In 1988, Michael Palin set out on his first BBC travel series, Around the World in 80 Days, which had him following the fictional voyage of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg. What began as a lark clearly unearthed some deep-seated wanderlust, because five series—and five best-selling tie-in books—later, Palin has just completed his latest, Himalaya, which airs June 20 to July 24 on the Travel Channel. (The accompanying book comes out June 17; BBC Video releases a DVD set of the series on July 19.) Armed with what appears to be no more than some chinos and half a dozen oxford shirts, Palin, 62, travels 3,000 miles through one of the globe’s most extraordinary and difficult-to-traverse regions, running into Maoist guerrillas in Nepal, cocksure helicopter pilots in Kashmir, the Dalai Lama in India, intrepid mountaineers on 26,504-foot Annapurna, and vestiges of the British Empire, including a high-altitude polo match in Pakistan. David Rakoff recently caught up with Palin in the relatively low-lying comfort of an 18th-floor hotel suite in New York City.

Michael Palin

Michael Palin

OUTSIDE: In 1998, after looping the entire Pacific Rim to make Full Circle, you claimed you were done with travel shows. But then you made Sahara in 2002, and now Himalaya. What keeps sending you back out there?
PALIN: After each series, I’ve thought, We’ve done the best we can do; let’s quit now. What keeps me going back is sheer curiosity. And I feel more secure when I travel the world. After 9/11, people became almost preternaturally xenophobic. That terrifies me; it is the most dangerous position to be in, to fear everyone around you.


Watching Himalaya, one gets the feeling that you’re never afraid, even in some pretty hairy situations.

When you travel, you come upon all sorts of moments that seem to be like crises, and you have to be careful not to get too hysterical. I do get anxious, but I try not to project it. There was one night on the way to Annapurna when I was very ill. I woke up and the room was completely dark. There was not a single sound, it was very cold, and my heart was just thumping away. I thought, You know, I could easily have a heart attack here. It was an awful moment. But then the next morning the sun on Annapurna was just so spectacularly beautiful. Once the camera goes on, I become a shameless old ham.


So is it by design—this downplaying of the pains of travel?

To get to some of these places is difficult, but to have someone going on—”Oh, this is difficult! Oh, I’m hating this!”—becomes quite monotonous. I’m far more interested in what you’re getting to afterwards. I don’t like to overdo my complaints.


You were filming in Pakistan in 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq. How were you received?

Honestly, there seemed to be very little hostility toward us. We never got spat on or had fists waved at us. One lovely incident was in Rawalpindi. We were in a crowd and a guy wearing a New York Yankees baseball hat tried to sell me this tape of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar talking together—”Never seen before anywhere on television!”—for $50. I was a bit skeptical, so he immediately dropped the price to $40. I’m not sure it was the real thing. I didn’t end up buying it, but I’ve thought about sending him back a picture of Queen Elizabeth having a shower or something like that.


Or perhaps one of the Dalai Lama, given your new connection to His Holiness.

There was something exceptional in meeting him. I’ve met some reasonably powerful people in the world, and there’s usually an aura that is quite difficult to crack, and you fumble for your words. That just didn’t happen. He’s completely disarming. It’s as though all he wants to do is spend the next hour with you. I know it’s fanciful, but I would say he’s the ideal traveling companion. He’s got a great sense of humor, and I think he’s quite a good judge of people. He said that when he was young, one of his favorite books in the palace in Lhasa was the atlas. If I got to take anyone else with me, he’d be brilliant.


Even with the jet lag he says he suffers?

Yes, yes. He told me in somewhat graphic terms how it affects him. “Head very good,” he said. “Bowels not so good.” He likes to empty his bowels in the morning, usually, but with jet lag sometimes in the evening, sometimes twice a day. And I’m thinking, All right, Your Holiness, thank you, that’s all we need to know.


You also picked up some interesting news from a Tibetan astrologer. Apparently, you used to be an elephant, and in your next life you’ll be a rich daughter from a Western family.

Someone said to me, “My God! You’re going to come back as John Cleese’s granddaughter. Trapped there by the man you sold the parrot to.”


Speaking of which, what do you make of the Broadway play Spamalot and this whole Python revival?

I’m amazed, really, the way things are recycled. When we started in the 1960s, you made a series and maybe got one repeat, and that was it. There are some very good Spike Milligan series, which very much inspired us, and they’re mostly gone—phew, keeps the plagiarism suits from coming up—so I think it’s remarkable that a new generation of people will watch these slightly out-of-focus bits of us being vicars or cricketeers. Technically, some bits are quite basic. We shot on a Scottish moor, which you can’t see anything of, aside from a clump of wet grass. But that all seems to be part of its appeal. Television now is rather overwhelming. Everything looks good.


That includes you. Every time you’re on camera, you’re clean and well shaven. How do you do it?

It’s just part of the waking-up process, getting ready for the day. Wherever you are, especially the more remote the place, the more important it seems to shave and put on a clean shirt.

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It was only this March that Branson attended, with what must have been mixed emotions, the victory celebration in Geneva honoring Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones, the Swiss and British adventurers who had just become the first men to successfully circumnavigate the globe by balloon—a voyage that Branson himself tried on two occasions, in each case with a lavish public-relations send-off and eventual ignominious failure. But the manic and megalomaniacal founder of the Virgin record- and airline-empire has neither the patience nor the constitution for wallowing. With the opportunity to be the first to circle Earth dirigibly now denied him, Branson has set his sights on another, and certainly unique, means by which to test his mettle. It seems the man who defined “thinking outside the box” for an entire generation of entrepreneurs is now thinking very much inside the box: He’s in the midst of his latest attempt to become the first man to FedEx himself around the world.

Armed with little more than an enviable supply of Xanax (“It helps me get to sleep while curled into a little ball”), some sandwiches, a tiny reading lamp, and three books (The Art of War; his own memoir, Losing My Virginity; and a dog-eared copy of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth), Branson has previously attempted this expedition twice. On his maiden voyage he narrowly escaped attack by a trio of very hungry drug-sniffing dogs at customs in Greenland. On his second try, Branson languished for two weeks inside his box in Vanuatu when his local contact was unexpectedly called away and unable to sign for the package. “I lost quite a bit of weight on that leg of the trip,” he laughs. “Which actually made things a lot roomier.”

Whether or not he makes it this time, Branson’s true legacy may well be something far more lasting: He has spawned an entire generation of like-minded CEOs, men—and sometimes women—who merely laugh at the sobriquets “madman,” “genius,” “seriously dangerous asshole,” and “stupid fucked-up motherfucker.” They are our new gladiators, recklessly brave in their efforts to keep up with the (Indiana) Joneses. Branson may have been the first. He may even be the best. But now he is just one of many.

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There are those in Hollywood who will admit, after the requisite snickering has subsided, that Michael Eisner has never looked better. Undeniably, with his filthy face—patined with the rich soil of an exclusive Beverly Hills neighborhood—his mud-caked work boots, and the grimy i brake for jayne mansfield’s headT-shirt, he looks quite peaceful. Gone is the permanently furrowed brow of the beleaguered executive as he stands at the bottom of the 60-foot crater that once was his estate, one foot propped up against the tricked-out leaf blower he rebuilt to do his dirty work, surveying his new domain. “I’m the king of the underworld!” he cries exuberantly.

“The idea for all of this”—he spreads his arms out, indicating his excavation—”came at a party we were having for Hank Kissinger and Jiang Zemin. It was right when we were starting the Kundun negotiations. I got to thinking that what would really bring us together wasn’t just some feel-good movie about China’s human-rights record or its occupation of Tibet—both of which are vastly misunderstood, by the way—but the actual physical connection of our two great nations. I remembered the old saw about digging a hole to China. And then I thought, Why not?”

Why not, indeed? At the bottom of Eisner’s project lies the wreckage of the manse in which he used to live; it loosed itself from its foundations after he got below 40 feet. Thankfully, it was unoccupied at the time, the mogul’s wife having taken the kids to Judy Ovitz’s house—reportedly muttering, “Half those Shakespeare in Love receipts are mine, you freaking nut-job,” on her way to the car—shortly after the tunnel reached two fathoms. Eisner now makes his home in a pup tent perched precariously on the ledge, his abrupt change of life having been met with both concern and grudging admiration from friends and colleagues. “I never knew he was so handy,” Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein offers diplomatically. Enthuses Kevin Costner, director of such films as Waterworld and The Postman, “It’s a great idea. I wish I’d thought of it.” Aside from the occasional visit from Margot Kidder, Eisner spends his days largely alone, moving pound after pound of soil. His former life as chairman and CEO of Disney seems as far removed as China itself. “You mean the Wonderfully Rigid World of Disney? The Linear Kingdom?” He takes a pull off his longneck, eyes glittering with the fire of a zealot. “I stopped talking to that bunch of magma alarmists weeks ago. Hey, I’ll worry about the alleged ‘molten core’ when I get to it, you know what I’m saying?”

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Ted Turner is viewing the brief but lethal thermal extrusion of volcanic steam that roasted alive one of his crew in the shallows off Oahu with the positive attitude so characteristic of the successful entrepreneur. “On the one hand, it was a terrible loss of life,” says the Croesus-wealthy Turner. “But because he was cooked so rapidly, and with steam as opposed to conventional heat, it really locked in all those flavorful juices.”

At the time of the accident, the unfortunate mate was doing repair work on the hull of Turner’s boat, the Hanoi Jane—a perfect replica of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki that was constructed out of tightly rolled bundles of Indonesian bhat, that country’s now-useless currency (an ingenious ploy to extol the virtues of recycling). Until Hawaii, Turner’s re-creation of Heyerdahl’s storied Peru-to-Polynesia voyage had been without incident, and despite the tragedy, the man who coined the term superstation is undeterred. “I think this voyage could really bring the world’s nations together,” he explains. “I’m white; my crew isn’t.”

Turner’s famously blue eyes are distant now, the captain scanning the horizon. “You really don’t have to be a billionaire to do this, you know,” he drawls. “We were able to construct this vessel, parts and labor, for about 30 bucks. I can’t tell you how beautiful a sight it is to watch 50 or 60 children climbing around, rolling those bank notes so tightly. You see, their fingers are much smaller than ours.” He laughs as he recalls, “Occasionally, I’d throw in a greenback and yell out, ‘Dollar in the bhat!’ Man, you should have seen those little tykes wrestle each other!”

All is not sentimentality and reminiscence on the Hanoi Jane, however. There must also be leadership, sometimes stern, often unpopular, and never more so than when dealing with the hard choices that must be made on an expedition whose official motto is “waste not, want not.” Indeed, some of the crew are noticeably upset by the unfortunate provenance of their surprise lunch. “What? You think not eating him is going to bring him back?” Turner asks the row of glum faces. He takes a bite of forearm, the skin crisp, the flesh succulent, and for a mouthwatering moment, it’s hard to fault his logic.

Clearly, the human imagination is boundless.Too bad the same can’t be said for the supply of undiscovered territory and unconquered obstacles on this planet. Thus it’s hardly surprising to hear that the newest and most unorthodox of the world’s übertycoons—a man who is turning the whole notion of derring-do on its head—should come from the paradigm-shifting realm of the Internet.

“I was trying to come up with a way to show Branson and Turner and the rest of those guys that I’m a player,” says Jeff Bezos, the unconscionably youthful and callow founder of Amazon.com. “And all of a sudden I realized that there’s really nothing left out there to do. So I figured, if nothing’s all that’s left to do, I’m damn well gonna do it better than anyone else.”

And with that, Bezos set off on his demanding extrafinancial quest. To look at him, you’d never know the strain he’s under as he sits in his chair, motionless, his life inexorably tied to the same two media that have made him a wealthy man: computers and books. But Bezos is indeed in the midst of an effort far more daunting, far more exhausting, far more life-affirming than any put forth to date: He is strapped in, eyelids held firmly open (“An homage to Kubrick, may he rest in peace”), attempting to read on a 20-inch monitor one of the most challenging literary works of the century 1,000 times consecutively.

“There was this bell that rang in my head somewhere around read number 472,” says Bezos, “when I realized that I wasn’t just reading a book, I was seeing the truth. I was sitting in this chair and I looked up to the higher power—God, Allah, Mars, Venus, whoever—and I found myself asking the central question posed by the title, spontaneously, yearningly: Can I really get what I want and want what I have?”

He sighs beatifically, and then cocks his head toward Amazon’s sports-and-outdoors editor, who’s been entrusted with the task of applying drops to his eyes. “Keep your Annapurnas, your spelunking, your hematomas,” Bezos says, his face shining, pearled not just with saline but with the sweat of a man newly emerged into light from the dark fastness of a cramped overnight pack. “For a true journey, my friend, I offer but two words: John Gray.”

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IT IS DIFFICULT in the extreme to construct either a Figure-Four or Paiute deadfall trap, to say nothing of having them work, in the dark, and in the rain, at 11 p.m., after 17 hours of lectures and demonstrations, during which one has already been taught (among other things) the Sacred Order of Survival—shelter, water, fire, food; how to make rope and cordage from plant and animal fibers; how to start a fire using a bowdrill; finding suitable materials for tinder (making sure to avoid the very fluffy and flammable mouse nest as it may contain hanta virus); how to recognize the signs of progressive dehydration; how to make a crude filter out of a matted clump of grass; how to distinguish between the common, water-rich grapevine and the very similar yet very poisonous Canadian moonseed; how to make a solar still out of a hole covered with a sheet of plastic (and how to continue the condensation process by urinating around the hole); and the Apache tradition of honoring those things one hunts, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral. All of this within the first day and a half of a Standard Class session at Tom Brown’s Tracking, Nature, and Wilderness Survival School in the wilds of northwestern New Jersey.

The Standard is the first and most basic of 28 classes offered by the school, a Wilderness 101 of sorts—a weeklong, lecture-heavy, intensive introduction to primitive outdoor skills and nature awareness. The same skills and awareness found at the very heart of the bildungsroman that is the oft-told life story of Tom Brown Jr. Briefly, the story is as follows: Growing up in the Jersey Pine Barrens in the late 1950s, a young Tom spends almost every waking moment from the ages of seven to 18 in the woods under the tutelage of his best friend Rick’s grandfather, Stalking Wolf, a Southern Lipan Apache from Texas. Brown’s apprenticeship ends in 1967 upon his graduation from Toms River High School. He is designated 4-F by the draft board due to a chip of obsidian that had lodged in his right eye in his teens; years earlier, Stalking Wolf is said to have predicted that a “black rock” would keep the boy out of Vietnam. Over the next decade Brown takes odd jobs to make the money necessary to spend his summers testing his skills in unfamiliar environments across the country (the Tetons, the Dakota Badlands, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon), living in debris huts and scout pits of his own devising, and subsisting on food he forages or kills himself. Eventually the young man re-emerges into society with a single-minded mission: to teach others and lead them back to the woods and a love of nature.

There have been digressions along the way. Brown has trained Navy SEALS in high-speed invisible survival and helped the FBI and state law enforcement agencies in tracking persons both missing and criminal. He solved his 600th case on his 27th birthday, a full year before the publication of his first book in 1978. The Tracker is a tale of an adventurous boyhood of limitless self-reliance in an unfathomably Arcadian wilderness. It makes for compelling, if not always easy to swallow, reading: part Richard Halliburton, part Carlos Castaneda, part Kung Fu. Grandfather, already an octogenarian in 1957 when Tom first meets him, appears as a man of almost Buddhalike wisdom with a penchant for posing oblique, seemingly insoluble riddles and laughing discreetly behind his hand as Rick and Tom, mired in narrow Western thought, fumble for answers.

It might not be Thoreau, but it is the key to the legend that Tom Brown may very well one day become, and certainly already is here at the Tracker School. Brown, 50, is a cultfigure of international stature. The best-selling author of 16 books, whatever tracking Brown does now, be it for the crooked or the merely lost, is more of the armchair variety. Having trained tens of thousands of people at his school, he can call upon a global network of former and current acolytes when his tracking wisdom is requested.

Many of us here for the Standard—some 90 people from the United States and Canada, four from Austria, and a young woman all the way from Japan—are aspirants, yearning to join those ranks of expert trackers. Everyone is acquainted with Stalking Wolf. All have read at least part of Brown’s oeuvre, be it one of the field guides to wilderness survival or to wild edible and medicinal plants, or perhaps the more spiritually oriented titles, such as The Vision, The Quest, The Journey, or Grandfather. According to the school’s statistics, roughly 90 percent of us will return to take a more advanced course, starting with the Advanced Standard and branching off thereafter, perhaps to learn Search and Rescue, the Way of the Coyote, Intensive Tracking, or How to Be a Shadow Scout.

We are diverse in age and gender, and we run the gamut from the pragmatic to the ethereal; from the unbelievably sweet 18-year-old vegan boy from Portland, Oregon, to the gun enthusiast who brought his own supply of hermetically sealed decommissioned military MREs (“Bought ’em on eBay for ten cents on the dollar after the whole Y2K thing didn’t pan out. Best au gratin potatoes I ever ate”); from the congenial soi-disant “hillbilly from West Virginia” in his fifties to the twentysomething physics major looking to drop out for a while. Most are friendly, intelligent, and environmentally and socially committed. More than a few are involved in education, in particular working with troubled teens in the wilderness. And, I am relieved to see, most are refreshingly immune to the pornography of gear. They radiate good health as they unpack bags of gorp, apples, whole-wheat pitas, and huge water bottles. I, too, have come prepared—with a deli-size Poland Spring mineral water, assorted candy bars, and four packs of Marlboro Lights.

I ARRIVE ON APRIL 30, a beautiful, sunny, but very windy Sunday afternoon. We all spend the first few hours battling the strong breeze to pitch our tents, the placement of which is overseen by Indigo, one of the eight or so volunteers, alumni of previous Standard Classes, who help out for the week and in so doing refresh their skills and relive what was clearly for them a wonderful experience. Indigo, a rural New Jersey local, hovers somewhere between 50 and 70 years old. With her sun-burnished face, craggy features, and rather extreme take-charge demeanor, she is straight out of My Antonia. Still, she’s not unfriendly, even as she tells one of the Austrians, his tent staked down and ready, “Uh-uh, mister. You gotta move it about four inches that way. We’re making a lane right here.” Indigo gesticulates like an urban planner dreaming of a freeway; she is the Robert Moses of Tent City.

It should be noted that we are not actually in the Pine Barrens, sacrosanct locus of Brown’s childhood in and around the town of Toms River. The Standard Class is held on the Tracker farm in Asbury, New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border (not to be confused with Asbury Park, sacrosanct locus of the early career of that other South Jersey legend, Bruce Springsteen). Brown splits his time between here and the Barrens, but the farm at Asbury is better for teaching novices because of its rich biodiversity; the surrounding fields, meadows, and light forest, and the Musconetcong River, which flows a few hundred yards away, offer ample flora and fauna for this week of instruction. Aside from the barn, the central structure where the (hours upon hours of) lectures take place, the farm consists of Tom Brown’s house, a dozen or so portable toilets, and a toolshed with an awning under which sits a row of chuck-wagon gas rings—our cafeteria. All activity is centered around the main yard, a scant acre of patchy lawn that lies between our nylon sleeping quarters and the barn. In the center of this is the all-important fire, which burns day and night, heating a large square iron tank with a tap, where we get hot water for our bucket showers.

Brown used to teach the Standard from beginning to end himself. These days, aside from evening and morning talks, he leaves the teaching responsibilities to his paid instructors, the most organically charming group of people I’ve ever encountered. They’re all affable, pedagogically gifted—there isn’t a dud public speaker in the bunch—and chasteningly competent at the endless variety of primitive skills we’re here to learn. They’re a lovable crew of commandos straight out of central casting: Kevin Reeve, 44, director of the school, a John Goodman paterfamilias type who opted for early retirement from Apple Computer nine years ago after taking his Standard Class; Joe Lau, 31, resident flint-knapper—his stone tools are things of beauty—currently ranked second in ninjutsu in the state of New Jersey; Mark Tollefson, 32, plant expert, wild-edible savant, also in charge of food; Tom McElroy as the Kid—at 23, youth personified—a thatch-haired Tom Sawyer with an aw-shucks charm that belies his sniper’s aim with the throwing stick; and Ruth Ann Colby Martin, 26, resident Earth Mother, who, it seems, can do literally everything, and is polymathically, beatifically dexterous, capable, strong, beautiful, and funny—Joni Mitchell as Valkyrie. Even though Ruth Ann has already run the Sandy Hook marathon on the day we meet her, she fairly glows. Let me be clear: As an avowed homosexual, I make it a practice to seek out the amorous embraces of men over those of women, and yet I fall heavily for Ruth Ann.

That first evening, the entire class gathers in the barn for an orientation session in which we are advised of the school’s general guidelines and given our first taste of the ethos of the place, summed up by Kevin pointing to a sign above the stage. It reads, “No Sniveling.”

“This is a survival school, not a pampering school,” Kevin adds. As if on cue to reiterate the rustic authenticity of the place, a bat that lives in the barn swoops down over our heads. We are reminded to hydrate regularly and properly, and to beware the poison ivy that grows rampant on the farm. “And if you are taking any sort of medication to regulate your moods,” Joe tells us, “we request that you stay on that medication while you’re here.”

All of the instructors chime in, in unison, their voices weary with hard-won experience: “We wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t important.”

Finally, we are warned about ticks and their dreaded Lyme disease. We are to check for the small black dots twice a day all over our bodies, particularly in those dark, warm, hairy places ticks apparently love. A proper self-scrutiny is demonstrated by one of the (clothed) volunteers, who takes to the stage holding a small hand mirror from the shower stalls. He moves it over and around his torso and limbs like a fan dancer, looking into the glass the whole time. As the coup de grâce, he shows us how to check our least accessible, most unwelcome potential Tick Hideout. Turning his back to us, he bends over, bringing the mirror up between his legs. “Ta-da!” he says, holding a triumphantly abject position. Everyone applauds.

WE MEET THE MAN HIMSELF the following morning in a welcome lecture of sorts. Tom Brown is handsome and in great shape. With his silvering hair neatly parted on the side, trim mustache, and penetrating blue eyes, he resembles nothing so much as the scary, casually hostile, and emasculating gym teachers of my youth.

I’m only half right. Brown, while blessed with deadpan comic timing and a Chautauqua preacher’s instinct for the performative flourish, also exhibits a disquieting and ever-present bass note of dwindling patience. This weird duality is an acknowledged fact. Kevin has warned us that Brown is “part mother hen, part drill sergeant.” For the uninitiated, it can make for a fairly bizarre ride, sometimes in the same sentence. He begins with a little flattery, praising our very presence.

“The terms ‘family’ and ‘brother- and sisterhood’ do not fall flippantly from our lips.”

That’s nice, we think, prematurely warmed to our cores.

He continues. “Even my parents—when they call, the calls are screened. I talk to them when I want to. But you,” he indicates us, snapping back to sweetness, “you speak my language. When I say to one of you, ‘Hey, I heard a tree call your name,’ you’ll know what I mean. You’re more than eight-to-five. I’m an alien out there,” he says, meaning society. “But not with you. You’re the warriors.”

Happily, the Standard Class is not boot camp. We are not hiked miles and miles, made to gather firewood for hours on end, or required to test our physical mettle in any appreciable way. It’s more intellectually rigorous. The days are long, from six in the morning to past 11 at night, largely spent in lecture, with hands-on experience making up only about 20 percent of our time. During breaks—primarily the time set aside for meals—we practice our skills. The yard outside the barn buzzes with pre-industrial activity: people making cordage, lobbing their throwing sticks at a shooting gallery of plush-toy prey, fox-walking and stalking slowly across the grass, and trying to start fires with bowdrills.

This last one is our primary milestone. The squeak of turning spindles and the sweet smell of smoldering cedar, occasionally followed by the applause of whatever small group might be standing nearby, is a constant. I make three attempts before success—but when it comes! The thrill of sawing the drill back and forth, watching the accumulation of heated sawdust, now brown turning to black, the thin plume that rises, the gentle coaxing of the tiny coal into fragile, orange life, the parental swaddling of that ember into a downy tinder bundle, the ardent, almost amorous gentle blowing of air into same, the curling smoke, and the final, brilliant burst into flames in one’s fingers—its atavistic high simply cannot be overstated.

Recapturing and maintaining a sense of wonder is at the very heart of the Tracker School philosophy, which is in part “to see the world through Grandfather’s eyes.” In other words, in a state of complete awareness, living in perfect harmony with nature, attuned to what is known in the Apache tradition as The Spirit That Moves Through All Things. This awareness will provide the key to tracking animals, both human and otherwise. “Grandfather didn’t have two separate words for ‘awareness’ and ‘tracking,'” Brown tells us one morning.

No doubt. But Brown’s subsequent description of a brief, hundred-yard morning walk from his house to the barn is so strange and omniscient, he calls to mind Luther and Johnny Htoo, the chain-smoking 12-year-old identical twin leaders of the Karen people’s insurgency movement in Burma, with their claims of invisibility and imperviousness to bullets: “There had been a fox. The hunting had not gone well. She emerged at 2:22 a.m. Her left ear twitches. Another step, now fear, and suddenly the feral cat appears. She’s gone!” We won’t be able to reach this level by week’s end, but apparently, we are told frequently by both Brown and the instructors, we will be able to “track a mouse across a gravel driveway.”

“FULL SURVIVAL,” in Tom Brown’s world, has nothing to do with the amassing of alarming quantities of canned food, a belief that the government is controlled by Hollywood’s Jewish power elite, home schooling, CBS reality-based programming, or Charlton Heston. Full survival means naked in the wilderness: no clothes, no tools, no matches. It is both worst-case scenario and ultimate fantasy. Worst case being that the End Days have come upon us, the skies bleed red, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have torn up the flower beds, and we must fend for ourselves and our loved ones. The fantasy being that we’ve gotten so sick and tired of our consumer society that we just park our cars by the side of the highway, step into the woods, and disappear. An oft-repeated joke throughout the week is, “Next Monday, when you go in to work and quit your jobs…”

Being in the woods, we are told, will become an experience akin to being locked in the Safeway overnight. “The main danger in full survival is gaining weight,” Kevin avers. Nature is a bounteous paradise for those who play by the rules. That would be nature’s rules, not the government’s. Since much of the nation’s remaining wilderness falls under the protective jurisdiction of the National Park Service—whose rangers don’t look kindly on the wanton building of debris huts, and killing and eating the animals—much of what we learn turns out to be illegal in what remains of wild nature.

Case in point: animal skinning. Even picking up roadkill requires a permit. On Tuesday evening, for the lecture on skinning and brain-tanning, Ruth Ann comes in wearing a fringed buckskin dress that she made herself. She tells us the story of coming upon a roadkill buck while taking a much-needed break from writing college papers. My immediate reaction the entire week to anything Ruth Ann tells me is eagerness and a wish to try whatever it is she is proposing. When she tells us how to slit the animal down the middle, and then to cut around the anus and genitals, and then to pull them through from inside the body cavity, I think, regretfully, “I wish I had a dead animal’s anus and genitals to cut around and pull through its body cavity.”

I almost get my wish. She dons a pair of rubber gloves, leaves the barn, and comes back bearing a very dead road-killed groundhog. It has already been gutted and the fur pulled down from the hind legs to just below the rib cage. She hangs it on a nail by its Achilles tendons. Grabbing hold of the pelt, instructor Tom McElroy—the Kid—pulls, using his entire body weight. Groundhogs, as it turns out, have a great deal of connective tissue. There is a ripping, Velcro-like sound as the fur comes down. McElroy briefly loses his grip and the wet animal jerks on its nail, spraying students in the front row with droplets of groundhoggy fluid. The bat flutters around the barn throughout.

Next comes the tanning. Almost nothing is better at turning rawhide into supple leather than the lipids in an animal’s own brain, worked into the skin like finger paint. A further, utterly beautiful economy of nature is the fact that every single animal has just enough brains to tan its own hide. Ruth Ann made her own wedding dress from unsmoked buckskin, as well as her husband’s wedding shirt. She has brought them to the lecture to show us. I expect her to look rough-hewn, disinhibited, and slightly tacky—like Cher—but when she takes the dress out of the box and holds it up against herself, it is lovely: soft, ivory, and impeccably constructed. My crush is total.

But there will be time for infatuation tomorrow. It is getting late, and as happens every night, my ragestarts to set in around 10:45 when people refuse to stop asking questions. I’m desperate to get to bed, having concluded my approximately two and a half hours’ worth of obsessively running to the can during breaks—prophylaxis against a groggy stumble through Tent City to the Porta-Johns in the middle of the freezing-cold night. A small cadre of exhausted fugitives has already disappeared, heading back to their tents slowly and silently, without flashlights. I join them.

AWARENESS STARTS small. Only when we understand the many mysteries that lie within the earth’s tiniest, seemingly mundane details will we be able to track animals or people. “Awareness is the doorway to the spirit, but survival is the doorway to the earth. If you can’t survive out there naked and alone, then you’re an alien,” Brown says one morning, gaining volume as he goes. “You think the earth is going to talk to someone who is not one of her children?” he yells.

My guess is no. To that end, we are taken out to a meadow overgrown with heavy grasses, garlic mustard, and wild burdock, a place known as Vole City for its large population of small rodents. We each lie down and examine an area no larger than a square foot, digging down, exploring.

My classmates look very idyllic and French Impressionist, scattered about here and there, supine in the sunlight, lost in contemplative investigation. Myself, I sit up, terrified at the prospect of finding anything, especially a vole. The instructorshows me how to root around just underneath the grass to find their ruts. I use a stick to gingerly push aside the stalks and turn over the debris, picking out the dull sheen of a slug here, the progress of a tiny worm there. Thankfully, no voles. Warming to my task, I suddenly spy—dark, wet, and gray against the fresh green of a blade of grass—the unmistakable articulation of amphibian digits, a hand span no bigger than this semicolon; it is connected to a tiny amphibian arm, connected to a tapered amphibian head the size of a peppercorn. The gleaming, dead eye catches the sunlight. My heart in my mouth, I call the instructor back over and show him. He picks up the tiny sprig with the half-eaten salamander still perched on it and holds it four inches from his mouth, enumerating the various classifications of the creature: the coloring, the reticulations, the patterns, the species. The instructor tries, God bless him, to draw me into a Socratic dialogue, asking me questions about what I’ve observed. He points to the chewed-out underside of the demi-lizard. “What kind of teeth marks made those cuts? Are the edges scalloped? Look at the gnaw marks. That’s a great find,” he concludes, patting me on the back.

I show my salamander to those working near me in the field, and they show me what they’ve uncovered. I feign interest in one woman’s small mound of unidentifiable animal scat. But we both know the truth: My corpse makes her find look like, well, a pile of shit. For a brief moment, I am Big Man in Vole City.

The instructor’s matter-of-fact treatment of the dead salamander, the complete lack of any “poor little guy” moral component to its demise, speaks to what makes the Tracker philosophy unique. There is none of that falsely benign conception of nature as friendly, inherently good, tame, and prettified. Aldous Huxley, in his essay “Wordsworth in the Tropics,” assails what he calls the Anglicanization of nature, the cozy revisionism of a force that is intrinsically alien and inhospitable: “It is fear of the labyrinthine flux and complexity of phenomena…fear of the complex reality driving [us] to invent a simpler, more manageable, and, therefore, consoling fiction.”

At Tom Brown’s Tracker School, there is a clear-eyed acknowledgment that things eat and get eaten. Ruth Ann, in telling us of the year she lived in the Pine Barrens in a house she made entirely by hand with cedar walls and a debris roof, gets straight to the point. “Whatever came into my house, I ate,” she says. “Mice? We just threw ’em in the fire, burned the hair off, and ate them whole. They just taste like meat, and there’s something to be said for that added crunch.”

She’s not being heartless; in fact, she’s the very opposite. For every skill we are taught, whether it’s harvesting plants, using our bowdrills, skinning an animal, or gathering forest debris, the first step in our instruction is always a moment of thanksgiving for the trees, the spirit of fire, the groundhog, the water. It’s a strange adjustment to have to make, at first. I am not proud to admit that there was a moment at 5:30 a.m. on the fourth day of class when, serving on cook crew, I stood bleary-eyed with exhaustion—having only gotten to bed some five hours earlier because of a late-night lecture on wild edibles—and seriously considered killing the guy who led us in a 15-minute thanksgiving that included complimenting the rising sun for being “just the perfect distance away from us.”There are worse things than acknowledging a continuum and connection between all things and staying mindful and grateful of our place therein, but it can be a hard concept to swallow before the coffee hits the system.

Even wide awake there are moments of fuzzy logic in this theory of interconnectivity. Kevin, our elder statesman, explains that the Apache tradition of being thankful to the prey will also result in a willing acquiescence on the part of the hunted. “Something that gives its life for your benefit does so with gladness, if you are humble,” he intones. Isn’t it pretty to think so. Ascribing complicit suicidal motives to the rabbit who licks the peanut butter from a deadfall bait stick—no matter how self-effacingly daubed on—seems a tad Wordsworthian to me.

But such doubts become ever fewer as the week progresses. From about Thursday on, the home stretch of the course, spirits are high. Most of us have gotten fire, and in a brilliant bit of Pavlovian pedagogy, the food improved markedly after the outdoor cooking demonstration. Despite the staff’s urging us not to take what we are told at face value, to go home and prove them right or prove them wrong, we’re all pretty jazzed and itching to head out into nature. That said, among the people I talk to there is also a growing skepticism about Brown himself. It has nothing to do with his credibility, the veracity of his life story, or even the purity of purpose of the Tracker School. Unfortunately, it’s personal: Brown’s drill sergeant persona thoroughly throttles his mother hen. As pleasant as he may be just after breakfast—and he frequently is sunny, sprightly, and very funny—if he addresses us after sunset, there is a darkness in him and a potential for ire that is frankly terrifying.

In one evening lecture, he talks about the necessity for us to “take bigger pictures,” to see more of the world through our wide-angle vision, to sense things before actually seeing them. “Instead of going click, click, click,” he minces, “go CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!” he suddenly roars. A few people actually flinch. Later on, in a moment meant to chide us for the persistence of our citified tunnel vision, he tells us that he has been observing us unseen from a perch on top of the tool shed. As we make our way to bed, we watch our backs, scanning our surroundings for heretofore unnoticed surveillance. One young man asks the group softly, “You guys ever see Apocalypse Now?”

IT’S TOO BAD THAT Brown the Personage has this effect on some people, because when I interview Brown the Person on Friday afternoon, the next-to-last day of class, he turns out to be a nice, intelligent guy with an undeniably noble and admirable mission in life. “It would be my dream to go back into the bush and live and never have to face another aspect of society,” he tells me as we sit at the kitchen table in front of a stone fireplace. “But that’s not my vision, that’s my dream. My vision is to reach as many people as I possibly can.” Still, he remains adamant about not franchising the Tracker School despite huge enrollment. (Before Standard Classes swelled to close to 100 people, the waiting list was six years.)

By the time I meet him, though, my disenchantment has become fairly entrenched. It doesn’t help that Kevin escorts me into the modest house that Brown shares with his second wife, Debbie, 33, and their two young children—and doesn’t leave, joining Tom McElroy, who is sitting in a chair, weaving a jute bag on a small circular loom. They crack jokes, weigh in with opinions, engage in quiet conversations with one another; the phone rings; they pour themselves coffee. Pretty soon I realize I’ve come to the teacher’s lounge.

Or is it a convocation of disciples? I ask Brown about the cult of personality that seems to be part of the Standard Class.

“Oh, I try to get rid of that real quick,” he says. “I tell people right off, ‘Don’t thank me, thank Grandfather.’ I’m a poor example. I am nobody’s guru.” Brown talks about how he, Kevin, Ruth Ann, and the crew have to make sure to keep “Tracker groupies”—those over-enthusiastic few who try to volunteer just a little too often—at a healthy distance. “Boy, this would be very easy to turn into a cult, big-time,” he admits, “and I just will not allow it to happen. That’s the last thing I want to happen.”

Noted. And yet, in almost every lecture, there is the requisite prefatory story from Brown’s life: “When Tom was 12 years old, Grandfather told him, ‘This is the year you will provide me with meat…'” The accrual of personal detail forms a gospel of sorts, and anecdotes are delivered in a hortatory, liturgical style. Granted, the stories are told to show the wisdom of Stalking Wolf, not Tom Brown, but the reflected glory of playing Boswell to Grandfather’s Johnson (a term straight out of a traveling salesman joke) clearly has its attractions.

Attractions not callously exploited, it seems. There is no line of Tom Brown sportswear, no exhortation from Brown that I buy anything while I am there, that I “Think Different.” At a very manageable 600 bucks for a week of food and instruction, the Tracker School is not the enterprise of the career opportunist. In person, Brown is not only not power-mad, but he comes across as almost as nice as one of his instructors.

I leave the house fairly won over. I return to Tent City and walk out into the field to gaze at the sun, now lowering in the late afternoon sky. I find one of my classmates standing in the grass in the honeyed light, enjoying a water bottle full of herbal tea. We stand there amiably and peacefully, mutually imbued with the soy milk of human kindness. He holds out the bottle of amber liquid, offering it to me, and says, “Rum?”

OUR LAST SUPPER is one of our own harvesting. I’m on burdock detail, digging the rough, brown, footlong roots out of the red clay of a nearby field with a fellow student. Back at the cooking shed in the main yard, all 90of us spend an hour or so cleaning, scraping, and slicing. I have never had a meal so Edenic in its profusion and beauty: a salad of chickweed, violet flowers, pennycress, and wild onions; a stir-fry of burdock, dandelion, nettles, and wintercress buds; dandelion flower fritters; garlic mustard pesto over whole-wheat pasta (store-bought—cut us some slack); nettle soup; and spicebush tea. We are each given a trout to gut, wrap in burdock leaves, and place in the fire. After six days here, I approach this task with a strange relish. It is the best fish I have ever eaten.

The grand finale of the Standard is a nighttime sweat lodge. I generally try to avoid pitch-dark, infernally hot enclosures, but now that Brown is my new best friend I find his preamble so avuncular and sweet that I almost consider it. He tells us we are to enter in a clockwise direction, leaving the area behind him free for those among us who suffer claustrophobia. “The minute you want to get out, just say so and we’ll open the doors,” he proclaims. “I won’t love you any less.”

I resolve to do it until he cedes the floor to Joe Lau, the ninjutsu expert, who reads us the guidelines. When I hear “crawl in on your hands and knees,” I realize that there is not Xanax enough in the world to make me enter the low, round, straw-covered structure. The other rules include taking off all metal jewelry that doesn’t sit directly against your skin as it can heat up, swing back, and burn you pretty badly. And then there’s the final admonition: “You are absolutely forbidden to pass wind in the sweat lodge,” says Joe. “We wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t important.”

The students assemble in their bathing suits, and there is something strange and primal about this nearly naked crowd in the moonlight. Their progress into the lodge is slow, and it takes a while for everyone to crawl in. I can hear Brown beginning his incantatory singing.

I rise early on the last morning. I’m almost the only student awake. I ask if there’s anything I can do, and one of the volunteers asks me to build up the fire. “Well, how the hell am I supposed to do that?” I think to myself. Almost as quickly, I realize I know precisely how to do that, and much more. I have never taken in more information in one week in my life. Can I track a mouse across a gravel driveway? I couldn’t track a mouse across a cookie sheet spread with peanut butter, but that’s no matter. Despite Kevin’s recantation in his final wrap-up, when he begs us, “Don’t quit your jobs, don’t make any radical decisions for the next three months, don’t trash your relationships…” (“How many of us did that?” Ruth Ann stage-whispers), I can’t help feeling like I could if I needed to, and survive. Lavishly.

Another student gives me a lift to the bus station. I count the roadkills on the shoulder of the highway along the way. “I could do something with that,” I think. “And that. And that.” I resist the temptation to ask my driver to pull over and let me out, so that I may part the trees and step through, letting the branches close behind me as I keep walking, until I can no longer be seen from the road.

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GLENN CLOSE AND I ARE HEAD OVER HEELS. Ass over teakettle we tumble, from our raft into the spin cycle of the Rio Futaleufú;. It is a perfect day: The sun is shining and the river is beautiful—a shimmering, effervescent foam that glints like a shower of sapphires as it closes over my head. Suddenly I’m hit with a preconscious instinct, my own reverse Elephant Man moment. I am not a man, I am an animal: Follow the bubbles to the surface!

The froth is disorienting, churning in every direction, with no clear way up. But flotation being what it is, the combination of our life jackets and the powerful arms of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Bobby for short; president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council) does the trick. Glenn and I are hoisted, dripping, back into the boat, our ordeal all of five seconds from start to finish.

Cutting through the green, snowcapped Andes in southern Chile like a satin ribbon, the “Fu” is nirvana for paddlers. Along with mind-bending Class V rapids, the river has two unique features: On its 120-mile, 8,000-foot descent to the Pacific, the Fu’s meltwater stops in several lakes, which simultaneously warm it—at 61 degrees, it is considerably more temperate than most glacially fed rivers—and filter out almost all the silt. This accounts for the Fu’s supreme clarity. By the time the water reaches the riverbed, it’s an astounding teal-blue, more Caribbean than Patagonian.

This is our last day on—and briefly in—the river. Glenn, 56, grins widely as we resume our positions in the raft, her already enviable bone structure somehow enhanced by this brush with mortality. I wish I could say the same for myself. I’ve traveled halfway around the world to write about celebrities behaving badly on an expedition meant to bring attention to an endangered river. But most of them—Woody Harrelson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Richard Dean Anderson—didn’t show up. And the ones who did—Bobby, his wife, Mary, and their longtime pals Glenn and New York hotelier Andre Balazs—all brought their kids. So I’m heading back with new friends and a story of a dam development scheme that seems more sleeping giant than clear and present danger. But not before having the crap scared out of me.

TRAVEL WITH A KENNEDY and you occasionally feel like you’re on the road with a major brand: Mickey Mouse, say, or the Coca-Cola logo. There’s a surreal quality to meeting RFK Jr. for the first time, at JFK. Kennedy, 49, has assembled two dozen people for a trip that will be part adventure tourism, part consciousness raising: The Futaleufú; is facing a proposed dam project by multinational corporation Endesa, Chile’s largest electric company.

We are being led by Earth River Expeditions, which started running outfitted trips down the river in 1992. Based in upstate New York, the organization has been buying up property along the Fu to keep it out of Endesa’s hands. Earth River currently owns about 1,500 acres—land goes for about $3,000 per—upon which about ten homesteaders live. The agenda behind a trip like ours is that we will return home and, through word of mouth, send others down the Fu, enhancing its value as a well-traveled ecotourist destination and making it a viable economic alternative to a hydroelectric dam. Or there’s the best-case scenario, from Earth River’s standpoint: One of the wealthier rafters in our group will buy a piece of land and put conservation easements on it so that it can never be sold to a power company. (Endesa is a corporation, not the government; it would have to own any land it proposes to flood.)

Earth River’s cofounders are Eric Hertz, 48, an American with the youthful, blue-eyed friendliness of Greg Kinnear; and Robert Currie, 44, a Santiago native of Scottish and Chilean parentage, with the physique and demeanor of a benign Hercules. Hertz waits in a cataraft for ejectees at the bottom of each set of rapids, and Currie is our trip leader. We’ll be on the Fu for six days in three rafts, starting at Infierno Canyon—roughly 25 miles from the river’s headwaters at Lake Amutui Quimei, in Argentina’s Sierra Nevada—and descending 45 feet per mile for the next 25 miles down to the rapids of Terminador. Glenn and I are in the grown-ups’ boat, behind Bobby and Mary, who have been taking rafting trips together since 1977, before they were even sweethearts.

Currie mans the oars in the back and precedes each run with a few minutes of river reading. On our first day, as we near Alfombra Magica (“Magic Carpet”)—our first Class IV challenge—he points to the geography of chaos roiling below.

“We’ll ride down that ridge of water and then we’ll typewriter across and back up when we get to the second drop,” he says. “Then we’ll paddle over to the eddy, which will stop our drifting.”

“I knew an Eddie once who stopped my drifting for a while,” Glenn deadpans.

As we sit at the top of each rapids, I can always see exactly what Robert is talking about. Once we’re in it, though, it’s a barreling spume of foamy white and Scope green. Where are those watery landmarks he described? I have no idea. It doesn’t matter, really—he can see them, and that’s what counts. As his crew, we only have one job: to do what he tells us. More often than not, that means paddle like hell. And even though at times it seems impossible that our efforts could be doing much of anything—those moments when our paddles stew nothing but the air as the river drops out from under us—we are apparently Currie’s power source.

And his mouthpiece. Kennedy is somewhat deaf in his left ear, and the river is loud. It falls to me to scream out Currie’s instructions. “Back it up! Stop! OK, dig in, dig in, dig in!” Later, when I get back home, I’m sent a copy of the video of our trip. I am talking in every shot, as if spooling out a monologue of fear. But there’s no way to run the Fu without making a sound of one sort or another. Glenn laughs exuberantly, while I opt for yee-hawing in what I hope sounds like an approximation of “Isn’t this fun?”

It is fun, in large part because I’m not steering. Currie’s skill gives the danger a virtual quality; it’s more like watching an exciting but consequence-free film of a river than being on one. I start to feel downright cocky.

EARTH RIVER HAS THREE CAMPS on the Fu, where we will stay over the next six days. The first is Camp Mapu Leufu, a rolling meadow that ends abruptly at the edge of a cliff, its springy grass littered with ox pies. Our routine is less than strenuous: Each evening we peel off our wetsuits and head for the hot tub. There is one at every camp. What initially seemed like so much Marin County nonsense proves indispensable, our best chance to get warm after a day spent on a chilly river. We’re treated like true adventure pashas—beer, snacks, excellent meals. We can even schedule a massage in our tents. With about a dozen children, ranging from seven to 18, we spend hours telling stories around the fire every night.

“A man checks into the Plaza Hotel in New York,” Kennedy says one evening in his gravelly Jimmy Stewart-like sob. “He eats too much for dinner and goes to bed. He wakes up a few hours later to find himself marinating in diarrhea.” That line is a big crowd-pleaser. Kennedy goes on: Horrified, the man throws his sheets out the window. They land on a wino, who wrestles them off and confusedly tells a cop he thinks he “just beat the crap out of a ghost.”

There is grown-up talk as well. A good deal of it about politics and, not surprisingly—given that we are traveling with Kennedys and a bona fide movie star—some really choice gossip. I’m sworn to secrecy, but it doesn’t really make a difference: I don’t recognize most of the names. By the time I’m back in my tent, all I can remember are “World Bank” and “Vanity Fair airbrushed his Speedo bulge.” Our wetsuits are hung overnight near the fire. By morning, the neoprene isn’t exactly dry, but it’s taken on a comforting bacony quality. The white noise of the Futaleufú; is good for sleeping, though it also serves to wipe clean whatever confidence I gained the previous day. I wake newly terrified, as does Glenn, I’m pleased to find out. This is as it should be, according to Currie. Especially because today, our first full day of Class V rapids, we are running Infierno Canyon.

“The day you think about Infierno without your hands doing this”—Robert shakes his like Al Jolson singing “Mammy”—”is the day to quit rafting the Fu.” This is no place for false bravado, he tells us, and seeing the sheer rock walls of Infierno up close, it would be hard to muster any. Even the names of the rapids suggest meeting your maker: Purgatorio, Danza de los Angeles, Escala de Jacobo. Once in, the only way out of Infierno is by running it. We couldn’t portage here even if we wanted to. Yesterday I was aware of the river and others in the raft; today my peripheral vision narrows to nothing. It’s just me and the end of my paddle.

THE RAPIDS DON’T take very long—r at least they seem not to. Time accordions when you’re on the river. The water widens out and quiets. Vegetation creeps back onto the cliffs, which get lower, opening out to gently sloping forest and pastures in places. We throw a Nerf football from boat to boat. (Well, they do; over the years I’ve perfected my “Please don’t throw the ball to me” face.)

Kennedy fly-fishes off the side of the raft and catches a ten-inch rainbow. When he removes the hook, the trout slips out of his hands and into the limited freedom of our boat, where it spends the afternoon swimming back and forth in the bilge. Sadly for this fish, the Fu is not a catch-and-release river; by nightfall it’s headed down one of the most famous intestinal tracts in America.

It is one of only two fish I see the whole week. The other is an ancient bull of a salmon, easily 40 pounds, which swims unmolested through the frigid waters. I also see two birds, kingfishers both. And that’s it. Not one insect, rodent, or small reptile. The Fu’s food chain appears to be as exclusive as our group: crowded at the top. There are apparently two types of deer, one subspecies of puma that eats the deer, and an alien population of wild boar brought over from Africa by the Argentinians. The pigs, huge omnivores with no natural predators, are of such mythic proportions, Hertz tells me, they can upend a man on a horse.

Such a preternaturally shy ecosystem wouldn’t seem to encourage living off the land. This might account for the short history of the region, which was only settled in 1905, when the Chilean government offered its citizens land grants to stave off annexation by Argentina. Chilean settlers found no recent evidence of inhabitants, but indigenous people must have lived here at one time or another—utaleufú is, after all, a Mapuche Indian word meaning “great waters” or “grand river.” Until Chile blasted a road through the region from the coastal fishing village of Chaiten, in 1986, the only way in by car was via Argentina. Even today, a scant 800 people live along the Fu—00 of them in the hamlet of Futaleufú and the rest on small farms or backcountry homesteads. All of which makes it an easy target for a dam project.

The vibe on our trip is fairly urgent—ell, as urgent as you can get sitting in a hot tub, sipping Chilean cabernet—ueled as it is by the cautionary tale of the Bío-Bío. Home to Chile’s indigenous Pehuenche people, the Bío-Bío river valley was once the Chilean equivalent of the Grand Canyon and one of the world’s premier whitewater destinations. Endesa—ith the Chilean government’s blessing and a loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a subsidiary of the World Bank—lanned a series of six dams on the river, starting with the Pangue, a 450-megawatt operation that would create a 1,250-acre reservoir.

In 1992, Kennedy, along with lawyers from the NRDC, pointed out to the IFC the major flaws in Endesa’s plans, including the fact that the dam was to be built in the middle of an earthquake zone at the base of two volcanoes. The World Bank, already under scrutiny for funding some environmentally questionable projects, launched its own internal investigation. In the end, an international coalition that included the NRDC, the Chilean Commission on Human Rights, and Grupo de Accion por el Bío-Bío, a grassroots organization, managed to keep Endesa from building all six dams. However, the Pangue devastated much of the Bío-Bío’s whitewater.

Endesa wants to build two dams on the Futaleufú that would bracket the river like concrete parentheses. The 800-megawatt La Cuesta facility would sprout up about nine miles from the village of Puerto Ramirez, our take-out. The 400-megawatt Los Coigü dam would sit just below Infierno Canyon, gateway to the river’s prime whitewater. Above that dam, local farms would be flooded under 75 feet of water; below the dam, there’s a distinct possibility that the rapids could slow to a trickle. As for the power generated, a good portion of it would probably be sold to Argentina.

In addition to trying to keep property out of Endesa’s hands, Earth River is waging its battle in the court of public opinion. One of the perks of being a river pioneer is getting to name rapids, and in 1991, when Hertz and Currie made their first descent of the Fu, they were vigilant about giving them Spanish or Mapuche names. (Endesa had tried to characterize the campaign to save the Bío-Bío as an affluent gringo insurgency, pointing out that some rapids, like Climax, were identified by English vulgarities.) The harsh reality of eminent domain, however, is that if the Chilean government really wants to hand over the Fu to Endesa, no amount of privately held riverfront property will make a difference.

Which makes it hard not to feel like a play-acting gringo insurgent. I had envisioned a trip where the whitewater thrills would be mixed with white knuckles of a different sort, as we bravely faced down bulldozers and sand hogs, blocking their way with our bodies, making us truly worthy of those long hot-tub soaks at the end of the day. But when I ask Hertz how dire the threat is, he puts it at about ten years off.

“Endesa hasn’t been buying up the land, and they need every piece they’re going to flood,” he tells me. “I think the fairest thing to say about the dam is that it’s in the future. People shouldn’t think they have to race down here, because it’s not true. But the more people who see the river…”

He’s not being a Pollyanna. When I call Endesa, in Santiago, I hear much the same thing. One energy planner guesses that getting these dams built by 2020 would be “optimistic.” “These projects are not confirmed,” adds Endesa communications manager Rodolfo Nieto. “They are only a far, far, far possibility.”

Perhaps, but it can’t hurt to get a 17-year head start when trying to halt a multinational hydroelectric concern. Kennedy certainly seems to think so.

“I’ve just seen this so often that it’s not even a question to me,” he says. “The locals get trampled. Dam projects like this consume their economies, devour them, and essentially liquidate them for cash. I’m worried about losing the Futaleufú.”

I’M WORRIED, TOO, but mainly because it’s our last day on the river and we’re about to run Terminador, the most challenging rapids of the trip. We take on some preliminary Class IVs in the morning—Caos and La Isla, which is where Glenn and I take our spill. It shakes me up more than I care to admit.

“How are you feeling?” Currie asks as we wait in an eddy above the rapids. Scared, we tell him. He demonstrates a Chilean gesture for our fear, bringing his fingertips together like a blossom closing up for the night.

“Get it?” he asks.

Kennedy guesses that it’s our balls shrinking down to the size of cocktail peanuts. No, Currie corrects us, it’s a sphincter tightening.

“That’s not a sphincter!” I shout. “A sphincter goes like this.” I make a fist and close it up tight like Señ;or Wences from The Ed Sullivan Show. S’alright?

Not really. I can’t remember much about Terminador, except that the force of the water seemed much more aggressive than on the other rapids, as if it were holding a grudge—the difference between a schoolyard bully and a Teamster with a baseball bat. It moved with such speed and magnitude that we had to stay close to the bank, which meant negotiating a steep drop backward at one point. Thankfully, Kennedy waits until we’re through it to tell me that it’s the most dangerous commercially run rapids in the world.

No matter, we’re alive and on to Himalayas, which is, by comparison, quite safe but possibly more thrilling. The waves are solid slopes of water easily 20 feet high, judging by our 18-foot-long raft. We ride up and down three or four of the aqueous mountains and we’re out, drifting safely in the eddy—wet, exhilarated, and done. Our last night in camp is a traditional Chilean asado. Two lambs—recently gamboling on the meadow near our tents, no doubt—have been slaughtered, butterflied on racks, and roasted on an open fire. The portions are medieval: great haunches and joints. We sit around a large square table, tearing into our food like Neanderthals.

After dinner, standing in the meadow at Mapu Leufu, there are more stars than I’ve ever seen, and that includes the pot-enhanced heavens of the “Laser Floyd” show at the planetarium. “Wow, wow, wow,” I whisper. I can’t even hear myself over the rush of the river.

HERE’S WHAT I LOST ON THE FU: two pairs of sunglasses, a water bottle, a carabiner, and my useless quick-dry towel, which swings, probably still damp, on a line somewhere.

Here’s what I didn’t lose: my life.

Here’s what I got: a new hat. When we pull the rafts out at Puerto Ramirez, Kennedy presents me with a baseball cap bearing the crest of the Swiss flag with an image of a tiny airplane clearing an alp. An adventurer’s cap.

“You don’t like my Krispy Kreme hat?”

“You’re so much more than a doughnut,” he replies.

He’s wrong, of course. I’m so much less.

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The 13 Biggest Outdoor Phobias

Sure, fear itself has plenty of fans—people with the good sense to be terrified when the rope snaps, the elephant charges, or the boat capsizes. But what about PHOBIAS, those singular, irrational, often inexplicable anxieties that lurk even in nature’s happiest scenes, waiting to creep you out and propel you into the panic zone? In the confessions that follow, our 13 unlucky writers reveal the things that give them the waking nightmares—from time-tested classics like snakes and vertigo to oddities like engorged ticks and beady-eyed armadillos. But don’t fret! There’s nothing like the shivery pinprick of dread to make you feel truly alive.

Swimming

After one traumatic day at the pool, a lifelong dread

HYDROPHOBIA NAMES NOT ONLY A FEAR but a disease—a generally fatal one, rabies, whose agonies of swallowing are stimulated by the sight of water, hence the name. Of course most phobias have at their root a fear of death, and my fear of water began, I believe, when my father, treading water in a swimming pool, invited me to jump from the tile edge into his arms; I did, and slipped from his grasp, and sank, and inhaled water for a few seconds. It felt, when I gasped, as if a fist had been shoved into my throat; I saw bubbles rising in front of my face as I sank down into a blue-green darkness.

Then my father seized me and lifted me back into the air. I coughed up water for some minutes, and my mother was very angry with my father for his mistake. Even then, it seems to me in the wavery warps of this memory, I took my father’s side; he was, after all, trying to teach me to swim, a paternal duty, and it was just bad luck, a second’s slip-up, that in fact he delayed my learning for several decades. Part of our problem, that traumatic summer day, was that we had little experience of swimming pools; not only did we have no pool ourselves, but no one in our neighborhood or circle of acquaintance did, in that blue-collar Depression world. We were not country-club people. It is a mystery to me how we found ourselves at that particular pool, in bathing suits. Nor do I know exactly how old I was—small enough to be trusting but big enough to surprise my father with my sudden weight.

Henceforth I knew what it was like to look through a chain-link fence at a public pool, its seethe of naked bodies in the sunshine, and inhale its sharp scent of chlorine, but not to swim in one. At the local , the pool was a roofed-in monster whose chlorinated dragon-breath, amplified by the same acoustics that made voices echo, nearly asphyxiated me with fear. Aged twelve or thirteen now, I tried to immerse my face in the water as the instructor directed, but it was like sticking my hand into fire; nothing could override my knowledge that water was not my element and would kill me if it could. At college five years later, where one had to pass a swimming test to graduate, I managed a froggy backstroke the length of the pool, my face straining upward out of the water while a worried-looking instructor kept pace at the poolside with a pole for me to grab in case I started to sink. I think I did sink, once or twice, but eventually passed the test, and stayed dry for years.

In the movies of my adolescence, smiled through the hateful element, using it to display her rotating body, but other movies, glorifying our wartime navy, showed sinking ships and sputtering submarines. One of my nightmares was of being trapped belowdecks and needing to force myself through adamant darkness toward air and light. My lungs felt flooded at the thought; my hydrophobia extended to a fear of choking, of breathlessness. Life seemed a tight passageway, a slippery path between volumes of unbreathable earth and water.

And yet, graduating from college, I took the Coronia to England, and contemplated the ocean calmly from the height of the deck, and slept behind a sealed porthole. Adulthood strives to right the imbalance of childhood, and to soothe its terrors. My fear of water eased as, in my mid-twenties, I moved with my wife and children to a seaside town. Paternity itself, with its vicarious dip into the amniotic fluids, made me braver, and the salty buoyance and the shoreward push of seawater were marked improvements over perilously thin fresh water. We bought a house by a saltwater creek in the marshes, and that was better yet; I plunged into our private piece of creek as if I were one with the grasses, the muddy banks, the drifting current, the overhead vapory clouds—one with the water, my body mostly water. By middle age I had learned to swim and take pleasure in it, but still tended to float on my back, and to keep my face averted from the murky, suffocating depths beneath me.

Freezing

First comes uncontrollable shaking, then a numb, frosty doom

BECAUSE I WAS THE GOALIE, when I fell through the ice it wasn’t simple. My homemade foam rubber pads became two huge sponges. That it happened in a cemetery didn’t help, or that I was at an age when I pointedly ignored things even if they could hurt me. We were there because we didn’t fear death, nonchalantly tromping between the headstones and over the snowy hills into the far heart of the place and down into the bowl that held the pond. In summer, fat goldfish slid under the lily pads, but now it was solid—or so we thought.

I screamed before I realized I was standing on the bottom. The water barely came to my waist. I still needed help getting out, and then the wind hit my wet clothes and skin and I began to shiver.

I had to get inside and get dry, but first I had to take my skates off. The laces seemed tighter now that they were wet, and my fingers didn’t work. A friend had to help. I didn’t think to peel my wet tube socks off (cotton, worthless), just jammed on my Pumas and ran.

The running was uncool, and if I’d been out in the middle of nowhere it would have been dumb. Fortunately, my friend Smedley’s house was only a couple blocks away, and I made it easily.

But in my worst nightmare, I don’t. I’m out in the woods by myself. The shivering turns to even larger involuntary contractions as my body tries to create heat through muscle friction. I lose control of my hands. I stumble like a drunk, my speech slurred, muscles stiffening. The initial pain gives way to numbness. I get foggy and make poor decisions, like walking the wrong way or sitting down at the base of a tree and going to sleep. In the end, I pass out and die in the snow without a struggle, frozen solid, my skin hard as wood.

It didn’t happen—it couldn’t have—but I still have trouble walking on ponds, and forget about hauling a bobhouse out and then sitting in it waiting for a nibble. On shore, I can hear the ice creak, and know that someone’s going in. Not me, I’ll think. No way.

Sleeping Bags

There’s a reason they’re called mummy sacks

ON THE WHOLE, I love sleeping bags. When I got my first, a slippery orange thing lined with images of ducks and shotguns, I quickly discovered that no matter where I slept—the haymow, the back forty, the living room—I felt like I was lighting out for the territory. I took immediately to that snug, toasty, flannelly embryo feeling. You know the one: After a long day of hiking, you crawl in the bag and give out an involuntary little happy-shiver and hug yourself. And yet, a claustrophobic bugaboo lurks in the coziness. As a child, I once wound up head-down in my sleeping bag and went frantic, crazy-ape bonkers trying to escape. Later, I slid from the top bunk in my orange bag, panicked because I was unable to throw out my arms. Even now, I find myself opening the bag before I push my legs in, just to check for teensy wolverines hidden in the toe end. I think of bears arriving, and me unable to escape. Freud would draw conclusions based on the male preoccupation with issues of zippers and entrapment.

After years of cheapo bags, I treated myself to a military-issue mummy sack. “FOR EMERGENCY EXIT,” read a tag sewn inside, “grasp each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly, forcing the slider downward.” Sweet reassurance for the claustrophobe. That night I slept in a farmhouse owned by a pair of photographers. Not wanting to muss the vintage quilts, I unrolled my new sleeping bag, slid in, zipped to chin level, hugged myself with the happy-shiver, and dozed off. It was July, and I woke up 15 minutes later drenched in sweat. Grasped each side of the opening above the slider and spread apart quickly. Nothing. The zipper was jammed. Be calm, I thought, and commenced thrashing on the bed like a prodigious eel. I jammed an arm out the face hole and, with one particularly contorted bounce, wrenched into a sitting position. Deep breath. Think. With one hand waving uselessly at the sky, I grabbed the interior zipper pull with the other. Bit down hard on the liner. Yanked and yanked. When the zipper finally gave way, cool air rushed across my skin.

Love your sleeping bag, I say, but do not trust it.

Lightning

Here’s hoping it never strikes twice

I HAVE A DEEP, incapacitating fear of lightning. On occasions too numerous to count I’ve actually, involuntarily, shrieked aloud at the terror of being struck down by a shimmering electric bolt from the sky.

The first such instance occurred the summer I was eight. My sister, grandmother, and I were alone at our cottage on a lake in Ontario. It’s a great old wooden barn of a place, a hundred years old and drafty, surrounded by pines and junipers and blueberry bushes. It could burn down easily—the cottage and the whole island with it.

One night it decided to storm. My sister and I crawled into bed with Granny while long, terrible spears of lightning lit up the sky like daylight, one after another. The thunder was deafening and constant. Through a screen door that opened onto a veranda, we watched a boathouse on the opposite shore take a bolt to the roof and catch fire. I was speechless with horror, envisioning our doomed evacuation should our cottage go up in flames. ¹ú²ú³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ, a solid crash of thunder shook the house. Then someone screamed, a long, fearsome howl. It was me.

In the morning, we inspected the damage. A 60-foot white pine, with a fresh smoldering scar through the bark, lay wedged between the kitchen and the laundry shed, having barely missed both.

Twenty-two years later, lightning no longer scares me when I’m safe inside four walls (cars count), but catch me outside as a storm moves in and the reflexive terror is always the same. With the first fork comes a silent dread, then a panicky, futile attempt to plot my getaway, followed by the grand finale: my scream.

Jumping

Sometimes the scariest thing isn’t out there, it’s inside you

IT’S NOT THAT I’M AFRAID OF FALLING; it’s that I’m tempted—unbearably, almost irresistibly, tempted—to take a leap. I don’t know how or where this developed, but at some point I realized that, whenever I was on a rooftop, all I wanted to do was take a run and then a jump, and feel myself sailing through empty space. I’m not afraid of the emptiness below; I’m afraid of my lack of fear. Some necessary inhibition that most children acquire never seemed to take hold in me.

Fear is, of course, the most irrational, even unreasonable of impulses: Heights and depths are what I tell myself I crave. I grew up in a house on a lonely mountain ridge. I drive, by choice, along ill-paved mountain roads in Ethiopia, Bhutan, Big Sur—a huge drop, and certain death, on one side of me. Yet none of that unnerves me like a hotel room with a terrace, which invites me to go out and look over the wall, see the cars down below, and imagine how I could turn my life around (and the lives of those around me) with a single radical act.

It’s bewildering to me that what I fear is entirely within my control. A few months ago, I gave myself up to fate by driving through the pitch-black mountains of Yemen, a precipice on one side, the man at the wheel furiously chewing qat to keep himself awake. Kidnappers prey on foreigners in those peaks, and teenagers waving large guns occasionally loomed out of the dark to flaunt their power at us. I was ready to surrender. But put me on a rock, a ledge, and all I want to do is act, irreversibly. I’m torn the way you are torn when drawn to a woman you know will undo you. I don’t want to get too close because I want to get close too much. I feel, I suppose, something of what an addict feels.

My phobia of heights is inherently different from the fear of spiders, or of cats or crowds, because what I’m afraid of is not what some malign outside threat will do to me; it’s what I will do to it. What fear can be so abject, and so impossible to cure, as the fear of who you really are, deep down?

Armadillos

Some say they’re cute. I say they’re evil.

THEY COME IN THE NIGHT, up from their burrows, out of prehistory, little sinister dinosaurs from South America. Across Mexican arroyo and Louisiana swamp they’ve traveled, out of the woods and into our Florida backyard, where they dig divots in the lawn, scuffing, snuffling, poking, as if looking for lost change. Genetic freaks—all born in sets of identical quadruplets, and highly susceptible to leprosy—they look half insect, half humanoid. Body of a pill bug, head of one of those poor kids who age too fast. They give my wife, H.B., the creeps.

For me the repugnance is more personal. Back in my single days as a nightlife reporter in Tallahassee I was “Barmadillo,” my byline appearing under a cartoon rendering of an inebriated armadillo. Now I’m just a totem assassin. A typical armadillo whack goes like this: I’m in my pj’s and rubber boots, down on my hands and knees under our deck. My right arm is thrust to the shoulder into a freshly dug burrow. I have a nine-banded armadillo by the tail.

It chirrups and grunts—”Nyuck nyuck, nyuck nyuck“—ratcheting itself deeper into the earth. In its element, the beast is immensely strong, like a rototiller run amok, headed for China.

“Golf club!” I say to H.B., who’s standing by with varmint tools.

I shove the club blade underneath the ‘dillo, then twist and pull. Out it comes like a bad tooth.

And it is hideous, writhing in the flashlight beam, a wizened Piglet far gone into leather and S&M. It scrabbles at my arm with its claws—the horror!—and I let go.

Breaking cover, it corners the house at a gallop, then cowers under H.B.’s car in the gravel drive. H.B. fetches her keys, starts the car, and begins to back up. Alas for Dasypus novemcinctus, its tendency to leap straight up when startled makes it synonymous with roadkill. There’s a clunk and a crunch, and the stricken ‘dillo makes one last dash, trailing viscera.

Suddenly one of our four dogs swoops in and snatches it up in a great mouthful and lopes off into the woods. Silence, and then the terrible scraping of tooth on nubby bone. In the morning, cranky with lack of sleep, we find the armadillo half buried atop a heaped-up ziggurat of dirt like a Lord of the Flies idol, the dogs arrayed in attitudes of worship. Damn. It didn’t have to go down like that.

Lima Beans

Is there anything more sinister than this hateful legume?

IT’S EASY TO BE TERRIFIED OF SPIDERS and dizzying heights and getting lost in a guano-filled cave, but it takes a certain neurotic genius, I submit, to be brought to clammy fear by the genus Phaseolus, that leguminous plant species commonly known as the lima bean.

My lima bean phobia dates back to a family dinner in my very early youth. That greasy little veggie looked to me like some slippery bivalve from under the sea, of an unhealthy gray-green color at that, and was therefore almost certain to be just as strange-tasting.

Still, I might have managed to choke my portion down as I obediently did the fried liver and other disgusting substances that every kid must learn to live with, were it not for the emotional vortex in which I was first forced to deal with the challenge of the lima bean. That dinner was presided over by my father, just home for the weekend from his job a hundred miles away in Toronto. Our attendance was mandatory, in the way of a roll call. But as we kids dutifully assembled in our places at the dining table, my oldest brother, Mike, was missing.

This threw my father, never exactly serene, into a rage. Half an hour later Mike finally straggled in from whatever diversion had warped his sense of time. Dad banished him from the dinner table amid a fusillade of threats and general contumely, followed by the sickening silence that always settles over the scene of a public execution. I stared down, head bowed, at my plate, and sublimated my roiling emotions onto my lima beans.

Mastodons in the root cellar, fire, heartburn 40,000 years before Pepto-Bismol—primitive man had much to be afraid of. But primitive man probably never came face to face with an ominous kidney-shaped legume. If he had, I bet he’d have developed a fluttery stomach and a desire to flee the vicinity, like me. After all these decades, a lima bean has never passed my lips. But I know what they taste like, without ever having tasted one. They taste like fear.

Ticks

They’ve come to suck your blood—and that’s not the worst of it

NOT TOO LONG AGO, I picked an engorged tick up off the floor of my kitchen, thinking it was a stray chocolate chip. It only took a moment for me to see more clearly the minuscule legs and the hideous crease down the underside, but the idea that I had mistaken a tick for something edible freaked me out for days. Because now that I’ve had my midlife mortality crisis and come to terms with just about every fear I used to have (and they were legion), the only one left is ticks.

I have dogs, the best of which is, unfortunately, a golden retriever. A golden retriever is a paradise for ticks—lots of hair to hide in. During tick season here in California, sometimes we see two or three dark-brown ticks crawling around the top of the dog’s head looking for a place to attach. That’s repulsive enough, but it’s the ones who found a spot, ate their fill, and dropped off that I worry about, lying there in the pattern of an oriental rug, waiting to be stepped on.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to find anyone who defends ticks. Spiders and houseflies and rattlesnakes and killer bees and even maggots and leeches have their fans, who inform the rest of us about how useful, well adapted, or beautifully designed their preferred creature actually is—but the only thing you ever hear about ticks is that they carry Lyme disease. It is typical of the malevolence of ticks that the carrier is too small to notice until after she has delivered her insidious message.

Ticks seem to exist for themselves alone. They are ugly as nymphs and grossly disgusting as engorged adults. They live only to reproduce, which females do by dropping thousands of larvae and then dying. They don’t take a meal and move on, like mosquitoes; they dangle by their mouths and get intimate. When feeding, they are motionless and passive. The worst thought when you find a tick in your hair is that it’s been there awhile, that it drank your blood without your even realizing it. You have to ask, in the parade of extinctions, why can’t we trade ticks for something we prefer, like black rhinos or snow leopards?

It happens to be summer now in California, too dry for ticks. I have some breathing room. I might even go for a walk one of these days. While I’m out there, I will visualize a world without ticks. It will be just like our world, only better.

Whitewater

Just because the boat floats doesn’t mean you will

AFTER YEARS OF TAKING FAST WATER FOR GRANTED, I learned to fear the ironic power of river rapids early last spring. The red inflatable kayak I was paddling caught a sharp rock at the top of a sizable and noisy chute coursing through the middle of an Oregon stretch of the Owyhee River, and began to sink.

In an instant I was sucked under the rock and shot over the waterfall, well beneath the surface. The shock of being pulled so quickly under the water precluded taking a decent breath, so by the time I felt the bottom of the Owyhee beneath my feet, I was already hurting for air. I looked around and realized that I was actually standing on the bottom of the river, surrounded by a surreal volume of luminous and silvery fat bubbles. I looked up to see the surface and the churning whitewater five feet above my head. I was being pummeled by a variety of powerful hits from each side and felt a consistent downward pressure on my helmet. Though I was wearing a life preserver and trying to swim, I realized that I was not rising to the surface.

Everything about the experience was dreamlike. The situation conjured no panic, and even the realization that the air-fat kayak was also being held down beside me, even the strange recall of interviews with people who’d come back from near-drowning episodes to report that the experience was not unlike going to sleep, caused a sensation beyond an abiding wonderment. I just stood there, thinking that here, beneath a river in Oregon most people had never heard of, a hundred miles from anything much more than a few earmarked steers—surrounded by the irony of gigantic white balls full of air—I would die.

I was egested from the hole as powerfully as I’d been swallowed. I bounced off six or seven rocks as I rode the rapids on my back, and I began to hear calls of concern from the others. I eventually found a conical rock I could hug downriver, and I remember thinking that no matter what, I would never let it go.

After I was helped onto the bank, I tried to imagine getting back into the red kayak. The thought sent a reverberating sensation that rattled the backs of my shaking legs. I’d once considered river whitewater no more treacherous than a roller coaster—but that had all changed now: I was afraid.

Bats

They may be worth protecting, but they can still creep you out

MAYBE YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE bat-loving types who lectures people that bats are actually very clean animals and they eat half their weight in insects every sundown and it’s a false slander that they get tangled in women’s hair. Batophilia is not that uncommon these days, as evidenced by all the people heading into the flying mammals’ very lairs: high-tech cavers armed with headlamps, special caving ropes, and the ability to use the word spelunk without laughing.

But back in that stone age when all outdoor equipment was bought at the store, caving was an amateur’s game. I was introduced to it in the late sixties by my friend Donald, whose grandmother had a house in Sewanee, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. T-ma, as the grand dame was known, was happy to share her equipment, mostly a pile of old dented lanterns that dated, probably, from the Civil War. You filled the lantern’s bottom with carbide and added water, and once it began to make a certain unmistakable sizzle, the resulting gas—as redolent as boiling ore—was flammable.

In most Tennessee caves there are several fairly unavoidable features—the big cathedral space, the mud room, the fat man’s squeeze. On one occasion, Donald’s father, a noted heart surgeon, was struggling through a fat man’s squeeze. Dr. Eddie was also bald, and every time he’d lift his head, he’d howl as a tiny stalactite dart punctured his scalp. He exited looking like a middle-aged messiah who’d just removed a crown of thorns.

I was next in the squeeze, grinding on my elbows across a gravel floor made more comfortable by a freezing stream of cave water trickling through. The spare plastic bag of carbide I kept in my pants pocket had rubbed open from all the wiggling, and my hip began to sizzle, then to warm up, and finally to burn hot as fire. I’d begun to hump pretty damn fast, squirming in a panic, as my mind foresaw a suffocating gas buildup—or, more likely, a Jerry Bruckheimer-like explosion—when a concerned Dr. Eddie bent down to shine his flame into the tunnel. “Hey, Jack, are you having any—” Boom!

Turns out there was a lot more air in the tunnel than I thought, because right then and there, ten cave bats decided to flutter through on their way out. The sudden chaos of fur—when I think about it, there must have been a hundred bats—encouraged me to discover the virgin pleasure of pressing one’s face into frigid gravel water. Fortunately, bats have that radar thing, so all one thousand of them easily found the space above my prostrate body, although it must have been difficult scrambling down my back given the vibrations caused by all the subaqueous screaming.

When I finally got out, everyone was tending to his own suffering. Dr. Eddie was stanching his head with a rag. No one cared about my encounter with ten thousand bats. Donald’s brother accused me of exaggerating. He said he’d seen only a couple of bats. I don’t know. In my mind—then and now—my ordeal resembled that encyclopedia picture of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk when a million bats roar out like demonic nuncios in a funnel of black terror.

And yet, I still cave. Because even though I fear bats, mine is an exquisitely nuanced phobia. It’s not truly activated unless I’m in a cave and I see a bunch of bats, and then my pants catch on fire.

Being Buried Alive

A convincing case that it’s the worst way to go

VIVISEPULTUROPHOBIA—the fear of being buried alive—is more sophisticated, more existentially bleak, than claustrophobia. It nullifies the most basic human egocentrism—that the universe gives a damn about our whereabouts. Rest assured: You will never be found, certainly not in this lifetime.

As a 15-year-old, camping near the Dead Sea, I blithely explored a series of caves, some natural, some clandestine cisterns carved out by Israelite zealots 2,000 years ago. More than two decades later, my throat closes up in panic at the memory of crawling on my stomach through lightless, birth-canal-narrow sandstone tunnels.

A cave is all well and good, but it still gives you room to flail, scream, and claw with bloody fingers on the rock walls. How much worse to be immobilized? Hemmed in by rock or sand—or even ice. Apparently, glaciologists in Norway have come up with a novel way to gather data: They carve tunnels into the core of a glacier using hot water, then climb through this frigid warren—hundreds and hundreds of feet down—amassing information. They have to work fast; in short order, the enormous pressure of the glacial mass overhead reduces each capacious passage to walkway to crawl space to eventually nothing at all.

Pressure is the force that separates the men from the boys, phobiawise. Think about the cumulative weight of that sand, earth, ice, what have you. It only starts with suffocation: the slow, inexorable squeezing of air from your lungs. Take it to the next level by contemplating the uncomfortable constriction of the thorax, the rush of blood out to the extremities, your hands and feet swollen and full to bursting. And what is that sound? Why, it’s the groan of your pelvis buckling under. See it all clearly as your eyes emerge -like from their sockets, the lids pried open like the gaps in a fat man’s shirt. And there you are, marking each torment as it comes. A martyrdom too gruesome even for the most devout saints.

But that’s just me.

Snakes

They lurk, they bite, they haunt your picnics forever

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1972, rural Illinois. A picnic along the banks of the Mississippi. My friend Elizabeth and I, both 17, were forced to attend as a disciplinary measure. We were wearing gauzy peasant shirts and sullen expressions, and were nursing stupendous, temple-clutching hangovers. While the rest of my family bustled around lighting grills and slapping hamburger into patties, Elizabeth and I winced our way barefoot down to the water’s edge to plunk stones into the current and say scathing things about my mother.

“She ought to try drinking a pint of lime vodka,” Elizabeth said darkly, “and see how it feels.” Behind her, at head height, something shifted on the low-hanging branch of a desiccated tree.

One of the worst sounds a person can hear is the heavy thump of a big snake dropping to the ground at her feet. One of the worst sights? Same snake, churning around in a wide circle, opening its mouth to reveal a pale-white interior, vaguely plush, like upholstery.

Our loyalty to each other was such that we engaged in a brief but violent shoving match, cartoon characters trying to get through a doorway. The cottonmouth unfurled itself and wound past us—four feet long and stout as a man’s wrist, but oddly flattened, like something molded out of clay and pressed into the ground. It slithered down the bank and into the river, lickety-split, like a strand of spaghetti pulled into a mouth.

Thirty years later, I experience startle responses not only to snakes but to lengths of rope, suspicious-looking sticks, and garden hoses, especially black ones draped over a fence or log. I am also spooked by snakish areas, including but not limited to grass, warm roads, stone walls, dirt paths, fields, old barns, sidewalks (trust me), tree branches, and, of course, water.

Being vigilant has worked pretty well, although not perfectly. Once I picked up a garden hose, after carefully making sure it actually was a garden hose, and there was a snake underneath. Elizabeth, on the other hand, recovered just fine and even went on to touch some kind of constrictor with a forefinger during a college biology class. Her professor said we couldn’t have seen a cottonmouth that day; too far north.

That’s what my father said, too, when we came racing up to the picnic table, hysterical and shuddering.

“Oh, boy,” he said agreeably. “Water snakes are big buggers. Scare a guy half to death.”

My mother, squinting as she flipped the burgers, cigarette corked in her mouth, turned to consider us, green-gilled and sweaty.

“People who drink too much see snakes,” she said.

Stars

There’s nothing like the universe to make you feel puny and afraid

INSIDE THE CITY, the night sky is more or less a backdrop, benign and one-dimensional. It comes on predictably, like the streetlights, and I pretty much ignore it. There is the moon. Some planets. That spread-eagled hunter who likes to show off his “belt.”

Then I go backpacking. Without warning, the stars go thick as gnats and the blackness has ominous depth. You can see the other side of our galaxy. The sudden hugeness overhead unhinges me. I’ll look up and practically drop my ramen. It’s The Universe. What frightens me, I think, is the abrupt, mind-slamming shift in scale. Like Alice after the “EAT ME” cake, I am instantly, alarmingly diminished—tiny to the point of disappearing. The longer I look up, the smaller and more vulnerable I feel, dwarfed by something huge and unknowable: God, the evil in men’s hearts, infinity. I suppose, on some level, that the fear I feel is a fear of death, of insignificance and nonexistence. Or else I’m just a sissy.

Falling stars in particular unnerve me. Forces are at work out there, and they are not human. If there’s that kind of weirdness in space, God only knows what’s in the woods ten feet away. I spook easily in the wilderness, and I blame the stars.

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