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The Missing Rink

sperkins-pom — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

WE’D HAD DREAMS of winning the 2008 U.S. Pond Hockey Championships, but now we just wanted to live. It was January in Minneapolis, 8:30 A.M. on a Friday, and the windchill was hovering at 17 below, with a sharp breeze sending snow dust billowing over the surface of the frozen lake.

The cold was actually the least of our problems. We were playing the first of a terrifying roster of teams, including, in our second game, last year’s champions, a group of hardened locals called the Wiskey Bandits. They were supposed to be the Whiskey Bandits; rumor had it they were drunk when they’d signed up. One of my teammates, Pete Stoddart, lives near Minneapolis and had heard a lot about the Bandits. He described their strengths this way: “The thing about them is that they are young and they are talented.”

So we had that to look forward to. At the moment, though, we were standing on the ice, eyeing our first opponents. They were called the Jets, and they were a group of friends from Winnipeg, Manitoba. We were in the open division, and you never quite knew who was going to show up. There were also divisions for seniors, women, and more casual players. The Jets looked serious, with matching jerseys and black helmets.

The only thing that matched about us was the six green practice jerseys I’d ordered online the week before. We called ourselves the Green Mountain Boys, because four of us play in Vermont. We’re all in our thirties and forties, and this was our first time competing together in a real tournament. It would have been nice to draw one of the other duffer teams from a non-hockey place like St. Louis or California, or maybe the Minnesota squad named Team Fat. But as with youth and talent, luck was not on our side. We also lacked size, speed, and, perhaps most important, experience.

Games were forming on 24 other rinks set up on the massive surface of Lake Nokomis, on the southern outskirts of Minneapolis. You could see the players in the distancesilhouettes gliding around, steam from their breath rising, the ice stretching out behind them toward trees half a mile away, the morning sun brilliant but useless.

On our rink, ice was forming on the goatee of my teammate Ian Bartrum. My four days of stubble, which I’d sprouted in a panic when I saw that it might go down to minus 20, was doing nothing against the cold. Clem Powers, another teammate, was taking a similar beating; his face was bright red. Peter Otto, the last of the Vermont four, stood still and quiet. He had good reason: He’d forgotten his stick. It was in his living room in Salem, Oregon, and he was holding Clem’s backup stick, a wooden number Clem had scored used at a sale where they were going two for $12. Worse, Peter had dislocated his shoulder in a game three months ago and hadn’t been playing.

The referee, a woman bundled in infinite layers, called us over and explained the rules. We listened carefully.

“Na wanna, ha na,” she said, then added, “ony been go Aye aye?”

That was the gist of it. It was hard to hear her through her scarf, which was wrapped over her balaclava, which was covered by her hood, but we nodded anyway. Pond hockey doesn’t really have any rules, other than teams of four try to put the puck in the goal, a six-foot-wide wooden box that’s only four inches tall and lies flat against the ice, with two foot-long slots on the front, one on each end, where you can sneak in a shot. You can’t score from more than halfway across the ice, and you can’t stand in front of the goal. If there’s a dispute, the ref is likely to yell something like “It’s pond hockey, boys! You figure it out!”

THE UNITED STATES isn’t much of a hockey nation, and that’s how most hardcore American fans prefer it. It’s like how a guy from New Orleans might feel about crawfish. He loves them, but that doesn’t mean he wants to see them on the dollar menu at McDonald’s.

Among the hockey cognoscenti, however, the devotion runs deep, and there definitely seems to be some sort of pond-hockey mania going on. One measure: All 160 spots in the open division of the 2008 U.S. Pond Hockey Championships (USPHC) were filled a day after registration opened the previous October.

The USPHC, inaugurated in 2006, is the premier tournament in the country, attracting some of the most talented players in North America. Dozens of other tournaments have popped up in places like Lake Placid, New York, and Eagle River, Wisconsin. Not surprisingly, pond hockey’s biggest tournaments are in Canada. Founded in 2002, the World Pond Hockey Championship, in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, hosts 120 teams from all over the world. The Canadian National Pond Hockey Championships, in Muskoka, Ontario, is in its third year and now fields 272 teams who play more than 700 games.

In both countries, the appeal is the same: Hockey is better outside. Pond Hockey, a documentary released on DVD this fall by Minnesota filmmaker Tommy Haines, argues that the outdoor gamewith its emphasis on skill and speed over sizeis true hockey. USPHC founder Fred Haberman certainly agrees. He likes to describe pond hockey as “hockey the way nature intended.”

I met Haberman right after the Jets pummeled us 123. He was standing on a deck outside the beer tent, a structure built on a temporary scaffold over the beach fronting Lake Nokomis. Before him were the 25 rinks, 150 by 75 feet, which he and about 100 volunteers had been working on all week, scraping, shoveling, and watering them down. Haberman, 42, is a big, tall guy with a neat red beard, and for most of the weekend he wore a watch cap with the USPHC logo stitched on it. He runs a PR company in Minneapolis that represents Volvo and other national brands. (Our teammate Pete Stoddart works for him.)

“How’s this for a midlife crisis?” Haberman asked. “Because that’s basically how it started.”

Haberman spent his childhood playing hockey on ponds in Wisconsin. He thought the scene there was pretty good, until he moved to Minnesota when he was 23. He likes to draw an analogy between pond hockey in Minnesota and pickup basketball in Harlem, and admits to putting together the USPHC after being inspired by Canadian pond tourneys. Haberman copies their game times, with two 15-minute periods and a five-minute halftime break (NHL games have three 20-minute periods), and speeds up the pace by adding boards around each rink, so the puck keeps moving rather than getting lost in snowbanks. “It seemed like we ought to have a U.S. version,” he says. “I just had no idea how much work it would be.”

From day one, his tournament has attracted ex-NHLers, college players of the first rank, and career minor-leaguers. Phil Housley and Brad Bombardir played this year on a team called RBC Dain Rauscher, after its sponsor. Housley, 44, is one of the legends of American hockey, an all-time great defenseman who played for the Buffalo Sabres and the Calgary Flames before retiring in 2003. Bombardir, 36, played for seven seasons in the NHL, most of them for the Minnesota Wild.

“That’s one of the great things about pond hockey,” says Haberman. “You might play a kid and you might play a legend. It doesn’t matter. You just play.”

FOR OUR SECOND GAME, we played Team Wood. They had matching helmets in a reflective yellow and wore weird-looking maroon pants.

“Those are Goldsworthy helmets,” said Pete Stoddart. “And they’ve got Cooperalls!” The Goldsworthy helmet is a strange padded contraption that was worn by Bill Goldsworthy when he played in the seventies for the Minnesota North Stars. Cooperalls are full-length padded pants that were introduced, jeered at, and quickly retired sometime in the eighties; they remain the AMC Pacer of hockey, beloved for their awesome ineptitude.

Team Wood played angry. They were young and cocky and quick, and they muscled us off the puck, pounding dangerously hard shots down the center of the ice. The shots were dangerous because pond ice features hills and valleys and crevices. One puck hit a crack, popped up, and winged Ian in the shoulder, leaving a purple bruise. We lost something like 121.

After our drubbing, we filed off the ice, stunned. At the corner of the rink, we ran into a huge friendly-uncle type with a gray beard, glasses, and a fur-lined parka. “You guys just played the former high school state champions!” he told us, giggling. “That was the Holy Angels team. They won it all in 2002.”

“Maybe we should play in Arizona next year,” said Peter Otto.

“Or maybe there’s a tournament in Belize,” said Ian.

Back in the beer tent, the scene was one of Dickensian cheer, with guys in their base layers sharing stories about their games. There were many women, too; some were spectators and some were playing.

“I just love how the girls look in the cold, with their woolly hats and their hair all falling over their parkas and their flush faces,” said Peter Otto, surveying it all.

In a way, Peter was the reason I was here. Along with Clem, Ian, and me, he’s a regular at a New Year’s Day game of pickup hockey that we’ve held with family and friends at a nameless pond in central Vermont for about 15 years. I remember, about nine years ago, watching Peter, who was skating at a good clip, lean down to scoop up a bouncing puck with his glove, and then drop it gently in front of his stick as he continued on. He did it with such ease that I had to learn how to do it, too. I’d skated a fair amount, but I’d never played organized hockey. So I started an apprenticeship of clinics and late-night games. Now my game is like Microsoft Windows: Usually it works all right, but from time to time there’s a sudden, unexpected crash.

Our New Year’s game waxes and wanes from about ten in the morning to nearly five, although we’ve gone later, with help from glowing pucks and spotlights. It’s the highlight of my year, and I think of theirs, too. We talk about the previous game throughout the winter and spring. Around July 1, we start to talk about next year.

Pond hockey is similar to ice fishing in its ratio of convenience to reward. Prepping a pond can be grueling. In Vermont, for hours at a time, we’ve shoveled wet snow that weighed 15 pounds a scoop. We’ve spent days trying to figure out how to improve nature’s ice. One of my cousins, Randy Leavitt, built a crude but highly effective Zamboni out of a 50-gallon drum. He laid it on a wheeled cart and attached a spigot to the back, which fed out to an old maple-syruping hose full of drilled holes. You’d fill the drum with water and skid it around on the ice.

But pond prep mainly means shoveling, so we understood exactly why the award granted to the winner of the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships is a gigantic golden shovel.

AT THE USPHC, strange uniforms were common. There was a team called the Party Posse that had taped extra-tall party hats with streamers to their helmets. There were Maxwell’s Demons, made up of grad students from the University of Minnesota. “Maxwell’s Demon,” they explained, was a thought experiment in thermodynamics proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Never mind the details. The team wore matching tweed jackets with numbers sewn on back. They didn’t look like they’d played since childhood. There was also a team in red-and-black flannel hunting jackets. They were pretty good.

On Saturday morning, with the temperature at minus 14, we played our third game against the KARE-11 All-Stars, a group made up of employees from a local television station. They wore plain white uniforms, and some of them were in their forties. Like us, they’d lost their first two games, and we thought we just might take them. We played well and led 62 early in the second period. But we got greedy for more goals and forgot to keep a guy back on defense. The All-Stars put in seven quick goals before we came to our senses, and then, in the last minute, with the game tied 1010, they scored off a long pass.

That afternoon, the Wiskey Bandits creamed us, racking up ten goals in the first half and eliminating us from the tournament. Still, I managed an impressive goal. About two minutes into the second half, I took a pass from Peter Otto and, as two Bandits closed in on me, cut right and took a long wrist shot. It sailed into the little opening some 50 feet away. We were too tired and overwhelmed to really celebrate.

After the game, we were in dire need of an ego-salving beer. There were three taps in the tent, with women in referee jerseys pouring a very tasty local ale, and the brews powered our upbeat postgame analysis: If we had stuck to the 1-2-1 formation, we all agreed, we could have beaten those newscasters. But nobody at this event took their losses too hard, as I discovered when I bumped into a friend of a friend from New York.

“How did you do?” I asked.

“We lost,” he said, brightly. “To Phil Housley!”

A little later, a team of Canadians found a spot next to us. They had won the 200708 Canadian championships, and Haberman had invited them down as special guests. One of them, a buzz-cut thirty-something named Tighe, started chatting with Ian about the high quality of play here at the U.S. championships. A few minutes later, Tighe looked at his watch and said, “Game time. Gotta go.” He took out his upper front teeth, put them in a special box, stowed the box in his bag, and clomped out on his skates.

SUNDAY WAS a relatively warm three below zero, and we simply bundled up and went out to watch the playoffs and finals. The cold of the last couple of days had resulted in far fewer spectators than originally predicted. In 2007, nearly 20,000 people had shown up to watch, but this year, media warned citizens to stay inside. Still, the reporters ignored their own advice: Local TV stations started filming weather segments on the ice, with anchors chuckling about the loonies on the pond.

Many of the fans did look a bit unusual. There were a number of enormous snowmobile suits, in colors like olive camouflage and safety orange. There were a variety of dead animals on people’s heads: Some looked roughly like hats; many looked like something that just decided to winter there. One spectator got drilled in the side of the knee by a wandering pass and hobbled off like Ahab.

Among the players, there were a number of bloody noses and cut lips. One game in the senior division was marked by nearly constant pushing and shovinga bunch of ex-Princeton players were going up against some aging former Olympiansand it devolved into a bona fide fight at the end, though the gloves were never dropped, it being too cold.

The finals were played in front of the beer tent and featured the Bandits and a team sponsored by a local builder, Wright Homes. Wright had a secret weapon, a minor-league veteran named Dave “Shuter” Shute. He played with a jerky, hopped-up style and wore a helmet that looked like it had been assembled from a pair of old football pads. He dashed around the goal like a squirrel and put enough pucks in to defeat the Bandits 84.

In the final moments of the weekend, Haberman, his right arm in a sling thanks to a broken wrist he’d suffered in a game on Saturday, awarded the Golden Shovel to Wright Homes. Shuter, looking like a delighted kid who’d built his own space suit, babbled into the cameras about the cult of hockey. The Wright players, one by one, skated stately and solemn circuits of the rink, pushing along the golden shovel in a mockery of the ceremonial tours with the Stanley Cup.

It was all very ridiculous, and beautiful, and I was already thinking about next year.

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And You Thought Shock Radio Was Dead!

sperkins-pom — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

WILL PENDARVIS PREPS Jason Ellis’s studio guests by warning them about the host. They show up thinking they’re stars who deserve star treatment, but Ellishe’s not really, he doesn’t quite well, his guests have been known to cry.

Sirius Satellite Radio’s Action-Sports DJs

Your hosts at Swinghouse Studios, in Los Angeles, December 2007

Sirius Satellite Radio’s Action-Sports DJs

Pendarvis outside Swinghouse, April 2008

On this Tuesday afternoon in September, it’s Greg Hetson sitting on the short couch that serves as the green room at Faction Radio’s studio, in Los Angeles. Pendarvis sits about four feet away at his cramped desk. Skateboards signed by Tony Hawk, Kevin Staab, Tony Alva, and other greats adorn the walls and rafters. Hetson, 46, is one of the founding members of the pioneering punk band Circle Jerks. He wears black geek glasses and looks smart and confident. But, thinks Pendarvis, he doesn’t know Ellis. Ellis is a 36-year-old pro skateboarder, but that only hints at who he can be on the air. What if Ellis asks Hetson to punch him? It could happen. Or what if he tells Hetson his music sucks? Ellis frequently introduces a song by saying he hates it.

Pendarvis considers this while sipping from a liter of Mountain Dew. As the operations manager of Faction, channel 28 on Sirius Satellite Radio, he’s responsible for a revolving cast of athlete DJs, including, in the past year, a core group consisting of Ellis, Tony Hawk, freestyle skier Jonny Moseley, and Jackass star Bam Margera. Because satellite radio is not subject to FCC decency standards, Pendarvis doesn’t technically have to be concerned with anything the guys say. But, still, warning Ellis’s guests seems like the right thing to do.

Pendarvis swings his chair toward Hetson, clasps his hands before him, and says, very slowly, “You know, this probably isn’t going to be a normal interview.”

Pendarvis always talks slowly. He’s 40 and from Bayou La Batre, Alabama. He grew up with a thick accent but has made a point of losing it. He has spiky blond hair, cool-blue eyes, and a wide face.

“Ellis isn’t really a musicologist,” says Pendarvis.

Hetson nods, laughs. “Sure, of course.”

“He might not know anything about your bands at all,” says Pendarvis.

They both glance to Pendarvis’s left, where, six feet away, Ellis is jabbering in his box of soundproof glass. His nickname is “Ellis-Mate,” because he’s from Australia. He’s wearing a trucker’s cap and track pants, as always. He has blue eyes, and there’s reddish stubble around his chin. His arms are huge.

Ellis is talking to a guest named Kat Von D, the star of LA Ink, a Learning Channel reality show about running a tattoo parlor. A few minutes ago, Ellis made her cry while giving her a hard time about her ex-boyfriend, Jackass star Steve-O. Still, for Ellis, this is relatively polite. When Penthouse Pet Krista Ayne comes on later in the fall, he won’t even introduce himself. He’ll just ask her if he can see her “cookie.” Then he’ll pull his pants down.

SUCH ARE THE PERILS of handing the mike to skaters. Not that Sirius is complaining. From its first minute on the air, in January 2004, Faction has sought to build a following of young males suckled on Howard Stern and eager to embrace authentic voices from the action-sports underworld. Scott Greenstein, the president of entertainment and sports at Sirius, conceived the channel. An avid skier, he claims the idea came as much out of his personal interests as his understanding of entertainment markets. “I looked around at broad-stroke niches that had passionate fans and good demographics but not too much access,” he says. “Until Faction, you never really got to know icons like Margera and Hawk as people or what turned them on.”

Turning people on, of course, is the big idea behind satellite radio, where there are few advertisers to offend and anything that captures more subscribers is fair game. Since they began selling their services, about seven years ago, Sirius and XM Satellite Radio Inc.a competitor turned potential partner, pending approval of a merger by the FCChave sought to elbow out the homogenized airwaves of “terrestrial” radio by offering an eclectic mix of uninhibited music and talk programming. In this goal, they’ve succeeded: XM has 70 music channels, with celebrity hosts like Bob Dylan, and 121 channels of news, sports, weather, and entertainment. Sirius has branded itself as an even more renegade alternative to the AM/FM dial, luring filth hero Howard Stern from Viacom with a five-year, $500 million deal that began in 2006. Across its 133 channels, you can also find Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell and NASCAR “bad boy” Tony Stewart.

So, while regulated broadcasters fret about their next Don Imustype crisis, Sirius and XM continue with the experiment, courting audiences with whatever works, be it Martha Stewart (Sirius Channel 112) or Jason Ellis.

The basic concept behind Factionget charismatic athletes to host shows by letting them do whatever they wanthas allowed Greenstein to sign top-tier talent. Kelly Slater’s Radio K-OS, which aired weekly through 2006, had the surf champ interviewing Eddie Vedder and Jack Johnson. In 2005, Lance Armstrong reported live every day from his seventh Tour de France win. Bode Miller dished on everything from parties to corrupt officials from slopes across Europe during the 200405 World Cup season. Olympic volleyball player Kerri Walsh, the only female athlete to host for Faction, had a show while competing in the Athens Olympics, though she spun tracks by the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain, artists that Pendarvis says aren’t really in line with Faction’s more “aggressive” tastes.

Pendarvis, a former DJ and radio producer, has seen his cast evolve into an increasingly edgy crew. As ringmaster, he gives very basic training to new hosts, makes sure the guys have everything they need, and tries to keep them from abusing their freedom too mucha daunting task when it comes to guys like Ellis. After pro skater Jake Brown survived an astonishing 45-foot fall during the 2007 X Games, he hobbled onto The Jason Ellis Show, along with skaters Danny Way, Dave Duncan, and Pierre-Luc Gagnon. On the air, Ellis and Brown announced they’d be taking the painkiller oxycodone together. “Mmmm,” said Brown, tasting his. “Nice and chalky.”

THREE HOURS AFTER ELLIS finishes the interview with Greg Hetson, which ends up focusing a good bit on paraplegic sex, Pendarvis and I watch Tony Hawk step off the skate ramp at his offices in Vista, California, flop down into a chair in his private studio, and start his weekly broadcast with “What up? What up, everybody? Welcome to Demolition Radio. We’re live, we’re back, it’s loud! I’m here with Jesse Fritsch and hopefully Jason Ellis in L.A.”

“I shaved my balls this morning,” says Ellis, who has called in from the Faction studio.

“That would be Jason Ellis,” says Hawk.

Ellis started off as one of Hawk’s on-air sidekicks, along with pro skater Jesse Fritsch, before spinning off with his own four-hour weekday-afternoon/evening show in May 2005, but he frequently phones in. Today’s guests, also calling in from Ellis’s studio, are Justin Warfield and Adam Bravin, of the darkwave duo She Wants Revenge.

“Has anybody seen that Life of Ryan show?” asks Warfield.

“I’ve seen one,” says Hawk.

“Ryan Sheckler?” asks Ellis, making sure Warfield is talking about the 18-year-old skater and MTV reality star. “Somebody keeps telling me that he cries all the time. Why is he crying?”

Warfield says, “Danny Way must be like Dude, try not to cry in every episode. Board sales are dropping.'”

“I’ll tell you what,” says Hawk, emphatically. “Board sales are not dropping because of that.”

As an extension of the Tony Hawk megabrand, Demolition Radio has functioned more or less as Faction’s flagship. Hawk headlined the initial marketing push for the channel and continues to be Pendarvis’s most low-maintenance host. Known for meticulously managing his image, Hawk tends to leave the shock-jockery to Ellis and others.

Jonny Moseley has a similar, if lower-profile, act. The hourlong Moseley Method is typically broadcast on Wednesday afternoons from the Olympian’s home in San Francisco and occasionally from California slopes. He features a bit more music than Hawk and Ellis, who usually play about five songs an hour. (Faction is primarily a hard-rock station when there isn’t a big-name host on.) In between sets, Moseley, in his back-of-the-throat dude voice, talks about his weekends, the Winter X Games, and such topics as global warming and the dubious value of energy drinks. “Jonny is pretty self-sustaining,” says Pendarvis. “He doesn’t pack the show with guests, but if he wants to bring someone in, he might call me up and be like Hey, do you know the Hives?'”

To keep Faction running, Pendarvis does everything from wooing guests to helping select music to fixing equipment in hosts’ homes, road trailers, and private studios. He also hosts his own Faction show for several hours every weekend, playing music from up-and-coming bands.?But wrangling his stars can feel like a full-time job in itself. “Bam is probably the hardest,” says Pendarvis. “Once he was supposed to do his show and I couldn’t find him. He was in Dubai.”

On the Friday before our visit with Hawk and Ellis, I met up with Pendarvis in New York so we could drive together to an evening taping of Radio Bam at Margera’s home in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Pendarvis, behind the wheel of a rented SUV, was wearing camo pants, a black T-shirt with flames up the arms, and yellow sunglasses that he’d just purchased for $12 at a rest stop.

As we sped down the Jersey Turnpike, his dueling Sidekick and BlackBerry were buzzing nonstop with calls and e-mails, many from MTV, which was pursuing Jason Ellis to star in a reality show. Some producers there liked his habit of getting injured, as he had two weeks earlier, when he challenged BMX icon Travis Pastrana to do a backflip on a snowboard. Both men tried and failed badly, and Ellis tore a ligament in his knee on the landing.

Margera’s estate, set in the woods, is a gothic Xanadu of colorful dinosaur statues, skate ramps, graffiti, four-wheelers, and Lamborghinis. Margera was outside when we arrived, sitting barefoot on a homemade swing in cutoffs, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. He was surrounded by some 13 friends, most of them men and all wearing black.

Having made his millions with the sick-stunt Jackass franchise and the MTV vehicle Viva La Bam, Margera clearly revels in the no-censorship land of satellite radio. Like Hawk and Ellis, he’s a former competitive skater and is using Faction more to grow his fan base than his bank account. (Nobody’s sharing numbers, but Sirius officials concede that Faction hosts aren’t given monster deals.)

Bam eventually led his entourage into his home studio, which includes a dentist chair, a winged pumpkin, and a butler mannequin wearing a fright mask. He kicked off his show with the announcement that his wife, Missy Rothstein, probably ought to get a pregnancy test, based on his estimation of her menstrual flow. There was a story about Bam falling out of a car, then getting a ride to a bar from the police. The group discussed whether one of the women in the room had allowed the most private part of her digestive system to be compromised for sexual pleasure by her boyfriend on a recent camping trip. Her boyfriend, sitting next to her, is nicknamed Shitbird.

Not surprisingly, Margera is the one Faction host that Pendarvis has unplugged, as the two explained to me after the taping. “Novak was going into rehab,” drawled Bam, referring to his childhood friend Brandon Novak, “and I was like I want to do something for you. What would you like?’ And he was like I want two hookers to have sex with me.’ And I was like OK.’ So we got two hookers in, and we were live, and they started to go down on him and Pendarvis cut us out.”

Pendarvis doesn’t relish this story. “It was more of a joke than anything,” he explained. “We went back and forth and I was saying, I’m gonna do it,’ and so I did it. Sirius isn’t censored. I just don’t want the guys to do anything they might regret.”

REGARDLESS OF HOW lowbrow the hosts go, Sirius shows no signs of regretting Faction. Still, its success remains an open question. Satellite radio continues to lose tens of millions of dollars every month while signing up new subscribersnow a combined 17 million-plus (9 million for XM, 8.3 million for Sirius) paying $12.95 a monthmany thanks to deals with automakers to outfit new cars with sat receivers. The advertising-light business model, meanwhile, means the companies don’t have to release program-by-program listener numbers. Estimates from the ratings service Arbitron show that over the course of any given week last spring, about 99,000 people in major metro areas tuned in to Faction for at least five minutes. Howard Stern, by comparison, attracted 1.2 million listeners.

Whether or not 8 percent of Stern equals long-term viability, Faction has earned the respect of other action-sports profiteers. “They’ve gotten the most credible, authentic voices,” says Bill Carter, a partner at Fuse, a youth-culture marketing agency with offices in New York City and Burlington, Vermont, that’s advised Pepsi, Burton, and Quiksilver. “They’ve made a lot of very smart decisions around action sports that a lot of media and marketers haven’t made.”

Meanwhile, the unfiltered energy of the hosts affords Faction at least some appeal to listeners who otherwise evade talk of halfpipes and McTwists. Listening to these dudes go off, it’s hard not to like them, even if you couldn’t care less about what made them famous or feel obliged to hit mute when the kids wander in.

Which is no surprise to Sirius’s Scott Greenstein, who insists that Faction is “working” when I meet with him in March at Sirius’s posh headquarters, in Manhattan, just across from Rockefeller Center. A former showbiz playerhe was an executive producer of The English PatientGreenstein says he welcomes whatever ribald content the hosts might produce, because it’s honest. “It’s a reflection of what the people and the culture are involved in. If you go to the Summer X games or the BMX tour, they’re covered in tattoos and edgy and raw. This is what they’re into.”

“And by the way,” he adds, “in this day and age of the Internet and other things, if Faction is the only thing your kids are listening to, we’re really happy.”

“SIX POUNDS!” cries Ellis, welcoming a caller to his show. We’re back in the studio the day after visiting Hawk’s compound. “Six pounds” refers to Ellis’s estimation of the weight of his genitals. He frequently uses the phrase in place of “Hello.”

Today, he’s taking calls from listeners in an effort to crown the “world’s greatest fat ass all-time in the history of the universe.” All four of his lines are flashing with suggestions, and the Faction intern cannot answer them fast enough.

“Yeah, I’d like to nominate John Candy,” says a caller.

“Well, he is a fat ass, but he’s dead and so he is disqualified.”

Ellis hangs up, muttering, “What a turtle-banger,” and turns to the next call.

“Crackalacka-cracka! What do you have?” “Crackalacka-cracka” is a slight modification of Ellis’s more standard “cracka-ass-cracka,” which basically means he’s a white boy, and what else can one do but joke about it?

“I’d like to award Sam Kinison one million points because he was awesome and fat and short and dated super-hot chicks,” says a caller.

Quietly, as a butler would speak, Ellis says, “Sir, thank you for calling.”

Then raising his voice to a yell, he announces, “I am granting Sam Kinison one million points, and it doesn’t matter that he’s dead!”

Pendarvis, out at his desk, listening with half an ear and half a smile, opens another bottle of Dew.

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The Grudge Report

sperkins-pom — Wed, 30 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

TOM AND TINA SJOGREN, the founders of ExplorersWeb, are rugged adventurers, as hardy as they come. They’d have to be to last so long in room 217 of the Arapahoe Inn. It’s the cheapest motel in Keystone, Colorado, and it offers pretty much every feature employed by a manager trying to shave pennies off his overhead, including dorm-grade furniture, a polyester bedspread in teal-and-purple camo, and halls as dark as the tunnels of Cu Chi.

Explorers Web

The Sjogrens, who are wealthy but thrifty, have endured the Arapahoe for six weeks already. This is their home at the momentthey’ve sublet their expensive Manhattan loftwhich also makes room 217 the current HQ of ExplorersWeb (), one of the world’s most avidly read and argued-about online hubs for hardcore adventurers. The site, which debuted in 1999, is an information-jammed clearinghouse for breaking news about expeditions, feats, and rescue missions, as well as a no-holds-barred forum for manifestos, rants, and interviews with mountaineers, trekkers, and explorers of every kind.

Planning to climb Pakistan’s Broad Peak in winter? Crossing the Arabian Sea in a pedal boat? ExWeb’s got you covered, practically by the minute, and will be the first to offer congratulations or catcalls, depending on what the Sjogrens think of your exploits.

As a voice of the far-flung, the heavily trafficked ExplorersWeb has established a reach that may be unparalleled for a site of its kind. When Tom and Tina broke the news last year that stranded Everest climber Lincoln Hall was alive and had been rescuedearlier, his expedition leader sent out a press release saying he was deadthe site logged 100,000 visitors. There would have been more, but it crashed under the load.

ExplorersWeb also reaches far beyond its readership, because it serves as a feeder for the mainstream media. In a typical three-month period, Tina says, she got requests for reporting leads from more than 20 different outlets, including Reuters, AP, the BBC, The New York Times, National Geographic, Climbing, ��ԹϺ��, and even Al Jazeera.

Show up at room 217, as I did one evening during a snowstorm in March, and you’ll see what looks like a spy-movie stakeout. Tom has a laptop set up on a desk overlooking a snow-covered Highway 6. Though March is a relatively slow month for news, Tina still spends most of each day on the bed with a laptop balanced on her legs, editing dispatches. (ExWeb is busiest in May, when readers are following expeditions on Everest.) Equipment is piled everywhere. Waterproof, shockproof Pelican cases are stacked against a wall; a corner is filled with plastic bins full of adapters and cables. All around are random heaps of HP iPaq PDAs, Thuraya satellite phones, and Nera sat modems.

Tom, 47, is Swedish. He’s a trim five-eleven, his skin burnished from the wind and cold. He keeps his sable hair tightly cropped and favors black and gray T-shirts, designer denim, and sandals.

Tina, 48, is a Swedish citizen who was born in Czechoslovakia back when it was under Soviet control. She has light-blue eyes and a giant frizz of blond hair, which she generally tames with a wool hat screwed down almost to the top of her eyebrows.

Both of them are perpetually busy, working from eight in the morning until ten at night, every day. Tina usually tends ExWeb, with help from paid freelance correspondents and editors in New York, Sweden, and Spain. Tom oversees a lucrative side business that involves selling satellite-ready communications packages to explorers, under the brand name HumanEdgeTech. The software and hardwarewhich Tom helped createare bundled as a product called Contact 4.0, which allows explorers to manage Web sites from just about any location.

Tom expects that 15 to 20 Everest expeditions will use his $3,000 packages this season, and he’s also sold them to NASA, the U.S. Army, and the USGS. The entire operation is breaking even, he says, with Contact 4.0 sales making up for the small annual deficits from ExplorersWeb.

Right now, Tom is on overdrive: He has to get out 17 packages in the next three days, and a client is coming over from Denver tonight at eight. Which leaves Tom and Tina just enough time for a tasty snack. Tina bounds off the bed, pulls ingredients out of a mini-fridge, and whips up a dill-crab-and-spinach sandwich.

“It’s Swedish,” she says. “Very healthy.”

FOR THE SJOGRENS, ExplorersWeb is not so much a news portal as a calling. They created it after climbing Everest without guides in 1999; they had found little reliable information for independent climbers like themselves, so they posted what they’d learned as a way to “give back.” Initially the site was called MountEverest.net, focusing mainly on news from the world’s highest peak. Over time it evolved into ExplorersWeba catchall site with links to specific topics like Everest, Oceans, Poles, and Space.

When you ask the Sjogrens why they do it, they talk about their motivations in nearly religious terms. “My grandfather was ten years in prison under the Soviets, for printing political stuff,” Tina explains. “He was one of those guys who told it like it was. Much of ExplorersWeb comes from that.”

They also give it up for Mother Teresa, whom they met while backpacking through India in 1985. Their visit was brief but powerful. “She sent us on our way to do our work in the world,” says Tina. “It changed our lives. She blessed us to do good, really.”

Sounds joyous, but their mission often leads to harsh coverage that many people find hard to take, and favorite target=s include prominent commercial guides, outfitters, and explorers who, one way or another, don’t meet with Tom and Tina’s approval. It was ExplorersWeb that, right or wrong, accused Everest guide Russell Brice of malfeasance because the Sjogrens think he should have tried harder to save the life of independent climber David Sharp in 2006. It was ExplorersWeb that accused Everest outfitter Henry Todd of supplying faulty oxygen to climbers. And, day after day, it is ExplorersWeb that practically tape-measures the claimed feats of dozens of adventurers, often causing anger, outrage, and embarrassment.

“I do think they run witch hunts,” says Ed Douglas, a lifelong climber and journalist who’s written about mountaineering for 20 years. “Their moral outrage is not helpful … it’s bad for climbing.”

Others counter that the Sjogrens’ high-handedness is usually justified. One fan is Michael Kodas, a writer with The Hartford Courant who’s finishing a book about the modern ugliness on Everest.

“There’s a great need for coverage of what’s happening on the mountain,” he says. “A lot of what Tom and Tina say is dead-on, though some of it is completely outrageous. I have a lot of respect for them. If ExWeb wasn’t doing this stuff, nobody would. They really have changed the face of adventuring.”

As adventurers, the Sjogrens are the real thing. They’ve climbed Everest and attempted McKinley. In 2002 they skied unsupported to the South Pole, a 63-day journey. They rested for a month and then headed for the North Pole, which they reached after 67 days, making Tina the first woman to ski to both poles unsupported. They’re now training for a two-person climb on K2 in 2008unguidedwhich is why they moved from New York to Keystone. With business so good, unfortunately, it’s getting hard to find time to train.

Their lives have always been a little crazy. Tina escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1968, at age nine, with her 29-year-old mother and one-year-old brother, leaving her father, a loyal Communist, behind. Tom was a competitive figure skater and a member of the Swedish national sailing team in the late seventies and early eighties.

They met when they were both 20 and started traveling the world. In 1986, they launched a Swedish business called Easy-shop, which delivers regularly scheduled shipments of toilet paper to customers. (“It’s a steady business,” says Tom, “and I’ve heard all the jokes.”) They got rich off it, giving them the freedom to expand their adventures, starting with Everest in 1996. They tried to summit four years in a row, failing the first three times. They took a break to sail across the Atlantic, setting out from the Canary Islands in November 1998 on an O’Day 37, a relatively modest sailboat for a crossing, arriving in St. Lucia in February 1999. They went back to Everest and bagged it that May.

Next, they moved to Manhattan, feeling pretty good about life. “We had summited Everest, crossed the ocean, and we were millionaires,” Tom says. Their first apartment was a penthouse on Central Park South. That felt too staid, so in 2000 they moved to a SoHo loft that became the base for ExplorersWeb until this spring.

After K2, their overarching desire is to take their act off-planet andsomehow, somewayget themselves to Mars. They aren’t kidding. Their goal is to be en route by 2014. They figure the project can be done privately for as little as $50 million to $100 million, and they plan to raise their own money. They’re ready to die in the attempt, if that’s what it takes.

“We talk about dying,” says Tina. “The only prayer I’ve made is that if we go, we go together.”

SNICKER IF YOU LIKE, but their idealism is sincere, and, at its best, ExplorersWeb is defined by it. The most compelling example is the story of the killing of 17-year-old Buddhist nun Kelsang Namtso at Nangpa La.

Nangpa La is a Himalayan pass a few miles to the west of Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest mountain in the world, and it’s a common route for refugees fleeing Tibet for Nepal. On September 30, 2006, Namtso was killed with a long-range rifle by the Chinese border police as she tried to cross. The shooting happened within sight of Cho Oyu advance base camp, in full view of some 100 people.

Word got out two days later, on October 2. Tina checked her e-mail and found a note from Luis Benitez, a Boulder-based guide who’d taken blind climber Erik Weihenmayer to the top of Everest in 2001.

“There is a story that happened here on the 30th and the 1st that is not being told,” Benitez wrote. He described glancing out of his team’s dining tent to see a line of Tibetans headed up the pass, hearing gunfire, watching the Tibetans break into a run, and then seeing two people gunned down. Though the facts coming in were sketchy, Tom and Tina went ahead with a tentative story headlined “Cho Oyu ABC Swarmed by Chinese ArmyTibetans Shot at Nangpa La?”

“The next day we get an e-mail from the mountain urging us to remove the story,” says Tina, declining to say who it was from. “There were commercial guides intimidating sources, saying that if they confirmed it, they would be detained at the border and that they wouldn’t be able to climb in the future.”

Benitez confirmed this to me, as did Kate Saunders, a spokeswoman for Washington, D.C.based Save Tibet, a nonprofit that conducted extensive follow-up interviews with the climbers and refugees. To the Sjogrens, active suppressionnot just silencewas typical of the way some big outfitters reacted to the events. “Why did they lie?” Tom asks. “To protect their business. It’s like the mob. Follow the money and you will find your reason.”

“We said, No, the story stays,’ ” Tina says. “So we had the story up for two days, but nothing happens. Then all of a sudden we start to see media. Now we get more confirmation. Save Tibet met with the refugees and interviewed them. But China denied. They said they had no information about any of that. So we posted a call to climbers. We said, Guys, we need pictures.’ To our big surprise, three hours later, there are pictures in our mailbox from Pavle Kozjek, a Slovenian climbing a new route on the mountain. So we published the pictures and we sent them to Save Tibet. Now China turns around and says, Yeah, OK, we did shoot them, but it was in self-defense.’ We made another posting. We said, Guys, we need video.’ That’s when Sergiu sent us the video.” It arrived two days later.

Sergiu Matei is Romanian, and it’s no surprise to Tina that the photos and video were sent by citizens of formerly Communist countries. “No one knows better how a toothache hurts than someone who has had his tooth pulled,” she says.

THE FLYING ELBOWS have started plenty of feuds, leading to threats ranging from lawsuits to physical violence. Longtime Everest figure Henry Todd is high on the Sjogrens’ enemies list, in part because of his past. He spent seven and a half years in prison in the seventies for the marketing and distribution of LSD and was banned from Nepal for two years after a base-camp altercation in May 2000 with Finn-Olaf Jones, a producer. Jones claimed he was punched. Todd denied it, but he was convicted by a Nepalese court and got the boot. These days, he’s an Everest outfitter again and was scheduled to be working on the mountain in 2007.

The Sjogrens’ first anti-Todd salvo appeared in 2003 under the headline “Everest’s Most Dangerous Person, Henry Todd,” and it accused Todd of supplying faulty tanks to a number of expeditions over the years. The second, which ran in 2005, was a six-parter called “Oxygen on Everestthe Highest Death Lab in the World,” which reiterated many of their earlier charges. Both blasts included quotes from unnamed climbers who allegedly had problems with oxygen supplied by Todd, none of them leading to fatalities.

Did the Sjogrens make a solid case? It’s hard to say. Their reportorial style often skips the norms of American journalism: Personal invective is seen as fair play, and source attributions can be maddeningly vague. When I read ExplorersWeb, I’m sometimes left with the feeling that a story could very well be true or false, or somewhere in between. But, during my own research, I didn’t come across any substantive fact-based rebuttals to their stories, and so far no one has sued them for libel.

Asked about ExplorersWeb, Todd, speaking from Edinburgh, Scotland, said, “I personally don’t look at it, but my wife has looked at it, and my lawyers have looked at it.” He wouldn’t comment on any specific accusations. “We don’t respond because we regard these people as totally absurd.” He did, however, offer 20 minutes of insults, calling his foes “a pair of complete idiots, utterly ludicrous, an absurd pair.”

I asked Todd if he or his lawyer had ever taken legal action of any kind. “We couldn’t be bothered,” he said.

Another favorite target= is expedition leader Russell Brice, one of the most prominent guides on Everest. In 2006, a Brice team passed dying climber David Sharp on the way down from a summit bid, because he appeared to be beyond rescue. The Sjogrens’ fury over this incident has been directed largely at Brice, who they believe should have tried to save Sharp. Their Brice piece, headlined “The Most Shameful Act in the History of Mountaineering,” ran to coincide with the Discovery Channel’s fall 2006 broadcast of Everest: Beyond the Limit, a reality series that followed the progress of Brice’s expedition.

Brice has defenderswriting in ��ԹϺ�� last year, Ed Douglas argued that it’s unfair to lay so much blame on him. In an e-mail, Brice expressed disdain for the Sjogrens. “ExplorersWeb were very hard on me and quite inaccurate,” he wrote. “However, I have never had anything to do with them in the past and I have no intention of having anything to do with them in the future, including making comments about their comments.”

Most explorers are charged with lesser crimes, usually against the record book. The Sjogrens have quibbled with exploration records claimed by David de Rothschild, Maud Fontenoy, and others. Fudging, in the Sjogrens’ view, is rampant in the adventure world, which they see as dominated by media hounds claiming specious firsts of all kinds. In their eyes, the mainstream media seem all too ready to lap up claims without scrutiny.

Many explorers, naturally, protest. “I’m not a fan,” says Ben Saunders, an Englishman who skied to the North Pole in 2004. Instead of starting from the Russian landmass and kayaking to the ice, he flew to the edge of the icepack, drawing jeers from the Sjogrens.

“By tradition, everybody has started at land,” Tom says.

“Dominick Arduin chose to start from land,” Saunders replies. “And she died.”

Despite such differences, Saunders says he can’t help but admit that ExplorersWeb is a great way to keep up. The site often irritates him, but he still checks it out once a week.

THE CONTACT 4.0 CUSTOMER shows up at the Arapahoe Inn just after eight. His name is Mike Haugen, and he’s leading an expedition on Everest this season. He’s driven through near-whiteout conditions from Denver to pick up his package.

Inside 217, Tom lays out the components, which include a waterproof case with a sat phone inside, an HP iPaq PDA with the Contact 4.0 software, and the Nera satellite modem. They need to test the sat modem, but there’s no good signal at the motel. Usually, Tom goes up to Loveland Pass, which is at 11,992 feet, but it’s ten o’clock and the snow has been coming down since five.

“We probably shouldn’t go,” says Haugen. “I think they’re gonna close that pass. It’s snowing pretty good out there.” They look out the window and decide to go anyway.

Tom, Tina, and Mike jump into the Sjogrens’ Ford Expedition and start up the road to Loveland Pass. Nine Inch Nails is blasting on the stereo; Haugen has his computer open on his lap, and the glow lights the cabin. Tina is leaning forward between the seats. The trip takes 15 minutes, and in the last ten they pass just two vehicles, a cowering 18-wheeler and some kind of snow-moving machine that looks like it came from another planet.

Then they pass two tracks leading over the edge of the winding road. They slow down and peer out. “I don’t see a car,” says Haugen. “I think the plow must have pushed snow down over there.”

“Let’s be good Everest summiteers and just keep going,” says Tom.

Finally, they reach the pass, which is nothing more than a small clearing amid a swirl of snow in the headlights. A sign reads WARNING BACKCOUNTRY USERS AVALANCHE BLASTING USING LONG RANGE WEAPONRY. While Tom and Mike search for a signal, Tina jumps out. In the dark, she starts taking pictures of the sign and of Tom and Mike in the car searching for a signal. The pictures are black. “You have to get out,” she says. “It won’t work.”

Mike finds a signal and the guys get out. Tina photographs them by the sign, by the car, by another sign. The cold is awful and everyone is shivering, so they all jump back in. They’ve clearly had fun on this escapade. As they head back, Tom, jazzed up, says to Haugen, “Did you hear about the guy who’s going to climb Everest naked?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Tina, already on top of it. “That goes up tomorrow.”

The post The Grudge Report appeared first on ��ԹϺ�� Online.

I’m Going to Rib-Cage World

sperkins-pom — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

AS A SPECIMEN, JAY VILLEMARETTE is fairly unremarkable, though when he’s viewed from the front, his cranial radius does seem a bit large. Other than that, as the 40-year-old stands before you with his largish head, blue eyes, and goatee, there’s nothing to suggest he’s the king of the bone business, the largest dealer of skulls and skeletons in all creation, a convicted but avowedly reformed wildlife smuggler (more about that later), and, in his own way, a visionary with a strange and redemptive dream.

skulls

As president and founder of Oklahoma City–based Skulls Unlimited International, Villemarette is the premier name in bone cleaning and assembly, turning unwanted carcasses of every kind into gleaming skeletons—and grossing more than a million dollars a year in the process. Now, inside an 8,000-square-foot building on the developing outskirts of town, he’s augmenting his core operation by creating the Museum of Osteology, a monument to the beauty and power of bones. It’s set two miles down the road from a Valero mini-mart, amid cattle blinking in their fields. If all goes well, the ribbon cutting will happen sometime in the middle of 2007.

“I want kids and researchers to come here,” says Villemarette. “I want this to be the best skeleton collection in the world. I’ve spent 32 years on this, and now it’s all coming together.”

He’s almost finished the building, the hub of a project that will cost him at least $750,000. The skeletons are ready to go—there are roughly 80 in here already, lined up against the walls on wheeled stands, arranged in lifelike poses. Among the specimens—all of which Villemarette says he obtained legally through a worldwide network of collectors, hunters, and zookeepers—there’s a white-sided dolphin leaping through the air, an African lion about to grab an eland, a rhino, a giraffe, a killer whale, a hippopotamus, and a king penguin.

Others are on the way. A big-game-trip packager from Tulsa recently donated an enormous elephant bull, sans ivory, which was shot by his daughter during a 2005 hunt in Botswana. There’s also a 44-foot humpback whale lying under horse manure on a friend’s spread in rural Pennsylvania. The friend brought it from Cape Cod after it beached. Villemarette will fetch that one himself, flying out and driving his smelly prize back in a U-Haul.

Over the museum’s entrance, Villemarette plans to display a flying flock of skeletal birds. He’d like to hang a 40-foot sei whale at the mezzanine level. On the ground floor, he wants to display a skeletal “pioneer family” in a wagon, pulled by wo skeletal horses, with a skeletal dog nipping at their legs. To Villemarette, such a display would be neither tacky nor weird but cool and educational.

“This is what I love,” he says, looking around and contemplating his own destiny, like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull. “I’ve got maybe 20 or 30 years left on the earth, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

EVERY BONE-LOVING Starsky needs a bone-loving Hutch, and Villemarette has his in Joey Williams, the museum’s 33-year-old educational director. With his swept-back red hair and freckles, Joey looks like the Eric Stoltz of the skeleton set. He’s worked with Villemarette for a couple of years but has known him since 1991. Neither man has a Ph.D. Villemarette is self-taught, a high school graduate. Williams majored in biology at a small state university in Kansas. Together they’re like two kids on an adventure, answering questions for each other, chiming in constantly.

Williams, who’s with us inside the museum, points at the killer whale skeleton. “Look at the fingers there,” he says, showing me the flipper bones. “It’s got a hand. Now, why would God put five fingers in a flipper? He wouldn’t. Clearly, this animal used to have hands.”

“Exactly,” says Villemarette. “It grew up on land and then crawled back into the water.”

It’s true. The killer whale (actually a species of dolphin) has the hands of a piano player, with five slender digits. Biologists hypothesize that whales and dolphins, mammals both, evolved from land-based creatures that returned to the sea 50 million years ago. But evolution can be a tricky topic in Oklahoma, and some visitors who come through might want to debate that sort of thing. Villemarette and Williams say they’ll let the bones speak for themselves. “We don’t want to argue,” says Williams.

“We’re scientists,” adds Villemarette, as if that term implies not arguing.

Skulls Unlimited—which everybody shorthands as “Skulls”—employs 13 people, including Michelle Hayer and Allyson Reed, two women who answer phones in the shipping room. Stacked high around them are boxes of bones, stamped with the words THE WORLD’S LEADING SUPPLIER OF OSTEOLOGICAL SPECIMENS. The headquarters for all this is a five-acre mini-campus housed in two large, mostly windowless buildings. The museum space is fronted by a gift shop, where you can buy souvenirs like rodent skulls and Skulls coffee mugs. Across the parking lot is the processing building, home of the “skeleton crew,” where carcasses go in and finished skeletons come out.

Who are the customers? Hollywood calls a lot. Bones from Skulls have appeared in Shanghai Noon, The Flintstones, and Pet Sematary II. Villemarette says movie people tend to ask for more bones than they end up taking—the classic kid-in-a-bone-store reaction. The producers of The 13th Warrior, for instance, called to order 20,000 pounds of cow bones but bought only 5,000 pounds—or so Villemarette estimates. “It was a big old pile, I’ll tell you that,” he says.

Nature centers call all the time, too, as do medical schools and prominent museums. Skulls has sent skeletons to the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., which recently bought a zebra skeleton. The Smithsonian has its own taxidermists, but they don’t “articulate” skeletons, a Skulls specialty that involves gluing joints, drilling and wiring bones, and welding custom stands.

“Skulls Unlimited is probably the leader in the field,” says Randall Kremer, a Smithsonian spokesman. “If you can really call it a field. There probably aren’t many competitors out there.”

TO BECOME KING of the dead, it helps to start early. Villemarette was seven when he found his first skull. He was living in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where his father used to take him and his brother Joe out for walks in the woods. One day, the boys came across something wrapped in a blanket. They thought it might be a person but peeked anyway. It was a decomposed dog, and for Jay it was love at first sight. He still has the skull.

When Villemarette was 14, by then living in Oklahoma City, he’d already found enough critters to start a small bone collection. Word got around, and people started letting him know whenever they came across an interesting dead thing. One afternoon, a neighbor brought over a bobcat. Villemarette asked his mother if he could boil it in the kitchen. She said no, so he boiled it while she was at work.

During those early years, Villemarette tried to perfect his skeleton-cleaning methods, learning by trial and error, experimenting with acids and fire. Eventually, he found some flesh-eating dermestid beetles working on a carcass, took a few, and started his first bone-scouring insect colony. That colony lasted for years but picked up a mystery disease and died, down to the last bug. Villemarette’s current bug team, housed in the processing building, is his second.

High school came and went; Villemarette turned his obsession into a business. He got married in 1985. In 1986, when he was 20, he printed a list of available skulls and sent them to schools, generating a few orders. As the business started growing, it took his wife a while to get used to the fact that her husband was a bone merchant.

“She pretty much cried herself to sleep the first few months,” says Villemarette. “But she’s fine with it now.”

While Villemarette tells me these things, Michelle Hayer pokes her head in to announce that the Oklahoma City Zoo is on line one. Like many zoos, OKC’s puts its animals in a freezer after they die. When the freezer fills up, Skulls gets the call to collect some free, rare, dead animals. As Villemarette and Williams swing into action, it seems like they should be sliding down a Batpole.

Alas, I’m not invited. “Zoos don’t like to talk about the fact that their animals die or what they do with them after,” Williams says as he and Villemarette head for the door. “They’re just weird about it.”

“We’ll leave you with the skeleton crew,” says Villemarette. We walk into the hot Oklahoma sun and cross over to the processing building, where I’m handed off to 32-year-old Eric Humphries, a 13-year Skulls veteran. The guys hop into Villemarette’s maroon pickup (license plate: SKULLS) and they’re off.

STANDING OUTSIDE the processing building, I hear a drill screaming in bursts. “Come on in,” says Humphries, a clean-cut guy with a constant smile.

Inside, stretched out on the cement floor, is the skeleton of a 30-foot gray whale, legally harpooned in 1999 by the Makah Indians of Washington State. The skull is wedge-shaped, about seven feet long, and features a ragged hole above the eye, where the harpoon went in. Skulls employee Clark Griffith is hunched over a football-size vertebra, drilling it with a spade bit, filling the room with bone dust. He’ll spend more than 170 hours putting this skeleton together, at a total cost to the Makah of around $11,000.

Humphries says he came to Skulls in a roundabout way: He was an art student looking for a human skull to draw, and one thing led to another. As he talks, he picks up a length of bone and starts tapping his left palm with it. I ask him what it is. “Oh,” he says, “that’s a humerus.” He holds it against his upper arm for comparison. So it is.

Human skeletons come through Skulls all the time, mostly bound for medical purposes. The current asking price for an articulated skeleton is $3,700. Villemarette gets all his human skeletons from companies in China, which handle supply and sourcing on that end. He has no idea what their sources are.

Humphries puts the bone down and we resume the tour. In another part of the room, there are stainless-steel lab tables, vats, tools, and bones everywhere. The smell is a combination of powerful chemicals and decomposing tissue. It shivers the nostrils. “You’ll smell like death all day,” Humphries says cheerfully.

Dale Dorsey, who oversees animal flensing (flesh removal), is sitting in an office chair, talking on the phone. He waves hello with an enormous mallet. When Dale is flensing, he’s stationed by a sink in the corner, either wielding a knife or operating a powerful vacuum that Villemarette designed and built himself. It’s used to suck out brains.

We move into a small, windowless chamber, where some three dozen large terrariums are filled with brown dermestid beetles—millions of them, chewing away. New skulls and bones are placed in the tanks, and, in about a week, the beetles eat every particle of flesh in every nook. Humphries picks up a dog’s skull, points into the nostrils, and says, “No way could we clean in there.”

After the bugs have done their damnedest, the bones are dropped in vats of hydrogen peroxide in the outer room, then they go into a barrel of acetone, which dissolves the bones’ natural oils. After that, it’s back into the peroxide for another 24 hours and then out to Griffith, who articulates the skeleton and sprays on lacquer. Hippo or human, at Skulls everybody gets treated the same.

IN THE BONE BIZ, it can be tough finding good employees. Villemarette usually puts an ad in The Oklahoman, reading something like “Seeking person to remove tissue from animal skulls. . . . Weak-stomached people need not apply.” More than once, new hires have shown up, worked until lunch, and not come back.

Skulls gets some strange requests from individual clients. One man wanted his own femur ball, which had been removed during a hip replacement, used as the knob of a walking cane. Recently, a model at an art school e-mailed to ask how much it would cost, after her death, to turn her into a skeleton the school could use. Villemarette quoted a price of $7,500, with a discount for prepayment.

Bone dealers, too, sometimes step outside the boundaries of normal behavior, which brings us back to the smuggling thing. In 1995, Oklahoma City–based agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service obtained a warrant to search Villemarette’s business and home, charging that he’d violated federal and international wildlife laws and treaties by falsifying documents related to the origins, contents, and shipping of many of his specimens. In 1998, he pleaded guilty to a two-count felony charge for interstate trafficking and smuggling of skulls from rare, endangered, and otherwise protected wildlife. He served 180 days of house arrest, got five years’ probation, and paid a $10,000 fine.

I’d asked Villemarette about this before I arrived in Oklahoma. He seemed comfortable with his past, the picture of a reformed man. “I don’t mind talking about it,” he said. “I have nothing to be ashamed of. It was a paperwork thing.” Then, like a true bone nut, he started to reminisce about one of the seized items, a skull from a 100-year-old babirusa, an endangered Indonesian pig. He misses that skull.

According to Nicholas Chavez, the Fish and Wildlife agent who oversaw the case, Villemarette’s problems were “hugely larger than just a paperwork issue.”

“We seized well over 500 skulls in violation of CITES and the Lacey Act,” says Chavez, referring to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and the 1900 U.S. government act designed to protect “scarce” domestic wildlife. “In his house, there was a hidden room, behind a big Cape buffalo skull on the wall. Inside were documents and letters and the contraband. It was kind of cool.”

Chavez believes Villemarette got off lightly, saying, “Sometimes we find that the judge does not see these things the way we do.” Chavez also wonders if Villemarette was less remorseful than he should have been. “I think he thought it was OK because he considered himself a scientist,” he says.

According to Fish and Wildlife, Villemarette is not currently under investigation for anything. Whether his obsession with bones will ever lead him astray again is something only he knows, but since the big bust his record has been as clean as one of his specimens.

VILLEMARETTE AND WILLIAMS are gone an hour, then they return with a truckload of animals, pulling up to the back door of the processing building. In the bed, there are a few garbage bags full of smaller specimens. A California sea lion and a grouper are wrapped in a tarp.

The guys crowd around the bags, now sitting on a lab table. There’s a hedgehog and a Goeldi’s marmoset, a lorikeet and a ferret. Williams pulls out a long hyacinth macaw, its blue feathers tinged with white frost, and says, “That’s nice.” He finds an amphibian and studies it.

“Surinam toad,” says Villemarette.

“That’ll make a cool skeleton,” says Humphries.

“Not bad,” says Villemarette. “No special mammals, though. I’m a mammal guy.” After a bit, we wander over to Villemarette’s office, a small, windowless rectangle. There are dozens of skulls in the bookshelves behind him, including one from a two-headed calf.

I ask Villemarette if he ever feels odd handling human bones, if he experiences moments of horror or transcendence. He shrugs. “Nah, I’ve seen too much of it.”

What about offending someone’s soul? “I’ve probably handled 2,000, maybe 3,000 human skulls,” he says. “I’ve never gotten a complaint.

Is there anything he wants for the museum that he can’t get? “There’s not room for a herd of rhinos, unfortunately,” he says. “Also, I’d like a panda, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Williams pokes his head in with news. “I just got an e-mail from the guy at Año Nuevo,” he says, sounding very excited.

Villemarette jumps up, explaining, “There’s a big die-off of elephant seals going on at Año Nuevo, in California. We’re talking 4,500-pound males.”

He sounds like a happy man.

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Tenthouse Suite

sperkins-pom — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

AH, THE CHALLENGES OF CAMPING: How much to pack? Where to pitch the tent? Sushi or steak? And what bottle of wine to order with dinner? I’ve wrestled with these questions the past two days while anxiously awaiting my visit to the Chattooga River Resort, a combo lodge, restaurant, and campground in South Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains, near the churning whitewater of the Chattooga and Nantahala rivers.

tree house camping

American-style safari, El Capitan Canyon

When I arrive, I pitch my tent at the best of the 30 secluded spots: a little clearing by a bend in bubbling Long Creek hidden behind a grove of hemlocks and poplars—and a five-minute walk through the woods to the restaurant and lodge.

There will be no ramen and Bud Light tonight. Instead, I’ve already ordered my meal by e-mail, having chosen from a menu that includes filet mignon, California rolls, and pork tenderloin. I settled on salmon teriyaki sushi, which is waiting for me in a cooler by the picnic table. The wine list ranges from a $14 California red table wine to a 2000 Château Mouton Rothschild Bordeaux that runs $569. The chill in the spring air, I knew, would call for a red, but the fish wanted to be with a white. Unable to decide, I typed, “And a bottle of whatever you think sounds good.”

Fortunately, I’m in the experienced hands of campground proprietor Craig Ewing. He’s nowhere to be seen, but in the cooler is a $42 Michel Picard Beaujolais, a red so light it goes perfectly with fish. I pull out the cork and take a swig straight from the bottle—I’m roughing it, after all.

That sip of Beaujolais is my first taste of “luxury camping,” an oxymoronic term that describes a new generation of North American campgrounds snapping out table linens from Vermont to British Columbia. It’s an idea that may seem ridiculous to traditionalists who relish being in the outdoors as a chance to appreciate the bare necessities, but it’s appealing to more and more travelers who want to enjoy the natural world without the hassle of planning menus, preparing food, finding firewood, or even pitching tents.

“This is the next big thing in adventure travel,” says Chris Doyle, of the ��ԹϺ�� Travel Trade Association, an industry group representing more than 400 lodges and outfitters. “More and more folks are paying for five-star experiences in the wild. They want the stars, they want the trees, but at night they want to be more than comfortable. Luxury camping is the perfect answer to that.”

Ewing opened his campground in 2000, and his first 21 sites were booked every weekend. Two years later he added nine more sites. He’s now building another 23 or so, and he takes reservations a month in advance.

“People who come here have done the Appalachian Trail and paddled Class V rapids,” says Ewing, “but now they want to kick back and enjoy a good bottle of wine.” He also finds that a lot of his customers have the money, but not the time, for an outdoor experience. “A lot of them live in the city, work full-time, and can’t spend two hours picking up groceries before they leave,” says Ewing. “And they don’t want to get home with a cooler full of warm mayonnaise and soggy bread.”

Soggy bread isn’t on the menu at Chattooga. Much of the best stuff, in fact, isn’t listed anywhere; you just have to ask. Campers have ordered tentside massages and manicures, and more than one couple has honeymooned there, with such perks as fresh flowers on the picnic table and, at breakfast, a bottle of Dom Perignon with their orange juice.

Perhaps the most unbelievable perk, however, is in store for me when I head down the path and step into what is normally the nadir of a campground experience—the communal bathroom. Instead of flies clustering around buzzing fluorescent lights, a prison-style cement floor, and the never-quite-powerful-enough smell of disinfectant, I’m greeted by gold-plated fixtures as well as shaving cream, mouthwash, and aftershave arranged on a chrome tray next to porcelain sinks. I half expect to find an attendant handing out warm towels. And, luxury of camping luxuries, the shower water is truly hot.

The Chattooga River Resort is located in Long Creek, South Carolina, about 90 miles north of Atlanta. Tent sites cost $19 for four people; everything else, like the Dom Perignon, is extra. Preorder your food by e-mail and pull up to a fully stocked campsite. 864-647-1110,

Buck’s on the Brazos, an hour southwest of Fort Worth, Texas, offers two-room safari-style canvas tents on the banks of the Brazos River, with queen-size beds and fresh coffee delivered tentside. Set on ten acres, the tents are shaded by 100-year-old pecan trees. Buck’s doesn’t offer fancy food, but they’ll make your bed, lay out your campfire, and stack the grill with charcoal. Tents run $100 a night. 254-898-2825,

El Capitan Canyon, in Santa Barbara, California, has canvas safari tents with handmade willow beds, full linens, maid service, and massages. Tents are set in a canyon across from El Capitan State Beach, amid old-growth oak and sycamore trees. There’s a solar-panel-heated pool, 35 miles of hiking trails, and miles of Pacific Ocean shoreline. Prepared meals are available at the Canyon Market and Deli, at the canyon entrance. Tents, $135; 866-352-2729,

On the Loose Expeditions‘ two luxury yurts are in a secluded corner of a 150-acre working organic farm in Vermont’s Green Mountains. Specialty meals include pasta with a sauce made from farm-raised grass-fed beef and homegrown tomatoes. Yurts, $135; 800-688-1481,

Sky Camp‘s isolated tents come complete with log beds, reading lamps, and a view of British Columbia’s Crystal Lake. There’s a wood-fired lakeside sauna, and meals are prepared by a graduate of the Scottsdale Culinary Institute. Four-day trips to the fly-in camp, with floatplane airfare from Whistler, from US$1,250; 866-455-1601,

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Bro’cast

sperkins-pom — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a July evening, and Tony Hawk is broadcasting his first live satellite-radio show from a studio overlooking the massive ramp at his headquarters, in Vista, California. Before spinning an hourlong set that kicks off with Devo’s “Gates of Steel” and includes tracks from Rancid and Radiohead, plus bantering with other pro skaters, the Birdman sets a critical ground rule: “We’ve banned skating on the ramp,” he declares. “We can’t stand to watch people while we’re on air.”

TUNES IN SPACE

For a month, SIRIUS delivers 120 channels: 65 with commercial-free music, and 55 with news, sports, and talk radio. Aftermarket receivers start at 0; many plug into car or home stereos with adapters (external antenna required), and some function as stand-alone players.

tony hawk

PASS THE MIKE: Hawk dishin’ it at his studio, in Vista, California

The show, dubbed Demolition Radio and airing Tuesdays at 7 p.m., marked the first of a barrage of new programs hosted by action-sport stars on Sirius Satellite Radio’s 11-month-old Faction channel. In August, surfing god Kelly Slater kicked off Radio K-OS—broadcast from breaks around the world—by sitting down with hip-hop bluesman G-Love in L.A. Beach volleyball diva Kerri Walsh filed daily reports from the Athens Games en route to a gold medal. This winter, U.S. Ski Team bad boy Bode Miller steps up to the mike.

Sirius’s clear goal with Faction is to attract the same hordes that prop up the X Games and Fox’s action-sports cable channel, Fuel. With some 500,000 subscribers, Sirius still lags far behind sole competitor XM Radio, which recently topped two million listeners. But as sat radio grows—analysts predict an audience of 25 million by 2009—both companies are following the model of cable TV by investing in highly specialized stations that draw dedicated fans.

“Hawk and Slater have big, committed audiences, and we want them,” says Scott Greenstein, head of entertainment at Sirius.

Of course, investing in the slacker set has its risks. “If the radio goes dead,” Hawk told listeners during his second show, “we’ve probably decided to go skating.”

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Master Blaster

sperkins-pom — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

KY MICHAELSON CALLS HIMSELF THE ROCKETMAN, which is a lot of nickname for a 65-year-old family guy living in Bloomington, Minnesota. But Michaelson has earned it. A former stunt coordinator for Burt Reynolds action films like Stick and Sharkey’s Machine, he’s spent the past half-century mounting rocket thrusters on motorcycles, wheelchairs, snowmobiles, bicycles, pickups, sleds, and even a toilet. Now he’s constructed the Go-Fast Rocket, which he hopes will be the first amateur-built craft to punch its way into suborbital space, 62 miles above sea level. His latest attempt to conquer hobby-rocketdom’s grandest challenge is scheduled for September 22 in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

Father, son, and nose cone: Ky in his Minnesota living room, with three-year-old Buddy Rocketman Michaelson

The Go-Fast is a 650-pound machined-aluminum cylinder with a titanium nose cone and carbon-fiber fins. It’s 17 feet long, and 13 of those feet are packed with 500 pounds of ammonium perchlorate, the same fuel that sends the space shuttle into orbit. Together with a group of fellow rocket buffs who call themselves the Civilian Space Exploration Team, Michaelson expects to spend upwards of $100,000 on the project, funding the dream with donations and proceeds from several companies he’s founded over the years, which peddle everything from exercise equipment to cosmetics. Though rivals are nipping at his heels—rocket groups in Alabama and Texas are also in the hunt—Michaelson is probably too far ahead to get beaten. We caught up with him in Bloomington, where he talked about what it takes to make the big shot. What got you into this?

When I was a kid, I had a copy of Collier‘s magazine from 1928 that showed this guy, Rodman Law, wearing a leather aviator’s hat and sitting on top of a rocket he’d built, which was basically just a keg of black powder. And then it showed him lying on the ground and smoldering.

And you said, “That’s me!”

Right. Immediately after that, I took a bicycle and mounted ironing boards on it, as wings, and went over to my old school and tried to fly. I pedaled down the hill like a bat out of hell. That didn’t work, so I switched to rockets. I’ve been building rocket-powered everything ever since.

Including a toilet…

Yes, the SS Flusher. I put a stainless-steel toilet on four wheels and added a fully adjustable rocket-motor propulsion system. It’s got 1,000 pounds of thrust. You could go 200 miles an hour if you wanted, but it’s not street legal. You’d need turn signals and windshield wipers and all that.

How did you go from rocket toilets to rockets in space?

Well, a rocket’s a rocket, I guess. About 1995, a friend brought over an amateur-rocketry magazine, and the rockets were just like the ones I’d been building, only much larger. I thought, Gee, I can do that—I’ll just upscale everything. So I built one and went out to Black Rock, where a group called the Tripoli Rocket Club holds an annual launch that attracts about 400 guys. That rocket had a P motor. In rocketry, motors are designated with letters, and each succeeding letter is twice as big as the one before it. Most of the guys were building K motors, maybe an M at most. They didn’t know who I was, and a lot of them were like, Who do you think you are, coming out here with a rocket this big?

What happened?

It blew up.

Was it a good explosion, at least?

It was a spectacular explosion. It looked like the Fourth of July. In 1997, my team went back to Black Rock with a two-stage rocket, which like the Go-Fast was around 17 feet tall. This was our first space attempt, but the upper stage didn’t light, so we only got to about 77,000 feet. That rocket came down at supersonic speeds and we lost a lot of it.

Last September, you made your second attempt at the space shot with a design similar to the one you’re using now. What happened?

That blew up, too. We recovered a three-inch piece of titanium nose cone—and that was it.

What goes into building a rocket?
It takes a lot of time and a lot of volunteers working together. We’re up to an S motor now, and you’ve got to realize that this thing will be going 4,000 miles per hour in 14 seconds. There are tremendous G-forces involved, so you need strong materials. The Go-Fast’s fuselage is aerospace-grade aluminum, T-6061, the same stuff they make airplanes out of. We hire a mill with a huge lathe to turn it. We build different parts of the rocket all over the country and assemble it when we meet at the launch.

What’s in the nose cone?

There’s a Kevlar parachute, an electronics bay, and a payload bay, which we’ll fill with coins, flags, and space mail—which is mail that’s been flown in space. Collectors are really into that stuff. We’ve got a GPS for tracking, and a black box with a pinger so we can find the rocket no matter where it lands.

What’s the hardest thing about putting a rocket in space?
The paperwork. We’ve got to get clearances from the Bureau of Land Management, because we use their land; the FAA, for flight clearances; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, because we’re working with explosives. It takes a year to get ready for one launch, for a trip that lasts only about ten minutes. You have to make sure that not one person is within 26 miles, there are no aircraft within 50 miles, no trains coming for 30 minutes, no cloud cover, and there’s no storm front coming within six hours.

What’s the blastoff like? Please tell me there’s a big red button.

Oh, yeah. We’re about a quarter-mile away, and there’s a box about one foot by two foot with a big red button on it. There’s also a safety switch and a combination that you have to set. Also, a button that you push to check for electricity in the line, so it doesn’t accidentally set off.

It must be a hell of a rush pushing that button.

I can’t even tell you. Your heart pounds so fast, you think you’re going to explode.

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All Legs On Deck!

sperkins-pom — Sat, 04 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE a giant squid to liven up a long ocean voyage. On January 11, Frenchman Olivier de Kersauson, 58, skipper of the trimaran Geronimo, set off from Brittany with an 11-man crew, hoping to break the around-the-world-sailing speed record. On the third day out, 400 miles from Gibraltar, his boat was grabbed by a 30-foot squid that slithered off the stern when the trimaran stopped. Scientists doubt it, since giant squid are deep-sea creatures and have never been seen live on the surface. “I’d say there’s a real possibility he hit a dead squid,” says Clyde Roper, zoologist emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “If it was alive, then professionally I’m very jealous.” We caught up with le capitaine by sat phone soon after the incident.

Illustration by Rob Clayton

What happened when you hit the great beast?
All at once the boat slowed down. And quite quickly. We were at 20 knots, and then we were down to 13.

What did you do?
We have a glass-bottom hull section by the rudder, so we can see what’s down there. I saw two arms of something that might have been a big octopus or squid. The arms were about the size of a man’s, red and white, very pretty. But I don’t want it grabbing my boat!

Giant squid are known to Tangle with sperm whales. Were you scared?
At the very beginning, no. But when we decided to stop, I said, “What kind of awful things are we starting now?” I was scared by the idea that the animal might come aboard if we stopped. I don’t know anything about those big calamari!

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Drone to Me, Baby

sperkins-pom — Fri, 11 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000

WHEN JOE DESROCHERS, dockmaster at Connecticut’s Guilford Town Marina, first heard the voices of Craig and Donna on his weather-band receiver last summer, he was somewhat heartened. NOAA Weather Radio’s new computer-generated voices were a definite improvement over their annoying predecessor, a synthesized robo-voice dubbed Perfect Paul, who had been broadcasting forecasts and warnings for the past five years. But like so many mariners, mountaineers, and other weather-dependent adventurers who spend lots of time alone, he still wished for the day when real people ruled the NOAA airwaves.

Illustration by Mark Todd

DesRochers well remembers that dark morning in January 1997 when the silence in his shed was broken not by a live meteorologist, but by the bass-heavy, monotonous sound of Perfect Paul. His metallic drone—the same voice produced by physicist Stephen Hawking’s speech synthesizer—was peppered with misplaced inflections and sounded a bit like a Speak & Spell with five-year-old batteries.

“It was terrifying,” says DesRochers, 65. “When I first heard it, I thought foreigners might have captured NOAA’s headquarters.”

NOAA’s high-tech system was able to get updates on the air several minutes faster, but the agency received torrents of complaints about Paul’s creepy muttering. “We even had letters from people who thought Paul was human,” says NOAA meteorologist Joanne Swanson. “They asked us to give the guy a day off.”

Craig and Donna, whose voices carry more natural inflection but are still a little stiff, are getting a warmer reception so far. Ninety-five percent of the 19,000 people recently surveyed on NOAA’s Web site gave Craig a thumbs-up, while 80 percent approved of Donna. Mariners, Swanson reports, overwhelmingly prefer the female voice, while just about everyone else, including hikers, farmers, and athletes, is evenly split between the sexes.

“I think Donna does a great job,” says Evelyn Lees, 45, a Salt Lake City avalanche forecaster. “But I can tell sheÕs a computer. I still miss the real voices.” Other listeners, like New Hampshire outdoor educator Mitch Richardson, 25, are just happy to have company in the woods. ÒTheyÕre not very human,Ó he says, Òbut theyÕre human enough.Ó

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Holy Rolling

sperkins-pom — Wed, 09 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000

IN THE BEGINNING, Todd Starnes was watching MTV’s Road Rules, and it was only moderately good. In that reality show, a group of twentysomethings travel the country in a Winnebago, parasailing and bungee jumping and generally finding out about themselves, which pleased Starnes greatly. But they were also swearing, and boozing, and falling into one another’s hard, tattooed arms with abandon. That was bad.

Starnes, 33, an assistant editor at the Baptist Press, a Nashville-based Christian news wire, took his concerns to FamilyNet Television, a national cable network. Thus was begotten TruthQuest: California, a 13-episode, 30-minute show that debuts in October, in which 12 not particularly unruly Southern Baptist teens cruise Cali in a 45-foot motor home, spreading the Word and partaking in adventure sports.
To do this, they will visit “cutting-edge ministries” across the state. In one episode, they’ll surf, hitting the waves near San Diego’s Crystal Pier on longboards rounded up by local beachside pastor Evan Lauer. (Lauer holds monthly summer services on the sand for his surfer congregation. “When the waves pick up,” he admits, “the members do get fidgety.”) After they’ve been tossed in God’s great washing machine, the TruthQuesters will head over to the boardwalk, where they’ll hand out sunblock.

Later on, the gang will top-rope in the Swan Slab area of Yosemite and rappel down 120 feet of Lena’s Crack before joining Steve Hughes, an in-park chaplain, for some proselytizing. In the past, says Hughes, he’s helped visiting church groups hand out refreshments. “We’d tell climbers, ‘We just wanted to let you know that God loves you and here’s some juice.’ The climbers are like, ‘Hey, wow, this is free?'”

Two weeks on a co-ed bus (with additional stops for a ropes course in the Sierra Nevada and a river-rafting trip) may lead into temptation, but don’t hold your breath. “People need to see that not every teenager has a foul mouth, or is out there being promiscuous or smoking,” says TruthQuester Sarah Brown, 16, of Youngstown, Ohio. “You know, we actually do positive things.”

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Bryant Urstadt Archives - �����ԹϺ��� Online

The Missing Rink

And You Thought Shock Radio Was Dead!

Sirius Satellite Radio’s Action-Sports DJs

Sirius Satellite Radio’s Action-Sports DJs

The Grudge Report

Explorers Web

I’m Going to Rib-Cage World

skulls

Tenthouse Suite

tree house camping

Bro’cast

TUNES IN SPACE

tony hawk

Master Blaster

All Legs On Deck!

Drone to Me, Baby

Holy Rolling

Bryant Urstadt Archives - ��ԹϺ�� Online