Lance Armstrong is telling a story. He is seated at a boisterous table in a barbecue joint in Aspen, Colorado, along with his five children, ages 6 to 17, his fianc茅e, assorted friends, and a reporter. Behind the restaurant rise the lush green slopes of 10,000-foot Buttermilk Mountain, which in late spring is still partly covered with snow. Because Armstrong鈥檚 conversation is, as usual, peppered with profanity, his eight-year-old son, Max, occasionally shouts across the table, claiming a dollar for every f-bomb. This is their agreement.听

鈥淲e were driving to the golf club, just minding our own business,鈥� Armstrong says. The familiar face is older now, more deeply creased, the famously electric, hazel-blue eyes offset with traces of gray hair. 鈥淎nd this guy pulls up alongside and flips us off. I couldn鈥檛 believe it.鈥�

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What he couldn鈥檛 believe was not that he was given the finger鈥攕omething he has experienced often in recent years, both literally and figuratively鈥攂ut that the driver of the car he was traveling in was given the听finger, too. That would be Joe DiSalvo, the tall, curly-haired man now seated to Armstrong鈥檚 left, who happens to be sheriff of Pitkin County, which contains Aspen. DiSalvo and Armstrong are close friends. They were driving in DiSalvo鈥檚 unmarked police SUV.

鈥淪o I said to Joey, 鈥楬ow about a little red and blue action?鈥� 鈥� Armstrong continues, his eyes lighting up. 鈥淚 mean, come on, the guy is an asshole.鈥�

This suggestion is so much in character that everyone laughs.

鈥淭he last time I looked, it wasn鈥檛 against the law to be an asshole,鈥� replies DiSalvo, who is known for his enlightened approach to law enforcement. 鈥淏esides, we were late for our tee time.鈥�

But the flipper didn鈥檛 stop there. He swerved around DiSalvo鈥檚 SUV, then proceeded to pass a bus on the right. Now a law had clearly been broken. To Armstrong鈥檚 satisfaction, DiSalvo kicked on his siren and flashing lights and pulled the perp over. Armstrong, sensing the surreal potential of the moment, decided that it would be fun if he and DiSalvo both got out. You know, to mess with the guy.

鈥淚 told Lance he was staying in the car,鈥� DiSalvo says. The offender was let off with a warning. DiSalvo and Armstrong made their tee time.听

Armstrong鈥檚 tale is only a snapshot of his life in Aspen, where he and his family spend their summers in one of the country鈥檚 wealthiest communities, but it captures something both of his still-bumptious personality and of his existence there: 颅lively, gregarious, free-form, rooted in family. Most of Armstrong鈥檚 life revolves around his splendid blue-shingle home near the center of town, which he bought for $9 million in 2009 and is constantly full of children and adults鈥攁 sort of standing cocktail party and kid fest that runs every night, all summer. There are occasional celebrities鈥攔ace car driver , a neighbor, is among them鈥攂ut mostly the attendees are what pass in Aspen for regular people.听

鈥淵ou know that one house in the neighborhood where everybody likes to drop in and hang out?鈥� DiSalvo asks me as we make our way from the restaurant to Armstrong鈥檚. 鈥淭his is that house.鈥� The traffic that night was relatively quiet by family standards. By my tally, 23 people came through, including four overnight guests from Austin, Texas. From all accounts and appearances, the Armstrongs鈥攈is fianc茅e, Anna Hansen, two children by her, and three children by his first wife, Kristin, with whom he has a friendly relationship鈥攁re a happy, close-knit fam颅ily. If you didn鈥檛 know any better, you might think you were looking at an ideal world.

You would be very wrong. It is in fact a breathtakingly fragile world, one defined by loss and liability. It is a world, moreover, that very soon may be taken away forever.听

In May, a civil trial is scheduled to begin in federal court in Washington, D.C., that will determine whether Armstrong defrauded his former sponsor, the U.S. Postal Service, by using performance-enhancing drugs to help him win the Tour de France and other races. If he loses, he could be forced to pay as much as $97 million, an amount that could ruin him financially, though at this point the trial鈥檚 outcome remains highly theoretical. Armstrong has already paid out $21 million in settlements related to his admission of doping, plus $15 million in legal fees. He makes no money these days from sports. He has a sizable investment portfolio, which spins off earnings, and two bicycle shops, and he makes a little money on the side as a speaker. But he is still a very wealthy man. If, as he reportedly told a friend in 2012, he was worth in the neighborhood of 鈥�$100 milski,鈥� a judgment against him could certainly exhaust what鈥檚 left of that amount, and then some.

The mega-lawsuit is not the only thing you can鈥檛 see. Also invisible, amid the 颅happy thrum of the 5,800-square-foot house, is the staggering global scorn that followed the 鈥檚 (USADA) condemnation of Armstrong in 2012 as a serial cheat and his subsequent public admission of drug use to Oprah. Nor can you see the depthless obloquy of the Internet, a place populated by uncountable numbers of people who call him a 鈥渃heating fuck鈥� and express the fond wish that he contract cancer again and die. You cannot see, or feel, the pain he experienced when many of his friends and colleagues deserted him or when he was forcibly separated from his cancer-fighting foundation.听

But perhaps the most important thing you can鈥檛 see is that the basic story has changed. Lance Armstrong has always been a human narrative machine. If you don鈥檛 know that by now, you are either too young to under颅stand such things or have been in a tent somewhere on a Greenland glacier for the past 20 years. He is a living story, a set of inter颅locking, constructed narratives, invented and given life by him, delivered in a series of ascending climaxes. Armstrong lived inside his narratives, and they were terrific: from the one featuring the poor kid, raised by a single mom, who rose to become a world-颅champion bicycle racer, to the one about the cancer survivor who won seven consecutive Tours de France and raised money to help millions of other cancer victims. Or the one, finally鈥攖his is where he lost control of the script鈥攊n which he suffered one of the greatest reversals of fortune of a public figure in American history, in which his legend was instantaneously obliterated.听

There is a new narrative now. How could there not be? It emphatically does not feature a broken, friendless man sunk in drugs or alcohol or depression or anger or self-pity. This one is about a man who has rebuilt his family and his friendships, who has attempted to come to terms with how 颅deeply his fans felt betrayed and who says he is sincerely sorry for what he did and the pain he caused. Banned from most official sports, he has transformed himself as an athlete, too. He has reengaged with the world. This is the new story: a humbled man who is working to try to deserve the forgiveness of millions of people who once believed in him.听

His enemies will tell you that this Tour de Redemption is as phony as Armstrong鈥檚 erstwhile claims that he rode clean. It鈥檚 just his new way of manipulating a universe in which everyone is seen as his domestique, they say. So, in a world where atonement听requires more than simple apologies, is Lance Armstrong really contrite? Is he really sorry? Is he really a new man?

To even begin to understand what Lance might be thinking now, you have to know how bitterly angry he once was about his downfall. Because he is by nature both arrogant and aggressive鈥斺�淗e had one main tool in his toolbox: a hammer,鈥� says his close friend and business manager Bart Knaggs鈥攖here was nothing meek or humble or accepting about his attitude in the dark days following his fall from grace. His public in 2013 was an unalloyed disaster. He did not seem sorry because he wasn鈥檛 sorry, and anyone could see that. 鈥淚f you go to Oprah, what you do is cry and crumble and get picked up and hugged,鈥� says Knaggs. 鈥淎nd so, if Oprah loves you, the rest of us can love you, too. But if you miss steps one and two, she can鈥檛 do step three. It doesn鈥檛 work.鈥澨�

And he really, really didn鈥檛 get it, even after鈥攐r perhaps especially after鈥攁ll his sponsors and foundation colleagues and pretty much the entire cycling world had ditched him. On the day USADA released its report, he lost an estimated $75 million in sponsorship money. 鈥淲hen I did Oprah, my attitude was, fucking get over it,鈥� he told me in an interview at his Aspen home in June. 鈥淢y feeling was, look at what we did. Look how the sport grew, look how the industry grew, and look how many people were affected because of Livestrong鈥檚 cancer work. Get over it. That was my attitude in 2013. I now understand that 鈥榞et over it鈥� was not an option. People were upset, hurt, livid.鈥�

He was angriest of all with the , which he had created, donated more than $5 million to, and helped to raise $500 million, and which, in effect, kicked him off the board. His doping admission had put board members, as fiduciaries, in a difficult position, not least because Armstrong had never hesitated to use his cancer work as a shield during the years he denied doping. His response to his curt dismissal was to fire off a scorched-earth e-mail to his former colleagues, some of whom were close friends, which prompted an equally blistering riposte from board member and prominent political consultant Mark Mc颅Kinnon, who told a journalist that Armstrong 鈥渟howed a lack of remorse or any听notion that he has to serve a cause greater than himself.鈥� McKinnon, who has never reconciled with Armstrong, says the board had no other 颅option. 鈥淣o group of people loved and revered Lance more than the board members and executive team of Livestrong,鈥� he told me. 鈥淗e was a good leader, and he has monster talents. But I don鈥檛 think we had a choice. It was existential. It was to save the foundation from going down.鈥� Rightly or wrongly, Armstrong felt betrayed.听

Nor could Armstrong comprehend how easy it was for his former fans and once loyal chroniclers to dismiss his success鈥攚hich included years of hard training and meticulous attention to the details of racing鈥攁s entirely the product of doping. He believed he had truly won all those races against well-funded, highly organized, and highly motivated competitors who were taking the same drugs and transfusions he was.听

He was furious, too, with USADA head Travis Tygart, who had made him the poster boy for doping in a sport that was certifiably awash in performance-enhancing drugs. 鈥淢y name was taken out of the [record books], but the Tour was held between 1999 and 2005, wasn鈥檛 it?鈥� he told Le Monde in 2013. 鈥淭here must be a winner then. Who is he? Nobody came forward to claim my jerseys.鈥� The doping statistics are indeed staggering: from 1998 to 2011, which frames the bulk of Armstrong鈥檚 professional career, 12 of 14 Tour de France winners and more than 40 percent of the event鈥檚 top-ten finishers either admitted to or were officially linked to doping. USADA, meanwhile, had been miserably ineffective in enforcing its doping rules, which in turn had increased pressure on riders to cheat. The doping agency had doled out minor suspensions to a group of admitted dopers in exchange for their testimony against Armstrong, who alone was stripped of all his titles and banned for life from competitive cycling.听

All this bad news鈥攁long with seven major books about the Armstrong scandal鈥攚as now ricocheting through a life that had decelerated, as Armstrong puts it, 鈥渇rom 100 miles an hour to ten.鈥� The phone stopped ringing, except with updates on lawsuits, which proliferated, including the big, apocalyptic one. Perhaps most damaging of all to his day-to-day life was his temporary ban by USADA from nearly all sports competition. His plan after retirement had been to remake himself into a world-class triathlete, and he had performed very well in a series of races before the ban went into effect. In April 2013, after registering for a masters swim meet in Austin, he was quickly barred by swimming鈥檚 governing body, which announced that it would uphold USADA鈥檚 decision.听

In an hours-long meeting with Tygart and another USADA official, Armstrong made this remarkable admission, as described by Juliet Macur in her 2014 book : 鈥淚 can鈥檛 get up in the morning without knowing that I have something to live for,鈥� he told them. 鈥淔or me, that鈥檚 training and competition. I鈥檓 not training because I enjoy it,听I鈥檓 training because I have to.鈥� Henceforth, he would have to train in what amounted听to a void.听

Close friends as well as reporters remem颅ber the Lance Armstrong of the year following his disgrace not as broken or depressed but as furious at an unforgiving world. 鈥淚 saw him that year [2013], and I have a very clear memory of it,鈥� says former U.S. Postal teammate Christian Vande Velde. 鈥淲e were sitting in a bar in Aspen, and I just remember how angry he was, how angry and 颅upset about what had happened. He couldn鈥檛 talk about anything else.鈥� Says Anna Hansen: 鈥淲e were scared and angry and a lot of things. He was definitely angry with the people in the cycling world, whom he felt had just turned their backs on him, which they did, more or less, and a lot of people would have argued that he deserved it. I think his hurt came out as anger.鈥澨�

There are Mamils everywhere, milling about in that peculiar halting way of people wearing bicycle shoes, adjusting their brightly colored kit, checking their tire pressure, grazing on protein snacks. There are about 400 of them鈥攎iddle-aged men in Lycra鈥攁long with a smattering of similarly attired women, watching the light come up over the Texas hill country and the sun break through the rain-torn skies. The June 3, 2017 is a century ride, followed by beer and barbecue and music on a private ranch near Burnet.听

It is not formally a race. What is unusual is that it is run by a venture called , which was cofounded by Lance Armstrong and is based in Austin, where he lives most of the year. WeDu is at this point less a company than a concept, a notion that there is a large, underserved community of people who are drawn to endurance sports. It is an idea that also, not coincidentally, offers Armstrong a chance to participate in cycling races and rides from which he might otherwise be banned. He is not completely shut out鈥攖his year he has ridden unsanctioned races in听Ari颅zona, Nevada, and California鈥攂ut remains outside anything like normal cycling competition. His WeDu partner is a former professional racer (once part of the U.S. Postal team) and Silicon Valley executive named Dylan Casey.听

鈥淭o be a good cyclist, you have to love suffering,鈥� says Casey, who until recently worked for Yahoo. 鈥淭he intent of WeDu is to create a community where like-minded people can engage and interact.鈥� This summer, WeDu is hosting its second-annual , a mountain-bike event. And there are some less than definite plans to sell gear on the Internet, to host multisport festivals throughout the country, and maybe someday to make money doing it. For now, WeDu is a startup with minimal revenue.听

Around 7 a.m., Armstrong addresses the crowd, looking trim in his gray WeDu kit. In spite of his troubles, there is still something inspiring about him, some instant, reflexive memory of his glory years that kicks in as he moves among the riders. These are his people, in more ways than one. Before he 颅started winning the Tour de France, there was no such thing as large packs of Lycra-clothed accountants, hairdressers, teachers, and lawyers whooshing through suburban neigh颅borhoods. He created them.听

鈥淕ood morning, everybody!鈥� he yells.听

鈥淕ood morning!鈥� they yell back.

鈥淲ho wants to get up at 5 a.m. and ride for 100 miles?鈥� he asks rhetorically.

鈥淲e do!鈥� comes the reply, sounding out the name of his new venture.

鈥淭here鈥檚 beer and barbecue and music when we get back,鈥� he says. 鈥淚鈥檒l be the guy drinking three beers.鈥�

And off they go. Armstrong, who at 45 is still in very good shape, though not nearly the rider he was when he retired nearly six years ago, will stay with a very strong lead pack, while the rest of the makeshift peloton labors along behind.

WeDu is part of Armstrong鈥檚 way forward, as he sees it, his chance to start living a 颅fully new life and stop litigating the past. Now that he has settled all but one of the lawsuits against him, he has time to spend on it.听Another piece of that strategy is the , a weekly podcast in which he chats with sundry friends and celebrities, many of whom he knows personally, some of whom he calls out of the blue. Forward is a very 颅deliberately chosen word, and in fact, it defines Armstrong鈥檚 new narrative: others may want or expect to see him curled up in a fetal position in the dark, but he is moving ahead, not听allowing himself to be crushed by the weight of the past.听

The podcast has been running since June 2016. His guests have included Lyle Lovett, Brett Favre, Malcolm Gladwell, Rahm Emanuel, and Bo Jackson. In one episode, he interviews former teammates George Hincapie and Christian Vande Velde, both of whom testified against him in the USADA investigation. Both remain friends.听

鈥淭here was a freeze,鈥� concedes Hincapie, one of the most prominent riders of his generation. 鈥淔or a while, we said what we had to say, and talking wasn鈥檛 going to help anything. But we are still really close, good friends.鈥� Armstrong, who also uses the broadcast to talk about his own life, is a surprisingly good interviewer. Though he will not say what his listenership is, his manager, Mark Higgins, says it has grown significantly, fueled in part by his ability to promote the podcast to his 3.8 million Twitter and 124,000 Instagram followers. In July, Armstrong expanded his media offerings to include Stages, a three-week Tour de France podcast in conjunction with this magazine. (He was paid nothing and received no expense 颅money from 国产吃瓜黑料, though he did get a significant platform, and his podcast drove traffic to 国产吃瓜黑料鈥檚 website.) A month later, he reached an agreement to do podcast coverage of the Colorado Classic stage race, but concerns raised by USADA prompted听organizers to cancel the deal.

Armstrong鈥檚 main path these days is less an activity or a business than a way of thinking. He and his entire family have been in therapy for the past two years, a course of action he laughed off as late as August 2014 in an , explaining that 鈥渕y therapy is riding my bike, playing golf, and having a beer.鈥� Family members now visit a counselor together and separately. 鈥淭he idea is total transparency,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 have worked hard at it.鈥� He is still coming to terms, he says, with his forced separation from the Livestrong Foundation. When I ask how he feels about it today, he replies, 鈥淢y answer may not come off right, but those 15 years of hustling and building Livestrong, I don鈥檛 miss the amount of work that took鈥攖raveling, grinding, asking for money, going to every chicken dinner. If it was my last day on earth, I would say I am proud of what I did. My head is high, my heart full, and no part of me wants to do more than what I am doing now, which is the one-on-one.鈥�

By that he means his continuing work with individual cancer survivors, which consumes a considerable amount of his time and involves making phone calls, sending videos, and visiting patients. Such contact happens weekly. He is dead serious about doing this yet does not volunteer any information about it. 鈥淢y inbox on that used to be so full, it was impossible to accommodate everybody. Now the quantity isn鈥檛 so great that I can鈥檛 do them, which is cool.鈥�

But the most profound change in Armstrong is his conviction that his disgrace and banishment were necessary and important events in his life. 鈥淚t has been a hellacious five years,鈥� he says, 鈥渁nd in terms of the era, I don鈥檛 think it was entirely fair. But I don鈥檛 think I would change it. Anna and I have talked about this at length. With all of that, as a husband, father, friend, interviewer, whatever I am on a daily basis, I am better. I really believe that. Most people would say, 鈥業 hate to have lost all that money, I hate it that I got sued, I hate it that people talk shit about me.鈥� But sitting here today, they did me a favor. I have a great wife-to-be. I have great children. I have a lot of time to spend with them. Also incredibly important is that I know who my friends are. How many people in the world know who their friends really are?鈥�

And he says鈥攁nd this perhaps has the most meaning for people who know anything about him鈥攈e is sorry. Not the 鈥済et over it鈥� sorry of the Oprah admission, but truly ashamed, and truly sorry.听

He has expressed this sentiment any number of times publicly in the past two years, everywhere from the popular Joe 颅Rogan podcast to the BBC. He talks about his behavior: 鈥淚t was literally like, finger in your chest, 鈥楩uck you, don鈥檛 ask me that,鈥� 鈥� he told Rogan. 鈥淲hen you are guilty, that is a real bad approach. It鈥檚 the one that I took.鈥� When talk-show hosts serve up softballs鈥攖he sort of 鈥渆verybody else was doping, too鈥� comments鈥擜rmstrong refuses to take the bait. 鈥淚t sounds like you鈥檙e defending me,鈥� he told Rogan. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 want that. I am of the belief that no one wants to hear that shit. They are听upset.鈥� To the BBC: 鈥淢y word doesn鈥檛 matter anymore.鈥� I get it, I need to be pun颅ished.鈥� He repeatedly says he understands that many people cannot forgive him.听

鈥淧eople come up to me and say, 鈥楽top apologizing, you don鈥檛 need to apologize anymore,鈥� 鈥� he says today. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 agree with that. There were all sorts of people out there who had my back the whole time, even as the smoke got thicker and thicker. They said, 鈥楴ope, we believe him.鈥� For them it was even worse than a betrayal. They felt com颅plicit. They鈥檙e in their cycling club or at church, and people say to them, 鈥楲ook how foolish you were to have believed this guy.鈥� That is what I have to apologize for, for the rest of my life. And I am comfortable with that.鈥�

Through all these exercises in atonement, all these expressions of regret, he maintains that he was treated unfairly. He will never change his mind on this. The apologies are for lying and suing people and damaging people鈥檚 reputations and finances, for betraying the trust of his fans. He believes that, in a sport where doping and lying about it was incredibly common, his punishment鈥攖he lost titles and the lifetime ban鈥攊s beyond anything reasonable. But he says he is no longer angry about it. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think Travis [Tygart] is a very honest guy, but I understand what he did and why he did it. All of that stuff he said publicly, that I was the greatest fraud in the history of the sport, forced young guys to put deadly substances into their bodies鈥攖hose are not true. I know they are not true, and my teammates and the people I battled with know they are not true.鈥�

His friends universally agree that, while he is still hypercompetitive and still tightly wound, he is a far more patient, tolerant, and considerate person鈥攁nd a better friend鈥攖han he used to be. 鈥淚 can call him out on stuff now, whereas back in the day he had never heard 鈥榥o鈥� from anybody in twenty years,鈥� says fianc茅e Hansen. 鈥淭丑补迟鈥檚 not good for somebody.鈥� And though no one can know for sure what is in someone else鈥檚 heart, his friends also believe that he is sorry in a way that he was not a few years ago. 鈥淚 knew him for about a year of his fame, and the rest has been in disgrace,鈥� says Joe DiSalvo. 鈥淚 have seen the shift in him from the tenacious, angry-at-the-world guy to a man who now鈥擨 don鈥檛 know if 鈥榓t peace鈥� is a good term, because I don鈥檛 know if Lance Armstrong is ever at peace, but who is certainly in a better place than he was before. I think he is happy with his life. I think he takes solace in the fact that his story is out. There鈥檚 nothing else. It鈥檚 all exposed, and I think that鈥檚 liberating.鈥�

Not everyone buys this. Though it is impossible to quantify the numbers of people who can鈥檛 forgive him, or don鈥檛 believe he鈥檚 truly sorry, there is a persistent feeling that Armstrong hasn鈥檛 come close to atoning for his sins, which include more than a decade of often harsh attacks, legal and otherwise, on people who challenged his legitimacy. in a New Zealand newspaper captures this sentiment. 鈥淎rmstrong was beyond a simple drugs cheat,鈥� the 颅paper wrote. 鈥淭he man was an evil empire. 鈥� Arm颅strong was more than happy to wreck lives, and has shown little to nothing of what most of us would call genuine remorse.鈥澨�

In the aftermath of his fall, Armstrong decided that he would apologize to some of the people he believed he had harmed, in some cases traveling long distances to do so. Some of these apologies were accepted; some were not. His former massage therapist on the Postal team, Emma O鈥橰eilly, who he had once called a whore and an alcoholic, accepted, and she even asked him to write the foreword to her . According to Armstrong, Filippo Simeoni and Christophe Bassons, riders whose careers and reputations he had damaged, both accepted.听

Others have refused. Most prominent among them are Greg LeMond, three-time Tour de France winner, and his wife, Kathy. LeMond, who was an early, vocal critic of Armstrong, says that Armstrong鈥檚 campaign against him both hurt his reputation鈥攈e was actually shunned in the sport for years鈥攁nd cost his family tens of millions of dollars in revenue from canceled contracts with Trek and other companies. 鈥淲e lost our livelihood,鈥� says Kathy, 鈥渁nd we spent $4 million in legal fees defending ourselves.鈥� In 2015, the LeMonds and their attorneys had a four-hour meeting with Armstrong and his attorneys because there was potential litigation with , one of Armstrong鈥檚 former sponsors. Armstrong鈥檚 stated intention was to apologize. But according to Kathy, that never happened. 鈥淚t was very dismaying for me, because he never actually said he was sorry for what he鈥檇 done. He said he got caught in a wave of everybody doing this and some people around him had treated us terribly.鈥� It is fair to say that Armstrong and the LeMonds are still bitter enemies.

Nor did his apology to his former teammate Frankie Andreu and his wife, Betsy, carry any weight. In 2005, the Andreus testified that Armstrong had admitted from a hospital bed in 1996 to using performance-enhancing drugs. The Andreus then learned, as the LeMonds had, that to oppose Armstrong was to cost them their employment and income and reputation. Though Armstrong telephoned the two to apologize on the eve of the Oprah appearance鈥斺�渟o he could say that he had done it,鈥� says Betsy鈥攈e later canceled a meeting with them and, still later, in a 2015 deposition, volunteered the factually unsupported claim that 鈥淔rankie had doped for his entire career.鈥� Betsy and Frankie say they are weary from so many years of feuding. 鈥淚 really don鈥檛 want to see him,鈥� she says. 鈥淚 just want him to stop coming after us, lying about us. I know why he is out there saying he is sorry, because of the impending trial.鈥� It is unlikely that Armstrong and the Andreus will ever reconcile, in part because Armstrong still denies the Andreus鈥� assertion that they heard him confess to doping. The Andreus鈥� testimony was the original cause of ill will; nothing is going to make it go away.

鈥淏etsy and Frankie didn鈥檛 have money to spare and spent money defending themselves,鈥� says Kathy LeMond. 鈥淚 asked Lance if he would please make financial amends to them. He owes them hard cash. When I said that, that is the most he raised his voice, and said: 鈥楴ever.鈥� When I asked Armstrong about the Andreus and LeMonds, he shook his head slowly from side to side. 鈥淢aking amends, apologizing, making it right with those affected is all I can do,鈥� Armstrong says. 鈥淭丑补迟 camp鈥濃�攎eaning both the LeMonds and Andreus鈥斺�渋s loud, and they have great stories, but I think it鈥檚 a smaller group than we鈥檝e ever thought. I really do. As long as you wake up and take a breath, they want you banned from breathing.鈥� When I asked if he would consider writing checks to make amends, he said, 鈥淭丑补迟 is not going to happen.鈥� He will not say if his looming trial, with its potentially massive liability, has anything to do with .

All of which leaves that federal lawsuit, with its potential for financial destruction, as the principal obstacle in the way of Armstrong鈥檚 forward path. The case has a long and tortuous history, originating in the 颅career flameout of another prominent U.S. rider and former Armstrong teammate, Floyd Landis. Landis won the Tour de France in 2006, the year after Armstrong retired, only to be stripped of his title after testing positive for doping. Landis launched a global campaign to prove his innocence. He started the Floyd Fairness Fund, which raised nearly half a million dollars for his legal appeal. He wrote a book defending himself with the now ironic title . When his appeal was denied in 2008, he went into a tailspin. Like Armstrong, he stormed at cycling officials and friends who had abandoned him and fellow cyclists who had unfairly gotten away with doping. Unlike Armstrong, he fell into a deep depression, during which he would sometimes take 15 painkillers a day, washed down with a fifth of Jack Daniels. (He was eventually ordered, under threat of criminal prosecution, to pay back the $478,354 he had raised from credulous fans.)

Shunned by most of the cycling world, including Armstrong, Landis had a revelation: he would rat out the lot of them鈥攐r, as he , 鈥渢orch the whole thing.鈥� And that is what he did. In 2010, he blew the whistle, admitting his own doping, naming names, describing how the doping was done. His searing e-mail to USA Cycling morphed into a criminal investigation by the , and eventually into the USADA investigation that brought Armstrong down.

Ten days later, Landis launched his own whistleblower lawsuit under the 颅federal False Claims Act against the men he said defrauded the Postal Service by taking its sponsorship money while doping. The main targets were Lance Armstrong and team director Johan Bruyneel, as well as various team owners, managers, and agents. In 2013, the federal government joined Landis鈥檚 suit and has since deployed a large team of lawyers. The Postal Service paid Armstrong鈥檚 team $32,267,279; under the False Claims Act, defendants, and Armstrong 颅personally, could be forced to pay back three times that, or $96,801,837. The law specifies that the whistleblower鈥攊n this case, the deeply compromised doper, liar, and cheater Floyd Landis鈥攕tands to make up to 25 percent of that, or a little over $24 million.

Landis is not on the list of people Lance Armstrong is now at peace with. To Armstrong, the worst thing about Landis is not the lawsuit. It鈥檚 that, seven years after he filed, Landis is now telling reporters that it no longer makes much difference to him what happens. When asked about it by , he replied: 鈥淭he last couple years, you know, my lawyer deals with it and I don鈥檛 really pay that much attention. I assume at some point there will be a trial. I don鈥檛 mean to sound flippant about it, but I just don鈥檛 care anymore.鈥� Comments like this, which Landis has made elsewhere, infuriate Armstrong. 鈥淭here are very few things that piss me off anymore, but this is one of them,鈥� he says. 鈥淢y family is at risk, and he doesn鈥檛 care. Believe me, I care.鈥�

In spite of Landis鈥檚 blas茅 indifference, the case, having failed in two attempts at mediation, is now steaming toward a May 2018听jury trial. The lawyers for Landis and the Postal Service, who seem dead set on pursuing the maximum possible damages, face some obvious legal challenges. Proving that the original Postal Service contract was fraudulently induced as a result of Armstrong鈥檚 doping is relatively straightforward, thanks to Armstrong鈥檚 admission eight years after the contract ended. Proving that the harm that fraudulent contract caused outweighs the benefits the Postal Service听received will be tougher. The Postal Service鈥檚 own commissioned studies, four of them, showed that its contract with Armstrong鈥檚 team was worth close to $140 million in global media exposure, showing, in other words, that the USPS got a good deal.听

A key issue is to what extent the Postal-Landis legal team will be able to bring Armstrong鈥檚 character into play, as opposed to being restricted to talking only about damage to the plaintiffs. If Armstrong鈥檚 deceptions and aggressive behavior are allowed in testimony鈥攆rom witnesses that could include the Andreus and LeMonds鈥攖he government could gain a significant advantage. That will also mean, however, that Armstrong鈥檚 lawyers may be able to talk about Floyd Landis鈥檚 character and motives.听

Though Armstrong jokes grimly that the jury could render him homeless, begging for money with a tin can, that is not likely to happen. But, in a worst-case scenario, a jury could award damages that exceed Armstrong鈥檚 net worth, which might鈥攁nd we are getting pretty speculative here鈥攆orce him to take refuge in Texas law, allowing him to keep the equity in his Austin residence. Armstrong once listed the house for $8 million; his equity in it is not known. He will have legal fees to pay. The bottom line: Armstrong could lose a gigantic percentage of his wealth, including his family鈥檚 Aspen paradise. He is clearly worried about this and spends time thinking about it. According to one friend, he was devastated when he lost a motion for summary judgment in February that asked the judge to throw out the federal case. There is still the possibility of a settlement, which could happen at any time, and this is the outcome that Armstrong says he would prefer.听

Whatever happens to his finances, Armstrong still has to live out his life in his skin as the 鈥渄isgraced cyclist鈥濃�攖he media鈥檚听favorite term鈥攚ho became the global symbol of doping. 鈥淢ost people don鈥檛 have to go through a public shaming and then have to look at their kids鈥� faces,鈥� says Anna Hansen. 鈥淭丑补迟 part was really hard. We try to keep an open dialogue.鈥� Not long ago, Hansen was talking to her and Armstrong鈥檚 son Max, then seven, about his father鈥檚 career. She was telling him that his father was one of the greatest cyclists, when Max interrupted and said, 鈥淵eah, but he cheated.鈥� Lance, Anna, and first-wife Kristin have spent years explaining his fall from grace to the three eldest children鈥攖win 15-year-old girls, Isabelle and Grace, and 17-year-old Luke, who once got into fights defending his father鈥檚 reputation. With a lot of counseling and personal effort, family life has improved. But in Lance Armstrong鈥檚 world, there is no stepping away from the past. Max and his six-year-old sister, Olivia, are a stunning illus颅tration of this: they know virtually nothing of the Armstrong narrative. Not yet. 鈥淚 will be having that discussion with them for a long time,鈥� Armstrong says. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 just say to a seven-year-old, 鈥業t was a really bad time, and everybody did it.鈥欌��

S. C. Gwynne () is听the author of and .听听is an听翱耻迟蝉颈诲别听contributing artist.

The post The Road Goes on Forever and the Story Never Ends appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Alson Kelen is seated comfortably on the grave of his great aunt, at the far eastern end of in the vast, hyperblue beyond of the Pacific Ocean. He is telling a story of a lost paradise, of a life he lived on this island a long time ago.

Hunting octopus in the swimming hole.

Island caretaker Edward Maddison with a coconut crab.

Displaced Bikinian descendants on Majuro’s Ejit Island.

Airplane wreckage on Bikini Island.

Bikini Island’s blue lagoon.

Alson Kelen wearing a traditional skirt.

Eneu Island’s welcoming committee.

Jackson Laslo, one of the 34 remaining Bikini natives.

Abandoned reconstruction equipment.

He is 44 years old now, a short, barrel-chested man with a bald head, medium-dark skin, elaborate tattoos over much of his body, and a disarming smile. The world he describes is lush and lovely. He was 10. He and his friends played here in the coconut groves and in the brilliantly colored waters of the lagoon. They ate breadfruit and pandanus fruit. They drank coconut milk. They fashioned hooks from common nails, baited them with hermit crabs, and caught all the fish they could carry. 鈥淓very day was an adventure,鈥� Alson says. 鈥淲e swam in the bluest water. We would cook the fish under the trees and eat them, and every day went like that鈥攆ishing, swimming, and cooking. It was a beautiful time.鈥�

From all appearances, this place is still an earthly paradise. Here in the Bikinian Ancestral Cemetery, with its tidy white fence and weathered graves, the 3.4-square-mile island looks exactly as Alson describes it. The sky is a deep cobalt blue; coconut palms, orange-limbed and yellow-fringed, sway in the steady trade winds. There are still breadfruit trees and pandanus trees and flame trees with brilliant red blossoms. Two hundred yards to the north, a coral reef meets the full, transparent blue violence of the Pacific.

There is just one problem, though you could stare at this palm grove for a lifetime and never see it. The soil under our feet, whitish gray in color with flecks of coral, contains a radioactive isotope called cesium 137. In high enough doses, it can burn you and kill you quickly; at lower levels, it just takes longer to do the job, eventually causing cancer. The soil itself is not dangerous to touch. The danger lies in the plant life that takes it in, and in the animal life, like the huge coconut crabs that live on the island and eat the plants. The cesium 137 is fallout, a word introduced to the world during the systematic detonation, from 1946 to 1958, of 23 nuclear weapons by the U.S. army on Bikini Atoll.

Over the course of a nuclear exile that has lasted 66 years, the Bikinian people have been relocated five times. They have nearly starved to death. They have seen their way of life vanish. They have watched as nuclear scientists swarmed over their island, trying to figure out what the bombs had done to it. They have fought the U.S. government in legal battles all the way to the Supreme Court. Alson was part of a group of three extended families who moved back to the island in the 1970s after it had been declared safe. He lived the fantasy existence he describes for me, only to be told, after the discovery of the horrifying cesium 137, that he and his people had to leave.

And still men like Alson, a former mayor of the relocated Bikinians, most of whom now live in the Marshall Islands鈥� capital, Majuro, and on the island of Kili, want to come back to the place they believe God gave them.

Perhaps the cruelest part of exile for Bikinians like Alson is the staggering beauty of the atoll today, 54 years after the final atomic test. Just beyond the cemetery鈥檚 fence, the lagoon is jumping with fish; corals are blooming; the atoll鈥檚 uninhabited outer islands have become a gigantic seabird rookery; the beaches are perfect and white, the plant life lush and dense. Bikini is paradise again, but with an asterisk.

ON A MAP, THE Marshall Islands look like a large expanse of nothingness鈥攁 great, empty blue ocean dotted with flyspecks of land. That鈥檚 pretty much the view from the air, too, as we sail through the cottony clouds in an old 17-seat Dornier 228 turboprop, 10,000 feet above the scrolling white waves of the equatorial Pacific. The physical dimensions of the Marshalls tell you everything about the place: 29 coral atolls and five islands that cover 70 square miles in a sea area of 750,000 square miles. It鈥檚 like taking the small city of Wichita Falls, Texas, chopping it up into city-park-size pieces, and scattering it over Western Europe. One of those pieces is Bikini Atoll, which consists of a large oval-shaped reef and 23 small islands, including Bikini, occupying a total area of 230 square miles. There are some 125 miles of open ocean between it and the nearest inhabited island.

I am joined on this mid-April flight by five Bikinians, all descendants of the people who abandoned their island at the command of the U.S. government before the first atomic test in 1946. Three鈥擝iten Leer, 49, Wilson Note, 50, and Banjo Joel, 62鈥攁re elected councilmen of the Bikini government, now located on Majuro. Jackson Laiso, 79, and Alson Kelen both grew up on Bikini Island鈥擫aiso in the 1940s and Kelen during the aborted repatriation in the 1970s. Also with us are Japanese filmmaker Masako Sakata, who is working on a documentary about Bikini, and photographer Corey Arnold.

Our host and translator (the Bikinians speak varying degrees of English) is Jack Niedenthal, 54, American born and a larger-than-life figure in this part of Micronesia. Bearded, of medium height, and with the shoulders of the all-American swimmer he once was, Niedenthal came to the Marshall Islands as a teacher with the Peace Corps in 1981. He has lived there more than 30 years, speaks fluent Marshallese, and is married to a Bikinian woman. His intriguing title鈥攖rust liaison and representative for the people of Bikini Atoll鈥攎eans that he manages the flow of trust funds from the U.S. to Bikini intended to compensate the Bikinians for their suffering and clean the place up. He is a friendly, relaxed presence; a good storyteller with a pocketful of tales spanning 30 years in the south seas.

We all met at 8 a.m. in the airport on Majuro, an island of 25,000 people that in some places is less than 300 yards wide. Our flight is taking us another 500 miles northwest. Getting to Bikini is not easy; for most people it鈥檚 actually impossible. In 2010, the government-owned Air Marshall Islands, known locally as Air Maybe, had its three planes grounded for a total of 568 days for everything from compass problems to 鈥渦ncommanded engine shutdown.鈥� The service to Bikini, until 2008 roughly one flight a week, is now practically nonexistent. Our temperamental Dornier was declared airworthy only at the last minute.

But it鈥檚 a joyous trip for my companions. After a three-hour flight, we land on the island of Eneu, at the southern end of the atoll鈥攁 historic place, in a dark, apocalyptic sort of way. As a decaying concrete-and-steel bunker near the deserted airport attests, Eneu was once the U.S. military鈥檚 staging ground for the atomic-bomb tests.

From there we board an open aluminum boat for the last eight miles to Bikini Island. As we head out into the atoll鈥檚 protected lagoon, we pass buoys that mark the sites of some of the warships sunk during the bomb tests, now moldering, their cannons still intact, under 180 feet of water. Down there is the Nagato, the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor. Finally, we land at the island鈥檚 only dock and are greeted by some of the men who live on Bikini, part of a five-person skeletal force paid by the Bikini council to look after the remaining infrastructure.

Our rooms, which sit in the bight of an immaculate two-mile-long white-sand beach, are plain but quite decent, with running water, toilets, showers, and air-conditioning. They are relics of once successful, now defunct Bikini Atoll Divers, a commercial scuba operation that was to be an economic cornerstone of the return.

As we exit our temporary home and wade into the lagoon鈥檚 85-degree water, the only sounds I hear come from the seabirds wheeling above me and the lap-lap of waves on the sand. Sea turtles roam just offshore, near reefheads that teem with brilliantly colored fish. If there is a lovelier beach anywhere in the world, I have not been on it.

DESPITE THE NATURAL BEAUTY, it is impossible to walk anywhere, or look anywhere, and escape Bikini鈥檚 nightmare history. Every man-made object on the island is an artifact either of the bomb tests or of some failed attempt to help the Bikinians return to their home. There are old bunkers built to shield cameras from atomic explosions; buildings put up by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of its radiological measuring program; houses erected by the U.S. in the 1970s for returning Bikinians; dump trucks, bulldozers, backhoes, semi trailers, fuel tanks, and forklifts, some decaying and covered with vegetation. There is a plywood building, nearly falling apart, with a rotting sign that says King Juda Lab, which was established to provide radiation testing for repatriated Bikinians. There is a sign on the machine shop that reads WE CAN FIX EVERYTHING EXCEPT BROKEN HEART. All of this is being reclaimed; it is all sinking back into paradise.

, the most spectacular and expensive science experiment in history, was first proposed in August 1945, a few weeks after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Harry Truman had ordered the Army and Navy to conduct further tests of nuclear weapons. The reason, which sounds implausible if not ridiculous today, was to see if atomic bombs, when dropped on warships at sea, would sink them.

The U.S. had taken control of the Marshall Islands from the Japanese after World War II, and Bikini Atoll was chosen as ground zero. Its 167 residents, who lived in huts and fished and sailed their outriggers as they had for centuries, were persuaded to leave their homes 鈥渇or the good of mankind and to end all world wars,鈥� as the local U.S. military governor put it to them. They were shipped 125 miles east to Rongerik Atoll and given a few weeks鈥� worth of food and cheerful assurances that they could return as soon as the tests were over.

Meanwhile, Bikini Atoll became the centerpiece of a colossal military operation. By the summer of 1946, there were 42,000 military and civilian personnel in place, with 242 ships involved in the test, 156 aircraft, more than 300 cameras, and 18 tons of film. Since the whole point was to sink ships, an armada of 95 of them鈥攖he equivalent of the sixth-largest navy in the world at the time鈥攚ere parked in the waters of Bikini lagoon, fully loaded with weapons and fuel. To see what the bombs might do to living things, 3,350 experimental rats, goats, and pigs were sacrificed on the decks. Servicemen sheared a number of them and put suntan lotion on their bare skin to see if that would somehow mitigate the effects of gamma radiation.

The first blast, code-named Able, was detonated on July 1 and, because the bombardier missed his target, was something of a dud. The July 25 Baker shot, however, was a monstrous success. Detonated under the ocean鈥檚 surface, it drove a 2,000-foot-wide column of water high into the sky in less than a second. A few moments later, millions of tons of atomized reef and water collapsed back into the lagoon, and a giant shock wave moved out across the water, sinking the 26,000-ton, 562-foot battleship Arkansas and lifting the stern of the 880-foot Saratoga 43 feet into the air. The shock wave released massive amounts of radiation, a phenomenon that was not widely understood at the time. One hundred and twenty-five miles away, the Bikinians, newly resettled on Rongerik and already running out of food, still thought they were coming back to their atoll. Soon.

THERE IS A SENSE, while on Bikini Atoll, of being at the end of the world. That sense is greatly enhanced when the twin 150-horsepower outboards on your 28-foot aluminum hammer-head rig stop simultaneously in the middle of the atoll鈥檚 massive shark-filled lagoon. This is precisely the situation we find ourselves in on day four: adrift, 15 miles from our lodge on Bikini, with only one day鈥檚 supply of water, in a place where people without water don鈥檛 last long in open boats. Though we have a radio and there are three men back on the island, our boat is the only functioning watercraft.

Our potential savior is a bandanna-wearing Filipino mechanic named Benjamin 鈥淏ai鈥� Maloloy-on, part of the five-man Bikini work-force. He is now squinting at the motors and shaking his head. Bai seems capable enough, but he speaks in a broken Marshallese-English pidgin that is hard even for the islanders to understand. Earlier that day, Jack had asked him about taking the boat to the dock, to which Bai had given a lengthy reply about preparing barbecued pig for dinner.

Up until now, today鈥檚 expedition was thrilling鈥攊n the good way. After leaving the island in the morning, we ran in the lee of the big reef, out of sight of the low-lying land for long periods of time, while big turquoise waves collided around us. We had set off to explore some of the atoll鈥檚 outer islands. Our main destination was the small island of Nam, about 25 miles due west of Bikini, location of one of the seminal moments in the development of thermonuclear weapons.

As we motored across the lagoon, our Bikinian travel companions, who wore shorts and baseball caps and carried throw nets and an assortment of fishing poles, explained that the atoll鈥檚 outer islands were their people鈥檚 traditional fishing and bird-hunting grounds. This was where they once sailed their 30-foot outrigger canoes, remarkable pieces of technology that can hit 20-plus miles per hour and amazed the first Europeans who saw them. The canoes defined the old way of life, traveling from island to island within the protected lagoon; they could also travel great distances across the open ocean.

And then, suddenly, we were there: a patch of midnight blue water in the transparent shallows of the lagoon. This was the Bravo crater, a mile wide and more than 200 feet deep, a place where imagination fails. The hydrogen bomb that was detonated on this spot on March 1, 1954, created a fireball four miles wide and raised the temperature of the lagoon water to 99,000 degrees. The blast was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and nearly three times stronger than its creators expected. It shook islands 250 miles away. It vaporized three islands in the atoll. And it killed every living thing in the air, on land, and in the sea for miles around.

Three to four hours after the blast, the 64 inhabitants of neighboring Rongelap Atoll, next door to Rongerik, watched in wonder as the snowlike ash from Bravo began to fall on their island, reaching a depth of two inches. The children played in it. People drank water saturated with it. Soon they began to experience vomiting and diarrhea; their eyes burned, and their necks, arms, and legs swelled. The Americans had not bothered to tell the Rongelapese what they were planning to do.

With these surreal thoughts in mind, we dropped fishing lines in the H-bomb crater. We spent a few hours on Nam and on neighboring Aomen island. There were seabirds everywhere, millions of them. Virtually any tree we saw contained two or three fledgling terns or boobies or frigate birds. At some point, the Bikinian men disappeared to look for food, an endeavor they took great pleasure in. Majuro, where they live, is dense and urban; food gathering is done at the supermarket. Here, there is something wild and free and timeless about it, a tradition Alson remembers from living on the atoll as a boy. 鈥淢y grandfather was the leader of the community,鈥� he says. 鈥淗e would call upon the men to go fishing or get birds or turtles. The basis of our culture is working together. Everyone taking part.鈥�

An hour later, the men returned from the narrow strip of jungle with broad smiles, carrying a dozen coconut crabs鈥攍arge, frightening creatures that looked as though they might have been spawned by the nuclear tests. They contain cesium 137 but at a level that makes occasional consumption harmless. It was a wonderful moment: a group of men from vastly different cultures uniting to celebrate the ancient, universal human bond of a successful hunt鈥攊n this case, for radioactive crabs. The Bikinians, huge grins lingering on their faces, were already planning a feast for that evening.

But a few hours later here we are, adrift on our broken-down skiff, the indomitable Bai covered with grease and sweat and barely visible in the boat鈥檚 well. We are now experiencing鈥擨 am, anyway鈥攁nother universal human feeling: fear. As casually as possible, I ask Jack what Plan B is.

He smiles, surveys the giant surf crashing above the reef and the rising seas around us, and replies: 鈥淗ope.鈥�

At the helm, Edward Maddison, another member of the island鈥檚 full-time crew and the former dive master for Bikini Atoll Divers, jokes: 鈥淚f we had a sailing canoe, we鈥檇 be home by now.鈥�

Alson laughs and nods.

鈥淭oo bad we can鈥檛 just take it to the Honda guy at Majuro,鈥� I say, joking.

鈥淭丑补迟 is the Honda guy,鈥� says Jack, with a nod of his head toward Bai. I can鈥檛 tell if I should be reassured by that.

Finally, an hour later, we hear one of the Honda 150s growl, and we鈥檙e able to limp back across the lagoon. For me it鈥檚 a harrowing reminder of what a remote place I鈥檝e traveled to. For the Bikinians it seems to offer nothing more than a few placid, pleasantly existential moments.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE displaced islanders after 1946 was a tragedy of neglect. There was never enough food on Rongerik: the reef fish were poisonous; a fire damaged the island鈥檚 coconut trees. There was not enough water. By 1948, they were starving to death, even though the United States had committed to taking care of them. In March of that year, the Bikinians were moved to Kwajalein Island, home to a new U.S. naval base, where they camped miserably on a small strip of grass next to the runway. A few months later they were relocated yet again, this time to the island of Kili.

This was a disaster, too, but of a different kind. Kili was a true island, which meant that there was no ring of coral, no protected lagoon, no jungle-fringed outer islands to fish and hunt, just the big waves of the Pacific crashing up against rugged shores. Fishing was nearly impossible. 鈥淚t was just a small piece of rock in the middle of the ocean with some coconuts growing on it,鈥� says Alson. Once again food supplies were intermittent. At one point, the island鈥檚 new inhabitants required an emergency airdrop. The Bikinian exile continued for another 20 years, long after the last bomb, code-named Fig, was detonated in August of 1958.

Then, in the late 1960s, something miraculous happened. Scientists from the Atomic Energy Commission decided that radiation levels at Bikini Atoll 鈥渄o not offer a significant threat to health and safety.鈥� In June of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced that the 540 Bikinians living on Kili could go home, and he ordered them resettled 鈥渨ith all possible dispatch.鈥� Coconut, breadfruit, pandanus, and other food trees were planted on the island; debris was cleaned up. Houses were built. By the mid-1970s, more than 150 Bikinians were living on the island.

That was when the U.S. Department of the Interior began to realize that the estimates of radiation levels had been dreadfully wrong. In 1977, scientists recorded alarming increases in cesium 137 levels in the bodies of people living on the island. Now an emergency existed, and the entire population of Bikini was moved yet again, this time to Kili and Majuro. 鈥淭hey brought three ships and a lot of food,鈥� recalls Alson. 鈥淚 was young. I saw the ships and said, 鈥楲et鈥檚 go cruising,鈥� not knowing that this was the end of my happy life in this paradise. I was running around on the ships, but I could see that everyone else was crying. I remember they were waving and crying.鈥�

Life in exile resumed, perhaps a bit more despairingly than before. But a decade of constant research later, scientists again offered new hope. It began with radiation testing by the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractor Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. By the mid-1980s, scientists had proven that by applying large amounts of potassium fertilizer to Bikini鈥檚 soil, cesium levels could be reduced tenfold. In addition, the scientists concluded that soil excavation鈥攕imply removing the top layer of dirt鈥攃ould further reduce radioactivity.

Neither of these solutions was cheap, but it was around this time that the Bikinians came into some real money. They received $75 million in damages in 1986 as part of a new Compact of Free Association with the U.S. and then, in 1988, another $90 million to be used specifically for radiological cleanup. The compact also set up a , which meant that Bikinians鈥� pending complaints against the U.S., dating from the early 1980s, would be heard by a new court. In 1987, a group of Bikinian elders traveled to the island to redraw old property lines; among them was Jackson Laiso, who is with us on this trip.

鈥淵ou can鈥檛 imagine the joy of knowing that, OK, they are finally giving us money to do this,鈥� recalls Niedenthal. 鈥淭he joy of coming back with the old men was something I had never experienced.鈥�

The new attempt to return began with the cleanup of Eneu, where a small worker village was raised and the airstrip improved. Soon, a hotel was under construction on Bikini, along with new docks and roads. Generators, desalinators, and power lines were installed. All preparation for what everyone believed would be the big, definitive cleanup.

One key component of the plan was , run by the Bikinians, which also offered sportfishing. The goal was to introduce the rest of the world to one of the planet鈥檚 great untapped fishing and diving destinations. For divers there were the sunken warships from the Able and Baker blasts in 1946, sitting just offshore in about 180 feet of water. There were also incredible reefs. Despite atomic destruction that had blown much of the atoll to pieces, 50 years later the corals had already recovered. And with the corals came the reef fish and the fish that feed on the reef fish: 30-pound dogtooth tuna, 20-pound barracuda, and bluefin trevally as big as 50 pounds. With no human beings anywhere near the atoll to harvest them, Bikini offered sportsmen one of the most plentiful and pristine fishing environments in the world.

The first tourists arrived in 1996, and not surprisingly, the travel industry swooned. Skin Diver, Newsweek, National Geographic, and Cond茅 Nast Traveler all proclaimed Bikini one of the best diving destinations on the planet. By 2000, Bikini Atoll Divers was attracting 250 people a year, all of whom paid roughly $4,000 for the experience鈥攁 good deal of money by the humble standards of Marshall Islands tourism and, suddenly, a real economic basis for a return to the island.

SINCE OUR BOAT IS temperamental all week鈥擝ai, in an effort to fix the outboards, has remachined fuel pumps that don鈥檛 quite fit鈥攚e explore Bikini Island as much as we can. One afternoon we visit the world鈥檚 most perfect swimming pool. Like everything else on Bikini Atoll, it has a twisted history. Back in the 1990s, an engineer had needed rock fill to build the bulkhead on the western end of the island. In keeping with Bikini鈥檚 time-honored policy of blowing things up, he dynamited the reefs at the eastern end. He got his landfill but also inadvertently created a coral-banked swimming pool, three to eight feet deep, in the middle of the island鈥檚 outer reef. At high tide the pool, and the reef, are invisible. When the tide goes out the reef emerges, and in the middle of it is the swimming hole. Calm and spectacularly clear, it鈥檚 too shallow for sharks and excellent for snorkeling.

We arrive as the last of the water recedes and plunge in. Whatever the dynamiters did to the place is long undone: there are massive coral formations housing spectacularly colored fish. While I swim among them, Alson hunts octopus, as he did when he was a child. He has a two-foot haft with a sharp hook on the end. He finds an octopus in a rock, and after a brief battle and several explosions of ink, Alson wins.

A while later, the tide changes and begins to rush in from the sea, where the breakers are now cresting the reef, sending powerful currents of colder water into our warm lagoon. The sharks鈥攂lacktip, whitetip, and gray reef鈥攚ill soon be back, so we get out and turn our attention to fishing: the men have thrown nets, seeking mullet and mackerel.

Fish are freakishly plentiful here, and our traveling companions are obsessed with hauling them in. The day after our return from Nam, three of us fished from the lone Bikini dock. There were strikes with almost every cast. We caught several bluefin trevally and a magnificent green jobfish. On another cast, we hooked a smallish three-foot barracuda, which put up a spirited fight. A few seconds later, a school of grouper arrived and attacked the barracuda, which, now in a fight for its life, bent the pole in half. And then the sharks showed up, blacktips, probably four feet long, and the trick was to get the barracuda in before the sharks tore it to pieces. It all happened in water so clear we could see every detail of the battle.

Sharks are a constant here. The water is lovely and the reefs incomparable, but you鈥檙e always looking over your shoulder. The guarantee of shark sightings was one of the diving operation鈥檚 attractions, though occasionally they got more than they bargained for. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 usually do night dives,鈥� says Niedenthal, who ran the operation, 鈥渂ut at one point the dive master decided to try one at the USS Saratoga with some customers who had been pestering him about it. So they loaded the boat, got their gear together, and dropped into the blackness. When they shined their lights around, all they could see was a wall of shark eyeballs glowing eerily in the sea around them. The dive lasted a total of 10 minutes, never to be attempted again.鈥�

Close to the end of our trip, we were eating lunch on our boat, which now, with the jerry-rigged fuel pumps, was sucking gas at an enormous rate. Someone threw some chicken bones overboard鈥攊nadvertently chumming the water鈥攁nd a five-foot whitetip shark showed up. We watched it turn aggressively toward Corey, who was in the water putting on snorkeling gear.

鈥淪hark!鈥� we all shouted, then spent the next 30 seconds convincing him we weren鈥檛 pulling his leg.

鈥淚 still haven鈥檛 seen a shark,鈥� Corey said suspiciously, as we finally hauled him aboard.

鈥淥h, it was a naughty one,鈥� said Alson, who should know. 鈥淭rust me. The little ones are the crazy ones.鈥�

JUST WHEN THE BIKINIANS' epic attempt to return lost steam is difficult to pinpoint. Niedenthal dates it from the moment, in 1995, when the council discovered that the EPA standard for radiation cleanup (15 millirems) was significantly lower than the standard the Department of Energy scientists had been using (100 millirems), thus boosting the potential cost of cleanup.

But there were other, more immediate reasons. The Bikinian world was changing. Its population, which had grown quickly (the original 167 residents now number 4,800), was poor by U.S. standards and needed a range of social services. Addressing those needs began to trump the repatriation efforts. 鈥淭hey had a trust fund, but it had two masters,鈥� says Niedenthal. 鈥淭hey had to take care of their people where they were living now: housing, food subsidies, insurance, medical plans, scholarships, health care. The other master was the cleanup of Bikini, and that just became a less important priority.鈥�

Then followed the successive market crashes in 2001 and 2008, the second of which cut their financial trusts in half. The funds recovered somewhat, now totaling a little more than $150 million. That may seem like a lot, but the trusts provide a scant $6 million to $8 million in investment income annually, which in turn allows the Bikinian government to pay out something less than $15,000 per family per year. That leaves virtually no money for the cleanup. The massive public works begun on Eneu in the early 1990s have been suspended. The worker town is now a ghost town. In 2008, Air Marshall Islands鈥� service became so unreliable that the diving and sportfishing operations had to be canceled.

The final devastating blow came in 2010, when the Bikinians lost their largest lawsuit against the U.S. government. In 2001, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal鈥攁 body established in 1983, as part of the Compact of Free Association, to handle Marshall Islands complaints鈥攁warded the Bikinians $563 million in compensation. But the tribunal was never adequately funded to pay a claim of that size. The Bikinians sued to force payment, but the effort failed when the Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 2010, claiming it doesn鈥檛 have the right to rule over international agreements. The U.S. courts are now closed to them. 鈥淚t was absolutely devastating,鈥� says Niedenthal. 鈥淲e always had the idea and the hope that we were fighting for something. When we got the final rejection by the Supreme Court, that was it. We鈥檙e done.鈥�

It鈥檚 ironic that, even as financial woes have all but ended the Bikinians鈥� efforts to return, the prospects for bringing radiation down to acceptable levels are better today than ever before. A March 2012 assessment from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is strikingly upbeat. One of its recent findings is that levels of cesium 137 are . Though the isotope鈥檚 radiological half-life is 30 years, its environmental鈥攐r actual鈥攈alf-life is only nine.

鈥淐onditions have really changed on Bikini,鈥� says Terry Hamilton, scientific director of Livermore鈥檚 Marshall Islands assessments. 鈥淭hey are improving at an accelerated rate. By using the combined option of removing soil and adding potassium, we can get very close to the 15 millirem standard. That has been true for roughly the past 10 years. So now is the time when the Bikinians, if they desired, could go back.鈥�

These findings leave Bikinians in a sort of cultural, scientific, and financial limbo. Considering the record of the U.S. government, it鈥檚 hard to blame them for being skeptical. But even if they had the money for one final cleanup effort, return would be difficult. There are only 34 Bikinians still living who were born on the island. Though these and other Bikinians, like Alson, still yearn to go back to their old home, most of the young people have no such dreams. They have never been to Bikini. For them it鈥檚 a myth. With 40 percent unemployment in the Marshall Islands and a four percent population growth rate, increasing numbers are leaving altogether for places like Salem, Oregon, and Springdale, Arkansas, where they are allowed to hold jobs based on the Marshall Islands鈥� Compact of Free Association with the U.S.

Still, Niedenthal, who has spent the past three decades trying to help the Bikinians realize their dream, isn鈥檛 ready to give up. 鈥淚f somebody came and said Bikini was suddenly safe, you would not see all 4,800 people jump on a boat,鈥� he concedes. 鈥淏ut they view the land as a gift from God, theirs forever. They are still Bikinians and think of themselves that way. Our duty is to provide the option, so they could move back if they wanted to.鈥�

DURING OUR SEVEN DAYS on Bikini, our lives follow a lazy pattern: jungle walks to the north side of the island, a lunch of whatever fish we caught that day, a trip to one of the southern islands鈥攁ll tempered by the wonderful freedom of having no cell-phone or Internet service.

But it always comes back to fishing. In the afternoons, the Bikinians use their throw nets, large seines with a 20-foot radius that require great skill to load and launch. I follow the men along the beach, having no idea why they are suddenly yelling and running to the water鈥檚 edge. 鈥淲e see the fish,鈥� says Edward Maddison during one outing, pointing to a school 15 yards offshore that I had again failed to see. 鈥淵ou just have to look.鈥�

In two nights, fishing with octopus-baited handlines, they catch 300 pounds of red snapper. We eat fish all the time, cooked and raw, boiled and roasted over open fires. We eat mackerel ceviche for lunch. At one point, the Bikinians catch a medium-size trevally from the beach. When I ask to see it later, they just smile. The fish was immediately consumed.

On one of our last nights, we have a cookout under the astoundingly clear skies of the central Pacific Ocean. I am talking to 79-year-old Jackson Laiso, the oldest person in our group and one of those 34 remaining Bikini natives. He speaks at length about sailing the outrigger canoes with the old men when he was a boy. Then he describes the last days in 1946. 鈥淚 remember when the Americans came and they gathered the old men and explained to them what they needed,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e had to move so they could test their weapon. It was a hard question, but we felt we had no choice.鈥� Our own departure will likely be the last time he sees the atoll.

A few minutes later, five Bikinian men assemble under a breadfruit tree to sing their anthem, written by Lore Kessibuki while he was experiencing the horrors of Rongerik in 1946. Soon we are listening to a sweet, sad, and hauntingly beautiful multipart harmony:

No longer can I stay, it鈥檚 true
No longer can I live in peace and harmony
No longer can I rest on my sleeping mat and pillow
Because of my island and the life I once knew there
The thought is overwhelming
Rendering me helpless and in great despair

They are singing almost exactly on the spot where their grandparents were loaded onto those Navy boats so long ago, back in the days when paradise was something real and no one imagined, not even for a moment, that they would never come back.听听听听听听听听听听

The post Paradise With an Asterisk appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

A MOMENT AGO the world was a sunny, happy place, full of giant herons gliding like ptero颅颅dac颅tyls on desert winds and schools of 颅un颅countable gar and bass swimming in turquoise pools so clear you could see crawfish walking on the bottom in ten feet of water. A place of exquisitely tortured limestone, river boulders the size of houses, humped black canyons framing pale autumn skies.

Lower Pecos

No more than 40 people run the Lower Pecos each year.

Emerald waters

Pristine emerald waters on take-out day

Side channel

Meandering through a side channel

Largemouth bass

Landing largemouth bass

Lining

Lining through a shallow section

Stuck

Scene from the disaster

Regional map

Regional map

Lower Pecos

Lower Pecos map

But that is all gone now.

In its place is an entirely different reality familiar to civilized people who have taken small boats into wild rivers. Four of us, in two canoes, have entered a stretch of whitewater that we have grossly underestimated. Only one boat has made it through. The other is pinned sideways on a rock, transformed suddenly from a reasonably efficient craft into a fixed part of the river, a small waterfall with tons of water now cascading over it. The 16-foot-9-inch polyethylene Old Town begins, ominously, to bend along its thwarts. There is no budging it. Not even a millimeter.

While watching our expedition mates cling to their canoe, Bill, my sternman, and I now have the leisure to contemplate this predicament.

We would seem to have only one option, and it is not encouraging: abandon the canoe and all of its gear, empty our craft of most of its equipment, and run the remaining rapids with four men in one boat. There is really no other way into or out of these steep rock canyons. Paddlers with worse problems鈥攍ike severe injuries or the loss of their vessels鈥攁re rescued by Border Patrol helicopters, if agents are not otherwise occupied chasing drug runners, coyotes, and other border crossers who tend to crop up in this part of the world.

Our problem lies in the fact that we are, in continental American terms, in the middle of nowhere. More precisely, we are on the Lower Pecos River, in West Texas. You have probably not heard of this particular stretch of the Pecos, the final 60 miles of which runs down to join the Rio Grande on the Mexican border near the town of Del Rio. Most Texans are aware of it only as they encounter it from the Pecos High Bridge on Route 90, where the river, widening 颅before it joins the Rio Grande at Lake 颅Amistad, cuts through a breathtaking limestone canyon. Travelers get out of their cars and take pictures, stunned by one of the most spectacular views in the desiccated wilds of West Texas, wondering where this wide, muscular desert river has suddenly materialized from. And then they move on to San Antonio or Los Angeles or wherever they are headed. Most people who do know the Pecos River know its New Mexican section, 800 miles or more upstream, which originates in the snowy upper elevations of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This is not that river, in any sense, as you will see. No more than 40 people run the Lower Pecos each year. In many years, far fewer.

There are good reasons for this. The Lower Pecos is surrounded on all sides by private land and is inaccessible to weekend enthusiasts and other river runners who do not have a lot of time on their hands. You are allowed to put your boat in at exactly one place, a tiny cluster of cabins known as Pandale Crossing, and take it out at exactly one place, the high bridge on Route 90鈥攁nd there are 60 difficult river miles and seven days of paddling in between. There are hardly any people or towns out in this rough, empty stretch of Chihuahuan desert. On nighttime satellite maps, this part of West Texas is one of the darkest areas in the lower 48. There are no public lands here, no national parks or national forests or friendly rangers, no park roads or convenient facilities. The river pierces country dominated by enormous ranches鈥�20,000- and 30,000-acre spreads鈥攖hat make it a sort of private wilderness, and all the more wild for it. It is a place, alternately, of cataclysmic floods and extreme droughts.

For all its obscurity, the Lower Pecos flows through one of the loveliest and most pristine landscapes in America. Spring-fed and limestone-bottomed, the river has a clarity matched only by its wild tropical color schemes, which would remind you of a 颅Corona beer commercial except that the colors are far more varied. It is both a whitewater river, with dozens of rapids from Class I through Class IV, and a giant aquarium鈥攋ammed with spotted gar, catfish, perch, bluegill, and carp鈥攚here you can watch a large颅mouth bass wheel, rise, and hit your fly. The country around it is a sort of museum of Native American history, home to one of the greatest concentrations of ancient rock art in America.

And so it is surprising that, out beyond the 100th meridian, where vast commercial cultures have arisen to service affluent Americans desperate for a run down big, remote, mythic rivers, no one knows the Lower Pecos. Our predicament in the rapids is relatively simple, in one sense: we鈥檙e the only ones here.

OUR TRIP BEGAN on the first day of November, in bone-dry, brilliantly clear 80-degree air, the sort of Texas weather that makes you glad you are alive and makes people from Milwaukee and Chicago wish they lived somewhere else. The cruel summer heat鈥�110 and above鈥攈ad gone away, and the northers had not started to blow yet.

We had driven 250 miles west from Austin, through the limestone canyonlands and live oak savannas of the Hill Country, the land a young Lyndon Johnson civilized with hydro颅electric power. This is in fact where the Big West begins. As you pass the town of Junction and cross the winding Llano River, you realize, looking at the high mesas and rock outcroppings and ashe juniper 颅forests, that you have finally left all of that forested trans-Mississippi land behind. Now we were in something completely other, a spectacular collision of three ecologies: Hill Country limestone river bottoms, Chihuahuan Desert uplands, and what botanists call Tamaulipan thorn scrub.

Who are we? A motley assemblage of middle-aged men, all looking for a bragging-rights adventure in the great American West. Maybe that sounds vainglorious. But middle-aged men tend to think that way. The clock is ticking down, and for most of us the remoteness of this expedition will test the limits of our abilities. I am 57 years old. There is my friend Jeff, 54, an investment banker from Dallas specializing in bankruptcy, with whom I used to drink inordinate amounts of Scotch and play Jerry Jeff Walker songs on guitar until 5 a.m. before going off to work, bleary-eyed, at a bank in Cleveland. There is Bill, also 54, my paddling buddy from Austin, a chiro颅practor with great medical knowledge and an obsession with outdoor gear, with whom I have kayaked many Class III rivers in Texas and the Northwest. And then there is Paolo, 41, our photographer. He is here for professional reasons. Paolo scales thousand-foot rock cliffs and ice-climbs in temperatures 30 below zero. He has swam with sharks and biked a thousand miles through Mexico. Paolo is not like us.

Our group has descended rivers before but nothing like the Pecos, which has a reputation for being murderous on marine hardware. In 1590, the Spanish explorer Gaspar Casta帽o de Sosa and his expedition tried in vain for two weeks to find a place to cross the river and were thwarted by the rough and difficult country with 鈥渕any sharp rocks and 颅ravines.鈥� He also noted that the rock had managed to ruin 25 dozen horseshoes. In the sole guidebook to this section (The Lower Pecos River, by Louis F. Aulbach and Jack Richardson, 2008), the Pecos is described as a place where your boat is in almost constant collision with rock鈥攍imestone that is 颅pitted and harshly abrasive and that chews the 颅vinyl off the 颅bottoms of boats. Canoes are 颅routinely pinned or broken. Indeed, after 颅calling a dozen outfitters, the only one who would rent us 颅canoes for the Pecos was a guide we knew on the Devils 颅River, another immaculate limestone-颅bottomed stream in West Texas. What he gave us鈥攕everely battered and cracked Old Towns with keels that had been re-epoxied so many times they looked like abstract art鈥攕eemed like a bad joke.

We traveled an hour north from the border town of Comstock to the launch site at Pandale with our shuttle driver, Emilio, who charges $325 for the drop-off and the pickup by boat at the other end. There is no bridge at Pandale, just a place where a bridge once was and a road that can be crossed only at low water. We stuffed the canoes well beyond the gunwales with drybags and coolers and water and fishing gear, planning to be out six nights and seven days camping along the river鈥檚 banks. Landowners here are tolerant of this, partly because they know how murderously difficult it would be to climb out of the canyon and trespass any further. As we launched, the river was running at 180 cubic feet per second (cfs), slightly below its average, which meant we would be encountering a good deal of shallow water and many sets of rocky rapids, especially in the first 20 miles.

We were soon careering down the first set and leaving the known world behind. One of the best things about the Pecos is its intimacy. The river is generally quite narrow, usually only 20 to 30 yards wide, bounded on both sides by ocher-colored limestone cliffs with deep black stains. As we moved downstream, there was a clear sense of 颅descending as the canyon walls loomed higher. The river itself becomes much deeper, stronger, colder. The farther down we went, the more we seemed to be in the canyon鈥檚 close embrace, enfolded by it and contained within it as though in some sort of bejeweled box amid the dun-colored hills, canyons, and mesas of the open desert.

There is another side to this intimacy, too. On the Lower Pecos, at these flow levels, we are often less on the river than in it.

Jeff and Paolo were in one boat, Bill and I in the other. As we plunged into our first sets of rapids, we were surrounded by 颅thickets of cane, which grow 15 to 20 feet high and create dark labyrinths in the river. The 颅effect was a sort of Mr. Toad鈥檚 Wild Ride as we whooshed through five-foot-wide chutes cloaked by cane thickets so dense we couldn鈥檛 see through them. This was complicated by the fact that our boat teams were often working at cross-purposes, the 颅bowmen (Jeff and me) screaming 鈥淩ight, right, right!鈥� while the men in the stern, distracted by the roar of the river, steered resolutely left, directly into whatever it was that the bowmen wanted them to avoid. Two- and three-foot standing waves broke regularly over the bows, soaking us and filling the already overladen boats with water. This lent a certain comic aspect to our descent.

鈥淚 was trying to point that rock out to you,鈥� I said to Bill, after we had hit one with a sickening thud and shipped on enough water to turn our canoe, aerodynamically speaking, into something more like a waterborne sofa.

鈥淚 still haven鈥檛 seen it,鈥� Bill replied placidly. 鈥淢aybe we need to work on hand signals.鈥�

There are other forms of intimacy with this river. Rapids that we couldn鈥檛 run had to be lined, an often difficult process using bow and stern lines to lower your gear-stuffed canoe through rapids. Throughout that first day and into the second, we were often out of our boats, hauling them over the shallow river bottom. In one notorious four-mile section, known as the Flutes, we dragged our boats over thousands of peculiar sculpted rock formations that sat just below the surface. Bill and I quickly discovered that our canoe leaked, and each time we lugged its overstuffed hull across all that rough limestone, we imagined the cracks getting bigger and bigger. We tried to patch them with duct tape where we could.

But these are minor inconveniences. For every rapid we had to line or drag, there were ten that were both rollicking and relatively easy to run. On one occasion, a few miles in, we found ourselves in an ever-darkening, cane-bracketed chute that became, alarmingly, narrower and narrower. Four feet wide, three feet wide, two feet鈥� A dead end would have been a small disaster, a sort of blind alley with no way out and the straining effect that all paddlers fear. Bill and I lost sight of Jeff and Paolo, who鈥檇 somehow found the main channel. The cane closed around us and the canoe began to turn sideways as the two of us, truly alarmed and cursing both the cane and the rather large spiders that were now running rampant over our faces and the boat, prepared to bail out. Just at that moment, we suddenly, and unaccountably, punched through the brush into the main channel.

鈥淗ey, where鈥檇 you guys go?鈥� yelled Paolo, a hundred yards downriver.

鈥淭o the land of the cane spiders,鈥� Bill 颅replied. 鈥淪orry you guys missed it.鈥�
听听 听
THAT THE LOWER PECOS exists at all is a small miracle. Like so many other western rivers, the Pecos was the victim, from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, of a series of grand and misbegotten attempts to harness it, dam it, and use its water to create the sort of irrigated paradise that the usual assortment of eastern land companies, tubercular millionaires, European financiers, railroad touts, reclamationists, industrial magnates, mining capitalists, and dry-land dreamers believed the West would become. They were wrong, of course, but it did not stop them, collectively, from damming up a great river.

The Pecos in its legendary, historic state was a waterway that flowed deep and strong from its origins in the mountains, through eastern New Mexico and West Texas, joining the Rio Grande鈥攁 river it roughly parallels鈥攐n the Mexican border. It happened to cross the Southwest precisely at the point where the land turned from simply harsh frontier into a gigantic, canyon-scarred, and lethal landscape that all westering settlers feared. The Spanish considered the country of the Lower Pecos difficult if not impassable. The phrase west of the Pecos refers not only to the folkloric character Judge Roy Bean (鈥渢he law west of the Pecos鈥�; see Newman, Paul), who operated out of the town of Langtry, but also and more tellingly to the great emptiness that lies just beyond it, a rugged, dry, and moun颅tainous land that would kill you with thirst or starvation or, if you were less fortunate, by 颅torture and evisceration at the hands of Comanches and Apaches. For most of the 19th century, the Pecos was one of those western rivers that, whether you were driving cattle, running a wagon train, marching blue-coated soldiers, or riding with a Comanche war party, you had to cross. It was the gateway to the Southwest, to the great lands of the old Spanish empire, to California. The river was famous for its swift currents and its quicksand, and if you made it through the most logical ford鈥攖he low-颅water Horsehead Crossing, between present-day Odessa and Fort Stockton鈥攜ou considered yourself lucky.

All that changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The agent of that change was water. Five dams were built between 1888 and 1988, first by private firms and then by the federal government, to capture the Pecos鈥檚 water and divert it to agricultural use. The most famous and massive of these irrigation schemes, the Carlsbad Project, happened in and around the town of Carlsbad, in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. Water was impounded and diverted in a series of canals and pipes to the barren lands around the river, turning them into fertile fields. If you fly over the central and southern parts of eastern New Mexico today, you can see the effect: a belt of bright green land spreading like a stain into the desert.

Almost all of the river鈥檚 water was impounded by New Mexico, but what that state did not take, the Texans did. At Red Bluff Dam, just south of the state line, Texas impounded most of what was left of the Pecos, leaving a small, alkaline, salt-cedar-choked stream to make its way pathetically south toward the Rio Grande. This is the way many people think of that river: dammed and tamed in New Mexico, a trickle in Texas. If you saw what emerged from Red Bluff Dam, you would consider the Pecos a dead river, or nearly dead, anyway, certainly compared with what it used to be鈥攐ne of many victims of the reclamation craze.

But as the river cuts southward through deepening limestone can颅yons and ever more inaccessible land, something remarkable happens, unseen by most people. Liberated by the sheer ruggedness of its country, the Pecos rises again, replenished by a sudden and enormous flow of crystal-clear water that enters from spring-fed creeks. The biggest of these is Independence Creek; fed by some of the largest springs in the state鈥攊ncluding Caroline Spring, which pumps 3,000 to 5,000 gallons a minute鈥攊t joins the river just south of Interstate 10.

The effect of all this on the attenuated Pecos is astonishing. Suddenly, and with a whoosh of brilliantly clear water, which my companions and I can feel as we go downriver, a great western river is reborn. The sheer volume of what is being pumped into it鈥攁n additional 40 percent of the Pecos鈥檚 flow鈥攄efeats all the attempts, upriver, to contain and reduce it. Thus re-created, the river runs gloriously through its cloistering canyons to the Mexico border. If it is a waterway of great beauty鈥攁nd it truly is鈥攊t is also unforgiving, the scene of some of the worst flash floods in America, draining such a huge watershed via Independence Creek that it is not unheard of for paddlers to be hit with a 20-foot wall of water under blue skies. In 2007, water-flow levels hit 25,000 cfs in canyons where the norm is 200. At its record high in 1954, the Pecos hit 948,000 cfs and drowned several people on its shores.

ON OUR SECOND NIGHT OUT, we pull in to the campsite at Everett Springs, exhausted by a ten-mile run that involved a good deal of complete immersion in the Pecos: wading, pulling, dodging strainers. The place is a sculpted, smooth grotto. On one side is a steep rock wall, on the other a little Eden of willow, oak, mesquite, cedar, chinaberry, and mountain laurel. At least eight springs gush from the steep rock wall. One of them is wonderfully warm. Another, emerging ten feet up the rock face, is enveloped in an enormous, lush beard of moss and ferns and lichens. I stand beneath it, feeling the water run over my body. The springs flow down our little canyon, burbling in a three-foot-wide, two-foot-deep stream through clear pools in the curvilinear stone.

鈥淗ow would you rate this camp?鈥� I ask my friends as we鈥檙e setting up the tents.

鈥淭op three鈥攅ver,鈥� Jeff and Bill both say. I say top two, maybe the best ever.

Paolo says nothing at first. I assume this is 颅because, for all I know, he has probably already run the wildest river in the Gobi Desert. 鈥淣ot bad,鈥� he finally offers. 颅鈥淩eally pretty amazingly nice.鈥� (Later, at Painted Can颅yon, he will up this to 鈥渃razy beautiful.鈥�)

We slip into what will become our routine. Jeff and Paolo take off with their fly rods, ribbing each other about who is catching the most, or the biggest, fish. (鈥淥h, look,鈥� Paolo says, 鈥淛eff has caught some giant bluegills,鈥� meanwhile showing off his splendid green-black haul of largemouth bass.) Bill occupies himself with tent gear and water purifiers. I busy myself with setting up the fire. Later we make fish tacos with fancy tartar sauce we have brought, spotting armadillos, a javelina, and white-tailed deer as we eat.

We fall asleep to the murmur of the spring, or at least we try to. Jeff, as it turns out, snores loudly鈥攊t sounds something like the London Symphony Orchestra tuning up鈥攕o Paolo has decided to sleep outside. He is not entirely certain this is a good idea.

鈥淲hat do you think there is out here?鈥� he asks, gazing at the raw desert all around us.

鈥淪nakes, black widows, tarantulas, scorpions, centipedes,鈥� I begin to answer.

鈥淐entipedes!鈥� says Jeff from inside his tent. Apparently, he is not fond of them.

鈥淥h, that鈥檚 very encouraging,鈥� says Paolo. Nonetheless he sleeps outside, that night and for the rest of the trip.

At each of our campsites, signs that 颅human beings lived in these limestone caves and over颅颅hangs for thousands of years are every颅where. There are mortar holes, seams of worked flint, and strange incisions in the rock made in parallel lines. There are also hundreds of rock paintings. With a little help from an informed source, we find one of them. About halfway down the river, we pull the canoes out onto a bleached gravel bar; Jeff uses his machete to hack through 50 feet of river cane, and we follow him into a small side canyon that was invisible from upstream. We scramble up a steep slope, at the top of which is a 100-foot-long rock shelter. Running for most of its length is a brilliantly preserved 4,500-year-old painting, depicting in black, red, and yellow pigments what looks like a collision of the real and magical worlds. In the middle stands a black shaman, five feet high. He is elongated, ornamented and surrounded by sinuous, snaking lines. To each side of him, lesser beings proliferate; you can see spears and clubs, dead people. There are arcs and squiggles that seem to define and limit power; there are odd flying creatures. On the far left is a plump panther, prompting the name by which this cave painting is sometimes known: 鈥淧iggy Panther.鈥� The painting manages to be surrealistic, primitive, abstract, and completely real. It鈥檚 like stumbling upon a Vermeer while walking in the woods.

The next day we find petroglyphs. We make camp at Lewis Canyon, on yet another tiered, sheltered white limestone shelf, climb to the top of the cliffs, and find ourselves standing on two full acres of rock art鈥攃arvings on a flat limestone surface. There are hundreds of glyphs, many of them pure abstractions. There are handprints and bear paws and swirls that look like targets; there are carvings of atlatls everywhere.

After dinner, we apportion our whiskey鈥攁 few ounces apiece鈥攁nd lie back and gaze at one of those startlingly clear star shows you get only in the darkest parts of the electrosphere. Bill, in his wisdom, offers an elegantly 颅simple explanation for what we have just seen: 鈥淭hey were just drawing what they saw,鈥� he says, 鈥渁nd you have to believe they were seeing the same thing we are seeing. They were drawing the gods of the night sky.鈥�

IN OUR PLANNING for the trip, we made one miscalculation, and it was a serious one. By day four we are running out of water. This may seem odd, surrounded as we are by a diamond-clear river. But that鈥檚 one of the prices we pay for dams. South of Red Bluff Dam, the river flows over alkaline beds, which means that even though we cannot taste them or see them, the river is full of alkali salts. The water can make you sick. Bill鈥檚 high-tech water purifiers do not work against this.

In the lower part of the river, there is exactly one freshwater source, known as China颅berry Spring. As we come within range of it we have exhausted our water. Chinaberry is no ordinary spring, in the sense that it does not emerge from a rock in an easily visible place. Bill has tried to plot its location 颅using his GPS and topographical maps, but he can only approximate, and our only tangible clues to its location in a 60-mile run through an enormous desert are (1) a chinaberry tree, of which there are tens of thousands, and (2) as Aulbach鈥檚 guidebook describes it, a sound of 鈥渁 gurgle of running water鈥� back in the cane. That鈥檚 all.

Amazingly, Jeff and Paolo both manage to identify the tree. Then, probing along the cane thicket at the river鈥檚 edge, they hear a very faint sound of dripping. But the sound is coming from deep inside the cane. We all pull our boats up, and what follows is that peculiar existential moment when someone has to be chosen to do the dirty work. Jeff, the owner of a machete that has done yeoman work on our trip, volunteers. 鈥淗ow many centipedes do you think are in there?鈥� he asks. (Even though we have seen only one centipede and have only a vague idea of what one could do to you, they provide a sort of thematic unity to the trip.)

鈥淧robably not more than a couple thousand,鈥� I answer cheerfully. 鈥淵our main worry is probably snakes.鈥�

And so Jeff gets out, wades through the muck, and begins to hack his way through dense thicket until he has completely vanished from sight. The rest of us wait, anxiously, in our boats. Above us looms a 300-foot cliff.

鈥淵ou guys are going to owe me big,鈥� comes the voice. He is now up to his waist in mud and in almost complete darkness.

鈥淐an you see it?鈥� I ask, not really believing for a moment that he can.

鈥淵es,鈥� he says at last. 鈥淵es, I can see it.鈥�

What he sees is the sort of trickle that would be barely enough to brush your teeth, and it is bubbling out of the mud at the base of the cane, about a foot above river level. It鈥檚 a sort of miracle. Jeff has to whack away the mud and the cane to even get to it. He fills a five-gallon jug with the water and emerges, and now it鈥檚 my turn to fill the second jug. I wade into the muddy darkness and behold the tiny trickle. I fill the rest of the jugs while Paolo attempts to shoot this weird, dark endeavor. But we have our water.
听
IN THE LAST TWO DAYS of the trip, the river bears little resemblance to the one we started out on. Everything is bigger, from the water, which is now often 20 feet deep, to the black cliffs, which rise 200 to 300 feet above us. The current is much more powerful here. We seem to be almost constantly in strong rapids that demand our full attention. In Waterfall Rapid, a Class III with a nasty hole, we decide to line the boats鈥攎ainly because the prospect of losing one or both of them is starting to seem less and less desirable. Bill and I go first. It鈥檚 an immediate disaster. The boat flips, smashes into a rock, rolls over, then labors on its side, like something dying, through the rest of the rapids. This places Paolo in a professional dilemma. He is just downstream, shooting this marvelous scene of canoeing gone wrong. Should he do his job or save the boat? He curses, shoots a few more frames, then hustles down the rock bank after the boat.

Now it鈥檚 Jeff and Paolo鈥檚 turn.

鈥淲hat do you think went wrong?鈥� Jeff asks his partner.

鈥淥perator error,鈥� says Paolo. 鈥淭his is a piece of cake.鈥�

Moments later their boat is fully capsized and engulfed in whitewater. For the next hour we retrieve gear and bail and repack the boats. Our last night is spent at the most beautiful place we鈥檝e seen yet: Painted Canyon, on a high limestone shelf at the head of a long Class III rapid. Here the river has carved a small lagoon with 30-foot walls and brilliantly green water. The lagoon is also full of fish. The spotted gar are three feet in length, with long snouts that make them look like barracuda. We swim, diving deep into the emerald pools. We eat catfish and bass and bluegill, marinated in olive oil, garlic, and salt and pepper and then pan-fried. We go to sleep in warm desert thermals and wake to a perfectly still morning in what seems to be the very heart of the American West, a place as it once was, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers ground their food in the rock holes we see all around us. I am exhausted; I ache and have bruises and cuts all over my legs. But that night as I watch the stars, I have an odd momentary realization that I鈥檓 not thinking about anything but those stars. Everything else has disappeared.

The end looms. Six miles downstream we are supposed to meet Emilio and a friend, who will tow us out the remaining ten miles to the take-out at Pecos High Bridge. We were sternly warned about these final miles, where the river begins to join Lake Amistad, created by the damming of the Rio Grande. Here the wind can blow 40 miles per hour for days at time, a southerly blast from Mexico so strong that you cannot paddle against it. It can be a cruel and bitter ending to a good trip.

It鈥檚 in this last stretch of river before our meeting spot that we enter something called Big Rock Rapid, where we pin the canoe. Pinning is a unique, unsettling experience. It does not even seem quite plausible. One moment you鈥檙e paddling a relatively maneuverable boat; the next you鈥檙e contemplating a sunken, immovable piece of wreckage. We spend a good hour taking everything out of the canoe, watching for signs that it鈥檚 going to break in half. Somehow it holds. Once it鈥檚 empty, though, it seems just as stuck under all that water as it did with 300 pounds of gear in it. At this moment, spurred by our mishap, I realize, for the first time really, how much can go wrong, even on a doable river like the Lower Pecos鈥攁 notion that probably wouldn鈥檛 have occurred to me at all at the age of 30 or even 40 but very definitely does at 57. The Pecos at this water level is not a terribly dangerous river. And yet in these wilds, injury or even death can be quite a casual thing: a foot stuck under a rock in high rushing water, a slip on one of the rock cliffs we climbed, a rattlesnake bite, or just a garden-variety heart attack. I silently vow never to run this river again with fewer than four boats.

Paolo, of course, has the solution. He tells us all to pull upward on the upstream gunwale, and miraculously the boat buoys up and floats off, swamped but intact, beyond the rocks, to the pools at the bottom of the rapid.

All that remains is our tow out. Emilio and his friend meet us in an old pontoon boat with an even older outboard motor. We pile the gear on, strap the canoes alongside, then 颅motor for two and a half hours into a stiff headwind. Our destination is that magnificent Route 90 bridge, the one with the stunning view of the Pecos River Gorge, where people take pictures and wonder, as I used to, where in the hell that river came from. And it is gratifying that, after a week on the water, I finally know the answer.

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