The Green Bicycle Murder

Bicycling
December 2007
Edited by Bill Strickland
© Bill Donahue

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

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

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

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

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

“Certainly not,” proclaimed Ronald Light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are no ravens in the midlands of England.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” admitted Clarke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hail Mary

Mother Jones
March 2007
Edited by Alastair Paulin
© Bill Donahue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lost and Found

Backpacker
October 2006
Edited by David Howard
© Bill Donahue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Shanghai by Bike

Sierra
September 2006
Edited by Marilyn Snell
© Bill Donahue

ON THE FIRST MORNING I WAS IN SHANGHAI, CHINA, I was awakened at 4:45 by an explosion in the alley just outside my hotel. Naturally, I ran to the window and looked out, filled with those keen fears common to travelers: Were there, like, terrorists here? In my research beforehand, had I overlooked some local guerrilla war?

The explosions kept coming—bam! bam! bam!—followed by a few smaller, sprightlier pops. In time, groggily, I remembered that the Chinese have a tradition of celebrating the launch of new businesses by setting off firecrackers.

I stood there listening, and eventually I saw something emerge from the billowing smoke: a man on a bicycle. He was riding slowly and unperturbed, his posture erect, as a small package rattled in his handlebar basket. A moment later, there were more cyclists: a guy talking on a cell phone, an old woman, and a workman in a hard hat with a cardboard box strapped to his rack. They all glided quietly out of the smoke through the rain-glistening streets.

The sight stirred a certain joy in my heart, for I had come to China with a manila folder crammed with bad news: In a country long celebrated as a kingdom of bicycles, this noble and practical form of transport was, it seemed, quickly becoming a relic, a victim of China’s march toward prosperity. According to the news clips, China was racing to emulate the transportation schemes of the most ill-planned U.S. cities—Houston, say, or Los Angeles. It was spending $40 billion each year to construct what would be, in 2008, the world’s most extensive interstate highway system. The state-owned Shanghai Auto Industry Corporation, recently allied in a joint venture with General Motors, now employs 65,000 people.

In 2005, China became the world’s second-largest car market, selling nearly 6 million vehicles. Suddenly it was littering its western high deserts with oil pumps and sucking oceans of crude out of Sudan. Meanwhile, Shanghai was cracking down on cyclists, barring them from select vehicle-heavy downtown streets and increasing by tenfold the fines it imposed on two-wheeled lawbreakers. Ridership was way down. While 60 percent of Shanghai’s population commuted by bike in 1995, only 27 percent did so in 2000—and the city’s power brokers seemed happy about the decline. As one former deputy mayor saw it, “The bicycle is just a reminder of past poverty.”

Grim, yes, but still I wanted to see China myself and measure how that vast land—more crowded than we can fathom—is changing. I could have toured Shanghai’s factories or super-haute clothing stores, musing on how the Chinese have been seized by the same consumerist desires that drive Americans. But I’m a devout urban cyclist. I ride almost everywhere in Portland, Oregon, scarcely driving, and I was taken by how neatly the story of China’s eco-future seemed to boil down to bikes versus cars. So I went to its biggest and fastest-growing city—Shanghai, population 17 million—to determine whether the equation is really that simple.

MORE THAN 5 MILLION BICYCLISTS still pedal the streets of Shanghai, and as dawn broke that first morning, they appeared in mounting throngs outside my hotel. Sichuan Street, a straight, flat downtown roadway off-limits to buses and cars, was so thick with bike traffic that pedestrians could not cross for minutes at a time. As I watched from my window, an old man on a rusty tricycle transporting a load of bamboo stalks was cut off by five electric bikes puttering by. A woman rode along one-handed, an umbrella over her head. The whole scrambled mess was as foreign to me as the hongshao shan I would eat for breakfast. I wanted to get on the pavement and ride.

I rented a mountain bike from an American expat. It was silver and shiny with fat, knobby tires and thick, cushy shocks, and I began bombing about on the streets. On pancake-flat marshland, Shanghai has been built organically over centuries, so the roads all seem to curl in on each other. Factor in the myriad one-way thoroughfares and No Biking signs, which are inevitably posted on the straightest, most direct routes, and you can understand why I was constantly lost. I’d occasionally stop to ask directions in guidebook Chinese, and small crowds would gather, puzzled, staring at me with great concern, as though I were giving voice to an urgent medical condition. Then I’d shoot back into the maze.

Every so often, I’d glimpse Shanghai’s brand-new business district—Pudong, on the east side of the Huangpu River—with its elegant 88-story Jin Mao Tower, home to the world’s largest Hyatt Regency, and beside it the slender Oriental Pearl TV Tower, with its three pink pearl-like globes. Then I’d round a corner and find myself waiting at a stoplight beside a haggard scrap-metal salesman and 300 other cyclists. One rider would hail me—”Lao wai!” (”Foreigner!”)—and as the light changed, there’d be a chorus of horns and the menacing sound of motors close by.

In Shanghai, and throughout China, motorcycles powered by liquefied petroleum gas—which is relatively clean-burning, emitting few volatile organic compounds—are allowed in the bike lanes, along with slighter, slower electric bicycles. The LPG bikes are a sort of stepping stone to cars. Topping out at about $1,200 apiece, they number more than a million in Shanghai. Their drivers all aspire, it seems, to be slalom champions. Twice LPG riders brushed up against my shoulder, pushing me out of their path. Another time I raced to follow a honking LPG bike as it carved a smooth path through the slow, pedaling crowd. For a few seconds, I felt as though I were connected to the very soul of the city. Then I fell off the pace, wheezing, and a phalanx of LPG bikes screamed by, honking.

My eyes stung constantly, and my throat was sore. I was pedaling through some of the planet’s most polluted air—a toxic stew of sulfur belched by Shanghai’s myriad factories, most of which are powered by coal. I also felt keenly self-conscious. Everyone around me wore drab street clothes, while I was dressed in a fluorescent yellow commuter jacket. I sported one of the few bike helmets in China and pedaled a snazzy ride that rented for $19 a day—roughly half of what most new bikes cost in Shanghai.

I’d wanted to rent a Chinese bicycle—a Flying Pigeon or a Forever. But when I went to the rental shop, all the bikes were tiny rattletraps. I looked at their rusty chains and dinged frames and went through a painful reckoning. It was clear that I wasn’t willing to go native here—and that my solidarity with Shanghai’s cyclists was, in fact, a contrivance. Back home, I ride a $1,000 Trek.

No doubt some of the riders around me worked in the city’s factories assembling the high-end doodads I use on my Trek. Typically, their monthly income is at or near Shanghai’s minimum wage: 690 yuan (about $85). They bike because Shanghai’s bus and Metro system is, for them, expensive, charging close to 36 cents a trip. They ride without lights and with preschool kids balanced on their racks amid perilous conditions. The streets of China see 600 fatal traffic accidents daily; cyclists are frequently the ones killed.

Meanwhile, a new, sweeter world is blossoming alongside the bike lanes. With Shanghai’s increasing allure to the likes of French manufacturing magnates, swank nightclubs are proliferating, tantalizing passersby with mysterious dim lighting and $7 tumblers of Johnny Walker Red. I stepped into just such a club one evening and watched as a super-sexy Chinese chanteuse yearned for things glamorous, most notably music television, in somewhat tortured English. “I want my, I want my, I want my STV!” she mispronounced avidly.

Later, I saw a looming billboard photo of cars streaming along a highway at dusk. The sky in the picture was rose-colored and silky, as in a dream, and the glow from the taillights was blurry, so the red dots streamed together like so many droplets of blood flowing through veins. “New Shanghai,” read the ad copy. “New Life.”

I WANTED TO TALK TO SOME CHINESE CYCLISTS, so I posted an Internet ad for an interpreter and got a response from Gorden, a 25-year-old university grad who was between jobs in the import-export business. The spelling of his name gave me pause, but he wrote, “I grew up in the countryside, i can ride a bike for 3 hours (not joking >-<),” so I hired him.

I expected Gorden to be jolly in a robust, backwoods way, but when I met him in a cafe, he was wearing a crisp, black velour blazer and sipping a demitasse with a worldly discernment I came to associate with the new China. He was carrying three cell phones and had arrived sans bike. “People today don’t want to waste their time riding a bicycle,” he said. “Everybody just wants to make money—more and more money. It doesn’t matter how you make the money, just that you have it. And everybody wants a car, of course.”

Gorden grew up in a rural area about 500 miles from Shanghai, and his parents are rice and cotton farmers. His home was so remote that he boarded at his high school and spent two hours pedaling his battered single-speed bike to his family every Friday. Now, each time he goes home for Chinese New Year, he has to spend about 17 hours riding the train. “It’s so crowded that usually you can’t get a seat,” he said. “You are standing up the whole way. I want to get a car, so I can drive home myself—that is my dream.”

But what kind of car? Gorden grinned broadly. “A BMW or a Benz, of course!” he said, adding that he also liked the Jaguar hood symbol. “Just a large cat—very cool. But I think I will buy something practical like a Honda Accord or an Elantra, or maybe a Toyota Crown or a Lexus.”

Eventually, I rented Gorden a bike, and we rode hastily, selecting interviewees from the cycling swarms. I’d read that Shanghai’s riders felt squeezed out by cars, and indeed I heard some discontent. “There are more and more roads,” said Kao Gen Ying, a 69-year-old retiree, “and so”—he smashed his hands together—”more cars and more crashes. And what if I want to ride down one of those streets that are off-limits to bikes? I have to dare the policeman. It’s not convenient.”

Most cyclists didn’t share Kao’s disdain, though. They were happy with the way Shanghai is modernizing. “The road is better paved now,” said Bai Zhi Feng, a recycler who was pulling a cart overloaded with cardboard. “It’s smoother.” “The road for bikes is wider than before,” said Hu Hua, a maid, noting that when Shanghai closed some downtown streets to cyclists, it also closed some lesser roads (such as Sichuan, near my hotel) to motorists.

At one point, Gorden and I saw a middle-aged shoe salesman, Zhang Zhong, teetering along by the curb, a huge stack of shoe boxes balanced on his homemade wooden bike rack. A bus rounded a corner and put the crunch on, grazing the boxes. Shoes went flying everywhere, but still Zhang, who was unscathed, voiced a happy faith that progress is blessing Shanghai. “There are more cars and more people, yes,” he said as he picked up his scattered shoes, “but the police control is better now, and the cars obey the traffic laws, mostly.”

I saw things differently. At intersections, motorists sailed right through the cycling crowds, honking with the entitled air of emperors riding sedan chairs. The cyclists I saw all tolerated it without protest. “In China,” Gorden explained, “most of the cyclists are down-class. It’s unfair when you are born, and so you are used to it.” He spoke with a cool distance—he was above these people now—and at times during interviews, he grew dismissive. “What that guy just said isn’t important,” he said once. Later he stopped translating mid-sentence so he could answer his cell. In murmurous English, he said something about a “special massage” and “very pretty young Chinese girls.”

When it finally dawned on me that the kid was pimping while I paid him to work for me, I about bit his head off. I stuck with him, though, because savvy, educated young English speakers willing to cruise the grimy streets on a bike were scant in Shanghai, and the truth is we had many splendid adventures.

One afternoon, Gorden and I came upon a Jaguar and Land Rover dealership, entered the showroom, and sat down on a black leather couch before a video screen that showed cheerful white people thrashing their Land Rovers through pristine mountain forests and rivers. “Very cool,” Gorden said. “I like Land Rovers. But they are for the extremely wealthy.” He was trying to be nonchalant, I think, but an innocent awe seeped into his voice.

AS GORDEN AND I TOURED THE CITY, construction crews worked day and night building and widening roads. Shanghai is now completing a “middle ring” to encircle downtown and most close-in neighborhoods and is adding lanes to Jiangsu Road, a major thoroughfare near downtown. But the campaign has a certain aura of failure about it because a vicious cycle is at work in China’s cities. The government frenetically throws up new highways, and then, almost immediately, the roads reach vehicle-flow levels forecast for 20 years hence.

It’s not that China is clogged with cars. There were still only about eight vehicles per 1,000 people in 2004, which is approximately where the United States stood in 1920. But most cars are in the cities, where wealthy people live, and car ownership is increasing by 15 percent per year, faster than anywhere else in the world. As the nation becomes richer, people suddenly have the means to travel—to zip away to the beach for the weekend or to visit families that still live in remote areas. China’s urban planners are hell-bent on meeting an ever-mounting hunger for mobility.

“If you go to a conference in China, everyone there is bragging about their city’s new roads,” said Lee Schipper, director of research at Embarq, a transportation think tank affiliated with the Washington, D.C.-based World Resources Institute. “They’re saying, ‘Our highways are better than yours.’”

When I spoke to Li Jian, a graduate student in transit planning at Shanghai’s Fudan University, he was adamant that China needs to build highways. In the United States, he said, “you are rich. You have a choice whether to develop. But if we chose not to build roads, it would be inhuman to poor people.” Li stressed that China’s new roads will help bolster a burgeoning middle class—and he’s right. If there’s a highway connecting Chengdu to Beijing, for example, companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard will more likely locate there. The children of destitute shepherds can come into the cubicles. Remote villages can get medical supplies.

In the cities, though, China’s frantic road-building initiative will mainly benefit the elite. In Shanghai—and throughout China—urban roadways are widened to make way for more cars. “The government makes people move out, and then it tears their buildings down and uses the cycling lanes for car traffic,” explained Simon Babes, general manager of the Chinese branch of Colin Buchanan, a British transport consultancy. “Poor people and cyclists lose out.”

Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the municipality of Shanghai as cretinous, because it has made many green decisions. Over the past three years, for instance, it’s turned a ravaged shantytown along Shuzhou Creek, a Huangpu tributary, into a greenway with hiking paths and delicate bamboo groves. It’s shunted many of its factories away from downtown, into vast industrial zones, thereby improving air quality for residents. It’s outlawed regular gas-powered motorcycles, which were deemed too polluting, and given their owners incentives to buy LPG bikes. It’s started requiring emissions tests for cars and established itself as one of the few cities in the world that strategically limit the number of auto license plates distributed each month. Today Shanghai gives out nearly 4,000, selling most at auctions for about $4,600 apiece. The auction program is aimed mainly at reducing traffic, but in a morally complex way it also reduces pollution by ensuring that only rich people drive. Rich people are, of course, more inclined to buy newer, and thus cleaner-burning, vehicles.

The biggest boon to Shanghai’s environment, though, is the city’s Metro system. Launched in 1995, it will soon boast 11 lines and about 6 million riders a day, making it one of the busiest transit systems in the world. Already, it carries 1.7 million people a day, in cars twice as big as those in New York City’s subway, which means that rush hour is a sort of underground football scrum. When I tried to ride out of People’s Square one morning at eight, the cars were crammed, as usual. Two burly young men boarded the train and entwined arms, then shoved in unison, compacting the crowd until they’d carved out a standing spot. A courteous prerecorded voice chimed on the overhead speakers, the doors closed, the train whooshed on, and everyone (save for a woman pressed into a pole, wincing) rode along in relative peace. I was amazed that human transport could actually work at such volume—and was chagrined only that Shanghai officials regard the Metro as a replacement for bikes, not cars.

The city’s most recent policy statement, the 2002 “Shanghai Municipality Transport White Paper,” noted, “The bicycle is the most popular transport tool by the citizens. But the interference of motor and nonmotor vehicles among one another not only lowers the operation efficiency of roads, but also threatens traffic safety.” The paper proposed a solution: “actively guiding the transfer of long-distance travel by bicycle to public transit.” By 2020, Shanghai’s policymakers hoped, no one in the sprawling city would travel more than 30 minutes by bike.

THE WHOLE TIME I WAS IN SHANGHAI, I kept searching for cyclists demanding their share of the road. I felt sure they were out there somewhere. In a 2004 piece for the International Herald Tribune, reporter Philip J. Cunningham wrote that Beijing was witnessing a new “David-versus-Goliath struggle” in which pedestrians were defiantly “playing chicken with … sport-utility vehicles and black-tinted limousines.” China’s walking radicals were stymieing cars by littering the streets with makeshift barricades. “A few bricks or bottles here, a broken paving stone or some rubbish there. Notice has been served,” he wrote. “The streets, and most especially the back alleys, will not be yielded without resistance.”

Cunningham underscored his point last year, reporting, “In July, in Chizhou, in Anhui Province, a mob of 10,000 flipped, smashed, and torched three police cars and a Toyota sedan after the sedan collided with a bicyclist.” Many news stories corroborate Cunningham’s take on Chizhou, but after a few days in Shanghai, I deemed it significant that he is American. Almost every expat I met in Shanghai burned with a protective zeal for Chinese cycling. Indeed, when I met Mark O’Neill, a British reporter for the English-language South China Morning Post, he was so thrilled to find a journalist biking around Shanghai that he celebrated me in print as a “gaunt” emissary of two-wheeled virtue. “Will the Sierra Club message be heard,” he wondered, “beneath the roar and smog of the Shanghai traffic?”

I wasn’t sure that it would, for I didn’t speak to any Chinese cyclists intent on halting Shanghai’s anti-bike drift—and there is not a single nongovernmental organization in the city advocating for cyclists.

I figured that at least China’s bicycle manufacturers would be lobbying for cyclists’ rights since they have a financial stake. So I arranged an interview with the CEO of Forever Bicycle, which sold 2.4 million bikes last year—and found myself on a surreal adventure. First, I was sent to the Pudong office of a Forever spokesman named Lawrence Yu. Yu guided me into a waiting company van, and then we drove on an eight-lane highway to the other side of Pudong as Yu spoke of Forever’s CEO in exalted tones, always referring to him as “our chairman.”

Finally, we arrived at a sprawling, gated compound almost devoid of people. This was Forever’s new factory one month before opening. The trench-coated guards at the gatehouse gave us a stiff salute, then we rolled down the drive, where a chauffeur was letting Forever CEO Gu Juexin out of his immaculate Toyota Royal Crown. We all went inside the factory, which was empty, and sat down in an unheated concrete room the size of a tennis court. Gu was fiftyish, casually clad in a black turtleneck, and patient with me, in part because he figured that my story would help him sell bikes at Wal-Mart. “Our chairman has decided that we should now sell half our bikes overseas,” Yu explained, translating.

I asked about Forever’s domestic prospects. “Nowadays,” Yu said, “living standards are much higher in China. People will start to use the bicycle for sport and leisure, like in your country. But the bicycle is not a transportation tool so much anymore. We have cars now, and the car can change people’s lives. Our chairman thinks that the Chinese people need more cars. And more and more roads, of course!”

I couldn’t think of any other questions to ask, so for a few seconds we sat there, Yu, the chairman, and I, in absolute silence.

I KEPT RIDING THE STREETS OF SHANGHAI, and one morning, with Gorden, I met a 55-year-old cyclist, Zhu Han Rong, as he crawled home from work. Zhu was slight, with thinning black hair and a black jacket, and he rode a beat-up single-speed with a ripped seat wrapped in a white plastic shopping bag. He pedaled so carefully, and with such serene slowness, that I regarded him as an ancient. I soon learned that he’d been riding around Shanghai for almost 50 years. He remembered a time, back in the 1960s, when the bicycle was, along with the sewing machine and the cassette player, one of the “three luxuries” a respectable Chinese family could dream of.

Zhu said, “Bicycling is more convenient than the bus. You can go wherever you want, and even if I had a car, I’d use the bike for short distances.” Our chat didn’t go deep, but there was a genial warmth that transcended language, so Zhu invited us to meet him again—and ride home with him from his workplace, the Golden Riverview Hotel, where he was a graveyard-shift boiler mechanic. The Golden is a four-star establishment, with a vast marble-floored lobby, and when Gorden and I strolled inside, we found Zhu awaiting us in a royal blue jumpsuit bearing an English name tag: “Jackson.” He greeted us exuberantly, as though we were visiting dignitaries, but said that, unfortunately, he had to meet with his boss.

We waited. After a long while, Zhu fished his bike out of the basement, and we all rode away. We were visiting his mother, it turned out. At first, we rode through her old neighborhood, where Zhu grew up. “The streets here used to be cobblestone,” he said wistfully. “I used to play marbles right over there.” Now the streets are paved. Zhu’s old building had been razed to make way for condo towers, and his mother had been relocated—to a more spacious apartment way out on the burgeoning western fringe of the metropolis.

As we rode, the fruit and vegetable stands petered out, and in time we were rolling by the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway, which, at 10 a.m., was gridlocked. We entered a sort of concrete canyon, a vast, echoey construction site where hundreds of workers were building an elevated freeway in the pattering rain, and passed a mall and a Volkswagen dealership. Zhu was quiet now, contained, and I asked Gorden what was going on.

“He was fired today,” Gorden said. “He just lost his family’s only income.” At Zhu’s mother’s, there was a feast waiting for us—pickled eggs, sweet lotus, and chicken. “Eat!” Zhu insisted. “You have traveled all this way! Enjoy!” Even though it was still before noon, he kept refilling my wine glass—and his generosity made me feel a little bit sad. American environmentalists, I thought, always want the rest of the world to be like Zhu: low-tech, quaint, and ecologically light on their feet. But the rest of the world doesn’t want to be low-tech and quaint. They want their “STV” too—and in Shanghai, as China strives to become the next superpower, that desire will drive nearly everything. Poor people will get shoved to the side of the road, forgotten.

And I will always feel a little complicit. I had to leave Zhu’s in a hurry that morning. I had an appointment at the Jin Mao Tower, with General Motors, and you don’t keep GM waiting. Gorden and I chugged our wine and bolted away on our bikes.

We rode fast, I in my bright yellow jacket and Gorden in a wrinkled, old blue windbreaker, a couple of sizes too big, that I’d lent him. We splashed through puddles and skittered through red lights, dodging cars. We reveled in the joy of being strong—and I was filled with this sense that, really, the future is ours. Soon enough, the fate of the earth will hinge on the decisions people like Gorden and me make, moment to moment, as we inhabit a world defined by limited resources. We will need to decide: Should we go to the store on our bikes, or do we drive there? Do we build that golf course in the desert? Do we really need that second DVD player?

Gorden will make his decisions in the first giddy flush of China’s new capitalist surge. I will make mine knowing full well that buying a Benz does not bring one happiness. But we will be in the struggle together, both of us figuring things out beneath the same threatening sky.

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Craig Rosebraugh

Inc.
October 2005
Edited by Dan Ferrara
© Bill Donahue

CRAIG ROSEBRAUGH IS SIX FEET THREE and until recently he weighed 140 pounds. He does not eat meat, and until he was diagnosed three years ago with dangerously low cholesterol, he was a practicing vegan. He did not eat any animal products whatsoever, including milk and cheese. Now, on the advice of his doctor, he eats one organic egg and a few shavings of organic cheese every week. He never eats the egg in a restaurant, for fear that even eggs advertised as organic may not be, in fact, organic.

Rosebraugh, who is 33, has a lean and weathered hawklike face, with slightly protruding front teeth and piercing blue eyes. He often wears his ginger hair in a buzz cut, and he is generally polite but also a little bit taut—combative, even. If you ask him what he thinks about the U.S. government, he will not snicker or roll his eyes comically. He will just look at you cold and say, “The same people have been in power since 1776: rich white men. And are they benefiting women? No. Latin Americans? No. The environment? No. It is time to start talking about a revolution in this country. And yes, if there is a revolution, it will be violent. Name one revolution in history that was not violent.”

From 1997 to 2001, Rosebraugh was, famously, a spokesperson for the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, two still-thriving, intertwined networks of saboteurs who have inflicted $100 million worth of property damage on those they deem despoilers of nature. The more prominent ELF has claimed responsibility for setting fire to four chairlifts in Vail, Colo., and also for vandalizing dozens of Hummers sitting in the lots of SUV dealerships nationwide. Rosebraugh says he never directly participated in such destruction. Instead, he fielded messages from the saboteurs and then, sitting in his office in Portland, Oregon, sent out incendiary press releases. “If we are vandals,” he once said, “so were those who destroyed forever the gas chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz.”

In 1998, The New York Times Magazine called Rosebraugh the “Face of Ecoterrorism.” In 2002, Congress summoned him to testify. FBI and ATF agents raided his house twice. Rosebraugh was unmoved. He went on to found the Arissa Media Group, a nonprofit with the stated purpose of pushing for a revolution in the U.S.A. Through Arissa, he then published his own book, The Logic of Political Violence, which bore on its cover a photo of the World Trade Center engulfed in orangey black flames.

What few people knew was that, as he angled to take down the Man, Rosebraugh also honed a taste for fine living. He bought an old Victorian house and furnished it with antiques. He became an accomplished vegan cook, treating his houseguests to some portobello tofu crepes, say. He disdained the prevalent view that, as he expresses it, “if you’re for world change, you have to live in sloppy squalor.” He saw elegance, in fact, as consistent with ELF’s sabotage—as a matter of “pride and dignity and caring.”

But his gourmet passions were little known. I live near Craig Rosebraugh in Portland, and until recently I always conceived of him as the consummate low-budget radical. He played drums for a garage band called the Procrastinators, and whenever I saw him out walking his dogs, he was dressed, head to toe, in penitent black.

So I was a bit shocked when, late in 2003, Rosebraugh’s parents, Fred and Marilyn Rosebraugh, laid down $650,000 for a sumptuous three-story Portland Victorian so that Craig could make it the home of Calendula, then the city’s only all-vegan restaurant. After an extensive refurbishment, the place bore graceful orange stained-glass windows and little crescent moons carved into the gingerbread surrounding the windows. The spindles on the railing of the large wraparound porch were painted a chromey silver.

The whole place seemed so…impeccable, and so cruelly dismissive of the scruffy radicals with whom Rosebraugh had traveled all through his twenties. And the business plan for Calendula seemed, likewise, almost overbearing in its ambition. The restaurant would serve only organic vegan food. No pesticide residues, no genetically modified fruits or vegetables. Its entrées—which now cost roughly $12 apiece and range from shitake-seitan fajitas to tomato-coconut tempeh—would abound in local produce. Some dishes would be uncooked, in deference to a growing subset of vegans who eat “raw,” meaning they won’t touch any food that has been warmed to over 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

Indeed, a certain moral rectitude would guide the whole Calendula project. Rosebraugh opened the restaurant explicitly to raise money to produce revolutionary media—TV programs, documentaries, and books. And now, on the walls of Calendula’s dining room, there are framed photographs of famed radicals: Che Guevara, for instance, illuminated by two sanctifying headlamps.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that Calendula would be a full-bore co-op, at which even the lowliest dish scrubber has license to quote Das Kapital ad nauseam at staff meetings. But no, no, no, no, it’s not like that at all because collectives are bad too. “In a collective,” Rosebraugh explains, “all people do is debate trivial things. They’ll spend six hours deciding whether to leave the light on or off. I believe in hierarchy, and I like the way corporations are structured. They’re successful because that’s what they set out to do—succeed. And I want to succeed.”

Yes, Craig Rosebraugh is a tangle of contradictions. And when he first opened his restaurant, I didn’t have much hunger to eat there. I was inclined, frankly, to leave Rosebraugh alone, festering on his own tiny island of piousness. But still, every time I passed by Calendula, I was galvanized by the acid battle that I imagined was frothing inside, between lynch-the-landlord anarchy and the white linen tablecloths. I was intrigued, too, by Rosebraugh’s über ethical campaign, just seven blocks from my home, to build an idealistic restaurant in a world where the vast majority of consumers favor Whoppers to go. Craig Rosebraugh was making no concessions whatsoever to crass reality. He was just plain right—stubborn, convinced of himself in so many irreconcilable ways—and he was plowing forward. How long, I wondered, would the guy last?

I FIRST MET ROSEBRAUGH FACE-TO-FACE on a drizzly, gray morning last January. It was early, around nine, and he was in Calendula’s kitchen, wearing a white chef’s smock as he minced broccoli on a white plastic cutting board. His weight was up to 165 pounds, but still there was a certain severity to the tableau I beheld, as though it were part of a film shot by Stanley Kubrick. The stainless-steel countertops were all gleaming and impeccably clean, as were the silver pots neatly racked on the wall, and I was distinctly aware that Rosebraugh was alone, hacking small objects to bits. This is his métier, really: Rosebraugh is not a people person. He’s an independent guerrilla. “When you’re running a business,” he told me, “every force in the world is pushing against you to avoid ethics. I go into Cash ‘n’ Carry, where they sell wholesale goods to restaurants, and I see people packing out huge crates of subgrade produce. Everything’s incredibly cheap, but you can’t buy it if you’re trying to be ethical. And I don’t. I occasionally get recycled paper products there, or maybe some soy milk, but that’s it.”

Rosebraugh invokes very precise operating procedures at Calendula. He explained as he began chopping carrots. “I’ve taken full color digital photos of each entrée,” he said, “so hopefully the kitchen staff can copy the pictures as they’re putting food onto plates. I’ve also implemented a system for tracking waste.” His workers were digitally weighing each morsel discarded during preparation and keeping a weekly waste tally. Meanwhile, Rosebraugh was taking produce poised to go bad and concocting impromptu specials—for instance, the seitan sausage fajitas he was making now. “The goal,” he told me, “is to keep both food and labor costs below 30% of total costs. Now I’m at 27 and 26.”

Rosebraugh is the executive chef at Calendula, as well as the owner, and until he recently hired two managers, he was working 100 hours a week—and all the while sequestering himself in a sort of political isolation ward. Rosebraugh has never voted in an election. Even now, as he feeds Portland’s most well-heeled liberals, he scoffs at the left, which by his lights achieves only incremental change. Groups like the Sierra Club, he feels, just let “the beast of injustice” grow, instead of working toward the future he craves—a heady era in which a new American government provides universal health care and endeavors to wipe out global warming as it fights illiteracy and poverty.

Rosebraugh kept chopping, and soon he spoke of his revolutionary ambitions. He was careful. “I’m not advocating that all the black-hooded anarchists go out and start shooting government officials,” he said. “And I’m not saying we should go door-to-door in Portland, Oregon. If you went around saying, ‘We’re signing up people to be part of the revolution,’ they’d call the counterterrorism task force on you.”

The key to overthrowing the government of the world’s sole superpower, Rosebraugh stressed, is education. To this end, he hopes to produce a documentary film that would deliver a primer in revolution to mainstream America. “I’d like to interview Assata Shakur, of the Black Power movement,” he said. “And Nelson Mandela, and Fidel Castro…”

“Fidel Castro?” I said. “Do you know Spanish?”

“I’m learning,” said Rosebraugh. “I have the tapes at home.”

CRAIG ROSEBRAUGH SITUATED HIS RESTAURANT in an optimal spot. Portland may well be the nation’s most radical and steak-hostile city. The activist community here is not one small troupe of worrisome dweebs gnashing their teeth in the back of a single café. It is, rather, a gathering of tribes: grungy tree sitters, pacifists, urban gardeners, anarchist skateboarders. The phrase “Got Kucinich?” still commands a wistful cachet in certain quarters of Portland. It sings, especially, on Hawthorne Boulevard, where Calendula sits near scuffed-up old record stores, coffeehouses, and boutiques selling aromatherapy candles. But still Portland’s political landscape is uneasy terrain for a firebrand like Rosebraugh.

Portland’s radicals may extend their hearts to small farm animals and disenfranchised molybdenum miners worldwide, but they inhabit, as most people do, a closed little society that knows its share of rancor and backbiting. When a guy like Rosebraugh comes along—pontificating, with dollar signs in his eyes—he will be made into organic mincemeat. The attacks, however, will be kept inside the community. When I asked other local activists about Rosebraugh, I found very few people willing to talk about him in a national business magazine. But a popular bulletin board, portland.indymedia.org, bristles with venom.

“All bosses are f—faces,” one indymedia correspondent wrote recently, discussing Rosebraugh. “Calendula is a ‘guilt-free’ politically correct reification of capitalism.”

“I can’t believe people haven’t f—ing torched the place already,” added another scribe.

How can anyone nurture a business in such a climate? Rosebraugh didn’t have it easy, in part because his restaurant was bound to a troubling reality: Fred Rosebraugh, Craig’s dad, earned the money to finance Calendula by manufacturing hydraulic valves for tractors and lawn mowers. The elder Rosebraugh founded a company called Compact Controls in his suburban Portland basement in 1977; he retired 24 years later after selling his company, which had 270 employees and $35 million in annual revenue, for an undisclosed sum.

Per Portland (and ELF) protocol, Craig Rosebraugh should have publicly renounced lawn mowers—lawns, even. Instead, he spoke of his father fondly and in defensive tones. “My dad’s a moderate Republican,” he told me. “He voted for [George W.] Bush the first time, but then he deeply regretted it. If you get down to it, he believes in education and welfare—he really believes in those things. In his industry, he was a leader. He was very responsible in making sure that toxic chemicals were disposed of properly.”

When Rosebraugh was subpoenaed by Congress in 2002, he brought his dad with him to Washington. “He flew out to support me,” he told me. “That was one of my greatest moments with him—for him to be witness to the everyday proceedings of the U.S. government.”

At a House subcommittee hearing, led by Colorado Republican Scott McInnis, a panel asked Rosebraugh probing questions about his links to ecoterrorism. He intoned versions of “I’ll take the Fifth Amendment” 54 times.

I asked Rosebraugh if I could talk to his dad, and he grew protective. “You can try,” he said, “but I’m going to tell him to ignore you because I trust you about as much as I trust any other reporter I’ve dealt with, which is not at all.” Rosebraugh’s father ignored my calls; I never spoke to him.

WHEN CALENDULA OPENED in January 2004, Rosebraugh had 18 employees, including an executive chef. He managed them as I imagined his dad would have, as de facto CEO. He called mandatory staff meetings and sat at the head of the table. He distributed detailed employee manuals and enforced a dress code, insisting that his servers wear “business casual” clothing. He began to rankle his underlings. “He was working against our collective flow,” a server named Abigail Barella would later write on indymedia. “His ego often blocked communication.”

Andrew Hodgdon, also a server, was more outspoken. “Working for Craig was an altogether negative experience that just consumed my precious energy,” Hodgdon, a professional actor, told me. “We had to wear these stiff black button-down shirts that were tight in the collar, and Craig—he was always watching you. You were always on thin ice with him. He’d say things like, ‘I’ve told you numerous times you need to iron your shirt. And button your top button—this isn’t a sex appeal kind of place.’ I started hating my job, and others were hating it too. I said, ‘Craig, there’s some s— going down, bro.’”

Indeed there was. By midsummer, just six months after launching his business, Rosebraugh had lost almost $100,000 of his parents’ money. By his own reckoning, Calendula was mismanaged. He had too many employees, and the chef cared not a whit about finances. “He ordered anything he wanted to,” Rosebraugh recalls ruefully. “I mean, produce shipped in from all over the world, out of season. The walk-in freezer was a gold mine of exotic fruits and organic nuts.”

On July 28 Rosebraugh took a bold step: He reduced servers’ hourly wage, before tips, to $7.05 from $8.00. He also made it clear that health care benefits would be a long time coming for his employees. Manager Katharine Atkinson teed off on Rosebraugh and, she wrote on indymedia, she got nowhere: “When I told Craig that the servers were disappointed, he said, ‘Let them quit! If they don’t like it, they can work somewhere else. This isn’t a utopia, it’s a business!’”

Within two days, Rosebraugh fired Atkinson, Hodgdon, and Barella, along with one other waiter, James Horn. In turn, these four employees allied with an all-but-forgotten union, the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, who 90-odd years ago shook fear into the titans of industry. Today the Wobblies can claim only 1,000 members worldwide. In Portland, however, they have serious street cred and clout. One night in August 2004, they ambushed Rosebraugh at Calendula. Led by their union rep, Pete Beaman, the striking workers stalked up the steps of the silvery porch and demanded their jobs back. Make no mistake: This was now civil war—and Rosebraugh was steamed.

He told the strikers that they were trespassing. He refused to give the Wobblies their jobs back, and he threatened to call the police. (That’s right: the donut eaters that Rosebraugh has called “the thugs of the state.”) Then, as a coup de grâce, he made one final supremely corporate gesture: He issued a self-explanatory press release. He spent $1,650 to place, in an alternative newspaper called Willamette Week, a full-page rejoinder to the strikers, who, he said, “received nothing but patience and respect from me.” Calendula’s servers, he said, “set their own schedules and received any time off as requested….The insinuation that I sit back in my office counting stacks of money while the ‘wage slaves’ do all the work is both insulting and laughable.”

In the same issue, the newspaper named Rosebraugh “Rogue of the Week,” noting that, during the restaurant’s first two months, he made his four-block commute to work in an SUV—a Toyota 4Runner. Rosebraugh, who now drives a Honda hybrid, couldn’t quite fathom the indignation against him. “Why do they single me out?” he asked me. “They hold me up to some superhuman standard. Most people drive their car to work, don’t they? Seriously, who the f— cares what I drive?”

Calendula customers, apparently. In late September, a sign on Calendula’s door said: “Closed, owing to financial difficulties.”

EVENTUALLY, I PHONED the organizer who’d helped bring Calendula down—Pete Beaman of the Wobblies. Beaman was guarded when I told him I was writing for Inc. “Why would I want to support their capitalist agenda?” he asked me. He said he’d take my interview request to his board and get back to me. I never heard from him.

Thinking things over, I began to hone a certain respect for Craig Rosebraugh. If nothing else, the guy was willing to get down in the mud. He was tenacious.

When Rosebraugh was working with the Earth Liberation Front, he suffered the ill effects of low cholesterol. He was frequently dizzy. He hallucinated; he lost his balance. He had severe food allergies. Rosebraugh conducted over 700 media interviews, many under the hot glare of TV studio lights. He never once spoke of his illness. He stayed on message. He also wrangled, he says, with an FBI agent who conducted “psychological warfare.” After one raid, the agent left all of Rosebraugh’s papers torn up and piled in a sort of pyre in his bedroom. On top, in shreds, was an announcement for the funeral of Rosebraugh’s grandfather. Rosebraugh cleaned up the mess and kept working.

On December 12, Calendula café reopened for business. This time it had a pared-down staff of nine. Rosebraugh himself was shaping the menu and relying on his digital scale for salvation—he immediately began the weighing of scraps and monitoring of costs that he thought would save him. Soon, his employees would be shielded from his astringency by two new managers, cook Tony Hauth and waitress Allison Bagby. Hauth works off the clock an hour every day, “just because I want to see this place still going in a year,” and Bagby, who’s served at Calendula almost since it opened, has defended Rosebraugh on indymedia. “I have quit two jobs due to my bosses saying something rude to me,” she wrote. “I would leave this job too if there was any reason to.”

I’ve eaten at Calendula a number of times since the reopening. I’ve brought my parents, my daughter, and friends, and each time I’ve taken delight in telling my guests that the place was run by the unrepentant Face of Ecoterrorism. I’ve liked watching them sit there in the dim lamplight of the dining room, trying to add that one up, because in truth Calendula is an exceptionally pleasant place to eat.

Rosebraugh had contradicted himself once again: The man who’d told me, “There are no utopias” had created what he calls, in his promotional literature, “a gourmet vegan paradise.” He’d labored to attain a space that was true to the chiffony vibe of that phrase. As you eat at Calendula, you can see that he worked at it earnestly—and that some details are a bit overwrought. The mojitos, for instance—why did Rosebraugh give them this funky vegetable undertow? Really, who needs organic cilantro in a cocktail?

But that’s a minor point. Mostly, Calendula does what any restaurant must: It lulls you. It cocoons you. And so recently, on a warm night, I found myself at Calendula sipping a chocolate martini and listening to the wheedling strains of the Decemberists playing softly on the stereo. The waitress came around and, with a tattooed arm, replenished my water glass. The busperson cleared the neighboring table and delivered the young couple there—sober and Pilates-lean—a pot of chamomile tea.

Just before 10, a tall, thin man—slightly disheveled, with his shirt hanging loose—burst up the steps and into the dining room. It was Rosebraugh himself, and for maybe two seconds he stood there, amid the tables, pivoting, as though in search of lost keys. And right then I thought: What would it be like to be him, to carry a storm of conflicting ideals inside you and to feel obliged, always, to force those ideals on the world, even as others called you a jerk?

Partly, I reckoned, Rosebraugh felt proud: Calendula is now turning a slim profit most months. (It’s been accepted in Portland as part of the woodwork—as a place where, say, a stylish real estate agent might take her more earth-friendly clients.) But partly, I was sure, Rosebraugh also felt frazzled. I remembered him telling me, “When I’m working 100 hours a week, I feel guilty that I’m not doing activism.” And I remembered visiting him once for 10 minutes in his office in Calendula’s basement.

For all but a few seconds, Rosebraugh stared straight at his computer screen, manipulating a graphic image of a calendula flower. The flower would decorate a menu, and it was fulgent and lovely, in keeping with the gentle vibe of the Calendula brand. Rosebraugh sat with his back facing me, his responses terse as he dialed in on his task. He was working: His restaurant was going to succeed, even if, in succeeding, he had to embrace the very capitalist system he yearned to destroy with a war. He would succeed.

“So is there anything else you want to say?” I asked into the tense silence.

“No,” Rosebraugh said. One syllable.

I left. Rosebraugh kept working. He peered into the screen, the war bubbling on, as always, inside his head.

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Under the Sheltering Sky

The Washington Post Magazine
September 2003
Edited by David Rowell
© Bill Donahue

THE COOLEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD do not wear their baseball caps backwards or pierce their navels with diamond studs. They are old and their cool is subtle, carrying hints of wisdom and poise. Johnny Cash, Marlon Brando, Georgia O’Keeffe: We behold their weathered sangfroid and we are ineluctably intrigued.

As I was, years ago, watching the 1990 film “The Sheltering Sky.” Based on a 1949 novel of the same name by the American expat Paul Bowles (1910-1999), the movie follows three aimless Americans who land in Bowles’s adopted home, Tangier, Morocco, and wander south, only to be destroyed by primal Third World realities: thieves, mystical religion and illness. Bowles makes a cameo appearance as narrator, and, in the end, we see him watch one of the stars drift into an ancient Tangier cafe. He just stands there, motionless, an old man with white hair and rheumy gray eyes. All he says to the woman before him is, “Are you lost?” And yet somehow he embodies existential grace, and a link to a bygone era.

Bowles first lived in Tangier in 1931. During the ’50s and ’60s—when the city was controlled by nine Western nations—and for a brief time after Moroccan independence in 1956, he was the reigning spirit over a glamorous and largely gay artists’ colony. Tangier loomed then as Paris had in the ’30s. William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, the definitive novel of heroin addiction, in Tangier, tossing the manuscript pages onto the floor of his fleabag hotel as he typed (Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg helped him assemble the trampled clutter of papers). The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones showed up to hear the mesmerizing Master Musicians of Jajouka. Timothy Leary came to Tangier, too, to lead experiments using mind-expanding mushrooms, and Bowles’s novelist wife, Jane, hosted grand parties.

Jane Bowles was a lesbian whose marital bond was primarily literary, and around the time of her death, in 1973, Tangier’s colonial flavor faded. The scene fizzled, and only Bowles remained. He wandered constantly, living for a time in Sri Lanka and Mexico, but always he came back to Tangier. In old photographs he wears white canvas trousers and a benevolent grin, smoking cigarettes on a long silver stem as exotic Morocco (The camels! The adobe forts with darkened slit windows!) shimmers behind him. He knew everybody in town, and yet he always retained that analytic detachment you hear in his cold-blooded Gothic prose—in words such as these, from The Sheltering Sky: “The wind at the window celebrated her dark sensation of having attained a new depth of solitude.”

Gore Vidal once wrote that Bowles “has few equals in the second half of the twentieth century . . . [He] has glimpsed what lies back of our sheltering sky.” The Library of America last year published a 940-page compilation of Bowles’s major works. But none of the three Bowles novels that followed The Sheltering Sky—Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider’s House (1955) and Up Above the World (1966)—sold especially well, and late in life Bowles was known more as an icon than a writer. When he visited New York City in 1995, for the first time in more than four decades, there were two sold-out celebratory concerts at Lincoln Center, replete with standing ovations. His primary gift to Americans was a dream: Here was a man who flew free of the doldrums of Middle America to live with aplomb in a faraway place. I envied him. So when I was in Morocco last year with a spare week, I went to Tangier and searched for the ghost of Paul Bowles.

TANGIER IS ON THE TEMPERATE northwest coast of Africa, just 10 miles from Spain, across the Strait of Gibraltar, and washed in the breezes coming off both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But to the average Tanjawi, Europe is a distant dream. Tangier, population 600,000, is extremely poor, almost entirely Muslim, and, like many African cities, growing rapidly. Tangier is a place where you see an amputee child hunched on the sidewalk with a begging cup beside the dusty stub of his truncated leg. Much of Morocco’s homegrown hashish travels through the port here, and the quieter beaches outside of town are a prime launch point for destitute Africans who risk their lives, and pathetically seek First World fortune, by sneaking makeshift boats across the strait, toward Spain. Old movies don’t tell the whole story.

But still, I made sure that there would be a certain bohemian splendor to my Tangier visit. I stayed in the Kasbah, the mud-walled old fortress city overlooking the burgeoning metropolis, in a decrepit home rented (but not occupied) by three young American expats/artists who’d given Tangier a whirl after college, then fled. I’d met these fellows one night at a bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, and in Tangier their painter friend, Abdel-Aziz Boufrakech, picked me up at the airport.

Aziz is 41. When he pulled up in his battered Citroen station wagon, I was unshaven and ragged from seven days in the Sahara, but Aziz just laughed when he saw me. “You will like the house,” he said. “There’s hot water for showers.” Aziz had lived in Paris, L.A. and Switzerland. Now he was married and raising three children according to Muslim law, pretty much, and painting tranquil and earthy Moroccan scenes that sold well in galleries. “You are inside four walls in Tangier,” he said, “blocked. There are almost no other artists to talk to.”

We turned onto a narrow side street, and at once there was an explosion of Mediterranean color: green doorways, turquoise shutters, splashes of soft red and lavender. We parked and walked into the Kasbah, where a few hundred people live, and there the streets were 10-foot-wide footpaths that wound through the ancient mud buildings and into dimly lit tunnels that led to massive wood doors.

I stowed my bags in the Americans’ house, and then I strolled down to the Cervantes Theater, a splendid art deco building that drew international stars in Bowles’s day. The building was shuttered. I visited the Grand Hotel Villa de France, where French romantic painter Eugene Delacroix stayed in 1831 as he sketched Tangier street life. All I could see through the locked gate was the weeds in the driveway.

Finally, I went to Guitta’s Italian restaurant, a one-time beacon for expats. There were actually a few people there, most of them ancient white men dining alone. I talked to an eightyish British gentleman, who was wearing an ascot inside his bright mustard blazer, and he assured me, “There’s still a few expatriates left. You can go down the boulevard and meet them, you know.”

A broad-boned and ample old woman sat beside us, so we could see her in profile. She gazed into space, her arms crossed, her lower lip quavering slightly and her eyes burning with what I took to be an ire at the world in general.

“The matron,” the Brit said tentatively. “She knows quite a bit of the history.”

“Does she, um, speak English?”

She answered herself, without ever shifting her gaze. “I don’t give interviews anymore,” she said crisply. “And I don’t like you talking to customers, either.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“You’re finished here.”

I left.

GRADUALLY, TANGIER BLOSSOMED for me. Bowles wrote that the city had “the classical dream equipment of tunnels, ramparts, ruins, dungeons, and cliffs,” and the place seemed surreal to me, too. The streets twist over a series of seaside hills, scantly marked by signs, and often I’d find myself cracking out my map to get directions from strangers. They puzzled over the document as though it were in hieroglyphics. One man stared long and hard at the blank back of the map before shaking his head in confusion.

There are camels on the beach in downtown Tangier, and one afternoon, as I watched them pick at the grass amid some old ruins, I met a man named Omar Charif. Omar identified himself as a travel agent and said that he knew Aziz. He said he was his uncle. And beyond that, he’d been acquainted with Paul Bowles himself. “A very nice man,” Omar said. “He spoke Arabic like a Moroccan.”

Omar was 47 and wearing a green mesh baseball cap and plaid polyester trousers. Eventually he offered to show me the apartment in which Bowles lived the last two decades of his life. There are no official Bowles walking tours in Tangier.

There is not even a Bowles museum, and I was curious to see where this excursion was going. So we meandered off the beach, then up a hilly, traffic-choked street and through a market, progressing at a dawdling pace.

It is no secret that Bowles, who was gay, had a fondness for the bronze-skinned young men of Morocco. Omar told me that he was once one of Bowles’s favorites, and that he and Bowles had numerous trysts. “But that’s life,” he said with a gruff shrug. “That’s life.”

We kept walking. At one point, we crossed paths with a longhaired young German who waved curtly at Omar before rushing away. “That man,” Omar confided, “is a very famous writer.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“I can’t remember,” said Omar.

“How much longer now?” I said.

“Soon, you know—five minutes.”

Roughly half an hour later, in the blazing sun just outside Bowles’s apartment building, Omar paused at a cross light. “I am not a boy hustling you on the street,” he said, his voice raspy and insistent, more proud than desperate. “I am a guide — that is my job. And I am doing something very special for you, and afterwards, my friend”—Omar cackled nervously, then clapped me on the back—”you can do something for me. Right, my friend?”

“Right.”

We went inside and knocked on the door of apartment No. 20, and, not getting an answer, we went downstairs, where the manager’s daughter addressed us impatiently. “Mr. Paul Bowles,” she said, “he is dead, and every week 20 people still come here. Why? His books are gone; the people who knew him are gone.

Why? What do you want?”

Omar looked at me and shrugged, and then held out his hand.

THE HOUSE I WAS STAYING IN slowly filled up. By odd coincidence, several other itinerant friends of the renters wandered into town simultaneously, and at one point I was domiciled with a French painter, a Canadian documentary filmmaker, a British banker and a Moroccan photographer. We interviewed one another. The French painter said things like, “The culture in France is finished—done.” We drank a lot of beer.

Aziz kept a bemused distance from the whole scene. He did not drink because, he said, he wanted to set a good example for his children. But still he came by, evenings, in the spirit of hospitality, and we’d talk. He spoke of painting in a precise and workmanlike manner, sounding almost technical when he noted, “Matisse came here because of the light and the warm Mediterranean colors. And the colors came from the hand-embroidered clothes of the country people — the Arabs who live outside of Tangier, in the Rif Mountains. You go up there and you’d think you were in Andalusia, in Spain.”

Some days Aziz got some painting done. Other days one of his kids was sick, or he got tied up renovating one of the 10 houses he owns and rents out. He was unfazed either way, and I appreciated his long vision, his understanding that making a life as an artist is ultimately about making compromises—about taking care of the kids and the mortgage (or whatever) as you try to remember, somehow, your original burning ambitions. It was nice to come to a place so far from home, and so steeped in crazy-artiste legend, and find an artist so steady.

I KEPT HEARING STORIES about Bowles.

Abdessalam Akaaboune, a cafe owner, told me, truthfully, that Bowles persuaded the Rolling Stones to record the tune “Continental Drift” in Akaaboune’s basement. He also spoke of Bowles, age 88 and dying, being carried through the streets of the Kasbah in a plastic chair, so he could see the leader of the Jajouka masters play flute. “It was the last time he went out of his house,” Akaaboune told me. Every story I heard about Bowles depicted him not as a friend, really, but as a treasure—an aloof and inscrutable icon.

I should have expected this. Bowles’s autobiography, “Without Stopping,” was so unrevealing that Burroughs nicknamed it “Without Telling,” and I’d read that, while living, Bowles had stymied hundreds of admirers—hippies, grad students, journalists—who’d come to Tangier in hopes of communing with the master.

They were all welcome in his home, but he endured them silently, smoking hashish with a weary look on his face. “I don’t know why he comes,” he sighed to a reporter after one frequent guest left in 1991.

I can understand his disdain. I have my own doubts about the whole literary pilgrimage thing. We experience the nuance of books alone, in the mind, and what sings for us isn’t really the place that inspired the writer. Rather, it’s the place the writer invented—a place you can’t reach on a tour bus. For this reason, I have always been skeptical of guided tours to, say, the pubs of James Joyce’s Dublin.

Still, I was hopeful that in Tangier I could somehow see through Bowles’s patrician exterior and find some glimpse of the person beneath. This wasn’t happening, in part because Bowles left behind very little tangible evidence. He fathered no children and, like most nomads, he was a minimalist; he didn’t collect stuff. You’d think there’d at least be a gravestone in Tangier, but there is not. Paul Bowles’s ashes were interred near his parents’ graves in Lakemont, N.Y., in November 2000.

A man named Joe McPhillips bore the urn west from Tangier.

McPhillips, 67, is the executor of Bowles’s estate and also the headmaster of the American School of Tangier. I visited him at the school one morning. His secretary, an American, was typing on an electric typewriter, and McPhillips himself was enjoying a cigarette as he puttered about in a rumpled tweed jacket and wide-wale cords. The scion of an old Alabama family, he likened the school to his prep school alma mater, calling it “The Andover of the Mediterranean. We provide an old-fashioned education,” he explained. “Students rise when adults come in the room. They read Lord Jim and ‘Julius Caesar.’ There’s not a lot of ancillary nonsense in the curriculum.”

McPhillips arrived in Tangier in 1962, following a Princeton classmate, and caught the last chapter of the city’s halcyon era. He spoke wistfully of the “old days” when, he said, there were 100,000 Europeans in Tangier and “no traffic lights. You could walk into the Parade Bar and you knew everybody, and things were incredibly cheap,” he said. “Tangier was small and charming then, and yet it was incredibly sophisticated. You’d go over to Paul and Janie’s, and there would be Leonard Bernstein; there’d be Gore Vidal. That time will never be replaced.”

Bowles had trusted McPhillips, I knew, because McPhillips was the last guardian of an old order—and a man who bore this mantle seriously. After a few minutes, McPhillips opened the top drawer and with great care took out a plastic bag containing a passport—the last passport Bowles ever owned. It was an American passport. McPhillips handed the document to me, and then gave me a minute with the hunched and withered old man in the photo. “You know,” McPhillips said, “I asked Paul once, ‘You’ve lived outside of America so long and you’ve traveled so extensively. Do you still feel American?’ He simply said, ‘I am American. I always will be.’”

“But he lived in Morocco for most of 60 years,” I said. “Why isn’t he buried here?” McPhillips began shouting, literally screaming. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how many people asked me, ‘You’re going to lug Paul Bowles all the way back to America?’ Look, I am the executor of Paul Bowles’s estate, and it was Paul Bowles’s will to be buried in America. I can’t just go and bury Paul Bowles wherever the hell I feel like it.” McPhillips flung himself down on a couch, and then, depleted, red-faced, with a trail of smoke rising from his fist, he added, “Yes, I buried Paul Bowles in America.”

The whole performance was a bit much, but McPhillips, who directs his school’s theater program, enjoyed soliloquizing, and I enjoyed listening, so that evening I went up to his home, on Tangier’s affluent Old Mountain Road, for drinks. He kept his necktie on for the cocktail hour. “I never saw Burroughs without a tie,” he said, “and Paul, too, abhorred sloppiness. He lived within the frame, and the frame held everything together for him. If you don’t have a frame, you fly off in all sorts of directions. But inside the frame you are secure; you can observe what happens. Paul came here to observe,” McPhillips said, “and to write what he saw. He was fascinated with the exotic, and that fascination was rooted in his own New England Puritanism.”

McPhillips’s butler, Ali, came around now, with vodka tonics and a silver tray bearing Ritz crackers. Ali was a striking young man in a white waist jacket. He wore white satin gloves to deliver the food and the drinks and went barehanded at all other times. I took my drink, and then McPhillips and I went out onto the terrace, where it was dark and we could see the lights of the Moroccan coastline glittering below in the distance.

“Tangier has changed so much since Paul first arrived,” McPhillips continued, “but it is indestructible; it will always have mythical qualities. Tangier is possessed of this very intense creative force—it comes up out of the earth.”

I knew what he meant, but way up high on the mountain, that earth force of Morocco seemed, like Paul Bowles himself, so far away.

THE NEXT DAY was the first day of Ramadan. Aziz was fasting and abstaining from all drink, even water. He offered me tea when I stopped at his house, but I felt weird about taking it, so we just sat there in his airy, tile-walled living room, awkwardly stoic, trying to make conversation as his giggly 4-year-old son, Jabir, took running dives into his lap.

My plan was to leave Tangier that morning and take the train a few miles south to a popular beach. But Aziz had friends in a more distant coastal village reachable only by bus, and he said, “It is beautiful in Moulay Bousselham. Why don’t you go to Moulay Bousselham?”

That is what I ended up doing. I rode in the back of the bus, surrounded by young men who stared straight ahead, not eating, not talking, keeping the Ramadan fast. The bus wound to the edge of the city, where there were goats on the road, and then on into rolling potato fields. Almost no one spoke. They simply rode. Night fell; the fast ended. Strangers passed a sweet pastry called chebakia from seat to seat in the cramped, unlit bus. “Kul,” said the man seated beside me. “Eat.” The chebakia tasted of almonds and honey, and I looked in my guidebook and came up with “hada bnin” (this is delicious), and the man smiled and gave me another chebakia. Then the bus stopped.

A young man got on with a boombox blasting a haunting and undulating Ramadan tune and, as the bus started again, held the box to his chin and sang in high, soulful tones, his gaze cast into the distance. I could not tell which words came from the box, and which from his mouth, and I was aware suddenly of how little I understood the spiritual tides surging around me. I was not in control; I was outside the frame.

In time, of course, I would come back within the frame, back to my familiar habits of observing and writing. But right then, on the bus, I was learning how rich it is to venture into that strange territory of the mind where you are bewildered and vulnerable—lost, even. I just listened to the music.

Black Copters over Oregon

Salon
September 8, 2003
Edited by Ed Lempinen
© Bill Donahue

THE HELICOPTERS WERE INDEED BLACK, and when they came thwocking through the clear blue skies above Redmond, Ore., on the afternoon of Aug. 19, Don Berry happened to be having a slow day selling campers and fifth wheels at Courtesy RV. “We just stood there in the lot, my friend Chuck and me, watching,” he says before launching into a bit of detail that government sources will not confirm. “They were Chinook military helicopters — huge things with round noses. There were three of them, and they were moving in tight formation, lollygagging over the woods, zigzagging near [the town of] Sisters and out toward Black Butte,” some 25 miles to the northwest.

The copters were in Central Oregon, officials from the U.S. Forest Service would later note, to do reconnaissance in advance of an Aug. 21 visit to the dry, wooded region by President George W. Bush. “They were doing routine surveillance,” according to Ron Pugh, a Forest Service special agent. The president planned to speak in Camp Sherman, a little town near Black Butte, and to call, controversially, for the “thinning” of 20 million acres of fire-prone public forests.

Don Berry is detached from the fray over Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative, but as the choppers flew near Sisters that day, he gazed skyward for much of their 90-minute flight. “They came right over the top of us,” he remembers, “and we watched them land, and then I looked up at the mountains, where they’d flown.”

“Chuck,” Berry said at that point, “I hope what I’m seeing out there is a cloud.”

It was not a cloud. That afternoon, Forest Service lookouts detected high columns of smoke rising from what would soon be called the Bear Butte and Booth fires. The fires were initially about 14 miles apart. They were first noted within two hours of one another — at 1:30 p.m. and 3:23 p.m., respectively — and they quickly became sprawling infernos. Still burning, they have now merged and have eaten across nearly 90,000 acres of remote forest dominated by lodgepole pine and Douglas fir.

The “B & B” fires were first noticed 11 days after Central Oregon’s most recent lightning storm, and they are now doing battle with 2,200 soot-smeared firefighters, most of whom are camping out on the rodeo grounds near Sisters. The fires have cost taxpayers over $20 million in firefighting fees; forced hundreds of homeowners to temporarily evacuate; closed roads; and thrashed Central Oregon’s tourist economy. As yet, though, no one knows how the fires started; no one can say whether the helicopters had anything to do with the flames.

Which means that speculation is spreading like, well, wildfire. On the virtuous, leftmost edge of Oregon’s political universe, out where the arugula is organic and the coffee shade-grown, a theory is taking root. Bush’s cronies set the fires, supposedly, so as to create the perfect backdrop for the president’s speech. It’s obvious. Just look at the photo ops he got out of the fires — at the way many Oregon TV stations appointed their stories on Bush’s visit with blazing footage from the B & B fires. When Bush addressed 600 invitation-only Republicans at a resort called Sunriver on Aug. 21 (he was smoked out of Camp Sherman), he didn’t even need to allude to the B & B Complex. His pyro henchmen had already ensured that the videotape did all the talking. The trees gotta go, the pictures were saying, or every forest will burn just like this one.

The W-plays-with-matches theory emerges at a pivotal moment. Bush is now trying to rally support for a congressional bill that would give his year-old Healthy Forest Initiative some teeth. House Bill 1904 — passed by the House and soon to get a Senate hearing — would suspend environmental and judicial review of most fire-prone timber sales and would enable loggers to harvest some old growth trees that are not now federally protected. Environmentalists worry that the bill’s passage would give the President a ticket to make good on his stated hope of doubling logging in Western forests. They say they’re loath to let him market his plan by setting a couple of fires. As is common among liberals and leftists, there is much fuel for their anger — the 2000 Florida election, the erosion of civil liberties, the Iraq war. Here, environmental issues are especially important. They already hate Bush for weakening the Endangered Species Act and for derailing what they saw as a hopeful trend. Under Clinton, the Forest Service was getting greener. Now the agency is taking direction from a former timber lobbyist — Mark Rey, the undersecretary of agriculture.

Portland’s daily newspaper, The Oregonian, and Oregon Public Broadcasting have given serious coverage to the argument that Bush allies may have set the fire. But larger environmental groups such as the Oregon Natural Resources Council have shied away from it, perhaps for fear of appearing paranoid, and so the conspiracy theory may never get a full hearing outside of a few funky cafes.

Randy Wight doubts the helicopters had anything to do with the flames. Wight is a captain for the Deschutes County, Ore., Sheriff’s Office and the coordinator of the Central Oregon Arson Task Force, which is now single-handedly investigating the B & B fires — and planning to release a report on their cause next week. “I don’t have any indication that it was political arson,” Wight told me. “The only people discussing that is the media.” Wight went on to say that the fires could have been started by a lightning strike whose fire smoldered for days, held in check for a time by the rain that came with the thunder. “Humans could have ignited the fires accidentally,” he added. “We really just don’t know what started them, and at this point we’re not foreclosing any possibility.”

The task force is a 15-year-old group comprised, in part, of reps from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Oregon State Police and five local fire departments. Environmentalist Joe Keating is dubious of the group’s claims to neutrality. “The fox is guarding the chicken coop,” says Keating, the issues coordinator for the 500-member Oregon Wildlife Federation. (He is also a part-time issues coordinator for the Sierra Club.)

Keating notes that, if the fires are deemed to be human-caused, investigators will then take direction from the agency whose land is burning — in this case, the Forest Service. And, he argues, “the Forest Service has a vested interest in saying it wasn’t arson. Their boss, Mark Rey, likes Bush; he likes the Healthy Forest Initiative.”

Keating has made a solo, and as-yet unheeded, call on the FBI and the Oregon governor’s office to launch their own investigations of the B & B fires. “I smell a rat,” he says. “These fires were the perfect backdrop for Bush to talk about his forest plan.”

Keating, 60, is a former Army lieutenant and investment banker who lives near me in Portland, riding his bicycle everywhere, a fisherman’s hat askew on his sparse horseshoe of white hair. Over the years, he has helped launched Oregon’s Pacific Green Party and also headed up a “Yellow Bikes” program, which saw him scattering unlocked, donated old bicycles around Portland, so that pedestrians could hop on, gratis, and ride. He is a socially nimble fellow who has at times slipped into a gray suit and tie to lobby in Washington, D.C. But in his pursuit of fire justice, he has enlisted some rather fringy and colorful scouts to search for hard evidence. One of them is named Russ Taylor; I called him too.

“I’m backing up a logging road at the moment,” Taylor said over his crackling cell. “I’m following up on a credible lead from a woman here in Detroit, and —”

“Detroit?” I asked. Detroit is a small Oregon town over 20 miles northwest of where the B & B fires started.

“This woman,” Taylor continued, undeterred, “used to work for the Forest Service. She was the secretary for this guy who was a real 7-foot timber beast — they called him Chainsaw Dave — and her son, he was out in the woods here and he saw a young man in his 20s. This is way out in the middle of Bumfuck, Egypt, and the young man was wearing a blue, lined fleece jacket. Now, I’ve been around pilots and that’s what they wear.” Taylor alleged that the pilot was a Bush operative, and that he touched down to set fires.

“But what difference does a fire in Detroit make?” I asked.

“You make it look like there’s a pattern,” Taylor explained. “You set a fire here, you set a fire there, and then everybody just says, ‘Oh, it’s just a dry day. The woods are burning all over the place.’

When I remained unconvinced, Taylor continued emphatically: “Look, we can’t give you a smoking gun on a silver platter. I’m sorry, but if you’re a real investigative reporter, you’ll need to do some digging around. You’ll need to go out to Sisters yourself.”

He was right, of course. I packed and got in the car.

The drive east from Portland, over Mount Hood to Sisters, 160 miles away, is essentially a journey from green, fecund lushness into a tinder box. You ride up through the rain shadow of the Cascades, and then, soon after you begin rolling down the east flank of Hood, the grass by the roadside becomes tawny and wispy. The smell of sage is pungent, and the woods are piled with the downed trunks of spindly, brittle dead trees. Here and there you see stands of completely charred forests: naked black trees straight and limbless as telephone poles.

Like much of the American West, Oregon has felt the ill effects of Smokey Bear and his 50-plus year campaign to tame nature and its inevitable wildfires. Though the Forest Service now manages “controlled burns,” many long-suppressed blazes are erupting with a coiled vengeance. Hundreds of thousands of forested acres have burned in Oregon over the past five years. House Bill 1904, co-sponsored by Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., is a direct response to what he calls “catastrophic wildfires.” It’s also a sort of litmus test in ever-evolving Central Oregon.

The region, which encompasses Bend, population 52,000, and six or eight much smaller burghs scattered across the western fringe of Oregon’s expansive high desert, is emblematic of the new American West, where, mountain bikers, vegans and tourists commingle with rock-ribbed loggers and ranchers. It’s a region where the ham and eggs breakfast has been supplanted, in large part, by fresh bagels and cappuccino. The residents get along, mostly; they tend to refrain from frothing on political matters. But a plain fact is that the old stalwarts generally regard HB 1904 as a cool breeze of common sense. The newcomers and their allies tend to see the bill as a manifesto for butchery. They’re hoping to find a cigarette lighter with a “W” on it.

Hoping against hope, maybe. Forest arson is a damnably difficult crime to trace. There are no witnesses, typically, and the evidence burns. Ron Pugh, who also serves as an investigator for Central Oregon’s Arson Task Force, estimates that his group catches fire starters “less than 5 percent of the time,” and he notes that the Booth fire may prove uncommonly tough. The wind has shifted over the ignition point two or three times and the evidence, if such exists, has been quite thoroughly cooked and recooked.

Once I pulled into Sisters, population 1,080, and became acclimated to the smoky haze hanging in the cloudless sky there, I had little choice but to begin my digging at the local organic bakery/cafe, a place called Angeline’s. I bought a gluten-free muffin and then wandered back to the green grass of the patio and spoke with the members of a Sisters band called the Blue D’Arts, who were setting up to play an evening of acoustic folk.

“You’d think it wouldn’t be possible,” said the D’Arts’ lanky guitarist Dennis McGregor, “that Bush would start a fire just to be expedient. Would he really that be that deceptive, that cruel? Yeah, that’s how he does everything — the election, for instance.”

An hour or so later, McGregor was inciting the crowd. “Was it a brush fire or a Bush fire?” he crowed from the stage. “Who started the fire?”

“Bush!” The response was unanimous, and rather spirited. Angeline’s has a beer and wine license. By dusk, in fact, there were about 50 people sipping away in the cool evening air. I wandered among them. Several folks spoke of seeing three Marine One helicopters flying over the now-burnt areas early on the afternoon of Aug. 19. “They were flying so low, it was scary,” bartender Karly Lusby told me.

Up the street at a bar called Bronco Billy’s, a somewhat schnookered source, speaking on the promise that he would remain anonymous, told me that a Forest Service lookout spoke of the copters over his radio — and then heard his boss say, “You didn’t see that.” The story echoed something I’d read in an e-mail Russ Taylor forwarded to me — an anonymous note about a “guy … working in the woods” who suddenly found his cell phone inoperable, the signal scrambled, as the copters flew overhead.

I wanted something a little more solid, so I went back to Angeline’s and spoke to co-owner Henry Rhett, who, I’d been told, had the skinny on some timing devices supposedly found near the spot where the Booth fire began. “I feel sheepish even mentioning it,” he told me, “because what I heard was like fifth-hand.”

I decided, at this juncture, that I needed a drink. I ordered a Mirror Pond ale and then, luckily, found someone who could elucidate the rumors swirling around me. Bonnie Malone, 56, is a chiropractor/social activist who is arguably the dean of Sisters’ liberal community. (The Chamber of Commerce named her “Citizen of the Year” for 2002.) “People here are scared of what’s going to happen if House Bill 1904 passes,” she said. “Timber companies have stolen from the woods near here before.”

Malone noted that many Sisters residents still remember Layton and Bartlett, a Bend logging firm whose principals were, in 1990, found guilty of illegally cutting 1,800 trees — federally protected old-growth — about 10 miles south of Sisters. James W. Layton and Frederick W. Bartlett each drew 18 months in federal prison.

Now the loggers are “after our old-growth again,” Malone said. “It’s hard not to be skeptical of a forest plan that bypasses environmental review. Why do we have to cut these trees down so fast, without even considering the facts? Didn’t we just rush into the Iraq war like that?”

Malone wore a denim jacket and peace symbol earrings, and as she leaned toward me and spoke, her manner was quiet, concerned. She took pains to convince me that Sisters was not split asunder by forest politics. “Most of my friends are Republicans,” she said, and then she pointed me toward the most ardent among them.

John Zapel, 39, was reading a book on the aerospace industry when I met him the next day in the vinyl-upholstered booth of a Sisters restaurant called the Gallery. “I’m a nerd,” he told me. “I’m the guy who carried a briefcase in high school.” Pale-complected with sandy blond hair and glasses, Zapel ran a logging company until last year, when he sold his equipment and became, reluctantly, a logger for hire and a part-time lecturer on topics like “fuel load reduction” in dry forests.

“It was those guys who never take showers that drove me out of the business,” he said. “Earth Liberation Front types. For 10 years, I got vandalized constantly. The last time they did $420,000 worth of damage to my harvester. They burnt it to a crisp and then they wrote all over the cab: ‘Stop Killing Trees.’” Zapel showed me some pictures of the ruined machinery. “The lunatic fringe does exist,” he said, “and that’s the first place I’d look now. It’s a good bet that these fires were set by ELF or some goofy thing like that. Consider their track record — the apartment building they burned in San Diego, that ski lift at Vail.”

I couldn’t fathom why enviros would burn trees.

“The president’s coming and they believe in disruption of process. They’re saboteurs.” Zapel stabbed a fork at his french fries. His right hand was missing two fingers, thanks to an ax. “Eugene is just two hours away,” he reminded me, “and that’s the premier bastion of the whole anarchist movement.”

Eventually, Zapel and I stepped outside, onto the sidewalk. The smoky haze was still there, and the sight made him angry. “The most disgusting thing to me is that this didn’t need to happen,” he said. “We could’ve gone in there and thinned. We could’ve reduced the fuels on those forests. But now they’re gone, and for the next 40 years we’re staring at a Holocaust. That’s sad for everybody.” Back in Portland, I talked one last time with Joe Keating, of the Oregon Wildlife Federation, and his scout Russ Taylor. We met for morning coffee, and Taylor, a 50-something freelance photographer, showed up at the cafe wearing a white straw Stetson. In his arms, he bore an aerial photograph he’d taken of a forest ravaged by clear-cuts. “The pilot who flew me that day died a very mysterious death soon after the photo was taken,” he said. “His plane crashed just after takeoff, and there were no mechanical problems.”

“Russ,” Keating implored in soothing tones, “Russ.”

“Yeah, I’m one of those conspiracy theorists,” Taylor continued, “and this goes real deep for me. It goes back to when a logging truck ran over my dog when I was 4. It goes back to when I was 8 and a bunch of redneck kids stole the hunting knife my father gave me as he was dying.”

Keating had both elbows on the table now, and he was cradling his bald head in his hands, his brow wrinkled as he looked down at a newspaper. Here was a man trying to do something very old-school and American (it was Thomas Jefferson, remember, who championed “unremitting vigilance”), and yet he was finding himself mixed up with what he gently called “loose cannons and wing nuts.” What on earth enabled him to soldier on?

Optimism and chipper resolve. “We want to get to the bottom of this quickly,” he said, “before the trees are all gone, and I’ll tell you, if that report comes out and it says the fires were not arson, then I’ll scream and yell. Then I’ll bring in the Sierra Club and all the other big groups and we’ll say, ‘This is exactly why we called for an independent investigation.’ If they say it is arson, then I ask questions: ‘Are you considering political arson? What is your time frame?’ If the smell increases, I increase.”

Keating grinned. “These fires are my favorite thing to talk about right now,” he said, “but I gotta go.” He tapped his newspaper, rolled now, against the table one time and then he stood up, a sturdy old guy in a T-shirt with a picture of an artichoke on it, and he strolled away down the street toward his office. His campaign to “shine the light of truth” on the planet’s most powerful political figure was still on.

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Life in Limbostan

Mother Jones
September 2003
Edited by Tim Dickinson
© Bill Donahue

THE WHOLE TIME I WAS IN LA CIUDAD AUTÓNOMA DE CEUTA, one of Spain’s last two enclaves in North Africa, a scrap of music kept insinuating its way into my mind: “El Himno de la Santísima Virgen de Africa,” a military march song. I heard it first in the dimly lit basement of Ceuta’s Legion Museum, on a quiet afternoon when there was no one about but me and the docent, an older, mustachioed legionnaire who was obliquely trailing me as I regarded various bloodstained Spanish flags, a few helmets, and a velvet-lined case displaying a sword owned by Spain’s 20th-century dictator, Francisco Franco. Suddenly the brass section crashed fortissimo over the loudspeakers. The sweet, churchy smell of votive candles hung in the air, and the legionnaire stood at attention—until, eventually, I asked him for directions to a renowned plaque bearing a bronze set of footprints.

“If you wish to see the feet of the Franco, ” he said in English, pointing east, “march 45 minutes this way, directly.”

I wandered slowly, instead, into the center of Ceuta, a town of 76,000 that is home to one of Spain’s largest military bases. I found a United Colors of Benetton shop and a Roma Perfumería. The sidewalks, washed daily, were gleaming, and around me Orthodox Jews bearing cell phones wove past ethnic Moroccans in stylish jellabas. I was in one of Africa’s most modern and ethnically diverse cities, and yet that archaic tune kept pounding away in my skull.

There is something absurd about Ceuta, which sits on a peninsula that juts into the Strait of Gibraltar 10 miles from Europe. In July 2002 Ceuta made international news when an uninhabited 30-acre island roughly a mile offshore—Perejil, as the Spanish call it—was occupied by six Moroccan soldiers for six days. The island is useless, except to the goats who nibble the parsley there, but Ceutis were nonetheless outraged. “They should let the legionnaires at them,” fumed one border guard. In the end, the Spanish army stormed the island in helicopters. It captured the Moroccans without bloodshed and then reclaimed dominion over the scattering goats.

But I was in Spanish Morocco to ponder a darker absurdity. Since the mid-1990s, Ceuta and Spain’s other African enclave, Melilla, population 69,000, have been magnets for immigrants—Moroccans, primarily, but also sub-Saharan Africans and even Iraqis, Turks, and Sri Lankans—who gather here, at the “Gateway to Europe,” in hopes of gaining permission to sail across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain’s Iberian Peninsula and the European Union’s first-world job market.

After hundreds of illegal immigrants descended upon Ceuta in 1997, the Spanish government and the European Union rimmed the city with a pair of parallel five-mile-long, 10-foot-high cyclone fences topped with razor wire. But they kept coming, shredding their skin on the fence, clinging to the underside of trucks crossing the border, and even swimming into the city. An estimated 2,400 immigrants made it into Ceuta last year. A few were children who struggled in from Morocco. Many were Moroccan adults who were immediately deported. The rest were non-Moroccans—men in their 20s, mostly—who quickly found themselves in a bizarre legal limbo.

You can go to the Spanish mainland only if you apply, and if you apply—and let the authorities know your name and your country of origin—you are liable to be sent back home. To avoid this fate, many immigrants destroy their identity papers and then notify the police of their arrival. They give the cops a name, perhaps a fake one, and then wait, paradoxically, in hopes of being expelled from Ceuta.

Expelled immigrants, in turn, are shipped on public ferries, to Algeciras, Spain—just across the strait—where they’re released and told to leave Europe within 15 days or face arrest. Almost invariably, they stay longer, harvesting olives, hammering nails, washing dishes—performing the menial, underpaid tasks that Europe’s aging population can’t (or chooses not to) shoulder.

As many as 1.6 million newcomers stream into the European Union every year, and many Europeans are clamoring to halt the inux. In the wake of September 11, the zeal is directed most intently at Muslims. The French irted with electing the National Front’s Jean Marie Le Pen as president in 2002, in large part because he pledged to stop North Africans from “menacing” white people. And at a recent summit, the European Union’s leaders agreed to impose trade penalties on nations that refuse to repatriate illegal immigrants.

The quality of mercy is in particularly short supply in Ceuta, where scores of young men are always wandering the street, forbidden to work. The Spanish government keeps them in dire suspense. “No one ever knows when they will get the papers,” says Paula Domingo, a nun with Colegio de las Adoratrices, one of a handful of humanitarian groups that work with Ceuta’s immigrants. The only other way out of limbo is dangerous: traveling at night in a cramped smuggler’s boat. When the boat nears Europe, you jump out and swim. Roughly 3,000 emigrants have died on the Strait of Gibraltar over the past five years. Most who make it into Ceuta elect to wait here, hopefully.

CEUTA IS A SMALL PLACE—a hectic, hilly coil of serpentine streets speckled by the odd verdant cow pasture. I probably could have taken the whole realm in by myself, but I decided instead to hire a translator, who doubled as my guide. Raquel Benítez was 21, a seventh-generation Ceuti and a soldier’s daughter who was recently back from university in England. She was no fan of the 20,000 Spanish-born Moroccans who reside legally in Ceuta. They drive, to her mind, like “a mad mental person escaped from a fucking psychiatric ward.” But she nonetheless drove me to Ceuta’s Temporary Stay Center for Immigrants, a $3.7 million facility that the Spanish government recently built to house the luckiest 400 of the 800 immigrants stalled in Ceuta on any given day. (The rest sleep in the woods, or wherever else they find shelter.)

The center is a hilltop cluster of concrete-block buildings: an office, an infirmary, a few dormitories abutting a basketball court. I met a man from Pakistan, 33-year-old Mahmood Sajid. With a distant, brooding look in his eye, he told me that he had borrowed $2,300 to come to Ceuta in a cargo ship after his fruit business failed and his children—ages one, two, and three—were in danger of starving. “I was on the ship 45 days,” he said, “in the hull. It was too crowded to move. We didn’t know where we were going. I worried about my children. They are staying with my friend, but he is poor, too. Maybe he feeds them; maybe he doesn’t.

“I’ve been here three months. I call my wife once and she says, ‘I have no clothes for the children. Winter season is coming.’ I cannot do something for them. Why? We don’t understand what the Spanish government is doing to us. Why must we stay here? At night I weep for my children.”

I noticed Raquel’s eyes welling up as Sajid spoke, but after we left, she caught herself, saying, “They all have pity stories, but they’re not so pure as they want you to believe.” She told me how once, two years ago, two immigrants hijacked her bicycle. Then she took me to the police station, to show me the dents that immigrant vandals had made in the cruisers, by pelting them with stones. “The illegal kids are the worst,” said one officer. “You feel sorry for them the first time, but then they throw stones at your windshield and you don’t feel pity anymore.”

Soon, we left for a pebbly beach where we found a group of middle-aged Spanish women playing bingo on towels beneath the fading Mediterranean sun. “The king of Morocco should feed his people, especially the children,” said Maika Bustamante, a voluble woman who was calling the numbers. “Their poverty is their problem. They have to solve it!” As Bustamante spoke (and played three bingo cards simultaneously), the Rif Mountains of Africa loomed rocky and green in the distance. General Franco made his name in these hills in the 1920s, back when Spain controlled a large slice of northern Morocco. In the War of the Rif, Franco helped suppress Moroccan rebels bent on independence. That independence was ultimately granted, in 1956, but Franco did retain two tiny footprints in Africa—Ceuta and Melilla. These slivers of land had been under constant Spanish control since the 16th century, and Franco wanted them for strategic reasons. In the middle of Ceuta, still, there is a moat surrounded by 40-foot-high stone walls. Soldiers have been crouching behind these walls, vigilant for enemies on the Strait of Gibraltar, for nearly a millennium.

Many in Ceuta still hold a soft spot in their hearts for El Caudillo. Indeed, in 1999 Franco’s populist heirs briefly won control of Ceuta’s city government. The reactionary Independent Liberal Group (GIL) prevailed with a campaign calling Ceuta “a ghetto of immigrants” that must reclaim its glorious past as a “fortress city.”GIL resolved to wage battle against Ceuta’s “bad things: drugs, unemployment, delinquency, robbery.” But in late 2000 a judge in Madrid indicted Ceuta’s GIL governor for misappropriating public funds. The Popular Party—still right-wing but more moderate—swept the following election.

Ceuta’s hardliners took another hit in 1999 when Morocco’s newly crowned king, Mohammed VI, fixed his eyes on Ceuta and Melilla, vowing that Morocco would reclaim these cities. Last year’s tiny invasion of Perejil was seen by many Spanish Ceutis as a shot across the bow—a warning of things to come. “We thought things were going to explode,” Raquel told me. “We didn’t know if the next bullet was going to come from a Moroccan soldier—or from a Muslim right here in Ceuta.”

Raquel held that, within Ceuta’s Muslim population, there were certain militants who were loyal to the Moroccan king. While it is true that Ceuta’s Muslims are, for the most part, quite poor and sorely underrepresented on the police force and in City Hall, I couldn’t find one who wanted Ceuta assimilated into Morocco. Even Abselam Hamadi, the president of Al Bujari, a Muslim advocacy group, had a picture of the Spanish king hanging over his desk. The reason was simple: Spain is, per capita, 12 times wealthier than Morocco. Hamadi also pointed to new signs of racial tolerance in Ceuta: Arabic is now taught in the schools, and the city is unearthing and restoring a brick village that dates from the 13th century. “In that time,”Hamadi told me, wistfully, “there was convivance. The Muslims, Christians, and Jews all lived in harmony.” Raquel and I drove past the village ruins, which were just a few dun-colored bricks poking out of the ground, and then stepped into Our Lady of Africa, a Catholic church, and watched as a slow parade of young men trickled into the rectory. There was a sad fellow who needed new shoes; a guy who wanted to photocopy his only document, a birth certificate folded into a small, wrinkled clump; and then, finally, a rather sprightly Nigerian—20-year-old Prince Nelson Odiu—who wrung his clasped hands with a piety that strained belief before sinking to his knees and beseeching the aid of Joseph Béjar, the priest. “Father,” he said, “there is a problem. I sleep outside, father. And also I am a footballer. I am trying to get with a club. Pray for me, father. I believe that, if you pray, we will all be blessed.” Odiu raised his bowed head. For good measure, he made the sign of the cross.

Father Béjar addressed him in broken English. “You are very good actor, “he said, and for a moment the pall in the room lifted, and everyone laughed.

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, we kept running into Odiu on the street. He told us his story. His father, a tribal king in Nigeria’s Edo state, had been killed by political rivals. His sister was murdered a week later. “I knew I was next, “he said. He fled to Casablanca and lived in Morocco for five months, begging for food, until a Moroccan friend drove him into Ceuta. “I can work in Spain,” Odiu said. “I’m a strong man.”

Odiu had been in Ceuta just five days when we met. He said that maybe he would just skip waiting for expulsion papers and cross the strait right away, in a smuggler’s Zodiac. I figured he was just being blustery. Crossing the strait was a desperate gesture, and Odiu seemed, well, boundlessly hopeful. Odiu slept in an abandoned car in a weedy and garbage-strewn gulch on a hill overlooking downtown, and one afternoon he and his somber friend—fellow Nigerian Feliz Osagia, 30—took us down to the car. They showed us how they draped it at night with corrugated cardboard to keep out the cold and the rain, and then Osagia, who is soft-spoken and balding, stood uncomfortably close to me and said, “I have been sleeping in this car for three months. How long am I supposed to sleep in this car? They will not let us work here; they will not give us the papers. We pray to God that we can leave. This is not a place to stay.”

I repeated these words later that day to Luis Vicente Moro, a Popular Party appointee who has been in charge of all of Ceuta’s federal matters, including immigration, since 1998. He told me, “The Moroccan border is open. They can leave whenever they want.” I suggested that some immigrants didn’t have the money and mentioned, by way of example, Mahmood Sajid, the man I’d met at the Temporary Stay Center. Moro said, “The Pakistani people are sent lots of money from Europe and Pakistan. You should go talk to Western Union about this.”

Moro leaned back in his beige easy chair, which sat beside a handsome grandfather clock. “We cannot stop them from coming, “he said. “It’s mathematically impossible. But there’s not much I can do to make their future more certain. They can apply for political asylum, but Madrid has to study each case. If these people come from countries where there is political unrest, they are eligible.”

Moro told me that, of the 200 people who applied for asylum in the first 10 months of 2002, 12 had succeeded. Then he limned Spain’s new “Foreigners Law,” passed by his party. It forbids illegal immigrants to work, demonstrate, strike, or form associations. (Spain’s opposition party, the Socialists, regard the law as barbaric and propose allowing a sizable quotient of immigrants from each developing nation to be naturalized as Europeans each year.) “We cannot accept 100,000 people into Spain every year,” Moro said. “We have 1.5 million unemployed Spanish people, and Spanish housing and education law respects Spaniards, not foreigners. That’s just the way the law is.”

I DID NOT SEE PRINCE ODIU again until my final night in Ceuta, and then his optimism was shaken. His friend Feliz Osagia had been beaten up, twice. “We were standing on the sidewalk near our car,” Odiu explained, “and these Moroccan guys drove by, fast. Feliz said, ‘Slow down,’ and this made the guy angry. He goes and gets nine of his friends and they say, ‘This is Moroccan land. Get out of here. Nik nafsak fi ra’s abuk!’”[Arabic for "Fuck you in your father's head!"]

They pummeled Osagia until, eventually, Sister Paula took him to the hospital. Then, when Osagia returned two hours later, the Moroccans jumped on him and rained him with stones until, Odiu told me, “he could not talk or move his fingers.”

There was no police report, but in the morning Odiu showed me the blood. There were two dark trails of viscous spatter on the pavement. I immediately went looking for Osagia and found him in the church. His face was swollen and, on his forehead and hand, there were fresh bandages that shone brilliantly white against his black skin. He spoke thickly, in a daze. “I am tired of this place,” he said. “Being in this place is not living for me. I have a brother in Madrid. I want to see him. If they just give me the papers to leave this place, I will be happy.”

Two weeks later, I called Ceuta, wondering what had become of Feliz Osagia and Prince Nelson Odiu. I reached Father Béjar on his cell phone and briey, struggling against the language barrier and a bad transatlantic connection, we spoke. “They left for the peninsula, without papers,” he told me. “On a small boat, I think. I don’t know where they are now. I don’t know how they are going to eat.”

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Wrestling with Democracy

The Washington Post Magazine
July 7, 2002
Edited by David Rowell
© Bill Donahue

HERE THEY COME NOW, THE PILGRIMS from Nickerson High School in tiny Nickerson, Kan.: 14 seniors, beef-fed and brawny and carrying cell phones; the eager-eyed teacher; and one weary, flat-footed father who is wearing a baseball cap that says “Kansas.” Here they come, shambling through the corridors of the Capitol, shuffling over the marble, past the statues and paintings, right out onto the wide-open floor of the House, where the carpet is royal blue and the air suddenly hushed.

“Have a seat,” says the kindly twentysomething congressional aide, who is a native of Kansas himself. “Please have a seat.”

They sit, and then their congressman, Jerry Moran, a Republican from Hays, comes into the room and says, “I represent you and your families.” He says that he goes back to Hays every weekend, to escape Washington’s hustle and bustle, and then he directs their gaze to the gallery, from which, in 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists shot up the House chamber. In unison they turn to the right and look up so that their faces align in studious profile.

There are 10 boys and four girls. Both of Nickerson’s football captains are here, as is the boys’ soccer star, Jake Easter; the boys’ basketball phenom; the homecoming queen; the head cheerleader; a yearbook editor; and 6-foot-4, 305-pound Mitchell Baldwin, who is bereft of athletic skills and straggling as a student but nonetheless a bona fide social kingpin. They are all looking up.

Teenagers have been coming to Washington to pay homage like this for over a century, and today more than a million students between the ages of 12 and 18 travel to the District on school trips each year. But the group clustered here, in the padded brown leather congressional seats, seems particularly worthy of the title “We, the People.”

These students have flown 1,200 miles to listen to a congressman who is a lot like them—a Farm Belt guy, a conservative homebody—in a nation’s capital newly enchanted with the values Dorothy so savored in Kansas: earnestness, steadfastness, love of the land. They have come to Washington to take in the shrines to their own republic. Over a stretch of five days in late April, they will visit 25 nationally famous sites, unfazed by the fear of terrorists that caused a drop of more than 25 percent in student tourism to Washington this school year. In fact, they will scarcely mention September 11.

Eventually, the aide points toward a desk on the floor. A bullet fired by one of the Puerto Ricans hit it that day in 1954. The hole is still there. You can examine it—and now the Nickerson students do, huddling around the desk, stooping and squinting.

“Cool!” says one kid, running his finger over the hole.

“Bad!” says Mitchell.

Ideally, Mitchell would go on to muse on the current quest for Puerto Rican independence, or on Jefferson’s maxim that a revolution only lasts 15 years. But he doesn’t. He’s got a lot on his mind—and post-colonial hegemony is pretty far down on his list. Graduation is just 17 days away, and Mitchell still has to finish a paper on immigration; if he doesn’t, he won’t walk. And then there’s his girlfriend, who wants a commitment. (Adriann Chaffin, 17, is a junior at a rival high school.) There’s his job at Kmart, too. Mitchell plans to keep working in the lawn and garden department after graduation, but this winter Kmart announced plans to close nearly 300 stores. Will his be next?

Amid the pillars outside the House chamber, Mitchell’s focus drifts. Apropos of nothing, he begins reciting lines from the comic movie “Joe Dirt,” which he’s watched at least 20 times. “Life’s a garden,” he says. “Dig it!”

We climb some stairs and then step into the gallery of the Senate, to find the floor nearly empty save for Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, both Democrats. Like every other student on this trip, Mitchell is sympathetic to the Republican Party. When we were looking at a picture of Hillary Rodham Clinton earlier, he glowered and said, “That woman is evil.” But now, as her ideological sisters hold the floor, he doesn’t rile. No, he just settles his chin on his elbow and nods off, waking only when Boxer mentions a chemical called MTBE. “I thought they were talking about MTV,” Mitchell gripes. Then he shakes his head in dismay and goes back to sleep.

I MET MITCHELL BALDWIN in Nickerson the night before he left for his trip to D.C. He lives with his father, a prison guard, and his stepmom, a nurse, in a modest gray farmhouse, and when I arrived there at 10 p.m., seven people were gathered in the living room to see him off. Among them were his stepbrother Harm, an out-of-work welder; Harm’s girlfriend; and their baby, Harm Jr., who whimpered now and then over the sound of the movie—”Speed”—playing on the large color television. “My father wanted to be present,” Mitchell told me, “but he’s on a fishing trip.”

We talked, as it turned out, about the Washington Redskins. The Baldwins have been huge fans ever since Mitchell’s dad visited Washington in 1989. “They’re pretty horrible, but we love ‘em,” said Mitchell’s stepbrother Marcus, who’s 19. “On game days,” Mitchell said, “there’s like 50,000 people in the house. Dad’ll get real tense and then he’ll go out on the porch to smoke, and we’ll have to open the blinds for him so he can watch the game through the window.”

There are no sports bars in Nickerson, population 1,194. In fact, there is not much at all. The main street, four lanes wide, is a vast prairie wind tunnel that might, at any given moment, be empty, except for a few parked cars and a stray, scuttling soda can. Traffic is light, even when locals are commuting to and from the farm-equipment and aerospace factories in the nearby city of Hutchinson, population 40,900. The biggest weekly event is the covered-dish supper that a group of white-haired “single ladies” (that’s what they call themselves) host at the community center each Tuesday. There once was a newspaper in Nickerson, and a high school, a college, a movie theater, three hotels, and a dry goods store. But that was back when small farms were still thriving in the United States. Today, only the high school remains—a stolid brick building on the south edge of town.

Three hundred sixty-five students go to Nickerson High. About a third are from Hutchinson, another third are from suburban South Hutchinson. But the small-town spirit of Nickerson prevails. On the wall of his sparsely appointed office, principal Kevin Abbott has a framed sign rendered in needlepoint. It reads, “There has to be a leader who is not afraid to be controversial and accepts the brunt of criticism.”

In his four-year tenure, however, Abbott has provoked no burning controversies. What’s distinguished him is that he’s hired many driven young teachers, including the leader of the Washington trip, Gary McCown. McCown is 38, 6-foot-1, and still possessed of the powerful build that once made him an all-conference punter at Hastings College in Nebraska. His handshake is just shy of bone-crunching, and he is a disciple of self-improvement guru Tony Robbins, the chief purveyor of “the science of peak performance.” In one government class I visited, McCown digressed to discuss both diet (”research says you should eat 17 times a day”) and the virtues of taking a daily nap so as to “increase your efficiency by 35 percent.” Back home, his 9-year-old son, Chandler, had just finished reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.

A native of Venango, Neb., McCown aspires to be a superintendent, and he had his resume out for a principal job at another high school in Kansas. He’d arranged the Washington trip himself, eschewing tour providers, so as to keep the cost down to $420 per student, airfare included. “We need to open young people’s eyes to what government does,” he explained. “A trip like this will help put faith back in America.”

And also afford a little fun. All spring, McCown had promised that the D.C. trip would culminate with a wrestling tournament among the students: He too would grapple, live and in technicolor, at the hotel. “We’ll clear the floor for some WWF-style action,” he said. “There will be sweat and a little bit of blood.”

I figured there was no way McCown would open himself up to that kind of liability, no way that in the 21st century a schoolteacher would do something so exuberantly un-PC. But I didn’t know Kansas, and what I would learn, over the next several days, is that the Kansas of American myth is alive and well. It’s a state of mind, really, an old conservatism that lingers despite the emergence of gay-friendly nightclubs in Wichita and places to see hip-hop and funk in Lawrence. It’s a belief that men should not flinch, that all good people get married and honor their family, that the American flag should be saluted, and that even big-city folks could be nice, if they were just allowed a little fresh air. Yes, rock-ribbed Kansas still flourishes, and real Kansans take it with them wherever they go.

One of the first places we visited in greater D.C. was Arlington National Cemetery. At the Tomb of the Unknowns, the soccer star, Jake Easter, and I watched as the white-gloved, gun-bearing military guards paced with slow, ramrod precision on the long stone plaza between us and the elegant tomb. One guard approached the audience and commanded us to remain silent out of respect.

Then Jake slipped away through the crowd—a nimble, rangy kid in shorts and white K-Swiss sneakers—and played a prank on McCown. With a friend, he hopped onto a shuttle bus and broadcasted ominous remarks back to the group over a walkie-talkie brought from Hutchinson: “We’re on our way to the airport. We’ll see you back in Kansas, over.” McCown was incensed. “Don’t leave me like that,” he implored the rest of the students. “That’s not fair to me. I’m responsible. If he does it again, I’m sending him home.”

Jake is the son of a prominent Hutchinson businessman; he lives on the edge of a golf course. He was kicked off the track team once, for chewing tobacco, and he likes to drive his ‘99 Chevy pickup so fast that he already has eight speeding tickets. Last summer, on the Nickerson High trip to Europe, he downed some vodka and then danced, inebriated, on an elevated platform in a Madrid discotheque.

In school, Jake is an honors student, and very involved. After September 11, he helped earn more than $250 for the search and rescue efforts at the World Trade Center by making flaglike lapel pins out of beads. But Jake seemed poised to turn this trip into a raucous party. McCown was not about to let that happen, so when we found Jake, in the visitors center, McCown took him into a remote corner to chastise him. From the get-go, Jake was smirking, but McCown’s scowl eased after a minute or so, and when he emerged from the corner, he had already put the skirmish behind him. Soon, he was back to making taunting remarks about the upcoming wrestling tourney. “Mitchell,” McCown said, “lift up your shirt. Show us your pipes.”

“McCown thinks he’s so tough,” Mitchell said, “but he’s going down.”

TRAVEL MADE MITCHELL REFLECTIVE. On the plane, he patted the vacant seat beside him and invited me over. Then he said, “It’s time to get away for a while. My girlfriend, she wants to get married—have babies and all that. Soon as I graduate, she wants me to move in with her and her parents. I don’t know about that, although they are loaded.

“She’s a beautiful girl,” Mitchell continued. “She’s got a lot of common sense. But she gets real jealous. That’s what this is about.” Mitchell twisted his neck so I could see the huge welt there: purple with tiny white teeth marks. “She gave me this hickey and she told me, ‘That’s so you don’t go and find anybody else.’”

Mitchell fidgeted with the tray table. “My parents got divorced 12 years ago,” he said, “and they’re still fighting. I don’t want my kids to have to go through that. I want to be financially well-off before we start having kids. And, you know, I always promised my dad I’d come live with him.” Mitchell told me that until he was a sophomore, he lived with his mom, near Lawrence; he talked with his dad on the phone. The dialogue between them deepened when he was 9. His father gave him a Washington Redskins jacket for Christmas. “He’d call me and say, ‘Did you watch the game?’”

Gradually, the conversation widened. Mitchell spent summers with his father, and one year—after eighth grade, when Mitchell was charged with a misdemeanor, for shoplifting—he and his dad spent 10 weeks feverishly amassing one of central Kansas’s largest collections of vintage Coleman lanterns. “My dad likes having me around,” Mitchell said. “He’d be real mad if I moved out.” Mitchell stared out the window, at the clouds below, for a moment and then he conceded that his girlfriend might be real mad if he didn’t move out. “But I think I can handle the situation,” he said. “I wear the pants.”

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF THE TRIP, the four girls sequestered themselves in their hotel room, primping, putting on makeup for almost two hours. The group was going to an opera, “Salome,” at the Kennedy Center. The tickets were $63 apiece. McCown had factored this lavish expense into the sparse trip budget, reasoning, “This might be the only time these students ever see an opera. They might not enjoy it, but they’ll be exposed to it.” He’d chosen “Salome” in part because the show offered some sizzle. It culminates with the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” in which the beguiling Salome does an elaborate striptease for her stepfather, King Herod.

The girls recognized that this was not the sort of thing one sees often in Hutchinson. When they emerged in the hotel lobby—together, from a single elevator car—they were the picture of Midwestern glamour. Bailey Basinger, the homecoming queen, wore a chiffony black dress, a black wrap of the same sheer material, and a silver necklace that cut a plunging V on her neck. Chelsey Curry, the yearbook editor, wore high heels and a purple velvet evening gown with a long slit up the side.

We sat fairly high in the balcony, so when the lights went down, the drama beneath us—baroque and in German—seemed remote, like a TV playing in the corner with the volume turned low. It all had to do with Salome’s obsessive, unrequited passion for the imprisoned John the Baptist. She gripped the holy man’s face as he lay there, chained, and trilled on and on about his splendid ivory skin. At one point, Mitchell leaned toward me and whispered, “How long do these things last?”

I woke him up for the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” and it, too, was rather drawn out. Salome divested all seven layers of flowing silk, languorously. In the end—at the very instant she seemed poised to emerge from the last layer as a naked, alabaster confection—an underling came out of nowhere to enfold her in a long, tasteful robe.

The Nickerson students filed out, disgruntled. “It wasn’t even good teasing, that dance,” said Aaron Bruce, one of the football captains, “and after four-and-a-half hours some punk comes out with a towel and ruins it.”

“It was a lot of singing,” said Bailey, wearily.

“I expected BOOBS,” said Jake, gesturing heartily, “not, you know, boobs.” A few minutes later, Jake and his friend Tyler Rempel, the other football captain, continued work on the documentary film they were making. Their technique was basic: Every time they saw an attractive girl in a group from another school, they trained their video camera on her and followed her walking by as Jake delivered voice-over comments such as “My goodness!” and “Hello, hello!”

McCown regarded the horseplay with an even mix of amused eye-rolling and wise equanimity. “Their brains are in the process of maturing,” he said, synopsizing one of his favorite videos, a program on teenagers narrated by ABC News correspondent John Stossel. “It isn’t until people get in their twenties that they really start using their frontal lobes, and that’s where critical thinking happens—in the frontal lobes. These kids are going to push the limits, no matter what I do. It was like that 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago. People have always looked at teenagers and said, ‘If we leave it up to these kids, the world’s going to be destroyed.’ But the world’s still here. The best thing we can do as parents and teachers is let them go, and support them.”

WE VISITED THE IWO JIMA MEMORIAL, the Library of Congress, the Pentagon, the FDR Memorial, the White House, the Smithsonian. We stood beneath the domed roof of the Jefferson Memorial and read the words carved into the wall: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” We were supposed to feel hallowed, I know. As envisioned by its first urban planner, Pierre L’Enfant, Washington is a succession of paeans to democracy.

But it was hard to feel hallowed. We were always in a hurry to get to the next site. Also, someone was always hungry and someone else needed a restroom and someone else was eager to pick up some camera batteries.

I doubt that L’Enfant anticipated such clamor when he was designing the District in 1791. “The city,” he wrote that year, “must be beautiful, due advantage being taken of the hilly nature of the spot for grand or lovely prospects.” There was time to feel hallowed then—and now there almost isn’t. If you are 18 today, your cell phone is constantly ringing and there are video games to play and car payments to make. Glib pop culture icons like Christina Aguilera and Shaquille O’Neal shimmer at you from every angle—from the TVs in restaurants, from newsstands and from the CD player you fiddle with as you race to your after-school job. In contrast, the sublime architecture of Washington speaks an ancient, almost indecipherable language.

Of course, there were times when reverence fell over the Kansans. In the somber darkness of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jake and Tyler were respectful and silent for a while. But then they spied cute girls. They offered to carry the girls’ bulging bags of souvenirs, and then the girls, flattered, divulged that they went to a Catholic school in Coburg, Ontario. “Do you guys wear those cute little uniforms like Britney Spears?” Tyler said.

On another outing, I was walking toward the Lincoln Memorial with Mark Steele, the parent chaperon. Steele, 47, is the office manager of a plumbing supply company, and the whole trip he’d been nearly invisible, staying to the side, smoking thin little Muriel cigars and chatting quietly with his brainy son, Jason, who is, like him, a high-ranking officer in the Hutchinson Coin Club. He was happy to be in Washington. “I’ve always wanted to come here,” he told me, “but a year ago, I was thinking, ‘Who knows if I’ll ever get there? I don’t know anyone there.’ This place is so foreign.”

As we wove past a family of tourists, Steele said that he had studied the picture of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the penny for ages. “One of the ways you can tell how good the strike is on a coin,” he said, “is by looking at Lincoln sitting in his chair. If it’s toward the end of the life of the die, he’s not detailed. You can’t make out his head or his legs.”

We came out of the trees, and the seated president became crisply visible through the pillars above us. “There he is,” Steele said. “There’s the man.”

We climbed the steps and then, in the big, echoey room at the top, Steele looked up at the statue, a cigar smoldering in his hand at his hip. “He was a great statesman,” Steele said. “He founded a lot of the values of this country. He was for freedom of the people. He didn’t want people enslaved by other people, or by their government. He was a people’s president.” A school group flowed past us, and Steele took a slow drag from his cigar, and then for a minute we just stood in silence, listening to the murmurs and footsteps of other people around us.

JAKE HAD A CD he’d made back in Kansas, and every once in a while he’d crack it out and gleefully let his friends know he was playing it again. The CD was flagrantly racist. One track, performed by aging country singer David Allan Coe, was sung to the tune of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” It went, “Leroy the big-lipped n——r also had a pushed-in nose. If he ever took his boots off, you would see 11 toes.” Track 5, also by Coe, went, “Now I like sugar and I like tea, but I don’t like n——s, no sirree.”

The N-word carried extra sting because in November 1999 Nickerson High made national news when a student wrote “NNAN” on the walls in three boys’ bathrooms one Friday. The letters were short for “No N——s at Nickerson,” according to the town’s police chief, Tom Burns, who never caught the culprit. There were only two black students at the school then, but each “NNAN” was coupled with a scrawled threat such as “Gonna rock this school no survivors” and “It’s going to happen Monday.” Forty percent of the student body stayed home the following Monday, and, although there was never any violence, one of the black students transferred out of the school immediately.

There was one black person at Nickerson High this spring, a student teacher named Curtis Carter. He told me, “People here are kind of uncomfortable around me, but I feel welcomed.”

The students at Nickerson High are way into rap (Ice Cube, Lil Bow Wow, Notorious B.I.G.), and McCown told me that recently he borrowed Jake’s racist CD and played it at home for his 9-year-old “just to let him know that sort of stuff is out there. I wanted him to ask, ‘Is this kind of music appropriate?’” In Washington McCown posed the same question, a little more sharply. When we were riding the Metro one day, in a crowd that was largely African American, he looked over at Jake, smiling defiantly, and shouted across the car: “Jake, why don’t you play track 5 now?”

Jake blanched and looked down and said nothing. But later he regained his sang-froid and assured me, “The music on that CD’s just funny. David Allan Coe is a comedian.”

ON THE THIRD NIGHT, Mitchell was expecting a call from his girlfriend. He’d bought her some sunglasses, a $23 T-shirt from the Hard Rock Cafe, and a plastic coaster that bore the seal of every branch of the U.S. military. But they hadn’t spoken yet, and Mitchell guessed that the silence was stoking Adriann’s jealousy. It was. When she called at 1 a.m., she was furious that there were girls in the room. “She was screaming at me and crying,” Mitchell told me over lunch the next day. “But those girls weren’t my company. There were three other guys in the room, too.

“She told me that she was going to go to the prom with my brother because I wasn’t there. Her prom is tonight. She tried to tell me that she was going to Joyland [amusement park] with her church youth group next weekend, and I was, like, ‘What? I leave for three days and you’ve entered into a youth group, and all of a sudden you’re Catholic?’”

The argument was, of course, adolescent, but it had serious undertones. Mitchell and Adriann had been together for 21/2 years. Mitchell’s father married when he was 18, and many other adults around Nickerson had also settled down young.

Mark Steele told me that, when he was 19, he lived it up for a while, touring through small-town America as a drummer for country-western singing star Leon Ashley. “For six months,” he said, “it was one long party.” He signed autographs in Bamberg, S.C., and Canon City, Colo.; he got drunk every night. But then one evening, upon finishing a bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine, Steele tried to hurl it through a half-open window on the tour bus. The window shattered.

“You grow up after you do a few things like that,” Steele said. “You get it out of your system.” He came home to marry his girlfriend before he turned 20, and today he leads a quotidian existence: “I get up and go to work and then I come home, eat, and feed the fish, and play on the computer for a while. About the only surprise in my life comes in the spring when I ask myself, ‘Do we have enough money to go out to Vegas?’ If we don’t, it’s no big deal. I just go up to Topeka for the day and get my gambling fix there.”

There were a few Nickerson kids who yearned for a broader existence. For instance, Erika Klosterhoff, who had the highest GPA on the trip, would be enrolling at the University of Kansas and hoped to do some traveling. “I’d like to go to Hollywood and see the stars’ houses,” she said. “I think I would enjoy going to South America. It would be real cool to see a different way of life.”

For many students, though, the Washington trip would be, like Steele’s country-western tour, a first and last hurrah. With sad resignation, McCown told me that he didn’t expect worldly ambitions from students in Nickerson. “They look at what their parents do and what’s offered around Nickerson—mostly service jobs—and they think, ‘It’s not a bad life. It’s pleasant. You can walk into the grocery store and be greeted by people you know.’”

Jake was going to Emporia State, with thoughts of majoring in business and taking over his dad’s pool maintenance/installation business. Aaron was going on a football scholarship to Sterling College, a Christian school 10 miles from Nickerson. John Schletzbaum wanted to be a locksmith, and Bailey aimed to study journalism at Kansas State, so as to become a TV reporter, for a station in Wichita or Kansas City. “I don’t want to move to a place like Washington and be the next Barbara Walters,” she said. “It’s nice having family around.”

Mitchell’s girlfriend feels the same way, but when he started yelling at her, she hung up. Then her friends called, asking what Mitchell’s problem was. Then, finally, around 3:30, there came a sweet reconciliation. “She said, ‘I’m sorry for getting mad,’ ” Mitchell told me. “I didn’t say sorry because I didn’t do anything wrong. But I did say, ‘I want you to think about me at prom.’ ” Then at 4 o’clock, three hours into the tussle, they at last said good night.

WHILE MITCHELL WAS TALKING to his girlfriend, house music throbbed from a dance venue, Club Insomnia, just two blocks from the hotel. We’d learned of the club earlier in the evening on the Metro, when Jake met a girl—pretty, in silk trousers—who said she was going there. We saw her take her place in a long line of revelers outside the club.

McCown did not want anyone going to Insomnia. In fact, he was doing a bed check at 1 to ensure the students stayed in. But you only had to be 18 to get into Insomnia and the chances of getting caught sneaking out after 1 were nil. Still, Jake wasn’t even considering it.

“The line’s halfway around the block,” he said, “and then we’d pay $15 to go in and get the crap beaten out of us. I’d rather make it home and live it up there.” What Jake did instead, after sneaking out, was linger on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, playing pranks on late-night sidewalk loiterers. “We told them we were supposed to meet a guy named Samson,” Jake told me later. “We said, ‘We gave Samson a bunch of money for fruit cocktail. You know Samson, man?’”

Nobody knew him, and “fruit cocktail” isn’t a code word for anything, but Jake proceeded to stick a cigarette in his undershorts. He pulled it out to offer to the next beggar who passed by, asking for smokes. It was a test of how depraved street people could be. “I made sure he saw where it came from,” Jake told me, serious.

The hotel’s security guard, Charles Monk, was nearby as the beggar took the cigarette and started to smoke it. Monk was keeping a protective eye on the kids. “I told them to let me know if they needed anything,” he said to me the next day. “They seemed like real nice kids, but I don’t think they understood what goes on in the street. Where they from, anyway?”

“Kansas,” I told him.

Monk chuckled softly. “I kind of figured,” he said.

“YOU’RE IN,” SAID MCCOWN. It was the last night of the trip, a Saturday night, and he was leaning against the dresser in a hotel room and writing—drawing up the card for the wrestling tournament. Every kid on the trip was packed into the room.

“No, I don’t really want to wrestle,” said Mitchell’s best friend, Nick White, whose arms were crossed, his eyes slanted down.

“I said you’re in,” McCown said, smirking. He was kidding.

“Nah,” said Nick, still looking down, shifting his feet, “I—”

McCown tossed his pen to the side and the fighting began: 45-second matches; hand-to-hand combat on the stubbly rug. The tournament was single elimination, with close matches decided by a poll of the spectators. All but three of the students, including all the girls, were in.

The first fight was epic: Aaron against Tyler. The two football captains, mano a mano. The beginning was a blur: bodies snapping and flipping on the hard floor, slamming the wall, grazing the sharp, square legs of the night table. Every few seconds, a face would rise to the top, beet red, teeth gritted, veins popping, as the crowd, all squeezed atop a bed in the corner, screamed encouragement: “Pin him! C’mon, put him to sleep!”

Ostensibly, this was all a big joke.

Really, it meant everything: Whoever won this wrestling tournament would loom larger than life for a moment. Every stupid thing he’d done in Washington—every gesture he’d made to reveal himself as a nervous, hormone-addled naif from the Midwest—would be washed away, forgotten.

Aaron picked Tyler up, his mighty, rug-burned thighs quavering, and whirled him around in the air for a second or so, watching the blood trickle down out of Tyler’s nose. The match ended with Tyler pressed to the carpet.

And then into the gladiator pit came Mitchell Baldwin, laughing, his back bent, his hands canted before him in warrior stance. He was fighting Gary McCown, a man 20 years older and 115 pounds lighter, and the match began with a thud: Mitchell’s back smacking the wall, buckling a dent into the plaster.

It was the first real WWF moment of the evening. Later, there would be a spot of blood on the white porcelain sink in the bathroom. Aaron would eliminate McCown. The floor would shake, violently. Charles Monk, the security guard, would appear at the door and warn, “If you continue to jump, I’ll have you out of here.” The entire group would then slip into the hall and McCown would direct the two finalists in the boys’ bracket—Aaron and 265-pound football player Chris Pettay—to have it out right there, by the elevator. He would stand in his doorway and, in an exhilarated loud whisper, say, “If someone comes, you guys are on your own.” Aaron would win.

Right now, though, Mitchell came off the wall with his eyes bulging, his arms flailing, groping for some purchase on McCown. He grabbed the teacher around the shoulders and made a bid to topple him. But Mitchell was standing almost straight up, not using his legs at all. McCown crouched there, his knees flexed, immovable, and Mitchell surrendered to his fate. Within a couple of seconds, he was crumpled on the floor, beaten.

“God, get off me!” he cried in a fit of faked misery. McCown got up, laughing warmly, and then Mitchell still lay there, moaning. “This better not get out,” he said, “because there’s a lot of people who think I’m a pretty bad fellow.”

I spoke to Mitchell one more time after the trip. He and Adriann were driving in his ‘82 Dodge Ram Charger past wheat fields and cattle ranches on their way north to Wilson Lake, near Russell, for a little fishing. He was real sorry that I hadn’t made it to Nickerson for graduation. “I walked, man,” he said. His voice was spotty over his cell phone.

I asked him what he would remember the longest about his visit to Washington. For a moment, he cogitated; I listened to crackling noises coming over the line. “Probably all the bums on the street,” Mitchell said. “I must have given away a whole pack of cigarettes while I was there.”

“What about the monuments? Did they move you?”

“Nah, not really.”

But in the week before graduation, Mitchell had felt moved to change his mind about his future. In the fall, he would begin a two-year course in criminal justice at Hutchinson Community College. He wanted to work in the Hutchinson prison with his dad, as a counselor. “When it’s the last day of school and they say, ‘You’re done. You don’t have to come back,’ it kind of opens your eyes,” Mitchell explained. “I knew that on graduation night, everybody would be at my house, asking, ‘What are you gonna do with your life?’ I had to think of something.”

Adriann came on the line. “It’s a good plan,” she said.

When Mitchell came back, I asked him if they were going to start living together. “Not right away,” he said. “We’ve got our whole lives in front of us.”

The plan was that they’d begin cohabiting in about a year, after Adriann graduated. They’d start out in her parents’ basement apartment, but gradually they’d become better off. “I’m just looking to have a nice home, a few cars, a motorcycle, and maybe a boat,” Mitchell said.

“And we’re definitely going to have kids,” Adriann said.

“And do you think you’re going to stay in Kansas?” I asked.

“I talk about leaving,” Mitchell said, “but I know I never will.”

The reception was getting really bad now. Almost all I could hear was static and what sounded like wind through the window. Mitchell and I talked for just a few minutes more, about deer hunting and winter in Kansas and the casino up in Topeka. And then he and Adriann drove on over the prairie, out of range.

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Nasty, Brutish, and Loud

Outside
April 2002
Edited by Jay Stowe
© Bill Donahue

BACK WHEN THEY WERE COURTING—back before their garage in McConnell, West Virginia, was filled with two monster all-terrain vehicles and three teeny-weeny ones—Bruce and Kim Browning used to go riding together. Just the two of them, squeezed close on Bruce’s old Suzuki LT 500. Kim’s hands laced Bruce’s belly, Bruce’s thumb worked the throttle, the aroma of gasoline danced about them, and they rolled through the hills.

“We’d go up a holler near where my mom lived,” recalls Bruce, a 34-year-old manager for a mining replacement parts company, “and we’d ride around for a while, and then we’d get hungry or whatever and we’d basically go somewhere where we knew a little store was and we’d get some pop and some chips, like that, and then we’d head back.”

“And it was real pretty up in those hills,” says Kim. “I miss riding like that.”

Kim, 29, has not had a single day off from mom duty in five years, which is why this afternoon’s ramble through the jagged hills is so sweet. The Brownings have enlisted Kim’s mom to baby-sit so that they can attend the grand opening of the Hatfield-McCoy Recreation Area, a 360-mile trail system that will eventually expand to more than 2,000 miles and could well become the Disneyland of outdoor motorized recreation.

There are other trail networks, but as ATV Connection, an independent online newsletter, puts it, the Hatfield-McCoy represents “the dawning of a new trail renaissance.” The Hatfield-McCoy Recreation Authority, created by the West Virginia legislature in March 1998 as a public corporation—in this case, a nonprofit whose 19 employees oversee the trail system and work for the citizenry—has paid close attention to the needs of your average ATV user. Field technicians spent a full year whacking through native oak, hickory, and poplar stands in Mingo and Logan Counties, widening existing outlaw ATV tracks, and smoothing old coal-mining and logging roads to create trails that are famously, ferociously steep. The authority’s hopes are high: to draw more than 600,000 visitors a year and, by 2005, to have a network of trails sprawling over eight counties.

On this warm early-autumn weekend, 300 red-blooded Americans are already on hand. The Super 8 in nearby Logan is full, and the Speedway Super America over in Man has been doing a brisk business in glazed crullers and pigs-in-a-blanket. The Hatfield-McCoy Recreation Authority will be hosting a free pig roast, and the City of Logan is staging an ATV Tug-of-War and a Poker Run, which involves contestants gathering playing cards from dealers at checkpoints in the woods. License plates from 15 states—some from as far away as Florida and Massachusetts— are represented in the parking lot at Bear Wallow, the most popular of the Hatfield-McCoy trailheads.

Right now, though, my attention is fixed on Bruce, who is engaged in a jaw-dropping feat: a four-wheel assault on a 100-foot-high pile of coal tailings.

The heap is absurdly steep, curving elliptically up to almost vertical, like a skateboard ramp. As Bruce climbs its flanks, his motor screeching, flecks of coal spitting from his tires, there is a very real chance that his four-wheeler will pop up, roll back, and crush him. This does not seem to worry him. He has won the ATV Amateur National Hill-Climbing Championships two years running. He rides standing straight up, his head canted forward like the prow of a Viking warship.

“That boy’s crazy!” one onlooker hoots.

“Kim’s gonna be a four-wheel widow!” shouts another.

The jeering goes on for maybe 15 seconds. Then, a few feet from the top, Bruce spins out in the rubble. His four-wheeler slips sideways, and the shouting stops. For a moment it seems as though we’re all watching a film in slow motion. He’s way up there on a hot red Honda 440 EX racing quad, bouncing on the shocks, trying to jostle and shimmy his way out of peril, and rocks are cascading down all around him. Shove. Twist. Squirm. Somehow he gets himself facing downhill. But does he slink back to terra firma? No. He just descends a few yards, turns around, and goes at it again. And this time he makes it—barely.

“He got lucky now, didn’t he?” someone says.

Kim unclenches her jaw. “He’s a showoff,” she says, “but I can’t stop him. He loves to climb, and he’s very good at it. I’m proud of him.”

YAMAHA RAPTOR. HONDA RUBICON. Polaris Sportsman 500. Kawasaki Mojave. Suzuki King Quad 4×4.

In 2000, 734,000 all-terrain vehicles were sold in the United States. The ATV industry—whose biggest players include Honda, Yamaha, Polaris, and Kawasaki—aims to crack the million mark by 2004, and the hope is not unrealistic. The sale of ATVs has risen 120 percent since 1997, and the Specialty Vehicle Institute of America, an Irvine, California-based trade group representing nine top manufacturers, is laboring ardently to keep that number trending upward. In 2001, it put roughly 43,000 people through its free half-day ATV Ridercourse.

Then there’s the Blue Ribbon Coalition, which represents 600,000 U.S. motor-sports enthusiasts, all in the off-road-vehicle (ORV) category, from ATVers, snowmobilers, and jet skiers to motorcyclists and dune buggyists. The Coalition has a simple message for the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management: “This land is ours,” it trumpets on its Web site (www.sharetrails.org). “We ride safely. We are courteous toward other users. We care about conservation. Yet environmental extremists continue their attacks. With emotional hysteria.”

Founded in 1988 and based in Pocatello, Idaho, the Blue Ribbon Coalition is funded mostly by mom-and-pop ORV dealers, though in the early nineties it also got financial support from corporations that shared its desire for wilderness access—Exxon, for instance, and Chevron, and Boise-Cascade. At present its constituency is hoping that Congress will authorize the construction of the Great Western Trail, a 4,455-mile off-road corridor zigzagging from Montana down through Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. It’s not a pipe dream. The BLM already offers ATVers unlimited access to 36 percent of its lands (and limited access to another 45 percent). The Forest Service, which currently allows ATVs on 60,000 miles of unclassified “ghost roads” out of the 445,000 miles of roads it oversees, published a study in 2000 embracing the Great Western Trail concept.

And the Bush administration is pro-ORV. Interior Secretary Gale Norton suspended Clinton-era bans on jet skiing at four national parks last year and is now lending a sympathetic ear to motorheads fighting a Park Service proposal to ban snowmobiling in national parks. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management has welcomed ATVs and other motorized vehicles onto eight of the 20 national monuments Clinton designated during his presidency. Ironically, in the latest political turnabout, Utah governor Michael Leavitt announced in January that he would ask President Bush to use the Antiquities Act—as Clinton did— to turn the red-rock backcountry of the San Rafael Swell into a 620,000-acre national monument accessible to off-road vehicles. Under President Bush, “there’s been definite improvements in the treatment of ORV recreationists,” says Blue Ribbon Coalition executive director Clark Collins.

The prophets of eco-doom are, of course, shrieking, and also jockeying to influence the BLM and the Forest Service, both of which will revise their respective off-road policies one region at a time over the coming decade. For starters, the Wilderness Society alleges that ATVs are ripping trees and wildflowers from the hills of Kentucky, muddying the sparse streams of New Mexico, scaring grizzlies and wolves in Montana, and mercilessly crushing slower creatures, such as the endangered desert tortoise in California.

In May 2000, the Wilderness Society and the Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads joined with Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the Bluewater Network, and 80 other environmental, hunting, and animal-rights groups to form the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition. This alliance is now urging the Forest Service and the BLM to keep ORVs on designated trails and out of riparian zones, as well as areas that the agencies have short-listed for wilderness designation. It also wants the Forest Service to resurrect the so-called 40-inch rule, officially dropped in 1990, which banned ORVs wider than 40 inches—meaning most of today’s ATV rigs—from singletrack trails. One NTWC affiliate, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, is currently waging a lawsuit in federal court in Utah, arguing that the BLM has illegally allowed ORVs to rampage through prospective wilderness areas, neglected to update its land-management plans to account for burgeoning ORV use, and broken its promise to close areas already ravaged by ORVs.

“Off-road vehicles are out of control on our public lands,” says Scott Kovarovics, director of the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition. “Every year, manufacturers make them bigger and more able to go anywhere, over anything. They are destroying the backcountry worse than ever before.”

Blue Ribbon honcho Collins vows that his group will counter its environmental foes by “riding responsibly.” “We will continue to be good citizens,” he says. But sometimes his allies resort to distinctly un-Gandhian forms of civil disobedience. This past Thanksgiving, 190,000 ATV and dune-buggy enthusiasts invaded Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, about 150 miles east of San Diego, for a long weekend of racing and raucous partying; by the time it was over, 220 people were injured, 70 were arrested, and three died. In November 1999, in the desert near El Centro, California, a group of ATV riders vented their feelings about restrictive regulations by stealing the keys to a BLM-owned four-wheeler and then heaving full cans of beer at a group of police and BLM rangers. Twenty people were arrested. Two months before that, four ATVers turned themselves in to Forest Service rangers in Blanding, Utah, after being photographed motoring through a prospective wilderness area.

“We were legally breaking the law,” said Joe Lyman, one of the riders and a member of Southern Utah Land Users, an ORV access group. “But we didn’t feel we were doing anything wrong morally.”

I DECIDED THAT it would probably not be a good idea to show up in West Virginia wearing my Birkenstocks and humming “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” I went instead with an open mind, as a novitiate in search of an ATV guru.

Luckily, the Specialty Vehicle Institute of America hooked me up with a brilliant instructor. Would it be too much to call Bob Johnson, the 47-year-old West Virginia native who guided me through the fiery hoops of my ATV initiation, my moral compass? I think not. For amid the perils and surging testosterone of the ATV universe, Bob showed me how to ride and play safe—and he did this without ever uttering anything sharper than “Now, you’re a-takin’ to this four-wheeling like a duck to water, aren’t ya?”

Bob is six-foot-six and balding, with a ruddy face that often eases into a grin. He rides just about every day, wearing a Valvoline windbreaker and a baseball cap with a little pin that reads “God Loves You And So Do I.” He has exquisite poise. A retired West Virginia state trooper disabled by a spine-torquing car crash, he pilots his Honda 300 with his back gracefully still and erect. He glides over trails with magisterial slowness, rarely exceeding 15 miles an hour. He is, at all times, cool. When I asked him what he did for a living, he said, “I’m an artist. I’m just a-settin’ on the porch, drawing a check.”

Bob gave me my first lesson a few days before the Hatfield-McCoy officially opened. His instructions were spare. “This here,” he said, pointing at the handlebars on the $6,500, 500cc Polaris Sportsman a dealer had lent me, “is your gas. This here’s your brake.” I turned the key, rotated the throttle, and kick-started my quad into gear.

I drove in a straight line through the parking lot at the Bear Wallow Trailhead, then over some gravel bumps, then in huge, sweeping, undulant turns. I felt the mad spattering of rocks under my wheels. I felt the handlebars vibrate. I felt a deep surge of confidence, rooted, I think, in the fact that my tires were brand-new—pegged, still, with those little black, stringy nubbins. After ten minutes, I found that it was extremely fun to do donuts, to whirl in tight circles so that a cyclone of dust rose around me. I whirled six or eight times, then hit the gas and whipped sharply out of the cloud. I felt like a badass mofo. I was ready.

Riding into the Hatfield-McCoy can be an uneasy trip into Appalachia’s hard-bitten past and not-so-bright future. To begin with, the name comes from the bloody late-19th-century feud between the Hatfield and McCoy clans, who lived and fought along the Tug Fork River on the nearby border with Kentucky. And no sooner had Bob and I left the trailhead than we came upon the crumbling, kudzu-covered remnants of Ethyl, a former mining camp abandoned about 50 years ago. Bob looped left, up a hill, and I followed. Now we were on Blair Mountain, the very ridgeline where the two-year-long West Virginia Mine War reached its ignominious end in September 1921, with President Warren G. Harding calling in more than 2,150 U.S. Army troops and the 88th Light Bombing Air Squadron. Ever since, the coal country of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky has been an inland colony dependent on out-of-state corporations.

In recent years, this region—which forms the heart of Appalachia—has waged a desperate campaign to make money. In 1991, for instance, McDowell County, on the southern edge of the state, flirted with Capels Resources Inc., a Philadelphia company that proposed to fill 800-acre Lick Branch Hollow with 3.5 million tons of garbage from New York City and New Jersey. (The plan never got off the ground.) Since then, the region has become the world leader in a super-efficient, super-reviled form of coal mining known as “mountaintop removal.” Coal-rich peaks are simply blasted apart, denuding and leveling thousands of highland acres at a time, and the rocky wreckage is then dumped into local streams.

It sounds perverse, but in such a landscape, the Hatfield-McCoy represents a relatively clean source of cash. Leff Moore, who works in Charleston as a lobbyist for the Specialty Vehicle Institute of America, calls it “environmentally friendly, an improvement to the flora and fauna.” If anyone can be called the father of the Hatfield-McCoy, it is he. A husky, ebullient 57-year-old, Moore first envisioned an ATV trail system in West Virginia in 1989, when he suggested to the Forest Service that it open the Monongahela National Forest to ORVs. The Forest Service didn’t cotton to the idea, but Moore was undeterred. “I realized that well over 50 percent of southern West Virginia is owned by a handful of land companies that lease to coal and timber extractors,” he told me. “I thought, ‘What if we got their permission to ride?”

The SVIA and the Motorcycle Industry Council thought Moore was onto something, so in 1991 they hired him to make the Hatfield-McCoy a reality. Moore began by approaching the Pocahontas Land Company and the Dingess-Rum Land Company, southern West Virginia’s largest landowners. His sales pitch was fairly simple: Since the locals were already careening all over their corporate turf, swilling beer and attempting Evel Knievel-style leaps over downed logs, they constituted a liability suit waiting to happen. If the companies allowed these rough-hewn paths to be cleaned up and transformed into a trail park managed by some form of state recreation authority, well then, the authority would become the liable party. Moore also reasoned that a world-class ATV park might actually lure tourists and businesses to southern West Virginia, in which case Pocahontas’s and Dingess-Rum’s tax burden would drop.

The land companies bit, and Moore was soon able to find some allies in the state legislature, especially when he called its attention to a 1996 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report. Noting the popularity of the West’s two premier ATV havens—Utah’s 260-mile Paiute Trail and the Silver Country Trail, a 1,000-mile snowmobile and ATV network straddling the Idaho-Montana border—the Corps projected that the Hatfield-McCoy could potentially create 3,200 new jobs and pump an estimated $107 million annually into the West Virginia economy. A case of irrational exuberance? Perhaps. Nevertheless, the legislature was impressed. In 1998, it pledged $1 million to develop the trails. Two years later, the Hatfield-McCoy Recreation Authority was up and running. The state, through the clever use of private land, had created an ATV safe zone peripheral to the larger eco-war.

Still, environmentalists shuddered. Jim Sconyers, former staff director of the West Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, sardonically calls the Hatfield-McCoy “somebody’s brainstorm—a way to fuck up the environment and get away with it.” Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, a Bend, Oregon-based backcountry advocacy group, and a man who has been fighting ATVs for over a decade, was a little more grave. “They’re looking to sacrifice southern West Virginia,” he told me. “They want to turn it into a Mad Max hell zone.”

AND SO INTO THE HELL ZONE I RODE. Midway up Blair Mountain, Bob and I encountered a guy who’d just rolled his quad and tumbled headlong into a ditch. He was Steve Green, 33, a machinist from Butler, Pennsylvania. He wore a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt that blared, “If you can read this, the bitch fell off!” He was limping. I asked if he was OK.

“Didn’t hurt at all,” he said. “Loosened me up. Just got a few nice scratches on my helmet, that’s it.”

Steve had come down for the weekend with two of his older brothers, Tom and Ron. Both were standing off to the side, chomping on venison jerky as Steve hobbled around. Tom offered Bob and me some jerky, and we killed our engines and listened as the Greens related the joys of ATV riding. “This is what guys who work in the mills do to unwind,” Ron said. “It keeps you from driving the wife crazy.” They spoke of touring back roads in search of taverns, of scouting for wild boar, of a friend who busted his CV joint deep in the woods. “He had to ride the rest of the day with his back wheel strapped to the quad with a bungee cord,” marveled Steve.

Bob remained silent, but he apprehended the manly tenor of the conversation. After a while, he broke in, offering a little West Virginia hospitality. “I don’t know what y’all are looking for,” he said to the Greens, “but there is a boobie bar in Logan.”

Giddy schoolboy laughter wafted through the forest. It was time to mount up. Bob and I headed back down to the trailhead as the Greens rampaged away, heading for one of the Hatfield-McCoy’s ugliest obstacles, a three-foot-deep mud bog that had been sucking riders Grendel-like into its muck all afternoon.

Ron got stuck almost immediately, he told me later that night in his room at the Logan Super 8. “The bike disappeared underwater,” he said. “All you could see was the front rack. I had to get my buddy to winch it out.” Ron was so disgusted that that very afternoon he traded in his 2000 Polaris Magnum 325, with only 200 miles on it, for a 2001 Polaris Scrambler 500, a lightweight banshee of a racing machine. The new vehicle glowed beneath the lights in the Super 8 parking lot. It was candy-apple red, with a needle- nose front end and the aerodynamic lines of a midget Corvette. It had all the attributes of a superior ATV: four-wheel drive, hydraulic disc brakes, automatic transmission, and a burly suspension system featuring thick red 10.5-inch Fox Shox. All in all, with the trade-in, it cost Ron $1,700.

When I caught up with Ron, the Brothers Green were between visits to Sheer Fantasy III, the boobie bar. Ah, but they had tales to tell. There was in Logan a certain stripper named Rose, who for a small tip would pluck the hat off a customer’s head and rub it in her crotch. “When we go back,” Steve assured me, grinning, “I’m wearing a hat.”

I SLEPT IN MY CLOTHES that night. When I awoke, the Sunday-morning sun stung my eyes. I assumed that the day would, in time, offer some mercy from my hangover, some softer splendor. But I found no reprieve. I meandered into Uncle Sam’s pawn shop in Man, the next town over. On the glass counter there was a curt one-sentence petition to “stop the Hatfield-McCoy Trail from taking the local trails that have been used for the past 30 years.” Another petition, signed by 30 people, demanded that the Hatfield-McCoy be closed during hunting season. Neither bore any hint of an author or organization, and neither voiced any criticism of ATVs. When I asked the clerk standing by the gun case who was behind the petitions, he refused to say.

This laissez-faire attitude toward ATVs is what makes the situation in West Virginia so idiosyncratic. In almost every other region of the country, hikers, kayakers, and climbers are intent on silencing the loud motors of the ATVs, jet skis, dune buggies, and snowmobiles that shatter their Thoreauvian reveries. They wage their anti-ORV campaign in part by citing a host of grisly statistics. In 2000, 218 Americans were killed in ATV accidents and 95,300 people were sent to the emergency room. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, more than a third of those injured were 16 years old or younger.

American flora and fauna have come in for harsh treatment, too. According to the Natural Trails and Waters Coalition, jet skis dump a gallon of gas directly into the water for every four gallons they burn; swamp buggies have carved 23,000 miles of muddy trails into Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve; and in Yellowstone National Park, 66,000 snowmobiles invade each winter, belching carbon-monoxide-laden exhaust and drowning out the steamy gush of Old Faithful with the whine of their engines.

The word that environmentalists use when discussing ATVs is “damage.” The word that many West Virginians use is “horsepower.”

After I left Uncle Sam’s, I went to the Hatfield-McCoy inaugural pig roast and met some of the disgruntled folks who’d signed the petitions, among them Roger Morrow, a 51-year-old tattoo artist and auto mechanic from Logan who’d been riding the local trails since the late eighties. Morrow had come to commune with kinfolk (his wife is a McCoy). “They’re making us pay to ride the trails,” he said.

“Twenty-five dollars a year—and we built half those trails. We pulled the logs up and threw down rocks to fill in the ditches. And you can’t drink on the trails now, and you can’t camp and you can’t build yourself a fire pit. If you want to sit around and tell stories at night, you can’t. You gotta go to a state park and be packed in with all these…strangers.”

Others complained about the ban on double-heading, the practice of two people riding on one ATV. But it was 90-year-old Robert Seay who posed the most cogent rebuke against the Hatfield-McCoy. Seay was bone-thin, with a stooped back, white hair, and piercing blue eyes, and he carried a freshly cut sourwood cane, which he occasionally raised—either to pantomime the beating he wanted to give a certain Polaris dealer (Seay’s a Yamaha man) or to add emphasis to his hoary pronouncements. He pointed it at a distant hillside. “They’re calling that hollow up there Browning Fork,” he said, alluding to the official trail map. “Now, I was born and raised here, and I worked as a coal miner for 42 years. I knew [Hatfield patriarch] Devil Anse’s grandson. I put electric heat in his house! And I’m telling you, I never heard that name in all my life. Browning Fork? That hollow’s Rockhouse. Where did these people come from?”

The cane was whitish-yellow and crooked, with a small triangular handle Seay had carved out of a deer antler, and when he finished his speech, he just let it hang there in the sky, quavering.

A FEW HOURS LATER, at the Poker Run, I met Jamey Thompson. Jamey is, was, and shall be many things—a former Marine Corps urban sniper, a 180-pound karate black belt, a corrections officer at the Logan County jail, and a veritable sage on the way ATVs should be driven through the hills of his homeland. But he is best known for an egregious youthful blunder. In 1992, after a man beat up a friend of his, Jamey bit a chunk off the man’s nose. He was charged with felonious assault and avoided imprisonment only by promising the judge that he’d enlist in the Marines.

Jamey, who is 32, was sitting on the tailgate of a friend’s pickup, sipping a can of Bud Light and professing how nighttime was the right time to go four-wheeling. “There’s just something about having a machine and a female in the dark that puts you in the mood,” he said. After a few more beers, he became so thrilled with the prospect of a night ride that he pulled out his cell phone and called his 20-year-old girlfriend, Beth. “I love you,” he cooed. Then he clicked off and stepped toward me, eyes gleaming. “Yeah, I’m gonna get some poontang tonight.”

Jamey invited me along. But when he picked me up at my motel at 10 p.m., I was a little apprehensive. Beth was with him, along with his cousin Kevin, a case of beer, and several sticks of Ted Nugent Biltong Beef Jerky. (”Gonzo meat,” read the label, “Flamethrower” flavor.) Jamey advised Beth to refrain from wearing a helmet, arguing, “If you wear a helmet, how you gonna drink beer?”

We rode. To get to the Hatfield-McCoy trails, we first had to ascend an ancient three-mile path up Peach Creek Hollow. Known only to locals, Peach Creek is quite possibly the nastiest trail in Logan County. Not only is it steep and full of sharp turns, but it abuts a 150-foot drop- off and its surface tilts laterally toward the edge. Jamey was double-heading with Beth, and when we arrived at the base of the trail, he stopped and spoke to me in a strangely serious tone. “Remember to downshift,” he said.

Then he gunned forward, mad for momentum, rattling over the rocks, skirting the edge of the cliff, heaving his chest at the handlebars. I followed, standing up, shivering. Jamey’s headlamps flickered as he and Beth climbed impossibly high. The woods screamed with noise. I rounded a turn, and in the murky light, way up the hill, I saw Beth pitch off the back of the quad. That was enough for me. I got off and began walking, still wearing my helmet.

Twenty minutes later, after Jamey, snickering, delivered my four-wheeler to the summit, I was still shaking. There came a faint noise in the distance—more ATVs, it sounded like. “Fucking pot growers,” Jamey hissed. “A couple weeks ago, they killed three people up on these trails—hung ‘em in the trees. There’s shallow graves all over this place.” The noise grew louder. “Fucking inbreeders!” he blurted. “Beth, get my pistol.”

It was all B.S., of course, except that Jamey really did have a gun in his backpack, as well as a high-power light capable, he claimed, of spotting a deer a mile away. He demonstrated its strength by flicking it toward my face.

We pressed on—down a short hill, up a ridge. The night air was crisp, the woods silvery beneath an almost-full moon. Jamey wore a purple bandanna knotted pirate-style over his hair. He let out war whoops. He tossed empties into the woods. He threatened to shoot a hole in a power transformer we rode by.

And then, a little after midnight, just before we descended a long hill into Logan, he stopped to take a leak and celebrate the essence of night riding. “Freedom!” he shouted. “It’s just you, your machine, and your friends!” He grabbed a fresh beer and looked over at me. “If you wasn’t here, we’d be flying,” he said. “I’ll tell you straight out, Bill, you’re a shitty rider. You suck.”

I NEEDED BOB. I needed his gentle ways, his serene guidance. Early the next morning I met him at his house outside Man for a purifying ride. We were bound for a nearby strip-mined hilltop where, Bob promised, “it’s so pretty you can talk to God and you don’t even have to call long distance.” Bob’s preacher, David Fisher, was coming along. Fisher, 49, is pastor of the Claypool United Methodist Church in Man. He has a white beard and wears wire-rim glasses. When we met, he’d just come from Hardee’s, where he’d partaken of his “daily biscuit.”

We started our quads, then whirred along the quiet streets near Bob’s home and through the clear eddies of a creek before beginning to climb Wylo Ridge. It was steep, and the trail was awash in loose golf-ball-size rocks. “A lot of weight on the front of the vee-hi-cle now,” Bob said, “and go slow.”

We crawled, but the trail became steeper and steeper, and my sense that I was safe in a warm cocoon spun by Bob’s wisdom began to fade. The fear that I’d felt on my night ride with Jamey jittered through me anew, and I remembered what can happen when you flip a quad on a hill: It pitches back. It lands on you. It snaps your spine. I became so terrified of flipping my quad that, in fact, I did flip it. I hit a rock, halted, then hit the gas a bit too abruptly. The front wheels lurched skyward. I bailed off the back, and as I ran, the quad reared up on its haunches. It tipped backward and slammed into the earth, first with its handlebars, then with its black, ugly tires. It rolled a full revolution before bashing into a sapling. There it stopped, its engine thrumming, its handlebars mangled.

I waited for Bob. When he arrived, he stood there puzzling over the damage. “Well,” he said finally, “it’ll still drive. You just gotta kind of point the handlebars to the side a bit.”

I let Bob drive my wreck. I climbed onto his, and the rest of the ride was quite pleasant. The ridgetop was lovely, a vast field of vetch grass bending in the soft breeze beneath a cloudless blue sky. I felt so happy to be there, so happy to be breathing exhaust in the mountains. I knew what the preacher meant when he patted his quad and said, “These things are a blessing. You can get back to nature with them, and God created nature for the enjoyment of the people.” Jesus Christ himself might have benefited from an ATV, he added. “He would’ve gone 35 miles an hour across the desert on one of these. He could have evangelized the known world!”

Perhaps. But when Bob called me a few weeks later with the inevitable question, I had come out of my ATV reverie. “So,” he said. “Do you think you’re going to buy yourself a four-wheeler?” “Maybe next year,” I said. I was being polite.

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