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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

“I got some Dramamine that’s supposed to knock me out,” says the elderly woman sitting nearby. “And I’ve got some headphones, too.”

Her husband, nose in a book about the minor prophets of the Old Testament, does not look up, and the bus rolls on, past Springfield, then past smaller communities on Ohio’s green prairie: Limecrest, Brighton, Gillivan. Darkness falls, and the passengers begin chatting and passing little crinkly bags of Cheez-Its and miniature Oreos back and forth across the aisle. Now and again, laughter jingles over the steady blast of the air conditioner.

They met, all 51 of them, at dusk outside of Dayton, in the vast parking lot of the Washington Heights Baptist Church. Most are from Dayton’s suburbs, but they started as strangers united by a common mission. Tomorrow, after their nine-hour journey, they will gather in the bright light of morning near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Precisely 47 years after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at that vaunted monument, Glenn Beck, the populist Fox TV superstar, will join former Alaska governor Sarah Palin to address his Tea Party faithful at a rally of his own fervent making.

“Restoring Honor,” it’s called. Beck wants his fans to look past President Obama and what Beck calls the “most corrupt” administration ever, and to focus, instead, on the heroism of the nation’s God-fearing founding fathers, who established an exceptional republic, “a shining city on the hill,” by crafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The people on the bus all seem to share Beck’s ardor for those hallowed sheets of parchment.

At the start of the trip, the tour leader gave each rider a souvenir copy of the Constitution and promised to show a film called “Fighting for Freedom: Revolution and Civil War” on the overhead video screens. But I wasn’t quite clear why, exactly, these folks were traveling to Washington, or what they stood for. Until recently, I’d never met a Tea Party supporter. I live in Portland, Ore., amid acupuncture clinics and co-op groceries, in what may be the nation’s most un-Tea Party neighborhood, and I knew only that these patriots composed a political force poised to change the outcome of November races nationwide.

On the bus, I would be embraced and welcomed as a shaggy dog cousin from the Left Coast. I would meet solicitous folks who would invite me into their homes back in Ohio. I’d ask hard questions about health care and taxes and race, and I would hear earnest declarations of religious faith.

Most of the bus riders I meet readily volunteer that they are, like Glenn Beck, devout Christians. The man sitting beside me right now is even built like Glenn Beck. Dale Unroe, a 41-year-old IT consultant for a Cincinnati telecom firm, is big and beefy, but he is also quite soul-searching as he describes his recent decision to spend $500 on a pistol, a .40-caliber Glock. “I’m not a gun person,” he says. “I mean, I went out and shot in the woods in Cub Scouts or whatever, but I’d never taken that deep of an interest in owning a gun until I got involved last year in this whole thing about people being upset with the country. Then, I began thinking, ‘Hey, we need be able to exercise our rights.’ I just felt that, as a citizen, I needed to honor the vision of the founders and, you know, buy a gun. So I purchased the Glock, and I’ve used it once, at a firing range.”

“So, how’s your shot?” I ask.

Unroe laughs. “You know, that’ll take time.” Years, perhaps. Unroe doesn’t like firing ranges. “They’re kind of a little scary,” he says. “Sometimes people misfire. Where we went, they’ve got all these holes in the ceiling, and that’s because people just fired, accidentally, when they were getting their weapon ready.” Unroe casts me an ominous, wigged-out look.

“So what are you going to do with this gun?” I ask.

“Right now,” Unroe says, “I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to make it an effective tool in my life.”

Soon we come to a rest area and pile out into the cool Ohio night. Nearby, there’s another silver bus, thrumming and idling, and beside it, a young man who hails us: “Where ya guys from?”

“Dayton.”

“Awesome! See ya on the Mall!”

**

The writer Greil Marcus anticipated the Tea Party in 2006, arguably, when he said, “America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion. …” In his book “The Shape of Things to Come,” Marcus, a culture critic and rock music historian, goes on to explain that unlike most nations — which came together organically, over time, as a gathering of tribes — America is cohered by ideals: “Its only legitimacy is found in a few pieces of paper. The promises made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution … were so great that their betrayal was part of the promise.”

The Tea Party is bound by a deep sense of betrayal, and my adventures with it began on a Friday afternoon, when the group’s leader picked me up at my hotel. Chuck Henthorn, 63, is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. He is leathery and compact, with toned pecs and a jaunty, can-do manner. The son of an alcoholic father, he enlisted at 17 because he needed a home. He served in the Air Force for 25 years and made his first-ever foray into political action last year. Henthorn was disgusted with the “extreme left-wing thought process” that he says underlies Obama’s bailout of General Motors; in protest, Henthorn attended a Tea Party rally in Dayton.

For the past few months, he has been coordinating Tea Party buses to Washington for an ad hoc Dayton group, the Freedom Institute, whose Web site, WethePeopleUnderGod.com, features an essay titled “Why the American Flag is Folded 13 Times.”

As we drove around Dayton gathering provisions, Henthorn said he has guided four citizens groups to Washington for rallies. “A lot of these people,” he said, “have never been to Washington before. I teach them a little bit about riding the Metro, about how to stay safe. They’re apprehensive about who they’re going to encounter — the SEIU [Service Employees International Union], the Black Panthers or what have you. I’ve encountered those people before. To me, it’s no big deal. I’ve lived in 11 foreign countries. Islamic extremists killed one of my deputies at his desk in Istanbul. I’ve had a bounty on my own head. I know what it’s like to be a hunted man.”

Henthorn spent most of his career in the Air Force’s “services” division. He ran mess halls, golf courses and gyms, and administrated over winding roads past bunkers and airstrips. He learned to focus on the safety and well-being of others. When we came across a motorcyclist wearing a flimsy T-shirt, Henthorn was disapproving. “I’ve scraped enough accidents off the highway to know that that guy ought to be wearing leather,” he said.

By his own reckoning, Henthorn is a “born leader.” On the bus, he announces, “I am running for U.S. Senate in 2012.”

There is a joyous burst of applause. People holler “Oh, yes!” and “Yee ha!” Then Henthorn continues. “And you may or may not think I’m crazy,” he says, “but five months ago, I got woken up in the middle of the night. The good Lord woke me up when I was sound asleep, folks, and he said, ‘You’re running for office.’ And I said no, and he said yes. We argued for three weeks, folks. Then I said, ‘Okay, I’ll run for township.’ And then we had another two-week fight, over what I was gonna run for. And, finally, we were up to senator or president.”

There’s a soft awestruck murmur from the back of the bus: “Wow!”

“And I said, ‘I’m not going to run for the U.S. presidency,’ ” Henthorn continues. “I’m running for Senate.” He lays out his platform: “I believe that elected officials on the Hill should govern from the state that elected them. They shouldn’t be up there holding hands singing ‘Kumbaya’ in D.C. I believe that we don’t need the Department of Education or the Department of Energy.”

“Or the IRS!” someone shouts.

“Well, I do believe in the flat tax,” Henthorn rejoinders gently.

“I’ve got an extremely different platform,” he’ll tell me later. “Most politicians would see my platform as the kiss of death.”

“So you don’t expect to win?” I say.

“No, no, no. I’m going to win. I’m just not going to be a career politician.”

Henthorn may get many votes. In the current race for Ohio’s open Senate seat, Republican Rob Portman is trouncing Democrat Lee Fisher, perhaps because Portman’s ads savage his foe for his ties to Obama. And the area around Dayton is a Tea Party stronghold. The South Montgomery County Liberty Group can lure 300 people to a meeting. I’ll hear varying assessments as to why this is so.

Henthorn thinks that greater Dayton is patriotic, in part, because sprawling Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is there. One middle-age bus rider, Sue Nannarone, a teacher, remembers hearing the fighter jets flying over her childhood home, cracking the sound barrier. “It made you feel proud,” she says.

Donna Schlagheck, the political science department chair at Dayton’s Wright State University, has a different explanation. “Southwestern Ohio culture is extremely conservative, Bible-belt, patriotic and stunned by globalization’s impact,” Schlagheck will say in an e-mail, noting the closure of several Dayton-area GM plants during the past decade. “And there is no discounting the racism in this Mason-Dixon region. I suspect we’re seeing a convergence of culture, economy and fear of a future represented by a black president.”

On the bus, I ask Ann Hucke, a 57-year-old ambulance billing specialist, about the accusations of racism frequently lofted at the Tea Party. She bristles. “I grew up in Oakland, California, which is probably the most diversified city in the United States,” she says, “and it’s not like I live in a lily-white neighborhood now. There’s Section 8 housing right near me.”

Hucke has grown skeptical, though, especially at work. “We see outrageous abuse,” she says. “It’s the people on Medicaid who cause the problems. These jackasses stub their toe and then call an ambulance. They have such a sense of entitlement.”

Hucke is a Christian who has spent years evangelizing at shopping malls, and by her lights, our once-godly nation has become so decayed — so crime-ridden and secular — that it’s time to draw lines. She supports racial profiling, for instance. “We’ve got Mexican people streaming across the border, and we can’t profile that?” she says. “And who’s flying airplanes into buildings? Muslims! You know how they treat Muslims over in Israel? They stop and search them. Because they’re the ones who are doing it.”

**

When we pull into the Wardman Park Marriott in Woodley Park, I scramble off first and watch the passengers trundle down the steps. There are 26 men here from Ohio and 25 women. Two-thirds appear to be older than 55. I do not see a person of color among them. There is an elderly couple with their 11-year-old grandson, who is wearing a T-shirt from Emmanuel Christian School, where he is a fifth-grader. There is a heavyset and contemplative man wearing a blue T-shirt that says “American Patriot.” It is 5 in the morning, and they are here in the nation’s capital to take a stand.

After a nap, we meet, per the lieutenant colonel’s instructions, in the lobby at 7:30. We make our way to the Metro stop en masse. Quickly, though, our neatly bunched group falls apart. The underground corridors are choked with Tea Party ralliers, and they are hot and fetid with human scent. The crowd is so compressed that it seems on the verge of a stampede, and at Foggy Bottom, it takes nearly half an hour to shuffle toward the exit. Two of the three long escalators are broken, and when a sole traveler moves toward one, he’s halted by a shrill voice in the crowd: “Stay away from that thing! It’s dangerous!”

Noah Weaver, here with his grandparents, is scared. “I felt like I was going to suffocate,” he says later.

“And the sad thing,” adds his grandfather, Paul Weaver, “is that it was totally unnecessary. The city didn’t need to let it happen like that. They weren’t doing their jobs, and I think it was deliberate. They wanted to deter people from going to the rally.” The Weavers will encounter another Metro jam later in the day, at Arlington Cemetery.

“There were police at the entry with assault weapons,” Noah says.

“And I set down a bag on the sidewalk, and they didn’t say anything,” his granddad says. “I could have been a terrorist setting off a bomb.”

Now, at Foggy Bottom, an African American Metro worker comes along and fiddles with one broken escalator. It lurches into motion. The crowd erupts with delight. The Metro guy grins.

And then the lieutenant colonel glides skyward. When he hits street level, there are two peppy young green-shirted volunteer marshals standing at the mouth of the escalator. Henthorn high-fives them both, simultaneously.

***

At the rally, my seatmate, Dale Unroe, unfurls an immense blue flag reading “Don’t Give up the Ship.” It’s a replica of a banner flown by a victorious Naval commodore, Oliver Hazard Perry, on Lake Erie during the War of 1812, and Unroe is in patriotic pique. “Maybe they’ll be flying Beck in a helicopter,” he speculates gleefully. “That’d be really wild to see him just drop down to the stage on a rope.”

There is no helicopter and no rope, however, and the rally itself is rather anticlimactic for the Ohioans. By the time they reach the Mall, at 9:30, it is so swarmed they’re relegated to a spot amid trees, with no view of the stage or the giant video screens. Beck’s opening prayer comes over the loudspeakers pretty well, but for much of the next three hours, it sounds as if the voices have been dunked underwater.

A woman named Kathryn Koehler is especially peeved. A retired Ohio State immunology instructor, Koehler is white-haired and chirpy. As she waits out the rally in a lawn chair, she says: “I can’t hear a word they’re saying. This is kind of bad, isn’t it? And if we have to go back in the heat of that Metro, I’ll die. We won’t do this every weekend, now will we?”

Henthorn busies himself by walking the perimeter of the entire crowd, roughly three miles, in search of portable toilets to which he can direct his charges. The toilets are precious few, with excruciatingly long queues, and when Henthorn comes back, he declaims, “Whoever planned this thing was no logistician.” He stands and listens to the amplified murk for a

We retreat from the crowd and sit down under a tree, where Henthorn tells me that when he was an airplane mechanic in An Khe, Vietnam, in 1966, he was exposed to Agent Orange for four months. “I was sprayed every day,” he says. His joints have ached ever since.

The Department of Veterans Affairs does not recognize Agent Orange as a cause of Henthorn’s joint pain, he says, adding that VA still gave him an 80 percent disability rating. “I accept that,” he says.

“But when you’re really hurting,” I ask, “does your patriotism ever wane?”

Henthorn purses his lips, regarding the question as fair. Then he goes long. “I took an oath, and if this nation calls on me to give my life at the age of 63 or 65 or 70, so be it. I’d go to Afghanistan today, in a microsecond. It’d hurt a lot, but I’d do it.”

By the time the rally is over, the Ohioans have scattered so that Henthorn is alone on the streets of Washington with Dale Unroe. The two men are close friends. Unroe is Henthorn’s communications director and the acting chief of staff for his campaign. Unroe frequently drives up to Dayton from his home in Cincinnati, an hour south, to crash at the comfortable ranch home Henthorn shares with his wife, their youngest son, and three tiny pugs. He maintains Henthorn’s computers, and Henthorn, a father of four, regards him as a wayward fifth child. Unroe giddily phones him after he works out with his personal trainer, a onetime tennis ace from Sweden, and Henthorn, in turn, fondly feigns exasperation. “Yes, Dale,” he drones when Unroe calls. “Okay, Dale. Sure, Dale.”

The two men wander onto Constitution Avenue, and then, they’ll both report later, they run into their political foes. Marching toward them are thousands of anti-Tea Party protesters led by the Rev. Al Sharpton. The vast preponderance are black, and they seem angry that Glenn Beck has come to town on Dr. King’s day. They’re chanting slogans such as, “Martin’s dream is under attack,” and Henthorn and Unroe are aghast.

“They had only one American flag that I could find,” Henthorn will say later, “but they had a huge, huge African American flag.”

As Unroe sees it, one of the protesters’ signs is egregiously impolite in its treatment of Alaska’s foremost celebrity. “It just called her ‘Palin,’ ” he tells me afterward. “It didn’t say ‘Governor Palin’ or ‘Mrs. Palin’ or even ‘Sarah Palin.’ Just ‘Palin.’ It seems they were trying to signify insult.”

“I have a rough-streets kind of instinct,” Unroe continues, “so I didn’t engage the bully.”

But Henthorn pitches a single question to the man with the looming red, black and green flag. “I asked him, ‘Are you an American, too?’” Henthorn says. “I have a problem with people who say, ‘I’m African.’ I think we’re all Americans first. And I think that, if you want to be here as a citizen, you need to participate as a citizen. But I didn’t say all that to him — I’m not that kind of person.”

***

On the ride home Sunday, I sit beside Unroe again. We talk about bicycling and the nasty crashes we’ve had. When Henthorn stands to make a campaign promise over the PA — “I’ll come and speak to any group that invites me” — Unroe cops a high, fluty voice and trills, “Even the Girl Scouts?”

Everyone seems to be in good spirits now, after a full night’s sleep, and Kathryn Koehler, the immunologist, is especially perky. “That was one of the most wonderful weekends I’ve had in a long time,” she says, having revised her earlier assessment. She raves about the killer deal Henthorn scored at the Marriott. “Ninety-nine dollars for a room like that? That Chuck, he knows how to travel!”

Eventually, we stop to eat, and standing outside the bus, I overhear a tall, 50-ish man with a salt-and-pepper mustache talking to Ann Hucke, the ambulance biller. “I was at some liberal church in Maryland,” he says, “and the pastor called the Pilgrims drunkards. So I stood up, right there in the pews, and I pointed my finger at him, and I said, ‘You are a liar!’ They called the cops on me, but I don’t care. The Pilgrims were godly people!”

Hucke has been listening with an admiring grin. She hugs the man intently, and I follow him inside. He continues, apocalyptic and wrought. “This country is under God’s wrath,” he says. “When a nation turns from God, God brings judgment. Look at Katrina, in New Orleans. Look at California and all the sodomy they have there. Why do you think they had those wildfires?”

The man says he is a beekeeper by trade but won’t give his name. His voice is steady and cool, and as he speaks, he looks away from me, out the window, gnawing a toothpick. Beside him is his father-in-law, a man named Herbert Joyner, who now turns to me: “If you were to die today, if you were to die today, do you know where you would spend eternity?”

The beekeeper answers the question for me by conjoining two verses from Revelation. “If your name is not written in the Lamb’s book of life,” he says, “you will be cast into the lake of fire.”

I feel a tap on my shoulder. Paul Weaver, the grandfather, has tears running down his face. He is weeping so profusely he cannot speak.

Ann Hucke leans toward him and gently touches his knee. “Go ahead,” she says.

What Weaver wants to talk about is how he found Christ. Working on the line at the International Harvester plant in Springfield, Ohio, 30-odd years ago, Weaver felt an urge at break time to step into an empty room by himself. “I started praying,” he says. “I asked God for forgiveness, and then it was almost like a movie: I could see that shimmering light. And it changed my life!” Weaver looks directly at me, his hands quivering as they urgently carve at the air. “We’re not trying to make you uncomfortable here,” he says. “I’m really sorry if it feels like that. We just want to help you.”

***

In the days that follow, as I linger in Dayton, I keep thinking of how caring Paul Weaver was, and I keep being treated to the same sort of earnest caring. One morning, Henthorn takes me out to Wright-Patterson and shows me where the Air Force’s B-52 crews once slept, in an underground bunker he calls a “mole hill.” Later, we dine with his 22-year-old son, Zack, who works at Staples. Zack aspires to serve his dad as a security officer, once Henthorn is elected as senator. “I’m excited about what my dad’s done for this country,” Zack says. “He cares for its people, and I’m proud of him. He’s my dad.”

Eventually, I get a clandestine call from a 62-year-old retiree I met on the bus. John Holdren once worked for the Air Force as a civilian, in a division that bought special ops airplanes. Now, he raises pet rats. Holdren keeps 10 rats in cages in a spare bedroom and devotes two hours a day tending to them. He wants to show them to me. Problem is, his wife doesn’t want a reporter in the house.

“Can we be a little sneaky here?” he asks over the phone. “My wife’s about to go out, and when she does, I’ll leave the porch light on. That’ll be your signal that it’s okay to knock.”

I rush to Holdren’s neighborhood, but as I’m killing time strolling past stately homes and well-manicured lawns while I wait for the porch light, a woman drives by, staring me down. A minute later, Holdren calls. “Here’s the thing,” he says gamely. “You’ve been spotted, but it’s my house, too. Why don’t you come on over?”

The rats are in the living room, scampering about in a cardboard box set amid a few dark blue leather chairs. In tender detail, Holdren describes how he ministers to the animals’ injuries and illnesses. “I give them antibiotics,” he says. “If they have bronchial problems, I work with a nebulizer. I take them to the vet for surgery sometimes.”

“Sounds like the Obama health plan,” I crack.

“Well,” Holdren says, smirking, “it’s paternalistic. They’re rats.”

Holdren is an eager-eyed man who trades in ideas. He grew up in an “all-white town,” he says: Westerville, Ohio. He was such a fan of Barry Goldwater and his libertarian allies that during a 1962 election, Holdren wore holes into a new pair of shoes in a single evening skipping up and down porch steps, delivering leaflets. Today, he spends four hours a day tuning into conservative media: Fox News, Drudge Report and NationalReview.com. He voices his political views with precision, as though they were mathematical theorems.

“I’m not particularly oriented toward embracing other cultures. I like American culture,” he says before adding, “Sharia law is not compatible with the Constitution. For starters, under sharia law, it’s legal to stone a woman to death. And the intent of Islam is world domination. If allowed, they will bomb and butcher their way to success. Their goal is to either convert you or tax you into submission or kill you.” Soon, Holdren says that back in the ’70s, at the University of Kentucky, he had Muslim friends. “Two brothers studying pharmacy,” he says. “They were Palestinians, and they used to joke about how they carried bombs in their back pockets.”

“What were their names?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Holdren says, chuckling. “They all have, like, five names. We need to control immigration,” he continues. “If you’re willing to say you’re Muslim, you need to leave. We are going to fight them in a big way, and we need to strike them in a way that’s memorable. Myself, I wanted us to make a nuclear strike after 9/11.”

Before I leave, I use Holdren’s bathroom. It’s immaculate, and on the wall by the toilet, there’s a small, oval-shaped wooden sign decorated with painted flowers. It says, “Be ye kind one to another.”

WHEN HE WENT MARAUDING about the known world some 800 years ago, Genghis Khan almost certainly never slept on a bed scattered with rose petals. He was a hard guy. So it seems fitting that the journey east from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, toward a 131-foot stainless-steel statue of the infamous Mongol warlord is a stark experience. The roadside is barren of trees and unpeopled, and brown rubbly mountains stretch into the distance. When you travel the 35-mile route on a bicycle, as I did recently, the headwinds can be cruel.

Still, I pedaled on, for Genghis Khan is Mongolia’s future. After his conquests were downplayed in the history books during seven decades of de facto Soviet rule, the nomad who ruled an empire stretching from the Caspian Sea to Siberia reemerged in 1990, as democracy was being established. Today, he is a poor nation’s avatar of hope—and he’s becoming a major industry.

In Ulaanbaatar, you can drink Chinggis beer at the Grand Khaan Irish Pub. (For obscure reasons, the local spelling differs from the Western.) The Genco Tour Bureau, an Ulaanbaatar-based company, has spent about $7 million on the Chinggis Khaan Statue Complex, a commercially minded homage where the giant steel Chinggis will soon be flanked by an artificial pond, a skating rink, and 200 small gers, or round tents, for paying campers. Nearby, Genco has also built a 13th-century living history museum, sort of a Colonial Williamsburg on the steppes, where artisans make felt by beating wool with wood sticks. And at the Chinggis Khaan Golf Country Club, the greens are tiny, bright patches of artificial turf on the infinite brown.

With a poignant hopefulness, Mongolia, population 2.7 million, is trying to establish a market economy in the deep shadow of neighboring China. One morning when I was looking for a pastry in Ulaanbaatar, I strolled into a grocery store and found all the bakery workers watching me with quiet, expectant pride. “You are our first clee-ent,” the manager told me, explaining that it was opening day. “We are so honored.” Down the street, Louis Vuitton opened its first Mongolian outlet last year, and Hugo Boss likewise set up a shop for the Mongolian elite who have grown rich mining gold. I stood beneath an ad for a Mongolian department store— I AM ALL NEW, read the slogan, next to a picture of a beautiful woman—and then the wind kicked up, uprooting a small road sign that came catapulting toward my head, pole and all.

Mongolia doesn’t quite have the modernity thing down yet. It remains a poor country where the electricity is constantly flickering, even in the capital, and it’s so dependent on ranching and sheepherding that last winter’s dzud, or unusually heavy snow, was still wreaking havoc on the economy when I visited in May. The tourist map I bought depicted what I swear were phantom roads. When I tried to follow one, I ended up in a cow pasture, being chased through a snowstorm by barking dogs.

On my way to the statue, I got lost. No road signs pointed there yet, and the only pedestrian I found outside Ulaanbaatar was an old man gathering horse dung for heating fuel. He could not help me. Finally, I found a gas station, built in 2009, where the attendants wore matching red-and-blue uniforms and sat inside a glass-and-steel booth.

“Chinggis?” I said.

“Ah!” They smiled and pointed.

A few miles later, I came upon a truck driver, who’d pulled over to pee. “Chinggis?” I said.

When he pointed, I saw it—a glimmer of silver down the hill. Genghis Khan sits astride a stallion, grimacing as he clutches a gold-tinted stainless-steel whip. The statue’s pedestal is a columned, white-granite rotunda, and everything inside the rotunda is calibrated to impress and make money. There’s a collection of Bronze Age artifacts, a screening room wherein a stentorian video (with English subtitles) heaps praise on the Mongolian construction industry, and a luxurious conference room and restaurant, both empty when I visited. The landscaping is brutal: not a tree or bush in sight. The black iron fence surrounding the complex goes on for more than a mile. Cumulatively, the place shouted, “Watch out, folks— Mongolia is back on its horse!” But I detected an undertone of desperation too. A more plaintive voice seemed to whisper, “Believe in us, please. We’re trying very hard.”

I snickered for a moment, but then, riding home, I felt guilty for laughing. I remembered a kid I had met earlier, while lost on a back road, named Ertene Bulgan. He was a shepherd, with a shaved head and a stud earring, and he invited me into his grandparents’ ger. Later, he drew a map of his world into the dirt with a stick. “Home,” he said, pointing. Then he drew a little rectangle. “School.” Then, with a solemn nod, he said, “Chinggis.” And he drew a long road, hooking into the distance, toward a steel marvel he hoped to visit one day.

Backpacker
July 2010
Edited by Dennis Lewon
© Bill Donahue

There’s something hallowed-looking about the faces of people the moment they step through the door of Galehead Hut, 3,800 feet up in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire. They’ve arrived there, invariably, on foot, over steep, rock-rubbly trails dotted with lichen-specked cairns and roots and stubby, wind-stunted evergreens. And they’ve traveled, often, up through cold mountain air and wisps of fog and lashing outbursts of rain.

By the time they reach Galehead–a rustic hikers’ bunkhouse and mess hall 4.6 miles from the nearest road–they are weary. But they’re also sort of floating, for they have wriggled free of the niggling abstractions of everyday life and accomplished something solid. They’ve traveled here on their feet. Their boots are dirty and their faces glisten with sweat, and they’re somehow alight with such pure happiness that, watching, you think, “That person is good.”

Whenever someone stumbles through Galehead’s front door at dinnertime, two dozen or so people at the long dining tables cheer–the applause is instinctive. Indeed, sometimes when you are merely waiting for someone to show up at Galehead, a certain aura of celebrity builds up around him, particularly if the new arrival has ever served on the hospitality staff–or the “croo”–in any of the eight shelters of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s White Mountains hut system, which was established in 1888.

Croo workers are almost invariably college students or recent grads, and by some measures they’re simply $7.25-an-hour wage slaves in a backwater of the tourism industry. The 49 caretakers who labor in the Whites’ huts every summer are tasked with cooking guests’ meals, selling them souvenir water bottles, and, every few days, wielding a stick, so as to stir the huts’ composting toilets. But their real mission is spiritual. It’s their charge to keep alive the delight that imbues each hut arrival, even after the dining hall starts festering with the fetid scent of wet, blister-bloody wool socks.

Hut workers sing and play guitar. They perform skits. And carrying 50-pound loads of food for the guests, they bound up mountain paths with lightning grace. Often, they become legends within the tight croo community–and on a chill, gray afternoon at Galehead last June, the hut’s five resident caretakers gather in the large, airy kitchen and await the arrival of two such legends: Gates Sanford and Alex May. Both are hut alumni, and collectively they’ve served seven seasons in the White Mountains.

“Alex May is coming?” one staffer says. “No way.”

“Yes, Alex May,” says his colleague, with a hushed reverence. “Alex May. And Gates too.”

I’m familiar with this sort of reverence, for 30-odd years ago, when I was a scrawny grade-schooler hiking hut-to-hut through the White Mountains with my mother and sister, I regarded the hut workers as looming gods–as lords over a surreal alpine kingdom where you could actually have snowball fights in July. More recently, as I’ve aged, I’ve wondered how a bunch of college students (children, essentially, from my antique perspective) could possibly run the nation’s oldest network of mountain shelters. The responsibilities are ominous. Hut staffers double as search-and-rescue crews, and they function as lifeguards to the myriad unprepared hikers who shamble up some of the nation’s most punishing trails. The White Mountains are steep, and devoid of switchbacks. There are frequent summer hailstorms and the wind can gust to more than 200 miles per hour. Since 1849, more than 130 people have died on the slopes of the Whites’ highest peak, Mt. Washington.

The threats are real, to be sure. But for the most part these young adults spend their transformative years working like glorified counselors in an extended version of summer camp. Does that mean they’re growing up fast, or not at all?

It’s not easy getting a job on croo. This year, more than 130 people applied for 20 open positions. And the appeal of the work is not immediately obvious. There you are, up in the mountains, cut off from all frontcountry pleasures–Facebook, school buds, beach parties, whatever–and obliged (at least at Galehead) to live for 10 weeks in a cramped 10-foot-by-10-foot bunk room with four other staff, each of whom often goes more than a week without bathing. (Croo members work 11 days on, three days off.) The social scene can get confining and testy.

Still, life is delightfully slow-paced. Workers help out with breakfast and dinner, and typically have afternoons off. In their free time, they’ll spend hours handwriting letters to friends, or updating journals, or enjoying picnics on mountaintops. They hike almost daily, and on my first stay at Galehead, Nick Anderson decides to bust out and climb a trail that scales 1,100 feet–ascending South Twin Mountain in less than a mile.

Anderson, 21, is Galehead’s assistant hutmaster, and a rather serious youth who often wears a pin-striped, blue-and-white oxford shirt while interacting with guests. (“You look fantastic,” Sanford tells him, “straight out of the summer Polo catalog.”) Short and sturdy, with curly black hair and a frequent black stubble on his chin, he does look quite dashing. He’s a fast hiker, too. Once, he made it to Greenleaf Hut–7.7 miles away, and over two mountains and through a trickling, sole-soaking cascade–in a blazing two hours and 45 minutes. Still, I invite myself along on his afternoon jaunt.

“OK,” says Anderson.

I follow. He lollygags for the first 50 feet or so and then, with no preamble, he turns his stride into a leap and begins hurling himself up the mountain, knee to chest, knee to chest. I’m in decent shape; I keep up. But I move with a desperate and gasping intent, gritting my teeth against twinges of pain in my knees, and Anderson just flows up the hill, chitchatting, oblivious to how lucky he is to possess fresh, unblemished cartilage.

Anderson is light on his feet, at all times. One night, when 10 little girls come to the hut with their parents, he summons them all to a table after dinner, leans toward them, and, in hushed, spooky tones, tells them ghost stories. The girls all giggle and squeal–and then, afterward, they linger about him, burbling, as though he is the drummer for the Jonas Brothers.

Working in the huts, it strikes me, is kind of like being in Neverland: You can stay on only as long as you remain young, unburdened by the worry and self-consciousness that crust on over time. And as with any fairy-tale landscape, arcane mores apply. Every summer, for instance, hut workers seek to distinguish themselves by “packing a century”–that is, by lugging a full 100 pounds into a hut, usually with a plain wooden packboard. But the most critical ritual is the raid. Half seriously, half in jest, the croo of one hut will invade another hut, sometimes “stealth raiding” at night and sometimes executing daytime “power raids” replete with all the sinewy horseplay of professional wrestling: chokeholds, half-nelsons, full-body pins. The object, always, is to steal previously heisted detritus attached to the walls of the invaded dining room: old road signs, for instance, and antique skis.

The practice of raiding began soon after the first AMC hut opened in 1888. In the 1940s and ’50s, the prize booty was a human skull, “Daid Haid,” lifted from an abandoned logging camp. Later, in more politic times, an airplane propeller, recovered from a high-mountain crash, was coveted above all else. Today, the grail is a long wooden rowing oar that was used, allegedly, in the 1972 Olympic Games. As the summer begins, the oar is at Zealand Falls Hut. The croo at every other hut wants it. “Once you have the oar,” Galehead staffer Chelsea Alsofrom, 22, tells me, “you don’t really need anything else.” Raid strategies and other clandestine plans are often hatched in the privacy of the kitchen, away from the guests. There, after dinner one night, Sanford unveils a plastic liter jug of Canadian Hunter whisky, along with a T-shirt that features his name (Gates “Rolling Thunder” Sanford) and the slogan “Get Hunted.” In Sanford’s day, Canadian Hunter was so celebrated among croos that one hut worker, a burly, mustachioed youth, was known simply as “The Canadian Hunter.”

“This stuff is vile, by the way,” Sanford says. “We did a taste test between it and Old Crow, and Old Crow won.”

It’s quite possible that Sanford could afford a tonier brand. He prepped at Milton Academy, and his grandmother owns a house in the Hamptons. Which shouldn’t be surprising. The huts have always attracted well-to-do Easterners. The first staffs were heavily represented by Dartmouth and Harvard, and today the huts still offer up-and-comers a chance to fly free of expectations–to get muddy and loopy up in the mountains.

The bottle goes round. No one gets anywhere near wasted. But toward the end of the night, Teschner wears a warm grin. “I’m feeling,” he says, “a little Canadian poached.”

The next time I visit Galehead, in early July, Teschner is off-duty, at home in Haverhill, New Hampshire. Anderson is hanging out in the kitchen. I’m a little hesitant to go in there, though. The kitchen is the one refuge where the croo doesn’t have to be all cheery and customer servicey, and sometimes when a guest peeks his head in there (to ask for tea water, say), it’s as though he’s crossed an electrified line. Anderson has been working for more than a week straight. Still, I decide to venture into the kitchen, where he’s reading a book. “Yeah?” he asks. I begin awkwardly, asking if being up in the mountains is losing its luster now, midsummer.

“No,” Anderson says. “I mean, has your life suddenly become less exciting for you because you were alive last year?”

I kind of move my jaw for a second, without speaking, and then I retreat to the dining room, intrigued. All along, I’ve been looking for little explosions–for telling failures in the Galehead machine. But I’ve seen very few, and minor ones at that. One morning, Sanford repeats the name of some woman and Anderson storms out of the room, irked. After another morning’s breakfast rush, Chelsea Alsofrom is supposed to tidy the bunk rooms. When she blows it off, the hutmaster, 22-year-old Katherine Siner, rolls her eyes and says, “Having this job is like being a mom. Someone has to be responsible.”

But mostly the hut glows with authentic, transcendent joy. On Bastille Day, 11 older women–one-time Girl Scout leaders who call their group “Babes in the Woods”–rise from the table and sing “La Marseillaise” before packing up and leaving a generous tip. (“We’re mothers,” explains the Babes’ leader, a lawyer. “We’re happy to know that there are young people up here, levitating over the trails.”)

The croo never imposes themselves on anyone’s holiday, but they sprinkle the festivities with good cheer of their own. “Hi, I’m Luke,” Teschner says one night during the staff’s standard after-dinner spiel, “and one interesting fact about me is that I’ve gone skiing in Africa. It’s a true story.”

“Hi, I’m Nick,” Anderson says, “and today, hiking, I stepped over a dead moose.”

It’s their job, of course, to be cheery, and they pull it off 99 percent of the time. Indeed, one night when I sit down with Siner, the hutmaster, she speaks in relentlessly upbeat tones. “I’ve learned so much in this job,” she says, “about responsibility, about working with other people, about guest services.”

I never would have talked like that in college. I would have been skulking in my bunk, reading Nietzsche as I silently fumed over the Orwellian implications of the huts’ communal dining scheme. Or, more likely, my application would have been nixed. The AMC is careful and somewhat image-conscious in its management of the huts. The club’s publicist specifically routed both me and another reporter toward Siner. He enjoined me from going on a raid, and before my first hike into Galehead, he met me at the trailhead and gently pleaded for sympathy. “If they say anything crazy,” he said of the staff, “remember: They’re young.”

The publicist didn’t hike in with me, though, and the AMC never sent any busybody, iPhone-toting “hospitality specialist” up to Galehead to ride herd on the crew. The graying administrators seem to recognize that the huts’ magic lies in surrendering control to the kids. The whole show is like a mountain flower in springtime–you don’t want to mess with its loveliness.

One morning at 6:30, Siner and another hut worker, Elizabeth Waste, stand in the hall outside the bunk rooms, silhouetted in the soft gray light coming in the fogged-over window, and play a wake-up song, “Angel from Montgomery.” The folk classic is a sad and plaintive tune, a story told in the voice of an old woman at the end of her life. “Just give me one thing that I can hold on to,” it goes. “To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”

The two young women sing softly and with tentative care, Siner holding the lyrics out before them. And as the guests begin traipsing out of their bunks (silent, unshaven, stooped and pottering about, in old long johns speckled with odd scraps of bark), I am moved to reflect that people have been waking like this, to the sound of the human voice, in the AMC’s huts for more than 120 years. The whole virtuous endeavor of sallying forth into the fresh air of New England’s high mountain climes began back when men hiked in knickers and women in long woolen dresses, and it is still going on. Kids are still playing mandolin and singing up in the mountains with sweet and earnest intent–it’s one thing to hold on to.

“We’ll have breakfast for you at 7,” Siner says, wrapping up. The salt smell of sizzling bacon wafts out of the kitchen, and the guests gather their toothbrushes and limp along toward the bathroom and its cold-water taps.

By midsummer, the croo settles into a veteran rhythm. Teschner starts reading a history book on Iran. He sets an easel up in the hut’s storage loft and begins painting the sylvan view from the window. Meanwhile, speculation mounts as to which hut will end the summer with the oar. Commonsense favors Lakes of the Clouds, the biggest hut, with 10 workers; Lonesome Lake, very small and remote, is a dark horse. But then Galehead bursts into dominance in late July, during a complex series of battles. To do it all justice, I’d need to conjure a hoary military historian with a wooden pointer, gesturing at a roll-down map.

In brief: One morning, on the short-wave radio, Anderson overheard that two croos were conspiring to converge on Zealand, to seize the oar. The invaders’ huts would, of course, be understaffed, so the Galeheaders split up and power-raided both of them, garnering an oversized wooden spoon and a few dilapidated signs. The oar ended up at Greenleaf, and one afternoon Anderson and Alsofrom hiked there, timing their arrival for lunchtime, when only one staffer was present. Anderson wore a skirt for the occasion. He and Alsofrom pinned their foe to the floor. “She fought like hell,” Anderson says. “She squeezed Chelsea’s head in a door pretty hard, and she kept kneeing me.” A crowd of hikers gathered. “People were videotaping us,” says Alsofrom.

After Anderson wrenched the oar from the wall, he gave it to Alsofrom and together they rushed it three miles downhill, to a parking lot, where Teschner was waiting with a getaway car. The next day, the croo of another hut, Lonesome Lake, raided Galehead, led by a large and swashbuckling red-bearded young man whom Teschner calls “the Jack Black of the hut system.” Johannes Griesshammer, 21, pried through a rope lashing Galehead’s front door shut and shouted, “Let the onslaught begin!”

But Galehead had been tipped off, and the staff had hidden the oar in the woods atop measly Galehead Mountain. Is this legal?

“Semi-legal,” Alsofrom tells me, days later, still gloating. “We’re like monsters. We steal and then we lie. It’s awesome.”

When I go back to the Whites, it’s a bright, warm day in early August, and I meet Teschner at the Gale River trailhead. He’s on a mission. He’s hiking up Galehead Mountain to retrieve the hidden oar. “I just ate a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s,” he says, walking toward me. “Let’s see how that goes.”

We start walking. Teschner’s hair is a little longer now, less bristly, and he has patches of duct tape stuck on his shoulders, covering an oozing yellow melange of friction sores. Two days earlier, he had packed his first century, laboring up the Gale River Trail bearing 110 pounds. “When I first came here,” he says, “I thought carrying 50 pounds up the trail time after time was going to crush me. I didn’t see how I could do it. But I broke the trail down mentally, into sections–this river crossing, that rocky pitch. During the last quarter-mile, I felt like I was going to collapse. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other, I was so tired. But I never questioned that I was going to make it. I’ve gained confidence this summer.”

I ask what he means. “Well,” he says, “I’ve definitely become a better cook. I’ve made peanut butter bars and apple spice cake; the other night, I cooked pasta primavera. I’m thinking about opening my own restaurant some day.” The scheme is vague. He says something about a “tiki bar in the U.S. Virgin Islands” and then adds, “I still think the cookbook is awesome.”

“Oh,” I say. I guess I’d hoped for deep insights–for dispatches from a mind finding its way toward cool adult poise. But the process of growing up is subtle and incremental, and Teschner is still ensconced in the woods of it. He cannot offer up any sweeping perspectives.

We cut across the river. Teschner stoops low to a cold pool of water and says, “Usually when I get here, I dunk my head in. It’s refreshing. The way you do it is you put your hands on these two rocks here, like you’re doing a push-up, and then you kind of lower…” He goes underwater and then he pulls his head out and shakes it, so the water flies off the tips of his hair. Then he waits as I dunk my head into the icy river.

When we get up on Galehead Mountain, the sun shines brightly and the oar is fairly visible in a thicket of trees. The wood on it is a little chewed up, and its metal paddles are bent, but the grail is now solely in Luke Teschner’s care. He isn’t giddy about it, but he does seem quite pleased. “Here we are in the middle of the woods,” he says, “and there’s stealth treasure lying around.” He shoulders the oar, which is surprisingly light, and starts down the tree-lined trail, carefully. The oar has a wide turning radius.

When Teschner reaches the hut, he fetches a long ladder and leans it against the dining-room wall. He climbs it and then pounds in some nails up near the ceiling, for the oar to sit on. Anderson stands at the base, holding the ladder and giving instructions: “Yeah, another nail there. Good, good.” Teschner bends the nails tight around the oar handle. He balances a cache of butter knives on a thin ledge above, so that a cascade of cutlery will rain down on any would-be marauders. And then he sets a large sign–”Dog Walk,” it reads–dangling below so it will fall like a guillotine if the oar ever is touched. “Ah yes,” Anderson says, peering up. “This is evil!”

By my reckoning, Galehead is toast: It’s only a matter of time, it seems, before invaders will come along to deliver the Galeheaders a large serving of humble pie. Indeed, one day over lunch, Johannes Griesshammer, aka Jack Black, pronounces ominously that he will blitz for the oar “in the very near future.”

I wait. But as August wears on, the thrill of raiding–and being up in the magical huts–finally wears thin. “It takes a lot of social energy being here,” Alsofrom says. “It can only last so many weeks and then you want summer to end.”

On August 20, with the oar still up on the wall at Galehead, the summer croos come down out of the mountains. Life as the rest of us know it resumes. Autumn arrives, eventually, and myself, I keep thinking about the sublime, long-ago joy of being up in the Whites amid blinding patches of snow as the summer sun baked down upon my bony little kid back. I begin hatching this theory that the most important part of the whole hut experience involves remembering the place and wanting to go back. And that’s when I think of Emily Taylor, the hut veteran who visited Galehead on my first night there.

Taylor is 24, and a small wire of a person, black-haired, tiny, and tautly muscular, with this intense, bouncy ebullience about her. She came to Galehead straight from her job at an organic farm in Portland, Maine, driving three hours right after work and then beginning her hike in at 7:30 p.m., bearing a six-pack of beer.

“I’m so happy to be here,” Taylor said, arriving, “so happy.” But she told a wistful story about her previous summer, her sixth and last season in the huts. It came right after her graduation from college. She was the hutmaster at Carter Notch, and Chelsea Alsofrom was on her crew. “I have so many great memories,” she said. “When it rained, I’d sit on the kitchen floor on a blanket with Chelsea and listen to James Taylor on an iPod. But I was stressed out, running a hut, not knowing what I was going to do in the fall.”

“You saved your senior spring college freak-out for the hut,” Alsofrom said. “It felt like you were having an existential crisis.”

“I was just feeling,” Taylor said, “like I couldn’t do another summer. A goal of my life had been completed, and I felt like I was being torn out by the roots.

“I wish I still had the energy for this job,” Taylor continued. “I wish that I was still OK with sharing my home space and that I could set out silverware again, without feeling like I was going to scream. I wish I could go back to being 19. I loved the huts; I’ve felt so at home here. But it’s time to move on.”

Luke Teschner was lingering by the stove as Taylor reckoned with the hard reality of growing a little older, of no longer belonging where once she was so comfortable. Does the sting of her story register on him?

He doesn’t remember, he says when I call him this spring. But he is looking forward to going back to the huts in June. He’ll be at Madison this time. “I’m pretty excited,” he says. “Madison is the oldest hut in the system. It’s above treeline. It’s notoriously the hardest hut to get to. The hike in is steep, so you tend to get more hardcores there: people who really know what they’re doing. It’ll be good. It’s gonna be a good summer.”

Inc.
May 2010
Edited by Dan Ferrara
© Bill Donahue

There are no hotels in Youngstown, Ohio, population 82,000, and there is no real airport, either. Even before you get there, you have a sense of the place as somehow gutted of commerce. But then you roll into the city, over the highway, and you shudder a bit, for the skyline is sublime. Here is the Central Tower, a graceful 17-story art deco sliver that narrows, à la the Empire State Building, as it reaches its peak. Here, beside it, is the older, more earthbound Huntington Bank building, with its white terra cotta façade.

Both of these structures were built for the ages, before 1930, when Youngstown was among the three largest steel producers in the U.S., with a population of 170,000 and dozens of foundries. Wealthy financiers lived upwind from the smokestacks then, in Doric-columned manses on Millionaire’s Row. The mansions are still there.

You don’t really apprehend how desolate Youngstown has become until you pull off the highway and begin navigating the potholes of Southern Boulevard. Here’s a concrete-block convenience store with bars on the windows. On some streets nearby, up to 40 percent of the houses are vacant, and down the hill, 200 yards or so from the mayor’s office, the brick, hangarlike Wean Steel plant stands vacant amid high, tawny grass. With a 13.7 percent unemployment rate and 3,500 vacant buildings, Youngstown is depressed, failed postindustrial America in distilled form.

Keep driving. Turn left onto the city’s main drag, West Federal Street,―and then, eventually, you see something weird: a newish green awning, printed with shiny metal lettering. Youngstown Business Incubator, it says. Inside is a guy, Jim Cossler, who calls himself the incubator’s “chief evangelist.” Cossler is a scrappy fellow, 55 years old and sparely built, balding, with a habit of ducking out onto the street to furtively light cigarettes, his hands fluttering a bit as he cups the match in the wind.

Cossler has a rap about how Youngstown is perfectly suited to become a mecca for producers of business-to-business software. “When you buy software,” he says, his voice a bit high and nasal, “do you ever turn over the box and say, ‘I wonder where this was made?’You don’t! Nobody cares where software is made. And you can make software in Youngstown, Ohio, inexpensively. You can hire a software programmer in Youngstown for $50,000, and that’s a good salary.

Cossler has been the CEO of the Business Incubator since 1998. The State of Ohio now gives him $375,000 each year, and he uses the money exclusively to nurture tech-related companies. The YBI houses seven start-ups and gives the newer ones free rent, free utilities, and free Wi-Fi and phone service. It also gives guidance to nine companies that sit off-campus in greater Youngstown as they develop tech products. A framed photo outside Cossler’s office, by the elevator, bespeaks the dream. It captures the original Microsoft team in 1978 — a baby-faced, beak-nosed Bill Gates flanked by several furry-bearded hippies. At first, it registers as a little absurd.

But attached to the YBI building is a symbol of hope — a brand-new 30,000-square-foot building in chrome and glass. This is the headquarters of Turning Technologies, which last year grossed $33.5 million making an audience response system used in academic settings and on shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Turning began in 2002, under Cossler’s stewardship, in a small room at the incubator. Today, it has 173 employees, who work amid airy, high-ceilinged rooms with exposed brick walls and aluminum ductwork.

Cossler is especially proud that Turning stayed next door. “In most business incubators,” he says, “when companies are successful, you graduate them, and then they move away and work in isolation. That’s a horrible idea. We’re open-source.”

It’s Cossler’s hope that everyone on the Turning/Business Incubator campus can share ideas by, say, advising one another on how to display wares at a trade show, or participating in what he calls “your baby is ugly” meetings — that is, candid product-review sessions. He wants Turning’s triumph to rub off, and he wants to reverse a grim brain drain: For decades now, Youngstown’s brightest youths have fled town. He wants to call home what he calls “the Youngstown diaspora,” to sprout a cerebral local culture and a computer industry that can support 5,000 jobs on the YBI campus.

Cossler is by no means there yet. The seven companies that sit beside Turning in the incubator collectively boast 62 employees. They are reluctant to share revenue figures, but by Cossler’s estimate, they grossed a total of about $3.5 million in 2009. Still, there are intimations of glory. Youngstown’s U.S. representative, Tim Ryan, keeps an office inside the incubator. In the past seven years, he has secured more than $23 million in federal grants for tech projects involving YBI’s portfolio companies.

Meanwhile, Cossler is scheming to expand the campus, which includes three buildings and 83,000 square feet. He gave me a tour, pointing first at a weathered brick warehouse — Furnitureland of Youngstown, read the fading sign — and then at an open pit alongside West Federal Street. “Here,” he said, gazing down, “we’re going to build a bocce court, or maybe a barbecue area where everyone on campus can mingle.”

We were out on the sidewalk, and it was winter. A scrim of windblown snow skittered about, accentuating the bleakness. But still, there was a new martini bar nearby and a swank Italian restaurant that YBI’s workers now frequent at lunchtime. And if you squinted a bit, you could actually see it happening — the rebirth of Youngstown.

Youngstown died on September 19, 1977. That was Black Monday. Forty-one hundred workers at the Campbell plant of Youngstown Sheet and Tube, the city’s biggest employer, showed up that morning to learn they had been laid off, permanently. A spirit of fear and anomie had been seeping into Youngstown for years, as the U.S. steel industry withered and the local foundries, once owned by the lions of Millionaire’s Row, got sold off to out-of-town conglomerates. Now, despair set in. By the early 1980s, Youngstown had one of the highest arson rates in the country. Sheet and Tube had shuttered another plant. U.S. Steel and Republic Steel left Youngstown, too. All told, greater Youngstown lost about 50,000 jobs in steel and related industries.

It was a story that repeated itself all over the rust belt, but Youngstown was particularly demoralized — and fragmented. In his recent book, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, organizational theorist Sean Safford celebrates how Allentown, Pennsylvania, a similarly ravaged steel town, reinvented itself in the 1980s, as “community-based divisions” melted and city leaders formed a “bridge across ethnic, class, and indeed geographical divisions” to develop a new, diverse economy driven by tech start-ups. Youngstown, Safford writes, was “balkanized.” Members of the Garden Club didn’t talk to entrepreneurs. A few power brokers (namely, the Garden Club bunch) held the purse strings, marginalizing everyone else. The place was lorded over by the Mafia and often called Murdertown USA. And Jim Cossler felt the sting. In 2002, he told Safford that the city’s mayor had never even set foot in YBI’s office. “The community isn’t behind the incubator,” Cossler said, in a rare moment of moping. “We are the ones with the least community support.”

Youngstown reserved its support, instead, for a onetime college football star who had apparent ties to the Mob. In 1980, Jim Traficant was elected sheriff of Mahoning County. Audiotapes nabbed him in clandestine chats with a Mafioso, who eventually handed him an envelope containing $163,000 in cash. Still, when Traficant was indicted in 1982, for accepting a bribe, he defended himself and opened, incredibly, by stating, “I fucked the Mob.” His populist gusto sang to bitter, disenfranchised Youngstown, and after he wriggled free of conviction, he became a beloved U.S. representative, serving from 1985 to 2002, when he finally was caught and sent to federal prison for bribe taking.

In Traficant’s heyday, Youngstown’s urban core was practically gagged — so moribund that the city’s leaders seemed almost determined to suffocate enterprise there. In the ’70s, they closed West Federal Street to cars and put in a brick terrace, thereby killing downtown.

Things got so dire that in 2005, the city’s voters did a 180. They elected as mayor Jay Williams, a 34-year-old African American banker and political rookie who carried a vision to make Youngstown “healthy and leaner,” largely by demolishing vacant houses and revitalizing downtown. Williams, who is still mayor, is now the rock star of the rust belt’s burgeoning “shrinking city” movement. He appears frequently on national television and has been invited to the White House. He works in tandem with Tim Ryan, who is just 36.

And there is suddenly a host of young, civic-minded idealists in Youngstown, among them Phil Kidd, a bald and muscled onetime Army lieutenant. Kidd, who is 30, made his first foray into activism in 2005, by standing on a downtown plaza each week with a sign reading Defend Youngstown. Today, he works for a new nonprofit, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative. He has rallied Youngstowners to shut down a corner liquor store where criminals gathered and to help residents of battered neighborhoods get the city to pull down vacant buildings — drug houses, usually, or vandal magnets.

Kidd often works 80 hours a week. He signs his e-mails Defend, PK, and he is intense even when he is just hanging out. One evening, he invited me to the Youngstown YMCA, where, he said, the city’s young professionals gathered each week to play dodge ball. I expected a convivial gathering with, perhaps, a pitcher of iced tea on the sidelines. But no, the game was ugly. Kidd whaled the ball so hard that he grunted, and one of his targets grew so riled that postgame, he was spoiling for a fight. “Did you call me a faggot, No. 4?” he bellowed to Kidd’s teammate.

“I was just sayin’, ” said No. 4, walking away.

Afterward, over beers, Kidd smirked, recalling the tension. “That’s Youngstown!” he reveled. “That’s Youngstown! What makes this place is its blue-collar ethic and its dysfunctionality. There are characters here.” In time, Kidd told me about Paul Dunleavy, the dauntless co-owner of a local gym who runs through the streets shirtless, year round, while carrying a 55-pound log. “It’s insane,” he said. He paused, and then he grew confidential. “I’ve got my own log,” he said, “back home, in my apartment.”

But how do you build businesses in a city that revels in its dysfunctionality?

When Jim Cossler first came to his job, from Youngstown’s chamber of commerce, the Business Incubator hosted just three start-ups — a digital printing company, a manufacturer of wooden rocking horses, and an outfit that wanted to place printers for travelers’ use at airport check-in areas. In 2002, the state legislature established funding for the development of technology businesses in Ohio, and Cossler had an insight that would help spawn Turning Technologies: “Software companies are easy to start. Pretty much all you need is a server and some computers. And if we have a bunch of tech companies here, we can build synergy.”

That year, Turning began at the incubator. CEO Mike Broderick is still grateful for the jump-start Cossler gave him. “We probably got $250,000 or $300,000 worth of help from the incubator,” Broderick says. “We didn’t have to worry about infrastructure. We could focus on the product — and that accelerated the process. Jim Cossler has a Rolodex of thousands of people, and he made introductions for us. We’ve been very cognizant of that.”

In 2007, when Turning needed to expand, it considered moving its headquarters to the suburbs of Youngstown. The city imposes a 2.75 percent income tax on everyone who works within its boundaries, and parking downtown can be a hassle for Turning’s largely suburban work force. “But we took an informal poll, and 95 percent of our workers said they liked working downtown,” says Broderick. “There’s an energy, a hope.”

Now Cossler is trying to create Youngstown’s next Turning. In a struggling city, he is a sort of kingmaker. About 20 people approach him every month, trying to secure space in the incubator by pitching ideas for products. Many of the ideas are just plain bad — “they tend to self-select out,” as Cossler gently puts it — but still, Cossler always speaks as though he is surrounded by geniuses on the cusp of greatness. He describes Zethus as “a company whose deep and leading-edge knowledge of cloud computing may just revolutionize how we manage our electronic data.” Founded in 2003, Zethus makes a platform called cumulus::DocumentMatrix. One of Zethus’s neighbors at YBI, BizVeo, makes an online platform that medical patients can use to download, say, medical-history forms or streaming video of their doctors discussing the nuances of open-heart surgery. The company just made its first sale, to a local hospital.

YBI’s off-campus companies, combined, grossed just shy of $60 million last year, and some have a deep history. Still, it seems that Cossler’s main job is cheering up a city with bad-self-esteem issues. In one open letter to the YBI community, he sounds an almost therapeutic ring, calling the incubator “a shining example of how disbelief in ourselves can and must be overcome throughout Northeast Ohio.” He wears a short-sleeved YBI polo shirt virtually all the time, even in winter, and in his talks with young inventors, he taps their potential deftly, with the indulgent patience of a good Little League coach.

One afternoon, I sat in as Cossler met with a 28-year-old photographer, Rasul Welch, who wants to fabricate and sell “follow focus” hardware that can facilitate video shooting on DSLR cameras. Welch’s business partner was a half-hour late. And as we all waited for him, Welch slumped in his chair. He was impressively schooled on camera technology, but he seemed a little casual for a guy on thin ice. “Charles is a young buck just off the boat from Dubai,” he said of his straggling mate. “He went to the University of Cambridge, in England.” He admitted he had done only one casual market study for his mount: quizzing five photographer friends about his concept. “Four of them hated it,” he said.

Cossler had a flash of doubt. “Just because your mom and your girlfriend like your idea…” he began. Then he changed tack. “I like you guys,” he said, after fabricator Charles Beal finally showed. “I like your pedigree. You have nice skill sets.” A moment later, he was offering the inventors access to YBI’s Inspire Lab, a set of two ground-floor conference rooms shared by about 20 start-ups so germinal that they are just tinkering, nights and weekends. He also offered the gratis aid of a lawyer who could help the inventors incorporate. “We could go to work for you tomorrow,” he said.

“But,” said Beal, “I don’t know how we’d create jobs for Youngstown.”

“Don’t worry,” Cossler said. “We’d morph you along so you did. Say you wanted to create software for DSLR; we’d find you programmers.”

As the inventors left, they were envisioning software that could aid video editing. Seven weeks later, they began working in the Inspire Lab.

Urban theorist and author Richard Florida has identified what he calls the “three T’s” of economic development. Florida argues in his 2002 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class that urban areas need “talent, technology, and tolerance.” By tolerance, he means venues that embrace “cultural, entrepreneurial, civic, scientific, and artistic creativity.” Cool hangouts, in other words: museums, microbreweries, experimental theaters, and research labs.

In those terms, Youngstown could go either way. The ruined steel mills hold a certain rust belt chic, and when I was there, I met artists and writers who had come back to the city, enchanted by the pathos and romance of the place. There is a splendid new café on West Federal Street — the Lemon Grove, where the walls are hung with paintings from local artists and the floors are made of planks salvaged from an old barn. There is an old-school museum, the Butler Institute of American Art, that boasts Edward Hoppers and Georgia O’Keeffes in its permanent collection, and there is also a gay advocacy group, Pride Youngstown. Youngstown State University, which sits on a hill above the downtown area, is a big and important presence. But Youngstown is — let’s face it — not the sort of place where U2 is going to kick off its next tour. It is a small town, more homey than cosmopolitan, and it is trying to fight its way back from a haunted past.

Skeptics hold that Youngstown could be damned by its history. Heike Mayer, a professor of urban planning at Virginia Tech, notes that Youngstown has no track record with high tech. She adds, “You can’t create 5,000 jobs out of nothing. You have to connect to what’s already there, historically. Pittsburgh did that. It was a steel town, and it built highly specialized steel-technology firms. But Youngstown, I don’t know.”

Mayer has studied Oregon’s Silicon Forest, south of Portland, where a number of small tech start-ups have emerged in the shadows of the local giants, Tektronix and Intel. “Even there,” she says, “the start-ups didn’t create 5,000 jobs. Youngstown has Turning, yes, but that won’t generate 15 spinoffs. If there’s two successful ones, that would be good. Perhaps Youngstown needs to lower its goals and go after low-level tech jobs — the sort of work that often goes to India or China, like customer support.”

But Mayer, who is on leave this year in Switzerland, is far removed from the good news that has of late been sweeping Youngstown. In February, a French pipe manufacturer, Vallourec, announced plans to spend $650 million building a Youngstown plant that will make small-diameter pipes for natural gas extraction. That project will create 350 blue-collar jobs. Eight days later, General Motors said it would expand operations at its Lordstown plant, just outside Youngstown, by adding a third shift and 1,200 jobs. The factory now employs 4,500 workers. Meanwhile, Ryan’s grant money keeps streaming in. Ned Hill, the dean of Cleveland State University’s urban affairs program, feels Youngstown has momentum. “There’s unprecedented optimism there,” he told me. “The mayor is walk-on-water amazing, and they know what they’re doing at the incubator. They realize that incubation isn’t just about giving away free space. And because that area is dominated by community, as opposed to national, banks, the tech companies can get good financing. The bankers there are willing to take a little risk to get Youngstown going again.”

For Hill, the big question is: Will software companies stay in Youngstown? Tech start-ups are often funded by venture capital — and VC firms have no qualms about selling a company as soon as it achieves some success and letting it be swept out of town. “Will that happen in Youngstown, or are YBI companies poised to stay and grow?” Hill asks. “The honest answer is, I just don’t know. I am not smarter than the market.”

Along with Hill, Mayor Williams knows that high tech is a gamble — and that it can’t single-handedly rescue Youngstown. “We’re pursuing software,” he says, “but not with the notion that it will replace steel. Manufacturing will still play a role here, and the service industry, too. We’ve got a new call center downtown that’s employing 650 people.”

Ryan also wants diversity. “We do have a manufacturing base,” he says, “and we need to build on that. But computers — that can change our image. The average salary at the business incubator is $58,000. That’s a force multiplier for us. We want those kinds of jobs here. And so we’re designing a city that people would want to live in.”

Soon, Ryan was talking about a Youngstown entrepreneur who had just spruced up three local golf courses, to host LPGA tournaments. “You want world-class golf here?” he says. “We’ve got it. You like to ski? It’s nearby. You like hunting and fishing? It’s here. Music? We’ve got Elton John coming. Right in downtown Youngstown, at the Covelli Centre. Elton John!”

When I had downtime, I wandered about town in the snow. The lyrics from a famous Bruce Springsteen dirge, “Youngstown,” wafted about in my head: “Here in Youngstown/ Here in Youngstown/ My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down.” In its direness and gloom, the soundtrack seems to fit, until Youngstown’s quiet old splendor sneaks up on you.

Directly across the street from YBI is the Powers Auditorium, built for $1 million in 1931 by three of Hollywood’s Warner brothers, who were Youngstown natives. The woodwork is wrought of Carpathian elm. The ceiling is coved and gilded, as in a church, and hung with grand chandeliers.

A few miles away is Kravitz Deli, which has been serving corned beef sandwiches since 1939. Founder Rose Kravitz, now 94, still works six days a week, even though she is nearly blind.

Ethnicity still matters in Youngstown, a city that lured legions of immigrants, mostly Italians and Eastern Europeans, in its steel heyday. Myriad Polish, Slovakian, and Ukrainian churches sell pierogis on Fridays, and on Saturdays at one Croatian eatery, the Dubic Palm Cafe, servers carve up whole smoked lambs on a backroom table, in full view of the diners. There is an old-world charm to Youngstown, a substance and intricacy that you would never find amid the McMansions of Phoenix. The place can pull on a person, and a few years ago, one Youngstown native, John Slanina, missed Youngstown while living in the Netherlands. Slanina, a policy analyst focused on tech-based development, launched a blog titled I Will Shout Youngstown.

The project became a record of one expat’s homesickness. Slanina wrote about both ancient Youngstown delights and nouveau tweaks, such as the group Polish Youngstown, which offers Polish-language karaoke at its sprightly ragers. A fondness pervades every word. When Slanina discusses a wedding tradition unique to the rust belt — the cookie table — he lambastes a friend’s painfully cookieless wedding. “The initial shock of not having a cookie table is difficult for the soul,” he says, “but it also shows us how there are some traditions out there that are weaved into the core of our beings, which you can’t find everywhere throughout the country.”

Cossler is happy to have Slanina in his corner. He dreams of a day when students at Harvard yearn to be sitting on West Federal Street, quaffing Rust Belt beer, which is proudly brewed with Youngstown tap water. But he doesn’t want to pinion bright twentysomethings. “We want our best and brightest to leave Youngstown,” he says. “We want them to go to Seattle or New York or wherever, and then come back and share everything they learned.”

Until about 2005, Youngstown was a hard sell to young creative types. Now, though, there is a small community of tech people who have come back to their hometown, to embrace the place as though it were the lost Holy Land. The group’s guiding spirit is Tyler Clark, a 34-year-old musician and Web-strategy consultant who serves as YBI’s “chief imagination officer,” helping local businesses spruce up their websites. Clark grew up in Texas and went to Youngstown State University; as an undergrad, he was the musical director at the Youngstown Playhouse. He bounced around after graduation, living in suburban Virginia and Tucson, but then, in 2006, a good friend in Youngstown fell ill. Clark’s wife, Jaci, a photographer who grew up here, came back, and the visit was a revelation. The Clarks bought a meticulously maintained five-bedroom Millionaire’s Row manse, once the home of Sharon Steel president Henry Roemer, for $188,000.

Today, Clark works in a home office replete with a curving black and crimson art deco bar, and he regards Youngstown as an adventure. “We’re urban pioneers,” he told me. “We’re trying to bring a city back from the dead, and Youngstown needs so much.” Clark writes a blog, Youngstown Renaissance, that advocates for a livable Youngstown. (“For God’s sake,” he writes, “no more surface parking lots.”) As a member of the group Resettle Youngstown, he takes care of vacant houses, boarding up the windows and doors to keep vandals out, and every so often, at the Lemon Grove Cafe, he emcees Thinkers and Drinkers, a casual powwow that sees locals sipping pints as they hash over questions like, How can we get Youngstown State students more involved in the community? When I went one night, he began with caution. “Complaining is OK,” he said, “but I don’t want this to turn into a bitch session.”

The Lemon Grove is Youngstown’s most progressive and outré venue, and among regulars, there is a feeling that the entrepreneurs at YBI are irrelevant — alien to the Youngstown revolution and ensconced on their own little island of narcissism. At Thinkers and Drinkers, I met Howard Markert, 43, a small-scale green developer who had recently arrived, from the Bay Area, to convert apartments into eco-havens replete with nontoxic paint and energy-efficient furnaces. He told me that he felt obliged to be civically engaged: “If you’re not,” he said, “the neighborhoods will fall to pieces around you. Your investment will be worthless.” Markert is active in nine Youngstown nonprofits. I asked him about YBI’s entrepreneurs. “I never see those people,” he said.

It was sad to see how far apart the techies and the activists are in a town that needs its visionaries to band together. At times, it seemed to me as though there were two separate Youngstown renaissances happening on the same street, and not in radio contact. It was as though the Garden Club schism was plaguing Youngstown all over again.

But then, on the day I was to leave town, there came hope for a bridge between the two worlds. John Slanina, the blogger, moved back to Youngstown. Revere Data, a San Francisco company specializing in investing software, was opening a 10-person office in the Youngstown Business Incubator. Slanina had taken a job as a senior analyst with Revere, and he came home brimming with schemes. “Maybe we ought to put a couch on the sidewalk outside the Business Incubator and offer passersby free milk shakes,” he said. “Maybe we could open the windows and blast polka music. I’m going to start a Boomerang Initiative. I’m going to get together all the people who moved back here, so we can talk about our hometown — and what we learned while we were away. I’ll ask, Can we combine local trust with global knowledge to do good projects?”

Later, I talked to Tyler Clark, and he insisted that the answer is yes. “Youngstown is a laboratory,” he said. “There’s not a lot of restrictions and bureaucracy. You can make a difference without a lot of effort.”

Clark paused, and then cracked out a screwdriver so that he and I could flagrantly violate the law. We were trespassing our way into an abandoned 10-bedroom Tudor mansion he was trying to keep standing, in hopes someone would buy it. The house had a sheet of plywood over the front door. It looked out onto grassy Wick Park. It was cold and musty inside, and Clark was dressed rather nattily for a burglar, in a long woolen overcoat, black pinstriped slacks, and a necktie. We walked up the stairs. The wallpaper was peeling and gathering into piles on the floor, amid a blizzard of old office papers. The bedroom floors were covered with an ugly yellow linoleum. Somehow, though, there was grandeur there under the surface, waiting for a makeover. Over the hearth was a white plaster mantel bursting with carved lions and cherubs.

Clark told me the story of the place. Until 2006, it was a home for the mentally disabled, but then the owner, facing financial trouble, walked away, abruptly, leaving the water service on, so the pipes burst. We strolled into another room, where there was an old piano and also a buckling floor. “A lot of houses in Youngstown should be torn down,” Clark said, “but this one — ” He paused. “There’s integrity that’s lost the moment it hits the ground, and there’s a gaping hole beside the park.”

We went back downstairs and screwed the plywood back onto the door, to stave off vandals. Then Clark lingered awhile on the lawn, talking to a neighbor. “It’s a beautiful house,” he said.

“Yeah,” said the neighbor, “it is. It’d be a shame to see it go.”