Bill Donahue is a writer living in Portland, Oregon.

Wired
November 2011
Edited by Mark McClusky
© Bill Donahue

To crack the mysteries of interplanetary space travel, you first consult with the old woman in the shack. She sits inside, surrounded by windows in a dingy little room warmed by a portable heater. You stand in the chill of the larger reception area, stooping down to a slit in the glass, and then you slide your identification papers toward her so she can give them a sour once-over. She scribbles something in a spiral notebook (there are no computers involved), and then, after a wait, you are released into the outdoor courtyard, which gives way to the monolithic concrete-walled buildings of the Institute for Biomedical Problems, in Moscow, where today—a gray morning in October 2010—the winds are howling, the pewter skies threatening snow. The grass in the courtyard is dead. On the cork bulletin board, there is a single note. Handwritten, it advises employees where to procure foam for their fire extinguishers. It is all so bleak that you feel the urge to grab a bottle of vodka and cling to it for dear life.

But wait, for there is romance alive at the institute as well. Everywhere in its vast, drafty building there are ancient gilt-framed photographs of Sergei Korolev, the mid-20th-century rocket engineer whom the Russians revere as the “father of space.” The pictures are black-and-white and dramatically shadowed, the better to highlight Korolev’s virile black eyebrows and his dreamy ambition. By 1956, Korolev had become a pioneer among space scientists, his designs inspiring serious plans to launch a manned mission to Mars. And now, at the institute he cofounded in 1963, mankind is making one small, decidedly unglamorous step toward that goal.

In a secluded area on the ground floor, six brave young men (three Russians, an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Chinese national) are simulating a mission to Mars. For 520 straight days—that’s more than 17 months—the volunteers will be sequestered in a tubular steel stand-in for a spacecraft whose 775-square-foot living area is so cramped and spare it might have been designed by Dostoyevsky himself. Mars500, as their mission is called, is jointly sponsored by the Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency. It seeks to answer a question that looms as the EU, the US, Russia, and India all look to put a man on Mars by the 2030s: Can the human animal endure the long isolation and boredom implicit in traveling to a planet that is, at its closest, 35 million miles—and roughly six months of rocket travel—away? Will one of the volunteers crack before the faux mission’s scheduled conclusion on November 5, 2011?

When I visited the institute last year, it was hard to tell. The voyagers were sealed off from terrestrial life, each one allotted a private bunk room just 32 feet square and access to a common living room, a small gym, a greenhouse, and two minuscule lavatories. The crew’s food storage room is almost as big as their living quarters, and when they entered isolation on June 3, 2010, it contained every single calorie they would consume as they soared through “space,” then spent nine days on “Mars” (in this case a small pit of red sand) before returning and exiting a year and a half later.

Mars500 is unprecedented. Never before have six healthy males been so thoroughly isolated under such unvarying circumstances. Both public health researchers and space scientists regard them as the perfect experiment subjects—and in fact the astronauts spend much of their days pricking their arms for blood and handling vials of their own urine. They are taking part in more than 100 experiments.

But what else is going on in their tube? Last fall, I was able to make a videotape posing questions to the astronauts. I heard back from the two western Europeans—France’s Romain Charles and Diego Urbina, a Colombian-born Italian. They appeared on camera one at a time, in a dimly lit room, and their tone was earnest and plaintive. “So far we’ve done 130 days,” said Charles, 31, who has worked mostly as a quality engineer for auto companies like Tesla Motors. “But I am not counting the days one by one.”

In his video, Urbina, a 27-year-old career astronaut, said, “I believe in a humankind that is space-faring, that expands its frontiers. I believe we cannot risk losing everything we have done by putting all our eggs in one basket—Earth. “

After I watched these clips, I turned to study the four nearby surveillance monitors that track activity in the Mars500 module. Charles and Urbina were slouched in the spaceship’s living room, staring at a TV screen. Charles was strumming on a plastic instrument, playing Guitar Hero. Urbina was singing. They were wearing socks without shoes, both of them, and they were killing time. It would still be more than a year until they could step out and see sunlight.

“I like Star Wars the most, but being in here feels more like Star Trek, so I think if I had to pick sci-fi characters to feel identified with, I’d say the crew of the Enterprise.”—Diego Urbina

The Institute for Biomedical Problems is a world leader in the torture of isolation. Over the years, it has done dozens of isolation experiments, starting with a brutal yearlong trial in 1967. Today’s isolates bear the added burden of living in a reality-TV sort of fishbowl: A team of psychologists and representatives from China, Russia, and the ESA is watching the closed-circuit television monitors 24/7. “We’re looking to see if they have breakfast together and whether they are playing together,” says Elena Feichtinger, a psychologist who works for the European Space Agency and serves as the deputy project manager. “During the experiment, they are dependent on us like children. They aren’t getting care and support from other people. So they lose their basic sense of safety. They need us.”

Feichtinger, an effervescent redheaded Austrian, is the western European astronauts’ link to civilization. It is she who sends them daily news, filtering out potentially depressing stories, and it is she who forwards the emails of family and loved ones. (On a brief time delay, of course. On a real space flight, an email would take up to 17 minutes to reach a Mars-bound spaceship.) When I visited, she suggested that I strike up a correspondence with the stimulation-starved astronauts.

I started emailing them soon after I left Moscow. It was a tricky endeavor, for I was hoping to glimpse the dark soul—the Russian-novel quality—of their long isolation. I aimed to pick my way into their hearts. But what tools did I have? We were all guys, so if I got too touchy-feely it was certain to backfire. And then there was the fact that I could move freely about and they couldn’t. Would I make them hate me by writing about my vacation to Mexico? I wrote about it anyway, and about riding my bicycle through Oregon wine country, in hopes that they might open up, too. Before long, responses from the astronauts began arriving.

“It definitely feels like we are in the middle of nowhere,” Urbina wrote.

“Half of us feel like we’re traveling far away,” Charles said, “while the other half still feel like we’re standing on Earth. I’m in this second half. Since the beginning of the experiment, I find too many hints of a surrounding presence to feel like I’m in a real spaceship. However, even if I can’t forget that I’m on Earth, I feel like I’m far away from anybody. As if the Mars500 modules had been moved to a strange and unknown place.”

Over time, isolated people undergo a social narrowing. They stop eating together. Their I.Q. goes down 5 to 10 points. they lose all affect. You look into their eyes and nobody’s home.

Charles came off as pensive and quietly genial. When I sent him a song by singer-songwriter Andrew Bird, he reminisced about seeing Bird once live in Angers in western France and marveled over Bird’s use of a loop pedal on the album The Mysterious Production of Eggs. Urbina, meanwhile, seemed restlessly creative and geeky. He was setting up a computer program that would, he said, gather statistics on his email and tweeting “to see if there is any correlation of the communications with my mood.”

But the emails I got rarely plumbed emotional depths. They seemed circumspect and of a piece with the G-rated stories that prevail on the European Space Agency website, esa.int, whose Mars500 coverage seems calibrated for schoolchildren. “Our Halloween party was great,” Charles wrote me. “With Diego and Wang Yue, we dressed up in our costumes in the morning and we spent the whole day like that. If anybody had some free time, he could play Resident Evil 4, which Diego had installed on the big screen of the living room. In the evening we watched two horror movies while eating gummy bears and other sweets.

“Our main challenge right now,” Charles added, “is to avoid being bored. Every single day is very similar to the previous one.”

“I miss the presence of women and especially mine. We’ve been away from each other for nearly five months now, and it’s not really easier to deal with it. It’s not harder either. Some weeks we need to communicate every day while another week could be spent without any message. We have ups and downs like in a normal relationship.”—Romain Charles

Isolation is hard; being deprived of fresh air and social variety makes you go batshit. That narrative is so ingrained in the collective psyche that when the Irish bookmaking chain Paddy Power set odds on Mars500, it all but anticipated failure. If a bettor wagered a dollar that the original six-member crew would not last the whole mission, he was, by Paddy’s lights, practically predicting the sun would rise tomorrow—he’d only get $1.20 back. Paddy, meanwhile, set 8-to-1 odds that at least one crew member would go “clinically insane” after leaving the Mars500 experiment. (Fairly long odds until you consider that most jobs don’t come with an 11 percent chance that you’ll go clinically insane in a year and a half.) The Irish bookie even set odds as to who’d be first to quit. It tapped the sole Chinese astronaut, Yue Wang, putting him at 2-1. (Yue was, after all, the most culturally isolated.) Diego Urbina was next, at 5-2. Urbina had deep experience. He’d designed a star compass for a nanosatellite in Italy, and just before joining Mars500 he’d spent two weeks in the Utah desert, in a space suit, simulating a Mars landing. But he was the youngest crew member, and in press photos he always bore the most eager grin.

All three Russians got, relatively speaking, a vote of confidence from Paddy Power. Indeed, captain Alexey Sitev was the long shot in the quitting department, at 10-1. Which is a bit weird, because during the 1970s and 1980s three Russian space missions ended early on account of psychological problems. In 1976, for instance, two Russian cosmonauts abruptly cut about 10 days off a planned nine-week mission aboard the Salyut 5 space station. The oft-repeated reason for the early return was “interpersonal issues,” but one cosmonaut, Vitaly Zholobov, would later report that he experienced almost hallucinatory fears when he looked out at a star. Zholobov apprehended space as “a bottomless abyss,” he said.

Isolation can drive people crazy on Earth, too. Lawrence Palinkas, a USC professor of social policy and health who has extensively researched what happens to people who linger in Antarctica when it is dark for six months straight, writes that the austral winter “has long been associated with reports of depression, irritability, aggressive behavior, insomnia, difficulty in concentration and memory, absentmindedness, and the occurrence of mild fugue states known as ‘long-eye’ or the ‘Antarctic stare.’”

Christian Otto, an emergency physician who studies space medicine for NASA, explains that isolation all but bores us to death. “As humans, we’re novelty-seeking creatures,” he says. Millions of years ago, he explains, our ancestors stood up “to seek food sources in the high grass. We look for refuge, for vistas. We have opioid receptors in our brain, and when we go outside—for a run, say—opioid release gets triggered. That’s good; we need that. But if you deprive the senses of variety, the hippocampus atrophies and the brain’s cortisol level rise.” High cortisol is associated with stress, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Otto has spent two winters as a physician in Antarctica. “I was busy all the time with mental health issues,” he says. “Over time, isolated people undergo social narrowing. They stop eating in the cafeteria; they just take food back to their rooms. Their IQ goes down 5 to 10 points. They lose all affect. There’s little inflection in their voices. You look into their eyes and you think, their lights are on, but they’re not home.”

Social tension has cropped up in past missions carried out by the Institute for Biomedical Problems. On a 240-day international experiment there in 2000, Russian crew member Vasily Lukyanyuk ruined a drunken New Year’s Eve celebration by shoving a Canadian, Judith Lapierre, away from the video monitors and forcibly French-kissing her twice, against her will. The astronauts weren’t supposed to have alcohol (drinking is also banned on Mars500), but scientists surreptitiously supplied it, crew commander Norbert Kraft later said.

The booze wasn’t the only contraband aboard that simulated space station run. The ship’s Russian cosmonauts regularly watched pornography, Kraft admitted, and one Japanese man, Masataka Umeda, left the mission two months early in protest. Meanwhile, there were cockroaches in the showers and mice crawling up through cracks in the floor.

“The walls are thin and with poor acoustic isolation. It is not a huge problem, but a bit annoying in that you have to make an active effort not disturb other people that can hear every little sound you make even from two or three rooms away. I think it is comparable to when you have to share rooms in college.”— Diego Urbina

Our six astronauts are multicultural, friendly, and given to horsing around. At one point, they joined forces to create a music video in which they wailed with gleeful exuberance through “Song 2,” by Blur, complete with a go-bananas “Woo-hoo” scream.

But there were serious duties to attend to as well. On February 12, 2011, the crew “landed” on Mars—or, more accurately, gained access to the small expanse of red sand, a facsimile of Mars’ Gusev Crater, just upstairs from their living quarters. “We opened the hatches of the Martian module,” Charles wrote me, “and it was like a second Christmas!” Before landing, the crew split into two groups of three. Urbina, Yue Wang, and the ship’s physician, Alexandr Smoleevskiy, positioned themselves in a tiny landing craft; the other astronauts stayed behind, feeling lonesome. “The main modules seemed big and empty,” Charles wrote me. “It was a strange feeling that I only experienced when I was younger. During the holidays it happened that my brothers and sister went away, leaving me alone at home with my parents.”

The Mars-faring trio “journeyed” to the Red Planet, holing up in the lander module, doing preparations for four days. “Europe has for centuries explored Earth, led by people like Columbus and Magellan,” Urbina said after he took his first steps in the sand wearing a 66-pound space suit. “Today, looking at this red landscape, I can feel how inspiring it will be to look through the eyes of the first human to step foot on Mars. I salute all the explorers of tomorrow and wish them godspeed.” Over the course of nine days, they took three walks on the Martian surface, each roughly an hour long.

The ESA website put the word “landed” in quotes, but among the astronauts, the suspension of disbelief was almost total. Urbina pretended that it was September 2018. He pictured the half-empty Mars500 mother ship orbiting 280 miles overhead and then reckoned that it could contact the landing crew only when it was directly above the Gusev Crater. Under such strictures, the Mars party would relay their reports from the surface only during prescribed intervals.

Despite such conscientious verisimilitude, the Mars500 crew drew mixed reviews among the space cognoscenti. Christian Otto of NASA questioned whether Mars500 was a useful exercise at all. “If you were actually going to Mars and a person made an error, that could have serious consequences,” he says. “A true space mission is more dangerous, more stressful. And also more rewarding: You actually get to go to Mars.”

In Russia, I encountered deeper skepticism among cosmonauts, who tend to live just outside Moscow in an elegant, tree-lined enclave known as Star City. When I ventured there one day, I spoke to Sergei Krikalev, who has spent 803 days in outer space—more than any other human being—and he scoffed at Mars500. “If you spend 500 days sitting in a chair,” he asked, “does that make you a race car driver?”

“As you guessed, the private messages that we receive from the outside are always a ray of light in our days. I spend a lot of time writing emails because it makes me very happy when I receive an answer.”—Romain Charles

Being aboard Mars500 is mostly menial and toilsome—the astronauts are glorified lab rats. Scientists are keeping close tabs on how the isolates’ hearts are coping with the stress of confinement. They are monitoring the microflora in the crew’s intestines, subjecting them to questionnaires on their interpersonal dramas, and hitting them with regular doses of blue light to gauge its effect on their psychological states. The regimen is at times exhausting. “The biggest challenge for me,” Charles wrote in one email, “is the width of my bed—60 centimeters. As soon as I have more than one device to wear during the night (for blood pressure tests, electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, etc.), I can’t move.”

“We have to collect urine the whole day,” Urbina said. “And in the morning we have to take samples of the previous day’s urine with syringes. That was pretty disgusting at the beginning, but now we’ve gotten used to it. “

The urine samples may help reshape notions of male hormonal fluctuations. Jens Titze, a nephrologist at University of Erlangen, in Germany, is using them to test a hypothesis. “Men might have periods, too,” he says. “We always thought it was females only, but it looks like there’s a clock ticking for men also.” Titze explains that the rhythms are related to the body’s excretion and retention of salt. With the Mars500 crew, Titze is measuring salt in and salt out—and reveling in the purity of his study sample. “Usually, there are so many variables in public health,” he says. “But with these guys we know their exact sodium intake.” (During Titze’s experiment, each astronaut is required to finish every meal.) “It might be that if you pee less,” Titze adds, “you are in a bad mood. We don’t know yet. We still have 6,000 urine samples to analyze, and we have to correlate those with mood reports.”

Moods aboard Mars500 aren’t just self-reported. David Dinges, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, has the astronauts sitting in front of videocams once a week, to gauge their emotional states with facial-recognition software. “We’re asking: How fast are they blinking? Are their facial expressions slowing down?” says Dinges, whose research could help show soldiers how to contend with stress and fatigue.

I wished I could see Dinges’ findings, for the astronauts’ missives to me were growing increasingly reserved. Still, in March, nine months into the mission, Charles wrote, “We haven’t had any conflict so far.”

I could gauge the astronauts’ stress levels only by trying to decipher hints. In June, at the mission’s one-year point, esa.int posted a small photo of Charles. It was a self-portrait; you could see his left hand reaching out for the camera. He was staring at the camera, not smiling. His eyes looked weary and tender, and as he leaned forward slightly, there was something plaintive in his posture, like he was showing us his heart and beseeching us to register the weight of a full year in isolation.

“We are now heading back to Earth, and we are prepared to deal with this hardest part of the trip, as the psychologists call it.”— Romain Charles

“Are we almost there?”

Whether this question is asked from the back of a minivan or from the hull of a mock spaceship, a “yes” answer always has a soothing effect. What’s most difficult about traveling is the part before almost-there. The third lap of a mile race always feels the slowest.

I hoped that my correspondence with the astronauts would finally blossom during their almost-there agony. I hoped that in their misery they might take to their laptops to proffer me something brooding and confessional. But no, they were fading from me. It was as though I were watching a movie and the screen kept getting dimmer and dimmer. On April 3, seven months before Mars500’s “return,” I got my last letter.

The withdrawal shouldn’t have surprised me. Feichtinger, the Austrian psychologist, had told me that isolated groups often grow skeptical of outsiders. “They have to focus their aggression on the outside,” she said. “This is normal. This is even good. It helps them to bond.”

After four more months of silence (it was now August), Feichtinger intimated that the astronauts were scarcely writing to anyone. “They’ve become close to each other, and they’re not paying so much attention to the outside world,” she said. “They’re doing that to survive. I still try to get them to write to their families, but I can’t be too pushy. This is a very delicate moment.”

When I spoke to Christian Otto, the NASA physician, late this summer, he struck an ominous note. “I cannot divulge information that has been shared with me in confidence by the researchers,” he said, “but I’d be absolutely shocked if they walked out of there in tip-top shape.”

I’d be shocked, too. And still, I ended my reporting awed by the astronauts. They are living, as all of us do, circumscribed lives. They’re obliged to grind through certain routines inside a small box, and they have to amuse themselves inside that box and to find meaning in their pursuits. And they are, it seems, succeeding. Their messages have been hopeful. They are surviving.

Still, I can only guess what is going on with them now. And I suspect that for years after they emerge, smiling and waving, we will all still be guessing. In their sealed lair, astronauts aboard Mars500 will have journeyed to a remote and unique psychological place—to a new planet that we won’t ever wholly understand, even after the data is crunched. They went on a mission and they came home, as travelers always do, changed in ways that they will forever protect as secret, and also in ways they may never quite fathom themselves.

Kateri Tekakwitha was a seventeenth-century Mohawk Indian and a Roman Catholic ascetic who slept on a bed of thorns. On December 19, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI credited her with causing a miracle. She will soon be named a saint. But what exactly does that mean? How does someone become a saint? And why is a con artist Italian friar who faked his stigmata wounds already a saint?
Edited by Laura Hohnhold.

The New York Times Magazine
September 18, 2011
Edited by Dean Robinson
© Bill Donahue

The long corridors of Antioch Hall are dark. The fluorescent lights, perhaps 50 years old and never updated, do not work. The vinyl floor tiles are loose. There are cobwebs and puddles on the floor, and the whole place smells of mold. You have to squint, almost, to picture this four-story brick building as the birthplace of one of the most vaunted experiments in American higher education.

Antioch College held its first classes here in 1853. There were women among the school’s early students, as called for in the charter of the Christian Connexion, the church group that founded Antioch amid the cornfields and forests of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Blacks soon matriculated as well. And the college’s first president, Horace Mann, the Massachusetts-born education reformer, instilled a spirit of moral resolve that has lingered ever since. At the 1859 commencement, just weeks before he died, Mann exhorted that year’s Antioch graduates: “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

In the decades that followed, Antioch flourished as a cradle of social activism and freethinking. It was the most liberal of liberal arts colleges. It never had fraternities, and its long-defunct football team had only one winning season in 40-plus years of existence. In the 1960s, it supplied the civil rights movement with a steady stream of volunteers who traveled South to register black voters. Coretta Scott King went to Antioch, as did the paleontologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould.

Yet Antioch College has been on shaky financial ground for its entire existence. Four times — in 1863, 1881, 1919 and 2008 — it has had to close. Next month, it will reopen again. The college has been sending recruiters to college fairs nationwide for a year now, eventually hoping to draw brainy iconoclasts willing to pay $35,000 in annual tuition and room and board. The plan is to have 110 students next year and 1,200 students in a decade or so. But when Antioch kicks off the school year on Oct. 4, it will do so as a sort of nanoschool, having chosen to commence with just 35 freshmen from a pool of 145 applicants. This starter batch of students will enjoy four-year full scholarships, paid for with the interest earned from Antioch’s $25 million endowment. They’ll begin, according to Antioch’s promotional literature, “with the premise that the way we live now is not sustainable.” They will be enrolled in a series of “global seminars” — on energy, food, water and health — as well as more standard liberal arts courses like Drawing I and Existentialism. Following Antioch tradition, they will be expected to spend nine quarters on campus and six off campus engaged in “co-op” jobs (on organic farms or in chemistry labs, for instance) meant to reinforce their classroom work. There may be a lapidary society or perhaps a judo club. No one knows yet. Decisions on college life always used to be made by a community government heavily populated by students.

But on a sweltering afternoon in July, the students were still many weeks away from showing up, and only support staff and Antioch’s new teachers were present. For this year, there will be just six faculty members, each of them 40 or younger. They sat that day in a classroom, in a small circle of chairs, for a meeting with a few retired Antioch professors, who sought to pass on the college’s DNA to their successors. “When I was a student here,” Victor Ayoub, who is 88 and taught anthropology, said, “we had quite staunch Republicans. We had communists, and it never affected their standing in the community.” Another retired professor added, “We have to think about Antioch and its exceptionalism.” A third said: “And love is important. We cannot forget love.”

The dialogue was exceedingly meta and free-ranging and permeated by the sort of hope that can come only at the beginning of things — before, say, the first bruising faculty fight. The spirit of reverence was so thick that when the meeting, scheduled for two hours, stretched 40 minutes past that, no one complained. Toward the end, Karen Shirley, who taught art at Antioch for 30 years, leaned toward the new hires and spoke in low tones. “We have been waiting for you for so long,” she said. “You are the future of what is the most important thing in my life.”

Antioch College is almost certainly the first American liberal arts school to start up in the 21st century, and it’s a rebirth that comes at an unsettled moment in higher education. Increasingly, critics are asking whether going to college is worthwhile. In their new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” Richard Arum, of New York University, and Josipa Roksa, of the University of Virginia, argue that many of today’s students learn almost nothing. Arum and Roksa updated their work with subsequent studies to weigh the effectiveness of 29 schools by reviewing data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment. The students in their sample took the C.L.A. at the beginning and at the end of their four-year college careers, and 36 percent of them showed no significant improvements. “Gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication,” Arum and Roksa write, “are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent.” Arum and Roksa attribute this to the fact that college students devote only 16 percent of their time to academics, while 75 percent of their time is spent doing things like sleeping and socializing.

Another set of critics speaks of a “bubble” in higher education. Just as people in recent decades poured money into stocks and real estate while assuming that the value of their investments would never fall, the country has been devoting more and more resources to an industry that has, over the past quarter-century, delivered little more than empty promises while the cost of tuition rose 440 percent. One of the biggest proponents of the bubble idea is Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, who recently told The National Review that no one is “measuring the return” that higher education yields. “It is, in fact, considered in some ways inappropriate to even ask the question of what the return is,” Thiel was quoted as saying. “We are given bromides to the effect of, ‘Well, you know college education is good, but it’s good precisely because it doesn’t teach you anything specific; you become a more well-rounded person, a better citizen; you learn how to learn.’ ”

But even as more Americans are entering college than ever before, the percentage of those seeking liberal arts degrees is dwindling. In his new book, “Liberal Arts at the Brink,” Victor E. Ferrall Jr., emeritus president of Beloit College in Wisconsin, says that in 1900 “as many as 70 percent” of all undergrads were studying the liberal arts. College was an enclave for well-heeled gentlemen, for whom being culturally refined was de rigueur. After World War II, when great numbers of students were able to attend college on the G.I. bill and the academy became democratized, a new practicality took root, and higher education became increasingly vocational.

Today’s youngsters start going to career fairs in eighth grade, Ferrall argues, and they are inclined toward very specific academic programs — casino management, say, or video-game design. A 2010 report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce ratifies their decisions, saying that higher education needs to focus on occupational training, lest the failure to do so “damage the nation’s economic future.” The Obama administration is, of course, focused on minting workers for the health and green-energy industries, rather than Latin and Greek scholars.

By Ferrall’s estimate, in 2009 there were 225 colleges where “the majority of students major in the liberals arts and live on campus,” and their collective population, about 350,000, represented roughly 2 percent of all those enrolled in higher education.

Liberal arts colleges aren’t closing in droves these days; the sector has already been through a contraction — 167 private four-year colleges closed between 1967 and 1990. But liberal arts schools are financially squeezed in an age when prospective students are often seeking deluxe athletic centers and duplex apartments. Many schools, like Bates College, where the comprehensive fee is $55,300, actually incur per-student costs as high as $80,000 and cover the shortfall using interest from their endowments. “The annual challenge,” Ferrall writes, “has become not how to choose which applicants to admit but how to attract enough students to fill their dormitories and provide sufficient tuition income to continue operating at current levels.”

Ferrall predicted to me that Antioch, as a residential liberal arts school, will struggle. “I’d guess that alumni gifts will keep it going for three or four years,” he said. “Then it will either morph into a different kind of school, or close.”

In 1964, in the ethos of the time, Antioch College undertook to bring education to the streets by opening its first expansion campus in Putney, Vt. Soon there were more than 30 campuses. One was in an inflatable vinyl bubble in Maryland; another was in a former perfume factory in Los Angeles. But if the expansion was haphazard at first, the Antioch empire streamlined itself over the years. By the mid-’90s only four campuses of what was now called Antioch University remained. Professors were untenured. Students were older, generally, and they lived off campus, pursuing graduate degrees that were quite vocational — in counseling, for instance, or sustainable business.

The university became, in short, more in tune with modern exigencies than the college was, and starting in the mid-’80s, it kept the enterprise afloat, allocating around $1.5 million to the college each year. Increasingly, the college became a bit player in the larger Antioch constellation, and as many supporters of the college see it, the muscular university soon began to kick the struggling college around.

“To the university,” says Scott Sanders, an archivist at Antioch College, “we were the aging family member who needed to be put in an old folks’ home. They didn’t want to take care of us. Pipes burst on campus. Roofs didn’t get repaired. Downspouts went forever without being cleaned out, and we saw constant budget cuts.”

As the college eroded, alumni contributions plummeted. “Alumni lost confidence in the university board and its stewardship of the college,” says Steven Lawry, the president of Antioch College in 2006 and 2007.

Meanwhile, the college’s students, who had always leaned to the left, were becoming more radicalized. In 1973, after the school’s president announced plans to halt an affirmative-action program, 230 students went on strike one April morning, chaining the doors of administration buildings and later scuffling with police. The protesters refused to go to classes and ended up shutting Antioch down for more than six weeks. Someone set a fire in a dean’s office; telephones and typewriters were smashed. One professor was maced. The New York Times published more than a dozen stories about the strike. The following autumn, 200 freshmen who were enrolled did not come to campus. By 1979, the student population was less than 1,000.

In 1991, a group called Womyn of Antioch persuaded the school’s trustees to approve a groundbreaking sexual-offense policy. Suitors were required to get verbal consent “with each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct” — in other words, to ask: “Can I touch your knee? And now can I . . . touch your buttocks?” “Saturday Night Live” parodied Antioch in a skit entitled “Is It Date Rape?” The national press corps flocked to the campus. When a photographer from Newsweek prepared to take a picture of Gerry Bello, Antioch ’97, he told me: “I ripped off all my clothes and said, ‘Sure, you can take pictures of me, but you’re not going to be able to run them!’ ”

By 2007, Antioch was in the third of four tiers of the 215 schools that U.S. News & World Report ranked in its “Best Liberal Arts Colleges” issue. There were fewer than 300 students. The university’s trustees voted to pull the plug, shutting down the college and voiding the tenure of its faculty members.

Few things galvanize a fan base like failure. At a weekend-long reunion in June 2007, Antioch alumni pledged $7 million to establish a new Antioch College Revival Fund.

Bello was so moved that he left Texas, where he was doing construction work, and resettled in Yellow Springs. A handful of other alums likewise decamped to the village, by then a crunchy haven of coffeehouses and organic groceries, and in the summer of 2008 they joined six or so Antioch professors in founding a sort of Antioch College in exile called the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute. Headquartered in a drafty, concrete-floored Yellow Springs warehouse, Nonstop offered courses that included “Local Sustainable Agriculture,” “Introduction to Poststructural Thought” and “Queer Animals,” a look at wildlife through the lens of queer theory. For the 2008-9 school year, the Revival Fund supplied Nonstop with almost a million dollars in operating expenses. Professors received competitive salaries, and tuition was just $1,500 per year.

But the Revival Fund financed Nonstop for just one year. In 2008, a new entity, the Antioch College Continuation Corporation, made up of former university trustees, major donors and alumni leaders, emerged to take control of the purse strings and stopped backing the operation. Its chairman, Lee Morgan, Antioch ’69, is a retired printing magnate who drives a built-to-order British convertible, a Morgan Plus 8, and is the main force behind the Morgan Family Foundation, which has given $2.75 million to the new Antioch. Morgan was not impressed with the direction Nonstop had taken. When he and I dined at TJ Chumps, a sports bar just outside Yellow Springs, he called the college-in-exile a “monoculture” and dismissed its most zealous operatives as “cromagnons.”

Morgan was an activist in his Antioch days — he was instrumental in a student-led sit-in against a Yellow Springs barber who excluded blacks. In the ’70s, he was an advocate for employee ownership, and he granted his employees at Antioch Publishing shares in the company. In 2008 and 2009, he helped Antioch College extricate itself from the university. The sales negotiations were complicated (they lasted 14 months) but friendly. The university didn’t really want a derelict campus — a science building with outdated bunsen burners lying around, for instance — or a $20 million endowment fund earmarked solely for the college’s use. So in the end the university sold 25 buildings, along with a 1,000-acre wooded glen and unfettered use of the endowment, to the Continuation Corporation for just $6.2 million. After the 750-page closing documents were signed, a ceremony was held on the lawn of Antioch College. Morgan was handed the keys to the college. There were 30 or so of them on a ring, and he hoisted them over his head and roared with delight.

Not everyone is thrilled by the new Antioch. Arthur Dole, a 1946 grad who went on to teach professional psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is currently withholding what he describes as a “five figure” gift to the college because he says that it has insulted its tenured professors by not rehiring a single one of them. A small but vocal cadre of recent Antioch alumni share Dole’s sentiment. Tenure exists, Bello says, “so that we have academic freedom, so that the pope can’t kill Galileo for saying that the earth goes around the sun. Tenure exists to keep people from being burned at the stake.”

Like many involved with Nonstop, Bello says he still feels betrayed by the corporation’s decision in 2008 to abruptly halt financing for the ad hoc school. A computer-science major, he now spends much of his time hunched at the Emporium, a Yellow Springs cafe, poring over Antioch-related documents. He is, for example, studying the personal investments of Antioch’s board members, to see if they hold arms-industry stocks, and he is pushing the jettisoned faculty to sue the college. He’s fighting an uphill battle, but on a recent morning, as he sipped coffee in a T-shirt emblazoned with the motto “Kicking Ass for the Working Class,” he vowed to press on. He said, “Horace Mann didn’t say, ‘Try really hard until you’re tired.’ ”

At the center of the fracas over how the new Antioch will create itself from the ashes of the old is the college’s new president, Mark Roosevelt. A great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt and also a onetime Massachusetts state legislator who later served, from 2005 to 2010, as the superintendent of Pittsburgh public schools, Roosevelt was hired last December. He is 55, and has five framed pictures of Abraham Lincoln in his office, as well as a bottle of cider vinegar that he sips judiciously to sooth a bad liver.

His experience at Antioch has been marked by “a lovely instability,” Roosevelt said. “What we’re undertaking is a high-wire act,” he said. “This has never been done before. I don’t think a college has ever created a university and then seceded from it.”

Roosevelt maintains that his first task is to establish “civil dialogue” between warring alumni factions. “A lot of the alumni got their noses bent out of shape,” he said. “I understand that. I appreciate that. But my feeling is that people will come home. Our disagreements are small, and I think we can work them out.” When I visited Roosevelt’s office this summer, he swiveled in his chair toward his computer and Googled Lincoln’s quote about appealing to the “better angels of our nature.”

Roosevelt isn’t sure how, exactly, he will guide campus discourse. Will he halt the old Antioch’s practice of letting students spray-paint political graffiti on designated walls? He doesn’t know. And how will the curriculum handle conservative ideas? The faculty he put together, largely for its ability to teach a broad range of topics, doesn’t include any outspoken right-wingers, he concedes, and he is leery of relying on guest speakers. “We have to do it in class,” he said. “We have to teach students to be dexterous at presenting — and understanding — the political views of people who disagree with them. They’ll need to if they want to win some victory for humanity.”

In 1989, Roosevelt was the lead sponsor on a bill that, when it passed, made Massachusetts the nation’s second state, after Wisconsin, to protect gay rights. But his experience in Pittsburgh may be more apropos. There, when he arrived, the city’s cash-starved, voter-elected school board was so besieged that Pittsburgh’s mayor was poised to appoint a replacement board. “It was stressful,” Roosevelt said. “I rarely slept through the night.” Roosevelt secured a $100 million pledge from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and used it to establish a scholarship fund, the Pittsburgh Promise, that now sends roughly 750 high-school seniors to college each year. He closed 23 of Pittsburgh’s 88 public schools. He may need to restructure Antioch as well.

With Lee Morgan, the Antioch corporation chairman, Roosevelt is working to establish community housing on campus for faculty and older adults — and then integrate its residents into the curriculum. (“You could send a kid overseas for three months and have him start an elderhostel for his co-op,” Morgan told me.) Roosevelt is also hoping to partner with neighboring colleges so that they share, say, a visiting poet. Antioch’s wellness center will be open to Yellow Springs residents, and the college will do some language teaching online.

“We’re not going to spend like an Amherst or a Williams,” Roosevelt said. “We can’t do that. And we’re going to have to say no to some things. Do we really need a course on Rousseau? Not necessarily. The core of what we need to deliver, I’d argue, is intimacy: quality teaching from quality teachers you get to form a deep relationship with.

“Our teachers need to tell students, ‘Trying and failing is O.K.’ What Antioch’s always been good at is letting student growth be unpredictable — and at not silencing voices outside of the mainstream. I’ve spent most of my life in the mainstream — in the legislature and as a superintendent. But look at history.” Roosevelt spoke of the stationmasters on the Underground Railroad, and of conscientious objectors during World War I. “Those people were dissenters,” he said. “But they were important, and I think that, when it comes to the issues ahead of us — like food and sustainability — we’re going to need the voices of people outside the mainstream.”

When the six new professors — there are plans to hire another 10 over the next four school years — were dispatched to the second floor of McGregor Hall for their first-ever visit to the faculty office suite, Roosevelt characterized the field trip as a “sociology experiment.” The offices weren’t assigned, and in keeping with Antioch mores, the teachers were obliged to reach a consensus as to who would look out onto Antioch Hall and who would gaze down at the cracked concrete steps of the library.

The literature professor, Geneva Gano, began moving in 12 boxes of books, even though, officially speaking, the offices couldn’t be occupied, on account of a problem with the fire alarm. The chemistry professor, David Kammler, got serious, putting on a back brace before he started heaving file cabinets around. But little was revealed about hierarchies or power dynamics, save for the fact that Lewis Trelawny-Cassity, a lanky philosophy professor from Georgia, ended up with the largest office of all by exercising Southern gentility, not saying a word until the others had all chosen their places. It was essentially a bunch of careful professionals, still not quite at ease with one another, being polite.

A while later the new faculty members went out for drinks at the Gulch, an old-school Yellow Springs dive. It was around 8:30 on a Thursday. A gentle breeze wafted into the bar from the sidewalk, and the faculty sat together at a long table, loosening up a bit. Their first inside joke evolved: They would turn to me just as they were on the verge of saying anything remotely juicy and declare, “This is off the record.”

Mostly, though, the professors talked about how they planned to guide students — which was what had really been missing that first week at Antioch. Even when the students arrived, there would be so few of them — just 35, compared with 53 staff members, including the secretaries, deans and maintenance crews — that the school’s staff threatened to smother them with an earnest attention approximating baby lust.

But soon, as luck would have it, the faculty met the first freshman. Eva Erickson strolled into the Gulch, wearing fatigue shorts and a T-shirt that said: “Antioch College. No Football Team Since 1929.” Erickson, who is 22, was a freshman at the old Antioch before it closed; she stayed on in Yellow Springs, studying at Nonstop and working a dozen odd jobs, raking leaves and selling shoes as her parents fretted over her devotion to a college that didn’t exist. Now she recognized the professors from photos she’d seen and rushed toward the table. “Oh, my God,” she said, her hands fluttering up toward her face. “This is going to sound creepy, but I know all about you guys.” Erickson sat down and said she was from Salt Lake City. “And when you say that,” she said, “everyone thinks you’re a Mormon.”

“It’s an interesting place, though, with an alternative community,” said Gano, the literature teacher.

“But what are you interested in studying?” another professor asked.

Erickson started to speak, and everyone at the table leaned in, eager to hear.

The Washington Post Magazine
September 4, 2011
Edited by David Rowell
© Bill Donahue

Back in Guatemala — when Raul Reyes was 13 years old and selling sliced coconuts on the buses going to Quetzaltenango — a mango smoothie was a simple thing. There was a guy standing on the corner, usually, with a card table before him and, underneath it, a crate of mangoes yanked from some nearby tree. He chopped the fruit right before your eyes and mixed in ice, then you paid him a few quetzals and stepped away sucking on a straw, savoring that sweet, cold ache in your throat.

Today, a mango smoothie is a different matter entirely for Reyes, who is 35 and who, for 16 years, has been living in greater Washington. Since 2004, Reyes has been the general manager of the McDonald’s at 2 I St. SE, near Nationals Park, and today, on the first official day of summer, McDonald’s is doing a nationwide rollout of a new beverage: the mango pineapple smoothie. The chain is about to launch a Real Fruit Smoothie Fusion Tour that will visit 38 cities, and an imposing delivery guy in steel-tipped boots and black shorts brought Reyes 3,800 servings of concentrate from a distributor in Manassas.

The 82 workers on Reyes’s staff, most of whom are paid between $8.25 and $9.50 an hour without medical benefits, have all been apprised of the smoothie’s arrival. Indeed, they have undergone smoothie video training, for like nearly all new McDonald’s products, the beverage has landed with expectations dictated from on high. The I Street McDonald’s is being urged to sell 300 mango pineapple smoothies a day. Each order should be filled within 50 seconds — there are electronic clocks attached to the cash registers that will help monitor whether the kitchen staff is meeting that goal.

But right now, at 7:30 a.m., Reyes is posting the smoothie signage sent by corporate. He has a staffer — Ramiro Rivera, from Mexico — up on the roof, jockeying a 4-by-6-foot, lime-green banner into place on the red tile. Reyes and I are standing below in the sweltering heat, in the parking lot, each of us holding cradling our own sample smoothies.

Reyes is a small man — stout, with a bristle-brush haircut and a sparse black mustache. He has a gentle, easy grin, and he greets his customers with a solicitous pride. “What you think?” he asks, gesturing toward my mostly gone smoothie.

“Pretty good,” I say. “Not bad.” And then we look up, both of us, as Rivera battens the banner down with rope. “Bueno,” Reyes shouts skyward. “Perfecto.”

All around us, the cars idle and lurch. There will be a line at the drive-through all morning long.

* * *

Two I Street is an American success story. Built in the early 1980s, the restaurant was bought in 2003 by Cuban-born Carlos Mateos, who spent $375,000 on a renovation that expanded the drive-through and updated the interior. Annual sales, which totaled $2.4 million eight years ago, have doubled. I Street is now one of the busiest McDonald’s in greater Washington. I spent five days at the restaurant in June, intent on meeting workers such as Raul Reyes who, in pursuing their own American dreams, had attached themselves to the McDonald’s juggernaut. Eighty percent of Reyes’s workers are from Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador. (Immigrants — both documented and undocumented — account for about 25 percent of all workers in the food services industry, and that number is rising.)

What is it like to grow up in, say, rural Guatemala, in a tranquil, small town, with only a few houses nearby, and then emigrate north, to work under fluorescent lights, sating the demands of rambunctious children craving Happy Meals? How does a newcomer reckon with pouring dozens of large Cokes every hour as french fries sizzle in grease and six or eight of his co-workers scramble about filling orders, shouting, “Big Mac, Big Mac, Big Mac, Quarter Pounder With Cheese?”

McDonald’s is, after Wal-Mart, the nation’s second-largest private employer, with 700,000 workers. And as the economy flags, and as more Americans seek cheaper food, that number is rising. On April 19, McDonald’s held a National Hiring Day and says that it brought in 62,000 new employees.

“We’ve got flexible schedules, benefits and jobs that can turn into satisfying careers,” McDonald’s’ Web site said. Yet many people above the poverty line would never even consider working at McDonald’s. The stigma of working at McDonald’s is so culturally ingrained that since 2001 the Oxford English Dictionary has defined the neologism “McJob” as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. created by the expansion of the service sector.”

Labor advocates are predictably in lockstep with the OED. “McDonald’s is no worse than Burger King or Wendy’s or anyone else in the fast-food industry,” says Jose Oliva, national policy coordinator for Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which advocates for food service workers nationwide. “But it pays the lowest wages possible. It starts people at minimum wage and then keeps them at a low wage for as long as they can get away with it.” (Minimum wage is $8.25 in the District and $7.55 nationwide. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.36 million American workers are paid minimum wage or less.)

Catherine Ruckelshaus, who also advocates for low-wage workers as a lawyer for the National Employment Law Project, says McDonald’s often find ways to get kitchen staffers to work off the clock.

She points to a class action suit brought against McDonald’s in 2008 by more than 2,200 employees in Delaware. In November, a U.S. district court judge ended the suit by approving a settlement that awarded each worker between $675 and $1,100. McDonald’s admitted no liability in the settlement, which cost the corporation $2.4 million.

“In today’s economy,” she says, “restaurants like McDonald’s can get away with it because workers are fighting over the last scraps of employment.” She says that McDonald’s should emulate In-N-Out Burger, a California-based regional chain. In-N-Out starts kitchen workers at $10 an hour and soon offers them 401(k) plans and paid vacation time.

But Dave Carroll, senior director of compensation for McDonald’s, argues that it’s not fair to compare McDonald’s to a smaller chain — or to blame McDonald’s for the infractions of its franchises. In a written statement he provided me, he said: “The majority of McDonald’s U.S. restaurants are independently owned and operated. As independent business people, McDonald’s franchisees make their own decisions regarding hiring, wages, and benefits for their employees.”

Carroll added: “McDonald’s and our franchisees offer competitive pay and benefits. In fact, in most cases we pay higher than minimum wage. … Rest assured, we value our employees, their well-being, and the contributions they make to our local businesses, and our community, every day. … Our people are, and always have been, a top priority.”

* * *

On I Street, the workers labored with an assembly-line efficiency. On my first morning there, Reyes explained that each order appears instantly on two screens: one behind the counter, another back in the kitchen. He noted that each cash register transaction typically takes 12 seconds. Then he showed me how a molded hood on the stove clamps down on eight meat patties and sizzles them into identical and infinitely replicable brown orbs.

“How long do they cook for?” I asked.

“Thirty-eight seconds,” he said, with delight.

Reyes’s job at McDonald’s is a dream come true. He told me that after he sneaked across the Mexican border in 1995 to join his brother in Washington, he stood outside a 7-Eleven in Silver Spring each morning, hoping to land gigs moving furniture or digging ditches. “I’d get there at 5,” he said, “and every time a car pulled up, I’d jump right in. But people always said: ‘No, you’re too young to work. You should be in school.’ By 10 or 11, I’d have nothing. I’d go home broke.”

He got a janitorial job, eventually, and cleaned office buildings from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. each weeknight. When at last he landed a $5.25-an-hour job at McDonald’s, he was “jumping up and down like crazy. I called my mother,” he said. “In my country, McDonald’s is a big restaurant — you need a college degree to work there.”

After his first day at McDonald’s, Reyes says, “my feet hurt, my back, my whole body.” That was probably because he was still janitoring. For six years he worked both jobs, earning enough to turn his 1996 Honda Accord into a sleek street racer replete with hydraulics, three television sets and neon-green running lights. He painted the vehicle three times; at one point, it was lemon green with a purple hood. He learned English from a security guard who followed him from room to room as he cleaned, pointing, saying, “Table. Chair. Desk.”

In time, Reyes was tapped to be a janitorial supervisor, but by then, he had impressed his McDonald’s boss, Carlos Mateos. “He was ambitious,” says Mateos, who owns 11 Washington area stores. “He was one of those people who was never content with where he was at. If he was in the grill, he wanted to know how to work the fryer. If he was in the fryer, he wanted to know what was going on up front.” Reyes climbed quickly through the McDonald’s hierarchy — he became a crew trainer, then a swing manager, then a second assistant manager — and in 2000, Mateos made him manager at his 1235 New York Ave. NW store. “He was hands-on,” Mateos says. “If he sent his guys to the roof to clean the AC unit, he’d grab the degreaser and help.”

In 2001, Mateos gave Reyes an ultimatum. “It’s time for you to choose between your two jobs,” he said. Reyes chose McDonald’s. As a cleaning supervisor, he’d need to write reports in English. The prospect scared him; he had only a ninth-grade education.

When he took over I Street and its staff in 2004, he worked three months without a day off. He shored up the inventory practices; no one was keeping records on, for instance, how many hamburgers were dropped on the floor. He fired 40 of the restaurant’s 72 workers. “People didn’t like me, but they were giving away free food,” he said. “They were taking money from the cash register like they were ATM machines.” He began tapping the Latino grapevine for employees. The neighborhood gentrified. Nearby low-income housing was demolished. Nationals Park opened in 2008, and Reyes rose meteorically.

In 2009, he received a Ray Kroc Award, given to the top 1 percent of the managers at the 14,000 McDonald’s nationwide. McDonald’s flew him to Chicago. The three-day trip was, he says, “something I’ll never forget. They picked me up in a limousine. They took me to the number one hotel in Chicago, the Sheraton, and the room I was in — it had everything, even a TV in the bathroom. I felt like a rich man.” Reyes’s wife was invited. “She couldn’t get the time off,” he says. She works at another McDonald’s.

Reyes, who has three small children, makes $39,000 a year managing a restaurant that grosses $5.2 million a year. Categorized technically as a legalized alien, he gets medical benefits from McDonald’s.

Often, he is entangled in the lives of employees who earn considerably less than he does: “Sometimes I’ll have people tell me, ‘I sent money to my family in El Salvador, and now I don’t have enough to take the Metro home,’ ” he says. “I tell them, ‘Don’t ever take money from the drawer. I can just give you the $5.’ And I do.”

At times, Reyes needs to have difficult talks with employees about the pace of their work. “If you’re at the drive-through and your sales last year were faster, I let you know,” he said. “It might not be their fault — if you have a customer who stalls, looking on the floor of their car for quarters, that runs your time up. Still, I have to tell them. Sometimes labor costs are high. They tell me, ‘You can’t spend over $50,000 on labor this month,’ and I’m at 60 and I have to let people go. I tell them, ‘Sorry, but it’s a bad time coming up.’ It’s hard, but in this job you have to work with your brain, not your body. If you work with your body, you won’t meet your goals.

“There’s pressure on me,” Reyes added. “Sometimes you have customers trying to get free food. They pick up a receipt from the floor and say, ‘I ordered this. Where is it?’ Sometimes little kids slip on the floor and get hurt. Junkies overdose in the bathroom. There’s no WiFi; the AC is down. Two weeks ago, it was 100 degrees outside and 110 in the restaurant, and everybody was swearing. Sometimes I just think, ‘No more McDonald’s. I want to go back to my country.’ ”

Both Starbucks and KFC have tried to lure Reyes away from McDonald’s by offering him higher-paying managerial posts. But he has stayed on. He works 45 hours a week, officially, but really his job is 24-7. One recent morning he had to swing by the restaurant at 5:30 on his day off to contend with a broken $5,000 toaster. And when I visited him one afternoon at his two-bedroom rental in Petworth, he was monitoring I Street’s 12 video cameras on his laptop on the couch, watching a movie starring Snoop Dogg.

“Oh,” I said, recognizing the restaurant, “I just came from there.”

“Yeah,” said Reyes, smiling. “I know.”

* * *

But sometimes there are hiccups in the McDonald’s machine. One afternoon, 32-year-old Marleney Ramirez was cleaning a small device that dispenses cold milk for McDonald’s oatmeal. The vessel containing the milk was stuck inside it; no one could dislodge it. Ramirez had to chip the ice around it with the handle end of a long metal spoon. I watched as a publicist from Golin Harris watched me. (Golin, which contracts with McDonald’s, would shadow me during my week at the restaurant: five days, five minders, each one a sharp-dressing young woman who took copious notes on my motions.)

After a half-hour, Ramirez began working the machine’s most obstinate crevices with a bent-in-half plastic coffee stirring straw. The publicist, Kim Persad, was effervescent as she looked on. “McDonald’s makes it oatmeal with milk,” she exclaimed. “That’s what makes it so good! That’s why I like it so much! Starbucks uses water.”

Ramirez wasn’t listening — like most of the workers at I Street, she understands little English. Seven years ago, in her Salvadoran village, she was making roughly $1 an hour washing clothes in a river. She had done the same work since age 14, and the money she earned was not enough to support her two sons, then 8 and 7. She was a single mother.

So she did some hard reckoning: If she immigrated to the United States, leaving her children with her parents, she could support them by sending home tuition money and American clothing. “Sometimes I lay awake in bed until 1 or 2 in the morning, worrying over what was the right thing to do,” she said. She arrived here in 2004 and at first she did janitorial work at a bank. The cleaning chemicals made her sick. “At McDonald’s, I feel happy,” she said. “I am busy all day long, and I like that. It makes the time go by fast.”

Ramirez has not seen her children in seven years. Like most I Street workers, she has temporary resident status; if she goes back to El Salvador, she cannot return to the United States. “Of course, I would love to bring my children here,” she said. “One day. But only God knows when. I talk to them every day, but they don’t like to send me photos.” She giggled. “They are afraid I will think they are too skinny.”

* * *

The kitchen kept cranking out Chicken McNuggets and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. The cashiers kept asking, “Would you like to add an apple pie to that order?” And the masses streamed in the door, hungry.

What you see, on a typical day at I Street, is the disparate American public in unrehearsed form, slouching toward a quick and forgettable meal. Here are the guys from the Splash Car Wash next door; here are Air Force soldiers in full bulletproof camo. Here are police officers and security guards. Here is a uniformed Otis Elevator repairman, and here is a family of weary tourists about to hit the on ramp to Interstate 395, right out front. From behind the counter, you see the underside of their necks, as they all look up at the menu board.

The clientele is African American and white, largely, so their fleeting exchanges with the Latino staff are melting-pot moments, usually happy ones. One afternoon, a flabby middle-age white guy with a telephone headset latched to his skull wove toward the counter to fetch his to-go order from a young Latina. “Gracias, señora. Ciao,” he said with warm linguistic confusion. Later, Thayne Currie, a 31-year-old astrophysicist, wandered in from his condo next door and paid for his iced coffee, $2.41, with exact change. As he plucked the coins from his palm, he wore a broad, otherwordly grin. I asked him what he found so amusing. “Oh, I don’t know,” Currie said. “Whenever I come here, I see the same people working. It’s nice.”

Sometimes there are dazzling moments at 2 I St. They happen, usually, at the drive-through window, which is the personal domain of the star employee Marvin Mateos, from Honduras. Mateos is 27. Back home, he played soccer for a farm team linked to Honduras’s national squad. Today he is still lean and graceful — and possessed of a lady-killing charm worthy of Lord Byron himself. When a co-worker recently taught him the phrase “For sure,” he turned it into a lascivious cry rife with rolling r’s and a cock-a-doodle-doo lilt — something like “forrrr shore-oooo” — and unleashed it on every female who rolled toward his window. One woman, Terry Keyes, responded with sharp peals of laughter as she wriggled appreciatively in her driver’s seat. “He made me shimmy!” she shrieked. “He’s so funny!”

“Marvin and I go way back,” gushed Rachel Semmel, an aide to Indiana Rep. Mike Pence. “Way back.”

Mateos, who has been at 2 I St. for three years, is the fastest worker there, according to Reyes, and the only one able to turn a task known as HBO — for Hand Bag Out — into theater. Almost invariably, he has food ready early, when the customer is 30 feet away. He holds the to-go bag, which is white, crisp and neatly top-folded, far out the window, with his arm stiff. Then he gently shakes the bag, as if to say, “Come ’n’ get it” as the car surges toward the grub and its visceral joys.

He sang to himself as he worked the iced tea machine and handled McMuffins. Under his breath, he taught himself English, chirping, “Coffee! Coffee! I am making coffee!” The job did not own him — he owned the job.

Still, Mateos acted unimpressed with life in the States. “In Honduras,” he said, “I had six girlfriends at the same time, and I could be lazy. I lived with my family, and I only had to work when I felt like it. Here, you have to pay rent. You have bills. I have to work all the time, and I am still poor. People tell you that when you come to the U.S., you’re going to have a car and make lots of money. But that’s not true — it’s all lies.” He spoke with swagger, but here and there a youthful unsureness shone through, as well. He kept gazing into my eyes, imploringly, to see if I was cool with his sourness. When I smiled, he high-fived me. “Party, buddy!” he said. “Party!”

A few minutes later, Reyes summoned Mateos to the break room to begin studying for a new, elevated position, as a kitchen staff trainer. He sat in front of a computer taking a multiple-choice Spanish-language quiz about McDonald’s sales volumes: “How many pounds of fish did McDonald’s buy in 2007?” (Correct answer: 110,231,131.) Mateos gazed toward the ceiling, pensively. How many french fries sold in 2007? The number 5,400,000,000 appeared on the screen and, along with it, a little diagram showing that, placed end to end, the fries would stretch all the way to the moon and halfway back. He stared at the screen in guileless astonishment, with his mouth agape.

* * *

One afternoon, when I was sitting in the break room listening to a single mom lament how she had to pay a babysitter $20 to spell her during each shift at McDonald’s, Reyes called the woman sharply from the kitchen. She was two minutes late punching in. “Raul es malo,” the woman hissed as she tugged on her work hat. “Raul is bad.” Likewise, a cashier complained, “With Raul, it’s always hurry, hurry, hurry.”

A certain tautness pervades I Street. The social contracts — between McDonald’s and its employees, and between the restaurant and its customers — are kept to the letter. One afternoon at the drive-through, I came across a man who had been short-changed by a cashier. I asked how much he was owed. “Forty-five cents,” he said contemptuously as he awaited his due, which came quickly, with an apology.

The same day, Tracee Taylor, an emergency medical aide for the D.C. Fire Department, appeared at the counter, alleging that an I Street kitchen error had thrown her into anaphylactic shock that morning. “I’m allergic to sea salt,” Taylor said, “and so I asked not to put salt on my Steak, Egg and Cheese Bagel. But they did anyway.”

McDonald’s doesn’t use sea salt. Still, Taylor had just come from the hospital bearing a doctor’s prescription on which she’d scrawled the phone number of a lawyer.

Later, I asked Reyes if he was worried about a lawsuit. We were sitting at his dinner table, eating Salvadoran dishes that his wife, Zonia, had prepared for us, and he just shrugged. “People sue McDonald’s all the time,” he said. “It’s no big deal. You want another pupusa?”

* * *

Amid the constant activity at I Street, there was only one person who always seemed calm. Saunder Field, 50, works the cash register for the drive-through window, usually. He is a reticent African American of medium build, and he is the only remaining crew member who predates Raul Reyes’s 2004 arrival. Field is not quite sure when he began on I Street. He knows only that he got there before his daughter, Tameka, was born 18 years ago.

I became aware of Field one day when a pair of Mormon missionaries dropped by for lunch, intimating that they’d made frequent visits to Field’s home. “He gained a testimony,” said a young man whose lapel badge read Elder Kunzle. “He was baptized in March.”

“They’ve got a comfortable place,” Field told me, describing his visits to a local tabernacle. “They make me feel like family.”

Field lives with his disabled mother and his sister. In the early 1990s, he began taking classes at the University of the District of Columbia. But he had to work two jobs then to come up with enough money for tuition. “I worked til 10 every night, cleaning at the Australian Embassy, and then I was here starting at 5 in the morning.” He took classes in the middle of the day. “It was all too stressful,” he says.

When Tameka was born, Field quit both school and his embassy job. He says that he raised Tameka himself on his McDonald’s salary. “I’d buy her books or pay whenever she wanted to get pizza or whatever,” he told me. “My brother’s a teacher, and he worked closely with her on her schoolwork.”

Tameka Gongs just graduated from the SEED School of Washington. She was the class salutatorian and is now a freshman at Louisiana State University. Field told me this with pride. “I wish that school wasn’t so far away,” he said. “It’s so far away. And what I am gonna do now that she ain’t here? I just don’t know.”

* * *

That Friday at 2:30 p.m., the lunch rush was still on. There were 15 or so people gazing up at the menu board. The mango pineapple smoothie had been a hit all week long. “We sold 350 yesterday,” Reyes told me, “and they haven’t even started the TV ads yet. Pretty soon, we’ll be selling 1,000 a day. We’ll have to hire someone just to make mango pineapple smoothies.”

A boy of 12 or 13 ambled by our table, fresh from nearby Randall Pool, and still dripping and bare-chested. “My friend,” Reyes said, “you gotta put your shirt on.” His manner was genial, almost apologetic. It was as if Reyes remembered being a kid himself, swimming on hot, humid days in the river that snaked through his village back in Guatemala. I thought about how far he had come, wading across the border, then living with 16 other Guatemalans in a one-bedroom apartment, then dancing and holding the phone as he bragged to his mom about his new job at McDonald’s.

“It’s going to get busy here this summer,” he told me. “Summer is always our biggest season, and they’ll want to make more money this year, I’m sure. But that’s okay. That’s good. That’s the American way. That’s the American way. And I won’t leave this place,” Reyes said, gesturing at the restaurant around him. “When I walk in here, I can do whatever I want. It’s like home.”

Eventually, Reyes’s cellphone rang and he excused himself, the phone pressed to his ear with a bent shoulder. He swept past the fryer vats, inspecting the grease. He looked over the coffee and the oatmeal and the soft drink machines. He cupped his hand over the receiver and had a rapid-fire exchange with the woman working the drive-through window. He made sure everything was in order. It was hot outside. The customers would keep coming all night long.

Popular Science
April 2011
Edited by Seth Fletcher
© Bill Donahue

It all began so hopefully. Al Gore proposed the satellite in 1998, at the National Innovation Summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gazing skyward from the podium, the vice president described a spacecraft that would travel a full million miles from Earth to a gravity-neutral spot known as the L1 Lagrangian point, where it would remain fixed in place, facing the sunlit half of our planet. It would stream back to NASA video of our spherical home, and the footage would be broadcast continuously over the Web.

Not only would the satellite provide “a clearer view of our world,” Gore promised, but it would also offer “tremendous scientific value” by carrying into space two instruments built to study climate change: EPIC, a polychromatic imaging camera made to measure cloud reflectivity and atmospheric levels of aerosols, ozone and water vapor; and NISTAR, a radiometer. NISTAR was especially important: Out in deep space, it would do something that scientists are still unable to do today directly and continuously monitor the Earth’s albedo, or the amount of solar energy that our planet reflects into space versus the amount it absorbs.

We know some things about the Earth’s albedo. We know that solar radiation is both absorbed and reflected everywhere on Earth, by granite mountaintops in New Hampshire and desert dunes in Saudi Arabia. We know that cloud cover also reflects some of it. We also know that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are currently causing the planet to retain more solar energy than it once did. But there is much we don’t know, because we don’t have a way to directly and constantly monitor albedo on a global scale—that is, to directly observe a key indicator of global warming.

To understand changes in the Earth’s climate, scientists rely on multiple and frequent readings of precipitation, temperature, aerosol and ozone levels, and a variety of other measurements, many of which are taken by Earth-monitoring satellites run by agencies such as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Space Agency. But these spacecraft are all relatively close—at least 50 times as close as the L1 point—so their utility is limited. No space agency has ever launched a satellite capable ofseeing the whole Earth as a single, solar-energy-processing orb.

That’s exactly what Gore’s satellite was meant to do. He named it Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor in Christopher Columbus’s crew who first spied the New World. In 1998, NASA enlisted a 62-year-old physicist named Francisco Valero to lead in the design of Triana.

The agency expedited the program, with the goal of moving from conception to launch in three years, instead of the standard five or six. Giulio Rosanova, the mechanical-systems lead engineer for Triana, remembers bringing pepperoni rolls into work on Fridays, to cajole his crew of 15 into coming in on weekends. “We were excited,” Rosanova says.

In those days, optimism abounded in NASA’s earth-sciences division. In a promotional video, the agency suggested that its planet-monitoring mission would extend beyond Triana—that a subsequent companion satellite would be dispatched to L2, 930,000 miles away from Earth in the opposite direction, where it could constantly monitor the dark half of our planet. Together the two satellites would continuously watch the entire globe.

But in 2001, just a few months after the inauguration of George W. Bush, Triana’s launch plan was quietly put on hold. “We were preparing to transport it to the launch site when we heard,” Rosanova says. Instead, they wheeled the $100-million satellite into storage.

The mission entered a state of bureaucratic limbo. Around 2003, NASA renamed Triana the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, but the satellite remained on the ground. During the Bush administration, it became politically vulnerable, largely because of its association with Gore. Dick Armey, then a Republican congressman from Texas, said of the satellite, “This idea supposedly came from a dream. Well, I once dreamed I caught a 10-foot bass. But I didn’t call up the Fish and Wildlife Service and ask them to spend $30 million to make sure it happened.” Despite the protests of independent scientists (including Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist and Nobel Laureate who wrote in a 2006 letter that “it would be a major waste of scientific effort and opportunity to discard such a meaningful mission”), NASA delayed the launch indefinitely.

Today, NASA officials aren’t eager to talk about it. When I first wrote to the agency last summer, I received a reply that made me feel like I’d asked about an unwanted pregnancy. “Currently DSCOVR is a mission without an agency,” NASA publicist Sarah DeWitt wrote. “NASA still has no direction from anyone to fly the mission, so we don’t really have anything definitive to say about its future as of right now.” She suggested I contact NOAA, the other agency with a hand in the mission. When I did, the publicist there advised me write to NASA.

So began my campaign. For the next eight weeks I would call, e-mail, and generally hassle various contacts at multiple agencies in a seemingly vain effort to see, with my own eyes, the only satellite that NASA has built but never launched.

Since 1999, NASA and NOAA have been calling for an integrated Earth-observing system—a network of satellites that, among other things, would consistently measure changes in the Earth’s climate. But that campaign is “languishing,” said a 2010 Government Accountability Office report, and there are “significant gaps in future satellite coverage.”

Meanwhile, Earth-observing satellites are subject to constant abuse. Cosmic rays grind on the delicate spectrometers that measure the planet’s radiation. Over time, the satellites stray from their orbit and sink nearer to Earth. The data they collect becomes inconsistent. In short, they have limited life expectancies, and some of NASA’s 14 Earth-observing satellites have already outlived theirs.

All of which makes DSCOVR’s decade of dormancy more puzzling. In addition to the continuous macrolevel monitoring of the Earth’s albedo that the satellite would perform, it could also be a crucial component of a larger satellite array. Because DSCOVR would be farther away from Earth than any other satellite, it would be able to see every other satellite in the sky. As a result, other satellites would be able to calibrate their location and sensors against DSCOVR. Moreover, because it would constantly face the moon, which has no atmosphere and thus a constant albedo, it would have a uniquely consistent baseline from which it could calibrate its instruments—and from which other satellites could calibrate as well. In this way, DSCOVR could be the keystone on which present and future space-based Earth-monitoring systems could depend.

Such a network would fulfill the primary missions of both agencies. NOAA’s mission is first and foremost to “understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment.” The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, meanwhile, established NASA’s first objective as the “expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.” Yet for nearly a decade now, space exploration has been a higher priority for NASA than monitoring our own planet. Just this spring, it succeeded in pulling off a familiar-sounding mission: STEREO, in which a pair of satellites orbit the sun and beam back continuous footage of our resident star. But DSCOVR remained in storage.

Last fall, my numerous entreaties to NASA were finally answered, and I was finally able to arrange a visit to Goddard Space Flight Center to see DSCOVR. Before I could get a glimpse, however, I was taken on a comprehensive tour that I couldn’t help but suspect was designed to direct my attention toward a more positive narrative. First I met with Arthur Hou, the chief scientist for Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), a multi-satellite mission that will start in 2013. Next my guide introduced me to the GPM’s project managers. We all admired the shimmering metallic blankets that protect the spacecraft out in the cold, dark sky. Then the publicist gave me a GPM-branded coffee mug, souvenir ruler and license-plate frame. The detours continued. On the second morning of my two day visit, I was guided into a theater and given special sunglasses, so I could behold Goddard’s first-ever 3-D film. Eventually, though, I got my wish: a look at DSCOVR. Or rather, the box that contains DSCOVR.

Standing in a small, carpeted nook, I was able to look through a small observation window into a high-ceilinged, white-walled clean room where a white metal crate was shoved into a corner, beneath a stairwell. DSCOVR sat inside. A green tube supplied the box with a steady feed of nitrogen, to minimize contaminants. It looked to me like forgotten hardware—last year’s cellphone gathering dust in a desk drawer.

It has never become entirely clear why the satellite had ended up here. In his 2009 book Our Choice, Gore wrote, “The Bush Cheney administration canceled the launch within days of taking office on January 20, 2001, and forced NASA to put the satellite into storage.” Warren Wiscombe, a senior physical scientist at NASA, blames a Bush-era “hostility” to earth science at NASA. “As to who ordered the axing of the mission,” he says, “we’ll never know, but the word we got was that Dick Cheney was behind it.”

Mitchell Anderson, a Vancouver-based reporter who has obsessively covered the DSCOVR story, also suspects Cheney’s hand, citing an unnamed NASA informant. Over the course of three years, Anderson filed five Freedom of Information Act requests for documents related to DSCOVR. After querying NASA in 2006, he waited 11 months to receive the documents. “They told me they were consulting with their lawyers,” says Anderson, who was then writing for desmogblog.com. “When they finally e-mailed me the documents, they were scanned sideways. I couldn’t read the top and bottom of the pages.” The 70-page packet contained mostly letters that prominent scientists had written in defense of DSCOVR. All correspondence relating to the mission’s mothballing was excluded.

In May 2007, six years after DSCOVR’s original launch date was canceled, NASA convened 35 satellite specialists for a one-day workshop to decide to what extent DSCOVR would be able to replace the existing system of aging American satellites once they are decommissioned. The scientists agreed that the satellite has unique observational capabilities—the report the committee produced notes, “Sensors on the DSCOVR satellite have the potential to make important and innovative measurements from a novel perspective”—but they decided that it was not itself a suitable long-term replacement for an entire network.

Hal Maring, the atmospheric chemist who chaired the workshop, says that other satellite projects in the pipeline could do some of DSCOVR’s work. NASA has a new low-Earth-orbiting mission, CLARREO, to be launched sometime in the next decade, and Maring says, “The [satellite] calibration capability offered by CLARREO will be much more useful than that possible with DSCOVR.”

Wiscombe doesn’t buy it. He says DSCOVR was stigmatized: “People called it GoreSAT, and NASA found people who would be the most hostile toward DSCOVR for the workshop. They handpicked the assassins.”

Yet DSCOVR isn’t dead. For all the talk of the satellite’s cancellation, the 2009 federal omnibus budget bill, the first passed under the Obama administration, contained $9 million specifically allocated “to refurbish and ensure flight and operational readiness of DSCOVR earth science instruments.”

At Goddard, I met with Joe Burt, the lean and ebullient project leader for DSCOVR. Burt told me that in late 2009, a team of 15 technicians and engineers uncrated DSCOVR and found it in “outstanding” condition. “The propulsion tank hasn’t lost a fraction of pressure after being put away for years,” he says. “Everything mechanical on the satellite is working well. It’s ready to go.” He added that the two earth-science instruments built for DSCOVR—EPIC and NISTAR—have recently undergone a $2-million refurbishment. “They’re in fine shape,” he says. “They’re changing a couple of wavelengths on the filter. With different filters, you can see different things—different aerosols, different clouds. But it’s not a big deal. Changing the filters is kind of like putting on a different pair of sunglasses.” Burt says now that NASA has done the refurbishing, it could fly the satellite to L1, as soon as 2014—if NOAA and the Air Force, which is interested in the effects of solar weather on its technology, provide the approximately $125 million to pay for the launch.

This all seemed like promising news until I visited NOAA, where I realized that interagency dysfunction still threatens DSCOVR’s fate. At NOAA’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, an assistant administrator named Mary Kicza told me that the climate instruments, EPIC and NISTAR, would be aboard the satellite when and if it launches. Then, speaking slowly, she said: “but earth science is not NOAA’s purpose for the mission.”

Instead, NOAA, like the Air Force, is interested in how the sun damages electronic equipment on Earth. It wants to equip DSCOVR with a coronagraph, an instrument that would monitor the plasma, particles and magnetic fields that stream out of the sun. Surges of plasma and magnetism can disrupt power supplies, short-circuit satellite electronics, and scuttle aircraft-navigation systems. “The goal,” Kicza said, “is to send warnings back to Earth.”

What about EPIC and NISTAR? I asked. “Those instruments are part of NASA’s program,” Kicza said, “and you don’t just flick them on. You need a ground system in place. You need algorithms developed.” Are the algorithms developed? “For that,” she said, “you’d really need to talk to NASA.”

Sitting there, I feared that simple bureaucracy might yield a weird paradox—a Deep Space Climate Observatory mission that would do no climate observing.

Francisco Valero, the physicist who led DSCOVR’s design team, is familiar with bureaucratic black holes. He is now 75 years old and retired, but he still actively tracks the fate of his creation. I figured that if anyone could accurately assess DSCOVR’s chances of one day completing its mission, it would be him.

A few weeks after my visit to NASA and NOAA, I met Valero at his hilltop home in La Jolla, California. He has blood clots in his legs and related respiratory problems that sometimes leave him gasping for breath, but he was eager to talk. Sitting in his sparely appointed study, he explained how decades of research led him to imagine DSCOVR.

Valero fled his native Argentina in 1968 after a military coup. Amid widespread student protests, soldiers showed up at his university lab with machine guns to bar him from entry. He came to the U.S. so that he could do science at a remove from political uproar. Instead, he wound up in another kind of maelstrom. Since DSCOVR was shelved, Valero has persistently and publicly raised questions about the direction of NASA’s earth-science program, and he has questioned where funds earmarked for DSCOVR have gone. In 2004, when Ukraine offered to send DSCOVR to L1 on a Ukrainian rocket—for free—Valero lobbied NASA to accept. “The satellite was built, the launch was free, and what did NASA say? The launch wouldn’t be safe for the satellite.” He shook his head in disdain. “I tell you, I lose sleep thinking about this stuff.” Much of Valero’s career focused on the effects that human activity can have on the Earth’s albedo, and when the opportunity to lead DSCOVR arose, he immediately recognized its potential. “With low-Earth-orbiting satellites, you can’t get that,” he said. “It’s like you’re reading a book with only one letter on each page. You can’t get the whole story.”

For Valero, DSCOVR isn’t merely a satellite—it’s part of the solution to one of the most pressing issues of our time. “We just need the truth,” he said. “We need good science. If we get DSCOVR launched, we’ll have that. And then the politicians will have something solid to base their arguments on.”

Such persistent criticism, combined with long-festering resentments from scientists whose funding was redirected to pay for DSCOVR, has only earned Valero enemies at the agency. “He is hated at NASA headquarters,” Wiscombe says. “His name is anathema there.”

But a week after my visit, it was widely reported that Obama’s proposed 2011 budget would increase NASA’s earth-science budget by $2.4 billion over the next five years. The funding would enable the agency to launch three Earth-observing satellites in 2011, including Glory, a delayed low-Earth-orbiting spacecraft that will monitor albedo, albeit not from the same privileged perch as DSCOVR would.

I called Valero to see what he thought of the news. He was guarded. “Is NASA’s budget increase good news for DSCOVR?” he said. “I doubt it. Not in the present environment at NASA. They resist new approaches, and after spending decades and billions on traditional low-Earth-orbit satellites, they’re too heavily invested to expand to new perspectives like L1.” He was silent a moment. Then his mood brightened.

“This satellite will fly someday,” he said. “I have hope, for I think there’s a beauty to science. It keeps asking questions. It demands answers, and it moves forward. DSCOVR represents the future. It has to launch, and it will.”

The Washington Post
February 6, 2011
Edited by David Rowell
© Bill Donahue

There are many ways to contend with the indignities of being middle-aged, but the only tack that’s ever worked for me involves flight — a deliberate fleeing, I mean, from the gray reality that my cartilage is fraying as my teeth travel south. It’s pathetic, maybe, but I like to chase after that sweet weightlessness I felt long ago as a kid. I try to escape.

Last winter, at age 45, I ran away to Minneapolis to spend a season cross-country ski racing. It was a bit like going to the South of France to taste wine. The Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area boasts what is almost certainly the most extensive network of urban ski trails in North America. There are more than 180 kilometers of groomed track. The terrain is nearly all publicly owned, and a season pass, usable at several ski parks, typically runs about $45.

In the Twin Cities, high school Nordic teams typically boast 50 or 60 athletes. There are citizens’ races each weekend. Some are serious; some have the loose-limbed aura of a pickup basketball game. And every season augurs toward one culminating late February gala. The American Birkebeiner, staged three or so hours from Minneapolis in tiny Cable, Wis., is North America’s premier Nordic ski festival. Last year, it drew more than 10,000 competitors. There are nine races over the course of a weekend and finish-line family reunions. There is a pancake breakfast for the distinguished members of the late February gala. The American Birkebeiner, staged three or so hours from Minneapolis in tiny Cable, Wis., is North America’s premier Nordic ski festival, which last year drew more than 10,000 skiers. There are nine races over the course of a weekend and finish-line family reunions. There is a pancake breakfast for the distinguished members of the Birchleggings Club, all of whom have finished at least 20 times since the Birkebeiner’s inception in 1973. There is even a genre of Birkie-specific music. (“Why do they ski so far?” goes one song. “It’s a long drive in my car.”) But the marquee event, always, is the 50-kilometer freestyle race, which wends from Cable to nearby Hayward, along a wide birch-lined trail, luring both Euro superstars who finish in roughly two hours and hackers who slog through in six. That race, set for Feb. 26 this year, is so nasty with hills that on any given subzero weeknight in January in Minneapolis, you’re likely to find whole legions of earnest, Lycra-clad Birkie-ists clattering their way through hill sprints like so many nuns telling their rosary beads.

Myself, I’d never actually raced on skinny skis, but long ago, in college, I ran cross-country and track. And before I ran, I was a downhill skier in love with the magic, swooping, birdlike sensation of gliding on snow. I wanted that delight all over again, and I wanted speed, too.

So one evening last January I found myself standing on a starting line in suburban Minneapolis, amid a scattering of whip-lean 20-somethings dressed in shiny stretch suits and jiggling their calves, warming up for a throwaway little race — a weekly 5K at Elm Creek Park Reserve. “Three,” said the starter, “two, one.”

There was the soft sound of poles swiftly smacking the snow, then the rattling whoosh of our skis. We were going — down a short straightaway at first, then hooking left, under the lights, jockeying for position, an entire pack of skis twisting like one fast-moving snake. I had not entered a race of any sort in almost 25 years. It was revelatory how focused — how unforgiving and basic — competition can be. A bunch of kids were whaling ahead of me; my task was to shut up and throw down.

We descended a hill, all of us stooping, our bodies aerodynamically tucked. The field spread out. I lost sight of the leaders. We came, about a half-mile in, to a small hill where I found a young woman faltering. I passed her (yes!) and kept pushing — and actually managed to gut past one other person, an older gentleman. When I finished, in a little over 14 minutes, I was in seventh place out of 11 and only eight seconds behind a 46-year-old racer who (I did some Googling) had done okay, age-group-wise, the previous winter. I was feeling my oats. I imagined a season of glory and upset.

But my joy was not complete until the next afternoon, when a call came in from my brother, Tim, who was studying the race results on Skinnyski.com as we spoke. “Not bad,” he said, his tone judicious and measured. “You hung right in there.”

***

My brother is 41, and he knows how to ski. In the 2009 Birkie, he came in 45th among more than 3,300 finishers. In two other Birkies, he has likewise finished in the top 60. And let me say this: I made the boy. Proof lies in a 1974 black-and-white photo I have taped to my fridge. In the picture, taken by the side of a lake in summer, I am all scrawny and bare-chested and throwing a rock into the water. I am throwing with my left hand. My brother, 4 at the time, is watching me intently and cradling a rock of his own — in his left hand.

It was no surprise that my brother pitched lefty in Little League, then became a runner, and then (after going to college in St. Paul) a Nordic ski racer. What startled and galled me was how he surpassed me eventually, bringing to athletics a grace I could never quite muster and, in his 30s, an almost scientific precision. One day a couple of years ago, when I asked him to join me for a long bike ride, he demurred, quibbling over my “training technique.”

A fraternal iciness ensued, enduring for months. But then around Thanksgiving 2009, I went cross-country skiing, and, thanks to a long summer of road biking, I felt stronger than ever. I e-mailed my brother. His response was one word: “Birkie?”

I sidestepped the question. My racing days were so ancient that I’d distilled them into myth, so when I regaled my daughter — now 16 and a runner herself — with tales of my running “career,” my essential mediocrity was forgotten. I was a walking highlights reel, 24-7. I was the worst kind of has-been, and I was okay with that. Sort of. Eventually, I went down in my basement and dusted off the skinny, rubber-wheeled “roller skis” my brother had scared up for me a decade before. I began skiing the streets of my city, Portland, Ore., each afternoon.

Most people, upon hearing of my Birkie quest, spooned me stupid bromides such as, “Oh, even finishing would be an accomplishment.” My brother took me seriously. When I spent Christmas with him at his home on Long Island, he turned the visit into a skiing colloquium, rolling the meandering roads with me for two hours each day before we repaired, evenings, to his laptop to analyze technique videos starring German wunderkind Axel Teichmann.

Tim’s refrain was “dynamic compression”: When you ski by skating along, as I would in the Birkie, you want to engage your abs and bend your shins low toward the snow before you stab both poles, rise and repeat. The motion is musical violence: Decompressed, with his hands held high, a good skier looks like a conductor poised to render a crescendo of Wagner’s. I looked more like a question mark, with my back bent and my pole plants mincing, so one morning my brother, playing coach, rode beside me in his car as I roller skied. It was 25 degrees out and snowing so hard that I was slithering and floating along on the slippery pavement. “Nail it!” my brother shouted each time I planted my poles. “Nail it! Nail it! Nail it!”

***

But my brother teaches high school in Manhattan. He couldn’t travel to Minneapolis, so when I landed there I needed a new guru. I went to Finn Sisu, arguably the Twin Cities’ premier shop. Finn Sisu is the sole U.S. purveyor of a Finnish-made roller ski, Marwe, that my brother deems sine qua non. There are ancient ski posters on the wall there, and there is a little museum of vintage roller skis. The proprietor, Ahvo Taipale, is a Finnish émigré who twice coached the University of Minnesota’s women’s Nordic squad to a national championship. He now coaches citizen racers. He is 64 and small and owlish, with a halo of red hair and whiskery red eyebrows. When I arrived, he was in his office, reminiscing about ’70s-era ski racing with a crony.

“Do you remember the Winter Carnival race in 1976?” he said. “It was 4 below that morning, and when I tried out my fiberglass skis” — Taipale waved his hand, dismissive — “very slow. I won that race on birch-bottomed skis, and I still have those skis out front — under glass by the counter.”

Taipale was giving voice to a deeper aesthetic. For him, skiing isn’t about snazzy gear. It is, rather, about the pursuit of perfect, Platonic technique, and he actually glimpsed such technique once, as a kid back in Finland. He listened to ski races on the radio then, and his hero was Nikolay Anikin, a Russian. Whenever Anikin’s picture appeared in the newspaper, Taipale cut open a potato and, using the juice, pasted the photo into a scrapbook. Decades later, Anikin immigrated to Duluth, Minn. Taipale saw him ski for the first time. “His technique was exactly as I imagined it,” he said. “So graceful.”

Taipale’s eyes welled with tears as he told the story. Usually, though, he is a crisp man — stern, even. He maintains that nearly all Birkie skiers have “terrible” form, and he says, “It takes me four to six years to teach someone to ski race. There are no shortcuts.”

When I asked if it was possible, ever, to learn in a season, he saw me as a symptom of a national pathology. “Americans,” he sniffed, “all they want is instant gratification. Every race, they start out too fast and then die. When I took a group over to Finland to race, they were all moaning: ‘These damned grandmothers with bamboo poles passed me.’ ”

I had come hoping to talk Taipale into giving me a private lesson. Now, tentatively, I asked. A few days later, at 7 a.m., we met at Battle Creek Park in St. Paul.

Taipale wore a knit ski cap that did not quite cover his eyebrows. As he watched me ski, he squinted, like a jeweler inspecting a watch. His reviews were sour, and also technical, alluding to various permutations of skate skiing. After I clambered up a small hill, he said: “I don’t even know what that was. That wasn’t V1, that wasn’t V2, that wasn’t open field skate.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what it was.”

I conceded that I struggled on uphills. “Of course,” he said, “because you are not using your core. Your technique is not sustainable.”

I repeated the hill five or six times, taking pains to crunch my abs and to time my pole plants so they coincided precisely with when I set my ski on the snow. I wanted so much to please him.

“That’s a little better,” he said finally.

It was an opening. “I understand what you’re saying,” I said brightly. “But I just can’t make my body do it.”

“That’s why I say four to six years.”

***

I kept skiing. I looped about the 25K trail network at Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis — over a hilly golf course and through a bog and some woods — for two hours each afternoon. I joined a team, Balance Nordic. I got a shiny gray uniform and two days a week streamed about on the snow with my gray-suited homies. I skied sometimes without poles to work on my balance. I did sustained sprints. I got better.

Still, I was trapped in a caste system. The Birkie’s organizers sort all skiers into 12 separate “waves” months before the race even begins. There is my brother’s wave, the “elite” men, who get to start first, when the snow is pristine and (usually) cooler and faster. There is the elite women’s wave. Then, for racers with slower qualifying times, there are 10 numbered waves whose start times are separated by 10-minute intervals. By Wave 8, there is a major funk factor going on — people skiing in Halloween masks and kilts, that sort of thing.

And then there are the lowliest waves, Waves 9 and 10, reserved for skiers who have no marathon credentials at all and are hence obliged to ski in rutted tracks, amid the PowerBar wrappers shucked by their betters. I was in Wave 10, of course. I got no credit for riding my bike 150 or so miles a week back home or for keeping pace with Wave 2 skiers in practice. I was unjustly oppressed, so I wrote a plaintive, carefully crafted note to the Birkie’s wave placement specialists, pleading for a promotion. No dice. I spent much of February vacillating between a smug certainty that I’d prove them wrong and a black self-doubt, a fear that they’d apprehended something that I myself lacked the courage to apprehend — that I was old and washed-up: done.

***

The start of any long-distance race is a release — a reprieve from the waiting. And when they let us loose, finally, beneath blue skies at the Birkie, it was a glorious moment. Almost instantly, I was way, way out in front of 500-odd skiers and ensconced, along with 10 or 12 other intent Birkie rookies — college guys, mostly — in a sort of Wave 10 wrecking crew. We were the lords of the gutter. We were kings, and early on we shared sprightly banter.

“Yeah, bro!”

“Dude!”

“Wave 10 power!”

We started to climb the first incline, the infamous Power Line, a 4-kilometer-long series of giant rollers that rise and undulate skyward like killer waves in a surf movie. A couple of kids passed me. I let them go. We turned left into the woods, and suddenly on the next climb there was a thick clot of skiers in Wave 9 bibs toiling along like an army of ants.

It is not easy to pass through packs of skating skiers, for they are wider than, say, runners, with their legs splayed and their poles cast wide. When I spoke to the greatest late-wave skier in recent memory — one Jason Liebsch, who stormed out of the now-extinct 11th wave in 2003 to finish 235th overall — he described a long struggle that saw him churning past more than 2,000 slower racers. “I was jumping over people’s skis on the downhills,” he said.

I propelled myself up some hills using only my poles, so as to be narrower. “Coming through,” I kept shouting. “On your left, on your left.” We worked through the eighth wave. The trail kept climbing. Fire Tower Hill, 12K in, is the highest point in the race, at 1,730 feet. My brother told me that’s where he always felt the most tired. I felt oddly fresh.

But the trail was spent. On curving downhills, the snow was carved up, so that you were confronted with four or five narrow chutes shaped like luge tracks, each ice-bottomed chute walled with a couple of high berms of shaved ice. You had to pick your chute, pre-descent (no one wants to climb out of a gully at speed), and on one plunge, Bobblehead Hill, I found myself closing in on a dawdling Wave 7 skier and at risk of great ridicule.

Bobblehead is where about 300 snowmobilers gather, Birkie time, to grade skiers’ crashes on a scale of 1 to 10 by holding up little numbered placards, as at a diving contest. The place brims with NASCAR-esque peril. Bryon Schroeder, the owner of Hayward Power Sports and the de facto dean of Bobblehead Hill, told me: “I’ve seen 40 skiers in a pile at the bottom, and if you go off the trail, there are blackberry brambles. And those are pretty hard to pull out of spandex.”

I was 30 feet behind the lady from Wave 7, then 20 feet. It was going to take some crazy tricks to avoid smacking into her and wrecking my knees. I jammed my poles downward, ruddering deep in the snow. Then, slowing slightly, I leapt the berm, teetered and skated clear amid, I believe, a small burst of hooting joy from the gallery.

***

By the time we reached the halfway point, crossing County Highway OO, the real race was long over. The elites were done, and yet I came across a tall, somber man standing trailside, keeping score. “You’re running sixth and seventh in your wave,” he shouted at me and a cohort. I was touched — someone actually cared. And I was buoyed, too, by the spectators clumped on the highway, wildly rattling cowbells. “More bell!” I said. “More bell!”

The truth is, I felt very good. My technique was a horror show still, but I had trained for this race. I felt strong. At the next water station, I dropped a couple of kids from my wave. I was still conserving, though.

The Birkie’s most infamous climb, Bitch Hill, which rises 90 feet in just 200 meters, starts at 40K. My brother had told me that Bitch was nothing compared with the cragged mountains we knew growing up in New England. I’m not sure I quite buy that take, but this time, at least, Bitch did not kill me. And when I crested the top, I let myself imagine the village of Hayward: the swarmed finish line, the little shops, the spectators roistering in the warm midday sun.

What was strange, indeed almost disorienting, was that my brother wasn’t down there. He was still back in New York, stranded by a blizzard. He’d made absurd efforts to get out, excavating two feet of snow from around his car at 4 a.m., then driving to the airport in Newark, but all flights were canceled, and when he called on the eve of the Birkie, he was pained. “I trained 500 hours for this race,” he said. Later, he recognized that this was my moment, too. He called back, leaving a message. “Bill,” he said, his voice at once sardonic and sweet, “do it for us, for the victims of the Blizzard of 2010. Ski smart. Think technique. It’s all you.”

My brother had been kind to me. I had come shambling along, begging admittance into his world, and he’d opened the door and shared with me all of skiing’s intricate wonders. He had been patient. On several occasions, he offered counsel as I hemmed and hawed over whether I should be using poles that were 160, as opposed to 165, centimeters long. Such conversations were always urgent and clipped. We spoke a common language stripped of superfluous gesture. We were brothers.

On the ice on Lake Hayward, fighting a headwind, I tried to ski like a machine punching nails. I wove through a traffic jam of Wave 5 skiers. Then I climbed a tiny slope onto the snow-packed city streets and kicked in. My finish time was 2 hours 46 minutes 3 seconds — a string of digits that at first made my blood sing with ecstasy. (In 2009, the winning time was 2:11:48.) Soon, though, I learned that on the morning’s firm, fast snow, Fabio Santus had set a course record of 1:56:58 as he became the seventh Italian to win the 50K freestyle race. Everyone blazed, and I was, well, the 723rd-place finisher of 3,645. I’d missed qualifying for Wave 1 by less than two minutes, and I felt a shade of chagrin. Why had I left so much in the tank? And all that hollering I did on the highway (“More bell, more bell”) — why had I stooped to such junior varsity horseplay?

But my self-recrimination was slight, and contained. When I sidled into the Moccasin Bar on Hayward’s main drag, what I felt mostly was a physical potency. For years, I had hungered for one more hit of that clean agony that only racing can yield: that taste of blood in your wheezing throat, that knowing that you have to push, and that you will, and that you will survive. I had not skied a perfect, all-out Birkie, definitely not, but I had come close enough to feel quite alive.

And so when a friend jostled toward me through the crowd with a pitcher of beer, I commenced drinking. And somewhere in the back of my skull there lurked a bright, splendid thought: In five years, I’ll have the technique licked. I’ll be 50, sure, but there’ll still be plenty of fight left in the dog.

That’s right. Read my lips. The Italians are going down.