, she is thrilled. “These guys are amazing!” she says, effervescent. Back in high school, she confides, her dream was to sit in the broadcast booth with Howard Cosell and do the play-by-play as her boyfriend, Todd, burned it up on the basketball court. “But this is better!” she adds. “These are my friends. This is my world.” One of her earliest dates with Todd was snowmobiling in the hills of Eureka, Alaska, in the bright sun, in shirtsleeves, in the middle of May.

The TV reporters are circling by now, and someone hands Todd his infant son, Trig. Todd smiles as he pats the boy’s head. A photographer leans in for the shot.

And then, a few hours later, Alaska’s First Couple flies home to Wasilla, to resume normal life. Todd goes to his daughter Willow’s basketball game. He tinkers with the boiler down in the basement, changes a water filter, and then gets together with Calvin Nolan, the Arctic Cat mechanic, to nail down what, exactly, went wrong.

A week after the race, on a clear, cold morning in Wasilla, Todd is pensive. “Scott and I just ran out of time this year because of our suspension setup,” he says over the phone, “and we definitely wouldn’t want a race like that one to be our last one. I’m ready to roll next year. I have to see how Trig’s doing, and [grandson] Trip, and what Sarah’s up to. But unless there’s some kind of catastrophe … ”

“You don’t think you’re too old?” he is asked.

“Hell, no,” says Todd Palin. “Hell, no.”

Top of page

Strange Paradise
The Atlantic
January 2009
Edited by Amy Meeker
© Bill Donahue

The birds, I learned later, were toucans. But as I made my way through the Panamanian jungle, their dry, echoing call—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—sounded almost mechanical, which seemed fitting. Before me, on an open plain in the Galeta Island Protected Landscape, was a mesh of 100-foot-high wires used by the United States during the Cold War to monitor Soviet submarines.

“They used to have a phone that connected straight to the White House,” my guide, a Panamanian student, remarked somberly. “And there was an underground tunnel soldiers could use to escape right out into the ocean.”

Of course, neither the tunnel nor the phone ever existed. But they were lovely details, embodying the mystique of Panama today. As the nation vaults toward prosperity, with an 8 percent average annual GDP growth rate, it is still haunted by its past—by the seven-year rule of Manuel Noriega, and by nearly 100 years of American soldiers guarding the canal. Noriega and the GIs left behind mementos that collectively have the dark, exotic ambiance of a Graham Greene novel. They also left behind pristine jungles—the U.S. allowed no logging in the rainforest surrounding the canal, because the trees afforded cover from potential attacks—and a serious ecotourism industry is sprouting up. So I went south for a few days, bringing my flip-flops and snorkeling gear.

Thirty minutes outside Panama City is a former radar tower that the U.S. once used to monitor the canal. Lavishly renovated, the three-story cylinder is now the Canopy Tower hotel, a mecca for serious birders. From the roof, you can see parrots and parakeets swooping through the mist and the trees. Birdwatching’s high Brahmins—Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Buffett, Martha Stewart—have all stayed here.

When I visited, there was a group, eight strong, from a Texas-based tour company. I joined them in the open-air “Rainfomobile” for three hours of hushed observation. For 20 minutes, we stood by a swampy pond, trying to home in on a small fluttering piratic flycatcher in the brambles. “If you look up at that branch there,” the guide whispered, “and follow it to that little knob— ”

“I got it!” one man cried. “I got some butt!”

I found myself yearning for a grittier encounter with the country’s past, and thought I might find it on Coiba Island, 15 miles off Panama’s Pacific coast. A penitentiary since 1919, Coiba is now the centerpiece of a bounteous national park, Galápagos-like, with more than 20 endemic bird species. It is also still a prison, though with only a handful of inmates.

In Santiago, four hours south of Panama City, I met up with a guide taking 17 others—Panamanians on holiday, mostly—to the island. We rode in a minivan for two hours, walked a couple of miles along a dirt road, and then piled into an aluminum outboard. “Paraíso!” our guide declared when at last we drew near. “Es como Hawaii!”

Maybe—with a little Guantánamo thrown in. On the beach, we were greeted by a jaunty, 60-something man with a gun—a prison guard. Around us were some 3,000 cows. The guard explained that they were there thanks to a bureaucratic snag: “The prisoners used to butcher the herd, but now the Ministry of Justice doesn’t allow it, and the cows can’t leave—they’d die of shock on the boat.”

We meandered past a grove of trees, and in the branches was a small, skittish bird that I loved as much for its name in Spanish as for its appearance. Sangre de toro is a tanager with a breast and throat carpeted, it seemed, with crimson velvet. Nearby, a sleek jackrabbit-­like mammal, a neque, fidgeted on the ground, its back hunched, its eyes bulging. Howler monkeys, smaller than their mainland cousins, bounded in the branches above.

After a while, we met a man chopping vegetables who is serving a 16-year sentence for murder. He asked me to sit down beside him, and quietly extolled the joys of Coiba. “The fresh air!” he said. “The peace!”

I asked what he did with his time.

“Cook,” he said, “and take care of the cows—make sure they don’t die. Like, if the little ones get caught in the sand, we help them out.”

He was so placid that I found our conversation disorienting. What kind of murderer was this guy? And what kind of country would let tour groups hang out with murderers? On Coiba, I often felt somewhat disoriented. I like to swim long distances, and every time I strapped on my goggles, a young Panamanian raised his hand and warned, “Los tiburones!” The sharks! I couldn’t tell if he was joking. For all I knew, Coiba is home to sharks that feast on gringos. But still I swam with abandon: over coral reefs, and scuttling crabs, and twisting schools of electric-blue fish.

One time, I misunderstood our guide and jumped in while everyone else stayed on the boat. I was alone in the water when a giant black manta ray came billowing along, headed shoreward. Its body was boneless; it moved like a flopping prehistoric bird in slow motion. As it passed by I just watched it, savoring another strange delight in a strange land.

My Grandson, The Writer

The Smart Set
August 8, 2008
© Bill Donahue

The summer I turned 18, my parents went away to Europe and I lived with my grandmother in our family’s rambling summer home in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. It was an unusual housing scenario. My grandmother was the grande dame of an elite summer colony that had begun hosting cocktail parties and picking blueberries in the New Hampshire hills even before her own grandparents had bought the house in 1905.

Meanwhile, I was there in the house expressly to escape the confines of the upper-crust world. A bony, scowling, and acne-pocked iconoclast, I’d never fit in at my prep school back in Connecticut. But there in New Hampshire, hanging out with my friends, year-round residents all, I’d been able to flourish — to recast myself as a wry comedian and a sort of visiting scholar capable of leading beery colloquiums on, say, the writings of Nietzsche and what The Door’s Jim Morrison really meant as he writhed his way through his 12-minute epic, “Celebration of the Lizard,” on the “Absolutely Live” album.

I lived in my own sphere that summer, independent of my grandmother. I bagged groceries at the IGA. I trained for cross-country, running a few miles each day on the winding back roads, and I spent long hours burrowed in my upstairs bedroom, trying to impress myself with how profound and subversive I was. I used all the stage props at hand, so that when the show was in full swing I was sprawled on my bed wearing a red bandanna around my head, a pair of rust-colored corduroy cutoffs, and a white T-shirt from the Madison Cafe back in Hartford, where I’d already savored the 25-cent happy hour drafts, thanks to a home-doctored fake I.D. that would cut no ice in today’s more litigious times. I had my earphones plugged into my Walkman, and by the bedside was a small blue plastic cup half-filled with a slimy brown fluid. Every few minutes I would spit into it. I had a penchant back then for Red Man chewing tobacco.

The most critical part of the equation, though, was the spiral notebook in my lap. I was keeping a journal that summer — stowing it in my sock drawer and filling it with my most private and deepest thoughts: my meditations on world peace and on certain girls I admired, along with notes on the classic rock I was still listening to, even in 1982, and on the various parties I attended in town that summer. These were not polite gatherings. At one, a fellow nicknamed Hinckley, after Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinckley, arrived late. He drove his van right up onto the lawn, crushing the host’s flimsy patio furniture, and then proceeded inside with his posse. There, he pried the cover off the back of the television set and, laughing, poured Old Milwaukee onto the filaments within.

Anyway, Granny knew about the journal, and when I was ensconced in my secret writing, she mostly gave me my space. Between songs, I’d hear her downstairs, rustling around in the small pantry, perhaps, or slamming a cast iron skillet onto the stove, so as to cook supper for herself and my step-grandfather, Ebby, a deaf and retiring Southern gentleman who was serving as her third husband. Her movements always seemed muscular and proprietary.

The house had existed as a physical structure before her birth in 1904, but if it had any story that predated my grandmother, I was unaware of it. The spirit of the place was her spirit. The house was a blithe and magical place, structurally crumbling and aesthetically akilter, with ancient, peeling wallpaper and a slapdash array of four-leaf clovers, all serendipitously found, Scotch-taped to the window in the entryway. She was a wildly impulsive and impractical person.

Born a society girl, she had never really shed the starry-eyed thrill and the dramatic flirtatiousness of a debutante. She was forever in search of a party. At her winter home, in Washington, D.C., she harbored an apolitical thrill for protests and social movements. In 1968, as police were teargassing civil rights protesters outside her townhouse in Georgetown one morning, she wandered out into the toxic mist, barefoot, in her nightgown, merely to be one with the action. Later, when she was in her 80s and a massive pro-choice rally hit town, she found a van crammed with slumbering male demonstrators and left a note on the windshield inviting them all in for breakfast. “They were such lovely people,” she reported after the visit, “and so handsome.”

Coming from someone else, the whole act might have seemed batty or vapid. But my grandmother had endured hardships and challenges: the early, sudden death of her father; a precipitous decline in her family’s fortune; a varied career as a publicist, retail saleswoman, and interior decorator; two divorces; and a prolonged ’30s-era court battle that saw her name splashed about in the newspapers as she lost primary custody of her only child, my mother. She was a survivor. Her bright presence at a gathering of summer people was a million times more inspiring than any motivational speaker ever could be.

But she was terrifying, too. She had pushed past tragedy by bending the world. Everything around her was marvelous — utterly charming. She did not brook exceptions to this rule. And so if she gazed at you across a crowded room, subtly nodding, to signal that it was your turn to pass the hors d’oeuvres, you did not dare disobey. If you did, you were toast.

My upstairs writing sessions were both a marvel and an affright to my grandmother. I was “developing a wonderful mind,” she’d tell me at the breakfast table, “just like your mother.” But I was a brooding kid writing — well, she didn’t know what, exactly, I was writing as I stood on the cusp of a shadowed adult world so different from the one she’d been born into. I scared her a little, I think, and I certainly did not live up to her standards of genteel decorum. The journals were a topic that at first she discussed nervously, with a game cheer. “Do you think when you’re older,” she asked once, “you might write about tennis? Or the opera, perhaps?”

As the summer wore on, remarkably, she learned to appreciate my life as an adventure. Indeed, she began to ask questions that struck me as very astute. “What’s the name of that band you listen to all the time,” she asked, “the one with the drummer named Moon? Isn’t it The Whos?”

“Bill,” she said, “you have the keenest eye for observing human nature. Has anyone ever told you that?”

Finally — unbelievably, and out of the blue — she asked me if I’d like to host my own party, in the airy barn we had behind the house. “We’re going away for the weekend,” she said. “Just a few people, just a small gathering.”

“Really?” I said. My grandmother had a knack for reading other people, for discerning what, precisely, they needed to make their lives the sunny gala that hers already was. But this? This was like a miracle. I activated the phone tree and the word got out — “Donahue’s having a rager.”

But then just a few hours before the party’s scheduled start, Ebby decreed that they were not going away at all. They were staying in the house.

“You’re staying where?” I said. This was totally uncool.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said my grandmother. “We wouldn’t dream of getting in your way.”

Ebby spent the early evening tacking up small signs inside the barn: “Absolutely no smoking,” “Please, no alcohol.” And then the first guests began trickling in, bearing full cases of Michelob Light on their backs. By 10 p.m., the barn was packed and crowds were spilling outside, onto the terrace and the darkened croquet course below. There must have been 70 people there. Ebby had removed his hearing aid and trundled off to bed hours before, and Granny, apparently in deference to the torrents of youth, was leaving us alone, staying inside the house. She was reading a novel in the lounge. The party was unfettered. It was huge, and it was my party, and as I stood there on the sloping wood floor of the barn, the roar of voices all around me, I felt something close to omnipotence.

At around 11, however, Hinckley showed up. His attack this time was clean and quick. He simply snipped our garden hose in half, used the severed end to siphon gas out of a VW Bug belonging to a guy named Art Jones, and then left.

Once the theft was discovered, Art needed to go inside the house to use the telephone. As he was waiting for his brother or whoever to pick him up, he talked to Granny. He was a large and genial kid, red-haired and poised to ship out, in a few weeks, to North Carolina, where he’d begin basic training with the Army. He was sloppy drunk. I don’t know what he and Granny talked about, but when he returned to the barn, he said, “Your grandmother, your grandmother, your grandmother, man — she’s amazing.”

Soon, the party seeped into the house. I went in there myself eventually and found five or six people circled around Granny. She was telling stories as though she were Sarah Bernhardt called back out on stage for an encore. For her it was old hat. What made the act work, though, was a certain tenderness. She heard the lilt in the young people’s voices and she joined, perfect pitch, in their revelry. It was almost as if somehow she already knew them.

How did she pull it off? How was it that every time people came over she had full social command? I always wanted to ask her, but it was the sort of question she was sure to meet with a steely, implacable smile. We both had our secrets.

•

Or so I thought, until that fall when one afternoon (I was in college by then) a packet arrived in the mail, sent by my mom. Photocopies. Of my own handwriting — of a few inflammatory excerpts from my personal journal. In one regrettable passage, I’d carped about my grandmother’s domineering and meddlesome ways. Beside my words was my grandmother’s own marginal comment: “Look what he said! How ungrateful! How hurtful!”

My grandmother had apparently rushed to the Kinko’s in Concord after clandestinely reading my slurs. Then she’d written my mother, in tears. My mother is a writer herself, a historian. She believes in handwritten documents — believes that they have an integrity and that they should never be raided. She’d put off writing me for a few weeks. But what else could she do? My grandmother had kept after her. She wanted my mom to exact an apology out of her cretinous son.

I did not apologize. Today, I kind of wish that I had called Granny to enunciate the obvious — that I only despised her for about 15 minutes, in my journal, and that I understood her desperate need to understand me. I also wish that I had asked her a question. That party in the barn — was that inspired by her reading? Did she settle down with an iced tea one afternoon while I was at work and immerse herself in my scrawled tales of Hinckley, et al? Did she think, “Oh, this all sounds so colorful” and then decide that what I needed most — what would make me most delighted — was a rager in the barn?

My guess is that this is what happened, more or less. It’s funny to think about, but still even now I can’t write off my grandmother’s snooping as pure lark. What she did was wrong. She invaded my privacy, and she did this at a time in my life when privacy shined as a new and exquisite thing. I was silly and juvenile that summer, sure, but I was making a splendid discovery — that one could have a secret, intricate life of the mind, and that maybe thinking and writing could be the focus of your existence.

My grandmother harbored a romance for the sort of person I was trying to become. She adored dreamy-eyed artistes, and she always raved about how she was there in Paris in the ’20s, staying just down the street from Sylvia Beach as she published the first-ever edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But at bottom she didn’t really get the whole fragile introvert thing. She just barged right in on me. It was a mark: an unfortunate part of our history. We never once talked about what had happened.

Still, we both knew, and as I went on to become a journalist, a freelance writer for magazines, the secret loomed larger. It bonded us, even. She was my first critic and my first fan. She’d read my earliest work. She had seen the best and the worst of me, exposed right there on the page, and in a sense I’d seen the best and the worst of her, too. I’d seen both her generosity and her thirst for control. And so it was no surprise what happened a decade ago when she summoned me to her deathbed. She whispered, “Bill, get a pen. You’re writing my obituary.” Then, in careful, stentorian tones, she began to dictate the lede.

I revised the write-up, of course, once she was dead. But as I remember that summer now, what I realize is how thoroughly my grandmother owned it. She read me. She knew me. She invented me, even, and forced upon me her own infinite hope.

I think of this one evening in August. She had a couple of codgers over for cocktails and came to the foot of the stairs and called up for me. “Bill,” she chimed, “Bill, dear, won’t you come down and be charming?”

I took off the headphones. I spat out my chaw. I lumbered downstairs and then stood there, my hands on my hips, and scowled at the codgers as they squinted back and then looked over at Granny, begging for some explanation.

She swept her arms along through the air, toward me with a great ta da flourish. My grandson,” she said, “the writer.” • 8 August 2008

Wonder Boy

Runner’s World
August, 2008
Edited by Peter Flax
© Bill Donahue

If you stand long enough by the temple complex, you will see them–the pilgrims–weaving on bare feet through the choked, filthy side streets, past bone-thin wandering cows and past amputee beggars and street children and mangy dogs sprawled on their backs on the cobblestone.

Patiently, the pilgrims pick their way through the mayhem of Puri, India, until they catch sight of the terraced white spires of Jagannath, a labyrinth of some 120 temples. Then they drop to their knees and pray–and, watching, you see how the gritty physical world and the shimmering spiritual realm are deeply intertwined in India, sometimes in strange ways.

On the morning of May 2, 2006, a little boy stepped into the streets of Puri, in running shoes. Budhia Singh was 4 years, 3 months old. A slum kid from a nearby city, Bhubaneswar, he wore bright red socks and a collared white tennis shirt that drooped to midthigh. His task that morning, as prescribed by his coach Biranchi Das, a one-time all-India judo champ, was to run home: 43 miles back to Bhubaneswar, the largest city in the state of Orissa, through the rising heat of Northeast India’s most sweltering season.

If all this sounds stranger than a fairy tale, consider that Budhia is now, at age 6, a celebrity in India. He’s starred in a popular music video in which he runs, does judo, and unleashes a hip-hop chant, “I am Budhia, son of Orissa.” Indian newspapers regularly hail him as a “wonder boy” bound for the Olympics.

As he stood in Puri, Budhia was said to have run six half-marathons and train 120-plus miles a week. Sometimes he ran barefoot on asphalt. Almost always, he ran without hydrating. “If he drinks while running,” reasoned Das, “he will go weak.”

This run wasn’t a race; it was a test with a spiritual resonance. Budhia was traveling a route that millions of pilgrims had ridden in busses: running north from Puri, with its 900-year-old holy shrine, and past the Sun Temple, a World Heritage site boasting exquisite stone carvings. Das had alerted the media and worked his connections with the Central Reserve police force. A squadron of officers and cadets in khaki shorts was ready to run with the boy. Budhia stood hip high among them. He looked little and fragile.

In time, Das would be pilloried by critics arguing that no 4-year-old should be forced to endure the ardors of long-distance running. Three days after Budhia’s Puri run, Orissa’s Minister for Women and Child Development would sweep in to arrest Das, who was also the boy’s foster father, on charges of child cruelty. Later, newspapers would air lurid accusations. Budhia’s mother alleged last summer that Das hung her son upside down from a ceiling fan, splashed him with hot water, and branded his skin with the words “Biranchi Sir.” Budhia himself told reporters, “He locked me in a room for two days without food.” Sukanti Singh took her son back from the coach.

All very damning, except that a medical report, conducted by a neutral forensics specialist, Sarbeswar Acharya, revealed that the scars on Budhia’s body were three to six months old. They were not caused by scalding water, Acharya opined, and not corroborative of Sukanti’s claims. And a newsbreak this spring only deepened the mystery.

On April 13, Biranchi Das, 41, was murdered–shot dead outside his judo hall. The prime suspect, a gangster named Raja Acharya, who faces some 30 unrelated counts of extortion, murder, and kidnapping, is now in jail, awaiting trial. He was infatuated with a lovely Indian actress, Leslie Tripathy. Police speculate that Das irked the gangster by cautioning him to stop harassing Tripathy. If they’re right, perhaps Das died for honor. Then again, you could ask why he was hanging out with a violent thug like Acharya in the first place. And was he himself the sort of tough who might thrash a child?

No one (except Budhia himself) will ever know for sure, and there’s an outside chance that the boy’s scars could have accrued without anyone striking him: In Bhubaneswar’s slums, open cook fires are always burning, and rusty nails and broken glass are heaped by the roadside. All that’s clear is that nearly every adult in Budhia’s life has caused the boy harm.

There is something about kids–their magic innocence, maybe–that can make adults go crazy. Anyone who has ever endured a child-custody battle knows how covetous grown-ups can get. And this is a story about adults going crazy–and about a child trying to remain whole amid the chaos. It’s a story about a sort of custody battle, one lacking moral clarity. Biranchi Das wasn’t a pure villain; in some ways he shined as devoted.

Back in Puri, he bent to the ground and tied Budhia’s shoes. Budhia started to run, at roughly 10 minutes a mile, up a long, slight incline, past roadside shops where vendors sold milky chai for 10 cents a cup and past bald patches of land where long-tailed monkeys crouched by the road, watchful and still.

The police officers surrounded Budhia, their boots scuffing the pavement with a militarized rhythm, and TV cameras craned in at the boy, shooting footage that would later verify that this run was no hoax. Thousands stood at the roadside. Later, everyone in Orissa would speak of how the crowds felicitated Budhia, and that the word, carrying hints of fervor and ecstasy, seemes to fit. Several times, spectators rushed toward the boy, attempting to garland him with a necklace of orange and red marigolds–the flowers that abound in Indian temples.

Budhia kept going. He crossed a bridge over the River Kushabhadra and passed the fishing village of Chandrabagha. With temperatures climbing into the 90s, Budhia drank only a touch of lemony water. He tired. Then, three miles short of his goal–seven hours, two minutes into his run–Budhia collapsed from exhaustion. He began vomiting and convulsing. Over and over, he bit at the arms of Jyotsna Nayak, the doctor tending to him.

Nayak later told a British filmmaker, “Brain irritation was there. Had I not been there, he certainly would have died.” And large questions seemed to hang in the air: Do coaches and parents have the right to conscript children to chase after glory? Who sets the rules? And why are we so transfixed by the bizarre achievements of a 4-year-old boy? Sitting here in the world’s most affluent nation, fretting over what type of soy milk our kids are drinking, are we entitled to dictate how the talent of a desperate Indian slum kid ought to be nurtured?

Budhia was thirsty. Nayak gave him water. And before long, the boy bounced back. After all, he’d seen hardship before.

Budhia Singh was born in Bhubaneswar’s Guatam Nagar slum, in a shanty that has since been razed to make way for the railroad. His mother worked, in Indian parlance, as a peon. She did domestic chores, earning $6 a month. Budhia’s father, meanwhile, was an alcoholic addicted to ginger–dirt-flecked firewater that women sell from battered metal bowls by the roadside in India. He was unemployed, a beggar who contributed nothing to his family’s welfare.

Budhia’s parents knew Biranchi Das, who was the president of their slum in Bhubaneswar, the owner of a hotel, and a partner in his family’s taxi business. For more than a decade, Das had run an esteemed judo hall, handpicking athletically promising boys and girls from the slums and subjecting them to an almost paramilitary training regimen and twice-daily workouts, strict dietary rules, and classes on combat theory. Seven of his students have become national champions, and more than 1,200 have launched careers with the Central Reserve police force.

I met Das four months before he was killed. He was stout and bearded, rippling with muscles despite a little potbelly, and he exuded the dark, burly benificence of a Mafia don.

In 2003, he said, Sukanti asked if 1-year-old Budhia could bunk at the judo hall. “She had three daughters, all older than Budhia,” Das said, “and already she’d sold the two oldest into servitude as maids. She told me, ‘I can’t afford this boy. I can’t feed him. Take him.’”

Das said no–Budhia was too young for judo. But about six months later, according to Das, the boy suffered an accident. Riding the crossbar of a neighbor’s bicycle, he crashed, fracturing his ankle and shredding the skin on his leg. Untended, the wound festered and got infected. When Sukanti at last took her son to the hospital, doctors advised amputation. Terrified, she returned to Das. This time he said he’d care for the boy. Budhia lived with Das and his wife for six months, until his leg healed.

Then the boy went back to his mother, only to be hit by tragedy. Inside a month, Budhia’s father died. Soon after, Das asserted, Sukanti sold her son to a bangle vendor, a man who sold peanuts and gum from his bicycle, with the expectation that, in time, Budhia would work as his assistant. “The vendor didn’t take care of Budhia,” Das said. “When Budhia visited me after one month, his skin was pale, his clothes were dirty, and he had sores on his body.” Das said he bought the boy back for $20. Then one day when Budhia was just 3, the boy cussed. Das punished him, forcing him to run around a dirt oval “until I get back.”

Five hours later, Budhia was still running. Soon Das decided that Budhia would become the first Indian runner to win an Olympic medal. He began training the boy, riding on his bicycle as Budhia ran–four miles a day at first, then six, then 10. In time, cowds of adoring fans joined the runs, trotting behind the boy or rolling beside him on bikes.

In October 2005, Das took Budhia, then 3, to his first race–a half-marathon in Delhi. Race officials forbade Budhia to start, but no matter. He was the darling of the 6-K fun run, and the It Boy of a postrace gala. British decathelete Daley Thompson tried to score a kiss from Budhia, but Tim Hutchins, international administrator for the London Marathon, fulminated, “For a child of 3 to be training hard is verging on criminal.”

By now, a British filmmaker was tracking Budhia’s story, making a half-hour TV documentary, and Das was hatching intricate plans. He decreed that, after the Puri run, Budhia would run a marathon in Nayagarh. “After that,” he said, “he’ll go to Madras, and then there’s a race in Cochin, and onto Guwahati. After this we will take him to some events abroad.”

He never completed in these races. After his Puri run, Orissa’s child welfare department issued a medical report finding him “undernourished, anemic, and under cardiological stress.” The agency banned all children from entering distance races before the age of 14. In India, the ruling was largely seen as ridiculous. “How self-indulgent and naive can our liberalism be?” railed Khaleej Times columnist Barkha Dutt. “This is a chance for a poor slum child to break down the class divide and travel on the same superhighway to success as everyone else.”

Snubbing officials, a public poll named Budhia the second most popular person in Orissa. A steel company hired the boy as a spokesmascot, and a Dubai businessman flew Budhia and his coach to the Emirates for a splashy getaway at an amusement park. Then came the video that nearly deified Budhia. “We hoped the song would clear many misconceptions about the child,” said producer Rajesh Kumar Mohanty. “We have tried to compare him with the mythological Lord Krishna.”

Over the following year, Budhia’s prospects seemed to brighten. With his mother’s permission, in September 2006, he’d moved to a state-run sports hostel, where he lived and trained with more than 100 other sports hopefuls, most of them teens. He had a new coach named Arun Das (no relation to Biranchi Das), who promised further glory. Then, on scholarship, he entrolled at the D.A.V. Public School, arguably Bhubaneswar’s most prestigious academy. He was treated like a celebrity on his first day. After his classmates, all dressed in uniform plaid pinafore shorts, clambered to kiss him on the cheek, he addressed the entire student body, from a stage, chirping, “I am Budhia Singh. You will all be my friends. I will help you to learn running.”

I arrived in Bhubaneswar on a warm day last winter. The city is loud 24/7, teeming with a vitality that is both joyful and desperate. From my hotel room, I heard hundreds of garbage-eating crows cawing in a tree, the low throttle of auto rickshaws, and a nightclub downstairs where middle-aged men paid teenage girls to sing for them.

I later moved to a quieter hotel. I also began counting dead dogs I saw smooshed on the roads. In one week, I saw eight. Once, when I was riding with an interpreter, he ran over a puppy and never let the conversation falter. “So your brother,” he said, “he is staying in New York?”

Crossing the street was life threatening. There were few public bathrooms, so men peed by the roadside; the stink of urine was everywhere. Orissa had the worst child mortality rate in India, and several times, young mothers trailed me, tugging at my shirt and begging me to buy food for their infants.

Biranchi Das’s judo hall was an oasis, secreted behind high concrete walls on the spacious grounds of the state museum. One day in the coolness just after dawn, recorded chant music echoed over the grounds. Das stood outside the hall, fresh from a six-mile run, dancing in place like a boxer, then vaulting into a handstand. He plucked a little branch of the ground and began using it, as many Indians do, as an improvised toothbrush.

“How’s Budhia,” he asked. “What did Budhia say?” I hadn’t yet met the boy, but Das continued. “Budhia is a good child,” he said. “I miss him. He and I had a dream. It was not fulfilled. That is agony for me. In Japan and Korea, they start training athletes at age 3. If you don’t take risks, you don’t get results. I am the person who took risks with Budhia, and I got results.”

As he spoke, a friend of his stood nearby, radiating his own athletic vigor. Ashwini Das, 55, is a devout yogi and an Art of Living instructor with the regal bearing and prominent clavicle that comes from a lifetime of Ashtanga and belly breaths. A few years ago, he told me, “I became interested in how Biranchi is growing up this Budhia. This child has an inner facility, and Biranchi just explored it.”

Biranchi drifted off, and Ashwini and I wandered through the deserted museum grounds. “When Budhia came to me,” Ashwini said, “the child had a physical problem, and Biranchi worked for Budhia as no parent can. Look, there are hundreds of millions of kids like Budhia in India–starving, without even a meal–and among all these children, Budhia alone became an inspiration.”

He halted abruptly and asked: “What is the nature of the mind?” I had no earthly idea, so I let him answer his own question. “Whatever you resist,” he said, “that persists. If you say, ‘I want to sleep,’ you can’t sleep. Medication means deconcentration–and Budhia achieved this, as few people can. He had an inner quality.”

“You mean he was wise?” I asked.

Ashwini looked at me like I was a total idiot. “No,” he said. “Budhia is a small child. He knows nothing of the world. I believe that he had a gift inculcated from a past life–a gift beyond imagination. He can run, and Biranchi brought that talent to life. He is the one who put the petrol in the Budhia vehicle.”

Sukanti Singh felt otherwise. I met with her one afternoon in a lawyer’s office. Budhia’s mother looks about 40. Slender and fine featured, she wore a Bindi (a red dot traditionally worn by married women on their foreheads). Her bony brow jutted out of her yello sari. She was quiet, keeping her eyes downcast as men yelled around her.

“She’s illiterate,” said the lawyer, Suresh Routray, dismissively waving a hand toward Singh. “She knows nothing.”

Singh’s boyfriend also spoke over her. “Biranchi Das is a goon,” said Pranakrushna Khatua, a convicted bank robber, according the Bhubaneswar police records. “He threatened to kill Sukanti and her three daughters. He told her if she said anything about the money, she would die.”

We were there to discuss the donations and endorsement money that Budhia had received during the 18 or so months he trained under Das. This past December, Singh told police that Das had embezzled more than 60 million rupees, about $1.4 million, from the Budhia Singh Trust. Routray, a corpulent man, about 40, with drowsy eyes and a broad mustache, prepared the legal papers. He did so because he’s the president of Salia Sahi (the slum Sukanti Singh now lives in) and also a prominent member of Orissa’s Communist Party.

Twice, I’d meet Routray in my hotel lobby, to probe him for details on how he arrived at 60 million rupees. His air was breezy and jocular. “Ah, Meester Bill,” he said, hailing me with bearish effusion, “Meester Bill! You want the papers? I will get you the papers.” He never got me any documents. Biranchi Das said that Routray was showboating to garner publicity for the Communist Party.

Now, in his office, I asked him, “What companies gave Budhia money?”

“Ah, there were so many companies, so many companies,” he responded. He named three, each of which, he reckoned, gave $500 or so. Then he repeated himself: “So many companies.”

I wanted to hear what Singh thought, and she bitterly lambasted Das. “When they stopped Budhia from competing,” she said, speaking to my interpreter, “he couldn’t make any more money for Biranchi. So Biranchi started torturing Budhia. There is no other reason.”

Singh argued that Das had bullied her into lying to the media. “That story about me selling Budhia,” she said, “it wasn’t true. I never sold my son. Biranchi just made me say stupid things. I said them because I was depressed.”

Singh talked of her husband’s death. “He left me without one pie,” she said. “My neighbors had to pay for the cremation. When they demolished my house to make way for the railroad, I asked Biranchi for money. I said, ‘You have taken all the money that my son earned. You should give me money to rent a house.’ He said, ‘There is no money left. We spent it on Budhia’s training.’ He is a liar.”

Suddenly Khatua’s cell phone rang. Budhia was calling from school. He’d just won a 100-meter race for kindergartners. I could hear his joyous voice coming out of the phone–and it seemed that he’d called to talk to his mother. They were still in touch, after all. Press photos have captured her cradling her slender boy in her own slender arms. She visits Budhia once a week, scraping together 10 rupees for the rickshaw ride.

But this was a big meeting for Sukanti Singh. An unfathomable pile of money was at stake, as she saw it, so she did not get on the phone to say hi. She just sat there stooped over the desk, staring dully ahead as she stewed in distain for Biranchi Das.

Two years after his 40-mile Puri run, Budhia is still famous in Bhubaneswar. On the streets, he is a one-name hero. “Ah, Budhia!” people will say. “Marathon boy!” “Ah, Budhia, he is a miracle!” Once, when I went to meet him at a D.A.V Public School picnic, he wasn’t present. His minders at the sports hostel forbid him to go out in public without a security guard, and on that day, the guard had a holiday.

I finally met Budhia in his classroom. He sat at a desk in his plaid pinafore and brown V-neck sweater. Budhia was watchful, with the whittled, ropy look of a runner, and he fidgeted–overwhelmed, perhaps, by my looming, pale presence. “This man has come all the way from America to see you,” the teacher proclaimed in the singsong universal to kindergarten instructors.

Budhia said nothing; he just looked up at me, skeptically. I’d bought a present for him–a book about children of the world. I’d tried to make the gift speak to his worldview: Pasted to the wrapping paper were pictures of Budhia himself, running. He picked open the paper as the teacher translated my questions. “Do you like running?” she asked, vigorously nodding her head. “Yes, you like running. It is very fun, isn’t it?”

I looked at Budhia and rolled my eyes. Tentatively, he smiled–and for a while, he seemed amused by me. We went back to the sports hostel, where he sleeps in a large concrete room, and he played cricket with me, waving a mop handle as I bowled him a yello ping-pong ball. At one point, he sprinted into the kitchen and came sprinting back, giddy as he pressed his fist toward my hip. “Want apple?” he said in faltering English, his voice tiny and high as he skittered away.

Soon, though, I was no longer a novelty. Budhia sat down in the corner. I thought that maybe he’d read the book that I’d given him, but no, carefully he plucked a piece of paper from out of his pinafore and stared at it, delighted. It was a picture of Budhia himself, running and waving to fans.

“You talked to Budhia? What did he say?” I’d expected that Biranchi Das, facing the torture accusations, would shun all my calls and refuse to be interviewed. But in fact he was the most media-friendly person I met in Bhubaneswar. He was polished and genial, and it seemed that impoverished slum dwellers considered his office a small fount of hope. One afternoon I found him meeting with a man who needed money for his sister’s wedding dowry. Without the money, his sister couldn’t marry; her future would be cast into doubt. “Five minutes,” Das told me.

The meeting lasted for half an hour, and when the man emerged, he was smiling. Das had promised he would help, personally, in a couple of weeks. “Right now,” Das explained to me, “I only have about 700 rupees [about $16] in my bank account. I am a poor man. I didn’t get rich from Budhia. All the money we got came to 1.32 lakh rupees [about $3,100], and we spent it on Budhia’s training.”

Yet on another occasion Das hinted that he had profited from Budhia. “I adopted him,” he said. “If he makes some money, I deserve some of it, don’t I?” Later, Das fed me what seemed an outright lie. “This judo hall,” he said, “is the production center for Budhias. Right now I am training four new Budhia runners. They are all between 3 and 5 years old. They are training every day. They are practicing. I have videotapes, but I cannot show you. It is all very secret right now, but when the day comes–when it is time for them to perform–I will tell everybody.”

I asked at least five children at the judo hall if they’d seen any preschoolers besides Budhia Singh training as runners. They all looked at me with blank stares. No, they had not seen the new Budhias.

Even when he was joking, Das oozed swagger and bravado. One morning, he smugly summoned me to lie on the judo mat. Then he sicced one of his young behemoths on me as I struggled to break free of the boy’s hold. When the farce was over and I lay there, whipped, Das chuckled and tossed me a little tip–a two-rupee coin.

Das’s police record was not pretty. After the Child Welfare Committee for Orissa’s Khurda District took Budhi out of Das’s house, the judo couch allegedly organized a mob of 200 protesters to rally outside the home of Rabi Shankar Misra, the agency’s chairman. Misra contends that some protesters burned his effigy, climbed a wall into his property, and surrounded his house for several hours. Misra also accused Das of using Budhia. “He got a free trip to Dubai out of him,” Misra told me. “Would he be able to go to Dubai otherwise?” (It was a valid critique, but a few days later Misra himself tried to milk the Budhia story for a free trip. In answering Runner’s World’s request that he e-mail some legal documents, Misra demurred. “I can give you a presentation on the complex issues,” he wrote, “in your office in USA, if invited for this presentation.”)

Later, in August 2007, after a street accident that saw Das’s 7-year-old son get harmlessly clipped by a motorcyclist named Sabeer Ekram, Das allegedly burst into the man’s home with 30-odd henchmen. Ekram’s mother, M.D. Manju, told police that Das beat her son up. “He pelted us with filthy expletives and threatened to set our house on fire,” she told the police.

Still, Das had close ties to the police. One afternoon, he brought me across town to visit his top contact at the Central Reserve police force–deputy inpsector G.P. Mastana.

Mastana’s building was guarded by several machine-gun-toting officers who wore full khaki uniforms topped by brilliant indigo tricorner hats. Scores of young recruits were training as we arrived, running along in lockstep on a sandy dirt road. We went inside. Mastana’s office was grand, with a large desk bearing four black telephones and, above that, a plaque honoring men who’d preceded him as deputies. Mastana, who’s a Sikh, was sitting there in a turban, very erect–a bristling, fit 60-year-old.

The mood was a bit stiff, so I tried to break the ice. “Jeez,” I said to Mastana, “I wouldn’t want to wrestle you.” He did not laugh, but after a few minutes he spoke warmly of Budhia. “I admire the boy,” he said, “and one time I advised him. I told him he could be a supreme athlete, and I said, ‘After that, then you can do something good. You can bring glory to the nation–you can become an officer with us and set an example for all the others.’”

Das was leaning forward in his chair now, listening with rapt attention. The troops scuffed by on the roadway outside, and it seemed almost forgotten that we were talking about a little boy who was still learning to read. “What did Budhia say?” I asked.

Mastana stared me down, somber and earnest. “Budhia said he was willing.”

Two days later, I saw Budhia on the track at Kalinga Stadium, but he didn’t seem particularly focused on athletic supremacy or national service. He was dribbling a soccer ball as some teenage girls in full soccer regailia made pretend futile attempts to steal the ball. He was laughing.

“Budhia is doing his training,” his new coach, Arun Das, told me before detailing the boy’s current regimen: seven or eight miles a week, a little stretching, a little hopping and bounding, a little horseplay with the soccer ball and the discus.

Arun Das is a genial and wrinkled man, about 60 and a tad flabby, dressed in a blue nylon track suit. As his older runners muscled their way through a speed workout, he sat on the grass, canted back in a lawn chair, savoring the mild winter sun as he spoke fondly of Budhia. “He’s like a son to me,” he said before adding with a warm, self-derisive chuckle, “Well, more like a grandson.”

I asked if he saw Budhia becoming a champion. He laughed. “Now is not the right time to say. Come back in 12 years and I’ll tell you.”

“But what kind of times is he running?”

The coach looked skyward for a moment, searching for the numbers. “For the 400,” he said, “about two minutes.”

Two-flat is good for a little kid; it would put Budhia in about the 85th percentile among 6-year old American boys. Still, I was surprised. The stories I’d read suggested that, like Biranchi, Arun was driving Budhia toward world-class glory. (One headline read: “Budhia gets new coach, dreams for Olympics.”) But now I got an inkling that Arun Das was like no other Budhia caretaker I’d met in all the days I’d spent rattling around Bhubaneswar in auto rickshaws. It seemed he might be playing a gentle trick on the Indian people–administering workouts, proffering photo-ops, and gamely sustaining the illusion that Budhia was on the brink of greatness while simultaneously protecting the boy. He was, it struck me, letting Budhia be a kid in a society where a leisurely childhood is a luxury.

After a few minutes, Budhia trotted toward us, to high-five a sprinter standing nearby. I tried to ask him a question, but by the time my words had been translated, he was already running off toward the steeplechase pit for a game of tag with the soccer players. These girls lived with him, and it looked as though they cherished him as a mascot.

“I am playing,” he squealed as I stepped toward him with a question. “Just let me play.”

I saw Budhia just one last time, at his school, on a day his class was doing “magic painting.” Again, the teacher came over to interpret. “Was it hard,” I asked, “doing all that running for Biranchi?”

“No, I just did what I was asked.”

“Was it stressful?” He shook his head: no.

“Was Biranchi nice to you?”

Now there was an awkward silence and I could hear the high, happy din of the other students larking about, unsupervised. Budhia stared at the floor, biting his lip. The question seemed to put him under enormous pressure.

Biranchi Das had helped deliver him to a new and wonderful place in his life. A peon’s son destined to caste-bound misery, he was now standing in a cool, pleasant room filled with the nation’s elite. He’d transcended social barriers in a way that few Americans can fathom, and he’d performed his own kid-magic. He had survived all the craven adults fighting to control him.

There was something elegant and beautiful about this lean little kid whose smile, at times, bordered on beatific. Maybe, in time, this magic would prevail. Maybe Budhia would turn out all right. But maybe, too, he was scarred. He seemed brooding and insular now. He kept staring down. He said nothing.

“He is not able to express himself,” said the teacher. “The question is difficult.”

I stopped my interview. Budhia finished his painting (of a Christmas tree), and then the class streamed outside to do calisthenics in the red, dusty schoolyard. There were two parallel lines of kids, and the exercises were supposed to be done in unison. But of course they weren’t. Every kid, including Budhia, flubbed the performance. The lines were a melee of children idly scuffing their feet and wiping their noses and scratching their legs. I stood there and thought about how all of these kids would carry their own quirks–and the history and traumas of their earliest childhoods–forward from here, all alone, ultimately, against the challenge of growing up in a world filled with tough questions.

Eventually, the teacher told the kids to sprint back to the playground. I watched for Budhia to stand out–to lope ahead like a sad, lone gazelle. But by now every single kid in the crowd was screaming with glee and sputtering and swerving along over the dirt, and I lost him in a swirl of dust.

Top of page

Ways and Means

The Washington Post Magazine
June 29, 2008
Edited by David Rowell
© Bill Donahue

The voice was booming and imperious as it came out of the bathroom, wafting over the blandly hip decor of the Dupont Circle hotel room. “If you excuse me a moment,” said Russell Means, “I’m going to braid my hair.”

I knew that Means was not talking about some quick twist-and-tie ponytail job, but rather the painstaking culmination of a resplendent costume. Means is 6-foot-1, with a powerful broad-boned physique. He is the actor who played the last Mohican in the 1992 film “The Last of the Mohicans,” and he is the onetime leader of the revolutionary American Indian Movement, or AIM. Arguably the most famous living Indian activist, he performs his role with panache. Already on this bright, cold morning in February, he was wearing dangling turquoise earrings, a crimson wool Navajo vest and black silver-tipped cowboy boots. His broad, truculent brow was creased with wear.

Means’s life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he remains a forceful presence — a warrior.

On this visit to the nation’s capital, Means was, per usual, fighting the United States of America. Along with three other Lakota Indians, he had recently severed his ties with the United States and declared himself a founding member of a new, autonomous nation — the Republic of Lakotah. Unsanctioned by their tribal government, and speaking only for themselves, the dissidents claimed dominion over more than 93,000 square miles of traditional Lakota territory — a continuous chunk of sparsely populated dry land that includes parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

Means was here in Washington seeking diplomatic recognition from the world community so that he could ultimately finagle a seat at the United Nations, whether the U.S. of A. likes it or not. His motto, borrowed from Gandhi, is, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

The plan was to barnstorm Embassy Row. He hoped to visit ambassadors from several U.S. adversaries (Venezuela and Serbia, for instance) as well as from a few other countries he deemed likely allies — for instance, Bolivia, which has an indigenous president in Evo Morales, and Finland, which, in Means’s view, “appreciates freedom because it’s always been an independent ally of Russia.”

It would be a four-day mission, and Means was traveling with an attache, Lakotah’s volunteer attorney general, Jerry Collette. A Libertarian activist and a paralegal who recently emigrated to Lakotah from his longtime home in North Carolina, Collette is most renowned for the intricate, loopholing legal work he did last winter to enable the supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul to fly a campaign blimp up and down the East Coast. Ethnically French-Canadian, Collette is 56 years old, with long gray hair and a shaggy gray beard. In contrast to Means, he is a meager physical presence — slender and only 5-foot-4. On this road trip, as Means luxuriated on the hotel’s single queen bed, Collette was sleeping on the floor. “I’m a guerrilla,” he explained, “and if you’re a guerrilla, you just don’t grumble about little discomforts.”

At the moment, Collette was standing outside the bathroom, valet-like, reporting on the progress he’d made that morning, canvassing embassies on his cellphone. “I called Iceland,” he said, “and they can’t meet with us. They’re busy. They said to just drop off a petition.”

“They’re busy?” Means asked. “What does Iceland have to be busy about?”

Collette paused a moment, and then, without answering, he said, “But can we just drop off the petition?”

“We’re too busy,” Means said, his voice laced with a larksome, sardonic swagger, and Collette went back to his phone, squaring away the logistics for a full afternoon of visiting embassies.

After a few minutes, Means emerged. His braids were done, and now he reached for his sunglasses — Dolce & Gabbanas.

“Well, then,” said Russell Means, “are we ready?”

The first embassy of the day was East Timor, which is actually not on Embassy Row but rather in a nondescript office building near the Van Ness-UDC Metro station. Means and Collette took the elevator to the fifth floor. The Timorese suite was dimly lit and sparsely appointed, new-smelling. East Timor is a fledgling Southeast Asian nation that is still adjusting to independence after having been occupied, from 1975 to 1999, by neighboring Indonesia, whose military caused the death of more than 100,000 Timorese people, or roughly 10 percent of the population. The ambassador, Constancio Pinto, 45, spent much of his adolescence running from bombs, sleeping in caves and subsisting on leaves. A small, dapper man in a black business suit, he greeted the Lakotans genially. “Welcome,” he said. “You are our first visitors.” From Lakotah, he meant.

They went into the conference room, and then Means spoke dryly, without referring to notes, telling Pinto that the United States is now occupying Lakota country illegally, in violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which granted the Lakota control of the Black Hills in western South Dakota. The treaty was repealed by Congress in 1877, and the Lakota have struggled ever since. “We are the poorest people in America,” Means said, “and we have the shortest life span in America, too. The life expectancy for Lakota women is 47; for a man, it’s 44. After 155 years of genocide, our way of life is on the brink of extinction. We have finally decided to withdraw from the United States and save our people and our lands. Here is our petition.”

Means handed Pinto a slim portfolio that consisted of a two-sentence cover letter followed by many pages of excerpts from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, among other documents. For a moment, Pinto read silently. Means sat with his legs crossed, his chin canted back. His air was not disrespectful, but it was vaguely proprietary. On the wall behind him was a framed photo of U.S. soldiers happily drinking beer in East Timor. This was surprising because, as Means had reminded me earlier, the United States had generously supported the Indonesians during the war.

“I know that the U.S. facilitated the genocide of East Timor,” Means said now. “I do understand the complexities of the world, and I understand the imperialist monster that is the United States of America.” He paused; there was an awkward silence. “But they can’t bomb Lakotah,” Means said. “We have too many white people living among us.”

Pinto looked up. “Um, as you know,” he began, “we are trying to put the war behind us. It was a very painful process. So many people died. Eighty-nine percent of our infrastructure was destroyed. Our whole country was leveled, and now we are trying to rebuild. The U.S. has been very supportive. Over the past five years, they have been our biggest donors of aid.”

“Really?” said Means. He was shocked.

“Yes, they have given us up to $25 million a year. I will give this petition to the capitol, in Dili, but” — Pinto laughed, a bit nervously — “I can assure you that my government will not take a position.”

There was a minute or two of closing niceties. Outside on the sidewalk, Means said, “I loved his straightforwardness.”

I said it was shocking how many people East Timor lost in the war.

Means sneered at me. “On the continental United States in 1492,” he said, “there was 12 to 14 million people — Indians. And according to the 2000 census, there were just 250,000 full bloods left. We’ve lost 99.6 percent of our population.”

His math was a little shaky. For one thing, Census statistics indicate that in 2000 there were 2.5 million U.S. citizens who claimed no ancestry other than “American Indian” or “Alaskan Native.” But I said nothing.

We kept walking, and, as Means descended the stairs into the Metro station, wearing the Dolce & Gabbanas again, a woman passing by did a double take.

Russell Means became an American icon in 1973. As a telegenic and quotable front man for AIM, he starred on TV as 250 Native Americans took over the sole church in tiny Wounded Knee, S.D., and seized control of the town, which sits amid the desolate brown hills of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. For 71 days, even as the National Guard’s armored tanks lurked in the pine trees and federal helicopters whirred overhead, spraying sniper fire, Means and his fellow Indians held their ground, bearing but a few old shotguns and hunting rifles as they burned down Wounded Knee’s grocery store and flew the American flag upside down.

The conflict was a reprise of an earlier, symbolically potent battle — an 1890 massacre that saw the U.S. Cavalry kill more than 150 Lakota men, women, and children. Wounded Knee II was a feud over what it means to be an American Indian. For much of the preceding century, the nation’s indigenous people had been forcibly assimilated. They’d been legally denied the right to practice their religious rituals — the sun dance, for instance — and shepherded into government-run boarding schools where white administrators cut the students’ long hair and forbade them to speak their native languages.

For some Indians in the early 1970s, the indignities were manageable: They harbored hope that in time the U.S. system could accommodate them — that tribal governments, which answer to the Department of the Interior, could incrementally improve life for Native Americans.

Other Indians saw no such hope. Taking cues from the Black Panthers, they decreed that it was time to get radical, to proudly and violently assert their racial identity. These radicals saw their assimilationist counterparts as sellouts — or “half-breeds,” as Means puts it — and in 1972 they found a target for their ire: Dick Wilson, the newly elected Pine Ridge tribal chair. A crew-cut Lakota prone to frothing with hatred for communists, Wilson bore a special animus for Means. At one point, he threatened, “I, Dick Wilson, will personally cut his braids off.”

In AIM’s view, Wilson was a puppet of the U.S. government. In the early days of his administration, he gave the Feds a large chunk of the Pine Ridge reservation, Sheep Mountain, that was coveted for its uranium and molybdenum deposits. In turn, the attorney general’s office sent 65 U.S. marshals to keep the peace on Pine Ridge, by surrounding the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building there at gunpoint.

Wounded Knee II was a retort — a fiery demonstration calling for Wilson’s removal. The U.S. government was there to defend Wilson as legitimate. Means played a valiant David to the Fed’s Goliath. At one point, he announced to the surrounding forces: “You’re going to have to kill us. I’m going to die for my treaty rights.” The press reveled — and lingered long on Means’s hairy past.

Raised near San Francisco, the oldest child of a physically abusive Lakota mother and a Lakota father who struggled with alcoholism, Means burglarized stores and stole wallets from bar patrons before discovering AIM in 1969. Then, he resolved, as he put it in his 1995 autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, “never again would I seek personal approval from white society on white terms. Instead I would get in the white man’s face until he gave me and my people our just due. With that decision, my whole existence suddenly came into focus.”

In 1972, in Washington, Means helped lead 300 AIM affiliates in a six-day occupation of the BIA building — a gambit that saw the Indians smashing the bathrooms and offices, toppling file cabinets and “repossessing” Indian paintings, pottery and rugs. Soon after that, he protested the killing of a fellow Lakota by leading hundreds of Indians to a demonstration at the county courthouse in Custer, S.D. There, he gouged a police officer in the eye. A nearby chamber of commerce building burned to the ground.

After the Custer riot, he was out of jail the following day — “just in time,” as he gloats, “to see national television coverage.”

The 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee failed to deliver clear-cut glory, however. Means fled the battle zone under the cover of night, and the last of his followers soon surrendered to authorities.

To some Native Americans, the whole campaign was little more than misguided theater. This February, Tim Giago, founder of the Lakota Times, a newspaper, wrote that “an entire village was pillaged and destroyed” without AIM ever spending “a single dollar” to repair the wreckage.

But Wounded Knee had a ripple effect. It brought anti-Indian racism into the newspapers and prompted a measure of social change. Sixty-six-year-old Lorraine White Face, who lives on Pine Ridge, says: “Before Russell Means took over Wounded Knee, the stores in [nearby] Nebraska would have signs on them saying, ‘No Indians Allowed.’ You couldn’t go to the movies or a cafe. After Wounded Knee, all that changed.”

America’s romance with Indians surged, and, in his defiance, Means seemed like a reincarnation of such Lakota legends as Sitting Bull, Rain in the Face, Gall and Crazy Horse. When Means went to court in the wake of the Wounded Knee mayhem, Marlon Brando and Harry Belafonte showed up, voicing support. (Means was found not guilty of burglary and larceny charges.)

Then, in 1976, Andy Warhol invited Means to New York to sit for a portrait. In Warhol’s silk-screen, Means is fierce, staring straight out of the frame. He wears a white bone neck choker and what looks like a brown leather rawhide robe. An imaginative viewer can almost hear buffalo thundering away out on the Plains. But still in Warhol’s silk-screen there is something fake and disquieting about Means’s face. It’s a mask-like splash of tan paint. The image is reminiscent of the cheap coloration in long-ago Sunday comics pages. The caption, Warhol seems to be telling us with a wink, could read, “Wild Indian, Authentic.”

At our first interview, over breakfast, Means was surly from the get-go. Within five minutes of shaking my hand, he accosted me for my “[expletive] white racist arrogance. There’s only one reason you people came to this continent,” he said. “Greed! We Indians have our spirituality. We have our land, but Americans have no culture except greed.”

I changed the subject, asking Means how many Lakota backed his independence claim. “That’s not germane,” he barked. “In all my years of international relations, not once has anybody ever questioned my sovereignty. Even if I am only speaking for myself and my brother, and I’m not, my sovereignty exists. It’s spelled out in the treaties.”

Eventually, I’d learn that Means has only six or eight active Lakota supporters scattered throughout North and South Dakota. Many other Lakota quietly share his contempt for the U.S. government; some even long for a return to the hallowed days of Lakota independence. And, while Means won 46 percent of the vote when he ran unsuccessfully for Pine Ridge tribal chair in 2004, he has not endeared himself with his desperado-style secession.

“I’m a little frustrated that he just went ahead and went to Washington,” says Alex White Plume, a bison rancher who serves on the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, which fights for Indians’ land rights. “It’s not like he came up with a brand-new idea. We’ve talked about separating from the U.S. at treaty council meetings. No traditional Lakota wants to be colonized, and actually I wanted to bring a group to Washington myself. But I wanted to bring thousands. Russell didn’t build that kind of consensus. He never even sat down with our traditional elders.”

“Russell didn’t do the protocol,” echoes Floyd Hand, also on the treaty council. “What I do is, I make people welcome at a meeting. I buy everybody some meat and vegetables and fry bread. Russell went solo.”

AIM is more severe in its critique of Means. In a press release, it has called him “clownish” and has taken pains to note that Means has “resigned from the American Indian Movement at least six (6) times, the latest on January 8, 1988.” No one from AIM would comment for this article.

But, for Means, the burned bridges behind him simply show that he’s nobody’s lackey. He’s free, and freedom is his foremost priority. He calls his republic the “epitome of liberty,” promising that, once it’s up and running (and that could take decades, he says), it would issue its own licenses and passports as it allowed its citizens a tax-free existence. There would be no police and no jails. The economy would be based on wind power.

“We get enough wind in our country to power the entire United States 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he told me. “We’ve formed an LLC, legal under U.S. law, and we’re going to join with large coal companies. We’ll go to individual landowners, both Lakota and non-Lakota, and lease their land and put windmills on them. We have a business plan.”

Means refused to share it, though. He was more interested in talking about Lakotah’s government, which, he said, would be matriarchal. “A lot of people think that just means that women run everything, but that isn’t right,” said Means, who is, technically speaking, the chief facilitator for Lakotah’s provisional government. “Matriarchy is where you celebrate the strengths of each sex. Both men and women know their roles. People get along.”

Lakotah would not be a democracy but rather a consensus-based system. “Individual liberty through community control,” is how Means described it. “Everybody has a right to be racist, but their behavior is regulated by the posse comitatus.”

Means argued that American Indians flourished for centuries in matriarchal societies. “I quote,” he said, holding a single index finger aloft, “the great Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr.: ‘The disagreement between Indian nations was largely without the spilling of much blood. It was about as dangerous as a professional football game.’ We lived, from the top of the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego, in harmony, without any disease. It was Heaven on Earth. Then you guys ruined it.”

There was a bit of the thespian about Means, and I kept thinking of perhaps his most cerebral Indian foe — Chippewa novelist and critic Gerald Vizenor, who has written: “We’re all invented as Indians. We’re invented from traditional static standards, and we are stuck in coins and words like artifacts.” Vizenor holds that, even as they live in contemporary society, playing bingo and using computers, Indians find their identity shaped (and limited) by what white Americans think Indians should be — that is, savage, and appointed with cool moccasins and colorful headdresses.

There’s a timeworn tradition of Indians capitalizing on the white man’s fascination — Sitting Bull and Gall signed on as part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling “Wild West” show in the late 19th century. Vizenor sees Means as the new standard-bearer for this sort of hokum. Means, he says, is “the media man, a master of simulations, a comical spectacle.”

A large question seemed to hang over Means’s visit to Washington. Was this jaunt down Embassy Row in earnest? Or was it just a little performance art — a trick to kick up a rhetorical dust storm?

Means didn’t answer the question, but he relished it. “What did Shakespeare say?” he asked, his face alight with a grin as he spread his arms wide. “All the world’s a stage.”

The meeting with Venezuela was promising. I was not allowed to attend, but afterward Collette emerged burbling: “They’re ready to invest. They just want to see a business plan so they can arrange something with Citgo to start developing alternative energy out in Lakotah.”

Bolivia was, by the Lakotans’ lights, a smashing success. Ambassador Gustavo Guzman, who is suave and lean, with his long hair pulled back into a ponytail, wore bluejeans and greeted Means as an old friend. Alone among nations, the Bolivians had sent a delegation to support Means when he and fellow secessionists announced their declaration of independence in Washington last December. (Bolivian President Evo Morales is Indian, as is roughly 55 percent of the Bolivian population.) “We respect the rights of Indians everywhere,” Guzman told me, “even though we cannot take an official position on the Republic of Lakotah.”

Uruguay’s ambassador to the United States, Carlos Gianelli, was a regal older gentleman with a crocodilian smile; his office was finely appointed with burgundy leather chairs and a mahogany desk. When Means proffered him the petition, he said: “Fine, then, we’ll study this and send it to Montevideo. We don’t have many indigenous people in Uruguay, as you know, but we are hopeful for cultural exchanges.”

Means was elated. “Now that’s what I call sophisticated,” he said in the elevator.

But the visit to the Finnish Embassy was doomed from the moment Means entered the building, a glass, steel and concrete minimalist masterpiece known as the “Jewelry Box” of Embassy Row. It was early morning. A cold gray light bore down through the bounteous windowpanes. The ambassador was out. Means met instead with the second secretary of political affairs, a young woman named Soile Kauranen. Perhaps because it was early, Means was in particularly testy form. “I could care less who recognizes us,” he told Kauranen. “Whether Finland recognizes us or not, we’re already free.”

Kauranen, who wore a light charcoal pantsuit and modish, clear-framed eyeglasses, spent much of the time assiduously scribbling notes on a legal pad. Her posture was erect, and her questions shimmered as small, pointillist pricks at Means’s reeling monologue. “And, uh, how many people in your country?” she asked. “And how many hectares is it?”

When Means and Collette had answered to Kauranen’s satisfaction, she said, “Thank you, gentlemen,” and ushered them out. They began moving down Massachusetts Avenue on foot, eventually coming upon a grand plaster-faced building adorned with a blue cupola. This was once the Iranian Embassy, but now it was vacant and dilapidated, with cracks in the walkway and weeds everywhere in the yard.

“Look at that,” Colette thrilled. “We could discover it — you know, the doctrine of discovery!”

Means stood on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets as he surveyed the property. “It could use a front lawn,” he said.

They pressed on, and a few moments later Means shouted at Collette: “Will you stop walking right in front of me? God!”

Collette moved to the side — and then, as we continued toward Dupont Circle, he delivered portfolios to various embassies while Means waited at the curb. They hit Brazil, South Africa and Lithuania.

I wondered what, beyond mere recognition, Means wanted from this odd and sundry collection of countries. Was it aid?

“No,” he said. “You saw that guy from East Timor. He can’t say a word because the U.S. is greasing him. We don’t want aid. Does the United States get aid? Does Germany or Japan? No. The U.S. has been throwing Indians aid for over a century, and it’s killing us. What we need is investments. We want to open things up, so that companies from all over the world can do business with us, without having to comply with the onerous laws of the United States of America.”

For many observers, Russell Means’s current rhetoric calls to mind another aging warrior — King Lear. Means’s harshest critics hold that he’s now just fulminating delusionally — and that in fact he’s been an ineffectual figure for more than 30 years now. “Ever since Wounded Knee, Russell has seemed more and more like a blind man with a Rubik’s Cube,” Laura Waterman Wittstock, a Seneca Indian and Minneapolis-based journalist, has said. “The older he’s gotten, the less coherent his career seems. He’s been frantically hunting around for a new identity and saying, ‘Is this it? Is this it? How about this?’ ”

Means has wandered most in the realm of politics. In 1984, when Hustler publisher Larry Flynt attempted to run for president on the Republican ticket, Means joined him as the vice presidential candidate. That same year, he traveled to Libya to cultivate an alliance with Moammar Gaddafi. He befriended Louis Farrakhan, eventually, and became so enamored of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and its evasion of the IRS that he did a lecture tour on the church’s behalf. In 1988, he ran for president himself, as a Libertarian, narrowly losing the party’s nomination to Ron Paul. Meanwhile, he built his cinematic r{Zcaron}sum{Zcaron}.

After appearing with Daniel Day-Lewis in “The Last of the Mohicans,” Means played a Navajo medicine man in Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.” Then he provided the voice of a sage elder, Powhatan, in the Disney animated film “Pocahontas.” He kept his hand in Lakota issues. He helped found a community-funded health clinic on the Pine Ridge reservation. Twice, he tried, unsuccessfully, to get himself elected tribal chair.

But then in 2006, he says, his life attained focus as he was driving near his home on Pine Ridge. On a whim, he collared five young pedestrians — 20-somethings — and asked them to define the word “freedom.”

“I sat down on the ground, and I listened to them,” Means said. “And none of them — not one — could define freedom. And the only thing they knew about me was from the movies. That absolutely scared the hell out of me. When I came to the reservation in 1972, everyone spoke Lakota. They knew about their ancestors. In 36 years, we’ve gone from a Lakota way of life to a poverty way of life. I started to wonder: ‘How do we save ourselves? How can I leave behind a meaningful legacy?’ ”

Means retreated to the mountain home of his fifth (and current) wife, Pearl, in New Mexico, to meditate on the “state of Indian affairs” with four friends. And there he kept circling back to what his great-uncle — Matthew King, or Noble Red Man to the Lakota — had told him decades before: “We must never forget that we were once a free people.” Means began talking about taking Lakota country back to its roots as a free nation.

“But what are we going to do about all the white people?” one friend asked.

“We’ll figure it out,” said Means.

On the third morning in Washington, Means was brooding and silent when we met. “I’ve become convinced,” he said finally, “that what you’re writing is a hatchet job. I’m so fed up with white people and their broken promises. When you go home and write your hatchet job, make sure you say how angry I am.”

All militants are angry, of course, but Means’s temper tantrums have been so baroque they seem fresh — dazzling, even.

In 1974, as he was standing trial for the 1972 Custer courthouse riot, Means refused to stand up for the judge. Riot police swarmed the courtroom. A melee broke out, and, Means wrote: “a cop came at me with a raised club. Rather than getting hit, I smashed his face mask and watched his nose twist and flatten against the plastic.” The outburst put Means behind bars for a year.

Later, in 1991, Means’s rage crested. Amid the tumult of his fourth marriage, which saw his wife, Gloria Grant, file charges of spousal abuse, Means began to wonder “if my life meant anything at all.”

“I began,” he writes in his autobiography, “to edge across the hazy line between reason and madness.” He decided to become an assassin, and he composed a list of more than 100 people he wanted to kill. “In one column were white people,” he told me. “In the other column, Indians. And you know what the difference was? The Indian list was longer. I wanted to rub out as many sellouts as I could. I was insane. I had a lot of anger, which I used to cover up my low self-esteem.”

Means underwent therapy, but in 1997, while living on Navajo land, he got into a scuffle with his wife’s father. Leon Grant was in his 70s; he had a prosthetic arm. Navajo police alleged that Means battered him, but Means fought the charge vociferously, arguing that, under the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Navajo had no right to prosecute an Indian who did not belong to their nation. Ultimately, even after Leon Grant withdrew his accusation, Means persisted with his sovereignty case against the Navajo Nation, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, which two years ago refused to hear it.

In Washington, I wondered how Collette handled working with Means. He’d just spent two months living at Means’s house, squeezed amid building supplies and crashing on the floor in a spare bedroom under remodeling. “There are times when Russell can be a little insistent,” he told me, choosing his words carefully. “But I’ve done a lot of healing work around my issues with insistent people, and this experience is enabling me to do a little more healing.”

Besides being a paralegal, Collette is a registered minister, training with the Heartland Aramaic Mission, based in Missouri, but he does not preach. Rather, he specializes in counseling spiritual seekers online. He is the mastermind behind an interactive self-help Web site, Innerpeace.org. He also promotes the use of rice hulls, an agricultural byproduct, as an eco-friendly building material.

Always inclined toward Libertarian views, Collette became an activist after watching the Berlin Wall fall in 1989. Suddenly, he felt that “maybe individuals can make a difference.” Since then, he has let “guidance” dictate how he puts his talent to work for the cause. “Basically,” explained Collette, who’s spent much of the past 20 years moving about the United States, “I’m here until I’m guided to go be somewhere else.”

Last Christmas Day, Collette found himself direly in need of guidance. He was camped in Washington, under the Ron Paul blimp in his Astro van, and he was at a crossroads in his life. “I had three choices,” he recalls. “I could have gone south with the blimp. I could have stayed still, or I could have gone north to help Ron Paul in the New Hampshire primary.”

That morning, another option presented itself: Collette read a short news piece about Lakotah’s declaration of independence. “All these years I’d been living in the United States because I couldn’t imagine any place having more freedom,” he said. “And now here was a country that actually had the potential to be freer.”

Within two days, Collette was driving cross-country to start his new life in Lakotah.

At a deli on P Street NW, Means and Collette happened upon an Eritrean cabdriver named Woldeab Kelati, and Means told him of his quest for Lakota liberty.

“This is not an easy thing,” said Kelati, nibbling his sandwich.

“Gaining freedom is never easy,” said Means. “Eritrea knows that.”

“But you don’t have a boundary,” said Kelati. “You are in the center of the United States.”

Means explained the Lakota’s treaty claims. Kelati shook his head. “You have a difficult task,” he pronounced. “Good luck.”

Means and Collette walked down Connecticut Avenue and came upon some petitioners for Greenpeace, two 20-ish women standing outside the Starbucks near Dupont Circle, crying, “Save the whales!” When they saw Means, one canvasser changed her tune, chanting, “Help Mother Earth!”

Means sidled toward them obligingly. “I can’t sign,” he said. “I’m not a citizen of this country.”

“But we’re international!”

Means signed but refused to give money. “You think indigenous people are a danger to the environment,” he explained.

“No, no, I think we’re all on this Earth together!”

“You have tried to stop the traditional whale hunts of the Makah Indians in the Puget Sound of the Pacific Northwest,” Means said. “That is why I cannot become a member.”

“Okay! Thanks for talking to us!”

Soon, Means and Collette took a cab to the Watergate, to visit the headquarters of the Libertarian Party. Means has high standing there. Executive director Shane Cory, 33, listened attentively to Means’s pitch and said: “What you’ve done is very bold. I’m afraid of bold action by our government. But I respect what you’re doing. I’m Potawatomi.”

The Potawatomi are an Indian nation with branches in Oklahoma and the upper Midwest, and, when Means heard the word, he all but leapt from his seat, delighted. “You are?” he exclaimed. Earlier, in a dark mood, he’d soliloquized on the truth of a slogan he’d seen once, on the butt of a gun owned by an indigenous freedom fighter in Nicaragua: “Only Indians help Indians.”

Cory is from Oklahoma, where the chairman of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, John Barrett, has spent the past three decades wildly growing the Potawatomi economy. Once headquartered in a beat-up trailer, with only $550 in assets, by 2006 the tribe had $350 million in assets. “We have our own power grid,” Cory said. “We have the largest geothermally heated building in the state of Oklahoma. We have the largest tribal bank in the country, and I don’t have to pay capital gains taxes.”

These details were all news to Means, so Cory gave him a starter kit for launching an international bank. “Have you talked to Bernard von NotHaus?” he asked, referring to the father of the Liberty Dollar, a legal, alternative currency now circulating in the United States. “What about the Cato Institute?”

It was the only time I saw anyone offer the Lakotans such detailed advice, and afterward, out in the hallway, Means shouted, “Yes!” Then he leapt toward Collette and hugged him.

Weeks passed. Collette, I learned, was arranging to mint two coins for a gold-and silver-based Lakotah currency system — the dollar-like tonka and also another coin worth roughly two cents, the mato. Means was readying to make one more bid, this November, to become tribal chair on Pine Ridge. “I’m going to run on the freedom ticket,” he said, describing an ultra-Libertarian scheme. “If I win, I will not have a job. I’ll do nothing. But I think the U.S. government will see that we have a constituency, and they’ll listen to us.”

Means hadn’t done a whit of campaigning, though, and he depicted the whole endeavor of wooing Pine Ridge voters as almost absurd. People are poor on the reservation, he told me. “They don’t have phones. And do you think I’m going to just walk around this whole goddamned reservation and get unanimous support?”

I asked him if he’d done any follow-up on his Washington visit. “No,” he said flatly. Later, Bolivia would call to discuss a possible Washington visit between Means and Evo Morales. Beyond that, though, the whole journey down Embassy Row seemed almost like vanished history. Not a single other nation got back to Means on his petition.

To make matters worse, Means’s young nation was already riven with conflict. The tension focused on a Lakota activist named Duane Martin Sr., who’d come to Washington with Means in December for the declaration of independence.

Martin, 42, is heavyset, with thick, powerful forearms and long black hair drawn back in a ponytail. He is the leader of a sort of paramilitary force, the Strongheart Warrior Society, which, he said, responds to crime problems on or near Pine Ridge, “day or night. It don’t matter. Me and my 27 warriors, we’re there because the tribal police, they do nothing. Nothing.” In recent years, he’s joined Means in protesting the flow of alcohol onto Pine Ridge from liquor stores in neighboring Whiteclay, Neb., and also coordinated meetings on gang violence. He has appeared as a guest on a talk-radio show Means used to host on Pine Ridge and helped Means in his campaigns for tribal chair. He came to Washington with a longtime ally — a white activist named Naomi Archer, who describes Martin in spiritual terms, as her “brother.”

Archer, who lives in North Carolina, is a male-to-female transsexual. She’d created the Republic of Lakotah’s Web site and was here to help the Lakota garner media coverage. But she and Means locked horns. Archer insisted that the Lakotans needed to pray before each meeting they held. Means wrote her off as a meddlesome white person — and soon he stripped Archer’s ability to update the site. That act so angered Martin that he stopped working with Means and launched his own breakaway nation — Lakota, it’s called, sans the “h.” Never mind that it is the same territory as Lakotah.

All this was on the table when Means and I were in Washington, and he discussed it calmly, saying: “Duane’s a free person. He’s free to start his own country.” But the situation was more tense than Means cared to get into. For soon a banner headline appeared on the Web site. “Duane Martin, Sr.,” it read, “represents ONLY himself and is known for soliciting funds for himself. He is not affiliated with Republic of Lakotah.”

This spring, Duane Martin met me by the roadside on the Pine Ridge reservation. It was cold outside, but he was wearing an immense pair of gray shorts and a droopy red T-shirt. His voice was a raspy, bellowing yell, and, as he sucked at the chewing tobacco lumped in his lower lip, he vowed to show me the “real reservation. I’ll let you see things that Russell Means don’t even know about,” he said.

We climbed into my rental car — and then, when I buckled my seat belt, Martin erupted in protest. “Leave that buckle alone!” he said. “Stop acting like a white man! All these constraints, all these rules. Be free, be free!”

We drove, unbelted, and Martin complained that Means is a “movie star. He doesn’t know what life is like for everyday Indians.”

The gripe may be rooted in jealousy. Means is a local celebrity, recognized wherever he goes on Pine Ridge. But, then again, Martin’s revolutionary propaganda is more populist than Means’s. The very name of his Web site — lakotaoyate.net — invokes an Indian word meaning “people.” As designed by Archer, it announces itself as “a place for all the oyate — Elders, mothers, fathers, and children.”

Martin is already issuing Lakota ID cards, and he claims to have given out more than 150. He showed me his own. The front bore a menacing photo of Martin wearing dark sunglasses. On the back, it gave the cardholder a sense of omnipotence, bearing a disjointed list of privileges. It read, “a. Diplomat; b. Passport; c. Driving; d. Hunting; e. Fishing; f. All of the Above.”

As I wrote these words down, Martin cackled with glee, rejoicing over how his card gave Indians a free pass to ignore white society’s niggling rules.

“See,” he said. “I’m not [expletive] around, am I?”

We drove on, through a public housing community, Evergreen, in Means’s own town of Porcupine, S.D. The 100 or so houses there, built in the ’70s, were spattered with graffiti, their barren yards awash in old beer cans and vodka bottles — all contraband on the dry reservation.

“There are 13 bootleggers in here,” Martin said, “and seven dope dealers. And see all them kids there?” He pointed to a pack of boys roughly 10 years old. “That’s who they sell it to. Them’s the kids who are running around breaking windows. We asked Russell Means to come to a community meeting here, and he said, ‘I’ve got no time for that.’?” (Means denies saying this, and says that Martin never invited him to the meeting.)

Martin had spent months trying to organize Evergreen residents against the thugs in their midst. This afternoon, he was getting crime reports from locals. He stopped to chat with a woman named Rose Never Missed a Shot, and she complained of a neighbor who was selling vodka to her 17-year-old son. “He got real drunk,” she said. “Then, the people who was selling him the alcohol, they beat my son up, broke his jaw. When they’re drunk like that, I stay up all night.”

We went into her small house to look at an X-ray of the fractured jaw. Sixteen family members lived inside. The interior walls were pocked with holes. The furnace did not work. The sole source of heat was the stove, and there was a bucket in the living room to catch the water that came in through the roof when it rained. A 19-year-old woman named Tammy Iron Shell was playing with her baby. I asked her if she supported Means’s claim of independence. “Russell Means is just an old guy who’s been in a bunch of movies,” she said. “He’s never done nothing for us.”

“Tell him to put us on ‘Oprah,’ ” said her sister, Wendy Wallowing Bull. “Tell him to put us on ‘Extreme Makeover.’ ”

Russell Means lives at a remove from the squalor afflicting most of Pine Ridge. He owns a large wood-frame house that sits on his own 140-acre horse ranch. The place was built, he says, in 1917 for the white BIA agent charged with overseeing Pine Ridge. But it’s more dilapidated than palatial. The paint is sun-worn, and there’s a wealth of construction material lying around amid a decade-long remodeling project.

Still, it is the headquarters of the Republic of Lakotah. I drove up the long driveway, past the sign warning of video surveillance.

When I arrived, Pearl Means was on the phone. She is a 48-year-old Navajo who works as a real estate broker. I heard her saying, “Russ thinks it’s going to be a hatchet job.”

Means himself was at the kitchen table, glowering. Though Pine Ridge is larger than Delaware, it functions more like a small town. Means had received detailed reports on my movements, and he did not like it that I’d tapped Duane Martin as a tour guide.

Tentatively, I noted that Means seemed to have some detractors.

“There is no employment here,” he thundered, “and no businesses. There is nothing on this reservation. It’s like a prison. And what do you think people in prison start doing? They can’t fight against the authorities oppressing them. The only way they can get out their frustration is by fighting each other. So yes, there’s division here, but look at your own [expletive] country.”

When Means calmed down, he began discussing how, over a lifetime, a traditional Lakota accrues four names, the last coming when he is recognized as an elder. “Your own people decide who you are,” he said. “My first name was Brave Eagle, and I tried to live up to it. I took dares; I wasn’t afraid to fight. Then I was Ci–, which is a male bird out on the Plains, and I was a fancy dance champion. Then, in 1972, I became Works for the People. I tried to live up to that. But my fourth name? I’m still waiting for that, and I’m one of the oldest guys out here. I’ve outlived almost everybody, but my people haven’t accepted me as an elder.”

Eventually, Means wanted to show off one of his proudest achievements — the Porcupine Health Clinic, which he helped start, with no help from the tribal government. We drove into the center of town and met with the clinic’s acting administrator, Floyd White Eyes. Means told him that he could help out over the summer by staffing the ambulance with Lakota supporters — EMTs who’d phoned him from Denver. “You’ll have ambulance service for at least eight weeks,” he said. “I can promise you that.”

“That would be great, Russ,” said White Eyes. “That’d really help us out.”

When we came out of the conference room, there were a few people sitting in the waiting area — a young mother with her baby, an old man, an obese young woman in shorts and a dirty sweatshirt. Means began moving around the room. Without saying a word, he presumed to shake the hand of everyone present.

Was he planting campaign seeds, despite himself, or was he simply exercising a little noblesse oblige? It was unclear, but the moment seemed expertly scripted. It was as though the film had suddenly slowed and the sound had been cut, leaving only an essence: Here was a large man looming unvanquished above the oyate, playing the part of a stormy, unpredictable king. There was nothing warm or neighborly about what he was doing, but the performance dominated the room. Each person there received Means’s hand silently and solemnly. The old man rose to his feet, astonished, as though he was beholding a hurricane.

And then Russell Means said goodbye and walked away into the hills, up Crazy Horse Drive, toward home.

Top of page

The Green Bicycle Murder

Bicycling
December 2007
Edited by Bill Strickland
© Bill Donahue

It was a quality bicycle for the year 1919, and an odd one as well: bright green, with an upturned green handlebar, a fancy-for-then coaster brake and a broad, huge-springed leather Brooks saddle. For many of the nine years that 34-year-old Ronald Light had owned the bike, he’d ridden it daily and, now, thinking back on his story, I can imagine Light rolling the bike out of Leicester, England, the booming industrial city where he lived, and into the quiet countryside, the breeze riffling his knit golf cap and necktie as he pedaled through the gentle hills of the British midlands, past small peasant cottages and little stone churches and pubs and green grassy meadows lined with hedgerows of hawthorn, blackthorn and ivy.

Blandly handsome and lean, with short, brown hair, a narrow, beaklike nose and a placid manner, Light was a wealthy one-time Army officer who had returned from World War I shell-shocked and disgraced. He’d been court-martialed for forging telegraphs, and ended up in Leicester unemployed and living with his sickly mother. Cycling was his escape.

But in the 9 p.m. darkness of this cold night in late autumn, Light was not riding but pushing his bike through the still streets of Leicester and, I suspect, desperately hoping no one would hear the low, grinding noise his machine gave off as the loose back wheel scraped the frame.

About five months earlier, in July 1919, a fetching young factory worker, Bella Wright, had been fatally shot in the head while riding a rickety bicycle outside of Leicester. The last person with whom she was seen was a new acquaintance: an unshaven man on a green bicycle. The name of this man was originally a mystery but it is now one of the few facts about the case everyone can agree on: It was Ronald Light who rode with Bella that night. The principle question is what happened that languid summer evening after they began rolling east over the crushed-stone roadways into the village of Gaulby.

Police investigators contended that Light shot the young woman with an Army-issue revolver, and his trial for her murder in early 1920 became a courtroom spectacle that was essentially the O.J. trial of its day. Facing a sentence of hanging if convicted, Light won his freedom by arguing, with refined, public-school poise, that he was an innocent man unjustly tangled in a sordid affair. Had Light ridden with Bella that night? Oh yes, he assured the jury. He had indeed. But had he, to quote his lawyer, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, “shot this unfortunate creature?”

“Certainly not,” proclaimed Ronald Light.

Until taking the stand, though, Light hadn’t acted innocent. In the weeks following Bella’s death, as “wanted” posters describing the still-unidentified suspect went up on telegraph poles throughout Leicester, Light hid his beloved bike in a closet. He said that, though he’d done nothing wrong, he didn’t want to go public as the man on the green bicycle; he was afraid, he would explain in court, of worrying his mother. “She’s been under the doctor for many years,” he said. “She has a bad heart.”

At some point, Light decided to rid himself of the bike altogether, and that’s how he found himself one cold night trudging through serpentine streets laid down almost two millennia earlier by the Romans who founded the city. He passed through the ancient kingdom of King Leir, Shakespeare’s inspiration, and snuck along among crumbling baths, walls and aqueducts. He descended some stairs to the bank of the River Soar.

Soon, a laborer named Samuel Holland, en route to the graveyard shift at a nearby mill, spotted a man beside the Upperton Road bridge, stooped over a bicycle frame and visible in the yellow pool cast from the bike’s lamps. As Holland watched, the man stood up, then strode a few yards down the path and, piece by piece, began throwing the bicycle into the water. The frame, the crank, the wheels, the pedals—everything went down into the murk.

It is now February 2007 and I’m standing by the Upperton Road bridge myself. I’ve traveled here, 6,000 miles from my home in Oregon, because ever since a random Google search coughed the details of the Green Bicycle Murder up onto my screen, it has intrigued me.

It may well be history’s most famous bike-related killing. Six thousand people came to Bella Wright’s funeral, and when Light was tried, newspapers all over England went yellow with thrill. “Who murdered Bella Wright?” blared the Daily Express in a multideck page headline that continued, “Green bicycle clue in lonely lane crime.”

“Grim story of a raven,” quoth the Daily Sketch, electing to focus on a black bird that was mysteriously—and quite gothically— found dead beside Bella’s body.

The affair also appealed to me because of its antique splendor, coming as it did in the last era when a bicycle could sit at the center of a cultural uproar. Bella was killed just as the joys of cycling, which for so long had been reserved for the well-heeled, were trickling down to the masses, who could suddenly afford a decent used ride, replete with mudguards, for a few weeks’ wages. Automobiles were not yet widespread, so on those rough roads, factoryworkers, coal miners and farmers moved as quickly as kings. Society was changing: Peasant families who had clung to their own villages, inbreeding for centuries, now mingled with faraway visitors and expanded the gene pool. To facilitate pedaling, ladies began wearing bloomers, casting off their heavy dresses—and, some historians say, striking the first spark for equal rights.

But what drove me toward Bella and Light, ultimately, was a book. The Green Bicycle Murder, written in 1993 by the British author C. Wendy East, is the most celebrated work on the case and it was, in my view, unsatisfactory. East is coolly reasoned in the book, but her arguments are founded on a dubious premise: “I never doubted Light was guilty,” she told me when she and I spoke briefly.

“But how can you know,” I asked, “unless you have, like, a videotape?”

“There is a way of knowing,” East said cryptically.

Her portrait of Light is peevish, dismissive. In discussing his war experience, for instance, East says, “His company seems not to have come under either long or continuous fire in France,” and notes that Lieutenant Light was likely pampered with frequent food parcels from home. Her book has largely shaped public opinion. Today, most people who know anything at all about Light—who died in 1975 at age 89—regard him as a spoiled brat who got away with murder.

There is no doubt Light grew up privileged. His father was a successful inventor of plumbing devices. The family had servants and, at one point, lived in an elegantly spired Leicester town house replete with a third-story balcony that yielded a view of the horse races at nearby Victoria Park.

There’s also no lack of proof that Light was a troubled character.

In 1902, at age 17, he was expelled from the elite Oakham School for “lifting a little girl’s clothes over her head,” according to a brief filed by prosecutors in the murder trial. In his 30s, he “attempted to make love to a girl 15 years of age,” according to the same brief, and admitted to “improper conduct” with another young girl, this one a mere eight years old. Two girls, ages 12 and 14, even testified in court that early on July 5, 1919, just hours before Bella’s murder, Light had chased after them as they wended their bikes through the countryside.

My initial research led me to imagine Light as slimy and despicable—wearing a trench coat, perhaps, as he hunches nervously over his strange handlebar, his teeth idly gnawing at the air, like a ferret’s, as his face bears a beady-eyed intensity. But all accounts depict him as calm and well-spoken in court, and in extant photos he appears almost blank-faced, as though no turgid thoughts whatsoever churned through his skull. Still, one photo lingers in my mind. Taken just a day or so after he was acquitted, it captures Light in a double-breasted suit and a tie held neatly in place by a pin. He is staring at the camera, his lips slightly pursed, his head tilted a bit, his eyes fixed straight ahead. He seems to be saying, as always, “Everything’s normal here. Nothing is wrong.” But in this picture there’s an undertow of determination in his look—the slightest hint of how hard he is working to conceal the secret that everything is wrong.

Light was an only child. He was smart. He got decent grades and seemed suited to step into the life of privilege presented to him by his father, a self-made man born to working-class parents. But as it turned out, his life was a series of disappointments. He lost his job at the railway in 1914 after he was suspected of setting a fire in a cupboard, and of drawing indecent figures on a lavatory wall. Later, working at a farm, he was accused of burning haystacks and dismissed. By the time Light was axed from his post as an Army second lieutenant in 1916, his father had fallen out of a second-story window in his home early one morning and died—an apparent suicide. Light’s mother told police, “For the past few weeks, he has been worried a good deal about our son.”

Light reenlisted, this time as a gunner, and when he came home after several months amid screaming howitzers on the Western Front in France, he was partially deaf. He’d seen fellow troops die or be wounded almost daily, as England had lost nearly a million soldiers in a conflict that, in the end, brought only despair to the country. “If any question why we died,” wrote the poet Rudyard Kipling, “tell them because our fathers lied.” It’s my sense that Light carried a certain grim nihilism. But did this make him a murderer? I couldn’t say.

I thought if I traveled to the scene of the crime I might attain a definitive verdict. But the Leicester of 1919 is largely buried beneath a new, vibrant city of 285,000. The stone church in which the poet Geoffrey Chaucer was married, in about 1366, is still there, as is the 287-year-old Globe pub, which faithfully serves 13 varieties of Real British Ale. Mostly, though, contemporary Leicester is a multicultural experience. It’s currently poised to become Britain’s first white-minority city, and emigrant Somalis, Ugandans, Pakistanis and Bosnians coexist here in relative peace. One evening I found myself in a launderette eating Indian takeout as I chatted with a pale young hipster intent on making a film about zombies.

Bella Wright seemed quite far away—even as I made my way along the towpath, past a bramble of high, tawny weeds toward St. Mary’s Mill, the looming brick building in which Bella last worked at her job making bicycle tires for W&A Bates. The building is now divided into several smaller business spaces, and the first person I encountered—a sullen young man of 30 or so—worked for a concern that made inflatable castles. He wore a blue tracksuit and his ears were bejeweled with gold earrings as he squatted there, rolling a cigarette. I told him of my mission and then asked if he knew anything of Bella Wright.

“No idea, mate,” he said. “I don’t got the foggiest, and it doesn’t mean fuck all to me.”

On the evening of Saturday, July 5, 1919, Light spun north out of the village of Great Glen, through a region known as the Strettons. He passed fields of stubble turnip and beet, and at about 6:45 he spotted a young girl stopped by the roadside, bent low as she inspected a wheel. Bella Wright was 5-foot-2, with what the police called a “well-nourished figure.” Her hair was auburn, her eyes soft brown, and she looked up at Light from beneath the black felt rim of her hat. There was some play in her freewheel. Did Light have a wrench?

He did not, but he did offer to accompany her. They rode east, down a hill toward the village of Gaulby, where Bella planned to visit her uncle and deliver a gift of some gorse.

While Light would claim in court that Bella was a stranger to him, there is some evidence to the contrary. Bella’s mother, Mary Wright, would testify that, in early 1919, “Bella came home after a ride on her bike and said, ‘What do you think? When I went down Braunstone Lane, I had an officer fall in love with me.’”

It’s safe to assume that Bella did not traffic often with officers. Her father, a cow herder, was illiterate. She was the oldest of seven children, and the family lived 4 miles outside Leicester, in the village of Stoughton, under essentially feudal conditions. Their tiny cottage sported a thatched roof and porous walls that wept profusely during wet weather. The floors sagged, the oak beams were bowed, and the outhouse sat a good distance away, by the animal barn.

Still, Bella was no numbskull serf. Rather, she emerges from the legal papers as a self-possessed, forward-thinking young woman. After she finished school at age 12, she took the standard route for girls of her station and worked as a domestic servant. Soon, she saw that there was better pay—and hence more freedom—in factory work, and began pedaling to her night shift at Bates, alone over the dark, hilly 5-mile route. On weekends, according to the Leicester Mercury, “She was often to be seen riding alone. She was never really happy except when enjoying the pleasures of the country-side.” She fixed her own flats, using tubes she got almost gratis at work, and though she was, in the parlance of the day, “keeping company” with 18-year-old Archie Ward, a stoker away at sea on a Royal Navy steamship, she still lived as she wished. Just one week before her death, on June 28, she’d gone to a party with her workmates and allowed a young blacksmith, William Wood, to escort her home through the night.

Did Bella see in Ronald Light a beguiling and urbane older man? Perhaps. In telling her mother of her encounter with the “officer,” Bella recounted, “He asked me who I was, and I told him I was a labouring man’s daughter. He said what a nice girl I was and said by my nice ways and looks I ought to be in a nicer position than a labourer’s daughter.”

They rode, Bella and Light, down the hill. Then they started up another and hopped off, walking side by side. While Bella stopped in at her uncle George Measure’s cottage, Light waited for her, passing time in the village by, he claimed, attending to a flat tire. Bella’s uncle told her he didn’t like the look of her scraggly cycling partner, who lingered outside, unshaven and wearing a raincoat on a clear night.

But when Bella emerged after an hour inside, she rejoined Light and the two of them rode west out of Gaulby, into the midsummer twilight, at about 8:50 p.m. Thirty minutes later, a farmer would find her on an ancient Roman thoroughfare, the Via Devana, lying dead in a puddle of blood.

I wanted to see the terrain Bella rode on her last night alive, so I rented a bike one cold, sleety morning and rode off toward the Strettons with a man named Philip Draycott.

Draycott, 59, is a college professor and TV film director, and the Falstaffian soul of a leisurely cycling club, the Leicester Spokes, who meet each Wednesday night for a spin of 20 miles or so before ending their ride at a pub.

Draycott is amply built for a cyclist, and as we set out, weaving through traffic, he wore a fluorescent yellow vest and fulminated with brio at motorists. “Indicate,” he yelled at a guy who turned without signaling. “Indicate!”

We turned right onto the Via Devana, and then pedaled by a few World War II bomb shelters crumbling into the farm fields. Soon, we passed a little cottage that was selling for $800,000, and I began to see that these days the Strettons are inhabited not by rustics but by people of means enchanted with the idea of rusticity. At Bella Wright’s former home, rechristened Sandbank Cottage, a Jaguar sat in the drive.

We passed the village of Little Stretton and then came to a gentle uphill, roughly paved, bordered by looming oak and ash trees, and shadowed by their high, spindly branches. The road’s dotted white line climbed into the gray distance. Here was where Bella Wright died.

“This very hill!” Draycott intoned with mock tour-guide solemnity. Then he laid out the geography of the case against Light. About a mile west of Gaulby, he said, Bella fled Light and his unwelcome advances. Panicking, she detoured south, setting out for home on a route that was not only longer—4 miles instead of 3—but also obstructed in two places by cattle gates. As Bella labored along, Light whipped down Gaulby Lane, then eventually cut over to intersect Via Devana, where he lay in wait by one of the cattle gates. He shot her, said Draycott, then fled down the gated path before us, escaping through the gathering dusk.

To test Draycott’s theory, I began riding over the path on my own bike, through spitting snow. The mud was ankle-deep, and it sucked so hard at my knobby tires that after 30 feet I shuddered to a stop, then stood gazing into the distance at the spire of the church in Stoughton, where Bella once played the organ on Sundays. But my mind kept turning back to the rusty field gate, which was now quietly piling with snow.

“I found smears of blood on the top bar of the field gate,” police constable Alfred Hall wrote in filing the only on-site account of the Green Bicycle Murder. “I made a diligent search for footprints but could find none [on] either side of the gate.”

Hall searched for hours, driven by his conscience. The doctor who’d come to the scene to examine Bella’s corpse was shockingly cursory. Giving the body a quick once-over, by candlelight, he opined that Bella had simply crashed to her death—an accident.

Spooked by Bella’s blood-spattered body, Hall went home and fretted over this summation until, at 6 the next morning, he rushed back to the crime scene and unearthed a .455 bullet buried in the dust 17 feet from where Bella still lay. He washed the dead girl’s face, and found, he later wrote, “a bullet hole about one inch behind and half an inch below the left eye.”

Hall’s court testimony was no less dramatic. He declared that the blood on the gate had come from a dead raven found at the scene, and that it had died from “gorging itself on blood.” Indeed, Hall claimed, citing footprints, that raven had made six gruesome, bloodthirsty journeys between the gate and the corpse.

There are no ravens in the midlands of England.

When I called Kevin McGowan, a crow specialist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, he was doubtful that a lookalike bird—a crow or a rook—would or could gorge on human blood. “These birds don’t have lips,” he explained. “They can’t get enough suction to suck blood.”

To my mind, the raven—or whatever it was—is evidence only of how the Green Bicycle Murder haunted the imagination back in 1919. It wasn’t just a story about a girl being killed. It was also about a certain hope dying. As David Hughes, a law professor at Leicester’s De Montfort University, wisely told me, “In 1919, with the war just over, people were desperately trying to get back to normal and Bella—she was poised to be married to a sailor. She and Archie Ward were going to be building the nation again, and suddenly she’s killed.”

But the raven was only one of the eerie, powerful images that floated through all the stories being told about the murder. On Febuary 23, 1920, a man named Enoch Whitehouse was hauling a load of coal along the River Soar, on a boat drawn by two horses dutifully plying the towpath. Near the Upperton Road bridge, his towrope went slack, dipping into the brown, filthy water. When it emerged, there was a green bicycle frame tangled up in it.

Soon, several constables lined the banks, wielding lawn rakes and dangling hooks, combing the canal for evidence. Detectives scrutinized the green bicycle. It was mutilated: Someone had filed the brand name, British Small Arms, off the fork and also scraped the serial number off the seat lug. The cops called in a bike mechanic who was able to locate a faintly visible second serial number inside the front fork—103648. Ronald Light had bought a BSA bike with that serial number in the city of Derby on May 18, 1910.

In his largely forgotten 1930 book, The Green Bicycle Case, H.R. Wakefield exudes a chummy Old Boy’s regard for Light and suggests that his clandestine manner was not guilt-induced, but rather the “very human” behavior of an innocent man under stress. As he rolled his bike toward the canal, Wakefield reckons, “Light may have said to himself: ‘I am doing no harm, there is nothing I can say which could contribute toward the solution of the mystery. But to come forward and face the frightful blaze of publicity, probably to be arrested, and have to stand my trial. Cui bono?‘”

The policemen of Leicester were not inclined toward such florid Latin. On March 4, they yanked Light out of Dean Close School, a boy’s academy where he’d just begun teaching math. “I never had a green bicycle,” he swore.

The cops tossed him into the jail in Leicester. Fifteen days later, a police sergeant dredged an Army gun holster and 12 live .455 caliber bullets out of the canal. The bullets precisely matched the one that Alfred Hall had found. Sequestered in his cell, Light hissed to himself in a fury: “Damn and blast that canal.”

Before I really learned about him, I assumed that the polished, privileged Light was a villain as hated by the general public as, say, the suave serial killer Ted Bundy. I guessed that England’s long-ago proletariat rejoiced in Light’s arrest and hankered to see him swing from the gallows. What I didn’t realize was that the Brits’ enchantment with aristocracy—evidenced even now by the widespread working-class love of the royals—was even thicker just after World War I. The glorious British empire was fast fading, and upper-class youths who’d risked their lives to defend it by fighting in World War I were seen as consummate noblemen.

Though the press coverage was sensational, Light’s despicable past never made it into print, and the stories about him were nearly all sympathetic. In one front-page headline, for instance, the Leicester Mercury fretted over “Ronald Light’s Ordeal.” The subheads read, “Why he did not come forward. Feared ‘unpleasant publicity.’ Didn’t want to worry his mother.” As Bella was reduced to a mere “factory girl,” Light was honored in print as an “engineer, teacher and ex-Army officer.”

Light’s trial, which drew an overflow crowd of friendly gawkers, was set in Leicester Castle, a grand, turreted complex built in the 1060s by the Normans, with Sir Thomas Horridge presiding as judge in a white-powdered wig. The star of the drama was not Light but his barrister—Sir Edward Marshall Hall, who was the Johnny Cochran of his day. Then 61, Hall had made a career of helping wealthy suspects triumph over formidable and sordid murder charges—the killing of a prostitute or of a young mistress. Glib, handsome and 6-foot-3, he was a master of oratory— and restraint. He did not cross-examine Bella’s mother or uncle, or even stop Light from admitting that he once had a revolver and that the holster dredged up from the canal was his. Hall saved his haughty disdain for the prosecution’s ballistics expert, a Leicester gunsmith named Henry Clarke.

In a prolonged browbeating, Hall got Clarke to concede that there were scratch marks on the bullet found near Bella’s body. “This bullet could be from a rifle as well as a revolver?” Hall asked meaningfully.

“Yes,” admitted Clarke.

Hall then posited that maybe the fatal shot had been accidentally fired from “some distance away.” If Bella had been shot at close range, as would be necessary with Light’s revolver, Hall continued, wouldn’t it almost “blow the side of the head off?”

“It depends on the velocity, sir,” said Clarke.

“Of course it does,” intoned Hall, as if he’d proven the case’s key point.

Listening, Light canted forward in his seat, clutching the bench before him with stiff, clawlike hands. He looks boylike in the newspaper photos—almost fragile in his neat white shirt and tie. When, after three hours of deliberation, the jury declared him “Not guilty,” he collapsed for a moment. A joyous horde closed in on him, crying, “Well done, Light!” and “Good old Light!” Then the free man slipped out of the castle and took the tram home across town, alone and unnoticed.

In the years after his trial, Light all but vanished. While researching her book, East established that by 1928 he’d moved to the village of Leysdown, on Island of Sheppey, in Kent—a seaside holiday spot for Londoners. Visitors go there in droves, making it easy for a person to hide in the ever-changing crowd. Light lived for a time under an assumed name, Leonard Estelle. He married an older woman with a daughter, but fathered no children himself, and it seems that East could not even ascertain if he ever worked. Over the phone, East told me, “When he died, his stepdaughter had never even heard of his trial.” In Leysdown, he was remembered, she writes, “as an elderly balding man… who was often seen leaning on the gate of his cottage smoking a cigarette and watching the world go by.”

I wanted more details, so I made calls to Kent—to newspapers, to the police and to the public archives. I found nothing, not even an obit. The lawyers who helped Hall prep a defense destroyed their papers right after the trial. Most of the police records for 1919 are missing. The bullets and holsters dredged up from the canal are in the hands of an anonymous collector who bought them for $6,000 at Christie’s in 1987. Even the green bicycle itself, which for several decades hung on the wall of a local bike shop, has been lost. Little remains but speculation.

One morning, I met with Ben Beazley, a retired police officer who has written several books on the history of Leicester. He hypothesized that Bella was killed not by Light but by a love interest in her own social circle. The evidence, he suggested, lay in a rather unfortunate line from the prosecution brief: Though Bella had not been raped or forcibly molested, the document said, “The girl was not a virgin.”

“Maybe she was the local nail,” Beazley mused vaguely. ” Maybe everybody was shagging her. There’s your motive—maybe someone got jealous.”

A retired clerical worker named Alison Keay had her own theory. A soft-spoken and painfully shy criminology buff who loves the TV program “CSI: Las Vegas,” Keay fixated on the bullet entry wound in Bella’s cheek, which, according to court records, was just large enough to “admit an ordinary pencil.” To Keay, such a hole seemed small for the dusty .455 bullet found near the corpse. After she found a self-appointed ballistics expert on the Internet, a retired American police officer named Dave, and Dave confirmed her hunch. Then Keay self-published a 60-page treatise, “The Green Bicycle Murder and New Evidence.” It posits that Light was innocent and that the dusty bullet and the look-alike bullets the cops found in the canal were “complete red herrings.” She may be right on this point. But her book lacks a theory as to who did kill Bella, and why.

Keay says she’s still mulling over those questions. “It was definitely a cover-up,” she told me. “The police knew more than they let on. Bella might have seen something she shouldn’t have seen, like maybe some military exercises, some enemy training.” I pointed out that by 1919 World War I had ended, but Keay persisted. “Say like a German plane came over,” she said. “They practice on random targets, don’t they? And there was a raven, wasn’t there—a black bird? The bird has something to do with it. I’m just not exactly sure what yet.”

Eventually I found my way to law professor David Hughes. Sixtyish and rotund, with a grand thespian air, Hughes is arguably the premier expert on the Green Bicycle Murder. He recently directed a mock trial of Light, and he possesses a keen radar for the case’s nuanced class ramifications; the grandson of domestic servants, he is also a graduate of Cambridge University.

I met him on a snowy morning in his office, which was absurdly cluttered with books and appointed with throw rugs. Hughes was wearing a cream-colored waistcoat, a green Cambridge country tie, and a large copper coin, a George IV farthing, on a long watch chain. “Do come in,” he beckoned. He quickly dismissed one theory I’d heard—that the Freemasons orchestrated Light’s acquittal—calling it “that old canard,” before dismantling it.

For Hughes, the soul of the case lies in a philosophical question. “Why does crime happen?” he thundered. “To quote the great Cambridge criminologist Sir Leon Radzinowicz: opportunity. Let’s say that Light had a fantasy about young women—and clearly I think he did. On that night, along came Bella. At some point, she saw his hunger. She fled.”

Slowly and rhythmically, Hughes began spinning his hands above his prodigious belly to imitate a spinning bicycle crank. “And now,” Hughes said, “Bella’s coming along, down the Via Devana, on a rattly old bicycle with a defective wheel. She’s weaving along—and suddenly out from behind the hedge steps the very man she’s been trying to avoid. She tries to turn 180 degrees, to get away from him—”

Hughes was now madly spinning his hands, and we were both watching them spin, transfixed. “And she panics,” he said. “She turns the bicycle over! She’s on the floor, and Ronald Light—suddenly he’s standing above her, dominant. He has attained his fantasy. He holds the ultimate power, which is not about sex but about destroying. He can kill her!”

Hughes’ hands were dead still. He looked at me, somber and wide-eyed. “And that is what Ronald Light did,” he said. “He murdered the girl.”

When I returned home from England, I believed that Hughes’s story was as close to the truth as anything I’d ever find. Then one afternoon I received a final batch of legal papers from Leicestershire County Records. I sat out on my porch, reading through legal boilerplates, nothing surprising—until one document stunned me. Drafted by Levi Bowley, the superintendent of the Leicester Police, three days after Light’s acquittal, it described how Light had come back to retrieve the personal items that had been seized from him upon his arrest. Bowley said that, because he’d treated Light well in prison, they were on good terms; they talked in his office and Light said: “Well, you are a good sport, if I tell you something can I depend on you keeping it to yourself?”

Bowley said yes, then Light responded “Well, I’ll tell you, but mind it must be strictly confidential, no other person knows about it and if you divulge it I shall, of course, say I never told you anything of the kind.” Then, Bowley wrote, Light volunteered this confession:

“I did shoot the girl but it was completely accidental, we were riding quietly along, I was telling her about the War and my experience in France, I had my revolver in my raincoat pocket and we dismounted for her to look at it. I had fired off some shots in the afternoon for practice and I had no idea there was a loaded cartridge in it. We were both standing up by the sides of our bicycles…. I took the revolver from my coat pocket and was in the act of handing it to her, I am not sure whether she actually took hold of it or not, but her hand was out to take it when it went off. She fell and never stirred, I was horror struck, I did not know what to do, I knew she was dead, I did not touch her, I was frightened and altogether unnerved and I got on my bicycle and rode away.”

Not one of the hundreds of news stories I’d read mentioned this confession and, instantly, I doubted its authenticity. While all the other documents in the file bore murky, dark type, this one was faint, with even type strokes. Was it a planted fraud intended to put the mystery to rest? Or someone’s idea of a practical joke—a hoax?

Robin Jenkins, the keeper of the Leicestershire Archives, guessed that the document was legitimate. Bowley’s report, he told me, “was secret until the Leicester Police deposited it with us just eight or 10 years ago.”

I tracked down Philip Bouffard, an Ohio-based forensic document specialist who is arguably the expert on historic typography. In 2004, The New York Times turned to him as it analyzed 1970s-era papers relating to George W. Bush’s National Guard stint. Bouffard was suspicious about the type. “This document is typed at 12 characters per inch,” he said. “It’s monotone elite, and in the 1920s most things were pica elite—10 characters per inch. And I can’t get over how crisp and sharp the letters are. The alignment is very good. On a 1920 typewriter, you’d typically have a lot of letters off to the left or right a bit, or off up and down. Something’s not right here.”

I consulted another typography expert, Harry C. Pears, who lives in Australia and graciously agreed to scrutinize a host of ’20s-era typefaces for me. He wrote back to say, “I can find very little evidence that the report wasn’t created in the 1920s.” He speculated that it was made on an Underwood typewriter.

But of course, neither of these assessments proved much at all. I knew that Bowley himself could have drafted a bogus report, just for kicks. For that matter, if I really wanted to spend the dough, I could go out and buy an ancient Underwood typewriter then type up my own confession on yellowing paper and slip that into the files. In the end, I kept circling back to something Wendy East had told me when I asked for her take on Light’s confession: “I think you must make of it what you will.”

History demands that of us—a little interpretation, I mean, a little bit of connecting the dots. It’s a matter of taking the still, dusty past and reinventing it so that it becomes, suddenly, a story, a cinematic drama that we can believe in. And the more the dust settles on the past—the more the old documents get lost and the principals wither away and die—the more the whole enterprise of writing history becomes conjectural.

It’s easy now for me to see Ronald Light swooping around the corner onto the Via Devana at dusk, his revolver tucked in his trousers, jolting heavily against the bone of his hip as he rattles over the rocks on the road. It’s easy to imagine the sick, hot hunger that frothed in his breast as he lay in the grass, watching Bella emerge through the hedgerow. She’s panicked and flushed— enchanting in the soft evening light…

And then the film flickers out. The house lights click on, and all we have in the end is Ronald Light stooped by the gate of his home with a cigarette. All we know is what we can see: that Light is old, and his face has become wrinkled and ancient—eaten away by time, and by whatever worries and self-reproach he harbored deep in his conscience.

Top of page

Hail Mary

Mother Jones
March 2007
Edited by Alastair Paulin
© Bill Donahue

Sadly, i missed the “modesty pool jump.” I was not on hand when a gaggle of students at Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, leapt fully clothed into their campus natatorium, so as to protest the rampant ungodliness of today’s bathing attire. I was absent, too, when Ave Maria’s Chastity Team hosted its first-ever fashion show. I will need forevermore to satisfy myself with club founder Stephanie Smith’s tantalizing preshow promise, “It’s not going to be frumpy stuff,” for I visited Ave Maria—one of the nation’s newest, and perhaps most reactionary, Catholic universities—on a quotidian week in late autumn. The school mascot—Jax, a wrinkly English bulldog who often wears a blue blanket emblazoned “Marines”—was roistering about amid a succession of little prefab buildings, and the Ave Maria basketball squad was shambling back from the gym, looking battered. “What was the score?” I asked one player, a short, pudgy youth still in his game jersey. “One hundred twenty-six to thirty-seven,” he said between drags on his cigarette. “Pray for us. Pray for us.”

The whole scene might have been charming in its ultra-silliness were it not for the fact that the Naples campus of Ave Maria, which now boasts 400 students, is only the bud of the huge vision imagined by a billionaire Catholic hardliner. Tom Monaghan—who founded Domino’s Pizza in 1965, then sold it 33 years later, for $1 billion—has given generously to antiabortion groups and has recently made headlines with his pledge to help bankroll the long-shot presidential campaign of Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who is the Senate’s most fervent pro-lifer. But Monaghan, now 70, sees his principal mission and legacy as founding Catholic schools. In 2000, he opened Ave Maria School of Law near the Domino’s headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Three years later he launched the school that I visited, using a former retirement home as a temporary campus, and is spending $400 million to construct his dream—a sort of right-wing Notre Dame University designed for 6,000 students that will, this fall, become the permanent home of all Ave Maria undergrads. (The law school may relocate there, too, but not before 2009.)

Now only partially built, the future Ave Maria University sits amid a flat, swampy, and desolate expanse of tomato fields and orange groves 30 miles northeast of Naples. A brawny, 100-foot-tall, arching Gothic oratory is already rising, soon to be flanked by the nation’s largest crucifix and encircled by an entire Catholic community, Ave Maria Town, which will welcome 25,000 residents. In keeping with the tenor of Naples, where the average home costs $1.95 million and Republicans outnumber Democrats by nearly 4-to-1, the town will not be a hive of spartan monks’ cells. Rather, it will feature a mix of “affordable” $175,000 town houses, $665,000 condos, and far more palatial Corinthian-columned manses equipped with lavish swimming pools. The golf course will be “championship” caliber, and the retail core will be at once walkable and pious. “Our plan,” Monaghan told a gathering of Catholics last year (sending constitutional lawyers into a kerfuffle), “is that no adult material will appear on the town’s cable system, and the pharmacy will not sell contraceptives.”

Essentially, Monaghan plans to draw a line in the sand against a trend he deems evil. Even as the rapidly growing church lists right worldwide and a few rock-ribbed Catholic orders—most notably Opus Dei—are surging, American Catholics are becoming ever more progressive. Thirty-seven percent favor an easing of the church’s abortion policies, according to a recent cnn/USA Today/Gallup Poll, and fifty-five percent support the ordination of women. Meanwhile, several Catholic universities—among them Holy Cross and St. Scholastica—have gone so far as to play host to the dread Vagina Monologues.

Monaghan’s campaign may be a first in Catholic history. For centuries, the church’s schools have always been headed up by a religious order—the Benedictines, for instance, or the Jesuits. Monaghan, though, is stealing a page from Protestant evangelicals such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and invoking a decidedly corporate structure. “I’m a businessman,” he’s pronounced. “I get to the bottom line…. And the bottom line is to help people get to heaven.”

To conservatives, Monaghan is a deep-pocketed savior. Florida governor Jeb Bush, a converted Catholic, made Ave Maria Town a special tax district like Disney World, giving the self-appointed Board of Supervisors (run by Monaghan’s development partner) wide, ongoing powers and exempting the town from state and local laws. John DiIulio Jr., once George W. Bush’s director of faith-based initiatives, is on the university’s board of regents, and Pope Benedict XVI—who has bemoaned the “dictatorship of relativism”—sees great hope in Monaghan’s school. A former student of the pope, Reverend Joseph Fessio, is the provost there, and when Fessio visited Rome recently, he reported that the pope asked, “How’s Ave Maria?”

It’s a question that few people can answer. The university insists that all interviews—with Monaghan, students, or faculty—be arranged through a PR office. When I sent in my request, noting that I’m a believing Catholic, I got the cold shoulder. “Why should I grant interviews to someone who’s going to kick the shit out of us?” publicist Rob Falls asked me. He added, “The campus is private.”

And so I trespassed in silence, mostly, until one Saturday evening when I saw a procession of students wandering the temporary campus, saying the rosary. I fell in behind them, my voice high and plaintive in prayer. And soon I was sitting in the student center, scribbling notes as four of my co-petitioners crowded around me, monitored—and then interrupted—by a lean, crew-cut young man with a lantern jaw, who rushed the table. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” this student said, identifying himself as a resident assistant. “Is this, like, an interview? With the media? You can’t say anything to him—that’s official policy.” So we ventured off campus, to Applebee’s.

“The first time i ever kissed a guy,” a gentle, soft-spoken Ave Maria freshman named Mersadis said over her mozzarella sticks, “I thought it was disgusting. And now I don’t want another guy to kiss me before marriage.” She took a sip of her iced tea, then continued. “In high school, I found myself looking at every girl and asking, ‘Has she given up her virginity? Is she still pure?’ Here, I’ve stopped asking. I know everyone is.”

Beside me sat a stern and erudite priest-in-training, a freshman named Aaron. “Here at Ave Maria, we follow the teachings of the magisterium,” he intoned, meaning that students regard the pope’s guidance as infallible. “We have not prostituted ourselves…. Other Catholic schools—and the rest of America—have embraced modernism and the culture of death. They have given wholehearted support to the death penalty, abortion, and euthanasia. The value of the human person is now entirely relative.”

Aaron argued that the United States can only be saved from moral perdition if it, like Ave Maria, embraces the magisterium as supreme. “We don’t believe in the separation of church and state,” he said, “and this country should orient itself toward Christ. The foundation of Western civilization rests on Christendom, which means that America owes its existence to the Catholic Church.”

But Catholicism, as Aaron sees it, has been straying ever since the early 1960s, when Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council of bishops to update and humanize the church. Revising cobwebby doctrine, the council acknowledged that other denominations and religions also offered “sanctification” and “truth.” And Vatican II radically altered the standard Mass. Prayers became shorter and simpler—and, as conservatives see it, a lax, unholy relativism gnawed its way into the church’s holiest rite. Where once the priest blessed the Eucharist in Latin, with his back to the congregation, he now faces his parishioners and speaks in the local tongue. “The offertory in the new Mass,” griped Aaron’s friend, an energetic and sandy-haired youth named Mike, “is essentially a Jewish table grace.”

A student at Florida Gulf Coast University, Mike has a fiancee at Ave Maria, and every weekend, when he pays her a chaste visit, he shuttles her two hours east to Miami, so that together they can take in a rarity not even offered on the Ave Maria campus: a Tridentine Mass, which uses the Latin and ancient prayers of the pre-Vatican II service. Quoting a 19th-century theologian, Frederick Faber, Mike called the ceremony, with its wafting incense and quietude, “the most beautiful thing this side of heaven.” Mostly, though, Mike’s faith seemed dismissive in spirit. He was disdainful of “those dissenting Catholics. They’re just going to contracept themselves out of existence,” he snickered.

Aaron, meanwhile, spoke of Ave Maria with a smug, William F. Buckleyesque swagger. He called it “the bulwark of orthodoxy. And if you are devout,” he added, “the calling of celibacy is not a problem…. Christ did not marry Mary Magdalene and all that hogwash.”

Not everyone at ave maria shares Aaron’s self-certainty and resistance to change. In fact, one student tracked me down outside a dorm and in urgent, secretive tones said, “Don’t use my name, but I saw you talking to Aaron, and you should know that most people here think he has very extreme views on modernism.”

To Aaron’s chagrin, modern Masses take place often at Ave Maria, and indeed on the weekend I visited, four Franciscan friars from New York were there, barefoot and clad in simple gray robes as they treated students to a nonstop 40-hour retreat that looked very much like a pajama party love-in. The friars were strumming winsome and lyrical folk music on their guitars and getting hip in their homilies, depicting Christ as a survivalist paintball player, and unleashing rap riffs: “You gotta go with the Jesus flow / All of us gotta know.” One brother twisted low, hips swiveling, as, prayerfully, he sang, “I want to see-eee-eee you.” The students all swayed, barefoot themselves and ardent, like so many ecstatic pilgrims at a Grateful Dead concert, before a six-foot-tall, wooden, Ikea-ish structure—a “burning bush” appointed with candles.

And for a moment I thought, hopefully, that they were getting subversive and channeling a looser-limbed Catholicism, a faith not based on persnickety rule-mongering but on a generosity of spirit—the sort that historian Thomas Cahill believes suffused the Catholic Church in its early, most formative years. Cahill is a graying don of liberal Catholicism, and in his new book, Mysteries of the Middle Ages, he depicts his spiritual forebears as social revolutionaries who laid the groundwork for modern feminism by exalting women such as Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic nun. He calls the Franciscans, who commit themselves to aiding the poor, “the world’s first hippies”—and it is his version of Catholicism that sings to me. I am with St. Martin de Porres when he argues that the precept of charity trumps that of obedience. Sitting in Stella Maris Chapel, wondered if that Catholicism was somehow thriving at Ave Maria beneath Tom Monaghan’s radar.

I soon discovered that it most decidedly is not. The students are far too controlled for that to happen. They are forbidden to live off campus, unable to take any elective courses during their first two years, barred from having TVs in their rooms, and (according to the student handbook) subject to fines if they listen to “any music which is sacrilegious, obscene or violent.” One Ave Maria adjunct music professor, Lan Lam, told me, “They seem very sheltered, very polite. It’s as if they don’t know how to act up.”

The celebrants of the burning bush were, I learned, not radical lefties but rather Franciscan Friars of the Renewal—that is, affiliates of an obscure, newly minted conservative branch of the order. “I thank God for Bill Clinton,” preached a friar/priest named Father Juniper, “because he led me to pray more, by disrespecting the sanctity of human life and the sacredness of marriage.” Juniper’s spiritual brother, David, told a long, complex story about “rescuing” a pregnant woman outside an abortion clinic. The woman, he said, fled out to the sidewalk after her abortion was already in progress, and he kept talking about the pins that, he said, were protruding from the woman’s uterus. He described his rushing her to the hospital, through New York City, as a hilarious high-action chase scene. “But, sir,” he told a police officer in frantic, pinched tones, “we’ve got this girl with us who’s got sticks in her uterus!”

I left the chapel. On the walkway outside, I crossed paths with Lantern Jaw, the sober RA who’d hassled me earlier. He was looking very Secret Service now, in a crisp black suit, so I ducked away. I went to the library. The New Yorker was there on the periodical rack, along with the Weekly Standard, the American Conservative, and Human Life Review, but I leafed through Ave Maria’s campus paper, the Angelus. University president Nicholas J. Healy Jr. writes a column for each issue. In one he calls Islam “a hostile and aggressive religion,” and goes on to lament a “widespread loss of the Christian moral vision,” most evident in Europe, where “birth rates far below replacement levels have already allowed millions of Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East to…heavily influence the political agenda.”

When I stepped outside, finally, I was relieved to find four rowdy guys huddled around the blue glimmer of a cell-phone screen, their mesh shorts drooping, their baseball caps askew and backward. “This shit is fuu-ucked up,” crowed one of them. I approached, thinking that maybe at last I’d located the wild heart of Ave Maria. “So,” I said, “are there any parties on campus tonight?” “Yeah, there’s a kegger over in Dorm 32.” “Really?” I rejoiced. But of course they were simply messing with me. “Dude, we’re Catholics,” said one. “We’ve got a lot of studying to do tomorrow. We’re going to bed.”

The next morning, i set out on my bicycle toward Ave Maria Town, the future site of the university. It was a long ride from Naples—and a journey into a different economy. When I detoured into the town of Immokalee, just six miles from the new Ave Maria, the houses lining the road were decrepit and had peeling paint, and the businesses on the main drag—La Michoacana, El Paraiso Restaurant—had bars on the windows.

Immokalee is the hub of southwest Florida’s agriculture industry, and during growing season upward of 35,000 people live here. The residents are migrant laborers, most of them from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti, and often they’re housed miles from town, in trailers chockablock with bunk beds. One Justice Department official has called Immokalee “ground zero for modern slavery.” His agency has successfully prosecuted six cases of involuntary servitude involving Immokalee-area workers in the past decade. A local advocacy group, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, has earned the ardent support of Catholic groups such as Pax Christi. But when I visited ciw’s offices, it was clear that their relations with Ave Maria were icy. No one there would speak on the record about Monaghan’s project.

I rode on toward Ave Maria Town, anticipating a pleasant, if cloistered, new urbanist mecca. On the development’s website, avemaria.com, it says that the community “has been designed to human scale. Street networks, distinctive character, and environmental sustainability are integral to its planning.” One future resident, construction manager Darryl Klein, who has six children, had told me earlier that he’d moved his family from South Carolina because Ave Maria represented “the ideal American community. It’ll be a place where you know your neighbors. We’ll be around like-minded people. The kids that play with my kids—they’ll go to the same church as us. And we’ll be accepted.”

I came around a curve in the road and saw the steel skeleton of the oratory rising out of nowhere, giant and irrefutable above the flat orange groves. The concrete shells of the university buildings surrounding it were gray blobs in the distance. I turned right, following a phalanx of construction rigs—at a distance because I’d been denied a tour of the town, too. Then, as I neared the security gate, I saw my moment. The guards, not hearing a motor, were looking away, so I bent low and pedaled all-out for the holy land. For roughly a quarter-mile I was in the clear. But then a security truck pulled up beside me, its yellow roof lights aglow and fluttering. “Who are you with?” said the guard, sternly. “I’m just, like, on a training ride,” I said. A few seconds later I was back on the road to Naples.

I visited the makeshift ave maria campus one more time, on a quiet Tuesday evening, when I went back to the library to leaf through a book that many regard as the manifesto for Catholic educators: The Idea of a University, written by Cardinal John Henry Newman in 1852. The church “fears no knowledge,” Newman says, “but she purifies all; she represses no element of our nature, but cultivates the whole.” Elsewhere, Newman writes, “I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom.”

Soon after I jotted down these words, there was a rustling behind me: Someone was stepping in through the library door, and I turned to look. Lantern Jaw. For a second, our eyes locked. And then, not two minutes later, a dapper student security guard in a black tie was stooping beside my study carrel and speaking in murmurous tones: “I’m sorry, sir, but…”

I’d read about Ave Maria’s uniformed forces earlier, in the Angelus, where the school’s director of physical plant and security, Thomas Minick, was quoted saying that, in their vigilance, his boys were “no different than the 18- and 19-year-old Marines, sailors, and Army centurions who are guarding posts all around the world for the military.” I did not have a fighting chance. And so, without protest, I let the guard escort me outside, to my bike.

Then I rode away through the dark. Ave Maria was behind me, a bright island of light in Naples’ endless archipelago of separate, gated, green-grass communities, and I thought of the students sequestered there. I imagined them all huddled together, far from the rest of the world, in fear of their God. And I did pray for them, yes. And for my church.

Top of page

Lost and Found

Backpacker
October 2006
Edited by David Howard
© Bill Donahue

NO ONE WILL EVER BE SURE how John Donovan spent his last days on earth. What is nearly certain is that on May 6, 2005, as a blizzard dumped 8 inches of snow on Southern California’s Mt. San Jacinto, Donovan was trapped on the flanks of the 10,834-foot peak under an ocean of blinding whiteness.

At the time, he was just 5 days shy of his 60th birthday. He had an enlarged heart, which made breathing—and often even thinking clearly—difficult at altitude. He was lost and alone. A veteran hiker who was nonetheless a notoriously bad navigator, Donovan had strayed from the Pacific Crest Trail, which he was thru-hiking. He carried no useful maps, nor a compass. He was traveling ultralight, using a tarp in lieu of a tent and socks in place of gloves, and he had few provisions. And he’d headed into the storm against the advice of altitude-savvy backpackers.

Anyone who knew Donovan would have cringed to see him in this predicament—and yet they wouldn’t have been terribly surprised. Donovan, stubborn and headstrong, had spent his life confounding others with what appeared at times to be contradictory behaviors.

To those who didn’t know him, Donovan often seemed gruff and ill-mannered. He swore like a sailor and burst into laughter at awkward moments. He never married, or even dated, and though he had earned a decent salary before retiring from his job as a social worker, he lived like a bum. He inhabited a succession of ravaged $300-a-month dwellings, including an abandoned, partially incinerated savings bank that had no heat. He never had a telephone, and he eschewed computers and cars, choosing instead to walk almost everywhere he went. And he was famously cheap; he never sprang for a restaurant tab.

Though his friends knew him to be a joker, Donovan was also a deep thinker and an inveterate student of history capable of waxing erudite on opera and Europe’s great cathedrals. Though his living situation suggests he was a hermit, he craved companionship, striving to avoid the loneliness of his childhood, most of which he spent as an orphan. He once told a friend that his greatest fear was dying alone, as a ward of the state, in a hospital. He hiked with his pals in Virginia’s Old Dominion Appalachian Trail Club as many as 100 days a year, never missing the Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day outings, and these friends remember him as the most generous and gentle person they ever met.

Donovan believed his mission in life was to help others, and he foreswore many of the niceties of modern culture to focus on that effort. At Central State Hospital, in Petersburg, VA, where he’d often supervised “dual-diagnosis” patients (who were in wheelchairs and mentally ill), Donovan had orchestrated novel field trips. He’d take them to city parks, or hunt down free theater tickets and drive them to the plays. “He’d lug these patients around all by himself,” says Sharon Loving, another social worker at Central. “He’d lift them into the hospital van one by one.”

Now, though, in the swirling snow on San Jacinto, no one was there to help Donovan. And his destiny seemed plain: Here was a willful and defiant man who’d taken chances in the outdoors one time too many. Surely the mountain would snuff him out, scattering his generous spirit to the wind.

And yet, his story somehow transcends that inexorable logic. Even when the mountain was done with him, Donovan’s mission seemed to gain a sort of afterlife, an ability to carry on when he couldn’t. Indeed, in getting lost and facing his darkest nightmare—a solitary death—he would be doing the best thing he possibly could for two people he would never meet.

DONOVAN, IT TURNS OUT, was no stranger to humbling situations. He was born in Pittsburgh to working-class parents, but his father left home when he was an infant. His mother died before he was 10, and he spent years bouncing between Catholic orphanages. Eventually, he moved in with an unmarried aunt who took him along to the swank hotel restaurant where she waited tables. The boy killed time in the bakery, or sold newspapers on the street. “He did grown-up things when he was young,” says his friend Chris Hook. “He kind of raised himself, like Oliver Twist.”

He had no siblings, not even a cousin he was close to, and there isn’t a single person who can recount the entire arc of his life. Questions about how he spent his 15 years in the Navy, for instance, remain unanswered. And Donovan’s legal next of kin was a stranger. “I can’t remember if I ever actually met him,” says cousin Chris Davenport, of Monrovia, CA. “But he kept in touch—Christmas cards and so on.”

Donovan looked to his ancestral past for a sense of rootedness. He saw Irish Catholics as his tribe. On the trail, he packed a little whiskey and carried it, per his trademark, in a recycled bottle that bore a Sea Breeze astringent label (providing him with his trail name). At parties, he often slipped into a full-on fake Irish brogue as he made cracks about the harsh discipline imposed by nuns at the orphanages.

He wasn’t a churchgoer, but he was keenly aware of religious history. Donovan could expound on the actions of long-ago popes and the church’s pantheon of saints. So it was characteristic that, on April 21, 2005, just before hitting the PCT trailhead in Campo, Donovan stood in a small alcove at San Diego de Alcala Mission and lit two candles. One was to honor St. Christopher, patron of travelers. The second flame paid tribute to St. Anthony, patron saint of the lost.

Donovan needed these saints’ help. He’d taken up hiking in his 40s, to lose weight, but he still walked slowly, sometimes trudging into camp 2 or 3 hours behind his pals. Though he trekked 4,000 miles a year, he was in some ways an amateur. He got lost often. Once, on Vermont’s Long Trail, he detoured to take in a vista—and then, returning to the path, hiked 3 miles back the way he’d come, not stopping until he hit a road and saw a car that looked vaguely familiar.

Donovan had originally planned to hike the PCT with Ken Baker, a good friend from the Old Dominion ATC. Baker, 60, is a retired mechanical engineer and lifelong bachelor who lives in an old farmhouse outside Richmond. A methodical man who speaks with a soft Southern drawl, he spends 3 or 4 months a year backpacking and is known for the easy, loping stride that helps him whip through 20-plus miles a day.

Baker had taken roughly 100 hiking trips with Donovan since they met through the ATC in the late ’90s, and though the two men were contemporaries, Baker regarded his friend with an elder’s fond dismay. “John was kind of clumsy,” he says, “and he wasn’t mechanically inclined. Sometimes he’d step on his glasses and I’d have to fix them for him.”

Baker introduced Donovan to ultralight backpacking, retrofitting his buddy’s gear by, say, removing a pack’s metal stays and replacing them with light, thin dowels of wood. In 2004, as Donovan cast about for a place to spend his retirement, Baker spruced up an outbuilding on his farm, erecting particleboard walls and installing a primitive bathroom. He offered Donovan a sweet deal: $200 a month, utilities gratis.

In spring 2005, Baker told Donovan he wanted to postpone the start of their PCT trip by 3 weeks. “I’d looked at the weather data,” Baker explains, “and Southern California had just had its snowiest winter in 30 or 40 years.” But Donovan couldn’t be dissuaded from the original plan. “I asked, ‘What if you get lost?’” Baker recalls. “He just said, ‘The crowds up ahead will blaze a trail through the snow. I’ll be all right.’”

That was Donovan’s style. His buds called him “El Burro” for the way he plowed through icy creeks and windstorms and meandered off course for 2 days and still finished his trek. Though Donovan never made it look easy, he’d bagged the 500-mile Colorado Trail and the 2,175-mile Appalachian Trail, which he section-hiked over the course of a decade.

Photos of Donovan finishing the AT show him picking his way past lichen-speckled boulders, climbing Maine’s Mt. Katahdin. There he is, pivoting over a rock obstacle, and then, finally, standing atop the fog-shrouded, 5,268-foot finish line, beaming in the wind as he flashes victory signs. The pictures, taken by Baker, are glorious. They show an unsung citizen realizing a dream after years of struggles.

Donovan was desperate to notch more moments like these, quickly, before he became too old and weak. “There was a lot he wanted to get done in his first few years of retirement,” says Baker. “He wanted to go to China and Russia and Australia. He was going to travel 6 months a year.”

But first and foremost was hiking the PCT, which Donovan spent a year planning. On a manual typewriter, he tapped out a 6-page itinerary that reflects a hunger to impose order on a big and unwieldy adventure. He stipulated, down to the half-ounce, how much coffee he’d need, and he encouraged friends to send gifts, “but nothing that has to be carried past the post office. I am just too old & lighter is better.”

Donovan wasn’t about to wait for Baker, or the melting snow. He took off on April 19, the day he retired. “They had a party for him that morning at work,” says Chris Hook. “And at 12:30 I called to wish him luck. He was already gone.”

AT THE START OF HIS THRU-HIKE, at least, Donovan was not alone. He headed north from the Mexican border with his friend Lynn Padgett, laboring through the hot, undulating Mojave Desert that surrounds the PCT’s first 100 miles. Padgett, 48, is a burly tool salesman with a bushy red beard and a warm, Falstaffian manner. He had thru-hiked the AT in 1997, but in the years since he’d drifted out of the hiking club’s inner circle and put on a good deal of weight.

Donovan didn’t care; he’d always relished Padgett’s boisterous company. The two men called each other “comrade,” in exaggerated deference to Donovan’s left-leaning politics, and they shared a propensity for bumbling adventures. One Christmas Eve, they hiked to a cabin in Shenandoah National Park, then lit the woodstove. At around 10 p.m., Padgett said, “Hey, comrade, what do you say we hike out to my car and go get some beer and cigarettes?”

“Yeah, a beer would be good right now,” Donovan said.

The trip out was 4.5 miles, one way, amid a chaos of trees felled by a recent storm. “So we’re cranking over these trees,” Padgett says, “and it’s cold, and we had nothing—no water, no packs. Finally, John sits down on a log and says, ‘Comrade, I can’t see one blaze.’ We turned back—and only the next morning did we realize we could’ve gotten lost and frozen out there. We were lucky. John had the luck of the Irish.”

Padgett said that once, when Donovan was hiking alone on icy snow in Poland’s Tetra Mountains, Donovan had slipped and went careening down a long, glazed slope. Two other hikers had died in the area that same day, as Donovan told it, but he’d survived because the cord on his windpants snared a bush, arresting his slide. “He called those his lucky pants,” Padgett says. “He wore them everywhere.”

In the Mojave, Donovan accidentally left his lucky pants at a motel. He soon became obsessed with the loss. “One windy night in camp, I set up my tent and got in,” Padgett says. “John was still out there struggling to set up that little tarp of his, so I yelled to him, ‘Hey, comrade, how’s that tarp treating you?’”

“The damn wind’s blowing it all over the place,” Donovan hissed, “and I don’t even have my lucky pants.”

A couple of days later, though, in the town of Warner Springs, the tables turned. Now, Padgett was frustrated. His feet were so swollen that he had to quit hiking after just 100 miles. Yet Donovan was jubilant. “Guess what, comrade,” he exclaimed, waltzing out of the post office. “The guy at the motel sent me my pants—and he paid the postage!”

The euphoria was short-lived. From there on, Donovan would hike alone, into the clutches of a powerful storm.

SAN JACINTO, THE FIRST MAJOR MOUNTAIN that north-bound PCT thru-hikers encounter, is a cragged giant rising from the desert floor 60 miles beyond Warner Springs. Everest-bound diehards frequently train on its north face, which is among the nation’s steepest escarpments, climbing more than 10,000 feet in just 7 miles. Those mountaineers frequently mingle with ultra-runners and PCT hikers on the bald, rocky peak.

But Mt. San Jacinto also has a broader appeal. The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, located just up the road from the resorts and golf courses of Palm Springs, climbs to an 8,500-foot mountain plateau in about 15 minutes, delivering tourists to two restaurants, a lounge, and a gift shop near the summit. On May 6, 2006, a warm Saturday, two young Texans were among visitors looking for a view with their cocktails. Brandon Day, 28, and Gina Allen, 24, had met on MySpace.com a few weeks before, and Day, a financial advisor from Dallas, had taken Allen along to a conference at a resort in Palm Desert.

Neither had been so high in the mountains before. In shorts and tennis shoes, holding a digital camera, they strolled to a creek and, in the giddy throes of new romance, pelted each other with snowballs. They were also a little hung-over, the aftereffects of a gala at the resort. And so they were not too sharp of mind that afternoon as they drifted down a path, away from the tram, and away from all things familiar.

BY THE TIME DONOVAN BEGAN CLIMBING Mt. San Jacinto on May 2, 2005, the signs of danger were legion. Snow was 3 feet deep up high, and meteorologists were predicting a heavy storm. Many thru-hikers elected to wait out the weather in Idyllwild, accessible via an easy 2.4-mile path branching west from an intersection called Saddle Junction.

These hikers feared the storm would hit as they were climbing Fuller Ridge, a steep, rocky spine rising to 8,725 feet about 5 miles north of Saddle Junction. Around noon on May 3, when three well-equipped hikers whipped down that ridge and encountered Donovan, they warned him that they’d seen clouds sweeping in. “But we weren’t going to change his mind,” says Brian Barnhart, a Pittsburgh-based metallurgist. “He was emphatic about going up Fuller Ridge.”

Duane Steiner, a photographer from Lake Arrowhead, CA, likewise remembers Donovan as overconfident. “This guy was going to conquer the world,” says Steiner. “I said, ‘I know the area. You need to buy an ice axe to do Fuller Ridge.’” Donovan rejected the advice, a choice that wouldn’t have surprised his friends and colleagues. They recall him defiantly walking 4 miles to work even on frigid days, his face wind-burned and frozen when he arrived. As an ultralighter, he probably figured an ice axe was a heavy, extravagant tool he’d rarely use, and anyway he was too stubborn to change now.

Around 1 p.m. on May 3, Donovan likely began to have doubts. He climbed into Little Tahquitz Valley, just south of Saddle Junction, and found that the trail, partly visible until then, was now concealed by snow. The footprints amid the tall ponderosas were scattered, and the trees bore no blazes. Donovan sought help from two other hikers—a Canadian nurse named Connie Davis, 46, and her 20-year-old son, Alex, both of whom had extensive altitude experience.

Donovan had camped near the Davises the night before, and they did not hit it off. “He had no trouble speaking his mind,” Connie Davis says. “When we talked of how young men can ‘find themselves’ on the trail, he was dismissive. He said, ‘You find yourself living your life.’”

When Donovan began following the Davises through the snowfield, Connie told him, “We’re not going to take the most direct route.” He tagged along anyway as the Davises navigated with an altimeter, staying at 8,000 feet, hugging the contour line as it squiggled across both the landscape and their topo map.

Donovan stayed about 30 feet behind them. He’d put on crampons, but the spikes didn’t work well with his lightweight trail runners, and he slipped and fell repeatedly.

“He was having a hard time,” says Connie. “But he seemed healthy, and it seemed to me that he was going to hike up Fuller Ridge if he wanted to. I remember thinking, he’s an adult. I won’t tell him what to do.”

The Davises kept gliding along, snapping photos and aiding their balance with trekking poles. Donovan kept falling—and cursing in frustration.

Eventually, the Davises followed a small creek uphill and turned northwest roughly half a mile south of Saddle Junction. “That’s where we saw him last,” Connie Davis later wrote in a letter to the PCT community. It was at about 8,080 feet on the afternoon of May 3. “He was very close to Saddle Junction. There was patchy snow at this point, and you could see hints of the trails.”

No one knows exactly what Donovan did next. No one ever saw him alive again.

IT WOULD BE COMFORTING TO hear that Donovan’s friends quickly learned that he was missing and summoned search-and-rescue crews. But they didn’t. The sad truth is that a surrogate family lacks the blood-thickness of a real one, and Donovan’s friends were preoccupied. They sent him mail drops and glanced at his itinerary, but Chris Hook was vacationing in Utah. Another friend, a nurse practitioner named Coleen Kenny, kept a votive candle that Donovan had asked her to light in his absence. Kenny was busy, though. The candle scarcely got lit. Twelve days passed before anyone realized Donovan was missing. No one called for help until after Kenny discovered, on May 15, that Donovan had failed to pick up three mail drops north of Palm Springs. By then, Donovan may have already been dead.

The PCT community, bound by the Internet and by rumors floating up and down the trail, collectively shuddered. “Missing” posters appeared at trailside post offices, and theories swirled as to his fate.

Many hikers believed that Donovan headed toward Fuller Ridge and then faltered in the blizzard. Dave Koskenmaki, 61, an orienteering expert, says the conditions on the ridge on May 6 were miserable. “The visibility was about 100 feet,” he says. Steiner, the photographer, postulated that Donovan spied the lights of Idyllwild after the whiteout eased up, then began to fight his way down toward the town, muscling through brush, only to stumble off one of the myriad 30- to 50-foot dropoffs en route.

About the only thing that seemed certain was that Donovan perished on San Jacinto’s west side, near Saddle Junction. On Memorial Day weekend, 2005, Riverside County Rescue Unit personnel combed the area with dogs. After 2 fruitless days, officials called off the search for good.

BACK IN VIRGINIA, Donovan’s friends could only reflect on the vacuum his absence created. Stephen Jones recalled how he needed a friend after his wife committed suicide in January 1999. “I needed to do something,” says the 46-year-old tile installer. “I needed to stop thinking, so I called the club and said, ‘Who goes hiking in winter?’”

Donovan seemed unfazed that Jones hadn’t hiked in 20 years. The two men backpacked almost every weekend that winter. At night, they had long conversations. “John talked about forgiveness,” says Jones, who continued the winter hikes with Donovan until his friend vanished. “He said that sooner or later you’ll stop being angry and forgive her for killing herself. He listened; he helped me see a way out. He offered a breath of fresh air when I needed it most.”

Another club member who was sexually abused as a child says Donovan helped him overcome the long-simmering trauma. “I’ve told very few people what happened to me,” the man says, “but when you got around John, you’d open up. He was very comforting. He quoted statistics about what happens to victims. He said I’d beaten the odds. He said, ‘You’re stable. You’re a good person.’ And then he never shared what I’d said with anybody. I came away feeling cleansed.”

When you’re a reporter asking about people who are gone, you can glimpse a dead person’s spirit by watching how his survivors receive your curiosity. Often, they’re cagey or indifferent. But Donovan’s friends were happy to talk, to tell hilarious stories about their old pal. Padgett told anecdotes for almost 3 hours in a TGI Friday’s one night. He followed up with a note that said: “God rest his soul.”

All of the stories painted a consistent picture: John Donovan was a little socially obtuse and eccentric, yes. But his generosity had an enduring quality, and he emitted a purity of spirit that was almost holy. Somehow, you’d always come away from time with him better for the experience.

AFTER THEIR SNOWBALL FIGHT, Brandon Day and Gina Allen hiked the 1.5-mile Desert View Trail, which loops the high flats by the tramway. On a whim, they ventured off-course to a cliff atop Long Valley. Day, who has hard blue eyes and a blond buzz cut, was never a wilderness type. He wears a gold Texas Tech fraternity ring, and still talks of his football days. “In high school,” the 5-foot-8, 155-pound Day says, “I played fullback, and the reason is I like to hit.”

Brandon’s father, Paul, later said Brandon actually played defensive back, a position better suited to slight players. But from his dad, who coached him early on in football and baseball, Day inherited an old-school code of manhood. He describes himself as a take-charge type possessed of a “can-do attitude.” And he is invariably courtly. “I’m the kind of guy,” he says, “who always holds the door open for ladies.”

Day was drawn to Allen’s MySpace.com profile because she, too, had football in her past. She was an all-American cheerleader as a teen and then a roving cheerleading instructor. After earning a degree in family-resource management from Iowa State, she moved to Dallas to live with her sister.

On their first date, Day took Allen to a Moroccan-themed lounge called the Velvet Hookah. “There were pillows all over the floor,” Allen recalls, “and people were lying on them with their shoes off. It was a very chill place. It was different.” It wasn’t the last unusual place Allen would go with Day.

CALIFORNIA AUTHORITIES NOW know that Donovan checked his bravado after parting company with the Davises on May 3, and tried to detour west down into Idyllwild. But with no way to navigate, he became disoriented. In a journal written in the margins of photocopied guidebook pages, Donovan scribbled, “Couldn’t find the trail to Idyllwild.”

So instead he cut away from Idyllwild, drawn by the lights of much larger Palm Springs. Traveling about 3 miles northeast from the Saddle Junction area that night, he traversed skinny Willow Creek, then climbed a small ridge and plunged down into a steep gash called Hidden Valley. As he dipped into lower, heartier climate zones, the brush became nasty and thick, the talus rife with scrub oak and manzanita.

Donovan’s journal places him in Long Valley, at about 4,300 feet, the night of May 3. On May 5, still camped in the same ravine, he took a fall. How badly he was hurt is unclear; Donovan didn’t elaborate. But clearly the ordeal of the past few days had landed him in trouble. He wrote that he had already become too weak to climb up out of the canyon.

Indeed, the cryptic notes Donovan scrawled depict a man coming to terms with the bleakness of his situation. He tried to signal for help. He built a few weak fires that smoldered out, due to the winter’s copious snows. He flashed a mirror at the sky. No one saw him. A 100-foot waterfall lay directly below, and the canyon’s walls were virtually sheer. He was boxed in, and he likely knew that it would be days, maybe a week or more, before anyone noticed he was missing.

At one point on May 5, Donovan took an inventory of his supplies. He was down to 12 cheese crackers.

His friends believe Donovan would’ve remained hopeful. “He always carried a transistor radio,” says Chris Hook, “and I bet he kept turning it on, waiting to hear that people were searching for a hiker. He believed things would work out.”

Then again, Donovan was a realist. “I see him walking around, yelling, ‘John, how the hell did you get yourself into this?’” says Lynn Padgett. “Especially as he got older, when he made mistakes he was hard on himself. John didn’t believe in fairy tales. He knew nobody was going to swoop down from the sky and save him.”

AROUND 3 P.M., DAY AND ALLEN heard a waterfall and wandered off-course again, to take pictures of the cascade. When they tried to get back on the trail, they couldn’t find it. “I wasn’t worried,” says Day. “I have a good sense of direction. And we figured that if we missed the bus back to the resort, we could just take a taxi.”

They followed voices for a while, only to discover that, in fact, they were chasing echoes. By 5 p.m., they’d floundered back to Long Creek, which they’d seen from the overlook. They yelled for help and heard nothing but echoes, so they tried to head directly north, toward the tram. But they kept hitting dead ends. “The mountain forces you downward,” Day explains. “It was like Chinese finger cuffs: The more we tried to get out, the tighter and steeper it got.”

When dusk fell, Day scrambled ahead alone in search of alternate paths. “He went out of sight,” Allen says, “and I was shaking. I was really scared.” Allen had never spent a night outside, though she’d tried to camp out back in Iowa. “Me and my girlfriends, we’d start out,” she says, “but then my brothers would come out and make scary noises.”

Now she was up above 7,000 feet, in a tank top and a windbreaker. Day returned after his unsuccessful reconnaissance mission, and the two sat and waited. “It made perfect sense to us,” he says, “that rangers were out looking for us with flashlights and bullhorns.”

AT A SPOT SEVERAL MILES DOWNHILL from them, exactly one year earlier, Donovan had less confidence. In his journal, he conceded that Ken Baker had been “the smart one.” He regretted not heeding his advice about waiting, and told Baker he wanted to be buried in a Navy cemetery. On May 11, he celebrated his 60th birthday by eating two of his crackers.

In his last entry, dated May 14, he scribbled that he was going down to Long Creek for water. “Goodbye and love you all,” he wrote.

THE RANGERS NEVER SHOWED UP, so in the morning, after shivering all night in the 45°F chill, Day and Allen decided to climb up San Jacinto to be more visible. The two made it almost to the summit, Day says, around noon. But they saw no one, and after yelling in vain for help, they made a snap decision. “We couldn’t sleep there, up high, in the cold,” says Day.

Riverside County SAR veteran Pete Carlson says Day and Allen should have followed a ridgeline down. “They’d be visible,” he says, “and the descent would be gradual.” Instead, they thrashed deeper into Long Valley, encountering an increasingly steep slope marred with gravel, weeds, and impassable boulders. Day, a chess player, tried to think “five moves ahead.” But the mountain kept vexing them. At one point, he says, “We were going down this steep, gravelly slope, and I got to a 10-foot dropoff. I’m hanging onto a vine to ease down, and then I see this boulder tumbling at me. I swung out over the cliff, holding the vine, and the rock tumbled by.”

They feared Long Creek was filled with microbes, but in time they drank from it to avoid dehydration. But they were famished. “By the third night,” Day says, “we were running out of bullets.”

Allen prayed. Raised Catholic, she prayed to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, and to St. Anthony, the patron saint of the lost.

John Donovan would not likely have shrugged off this uncanny coincidence. He was not, at his core, a logical or technical person, and he saw the world as shaped by forces beyond reason. It’s no surprise, really, that a man who was orphaned as a boy believed in the power of random luck, both good and bad, and in saints and the karmic value of doing good unto others. He also likely adhered to the notion of “trail magic”—a term thru-hikers use to explain the unexplainable good things that happen on a trail.

But Donovan also clearly figured out that good things don’t just happen; you make them happen. And maybe some lingering thread of his generous spirit occupied Long Valley that day when Brandon Day spied a yellow backpack down below. The pair went to look. Inside, along with some clothes, was Donovan’s journal, with an entry dated May 8. Allen was ecstatic. “He’s got to be nearby,” she said. “That’s today!”

“But the entry was dated May 8, 2005,” says Day. “Exactly a year before. It sank in that somebody died there. Mr. Donovan was prepared and he had supplies. But still, he didn’t survive.”

DONOVAN’S BODY LAY JUST 50 YARDS from Day and Allen. Though they never saw it, it was just downstream, by a 20-foot waterfall, in a pool set amid birches and mossy green rocks.

But because help, or even a recovery crew, never came for him, Donovan provided the Texas couple with a way out. In the pack, Day and Allen found matches—roughly 20 strike-anywheres preserved in a plastic bag. At once, Day set to work lighting a signal fire. He piled dry vines and leaves and set them ablaze as Allen waved an orange stuff sack they found in Donovan’s pack. Soon, a helicopter floated over. “I was ripping branches off dead trees, frantically feeding the fire,” says Day. “Gina was jumping up and down, yelling.”

The copter drifted by, its occupants oblivious, and the next morning—the couple’s fourth day on the mountain—there were a dozen matches left. “If we’re going out,” Day told Allen, “we’re going out swinging.” He gathered 30 or so dry logs and lit them. He shredded spent matches for kindling. The flames leaped 20 feet. Suddenly, half an acre was burning. Day sprinted toward Allen, hoping that the blaze wouldn’t engulf them. “The smoke was thick,” he says, “and the trees were on fire. I’m thinking, it’s going. It’s a good signal fire.”

Rescue workers had begun looking the night before after family members reported them missing. Soon, a helicopter began circling. Allen blew kisses to the pilot and leapt in the air, shouting. Then she clung to Day, sobbing. “Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life.”

Three weeks later, rescue personnel returned on a different mission, and a voice crackled over the radio: “We’ve got a body in the water.” Donovan’s body was wrapped in his tarp, straddling a fallen branch choking the stream. Now, only one mystery lingered. Was Donovan’s final message a suicide note? Did he leap to his death, anguished, after 11 days of waiting? Or did he slip and endure a final fall? Not even his closest friends know the truth.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED THEIR RESCUE, Day and Allen became inseparable. “We have such a deep bond now,” Allen says. “I trust Brandon with my life.”

“I feel like I’ve looked into Gina’s core inner being,” Day says, “and found she has a lot to offer. We trusted each other.”

Day hopes to return to Long Canyon someday, with a guide. “Round one went to the mountain,” he says, “but it’s not over yet. We won’t feel complete until we conquer that mountain.”

Day, for one, doesn’t see Donovan’s tragedy as integral to his survival. “They probably would have found us anyway,” he told Allen. “They were on our trail.”

IN VIRGINIA, THOUGH, DONOVAN’S FRIENDS BELIEVED. They recognized his gift. On July 11, they buried him in a veterans’ cemetery in Amelia County. Eighty people filled the chapel, and a minister read from Psalm 23: “He leads me beside quiet water. He restores my soul.” A ramrod-stiff Navy officer presented Ken Baker with a flag.

Then, as the crowd spilled outside onto the lawn, bagpipers played “Amazing Grace” and Lynn Padgett moved to the grave bearing a red plastic cooler. There, he opened a Sea Breeze bottle filled with Irish whiskey and began filling up plastic cups, so everyone could take a nip.

“I think of him all the time,” Padgett says. “Sometimes as I fall asleep at night I see myself hiking by a stream and I come around a bend and there’s a tarp. There’s a yellow pack, and I yell, ‘Hey, comrade! Hey, comrade!’ But there’s no sound, just the wind and the stream, and there’s nothing there—just this green tarp and a pack and some shoes on a rock.”

Bill Donahue was on Mt. San Jacinto when John Donovan’s body was recovered.

Top of page