The Atlantic
September 2010
Edited by Tim Lavin
© Bill Donahue

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.”

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

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

Guilherme Marchi? From Leme, São Paulo, Brazil?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reed Magazine
Autumn 2009
Edited by Chris Lydgate
© Bill Donahue

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

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

With his venom

Irresistible

and bittersweet

that loosener

of limbs, Love

reptile-like

strikes me down

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

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

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

Let me tell you this:

someone in some future time

will think of us

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

If you are squeamish

Don’t prod the

beach rubble

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

Equal to Jove that youth must be —

Greater than Jove he seems to me —

Who, free from Jealousy’s alarms,

Securely views thy matchless charms.

Barnard’s rendering of the same stanza reads:

He is more than a hero

He is a god in my eyes—

the man who is allowed

to sit beside you—he

who listens intimately

to the sweet murmur of

your voice

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

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

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

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

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

Sweep the mind

clean

like a field of dry stubble

when the constellations

of daisies have been mown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is clear now:

Neither honey nor

the honey bee is

to be mine again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Evening

you gather back

all that dazzling dawn has put

asunder:

you gather a lamb

gather a kid

gather a child to its mother

2. of all the stars most beautiful

Now, look at Barnard’s condensation:

The evening star

Is the most

beautiful

of all stars

Likewise, Carson records these words:

but I to you of a white goat

and I will pour wine over

Where Barnard writes:

And I said

I shall burn the

fat thigh-bones of

a white she-goat

on her altar

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

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

like a hyacinth in

the mountains, trampled

by shepherds until

only a purple stain remains

on the ground

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

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

Pain penetrates

me drop

by drop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yup,” says his bud.

“Ohlins shocks?”

“Yup.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did Palin say?

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top of page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked what he did with his time.

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

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

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

The Smart Set
August 8, 2008
© Bill Donahue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You mean he was wise?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But what kind of times is he running?”

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I just did what I was asked.”

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

“Was Biranchi nice to you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top of page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” said Means. He was shocked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ll figure it out,” said Means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But we’re international!”

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

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

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

“Okay! Thanks for talking to us!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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